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Cartesian Meditation EUGEN FINK Sixth Cartesian Meditation THE IDEA OF A TRANSCENDENTAL THEORY OF METHOD WITH TEXTUAL NOTATIONS BY EDMUND HUSSERL TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY Ronald Brutina EUGEN FINK Sixth Cartesian Meditation THE IDEA OF A TRANSCENDENTAL THEORY OF METHOD WITH NOTATIONS BY EDMUND HUSSERL TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY Ronald Bruzina "... a thorough critique of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology . raises many new questions. a classic." — J. N. M ohanty Eugen Fink's Sixth Cartesian Medita­ tion, accompanied by Edmund Husserl's detailed and extensive notations, is a pivotal document in the development of one of the dominant philosophical directions of the twentieth century, Husserlian transcendental phe­ nomenology. Meant to follow a systematic revision of Husserl's first five Cartesian Meditations, (continued on back flap) Sixth Cartesian Meditation Studies in Continental Thought John Sallis, general editor Consulting Editors Robert Bernasconi W illia m L. M cBride Rudolf Bernet J. N. Mohanty John D. Caputo M ary Rawlinson David Carr Tom Rockmore Edward S. Casey Calvin O . Schrag Hubert L. Dreyfus f Reiner Schiirmann D o n Ih d e C h a rle s E. Scott David Farrell Krell Thomas Sheehan Lenore Langsdorf Robert Sokolowski Alphonso Lingis Bruce W . Wilshire D a v id W o o d Sixth Cartesian Meditation T H E ID EA OF A TRANSCENDENTAL THEORY OF M E T H O D WITH TEXTUAL NOTATIONS BY EDMUND HUSSERL TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY Ronald Bruzina INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOOMINGTON & INDIANAPOLIS Published in G erm an as Eugen Fink, Vi. Cartesianische Meditation.Teil 1. Die Idee Einer Transzendentalen Metbodenlebrr, edited by Hans Ebeling, Jann H o ll, and Guy van K.erckhoven. C opyright © 1988 by Kluwer -Academic Publishers B.V. English-language edition © 1?95 by Ronald Bruzina All rights re served N o part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48 -1984. ® T“ M anufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fink, Eugen. [Idee einer transzendentaler Methodenlehre. English] Sixth Cartesian meditation : the idea of a transcendental theory of method / Eugen Fink; with the complete textual notations by Edmund Husserl , translated with an introduction by Ronald Bruzina. p. cm. — (Studies in Continental thought) Translation of: VI. cartesianische Meditation. T. I. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-32273-1 (alk. paper) 1. Husserl, Edmund, 1859-1938 Cartesianische Meditationen. 2. Phenom enology. I. Husserl, Edmund, 1859-1938. II. Title. III. Title: 6th Cartesian meditation. IV. Title: Idea of a transcendental theory of method. V. Series. B3279.H94F4913 1995 193—dc20 94-34 1 2 3 4 5 00 9 9 98 97 96 95 L. Contents TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION vii [DRAFT OF A FOREWORD] 1 PREFATORY NOTE [TO THE HABITATION TEXT], DECEMBER, 1945 2 SIXTH [CARTESIAN] MEDITATION The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method §1. The methodological limitation of the previous Meditations 3 §2. The theme of the transcendental theory of method 10 §3. The "self-reference" of phenomenology 13 §4. The problem and articulation of the transcendental theory of method 19 §5. Phenomenologizing as the action of reduction 29 §6. Phenomenologizing as a process of regressive analysis 48 § 7 . Phenomenologizing in "constructive" phenomenology 54 §8. Phenomenologizing as theoretical experience 66 §9. Phenomenologizing as an action of ideation 77 §10. Phenomenologizing as predication 84 §11. Phenomenologizing as "making into a science" 100 A) The problem of the scientificity of phenomenologizing 101 B) The enworlding of phenomenologizing 106 C) The concept of "science" 133 §12. "Phenomenology" as transcendental idealism 152 A PP E N D IC E S Texts by Edmund Husserl relating to Eugen Fink's D raft of a Sixth M editation A. Appended pages and insertions [from Summer 1933 to January 1934) 163 A ppendix I 163 Appendix II 163 Appendix III 165 Appendix IV 165 Appendix V 166 Appendix VI 167 Appendix VII 168 Appendix VIII 170 Appendix IX 171 B. Comments and research notes 174 A ppendix X 174 Appendix XI 178 Appendix XII 181 C. Unassigned pages 188 Appendix XIII 188 Appendix XIV 190 Appendix XV 191 TRANSLATOR'S NOTES 193 INDEX 201 TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION Eugen Fink's "Sixth Cartesian Meditation" is one of those famous unknown works in philosophy that haunt the margins of established texts while seldom if ever coming to light themselves, at least in any form other than scant frag­ ments. Occasionally, however, one of these missing writings does become ac­ cessible in full and is at last itself known, and this is the case with the present publication. For a whole generation of philosophers in phenomenology— which is a long time in the modern age of rapid and extensive communication and scholarship— the Sixth Meditation was a work known to have been writ­ ten, yet one that very few had ever seen, one that could easily be presumed not to have survived the descent of fascism and war upon Europe. Those who had read the Sixth Meditation were individuals who had maintained a close connection with Edmund Husserl even as the times darkened after 1933, and as acknowledgment of Husserl's accomplishments and of his very name came to be suppressed in Germany. Published mention of the Sixth Meditation first occurred in 1941 in France, in Gaston Berger's Le cogito dans la philosophic de Husserl1 to be followed only after the end of the war by reference to it in M au­ rice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenologie de la perception.2 It was most natural, then, that, when the editing of Husserl's Cartesian Meditations was under way for the first volume of the Husserliana edition, in­ terest would again turn to this text of Fink's. Stephan Strasser spoke of it in his editor's introduction to the Cartesianische Meditationen,3 expressing the hope that, while the Sixth Meditation did not figure into the edition he was prepar­ ing, it would nevertheless be itself published as part of the whole set of revi­ sion texts that Fink had produced for Husserl for the Cartesian Meditations in that earlier decade. The texts in question— the Sixth Meditation itself and these revision texts for Husserl's earlier five Cartesian Meditations— were and are not, however, part of the Husserl Nachlass in the Archives in Louvain.4 Apart from the period when Fink resided and lectured at Louvain (from the spring of 1939 to the autumn of 1940),5 these texts were not available even there,- and not until 1971 were copies finally provided for the Husserl Archives. Arrangements for their publication got under way only after Fink's death in 1975 and after the opening of the adjunct series, Husserliana Doku- mente, in 1977. It is in this series, now, that the texts have finally appeared in a two-volume edition, Eugen Fink, VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Part I: Die Idee einer Transzendentalen Metbodenlebre, ed. Hans Ebeling, Jann Holl, and Guy van Kerckhoven,- Part II: Ertjanzungsband, ed. Guy van Kerckhoven.6 It is the text of the first of these two volumes that is integrally translated here. The question of how and why these texts were preserved and yet kept pri­ vate is directly bound up with the history of their origin, which includes nat­ urally the nature of their content. They are the product of an intimate collaborative effort on the part of two philosophers, one an established and world-renowned master, the other a youthful scholar who had just finished his doctoral work. Each had an independent mind, each highly valued the other's work, and both were deeply involved in a shared project of philo­ sophic investigation and reflection. Yet they were different individuals in this common project,- and so the project acquired from the one differing emphases and a differing character than it did from the other. Both were beginners, but differently: one was a beginner in the final stage of a lifelong thinking,7 the other a beginner in the first realization of what would be a similar dedication. It will not be possible in this introduction to treat in any great detail the iden­ tities and differences between these two linked endeavors,- and yet som ething of this will have to be covered, for the nature of the documents given here in English is such that the primaiy thing is precisely the interplay of the two thinkings. W hen one considers what this final period of Husserl's thinking is taken to represent, namely, the culmination of an originally Cartesian impe­ tus that is being at the same time transcended, then the documented record of the direct interplay, the dialogue, of these two minds deep within tran­ scendental phenomenology takes on special importance. W hen we look at the title of the main text of the present translated vol­ ume, we should notice two things. First, we have here the sixth of a series of "Cartesian" meditations,- second, the subtitle of this sixth "Cartesian" medita­ tion, "The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method/' is frankly Kantian. W e must understand, then, what the fuller context and principal orientation of this piece are in order to interpret it properly. In the first place, it must be recognized that Fink's Sixth Meditation was meant to follow not upon Husserl's Cartesian Meditations as they have be­ come familiar to us up until now,8 but upon an extensively reworked version that was produced three years after Husserl's first full revision in 1929.
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