Husserl and Other Phenomenologists

Abstract

This article addresses a basic question: what elements in Husserl’s phenomenology can account for the variety of post-Husserlian phenomenologies? The answer, I suggest, is that Husserl’s idea of reality, particularly his notion of givenness vis-à-vis self-givenness, facilitated the work of his followers by offering them at once a firm ground and a point of departure for their inquiries. However, adopting Husserl’s phenomenology as their starting point did not prevent his followers from developing their own independent phenomenological theory. Moreover, despite the elusive particulars that shape one’s individual experience of the world, so it transpires, Husserl’s thinking which was different and beyond their own observations and actual experiences, namely, transcendent, appears to have been a genuine guide along their path to achieve meaning. This interpretation thus gives precedence to a metaphysical point of departure, that is, to Husserl’s idea of reality as ‘givenness’, in launching phenomenological investigation—over any specific aspect of his work—as that which continues to sustain phenomenological discourse.

Keywords:

• Phenomenology
• Edmund Husserl
• givenness
• post-Husserlian phenomenologies
• philosophical debt

Notes

1. Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 2 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 1.xxvi, xxviii, xxvii, xxxvii. Spiegelberg presents a more critical view of the subjectivity of phenomenology in “How Subjective is Phenomenology?” in Essays in Phenomenology, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 137–43.

2. Dorion Cairns, “An Approach to Phenomenology,” in Philosophical Essays in the Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. Marvin Farber (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 3, 4; all emphases follow the original, unless stated otherwise.

3. Husserl Edmund, Ideas I, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913), trans. W. R. Gibson (London: Routlegde, 2012), §132, 275; hereafter cited in the text. Originally published as Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosphie, vol. 1, Husserliana 3 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950).

4. Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. William P. Alston and George Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 8.

5. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, trans. John Niemeyer Findlay, ed. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2001), Prolegomena §65, 150. The original title “Idee der Subjektivität überhaupt” was mistranslated as “Idea of Subjectivity in Science.”

6. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, §§67–69.

7. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, §§12–14, 26–33; §20, 44–45.

8. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, §8, 250.

9. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, §1, 9.

10. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, Introduction, §2, 168. In this work this determination meant focusing on logical lawfulness and most fundamental ideal essences of things. See Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, §66, 151–52.

11. The term objekt is distinguished from Gegenstand, see Dermot Moran and Joseph Cohen, The Husserl Dictionary (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 228.

12. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, §4, 85.

13. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 11.

14. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, §7, 177. In a manuscript, probably from 1989, titled “Keine Wahrnehmung ohne wharnehmende Subjekt” (Ms. A VI 11 I , 186), Husserl notes: “The entire observation is valid for psychic acts in general in relation to the I.” Cited in Eduard Marbach, Das Problem des Ich in der Phänomenologie Husserls (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 6, n. 6.

15. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, §4, 85–86; my emphasis.

16. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, §8, 92–93.

17. Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 8.

18. See Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 12.

19. Elisabeth Strӧker explains that for Husserl evidence “is the experience of self-givenness of a thing [Sache]. This implies that an epistemological difference obtains between the mere givenness of a thing and its self-givenness.” Ströker Elisabeth, Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1933), 30.

20. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, x. On Husserl’s view of self-evidence regarding intuitive data as testifying to truth, see Herbert Spiegelberg, “Phenomenology of Direct Evidence,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2.4 (1942): 427–56. Elsewhere, Spiegelberg cites Husserl’s words in the “Platform” of his Jahurbuch für Philosophie and phänomenologische Forschung, where he establishes that what unites different phenomenologists is “the conviction that only by a return to the primary sources of direct intuition and to insights into essential structures derived from them” may we be able to approach, clarify and eventually solve (at least in principle) philosophical and conceptual problems. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 1.5.

21. For Husserl self-givenness is not a requirement of phenomenological investigation only but of science in general, in his words: “Every science has its own object-domain as field of research, and... to all its correct assertions, there correspond as original sources of the reasoned justification that support them certain intuitions in which objects of the region appear as self-given and in part at least as given in a primordial (originärer) sense” (Ideas, §1, 9). In the background of this insight stand the principles of “descriptivity” and “lack of supposition,” which were foundational for Husserlian thinking from its very beginning and were designed to save knowledge from various speculative and scientific theories and to consolidate phenomenology as a non-constructivistic theory.

22. Both processes are finally crystalized in Husserl’s phenomenology as two stages of the phenomenological method: the first largely corresponds to “phenomenological reduction,” while the second corresponds to “eidetic reduction.” While the discussion of Husserl’s method of reduction exceeds the scope of this introduction, I argue that both processes are already implicit in his idea of givenness, which he shared with the phenomenologists who followed him, unlike the method of reduction, which was one of the issues that led to the split of the phenomenological movement.

23. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 18. This approach is already implied in the subtitle of the second volume of Logical Investigations: “Investigation into Phenomenology and the Theory of Knowledge.”

24. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, §7, 177; my emphasis.

25. As Husserl put it: “It belongs to the type of development peculiar to certain categories of essential being that essences belonging to them can be given only ‘one-sidedly’, whilst in succession more ‘sides’, though never ‘all sides’, can be given” (Ideas, §3, 12).

26. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, §4, 85–86; my emphasis.

27. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, §5, 82–86. For more on outer and inner perception, see the appendix “Beilge über inner und äuβer Wahrnehmung,” which appears in the German original only, Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 2, part 1 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992), 751–75.

28. “Erste Philosophie” is the title of Husserl’s Freiburg Lecture courses (1923–1924), later published as Husserliana 7 and 8.

29. The realist phenomenologist Hedwig Conrad-Martius (1888–1966) describes this as follows: “In order to be a phenomenologist... one should somehow shift the standards from our eyes. How does this happen? I cannot tell. However, we suddenly see thousands of things that we did not see before. Husserl, our honored and good teacher taught us this way... a secular action. We philosophized passionately, almost day and night... we did nothing other than to bring everything, absolutely everything, under the magnifying glass of eidetic inquiry” (presented at the congress of “Distinguished Service Cross,” March 1958), in “Nachlässe Archiev,” Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek (BSM) (Conrad-Martius, DII, 2), cited in Alexandra Elisabeth Pfeifer, “Ontological Phenomenology: The Philosophical Project of Hedwig Conrad-Martius,” Axiomathes 18 (2008): 448; my emphasis.

30. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, §14, 103.

31. See also Logical Investigations, vol. 2, §92.

32. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, §47, 92.

33. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, §43, 83.

34. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, 1.

35. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, Introduction, §3, 170.

36. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, §6, 175.

37. As is well known, Husserl later established both methodical dispositions as two successive operative methodological steps, “phenomenological reduction” and then “eidetic reduction.” The discussion of these two reductions exceeds the scope of this article. However, I argue that the main insights upon which these methodological steps are based are implicit already in Husserl’s idea of givenness. 

38. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, §6, 175.

39. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, §2, 12.

40. Spiegelberg, “How Subjective is Phenomenology?” in Natanson, Essays in Phenomenology, 143.