Phenomenological Intuitionism and Its Psychiatric Impact

The present chapter centers around the notion of intuition and how it functions in Husserl’s phenomenology on the one hand, and in Jaspers’s Psychopathology, on the other hand. Our line of reasoning challenges two widespread views. First, we argue that Husserl’s conception of an intentional analysis referring to a methodically “purified” human consciousness requires an account of what we call “rational hermeneutics,” as distinct from a more conventional individualizing and historicizing hermeneutics in the vein of Dilthey. The relating aspects are explained in terms of the inextricably interrelated notions of attitude, intuition and description (AID-Thesis). Our relating considerations address the overall effects of Husserl’s transcendental turn and result in specifying a complex notion of intuition. Secondly, we argue that Jaspers misconceived Husserl’s early phenomenology (“descriptive psychology”) and that, in general, it is short-sighted to exclusively focus on Husserl’s Logical Investigations as was usual among Jaspers scholars for a rather long period. Instead, we contend that understanding several basic conceptual and methodical commitments that are implied in Jaspers’s Psychopathology (e.g., his defense of a plurality of methods; the distinction between different types of intuition) considerably benefits from the complex notion of intuition which can be extracted from Husserl’s conception of transcendental phenomenology.