Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology
Born in Moravia, educated in Vienna and Berlin, first in mathematics and later in philosophy, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) taught and wrote philosophy at a succession of German universities. He is best known as the founder of phenomenology, defined as the study of the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. Husserl's phenomenology launched a philosophical program that changed the course of European thought. Not only the preeminent phenomenologist, Husserl was also one of the great systematic philosophers, akin to Aristotle and Kant. It is time for Husserl to take his rightful place in this pantheon. Accordingly, this study of Husserl will focus on his overall system of philosophy, in which phenomenology plays its special role.
There are two Husserls: the passionate, revolutionary philosopher who fits naturally in the dynamic “continental”tradition, and the exacting, mathematical, formalist philosopher who fits naturally in the “analytic”tradition. Both are equally real; both have exerted influence on different trends in 20th-century philosophy. Yet there is also a third Husserl, the one who integrates the revolutionary Husserl and the scientific Husserl. This is the systematic philosopher who sees all things as interdependent, the Husserl who even produced a theory of dependence itself, a theory that binds together his many other theories about consciousness, nature, society, number, ideal “logical”forms in all these things, and so on.
Husserl entered the intellectual scene near the turn of the 20th century, a time when psychology, logic, mathematics, and physics were taking giant leaps. He initiated a new philosophical discipline to join these diverse sciences, setting phenomenology amidst the other core disciplines of philosophy. Integrating theories in logic, ontology, phenomenology, epistemology, and social cum ethical theory – in a way that is not yet widely understood – Husserl developed a complex and wide-ranging system of philosophy, including a high-level philosophy of philosophy cum science, mathematics, and humanistic concerns. It is my hope that the portrait of Husserl presented in this volume will simultaneously portray the revolutionary phenomenologist, the scientific philosopher, and the traditional systematist.
Husserl played a significant role in the flow of ideas in two 20th-century traditions: “continental”(European) philosophy and “analytic”philosophy, the former inspired by humanistic concerns and the latter by logical-mathematical-scientific concerns. Husserl's impact on continental philosophy is well known, along with his impact on phenomenological philosophy in the Americas and Asia. His impact on analytic philosophy, however, is only gradually coming to light. (See Dreyfus 1982; Mohanty 1982; Coffa 1991; Dummett 1993; Richardson 1998; Friedman 1999; Hill and Rosado Haddock 2000; Fisette 2003; Livingston 2004; Ryckman 2005, 2006.) The present volume explores the place of Husserl's system in the long sweep of history from Plato and Aristotle through Descartes, Hume, and Kant into 20th-century philosophy, highlighting his significance for these three historical lineages.
I have sought to present Husserl's complex ideas – his methods, concepts, theories, and system – in as simple a form as possible. Still, Husserl's thought is complex, and I try to show its complexity as the different themes interact across the chapters to follow. Weaving in and out of these doctrinal discussions are observations about Husserl's relations to other historical figures, indicating the context of his ideas. Also informing the discussion are passing remarks about the development of his ideas in particular texts, indicating the history of views within his own corpus. These aspects of the presentation offer guides for reading Husserl, as our presentation of Husserl is to serve readers as a first stop at Husserl's door, in the spirit of the Routledge Philosophers series.
Thus, I am writing for several audiences at once. As I turn to each area of philosophical theory that Husserl entered, I sketch basic concepts, key alternative views, and main historical thrusts in the background of Husserl's own discussion. If you are an experienced reader of philosophy but relatively new to Husserl, you may read a given chapter without, at first, following the narrative that moves through the chapters one by one. If you are already well versed in Husserl, you will easily find your own way to the themes and issues that most interest you, not least in the two chapters devoted to phenomenology. Whatever your background may be, you will find in Chapter 2 a unified presentation of Husserl's overall system, featuring an analysis of how and why the various parts of the system are mutually interdependent. And if you want to study Husserl's system in detail, finding issues of phenomenology in that larger context, then kindly follow the narrative as it develops over the course of the book. If you are particularly interested in the history of Husserl's work, and its development through his voluminous writings over half a century, then you may follow the leads I have laid down about particular texts, outlined in Chapter 1 but recited along the way. Finally, if you are interested in specific texts in Husserl's corpus, and how they play in his phenomenology, ontology, and so on, or in his overall system, then follow the references to particular texts, which I include as I reconstruct particular ideas along the way.
There is a tradition in European philosophy, from Rousseau and Kant to Nietzsche and Heidegger and recent cultural critics like Foucault and Derrida, a tradition that emphasizes radical change. History is a dynamic process, always changing from one contingent social reality to another, embracing abstract philosophical theories about mind and body and society, and concrete political movements promoting particular ideologies of self and polis. In this tradition of “historicity,” Husserl plays his role of abstract revolutionary, pressing the cause of phenomenology in philosophy and beyond. Husserl's famous critique of the “life-world”holds that the European sciences have lost touch with everyday life, in their zeal for “mathematizing” nature. The result is a disastrous loss of respect for rationality in ordering human life, from science to politics, an irrationality Husserl saw as driving the hideous movement of National Socialism in his last years (1935–8) in his adopted land of Germany. Apart from politically revolutionary critique, Husserl's philosophy falls largely in line with the revolutionary “critique of reason”launched by Kant in so many words. Husserl saw transcendental phenomenology as a radical rethinking of our relation to the world, not simply a cognitive relation (conceptual representation infused with sensory input, per Kant), but an “intentional”relation guided by ideal meaning. Husserl's passion for this vision launched a large and continuing movement in European thought. Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, inter alios, developed their own visions of phenomenology, dependent on Husserl's yet seeking fundamental changes, as their existential phenomenologies emphasized concrete practical and political engagements. In their wakes followed the social perspectives and cultural theories of language in Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jürgen Habermas, still visibly moving in a philosophical space of meaning framed by Husserl.
But there is another tradition in European philosophy, the tradition that emphasizes not political, social, or cultural dynamics, but science, mathematics, and logic, with a very different dynamic. For decades, this tradition was seen as the legacy of logical theory developed by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and then the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 1930s, especially Rudolf Carnap, who promoted the ideal of exact philosophy guided by the new logic. The positivists took mathematics and modern physics as exemplars of clear and objective philosophical thought, as opposed to the impressionistic, subjective, and emotional writing of what are today called the continental philosophers. What's wrong with this familiar picture? Decades before the Vienna Circle, Husserl promoted a model of rigorous, exact, and scientific philosophy, in line with the ideals of his teacher Franz Brentano and his hero Bernard Bolzano. At the turn of the 20th century, Vienna was the high point of European thought, in art, architecture, music, science, and mathematics. Husserl came of age in that Vienna, while studying also in Germany. His early work was entirely in mathematics and then philosophy of mathematics. His revolutionary zeal was similar to that of the European mathematicians of his day, including his friends Georg Cantor (pioneer in set theory) and David Hilbert (pioneer in formal axiomatic methods leading to the very idea of metamathematics). Even Albert Einstein evolved in this milieu, in direct contact with Hilbert and with the mathematician Hermann Weyl, who was directly influenced by Husserl. Carnap himself attended Husserl's lectures, which left an indelible imprint on Carnap's positivist treatise The Logical Structure of the World (1928). Husserl's place in the logical-mathematical-scientific turn of European philosophy is less well known but emerging in force, as the details of Husserl's role in this lineage are gradually coming to light. Stay tuned for references in the text to follow, especially Chapter 1 and Chapter 3.
The portrait I shall develop of Husserl's philosophy is that of an intricate philosophical system that ranges widely yet develops with an overall unity, at all points opening to still further exploration. Of the great thinkers in the West, the greatest systematic philosophers were arguably first Aristotle and then Kant. Husserl joins these two, I submit, on the short list of greatest systematic philosophers, those who produced a truly wide-ranging system of philosophy and worked out exceedingly careful details through the system. There are other systematic thinkers of great stature – Aquinas, Hegel, Whitehead. But my thesis here is that the greatest systematic philosophers are Aristotle, Kant, and Husserl – not least because each system in this sequence can be seen as a successor system that radically changes and improves on its predecessors.
What makes Husserl a systematic thinker is the way everything is related and interdependent as he writes about consciousness, meaning, evidence, the natural world, time, space, cultural institutions, number, mathematical structure, science, objectivity and subjectivity, objects and their properties, essences and categories, and more. What is remarkable in Husserl's oeuvre is the natural way in which one text ties into another, even if the texts were written decades apart and are nominally aimed at different themes. Trained as a mathematician, Husserl seems to have carried the sense of cumulative results into his philosophical work. Indeed, he rarely changed his views as he constantly expanded on his previous results, much as a mathematician builds on previous theorems. Few philosophers tie their results so tightly together, and few develop their ideas in this theorem-by-theorem way. Accordingly, Husserl's views about consciousness presuppose his views about body and vice versa, his conception of logic presupposes his conception of “intuition”and vice versa, his theory of essence joins with his theory of dependence, and so on. Moreover, as is explained in Chapter 2, Husserl's system includes its own metatheory, a theory about how the partial theories in the system are bound together: they are parts of a well-defined whole, and Husserl's theory of parts and wholes thus allows a theory of how his overall theory of consciousness-and-world is tied together.
Husserl's system of ideas is thus an instance of what he called a “precise [prägnant] whole,”where each part of the whole depends on every other part.Husserl's choice of phrase is evocative.Although the German “prägnant”is sometimes translated as “pregnant”(as in “a pregnant phrase,”which is full of meaning), the term derives from the verb “prägen,”meaning to stamp or mint a coin, producing a precise form, and so “prägnant”means precise, concise, or terse. Thus, Husserl is saying that a prägnant whole is one that is precisely formed, namely so that its parts are precisely bound together. So it is with the parts of Husserl's philosophical system: the partial theories – of experience, meaning, time, culture, essence, number, and so on – are bound together tightly into the whole theory that is his system.
Husserl's writing can be difficult. He wrote a series of books, each of which was to be a new introduction to the new science of phenomenology. Yet, somehow, he lacked the knack for laying out his theories so that one idea follows simply on another. He was not building his edifice one brick at a time. Husserl's pedagogy is thus challenging, with one text on one theme echoing another text on a different theme. In the end Husserl's writing, and thinking, is holographic. It is as if he is working, year to year, from an eidetic pictorial image etched in his mind, a broad canvas on which his system is painted. As he refines one part of the image, he preserves the rest, integrating the new work with the old.
Accordingly, Husserl's texts are like holographic plates, or rather chunks of the whole plate that contains Husserl's systematic philosophical image of consciousness and the world. Husserl's whole philosophical system is visible in each of his texts, although each text focuses on specific themes of phenomenology, ontology, logic, and so on. So the system is a hologram. Reading Husserl on one theme reignites the image of his whole system, inviting the reader to look more closely into other parts of the system. Hence, as I work through Husserl's system chapter by chapter, I frequently allude to other parts of the system, in other chapters, earlier or later, reconstructing the system to the best of my ability so as to show the whole in the parts. The same point or idea will thus appear in different guises in several chapters. This style of repetition is meant to show the interconnections among the various parts of Husserl's system, each reflected in the others. If I am right about the holographic character of Husserl's thought, there is no other way to lay out the systematic structure of his philosophy.
The narrative of the book follows this vision of Husserl's overall system of philosophy. Chapter 1 introduces Husserl, the human being, his life, his work, his significance.
Chapter 2 then constructs an overview of Husserl's philosophical system, sketching the key parts and how they work together. This scheme follows the development of ideas in Husserl's first major work, the Logical Investigations, which appeared in three volumes covering some 1,000 pages. It is not easy to see the forest for the trees, and so I try to portray the structure of the forest before describing in detail individual trees (concepts) or groves (theories).
In the Investigations Husserl develops a constantly expanding overall theory, as he progresses through specific theories in logic, language theory, ontology, phenomenology, and, finally, epistemology. The same progression is discernible in his next book, Ideas I, but phenomenology is there given the salient role. Husserl's later books, and the many courses of lectures published posthumously, all expand on ideas or theories that fit into the organization laid out in the Investigations. I have chosen to follow that plan through the remaining chapters, each expanding on Husserl's results in one of the core areas of philosophy, guided by the overall structure of theory mapped in the Investigations. It is sometimes said that Husserl moved through radical changes of doctrine, from a realist ontology to a purely phenomenological philosophy and on to a radical idealism. However, I concur with those who say there is a deep continuity throughout Husserl's corpus, for each subsequent body of work takes its place in the plan of the Investigations. The resulting picture of Husserl's philosophy is then systematic, with phenomenology taking its place in the system, interdependent with doctrines of logic, ontology, epistemology.
Chapter 3, accordingly, studies Husserl's conception of “pure logic,”especially bringing out his prescient vision of what would later be called semantics (how meanings represent various types of objects) and metamathematics (the mathematical theory of mathematical theories). Husserl's philosophy of everyday language enters here, as language expresses meanings, which play their roles in relating expressions to the world.
Chapter 4 then pursues Husserl's views in ontology. These include a theory of “essences”(species, properties, relations) as ideal or abstract entities, and a theory of parts and wholes, in which a theory of dependence arises (how one object may depend on another for its existence). These theories play their roles in other of Husserl's theories, including his theory of the relation of consciousness to the external world, involving his so-called transcendental idealism.
Chapter 5 turns to phenomenology. Here I present Husserl's new, first-person science of consciousness, couched in fairly neutral terms, and I summarize his various results, including analyses of the structure of intentionality (consciousness “of”something), the structure of our experience of space and time and physical objects, and awareness of other persons.
Chapter 6 delves into the more technical details of Husserl's formulation of phenomenology. These include his method of “bracketing”or “epoché”(bracket the question of the existence of objects in the natural world around us and thereby attend to the way we experience them). Here we pursue details of Husserl's theory of intentionality, as each act of consciousness is directed toward an appropriate object via a certain ideal meaning or conceptual structure called a “noema”(from the Greek for what is thought or known). His theory of intentionality harks back to his conception of logic.
Chapter 7 follows with Husserl's theory of knowledge, featuring his generalized doctrine of “intuition,”or evidential experience. We perceive or “intuit”physical objects around us, but we also “see”or have insight about the natures or essences of things, including mathematical forms. Husserl develops an analysis of these various forms of “intuitive”experience, which ground knowledge of various types of object. We also consider his account of systematic knowledge in the sciences, and the ways in which scientific knowledge depends on everyday knowledge in the “life-world.”
Chapter 8 purses Husserl's views on the foundation of ethics, which are not so well known as his phenomenology and attendant doctrines. Husserl views ethical norms as grounded in our experience in reason and love, yet objective, somewhat in the way that meaning in logic is objective yet grounded in the intentionality of consciousness.
Chapter 9 concludes with an appraisal of Husserl's legacy and continuing relevance. Husserl's role in 20th-century philosophy is addressed in both “continental”and “analytic”traditions. Then specific implications are drawn for contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness theory.
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was a Czecho-Austro-German philosopher best known as the founder of phenomenology, which he defined as the science of the essence of consciousness. In fact, Husserl was one of the great systematic philosophers of the Western tradition, joining Aristotle and Kant in the top rank of systembuilders. This book presents Husserl's overall system of philosophy, in which his conception of phenomenology plays a central role. Historically, Husserl's phenomenology was the seminal force in 20th-century continental European philosophy, while his conception of logic and epistemology interacted also with the tradition of 20thcentury analytic philosophy. Husserl's place in the longer history of philosophy is becoming apparent as we gain some distance from the preceding century.
A broad picture of the context in which Husserl wrote can be gained from the following works. Looking to the tradition of classical phenomenology, Dermot Moran expounds the results of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and other early 20th-century phenomenologists, while Simon Critchley offers a succinct perspective on the revolutionary style of continental philosophy that features phenomenology. Looking to the tradition of analytic philosophy,Alberto Coffa interprets the development of logical theory, especially semantic theory, in which Husserl plays a sometimes neglected role, while Michael Dummett appraises the growth of analytic philosophy, looking to the relations between Husserl and Frege. Barry Smith interprets the wider tradition of Austrian philosophy, featuring Brentano, inter alios, a tradition that gave rise to both phenomenology and analytic philosophy.
Coffa, J. Alberto. 1991. The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Critchley, Simon. 2001. Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dummett, Michael. 1993. Origins of Analytical Philosophy. Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press.
Moran, Dermot. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology, London and New York: Routledge.
Smith, Barry. 1994. Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano. Chicago and LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court.