Ⅴ．Phenomenological Reduction: Epoche and Inten tionality

In the broadest sense, phenomenological reduction is a phenomeno logical research method. Its research method is completely descriptive, and its purpose is to restore an entity to a phenomenon by means of “reduction.”

i．Observation Form and Epoche

As a collection of the world's total horizons, it is open to people,even if people don't notice it. All these clear, unclear, obvious and gloomy intuitions jointly present events and things that extend to infinity in their fixed order. Horizon is mainly a visual area, but this concept is more extensive and not limited to vision. In these intuitions, the opening of horizon or “seeing” is always initiated by the subject of “I” and points to the world around me (horizon). However, contrary to idealism, Husserl believes that different cogito can all point to the same thing in a world,which means that there must be a world other than cogito, but it no longer appears to me, but this world itself is a natural world and exists. In phenomenology, my world is defined by the concept of similar horizon.For example, when I was looking at the towering mountains, the mountains came into my sight and appeared in my world. When I left the mountain forest and returned to the city, the mountains withdrew from my horizon and disappeared from the meaningful world to me. Do mountains exist in a broad world when I don't look at them? Of course, it still exists. But are the mountains in my meaningful world? They are not. Husserl then introduced the concepts of absolute evidence and absolute giveness. Husserl replaces the concept of internal perception with the concept of evidence. In traditional philosophy, cognition is divided into internal perception and external perception. The so-called internal perception can be understood as the perception occurring in the heart, which establishes knowledge, and the external perception is just experience. For example, everyone looks at mobile phones in daily life, and everyone must be very familiar with every APP, in their own mobile phones. But this is just a purely empirical fact,and we won't have the ability to conclude that it is a mobile phone just because of the combination of this mass of substances. What really guides people to establish the concept of mobile phone is not the experience itself,but the reflection on the experience. Therefore, intention will lead people to pursue knowledge, and the essence of things will be displayed in the original in absolute evidence. At this time, we have formed a time series of some kind of cognition. What Husserl talks about is the original fact, which proves that the original has been given in cognition, so it is called absolute giveness.

Excluding all those things that are not given in the true sense, or all things that are not pure phenomena, we describe a field of absolute knowledge. In this field, things are open to us, while phenomenologists only care about these pure experiences and analyze what they present to us. Phenomenologists cannot directly analyze the transcendental things behind the experience: God and the world, Mathematics, ego, science and so on.These have been excluded from cognition. Husserl didn't destroy these transcendental things, but added brackets, and only studied and described phenomenology in the sense that they were given, instead of including themselves.

In a word, we make the general setting, which is the essence of natural attitude, ineffective, and we put all the existential aspects of the changed setting in brackets: therefore, we put the whole natural world in brackets,and this natural world continues to exist for us and around us, and it will always exist as a realized reality, even if we are willing to put it in brackets.

What Husserl means is that although we put brackets on science or mathematics for the time being, they still exist in our research, just in different forms. Because our pure experience may still involve some experiences about mathematics, God and science. What we should do at this time is not to completely deny these experiences, but to describe the significance of these transcendent things to us in the experiences.

ii．Intentionality

Intentionality is not only a crucial concept for Husserl, but also has a profound influence on Munich-Göttingen School of Phenomenology,Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and all philosophers related to phenomenology and existentialism, and has become the cornerstone of their works.

Let's make an analogy commonly used by Husserl as an example, a table. When we observe a table, we can only see one or several specific angles due to the limitation of space, but we can never see the whole table in reality, because geometric shapes can't show all the faces. But“intentionality” makes us regard the table as a table rather than something else. It allows people to “intend” something, point to something that has not been injected into the horizon, point to that object, that table. In the sense of Husserl:

Cognitive experience has a kind of “Intentio”, which belongs to the essence of cognitive experience. They mean something, and they have a relationship with the object in one way or another. Although the object itself does not belong to cognitive experience, the relationship with the object belongs to cognitive experience. The object can be manifested, and it can have some kind of giveness in its manifestation, but nevertheless, it is not a real thing that exists in cognitive phenomena, nor is it a cogitatio.

The general idea is that intentionality is an inherent attribute of cognitive activities. And in Husserl's view, the concept of intentionality is subtle. It can't be understood as material or pure psychological activity. As an inherent attribute of cogitatio, it can subtly mediate between material and psychology. Intentionality is the essence of every cognitive experience,and it tends to transcend the existing horizons and limitations, so that the transcendent complete object can show people its meaning in the experience. To some extent, it can be understood as an important reason and tool for people to go beyond the present experience and cut into the things that have not yet been put into the horizon. According to Husserl,intentionality is the basic unit of the world.

iii．Time and the Experience as the Stream of Concept

The question now is: How should people grasp intuition as the stream of experience or consciousness? In Husserl's view, time in phenomenology is different from the popular concept of time. It doesn't mean the ticking of measurement units on clocks and watches, but the change of state in an“experience stream”. “Time in phenomenology is the unified form of all experiences in an experience stream.” The stream of consciousness is in a continuum, which is a part of the infinite experience stream, in which each single experience begins and ends, defining the duration and time of each experience. Experience is not a point, but a line. For example, when we talk about life in middle school, we are actually immersed in a line. This time stream contains many memorable events. Let's call this line the experience stream (probably originated from Bergson's stream of consciousness). By resorting to experience, people can easily find that the definition of an event is always defined as a process. Take Xiao Ming's climbing as an example, it is hard to say whether climbing a mountain is the moment of reaching the top of the mountain or the moment of having a picnic on the mountain. On the contrary, climbing a mountain is the process of climbing a mountain, an experience stream. In an experience stream, time is divided by events, and a poorly done mid-term exam is divided into eariler and later by defining the reviewing before the exam and being sad after the exam result is annouced.Only in events can time be meaningful, which is the biggest difference between time in phenomenology and traditional time. This concept has a deep influence on later generations, especially in Heidegger's works.

In this time in phenomenology, the intuitive grasp of an experience stream needs the change of intuition from dark to visible, and the new“marginal field” is put into intuition. In the process of event-to-event conversion, time is also changing, and in this process, we have to put a new event and new time in our world, while the past time and the physical form of the event temporarily disappear. Husserl used Kant's terminology quite carefully here to describe his conclusion:

I once said that in the continuous process from one grasp to another,we have now grasped the experience stream as a unity in some way. We don't grasp it as a single experience, but as a concept in Kant's sense.

In Kant's philosophy, ideas are similar to people's feelings about existence. In this sentence, the time is described as something that can be grasped. In experience stream, we always have to change to a new horizon. For example, Xiao Ming will go home to study after climbing a mountain. This description includes two experience streams, climbing a mountain and doing homework. Xiao Ming's transition from the horizon of climbing mountains to the horizon of doing homework can actually be regarded as a microscopic time transition. His transition from climbing mountains to doing homework at home, from one event to another. This transformation of horizon means some possibility: we can grasp the concepts of these two kinds of experience streams and make a distinction. A complete “concept” of the thing represents a system of things, which is determined in the infinity of the stream of consciousness. It has different aspects and is completely dominated by the essential law.