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SREN OVERGAARD
Abstract: This article discusses Jaakko Hintikkas interpretation of the aims and
method of Husserls phenomenology. I argue that Hintikka misrepresents
Husserls phenomenology on certain crucial points. More specically, Hintikka
misconstrues Husserls notion of immediate experience and consequently fails
to grasp the functions of the central methodological tools known as the epoche
and the phenomenological reduction. The result is that the conception of
phenomenology he attributes to Husserl is very far from realizing the philoso-
phical potential of Husserls position. Hence if we want a fruitful rapprochement
between analytical philosophy and Continental phenomenology of the kind that is
Hintikkas ultimate aim, then Hintikkas account of Husserl needs correcting on a
number of crucial points.
Introduction
Within the past few decades, many prominent philosophers have realized
the fruitlessness of the so-called analytical-Continental divide. Various
strategies for bridging or closing the gap have been adopted. Some have
simply proceeded as if no such gap had ever existed, pursuing their
philosophical interests wherever they might lead. Others have argued for
the necessity of tracing the philosophical traditions back to their
(common or closely related) historical roots.1 Yet others have tried to
locate, among the many heterogeneous philosophical programs on both
sides of the divide, agendas or methodologies that are fundamentally
related. To the latter group belongs Jaakko Hintikka. Inspired by the
discovery that WittgensteinFin works from what is usually referred to as
the middle periodFirted with the notion of philosophy as phenom-
enology, Hintikka has in recent years devoted particular interest to
1
Stanley Cavell is a good example of the rst type of philosopher, while Michael
Dummett exemplies the second approach (cf. Cavell 1999, xiii; Dummett 1996, 26, 193).
Hintikkas Husserl
Let me begin by offering a brief sketch of Hintikkas reading of Husserl.
One thing Hintikka has stressed consistently in practically all texts he has
written on Husserlian phenomenology is the difference between phenom-
enology and phenomenalism (Hintikka 1975, 230; Hintikka and Hintikka
1986, 72). Phenomenology is not about mere appearances as opposed
to reality. Rather, [w]hat a phenomenologist like Husserl maintains is
that everything must be based on, and traced back to, what is given to me
in my immediate experience (Hintikka 1995, 83). The reason this does
not amount to phenomenalism is Husserls insistence that reality in fact
impinges directly on my consciousness (Hintikka 1995, 83), so that there
is no fundamental gap between the real, so-called external world and the
givens of immediate experience. The denial of such a gap is in fact
dening for phenomenology. As Hintikka phrases it, the project of
Husserlian as well as other types of phenomenology is simply to uncover
the conceptual structure of the world by attending to our immediate
experience (Hintikka and Hintikka 1986, 148; Hintikka 1995, 82). What,
then, is involved in such uncovering, and how is it achieved?
According to Hintikka, Husserl takes a deeply problematic turn in his
attempt to uncover the conceptual structure of the world. Husserl was
persuaded by epistemological arguments concerning sense-perception
and its fallibility [ . . . ] that everyday material objects are not given to us
directly in the relevant sense (Hintikka 1995, 95). To reach the level
of the immediately and directly experienced, therefore, Husserl imagined
that he had to employ a peculiar methodological apparatus, consisting
inter alia of the epoche and the phenomenological reduction. As Hintikka
commentsFthereby also revealing what immediate experience is,
on Husserls accountFthe phenomenological reductions have to lead
us step by step to the different basic ingredients of our experience, on the
one hand to the unarticulated hyletic data, and on the other hand to the
essences that are used to articulate them (Hintikka 1996a, 71). Hintikka
is here alluding to a distinction Husserl makes in the rst book of Ideas
between sensation-contents such as color-Data, touch-Data and tone-
Data, and the like, which are in themselves devoid of intentionality, and
the mental processes or their moments which bear in themselves the
specic trait of intentionality (Husserl 1983, 203). Husserl calls the
sensation-contents hyle or hyletic data (or simply formless stuffs),
and refers to the mental moments by such names as noetic moments
and morphe. Husserls point here can be understood along Kantian
lines as the claim that sense-contents alone cannot yield experiences of
(spatiotemporal) objects; they need a form-giving or sense-bestowing
addition from the side of the experiencing subject (Husserl 1983, 203).
Hintikka phrases the basic idea in the following way: For Husserl, as
we know, empirical experience does not come to us already articulated
categorically. We structure it through our noetic activity; we impose the
forms on the raw data (hyletic data) of experience that are needed to make
that experience into experience of objects, their properties, relations, etc.
(Hintikka 1996a, 64). In the reductive attempt to reach the noetic and
hyletic strata, the notion of epoche, or bracketing, plays an important
role, being the method of excluding from the phenomenologists focus
everything which is not given to us in immediate experience (Hintikka
1995, 80, 85). Among the things not given to us in immediate experience, as
already indicated, we nd everyday material objects. Thus, we get the
following picture: Husserl thinks immediate experience reveals the con-
ceptual structure of the world. Inuenced by reections on the fallibility of
perception, he also (and more problematically) thinks immediate experience
cannot concern ordinary sorts of objects, such as trees, animals, people,
paraphernalia, and so on, but must rather be conceived as consisting of
unarticulated hyletic data, or sense data (cf. Hintikka 1996b, 201), which
stand in need of noetic articulation. We therefore need some process
of exclusion (the epoche and the reduction) to get from experiences of
ordinary objects down to these layers of immediate experience.
What do we do, once we have reached immediate experience? Hintikkas
answer to this question involves the important Husserlian notion of
constitution. According to Hintikka, constitution is in a certain sense
the inverse of the phenomenological reductions: whereas the reduction
took us from the world of ordinary objects back to immediate experience,
constitution has to do with the processes through which the given is
articulated in ones consciousness (Hintikka 1995, 92), thereby, presum-
ably, again reaching the level of ordinary objects.
So now we should have some kind of overview over the fundamentals
of Husserlian phenomenology. It is phenomenology in that it searches
for the basis of our conceptual world in immediate experience
(Hintikka 1995, 82). Yet it construes immediate experience as being
different from the experiences that are about ordinary objects, and as being
accessible only via a special procedure involving bracketing or exclusion of
the world of ordinary objects. However, under the title of constitution it
aims to reintroduce the ordinary world, by way of showing how it results
from our noetic activity being imposed on the raw hyletic data
(Hintikka 1996a, 64).
Criticizing this conception of phenomenology, Hintikka implies that it
falls short precisely when judged by its own (that is, phenomenological)
standards. The whole methodological apparatus makes sense only against
the background of a dubious notion of immediate experience, and
Husserls project of constitutive phenomenology springs from a construc-
tive ambition that can hardly be phenomenological. First of all, then,
Husserl should not have let epistemological worries convince him that
everyday material objects are not given to us directly (Hintikka 1995,
95). This supposition led him to postulate raw hyletic data as the basic
constituents of experience. In contrast, a more acute phenomenologist such
as Wittgenstein realized that the most primitive, unedited experience is
already articulated categorically (Hintikka 1996a, 64). For Wittgenstein,
that is, we already immediately experience the world around us as
consisting of utensils, animals, plants, people, houses, mountains, as well
as signicant states of affairs, events, and so on. This also means that
Wittgenstein, unlike Husserl, has no need for a special technique or
method to uncover immediate experience (Hintikka 1996a, 66). Once we
realize that the true immediate experience is simply the one that presents
perfectly ordinary material and cultural objects to us, the whole methodo-
logical apparatus of Husserl becomes redundant, designed as it was to
exclude all reference to these ordinary objects in favor of some supposedly
more immediate layers of experience. But that is not all. For when we
have realized that there is no need to dismantle the world of ordinary
objects, we are bound to conclude that there is no task for Husserls notion
of constitution to perform either. Thus, [f]or Wittgenstein, no process of
constitution is needed for the purpose of providing our language with the
objects it refers to (Hintikka 1996a, 65).
In the conclusion (entitled Who Is Right?) of his contribution to The
Cambridge Companion to Husserl, Hintikka launches his nal attack on
Husserls ideas. For it is one thing to have shown that there is no real need
to isolate, within ordinary experience, some core of hyletic data. A more
serious question is whether it even makes sense, phenomenologically, to
speak of something like hyletic data. The moot issue, Hintikka observes,
is whether the hyle and the noetic activity of which Husserl speaks are
accessible to phenomenological reection at all, or whether they rather
occur under the surface of our intentional consciousness (Hintikka
1995, 103). Hintikka offers a cautious reply to this question. Although he
observes that the testimony of many of the best phenomenological
psychologists seems to suggest that they occur under the surface, he
Points of Agreement
Hintikka has, I think, a number of valid points. Before I launch my
critical discussion of the claims I disagree with, let me briey go through
some of what I think is right in Hintikkas account.
It is right that phenomenology, in all its various guises, attempts
to say something about the fundamental structures of our world by
attending to our immediate experience. This goes for Husserl as well
as for Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. A benet of Hintikkas
interpretation of phenomenology as meaning philosophy of immediate
experience is that it highlights the positivistic element in phenomen-
ology. As Husserl states in the rst book of Ideas, if positivists are
those who take their point of departure in all that can be immediately
seen and grasped, then phenomenologists are the genuine positivists
(1983, 39). Of course, in saying this Husserl also implies that those
thinkers who are usually known as positivists have failed to locate the
right point of departure; so one should be careful not to exaggerate
the positivistic element. Nevertheless, as long as due caution is exercised,
the notion of a philosophy of immediate experience may help to bring
out a central motif in phenomenology.
I also share Hintikkas view that, as a philosophy of immediate
experience, phenomenology should not be unduly impressed by skeptical
worries about the fallibility of perception. Independently of what Husserl
or others might have thought, I think Hintikka is right that there is no
reason to assume out of hand that immediate experience is the same as
indubitable or infallible experience. We may grant the skeptical point that,
in any given case, it is possible that the objects of our perceptual
experience do not exist, and still insist that nevertheless our immediate
experience purports to present such things as houses, people, and apple
trees. For what is immediate experience supposed to mean if not
2
So anyone who thinks that there is a lot more to be said for the position that Hintikka
attributes to Husserl than I have given it credit for may view this article as qualied by a
conditional to the effect that even if that position were deeply problematic, it still would not
affect Husserl.
3
Byong-Chul Park, who has attempted to develop further Hintikkas readings of
Husserl and Wittgenstein, is considerably less clear on this point. Among many other
astonishing statements in Parks book, one nds the following: What is given before noetic
activities take place is not an object but formless raw material that cannot be picked out or
named [ . . . ]. Husserl cannot have phenomenological language that describes what is given in
pure experience because for him, what is given in pure experience is hyletic data, which
cannot be picked out in any language (Park 1998, 48). In Parks construal of Husserls
position, the hyletic moments would seem not to be moments of the experience as such but
rather what is given in immediate experience, before interpretative activities intervene. This is
completely confused.
4
This should be contrasted with genetic phenomenology that precisely investigates the
temporal emergence of such static constitutive systems. See, for example, Husserl 1969,
31619.
seems to me, would rather insist on the very different claim that while
the true or pure perception is the ordinary perception, the one in
which ordinary spatiotemporal objects are presented to us, we can
distinguish within this perception between hyletic and noetic aspects.
It counts in favor of such an interpretation that Husserl speaks of
the hyletic and noetic as moments (Husserl 1983, 2037). According
to the terminology Husserl introduces in section 17 of his third investiga-
tion in Logical Investigations, a moment is a dependent part of a whole.
In other words, a moment in Husserls terminology is something
that cannot exist apart from its materialization or incorporation in a
whole, as opposed to a piece, which is something that can be detached
from the whole to which it belongs (Husserl 1984, 272). The blue
color of the cover of Hintikkas Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, is
a moment in that it cannot exist by itself, detached from the cover it
belongs to. Any given page of the book, by contrast, is a piece that
can be torn out of the book and become a separate, concrete object.
So if Husserls hyletic data are moments of experiences, it would make
no sense to speak of them as the real or pure perceptions; for they would
be nothing apart from the wholesFthe concrete experiencesFto which
they belong.
This may not sufce to establish beyond doubt that Hintikkas
interpretation of Husserl is awed. But it does suggest that Hintikka
needs to be more explicit about the assumptions he is attributing to
Husserl, and that he needs to say something to make it plausible that he is
justied in so attributing them, if he is to substantiate his claim about
immediate experience being unarticulated, on Husserls account.
No such conclusion follows from the mere fact that Husserl proposes
to distinguish two components within the experience itself.
I think, however, that Husserl would agree with Hintikka about what
would count as immediate experience. It is not easy to give a very
precise characterization of it, but I think Hintikka would say something
to the effect that immediate experience is our experience as it is given,
that is, as it is before we start tampering with it, interpreting or editing it,
actively working on it in some sense. Thus, to pick a rather trivial
example, when I am walking home on a dark winters night and
involuntarily jump back at the sight of a gure standing beside my front
door, my immediate experience is that of seeing a stranger lurking at my
door. When I then start to subject my experience to closer scrutinyFask-
ing questions like: What do I actually see? Could it not be a Christmas
tree just as well as a person?Fthen I am in the process of editing my
experience. Husserl, too, it seems to me, would want phenomenology rst
and foremost to study experience as it comes to us, unedited, although
he would also hold that it is part of the business of phenomenology
to provide an account of what happens when we engage in processes of
critically scrutinizing or interpreting our experience. Of course, it would
Being) from the purview of the phenomenologist.5 And the thought might
seem natural: if the epoche does not exclude anything, then why would
Husserl think it so important? However, one ought to pay close attention
here to Husserls statement that the epoche attaches an index or a
label to the world of the natural attitude.6 This suggests both that what
is subjected to the epoche does not disappear from our view but, rather,
remains in view; and that something must nevertheless happen to it. On
the one hand, everything remains as of old (Husserl 1983, 216); and on
the other hand, we have somehow changed our viewpoint on it all:
[T]hrough the epoche a new way of experiencing, of thinking, of
theorizing, is opened to the philosopher; here, situated above his own
natural being and above the natural world, he loses nothing of their being
and their objective truths and likewise nothing at all of the spiritual
acquisitions of his world-life or those of the whole historical communal
life; he simply forbids himselfFas a philosopher, in the uniqueness of his
direction of interestFto continue the whole natural performance of his
world-life (Husserl 1970, 152; cf. 176).
The crucial importance of the epoche resides precisely in the way it
modies our attitude, without annihilating, excluding, or altering any-
thing that was given to us in the natural attitude. It is one thing to live our
natural, everyday life; it is quite another thing reectively to thematize
this life. And within the reective stance, there is a big difference between
the kind of reection in which I sit back and try to look at my actions,
experiences, and so forth, to get some kind of overview of my life or to
evaluate it morally, say, and another kind of reection in which I am
interested in my life in the natural attitude as a world-revealing or world-
disclosing life (cf. Husserl 1970, 209). Normally, we do not think of
ourselves as places where the world is revealed; rather, we think of
ourselves as particular, rather small creatures going about our business in
various corners of the world. Husserls descriptions of what we experience
in the natural attitude are intended to awaken in us a sense of how the
world is something that is given to us as such in our (immediate)
experiencesFprecisely as a world that encompasses us, transcends
us, and contains endless varieties of cultural and natural objects that
transcend us. Once we have realized that, the next step is to make us
5
Such claims have, for example, also been made by the famous historian of the
phenomenological movement, Herbert Spiegelberg. See his 1940, 9394, for the claim that
the epoche and the reduction involve an exclusion of the reality of phenomena; and his 1965,
299, for a similar point phrased in terms of the Heideggerian notion of Being. Husserl
himself insists that the epoche excludes nothing from our view, but on the contrary enables
us to attend to the phenomena (1970, 15152, 176, 241). For an elaborate critique of the
most common misunderstandings of Husserls epoche and reduction, see Overgaard 2004,
chap. 2.
6
This statement also appears in one of the few other works that Hintikka refers to, The
Idea of Phenomenology (see Husserl 1950, 29).
aware that we do not really understand how our experiences can present
such a world to us. As I mentioned in the previous section, the point of
Husserls transcendental phenomenology is precisely to provide us with
this understanding. We are supposed to reect on our experiential life as
world-disclosing or world-revealing in order to achieve an understanding
of how this life can accomplish what it evidently accomplishes: namely,
presenting a world to us.
Now a task is beginning to emerge for the epoche to perform. For when
we are living in the natural attitude, pursuing our various practical and
theoretical objectives, we rely on various diverse kinds of knowledge
(practical, social, commonsense, scientic, and so on) about all kinds of
different matters in order to reach our conclusions and decisions. This is
part of what it means to live in the natural attitude. If, however, we want to
inquire how the world as a whole, with everything it contains, can present
itself to us, then it becomes problematic to relyFat least directlyFon these
types of natural knowledge. What must be avoided here is a special kind of
question-begging or circularity. Husserl calls it the transcendental circle
(1962, 24950). Briey stated, the point is that if you want to understand
how a world can be manifested or disclosed at all, then you cannot, in that
enterprise, base your conclusions on any kind of knowledge that presup-
poses (as all knowledge that belongs within the natural attitude does) the
manifestation of the world. For example, we cannot rely on empirical
investigations of visual perception in trying to answer our transcendental
question, for, as investigations based upon observations of particular
worldly entities and states of affairs, these presuppose and exploit that
which we need to understand: world-manifestation as such (cf. Husserl
1962, 24850, 273). Making sure that our explanation does not base itself
on that which has to be explained is precisely the job of the epoche. The
index or label of which Husserl speaks, therefore, we might imagine as
consisting of the warning, Do not use.
But precision is of the essence here. Husserls point, after all, is merely
that there is a fundamental difference between posing the philosophical
question concerning the manifestation of the world as a whole and posing
everyday or scientic questions about particular matters in the world.
Therefore, we should avoid treating answers to questions of the second
sort as answers to questions of the rst sort. This means that as
phenomenologists we must exercise a certain caution in relating to the
experiences of the natural attitude, but not that we are barred from every
kind of use of these. We are not supposed to live these experiences, in the
normal way; but we are allowed, even obliged, to study them reectively.
The epoche, by prohibiting the former, makes possible the latter (cf.
Husserl 1970, 148).
Suppose I am now experiencing a coffee cup placed on a table amid
heaps of papers and books. When I am naturally attuned, my interest in
the cup has to do with the fact that it contains the coffee I have just made
Conclusion
If the preceding two sections have offered a coherent, exegetically
defensible account of central notions in Husserlian phenomenology,
9
Again, Hintikka is not alone in interpreting Husserls notion of constitution along the
lines in question. Another inuential commentator in this regard is Gadamer (cf. his 1987,
135).
Department of Philosophy
University of Hull
Hull HU6 7RX
United Kingdom
S.Overgaard@hull.ac.uk
References
Cavell, Stanley. 1999. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism,
Morality, and Tragedy. New edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dummett, Michael. 1996. Origins of Analytical Philosophy. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1987. Die phanomenologische Bewegung. In
Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, 10546. Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Hintikka, Jaakko. 1975. The Intentions of Intentionality and Other New
Models for Modalities. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
FFF. 1995. The Phenomenological Dimension. In The Cambridge
Companion to Husserl, edited by Barry Smith and David W. Smith, 78
105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
FFF. 1996a. The Idea of Phenomenology in Wittgenstein and
Husserl. In Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-
Truths, 5577. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
11
The research leading to this article was carried out at the Center for Subjectivity
Research, University of Copenhagen. An early version of the article was presented at the
Fourth Annual Conference of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology, University of Iceland,
April 2006. I am grateful to everyone who took part in the discussion of it. Thanks also to an
anonymous referee for this journal, for a number of helpful comments.