By Individual Philosopher > Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl
(Undated photograph)

Introduction

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (1859 - 1938) was a Moravian-Germanphilosopher and mathematician (usually considered German as most of his adult lifewas spent in Germany), best known as the father of the 20th Century Phenomenologymovement.
His work broke with the dominant Positivism of his day, giving weight to subjective experience as the source of all of our knowledge of objective phenomena. Along withGeorg Hegel and his own student Martin Heidegger, he was a major influence on the whole of 20th Century Continental Philosophy.

Life

Husserl was born on 8 April 1859 in Prossnitz, Moravia (present-day Prostejov in theCzech Republic, but then part of the Austrian Empire). His father was a Jewish clothing merchant, and the language of the Husserl home was probably Yiddishalthough it was not an orthodox household.
His father had the means and the inclination to send Edmund away to Vienna at the age of 10 to begin his German classical education (and he was lucky that the recentliberalization of the laws governing Prossnitz's Jews allowed this), atlhough just a year later, in 1870, he moved back closer to home to the Staatsgymnasium in Olmütz. He was remembered there as a mediocre student who nevertheless loved mathematics and science. He graduated in 1876 and went to Leipzig for university studies, where he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy.
He moved to the University of Berlin in 1878 for further studies in mathematics, and then to Vienna (under the supervision of Leo Königsberger), where he completed his doctorate in 1883, at the age of 24, with a dissertation on the theory of the calculus of variations. He briefly held an academic post in Berlin, before returning again to Vienna in 1884 in order to attend the philosophy lectures of Franz Brentano (1838 - 1917), which had a great impact on Husserl and was instrumental in Husserl's decision todedicate his life to philosophy.
In 1886, Husserl went to the University of Halle to study psychology and to obtain his habilitation under Carl Stumpf (1848 - 1936), a former student of Brentano. There he also converted to Christianity (Evangelical Lutheran) and was baptized. He marriedMalvine Charlotte Steinschneider, a woman from the Prossnitz Jewish community, who was also baptized before the wedding, and the couple were to have three children. He remained at Halle teaching as an associate professor until 1901, and wrote his important early books, including the "Philosophie der Arithmetik" ("Philosophy of Arithmetic") of 1891 and the "Logische Untersuchungen" ("Logical Investigations") of 1901.
In 1901, Husserl joined the faculty at the University of Göttingen, where he taught for 16 years, and where he worked out thedefinitive formulations of his theory of Phenomenology, which he presented in his 1913 "Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie" ("Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy"). From about 1905, Husserl's students formed themselves into a group with a common style of life and work, referring to Husserl as "the master". The onset of World War I disrupted the circle of Husserl's younger colleagues, and when his son, Wolfgang, died at Verdun in 1916, Husserl observed a year of mourning and kept silence professionally during that time.
In 1916, Husserl accepted an appointment to a professorship at Freiburg im Breisgau, a position he retained until he retiredfrom teaching in 1928. Among his students at Freiburg were Martin Heidegger, (who Husserl always looked on as his legitimate heir, although their relationship cooled as Heidegger's path took him more in the direction of Existentialism) and Rudolf Carnap(1891 - 1970), a leading figure in the Vienna Circle and a prominent advocate of Logical Positivism.
During this time, he continued to work on manuscripts that would be published after his death as volumes two and three of the"Ideen", and to refine his Phenomenology, as well as on many other projects. After his retirement, he continued to make use of the Freiburg library until denied by the anti-Jewish legislation passed by the National Socialists (Nazis) in April 1933. The rise of the Nazis in Germany also caused Husserl to definitively break with Heidegger.
Husserl died of pleurisy on 28 April 1938 (Good Friday) near Freiburg, Germany.

Work

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Husserl developed his own individual style of working: all of his thoughts were conceived in writing, and during his life he produced more than 40,000 pages.
Under the supervision of Carl Stumpf (1848 - 1936), a former student of Franz Brentano (1838 - 1917), Husserl wrote "Über den Begriff der Zahl" ("On the concept of Number") in 1887, which would serve as the base for his first major work, the"Philosophie der Arithmetik" ("Philosophy of Arithmetic") of 1891. In these early works, he tried to combine mathematics, psychology and philosophy, his main goal being to provide a sound foundation for mathematics.
He published his major philosophical works while at the University of Göttingen: the "Logische Untersuchungen" ("Logical Investigations") in 1901 (produced after an intensive study of the British Empiricists), and the first volume of the "Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie" ("Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy") in 1913. It was in these works, particularly in the "Ideen", that he introduced the major themes of his theory of Phenomenology, and Husserl himself believed that his work represented the culmination of the whole of philosophy from Plato on, because, as he saw it, he had discovered a description of reality which could not be denied.
Similar to Descartes, more than two centuries earlier, Husserl started from the standpoint that, for each of us, there is only one thing which is indubitably certain, namely our own conscious awareness. That, he concluded, must be the place to start to build our knowledge of the world around us. However, our awareness and consciousness must be awareness and consiousnessof something, and we cannot distinguish from experience alone between states of consciousness and objects of consciousness. Husserl agreed with Skeptics down the ages who have asserted that we can never know whether objects of consciouness have an independent existence separate from us, but he insisted that they do indubitably exist as objects of consciousness for us and so can be investigated as such without making any unwarranted assumptions about their independent existence. It was this general idea of Husserl's that launched the influential school of philosophy known asPhenomenology.
His fundamental methodological principle was what he called "phenomenological reduction", essentially a kind of reflection on intellectual content. He asserted that he could justifiably “bracket” the data of consciousness by suspending all preconceptions about it, including (and especially) those drawn from what he called the “naturalistic standpoint”. Thus, it really did not matter, in his philosophy, whether an object under discussion really existed or not so long as he could at least conceive of the object, and objects of pure imagination could be examined with the same seriousness as data taken from theobjective world.
Husserl concluded, then, that consciousness has no life apart from the objects or phenomena it considers. He called this characteristic “intentionality” (or object-directedness), following Brentano, and it embodied the idea that the human mind is the only thing is the whole universe that is able to direct itself toward other things outside of itself. Husserl described a concept he called intentional content, something in the mind which was sort of like a built-in mental description of external reality, and which allowed us to perceive and remember aspects of objects in the real world outside.
Husserl continued to refine his Phenomenology throughout his life. His last three major books were "Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins" ("Lectures on the Phenomenology of Inner Time-Consciousness") published in 1928, "Formale und transzendentale Logik" ("Formal and Transcendental Logic") published in 1929, and"Mèditations cartèsiennes" ("Cartesian Meditations") published in 1931. Two more volumes of his "Ideen", which he had written during his time at Freiburg im Breisgau were published after his death, in 1952.

In his later work, Husserl moved further towards a kind of Idealism, a position which he had initially had tried to overcome oravoid, declaring that mental and spiritual reality possessed their own reality independent of any physical basis. At first, he espoused a kind of Transcendental Idealism, similar to that of Kant and the German Idealists, which asserted that ourexperience of things is about how they appear to us (representations), and not about those things as they are in and of themselves, and his view generally fell short of asserting that an objective world external to us does not exist. However, as he continued to gradually refine his thought, he ultimately arrived at an even more radical Idealist position, which essentially deniedthat external objects existed at all outside of our consciousness.

Positivism is a philosophical school developed by the French sociologist and philospher Auguste Comte in the mid-19th Century.
Comte believed that Metaphysics and theology should be replaced by a hierarchy of sciences, from mathematics at the base to sociology at the top. The school is based around the idea that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such knowledge can only come from positive affirmation of theories through strict scientific method (techniques for investigating phenomena based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence, subject to specific principles of reasoning). For more details, see the section on the doctrine of Positivism.
As a religious system, developed by Comte later in his life, Positivism denies the existence of a personal God and takeshumanity ("the great being") as the object of its veneration and cult, and in this respect has similarities to Humanism. Comtedeveloped a hierarchical priesthood, positive dogmas, an organized cult, and even a calendar on the model of Catholicism.
After Comte's death in 1857, a division arose among the Positivists between the orthodox group under the direction of Pierre Laffitte (which maintained both the scientific and the religious teaching of Positivism) and a dissident group formed under Paul-Maximilien-Emile Littré (1801 - 1881). Orthodox groups (complete with its cult, sacraments, and ceremonies) were formed in England, Sweden, Brazil and Chile. For Littré, however, Positivism was essentially a method which limits human knowledge to the study of experimental facts, and neither affirms nor denies anything conerning what may exist outside of experience. Littré and his followers therefore rejected the religious organization and cult of Positivism.
Although not a large movement in terms of individual contributors, its influence on subsequent philosophic thought was quiteprofound. The principles of Positivism as a philosophical system were accepted and applied in England by John Stuart Mill, a major figure in the Utilitarianism

By Individual Philosopher > Edmund Husserl Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(Portrait by Jakob Schlesinger, 1831)

Introduction

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (often known as G. W. F. Hegel or Georg Hegel) (1770 - 1831) was a German philosopher of the early Modern period. He was a leading figure in the German Idealism movement in the early 19th Century, although his ideas went far beyond earlier Kantianism, and he foundedhis own school of Hegelianism.
He has been called the "Aristotle of modern times", and he used his system ofdialectics to explain the whole of the history of philosophy, science, art, politics and religion. Despite charges of obscurantism and "pseudo-philosophy", Hegel is often considered the summit of early 19th Century German thought.
His influence has been immense, both within philosophy and in the other sciences, and he came to have a profound impact on many future philosophical schools (whether they supported or opposed his ideas), not the least of which was theMarxism of Karl Marx which was to have so profound an effect on the political landscape of the 20th Century.

Life

Hegel (pronounced HAY-gul) was born on 27 August 1770 in Stuttgart in south-western Germany. His father, Georg Ludwig Hegel, was secretary to the revenue office at the court of the Duke of Württemberg; his mother, Maria Magdalena Louisa (née Fromm), was the well-to-do and well-educated daughter of a lawyer at the High Court of Justice at the Württemberg court (she died when Hegel was thirteen of a "bilious fever"). Hegel had a younger sister, Christiane Luise (who was later committed to an asylum and eventually drowned herself), and a younger brother, Georg Ludwig (who was to die in Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812).
At the age of three, Hegel went to the "German School", and entered the "Latin School" at age five, and then attended Stuttgart'sGymnasium Illustre high school from 1784 to 1788. He was a serious, hard-working and successful student, and a voracious reader from a young age, including Shakespeare, the ancient Greek philosophers, the Bible and German literature. In addition to German and Latin, he learned Greek, Hebrew, French and English.
At the age of eighteen, he entered the Tübinger Stift, a Protestant seminary attached to the University of Tübingen, where two fellow students were to become vital to his development: the poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 - 1843), and the younger brilliant philosopher-to-be Friedrich Schelling. The three became close friends, sharing a dislike for the restrictive environment of the seminary. Hölderlin and Friedrich Schelling soon began to be interested in the theoretical debates on Kantian philosophy, although Hegel's own critical engagement with Kant did not occur until much later (around 1800).
Having graduated from the Tübingen Seminary in 1793, Hegel became house tutor to an aristocratic family in Berne, Switzerland, and then took a similar position in Frankfurt-am-Main from 1797 to 1801. During this time he produced someearly works on Christianity, and his friend Hölderlin began to exert an increasingly important influence on his thought.
In 1801, Hegel secured a position as an unsalaried lecturer at the University of Jena (with the encouragement of his old friendSchelling, who was Extraordinary Professor there). He lectured on Logic and Metaphysics and, with Schelling, gave joint lectures on an "Introduction to the Idea and Limits of True Philosophy" and held a "Philosophical Disputorium". In 1802, Schellingand Hegel founded a journal, the "Kritische Journal der Philosophie" ("Critical Journal of Philosophy"), and he produced hisfirst real book on philosophy, "Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie" ("The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy") in 1801.
In 1805, the University promoted Hegel to the position of Extraordinary Professor (although still unsalaried) and, under somefinancial pressure, he brought out the book which introduced his system of philosophy to the world, "Phänomenologie des Geistes" ("Phenomenology of Mind"), in 1807, just after Napoleon Bonaparte (whom Hegel greatly admired) had entered the city of Jena and closed the University. The same year, he had an illegitimate son, Georg Ludwig Friedrich Fischer by his landlady, Christiana Burkhardt (who had been abandoned by her husband). However, unable to find more suitable employment, he was then forced to move from Jena and to accept a position as editor of a newspaper, the "Bamberger Zeitung", in Bamberg.
From 1808 until 1816, he was headmaster of a gymnasium in Nuremberg, where he adapted his "Phenomenology of Mind" for use in the classroom, and developed the idea of a comprehensive encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences (later published in 1817). In 1811, he married Marie Helena Susanna von Tucher, the eldest daughter of a Senator, and they had two sons, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm in 1813 and Immanuel Thomas Christian in 1814 (and, in 1817, his illegitimate son, Ludwig Fischer, who was by then orphaned, joined the Hegel household). This period saw the publication of his second major work, "Wissenschaft der Logik" ("Science of Logic") in three volumes in 1812, 1813 and 1816.
From 1816 to 1818, Hegel taught at the Univeristy of Heidelberg, and then he took offer of the chair of philosophy at theUniversity of Berlin, where he remained until his death in 1831. He published his "Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts"("Elements of the Philosophy of Right") in 1821. At the height of his fame, his lectures attracted students from all over Germany and beyond, and he was appointed Rector of the University in 1830, and decorated by King Frederick William III of Prussia for his service to the Prussian state in 1831.
Hegel died in Berlin on 14 November 1831 from a cholera epidemic, and was buried in Berlin's Dorotheenstadt Cemetery, next to fellow philosophers Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780 - 1819).

Work

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Hegel published only four main books during his life: "Phänomenologie des Geistes" ("Phenomenology of Mind") in 1807, his account of the evolution of consciousness from sense-perception to absolute knowledge; the three volumes of "Wissenschaft der Logik" ("Science of Logic") in 1811, 1812 and 1816, the logical and metaphysical core of his philosophy; "Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften" ("Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences") in 1816, a summary of his entire philosophical system, intended as a textbook for a university course; and "Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts"("Elements of the Philosophy of Right") in 1821, his political philosophy and his thoughts on “civil society”. A number of other works on the Philosophy of History, Philosophy of Religion, Aesthetics, and the history of philosophy were compiled from thelecture notes of his students and published posthumously.
His works have a reputation for their abstractness and difficulty (no less an academic than Bertrand Russell claimed that Hegel was the single most difficult philosopher to understand), and for the breadth of the topics they attempt to cover. These difficulties are magnified for those reading him in translation, since his philosophical language and terminology in German often do not have direct analogues in other languages (e.g. his essential term "Geist" is usually translated as "mind" or "spirit", but these still do not cover the full depth of meaning of the word).
Hegel's thought can be seen as part of a progression of philosophers (going back to Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Leibniz, Spinoza,Rousseau and Kant) who can generally be described as Idealists, and who regarded freedom or self-determination as real, and as having important ontological implications for soul or mind or divinity.
He developed a new form of thinking and Logic, which he called "speculative reason" (which includes the more famous concept of "dialectic") to try to overcome what he saw as the limitations of both common sense and of traditional philosophy at grasping philosophical problems and the relation between thought and reality. His method was to begin with ultra-basic concepts (like Being and Nothing), and to develop these through a long sequence of elaborations towards solutions that take the form of series of concepts. He employed the tried-and-tested process of dialectic (which dates back to Aristotle and involves resolving a thesis and its opposing antithesis into a synthesis), but asserted that this logical process was not just a matter of form as separate from content, but had applications and repercussions in the real world. He also took the concept of the dialectic one step further, arguing that the new synthesis is not the final truth of the matter, but rather became the new thesis with its corresponding antithesis and synthesis. This process would continue effectively ad infitum, until reaching theultimate synthesis, which is what Hegel called the Absolute Idea.
Hegel's main philosophical project, then, was to take the contradictions and tensions he saw throughout modern philosophy, culture and society, and interpret them as part of a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity that, in different contexts, he called"the absolute idea" or "absolute knowledge". He believed that everything was interrelated and that the separation of reality into discrete parts (as all philosophers since Aristotle had done) was wrong. He advocated a kind of historically-mindedAbsolute Idealism (developed out of the Transcendental Idealism of Immanuel Kant), in which the universe would realize itsspiritual potential through the development of human society, and in which mind and nature can be seen as two abstractions of one indivisible whole Spirit.
However, the traditional triadic dialectical interpretation of Hegel's approach (thesis - antithesis - synthesis) is perhaps toosimplistic. From Hegel's point of view, analysis of any apparently simple identity or unity reveals underlying inner contradictions, and it is these contradictions that lead to the dissolution of the thing or idea in the simple form in which it presented itself, and its development into a higher-level, more complex thing or idea that more adequately incorporates the contradictions.
Hegel was the first major philosopher to regard history and the Philosophy of History as important. Hegel's Historicism is the position that all human societies (and all human activities such as science, art or philosophy) are defined by their history, and that their essence can be sought only through understanding that. According to Hegel, to understand why a person is the way he is, you must put that person in a society; and to understand that society, you must understand its history, and the forces that shaped it. He is famously quoted as claiming that "Philosophy is the history of philosophy".
His system for understanding history, and the world itself, was developed from his famous dialectic teachings of thesis,antithesis and synthesis. He saw history as as a progression, always moving forward, never static, in which each successive movement emerges as a solution to the contradictions inherent in the preceding movement. He believed that every complex situation contains within itself conflicting elements, which work to destabilize the situation, leading it to breakdown into a new situation in which the conflicts are resolved. For example, the French Revolution constituted the introduction of real individual political freedom, but carried with it the seeds of the brutal Reign of Terror which followed, and only then was there the possibility of a constitutional state of free citizens, embodying both the benevolent organizing power of rational governmentand the revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality.
Thus, the history of any human endeavour not only builds upon, but also reacts against, what has gone before. This process, though, is an ongoing one, because the resulting synthesis has itself inherent contradictions which need to be resolved (so that the synthesis becomes the new thesis for another round of the dialectic). Crucially, however, Hegel believed that this dialectical process was not just random, but that it had a direction or a goal, and that goal was freedom (and our consciousness andawareness of freedom) and of the absolute knowledge of mind as the ultimate reality.
In political and social terms, Hegel saw the ultimate destination of this historical process as a conflict-free and totally rational society or state, although for Hegel this did not mean a society of dogmatic and abstract pure reason such as the French Revolution envisaged, but one which looks for what is rational within what is real and already existent. Some have argued that Hegel's vision of the state as an organic rational whole, leaves no room for individual dissent and choice, no room for the veryfreedom he was advocating. However, it should be noted that Hegel's idea of freedom was quite different from what we thing of as the traditional Liberal conception of freedom (which he would have seen as merely the ability to follow your own caprice), and rather consists in the fulfillment of oneself as a rational individual. He did not expound in any detail, though, on his vision of theideal state, and how such a state might avoid sinking into authoritarianism and Totalitarianism.
Hegel categorically rejected Kant's "thing-in-itself" and his noumenal world, arguing against Kant's claim that something that exists was unknowable as contradictory and inconsistent. On the contrary, he claimed that whatever is must by definition beknowable: "The real is rational, and the rational is real". He asserted that what becomes the real is "Geist" (which, as we have noted above, can be translated as mind, spirit or soul), which he also sees as developing through history, with each period having a "Zeitgeist" (spirit of the age). Thus, although individuals and whole societies change as part of the dialectical process, what is really changing is the underlying Geist. He also held that each person's individual consciousness or mind is really part of the Absolute Mind (even if the individual does not realize this), and he argued that if we understood that we were part of agreater consciousness we would not be so concerned with our individual freedom, and we would agree with to act rationallyin a way that did not follow our individual caprice, thereby achieving self-fulfilment.
There has been much debate about whether Hegel's philosophy should be considerad religious or spiritual or not. Most have interpreted his idea of an Absolute Mind as essentially a kind of Monism, which may or may not involve a monotheistic God of the traditional Christian kind. Some have seen it as closer to a kind of Pantheism. However, most of his philosophy also makes good sense when interpreted in a non-religious way, concerned merely with human minds.
Hegel also discussed the concept of alienation in his work, the idea of something that is part of us and within us and yet seems in some way foreign or alien or hostile. He introduced the figure of the "unhappy soul", who prays to a God whom he believes to be all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good, and who sees himself in contrast as powerless, ignorant and base. Hegel submits that this is wrong because we are effectively part of God (or Geist or Mind), and thus possessed of all good qualities as well as bad.
Hegel's thought is often considered the summit of early 19th Century German Idealism. Despite the suppression (and evenbanning at one point) of his philosophy by the Prussian right-wing, and its firm rejection by the left-wing, Hegel's influence has been immense, both within philosophy and in the other sciences. It would come to have a profound impact on many future philosophical schools (not least those that opposed his ideas), such as Existentialism, Marxism, Nationalism, Fascism,Historicism, British Idealism and Logical Positivism and the Analytic Philosophy movement.

After his death, Hegel's followers split into two opposing camps: the Protestant, conservative Right ("Old") Hegelians, and theatheistic, revolutionary Left ("Young") Hegelians. Although that distinction is perhaps now considered somewhat naïve, it can be seen as a tribute to the breadth of Hegel's vision. In the latter half of the 20th Century, Hegel's philosophy has undergone amajor renaissance, partly due to the re-evaluation of Hegel as a possible philosophical progenitor of Marxism, and partly due to a resurgence of the historical perspective that he brought to everything, and an increasing recognition of the importance of his dialectical method.

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