Some philosophers have abandoned the possibility that...

Some philosophers have abandoned the possibility that knowledge can be in contact with the transcendent and, at that point, what remains to be explained in how the prejudice has arisen whereby it is assumed that human knowledge does reach the transcendent. For Husserl, it is Hume who took this latter route. For Husserl, on the other hand, the epistemological reduction must be performed whereby every transcendence is excluded, and intentional connections of meaningfulness are revealed.

Overcoming the probematic of traditional epistemology, Husserl defines a new kind of givenness -- ‘absolute givenness’ -- which he attaches to the very act of conscious experiencing itself, to every ‘thought’ or cogitatio. This leads Husserl to declare in the Second Lecture of the Idea of Phenomenology: Every intellectual experience, indeed every experience whatsoever, can be made into an object of pure seeing and apprehension while it is occurring.

And in this act of seeing, it is an absolute givenness. ( IP, p. 24; Hua II: 31 ) The stream of experience given in reflection has ‘absolute givenness’. Husserl goes on to discuss the manner in which the given is immanent in our experience while at the same time emphasising that there is no actual thing present or immanent in the actual occurring Erlebnis .

This leads to a double meaning for transcendence: …it can refer to the fact that the known object is not really [ reell ] contained in the act of knowing (IP, p. 27; Hua II: 35) But …there is another sense of transcendence , whose counterpart is an entirely different kind of immanence, namely, absolute and clear givenness , self-givenness in the absolute sense . (IP, p.

27; Hua II: 35) This absolute self-givenness consists in ‘an immediate act of seeing and apprehending the meant objectivity itself as it is’. Only the immanent cogitatio is given. The problem now becomes for Husserl how to safeguard the purity of the phenomenon of the cogitatio from contamination by our prejudices including the psychological reading of the cogitatio (as a psychological fact, a datum in space-time, and so on).

This purification for Husserl goes beyond the epistemological reduction and he calls it the ‘phenomenological reduction’ (IP, p. 34; Hua II: 44) whose aim is to purify the ‘psychological’ phenomenon into the absolute givenness of pure phenomenon. Husserl contrasts this absolute givenness of the immanent with the ‘quasi-givennesses’ ( Quasi-Gegebenheiten , Hua II: 45) of transcendent objects.