Abstract
Interpreted according to the intentions of the author in Ideen I, Ideen II (with Ideen III) analyzes the relation between phenomenology and the natural and the spiritual sciences. Dilthey and early twentieth century discussions of the Geisteswissenschaften, the historical sciences in particular, are not examined by Husserl, but reflections on the personalistic attitude explicates Dilthey’s intentions. The person, motivation, communities, cultural objects, psychology, and relations with nature and with transcendental phenomenology are considered, as are pertinent abstractive reductions. References to continuations of the analyses here in later works of Husserl are also included.
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Notes
- 1.
Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, (SW) ed. R.A. Makkreel and F. Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989).
- 2.
J. St. Mill, System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive (London: Harrison and Co., 1843); first German translation by J. Schiel, 1849.
- 3.
James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, ed. J. St. Mill (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1829).
- 4.
W. Dilthey’s method presupposes inner experience and is in this sense positivistic, positivism understood as nineteenth century positivism but not in the sense of the analytic positivism of the twentieth century.
- 5.
Cf. the translation of Ideen I, §60 in: Ideas. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: Allen and Unwin, 1931). Cf. also Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy, Book I, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. Fred Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982).
- 6.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989).
- 7.
Cf. e.g., Die Krisis des europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie Husserliana VI. Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), 347, on absoluter Geist and absolute Historizität; henceforth, Hua VI.
- 8.
Hua III, 144.
- 9.
Hua III, 7–8
- 10.
Hua IV and V. The original textual basis of the editions of Ideen II and of Ideen III is the collection of manuscripts of Edith Stein 1913f. in the typescript of Landgrebe 1923–1924. Landgrebe’s version of Ideen II together with later additions and notes of Husserl is the material that has been used in the edition of Ideen II in the Husserliana. Cf. Hua IV, Introduction of the Editor, XVIII.
- 11.
Hua IV, XIV.
- 12.
Hua IV, XIV f.
- 13.
Hua VII and VIII.
- 14.
Cf. e.g., Hua V, 17. The real things are the foundations of the objects of the sciences.
- 15.
Cf. Ideen I, Hua III, §72, §153.
- 16.
Hua V, Chapter I.
- 17.
Hua V, Chapter 3.
- 18.
Hua V. Of significance is the remark on p. 9 that biology dealing with animals and plants and organic life is a part of material nature. Nothing more is said about the life sciences in Ideen III.
- 19.
Hua IX.
- 20.
There are early manuscripts about the cognitive attitude of the spiritual sciences (geisteswissenschaftliche Einstellung) written in connection with the original project between 1913 and 1917 that have been dropped from the draft of the main text in Landgrebe version of 1923/1924 and added as appendices by Landgrebe together with further remarks from Husserl himself. Cf. Hua IV, esp. Appendices IV, V, X, XL XII part II, XIV and the remarks to the appendices of the editor, 417f.
- 21.
Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, Vols 1–12 (Teubner, 1914ff.); Vol. VI, Die geistige Welt. Zweite Häfte (1924), 13f., 39f., 322.
- 22.
GS VII, DerAufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (1927), 296, “phenomenology of knowledge.”
- 23.
Central passages of the letters can be found in Phänomenologische Psychologie, Hua IX, Preface of the editor, XVII–XXI. English trans., Edmund Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology, trans. John Scanlon (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977).
- 24.
It is not possible to discuss the remarks about Dilthey point by point in this essay. The main references to Dilthey can be found in Hua IV, §48: Introduction to section III; appendix XII, §11,365 ff. and XIII, 393; and Hua IX, Phänomenologische Psychologie§1, 5–6, 10; §2, esp. 13–14, and Appendices II, 357 and III, 361. On Husserland Dilthey, cf. Dilthey und die Philosophie der Gegenwart, ed. E.W. Orth (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1985), the essays of Ströker, Seebohm, Pfafferott, Makkreel, and Carr and Dilthey and Phenomenology, eds. R. A. Makkreel and J. Scanlon, Current Continental Research 006 (Washington, D.C.: CARP & University Press of America, 1987), Part I: Dilthey, Husserl, and the Foundations of Science.
- 25.
The main source for Dilthey’s epistemological reflections on the spiritual sciences is Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften first published 1910 and then in GS VII; English trans., The Formation of the Historical World in the Human sciences, SW /11, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). The question is whether Husserl ever read the Aufbau. There is no trace of such a reading in the material in Ideen II or Phänomenologische Psychologie. Husserl read and mentioned (Hua IX, 6) Dilthey’s ldeen zu einer beschreibenden und zergliedernden Psychologie of 1884 (now in GS V 1924) and his remarks to Dilthey indicate that he also knew the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften of 1883 (now GS I 1922 and SW I, Introduction to the Human Sciences.)
- 26.
On the methodology and epistemology of the human sciences from Schleiermacher and Boeckh to Dilthey and Droysen, see R. A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), esp. Part Three; T. M. Seebohm, “Boeckh and Dilthey: The Development of Methodical Hermeneutics,” Man and World 17 (1984): 325–46, and Thomas M. Seebohm, Hermeneutics. Method and Methodology. Contributions to Phenomenology 50 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press, 2004), Chapter 3.
- 27.
Two comprehensive essays on Ideen II have to be mentioned: Alfred Schutz, “Edmund Husserl’s Ideas, Volume II,” Collected Papers III, Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. I. Schutz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966) and Paul Ricoeur, “Husserl’s Ideas II: Analyses and Problems,” Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology, trans. E.G. Ballard and L. Embree (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967).
- 28.
(8/9; 25) The references to paragraphs, numbers of appendices, and/or page numbers of Ideen II, Hua IV will be given in parentheses on the following pages.
- 29.
§18 d and g. What is said there can be read as a first sketch of what will be said later in the Crisis about the abstraction that is a necessary presupposition for the theoretical attitude of the natural sciences in general, cf. e.g., Hua VI, §2, esp. 3 and 4, §66, 230 and §§8–10 about the mathematical abstraction presupposed in the theoretical attitude of physics.
- 30.
Cf. Hua IV, pp. 99/ I 00, 104 and Hua III p. 136/7, the Analysen zur passiven Synthesis, Hua IX, Parts III and IV, and the Cartesianische Meditationen, Hua I, §§44–46. Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).
- 31.
See, however, the critical remark in fn. 40 about a misinterpretation of Dilthey’s distinction in Appendix XIII, 393.
- 32.
They are intersubjectively given not for a relative community but as intersubjective in principle; cf. Ideen I, Hua III, 113.
- 33.
It is, according to Ideen II, 243, not difficult to give a detailed analysis. However, such an analysis would be the epistemological analysis of the “methodology and encyclopaedia,” e.g., of the science of classical antiquity according to August Böckh and this is by no means a simple enterprise, cf. below fn. 49.
- 34.
The theoretical I ought not to be understood as the transcendental ego. The theoretical I is the I of the theoretical attitude of the natural as well as the spiritual sciences.
- 35.
It is an assumption because there are other assumptions, e.g., the metaphysical assumptions of the occasionalists following Geulincx and Malebranche rejecting a possible Cartesian influxus physicus in the brain and assuming “occasional” interventions of God.
- 36.
XIV pp. 390 ff, esp. 392–93. What is said in appendix XIV, probably from 1917, is at least prima facie not compatible with the refutation of this parallelism in chapter 3 of Part III. Cf. the notes to the text of the editor, pp. 423–24.
- 37.
373–75. Both texts were written in 1917. Cf. editorial remarks, pp. 418, 423.
- 38.
The enumeration in the following list is added.
- 39.
Ideen III, Hua V, Chapters 1, 2 §§5–7, Chapters 3 and 4, cf. Appendix I, §6.
- 40.
Some remarks about the ontological foundations of physics can be found in Chapter 2, §11.
- 41.
Cf. above fn. 30, and about the references to Dilthey, §48 of Ideen II in the main text. The critique of Dilthey’s distinction in Appendix XIV, 393 is incompatible with what is said in §48 and with Dilthey’s distinction between the natural sciences as sciences of causal explanations and the spiritual sciences of understanding. XIV claims that Dilthey characterized the spiritual sciences as descriptive sciences and also points out that the natural sciences presuppose descriptions. Dilthey characterizes his psychology as descriptive, but this description presupposes, like all other spiritual sciences, understanding, i.e., precisely that what is analyzed as empathy in Ideen II.
- 42.
What is said in Ideen III is a first sketch of the detailed analyses in the Phänomenologische Psychologie, Hua IX and the Analysen zur passiven Synthesis, Hua XI.
- 43.
Hua I, §§42–47.
- 44.
Alfred Schutz was dissatisfied with the analysis of the constitution of social groups, cf. pp. 38–39, fn. 26. In his review of Husserl’s Méditations Cartésiennes (1931) in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung, December 18, 1932, Schutz writes “To Husserl’s list I would like to a social science which, while limited to the social sphere, is of an eidetic character. The task < of such a social science > would be the intentional analysis of those manifold forms of higher-level social acts and social formations that are founded on the—already executed—constitution of the alter ego. This can be achieved in static and genetic analyses, and such an interpretation would accordingly have to demonstrate the aprioristic structures of the social sciences.” Trans. Helmut Wagner in Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. IV, ed. Helmut Wagner, George Psathas, and Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), 164.
- 45.
Both terms are used as synonyms. The methodologies of hermeneutics and histories of the nineteenth century distinguished historical research and historiography as representations of the results of historical research. See Hermeneutics Method and Methodology l.c., fn. 25, §l0 on Droysen.
- 46.
Husserl distinguished later between genesis as subjective genesis and generation as the genesis of intersubjective communities in manuscripts 1929–1936 published as Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjekivität III, Hua XV.
- 47.
Appendix V, 316.
- 48.
Cf. above, fn. 24 and 25.
- 49.
Cf. §§8, 9, n. 44.
- 50.
Philology, and its methodology, hermeneutics, the basic discipline of the philological historical method and histories is not mentioned in Ideen II. What is mentioned is linguistics (Sprachforschung), but this covers only the lowest level of Boeckh’s methodology, grammatical interpretation and critique.
- 51.
A phenomenological epistemology of the empirical sciences requires more than the phenomenological givenness of the ideal objects of mathematics. The distinction of adequate and inadequate evidence is not sufficient because there is no flawless adequacy of evidence, e.g. of presently recognized “laws of nature.” Knowledge in the empirical sciences remains fallible. This must be added to the investigation of LI Zhongwei, “Towards a Husserlian Conception of Epistemology” in: Advancing Phenomenology. Essays in Honor of Lester Embree, eds. T. Nenon & P. Blosser, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), sect. 4 and 5, pp. 124f.
- 52.
Practical life is vitally interested in successful predictions of events following certain actions. This is the pre-scientific root of the theoretical interest of the natural sciences in causal connections and of the development of a scientific technology.
- 53.
Cf. §§33–35, l.c.: 44.
- 54.
Cf. §§27 and 36, l.c. 44.
- 55.
The first canon implies a methodological abstraction. The philologist and the historian has to “bracket” the prejudices of the own historical context. The “uninterested observation” of research in the social sciences requires also an abstraction. It is, hence, a mistake to assume that the methodology of the human sciences as sciences does not imply methodological abstractions.
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Seebohm, T.M. (2013). Husserl on the Human Sciences in Ideen II . 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_8
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