Issues in Husserl's Ideas II.

McDonald, Peter

Nemon, Thomas and Embree, Lester, eds. Issues in Husserl's Ideas II. Contributions to Phenomenology in Cooperation with the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, vol. 24. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996. xi + 263 pp. Cloth, $143.00--The 13 essays in this collection mirror the structure of Husserl's text in exploring, sequentially, the constitution of material nature, animal nature, and the spiritual world. A passage from Husserl's research manuscripts (with translation) sets the stage for investigation by establishing the crucial distinction between "causality," applicable to the spatio-temporal relations of the physical realm, and "motivation," applicable to the interior psychical sphere. The role of motivation becomes a central theme underlying the topics treated in the subsequent essays. The essays thus make clear, in various ways, that what is ultimately at stake here for Husserl is the rescue of the spiritual or cultural world and the human person from the absolutized dominance of a theoretically conceived "nature" devoid of value, meaning, and purpose.

One of the things that makes these essays particularly effective is the phenomenological approach they adopt in investigating Husserl's analyses. By inviting us to "become Husserl's fellow researchers, entering his laboratory" (p. 136), they prompt us to adopt this same attitude so that we, too, can see for ourselves. We are therewith required, among other things, to follow the shifting play of attitudes within Husserl's text. For example: Husserl's analysis of the pure ego begins not, as we might expect, in the third section of Ideas II (the spiritual world), but within the second section (the constitution of animals). Chapter 13 shows that this apparent misplacement is dictated by an important methodological concern. Self-consciousness--comprising second-order mental states with first-order mental acts as their intentional correlate--is a necessary condition for recognizing as explicitly mental the first-order states upon which it is itself founded. By disclosing the methodological motivation underlying Husserl's anticipatory description of self-consciousness, the essay makes it evident that, if we are truly to learn from Husserl, we must come to appreciate the structural complexity and integrity of his thought.

Complementing their predominantly text-immanent approach, the essays explore not only the influence and interpretation, but also the sources of Husserlian philosophy. An inquiry into motivations for the naturalistic concept of meaningless, material nature (chap. 6) draws upon the thought of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty to suggest that beneath the achievement of sociality there lies the unsettling recollection of solipsistic experience. Chapter 7 draws upon Sokolowski to reject Kern's criticism, namely that Husserl "projects the mediate structures of understanding ... into the immediacy of sensibility's flux" (pp. 121-2). The essay Illustrates how a rudimentary identity synthesis is "feebly present" (p. 127), even on the level of passive streaming. Chapter 9 refutes Dreyfus's contention that Husserlian intentional analysis is unable to account for the practice of everyday coping skills. Since, for Husserl, there is implicit awareness of the everyday objects we encounter, embedded in a spatio-temporal horizon, it is indeed possible to make explicit these intentional correlates of acts of coping. Investigations into intersubjectivity (chaps. 11, 12) explore the role of empathy (Lipps), together with the associated concepts of transposition (Dilthey), divination (Schleiermacher), and introjection (Avenarius), as these are appropriated and transformed by Husserl.

Taken as a whole, the work suggests a threefold conclusion: 1) The "naturalistic" attitude downgrades the surrounding world of prescientific experience to "a subjective epiphenomenon" (p. 40) of nature as eternal nexus of mechanical succession. Phenomenological analysis shows, however, that the "unbiased" attitude, of purely theoretical science is highly artificial, and the correlative concept of nature a rationally motivated abstraction yielding a heightened, mathematically constructed objectivity no longer correlative to "contingently constituted human organisms" (p. 217). Disclosing this forgotten motivation makes it clear that the naturalistic attitude presupposes the natural (pretheoretical) attitude. The naturalistic attitude, therefore, undermines its own possibility when applied beyond the restricted domain within which it is properly applicable. 2) The experiencing subject (quasi-solipsistic scientific observer) must be understood as inhabitant of an intersubjective (prescientific) world. In the "personalistic" attitude, this subject comes into view as participant in a spiritual world, a person whose body constitutes "a medium for the articulation of typical human meaning" (p. 202). 3) At the heart of Husserl's though lies the personal and cultural element His investigations thus culminate in the generation of authentic community (chap. 14), the inherent telos of an interplay between the individual and the societal as reciprocally founding strata.

Issues in Husserl's Ideas II should prove of interest not only to Husserl scholars, but to anyone seeking a well-balanced Introduction to Husserl's thought. The work offers insight into the core issues with which Husserl battles, their interrelatedness, and the methodology appropriate to their resolution. It fulfills its stated objective in a series of detailed and carefully nuanced analyses; for the reader is indeed encouraged to learn from Husserl, exploring further the Issues raised in his text in order "to go beyond him in an orientation `zu den Sachen selbst'" (p. xi).