The Phenomenological Status of the World: Possibility and Actuality

Abstract

The phenomenological method is particularly well-suited to address the theme of the 51st International Phenomenology Congress, “The Controversy over the Existence of the World,” since Edmund Husserl devised its method specifically to provide an account of the possibility of the experience of the world that we encounter in daily life. Husserl suggests a thought experiment at the beginning of phenomenologizing: imagine the destruction of the entire universe. The thinker sees that the experiment cannot be executed in its entirety since the acts of a conscious subject must remain as the source of the condition of the possibility of executing the experiment. This peculiar thought experiment, the transcendental phenomenological reduction, performs the service of releasing objects from a metaphysics of substance that presupposes the independence of objects from the subjects that experience them. The reduction reveals instead that subjects are more basic epistemologically than the objects that derive from subjects experience of them. Objects only become such since they are intended by a conscious subject; objects can be only for subjects. Consciousness is a necessary condition for meanings, including all that we mean when we wonder if this world is the real world. Yet, Husserl knows that thinking cannot make it so.