"At the lowest cognitive level, they are processes of experiencing, or, to speak more generally, processes of intuiting that grasp the object in the original"
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Husserl is trying to rescue experience from the suspicion that it is just raw sensation waiting to be “interpreted” by higher thought. When he says “the lowest cognitive level,” he’s not insulting it; he’s clearing rhetorical space. He wants a stratum of consciousness that is already meaningful without needing concepts to do the heavy lifting. “Processes of experiencing” and the more technical “processes of intuiting” name that stratum: the way something shows up for us before we start theorizing, explaining, or doubting.
The key provocation is “grasp the object in the original.” Husserl is staking out a notion of contact that sounds almost scandalous after Kant: not merely representations in the mind, not mere effects of a world we can never reach, but an appearance that carries its own authority as appearance. The “original” is not a metaphysical promise that we possess things-in-themselves; it’s a methodological demand. Phenomenology begins by treating the given-as-given as worthy of description, rather than immediately reducing it to physics, psychology, or cultural habit.
Subtext: modern knowledge has become allergic to immediacy, and that allergy has consequences. If everything is secondhand - inference, construction, interpretation - then certainty collapses into either skepticism or scientism. Husserl’s line is a pivot toward his larger project: describe the structures of consciousness (intentionality, horizons, time-consciousness) precisely because the world is always encountered as already there, in “originary” presentation. It’s a foundational move, but also an ethical one: pay attention to what you actually live through before you outsource reality to abstractions.
The key provocation is “grasp the object in the original.” Husserl is staking out a notion of contact that sounds almost scandalous after Kant: not merely representations in the mind, not mere effects of a world we can never reach, but an appearance that carries its own authority as appearance. The “original” is not a metaphysical promise that we possess things-in-themselves; it’s a methodological demand. Phenomenology begins by treating the given-as-given as worthy of description, rather than immediately reducing it to physics, psychology, or cultural habit.
Subtext: modern knowledge has become allergic to immediacy, and that allergy has consequences. If everything is secondhand - inference, construction, interpretation - then certainty collapses into either skepticism or scientism. Husserl’s line is a pivot toward his larger project: describe the structures of consciousness (intentionality, horizons, time-consciousness) precisely because the world is always encountered as already there, in “originary” presentation. It’s a foundational move, but also an ethical one: pay attention to what you actually live through before you outsource reality to abstractions.
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| Topic | Deep |
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