reduction is Husserl’s response to the problem of psychologism and anthropologism. He considers the problem from a different point of view by showing that our knowledge of an object cannot be reduced to our subjective mental states.
For Husserl, “psychology is an experiential science,” while phenomenology is “a science of essences,”70 or, we might say, of typicalities. We can attend to the meaning of a thing if we bracket out everything that transcends our awareness and begin to pay attention to what we are aware of as it appears to us; that is, if we bracket out res extensa and concentrate on cogitationes. This does not mean that the world ceases to exist. If we experience something, it must exist in the world, but what we are attempting to do is to describe our awareness only. What becomes apparent is the fact that our consciousness is intentional.71 We always experience something as something; we are always aware of something as something.72
To investigate this constitution of experience, a phenomenologist must pay attention to the immanent flow of cogitationes revealing that we always see “more” than we actually see. The issue is how to describe this “seeing.” My perception of a tree in a garden is relative to my position in relation to that tree. The question is: How can I see this tree as a three-dimensional object standing in the garden when I really only see one side of it?73 How do I constitute the meaning of my experience from this one side that is perceptually given to me? How can I extrapolate from this one side and experience it as a tree blossoming in my garden? How do I constitute the cognitive meaning of my experience?74
According to Husserl, the sensations that constitute my experience of a tree are “moments of experience” that contribute to my meaningful constitution of this tree; but they are, by definition, not a tree. As Dan Zahavi explains, only by interpreting sensations do “we have an object-directed perception. It is [. . .] because the sensations are in themselves nonintentional [. . . that] they lack an intrinsic object-reference.”75 What is needed is the understanding of a synthesis: of how those sensations come together to form my experience of an object. How can I see the tree in my garden? I cannot explain my perception as meaningful experience if I posit sensations as primary. To account for my perception of the tree, I have to account for the synthesis through which the object becomes constituted. I have to abstract from this tree, this time, this place, and my empirical awareness of this tree. As Husserl explains, if I do not abstract from my particular “I,” I am still on the ground of natural science, in this case psychology, which investigates the mental processes of an individual consciousness. To understand the meaning of experience is to pay attention to the constitution of any and every experience. How does it happen that, in normal circumstances, we constitute the meaning of this one-sided percept as the tree standing in the garden, persisting through space and time?
We can attend to the phenomenon of a tree only if we perform a reduction; that is, if we pay attention only to “the sphere of pure self-givenness” (IP, 45; italics in original); if we pay attention to the constitution of meaning. For Husserl, “every act of thinking [. . .] ‘has’ phenomenally in it what it thinks.”76 To reflect on thinking, on the constitution of meaning, we have to pay attention to the pure immanence of consciousness by excluding all that is transcendent to it.77 We have to bracket out the world in order to consider how meaning is constituted in this pure immanence. As Husserl puts it: “The whole trick here is to let the seeing eye have its say and to exclude all transcendent reference that is interwoven with seeing, those things that are ostensibly given or thought along with what is seen [. . .] those things that in subsequent reflection get imputed to what is given” (IP, 47). This means that for Husserl in IP, only knowledge based on “absolute givenness is ultimate” (45).78 “Absolute givenness” becomes the touchstone of truth because it is free of the riddle of transcendence.
In order to investigate the appearance of a tree, we must assign the epistemological index of dubitability to the “real” tree in the garden, to the space and objective time and to the empirical “I” (IP, 34). To reflect on my perception as a perception, “a reflection that simply ‘sees,’” we must restrict our investigation to the cognitive side of appearing (i.e., to the act of knowing), “the pure cogitatio.” We consider the constitution of meaning only. By this act, we disclose “the phenomenon of this apperception: the phenomenon [. . .] of ‘perception apprehended as my perception.’” As Husserl puts it: “A pure phenomenon that exhibits its immanent essence (taken individually) [is] an absolute givenness” (IP, 34; italics in original). The eucalyptus tree in my garden can burn or decay, but the “pure phenomenon” of a tree—the immanent quiddity of a tree—is indestructible, and it is given as the tree itself.79
The key term is a “tree itself.” It is a tree that we are aware of and not the singular perception of one side of this tree. Husserl warns us against the misconception of the atomistic understanding of perceptual data. There is no singular cogitatio that can account for our perception of a tree; “the self-givenness” of the pure phenomenon is always “bound to the sphere of the cogitationes” (IP, 46). We are aware of a tree because it is constituted through a synthesis of many sensations, but those sensations cannot be accounted for outside of the bestowal of meaning that we understand as a tree.
This investigation can also be described by analogy with the method practiced in natural science.80 Galileo did not posit the law of gravitation as applying to those two particular cannonballs that he is said to have dropped from the Tower of Pisa. He did not perceive this experiment as his own singular observation. He abstracted from the time and space of the experiment, from his own person as the one who was conducting this experiment, and from the actual falling cannonballs, and formulated the law of gravity, which would apply to any object whatsoever, at any time and place. Similarly, the investigation of “this” tree as a phenomenon, constituted through the act of knowing, for example, will reveal that there are other “typicalities” in the life-world that can be made clear. By abstracting from the world, we ostensibly discover “typicalities” that reveal certain basic structures that constitute every possible experience of any object whatsoever; present, future, or nonexistent but imagined. As Husserl puts it, “This goes together with the problem of recognition of the concrete typicality of the objects, and of the objects themselves in their type.”81
Husserl’s further insight is that the empty generalization of a “type” can be abstracted only from the particular “moment of experience.”82 I can reflect on the appearance of the red roof I see from my window. I am aware of this distinct red roof. By bracketing out the world, I pay attention to the appearance of this red roof as I am aware of it. However, this is still transcendence, since I pay attention to the cogitationes of my singular consciousness. I have to abstract from my singular “I” and attend to a pure phenomenon: the pure seeing abstracted from the world and from my empirical “I.” This particular then appears as this individual red roof, but by abstracting from this singular roof, it is an instance or a type of redness per se. So I “see” the redness in two ways, so to speak: either as an instance of this particular red roof, or, by abstracting from the world and my particular “I,” as an instance of redness in general—in other words, the type or eidos of redness that embraces all possible appearances of red color.
But how is it possible to see red in two different ways? Where does the “generalization” come from? It cannot be given to me as pure self-givenness. There is nothing in the world of objects that is redness in general. My intentional awareness can be only of the particular, but never of the general. As Husserl notes, generality transcends the pure phenomenon, the pure givenness.
THE APPEARANCE AND THAT WHICH APPEARS
So, when we reflect on the pure phenomenon, we realize that the cogitationes are not pure givenness, as we assumed at the beginning, but they already “conceal all sorts of transcendencies” (IP, 67). Husserl realizes that “the appearance and that which appears stand over against each other” (67; italics in original). We tend to focus on the thing, forgetting that no thing is ever