Transcendental phenomenological unbuilding to the tactually, visually and auditorily presented in prespace

pp. 125-161

in: Frederick Kersten, Phenomenological method, Berlin, Springer, 1989

Abstract

Because it critically incorporates most of the modern scientific and philosophic thought about space perception, the Kantian formulation of the intuition of space will serve, in what follows, as the central point of reference to the historical setting of the problem of space. That setting is important not just because its conflicting specifying assumptions motivate exercise of the phenomenological epoché. It is equally important because the setting requires that a phenomenological account of space establish a basis for distinguishing between kinaesthetic and other sensa-processes while at the same time tracing the ways in which the inherently prespatial acquires the "appearance" of the quasi-objective or objective space of the real world (cf. above, sections 27ff., 37). In its Kantian formulation, the historical setting would seem to require that a phenomenology of space begin with the second step of unbuilding reduction. But this requirement is not so much the demand that a certain reflective procedure be carried out to resolve a certain set of problems as it is that the very innermost possibility of the second step of unbuilding reduction be explored and its limits established.