The Problem of the Motivation for the Phenomenological Reduction

Abstract

From the time when Husserl first began talking about the phenomenological reduction (around 1906) until the end of his life, he never tired of emphasizing its importance for phenomenology. But the great effort he devoted to the reduction in his last decade-documented in the research manuscripts recently published in Husserliana XXXIV-suggests that he was never completely satisfied with his understanding and presentation of it. Among the many difficulties posed by the reduction, one of the most fundamental is the problem of the motivation to perform it. At the heart of this problem is a certain paradox that seems to attend the very idea of moving, via the reduction, from the natural to the phenomenological (or transcendental) attitude. In what follows, I will explain this paradox in detail, and then consider several proposals for resolving it. Though I will not be offering a concrete answer to the question of what motivates us to perform the reduction, I do hope to show that a resolution of the paradox does not imply, as it might seem to, that Husserl's Cartesian project of "ultimate grounding" must be abandoned. I The need for the phenomenological reduction grew out of Husserl's demand for "scientifically" rigorous, ultimately grounded philosophy, a demand that directs us to reject as ungrounded and hence dogmatic any assumption that cannot be verified by experience. This demand was in place as early as the Logical Investigations, which are governed by an epistemological restriction Husserl calls the "principle of freedom from presuppositions" (Hua XIX/1, 24). It was only after the Investigations, however, that Husserl came to realize that this demand entails that we must put in question the most basic belief of everyday waking life, viz., the assumption that the world of our experience exists independently of us.1 The phenomenological epoche calls our attention to this Weltglaube or "belief in the world" and asks us to withhold judgment on it, to "put it out of play" or "not go along with it." In not going along with this assumption, we leave the natural attitude and enter into the properly phenomenological or transcendental attitude.2 Husserl thus calls the belief in the world the "General Thesis" of the natural attitude.2 In his presentations of the reduction, Husserl tended to emphasize that the choice of whether or not to go along with the General Thesis is (as he puts it in the Ideas) "a matter of our complete freedom" (Hua III/1, 63). But this way of presenting the reduction overlooks a significant problem: that the General Thesis can only be recognized when one has already performed the epoche. The performance of the epoche thus seems subject to an inescapable circularity: to recognize that one has the freedom to go along or not go along with the General Thesis is already to be released from what Eugen Fink called the Weltbefangenheit that characterizes the natural attitude. Let us examine the difficulty more closely. We can begin by drawing a distinction between two levels of reflection. In ordinary, waking life consciousness is absorbed in the world of its concerns; it is "given over" to the things it experiences. Using the language of intentionality, we can say that although consciousness intends objects in the world, for the most part it is lost in what it intends and so is not aware of itself as intentionally directed toward these objects. But occasionally a shard of lucidity breaks through this patina of absorption, and we become, for a moment, aware of ourselves as watching the scene, listening to the rain, etc. Philosophers long ago learned to exploit this peculiar human ability to self-reflect, developing a method we call "introspection" that enabled them to "inspect the contents of the mind." But such reflection, which Husserl calls "natural reflection" (Hua XIX/1, 389; VIII, 82f., 120; CM, 35-36), falls short of what is required for the phenomenological epoche. For this reflection is as yet completely unconcerned with the ontological status of the objects of its experience. …