Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1997 15:22:25 +0100
From: Paul Mathias <pmat-AT-ext.jussieu.fr>
Subject: Re: PLC: Husserl


Reg Lilly wrote:

> I was wonderning,
> do you find students 'warming' to Husserl's nostalgia and, thereby
> identifying
> with 'conservative' inclinations, or does this make Husserl seem even
> more
> anachronistic to a positivist and postmodern-inured Gen-X?

I am not certain about this, but it seems to me it is neither. If they
(already) are conservatives, they won't change by reading Husserl, and
if they aren't -- well, they already are anyway, in the sense that, you
know, "la langue fran=E7aise, ta ta ta...". Actually what seems to be the
case is that Husserl is going to be either (slightly) known as a
notorious unintelligible philosopher, or totally unknown to them. So the
problem of their inclinations doesn't even exist in the matter.

Now the question is: teaching Husserl, or at least the _Krisis_, is
*that* conservative, in the sense of "the old values revival"? I don't
think so, because I don't think that the "Greek spirit" of rationality
or the "european conscience" are anything from the past, and belonging
to the past. Be the forms of interpretation quite different today on the
Net from what they were at the Sorbonne in 1880, they still are forms of
interpretation and a way to struggle against nonsense. In this regard, I
don't feel like a conservative; rather like a naive young (?) man
looking for something to learn-- while teaching things he knows nothing
about!

See yah'

pM





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