naturalism and transcendental experience

For Husserl it is “universally dominant naturalism” (Hus IX 267) which impedes recognition of transcendental subjectivity as a “field of transcendental experience” (Hus IX 269). Overcoming naturalism is made possible only by the “method of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction” (Hus IX 270) which “raises up the totality of the positive to the philosophical level,” bracketing the lingering naivete of that psychological reflection which posits the realm of subjective experience as a natural entity, a bit of the world. With the reduction, however, a “cloud of unintelligibility” spreads over the world as the “taken for granted reality and pre-given field of all our theoretical and practical activities” (Hus IX 271). The world, whose reality before the reduction was never so much as questioned, is now seen to be “constituted in whatever meaning it may have, and whatever existential validity is attributed to it, ‘in ourselves’,” i.e., in the “immanence of our own perceiving, representing, thinking, valuing, etc. life” (Hus IX 271).

Steven Galt Crowell, Husserl Heidegger and Transcendental Philosophy – Another Look at the Encyclopaedia Britannica Article, p. 511

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