Roman Ingarden used to say that he is not sure whether he was a phenomenologist. This does not seem to be just coquetry. Transcendental phenomenology in its official Husserlian version did not achieve adequacy of describing our primary experience in its fullness because it began as a sort of science, in the attitude of an 'uninvolved observer'. Yet phenomenology postulated a separate methodology, different from that of science, a methodology understood as building up a new conceptual apparatus based on a (...) full analysis of primary experience – and the phenomenologists did achieve a great progress in this direction – the direction of transcending the limits of some sort of analytic philosophy of 'pure consciousness' based on traditional concepts which phenomenology could seem to be at the beginning. Husserl oscillated between the 'dogmatic' and 'critical' motive discerned in his thought by Ernst Tugendhat: between accepting consciousness as a sphere of absolute insights and seeing such insights as an asymptotic limit of investigation. A similar duality exists also in Ingarden's thought. This duality could have been a motive of Ingarden's doubts. (shrink)

One of the main goals of modern philosophy was to achieve an in-depth insight into the foundations of empirical knowledge. The problem was expected to be resolved by the analysis of experience. However, the road to a plausible account of experience was at the very beginning obstructed by turning the analysis into a search for clear and distinctive elements of experience and by sticking to purely intellectual intuition as means of this analysis. Moreover, clear and distinctive elements of experience were (...) thought of as the basis of cognitive certainty. Both psychology and philosophy, at least until the nineteen-thirties, were deeply influenced by this essentially rationalistic conception of sensor experience. It is gestalt psychology and phenomenology that should be merited for overcoming that ill-conceived model. Only by taking into account the immediate sensor relation between the human subject and the environment, it is possible to show the kind of unity which is the prerequisite of human intellect. (shrink)