Instructions

Note: this assignment is for students in Group III only.

The assignment is due, as an attachment, via the “Assignments” tool on eCommons, by midnight Thursday, November 19 (in PDF or any format easily converted to PDF, e.g. MSWord, LATEX, RTF, plain text).

Please respond to the following question in approximately two pages (double spaced). (Needless to say this should be your own original work.)

§43 of the Ideas is titled “The Clariﬁcation of a Fundamental Error.” The “fundamental error” in question is to think that we see only the appearances of “physical things,” as opposed to seeing them the way they are in themselves. (Recall that a “physical thing” [Ding] is just an ordinary perceivable object, such as a tree.) According to this erroneous view, “God” — that is, a hypothetical subject “possessing every possible adequate perception” — would, unlike us, see physical things themselves. (Note, important for understanding this: the entire ﬁrst paragraph of §43 is a statement of the erroneous view; Husserl only starts to speak for himself again when he says “But this view is a countersense.”) Why, according to Husserl, is this an error? Why is it wrong to suppose, even hypothetically, a subject which perceives physical things adequately? How does a confusion between perception and symbolic representation (or “objectivation”: Vorstellung) lead people to commit this error?