Abstract
In his Ideas I (1913), with his thought experiment of world-annihilation, Husserl
becomes persuaded that the beings of which we are conscious do not simply
lie ‘out there’ in themselves, enjoying an independent (realistic) existence. Our
experience of beings in a world, qua total horizon of beings, is the achievement
of our intentional consciousness, which unfolds its overall constitutive possibilities.
It is because of this that in our everyday meaningful comportments, we are always
intentionally correlated with what is “Vorhanden” for us.
In what we know as Ideas II, Husserl sought to offer concrete analyses of such
intentional constitutions. He distinguished three fundamental spheres of intentional
objectities: inanimate material nature, animate or psychic nature, and spirit or
culturality. These constitute, as Husserl puts it, three different regions of Being,
comprising beings that are meaningfully given in the three corresponding kinds of
intentional correlation. Thus, he divided the problem of intentional constitution into
three corresponding sub-problems. Now, according to Husserl’s Phenomenology,
some intentional interdependence holds between these three regions of Being. In
the way the matter was approached in Chap. 5 of the present book, the region
of inanimate material nature, which comprises the nature-things (Naturdinge), is
presented as being the most fundamental. The constitution of animate-psychic nature is, in its turn, thought of as presupposing inanimate nature-thinghood as
its intentional foundation. Spirit and culturality, finally, presupposes the first and,
somehow, the second region.
It is generally thought that Husserl was of the view that, for us, primordial
consciousness is the perceptual experience of nature-things; simple sensory perceptual things. That is, on the lowest level of our conscious life, we are intentionally
correlated with simple perceptually appearing things. Our experience of cultural
beings or, more broadly speaking, things of value (goods) like tools, books, etc., is
intentionally derivative and founded upon the former.
In his Being and Time (1927), Heidegger, who had already been influenced
by Husserl’s discussion of the aforementioned ontological regions, claimed that
primordially, intentional experience presents us with a world where equipment and
other beings like us appear. Moreover, the givenness of beings as nature-things,
or simply as sensory perceptual beings, is the result of a theoretical construction.
In what I would like to call “standard” or “received” Heideggerian criticism of
Husserl’s Phenomenology, it is held that Husserl starts his analysis at a high
level of theoretical intentionality. What Husserl takes as primordial intentionality,
the story goes, is an experience that is possible only as attentive-observational
and thematic givenness of beings; nature-things can appear only in ‘elaborate’
derivative experience of such a kind. In addition, in this judgmental constitution
of nature-things, the properties attributed to them appear to belong to science. This
thesis, Heidegger maintains, makes Phenomenology unfaithful to its very dictum
that calls us to remain close “to the things themselves.” If Phenomenology were
to stay close to how things indeed are, it would discover that primordially, we
are not correlated with theoretically constituted vorhanden nature-things, but with
zuhanden equipment of different kinds. Positing nature-things or perceptual things
as the ultimate fundament of intentional givenness moves us away from the original
sense of Phenomenology and accepts phenomenologically unjustified prejudices.