Quotes from Edmund Husserl

I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.

Philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science -- the dream is over.

We would be in a nasty position indeed if empirical science were the only kind of science possible.

It just is nothing foreign to consciousness at all that could present itself to consciousness through the mediation of phenomena different from the liking itself; to like is intrinsically to be conscious.

Pure phenomenology claims to be the science of pure phenomena. This concept of the phenomenon, which was developed under various names as early as the eighteenth century without being clarified, is what we shall have to deal with first of all.

I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.

I must achieve internal consistency.

First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must "once in his life" withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom (sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair. It must arise as His wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute insights.

To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness.

Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people.

I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights, principally before myself but in the same manner also before others, as one who has lived in all its seriousness the fate of a philosophical existence.

Philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science -- the dream is over .

Why must the plastic form make up the foundation of image consciousness?

Zu den Sachen selbst!

All forms of perception, according to Husserl, presuppose an intentional structure of consciousness, and it is in this intentional structure that the primordial link between consciousness and the world is to be sought.

Science] presupposes as data principles that are themselves thoroughly lacking in actual rationality. In so far as the intuitive environing world, purely subjective as it is, is forgotten in the scientific thematic, the working subject is also forgotten, and the scientist is not studied.

To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness.

Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within.

The actuality of all of material Nature is therefore kept out of action and that of all corporeality along with it, including the actuality of my body, the body of the cognizing subject.

What is thematically posited is only what is given, by pure reflection, with all its immanent essential moments absolutely as it is given to pure reflection.

Without troublesome work, no one can have any concrete, full idea of what pure mathematical research is like or of the profusion of insights that can be obtained from it.

At the lowest cognitive level, they are processes of experiencing, or, to speak more generally, processes of intuiting that grasp the object in the original.

Within this widest concept of object, and specifically within the concept of individual object, Objects and phenomena stand in contrast with each other.

The ideal of a pure phenomenology will be perfected only by answering this question; pure phenomenology is to be separated sharply from psychology at large and, specifically, from the descriptive psychology of the phenomena of consciousness.