Conscience and Subjectivity in Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations

Abstract

Throughout the 20th century, Phenomenology could make solid contributions to philosophical knowledge. Husserl demanded philosophy to be raised as a rigorous science, as a foundation for pure logic. Trained as a mathematician, Husserl was attracted to philosophy by Franz Brentano. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl began with an analysis and critical discussion of the main authors of psychologism, naturalism and historicism. These tendencies were incapable of achieving the rigor demanded by genuine science. The directionality of consciousness towards an object is a basic concept in Phenomenology. The call "to things themselves" is not a demand for realism, because the things at stake are the acts of consciousness and the objective entities that get constituted in them; the objects of Phenomenology are absolute data grasped by pure, immanent intuition. The second part of this paper continues with a reading of Husserl's various ideas on the difference between empirical and transcendental subjectivity from the early Logical Investigations and the paradox of subjectivity. The problem is that the ego is more than a simple phenomenon, or a logic object. For Husserl, doing phenomenology was tantamount to returning to the transcendental ego as the grounds for the foundation of all meaning.