Husserl's Phenomenology Book

Zahavi nicely explicates Husserl's primary contributions, explaining them in a clear, orderly manner. There are three chapters, on early, middle, and late Husserl. Husserl's early works stemmed from his motivation to counter psychologism. This position attempts to dismiss the objective status of logic by understanding logic as a purely psychological phenomenon, which ought to be studied empirically, as other natural processes. Husserl sought to find a new objective grounds of logic in the possibilities of conscious experience; this required attending carefully to our first-personal experience and gave birth to his phenomenological approach.

Through this investigation, Husserl believed he discovered that all conscious experiences are distinguishable into two components, an intentional act, and the object of that act. Our intentional acts are directed towards real objects in the world, which there is subjective content that enables the act; so we are connected to the world, and the basis of logic is to be found in this relation to real objects. Husserl distinguished between different kinds of intentional acts, which deliver us objects of differing ontological standings. On one end, in perceptual acts we encounter objects most directly and optimally; on another end, in linguistic acts we encounter mere references to objects, which lack all the detail of perceptually delivered objects.

Husserl shifted his philosophical focus from the examination of details in phenomenological experience to to formulating a systematic method of using phenomenological description to discover transcendental conditions that make those details possible. (This is pretty much Kant's project, and I am still unclear whether Husserl's primary points make any real advancements from Kant, other than a few that I'll name below). Husserl carved out a category the natural attitude to refer to an epistemic attitude we typically hold in everyday life on which we assume that all the immediate identities and facts of things we encounter are true and actual in a mind-independent way. On Husserl's transcendental phenomenological method, we are supposed to suspend or bracket off the validity this natural attitude; this is called the epoche.

This is a fancy way of talking about having general skepticism. We perform this epoche for the sake of realizing how we, as transcendental subjects, are responsible for the typical meanings that objects have for us. (It seems to me that the general insight is that when we shift our attitudes, beliefs, or other sorts of doxastic relations to objects, the ways those objects appear to us change; I don't see why it is essential that the two attitudes, between which we shift, must be this natural attitude and then an attitude of skepticism. Maybe the skepticism is necessary because only this, as a prior condition, is consistent with the position that the meanings of things are created by us; if we maintained a certain belief in the positive meaning of objects as being given or self-evident, as the prior position, this contradicts the view that the meaning is conditional upon us. But more generally, I don't see how these conclusions move any further from Kant's).

Later in his career, Husserl began to focus on embodiment, intersubjectivity, and the lifeworld. He focused on the fact that the possibilities of our experiences are conditional upon our embodied standpoint, which is subject to natural forces like biology, time, and culture. Particularly, the meanings that objects have are not just solely created by our isolated selves. Rather, our enculturation and interactions with others hand to us the normative meanings objects ought to have. Others show us what objects mean and set forth the trajectories of the meanings we'll make.

Husserl also critiqued natural science. He argued that natural science cannot account for subjectivity, value, or anything that is existentially meaningful. Science fated itself to this incapacity from the assumptions and goals it set for itself at its genesis: science aims to deliver totally objective knowledge, which holds true for any person, regardless of their enculturation and particularity. The consequence of this is that science bars itself from taking details of this enculturation and particularity of the individual seriously.

In contrast, Husserl's transcendental phenomenological method can attend to this domain. Husserl gives a name for it: the lifeworld -- the realm of everyday experience had by a subject. Husserl argues that all scientific knowledge is conditional on the lifeworld, since scientists are embodied subjects who conduct their investigations within their lifeworlds. There are totally invariant structures to the lifeworld (e.g., due to the biological hardwiring of our cognitive system; or the mind-independent features of the environment), and these undergird the objectivity of scientific knowledge. So while science really is objective in its own way, we have an incomplete understanding of any of its claims, until we consider the lifeworld in which it is based. Scientific truth is objective but not totally unconditional.

I would give this book 5 stars for the clarity and succinctness of this writing. My only irritation with it is that Zahavi has a very clear agenda to defend Husserl against some traditional attacks on him, attacks that he is Cartesian at heart, married to the ideal for totally unconditioned knowledge of the subject. Zahavi wants to show the world that Husserl had many of the radical positions that are typically thought of as belonging to only later thinkers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.

Perhaps this is true. I've read only the Crisis in the European Sciences, Husserl's last work, and the primary place in which he talks about intersubjectivity and culture. But there his ideas are extremely preliminary; I still think Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are the first to really do radical work on these topics. But I am no Husserl scholar, as Zahavi is; and anyways, the debate over who owns what idea is very uninteresting.

I'd highly recommend this book for readers who want a general orientation to Husserl's thought. For readers who as especially interested in the topics dealt with by late Husserl, I'd recommend them to read Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty instead.