Truth Within Phenomenological Speech

Abstract

The problem of truth within phenomenology is the problem of how we can mean anything after we have carried out Husserl’s transcendental reduction, and how we can verify our meanings. How can we talk philosophically after we suspend our natural assertion of the world as an assumed, real background of experience? Can we talk at all after we disengage this underlying belief which is the condition for all our speech about things in the world? Is there anything left to say, and if so, how are we to decide whether what is said is true or not? Within philosophy, within the transcendental reduction, do meaning and truth work the same way they do in ordinary, non-philosophical consciousness? To ask about philosophical discourse in Husserl is therefore to ask about the transcendental reduction, which we will interpret as Husserl’s way of showing how we can speak philosophically about consciousness, and how we can speak about the world from a philosophical point of view.

“Since ‘Know thyself’ is not said to the mind … as it is said, Know the will of that man: for this it is not within our reach to perceive at all, either by sense or understanding, unless by corporeal signs actually set forth; and this in such a way that we rather believe than understand. Nor again as it is said to a man, Behold thy own face; which he can only do in a looking-glass. For even our own face itself is out of the reach of our own seeing it; because it is not there where our look can be directed. But when it is said to the mind, Know thyself; then it knows itself by that very act by which it understands the word ‘thyself’; and this for no other reason than that it is present to itself. But if it does not understand what is said, then certainly it does not do as it is bid to do. And therefore it is bidden to do that thing which it does do, when it understands the very precept that binds it.” St. Augustine, De Trinitate X, #9.

This essay was written in 1969 and a more extensive version is being published as a chapter in my book, Husserlian Meditations, Northwestern University Press.