Edmund Husserl

Introduction

Edmund Husserl is the Moravian-German philosopher whose work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries founded the phenomenological tradition and shaped the entire course of twentieth-century continental philosophy. The 1900–1901 Logical Investigations (Logische Untersuchungen) is conventionally treated as the founding text; the 1913 Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (the Ideen) gave the method its mature systematic articulation; the 1936 Crisis of European Sciences (the Krisis) gave the late framework within which phenomenology engages the history of philosophy and the natural sciences.

Husserl's institutional and personal trajectory was shaped by the catastrophes of his time. He was Jewish by ancestry (Christian by conversion in 1886, when he was preparing to marry his wife Malvine Steinschneider, also a convert); his late career was disrupted by the rise of National Socialism, which dismissed him from his Freiburg professorship in 1933 and forbade him to publish in German academic venues. His former student and chosen successor Martin Heidegger, who had succeeded him in the Freiburg chair in 1928, joined the National Socialist Party in 1933 and conspicuously did not defend Husserl; the personal and philosophical relationship between the two had already deteriorated by then, but the public abandonment in 1933 was particularly bitter.

The phenomenological tradition that Husserl founded became one of the two major streams of twentieth-century continental philosophy (alongside the various Marxisms). Heidegger, Edith Stein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida — the major twentieth-century continental philosophers were each shaped by phenomenology, whether as continuators, modifiers, or critics. The contemporary engagement remains across philosophy of mind (Dan Zahavi, Shaun Gallagher), philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of medicine, and philosophy of ethics.

Life

Edmund Husserl was born in 1859 in Prossnitz, a Moravian town in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Prostějov in the Czech Republic), to a Jewish family of moderate prosperity. He was educated at the local Realgymnasium, then at the universities of Leipzig (mathematics under Wilhelm Wundt), Berlin (mathematics under Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker), and Vienna (philosophy under Franz Brentano). The early academic identity was that of a mathematician; the philosophical turn came through Brentano's influence in Vienna.

The early academic career was at Halle, where Husserl took his Habilitation in 1887 (with the philosopher Carl Stumpf) and taught as Privatdozent until 1901. The early publications were the Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891), a psychologistic treatment of mathematical concepts, and the breakthrough Logical Investigations (1900–1901), which reversed the earlier psychologism and gave the founding statement of the phenomenological program.

Husserl moved to Göttingen in 1901 as extraordinarius and became ordinarius (full professor) there in 1906. The Göttingen years (1901–1916) were the period of the early phenomenological school, with Husserl gathering around himself a circle of students and colleagues (Adolf Reinach, Roman Ingarden, Edith Stein, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Alexandre Koyré, and many others). The first volume of the Ideen appeared in 1913 and marked the transcendental turn in Husserl's thinking that produced disagreement with the early phenomenological school.

Husserl moved to Freiburg im Breisgau in 1916 as Heinrich Rickert's successor and remained there until his retirement in 1928. The Freiburg years saw the later work, the major engagement with the transcendental phenomenology of the Ideen, and the relationship with Heidegger, who succeeded Husserl in the Freiburg chair in 1928. The personal and philosophical relationship between the two had been intense in the early 1920s but had deteriorated by the late 1920s, especially after the publication of Heidegger's Being and Time in 1927 with its departures from Husserlian transcendental phenomenology.

The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 produced immediate consequences. Husserl was dismissed from his Freiburg professorship in April 1933 under the laws excluding Jewish academics; he was forbidden to publish in German academic venues; the proposed visit to Lecture at Oxford in 1937 was prevented when the Nazi authorities refused him a passport. Heidegger's public silence and failure to defend his former mentor was the major personal betrayal of Husserl's last years.

The last writings were composed in the late 1920s and 1930s and were unpublished at Husserl's death. The Crisis of European Sciences (composed in the mid-1930s, published 1936–38 in parts) gave the late framework within which phenomenology engages the history of philosophy and the natural sciences; the body of unpublished manuscripts (some 40,000 pages of stenographic notes) was rescued by the Belgian Franciscan Herman Leo Van Breda from Husserl's home in Freiburg in 1938 and 1939 and brought to Leuven, where the Husserl Archives became the center of subsequent phenomenological scholarship.

Husserl died in Freiburg on April 27, 1938, of pleurisy. His widow Malvine emigrated to Belgium and survived the war; her testimony was central to the post-war reconstruction of Husserl's late thinking.

The problem he worked on

Husserl's intellectual project, across multiple decades and methodological revisions, was the systematic foundation of philosophy as a rigorous science (strenge Wissenschaft) based on the direct description of the structures of conscious experience. The framework was supposed to provide the foundations both for the natural sciences (whose claims about objective reality depend on the structures of conscious experience that grasp them) and for the human sciences (whose subject matter is the structures of conscious experience themselves). The phenomenological method, as it developed across Husserl's career, provided the technical apparatus by which this foundational project was to be pursued.

The organizing methodological commitment is the return to the things themselves (zu den Sachen selbst) — the methodological insistence on grasping the structures of conscious experience as they actually present themselves, without imposing prior theoretical frameworks. The technical apparatus that Husserl developed for this return (the epoché or bracketing of the natural attitude; the phenomenological reduction; the eidetic reduction; the analyses of intentionality, of time-consciousness, of the embodied self, of intersubjectivity, and of the life-world) constitute the systematic body of phenomenological method.

Contributions

The phenomenological method

The phenomenological method, as it developed across Husserl's career, has several stages. The epoché (bracketing) is the methodological suspension of the natural attitude — the everyday assumption that the world is independently real and that consciousness is one item in it. Suspending the natural attitude allows attention to focus on the structures of conscious experience as they actually present themselves, prior to any theoretical assumptions about what they represent.

The phenomenological reduction (the transcendental reduction in the mature Ideen) leads from the bracketed natural world to the structures of transcendental subjectivity — the consciousness that constitutes the appearance of any object whatever. The eidetic reduction leads from particular conscious experiences to their essential structures (the eidē, the formal features that any experience of that kind must have).

The combination of bracketing, transcendental reduction, and eidetic analysis provides the technical apparatus for the systematic phenomenological project. The method has been contested within the phenomenological tradition itself — Heidegger rejected the transcendental reduction in Being and Time; Merleau-Ponty modified the method in Phenomenology of Perception (1945); Levinas extended the method to encounter with the other — but the framework of bracketing and the return to direct description of conscious experience remains the methodological core of the tradition.

Intentionality

Husserl's development of the concept of intentionality — the directedness of consciousness toward an object — is one of the foundational doctrines of the phenomenological tradition. Brentano had introduced intentionality as the mark of the mental (every mental act is directed toward an object; this is what distinguishes the mental from the physical); Husserl extended and refined the analysis.

The Husserlian analysis distinguishes the noesis (the conscious act of intending) from the noema (the object as intended in the act). The distinction allows for the systematic analysis of how the same object can be intended in different ways (perceptually, imaginatively, judgmentally, in memory) and how the same act can have different noematic correlates depending on its mode. The framework provides resources for the analysis of perception, judgment, memory, imagination, and the broader range of conscious experiences.

Time-consciousness

The lectures On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (delivered 1905, edited by Heidegger and published 1928) give Husserl's analysis of how consciousness experiences time as a structured continuity rather than as a series of discrete moments. The technical apparatus (the three-fold structure of primal impression, retention of the just-past, and protention of the about-to-come; the analysis of how the present moment includes elements of the past and the future without thereby ceasing to be the present) provides the foundational analysis on which the broader phenomenological treatment of memory, expectation, and historical consciousness depends.

The life-world

The late concept of the Lebenswelt (life-world) gave the systematic articulation of the pre-theoretical world of everyday lived experience that grounds and orients all theoretical inquiry. The Crisis of European Sciences (1936–38) develops the framework: the natural sciences had achieved theoretical success at the cost of forgetting their grounding in the life-world from which they had originally taken their problems and to which their results were supposed to return; the recovery of the life-world is the recovery of the grounding that the theoretical sciences had increasingly lost contact with.

The framework has been influential beyond strict phenomenology. The twentieth-century engagement with the relation between theoretical knowledge and lived experience — in Heidegger's Being and Time, in the early Frankfurt School, in Habermas's development of the concept of the life-world in The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), in the contemporary phenomenology of medicine and the cognitive sciences — extends Husserl's late framework.

Intersubjectivity

The Cartesian Meditations (1931) and the unpublished work on intersubjectivity develop Husserl's account of how the experiences of other conscious subjects can be given within the framework of transcendental phenomenology. The technical apparatus (the pairing of the other's body with one's own; the empathy by which the other's consciousness is intended; the analysis of how the objective world is constituted as the correlate of an intersubjective community of conscious subjects) is one of the more demanding parts of the Husserlian corpus and one of the most developed by subsequent phenomenologists (especially Edith Stein, whose dissertation On the Problem of Empathy of 1916 is the major early development).

Key works

• Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891). The early, psychologistic treatment.
• Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations, 1900–1901). The founding work of phenomenology.
• Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft (Philosophy as Rigorous Science, 1911). The programmatic essay.
• Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie (Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Book I 1913; Books II and III posthumous). The mature systematic statement of transcendental phenomenology.
• Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (lectures on time-consciousness delivered 1905; edited by Heidegger and published 1928).
• Formale und transzendentale Logik (Formal and Transcendental Logic, 1929).
• Cartesianische Meditationen (Cartesian Meditations, 1931; based on Paris lectures 1929).
• Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften (The Crisis of European Sciences, parts published 1936–38; complete posthumous publication).

The standard scholarly edition is the Husserliana series published since 1950 by Martinus Nijhoff (later Kluwer, then Springer), in over 40 volumes; the Leuven Husserl Archives manage the unpublished manuscripts and the ongoing editorial work. The major English translations are by Dorion Cairns, F. Kersten, and the more recent Edmund Husserl Collected Works series.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Franz Brentano (his Vienna teacher who introduced intentionality); Karl Weierstrass (his Berlin teacher in mathematics, whose rigor shaped Husserl's mathematical sensibility); Bernard Bolzano (the Czech logician whose work on propositions and meaning Husserl engaged); Descartes (the historical model of the transcendental turn; the Cartesian Meditations engage Cartesian philosophy); Kant (whose transcendental philosophy shaped the mature Husserlian framework); the broader Austrian school of philosophy in the late nineteenth century.

Influenced: Heidegger (his most consequential and most difficult student); Edith Stein (whose dissertation on empathy extended the phenomenological method); Hedwig Conrad-Martius and the early Göttingen phenomenological school; Roman Ingarden (the Polish phenomenologist of literature and aesthetics); Maurice Merleau-Ponty (whose Phenomenology of Perception, 1945, was the major French development); Jean-Paul Sartre (whose early engagement with phenomenology shaped Being and Nothingness); Emmanuel Levinas (whose engagement with Husserl produced the major French reception alongside Merleau-Ponty); Paul Ricoeur (whose work on hermeneutic phenomenology continues the tradition); Jacques Derrida (whose early engagement with Husserl in Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology was decisive); Hannah Arendt; Jürgen Habermas (whose engagement with the Lebenswelt concept shaped his social theory); the contemporary phenomenology of mind through Dan Zahavi, Shaun Gallagher, Hubert Dreyfus, and the recent literature.

Reception

The immediate reception in the German-speaking world was substantial; the Logical Investigations established Husserl as a major figure in the philosophy of mind, and the Göttingen circle of the 1910s constituted the first phenomenological school. The transcendental turn of the Ideen (1913) produced internal disagreement; many of the early Göttingen phenomenologists rejected the transcendental framework and continued the realist phenomenology that the early Logical Investigations had seemed to support.

The French reception, beginning in the late 1920s and accelerating in the 1930s and 1940s, was substantial. Sartre's encounter with phenomenology in 1933 (he was in Berlin on a fellowship at the time and was affected by the engagement with Husserl and Heidegger) was decisive for the development of French existential phenomenology; Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) was the major French systematic statement; Levinas's engagement, especially in Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology (1930) and the later major works, made phenomenology one of the principal currents in post-war French philosophy.

The Anglo-Saxon reception was slower. The analytic tradition's general suspicion of continental philosophy limited the engagement until the 1970s and 1980s, when Hubert Dreyfus's What Computers Can't Do (1972) and the broader cognitive science engagement with Heideggerian and Husserlian phenomenology produced Anglo-Saxon interest. The contemporary engagement, especially through Dan Zahavi (whose Husserl's Phenomenology of 2003 has been the major recent English-language introduction) and Shaun Gallagher, is active.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Dan Zahavi's Husserl's Phenomenology (2003), Husserl's Legacy (2017), and his broader corpus; Donn Welton's The Other Husserl (2000); Steven Crowell's Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (2001); the work of David Carr (whose translations include the Crisis) and J. N. Mohanty. Active scholarly debates concern the precise relation between the transcendental and the descriptive phenomenology, the interpretation of the Crisis's late framework and its relation to the earlier work, the relation between Husserl and Heidegger, the contemporary cognitive science engagement with phenomenology, and the political dimensions of the late work in light of its composition in the shadow of Nazi Germany.

Further reading

• Heidegger — his major student and the figure whose Being and Time modified phenomenology
• Sartre — the major French phenomenologist whose work extended Husserl
• Beauvoir — the major French phenomenologist whose engagement extended the tradition
• Descartes — the historical model of the transcendental turn the Cartesian Meditations engages
• Kant — the philosophical predecessor whose transcendental framework shaped the mature Husserlian system
• William James — the contemporary whose Principles of Psychology Husserl engaged
• Existentialism — the tradition that developed from phenomenology

The Moravian-German philosopher who founded the phenomenological tradition and shaped the entire course of twentieth-century continental philosophy.