Husserl and James

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Edmund Husserl

Piet Hut, Oct. 1998

The German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was the founder of the School of Phenomenology, which provided one of the most influential currents in early twentieth century European thought. His slogan was ``Zu den Sachen selbst'' (To the matters themselves).

Husserl is an unusual philosopher in that he effectively modeled himself after a physicist, in using both theory and experiment, while letting experiment be the deciding factor. His laboratory was what he called the epoche (a Greek word indicating `suspense of judgment'), a switch in attitude from the what to the how. Rather than taking the world for granted, while finding our way amidst the many things that populate our world, Husserl invites us to change our focus, in order to investigate how all those things appear. In doing so, he extended William James's radical empiricism.

Through the epoche, all that appears is seen and acknowledged as it appears, in its own structure of appearing. The trick is to refrain from tying down appearance immediately and prematurely to the usual external explanatory framework (of a physical world of objects, in which we possess a body with sense organs and a brain that gives rise to our consciousness that grasps the objects).

At first, it may seem to be very strange to `put the world on hold,' to drop any belief in an objective reality as the prior and only `real' form of reality. But there is nothing magic or special in making this shift. It is only the result of the shift that is remarkable, a form of amazement and wonder. In fact, reactions of such a type are the touchstone to check whether a shift really has been made, or whether an attempt to `put the world on hold' has only been an intellectual game.

Many poets and novelists have testified to such a shift, a dramatic change in experience, away from a belief in a solid world in which we are anchored, and towards a completely open experience of the world as bottomless. Several philosophers, too, have given us an inkling of their experience along these lines. The problem is, in our culture, that poets typically give their experiential report without any theory, and philosophers tend to give only their theoretical reflections while glossing over the experiential component that undoubtedly underpins their theoretical moves towards more open interpretations of reality.

One philosopher who was unusually open and honest about both the importance and personal impact of experiential involvement in philosophy was William James. It was partly through inspiration he received from James, that Husserl made his far more detailed attempts to combine experimental and theoretical philosophy.

When reading Husserl, one is struck by the sense of honest amazement that is conveyed. An amazement about the way we make sense of the world, and a deep sense of surprise about sense, something we find everywhere but something we cannot catch. Like space, like time, sense is for us what water is for a fish. Our lives are embedded in it, given by it, irremovably linked to and through it. (Note: I use `sense' here in its aspect of `meaning,' and I do not imply any connection with `sense experience' - the word sense conveys more of a real grasp of something than the somewhat abstract word meaning).

Sure, we can interpret our world as a world of things. But what is a thing? When we look carefully, then we find that what we considered to be an object appears in our consciousness as a bundle of meanings, draped around sensory impressions that are far, far less complete and filled in and filled up than the `real thing' we feel to be present, three-dimensionally, continuous in time. What then remains of the solidity of the object? It is recognized in its givenness for us through the sense of solidity we have. Its continuity? This follows from our sense of continuity and identity. Its reality? Nothing but a sense of reality. The indubitability of its reality? The only thing we have a real handle on is our sense of indubitability of its reality.

Husserl himself did give ample indications of the fact that for him the epoche was a way of life; towards the end of his life he described it as a ``complete personal transformation'' ( Husserl 1936). And indeed, recognizing that we live in a world of sense can be a shocking experience. Not only do we find the world to be dissolved in sense, upon close inspection, but we find that we ourselves, too, are known to ourselves only as complex forms of sense. This shift towards sense is far from an armchair philosophy consideration, it takes place in the laboratory of our life, as is nicely expressed by Harvey (1989):

Husserl's procedural techniques for inducing the `shift' are an attempt to articulate a certain strange experience that has happened to philosophers, to artists and poets, and perhaps to everyone save the hopelessly sane, now and again throughout their personal history. This strange experience is the experience of the strangeness of experience, and of the world. And this strangeness is nothing more (nor less) than the act of seeing through the sedimented meanings that one inherits and develops, and that structure one's world.

One important point has to be emphasized here. When we take a turn towards experience as primal, rather than derived, it is not at all clear ``whose'' experience we are talking about. We normally assign experience to ourselves, to a person with a certain identity, playing all kinds of roles. But aren't all these aspects given as part of experience? In this context, it is interesting to read the reaction of the Japanese philosopher Nishida (1911)

Over time I came to realize that it is not that experience exists because there is an individual, but that an individual exists because there is experience.

After all, we can only know objects in the presence of a subject, just as we know ourselves as subject only through our interaction with objects, be they thoughts or things or other forms of appearance. And since it all leads back to experience, it does seem reasonable to start there, and to consider both subject and object to be attributes of experience, rather than the other way around.

So it would seem that the whole world dissolves into a world of experience. But that is not quite right. If we put on hold the notion of `world,' `person,' and `self,' then we cannot label what happens as being the experience of a self. Yes, of course, things still happen, but we can refrain from calling it experience. What then to call it? How about calling it appearance. It is clear that something is going on. Something happens. Something appears. What appears? Appearance appears. That's all. Yet, as Husserl and James showed us, the field of appearance offers a wide realm for exploration (cf. Hut 1996,   Hut & Shepard 1996,   Hut & van Fraassen 1997,   Hut 1999a,   Hut 1999b,   Hut 1999c,   Hut 2000c,   Hut 2001a).

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William James

Piet Hut, Oct. 1998

The American philosopher William James (1842-1910), psychologist and philosopher, coined the term `radical empiricism'. He provided one of the sources of inspiration for the even more radical approach of Husserl's epoche, in which all questions about objective reality are set aside. Like the later phenomenologists, James made it a point to go back to the `things themselves', as they appeared, without adding or subtracting anything. Towards the end of this life, he summarized his view as follows (James 1912, p. 42):

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

In many ways, this attitude resembles Husserl's main guiding rule, his `principle of all principles' ( Husserl 1913), according to which we should take experience at face value, so to speak, without adding or subtracting anything. This may seem simple, perhaps even trivial. However, both James and Husserl understood how difficult it really is to focus on experience as it presents itself, rather than as we package it through various layers of re-presentation. In fact, James saw this task as being part of his earlier philosophy of pragmatism, in which he only wanted to accept philosophical ideas that had `cash value'. On p. 159, he writes:

The pragmatic method starts from the postulate that there is no difference of truth that doesn't make a difference of fact somewhere; and it seeks to determine the meaning of all differences of opinion by making the discussion hinge as soon as possible upon some practical or particular issue. The principle of pure experience is also a methodological postulate. Nothing shall be admitted as fact, it says, except what can be experienced at some definite time by some experient; and for every feature of fact ever so experienced, a definite place must be found, somewhere in the final system of reality. In other words: Everything real must be experienceable somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real.

As is the case with Husserl's writing, especially after his discovery of the epoche, James's later writing clearly shows his personal involvement in his explorations of the nature of experience. Like for Husserl, and for any physicist or other natural scientist, for James experiment is at least as important as theory. And a study of experience requires a focus on first-person experience; the usual academic emphasis on third-person experience does not suffice. Therefore, a purely intellectual analysis of the writings of Husserl and James, no matter how accurate as to their historical and literary aspects, will never revive their deeply felt experiential commitment to inquiry -- as little as reading a recipe book will let you taste a meal, let alone feed you. To understand them, we have to relive their way of questioning the very way that appearance appears, in what we call our experience (cf. Hut 1997,   Hut, Ruelle & Traub 1998,   Hut 1998,   Hut, Goodwin & Kauffman 2000,   Hut 2000a,   Hut 2000b).

References

Harvey, C.W. 1989, Husserl's Phenomenology and the Foundations of Natural Science [Athens: Ohio University Press], p. 233.

Husserl, E. 1936, transl. 1970, The Crisis of European Sciences [Northwestern Univ. Pr.], p. 137.

Husserl, E. 1913, transl. 1962: Ideas, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology [New York: Macmillan Publ. Co.], section 24.

Hut, P. 1996, Structuring reality: the role of limits, in Boundaries and Barriers, eds. J. Casti and A. Karlqvist [Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley], pp. 148-187.

Hut, P. 1997, Confronting Reality, paper presented at the 5th Japanese-American Phenomenology Conference, Sept. 1996, Sendai, Japan.

Hut, P. 1998, Book Review of The Special Theory of Relativity, by David Bohm, to appear in J. of Consc. Stud.

Hut, P. 1999a, Exploring Actuality through Experiment and Experience, in Toward a Science of Consciousness III, eds. S.R. Hameroff, A.W. Kaszniak, and D.J. Chalmers (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press), pp. 391-405.

Hut, P. 1999b, Theory and Experiment in Philosophy, J. of Consc. Stud. 6, No. 2-3, pp. 241-244.

Hut, P. 1999c, The Role of the Subject in Science, in the proceedings of the State of the World Forum, 1998.

Hut, P. 2000a, The Construction of Autonomous Tools, in The Greatest Inventions of The Past Two Thousand Years, ed. J. Brockman (Simon & Schuster), pp. xxx.

Hut, P. 2000b, There Are No Things, invited contribution to The World Question Center, on the edge web site.

Hut, P. 2000c, As in a Dream, position paper, which was the basis for the closing talk at the Future Visions conference in New York City, in September 2000, as part of the meeting of the State of the World Forum in tandem with the United Nations Millennium Summit.

Hut, P. 2001a, The Role of Husserl's Epoche for Science: A View from a Physicist, invited paper presented at the 31st Husserl Circle conference in Bloomington, IN, in February 2001.

Hut, P., Ruelle, D. & Traub, J. 1998, Varieties of Limits to Scientific Knowledge, Elements of Reality: A Dialogue, Complexity, 3, No. 6, pp. 33-38.

Hut, P., Goodwin, B., & Kauffman, S. 2000, Complexity and Functionality: A Search for the Where, the When, and the How in Unifying Themes in Complex Systems, Proceedings of the International Conference on Complex Systems, ed.: Y. Bar-Yam (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books), pp. 259-268.

Hut, P. & Shepard, R. 1996, Turning `The Hard Problem' Upside Down & Sideways, J. of Consc. Stud. 3, 313-329; reprinted in Explaining Consciousness , ed. J. Shear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 305-322.

Hut, P. & van Fraassen, B. 1997, Elements of Reality: A Dialogue, J. of Consc. Stud. 4, 167-180.

James, W. 1912, Essays in Radical Empiricism , reprinted in Essays in Radical Empiricism & A Pluralistic Universe, 1967 [Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith].

Nishida, K. 1911, transl. 1990, An Inquiry into the Good [New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr.], p. xxx (Rom. num. 30).