An Event, Perhaps. Peter Salmon
of Franz Brentano (whose other students included Sigmund Freud and Rudolf Steiner). In 1887 he married Malvine Steinschneider, shortly after they had converted to Lutheranism.
Husserl’s initial goal and lifelong obsession was to find a way of grounding mathematics. How can we know that mathematics is true? His decision to dedicate himself to philosophy was a means to this end, and phenomenology an accident of his pursuit. As a system of epistemology – How do we know stuff? How do we know the stuff we know is right? – it was to grow into one of the major philosophical movements of the twentieth century, but Husserl never lost sight of the original stuff he wanted to know: mathematical truth and our justification for our confidence in it.
His first book, Philosophy of Arithmetic, was published in 1891. In it, Husserl attempted to secure a foundation for mathematics by examining the concept of number, in particular the concept of multiplicity. How do we have the concept of a multiplicity, say the number seven? Husserl argued that we do by reflecting on a set of objects, connected by the conjunction ‘and’. That is ‘one and one and one’, such that each object is identical with itself and different from the other objects. One then ‘abstracts’ a number from this multiplicity. This is a psychological answer – the work is done by the human mind.13
There are a number of objections to this. Where does one object end and another begin? How do we separate object x from the field of everything? And does our ability to make this judgement already rely on a concept of number (can I see seven things if I don’t already have the concept of seven)? Also how, if we obtain numbers from counting, do we explain 0 and 1? Husserl argued that we get to them by ‘taking away’, but as the mathematician Gottlob Frege was to argue in his review of the work, when I see ‘one moon’, it is implausible to assert I have carried out a subtraction from two.
Frege’s harsh review was of crucial importance to Husserl’s development. Husserl’s work, noted Frege, had a fundamental problem: psychologism. If numbers derive simply from a subject’s experience, numbers then become subjective. So how can objectivity be certain? Couldn’t the subject be wrong? Couldn’t we all be wrong? Far from being a foundation for mathematics, this leads to radical subjectivity; we need to be confident that 2 + 2 = 4 whether or not there is a human mind in which that concept adheres. Husserl’s book had thus failed in its mission. (In his dissertation, Jackie cheekily called it ‘the book of a disappointed mathematician’.)14
Husserl was himself becoming aware of these problems, as a letter to Frege makes clear. As he put it:
I was a novice, without a correct understanding of philosophical problems … And while laboring over projects concerning the logic of mathematical thought … I was tormented by those incredibly strange realms: the world of the purely logical and the world of actual consciousness – or, as I would say now, that of the phenomenological and also the psychological. I had no idea how to unite them; and yet they had to interrelate and form an intrinsic unity?15
Trying to unite these ‘incredibly strange realms’ constituted his life’s work, which he performed with varying degrees of success, always attempting to answer what was for him the fundamental question of how the mind can transcend its own experiences and gain a foothold in objectivity and what accounts for validity of knowledge. This began with his next work, The Logical Investigations, published in 1900–1. These investigations were, as he put it, ‘born of distress, of unspeakable mental distress, of a complete collapse’.16
Vast and unwieldy in its original form, with considerable slippage in the defining of its technical terms, it is for all that crucial in establishing Husserl’s ‘new science’, phenomenology. It is in this work, as Jackie writes in his dissertation, that ‘the phenomenological level is reached’, introducing its key concepts, including intentionality, the distinction between noema and noesis, the intuition of essences and mereology (the study of wholes and parts, a philosophical field of its own).
For Husserl, the first of these, intentionality, became the ‘indispensable fundamental concept of phenomenology’,17 and the key to any attempt to unite the incredibly strange realms. Descartes had argued cogito ergo sum, ‘I think therefore I am.’ But what is it to think? Consciousness does not simply ‘think’, it ‘thinks about’ – about trees, or what to have for lunch, or the problem of the concept of number. An ego alone in the universe, thinking, with no objects of consciousness, bears no relation to our own. In order to describe consciousness – and therefore do philosophy – one has to acknowledge and incorporate an ‘intentionality’, a directedness to our thinking.
By interrogating consciousness in this form – by describing how it is for consciousness to be in the world – we can attempt to establish and understand this concord between consciousness and the outer world. Husserl’s revolutionary insight is that this analysis does not require an investigation of one of the major questions that had dogged philosophy, overtly and covertly, since its inception: the question of the actual existence of the world. What is important is not, for instance, whether or not the tree I am experiencing actually exists, the important thing is my experience of it, as a first-person phenomenon. I am to describe this phenomenon and analyse it. This task of description and analysis is the task of phenomenology.
These ideas were elaborated on and interrogated further in the 1913 work, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, generally known as Ideas I. Husserl introduced the concept of the ‘epoché’, – from the ancient Greek, meaning ‘suspension of judgement’ or ‘withholding of assent’ – whereby the question whether the world exists is ‘bracketed’ out of the analysis. Whether there is a world or not is moot; consciousness is to be studied precisely as it is experienced, and objects are to be studied only as they are given to experience, as, therefore, phenomena:
Let us suppose that in a garden we regard with pleasure a blossoming apple tree, the freshly green grass of the lawn, etc. It is obvious that the perception and the accompanying liking are not, at the same time, what is perceived and liked. In the natural attitude, the apple tree is for us something existing in the transcendent realm of spatial actuality, and the perception, as well as the liking, is for us a psychical state belonging to real people. Between the one and the other real things, between the real person or the real perception, and the real apple tree, there exist real relations. In such situations characterizing mental processes, it may be in certain cases that perception is ‘mere hallucination’, the perceived, this apple tree before us, does not exist in ‘actual’ reality. Now the real relation, previously meant as actually existing, is destroyed. Only the perception remains, but there is nothing actual there to which it is related.18
This ‘bracketing’ was, importantly, not tactical; in no sense was Husserl simply putting the question to one side. On the contrary, he was attempting to access how the world actually is to consciousness in everyday life in the ‘natural attitude’. As in the above example, unless we make a conscious decision to question the existence of the apple tree (or the entire world) – when doing philosophy for instance, or as an intellectual game – we have an absolute confidence it is there, its existence is self-evident, to question it is unnatural. As he notes, in the epoché
the real world is not ‘re-interpreted’ or even denied, but an absurd interpretation of it, that is, an interpretation [such as philosophy] which contradicts the proper sense of reality as it is rendered self-evident, is removed. This interpretation is the product of a philosophical hypostatization of the world, which is completely alien to the natural view of the world.19
In other words, the world of human experience is the only world there is – ‘my world is the opening through which all experience occurs.’ In any situation into which we are thrown, we, as phenomenologists, must describe what it is like, and in absolute detail, using the ‘incomparable rigour’ to which Derrida alluded. Intentionality here becomes paramount, as the ‘existence of our consciousness is indubitably certain; existence of the natural world is phenomenal and doubtful; thus consciousness may exist without the material world, but the material world relies on consciousness.’20
The world becomes an intentional correlate of consciousness. This means