A few comments on Husserl's sedimentation

Rahul Sharma
In this essay, I intend to investigate into how sedimentation (Sedimentierung)
is a central concept of later Husserl's phenomenology. I have said nothing
new except emphasizing on the concept of sedimentation. I shall begin with
a brief description of Kant's epistemology and then switch to what makes
Husserl different from him. This difference points in the direction of
sedimentation which then, I look into as a critique of positivism.

KANT
Kants so-called Copernican revolution brought about a shift in the way the
world was cognized. Before him, the so-called rationalists of the likes of Descartes
and Spinoza believed in the idea of universality of a priori knowledge wherein the
subject was the sole author of his knowledge content. He could by way of reason
develop a whole world and explain the world. On the other hand, the epistemology
of empiricists like Locke and Hume was dependent on an object-centered
approach, according to which, roughly speaking, the objects of real existent world
sent particles of information (visual auditory etc) which the mind of the subject
received. In one case, the world was a construction of the mind whereas, in the
other, the mind was just a passive receiver which accepted the sense data being
bombarded onto it creating an image of the world in the world.

Kant brought out a synthesis of these two approaches. For Kant mind was a
structuring unit which not only perceived the sense perceptions but also organized
it according to two forms of sensible intuitions viz. space and time, and twelve
categories of understanding both a priori. Thus he mixed two aspects of rationalist
and empiricist philosophy and came out with a mixture which he termed as
Transcendental aesthetic.

According to his Copernican revolution, rather than knowledge confirming

to the object, it is the object which confirms to our knowledge of it. This is the first
step towards what shall become phenomenology because it opened the world of
phenomena to the philosophers. Owing to the newfound understanding of
epistemology which Kant developed in his Critique, a metaphysics was developed
by him in which reality can be conceptually demarcated into two types, based on
the cognitive apperception of the same: Phenomenal and noumenal. The
phenomenal reality is the term Kant uses for the world as we experience it, and
noumenal reality is the world which our mind cannot cognize, and can only
speculate with the help of reason.
 There are two major changes which we observe when we proceed from Kant
to Husserl. First, the concept of noumena is disposed of in Husserl. He asserts
that since what we can have access to only what we can study (experience), it
makes no sense to hypothesize a world of noumena. Thus, in phenomenology,
there is no noumena. It is considered to be a concept of reason going beyond the
empirical, which paradoxically was Kant trying to put forward in his Critique:
limiting the reason to the world of phenomena. Thus in a way, it is a step further,
because clearly (as suggested in Kants ideas of free will) Kant had not still broken
off from the cogito which can look at the world objectively.

A second major change is epistemological, something which becomes more

prominent in later Husserl: the so-called genetic phenomenology. In static
phenomenology, instead of a priori structures: the a priori categories of Kant (and
two forms of intuition, space and time), our consciousness experiences the
Lebenswelt (life-world) (Crisis, 37) with contingent structures which are not a
priori in experience. This is well exemplified in phenomenology's description of
how in it is described the experience of a cube or, in which by the absence of
something, we cognize its presence. But this was static in his Idees, in the sense
that they these modes of cognition were not dynamic. In later Husserl, we find a
sort of plasticity in these modes, which structure our experience. Thus instead of
being an unchanging one, our consciousness is perceived as having an ever
dynamic property vis a vis its ability to let the modes of experience undergo
change. This is what Sedimentation is, a concept which Husserl which developed
in his later works. In Experience and Judgement, Husserl explains sedimentation
as: ... the continuous transformation of what has been originally acquired and has
become a habitual possession and thus something non-original (EU 67, p. 275).
(Dermont, Moran. The Husserl Dictionary, p. 372)

Traditional beliefs are sedimented propositions that we typically share while

having little if any explicit awareness of these belief-contents. These may be called
background beliefs. The meaning of the Lebenswelt thus, is compounded by our
meaning of the experience, which can be temporally located either in our past or in
our future. Metaphorically speaking, as we experience the world through the
passage of time, the lens through which we cognize the world itself goes through
various changes, by our experience of the world. It is an important point. Even our
future hopes and desires get sedimented in our consciousness layers after layers
being continuously added to our meaning making faculty compound our
experience of the world.
 One can imagine mind/consciousness to be this actively generated
mathematical function which constitutes experience from the arguments of
sense experience. But this is not what phenomenology says. This is a subjective
description very much akin to empiricists. For phenomenologists, there are no raw
sense perceptions because all our consciousness can make sense of is the
constructed world, the world which has been structured according to certain
structuring elements, a few a priori and many: sedimented. raw sense perceptions
is an abstraction. They do not exist in reality because we cannot cognize as such.

SEDIMENTATION and MATHEMATIZATION OF NATURE

It is only in First in Crisis, Husserl explains how mathematical knowledge
too, is sedimented. He primarily focuses on Euclidian geometry in his analysis, the
system of propositions we have inherited and developed since Euclid. As he
explains in his Crisis,

with Euclidean geometry had grown up the highly impressive idea of a

systematically coherent deductive theory, aimed at a most broadly and highly
conceived ideal goal, resting on "axiomatic" fundamental concepts and principles,
proceeding according to apodictic arguments a totality formed of pure
rationality, a totality whose unconditioned truth is avail- able to insight and which
consists exclusively of unconditioned truths recognized through immediate and
mediate insight. (Crisis, p. 21)

So the axiomatic nature of pure geometry was taken to obvious to Galileo,

who is considered to the trailblazer (Crisis, p. 21) of physics by Husserl, a
historical false idea, but this does not affect the theoretical analysis in any way.
Pure geometry, Husserl takes to be inherited from the greeks. It were greeks who
took the first documented steps towards formalization. From the empirically given
world (plena), they produced abstractions called ideal shapes by the
complementing acts of measurement and approximations. For example from the
usually given body shapes like stones and rivers, and trees they produced
idealities like triangles and circles which gave rise to Euclidean geometry by
further abstraction of ideal shapes into algebraic formulations. A circle was
quantified in terms of its circumference and area.

Galileo took these ideal shapes to be representatives of the world, going

back and forth (from the world of plena to the world of pure geometry and back)
and instead of mapping the nature to ideal shapes, started the task of mapping
ideal shapes to nature. This was an important step because it gave rise to new
abstractions like force and velocity. Quantification of nature was already available
to him. From quantification, he went to mathematization, which began seeing the
natural world as combination of ideal shapes. This is what Husserl calls
mathematization of nature, and it gave rise to the modern conception of science. As
he says, after Galileos mathematization of nature, nature itself becomes a
mathematical manifold [Mannigfaltigkeit] (Crisis, p. 21)

We see here, clearly how mathematization of nature is a product of

continuous sedimentation of ideas, belief, and experience of the world. The journey
till now can be schematized as: from pure geometry to applied geometry over
nature. After that, with the development of logic in the beginning of the twentieth
century, the mathematical sciences enter into a new kind of formalization, called
non-euclidean in nature by virtue of its being non-limiting and constructible. From
measurement to theorization to constructing, this was the journey till Husserls
time. And all of it came to being from a sedimentation of ideas.

This constructibility of mathematical nature is interesting, which was

apparent in the way humans abstracted rectangles out of farms because it gave a
quality of infinite to the whole of mathematical sciences. Using tools of algebra
and imagination, with the available arson of ideal shapes, man started creating new
and complex ideal shapes. Science (as physics) broke off its ties with any kind of
typology and gave rise to an a priori infinity which is formally closed. From
Newtonian mathematics, we entered the world of General relativity and Quantum
theory. And thereafter these ideas started affecting our experience of the
Lebenswelt by the process of sedimentation in which new ideas become usual. For
example, today we look at the world from a thoroughly relative perspective and
do not get awed by the mention of an idea like space and time are entangled, an
awe which is different for the awe we feel for the genius of who propounded it.

SEDIMENTATION AND POSITIVISM

Thus the historicity of Husserlian phenomenology ascribed to sedimentation
of ideas, ideas which are shared and promulgated as they appear. For him, we live
in a world of meaning, and we cannot avoid it, and that meaning in Husserlian
phenomenology is rooted in historicity. This inclusion of historicity is a very
important point of difference between phenomenology and positivism. We cannot
look at the outside world from an outsider perspective because we are historically
located and a hypothetical outside world is also historical located, and by this
historicity, we are connected with each other. Descartes cogito was never free of
the prejudices as he wanted to be, because even in a hypothetical scenario, it is
impossible to observe and explain the world as an external observer. There is no
external world because there is no external observer.
 In truth, phenomenology includes positivism into its methodological
approach. Positivism is just a special case of the phenomenological method and
should not be taken as general. As a parallel, one can see how the general relativity
includes itself into the special relativity. The critique of positivism by
Phenomenologists is a kind of philosophical reaction to the dominance of
positivistic sciences in the thought-structure of human beings as a collective
(collective consciousness). The nature of critique is not against the method as such
it is against the overemphasis we put on the method.

Crisis is basically a return inquiry into the development of science from it

roots by which Husserl wants to point out the reasons which for him
teleologically lead to the present (the 1940's) crisis in sciences (I am not going into
the debate of its European nature) and as a consequence, crisis in human world
(world war). The idea of return inquiry stems from our unique position in the
meaning making trajectory. In this trajectory of meaning making, the method of
positivism was just a point in which collective consciousness of humans was ready
to become aware of it. Humans are meaning-makers because they are self-reflexive
(they can return-enquiry because they are self-conscious), they can return to the
historical past and look at it from a sedimented consciousness, and as there is no
need to mention that this historical past is mans historical past. In Husserl, the
self-consciousness itself became conscious of itself and in a way, led to the
development of what is Dasein in Heidegger. And if Heidegger had not read
Husserl, he might not have coined the term Dasein.

Thus we see that sedimentation is a central notion of Phenomenology and in

fact human thought. And it would be interesting to see what comes after
phenomenology... as a method. Now that this 'way of looking at the world' has
been sedimented into human thought (in forms like hermeneutics and
existentialism), what should be the new approach of meaning-making in the
evolution of human thought.

References:
1. Husserl, Edmund (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology (David Carr, Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
2. Sokolowski, Robert (2000). Introduction to phenomenology. Cambridge University
Press.
3. Dermot Moran (2012). The Husserl Dictionary. Continuum, Bloomsbury.