MY SCHOOL WORK: EDMUND HUSSERL IS STUCK WITHIN REALISM AND IDEALISM

Edmund Husserl who was born April 8, 1859, he is known to be a prominent German philosopher. Husserl is the founder of Phenomenology, a method for the description and analysis of consciousness through which philosophy attempts to gain the character of a strict or rigorous science. Husserl’s phenomenological method reflects an effort to resolve the opposition between Empiricism, which stresses observation, and Rationalism, which stresses reason and theory, by indicating the origin of all philosophical and scientific systems and developments of theory in the interests and structures of the experiential life. Before justice is done to the argument on whether or how Husserl is stuck between realism and idealism, it is important that an understanding needs to be giving to Husserl’s phenomenology.

While a professor in the Göttingen, German institute, Husserl drafted the
outline of Phenomenology as a universal philosophical science. Its fundamental methodological principle was what Husserl called the phenomenological reduction as against the natural standpoint we all perceive reality from caused by the crisis of Western culture. This phenomenological methodology focuses the philosopher's attention on un-interpreted basic experience and the quest, thereby, for the essences of things, in this sense; it is “eidetic” reduction. On the other hand, it is also the reflection on the functions by which essences become conscious. As such, the reduction reveals the ego or consciousness for which everything has meaning. Hence, Phenomenology took on the character of a new style of transcendental philosophy, which repeats and improves Kant's mediation between Empiricism and Rationalism in a modern way and also the Meditation of Descartes in a radical way. Husserl presented the program and systematic outline of phenomenology in his book, Ideas; General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology; 1913, of which, however, only the first part was completed according to history (Completion of the second part was hindered by the outbreak of World War I).

With his work, Husserl wanted to give his students a manual to solving the crisis of Western culture and closing the gap that existed between the subject and object of knowledge. The result however, was just the opposite: most of his students, like Heidegger and Sartre, took Husserl's turn to transcendental philosophy as a lapse back into the old system of thought and therefore rejected it. Because of this turn, as well as the war, it is believed that the phenomenological school fell apart.

Husserl accepts neither the rigid division between appearance and reality nor the narrower view that phenomena are all that there is; (sensations or permanent possibilities of sensations). Husserl’s Phenomenology insists on the intuitive foundation and verification of concepts and especially of all a priori claims. Husserl’s philosophy cum phenomenology is mostly seen as a scholastic thought which is aimed at solving the problems encountered in the philosophy of Plato, Descartes and Kant. It is a truism that Husserl opines that phenomenology must honor Descartes as its genuine patriarch; this is not far-fetched from the fact that Descartes influenced much of Husserl’s phenomenology. Nevertheless, Descartes’ influence was decisive for it led Husserl to begin where Descartes began, with the thinking self. But Husserl took a more radical approach to his quest to finding a foundation to knowledge, unlike Descartes who sought his quest through systematic doubt, Husserl tries to build a philosophy and foundation of knowledge without any presuppositions, looking solely to things and facts themselves, as they are given in actual experience and intuition. Consequently, after a brief look at Husserl’s phenomenology has been carried out, it is pertinent that we understand or clarify the terms; realism and idealism.

Realism is a term and school of thought in philosophy, which accords to things which are known or perceived an existence or nature which is independent of whether anyone is thinking about or perceiving them. Realism as a concept is faced with the following questions; Do sense perception and other forms of cognition, and the scientific theorizing which attempts to make sense of their deliverances, provide knowledge of things which exist and are as they are independently of people's cognitive or investigative activities? It is at least roughly true to say that philosophical realists are those who defend an affirmative answer to the question, either across the board or with respect to certain areas of knowledge or belief. A realist as they are often called, belief in the existence of a Unicorn, numbers, at el even though there is no physical prove that these things exist or can be experienced with the four senses.

On the other hand, idealism is seen as any view that stresses the central role of the ideal or the spiritual in the interpretation of experience. Idealism further holds that the world or reality exists essentially as spirit or consciousness, that abstractions and laws are more fundamental in reality than sensory things, or, at least, that whatever exists is known in dimensions that are chiefly mental as ideas. There are two classes of idealism, we have the metaphysical idealism which asserts the ideality of reality, and epistemological idealism, which holds that in the knowledge process, the mind can grasp only the psychic or that its objects are conditioned by their perceptibility. The metaphysical idealism on one hand is opposed to materialism, which assert that reality exist only through matter. The epistemological idealism is opposed to realism.

For Husserl, we can experience an object without the five senses, eye, smell, hear and feel. This form of philosophy is a radical empiricism and can be linked with that of the realist philosophy, which gives room for the existence of something irrespective of whether we can perceive them or not. Some empiricists, for example, conceive of sensation in such a way that what one is aware of in sensation is always a mind-dependent entity (sometimes referred to as a “sense datum”). Others embrace some version of “direct realism,” according to which one can directly perceive or be aware of physical objects or physical properties. Kant is known with the dictum that, although all knowledge begins with experience it does not all arise from experience; he established a clear distinction between the innate and the a priori. He held that there are a priori concepts, or categories—substance and cause being the most important—and also substantial or synthetic a priori truths. Although not derived from experience, the latter apply to experience. A priori concepts and propositions do not relate to a reality that transcends experience; they reflect, instead, the mind's way of organizing the amorphous mass of sense impressions that flow in upon it.

In relation to this, there is a long-standing, and nevertheless still open, controversy within the phenomenological tradition, concerning the question whether Husserl phenomenology represents a form of idealist or realist philosophy; Husserl himself, although he defines, in the vast majority of the cases (at least after the so-called “transcendental turn” of the1907 lectures on “The idea of the phenomenology” and the development of the “transcendental reduction” there introduced), his own position as a “transcendental idealism”, seems not to be satisfied with this definition, to the point that sometimes he describes, on the contrary, his own philosophical position in terms of a form of philosophical realism. If, for instance, in the Cartesian Meditations Husserl writes that “phenomenology is eo ipso (transcendental idealism)”, in his book, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, he claims nevertheless, with reference to his own position, that indeed “there can be no stronger realism than this”. This, at least “alleged”, uncertainty of Husserl’s view, has led to a deep discordance among Husserl’s pupils and critics, since the very beginning of what Spiegelberg, an American phenomenologist, has called “The phenomenological movement” and then within the general reception of Husserl’s work.

Conclusively, we can vehemently see Husserl’s phenomenology being stuck with idealism, when we look at Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Here Husserl had hoped to find a middle road between realism and idealism, however, according to many continental scholars, there was always an ambiguity or a tension in Husserl’s phenomenology that he could not resolve and that drove him into the ranks of the idealists. This is somewhat evident in Husserl’s phenomenological thesis when he argues that only through consciousness are things present to us as meaningful entities or that this depend entirely on consciousness for their existence. To a great extent and due to Husserl’s emphasis on consciousness and genetic phenomenology, we can argue that Husserl’s seems to be comfortable in the idealist school of thought than the realist school, in closing the gap between the object-subject philosophy and consciousness.

References:

"Phenomenology", Encyclopedia Britannica. “Encyclopedia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite” Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 2012.

"Continental philosophy" Encyclopedia Britannica. “Encyclopedia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite” Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 2012.

Steven Crowell, “Husserlian Phenomenology” in A Companion to Phenomenology And Existentialism, Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall (eds), Blackwell Publishing, 2006.