Abstract
As one who was constantly at pains to clarify his field, its methods, and their results in a manner that was radical and universal, Edmund Husserl, the self-styled perpetual beginner, was explicitly at odds with worldview-oriented philosophy (Weltanschauung) and a scientific project that would assume a natural existence as given (Dasein). He championed an inevitably experiential, pre-theoretical, conditioning life (leib) whose mechanism he described as the life-structure and whose output he demarcated as sense and validity (sinn und geltung). This life-structure is the irreducible composite of my living body, the living social bodies that I have part in, and the lived surrounding world that is the correlate of each (leib, lebendiger generativer Sozialität und lebensumwelt). Together these form an intersubjective, egosomatical ground manifesting the lifeworld (lebenswelt) and, through it, the natural and human sciences (natur und geist). These strata of Husserl’s scientific philosophy are what set apart phenomenology. With the life-structure Husserl established a radical thinking that works systematically to secure the end of systematicity as such in a ruthlessness of inquiry demanding the infinite passage of embodied collectives manifesting, what he called, “truth in motion”—the outer edge of which is the Husserlian philosophy of the event: the in-breaking of the unimaginable something that finds its passage into the imaginal through the life-structure.
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- 1.
One of this paper’s reviewers made mention of the uncharacteristic tone of familiarity struck by the use of the pronouns “me” and “we” throughout the work. This choice has been made explicitly. It is an aesthetic risk that I am taking in an effort to drive home the centrality of the me and we in Husserl’s argument for the life-structure.
- 2.
Herbert Spiegelberg, The Context of the Phenomenological Movement, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff: 1981), p. 183.
- 3.
An interesting example of this is Husserl’s Erste Philosophie. Ludwig Landgrebe calls First Philosophy a shipwreck that singularly conveys the “radicalism concerning the continually new ‘presuppositionless’ beginning and the questioning of all that had so far been achieved” (Ludwig Landgrebe, The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, ed. Donn Welton, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 6). In the lecture course Husserl, according to Landgrebe, “exposed himself to the ‘force of the absolute’ (Hegel) to such an extent, so that this basic feature of his thought is manifested here to a unique degree, a thought which does not aim at a will to mastery through system, but one which advances toward the ‘affair’ [Sache] with restless abandon.... there occurs within this text a departure from those traditions which are determinative for modern thought and a breaking into a new basis for reflection. It is a reluctant departure insofar as Husserl had wished to complete and fulfill this tradition without knowing to what extent his attempt served to break up this tradition. It is therefore a moving document of an unprecedented struggle to express a content within the terminology of the traditions of modern thought that already forsakes this tradition and its alternatives and perspectives.” (Ibid., 68). Rather than Landgrebe’s characterization of Husserl’s project as one setting out to “complete and fulfill” philosophy as a tradition, I would suggest the mission of Husserl’s phenomenology to be one of “renewing and beginning” philosophy as a science. In this way, fundamental phenomenology becomes a grounding of philosophy in a manner similar to the groundings of science and mathematics in the formal pursuits of logic and arithmetic (projects Husserl undertook in the first two decades of his academic work). It is in these three groundings that the Husserlian project in toto can be seen.
- 4.
Herbert Spiegelberg, The Context of the Phenomenological Movement, p. 182.
- 5.
Rudolf Bernet, Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach, An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), p. 77. See also Die Krisis where Husserl further clarifies this endeavor to be a multi-generational project of thinking with its ongoing relative achievements carried out by and realized amidst those living together in a common “life-purpose”. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, Trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 379–83.
- 6.
“The characteristic feature of phenomenology consists in its being radical and universal in reflection and accepting no natural datum in a simple and straightforward manner. Rather, it leads every datum back to consciousness, to the universe of actual and possible consciousness in which natural being is given in consciousness, intended, possibly ‘demonstrated as true,’ etc. [It thus reduces every datum,] not in hazardous isolation, but every one together with every other actual and possible [datum]—in the unity of a radical resolve to assume no natural existence [Dasein] as given, but rather to make a theme of the universe of consciousness and of this alone and thus to wish to have and regard natural existence solely as that which is experienced or otherwise intended, thought, etc.” (Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie, 2 vols., 430. As translated in Rudolf Bernet, Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach, An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), pp. 75–6.)
- 7.
Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer, (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 166.
- 8.
Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil. 1921–28. Ed. Iso Kern. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. xix.
- 9.
Herbert Spiegelberg, The Context of the Phenomenological Movement, pp. 180–81.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 181.
- 11.
Ibid., pp. 181–82.
- 12.
Roman Ingarden, “Edith Stein on her Activity as an Assistant of Edmund Husserl” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. XXIII, No. 2 (Providence: International Phenomenological Society, 1962) 160–61. While outside of the scope of this paper, this notion of “selflessness” as a character trait of the investigator who would take up the phenomenological mandate is a rich vein for continued reflection as it centers in on both the very subjectivity central to noetic-noematic correlational thinking and the nearly monastic outlook that Husserl had when it came to his work and its continuance. In a very personal letter, written to his teacher Franz Brentano on New Year’s Day, 1905, Husserl recounts his own struggles as one seeking truth amidst those positioning themselves for very narrowly defined vocational advancement. See: Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), p. 83.
- 13.
Edmund Husserl, Natur und Geist: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1927, ed. Michael Weiler, Husserliana 32 (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), p. 241. All passages from Natur und Geist (1919 and 1927) cited here and below are my translations.
- 14.
Herbert Spiegelberg, The Context of the Phenomenological Movement, p. 182.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 184.
- 16.
Edmund Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), p. 39.
- 17.
Edmund Husserl, “Edmund Husserl’s Letter to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl” in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VIII, eds. Burt Hopkins and John Drummond. (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2008a), p. 2.
- 18.
Otherwise, “In accord with each one’s dominant habit of interpretation, the natural scientist has the tendency to look upon everything as nature, and the humanistic scientist sees everything as… a historical creation; by the same token, both are inclined to falsify the sense of what cannot be seen in their way.” From Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, p. 169. See also p. 179.
- 19.
Edmund Husserl, “Edmund Husserl’s Letter to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl” in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VIII, eds. Burt Hopkins and John Drummond. (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2008a), 2–3. Translator’s additions appear in <>.
- 20.
Bernet, Kern, and Marbach, An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology, p. 257.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 84.
- 22.
Schuhmann (1977, pp. 212–213).
- 23.
Herbert Spiegelberg, The Context of the Phenomenological Movement, pp. 183–84. The wider quotation may be of interest to some, “This means that it occurs in the investigation of the constitutive formation of the world with a view to the concordance of the meaning of being foreshadowing and validating itself in intention and fulfillment: a concordance through collapses of its modalizations and through ever new ‘corrections.’” Husserl continues, “This is a matter of an all-comprehensive set of problems which can also be designated by the title of universal teleology. Put differently, these are the problems of totality, of the transcendental possibility of an existing, open, infinite transcendental intersubjectivity…. Thus the supreme terminus for the problems of phenomenological philosophy is the question of the “principle” of teleology disclosed concretely in its universal structures.”
- 24.
“There has never been a scientific inquiry into the way in which the life-world constantly functions as subsoil, into how its manifold pre-logical validities act as grounds for logical ones, for theoretical truths.” Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, Trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 124.
- 25.
The language of “the flowing, vital horizon” comes from Husserl’s reflections on horizon-certainty and horizon-exposition in The Crisis texts. See: Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr, pp. 374–75.
- 26.
This wonderful phrase, “truth in motion” is Husserl’s from a manuscript passage now collected in the Die Lebenswelt volume. The wider context reads: “Descriptive science is in the widest sense that which remains within the realm (of the open-endless) lifeworld, within the horizon of actual and possible experience, with the conscious goal of bringing that which is experienced as world consequently to an ever more complete, immediate or inductive experiential cognizance, descriptive cognizance. It is directed towards the truth, but truth in constant motion, anticipating, that each achieved truth as being relative lies within a horizon of possible systematic completion, in pre-delineated directions of this completion…” (Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa, Husserliana 39 (New York: Springer, 2008b), p. 619. All passages cited from Die Lebenswelt are my translations.)
- 27.
Herbert Spiegelberg, The Context of the Phenomenological Movement, p. 182.
- 28.
See: Edmund Husserl, Natur und Geist. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1919, ed. Michael Weiler, Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Materialienband 4 (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), pp. 135–36. And Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa, Husserliana 39 (New York: Springer, 2008b), p. 181.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 675.
- 30.
Ibid., pp. 259–62.
- 31.
Edmund Husserl, Natur und Geist: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1927, ed. Michael Weiler, Husserliana 32 (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), p. 241. This passage from the 1927 seminar was brought to my attention while reading Adam Konopka’s useful essay, “The Role of Umwelt in Husserl’s Aufbau and Abbau of the Natur/Geist Distinction” in Human Studies 32 (3), (Springer Science + Business Media: 2009), p. 331.
- 32.
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, Trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 176. Also see, Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer, p. 166–169.
- 33.
See Tetsuya Sakakibara’s article “The relationship between nature and spirit in Husserl’s phenomenology revisited” for a deep explication of our theme from the period of the Ideen texts (Tetsuya Sakakibara, “The relationship between nature and spirit in Husserl’s phenomenology revisited” in Continental Philosophy Review, (The Hague: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), pp. 255–72.).
- 34.
Edmund Husserl, Natur und Geist. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1919, ed. Michael Weiler, Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Materialienband 4 (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), pp. 128 and 211–20. Also see: Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa, Husserliana 39 (New York: Springer, 2008b), pp. 259–74.
- 35.
Edmund Husserl, Spate Texte uber Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934): Die C-Manuskripte, ed. Dieter Lohmar (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2006), p. 351.
- 36.
“…the constant streaming [of] the pre-being that bears all being…” Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologischen Reduktion: Texte aus dem Nachlass (1926–1935), ed. Sebastian Luft, Husserliana: Edmund Husserl – Gesammelte Werke 34 (New York: Springer, 2002), p. 184.
- 37.
For more on the anonymity of the functioning that is the core of my living body as the zero-point of ego/non-ego please see the C-Manuscripts (e.g. Edmund Husserl, Spate Texte uber Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934): Die C-Manuskripte, ed. Dieter Lohmar (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2006), pp. 7, 145, 351, 577).
- 38.
A functioning that is a nameless presence of open pre-givenness (Vorgegebenheit), never simply absence, contra Heidegger, Sartre, et al.
- 39.
“I exist in streaming. In streaming a self-transcending is always being accomplished specifically as the constitution of a past.” Edmund Husserl, Spate Texte uber Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934): Die C-Manuskripte, ed. Dieter Lohmar (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2006), p. 130.
- 40.
While we do not have space to go into this here please see Edmund Husserl, Spate Texte uber Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934): Die C-Manuskripte, ed. Dieter Lohmar (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2006), p. 8.
- 41.
Countless reiterations of the distinctions and emphases of körper and lieb are to be found throughout Husserl’s texts and in each generation of scholarship thereafter. In addition to the seminars and manuscripts cited in this paper, particular attention should be paid to Husserl’s Section IX of Die Lebenswelt and to Ideen II and III. Additionally, some recent articles and chapters of interest include:
-
Ullrich Melle, “Nature and Spirit”, in Issues in Husserl’s Ideas II, eds. Thomas Nenon and Lester Embree. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996).
-
Luis Román Rabanaque, “The Body as Noematic Bridge Between Nature and Culture” in Epistemology, Archaeology, Ethics: Current Investigations of Husserl’s Corpus. Eds. Pol Vandevelde and Sebastian Luft. (London & New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010).
-
Tetsuya Sakakibara, “The relationship between nature and spirit in Husserl’s phenomenology revisited” in Continental Philosophy Review, (The Hague: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998).
-
Shinji Hamauza, “From Ideas II to Nature and Spirit” in Essays in Celebration of the Founding of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations. Ed. CHEUNG, Chan-Fai, Ivan Chvatik, Ion Copoeru, Lester Embree, Julia Iribarne, & Hans Rainer Sepp. (Web-Published at www.o-p-o.net, 2003).
-
Dan Zahavi, “Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Body” in N°19 Problèmes husserliens, Études phénoménologiques, No. 19, (Louvain: Phenomenological Studies Centre of the Catholic University of Louvain, 1994).
-
- 42.
On the egosomatic organism: “Thus it is with all perceiving, even if in different ways in the different modes of touching, seeing, etc. This means: The organism as constantly functioning in a perceptual way ont<ically> has a double-sidedness, in which the Ego is ont<ically> present, that is, in a constant way of “function”, being constantly unified with the constant bodily layer appearing in an ont<ic> way. The Ego is here ont<ically> so to say incorporated into the body, which is called “my organism” there.” Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa, Husserliana 39 (New York: Springer, 2008b), p. 633.
- 43.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Book III Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences, trans. T. Klein and W. Pohl. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980).
- 44.
Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa, Husserliana 39 (New York: Springer, 2008b), p. 186.
- 45.
Ibid., p. 634.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 633.
- 47.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Book III Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences, trans. T. Klein and W. Pohl., p. 118.
- 48.
Edmund Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), p. 39.
- 49.
Husserl makes it clear that urnatur is a hyletic material actuality that functions pre-egoically (“in an ego-foreign, mindless nature”) through the subject (as the subject) in a flow of primal constitution (“‘Natur’ aus der hyletischen Urnatur”) that is the life from which springs the investigations of the sciences which experimentally interrogate and approximate said life resulting in descriptions and causal laws (which are themselves gestating, making humanity a gestating watcher of the gestation of (ur)natur). These empirical descriptions and causal laws of nature are expressions of “harmonies of experience” that are the auto-generated outcome of the life-structure. (Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa, Husserliana 39 (New York: Springer, 2008b), p. 600.) As Husserl writes in a footnote in Die Lebenswelt,
“If one now tries to say: ‘The sensual-vague coincidence of all experiencing subjects is an appearance of adaptation. It is just the rational cognizance which has to work out the objective truth’, then we ask again, where the rational subject has received his being world from, the truth of which <he> wants to cognize, if not from experience, and where all rational verifications go back to eventually, <if> not to the harmonies of experience. If the appearances are radically changed, if the experiences proceed in a completely different way, can nature be the same? Do not all natural laws have their de facto shape from the de facto course of experience in observations and experiments? If now the psycho-physical ruling would cause together with the de facto organism organization completely different courses of appearances than those leading towards nature and world which is our present one? Obviously: If we talk of psycho-physical organization then we have already presupposed nature as being partially determined, and then from universal experience which we now again for its part make dependent on presupposed physical realities, and indeed find to be dependent.” (Ibid., p. 654.)
- 50.
Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science, (Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media, 2002).
- 51.
Stephen Wolfram, Universality and Complexity in Cellular Automata (1984). Web: http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/articles/ca/84-universality/9/text.html. 02 June 2013.
There are important limitations on predictions which may be made for the behaviour of systems capable of universal computation. The behaviour of such systems may in general be determined in detail essentially only by explicit simulation of their time evolution. It may in general be predicted using other systems only by procedures ultimately equivalent to explicit simulation. No finite algorithm or procedure may be devised capable of predicting detailed behaviour in a computationally universal system. Hence, for example, no general finite algorithm can predict whether a particular initial configuration in a computationally universal cellular automaton will evolve to the null configuration after a finite time, or will generate persistent structures, so that sites with nonzero values will exist at arbitrarily large times. (This is analogous to the insolubility of the halting problem for universal Turing machines… If class 4 cellular automata are indeed capable of universal computation, then their evolution involves an element of unpredictability presumably not present in other classes of cellular automata. Not only does the value of a particular site after many time steps potentially depend on the values of an increasing number of initial site values; in addition, the value cannot in general be determined by any ‘short-cut’ procedure much simpler than explicit simulation of the evolution. The behaviour of a class 4 cellular automaton is thus essentially unpredictable, even given complete initial information: the behaviour of the system may essentially be found only by explicitly running it.
Only infinite cellular automata may be capable of universal computation; finite cellular automata involve only a finite number of internal states, and may therefore evaluate only a subset of all computable functions (the “space-bounded” ones).
The computational universality of a system implies that certain classes of general predictions for its behaviour cannot be made with finite algorithms. Specific predictions may nevertheless often be made, just as specific cases of generally noncomputable function may often be evaluated.
- 52.
Edmund Husserl, “Edmund Husserl’s Letter to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl” in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VIII, eds. Burt Hopkins and John Drummond. (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2008a), p. 2.
- 53.
Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa, Husserliana 39 (New York: Springer, 2008b), pp. 135–36.
- 54.
Ibid., 262.
- 55.
For example, “The organism as constantly functioning in a perceptual way ont<ically> has a double-sidedness, in which the Ego is ont<ically> present, that is, in a constant way of “function”, being constantly unified with the constant bodily layer appearing in an ont<ic> way. The Ego is here ont<ically> so to say incorporated into the body, which is called “my organism” there.” (Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa, Husserliana 39 (New York: Springer, 2008b), p. 259 and 633.)
- 56.
Edmund Husserl, “Edmund Husserl’s Letter to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl” in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VIII, eds. Burt Hopkins and John Drummond. (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2008a), p. 2.
- 57.
See: Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa, Husserliana 39 (New York: Springer, 2008b), pp. 151, 278, 542–43, 573–580, 612–614.
- 58.
Ibid., p. 613.
- 59.
Ibid., p. 613.
- 60.
Edmund Husserl, “Edmund Husserl’s Letter to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl” in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VIII, eds. Burt Hopkins and John Drummond. (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2008a), p. 3.
- 61.
Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa, Husserliana 39 (New York: Springer, 2008b), p. 181. See also: Husserl, Natur und Geist (1919), pp. 135–36.
- 62.
Edmund Husserl, Natur und Geist. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1919, ed. Michael Weiler, Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Materialienband 4 (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), p. 134.
- 63.
Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil. 1921–28, ed. Iso Kern, Husserliana: Edmund Husserl – Gesammelte Werke Volume 14 (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 171, 174–75.
- 64.
See: Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, Trans. David Carr (Evanston: Nortwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 51–53. And, Edmund Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), Sec. 5–45.
- 65.
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, Trans. David Carr (Evanston: Nortwestern University Press, 1970), p. 51.
- 66.
Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa, Husserliana 39 (New York: Springer, 2008b), p. 181. Husserl’s emphasis. See also: Husserl, Natur und Geist (1919), p. 603.
- 67.
Ibid., 67.
- 68.
Ibid., 69.
- 69.
Ibid., 69. “…each experienced thing holds its own logical horizon, but as a founded one, a second order horizon.”
- 70.
Ibid., 67.
- 71.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Book II Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher), p. 292.
- 72.
Shinji Hamauza, “From Ideas II to Nature and Spirit” in Essays in Celebration of the Founding of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations. Ed. CHEUNG, Chan-Fai, Ivan Chvatik, Ion Copoeru, Lester Embree, Julia Iribarne, & Hans Rainer Sepp. (Web-Published at www.o-p-o.net, 2003), Pg. 6.
- 73.
Dorion Cairns recounts a conversation with Eugen Fink from August 17, 1931 where Fink (a student of both Heidegger and Husserl) states that, “Everything which Heidegger takes over from Husserl loses the ‘methodological sense’ which it has in Husserl.” Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink, Phaenomenologica 66, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), pp. 13–14.
- 74.
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, Trans. David Carr (Evanston: Nortwestern University Press, 1970), p. 69.
- 75.
Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa, Husserliana 39 (New York: Springer, 2008b), p. 181. See also: Husserl, Natur und Geist (1919), p. 167.
- 76.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, eds. Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. 14.
- 77.
Ibid., 14. The full quote is the rather more cumbersome: “side-tracked toward rationalism [significant intentional spacing] irrationalism”.
- 78.
See Husserl’s E-manuscripts for more on instinct.
- 79.
Edmund Husserl, Natur und Geist. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1919, ed. Michael Weiler, Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Materialienband 4 (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), p. 224.
- 80.
For more on absolute actuality, Aristotle’s neologism entelécheia (ἐντελέχεια), and potentiality, dynamis (δύναμις), see: Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book XII.
- 81.
Angela Ales Bello, The Divine in Husserl and Other Explorations, Analecta Husserliana Vol. XCVII (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), p. 41.
- 82.
Husserl quoted in conversation with Edith Stein as cited by Jacques Derrida in his seminar Phénoménologie, téléologie, théologie: le Dieu de Husserl delivered at the Sorbonne over four sessions in February of the 1962–1963 school year. Original source: Jacques Derrida Papers. MS-C001. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California. Box 7, Folder 8, “Phénoménologie, téléologie, théologie: le Dieu de Husserl” (sheet 42). English translation mine. Special thanks to Edward Barring for his, not easily achieved, reconstructed French text from the handwritten lecture notes of the young Derrida.
- 83.
Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa, Husserliana 39 (New York: Springer, 2008b), p. 600.
- 84.
Spiegelberg, The Context of the Phenomenological Movement, p. 182.
- 85.
Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa, Husserliana 39 (New York: Springer, 2008b), p. 600.
- 86.
Spiegelberg, The Context of the Phenomenological Movement, p.184.
- 87.
The Husserlian basis for Derrida’s “I quite rightly pass for an atheist” (Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993), p. 155.) is the problematizing of such direct confessions through a certain lived suspension, “…she must have known that the constancy of God in my life is called by other names, so that I quite rightly pass for an atheist, the omnipresence to me of what I call God…” (Ibid., 155). This Husserlian influence, it goes without saying, does not indicate a sameness. Husserl, unlike Derrida, is not content with the “absolutely private language” or with simply stipulating the divine “secret I am excluded from” that Derrida is given to taking shelter in. These realities simply being part of infinite trajectories of historical unfolding and evental in-breaking at the heart of truth in motion.
- 88.
Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa, Husserliana 39 (New York: Springer, 2008b), p. 167.
- 89.
Ibid.
- 90.
And any cognitively comparable subjectivity, Husserl would be quick to point out, despite a necessary anthropocentrism inherent to a discussion of world (Edmund Husserl, Zur Lehre vom Wesen und zur Methode der eidetischen Variation, ed. Dirk Fonfara, Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke Band XLI (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), p. 291).
- 91.
Edmund Husserl, “Edmund Husserl’s Letter to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl” in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VIII, eds. Burt Hopkins and John Drummond. (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2008a), pp. 4–5.
- 92.
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, The Later Husserl and the Idea of Phenomenology Idealism-Realism, Historicity and Nature, 2 vols., ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Analecta Husserliana, (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company), Vol. II, p. 15.
- 93.
Edmund Husserl, Natur und Geist. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1919, ed. Michael Weiler, Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Materialienband 4 (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), p. 83. As Husserl writes, “everything suspended remains within the realm of phenomenological composition”.
- 94.
Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink, Phaenomenologica 66, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), pp. 51. The extended quotation is relevant here:
The phenomenological reduction is not to be regarded as merely an event in the history of the world, it is essentially a catastrophic event, a Weltvernichtung<annihilation of the world>. This Vernichtung is the purpose of philosophy. He cited Hegel’s phrase: Philosophy is Zugrundegehen [being shipwrecked: the running aground that is the return to the base or the foundation of something].
But in the end he holds these views of his own to be, like Husserl’s optimism, unjustified by phenomenological investigations. He spoke of the pathos of phenomenology as a philosophy subordinated to the ideal of cooperative labor toward a goal which must be beyond the range of every finite and any finite social continuity. Every phenomenologist must always, qua phenomenologist, be able clearly to distinguish between his “scientific” work and his personal speculations. Yet the Einzeluntersuchungen<single, detailed investigations> of philosophy have in themselves no sense, save as guided by a speculation inhibited by the urge to Einzeluntersuchungen. Unless we assume a speculative urge, the painful working over and over of seemingly trivial points which has occupied years of Husserl’s life, would be psychologically inexplicable as well as pointless. It is not always those who speak most of “existenzielle Ergriffenheit” <existential state of being moved, touched by something or someone> who are most ergriffen<moved, touched>.” Ibid., pp. 50–51.
- 95.
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, “Possibility, Life’s Ontopoiesis, and the Vindication of the Cosmos” in Phenomenological Inquiry, Ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Vol. 36, October, 2012, (Hanover, New Hampshire, USA: The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, 2012), p. 6.
- 96.
- 97.
Which is not to say, of course, that the life-structure is human. Husserl references this in the manuscripts when he speaks of animal and plant life (a topic for another time). We have seen a worthwhile statement released recently in this regard from the group that joined together for the Francis Crick Memorial Conference in 2012 that produced The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals.
- 98.
The life-structure, and its attendant lifeworld and geistic developments, are not simply wielding me. I ontogenetically come to co-wield them. This is to become, in the words of Eugen Fink, “the self-mastering experimenter of being… the player of the world [Weltspieler]”. Fink goes on, “In this way… he is like the gods, as Heraclitus says of Zeus: ‘He plays with worlds.’” (From notes related to Fink’s December 1935 Dessau lecture as cited in Ronald Bruzina, Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928–1938. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 354.). Even should one be less given to such poetic proto-transhumanism it is not without reason that Fink writes this.
- 99.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, eds. Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. 7.
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Hughes, D.J. (2016). My Living Body: The Zero Point of Nature-Mind and the Horizon of Creative Imagination. In: Tymieniecka, AT., Trutty-Coohill, P. (eds) The Cosmos and the Creative Imagination. Analecta Husserliana, vol 119. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21792-5_10
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