Abstract
The following essay attempts to outline some features of Husserl’s theory of community and to propose incidentally that it is a central consideration of his social theory, ethics, and theology. Most of the topics treated here find a more complete discussion in a MS which I hope to finish soon. I begin by connecting Husserl’s philosophical theology to the theme of community.
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Notes
For a more thorough but still quite inadequate discussion of Husserl’s concept of the divine entelechy, see James G. Hart, “Divine Truth in Husserl and Kant: Some Issues in Phenomenological Theology”, in Daniel Guerriere, ed., The Phenomenology of Truth Proper to Religion (Albany: SUNY, forthcoming; also “A Precis of an Husserlian Philosophical Theology”, in Essays in Phenomenological Theology, ed. Steven Laycock and James Hart (Albany: SUNY, 1986). I wish to thank Professor Samuel IJsseling, Managing Director of the Husserl-Archives in Louvain for permission to use and quote from the Nachlass. I wish also to thank the Lilly Foundation for the grant which enabled me to spend the summer of 1988 in writing this essay.
H.-N. Castañeda, “On the Phenomeno-logic of the I” Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Philosophy (Vienna: Herder, 1968), Vol. III: 260–266. We do not find exactly this position in Husserl. Yet there are variations on an ontological argument. Because Husserl holds that the listener’s perception of occasional-indexical expressions involves reference to the speaker’s situation, “I” is an expression, a concept, to whose content the existence of the object belongs. (See Manfred Sommer, 188, of the work cited in n. 17 below.) Consider also, that whereas the being of eide typically is indifferent to the issue of real factual existence, the eidos “I” is inconceivable without the factual existence of the transcendental “I” (Hua XV, 385). Similarly, Husserl holds that the transcendental “I”, as the dative of manifestation (see the body of the text below), is nichtwegdenkbar, i.e., not able to be eliminated conceptually, in exercitu, in the presentation of anything — even the presentation of a world in which there are no human forms of consciousness. See, e.g., B IV 6 and B III 1; also, e.g., Hua VIII, 408–413; Hua IX, 477–488; Hua XIII, 290 ff.; Hua XIV, 151–154.
Cf. Roderick Chisholm, The First Person (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1981), 49.
Castaneda has orchestrated this theme in numerous writings. The seminal essay is “Indicators and Quasi-Indicators”, American Philosophical Quarterly IV (1967), 85–100; see also n. 2.
In a richly instructive article (which I discovered after completing this essay) Herbert Spiegel-berg holds that an authentic use of “we” is when the speaker addresses others whom he wants to include. “We” therefore tries to make the others listen and realize that they are appealed to as partners. This is its performative function. I hold this to be an improper use of “we” (see below). I owe the insight to my eleven-year old daughter Jenni’s instruction on how this use of “we” is a form either of imperialism or disingenuous presumption of the fulfillment of conditions which are still unfulfilled. See Spiegelberg’s “On the Right to Say ‘We’”in Phenomenological Sociology: Issues and Applications, ed. George Psathas (New York: John Wiley, 1973, 129–158).
For an excellent essay which complements my study, see David Carr’s “Cogitamus Ergo Sumus: The Intentionality of the First-Person Plural”, in his Interpreting Husserl (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987), 281–298.
For the following I have benefitted from remarks by J.N. Findlay in Values and Intentions (New York: Humanities Press, 1968), 429–430.
F I 24, 115; See also A. Roth, Edmund Husserls ethische Untersuchungen (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), 161;
R. Toulemont, L’essence de la société selon Husserl (Paris: PUF, 1962), 251.
I have wrestled with the “anonymity” of the primal presencing in “Constitution and Reference in Husserl’s Phenomenology of Phenomenology”, forthcoming (1988–89) in Husserl Studies.
See Thomas Prufer, “An Outline of Some Husserlian Distinctions and Strategies, Especially in The Crisis, Phänomenologische Forschungen, I (1975), 89–104; and “Welt, Ich und Zeit in der Sprache”, Philosophische Rundschau 20 (1974). At this level Husserl (e.g., in the C MSS) speaks of that which is affected and the affecting.
H.P. Grice, “Meaning”, Philosophical Review (July, 1957) and “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions”, Philosophical Review (April, 1969).
I have been helped by Daniel Dennet, “Conditions of Person-hood”, in The Identities of Persons, ed. A. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 186.
I look forward to reading Karl Schuhmann’s Husserls Staatsphilosophie (Freiburg, Br.: Alber, 1988).
Cf. K III 7, 13, K III 3, 78–79, and K III 9,20, 74–76; also R. Toulemont, L’essence de la société selon Husserl, 198 ff.
This is from Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), Hua XXVII, 52–53.
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper Torchbooks).
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1965), 267.
See Manfred Sommer, Husserl und der frühe Positivismus (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985), especially 138 ff.
See, e.g., Hua VIII, 201; Hua XI, 62; A V 22, 19; and E III 4, 8b and 13b.
I am indebted to Hannah Arendt here. See her essay, “Truth and Politics”, in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1968), 241–242. Arendt goes to the other extreme from Husserl when she refuses to professional philosophers the disposition or capacity for the necessary rationality of the political realm.
See Murray Bookchin, “Towards a Liberatory Technology”, in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Press, 1986), 105 ff.;
also his Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose Press, 1986);
and The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books: 1982).
For good arguments, based on anthropological and political considerations, that the state is not necessary, see Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy and Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982).
Sokolowski has treated the topic of moral categoriality in “Moral Thinking”, in Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition, R. Sokolowski, ed. (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 235–248.
However the essentials are to be found in the rich ch. 3 of his Moral Action: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 41 ff.
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Hart, J.G. (1990). I, We, and God: Ingredients of Husserl’s Theory of Community. In: Ijsseling, S. (eds) Husserl-Ausgabe und Husserl-Forschung. Phaenomenologica, vol 115. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2427-7_8
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