Ⅳ．Essential Problem and Essential Intuition

At the beginning of Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology , Husserl put forward:

Natural knowledge starts from experience and stays in it all the time...The original presentation of a real thing is the same thing as noticing and intuiting it in direct intuition.

The boundary of human experience is the boundary of human cognition, and this empirical cognition is reliable. When we talk about a target, we do talk through experience, such as pencils with pure entities,unicorns with imagination, abstract laws and so on. When we are talking about these targets, these targets have emerged in our minds in advance. In fact, what Husserl wants to express is that the world's construction category of human beings is bounded by phenomena, and phenomenological research should describe the phenomena in the world. But here we have to answer why this kind of experience has the ability to know the “essence”,rather than just the existence of representation as suspected by skeptics.

Husserl thinks that something else can't be simply understood as accidental in terms of its “class nature”. In fact, it is precisely because a thing is related to the essence of a class in advance that there are individualized things. For example, when we see a shrimp dumpling on a steamer, what we see is an “individual” or “accidental” shrimp dumpling.But if we don't grasp the essence of shrimp dumplings to some extent,shrimp dumplings can't be distinguished from steamed buns. Therefore,people must admit that this contingency must be associated with an inevitability, which is: The characteristics of essential inevitability, and therefore a relationship involving essential generality. When we say that any fact can be another way according to its own essence, we are already saying that every accidental thing has an essence that can be purely grasped according to its meaning, and thus has a kind of Eidos that can be classified into various general levels of essential truth.

On the one hand, what we have already discussed must contain the meaning of facts. On the other hand, it connects to Kant's theory that the object of cognition must have a meaning essence that can be used by people. The essence of things, or “the original form that is purely grasped”is called “Eidos” by Husserl here (it can be traced back to noesis, the spiritual appearance of a specific area). The essence of things does not mean that they are innate in our minds, but that they can be grasped in a meaningful way. This conclusion means that when someone speaks the object in a proposition, the stated object is already included in the proposition. Without the essence of the object, the proposition is empty,and it will not exist. However, it should be noted that, as Husserl himself admitted, this essence is the essence of meaning, which cannot be simply understood as the object itself. Only at the level of meaning can the subject and object be unified. For example, when a person says, “I see a tall building,” the tall building already has a certain essence for this person,otherwise he would not definitely say that this thing is a tall building.Because of the existence of this essence, I can realize that this object is a tall building. At the same time, one thing that should be clarified is that,although all our analyses just now are made in sentences, Husserl does not mean that the essence is only a linguistic necessity, and this does not mean that Husserl himself is a linguistic philosopher (if he thinks so, it will be completely the opposite), but that he digests the problem of meaning in language to solve it.

At the same time, all individual objects have a series of “essential predicates”, and these predicates, including but not only adjectives, belong to this object. For example, we say that red is one of the essential predicates of red apples, because red describes the essence of red apples. At the same time, there are levels of essence, and the universal essence of general things has been successfully constructed in the highest essential category, which defines the “areas” and “categories” of individuals. This means that the essence is transitive between genera and classes, and an essential predicate can be generalized or summarized to a higher level. In the familiar example,red is not necessarily the predicate of apple in a higher level, but “having sugar” can be used as a higher level predicate throughout the full name of“apple” and the special name of “red apple”.

At first, essence means in turn what appears as an individual's most unique existence. However, anything can be included in the concept.Individual intuition of experience can be transformed into essence: this possibility itself can't be understood as experience, but essence.

Looking at the essence of an object is not purely analytical as it is commonly known, but is has been revealed in the mind, and it has been displayed intuitively by syntax such as “this is red”, even if this thing does not appear in your mind originally. In other words, Husserl thinks that by describing individual phenomenon, individual intuition already contains essential intuition as the essence of a thing. For example, when we look at a ripe apple, we are definitely not only looking at the empirical significance of the apple, but also discovering its essential attribute, let's just say it's sweet. From this kind of individual observation, it can be deduced to a kind of intuition. This kind of intuition may not be sufficient (such as a cube covered by gauze) or sufficient (a picture is completely spread out in front of us), but no matter what kind of form, it can be transformed into an essentially intuitive form.

However, it is proved that individual judgments can contain essential intuition, and there is still a problem: how to construct universal objective judgments as the essence of category existence, or how should people construct general rules? How can people say from the essence of an apple:“Ah, all apples are like this and have this essence?” Logically, it seems wrong to demonstrate the whole by citing individual examples (regardless of logical positivism). Husserl's answer is:

Every individualization and simplification of a concept in a general state of affairs, as far as it is, is called an essential inevitability.

In other words, an attribute is the attribute of this thing in every possibility of this thing, so this attribute is the universal essence or one of the universal essences of this thing. An essence has individual objectivity and objectivity at all levels. If we say that apples have an essence and can be sure that these things are called apples, then we can also say that all apples have this nature, which is the reason and cornerstone of people's so sure understanding of objects. This fact has been set. Husserl thinks that this essence, or the essence of a kind of substance, is absolutely inherent in intuition, that is to say, the essence can be fully grasped in the mind. In Husserl's own words:

The knowledge of the universal thing is an individual thing, every moment of the stream of consciousness; in this matter, the universal thing given in the evidence is not an individual thing in itself, but a universal thing, so it is beyond in the sense of real items.

Different from people's general idea that the real universal thing can only be known in a logical way. On the contrary, the universal thing of this kind of thing can pervade every individual and experience, and it is precisely because of this that it can be called universal essence. When you know the essence of a pencil, you also know the essence of this kind of pencil, otherwise the rest will not be called pencils. After this formalization,we can simply summarize the essential concept of Husserl. We find that Husserl's essence can be individualized, generalized, and formalized(formalization needs the participation of propositional logic based on logical categories and syntactic forms). In this process, the essence of existence at different levels can also be deduced. For example, the essence of red apples can be red and food containing vitamins, but in the case of green apples, the essence of “red” does not exist. However, as the full name of the concept “apple”, it must have a certain essence that all apples have,so let's call it a plant. In this example, we can find out how a concept is individualized into “regions” and how the essential concept is turned into a whole.