Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997 15:34:32 +0100
From: Paul Mathias <pmat-AT-ext.jussieu.fr>
Subject: Re: PLC: Husserl


Reg Lilly wrote:

>         Oh, delight!  What are you teaching of Husserl? 
> Unfortunately, the Husserl one
> finds on this side of the divide is rather uninspiring or/and
> unphenomenological.
>
> Courtinely yours(?),
> Reg

Oh -- there's nothing courtelinesque about Husserl... That's one
character whose unquestionable seriousness doesn't make me feel like
being "courtelipinesque" (not like Kant, for instance!)... He makes me
melancholic, rather... Anyway, yes... Yesterday was the first teaching
day at the Institute, where a few of us have to teach "Les grands enjeux
du débat politique économique et social". Pompous, undoubtedly, but not
as illegitimate as it seems. In fact our students are good
"technicians", who know many things about economics, laws, human
resources, and the like. Only suddenly, just a few months before they
graduate, it has been decided that they would also "meditate". Most
officially, our duty is to "knock them down", make them uncertain,
doubtful, skeptical. So I had to hit them, and hit them hard. Which I
did with the beginning of the _Krisis_, where Husserl explains why
sciences-of-facts are unlikely to elucidate anything about our lives.
And the more they were opening their staring eyes, the more I would
insist on meditation as a means to question not the meaning of life, but
the very questioning of the meaningfulness or the meaninglessness of
life -- a means to question questioning itself.Well -- that's not a way
to behave with these young positivists of ours! You can imagine how they
feel, looking deeply into themselves and thinking: "Now they tell us:
'don't act, think!' -- why the heck didn't they tell us when we were
5...?"
I don't have an answer to that question -- nor the other by the way. But
at least, for the first time in their not so very young lives, they
would just look at an idea for the sake of its ideality.

Chaire,

pM




     --- from list phillitcrit-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---