Edmund Husserl quotes

Edmund Husserl was a German philosopher and the founder of phenomenology. His work laid the foundation for much of twentieth-century continental philosophy. He greatly influenced thinkers such as Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. Here are 20 of his quotes:

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

Edmund Husserl

To every object there corresponds 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

I must achieve internal consistency.

Edmund Husserl

I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this 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

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

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.

Edmund Husserl

A new fundamental science, pure phenomenology, has developed within philosophy: This is a science of a thoroughly new type and endless scope. It is inferior in methodological rigor to none of the modern sciences. All philosophical disciplines are rooted in pure phenomenology, through whose development, and through it alone, they obtain their proper force.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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