Husserl, Edmund

born April 8, 1859, Prossnitz, Moravia, Austrian Empire

died April 27, 1938, Freiburg im Breisgau, Ger.

German philosopher, founder of phenomenology.

He received a doctoral degree in mathematics at the University of Vienna in 1882. From 1883 to 1886 he studied with Franz Brentano, whose descriptive psychology prompted Husserl to reflect on the psychological sources of basic mathematical concepts. He lectured at the University of Halle from 1887 to 1901. His Logical Investigations (1901) employed a method he called "phenomenological," consisting of an analysis of experienced reality exactly as it presents itself to consciousness. He developed the method in Ideas (1913) and other works written while teaching at the University of Göttingen (1901–16); its fundamental methodological principle was what he called phenomenological, or "eidetic," reduction, which focuses the philosopher's attention on uninterpreted experience and the quest, thereby, for the essences of things. Because it is also reflection on the functions by which essences become conscious, the reduction reveals the ego for which everything has meaning. In 1916 Husserl accepted a professorship at the University of Freiburg, where Martin Heidegger was one of his students; when Husserl retired in 1928, Heidegger succeeded to his chair. After 1933, when the Nazis seized power in Germany, Husserl was excluded from the university because of his Jewishness. His work was enormously influential in the subsequent development of Continental philosophy and in other fields, including the social sciences and psychoanalytic theory.

Edmund Husserl, с 1930.

Archiv fur Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin

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▪ German philosopher

Introduction

born April 8, 1859, Prossnitz, Moravia, Austrian Empire [now Prostějov, 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 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 (Brentano, Franz) 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 (Stumpf, Carl), 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 (Mill, John Stuart)) 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 (Russell, Bertrand), 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 (Scheler, Max), 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 (Dilthey, Wilhelm), 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 (Göttingen, University of) 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

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 Patočka, 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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