Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl was a German philosopher, born in Moravia, who founded phenomenology, the careful description of experience exactly as it presents itself to consciousness. Trained first as a mathematician, he wanted to make philosophy a rigorous science grounded in what can be directly seen and described. His method became the starting point for much of twentieth-century European thought, from Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas.

Husserl was born on 8 April 1859 in Prossnitz, today Prostějov in the Czech Republic, then part of the Austrian Empire of the Habsburg Monarchy. His family was Jewish and his father was a milliner. He studied mathematics, physics and astronomy at Leipzig, then mathematics in Berlin under the great analyst Karl Weierstrass, and took a doctorate on the calculus of variations at Vienna in 1883.

Back in Vienna, he attended the lectures of the philosopher Franz Brentano from 1884 to 1886, and they changed the course of his life. Brentano persuaded him that philosophy could be pursued with scientific strictness, and gave him the idea that would be central to all his work: intentionality, the fact that consciousness is always consciousness of something. In 1886 Husserl was baptised a Lutheran, and the following year he married Malvine Steinschneider, who also came from a Jewish family in Prossnitz.

In 1887 Husserl qualified as a university lecturer at Halle under Brentano's former student Carl Stumpf, with a thesis on the concept of number, and he remained there as an unsalaried lecturer for fourteen years. His Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) tried to explain numbers through the mental acts of collecting and counting. Gottlob Frege reviewed it harshly, accusing it of psychologism, the error of confusing the objective truths of logic and mathematics with the psychological processes of people who think them.

Husserl came to agree. The first volume of his Logical Investigations (1900–1901) is a sustained attack on psychologism: the laws of logic, he argued, are not generalisations about how human minds happen to work, and two plus two would equal four even if no one ever counted. The second volume turned to a detailed analysis of meaning, perception and the structure of conscious acts. The book made his name, and in 1901 he moved to a post at the University of Göttingen, where a circle of young phenomenologists formed around him.

Husserl's rallying call was to go back "to the things themselves", to describe what appears in experience before any theory is imposed on it. In Ideas I (1913) he set out his mature method. Normally we live in what he called the natural attitude, simply taking for granted that the world exists out there. Phenomenology asks us to perform the epoché, or bracketing: without denying the world, we suspend our belief in it, and attend instead to how things are given to us. A tree, for instance, is never seen all at once but always from one side, with its hidden sides anticipated; it appears as perceived, remembered, imagined or desired.

This led Husserl to analyse the two sides of every experience, the act of consciousness and the object as intended, which he called noesis and noema. He also studied the experience of time, showing that each present moment carries a fading trace of the just-past and a sketch of what is about to come, and the problem of other minds, which he addressed through empathy and the shared, intersubjective world. Over time his thought became a transcendental idealism, in which the meaning of the world is constituted by consciousness, a turn that troubled many of his own followers. Though he admired Descartes and drew on Kant and David Hume, he believed he was beginning philosophy afresh.

In 1916 Husserl became professor at Freiburg im Breisgau. That year his younger son, Wolfgang, was killed at Verdun in the First World War. At Freiburg his assistants included Edith Stein and, from 1920 to 1923, the young Martin Heidegger, whom Husserl treated as his heir. Heidegger dedicated Being and Time to him in 1927, and when Husserl retired in 1928 he secured Heidegger's appointment as his successor. Reading Being and Time closely, however, Husserl concluded that Heidegger had abandoned phenomenology for what he regarded as a mere philosophical anthropology, and the friendship cooled.

In retirement he remained prolific. Lectures in Paris in 1929 became the Cartesian Meditations, published in French in 1931, which strongly influenced the young French generation.

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Husserl, as a man of Jewish descent, was suspended from the university, and later lost his teaching rights, while Heidegger, now rector, was a member of the Nazi Party. Husserl was barred from public life in Nazi Germany and found it increasingly hard to publish there. Lectures he gave in Vienna and Prague in 1935 grew into his last great work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, part of which appeared in Belgrade in 1936. In it he argued that modern science, since Galileo, had replaced the lived world of everyday experience, the lifeworld, with abstract mathematical models, and had lost sight of its own human meaning; he presented this as part of a wider crisis of European civilisation.

Husserl died in Freiburg on 27 April 1938, after an illness. Soon afterwards a young Belgian Franciscan, Herman Van Breda, smuggled his roughly 40,000 pages of shorthand manuscripts and his library out of Germany to Leuven, where they formed the Husserl Archives and saved them from destruction.

Husserl's influence ran through almost all of continental philosophy. Heidegger turned phenomenology into an inquiry into being and existence; Merleau-Ponty, one of the first scholars to work in the Leuven archive, developed it into a philosophy of the body and perception; Jean-Paul Sartre, who read Husserl in Berlin in 1933–1934, built his early existentialism on it; and Levinas, Jacques Derrida and others defined their own positions through criticism of him. The publication of his manuscripts in the Husserliana series, still continuing, has revealed a thinker more varied than his published books suggested. Phenomenological ideas have also entered psychology, sociology and cognitive science, and his work in logic gives him a place in the history of the philosophy of mathematics alongside Frege, in Germany and beyond.