8 - Common sense

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Consider an experience that is free from all theory, an experience precisely as it is experienced, with no superadded interpretations (derived, for example, from physics or biology or myth or religion). It is Husserl's thinking on this topic that will concern us in what follows. We shall set forth initially the main features of what we shall call common-sense experience. We shall then, by way of contrast, set forth some parallel remarks on the nature and status of physical theory. Finally we shall examine Husserl's “phenomenological” account of the ways in which the worlds of common sense and of physics may each be conceived as reflections or products of certain special sorts of mental acts.

As basis for our inquiries we shall adopt the second book of Husserl’s Ideas, a work stemming largely from the period 1912-15 which presents above all an account of the fine structures of perceptual experience and of the world that is given in and through perception. We shall deal also with Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences, a work that dates from around 1935 and presents a speculative history of the development of the scientific world-conception in its relation to what Husserl calls the “life-world” of common sense. Ideas II, which forms the hidden basis of the later work, was held back from publication in Husserl’s lifetime. Our aim in what follows is not that of textual exegesis, however, nor is it one of presenting an account of the development of Husserl’s thought. Rather, we seek to elucidate as clearly as possible the most important ingredients of Husserl’s ideas on the topic of common-sense experience, and to show how they form a coherent whole from which much can still be learned.