Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was born on April 8, 1859, in Prossnitz, a town in Moravia then part of the Austrian Empire, the second of four children in an assimilated Jewish family. His father kept a clothing business; the household was comfortable, German-speaking, and not especially observant. He was sent to Vienna and then to Olmütz for his schooling, and showed no early sign of philosophical vocation. His gifts lay in mathematics and astronomy, and he went on to study those subjects at Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna, taking his doctorate in mathematics at Vienna in 1883 with a dissertation on the calculus of variations.

The turn toward philosophy came through Franz Brentano, whose Vienna lectures Husserl attended from 1884. Brentano, a former Catholic priest, taught that mental acts are always directed toward an object, and he treated philosophy as a rigorous discipline rather than a system of edifying opinion. Husserl later said that Brentano's lectures persuaded him that philosophy could be pursued as serious work. Brentano sent him to Halle to study under his own pupil Carl Stumpf, and there Husserl wrote his habilitation on the concept of number. He taught at Halle as a private lecturer for fourteen years, a long and unremunerative apprenticeship, and began the work that would become the Logical Investigations.

His religious history is brief but not trivial. In 1886, in Vienna, he was baptized into the Lutheran church, a step taken during the period of his turn to philosophy. Friends and biographers have noted the influence of reading the New Testament and of his friendship with Brentano's circle, though Husserl himself said little about it in public. He married Malvine Steinschneider in 1887, also of Jewish background and also converted to Protestantism, and they had three children. Faith never became a theme of his published philosophy, which he insisted must proceed without theological presuppositions. In private he spoke of his work as a kind of calling, and in later life he described philosophy as a vocation carried out under a sense of ultimate responsibility, language that has led some readers to detect a religious earnestness beneath the method.

Recognition came slowly. The Logical Investigations appeared in 1900 and 1901 and won him a call to Göttingen as an extraordinary professor, though the Prussian ministry delayed his promotion to full professor until 1906. At Göttingen he gathered the first phenomenological circle, students and colleagues who took the new method in directions he did not always welcome. Among them were Max Scheler, Adolf Reinach, and Edith Stein, the last of whom would later enter the Carmelite order. In 1916 he accepted a chair at Freiburg im Breisgau, where he remained until his retirement in 1928. There he trained a generation of philosophers, and there Martin Heidegger became first his assistant and then his successor in the chair.

The First World War struck him personally. His younger son Wolfgang was killed at Verdun in 1916, and his other son Gerhart was seriously wounded. Husserl wrote of these years with a grief that did not find its way into his published pages but is visible in his letters.

The final years were darker. Although baptized for nearly half a century and a lifelong German patriot, he was classed as a Jew under the Nazi racial laws. In April 1933 he was suspended from the university, and his name was removed from the roll of emeritus professors. His relationship with Heidegger, long strained by philosophical divergence, ended in a rupture that remained painful to him. Barred from the library and from lecturing in Germany, he delivered lectures in Vienna and Prague in 1935 that became the basis for The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, his last major work, left unfinished. He died of pleurisy in Freiburg on April 27, 1938, in a country that had stripped him of his standing. His unpublished manuscripts, some forty thousand pages of stenographic shorthand, were smuggled to Leuven by the Franciscan priest Herman Van Breda, saving the work from destruction.

His Writing and Its Influence

Husserl began publishing in the 1890s with Philosophy of Arithmetic, an early attempt to ground mathematics in psychological acts of counting. Gottlob Frege's sharp review persuaded him that logic could not be reduced to psychology, and the long argument against what he called psychologism became the ground of the Logical Investigations. That work gave philosophy a new starting point: instead of building theories about consciousness from outside, one should describe, with discipline, how things actually show themselves in experience. The phrase that became his banner, "to the things themselves," meant exactly this. Brentano's doctrine that consciousness is always consciousness of something, which Husserl called intentionality, became the hinge of the whole method.

Ideas I, published in 1913, sharpened the method into the phenomenological reduction, a deliberate suspension of the assumption that the world exists independently of experience, so that the structures of experience itself could be examined. This turn toward what he called transcendental idealism cost him many of his early students, Reinach and Scheler among them, who had understood phenomenology as a realist return to objects. The later works, including Cartesian Meditations and The Crisis of European Sciences, pressed further into questions of intersubjectivity and the "lifeworld," the pre-scientific world of lived experience that, he argued, the sciences presuppose and have forgotten. He read the crisis of European culture as a crisis of reason that had lost its roots in meaning. The manuscripts that survived in Leuven, now edited as the Husserliana, continue to appear, and his published books represent only a fraction of his thought.

The legacy is difficult to overstate. Heidegger's Being and Time was dedicated to Husserl and built on his method while departing from it, and from there phenomenology passed into Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. Husserl himself never made theology a theme, and he insisted that philosophy as rigorous science must bracket religious claims. Yet Christian thinkers found in his method a way to take religious experience seriously on its own terms without reducing it to psychology or sociology. Edith Stein, his student and assistant, carried his discipline into her study of empathy and later into her synthesis of phenomenology with Thomas Aquinas and Carmelite mysticism, before her murder at Auschwitz in 1942. Roman Ingarden and Dietrich von Hildebrand, both Catholic, extended the realist side of the movement. Max Scheler, before his own break with the Church, wrote phenomenologically on values, sympathy, and the person. Later Christian thought took up the method more widely: Karol Wojtyła, the future John Paul II, used phenomenological analysis of the acting person in his philosophical work, and the French school of Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry turned the method toward revelation and the givenness of the divine, arguments that Husserl might have resisted but that his method made possible. Others, notably in the Reformed tradition, answered him critically, questioning whether a method that brackets God can finally do justice to a world that depends on him.

His reception has shifted as the manuscripts have appeared. The older picture of a dry, systematic idealist has given way to a more restless thinker, constantly revising, moved in his last years by questions of history, ethics, and Europe's spiritual condition.

Who should read Husserl: Readers of this library who want to understand the philosophical ground on which much modern Christian reflection on experience, embodiment, and the person is built, and who are willing to work through demanding, technical prose to get there. He is useful for anyone trying to follow Stein, Wojtyła, or Marion, or to think carefully about what it means to describe an experience faithfully before interpreting it. He is not for readers seeking devotional help, doctrinal guidance, or a Christian author; he deliberately wrote without theological presuppositions, and his own faith stays almost entirely out of view. Start with the lectures collected as The Idea of Phenomenology or with Cartesian Meditations, and read slowly.