Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl (April 8th 1859 - April 26th 1938) is a German Philosophe, founder of the Phénoménologie Transcendantal E.

Biography

Husserl was born on April 8th, 1859 with Prostějov in Moravie. It makes initially studies in mathematics, with Weierstrass before being devoted to the philosophy where it will try refonder this one as a rigorous science. Of Jewish origin, it converts with Protestantism Lutheran the April 8th, 1886. In 1887, he is privatdocent at the university of the Market. In 1906, it obtains the title of full professor with Göttingen, then in Freiburg in Brisgau of 1916 to 1928. Professor Husserl sees himself prohibiting the access to the library of the university of Freiburg pursuant to the legislation anti-semite adopted by the Nazis in April 1933. He is erased teaching staff in 1936. It is in Vienna, then in Prague, that Husserl will make its last conferences. Martin Heidegger is his more famous pupil. Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry in France, could be inspired some. Although it was never its student, max Scheler also was subject to the influence of Edmund Husserl. At his place also studied Edith Stein and Roman Ingarden.

Philosophy

To constitute a philosophy like rigorous science, Husserl must find:

an absolute base;
a method of investigation allowing to advance in its research.

“Whoever wants to really become philosophical will have “once in its life” to be folded up on oneself and, with-inside self, to try to reverse all allowed sciences up to now and to try to rebuild them. ” ( Cartesian Meditations , Introduction)

The Cogito

It is in the Cogito that Husserl finds the base absolute of its philosophy: it is a concept that it borrows from Descartes, according to a filiation which it explicitly asserts in its Cartesian Méditations (whose Emmanuel Lévinas will ensure the French translation).

Why is this an absolute base?

because it is a principle to which any experiment returns, which founds any experiment;
because it is not itself founded (without what one would risk a regression ad infinitum principle in theory);
because it is universal, i.e. divided by all the human ones, and in any time.

But once worked out this principle, it remains to find a method of investigation to constitute a true rigorous science.

Gasoline

The acceptance of the cogito as absolute base has as a consequence natural to place the study of the conscience in the center of the concerns of phenomenology. As in the Phenomenology of the spirit of Hegel, phenomenology husserlienne is thus a science of the conscience - but it is perhaps one of the rare possible bringings together between the two companies, which remain very different.

The Phénoménologie is the Science phenomena, of what appears with the conscience. To make possible this science, it is necessary “to return to the same things ”: to describe such that they are presented to the Conscience.

True the Connaissance is the knowledge of the gasolines, i.e. of what remains invariant in the modifications of prospects that the spirit has on the things. Indeed, any object has its determinations according to the prospect for the conscience; the lived object will thus be given entirely only by the total synthesis from the points of view. Thus, to describe the structure of the phenomena, it that the conscience perceives, by the intuition is necessary, these gasolines.

It is by allusion to Plato that Husserl calls gasoline S these universal structures that phenomenology intends to release and base on the cogito . If Husserl takes again this term, one of oldest of philosophy, it is because it is located in a philosophical tradition which it intends to carry out. Philosophy is a project consisting in wanting to release the rational structure of the world: phenomenology has the means of carrying out this project.

Épochè

But how to give off these gasolines starting from the common experiment (Husserl often says “naive”) of the conscience, if this experiment is always particular? How to claim to leave the universal one the private individual without sinking in the arbitrary one?

To leave this paradox, Husserl advances the concept of épochè , that it borrows, once again, with the philosophical tradition (this Greek term was used by the Sceptiques in the direction of “suspension of the judgment”). The épochè consists in “putting between brackets” what each lived of conscience has of private individual, thus revealing its only universal structure. Husserl thus defines this concept in the Cartesian Meditations: " It is the universal and radical method by which I seized like me pure, with the life of pure conscience which is clean for me, life in and by which the entire objective world exist for me, such precisely that there exists for moi". This method results from the indisputable obviousness of a " Ego cogito" who is universal by his possible presence in all the particular beings.

Intentionality

The épochè also reveals by there, from a methodological point of view, one of the fundamental structures of phenomenology, as important as the cogito : the Intentionality. It is of its Master Franz Brentano that Husserl takes again this concept. It indicates the character basically directed of the conscience. The conscience does not have the same mode to be that physical objects, and it is the structure of the intentionality which distinguishes the psychic one from the physique.

The conscience is not a box which enter of the images, perceptions, etc, but it is each time an aiming (intentional aiming), which is donneuse direction. For example, the perception of an apple is not the imagination of an apple, though the object concerned (or noème) is the same one: what differs, it is the nature of the act of aiming (or noèse).

Outlines on ontology husserlienne

One will be able to refer to the work of Jacques Derrida of Grammatologie (1967) which evokes it in its chapter II and whose these lines are inspired. It is important to understand that the structure hylè-morphè recutting the conceptual couple intuitively matter-form, although it is a real component real and one real of lived, is not in itself a reality Realität . Derrida: " As for the intentional object, for example the contents of an image, it belong really real neither to the world nor with the vécu." Is this to say that it does not have any consistency? Admittedly not, it acts for Husserl of a not-real component of lived. It is thus seen that its ontology borrows a vocabulary diverting for the tradition and that the zone of lived accommodates types of hierarchical layers: reality, the real component of the structure hylé-morphé and the not-real component of the intentional object. Here not-reality is not synonymous at all with inexistence. Simply, the intentional object must be apprehended in manner definitely more subjectivist that the Platonic objective idealities. Conclusion: the acoustic image for example, as an intentional object, should not be analyzed as the copy of external reality by internal reality. It is precisely a question of driving back the model of carried criticized in Ideen I and of overcoming the opposition between external reality and interior reality.

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