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The Critique of Cognition and Phenomenology: A Summary Up to Our Reading for Today

Contextual remarks in mind, I now briefly explicate the aims and themes of the
introduction and first lecture. Husserl begins his introductory remarks on the lectures by
describing a problem – namely, that of what he calls the problem of the possibility of cognition.1
The possibility of cognition refers to whether cognition accords with reality that is independent
of cognition as it really is.2 Two ways of thinking are possible in relation to this question.
According to Husserl, natural thinking, thinking that is not philosophical in quotidian life and in
the sciences, does not engage in the question of the possibility of cognition.3 Philosophical
thinking, however, “is circumscribed by one’s position toward the problems concerning the
possibility of cognition.”4 The focus of the book will be to provide a theory of knowledge that
“solves the above-mentioned difficulties, and gives us an ultimate, clear, and therefore inherently
consistent insight into the essence of cognition and the possibility of its achievements.”5 Thus,
Husserl sets the stage for a methodological discussion that will provide for the achievement of
these goals.
That method is called the phenomenological method, and is a method for the critique of
cognition, a critique that, Husserl notes, “is the condition of the possibility of a metaphysics.”6
Anticipating Heidegger’s remarks about the relationship between particular sciences and
fundamental ontology,7 and in language that seems reminiscent structurally of certain German
idealist formulations of a systematic ground for knowledge,8 phenomenology functions as a
critique of cognition insofar as it provides access to the ground from which the sciences are
possible, insofar as phenomenology examines the essence of cognition itself vis-à-vis what is
cognized.9 By cutting to this fundamental level of human thought, the sciences are made
derivative of this more basic mode of knowledge. Yet, as Husserl notes, there is an apparent
circularity to the question of a “science of cognition” that takes place within the parameters of
the object (of thought) in question – namely, cognition.10 What kind of method, then, is the
phenomenological method? The remaining portions of the introduction are dedicated to
answering this question.

1
Edmund Husserl. The Idea of Phenomenology. Tr. William P. Alston & George Nakhnikian. Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic, 1964. p. 1.
2
Ibid. p. 1.
3
Ibid. p. 1.
4
Ibid. p. 1.
5
Ibid. p. 1.
6
Ibid. p. 1.
7
Martin Heidegger. Sein und Zeit. GA. 2. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1977. p. 12-14; Being and Time.
Tr. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. p. 29-31.
8
See for example J.G. Fichte. Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre. Leipzig: Fritz Eckhardt Verlag, 1911. p. 15-
20. The similarities between Fichte and Husserl’s problem arises already with the title of Fichte’s book – On the
Concept of the Doctrine of Science (the making of Knowledge) – vis-à-vis my remarks regarding Husserl’s
introduction to his lectures. For Fichte, the relationship between the sciences and cognition is central to his own
explication of what he will call the “foundational principle,” or Grundsatz, of knowledge generally. Husserl’s
description of individual sciences as phenomena of science qua science appears similar to the way Fichte describes
the coherence and intelligibility of individual scientific principles in relation to a foundational principle that guides
the making of knowledge – science – overall. While obviously Fichte and Husserl, and other idealists, are engaged
in different approaches, the structure of the problem remains similar.
9
Husserl. The Idea of Phenomenology. p. 1.
10
Ibid. p. 1-2.
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Certain cognitions – cogitationes – are indubitable, and thus, “the first absolute data.”11
The question again arises as to how and why this is possible, and this leads Husserl to the
schematization of immanence and transcendence. What is immanent is immediate, and is
characterized in terms of seeing, or schauen, which has connotations of watching or looking.12
Thus, immanent cognition, or seeing cognition, occurs within the parameters of what is
indubitably given without reserve or inadequacy vis-à-vis the totality of what-is and what-
appears.13 The phenomenological method will function according to this sense of the immanent,
putting out of question the transcendent, insofar as this would be to broach the indubitable limits
of the adequately self-given. The sciences are thus described as “phenomena of science,” which
attempt to go beyond the sheer givenness of what-is in the attempt to take an accepted array of
facts and elucidate something new, in contrast to science as cognition more basically, which
cannot be a matter of elucidating from assumed evidence.14 Thus, in the second section of the
introduction Husserl notes that we cannot even assume the fact of human cognitive activity as an
assured basis from which elucidate the fact of cognition as a psychologist might do.15 Yet, the
question seems to arise as to whether an argument can then be made about the possibility of
cognition if the scientific modes of calculation are to be abandoned.
It is through eidetic abstraction and a distinction between the immanent and self-
givenness that Husserl finds we can retain a sense of intelligible arguments in describing the
essence of cognition in terms of the universal, and thus, in terms of the “a priori within absolute
self-givenness” rather than strictly something immanent contra real transcendence of the ego.16
Yet, as was already the case in Husserl’s description of the various sciences in relation to the
concepts of immanence and transcendence, we see here the instability of these categories vis-à-
vis what is meant by self-givenness. This is so insofar as the indubitable cognitions that occur
through/as self-givenness are not strictly speaking immanent. Husserl’s description of the
cognition of the duration of sound shows that temporally there are discrete moments in said
cognition. Thus, what is occurring, what is given, is not contained in the simultaneity of the now
of the appearance.17 This leads Husserl to describe what is occurring in cognition vis-à-vis
cognizing and what is cognized as the constitution of the latter through the various processes of
memory, imagination, predication, and perception. Whatever the objects are or are not
independent of this activity is not for phenomenology to say. Givenness entails representation
and givenness is what phenomenology examines both in terms of the activity of cognition and
the fact that objects are given.18 As a point slight digression and point of interest for those
interested in the reception of this idea of givenness, I want to note how, despite the various ways
of augmenting the reduction to givenness as described here, this general idea persists today, for
example, in the so-called third reduction of French phenomenologist and Christian theologian
11
Ibid. p. 2.
12
Ibid. p. 2-3.
13
Ibid. p. 3.
14
Ibid. p. 4-5.
15
Ibid. p. 5, 11. What the translators call “mental activity” is Erlebnis in German, which has connotations of
embodied experience. I am not suggesting mental activity is wrong in this context, but it may hide the sense in
which mental activity at the phenomenological level is an experience rather than something set over against a person
in a detached sense. The objectivity of cognition, or the representation of cognition as a given, is rather the posterior
description of what is experienced in or as simultaneity. In this sense, Husserl’s remark on page 11 that, “the
cogitation, the appearing itself, becomes an object,” is true and can be characterized as activity read to be analyzed.
16
Ibid. p. 7.
17
Ibid. p. 8-9.
18
Ibid. p. 10-11.
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Jean-Luc Marion, where the idea of phenomenology is a letting-manifest (de laisser l’apparition
se montrer) of givenness as such,19 and earlier in the reception of phenomenology in Theodor
Adorno’s 1966 Negative Dialectics, and in Enrique Dussel’s 1977 Philosophy of Liberation,
wherein this idea of givenness is rendered socio-politically problematic, because allegedly
reifying what-is as first philosophy. 20 Thus, there is no small amount of importance in getting
clear about what Husserl himself means by givenness, both for the natural attitude and for the
philosophical attitude, for understanding various trajectories of philosophies in the 20th century.

Lecture 1: A Return to the Critique of Cognition as the Philosophical Attitude

The direction of the lectures so established, Husserl discusses the distinction between the
natural attitude of thinking, philosophical thinking, and what the critique of cognition as
approached from the latter in distinction from the natural attitude is in lecture one. Taking up the
previous definition of the natural attitude as “unconcerned with the critique of cognition,”
Husserl notes that the natural attitude is characterized by a mode of givenness that is constituted
by perception and memory.21 Here, “we are turned to the objects as they are given to us each
time and as a matter of course, even though they are given in different ways and in different
modes of being, according to the source and level of our cognition.”22 From this follows a
description of the sciences generally as a presentation of the logical relations between the objects
of our perception and memory and the falsification of contradictions therein by “assured
cognition.23 Whence this assurance? The answer is again from the things themselves, so qualified
through the natural attitude and the sort of givenness one may speak of from that attitude. “In
every step of natural cognition pertaining to the sciences of the natural sort, difficulties arise and
are resolved, either by pure logic or by appeal to facts, on the basis of motives or reasons which
lie in the things themselves…”24
Philosophical thinking, however, focuses upon as an object of inquiry what is taken for
granted in the natural attitude – namely, “the possibility of cognition.”25 This is not to say,
however, that cognition is not treated as an object in the course of other objects of scientific
inquiry by the natural attitude. “To be sure, as with everything else in the world, cognition, too,
will appear as a problem in a certain manner, becoming an object of natural investigation.”26
Husserl admits that cognition can and is so described because cognition is a part of nature.27 It is
within this paradigm that the natural attitude yields “a pure grammar and at higher stages a pure
logic (a whole complex of disciplines owing to its different possible delimitations…”28

19
Jean-Luc Marion. Étant donné : essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris : Quadrige/ PUF, 1997. p. 14 ;
Being Given : Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness. Tr. Jefferey L. Kosky. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002. p. 8.
20
Theodor Adorno. Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966. p. 19; Negative Dialectics. Tr.
E.B. Ashton. London: Continuum, 1973. p. 9; Enrique Dussel. La filosofía de la liberación. Segunda reimpresión
FCE. Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2018. p. 44; The Philosophy of Liberation. Tr. Aquilino
Martinez & Christine Morkovsky. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2003. p. 16.
21
Husserl. The Idea of Phenomenology. p. 13.
22
Ibid. p. 13.
23
Ibid. p. 13-14. See Fichte again for the comparatively similar way the sciences are described.
24
Ibid. p. 14.
25
Ibid. p. 15.
26
Ibid. p. 15.
27
Ibid. p. 15.
28
Ibid. p. 15.
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…cognition is essentially cognition of what objectively is; and it is cognition through the meaning
which is intrinsic to it; by virtue of this meaning it is related to what objectively is. Natural
thinking is also already active in this relating. It investigates in their formal generality the a priori
connections of meanings and postulated meanings and the a priori principles which belong to
objectivity as such…29

In contrast, the critique of cognition engages the possibility for the sort of givenness that
occurs in the natural attitude, the connection between cognition and what is cognized that makes
possible the scientific investigations into the various logical realtions and contradictions between
objects and thematizations thereof.30 Yet, in so doing several difficulties arise from the
apparently circular nature of asking after that which enables one to inquire. Taken to an extreme,
one runs the risk of collapsing the reality of what is given to the reality of cognizing activity, a
solipsistic notion that betrays itself, betrays the allegedly sheerness of its corresponding notion of
immanence, by positing connections between appearances that transcend the bounds of
immanent recognition.31 Yet, this contradiction gives way to a more basic problem by which the
necessity of logic is in fact a historical accident in the course of evolutionary history,32 and the
further absurdity arises according to which the questioning of the possibility of cognition can
only happen by presupposing the law of non-contradiction, thus depriving cognition of its basis
for making judgments even as cognition seeks to make a judgment about its own possibility.33
Thus, “We are in constant danger of becoming sceptics, or still worse, we are in danger of falling
into any one of a number of skepticisms all of which have, sad to say, one and the same
characteristics, absurdity.”34
Central to phenomenology as a critique of cognition, then, are the identification and
resolution of these problems that all go back to the nature of “the correlation between cognition
and being an object of cognition,”35 the aforementioned fact that cognition cognizes itself. “And
this naturally applies also to all basic forms of being an object which are predetermined by the
nature of cognition (To the ontological, the apophantic as well as the metaphysical forms).”36
With this, we return to the critique of cognition as a theory of knowledge, the beginning of
epistemology, through which the possibility of metaphysics is possible. Whereas the natural
sciences function with the assumption of the possibility of cognition, and thus base
interpretations of objects thereupon, “Epistemological reflection first brings to light that the
sciences of a natural sort are not yet the ultimate science of being. We need a science of being in
the absolute sense. This science, which we call metaphysics, grows out of a “critique” of natural
cognition and what it is to be an object of cognition…”37 So framed, Husserl frames
29
Ibid. p. 15.
30
Ibid. p. 15-16.
31
Ibid. p. 16.
32
Ibid. p. 16-17.
33
Ibid. p. 17.
34
Ibid. p. 17.
35
Ibid. p. 17-18.
36
Ibid. p. 18.
37
Ibid. p. 18. Here one is presumably struck again by the similarities between Husserl and German idealism
generally construed as a movement based in the critique of cognition carried out by Kant, and by the Heideggerian
formulation of the question concerning being in Being and Time and his 1929 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.
Heidegger’s reading of Kant’s first critique is as a work that makes the foundation of metaphysics the critique of
pure reason, which is of course a critique of the possibility of cognition. Despite being derivative of Husserl on this
point, the connection is important to note. See Martin Heidegger. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. GA. 3.
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phenomenology, at least initially, as “clarifying the essence of cognition and of being an object
of cognition…a phenomenology of cognition and of being an object of cognition…the first and
principal part of phenomenology as a whole…the specifically philosophical attitude of mind, the
specifically philosophical method.”38

Conclusion: A New Thinking

Husserl ends his lecture by speaking to the importance of this method and the distinction
between the natural and philosophical attitudes, in the context of a question regarding whence
the unity of the sciences is posited. In contrast to the natural sciences, which may build
uniformly upon the different discoveries made in distinct spheres of inquiry such that it is
possible to speak of “the natural sciences” as a unity despite their diverse principles of inquiry,
philosophy “needs an entirely new point of departure and an entirely new method distinguishing
it in principle from any “natural” science.”39 The absurdities that arise in approaching the
possibility of cognition from the natural attitude of the natural sciences can only be addressed
and answered from a different perspective. “If the meaning and value of natural cognition as
such together with all of its methodological presuppositions and all of its exact foundations have
become problematic, then this strikes at every proposition which natural cognition presupposes
in its starting point…”40
Insofar as Husserl posits the necessity of this new beginning for philosophy, he is,
retrospectively, continuing the connection between critique and novelty that persists not only in
the German idealists who came before him, but so too in his contemporary Franz Rosenzweig41
and his student Martin Heidegger. Some initial questions for discussion that I pose following this
point are: 1. What is the nature of critique for Husserl? 2. How does Husserl describe the
continuity and discontinuity between his new method and the natural sciences? 3. Why does
Husserl avoid solipsism even as he draws attention to the need to put the certainty of what is
cognized into question?

Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Tr. James S. Churchill.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962.
38
Ibid. p. 18-19.
39
Ibid. p. 19.
40
Ibid. p. 20.
41
Rosenzweig is an example of somebody thinking through related but different problems in connection to how
canons of philosophy and metaphysics have been passed down. Moreover, as Bernhard Casper notes in his
introductory essay to the digital edition of the 1921 Der Stern der Erlösung, or The Star of Redemption, by the
university library in Freiburg im Breisgau, entitled “Transzendentale Phänomenalität und ereignetes Ereignis,” the
method of the first part of The Star is in a qualified sense a phenomenology of the foundational themes that
comprise philosophy. See Franz Rosenzweig. Der Stern der Erlösung. Freiburg im Breisgau: Universitätsbibliothek,
2002; The Star of Redemption. Tr. Barbara E. Galli. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005; Franz
Rosenzweig. Das neue Denken. GS III. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1984; Franz Rosenzweig. The New
Thinking in Philosophical and Theological Writings. Tr. Paul W. Franks & Michael L. Morgan. Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2000.