Edmund Husserl

Husserl began as a mathematician. In The Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) he tried to explain psychologically how the concept of number arises in the mind, and the logician Gottlob Frege criticised him for reducing logic to psychology. In the first volume of Logical Investigations (1900–01) Husserl rejected that very "psychologism": the laws of logic and mathematics hold regardless of how anyone happens to think.

Where, then, should philosophy start? Husserl's answer was phenomenology, the description of what appears to us, the phenomena, just as it appears. In Logical Investigations he wrote that we cannot rest content with "mere words" but must go back to "the things themselves", and the phrase became the watchword of phenomenology: do not start from high-flying speculation or inherited theory, but look closely at how things are actually given to us in experience.

The basic structure of consciousness he identified is intentionality: consciousness is always consciousness of something. To see is to see something, to wish is to wish for something. In Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology (1913) he proposed the method of epoché, the suspension of judgement: we "bracket" our everyday belief that the outside world exists and concentrate instead on the structure of how the world appears to consciousness.

The method changed a generation of philosophy. At Göttingen and Freiburg he gathered a large circle of students, and Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger served in turn as his assistants. Words of everyday use today such as "empathy" and "lifeworld" go back in large part to his work.

Husserl had been baptised a Protestant in 1887, but Nazi racial policy took no account of conversion. In April 1933 a special decree of the state of Baden under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (the law that drove opponents of the Nazis and Jewish officials out of public service) placed the already retired Husserl on leave and barred him from all teaching.

The details differ between sources. The German Wikipedia says the measure was revoked in July 1933 because his son had fallen at the front, which brought him under the "front-line veterans' privilege", and that his teaching licence was withdrawn for good in 1936, after the Nuremberg race laws of 1935. The English Wikipedia says he was barred from the university library on 6 April and reinstated the following week after a public outcry, yet elsewhere in the same article calls the library ban a rumour. Publication was certainly blocked: his last major work could not appear in Nazi Germany.

His relationship with his student Heidegger mixes legend and record. Husserl championed Heidegger from 1917 and helped him succeed to his chair in 1928. But after carefully studying Heidegger's writings in 1929, he concluded that Heidegger had put Dasein in place of the pure ego and so turned phenomenology into anthropology, and he criticised this in a 1931 lecture, "Phenomenology and Anthropology". In April 1933 Heidegger became rector and joined the Nazi Party, while Husserl that year resigned from the Deutsche Akademie.

It is often said that Heidegger notified Husserl of his dismissal, but according to English-language accounts that is a rumour and the notice came from the previous rector. By then Heidegger had broken off direct contact; he did not attend the funeral in 1938, and he removed the dedication to Husserl from the 1941 edition of Being and Time. Accounts also differ on whether that removal was a repudiation of their relationship or the result of the publisher's fear that the book might otherwise be banned. Hannah Arendt at first suggested that Heidegger's conduct had hastened Husserl's death, but later withdrew the accusation.

After a fall in the autumn of 1937 Husserl developed pleurisy, and he died in Freiburg on 27 April 1938, aged 79. The historian Gerhard Ritter was the only member of the Freiburg faculty to attend the funeral. German biographies note that his death spared him further persecution. His student Edith Stein was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942.

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, his last work, grew out of lectures Husserl gave in Vienna and Prague in 1935 (some sources date the Vienna lecture to 1936). Pushed out of the university, the old philosopher argued all the more passionately for the relevance of philosophy at a time when Europe was descending into irrationalism.

The crisis he meant was not that science was wrong; physics and mathematics had been brilliantly successful. The trouble was that modern science, trying to grasp the world only objectivistically, could no longer say anything to people asking about the meaning of their lives. He therefore called on the sciences to remember where they came from: the "lifeworld", the pre-theoretical world we take for granted, in which we live, think, act and create. Even the exact world of science is built up on that lifeworld through people's shared effort.

With this idea Husserl sought to lessen the estrangement that had grown between human beings and the world. But the book could not appear in Germany in his lifetime; only its first two parts were printed, in 1936, in a Belgrade philosophy journal.

His manuscripts, some 40,000 pages in shorthand, nearly perished after his death. A young Belgian Franciscan, Herman Leo Van Breda, who came to Freiburg in 1938, smuggled them out of Germany, and they remain today in the Husserl Archives founded at Leuven. Almost the entire first edition of the posthumous Experience and Judgment, published in Prague in 1939, was destroyed by the Germans after they annexed Czechoslovakia.