Edmund Husserl
He founded phenomenology and trained the generation that built modern philosophy. In 1933, the student he trusted most signed the order barring him from his own university library. His 40,000 pages of manuscripts were saved by a Belgian monk who smuggled them across the German border.
Edmund Husserl died in Freiburg in April 1938. He was seventy-eight years old. His death certificate listed pleurisy as the cause. His physician believed the real cause was something harder to put on a certificate: the isolation, the exclusion, the knowledge of what had been done.
He had been barred from using the university library five years earlier. The institution he had spent decades building, the philosophy faculty he had shaped, the professorship he had engineered for his most celebrated student: all of it had been turned against him. The student who signed the order was Martin Heidegger.
What Husserl left behind was forty thousand pages of manuscript in his own shorthand: a lifetime of philosophical thinking that had not yet been published, that might never be published, that sat in his home waiting for confiscation. Weeks before he died, a Belgian Franciscan priest named Herman Leo Van Breda visited Freiburg, understood what he was looking at, and arranged for the manuscripts to be transported across the German border in diplomatic luggage. He had never met Husserl before that visit. He simply recognized what he was holding and understood that it could not be allowed to disappear. The Husserl Archives were established at the University of Leuven in Belgium in 1939 and have been editing and publishing those manuscripts ever since. Without Van Breda, phenomenology would have lost most of its primary sources.
This is who Husserl was: a man whose life’s work was saved by a stranger, after it had been turned against him by a student.
He was born in 1859 in Prostejov, in Moravia, to a Jewish family. His early training was mathematical. He studied in Leipzig, then in Berlin under Karl Weierstrass, one of the great mathematicians of the nineteenth century. He took his doctorate in mathematics in Vienna in 1882. Then he encountered Franz Brentano.
Brentano was a philosopher and psychologist who had made a claim that seemed simple and was not: all consciousness is consciousness of something. There is no such thing as pure, objectless awareness. Every mental act -- perceiving, imagining, remembering, desiring, judging -- is directed toward an object. Brentano called this directedness intentionality. Husserl studied under Brentano for two years in Vienna, and when he left he had been permanently redirected. He was a mathematician who had found a problem that required philosophy. He spent the rest of his career working out what intentionality means.
He converted from Judaism to Lutheranism in 1886, an act that reflected both personal conviction and the pressures that shaped the lives of educated Jews in the German-speaking world. The Nazis would later classify him as Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws, regardless of his conversion and regardless of his faith.
His first major work, the Logical Investigations, appeared in 1900 and 1901. It was immediately recognized as something new. A young man studying in a seminary read it and was electrified. The young man was Martin Heidegger. Heidegger later said that Logical Investigations had shaped the direction of his entire thinking.
What Husserl had done was to establish philosophy as the rigorous study of the structure of consciousness itself. Not psychology, which describes mental events empirically. Philosophy of consciousness: the study of the essential structures that make experience possible at all, that must be present for there to be a perceiving, remembering, imagining, judging subject in the first place.
His central method was what he called the phenomenological reduction, or the epoche -- from the Greek word for suspension. To study experience without presuppositions, Husserl proposed bracketing the question of whether the objects of experience really exist. Not denying that the world is real. Simply setting the question aside temporarily, in order to focus entirely on how things present themselves to consciousness. What is the structure of a perception? Of a memory? Of an expectation? Of a judgment? These questions can be answered, Husserl thought, with something approaching mathematical rigor, if we attend carefully and patiently enough to experience itself.
He moved to Göttingen in 1901, and to Freiburg in 1916. At Freiburg, he attracted extraordinary students. Edith Stein was one of his most gifted research assistants, a woman of remarkable philosophical ability. She later converted to Catholicism, became a Carmelite nun named Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, and was deported to Auschwitz in 1942, where she was murdered. Pope John Paul II canonized her in 1998. Heidegger came to Freiburg in 1916 as Husserl’s assistant, and Husserl championed him at every stage. He engineered Heidegger’s appointment to the Freiburg chair that had been his own.
Being and Time appeared in 1927, dedicated to Husserl in friendship and admiration. Husserl read it carefully. He was not entirely satisfied with what he found: Heidegger had taken phenomenology in a direction that seemed to abandon its original commitment to rigorous description of consciousness. There were signs of growing distance. But the dedication stood.
In the final years of his active philosophical life, Husserl turned to a problem he called the crisis of European sciences. The natural sciences had become so dominant in modern Western civilization that they had eclipsed something he called the lifeworld: the pre-theoretical, pre-scientific layer of lived experience that is the actual foundation of all meaning. Science begins from the lifeworld. It abstracts from it, replaces it with mathematical structures, equations, models. This abstraction is enormously powerful. But science then forgets that it performed the abstraction. It presents its models as the real world. Colors and purposes and persons become merely subjective. The result is a civilization increasingly unable to answer questions about meaning, about value, about how to live.
The lectures in which he developed this argument, given in Vienna and Prague in 1936, were among his last public appearances. The Crisis of European Sciences was published posthumously. It is now recognized as one of the most prescient philosophical diagnoses of the twentieth century.
In April 1933, Heidegger joined the National Socialist Party and became Rector of the University of Freiburg. That same month, under his signature, Husserl was informed that he was barred from using the university library.
Heidegger did not write to him. He did not defend him. He did not visit.
Husserl wrote to a former student: it appears that at the present time I am persona non grata at the University of Freiburg. He had spent his career describing the structure of experience with the patience and rigor of a mathematician. Now his experience was this: exclusion from the institution he had built, by the student he had trusted most.
His daughter Elli and her husband were later deported and murdered. His wife Malvine survived the war. Husserl himself died before the worst arrived, in April 1938, of pleurisy, aggravated, his physician believed, by the stress of isolation.
For the 1941 edition of Being and Time, Heidegger removed the dedication.
The forty thousand pages crossed the German border in diplomatic luggage and went to Leuven. Van Breda spent decades overseeing their organization, transcription, and publication. The Husserliana series, the complete scholarly edition, began publication in 1950 and continues to this day.
What Husserl had built was a method, a school, a set of problems and distinctions that shaped the entire course of European philosophy after him. Heidegger took phenomenology and turned it toward the question of Being. Sartre took it toward existentialism. Merleau-Ponty took it toward the body and perception. Levinas took it toward the face of the Other and the primacy of ethical obligation. Derrida deconstructed it. Each of them was, in some essential way, in conversation with the work of the man in Freiburg who had proposed that we could study consciousness with rigor, who had argued that philosophy should return to the things themselves.
Return to the things themselves. To what is actually there in experience, before we explain it away or theorize it into abstraction or mistake our models for what we are modeling.
He said it at the beginning of his career and spent the rest of it trying to show what it meant to take that seriously.
He died in April 1938. His manuscripts survived. The stranger who saved them made sure of that.