Abstract
First, more is said about how the primordial object of sensuous perceiving endures, is spatially determined, and is materially qualified, then the role of appearances is explored, geometrical space is contrasted, changes, qualities, and states of things distinguished, and then causal-functional relations are described, circumstances and the role of the organism and its normal and abnormal organs and kinaesthesia included.
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- 1.
The present analyses hold not only for the primordial-world-phenomenon, but also for the intersubjective-world-phenomenon, since we are not here considering those dimensions of the two wherein lie their mutual differences. It must not be forgotten that we are analyzing the constitution only of the world as we posit it in sense-perception and its derived modes (recollection of sense-perception, anticipation of sense-perception, empty intending of an object ideally presentable in sense-perception). We are not here concerned with the world-sense as posited on the basis of explicit inductions or hypotheses. The modern cultured man does not accept all the evidence of his senses, not even so much as reveals to sense-perception no evident inconsistency. He knows, e.g., that the temporal phase of the star which he sees is not simultaneous with the temporal phase of the tree which he perceives as simultaneous. But he sees the two phases as simultaneous, even as does the crudest savage. It is the world as “taken for granted” in sense-perception and its modifications that we are here analyzing.
- 2.
Cf. pp. 8ff.
- 3.
The problem of the original constitution of a single infinite egological natural time is raised, but not solved, herewith. Analogous problems arise concerning the unity and infinity of transcendental time and the infinity of primordial space; then, on higher levels, concerning the infinity of intersubjective time and space. Husserl’s analyses of these matters, so far as the author is familiar with them, have not attained a form adapting them to inclusion in the present exposition. As clarifications of the problems they are indeed of essential importance, but solutions they are not. Too much of the problematic still remains. Problems of infinity and totality belong, however, to a higher level. We can analyze the perceptively given in its perceptively giveable sense, in abstraction from the higher level of sense, in which it is characterized as located in an objectively infinite time and space, not graspable in perception.
- 4.
Cf. Chap. 13.
- 5.
If the danger of misunderstanding were as great, we should have stated, when speaking of the temporal sense of objects of perception, that we were not speaking of the phoronometric properties of objects in a “mathematized” time.
- 6.
What would distinguish this case from the case of two distinct things?
- 7.
Just as we are speaking throughout this chapter of the endurance and extension originally given and givable in sensuous perceiving, so here we mean sensuously perceived weight, hardness, etc., not the “ideal” qualities of geometrized things which belong to the subject-matter of mathematical physics.
- 8.
Cf. pp. 65.
- 9.
Cf. Chap. 9.
- 10.
Cf. p. 133.
- 11.
Natural science, as a cultural fact, deals with intersubjective nature. (Furthermore, it deals, not with nature as given in sheer sense-perception, but with nature as “geometrized” and otherwise ideally—exactly quantified—exact mass, etc.—and in abstraction from secondary qualities.) A primordial natural science, is, however, a real potentiality, part of the horizonal sense of primordial nature as given in primordially reduced sense-perception, just as inter-subjective natural science is part of the horizonal sense of inter-subjective nature.
- 12.
Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts on the “constitution of nature” contain analyses of the perceptual constitution of most if not all the types of natural objects we have mentioned.
- 13.
Cf. pp. 109–118.
- 14.
“Medium” has two distinct meanings. In one sense, any natural object in which another natural object is “immersed” or “imbedded” is a “medium.” In this sense, air is a “medium” in which most men are immersed, water is the “medium” most fish are immersed, rock is the medium in which certain fossils are embedded, etc. In another sense, any natural object “through” which another object is perceived is a “medium.” Air and water, through which men are fish are seen, are in this sense “media,” but the rock in which fossils are embedded is not a “medium” in this sense. On the other hand, a glove through which I tactually perceive a thing, is a “medium” in the second, but not the first sense—unless we think of the particles of leather inside the solid walls of the hand inside the hollow cavity of the glove as “imbedded” in it. In the passage to which this note is appended “medium” has the second sense, medium of perception.
- 15.
Cf. also pp. 173ff.
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Cairns, D., Embree, L. (2013). Primordial Sense-Perception (Continued). In: Embree, L. (eds) The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Phaenomenologica, vol 207. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5043-2_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5043-2_14
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