Updated September 13, 2023
From a phenomenological perspective, in everyday life, we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas as simply real and straightforwardly existent. In other words, they are “just there.” We don’t question their existence; we view them as facts.
When we leave our house in the morning, we take the objects we see around us as simply real, factual things—this tree, neighboring buildings, cars, etcetera. This attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, Edmund Husserl terms the “natural attitude” or the “natural theoretical attitude.”
When Husserl uses the word “natural” to describe this attitude, he doesn’t mean that it is “good” (or bad), he means simply that this way of seeing reflects an “everyday” or “ordinary” way of being-in-the-world. When I see the world within this natural attitude, I am solely aware of what is factually present to me. My surrounding world, viewed naturally, is the familiar world, the domain of my everyday life. Why is this a problem?
From a phenomenological perspective, this naturalizing attitude conceals a profound naïveté. Husserl claimed that “being” can never be collapsed entirely into being in the empirical world: any instance of actual being, he argued, is necessarily encountered upon a horizon that encompasses facticity but is larger than facticity. Indeed, the very sense of facts of consciousness as such, from a phenomenological perspective, depends on a wider horizon of consciousness that usually remains unexamined. Any individual object, Husserl wrote:
“Is not merely an individual object as such, a ‘This here,’ an object never repeatable; as qualified ‘in itself‘ thus and so, it has its own specific character, its stock of essential predictables which must belong to it … if other, secondary, relative determinations can belong to it.”
Hence, any individual object necessarily belongs to multiple “essential species,” or essential structures of consciousness, and “everything belonging to the essence of the individuum another individuum can have too…”
The gray cat I notice crossing the street is both unique and, if investigated phenomenologically, reveals a common structure or essence “cat” that can apply equally well to other members of the species. Indeed, without the structure “cat” in some sense accompanying or preceding the experience of this particular gray cat, I would be unable to identify it as such. There would still be an animal present to me, but even this identification is dependent upon another essence, that of “animal.”
The point here is that seeing the individual cat presupposes a meaningful structure that is inclusive of a wider horizon of possible cats—black, spotted, green-eyed; big, small, healthy, sick, four-legged and three-legged, etc.—and the empirical cat, the individuum, is the empirical foreground upon a background of possible cats unified by the structure “cat.”
No empirical object, Husserl insisted, is sui generis. The idea or essence is a “necessary general form,” Husserl wrote in “Experience and Judgment,” a structure of and for consciousness that can be grasped within the reduction, that which makes the very seeing of individual empirical objects as objects possible for us. In other words, “that without which an object of a particular kind cannot be thought, i.e., without which the object cannot be imagined as such.”
All of this is evident once one begins to actively phenomenologize. Yet, from the natural attitude, we see everything at face value: There is simply this cat, this tree, this house, simply accepted in their facticity as self-evidently present; we do not inquire further into our perceptions, our intuitions.
Expanding on this theme, Husserl wrote in Eugen Fink’s book “Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method (Studies in Continental Thought)“:
“In the natural attitude, in which for ourselves and for others we are called and are humans, to everything worldly there belongs the being-acceptedness: existent in the world, in the world that is always existent beforehand as constant acceptedness of a basis. So also man’s being is being in the world that is existent beforehand. In phenomenology, this being-beforehand is itself a problem.”
Within the natural attitude, the world is experienced as always already present, prior to my reflection upon it. Yet, this theoretical attitude—for as Husserl noted, there is a theorizing about the world implicit in this attitude—represents a fundamental naïveté.
Simply put, from an empirical or natural standpoint, I see my ego as fundamentally separate from the world around me, a world that is obviously already here, quite apart from me, and which has no relation to me other than as my context and the container for other objects of interest to me.
In essence, the entire theoretical structure of positivist thought is implicit in the seemingly self-evident assertion that the world is fundamentally separate from me and preexists me. In beginning to tease out the implications of natural attitude, this description may appear questionable as a description of the life-world, though it is recognizable as the world of the natural sciences. One of phenomenology’s primary claims is that the ego is never severed from the world, that the sense of “world” is always more than a collection of empirical objects, that I am always implicated in the world and vice versa.
What is Phenomenology Reduction?
For Husserl, the process he calls the phenomenological reduction is the means by which the phenomenologist frees himself from the reifications of the natural attitude, gaining a standpoint from which to view and explicate both real (Ger: real) and irreal (Ger: reel) objects, having bracketed their facticity, in pure phenomenal flow. The word “reduction” is used philosophically. It doesn’t mean diminishing something but instead relies upon one of the meanings of reduction’s Latin root: to restore or return something to a more primordial mode.
Husserl uses the term reduction to signify a specific shift in attitude that can be employed by the researcher in a variety of contexts. Hence, Husserl referred to phenomenological, philosophical, psychological, eidetic, transcendental, ethical, and intersubjective reductions, according to Joseph J. Kockelmans’ “A First Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology.” Not only is my perception of external objects transformed when I adopt the attitude of the reduction, but likewise my perception of the most intimate of objects: my personal ego. Phenomenology’s reductions reveal not only the phenomenal nature of objects but also, Husserl claimed, transcendental subjectivity and intersubjectivity.
The researcher “reduces” everyday, empirical reality through use of the phenomenological epoché or “bracketing.” The meaning of ἐποχή(epoché) is “to hold back” or “to withhold”; in affecting the epoché, I withhold my assent to the ontological status of the perceived: I “bracket” its facticity. In E. Spiegelberg’s “The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (Phaenomenologica),” the author wrote that the reduction is the conscious act in which the:
General thesis of belief in factual existence characteristic of the natural attitude is inhibited, suspended, bracketed … or turned off, and which uncovers in transcendental subjectivity the acts which constitute pure phenomena.
Edmund Husserl’s “Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (Husserliana: Edmund Husserl – Collected Works)” explained the reduction’s rigor in his discussion of the “Principle of all Principles”: “Everything originarily … offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.”
Employing the phenomenological reduction, I take no position with respect to the ultimate (existential) reality of what I see. Instead, I simply witness it just as it presents itself to me and describe it as such. This instance of the reduction is properly termed the phenomenological reduction because facts are “reduced” to the way they stand out to me as presences.
Phenomenology uses the reduction to entirely set aside existential questions and shift from existential affirmation or negation to description. It is a method involving a bracketing or parenthesizing (in German: “Einklammerung”) of something that had formerly been taken for granted in the natural attitude.
In order, therefore, to examine psychic subjectivity, the researcher must perform a phenomenological-psychological reduction, suspending the “taking-for-grantedness” of psychological phenomena. In the psychological reduction, Husserl wrote, “psychic subjectivity, the concretely grasped ‘I’ and ‘we’ of ordinary conversation, is experienced in its pure psychic owness…” (1973, p. 62, in Zaner & Idhe). Gurwitsch (1966) explained that performing the psychological reduction means a shift in attitude toward everything normally perceived as a mundane existent in the life world (Lebenswelt). Rather than taking them for granted:
All persons, including the psychologist himself, inasmuch as they perceive themselves as human beings, hence as mundane existents, are transformed into phenomena, and by the same token disclosed as subjects of intentional conscious life. (p. 443)
This particular reduction (as has been noted, there are many kinds of reductions for Husserl) leads the researcher to recognize his or her embeddedness in intersubjectivity. Husserl claimed that when one examines the phenomenal ground of what it means to be an “I,” one discovers that it is impossible to have a sense of “I-ness” without an accompanying sense and expectation of “you-ness”—indeed, at the core of the sense of “I,” there is the experience of a plurality of “you’s”—what Husserl termed “co-subjectivity” (Mitsubjectivität).
Moreover, I immediately recognize others as similar to myself—i.e. they are not just objects, they are subjects like myself—and the world I live in is a world of commonly (intersubjectively) recognizable people, places, and things. Gurwitsch (1966) summarized Husserl’s view of intersubjectivity by stating that:
Performing the [psychological] reduction upon himself, the psychologist, in analyzing his own conscious life, becomes aware of its relationship to and connectedness with, the conscious life of other persons…in his very experience of himself as human being are implied references to other human beings, to an open horizon of humanity…and co-subjectivity (Mitsubjectivität). Experience of oneself proves to be inseparable from that of others. (p. 443)
This collectivity is an open horizon of transcendental subjects, that is, subjects whose conscious acts (noesis) transcend the factual objects of experience. Since, Husserl argued, the co-subjectivity of transcendental others is an indispensable constituent of the life world, he concludes that the life world is a field of transcendental intersubjectivity. These insights are close to the foundation of the phenomenological study of empathy by Scheler, Husserl, and Stein, a topic Zahavi (2010) has recently explored.
Therefore, the primacy of one’s ego-pole in experience is not absolute: that is to say, there is never, from Husserl’s standpoint, the experience of a solus ipse. An ego utterly detached and unrelated to others is not even strictly speaking imaginable, in Husserl’s view, if we are true to the essential structure of what it means to be an “I,” namely, to be always located in an intersubjective field. This intersubjectivity can be experienced empirically as the world of other people in their concreteness, psychologically-phenomenally, as the world of other psychological consciousnesses, or transcendentally, as the world of other transcendental subjects. Transcendental intersubjectivity, Gurwitsch (1966) wrote, is:
The community of ego-poles to which my own ego-pole also belongs, though it enjoys a privileged position, since it remains forever the ego-pole with respect to which every other ego-pole appears as an alter ego-pole. (p. 435)
It is in this context that Husserl spoke of a “transcendental reduction” or an “intersubjective reduction.” For Husserl, transcendental subjectivity, always embedded in intersubjectivity, constitutes and bestows sense to the psychological and natural domains (Gurwitsch, 1966, p. 111). Therefore, transcendental subjectivity “can be called the primal basis for all legitimacy and validity…” (Ibid., p. 111). Consequently, it is the transcendental reduction that differentiates phenomenology decisively from every other kind of psychology.
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References and Further Reading:
Gurwitsch, A. (1966). Studies in phenomenology and psychology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Husserl, E. (1973). Phenomenology. In R. M. Zaner and D. Ihde, Phenomenology and existentialism. (pp. 46-70). New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Husserl, E. (1982). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy: First book, General introduction to a pure phenomenology. (F. Kersten, Trans.). Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Kockelmans, J. (1967). A first introduction to Husserl’s phenomenology. Louvain: Duquesne University Press.
Spiegelberg, H. (1965). The phenomenological movement: A historical introduction. (2 Vols.) The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Zahavi, D. (2010). Empathy, embodiment, and interpersonal understanding: Empathy from Lipps to Schutz. Inquiry 55 (3), 285-306.
