Husserl, Wittgenstein

Husserl “is not a system builder but a searcher for beginnings and his philosophy is precisely this search” ( from Robert Sokolowski, “Edmund Husserl and the Principles of Phenomenology,” in John C. Ryan, Twentieth Century Thinkers (Staten Island: Alba House, 1965), pp. 134-157) 

What Husserl calls “the principle of all principles” is that only immediate intuition is to be considered the ultimate norm and criterion for what is said in philosophy.  His standpoint appears therefore to be radically subjective. 

We can see this searching element in Husserl’s ideas about time.  His thesis is that time  -- the present instant -- is not an atomic, dimensionless unit, but contains within itself a protension into the future and retention of the past.  This idea makes it possible to think about consciousness as self-aware -- to think about consciousness of consciousness -- and to investigate this problem.

Consciousness holds its past states in present consciousness and also allows present thoughts to plan the future; holding these moments together in human extra-dimensional temporality is what it means for thought to reflect on itself -- this is "self-awareness."

Yet if we only know our own states then consciousness is self-enclosed and insular -- this seems the last result of British Empiricism and the Critical philosophy, since the ‘thing in itself’ appears to be out of reach -- Husserl gets us back to ideas that Aristotle and the scholastic traditions held, i.e. that via our senses, we grasp reality -- a stance that Descartes attacks at the beginning of modern philosophy. 

By Husserl’s teachings, there is no truth in itself; truth is a correlation to consciousness; it must be constituted by consciousness to exist at all; and since reality is what is considered as true, reality must be constituted by consciousness.  Everything hinges on human intentionality and the activity of consciousness which allows reality to manifest itself.  Tagore held a position like this in his discussions with Einstein.  It has been attacked as tending towards a radical subjectivation in philosophy.  

Although consciousness is correlated to reality as a phenomenon, it is aware of more than reality. It is also aware of itself. Consciousness does not only know reality, it also knows itself.  This knowledge of self is not an accessory, unessential adornment to the more normal knowledge of reality. Unless we are aware of ourselves, we do not know reality, for if we did not know ourselves, we would not recognize reality as something distinct from ourselves -- we need the one for the other -- other-consciousness requires some level of self-consciousness -- thus an intentional consciousness must be at work in order for reality to become a phenomenon -- the dimensionality of human temporality makes self-consciousness possible -- time makes being possible -- this idea becomes Heidegger's main thesis.  

Husserl makes subjectivity supreme but this creates some tension with the evidence for an unconscious mind -- in a case like this subjectivity is denied access to its own nature -- which means that subjectivity cannot be the basis for philosophy after all -- the subjective standpoint is most problematic when we see that there is more consciousness than we will ever be able to bring into self-consciousness.  Thus reality reemerges as a fundamental element in philosophy -- now, not in the sense that Husserl is worried about -- the process by which consciousness shapes ‘reality’ -- but in the different and enigmatic sense that there is something ‘real’ out there in the first place that consciousness shapes and colors and interprets --

Thus we are talking about reality in different senses or about different realities or levels of reality or aspects, sides, perspectives, viewpoints, or different ways of talking about the same experiences …

In the same sense that Wittgenstein saw too much language and too little reality, Husserl saw too much intentionality and too little reality.  The world we face and live in is not just mind nor just language.  

Man is capable of insight into the nature of reality as the basis of his use of language -- 

Man is capable of insight into the nature of reality as the basis of his awareness --

Thus we are at work in discovering principles of philosophy that do not assume a subjective standpoint or a linguistic standpoint, but return to classical ideas about the real as the true -- about stuff, matter