Husserl Quotes

To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness. ~ Edmund Husserl

I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world. ~ Edmund Husserl

In his mature works from Ideas I, notably the Cartesian Meditations (1931), Husserl presented his approach as a radicalization of Descartes' project that sought to return knowledge to a foundation in the certainty of subjective experience (cogito ergo sum). ~ Dermot Moran

In our vital need ... science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the question which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions about the meaning or meaninglessness of this whole human existence. Do not these questions, universal and necessary for all men, demand universal reflections and answers based on rational insight? In the final analysis they concern man as a free, self-determining being in his behaviour toward the human and extrahuman surrounding world and free in regard to his capacities for rationally shaping himself himself and his surrounding world. ~ Edmund Husserl

Philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science
the dream is over. ~ Edmund Husserl

If all consciousness is subject to essential laws in a manner similar to that in which spatial reality is subject to mathematical laws, then these essential laws will be of most fertile significance in investigating facts of the conscious life of human and brute animals. ~ Edmund Husserl

Since our philosophy has given us no better way to express that intemporal, that indestructible element in us which, says Freud, is the unconscious itself, perhaps we
should continue calling it the unconscious - so long as we do not forget that the word is the index of an enigma - because the term retains, like the algae or the stone that one drags up, something of the sea from which it was taken.

The accord of phenomenology and of psychoanalysis should not be understood to consist in phenomenology's saying clearly what psychoanalysis had said obscurely. On the contrary, it is by what phenomenology
implies or unveils as its limits - by its latent content or its unconscious - that it is in consonance with psychoanalysis. Thus the cross validation between the two doctrines is not exactly on the subject man; their agreements, rather, precisely in describing man as a timber yard, in order to discover, beyond the truth of immanence, that of the Ego and its acts, that of consciousness and its objects, of relations which a consciousness cannot sustain: man's relations to his origins and his relations to his models. Freud points his finger at the Id and the Superego. Husserl, in his last writings, speaks of historical life as of a Tiefenleben. Phenomenology and psychoanalysis are not parallel; much better, they are both aiming toward the same latency. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

At the beginning of the project, I wasn't certain that I could come up with an engaging storyline and cast of characters in this world, so I had a strong bias toward actually writing, and worrying about research later. In other words, I was afraid that I'd devote a year or two of my life to grinding through Kant and Husserl, then discover that there simply was no novel to be written here. ~ Neal Stephenson

Psychologically experienced consciousness is therefore no longer pure consciousness; construed Objectively in this way, consciousness itself becomes something transcendent, becomes an event in that spatial world which appears, by virtue of consciousness, to be transcendent. ~ Edmund Husserl

Direct the glance of apprehension & inquiry to pure consciousness, in its own absolute Being. ~ Edmund Husserl

Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within. ~ Edmund Husserl

Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people. ~ Edmund Husserl

We would be in a nasty position indeed if empirical science were the only kind of science possible. ~ Edmund Husserl

First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher
must "once in his life" withdraw into himself and attempt,
within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences
that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom
(sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair. It must
arise as His wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending
toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from
the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute
insights. ~ Edmund Husserl

It is because we are through and through compounded of relationships with the world that for us the only way to become aware of the fact is to suspend the resultant activity, to refuse it our complicity (to look at it ohne mitzumachen, as Husserl often says), or yet again, to put it 'out of play'. Not because we reject the certainties of common sense and a natural attitude to things - they are, on the contrary, the constant theme of philosophy - but because, being the presupposed basis of any thought, they are taken for granted, and go unnoticed, and because in order to arouse them and bring them to view, we have to suspend for a moment our recognition of them. The best formulation of the reduction is probably that given by Eugen Fink, Husserl's assistant, when he spoke of 'wonder' in the face of the world. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

In philosophy, phenomenology is the study of the structures of experience and consciousness. Wine blind tasting is the best phenomenology, phenomenology par excellence, returning us from our heads into the world, and, at the same time, teaching us the methods of the mind. ~ Neel Burton

The physical image presentation aims at the subject. The presentation of the image itself as the presentation of the appearing image-representant is an entirely different experience. Here, too, it is possible that the consciousness of imaging can slip away entirely, in which case an ordinary perceptual presentation would result. Preventing this consciousness of imaging from arising from the start in a purely intuitive manner is the effect produced by images simulating the look of reality, images of the sort found in the wax museum, and the like. Although in such cases we have a conceptual knowledge of the fact that the appearances are merely image appearances, in the intuitive experience itself the re-presentative moment, which is otherwise intimately mingled with the appearances, is absent. But this moment is decisive for intuitive image presentation. We have genuine perceptual presentations in those cases, accompanied by the thought that their objects are mere images. The appearance itself, however, presents itself as the appearance of a present object and not as an image. Indeed, in naïvely contemplating it, the appearance forces us to make the intuitive perceptual judgment. In doing this, it deceives us. In truth, there is perhaps another (nonappearing) object, standing to the appearing object in the relation of original to image. We know all of this, and yet the illusion continues to exist, since the appearance possesses the characteristic of normal perceptual presentati ~ Edmund Husserl

All consciousness is consciousness of something ~ Edmund Husserl

Within this widest concept of object, and specifically within the concept of individual object, Objects and phenomena stand in contrast with each other. ~ Edmund Husserl

To every object there correspond an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject. ~ Edmund Husserl

Why must the plastic form make up the foundation of image consciousness? ~ Edmund Husserl

Experience by itself is not science. ~ Edmund Husserl

The ideal of a pure phenomenology will be perfected only by answering this question; pure phenomenology is to be separated sharply from psychology at large and, specifically, from the descriptive psychology of the phenomena of consciousness. ~ Edmund Husserl

You sometimes hear people say, with a certain pride in their clerical resistance to the myth, that the nineteenth century really ended not in 1900 but in 1914. But there are different ways of measuring an epoch. 1914 has obvious qualifications; but if you wanted to defend the neater, more mythical date, you could do very well. In 1900 Nietzsche died; Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams; 1900 was the date of Husserl Logic, and of Russell's Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. With an exquisite sense of timing Planck published his quantum hypothesis in the very last days of the century, December 1900. Thus, within a few months, were published works which transformed or transvalued spirituality, the relation of language to knowing, and the very locus of human uncertainty, henceforth to be thought of not as an imperfection of the human apparatus but part of the nature of things, a condition of what we may know. 1900, like 1400 and 1600 and 1000, has the look of a year that ends a saeculum. The mood of fin de siècle is confronted by a harsh historical finis saeculi. There is something satisfying about it, some confirmation of the rightness of the patterns we impose. But as Focillon observed, the anxiety reflected by the fin de siècle is perpetual, and people don't wait for centuries to end before they express it. Any date can be justified on some calculation or other.

And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has not diminished, and ~ Frank Kermode

Pure phenomenology claims to be the science of pure phenomena. This concept of the phenomenon, which was developed under various names as early as the eighteenth century without being clarified, is what we shall have to deal with first of all. ~ Edmund Husserl

Something similar is still true of the courses followed by manifold intuitions which together make up the unity of one continuous consciousness of one and the same object. ~ Edmund Husserl

I must achieve internal consistency. ~ Edmund Husserl

In essence, Zizek's procedure here is no different in principle from that of Husserl, who wrote and rewrote voluminous drafts and was continually "introducing" the project of transcendental phenomenology. The one thing that has changed is that Zizek is publishing his drafts as he goes. ~ Adam Kotsko

Summertime, and the reading is easy ... Well, maybe not easy, exactly, but July and August are hardly the months to start working your way through the works of Germanic philosophers. Save Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl for the bleaker days of February. ~ Michael Dirda