Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (1859-1938) was a German philosopher and mathematician

who established the school of phenomenology. He is widely known as the founder of modern
phenomenology, a highly influential movement in 20th century western philosophy. Husserl
developed phenomenology into a systematic philosophical approach and method with certain
definite goals.
Edmund Husserl made all major contributions in this area that appears as a philosophy and as
a method. Husserl further conceived phenomenology as a foundational science and as a
presuppositionless philosophy. David Hume’s empiricism influenced Husserl. He found the
predominant naturalism and historicism in German thought objectionable and became
interested in exploring the foundations of mathematics. This interest has led him to study
logic and finally epistemology and philosophy.
What is Phenomenology?
Husserl conceived phenomenology in three important ways.
1. It was conceived as the science of sciences, which endeavoured to discover the basis of
consciousness.
2. Phenomenology was conceived as a first philosophy and therefore, it is coextensive
with philosophy, as traditionally it was the latter which had been enjoying the status of
first philosophy.
3. the most important one, where it is conceived as a transcendental idealism. This view
conceives the transcendental ego as the source of all meaning.
As a philosophy, Phenomenology inaugurates a new way of thinking. It is considered as the
most influential movement because it inspired the emergence of many other movements in
philosophy like Existentialism and Hermeneutics. Philosophical thinking was facing a crisis
and at that time Phenomenology was introduced that gave a new life to German Philosophy.
According to Husserl, the subject matter of phenomenology is the idea of phenomena that refers
to ourselves, other people and the objects and events around us. The reflection of our conscious
experience as we experience them is also included in it. Phenomena constitute the things as
they are given to our consciousness whether in perception or imagination or though or volition
according to Husserl. The fundamental objective of phenomenology is to study the phenomena,
which is experienced in various acts of consciousness.
There are two types of phenomena in this sense:
a) Mental Phenomena constitute of what occur in the mind when w experience something.
They also include the acts of consciousness, or its contents
b) Physical Phenomena include the objects of external perception starting with colors
and shapes.
In developing the concept of phenomena, Husserl was influenced by Brentano, who
made a distinction between psychological phenomena from physical phenomena. Brentano
found that the psychological is different from the physical, as the former is characterized
by what is known as intentionality. Brentano says that the mental phenomena exist
intentionally in acts of consciousness, a phenomenon which is known as intentional in-
existence. Brentano and Husserl maintain that every mental phenomenon, or act of
consciousness, is directed toward some object. They are about something that lies outside.
While for Brentano, this is the feature of all psychological phenomena, Husserl replaces
psychical phenomena with experiences or intentional experiences. The thesis of intentional
directedness constitute the core of Brentano's descriptive psychology and according to
Husserl, our consciousness is always intentional and it aims at or refers to something
objective
The Principle of Intentionality
The phenomenological account of experience asserts two things:
1. It claims that everyday experiences are intentional.
2. It affirms that experiences always reveal their objects from a perspective.
Hence the phenomenological account of intentionality reconciles the objectivism of
intentionality with perspectivism of empiricism. The principle of intentionality asserts that
consciousness is always ‘consciousness about” something. This aboutness of consciousness
points to something outside the mind which is conscious of the object. The intentionality
principle underlines the fact that our everyday experiences are directed towards objects,
properties and states of affairs. At the same time, objects are revealed from definite
perspectives. There seems to be a contradiction between the definite directedness of
consciousness and the perspectivism of experiences. Husserl argues that, though experience
reveals its object from a perspective, we are intentionally directed toward a full three-
dimensional object. The different modes of consciousness we may have when we love,
hate, desire, present, wonder etc. are all about something. Hence all objects of experience
are presented to consciousness as transcending. They are presented as going beyond the
experience we have of them. Though all our experiences are perspectival, they also
present their objects to us as transcending the perspective. For instance, when we see a
tree, we do not see a mere image of the tree or a packet of sense data, but we see the tree itself.
Of course the tree is seen from a definite perspective and only those parts of the tree that are
visible from our perspective are seen by us. But Husserl asserts that, the whole tree is
given to the consciousness as an intentional object. Hence phenomenology goes beyond mere
empiricism. It goes beyond the image theory proposed by empiricism.
Husserl argues that perception enables us to go beyond the image, which is present to us. We
relate ourselves to the object itself as an image to a certain extra conscious object. Husserl
claims that in intentional experiences, we do not get raw, uninterrupted images in
consciousness. Instead, we get the data that are already interpreted as images of some objects
or other. Brentano, while introducing the notion of intentionality had asserted that
consciousness was essentially intentional and argued that every mental phenomenon was
characterized by the intentional inexistence of an object. It is directed toward an object or
immanent objectivity. According to Brentano, every mental phenomenon contains something
as an object within itself, although not everyone does so in the same way. This object, argues
Brentano, is the reference to a content. Brentano’s intentionality principle thus aims at
distinguishing the psychical from the physical. Brentano thus initiates a study on the
nature of consciousness and also on the phenomena as they are directly given to
consciousness. He argues that every mental state contains its object completely within itself as
an intentional object is immanent to the mental state. While adopting the principle of
intentionality as a central doctrine in his phenomenology, Husserl proposed some crucial
changes in its conceptualization.
According to him, experiences are directed towards entities which are both mental and
non-mental. He argues that in the experience of colour, we see coloured things and not
mere colour sensations. He maintains that, entities like physical objects, persons, numbers
which are not spatio-temporal, particulars like the patch of blue, universals like blueness,
states of affairs, mental entities like thoughts, images and feelings, etc., can become an
intentional object. In this sense he takes phenomenology and the principle of intentionality
beyond what Brentano intended it to be.
Husserl’s Phenomenology
Husserl’s phenomenology is not confined to a mere philosophical doctrine about the nature of
consciousness and the essences that are directly given to it. Instead, it proposes a method to
isolate this directly given essences. The central concern of phenomenology aims at isolating
the essential aspects which constitute meanings. In other words, it seeks to isolate the essences.
Everything perceived is bound up with the essence of perception which is different from the
object that exists in nature.
Husserl argues that every intentional experience gives meaning. In other words, intentional
experiences have the essential characteristic of giving some meaning. The fundamental
aim of phenomenology is to grasp the perceived as such. It tries to grasp what is essentially
given. The task of phenomenology is to capture the phenomenon as meant. Phenomenology
searches for essences in the consciousness, which is the domain of essences. It searches
for pure mental processes which are immanent to the sphere of consciousness that investigates
them.
The ultimate focus is on pure consciousness. The various mental processes like remembering,
imagining, judging, willing, describing, feeling, perceiving etc. have their own essences.
The phenomenological method examines these essences, by excluding what do not lie in the
mental act itself. It thus builds a science of essences. In order to find the essence of
consciousness, phenomenology excludes what is non-essence. For this the major hurdle is
the natural attitude, which a phenomenologist has to overcome.
The natural attitude is characteristic of both our everyday life and ordinary science. The natural
attitude is the taken for granted attitude we adopt in our day to day life and in our scientific
theorizing endeavours about the world. This is our usual way of existing, by believing and
taking for granted the reality of the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other
people, and even ideas. We simply believe in their existence and never question this
belief. We take them as “just there” and do not question their existence. In other words, we
view the objects of consciousness as factual items. According to Husserl, the genuine
philosophical attitude opposes this view. While the natural attitude accepts the possibility of
knowledge as a self-evident fact, philosophy raises doubts about such assumptions. It
affirms that the self-evident givenness of objects of our natural attitude can be questioned.
Husserl proposes to overcome the natural attitude by suspending the spatio-temporal world and
focusing on pure mental processes. This process is called the phenomenological reduction,
which involves a process of bracketing or Epoche which is the Greek word for cessation.
This process of reduction aims at excluding all that is not genuinely immanent from
the sphere of absolute data. What is intended is adequately given in itself.
The process of bracketing involves a suspension of inquiry. It suspends the object’s
status as reality and therefore, involves a neutralization of belief. It sets aside everything that
is external, and the prejudices that we associate with the reality of the world. The
phenomenological method thus concentrates only on the inner content of our conscious acts.
It tries to isolate what is remembered in the act of remembering, imagined in the act of
imagination, perceived in the act of perception etc.
According to Husserl, the process of reduction has two broad phases: phenomenological
and transcendental. The phenomenological reduction attempts to focus on pure
consciousness and it describes objects not in their natural causal relations, but as they
appear in the consciousness. Hence it is called phenomenological. Transcendental reduction
on the other hand deals with the conditions that make any knowledge possible. According to
Husserl, there are three types of reduction: the phenomenological-psychological reduction,
eidetic reduction and transcendental
reduction. The phenomenological-psychological reduction is conceived as the gateway
to the right form of phenomenological attitude from natural attitude. The natural attitude
is bracketed at this stage and it contains the description of mental acts free of theories and
presuppositions. It also refrains from taking any natural-objective position.
The second type of reduction is eidetic, where the individual existence of the object in question
is bracketed, since phenomenology is interested only in the essence. The idos or essences
are evaluated at this stage. The focus here is on properties, kinds, or types and the ideal
species that entities may exemplify. This process involves a free variation of the individuals in
our imagination. With this it finds out what characteristics these things have in common.
It locates the invariant forms which are essences. These two stages of reduction together set
the stage for what is described as the ultimate goal of phenomenological method; the
isolation of the Transcendental subjectivity. As Speigelberg observes: It indicates that
reduction has the purpose to inhibit and “take back,” as it were, all references to the
“transcendent” as the intentional correlate of our acts and to trace them back to the immanent
or “transcendental” acts in which they have their source. [Vol. I, p. 136]
Husserl observes that without consciousness there would not be a world at all and according
to him, phenomenology has to study the realm of pure consciousness and the essential
formations found there.
The Transcendental Reduction and the Transcendental Ego
Husserl argues that since the basic approaches of the reductions that involve suspension
or bracketing are negative—in psychological-phenomenological and eidetic reductions—we
need to adopt more positive approaches. We need to specify in what direction the reductions
head to. The first two reductions move away from the natural world, and do not specify
what phenomenological reduction ultimately heads to. Husserl here affirms that
transcendental subjectivity is the ultimate goal of the phenomenological method. Since
isolating the transcendental ego is the ultimate goal of Phenomenology, Husserl argues
that a proper understanding of the ego is essential in carrying out the phenomenological
exercise. He says that there is a fundamental problem with our understanding about the ego.
The ego is usually conceived as the essentially nonphysical entity, which is causally interacting
with the physical. We often understand the ego and its acts in naturalistic terms. The talk of
the ego and its experiences presuppose the natural attitude, which phenomenology tries
to overcome. Hence it is important that we should bracket to the ego as well. This happens in
the third stage of reduction, which is known as the transcendental reduction. In transcendental
reduction, we bracket the ego and its intentions. We then cease to affirm the existence of
the ego as a psychological reality. In other words, the empirical or psychological ego has to be
set aside. Husserl writes: By phenomenological epoche I reduce my natural human Ego and
psychic life - the realms of my psychological self-experience – to my transcendental
phenomenological Ego, the realm of transcendental phenomenological self-experience.
[Cartesian Meditations, p.26] The transcendental reduction proceeds with a bracketing of the
ego and its intentions. This stage ceases to affirm the existence of the ego as a psychological
reality. With this we may get access to the transcendental subjectivity or the
transcendental ego. Husserl believed that the epoché that brackets the empirical elements in
consciousness would finally leaves only the transcendental ego and its pure acts. According to
him, the reflection on these transcendental elements of consciousness is pure or
transcendental reflection. He thought that we have direct access to this transcendental
subjectivity through a transcendental experience and epoche is a form of transcendental
experience. The transcendental ego and its pure acts are the residue of transcendental
reduction. Husserl says that, while every cogitato come and go, the pure ego appears to be
necessary in principle. It remains absolutely self-identical in all possible changes of
experience. Husserl asserts that the pure Ego is the necessary prerequisite for experience
to occur. With the transcendental reduction of the empirical ego, we enter into the domain
of meaning, not the consciousness of an individual human, but the essence of all meaning-
making.
The notion of transcendental ego and the idea of transcendental reduction are the most
interesting and the most problematic aspects of Husserl’s philosophy. Though Husserl
considered these ideas as the most important constituents of his philosophy, none of his
disciples have shown interest in further developing them. Husserl was reported to have
stated once that even after his death, his transcendental ego might exist, as it is eternal. In this
sense phenomenology is ultimately a philosophy of the self.