Maurice  Natanson

EDMUND  HUSSERL:
PHILOSOPHER  OF  INFINITE  TASKS

Evanston. Northwestern University Press. 1973. 1974. Paperback: 248 pages.

ISBN-10: 0810104563

Reviewed by Patrick Killough


(1) biblio.com 01/20/2011

Would you recommend this book to other readers?  Yes. * * * * *

review:

You will find the word "phenomenology" used in architecture, archeology, physics, philosophy, psychology, general science, perception, religion and existentialism. It may have been first used by G.W.F. Hegel in his PHAENOMENOLOGIE DES GEISTES (1807). In the early 1960s I took a graduate course in that text at the University of Texas with visiting Professor Richard Kroner, at the time the grand old man of Hegelian studies. 

Etymologically "phenomen - ology" is the study or philosophy of phenomena. Phenomena are objects of human consciousness. In both Hegel and more especially Edmund Husserl, questions asked may include:

-- What do I know when I receive sense impressions?

-- What is the contribution to knowing phenomena of my "I," i.e., of myself as knower?

-- What is consciousness?

-- How does consciousness work?

-- Why am I sure that phantasms/impressions in my consciousness point to or "intend" a reality outside my consciousness?

-- What is the basis of my human certitude about the world beyond my knowing? 

Let's look briefly at Professor Maurice Natanson's 1973 EDMUND HUSSERL: PHILOSOPHER OF INFINITE TASKS. Despite many, many antecedents, including his teacher Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938) is the man scholars instinctively have in mind as the father of contemporary phenomenology.  A chief concern of Professor Natanson is to find and demonstrate the underlying unity in Husserl's evolution as a thinker first in mathematics and physical sciences, then psychology and finally beyond all that into the "infinite tasks" of phenomenology.

The book is not by any means an easy read unless you are a professional phenomenologist or historian of philosophy. It is not PHENOMENOLOGY FOR DUMMIES or Cliffs Notes. But you will emerge, I think, with a good grasp of key Husserlian concepts such as intentionality (objects of consciousness point to something beyond themselves), essences, epoche (= "bracketing" assumptions out of what is being focused on by consciousness), transcendental ego/I, intersubjectivity and others.

The book also looks at the critics of and experimenters with Husserl such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and how Husserl did or would today answer them. His disciples and followers are noted, including his two famous research assistants Edith Stein (gassed at Auschwitz in 1942 and now a canonized Roman Catholic Saint) and Martin Heidegger, exuberant Nazi. 

Maurice Natanson leaves us in no doubt that phenomenology lives and grows today. Some of its methodology has proven attractive to certain social scientists and humanists, not to mention to Pope John Paul II. No matter where you start learning about Edmund Husserl and his Phenomenology, it will not be easy reading. Wikipedia is not a bad starting point. A bit later tackle Natanson's EDMUND HUSSERL.

You are in the world of "hard thinking." But is a world happily embraced and gloried in by Edmund Husserl: the idea world that civilized Europe; the world of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Kant and Hegel.  -OOO-

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(2) lunch.com 01/21/2011

name of review:  Say something about philosophy and phenomenology, please.

rating: * * * *

review:

For six of the seven years from 1956 through 1963 I was largely immersed in the study of academic philosophy: in Mobile, Alabama, Vienna, Austria (Fulbright student) and Austin (University of Texas). Then I opted for a career as a Foreign Service Officer of the U.S. Department of State. I read very little in academic philosophy until I recently decided to return to my old haunts. I decided to begin by re-familiarizing myself with a discipline or school called "Phenomenology" and its modern discoverer or founder, Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938).

Back when I studied philsophy virtually full time (1956 - 1963), phenomenology was not widely if at all considered a traditional branch of academic philosophy. The classical divisions that I studied were

epistemology,
logic,
metaphysics (ontology),
theodicy (philosophy of religion),
ethics/morals,
cosmology,
psychology,
aesthetics (philosophy of beauty)
and
history of philosophy.

Nowadays, I believe, at some universities phenomenology is treated as a new, separate division within philosophy, along with linguistic analysis and others.

Thales, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Saint Augustine and other great thinkers of antiquity spent their lives in philosophy. That is, they "loved" or pursued "wisdom" day in and day out. Golden Age Athens's non-philosopher leader Pericles once famously orated: "We (Athenians) philosophize, but not to excess!"

These days, a teenager might decide to make a career in philosophy much like any other well established profession: the law, theology, economics, physical fitness. After so many years of writing and gaining respect among his colleagues, he retires like anyone else. Philosophy, that is, is no longer expected to be life-transforming.

Edmund Husserl was an original thinker very much within the well-established general framework of philosophy as practiced from Plato through Descartes, Hume, Locke Kant, Hegel and even Sartre. Alfred North Whitehead once said that all subsequent philosophy is mere commentary on or footnote to Plato.

Certainly, one who knows Plato will feel at home reading Maurice Natanson's 1973 EDMUND HUSSERL: PHILOSOPHER OF INFINITE TASKS. There is constant comparison between what a phenomenologist does and Plato's great Myth of the Cave. In that cave men are chained in place and forced to watch a wall on which torches behind them cast shadows of men and beast who march silently past between prisoners and torches. One day they are freed and out into bright sunshine. From ignorance or partial knowledge into the Idea of the Good.

Husserl's thinking evolved away from the mathematicism, logical positivism and naturalism holding sway in his youth. He felt that all men instinctively believe in the reality of a world outside them that they reach through the "phenomena" presenting themselves in consciousness. He spent his life trying to find a method for finding the necessary, certain, incontrovertible substratum of truth which authenticates our belief in external reality, especially other men and women with consciousness and awareness like our own.

In the process Husserl influenced two radically different students. One was a young woman convert from Judaism to Catholicism, Edith Stein, later a Carmelite nun and recently canonized Catholic Saint, gassed with her sister at Auschwitz in 1942. Husserl said that she was the most gifted student he ever had. And that included Martin Heidegger who became a flaming, much admired senior Nazi under Hitler.

Husserl preferred that his readers be newcomers to philosophy. They brought fewer prejudices to phenomenologizing. And every man must pick his own starting point to begin philosophizing and work out his own reasons for believing in a real world of other knowing egos besides his own. You cannot romp through Natanson's EDMUND HUSSERL. But with patience, you can hardly read a page without new insights.

-OOO-



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(3) bn.com 01/22/2011

title of review:  "The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile"

rating: * * * *

review:

For centuries, I suspect, most people have made their first acquaintance with philosophy by reading some of Plato's shorter Dialogs in which Socrates wanders around Athens questioning people, challenging never before questioned assumptions and leading them from conceptual fuzziness into clear thinking.

Philosophy has come a long way since, as the names of its heroes such as Aristotle, Augustine, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Boethius, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Sartre remind us. 

Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938), born an Imperial Austrian subject, believed that, among modern philosophers, Descartes had found an especially good entry point for beginners into "the love of wisdom." That was Descartes's dictum, "Cogito ergo sum." "I think therefore I am." Descartes, said Husserl, was right to make human consciousness the starting point. The one thing we cannot doubt is our consciousness.  But Descartes came close to but did not enter the new world of phenomenology. That was left to Husserl and his disciples.

We must, in philosophy, answer two questions: (1) What things, besides man-stipulated fields such as mathematics and logic, can we know without doubt or error? and (2) How is such knowledge possible?

All this and more is carefully and convincingly explored by Professor Maurice Natanson in his 1973 EDMUND HUSSERL: PHILOSOPHER OF INFINITE TASKS. Husserl taught his students (including Martin Heidegger and recently canonized Saint Edith Stein) to emphasize more than Descartes had the ego's actively outreaching role in knowing. Our ego reaches out "intentionally" (through remembering, sensing, emoting, understanding) to objects present in consciousness. And they in turn reach out to the knower. But both the knowing "I" and the known object come with distracting, not necessarily undoubtable concreteness (hints of what caused them, what they are for, etc.). Through concepts such as intentionality, epoche (bracketing, prescinding from) and reduction, Husserl's new discipline of philosophical phenomenology penetrates through the real-world ego (yours, mine)  penetrates knowing and known objects to their pure essences that provide absolute assurance that we are right in believing that our thoughts put us in touch with a real world beyong our thinking and with a real intersubjective world of people like us.

That underlying eternal world of knower, the act of knowing and known essences is what guarantees the possibility of truth in such disciplines as different as psychology, sociology, biology. Phenomenology is indifferent to such claims by non-philosophical disciplines as, "The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile"  (words of 19th Century zoologist Karl Vogt,  Ch. 3). If he is right, it is because phenomenology has found the bedrock basis for indubitable truth in the real material world that exists independently of our senses.

As Natanson shows, by 1973 phenomenological attitudes and methods were revolutionizing contemporary social studies and also impacting literary analysis. Phenomenolgy lives! As method, as mind-set and as philosophy. It has been applied to old problems,

such as empathy by the knowing ego with other egos - Edith Stein,

or the social sciences - Alfred Schutz.

EDMUND HUSSERL is not an easy read. But take it slowly. Pause and think. And you will go far and find much to enjoy.  -OOO-

recommended reading:

-- Henri Bergson - LAUGHTER

-- G.W.F. Hegel - THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT

-- Waltraud Herbstrith - EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY

-- Alasdair MacIntyre - EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 - 1922

-- Alfred Schutz - THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL WORLD

-- Edith Stein - ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY.
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(4) amazon.com one review  01/23/2011

title of review: What do phenomenologists do?

rating: * * * *

review:

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.

-OOO-

tags: edmund husserl, edith stein, epoche, phenomenology, intentionality, reduction, ego cogito cogitatum


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(5) epinions.com  01/23/2011

title of this review:  phenomenology is not for everyone

product rating:  * * * *

Pros: Lays out what makes phenomenology distinctive in philosophy: method, attitude, results, repeatability. Well researched.

Cons: Author Natanson is no Plato when it comes to clear or vivid writing.

The Bottom Line: Not every philosopher is a phenomenologist, but every phenomenologist is a philosopher. Phenomenology provides impressive grounding for any field in which self-awareness matters.

aohcapablanca's Full Review: Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks

I think that I owe you, dear reader, an explanation in advance, if not an apology.

Why have I waited until my 217th epinions review to discuss a book about academic philosophy: EDMUND HUSSERL: PHILOSOPHER OF INFINITE TASKS by Professor Maurice Natanson? And why is my first philosophy review about an ageing book published in 1973? That's 38 years ago!

Well, once upon a time I spent six of seven years between 1956 and 1963 immersed in undergraduate then graduate study of academic philosophy: in Mobile, Vienna and Austin. In late 1963, however, having passed the written and oral examinations for the Foreign Service of the U.S. Department of State, I made a career shift: opting for work in government instead of in academia.

For the past 48 years I have done next to nothing either philosophizing on my own or even reading about the philosophizing of others. I recently judged, in this, my 76th year of life, that it was time to "come home." 

But where begin? Theory of knowledge (epistemology) was always my favorite branch, but I disliked the Anglo-Saxon "linguistic analysis" approach so powerful in my student days at the University of Texas. I decided to look into phenomenology (an academic interest of the late Pope John Paul II.) So I googled and found a few good books in that arena.

Natanson's HUSSERL is the first book that I have since read in phenomenology. It came highly recommended. For it won the 1974 National Book Award, deservedly, I now think. I hope that you, too, will enjoy it. 

Through Natanson I have come in touch with other phenomenologists of note, including Adolph Reinach, Alfred Schutz and above all, Edith Stein. You will, I fear, in time be presented with some reviews by me about them and other more recent phenomenolgists. Sorry about that! For as Professor Natanson conceded: "Phenomenology is not for everyone" (Ch. 4). End Explanation/Apology.

                               * * * * 

I suspect that, like me, students for centuries have been initially tempted into philosophy by reading Plato's great Dialogues about Socrates. That "gadfly" wandered cheerfully around Athens stopping anyone who would listen and helping them bring into consciousness and critiquing everyday beliefs and values that they had always taken for granted.

An abiding concern of most philsophers has been: "Is there any truth that I cannot possibly doubt?" Saint Augustine, shortly after his conversion in 386 from Manicheism to Christianity, retired from Milan with his son Adeodatus and some friends to a villa on a North Italian Lake at Cassiciacum (today's Cassago Brianza). Later Augustine wrote up the philosophical dialogs that he and he friends had indulged in there.

Augustine demonstrated that no matter how hard he tried, there was one truth he could not doubt: his own existence as revealed in the simple fact that he thought.

Over a millennium later Rene Descartes revisited the area of epistemology pioneered by neo-Platonic Augustine: beginning to philosophize through awareness of self and especially of one's mental activities. Descartes posited "Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) as an example of a truth so intuitively evident to consciousness that it cannot be doubted, it cannot be false.

More recently came Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938). He began as a mathematician and physical scientist. But he turned to philosophizing in search of "warranties" for truths about the real, common sense world of time, space, change and other people. He developed a new method of probing for truth called Phenomenology.

Like Socrates, Professor Husserl (first in Goettingen and later in Freiburg), taught his students how to bring into consciousness everyday beliefs and values that they had always taken for granted or barely noticed. Husserl probed for a lifetime the question, "is there any truth that I cannot possibly doubt?" And what is it in such truth or truths that make them impossible to be wrong about?

In an Introduction and ten packed chapters, Maurice Natanson in EDMUND HUSSERL lays out Husserl's life in philosophy, the major elements of his new method of philosophical enquiry, also the ever evolving nature of Husserl's thinking and reactions to that phenomenological thinking by disciples and critics such as Sartre. 

Natanson chooses the work of Husserl's trusted student Alfred Schutz to illustrate how to apply phenomenology. Schutz was both sociologist, philosopher and phenomenologist and his work exploring the world of ego and alter-ego in the value-rich world of interpersonal relations is indeed instructive.

Descartes said "Cogito ergo sum." Husserl broke this down into "Ego cogito cogitatum" (I think a thought-about object.) In his earliest days, emerging from mathematics and science, Husserl won most of his followers through strong emphasis on the "cogitatum," the object of sensing, remembering, thinking. The thinking ego was relatively passive. The normal world of objects and people was never in doubt and imposed itself on the receptive knower. This pleased some of Husserl's first generation of students for reviving Aristotelian and later Scholastic philosophical "Realism."

But in 1913, through his book IDEAS, Husserl, in the eyes of some -- including key students -- lamentably fell back into the previously dominant 19th Century German Idealism associated with Hegel. For Husserl's new focus had shifted from the object of knowledge to the act of knowing and to the knower. The knower actively reaches out or intends the object of memory, etc., and in its turn, the object reaches out to be known. 

Husserl made himself, in the eyes of an admiring Professor Maurice Natanson, truly great by continuing to assert in his middle and later years the reality outside the mind of the world of time, space and alter-egos, but always as seen by a knower or a world of knowers. But he also taught people how to block out (put in brackets through an act called epoche) all the time-bound aspects of both knowing subject and known object. He thereby found their essence (eidos). He never left off attending to the real common sense world. But Husserl probed through phenomenology its value-laden "meaning."

Natanson repeatedly invokes Plato's Myth of the Cave to throw light on phenomenology, seen as the "logos" or science of "phenomena," that is,  of objects present to an attentive consciousness. Neither Natanson nor, alas, Husserl writes as clearly as Plato. So EDMUND HUSSERL is not a book to be romped through in a couple of hours.

Yet phenomenology lives. Its advocates (sometimes on the basis of less than perfect knowledge of what they are doing) were in 1973 especially active in the social sciences (as pioneered by Max Schutz) but also in literature and psychology.

EDMUND HUSSERL is a book worth reading. It is curious how many of his students (like Husserl himself) became Christians after having been atheists, sceptics, positivists, Jews or all of the above. 

I am glad that I chose phenomenology as my place to resume cultivating "love of wisdom." It is a discipline that I have already begun to apply at local cocktail parties and in feldenkrais and pilates classes. Some students, according to Natanson, claimed that they had learned the ultimate Husserlian art of "phenomenological reduction" in as little as 12 minutes. Natanson himself said it took him much longer.

Enjoy phenomenology! Or not, as you think best.

Thank you, epinions gatekeeper Pestyside for making this reviewable.

-OOO-

Recommended: Yes


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