A CRITIQUE OF EDMUND HUSSERL’S PHENOMENOLOGY

The focus of this study is to attempt a critique of Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology. Husserl, a modern founder of phenomenology is the German philosopher, who sought to make philosophy a "rigorous science" by returning its attention "to the things themselves" (zu den Sachen selbst). By this he does not mean that philosophy should become empirical, as if "facts" could be determined objectively and absolutely. Rather, searching for foundations on which philosophers could ground their knowledge with certainty. Husserl proposed that reflection put out, play all unprovable assumptions (about the existence of objects, for example, or about ideal or metaphysical entities) and describe what is given in experience. The road to a presuppositionless Philosophy, he argues, begins with suspending the "natural attitude" of everyday knowledge, which assumes that things are simply there in the external world. Philosophers should therefore "bracket" the object-world through a process he called epoché, or "eidetic reduction," and focus their attention on what is imminent in consciousness itself, without presupposing anything about its origins or supports. Edmund Husserl proposed bracketing the mind from the object world in order to get to the essences of things. But how can these be possible when the self is already in the world interacting with objects; how can it go off the world? Again Husserl's quest for certainty in knowledge of reality is predicated in the transcendental ego; Husserl at this point attempted the impossible. How can one get to the nature of reality when there is a dichotomy between things as it appears (phenomena) and things in itself (noumena) as espoused by Immanuel Kant. These are the different questions, that aroused in Edmund Husserl's idea on phenomenology. Therefore the main stay of this Research shall be to spot out the downside in Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology.