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Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks

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Natanson's book is amazingly well-written. Husserl's often difficult and wordy ideas of phenomenology are covered clearly enough for the beginner, and in-depth enough for the student of Husserl. Natanson offers not just a review of phenomenology, but covers all from attitudes to methods, existence to the application of phenomenology. This is the first book I recommend to anyone studying Husserl.

What do phenomenologists do?

Nowadays they do what the father of modern phenomenology, Austrian-born Professor Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938) , taught his students and readers to do. They philosophize in a distinctly new way. They ask

(1) What things in the common-sense, space-time continuum real world can we know beyond doubt or error?

and

(2) What makes such knowledge possible?

Before he was a philosopher, Edmund Husserl was a mathematician and a natural scientist. He began philosophizing as a Cartesian. He agreed with Rene Descartes that "cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) is true beyond doubt. Descartes pushed his insights up to the door leading into phenomenological analysis but did not go through that door.

Husserl made cogito ergo sum more explicit: ego cogito cogitatum. I think something thought. Early on, Husserl focused on the cogitatum, the object thought about. The ego/mind passively receives impressions of extra-mental objects presented by the senses.

Most of his earliest students, including Adolph Reinach and (future canonized saint) Edith Stein began with Husserl at this first stage in his evolution. In those days Husserl was focusing on the known world as real, extra-mental world. He was busy, everyone thought, re-establishing the ancient Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophia perennis of knowable, necessary, pure essences.

Then in 1913 Husserl published IDEAS. In that book he fell back, ostensibly, into an earlier German philosophical passion for idealism associated with Hegel. Husserl moved, it seemed, away from the thing thought and its objective reality. He now focused on the act of knowing (cogitatio) and the knowing ego (cogitans). Knowing was now presented as an active reaching out by the knower for objects presented in consciousness. For their part, those objects by their natures also reached out to be known. There was two-way "intentionality."

How was all this possible? Answering these questions and extending methods of phenomenology: e.g. -- intentionality, epoche (bracketing aspects of the perceived object out of consideration) and reduction (movement from the ego with a biography and the object with a history to timeless knower-knowing-known) on to the human body, out farther toward alter egos and inter-subjectivity, to empathy, to politics, to sociology -- is what phenomenologists have done ever since Husserl first excited them to do so.

All this and much more is delved into lucidly and convincingly by Professor Maurice Natanson in his 1973 EDMUND HUSSERL: PHILOSOPHER OF INFINITE TASKS. A practicing phenomenologist himself, Natanson makes it clear that is the ever evolving middle and late Husserl that Natanson most admires. The Austrian's thinking had become highly nuanced. His students, including Martin Heidegger and Edith Stein, were producing dazzling monographs showing phenomenologists at work. And Husserl's probing of the inter-subjective world of egos and alter-egos began its continuing appeal to students of literature, art and social sciences. More recently Husserl was criticized by Sartre.

Natanson's book is not an easy read. But it is a rewarding read. Not as clear an exposition of phenomenology as method as several more recent writers. But Natanson is honest and constructive.

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