Husserl

[Anonymous No.19992541]

Writing a paper on Husserl for a Phenomenology class and needed to work out some of the contextual stuff before I actually delve into Husserl's ideas themselves. If anybody could help me summarise the following:
>What were the prevailing philosophical orthodoxies during the turn of the 20th century - what was Husserl a response to? (Naturalism/Rationalism)?
>Does Husserl's study of consciousness thread into the general modernist trends in art/literature? (centrality of Subject, decay of conventional institutions)

Any help would be greatly appreciated! I have more questions about Phenomenology but I'll stick with these two just to open up the discussion. Will be replying slowly.

[Anonymous No.19992927]

>>19992541
>>What were the prevailing philosophical orthodoxies during the turn of the 20th century - what was Husserl a response to? (Naturalism/Rationalism)?
Representationalism, Relativism/scepticism, reductive psychological empiricism & psychologism and historicists (the later mostly in the 1910 Logos article).
>>Does Husserl's study of consciousness thread into the general modernist trends in art/literature?
No, you have to wait for Merleau-Ponty for that. I mean, obviously, there is a lot about the "centrality of the Subject", because Husserl is primarily interested about questions of constitution of the Subject's acts, and he does put the Subject in the highest position possible, but he does not approach directly any issue of literature or art.

[Anonymous No.19993017]

Husserl is an ambitious thing to write a paper on because not only is he poorly understood and not often studied, even among the people who study him there is more disagreement than agreement. Just be warned. I don't say this in a way to discourage you, but you may find yourself biting off more than you can chew if this is meant to be a quick project - if you don't already know about the philosophical trends at his time, excavating those is going to be just as much if not more work than understanding Husserl (and then where do you start? with his Ideas I, assuming this is representative of his earlier work too, which would require some fudging to say the least? or with Logical Investigations, which you definitely won't have a fun time reading or understanding if you don't already understand contemporary developments pretty well?).

>What were the prevailing philosophical orthodoxies during the turn of the 20th century - what was Husserl a response to? (Naturalism/Rationalism)?
This is complicated both because they were simply complex, and because Husserl wasn't necessarily in dialogue with all of them or "up to date." For example he read Dilthey fairly late (1910s and on) I believe, and then possibly integrated Diltheyan ideas and criticisms of him into his work, but Dilthey was already a major intellectual in the 1890s and even 1880s. And then Dilthey can sort of be summed up by saying he's "like" the hermeneutic neo-Kantians (Rickert, Windelband) but he's also not the same as them. Both Dilthey and the hermeneutic neo-Kantians also have a complex relationship with German historicism (see Iggers for a decent single reference). Yet none of this was directly influential on Husserl, at least not during his early phase and Logical Investigations "middle" phase. So there are various levels and shades of complexity here if you want to truly understand all this, far more than just rationalism vs. empiricism (a shorthand attributed to Kuno Fischer), or some other shorthand. You will have to make strategic considerations about how far you want to go for the scope of your project.

If you want to really understand Husserl I would recommend reading half-decent overviews like Spiegelberg's History of the Phenomenological Movement and Dermot Moran's Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology. In fact, it might be a good idea to go try to blitz 1-3 chapters of Moran's book right now, to see what you're up against, so you can have this preview of what you're getting into firmly in mind before wading in any deeper.

None of this is to discourage you. Some of the questions you're asking are so "big" that, while they're on the right track and interesting, it's going to be quite a task to "circle them in" on Husserl in particular, if you want to really answer them in a nuanced way. But maybe the expectations and scope of your project allow for this, I can't know, so I am just being generally monitory here.

[Anonymous No.19993027]

>>19993017
Obviously a very good understanding of Kant can only help you, but that's a project on its own if you aren't already there. Knowing about the "back to Kant" and neo-Kantian movements will also help. The hardest but maybe most important thing to know about would be the post-Kantian, anti-Hegelian, logicist/rationalist movement (it's hard to define this movement) represented by figures like Brentano (especially), Herbart, Lotze, and Trendelenburg. The best place to read about them is in a few of Beiser's books: After Hegel, Late German Idealism, The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism. These can be helpful context for understanding where exactly these (supposed) neo-realists, neo-rationalists, neo-logicists, neo-Aristotelians etc. fit into the general scheme of German philosophy. In my opinion it's one of the most difficult things to understand. Beiser's chapter on Trendelenburg is a decent place to start, but again familiarity with early German idealism (especially Kant) is somewhat assumed.

Strictly speaking these are all somewhat peripheral to Husserl, but they may help in getting a sense of the milieu he came out of, because this is ultimately vital for having a nuanced opinion on what relation exactly BOTH his pre-Ideas AND his Ideas work have to some of the most important philosophical movements of the time: developments in mathematical logic, anti-German idealist logicism and rationalism, the controversy over "psychologism" (very hard to understand when you first get into this), neo-Kantianism and transcendentalism. The central questions of Husserl's thought: Is he a transcendentalist? Was he a transcendentalist all along, or was he a rationalist logicist who then TURNED to idealism? If the latter is true, then why did he himself claim he was never a rationalist logicist? Husserl is hard, and just when you think studying the Logical Investigations directly is a good idea, you'll get filtered by them hard. Even Heidegger says somewhere he didn't understand them at first, and had to wait for the actual investigations of the second volume to appear, so it's not like you're alone in this. Compare also Roman Ingarden and the "Munich school" of phenomenology that initially followed

It may also be helpful to know the general course of development of mathematical philosophy during the mid to late 19th century, so you can know the context in which Husserl's first experiments with intuitionism. But that is more secondary and I mostly mention it in case you already have a leg up in this department from studying maths and logic.

[Anonymous No.19993032]

>>19993027
>Does Husserl's study of consciousness thread into the general modernist trends in art/literature? (centrality of Subject, decay of conventional institutions)
Yes, but it's difficult to make any one simplistic argument. Husserl is representative of modernity just as much as the popularity of Bergson around the same time, or the popularity of Blondel's l'Action, were. This also ties into the rise and fall of aesthetic and cultural movements predicated on a crisis of self-consciousness and self-assertion in what was widely regarded as a decadent and relativistic age, plus just about anything else you want depending how far you extend the "web" of connections that constitute "the crisis of modernity."

There was a general epistemological crisis of foundations in every philosophy and science and this underlies modernism just as much as it underlies Husserl's lifelong quest for a new foundational meta-philosophy that could ground a new "axial age" in human thought. If you can read German, and you have a lot of time, his articles about the refoundation of philosophy were published in a Japanese journal in Japanese translation and have been translated into German in one of the editions of Husserliana.

Probably the best place to start with this would be looking for sources that discuss his (probably most famous and accessible) Crisis of the European Sciences in cultural and intellectual context, if you are looking for a strategic overview of "how does Husserl relate to modernity" that allows you to see the forest BEFORE you start seeing the trees.

I kinda shot for the moon here, assuming you want the real actual answer to these questions, and trying to give you the best possible fuel to at least start that journey that I can think of. This may all be beyond the scope of your project obviously, but hopefully you can dissect this post and at least get a lay of the land from some of the books. I highly recommend just crashing into Moran's Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology book and just seeing how your current state of knowledge handles it.

[Anonymous No.19993266]

>>19993017
>>19993027
>>19993032
What do you do anon? Are you that soon-to-be Kant scholar?

Reading Ideas volume one right not. Interesting though I often think 'this is complete bs'.

[Anonymous No.19993762]

>>19993017
>>19993027
>>19993032
Are you this Husserlanon? If not, what do you feel foe this husserlanon?

[Anonymous No.19993860]

>>19993266
>Reading Ideas volume one right not. Interesting though I often think 'this is complete bs'.
Same here, reading Husserl while on the graveyard shift at work is peak comfy.

[Anonymous No.19993981]

>>19993017
>>19993027
>>19993032
Thank you SO much, I'm short of time right now but will absolutely give you something substantive in the morning.

[Anonymous No.19994878]

>>19993027
>The central questions of Husserl's thought: Is he a transcendentalist? Was he a transcendentalist all along, or was he a rationalist logicist who then TURNED to idealism? If the latter is true, then why did he himself claim he was never a rationalist logicist?
This was very clearly answered by Gaston Berger, who was in direct correspondence with Husserl. See the 2nd chapter of Le Cogito dans la Philosophie de Husserl, " Preparation à la philosophie transcendantale".

[Anonymous No.19995313]

>>19993032
Are these the Japanese articles you mentioned?

[Anonymous No.19995320]

[Anonymous No.19995971]

>>19994878
>Le Cogito dans la Philosophie de Husserl
Thanks, will check this out too.

[Anonymous No.19996164]

>>19995971
Btw, I'm not really dunking on that anon, he is somewhat right that Husserl's "shift" should be thematized early by any student, in order to situate Phenomenology properly. Every introductory course makes it its central question (one of my biggest academic shame is that I defended Husserl as a full-fledged Realist in my first course exam). It is a necessary step, however so much goddamn ink has been wasted on it instead of developing Phenomenology proper that it becomes a source of stagnation, and, as I said, it can be answered incredibly quickly and simply if you refer to Berger's book (which is admittedly completely unknown, Berger was a weird figure, an industrialist that had a huge interest in Pheno, sorta like a hobby, and contrary to those who usually are interested in pheno as a hobby, was incredibly rigorous in his work). Hopefully you speak frog, I dont even know if it's been translated.