HUSSERL, EDMUND

HUSSERL, EDMUND (1859–1938), Austrian philosopher.

One of the most significant and prolific philosophers of the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl is widely known for his development of several forms of phenomenology. As a student, Husserl attended Franz Brentano's (1838–1917) lectures on descriptive psychology or psychognosy at the University of Vienna, which inspired him to undertake his own intensive investigations in the introspective structural analysis of the contents of thought. Throughout his later period, Husserl explored the implications of these findings for a variety of traditional philosophical problems in logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and theory of knowledge.

Husserl was born in Prossnitz (Prostejov) in Moravia, which now is part of the Czech Republic and was then a garrison town of the Austrian Empire. He studied astronomy, physics, and mathematics at the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin with the famous mathematicians Karl Weierstrass (1815–1887) and Leopold Kronecker (1823–1891). He also attended lectures in philosophy by Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) and Tomas Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), a student of Brentano's. Husserl wrote his dissertation in mathematics at the University of Vienna with Leo Königsberger (1837–1921), who in turn had studied with Weierstrass, earning a doctorate in 1883 with the thesis Beiträgezur Theorie der Variationsrechnung (Contributions toward a theory of the calculus of variations). After 1884, Husserl began attending lectures by Brentano, and decided to devote his continued studies to philosophy. Changing venues again, this time to the University of Halle, Husserl wrote his Habilitationsschrift titled Über den Begriff der Zahl (On the concept of number) in 1887 with Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), another former student of Brentano's. This work, reflecting Husserl's developing interests in logic and philosophy of mathematics from an intentionalist point of view, was revised as Husserl's first major publication, Philosophie der Arithmetik: Psychologische und logische Untersuchungen (Philosophy of arithmetic: psychological and logical investigations), appearing in 1891.

In this early phase of his philosophy, Husserl was under the influence of Brentano's thesis of the immanent intentionality of all psychological phenomena, according to which every thought intends an object that is literally contained within the thought. Some of his critics at the time misinterpreted his adoption of an intentionalist standpoint with respect to the origin of number concepts, seeing it as an objectionable form of psychologism. Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) in particular complained of Husserl's efforts to construe the nature of objective mathematical entities and relations in terms of subjective psychological factors. Although Husserl had been critical also of Frege's logicism—the effort to reduce all of mathematics to pure logic—as mere empty formalism, Frege's objections seem to have struck home at some deep level, and Husserl soon came to renounce his early efforts to explain mathematical concepts by appeal to Brentano's intentionalist theory of mind. In the foreword to the first edition of his major work, the Logische Untersuchungen (Logical investigations, 1900–1901), Husserl speaks of his "disastrous choice of terminology" in referring to the "psychological nature" of the collective combinations that constitute the conceptual foundations of arithmetic in his early theory. By the time of the second revised edition of this two-volume work in 1913, Husserl had undergone what many twenty-first-century thinkers lament while others celebrate as his transcendental turn. His philosophy from this time forward took on a more distinctively Kantian slant, meaning that he began to think of philosophy as directed toward the discovery of the presuppositions of experience that of necessity lie beyond what can be empirically known.

Also in 1913, Husserl published the three volumes of his Ideen (Ideas), in which he outlined the main principles of his phenomenology. For Husserl, Brentano first sowed the seed of Ideen in his lectures on descriptive psychology, which he also spoke of as phenomenology. Husserl explains his project as that of investigating the essential ideal structures of consciousness, which he proposes to do by means of the method of epoché. This word in its original Greek meaning signifies a pause or halting in the pursuit of an activity. The ancient Skeptics applied the term to a suspension of belief due to the difficulties of attaining certainty in knowledge. Husserl advances a similar interpretation that he refers to as "bracketing the natural attitude." He requires that phenomenology begin by suspending belief in the existence of objects corresponding to the contents of thoughts in order to investigate their structures independently of the existence or nonexistence of things. In his later Sorbonne lectures, the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl describes progressive stages of the epoché, leading to an increasingly more penetrating grasp of the underlying intentional structures of consciousness, culminating finally in the transcendental epoché. What Husserl claims to discover in the process is an infinitely receding series of time horizons involving the contents of psychological presentations, and concerning the potential for the thinking subject to act in response to what is perceived. As each horizon is attained another presents itself, posing an equally formidable purely descriptive phenomenological challenge. This led Husserl later in life to describe himself always as a beginner in philosophy, faced with a series of infinite tasks, as though nothing substantial had previously been achieved on which to build.

In his final years, Husserl concentrated on the problems of intersubjectivity, trying to understand how it is possible for different thinkers to be conscious of and refer in thought and language to the same object from a phenomenological standpoint. The natural attitude, with its assumption that the contents of consciousness correspond to real external things that are objectively causally interrelated as explained by empirical science and subject to natural scientific law, is once again the focus of Husserl's critical analysis, especially as it applies to psychology and sociology in his unfinished but powerfully insightful later work, The Crisis of the European Sciences (1936).

Although Husserl did not directly exert an influence on popular European culture, his pioneering studies in phenomenology were of crucial importance to his student Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) in his existential phenomenology and ontology or theory of being, and to Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) and their followers. Through these later writers, Husserl's impact eventually extended beyond academic philosophy to the modern tradition of existentialism in philosophy and literature.

See alsoBrentano, Franz; Frege, Gottlob.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Husserl, Edmund. Husserliana: Edmund Husserl—Gesammelte Werke. Dordrecht, 1950–. Definitive ongoing edition of Husserl's collected works in German.

——. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, Ill. 1970.

——. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague, 1977.

——. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by Fred Kersten. The Hague, 1980–1982.

——. Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations: With Supplementary Texts from 1887–1901. Translated by Dallas Willard. Dordrecht, 2003.

Secondary Sources

Bell, David. Husserl. London, 1990. An introduction to Husserl's thought intended for beginning readers presupposing minimal prior familiarity with philosophy in the phenomenological tradition.

Carr, David. Interpreting Husserl: Critical and Comparative Studies. Dordrecht, 1987. Examination, among other interesting topics, of the concept of the transcendental ego in the later Husserl; explores the transitional periods in Husserl's thought throughout his career.

Rollinger, Robin D. Husserl's Position in the School of Brentano. Dordrecht, 1999. Well-documented treatment of Husserl's philosophy in relation to Brentano's empirical psychology, psychologism, and immanent intentionality thesis, within the broader Brentano school in descriptive psychology and intentionalist epistemology.

Smith, Barry, and David Woodruff Smith, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Cambridge, U.K., 1995. Essays on Husserl's philosophy, including the theory of perception, knowledge, meaning and language, mereology or theory of part-whole relations, and philosophy of mathematics.

Sokolowski, Robert, ed. Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition: Essays in Phenomenology. Washington, D.C., 1988. Multiple facets of Husserl's phenomenology explored in a collection of essays; clear exposition of Husserl's theory of ideas and idea contents or noemata.

Spiegelberg, Herbert. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction. Third revised and enlarged edition. The Hague, 1982. Classic detailed study of the historical roots of phenomenology; particularly valuable for understanding the dynamic personal and philosophical relation between Brentano and Husserl.

Zahavi, Dan. Husserl's Phenomenology. Stanford, Calif., 2003. Comprehensive discussion of Husserl's philosophy, with special emphasis on the topics of the phenomenology of internal time consciousness, body, intersubjectivity, and life-world.

Dale Jacquette