Phenomenology - Edmund Husserl

 Biography

Good day everyone! It is a pleasure to share my analysis about a certain philosopher named Edmund Husserl but first lets have a short background of him before discussing about his philosophies. Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (1859 - 1938) was a Moravian-German philosopher and mathematician (usually considered German as most of his adult life was spent in Germany), best known as the father of the 20th Century Phenomenology movement. 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 with Georg Hegel and his own student Martin Heidegger, he was a major influence on the whole of 20th Century Continental Philosophy.

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl commonly known as Edmund Husserl was born on 8 April 1859 in Prossnitz, Moravia. His father was a Jewish clothing merchant, and the language of the Husserl home was probably Yiddish although 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 recent liberalization of the laws governing Prossnitz's Jews allowed this), although just a year later, in 1870, he moved back closer to home to the Staats gymnasium 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 to dedicate his life to philosophy.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. 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.

Philosophy/Analysis

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 the objective world. Husserl's thought is revolutionary in several ways, most notably in the distinction between "natural" and "phenomenological" modes of understanding. In the former, sense-perception in correspondence with the material realm constitutes the known reality, and understanding is premised on the accuracy of the perception and the objective knowability of what is called the "real world". Phenomenological understanding strives to be rigorously "presuppositionless" by means of what Husserl calls "phenomenological reduction".This reduction is not conditioned but rather transcendental: in Husserl's terms, pure consciousness of absolute Being. In Husserl's work, consciousness of any given thing calls for discerning its meaning as an "intentional object". Such an object does not simply strike the senses, to be interpreted or misinterpreted by mental reason; it has already been selected and grasped, grasping being an etymological connotation, of percipere, the root of "perceive".

Conclusion

I therefore conclude that Husserl’s aim was to arrive at a philosophy understood as a rigorous science which should describe rather than explain, immedaite experience. Husserl refers to a philosophy that is “presuppositionless”, that is a philosophy with the least number of presuppositions(things that you suppose as true beforehand”. So in my opinion, his main point in transcendental reduction is to think more beyond consciousness. Therefore, he came up with his main insight of phenomenology through his transcendental reduction method.









            Januel Franz Q. Gloria
Stem111-1A
Analysis paper