Abstract
This article examines the major contribution to phenomenology by Jitendra Nath Mohanty, who first published in Philosophical and Phenomenological Research in 1954 soon after he had completed his dissertation under Josef König at the University of Göttingen. In 2008 and 2011, this literary output culminated in a substantial two-volume intellectual history of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl from the early Göttingen years until Husserl’s death in 1938. In the five decades of commitment to the exposition of Husserl’s thought, Mohanty’s early philosophical influences remained with him and justify his self-identification as a phenomenological Vedāntin.
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- 1.
Mohanty, J.N. 1954. The ‘Object’ in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14: 343–353.
- 2.
Mohanty, J.N. 2011. Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years 1916–1938. Hartford: Yale University Press.
- 3.
Mohanty, J.N. 1959. Individual Fact and Essence in Edmund Husserl’s Philosophy. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 20: 222–230.
- 4.
Mohanty, J.N. 2002. Between Two Worlds: East and West. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- 5.
Between Two Worlds, 30–31.
- 6.
Between Two Worlds, 114.
- 7.
Mohanty, J.N.1975. Consciousness and Life World. Social Research 42:147–166. The publication fate of Gurwitsch’s book is discussed in Grathoff, Richard, ed. 1989. Philosophers in Exile, The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1939–1959, translated by J. Claude Evans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. The text was finally published in English in 1964 by Duquesne University Press, 7 years after its appearance in French.
- 8.
Between Two Worlds. See chapter 4, Calcutta, Oh! Calcutta.
- 9.
Between Two Worlds, 130.
- 10.
Mohanty, J.N. 1974. ‘Life-world’ and ‘A priori’ in Husserl’s Later Thought. Analecta Husserliana III: 46–65. Husserl’s life-world, which begins to take shape in the Fifth Meditation of Cartesian Meditations and which by the time of the Crisis is conceived as the pre-given grounding horizon or general field, is interpreted by Mohanty as Husserl’s reconciliation with Dilthey’s notion of Lebensphilosophie, since Husserl defined the life-world in terms of the subject’s engagement with value and motivation in contrast to the theoretical and methodological stance of the naturalistic point of view. It should be recalled that some of Husserl’s students were drawn to Dilthey’s life philosophy; Edith Stein famously wrote her dissertation for Husserl on the subject of Einfűhlung or sympathy which derives from Dilthey’s work
- 11.
Gurwitsch, Aron. 1968. Intentionality and Consciousness. In Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. Marvin Farber, 65–83. New York: Greenwood Press.
- 12.
Mohanty. J.N. Consciousness and Life-World. Social Research, 42: 153.
- 13.
Ibid., 154.
- 14.
Ibid., 155.
- 15.
Ibid., 164.
- 16.
Ibid., 165.
- 17.
Mohanty, J.N. 1970. Phenomenology and Ontology. In Phenomenology and Ontology. 92–103. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff.
- 18.
Ibid., 103.
- 19.
Mohanty, J.N. 1962. The Nyāya Theory of Avayavipratyakṣa. Journal of the Indian Academy of Philosophy I: 30–41.
- 20.
Mohanty, J.N. 1970. The Nyāya Theory of Avayavipratyakṣa. In Phenomenology and Ontology, 183–197. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff.
- 21.
Ibid., 196.
- 22.
Mohanty, J.N. 1965. The Conception of Phenomenology. Journal of the Indian Academy of Philosophy IV: 10–31.
- 23.
Ibid., 28.
- 24.
Mohanty, J.N. 1988. Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy: The Concept of Rationality. Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology 19: 269–281.
- 25.
Mohanty, J.N. 1992. Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy: The Concept of Rationality. In Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy, editors, Chattopadhyaya, D.P., Embree, Lester, and Mohanty, Jitendranath, 8–19. Albany: SUNY Press.
- 26.
Husserl, Edmund.1973. Cartesian Meditations. Trans. Dorion Cairns. §56. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff.
- 27.
Ibid., 128–131.
- 28.
Mohanty. 1988. Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy, 272.
- 29.
Ibid., 273.
- 30.
Mohanty, J. N. 1970. Husserl’s Concept of Intentionality. Analecta Husserliana 1:101–132.
- 31.
Ibid., 120.
- 32.
Ibid., 102–103.
- 33.
Ibid., 108–109.
- 34.
Ibid., 123.
- 35.
Ibid., 121.
- 36.
Mohanty, J.N. 1972. Phenomenology and Existentialism: Encounter with Indian Philosophy. International Philosophical Quarterly 2:484–511.
- 37.
Ibid., 494.
- 38.
Ibid., 496.
- 39.
Ibid., 501.
- 40.
Mohanty, J.N. 1978. Consciousness and Existence: Remarks on the Relation Between Husserl and Heidegger. Man and World 11: 324–335. The paper had been previously read at SUNY Stony Brook and the University of Oklahoma.
- 41.
Ibid., 329.
- 42.
Ibid., 330.
- 43.
Ibid., 332.
- 44.
Ibid., 332.
- 45.
Ibid., 333.
- 46.
These are all ideas that Mohanty anticipated in his article “Consciousness and the Life World” published in Social Research in 1975 and which we addressed earlier in this paper.
- 47.
See my Husserl’s Assistants: Phenomenology Reconstituted. 2010. History of European Ideas 36: 419–426, and Importing Phenomenology, The Early Editorial Life of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in this volume for references to key episodes in this contentious history.
- 48.
Sinha, D. 1963. Phenomenology and Positivism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 23: 562–577.
- 49.
Ibid., 576.
- 50.
Sinha, D. 1965. The Idealist Standpoint, A Study in the Vedantic Metaphysic of Experience. Santiniketan: Center of Advanced Study in Philosophy Visva-Bharati. 87.
- 51.
Schumann, Karl. 1992. Husserl and Indian Thought. In Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy, editors, D.P. Chattopadhyaya, Lester Embree, Jitendrnath Mohanty. 20–43. Albany: State University Prress.
- 52.
Maharana, Kanta, Surya. 2009. Phenomenology of Consciousness in Ādi Śamkara and Edmund Husserl. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 9: 1–12.
- 53.
Mohanty, J.N. Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy.
- 54.
Ibid., 272–273.
- 55.
Ibid., 274.
- 56.
Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. The spirit of philosophy, according to Husserl, was, from its beginnings in ancient Greece, teleologically directed to realizing universal reason. The fact that Husserl defined this historical process in terms of a form that supplies its own standards, eventually to become conscious of itself through this form, adds an unmistakable Hegelian ring to the mix. 16.
- 57.
Mohanty, J.N. The Relevance of Husserl Today.1988. Husserl Studies 5:219–233. The original talk was delivered at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford on 25 March 1988.
- 58.
Ibid., 226–227.
- 59.
Ibid., 228.
- 60.
Ibid., 231.
- 61.
Ibid., 232.
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Ricci, G.R. (2019). Jitendra Nath Mohanty: A Phenomenological Vedāntin. In: Ferri, M.B. (eds) The Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 100. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99185-6_10
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