Husserl: Empiricism, Psychologism, Circularity, and Reification

Phenomenology first emerged as a school of philosophy from German Universities in Gottingen and Munich before World War I. Between 1913 and 1930 a series of articles on phenomenology were published by a group of phenomenologists whose chief editor was mathematician Edmund Husserl. Husserl always referred to himself as a “perpetual beginner.” Phenomenology is a non-empirical science that is descriptive without presuppositions and examines objects as phenomena. In this context the term “intuition” simply means, “seeing.” Essences are the most general, necessary, and invariant characteristics of the object observed. “Bracketing” or “Epoche” (borrowed from skeptics) is the suspending belief in existence.

“Bracketing” has under gone another change in meaning under Husserl. “Bracketing” means the transition from non-reflective thinking to reflective thinking. The purpose of this definitional change is to protect phenomenology from the criticism that its methodology and epistemology is logically circular. Phenomenologists have presented counter arguments claiming non-circularity, but I am unconvinced.

One of the first schools of thought phenomenology had to defeat was Psychologism.

Psychologism was popular at the end of the 1800s. The problem with psychologism is it reduces all knowledge to neuroscience which creates big epistemological problems since necessary truths like "A is not non-A" or "a ÷ b = a × 1⁄b" are not necessarily true at all since these formulas only express the physical structure of our brain which is contingent--that is, our brains could have been organized another way so that these necessary truths could be false! All of mathematics and logic would collapse if their propositions were merely contingently true! Edmund Husserl absolutely destroyed this school of thought in his book, Logical Investigations (1901). Husserl’s arguments against psychologism still stand today. In this famous critique of psychologism, Husserl revealed himself to be a Platonic Realist—numbers exist along with Plato’s Forms. One of Husserl’s phenomenological studies asked, “What is a number?”

Husserl thought of phenomenology as a scientific positivism of essences. Adorno is critical of both phenomenology and positivism because they extract the “immediate data of consciousness” from phenomena in the stream of consciousness. Adorno argues that Husserl and positivistic methodology buy into the idea that thought is Being itself--which is pure idealism. Positivists are actually “subjectivists” except they eliminate the subject from the truth. And yet at the same time positivism is “solipsistic.”

"What Husserlian phenomenology amounts to, therefore, is the ‘transfer of positivism into Platonic realism’" (Adorno: The Recovery of Experience, Roger Foster, Loc. 54-55, p. 132).

The Husserlian phenomenological definition of consciousness is Intentionality, "the distinguishing property of mental phenomena of being necessarily directed upon an object, whether real or imaginary." Consciousness is always directed at an object and has an object before it.  You would think that positivists would be more suspicious of "facts" if consciousness can be directed at objects whether real or imagined. But consciousness can forget its transcendental character (not an object) and view itself only as an constructed “I.”  The subject identifies with objects because they are defined and static. Objectification of the self is the first reduction of the self. This is Sartre’s existentialist theory of consciousness--The Transcendental Ego. In fact, all modern existentialist literature accepts this theory of the Self—that is, consciousness as intentionality.

We also must understand “false consciousness” in which symbolic meaning becomes confused with the thing symbolized. Thought habitually reifies its experiences:

"Reification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly superhuman terms…reification is the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something else than human product—such as facts of nature, results of cosmic law, or manifestations of divine will…. The reified world is, by definition, a dehumanized world."(The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. By Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman, (1966), Double Day, p. 89).

Husserl wrote, "Whereas the philosophy of nature [Science] by contrast, seeks to eliminate the subjective, transcendental philosophy seeks absolutely to elucidate it." This is the, The Crisis of the European Sciences, by Husserl (1911)(Introduction, pdf.). This is our current challenge today--to restore the Subject as Human Being. The elimination of the Subject from science, history, philosophy, logic--and even the science of psychology, of all disciplines--is the hallmark of our historical epoch moving toward greater dehumanization. 

Husserl two major works are Ideas, and Cartesian Meditations.

Ideas, by Edmund Husserl,(1913)(pdf.). This is the best book to start with if you want to read Husserl directly. I would recommend reading secondary material around phenomenology as much as possible before reading Husserl directly.

Cartesian Meditations by Edmund Husserl (1929)(pdf.).

This work is divided into five "Meditations" of varying length, whose contents are as follows:

1. First Meditation: The Way to the Transcendental Ego

2. Second Meditation: The Field of Transcendental Experience

3. Third Meditation: Constitutional Problems

4. Fourth Meditation: Constitutional Problems Pertaining to the Transcendental Ego Itself

5. Fifth Meditation: Transcendental Being as Monadological Intersubjectivity