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Edmund Husserl
Encyclopædia Britannica Article
born April 8, 1859, Prossnitz, Moravia, Austrian Empire [now
Prostejov, Czech Republic]
died April 27, 1938, Freiburg im Breisgau, Ger.
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
Edmund Husserl, c.
opposition between Empiricism, which stresses
1930. observation, and Rationalism, which stresses reason
Archiv für Kunst und
Geschichte, Berlin
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
Additional Reading
Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1913–21; Logical
Investigations, 2 vol., 1970), are ably reported on in J.M. Findlay's
article “Phenomenology” in the 1956 through 1966 printings of the
Encyclopædia Britannica and more fully paraphrased in Marvin
Farber, The Foundation of Phenomenology (1943). The first book of
Husserl's Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und
phänomenologischen Philosophie is available in a not always
reliable translation (1931, reissued 1952); the Cartesianische
Meditationen in a faithful rendering (1960). The Husserliana edition
of the Husserl Archives (1950 ff.) in its early volumes emphasized
previously unpublished materials but will eventually include all of
Husserl's works. A short biography is given in the “Husserl” article
in the Neue deutsche Biographie, vol. 10 (1974). Reflections on his
personality may be found in Ludwig Landgrebe and Jan Patocka,
Edmund Husserl zum Gedächtnis. Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis
of His Phenomenology (1967), is a valuable collection of
interpretive and critical essays. Maurice Natanson, Edmund
Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks (1973), is a good introduction
to the philosopher's fundamental ideas.
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