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Amsterdam Lectures, trans. R. E. Palmer - 8/19/94 1
THE AMSTERDAM LECTURES
<ON>
PHENOMENOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY1)
Part I. Pure Phenomenological Psychology:
Its Field of Experience, its Method, its Function.
<¤ 1. The Two Senses of Phenomenology: As Psychological Phenomenology and
as Transcendental Phenomenology.>
At the turn of the century as philosophy and psychology struggled
for a rigorously scientific method, there arose what was at once a new science
and a new method both of philosophical and psychological research. The new
science was called phenomenology because it, or its new method, was developed
through a certain radicalizing of an already existing phenomenological method
which individual natural scientists and psychologists had previously demanded
and practiced. The sense of this method in men like Mach and Hering lay in a
reaction against the threatening groundlessness of theorizing in the exact
natural sciences. It was a reaction against a mode of theorizing in
mathematical speculations and concept-forming which is distant from intuition,
a theorizing which accomplished neither clarity with insight, in any
legitimate sense, nor the production of theories.
Parallel to this we find in certain psychologists, and first in Brentano, a
systematic effort to create a rigorously scientific psychology on the basis of
pure internal experience and the rigorous description of its data
(ÒPsychognosiaÓ).
It was the radicalizing of these methodic tendencies (which, by the way,
were already quite often characterized as ÒphenomenologicalÓ) /303/ more
particularly in the mental sphere and in the rational-theoretical sphere which
was at that time in general
interwoven with it, which led to a quite novel method of investigation of the
purely mental and at the same time to a quite novel treatment of questions
that concern specific principles of philosophy, out of which there began to
surface, as we mentioned before, a quite new way of being scientific <eine
neuartige Wissenschaftlichkeit>.
In the further course of its development it <the phenomenological>
presents us with a double sense of its meaning: on the one hand, as
psychological phenomenology, which is to serve as the radical science
fundamental to psychology; on the other hand, as transcendental phenomenology,
which for its part has in connection with philosophy the great function of
First Philosophy; that is, of being the philosophical science of the sources
from which philosophy springs.
In this first lecture, we want to leave out of play all our
philosophical interests. We will be interested in the psychological in the
same way as a physicist is interested in physics. With pure objectivity in
the spirit of positive science, we will weigh the requirements for a
scientific psychology and develop the necessary idea of a phenomenological
psychology.
¤ 2. Pure Natural Science and Pure Psychology.
Modern psychology is the science of the real events <Vorkommnisse, what
comes forward> arising in the concrete context of the objective and real
world, events which we call ÒmentalÓ <psychische>. The most exemplary way in
which the ÒmentalÓ <Psychischem> shows itself arises in the living
self-awareness of what I designate as ÒIÓ <or ego> and of indeed everything
that shows itself to be inseparable from an ÒIÓ <or ego> as a process lived by
an ÒIÓ or as mental processes (like experiencing, thinking, feeling, willing),
but also as ability and habit. Experience presents the mental as a dependent
stratum of being to man and beast, who are at a more fundamental level
physical realities. Thus psychology becomes a dependent branch of the more
concrete sciences of anthropology or zoology, and thus encompasses both thephysical and psychophysical.
If we examine the world of experience in its totality, we find that its
nature is to articulate itself into an open infinity of concrete single
realities. According to its nature, /304/ to each single particular belongs a
physical corporality, at least as a relatively concrete substratum for the
extra-physical characteristics that are possibly layered on it, to which
belong, for example, the determining factors through which a physical body
becomes a work of art. We can abstract consistently from all extra-physical
determinations, and that signifies that we regard every reality and the whole
world purely as physical Nature. In this there lies a structural law of the
world of experience. Not only does every concrete worldly or real thing have
its nature, its physical body, but also all bodies in the world form a
combined unity, a unity which in itself is linked together into infinity, a
unity of the totality of Nature which possesses the unifying form of
spatiotemporality. From the correlated standpoint of method this is expressed
as follows: A consistently abstractive experience can be continuously and
exclusively directed to the physical and on this basis of physical experience
one can practice an equally self-contained theoretical science, the physical
science of natureÑphysical in the widest sense, to which thus also belong
chemistry, and also physical zoology and biology, abstracting away from it
whatever pertains to the spirit <Geistigkeit>.
Now the question obviously arises as to how far it is possible within an
interest one-sidedly directed to the mental in brute animals and in the world
as such, which we grant never emerges autonomously, for there to be an
experience and theoretical inquiry which consistently and continuously moves
from mental to mental and thus never deals with the physical. This question
leads, further, into another: to what extent is a consistent and pure
psychology possible in parallel with a consistent and purely developed
empirical natural science? This latter question is apparently to be answered
in the negative: Psychology in its customary sense as an empirical science of
matters of fact cannot, as the parallel would demand, be a pure science of
matters of mental fact purified of everything physical in the way that
empirical natural science is purified of everything mental.
However far continually pure mental experience may reach, and however far
by means of it a <pure> theorizing may be effected, it is certain from the
very outset that the purely mental to which it <pure mental experience> leads
still has its spatiotemporal determinations in the real world, /305/ and that
in its concrete factualness, like everything real as such, it is only
determinable through local spatiotemporal determinants. Spatiotemporality as
system of places <Stellensystem> is the form <Form> of all actual, factual
being, of being within the world of matters of fact. And so it follows from
this that all determination of concrete facts is founded on spatiotemporal
determinations of place. Spatiotemporality, however, belongs primordially and
immediately to nature as physical nature. Everything outside the physical, in
particular everything mental, can belong to the spatiotemporal situation
<Lage> only through a foundedness <Fundierung> in a physical corporality.
Accordingly, it is easy to grasp that within empirical psychology a completely
psychological inquiry can never be isolated theoretically from the
psychophysical. In other words: Within psychology as an objective,
matter-of-fact science, an empirical science of the mental cannot be
established as a self-contained discipline. It can never let go of all
thematic consideration of and connection to the physical or psychophysical.
On the other hand, it is clear that investigation into the purely mental
is, nevertheless, in some measure possible, and has to play a role in any
empirical psychology which strives for a rigorously scientific character. How
otherwise is one to attain rigorously scientific concepts of the mental in
terms of its own essence and without regard to all its concrete interwovenness
with the physical? If we reflect on the fact that to these concepts there
must also necessarily belong concepts which encompass the universal and
necessary eidetic form of the mental in its ownmost essential characterÑwhich
are concerned with all of that without which something
like the mental would simply not be thinkableÑthen there opens up the prospect
of a possible a priori science of essences belonging to the mental purely as
such. We take this as our guiding idea. It would not be parallel to physics
as an empirical science of nature but to a science of the a priori conceivableNature as such in its own pure essence. Although one does not <ordinarily>
speak of a priori natural science, it is nevertheless very familiar in the
form of certain important particular disciplines, such as the a priori
doctrine of time, or as pure geometry and mechanics. /306/
<¤ 3. The Method of Pure Psychology (Intuition and Reflection);
Intentionality as the Fundamental Characteristic of the Mental.>
Apriori truths are not so easy to arrive at as we thought in earlier
times. They arise as authentic eidetic truths in apodictic insight only