Abstract
Husserl is true to form as a totalist. He prefers an alternate phenomenological world to the ordinary natural world in which we all live. To be sure, this alternate world is a theoretical and rational enterprise. But he prefers this world of total reason to the natural world we inhabit. The alternate world gives him a new ‘foundation for knowledge,’ the freedom to live in the sphere of transcendental subjectivity, as well as absolute truth (with apodictic certainty). The world Husserl leaves behind him is not just doubtable; it is suspendable. One can bracket such a world, put it out of action, and make it completely inconsequential in the world of the mind. Husserl presents an elaborate methodology for making a ‘break’ with this world in order to achieve extraordinary knowledge. The world of total reason is made possible by infinite transcendence, which mediates the journey from our world to an alternate one. This anonymous infinite transcendence is also central to the operations of the alternate world of total reason.
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Notes
Frederick Elliston and Peter McCormick, eds., Husserl (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. 126 (Iso Kern).
Joseph J. Kockelmans, Phenomenology ( New york: Doubleday, 1967 ), p. 206.
Franz Brentano, Psychology From An Empirical Standpoint ( New York: Humanities Press, 1973 ), p. 370.
R.O. Elveton, ed., The Phenomenology of Husserl ( Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1970 ), p. 51.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas I, Gibson trans. ( London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1952 ), p. 92.
E. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, Alston & Naknikian, eds. ( The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964 ), p. 46.
R.B. Laing, ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Communication,’ Philosophy Today, Vol. 14 (1970), p. 79.
Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations ( Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974 ), p. 173.
Paul A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer ( La Salle: Open Court, 1973 ), p. 811.
Th. Kisiel, ‘Ideology Critique and Phenomenology,’ Philosophy Today (Fall, 1970), p. 152. Marcuse writes: ‘The radicalism promised by the battle cry of phenomenology, Zu den Sachen selbst, peters out in the leveling dimension of transcendental subjectivity, where all is equally a phenomenon of consciousness. Its universal freedom from presuppositions is at this level equivalent to universal affirmation, spent of all its critical drive…. The overtly critical move of the epoche does not abolish or change the world that brackets, but only understands it. Moreover, the receptivity of the intuition of essence replaces the spontaneity of the kind of understanding that is inseparable from critical reason. The phenomenological reduction subjects itself to the powers-that-be under the guise of the ‘given’, which promotes the resignation of quietistic indifference and paves the way for further ideologies. The phenomenologist is just a more sophisticated version of one-dimensional man.’ Later, Marcuse accepted Husserl’s term, the Lebenswelt and related this concept to his concerns with art.
J.N. Mohanty, Phenomenology and Ontology ( The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970 ), p. 26.
Wolfgang W. Fuchs, Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence (Pennsylvania State University: Ph.D. Dissertation, 1971), p. 34. Fuchs makes clear that Husserl belongs to the tradition of metaphysical thinking which emphasized the dialectic of presence and absence. It is ‘ideation’ that brings the object into ‘presence.’ ’Ideation is the bringing into the presence, this being ‘busied’, taken up, with the presence of the object. Ideation is the presence of the object.’
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 11, 339, 340.
Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. I (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), pp. 399–400. Also on pp. 400-01.
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Horosz, W. (1987). Husserl’s world of infinite transcendence. In: Search Without Idols. Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3493-1_9
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