Skip to main content

Ideen I and Eugen Fink’s Critical Contribution

  • Chapter
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Contributions to Phenomenology ((CTPH,volume 66))

Abstract

Husserl’s Ideas I is the first volume of a three-part work laying out the conception of how his phenomenology was to be realized as a transcendental philosophic undertaking. However, it left undone the final phenomenological task, adequate analysis of the genuinely ultimate absolute, temporalization. When this was finally taken up in the C-Mss of the early 1930s, the analyses pursued revealed serious methodological issues, while indicating the extent of reconsideration and recasting needed for the results in stages of work such achieved in Ideas I, among other materials.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD   169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    The list of Fink’s courses with Husserl:

    • Winter 1925/26 – Grundprobleme der Logik

    • Winter 1926/27* – Einführung in die Phänomenologie und die phänomenologische Philosophie

    • Summer 1927* – Natur und Geist

    • Winter 1927/28* – Geschichte der neueren Philosophie

    • Summer 1928* – Einleitung in die phänomenologische Psychologie

    * includes a seminar, Phänomenologische Übungen, directed by Husserl. Fink’s first university semester, Summer 1925, was taken at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, and he spent the summer semester 1926 at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin. In the winter semester of 1928/29, he took Heidegger’s first course on his return to Freiburg as Husserl’s successor, Einleitung in die Philosophie (along with Heidegger’s Philosophische Übungen), as well as the last course Husserl would offer, Phänomenologie der Einfühlung, soon broke off and canceled when it interfered with his writing projects.

  2. 2.

    Altogether, although Husserl’s lecture courses were the most that Fink took from any one professor, the 15 other lecture courses in philosophy—not counting the more numerous Übungen sessions—comprised a rich and comprehensive surrounding for his concentration in phenomenology.

  3. 3.

    Following strictly the assigned theme, the title of Fink’s essay is Beiträge zu einer phänomenologischen Analyse der psychischen Phänomene, die unter den vieldeutigen Ausdrücken:sich denken, als ob,” “sich nur etwas vorstellen,” “phantasierenbefaßt werden. See Eugen Fink, Phänomenologische Werkstatt, Eugen Fink Gesamtausgabe, 3/1: Teilband 1: Die Doktorarbeit und erste Assistenzjahre bei Husserl, ed. Ronald Bruzina (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2006), p. 107 for this title, and p. 108 for Fink’s“Foreword” acknowledging his dependence on Husserl’s work (Abbreviation EFG 3/1).

  4. 4.

    Husserl had shown Fink typed-out materials from his earlier lectures in the area of the prize-competition topic—as e.g. in Husseriana 23, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1892–1925), ed. Eduard Marbach (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980)–, it may be supposed, but there is no documentation confirming it.

  5. 5.

    The dissertation was in fact presented with the very same title as the prize-essay bore (see footnote 3 above). When, however, it was published in Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phënomenologische Forschung, IX (1930), it was titled Vergegenwärtigung und Bild.

  6. 6.

    From the dissertation text in Eugen Fink, Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930–1039, (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 19. My translation, from this collection of Fink’s Husserl-period publications, of which only three other of its five essays have been translated. (See footnote 15 below.)

  7. 7.

    EFG 3/1, Z-I, Z-II, Z-III, Z-IV, and Z-V. For a fuller treatment of Fink’s idea in the full dissertation project, see my Edmund Husserl & Eugen Fink, Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928–1938 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2004), Ch. 1, 17–19, and the surrounding account of the active scene in philosophy at Freiburg before and after 1928.

  8. 8.

    For example, in the first folder of notes Fink has a transcription of his first recorded discussion with Husserl, from December 1, 1927 (EFG 3/1, Z-I 23a–24b), and in it Fink poses two questions regarding temporality, one about the fundamentality of the noesis-noema correlation, the other about if temporality can have a beginning or end.

  9. 9.

    While all-pervasive, samples of these can be found in EFG 3/1, Z-IV Z- 11a–b, on the question of how the “intentionality” of temporality’s three dimensions are to be conceptualized for which he, in his dissertation, proposes “de-presenting [Entgegenwärtigung]” as more suitable; 15a–18b and 27a–29a on the reduction and the world; and 110a to 112b, on “pure consciousness” and “absolute” being (all approximately from late 1928 into 1929, though not specifically dated).

  10. 10.

    I.e., Husserliana 6 that almost everyone is familiar with: Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954). Drafts written by Fink are noted as such, Beilagen XXI and XXIX. Many portions of text in which Fink’s suggestions have been incorporated are noted in the “Textkritische Anmerkungen zum Hauptext,” 521–43. Finally, the most extraordinary set of drafts by Fink for Husserl comprise Fink‘s, VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Teil 1 Die Idee einer transzendentalen Methodenlehre, Texte aus dem Nachlass Eugen Finks (1932) mit Anmerkungen und Beilagen aus dem Nachlass Edmund Husserls (1933/34), Husserliana Dokumente II/1, hrsg. von Hans Ebeling, Jann Holl and Guy van Kerckhoven; Teil 2 Ergänzungsband, Texte aus dem Nachlass Eugen Finks (1930–1932) mit Anmerkungen und Beilagen aus dem Nachlass Edmund Husserls (1932/33), Husserliana Dokumente II/2, hrsg. von Guy van Kerckhoven, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988. English translation by Ronald Bruzina, Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, The Idea of A Transcendental Theory of Method (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995).

  11. 11.

    From a letter by Husserl to Father Daniel Feuling, from March 30, 1933, in Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, Husserliana Dokumente III/ I–X, edited by Karl Schuhmann with Elisabeth Schumann (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), VII, 89.

  12. 12.

    From a letter by Husserl to his close friend Gustav Albrecht, from October 7,1934, in Briefwechsel, III/IX, 105. Husserl also speaks of certain of Fink’s characteristics that are nonetheless a bit worrisome to Husserl. For a fuller presentation of such remarks as given above, including Fink’s own remarks on their relationship, see my Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink, 49–54.

  13. 13.

    A brief account of this is given in the opening pages of the “Preface” to my Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink.

  14. 14.

    Phaenomenologica 66, edited by Richard M. Zaner, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976.

  15. 15.

    These are: Eugen Fink, Studien Zur Phänomenologie 1930–1939, Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966, and Eugen Fink, Nähe und Distanz, Phänomenologische Vorträge und Aufsätze, hrsg. von Franz-Anton Schwarz, Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber, 1976.Of the 18 essays in these two collections, only the following have been translated:

    • Studien zur Phänomenologie;

      • – “The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism,” see footnote 18 below;

      • – “What Does the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl Want to Accomplish?” tr. by Arthur Grogan, in Research in Phenomenology, II (1972), 5–27;

      • – “The Problem of the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl,” tr. Robert M. Harlan, in Apriori and World, European Contributions to Husserlian Phenomenology, ed., William McKenna, Robert M. Harlan, and Laurence E. Winters (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 21–55.

    • Nähe und Distanz:

      • – “Operative Concepts in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” tr. William McKenna, in The Human Being in Action: the Irreducible Element in Man, Part II, ed. Anna-Teresa Tynieniecka, Analecta Phenomenologica 7 (Dordrecht/Boston: Reidel, 1978), 56–70.

  16. 16.

    See footnote 10 above.

  17. 17.

    Eugen Fink, Phänomenologische Werkstatt, Eugen Fink Gesamtausgabe, 3/1–4, ed. by Ronald Bruzina (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2006) for Vol. 3/1, 2008 for 3/2, and with Vols.. 3/3 and 3/4 under way.

  18. 18.

    “Die phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gegenwärtigen Kritik,” originally in Kant-Studien XXXVIII (1933), pp. 321–383, and republished in Fink, Studien zur Phänomenologie, 79–156. The English translation is The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings, trans. and ed. R.O. Elveton (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 73–147.

  19. 19.

    One should note that it is Husserl himself who warns of the provisionality of the studies in both Logical Investigations (Introduction to Volume II, in particular §3 and §6, Note 2) and in Ideen I (even if he does not make it a matter specifically of naïve-mundane conceptual remnants as Fink does).

  20. 20.

    Nachwort,” Husserliana V, 138–162.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., 161: “Der Verfasser sieht das unendlich offene Land der wahren Philosophie, das ‘Gelobte Land’, ausgebreitet vor sich, das er selbst nicht mehr als schon durchkultiviertes erleben wird.”

  22. 22.

    Edmund Husserl, “Nachwort,” in Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Drittes Buch, Husserliana V, hrsg. von Marly Biemel (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 161: “Der Verfasser sieht das unendlich offene Land der wahren Philosophie, das ‘Gelobte Land’, ausgebreitet vor sich, das er selbst nicht mehr als schon durchkultiviertes erleben wird.”

  23. 23.

    See the article referred to in footnote 34 below for some of the further treatment of this point.

  24. 24.

    The very title of Ideen I, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, (my bold face) indicates that the book is working toward an achievement, rather than being its definitive completion. The first book itself, as an Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, reinforces its initial and introductory status. Within the texts from which I draw my material here, note the following remarks. (1) “The indications just given make us sensitive to how far we are from understanding phenomenology” ([143], in the pagination of the 1913 edition, given here for all quotations from Ideen I). (2) “Here, in the context of our merely initiating meditations, [some] parts of phenomenology cannot be treated systematically” (200). Finally, speaking of noesis and noema, Husserl writes: (3) “The parallelisms obtaining here—and there are many of them that are all too easily confused with one another—are fraught with great difficulties that still need clarification” (207). (My translations) Finally, the corrective process is explicitly mentioned: “[I]t is to be noted that in phenomenology as it begins all concepts, all terms, have to remain in a certain way fluid, always ready to become differentiated in accord with the advances made in the analysis of consciousness and the recognition of new phenomenological strata within what is at first seen in undifferentiated unity” (170).

  25. 25.

    Again, “Nachwort,” Hua V, 161.

  26. 26.

    Op. cit., 161–62.

  27. 27.

    See the “Einleitung” to the revised edition of Ideen I, Hua III/1, xlix–lvii.

  28. 28.

    Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil, edited by Rudolf Boehm, Husserliana VIII (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), Beilage XX, from 1924, gives the most specific of Husserl’s self-criticism. Again Schumann includes in his edition of Hua III/1 (liv–lv) the instructive comments and corrections Husserl saw to be needed, written in on the pages of his copies of Ideen I and placed by Schumann in Hua III/2, companion volume to the main text.

  29. 29.

    It should be remembered that it is not temporalization as suchZeitigung—that is the focus of Husserl’s remarks in §81 and §82, but the temporality of experiential streaming precisely as the transcendental to be focused on here in Ideen I. Husserl does not even use the word “temporalization” [Zeitigung] when he speaks of this way the experiential transcendental is not “in truth the last thing,” “the Ultimate”—“das Letzte.” All he says is that “the transcendental absolute” reached in the reductions has “its proto-source in an ultimate true Absolute.” Hua III/1, §81. [162–63].

  30. 30.

    Edmund Husserl, Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie, translated and annotated by Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Gallimard, 1950).

  31. 31.

    Namely, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, Hua I; Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Hua II; and Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Hua III.

  32. 32.

    Indeed, Ricoeur himself unabashedly points out serious difficulties in Ideen I in the “Introduction” to his translation see xiv–xv.

  33. 33.

    Idees, note 1 to §85 [171], 287–88. A translation of Ricoeur’s “Introduction” and notes, by Bond Harris and Jacqueline Bouchard Spurlock, ed. by Pol Vandvelde, has been published as Paul Ricoeur, A Key to Husserl’s Ideen I, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1996. The translation here is largely the one in this book, but I have modified it slightly. I might suggest, too, that in the last line above “transcending intentionality,” a close rendering of Ricoeur’s l’intentonnalité transcendante, could be translated as “intentionality aiming at the transcendent.” In the passage in the same §85, Husserl points out that he is leaving aside the questions (a) whether the sensuously experiential could ever be without “animating apprehensional take [beseelende Auffassung],” i.e., without “intentional function,” and (b) whether intentionality could be concrete without “the sensuous.” Ricoeur’s translation for Abschattungen is esquisses, which in a way is better in its suggesting detail while slowly less-essential features might diminish, than “adumbrations” with its connotation of general vagueness.

  34. 34.

    Eugen Fink, “Die phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gegenwärtigen Kritik, mit einem Vorwort von Edmund Husserl” Kantstudien 38 (Berlin 1933), 319–61; reprinted in Eugen Fink, Studien zur Phänomenologie, (den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 79–156; English translation by Roy Elveton, The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970. The pages from 122 to the end of the essay on page 145 in the English translation deal with the distinction referred to here, while the treatment on which Ricoeur bases his remark is run from page 123 to 137. Early in this passage Fink discusses the distinction between the transcendental and the psychological, asserting quite straightforwardly that “The Ideas does not give a thorough discussion of the difference between the psychological and the transcendental noemas.” (124.) In almost all cases of cited material from Elveton’s translation I have modified the wording. In my references here I give the pagination in the English translation first, then that in Studien, and finally that in the Kantstudien original.

  35. 35.

    Fink, “Husserl’s Philosophy and Contemporary Criticism,” 126–28, 133–34, and 136–37 [Studien, 134–136; Kantstudien, 365–67].

  36. 36.

    Elveton, 130 [Studien, 139; Kantstudien, 370]; my italics.

  37. 37.

    Elveton, 130–34 [Studien, 139–43; Kantstudien, 369–73].

  38. 38.

    Elveton, 136 [Studien, 146; Kantstudien, 376] (my italics here and my phrase in brackets for clarification ). The relativizing is expressed as follows: “In the provisional conceptual indicating of the constitution problematic constitutive achievement is identified with the act’s intentional bestowing of sense, so that, measured by this preliminary indicative concept of constitution, the deeper lying constitution by transcendental temporalization [Zeitigung] cannot be brought out; and so ‘hyle’ had to appear as sheer matter.”

  39. 39.

    Elveton, 124–25 [Studien, 132–33; Kantstudien, 364–65].

  40. 40.

    Elveton, 124. [Studien, 132; Kantstudien, 364] The German in the Kantstudien article is as follows: “Mit anderen Worten, das transzendentale Noema ist die Welt selbst als die im Glauben der strömenden Weltapperzeption der transzendentalen Subjektivität liegende Geltungseinheit.” (Studien 132; Kantstudien 364). Geltung is usually translated as “validity,” but because of the logical connotation so predominantly clinging to “validity,” this word does not suggest the phenomenological force of “holding-and-counting”in gelten here.

  41. 41.

    Elveton, 125, [Studien,133; Kantstudien, 364] my boldface.

  42. 42.

    In Ideen I Husserl’s use of such words as Erzeugung, Produktion, and schöpferisch should be read as meaning ultimately the syntheses of senseSinn, but equally as well Bedeutung—i.e., meaning in general, both experiential (predominantly termed Sinn) and linguistically articulated (predominantly termed Bedeutung). In this, as we see in §122, the emphasis is on the character of these “productions” (positing, counter-positing, setting as antecedents or as consequences, etc.) as free and spontaneous—by virtue of being of meaning as such—rather than as causally effectuated.

  43. 43.

    Ideen I, §55, [107].

  44. 44.

    Elveton, 134. [Studien, 143; Kantstudien, 373].

  45. 45.

    Hua III/1, [3]. The English writes “irreal” exactly like the German. The translations here are my own, but in many subsequent quotations I make of Fred Kersten’s translation, Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, The Hague: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983, although in these cases I usually modify the translation. Page numbers are given in the original German pagination, and as such are placed in brackets [NN]. Kersten’s translation retains these page numbers in the margins.

  46. 46.

    Op. cit, [4].

  47. 47.

    Op. cit, [3]. The conjunction of “consciousness” and “phenomena” is obvious from the whole passage here, but the two terms are not actually placed in a single-sentence statement of the “field” in question, the “field of phenomenology.” What Husserl does write, however, is that phenomena as “‘transcendentally’ purified phenomena” become the “field of phenomenology” (ibid).

  48. 48.

    Cf. Ideen I, §55, [107].

  49. 49.

    Op. cit., [176]; my boldface for emphasis here and in the following two quotations. Note an allied remark from §85 “Sensuous ὑλήv—intentional μορφήv” : “These noeses make up what is specific to nous in the broadest sense of the word. … At the same time, it is not unwelcome that the word, nous, recalls one of its distinctive significations, namely, precisely ‘sense,’ although the ‘sense-bestowal’ which is effected in the noetic moments comprises many different things and only as foundation  <  is  >  a “sense-bestowal” joined onto the succinct [prägnant] concept of sense.” Translation modified.

  50. 50.

    Ideen I [182]. Translation modified.

  51. 51.

    Op. cit. [185]. Translation modified.

  52. 52.

    A suggestion of this kind occurs, tangentially perhaps, in the passage in Hua III/1 that continues from the sentence quoted above from Hua III/1 [4] (with footnote 46). There he is talking about the inquiry into “essence,” but the “irreality” of matters inquired into for their essences—which I am arguing here are essential matters precisely of “pure phenomenological sense”—remains amenable to the same caution he voices there.

  53. 53.

    A treatment of the “interworking” of this (as it were) “mechanism” is offered in my “Phenomenology in a New Century: What Still Needs to be Done,” in Analecta Husserliana, Vol. 105, Phenomenology and Existentialism in the Twentieth Century, Book Three: Heralding the New Enlightenment (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 39–79. See in particular 42–52.

  54. 54.

    Fink’s beginning to work on editing the Bernau manuscripts of 1917–1918, the first task Husserl gave him as assistant (which normally involved almost daily conversations with Husserl), is likely to have been the instigation for Husserl’s beginning the new series of manuscript studies on temporality that continued until 1934. Fink thus worked frontally on the question of the analysis of Urzeitigung in the very years in which the third set of manuscripts was produced. Ultimately Fink’s work on this project, which by now had to take into account Husserl’s new C-manuscripts, became the composition of an entirely new monograph on temporality. As such, it went beyond being simply the analysis of temporalization to offer a whole interpretive and critical drawing of methodological and philosophical lessons. Unfortunately, the entire draft has been lost. There is good reason to believe that Fink destroyed it himself, in view of his own judgment on it as expressed in a note from 1969 to 1971 (EFA 3.2, 441): “Das Manuskript ist 654 Seiten stark – und ‘mißglückt’.” For a fuller account, see Chapter 5 of my Edmund Husserl & Eugen Fink, Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928–1938 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2004).

  55. 55.

    For more on this, see my Husserl Circle paper in Paris, June 2009, “Husserl’s ‘Naturalism’ and Genetic Phenomenology,” from which the present points are drawn. This paper is now published in Vol. 11 of the New Yearbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. (I must correct a spelling of the pivotal German word Vergeistigung that appears in this Husserl-Circle study [see below Section C on this term]. By some oversight this word’s misspelling as Vergeist er ung had gone uncorrected.) I should also mention that Affektivität in question here becomes the question of the pathic character of what Fink terms Vollzugsbewußtsein.

  56. 56.

    Examined in a C-manuscript from May 1932 published not in Edmund Husserl, Späte Text über Zeitkonstitution (1925–1934), Die C-Manuskripte, Husserliana Materialien VIII, ed. Dieter Lohmar (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), but as Beilage XX in Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Dritter Teil: 1929–1935, Husserliana XV, ed. Iso Kern (den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973); the text on the issue emphasized (too briefly) here is on 355. A supporting passage to this is Husserl’s finding in Hua VIII Text Nr. 13, 41–42, from 1931.

  57. 57.

    Hua Mat VIII, Text Nr. 79 (from 1931), pp. 351–352 (my emphases in boldface.) Zuständlichkeit is not an ordinary word in German usage. Zustand generally means state or condition—the concrete way something is what it is. Zuständlich, then, means having to do with the concrete way something is what it is constitutively supposed to be. Husserl’s making a noun of the adjective suggests the fundamental constitutive state of something, its concretely basic way of being and continuing to be itself.

  58. 58.

    Hua Mat VIII, the same Text Nr. 79, 352 (again, my emphases in boldface).

  59. 59.

    Phrasing from Hua III/1, in the paragraph that begins on [200] and carries on in [201] to end Chapter 3—“Noesis and Noema.”

  60. 60.

    See the quotation above, on 23, from Text Nr. 79 in Hua Mat VIII (from 1931).

  61. 61.

    Portions of text from Hua VIII, Text Nr 79, 250, again the same text as just referred to in a the previous footnote.

  62. 62.

    See Hua Mat VIII, Text Nr. 20, from 1931, 81. In more detail, Text Nr. 21 asserts: “Flowing is a proto-phenomenon, it is not an explicit following of one thing after another. To the proto-phenomenon of flowing there belongs a phenomenon of increase (a phenomenon of increasing ‘magnitude,’ a graduality), namely of shorter- or longer-lasting or a lasting that just keeps going on longer.” This is clearly nothing less than temporalization, and specifically “die lebendige Gegenwart.” (Hua Mat VIII, 93).

  63. 63.

    This first is from Hua Mat VIII, Text nr. 21 (1930), 99.

  64. 64.

    This qualification is well expressed in Hua Mat VIII, Text Nr. 24 (1930), 112–13.

  65. 65.

    Hua Mat VIII, Text Nr. 62, 269. This phrase in brackets is my gloss, which in view of the rest of the sentence seems the preferable reading.

  66. 66.

    The phrasings in this half up to this point here in this paragraph are from Hua Mat VIII, Text Nr. 62, 269 (1934).

  67. 67.

    These qualifications are from Hua Mat VIII, Text Nr. 24, 112, the same text as referred in note 42 just above.

  68. 68.

    Hua Mat VIII, Text Nr. 23 (1930), 110–12.

  69. 69.

    Here again, “‘before’-being” could be the rendering.

  70. 70.

    Again from Hua Mat VIII, Text Nr. 62, 269. Not accidental is the parallel here to Fink’s point in VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Teil 1 Die Idee einer transzendentalen Methodenlehre (see note 10, in the first part of the present paper), 85–86; Sixth Meditation, 76. See also Husserl’s marginal remark no. 257 in this document.

  71. 71.

    See Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917), Husserliana X, ed. Rudolf Boehm (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), §36: “Für all das fehlen uns die Namen,” despite the fact he had just provided a description for them.

  72. 72.

    Eugen Fink, VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Teil 2 Ergänzungsband, Hua Dok II/2, 3–9: “Disposition zu ‚System der phänomenologischen Philosophie‘ von Edmund Husserl (13. August 1930).”

  73. 73.

    From Section 2, “Regressive Phänomenologie,” subsection E: “MethodischeReflexionen,” in Fink’s “Layout [Disposition]”: VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Hua Dok II/2, 7.

  74. 74.

    The way this is treated in Edmund Husserl & Eugen Fink can easily be found by searching “retro-application” in the index.

  75. 75.

    Eugen Fink, Phänomenologische Werkstatt, Eugen Fink Gesamtausgabe, 3/1: Teilband 1: Die Doktorarbeit und erste Assistenzjahre bei Husserl, ed. Ronald Bruzina (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2006), Z-IV 112b, 269.

  76. 76.

    Op. cit., Z-IV 10a, 213–14 (my addition in brackets).

  77. 77.

    From Fink’s “Layout [Disposition]”: VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Hua Dok II/2, Section 3, “Progressive Phänomenologie,” subsection A “Das methodische Problem,” (a), 7.

  78. 78.

    VI CM, Hua Dok, II/2, 7. Rather than the overused Latinate words, “deconstruct” and “construct,” a more colloquially based rendering is adopted here (one could also say “take down” and “build up”). The general idea is that of the difference between seeing something in terms of distinct components and seeing it in terms of integrative coherence and meaning. One of Fink’s striking watchwords throughout his research notes is Integration, a task regularly spoken of by Husserl but largely not pursued thoroughly enough in terms of the problematic depth to which phenomenological investigation, on its own principles, had to reach, as the whole of this section 3 on “Progressive Phänomenologie” indicates. The possibilities and demands in Fink’s bare-bones outline suggests what all would remain to be done when Husserl’s corpus of writings came to a close with his death.

  79. 79.

    It should be said that for the native speaker of German, while in everyday situations—say, in arranging for a convenient time for some kind of event—one could easily express satisfaction by saying “Perfekt!” nonetheless, in a theoretical discussion of Perfekt (such as in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, (Tübingen, 1963, 85)), the grammatical connotation would be obvious and its relevance understood. Fink’s one mention of Perfektivität is in notebook OH-II, manuscript page 53, which will be in Phänomenologische Werkstatt 3.3.

  80. 80.

    See for example Hua Mat VIII, Text Nr. 80, 357.

  81. 81.

    See the situations represented in section 2, p. 250 above.

  82. 82.

    For a preliminary representation of some of this innovative reconception that Fink considers, see my Edmund Husserl & Eugen Fink, in particular in Chapter 5 “Fundamental Thematics II: Time,” section5.1.2.3.3, 276–80. Here too (specifically on 277) “field-intentionality” is mentioned, again with further places locatable via the index.

  83. 83.

    Hua Mat VIII, 111–12. Before the passage quoted here, Husserl goes through several pages of “regression” from the familiar—perceptual objects in the world—to the unfamiliar—the proto-temporalized constitution of sense. The present passage, however, is not simply a further stage in a unilinear sequence, but rather a deepening redoing, with further development, of those previous analyses in this manuscript.

  84. 84.

    Op. cit, 111.

  85. 85.

    See, for example, Hua IV, §56 h, 236–41. There the terms are beseelen and begeisten (the latter quite distinct from begeiste rn, which means “to fill with delight or enthusiasm”).

  86. 86.

    See for example, Hua Mat VIII, Text Nr. 23, 111–12, also important in my 2009 Husserl Circle paper. (See note 54 above.)

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ronald Bruzina Ph.D. .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Bruzina, R. (2013). Ideen I and Eugen Fink’s Critical Contribution. In: Embree, L., Nenon, T. (eds) Husserl’s Ideen. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 66. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5213-9_15

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics