Husserl Postscripts

A man is what he is as a a being who maintains homself in his commerce with the things of his thingly, and with the persons of his personal, surrounding world and who, in doing so, maintains his individuality throughout. And furthermore, he maintains himself over against the powers of the Objective spirit, which like legal institutions, morals, and religious prescriptions, stand over against him precisely as objectivities.
- Husserl, Ideas II, 141.

Here, I take Husserl to be arguing that there is a certain lawful meaningfulness of psycho-physical reality. We can know our psychological subjectivity and can know others as well, if not in the same schematic fashion we would know material reality. If one has read the lengthy post previous to this one, where I describe Husserl's temporalizing consciousness of inner time in relation to the unconscious deprivation of self-relation in immanent time, this should be understood as a brief follow up to the question of the sense of this psycho-physico subjectivity temporally constituted in relation to immanent time. There are a number of difficult questions concerning the status and the "substance" of this subjectivity in Husserl's work from this period. Here, it should be noted, that the self-relation of the subject in immanent time is primordially giving both of the self and of material perceptual reality. Typically, one of Husserl's argument's on the side of the self in empirical reality is from the natural-scientific psychology. He writes of "visual acuity," and the way this is manifested to the subject in lived experience and gains its sense over time, becomes evident to the subject that his perception is "true."

And here it is important to keep in mind the distinctions Husserl is beginning to make above. Other than the pure Ego's self relation in immanent time (a question I am ignoring - however, one notes that for Husserl, no meaning is possible without this essential possibility of taking oneself as pure Ego living through the immanence of time, neither for the psycho-physical subjectivity nor for material reality), he produces the distinction between attitudes toward the self one can take: natural scientific and human-scientific. Here, the difference between schematism and human scientific self relation is perhaps at its sharpest. We approach natural scientific reality as if its levels of causal change covered a nonmutable reality that is determinable through our schematic understanding of causality. I take it that to a degree that this would be true of natural-scientific self-relation, where everything comes back to physical, biological dependence. My eyes see because of their organic composition and relation to nerve fibers, etc. But my knowledge of myself can only come from a kind of infinite change affecting my entire being.

Husserl's assertion is that we know ourselves in this latter sense through a history we make of ourselves that can only be apprehended in reference to the immanence of time. At this level, what I've said in the previous post about intentional remembering in Husserl and the possibility of apprehending my relationship to the immanence of time as one which apprehends as well the passing of time as a series of now points to which my life, indivisibly and indissolubly, refers.
However, we can only understand Husserl's point if we take into account his theoretical perspective. This latter is the realm of pure consciousness associated with undermining the naive normativity of naturalistic thought. For Husserl, we need to see the radicalized nature of the necessity of our constitution of all realities manifest to us, and this can only be achieved by accessing this realm of, one would almost have to say, pure mind, pure theoretical insight into the meaning-giving acts of transcendental subjectivity, which for him, give us world, and in this case, self.

I am endlessly fascinated however with the tightrope in Husserl's philosophy. In my quote above, the human subject is balanced on a precipice between determinations whose only sense is this "freedom" of the self in immanent time, to which all these Objectivities over against the subject must refer. The compellingness of this thinking is that no matter our determinations, theoretically, descriptively speaking, we are meaning-giving subjects, and as such, this freedom is our source of self-realization. But to see the world is to see the world in determinations, to know ourselves is to know ourselves as determined. Kant wrote, for the self to know the self, it must relate to itself passively, and for him this "freedom" was oddly paradoxical.

As a sidenote, Freud's challenge here is that this insight into the self is improbable. We can never grasp this immanent self-relation in an intentional insight. This is the importance of the interpretative technique. However, Husserl's insight somehow rings truer to me despite its metaphysical suppositions. When we make our memorial experience explicit, when it is a loss which has habitualized our temporalization in some fundamental way, what we indeed make explicit is this obscurity in our memory. This is what it means for time to pass and to know ourselves historically. And the meaninfulness of immanent time takes on here a certain status for the psycho-physcial subject perhaps underappreciated. To know the passing of time and to know our essential experience is to know it in its adumbrative flux, its manner of givenness.

And this applies to ourseves as well. The metaphysical supposition is not, as many would argue, so much the pure mind of the Cartesian cogito, but rather an experience whose status as metaphysical should be examined in the sense that Husserl intends it. It is experience of acts, of the temporalization of intentional activity, and our relations to the fulfilment of these acts. It is an activity and not a mind, not an I think, but an I can.