Edmund Husserl

Key ideas

1. Against psychologism. The laws of logic and mathematics are ideal and timeless, not descriptions of how minds work. The theorem of Pythagoras holds whoever thinks it, while thinking is a temporal process.
2. Intentionality. Consciousness is always directed at something: to see, hope, fear or judge is to see, hope, fear or judge something. Husserl distinguished the act’s quality (believing, doubting) from its matter, and acts that merely mean an object from acts that present it directly.
3. The epoché and the reductions. By suspending our taken-for-granted belief in the world, without denying it, we can study how the world appears and how its meaning is constituted. The eidetic reduction moves from particular cases to their essences, and the transcendental reduction to the consciousness that constitutes meaning.
4. Time-consciousness. We hear a melody, not a string of disconnected notes, because each moment of consciousness holds a primal impression of the present, a retention of what has just passed and a protention of what is about to come.
5. Transcendental idealism. In Ideas I (1913) Husserl held that the sense of being real can be traced only to how things are constituted in experience. He meant a claim about meaning and validity, not that consciousness creates things, and many of his students rejected it.
6. Intersubjectivity and the body. We grasp other minds through empathy, a direct but never fully immediate experience, and something counts as objective when it is available to others as well. Perception is also embodied: we see from a here, with a lived body that we can also experience as a thing.
7. The lifeworld. In the Crisis he argued that modern science mathematises nature and then mistakes a method for reality, cutting knowledge from human meaning. The remedy is to return to the lifeworld of lived experience that science presupposes.

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) founded phenomenology, the disciplined description of experience as it is lived, and built it on one observation: consciousness is always consciousness of something. Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas all worked from his writing, and against it.

He was born in Prossnitz (now Prostějov) in Moravia, then in the Austrian Empire, into a Jewish family. After a doctorate in mathematics at Vienna in 1883 he heard Franz Brentano lecture there, which turned him to philosophy. He taught at Halle from 1887, at Göttingen from 1901, after the success of the Logical Investigations (1900–01), and at Freiburg from 1916, where Edith Stein and later Martin Heidegger were his assistants. He retired in 1928 and in 1933 was banned from the university library because of his Jewish family background. He died in Freiburg in 1938, and soon afterwards a Franciscan priest, Herman Van Breda, smuggled tens of thousands of pages of his manuscripts to Leuven, where they became the Husserl Archives.

What is phenomenology?

Husserl’s call was “To the things themselves!” Look at a cup on a desk. You see one side of it, yet you see a cup, not a facade. Phenomenology describes how things are given in perception, memory and judgement, without first deciding what lies behind appearances. It is not introspective psychology: it seeks the essential structures that any such experience must have.

Why did Husserl reject psychologism?

Early in the Logical Investigations he argued that the laws of logic are ideal, not psychological. The theorem of Pythagoras is the same whoever thinks it, whereas mental acts are events in time, and explaining the first by the second confuses ideal with real laws. Frege had made a similar charge against Husserl’s own Philosophy of Arithmetic in a review of 1894. Scholars disagree about how far it changed his mind: J. N. Mohanty argues that the change grew from his own development, and Husserl had met Bolzano’s work by about 1890.

What is intentionality?

Husserl took from Brentano the thesis that every conscious act is directed at something, and made intentionality the core of the new subject. He separated the quality of an act, such as believing or doubting, from its matter, what it is about and how. Thinking that your passport is in a drawer and seeing it there share a matter, but only the second presents the passport itself. He rejected the picture of perception as awareness of inner images: in ordinary perception we meet the things themselves.

What are the epoché and the reduction?

In daily life we live in the natural attitude and take the world for granted. The epoché, a Greek word for suspension, brackets that belief without denying the world, so that we can turn from what the world contains to how it appears. The phenomenological reduction then studies how consciousness constitutes the meaning of what it is conscious of. He credited Descartes with starting this turn to first-person subjectivity and took the word “transcendental” from Kant.

How do we hear a melody?

Each moment of consciousness holds a primal impression of the note sounding now, a retention of the notes just past and a protention of those about to come. This is why we hear a tune, not isolated tones.

Was Husserl an idealist?

From Ideas I (1913) he described phenomenology as a transcendental idealism. He did not mean that the world is made of ideas or that minds create things. His claim concerns meaning and validity: what it is for a thing to be real is traced in how it is constituted in experience. Many of his students, among them Roman Ingarden, resisted this turn.

Other minds, the body and the lifeworld

We grasp other people through empathy, an experience that resembles perception but is never as immediate as our access to ourselves, and that difference keeps others other. See the problem of other minds. Objectivity is intersubjective: a thing is objective when it is available to others too. Perception is also embodied: we see from a here, through a body we live in.

In the Crisis (1936) he argued that modern science, from Galileo, mathematises nature and then mistakes a method for reality. The remedy is to return to the lifeworld, the world of lived experience that science presupposes.

What was his influence?

Heidegger turned phenomenology towards the question of being in Being and Time (1927), dedicated to Husserl, and later attacked his idealism. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas all engaged critically with him; Levinas co-translated the Cartesian Meditations into French, and Merleau-Ponty read the manuscripts at Leuven in 1939. Through Gadamer and Ricoeur he influenced hermeneutics, and through Derrida deconstruction. His analyses of intentionality, embodiment and time are now used in philosophy of mind; for the movement see phenomenology.

UGC NET Unit 6 lists his method, intentionality, reduction and intersubjectivity, and UPSC Paper I his method, theory of essences and avoidance of psychologism; see the UGC NET guide and UPSC guide.

How to start reading Husserl

Begin with the Cartesian Meditations, from lectures meant to introduce phenomenology to a French audience, then the opening sections of Ideas I. The Logical Investigations is long: read the Prolegomena for the case against psychologism, then the later investigations selectively. No Husserl text is in this site’s library, because the standard English translations are modern and not free online.