Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We are doing something
a little different today. Usually we look at
things out there, you know, history, technology,
economics. But today we're kind of turning the
lens inward. Way inward. Yeah, we are tackling
a figure who is, I think it's fair to say, one
of the most important, but maybe also the most
intimidating thinkers of the 20th century. We
are talking about Edmund. hustle intimidating
is definitely the word i mean if you walk into
a philosophy library and you pull a book like
logical investigations or god forbid ideas pertaining
to a pure phenomenology off the shelf right your
first instinct is probably to just slide it right
back in the language is so dense the sentences
go on for like a full page and the concepts feel
incredibly abstract. I've heard his work described
as mathematics for the soul, which, you know,
frankly, sounds like a complete nightmare for
anyone who struggled with algebra. It really
can feel that way. But the irony, and this is,
I think, what we really need to land on today,
is that Husserl's entire mission, the whole reason
he wrote thousands of these impossible to read
pages, was to get us back to simplicity. Simplicity.
That feels... counterintuitive it does but his
goal was to strip away all the complex theories
all the scientific baggage and just look to look
at the world as it actually appears to us I've
also seen him described not just as a philosopher,
but as a radical scientist of the mind. That
is the perfect description. And radical is the
key word there. He wasn't just trying to, you
know, tweak psychology or something. He was trying
to rebuild all of human knowledge from the ground
up. Because when we think of science, we usually
think of test tubes, telescopes, measuring things,
external things. Objectivity. Right, objectivity.
But Husserl seemed obsessed with a totally different...
problem, a problem that sounds really simple,
but it's actually kind of terrifying when you
stop and think about it for a second. How do
we know anything is actually real? Exactly. I
mean, think about the time he was living in.
This is a late 19th, early 20th century. You've
got this massive explosion of scientific objectivity,
physics, chemistry, biology. They were mapping
the physical world with this incredible new precision.
But Husserl looked at all this progress and he
asked a very, very uncomfortable question. Where
is the human being in all of this? Right. Like
you can measure the wavelength of light until
you're blue in the face, but that doesn't explain
my actual experience of seeing the color red.
Precisely. How do we account for the subjective
experience of the scientist who is doing the
measuring in the first place? If you strip away
the conscious mind that's having the experience,
does the objective world even make sense anymore?
So he's saying we're building this giant skyscraper
of science on a foundation that we don't understand
at all. Which is our own conscious life. That's
it. It's the classic if a tree falls in the forest
question, but on steroids. On steroids and with
rigorous mathematical logic applied to it. You
got it. And that is what we're going to unpack
today. We've got a massive stack of sources here,
extensive biographical records, his major works
like Logical Investigations, Ideas, and his later
stuff like The Crisis of European Sciences, plus
accounts of his very dramatic and frankly tragic
personal life. And we're going to get into how
he went from being a mathematician to a philosopher,
how he founded this whole school of thought called
phenomenology. And yeah, the incredibly high
personal stakes of his later years. We have to.
The drama is a huge part of the story. The rise
of the Nazis, his, well, his betrayal by his
star student, Martin Heidegger. It's not just
abstract theory. It's a tragedy. A Shakespearean
tragedy, it sounds like. It really is. But let's
start at the beginning. You mentioned he started
in math. And I think that's surprising for a
guy known for studying feelings or consciousness.
You expect a poet, not a calculator. Well, it
is absolutely essential to understanding it.
If you don't get the math part, you don't really
get hustle. So Edmund Hussle was born in 1859
in Prusnitz -Moravia, which was part of the Austrian
Empire back then. Okay. He was born into a Jewish
family. He was the second of four kids. And his
father was a milliner. A hat maker. A hat maker.
Yeah. Or practical trade. And I think that's
interesting because Husserl wasn't, you know,
born into the high aristocracy of German academia.
He came from a background of making things, of
practical, solid reality. But his mind. His mind
was somewhere else entirely. It was in the stars.
His early academic path was strictly hard sciences.
He went to the University of Leipzig, then Berlin,
studying mathematics, physics, and astronomy.
So he wasn't sitting around in cafes discussing
the meaning of life. He was crunching numbers.
He was crunching numbers at the highest possible
level. I mean, look at who his mentor was, Karl
Weierstrass. I remember that name from the briefing.
For those of us who haven't touched a calculus
textbook in, let's say, a decade or two, remind
us who Weierstrass is. He is essentially the
father of modern analysis. Before Weierstrass,
calculus was a bit... Lucy goosey. You know,
people played fast and loose with concepts like
infinitesimals. Wierstrass was the guy who came
in and brought absolute ironclad, rigorous logic
to calculus. He was all about precision, definition,
removing any ambiguity whatsoever. So Husserl
is trained in this environment where there is
a right answer, a wrong answer, and a logical
proof for everything. There's no room for, well,
that's just, you know, your opinion, man. None.
Zero. He is a logic nerd through and through.
He gets his PhD in mathematics in 1883. But here's
the pivot. While he's in Leipzig, he starts wandering
into some philosophy lectures just for fun. And
then later in Vienna, he attends lectures by
a man named Franz Brentano. Brentano. Okay, this
is a name that keeps popping up in the history
of psychology and philosophy. He was a force
of nature. Brentano was this former Catholic
priest who had left the church because he couldn't
accept the doctrine of papal infallibility. Wow.
So he was intense, he was charismatic, and he
was teaching this new idea of descriptive psychology.
He believed you could study the mind with scientific
rigor. So you've got Wierstrass on one shoulder,
the cold, rigid logician, and then you have Brentano
on the other, the fiery, passionate psychologist.
And poor Husserl is stuck right in the middle.
Brentano is the one who plants the seed in his
mind. What if we could be just as rigorous about
consciousness as we are about math? What if we
could find the fundamental laws of the mind?
And that attempt to bridge that gap, that leads
to his first big, well, his first big farrier,
right? Or at least his first big rethink, his
book, The Philosophy of Arithmetic. Yes, published
in 1891. This was his first major attempt to
square that circle. And frankly, looking back,
it was a bit of a disaster. He tried to explain
mathematics psychologically. He wanted to figure
out how does the mind actually count? OK, let
me unpack this, because to me, counting just
seems like something we do. I see three apples
on the table. I say three. Why is that a deep
philosophical problem? Because Husserl was fascinated
by the mechanism of it. He made this distinction
between what he called proper and improper presentation.
Proper and improper. It sounds like table manners.
Don't use the improper fork for your salad. Eh,
not quite. Think of it more in terms of direct
versus indirect. Let's say you're standing in
front of a house. You're looking right at it
with your own eyes. You have a proper presentation
of the house. It's there, physically present
to your senses. You're experiencing houseness
directly. Okay, got it. Direct experience. But
now, let's say you're looking for a friend's
house, and all you have is the address. written
on a piece of paper, 123 Maple Street. You are
thinking about the house. You're trying to find
the house. But the house itself isn't present
to you. You're using a symbol, signs, words,
numbers, to point to something that isn't here.
That is an improper presentation. I see. So the
address is like a pointer. It's not the thing
itself. It's just a pointer. And Husserl realized
that... Most of mathematics is improper in this
sense. When we talk about the number 1 ,000 or
1 billion, we aren't actually visualizing 1 billion
individual dots in our heads. No, of course not.
Our brains can't hold that. Right. We're using
a symbol. We're manipulating signs that stand
in for that quantity. And Husserl tried to read
all of this in psychology. in how the brain groups
things together and performs these mental acts
to create these concepts. So he publishes this
book. He's feeling pretty good about it. He thinks
he solved the puzzle of math by explaining it
through brain processes. And then the sledgehammer
drops. The sledgehammer named Gottlob Friege.
I love that name, Gottlob Friege. It sounds like
a villain in a silent movie or something. To
Husserl at the time, he probably felt like one.
Frege was this brilliant logician who wrote a
review of Husserl's book. And it wasn't just
a bad review. I mean, it was a complete demolition.
Ouch. Frege essentially said, Edmund, you are
a very smart man, but you have made a catastrophic
error. And what was that error? Psychologism.
That's the technical term for it. Frege argued
that if mathematics is just psychology, if it's
just how the human brain happens to count, then...
math becomes subjective. It becomes relative.
Wait, I want to make sure I get this. Because
my brain works pretty much like your brain. So
wouldn't our math be the same? It still feels
objective to me. Maybe. But what if we encountered
an alien species and their brains were, I don't
know, silicon -based and wired completely differently?
Would 2 plus 2 still equal 4 for them? Wow. Yes,
of course it would. 2 plus 2 is 4. It doesn't
matter who or what is doing the counting. Exactly.
That was Frege's entire point. Yeah. But if Husserl
was right, and math is just a biological process
of the human brain, then math is contingent on
our specific biology. If the human species died
out, the number four would cease to exist, Preach
said. No, the number five is an objective fact.
It is an eternal truth. It isn't a brain state
any more than the planet Jupiter is a brain state.
That is a heavy, heavy hit. Because if Husserl
is right, then truth itself is just a matter
of opinion or, you know, biology. And that leads
directly to skepticism. If truth is just how
we happen to think, then there is no absolute
truth. There's just my truth and your truth and
the alien's truth. And Hussle, at his core, was
a man who believed in absolute truth. He took
this criticism incredibly seriously. So this
is the crisis point. Most people, I think, would
probably double down and defend their books.
They'd write an angry letter back saying, you
just don't get it, Frege. But Hussle didn't do
that. No. And that is the mark of his profound
intellectual honesty. He went silent. He barely
published anything for nearly a decade. He went
back to the drawing board entirely. He realized
he had made a huge mistake. He needed a way to
save the objectivity of logic but without just
ignoring the mind that perceives it. Yet to thread
an impossible needle. He had to invent a completely
new way of seeing. And this leads to his great
breakthrough work around 1900, The Logical Investigations.
He completely reverses his position. He starts
arguing that logical laws are ideal, they're
objective, they exist independently of the human
mind, almost like platonic forms. But wait, if
they exist outside the mind, then how do we access
them? Isn't he just back to being a pure mathematician
again, ignoring the mind? Ah, that's the brilliance
of his pivot. He decides that we need a new way
to study the mind itself, not as a biological
organ that creates fuzzy subjective logic, but
as the instrument that is capable of grasping
these ideal objective truths. Oh, he changes
the question. He completely changes the question.
He stops asking, how does the brain create logic?
And he starts asking, how does consciousness
experience logic? And this, my friend, is the
birth of phenomenology. Okay, cue the dramatic
music. This is the big moment. He invents a science
of essences. A vis and season shaft. I am definitely
not going to try to pronounce that. But let's
get into the how, because this is where Husserl
goes from being a math nerd to a radical scientist.
He says we have to start by moving beyond something
he calls the natural attitude. Yes, the natural
attitude. I love this term. It sounds like something
a teenager has. You'd better lose that attitude.
But what did Husserl mean by it? The natural
attitude is our default mode of existence. It's
how you and I and everyone listening goes through
99 .9 % of our day. We just assume the world
is out there. This microphone is real. The table
is real. The traffic outside is real. We take
it for granted. Completely. We assume we are
just biological entities moving through a pre
-existing physical space. We assume that our
perception just passively mirrors reality. We
don't question how the world is appearing to
us. We just accept that it is. It's being on
autopilot. It's like being in the Matrix before
you take the red pill. You just accept the simulation
as reality because you don't know anything else.
That's a great analogy. Husserl says that for
the practical business of living our lives, the
natural attitude is fine. You need it to drive
a car or make a sandwich. But for a philosopher
or for anyone who wants to find real foundational
truth, it's fatal. Because it takes everything
for granted. Exactly. If we want to really know
what's true, we have to suspend that attitude.
We have to stop just assuming the world exists
out there and turn our gaze inward to look at
the experience itself. And this brings us to
the famous toolkit. If we're going to do this
phenomenology, what are the tools we need? The
first big one is something he got from Brentano,
right? Intentionality. Yes, intentionality. This
is the absolute core, the bedrock of all of phenomenology.
And we have to be really careful here because
in everyday English, intentionality means doing
something on purpose. Right. I intended to go
to the gym, but then I ate a whole pizza instead.
I had good intentions. Exactly. In phenomenology,
intentionality has nothing to do with purpose
or willpower. It means aboutness. It comes from
the Latin word intender, which means to aim at
or to stretch toward. Okay. Hustle and Brentano
before him realized that the single defining
feature of consciousness is that it is always
of something or about something. Can you give
us a concrete example of that? Sure. Try right
now to just believe. Don't believe in something.
Just believe. I can't. My brain immediately asks,
believe what? I have to believe that it's raining
or believe that you're right about this. Exactly.
Or try to fear. You can't just have generic objectless
fear floating in your head. If you're a spider,
or you fear failure, or you fear the dark, consciousness
is like a directional arrow. It is always shooting
out from you towards an object. You cannot have
a thought without an object of thought. Okay,
that makes a lot of sense. My mind isn't just
an empty bucket. It's always actively grabbing
onto something or pointing at something. And
this changes everything. Because it means you
can't study the mind in a vacuum in isolation,
like the psychologists wanted to. And you can't
study the world in a vacuum in isolation, like
the physicists wanted to. You can only study
the connection, the intentional arc that links
the two. So if intentionality is the arrow, what
is the apache? This is another one of those big
hustle terms, bracketing. The apache is the specific
method we use to break out of the natural attitude.
It comes from an ancient Greek skeptic term meaning
suspension of judgment. So we just stop judging
things. We stop judging reality. When we perform
the apache or when we bracket. the world we don't
deny that the world exists we aren't saying oh
nothing is real it's all an illusion that's not
it at all okay so what are we doing we are just
setting the question of its reality aside we
are putting it in brackets just like in a math
equation where you deal with the stuff in the
brackets first we're temporarily ignoring the
question of whether it's really there Walk me
through this. Let's say I'm looking at this coffee
cup on the desk right now. How do I bracket it?
Okay. In the natural attitude, you look at it
and you think, that is a ceramic cup filled with
coffee. You assume it has mass, it's made of
atoms, and that it will fall and smash if I push
it off the desk. Right. Standard cup stuff. Now
bracket it. Suspend your belief that the cup
is a physical object made of atoms. Suspend your
knowledge of ceramics or gravity or the coffee
trade. Just focus strictly, and I mean strictly,
on how it appears to you in your consciousness
right this very second. Okay. I see a curved
white shape. I see a dark brown circle inside
it. I see a grip of light from the overhead lamp
reflecting on the room. I can smell something
roasted. Good. Now, can you see the back of the
cup? No. But you assume it's there. You assume
it has a back. Yes, of course. In the apache,
you don't just assume it. You notice that you
are assuming it. You realize, ah, my consciousness
is presenting this object to me as a complete
three -dimensional whole, even though I am only
ever seeing one two -dimensional side of it at
a time. So I'm watching my own mind construct
the object. You're watching the construction
process. You aren't studying the cup anymore.
You are studying your experience of the cup.
So it's about becoming hyper -aware of the experience
itself rather than the object that's supposedly
causing the experience. It feels a little like
meditation or mindfulness. It is very, very similar
to mindfulness. It's a fundamental shift from
the what to the how. And once you learn to do
that, Husserl says, you can perform the phenomenological
reduction. You can start moving from the specific
messy fact to the general pure essence. And he
had a very specific way of getting to that essence,
right? A kind of mental workout he called eidetic
variation. This is a fascinating exercise. And
it's his answer to the question of how we can
know things for sure without running a scientific
experiment. Let's try it. The classic example
is always a triangle, which is a bit easy, but
let's start there. So imagine a triangle. Okay.
I'm picturing a triangle in my head. It's an
isosceles triangle, since you asked. Perfect.
Now, in your mind, I want you to start varying
its features. This is the variation part. Make
one of its sides much longer. Is it still a triangle?
Yes. Just a weirder looking one. Change its color
to bright blue. Is it still a triangle? Yes.
Imagine it's made of wood instead of just being
a line drawing, still a triangle. Yep. Okay.
Now add a fourth side to it. No. Now it's a square
or a rectangle or some kind of quadrilateral.
It is definitely not a triangle anymore. Exactly.
Through this eidetic variation, just by playing
with the features in your imagination, you have
discovered the essence, the eidos. of a triangle
you found the invariant feature the thing that
cannot be changed without destroying the object
which is having three straight sides that connect
you stripped away all the non -essentials like
color material size and you found the core truth
okay that works for geometry but Husserl wanted
to do this with everything right with perception
with justice with love yeah that seems a whole
lot harder it is much much harder but the method
is the same Let's try it with something more
complex. Let's try it with the concept of a promise.
What is the essence of making a promise? Okay.
A promise is when I say I'll do something in
the future. Okay, let's vary it. Imagine you
say, I promise I will fly to the moon tomorrow
using only my arms. But you know you can't possibly
do it. Is that a genuine promise? No, that's
either a lie or a joke. So sincerity or maybe
capability has to be part of it. Good. Now imagine
you say to someone, I promise I'm going to rob
that bank for you. Is that a valid promise in
the same way? We'd probably call that a threat
or a conspiracy, not a promise. A promise feels
like it should be about something good or at
least neutral. Ah. So maybe a promise implies
some kind of benefit to the person being promised,
or at least that it's not a malevolent act. Maybe.
Or at least it has to be part of a shared moral
framework. Okay, one more. Imagine you make a
promise to yourself. It feels less binding. It's
more like a resolution. A real promise seems
to involve another person. See what we are doing
here. We're crashing the concept against all
these different imaginary scenarios to see where
it breaks, to see what its essential components
are. Husserl believed that if we did this rigorously
enough for everything, we could map out a kind
of periodic table of human consciousness. We
could understand the fundamental essence of law,
of religion, of art, of everything. That is unbelievably
ambitious. He wanted to create a complete map
of the geography of the mind. That's a great
way to put it. And to do that, to make his map
more precise, he introduced two more key technical
terms, noesis and noema. These sound like the
names of Greek gods or something. They're Greek
terms. Noesis, from the word nos for mind, is
the act of thinking so, the perceiving, the judging,
the remembering, the fearing. It's the inking
part. Noema is the object of thought, the thing
that is being perceived or remembered or judged.
Well, wait a minute. Didn't we just say that
we've bracketed the object? Yeah. We don't care
if it's really there. This is the crucial distinction,
and it's a little tricky. The noema is not the
physical object out there in the world of atoms
and molecules. It is the object as it is perceived
by the mind. Okay. So if I remember a favorite
toy from my childhood, the physical toy might
be long gone. It could be in a landfill somewhere,
totally disintegrated, it doesn't exist anymore.
But the Noema, the toy, as remembered, with all
its specific colors and the feelings and meanings
attached to it, exists perfectly in my consciousness
right now. The Noema is the meaning object. So
the noema is like the internal avatar of the
object, the file for it in my head. That is a
very good way to put it. It holds the sense of
the object and it includes all the different
modes like possible or doubtful or existent.
If I see a vague figure in the fog, the noesis
is my act of straining to see. The noema might
be a possibly scary person. Then I get closer
and I realize, oh, it's just a tree. The physical
atoms of the tree didn't change, but the noema
in my mind shifted dramatically from person to
tree. This is getting really deep. So he's building
this massive, intricate, almost architectural
structure of how the mind builds up reality from
experience. But then around 1913, in his book
Ideas, he takes a turn that apparently freaks
some of his own students out. The transcendental
turn. Yes. In Ideas, I, as it's known, Husserl,
goes full on transcendental idealism. He starts
to argue that the world is actually constituted
by consciousness. Okay, that sounds trippy. Constituted?
What does that mean? Like we literally create
the world with our minds. Is this like the secret
manifest reality? Hey, no, it's not magic. He's
not saying you can just close your eyes and wish
for a Ferrari to appear in your driveway. But
he did argue that the only way the world has
any meaning, any structure, any objectivity at
all is through the structuring activity of what
he called the transcendental ego. The transcendental
ego. This isn't Edmund Hussle, the guy with the
big beard. And it's not host, speaker, the podcaster.
This is the pure, absolute, anonymous self that
is the ultimate observer of the world. It's the
eye that is doing the looking, the center point
of all experience. And this is where it gets
super controversial, because if the world depends
on my eye to exist, that sounds dangerously close
to solipsism. His students, people like Roman
Ingarden, started getting very, very nervous.
They thought, wait a minute, is he saying only
the mind exists? That the physical world is just
a dream? Is he becoming a solipsist? Solipsism,
the ultimate philosophical trap. The idea that
I am the only conscious being that truly exists
and everyone and everything else is just a figment
of my imagination. It's the black hole of philosophy.
Because if I perform the Apoche and I bracket
the entire world, and I focus only on my consciousness,
how do I ever prove that you exist? I can see
your body. I can hear your voice. But those are
just phenomena happening in my visual field and
my auditory field. How do I know there's actually
a light on? inside your head. That seems like
a pretty gigantic problem for a guy who's trying
to explain all of reality. If he can't even prove
that other people exist, his whole system fails.
It was a huge problem. Yeah. And Hussle spent
a lot of his later career wrestling with it,
particularly in a series of lectures called the
Cartesian Meditations. He tries to solve the
problem of other minds. So how does he do it?
How does he prove that I'm not just a sophisticated
robot in his dream? He starts from within what
he calls the sphere of onus. That's my private
reduced first -person experience. He says, okay,
within my field of vision, I perceive various
bodies. I perceive my own body, you know, my
hands, my legs, which I experience from the inside.
And I also see your body over there. Okay. But
I perceive your body differently than I perceive
a mannequin or a stone. Because I move. Because
I talk. Because of a process he calls pairing
or analogy. So I basically project my own experience
of being an ego onto you. Exactly. I recognize
you as an alter ego, another I. It's a kind of
empathy, but it's a structural... perceptual
empathy. It's not just a feeling. It's a fundamental
way I constitute the world. So he says we recognize
the other. We recognize the other. And this is
the absolute key to solving the problem. Once
I recognize that you are another subject, another
point of view on the world, I realize that the
world isn't just my world. It is our world. A
shared reality. Precisely. This is what he calls
intersubjectivity. The coffee cup is real and
objective, not because it's atoms exist in some
void, but because I know that if you were to
walk over here and look at it from your angle,
you would see it too, just from a different perspective.
We triangulate reality between our different
consciousnesses. Objectivity for Hustle is actually
just shared subjectivity. That's actually a really
beautiful idea. Reality is the thing that we
all agree on because we experience it together.
It is. But as beautiful and intricate as these
ideas were, The real objective historical world
was about to crash in on Husserl in the most
devastating way possible. And to understand that,
we have to talk about the shadow of history.
Yes. We absolutely cannot talk about Husserl
without talking about the rise of the Nazis and
specifically his relationship with Martin Heidegger.
This part of the story feels like a movie plot.
The master and the apprentice. It really is.
And to understand the pain of what happened,
you have to understand the depth of the initial
relationship. Martin Heidegger wasn't just another
student. He was the prince. That's what called
him his phenomenological child. He was the chosen
one. I read that Husserl didn't have a great
relationship with his own biological sons. Is
that right? It was complicated, yes. But Heidegger,
Heidegger was the heir apparent. He was Husserl's
personal assistant from 1920 to 1923. Husserl
absolutely adored him. When Assur retired from
his chair at the University of Freiburg, he thought
to make sure that Heidegger was the one who succeeded
him. He thought, I have built the foundation,
and Martin will be the one to build the skyscraper.
And Heidegger seemed to reciprocate that, at
least at first. Initially, yes. When Heidegger
published his own philosophical masterpiece,
Being and Time, in 1927, he dedicated it to Husserl
in grateful respect and friendship. It was a
huge public acknowledgement. So what went wrong?
Where did it all fall apart? Well, first, the
philosophy went wrong. And this is important.
As Husserl read Being and Time more closely,
he started to realize that Heidegger wasn't actually
doing phenomenology the way Husserl intended
it. How so? Husserl was interested in pure consciousness,
the transcendental ego, the abstract, timeless
structures of the mind. But Heidegger, he was
interested in Dasein, which means roughly. being
there. He was interested in the concrete, messy,
anxious experience of being a human being thrown
into the world facing death. So Heidegger made
it gritty. He took the clean, sterile laboratory
of phenomenology and dragged it out into the
mud of real life. He did. And Husserl saw this
as a profound intellectual betrayal. He thought
Heidegger was slipping back into what he called
anthropology, just studying humans as a particular
species of animal rather than studying the pure
essence of mind itself. For Husserl, it felt
like a return to the very psychologism he had
fought so hard to escape. But that intellectual
betrayal was, in the end, nothing compared to
the political one. Nothing. 1933. Hitler comes
to power. Now, we have to remember, Husserl was
born into a Jewish family. He had converted to
Lutheranism way back in 1886, and he considered
himself a fiercely loyal German patriot. He was
politically conservative. He loved Germany. His
son, Wolfgang, had been killed in World War I
fighting for Germany. Another son, Gerhardt,
had been badly wounded. So he had paid the ultimate
price for his country. He had given his country
a son. He had. But to the Nazis, none of that
mattered. He was just a Jew. In April 1933, the
new racial laws began to bite. And this is where
the story gets just heartbreaking. Husserl is
living in Freiburg, this quiet university town
he had helped make world famous. And suddenly,
overnight, he's a pariah. There's a famous story
about him being banned from the university library.
We need to be careful with this because there
are a lot of rumors and there are facts. Did
Heidegger, his former student who is now a big
shot at the university, personally ban him from
the library? Okay. So the records are clear on
this. Husserl was banned from using the University
of Freiburg Library in April of 1933. This was
done by the university administration applying
the new state laws. It was a blanket ban on all
non -Aryan faculty. Right. Now, there was a huge
public outcry from abroad. Husserl was a global
figure, and the ban was actually rescinded about
a week later. But the damage was done. The insult
was profound. He wrote in a letter that he felt
he had been struck directly in the heart. And
where was Heidegger in all of this? What was
his role? Well, Heidegger was elected rector
of the university just a few weeks later, at
the end of April 1933. And on May 1st, Heidegger
officially joined the Nazi party. Oof. It gets
worse. While there is no direct evidence that
Heidegger personally signed the order banning
Husserl from the library, his silence is damning.
He was now the rector. He's the boss. He did
nothing to stop the notsification of the university.
He didn't visit Husserl. He didn't write a letter
saying, Edmund, my old friend, I'm sorry, my
hands are tied. He just goosted him. That's a
very specific kind of cruelty, isn't it? It's
the banality of evil right there in the university
hallway, just looking the other way. And then,
of course, there's the matter of the book dedication.
In being in time. Right. The 1927 edition had
that glowing dedication to Husserl. But in the
1941 edition, published during the height of
the war. Let me guess. It's gone. The dedication
page was removed. It just wasn't there. Now,
after the war, the publisher claimed this was
done to avoid the book being banned entirely
by the Nazi authorities. And it's true that a
footnote acknowledging Husserl remained deep
inside the text. But the symbolism is just stark
and horrifying. The student erasing the teacher
from the public record. And so Husserl was just.
Isolated. Completely. He resigned from the Deutsch
Academy in 1933. He just sat in his home in Freiburg,
completely ostracized by the very academic community
he had helped to build. We have letters from
him during this time. He sounds utterly heartbroken.
He talks about the complete social vacuum around
him. Former colleagues and students would literally
cross the street to avoid having to say hello
to him. But he didn't stop working. And this
leads to one of the most incredible stories in
the entire history of philosophy, the rescue
of his manuscripts. Because when he died in 1938,
he left behind a mountain of paper. A literal
mountain. 40 ,000 pages of unpublished notes,
manuscripts, and lectures. And it wasn't just
regular writing. He wrote almost everything in
Gabelsberger stenography, an obsolete, very difficult
form of German shorthand. So it was basically
written in code. To the untrained eye, yes. It
looks like chicken scratch. And with the Nazis
in power, these manuscripts were in grave danger
of being seized and destroyed. They were Jewish
writings. If the Gestapo ever found them, they
would have been burned. Enter Herman van Breda.
The hero of the story. The absolute hero. He
was a young Franciscan priest from Belgium, a
PhD student, just 27 years old. He came to Freiburg
in 1938, hoping to study Husserl's papers for
his dissertation. When he arrived, he found Husserl's
widow. Malvin, living in constant fear. He immediately
realized the danger the papers were in, and he
decided on the spot, I have to get these out
of Germany. A Catholic priest smuggling banned
philosophy papers out of Nazi Germany. That is
a movie waiting to happen. It truly is. This
was late 1938, early 1939. War was imminent.
Van Breda used his status as a priest and a foreigner.
He got the Belgian embassy involved to create
a diplomatic pouch. He packed the 40 ,000 pages
of manuscripts plus Husserl's entire personal
library into suitcases and trunks and smuggled
them across the border to Leuven in Belgium.
He even smuggled Malvin Husserl out to safety
in a convent. He established the Husserl archives
in Leuven where they are today. If it were not
for Father Van Breda, we would have lost the
vast majority of Husserl's life's work. It would
have gone up in smoke. That is just incredible.
And it's a very good thing they were saved. Because
Husserl's final work, the stuff he was writing
in those dark, isolated years, was some of his
most important and influential, The Crisis of
European Sciences. Yes, published in 1936 in
Belgrade, because of course he couldn't publish
in Germany anymore. This is Husserl in his late
70s, looking at a Europe that is tearing itself
apart at the seams. And he asks us a fundamental
question. Why has science failed us? Which is
a bold question to ask. Considering science was
advancing more rapidly than ever, we were splitting
the atom, building airplanes, inventing radio.
But Husserl argued that science had become too
abstract. It had lost its way. It had forgotten
its roots. And this brings us to his final great
concept, the life world. Lee Levenswelt. Lee
Levenswelt. Now, this is the concept that feels,
to me, the most relevant to us today. What is
it? The life world is the world of immediate
pre -scientific lived experience. It is the world
we actually live in before we start applying
formulas and theories to it. It's the world of
colors and textures and relationships and hunger
and love and disappointment. So it's kind of
like the natural attitude world again. Yes, but
viewed with a newfound respect. In his early
work, he wanted to bracket the life world to
get to the pure essences. In his late work, he
realized that objective science, physics, chemistry,
geometry is actually built upon the life world.
It grows out of it. Well, think about something
as abstract as geometry. It didn't just fall
from the sky in a perfect logical form. It started
with ancient land surveyors in Egypt measuring
actual fields of mud and grass along the Nile.
It started with carpenters and builders. It started
in the messy practical life world. Then over
centuries, we abstracted it into pure ideal formulas.
So the abstract formula always comes from the
messy lived reality. Exactly. But Hussle said
we've forgotten that. We have started to think
that the formula is the only reality and that
our messy lived experience is just a kind of.
illusion, or a source of error. He called this
the surreptitious substitution. We have substituted
the map for the territory. And when you do that,
science loses its meaning for actual human life.
Right. Think about modern medicine. You go to
the doctor because you're in pain. That is your
life world reality. It hurts when I breathe.
That's real. That's as real as it gets for me.
But the doctor looks at the MRI scan, the chart,
the blood work numbers. If all the numbers on
the chart say you are fine, the doctor might
be tempted to say there's nothing wrong with
you. Gaslighting by science. The data says you're
fine, so therefore your pain isn't real. Exactly.
Husserl saw this coming a mile away. He said
we have let what he called the garment of ideas,
the math, the charts, the data, completely cover
up and replace the living body of experience.
We trust the map more than the territory. And
in the 1930s, he saw where this leads politically.
If you start to see human beings as just data
points, as just biological variables to be managed,
it becomes very, very easy to manipulate them
or to delete them if they don't fit the model.
That is absolutely chilling because if I'm just
a data set, I don't have rights. I just have
variables that can be optimized. And that is
why he wrote The Crisis. He wasn't just trying
to fix some obscure problem in philosophy. He
was trying to save European civilization from
its own cold calculus. objectifying logic. He
wanted to re -inject the human soul back into
the scientific machine. He wanted to ground reason
back in the Levin's world in shared human experience.
That is a powerful, powerful message. And it
feels so relevant today with algorithms and big
data basically running everything. We are constantly
being told what we like, who we are, and what
is true by these black box algorithms. Extremely
relevant. And that is a huge part of his massive
legacy. Let's talk about that legacy. We still
got some time left. Who did Husserl influence?
It seems like pretty much everyone in 20th century
thought. It is a massive and incredibly diverse
family tree. I mean, first you have the existentialists.
Jean -Paul Sartre. Sartre was a young man when
he read Husserl, and it completely blew his mind.
There's a famous story of him sitting in a cafe
in Paris, and his friend Raymond Aron tells him,
you see, if you are a phenomenologist, you can
do philosophy about this cocktail. And Sartre
apparently turned pale with excitement. Because
he realized he could analyze the experience of
the cocktail. The cocktail as perceived. Exactly.
Sartre basically took Husserl's method. described
the lived experience, and he applied it to freedom,
to anxiety, to what he called the look of the
other person. But he stripped out the transcendental
ego. Sartre didn't believe in some pure, abstract
self. He famously believed that existence precedes
essence. And then there's Simone de Beauvoir.
She took that same method and applied it to gender.
She asked, what is the lived experience of being
a woman in this society? Not the biology, not
the theory, but the experience. And that investigation
led directly to her monumental book, The Second
Sex. And what about in ethics? You mentioned
Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas was actually a student
of Husserl's in Freiburg. He was deeply influenced
by that whole idea of recognizing the other and
intersubjectivity. But Levinas took it in a radical
new direction. He said, the face of the other
person makes an absolute ethical demand on us.
Before we even think, before any philosophy,
we are fundamentally responsible for the other.
He shifted the focus of phenomenology from knowledge
or epistemology to pure ethics. And we can't
forget the most unlikely one, Pope John Paul
II. Yes. Before he was pope, he was a serious
philosopher. He wrote his doctoral thesis and
a major book called The Acting Person, where
he tried to synthesize traditional Catholic Thomism
with Husserlian phenomenology. He was fascinated
by the subjective experience of the moral agent
who was making a choice. So you have a direct
line from Husserl's study in Freiburg right to
the Vatican. And finally, what about someone
like Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction?
Derrida is a fascinating case. He literally started
his career by translating and writing a long,
critical introduction to one of Husserl's minor
works. His entire idea of deconstruction actually
began as a way of taking apart Husserl's ideas
about presence and meaning and speech. You really
cannot understand postmodernism. without understanding
the hustle that it is constantly reacting against.
It's just amazing this guy who started out as
a math nerd in Moravia ended up shaping everything
from Catholic theology to French atheism to postmodernism.
And even cognitive science today. The debates
we are having right now about artificial intelligence.
Can a computer ever truly be conscious? These
are fundamentally Husserlian debates. How so?
Well, look at something like ChatGPT. It can
process syntax with incredible skill. It can
manipulate symbols. It can give you a perfect,
improper presentation of a house. You know, a
text description. But does it have a proper presentation?
Does it have a living swell? Yeah. Does it feel
the warmth of the coffee cup or see the redness
of the sunset? No. It's just predicting the next
most probable word in a sequence. Hustle would
say. If it has no life world, it has no meaning.
It's just syntax without semantics. It's the
old Chinese room argument. It can simulate thinking
perfectly, but it isn't thinking because there
is no intentionality, no I that is directing
the arrow of consciousness toward a world. So
Husserl saves us from the robots, too. Maybe.
Or at least he gives us the vocabulary to understand
why we are fundamentally different from them.
So as we wrap up here, let's try to summarize
this incredible journey. We went from the rigid
objective logic of math to the fluid first -person
exploration of consciousness, from the solitary
ego to the shared world, from the heights of
academic fame to the absolute tragedy of the
Nazi era. It's a journey of trying to find a
firm footing in a world that was falling apart.
Husserl lived in a time when everything was being
thrown into question. Traditional religion was
fading for many, science was exploding, but also
becoming dehumanizing, and politics was becoming
terrifyingly radical. He wanted to find a place
to stand, a point of absolute certainty. And
he found it not in the stars or in old books
or in God, but in the undeniable reality of the
structure of consciousness itself. To the things
themselves. That was his famous motto, right?
Don't rely on theories. Don't rely on assumptions.
Just look. Look at the experiences it's given
to you. So what's the so what for our listener
today? Why should someone driving to work or
doing the dishes care about transcendental phenomenology?
I think the so what is about reclaiming your
own experience. We live in an age of data overload.
We are constantly being told what is real by
algorithms, by news feeds, by scientific studies
that contradict each other every other week.
We are told our feelings are just chemicals in
our brain. Our choices are just the result of
our conditioning. Yeah, it's very easy to feel
like you are just a cog in a machine, a spectator
in your own life whose experience doesn't really
count unless it can be measured. And Hussle's
work is a powerful reminder that everything starts
with the subjective experience. The scientific
data means nothing without a consciousness there
to interpret it. The algorithm doesn't exist
without the human mind that built it. Phenomenology
is a way of saying my first person experience
matters. It is not an illusion. It is the foundation
of all truth. It restores a fundamental dignity
to your perspective on the world. That's a very
empowering thought. It's a kind of defense of
humanity in an increasingly mechanical world.
Absolutely. It's giving yourself permission to
trust your own eyes again. I want to leave the
listener with a provocative thought then. We
talked about the Lebenswelt, the life world,
the world of walking, talking, touching, smelling.
Husserl warned that if our science and our culture
forget the life world, they become hollow and
dangerous. Today, we spend more and more of our
time in digital worlds, in metaverses, on social
media, in remote work environments. We are abstracting
ourselves from physical reality more than at
any point in human history. So the question is,
is, in an age of algorithms and objective data,
have we already completely lost touch with the
Lebenswelt? And if we have, if our world is now
mostly made up of improper presentations and
symbols on screens, is our knowledge actually
baseless? Are we building a skyscraper on a cloud?
That is the question. If we lose the ground of
lived experience, do we ultimately lose the truth
itself? Something to chew on. This has been the
Deep Dive on Edmund Husserl. Thanks for listening.
Thank you. We'll see you next time.