The intentionality of transcendentally pure consciousness

pp. 55-77

in: Burt C. Hopkins, Intentionality in Husserl and Heidegger, Berlin, Springer, 1993

Abstract

Chapter Four of my study of Husserl's phenomenological account of intentionality will be concerned with his exhibition of the transcendental manifestation of this phenomenon. It appears to me that Husserl finds the motivation for the transcendental turn in the "paradoxical ambiguity" which phenomenology's methodological reflections encounter, when they attempt to exhibit the subjective origin of the Sinn manifested by the world-horizon. Specifically, so long as the subjectivity of this origin is understood to belong to the non-actional intentionality of the worldly "I," a psychologism results. Hence, in this final discussion of Part One, I will endeavor to clarify Husserl's transcendental resolution of this psychologistic paradox, by bringing into relief his temporal analyses of the "subject pole" of intentionality. In particular, I will try to show the following: (1) That and how these analyses lead Husserl to eidetically differentiate actional and nonactional intentionalities, at both the phenomenologically psychological and transcendental level of pure subjectivity and (2); that such differentiations do not involve a multiplicity of pure egos and their non-actional horizonal consciousnesses, but rather, these differentiations involve evidentially different manifestations of the "same" phenomenon as it appears, respectively, within the mundane and transcendental attitudes.