Subjectivity and Lifeworld in Transcendental Phenomenology

1. Husserl’s Phenomenological Discovery of the Natural Attitude

37 1 Husserl’s Phenomenological Discovery of the Natural Attitude Wir können nicht leben wie andere Menschen, naiv dahin und mit anderen streiten, wir haben den schlimmsten Feind in uns selbst. —from Husserl’s letter to Fink, March 6, 1933, Hua-Dok III/4, 91 Introduction Among the great themes of Husserl’s phenomenology—such as intentionality , the reduction, transcendental subjectivity, intersubjectivity, the lifeworld—one generally does not consider Husserl’s notion of the natural attitude.1 After all, was it not Husserl’s whole intention as a philosopher to overcome the naïveté and fallacy of the natural attitude and to move, employing the classical Greek dichotomy, from a naive dóxa to an epistéme, to a philosophy as “rigorous science” (Hua XXV, 3ff.)? However , if it is his claim, as it is, that all philosophy before him has failed to perform the phenomenological reduction, in other words, that all pre-phenomenological philosophy has unconsciously remained on the ground of the natural attitude, one can begin to see how central his concept of the natural attitude must be. The natural attitude is pervasive and dominant as long as the phenomenological reduction, inaugurating phenomenology itself, has not been performed. Hence I want to raise the question: What exactly is this natural attitude? How is it characterized , and what does it mean to overcome it? If this natural attitude is so fundamental that all philosophy before Husserl has overlooked it (or at least not fully grasped it, though some philosophers, such as Heracleitus or Descartes have glimpsed rudimentary fragments of it), how does it become explicit in the first place? This chapter will argue that the phenomenological discovery of the natural attitude, hence the natural atti- 38 H U S S E R L tude itself, ought to be considered one of the great themes of Husserlian phenomenology. The natural attitude already implicitly belongs to those previously mentioned themes and, even though it is Husserl’s project to overcome it, its dominance can be seen by the fact that it ultimately acquires a late recognition and restoration in the Crisis (Hua VI, 176–77, “The Task of an ‘Ontology of the Lifeworld’”).2 Husserl never systematically worked out a full and consistent theory of the natural attitude. This notion is rather, to use Fink’s (1976, 190ff.) often-quoted term,3 an “operative concept” in Husserl’s thinking that serves as an unthematical basis for further thought. The task of this chapter is thus to reconstruct a theory of the essential content of this natural attitude, as well as the way it becomes thematic in the first place. This task has two levels, a thematic and a methodological level: in speaking thematically about the natural attitude, describing it in its content (on the thematic level), we are obviously speaking from another standpoint. If the natural attitude is, as the name suggests, a title for our everyday life, then speaking about it means we have, in one way or the other, already superseded its boundaries on a methodological level. To put it as Hegel would: seeing the limit as limit means it has already been surpassed. A description of the natural attitude will therefore nolens volens stand outside of it, occupy or speak in a different attitude. So much is intrinsic to the thematization of this phenomenon. The Two Levels of Description: Thematic— Methodological What I have already stated gives us two clues as to how we should proceed . First, we have to differentiate, on the one hand, between a thematical description of the natural attitude in its content, and on the other, our position in describing it. Whereas the description gives us an account of the natural attitude itself (as the theme), the methodological reflection upon this description will give an account of what it means to be in the natural attitude. A phenomenological analysis of the natural attitude will have to make the difference, in other words, between anobject level and a meta level. The object level will give a description of the natural attitude itself, whereas the meta level will clarify that which makes this attitude “natural.” This will become clearer as I proceed. For now we can keep in mind that what makes this phenomenological account of the phenomenon of the natural attitude so interesting and yet curious is the interdependence and inseparability of theme and method. 39 H U S S E R...