Edmund Husserl

Founder of the Phenomenological School

Note: Strictly speaking, Husserl should not be considered to be an existentialist; he would probably have rejected that classification. The influence of his philosophy of phenomenology on the development of existentialism (especially in the case of Heidegger and Sartre) is the reason for his being included here.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was the teacher of Heidegger and the founder of the Phenomenological School. According to Husserl, philosophy must be able to present a doctrine of truths of absolute validity. In his search for this absolute truth, Husserl starts from the phenomenology of the spirit, with the purpose of discovering whether a truth of absolute validity can be drawn from an analysis of the phenomena which are present to man's consciousness.

By "phenomena" Husserl understands any act of sensitive perception or of intellective knowledge which makes its "appearance" in consciousness. Consciousness, understood as the background upon which the phenomena are offered to the will, receives and connects these phenomena.

Now, Husserl observes that in any phenomenon there is an "ideal essence" which is perceived by the mind and which makes up the "content of consciousness." These essences are understood by Husserl to be like Plato's Ideas, but with this difference -- that they come from within the phenomena and are not separated from them.

The ideal essences, making up the content of consciousness, do not depend for their reality upon the existence of the external world. In other words, even assuming the Cartesian principle that I may be deceived as to the real existence of all surrounding objects, I cannot be deceived by whatever is actually experienced in my consciousness.

The objects of my experience may be real or imagined, but my experiences are genuine contents of my consciousness; and as such, they have an absolute element (ideal essence) which has to be distinguished from what is contingent (the existence).

Now, it is the ideal essence which gives a significance to the facts of experience. In other words, any knowledge and judgment of the facts of experience must be preceded by knowledge of the ideal essences, because they open the way to an understanding of what reality is.

These essences can be combined to form part of another, larger pattern -- for instance, the idea of species, of morality, of aesthetics. But no matter how greatly the pattern may be enlarged, it never will contain Being in its totality. For the absolute Being is transcendent, while the greatest possible pattern is still in itself an activity of consciousness and therefore a phenomenon.