Edmund Husserl

Husserl, Edmund (1859–1938)

Through his creation of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl was one of the most influential philosophers of our century. He was decisive for most of contemporary continental philosophy, and he anticipated many issues and views in the recent philosophy of mind and cognitive science. However, his works were not reader- friendly, and he is more talked about than read.

Husserl was born in Moravia, received a Ph.D. in mathematics while working with Weierstraß, and then turned to philosophy under the influence of Franz Brentano. He was particularly engaged by Brentano’s view on intentionality and developed it further into what was to become phenomenology. His first phenomenological work was Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations) (1900–1). It was followed by Ideen (Ideas) (1913), which is the first work to give a full and systematic presentation of phenomenology. Husserl’s later works, notably Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time) (1928), Formale und transzendentale Logik (Formal and Transcendental Logic) (1929), Kartesianische Meditationen (Cartesian Meditations) (1931) and Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (Crisis of the European Sciences) (partly published in 1936), remain largely within the framework of the Ideas. They take up topics that Husserl only dealt with briefly or were not even mentioned in the Ideas , such as the status of the subject, intersubjectivity, time and the lifeworld.

Brentano had characterized intentionality as a special kind of directedness upon an object. This leads to difficulties in cases of hallucination and serious misperception, where there is no object. Also, it leaves open the question of what the directedness of consciousness consists in. Husserl therefore endeavours to give a detailed analysis of those features of consciousness that make it as if of an object. The collection of all these features Husserl calls the act’s ‘noema’. The noema unifies the consciousness we have at a certain time into an act that is seemingly directed towards an object. The noema is hence not the object that the act is directed towards, but is the structure that makes our consciousness be as if of such an object.

The noemata are akin to Frege’s ‘third world’ objects, that is, the meanings of linguistic expressions. According to Husserl, ‘the noema is nothing but a generalization of the notion of meaning [Bedeutung] to the field of all acts’ ([1913] 1950: 3, 89 ). Just as distinguishing between an expression’s meaning and its reference enables one to account for the meaningful use of expressions that fail to refer, so, according to Husserl, can the distinction between an act’s noema and its object help us overcome Brentano’s problem of acts without an object.

In an act of perception the noema we can have is restricted by what goes on at our sensory surfaces, but this constraint does not narrow our possibilities down to just one. Thus in a given situation I may perceive a man, but later come to see that it was a mannequin, with a corresponding shift of noema. Such a shift of noema is always possible, corresponding to the fact that perception is always fallible. These boundary conditions, which constrain the noemata we can have, Husserl calls ‘hyle’. The hyle are not objects experienced by us, but are experiences of a kind which we typically have when our sense organs are affected, but also can have in other cases, for example under the influence of fever or drugs.

In our natural attitude we are absorbed in physical objects and events and in their general features, such as their colour and shape. These general features, which can be shared by several objects, Husserl calls essences, or ‘eidos’ (Wesen). Essences are studied in the eidetic sciences, of which mathematics is the most highly developed. We get to them by turning our attention away from the concrete individuals and focusing on what they have in common. This change of attention Husserl calls ‘the eidetic reduction’, since it leads us to the eidos. However, we may also more radically leave the natural attitude altogether, put the objects we were concerned with there in brackets and instead reflect on our own consciousness and its structures. This reflection Husserl calls ‘the transcendental reduction’, or ‘epoché’. Husserl uses the label ‘the phenomenological reduction’ for a combination of the eidetic and the transcendental reduction. This leads us to the phenomena studied in phenomenology, that is, primarily, the noemata.

The noemata are rich objects, with an inexhaustible pattern of components. The noema of an act contains constituents corresponding to all the features, perceived and unperceived, that we attribute to the object, and moreover constituents corresponding to features that we rarely think about and are normally not aware of, features that are often due to our culture. All these latter features Husserl calls the ‘horizon’ of the act. The noema is influenced by our living together with other subjects where we mutually adapt to one another and come to conceive the world as a common world in which we all live, but experience from different perspectives. This adaptation, through empathy (Einfühlung), was extensively studied by Husserl.

Husserl emphasizes that our perspectives and anticipations are not predominantly factual: ‘this world is there for me not only as a world of mere things, but also with the same immediacy as a world of values, a world of goods, a practical world’ ([1913] 1950: 3, 1, 58 ). Further, the anticipations are not merely beliefs – about factual properties, value properties and functional features – but they also involve our bodily habits and skills.

The world in which we find ourselves living, with its open horizon of objects, values, and other features, Husserl calls the ‘lifeworld’. It was the main theme of his last major work, The Crisis of the European Sciences , of which a part was published in 1936. The lifeworld plays an important role in his view on justification, which anticipates ideas of Goodman and Rawls.

1 Life

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was born of Jewish parents in Prossnitz (now Prostejov in the Czech Republic) in Moravia, in what was then Austria-Hungary on 8 April 1859. He was thus of the same age as Dewey and Bergson.

Husserl’s early interests lay in the direction of mathematics and science. In 1876 he began studying mathematics and astronomy at the University of Leipzig. After three semesters he transferred to the University of Berlin in order to study with Weierstraß, Kronecker and Kummer, a trio that made Berlin a centre in the mathematical world during that period. After three years in Berlin he left for Vienna, where he received his doctorate in January 1883. He then returned to Berlin in order to become an assistant for Weierstraß. However, Weierstraß became ill, and after just one semester in Berlin Husserl entered military service for a year, spending most of it in Vienna. A growing interest in religious questions made him decide in 1884 to study philosophy with Franz Brentano in Vienna, who inspired him to go into philosophy full-time and exerted a decisive influence on his later phenomenology.

Husserl studied with Brentano until 1886, when Brentano advised him to go to Halle, where one of Brentano’s earlier students, Carl Stumpf, was teaching philosophy and psychology. Husserl habilitated in Halle in 1887 and remained there as a Privatdozent until 1901, when he became Associate Professor (außerordentlicher Professor) in Göttingen, and in 1906 Full Professor. In 1916 he went to Freiburg, where he taught until he retired in 1928. He died in Freiburg on 27 April 1938.

Husserl’s first philosophical work was his Habilitation dissertation, On the Concept of Number, which was printed, but not published, in 1887. This was incorporated into the first three chapters of his Philosophy of Arithmetic, whose first volume was published in 1891. A second volume was announced, but never came. Instead, Husserl underwent a radical philosophical reorientation. He gave up his main project in Philosophy of Arithmetic, which had been to base mathematics on psychology. Instead, he developed his lasting philosophical achievement, phenomenology, which was first presented in Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations) , arriving in two volumes in 1900 and 1901. In 1905–7 he introduced the idea of a transcendental reduction and gave phenomenology a turn towards transcendental idealism. This new version of phenomenology was expounded in Ideen (Ideas) (1913), and is the most systematic presentation of phenomenology.

Husserl’s notable later works were Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time) (1928), Formale und transzendentale Logik (Formal and Transcendental Logic) (1929), which Husserl characterized as his most mature work, and Kartesianische Meditationen (Cartesian Meditations) (1931). The first part of his Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften (Crisis of the European Sciences) was published in 1936, but the main part of this work and about 40,000 pages of manuscripts were left after his death. These manuscripts, together with Husserl’s family and his library, were rescued from Germany by the Belgian Franciscan Van Breda, who established the Husserl Archive in Louvain, where the material is now accessible to researchers. Copies of the manuscripts are kept in other Husserl archives in various parts of the world. Gradually, the most important parts of Husserl’s papers and scholarly editions of his published works are being published in the series Husserliana. In addition, Erfahrung und Urteil (Experience and Judgment) was prepared by Husserl’s assistant Ludwig Landgrebe in consultation with Husserl, and appeared shortly after Husserl’s death in 1938. Husserl’s main works are available in good English translations.

2 Intentionality

The central theme of phenomenology is intentionality. All of phenomenology can be regarded as an unfolding of the idea of intentionality (see Intentionality ). Husserl’s interest in intentionality was inspired by his teacher, Franz Brentano. However, there are many differences between Husserl’s treatment of this notion and that of Brentano. This section deals first with these differences, then goes on to further features of Husserl’s notion of intentionality reaching beyond the issues considered by Brentano.

Husserl retains the following basic idea of Brentano’s: ‘We understand by intentionality the peculiarity of experiences to be "consciousness of something"’ ([1913] 1950: 3, 1, 188; Husserl’s emphasis). Husserl’s formulation comes close to Brentano’s oft-quoted passage from Psychology from an Empirical Point of View :

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the scholastics in the Middle Ages called the intentional (and also mental) inexistence of an object, and what we could also call, although in not entirely unambiguous terms, the reference to a content, a direction upon an object.

(1874: 1, 2, 85)

However, there is already an important difference between Brentano and Husserl at this starting-point. While Brentano says straightforwardly that for every act there is an object towards which it is directed, Husserl focuses on the ‘of’-ness of the act. There are two reasons for this difference: First, Husserl wants to get around the difficulties connected with acts that lack an object. Second, he aims to throwing light on what it means for an act to be ‘of’ or ‘about’ something. Let us begin by discussing these two differences.

Acts that lack an object. Brentano’s thesis may seem unproblematic in the examples Brentano considered: just as when we love there is somebody or something that we love, so there is something that we sense when we sense, something we think of when we think, and so on. However, what is the object of our consciousness when we hallucinate, or when we think of a centaur? Brentano insisted that even in such cases our mental activity, our sensing or thinking, is directed towards some object. The directedness has nothing to do with the reality of the object, he held. The object is contained in our mental activity, ‘intentionally’ contained in it. And Brentano defined mental phenomena as ‘phenomena which contain an object intentionally’.

Not all of Brentano’s students found this lucid or satisfactory, and the problem continued to disturb both them and Brentano. Brentano struggled with it for the rest of his life, and suggested, among other things, a translation theory, giving Leibniz credit for the idea: when we describe an act of hallucination, or of thinking of a centaur, we are only apparently referring to an object. The apparent reference to an object can be translated away in such a way that in the full, unabbreviated description of the act there is no reference to any problematic object. There are two weaknesses of Brentano’s proposal. First, unlike Russell later, Brentano does not specify in detail how the translation is to be carried out (see Russell, B. §9 ). Second, if such a translation can be carried out in the case of hallucinations and so on, then why not carry it out everywhere, even in cases of normal perception? What then happens to the doctrine of intentionality as directedness upon an object?

One of Brentano’s students, Alexius Meinong (§§2–4), suggested a simple way out. In his Gegenstandstheorie Meinong maintained that there are two kinds of objects, those that exist and those that do not exist. Hallucinations, like normal perception, are directed towards objects, but these objects do not exist. Brentano was not happy with this proposal. He objected that, like Kant, he could not make sense of existence as a property that some objects have and others lack.

Husserl’s solution was, as noted, to emphasize the ‘of’. Consciousness is always consciousness of something. Or better, consciousness is always as if of an object. What matters is not whether or not there is an object, but what the features are of consciousness that makes it always be as if of an object. These three words, ‘as if of’ are the key to Husserl’s notion of intentionality. To account for the directedness of consciousness by saying only that it is directed towards an object leaves us in the dark with regard to what that directedness is. This leads us to the second reason for why Husserl diverged from Brentano. Husserl wanted to throw light on just this issue: what does the directedness of consciousness consists in? He made it a theme for a new discipline: the discipline of phenomenology.

What is directedness? To get a grip on what the directedness of consciousness consists in – to understand better the word ‘of’, which Husserl emphasized in his definition of intentionality quoted at the beginning of §2 above – let us note that for Husserl intentionality does not simply consist in consciousness directing itself towards objects that are already there. Intentionality for Husserl means that consciousness in a certain way ‘brings it about’ that there are objects. Consciousness ‘constitutes’ objects, Husserl said, borrowing a word from the German Idealists, but using it in a different sense. Above, the phrase ‘bringing about’ was put in quotation marks to indicate that Husserl does not mean that we create or cause the world and its objects. ‘Intentionality’ means merely that the various components of our consciousness are interconnected in such a way that we have an experience as of one object. To quote Husserl:

an object ‘constitutes’ itself – ‘whether or not it is actual’ – in certain concatenations of consciousness which in themselves bear a discernible unity in so far as they, by virtue of their essence, carry with themselves the consciousness of an identical X.

([1913] 1950: 3, 1, 313; translation emended)

Husserl’s use, here and in many other places, of the reflexive form ‘an object constitutes itself’, reflects his view that he did not regard the object as being produced by consciousness. Husserl considered phenomenology as the first strictly scientific version of transcendental idealism, but he also held that phenomenology transcends the traditional distinction between idealism and realism, and in 1934 he wrote in a letter to Abbé Baudin: ‘No ordinary "realist" has ever been as realistic and concrete as I, the phenomenological "idealist" (a word which by the way I no longer use)’ (Kern 1964: 276). In the preface to the first English edition of the Ideas (1931), Husserl stated:

Phenomenological idealism does not deny the factual [wirklich] existence of the real [real] world (and in the first instance nature) as if it deemed it an illusion .… Its only task and accomplishment is to clarify the sense [Sinn] of this world, just that sense in which we all regard it as really existing and as really valid. That the world exists…is quite indubitable. Another matter is to understand this indubitability which is the basis for life and science and clarify the basis for its claim.

(1950: 5, 152–3)

To see more clearly what Husserl is after, consider Jastrow and Wittgenstein’s duck/rabbit picture. In order to come closer to Husserl we should modify the example and consider not a picture, but a silhouette of the real animal against the sky. When we see such a silhouette against the sky, we may see a duck or a rabbit. What reaches our eyes is the same in both cases, so the difference must be something coming from us. We structure what we see, and we can do so in different ways. The impulses that reach us from the outside are insufficient to determine uniquely which object we experience; something more gets added.

3 Noema

The structure that makes up the directedness of consciousness, Husserl called the ‘noema’. More accurately, the noema has two main components. First, the ‘object meaning’ that integrates the various constituents of our experience into experiences of the various features of one object, and second, the ‘thetic’ component that differentiates acts of different kinds, for example, the act of perceiving an object from the act of remembering it or thinking about it. The thetic component is thereby crucial for the reality-character which we ascribe to the object.

Our consciousness structures what we experience (see Kant, I. ). How it structures it depends on our previous experiences, the whole setting of our present experience and a number of other factors. If we had grown up surrounded by ducks, but had never heard of rabbits, we would have been more likely to see a duck when confronted with the duck/rabbit silhouette; the idea of a rabbit would not have occurred to us.

The structuring always takes place in such a way that the many different features of the object are experienced as connected with one another, as features of one and the same object. When, for example, we see a rabbit, we do not merely see a collection of coloured patches, various shades of brown spread out over our field of vision (incidentally, even seeing coloured patches involves intentionality, since a patch is also a kind of object, but a different kind of object from a rabbit). We see a rabbit, with a determinate shape and a determinate colour, with the ability to eat, jump and so on. It has a side that is turned towards us and one that is turned away from us. We do not see the other side from where we are, but we see something which has another side.

That seeing is intentional, or object-directed, means just this, that it is as if of an object: the near side of the object we have in front of us is regarded as a side of a thing, and the thing we see has other sides and features that are co-intended, in the sense that the thing is regarded as more than just this one side. The object meaning of the noema is the comprehensive system of determinations that gives unity to this manifold of features and makes them aspects of one and the same object.

It is important at this point to note that the various sides, appearances or perspectives of the object are constituted together with the object. There are no sides and perspectives floating around before we start perceiving, which are then synthesized into objects when intentionality sets in. There are no objects of any kind, whether they be physical objects, sides of objects, appearances of objects or perspectives of objects without intentionality. And intentionality does not work in steps. We do not start by constituting six sides and then synthesize these into a die; we constitute the die and the six sides of it in one step.

We should also note that when we experience a person, we do not experience a physical object, a body, and then infer that a person is there. We experience a fully fledged person, we are encountering somebody who structures the world, experiences it from their own perspective. Our noema is a noema of a person; no inference is involved. Seeing persons is no more mysterious than seeing physical objects, and no inference is involved in either case. When we see a physical object we do not see sense-data or the like and then infer that there is a physical object there, but our noema is the noema of a physical object. Similarly, when we see an action, what we see is a fully fledged action, not a bodily movement from which we infer that there is an action.

The word ‘object’ must hence be taken in a very broad sense. It comprises not only physical things, but also, as we have seen, animals, and likewise persons, events, actions and processes, and sides, aspects and appearances of such entities.

Essences. Husserl distinguishes between physical objects and processes, which are temporal and normally also spatial, and essences (Wesen) or eidos, which are features that the object can share with other objects, such as the triangularity of a triangle or the greenness of a tree. For Husserl, an object’s essence is therefore not something unique to that object, as it is for many other philosophers. Mathematics is the most highly developed study of essences.

Noema and meaning. The features of the noema that we have mentioned, in particular the role it plays in the analysis of acts without objects and the way it accounts for the object-directedness of acts, make it natural to compare the noema to the meaning of linguistic expressions. This comparison and the ensuing way of reading Husserl has been contested. However, it is well supported by textual and systematic considerations, and it is now often regarded as the standard way of interpreting Husserl. One factor contributing to this has been Husserl’s own statement, in a manuscript, that ‘the noema is nothing but a generalization of the notion of meaning (Bedeutung) to the field of all acts’ ([1913] 1950: 5, 89).

Noesis. The noema is an abstract structure that can in principle be the same from act to act, in the unlikely case that at two different occasions we should have the same kind of experience of the same object from the same point of view, with exactly the same anticipations, and so on. An act has a noema in virtue of comprising a kind of experience that Husserl calls a ‘noesis’. The noema is the meaning given in an act, Husserl says, while the noesis is the meaning-giving aspect of the act. There is hence a close parallelism between noema and noesis. The relation between noema and noesis bears some similarity to the type/token relation in Peirce (see Type/token distinction ). The noesis is a temporal process, in which the noema ‘dwells’.

4 Hyle; filling; evidence

In acts of perception, the noema that we can have is restricted by what goes on at our sensory surfaces, but the restriction does not narrow our possibilities down to just one. Thus in a given situation I may perceive a man, but later come to see that the man was a mannequin, with a corresponding shift of noema. Such a shift of noema is always possible, corresponding to the fact that perception is always fallible. These boundary conditions, which constrain the noemata we can have, Husserl calls ‘hyle’. The hyle are not objects experienced by us, but are experiences of a kind which we typically have when our sense organs are affected, but also can have in other cases, for example, under the influence of fever or drugs.

In the case of an act of perception, its noema can also be characterized as a very complex set of expectations or anticipations concerning what kind of experiences we will have when we move around the object and perceive it, using our various senses. We anticipate different further experiences when we see a duck and when we see a rabbit. In the first case we anticipate, for example, that we will feel feathers when we touch the object, while in the latter case we expect to find fur. When we get the experiences we anticipate, the corresponding component of the noema is said to be ‘filled’. In all perception there will be some filling: the components of the noema that correspond to what presently ‘meets the eye’ are filled, and similarly for the other senses.

Such anticipation and filling is what distinguishes perception from other modes of consciousness, such as imagination or remembering. If we merely imagine things, our noema can be of anything whatsoever. In perception, however, our sensory experiences are involved; the noema has to fit in with our sensory experiences. This eliminates a number of noemata which I could have had if I were just imagining. In your present situation you can probably not have a noema corresponding to the perception of an elephant. This does not reduce the number of perceptual noemata you can have just now to one, for example, of having a book in front of you.

It is a central point in Husserl’s phenomenology that I can have a variety of different perceptual noemata that are compatible with the present impingements upon my sensory surfaces. In the duck/rabbit case this was obvious, for we could go back and forth at will between having the noema of a duck and having the noema of a rabbit. In most cases, however, we are not aware of this possibility. Only when something untoward happens, when I encounter a ‘recalcitrant’ experience that does not fit in with the anticipations in my noema, do I start seeing a different object from the one I thought I saw earlier. My noema ‘explodes’, to use Husserl’s phrase, and I come to have a noema quite different from the previous one, with new anticipations. This is always possible, he says. Perception always involves anticipations that go beyond what presently ‘meets the eye’, and there is always a risk that we may go wrong, regardless of how confident and certain we might feel.

When some components of the noema are filled, we have ‘evidence’. Evidence comes in degrees, depending on how much of the noema is filled. Husserl discusses two kinds of perfect evidence: ‘adequate’ evidence, where every component in the noema is filled, with no unfilled anticipations, and ‘apodictic’ evidence, where the negation of what seems to be the case is self-contradictory. After some vacillation Husserl ended up holding that we can never attain any of these kinds of perfect evidence – we are always fallible.

5 Intuition

Husserl uses the term ‘intuition’ (Anschauung) for any act where an object is experienced as ‘given’, that is, as really there. Earlier philosophers have used the word ‘intuition’ in a variety of ways, mostly about some sort of direct, non-inferential insight. Perception has usually been classified as a kind of intuition. A key issue in medieval philosophy as well as in rationalism and empiricism was whether there are other sorts of such insight. Kant defined ‘intuition’ as a representation which ‘relates immediately to its object and is singular’ (Critique of Pure Reason 1781/87: A320; B376–7). Bernard Bolzano developed this idea with great precision. For Husserl, an intuition is an act where we are constrained in how we constitute its objects, such as we typically are in perception, which is one of his two varieties of intuition. He calls the other variety ‘essential insight’ (Wesensschau). The object is here a general feature, an essence. For Husserl, as for Kant, intuition is a key kind of evidence in mathematics. This, then, is what Husserl means by the mysterious-sounding term ‘Wesensschau’. One might still claim that there is no such thing, but it is difficult to reject the notion once one agrees that the object of an act is underdetermined by what reaches our senses, and one accepts the correlated idea of intentionality.

6 The reductions; phenomenology

Husserl distinguishes between several so-called ‘reductions’. First, there is the ‘eidetic’ reduction, which we perform each time we pass from focusing on an individual physical object to focusing on one of its essences (eidos). This kind of reduction has been carried out in mathematics since its beginning, and Husserl conceived of other eidetic sciences in addition to mathematics. Second, a reduction that is distinctive for phenomenology is a special kind of reflection. Instead of focusing on the normal objects of our acts, be they physical objects, actions, persons or general features that many objects can have in common, we reflect on the structures of our own consciousness and study the noemata, the noeses or the hyle. The noemata, the noeses and the hyle have two important features: we are normally not aware of them, and they are a sine qua non for the appearance of a world. Entities with these two features are called ‘transcendental’. The reduction that leads to them, where the ordinary objects are bracketed, is therefore called the ‘transcendental’ reduction. Husserl also calls it the ‘epoché’, using a word that the ancient sceptics used for refraining from taking a stand. We study the features of the act that make it seem to have an object and do not ask whether or not it actually has one. Husserl got the idea of the transcendental reduction in 1905. It marks the transition from the early phenomenology of the Logical Investigations to the ‘idealist’ phenomenology of the Ideas and later works.

The ‘phenomenological’ reduction, finally, is the combination of the eidetic reduction and the transcendental reduction. That is, it is a reduction that leads us from acts directed towards physical objects via acts directed towards essences to acts directed towards the noema, noesis and hyle of acts directed towards essences. Husserl sometimes takes the two steps in the inverse order, starting with a transcendental reduction and then focusing on the essential traits of the noema, noesis and hyle. The end product is not quite the same, but the phenomenological reduction can presumably be either.

Phenomenology is the study of the transcendental elements in our experience that are uncovered through the phenomenological reduction: the noema, the noesis and the hyle. In phenomenology, all these three elements are studied, with emphasis on the noematic/noetic structures. Husserl carried out detailed analyses of temporal structures and how they are constituted, in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, on the structures that are basic to logic and mathematics, in Formal and Transcendental Logic and Experience and Judgment, and on intersubjectivity and the processes whereby we come to constitute a common world, in Cartesian Meditations and in thousands of pages of manuscripts, the most important of which have been collected by Iso Kern in Husserliana , vols 13–15.

For Husserl, phenomenology is a study of the subjective perspective. In science one aims for objectivity and endeavours to arrange observations and experiments in such a way as to minimize differences between different observers. Phenomenology focuses on the subjective, on the manner in which each subject structures or ‘constitutes’ the world differently, on the basis of different experiences and cultural background, but also on the basis of adaptation to other subjects through interaction and communication.

7 The past

We constitute not only the different properties of things, but also the relation of the thing to other objects. If, for example, I see a tree, the tree is conceived of as something which is in front of me, as perhaps situated among other trees, as seen by other people than myself, and so on. It is also conceived of as something which has a history: it was there before I saw it, it will remain after I have left, or perhaps it will eventually be cut down and transported to some other place. However, like all material things, it does not simply disappear from the world.

My consciousness of the tree is in this way also a consciousness of the world in space and time in which the tree is located. My consciousness constitutes the tree, but at the same time it constitutes the world in which the tree and I are living. If my further experience makes me give up the belief that I have a tree ahead of me because, for example, I do not find a tree-like far side or because some of my other expectations prove false, this affects not only my conception of what there is, but also my conception of what has been and what will be. Thus in this case, not just the present, but also the past and the future are reconstituted by me. To illustrate how changes in my present perception lead me to reconstitute not just the present, but also the past, Husserl uses an example of a ball which I initially take to be red all over and spherical. As it turns, I discover that it is green on the other side and has a dent:

the sense of the perception is not only changed in the momentary new stretch of perception; the noematic modification streams back in the form of a retroactive cancellation in the retentional sphere and modifies the production of sense stemming from earlier phases of the perception. The earlier apperception, which was attuned to the harmonious development of the ‘red and uniformly round’, is implicitly ‘reinterpreted’ to ‘green on one side and dented’.

(1938: 96)

Husserl held that time and space are constituted. In On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time and various manuscripts that have been published in Volume 10 of Husserliana he gives a highly interesting analysis of the way objective time is constituted (Miller 1984 ).

8 Values; practical function

So far we have focused on the factual properties of things. However, things also have value properties, and these properties are constituted in a corresponding manner. The world within which we live is experienced as a world in which certain things and actions have a positive value, others a negative. Our norms and values, like our beliefs, are subject to change. Changes in our views on matters of fact are often accompanied by changes in our evaluations.

Husserl emphasizes that our perspectives and anticipations are not predominantly factual. We are not living a purely theoretical life. According to Husserl, we encounter the world around us primarily ‘in the attitude of the natural pursuit of life’, as ‘living functioning subjects involved in the circle of other functioning subjects’ ( 1950: 4, 375). Husserl says this in a manuscript from 1917, but he has similar ideas about the practical both earlier and later. Thus in the Ideas he says: ‘ this world is there for me not only as a world of mere things, but also with the same immediacy as a world of values, a world of goods, a practical world’ ( [1913] 1950: 3, 1, 58 ).

In later manuscripts, particularly from 1917 onwards, Husserl focused more and more on the role of the practical and the body in our constitution of the world. Just as he never held that we first perceive sense-data, or perspectives or appearances, which are then synthesized into physical objects, or that we first perceive bodies and bodily movements and then infer that there are persons and actions, so it would be a grave misunderstanding of Husserl to attribute to him the view that we first perceive objects that have merely physical properties and then assign a value or a practical function to them. Things are directly experienced by us as having the features – functional and evaluational as well as factual – that are of concern for us in our natural pursuit of life.

In our discussion of the hyle we characterized the noema of an act of perception as a very complex set of expectations or anticipations concerning what kind of experiences we will have when we move around the object and perceive it. We should note that these experiences depend not only on our sensory organs, but also on the movements of our body, on our bodily skills and our familiarity with various kinds of practical activities. In numerous passages Husserl talks about practical anticipations and the role of kinesthesis in perception and bodily activity (Føllesdal 1979 ).

9 Horizon

When we are experiencing an object, our consciousness is focused on this object, and the rest of the world and its various objects are there in the background as something we ‘believe in’ but are not presently paying attention to. The same holds for most of the inexhaustibly many features of the object itself. All these further features of the object, together with the world in which it is set, make up what Husserl calls the ‘horizon’ of that experience. The various features of the object, which are co-intended, or also-meant, but not at the focus of our attention, Husserl calls the ‘inner horizon’, while the realm of other objects and the world to which they all belong, he calls the ‘outer horizon’.

The horizon is of crucial importance for Husserl’s concept of justification, which we shall discuss later. What is particularly significant is the hidden nature of the horizon. As we noted, the horizon is that which is not attended to. Take as an example our ‘expectation’ that we will find a floor when we enter a room. Usually, we have not even thought about there being a floor. Typically, we cannot even recall when we first acquired the corresponding ‘belief’ or ‘anticipation’. According to Husserl, there may never have been any occasion when we actually judged there to be a floor in some particular room. Still we have come to ‘anticipate’ a floor, not in the sense of consciously expecting one, but in the sense that if we entered the room and there were none, we would be astonished. In this example we would easily be able to tell what was missing, in other cases our ‘anticipations’ are so imperceptible that we just may feel that something has gone awry, but not be able to tell what it is.

Words like ‘belief’ and ‘anticipate’ are clearly not the proper ones here, since they have overtones of something being conscious and thought about. Both English and German seem to lack words for what we want to get at here: Husserl uses the words ‘antizipieren’, ‘hinausmeinen’ and ‘vorzeichnen’.

10 Intersubjectivity

Throughout his life, Husserl emphasized that the world we intend and thereby constitute is not our own private world, but an intersubjective world, common to and accessible to all of us. Thus in the Ideas he writes:

I continually find at hand as something confronting me a spatiotemporal reality [Wirklichkeit] to which I belong like all other human beings who are to be found in it and who are related to it as I am.

([1913] 1950: 3, 1, 61)

Husserl’s studies of intersubjectivity focus in particular on the processes by which we experience others as experiencing subjects, like ourselves, and adapt our anticipations to those that we take them to have. Thanks to this, our way of constituting the world is not solipsistic, but we constitute the world as a shared world, which we each experience from our different perspective. A notion of objectivity arises, we may come to regard ourselves as deviant, for example, as colour-blind or as cognitively biased, and we also experience ourselves as confronted with a reality to which our beliefs and anticipations have to adapt. In works that remain largely unpublished, Husserl started to develop an ethics based in part on a study of the objectifying processes whereby objective ethical principles and norms arise from our subjective likes and dislikes.

Husserl stresses the shared, intersubjective nature of the world, particularly in §29 of the Ideas, which he entitles ‘The "Other" Ego-subjects and the Intersubjective Natural Surrounding World’ . There he says:

I take their surrounding world and mine Objectively as one and the same world of which we are conscious, only in different ways [Weise].… For all that, we come to an understanding with our fellow human beings and together with them posit an Objective spatiotemporal reality.

([1913] 1950: 3, 1, 60)

In the later works one finds similar ideas, particularly in the many texts that have been collected by Iso Kern in the three volumes of the Husserliana devoted to intersubjectivity, but also in many other works, for example in the Crisis :

Thus in general the world exists not only for isolated men but for the community of men; and this is due to the fact that even what is straightforwardly perceptual is communal.

(1936, 1954: 6, 166)

Husserl discusses in great detail empathy and the many other varieties of intersubjective adaptation that enable us to intend a common, intersubjective world. (See the three volumes on intersubjectivity referred to above.)

11 Existence

The passages quoted in §10 above express a further feature of Husserl’s notion of intentionality which is rarely discussed, in spite of its importance: intentionality does not just involve directedness upon an object, but also a ‘positing’ of the object, corresponding to the two components of the noema discussed in §3 above. The object is experienced as real and present, as remembered, or as merely imagined, and so on. In the passages just quoted, Husserl said, ‘I continually find at hand as something confronting me a spatiotemporal reality’, and ‘we come to an understanding with our fellow human beings and together with them posit an Objective spatiotemporal reality’. The same point is stressed also when he discusses the lifeworld in the Crisis :

the lifeworld, for us who wakingly live in it, is always there, existing in advance for us, the ‘ground’ of all praxis, whether theoretical or extratheoretical. The world is pregiven to us, the waking, always somehow practically interested subjects, not occasionally but always and necessarily as the universal field of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon. To live is always to live-in-certainty-of- the-world.

(1936, 1954: 6, 145)

Husserl discusses this thetic character of intentionality, and, correspondingly, of the noema, in many of his books and manuscripts. He was particularly concerned with what gives reality-character to the world. Like William James, whom he had read already when he made the transition to phenomenology in the mid-1890s, he stressed the importance of the body, and the inflictions upon our body, for our sense of reality. As James put it: ‘Sensible vividness or pungency is then the vital factor in reality’ (1890: 2, 301). Husserl could also have subscribed to James’s observation that ‘the fons et origo of all reality, whether from the absolute or the practical point of view, is thus subjective, is ourselves’ ( 1890: 2, 296–7 ).

This latter passage from James gets a double meaning in Husserl which expresses the core of his view of the reality of the world: the subjective (ourselves) is the fons et origo of all reality in two senses, a transcendental and an empirical: we constitute the world as real through our intentionality, and the reality-character we give it is derived from our being not merely transcendental subjects, but empirical subjects with a body immersed in a physical world.

12 The lifeworld

The idea of Husserl’s that has become most widely known is that of the lifeworld. In particular, the word ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt) itself has gained wide currency. It was used by Simmel and others before Husserl. After the Second World War it became a favourite word of many social scientists, who used it in many different senses. Several of them refer to Husserl without seeming to have studied his philosophy and therefore without knowing the many important features that the lifeworld has in his thought.

The first place Husserl uses the word ‘lifeworld’ in print is in his latest work, the Crisis, of which the first two parts were published in 1936. The rest of this unfinished work, containing the important third part, with the main discussion of the lifeworld, was not published until 1954, but it was known to some of Husserl’s students and followers, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty , who came to the Husserl Archives in Louvain to study this part in April 1939.

Interpreters of Husserl differ widely in their views on the lifeworld. It is often thought that it constitutes a major break in Husserl’s development, from the ‘early’ Husserl of the Ideas to the ‘late’ Husserl of the Crisis . Is it such a break? And second, what exactly is the lifeworld and what role does it play in phenomenology? On the former question the answer is a definite ‘No’. The lifeworld is fully compatible with Husserl’s earlier philosophy, and there is even a definite place for it in his phenomenology from its beginning. Husserl touches upon the lifeworld repeatedly in his earlier work and he gradually deepens and modifies his views on it, as he did with everything else in his phenomenology. Instead of regarding the lifeworld as a break with Husserl’s earlier philosophy, we should view it as intimately connected with the other main themes in phenomenology. Properly to understand the lifeworld with all its nuances it is important to appreciate fully the connection between it and the rest of Husserl’s philosophy.

The lifeworld arises from the distinction between the natural attitude and the transcendental or phenomenological attitude, which Husserl introduced in 1905. The first appearance of the notion for which he later introduced the term ‘lifeworld’ occurs shortly thereafter, in his lectures ‘Fundamental Problems in Phenomenology’ in 1910– 11, that is, already before the Ideas. Husserl begins these lectures with an extended discussion of ‘the natural attitude and the "natural world concept"’ . Here he says:

It could also be shown that philosophical interests of the highest dignity require a complete and comprehensive description of the so-called natural world concept, that of the natural attitude, on the other hand also that an accurate and profound description of this kind is not easily carried out, but on the contrary would require exceptionally difficult reflections.

(1950: 13, 124–5)

Husserl here borrows the phrase ‘natural world concept’, which he emphasizes, from Richard Avenarius , whom he discusses later in the lecture. In a manuscript from 1915, Husserl describes this world in the following way (following Avenarius):

All opinions, justified or unjustified, popular, superstitious, scientific, all relate to the already pregiven world.… All theory relates to this immediate givenness and can have a legitimate sense only when it forms thoughts which do not offend against the general sense of the immediately given. No theorizing may offend against this sense.

(1950: 13, 196; emphasis added)

In the following years, Husserl repeatedly returns to this and related themes, using various labels that sometimes allude to other philosophers who had propounded similar ideas, such as Nietzsche. Quite often he uses Avenarius’ phrase ‘natural world’. In a manuscript from 1917, which appears to be the first place where he uses the word ‘lifeworld’, he introduces this new word as equivalent to the former: ‘The lifeworld is the natural world – in the attitude of the natural pursuit of life are we living functioning subjects involved in the circle of other functioning subjects’ (1950: 4, 375 ; the manuscript dates from 1917, but was copied during the first half of the 1920s, and it is possible that the word ‘lifeworld’ appeared then).

Gradually during the 1920s and especially in the 1930s the lifeworld becomes a central theme in Husserl’s writings, until his discussion culminates in the Crisis in 1936. One aim of this work was to provide a new and better access to phenomenology, through the notion of the lifeworld. The lifeworld is for Husserl our natural world, the world we live in and are absorbed by in our everyday activities. A main aim of phenomenology is to make us reflect on this world and make us see how it is constituted by us. Through the phenomenological reduction phenomenology will take us out of our natural attitude where we are absorbed by the world around us, into the phenomenological, transcendental attitude, where we focus on the noemata of our acts – on our structuring of reality.

Pregivenness. In the passage just quoted from Husserl’s 1915 manuscript, Husserl says that the world is pregiven (vorgegeben). This point is also discussed in the Ideas , where Husserl notes that

In my waking consciousness I find myself in this manner at all times, and without ever being able to alter the fact, in relation to the world which remains one and the same, though changing with respect to the composition of its contents. It is continually ‘on hand’ for me and I myself am a member of it.

([1913] 1950: 3, 1, 58)

and a few pages later the passage that was quoted earlier, in the section on intersubjectivity:

I continually find at hand as something confronting me a spatiotemporal reality [Wirklichkeit] to which I belong like all other human beings who are to be found in it and who are related to it as I am.

([1913] 1950: 3, 1, 61)

Also the passage from §37 of the Crisis that was quoted in the section on existence above expresses this same idea:

The lifeworld…is always there, existing in advance for us, the ‘ground’ of all praxis, whether theoretical or extratheoretical. The world is pregiven to us…

(1936, 1954: 6, 145)

Science and the lifeworld. A contested point in Husserl scholarship is the relation between the lifeworld and the sciences. Many interpreters of Husserl like to find an opposition to the sciences in the lifeworld. However, such a disdain for the sciences is out of character with Husserl’s background in and continued interest in mathematics and science. It also accords poorly with the texts, which give us a different and more intriguing picture. According to Husserl, the lifeworld and the sciences are intimately connected, in three different ways:

(1) The sciences are part of the lifeworld. This comes out most explicitly and clearly in Experience and Judgment , where Husserl says:

everything which contemporary natural science has furnished as determinations of what exists also belong to us, to the world, as this world is pregiven to the adults of our time. And even if we are not personally interested in natural science, and even if we know nothing of its results, still, what exists is pregiven to us in advance as determined in such a way that we at least grasp it as being in principle scientifically determinable.

(1938: 39)

Similar statements are also found elsewhere in Husserl’s work, for example in the Crisis: ‘Now the scientific world – [the subject matter of] systematic theory – …like all the worlds of ends "belongs" to the lifeworld’ (1936, 1954: 6, 460 ).

(2) Scientific statements get their meaning by being embedded in the lifeworld. This was stressed by Husserl already in the manuscript from 1915, quoted in §12 above:

All opinions, justified or unjustified, popular, superstitious, scientific, all relate to the already pregiven world.… All theory relates to this immediate givenness and can have a legitimate sense only when it forms thoughts which do not offend against the general sense of the immediately given. No theorizing may offend against this sense.

(1950: 13, 196; emphasis added)

(3) The sciences are justified through the lifeworld. There is an interplay between this point and point (1) above; the sciences are justified because they belong to the lifeworld, and at the same time they belong to the lifeworld because they are conceived of as describing the world, as claiming to be true:

Though the peculiar accomplishment of our modern objective science may still not be understood, nothing changes the fact that it is a validity for the lifeworld, arising out of particular activities, and that it belongs itself to the concreteness of the lifeworld.

(1936, 1954: 6, 136)

And similarly:

all these theoretical results have the character of validities for the lifeworld, adding themselves as such to its own composition and belonging to it even before that as a horizon of possible accomplishments for developing science. The concrete lifeworld, then, is the grounding soil [der gründende Boden] of the ‘scientifically true’ world and at the same time encompasses it in its own universal concreteness.

(1936, 1954: 6, 134)