Edmund Husserl

Founder of Phenomenology

Dermot Moran

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745639437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Dermot Moran provides a lucid, engaging, and critical introduction to Edmund Husserl's philosophy, with specific emphasis on his development of phenomenology. This book is a comprehensive guide to Husserl's thought from its origins in nineteenth-century concerns with the nature of scientific knowledge and with psychologism, through his breakthrough discovery of phenomenology and his elucidation of the phenomenological method, to the late analyses of culture and the life-world. Husserl's complex ideas are presented in a clear and expert manner. Individual chapters explore Husserl's key texts including Philosophy of Arithmetic, Logical Investigations, Ideas I, Cartesian Meditations and Crisis of the European Sciences. In addition, Moran offers penetrating criticisms and evaluations of Husserl's achievement, including the contribution of his phenomenology to current philosophical debates concerning consciousness and the mind.

Edmund Husserl is an invaluable guide to understanding the thought of one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century. It will be helpful to students of contemporary philosophy, and to those interested in scientific, literary and cultural studies on the European continent.

1

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938): Life and Writings

Edmund Husserl was a serious, somewhat distracted academic, although ‘not without charm and a certain sense of humour’,¹ who lived his professional life within the confines of the German university system. He published only sporadically, and generally avoided philosophical conferences (since, in his view, they did not produce genuine philosophizing), and made few trips outside Germany. Even his most devoted students considered his lectures to be interminable monologues, lost in intricate detail (he reminded one hearer of a mad watchmaker²), although he obviously had charisma and conveyed authority such that, as his Freiburg student Gerda Walther (1897–1977) recalls, at the lecture podium he seemed like an Old Testament prophet.³ While he could write clearly and fluently (as in Krisis), much of his output consists of notes – complicated, private musings not intended for publication. As we shall see in chapter 2, he had a profound, even grandiose sense of the mission of philosophy, and sought always to lead ‘the philosophical life’. But he also had constantly to struggle against deep uncertainty and depression to gain the longed-for ‘clarity’ that obsessed him.

Husserl’s Early Education and his First Mentor, Karl Weierstrass

Edmund was born into comfortable, bourgeois circumstances on 8 April 1859, in Prossnitz, Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire, now Prostejov in the Czech Republic.⁴ His father, Adolf Abraham (1827–84), owned a draper’s store, and his family belonged among the assimilated Jews in what was the largest and most liberal Jewish community in Moravia at that time. Edmund was brought up in the Jewish religion in a liberal manner.⁵ He attended a local school for three years (1865–8), and then transferred to the Leopoldstädter Realgymnasium in Vienna and, a year later, to the Deutsches Staatsgymnasium in Olmütz (now Olomouc in the Czech Republic). He was an unexceptional student, albeit with an aptitude for mathematics,⁶ and he graduated in June 1876 with solid but unspectacular results. Indeed, his own classmates were somewhat surprised when he announced his intention to study astronomy at university.⁷

Husserl enrolled in the University of Leipzig that autumn, and for the next three semesters attended lectures in mathematics, physics and astronomy. He took philosophy lectures from the renowned philosopher and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), lectures that, at the time, made little impression.⁸ However, encouraged by another philosophy student, Thomas Masaryk (1850–1937), he began reading the British empiricists, especially Berkeley, who held a lifelong fascination for him.⁹ In the summer of 1878 he moved to Berlin, where he spent six semesters studying mathematics, attending the lectures of Karl Weierstrass (1815–97),¹⁰ renowned for his success in arithmetizing analysis, and Leopold Kronecker (1823–1891). He also attended philosophy lectures, given by Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908) and Johann Eduard Erdmann (1805–92) – but again they made no great impression.¹¹ Weierstrass, on the other hand, was inspirational, instilling in the young Husserl the ‘ethos for scientific striving’.¹² His lectures on the theory of functions awoke Husserl’s interest in the foundations of mathematics such that he would later write that he hoped to do for philosophy what Weierstrass had done for arithmetic: that is, set it on a single foundation.¹³

In the belief that an Austrian degree might improve his chances of employment,¹⁴ at the beginning of the summer semester of 1881 Husserl transferred to Vienna to study mathematics. He earned his doctoral degree in 1882 with a purely mathematical dissertation on differential calculus, ‘Beiträge zur Theorie der Variationsrechnung’ (‘Contributions to the Theory of the Calculus of Variations’), supervised by Leopold Königsberger (1837–1921), a disciple of Weierstrass. In the summer of 1883 he returned to Berlin to assist the ailing Weierstrass, but soon became restless, and in October began a year’s military service. On his discharge from the army, he moved to Vienna, where his friend Masaryk was now Privatdozent. Masaryk recommended that Husserl attend the lectures of the former Catholic priest Franz Brentano, who was causing quite a stir with his new approach to psychology. Masaryk, a committed Christian, also encouraged him to read the New Testament, leading to Husserl’s baptism in the Lutheran church in Vienna on 26 April 1886 (Chronik, p. 15). Thereafter he remained a committed if non-confessional Christian, reading the New Testament daily.¹⁵ Although his phenomenological approach was ‘atheological’ (Briefwechsel, 7: 237),¹⁶ in that it bracketed the results of all positive sciences, including theology, nevertheless he was deeply religious, and even saw phenomenology as progressing ultimately to theological questions and treating scientifically what had previously been symbolized in religion. A close confidante of his final years, Sr Adelgundis Jaegerschmidt records him as saying: ‘In my phenomenological reduction I simply want to gather all philosophies and religions by means of a universally valid method of cognition.’¹⁷ His aim was, as he put it, to reach ‘God without God’. Husserl had converted from his lapsed Judaism to Christianity for genuinely religious reasons; however, he always rejected the traditional conception of the divine attributes as absurd: for example, he denies that God has the kind of immediate, non-inferential and complete intuition of entities that has been traditionally attributed to him.¹⁸ His mature conception of the divine was expressed in terms of quasi-Hegelian ‘absolute spirit’, in the form of a ‘community of monads’ in a teleological project of absolute reason, or as an absolute ego that temporalizes itself, pluralizes itself in individual egos, and requires expression in the world (15: 381).¹⁹

With Brentano in Vienna

Husserl spent but two years (1884 to 1886) with Brentano, attending his lectures and absorbing the latter’s distaste for German Idealism and his admiration for British empiricism, notably Hume.²⁰ Brentano was also part of the German neo-scholastic ‘return to Aristotle’. He wanted philosophy to emulate the kind of exact description practised by empiricists from Aristotle to Mill. In Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) he proposed a new strict science of psychology – descriptive psychology – as a classificatory science of mental acts and their contents based on the apodictic self-evidence of inner perception. From the Scholastics, he took over the concept of intentionality, ‘directedness to an object’ (die Richtung auf ein Objekt; PES 88), as the chief characteristic of ‘mental phenomena’.

Brentano’s vision inspired Husserl to become a philosopher: ‘Brentano’s lectures gave me for the first time the conviction that encouraged me to choose philosophy as my life’s work, the conviction that philosophy too was a serious discipline which also could be and must be dealt with in the spirit of the strictest science.’²¹ In particular, Husserl cites Brentano’s attempts to trace every concept back to its intuitive sources. As he later claimed, he was also particularly stimulated by Brentano’s attempted reform of Aristotelian logic,²² proposed in his 1884–5 lecture course. Husserl remained in contact with Brentano even after he left Vienna. He diligently collected Brentano’s lecture transcripts, e.g. his Descriptive Psychology lectures of 1887–91, his investigation of the senses, as well as his studies of fantasy, memory and judgement. Husserl always acknowledged the fundamental importance of Brentano.²³ They remained friends and engaged in correspondence on technical issues in mathematics and geometry until Brentano’s death in 1917.²⁴ Husserl initially followed Brentano’s concept of descriptive psychology in his first publication, Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891), which aimed at the clarification of arithmetical concepts by elucidating their ‘psychological origin’. For example, in his late Krisis he could write:

This is the place to recall the extraordinary debt we owe to Brentano for the fact that he began his attempt to reform psychology with an investigation of the peculiar characteristics of the psychic (in contrast to the physical) and showed intentionality to be one of these characteristics; the science of “psychic phenomena”, then, has to do everywhere with conscious experiences. (Krisis §68, pp. 233–4; Hua 6: 236)

But, crucially, Husserl continues: ‘Unfortunately, in the most essential matters he remained bound to the prejudices of the naturalistic tradition (Krisis, §68, p. 234; Hua 6: 236). In fact, it took Husserl many years to extract himself from the shadow of his teacher. As he wrote to his American student Marvin Farber:

Even though I began in my youth as an enthusiastic admirer of Brentano, I must admit that I deluded myself, for too long, and in a way hard to understand now, into believing that I was a co-worker on his philosophy, especially, his psychology. But in truth, my way of thinking was a totally different one from that of Brentano, already in my first work, namely the Habilitation work of 1887.²⁵

In LU Husserl was already marking off his differences from his teacher, rejecting his psychophysical dualism, his representationalism and his account of the distinction between inner and outer perception. Many years later he would point to the deficiency in Brentano’s conception of intentionality:

… Brentano’s discovery of intentionality never led to seeing in it a complex of performances (Zusammenhang von Leistungen), which are included as sedimented history in the currently constituted intentional unity and its current manners of givenness – a history that one can always uncover following a strict method. (FTL §97, p. 245; Hua 17: 252)

Husserl’s own breakthrough insight concerning intentionality came in 1898 (as he later recalled in Krisis), when he realized that there was a ‘universal a priori of correlation between experienced object and manners of givenness’ (Krisis §48, p. 166n. Hua 6: 169 n. 1). In other words, that intentionality really encapsulated the entire set of relations between subjectivity and every form of objectivity. Anything that is – whatever region it belongs to – must be understood as ‘an index of a subjective system of correlations’ (Krisis §48, p. 165; Hua 6: 168).

Inspired by Brentano and Weierstrass, Husserl became increasingly conscious of the need for a clarification of the fundamental concepts of mathematics and logic. An important influence on Husserl at this time was the four-volume Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Science, 1837) by the neglected Austrian thinker Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848),²⁶ which contained new approaches to semantics and logic, and, in particular, defended the objective validity of logical meanings.²⁷ Bolzano carefully distinguished between thoughts as psychic occurrences, their expression in linguistic sentences, the statements made, and the abstract propositions they stood for, ‘propositions-in-themselves’ (Sätze an sich) which have existence but not actuality, thus anticipating Frege’s critique of psychologism by some fifty years.²⁸ Husserl was drawn to Bolzano’s account of pure logic as the ‘theory of science’; his conception of science as a coherent intermeshing system of theoretical truths; his account of ‘presentations’ and ‘truths-in-themselves’ (Wahrheiten an sich), a conception later defended in the Prolegomena (1900). He adopted and developed Bolzano’s accounts of analyticity, logical consequence (Abfolge) and the distinction between the judgement itself (Satz an sich) – the content or proposition judged – and the act of judging (see ELE; Hua 24: §49c; see also 26: §8a), a distinction crucial for the development of pure logic, distinct from psychology.²⁹ On the other hand, it is clear from the Draft Preface to the second edition of LU that Husserl resented the claim (made by Rickert among others) that he was merely reviving Bolzano (EV, p. 37; Fink 130; 20/1: 298).³⁰

Brentano recommended that Husserl continue his studies with a former student, Carl Stumpf (1848–1936),³¹ who was actively developing descriptive psychology, in particular in concrete analyses of sense perception and spatial awareness.³² In 1886 Husserl moved to Halle, where he attended Stumpf’s psychology lectures, and in 1887 completed his Habilitation thesis, Über den Begriff der Zahl, Psychologische Analysen (On the Concept of Number, Psychological Analyses, Hua 12). The mathematician Georg Cantor (1845–1918), another former student of Weierstrass, was a member of the examination committee. Meanwhile, on 6 August 1887, he married Malvine Charlotte Steinschneider, who had also grown up in Prossnitz, the daughter of the sc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Edmund Husserl (1859–1938): Life and Writings
• 2 Husserl’s Conception of Philosophy
• 3 The Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891)
• 4 Husserl’s ‘Breakthrough Work’: Logical Investigations (1900/1901)
• 5 The Eidetic Phenomenology of Consciousness
• 6 Transcendental Phenomenology: An Infinite Project
• 7 The Ego, Embodiment, Otherness, Intersubjectivity and the ‘Community of Monads’
• Conclusion: Husserl’s Contribution to Philosophy
• Bibliography
• Index