Our “belief in the world” is the basis from which our theorizing begins.103
As Husserl affirms, things themselves are the primary guide that will lead us to knowledge in general. We need to recognize that our knowledge is based on our experience of the life-world. Duc Thao Trân states: “The truth of predicative forms is founded on the movement of antepredicative experience.”104 Epistēmē is always already based on doxa.
DOXA AND EPISTĒMĒ: “BACK TO THE THINGS THEMSELVES”—ZU DEN SACHEN SELBST!
Profound thought is an indication of chaos, which genuine science aims to transform into a cosmos, a simple, entirely clear, dissolved order.105
In his 1917 inaugural lecture in Freiburg im Breisgau, Husserl affirms the recognition of the primacy of the world with his call to return to things themselves when he says: “Natural objects [. . .] must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur. [. . .] There is consciousness of the original as being there ‘in person.’”106 As we live in the world, we pass judgments about things according to our “natural attitude”:107 we simply take for granted that the world is outside us, and we encounter it unproblematically as being simply there. Yet, as Husserl notes also, natural attitude is ignorant of the “bestowal of sense.”108 That is, we are ignorant that it is we ourselves who constitute the world’s meaning. It is this attitude that Husserl challenges by showing that “the objects would be nothing at all for the cognizing subject if they did not ‘appear’ to him, if he had of them no ‘phenomenon.’” In other words, only by disclosing the constitution of meaning of the world we live in, only by showing the lawful structure of our experience, can we confront not only the charges of relativism and skepticism,109 but also our own human participation in the erection of the mathematized structure of the world of positive sciences.
So, if Husserl is right and doxa is the stepping-stone toward epistēmē—knowledge—there must be a way to account for this progression. This is the problem that Husserl tries to confront in his last work.
Husserl’s conception of truth changes between the writing of LI and the writing of Ideas and FTL. In LI, Husserl speaks of truth-in-itself. The idea of truth is the idea that truth is a property of judgment. In his introduction to the revised version of LI, Husserl notes that “theoretical thinking and cognition are accomplished in statements,” hence the need for the “epistemologically clarifying efforts” that take as their starting objective “the essence of ‘expressing.’”110 This idea is dealt with in Expression and Meaning, the first volume of LI. However, as Husserl notes, the problem is the “imperfect conception of the essence of ‘truth in itself’ in the Prolegomena,”111 because “the concept of a ‘truth in itself’ [. . .] is too one-sidedly oriented to vérités de raison”—or, pure logic unconcerned about things themselves. It is the sixth volume of LI that “brings in necessary clarification in this respect.”112 The only way to reach “an absolutely justified knowledge” is to go back to “original sources,”113 that is, “back to the things themselves”; in other words, back to the world. Husserl’s shift from LI’s truth-in-itself to his call “back to the things themselves” is a shift from formal principles of knowledge to a consideration of “the sense or essence of knowledge” (IP, 25). As Thao points out, “‘That of which we speak,’ the upokeimenon, is not a simple indeterminate and empty substrate: it is the object itself, just as it presents itself in the antepredicative evidence of perception.”114 It is the thing itself, in other words, the meaningful thing, that we experience and that is the starting point for the way we arrive at knowledge of it.
Based on prepredicative experience, this new conception of knowledge is not reduced to truth-in-itself, which is the property of a judgment alone. Rather, evidence is based on the “originary presentive intuition.”115 As Husserl says, “Evidence is [. . .] not some sort of consciousness-index attached to a judgment [. . .] calling to us like a mystic voice from a better world: Here is the truth;—as though such a voice would have something to say to free spirits like us and would not have to show its title to legitimacy.”116 Knowledge is not based on some mysterious process that aligns the thing itself with our knowledge of it. We must reflect upon evidence, work hard to understand its structure and discern the typicalities that are hidden at the first unreflective understanding. Evidence is not something that is freely floating in the world. It is based on our freedom as thinkers who can reflect; distancing ourselves from immediate experience to discover its structural underpinnings. Only by way of reflection can we disclose the structures that can illuminate other instances of our experience. Human freedom means that we can transcend the immediacy of our perception and see beyond the given. By way of phenomenological analysis, we can show that our experience is not reduced to the here and now but is structured by past experiences. Truth is something that guides our thinking, but it cannot be reduced to the predicative judgment. It is the world of our living, the life-world, that informs our judgments.
Yet, if our experience of the world is subjective, “how can singular judgments of fact be valid at all? How can the experienced world even be in truth?”117 As Husserl suggests, it is the case that our experience of the world changes; we need to reflect on how we nevertheless take the world for granted, how it forms the backdrop to our experience and how we anticipate the things we encounter in the world. As he also explains: “Real truth is the correlate of real being, and just as real being is an infinitely distant idea, the idea of a pole for systematic infinities of appearances, of ‘experiences’ in constantly legitimate presumption, so real truth is an infinitely distant idea.”118 It is not the case that truth is somewhere in the world where we can “discover” it once and for all. Truth is a regulative idea that will guide our understanding toward “what is identical in the agreement of experiential judgments” by making us see how “in each [. . .] truth ‘appears,’ [and] achieves legitimate subjective givenness.” Our experience is based on “the pure form of generality which contains all possibilities.” We know that things can deceive us because they show themselves one-sidedly, but we also know that we can approach them, look with more attention, and confirm or disprove our initial beliefs about them.119 Husserl’s insight is that our intuition of a thing is, at first, empty. Only through evidence can we reach a fulfilled intuition and become certain of the thing’s being as we think it is.120
Husserl’s call to return to the things themselves leads him to formulate the principle of all principles.121 As he says in IP, “The proper sense of the principle lies in the constant requirement of sticking with the things that are put in question [. . .] and not [confusing] the problems brought up here with entirely different problems.” He insists that “the clarification of the possibilities of knowledge does not follow the ways of objective science.” It is not “a matter of deducing, inducing, calculating, and the like; and it is not a matter of deriving in a reasoned way new things from things already given, or from things that count as already given” (IP, 64). As he says, to see something is to know, but “seeing cannot be demonstrated or deduced. It is a manifest piece of nonsense to try to clarify possibilities (and immediate possibilities at that) through a logical derivation from non-intuitive knowledge.” His example is of a deaf man. Someone born deaf is told that “there are tones, that harmonies are based on tones, and that a splendid art is derived from them,” but how could he know how those tones lead to something that others call musical compositions? He has never heard any of it; how can he even imagine what music is? To know that there is something that others call music is of no help in considering what this “thing” called music is. “Knowledge of existence would be of no help here; and it would be absurd to propose to deduce the ‘how’ of music” from knowledge that music exists. “It will not do to draw conclusions from the existence of things one merely knows but does not see” (IP, 30).122 Either we know what music is because we have experience of it or we do not. It is not possible to deduce knowledge from somebody’s explanation of music’s existence without my own experience of an opera, for example.