Born in Prossnitz, Moravia (now Prostêjov, Czech Republic) on April 8, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) inaugurated the phenomenological movement in philosophy. Trained as a mathematician at Vienna, where he received his Ph.D. in 1883, Husserl began studying philosophy in 1884 under Franz Brentano (1838–1917) and went on to teach in the philosophy faculties at Halle an der Saale, Göttingen, and Freiburg. His most notable works—Logical Investigations, Ideas (Volumes I, II, and III), Cartesian Meditations, and The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology—seek a philosophical grounding for mathematics, logic, and science by analyzing the intentional or essential structures of consciousness in its relation to objects in the world relations between subjectivity and objectivity. After his death on April 26 in Freiburg, a substantial body of posthumously published work extended his account of subjectivity and its correlative world into the domain of intersubjective experience, and the development of an ethical system that exhorts a fully rational human existence in which all persons repeatedly justify their beliefs and actions.
The fundamental method of phenomenology is the "reduction," which entails suspending the philosopher's own participation in our natural beliefs about the world. Not a denial of the external world, the reduction simply neutralizes dogmatic assumptions about experience in order to examine more closely experience and its objects just as they are given; hence, phenomenology calls itself a "presuppositionless" enterprise.
Husserl's most overtly relevant work for science, technology, and ethics, The Crisis (1936), argues that science and technology constitute a nonneutral transformation of life rather than a simple neutral extension of ahistorical human concerns. Neither pro–nor anti–science and technology, Husserl's Crisis suspends the typically modern commitment to science in order to disclose and examine the repercussions of those unreflectively accepted scientific presuppositions and practices that transform the prescientific life-world of human experience. Husserl values the way science tests and retests experience, thereby contributing to a fuller sense of objectivity than everyday judging. In their great success, however, science and technology create "fact-minded" citizens blinded by promises of objectivity and control. In their narrow view of reason as mere calculation, science and technology consider themselves value neutral and thus exempt from responsibly advising about how to make difficult decisions arising from the meansthey produce. Moreover, one could argue, science and technology evolve in rarefied discourses unavailable to most citizens and beyond democratic control. Followers of Husserl thus are able to argue that humankind's historical circumstance marks a crisis in which science and technology develop independently of value questions and democratic voice, yet are unreflectively and passively received and deployed.
Edmund Husserl, 1859–1938. The German philosopher is considered the father of phenomenology, one of the most important trends in 20th-century philosophy. (The Granger Collection, New York.)
To philosophers of technology, however, Husserl's corrective measure in the form of a relentless search by the subject for a fuller sense of evidence to justify beliefs and actions often appears to be a formal, abstract quest for ideal essences. Ethical discussions of science and technology thus often disregard Husserl's phenomenology. Husserl's protégé, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), for example, believes Husserl's emphasis on cognition lands him squarely in the path of human technological domination of the world. The phenomenological reduction, Heidegger argues, "reduces" the world to human "intentional" activities and sacrifices world independence to consciousness's drive to explain and predict experience with absolute certainty. American pragmatist philosopher Larry A. Hickman (2001) argues that privileging conscious reflection and increased objectivity over lived experience renders phenomenological inquiry a private enterprise tied to "ideal essences." Unable to reconfigure its ideals, Hickman finds phenomenology incapable of a providing a viable program for the reform of technology. And the American post-phenomenologist Don Ihde (1990) reiterates Heideggerian and pragmatist criticisms. Because Husserl neglected the inseparability of senseextending technologies from scientific discovery, Ihde argues he never reached beyond an intimation of a philosophy of technology.
Yet Husserl's contribution to the philosophy of technology can be found in these criticized notions intentionality and objectivity, which form the basis of his ethics of a self-conscious community founded on intuitionally fulfilled beliefs and actions, and provide the basis for a critical assessment of technology. For Husserl, consciousness, in its very nature as activity, is intentional. In its care for and interest in the world, consciousness transcends itself. Always outside of itself, a subject experiences the world in a public and intersubjective rather than private and solipsistic way. Intuitional fulfillment denotes the correlation of a subject's intentional anticipations with the evidence found in experience. When experience does not confirm a subject's anticipation, the intention goes "unfulfilled" and demands that the subject revise prior beliefs, thus achieving a degree of objectivity. When experience confirms a subject's anticipation, the intention gets "fulfilled," again achieving a degree of objectivity. Because Husserl advocates self-critique and reflection as a lifelong task, even fulfilled intentions require further experiential confirmation over time and across subjects. Rather than a fixed ideal, objectivity remains open to reconfiguration according to experiential evidence given in the fluxing relation between subject and world.
An interesting instance of the kind of self-critical agency that Husserl advocates can be found in the life of the Polish scientist Joseph Rotblat (b. 1908), who worked on the atomic bomb. Rotblat initially justified his participation by reasoning that only Allied bomb development would counter potential German development. After the German defeat, Rotblat reflected on the standard attitude of the scientists working on the project—many of whom believed it was not their job to advise about how the atomic bomb should be used—leading him to leave the project before the first testing and use of the bomb. Rotblat resolved to henceforth carefully choose each of his future projects, accepting only assignments he judged of definite benefit for humanity. Rotblat's revised outlook on his career as a scientist follows in the spirit of Husserl's ethics based on a subject's vow to live a life guided by a repeated and critical evaluation of beliefs. Rotblat's decision to withstand the heedless activity that Husserl believes characterizes the contemporary relation to science and technology exemplifies the self-reflection and self-responsibility for which Husserl argues when he exhorts subjects to continuously assess their experiences.
Hickman, Larry A. (2001). Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Develops John Dewey's pragmatist philosophy of technology, and criticizes phenomenology along the way.
Husserl, Edmund. (1973). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Discusses the value of reason and the life-task of seeking intuitional fulfillment and increased objectivity beyond its mere facts and calculation.
Husserl, Edmund. (1982). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book 1: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. Fred Kersten. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Extended, detailed discussion of the phenomenological "reduction."
Ihde, Don. (1990). Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. A clearly written overview and analysis of relevant phenomenological literature.
Melle, Ullrich. (1991). "The Development of Husserl's Ethics." Études Phénoménologiques 13–14: 115–135. Overview of the chronological development of Husserl's ethical thought.
Melle, Ullrich. (1998). "Responsibility and the Crisis of Technological Civilization: A Husserlian Meditation on Hans Jonas." Human Studies 21(4): 329–345. In place of Jonas's heuristic of fear, Melle discusses Husserl's notions of self-critique, objectivity, evidence, and intuitional fulfillment as methods for ensuring responsible engagement with technology.
Rotblat, Joseph. (1986). "Leaving the Bomb Project." In Assessing the Nuclear Age: Selections from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, ed. Len Ackland and Steven McGuire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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