Edmund Husserl
German philosopher
born April 8, 1859, Prossnitz, Moravia, Austrian Empire
[now Prostějov, Czech Republic]
died April 27, 1938, Freiburg im Breisgau, Ger.
Main
German philosopher, the founder of Phenomenology, a method
for the description and analysis of consciousness through
which philosophy attempts to gain the character of a strict
science. The method reflects an effort to resolve the
opposition between Empiricism, which stresses observation,
and Rationalism, which stresses reason and theory, by
indicating the origin of all philosophical and scientific
systems and developments of theory in the interests and
structures of the experiential life. (See phenomenology.)
Education and early life.
Husserl was born into a Jewish family and completed his
qualifying examinations in 1876 at the German public
gymnasium in the neighbouring city of Olmütz (Olomouc). He
then studied physics, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy
at the universities of Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna. In
Vienna he received his doctor of philosophy degree in 1882
with a dissertation entitled Beiträge zur Theorie der
Variationsrechnung (“Contributions to the Theory of the
Calculus of Variations”). In the autumn of 1883, Husserl
moved to Vienna to study with the philosopher and
psychologist Franz Brentano. Brentano’s critique of any
psychology oriented purely along scientific and
psychophysical lines and his claim that he had grounded
philosophy on his new descriptive psychology had a
widespread influence.
Husserl received a decisive impetus from Brentano and
from his circle of students. The spirit of the
Enlightenment, with its religious tolerance and its quest
for a rational philosophy, was very much alive in this
circle. Husserl’s striving for a more strictly rational
foundation found its corroboration here. From the outset,
such a foundation meant for him not only a theoretical act
but the moral meaning of responsibility in the sense of
ethical autonomy. In Vienna Husserl converted to the
Evangelical Lutheran faith, and one year later, in 1887, he
married Malvine Steinschneider, the daughter of a
secondary-school professor from Prossnitz. As his energetic
and skilled wife, she was his indispensable support, until
his death, in all the things of their daily life.
Lecturer at Halle.
In 1886 Husserl went—with a recommendation from Brentano—to
Carl Stumpf, the oldest of Brentano’s students, who had
further developed his psychology and who was professor of
philosophy and psychology at the University of Halle. In
1887 Husserl qualified as a lecturer in the university
(Habilitation). He had become a close friend of Stumpf, and
he was indebted to Stumpf for many suggestions in the
formation of his own descriptive concepts. The theme of
Husserl’s Habilitation thesis, Über den Begriff der Zahl:
Psychologische Analysen (“On the Concept of Number:
Psychological Analyses”), already showed Husserl in the
transition from his mathematical research to a reflection
upon the psychological source of the basic concepts of
mathematics. These investigations were an earlier draft of
his Philosophie der Arithmetik: Psychologische und logische
Untersuchungen, the first volume of which appeared in 1891.
The title of his inaugural lecture in Halle was “Über die
Ziele und Aufgaben der Metaphysik” (“On the Goals and
Problems of Metaphysics”). In the traditional sense
metaphysics is the study of Being. Though the text is lost,
it is clear that Husserl already understood his method of
the analysis of consciousness to be the way to a new
universal philosophy and metaphysics, which he hoped would
lay all previous schemes of metaphysics to rest.
The years of his teaching in Halle (1887–1901) were later
seen by Husserl to have been his most difficult. He often
doubted his ability as a philosopher and believed he would
have to give up his occupation. The problem of uniting a
psychological analysis of consciousness with a philosophical
grounding of formal mathematics and logic seemed insoluble.
But from this crisis there emerged the insight that the
philosophical grounding of logic and mathematics must
commence with an analysis of the experience that lies before
all formal thinking. It demanded an intensive study of the
British Empiricists (such as John Locke, George Berkeley,
David Hume, and John Stuart Mill) and a coming to terms with
the logic and semantics stemming from this
tradition—especially the logic of Mill—and with the attempts
at a “psycho-logic” grounding of logic then being made in
Germany.
The fruits of this interaction were presented in the
Logische Untersuchungen (1900–01; “Logical Investigations”),
which employed a method of analysis that Husserl now
designated as “phenomenological.” The revolutionary
significance of this work was only gradually recognized, for
its method could not be subsumed under any of the
philosophical orientations well known at that time. Bertrand
Russell, in a retrospective glance at the Logische
Untersuchungen, spoke of them as constituting one of the
monumental works of the present philosophical epoch.
Influence as a teacher.
After the publication of the Logische Untersuchungen,
Husserl was called, at the instigation of David Hilbert, a
Formalist mathematician, to the position of
ausserordentlicher Professor (university lecturer) by the
University of Göttingen. Husserl’s time of teaching in
Göttingen, from 1901 to 1916, was important as the source of
the Phenomenological movement and marked the formation of a
school reaching out to many lands and branching out in
numerous directions.
The phenomenological analysis of experienced
reality—i.e., of reality as it immediately presents itself
to consciousness—drew not only the German students who were
unsatisfied with the Neo-Kantianism that then prevailed in
Germany but also many young foreign philosophers who came
from the traditions of Empiricism and Pragmatism. From about
1905, Husserl’s students formed themselves into a group with
a common style of life and work. Standing in close personal
contact with their teacher, they always spoke of him as the
“master” and often accompanied him, philosophizing, on his
walks. They understood Phenomenology as the way to the
reform of the spiritual life.
This group was not a school, however, in any sense of
swearing by every word of the master; Husserl gave each of
his students the freedom to pursue suggestions in an
independent way. He wanted his teaching to be not a
transmission of finished results but rather the preparation
for a responsible setting of the problem. Thus, he
understood Phenomenology as a field to be worked over by the
coming generations of philosophers and claimed for himself
only the role of the “beginner.” In view of this freedom of
his teaching, the fact that Phenomenology soon branched off
in many directions is understandable, and it explains its
rapid international expansion.
Husserl himself had developed an individual style of
working: all of his thoughts were conceived in writing—the
minutes, so to speak, of the movement of his thought. During
his life he produced more than 40,000 pages written in
Gabelberger stenographic script.
Husserl was still at Göttingen when Max Scheler, who was
at that time a Privatdozent (unsalaried university lecturer)
in Jena and who later became an important Phenomenologist,
came in contact with Husserl (1910–11). Husserl’s friendship
with Wilhelm Dilthey, a pioneering theoretician of the human
sciences, also falls within the Göttingen period. Dilthey
saw the publication of the Logische Untersuchungen as a new
encouragement to the further development of his own
philosophical theory of the human sciences; and Husserl
himself later acknowledged that his encounter with Dilthey
had turned his attention to the historical life out of which
all of the sciences originated and that, in so doing, it had
opened for him the dimension of history as the foundation of
every theory of knowledge.
Phenomenology as the universal science.
In the Göttingen years, Husserl drafted the outline of
Phenomenology as a universal philosophical science. Its
fundamental methodological principle was what Husserl called
the phenomenological reduction. It focuses the philosopher’s
attention on uninterpreted basic experience and the quest,
thereby, for the essences of things. In this sense, it is
“eidetic” reduction. On the other hand, it is also the
reflection on the functions by which essences become
conscious. As such, the reduction reveals the ego for which
everything has meaning. Hence, Phenomenology took on the
character of a new style of transcendental philosophy, which
repeats and improves Kant’s mediation between Empiricism and
Rationalism in a modern way. Husserl presented its program
and its systematic outline in the Ideen zu einer reinen
Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (1913;
Ideas; General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology), of
which, however, only the first part was completed.
(Completion of the second part was hindered by the outbreak
of World War I.) With this work, Husserl wanted to give his
students a manual. The result, however, was just the
opposite: most of his students took Husserl’s turn to
transcendental philosophy as a lapse back into the old
system of thought and therefore rejected it. Because of this
turn, as well as the war, the phenomenological school fell
apart.
In contrast to the esteem that Husserl enjoyed from his
students, his position among his colleagues in Göttingen was
always difficult. His appointment to Persönlichen Ordinarius
(full professor) in 1906 had resulted from the decision of
the minister of education against the will of the faculty.
The representatives of the humanities faculty had
predominantly philological and historical interests and had
little appreciation for philosophy, whereas the natural
scientists were disappointed that, with the division of the
philosophical faculty, Husserl did not go over to the new
faculty of natural sciences.
Phenomenology and the renewal of spiritual life.
Thus his call in 1916 to the position of ordentlicher
Professor (university professor) at the University of
Freiburg meant a new beginning for Husserl in every respect.
His inaugural lecture on “Die reine Phänomenologie, ihr
Forschungsgebiet und ihre Methode” (“Pure Phenomenology, Its
Area of Research and Its Method”) circumscribed his program
of work. He had understood World War I as the collapse of
the old European world, in which spiritual culture, science,
and philosophy had held an incontestable position. In this
situation, the epistemological grounding that he had
previously provided for Phenomenology no longer satisfied
him; after this, his reflections were directed with special
emphasis upon philosophy’s task in the renewal of life.
In this sense he had set forth in his lectures on Erste
Philosophie (1923–24; “First Philosophy”) the thesis that
Phenomenology, with its method of reduction, is the way to
the absolute vindication of life—i.e., to the realization of
the ethical autonomy of man. Upon this basis, he continued
his clarification of the relation between a psychological
and a phenomenological analysis of consciousness and his
research into the grounding of logic, which he published as
the Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik
der logischen Vernunft (1929; Formal and Transcendental
Logic, 1969).
Husserl’s teaching, in this last period of his life,
assumed a different style from that at Göttingen. It did not
lead to the founding of a new school. Husserl was so intent
upon completing his work that his thinking and teaching
assumed more the character of a monologue. At the same time,
however, his influence upon his listeners and the members of
his seminar was not diminished, and he placed his
intellectual stamp upon many of them. Numerous foreign
guests usually took part in his seminar. For a period,
Rudolf Carnap, a leading figure in the Vienna Circle, where
Logical Positivism was born, also studied under Husserl.
Recognition from without was not wanting. In 1919 the law
faculty of the University of Bonn bestowed upon Husserl the
title of Dr. jur. honoris causa. He was the first German
scholar after the war to be invited to lecture at the
University of London (1922). He turned down a prestigious
call to the University of Berlin as the successor to Ernst
Troeltsch in order to devote his energies to Phenomenology
without interruption. An invitation followed to give some
lectures at the University of Amsterdam and later, in 1930,
at the Sorbonne—lectures that furnished the occasion for
preparing a new systematic presentation of Phenomenology,
which then appeared in a French translation under the title
of Méditations cartésiennes (1931).
When he retired in 1928, Martin Heidegger, who was
destined to become a leading Existentialist and one of
Germany’s foremost philosophers, became his successor.
Husserl had looked upon him as his legitimate heir. Only
later did he see that Heidegger’s chief work, Sein und Zeit
(1927; Being and Time, 1962), had given Phenomenology a turn
that would lead down an entirely different path. Husserl’s
disappointment led to a cooling of their relationship after
1930.
Later years.
Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 did not break
Husserl’s ability to work. Rather, the experience of this
upheaval was, for him, the occasion for concentrating more
than ever upon Phenomenology’s task of preserving the
freedom of the mind. He was excluded from the university;
but the loneliness of his study was broken through his daily
philosophical walks with his research assistant, Eugen Fink,
through his friendships with a few colleagues who belonged
to the circles of the resistance and the “Denominational
Church,” and through numerous visits by foreign philosophers
and scholars. Condemned to silence in Germany, he received,
in the spring of 1935, an invitation to address the Cultural
Society in Vienna. There he spoke freely for two and
one-half hours on “Die Philosophie in der Krisis der
europäischen Menschheit” (“Philosophy in the Crisis of
European Mankind”) and repeated the lecture two days later.
During this time, the Cercle Philosophique de Prague made
it possible through a Rockefeller grant for Ludwig
Landgrebe, a Dozent (lecturer) at the German University in
Prague and Husserl’s former assistant, to begin the
classification and transcription of Husserl’s unpublished
manuscripts. Through the Cercle, Husserl received an
invitation to address the German and Czechoslovakian
University in Prague in the fall of 1935, after which many
discussions took place in the smaller circles. Thus, in a
place which already stood under the threat of Hitler, the
voice of free philosophy was once again audible through
Husserl. The impression of his absolute sovereignty over all
of the confusions of this time was overpowering for his
listeners.
Out of these lectures came Husserl’s last work, Die
Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die
transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die
phänomenologische Philosophie (1936; The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 1970), of which
only the first part could appear, in a periodical for
emigrants. The following period until the summer of 1937 was
entirely devoted to the continuation of this work, in which
Husserl developed for the first time his concept of the
Lebenswelt (“life-world”).
In the summer of 1937, the illness that made it
impossible for him to continue his work set in. From the
beginning of 1938 he saw only one remaining task: to be able
to die in a way worthy of a philosopher. Not committed to a
particular church creed, he had respect for all authentic
religious belief, just as his philosophy demanded the
recognition of each authentic experience as such. His
concept of absolute philosophical self-responsibility stood
close to the Protestant concept of the freedom of man in his
immediate relationship with God. In fact, it is evident that
Husserl characterized the maintenance of the
phenomenological reduction not only as a method of but also
as a kind of religious conversion. Thus, on the one hand, he
could refuse spiritual help at his death—“I have lived as a
philosopher,” he said, “and I want to die as a
philosopher”—yet, on the other hand, he could explain a few
days before his death: “God has in grace received me and
allowed me to die.” He died in April 1938, and his ashes
were buried in the cemetery in Günterstal near Freiburg.
Ludwig M. Landgrebe
