HOW TO ANALYZE IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE:

HINTIKKA, HUSSERL, AND THE IDEA OF PHENOMENOLOGY

SREN OVERGAARD
Abstract: This article discusses Jaakko Hintikkas interpretation of the aims and
method of Husserls phenomenology. I argue that Hintikka misrepresents
Husserls phenomenology on certain crucial points. More specically, Hintikka
misconstrues Husserls notion of immediate experience and consequently fails
to grasp the functions of the central methodological tools known as the epoche
and the phenomenological reduction. The result is that the conception of
phenomenology he attributes to Husserl is very far from realizing the philoso-
phical potential of Husserls position. Hence if we want a fruitful rapprochement
between analytical philosophy and Continental phenomenology of the kind that is
Hintikkas ultimate aim, then Hintikkas account of Husserl needs correcting on a
number of crucial points.
Keywords: epoche , immediate experience, Hintikka, Husserl, phenomenology,
philosophical method.
Introduction
Within the past few decades, many prominent philosophers have realized
the fruitlessness of the so-called analytical-Continental divide. Various
strategies for bridging or closing the gap have been adopted. Some have
simply proceeded as if no such gap had ever existed, pursuing their
philosophical interests wherever they might lead. Others have argued for
the necessity of tracing the philosophical traditions back to their
(common or closely related) historical roots.
1
Yet others have tried to
locate, among the many heterogeneous philosophical programs on both
sides of the divide, agendas or methodologies that are fundamentally
related. To the latter group belongs Jaakko Hintikka. Inspired by the
discovery that WittgensteinFin works from what is usually referred to as
the middle periodFirted with the notion of philosophy as phenom-
enology, Hintikka has in recent years devoted particular interest to
1
Stanley Cavell is a good example of the rst type of philosopher, while Michael
Dummett exemplies the second approach (cf. Cavell 1999, xiii; Dummett 1996, 26, 193).
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articulating and criticizing the ideas of phenomenology that he claims to
nd in Wittgenstein and Husserl.
In this article I want to discuss some of the claims Hintikka makes
about Husserls conception of phenomenology. Although there
are valuable insights to be found in Hintikkas discussions of Husserl,
I will argue that Hintikka misrepresents Husserls phenomenology on a
number of crucial points. In particular, he misconstrues Husserls notion
of immediate experience and as a result misses the proper functions
of the central methodological tools known as the epoche and the
phenomenological reduction. Throwing critical light on Hintikkas
claims about Husserl is pertinent because the dialogue between analytical
philosophers and phenomenologists, which I believe is Hintikkas
ultimate and commendable aim, cannot be a genuine and fruitful one if
we work with a seriously distorted picture of Husserlian phenomenology.
Hintikkas Husserl
Let me begin by offering a brief sketch of Hintikkas reading of Husserl.
One thing Hintikka has stressed consistently in practically all texts he has
written on Husserlian phenomenology is the difference between phenom-
enology and phenomenalism (Hintikka 1975, 230; Hintikka and Hintikka
1986, 72). Phenomenology is not about mere appearances as opposed
to reality. Rather, [w]hat a phenomenologist like Husserl maintains is
that everything must be based on, and traced back to, what is given to me
in my immediate experience (Hintikka 1995, 83). The reason this does
not amount to phenomenalism is Husserls insistence that reality in fact
impinges directly on my consciousness (Hintikka 1995, 83), so that there
is no fundamental gap between the real, so-called external world and the
givens of immediate experience. The denial of such a gap is in fact
dening for phenomenology. As Hintikka phrases it, the project of
Husserlian as well as other types of phenomenology is simply to uncover
the conceptual structure of the world by attending to our immediate
experience (Hintikka and Hintikka 1986, 148; Hintikka 1995, 82). What,
then, is involved in such uncovering, and how is it achieved?
According to Hintikka, Husserl takes a deeply problematic turn in his
attempt to uncover the conceptual structure of the world. Husserl was
persuaded by epistemological arguments concerning sense-perception
and its fallibility [ . . . ] that everyday material objects are not given to us
directly in the relevant sense (Hintikka 1995, 95). To reach the level
of the immediately and directly experienced, therefore, Husserl imagined
that he had to employ a peculiar methodological apparatus, consisting
inter alia of the epoche and the phenomenological reduction. As Hintikka
commentsFthereby also revealing what immediate experience is,
on Husserls accountFthe phenomenological reductions have to lead
us step by step to the different basic ingredients of our experience, on the
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one hand to the unarticulated hyletic data, and on the other hand to the
essences that are used to articulate them (Hintikka 1996a, 71). Hintikka
is here alluding to a distinction Husserl makes in the rst book of Ideas
between sensation-contents such as color-Data, touch-Data and tone-
Data, and the like, which are in themselves devoid of intentionality, and
the mental processes or their moments which bear in themselves the
specic trait of intentionality (Husserl 1983, 203). Husserl calls the
sensation-contents hyle or hyletic data (or simply formless stuffs),
and refers to the mental moments by such names as noetic moments
and morphe. Husserls point here can be understood along Kantian
lines as the claim that sense-contents alone cannot yield experiences of
(spatiotemporal) objects; they need a form-giving or sense-bestowing
addition from the side of the experiencing subject (Husserl 1983, 203).
Hintikka phrases the basic idea in the following way: For Husserl, as
we know, empirical experience does not come to us already articulated
categorically. We structure it through our noetic activity; we impose the
forms on the raw data (hyletic data) of experience that are needed to make
that experience into experience of objects, their properties, relations, etc.
(Hintikka 1996a, 64). In the reductive attempt to reach the noetic and
hyletic strata, the notion of epoche , or bracketing, plays an important
role, being the method of excluding from the phenomenologists focus
everything which is not given to us in immediate experience (Hintikka
1995, 80, 85). Among the things not given to us in immediate experience, as
already indicated, we nd everyday material objects. Thus, we get the
following picture: Husserl thinks immediate experience reveals the con-
ceptual structure of the world. Inuenced by reections on the fallibility of
perception, he also (and more problematically) thinks immediate experience
cannot concern ordinary sorts of objects, such as trees, animals, people,
paraphernalia, and so on, but must rather be conceived as consisting of
unarticulated hyletic data, or sense data (cf. Hintikka 1996b, 201), which
stand in need of noetic articulation. We therefore need some process
of exclusion (the epoche and the reduction) to get from experiences of
ordinary objects down to these layers of immediate experience.
What do we do, once we have reached immediate experience? Hintikkas
answer to this question involves the important Husserlian notion of
constitution. According to Hintikka, constitution is in a certain sense
the inverse of the phenomenological reductions: whereas the reduction
took us from the world of ordinary objects back to immediate experience,
constitution has to do with the processes through which the given is
articulated in ones consciousness (Hintikka 1995, 92), thereby, presum-
ably, again reaching the level of ordinary objects.
So now we should have some kind of overview over the fundamentals
of Husserlian phenomenology. It is phenomenology in that it searches
for the basis of our conceptual world in immediate experience
(Hintikka 1995, 82). Yet it construes immediate experience as being
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different from the experiences that are about ordinary objects, and as being
accessible only via a special procedure involving bracketing or exclusion of
the world of ordinary objects. However, under the title of constitution it
aims to reintroduce the ordinary world, by way of showing how it results
from our noetic activity being imposed on the raw hyletic data
(Hintikka 1996a, 64).
Criticizing this conception of phenomenology, Hintikka implies that it
falls short precisely when judged by its own (that is, phenomenological)
standards. The whole methodological apparatus makes sense only against
the background of a dubious notion of immediate experience, and
Husserls project of constitutive phenomenology springs from a construc-
tive ambition that can hardly be phenomenological. First of all, then,
Husserl should not have let epistemological worries convince him that
everyday material objects are not given to us directly (Hintikka 1995,
95). This supposition led him to postulate raw hyletic data as the basic
constituents of experience. In contrast, a more acute phenomenologist such
as Wittgenstein realized that the most primitive, unedited experience is
already articulated categorically (Hintikka 1996a, 64). For Wittgenstein,
that is, we already immediately experience the world around us as
consisting of utensils, animals, plants, people, houses, mountains, as well
as signicant states of affairs, events, and so on. This also means that
Wittgenstein, unlike Husserl, has no need for a special technique or
method to uncover immediate experience (Hintikka 1996a, 66). Once we
realize that the true immediate experience is simply the one that presents
perfectly ordinary material and cultural objects to us, the whole methodo-
logical apparatus of Husserl becomes redundant, designed as it was to
exclude all reference to these ordinary objects in favor of some supposedly
more immediate layers of experience. But that is not all. For when we
have realized that there is no need to dismantle the world of ordinary
objects, we are bound to conclude that there is no task for Husserls notion
of constitution to perform either. Thus, [f]or Wittgenstein, no process of
constitution is needed for the purpose of providing our language with the
objects it refers to (Hintikka 1996a, 65).
In the conclusion (entitled Who Is Right?) of his contribution to The
Cambridge Companion to Husserl, Hintikka launches his nal attack on
Husserls ideas. For it is one thing to have shown that there is no real need
to isolate, within ordinary experience, some core of hyletic data. A more
serious question is whether it even makes sense, phenomenologically, to
speak of something like hyletic data. The moot issue, Hintikka observes,
is whether the hyle and the noetic activity of which Husserl speaks are
accessible to phenomenological reection at all, or whether they rather
occur under the surface of our intentional consciousness (Hintikka
1995, 103). Hintikka offers a cautious reply to this question. Although he
observes that the testimony of many of the best phenomenological
psychologists seems to suggest that they occur under the surface, he
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ultimately refrains from condemning as unphenomenological Husserls
heroic struggle with notions like hyle, lling, and reduction (Hintikka
1995, 103). Elsewhere, however, discussing a similar question, Hintikka
does conclude that Wittgenstein is a far purer phenomenologist than
Husserl (Hintikka 1996a, 65), thereby giving us a clear indication of
who is right.
In fact, although again Hintikka graciously refrains from drawing this
conclusion explicitly, it would seem that not much of Husserls transcen-
dental phenomenology can be left intact after a critique such as this.
Husserl himself associates the ability to grasp his phenomenology at all
with the proper understanding of the phenomenological reduction
(Husserl 1962, 188). Hence, any argument that would have as its
conclusion that the reduction is redundant would surely strike a blow
against the very foundations of Husserlian phenomenology.
Points of Agreement
Hintikka has, I think, a number of valid points. Before I launch my
critical discussion of the claims I disagree with, let me briey go through
some of what I think is right in Hintikkas account.
It is right that phenomenology, in all its various guises, attempts
to say something about the fundamental structures of our world by
attending to our immediate experience. This goes for Husserl as well
as for Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. A benet of Hintikkas
interpretation of phenomenology as meaning philosophy of immediate
experience is that it highlights the positivistic element in phenomen-
ology. As Husserl states in the rst book of Ideas, if positivists are
those who take their point of departure in all that can be immediately
seen and grasped, then phenomenologists are the genuine positivists
(1983, 39). Of course, in saying this Husserl also implies that those
thinkers who are usually known as positivists have failed to locate the
right point of departure; so one should be careful not to exaggerate
the positivistic element. Nevertheless, as long as due caution is exercised,
the notion of a philosophy of immediate experience may help to bring
out a central motif in phenomenology.
I also share Hintikkas view that, as a philosophy of immediate
experience, phenomenology should not be unduly impressed by skeptical
worries about the fallibility of perception. Independently of what Husserl
or others might have thought, I think Hintikka is right that there is no
reason to assume out of hand that immediate experience is the same as
indubitable or infallible experience. We may grant the skeptical point that,
in any given case, it is possible that the objects of our perceptual
experience do not exist, and still insist that nevertheless our immediate
experience purports to present such things as houses, people, and apple
trees. For what is immediate experience supposed to mean if not
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precisely our experiences, just as they areFunedited, to use Hintikkas
term? And what may immediately experienced refer to, then, if not
simply what our experiences, just as they are, immediately (purport to)
present us with? These immediately experienced objects, in turn, must
surely include ordinary spatiotemporal objects. And something must
be excluded as well: our immediate experiences do not come to us as
consisting of sense data. This is a descriptive, phenomenological point
which I think anything that deserves the name phenomenology will
have to acknowledge.
Hintikka is on the right track on other points too. Clearly, in light of
what we have granted so far, we cannot avoid concluding that any
supposed phenomenology that would employ a special methodology to
exclude the world of ordinary objects in order to reach some supposedly
more fundamental stratum of experience would be fundamentally mis-
guided. Indeed, as in fact moving away from at least parts of the true
phenomenological data, such a methodology could hardly even be
phenomenological. This follows immediately from the pointFwhich,
again, I do not see how it might be phenomenologically permissible to
denyFthat immediate experience generally presents itself as being the
experience of perfectly ordinary things. And even if the philosophy under
consideration should manage somehow to rebuild the ordinary world
after 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 taking
the world apart in the rst place.
Given these points, there is even reason explicitly to endorse a
conclusion that Hintikka stops short of endorsing. When he contrasts
Wittgenstein with Husserl, Hintikka states that the two promote phe-
nomenologies of different kinds (Hintikka 1996a, 66). Arguably, however,
this is too weak. Insofar as Husserls position is the one I have outlined in
the previous section, it makes good sense to claim that is it not
recognizably phenomenological at all. A philosopher who has little idea
what the nature of immediate experience is can hardly (except perhaps as
a joke) be called a philosopher of immediate experience.
On systematic, philosophical grounds, I thus agree with Hintikka that
there are serious problems with the position he attributes to Husserl.
Others might disagree, and I do not pretend to have offered any
conclusive arguments for Hintikkas and my views in this brief section.
Rather, I simply assume their correctness in order to pose the question
whether these agreed-upon critical points affect Husserl at all. In the
following 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 Hintikka
attributes to Husserl than I have given it credit for may view this article as qualied by a
conditional to the effect that even if that position were deeply problematic, it still would not
affect Husserl.
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Husserl on Immediate Experience
According to Husserl, subjectivity, or the mind, reaches out into the
world, as it were. Inuenced by his teacher Brentano, Husserl gives this
reaching 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 happen
actually in the real world; when I am seeing, I am seeing something, and
again this something usually exists out there in reality; and so on. From
the point of view of traditional epistemology, this is of course question-
begging: we are not entitled simply to assume that the real world is
directly presented to us in our experiences, since this is precisely what the
skeptic challenges us to demonstrate. Husserl is well aware of this. His
response, in his nal work, The Crisis, reads: The point is not to secure
[sichern] objectivity but to understand it (1970, 189). In other words, the
epistemological project of proving or securing our possession of the
world is not Husserls project. Rather, Husserl simply presupposes
that we are in experiential contact with the world, and he declares that
this contact, though certain enough, still needs to be understood on some
fundamental level (1970, 187). Through a careful study of immediate
experience, it is precisely the job of phenomenology to provide us with
this understanding. None of this departs signicantly from what Hintikka
says about phenomenology.
When we ask, however, what Husserl has to say about immediate
experience, things get more complicated. First of all, the distinction
between hyletic and noetic moments or strata that Hintikka lends so
much weight to appears mainly in the rst book of Ideas, and it seems
completely absent from later works, such as the Cartesian Meditations
and The Crisis. Hintikka is not unaware of this fact. In the title essay of
his 1975 essay collection The Intentions of Intentionality and Other New
Models for Modalities, Hintikka grants that his interpretation may be
problematic. He admits to not being able to put forward his interpreta-
tion with complete condence (1975, 204), and species his qualms in
the following way: My account is closely geared to what [Husserl] says in
the Ideen, but it must be added that Husserl himself indicates that the
account given there is only a provisional one. It seems that he was
bothered by doubts (1975, 203). As we will see later, Hintikka was right
to air these doubts, and it is a bit disappointing that he seems in later texts
to have gained complete condence in his interpretation of Husserl.
It will also become clear, however, that, as far as my conversation with
Hintikka is concerned, one should not give too much weight to the point
that the later Husserl had serious misgivings about the account he offered
in 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 even
completely misplacing it. Hintikka, in other words, misconstrues Hus-
serlian phenomenology completely, including the provisional hyle-
morphe account advanced in the Ideas.
The rst thing we must become clear about is the difference between
the constituents of the experience itself and that which belongs to the
experienced object. Husserl himself is very emphatic on this point, and he
explicitly relegates the noetic and hyletic strata to the side of the
experience itself (Husserl 1983, 21314). Supposing, for example, that I am
perceiving 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 should
not, of course, be so analyzed. On the other hand, the perceived tree
has a brown trunk, is located at the rear end of the garden, and so on, none
of 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, Husserl
makes 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 Hintikkas claims begin to
appear puzzling. For instance, what are we now to make of Hintikkas
claim that for Husserl empirical experience does not come to us
articulated categorically (Hintikka 1996a, 64)? Surely Hintikka does
not 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 already
having a categorically articulated object (such as, say, a blooming apple
tree). But what can be the justication for such a claim? None of what we
have said about the experience as suchFin particular, its being analyz-
able in terms of hyle and morpheFcarries the implication that an
experience we may analyze in such a way comes to us without any
articulated object. We only get this result if we subscribe to a whole series
of additional assumptions about Husserls hyle-morphe talk.
Some of these assumptions are evident when Hintikka recasts
Husserls 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 Hintikkas readings of
Husserl and Wittgenstein, is considerably less clear on this point. Among many other
astonishing statements in Parks book, one nds the following: What is given before noetic
activities take place is not an object but formless raw material that cannot be picked out or
named [ . . . ]. Husserl cannot have phenomenological language that describes what is given in
pure experience because for him, what is given in pure experience is hyletic data, which
cannot be picked out in any language (Park 1998, 48). In Parks construal of Husserls
position, the hyletic moments would seem not to be moments of the experience as such but
rather what is given in immediate experience, before interpretative activities intervene. This is
completely confused.
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experience initially comes to us (here we are passive) as unarticulated,
pure sense data; we then have to engage in a particular sort of mental
activity, in order to imbue these data with objective meaning. Thus, as
Hintikka sees it, a process of constitution is needed for the purpose of
providing our language with the objects it refers to (Hintikka 1996a, 65).
Without a constitutive activity or process being added to the immediately
given, there would be no objective world for us to experience and talk
about. There is an assumption about temporality here, and an assump-
tion about activity and passivity, as well as an implicit assumption about
what makes an experience immediate or pure. Hintikkas assumptions
are close to explicit in the following passage: Husserl in effect retained
the nonintentional character of pure perception, and introduced
the intentional element only secondarily, in the form of an act of
noesis superimposed on the perceptual rawmaterial (Hintikka 1975,
198). But few, if any, of these ideas can be attributed to Husserl with any
degree of certainty.
First of all, it is highly questionable whether Husserl would hold that
whenever we experience an empirical object we are rst presented merely
with sense data, awaiting our sense-bestowing operations. Rather, he
refers to the hyletic and the noetic as components or strata within the
concrete intentional experience (cf. Husserl 1983, 203), thus implying
simultaneity rather than temporal succession. But in fact it is fundamen-
tally misguided to explicate the hyle/morphe distinction in temporal
terms. The distinction belongs to what Husserl would later call static
phenomenology, which for our purposes we may circumscribe as the
investigation of the logic of intentional experience, that is, the inves-
tigation of the foundational relationships between various types of
experience and within individual types of experience.
4
There is, then, no
reason to assume a temporal priority for hyletic data.
Against the second assumption (about passivity) one might point to
the fact that Husserl considers perception as such to be mainly passive
(Husserl 1962, 95; 1966b, 5158). It would not, therefore, make sense to
describe the noetic components in such experiences as activities.
Indeed, the notion that whenever I perceive, say, my computer I literally
have to engage in some activity of interpreting or forming otherwise
meaningless or formless sense data is so absurd that it might serve as a
reductio of Husserls position if his position implied that notion. But of
course Husserls view has no such implications.
Finally, it is also highly questionable whether Husserl would say that
the 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 the
temporal emergence of such static constitutive systems. See, for example, Husserl 1969,
31619.
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seems to me, would rather insist on the very different claim that while
the true or pure perception is the ordinary perception, the one in
which ordinary spatiotemporal objects are presented to us, we can
distinguish within this perception between hyletic and noetic aspects.
It counts in favor of such an interpretation that Husserl speaks of
the hyletic and noetic as moments (Husserl 1983, 2037). According
to the terminology Husserl introduces in section 17 of his third investiga-
tion in Logical Investigations, a moment is a dependent part of a whole.
In other words, a moment in Husserls terminology is something
that cannot exist apart from its materialization or incorporation in a
whole, as opposed to a piece, which is something that can be detached
from the whole to which it belongs (Husserl 1984, 272). The blue
color of the cover of Hintikkas Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, is
a moment in that it cannot exist by itself, detached from the cover it
belongs to. Any given page of the book, by contrast, is a piece that
can be torn out of the book and become a separate, concrete object.
So if Husserls hyletic data are moments of experiences, it would make
no sense to speak of them as the real or pure perceptions; for they would
be nothing apart from the wholesFthe concrete experiencesFto which
they belong.
This may not sufce to establish beyond doubt that Hintikkas
interpretation of Husserl is awed. But it does suggest that Hintikka
needs to be more explicit about the assumptions he is attributing to
Husserl, and that he needs to say something to make it plausible that he is
justied in so attributing them, if he is to substantiate his claim about
immediate experience being unarticulated, on Husserls account.
No such conclusion follows from the mere fact that Husserl proposes
to distinguish two components within the experience itself.
I think, however, that Husserl would agree with Hintikka about what
would count as immediate experience. It is not easy to give a very
precise characterization of it, but I think Hintikka would say something
to the effect that immediate experience is our experience as it is given,
that is, as it is before we start tampering with it, interpreting or editing it,
actively working on it in some sense. Thus, to pick a rather trivial
example, when I am walking home on a dark winters night and
involuntarily jump back at the sight of a gure standing beside my front
door, my immediate experience is that of seeing a stranger lurking at my
door. When I then start to subject my experience to closer scrutinyFask-
ing questions like: What do I actually see? Could it not be a Christmas
tree just as well as a person?Fthen I am in the process of editing my
experience. Husserl, too, it seems to me, would want phenomenology rst
and foremost to study experience as it comes to us, unedited, although
he would also hold that it is part of the business of phenomenology
to provide an account of what happens when we engage in processes of
critically scrutinizing or interpreting our experience. Of course, it would
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not be the business of the phenomenologist as such to engage in any such
editing; rather, qua phenomenologists we are only supposed to describe
the various types of experience. The question now is how Husserl would
describe the givens of our immediate, unedited experience, with which
phenomenology has to begin.
The rst book of IdeasFthe main source for Hintikkas portrait of
HusserlFis admirably clear on this point. Phenomenology, writes Husserl,
must take its point of departure in the experiences of what he calls the
natural attitude (1983, 51). He describes these natural experiences and their
various objects like this:
I am conscious of a world endlessly spread out in space, endlessly becoming
and having endlessly become in time. I am conscious of it: that signies, above
all, that intuitively I nd it immediately, that I experience it. By my seeing,
touching, hearing, and so forth, and in the different modes of sensuous
perception, corporeal physical things with some spatial distribution or other
are simply there for me, on hand in the literal or the gurative sense, whether
or not I am particularly heedful of them and busied with them in my
considering, thinking, feeling, or willing. Animate beings tooFhuman beings,
let us sayFare immediately there for me: I look up; I see them; I hear their
approach; I grasp their hands; talking with them I understand immediately
what 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, Husserl
remarks: Moreover, this world is there for me not only as a world of
mere things, but also with the same immediacy as a world of objects with
values, a world of goods, a practical world [ . . . ]. Immediately, physical
things 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 is
remarkable 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 we
simply experience without having to engage in any sort of interpretative
or editorial activity. That is, to borrow Hintikkas phrase, Husserl wants
these descriptions to be accepted as descriptions of how our experiences
come to us. If this is so, then Hintikka is clearly mistaken when he says
that Husserl conceived of immediate experience or pure perception as
nonintentional sensory raw material awaiting noetic editorial activity
(Hintikka 1975, 198). Husserl is explicit that immediate experience is
precisely the sort that is essentially experience of perfectly ordinary things
and events, and he repeatedly denies that we can make sense of immediate
experience in terms of sensory data (1970, 30, 125):
The rst thing we must do, and rst of all in immediate reective 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 immediate
givenness, one nds anything but color data, tone data, other sense data or
data of feeling, will, etc.; that is, one nds none of these things which appear in
traditional psychology, taken for granted to be immediately given from the
start. Instead, one nds, as even Descartes did (naturally we ignore his other
purposes), the cogito, intentionality, in those familiar forms which, like every-
thing actual in the surrounding world, nd their expression in language: I see
a 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 tradition
of sensualism and starts with a theory of sensation. To do so involves
the following: In advance, as though this were obviously correct, one
misinterprets conscious life as a complex of data of external and (at best)
internal sensuousness; then one lets form-qualities take care of combining
such data into wholes. [ . . . ] But, when descriptive theory of consciousness
begins radically, it has before it no such data and wholes, except as prejudices.
Its beginning is the pure [ . . . ] psychological experience, which now must be
made to utter its own sense with no adulteration. The truly rst utterance,
however, is the Cartesian utterance of the ego cogitoFfor example: I
perceiveFthis house or I rememberFa certain commotion in the street.
(1995, 3839)
What Husserl says in these quotes is surely incompatible with Hintikkas
claim 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 Hintikkas point is inter-
preted in the way I suggested above that it should be, then it precisely
amounts to the claim that immediate experience in the Husserlian sense
does not (before noetic form qualities are superimposed on it) have
intentional objects, such as houses, owers, human beings, and so on.
Indeed, immediate experience in this allegedly Husserlian sense is not
intentional at all. But Husserl simply contradicts this. He insists that the
immediate, unedited experiences with which phenomenology must begin
are such experiences as perceiving a house, looking at a tree, smelling its
owers, 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 Husserls Ideas contains a description
that Husserl explicitly introduced as a description from within the
natural attitude (1983, 51). And although it is correct that, on Husserls
view, we must all begin within the natural attitude (cf. Husserl 1962, 270),
it is also Husserls view that we only become phenomenologists the
moment we transcend this attitude. More precisely, according to Husserl
we only reach the phenomenological dimension when we perform the
phenomenological reductions. And these involve a bracketing or exclud-
ing of exactly the kind of natural-attitude account of experience that I
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have just presented. This objection leads me to the next point on my
critical agenda: Hintikkas understanding of the nature of Husserls
epoche and reduction.
Putting Things in Brackets
In Hintikkas picture of phenomenology, there is a clear task for the
epoche and the reduction to perform. They are supposed to lead us from
the 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 to
Hintikkas Husserl, more adequate) picture of immediate experience. In
contrast, my claim has been that the description Husserl provides from
within the natural attitude is his description of the world of immediate
experience. But this would seem to leave the epoche and the reduction out
of a job. If we are already in possession of the phenomenological
dimension, then what need do we have for Husserls phenomenological
reductions?
Before I address this question head on, let me point out a problem
with Hintikkas construal of the epoche . It is correct, of course, that the
epoche and the reduction are said by Husserl to bracket the natural
attitude (or the world of the natural attitude). But the question is
what bracketing means in this context. On Hintikkas account, as we
have already seen, it means excluding. This is why Hintikka claims
that if a phenomenon belongs to the realm of objects and must thus
be bracketed by a phenomenologist, this phenomenon will henceforth
be inaccessible to [the] phenomenologist (1995, 81). Whatever is
bracketed, it would seem, is excluded from phenomenological considera-
tion. But in an interesting passage from IdeasFagain, the very work
Hintikka almost exclusively relies onFHusserl explicitly contradicts this
claim: Figuratively speaking, that which is bracketed is not erased from
the phenomenological blackboard but only bracketed, and thereby
provided with an index. As having the latter it is, however, part of the
major theme of inquiry [im Hauptthema der Forschung] (1983, 171;
translation modied). Far from thinking that bracketing means excluding
or making phenomenologically inaccessible, Husserl emphasizes that it
means putting the bracketed as such at the center of phenomenological
research. So if we grant Hintikkas point that the world of the natural
attitude must be subjected to the epoche and thus bracketed, we have not
thereby granted that there is no role to play for this world in the
phenomenological account of immediate experience. Quite the contrary,
we have in fact said that there is a sense in which the world of the natural
attitude is our major theme of inquiry.
Hintikka is not the rst to have interpreted the epoche (and the
reduction) 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 might
seem natural: if the epoche does not exclude anything, then why would
Husserl think it so important? However, one ought to pay close attention
here to Husserls statement that the epoche attaches an index or a
label to the world of the natural attitude.
6
This suggests both that what
is subjected to the epoche does not disappear from our view but, rather,
remains in view; and that something must nevertheless happen to it. On
the one hand, everything remains as of old (Husserl 1983, 216); and on
the other hand, we have somehow changed our viewpoint on it all:
[T]hrough the epoche a new way of experiencing, of thinking, of
theorizing, is opened to the philosopher; here, situated above his own
natural being and above the natural world, he loses nothing of their being
and their objective truths and likewise nothing at all of the spiritual
acquisitions of his world-life or those of the whole historical communal
life; he simply forbids himselfFas a philosopher, in the uniqueness of his
direction of interestFto continue the whole natural performance of his
world-life (Husserl 1970, 152; cf. 176).
The crucial importance of the epoche resides precisely in the way it
modies our attitude, without annihilating, excluding, or altering any-
thing that was given to us in the natural attitude. It is one thing to live our
natural, everyday life; it is quite another thing reectively to thematize
this life. And within the reective stance, there is a big difference between
the kind of reection in which I sit back and try to look at my actions,
experiences, and so forth, to get some kind of overview of my life or to
evaluate it morally, say, and another kind of reection in which I am
interested in my life in the natural attitude as a world-revealing or world-
disclosing life (cf. Husserl 1970, 209). Normally, we do not think of
ourselves as places where the world is revealed; rather, we think of
ourselves as particular, rather small creatures going about our business in
various corners of the world. Husserls descriptions of what we experience
in the natural attitude are intended to awaken in us a sense of how the
world is something that is given to us as such in our (immediate)
experiencesFprecisely as a world that encompasses us, transcends
us, and contains endless varieties of cultural and natural objects that
transcend us. Once we have realized that, the next step is to make us
5
Such claims have, for example, also been made by the famous historian of the
phenomenological movement, Herbert Spiegelberg. See his 1940, 9394, for the claim that
the epoche and the reduction involve an exclusion of the reality of phenomena; and his 1965,
299, for a similar point phrased in terms of the Heideggerian notion of Being. Husserl
himself insists that the epoche excludes nothing from our view, but on the contrary enables
us to attend to the phenomena (1970, 15152, 176, 241). For an elaborate critique of the
most common misunderstandings of Husserls epoche and reduction, see Overgaard 2004,
chap. 2.
6
This statement also appears in one of the few other works that Hintikka refers to, The
Idea of Phenomenology (see Husserl 1950, 29).
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aware that we do not really understand how our experiences can present
such a world to us. As I mentioned in the previous section, the point of
Husserls transcendental phenomenology is precisely to provide us with
this understanding. We are supposed to reect on our experiential life as
world-disclosing or world-revealing in order to achieve an understanding
of how this life can accomplish what it evidently accomplishes: namely,
presenting a world to us.
Now a task is beginning to emerge for the epoche to perform. For when
we are living in the natural attitude, pursuing our various practical and
theoretical objectives, we rely on various diverse kinds of knowledge
(practical, social, commonsense, scientic, and so on) about all kinds of
different matters in order to reach our conclusions and decisions. This is
part of what it means to live in the natural attitude. If, however, we want to
inquire how the world as a whole, with everything it contains, can present
itself to us, then it becomes problematic to relyFat least directlyFon these
types of natural knowledge. What must be avoided here is a special kind of
question-begging or circularity. Husserl calls it the transcendental circle
(1962, 24950). Briey stated, the point is that if you want to understand
how a world can be manifested or disclosed at all, then you cannot, in that
enterprise, base your conclusions on any kind of knowledge that presup-
poses (as all knowledge that belongs within the natural attitude does) the
manifestation of the world. For example, we cannot rely on empirical
investigations of visual perception in trying to answer our transcendental
question, for, as investigations based upon observations of particular
worldly entities and states of affairs, these presuppose and exploit that
which we need to understand: world-manifestation as such (cf. Husserl
1962, 24850, 273). Making sure that our explanation does not base itself
on that which has to be explained is precisely the job of the epoche . The
index or label of which Husserl speaks, therefore, we might imagine as
consisting of the warning, Do not use.
But precision is of the essence here. Husserls point, after all, is merely
that there is a fundamental difference between posing the philosophical
question concerning the manifestation of the world as a whole and posing
everyday or scientic questions about particular matters in the world.
Therefore, we should avoid treating answers to questions of the second
sort as answers to questions of the rst sort. This means that as
phenomenologists we must exercise a certain caution in relating to the
experiences of the natural attitude, but not that we are barred from every
kind of use of these. We are not supposed to live these experiences, in the
normal way; but we are allowed, even obliged, to study them reectively.
The epoche , by prohibiting the former, makes possible the latter (cf.
Husserl 1970, 148).
Suppose I am now experiencing a coffee cup placed on a table amid
heaps of papers and books. When I am naturally attuned, my interest in
the cup has to do with the fact that it contains the coffee I have just made
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and now would like to drink. I am not interested in my experience of the
cup 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 intended
to allow me to pursue this interest in a proper manner. But it should be
obvious that it can be no part of my phenomenological agendaFand thus
no part of the function of the epoche Fto change the experiences I am
interested in describing. Rather, I am, of course, to describe them just as
they are. Nothing should be added to them; but neither should we exclude
or deduct anything from them. As Robert Sokolowski has recently put it,
We must leave everything as it was, for otherwise we would change the
very thing we wish to examine (Sokolowski 2000, 190).
This ought to constitute a coherent and convincing alternative to
Hintikkas account of Husserls epoche . But if so, it would take care of
only 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 rst blush, Hintikkas interpretation might again seem superior to the
one I am offering. In Hintikkas account of Husserl, the re-duction
(leading back) consists in leaving behind the everyday world of
ordinary, physical objects in favor of some putative layers of immediate
experience. In the picture I have been presenting, it is so far unclear what
sense 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 unlikely
that this could be Husserls view.
What is immediately given to us as phenomenologists is the intentional
experience. Qua intentional, the experience is essentially an experience of
something, for example, a perceptual experience of a coffee cup. In fact,
the most immediately given after the epoche is the something that the
experience is experience of. Because the epoche prohibits me, for as long
as I am doing phenomenology, from relying on my natural (commonsense
as well as scientic) knowledge of the world, it actually frees me to look at
the 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 how
things appear to us; we are not particularly interested in this type of
question, and were we presented with it, what we say would probably be
based just as much on all the things we now about whatever object we are
experiencing as on what is given in the experience itself. The epoche
changes this. By bracketing the natural knowledge (providing it with a
Caution! label), the epoche frees us to thematize purely the intended
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object as it is intended (Husserl 1970, 241). To represent graphically what
happens, we might say that what the epoche makes possible is an
undistorted description of the terminiFthe object(s)Fof all current
intentional rays.
An advantage of this image is that it also makes possible a graphical
representation of the point of the phenomenological reduction. For the
re-duction, the leading back, is a process of leading the phenomenolo-
gists gaze from the objects of immediate experience back along the
intentional rays to their points of departure, as it wereFto the experience
proper and the subject enjoying the experience. As Husserl puts it, [T]he
transcendental-phenomenological reduction [ . . . ] [is] the method of
access which leads systematically from the necessarily rst given eld of
experience, 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 by
performing this reduction we are providing an answer to the question of
world-manifestation. For when we follow the intentional rays back to
their point of departure, we become able to say something about how the
experiencing subject must be in order to be a subject that can accomplish
or perform (leisten) the feat of revealing to itself a transcendent world. So
the 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 the
phenomenological revelation of the structures of experience and of
experiencing subjectivity. The reduction is thus not a procedure of
regressing from the ordinary world back to something more immediately
given. For the immediately given is nothing but the ordinary world, and
the reduction takes this world as its guiding clue in order to be able to
say something about the structures of the transcendental subject. In
Husserls words, Necessarily the point of departure is the object given
straightforwardly at the particular time. From it reection goes back to
the mode of consciousness at that time and eventually to the transcen-
dental ego itself (Husserl 1995, 50). But it is worth reemphasizing that
there is no movement of departure or withdrawal from the world of
objects in this reductive procedure. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, the
phenomenological reection does not withdraw from the world towards
the unity of consciousness as the worlds basis; it steps back to watch the
forms of transcendence y up like sparks from a re; it slackens the
intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to
our notice (1962, xiii).
Three things are worth noting here vis-a` -vis Hintikkas interpretation.
First of all, we have now located the proper context for Hintikkas much
discussed hyletic and noetic moments. These notions form part of one
particular attemptFthat of the rst 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 material
objects out of reach of immediate experience. Rather, the hyle-morphe
schema is introduced precisely as an account of our direct and immediate
experience of such perfectly ordinary objects.
Besides, secondly, it is worth mentioning that already at the time of his
Ideas Husserl had realized that this Kantian-style schematic could not be
used to explain all kinds of intentional experience (1966a, 7).
7
And as I
have already mentioned, Husserl would be reluctant in later works to use
this schematic at all. This reluctance was at least in part because he
suspected that the schematic account was more constructive than genuinely
descriptive. In Formal and Transcendental Logic Husserl comes close to
retracting the account in Ideas: The Data-sensualism that is generally
prevalent in psychology and epistemology and, for the most part, biases
even those who verbally polemicize against it [ . . . ] consists in constructing
the life of consciousness out of Data as, so to speak, nished objects. It is
actually a matter of indifference here [ . . . ] whether, within this realm of
objects already existing in advance, one distinguishes between sensuous
Data and intentional mental processes as Data of another sort (1969,
286). This certainly seems to license a nal rejection of Hintikkas claim
that, according to Husserl, the constituents of immediate experience are
sense data that require our noetic activities in order to yield ordinary
objects (cf. Husserl 1970, 233). For, as we have seen, the idea that Hintikka
is working with is precisely the idea of hyletic data existing in advance of
the 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 the
criticism of Hintikka offered in this article depends on this fact. In a later
work such as The Crisis, Husserl, discussing perception, claims that
aspect-exhibitions can only achieve the status of aspects of perceived
spatial things by being functionally correlated with kinesthetic patterns
and processes (1970, 1067, 161).
8
In other words, he carefully avoids
all talk of sensory or hyletic data, material, and so on, and
there 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 Hintikkas interpretation of the hyle-morphe account
were right, then it would be hard to see why we should not be able to
7
Husserls struggle with and eventual criticism of the hyle-morphe schema is thoroughly
accounted for in Sokolowski 1964, 74115, 204210. Interestingly, this is a work that
Hintikka is not unfamiliar with (cf. Hintikka 1975, 222). But, particularly in later discussions
of Husserl, he seems to pay little attention to Sokolowskis argument.
8
This account of perception was, in all essentials, already developed well before Ideas
was composed, namely, in Husserls 1907 lectures Thing and Space (Husserl 1973).
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bring a similar interpretation to bear on the account offered in The Crisis.
After all, if the former account conceived of immediate experience as pure
hyletic data, in need of noetic animation before yielding presentations of
ordinary objects, then the latter account seems merely to reproduce this
schematic in terms of (immediately given) aspect-exhibitions that only
achieve objective signicance when correlated with kinesthesia. On both
accounts, it would seem, immediate experience is not enough to furnish us
with ordinary spatiotemporal objects. Hence if Hintikka offers a coher-
ent, exegetically well-founded interpretation of phenomenology that
accommodates his construal of the hyle-morphe schematic, then there is
no compelling reason to think that he would not be able to offer a similar
reading of those Husserlian accounts in which there is no mention
of hyletic data and noetic animation. However, as I have tried to
show throughout this article, there are good reasons for resisting
Hintikkas interpretation of Husserlian phenomenologyFreasons that
do not depend on Husserls eventual abandonment of the hyle-morphe
schema.
The third and nal thing worth noting in this regard is crucial. For
we now have in hand an account of constitution that rivals that of
Hintikka. If the reduction consists in an investigation that takes its lead in
the experienced object and inquires into the structures on the side of the
subjectFthe structures that would make it possible for the subject to be a
subject experiencing precisely such an objectFthen by performing the
reduction we provide an explanation of how experience can accomplish
what it accomplishes. We explain, in other words, how a world is revealed
or manifested. And to explain this is precisely to account for what Husserl
calls world-constitution (cf. 1970, 168; 1995, 4748, 62). It is therefore
not correct to see constitution as some kind of rebuilding that must
accompany or succeed the disassembling performed by the reduction.
9
For
the reduction does not disassemble anything; it leaves the experienced
world intact just as it is experienced, and tries to unveil how a subject would
have 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 want
to understand (world-manifestation or constitution) and the method by
which we seek to achieve this understanding (the reduction).
Conclusion
If the preceding two sections have offered a coherent, exegetically
defensible account of central notions in Husserlian phenomenology,
9
Again, Hintikka is not alone in interpreting Husserls notion of constitution along the
lines in question. Another inuential commentator in this regard is Gadamer (cf. his 1987,
135).
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then we may conclude that Hintikkas picture of Husserl is something of a
caricature. It could be said that this conclusion, being exclusively
negative, is not very interesting in itself. Part of what has been said,
however, especially in the section on the epoche , has wider ramications. In
particular, it contains the seeds to what may be important insights
concerning 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 already
articulated categorically, then Wittgenstein, unlike Husserl, needs no
special method or technique to do his phenomenology (Hintikka 1996a,
6466; cf. Park 1998, 2, 190). Having argued this point, Hintikka
imagines an objection to it: Some people might claim that this absence
of any phenomenological method in Wittgenstein disqualies him
from being called a phenomenologist. Purely historically, there might
very well be something to be said for such terminology. Yet in a deeper
sense this difference between Husserl and Wittgenstein is merely a
difference between two fellow phenomenologists (1996a, 66). This is of
course not the place to discuss whether Wittgenstein (early and/or late)
was a phenomenologist,
10
and if so to what extent he used any special
phenomenological method. In the present context what is interesting
in the quote is the way Hintikka classies the question concerning method
in phenomenology. Hintikka suggests that, based on purely historical
considerations, it is perhaps meaningful to adopt the terminology of
admitting into the ranks of phenomenologists only philosophers who
employ a special method. Thus, only terminologyFand based on
purely historical considerations at thatFis at stake here. The essence
or idea of phenomenology is unaffected. Of course one can be a
phenomenologistFa philosopher of immediate experienceFwithout
employing any phenomenological method, perhaps even a phenomenol-
ogist better than those who do stick to such a method.
This is surely too nave, however. We need something like Husserls
epoche . The reason for this is that, while we are in constant contact with
immediate experience (living through it), we are not usually thematizing it
as such. I am not used to describing my experience of the coffee cup as
such, and from the perspective of ordinary life it may well seem pointless
to do so. We have other interests, and these interests make us as it were
see straight through the ways in which things appear to us (Husserl 1970,
105; Sokolowski 2000, 50). It is not enough that we reect on our
experiences, for as long as we have not explicitly put our natural
knowledge and interests on hold (that is, bracketed them), they are
liable to interfere with our descriptive efforts. Our intimate familiarity
with 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.
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HOW TO ANALYZE IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE 301
faithful description of it. On the contrary, it may make it hard for us to do
so. As Wittgenstein once remarked, it is very difcult to notice what is
always before ones eyes (1963, 129).
In other words, we need a special phenomenological method, for the
simple reason that implicit intimate familiarity is not the same as explicit
analytic or descriptive mastery. We need a little distance from our
experiential lives in order to analyze them philosophically. This is the basic
insight of Husserls epoche , and, contra Hintikka, it has nothing whatever
to do with a procedure of abstracting or excluding any part of experience
from our thematic focus. Rather, as Merleau-Ponty writes, the epoche
slackens the intentional or experiential threads that bind us to the world,
and thereby brings them to our notice. The epoche , we might say, is the
move into philosophy, and as such it is indispensable for phenomenology.
Without the epoche we have immediate experience, of course; but we have
no philosophy of immediate experience.
11
Department of Philosophy
University of Hull
Hull HU6 7RX
United Kingdom
S.Overgaard@hull.ac.uk
References
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11
The research leading to this article was carried out at the Center for Subjectivity
Research, University of Copenhagen. An early version of the article was presented at the
Fourth Annual Conference of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology, University of Iceland,
April 2006. I am grateful to everyone who took part in the discussion of it. Thanks also to an
anonymous referee for this journal, for a number of helpful comments.
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FFF. 1996b. Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Immediate Experi-
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