From: "Anthony Crifasi" <crifasi-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: more Husserl on Heidegger
Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 20:48:46 +0000


Malcolm, I was just reading Husserl's "Phenomenology and Anthropology," and 
found a text that I really don't think you can get around:

"As Ego I am for myself not a human being within the world that is in being; 
rather, I am the ego that places the world in question regarding its entire 
being, and hence too regarding its being in this way or that. Or: I am the 
ego that certainly continues to live its life within universally available 
experience but that brackets the validity of the being of that experience. 
The same holds for all non-experiential modes of consciousness in which the 
world retains its practical or theoretical validity."

Two things are striking about this text. First, he explicitly says that the 
ego "places the world in question regarding its ENTIRE BEING". Secondly, he 
says that this holds also for PRACTICAL comportments. Both of these are in 
flat contrast to Heidegger's insistance that Dasein is FUNDAMENTALLY 
being-alongside-entities-in-the-world, and precisely in practical 
comportments is this most clear. So for Heidegger, the being of the world is 
constitutive of Dasein, whereas for Husserl, the being of the world is not 
essentially constitutive of the transcendental ego - hence the possibility 
of considering the ego quite apart from the being of the world.

Nor can this fundamental conflict between them be resolved by referring to 
temporality, because Husserl explicitly insists that ONLY THROUGH THE 
REDUCTION is a field of research opened up for phenomenology:

"Against all expectations, what in fact opens up here - BUT ONLY THROUGH THE 
PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION - is a vast field of research."

Without the reduction, he says, philosophy would be:

"groundless speculations, the unscientific character of which is not a 
matter of debate and (contrary to the opinion of many today) is not to be 
commended. In general, it was extraordinarily hard to completely satisfy the 
demands of the new problem of philosophical method as a means for making 
philosophy a science based on ultimate accountability. But in the final 
analysis everything depends on the initial moment of the method, the 
phenomenological reduction."

So Husserl himself explicitly says that phenomenology can be opened up at 
all ONLY through the phenomenological reduction, the result of which is that 
"I am the ego that places the world in question regarding its entire being". 
Otherwise:

"I cannot help branding all philosophies that call themselves 
phenomenological as abberations which cannot attain the level of authentic 
philosophy."

No wonder both he and Heidegger agree that their respective phenomenologies 
are essentially incompatible.

Anthony Crifasi

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