PHENOMENOLOGY OF EDMUND HUSSERL by Jobin Tholanickal Reg.No.9041

The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl

As a movement and a method, as a "first philosophy," phenomenology owes its life to Edmund Husserl, a German philosopher. Phenomenology was Husserl's continuing and continuously revised effort to develop a method for grounding necessary truth. By the end of the nineteenth century, a new perspectivism or relativism had come into philosophy. According to which philosophy could not be reduced into a single perspective. Against any such relativism, Husserl insisted on philosophy as a singular, rigorous science, and his phenomenology was to provide the key.

It is often debated whether phenomenology is a philosophy or a method, but it is both. As a "first philosophy," without presuppositions, it lays the basis for all further philosophical and scientific investigations. Husserl defines phenomenology as the scientific study of the essential structures of consciousness. By describing those structures, Husserl promises us, we can find certainty, which philosophy has always sought. To do that, Husserl describes a method for taking up a peculiarly phenomenological standpoint, "bracketing out" everything that is not essential, thereby understanding the basic rules or constitutive processes through which consciousness does its work of knowing the world. The central doctrine of Husserl's phenomenology is the thesis that consciousness is intentional. Thus, the phenomenologist can distinguish and describe the nature of the intentional acts of consciousness and the intentional objects of consciousness, which are defined through the content of consciousness. It is important to note that one can describe the content of consciousness and, accordingly, the object of consciousness without any particular commitment to the actuality or existence of that object.

Husserl distinguishes between the natural standpoint and the phenomenological standpoint. The former is ordinary stance of the natural sciences, describing things and states-of-affairs. The latter is the special viewpoint achieved by the phenomenologist as one focuses not on things but on our consciousness of things. One arrives at the phenomenological standpoint by way of a series of phenomenological "reductions," which eliminate certain aspects of our experience from consideration.  The second reduction eliminates the merely empirical content of consciousness and focuses instead on the essential features, the meanings of consciousness. Thus Husserl defends a notion of "intuition" that differs from and is more specialized than the ordinary notion of "experience."

In his early work, including Ideas, Husserl defends a strong realist position that is, the things that are perceived by consciousness are assumed to be not only objects of consciousness but also the things themselves. A decade or so later, Husserl made a shift in his emphasis from the intentionality of the objects to the nature of consciousness as such. As in the 1930s, Husserl again reinvented phenomenology, this time with a shift toward the practical, or what some might call the more "existential" dimension of human knowledge. But it is much to Husserl's credit that he continued to see the inadequacies of his own method and correct them, in ever-new efforts to get phenomenology right.

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