Edmund Husserl

Husserl's position espouses neither empiricism, which reduces all knowledge to sensation, nor the rationalism that deduces the real from reason alone: this is its distinctiveness. His "principle of principles" is that every originarily giving intuition is a source of right for knowledge, but intuition is not only sensory. Alongside the perception of fact there is an intuition of essences, an immediate giving of the general with its own evidence. Knowledge is thus governed not by a privileged faculty but by the given itself, as it presents itself: a third, intuitionist term that passes between the two classic poles rather than arbitrating them.

Ideas I, §24 (the "principle of principles") · Logical Investigations, VI

Husserl is resolutely foundationalist: he seeks a last and absolute foundation of knowledge, a base of originary evidences on which all the rest can be built without circle or regress. This bedrock is neither a coherence of the system nor the reliability of a process, but giving evidence, the thing showing itself in person. Phenomenology means to be "first philosophy", the discipline of principles that justifies the other sciences while borrowing nothing from them, which places Husserl with the Cartesian quest for an absolute beginning rather than with a web of mutually supporting beliefs.

Cartesian Meditations, First-Second Meditation · Ideas I, §24

For Husserl truth is no convention nor mere internal coherence: it is the full agreement of a signitive intention with its object given in person, the "fulfilment" by which what was only intended comes to intuition. The true is the identity of the intended and the given object, which keeps him on the side of correspondence, but a lived correspondence measured by intuitive evidence rather than by a copy of facts.

Logical Investigations, VI, §36-39

Husserl defends the ideal being of general objects: number, the proposition, the species are no fictions nor mere words, but identical, timeless unities that many acts can intend and recognise as the same. Against nominalism and empiricist abstractionism, he holds that the species gives itself in an intuition of its own. This idealism of meanings is yet without a separate Platonic hypostasis: essences are objective, not a world of Forms subsisting in itself.

Logical Investigations, II ("The ideal unity of the species")

Husserl's whole method is a reflective return upon consciousness: suspending the natural attitude turned toward things in order to bring the gaze onto the lived experiences themselves and their way of intending. Truth is sought in the patient description of the mind's inner life, not in action or the transformation of the world. It is a philosophy of reflection par excellence, making the examination of seeing, judging and perceiving the philosopher's first task.

Ideas I, §27-32, §50

In the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl distinguishes the body-object (Körper), a thing among things, from the lived body (Leib), the living body I am, seat of my sensations and organ of all perception. It is through my lived body that I experience the other as another self, by an analogising apprehension of their body. He thus opens the analysis of lived corporeality that Merleau-Ponty will carry further, but without making the body the ultimate subject of perception: there the lived body remains subordinate to constituting consciousness, which holds the score back from the extreme.

Cartesian Meditations, Fifth Meditation · Ideas II

Husserl's great battle is aimed at relativism: to make the validity of the true depend on a species, a culture or a psychic constitution is to contradict oneself, since that very thesis would claim to be universally true. What he establishes for logic he extends by right to any norm: there are ideal validities, independent of the facts that think them. His fight bears on the status of intellectual norms more than on moral values, which he little thematised; but its spirit is clearly universalist, hostile to reducing everything to variable conventions.

Logical Investigations, I, §32-39 (the refutation of relativism)

After the reduction, Husserl holds that all objectivity is constituted by transcendental consciousness: the world has meaning and validity of being only as the correlate of the acts that intend it, never as an absolute reality posited outside them. This is a transcendental idealism, but one to be carefully distinguished from Berkeley's: it does not deny the world's existence nor dissolve it into sensations in a mind; it analyses how the world gives itself and makes sense for a consciousness. The real is no illusion, it is what is constituted in and for subjectivity; a measure of realism remains, since the perceived thing keeps its transcendence over against consciousness, always given by profiles, never exhausted.

Ideas I, §49-55 · Cartesian Meditations, Fourth Meditation

Husserl steadily opposes the naturalism that would treat consciousness as one psychic fact among the facts of nature, answerable to causal laws alone. The psychologism he combats is precisely this naturalising of mind. Consciousness has a mode of being of its own, that of meaning and intending, irreducible to the thing: it calls for an eidetic description, not a naturalistic explanation. Without denying that the human being is also a being of nature, he refuses to let spiritual life be absorbed into it.

Philosophy as Rigorous Science (1911)

Without thematising technology for its own sake, Husserl prepares its critique: the Galilean mathematisation of nature breeds a "technicisation" of knowledge, in which one manipulates formulae and procedures whose originary meaning has been forgotten, emptied of the intuition that grounded them. This denunciation of a knowledge become pure operative calculation, cut off from its lived ground, foreshadows the techno-criticism Heidegger will radicalise. A cautious position, drawn from the diagnosis of the Crisis rather than from an explicit philosophy of technology.

The Crisis of the European Sciences, §9