Although Husserl can occasionally speak of the world in terms of a totality of entities, the fundamental phenomenological sense of ‘world’ is that of the horizonal structure of experience. And as we now know, horizons are not objects, but structures of experience without which no perceptual object can come to consciousness. The world is the ultimate horizon for any physical object: the horizon of all horizons, as it is sometimes said. We do not come by an appreciation of a world by perceiving this thing, and that thing, and many other things, and then synthesizing them together with indefinitely many other supposed and remembered things into one big thing called a ‘world’. Phenomenologically speaking, the world is not a big thing. Indeed, it is not an ‘object’ at all – except for a reflective, theoretical attitude; and to explicate the world at that level would be to bring it in too late, and to miss its phenomenological origin, which is to be found in each individual perceptual experience. What we are primarily directed towards in perception is not some arbitrary set of individual objects, but the world, whose sense infuses every perceptual act. So Wittgenstein was wrong in the Tractatus – or at least did not penetrate deeply enough. The world is not ‘all that is the case’. It is the precondition for anything being the case

Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (Routledge Philosophy GuideBooks)

Author(s): A.D. Smith

Series: Routledge Philosophy GuideBooks

Publisher: Routledge, Year: 2003