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HOW TO ANALYZE IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE:

HINTIKKA, HUSSERL, AND THE IDEA OF PHENOMENOLOGY

SØREN OVERGAARD

Abstract: This article discusses Jaakko Hintikka’s interpretation of the aims andmethod of Husserl’s phenomenology. I argue that Hintikka misrepresentsHusserl’s phenomenology on certain crucial points. More specifically, Hintikkamisconstrues Husserl’s notion of ‘‘immediate experience’’ and consequently failsto grasp the functions of the central methodological tools known as the ‘‘epoche’’and the ‘‘phenomenological reduction.’’ The result is that the conception ofphenomenology he attributes to Husserl is very far from realizing the philoso-phical potential of Husserl’s position. Hence if we want a fruitful rapprochementbetween analytical philosophy and Continental phenomenology of the kind that isHintikka’s ultimate aim, then Hintikka’s account of Husserl needs correcting on anumber of crucial points.

Keywords: epoche, immediate experience, Hintikka, Husserl, phenomenology,philosophical method.

Introduction

Within the past few decades, many prominent philosophers have realizedthe fruitlessness of the so-called analytical-Continental divide. Variousstrategies for bridging or closing the gap have been adopted. Some havesimply proceeded as if no such gap had ever existed, pursuing theirphilosophical interests wherever they might lead. Others have argued forthe necessity of tracing the philosophical traditions back to their(common or closely related) historical roots.1 Yet others have tried tolocate, among the many heterogeneous philosophical programs on bothsides of the divide, agendas or methodologies that are fundamentallyrelated. To the latter group belongs Jaakko Hintikka. Inspired by thediscovery that WittgensteinFin works from what is usually referred to asthe ‘‘middle period’’Fflirted 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 first type of philosopher, while MichaelDummett exemplifies the second approach (cf. Cavell 1999, xiii; Dummett 1996, 26, 193).

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articulating and criticizing the ideas of phenomenology that he claims tofind in Wittgenstein and Husserl.

In this article I want to discuss some of the claims Hintikka makesabout Husserl’s conception of phenomenology. Although thereare valuable insights to be found in Hintikka’s discussions of Husserl,I will argue that Hintikka misrepresents Husserl’s phenomenology on anumber of crucial points. In particular, he misconstrues Husserl’s notionof ‘‘immediate experience’’ and as a result misses the proper functionsof the central methodological tools known as the ‘‘epoche’’ and the‘‘phenomenological’’ reduction. Throwing critical light on Hintikka’sclaims about Husserl is pertinent because the dialogue between analyticalphilosophers and phenomenologists, which I believe is Hintikka’sultimate and commendable aim, cannot be a genuine and fruitful one ifwe work with a seriously distorted picture of Husserlian phenomenology.

Hintikka’s Husserl

Let me begin by offering a brief sketch of Hintikka’s reading of Husserl.One thing Hintikka has stressed consistently in practically all texts he haswritten on Husserlian phenomenology is the difference between phenom-enology and phenomenalism (Hintikka 1975, 230; Hintikka and Hintikka1986, 72). Phenomenology is not about ‘‘mere appearances’’ as opposedto reality. Rather, ‘‘[w]hat a phenomenologist like Husserl maintains isthat everything must be based on, and traced back to, what is given to mein my immediate experience’’ (Hintikka 1995, 83). The reason this doesnot amount to phenomenalism is Husserl’s insistence that ‘‘reality in factimpinges directly on my consciousness’’ (Hintikka 1995, 83), so that thereis no fundamental gap between the real, so-called external world and thegivens of immediate experience. The denial of such a gap is in factdefining for phenomenology. As Hintikka phrases it, the project ofHusserlian as well as other types of phenomenology is simply to ‘‘uncoverthe conceptual structure of the world by attending to our immediateexperience’’ (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 hisattempt to uncover ‘‘the conceptual structure of the world.’’ Husserl waspersuaded by epistemological arguments ‘‘concerning sense-perceptionand its fallibility [ . . . ] that everyday material objects are not given to usdirectly in the relevant sense’’ (Hintikka 1995, 95). To reach the levelof the immediately and directly experienced, therefore, Husserl imaginedthat he had to employ a peculiar methodological apparatus, consistinginter alia of the epoche and the phenomenological reduction. As HintikkacommentsFthereby also revealing what immediate experience is,on Husserl’s accountF‘‘the phenomenological reductions have to leadus step by step to the different basic ingredients of our experience, on the


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one hand to the unarticulated hyletic data, and on the other hand to theessences that are used to articulate them’’ (Hintikka 1996a, 71). Hintikkais here alluding to a distinction Husserl makes in the first book of Ideasbetween ‘‘‘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 thespecific trait of intentionality’’ (Husserl 1983, 203). Husserl calls thesensation-contents ‘‘hyle’’ or ‘‘hyletic data’’ (or simply ‘‘formless stuffs’’),and refers to the mental moments by such names as ‘‘noetic moments’’and ‘‘morphe.’’ Husserl’s point here can be understood along Kantianlines 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, aswe know, empirical experience does not come to us already articulatedcategorically. We structure it through our noetic activity; we impose theforms on the raw data (hyletic data) of experience that are needed to makethat experience into experience of objects, their properties, relations, etc.’’(Hintikka 1996a, 64). In the reductive attempt to reach the noetic andhyletic strata, the notion of epoche, or ‘‘bracketing,’’ plays an importantrole, being the method of ‘‘excluding’’ from the phenomenologist’s focuseverything ‘‘which is not given to us in immediate experience’’ (Hintikka1995, 80, 85). Among the things not given to us in immediate experience, asalready indicated, we find everyday material objects. Thus, we get thefollowing picture: Husserl thinks immediate experience reveals the ‘‘con-ceptual structure’’ of the world. Influenced by reflections on the fallibility ofperception, he also (and more problematically) thinks immediate experiencecannot concern ordinary sorts of objects, such as trees, animals, people,paraphernalia, and so on, but must rather be conceived as consisting ofunarticulated hyletic data, or sense data (cf. Hintikka 1996b, 201), whichstand in need of noetic articulation. We therefore need some processof exclusion (the epoche and the reduction) to get from experiences ofordinary objects down to these layers of immediate experience.

What do we do, once we have reached immediate experience? Hintikka’sanswer to this question involves the important Husserlian notion of‘‘constitution.’’ According to Hintikka, constitution ‘‘is in a certain sensethe inverse of the phenomenological reductions’’: whereas the reductiontook us from the world of ordinary objects back to immediate experience,constitution has to do with the ‘‘processes through which the given isarticulated in one’s 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 fundamentalsof 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


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different from the experiences that are about ordinary objects, and as beingaccessible only via a special procedure involving bracketing or exclusion ofthe world of ordinary objects. However, under the title of ‘‘constitution’’ itaims to reintroduce the ordinary world, by way of showing how it resultsfrom ‘‘our noetic activity’’ being imposed on the ‘‘raw’’ ‘‘hyletic data’’(Hintikka 1996a, 64).

Criticizing this conception of phenomenology, Hintikka implies that itfalls short precisely when judged by its own (that is, phenomenological)standards. The whole methodological apparatus makes sense only againstthe background of a dubious notion of ‘‘immediate experience,’’ andHusserl’s 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 basicconstituents of experience. In contrast, a more acute phenomenologist suchas Wittgenstein realized that ‘‘the most primitive, unedited experience isalready articulated categorically’’ (Hintikka 1996a, 64). For Wittgenstein,that is, we already immediately experience the world around us asconsisting of utensils, animals, plants, people, houses, mountains, as wellas significant states of affairs, events, and so on. This also means thatWittgenstein, unlike Husserl, has no need for a ‘‘special technique’’ ormethod to uncover immediate experience (Hintikka 1996a, 66). Once werealize that the true immediate experience is simply the one that presentsperfectly ordinary material and cultural objects to us, the whole methodo-logical apparatus of Husserl becomes redundant, designed as it was toexclude all reference to these ordinary objects in favor of some supposedlymore immediate layers of experience. But that is not all. For when wehave realized that there is no need to dismantle the world of ordinaryobjects, we are bound to conclude that there is no task for Husserl’s notionof constitution to perform either. Thus, ‘‘[f]or Wittgenstein, no process ofconstitution is needed for the purpose of providing our language with theobjects it refers to’’ (Hintikka 1996a, 65).

In the conclusion (entitled ‘‘Who Is Right?’’) of his contribution to TheCambridge Companion to Husserl, Hintikka launches his final attack onHusserl’s ideas. For it is one thing to have shown that there is no real needto isolate, within ordinary experience, some core of hyletic data. A moreserious question is whether it even makes sense, phenomenologically, tospeak of something like hyletic data. The moot issue, Hintikka observes,is whether the hyle and the noetic activity of which Husserl speaks ‘‘areaccessible to phenomenological reflection’’ at all, or whether they ratheroccur ‘‘under the surface of our intentional consciousness’’ (Hintikka1995, 103). Hintikka offers a cautious reply to this question. Although heobserves that ‘‘the testimony of many of the best phenomenologicalpsychologists’’ seems to suggest that they occur under the surface, he



ultimately refrains from condemning as unphenomenological ‘‘Husserl’sheroic struggle with notions like hyle, filling, and reduction’’ (Hintikka1995, 103). Elsewhere, however, discussing a similar question, Hintikkadoes conclude that ‘‘Wittgenstein is a far purer phenomenologist thanHusserl’’ (Hintikka 1996a, 65), thereby giving us a clear indication of‘‘who is right.’’

In fact, although again Hintikka graciously refrains from drawing thisconclusion explicitly, it would seem that not much of Husserl’s transcen-dental phenomenology can be left intact after a critique such as this.Husserl himself associates the ability to grasp his phenomenology at allwith the proper understanding of the phenomenological reduction(Husserl 1962, 188). Hence, any argument that would have as itsconclusion that the reduction is redundant would surely strike a blowagainst the very foundations of Husserlian phenomenology.

Points of Agreement

Hintikka has, I think, a number of valid points. Before I launch mycritical discussion of the claims I disagree with, let me briefly go throughsome of what I think is right in Hintikka’s account.

It is right that phenomenology, in all its various guises, attemptsto say something about the fundamental structures of our world byattending to our immediate experience. This goes for Husserl as wellas for Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. A benefit of Hintikka’sinterpretation of phenomenology as meaning ‘‘philosophy of immediateexperience’’ is that it highlights the ‘‘positivistic’’ element in phenomen-ology. As Husserl states in the first book of Ideas, if positivists arethose who take their point of departure in all that can be immediatelyseen and grasped, then phenomenologists are the genuine positivists(1983, 39). Of course, in saying this Husserl also implies that thosethinkers who are usually known as positivists have failed to locate theright point of departure; so one should be careful not to exaggeratethe positivistic element. Nevertheless, as long as due caution is exercised,the notion of a ‘‘philosophy of immediate experience’’ may help to bringout a central motif in phenomenology.

I also share Hintikka’s view that, as a philosophy of immediateexperience, phenomenology should not be unduly impressed by skepticalworries about the fallibility of perception. Independently of what Husserlor others might have thought, I think Hintikka is right that there is noreason to assume out of hand that immediate experience is the same asindubitable or infallible experience. We may grant the skeptical point that,in any given case, it is possible that the objects of our perceptualexperience do not exist, and still insist that nevertheless our immediateexperience purports to present such things as houses, people, and appletrees. For what is ‘‘immediate experience’’ supposed to mean if not


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precisely our experiences, just as they areF‘‘unedited,’’ to use Hintikka’sterm? And what may ‘‘immediately experienced’’ refer to, then, if notsimply what our experiences, just as they are, immediately (purport to)present us with? These immediately experienced objects, in turn, mustsurely include ordinary spatiotemporal objects. And something mustbe excluded as well: our immediate experiences do not come to us asconsisting of sense data. This is a descriptive, phenomenological pointwhich I think anything that deserves the name ‘‘phenomenology’’ willhave to acknowledge.

Hintikka is on the right track on other points too. Clearly, in light ofwhat we have granted so far, we cannot avoid concluding that anysupposed phenomenology that would employ a special methodology toexclude the world of ordinary objects in order to reach some supposedlymore fundamental stratum of experience would be fundamentally mis-guided. Indeed, as in fact moving away from at least parts of the truephenomenological data, such a methodology could hardly even bephenomenological. This follows immediately from the pointFwhich,again, I do not see how it might be phenomenologically permissible todenyFthat immediate experience generally presents itself as being theexperience of perfectly ordinary things. And even if the philosophy underconsideration should manage somehow to rebuild the ordinary worldafter having dismantled it, this could surely not count as a real achieve-ment, since it is hard to see how there could have been any point in takingthe world apart in the first place.

Given these points, there is even reason explicitly to endorse aconclusion that Hintikka stops short of endorsing. When he contrastsWittgenstein with Husserl, Hintikka states that the two promote phe-nomenologies of different kinds (Hintikka 1996a, 66). Arguably, however,this is too weak. Insofar as Husserl’s position is the one I have outlined inthe previous section, it makes good sense to claim that is it notrecognizably phenomenological at all. A philosopher who has little ideawhat the nature of immediate experience is can hardly (except perhaps asa joke) be called a ‘‘philosopher of immediate experience.’’

On systematic, philosophical grounds, I thus agree with Hintikka thatthere are serious problems with the position he attributes to Husserl.Others might disagree, and I do not pretend to have offered anyconclusive arguments for Hintikka’s and my views in this brief section.Rather, I simply assume their correctness in order to pose the questionwhether these agreed-upon critical points affect Husserl at all. In thefollowing three sections, I offer a negative reply to this question.2

2 So anyone who thinks that there is a lot more to be said for the position that Hintikkaattributes to Husserl than I have given it credit for may view this article as qualified by aconditional to the effect that even if that position were deeply problematic, it still would notaffect Husserl.



Husserl on Immediate Experience

According to Husserl, subjectivity, or the mind, reaches out into theworld, as it were. Influenced by his teacher Brentano, Husserl gives thisreaching out the title intentionality. The idea is that when I am thinking,I am thinking about something (usually something out there in the world;but sometimes I am just fantasizing, or contemplating my headache);when I am wishing, I am wishing for something to happen, to happenactually in the real world; when I am seeing, I am seeing something, andagain this something usually exists out there in reality; and so on. Fromthe point of view of traditional epistemology, this is of course question-begging: we are not entitled simply to assume that the real world isdirectly presented to us in our experiences, since this is precisely what theskeptic challenges us to demonstrate. Husserl is well aware of this. Hisresponse, in his final work, The Crisis, reads: ‘‘The point is not to secure[sichern] objectivity but to understand it’’ (1970, 189). In other words, theepistemological project of proving or ‘‘securing’’ our possession of theworld is not Husserl’s project. Rather, Husserl simply presupposesthat we are in experiential contact with the world, and he declares thatthis contact, though certain enough, still needs to be understood on somefundamental level (1970, 187). Through a careful study of immediateexperience, it is precisely the job of phenomenology to provide us withthis understanding. None of this departs significantly from what Hintikkasays about phenomenology.

When we ask, however, what Husserl has to say about ‘‘immediateexperience,’’ things get more complicated. First of all, the distinctionbetween hyletic and noetic moments or strata that Hintikka lends somuch weight to appears mainly in the first book of Ideas, and it seemscompletely absent from later works, such as the Cartesian Meditationsand The Crisis. Hintikka is not unaware of this fact. In the title essay ofhis 1975 essay collection ‘‘The Intentions of Intentionality’’ and Other NewModels for Modalities, Hintikka grants that his interpretation may beproblematic. He admits to not being able to put forward his interpreta-tion ‘‘with complete confidence’’ (1975, 204), and specifies his qualms inthe following way: ‘‘My account is closely geared to what [Husserl] says inthe Ideen, but it must be added that Husserl himself indicates that theaccount given there is only a provisional one. It seems that he wasbothered by doubts’’ (1975, 203). As we will see later, Hintikka was rightto air these doubts, and it is a bit disappointing that he seems in later textsto have gained ‘‘complete confidence’’ in his interpretation of Husserl.

It will also become clear, however, that, as far as my conversation withHintikka is concerned, one should not give too much weight to the pointthat the later Husserl had serious misgivings about the account he offeredin Ideas. The main trouble is that, even within the ‘‘provisional’’ frame-work of the Ideas, it appears as if Hintikka is overexposing the distinction


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between hyle and morphe, blowing it out of proportion, or evencompletely misplacing it. Hintikka, in other words, misconstrues Hus-serlian phenomenology completely, including the ‘‘provisional’’ hyle-morphe account advanced in the Ideas.

The first thing we must become clear about is the difference betweenthe constituents of the experience itself and that which belongs to theexperienced object. Husserl himself is very emphatic on this point, and heexplicitly relegates the noetic and hyletic strata to the side of theexperience itself (Husserl 1983, 213–14). Supposing, for example, that I amperceiving a blooming apple tree; the perceptual experience itself, accord-ing to Ideas, should be analyzed in terms of sensory hyle and noetic sense-bestowal, but the perceived object (the apple tree) itself shouldnot, of course, be so analyzed. On the other hand, the perceived treehas a brown trunk, is located at the rear end of the garden, and so on, noneof which can be said about the experience as such. Hintikka is(or was at least at one point) aware of this. As he correctly notes, ‘‘Husserlmakes it clear that his sense-data are not what is experienced. However,they are components of perceptual acts’’ (Hintikka 1975, 198).3

But with this distinction in mind, some of Hintikka’s claims begin toappear puzzling. For instance, what are we now to make of Hintikka’sclaim that for Husserl ‘‘empirical experience does not come to usarticulated categorically’’ (Hintikka 1996a, 64)? Surely Hintikka doesnot mean to say that the experience itself is not yet articulated categori-cally (as, say, a visual perception, as opposed to an act of remembering).Rather, his point is that the experience does not come to us as alreadyhaving a categorically articulated object (such as, say, a blooming appletree). But what can be the justification for such a claim? None of what wehave said about the experience as suchFin particular, its being analyz-able in terms of hyle and morpheFcarries the implication that anexperience we may analyze in such a way comes to us without anyarticulated object. We only get this result if we subscribe to a whole seriesof additional assumptions about Husserl’s hyle-morphe talk.

Some of these assumptions are evident when Hintikka recastsHusserl’s ‘‘noetic stratum’’ as ‘‘our noetic activity’’ (Hintikka 1996a, 64,my emphasis; cf. 1996b, 201: ‘‘constitutive activities’’). The idea is that

3 Byong-Chul Park, who has attempted to develop further Hintikka’s readings ofHusserl and Wittgenstein, is considerably less clear on this point. Among many otherastonishing statements in Park’s book, one finds the following: ‘‘What is given before noeticactivities take place is not an object but formless raw material that cannot be picked out ornamed [ . . . ]. Husserl cannot have phenomenological language that describes what is given inpure experience because for him, what is given in pure experience is hyletic data, whichcannot be picked out in any language’’ (Park 1998, 48). In Park’s construal of Husserl’sposition, the hyletic moments would seem not to be moments of the experience as such butrather what is given in immediate experience, before interpretative activities intervene. This iscompletely confused.



experience initially comes to us (here we are passive) as unarticulated,pure sense data; we then have to engage in a particular sort of mentalactivity, in order to imbue these data with objective meaning. Thus, asHintikka sees it, a ‘‘process of constitution is needed for the purpose ofproviding our language with the objects it refers to’’ (Hintikka 1996a, 65).Without a constitutive activity or process being added to the immediatelygiven, there would be no objective world for us to experience and talkabout. There is an assumption about temporality here, and an assump-tion about activity and passivity, as well as an implicit assumption aboutwhat makes an experience immediate or ‘‘pure.’’ Hintikka’s assumptionsare close to explicit in the following passage: ‘‘Husserl in effect retainedthe nonintentional character of ‘pure’ perception, and introducedthe intentional element only secondarily, in the form of an act ofnoesis superimposed on the perceptual rawmaterial’’ (Hintikka 1975,198). But few, if any, of these ideas can be attributed to Husserl with anydegree of certainty.

First of all, it is highly questionable whether Husserl would hold thatwhenever we experience an empirical object we are first presented merelywith sense data, awaiting our sense-bestowing operations. Rather, herefers to the hyletic and the noetic as components or strata within theconcrete intentional experience (cf. Husserl 1983, 203), thus implyingsimultaneity rather than temporal succession. But in fact it is fundamen-tally misguided to explicate the hyle/morphe distinction in temporalterms. The distinction belongs to what Husserl would later call ‘‘static’’phenomenology, which for our purposes we may circumscribe as theinvestigation of the ‘‘logic’’ of intentional experience, that is, the inves-tigation of the foundational relationships between various types ofexperience and within individual types of experience.4 There is, then, noreason to assume a temporal priority for hyletic data.

Against the second assumption (about passivity) one might point tothe fact that Husserl considers perception as such to be mainly passive(Husserl 1962, 95; 1966b, 51–58). It would not, therefore, make sense todescribe the noetic components in such experiences as ‘‘activities.’’Indeed, the notion that whenever I perceive, say, my computer I literallyhave to engage in some activity of interpreting or forming otherwisemeaningless or ‘‘formless’’ sense data is so absurd that it might serve as areductio of Husserl’s position if his position implied that notion. But ofcourse Husserl’s view has no such implications.

Finally, it is also highly questionable whether Husserl would say thatthe stratum of hyletic data constitutes the ‘‘pure’’ perception or the true‘‘immediate experience,’’ as Hintikka seems to presuppose. Husserl, it

4 This should be contrasted with ‘‘genetic phenomenology’’ that precisely investigates thetemporal emergence of such ‘‘static’’ constitutive systems. See, for example, Husserl 1969,316–19.


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seems to me, would rather insist on the very different claim that whilethe ‘‘true’’ or ‘‘pure’’ perception is the ordinary perception, the one inwhich ordinary spatiotemporal objects are presented to us, we candistinguish within this perception between hyletic and noetic aspects.It counts in favor of such an interpretation that Husserl speaks ofthe hyletic and noetic as moments (Husserl 1983, 203–7). Accordingto 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 Husserl’s terminology is somethingthat cannot exist apart from its materialization or incorporation in awhole, as opposed to a ‘‘piece,’’ which is something that can be detachedfrom the whole to which it belongs (Husserl 1984, 272). The bluecolor of the cover of Hintikka’s Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, isa moment in that it cannot exist by itself, detached from the cover itbelongs to. Any given page of the book, by contrast, is a piece thatcan be torn out of the book and become a separate, concrete object.So if Husserl’s ‘‘hyletic data’’ are moments of experiences, it would makeno sense to speak of them as the real or pure perceptions; for they wouldbe nothing apart from the wholesFthe concrete experiencesFto whichthey belong.

This may not suffice to establish beyond doubt that Hintikka’sinterpretation of Husserl is flawed. But it does suggest that Hintikkaneeds to be more explicit about the assumptions he is attributing toHusserl, and that he needs to say something to make it plausible that he isjustified in so attributing them, if he is to substantiate his claim aboutimmediate experience being ‘‘unarticulated,’’ on Husserl’s account.No such conclusion follows from the mere fact that Husserl proposesto distinguish two components within the experience itself.

I think, however, that Husserl would agree with Hintikka about whatwould count as ‘‘immediate experience.’’ It is not easy to give a veryprecise characterization of it, but I think Hintikka would say somethingto 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 trivialexample, when I am walking home on a dark winter’s night andinvoluntarily jump back at the sight of a figure standing beside my frontdoor, my immediate experience is that of seeing a stranger lurking at mydoor. When I then start to subject my experience to closer scrutinyFask-ing questions like: ‘‘What do I actually see? Could it not be a Christmastree just as well as a person?’’Fthen I am in the process of editing myexperience. Husserl, too, it seems to me, would want phenomenology firstand foremost to study experience as it comes to us, unedited, althoughhe would also hold that it is part of the business of phenomenologyto provide an account of what happens when we engage in processes ofcritically scrutinizing or interpreting our experience. Of course, it would



not be the business of the phenomenologist as such to engage in any suchediting; rather, qua phenomenologists we are only supposed to describethe various types of experience. The question now is how Husserl woulddescribe the givens of our immediate, unedited experience, with whichphenomenology has to begin.

The first book of IdeasFthe main source for Hintikka’s portrait ofHusserlFis admirably clear on this point. Phenomenology, writes Husserl,must take its point of departure in the experiences of what he calls ‘‘thenatural attitude’’ (1983, 51). He describes these natural experiences and theirvarious objects like this:

I am conscious of a world endlessly spread out in space, endlessly becomingand having endlessly become in time. I am conscious of it: that signifies, aboveall, that intuitively I find it immediately, that I experience it. By my seeing,touching, hearing, and so forth, and in the different modes of sensuousperception, corporeal physical things with some spatial distribution or otherare simply there for me, ‘‘on hand’’ in the literal or the figurative sense, whetheror not I am particularly heedful of them and busied with them in myconsidering, thinking, feeling, or willing. Animate beings tooFhuman beings,let us sayFare immediately there for me: I look up; I see them; I hear theirapproach; I grasp their hands; talking with them I understand immediatelywhat they objectivate [vorstellen] and think, what feelings stir within them,what they wish or will. (1983, 51)

Two pages later, returning to the example of physical things, Husserlremarks: ‘‘Moreover, this world is there for me not only as a world ofmere things, but also with the same immediacy as a world of objects withvalues, a world of goods, a practical world [ . . . ]. Immediately, physicalthings stand there as Objects of use, the ‘table’ with its ‘books,’ the‘drinking glass’ the ‘vase,’ the ‘piano,’ etc.’’ (1983, 53).

The reason I quote the passages at length is of course that it isremarkable how frequently Husserl here uses the adverb ‘‘immediately’’(unmittelbar). It seems to be very important to Husserl that we under-stand these as descriptions of what we immediately experience, of what wesimply experience without having to engage in any sort of interpretativeor editorial activity. That is, to borrow Hintikka’s phrase, Husserl wantsthese descriptions to be accepted as descriptions of how our experiences‘‘come to us.’’ If this is so, then Hintikka is clearly mistaken when he saysthat Husserl conceived of immediate experience or ‘‘‘pure’ perception’’ asnonintentional sensory ‘‘raw material’’ awaiting noetic editorial activity(Hintikka 1975, 198). Husserl is explicit that immediate experience isprecisely the sort that is essentially experience of perfectly ordinary thingsand events, and he repeatedly denies that we can make sense of immediateexperience in terms of sensory data (1970, 30, 125):

The first thing we must do, and first of all in immediate reflective self-experience, is to take the conscious life, completely without prejudice, just as


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what it quite immediately gives itself, as itself, to be. Here, in immediategivenness, one finds anything but color data, tone data, other ‘‘sense’’ data ordata of feeling, will, etc.; that is, one finds none of these things which appear intraditional psychology, taken for granted to be immediately given from thestart. Instead, one finds, as even Descartes did (naturally we ignore his otherpurposes), the cogito, intentionality, in those familiar forms which, like every-thing actual in the surrounding world, find their expression in language: ‘‘I seea tree which is green; I hear the rustling of its leaves, I smell its blossoms,’’ etc.(1970, 233)

Access to both theories [i.e., transcendental ‘‘egology’’ and descriptive psy-chology] is barred, if one is misled by the still all-prevailing traditionof sensualism and starts with a theory of sensation. To do so involvesthe following: In advance, as though this were obviously correct, onemisinterprets conscious life as a complex of data of ‘‘external’’ and (at best)‘‘internal sensuousness’’; then one lets form-qualities take care of combiningsuch data into wholes. [ . . . ] But, when descriptive theory of consciousnessbegins radically, it has before it no such data and wholes, except as prejudices.Its beginning is the pure [ . . . ] psychological experience, which now must bemade to utter its own sense with no adulteration. The truly first utterance,however, is the Cartesian utterance of the ego cogitoFfor example: ‘‘IperceiveFthis house’’ or ‘‘I rememberFa certain commotion in the street.’’(1995, 38–39)

What Husserl says in these quotes is surely incompatible with Hintikka’sclaim that the immediate, ‘‘unedited’’ experience with which phenomen-ology has to begin ‘‘does not come to us articulated categorically’’(Hintikka 1996a, 64). Or, more cautiously, if Hintikka’s point is inter-preted in the way I suggested above that it should be, then it preciselyamounts to the claim that immediate experience in the Husserlian sensedoes not (before noetic ‘‘form qualities’’ are superimposed on it) haveintentional objects, such as houses, flowers, human beings, and so on.Indeed, immediate experience in this allegedly Husserlian sense is notintentional at all. But Husserl simply contradicts this. He insists that theimmediate, unedited experiences with which phenomenology must beginare such experiences as perceiving a house, looking at a tree, smelling itsflowers, remembering an event, and so forth.

There is, however, a very natural objection to what I have just said.For at least my long quote from Husserl’s Ideas contains a descriptionthat Husserl explicitly introduced as a description from within the‘‘natural attitude’’ (1983, 51). And although it is correct that, on Husserl’sview, we must all begin within the natural attitude (cf. Husserl 1962, 270),it is also Husserl’s view that we only become phenomenologists themoment we transcend this attitude. More precisely, according to Husserlwe only reach the phenomenological dimension when we perform thephenomenological reductions. And these involve a bracketing or exclud-ing of exactly the kind of natural-attitude account of experience that I



have just presented. This objection leads me to the next point on mycritical agenda: Hintikka’s understanding of the nature of Husserl’sepoche and reduction.

Putting Things in Brackets

In Hintikka’s picture of phenomenology, there is a clear task for theepoche and the reduction to perform. They are supposed to lead us fromthe natural attitudeFwhere indeed we perhaps think we ‘‘immediately’’perceive trees, houses, books, and pianosFto the proper phenomenolo-gical attitude, where we are presented with a different (and, according toHintikka’s Husserl, more adequate) picture of immediate experience. Incontrast, my claim has been that the description Husserl provides fromwithin the natural attitude is his description of the world of immediateexperience. But this would seem to leave the epoche and the reduction outof a job. If we are already in possession of the phenomenologicaldimension, then what need do we have for Husserl’s phenomenologicalreductions?

Before I address this question head on, let me point out a problemwith Hintikka’s construal of the epoche. It is correct, of course, that theepoche and the reduction are said by Husserl to ‘‘bracket’’ the naturalattitude (or the world of the natural attitude). But the question iswhat ‘‘bracketing’’ means in this context. On Hintikka’s account, as wehave already seen, it means ‘‘excluding.’’ This is why Hintikka claimsthat if a phenomenon belongs to ‘‘the realm of objects’’ and must thusbe bracketed by a phenomenologist, this phenomenon will henceforthbe ‘‘inaccessible to [the] phenomenologist’’ (1995, 81). Whatever isbracketed, it would seem, is excluded from phenomenological considera-tion. But in an interesting passage from IdeasFagain, the very workHintikka almost exclusively relies onFHusserl explicitly contradicts thisclaim: ‘‘Figuratively speaking, that which is bracketed is not erased fromthe phenomenological blackboard but only bracketed, and therebyprovided with an index. As having the latter it is, however, part of themajor theme of inquiry [im Hauptthema der Forschung]’’ (1983, 171;translation modified). Far from thinking that bracketing means excludingor making phenomenologically inaccessible, Husserl emphasizes that itmeans putting the bracketed as such at the center of phenomenologicalresearch. So if we grant Hintikka’s point that the world of the naturalattitude must be subjected to the epoche and thus bracketed, we have notthereby granted that there is no role to play for this world in thephenomenological account of immediate experience. Quite the contrary,we have in fact said that there is a sense in which the world of the naturalattitude is our major theme of inquiry.

Hintikka is not the first to have interpreted the epoche (and thereduction) as a method of excluding something (the world, reality, or


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Being) from the purview of the phenomenologist.5 And the thought mightseem natural: if the epoche does not exclude anything, then why wouldHusserl think it so important? However, one ought to pay close attentionhere to Husserl’s statement that the epoche attaches an ‘‘index’’ or a‘‘label’’ to the world of the natural attitude.6 This suggests both that whatis subjected to the epoche does not disappear from our view but, rather,remains in view; and that something must nevertheless happen to it. Onthe one hand, ‘‘everything remains as of old’’ (Husserl 1983, 216); and onthe other hand, we have somehow changed our viewpoint on it all:‘‘[T]hrough the epoche a new way of experiencing, of thinking, oftheorizing, is opened to the philosopher; here, situated above his ownnatural being and above the natural world, he loses nothing of their beingand their objective truths and likewise nothing at all of the spiritualacquisitions of his world-life or those of the whole historical communallife; he simply forbids himselfFas a philosopher, in the uniqueness of hisdirection of interestFto continue the whole natural performance of hisworld-life’’ (Husserl 1970, 152; cf. 176).

The crucial importance of the epoche resides precisely in the way itmodifies our attitude, without annihilating, excluding, or altering any-thing that was given to us in the natural attitude. It is one thing to live ournatural, everyday life; it is quite another thing reflectively to thematizethis life. And within the reflective stance, there is a big difference betweenthe kind of reflection 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 toevaluate it morally, say, and another kind of reflection in which I aminterested in my life in the natural attitude as a world-revealing or world-disclosing life (cf. Husserl 1970, 209). Normally, we do not think ofourselves as places where the world is revealed; rather, we think ofourselves as particular, rather small creatures going about our business invarious corners of the world. Husserl’s descriptions of what we experiencein the natural attitude are intended to awaken in us a sense of how theworld 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 thephenomenological movement, Herbert Spiegelberg. See his 1940, 93–94, for the claim thatthe 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.’’ Husserlhimself insists that the epoche excludes nothing from our view, but on the contrary enablesus to attend to the phenomena (1970, 151–52, 176, 241). For an elaborate critique of themost common misunderstandings of Husserl’s epoche and reduction, see Overgaard 2004,chap. 2.

6 This statement also appears in one of the few other works that Hintikka refers to, TheIdea of Phenomenology (see Husserl 1950, 29).



aware that we do not really understand how our experiences can presentsuch a world to us. As I mentioned in the previous section, the point ofHusserl’s transcendental phenomenology is precisely to provide us withthis understanding. We are supposed to reflect on our experiential life asworld-disclosing or world-revealing in order to achieve an understandingof 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 whenwe are living in the natural attitude, pursuing our various practical andtheoretical objectives, we rely on various diverse kinds of knowledge(practical, social, commonsense, scientific, and so on) about all kinds ofdifferent matters in order to reach our conclusions and decisions. This ispart of what it means to live in the natural attitude. If, however, we want toinquire how the world as a whole, with everything it contains, can presentitself to us, then it becomes problematic to relyFat least directlyFon thesetypes of natural knowledge. What must be avoided here is a special kind ofquestion-begging or circularity. Husserl calls it the ‘‘transcendental circle’’(1962, 249–50). Briefly stated, the point is that if you want to understandhow a world can be manifested or disclosed at all, then you cannot, in thatenterprise, base your conclusions on any kind of knowledge that presup-poses (as all knowledge that belongs within the natural attitude does) themanifestation of the world. For example, we cannot rely on empiricalinvestigations of visual perception in trying to answer our transcendentalquestion, for, as investigations based upon observations of particularworldly entities and states of affairs, these presuppose and exploit thatwhich we need to understand: world-manifestation as such (cf. Husserl1962, 248–50, 273). Making sure that our explanation does not base itselfon that which has to be explained is precisely the job of the epoche. Theindex or label of which Husserl speaks, therefore, we might imagine asconsisting of the warning, ‘‘Do not use.’’

But precision is of the essence here. Husserl’s point, after all, is merelythat there is a fundamental difference between posing the philosophicalquestion concerning the manifestation of the world as a whole and posingeveryday or scientific questions about particular matters in the world.Therefore, we should avoid treating answers to questions of the secondsort as answers to questions of the first sort. This means that asphenomenologists we must exercise a certain caution in relating to theexperiences of the natural attitude, but not that we are barred from everykind of use of these. We are not supposed to live these experiences, in thenormal way; but we are allowed, even obliged, to study them reflectively.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 amidheaps of papers and books. When I am naturally attuned, my interest inthe cup has to do with the fact that it contains the coffee I have just made


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and now would like to drink. I am not interested in my experience of thecup or in the way the cup appears to me. I am interested in coffee.Phenomenologically or transcendentally attuned, however, I am inter-ested in the perceptual experience as such, as forming part of a world-revealing experiential life. The epoche is a methodological tool intendedto allow me to pursue this interest in a proper manner. But it should beobvious that it can be no part of my phenomenological agendaFand thusno part of the function of the epocheFto change the experiences I aminterested in describing. Rather, I am, of course, to describe them just asthey are. Nothing should be added to them; but neither should we excludeor deduct anything from them. As Robert Sokolowski has recently put it,‘‘We must leave everything as it was, for otherwise we would change thevery thing we wish to examine’’ (Sokolowski 2000, 190).

This ought to constitute a coherent and convincing alternative toHintikka’s account of Husserl’s epoche. But if so, it would take care ofonly one of the three Husserlian concepts that we need to interpret here.We still have to provide an intelligible account of the ‘‘phenomenological’’or ‘‘transcendental’’ ‘‘reduction’’ and the crucial notion of ‘‘constitution.’’

Reduction and Constitution

At first blush, Hintikka’s interpretation might again seem superior to theone I am offering. In Hintikka’s account of Husserl, the ‘‘re-duction’’(‘‘leading back’’) consists in leaving behind the everyday world ofordinary, physical objects in favor of some putative layers of immediateexperience. In the picture I have been presenting, it is so far unclear whatsense can be attached to the notion of a ‘‘phenomenological reduction.’’Indeed, I have been emphasizing the importance of leaving our natural,everyday experience as it is, that is, ‘‘unreduced.’’ It might seem unlikelythat this could be Husserl’s view.

What is immediately given to us as phenomenologists is the intentionalexperience. Qua intentional, the experience is essentially an experience ofsomething, for example, a perceptual experience of a coffee cup. In fact,the most immediately given after the epoche is the something that theexperience is experience of. Because the epoche prohibits me, for as longas I am doing phenomenology, from relying on my natural (commonsenseas well as scientific) knowledge of the world, it actually frees me to look atthe world purely as it presents itself to me in the experience in question.This is crucial. In the natural attitude, we are not prepared to say howthings appear to us; we are not particularly interested in this type ofquestion, and were we presented with it, what we say would probably bebased just as much on all the things we now about whatever object we areexperiencing as on what is given in the experience itself. The epochechanges this. By bracketing the natural knowledge (providing it with a‘‘Caution!’’ label), the epoche frees us to thematize purely the intended



object as it is intended (Husserl 1970, 241). To represent graphically whathappens, we might say that what the epoche makes possible is anundistorted description of the terminiFthe object(s)Fof all currentintentional rays.

An advantage of this image is that it also makes possible a graphicalrepresentation of the point of the phenomenological reduction. For there-duction, the leading back, is a process of leading the phenomenolo-gist’s gaze from the objects of immediate experience back along theintentional rays to their points of departure, as it wereFto the experienceproper and the subject enjoying the experience. As Husserl puts it, ‘‘[T]he‘‘transcendental-phenomenological reduction’’ [ . . . ] [is] the method ofaccess which leads systematically from the necessarily first given field ofexperience, that of external experiencing of the world, upward into all-embracing, constitutive absolute being, i.e.,Finto transcendental sub-jectivity’’ (1962, 340; cf. 1970, 174; 1995, 136). Husserl thinks that byperforming this reduction we are providing an answer to the question ofworld-manifestation. For when we follow the intentional rays back totheir point of departure, we become able to say something about how theexperiencing subject must be in order to be a subject that can accomplishor perform (leisten) the feat of revealing to itself a transcendent world. Sothe immediately experienced intentional object ‘‘plays, for easily under-stood reasons, the role of ‘transcendental clue’ [Leitfaden; literally,‘guiding thread’]’’ (Husserl 1995, 50; cf. 1969, 269; 1970, 174) to thephenomenological revelation of the structures of experience and ofexperiencing subjectivity. The reduction is thus not a procedure ofregressing from the ordinary world back to something more immediatelygiven. For the immediately given is nothing but the ordinary world, andthe reduction takes this world as its ‘‘guiding clue’’ in order to be able tosay something about the structures of the transcendental subject. InHusserl’s words, ‘‘Necessarily the point of departure is the object given‘straightforwardly’ at the particular time. From it reflection goes back tothe mode of consciousness at that time’’ and eventually to the transcen-dental ‘‘ego’’ itself (Husserl 1995, 50). But it is worth reemphasizing thatthere is no movement of departure or withdrawal from the world ofobjects in this reductive procedure. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, thephenomenological reflection ‘‘does not withdraw from the world towardsthe unity of consciousness as the world’s basis; it steps back to watch theforms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens theintentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them toour notice’’ (1962, xiii).

Three things are worth noting here vis-a-vis Hintikka’s interpretation.First of all, we have now located the proper context for Hintikka’s muchdiscussed hyletic and noetic moments. These notions form part of oneparticular attemptFthat of the first book of IdeasFto explicate reduc-tively the necessary moments internal to an intentional experience. But


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clearly there is no way in which this explanation places ordinary materialobjects out of reach of immediate experience. Rather, the hyle-morpheschema is introduced precisely as an account of our direct and immediateexperience of such perfectly ordinary objects.

Besides, secondly, it is worth mentioning that already at the time of hisIdeas Husserl had realized that this Kantian-style schematic could not beused to explain all kinds of intentional experience (1966a, 7).7 And as Ihave already mentioned, Husserl would be reluctant in later works to usethis schematic at all. This reluctance was at least in part because hesuspected that the schematic account was more constructive than genuinelydescriptive. In Formal and Transcendental Logic Husserl comes close toretracting the account in Ideas: ‘‘The Data-sensualism that is generallyprevalent in psychology and epistemology and, for the most part, biaseseven those who verbally polemicize against it [ . . . ] consists in constructingthe life of consciousness out of Data as, so to speak, finished objects. It isactually a matter of indifference here [ . . . ] whether, within this realm ofobjects already existing in advance, one distinguishes between sensuousData and intentional mental processes as Data of another sort’’ (1969,286). This certainly seems to license a final rejection of Hintikka’s claimthat, according to Husserl, the constituents of immediate experience aresense data that require our ‘‘noetic activities’’ in order to yield ordinaryobjects (cf. Husserl 1970, 233). For, as we have seen, the idea that Hintikkais working with is precisely the idea of hyletic data ‘‘existing in advance’’ ofthe noetic components. The latter, says Hintikka, are ‘‘only secondarily[ . . . ] superimposed on the perceptual rawmaterial’’ (1975, 198).

Although the fact that Husserl had serious misgivings about the hyle-morphe schema should not go unmentioned, it is wrong to think that thecriticism of Hintikka offered in this article depends on this fact. In a laterwork such as The Crisis, Husserl, discussing perception, claims that‘‘aspect-exhibitions’’ can only achieve the status of aspects of perceivedspatial things by being functionally correlated with kinesthetic patternsand processes (1970, 106–7, 161).8 In other words, he carefully avoidsall talk of ‘‘sensory’’ or ‘‘hyletic’’ ‘‘data,’’ ‘‘material,’’ and so on, andthere seems to be no mention of noetic, ‘‘sense-bestowing’’ compo-nents. A perception of a spatial object arises purely as the result of the(passive) correlation of certain patterns of presentations or exhibitions(Darstellungen) with certain patterns of subjective movement.

Nevertheless, if Hintikka’s interpretation of the hyle-morphe accountwere right, then it would be hard to see why we should not be able to

7 Husserl’s struggle with and eventual criticism of the hyle-morphe schema is thoroughlyaccounted for in Sokolowski 1964, 74–115, 204–210. Interestingly, this is a work thatHintikka is not unfamiliar with (cf. Hintikka 1975, 222). But, particularly in later discussionsof Husserl, he seems to pay little attention to Sokolowski’s argument.

8 This account of perception was, in all essentials, already developed well before Ideaswas composed, namely, in Husserl’s 1907 lectures Thing and Space (Husserl 1973).



bring a similar interpretation to bear on the account offered in The Crisis.After all, if the former account conceived of immediate experience as purehyletic data, in need of noetic animation before yielding presentations ofordinary objects, then the latter account seems merely to reproduce thisschematic in terms of (immediately given) aspect-exhibitions that onlyachieve objective significance when correlated with kinesthesia. On bothaccounts, it would seem, immediate experience is not enough to furnish uswith ordinary spatiotemporal objects. Hence if Hintikka offers a coher-ent, exegetically well-founded interpretation of phenomenology thataccommodates his construal of the hyle-morphe schematic, then there isno compelling reason to think that he would not be able to offer a similarreading of those Husserlian accounts in which there is no mentionof hyletic data and noetic animation. However, as I have tried toshow throughout this article, there are good reasons for resistingHintikka’s interpretation of Husserlian phenomenologyFreasons thatdo not depend on Husserl’s eventual abandonment of the hyle-morpheschema.

The third and final thing worth noting in this regard is crucial. Forwe now have in hand an account of ‘‘constitution’’ that rivals that ofHintikka. If the reduction consists in an investigation that takes its lead inthe experienced object and inquires into the structures on the side of thesubjectFthe structures that would make it possible for the subject to be asubject experiencing precisely such an objectFthen by performing thereduction we provide an explanation of how experience can accomplishwhat it accomplishes. We explain, in other words, how a world is revealedor manifested. And to explain this is precisely to account for what Husserlcalls ‘‘world-constitution’’ (cf. 1970, 168; 1995, 47–48, 62). It is thereforenot correct to see constitution as some kind of ‘‘rebuilding’’ that mustaccompany or succeed the disassembling performed by the reduction.9 Forthe reduction does not disassemble anything; it leaves the experiencedworld intact just as it is experienced, and tries to unveil how a subject wouldhave to be in order to be able to experience such a world. So ‘‘constitution’’and ‘‘phenomenological reduction’’ are really two sides of a single coin.The difference between them is simply the difference between what we wantto understand (world-manifestation or constitution) and the method bywhich we seek to achieve this understanding (the reduction).

Conclusion

If the preceding two sections have offered a coherent, exegeticallydefensible account of central notions in Husserlian phenomenology,

9 Again, Hintikka is not alone in interpreting Husserl’s notion of constitution along thelines in question. Another influential commentator in this regard is Gadamer (cf. his 1987,135).


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then we may conclude that Hintikka’s picture of Husserl is something of acaricature. It could be said that this conclusion, being exclusivelynegative, is not very interesting in itself. Part of what has been said,however, especially in the section on the epoche, has wider ramifications. Inparticular, it contains the seeds to what may be important insightsconcerning the idea of a philosophy of immediate experience. In conclusion,I would like to offer a brief indication of what I take these insights to be.

As I have already mentioned, Hintikka claims that because Wittgen-stein realizes that ‘‘the most primitive, unedited experience is alreadyarticulated categorically,’’ then Wittgenstein, unlike Husserl, needs nospecial method or technique to do his phenomenology (Hintikka 1996a,64–66; cf. Park 1998, 2, 190). Having argued this point, Hintikkaimagines an objection to it: ‘‘Some people might claim that this absenceof any phenomenological method in Wittgenstein disqualifies himfrom being called a phenomenologist. Purely historically, there mightvery well be something to be said for such terminology. Yet in a deepersense this difference between Husserl and Wittgenstein is merely adifference between two fellow phenomenologists’’ (1996a, 66). This is ofcourse not the place to discuss whether Wittgenstein (early and/or late)was a phenomenologist,10 and if so to what extent he used any specialphenomenological method. In the present context what is interestingin the quote is the way Hintikka classifies the question concerning methodin phenomenology. Hintikka suggests that, based on purely historicalconsiderations, it is perhaps meaningful to adopt the ‘‘terminology’’ ofadmitting into the ranks of phenomenologists only philosophers whoemploy a special method. Thus, only ‘‘terminology’’Fand based on‘‘purely historical’’ considerations at thatFis at stake here. The essenceor idea of phenomenology is unaffected. Of course one can be aphenomenologistFa philosopher of immediate experienceFwithoutemploying any phenomenological method, perhaps even a phenomenol-ogist better than those who do stick to such a method.

This is surely too naıve, however. We need something like Husserl’sepoche. The reason for this is that, while we are in constant contact withimmediate experience (living through it), we are not usually thematizing itas such. I am not used to describing my experience of the coffee cup assuch, and from the perspective of ordinary life it may well seem pointlessto do so. We have other interests, and these interests make us as it weresee straight through the ways in which things appear to us (Husserl 1970,105; Sokolowski 2000, 50). It is not enough that we reflect on ourexperiences, for as long as we have not explicitly put our naturalknowledge and interests ‘‘on hold’’ (that is, bracketed them), they areliable to interfere with our descriptive efforts. Our intimate familiaritywith our immediate experience does not put us in a position to provide a

10 For a discussion of this question, see Overgaard and Zahavi forthcoming.



faithful description of it. On the contrary, it may make it hard for us to doso. As Wittgenstein once remarked, it is very difficult to notice what is‘‘always before one’s eyes’’ (1963, § 129).

In other words, we need a special phenomenological method, for thesimple reason that implicit intimate familiarity is not the same as explicitanalytic or descriptive mastery. We need a little distance from ourexperiential lives in order to analyze them philosophically. This is the basicinsight of Husserl’s epoche, and, contra Hintikka, it has nothing whateverto do with a procedure of abstracting or excluding any part of experiencefrom our thematic focus. Rather, as Merleau-Ponty writes, the epocheslackens the intentional or experiential threads that bind us to the world,and thereby ‘‘brings them to our notice.’’ The epoche, we might say, is themove into philosophy, and as such it is indispensable for phenomenology.Without the epoche we have immediate experience, of course; but we haveno philosophy of immediate experience.11

Department of PhilosophyUniversity of HullHull HU6 7RXUnited [email protected]

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1963. Philosophical Investigations. Translated byG. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.


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