Edmund Husserl Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Edmund Husserl - Essay ExampleIn Husserls characterization of conscious intentionality we see a kinship with Whiteheads notion of the vector character of experience The experiencer aims at the information even as the data aim at the experiencer (). To explore this intentional structure of consciousness, Husserl attempts to develop a method to reveal the multiform contents of consciousness as clearly as we experience a simple virtuoso perception. scarce even a sense perception comes to us amid a lifetime of assumptions and beliefs about the cause and context of the perception. Husserl tries to work out a step-bystep series of phenomenological or eidetic reductions in which reality, as presented in our frank experience, is bracketed in hopes of bringing forth the structures that constitute phenomena (Hart 644). Husserl finds that the uniqueness of consciousness lies in the fact that the phenomena are represent by conscious activities regarding the phenomenas essences (or meaning s). Husserl does not mean to say that things are imaginary inventions. Entities are not created by consciousness, but their essences are constructed from the hyle, the stuff presented to the synthetic character of hidden consciousness. Husserl describes these activities as meaning intentions of consciousness and fulfilling intentions of phenomena. For example, my ken of my desk is not identical to the desk itself. The desk is solid, rectangular, and several feet wide, but my idea of the desk possesses none of those qualities. Although the hardness and size of the desk cannot physically memorialise my consciousness, they are somehow presented to me from the stuff of my idea of the desk (Hart 645). Husserl shows that this presentation is an exceedingly complex activity in which sense data take many forms and occur at bottom a complicated array of potential sensations. alone these sense data would be meaningless without the meaning intentions, the noetic activity of consciousness that assigns appropriate categories such as substance, quality, and explains the relations as the shape, size, of a material object that is, noetic activities constitute the whatness of what is intended by consciousness (Schrag 278). For Husserl, the detachment proposed in any judgment, then, is the agreement of what is meant and what is given in fulfilling intentions. The difference between Husserls transcendentalism and Heideggers is found in the latters attempt to express the way phenomena are constituted in terms deeper than Husserls transcendental consciousness. (Hart 645). Husserls attempt is far too idealistic, subjectivistic, and egoistic for Heidegger. In considering consciousness to provide the fundamental, presuppositionless beginning of philosophy, Husserl places himself squarely within the Cartesian tradition that takes the cogito to be prior to what Heidegger considers the ontological structure beneath, the sum. Husserl maintains the subject-object dichotomy so sever ely divide res cogitans and res extensa.Critics admit that Husserl goes far beyond Descartes in attempting to resolve how the activities of the knowing subject start out connected to the known through the