Edmund Husserl; philosopher of infinite tasks

by Maurice Alexander Natanson

Winner of the National Book Award

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

Unknown Binding

First published December 1, 1973

Reviews

[Kamakana · Rating 5 out of 5]

130315: this is a strong five. this has ventured to explain husserl, explicate phenomenology, describe this philosophical attitude and method, far better for me than all the other books read (154) on these subjects- though of course that it works so well might just be all those works read. yes it is an historical document, from 1974, and husserl himself (29) in the early 20th century, but I can see how he is so influential, his work, his techniques, his tasks yet to be completed or superseded, as phenomenology underlies much continental philosophy of the past century...

but am I able to encapsulate his thought as explored in this book, in this review? I will try, simply by following with a gesture towards the chapter titles: 1) introduction, 2) the world of the natural attitude, 3) the phenomenological attitude, 4) phenomenological method, 5) intentional consciousness, 6) phenomenology applied, 7) the life-world, 8) phenomenology and existence, 9) the crisis of reason, 10) conclusion...

1) the order, the themes, natanson follows is very logical, such that even previously enjoyed summaries of husserl seem too brief, too simple, and fail to reflect how much work put into it, the thousands of pages of notes, the way it by close inspection can overcome or correct logical complaints- particularly against charges of obscurantism by those who would see philosophy as a 'positivistic' discourse concerned with metaphysical claims and disputes of ontology, materialism, idealism, skepticism, of natural science- but none of these are husserl's interests, and phenomenology is above or beyond such disputes. phenomenology is the attempt to ground science, to be a 'first science', that cannot found itself...

in 2) there is his idea of the 'natural attitude', how this insistence of subject/object, of the metaphysics borne of this dispute fails to express a true conception of philosophy- this attitude would have us believe the world we think of is independent of 'how' we think of it, how we must participate, 'construct' or 'be constructed', by our minds beyond vagaries of perception, this attitude is how we live, how we pursue scientific knowledge 'naively'... this is the way we humans all live our lives and this is not a bad thing. this is not yet science, however, from which...

3) the phenomenological attitude must free us, the attitude that recognizes all our 'knowledge' of any sort is only our human sense where such concepts as we create are always on the first level of reflection- that level which thinks the world is only as our psychology thinks it in 'psychologism'- not the level of reflection on itself, nothing but our 'representations' of the world, not the 'predicative' but the 'primordial' 'essence' of the 'things themselves'- please be patient, I finished reading this book the first time only yesterday, and doubt my attempts to review it- see, this is the attitude we must employ before the abstractions common to say the natural sciences, these are the abstractions of thought itself, as examined in...

4) the phenomenological method, husserl's technique by which all questions of metaphysics, of what is 'real', is 'bracketed' or put 'in suspension', so the thought concentrates on what is 'eidetic'- that is, 'essential' in the way he uses it- of the phenomena, and here comes the first wonderful description of how this precedes, overcomes, any complaint from the sciences, such as neurology. husserl makes no claims, admits his own ignorance of the causal structures of the brain as it was then known, as it will ever be known by science, because what is reflected on is the mind, the thought, the 'things themselves' and in recognition that first comes...

5) intentional consciousness, which foregrounds the fact of any mental operation, thought, dream, concept, perception- is ultimately 'intentional', that is intending, or being about, of being 'of-' some 'thing' and how we are freed from idealistic worries of both solipsism and skepticism, how everything from 'the world' to 'the other' is 'given', and thus our thinking being, our ego, our selves, are always already 'in the world', through the constant human intentionality of sense and thus we are inescapably 'transcendent'...

6) by 'application' of these techniques of phenomenology, which sets out a critical reflection on reflection, which it is claimed husserl himself critiqued himself, never expressing himself as the arbiter of correctness of the way his idea of phenomenology could be used, though we can set up qualifications of everything thought, has it escaped the natural attitude, has it reduced itself from extraneous aspects to capture essence, has it recognized how it is in the world before thought thinking, all these are questions we can ask of anything calling itself 'phenomenological'...

7) and ultimately, this leads to the 'life-world', world of our human being as distinct from the universe of our human body, our 'corpse'- this definitely confronts, dismisses, any complaint husserl was abstract and obscure and did not care for the human, for this is our 'primordial' world, this is in a sense the 'revenge of the natural attitude'- with attempts to phenomenologically reduce phenomenological reduction! is this possible? how is the natural world how is the phenomenological world? admittedly, I am not a prof, not someone who can explain even this question let alone offer an answer...

8) but maybe existentialism can? well this is actually where my interests in philosophy, and thus phenomenology, began- with sartrean existentialism, so many books ago, years past (decades...), but this book concentrates on the literary expression of this from 'underground', from Dostoevsky, and suggests that the narrator, the unhappy man, howls against religion as an answer for the world, feels abandoned- but cannot find something else to justify his being. yes I have read this book but no the claim, the nihilism implicit, did not then and does not now impress me: the angst of being seems too much turning away from being oneself however that being is...

9) for out of such nihilism rises the 'crisis of european man', which bothered me as a title firstly because it is parochial, ethnocentric, but suppose that is husserl in his time. for 'reason' is not domain of any particular culture, is defined by its universality, its applicability, rather than contingent works of art which are of its time, and I can agree that this is where relativism must be confronted, as husserl himself had to when he wrote his book- after one devastating European war, leading up to another even more global...

10) so, tried the other day to offer evidence for how this book is so good at explaining husserl, to a friend at another coffeehouse- by finding a few sentences on page 65: 'the turn from fact to essence will be called the eidetic reduction', and 'the movement from believing-ness to transcendental subjectivity will be called the phenomenological reduction'. great, isn't it? well it did not work for him, but definitely does for me...

020220: more
Husserl's Phenomenology
Husserl
Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations
Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology
Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology

[Jordan Goings · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very accessible work on Husserl's pure phenomenology. The author's thoroughness--along with insightful examples--of Husserl's contributions and criticisms moved this work along smoothly without leaving me wanting.

[r0b · Rating 4 out of 5]

It would be hard for me to overstate how much I enjoyed this book...so well written, so interesting...it’s impressive how the author makes Husserl’s phenomenology so accessible.

Some extracts I found particularly interesting (mostly from my ‘notes’):

‘1) Phenomenonology purports to be “presuppositionless” philosophy.’

‘2) Consciousness is the source and matrix of all phenomena...Thinking is necessarily thinking about...the intentionality of consciousness.

‘Indubitable knowledge, what Husserl refers to as “apodictic” knowledge, is sought as the basis for erecting philosophy as “rigorous science”.

My comment- Phenomenology, although very impressive in its efforts, strikes me as quixotic nevertheless. Pretty much like all western philosophy in general...limited and self indulgent/serving...though phenomenology probably goes the furthest.

And from the book itself:
‘The first sign of spiritual decay, in Husserl’s terms, is the willingness to turn away from universal truth. That is what happened to philosophy- its comprehensive mission has been deemed quixotic and its own practitioners have suffered a loss of confidence. The result for philosophy has been a profound unsettlement and disorientation, but the effects for Western man has been the crisis which Husserl describes.’

‘In a sense, phenomenology must be begun all over again by each phenomenologist, for he must start from his own resources in validating the research of his colleagues. He can take nothing for granted.’

‘...with the full expression of transcendental phenomenology, Husserl turned to his most profound theme, the search for a philosophy of the life-world which could revitalize the meaning of history through a new critique of reason...What I find in Husserl’s development is the expression of a dominant, enlarging, and deepening idea: the establishment of philosophy by transcendental phenomenology. I cannot claim much company in taking this view.’

‘In what I believe to be the most profoundly antiphilosophical sentence ever written by a philosopher, Marx said: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it.”....OR...it might ‘be more just to say with all candor that revolutionaries have only changed the world; the point is to interpret it.’

‘If the crisis which Husserl diagnoses is as profound as he makes it out to be-and I believe it is-then the need for genuinely fundamental reflection is indeed absolute.’

Well, that ain’t gonna happen, at least not to any significant degree...

‘...if Western man was sick when Husserl wrote, he is sicker today [1973]’...and the beat goes on...

[Arjun Ravichandran · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a monograph on the discipline of phenomenology, founded by the venerable Edmund Husserl at the juxtaposition of the 19th/20th centuries. The author is obviously deeply immersed in his subject matter, and ranges lightly but forcefully over the different dimensions of the phenomenological project with repeated references to Husserl’s own torturous working out of his raison d’etre exemplified through his numerous texts, as well as to fellow travellers and comrades and their differing interpretations of the same.
At the heart of phenomenology is intentionality – the simple but profound intuition that consciousness is always consciousness of something. At one stroke, this demolishes a host of related questions of classical metaphysics, including mind/body dualism, the relationship of the soul to the world. The formalization of intentionality as performed by the phenomenological methodology means that philosophy is grounded afresh, and the immediacy of human existence is affirmed.
Armed with this new entry-point into a feasible explication of human existence, the book then launches into several other central phenomenological terms, all tasked with the explication of intentionality. Epoche , the reduction, the natural attitude – these are all explained lucidly and with forceful emphasis on how the thrust of this new philosophical endeavour allows the phenomenologist renewed access to perennial questions of being. The deft explanation is only occasionally bogged down by extracts from Husserl’s writings, which almost exhibit an unwitting genius for obfuscation and clunky sentence construction; a native danger of all great thinkers, it seems.
The last couple of chapters, dealing with the question of the life-world, as well as the intricate connection of phenomenology’s connection with existentialism, is where the book reaches a crescendo of interpretive synthesis and brilliance. Beautifully demonstrating how Husserl’s insistence on the priority of the lifeworld as the pre-assumed grounds of scientific endeavour, and thus, at a stroke, affirming the validity of concrete human existence in its connection with any possible level of abstraction, the author showcases the hidden strand of existentialist import in Husserl’s thought, and contrasts this to (in his opinion) Sartre’s naïve and incomplete appropriation of the phenomenological method.
Ending his life as an academic pariah amidst the brutality of Nazi Germany in its horrifying ascendance, Husserl (much like Freud, his near counterpart, across the sea in bombed out London) spent his last days rededicating himself to his vocation, plumbing the depths of the philosophical endeavour to extricate an answer to the degradation and carnage around him. It is in these last chapters, that the title of the book, describing Husserl as a “philosopher of infinite tasks” becomes apparent as something more than mere hagiography ; Husserl, springing from the purely logical axiom of intentionality, fleshes out his conception into a whole-hearted appropriation of the teleology hidden in human endeavour, most notably manifested in the unavoidable historicism in which even the most banal and hedonistic present moment is appropriated ; for Husserl, philosophy is reasons’s mediation of itself ; the inherent teleology of philosophical endeavour is inseparable from the inherent teleology underpinning the structure and coherence of human life. Thus, for Husserl, culture undergoes a decline when reason (and its associated teleology) loses its way. Philosophers, in this estimation, are ambassadors of reason to itself – ambassadors of humanity. But because teleology, like the nature of human life, is endless – the task of philosophy is never complete. There will always be further explication, further understandings, further truths – philosophy is an infinite task.
This was an aspect of Husserl’s thought I was not familiar with, having understood him previously as a logician-philosopher (the author, to be fair to him, admits that his interpretation may be a bit on the limb) ; it was a resounding end to a very impressive book, granting an impressive introduction to one of the more modest, and hugely underappreciated thinkers of the modern era. Strongly recommended for students of philosophy, especially of 20th century continental philosophy, all of which assumes Husserl’s investigations as starting-point.

[Dave Franklin · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a philosopher with a mathematical background, Husserl was interested in developing a general theory of inferential systems, a theory of science, based as a system of propositions established by a set of inferences. Maruice Natanson’s “Edmund Husserl,” is an important study.

Following Mill, he argues that “Logical Investigations” is an important methodological study, the way to look at the nature of systems, and a start with the view of their manifestations, i.e., their sentences and utterances.

Husserl asserts that we should study the units of consciousness a speaker presents- such as expressing the proposition, or a question. The units of consciousness are labeled as intentional acts or intentional experiences, because they represent something. According to Husserl, there are no non-intentional units of consciousness.

Objects -however strange, are thoughts that have content. In Husserl's view, Dr.Natanson shows that Husserl is on less than solid epistemological grounds here. Intentional representations of objects, like other pictures, are important; these images may exist without a depicted object in the actual world.
Husserl's insight, between his phenomenology and his sense-data philosophy, is that ideal content does not reflect an abstraction of given sensory data.

In new experiences we are given new content, a content different from the sensory content that fulfills our perceptual intentions. Husserl attempts to make a demarcation between sensory acts and categorical acts- an obscure delimitation. The Husserlian philosophy of mathematics rests on categorical intent: no sensory experience is involved in the fulfillment of our mathematical intuition. Geometry is an exception: Husserl argues that geometric knowledge is founded on sensory experience of three dimensional space.

This book is foundational for mathematicians.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, a bit hard to read

This is easier to read than Husserl, but harder to read than some of the more recent Husserl studies. Overall it is beautifully written.