Phenomenology

Phenomenology as a Rigorous Science and as the Science of the Lifeworld

The concept of phenomenology was primarily developed by the philosopher Edmund Husserl in the first decades of the twentieth century He was born in 1859 in a German Jewish family in Prostejov, Moravia, which was a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and which is currently a part of the Czech Republic. He studied mathematics and philosophy at Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna and taught philosophy at the Universities of Halle, Göttingen, and Freiburg, where he died in 1938. The genesis of his work can be divided into three periods: (1) investigation of the philosophical presuppositions of logical thought, (2) investigations into the meaning of establishing acts of consciousness, and (3) the theory of lifeworld.

Husserl begins with a critical assessment of the contemporary currents of philosophical thought. At that time, the philosophical thought concerning the starting points that form our knowledge were divided into approaches stressing methodological (neo-Kantianism) or logical (Frege, Vienna Circle) operations, on one hand, and the originality of lived experience (philosophy of life—Dilthey, Bergson), on the other. Husserl's conception cuts across the boundaries separating those positions. His programmatic aim was to make the “characteristic correlation between ideal objects (ideale Gegenstände) of the purely logical sphere and subjectively lived experience as constitutive action (bildendes Tun) a topic of research” (Biemel 1959). This aim, which sounds purely philosophical, had an enormous impact on the state of discussion at that time, since it helped to bridge the gap between the logical systematic approach to epistemological problems and its opposite, the analysis of consciousness as a stream of lived experience where intuitive introspection is the preferred method. Husserl, who had started out as a mathematician, emphasized the self-evident necessity of pure logic for any science. At the same time, however, he demonstrated that logic itself required a philosophical foundation in order to illuminate the context of meaning in which logical thought takes place. He conceived consciousness as a stream of acts that always are “intentional,” that is, that always are correlated with a reality that they are able to grasp. Thinking means for him primarily “thinking of something,” so that the “empty” formal mode of thought represented by pure logic needs to be seen as a secondary derivation from those primary acts. Husserl is interested in the structure of acts of consciousness that, as intentional experience (intentionales Erleben), always represents a unity of content and form of experience and hence is the basis of the human approach to reality in its every mode (Husserl 1975–1984 2:9, 401). This does not mean that he would neglect the significance of logic for the sciences and scientific procedures. But if it is to claim to be a rigorous science providing a foundation of all individual sciences, philosophy must achieve both: It must employ pure logic and at the same time be able to clarify its basis in the stream of intentional consciousness itself.

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