Edmund Husserl Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

The actuality of all of material Nature is therefore kept out of action and that of all corporeality along with it, including the actuality of my body, the body of the cognizing subject. — 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

It just is nothing foreign to consciousness at all that could present itself to consciousness through the mediation of phenomena different from the liking itself; to like is intrinsically to be conscious. — Edmund Husserl

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

In a few decades of reconstruction, even the mathematical natural sciences, the ancient archetypes of theoretical perfection, have changed habit completely! — Edmund Husserl

Without troublesome work, no one can have any concrete, full idea of what pure mathematical research is like or of the profusion of insights that can be obtained from it. — Edmund Husserl

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

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

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

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

The perception of duration itself presupposes a duration of perception. — Edmund Husserl

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

Natural objects, for example, must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur. — 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

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

In all the areas within which the spiritual life of humanity is at work, the historical epoch wherein fate has placed us is an epoch of stupendous happenings. — Edmund Husserl

I must achieve internal consistency. — 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

Experience by itself is not science. — Edmund Husserl

At the lowest cognitive level, they are processes of experiencing, or, to speak more generally, processes of intuiting that grasp the object in the original. — Edmund Husserl

All consciousness is consciousness of something — Edmund Husserl

All perception is a gamble. — Edmund Husserl

What is thematically posited is only what is given, by pure reflection, with all its immanent essential moments absolutely as it is given to pure reflection. — 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

I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights, principally before myself but in the same manner also before others, as one who has lived in all its seriousness the fate of a philosophical existence. — Edmund Husserl

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