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Although the nature of reality has always been debated, discussion was particularly fierce - and, in my view, somewhat poignant -  in the 18th and 19th centuries. Greek philosophers some 2 500 years earlier had been divided between those who thought that we are able to perceive the world as it really is, and those who thought that our perceptions are copies, as it were, of a perfect reality.

The coming of Christianity settled the matter for a long while. This world, said Church doctrine, is real enough but rotten to the core. Our true home is with God, his angels and his saints in heaven where Jesus has gone before us. Reality is therefore two-tier, one merging into the other imperceptibly. The heavenly rules the earthly.

The gradual emergence of the scientific method in the Enlightenment in the West put matters of reality to the test once more. The old questions had been asked continually during the ascendance of the Christian order. But unorthodox answers tended, especially in Medieval times, to be dangerous. As the new breed of what we now casually call scientists began describing the physical world, so more and more people set aside the version of reality which ecclesiastical and civil authority had imposed, sometimes on pain of death.

In the process an increasingly sharp distinction came to be made between "what's out there" (which scientists describe) and "what's in here", which only the individual can describe. Which is "reality" - the objective world we "know" more and more about, or the subjective world we all "know" intimately but which is unique to each individual?

Some concluded that everything out there is an illusion and that reality is entirely subjective. Emmanuel Kant held that objects "as they really are" (noumena or "things-in-themselves") must be clearly distinguished from how these objects appear in our experience - which he called phenomena and which are all we can "really know". G W F Hegel thought this was wrong. The knowledge of phenomena (phenomenology) is the science of knowing mind as it is in itself.

Meanwhile, the word "phenomenon" had come to be used in the 19th century as synonymous with "fact", that is, with what is observed to be the case. In its strongest sense, a phenomenon was a fact discovered by the scientific method and having a wide consensus in the scientific community.

Husserl saw himself as utterly dedicated to philosophy. He thought of it as our attempt to deduce what's true from prior assumptions. Phenomenology was the means through which philosophy could become scientific in the sense that it could proceed from description rather than axiom. It was a method by which subjective reality or the phenomena of consciousness could be described without uncertainty or provisionality. So Husserl called phenomenology a "descriptive science" of conscious phenomena.

It's worthwhile noting that Husserl's first discipline was mathematics, in which he received a PhD at the tender age of 22 in 1881. Mathematics is an a priori discipline in the sense that 1+1 = 2, once elucidated, is "obvious" or necessarily true, and is not empirical. It's roots are in language, in particular the principle of contradiction (Law of Excluded Middle) which states that no two identical statements can mean different things at the same point in time. 

He stuck with the idea that it is possible to find a body of truths which can't be disputed, truly "objective" facts which would deserve to be called "scientific". He spent his long life seeking those truths upon which our knowledge supposedly rests. Because he constantly tried to get the prior assumptions correct he more than once abandoned earlier views, referring to himself as "a perpetual beginner". Perhaps he hoped for a "science" of consciousness with a similar degree of a priori certainty. 

Be that as it may, Husserl was attacked on the grounds that his approach was psychology under another name. Scientifically "describing" subjective phenomena is what psychologists do. He countered that, on the contrary, psychology is (or should be) an empirical science concerned with facts of observed behaviours and which infers mental processes. Mental processes can't be observed except by the person who is "having" them, but we can observe the behaviours which result from them.

On the other hand, phenomenology is concerned, he said, with "essences" by which he seems to have meant describable subjective truths upon which all knowledge rests. Husserl was, of course, writing before our new ability to scan the brain and observe its processes. But even when we do that, we're observing the brain - not the mind.

How then are we to distinguish between a phenomenological description and a psychological description? He pointed out that thoughts are "intentional". In other words, merely having the thought that "Pigs are blue" doesn't make them so. If this is so, how is it possible to have a thought which can be demonstrated to correspond with a truth about what's "out there"?

Husserl appears to have overcome this problem by inventing a method or device by which one moves from ordinary perception to a sort of reflective attitude (Die Idee der Phenomenologie, 1907). He called this "transcendental-phenomenological reduction".

Husserl modified his position constantly over the years, not by refuting arguments but by adding to his own scheme. He asserted that phenomenology always describes but never argues. 

However, it seems that he never satisfactorily overcame the problem of describing how his process of reduction actually works. He merely went on to assert that it leads to a sort of "pure consciousness" which he called the "transcendental ego". This is a realm which had up to then never been suspected but which he claimed to have discovered. It was an absolute foundation for our normal experience and was not accessible to empirical observation but known only via "eidetic intuition".

The latter is concerned with "universal essences", the unshakable foundation of all knowledge which was focused into what Husserl called an "Archimidean point" - an ultimate reality which lacks all presuppositions, is a priori and autonomous. The intuitive part of the process is attained, therefore, through a radical suspension of judgement which puts everything "in brackets" - that is, excludes from an "essence" everything which does not belong to it (like presuppositions) until one comes to "the things themselves", the pure phenomena, free of all distortion.

At one stage Husserl maintained that the "transcendental ego" would remain "real" even if the world ended (echoes of Plato's "Forms"). It's almost as though each of us consists of two parts in a type of dualistic relationship. One part is that which relates to the empirical, the real, physical world. The other is a mysterious, eternal and fundamental self which can see through and beyond the empirical into absolute truth.

However he later changed the "transcendental ego" into a "correlative" of the world rather than an alternative mode of perception. It thus lost its absolute status and became "inter-subjective" rather than "pure" consciousness. This is not to say that Husserl was satisfied with his position. He constantly strove to modify it, seeing objections as indications that what he said needed revision.

If true, Husserl's approach seems to me to demolish traditional Christianity. Revelation, an essential dogma of traditional belief, becomes unnecessary because ultimate truth is attributable not to God but to the depths of pure human consciousness. It is discoverable in Husserl's Archimidean Point.

More inimical to his position, however, is the possibility that none of us can think without certain presuppositions. We can't show that phenomenological statements are true in relation to all other statements, as any scientific theory must be able to do. We must therefore perforce start with some assumptions or a priori objective truths. 

To put this another way, we are all creatures of our cultures. That is, there are aspects of our perceptions which are necessarily beyond our awareness - they are "givens" which we can't question because we don't know they're there. 

A simple example is the subjective perception of weight. It's a priori obvious that objects are heavy because they "contain" a "property" of heaviness - not so? If you lived in the 10th century the answer would be "Yes" because the concept of the weak nuclear force we call gravity was not and could not be conceived at that point in history.

Towards the end of his life, Husserl seems to have recognised our dependence upon culture, and in particular scientific dependence upon consensus for its provisional truths. He described phenomenology more as the study of the Lebenswelt or "lived world" than as some kind of numinous reflection on the foundations of scientific knowledge. It becomes a way in which our shared experience hangs together. When we reflect we consider how communal experience coheres, rather than matters of fact.

Husserl's was a brave attempt to unify human experience at a point of deep conceptual fracture - that between objective and subjective experience. In some ways, therefore, he foreshadowed 20th century systems thinking. 

Systems theory attempts to define the world in terms of an interlocking, hierarchical set of open systems "contained" in a unified closed system which we call the universe. It has the merit of allowing physical systems (such as the brain) to be observed in more than one way, and from more than one perspective, without destroying the holistic nature of the human being. 

Thus if we observe a brain we perceive one set of data as objective. When we experience the workings of a brain we "observe" by self-reflection that which we call the subjective. Husserl's "reflection" can be observed as a physical process in the brain. But the process can be described just as validly from an "internal" vantage point. Thus I can test by reflection whether or not my thoughts are internally consistent, and by science whether or not that internal consistency relates accurately to other systems, both cognitive and physical.

Husserl, it seems to me, was reaching for something like this. He needed the empirical clarity and scepticism of the scientific method. At the same time he sought for certainty about the starting points of enquiry which, by definition, arise from within the human cognitive system. That he got neither was, I think, due more to his position in history than intrinsic incapacity.
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For a technical discussion of Husserl see Stanford

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