Husserl’s Constitution of Visual Space
Abstract
Husserl’s phenomenology of space issues from the so-called static transcendental phenomenology and its foundations were created in the years 1907-1910. However, one can talk about Husserl’s two approaches to the problem of the constitution of space: 1) from the period before Ideas, and 2) the one initiated with considerations in Ideas II (this latter approach is a modified continuation of the former one).
For Husserl the problem of visual space is connected with his studies of the inner consciousness of time, his philosophy of geometry and the specific conception of experience (understood as experiencing the world).
According to the phenomenological methodology - in Husserl’s opinion - a certain reduced sphere that cannot undergo further reduction should be the point of departure for studies of the visual space. Hence he conducts a visual reduction of the outer observation (understood as pre-experience), as it is there that spatiality of every perceived thing is constituted. Husserl understands reduced outer observation as one that is isolated temporally and causally both from other observations and from observed objects. At the same time reduction includes the object of perception (here it assumes the shape of so-called phantom, or pure sensual scheme, ressensibilis) and the perceiving subject (here it assumes the shape of intentional approach of res sensibilis.
With such reduction of the subject and object of perception, for Husserl the layers of pure, transcendental subjectivity are revealed only in correlation with the constituted layers of what is perceived, that are revealed in phenomenological analysis. Revelation of ever higher layers o f the constitution of visual space and layers of the subject (that in various ways - kinetically, kinaesthetically etc. - is correlated with that space) is directed by the principle of horizontality discovered by Husserl. Intentional horizontality is revealed on the level of pure impression contents and their formulations and it penetrates all levels of constitution. Besides it (or more precisely: within it) Husserl finds the existence of the so-called in ten tio n a l implication that, as further analyses show, motivates the intentional teleology of perception, that is aspiration for achieving a certain (aspectual) optimum of giving. This is so due to the fact that within perceptive correlation a constant dependence is revealed between grasping and intentional presumption.
Interperceptive horizontality, in turn, refers one to the (phenomenologically reduced) sphere o f touching, experiencing, feeling, moving, that is, to the sphere of the subject’s corporeality. As long as the latter is not constituted the constitution of a spatial thing or of visual space proves to be - according to Husserl - impossible. This is because this space is only constituted against the background of the constituted so-called impression areas (intentional correlates of corporeal spheres of experiencing-feeling-moving) on the basis of the two constitutive movements of the perceiving subject’s whole body (approaching / moving away from the perceived thing and moving around it).
On the other hand, studies undertaken in Ideas II (and expanded in the later writings) on the constitution of visual space are subjected to the findings of phenomenology of inter-subjectivity. Husserl, although he refers to his earlier theory of space analyses, starts with the phenomenon of my body and supports his considerations with the conception of the so-called inter-subject understanding (based on empathy) and on the inter-systemic agreement of systems of appearances and systems of formulations. The visual space here is a certain objectivised (intersubjectively) system of places that is the ultimate form enabling appearance of identical things for all transcendental subjects.
Husserl’s theory of constitution of space shows an aporethic character in such points as: the problem of the Other’s constitution, the problem of the so-called sphere of primordiality. the conception of experience (interpreted solipsistically), the problem of the body’s constitution and the conception of movement used in the course of perceiving. Translated by Tadeusz Karłowicz
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