Phenomenology (Philosophy)

Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was a student of both Franz Brentano at the University of Vienna and Carl Stumpf at the University of Halle. The publication of Logische Untersuchunger (“Logical Investigations”) in 1900 through 1901 represents the beginning of phenomenology. Husserl was distressed by the diminished importance of ancient philosophy and the growing influence of naturalism in the European scientific tradition. He believed that philosophy was moving away from what was true, immutable, and eternal and toward conceptions of truth that were tied to ever-changing, contemporary, relativistic standards. It was Husserl's deeply held belief that philosophy must address a clear understanding of what was essential and irrefutably true in nature. Phenomenology, he believed, offered a glimpse of the essence of human conscious experience, unaffected by constantly emerging (and often conflicting) scientific discoveries about the nature of man and the mind.

For Husserl, phenomenology was much more complex than an examination of subjective experience or a person's idiosyncratic perceptions of cognitive events. It was Husserl's goal to inform psychologists of the structure of mental events that supported such activities as memory, recognition, and expectancy—a more ambitious agenda than the one begun by Wilhelm Wundt (1831–1920) at Leipzig in the mid-1870s with the application of trained introspection to the elements of conscious experience. “Naturalizing consciousness” with the methodological tools and concepts of the natural sciences was, for Husserl, an error. He would never accept the premise that consciousness was a phenomenon of physical reality that followed all the laws and principles of physical science. He could not accept the identity of consciousness and psychophysiological processes in the central nervous system.

This raises the question as to the nature of these basic, background psychological events that were thought to be behind our most vivid, personal perceptions. Husserl's objective was to study the nature of “essences” in his attempt to answer these questions. In a nativistic sense, essences are identical for all people in all places and have been for all time. An essence is a subjectively experienced point in time with no shared, agreed-upon linguistic descriptors. It is an understanding of the supraordi-nate descriptors of a class of objects. For example, houses exist in many sizes, shapes, and architectural styles. They are built of brick, stone, boards, vinyl, and aluminum. Their windows have a variety of appearances. They are surrounded by beautifully landscaped lawns or malodorous concrete walkways. The phenomenologist here asserts that we comprehend (and recognize and recall) the quality of “houseness” wherever we go. Enclosed dwellings that protect inhabitants from the elements are too simplistic generalizations but approaches the idea of Husserl's “essence” of “houseness.”

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