Consciousness as the Seat of Evidence
Edmund Husserl’s works emerge as a salvation for European civilization. It is the work of a selfless individual who paved the way for what he calls “the good Europeans''—those who love the civilization of Europe and, despite recognizing its contradictions and faults, seek to carry it forward rather than destroy it.
He argued that the new sensation created by the loss of truth in the sciences should be confronted with the “heroism of reason,” which is reason transcending itself, overcoming the absurdity of its own products and effects. He proposes a return to the primary notion of evidence: what is evidence and what is correct knowledge. He notes that there are two pieces of undeniable evidence.
The first is the Cartesian cogito, the evidence that the human individual exists. He considers this a definitive acquisition of the scientific world, indestructible knowledge. The foundation of truth in subjectivity, the idea that the existence and self-recognition of the ego are self-conscious, is the sine qua non condition for the foundation of science and an undeniable evidence.
The second evidence that no one denies is the truth of mathematical deduction. No one denies that 2 + 2 = 4.
However, it seems that these two pieces of evidence have nothing to do with each other because the way I arrive at mathematical evidence is entirely different from how I arrive at subjective evidence. At this point, Husserl makes a key observation: mathematical evidences are evidences to the extent that consciousness perceives them; they are evidence in consciousness, for consciousness. Just like the evidence the subject has of its own existence, mathematical evidence is evidence for consciousness. Thus, the problem at hand is to understand what consciousness is and the different ways in which evidence can present its truth to it. Human consciousness is one, and this same consciousness becomes aware of itself and of the accuracy of mathematical deduction. They are two types of evidence with different modes of presenting their truth to consciousness.
Therefore, to establish the pure idea of science, it is necessary to describe consciousness and the various ways in which truth presents itself to it. Thus, it is necessary to first undertake a phenomenology of consciousness. Then, when Husserl proceeds to reunify the notion of evidence, analyzing what is common to the two mentioned evidences and showing consciousness as the place where evidence appears, he first turns to the philosophy of logic, i.e., a philosophy of mathematical deduction, and in a second moment, to the philosophy of consciousness.
However, this is where the great problem begins: consciousness cannot be approached in the psychological sense because, in that case, it would be assumed that consciousness could be studied by the two methods admitted in psychology, namely the method of observation and experimentation and the method of introspection. The psychological approach, Husserl affirms, depends on putting in parentheses the truthfulness of consciousness contents. If a psychologist studies how you really think, the truth or falsity of the content of your thoughts does not appear as a psychological problem. The psychological study of how evidence is produced does not aim at the object of evidence but only at the mode of producing evidence in the mind—while here we are seeking exactly the opposite: not the mode of production but the object of evidence.
When Husserl speaks of the phenomenology of consciousness, he thinks of a phenomenology of different contents of consciousness, of which the mathematical content would be one and the cogito another. However, to study consciousness in an extra-psychological way, one must escape the idea that was held of science at that time, limited to the positive sense, to the sense of experimental science. To accomplish the task, Husserl initially examines the philosophies of logic and the philosophies of consciousness that existed until then, and this text by Husserl refers precisely to the critical examination of the philosophies of logic known until then. Logic, this theory of science, needs to prove that the possibility of true knowledge exists independently of its psychological mode of production; otherwise, psychology itself could not be a science. If the definition of what is truth in science depended on the prior existence of a science that studied the functioning of consciousness that gives us this truth, we would enter into contradiction. Truthfulness and falsity must be definable, and their criteria must be establishable independently of any considerations of a psychological nature, i.e., regardless of whether thinking occurs in the brain or stomach, or even regardless of knowing that we are thinking. These conditions are purely formal, logical, and have nothing to do with the actual process of thought, just as the rules of geometry are real regardless of the process of their conception as someone's thought.
To establish the entire set of criteria for knowledge in an entirely pure manner, without reference to psychological data, is Husserl's undertaking, this new St. Thomas Aquinas, this new Aristotle.
From Chapter 12 of the book “Edmund Husserl Contra o Psicologismo” [Edmund Husserl against psychologism] (2019). Edition based on a course taught by Olavo de Carvalho in 1993.
