The task of the ante-predicative experience in the constitution of the object’s meaning: a study of Husserl’s vª logical investigation

Abstract

The goal of this article is to analyze how it is constituted the object’s meaning from the ante-predicative experience of consciousness as exposed in Husserl’s Vª Logic Investigation (1901). We understand the ante-predicative experience as the basis for sustaining intentional acts of consciousness and it is the experience of what is lived and not of what is objectified. The ante-predicative experience is founded on the sensual of consciousness (hylé), which is to say, from the syntheses that occur without any explicit activity of objectification (i.e., in a non-intentional way). In order to get this objective, we divide this work into two stages: § 1 Content as a Matter of Sensations and § 2 Content as Matter of Intentional Acts. Thus, it is possible an argument about the fundamental role of the content, as a matter of intentional act, to be a consciousness’ constituent living experience. We believe, therefore, to be able to affirm that all knowledge, in the Husserlian phenomenology, would start from the ante-predicative experience. This belief is based on the Husserlian reappraisal of the Kantian conception that all knowledge would begin with experience, but it would not come only from it. The hyletic data would appear as the substrate of the experience of the lived (Erlebniss), making part of the plot of the intentional act. We then consider that it is possible to demonstrate that the husserlian phenomenology does not abandon the sensitive data, but rather it reserves a space of fundamental importance when it comes to the bases that constitute the object’s meaning.