HUSSERL and STEIN

Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change Series I. Culture and Values, Volume 31 HUSSERL and STEIN Edited by Richard Feist William Sweet The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy 1 Copyright © 2003 by The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy Gibbons Hall B-20 620 Michigan Avenue, NE Washington, D.C. 20064 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Husserl and Stein / edited by Richard Feist, William Sweet. p.cm.—(cultural heritage and contemporary change. Series I, Culture and values ; vol. 31) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1.Husserl, Edmund, 1859-1938. 2. Stein, Edith, Saint, 1891-1942. I. Feist, Richard. II. Sweet, William. III. Series. B3279.H94H855 2003 2003021425 193—dc22 CIP ISBN 1-56518-194-8 (pbk.) 2 Table of Contents Introduction: Husserl, Stein, and Phenomenology 1 William Sweet and Richard Feist 1. Brentano and Intentionality 21 Rolf George 2. Altered States: American Empiricism, Austrian Rationalism, and Universal Intuition 35 Anoop Gupta 3. The Sixth Meditation 49 Richard Holmes 4. Carnap, Husserl, Euclid, and the Idea of a Material Geometry 57 René Jagnow 5. Reductions and Relativity 89 Richard Feist 6. Are There Really Appearances? Dennett and Husserl on Seemings and Presence 103 David L. Thompson 7. Other Bodies and Other Minds in Edith Stein: Or, How to Talk About Empathy 119 Judy Miles 8. Edith Stein and Intersubjectivity 127 Ernest J. McCullough 9. The Humane Community: Husserl versus Stein 141 Marianne Sawicki 10. Edith Stein and Modern Philosophy 155 Chantal Beauvais Contributors 3 Introduction Husserl, Stein, and Phenomenology William Sweet and Richard Feist Introduction The philosophy of Edmund Husserl is difficult to categorise. Although laced with idealist themes, Husserl’s work presents a ‘phenomenology’ that resists reduction to any standard idealist view. In fact, Husserl wove a realist thread throughout the fabric of his writings – a thread that reflects his education in mathematics and his subsequent interaction with some of the seminal figures of modern philosophy of mathematics (such as Georg Cantor and Kurt Gödel). And while Husserl’s thought has often been regarded as very different from that characteristic of Anglo- American philosophy, there are nevertheless important links between it and the twentieth-century ‘analytic’ tradition. A similar comment might be made concerning the philosophy of Edith Stein. Although a student of Husserl, his assistant, and an interlocutor, Stein resisted drawing on mathematics and the sciences that were central to Husserl’s understanding of phenomenology. She was faithful to the phenomenological project, yet brought it into closer contact with classical thought and, after a fashion, back to its roots in scholastic philosophy. And while Stein came to develop phenomenology in a way quite different from her contemporaries, the result was to reinforce its realist character. Aside from all this, Stein is widely recognised as one of the leading feminist writers of the early twentieth century, and her work has had a particularly strong influence within the Catholic tradition on how one should understand the role and ‘genius’ of woman.1 There are, clearly, important relations between the work of Husserl and Stein. Husserl obviously influenced Stein. But he also referred to, and drew on, her writings in his efforts both to ground knowledge of the person and to extend phenomenological insights to social and political issues. And yet, while they were equally committed to approaching philosophical questions through a phenomenological method, much distinguishes the two. (To fully appreciate the continuity in their philosophical views as well as the differences between them, one might also know the intellectual context of their work – e.g., the influence of Franz Brentano, William James, and Cantor, for Husserl, and these and others, such as St Thomas Aquinas and St John of the Cross, for Stein.) Much needs to be said, then, to understand each’s distinctive contribution to philosophy, and to phenomenology in particular. The aim of the present volume is twofold: to help readers to better understand some of the insights of two very different representatives of the phenomenological tradition, and to suggest where the work of these authors might lead. Yet it is also the case that, in providing readers with some background to the thought of Husserl and Stein, these essays may enable us see connections between phenomenology and the classical and analytic approaches to philosophy. Of course, a volume of essays on Husserl and Stein will be – almost by the very nature of its subject matter – incomplete. Both thinkers contributed to a wide range of topics. Yet this openness is a virtue, since it allows the authors of the essays in this collection to proceed in different directions, determined only by where each author sees the contribution of the thinker concerned. Thus, some focus on questions in the philosophy of mathematics or philosophy of physics; some 5 discuss philosophical psychology and the role of intention, or intuition, or empathy; some examine issues in social and political theory. Still, many of the studies here – particularly (and understandably) those on Stein – have something to say on questions which concern both thinkers, and allow us to see the relevance of Husserl and Stein to contemporary philosophical thought. Husserl Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) is often called the ‘father of phenomenology.’ This may be misleading, since he was by no means the first to use the term. Prior to Husserl, many philosophers and scientists claimed to be doing ‘phenomenology,’ by which they meant describing and analyzing appearances without providing a causal explanation of these appearances. What was particularly distinctive about Husserl’s work was his approach. Husserl declared that philosophy must return ‘to the things themselves.’ But this return must be within the guidelines of the methodology Husserl called the ‘phenomenological reduction’ or epoché. One lives normally in the ‘natural attitude,’ which holds that the world exists outside and independent of consciousness. The phenomenological reduction, however, brackets this thesis, declaring it unusable. Consciousness must be examined on its own terms. It is its own field of inquiry. Thus, the epoché is a shift, from the natural attitude to the phenomenological attitude. Despite certain common themes that appear in his writings, it is difficult to provide a concise outline of Husserl’s philosophy; he changed his mind on several issues during the course of his life. Nevertheless, we can get a broad sense of Husserl’s philosophical work if we have some understanding of his intellectual career. Husserl lived during a time of intense developments in the so-called hard sciences; mathematics and physics achieved unprecedented heights of content and depths of rigour.2 He began his academic life in the area of mathematics. From 1878 to 1881, at the prestigious University of Berlin, he studied and worked with the mathematician Karl Weierstrass. Soon he departed for the University of Vienna, where in 1883 he completed his doctoral thesis in mathematics. As was then common, Husserl had to confirm his doctoral work by defending a ‘thesis of habilitation’; Über den Begriff der Zahl: Psychologische Analysen ["On the Concept of Number"] was written at the beginning of his time (1886-1901) at the University of Halle. Georg Cantor, the founder of transfinite mathematics and one of the most important mathematicians of the nineteenth century, sat on the jury that examined Husserl’s habilitation thesis, and the two struck up a lasting friendship. Husserl’s first major work, Philosophie der Mathematik [The Philosophy of Arithmetic], which contains the text of hisHabilitationsschrift, appeared in 1891, and it clearly shows Cantor’s influence.3 Husserl had also attended lectures by Franz Brentano (1838-1917) from 1884 to 1886, while in Vienna. In perhaps his best-known work, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874) [Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint], Brentano attempted to develop a systematic psychology that was scientific without, at the same time, excluding the possibility of "inner states" or metaphysics. Brentano’s lectures were largely responsible for ‘shifting’ Husserl’s interests from the philosophy of mathematics to what became phenomenology. In "Brentano and Intentionality," Rolf George discusses the nature of Brentano’s understanding of philosophy and how the concept of ‘intentionality’ was to fit into it. Brentano’s work provided a starting point from which Husserl argued that the basic structure of human consciousness, revealed after the phenomenological reduction, is ‘intentional.’ (The term ‘intentional,’ as it applies to mental states or beliefs, does not, however, mean the same as 6 ‘intentional’ in contemporary speech. It refers, rather, to the act of directing one’s attention to something, and holds that, when a person does so, this has "immanent objectivity" – even though no explicit reference is being made to anything existing outside of consciousness.4 ) A particular concern of Husserl was the appearance of consciousness; he wanted to articulate structures of conscious experience. This, of course, puts Husserl in line with the Kantian tradition that concentrated on the explication of the a priori structures of human experience. However, Husserl’s reduction demands that the structures themselves be ‘brought to intuition.’

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