Philosophy › The 20th century › Existentialism
Husserl and phenomenology
1900 onward· School or movement· Reality, mind & God
Well documentedSolid records, texts or physical evidence.
Edmund Husserl's method of describing experience exactly as it appears to consciousness, setting aside assumptions about what lies behind it.
See it on the Philosophy map →The idea
Idea: before theorizing about the world, describe carefully how things show up in experience. Husserl (1859–1938), a German mathematician turned philosopher, launched it with Logical Investigations (1900–01). Key moves: 'bracketing' (epoché), suspending belief in the outside world to study experience itself, and intentionality, the fact that consciousness is always of something. His slogan: 'to the things themselves!' Main objection: critics, including his own students, doubted that description free of all assumptions is possible.
Why it matters
It became the root of most continental European philosophy: Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty all started from it.
Where it comes from
Husserl's books plus about 40,000 pages of shorthand manuscripts, smuggled out of Nazi Germany to Leuven, Belgium, in 1938 by the Franciscan priest Herman Van Breda.
Still debated
Whether Husserl's late turn to the shared 'life-world' broke with his earlier focus on pure consciousness is debated.
Connections (3)
▸Husserl and phenomenology was transformed by Martin Heidegger, Being and TimeWell documented
The connection
Heidegger, Husserl's assistant and chosen successor, kept phenomenology's method of careful description but changed its subject. Husserl studied consciousness; Heidegger argued we are first beings already in the world, practically involved with tools and other people, and that phenomenology should uncover Being itself. Husserl came to see this as a betrayal.
When and how
At Freiburg University, where Heidegger was Husserl's assistant from 1919; Being and Time (1927) was dedicated to Husserl, and Heidegger succeeded to his chair in 1928.
How we know
The dedication, Husserl's critical marginal notes in his copy of Being and Time, and their letters document both the debt and the break.
Debates and open questions
Whether Heidegger misread Husserl or exposed real limits is debated, as is his conduct after 1933; the dedication was dropped from the 1941 edition.
▸Husserl and phenomenology shaped Jean-Paul SartreWell documented
The connection
Phenomenology gave Sartre a way to do philosophy about everyday experience: a glass, a café, a stranger's look. He adopted Husserl's idea that consciousness is always of something, and pushed it further: consciousness is empty in itself, a 'nothingness', which is why it is free.
When and how
Over apricot cocktails in a Paris bar in 1932–33, Raymond Aron told Sartre that phenomenology could make philosophy out of the cocktail; Sartre then studied Husserl in Berlin, 1933–34.
How we know
De Beauvoir recounts the scene in her memoir The Prime of Life; Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego (1936–37) engages Husserl directly.
Debates and open questions
Husserl scholars say Sartre's reading was selective, keeping the method while rejecting Husserl's 'transcendental ego', the self standing behind experience.
▸"I think, therefore I am" (the cogito) was reworked by Husserl and phenomenologyWell documented
The connection
Husserl saw Descartes as phenomenology's ancestor: both start from the certainty of one's own consciousness. But Husserl reworked the cogito. Instead of using it to prove God and the outside world, he 'bracketed' the world and studied the structure of experience itself, stressing that every thought is about something.
When and how
In lectures at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1929, published in French in 1931 as Cartesian Meditations.
How we know
The title and text build explicitly on Descartes' Meditations; Husserl says phenomenology might almost be called 'a neo-Cartesianism'.
Debates and open questions
Whether Husserl stayed trapped in Descartes' isolated mind, as Heidegger and others charged, or escaped it through his later idea of the shared 'life-world' is debated.