HUSSERL - THE ANSWERS

HUSSERL
THE PHENOMENOLOGIST

All is Revealed

THINKING
Thinking is always intentional, aimed at a specific object. But the difference between thinking and acting is that the "intentional object", what the mind is thinking about, need not be present. It may not even exist. The difference between mental acts and other acts, is that the objects of mental acts may be "intentionally inexistent". This does not, however, mean they have no reality. The act of thinking gives them a meaning and significance; they become "objects of our consciousness". It is these objects of consciousness, phenomena, that are the focus of Husserl's philosophy.

A SCIENCE OF THE MIND
Husserl saw modern science in crisis precisely because its claims to objectivity had failed to recognise the active role of consciousness in developing human understanding. Any theory of knowledge must be based on an understanding of the workings of the human consciousness. The natural sciences give the appearance of rational, objective knowledge. But the "natural attitude" of the scientific method fails to acknowledge the role of consciousness in constituting meaning. It denies the essential status of objects of consciousness as living intentional experiences.

"The mind and only the mind is a being in itself and for itself; it is autonomous and capable of being handled in a rational, genuinely and thoroughly scientific way... Thus the science of nature presupposes the science of the mind."
("Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man")

A SCIENCE OF SCIENCE
Phenomenology claims to be absolutely original and scientific in a genuine sense. It abandons the speculative abstractions that science mistakes for reality and the pseudo-scientific pretensions of naturalism. Husserl is not denying a legitimate role for natural science. He is simply arguing that its very legitimacy presupposes a phenomenological investigation of the intentional origins of knowledge. A solid foundation for knowledge can only be secured by a rigorous method that returns to the intuitive evidence of the immediate experience of consciousness.

Phenomenology is therefore a science of science.