# Edmund Husserl German philosopher (1859 to 1938), founder of [phenomenology](/codex/phenomenology/) and one of the most consequential figures in twentieth-century thought. A mathematician by training who turned to philosophy under Franz Brentano, Husserl developed a method for describing the structures of conscious experience as they are given, prior to any causal theorizing about their mechanism. Its programmatic slogan, *zu den Sachen selbst*, "to the things themselves," announced a refusal to substitute an account of causes for a description of what is to be caused. His influence runs through nearly every subsequent continental philosopher and through a substantial part of analytic philosophy of mind. His students and readers include Edith Stein, Martin Heidegger, [Maurice Merleau-Ponty](/codex/maurice-merleau-ponty/), Emmanuel Levinas, and, at one remove, [John Paul II](/codex/john-paul-ii/). ## Biography - **1859**, born in Prossnitz, Moravia, then in the Austrian Empire and now Prostějov in the Czech Republic, into an observant Jewish family - Studied mathematics at Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna, completing a doctorate in the calculus of variations under Leo Königsberger in 1883 - **1884 to 1886**, attended Brentano's lectures in Vienna, which redirected him from mathematics to philosophy and gave him the thesis of [intentionality](/codex/intentionality/) - **1886**, baptized into the Lutheran church; the conversion was sincere in his own account and did not protect him or his family from later racial legislation - **1891**, *Philosophie der Arithmetik*, his first book, which Gottlob Frege reviewed severely for psychologism - **1900 to 1901**, *Logische Untersuchungen* (*Logical Investigations*), the breakthrough work, attacking the reduction of logical laws to contingent regularities of thinking and laying out the descriptive method - **1901 to 1916**, professor at Göttingen, where the realist phenomenological circle formed around him - **1913**, *Ideen I* (*Ideas I*), introducing the *epoché* and the transcendental turn that split his followers - **1916 to 1928**, chair at Freiburg; Edith Stein served as his assistant, and Heidegger succeeded him - **1916**, his younger son Wolfgang was killed at Verdun - **1931**, *Cartesianische Meditationen*, based on lectures given in Paris in 1929 - **1933 onward**, stripped of his university privileges and library access under the racial laws of the Nazi regime, despite his Lutheran baptism and his sons' war service - **1936**, *Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften*, his last and unfinished work, published in part in Belgrade because it could not appear in Germany - **1938**, died in Freiburg - **1938 to 1939**, roughly forty thousand pages of shorthand manuscripts were smuggled out of Germany by the Franciscan Herman Van Breda and deposited at Leuven, where the Husserl Archives were founded; without that rescue most of his work would have been lost ## The work ### Against psychologism Husserl's first major achievement was negative and remains among his most durable. Psychologism holds that the laws of logic are descriptions of how human beings happen to think. His objection in the *Logical Investigations* is that this makes logical laws contingent and empirical, so that the law of non-contradiction would be a well-supported generalization about brains that might have been otherwise, and could be revised by future psychological findings. But the argument for psychologism uses logic to establish its conclusion, and treats that use as binding. The position saws through the branch it stands on. This is the same structure the codex uses at [Self-refutation](/codex/self-refutation/) and, applied to cognitive faculties rather than logical laws, at [Argument from the Reliability of Reason](/codex/argument-from-the-reliability-of-reason/). Husserl's version arrived decades earlier and from a source with no theological interest whatever. ### The method The two operations, set out at [Phenomenology](/codex/phenomenology/) in detail, are the *epoché*, suspending the question of whether the object of experience exists so that the experience can be described as given, and the *eidetic reduction*, varying a phenomenon imaginatively to isolate the structures it cannot lack. Applied to perception, the method yields the analysis of *Abschattung*, adumbration: a spatial object is always given through one profile, and always given *as more than* the profile, with its hidden sides co-intended as really there. This is developed at [Phenomenology of Perception](/codex/phenomenology-of-perception/), and it is the finding that the representational model of perception has no room for. ### Intentionality Taking Brentano's thesis that mental states are always *of* something, Husserl made it the organizing structure of consciousness and distinguished the *noesis*, the act, from the *noema*, the object precisely as intended in that act. See [Intentionality](/codex/intentionality/). ### The lifeworld and the crisis His late and unfinished *Crisis* advances a historical thesis with unexpected apologetic force. The mathematized natural science inaugurated by Galileo achieved its power by treating the measurable as the real. Over three centuries this hardened into the assumption that the measurable *is* the real, and the *Lebenswelt*, the lived world of colors, purposes, meanings and persons, came to look like a subjective film over a true world of particles. Husserl's objection is that this inverts the actual order of dependence. The scientific image is not what the lifeworld is really made of. It is an achievement carried out *within* the lifeworld, by embodied persons reading instruments they perceive with senses they trust. A method that ends by discrediting the conditions of its own exercise has made a mistake somewhere. This converges with the codex critique of [Scientism](/codex/scientism/), reached by a route that owes nothing to theology, which is exactly why it is worth citing. ## Religion and use in this codex Husserl's personal religious position is not a simple matter and should not be overstated in either direction. Born into an observant Jewish family, he was baptized a Lutheran in 1886 and by several accounts took the step seriously rather than as a career convenience. He was not, for most of his career, a practicing churchman, and his philosophical work is not conducted as theology. Late remarks recorded by those close to him suggest a persistent religious seriousness, but they are secondhand and thin, and the codex does not build on them. What his work supplies is method and premises, not conclusions: - **The anti-psychologism argument**, a fully worked non-theological instance of the self-refutation structure central to several arguments here. - **The analysis of intentionality**, the load-bearing premise under [Argument from Reason](/codex/argument-from-reason/) and [Argument from Perception](/codex/argument-from-perception/). - **The description of perception**, which blocks the representational model that would otherwise dissolve eyewitness testimony into reports about mental states. - **The lifeworld critique**, an independent line against [Scientism](/codex/scientism/) from inside the European scientific tradition. - **A method for treating religious experience seriously** without either credulity or the "just a feeling" dismissal, which is the disciplined footing under [Argument from Religious Experience](/codex/argument-from-religious-experience/). The steel-manned caution: Husserl's transcendental turn after 1913 moved toward a form of idealism that his own realist students, including Stein and Adolf Reinach, resisted. A reader who cites Husserl as straightforwardly establishing that perception reaches a mind-independent world is citing the early Husserl against the late one, and should say so rather than be caught at it. ## See also - [Phenomenology](/codex/phenomenology/), the method and movement he founded - [Phenomenology of Perception](/codex/phenomenology-of-perception/), where his analysis of adumbration does its work - [Intentionality](/codex/intentionality/), the structure he took from Brentano and made central - [Maurice Merleau-Ponty](/codex/maurice-merleau-ponty/), his most influential successor on perception and the body - [Argument from Perception](/codex/argument-from-perception/), the apologetic argument resting on these findings - [Self-refutation](/codex/self-refutation/), the structure his anti-psychologism argument exemplifies - [Argument from the Reliability of Reason](/codex/argument-from-the-reliability-of-reason/), the same structure applied to cognitive faculties - [Scientism](/codex/scientism/), which the lifeworld analysis independently undercuts - [Argument from Religious Experience](/codex/argument-from-religious-experience/), where phenomenological method replaces dismissal - [John Paul II](/codex/john-paul-ii/), whose personalism grew from a phenomenological habilitation - [Rene Descartes](/codex/rene-descartes/), the interlocutor of the *Cartesian Meditations* - [Immanuel Kant](/codex/immanuel-kant/), whose transcendental turn Husserl reworked and radicalized - [Epistemology](/codex/epistemology/), the parent domain