"It just is nothing foreign to consciousness at all that could present itself to consciousness through the mediation of phenomena different from the liking itself; to like is intrinsically to be conscious"
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Husserl is doing a neat bit of philosophical deflation here: he refuses to treat a feeling like "liking" as a mysterious inner object that consciousness somehow notices, the way you might notice a sound or a color. The sentence is clotted because it is trying to block a tempting picture: that there is (1) a mental state, (2) a separate act of awareness that looks at it, and (3) some "phenomenon" that mediates between the two. Husserl’s claim is that for certain experiences, that whole architecture is a category mistake. Liking does not arrive in consciousness by courier. Liking is already an being-in-consciousness.
That’s the intent: to protect phenomenology from becoming a private science of inner things. In Husserl’s terms, the act is intentional and self-given. You don’t infer that you like; you live the liking as a directedness toward something (a melody, a person, a proof) that is already suffused with that valuation. The subtext is methodological: if philosophers keep treating emotions as inner objects, they’ll keep demanding skeptical "access" stories and will end up trapped in pseudo-problems about how we know our own mind.
Context matters. Husserl is writing against both psychologism (reducing meanings to mental events) and a more general modern habit of splitting mind into a hidden interior plus a set of observable symptoms. His move is to relocate certainty at the level of experience as it is lived. The rhetorical effect is austere but radical: it makes consciousness less like a theater with props and more like a field of enactments where some acts, like liking, come with their own illumination.
That’s the intent: to protect phenomenology from becoming a private science of inner things. In Husserl’s terms, the act is intentional and self-given. You don’t infer that you like; you live the liking as a directedness toward something (a melody, a person, a proof) that is already suffused with that valuation. The subtext is methodological: if philosophers keep treating emotions as inner objects, they’ll keep demanding skeptical "access" stories and will end up trapped in pseudo-problems about how we know our own mind.
Context matters. Husserl is writing against both psychologism (reducing meanings to mental events) and a more general modern habit of splitting mind into a hidden interior plus a set of observable symptoms. His move is to relocate certainty at the level of experience as it is lived. The rhetorical effect is austere but radical: it makes consciousness less like a theater with props and more like a field of enactments where some acts, like liking, come with their own illumination.
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