The starting-point

the natural standpoint

pp. 11-24

in: Eugene Kelly, Structure and diversity, Berlin, Springer, 1997

Abstract

In the Introduction, I spoke of the philosophical impulse toward unity. To unify experience, we noted, is either to trace back all that is to its ultimate source, or to trace back all knowledge to an infallible certainty. For the Husserl of the Logische Untersuchungen, the quest for unity begins with the "things themselves" given to intentional consciousness. The primordial epistemological relationship is that of the given to the cognitive act in which it is given, and the phenomenological analysis of this relationship, Husserl believed, offers the final rock upon which philosophy must build its edifice. His initiative dismantles the wall that early modern philosophy had built between the subject and the object that had left the world divided between the mind, which "represents" objects to itself by means of images given through the senses and by concepts, and the physical world, which was thought to be known indirectly or "mediately." The problem of establishing and clarifying the means by which an indirect access to the "external world" might be estab­lished had been left to transcendental, psychologistic, and empiricist theories. This mysterious rift in the world, Husserl, believed, arises out of a false start. We must begin not with speculations about the ultimate nature of things or of knowledge, but with a scrutiny of what is in fact given in cognitive acts. The totality of the world, Husserl believed, consists in what can be given to inten­tional consciousness upon the phenomenological standpoint.