Edmund Husserl Quotes

I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.

I must achieve internal consistency.

To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness.

Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people.

First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must "once in his life" withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom (sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair. It must arise as His wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute insights.

I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights, principally before myself but in the same manner also before others, as one who has lived in all its seriousness the fate of a philosophical existence.

Philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science -- the dream is over.

Why must the plastic form make up the foundation of image consciousness?

Zu den Sachen selbst!

Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia, Hermann Hesse's Glimpse Into Chaos, Edmund Husserl's The Crisis in European Science, Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind, Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, René Guenon's The Reign of Quantity, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Colin Wilson's The Outsider—the list could go on.

In our vital need ... science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the question which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions about the meaning or meaninglessness of this whole human existence. Do not these questions, universal and necessary for all men, demand universal reflections and answers based on rational insight? In the final analysis they concern man as a free, self-determining being in his behaviour toward the human and extrahuman surrounding world and free in regard to his capacities for rationally shaping himself himself and his surrounding world.

All forms of perception, according to Husserl, presuppose an intentional structure of consciousness, and it is in this intentional structure that the primordial link between consciousness and the world is to be sought.

Every experience has its own horizon; every experience has its core of actual and determinate cognition, its own content of immediate determinations which give themselves; but beyond this core of determinate quiddity, of the truly given as "itself here," it has its own horizon. This implies that every experience refers to the possibility . . . of obtaining, little by little as experience continues, new determinations of the same thing . . . And this horizon in its indeterminateness is copresent from the beginning as a realm (Spielraum) of possibilities, as the prescription of the path to a more precise determination, in which only experience itself decides in favor of the determinate possibility it realizes as opposed to others. [Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. James Spencer Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 32.]

Edmund Husserl abandonó las Matemáticas por la Filosofía cuando descubrió que «la ciencia no tiene nada que decir sobre la angustia de nuestra vida, pues excluye por principio las cuestiones más candentes para los hombres de nuestra desdichada época: las cuestiones sobre el sentido o sinsentido de la existencia humana».

In Germany, Martin Heidegger turned against his former mentor Edmund Husserl, but later Heidegger's friends and colleagues turned their backs on him. In France, Gabriel Marcel attacked Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre fell out with Camus, Camus fell out with Merleau-Ponty, Merleau-Ponty fell out with Sartre, and the Hungarian intellectual Arthur Koestler fell out with everyone and punched Camus in the street.

[Science] presupposes as data principles that are themselves thoroughly lacking in actual rationality. In so far as the intuitive environing world, purely subjective as it is, is forgotten in the scientific thematic, the working subject is also forgotten, and the scientist is not studied.

The free artistic fiction and the formation produced in the real world by means of the connection of fictions creates a predelineation for the one contemplating art. But it extends only as far as the artist has tied his unitary forms to such predelineations; beyond that, everything is again an empty possibility that can be shaped by phantasies chosen at will with any sense one likes. The perception as such determines nothing. One sees this in the fact that we would not live with one another in a pure phantasy world and that obviously nothing at all would change in what has been said if we had the same immediate freedom of perceptual phantasy as we do of reproductive phantasy: hence if we could hallucinate at will.

Se a verdade contivesse uma referência essencial a inteligências pensantes, às suas funções espirituais e formas de movimentos, então ela se geraria e pereceria com elas, senão com o indivíduo, com a espécie. Como a genuína objetividade da verdade, perder-se-ia também a do ser, mesmo a do ser subjetivo, a do ser do sujeito. E se, e.g., os seres pensantes fossem totalmente incapazes de admitir o seu próprio ser como verdadeiramente existente? Então seriam e também não seriam. A verdade e o ser são ambos "categorias" num mesmo sentido, e são manifestamente correlativos. Não se pode relativizar a verdade e manter a objetividade do ser. A relativização da verdade pressupõe, entretanto, certamente de novo, como ponto de referência, um ser objetivo - aí reside a contradição relativista.

The physical image presentation aims at the subject. The presentation of the image itself as the presentation of the appearing image-representant is an entirely different experience. Here, too, it is possible that the consciousness of imaging can slip away entirely, in which case an ordinary perceptual presentation would result. Preventing this consciousness of imaging from arising from the start in a purely intuitive manner is the effect produced by images simulating the look of reality, images of the sort found in the wax museum, and the like. Although in such cases we have a conceptual knowledge of the fact that the appearances are merely image appearances, in the intuitive experience itself the re-presentative moment, which is otherwise intimately mingled with the appearances, is absent. But this moment is decisive for intuitive image presentation. We have genuine perceptual presentations in those cases, accompanied by the thought that their objects are mere images. The appearance itself, however, presents itself as the appearance of a present object and not as an image. Indeed, in naïvely contemplating it, the appearance forces us to make the intuitive perceptual judgment. In doing this, it deceives us. In truth, there is perhaps another (nonappearing) object, standing to the appearing object in the relation of original to image. We know all of this, and yet the illusion continues to exist, since the appearance possesses the characteristic of normal perceptual presentation so completely that it will not stand being degraded into a mere representant. The accompanying judgment that it is a mere image just does not impress the image-characteristic on the appearance itself.

The phenomenologists’ leading thinker, Edmund Husserl, provided a rallying cry, ‘To the things themselves!’ It meant: don’t waste time on the interpretations that accrue upon things, and especially don’t waste time wondering whether the things are real. Just look at this that’s presenting itself to you, whatever this may be, and describe it as precisely as possible. Another phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger, added a different spin. Philosophers all through history have wasted their time on secondary questions, he said, while forgetting to ask the one that matters most, the question of Being. What is it for a thing to be? What does it mean to say that you yourself are? Until you ask this, he maintained, you will never get anywhere. Again, he recommended the phenomenological method: disregard intellectual clutter, pay attention to things and let them reveal themselves to you.

Within the bounds of positivity we say and find it obvious that, in my own experience, I experience not only myself but others—in the particular form: experiencing someone else. The indubitable transcendental explication showed us not only that this positive statement is transcendentally legitimate but also that the concretely apprehended transcendental ego (who first becomes aware of himself, with his undetermined horizon, when he effects transcendental reduction) grasps himself in his own primordial being, and likewise (in the form of his transcendental experience of what is alien) grasps others: other transcendental egos, though they are given, not originaliter and in unqualifiedly apodictic evidence, but only in an evidence belonging to ‘external’ experience. ‘In’ myself I experience and know the Other; in me he becomes constituted—appresentatively mirrored, not constituted as the original. Hence it can very well be said, in a broadened sense, that the ego acquires—that I, as the one who meditatingly explicates, acquire by ‘self-explication’ (explication of what I find in myself) every transcendency: as a transcendentally constituted transcendency and not as a transcendency accepted with naive positivity. Thus the illusion vanishes: that everything I, qua transcendental ego, know as existing in consequence of myself, and explicate as constituted in myself, must belong to me as part of my own essence. This is true only of ‘immanent transcendencies’. As a title for the systems of synthetic actuality and potentiality that confer sense and being on me as ego in my own essentialness, constitution signifies constitution of immanent objective actuality.

Hume had shown that we naively read causality into this world and think that we grasp necessary succession in intuition. The same is true of everything that makes the body of the everyday surrounding world into an identical thing with identical properties, relations, etc. (and Hume had in fact worked this out in detail in the Treatise, which was unknown to Kant). Data and complexes of data come and go, but the thing, presumed to be simply experienced sensibly, is not something sensible which persists through this alteration. The sensationalist thus declares it to be a fiction. He is substituting, we shall say, mere sense-data for perception, which after all places things (everyday things) before our eyes. In other words, he overlooks the fact that mere sensibility, related to mere data of sense, cannot account for objects of experience. Thus he overlooks the fact that these objects of experience point to a hidden mental accomplishment and to the problem of what kind of an accomplishment this can be. From the very start, after all, it must be a kind which enables the objects of pre-scientific experience, through logic, mathematics, mathematical natural science, to be knowable with objective validity, i.e., with a necessity which can be accepted by and is binding for everyone.

In 1935, three years before his death, Edmund Husserl gave his celebrated lectures in Vienna and Prague on the crisis of European humanity. For Husserl, the adjective "European" meant the spiritual identity that extends beyond geographical Europe (to America, for instance) and that was born with ancient Greek philosophy. In his view, this philosophy, for the first time in History, apprehended the world (the world as a whole) as a question to be answered. It interrogated the world not in order to satisfy this or that practical need but because "the passion to know had seized mankind." The crisis Husserl spoke of seemed to him so profound that he wondered whether Europe was still able to survive it. The roots of the crisis lay for him at the beginning of the Modern Era, in Galileo and Descartes, in the one-sided nature of the European sciences, which reduced the world to a mere object of technical and mathematical investigation and put the concrete world of life, die Lebenswelt as he called it, beyond their horizon. The rise of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of the specialized disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Husserl's pupil Heidegger called, in a beautiful and almost magical phrase, "the forgetting of being." Once elevated by Descartes to "master and proprietor of nature," man has now become a mere thing to the forces (of technology, of politics, of history) that bypass him, surpass him, possess him. To those forces, man's concrete being, his "world of life" (die Lebenswelt), has neither value nor interest: it is eclipsed, forgotten from the start.

Prior to all theory the world is given. All opinions, warranted or not, popular, superstitious, and scientific ones — they all refer to the world already given in advance. How does the world give itself to me, what can I immediately articulate about it, how can I immediately and generally describe that for what it gives itself, what it is according to its original sense, as this sense gives itself as the sense of the world itself in “immediate” perception and experience?... ...All theory refers to this immediate givenness, and theory can have a justified sense only when it forms thoughts that do not run counter to the general sense of the immediate givenness. No theorizing can contradict this sense. What is the world? It is what I find through describing and theorizing, and theorizing is only the continuation of describing, being a more broadly encompassing describing. To seek for more has no meaning.

Francisco Varela once told me that a European philosopher, Edmund Husserl, already suggested a similar approach to the study of consciousness.

In the twentieth century, Kant’s subject-oriented intellectual approach encountered firm opposition. The breakthrough came from the new phenomenological direction given philosophy by Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler. They wanted to overcome the subject as the neo-Kantian starting point.

Experience by itself is not science. ― Edmund Husserl Experience is itself a science that encompasses all sciences; before it, everything was just a mystery. ― Ehsan Sehgal

I start here because phenomenology makes “orientation” central in the very argument that consciousness is always directed “toward” an object, and given its emphasis on the lived experience of inhabiting a body, or what Edmund Husserl calls the “living body

For Aristotle, fourth-century BCE Greek philosopher, the starting point of wisdom, or philosophy, was metaphysics. Modernity, in its quest for self-destruction, has more or less rejected metaphysics. But metaphysics will never go away because metaphysics is reality itself—the study of the totality of what is. Metaphysics is the starting point in terms of actual foundations of knowledge and presupposition, yet it comes at the end of the process of pedagogy, as it is the highest science. Nowadays, aside from certain continental philosophers who follow in the train of genius writers like nineteenth/twentieth-century German philosopher mathematician Edmund Husserl, theoria and metaphysics have been jettisoned for pragmatism, postmodernism, and other forms of self-destructive prattle. [...] Unfortunately, certain basic flaws in Aristotle’s own position led to that decline, particularly his adoption of empiricism. Aristotle cut the world off from the possibility of any other world or reality or dimension, and while it took a millennium or two, this ultimately resulted in materialism, positivism, and finally the negation of all meaning and purpose.

Método desarrollado por Edmund Husserl que, partiendo de la descripción de las entidades y cosas presentes a la intuición intelectual, logra captar

The philosopher Edmund Husserl called seeing the world in this way ‘the natural standpoint’. We really can’t help it. We seem to be made this way. The world as I see it existed before I came on the scene and it will be here after I depart, and my entrance and exit will do little to change it. In fact, according to the natural standpoint, the world was here before anyone turned up and it will remain after the last flicker of consciousness, human or otherwise, dies out. When the first humans became self-conscious and gazed out on the world, we assume they saw it in the same way that we do, as something ‘outside’ them. There were no buildings, no cities, no shopping malls, no highways or airports. Our man-made world did not exist. But the natural world did, and the humans who were waking up to that world experienced it in much the same way as we do today. We know a great deal more about the world than our ancestors did, in the sense of our new way of knowing, and this knowledge is what sets us apart from them. It’s what constitutes our ‘progress’. But the world our prehistoric ancestors experienced and the one we do today are the same. We just understand it better than they did.

The word ‘phenomena’ derives from the Ancient Greek meaning ‘things that appear’, and phenomenology can be defined as the direct examination and description of phenomena as they are consciously experienced. Pioneered by Edmund Husserl (d. 1938) as a philosophical tool, phenomenology involves paying close attention to objects so that they begin to reveal themselves, not as we take them to be, but as they truly appear to naked human consciousness, shorn of superimposed theories and preconceptions.