ISSUES IN HUSSERL'S IDEAS II

Transcription

1 ISSUES IN HUSSERL'S IDEAS II

2 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.

3 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.

4 A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / 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.

5 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 Chapter 3 Gail Soffer: Perception and Its Causes Chapter 4 J. Claude Evans: Where is the Life-World? Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Ted Klein: "Essences and Experts": Husserl's View of the Foundation of the Sciences Steven Galt Crowell: The Mythical and the Meaningless: Husserl and the Two Faces of Nature Chapter 7 James G. Hart: Agent Intellect and Primal Sensibility Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Elizabeth A. Behnke: Edmund Husserl's Contribution to Phenomenology of the Body in Ideas II Kristana Arp: Husserlian Intentionality and Everyday Coping Lester Embree: Advances Regarding Evaluation and Action in Husserl's Ideas II Rudolf A. Makkreel: How is Empathy Related to Understanding? Chapter 12 John Scanlon: Objectivity and Introjection in Ideas II Chapter 13 Tom Nenon: Husserl's Theory of the Mental Chapter 14 John J. Drummond: The 'Spiritual" World: The Personal, the Social, and the Communal Notes on Contributors Index of Names Index of Topics

6 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, 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

7 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 ),' 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).

8 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 Husser Ii 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

9 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