Husserl, Edmund (1859-1938)

Philosophy as a Rigorous Science

1911

"The psychical is divided (to speak metaphorically and not metaphysically) into monads that have no windows and are in communication only through empathy."

[…] We soon see that the relationships in the sphere of the psychical are totally different from those in the physical sphere. The psychical is divided (to speak metaphorically and not metaphysically) into monads that have no windows and are in communication only through empathy. Psychical being, being as "phenomenon," is in principle not a unity that could be experienced in several separate perceptions as individually identical, not even in perceptions of the same subject. In the psychical sphere there is, in other words, no distinction between appearance and being, and if nature is a being that appears in appearance, still appearances themselves (which the psychologist certainly looks upon as psychical) do not constitute a being which itself appears by means of appearances lying behind it--as every reflection on the perception of any appearance whatever makes evident. It is then clear: there is, properly speaking, only one nature, the one that appears in the appearance of things. Everything that in the broadest sense of psychology we call a psychical phenomenon, when looked at it and for itself, is precisely phenomenon and not nature.
(179)

Architecture::Windows

Reading

First published in Logos. See "Philosophy as a Rigorous Science," trans. Quentin Lauer, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 71-147.

Meta-metaphorical

08/14/2013