Robert Sokolowski

EVERYONE IS INVOLVED in the question of being in one way or another. When we ask someone how to change the oil in an automobile, or what the diameter of the moon is, or how numbers are different from numerals, we are asking about being. Such interrogations, whether addressed to others or addressed by ourselves to ourselves, are particular questions about beings. But when as metaphysicians we raise the question of being, we do not pursue just one more of these particular investigations. We ask a question that is somehow essentially singular, a question that cannot be made into many. If our question were to become plural, it would be a sign that we have cut off only part of being for our study and that we allow still other questions of being to be raised concerning the parts we have left out. It would be a sign that we have turned being into a genus, into one kind among many. Somehow the question of being has to be complete and comprehensive in itself; it has to be one question; and it must get at issues that enable all the particular questions to arise and to be answered. It is not that the question of being has nothing to do with questions about automobile oil and the diameter of the moon and numbers and numerals; the question of being can be recognized in all these particular questions, but it cannot be reduced to being one like them.

WHEN WORDS APPEAR THEY INTERRUPT the dense continuity of things. Pictures do so as well, but in a different way. The things surrounding me form a dense continuum: my attention can move from one thing to another without leaving what is immediately there. I can go from the table to the rug to the chair to the lamp and to the wall. But if at some point I come to a picture, this plain sequence is broken, and although it may quickly be picked up again, it is interrupted by the picture. When I hit the picture, I am no longer just with what is immediately there. I am with the depicted as well as with what is itself there. It is as though a fourth spatial dimension suddenly came into play, not effacing but being added to the three that were and are there all along. A new horizon appears and is blended with the one in which I am engaged.

Husserl’s Idea of Phenomenology is his first systematic attempt to show how phenomenology differs from natural science and in particular psychology. He does this by the phenomenological reduction. One of his achievements is to show that the formal structures of intentionality are more akin to logic than to psychology. I claim that Husserl’s argument can be made more intuitive if we consider phenomenology to be the study of truth rather than knowledge, and if we see the reduction as primarily a modification in our vocabulary and discourse and not as simply a change in attitude. I briefly compare Husserl’s concept of philosophy with those of Plato and Kant.