Husserl and the Problem of Ontology

Abstract

In a terse autobiographical essay which coordinates personal data with the intellectual perspectives opened for his own life and thought by the work of Edmund Husserl, Levinas assesses the value of Husserl’s method:

Husserl will be remembered for having brought to philosophy a method. It amounts to the analysis of “intentions” which maintain the irreducibility of the various experiences of the real, delineates the unsuspected horizons in which this reality situates itself when one “heeds” the “intentions” which apprehend the real, and fixes the original standing of the being thus approached. But the method consists especially in recognizing a dignity of experience and of apprehension in the attitudes of the mind (and of the body) which until now were not supposed to play a part in discovering being. These experiences of a new type, totally strange to the subject-object archetype, sometimes are foundations of the contemplative thought which fixes things and ideas and are prior to the technique which handles them and fashions them. The structure of the contemplated object does not serve at all as a norm for the correlate of non-theoretical experiences.¹