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Direct and indirect consciousness.

Article Excerpt
Editor's Note

This text is pp. 042343-042354 in the Cairns Nachlass held in the Archival Repository of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc. at the University of Memphis. It is a typescript with corrections by the author on several pages. There was originally no title, but there is the date "August 24, 1954" at the head of the first page. It seems the script for a lecture and it seems complete, but there are no indications of its occasion. Since that was when he was beginning in the Department of Philosophy of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School for Social Research, it might have been designed to introduce the new professor and might have been presented to the student club, but this is a speculation.

We have added the title on internal grounds and corrected several typographical errors. The transcription was made by Daniel Marcelle, the William F. Dietrich Fellow at Florida Atlantic University during 2003-2006, it was edited by Lester Embree, and their work has been reviewedby Fred Kersten and Richard Zaner.

The Editors

The fundamental fact about Husserl's treatment of problems indicated by such words as "sign," "expression," and "indication," is that he deals with them, not as problems concerning objective entities and relations, but as problems concerning one's consciousness of what one means as objective entities and relations. This does not distinguish his treatment of the problems in question from his treatment of other problems. It does distinguish his treatment of those problems from the treatment given them by some important contemporaries.

Husserl's approach can be indicated as follows. I am conscious of what I take to be a plurality of things of different kinds; and I am conscious of them in different ways. Thus the manner in which I am conscious of something as of one kind differs specifically from the manner in which I am conscious of something as of another kind. But it can also be the case that I am conscious in different ways of things I mean as similar. Indeed, I can be conscious in different ways of what I mean as one and the same individual. Accordingly, there are, so to speak, two dimensions in which my processes of being conscious of something or other vary. (There are other such dimensions, but we may ignore them for the present.)

In the first place, I may be conscious of something as, for example, a physical...

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