Conference | Paper

The Problem of Presentations in Blaustein: A Route in the Early Phenomenology”

Daniele Nuccilli

Wednesday 6th September 2023

11:30 - 12:00

 

The theory of content of presentations and in general the question of objects of presentations in the perceptual act represents one of the central topics of Blaustein’s critical interpretation of Husserlian intentionality. This topic moreover plays a decisive role in the complex Husserlian theoretical transition from the Logical Investigations to his Ideas I. Indeed, it is no accident that Schapp, one of Husserl’s first doctoral student at Göttingen, in his dissertation, Contributions to the phenomenology of perception (1910), precisely explores the question of how the world presents itself in consciousness through colours and sounds. Both Blaustein’s and Schapp’s interpretations lead to a personal recasting of the theory of intentionality and the perceptual act and shed some light on one of the decisive crossroads in the history of early phenomenology. It is in approaching the consideration of sensation as the presenting content of objects of the external world in fact that the issue of phenomenological reduction becomes more urgent. After pointing out how the topic of presentation is addressed by Husserl before and after the introduction of phenomenological reduction, in this paper, I will outline Blaustein’s critical position that he has laid out in his doctoral dissertation Husserl’s Theory of Act, Content and Object of Presentation (1928) and relate it to the interpretation of other figures of early phenomenology, such as Schapp and Hoffmann. As will see, the way in which the role of sensations is understood in the context of presentations of objects and the relationship it establishes with the perceptual act constitutes one of the building blocks for the construction of a method that would investigate the relationship between consciousness and the external world.because we all shape our existential movement through the lifeworld in a continuous encounter with other people, in a complex interplay between the background of past experiences, our present concern in action, and the future goals we project (Gallagher 2008, 90). In Husserl, the transtemporal horizon of consciousness shows that my past experiences have effects on the way that I understand the world and the people I encounter in the world (Husserl 1973). I experience the spatial and temporal intersubjectivity of my personal world (Ideas II, § 50). Personal world is made up not only by overlapping histories belonging to individuals but also by a common shared history belonging to groups and communities, and more in general, to the anonymity of the generational succession of humanity in the uncanniness of history (Ricoeur, 2000). We live in the threefold reign of predecessors, contemporaries, and successors (Schutz, 1967), and it seems that understanding history depends on the capacity to hold together this transgenerational continuity. History is not just the understanding of the past, but it has to do with a common capacity to image new beginnings that may interrupt or divert the chains of events set in motion in the generational succession (Arendt 1994).