Origin and development of Husserl’s phenomenology

Basic principles

Phenomenology was not founded; it grew. Its fountainhead was Husserl, who held professorships at Göttingen and Freiburg im Breisgau and who wrote Die Idee der Phänomenologie (The Idea of Phenomenology) in 1906. Yet, even for Husserl, the conception of phenomenology as a new method destined to supply a new foundation for both philosophy and science developed only gradually and kept changing to the very end of his career. Husserl was trained as a mathematician and was attracted to philosophy by Brentano, whose descriptive psychology seemed to offer a solid basis for a scientific philosophy. The concept of intentionality, the directedness of the consciousness toward an object, which is a basic concept in phenomenology, was already present in Brentano’s Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (1874; Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint): “And thus we can define psychic phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which, precisely as intentional, contain an object in themselves.” Brentano dissociated himself here from the Scottish philosopher Sir William Hamilton, known for his philosophy of the “unconditioned,” who had attributed the character of intentionality to the realms of thought and desire only, to the exclusion of that of feeling.

The point of departure of Husserl’s investigation is to be found in the treatise Über den Begriff der Zahl (1887; Concerning the Concept of Number), which was later expanded into Philosophie der Arithmetik: Psychologische und logische Untersuchungen (1891; Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations). Numbers are not found ready-made in nature but result from a mental achievement. Here Husserl was preoccupied with the question of how something like the constitution of numbers ever comes about. This treatise is important to Husserl’s later development for two reasons: first, because it contains the first traces of the concepts “reflection,” “constitution,” “description,” and the “founding constitution of meaning,” concepts that later played a predominant role in Husserl’s philosophy; and second, because criticism of the book by the German logician Gottlob Frege, who charged Husserl with confusing logical and psychological considerations, subsequently led Husserl to an analysis and critical discussion of psychologism, the view that psychology could be used as a foundation for pure logic.

In the first volume of Logische Untersuchungen (1900–01; Logical Investigations), entitled Prolegomena, Husserl began with a criticism of psychologism. Yet he continued by conducting a careful investigation of the psychic acts in and through which logical structures are given; these investigations too could give the impression of being descriptive psychological investigations, though they were not conceived of in this way by the author, for the issue at stake was the discovery of the essential structure of these acts. Here Brentano’s concept of intentionality received a richer and more refined signification. Husserl distinguished between perceptual and categorical intuition and stated that the latter’s theme lies in logical relationships. The real concern of phenomenology was clearly formulated for the first time in his article “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft” (1910–11; “Philosophy as Rigorous Science”). In this work Husserl wrestled with two unacceptable views: naturalism and historicism.

Naturalism attempts to apply the methods of the natural sciences to all other domains of knowledge, including the realm of consciousness. Reason becomes naturalized. Although an attempt is then made to find a foundation for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) by means of experimental psychology, it proves to be impossible, because in so doing one is unable to grasp precisely what is at stake in knowledge as found in the natural sciences.

What a philosopher must examine is the relationship between consciousness and Being, and in doing so, he must realize that from the standpoint of epistemology, Being is accessible to him only as a correlate of conscious acts. He must thus pay careful attention to what occurs in these acts. This can be done only by a science that tries to understand the very essence of consciousness, and this is the task that phenomenology has set for itself. Because clarification of the various types of objects must follow from the basic modes of consciousness, Husserl’s thought remained close to psychology. In contradistinction to what is the case in psychology, however, in phenomenology consciousness is thematized in a very special and definite way—viz., just insofar as consciousness is the locus in which every manner of constituting and founding meaning must take place. In human intuition, conscious occurrences must be given immediately in order to avoid introducing at the same time certain interpretations. The nature of such processes as perception, representation, imagination, judgment, and feeling must be grasped in immediate self-givenness. The call “To the things themselves” is not a demand for realism, because the things at stake are the acts of consciousness and the objective entities that get constituted in them: these things form the realm of what Husserl calls the phenomena.

Thus, the objects of phenomenology are “absolute data grasped in pure, immanent intuition,” and its goal is to discover the essential structures of the acts (noesis) and the objective entities that correspond to them (noema).

On the other hand, phenomenology must also be distinguished from historicism, a philosophy that stresses the immersion of all thinkers within a particular historical setting. Husserl objected to historicism because it implies relativism. He gave credit to the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, author of “Entwürfe zur Kritik der historischen Vernunft” (“Outlines for the Critique of Historical Reason”), for having developed a typification of worldviews, but he doubted and even rejected the skepticism that flows necessarily from the relativity of the various types. History is concerned with facts, whereas phenomenology deals with the knowledge of essences. To Husserl, Dilthey’s doctrine of worldviews was incapable of achieving the rigour required by genuine science. Contrary to all of the practical tendencies found in worldviews, Husserl demanded that philosophy be founded as a rigorous science. Its task implies that nothing should be accepted as given beforehand but that the philosopher should try to find the way back to the real beginnings. This is tantamount to saying, however, that he must try to find the way to the foundations of meaning that are found in consciousness. Just as for the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, the empirical has merely relative validity and never an absolute, or apodictic, validity, so for Husserl too what is to be searched for is a scientific knowledge of essences in contradistinction to a scientific knowledge of facts.

Basic method

The basic method of all phenomenological investigation, as Husserl developed it himself—and on which he worked throughout his entire lifetime—is the “reduction”: the existence of the world must be put between brackets, not because the philosopher should doubt it but merely because this existing world is not the very theme of phenomenology; its theme is rather the manner in which knowledge of the world comes about. The first step of the reduction consists in the phenomenological reduction, through which all that is given is changed into a phenomenon in the sense of that which is known in and by consciousness, for this kind of knowing—which is to be taken in a very broad sense as including every mode of consciousness, such as intuition, recollection, imagination, and judgment—is here all-important. There are several reasons why Husserl gave a privileged position to intuition; among them is the fact that intuition is that act in which a person grasps something immediately in its bodily presence and also that it is a primordially given act upon which all of the rest is to be founded. Furthermore, Husserl’s stress on intuition must be understood as a refutation of any merely speculative approach to philosophy.

This reduction reverses—“re-flects”—the human direction of sight from a straightforward orientation toward objects to an orientation toward consciousness.

The second step is to be found in the eidetic reduction. To get hold of consciousness is not sufficient; on the contrary, the various acts of consciousness must be made accessible in such a way that their essences—their universal and unchangeable structures—can be grasped. In the eidetic reduction, one must forgo everything that is factual and merely occurs in this way or that. A means of grasping the essence is the Wesensschau, the intuition of essences and essential structures. This is not a mysterious kind of intuition. Rather, one forms a multiplicity of variations of what is given, and while maintaining the multiplicity, one focuses attention on what remains unchanged in the multiplicity; i.e., the essence is that identical something that continuously maintains itself during the process of variation. Husserl, therefore, called it the invariant.

Up to this point, the discussion of reduction has remained within the realm of psychology, albeit a new—namely, a phenomenological—psychology. The second step must now be completed by a third, the transcendental reduction. It consists in a reversion to the achievements of that consciousness that Husserl, following Kant, called transcendental consciousness, though he conceived of it in his own way. The most fundamental event occurring in this consciousness is the creation of time awareness through the acts of protention (future) and retention (past), which is something like a self-constitution. To do phenomenology was for Husserl tantamount to returning to the transcendental ego as the ground for the foundation and constitution (or making) of all meaning (German Sinn). Only when a person has reached this ground can he achieve the insight that makes his comportment transparent in its entirety and makes him understand how meaning comes about, how meaning is based upon meaning like strata in a process of sedimentation.

Husserl worked on the clarification of the transcendental reduction until the very end of his life. It was precisely the further development of the transcendental reduction that led to a division of the phenomenological movement and to the formation of a school that refused to become involved in this kind of system of problems (see below Phenomenology of essences).

Basic concepts

In an effort to express what it is to which this method gives access, Husserl wrote:

In all pure psychic experiences (in perceiving something, judging about something, willing something, enjoying something, hoping for something, etc.) there is found inherently a being-directed-toward…. Experiences are intentional. This being-directed-toward is not just joined to the experience by way of a mere addition, and occasionally as an accidental reaction, as if experiences could be what they are without the intentional relation. With the intentionality of the experiences there announces itself, rather, the essential structure of the purely psychical.

The phenomenological investigator must examine the different forms of intentionality in a reflective attitude, because it is precisely in and through the corresponding intentionality that each domain of objects becomes accessible to him. Husserl took as his point of departure mathematical entities and later examined logical structures, in order finally to achieve the insight that each being must be grasped in its correlation to consciousness, because each datum becomes accessible to a person only insofar as it has meaning for him. From this position, regional ontologies, or realms of being, develop—for instance, those dealing with the region of “nature,” the region of “the psychic,” or the region of “the spirit.” Moreover, Husserl distinguished formal ontologies—such as the region of the logical—from material ontologies.

In order to be able to investigate a regional ontology, it is first necessary to discover and examine the founding act by which realities in this realm are constituted. For Husserl, constitution does not mean the creation or fabrication of a thing or object by a subject; it means the founding constitution of its meaning. There is meaning only for consciousness. All founding constitution of meaning is made possible by transcendental consciousness. Speaking of this transcendental motif, Husserl wrote:

It is the motif of questioning back to the last source of all achievements of knowledge, of reflection in which the knower reflects on himself and his knowing life, in which all the scientific constructs which have validity for him, occur teleologically, and as permanent acquisitions are kept and become freely available to him.

In the realm of such transcendental problems, it is necessary to examine how all of the categories in and through which one understands mundane beings or purely formal entities originate from specific modes of consciousness. In Husserl’s view, the temporalization must be conceived as a kind of primordial constitution of transcendental consciousness itself.

Understood in this way, phenomenology does not place itself outside the sciences but, rather, attempts to make understandable what takes place in the various sciences and thus to thematize the unquestioned presuppositions of the sciences.

In his last publication, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie (1936; The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology), Husserl arrived at the life-world—the world as shaped within the immediate experience of each person—by questioning back to the foundations that the sciences presuppose. In Die Krisis he analyzed the European crisis of culture and philosophy, which found its immediate expression in the contrast between the great successes of the natural sciences and the failure of the human sciences. In the modern era, scientific knowledge had become fragmented into an objectivistic-physicalist knowledge and a transcendental knowledge. Until recently this split could not be overcome. It led, rather, to the attempt to develop the human sciences in accordance with the procedures used in the exact sciences of nature (naturalism)—an attempt doomed to failure. In opposition to this attempt, Husserl wished to show that in the new approach one must reflect on the activities of the scientists.

As the immediately given world, this merely subjective world, was forgotten in the scientific thematization, the accomplishing subject, too, was forgotten and the scientist himself was not thematized.

Husserl demonstrated this point by using the example of Galileo and his mathematization of the world. The truth characteristic of the life-world is by no means an inferior form of truth when compared with the exact, scientific truth but is, rather, always a truth already presupposed in all scientific research. That is why Husserl claimed that an ontology of the life-world must be developed—i.e., a systematic analysis of the constitutive achievements the result of which is the life-world, a life-world that is, in turn, the foundation of all scientific constitutions of meaning. The stimulating change that occurred here consists in the fact that truth is no longer measured after the criterion of an exact determination. For what is decisive is not the exactness but, rather, the part played by the founding act.

It is in this connection that, rather abruptly, historicity too became relevant for Husserl. He began to reflect upon the emergence of philosophy among the Greeks and on its significance as a new mode of scientific knowledge oriented toward infinity, and he interpreted the philosophy of René Descartes, often called the father of modern philosophy, as the point at which the split into the two research directions—physicalist objectivism and transcendental subjectivism—came about. Phenomenology must overcome this split, he held, and thus help humanity to live according to the demands of reason. In view of the fact that reason is the typical characteristic of humans, humankind must find itself again through phenomenology.