This transcendence is comparable to that of the case of generalization. Melody, as such, is not in the world; only tones are (if we can put it this way), just as redness is not a part of the world in the same way as the red roof is. Redness and melody are constituted by us: “It is a consciousness that constitutes a self-givenness which is not really [reellen] contained in it and it is not to be found as a cogitatio” (IP, 67; square brackets and italics in translation).
In the “Preparatory Notes for the Course of Lectures (1910–1911): Pure Psychology and the Humanities (Geisteswissenschaften), History and Sociology,” Husserl notes that the consideration of the thing and its appearance—how it appears and how we posit its lawful appearance by bracketing out its transcendent existence—is not a question of the “real” existence or nonexistence of the object. Husserl’s key strategy is to consider “the thing’s real existence in some philosophical scheme.”86 In other words, it is his answer to Descartes and Locke, and, later, Mill. Husserl’s point is that “regardless of how skeptically I proceed as a philosopher, and even if I want to deny the thing as an existent entity ‘in itself,’” he can demonstrate the way the thing is constituted.87 The thing-experience always proceeds according to ordered perceptions: we always experience the thing in the world as meaningful. Our experience of any and every object is not haphazard but uniform. We know that the cube has other sides, even if we do not really see them. There is no possibility of skepticism in this domain. As Husserl notes in Formal and Transcendental Logic, by bracketing out the world, we do not deny it; rather, we investigate the way of its positing by showing the lawfulness of its constitution (see, e.g., § 104, 275).
Husserl’s quest is to understand and describe our way of experiencing the world by showing the inadequacies of theories of empiricism; it is to return to things themselves by showing how our experience of the world is constituted.
In Experience and Judgment, Husserl points out that logic, or our formal knowledge, is based on prepredicative experience, our everyday living. As he puts it, “All predicative self-evidence must be ultimately grounded on the self-evidence of experience”; the task is to show that the origin of formal predicative logic is nothing but “the world of experience immediately pregiven and prior to all logical functions.” It is the world in which we live that “furnishes the ground for all cognitive performance and all scientific determination.”88
Proceeding from this understanding of the constitution of the world, Husserl shows not only the original ground of formal knowledge but also the constitution of positive sciences.89 As he suggests, philosophical considerations are different from theoretical reconfiguration of the world in natural science, because physicists “have a completely different attitude”;90 yet the basis for both is the life-world.
LEBENSWELT
In ordinary life, we have nothing whatever to do with nature-Objects. What we take as things are pictures, statues, gardens, houses, tables, clothes, tools, etc. These are all value-Objects of various kinds, use-Objects, practical Objects. They are not Objects which can be found in natural science.91
Husserl recognizes that human experience is based on the particular finite experience of the world in which we live. We experience things in the world and our experience is always already based on our previous experience, even before we reflect on our understanding. So Husserl brings to the fore our experience of the life-world by showing that it is based on “seeing” and understanding things according to “types.” This experience of typicalities growing out of particularities is a basis for the possibility of knowledge, but this typicality is not thematized. It is not a theoretical insight. In other words, despite the fact that the life-world is perceived as nothing but many typicalities that we encounter in our everyday living, we are not aware of this. Our experience of the life-world is unreflective. Once we realize this, we can reflect upon these “types”; understanding experience by investigating and abstracting from particularities to discern the typical structures that illuminate them. When we bring this latent understanding, or, as Husserl calls it, prepredicative experience, into relief, we can thematize those typical instances—eidetic structures—on which our understanding is based.92
As Husserl writes, “Thanks to [the] recoverable past given through memory and also to expectations which predelineate the living future for us it is a thoroughly typified world. All that exists within it, whether known or unknown, is an object of experience with the form: an A, and, this A”93 (i.e., a house per se, and this particular house in which I live). Schütz puts it this way:
The unquestioned pre-experiences are [. . .] from the outset, at hand as typical ones, that is, as carrying along open horizons of anticipated similar experiences. For example, the outer world is not experienced as an arrangement of individual unique objects, dispersed in space and time, but as “mountains,” “trees,” “animals,” “fellowmen.”94
Husserl suggests that although these types are played out differently in different human communities in different periods, their essential structures are independent of any and every culture. Phenomenology, by the bracketing out of the world, discloses these “typicalities” that can be discerned across different surrounding worlds.95 When these structures are revealed and described, they can be understood by anyone practicing phenomenology, anywhere, independent of the “time and place” of our own lives. Once revealed, they can serve as “templates” to help us understand other typical instances of phenomena in different surrounding worlds. By transcending our particular position, we can understand the experiences of others.96 Landgrebe speaks of the basic description of “our immediate way of having the world [as] the distinction between near and far, between near-world and far-world, though these concepts at once involve more than spatial relations.”97 From this basic structure, we can imagine the extension of this opposition to variants such as the “home-world” as opposed to the “alien or foreign world.”98 According to Husserl, the typical structure is the “essential difference between familiarity and strangeness.”99 This difference can manifest itself in many guises, but it is typical for human communities through their different ways of living.100
For Husserl, then, the world is the horizon to all of our positing acts; as Landgrebe puts it, the world is “the doxic basis persisting throughout all experiences.”101 Things always manifest themselves against the background of the world. It follows, then, that if the world is “the universally fundamental doxic thesis,” it cannot be construed simply “as a blind ‘prejudice.’”102 We need to rethink this understanding of the world. Rather, as Landgrebe shows, our thinking about the world, based on the doxic thesis, “is not a definite act, explicitly performed at some time or other, but rather the foundation for every definite act.” We live in the world and our understanding is based on it, or, rather, drawn from it. We do not reflect