The Reflective Method of the Pure Psychology of Consciousness

Fig. 4.1

Summary of the correlation between noeses and noemata with respect to the manifold of an object of here and now senses and past retained senses

The processes of self-awareness are captured in the use of self-reflexive verbs that refer to the self-presence of both the forms of awareness and the object that becomes apparent in reflection (II, 14). This self-presence can be understood as a simultaneous presence where consciousness is aware of itself across time as it is aware of the presence that it is turned toward. Even when such awarenesses are peripheral, subliminal, preconscious or descriptively unconscious, consciousness is still self-present. In French, “se représenter” is used to express the idea that it is understood that when people have conscious experience, they are automatically aware of it. This is why the term “reflet-reflétant” appears in Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Être et le Neant (1943, 198) in relation to the discussion of temporality (Sartre 1958, 151). In German, a person “stellt etwas vor” means a person represents it for themselves (Kern and Marbach 2001, 75). The point is that a meta-cognitive awareness is central to the phenomenological view of how consciousness works qualitatively and how reflective analysis understands it. Even though consciousness is aware of what it is aware of and how it is aware of such, there is no doubling of consciousness or infinite regress (X, 332, 355). Intentional implication also occurs when explicit egoic acts of memory replay an original perception as recorded and retained in consciousness and stored. For instance, “I can relive the present, but it cannot be given again. If a return to one and the same succession, as I can at any time, and identify it as the same temporal object, I produce a succession of recollecting experiences in the unity of an overlapping consciousness of succession”, (X, 43). Similarly for empathy , imagination and hallucination and all other forms that constitute objects.

Reflection is a two-headed awareness of noesis-noema correlates, where it is possible to study objects and noeses by regarding the manifold of noematic presentations of them across time: “the universally possible turning of one’s regard which can be effected within each act whereby the constituents, which one has as objects of one’s regard, are reciprocally combined with one another by various eidetic laws. The primary attitude is focused on something objective: the noematic reflection leads to the noematic constituents, the noetic reflection on the noetic compositions. From these constituents the disciplines of interest to us here abstractively single out and seize upon pure forms and, more particularly, the formal apophantics seizes upon noematic forms, the parallel noetics , noetic forms”, (III, 307). This is a way of stating that the reflective gaze can go towards the object-side or the mental process-side to be aware and define both. The link to the ideal term essence is that both essences on the object- and the intentional-process sides of the noemata are capable of definition. Husserl warned readers not to focus exclusively on the noetic side and only research the forms of mental processes but to span the subject-object connection and create a study of the correlations between the many forms of mental process as they present possible mental senses that coalesce into identifiable meaningful objects of sense about their referent (III, 266, 267, 307–308, XXIV, 230).

The work of intentional analysis itself, of reflection and making ideal conclusions, is the representation of what we can be aware of. Consciousness is aware of itself in very many ways. With the use of the word “representation” another overlapping idea is brought in, for it is generally assumed that a representation means that a conscious experience is occurring, although it has to be noted that some referents are not fully conscious at any moment. Meta-cognition is a part of the empirical position called the theory of mind which was originally part of Jean Piaget’s developmental psychology (Flavell 1979, 1985). Reflection is either on one’s own experience, or a specific other person, or consciousness in general (XI, 327). The terms “meta-cognition” and “meta-representation” form part of the study of how thoughts, feelings, behaviours and associations relate to each other. Hence, the basic idea of meta-cognition is merely thoughts about thoughts, or feelings about thoughts, or any combination of experiences about experiences. In pure psychology they could be called meta-intentionality. If they were prior to reflection on them, the senses that are linked could be called meta-presences.

Meta-cognition is any form of awareness about any form of noesis-noema correlation within the same consciousness, or becoming aware through speech and understanding in a discussion, or becoming aware in general discussion about “higher” secondary forms of awareness about the more fundamental sorts defined as reflection in noesis-noema correlates about other consciousness, or the world of meaning for others (XVII, 251–252). The academic study of meaningful experiences through ideals starts with the most basic ability to be aware and discuss similarities and differences of objects across their manners of appearing. The language is abstract yet precise at the same time because what is referred to are universal structures of consciousness that comprise a metaphorical “geometry” or “grammar” of meaning for consciousness.

The following notation formalises the change from the pre-reflexive being immersed in an experience, to identify and reflect on it in the following way. Pre-reflexive self-presence is non-egoic general attention to objects of awareness plus the co-occurrence of what else is in consciousness. This forms an object among other objects in the here and now or within the potential universe of meaningful situations of a consciousness in a world. However, reflection begins the first straightforward representation of objective awareness that can be written as A₁(objectifying act) → O₁ or A₁(objectifying synthesis) → O_1, where → means leads to, when the ego turns its attention to the pre-reflexive level of being in the world. When reflection occurs, the meta-awareness leads to judging, producing a higher self-awareness or representation which could be written: “A₂ → (A₁→O₁)”, (Kern 1988, 285). This straightforward awareness and the higher self-awareness of the first awareness are returned to below, because with the comments above, phenomenology has pitched its case. The processes of constituting presences at lower levels lead to a higher awareness on reflection, so it becomes possible to represent in language what was in mere awareness. This higher level of awareness leads to analysis and representation in concepts and notation at the meta-level of intersubjective commentary. There are numerous asides to the process of reflection as gaining direct meta-cognitive awareness. One of which is “the operation of presentative objectification, shown symbolically in the sequence O, P(O), P(P(O))… where O is any object and P(O) its presentation , admits of iteration, whereas qualitative modification does not, and in the further fact that presentative objectification applies to all objects whatever, whereas qualitative modification only makes sense in the case of acts”, (XIX/1, 486–487): meaning that there are different occurrences where meta-cognition occurs. A similar identification of structure occurs in relation to the understanding of the connection between meaning and the original temporal field comprised of the three parts of the protention, the now and the retention.

The phenomena of being aware and self-aware in a self-reflexive way lead to the phenomenological academic discourse about mental processes within a community who research meanings in culture and history . This is different to other studies of communication that deal entirely with the biological processes of what happens or historical and societal research. The point is that ability to be aware and self-reflexively identify difference in mental processes is a form of knowledge that differentiates between forms of awareness and lends itself to eidetically-understood sets of relations about how consciousness constitutes its meanings (X, 129). Thus, Newton’s fluxions and Leibniz’s terms differentialis, understood as taking apart or taking differences in givenness , and integralis, understood as bringing together in calculating and area or volume, as the idea behind the developmental constitution of an object across time, might have been the sort of judgment that Husserl had in mind in his work Nova methodus in 1684 and in 1686 (Leibniz 1684).

What is unveiled in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time up to 1911 is the inter-relation between various aspects of meta-cognition within consciousness that are qualitatively identifiable (X, 273). Namely, that there must be a retained consciousness (a sort of on-going working memory) with a part called absolute consciousness that is the originating self-presence of consciousness to itself. (It has to be noted that Husserl used the word “absolute” in conjunction with the central focus on understanding consciousness itself (IV, 180) and in relation to understanding consciousness in connection with other consciousness (IV, 171–172, IX, 344)). The presence of retentional consciousness functions in holding understanding of the world inside consciousness. It shows its presence when the world is made sense of pre-reflexively due to unconscious processing: the transcendent world is unconsciously immediately understood because of the immanent world (VI, 185–190). It automatically records conscious experiences and pre-reflexively helps in constituting all sense prior to reflection (X, 6, 117). Any action or experience is retained in consciousness automatically by implicit processes of retentional memory (XI, 72). So the self-presence spans past time and refers to preconscious and unconscious processes of this sort.

What is pre-reflective is not yet an object of attention (III, 145). Objects become conscious with additions of meaning from retentional consciousness (III, 166). It is only when consciousness has properly focused on sensation that an object appears. For instance, in the case of listening to music for instance, “a tone dies away… and then there follows a rapid weakening in intensity. The tone is still there, still sensed, but in mere reverberation”, (X, 31), which is a way of describing the immediate lingering on of recent experience although it is hypothesised that this process is on-going across the lifespan. Such a tone or part of a recently heard melody lingers on and automatically plays back prior senses of the objects-experienced into the now. This shows that the original temporal field is connected to retentional consciousness so there becomes an inclusive nature of the current moment that has an involuntary aspect. Two metaphors can explain what is being analysed. Like a waterfall there is flow of contents across the now, but the shape of the flow remains the same as does its water flow. Yet within retentional consciousness there is a holding onto the past and a supply of patterns from its storehouse. Retentional consciousness holds all the patterns that have registered consciously and subliminally, to non-egoic awareness.

Three Dependent Moments are Identifiable After the Reduction: Noesis, Noema and Object

One way of explaining the three terms that apply to the whole of objective pattern-recognition is to start with a conclusion: ““Reflection” is taken here in an enlarged sense and includes not only the grasping of acts but also every “turning back”, i.e., every turning away from the natural attitude’s directedness toward the Object. Included would also be, for example, the turning to the noemata , the manifold of which brings into appearance the only identical thing”, (IV, 5, fn). This is a clear statement that the moments of the whole are noted but this needs explaining, for the differences cut across three aspects of one experience (cf XIX/1, Secs. 7, 14, XI, 334, fn, 335, XVII, 239). Strictly speaking after a reduction , the focus is cognition in all its qualitative sorts between a noema (from the ancient Greek νoηµα, representation, or meaning in contemporary Greek) in relation to its presenting noesis (νóησις, awareness, or understanding in modern Greek). Strictly speaking, a noema is the general sense or profile of what is then identified, re–cognised, as a sense or profile of the object of whatever sort it is. The correlation between noesis and noema is because the two are ontologically necessary and co-occurring. In as much as these terms refer to ideal universal aspects, they are ideal categories. In as much that they refer to specific instances, they are only instances.

Noematic senses appear through the noeses that apprehend them. When the term noema appears by itself, it is a shorthand for it would be better to write “noetic-noematic sense” to refer to their connection as a class of reduced experiences, or identify specific noemata about an object. This is a convenient correlation to emphasise that meanings are senses or profiles of objects belonging to the intersubjective sphere. The usefulness of the term “noema” is an attempt to lay aside excessive concern with received wisdom in favour of attending to the work of consciousness afresh. Specifically without concern about the previous bias concerning the referent’s actuality and its contextualisation in the already known world of science and commonsense . A reduced phenomenon is also called an acausally-understood “phantom” , (IV, 22, 36–38, V, 2, Cairns 1976, 24, 57). Whereas other senses of it, particularly in different temporal contexts other than the present, its’ senses are presentiational and may only be apparent to one person. The terminology for comparing how objects appear includes terms such as “noema” , “intentional correlate” , or “the contents” of what we experience, what is “given” or “present” in various ways. Meaningful objects of attention appear as the immediate result of pre-reflexive “anonymously functioning consciousness” that works without egoic volition in fast involuntary mental processes that give their senses directly to consciousness, and receptively, to the co-occurring ego that bears witness to the products of unconscious mental processes (III, 271, XIX/1, V Sec. 20–2, X, 83, XIX/2, Sec. 5, XXXI, 78). Explanation in chapter 8 below will show in more detail, there are two types of constitution : The first is the automatic and immediate making of sense of presence, before the egoic attention can turn to it. The second is what appears of the object of sustained reflective attention, the phenomenological gaze proper (I, 65, 83, III, 148–149, X, 128, XXIII, 333, 343), giving rise to the detailed work of the comparison of givenness of the intentional being (X, 278–279) .

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