THE IDEAS OF EDMUND HUSSERL

The Ideas of Edmund Husserl Husserl’s phenomenology is so difficult to translate into usable sociological concepts. Husserl’s general orientation to the social world can be used as a starting point (Freeman 1980). In general, people view the world in a highly ordered way. Actors are always engaged in the active and highly complex process of ordering the world. However, they are most often unaware that they are ordering the social world; hence they do not ques­tion it. To Husserl, this is the general thesis of the “natural standpoint.” To actors, the social world is naturally ordered, not ordered by them. However, phenomenologists are acutely aware that ordering is being done, and it becomes for them an important subject of phenomenological investigation. The natural standpoint, or “natural attitude,” was conceived by Husserl as an obstacle to the discovery of phenomenological process. These basic components are hidden to actors and remain hidden to phenomenologists if they are unable to overcome their own natural attitude to the world. Philosophers must be able to set aside (“bracket”) the natural atti­tude so that they will be able to get to the most basic aspects of consciousness. The natu­ral attitude is, to Husserl, a source of bias and distortion for the phenomenologist. One of the key orientations of Husserl’s work was the scientific study of the basic struc­tures of consciousness. As Husserl put it, he wanted to develop “philosophy as a rigorous science” . However, to Husserl science did not mean empiricism and statistics. In fact, he feared that such a science would reject consciousness as an object of scientific scrutiny and that it would either be found too metaphysical or he turned into something physical. What Husserl did mean by science was a philosophy that was rigorous, systematic, and critical. In using science in this way, phenomenologists ultimately could arrive at abso­lutely valid knowledge of the basic structures of consciousness. This orientation to sci­ence has had two effects on contemporary phenomenologists. First, most modern phe­nomenological sociologists continue to eschew the tools of modern social science re­search-elaborate methods, high powered statistics, and computerized results. They pre­fer, as did Husserl, a serious and systematic reflection on the nature and constitution of consciousness. Second, modern phenomenologists do not favour vague, “ soft” intu­itionism. Philosophising about consciousness is a rigorous and systematic enterprise. Husserl’s phenomenology involves a commitment to penetrate the various layers con­structed by actors in the real world in order to get to the essential structure of conscious­ness. To do this, the phenomenologist must “disconnect” the natural attitude, a very dif­ficult task ( Freeman, 1980). Once the natural attitude is set aside or is “bracketed”, the phenomenologist can begin to examine the invariant properties of consciousness that govern all people. The phenomenologists also must set aside the incidental experiences of life that tend to dominate consciousness. Husserl’s ultimate objective was to look be­yond all the layers in order to see the basic properties of the “transcendental ego” in all its purity. Another way to put this is that Husserl was interested in the pure form of con­sciousness stripped of all empirical content. The idea of the transcendental ego reflects Husserl’s interest in the basic and invariant properties of human consciousness. Although he is often misinterpreted on this point, he did not have a mentalistic, metaphysical conception of consciousness. For him, it was not a thing or a place but a process. Consciousness was found not in the head of the actor but in the relationship between the actor and the objects in the world. Husserl expressed this in his notion of intentionality. For him, consciousness is always consciousness of something, some object. Consciousness is found in this relationship; consciousness is not interior to the actor, as we saw in the proceeding chapter, it is relational, Further­more, meaning does not inhere in the objects but in the relationship of actors to those objects. This conception of consciousness as a process that gives meaning to objects is at the heart of contemporary phenomenological sociology. Reserved by Rakhesh.C.K. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior permission of Rakhesh.C.K.