A Representation of Edmund Husserl [1859-1938] Introduction

Eventually I decided firstly that you ought to consider something from Husserl himself, and so I asked Maurice Natanson to read from section twenty-seven of Kersten’s translation of Husserl’s Ideas I. This and subsequent readings of statements by others are edited and illustrated, and their text will be displayed on the screen for maximum impact. In addition, I decided to present a list of twenty-seven results of Husserl’s investigations that my teacher, Cairns, published the year after Husserl died. Cairns spent four years with Husserl, was highly respected by him, and in his lifetime knew more about Husserl than any other American. The reading of this list by Richard Zaner is in the appendix and, like this introduction, may be omitted in classroom use of this video tape.

Where Husserl’s character is concerned, no full-fledged biography has thus far been published. Probably this is because Husserl was in no way a flamboyant public figure, but rather a private person who chiefly spent time with his family when he was not researching, writing, or teaching. There is some information about his life and especially his influence in Herbert Spiegelberg’s book. There is additional information in Karl Shuman’s book as well. But neither of these treatments are devoted to Husserl’s character and personality. Other sources are this little book by Kelkel and Sherer and this fine interpretation of Husserl’s philosophy by Maurice Natanson. For lack of other information I decided to assemble a complex representation from a variety of materials I have collected.

These materials are representations of several sorts. Firstly, there are testimonies about Husserl by Dorion Cairns, Herbert Spiegelberg, and Alfred Schutz, which are not only in their own words, but also, thanks to the tape recorder, in their own voices. Similar are the published statements about Husserl from Aron Gurwitsch, Ludwig Landgrebe, and Eugen Fink. Fred Kersten, Algis Mickunas, and Ronald Bruzina have recorded these for us. Secondly, there are some fifty visual representations of Husserl. One is a statue. The rest are pictures. Two of the pictures are oil paintings in color. The rest of the stills are in black and white, and most of them are from this recent book edited by Hans Rainer Sepp. One of the photographs is a silent moving picture, all of seventy-five seconds long. It is an amateur home movie made by James Luther Adams in 1936 and is the only film of Husserl that exists. This is a still taken from the film. Finally, we have Cairns’ comical imitation of how Husserl began a lecture, which appears the closest we can come to hearing Husserl speak. Furthermore, Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata has been used because the legend has it Husserl played it for guests after dinner.

The obvious way in which to combine these visual, verbal and sonorous representation is on a video tape. In most of these representations, Husserl can be seen relating to his work, his family, his collaborators, his friends and his students. My hope then is that by means of this video representation you will become aware of Husserl’s character and achievements.

Dedicated to the Memory of Raquel Kersten

Main Text

“A Representation of Edmund Husserl”

Eulogy at the 50^th Year Commemorative Meeting of the Husserl Circle,

Wilfred Laurier University

Ontario, Canada, June 1988

Lester Embree,

President of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc.

Nearly fifty years after his death it is already clear that, in terms of his direct and indirect influence, Edmund Husserl is the most important philosopher to think, write, and teach in the twentieth century. His influence continues to be increasingly felt not only in phenomenological philosophy but also in existentialism, hermeneutics, and structuralism, and also in such non-philosophical disciplines as psycho-pathology, sociology, and linguistics. His life and work thus deserve serious consideration.

Edmund Husserl was born in Proznitz, a small town in Moravia which was then part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire on April 8^th, 1859. The family was Jewish. Husserl’s father was a merchant. He died while Husserl was still in school. Husserl does not seem to have been a remarkable student before he went to college. His first interest, however, was in astronomy. Husserl went to the University of Leipzig in order to study mathematics and natural science. In 1878, he focused on mathematics and went to the University of Berlin where he worked with a famous mathematician, Karl Weierstrass. Husserl wrote his doctoral dissertation on the calculus of variations and received his degree in mathematics. He was then supposed to become Weierstrass’ assistant in Berlin but lost that opportunity when Weierstrass became ill. His career as a mathematician at least delayed, Husserl then served his year in the army. Fortunately, no war going on at that time.

He returned to Vienna in 1884, accepted the recommendation of a friend, and went to hear the lectures of Frantz Brentano. Already quite influential in philosophy and psychology, Brentano was also known as a Catholic priest who had not only left the Church after the dispute over the infallibility of the pope, but eventually married. Brentano impressed Husserl enormously. Following him, Husserl began to use above all the method of reflective observation. By this method one can investigate how conscious processes are intentional, or in other words how they are directed at objects. Brentano and his wife took Husserl with them on vacation. Together they painted his picture, which was lost during the second world war. Herbert Spiegelberg tracked down this picture of the painting in Husserl’s daughter’s room and enlarged it as best possible. Perhaps we can see in this painting the spirit of the leading thinker of the next century, as he was seen by a leader of the previous generation of German philosophers.

In 1886 Husserl was converted to Lutheranism by Gustav Albrecht. He is at left in this picture from 1880. Thereafter, his full name was Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl. Albrecht was a close friend from graduate school at Berlin. Although they are not usually emphasized, there are indications that Husserl always had some religious feelings. In 1887 Edmund Husserl and Malvine Steinscheider were married. She is in the center here. Also of Jewish background, she too had been recently baptized. They eventually had three children. By all accounts Husserl was not very practical. Malvine, however, was. One month before his marriage, Husserl successfully defended his Habilitationschrift, which was directed by the older, fellow Brentano student, Carl Stumpf. It is a logical and psychological study of the concept of number and combined not only what he knew as a mathematician, but also relied on the method of reflective observation that he had learned from Brentano and Stumpf.

After his defense he was able to begin his career as a Privatdozent at the University of Halle under Carl Stumpf. In 1890 Husserl published his Philosophie der Arithmetik. This continued the work began in his Habilitationschrift. During the 1890s he had an interesting interaction with Gottlob Frege that Jiten Mohanty has recently analyzed brilliantly. But he was chiefly working towards the book that was to catapult him into the philosophical firmament. According to oral tradition, he was never satisfied with the manuscript, so one day Malvine and Stumpf took it to the publisher behind his back. This book is, in English, the Logical Investigations. It was published in 1900 and 1901. Soon everybody in Germany and many elsewhere were talking about it.

Three remarks about this great book: first, it is a contribution to the philosophy of science and specifically to the philosophy of the formal sciences, where it decisively establishes that logic and mathematics are not parts of psychology, as some, such as John Stuart Mill, had thought. Against a three-hundred year tradition, the Logical Investigations, secondly establishes that awareness fundamentally does not involve images, ideas, or representations. In other words, perceiving and remembering, for example, involve an awareness that is intentive to an object, such as the wall across the room or a childhood event, but there is no representation in between the perceiving or remembering awareness and its object. There are representations, of course, involved when one is aware of something on the basis of texts, pictures, and indications, but such are secondary. Thirdly, the Logical Investigations establish that the knowing of ideal objects, such as numbers and propositions, has a non-sensuous seeing or, as I prefer to call it, evidencing as the foundation that justifies it. Husserl is not thereby a Platonist, however, for the non-sensuous evidencing of ideal objects must be founded upon a fictive or serious perceiving of real objects.

After the Logical Investigations appeared, Husserl moved, with a promotion to something like the American associate professor, to the University of Göttingen. He was forty-two years old and a leader in German philosophy. His reputation would continue to grow and spread, and his thought would develop quite a bit further in the subsequent thirty-seven years of his life. Here are Malvine and Husserl with their sons Wolfgang and Gerhardt, their daughter Elizabeth, who was called Eli (I met her once). And, also Husserl’s brother, Heinrich, and Heinrich’s wife, Klotilde in 1905. There was then still a German empire with a Kaiser. This was the German version of the Edwardian age. People were unaware of what was to come. One of Husserl’s colleagues in Göttingen was David Hilbert, who was as important for the history of mathematics and mathematical physics as Husserl was for the history of philosophy.

Wilhelm Dilthey used the Logical Investigations in his seminar, invited Husserl personally to Berlin for discussions, and Husserl was increasingly interested in the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) after that. After the Logical Investigations, students were coming to Husserl from all over, including Russia, America, and France. This picture is of the so-called Göttingen phenomenologists. One can read about them in Spiegelberg’s big blue book. Let me mention only two of those who became famous now and mention some others later. Roman Ingarden, a Pole, has made extensive contributions, especially in aesthetics, and several of his books are available in English. Alexandre Koyré is extremely important for the history of the natural sciences. It is not widely recognized that Thomas Kuhn considered Koyré his master, and Koyré, of course, always considered Husserl his master.

In 1911, Husserl published a long article that can be considered his philosophical manifesto. In English, the title is “Philosophy as a Strict Science” and a new translation is in preparation. This work introduces the distinctive methods of the mature philosophy, in a crude form, and clearly includes the natural and human, as well as the formal sciences, within its scope. In 1913, Husserl and several of his associates founded what in English translation would be called the Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. The first item published in it was Husserl’s third book-length publication which is called, again in English, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book. The second book of the Ideas, which Husserl was never satisfied with, was published posthumously, and the third book was never written. From Husserl’s later point of view, the Logical Investigations of a dozen years before are pre-philosophical. The Ideas is then where Husserl’s mature philosophy begins to be well expressed. Originally, the book was to begin with what is now numbered as §27. At the last minute, however, Husserl added what is now part one for the sake of his earlier students and renumbered, then, all the parts and sections accordingly. Nevertheless, §27 contains, I believe, the original starting point of Husserl’s mature philosophy. Before we have Maurice Natanson read from this section, let me remark that, without calling it so, Husserl begins from the lifeworld, the famous Lebenswelt. Despite the emphasis on the naturalistic outlook, it is clear that this lifeworld is an historical and social world, containing brutes as well as humans, and also a cultural world, the contents of which have value and use. I will include pictures from other socio-cultural lifeworlds during Maurice’s reading.

We begin our considerations as human beings who are living naturally, objectivating, judging, feeling, willing in the natural attitude. What that signifies, we shall make clear in simple meditations which can best be carried out in the first person singular. I am conscious of a world endlessly spread out in space, endlessly becoming and having endlessly become in time. I am conscious of it: that signifies, above all, that intuitively I find it immediately, that I experience it. By my seeing, touching, hearing, and in the different modes of sensuous perception, corporeal physical things with some spatial distribution of other are simply there for me, “on hand,” in the literal or the figurative sense, whether or not I am particularly heedful of them and busied with them in my considering, thinking, feeling or willing. Animate beings too – human beings, let us say – are immediately there for me: I look up; I see them; I hear their approach; I grasp their hands; talking with them I understand immediately what they objectivate and think, what feelings stir within them, what they wish or will. They are also present as actualities in my field of intuition even when I do not heed them. I can let my attention wander away from the writing table which was just now seen and noticed, out through the unseen parts of the room which are behind my back, to the verandah, into the garden, to the children in the arbor, to all the objects I directly know of as being there, and here in the surroundings of which there is also consciousness – a “knowing of them,” which involves no conceptual thinking. It is continually “on hand” for me, and I myself am a member of it. Moreover, this world is there for me not only as a world of mere things, but also with the same immediacy as a world of objects with values, a world of goods, a practical world. I simply find the physical things in front of me furnished not only with merely material determinations but also with value–characteristics, as beautiful and ugly, pleasant and unpleasant, agreeable and disagreeable. Immediately, physical things stand there as Objects of use, “the table” with its books, “the drinking glass,” “the vase,” “the piano,” etc. Naturally this applies not only in the case of the “mere physical things,” but also in the case of humans and brute animals belonging to my surroundings. They are my “friends” or “enemies,” my “servants” or “superiors,” “strangers” or “relatives.”

Two more remarks about the mature philosophy that beings with the Ideas. Firstly, the central insight presented in this book is that consciousness or mental life can present itself, if the right attitude is taken up toward it, as not part and parcel of the one spatial, temporal, and causal world—in other words as not a being in the world. Taking up such an attitude is considered essential for grounding the world and the positive sciences of it in a transcendental first philosophy. Otherwise, one has the difficulty of attempting to ground the whole of the world in a part of it. More than this though cannot be said on this occasion. Secondly, for all his emphasis on science, knowledge and the existence of things of various sorts, Husserl had clear places in his position for a theory of value and a theory of action; that is, a phenomenological axiology and a phenomenological praxiology, as well as a phenomenological epistemology.

In 1914 came the Great War, the one that was called “the war to end all wars,” and then the first of at least two world wars thus far. Husserl was fifty-five and too old to serve, but he was still patriotic. Bismark’s picture is said to have hung in his study. His children were old enough to serve. His daughter Eli is the nurse next to the soldier holding the crutches here. Husserl’s eldest son, Wolfgang, was killed in March 1916 at Verdun. His second son, Gerhardt, was wounded. Father van Breda once told me that it took Husserl many years to recover from the loss of Wolfgang. Later, during the 1930s, when the Nazis classified Husserl as a non-Aryan and attempted to take away his citizenship, Husserl protested that he had had one son killed and the other wounded for the fatherland. Also in March 1916, Edmund Husserl accepted the call and promotion to the full professorship at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. He lived there for the rest of his life. Eventually he was happy too, at least for a while.

At Freiburg Husserl had assistants. I believe that Edith Stein was the first. During the 1920s she became a Thomist and then a Carmelite nun. Later the Nazis took her from her convent and gassed her because she had been a Jew. She has since then been proposed for sainthood. Husserl’s next assistant was, I believe, Arnold Metzger. At the end of the war in Germany, the monarchy of the Kaiser was replaced by the Weimar Republic. Metzger wrote a book called, if we translate the title, Phenomenology of the Revolution. A letter from Husserl to Metzger from September 1919 is available in English and tells a great deal about Husserl’s inner motivation. Martin Heidegger seems to have been the next assistant. He later became famous for his hermeneutics and fundamental ontology, and increasingly infamous for his adherence to National Socialism. Oskar Becker was another early assistant who later flirted with Nazism.

This is Husserl with his daughter on vacation in 1921. Although he worked at his desk a great deal, he did go on vacations and even sometimes just read the newspaper and drank coffee. For some reason I have no pictures of Husserl between 1921 and 1927. But for this time period I do have several verbal representations which I can illustrate with pictures of Husserl and other people from other times. But before we hear this testimony it will be good to have a sense of how Husserl sounded. This is Dorion Cairns’ imitation of Husserl beginning a lecture: “Meine Damen und Herren, wir haben zum letsten mal gesehen, das René Descartes eine verdamfte tor war.” The first testimony is from Spiegelberg when he went to study with Husserl in Freiburg.

In the winter semester of 1924-25, Husserl lectured on history of philosophy, a lecture course which did not attract the phenomenological novice particularly. But he also gave a phenomenological seminar for advanced students on Berkeley’s Treatise on Human Knowledge. In spite of my insufficient preparation for an advanced seminar, I decided to make at least an attempt to be admitted as an auditor. Thus I had my first chance to see Husserl during his office hour in person. Erect, the striking head somewhat tilted backwards in a manner which made him look less physically undersized, he mustered me with a penetrating glance. What a relief it was when he recognized my preparation as adequate and my reasons for early admission as sufficient.

The two-hour weekly seminar took place in one of the smaller lecture rooms of the old university building. Berkeley’s Treatise meant not much more than the take-off point for Husserl’s philosophizing triggered off by minutes of the discussions of the preceding sessions by a seminar member at the beginning of each meeting. The balance of the session consisted almost exclusively of Husserl’s monologue. But this monologue was fascinating in its intensity, even though especially in the beginning, Husserl often repeated himself. He never used the lectern. Mostly he stood in front of the first bench fixating his audience. But at times he also walked back and forth in meditation. His peculiarly insistent high-pitched voice with the Austrian intonation still rings in my ears. He talked without notes. Only rarely did he stop. His style was often involved. Sometimes he displayed a somewhat grotesque humor, even at the expense of a seminar member. I still remember how at one time, in order to explain the essential relationship between body and ego using free varying fantasy, he converted one of the older members into a huge paper ball. Only rarely did he direct his questions at the audience. Once when a member raised a point, he interrupted, “Please talk slowly. You must know it is very difficult for me to transpose myself into the thought of others.”

Husserl talked about the need to learn phenomenological inner viewing (Innenschau), not differently from the way one has to learn observing in the natural sciences. As he put it, phenomenology means the use of one’s own eyes, abandoning tradition especially the tradition of language, and all one has been merely told. Thus Berkeley, the first philosophy Husserl had studied, as he told us, was one of the exemplary phenomenologists, “The phenomenologist must study history, he must not push it aside, he must hold conversations with its creators.” However, “the mere reading of books as books must cease, one has to read books as the works of living persons in order to understand them as live works.”

Then came an exhortation to the study of the much-neglected British empiricists, generally considered as outmoded, starting with Locke and using the original text rather than translations such as Kirchmann’s. This exhortation was for me a first incentive for studying English and English philosophy intensively.

But the most vivid impression I received on Husserl’s personality was on the occasion of a seminar reception in the Husserl apartment on the second floor of the apartment house on Lorettostrasse 40. Here Husserl circulated informally from group to group, asking and answering questions, and then commenting and philosophizing in free style.

Of Max Scheler he remarked that, in spite of his genius, he was merely a “fool’s gold” phenomenologist (“Talmiphänomenologe”): “One needs bright ideas, but one must not publish them.” He called Alexander Pfänder “our most solid craftsman.” When asked about Kierkegaard and Theodor Hacker, one of the German Catholic writers of the time, he responded sympathetically. Of the “History of German Literature” by Herman Hettner, he spoke with spontaneous enthusiasm. Since I was technically a law student at the time, he referred me to Adolf Reinach, an ex-law student who had written on the phenomenology of law, adding however that something more was needed than Reinach’s ontology, namely a phenomenology of the consciousness of law, of which he developed by way of improvisation, a picture which fascinated me.

But what stands out most vividly in my memory is Husserl’s plea for thoroughness at any price. “One must not consider oneself too good to work at the foundations.” He himself did not want to be anything but a worker at foundation walls. This was the spirit of the specialist of rigorous science. There was a certain bravado in the way in which he expressed his commitment, but it was genuine.

Next we have the story of how a second-year Harvard graduate student, who looked like this at the time, went to Germany on a traveling fellowship and was, so to speak, captured for phenomenology. This is how Dorion Cairns looked in 1969 when this recording was made. He was 68 years old.

So I went around to Edmund Husserl’s apartment and I did not realize that the proper time for making a formal call in Freiburg was exactly twelve o’clock noon. I got there at about three o’clock in the afternoon, and rang the doorbell. And this young man who looked like a prematurely gray Emmanuel Kant answered the door. His name was Ludwig Landgrebe and he was Husserl’s assistant at the time. I said as best I could, because my German was still pretty bad, that I would like to speak to Professor Husserl. He took my letters and asked me: “Wen darf ich melden?” “Whom shall I announce?” I no more understood what “Wen darf ich melden” meant than nothing at all! I made a big guess and said “Herr Cairns.” Apparently that was all right; he went in and I waited in an anteroom. The doors to Husserl’s study were closed.

There came out from the study a little man who introduced himself in a light, calm voice as Edmund Husserl; incidentally, he had taken the time to read the letters. I never read them. He then took me into his study. He asked me what I had read of his work and I said, “Well, my German as you see is not very good but I have attempted to read the Logische Untersuchungen.” He turned around in his desk chair, took down the second volume of the Logische Untersuchungen, and said: “Study this. Study it pen in hand. If you don’t understand or if you object, write down your question or objection. Come to me next week with what you have done and we shall discuss it together.”

My plan to do the grand tour of all the universities of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom went completely by the board. Soon I became immersed in studying Husserl, and talking with him, and I decided to remain and study with Husserl. The first thing that made me believe that he had something that nobody else had was his analyses of perception, imagination, and memory. I had never seen anything like it before, and I felt: “The guy is right! and nobody else.” “He’s right, at least about these things, and I’m going to stick with him. Who cares about a grand tour, etc.?”

In 1966 Aron Gurwitsch, who looked like this at the time, published a statement about the effect on him of his encounters with Husserl during the 1920s, when he looked more like this. Fred Kersten will read his recollection.

When the author made his first acquaintance with Husserl’s philosophy about 40 years ago, he was overwhelmed by the spirit of uncompromising integrity and radical philosophical responsibility, by the total devotedness which made the man disappear behind his work. Soon the young beginner came to realize the fruitfulness both of what Husserl had actually accomplished and of what he had initiated, the promise of further fruitful work. In Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Husserl had disclosed a vast field of research and had indicated approaches and methods of analysis by means of which results of enduring value could be obtained, to the extent and in the sense in which results of enduring value may be expected from any human, scientific, scholarly, or philosophical activity. The same holds with respect to Logische Untersuchungen, though this work is more restricted in scope. It was the style of Husserl’s philosophizing, painstaking analytical work on concrete problems and phenomena rather than the opening up of large vistas, that made the young student take the decision to devote his life and work to the continuation and expansion of Husserl’s phenomenology – in a word, to become a disciple forever, faithful to Husserl’s spirit and general orientation, but at the same time, prepared to depart from particular theories if compelled to do so by the nature of the problems and the logic of the theoretical situation.

A postcard that Husserl sent to Gurwitsch after Gurwitsch had published a review also conveys something about how the phenomenologist treated his followers. This is how Gurwitsch looked at about that time. The following is Gurwitsch’s own translation of the Husserl postcard. The picture is a print by Aron’s wife, Alice.

April 15, 1932

Dear Mr. Gurwitsch,

Your review has pleased me very much. As far as I look back, it is about the only review based on real understanding of any one of my writings (since the Logical Investigations). Only with regard to some passages I could imagine that you have not ultimately penetrated the complete bearing of the reduction, that is, the total revolution which it purports for the idea and method of philosophy over and against the total tradition. But since you have come thus far, you will by yourself come farther. The new writings will speak to you. I would like it very much if you could review Formal and Transcendental Logic. Have you studied this work in connection with the Cartesian Meditations? I regret very much that you are not in my vicinity so that you could partake with two excellent younger philosophers (Dr. Fink and D. Cairns) in the discussion concerning the recently opened up problem spheres of transcendental phenomenology. Write me about your work and its progress, for which I have such great confidence. With best wishes,

Your,

E. Husserl

The following recollection of Husserl, by Ludwig Landgrebe, has been translated and is read by Algis Mickunas.

Almost everyone who first encountered Husserl experienced something of a disappointment at not immediately seeing any external signs of how this quiet and simple man could come to have the vast international fame that he had finally garnered. His thought was a simple recounting of what he had seen and thought as if it was a report about a distant land he had explored. And yet, something soon came to compel the listener. Husserl did not offer a precise and cold report of his discoveries. Rather, thinking itself spoke through him, a thinking that he had mastered and made into a spirit who resided in him and transformed him as soon as he began to speak. He was no longer himself, name and rank were forgotten, the surroundings disappeared for him, he offered nothing but chains of thought, which he had developed and brought to ever new turns. His glance went far beyond things, almost blind to the environment, toward a distance that might be far outside or deep inside. In this way, he sketched a magic circle in which reality was encompassed.

One might enter his study preoccupied with oneself, with one’s concerns and joys, with events of the day. Then one was confronted as if by another world, where nothing that would concern one’s individual self mattered any more. In this world, the concentrated power of thought, exercised for decades, lead its own life. One became almost ashamed to have thought about oneself. He could be so fatherly, so kind, completely devoted and helpful to his students and friends. When he was surrounded by his thoughts, however, everything stood still. Even for the listener there was nothing more important than what Husserl was saying and hours then passed as minutes.

In 1929 Husserl gave the lectures in Paris from which the Cartesian Meditations were developed. He was the first German philosopher invited to France since the war. The feelings ran that deeply. The next year he published Formal and Transcendental Logic. Eugen Fink says somewhere that Husserl actually in his lifetime published only three books, each of them twice. Thus, Formal and Transcendental Logic is a redoing of the thought in the Logical Investigations, but of course from a transcendental point of view. The Cartesian Meditations repeat the Ideas, First Book of 1913, and the Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology repeats the 1911 article “Philosophy as a Strict Science.”

In 1929 Husserl was seventy years old and retired from the university. He continued to live in Freiburg. He had his family around him. This is his daughter and grandchildren, Wolfgang and Ruth. His son Gerhardt is in the center of this picture. After retiring Husserl did not stop working. Alfred Schutz knew Husserl during the 1930s. For reasons that will become obvious I have divided his testimony into two parts. Schutz was also in the First World War. He was in the Austrian army.

In a book published in 1932, I tried to use Husserl’s phenomenology as I understood it and Weber’s methodology as a starting point for the analysis of the meaning-structure of the social world. Encouraged by some friends, I sent the philosopher a copy and received from him a letter with highly gratifying comments and the invitation to visit him in Freiburg. I hurried to see the philosopher in Freiburg and was received in the friendliest way. From this time on up to Christmas 1937, I managed to see Husserl every year, three or four times in Freiburg, Vienna, and Prague for shorter or longer periods. During my stays in Freiburg, I had the ever-memorable experiences of accompanying him on his “philosophical walks,” which he undertook every day, weather permitting, after his work at his desk, for one and a half hours before lunch, accompanied by Fink, sometimes also by Dorion Cairns and Landgrebe. I was also permitted to participate in discussions in his home in the evenings with a few of his intimate friends, such as Jean Hering.

On these occasions Husserl frequently invited his interlocutors to ask questions, and I availed myself eagerly of such a gracious offer. Husserl started in the friendliest way to answer the question. But after a few sentences he turned to the ideas with which his mind was occupied during his work and explained in a long monologue his latest discoveries. Problems of the constitutive and constructive phenomenology, such as that of the constitution of time, of the streaming-standing present, of the flowing-in, of the phenomenological observer, of the Lebenswelt, and of the birth and death occupied him in the first years. Later on, the themes of his Viennese and Prague Lectures, which led to “Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die Phänomenologie,” stood in the center of his interests. He had hoped to sum up his life work in six or seven continuations of the articles published in Philosophia.

One single time I had the opportunity to listen to Husserl talk to students. This was in Prague in November 1935. Husserl delivered at the German and the Czech University the lectures from which the essay published in Philosophia was developed. Emil Utiz, at that time Professor of Philosophy at the German University, asked Husserl to speak one morning to the students in his seminar, and Husserl invited me to accompany him. Husserl improvised for more than one hour without any notes on the great event in occidental culture when a few Greek thinkers started to wonder why things are as they are, on the importance of the theoretical attitude, on the dignity of philosophy, and on its vocation in the time of troubles such as those we were living in. I had never heard Husserl talk with such persuasion and deep feeling. His emotions swept over the fascinated young hearers who learned certainly for their whole lives what philosophy means and what a philosopher is. Husserl speaks somewhere in his writings of his endeavor to live a philosophical life in its full earnestness. By this statement he has revealed the innermost kernel of his personality. Everyone who met this astonishing man came immediately to the impression “Ecce philosophus.”

When Husserl gave his lectures in Vienna and Prague he was not able, because classified as a non-Aryan, to speak in public in Germany. That was of course because this fellow, who had recently been pleased to hear German youth call “Adolf Nazi,” had been elected. If one remembers the political climate outside, then this family portrait from 1935 can have a false gaiety about it. During the 1930s Husserl declined an opportunity to immigrate to America. Had he lived much more than three more years, he would have died in a concentration camp.

The most vivid picture we have of Edmund Husserl is from when he was seventy-seven years old. With Husserl is his daughter. [FILM]

In his last years, Husserl went on writing as he always had. This is what his famous research manuscripts look like. They are in a nineteenth century version of short-hand. Now let me show you some further pictures of Husserl working in his retirement and also his last research manuscript. After that we will have the rest of the Schutz testimony.

At my last unforgettable visit with him shortly after Christmas 1937 he expressed the confident hope that his book, should it ever be finished, would be the coronation of his life work. Husserl was bed-ridden and suffered already from the disease which led a few months later to his death. I was merely permitted to see him for a short time. But he must have had a presentiment of his forthcoming end, for he explained to me that the fully developed transcendental phenomenology makes it indubitable that he, the mundane man Edmund Husserl will have to die, but that the transcendental Ego cannot perish. The patient got so deeply moved by this idea that Mrs. Husserl had to make an end to our last meeting.

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl died on April 27^th, 1938. He was seventy-nine years old. That was fifty years ago this year. The death notice has all his honors mentioned. The line at upper write is from the book of Matthew and translates “Blessed are the pure at heart for they shall see God.” I’ve always thought, however, that Husserl wrote his own epitaph when, at the end of the first essay in the Krisis, he said, “I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of speaking, according to my best lights, principally before myself, but in the same manner also before others, as one who has lived in all its seriousness, the fate of a philosophical existence.” At the burial, Husserl’s last assistant, Eugen Fink, offered this eulogy. His previously unpublished statement has been translated and read by Ronald Bruzina. In this picture, Jan Patoka is at left, and Fink is at right.

Eulogy for Edmund Husserl given at his cremation, April 29, 1938 by Eugen Fink:

It was in the midst of work on the text in which to give decisive expression to what for him was the final truth, wanted thus to bring his work to internal completion, that fatal illness struck Edmund Husserl. Because the essential movement of his life was philosophy, his death perhaps seems to us now as untimely and senseless. The question arises: Does the life of him who died remain incomplete, a tragic fragment? In the silence that surrounds him in his death there is no longer place for the words of praise and acclaim that are due the work, the philosophic achievements of Edmund Husserl. By his death he has been taken out of the world of human measure and human honoring. His work stands on its own, and will endure and be appreciated as long as knowledge of the truth is that wherein man sets his rank and worth.

The meaning of the death that Edmund Husserl died first begins to show by looking at the life of this unique man. He was someone who took up his philosophizing as commission and grace from God; and so from the outset he had removed it from the limited contexts where life, enclosed in the finite, anxiously keeps death out of view. Death was never for him the alien sense-shattering power that can suddenly cut short an existence caught up in self-achievement as its meaningfulness. To him death was always the mystery of life, the real fulfillment of its meaning. Just as the essence of righteousness refers beyond the earthly and points to the gateway of death, so the essence of life always seemed to him pervaded by death and in turn to pervade death itself.

He held his own life to be a thing not to be ruled, as filled to the brim with passion, that keen enthusiasm with which an unconditional thinking takes the essential and the eternal to be what ultimately counts, the eternal beyond philosophical concepts, which discloses itself to man in the beautiful and the holy. Precisely because Edmund Husserl had, in absolute unconditionality, raised his life beyond captivity to the transitory and this-worldly, and with his whole living fervor existed in the eternal and the essential, he was fulfilled, and as fulfilled could truly die. The truth of his death, the valid meaning of his return home to the eternal is only worthily expressed in Plato’s words: “In fact, then, what those who are really philosophers do is to learn the practice of dying.”

Besides his many manuscripts and phenomenological followers, Husserl left behind his wife, Malvine. She is here with a Franciscan priest, Herman van Breda, who helped to save her as well as Husserl’s Nachlass and library and to establish the Husserl archive in Louvain, Belgium. After the war, Israel gave van Breda a medal in recognition of his efforts on behalf of Jewish children during the Nazi period. He had a drink with Golda Mayer on that occasion. Van Breda’s successor at the Archive in Louvain is Sam Ijsseling, at the left here with his staff. There are branches of the Husserl Archive at Cologne, Freiburg, Paris, and Duquesne University. The Nachlass is well cared for. These are some of the many journals receptive to studies of and investigations in Husserl’s phenomenology. Most significant of all is Husserl Studies. There are hundreds of books in at least a dozen languages dealing with Husserl’s thought.

During the fifty years since Husserl’s death, the phenomenological movement has undergone further extensive and complex development in France and America, as well as Germany and elsewhere. This is not the occasion to discuss that. Rather, our concern has been with Husserl’s character and accomplishments. I hope that you now have some sense of the sort of person he was and what he did.

Appendix:

As an appendix for the specialist, we will now have Zaner’s reading of the twenty-seven results of Husserl’s philosophizing that Dorion Cairns listed in 1939.

“Some results of Husserl’s Investigations”

According to those in a position to know, the bulk of Husserl’s philosophy lies not in his published works but in his literary remains. Therefore, so long as the latter remain inaccessible, any statement of what is “most noteworthy in Husserl’s thought” must be provisional.

1. Differentiation between the real determinations of the stream of consciousness and what pertains to its intentional correlate.

2. Analysis of the general structure of the conscious act and its intentional correlate: the object as it is posited with its objective sense and in its manner of givenness.

3. Analysis of the horizon of acts predelineated by the given act, especially the horizon of acts intending the object as identical.

4. Distinction between various kinds and modes of positing and between various manners of givenness, original or reproductive, direct or indirect.

5. Analysis of evidence as a manner of givenness; distinction between types of evidence, adequate, inadequate, apodictic, evidence of clarity or fullness and evidence of distinctness, fictive self-givenness as evidence of possibility.

6. Conception of synthesis: fulfillment as a synthesis of identification between the more and less evident.

7. Differentiation between individual objects and essences.

8. Analysis of sense-perception and of the general nature of the world of sensually perceivable objects.

9. Conception and realization of the idea of constitutive analysis.

10. Analysis of the passive self-constitution of the stream of consciousness with its temporal phases and simultaneous complexity.

11. Analysis of the passive constitution of objects transcendent of the stream of consciousness, particularly the constitution of the sensually experienced world through founding objective strata.

12. Analysis of the passive constitution of other minds and the world as intersubjective.

13. Description of spontaneity in general: ego-stimulation, attention, action.

14. Analysis of secondary passivity, the habitual retention of the products of active constitution.

15. Conception of the ego as subject-pole; analysis of the constitution of the ego’s habitual character through spontaneity.

16. Analysis of categorial objects (e.g., facts) as constituted in syntactical acts founded ultimately in non-syntactical acts (e.g., of sense-perception).

17. Clarification of the relation between the reflectively intended categorial sense and the straightforwardly intended categorial object.

18. Description of syntheses of fulfillment of acts in which categorial objects are intended.

19. Distinction between formalization and generalization; correlatively, between formal and material essences.

20. Clarification of the idea of logic and of the relations of mathematics and logistics to formal logic and formal ontology.

21. Conception and realization of the idea of material ontologies.

22. Analyses of axiotic and practical acts and objects; development of formal and material a priori theories of value and practice.

23. Analysis of the relation of experience to objective sense.

24. Analyses of the relation of the world of physical science to the world as given in direct experience.

25. Rudimentary constitutive analyses of the social and cultural worlds.

26. Clarification of the sense of Occidental science and philosophy since the Renaissance.

27. Clarification of the nature of phenomenology and its relation to other sciences.

Written and Performed by Lester Embree.

Edited by Melanie Dudash