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Notes
“Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas.” (“Do not go outside; return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.”)
In a curious move, Moran chooses to devote much of the final paragraph of his conclusion to a discussion of the historian of mathematics Jacob Klein, rather than elaborate the dangers of substituting “the mathematically ideal for the intuited-real” (p. 98). This is a case where the scholarly scope of Moran’s text works to its detriment.
This second, ontological notion seems to accord most closely with Husserl’s understanding of naturalism, at least as expressed in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” There Husserl characterizes naturalism as the view that “[w]hatever is is […] physical, belonging to the unified totality of physical nature,” where “physical nature” means “a unity of spatio-temporal being subject to exact laws of nature” (Hua XXV, p. 9/79).
Moran does try to motivate Husserl’s criticism from another angle, by focusing on how psychology’s “methodological individualism” (p. 111) supposedly undermines any attempt to provide a proper treatment of intersubjectivity (p. 125). Whatever the cogency of this criticism may be, it is unclear how it would not equally apply to phenomenology. For as is well known and as Moran himself emphasizes, Husserl was unwaveringly committed to a strong form of individualism, both of a methodological and ontological sort. Moran writes, for example, of how Husserl “begins from the first person experience of the self or ‘egoic subjectivity’” (p. 124) and how this “egoic core to the self […] is essential to it at a level prior to intersubjective engagement” (p. 254). Indeed, according to Moran, “the exercise of the transcendental reduction is supposed to lead beyond [the] intersubjectively communicating self to uncover the transcendental ego as an absolute singularity” (p. 254). On Moran’s view, Husserl “never abandons his commitment to the ontological priority of the transcendental ego” (p. 230; Moran’s emphasis). This individualism proved notoriously troublesome for Husserl’s own attempts to account for intersubjectivity phenomenologically. See, for example, Husserl’s dissatisfaction with the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations or Moran’s own admission in Chapter 7 that The Crisis “never manages to sort out [the] transcendental relations between ego, temporality and the constitution of the other” (p. 255).
References
Hua VI. Husserl, E. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. W. Biemel (Ed.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971; The crisis of european sciences and transcendental phenomenology. D. Carr (Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997.
Hua XXV. Husserl, E. Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921). T. Nenon and H. R. Sepp (Eds.). Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1989; Philosophy as rigourous science. In Phenomenology and the crisis of philosophy (pp. 71–146). Q. Lauer (Ed.). New York: Harper & Row, 1965.
Moran, D. (2000). Introduction to phenomenology. New York: Routledge.
Moran, D. (2005). Edmund Husserl founder of phenomenology. Malden, MA: Polity.
Moran, D., & Cohen, J. (2012). The Husserl dictionary. New York: Continuum.
Moran, D., & Mooney, T. (Eds.). (2002). The phenomenology reader. New York: Routledge.
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Bachyrycz, D.J. Dermot Moran: Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction . Husserl Stud 30, 171–177 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-013-9140-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-013-9140-y