Edmund Husserl

Husserl is the acknowledged founder of Phenomenology. Husserl thought that Phenomenology was an exact science whose main drive was to study the phenomena, or appearances of human experience. Yet, he did not thought of it as a science of facts, but rather as an a priori or eidetic science, which deal with essences, and is grounded on the absolute certainty. This sort of certainty was thought to be achieved through examination of consciousness by consciousness itself. Thus, Husserl considered consciousness the main topic for philosophy. And in examining the form of this consciousness, Husserl discovered what he called ‘the natural standpoint’. Husserl said that the world as it is actually lived by individual is the natural standpoint. Yet according to Husserl, it is possible to get behind this natural standpoint to identify an invariant intentional structure. Husserl developed a method of bracketing, which he called epoche. For example, I may look with pleasure at a blossoming apple tree. From the natural standpoint, I can see that the tree exists outside of me in space and time and that I am enjoying my physical state of pleasure. From this standpoint, moreover, there is an assumed relation between me and the apple tree. But I can suspend my judgments about the tree and perform an epoche. This bracketing moves me from a natural to a phenomenological standpoint. By no longer referring to objective existence, by applying the phenomenological instead, I have arrived at the pure datum of intending experience. However, the fact that the external world is disregarded and that epoche is committed, does not deny this world; the external world maintains its existence. Husserl claims we should describe experience purely as we experience it, without prejudging it by any philosophical doctrine, any scientific theory, or even by our everyday faith that there are things in the world independent of our experience. We should take what we are conscious of at face value and not twist our experience into what we believe it should have been. Indeed, what a phenomenologist like Husserl considers important is that which can be experienced via the human senses. After reduction and abstraction, what remains is what an individual knows, regardless of the scientific or transcendental data.