Intentionality
Consciousness is always consciousness of something. To analyse consciousness is to analyse the correlation between acts and their objects.
The Twentieth Century to Today · 1859 – 1938
Edmund Husserl
胡塞尔 · Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl
Founder of phenomenology: back to the things themselves, suspend belief in the world's existence, and describe how consciousness constitutes its objects. Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty all begin with him.
PhenomenologyBirthplace: Prossnitz, Moravia
Back to the things themselves.
Source: Logical Investigations, introduction to vol. 2
Husserl was born to a Jewish merchant family in Moravia and studied mathematics at Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna under Weierstrass, taking his doctorate in 1883 with a thesis on the calculus of variations. In Vienna he attended Brentano's lectures for two years and turned from mathematics to philosophy; Brentano's concept of intentionality, that consciousness is always consciousness of something, became the centre of his life's work. In 1887 he converted to Lutheranism and became a lecturer at Halle, where he stayed fourteen years.
The Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) tried to explain the concept of number from mental acts; Frege's criticism turned him around completely. The Logical Investigations of 1900–1 first refute psychologism and then, in six investigations, analyse meaning, whole and part, intentionality and evidence, proclaiming 'back to the things themselves'. The book won him a chair at Göttingen, where students gathered into the first generation of the phenomenological movement, including Scheler, Reinach and later Edith Stein.
The first volume of Ideas (1913) introduced the 'phenomenological reduction': bracket the natural belief in the world's existence, and what remains is pure consciousness with its intentional objects; philosophy's task is to describe how consciousness 'constitutes' the world. This turn to transcendental idealism drove many early students away. In 1916 he moved to Freiburg, where Heidegger became his assistant and designated successor; when Being and Time appeared in 1927 he read it and found that his student was on another road, and the two drifted apart.
After retiring in 1928 he wrote daily, leaving over forty thousand pages in shorthand. When the Nazis took power in 1933 he was barred from the university for his Jewish origin, and Heidegger as rector said nothing on his behalf. The late Crisis of European Sciences diagnosed Europe's crisis as science's forgetting of its ground in the 'life-world', and called for a new founding of the idea of reason. He died in 1938; a Belgian Franciscan smuggled his manuscripts out of Germany to Leuven, and phenomenology was reborn after the war.
Key Ideas
The phenomenological reduction
Suspend belief in the world's existence, neither denying nor affirming, and describe only how it is given in consciousness. Not doubt, but a change of attitude.
Eidetic intuition
By freely varying imagined examples one sees the invariant essential structure. Phenomenology is a science of essences, not of facts.
Constitution
Objects are not passively received but constituted as unities in the syntheses of consciousness. The transcendental subject is the source of the world's meaning.
The life-world
The abstractions of science rest on the everyday lived world; forgetting that ground is the root of the crisis of European sciences.
Influenced by
- René Descartes
The Cartesian Meditations call phenomenology a 'neo-Cartesianism': it too begins by suspending everything, but what remains is not a thinking substance but the whole structure of consciousness.
- Immanuel Kant
- David Hume
- Gottlob Frege
Frege's 1894 attack on the psychologism of his early work pushed him toward the objectivity of logic; the first volume of the Logical Investigations settles accounts with psychologism.
- Wilhelm Dilthey
His late concept of the 'life-world' conceded Dilthey's historicity: science rests on the pre-scientific, lived world.
- William James
Influenced
- Martin Heidegger
He was Husserl's assistant and designated heir; Being and Time is dedicated to him, yet it turned phenomenology from the analysis of consciousness into the analysis of Dasein, and the two grew apart.
- Hans-Georg Gadamer
- Theodor W. Adorno
In Oxford exile he wrote a critique of Husserl, Against Epistemology, arguing that the search for an absolute first principle is itself a will to domination.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
In 1932 Aron told him in a café that phenomenology could talk about a cocktail; he turned pale, bought a book the next day, and spent the following year in Berlin reading Husserl.
- Emmanuel Levinas
In 1928 he went to Freiburg for Husserl's last semester; his doctoral thesis of 1930 and his French translation of the Cartesian Meditations brought phenomenology to France, and Sartre began with his book.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
In 1939 he was the first foreign scholar to consult Husserl's unpublished manuscripts at Leuven, and out of the late Husserl's life-world and embodiment he read his own phenomenology.
- Simone de Beauvoir
- Paul Ricoeur
In five years as a prisoner of war he translated the first volume of Husserl's Ideas into French in the margins of the German text, one of the earliest French Husserl translations.
- Jean-François Lyotard
- Jacques Derrida
His earliest works were all on Husserl, the translation of The Origin of Geometry and Speech and Phenomena; in Husserl's pursuit of the 'living present' he found the purest specimen of the metaphysics of presence.