Welcome to The Debate. We are looking at a man
today who, well, who in my view attempted probably
the most audacious intellectual reboot in history.
We're talking about Edmund Husserl. Now, I know
people often dismiss philosophy as abstract,
but Husserl was a mathematician. He wanted certainty.
He wanted a foundation for science that was,
you know, absolutely unshakable. And to get there,
he decided we had to stop looking at the world
and start looking at the lens. We're seeing it
through. And that is exactly, I mean, exactly
where he went off the rails. Look, I have immense
respect for Husserl's intellect. The man was
a giant, no question. But we are here to discuss
a very specific turn in his thinking. The shift
where he decided that the only way to save reality
was to retreat entirely into the mind. He called
it transcendental phenomenology, which is a mouthful.
But let's be honest. It's an intellectual trap.
It's the philosophy of a man locked in a room,
convincing himself that the room only exists
because he's looking at it. Okay, that is a massive
oversimplification, and you know it. We are debating
the shift Hussle made, what, around 1913? The
question is this. Can we reach absolute truth
by bracketing the external world, by putting
our assumptions on hold, and focusing solely
on consciousness? Or, as you seem to think, Does
that just turn us into solipsists, totally cut
off from reality? It's not just what I think.
It's what his best students thought. You look
at the early Husserl, and he's a realist. He's
fighting for logic. Then suddenly, he pivots.
He starts telling us that the world is constituted
by the ego. So that's the debate. Did he unlock
the secrets of consciousness? Or did he just,
you know, lose touch with the real world? He
didn't lose the world. He found the source of
it. But okay, we're getting ahead of ourselves.
To really understand why this matters, we have
to start with where we all live right now. It's
what Husserl called the natural attitude. Which
is just a fancy way of saying common sense. It's
more than common sense. It's a trance. In the
natural attitude, we assume that objects are
just out there, like furniture in a room, and
we are just cameras recording them. We assume
the world is a hard physical fact that exists
entirely independent of us. Husserl's genius
was to say, stop, look at that assumption. You
are not a camera. You are an active participant.
To truly understand reality, you have to perform
the Apoche. You have to suspend that belief.
Okay, let's ground this for a second, because
epoche sounds incredibly mystical, and it's not.
It's a Greek term for suspension of judgment.
But here is my problem with how Husserl uses
it. You say the natural attitude is a trance.
I say it's survival. If I see a bus coming toward
me, I don't perform a phenomenological reduction
and analyze how the redness of the bus is given
to my consciousness. I jump out of the way. Because
the bus is real. It has mass and velocity, regardless
of my intentionality. Bus is a hallucination.
He's asking, how do you know it's a bus? How
does that meaning danger, vehicle, redness, how
does that all assemble itself in your mind? Think
of it like a virtual reality headset. The natural
attitude is playing the game and completely forgetting
you're wearing the headset. You think you're
in a jungle fighting tigers. Hustrell says, take
the headset off. Or, better yet, Keep it on,
but look at the screen. Look at the pixels. Look
at how the software is rendering the tiger. That
isn't denying the tiger. It's understanding the
mechanism of the tiger's appearance. That's a
slick analogy, but it hides the danger. If you
treat the world like a VR rendering, you stop
caring about the hardware that's running it.
And look, I grant you, Husserl started strong.
His logical investigations in 1900 were just
brilliant. He absolutely destroyed psychologism.
Right. The idea that logic is just how our brains
happen to be wired. Exactly. He proved that 2
plus 2 equals 4 is true whether humans exist
or not. It's an objective truth. I'm with him
100 % there. But then fast forward to 1913 when
he publishes Idea's Eye. Suddenly he's not just
talking about logic. He's talking about trees
and tables and coffee cups. And he says they
are constituted by consciousness. He makes the
object dependent on the subject. And that is
where he lost the realists. You just can't have
it both ways. You can't say logic is objective
and independent, but the physical world is just
the dependency of my mind. That's not what he
means at all. Husserl is using the concept of
intentionality, which he picked up from Brentano.
The core maxim is, consciousness is always consciousness
of something. You cannot just think, you must
think about something. You can't just love, you
must love someone or something. The mind and
the world are correlated. They're a pair. You
can't peel them apart. But he does peel them
apart. He peels away the world to look at the
mind. No, no. He peels away our prejudices about
the world. He wants to see the things themselves
as they actually appear, not as physics tells
us they are. If you strip away the observer,
you aren't left with reality. You're left with
a mathematical abstraction. Husserl is saying
that the only reality we have access to is the
one that appears to us. Constituting the object
just means putting together the different profiles,
the front view, the back view, the memory of
it, into a coherent whole. The mind is active.
It's building the image. Okay, but listen to
what you're admitting there. You're saying the
mind builds the image. If I'm building it, how
do I know I'm not building it wrong? How do I
know there's anything behind the facade? This
is the issue his student Roman Engarden had.
Engarden was a diehard realist. He basically
told Husserl, Master, if you keep going down
this road, you're going to end up in solipsism.
If the world is just a correlate of my consciousness,
then I am effectively alone in a theater of my
own making. Solipsism is, well, it's the lazy
critique, isn't it? It's what everyone throws
at idealism because it's a scary thought. But
Husserl was way ahead of that. This brings us
to the mechanism of the reduction itself. We
need to distinguish between the noeseus, the
act of thinking, and the noema, which is the
thing, as it is thought. Ah, the noema. This
is probably the most controversial concept in
the whole framework. It's controversial because
people want it to be simple. Think about the
house example. You're standing in front of a
house. You see the front door, the windows. That
is a proper presentation. It's bodily present.
Now walk away, go to a coffee shop, and think
about the house. The house is not there physically,
but you are still intending the same house. The
nomia, the meaning of that house, is consistent,
even though the mode of access has changed. Husserl
lets us study that meaning structure directly.
We can analyze the essence of houseness without
needing to go bang on the drywall to see if it's
real. But that's just psychology. If I'm analyzing
my memory of the house, or my concept of the
house, I am looking at my internal mental furniture.
I am not looking at the house. This was the fight
he had with Frege. Frege said there is the sense,
the meaning, and the reference, the actual object.
Husserl blurs them. He fuses the object into
the act of perception. So if you bracket the
existence of the external world, you are effectively
cutting the cord to the reference. You're just
studying the sense. You're studying the internal
movie. You keep calling it an internal movie
like it's a hallucination. It's not. It's the
essence. Hustle developed a tool for this called
eidetic furiation. It's brilliant, really. Let's
say I want to understand what a cup is. I don't
need to go out and measure 5 ,000 cups. I can
do it right here in my mind. I imagine a cup.
Can I change the color? Yes, it's still a cup.
Can I make it giant? Yep, still a cup. Can I
seal the top so liquid can't get in? Then it's
a block, not a cup. Exactly. The moment I seal
the top, the cupness explodes. It vanishes. By
doing this little mental variation, I have discovered
an absolute invariant truth about the essence
of a cup. It must be a vessel capable of containment.
I discovered that without leaving my armchair.
That is rigorous science. That is getting to
the things themselves, the essences that govern
reality. Okay, that works for cups. It works
for triangles. Husserl was a mathematician, and
he treats the world like geometry. But try doing
identical variation on your wife. Try doing it
on the Nazis marching in Berlin outside his window.
You can't just vary history in your mind and
call it truth. The world has a brute force resistance
that this method just ignores. And this leads
us to the absolute hardest problem for Husserl.
The one he spent years agonizing over. Other
people. Right. If I am this transcendental ego,
this godlike creator of meaning, and I constitute
the world, then I must also constitute you. You
are just a phenomenon in my visual field. You're
a coat and a hat and a sound stream coming at
me. How do I know you have a mind? How do I know
you aren't just a philosophical zombie? Under
Husserl's strict rules, I can't know that. I
am trapped. He addresses this head -on in the
Cartesian meditations. He doesn't dodge it. He
describes the sphere of oneness, what is undeniably
mine, my body, my sensations. But then I encounter
something unique in my field of vision. I see
a body that looks like mine. It moves like mine.
It looks like mine? That's the argument? That's
it? It's deeper than that. It's pairing. It's
an associative transfer of meaning. I see your
physical behavior. You flinch when you touch
fire, just like I do. Instantly, involuntarily,
my ego transfers the sense of subject onto you.
I grasp you by analogy. I don't telepathically
enter your mind, but I experience you as an alter
ego, another I. This isn't a flaw. It's the only
way we can know others. We always bridge the
gap through empathy and analogy. But analogy
is a guess. That's my point. If I see a character
in a video game, they move like me, they flinch
when I shoot them, they run away. By Husserl's
logic, I should assume they have a conscious
soul. But they don't. They are code. Husserl's
pairing is just projection. It's the lonely ego
painting faces on the rocks to feel less alone.
He never truly breaks out of the sphere. He just
decorates the walls with pictures of other people.
Transcendental intersubjectivity is a community
of one. I think you're being incredibly uncharitable
to the nuance of the argument. It's not just
visual matching. It's a reciprocal relationship.
But look, even if you think he failed to fully
solve the other mind's problem, which, by the
way, no philosopher has solved perfectly. You
have to admire how he tried to ground logic and
math in this same framework. Because that's where
things get really interesting in his late career.
You mean where things get messy? I mean where
they get vital. Husserl spent his life fighting
for logic as a pure, super temporal science.
He built this whole hierarchy from grammar to
logic to a theory of manifolds. Pure, beautiful,
objective truth. And then in 1936. Knowing he
was dying, knowing Europe was collapsing into
fascism, he writes The Crisis of European Sciences.
And suddenly the pure logician starts talking
about the Lebenswelt, the life world. Because
he realized that science had lost its way. Or
because he realized his philosophy had no ground.
The life world is the world of everyday experience.
Culture, history, going to the market, talking
to your neighbors. It's the messy, pre -scientific
soup we all swim in. For 30 years, Husserl tried
to float above it. And now at the end, he says,
actually, all science is rooted in this life
world. It feels like a capitulation. It's a chicken
and egg problem. If the transcendental ego is
supposed to constitute the world, how can it
be rooted in the world? It's not a capitulation.
It's a deepening of the argument. He's saying
that modern science, from Galileo to today, has
committed a fatal error. They mistook the map
for the territory. They looked at mathematical
formulas and said, that is reality. And they
looked at human experience and said, that is
just subjective fluff. Husserl is arguing that
the mathematical formulas come from the life
world. You can't have geometry without a guy
first measuring a field with a rope. He was trying
to reconnect abstract science with human meaning.
He was warning us, if science forgets the human
subject, it becomes a soulless machine. And,
I mean, looking at the 20th century, was he wrong?
Soulless machines. Well, that's a perfect segue
to the betrayal, isn't it? We can't talk about
Husserl's legacy without talking about the prodigal
son, Martin Heidegger. Ugh. The most painful
chapter in philosophical history. It wasn't just
professional. It was personal. Heidegger was
his assistant. Husserl called him the phenomenon
of phenomenology. He thought he had found his
heir. He handed him the keys to the kingdom.
And what did Heidegger do? He took Husserl's
method. the analysis of experience, and completely
gutted the transcendental ego. He turned it into
anthropology. He turned it into reality. Heidegger
said, Edmund, there is no pure ego floating in
a void looking at the world. There is only Dyson,
being in the world. We are thrown into this mess.
We are coping with anxiety, with tools that break,
with the fact that we're going to die. We aren't
spectators. We are participants. And Hosterl
hated it. He read Being in Time and scribbled
furiously in the margins. He felt, rightly, I
think, that Heidegger had relapsed into psychologism.
Heidegger made philosophy about human existence
rather than absolute truth. And the betrayal
wasn't just in the text. When the Nazis took
power, Heidegger became the rector of Freiburg
University. The man who was supposed to carry
the torch of pure reason ended up signing letters
with Heil Hitler. And Husserl, a Jew by birth,
was isolated, banned from the library he held
build. This is tragic, but we have to separate
the politics from the philosophy here. Heidegger's
critique stuck because it felt true. Husserl
wanted us to be angels, viewing the world from
nowhere. Heidegger admitted we are mud, viewing
the world from right here. But notice this. Heidegger
couldn't have written a single page of being
in time without Husserl's tools. The concept
of world, of being with others, of disclosure,
it's all modified Husserlian code. Hustle built
the operating system that Heidegger used to run
his own program. Even in his rejection, Heidegger
was a phenomenologist. That I will grant you.
Hustle changed the vocabulary forever. You can't
do modern philosophy or psychology or even cognitive
science without bumping into intentionality.
Exactly. And I think in our modern era, Hustle
is more relevant than ever. We are living in
a time of deep fakes of AI, of algorithms that
curate our reality. The natural attitude today
is trusting the screen, trusting the feed. Hussle's
demand that we stop and analyze how reality is
being presented to us is the critical skill of
the 21st century. We need to be transcendental
egos, or we're just going to be data points.
That's a noble pitch, but I still land on the
side of the realist. I think there is a hard
reality out there, biological, physical, historical,
that doesn't give a damn about my transcendental
reduction. I think we need to look outward, not
inward. Bracketing the world feels safe, but
eventually the bracket breaks. And I think that
without the inward look, the outward look is
blind. You're just measuring shadows if you don't
understand the light source. Well, we've certainly
bracketed enough for one day. It's a dense topic,
and I'm sure our listeners are currently performing
a reduction on their own headaches. A headache
is a phenomenon, too. Analyze it. I'll pop an
aspirin instead. Thanks. That's the natural attitude
for you. Fair enough. To our listeners, thank
you for joining us on this dive into the mind
of Edmund Husserl. Whether you are a realist
or an idealist, remember, the world is only there
because you are there to witness it. Or maybe
it's there anyway. Until next time, goodbye.