Edmund Husserl

• 1. Introduction

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  Edmund Husserl was born on the 8th of April 1859 in Proßnitz, a small town in the Margraviate of Moravia, the second of four children of a Jewish milliner. He would go on to found phenomenology, one of the most far-reaching philosophical movements of the twentieth century. Yet for all his eventual influence, his path to philosophy ran through mathematics, through a crisis of foundations, and through a lifelong conviction that Western thought had gone fundamentally wrong in how it understood the mind.

  By the time he died in Freiburg on the 27th of April 1938, barely days after turning 79, his manuscripts ran to approximately 40,000 pages of stenographic notes. A Franciscan priest would have to smuggle them out of Nazi Germany to save them. His closest intellectual heir would strip his name from a dedicated book while joining the regime that had barred Husserl from his own library.

  What drove a mathematician to remake philosophy from the ground up? How did a scholar who spent decades insisting that consciousness alone was the proper object of rigorous inquiry end up writing, near the end of his life, about the cultural crisis engulfing Europe? And what does it mean to study consciousness itself with the same precision one brings to calculus? Those are the questions this documentary will pursue.

• 2. From Mathematics to Mind

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  At the University of Leipzig between 1876 and 1878, Husserl studied mathematics, physics, and astronomy, and encountered philosophy for the first time through lectures by Wilhelm Wundt, one of the founders of modern psychology. He then moved to the Frederick William University of Berlin, where Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker shaped his mathematical sensibility. Weierstrass, in particular, gave him an enduring idea: generating the concept of number by counting a determinate collection of objects.

  In 1881, Husserl transferred to the University of Vienna, where he completed his doctorate under Leo Königsberger. His 1883 dissertation concerned the calculus of variations, but his eye was already drifting elsewhere. He returned to Berlin briefly as assistant to Weierstrass, then, when Weierstrass fell ill, Husserl found himself free. He went back to Vienna, fulfilled a brief military obligation, and walked into the lecture hall of Franz Brentano.

  Brentano would become, by Husserl's own reckoning and that of later commentators, the single most important intellectual influence on his life. Brentano introduced him to Bernard Bolzano, Hermann Lotze, John Stuart Mill, and David Hume. More crucially, Brentano gave him the concept of intentionality: the idea that every mental act is directed toward an object, that consciousness is always consciousness of something. Husserl found this so compelling that he resolved to dedicate his life to philosophy.

  He followed Carl Stumpf, a former student of Brentano, to the University of Halle in 1886, seeking his habilitation. There he wrote his qualifying thesis, Über den Begriff der Zahl (On the Concept of Number), in 1887, the same year he married Malvine Steinschneider. That thesis became the seed of his first major published work, Philosophie der Arithmetik, which appeared in 1891.

• 3. The War on Psychologism

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  Philosophie der Arithmetik drew an early and pointed attack from Gottlob Frege, who criticized it for grounding mathematics in psychological processes. The criticism stung, but the historical picture is more complicated than a simple conversion story. Husserl would later say he had harbored doubts about psychologism from the very outset of writing the book, and that he had already changed his mind by the time it was published. He attributed that change not to Frege but to his own readings of Leibniz, Bolzano, Lotze, and Hume.

  The rebuttal came in Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations), published in Halle in 1900-1901. Its first volume, the Prolegomena of Pure Logic, methodically dismantled the psychologistic view, which held that logic is a branch of psychology and that logical laws are descriptions of how minds actually work. Husserl's counter-argument was precise. Counting five objects is undeniably a mental event; the number 5 is not. Truth itself, along with logical laws, remains valid regardless of any psychological process that may make it feel evident to a particular thinker.

  He identified three prejudices that made psychologism so persistent. First, the mistaken assumption that logic is primarily normative rather than theoretical. Second, the confusion of intentional acts with the objects those acts are directed toward. Third, the failure to see that psychology cannot ground a priori laws, because a priori laws are themselves the precondition of all correct thought, including the psychologist's own reasoning.

  The Logical Investigations was received seriously enough that Wilhelm Dilthey devoted a seminar to it. In 1905, Husserl traveled to Berlin to visit Dilthey in person. The work also planted the seed for what Husserl himself would later call the formal theory of wholes and their parts, now known as mereology.

• 4. The Phenomenological Turn

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  Several years after the Logical Investigations, Husserl made a set of conceptual moves that changed the direction of his project. To study the structure of consciousness rigorously, he decided, one must distinguish between the act of consciousness and the object toward which it is directed. Knowledge of essences would require bracketing all assumptions about the existence of an external world. He called this procedure the epoché.

  These ideas found their fullest early expression in Ideen, published in 1913 in the first issue of a new journal, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung, which Husserl and his school founded. Paul Ricœur later described the intellectual movement of Ideen as leading from a psychological cogito to a transcendental cogito. Jean-Paul Sartre would eventually criticize the transcendental interpretation Husserl pursued there, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty questioned whether he had fully accepted the eidetic reduction it required.

  In Ideen, Husserl described what he called the natural attitude: the ordinary stance in which people assume objects exist independently of any perceiving subject and that those objects simply emit their properties outward. The phenomenological standpoint brackets that assumption. An object, viewed phenomenologically, becomes not something external but a grouping of perceptual and functional aspects that imply one another under the idea of a particular type of thing. This is not idealism in the sense of denying that objects exist; it is a methodological move designed to investigate how objects come to be experienced as they are.

  The epoché procedure he had outlined in Ideen was revisited in his 1929 Paris lectures, which became Méditations cartésiennes. There he introduced the concept of a sphere of ownness, from within which the transcendental ego finds itself always already paired with the lived body of another person, another monad. This pairing grounded what Husserl called transcendental intersubjectivity. Whether that account is sufficient to rule out solipsism became one of the central debates surrounding his late work.

• 5. Students and Successors

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  Edith Stein served as Husserl's personal assistant during his first years at the University of Freiburg, where he had transferred in 1916. She had written her doctoral thesis on the problem of empathy at Göttingen before becoming his assistant in Freiburg through 1918. Martin Heidegger then served in that role from 1920 to 1923, and Husserl chose him as his successor at Freiburg. In 1926, Heidegger dedicated Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) to him "in grateful respect and friendship."

  Adolf Reinach was an earlier and, to Husserl, a deeply valued figure. At Göttingen in 1913, Reinach served as his right hand and the mediator between Husserl and students, compensating for what observers noted was Husserl's own difficulty dealing with other people. Reinach was killed in Flanders in November 1917 while serving in the war. In his obituary, Husserl wrote of Reinach: "He wanted to draw only from the deepest sources, he wanted to produce only work of enduring value."

  Max Scheler met Husserl in Halle in 1901 and found phenomenology a methodological breakthrough. He was among the original editors of the Jahrbuch. Despite their eventual estrangement, Scheler acknowledged remaining "deeply indebted" to Husserl throughout his career. Roman Ingarden, an early Freiburg student, diverged on a significant point: he rejected Husserl's transcendental idealism, fearing it would lead to relativism, and built his own realist phenomenological position.

  Beyond that immediate circle, the influence ran wide. Kurt Gödel read Cartesian Meditations closely and expressed strong appreciation for the epoché. Hermann Weyl's interest in intuitionistic logic grew partly from Husserl's work, an interest he came to through his wife Helene Joseph, herself a student of Husserl at Göttingen. Karol Wojtyla, who would later become Pope John Paul II, drew on phenomenology in his major work The Acting Person, published in 1969.

• 6. The Nazi Years and Aftermath

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  On the 6th of April 1933, the racial laws of the National Socialist government barred Husserl from using the library at the University of Freiburg or any other academic library. A public outcry led to his reinstatement the following week. Two weeks later, on the 21st and the 22nd of April, his former student and chosen successor Martin Heidegger was elected Rector of the university and joined the Nazi Party. In July, Husserl resigned from the Deutsche Akademie.

  On the 4th of May 1933, Husserl addressed what was happening directly: "The future alone will judge which was the true Germany in 1933, and who were the true Germans - those who subscribe to the more or less materialistic-mythical racial prejudices of the day, or those Germans pure in heart and mind, heirs to the great Germans of the past whose tradition they revere and perpetuate."

  It had been rumored that Heidegger personally delivered the notice of Husserl's discharge, but Husserl's biographers later established that the notice came from the previous rector. The philosophical rift between the two men had in any case opened years earlier. As far back as the summer of 1929, Husserl had studied selected writings of Heidegger and concluded that Heidegger had substituted Dasein for the pure ego, transforming phenomenology into something resembling anthropology, a form of precisely the psychologism Husserl had spent his career dismantling. He gave lectures criticizing Heidegger openly to Kant Societies in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Halle in 1931.

  In the wartime 1941 edition of Being and Time, Heidegger's publisher urged removal of the dedication to Husserl, fearing the book might otherwise be banned. The dedication was not erased; it survives in a footnote on page 38. In post-war editions, it was restored to its original position. Husserl had died three years before the wartime edition appeared.

  After suffering a fall in the autumn of 1937, Husserl became ill with pleurisy. He died in Freiburg on the 27th of April 1938. At his funeral, the only Freiburg faculty member present was Gerhard Ritter, attending as an explicit act of protest against the Nazi regime. Eugen Fink, his research assistant, delivered the eulogy. The following year, the Franciscan priest Herman Van Breda smuggled Husserl's approximately 40,000 pages of stenographic manuscripts and his complete research library to the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, where they became the Husserl-Archives of the Higher Institute of Philosophy.

• 7. The Crisis and the Lifeworld

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  Lectures at Prague in 1935 and Vienna in 1936 led to Die Krisis, published in Belgrade in 1936 and left unfinished at Husserl's death. The work was unlike anything he had produced before. The philosopher who had spent decades insisting on a direct investigation of consciousness, deliberately avoiding historical discussions, now offered his first extended philosophy of history, tracing what he saw as a cultural crisis running through European thought from Galileo and Descartes forward.

  Merleau-Ponty and others raised a pointed question about the project: Husserl had attacked historicism in principle, yet here he was explaining how historical traditions had distorted philosophy and science. Husserl's own position may have been that historical traditions are merely features given to the pure ego's intuition, no different from any other datum of experience, and therefore subject to phenomenological analysis rather than a threat to it.

  Central to the Krisis is the concept of the Lebenswelt, the lifeworld: the world as it is lived and experienced prior to the abstractions of scientific theory. The objective logic of natural science, Husserl argued, rests on a pre-theoretical stratum of experience that it cannot itself explain. The question that the Krisis raises but does not fully resolve is the same chicken-and-egg problem that runs through his late work: does the lifeworld contextualize and thereby limit the phenomenological gaze, or does the phenomenological method allow the ego to rise above it?

  Husserl's explicit conviction, stated in the Krisis, was that intentional phenomenology had for the first time made spirit as spirit the field of systematic scientific experience. He described this as effecting a total transformation of the task of knowledge. Despite his retirement in 1928, he had, as his manuscript record shows, worked at what observers described as a tremendous pace, producing several major works in the years that remained.