Issues in Husserl’s Ideas II

267 Pages·1996·5.985 MB·English

by  Edmund Husserl (auth.), Thomas Nenon, Lester Embree (eds.)

ISSUES IN HUSSERL'S IDEAS II
CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHENOMENOLOGY
IN COOPERATION WITH
THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH IN PHENOMffiNOLOGY
Volume 24
Editor:
John Drummond, Mount Saint Mary's College
Editorial Board:
Elizabeth A. Behnke
David Carr, Emory University
Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University
J. Claude Evans, Washington University
Jose Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University
Joseph J. Kockelmans, The Pennsylvania State University
William R. McKenna, Miami University
Algis Mickunas, Ohio University
J. N. Mohanty, Temple University
Tom Nenon, The University of Memphis
Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat, Mainz
Elisabeth Stroker, Philosophisches Seminarium der Universitat KOln
Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University
Scope
The purpose of this series is to foster the development of phenomenological philosophy
through creative research. Contemporary issues in philosophy, other disciplines and in
culture generally, offer opportunities for the application of phenomenological methods that
call for creative responses. Although the work of several generations of thinkers has
provided phenomenology with many results with which to approach these challenges, a truly
successful response to them will require building on this work with new analyses and
methodological innovations.
ISSUES IN HUSSERL'S
IDEAS II
edited by
THOMAS NENON
University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, U.S.A.
and
LESTER EMBREE
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, U.S.A.
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-90-481-4746-5 ISBN 978-94-015-8628-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-8628-3
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1996
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
Table of Contents
Preface ....................................................... vii
Introduction ................................................... ix
Chapter 1 Edmund Husserl: Naturwissenschaftliche Psychologie,
Geisteswissenschaft und Metaphysik (1919) ................ 1
Natural Scientific Psychology, Human Sciences, and
Metaphysics (1919) .................................... 8
Chapter 2 Ullrich Melle: Nature and Spirit ........................ 15
Chapter 3 Gail Soffer: Perception and Its Causes ................... 37
Chapter 4 J. Claude Evans: Where is the Life-World? ............... 57
Chapter 5 Ted Klein: "Essences and Experts": Husserl's View of the
Foundation of the Sciences ............................. 67
Chapter 6 Steven Galt Crowell: The Mythical and the Meaningless:
Husserl and the Two Faces of Nature ..................... 81
Chapter 7 James G. Hart: Agent Intellect and Primal Sensibility ..... 107
Chapter 8 Elizabeth A. Behnke: Edmund Husserl's Contribution to
Phenomenology of the Body in Ideas II .................. 135
Chapter 9 Kristana Arp: Husserlian Intentionality and Everyday
Coping ........................................... 161
Chapter 10 Lester Embree: Advances Regarding Evaluation and
Action in Husserl's Ideas II ........................... 173
Chapter 11 Rudolf A. Makkreel: How is Empathy Related to
Understanding? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 199
Chapter 12 John Scanlon: Objectivity and Introjection in Ideas II ...... 213
Chapter 13 Tom Nenon: Husserl's Theory of the Mental ............. 223
Chapter 14 John J. Drummond: The 'Spiritual" World: The Personal,
the Social, and the Communal ......................... 237
Notes on Contributors .......................................... 255
Index of Names ............................................... 259
Index of Topics ............................................... 261
Editors' Preface
This volume is chiefly composed of revised versions of essays presented and
discussed at the research symposium of the same title held in Delray Beach, Florida,
on May 7-9, 1993. The symposium was conducted under the sponsorship of the
William F. Dietrich Eminent Scholar Chair in Philosophy at Florida Atlantic
University and the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc. Several
essays have been added, including the Husserl ineditum and its translation.
The intention of the project was to attract even wider appreciation for this
posthumous work by Husserl, especially since it has now been first translated into
English by Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. In manuscript form, the Ideas
II was known to Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty before Sein und Zeit
(1927) and Phenomenologie de la perception (1945), as well to Edith Stein and
Ludwig Landgrebe, of course, who worked on it as Husserl' s assistants. It was
published in 1952 as Volume IV of the Husserliana series, and critical studies of
that volume were written by Paul Ricoeur and Alfred Schutz. Now that there is an
English translation, it is increasingly being taught in the United States along with
the Ideas I.
The participants in the research symposium were furthermore invited not only
to provide interpretations of Husserl's texts, but also to engage in criticizing,
refming, and continuing further the analyses of the issues addressed by the text,
something that the richness and concreteness of this work itself invites. Taking
Husserl at his word, that phenomenology is an endless task, one can never be
satisfied that enough phenomenology has been done, but we are pleased with the
outcome.
Thomas Nenon
Lester Embree
Introduction
There is almost an inverse proportion between the influence that Husserl's
Ideas II exercised on important philosophical developments in this century and the
attention it has received in secondary literature. Part of the explanation for this
disproportion lies in the history of its pUblication. Although most of the manuscripts
which formed the basis for this study were composed between 1912 and 1915, a
handwritten shorter draft of the book was undertaken by Edith Stein around 1916,
and a second longer version was composed by her two years later (which was typed
up by Landgrebe in 1924125),' Book Two of Husserl's Ideen zu einer reinen
Phdnomenologie und phdnomenologischen Philosophie was not published until
1952 as Volume IV of the Husserliana series.2 It was not until 1989 that it was
translated into English by Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer and thus made
available to a wider audience. Moreover, even today Husserl's failure to carry
through his project of a series of concrete phenomenological analyses of various
important ontological regions that would serve as concrete illustrations of
phenomenological method described in Book One of the Ideas, presents the reader
with difficult textual problems, since it is apparent that the text presented here is
anything but a seamless whole. Most of these text-historical questions will never be
resolved or will be so only after someone has undertaken the arduous task
reconstructing, iif possible, the original stenographic manuscripts that were
available to Stein and later Landgrebe in their editorial efforts.
In spite of these impediments, however, the Ideas II proved to be a decisive
text in the history of phenomenology even before it appeared. Anyone vaguely
familiar with Heidegger's analyses of the worldhood of the world and the contrast
between Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit, between the concrete, everyday
surrounding world (Umwelt) and the abstract world of theoretical science, cannot
help but be struck by the parallels to Section Three of the Ideas II. This is certainly
no accident. During Heidegger's early Privatdozent years in Freiburg, and as a
young professor in Marburg years, he had access to various unpublished
manuscripts by Husserl, These would have included above all those prepared by
, For details concerning the history of the text and the manuscripts that provided the
basis for it see Marly Biemel's "Einleitung des Herausgebers" (xiii-xix) and the
"Textkritischer Anhang" (295 ff.) in the Husserliana edition.
2BibJiographicai information about the volumes in the Husserliana series and an
explanation of the method of citation employed here and in most of the subsequent chapters
can be found in the final paragraph of this introduction (see below p xi).
x ISSUES IN HUSSERL 'S IDEAS II
Edith Stein, of which the Ideas 11 and the lectures on internal time consciousness
were the most extensive and important examples. Of course, there are other
influences at work in these sections of Being and Time, such as Dilthey who was
also a source of many of Husserl's own ideas, the backdrop of the NeoKantian
(Rickert and Windelband) distinction between natural and cultural sciences, with
which Husserl and Heidegger were both familiar, as well as Heidegger's reading of
Aristotle from a practical as opposed to a theoretical perspective. Nonetheless, it is
clear that HusserI's analyses of the personalistic attitude in the Ideas 11 was a direct
and immediate influence upon Heidegger. At the very least, the Ideas 11 puts to rest
the opinion, common for a time, that Husserl owed his concept of the life-world to
Heidegger. The Ideas 11 shows that the concept of Umwelt, which would be
replaced by that of the life-world during the 20's and 30's for Husserl, was fully
developed already by 1915 at the latest-Leo before he had ever met or read
anything by the young Heidegger.
Similarly, in the introduction to the English edition of the Ideas 11, the
translators recall Merleau-Ponty's high estimation of that text, which he had studied
closely at the Husserl-Archives in Leuven prior to the composition of his
Phenomenologie de la perception. Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty will part
ways with Husserl over questions of philosophical methodology and the notions of
a pure ego that figure into the Ideas 1 in such a central way. Thus, it has been
common to speak of Heidegger's and Merleau-Ponty's rejection or at least
overcoming of HusserI i an phenomenology. The Ideas 11, however, documents some
of their ongoing debt and the continuity between Husserl and some of his more
critical successors in phenomenology.
The text of the Ideas 11 is divided into three main sections, Section One dealing
with the constitution of material nature, Section Two with the constitution of animal
nature, and Section Three with the constitution of the spiritual (geistige) world of
persons and cultural objects. The essays in this volume will deal with various
aspects of all three of these sections. What unites the three sections, and is thus also
a recurrent theme in the following studies, is the notion of "constitution," which
serves as a bridge between the earlier Husserl' s static phenomenology, which
analyses the structures of various kinds of objects and the essential relationships
between them, and his later genetic phenomenology, which shows how various
kinds of objects are constituted from the most basic temporal structures of
consciousness.
In the Ideas I, Husserl had described the necessary correlation between noesis
and noema in a general way. In the Ideas II, we find concrete examples of such
correlation, expressed now in terms of the correlation between different attitudes
(Einstellungen) and different kinds or regions of objects. Moreover, the emphasis
INTRODUCTION xi
on the priority of the nonphysical realm over the physical which one fmds expressed
in terms of the priority of the transcendental ego over the objects constituted for
consciousness in the Ideas I takes on a new dimension when it is linked to the
priority of the personalistic over the naturalistic attitude, the surrounding world of
concrete experience over the abstract world of science in the Ideas II. Even later
phenomenologists reject the notion of a transcendental ego from the Ideas I, still
continue to build on the Husserl's insights into the priority of the attitudes guiding
our concrete daily existence as they are outlined in the Ideas II.
The essays in this volume concern the issues raised in the Ideas II. The starting
point is often a passage from the Husserlian text, yet each of them goes beyond the
text in some way by addressing one or more of the problems raised by Husserl's
analyses of the constitution of these various realms. It will become apparent that the
contributors do not restrict themselves just to what Husserl has said, and that
questions concerning the status of the text as a philological question have not been
addressed. However, each of them demonstrates that there is much to be learned
from the complex and rich phenomenological descriptions presented by Husserl in
the Ideas II. We hope that this volume will further the project of phenomenology
by encouraging others also to return to the Ideas II and the issues raised there, and
to learn from Husserl and likewise to go beyond him in an orientation "zu den
Sachen selbst."
A few remarks on the method of citation for volumes from the Husserliana
series are also in order. The numerous references to the text-critical edition of
Husserl's works, begun in 1949 and continuing on to this day under the supervision
of the Husserl Archives in Leuven, as Husserliana (first by Martinus Nijhoff
Publishers, The Hague; then by Kluwer Academic Publishers, DordrechtIBoston!
London) will be cited in parentheses by volume number in roman numerals,
followed by a colon and then the page number in arabic numerals. If there is an
English translation of that text, its page number will follow in italicized arabic
numerals after a back-slash. Hence where one finds a citation that begins with a
roman numeral in parentheses, followed by a colon and an arabic numeral, the
reference will be to the corresponding volume of the Husserliana. The most
common reference in these essay will be to Volume IV, of course, the Ideen zu
einer reinen Phdnomenologie und phdnomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch.
Thomas Nenon
Chapter 1
N aturwissenschaftliche Psychologie,
Geisteswissenschaft und Metaphysik (1919)
Edmund Busserl
Preface of the Editor
This text, published here for the first time, consists of pages 25-29 of convolute A IV
16. The convolute contains a fragment of the lecture "Nature and Spirit" that Husserl had
given on February 21,1919 at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft in Freiburg, as well
as the manuscript of an earlier version of the lecture. These texts have been published in
Aujsiitze und Vortriige (1910-1911), Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp eds.,
Husserliana Bd. XXV (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 316-330. The text published
here most probably originated in connection with the composition of the lecture, thus from
the beginning of 1919. It is quite possible that the text is fragmentary and that the initial
pages are missing. The text is written in ink in Gabelsberger stenography. The title comes
from the editor. The not very numerous alterations of the text are likewise made in ink. As
is often the case in Husserl' s text there are numerous underlinings in ink and pencil, not all
of which have been adopted. The editor has improved the text stylistically or grammatically
in only a few places. Insertions by the editor are in angled brackets. The critical remarks of
the editor on the text will be limited to the unavoidable minimum.
In terms of their content, the text like the lecture clearly stems from the group of
problems and themes of Ideas II In a very concentrated form HusserI develops his
arrangement of sciences into natural science, the human sciences, and philosophy, i.e.,
metaphysics. He contrasts natural scientific, that is, naturalistic psychology, psychophysics,
with the psychology belonging to the human sciences, and in so doing goes into the
distinction between causality and motivation and, correlative to it, the distinction between
causal explanation and explanation by understanding (verstehende Erkliirung). He then
divides the human sciences into the descriptive-hermeneutic-here, in turn, are to be
distinguished the empirical and the eidetic human sciences and the normatively-judging
human sciences, making the difference clear by means of the concept of development. "The
last step" leads him to the absolute contemplation of monad o logical philosophy, which is
to say, metaphysics. Here, once again, Husserl distinguishes a lower from a higher stage.
This higher stage deals with the problem of facticity, which is to say irrationality, in
connection with the teleological-theological problem of the sense of the world. Thus Husserl
sketches out here in a few pages the basic framework of his theory of science and philosophy
with a noteworthy view to the highest and the ultimate, i.e., the metaphysical-theological
problems of philosophy.
The publication of this manuscript has come about with the kind permission of
Professor Samuel IJsseling, director of the Husserl-Archives in Leuven. The manuscript and