The German Genius

Neoplatonists, neo-Pythagoreans
    Medieval : Lullus, Cusanus
    Modern : German Idealism
     
     
    This approach helped make Brentano a classic halfway figure in intellectual history. His science led him to conclude, after twenty years of search, that there does indeed exist “an eternal, creating and sustaining principle,” which he called “understanding” (an echo of Kant). At the same time, his view that philosophy moved in cycles led him to doubt the progressivism of science. Despite this, his approach did spark two other branches of philosophy that were themselves influential in the early years of the twentieth century, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and Christian von Ehrenfels’s theory of Gestalt . 9
    Husserl (1859–1938) was born in the same year as Freud and in the same province, Moravia, as both Freud and Mendel. Like Freud he was Jewish, but he had a more cosmopolitan education, studying at Berlin, Leipzig, and Vienna. His first interests—as we have seen earlier—were in mathematics and in logic, but he found himself drawn to psychology. In those days, in the German-speaking countries psychology was usually taught as an aspect of philosophy, but it was growing fast as its own discipline, thanks in particular to the laboratory psychology pioneered by Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt (1832–1920), a prolific professor at Leipzig—his works run to 53,000 pages—had shared a laboratory with Helmholtz and tried all his life to introduce the methodology of experimental physiology into psychology. Contrary to Dilthey, Wundt firmly believed that our psychology would eventually be explained by small physical events, such as reflex arcs, observed in the laboratory. 10
    Husserl, who attended some of Wundt’s lectures, is best understood as a post-Kantian, post-Darwinian, post-Nietzschean—and therefore post-Christian—philosopher, whose concern was to understand the phenomenon of existence, of being, in a nonreligious way. The key concepts for him, therefore, were consciousness, logic, and language. How are we to understand the phenomena of the world and the phenomena in the world? Through the mind we are conscious, the central psychological phenomenon of our existence; to what extent are the phenomena available to us through consciousness real—i.e., independent of our mind, our consciousness? Or do our minds in some way “intend” these phenomena? Does an apparently straightforward phenomenon like logic exist “out there” in the world, or is logic an “intention” of the mind? And how does all this relate to our use of and understanding of language? Is language an accurate reflection/description of phenomena and if so, how does the analysis of language help in understanding the world?
    Husserl’s big book on the subject, Logische Untersuchungen ( Logical Investigations ), was published in 1900 (volume one) and 1901 (volume two). 11 His main conclusion can be characterized as an updated Idealism, that there is a “tendency” of the mind to organize experience, to order consciousness. Husserl was not a great stylist, it has to be said, and many—especially in the Anglophone world—have difficulty following him. But one accessible way of approximating what he was getting at, in an admittedly simple and basic way, is via the well-known visual illusion that may be seen either as a candlestick (in black), or two faces opposing each other (in white). The fact that we switch—almost involuntarily—between these two perceptions means, for Husserl, that there is some organizing principle in our consciousness that can determine—or help determine—how we experience the world.
    Husserl was fascinated by how one individual both changes and stays the same over time: what does it mean to have a continuous identity, and what does it mean to be part of a whole? He was convinced that there are entire areas of being, of consciousness, that science can never address, even in principle, and in this Husserl (who left a vast archive) is best understood now as the immediate father of the so-called continental school of twentieth-century Western philosophy, whose members were to include Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jürgen Habermas. They stand in contrast to the “analytic” school begun by Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, which is more popular in North America and Great Britain. 12
    Brentano’s other notable legatee was Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932), the father of Gestalt philosophy and