Insight Editions · No. 73
Husserl's Phenomenology
Dan Zahavi
Dan Zahavi presents Husserl’s account of intentionality, phenomenological reduction, transcendental subjectivity, time, embodiment, intersubjectivity, and the lifeworld in modern philosophy.
A study guide to Husserl's Phenomenology by Dan Zahavi. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
The argument map: from the critique of psychologism to the historical lifeworld.
How the book is built
The book has three parts. Part 1 presents the Logical Investigations: the refutation of psychologism, the theory of intentionality (quality, matter, object), signitive, pictorial and perceptual givenness, fulfilment, evidence and truth, categorial intuition and Wesensschau, ending with the claim that the early work is metaphysically neutral. Part 2 explains the transcendental turn: the epoché and reduction, the Cartesian and ontological ways, three misreadings (introspection, the noema as mental proxy, foundationalism), transcendental idealism and constitution. Part 3 tests the method on four concrete themes, showing how each revises it: time shows the subject is self-aware and never purely present; the body shows it is incarnated; intersubjectivity shows objectivity depends on others; the lifeworld shows science and subjectivity are historical.
Three charges against Husserl and where the book answers each.
| No. | Section | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| Pref. | Preface to the English Edition | A self-translated, completely reworked edition using Leuven manuscripts. |
| Intro | Life, work, manuscripts, plan | 45,000 pages make any overview selective; the late analyses revise the principles. |
| 1 | The Early Husserl: Logic, Epistemology, Intentionality | Ideal validity, intentional acts and fulfilment; a neutral early phenomenology. |
| 2 | The Turn to Transcendental Philosophy | The reduction expands inquiry to the subject-world correlation; constitution is non-causal. |
| 3A | Time | Primal impression, retention, protention; the absolute flow is pre-reflective self-awareness. |
| 3B | The Body | The lived body is a transcendental condition of perception, an "I can" before an object. |
| 3C | Intersubjectivity | The Other's transcendence grounds objectivity; three kinds of transcendental intersubjectivity. |
| 3D | The Lifeworld | Science rooted in the lifeworld; normality, tradition and truth as a regulative ideal. |
| Concl. | Conclusion | The received picture is outdated; continuity, not rupture. |
Reading tips
- Read Part 1 for the vocabulary. Quality, matter, fulfilment and evidence recur in every later chapter.
- Treat Chapter 2 as the hinge. The epoché, the noema debate and "constitution" are where most misreadings start; Zahavi's answer to them frames Part 3.
- Read 3A to 3D as one arc. Time, body, others and tradition progressively thicken the transcendental subject; the critical lenses flag where Zahavi reconstructs rather than reports.
Preface to the English Edition
- Readers. John Drummond (Fordham) and Eduard Marbach (Bern) commented on an early draft of the translation.
- Archive access. Rudolf Bernet, then director of the Husserl-Archives in Leuven, permitted quotation from Husserl's unpublished research manuscripts, which matters because the book leans on them in Parts 2 and 3.
- Language. Ryan Gable went through the English for grammar and idiom.
How the English edition came about: a Danish primer rebuilt with manuscript evidence.
Husserl's Life, Work, Manuscripts and the Plan of This Book
A life in four universities
Edmund Husserl was born to a Jewish family on 8 April 1859 in Proßnitz, Moravia, then in the Austrian Empire. From 1876 to 1882 he studied physics, mathematics, astronomy and philosophy in Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna, took a doctorate in mathematics in Vienna in 1882, and then heard Franz Brentano lecture there. He converted to Protestantism in 1886 and in 1887 completed his Habilitation on the concept of number at Halle, where he stayed fourteen years as Privatdozent working on foundations of epistemology and theory of science.
That work produced Logische Untersuchungen (1900-1901), which earned him a post at Göttingen (1901-1916; Extraordinarius, then Ordinarius from 1906). Ideen I (1913) marked the turn to transcendental philosophy; Ideen II and III appeared only posthumously. In 1916 he took the Freiburg chair, succeeding the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert. His assistants there, Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger, edited the time-consciousness lectures (published 1928), and Heidegger succeeded him on his retirement that year. Formale und transzendentale Logik followed in 1929 and Méditations cartésiennes in 1931.
1882 doctorate in mathematics, Vienna; then Brentano's lectures.
1887 Habilitation on number, Halle; Privatdozent for 14 years.
1900-01 Logische Untersuchungen; call to Göttingen.
1913 Ideen I, the transcendental turn.
1916 Freiburg chair after Rickert; Stein and Heidegger assistants.
1928 time lectures published; retirement, Heidegger succeeds.
1929 Formale und transzendentale Logik; 1931 Méditations cartésiennes.
1933 removed from the list of professors; library access denied.
1935 Vienna and Prague lectures; 1936 first part of Krisis.
1938 dies 27 April; Van Breda saves the manuscripts.
1939 Erfahrung und Urteil (Prague), first edition almost all destroyed.
Persecution and the rescue of the Nachlass
After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, anti-Semitic laws struck Husserl from the list of university professors and, partly through Heidegger's complicity, cost him access to the university library. Isolated in Germany, he still lectured in Vienna and Prague in 1935; those talks became the core of Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, whose first part appeared in a Yugoslav periodical (Philosophia, Belgrade) in 1936.
His published books were mostly programmatic introductions. Husserl wrote every day, and at his death on 27 April 1938 the research manuscripts, lecture notes and unfinished books came to about 45,000 pages. The Germans destroyed almost the entire first edition of Erfahrung und Urteil (Prague, 1939). A young Franciscan, Hermann Leo Van Breda, smuggled the whole Nachlass to a monastery in Belgium, and the Husserl-Archives were founded at the Institute of Philosophy in Leuven, where the originals remain. The critical edition, Husserliana, began then and held thirty-four volumes when Zahavi wrote.
The plan: three parts, systematic and chronological
Zahavi treats the development of Husserl's phenomenology, not his formal ontology or his essentialism. The book follows Husserl from the early analyses of logic and intentionality, through the mature transcendental analyses of reduction and constitution, to the late work on intersubjectivity and lifeworld.
The book's three-part route, and the thesis that the late work loops back to revise the principles.
- Part 1, intentionality. The object-directedness of consciousness is among Husserl's most influential analyses and works as a key to the rest, since much of the later work radicalises insights from the first investigation of intentionality.
- Part 2, transcendental philosophy. It asks why Husserl calls phenomenology a kind of idealism and what he means by calling subjectivity world-constituting; here the concepts of epoché, reduction and constitution enter.
- Part 3, concrete analyses. The longest part covers the mostly late investigations of body, time and intersubjectivity (and the lifeworld), which led to a continual revision of phenomenology's foundations.
Defending the use of the research manuscripts
Some critical scholars, notably Paul Ricoeur, held that interpretation should rest almost entirely on what Husserl published, since he may have withheld manuscripts written to think on paper (Hua 13/xviii-xix) because he was dissatisfied with them. Zahavi replies with Iso Kern's account of Husserl's working method in the introductions to the three intersubjectivity volumes (Hua 13-15).
The book is therefore both an introduction and a piece of research: it draws on the published works, the Husserliana volumes, and some still unpublished manuscripts, and it offers more than the standard reading.
The Early Husserl: Logic, Epistemology, and Intentionality
The critique of psychologism
The work has two parts: the Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, mostly the critique of psychologism, and six Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, culminating in the analysis of intentionality. Its stated aim is a new foundation for pure logic and epistemology (Hua 18/6). Husserl's epistemology asks how knowledge is possible, not whether consciousness can reach a mind-independent reality; questions about the existence of an external world he rejects as metaphysical and out of place (Hua 19/26). He wants to commit to neither realism nor idealism and to ask quasi-Kantian questions about conditions of possibility (Hua 18/23, 208).
Psychologism argued: epistemology studies perceiving, believing, judging and knowing; these are psychical phenomena; so psychology must study them, including logical reasoning; so logic is part of psychology and its laws are empirical regularities of thought (Hua 18/64, 89). Husserl replies that this ignores a difference in kind. Logic, like mathematics and formal ontology, studies ideal structures with certainty and exactness; psychology is an empirical science whose results share the vagueness and mere probability of all empirical findings (Hua 18/181). Reducing one to the other is a category mistake that ignores the ideality, apodicticity (indubitable certainty) and aprioricity (non-empirical validity) of logical laws (Hua 18/79-80).
The psychologistic argument and the point where Husserl breaks it.
The root error is failing to separate the act of knowing from the object of knowledge. The act is a psychical process with a beginning and end; the principle known is atemporal, objective, eternally valid (Hua 24/141). Husserl at times approaches a logical Platonism: "No truth is a fact, i.e. something determined as to time"; a truth "is raised above time" (Hua 18/87). The truth that 2 + 3 = 5 holds "whether there is a world... or not" (Hua 9/23).
The First Investigation, Ausdruck und Bedeutung, repeats the point for meaning. "That Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark" can be meant again and again by different people while each act of meaning is new; the theorem of Pythagoras stays identical whoever thinks it, wherever and whenever (Hua 19/49, 97-98). Context can change meaning, but a mere change of place, time and person does not: "In January 2000, the Danish prime minister was a man" keeps its truth value in Copenhagen or Tokyo, today or tomorrow, except for indexicals such as "I", "here" and "now" (Hua 19/85-91).
Husserl also states positive conditions of knowledge, of two ideal kinds (Hua 18/240). The objective (logical) conditions are the laws any theory must respect, such as consistency and non-contradiction (Hua 18/119). More surprisingly, there are subjective (noetic) conditions: a knower must be able to tell truth from falsity, validity from invalidity, fact from essence, evidence from absurdity (Hua 18/240, 3/127). This is no relapse into psychologism, because the question concerns ideal, not causal, conditions: what any subject, whatever its material make-up, must be able to do to know, not what neurons Homo sapiens sapiens needs.
That requires a return to the things themselves: attend to how ideality and reality are actually given, which means investigating consciousness, since only in or for consciousness can anything appear (Hua 19/9-13, 3/111). The needed shift is an "unnatural" change of interest from objects to acts (Hua 19/14). The two halves of the work look opposed, but the 1913 preface to the second edition says the opposition is more apparent than real (Hua 18/11). Husserl's first-edition label "descriptive psychology" was a mistake he soon admitted (Hua 22/206-208): he wanted what belongs essentially to perceptions, judgements and feelings, not empirical psychophysics.
- Objective or logical. Principles and laws that form the a priori foundation of any theory, such as non-contradiction; violate them and the concept of theory collapses.
- Subjective or noetic. Abilities any knower must have: to distinguish truth/falsity, validity/invalidity, fact/essence, evidence/absurdity.
- Not causal. Both are ideal conditions; the noetic ones hold for humans, animals or extraterrestrials alike.
The concept of intentionality
The Fifth and Sixth Investigations ask what being conscious as such involves, whether in humans, animals or extraterrestrials (Hua 24/118), abstracting from brains and sense organs. Husserl's interest is the cognitive dimension, and it is no part of my experience of a withering oak that something happens in my brain. Hence phenomenology's presuppositionlessness: a faithful description of what appears, free of metaphysical and scientific postulates (Hua 19/27-28). Intentionality names the fact that many experiences are of something: one loves a beloved, fears something fearful, judges a state of affairs. Zahavi first clears away three rival views.
- The container view (objectivist). Consciousness is a box with no relation to the world until something causally affects it; intentionality becomes a relation between two worldly objects, and feeling the sun's heat is no different from being heated. Refutation: I can think of the back of the moon, square circles, unicorns, next Christmas or the principle of non-contradiction. Absent, impossible, non-existent, future and ideal objects do not cause my thought, and hallucinations are intentional too; my intention does not stop being intentional if its object does not exist.
- The immanent-object view (subjectivist). Since a relation needs both relata, the object must be intramental. Wrong, says Husserl (Hua 19/385): first, many acts by me and by others intend the same tree, so the object's identity cannot depend on the act's; second, objects appear perspectivally, while an act reflected on has no hidden backside. An intramental object would have to share the act's non-perspectival givenness, and it does not.
- The representative theory of perception. A rose affects the senses, which cause an inner picture. Husserl calls the inner/outer split no clarification at all (Hua 19/436): it never explains why a representation, different by definition from the object, should lead to it, and the doubled rose is a pure postulate (Hua 3/207-208).
Three misreadings of intentionality and the reply that disposes of each.
The decisive argument against representation is an intentional analysis of representing. Being a representation is not a natural property like being red or metallic. Two copies of a book look alike, yet neither represents the other; resemblance is symmetric, representation is not. X represents Y only if X is interpreted as representing Y. Dürer's portrait of Emperor Maximilian is first a physical thing (frame, canvas, paint) and becomes a portrait only through an imaginative apperception founded on perceiving it. If perception itself worked through an inner image, that image would need perceiving too: a regressus in infinitum (Hua 19/437). So representation presupposes perception and cannot explain it. We are "zunächst und zumeist" directed at real things; experiences are presentational, not representational.
Zahavi sums up with a table. Comparing a perception of a withering oak with a fantasy of a faun, four theories go wrong and the fifth is Husserl's.
| Theory | Perception | Fantasy |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Intends an object | Intends no object |
| 2 | Object exists immanently | Object exists immanently |
| 3 | Object exists transcendently | Object exists immanently |
| 4 | Object both immanent and transcendent | Object exists immanently |
| 5 (Husserl) | Transcendent object that exists | Transcendent object that does not exist: a reference without a referent |
"The object is merely intentional" does not mean it exists inside the intention as a real (reell) part or shadow; it means the reference exists and the object does not (Hua 19/439). Hence the core feature, existence-independence: if A causes B both must exist; if A intends B, only A must. Intentionality is perhaps better not called a relation. It is an intrinsic feature of consciousness, due "to its own inner peculiarity alone" (Hua 19/451), not an external link added by influence.
Here Husserl parts from Brentano and Kasimierz Twardowski, who treated the intentional object as an intramental content mediating access to the real thing ("intentional inexistence"). For Husserl it is absurd to distinguish intentional from actual object: if the intended object exists, that real object, and no other, is the intentional object (Hua 19/439), "a merely analytic proposition".
Act, meaning, object
Every intentional experience can be analysed three ways (Hua 19/129): its immanent (reell) content, the psychical process; its intentional content, the meaning; and its intentional object. The intentional content is what gives the act its directedness, and it has two inseparable moments (Hua 19/425-426).
The anatomy of an intentional act in the Logical Investigations.
- Intentional quality. The act's type: hoping, desiring, remembering, affirming, doubting, fearing. One can believe, wish or doubt that swimming in the Dead Sea is healthy.
- Intentional matter. What the act is about and as what it takes it: a deer, a cat, a mathematical state of affairs. The same quality combines with different matters ("the inflation will continue", "the election was fair") and vice versa (judging, denying, questioning that "the lily is white").
- Relation to today's terms. Matter and quality resemble propositional content and propositional attitude, though Husserl did not think all intentional experience propositional.
- Priority of matter. The two are abstract moments that cannot exist apart (Hua 19/430), but matter establishes the object-reference and quality only qualifies it (Hua 19/452).
Husserl also calls the matter the act's ideal meaning or sense: "To use an expression significantly, and to refer expressively to an object... are one and the same" (Hua 19/59). Intentionality is therefore conception-dependent: one always intends something as something. The capital of Denmark and the native town of Niels Bohr; Hillary Clinton's husband and the last U.S. president of the twentieth century; 2 + 4 and 5 + 1; a Swiss cottage seen from below or above. Each pair has one object, two act-matters. One matter can never intend two objects, but two matters can intend one (Hua 19/430). Normally we attend to the object, not the meaning (Hua 19/47).
Meaning determines reference, but not only by definite description. Husserl knew early that "this" refers directly rather than attributively, and that perception has a demonstrative component: I perceive this object, not any object with similar properties (Hua 19/553-554).
Some acts also include sensations (Empfindungen). Turning the pen, I live through a changing manifold of visual and tactile sensations while intending one object (Hua 19/396, 3/84). Sensations are not objects: Husserl is not reviving sense data. They are non-intentional moments of experiencing, part of the act and not of what is perceived. Because different sensations can present one object, the object is not a complex of sensations. Hence the asymmetry: what is in the act is not what we intend, and what we intend is not in the act (Hua 10/89).
What yields a stable object is an objectifying apprehension (Auffassung) that interprets the sensations with a meaning, the act-matter (Hua 19/397). Apperception is "our surplus", the act-character that "ensouls sense": "Objects... appear and are perceived, but they are not experienced"; sensations are experienced but do not appear (Hua 19/399). Since sensations lack intrinsic reference, they can be interpreted in different ways, and against Brentano Husserl denies that every experience is intentional: sensations, happiness, dizziness, nausea, anxiety lack an intentional object. Objects are not in consciousness "as in a box"; they are constituted as what they are for us (Hua 19/169).
Apprehension and sensation: how a stable object appears across changing sense contents.
Signitive and intuitive givenness
Quality plus matter forms the intentional essence, or meaning-intention (Hua 19/432). It fixes which object, as what, and how (judged, doubted). But it does not fix how the object is given. Judging "it is blue" of my absent notebook and judging it while seeing the notebook share quality and matter; the first is merely signitive (empty), the second intuitive, with the notebook bodily present (leibhaftig) in propria persona (Hua 19/434).
Ranking modes of givenness by how directly they present the object.
- Signitive. I talk about a withering oak I have never seen but heard about; or about how terrible sleeping rough must be. Reference, but no fleshed-out object; mediated by a contingent sign.
- Imaginative or pictorial. I see a detailed drawing of the oak, or a television programme on homelessness. Some intuitive content, but still indirect, via an image that resembles the object.
- Perceptual. I see the oak, or try sleeping on the street myself. Only perception gives the object directly, in bodily presence (Hua 19/646, 3/90-91). Fantasy and recollection are further important modes.
The modes form a strict hierarchy of epistemic levels. Every re-presentation (Vergegenwärtigung) is derived and refers back to a presentation (Gegenwärtigung). Linguistic intentions are founded: X founded on Y means X cannot exist without Y, not that X reduces to Y (Hua 19/281-282). Linguistic meaning is rooted in prelinguistic, prepredicative experience, not just earlier in time but as a permanent condition and source. A blind speaker who knows "crimson", "scarlet" and "vermilion" lacks the concepts properly.
When I find the notebook, the perception fulfils my signitive intention: what was thought is now seen. The relation mirrors the classic pair concept and intuition (Hua 19/522, 538-539), or absence and presence. Calling the perceived object "the real object" does not break existence-independence: it is the same intentional object in an intuitive mode. Being is not a property like blue (Kant agrees), but unlike Kant, Husserl takes the thing-in-itself to be whatever would fulfil the signitive intention, not an unknowable cause. Being becomes a mode of givenness (Hua 19/614, 646, 666). As Bernhard Rang puts it, the difference between merely intended and real object is "not a 'real' one, but one concerning the 'modes of givenness'". Talking about the notebook, seeing a photo and writing in it are one notebook given three ways; intuition adds fullness (Fülle), present in intuitive acts and absent in signitive ones (Hua 19/600, 607-608).
Evidence
Knowledge, justification and truth are now explained by fulfilment. I think my notebook is blue; I find it and see that I was right. Knowledge is a synthesis or identification of what is intended and what is given (Hua 19/539, 566), and truth is the identity of the meant and the given (Hua 19/651-652). It is a synthesis of coincidence (Deckung) between two intentions, not a correspondence between consciousness and a mind-independent object, so this is no classical correspondence theory.
From empty intention to knowledge: Husserl's fulfilment model of truth.
Does this contradict the Prolegomena, where 2 + 3 = 5 holds without any world? Only apparently: truth is tied to possible, not actual, knowledge; a claim is true if it can be intuitively fulfilled. Evidence is not a mysterious feeling of certainty. Husserl calls feelings of evidence psychological fictions leading to relativism, since one can feel certain of almost anything (Hua 3/46, 334; 24/156). Evidence in the strict sense is the ideal of a perfect synthesis of fulfilment in which an existence-positing signitive intention is adequately fulfilled by perception, giving the self-givenness of the object (Hua 19/651, 17/166).
- Not private. Evidence carries a claim to intersubjective validity and is therefore open to criticism.
- Fallible. The possibility of error belongs to experiential evidence (Hua 17/130), yet this breeds no scepticism: only a new and stronger evidence can defeat an evidence (Hua 17/164), close to today's talk of defeasibility.
- Two concepts (FTL, 1929). Evidence as the originary givenness of the object, and evidence as an actual synthesis of coincidence with it (Hua 17/151-152); correspondingly truth as disclosure and truth as correctness.
- Judgement is the home of knowledge. Prepredicative self-showing is already a kind of truth, but intuition alone is epistemically idle until it fulfils a signitive intention.
| Evidence | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Apodictic | Indubitable | That 3 > 2 |
| Adequate | Exhaustive: all intended is given | Some mathematical relations |
| Inadequate | Partial, corrigible, open | Perceiving a chair in profiles |
Complete fulfilment is rare. Physical things appear perspectivally, so perceptual knowledge shows a lack of coincidence between intended and given. Yet we intend the thing, not its profiles: "Whether I look at this book from above or below... I always see this book" (Hua 19/677). Perception constantly transcends the given. Demanding mathematical exhaustiveness of things is a category error (Hua 3/321): things could appear exhaustively only by ceasing to appear as things. Each kind of object has its own originary mode. Perspectival givenness is rooted in the things themselves, so that even God would see physical things in profiles (Hua 3/351).
Categorial objects and Wesensschau
Husserl's concept of object is broad: whatever can be predicated of. He distinguishes real (perceptual) from ideal (categorial) objects: pear trees and the Empire State Building, but also justice, the figure 3, the principle of non-contradiction, and states of affairs (Sachverhalte) such as "the green book is lying beneath the papers on the desk". Categorial intentions are founded on simple ones and cover universals as well as predication, conjunction and synthesis. I can see a chair and see blue, but that the chair is blue occupies no position in physical space.
Sixth Investigation § 48: how a categorial state of affairs is built on perception.
The formal elements "is", "beneath", "on" have no perceptual correlates: one cannot see an "is" (Hua 19/658). Yet a state of affairs can be given intuitively, by a higher-order act founded on perceiving book, papers and table but intending their relation and unity. Husserl "bites the bullet": besides sensuous intuition there is categorial intuition (Hua 19/670-676). Intuition need not be sensuous, simple or non-discursive, only non-signitive; even an argument or proof that brings a state of affairs to originary givenness counts.
- Synthetic categorial acts. Remain directed at their founding objects: "the book is lying on the table" includes book and table.
- Ideative (eidetic) acts. Aim at the universal, using a particular (the chair I sit on, to think furniture as such) only as a starting point.
- Enlarged experience. As Husserl's Encyclopaedia Britannica article says, phenomenology must replace the narrow empiricist concept of experience with one that includes intuition of essences and apodictic evidence (Hua 9/300).
Husserl's essentialism draws on two distinctions. Formal ontology asks what it is to be an object at all (quality, property, relation, identity, whole, part) regardless of content; material or regional ontology asks what holds necessarily within a region: mathematical entities, psychical processes and physical objects are distinct regions, the physical subdivided into chemical, biological and so on (Hua 3/37).
Eidetic variation: imagining variants until the invariant essence shows.
Eidetic knowledge comes from eidetic variation or eidetic reduction, not to be confused with the transcendental reduction. Starting from, say, a 400-year-old tsuba used as a paperweight, one imagines it otherwise until reaching properties that cannot vary without the object ceasing to be that kind of thing. These invariants form its essence; a Wesensschau is achieved when the horizon of permissible variation is fixed (Hua 9/72-87, EU § 87). It is no infallible passive gaze but a demanding, defeasible conceptual analysis, aimed at basic distinctions (mathematical entity vs artwork vs physical thing vs mental act), not dogs vs cats.
Phenomenology and metaphysics
Identifying the intentional with the real object does not endorse metaphysical realism. Calling an object "real" is a descriptive claim that it is intuitively given in bodily presence. The early position is metaphysically neutral, committed to neither realism nor idealism, though it still criticises subjective idealism (the object as part of consciousness) and naturalism (everything, intentionality included, explained by natural-science methods). Hence Husserl's much-misread claim that the existence of the intentional object is phenomenologically irrelevant (Hua 19/59, 358, 387): a perception and a hallucination of a blue book differ in nothing phenomenologically relevant, and existence is methodologically suspended.
Three ways to appraise the early metaphysical neutrality; Zahavi favours the third but grants each a domain.
- Liberating. Traditional metaphysical questions are pseudo-problems that have spellbound philosophers too long.
- Modest. Phenomenology is descriptive and may prepare metaphysics but should keep silent where it cannot speak.
- Regrettable. Metaphysical problems are real and phenomenology could contribute, so neutrality is a self-imposed straitjacket. Zahavi favours this, while granting that different metaphysical questions fall under each heading.
Husserl soon complained of descriptive phenomenology's limits. In the lectures Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie (1906-1907) he says that to understand act, meaning and object one must move to transcendental phenomenology (Hua 24/425-427). Intentionality already implied constitution: the object is an object for us only through our meaning-giving contribution (Hua 19/397), and categorial objects appear only in or for acts (Hua 19/675; 1907 lectures Hua 2/72). But without clarifying the status of the phenomenon and the relation of appearance to reality, it stays unclear whether constitution means production or epistemic reproduction.
Robert Sokolowski, on early constitution
Husserl's Turn to Transcendental Philosophy: Epoché, Reduction, and Transcendental Idealism
Presuppositionlessness and the natural attitude
After 1900 Husserl stresses the foundational role of phenomenology as a new, critical, rigorous science that examines the assumptions the positive (objective, dogmatic) sciences take for granted. "Science" here does not blur philosophy and positive science; it names an ideal of fully justified knowledge that the sciences miss because they chase results without reflecting on their own presuppositions.
The deepest presupposition is belief in a mind-, experience- and theory-independent reality. It runs through daily life as well as science, so Husserl calls it the natural attitude. However obvious, its validity may not be taken for granted. Phenomenology must turn to the givenness of reality: let experience shape theories, not the reverse. Ideen I § 24 states the principle of principles: originary giving intuition is the source of all knowledge, which no authority, not even modern science, may overrule.
Epoché and reduction
To avoid prejudging the result, phenomenology must suspend the natural attitude: keep it (to study it) but bracket its validity. This is the epoché. Its point is not to deny, doubt, neglect or exclude reality but to neutralise a dogmatic attitude toward it, so as to focus on objects just as they appear (Hua 8/457, 15/366).
Husserl, Ideen I, Hua 3/120; compare Hua 6/154-155, and Hua 8/432 on avoiding talk of a "residuum"
Epoché and reduction: two moments of one transcendental reflection.
- Epoché. The abrupt suspension of a naive metaphysical attitude, a philosophical gate of entry (Hua 6/260), and sometimes the condition of possibility of the reduction (Hua 6/154).
- Reduction. The long, difficult thematisation of the correlation between subjectivity and world, leading from the natural sphere back (re-ducere) to its transcendental foundation (Hua 1/61).
- Shared purpose. Both free us from naturalistic dogmatism and reveal our own constitutive (cognitive, meaning-giving) contribution. Neither turns inward or loses anything; Husserl compares the change to passing from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional life (Hua 6/120).
The Cartesian way and the ontological way
Why should suspending the natural attitude lead to transcendental subjectivity? Husserl offers several routes, conventionally the Cartesian, the psychological and the ontological ways. Zahavi treats the first (in Ideen I) and the last (in Krisis).
The Cartesian way in Ideen I, from two modes of givenness to an absolute region.
The Cartesian way starts from a difference in givenness. Spatio-temporal objects appear perspectivally and inadequately; an experience appears in its totality. So subjectivity differs from every object, and a naturalistic study of consciousness must be supplemented by one in the first person. Inspired by Descartes' doubt, Husserl adds a priority claim: one can imagine a worldless subject but not a subjectless world. In the "(in)famous" § 49 of Ideen I, even an imagined annihilation of the world would leave consciousness intact. The world is relative, since the condition of its appearing lies in the subject; the subject is absolute, since its manifestation depends on itself alone. If a worldless subject is conceivable, naturalism cannot be exhaustive, and consciousness is an independent region of being (Hua 3/105).
Two reflections correspond. Psychological (natural) reflection treats an act as a psychical process in a psychophysical worldly being; this "mundane self-consciousness" is as worldly as perceiving things and gives only a constituted, objectified subject (Hua 17/290, 7/269). Pure or transcendental reflection targets subjectivity stripped of all transcendent interpretations (Hua 3/117), and it is reachable only through the epoché. With "an obvious jab at introspectionism", Husserl insists that without the epoché, however carefully one reflects, one deals with a mundanised experience (Hua 8/79, 3/107).
The Cartesian way is clear, but it invites the misreading that phenomenology studies pure subjectivity isolated from world and others. The ontological way answers this (Hua 6/158, 175). It begins with the givenness of an ontological region, ideal or physical objects, studies it as appearing, and asks for the conditions of that appearing. Attending to the appearance we normally overlook leads to the acts of presenting, perceiving, judging and valuing, and so to the subject: we discover ourselves as datives of manifestation, those to whom objects appear.
The ontological way in Krisis: the lifeworld as guideline back to subjectivity.
On this route the subject reached is not the empirical subject of psychology, history or neurophysiology, itself a worldly object presupposing someone to whom it appears, but the transcendental subjectivity hidden while we live "in self-oblivion among objects". Transcendental subjectivity is no part of the world, yet not worldless: as subject of intentionality it is nothing in isolation from the world. Phenomenology is interested in consciousness only as the field where the world appears. Hence the thesis shared by all phenomenologists: it is absurd to speak of an absolutely mind-independent world existing apart from any possible experiential and conceptual perspective. Negatively, this rejects a realistic and naturalistic objectivism that would explain meaning, truth and reality without subjectivity.
Some misunderstandings (I): phenomenology as introspection
Leslie Stevenson's popular introduction calls phenomenology an obscure method that describes "the phenomena as they seem to be without making any presumptions about what they are in reality", giving philosophy a quasi-psychological twist. Zahavi calls this reading "bizarre" but useful, since it packs several classic errors into a few sentences.
- Modes of givenness are the topic. Phenomenology studies not weight, rarity or chemistry but how things show themselves: a physical thing, a utensil, an artwork, a melody, a state of affairs, a number, an animal and a social relation appear in essentially different ways, and one object can appear perceived, imagined, feared, anticipated, recollected, described or communicated.
- The transcendental question. Beyond description it asks for the conditions of possibility of appearance as such, so it cannot be equated with introspection or replaced by psychology.
- Not introspection. Introspection reports current private states ("I am thinking about a red balloon"). Phenomenology concerns intersubjectively accessible modes of appearance and claims validity corrigible by any phenomenologically tuned subject.
- An ancient concept of phenomenon. Not appearance as opposed to reality, but the manifestation of the thing itself, a concept going back to Antiquity.
The banality objection says the world "as conceived by us" obviously depends on us. It misses Husserl's rejection of a two-world theory: the world that appears in perception, practice and science is the only real world, and a hidden world beyond all possible evidence is an empty postulate and a category mistake. Appearances are not mere appearances; how things appear is part of what they are. As Heidegger says, it is phenomenologically absurd to call the phenomenon something that stands in front of something more fundamental.
The misreading Zahavi rejects and the reading he defends, on the reduction.
Hubert Dreyfus reads the reduction as a purification that removes everything transcendent so as to study the abstract mental representations that make intentionality possible, making Husserl a prototypical internalist for whom representations work regardless of how the world is, and who can explain how objects are intended but not how they are given. David Woodruff Smith and Ronald McIntyre similarly see a special reflection that brackets the external world to study "the intrinsic features of consciousness", which slides toward introspection; Smith ends by calling phenomenology an intentional psychology. They distinguish a phenomenological-psychological reduction (attention to consciousness) from a transcendental one (removing empirical considerations).
Some misunderstandings (I, continued): noesis, noema and the noema debate
Ideen I keeps the Investigations' analysis in new terms, noesis and noema, while preserving the act-object correlation (Hua 3/192-196).
Ideen I's terms for the structure of an experience.
- Hyle. Non-intentional sensuous matter (hylē): visual, tactile sensations, pain, nausea.
- Noesis. The animating, meaning-giving component, also called intentional form (morphē).
- Noema. The transcendent constituted correlate, often identified with the object-as-it-is-intended.
The great question is how the object-as-it-is-intended relates to the object-that-is-intended. The debate began in earnest with Dagfinn Føllesdal's 1969 paper "Husserl's Notion of Noema" and generated countless articles. All agree the noema is discovered only through epoché and reduction (Hua 3/202-205). The split is over whether the epoché swaps the world for inner representations or keeps describing the world in a new manner.
| Issue | West Coast (Fregean) | East Coast |
|---|---|---|
| Who | Føllesdal, Dreyfus, Miller, Smith, McIntyre | Sokolowski, Drummond, Hart, Cobb-Stevens |
| Noema is | Ideal sense distinct from act and object | The object itself in phenomenological reflection |
| Role | That by which consciousness is directed | That toward which, considered as intended |
| Model | Like linguistic sense/reference; "mediator theory" | Intentionality basic to experience; no intermediary |
| Reduction | Brackets world; study meanings | Keeps world; studies it as correlate |
| Claimed edge | Handles hallucination easily | Avoids representationalism; close to later phenomenologists |
For Smith and McIntyre, Husserl's theory "is not an object-theory but a mediator-theory": an act reaches its object via the noema. The East Coast denies that directedness derives from the intentionality of meaning. Studying the object-as-intended "is to examine the object itself", not a structure of consciousness (Sokolowski). The noema is not a concept, proposition or intermediary bestowing intentionality on a closed container; it is the perceived as perceived, the recollected as recollected. The West Coast confuses an ordinary object considered abstractly in a non-ordinary attitude with a non-ordinary abstract entity. The object-as-intended and object-that-is-intended still differ, but as a structural difference within the noema: in John Drummond's phrase, we intend the object through its sense not by going beyond it but by penetrating it.
The semantic reading may come from confusing descriptive with transcendental phenomenology (the Investigations did call existence irrelevant, Hua 19/59, 358, 387, 672), or from overlooking that the epoché suspends unjustified metaphysics but has metaphysical implications. Phenomenology reintegrates what it bracketed (Hua 3/107, 159, 337); a developed transcendental phenomenology is "eo ipso the true and realized ontology" (Hua 8/215). It excludes "every naive metaphysics that operates with absurd things in themselves, but does not exclude metaphysics as such"; the first being is transcendental intersubjectivity, "the universe of monads" (Hua 1/38-39). Ludwig Landgrebe: the reduction is Husserl's road to the core problems of metaphysics.
- System-building about first principles, constructed speculatively.
- Science of the supersensible, transphenomenal entities.
- View from nowhere: an absolute non-perspectival account.
- Why is there something rather than nothing?
- Logic of binary oppositions (the deconstructive sense).
- Meaning of factual human life, the perennial questions.
- Minimal sense: systematic reflection on the nature of existing reality. Only in this sense does Zahavi think neutrality wrong, since it reintroduces a two-world theory.
Metaphysics stays precritical: it maps reality's building blocks without leaving the natural attitude, while transcendental phenomenology is reflective. But claiming it has no metaphysical impact, compatible with any metaphysics, turns it into phenomenological psychology, a regional ontology of the a priori structures of any intentional subject, which Husserl always distinguished from transcendental phenomenology. When Husserl describes the world's ontic meaning (Seinssinn) he explores the signification of the existing world, not a separate layer of sense. Eugen Fink (1939) calls the claim that Husserl ignores being "a complete misunderstanding". The reduction transcends the objectivist distinction between meaning and being; this does not make every meaningful entity exist, since existing means a preeminent mode of givenness, bodily presence. The last part of Ideen I, "Reason and Actuality", treats objective reality and rational consciousness and leads toward transcendental intersubjectivity as the foundation of objectivity.
Eugen Fink, 1933 Kantstudien article that Husserl endorsed "in every single sentence"
Husserl himself wrote in 1922 that saying consciousness relates to a transcendent object "through its immanent noematic Sinn" is a "problematic and... false way of speaking. I have never meant something like this" (Ms. B III 12 IV, 82a). Still, the Fregean reading has textual support. Rudolf Bernet finds three concepts of noema in Ideen I alone, and Elisabeth Ströker explains the confusion by Husserl's sliding between natural and phenomenological attitudes.
- Concrete appearance. The noema as how the thing appears here and now.
- Ideal meaning. The noema as a repeatable sense (the Fregean reading's anchor).
- Constituted object. The noema as the object itself as constituted (the East Coast anchor).
- Ströker's diagnosis. In the transcendental attitude there is no "beyond" the noematic sphere, only constituted transcendence; the mediator reading feeds on Husserl's own drift between attitudes.
Some misunderstandings (II): was Husserl a foundationalist?
The Cartesian way's appeal to the special evidence of consciousness, the title Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, the hunt for ever deeper layers and the early lectures Die Idee der Phänomenologie (which seem to keep only the adequately, apodictically given, Hua 2/44-45) suggest foundationalism: indubitable truths from which all knowledge follows. Husserl does seek a kind of foundation, since transcendental phenomenology studies the framework that makes other sciences intelligible, unlike, say, a study of sex-role patterns among tribes in New Guinea. But in the epistemological sense the label misleads: Formale und transzendentale Logik calls a science built only on absolutely certain truths a misunderstanding of science (Hua 17/169), and his evidence is fallible.
Why 'foundationalist' fits Husserl badly: three departures from the classic model.
- Not conclusive. The transcendental field is unhintergehbar (unavoidable), but its analysis can always be refined; full truth is a regulative ideal, and philosophy as ultimately justified science is realised only in an infinite historical process (Hua 8/186, 6/439).
- Not axiomatic-deductive. Husserl rejects the rationalist method (Hua 1/63) and denies that the transcendental "I" could start a transcendental deduction (Hua 6/193). Phenomenology is descriptive, a different kind of science from mathematics (Hua 3/158); no positive science's content can be deduced from it.
- Ethically motivated. The motive is practical: absolute self-responsibility (Hua 8/197), an evidence-based life of personal and existential significance (Hua 6/140).
In Erste Philosophie I Husserl invokes Socrates' ethical reform: the truly satisfying life is one of pure reason, with unremitting self-reflection and "radical accountability" for one's aims, paths and means, returning to "insight, evidence" (Hua 7/9). Because complete foundation is an infinite ideal, what matters is not possessing absolute truth but the attempt to base thoughts and deeds on as much insight as possible. An unpublished manuscript adds that self-responsibility includes responsibility for the community and is fully realisable only with others (Ms. E III 4 18a).
Husserl's transcendental idealism
Every object must be understood in correlation with constituting subjectivity, so an absolutely mind-independent reality seems unacceptable. The Investigations had already called only an idealistic epistemology coherent (Hua 19/112), but then "idealism" meant only the irreducibility of ideality. In the Cartesian Meditations (Hua 1/118) it means the transcendental primacy of subjectivity (Hua 8/215), so central that "only someone who misunderstands... the intentional method, or... the transcendental reduction... can attempt to separate phenomenology from transcendental idealism" (Hua 1/119).
Yet it is unlike any traditional idealism, which by opposing realism stays inside the natural attitude (Hua 5/149-153, 17/178). Husserl condemns phenomenalism, whose "fundamental defect" is to identify experienced sensation complexes with the object's features (Hua 19/371, 764-765); his idealism does not dissolve reality into mental content (Hua 3/335). Reality is not a brute fact cut off from experience and concepts but a system of validity and meaning that needs experiential and conceptual perspectives to manifest itself. That is why an absolute mind-independent reality is as nonsensical as a round square (Hua 3/120). The real world is not denied; an objectivist interpretation of its status is.
The idealism thus redeems rather than renounces the realism of the natural attitude; it "contains natural realism within itself" (Hua 9/254). The world and other people "are not annulled by my phenomenological reflection... but only understood" (Hua 17/282). "There can be no stronger realism than this", but the great problem is to understand what is so obvious (Hua 6/190-191). Most strikingly: "No ordinary 'realist' has ever been so realistic and so concrete as I, the phenomenological 'idealist' (a term that I by the way don't use anymore)" (Dokumente III/7, 16).
| Definition | Realism | Idealism | Husserl |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inner representation vs outer reality | Representation matches mind-independent object | Only the representation exists | Rejects both: no inner images |
| Persistence | World persists without subjectivity | Subjectivity persists without world | Strict correlation: beyond both |
| Kant's pairing | Empirical realism | Transcendental idealism | Close to Kant's compatibility |
| Putnam | Metaphysical realism | Near internal or experiential realism |
The criticism of representationalism supports a direct realism grounded in experience, close to Hilary Putnam's internal realism and unlike metaphysical realism. Against the realism defined by persistence, it is even a kind of anti-realism. The lesson: "realism" and "idealism" are so elastic as to be nearly useless, and Gadamer and Fink praised Husserl for overcoming the opposition. He was neither a subjective idealist nor a metaphysical realist.
The concept of constitution
Critics call constitution a creative process and Husserl an untenable idealist. Friendlier readers reply that it is only an epistemic relation (compatible with realism), or that it constitutes meaning, not being. Zahavi finds all three readings problematic and the creation/restoration alternative possibly false, Husserl himself never having settled it. Paraphrasing Putnam: the mind does not make up the world, but it does not simply mirror it either.
Constitution is a non-causal conditioning, never a "Big Bang"; it is the process that lets what is constituted appear, unfold, articulate and show itself as what it is (Hua 15/434, 14/47). Heidegger: "'Constituting' does not mean producing in the sense of making and fabricating; it means letting the entity be seen in its objectivity."
Constitution as manifestation: two primal sources and a factical pregiven element (Ms. C 10 15b, 1931).
- Not ex nihilo. A 1931 manuscript names two inseparable primal sources, the primal ego and the primal non-ego (Ms. C 10 15b); subjectivity is a necessary but not sufficient condition of manifestation.
- World as non-ego. Husserl sometimes identifies the non-ego with the world (Hua 15/131, 287), even a "transcendental non-ego" (Ms. C 7 6b), a deeper notion than the objective reality nullified in § 49.
- Facticity. Constitution presupposes a passive pregivenness without the ego's active contribution (Hua 13/427, 11/386).
- No new dualism. Subjectivity and world cannot be understood apart, close to Merleau-Ponty: the subject is "nothing but a project of the world" and the world one "which the subject itself projects".
Husserl's concepts of subject and world are thus transformed: being and consciousness are united in transcendental subjectivity (Hua 1/117), and the monad, the subject in full concretion, includes the objects constituted through it (Hua 1/26, 102). There are two concepts of subjectivity, a narrow one and a broad one embracing consciousness and world. A pure, worldless I-pole is an abstraction; full subjectivity is a world-experiencing life (Hua 15/287), whence the late terms lifeworld and Weltbewußtseinsleben (Hua 29/192, 247).
So the empirical subject is no contingent appendix. The Krisis supplement calls it apodictically certain that the I must appear in the world as a human being, because the transcendental subject can constitute an objective world only if incarnated and socialized (Hua 29/160-165). Intersubjectivity is the third element: world- and self-constitution occur intersubjectively, as a plurality of monads in communion that constitutes an objective world and spatializes, temporalizes, realizes itself within it (Hua 1/166). "I, we, and the world belong together" (Hua 4/288).
The final position: a threefold structure in which each term leads to the other two.
Whichever term one starts from, one is led to the others (Hua 8/505, 15/373, 13/480). This may recall Hegel, but Fink insists it is no speculative construction, only an articulation of the reduction's insights. It is strikingly close to Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty: Heidegger's being-in-the-world is equally originally being-with others and being-among things; "self and world belong together in the single entity, the Dasein".
The Later Husserl: Time
Why time comes first
Husserl opens his Lectures on the Phenomenology of Inner Time-Consciousness with Augustine (Confessions XI.14): "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not." Zahavi gives two reasons for time's centrality.
- Objects need time. Without time-consciousness we cannot understand the link between perception and recollection, nor the syntheses of identity: walking round an oak, its profiles appear as integrated moments, not fragments. An object is constituted as act-transcendent only as an identity in a manifold across acts (Hua 11/110-111, 1/96, 17/291). Temporality is the formal condition of constituting any object (Hua 11/125, 128).
- Subjectivity needs time. Ideen I analysed how objects depend on subjectivity but left the givenness of subjectivity itself dark, which is phenomenologically unacceptable. Husserl admits there that he left out "the most important problems", those of inner time-consciousness, and that only their analysis discloses "the truly absolute" (Hua 3/182).
Two reasons time is the bedrock of phenomenology.
Primal impression, retention, protention
Everyday time is datable, measurable, historical and cosmic: billions of years of cosmic history, geological periods, the medieval age, the German occupation of Denmark from 9 April 1940, a train leaving in twenty-two minutes. Husserl does not deny objective time, but refuses to assume its status. The question is how time comes to appear with that validity, which needs an epoché about objective time and a return to lived time. Husserl therefore swaps trees and tables for temporal objects (Zeitobjekte), such as melodies, whose phases exist only across time (Hua 10/23).
If consciousness held only a punctual now, a stream of isolated now-points "like a line of pearls", we could never experience anything that endures, nor change or succession. Brentano said imagination supplies the past and future. Husserl rejects this because it implies we can only imagine, never hear, a melody or a conversation. His alternative is the width of presence: when the third tone E of a triad C-D-E sounds, I still hear D and C, as past, not as simultaneous, and neither imagine nor remember them.
The ecstatic-centred structure of each phase of consciousness and its object correlates (Zahavi's Figure 1).
- Primal impression. The act-moment narrowly directed at the now-phase; an abstract component that never appears alone. It names our consciousness of the now, not the now-phase itself (Hua 10/372).
- Retention. An intention giving consciousness of the phase that has just been.
- Protention. A more or less indefinite intention of the phase about to come (Hua 9/202, 33/46). We would be surprised if the wax figure moved or the door opened on a stone wall; since we can always be surprised, we always have a horizon of anticipation (Hua 11/7).
Retention and protention are not past or future relative to the primal impression but "simultaneous" with it: every actual phase contains the triad (Ms. C 3 8a). The now-phase's horizon is made of the object's past and future phases, not of retention and protention.
| Feature | Retention / protention | Recollection / expectation |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Dependent moments of an occurrent experience | Independent intentional acts |
| Object | No new object; the present object's temporal horizon | A new object: past holiday, next vacation |
| Mode | Retention is an intuition of the just-absent (Hua 10/41) | Recollection re-presents (vergegenwärtigt) a completed past (Hua 10/333) |
| Agency | Passive retentional modification | Acts we can initiate |
| Dependence | Basic | Presuppose retention and protention |
Because perception depends on retention, the intuitively given cannot be identified with the punctual now; retention brought a "significant widening of the phenomenological field" (Hua 11/324-325).
Running-off of the triad C, D, E (after Hua 33/22): each new now retains the last and the retentions within it.
When E sounds it carries a retention of D (Ed) and of the C retained in D (Ec) (Hua 10/81, 100). The primal impression is simultaneous with the whole series of retentions, but what they present is not simultaneous: the order of tones is preserved. A tone keeps its position while its distance from the now grows (Hua 10/64). That this fixed order can be revisited and identified in recollection is the first step toward objective time, the "time of the clock".
Absolute consciousness
Acts themselves are temporal unities that arise, persist and perish, given only within the same impressional, retentional, protentional framework (Hua 11/233, 4/102). So constitution is radicalised: acts too are constituted. What constitutes them? Time-constituting consciousness cannot itself be given in constituted time, or an infinite regress of higher time-consciousnesses would follow. Hence the absolute stream is not simultaneous with what it constitutes (Hua 10/96, 371); it neither arises nor perishes nor endures (Hua 10/113). Husserl's talk of it as supratemporal (Hua 10/112) means "not in time", not "timeless": its standing now (nunc stans) is itself a kind of temporality.
Husserl's three levels of temporality (Hua 10/73, 76, 358).
Husserl struggled to the end with the link between subjective time and the absolute streaming, mainly in the enigmatic C and L manuscripts; Zahavi stresses his reading is tentative and ties it to the difference between reflective and pre-reflective self-awareness.
Reflection is founded twice over, and retention makes it possible.
- First founding. Reflection shows a self-transcending subjectivity aimed at an object, so it presupposes the act of object-intentionality (Hua 15/78, 8/157).
- Second founding. As explicit self-awareness it relies on tacit self-awareness. Using the Investigations' pair Wahrnehmen/Erleben, before reflection one perceives the object but lives through the act (Hua 3/162, 4/118).
- Disclosure. Reflection grasps "something that was already there for me" (Hua 15/492-493); it needs a motivation, and motivation means being affected (Hua 4/217). I can grasp myself because I am already affected by myself (Hua 6/111).
- Retention as condition. Reflection first grasps the just-elapsed motivating phase, available because it is retained: "it is because of the retention that consciousness can be made into an object" (Hua 10/119).
The reigning interpretation models the stream-act relation on the act-object relation: the absolute stream makes us conscious of acts as temporal objects. Zahavi finds this problematic. Inner time-consciousness is the act's own pre-reflective self-awareness, "inner" because it belongs to the act's innermost structure; the triad is the structure of that self-manifestation, also called internal consciousness or Urbewußtsein (Hua 4/118-119, 10/83, 89-90). Acts are originally "waves" in a self-temporalising stream (Hua 10/75); only when reflection or recollection thematises them do they become objects in subjective time. The absolute flow and the reflected stream of acts are not two flows but two manifestations of one. "The self-appearance of the flow does not require a second flow" (Hua 10/83): no regress. With this Husserl abandons the principle that constituting and constituted belong to two different dimensions; principles of object-intentionality fail for the self-manifestation of subjectivity.
The limits of reflection and language
How can the absolute stream be described if description rests on reflection and reflection objectifies? Reflection seems always too late; Husserl calls functioning subjectivity anonymous (Hua 9/478, 14/29), an anonymity no reflection or reduction removes. This threatens the principle of principles (Hua 3/51): either phenomenology meets its limits or the principle must be reappraised. Language strains too: we call the stream "streaming", "standing", "present", using predicates of temporal objects, "but we simply lack more adequate words" (Hua 10/75).
Husserl, Bernau manuscripts, Hua 33/277-278
Zahavi's verdict: the anonymity of functioning subjectivity shows the nature of what is investigated, not the absurdity of the method; subjectivity cannot be disclosed as objects are.
Horizon and presence
The charge that Husserl is an intuitionist and a model metaphysics of presence, with subjectivity as pure self-presence and meaning, truth and reality as what is intuitively given, comes from hermeneutics and deconstruction, often targeting his "presuppositionless" philosophy.
- Mediation. Self-givenness is mediated through time, world, language, body and intersubjectivity.
- Tradition. Meaning, truth and reality need language and tradition, which transcend the individual.
- Différance. Presence presupposes complexity; difference and absence constitute presence, not the reverse (the Derridean charge).
The first two are answered by the later sections on body, intersubjectivity and lifeworld. Between 1917 and 1921 Husserl distinguished static from genetic phenomenology, which shows he was aware that even immediate experience is shaped by earlier experience and acquired knowledge.
Static and genetic phenomenology, distinguished 1917-1921.
Both objections also partly misfire. They confuse formal self-givenness ("How is consciousness aware of itself?") with substantial self-knowledge ("Who am I?"). And "presuppositionless" means description led by the things themselves, not a non-conceptual account; the "things" are not coins, anemones, television sets or x-rays but structures of phenomena and conditions of appearance, which require reductions, "destructions", even deconstructions (Abbau) to uncover.
On the third objection, Husserl does privilege intuition: the perceived flowering apple tree is "leibhaftig selbstgegeben", while recollection and imagination are derived modes referring back to perception, and existence is correlated with intuitive givenness in propria persona. But he also stresses transcendence: only a profile is ever given, and we perceive the tree itself thanks to horizonal intentionality, the co-intending of absent profiles (Hua 6/161). The co-apprehended sides are not "sensibilised", yet without them "we would have no objects at all before our eyes, not even a side" (Hua 16/55). "Nothing in perception is purely and adequately perceived" (Hua 8/45); every perception involves a Hinausdeutung (Hua 11/19).
Presence is a play of presence and absence, never pure self-presence.
- Object horizon. The present profile counts as present only because of its embedding in a horizon of absence. Yet Husserl never gives absence primacy: an absence that is not an absence for somebody makes no phenomenological sense.
- World horizon. The lemon on the kitchen table is co-given with utensils, a dripping tap, children's cries, and a vague, inexhaustible world-horizon (Hua 3/57).
- Self horizon. The primal impression always sits in retentional and protentional horizons (Hua 11/337): there is no pure self-presence.
- Flow and object together. Retention keeps not only the tone but the primal impression P(t), as Rp(t); the elapsing phase of the flow is retained too. Object duration and stream are given interdependently (Hua 10/83): consciousness is temporally self-given only in relation to something foreign (Hua 14/14, 379), and "the I is not thinkable without a non-I" (Hua 14/245).
The Later Husserl: The Body
The body and perspectivity
Every perspectival appearance has a genitive and a dative: it is an appearance of something for someone. Since spatial things appear at a distance and angle, "there is no pure point of view and there is no view from nowhere, there is only an embodied point of view." The subject has a location only through embodiment (Hua 3/116, 4/33), so spatial objects appear only to embodied subjects. The body is the zero point, the indexical "here" around which egocentric space unfolds (Hua 11/298, 4/159), and a condition of possibility of perceiving and handling spatial objects (Hua 14/540, 6/220).
From perspectival appearance to the moving, self-sensing body.
Husserl then moves from the body as orientation centre to bodily mobility. As James Gibson puts it, we see with mobile eyes in a turning head on a moving body; a stationary viewpoint is a limiting case. Movement of eye, hand and step matters for space (Hua 11/299), and perception requires bodily self-sensitivity: a co-functioning, unthematic experience of position and movement called kinaesthetic experience. Piano keys come with felt finger movement; a running horse with felt eye movement. Kinaesthesis is bodily self-awareness and is indispensable for constituting perceptual objects (Hua 16/189, 11/14-15, 4/66).
Kinaesthesis and the identity of the object
What lets several appearances count as appearances of one and the same object? Qualitative fit is necessary but not sufficient: the underside of a dining table and the front of a haystack are too different, while the front of one sheet of paper and the back of another match perfectly yet belong to two objects (Hua 16/155). The appearances must belong to one continuum, a continuous synthesis with sliding transitions, and awareness of that continuity requires kinaestheses.
The double performance in every perception: kinaesthetic series and motivated appearances (Hua 11/14-15, 9/390).
- If-then. The seen front of a wardrobe goes with a particular bodily position; its absent back and bottom go with my kinaesthetic horizon, my capacity to move (Hua 11/15). If I move thus, then this profile becomes visible or touchable (Hua 6/164).
- Systems coordinated. All possible profiles form a system tied to one kinaesthetic system, so that if a kinaesthesis runs its course, the matching profiles "must necessarily" follow (Hua 9/390).
- Double performance. Each perception has a kinaesthetic series and a functionally correlated series of appearances. Kinaestheses are not object properties and constitute no objects, but they give a unity and framework that lets appearances gain object-reference (Hua 4/66, 16/159).
The body as subject and the body as object
If the body is a condition of spatial objects, yet itself a spatial object, is the argument circular? Husserl answers by separating (1) unthematic, pre-reflective lived body-awareness, which conditions every spatial experience, from (2) the later thematic experience of the body as object. My original body-awareness is not awareness of a spatial object (Hua 13/240). Even when the body is experienced as a thing, it is experienced "in a double way", as thing and as functioning lived body together (Hua 14/57).
Zahavi, glossing Hua 11/14, 1/128, 14/540: the body as "I do" and "I can"
| Aspect | Functioning body (Leib) | Thematised body (Leibkörper) |
|---|---|---|
| Given as | Unified field of activity and affectivity, "I can" | Object among objects, perspectivally |
| Space | Zero point of egocentric space | Located in objective, homogeneous space |
| Sensation | Empfindnis: localised sensing | Empfindung apprehended as object property |
| Access | Pre-reflective, non-perspectival | Via self-objectivation and others' view |
| Status | Founding | Founded on the functioning body |
Objective space is constituted as transcending egocentric space, with coordinates independent of my "here". This happens by objectifying the body as one object among others, so suspending its indexicality, as already in the experience of walking through space. The body is first one volitional structure, later split into subsystems of fingers, eyes, legs, with sensing localised in them (Hua 4/56, 155).
Touching a table, I perceive its hardness, smoothness and extension. Shifting attention to the touching hand, I find sensations of pressure and movement that are localised in the hand but are not properties of it (Hua 4/146). Husserl calls the dual reading Empfindung (sensation as appearance of the object) and Empfindnis (sensing localised in the organ). The two do not appear alike: object properties are constituted in adumbrations, localised sensings are not (Hua 4/149-150). "Sensations of touch are not in the skin as if they were parts of its organic tissue" (Hua 13/115): Empfindnis is embodied subjectivity itself. Better to say one sensation has two dimensions, sensing and sensed.
- Seen vs felt gesture. Vision presents space as independent of the gesture, something the hand moves through; kinaesthesis gives space as the hand's field of mobility.
- Localisation is not objectification. A throbbing ankle or aching back is sensing localised in the body, still an experiencing, not an experienced, organ. Objectification comes when I gaze at my foot or one hand touches the other.
- Inner and outer body. The body is interiority (volition, sensing) and visually and tactually appearing exteriority: Husserl's Innen- and Außenleiblichkeit (Hua 14/337).
Double sensation: the reversible touch that links self-experience to the experience of others.
When my right hand touches my left, the left is not a mere object; it feels the touch (Hua 4/145). (Waking with a numb arm used as a pillow, it "could just as well be the arm of an Other".) Touching one's own body, unlike touching things or other bodies, involves a double sensation, a "bodily reflection" (Hua 1/128). Its reversibility, touching touched and touched touching, shows that interiority and exteriority are the same body (Hua 14/75, 13/263). Unlike an act of judging, bodily self-givenness lets me meet my own exteriority. This interplay of ipseity and alterity is decisive for empathy (Hua 15/652): in double sensation I anticipate how an Other would experience me and how I would experience an Other, which may be why sociality presupposes an "intersubjectivity of the body" (Hua 4/297).
The touched body shares extension, mass and smoothness with things but, as field of localisation, differs radically from them (Hua 4/151-152). Seeing my body as a mere object in a causal network is possible, but not immediately; it comes through another's perception of my body, superior in some respects (my own neck and eyes, Hua 5/112), and my appropriation of that view (Hua 14/62-63).
Self-affection and hetero-affection
Object constitution and body constitution are reciprocally co-dependent. "The body is not first given for us and subsequently used to investigate the world"; the world is given as bodily investigated and the body is revealed in exploring the world (Hua 5/128, 15/287). We perceive "the lived body but along with it also the things that are perceived 'by means of' it" (Hua 5/10). The hand cannot touch without being touched: touching and touched are constituted together (Hua 14/75), and this holds for sensibility in general.
Egocentric space presupposes a functioning body; objective space presupposes bodily self-objectivation (Hua 16/162). The constituting subject is embodied and already interprets itself as belonging to the world, so in the body analysis Husserl argues against his own Cartesian position in Ideen I. Zahavi limits the claim: not every experience is bodily, but the lived body is indispensable for sense experience and so of founding significance for the rest. Consciousness is bound to the body "by means of its hyletic substrate", though intentional experiences are not themselves localised (Hua 4/153; 5/11).
Two consequences: sensations and the mortal transcendental subject
Zahavi gives two further arguments that the body analysis is transcendental, not merely regional-ontological.
Husserl's ambiguous 'sensation' split in two by the body analysis.
- Sensations revisited. Later phenomenologists attacked Husserl's non-intentional sensations as a prejudice inherited from British empiricism: meaningless sensations are not found in ordinary life, and if meaningless they could not guide or limit interpretation, making the link between sense and concept arbitrary. Zahavi grants this "to a certain extent" but notes the concept is ambiguous (sensing vs sensed) and changed over time. The body analysis distinguishes kinaestheses (noetic, self-awareness) from hyletic sensations (Merkmalsempfindungen, Aspektdaten), which are neither formless nor senseless: configured with the kinaesthetic field, they are the primordial manifestation of worldly being. The difference from objects remains: hearing increasing loudness vs an approaching car, a local pain vs the prick of a needle.
- A finite transcendental subject. For Kant transcendental subjectivity is a transpersonal, abstractly deduced principle; for Husserl it is concrete and finite. At first he thought talk of its birth and death a category mistake; since the body dies, he said it could persist disembodied, death being like dreamless sleep (Hua 11/379-381), an impoverished, limit-concept of subjectivity (Hua 13/464-465). In the early 1930s he changed his mind: birth, death and generativity (the change of generations) are conditions of possibility of an objective and historical world (Hua 15/171-172).
Husserl's changing view of the birth and death of transcendental subjectivity.
Zahavi is candid about the limits: it would be "an exaggeration" to say Husserl solved the birth and death of subjectivity, and it remains open whether phenomenology can treat it at all or only speculative metaphysics can. Already, though, Husserl takes our situatedness in a living tradition to have constitutive weight, a theme taken up in the lifeworld section.
The Later Husserl: Intersubjectivity
The solipsism charge
Solipsism claims that only one consciousness exists, one's own, or that we cannot know whether other subjects exist. Phenomenology seems exposed because the epoché and reduction appear to confine research to the phenomenologist's own consciousness. If the task is the world's givenness for me, how can it reach the world's givenness for another, let alone the Other's self-givenness? Two difficulties follow.
- Constituting the Other. How can I constitute the Other when the Other, as Other, must be more than a product of constitution?
- Describing the inaccessible. How can the Other's givenness be described when foreign subjectivity is defined by always transcending its givenness for me?
Husserl makes it worse by saying the phenomenologist must start as a solipsist (Hua 8/176, 17/276) and perform a primordial reduction isolating the sphere of ownness, all an isolated ego could constitute without others (Hua 1/124, 17/248), the only way to grasp the Other's constituted validity (Hua 15/270-271). This seems to confirm the standard criticism. Zahavi replies that "the actual situation is considerably more complex".
Transcendental intersubjectivity
Perception presents intersubjectively accessible being: objects, events and actions appear as public, not private (Hua 9/431, 1/123). An ontological analysis that reveals the world's being-sense as intersubjectively valid therefore leads to the transcendental relevance of other subjects (Hua 15/110).
Husserl, Hua 9/344
Husserl calls intersubjective-transcendental sociality "the source of all real truth and being" (Hua 1/35, 182), and even describes his project as a sociological transcendental philosophy (Hua 9/539) that must step from an egological to a transcendental-sociological phenomenology. The primordial reduction is methodological: we see how much intersubjectivity matters only when we see how little the single subject can manage alone. A radical reduction ends in transcendental intersubjectivity (Hua 1/69, 9/245-246). The stakes are total: if phenomenology could not account for intersubjectivity, the failure would be that of a fundamental philosophical project, since intersubjectivity holds the key to objectivity and transcendence (Hua 8/465).
Why Husserl's analysis of intersubjectivity has been misjudged: the way confused with the aim.
The aim is a theory of transcendental intersubjectivity, not an account of concrete sociality or the I-Thou relation. Critics, often reading only the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, asked whether empathy (Einfühlung) gives a direct or indirect experience of the Other, and whether an idealist model of constitution could make I and Other symmetrical, usually presupposing a flawed reading of constitution. These questions matter, since inter-subjectivity is a relation between subjects, analysed from the first person: in Krisis intersubjectivity becomes transcendental only through a radical "mich-selbst-befragen" (questioning myself, Hua 6/206). But critics confuse the way with the aim: even if the empathy account failed, the rest would survive, and Husserl works with several kinds of intersubjectivity.
The experience of the Other
The concrete experience of the Other is always of the Other's bodily appearance; concrete intersubjectivity is a relation between incarnated subjects. Zahavi skips the details of appresentation (Appräsentation) and pairing (Paarung), but stresses three points.
- Similarity, not inference. Empathy presupposes a likeness between the foreign embodied subject and me: were I not bodily, I could not recognise other embodied subjects. Yet it is no analogical inference (Hua 1/141, 13/338-339) but an actual experience whose structure must be uncovered.
- Not a brute fact. Against Max Scheler, whom he accuses of treating it as basic and unanalysable (Hua 14/335), Husserl seeks the genesis and conditions of empathy. My body's unique subject-object status, shown in double sensation, lets me recognise another body as foreign subjectivity (Hua 8/62).
- Bodies first. Experience of bodies, mine and others', is the foundation and norm of all other experience (Hua 14/126); the mother-child relation is the most original relation (Hua 15/511, 582, 604-605), prior to experience of physical things. The question is not how to get from objects to subjects, but how experience of incarnated subjectivity conditions experience of mere objects (Hua 15/637).
So "the ego constitutes the Other" means only that alterity must appear to be met: "Other" and "foreign" are relational concepts presupposing the ego as contrast. Husserl never says the ego constitutes the Other's self-givenness (Hua 15/43), and repeats that I do not "create, invent, or produce" the Other (Hua 1/168, 17/244). One correction: since every subject's full self-being depends on relations to others, the Other's self-being depends on me to that extent, and here Husserl's view is strongly symmetrical.
Constituting intersubjectivity: why objectivity needs others
Why can a subject constitute objectivity only after experiencing an Other? Husserl's thesis: the transcendence and inaccessibility of foreign subjectivity, "the first real alterity", is the source of all real transcendence and gives the world objective validity (Hua 14/277, 15/560, 1/173). It is the only transcendence "genuinely worthy of its name" (Hua 8/495); all objectivity refers back to "the non-Ego in the form, 'another Ego'" (Hua 17/248).
How the Other's transcendence grounds the objectivity of the world.
Objects cannot be merely my correlates if others can experience them; their intersubjective experienceability guarantees their real transcendence. That is why the Other's transcendence matters: if the Other were only a modification or eidetic variation of me, agreement would prove as little as finding the same report in several copies of the same newspaper (Wittgenstein's example). Each encounter is fallible, since an apparent Other may be a hallucination, but the link between intersubjectivity and objectivity is a priori: what in principle no one else could experience cannot be called objective.
- Bodily congruity. The experience of another as incarnated subject is the first step toward an objective shared world (Hua 14/110, 15/18): my experience of something as her body must go with her experience of it as her own (Hua 13/252), a congruity that founds all intersubjective objects.
- Being experienced. When I experience the Other experiencing me, an "original reciprocal co-existence" that Michael Theunissen calls Veränderung, I take over her objectifying view of myself and experience myself as alien. "Parity thus ensues: a multiplicity of feeling, willing Is that are alike in kind" (Hua 13/243-244).
- Loss of privilege. My perspective is one among many, so whether I or another is the subject makes no difference in principle to validity (Hua 17/245, 1/157). The object gains an autonomy of being that transcends my finite existence (Hua 15/218).
- Immanence too. Not only objectivity but immanence, subjectivity and appearance are intersubjectively constituted: only once I know others see the same can I distinguish the thing from its appearance for me, and call something merely subjective (Hua 6/167, 9/453).
Three kinds of transcendental intersubjectivity
Concrete bodily encounters are contingent and fallible, as Husserl admits (Hua 14/474-475), so if they were the whole story they would be a weak foundation for transcendental philosophy. But Husserl has several kinds of transcendental intersubjectivity.
| Kind | What it is | Key texts | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open intersubjectivity | A priori reference to possible co-subjects in horizonal intentionality | Hua 14/289, 15/192, Ms. C 17 36a | Most fundamental; precedes any encounter |
| Concrete empathy | Bodily encounter, taking over the Other's view of me | Hua 1, 13/243-244, 14/388 | Still constitutive: true alterity, true objectivity |
| Anonymous normality | Linguistically sedimented, handed-down tradition | Lifeworld manuscripts, Hua 15 | Different in kind; presupposes the first two |
The analysis of the ego reveals its apodictic intersubjective structure (Hua 15/192). Every perceived object refers to me and to others as co-subjects (Hua 6/468): my mundane experience entails others "constantly in existential co-validity as co-subjects, as co-constituting" (Ms. C 17 36a). The reason is horizonal: I cannot see the front and back of a chair at once, but others could, so the object is always "there for others too", whether or not they appear or even exist. Every appearance belongs to "an open, endless... totality of possible appearances of the same, and the subjectivity belonging to this appearance is open intersubjectivity" (Hua 14/289).
Three kinds of transcendental intersubjectivity, each presupposing the one before.
This undercuts solipsism already at the level of perception: co-subjectivity is present before any concrete encounter. Husserl asks in Ms. C 17: "When empathy occurs, is the community, the intersubjectivity there already in advance, and is empathy merely a disclosing performance?", and answers yes (Ms. C 17 84b). Concrete encounters remain transcendental, not mere intramundane episodes, because only there do I meet true alterity and take over the Other's view of me. The third kind, normality as anonymous community, is developed in the lifeworld section.
Subjectivity and inter-subjectivity
Husserl says the subject is world-experiencing only as member of a community (Hua 1/166), the ego is what it is only as socius (Hua 15/193), transcendental subjectivity in full universality "is exactly inter-subjectivity" (Hua 8/480), and the absolute reveals itself as the intersubjective relation between subjects (Hua 13/480, from 1927). With a nod to Leibniz he calls his theory a transcendental monadology (Hua 8/190). Unlike Kant, he holds that a plurality of transcendental egos is not only coherent but necessary: "subjectivity is what it is, an ego functioning constitutively, only within intersubjectivity" (Hua 6/175).
But Husserl also says the transcendental primal ego (Ur-Ich) cannot be pluralised (Hua 6/188). Is there a contradiction at the core?
- "He changed his mind." Ego first in the Cartesian Meditations, intersubjectivity in Krisis. Fails because both emphases appear in both works.
- "He stayed egological." Intersubjectivity remained superficial. Fails against the many passages giving it a decisive role.
- Resolution. Transcendental intersubjectivity is not a third-person structure but a relation in which the ego participates, so it is disclosed only by explicating the ego's experience: an intersubjective structure of the ego and an egological rootedness of intersubjectivity.
- Uniqueness as first-person givenness. Ms. B I 14: "I" has no plural in its original sense; others experience themselves as I, but only I experience myself as I. "The unique I... posits other unique transcendental Is, as 'others'" (Ms. B I 14 138a-b).
Subjectivity and intersubjectivity as complementary, not competing.
This uniqueness is no contingent linguistic fact but a transcendental necessity tied to self-givenness and inner time-consciousness: "I am" is "the primal fact" a philosopher must never overlook (Hua 17/243-244). Transcendental intersubjectivity is a foundation with a necessary I-centring (Hua 15/426), so the reduction is ambiguous, leading to subjectivity and to intersubjectivity (Hua 15/73-75).
Each subject must also keep some ontological autonomy: if the difference between subjects were negated, there would be no plurality and so no inter-subjectivity (Hua 15/335, 339). Hence subjects cannot be grounded in a prior unity. Husserl's view seems to be that the temporal flow, the most basic level of subjectivity, does not depend on the Other (Hua 14/170-175). Yet he also roots openness to others in temporality, through the structural likeness of empathy and recollection: recollection already involves self-displacement. Self-temporalisation through de-presentation (Ent-Gegenwärtigung) "has its analogue in my self-alienation (Ent-Fremdung)" in empathy, a higher-level de-presentation of my primal presence (Hua 6/189). Temporal self-differentiation is thus a condition of possibility of openness to the Other.
From temporal self-difference to the Other: an intensification of alterity.
The Later Husserl: The Lifeworld
Three lines of thought in Husserl's analysis of the lifeworld.
The lifeworld and the crisis of science
The theme appears early, but its most systematic treatment is in Husserl's last work, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (1936). What crisis? Paradoxically, the positive sciences have been too successful. A crisis can show itself not only in dramatic breakdowns but in "a smoothly functioning mindlessness": the sciences no longer reflect on their foundations and limits, only on technical issues. Questions like "What is truth?", "What is reality?", "What is a good and meaningful life?" have dropped out. The sciences need ontological and epistemological clarification and have lost existential relevance, so Husserl accuses them of being bankrupt ethically and philosophically.
The cause is the objectivism dominant since the Scientific Revolution: a quantitative ideal of method, a sharp fact-value split, and the claim that science alone describes reality as it is in itself. Its emblem is Galileo:
Galileo, Il Saggiatore (1623), quoted by Zahavi
Husserl's remedy for the rupture between the world of science and everyday life is to criticise the reigning objectivism by recovering the lifeworld, which is the historical and systematic foundation of science yet has been forgotten and repressed by it.
| Feature | Lifeworld | World of science |
|---|---|---|
| Givenness | Concrete, sensuous, intuitive | System of idealities beyond sense |
| Truth | Situated, relative | Strict, objective, freed from the first person |
| Objects | Relative, approximate, perspectival (water cold to me, warm to you) | Irrelative, non-perspectival, univocal, exact (Hua 6/309) |
| Concepts | Morphological, essentially vague | Ideal, exact, constructed |
| Aim | The world as it is for us | The world "in itself" (Hua 13/381) |
The old split between primary qualities (form, size, weight) and secondary qualities (colour, taste, smell) was radicalised: now everything that appears counts as subjective, a distortion of the true reality, so the goal becomes "Water = H2O". That we drink and swim in water is irrelevant. Science set out to rescue the world from scepticism and "apparently did so by returning us a world we barely recognize".
- Category mistake 1. The appearing, intentional object is not intramental; not even a hallucinated pink moose is, still less green grass or fragrant peaches (Ideen I §§ 40, 52).
- Category mistake 2. The intuited object is not a representation of the physical one; representing is no natural property but an intentional interpretation, as Part 1's critique showed.
- Experience grounds theory. Any justified claim must be supported directly or indirectly by experience, in arithmetic as in astrophysics or botany, given Husserl's broad notion of experience including categorial intuition.
- Not anti-science. Husserl does not call science false or superfluous; he targets its inflated self-understanding: the scientistic claim that reality is what physics describes (so tables, books and nations are illusions), and the bland objectivism that defines reality as absolutely independent of subjectivity, interpretation and community.
Science attains more objectivity than daily observation, but two inferences are faulty: that only science captures true reality, and that it grasps something radically independent of our experiential and conceptual perspective. A "view from nowhere" is a misunderstanding; physics is not "the sole arbiter of what there is". Natural science itself undercuts the split, since it insists it studies the water I drink or the diamond I admire:
Husserl, Hua 3/113
Physics offers a higher, more exact determination of the same object (Ms. A III 9 8b), valid for all subjects. Yet even the most abstract results stay rooted in the subject-relative evidence of the lifeworld, not a disposable waypoint but a permanent source of meaning and justification (Hua 6/142). Science draws on intuition whenever one sets up an experiment, reads instruments, or discusses results with colleagues (Hua 6/128-129).
Founding and sedimentation: science rises from the lifeworld and sinks back into it.
What is the lifeworld?
Husserl's concept is equivocal. Distinguish an ontological concept from a transcendental one. The ontological concept divides in two.
- Concept 1: the prescientific world. The taken-for-granted, familiar, unquestioned world of daily life.
- Concept 2: the absorbing lifeworld. The lifeworld absorbs scientific theories (Hua 6/132): science "will eventually sink down into the ground it is standing on". We all assume the Earth is round though few have seen it, and use vitamins or sun oil. This lifeworld has a genesis and is under permanent transformation.
This tracks Husserl's development: Ideen I already treats the founding relation, but only Krisis attends to the actual historicity of theories. An empirical survey is not enough; the task is the a priori of the lifeworld, its ontological essence. Is that doomed, given its relativity? No: the lifeworld has an invariant morphological structure.
- Morphological essences. Knives, pens, birds, trees, stones have an essential vagueness; classifying them is approximative. Concepts like "notched", "scalloped", "lens-shaped", "umbelliform" are "essentially, rather than accidentally, inexact" yet "absolutely indispensable" (Hua 3/155).
- Ideal essences. No line can be drawn perfectly straight, but we can think the absolutely straight line as an ideal to approximate. "Dog" names something seen; the straight line is an exact construction existing nowhere in nature.
- Idealisation. The method by which exact science overcomes vagueness. Imposing geometric exactness on lifeworld phenomena violates them.
- Consequence. The lifeworld's morphological typicity makes a science of the lifeworld possible and every other science too: a chaotic lifeworld would leave theory nothing to build on (Hua 6/142-145).
So there is a universal structure of every possible lifeworld, however different geographically, historically or culturally. That universality, Husserl's contribution to the relativism debate, does not guarantee but makes possible transhistorical and intercultural understanding. What is it? Again equivocal: sometimes formal features, a common spatiotemporal world-form (Hua 1/161-162, 4/83) and nature as unconditionally universal (Ms. C 17 45a); sometimes concrete: every lifeworld is correlated to a functioning body, and corporeality with sexual drives, nutritional needs, birth and death, community and tradition forms the universal framework of any conceivable lifeworld (Hua 15/433).
Two concepts of the lifeworld and where the reduction comes in.
The transcendental concept: a way to the reduction
Both lifeworld ontology and the regional ontologies of chemistry, biology or physics stay within the natural attitude; neither presupposes the reduction, so the inquiry is not finished. Krisis is, like several earlier works, an introduction to transcendental phenomenology, but this way runs through a critique of objectivism: show that theories are rooted in the lifeworld, take its ontology as a guiding line for constitutive analysis, and show that lifeworld and science are both constituted by transcendental (inter)subjectivity. Any claim that the lifeworld analysis is a break with the transcendental project is mistaken: the lifeworld is correlated to "the intersubjective life of world-consciousness" (Weltbewußtseinsleben, Hua 15/539). Theoretical idealities are constituted intentional objects too, fully intelligible only in correlation with transcendental (inter)subjectivity.
Normality and tradition
If reality is intersubjectively constituted, dissent matters as much as consensus. This drew Husserl into fields reserved for psychopathology, sociology, anthropology and ethnology. A strict Kantian would deny such mundane domains transcendental relevance; Husserl had to treat them transcendentally (Hua 15/391). Zahavi reads the late Husserl as expanding the transcendental sphere, re-examining the transcendental-empirical relation through generativity, tradition, historicity and normality.
- Anticipations of normality. Experience is guided by typical patterns laid down by earlier experience (Hua 11/186); a clash is experienced as anormality and may modify anticipations (Ms. D 13 234b, Hua 15/438).
- Learned from others. Analysed first in solitary passive synthesis, normality turns out intersubjective: "I have been among people as long as I remember" (Hua 14/117). Normality is conventionality transcending the individual (Hua 15/611): "'One' judges thus, 'one' holds the fork in such and such a way" (Hua 4/269).
- Family and generations. I learn the normal first from those who raised me (Hua 15/428-429, 602-604), and so join a tradition reaching back "through a chain of generations into a dim past".
- Only normal disagreement counts. "Everybody" means members of a normality of subjects (Hua 15/142); experienceability by all is an averageness and idealisation (Hua 15/141). Only the normal count as co-constitutive (Hua 15/162, 9/497); disagreement with the anormal is (at first) inconsequential. Even agreeing that we disagree shows common ground (Hua 15/47).
| Type of normality | The normal | The anormal | Constitutive role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Personal | Mature, healthy, rational person | Infant, the blind, the schizophrenic | Disagreement initially discounted |
| Cultural | Our homeworld (Heimwelt) | The foreigner, possibly member of a foreign normality | Disagreement between normalities motivates science |
Discrepancy between normal subjects, including meeting plural normalities with their own truths, enlarges understanding and motivates scientific objectivity: the aim of a truth valid with unconditional validity for all rational subjects (Hua 6/324). Without experiencing that we see the world differently, there would be no incentive to seek irrelative knowledge.
- Limited intersubjectivity. A community of colour-blind subjects examining a painting deals with an intersubjectively constituted object; so do people with normal vision.
- Formal mediation. A geometrical description of the "same" painting has a more formal, emptier validity and so higher objectivity.
- Two kinds. Everyday objectivity correlated with limited intersubjectivity, and "rigorous" scientific objectivity, valid for all subjects (Hua 14/111).
- Practical sufficiency. The ideal of irrelative truth is irrelevant to most daily concerns: we deal with tools, values, books, houses, friends and family (Hua 4/27), and "that which is sufficient in praxis counts as the thing in itself" (Hua 11/23).
Writing, its dangers, and the origin of geometry
At the highest level, scientific objectivity, writing matters. Meaning gains full objectivity when written and detached from indexical ties to person, time and place, and can be handed down to later generations. As the appendix Ursprung der Geometrie ("The Origin of Geometry") argues, complex theories built over centuries would be impossible without writing's preserving function (Hua 6/369-374). Writing is a collective memory with major constitutive impact (Hua 15/224), but carries two dangers, which together cause the modern crisis of science.
- Seduction of language. We are easily seduced by handed-down assumptions and interpretations rooted in language instead of acting on proper evidence (Hua 6/372, 4/269).
- Threatening objectivism. Once idealities are detached from their subject-relative origin, it is easy to forget constituting subjectivity altogether.
How a primal institution becomes a forgotten obviousness: Husserl's genealogy of objectivism.
Theories arise from practical life through horizon-expanding primal institutions (Urstiftungen), where new types of objects, such as geometrical idealities, are first constituted. Handed down, they become so obvious that their origin is forgotten. Galileo inherited a developed mathematics and took it as true reality. But the objectivist ideal and the idealising attitude are "not natural in any sense" but products of a historically developed method.
This is not historicism, "psychologism's cousin". The Rückfrage (return inquiry) does not seek geometry's actual discoverer or reconstruct its factual history, nor ground validity in facts. It asks what it means for science that it necessarily arose at some point and was handed down. Against Kant's static categories, given once and for all, Husserl concludes that the constitutive performance of scientific rationality has a genesis: science is a tradition, a cultural formation of a historical community of transcendental subjects.
Market truth and regulative truth
Criticising objectivism also delimits scientific truth, allowing several equally valid types of description. In terms resembling the later Wittgenstein:
Husserl, Hua 17/284
There is a correlation between levels of normality and objectivity (Hua 15/155); even absolute truth correlates with the normality of rational subjects (Hua 15/35-36). Normality is a tradition-bound set of norms, so the normal life is generative and every normal person is historical (Hua 15/138-139): "I am a 'child of the times'... I am what I am as an heir" (Hua 14/223).
- Objectivity as process. The common objective world is constituted historically (Hua 15/421); objectivity and reality are intersubjective presumptions realised only in an infinite process of socialisation and horizon-fusion.
- Truth as regulative ideal. "Here Husserl is speaking, neither Apel nor Habermas": absolute truth is an idealisation correlated with the ideal consensus of an open community, approximated by permanent correction but never reached (Hua 8/52, 6/282, 15/33).
- No stagnant world. The world is given only in its relativity of normality and anormality (Hua 15/212); its stability is apparent, "a construction of normality, which in principle can collapse" (Hua 15/214).
- Generative intersubjectivity. The world's transcendence is constituted through others and generatively constituted co-subjectivity (Ms. C 17 32a, Hua 15/199), so birth and death become transcendental conditions (Hua 15/171). Embedding in a generative context belongs to the ego as inseparably as its temporal structure (Hua 6/256). This is the third kind of transcendental intersubjectivity, anonymous normality: the category "historical reality" implies a transcendence constituted only by taking over meaning that originates outside me.
Zahavi concedes that probably no one would claim Husserl integrated historicity and transcendentality definitively. Whether his attempt is fruitful or "a final aporetical draft" is open. What should now be demonstrated is that he held no classical Cartesian-Kantian subject-philosophy, was not a solipsist, and treated intersubjectivity as a transcendental notion of utmost importance.
- Dating slip. Zahavi places the Scientific Revolution "in the Renaissance". The standard span runs roughly from Copernicus (1543) to Newton's Principia (1687), overlapping only the late Renaissance; Galileo's Assayer (1623) is early-modern. A small imprecision, not an error of substance.
- Brevity. The lifeworld gets the shortest treatment of Part 3 relative to its fame, and the debate with Habermas's system-lifeworld distinction is gestured at, not argued.
- Normality. Husserl's examples of the "anormal" (the blind, the schizophrenic, the infant, the foreigner) read harshly now; Zahavi reports them neutrally. Later phenomenologists of disability and illness (for instance Havi Carel) have pressed exactly this point.
- Since publicationupdate. The lifeworld manuscripts Zahavi cites by signature are now largely edited in Die Lebenswelt (Hua 39, ed. Rochus Sowa, 2008, about 960 pages; Husserl Archives Leuven list, checked Oct 2026), so readers can test his reading of normality and generativity directly. The Krisis diagnosis of "smoothly functioning mindlessness" is now routinely cited in debates on AI and science: models that predict well without understanding revive Husserl's worry about method mistaken for reality. The Galileo quotation remains standard, from Il Saggiatore (1623).
Conclusion: Husserl Beyond the Received Picture
The received view and why it survived
Everyone agrees Husserl founded phenomenology, developed a theory of intentionality and a concept of the lifeworld, and taught Heidegger. For a long time it was also "common knowledge" that he never escaped classical metaphysics of presence, that reality and the Other were constituted by a pure, disincarnated, worldless transcendental subject, and that his thought stayed foundationalist, idealist and solipsist, so that later phenomenologists, hermeneuticists, deconstructivists and philosophers of language were right to leave him behind. Zahavi gives a historical reason for the image's survival.
- Nazi era (1933-1945). Because of Husserl's Jewish origin his philosophy was not taught in Germany, so a whole generation was trained in Heideggerian phenomenology instead.
- France after the war. Despite early interest in the 1930s, the French read Husserl "through the eyes of Heidegger".
- 1960s onward. Young scholars such as Klaus Held and Ulrich Claesges wrote dissertations on the research manuscripts, and scholarship "took a decisive step forward".
What the manuscripts revealed
The ongoing Husserliana made it necessary to revise dominant readings, both by complementing core concepts and by disclosing aspects one could not have anticipated from the published works.
How three Husserliana publications overturned the received picture.
- Intersubjectivity (1973). Iso Kern's three volumes made prior discussions, confined to Ideen II and the Cartesian Meditations, obsolete; in Stephan Strasser's words they made "all current views" about Husserl's philosophy inadequate.
- Ethics (1988). Ullrich Melle's edition revealed Husserl's work on ethics and value theory, refuting the picture of a thinker concerned only with pure theoria.
Continuity, not rupture
The standard story divides Husserl into phases with four decisive breaks. Zahavi grants each "a greater or... smaller core of truth" but calls the rupture idea "a relic from a time where one had access only to his published works".
| Ch | Alleged break | Period | Zahavi's correction |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Psychologism to anti-psychologism | Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891) to Logische Untersuchungen (1900-1901) | Real change, anticipated and not a rupture |
| 2 | Descriptive to transcendental phenomenology | About 1905-1908, before Ideen I (1913) | Ch. 2 showed LU's metaphysical neutrality pointed this way |
| 3 | Static complemented by genetic phenomenology | 1917-1921 | Complement, not replacement |
| 4 | Subject-centred philosophy to lifeworld phenomenology | Cartesian Meditations (1929) to Krisis (1936) | Both emphases in both works; still I-centred |
There is development and a decisive difference between early and late works, but later changes are often anticipated earlier and are never so radical as to be a veritable rupture. The canon has widened from Logische Untersuchungen, Ideen I, Cartesian Meditations and Krisis to all available Husserliana, especially Erste Philosophie II, Phänomenologische Psychologie and the Krisis supplement. The new interpretation stresses facticity, passivity, alterity and ethics, and rereads the classics to reveal "a unity and consistency" that would otherwise have stayed hidden.
Received picture versus Zahavi's Husserl, topic by topic.
Purpose, omissions and legacy
Refuting misunderstandings was not an attempt to immunise Husserl against criticism, but to clear away distractions so a "novel and more constructive criticism" can carry the discussion forward. Zahavi lists what he left out:
- Intentionality in full. His "far more complex" investigation of intentionality.
- Ego and person. The structure of the ego and personality.
- Language. The relation between linguistic and prelinguistic meaning.
- Passivity. Including the instincts and the unconscious.
- Logic and mathematics. Their foundations.
- Practical philosophy. Politics, ethics, aesthetics and religion.
He hopes the book shows the scope, fertility and contemporary relevance of Husserl's thought and sends readers to Husserl's own writings, indispensable for understanding phenomenology and valuable in themselves. Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Schutz, Ricoeur, Henry and Derrida owe him much. Successors tended to criticise him "in order to emphasize their own merits", but Husserl is "no longer regarded as a mere precursor" or "a surpassed chapter in the history of phenomenology".
- Partisanship. "Must now be regarded as outdated" is the verdict of a leading participant in the reinterpretation; critics such as Dreyfus and the deconstructive readers did not concede, and Zahavi's own chapters admit unresolved points (birth and death, historicity, the consistency argument).
- Continuity cuts both ways. If every later move is "anticipated", the claim risks becoming unfalsifiable; the 1917-1921 genetic turn and the 1905-1908 transcendental turn remain real changes even on his account.
- OCR. The scan prints "Meile" for Ullrich Melle and "Ideen 11" for Ideen II.
- Since publicationupdate. Husserliana has continued well past the volumes Zahavi could use (see the Introduction's update), including the late manuscripts on time (C-manuscripts, Hua Materialien VIII, 2006) and the volumes on the limit problems (Grenzprobleme, Hua 42, 2014). These have, if anything, strengthened the "continuity plus manuscripts" approach he champions.
Main Points
Twenty-four takeaways
- The received Husserl is outdated. The foundationalist, idealist, solipsist philosopher of presence is a picture built on four published books and on reading him through Heidegger; the manuscripts dissolve it (Intro, Conclusion).
- The reduction expands, it does not subtract. Epoché and reduction suspend the natural attitude's positing to study the correlation of subjectivity and world; nothing is lost but naivety (ch. 2).
- Constitution is non-causal. To constitute is to let something appear and show itself as what it is, never to create it; the constitutor is itself constituted (ch. 2).
- Time-consciousness is self-awareness. Primal impression, retention and protention structure every experience; the absolute flow is the pre-reflective self-manifestation of acts, not a second consciousness (3A).
- The subject is embodied and social. The lived body is a transcendental condition of perception, and the Other's transcendence is the source of objectivity (3B, 3C).
- Continuity, not rupture. Husserl developed, but later moves are anticipated earlier; the lifeworld and intersubjectivity extend the transcendental project rather than abandon it (3D, Conclusion).
- Logic is not psychology. Psychologism collapses into relativism and confuses the act with its ideal content; repeatable, identical meanings refute it (ch. 1).
- Intentionality is no relation between two things. Consciousness is of something even when the object does not exist; neither container nor immanent-object nor representative theories capture it (ch. 1).
- Quality and matter. Every act has a type (believing, wishing) and a matter (what, and as what); matter fixes reference (ch. 1).
- Givenness has degrees. Signitive, pictorial and perceptual acts give the same object emptily or in bodily presence; knowledge is the fulfilment of meaning by intuition and truth the identity of meant and given (ch. 1).
- Evidence is fallible but not sceptical. Only a stronger evidence can overturn evidence; it is intersubjective and open to criticism (chs. 1, 2).
- Experience includes the categorial. States of affairs and essences can be intuited; Wesensschau uses examples as starting points, not inductive samples (ch. 1).
- The early work was neutral. The Logical Investigations bracket metaphysics; that neutrality left the phenomenon's status unclarified and motivated the transcendental turn (chs. 1, 2).
- Phenomenology is not introspection. It studies structures of givenness in the first person, not private psychological facts (ch. 2).
- The noema is the object as meant. Against the Fregean West-Coast reading, Zahavi sides with the East-Coast view: the noema is the object itself in its givenness, not an intermediary (ch. 2).
- Transcendental idealism is beyond realism. It denies a world in principle inaccessible to any subject, while affirming a world transcendent to every actual experience (ch. 2).
- No presence without absence. Every now holds the just-past and the about-to-be, every perceived side co-intends absent profiles; Derrida's charge of a metaphysics of presence misses this (3A).
- Perception presupposes movement. Kinaesthesis, the "I can", and the zero point of orientation make spatial objects possible (3B).
- The body is both subject and object. Double sensation reveals Leib as Leibkörper and prepares the experience of other bodies; self-affection always involves hetero-affection (3B).
- The Other is given as inaccessible. Full access would abolish alterity; the asymmetry is essential (3C).
- Three kinds of intersubjectivity. Open intersubjectivity in every horizon, concrete empathy, and anonymous normality in language and tradition (3C, 3D).
- Science rests on the lifeworld. Exact idealisations arise from morphological lifeworld evidence and sediment back into it; forgetting this produces objectivism and the crisis of the sciences (3D).
- Normality is constitutive. Anticipations, homeworld and foreign world, and normal disagreement shape objectivity; scientific truth is a regulative ideal of open consensus (3D).
- The ego stays at the centre. Intersubjectivity and history are always I-centred: the unique primal ego is first-person givenness, not a rival to the community of monads (3C, 3D).
How the takeaways connect: from meaning and evidence to an embodied, social, historical subject.
Frameworks and mental models
The book's distinctions work as reusable tools. Each row names one, states it in a line, and suggests where it applies outside phenomenology.
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Quality and matter | Every intention has an attitude and a content "as what" | Separating what a record asserts from how it is held (fact, forecast, wish) |
| Signitive / intuitive / fulfilment | Meaning can be empty or filled; knowledge is filling | Distinguishing a claim from its evidence; designing verification |
| Fallible evidence | Only stronger evidence overturns evidence | Audit, model validation, incident review |
| Epoché | Suspend the default positing to see how things are given | Architecture reviews, root-cause analysis, onboarding a legacy system |
| Noema as object-as-meant | Meaning is the object under a description, not a proxy | Data semantics: one entity, many views |
| Retention, protention | The present includes a just-past and anticipated future | Stream processing, windows, forecasting |
| Kinaesthetic if-then | Appearances are lawfully tied to movement | Active sensing, robotics, exploration in learning |
| Open intersubjectivity | Objects are given as accessible to others | Designing shared data and APIs as public by default |
| Normality and anormality | Experience is guided by learned typical patterns | Anomaly detection, drift monitoring |
| Morphological vs exact | Vague concepts are legitimate where exactness distorts | Choosing categorical vs numeric models; bounded contexts |
| Sedimentation and Rückfrage | Inherited methods hide their origins; return inquiry restores them | Model documentation, revalidation, legacy decommissioning |
- An advocate's introduction. The book is clear and well documented, but it argues one side: almost every criticism ends in a misunderstanding to be cleared away. Zahavi says this is to enable "a more constructive criticism", yet the book offers little of that criticism itself; the unresolved points (birth and death, the consistency of ego and community, historicity) are noted briefly.
- Manuscripts as trump. Reliance on unpublished texts is a strength and a risk. Ricoeur's worry that Husserl withheld some texts deliberately is reported, not answered, and the "three kinds of intersubjectivity" and the split concept of sensation are Zahavi's reconstructions.
- Gaps by design. Ethics, language, passive synthesis, instincts, logic and mathematics are omitted, as the Conclusion admits; the analytic-continental bridge (the noema debate) gets less space than its literature.
- Slips flagged chapter by chapter. "Ricken" for Rickert; the Permian as a "period" of the Paleozoic "period" lasting about 41 million years (an era; about 47 million years on current charts); the Scientific Revolution placed "in the Renaissance"; scan errors such as "Hua 15/2.97", "Meile" for Melle, "Mermalsempfindungen". None changes an argument.
- Since 2003. Husserliana has grown past 40 volumes, including Transzendentaler Idealismus (Hua 36, 2003), Die Lebenswelt (Hua 39, 2008), Grenzprobleme (Hua 42, 2014) and the C-manuscripts (Materialien VIII, 2006). Zahavi's later books (Subjectivity and Selfhood 2005, Self and Other 2014, Husserl's Legacy 2017, Phenomenology: The Basics 2018/19) and The Phenomenological Mind (with Gallagher, 3rd ed. 2021) carry the programme into cognitive science.
Who's who
| Person | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) | Subject; founder of phenomenology |
| Franz Brentano | Teacher; intentionality, time and imagination |
| Gottlob Frege | Fellow critic of psychologism; the Fregean noema |
| Martin Heidegger | Student and critic; lens through which Husserl was long read |
| Eugen Fink | Husserl's assistant; 1933 Kant-Studien defence |
| Maurice Merleau-Ponty | Body, self-affection, manuscripts read early |
| Jacques Derrida | "Metaphysics of presence" critique (3A) |
| Alfred Schutz | Transcendental ego as singulare tantum (3C) |
| Max Scheler | Empathy as basic, criticised by Husserl |
| Apel, Habermas | Intersubjective transformation, consensus theory |
| Føllesdal, Dreyfus, Smith, McIntyre | West-Coast (Fregean) noema |
| Sokolowski, Drummond, Gurwitsch | East-Coast noema |
| Bernet, Brough, Held, Kern, Melle | Husserl scholars and editors |
About this book
Husserl's Phenomenology by Dan Zahavi, 2003. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions
- The received Husserl is outdated. The foundationalist, idealist, solipsist philosopher of presence is a picture built on four published books and on reading him through Heidegger; the manuscripts dissolve it (Intro, Conclusion).
- The reduction expands, it does not subtract. Epoché and reduction suspend the natural attitude's positing to study the correlation of subjectivity and world; nothing is lost but naivety (ch. 2).
- Constitution is non-causal. To constitute is to let something appear and show itself as what it is, never to create it; the constitutor is itself constituted (ch. 2).
- Time-consciousness is self-awareness. Primal impression, retention and protention structure every experience; the absolute flow is the pre-reflective self-manifestation of acts, not a second consciousness (3A).
- The subject is embodied and social. The lived body is a transcendental condition of perception, and the Other's transcendence is the source of objectivity (3B, 3C).
- Continuity, not rupture. Husserl developed, but later moves are anticipated earlier; the lifeworld and intersubjectivity extend the transcendental project rather than abandon it (3D, Conclusion).