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Description, Reflection, Reduction

Description, Reflection, Reduction PHAINOMENON, 33 (2022): 85-98 Pierre-Jean Renaudie Université de Lyon 3 Faculté de Philosophie pjrenaudie@gmail.com Reception date: 06-2015 Acceptance date: 09-2017 Abstract: This article analyses the fundamental relationship between Husserl’s theory of reflec- tion in the first volume of Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and the two main concepts upon which transcendental phenomenology is grounded: namely, description and reduction. Alt- hough the concept of reflection was already used in Logical Investigations, Husserl revised it entirely thanks to his analysis of time-consciousness in the 1905 Lectures. Reflection thus appears as a key concept in understanding the ‘turn’ that led Husserl to deeply modify his descriptive method in order to move to transcendental phenomenology. Keywords: Phenomenology, Time-consciousness, Reflexion, Retention, Reduction, Descriptive psychology, Transcendental turn. At first, reflectivity does not seem to be a theme somehow likely to shed light on the understanding of Ideas, insofar as Husserl allows very little space to this concept in his 1913 book. Only a few paragraphs are devoted to the analysis of reflection, and the concept itself does neither look new nor original: Husserl had already used it in 1901 in his Logical Investigations in order to provide some grounds for a phenomenological de- scription of lived-experiences. Consequently, reflection does not seem to play a funda- mental part in the development of transcendental phenomenology or to be a key concept in Ideas. It must be noted, however, that the notion of reflection keeps reoccurring as an ongoing question that runs through the main articulations of the work Ideas. Moreover, it is worth pointing out that the concept of reflection appears both before and after the tran- scendental reduction, which seems to indicate that Husserl did not consider it to be only a psychological device that supports phenomenological description and makes it possible. This point raises two questions. On the one hand, regarding the methodological status of ISSN: 0874-9493 (print) / ISSN-e: 2183-0142 (online) DOI: 10.2478/phainomenon-2022-0006 86 Pierre-Jean Renaudie reflection and, on the other hand, its peculiar role within the process of transcendental reduction. I will argue that, far from being a secondary theme of phenomenology, reflec- tion is fundamental not only in order to understand Ideas, but also (and more essentially) in order to make sense of the turn that reoriented phenomenology towards a transcenden- tal perspective between Logical Investigations (1901) and Ideas (1913). So, the leading thread of my paper is an investigation of the relationship between two ways of performing reflective acts: namely psychological and transcendental reflection. 1. Psychological and phenomenological reflection The relationship between reflection and description is not difficult to understand. Twelve years after he first stressed the importance of reflection with respect to the phe- nomenological method in the introduction to Logical Investigations, Husserl still empha- sizes its “universal methodological function” in Ideas: “The phenomenological method operates exclusively in acts of reflection” (Husserl 1983, 174). Indeed, insofar as phe- nomenology claims to describe the structures of consciousness and its intentional relation to objects, it presupposes that lived-experiences can be somehow given in order for us to be able to describe them. Reflection is then characterized as the “essentially necessary condition of possibility” of phenomenology (Husserl 1983, 184), in the sense that it pro- vides us with access to consciousness and makes lived-experiences describable. Reflec- tion, in order words, bestows a certain kind of self-transparency on consciousness, since it guarantees that the ego and its lived-experiences can be reached through intuition and seized upon immanently. However, what specific kind of reflection are we speaking about? The answer to that question is not entirely clear in Ideas. Husserl first introduces the concept of reflec- tion in the second part of the book, where he considers the “psychological reflection” that we can effect “on our ego and its mental living” without “relinquishing the natural atti- tude” and “without troubling ourselves with any phenomenological epoché” (Husserl, 1983: 67). Yet, later on (in §51), Husserl stresses the need to bring this psychological form of reflection to a higher level and to perform it as a strictly phenomenological act of reflecting, which can happen only after transcendental reduction has been accomplished. Reflection then becomes in the third part of the book nothing less than a fundamental structure of pure consciousness, and its phenomenological status is changed. Reflection Description, Reflection, Reduction 87 is no longer characterized as a psychological and empirical property of psychic phenom- ena: it is understood as an essential law of transcendental consciousness. There is a tre- mendous gap between those two modes of reflection, as big a gap as the one that opposes phenomenology to psychology or the transcendental analysis of the essential structures of consciousness to the empirical study of psychic phenomena. Nonetheless, even before reduction has been accomplished, and as we are still supposed to stick to natural attitude, Husserl anticipates this major phenomenological shift when he writes, in §38, that the essence of the cogitatio “involves the essential possibility of a reflective turning of re- gard”, so that the cogitatio itself becomes “the object of a so-called ‘internal perception’” (Husserl, 1983: 78). Thus, the question is whether psychological reflection suffices to induce a shift of attitude thanks to which one can conceive of reflection as a transcenden- tal act of the pure Ego, or whether transcendental reflection requires a transcendental reduction in order to be performed. 2. The problem of skepticism In order to understand how we can answer that question, we need to make a detour and examine a possible objection that Husserl himself raises against his own theory, call- ing it the problem of ‘methodological skepticism’ (Husserl, 1983: 181). Interestingly, this objection comes from H. J. Watt, who used it against the psychological use of introspec- tion defended by Theodor Lipps (Watt, 1907). Husserl extends it to his own theory, claim- ing that it might as well threaten the possibility of phenomenology as such. Watt points out the temporal gap that separates the presence of a lived-experience from the later act of reflection, which takes this past experience as its object. As he states, “the actuality of the present Ego and the present consciousness-processes” is “merely lived, not ‘known’, i.e., not seized upon reflectively” (quoted in Husserl 1983: 182). To be living an experi- ence and to reflect on it are two essentially different modes of consciousness: While the former is characterized by its openness to the world and is intentionally directed towards it, the latter is on the contrary turned towards a previous lived-experience that needs to belong to the past in order to be made the object of a new act of reflection. Emphasizing the gap between the “merely lived” experience and the one reflected upon (or between what Sartre calls unreflected and reflected consciousness), Watt’s objection raises a doubt about the possibility of knowing reflectively any of our conscious life and contests the 88 Pierre-Jean Renaudie epistemic legitimacy of reflection: “Each of us lives mentally. Only he does not know it. And if he were to know it, how can he know that his mental living is in actuality abso- lutely thus as he thinks it is?” (Husserl, 1983: 183). Husserl does not underestimate the extent of this objection, which is according to him likely to weaken the very principles of phenomenology: “What could be made of phenomenology if it could make statements about the essence of ‘known’, reflectionally modified mental processes but not about mental processes pure and simple?” What should it be if “one can scarcely even inquire into the likelihood of how one arrives at the cognition of immediate mental living?” (Hus- serl, 1983: 184; in the last part of this sentence, Husserl himself quotes Watt). 3. Introspection and reflection However, this skeptical objection is not new to Husserl. One might assume that the reason why Husserl takes Watt’s remarks so seriously is precisely that they echo his own discussion of Brentano’s psychology in Logical Investigations and bring out his ear- lier attempt to extract phenomenology from the shortcomings of empirical psychology. Reacting against Wundt’s experimental psychology, which focused exclusively on the external/physical conditions of inner phenomena (Wundt, 1874), Brentano set the basis of a strictly descriptive method in psychology that emphasizes first-person access to one’s own mental states. Following the British empiricist tradition from Locke to Stuart Mill, and in opposition to Auguste Comte’s positivism, Brentano restores the role of inner ex- perience in psychology, denying that physical laws can apply to mental phenomena and provide a satisfactory account of them: Contrary to physical phenomena, psychic phe- nomena are specifically given to inner perception. According to such theory, inner expe- rience is then not only the mode of the givenness of mental phenomena but also the epis- temic basis of psychological knowledge. Psychic phenomena are such that they always seize upon themselves immediately with absolute evidence (Brentano, 1995: 70). However, Brentano needs to distinguish between the way a psychic phenomenon seizes upon itself and its relation to an object. If, for instance, I hear a specific sound, this sound is the primary object of my act of hearing while the hearing itself must be charac- terized as the secondary object of that very same act: “In the same mental phenomenon in which the sound is present to our minds we simultaneously apprehend the mental phe- nomenon itself” (Brentano, 1995: 98). Only the primary object is the intentional target Description, Reflection, Reduction 89 towards which this psychic phenomenon is directed, whereas the act of hearing is not properly intended as such. Consequently, this distinction urges Brentano to strictly tell “inner perception” (innere Wahrnehmung) apart from “inner observation” (innere Beo- bachtung): Whereas inner observation is intentionally turned towards mental phenomena and takes them as primary objects, inner perception is described as a direct and immediate consciousness that does not require any objectification of the mental phenomena (Bren- tano, 1995: 22). This is very clear for instance with a phenomenon like anger, which is experienced as it is lived through but is lost whenever it becomes observed, and then taken as a primary object: “If someone is in a state in which he wants to observe his own anger raging within him, the anger must already be somewhat diminished, and so his original object of observation would have disappeared” (Brentano, 1995: 22). Brentano thus concurs that inner observation misses the specificity of living men- tal phenomena, without needing to draw the conclusion that psychic phenomena are in- accessible to inner perception: “No simultaneous observation of one’s own mental acts is possible at all. We can observe the sounds we hear (the primary object of the mental phenomenon), but we cannot observe our hearing of the sounds (the secondary object) for the hearing itself is only apprehended concomitantly in the hearing of sounds” (Bren- tano, 1995: 99). Consequently, Brentano holds that although we do perceive our present mental phenomena inwardly while we are living them, we can only observe and analyze them retrospectively, thanks to memory, as past phenomena (Brentano, 1995: 26). So, this is why descriptive psychology is necessarily empirical and retrospective, according to Brentano. However, the point is that we can still recall the phenomenon as it was in- wardly perceived, and not only as the intentional object of an act of observation. 4. Reflection and inner perception in Husserl’s Logical Investigations In a way, Brentano was not far from Watt’s objection against the role of reflection and introspection in psychology, even if the former admits inner perception while the latter explicitly rejects it. It is still true, for both Brentano and Watt, that an ‘absolute description’ of mental phenomena as such is impossible since reflection can be nothing but a kind of retrospective observation of our mental states. Yet, far from denying such analysis, Husserl attempted to radicalize it in his Logical Investigations in order to set the 90 Pierre-Jean Renaudie strictly phenomenological concept of description. However, as we will see, such radical- ization led Husserl to somehow restore the role of reflection within phenomenology, alt- hough Brentano’s psychology urges us to get rid of it. In the appendix to the Logical Investigations, Husserl contests the legitimacy of inner perception on behalf of the intentionality thesis. Husserl sees a contradiction in the fact that mental phenomena, though intentional, can be directly seized upon through inner perception: According to Brentano, “psychic phenomena are not only conscious but at the same time contents of consciousness, and also, in this case, objects of consciousness in the narrower sense of perception” (Husserl, 1984/2: 758). Husserl then denies that an intentional mental phenomenon can be at the same time lived through and apprehended as its own secondary object. If mental phenomena are intentional, they need to be expe- rienced as directed towards an object that is constituted as such through this very con- sciousness process, although natural attitude prevents us from being aware of this consti- tutional process. Accordingly, there is no possible exception to the intentionality thesis in Logical Investigations. A mental act that seizes upon itself necessarily seizes upon itself as an object while, on the other hand, a mental phenomenon that would not be intention- ally directed towards an object, as for instance a pure sensation, cannot be properly expe- rienced as such: Being an experience of nothing, it is purely and simply not an experience at all (Husserl, 1984/1: 378-379). If all mental phenomena are intentional, as Brentano claims, then our access to mental phenomena needs to be intentional as well, which means that one’s own lived-experiences can only be seized upon through an intentional objecti- fication, and as the primary object of another lived-experience. This is the reason why his radicalization of Brentano’s intentionality thesis leads Husserl to emphasize the role of reflection within the phenomenological description. Re- flection precisely needs to be understood as the only access one has to her own lived- experience in order to describe it. Nonetheless, reflection is characterized as a new inten- tional mode of consciousness rather than as direct and immediate access to one’s own mental phenomena. It is an act that takes a previously lived experience as its intentional or primary object. Description, Reflection, Reduction 91 5. The reflective distance Consequently, according to Husserl, we are forced to admit that we only access our own lived experiences through a reflective modification that objectifies them, making mental phenomena its object. On this point, Logical Investigations express a view that seems very close to one of the fundamental thesis supported later on in Ideas, where Hus- serl stresses that reflection adds an intentional modification to the lived-experience re- flected upon: “Reflection” of any kind has the characteristic of being a modification of a consciousness and, moreover, a modification that essentially any consciousness can undergo. We speak here of modification because any reflection is, according to its essence, the consequence of changes in attitude whereby an already given mental process or really immanent Datum thereof (one not modified reflectionally) undergoes a certain transmutation precisely into the mode of consciousness (or object of consciousness) reflectionally modified. (Husserl, 1983: 178) However, although Husserl keeps maintaining that reflection entails a necessary modification of the lived-experiences reflected upon, the conclusions he drew on this ba- sis are not at all the same in Logical Investigations and in Ideas, before and after the transcendental turn, thus. I will quickly attempt to show why. Since in Logical Investigations reflection appears to be the only access to one’s mental phenomena, which is left once inner perception has been discarded, Husserl keeps emphasizing the irreducible temporal gap between living through mental phenomena and reflecting upon them: Lived-experiences need to be objectified through reflection before they can be described. Accordingly, reflective modification is not only understood as a shift of attitude but more radically as an alteration of the mental phenomenon itself (Hus- serl, 1984/1: 6-7). Lived-experience loses its living and unreflected character when it is made into an object by reflection while the unreflected experience as such is never di- rectly accessible. “We perform description on the basis of an objectifying act of reflection […]. Plainly an essential descriptive change has occurred. The original act is no longer simply there, we no longer live in it, but we attend to it and pass judgment on it” (Husserl, 1984/1: 391). In Logical Investigations, phenomenological description is still based on 92 Pierre-Jean Renaudie empirical mental processes, which are retrospectively given through reflection. Such re- flection is then to be understood as a temporal part of our flow of consciousness, which is logically independent from the previous part of the flow that has become its object. Those two different modes of consciousness, living through an experience and reflecting upon an experience, are thus temporally incompatible. Reflection always comes too late since there is an irreducible delay between a lived-experience and the reflection that nec- essarily follows it. The living-present of the experience as such is evasive and logically indescribable. 6. The temporal analysis of reflection Such a conclusion is, again, strikingly close to Watt’s objection against reflection and to his rejection of ‘absolute description’, which is probably the true reason why Hus- serl is, in Ideas, so concerned about Watt’s remarks. Although the latter specifically tar- gets the role of reflection in psychology, they perfectly echo a theoretical issue Husserl himself addressed at the time he was setting the methodological basis of phenomenology: Reflective modification a priori forbids any comparison between reflected and unre- flected lived-experiences, which means that there is no way to verify or guarantee the adequacy between the phenomenological description and the lived-experience it is sup- posed to describe. However, Husserl’s conclusions in Ideas were totally different, alt- hough he keeps stressing the necessary modification that reflection entails. Indeed, in 1913, Husserl holds that such a modification does not alter the lived experiences as much as he first thought in 1901: “We see with the most perfect clarity and with the conscious- ness of unconditioned validity that it would be countersensical to doubt whether mental processes which become the object of a regard are not, as a consequence, converted toto coelo into something different” (Husserl, 1983: 181). Something definitely shifted be- tween Logical Investigations and Ideas: Husserl’s analysis of the temporal dimension of consciousness in the famous lectures he gave in 1905 allowed him to solve the issues he was dealing with in his first phenomenological work, and to lead phenomenology to a 1 th th This is also the reason why Husserl, in the 8 section of the 5 Logical Investigation, takes on Hume’s critique of the Cartesian cogito, against Natorp’s claim regarding the “pure I”: We can only describe our empirical “I”, and not our so-called transcendental ego. By making the “me” its object, reflection neces- sarily deprives the “I” of its purely subjective dimension and is unable to grasp it as a transcendental ego. Description, Reflection, Reduction 93 major turn that would later be called “transcendental”. Whereas his logical analysis of the mental processes led Husserl to emphasize the irreducible gap between the living present of the lived-experience and its objectification through reflection, the discovery of the es- sentially temporal structure of consciousness opened a new route towards a resolution of this problem. Indeed, as the 1905 lectures have shown, the bond between consciousness and time is not contingent or secondary: it belongs to the very essence of consciousness as such: The essential property, which the term temporality expresses for any mental process whatever, not only designates something universally belonging to every single mental process, but also a necessary form combining mental processes with mental processes. Each actual mental process […] is necessarily an enduring one.” (Husserl, 1983: 194) Consequently, the temporal gap that separates the living present from the past lived-experience I can retrospectively reflect upon should not be understood as a short- coming of my consciousness, since it displays on the contrary the very law of its exist- ence. Insofar as consciousness is intrinsically temporal, it is an essential feature of lived- experiences that they can only be given through different temporal modalities without being altered by temporal modifications. The same mental process can be either lived through in the living-present or seized upon as passed through reflection; the modification that is here in question is nothing but an ‘ideal possibility’ (Husserl, 1983: 174) of con- sciousness that does not transform the lived-experience reflected upon into another one. Husserl manages in this way to incorporate the temporal constraint that reflection implies to the essence of consciousness as such. As he writes in §45: The kind of being belonging to mental processes is such that a seeing regard of percep- tion can be directed quite immediately to any actual mental process as an originary liv- ing present. This occurs in the form of “reflection”, which has the remarkable property that what is seized upon perceptually in reflection is characterized fundamentally not only as something which exists and endures while it is being regarded perceptually but also as something which already existed before this regard was turned to it. […] The sort of being which belongs to the mental process is such that the latter is essentially capable of being perceived in reflection. (Husserl, 1983: 98) 94 Pierre-Jean Renaudie Reflectivity is a fundamental and not accidental property of lived experiences, whose temporality is intrinsically modifiable. Such a modification is then one “which essentially any consciousness can undergo” (Husserl, 1983: 178). Husserl meets here a fundamental point he brought out in his 1905 lectures. As fluent, lived experiences are constantly undergoing some temporal modifications that do not alter them as such, since they are essential to them: “Each living present of consciousness is subjected to the law of modification” (Husserl, 1966: 29). Insofar as a lived-experience temporally stretches, it is such that its unity cannot be seized upon as something static and a-temporal: “It is the case of a lived-experience that it is never perceived completely, that it cannot be adequately seized upon in its full unity. A lived-experience is, with respect to its essence, in flux which we, directing the reflective regard to it, can swim along after it starting from the Now-point” (Husserl, 1983: 97). Consequently, the living-present itself can only make sense in relation to a past background on the basis of which it occurs and that is somehow retained in the present itself so that we can essentially go back to this past dimension of the lived-experience through a reflective modification: “In itself, every mental process is a flux of becoming […]; it is a continuous flow of retentions and protentions mediated by a flowing phase or originarity itself in which there is consciousness of the living now of the mental process in contradistinction to its ‘before’ and ‘after’” (Husserl, 1983: 179). The living present is constantly retained as it flows in what Husserl calls a “retentional consciousness”: it is not only a consciousness of the past, but also a living present consciousness of the imme- diately elapsed experience as retained in the enduring present of this new consciousness. Husserl draws on the distinction he established in 1905 between primary and secondary memories: While the primary memory of a melody just heard retains it within the living- present of one’s consciousness as a “presence in flesh and blood”, the secondary memory loses the living character of the experience and provides a new representation that repro- duces this past experience as past. The consciousness of the immediately elapsed experi- ences is both a “presentative consciousness” and a consciousness of the now. Consequently, one must distinguish several levels of reflectivity: I can direct my regard towards my past feeling of joy as a secondary memory, but I can also intend my immediately elapsed feeling of joy that is enduring and still present in my living experi- ence as a primary memory. In the second case, the reflective modification does not cast- off the lived-experience into the past as if it were secondary, but on the contrary, brings Description, Reflection, Reduction 95 it to the living-present. Thus, instead of creating a temporal gap between the act of reflec- tion and the lived-experience reflected upon, reflection guarantees the unity of conscious- ness despite the modification it entails. This thesis allows Husserl to solve Watt’s objec- tion against reflection: However through the alteration that the mental processes of actional consciousness un- dergo in consequence of their going over into non-actionality, the modified mental pro- cesses still continue to have a significant community of essence with the original ones. […] The modified cogitatio is also consciousness, and consciousness of the same thing as that intended to in the corresponding unmodified consciousness.” (Husserl, 1983: 73) The reflective modification as such can even be seized upon thanks to a new act of reflection that discloses the relationship between modified and unmodified conscious- ness. As he writes, On the other hand, there exists the possibility of paying attention to the rejoicing advert- ence to it and, by contrast, to seize upon the lack of regard adverted to it in the phenom- enon which has run its course. But also with respect to the rejoicing which has subse- quently become an object, we have the possibility of effecting a reflection on the reflec- tion which objectivates the latter and of thus making even more effectively clear the dif- ference between rejoicing which is lived, but not regarded, and a regarded rejoicing; like- wise the modifications which are introduced by the acts of seizing-upon, explicating, etc., which start with the advertence of regard.” (Husserl, 1983: 176) Reflection is not only a modification of consciousness but a modification that is likely to seize upon itself and to know itself as a modification. Modification can then be understood as a way for consciousness to access itself rather than a transformation of the lived experience that loses its living character. 7. The epistemic thesis on reflection Accordingly, Husserl is able to state in §78 that “in generical eidetic universality” we seize upon “the absolute legitimacy of reflection on perceiving something immanent” 96 Pierre-Jean Renaudie (Husserl, 1983: 180). The epistemic status of reflection is then totally revisited since re- flection can then no longer be alleged to objectify mental phenomena and miss the unre- flected character of lived-experiences. Reflection seizes upon one’s own lived-experi- ences as an absolute givenness upon which existence cannot be doubted: “If reflective seizing-upon is directed to a lived-experience of mine, I have seized upon something ab- solute itself, the factual being of which is essentially incapable of being negated […]. It would be a countersense to believe it possible that a mental process given in that manner does not in truth exist” (Husserl, 1983: 100). In conclusion, I want to draw two major consequences of this epistemic thesis on reflection: (i) The first consequence concerns the relationship between Ideas and Logical Investiga- tions. Whereas his analysis of reflection prevented Husserl from extending the scope of the phe- nomenological investigation to the “pure Ego” in 1901, it is no longer the case in 1913. Under- standing reflection as a psychological process in Logical Investigations, Husserl considers that phenomenology has to borrow the object of its descriptions from psychology. Consequently, he claims, along with Hume and against the Cartesian cogito, that only the empirical Ego can be given through reflection, which led to difficulties when he attempted to rewrite these paragraphs in 1913. However, in Ideas, the absolute evidence of reflection allows access to the “pure Ego” as such and opens the field of transcendental egology. Insofar as it provides us with absolute data, reflection discloses the lived-experiences as ours, enabling us to apprehend ourselves as “pure subjects” of these lives. Reflection reveals the transcendental egological structure of all con- sciousness and provides the highest possible evidence about oneself, according to which “I say unqualifiedly and necessarily that I am, this life is, I am living, cogito” (Husserl, 1983: 100). Contrary to his position in Logical Investigations, Husserl is now on Descartes’ side, and against Hume. Although he had already used reflection as a methodological device of phenomenology, it now occupies a fundamental function in the process that is supposed to lead us from an empirical description of our psychic phenomena to the disclosure of the transcendental ego. (ii) Since the phenomenological use of reflection enables us to seize upon our lived ex- perience “as something absolute itself”, it brings forth the distinction between immanence and transcendence, revealing the fundamental asymmetry between being as consciousness and being as reality. “A veritable abyss yawns between consciousness and reality. Here, an adumbrated being, incapable of ever becoming given absolutely, merely accidental and relative; there, a nec- essary and absolute being, essentially incapable of becoming given by virtue of adumbration and appearance” (Husserl, 1983: 111). The relationship between consciousness and reality must then be spectacularly reversed as follows: “The being which is first for us is second in itself, i.e., it is what it is, only in “relation” to the first” (Husserl, 1983: 112). Since reflection allows us to “direct Description, Reflection, Reduction 97 our seizing and theoretically inquiring regard to pure consciousness in its own absolute being” (Husserl, 1983: 113), it constitutes the necessary ground for the radical shift that occurs in §50 of Ideas. Reflection is at the core of transcendental attitude, which Husserl describes as follows: “We prevent the effecting of all … cogitative positings, i.e., we “parenthesize” the positings ef- fected […]. Instead of living in them, instead of effecting them, we effect acts of reflection di- rected to them; and we seize upon them themselves as the absolute being which they are” (Hus- serl, 1983: 114). Insofar as reflection seizes upon consciousness as an absolute being, it allows us to move from the mere epoché to the proper phenomenological reduction, which “does not mean a mere restriction of judgment to a connective part of actual being as a whole” (Husserl, 1983: 115). Reflection urges us to acknowledge “that there is such thing as the field of pure conscious- ness […], which is not a component part of Nature” (Husserl, 1983: 114-115). Consciousness is no longer understood as a “phenomenological residuum” and can be analyzed as the primal con- stituent region (Ur-Region). From this point of view, reflection seems to be purely and simply identical to transcendental reduction since the latter is nothing but the result of the former. Reflection can then be understood as the key methodological concept that opens the gate of tran- scendental phenomenology: Starting within natural attitude as a psychological reflection, it enables us to enter the “infinite field of absolute lived-experiences” and to effect tran- scendental reduction (Husserl, 1983: 114). From this standpoint, it seems that, anticipat- ing Husserl’s claim in the last part of Krisis, Ideas had already opened a psychological way toward reduction. 98 Pierre-Jean Renaudie References Brentano, Franz (1995). Psychology from an empirical standpoint. Translated by McAl- ister. New York: Routledge. Husserl, Edmund (1966). Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (1893– 1917). Husserliana X. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1983). Ideas pertaining to a pure Phenomenology. First book. Trans- lated by Kersten. Nijhoff: Den Haag. Husserl, Edmund (1984/2/1). Logische Untersuchungen, Dritter Band. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenolgie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Husserliana XIX, no. 1. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1984/2/2). Logische Untersuchungen, Dritter Band. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenolgie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Husserliana XIX, no. 2. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Watt, Henry Jackson (1907). “Über die neueren Forschungen in dem Gedächtnis- und Assoziationpsychologie aus dem Jahre 1905.” In Archiv f. d. ges. Psychologie, t. IX. Wundt, Wilhein (1974). Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Phainomenon de Gruyter

Description, Reflection, Reduction

Renaudie, Pierre-Jean
Phainomenon , Volume 33 (1): 14 – Sep 1, 2022
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PHAINOMENON, 33 (2022): 85-98 Pierre-Jean Renaudie Université de Lyon 3 Faculté de Philosophie pjrenaudie@gmail.com Reception date: 06-2015 Acceptance date: 09-2017 Abstract: This article analyses the fundamental relationship between Husserl’s theory of reflec- tion in the first volume of Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and the two main concepts upon which transcendental phenomenology is grounded: namely, description and reduction. Alt- hough the concept of reflection was already used in Logical Investigations, Husserl revised it entirely thanks to his analysis of time-consciousness in the 1905 Lectures. Reflection thus appears as a key concept in understanding the ‘turn’ that led Husserl to deeply modify his descriptive method in order to move to transcendental phenomenology. Keywords: Phenomenology, Time-consciousness, Reflexion, Retention, Reduction, Descriptive psychology, Transcendental turn. At first, reflectivity does not seem to be a theme somehow likely to shed light on the understanding of Ideas, insofar as Husserl allows very little space to this concept in his 1913 book. Only a few paragraphs are devoted to the analysis of reflection, and the concept itself does neither look new nor original: Husserl had already used it in 1901 in his Logical Investigations in order to provide some grounds for a phenomenological de- scription of lived-experiences. Consequently, reflection does not seem to play a funda- mental part in the development of transcendental phenomenology or to be a key concept in Ideas. It must be noted, however, that the notion of reflection keeps reoccurring as an ongoing question that runs through the main articulations of the work Ideas. Moreover, it is worth pointing out that the concept of reflection appears both before and after the tran- scendental reduction, which seems to indicate that Husserl did not consider it to be only a psychological device that supports phenomenological description and makes it possible. This point raises two questions. On the one hand, regarding the methodological status of ISSN: 0874-9493 (print) / ISSN-e: 2183-0142 (online) DOI: 10.2478/phainomenon-2022-0006 86 Pierre-Jean Renaudie reflection and, on the other hand, its peculiar role within the process of transcendental reduction. I will argue that, far from being a secondary theme of phenomenology, reflec- tion is fundamental not only in order to understand Ideas, but also (and more essentially) in order to make sense of the turn that reoriented phenomenology towards a transcenden- tal perspective between Logical Investigations (1901) and Ideas (1913). So, the leading thread of my paper is an investigation of the relationship between two ways of performing reflective acts: namely psychological and transcendental reflection. 1. Psychological and phenomenological reflection The relationship between reflection and description is not difficult to understand. Twelve years after he first stressed the importance of reflection with respect to the phe- nomenological method in the introduction to Logical Investigations, Husserl still empha- sizes its “universal methodological function” in Ideas: “The phenomenological method operates exclusively in acts of reflection” (Husserl 1983, 174). Indeed, insofar as phe- nomenology claims to describe the structures of consciousness and its intentional relation to objects, it presupposes that lived-experiences can be somehow given in order for us to be able to describe them. Reflection is then characterized as the “essentially necessary condition of possibility” of phenomenology (Husserl 1983, 184), in the sense that it pro- vides us with access to consciousness and makes lived-experiences describable. Reflec- tion, in order words, bestows a certain kind of self-transparency on consciousness, since it guarantees that the ego and its lived-experiences can be reached through intuition and seized upon immanently. However, what specific kind of reflection are we speaking about? The answer to that question is not entirely clear in Ideas. Husserl first introduces the concept of reflec- tion in the second part of the book, where he considers the “psychological reflection” that we can effect “on our ego and its mental living” without “relinquishing the natural atti- tude” and “without troubling ourselves with any phenomenological epoché” (Husserl, 1983: 67). Yet, later on (in §51), Husserl stresses the need to bring this psychological form of reflection to a higher level and to perform it as a strictly phenomenological act of reflecting, which can happen only after transcendental reduction has been accomplished. Reflection then becomes in the third part of the book nothing less than a fundamental structure of pure consciousness, and its phenomenological status is changed. Reflection Description, Reflection, Reduction 87 is no longer characterized as a psychological and empirical property of psychic phenom- ena: it is understood as an essential law of transcendental consciousness. There is a tre- mendous gap between those two modes of reflection, as big a gap as the one that opposes phenomenology to psychology or the transcendental analysis of the essential structures of consciousness to the empirical study of psychic phenomena. Nonetheless, even before reduction has been accomplished, and as we are still supposed to stick to natural attitude, Husserl anticipates this major phenomenological shift when he writes, in §38, that the essence of the cogitatio “involves the essential possibility of a reflective turning of re- gard”, so that the cogitatio itself becomes “the object of a so-called ‘internal perception’” (Husserl, 1983: 78). Thus, the question is whether psychological reflection suffices to induce a shift of attitude thanks to which one can conceive of reflection as a transcenden- tal act of the pure Ego, or whether transcendental reflection requires a transcendental reduction in order to be performed. 2. The problem of skepticism In order to understand how we can answer that question, we need to make a detour and examine a possible objection that Husserl himself raises against his own theory, call- ing it the problem of ‘methodological skepticism’ (Husserl, 1983: 181). Interestingly, this objection comes from H. J. Watt, who used it against the psychological use of introspec- tion defended by Theodor Lipps (Watt, 1907). Husserl extends it to his own theory, claim- ing that it might as well threaten the possibility of phenomenology as such. Watt points out the temporal gap that separates the presence of a lived-experience from the later act of reflection, which takes this past experience as its object. As he states, “the actuality of the present Ego and the present consciousness-processes” is “merely lived, not ‘known’, i.e., not seized upon reflectively” (quoted in Husserl 1983: 182). To be living an experi- ence and to reflect on it are two essentially different modes of consciousness: While the former is characterized by its openness to the world and is intentionally directed towards it, the latter is on the contrary turned towards a previous lived-experience that needs to belong to the past in order to be made the object of a new act of reflection. Emphasizing the gap between the “merely lived” experience and the one reflected upon (or between what Sartre calls unreflected and reflected consciousness), Watt’s objection raises a doubt about the possibility of knowing reflectively any of our conscious life and contests the 88 Pierre-Jean Renaudie epistemic legitimacy of reflection: “Each of us lives mentally. Only he does not know it. And if he were to know it, how can he know that his mental living is in actuality abso- lutely thus as he thinks it is?” (Husserl, 1983: 183). Husserl does not underestimate the extent of this objection, which is according to him likely to weaken the very principles of phenomenology: “What could be made of phenomenology if it could make statements about the essence of ‘known’, reflectionally modified mental processes but not about mental processes pure and simple?” What should it be if “one can scarcely even inquire into the likelihood of how one arrives at the cognition of immediate mental living?” (Hus- serl, 1983: 184; in the last part of this sentence, Husserl himself quotes Watt). 3. Introspection and reflection However, this skeptical objection is not new to Husserl. One might assume that the reason why Husserl takes Watt’s remarks so seriously is precisely that they echo his own discussion of Brentano’s psychology in Logical Investigations and bring out his ear- lier attempt to extract phenomenology from the shortcomings of empirical psychology. Reacting against Wundt’s experimental psychology, which focused exclusively on the external/physical conditions of inner phenomena (Wundt, 1874), Brentano set the basis of a strictly descriptive method in psychology that emphasizes first-person access to one’s own mental states. Following the British empiricist tradition from Locke to Stuart Mill, and in opposition to Auguste Comte’s positivism, Brentano restores the role of inner ex- perience in psychology, denying that physical laws can apply to mental phenomena and provide a satisfactory account of them: Contrary to physical phenomena, psychic phe- nomena are specifically given to inner perception. According to such theory, inner expe- rience is then not only the mode of the givenness of mental phenomena but also the epis- temic basis of psychological knowledge. Psychic phenomena are such that they always seize upon themselves immediately with absolute evidence (Brentano, 1995: 70). However, Brentano needs to distinguish between the way a psychic phenomenon seizes upon itself and its relation to an object. If, for instance, I hear a specific sound, this sound is the primary object of my act of hearing while the hearing itself must be charac- terized as the secondary object of that very same act: “In the same mental phenomenon in which the sound is present to our minds we simultaneously apprehend the mental phe- nomenon itself” (Brentano, 1995: 98). Only the primary object is the intentional target Description, Reflection, Reduction 89 towards which this psychic phenomenon is directed, whereas the act of hearing is not properly intended as such. Consequently, this distinction urges Brentano to strictly tell “inner perception” (innere Wahrnehmung) apart from “inner observation” (innere Beo- bachtung): Whereas inner observation is intentionally turned towards mental phenomena and takes them as primary objects, inner perception is described as a direct and immediate consciousness that does not require any objectification of the mental phenomena (Bren- tano, 1995: 22). This is very clear for instance with a phenomenon like anger, which is experienced as it is lived through but is lost whenever it becomes observed, and then taken as a primary object: “If someone is in a state in which he wants to observe his own anger raging within him, the anger must already be somewhat diminished, and so his original object of observation would have disappeared” (Brentano, 1995: 22). Brentano thus concurs that inner observation misses the specificity of living men- tal phenomena, without needing to draw the conclusion that psychic phenomena are in- accessible to inner perception: “No simultaneous observation of one’s own mental acts is possible at all. We can observe the sounds we hear (the primary object of the mental phenomenon), but we cannot observe our hearing of the sounds (the secondary object) for the hearing itself is only apprehended concomitantly in the hearing of sounds” (Bren- tano, 1995: 99). Consequently, Brentano holds that although we do perceive our present mental phenomena inwardly while we are living them, we can only observe and analyze them retrospectively, thanks to memory, as past phenomena (Brentano, 1995: 26). So, this is why descriptive psychology is necessarily empirical and retrospective, according to Brentano. However, the point is that we can still recall the phenomenon as it was in- wardly perceived, and not only as the intentional object of an act of observation. 4. Reflection and inner perception in Husserl’s Logical Investigations In a way, Brentano was not far from Watt’s objection against the role of reflection and introspection in psychology, even if the former admits inner perception while the latter explicitly rejects it. It is still true, for both Brentano and Watt, that an ‘absolute description’ of mental phenomena as such is impossible since reflection can be nothing but a kind of retrospective observation of our mental states. Yet, far from denying such analysis, Husserl attempted to radicalize it in his Logical Investigations in order to set the 90 Pierre-Jean Renaudie strictly phenomenological concept of description. However, as we will see, such radical- ization led Husserl to somehow restore the role of reflection within phenomenology, alt- hough Brentano’s psychology urges us to get rid of it. In the appendix to the Logical Investigations, Husserl contests the legitimacy of inner perception on behalf of the intentionality thesis. Husserl sees a contradiction in the fact that mental phenomena, though intentional, can be directly seized upon through inner perception: According to Brentano, “psychic phenomena are not only conscious but at the same time contents of consciousness, and also, in this case, objects of consciousness in the narrower sense of perception” (Husserl, 1984/2: 758). Husserl then denies that an intentional mental phenomenon can be at the same time lived through and apprehended as its own secondary object. If mental phenomena are intentional, they need to be expe- rienced as directed towards an object that is constituted as such through this very con- sciousness process, although natural attitude prevents us from being aware of this consti- tutional process. Accordingly, there is no possible exception to the intentionality thesis in Logical Investigations. A mental act that seizes upon itself necessarily seizes upon itself as an object while, on the other hand, a mental phenomenon that would not be intention- ally directed towards an object, as for instance a pure sensation, cannot be properly expe- rienced as such: Being an experience of nothing, it is purely and simply not an experience at all (Husserl, 1984/1: 378-379). If all mental phenomena are intentional, as Brentano claims, then our access to mental phenomena needs to be intentional as well, which means that one’s own lived-experiences can only be seized upon through an intentional objecti- fication, and as the primary object of another lived-experience. This is the reason why his radicalization of Brentano’s intentionality thesis leads Husserl to emphasize the role of reflection within the phenomenological description. Re- flection precisely needs to be understood as the only access one has to her own lived- experience in order to describe it. Nonetheless, reflection is characterized as a new inten- tional mode of consciousness rather than as direct and immediate access to one’s own mental phenomena. It is an act that takes a previously lived experience as its intentional or primary object. Description, Reflection, Reduction 91 5. The reflective distance Consequently, according to Husserl, we are forced to admit that we only access our own lived experiences through a reflective modification that objectifies them, making mental phenomena its object. On this point, Logical Investigations express a view that seems very close to one of the fundamental thesis supported later on in Ideas, where Hus- serl stresses that reflection adds an intentional modification to the lived-experience re- flected upon: “Reflection” of any kind has the characteristic of being a modification of a consciousness and, moreover, a modification that essentially any consciousness can undergo. We speak here of modification because any reflection is, according to its essence, the consequence of changes in attitude whereby an already given mental process or really immanent Datum thereof (one not modified reflectionally) undergoes a certain transmutation precisely into the mode of consciousness (or object of consciousness) reflectionally modified. (Husserl, 1983: 178) However, although Husserl keeps maintaining that reflection entails a necessary modification of the lived-experiences reflected upon, the conclusions he drew on this ba- sis are not at all the same in Logical Investigations and in Ideas, before and after the transcendental turn, thus. I will quickly attempt to show why. Since in Logical Investigations reflection appears to be the only access to one’s mental phenomena, which is left once inner perception has been discarded, Husserl keeps emphasizing the irreducible temporal gap between living through mental phenomena and reflecting upon them: Lived-experiences need to be objectified through reflection before they can be described. Accordingly, reflective modification is not only understood as a shift of attitude but more radically as an alteration of the mental phenomenon itself (Hus- serl, 1984/1: 6-7). Lived-experience loses its living and unreflected character when it is made into an object by reflection while the unreflected experience as such is never di- rectly accessible. “We perform description on the basis of an objectifying act of reflection […]. Plainly an essential descriptive change has occurred. The original act is no longer simply there, we no longer live in it, but we attend to it and pass judgment on it” (Husserl, 1984/1: 391). In Logical Investigations, phenomenological description is still based on 92 Pierre-Jean Renaudie empirical mental processes, which are retrospectively given through reflection. Such re- flection is then to be understood as a temporal part of our flow of consciousness, which is logically independent from the previous part of the flow that has become its object. Those two different modes of consciousness, living through an experience and reflecting upon an experience, are thus temporally incompatible. Reflection always comes too late since there is an irreducible delay between a lived-experience and the reflection that nec- essarily follows it. The living-present of the experience as such is evasive and logically indescribable. 6. The temporal analysis of reflection Such a conclusion is, again, strikingly close to Watt’s objection against reflection and to his rejection of ‘absolute description’, which is probably the true reason why Hus- serl is, in Ideas, so concerned about Watt’s remarks. Although the latter specifically tar- gets the role of reflection in psychology, they perfectly echo a theoretical issue Husserl himself addressed at the time he was setting the methodological basis of phenomenology: Reflective modification a priori forbids any comparison between reflected and unre- flected lived-experiences, which means that there is no way to verify or guarantee the adequacy between the phenomenological description and the lived-experience it is sup- posed to describe. However, Husserl’s conclusions in Ideas were totally different, alt- hough he keeps stressing the necessary modification that reflection entails. Indeed, in 1913, Husserl holds that such a modification does not alter the lived experiences as much as he first thought in 1901: “We see with the most perfect clarity and with the conscious- ness of unconditioned validity that it would be countersensical to doubt whether mental processes which become the object of a regard are not, as a consequence, converted toto coelo into something different” (Husserl, 1983: 181). Something definitely shifted be- tween Logical Investigations and Ideas: Husserl’s analysis of the temporal dimension of consciousness in the famous lectures he gave in 1905 allowed him to solve the issues he was dealing with in his first phenomenological work, and to lead phenomenology to a 1 th th This is also the reason why Husserl, in the 8 section of the 5 Logical Investigation, takes on Hume’s critique of the Cartesian cogito, against Natorp’s claim regarding the “pure I”: We can only describe our empirical “I”, and not our so-called transcendental ego. By making the “me” its object, reflection neces- sarily deprives the “I” of its purely subjective dimension and is unable to grasp it as a transcendental ego. Description, Reflection, Reduction 93 major turn that would later be called “transcendental”. Whereas his logical analysis of the mental processes led Husserl to emphasize the irreducible gap between the living present of the lived-experience and its objectification through reflection, the discovery of the es- sentially temporal structure of consciousness opened a new route towards a resolution of this problem. Indeed, as the 1905 lectures have shown, the bond between consciousness and time is not contingent or secondary: it belongs to the very essence of consciousness as such: The essential property, which the term temporality expresses for any mental process whatever, not only designates something universally belonging to every single mental process, but also a necessary form combining mental processes with mental processes. Each actual mental process […] is necessarily an enduring one.” (Husserl, 1983: 194) Consequently, the temporal gap that separates the living present from the past lived-experience I can retrospectively reflect upon should not be understood as a short- coming of my consciousness, since it displays on the contrary the very law of its exist- ence. Insofar as consciousness is intrinsically temporal, it is an essential feature of lived- experiences that they can only be given through different temporal modalities without being altered by temporal modifications. The same mental process can be either lived through in the living-present or seized upon as passed through reflection; the modification that is here in question is nothing but an ‘ideal possibility’ (Husserl, 1983: 174) of con- sciousness that does not transform the lived-experience reflected upon into another one. Husserl manages in this way to incorporate the temporal constraint that reflection implies to the essence of consciousness as such. As he writes in §45: The kind of being belonging to mental processes is such that a seeing regard of percep- tion can be directed quite immediately to any actual mental process as an originary liv- ing present. This occurs in the form of “reflection”, which has the remarkable property that what is seized upon perceptually in reflection is characterized fundamentally not only as something which exists and endures while it is being regarded perceptually but also as something which already existed before this regard was turned to it. […] The sort of being which belongs to the mental process is such that the latter is essentially capable of being perceived in reflection. (Husserl, 1983: 98) 94 Pierre-Jean Renaudie Reflectivity is a fundamental and not accidental property of lived experiences, whose temporality is intrinsically modifiable. Such a modification is then one “which essentially any consciousness can undergo” (Husserl, 1983: 178). Husserl meets here a fundamental point he brought out in his 1905 lectures. As fluent, lived experiences are constantly undergoing some temporal modifications that do not alter them as such, since they are essential to them: “Each living present of consciousness is subjected to the law of modification” (Husserl, 1966: 29). Insofar as a lived-experience temporally stretches, it is such that its unity cannot be seized upon as something static and a-temporal: “It is the case of a lived-experience that it is never perceived completely, that it cannot be adequately seized upon in its full unity. A lived-experience is, with respect to its essence, in flux which we, directing the reflective regard to it, can swim along after it starting from the Now-point” (Husserl, 1983: 97). Consequently, the living-present itself can only make sense in relation to a past background on the basis of which it occurs and that is somehow retained in the present itself so that we can essentially go back to this past dimension of the lived-experience through a reflective modification: “In itself, every mental process is a flux of becoming […]; it is a continuous flow of retentions and protentions mediated by a flowing phase or originarity itself in which there is consciousness of the living now of the mental process in contradistinction to its ‘before’ and ‘after’” (Husserl, 1983: 179). The living present is constantly retained as it flows in what Husserl calls a “retentional consciousness”: it is not only a consciousness of the past, but also a living present consciousness of the imme- diately elapsed experience as retained in the enduring present of this new consciousness. Husserl draws on the distinction he established in 1905 between primary and secondary memories: While the primary memory of a melody just heard retains it within the living- present of one’s consciousness as a “presence in flesh and blood”, the secondary memory loses the living character of the experience and provides a new representation that repro- duces this past experience as past. The consciousness of the immediately elapsed experi- ences is both a “presentative consciousness” and a consciousness of the now. Consequently, one must distinguish several levels of reflectivity: I can direct my regard towards my past feeling of joy as a secondary memory, but I can also intend my immediately elapsed feeling of joy that is enduring and still present in my living experi- ence as a primary memory. In the second case, the reflective modification does not cast- off the lived-experience into the past as if it were secondary, but on the contrary, brings Description, Reflection, Reduction 95 it to the living-present. Thus, instead of creating a temporal gap between the act of reflec- tion and the lived-experience reflected upon, reflection guarantees the unity of conscious- ness despite the modification it entails. This thesis allows Husserl to solve Watt’s objec- tion against reflection: However through the alteration that the mental processes of actional consciousness un- dergo in consequence of their going over into non-actionality, the modified mental pro- cesses still continue to have a significant community of essence with the original ones. […] The modified cogitatio is also consciousness, and consciousness of the same thing as that intended to in the corresponding unmodified consciousness.” (Husserl, 1983: 73) The reflective modification as such can even be seized upon thanks to a new act of reflection that discloses the relationship between modified and unmodified conscious- ness. As he writes, On the other hand, there exists the possibility of paying attention to the rejoicing advert- ence to it and, by contrast, to seize upon the lack of regard adverted to it in the phenom- enon which has run its course. But also with respect to the rejoicing which has subse- quently become an object, we have the possibility of effecting a reflection on the reflec- tion which objectivates the latter and of thus making even more effectively clear the dif- ference between rejoicing which is lived, but not regarded, and a regarded rejoicing; like- wise the modifications which are introduced by the acts of seizing-upon, explicating, etc., which start with the advertence of regard.” (Husserl, 1983: 176) Reflection is not only a modification of consciousness but a modification that is likely to seize upon itself and to know itself as a modification. Modification can then be understood as a way for consciousness to access itself rather than a transformation of the lived experience that loses its living character. 7. The epistemic thesis on reflection Accordingly, Husserl is able to state in §78 that “in generical eidetic universality” we seize upon “the absolute legitimacy of reflection on perceiving something immanent” 96 Pierre-Jean Renaudie (Husserl, 1983: 180). The epistemic status of reflection is then totally revisited since re- flection can then no longer be alleged to objectify mental phenomena and miss the unre- flected character of lived-experiences. Reflection seizes upon one’s own lived-experi- ences as an absolute givenness upon which existence cannot be doubted: “If reflective seizing-upon is directed to a lived-experience of mine, I have seized upon something ab- solute itself, the factual being of which is essentially incapable of being negated […]. It would be a countersense to believe it possible that a mental process given in that manner does not in truth exist” (Husserl, 1983: 100). In conclusion, I want to draw two major consequences of this epistemic thesis on reflection: (i) The first consequence concerns the relationship between Ideas and Logical Investiga- tions. Whereas his analysis of reflection prevented Husserl from extending the scope of the phe- nomenological investigation to the “pure Ego” in 1901, it is no longer the case in 1913. Under- standing reflection as a psychological process in Logical Investigations, Husserl considers that phenomenology has to borrow the object of its descriptions from psychology. Consequently, he claims, along with Hume and against the Cartesian cogito, that only the empirical Ego can be given through reflection, which led to difficulties when he attempted to rewrite these paragraphs in 1913. However, in Ideas, the absolute evidence of reflection allows access to the “pure Ego” as such and opens the field of transcendental egology. Insofar as it provides us with absolute data, reflection discloses the lived-experiences as ours, enabling us to apprehend ourselves as “pure subjects” of these lives. Reflection reveals the transcendental egological structure of all con- sciousness and provides the highest possible evidence about oneself, according to which “I say unqualifiedly and necessarily that I am, this life is, I am living, cogito” (Husserl, 1983: 100). Contrary to his position in Logical Investigations, Husserl is now on Descartes’ side, and against Hume. Although he had already used reflection as a methodological device of phenomenology, it now occupies a fundamental function in the process that is supposed to lead us from an empirical description of our psychic phenomena to the disclosure of the transcendental ego. (ii) Since the phenomenological use of reflection enables us to seize upon our lived ex- perience “as something absolute itself”, it brings forth the distinction between immanence and transcendence, revealing the fundamental asymmetry between being as consciousness and being as reality. “A veritable abyss yawns between consciousness and reality. Here, an adumbrated being, incapable of ever becoming given absolutely, merely accidental and relative; there, a nec- essary and absolute being, essentially incapable of becoming given by virtue of adumbration and appearance” (Husserl, 1983: 111). The relationship between consciousness and reality must then be spectacularly reversed as follows: “The being which is first for us is second in itself, i.e., it is what it is, only in “relation” to the first” (Husserl, 1983: 112). Since reflection allows us to “direct Description, Reflection, Reduction 97 our seizing and theoretically inquiring regard to pure consciousness in its own absolute being” (Husserl, 1983: 113), it constitutes the necessary ground for the radical shift that occurs in §50 of Ideas. Reflection is at the core of transcendental attitude, which Husserl describes as follows: “We prevent the effecting of all … cogitative positings, i.e., we “parenthesize” the positings ef- fected […]. Instead of living in them, instead of effecting them, we effect acts of reflection di- rected to them; and we seize upon them themselves as the absolute being which they are” (Hus- serl, 1983: 114). Insofar as reflection seizes upon consciousness as an absolute being, it allows us to move from the mere epoché to the proper phenomenological reduction, which “does not mean a mere restriction of judgment to a connective part of actual being as a whole” (Husserl, 1983: 115). Reflection urges us to acknowledge “that there is such thing as the field of pure conscious- ness […], which is not a component part of Nature” (Husserl, 1983: 114-115). Consciousness is no longer understood as a “phenomenological residuum” and can be analyzed as the primal con- stituent region (Ur-Region). From this point of view, reflection seems to be purely and simply identical to transcendental reduction since the latter is nothing but the result of the former. Reflection can then be understood as the key methodological concept that opens the gate of tran- scendental phenomenology: Starting within natural attitude as a psychological reflection, it enables us to enter the “infinite field of absolute lived-experiences” and to effect tran- scendental reduction (Husserl, 1983: 114). From this standpoint, it seems that, anticipat- ing Husserl’s claim in the last part of Krisis, Ideas had already opened a psychological way toward reduction. 98 Pierre-Jean Renaudie References Brentano, Franz (1995). Psychology from an empirical standpoint. Translated by McAl- ister. New York: Routledge. Husserl, Edmund (1966). Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (1893– 1917). Husserliana X. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1983). Ideas pertaining to a pure Phenomenology. First book. Trans- lated by Kersten. Nijhoff: Den Haag. Husserl, Edmund (1984/2/1). Logische Untersuchungen, Dritter Band. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenolgie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Husserliana XIX, no. 1. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1984/2/2). Logische Untersuchungen, Dritter Band. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenolgie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Husserliana XIX, no. 2. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Watt, Henry Jackson (1907). “Über die neueren Forschungen in dem Gedächtnis- und Assoziationpsychologie aus dem Jahre 1905.” In Archiv f. d. ges. Psychologie, t. IX. Wundt, Wilhein (1974). Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann.

Journal

Phainomenon – de Gruyter

Published: Sep 1, 2022

Keywords: Phenomenology; Time-consciousness; Reflexion; Retention; Reduction; Descriptive psychology; Transcendental turn

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