The third elaboration

transcendental aesthetics

pp. 212-253

in: Donn Welton, The origins of meaning, Berlin, Springer, 1983

Abstract

Husserl's account of perceptual constitution in the Investigations and Ideas I is focused squarely on an attempt to explain how a factual, immanent sensorial content acquires the function of becoming an appearance of an object, or, correlatively, how a family of appearances achieves the status of being a unified presentation of a single object. At the same time Husserl assumes a functional correlation between sensations and the complexion of a given profile. In both works, however, the question of an organization immanent to the profile proper and the question of the way in which that organization is determinative of the perceptual sense of the object is not raised. The sense-datum is taken as a sheer given and the fact that every Empfindungsfarbe is situated in an Empfindungsfeld is not itself problematized.