Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology

This entry defines some of the key aspects of the work of the post-Neo-Kantian philosopher
Edmund Husserl, called phenomenology. It provides some introductory details and makes
links to some of his influence in contemporary philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and
psychotherapy.
What these developments share is theorising about how the mind works by attending
to the conscious experiences of oneself and others in relation to the common objects of
attention around us. It could be called a qualitative cognitivism or the experiential
interpretation of mental acts in relation to their objects of awareness. More formally,
phenomenology can be defined as studying noesis-noema correlations, in a neutrally believed
attitude, in the 1913 presentation of it: Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a
phenomenological philosophy: First book (Husserl, 1982, §§87-127, but particularly §§130-
132, 149-150). But different wordings are equivalent to this early notation. Other equivalent
terms are intentional analysis, noetic phenomenology, and the explication towards the objects
of our attention with an explication of the intentional processes involved. To the degree that
people are following both the attention towards objects of attention, meanings of various
sorts – and towards the mental processes that made them, for one person or more, then they
are carrying out what Husserl wanted (or not as the case may be).
But the first thing to note is that there are two types of phenomenology. Husserl’s
work came to maturity in 1927 in the work Formal and Transcendental Logic (Husserl, 1969,
1974) and the drafts that were written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1997a, 1997b). The
first introductory type of phenomenology is called “pure psychology”. It is a theoretical
psychology preparatory for any applied psychology. It is social as well as individual. The
stance that was being urged would now be called a biopsychosocial perspective. In 1930,
Husserl mentioned it as “the genuine psychology of intentionality (...ultimately a psychology
of pure intersubjectivity)” that “reveals itself through and through as the constitutive
phenomenology of the natural attitude”, (1989, p 426). This means that this philosophical or
theoretical approach concerns how people have commonsense meanings. The aim is to find
how mental processes are necessary to create the sense of shared or disputed reality for actual
groups of people.
The second type of phenomenology is transcendental phenomenology. It studies how
there is a world of meaning for more than one person. Transcendental phenomenology is an
abstract study preparatory for philosophy and the applied sciences. It concerns how ideal,
verbal and non-verbal meanings exist for consciousness in its social habitat. It is allegedly
devoid of influences from specific worlds of meaning. The word “transcendental” means
finding the enabling conditions of possibility for meaning to exist in a shared cultural world.
Pure psychology and transcendental phenomenology share a number of aspects of
method and stance. Their focus is on meaning in the sense that it is assumed that
intentionalities (mental processes) create specific lived conscious senses of an object of
attention in some context. Intentionalities are mental processes that can be grouped into
families of ways of being aware. Some of these are perceiving (sight, hearing), conceptual
(speech, writing, mathematics), more complex types such as understanding the perspective
and intentions of others (empathy or empathic presentiation), or the way that canvases depict
in visual art (depictive presentiation), for instance.
Both types of phenomenology are preparatory to applications of thought in decision-
making and the sciences in that they make theoretical conclusions from lived experience
generally and about the general nature of consciousness understood socially. In this way,
Husserl’s work is the development of Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason (1993).
In Kantian terms, phenomenology is “a priori” in that it is not empirical. (Yet phenomenology
has qualitative and mentalistic methods). Phenomenology is “transcendental” in that it is
about the enabling conditions of possibility for meaning. The conclusions of phenomenology
are like geometry in relation to the applications of geometry. Its conclusions are about the
universal and constant structures of the mind in social life. Both types of phenomenology are
not only focused on the objects of attention but also interpret how the intentionalities work
together - when any person remembers something, for instance: Remembering something is
the re-playing of a prior perception superimposed on the current perceptions.
What follows below are two sections. The first shows some details of the intricate
stance of Husserl’s mature phenomenology. The second section makes some comments on
how it has influenced various areas of study.

1 Some details common to both types of phenomenology

Phenomenology comprises a number of methods of interpreting conscious experience. They

begin with reflection from an interpretative position concerning what appears and what must
be occurring in one’s own or others’ experience. It concludes on invariant structures of
experience that are allegedly common to all human beings. Its technical language refers to
conscious similarities and differences in meaningful experience.
Husserl championed a qualitative perspective as a necessary starting point in
academia. He employed interpretative practices to differentiate forms of intending meaning,
experientially and linguistically. He applied rational principles and a novel set of
interpretations because mental processes themselves do not appear: Their conscious end-
products do. Husserl’s approach is a hermeneutic cognitivism and is close to the areas
currently called social constructionism, theory of mind and qualitative research.
What Husserl meant by a “mathematics of the mind,” (1977a, §4, p 36), is a theory
about consciousness in its social habitat of the consciousness of others, for use in any applied
psychology, for instance. In summary of this overview, there are five essential steps to
phenomenology.
First, there is a need to become self-reflexive about the forms of intentionality that
create different types of sensation, meaning and temporal givenness in relation to meaningful
objects in the world of human consciousness. What Husserl actually did was to interpret the
implicit, after considering explicit objective appearances of different types. Reflected-on
experience is the raw data in order to begin such conclusions.
Second, “reductions” are methodical steps to create “attitudes” towards a referent and
making regions of raw data for study. There is a manner of looking for finding constancies in
relation to a what. The what is how any object is experienced as perceptual, imagined,
remembered, empathised, empathised as someone else remembering, so on and so forth.
Third, what is found is that the different senses of meaning-objects, for instance,
appear with added sense, often as a result of previous learning from past contexts. The past
meanings get added to sensation in the current context. The past meanings need
distinguishing through reflection on their source. In some cases, anticipated meanings are
added and they may also have a relation to the past.
Fourth, raw data is refined through eidetic imaginative variations. These are thought
experiments for the purpose of determining variables and constancies of sense and intentional
relation. Variation is a means of finding the inherent structure of consciousness. For instance,
one such structure is the relation of intentionality to the constituted sense of a specific object.
Another is the relationship between a self, another and a cultural object (any public object, be
it a thing, an idea, a piece of music, another person, a social event or anything that is
conceivable).
 Fifth, phenomenology concludes on ontologically more independent qualities and
relations - in relation to varieties of less fundamental, more dependent sorts of objects and
intentionality. Phenomenological concepts have a direct mode of referring to what everybody
can acknowledge in first-hand experience for themselves and in the second-hand empathy of
others’ experiences. Husserl held a theory of consciousness that interprets what appears in the
following way.
 The meaning of an object (or region of objects) of any academic discipline exists relative to
the attitude taken towards it.
 The answer to the problem of attitudes that dictate their results is to become self-reflexive
about assuming fundamental ideas and creating claims. Phenomenology constrains the means
for claiming understanding, through interpreting intentionality between contexts.
 The method compares and contrasts different types of the givenness of objects and
interprets their co-constituting intentionalities. “Givenness” means how an object appears as
remembered, perceived or written about. The answer is that objects are “appresented” with
other objects and other contexts, and the addition of retained past learning. The term
“appresented” means that meanings are added to appearance. Any learned meaning is
maintained and updated across time with new senses and co-occurrences of sense. Such
learning is co-empathised and intersubjective. It is developed and becomes automatically
recognisable through prolonged, contact with it. These learnings form a basis for
understanding the past, present and future.
In conclusion, phenomenology is a re-interpretation of the everyday experience of
being involved through intentionalities with the cultural objects of attention. The experience
of the world and the meanings of others are considered as “explicit and implicit
intentionality”, (Husserl, 1977b, §42, p 90). This is because many types of intentionality are
found by intellectually working out how and from where a meaning has arisen. Psychological
meanings, like other types, are abstract in the sense that they are not perceptual. But they
occur in relation to the perception of the physical bodies and speech of other people in a
variety of contexts. Like Immanuel Kant, Husserl judged between the conceivable and the
inconceivable.
2 Phenomenological influences

Husserl’s phenomenology has been an inspiration for development in a large number of

academic movements. These developments include returns to the phenomena in empirical
psychology, the theory and practice of psychotherapy and psychiatry and for social
psychology and the human sciences, as well as philosophy.
The core group of Husserl and his peers were first influenced by the history of
philosophy and reacted to Kant, Neo-Kantianism and worked to moderate the zealous idea
that empirical sciences can answer all basic questions. The problem that Husserl set out to
overcome was to help the users of ideas understand the nature of ideas. Husserl’s guiding
thought was the role of pure mathematics in relation to applied mathematics in the real world.
Contemporarily some key thinkers in phenomenology are Eduard Marbach (1993,
2005), Iso Kern (1977, 1986, 1997, Kern & Marbach, 2001), Elisabeth Ströker (1980, 1993),
Rudolf Bernet (Bernet, Kern & Marbach, 1993) and Dan Zahavi (2003). These writers have
grasped the full extent of what Husserl intended by their knowledge of his unpublished
works. There is also the connection to ontology and hermeneutics through Husserl’s pupil
Martin Heidegger (1996, 1997). Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher who
stayed close to the spirit of what Husserl was trying to achieve and brought Husserl’s ideas to
the attention of a wider audience (1962). Aron Gurwitsch (1964) is another who was
influential and mixed phenomenology with Gestalt psychology. Dorion Cairns (1972) was a
major translator of Husserl’s works into English, although he differed in his conclusions
about what is achievable.
One of the major contemporary uses of Husserlian ideas is the use of intersubjectivity
in child and adult development by Daniel Stern (1977, 1985), Colwyn Trevarthen (1979),
Josef Perner (1991) and Stein Braten (2006). Intersubjectivity refers to the inter-responsive
nature of human beings in contact with each other. In a way similar to the problem of other
minds, Husserl worked to find the necessary conditions that enable there to be selves and
others who together create a common world of meaning. Each self has senses of others’ views
that are gained through social learning of what a self does not have first-hand: The view of
the other is another view entirely different in physical space and not one’s own.
There have been a number of applications of phenomenological ideas in
psychotherapy. The greatest influence has been via Heidegger to critique and develop
Sigmund Freud’s psycho-analysis (Boss, 1982). This produced the movement called
existential psychotherapy (May, 1995, Laing, 1960) and influenced humanistic therapy. More
recently there has been a return to Husserl in the work of Ian Rory Owen who has included an
attention to cognitive behavioural therapy as well as attachment and psychodynamics (2006a,
2006b, 2007a, 2007b). If a school of therapy had no formal account of how we understand
the other’s view, then it would be insufficiently self-reflexive. Phenomenology in the human
sciences makes a response to more than a century of naturalistic empirical psychology.
Empirical psychology claims to be a natural science in the mould of chemistry, physics or
biology.
In psychiatry there has been the development of the study of mental health problems
known as psychopathology by Karl Jaspers (1963) and Ludwig Binswanger. There the term
“phenomenology” has become synonymous with the lived experience of mental health
problems.
The loose grouping called “continental philosophy” took from Husserl, Heidegger,
hermeneutics and scepticism to produce existential phenomenology (Sartre, 1958),
deconstructionism (Derrida, 1982) and the allied groupings of post-structuralism and post-
modernism. There are a number of writers who took phenomenology forward in further
addressing social reality, following the lead of Sartre. Perhaps, the most innovative is the
work of Simone de Beauvoir (1949a, 1949b, 1972) who took inspiration from a wide number
of sources to discuss relations between men and women and made cogent responses to Freud
on the topics of child development and sexuality. There is a long list of French thinkers who
have been influenced by phenomenology but to name them all detracts from the purpose of
this essay.
There has been some connection in analytic and post-Wittgenstein philosophy that
sees some similarities between Wittgenstein and Husserl (Reeder, 1984).
There is some crossover between phenomenology and cognitive science (Marbach,
1993, 2005).
Finally, there is phenomenology as an empirical qualitative psychology in America
(van Zuuren, Wertz & Mook, 1987, Giorgi, 1970) with further developments in areas such as
nursing.
In conclusion, phenomenology can be defined as being six things.

1. It is a method of making theory by imaginative variation and the contemplation of enabling

conditions and necessities of various sorts.
2. It centres on empathy and intersubjectivity that form a common world of meaning where
people gather around any cultural object and can grasp each other’s view of it.
3. It does accept the existence of temporarily unconscious objects but not permanently
unconscious ones.
4. It is not empiricism, solipsism or the use description alone but requires the interpretation of
mental relationships with respect to conscious mental senses. It entails hermeneutics because
intentionalities can never be observed in others or oneself.
5. It is against psychologism, the natural attitude of the everyday common sense and the
naturalistic attitude of natural science because they confuse the real instance with the ideal
universal.
6. It can be criticism of other perspectives from its intentional and intersubjective point of
view.
Husserl made several approaches to empathy and intersubjectivity during thirty years
of writing and lecturing. Phenomenology attends to conscious phenomena as a starting point
for understanding mental processes and the enabling conditions for meaning to be social.

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