“Transcendental Reductions”, Ch1Sb4 of Nicolas de Warren’s Husserl and the Promise of Time

by Corry Shores

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Nicolas de Warren

Husserl and the Promise of Time:

Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology

Chapter 1

The Ritual of Clarification

Subsection 4

Transcendental Reductions

Brief Summary:

Husserl’s reductions are methods for bringing our consciousness to a state where we become aware of the phenomenal givenness of things, including our own transcendental subjectivity that is responsible for the constitution of our entire phenomenal world.

Summary

One methodological component of Husserl’s phenomenology are his transcendental reductions. They involve “a movement of questioning that unfolds without ever becoming entirely transparent to itself” (25). He continually reworked his reductions, because he was never fully satisfied with any of their forms.

The reduction is not an instrument that we bring to the world, but a mode of reflection that uncovers a way of questioning into the world that requires a fundamental shift in attitude, a breaking of our naïveté, through which the obviousness of experience turns into a philosophical problem. (25)

The world is given to us in its apparent self-evidence by means of our experiences of it. But the obviousness of the world should come into question when examining it phenomenologically (25-26).

In one form of the reductions, the epoché, we make a fundamental shift in our attitudes: first, we begin in the “natural attitude,” where we naïvely accept the world and attend to “what the world is;” next, we inhibit this attitude in order to move to the “phenomenological attitude,” where we attend to “how the world is at all given to me.” (26) To do this, we must withhold our acceptance of the world as given and bring into question the grounds of its givenness to us.

This shift to what Husserl calls the “phenomenological attitude” involves a self-induced modification of consciousness to the extent that consciousness withholds its own (implicit) acceptance of the world as given in order to see, and thus to question, itself as the ground of acceptance of the world. The reduction is as much a questioning of the world as a questioning of consciousness itself in relation to the world. (26)

We do not doubt the world, or exclude or destroy it. The world as it is continues to be what it is in our experience of it. All that changes is that we become aware of our intentional relation with the world. Doing so requires a transcendence of our consciousness (to a position of self-observation), which allows for a transcendental analysis of the conditions that make consciousness of the world possible in the first place.

the reduction transforms the traditional problem of knowledge into the problem of transcendence by way of a proper understanding of intentionality in and through which objects of experience are constituted. The defining insight behind the method of reduction is that the discovery of transcendental subjectivity functions as the counterpart to the discovery of the intentionality of consciousness. Transcendence belongs intrinsically to the sense of the world, yet this transcendence only acquires its sense as transcendence from my experiencing, as transcendence for consciousness. The connection between “transcendence” and “transcendental” is here clearly circumscribed: the basic problem of transcendental phenomenology is the problem of transcendence, and the ego, or consciousness, “who bears within him the world” is transcendental in this sense, as intentionality, as the ground of the world. (27)

When we are in the natural attitude, we do not notice our intentional relation with the world. The reduction allows us to observe that (a) our consciousness is given to us differently than the things of the world are (it is not worldly; it is transcendental) and (b) our consciousness constitutes the phenomenal world. (27-28)

The reduction also puts into suspension our normal taking-for-granted of our self-givenness in the world. (28)

Husserl developed three formulations for the reduction, each corresponding to a different dimension of transcendental subjectivity. (28)

The Cartesian path opens subjectivity as the field of transcendental experience, or immanence, and a “new idea of the grounding of knowledge” (CM, 66 [27]). Subjectivity is here conceived as a foundation. The Kantian path opens subjectivity as the transcendental prerogative of constitution, as centered on the | guiding question of how experience is at all possible for consciousness in the form of its possible intelligibility. Subjectivity is here conceived as world-constituting, but also, as we shall discover in Husserl’s unique brand of transcendental thinking, as self-constituting. The Brentanian path (i.e., through intentional psychology) opens subjectivity as a field of experience or givenness. Subjectivity is here conceived as the concreteness of experience, or “lived experience.” (28-29 boldface mine)

[…]

As indicated, all three tendencies stress a particular conception of subjectivity: subjectivity as foundation or origin; subjectivity as constituting; subjectivity as descriptive field of experience. (29)

Transcendental subjectivity is the grounds for the disclosure of beings, including consciousness itself, because it is the foundational activity of constitution (29). This makes it not necessarily inside or outside the world, for it is the constitutional unfolding of the world (29d).

The transcendental reduction uncovers our transcendental subjectivity, which is normally obscured in the natural attitude (29). Our transcendental subjectivity is not to be thought in spatial terms but rather in temporal ones.

The overcoming of Brentanian descriptive psychology through the problem of time-consciousness leads to the articulation of transcendental subjectivity in its self-constituting temporality. [...] | [...] The transcendental reduction is the reduction to a new sense of temporality or time-consciousness; it is as much the reduction of time to consciousness as of consciousness to time, both of which depend on overcoming, or seeing-through, the master metaphor of time as a stream. (30-31)

Nicolas de Warren. (2009)  Husserl and the Promise of Time: Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge.

Deep Multiplicity. TF §78. There are therefore two forms of multiplicity, of duration and conscious life. Bergson. Time and Free Will

by Corry Shores
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Deep Multiplicity

Henri Bergson

Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience

Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness

Ch. II, "The Multiplicity of Conscious States," "The Idea of Duration"

De la multiplicité des états de conscience : l'idée

de durée

Part XXVIII: The Two Aspects of the Self

Les deux aspects de moi

Previously Bergson discussed how duration is really heterogeneous and non-spatial, even though we commonly think of time in terms of an extent, as if time spanned a sort of temporal space. We obtain this mistaken impression, because we perceive the extensive world around us. Say for example we would like to count the number of times a hammer falls upon an anvil. The strikes did not happen all at once, but we want to numerically group them together. So we form an image for each one. They each serve as a symbolic token for a different strike. Then we conceive these symbolic tokens as if they were laid out in extensive space, side-by-side. This allows us to take them all together at once and count them, even though they were not concurrent. But each strike correlates to a moment in our consciousness. So we also come to see our conscious duration as having coincided along an extent of time parallel to the symbolic hammer strikes. Yet, consider our inner experience of duration. On this deeper level, we do not experience duration as a homogeneous linear continuum. Rather, it is a continuous qualitative change. And again, it only becomes a quantitative stable homogeneity on account of our experiences with the spatialized outside world. When we dream, we lose that contact. We only experience our inner duration. Can we measure time while dreaming? In dreams, past and present do not bear their normal logical relations. So we fundamentally experience our conscious duration as a pure qualitative flux. It obtains quantitative features only secondarily. For example, when Bergson is writing intently, the bell also tolls the hour. While pausing in his work, he wonders the time. All the tolls together were combined in his inner awareness, like how the notes of a melody cohere together. He cannot count the tolls by giving them symbolic places in ideal space, because he was not observing the tolls explicitly while they rang. But he can recall the qualitative feeling he had when he heard the last toll. It felt for example, like four tolls, and not three or five. He writes: "In a word, the number of strokes was perceived as quality and not as a quantity: it is thus that duration is presented to immediate consciousness, and it retains this form so long as it does not give place to a symbolical representation derived from extensity. / Bref, le nombre des coups frappés a été perçu comme qualité, et non comme quantité ; la durée se présente ainsi à la conscience immédiate, et elle conserve cette forme tant qu'elle ne cède pas la place à une représentation symbolique, tirée de l'étendue" (128a/97b).

§78 There are therefore two forms of multiplicity, of duration and conscious life

So we have two sorts of multiplicities:

1) consciousness as a continuously heterogeneous qualitative manifold and

2) consciousness as being divided-up into symbolic tokens that correspond to extensive space.

Below homogeneous duration, which is the extensive symbol of true duration, a close psychological analysis distinguishes a duration whose heterogeneous moments permeate one another; below the numerical multiplicity of conscious states, a qualitative multiplicity; below the self with well-defined states, a self in which succeeding each other means melting into one another and forming an organic whole. (128bc)

Au-dessous delà durée homogène, symbole extensif de la durée vraie, une psychologie attentive démêle une durée dont les moments hétérogènes se pénètrent ; au-dessous de la multiplicité numérique des états conscients, une multiplicité qualitative ; au-dessous du moi aux états bien définis, un moi où succession implique fusion et organisation. (97c)

Normally we concern ourselves only with the superficial "shadow of the self projected into homogeneous space" (128c). Language, society, and our natural tendencies all influence the way we think. As a result of them, our minds tend to break things apart into identifiable pieces. But afterward we then mistake our representations for reality.

Consciousness, goaded by an insatiable desire to separate, substitutes the symbol for the reality, or perceives the reality only through the symbol. As the self thus refracted, and thereby broken to pieces, is much better adapted to the requirements of social life in general and language in particular, consciousness prefers it, and gradually loses sight of the fundamental self. (128d)

La conscience, tourmentée d'un insatiable désir de distinguer, substitue le symbole à la réalité, ou n'aperçoit la réalité qu'à travers le symbole. Comme le moi ainsi réfracté, et par là même subdivisé, se prête infiniment mieux aux exigences de la vie sociale en général et du langage en particulier, elle le préfère, et perd peu à peu de vue le moi fondamental. (97d)

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Images from the pages summarized above, in the English Translation [click on the image for an enlargement]:

Images from the pages summarized above, in the original French [click on the image for an enlargement

Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Transl. F. L. Pogson, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2001).

Available online at:

http://www.archive.org/details/timeandfreewill00pogsgoog

French text from:

Bergson, Henri. Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Originally published Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1888.

Available online at:

http://www.archive.org/details/essaisurlesdonn00berguoft

Labels Continuation for Entry:The Abstract Machine of Love's Diagrammatic Functioning in Mille Plateaux / Thousand Plateaus §170

by Corry Shores
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The Abstract Machine of Love's Diagrammatic Functioning in Mille Plateaux / Thousand Plateaus §170