(a) Present a critical exposition of Husserl's criticism of 'natural attitude'. How does Husserl propose to address the problems…

(a) Husserl on the natural attitude and the phenomenological remedy

In Ideas I (1913) the natural attitude is our everyday, and also scientific, stance of taking the world as simply there, existing independently of consciousness, in space and time, with ourselves as parts of it. Husserl calls this the "general thesis" of the natural attitude. His criticisms are as follows.

It is unreflective: it assumes what it should clarify, namely that things exist and can be known.

It is blind to the constituting role of consciousness, which makes objects appear as meaningful and as existing.

Naturalism and psychologism, its scientific forms, reduce logic and consciousness to facts of nature and so undercut the objectivity of knowledge.

Phenomenology remedies this in three steps. The epoché suspends the general thesis, with no denial of the world, so that it is bracketed. The phenomenological (transcendental) reduction turns attention to pure consciousness and its intentionality, which is always consciousness of something. The eidetic reduction grasps essences by free imaginative variation of examples. The world is then seen as constituted in the intentional acts of the transcendental ego, giving philosophy a rigorous basis ("back to the things themselves"). In The Crisis (1936) Husserl adds the life-world as the pre-scientific ground that the sciences forget.

Criticism: Heidegger held that being-in-the-world is prior to a detached consciousness. Merleau-Ponty argued that the reduction can never be complete. The transcendental ego also raises worries of solipsism and idealism, which Husserl met through intersubjectivity (Cartesian Meditations, Fifth).

(b) Sartre on choice and responsibility

For Sartre, existence precedes essence: a human being has no fixed nature and makes himself by his choices. Hence "man is condemned to be free". Even refusing to choose is a choice; the statement itself says one cannot step outside freedom. Choosing not to decide is one more way of deciding.

Responsibility follows. In choosing for himself, one chooses an image of what a human being ought to be, so one is responsible for all (Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946). Freedom brings anguish, and bad faith (mauvaise foi) is the attempt to escape it by treating oneself as a thing with a fixed nature or by blaming circumstances. Authentic existence accepts freedom without excuse.

Criticism: Merleau-Ponty held that freedom is situated, shaped by body, history and others, and that Sartre's freedom is too absolute. Marxists, and the later Sartre (Critique of Dialectical Reason), accepted conditioning by social structures. Choice without any criterion seems to leave ethics empty. The unconscious and psychology challenge the claim that all behaviour is chosen. Sartre's strength is in making agents own their actions.

(c) Wittgenstein on silence

The sentence is proposition 7 of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). On the picture theory, a proposition is meaningful when it pictures a possible state of affairs. The sayable is therefore the propositions of natural science. What cannot be said includes ethics, aesthetics, the meaning of life, God and the logical form of language itself. Such things cannot be put into propositions, but they can show themselves, and Wittgenstein calls them "the mystical". Silence is therefore a limit and not a dismissal: in a letter to Ficker he said the book's point was ethical, and that what he left unsaid mattered most.

Evaluation: the Tractatus seems to say what it declares unsayable, and Wittgenstein admits this: its propositions are a ladder to be thrown away after use (6.54). Ramsey objected that "what we can't say we can't say, and we can't whistle it either". The Logical Positivists misread the closing sentence as dismissing metaphysics as nonsense, while Wittgenstein valued what lies beyond language. The later Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations) gave up the picture theory for meaning as use.