A foundational inquiry into the essential architecture of conscious experience and the phenomenological method for examining it
What the Work Is
Studies on the Structure of Consciousness represents Edmund Husserl’s mature phenomenological investigation into the fundamental organization of conscious experience. Husserl, the Austrian-German philosopher who established the school of phenomenology, developed this work as part of his systematic effort to create a rigorous foundational science based on what he called the phenomenological reduction. The work emerges from his conviction that transcendental consciousness sets the limits of all possible knowledge, and that careful examination of consciousness itself must precede any other philosophical or scientific inquiry.
What the Book Is About
The central concern of this work is the architecture of consciousness itself—how conscious acts are structured, how they relate to the objects they intend, and what invariant features characterize all conscious experience. Husserl argues that to study consciousness properly, one must distinguish between the act of consciousness and the phenomena at which it is directed. This distinction, rooted in the concept of intentionality that Husserl inherited from his teacher Franz Brentano, holds that consciousness is always consciousness of something: every thought, perception, desire, or judgment is directed toward an object. The book examines how these intentional acts are organized, how they constitute meaning, and what essential structures remain constant across all possible conscious experiences.
Key Ideas and Themes
The concept of intentionality stands at the center of Husserl’s analysis. Brentano had defined intentionality as the distinguishing feature of mental phenomena—every psychological act has a content and is directed at an object. Husserl develops this insight further, examining how different types of conscious acts relate to their objects in different ways. A perception, a memory, a judgment, and a wish all intend their objects differently, and understanding these differences is essential to understanding consciousness itself.
Husserl introduces a crucial distinction between the act of consciousness and the object toward which it is directed. This separation allows him to examine consciousness without making assumptions about whether its objects actually exist in the external world. The method for achieving this examination is the epoché, a procedure of bracketing all assumptions about the existence of an external world. By suspending these assumptions, Husserl argues, one can examine the essential structures of consciousness itself—what he calls the ideal, essential structures that remain invariant across all possible experiences.
The work also develops the distinction between meaning and object, which Husserl had explored in his earlier Logical Investigations. He identifies different kinds of names: some express a meaning and designate an object, such as “the victor in Jena” and “the loser in Waterloo,” which express different meanings but designate the same object. Other names, like “Aristotle” or “Socrates,” designate objects without expressing a meaning. Still others, called universal names, designate a variety of objects and have a concept as their meaning. This analysis reveals how consciousness structures its relation to objects through meaning.
Husserl also examines what he calls formal words—terms like “a,” “the,” “more than,” “under,” “two,” and “group”—which are necessary for forming sentences but have no sensible correlates. These words designate formal categories, which come in two kinds: meaning categories that relate judgments, and formal-ontological categories that relate objects. The former include forms of conjunction, disjunction, and plurality; the latter include notions such as set, number, part and whole, and relation. Understanding how consciousness grasps these categories requires what Husserl calls categorial intuition, a faculty distinct from the sensible intuition through which we perceive ordinary objects.
Through sensible intuition, consciousness constitutes what Husserl terms a “situation of affairs”—a passive constitution in which objects themselves are presented. Through categorial intuition, consciousness can then constitute a “state of affairs” from this situation. One situation of affairs can serve as the basis for constituting multiple states of affairs: given two sensible objects a and b in a certain situation, one can form the judgments “a is less than b” and “b is greater than a,” which designate the same state of affairs. A sentence, for Husserl, has a proposition or judgment as its meaning and refers to a state of affairs that has a situation of affairs as its reference base.
Structure and Approach
The work employs the phenomenological method that Husserl had developed over decades of philosophical investigation. This method strives to be rigorously presuppositionless through the phenomenological reduction, which is not conditioned but transcendental—it aims at pure consciousness of absolute Being. In the natural attitude, people normally believe that objects exist distinct from the perceiving subject and exhibit properties that emanate from them. Husserl proposes a radical new way of looking at objects by examining how people, in their many ways of being intentionally directed toward them, actually constitute them. In the phenomenological standpoint, the object ceases to be something simply external and becomes a grouping of perceptual and functional aspects that imply one another under the idea of a particular object or type.
The notion of objects as real is not expelled by phenomenology but bracketed—treated as a way in which people regard objects rather than a feature that inheres in an object’s essence. Phenomenology attempts to identify the invariant features of how objects are perceived and pushes attributions of reality into their role as attributions about the things people perceive. This approach allows Husserl to examine the essential structures of consciousness without becoming entangled in metaphysical questions about whether perceived objects really exist.
Significance and Influence
This work represents a key development in Husserl’s elaboration of phenomenology as a transcendental idealist philosophy. His thought profoundly influenced twentieth-century philosophy, and his redefinition of phenomenology as the study of essential structures of consciousness set the agenda for subsequent phenomenological inquiry. The distinction between the act of consciousness and its object, the method of bracketing assumptions about external existence, and the analysis of how consciousness constitutes meaning through intentional acts became foundational concepts for the phenomenological movement.
Husserl’s insistence that mental and spiritual reality possess their own reality independent of any physical basis, and his conviction that a science of the mind must be established on as scientific a foundation as the natural sciences, gave phenomenology its distinctive character as a rigorous discipline rather than a speculative enterprise. His declaration that intentional phenomenology made spirit as spirit the field of systematic scientific experience effected a total transformation of the task of knowledge. The work’s examination of how consciousness structures experience continues to inform philosophical inquiry into perception, meaning, and the nature of mental life.
The source material elaborates on the distinction between the “natural” and “phenomenological” modes of understanding. In the natural attitude, sense-perception in correspondence with the material realm constitutes the known reality, and understanding is premised on the accuracy of the perception and the objective knowability of the “real world.” The phenomenological reduction is described as a procedure that is not conditioned but transcendental, aiming at pure consciousness of absolute Being. In this mode, consciousness of any given thing calls for discerning its meaning as an “intentional object.” Such an object does not simply strike the senses to be interpreted by mental reason; it has already been selected and grasped, a connotation derived from the root of “perceive,” percipere.
The Elaboration of Phenomenology and Intersubjectivity
Some years after the publication of the Logische Untersuchungen, Husserl made key conceptual elaborations that led him to assert that to study the structure of consciousness, one must distinguish between the act of consciousness and the phenomena at which it is directed. Knowledge of essences would only be possible by “bracketing” all assumptions about the existence of an external world, a procedure he called “epoché.” From the Ideen onward, Husserl concentrated on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness. The metaphysical problem of establishing the reality of what people perceive was of little interest to him, despite his being a transcendental idealist.
In a later period, Husserl began to wrestle with the complicated issues of intersubjectivity, specifically how communication about an object can be assumed to refer to the same ideal entity. This is addressed in Cartesian Meditations, particularly in Meditation V. In The Crisis of the European Sciences, Husserl for the first time attempts a historical overview of the development of Western philosophy and science, emphasizing the challenges presented by their increasingly one-sided empirical and naturalistic orientation. He declares that mental and spiritual reality possess their own reality independent of any physical basis, and that a science of the mind must be established on as scientific a foundation as the natural sciences.
Formal and Regional Ontology
Husserl sees ontology as a science of essences, which are contrasted with factual sciences. The former are knowable a priori and provide the foundation for the latter, which are knowable a posteriori. Ontology is not interested in actual facts, but in the essences themselves, whether they have instances or not. Husserl distinguishes between formal ontology, which investigates the essence of objectivity in general, and regional ontologies, which study regional essences shared by all entities belonging to a region. Regions correspond to the highest genera of concrete entities: material nature, personal consciousness, and interpersonal spirit. Husserl’s method for studying ontology is called eidetic variation, which involves imagining an object of the kind under investigation and varying its features. A changed feature is inessential if the object can survive its change; otherwise, it belongs to the kind’s essence. For example, a triangle remains a triangle if one of its sides is extended, but it ceases to be a triangle if a fourth side is added.
Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics
Husserl believed that truth-in-itself has as its ontological correlate being-in-itself, just as meaning categories have formal-ontological categories as correlates. Logic is a formal theory of judgment that studies the formal a priori relations among judgments using meaning categories. Mathematics, on the other hand, is formal ontology; it studies all the possible forms of being. For both logic and mathematics, the different formal categories are the objects of study, not the sensible objects themselves. The problem with the psychological approach to mathematics and logic is that it fails to account for the fact that this approach is about formal categories, and not simply about abstractions from sensibility alone. Through a faculty of understanding called “categorial abstraction,” people are able to get rid of sensible components of judgments and focus on formal categories themselves. Thanks to “eidetic reduction” (or “essential intuition”), people are able to grasp the possibility, impossibility, necessity, and contingency among concepts and among formal categories.
