Edmund Husserl’s Ideas was published in 1913, a masterwork of modern philosophy.

The First World War began the following year. One of Husserl’s sons was killed, then one of his most talented students, then his other son was badly injured. This was the war that was supposed to end all wars. Instead of peace, the war was followed by revolutionary crisis, and fascism, and after that, an even more horrible war. Such is the terrible history of the twentieth century.

Little wonder that the large intellectual project of the European Enlightenment was abandoned, given its manifold failures in social practice. But not by Husserl. Husserl was the last philosopher to contemplate the universalizing power of essential ideas. In the postwar age of intellectual modesty, nay pessimism, the subtitle to Ideas is startling: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.⁹³

Husserl’s Phenomenology stands in the confidently human-centered tradition of Western Philosophy. For Plato, the highest form of knowledge was to be found in “ideas” or “forms” that captured the essence of worldly realities.^§AS1.0.1 For Descartes, there was at least one grounding certainty that mitigated against productive doubt, and that was cogito ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am.”^§MS3.1.2g For Kant, human understanding can be traced to pure concepts, or the categories of the mind in terms of which all thinking occurs: quantities, qualities, relations, and modalities.^§MS3.3e Husserl works firmly in this tradition, perhaps its last philosopher.

Husserl’s first book had been published in 1891, Philosophy of Arithmetic, elaborating on themes from his doctorate. After this, his thought began to range wider, to explore the nature of thinking that underlay mathematics and all sciences. His massive six-part work, Logical Investigations, was published in 1901.

“The mathematician, the physicist and the astronomer,” he says, “need not understand the ultimate grounds of their activities in order to carry through even the most important scientific performances … Significant metaphysical propositions … underlie all those sciences that are concerned with actual reality … time, space, math, cause.” These conceptual presuppositions are the grounding of science. So, Husserl set out to reflect on “the relationship between the subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity of the known content.” This was to be the basis of “a new, purely theoretical science,” a “theory of theory,” a “science of sciences,” a “phenomenology of experiences in general,” a “universal … grammar … [of] laws which determine the possible forms of meaning.”⁹⁴

Then there was a hiatus in Husserl’s philosophical output for over a decade, before his Ideas was published. At this point, Husserl’s ambition became even more expansive, to trace the path of thinking from grounded experience to the most transcendental truths of science.

[The] first outlook on life … [is] the natural standpoint. I am aware of the world, spread out in space endlessly, and in time becoming and become, without end. I am aware of it, that means, first of all, I discover it immediately, intuitively. I experience it. Through sight, touch, hearing etc., in the different ways of sensory perception, corporeal things somehow spatially distributed are for me simply there, in verbal or figurative sense “present,” whether or not I pay them special attention by busying myself with them, considering, thinking, feeling, willing.⁹⁵

The sciences of the empirical world expand these everyday horizons. They address “the World [as] the totality of objects that can be known through experience, known in terms of orderly theoretical thought on the basis of direct, present experience … justif[ying their] claim to transcend the narrow framework of direct empirical given-ness.” These are “grounded systems of knowledge, so rich and so ramified.”⁹⁶ Hence the achievements of the natural sciences, history, and applied mathematics, as they document the empirical world.

However, “every factual science (empirical science) has essential theoretical bases in … objectivity in general,” a higher level of truth. For instance, “in pure geometry, we judge as a rule … ‘straight,’ ‘angle,’ ‘triangle,’ or ‘conic section,’ … about universal triangles in general, conic sections in general. Such universal judgments have the character of essential generality, of ‘pure,’ or as one says, of ‘rigorous,’ absolutely ‘unconditioned’ generality.” These generalities don’t apply only to the discernible empirical world. They also apply to other worlds, not yet the objects of experience. These are “constructions of a syntactico-logical kind: … substantive meaning, relation, constitutive quality, unity, plurality, numerical quantity, order, ordinal number, and so forth.”⁹⁷

The process of ascending from the natural standpoint, to empirical science, to the syntactico-logical constructions of phenomenology, is a process of progressive “disconnexion” from the specifics of the empirical world. Husserl calls this “bracketing.” This “renders ‘pure’ consciousness accessible to us.” Now we reach “the free outlook upon ‘transcendentally’ purified phenomena” and “pure or transcendental phenomenology, established not as a science of facts, but as a science of essential Being.”⁹⁸

If we wanted to step back from the grandiosity of this claim in order to trace a path towards transcendental knowledge, we might paraphrase it as this: things of experience are not just how they immediately seem to be. If we work diligently at our examination of experience, and move our investigation to the level of experience in general, we can come to a point where we understand aspects of experience that are not immediately obvious in the circumstantial, empirical moments that are a-spot-in-time and/or a place of happen-to-be. Albeit on a far more modest scale, this is the kind of project we now are attempting in this transpositional grammar.

Ideas was the first of Husserl’s works to be translated into English by W.R. Boyce Gibson, Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Boyce spent his sabbatical leave with Husserl at the University of Freiburg in 1928, working on the translation.⁹⁹

While Boyce remained faithful to the text and spirit of Husserl’s phenomenology, some of the students he inspired did not. As editor of the Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Husserl published Being and Time¹⁰⁰ in its 1927 volume, the work of his assistant and, for a time, close friend, Martin Heidegger. But when, after publication, Husserl finally found the time to read Heidegger’s full text carefully, he was angered and disappointed by the extent of its revision of his ideas. Jean-Paul Sartre also took phenomenology in a different direction, so different that it needed another name: existentialism.¹⁰¹ Husserl’s most famous followers abandoned him, and the project of the European Enlightenment.

Husserl, a Jew by Nazi racial classification but not religious persuasion, was suspended from the University of Freiberg in 1933 and banned from teaching or publishing in Germany. Not that his ideas were any particular threat to the new Nazi state, as they might have been if he were a communist. Heidegger joined the Nazi party and become the Rector of the University.

Husserl died in 1938, before he could become a victim of the Holocaust. His voluminous papers were smuggled out of Germany in 1939.

---

⁹³ Edmund Husserl, 1913 [2002], Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, translated by W.R.B. Gibson, London, UK: Routledge.

⁹⁴ Edmund Husserl, 1913 [2001], Logical Investigations, Volume 1, translated by J.N. Findlay, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 15–16, 2, 152, 166; Edmund Husserl, 1921 [2001], Logical Investigations, Volume 2, translated by J.N. Findlay, London, UK: Routledge, p. 49.

⁹⁵ Edmund Husserl, 1913 [2002], Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, translated by W.R.B. Gibson, London, UK: Routledge, p. 51.

⁹⁶ Ibid., pp. 10, 20.

⁹⁷ Ibid., pp. 20, 15, 25, 24.

⁹⁸ Ibid., pp. 61, 63, 3.

⁹⁹ S.A. Grave, 1988, “Gibson, William Ralph Boyce (1869–1935),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Melbourne, AU: Melbourne University Press.

¹⁰⁰ Martin Heidegger, 1926 [1962], Being and Time, translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

¹⁰¹ Jean-Paul Sartre, 1943 [1993], Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, translated by H.E. Barnes, New York, NY: Washington Square Press.

---

Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 58-61. https://doi.org/10.1017/97813164596

Edmund Husserl’s "Pure Phenomenology" §MS0.4c