Abstract
In this paper I intend to appraise the meaning of naiveté in Husserl’s phenomenology against the backdrop of Hegel’s philosophy. I will take my cue from an insightful remark by James Dodd in his recent book Crisis and Reflection. Commenting on Husserl’s famous statement that empirical science is intrinsically naïve, Dodd underscores that: “‘Naiveté’ is not meant here to be a term of reproach. There is in fact enormous power in naiveté, and it should be respected” (Dodd, 2004, p. 55). The goal of this paper is to provide a description of naiveté’s power and, in so doing, to articulate the possibility of the respect to be owed to it by philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
Dodd, 2004.
- 2.
I am largely indebted to Peter Kalkavage’s illuminating commentary of the Phenomenology for the helpful language of ‘claims to know’ connected to the shapes of consciousness presented by Hegel. His suggestion is that the various shapes of consciousness are best understood as respective ‘forms of life,’ each characterized by a distinctive claim to know, almost like the characters putting forward their claims in Plato’s dialogues. See Kalkavage, 2007, p. 2.
- 3.
Luft, 1998.
- 4.
See Staiti, 2009.
- 5.
These statements, incidentally, should be read against the background of Rickert’s so-called cognitive emotionalism.
- 6.
My gratitude to Nicolas De Warren for calling my attention upon this point.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Faustino Fabbianelli and Sebastian Luft for inviting me to the Humboldt Kolleg “Husserl und die klassische deutsche Philosophie” in Parma on March 12th–14th 2012, where I presented an earlier version of this chapter. I am grateful also to all the participants for their helpful remarks and to Nicolas De Warren who read and commented on my paper. In keeping with the bilingual spirit of the conference I left some of the quotes from both Hegel and Husserl untranslated, especially those quotes for which no published English translation is available. Some of the shorter quotes I translated myself, in order not to interrupt the text flow. Needless to say, all the obscurities, mistakes or mistranslations that the reader may still find in the text are entirely my responsibility.
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Staiti, A. (2014). The Mark of Beginnings. Husserl and Hegel on the Meaning of Naiveté. In: Fabbianelli, F., Luft, S. (eds) Husserl und die klassische deutsche Philosophie. Phaenomenologica, vol 212. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01710-5_17
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