Abstract
In this essay, I argue against Sebastian Luft ’s recent interpretation of the ‘final and ultimate shape’ of Husserl ’s thinking as a phenomenological philosophy of culture. I argue that this image of Husserl is narrow and untenable on the basis of Husserl ’s own thinking. I further suggest that this image of transcendental idealism is equally foreign to Kant , for whom transcendental philosophy (in all three critiques) does not centre on or ‘envision’ a critique of culture. Given the extent and degree of my reservations, I also attempt to track within the development of Luft ’s argument the sources for his misrepresentations and give special attention in this regard to his discussion of Gadamer . My overarching claim is that Luft ’s ‘final and ultimate’ Husserl reflects a post-Hegelian and specifically Neo-Kantian conception of enlightened philosophy. Luft effectively proposes to recover a hidden Neo-Kantian axis in Husserl ’s thinking or, in other words, another form of Neo-Kantianism in Husserlian phenomenology. I do not suggest that Luft considers Husserl as belonging to an established school of Neo-Kantian thought; but that in a more complex fashion, Husserlian phenomenology represents, for Luft , a departure from the grand narrative of Neo-Kantianism that at the same time stakes out an original position within the horizon of Neo-Kantianism in fulfilling one of its driving ambitions (and, to be sure, not shared by all forms of Neo-Kantianism): a philosophical critique of culture. Husserlian phenomenology would thus represent a kind of ‘subculture’ within Neo-Kantianism; and as with every subculture, it lives both from and against a dominant culture.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Also see my discussion in de Warren 2013.
- 2.
Unless otherwise stated, emphasis is in original unless otherwise stated.
- 3.
Luft is correct to consider Kant as a paradigmatic figure of the Enlightenment. But Luft ’s own view of the Enlightenment represents a nineteenth-century – and German – embrace of the primacy of culture (as opposed to civilisation; i.e. nineteenth-century debates between Kultur and civilisation). If we look back to Kant ’s conception of the Enlightenment, we recognise a noticeable absence of the centrality of culture in the sense subsequently developed by the Baden School of Neo-Kantianism . Whereas Kant situates the notion of culture, as the cultivation of mankind’s rational capacities, within his philosophy of history, Neo-Kantianism widens and deepens the concept of culture to the point of a philosophical identity between ‘Philosophy of culture and transcendental Idealism’ – the title of Windelband’s influential 1910 essay (included in Windelband 1921). Windelband’s statement, “History is the true Organon of philosophy” could not have been written by Kant , for whom Reason is the true Organon of philosophy. Moreover, Kant ’s Enlightenment is centred around a political conception of the world, or ‘life-world ’, not a world of culture, but a cosmopolitan world in which rational agents can pursue the highest good, obey moral imperatives (autonomy) and recognise each other as ends in themselves (the Kingdom of Ends). The cultural identities and markers of individuals are secondary to rights and obligations. Luft represents the collapse of this Kantian political conception of Enlightenment with a cultural conception at the expense of the universality that would only seem possible through a political and ethical conception. This aspect of Kant ’s thinking does not receive the appropriate emphasis, even thought Luft does consider the relation between theoretical and practical reason in his chapter on Kant and Husserl . Husserl ’s own critique of Kantian ethics is, to be sure, complex. The point that bears emphasis is not so much Husserl ’s confrontation with Kantian ethics , but the lack of a confrontation with Kant ’s political thought and the relationship between ethics (system of morality) and system of justice; as evident in Husserl ’s repeated emphasis on culture in his historical writings on Europe – such as the Kaizo articles.
- 4.
Luft has devoted a lengthy analysis of Husserl ’s reduction (s) in his Luft 2002.
- 5.
Luft here uncritically adopts the thrust of Heidegger ’s basic critique of Cassirer in the famous Davos disputation of 1929 and already formulated in Heidegger ’s 1928 review of Volume II of Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. As Heidegger writes: “Instead of placing the interpretation of mythic Dasein in a central characteristic of the ontological constitution of this being, Cassirer begins with an analysis of the mythic consciousness of objects, its form of thought and intuition . To be sure, Cassirer clearly sees that such a form must be traced back to the mythic form of life as the spiritual original foundation (Urschicht) […] Nevertheless, the express and systematic clarification of the origin of thought-form and intuition -form in the form of life is not carried out” (Heidegger 1976: 42). Puzzling, however, is Luft ’s ignorance of Cassirer ’s response to this very critique in Volume III of Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, with the notion of “symbolic pregnance” (symbolische Prägnanz) (cf. Cassirer 1955). Cassirer speaks explicitly of “symbolic pregnance” as an “ultimate foundation” that is more primordial than the synthetic activity of consciousness in Kant and Husserlian intentionality. Indeed, Cassirer objects to the One structure of Husserlian intentionality on account of its dualism between form and matter (at least in Ideen I). But even if we grant the later developments of Husserl ’s thinking, Cassirer ’s tripartite structure of symbolic form (expression, representation and meaning) still displaces the ‘subject–object’ correlation of intentionality. Moreover, Cassirer ’s metaphysical reflections on “original phenomenon” in his unfinished Volume IV and the “fact” of having a world in view, or the showing-up of the world, would also need to be discussed in this context. As Cassirer argues in this unfinished volume, “the phenomenon of the ‘I’, of the monas, of ‘life’ itself [is] a process, as movement – the ‘stream of consciousness’ which constantly flows and knows neither rest nor quiet” (Cassirer 1996: 128, 138). For a different account of the confrontation between Husserl and Cassirer , see Bernet (1994: 139–162), who argues that Cassirer is positioned in-between Husserl and Heidegger (but not that Cassirer and Husserl meet at some middle point).
- 6.
As noted above, Cassirer himself rejects this insistence on subjectivity . Another way to formulate the crucial difference between Husserl and Cassirer on the question (and direction) of foundations is to highlight Cassirer ’s statement in the preface to Philosophy of Symbolic Forms that he appropriates the concept of ‘phenomenology’ for his own phenomenology of knowing from Hegel. That is: the problem of foundation is handled in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms through the problem of totality, not ‘subjectivity ’, albeit in a modified form. If, for Hegel, das Wahre ist das Ganze, for Cassirer , who cites Hegel here in the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, die Wahrheit ist das ‘Ganze’. On Cassirer ’s deliberate use of ‘die Wahrheit’ instead of Hegel’s ‘das Wahre’, see the illuminating discussion in Verene 2011: 45–46.
- 7.
My gratitude to Andrea Staiti for helping me see this point more clearly.
- 8.
Also see my own effort to address these issues in de Warren 2008: 23–44.
- 9.
This passage would require more careful analysis, but as far as I can see, Luft does not establish any clear distinction between Gadamer and Husserl on this issue of the life-world . On the one hand, he intends to draw a contrast between Husserl ’s notion of the life-world as ‘horizon of all horizons’ with Gadamer ’s ‘life-world as sphere of plurality’, but on the other hand, when Luft speaks of the life-world as “horizon that is essentially plural” he actually identifies Gadamer ’s notion with Husserl ’s or, at least, fails to clearly distinguish between both, as it would seem was his original intention. This is further confirmed when Luft states: “Husserl ’s phenomenology offers a rich account of the lifeworld in the plurality of its meaningful horizons that correspond to a plurality of subjective interactions with, and comportments toward (through the concept of ‘attitudes’), this lifeworld” (Luft 2011: 322).
- 10.
I have also argued elsewhere that forgetfulness is an original accomplishment of retentionality within Husserl ’s analysis of time-consciousness. See de Warren 2009. Husserl himself often uses the expressions “vergessenes Sinnesfundament” and “Verborgenheit” as characterisations for the life-world in both the Crisis and the supplementary manuscripts in Husserliana XXIX.
- 11.
But can we accept this identification (or equivocation) of “true existentialism” with “true Lebensphilosophie”? For a critical reflection on such an equivalence, see Patočka 2011.
- 12.
In this context of discussing Gadamer ’s development of Husserl ’s ‘paradigm’, Luft makes the curious comment that “Husserl never really considered possible this switch from one attitude to another other than through an unmotivated leap”. But this is simply not the case, as Husserl devoted a significant amount of manuscripts to this issue of switching from one horizon to another (in Husserl ’s language: from one particular world to another) as well as the motivation for the suspension of all possible particular worlds. It is, furthermore, unclear why Luft considers that “in Husserl ’s scenario there can be no fusion; rather, there would occur a violent clash of horizons” (Luft 2011: 321). Husserl is not Sartre, and as Husserl ’s own inventive use of the terms Paarung and Deckung from his famous analysis in the fifth Cartesian Meditation and the entire problem of empathy suggests, horizons are intersubjectively, constantly in the play of ‘fusion’.
- 13.
Luft ’s worry that Gadamer ’s “effective-historical consciousness takes on the role of the über-subject in history” mirrors his worry with regard to Cassirer ’s “phenomenology of objective spirit” (Luft 2011: 329).
- 14.
It is puzzling how one could advance this reading of Kant ’s revolution in light of Cassirer ’s argument that Kant ’s revolution in the way of thinking (Denkart) consists in his discovery of a pure functional notion of the concept, as Cassirer argues in Substance and Function (1910) and further develops in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Following Hermann Cohen, for Cassirer , transcendental idealism does not depend on a claim about subjectivity as it does on a claim about method and concept (i.e. transcendental method of analysis; concept as function of pure formation of meaning) in light of which our understanding of subjectivity becomes transformed.
- 15.
As Luft also expresses himself: “Husserl ’s version of transcendental idealism shows us a path to the true being of the world, rather than leaving us stuck with an irritating duality between thing-in-itself and appearance” (Luft 2011: 187).
- 16.
References
Arendt, Hannah. 1953. Ideology and terror: A novel form of government. The Review of Politics 15(3): 303–327.
Arendt, Hannah. 1979. The origins of totalitarianism, New ed. San Diego/New York/London: A Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace and Company.
Bernet, Rudolf. 1994. Perception et Herméneutique (Husserl, Cassirer et Heidegger). In La vie du Sujet: Recherches sur l’Interprétation de Husserl dans la Phénoménologie, 139–162. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Bizot, François. 2011. Le Silence du Bourreau. Paris: Flammarion.
Cassirer, Ernst. 1955. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Trans. Ralph Manheim, vol. III. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Cassirer, Ernst. 1996. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: Including the Text of Cassirer’s Manuscript on Basis Phenomena. Trans. John Michael Krois., ed. John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene. New Haven: Yale University Press.
de Waehlens, Alphonse. 1959. Réflexions sur une Problématique Husserlienne de l’inconscient, Husserl et Hegel. In Edmund Husserl: 1859—1959, 221–237. The Hague: Nijhoff.
de Warren, Nicolas. 2008. La Crise de la Raison et l’Énigme du Monde. In Lectures de la Krisis de Husserl, ed. Francois de Gandt and Claudio Majolino, 23–44. Paris: Vrin.
de Warren, Nicolas. 2009. Husserl and the promise of time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
de Warren, Nicolas. 2013. Emmanuel Levinas and a Soliloquy of Light and Reason. In Husserl’s Ideen, Contributions to phenomenology 66, ed. Lester Embree and Tom Nenon, 265–282. Dordrecht: Springer.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2004. Truth and Method. Trans. W. Glen-Doepel, revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd, Rev. ed. London/New York: Continuum.
Heidegger, Martin. 1976. Review of mythic thought. In The Piety of Thinking: Essays by Martin Heidegger, Trans. and ed. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo, 32–45. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 1996. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Unified (with all variants from the 1781 and 1787) Ed. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1929. Sur les ‘Ideen’ de M. E. Husserl. Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger CVII(3–4): 230–265.
Luft, Sebastian. 2002. Phänomenologie der Phänomenologie. Dordrecht: Springer.
Luft, Sebastian. 2011. Subjectivity and lifeworld in transcendental phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Makkreel, Rudolf A., and Sebastian Luft (eds.). 2009. Neo-Kantianism in contemporary philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Marx, Werner. 1970. Vernunft und Welt. The Hague: Nijhoff.
Patočka, Jan. 2011. Éternité et historicité. Trans. E. Abrams. Paris: Verdier.
Verene, Donald Phillip. 2011. The origins of the philosophy of symbolic forms: Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Windelband, Wilhelm. 1921. Präludien: Aufsätze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihre Geschichte, vol. II. Tübingen: Paul Siebeck.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
de Warren, N. (2015). Husserl’s Hermeneutical Phenomenology of the Life-World as Culture Reconsidered. In: Učník, Ľ., Chvatík, I., Williams, A. (eds) The Phenomenological Critique of Mathematisation and the Question of Responsibility. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 76. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09828-9_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09828-9_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-09827-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-09828-9
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)