A PHENOMENOLOGICAL EXAMINATION OF HUSSERL'S THEORY OF HYLETIC DATA PROF. QUENTIN SMITH EDMUND HUSSERL PHENOMENLOGIST 1859-1938

Husserl is the father of phenomenology. Born in the former Czechloslovakia, Husserl studied in Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna, where he also taught. He began his studies as a mathemetician, but his studies were influenced by Brentano, who moved him to study more psychology and philosophy. He wrote his first book in 1891, The Philosophy of Arithmetic. This book dealt mostly with mathematical issues, but his interests soon shifted. Husserl immersed himself in the study of logic from 1890-1900, and he soonafter produced another text: Logical Investigations(1901). Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, was translated with Notes and an Introduction by Quentin Lauer, Harper Torchbooks, ©1965 by Quentin Lauer. This page originally copied from PRO EUROPA website, where you will find much other good material, including (e. g.) Thomas Mann's response (1937) to the Third Reich stripping him of his honorary doctorate degree from the Frederick-William University at Bonn. PRO EUROPA's epigraph to the section of their website containing these texts is also fitting to quote here: "The struggle against everything whose only claim to dignity is its materiality, to refuse to be merely a passive and determined element in the order of Creation this seems to me the primordial virtue which transformed an Asian peninsula into Europe" - Carlo Schmid] "The lights are going out all over Europe. We at least shall try to relight them." (--"Daniel Corbett, Christian Filips 7D", apparently from a German/Belgian student's 2000 online yearbook webpage) I A Phenomenological Examination of Husserl's Theory of Hyletic Data Prof. Quentin Smith Philosopher, Physicist, Linguist, Painter, Poet. Professor, Philosophy Department, Western Michigan University W. M. U Distinguished Faculty Scholar. Editor-In-Chief, Philo: A Journal of Philosophy Philosophy Editor, Prometheus Books. Published in: Philosophy Today, Vol. 21, No. 4, Winter 1977, pp. 356-367. Quentin Smith is the University Distinguished Faculty Scholar (from 2002) at Western Michigan University and also Professor of Philosophy (from 1995). He works primarily in certain areas in philosophy, such as Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion, Atheism, and Naturalism, Philosophy of Time, Philosophy of Language, Ethics, Philosophy of Physical Cosmology and Philosophy of Physics, The History of Analytic Philosophy, and Existentialism and Phenomenology. Among philosophy professors, he is mostly known for his work on the philosophy of time, philosophy of religion, naturalism and atheism, and philosophy of big bang cosmology and quantum cosmology. Most of the philosophical works written about Dr. Smith are in the areas of philosophy of time and philosophy of religion, naturalism and atheism. Regarding questions about religion, God, naturalism and atheism, Quentin of the Smith's work argues that big bang cosmology and quantum cosmology are inconsistent with the existence of God, and are the main topics discussed in the literature on Quentin Smith's work on atheism, naturalism, and the existence of God. . Quentin Smith has published four books on time, two books on atheism and the philosophy of religion, one book on physical cosmology, one book on existentialism and phenomenology (on his "metaphysics of feeling"), and one book on the philosophy of mind. Also, he has published approximately 120 articles in scholarly academic journals and edited books. Quentin Smith's other publications on other topics are can be found in his vita by visiting his excellent website at: http://www.qsmithwmu.com/http://www.qsmithwmu.com/

A Phenomenological Examination of Husserl's Theory of Hyletic Data

Quentin Smith

Our aim in this paper is to examine the phenomenological evidence for Husserl's theory of hyletic data. It is Husserl's claim that hyletic data form an immanent basis for intentional acts and their constitution of objects. The evidence that Husserl offers in support of this claim is that this immanent data can be brought to intuitive givenness by an act of phenomenological reflection. We would like to investigate the nature of this reflection and of what appears to it, in order that we may reach a determination of the veracity of Husserl's theory. We will do this by first giving a presentation of Husserl's theory of hyletic data, and then by subjecting this theory to a step by step phenomenological examination.

Our investigation of this theory will be a purely phenomenological investigation. This means that our sole concern will be with the intuitive and descriptive evidence for this theory. We will not be concerned with its logical cogency or its explanatory power. It is because of this that we will not take into account the argument that Sartre presented against the explanatory value of this theory in section 4 of the Introduction to Being and Nothingness.[1] Sartre argued in this section that the theory of hyle is unsatisfactory because it fails to explain how consciousness can transcend i t to the world. After showing that the hyle could neither be consciousness, nor derive its being from consciousness, Sartre writes "But if the hyle derives its being from itself alone, we meet once again the insoluble problem of the connection of consciousness with existents independent of it. Even if we grant to Husserl that there is a hyletic stratum for the noesis, we can not conceive how consciousness can transcend this subjective toward objectivity. In giving to the hyle both the characteristics of a thing and the characteristics of consciousness, Husserl believed that he facilitated the passage from the one to the other, but he succeeded only in creating a hybrid being which consciousness rejects and which can not be a part of the world."[2] Now whether this argument against the theoretical cogency of hyle is valid or not is irrelevant to our goal in this paper. We are concerned only with the phenomenological cogency of hyle. That is, we are concerned solely with the question of whether or not this hyle can be given to a reflective intuition.

I. HUSSERL'S THEORY OF HYLETIC DATA

Husserl's first mention of hyletic data can be found in the first chapter of the Fifth Logical Investigation. Al- though it should be noted that the term "hyle" is not yet used by Husserl (its first use will be in section 8 of The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness[3]) .Husserl here discusses it in terms of "sensations". Sensations are introduced in the context of colors, where Husserl makes a distinction between the color-sensations and the objective colors. In this field, Husserl writes, "the color-sensations and the object's objective coloring are often con- founded."[4] One should always be aware that the color-sensation is an immanent and real (reelle) moment of the conscious experience, whereas the object's coloring is an objective property that is transcendent to the conscious experience. Although these two colors correspond to one another, they are distinct and separate moments. We gave an example of this correspondence in Our paper, "On Husserl's Theory of Consciousness in the Fifth Logical Investigation" :

"In the perception of a red box, there is both a red sensation that is an immanent component of the perceptual consciousness, and an objective redness that is a real (real) property of the box. What I perceive is not the sensation, but the objective property that corresponds to the sensation. What enables me to 'get beyond' the sensation and envisage the objective property is the 'objectifying interpretation' of the sensation. This 'objectifying interpretation', which in later years Husserl will call a noetic phase, is also an immanent component of consciousness; it is that which 'ensouls' the sensation and thereby constitutes a reference to the objective property that corresponds to the sensation."[5]

This objectifying interpretation, like the sensation itself, does not appear in the perceptual act. As Husserl explains, the objectifying interpretation and the sensations are merely experienced in this act: "Sensations" and the acts 'interpreting' them or apperceiving them, are alike experienced, but they do not appear as objects: they are not seen, heard or perceived by any sense. Objects on the other hand, appear and are perceived, but they are not experienced."[6]

However sensations are not the only kind of hyletic data. Sensations are the hyle only of perceptual consciousnesses. There is also a distinct hyle of imaginative, signitive and feeling acts. It is true that Husserl barely mentions these other kinds of hyle, but nevertheless they must be accounted for. With regard to the hyle of imaginative acts, Husserl writes in Chapter Six of the Fifth Logical Investigation that they are to be called "images" rather than "sensations" : "The distinction between perception and imagination ... is always confused with the distinction between sensations and images. The former is a distinction of acts, the latter of non-acts, which receive interpretation in acts of perception or imagination."[7] In The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness Husserl calls these images "phantasms". We get a brief indication of their relation to perceptual sensations: "to sensations correspond the phantasms. .." to sensed red corresponds a phantasm of red. .."Phantasms [are] presentificational modifications of sensations".[8]

On the basis of this brief remark about phantasms being presentificational modifications of sensations, it would appear that Sartre's evaluation of Husserl's theory of imagination in Chapter Nine of Imagination is correct: "Husserl remained a prisoner of the old conception, at least with regard to the hyle of the image, which was for Husserl a reviving sensory impression."[9] Sartre gave an exhaustive critique of this notion of hyle in a subsequent work, The Psychology of Imagination.[10] Since we presented the essentials of this critique in our "Sartre and the Matter of Mental Images",[11] and gave an expanded formulation of it to cover the four types of images other than the visual ones (Sartre himself only dealt with the visual images) , we will not repeat this critique in the present paper .

The hyle of signitive acts are discussed by Husserl in Chapter Three of the Sixth Logical Investigation. In this Chapter Husserl talks of hyle in terms of "contents", specifically in terms of "intuitively presentative or intuitively representative contents"[12] The intuitively representative contents are the imaginative hyle, the images or phantasms, and Husserl proceeds, in section 25, to distinguish these contents from the signitive contents. Recalling that for Husserl signitive acts are empty intentions which require a sign to refer to their objects, we can understand the grounds on which he makes this distinction:

"If we bear in mind the fact that the same (e. g. sensuous) content can at one time carry a meaning, and at another time an intuition-denoting in one case and picturing in the other-we come to widen the notion of a
1 representative content, and to distinguish between contents which represent signitively (signitive representatives) and contents which represent intuitively (intuitive representatives)."[13]

So we see that a signitive representative is peculiar in that it is a content which is interpreted as a sign which denotes the object of the signitive act, rather than as an image which pictures this object. To give an example, we may say that the ink marks "Mount Everest" are signitive representatives which denote rather than picture the object Mount Everest.

The hyle of feeling-acts is described by Husserl in section 15B of the second chapter of the Fifth Logical Investigation. Feeling hyle, or "feeling-sensations", are sensations of pain, pleasure, desire or volition which are intentionally referred to the subject's empirical ego and to the thing that is 'provoking' his feeling. For example, in sadness "the same unpleasing sensation which the empirical ego refers to and locates in itself-the pang in the heart-are referred in one's emotional conception to the thing itself."[14]

Now we come to the question of categorical acts. Whether categorial acts, the acts which intuit categorial objects (universals and relations), have a hyletic content is something that Husserl was of different minds on. In the First Edition of the Logical Investigations (1900) Husserl maintained that there was such a hyle, and devoted Chapter Seven of the Sixth Investigation, a Chapter entitled, "A Study in Categorial Representation", to its; explication. In this Chapter he described the hyle, or "categorial representatives", as consisting of "reflective contents",[15] which are the psychic contents of a past conscious experience that is being reflected on. However in his later writings Husserl abandoned this concept of categorial representatives. In this vein he writes in the Second Edition of the Logical Investigations (1913) that he no longer approved of the doctrine of categorial representation: "I do not approve of much that I then wrote, e. g. the doc- trine of categorial representation."[16] The concept of a categorial hyle never appeared in his subsequent works, and there are even indications that he had rejected this concept as early as 1904, for in Part One of The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (which was given as a lecture course in 1904-5) we read: "Not every constitution has the schema: content of apprehension-apprehension."[17] Since in this and later works Husserl never rejected the idea of a hyletic content of perceptual, imaginative, signitive and feeling acts, r this sentence can only be understood as a reference to the acts that constitute categorial objects.

We have now expounded Husserl's, theory of the four different types of hyle, the sensations, phantasms, signitive representatives, and feeling-sensations, and we have expounded his rejected theory of categorial representatives. With this behind us, we can turn to his theory of the pre-objective constitution of hyle. The first hint of this comes in The Phenomenology of Internal Time-consciousness. This book is an investigation of the hyletic content of time and of the acts that pertain to time. Thus in the "Introduction" Husserl writes : "We try to clarify the apriori of time by investigating time-consciousness... by setting forth the content of apprehension and act-characters pertaining specifically to time".[18] In the course of this investigation we learn something of unique importance for the theory of hyletic content in general. Husserl shows that hyle is temporally constituted in a pre-objective fashion. That is, the hyle that serve as the contents for the apprehension of objects other than that of objective time are themselves already constituted as temporal unities by an immanent time-consciousness. "The data of sensation which play their role in the constitution of a transcendent Object are themselves constituted unities in a temporal flow... The apprehension [of the transcendent Object] is the 'animation' of the datum of sensation [which] must be constituted before the animating apprehension can begin. .. For in the moment in which the apprehension begins, a part of the datum of sensation has already expired and is only retentionally retained. The apprehension, then, animates not only the momentary phase of primal sensations, but also the total datum, including the interval which has expired."[19] That is to say the sensations which are objectified into the transcendent Object are themselves already "temporalized"-they are already constituted in the temporal form of "now", "no longer" and "not yet", prior to their objectification.

The consciousness that constitutes this immanent temporality is absolute consciousness: "Subjective time is constituted in absolute, timeless consciousness".[20] This absolute consciousness is not what Husserl later came to call the absolute ego, for the absolute consciousness is itself prior to the ego. Thus Husserl writes in Ideas I: "The transcendental 'Absolute' [ego] which we have laid bare through the reductions is in truth not ultimate; it is something which in a certain profound and wholly unique sense constitutes it- self, and has its primeval source in what is ultimately and truly absolute ... time- consciousness."[21]

In Experience and Judgment[22] (written from 1910 to 1934) Husserl explains the priority of time-conscious- ness over the absolute ego in terms of its prior constitution of hyle. We learn that previous to any activity of the ego, there is a field of hyletic data (the passively pregiven data) which is constituted by time-consciousness. "Sensuous data ... are themselves also al- ready the product of a constitutive synthesis, which, as the lowest level, presupposes the operations of the synthesis in internal time-consciousness. These operations, as belonging to the lowest level, necessarily link all others."[23] However, below the level of the absolute ego, there is even another level of constitutive activity. "The result of temporal constitution is only a universal form of order of succession and a form of co-existence of all immanent data. But form is nothing without content. Thus the syntheses which produce the unity of a field of sense are already, so to speak, a higher level of constitutive activity."[24] This "higher level" is the level of "associative genesis",[25] which is largely a unification of the passive data through "homogeneity and heterogeneity".[26] From this level we can reach the lowest level of the ego's acts, which is the level of receptivity. "Receptivity must be regarded as the lowest level of [the ego's] activity."[27] In receptivity the ego turns-toward a prominent hyletic datum (a prominence which is the result of the associative genesis) and receives the datum that is affecting it in this manner. "In this turning-toward the ego receives what is pregiven to it through the affecting stimuli."[28] It is now that the ego interprets the hyle as an object of perception: the ego's "perceptive apprehension turns in order to grasp [the hyle] as an object of perception".[29] Thus it is that the ego's first objectification of the hyle is based on the prior pre. objective constitution of this hyle by the temporal and associative operations.

We are not interested here in the higher levels of the ego's objectifying acts, such as its explicative and relational contemplations of the perceptual object. What concerns us is Husserl's theory of hyletic data, and his theory of the intuitive givenness of this data. The overriding goal in our presentation of Husserl's theory is to bring out the structure of the hyletic data insofar as it can appear to a phenomenological intuition. In relation to this goal, the preceding remarks about the pre-objective temporal and associative constitution of hyle have been especially significant. For in the phenomenologically reflective intuition of hyle, this hyle does not appear by itself, in an unconstituted or pre-constituted state. It is intuited only insofar as it is already constituted by the temporal and associative operations. Our view that this is the case is confirmed by a passage in Experience and Judgment, which we will quote at length:

"Although a field of sense, an articulated unity of sensuous data-colors, for example-is not given immediately as an object in experience, for colors are always already 'taken' in experience as colors of concrete things, as colored surfaces, 'patches' on an object, etc., still an abstractive turning of regard is always possible, in which we make this apperceptive substratum itself into an object. This implies that the sensuous data brought into prominence by abstraction are themselves already unities of identity which appear in a multiform manner and which, as unities, can then them- selves become thematic objects; the present sight of the color white in this particular light, etc., is not the color white itself. Thus, the sensuous data, on which we can always turn our regard as toward the abstract substratum of concrete things, are themselves also al- ready the product of a constitutive synthesis, which, as the lowest level, pre- supposes the operations of the synthesis in internal time-consciousness."[30]

The last sentence we quoted above, on page 360, in reference to the temporal and associative constitution of the data. The "constitutive synthesis" which presupposes the temporal synthesis is explained by Husserl in the succeeding paragraphs to be the associative genesis. From this quotation, then, we can see that the reflective intuition of hyle, the "abstractive turning of regard", does not abstract from the temporal and associative syntheses. For it is precisely these syntheses that constitute the hyle as unities of identity, and thereby enable the hyle to be brought before a reflective intuition. It is only the "sense- giving operations"[31] of the ego, the operations that constitute objects from the hyle, that are abstracted from in the reflective intuition. Husserl makes this clear in a passage from the same section of Experience and Judgment:

"Let us take the field of passive data in its originality, which of course can be established only abstractly, i. e., by disregarding all the qualities of familiarity, of trustworthiness, according to which everything which affects us I is already there for us on the basis of previous experience. If we take this field as it is before the activity of the ego has as yet carried out any sense-giving operations whatever with regard to it, it is not as yet a field of objectivities in the true sense of the term. For, as has already been mentioned, an object is the product of an objectivating operation of the ego."[32]

In the intuition of this field of passive data what we do-according to the above quotes-is abstract from and disregard the objectivating operations of the ego, but leave in place, as it were, the temporal and associative syntheses. But this does not as yet fully clarify the nature of the hyletic data that will appear to this intuition. For we may still ask what it is that will appear along with the temporal and associative operations. In other words, what is the exact nature of this "hyletic data" that will appear as "now", "just past", and "about to be", and additionally as "similar to X" and as "contrasting with Y"? Let us take the case of perceptual sensations. In what way can we characterize the inner nature of these sensations, so that when we intuit them we will be able to recognize a distinguishing feature that characterizes them precisely as sensations? In a negative fashion Husserl points out in an Appendix to the Logical Investigations that a distinguishing feature is their entire distinctness from the sensuous properties of the perceived object. "It is plain, and confirmable by phenomenological analysis in each instance, that the thing of perception, this so-called sensational complex, differs in every circumstance, both as a whole and in every distinct moment of property, from the sensational complex actually lived through in the percept."[33]

But in positive terms, how can this immanent sensational complex be described? Husserl answers this by saying that the immanent and objective sensations are composed of ana1ogous stuffs. "Apparent things as such, the mere things of sense, are composed of a stuff analogous to that which as sensation is counted a content of consciousness."[34] But with this characterization of the immanent and objective sensations as being composed of analogous stuffs, we are left with the problem of determining the precise factor that differentiates one of these stuffs from the other. If the immanent and objective sensations are composed of analogous stuffs, and yet are always different from one another, what is it that makes them different?

The solution to this problem is most clearly stated in The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. In section 1, Husserl is explaining how the sensation of red differs from the perceived red. "Not the sensed but the perceived red is a quality in the true sense, i. e., a characteristic of an appearing thing. Sensed red is red only in an equivocal sense, for red is the name of a real quality."[35] The true sensory qualities are the perceived qualities, for these are the qualities that appear as properties of things. We then find that the factor which differentiates these two kinds of sensory qualities is the factor of apprehension. "It is through apprehension that sensed red first acquires the value of being a moment which exhibits a material quality."[36] Thus when the sensed red is apprehended it then exhibits the real quality of perceived red. However in itself, viewed without the apprehension, the sensed red is merely a sensed red, and is not a moment which exhibits a real quality: "Viewed in itself, however, sensed red is not such a moment."[37] Accordingly we may say that the real qualities, the Objective "sensational stuff", differs from the immanent sensational contents precisely through the "addition" of the factor of apprehension to the immanent contents. This is stated by Husserl in a definitive fashion:

"The lived and experienced con- tent is 'Objectified', and the Object is now constituted from the material of this content in the mode of apprehension. The object, however, is not merely the sum or complexion of this 'content', which does not enter into the object at all. The object is more than the content and other than it. Objectivity belongs to 'experience', that is, to the unity of experience, to the law- fully experienced context of nature. Phenomenologically speaking, Objectivity is not even constituted through 'primary' content but through characters of apprehension and the regularities which pertain to the essence of these characters."[38] (our italics).

The differentiating factor of "apprehension" that marks off the Objective properties from the immanent sensations is highlighted even further by a passage in section 14 of the Fifth Logical Investigation. Husserl here distinguishes the raw sensations from the apprehension or apperception which "ensoul" them and thereby constitutes the Objective properties. "Apperception is our surplus, which is found in experience itself, in its descriptive con- tent as opposed to the raw existence of sense: it is the act-character which as it were ensouls sense, and is in essence such as to make us perceive this or that object, see this tree, e. g., hear this ringing, smell this scent of flowers etc."[39] The sensations themselves have no apperceptive or interpretative structure, for it is they who are the bases for all interpretations. In fact Husserl defines them as the moments "serving as the bases to interpretation".[40] In the Ideas I Husserl expresses the same thing, although in different words: "Sensory data offer themselves as material for intentional informings or bestowals of meaning".[41]

From all of this we are able to draw the conclusion that the distinguishing mark of these sensations which will enable them to be recognized as such by a reflective intuition is the absence from them of all interpretation and meaning. For, as we have seen, it is exactly this factor of interpretation and meaning-bestowal that differentiates the objective properties from the sensations proper. It is when the sensations are interpreted, and the objective properties are seen "through" them, that their character as sensations is passed over. Consequently, if we wish to intuit the sensations as such, we must abstract from all interpretation and meaning, and come to see them as raw sensations. We must come to see them as uninterpreted, meaningless contents, as contents which themselves have no meaning but which can serve as the basis for the bestowal of meaning.

This brings us to the point that we have been aiming at since the beginning of this paper. We are now ready to undertake a reflective intuition to see if these sensations can appear in an original, phenomenological givenness.

2. A PHENOMENOLOGICAL EXAMINATION OF HUSSERL'S INTUITION OF HYLETIC DATA

The analyses we have undertaken enable us to understand how this reflective intuition is to be carried out. We have seen that to arrive at the hyletic content we must abstract from the "sense-giving operations" and come to see the sensations as they are in themselves, without any "sense" or "meaning". As Husserl phrases it in an " Appendix" to the Logical Investigations, when we "reflect on" these sensations we must "abstract from all that we recently or usually meant by them, and take them simply as they are.

I now attempt to do this. But I suddenly find there is an insurmountable problem. In fact, I am confronted with the destruction of my very project of intuition itself. I learn that the intuition of the hyle is an impossibility. For the sensation that I am trying to intuit cannot be intuited as being anything, for if it were intuited as a certain "what", this "what" would constitute an interpretation of the sensation. If I were to intuit the sensation of white, I could not be conscious of it as white, for this ''as white" would then be a meaning with which the sensation is interpreted. Nor can I be conscious of this sensation as a color, or even as something, for these are both interpretative meanings. In fact, I cannot be conscious of it as being anything at all, for to do so would be to be conscious of an interpretative meaning of it. A sensation as such cannot appear to me, for to do so it must appear as a "what", and this "whatness", as a meaning, destroys its character as an uninterpreted, meaningless sensation.

But all this appears far too obvious. In fact, it seems so obvious that we cannot intuit uninterpreted sensations that we can hardly believe that Husserl really meant this. It is true that Husserl says many times that these sensations can be intuited as they are in themselves by abstracting from all that we "meant by them",[42] but to intuit something that has no meaning or sense-this is too obviously absurd to be a position that Husserl could have seriously maintained. And we find this is the case. If we examine Husserl's writings very closely, we will discover that in actual practice he maintained a position that was altogether different. In his actual descriptions of hyletic data, Husserl did not really abstract from all "sense-giving operations".[43] Instead of describing meaning- less sensations which themselves serve as the basis for all interpretation and meaning, Husserl in reality was describing certain kinds of meaningful formations. In other words, rather than abstracting from the interpretational 'overlay' and achieving an intuition of a 'raw sensation', Husserl was in truth simply intuiting one kind of interpretational "overlay'. This can be shown by several examples. In The phenomenology of Internal Time-C0n8ciousness Husserl described his intuition of the visual sensations of space:

"If we abstract all transcendental interpretation and reduce perceptual appearance to the primary given content, the latter yields the continuum of the field of vision, which is something quasi-spatial but not, as it were, space or a plane surface in space. Roughly described, this continuum is a twofold, continuous multiplicity. We discover relations such as juxtaposition, super- imposition, interpenetration, unbroken lines which fully enclose a portion of the field, and so on."[44]

Obviously Husserl is here describing the intuition of an interpreted and meaningful appearance. It has such meanings as "juxtaposition, superimposition, interpenetration, unbroken lines" etc. And later in this book Husserl does the very same thing with the intuition of a sound sensation. "We now exclude all transcendent apprehension and positing and take the sound purely as a hyletic datum... I am conscious of the sound and the duration which it fills."[45] Here Husserl is intuiting something that is interpreted as a sound. In fact, the whole of The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness is a description of the sensations of time, and yet what is described in this work are the meaning formations that appear to me as a "now", a "just past", and an "about to be". And if we jump ahead to a later work, Experience and Judgment, we will find the same thing. In his description of the field of passive data ''as it is be- fore the activity of the ego has as yet carried out any sense-giving operations whatever with regard to it",[46] he talks of seeing "red patches against a white background",[47] which again are appearances to him of something that has a sense or meaning, the sense or meaning of "red" and "white".

What is really occurring here in Husserl's reflective intuitions of these "sensations"? It is apparent that he is not intuiting what he believes himself to be intuiting, uninterpreted sensations. What then is he intuiting? And why does believe he is intuiting uninterpreted sensations? In order to answer these questions, we must undertake a close phenomenological investigation of the reflective consciousness that Husserl believes to be an in- tuition of "the raw existence of sense."[48]

In section 36 of Ideas I Husserl mentions that we can intuitively discover the sensations that are immanent in a perception of white paper. "In the experience of the perception of this white paper, more closely in those components of it related to the paper's quality of whiteness, we discover through properly directed noticing the sensory datum 'white'. This 'whiteness' is something that belongs inseparably to the essence of the concrete perception, as a real (reelles) concrete constitutive portion of it."[49] Now the best thing we can do to understand the nature of Husserl's intuition of sensations is to repeat this intuition of "white- ness" and to describe what appear to our reflective consciousness.

Before myself at this moment there is a white paper, which I am perceiving. I will now try to repeat Husserl's intuition of the white sensations that are immanent in my perception of the paper. I begin to reflect upon immediately past perception of this paper. From within this reflection I can see that there is no doubt that the color white appeared to my perception. It appeared as an objective property of the paper. I now attempt to apprehend the sensation of white. Since what is immediately given to my reflection is the white color of the paper, I must try to exclude the apprehension of the white as a property of the paper. I must try to see a 'raw white'. And to a degree it seems I can do this. I can hold the white before my mind and consider it as a 'whiteness', as a meaningless 'sensation of white', unconnected to the paper. But what am I doing here? Am I grasping a hyletic whiteness that formed the basis for the objectification of the white property? It is manifest that I am not. All I am doing is intuiting the white color of the paper that was given to my perception, but reflectively considering it in abstraction from its perceptual givenness. I have removed its objective meaning, and replaced it with a new meaning, the meaning of "a hyletic sensation", a meaning that is posited by my reflective consciousness. All that I have done is to reinterpret the white color that was given to the perceptual consciousness. I have not achieved an intuition of something that was originally there in the perceptual consciousness itself. The "hyletic nature" of the color is not something that was already Present in the perceptual consciousness; it is a meaning in terms of which the Perceived color is reinterpreted by the subsequent reflective consciousness.

The important thing here is to understand how this erroneous belief that the white is a hyle of the perceptual consciousness could have arisen. While I am in the reflective consciousness, I am conscious of the meaning 'a white hyle' as being something that was a part of the perceptual consciousness, and which formed the basis for its intentional objectification of the white property of the paper. It is only when I reflect upon this reflective consciousness that I become aware that this reflective consciousness itself had reinterpreted the white as 'a hyle', and had reinterpreted it as 'a base for the intentional objectification of the white property of the paper'. In other words, it is only when I reflect upon the reflective consciousness that I realize that the 'hyle' is nothing but another meaning by which the objective sense property is reinterpreted, and hence cannot itself be something that was immanent to the perceptual consciousness as an uninterpreted, meaningless basis for its objectification of the sense properties.

It could be argued that what sup- ports both the objective interpretation and the hyletic interpretation are the hyletic sensations themselves. However this would be a merely logical argument, for I cannot intuit anything that supports the two interpretations. All I can intuit is the interpreted 'white property' and the interpreted 'white hyle'. I cannot do away with both interpretations and intuit a pure hyle, for any intuition of a hyle would remain an interpretation of what I see as a hyle. All I can do is to emptily think the concept of "that which supports the two interpretations", but since this concept cannot be fulfilled, it must remain an empty theoretical construct that has no intuitive phenomenological validity.

However this does not end the matter. For Husserl has a kind of "back-up" argument for the existence of hyle that he has presented in an "Appendix" to the Logical Investigations. After explaining how the sensations of a perception can be intuited as they are in themselves, Husserl anticipates an objection that these sensations cannot be intuited as they are in themselves because they are always bearers of objectifying interpretations. Husserl here grants this premise to his opponents, but claims that it would make no difference to the intuitive givenness of the sensations:

"If it were now objected that sensuous contents are invariably and necessarily interpreted objectively, that they are always bearers of outer in- tuitions, and can only be attended to as contents of such intuitions, the point need not be disputed: it would make no difference to the situation. The evidence of the existence of these con- tents would be as indisputable as before. ... The evidence for the being of the whole psychic phenomenon im- plies that for each of its parts, but the perception of the part is a new perception with a new evidence, which is by no means that of the whole phenomenon."[50]

But is this really the case? Can I really intuit the hyle when it is the bearer of an objective interpretation? If I leave the objective interpretation as it is, and do not reinterpret the objective property as a hyle, can I really then have an intuition of the objective property as a hyle? If I do not abstract from the meaning "a white property of the paper", but rather leave this meaning "in" the white color, is it then possible for this color to give itself to my intuition as a hyle? It seems not. Since I have not abstracted this meaning, the color still appears to me as a white property, and the best I can do is to think in relation to this white property that "it is a hyle which is immanent to the perceptual consciousness". But since this thought has no foundation in the intuitively given property, it must remain an empty construct, a construct that has no validating fulfillment.

What these different analyses lead us to conclude is that what Husserl believed to be a reflective intuition of hyletic data is not in fact such an intuition. It appears that he was not as careful in his checking and rechecking of his intuitions of this data as he was with the other aspects of his theory .He believed himself to be seeing something that was not really there-what he was reflecting on was really a "projection" of his reflecting consciousness, rather than something that had an independent and real (reelles) existence. That this "projection" was occurring could only be known if the reflecting consciousness was itself reflected on and subjected to a close phenomenological examination, such as we have attempted in this paper. Apparently Husserl was so convinced by what he thought to be the theoretical necessity of this concept that he did not scrutinize his intuitive fulfillments of this concept as closely and systematically as he did with the fulfillments of his other concepts.

CONCLUSION

It appears, then, that our phenomenological examination of hyletic data has brought us to the same conclusion that Sartre came to -that the existence of this data has no true validity. But while Sartre was led to reject this data because he found it to have no theoretical validity, we were led to reject it because we found it to have no phenomenological validity. For Sartre, the concept of hyle is invalid because it renders inexplicable how conscious- ness could transcend it to the objects in the world. For us, the concept of hyle is invalid because it can not be fulfilled by a phenomenological intuition.

However the import of our examination of Husserl's theory of hyletic data has not been wholly negative. We have not only restricted the field of phenomenological inquiry by rejecting what we have seen to be a pseudo-phenomenon. We have also freed phenomenology for its real and genuine areas of inquiry. Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty have undertaken their phenomenological investigations without the notion of a hyle, and it seems to us that all true phenomenology must now do so.

[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956).

[2] Ibid., p. lix.

[3] Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. J. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), p. 44.

[4] Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), pp. 537-8.

[5] "On Husserl's Theory Of Consciousness In The Fifth Logical Investigation" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. XXXVII, June 1977, pp. 482-483.

[6] Logical Investigations, op. cit., p. 567. 7. Ibid., p. 655.

[7] Ibid., p. 655.

[8] The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, op. cit., pp. 135, 115, 134-5.

[9] Imagination: A Psychological Critique, trans. F. Williams (Ann Arbor, 1972), p. 138.

[10] The Psychology of Imagination, trans. B. Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948).

[11] "Sartre and the Matter of Mental Images", Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1977.

[12] Logical Investigations, op. cit., p. 730 and p. 731.

[13] Ibid., p. 739.

[14] Ibid., p. 574.

[15] Ibid., p. 815.

[16] Ibid., p. 663.

[17] The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, op. cit., n. to p. 25.

[18] Ibid., p. 29.

[19] Ibid., pp. 1476-7.

[20] Ibid., p. 150.

[21] Ideas, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York : Humanities Press, 1931), p. 236.

[22] Experience and Judgment, trans. J. Churchill and K. Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestem University Press, 1973).

[23] Ibid., p. 73.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid., p. 74.

[26] Ibid., p. 75.

[27] Ibid., p. 79.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid., pp. 75-6.

[30] Ibid., p. 73.

[31] Ibid., p. 72.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Logical Investigations, op. cit.. p. 862.

[34] Ibid., p. 861.

[35] The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, op. cit., p. 25.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid., p. 27.

[39] Logical Investigations, op. cit., p. 567.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Ideas, op. cit., p. 247.

[42] Logical Investigations, op. cit., p. 864.

[43] See note 31.

[44] The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, op. cit., p. 24.

[45] Ibid., p. 44.

[46] See note 32.

[47] Experience and Judgement, op. cit.. p. 73.

[48] See note 39.

The Reason the Universe Exists is that it Caused Itself to Exist - Prof. Quentin Smith - Athenaeum Library of Philosophy

[49] Ideas, op. cit., p. 120.

[50] Logical Investigations, op. cit.. p. 865.

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