We are already familiar with one of the slogans, or fanfares of the phenomenological project - Husserl called us “back to the matters themselves.”
We can zoom into the lemon; perceiving is a process through time, within which the perceiving also changes the information that we are gathering.
Gestalt psychologists were the ones that paid particular attention to the interplay of foreground and background; ← this is very important, for example, for Merleau-Ponty.
The internal horizon = going further into the matter
The external horizon = zooming out
^ Horizons, because the horizon is always shifting; you get into a boat and swim across the sea, without ever finding the boundary of it. You can always keep looking closer, and you can always keep looking from further away: whether through personal or scientific inquiry.
Any perceiving involves a kind of self-awareness.
There is an I that is perceiving. Usually that sense is implicit, but it is there nonetheless.
The “I can” → sense of one’s own capability.
Say, perhaps, one is a tad more rotund, and unconsciously realizes they might struggle getting through a space; thus, proprioception is called into mind. In other circumstances, proprioception remains something we don’t notice.
But proprioception is a sense of one’s own body.
[The professor just made at least some part of the class start blinking manually]
kinaisthesis → the sense of one’s moving.
Why do we perceive something as real?
In part, because we see it from different sides and perspectives.
One of the laws of perception is that it is impossible to see perceptual objects [technical term] from all sides at once.
Usually we don’t wonder whether different profiles we get of an object make up one and the same object; we walk around and see a different sight, but we still recognize it as the same thing. → these are profiles, or
Adumbrations (Abschattungen) - shades of something; something shows itself in different adumbrations.
We have different perspectives.
‘The transcendence of objects’ - Sartre uses this a lot; this is just something that is different, distinct from the perspectives I have of it. → the object ‘transcends’ my perspective.
The zero-point of orientation
One’s body is always their ‘here.‘
You are never not ‘here,’ you are in your body. Everything else is ‘there’ for me.
Value-ception (Wertnehmung)
Perception is (Wahrnehmung);
Hylomorphism
I perceive a yellow lemon made of wax or marzipan.
The epoche
We do not doubt the existence of the world; we bracket it.
The demand of the phenomenological method is beginning with the investigation of the way things are experienced.