PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISM IN THE …download.e-bookshelf.de/download/0000/0727/57/L-G-0000072757... · KATARZYNA STARK / The Idea of God-Man in Nicolas Berdyaev’s Existentialism

PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISMIN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA

T H E Y E A R B O O K O F P H E N O M E N O L O G I C A L R E S E A R C H

VO L U M E C I I I

Founder and Editor-in-Chief:

A N N A - T E R E S A T Y M I E N I E C K A

The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning

Hanover, New Hampshire

For other titles published in this series, go tohttp://www.springer.com/series/5621

PHENOMENOLOGY ANDEXISTENTIALISM

IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Book One

New Waves of Philosophical Inspirations

Edited by

A N NA - T E R E S A T Y M I E N I E C K A

The World Phenomenological Institute, Hanover, NH, U.S.A.

Published under the auspices ofThe World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning

A-T. Tymieniecka, President

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EditorProf. A-T. TymienieckaThe World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning1 Ivy Pointe WayHanover NH [email protected]

ISBN 978-90-481-2724-5 e-ISBN 978-90-481-2725-2DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2725-2Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009926825

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form orby any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, with-out written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specificallyfor the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by thepurchaser of the work.

Printed on acid-free paper

Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA / Theme 1

S E C T I O N I

CLAIRE ORTIZ HILL / Husserl and Phenomenology, Experience andEssence 9

ANGÈLE KREMER-MARIETTI / Jean Wahl the Precursor:Kierkegaard and Existentialism 23

MARIA VILLELA-PETIT / The Transcendental and the Singular:Husserl and the Existential Thinkers Between the Two WorldWars 31

JOZEF SIVÁK / De l’ « In-Existence » intentionnelle à l’« Ek-in-sistence » existentielle 45

WITOLD PLOTKA / The Value of the Question in Husserl’sPerspective 75

S E C T I O N I I

JEFFREY M. WALKEY / The Essential Structure and IntentionalObject of Action: Toward Understanding the BlondelianExistential Phenomenology 95

JAROSLAVA VYDROVÁ / Subjectivity, Openness and Plurality: onthe Background of Edmund Husserl’s PhenomenologicalReduction 111

PIOTR MRÓZ / What Does it Mean to be an Existentialist Today? 127

MICHAEL BERMAN / Dufrenne and Merleau-Ponty: A ComparativeMeditation on Phenomenology 145

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SUSI FERRARELLO / The Ethical Project and Intentionality inEdmund Husserl 161

LARS PETTER STORM TORJUSSEN / Is Nietzsche aPhenomenologist?—Towards a Nietzschean Phenomenology ofthe Body 179

JOANNA HANDEREK / The Problem of Authenticity andEverydayness in Existential Philosophy 191

S E C T I O N I I I

GRZEGORZ GRUCA / Lev Shestov’s Philosophy of Crisis 203

KATARZYNA STARK / The Idea of God-Man in Nicolas Berdyaev’sExistentialism 217

TZE-WAN KWAN / Unamuno as “Pathological” Phenomenologist:Tragic Sense and Beyond 231

CLARA MANDOLINI / Blondel and the Philosophy of Life 253

S E C T I O N I V

ALEKSANDRA PAWLISZYN / From the Archeology ofHappening . . . to the Matter of Death 277

J.C. COUCEIRO-BUENO / The Phenomenology of Pain: AnExperience of Life 295

MARIA ZOWISŁO / The Existential Overcoming of Phenomenologyin Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophy of Life and Myth 309

S E C T I O N V

MOBEEN SHAHID / Temporality and Passivity in Edmund Husserl’sAnalyses 325

SEMIHA AKINCI / On Existence, Actuality and Possibility 347

AURELIO RIZZACASA / The Consciousness of Time in LifeThrough Phenomenology and Existentialism 359

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S vii

S E C T I O N V I

WILLIAM FRANKE / Existentialism: An Atheistic or a ChristianPhilosophy? 371

JOHANNES SERVAN / The Horizon of Humanity and theTranscendental Analysis of the Lifeworld 395

STEFANO ZECCHI / Crisis and Culture 409

S E C T I O N V I I

MARA STAFECKA / Understanding as Being: Heidegger andMamardashvili 423

WIESŁAW KURPIEWSKI / Mind – its Way of Existence, Structureand Functions in Tibetan Buddhism – Comparison withPhenomenology 433

NAME INDEX 451

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

This collection of studies expands on the theme of the World Phe-nomenology Institute’s Fourth World Congress of Phenomenology—“PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISM IN THE TWENTIETHCENTURY.” On that auspicious occasion we attempted a philosophical appre-ciation of the origins, growth, dissemination of phenomenology and existen-tialism and of the metamorphosis they brought about in our culture in thetwentieth century. The Congress was held at the Jagiellonian University ofKrakow, Poland on August 17–20, 2008.

The studies presented there are here appropriately divided in three,according to phases in this history. The present volume bears the title Phe-nomenology and Existentialism in the Twentieth Century, Book One: NewWaves of Philosophical Inspirations.

This Congress was hosted by the Department of Philosophy of the Jagiel-lonian University, and we owe our gratitude to the Dean, Professor dr. hab.Maria Flis, for the most friendly hospitality with which we were received. Ourspecial appreciation goes to our local co-organizers chaired by Professor drhab. Piotr Mróz, who was ably assisted by Dr. Joanna Handerek, Mgr. MaciejKałuza and their coworkers, who with sustained effort gave great care to allthe details of the local organization of so complex a gathering of participantsfrom all parts of the world and numerous fields of research. They truly felt athome in Krakow and Poland. The beautiful historic location of the event, thepleasant receptions, and the sightseeing, gave a special charm and aura to thisconference.

I owe special personal thanks to Professor Thomas Ryba, Vice-Presidentof the World Phenomenology Institute, who in my absence assumed thedirecting role at the Congress, and to Professor Piotr Mróz, who with the assis-tance of Professor Konrad Rokstad carried out the Conference with masterlycoordination.

Last, but foremost, our thanks go to the Jagiellonian University, to itsrector, Professor dr. hab. Karol Musial, for having received us with open doors.I am particularly sensitive to this, being an alumna of this university and feelingever to belong to it.

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Our faithful associate Robert Wise Jr. and our editorial assistant JeffreyHurlburt deserve our appreciation for the editorial preparation of this vol-ume. And we are indebted to our publisher, Ms. Maja de Keijzer of SpringerScience+Business Media B.V., for her sympathetic encouragement of ourwork.

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

A N N A - T E R E S A T Y M I E N I E C K A

T H E M E

We are so involved in the current of life, so immersed in its vital cultural tides,the passage of events, their impact on our feelings and thinking, our own innertendencies and aims, hopes and fears, are so absorbed in these at every instant,that they succeed each other without our clearly distinguishing them. In the fluxof our metamorphoses, they succeed each other spontaneously. Even dramatichappenings that seem to us to decide the course of things become doubtful intheir significance upon closer examination. Our view of definitive outcomesalso varies in our evolution, being dependent on what we bring to their appre-ciation. Was the Battle of Borodino necessarily “the beginning of the end”for Napoleon, as Talleyrand so famously said at the time? In World War IIChurchill had the perspicuity to say that the Battle of Egypt was “perhaps, theend of the beginning” (emphasis added).

If reserve in judging what is of definitive significance be prudent whenassessing “the situation on the ground,” with what assurance can we discernthe gathering and sweep of cultural tides? It is only with distance gained fromthe actual past that we can acquire a clearer view of a historic metamorphosisin human understanding for we can then be more broadly informed of whatwas then current than were those who experienced the shift in its immediacy,which allows us to arrive at new insights and take less prejudiced and moreconsidered views. Ours too is the benefit of having seen the consequencesof ideas. We may then obtain a clearer, more comprehensive overview of thecrystalization of a cultural development now that it rests on a horizon.

This is the point of our project in these three volumes, of which this is thefirst. These collections are dedicated to following the course of two highlysignificant and interrelated intellectual movements of the twentieth century,existentialism and phenomenology. The studies in the present volume treatthe origins and reception of these two intellectual projects. Those of the nextvolume will examine how they cross-fertilized each other and cover the newexpressions the movements generated after their launching. In the last vol-ume there will follow appreciative assessments, yielding the harvest of a NewEnlightenment. Although this effort is far from giving a complete account ofthis philosophical moment’s sources, tendencies, and high universal impact onthe course of cultural history, we intend to pinpoint what appears to have been

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A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIII, 1–5.© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

2 A N N A - T E R E S A T Y M I E N I E C K A

the major sources, reasons, and universal significance of the two philosophi-cal currents that have transformed humanity in the twentieth century and haveplaced it upon new roads thereafter. Phenomenology and existentialism, popu-larly called, are still, even as they lose their sharp outlines, being disseminatedin all areas of life and are a yet growing force of the spirit permeating theevolutive stream of human development.

Our venture is then an appreciation of these movements that is at onceseasoned and vibrant, evaluative and transformative.

P H E N O M E N O L O G Y A N D E X I S T E N T I A L I S M I N T H E T W E N T I E T H

C E N T U RY

Both, phenomenology and existentialism, popularly so called, are two vigorousthrusts of thought that marked a distinct phase of the cultural development ofthe Occident. While their germinal crystalization took place before World WarII, they burst forcefully upon philosophical attention only after that desperateconflict. The profound philosophical concerns leading to their crystalizationhad actually been animating philosophical meditation from the time of theGreek philosophers’ incipient quest after absolute truth. These concerns havepervaded the search after the origins and the rational order of reality through-out Occidental history, reappearing in various guises until they came to receiveprimary focus toward the end of the nineteenth century.

Antithetic focusing, now on essence and now on experience, has markedphilosophical appreciations of the reality of beingness – now on being (esse, tobe) and now on existence (existere, to stand forth, appear) – in various stylesof thought unfolding through history, and through the controversies stimulated,deeper and more subtle intuitions were achieved.

In our present-day perspective on the future it appears that it is preciselyat the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth centurythat the philosophical controversies reached a culminating point in the con-currence of protest against the project of Hegelianism, on the one hand, andagainst the reductionism of biological science, on the other. Speculation wasbeing rejected for the sake of appreciating the concrete, while empiricism,positivism, and naturalism were being rejected for the sake of an anchoringapriorism.

Nihil sub sole novum. At the beginning of Western philosophy Socratesurged the examination one’s own life, saying that without such individual-subjective effort, a life was not worth living. Hence the significance ofindividuals in themselves, of the play of the passions, of the irrational moti-vations impinging on life’s conduct, and of the quest after personal freedom

T H E M E 3

in individual responsibility and morality are themes running through the entirecourse of Western history. These themes received signal attention in the vastlyinfluential St. Augustine, who examined himself more openly and exten-sively than any writer had before him. These themes were violently recastby Nietzsche. The protest against Hegel’s speculative assimilation of realityinto thought registered by that strikingly autobiographical thinker Kierkegaardwould have to await the twentieth century to be acclaimed and echoed in thethought of Jaspers, Mounier, Marcel, Camus, Berdyaev, Sartre, and others.Meanwhile the novels of Dostoyevsky sounding these same themes had foundacclaim from the start.

It is not accidental that it was a psychiatrist, Karl Jaspers, who introducedinto the wider discourse the thought of Kierkegaard, which spoke to him pro-foundly during the days of World War I, as they would speak to many, manymore after World War II. In his Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919),Jaspers coined the word Existentialismus to convey the sense of this philoso-phy. Later when it had become a byword, Jaspers would say that he himselfwas not an “existentialist.”

After presenting prime examples of the precursors advancing the crucialideas of the movement popularly called “existentialism,” we focus in this vol-ume on the main representatives identified with the movement that bears thename, who characteristically denied taking part in any movement, defendingtheir individual uniqueness and originality. With or without definition, theysustained a movement of thought, supplementing each other and informing afull cultural and philosophical blossoming.

The directing ideas they advanced, indeed, swept through through the cul-ture of the Occident and throughout the entire world, not least because they lentthemselves to literary and theatrical expression. The germinal Socratic stancehas found varied expressions over the course of history but never so dramati-cally as in the twentieth century, and that particular expression of the theme isfertilizing thought and lives still.

A comet flying from another direction was the powerful inspiration ofHusserl’s rationality of cognition. Again, the Greek fertilization of the philo-sophical ground saw the origins of our human reflection and meditation onsources, vital and dynamic, as well as on the architectonics of the constitu-tion of the human reality, for Plato’s disciple Aristotle brought to the forethe question of stasis and becoming, of nature and existence, and that of ourobjective constitution of reality, framing it in the sharply contrastive terms ofthe essence and the existence of objectivities. In numerous configurations, theinward structures, the nuclei of things and living beings appear to the mindin contrast to their beingness, modes of being, existence. Within innumerableperspectives – logical, epistemological, ontological, and metaphysical – this

4 A N N A - T E R E S A T Y M I E N I E C K A

contrastive metaphysical perspective endures, however variously nuanced, inour thought and practice.

It was as an heir of mathematical rationalism that Husserl scrutinized ratio-nality and saved it from being engulfed by the empiricist, naturalistic, andpositivistic reasoning inspired by the great growth of the natural sciences.In reaction, he swung first, to the pole of an essentialism employing “eide-tic” intuition, so that some of his first students at Göttingen drew from himan ontological continuation of Plato’s theory of ideas (e.g., Jean Hering). Butthen Husserl methodically shifted his focus to the cognitive/constitutive aspectof human consciousness and so to experience. In taking as his starting pointour experience of reality, Husserl never repudiated the validity of apprehend-ing eidoi, essences, ideas. He simply relegated their apprehension to “naive”ontology as he plunged wholeheartedly into the exploration of the innumerableperspectives of experience, seeking to uncover therein the existential footholdof reality.

Before his great foundational ideas on rationality became digested andthen incarnated in the researches of his first Göttingen followers – Reinach,Scheler, Pfänder, Conrad-Martius, Stein, Hering – Husserl had moved on tothe genesis of the objective meaning that they heralded, that is, from descryingradical apriori objectivities to the constitutive processes at work in cogni-tive consciousness. To express it sharply, the search for apriori objectivitygot absorbed in exploration of the transcendental genesis of subjective con-sciousness. Thus, the achievement of the pure apriori endurance of meaningswas crowned by a transcendental turn toward meanings as they are found insubjective experience.

This revelation of transcendental subjectivity fostered a new wave of philo-sophical insights and intellectual reorientations and mingled in a wondrousway with the inspirations of existentialism, and to that we will turn in our sec-ond volume. Strangely enough, while the basic tendencies of the two powerfulnew philosophical currents seemed at base to oppose each other in their visionof reality, and even though they independently radiated streams of intuitionsand analytic findings in accord with seemingly opposed doctrines, in their innerunfolding they became closer and closer in such a way that the distinction of“phenomenology” and “existential philosophy” became blurred amid the cul-tural turmoil of the world. At their furthest fringes, the rippling circles thrownup by the impact of each on culture would join. Interfusion with each otherweakened the initial inspirations of each movement but also yielded illumina-tions. Thus the essence and the existence of things in their innumerable aspects,shadings, and the functioning of human living beings and of their lifeworldbecame not just conjoined but amalgamated in their authentic diversity.

T H E M E 5

What our debts are to each movement needs assessment. In the succeedingvolumes we will, therefore, attempt to survey the progressive dissemination ofthe original ideas of both movements right through to the points where theyacquired novel direction through their mutual influence. But here the points offirst impact of these intellectual projects, their immediate precursors, and theirgenerative continuities will be our focus.

In the present collection you will find perspectives on the ground layingsteps made by significant thinkers preceding the breaking out into full light ofthese protagonist projects at the moment when one was focused on existence(experience) and the other on essence.

We will also treat herein the reception of these initiatives, limning what inthe main was their appeal, what were the various perspectives they opened,so that their powerful new lights permeated the philosophical climate andtransformed much of our culture from the middle of the twentieth century on.

N O T E

1 For a summation of the various steps and phases of Husserl’s development, going throughthe genetic experience of constitutive process extending from the empirical stage of experiencethrough the entire cycle of the “ideation” of the meaningfulness of the aprioric level of pureconsciousness, see Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, “Introduction,” in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.),Phenomenology World-Wide. Foundations, Expanding Dynamics, Life-Engagements. A Guidefor Research and Study, Analecta Husserliana LXXX (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,2002), pp. 1–8.

S E C T I O N I

C L A I R E O RT I Z H I L L

H U S S E R L A N D P H E N O M E N O L O G Y, E X P E R I E N C E

A N D E S S E N C E

A B S T R A C T

Husserl’s search to fathom the complex interplay between experience andessence was at the heart of the dynamic that brought phenomenology intobeing, and the slipperiness of the issues harbors one of the secrets of phe-nomenology’s impact. The underlying paradox of his phenomenology is thathis science of subjectivity was his science of objectivity. At its heart, thescience of intentionality is ambiguous, because intentionality points in twodirections, towards the world of subjectivity and towards the world of objects.It had, and still has, the impact that signs of contradiction have. To supportthese claims, I examine the evolution Husserl’s ideas underwent at the time thefoundations of phenomenology were lain. In particular, I examine the natureof the intellectual crisis that accompanied Husserl’s conversion from experi-ence to essences during the last decade of the 19th century. I integrate textsand research first published during the last few decades into the more familiarpicture of the genesis of phenomenology.

For Husserl, which came first, experience or essence? That question is as slip-pery as the famous one about the chicken and the egg. And, since there isprobably no completely satisfactory answer to it, it is surely something that isgoing to be debated as long as there are philosophers to debate it.

However, whether or not there is an definitive answer, the question is wellworth asking. For Husserl’s search to fathom the complex interplay betweenexperience and essence was at the heart of the dynamic that brought phe-nomenology into being, and the slipperiness of the question harbors one ofthe secrets of phenomenology’s impact.

The underlying paradox is that Husserl’s science of subjectivity was hisscience of objectivity. He taught that the ultimate meaning and source of allobjectivity making it possible for thinking to reach beyond contingent, sub-jective, human acts and lay hold of objective being-in-itself was to be foundin ideality and the ideal laws defining it.1 In Experience and Judgement, he

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presents the world constituted by transcendental subjectivity as a pre-givenworld that is not a pure world of experience, but a world determined and deter-minable in itself with exactitude, a world in which any individual entity isgiven beforehand in an perfectly obvious way as in principle determinable inaccordance with the methods of exact science.2

Yet, while insisting on the primacy of the objective order, Husserl stressedthat, for example, logic turns both towards ideal objects, towards a world ofconcepts where truth is an analysis of essences or concepts, where know-ing subjects and the material world play no role, and towards the deeplyhidden subjective forms in which reason does its work. He considered thatalmost everything concerning the fundamental meaning of logic was ladenwith misunderstandings owing to the fact that objectivity arises out of subjec-tive activity. He considered that even the ideal objectivity of logical structuresand a priori nature of logical theories especially pertaining to this objectivity,and the meaning of that a priori, suffered from this lack of clarity since what isideal appears as located in the subjective sphere and arises from it.3

Fortunately, texts and research published during the last few decades areshedding light on many of phenomenology’s puzzles. Here, I want to take anew look at what I have called Husserl’s paradox by integrating some of thisless familiar material into the familiar picture of the genesis of phenomenol-ogy. In particular, I want to look at Husserl’s conversion from experience toessences during the last decade of the 19th century, a time that resembles ourtimes on some respects.

F R O M E X P E R I E N C E T O E S S E N C E S

To see in what way Husserl’s paradox about subjectivity and objectivity isat the heart of the dynamic that brought phenomenology into being, we needto look at the evolution his ideas underwent at the time the foundations ofphenomenology were lain.

At first, we know, experience came first. As a student of Franz Brentano,Husserl was not receptive to the claims of metaphysical idealism. Brentanowas entirely devoted to the austere ideal of a strict philosophical science asrealized in the exact natural sciences. He considered metaphysical idealismodious and despicable.4

Only after experiencing the shortcomings of Brentano’s empirical psychol-ogy did Husserl begin veering in the direction of essences. There were waysin which psychology from the empirical standpoint never came to satisfy him.Once he tried to pass from the psychological connections of thinking to thelogical unity of the thought-content, the unity of theory, he was unable to estab-lish any true continuity and unity. The further he delved into his philosophical

H U S S E R L A N D P H E N O M E N O L O G Y 11

investigations into the principles of mathematics, the more he grew troubledby doubts as to how to reconcile the objectivity of mathematics and all sciencein general, with empirical foundations for logic, and the more he saw the needto engage in general critical reflections on the essence of logic and the rela-tionship between the subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity of the contentknown.5

Husserl left dramatic descriptions of ten years of hard, lonely work andstruggling during which he aspired after clarity, but only encountered confu-sion. He felt tormented by the incredibly strange worlds of the purely logicaland actual consciousness that he saw opening up on all sides. The two had beinterrelated and form a whole, but he did not see how to bring them together.6

He was assailed by questions. How are objective, mathematical and logicalrelations constituted in subjectivity? How can the mathematical-in-itself givento the mind be valid? If everything purely logical is an in itself, something idealhaving nothing at all to do with acts, subjects or empirical persons belongingto actual reality, then how is symbolic thinking possible? If scientific knowl-edge is completely based upon being able to abandon ourselves completely tothought that is removed from intuition, or being able to prefer such thinkingover thought more fully in accord with intuition, how is rational insight possi-ble in science? How does one arrive at empirically correct results? We proceedwithout justification, guided by a psychological mechanism, but this does notanswer questions about truth, for a logically unjustified procedure can welllead to true results.7

He saw himself standing before “great unsolved puzzles” concerning thevery possibility of knowledge in general, as coming “close to the most obscureparts of the theory of knowledge”, as powerfully gripped by the deepest prob-lems. Facing only riddles, tensions, puzzles and mysteries, and seeing allaround him only unclear, undeveloped, ambiguous ideas, weary of all the con-fusion, he felt he had to risk setting out on his own.8 This crisis could bethought of as the birth pangs of phenomenology.

During those years, Husserl kept company with Georg Cantor,9 the eccen-tric creator of set theory, who was hard at work discovering and exploringthe strange worlds of pure mathematics and actual consciousness. Howeverpsychologistic his mysterious references to inner intuition or to experienceshelping produce concepts in his mind might seem, Cantor was strictly opposedto any philosophy that located the sources of knowledge and certainty in thesenses or in the supposedly pure forms of intuition of the world of presentation.A good measure of the freedom he felt he possessed as a mathematician camefrom distinguishing between an empirical treatment of numbers and Plato’spure, ideal arithmoi eidetikoi, which by their very nature were detached from


things perceptible by the senses. Originally untainted by the metaphysical ide-alism that Brentano disdained, Husserl drew near the Platonic idealism thatCantor espoused and renounced the psychologism, empiricism, and naturalismthat he renounced.10

Husserl’s fully conscious and radical turn away from empirical psychol-ogy and his espousal of Platonism came about through his study of HermannLotze’s logic. Husserl said that his own concepts of ideal significations andideal contents of presentations and judgments originally derived from Lotze,whose interpretation of Plato’s Theory of Ideas gave Husserl the key tounderstanding Bernhard Bolzano’s ideas about propositions and truths inthemselves, which under Brentano’s influence, Husserl had thought of as meta-physical abstrusities, mythical entities suspended somewhere between beingand non-being.11

The last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twen-tieth century found Husserl teaching that the ideal entities so unpleasant forempiricistic logic, and so consistently disregarded by it, had not been artifi-cially devised either by himself, or by Bolzano, but were given beforehand bythe meaning of the universal talk of propositions and truths indispensable in allthe sciences. This indubitable fact, Husserl now stressed, must be the startingpoint of all logic. This constant talk of propositions, of true and false meanssomething identical and atemporal. No more is meant by the ideality than thatit is a matter of a kind of possible objects of knowledge, whose particular char-acteristics can, and in scientific investigation must, be determined, while theyare just not objects in the sense of real objects.12

As regards its essential, theoretical makeup, Husserl taught, science is a sys-tem of ideal meanings that unite into a meaning unit. The theory of gravity, thesystem of analytic mechanics, the mechanical theory of heat, the theory of met-ric or projective geometry are all units, not of mental experiences of one personor another, or of states of mind, but units entirely made up of ideal material,of meanings. And, in this lies truth and falsehood, what science makes into anobjective, supra-individual unit of validity logically grasping and dealing witha sphere of objectivity.13

All truly scientific thinking, all proving and theorizing, operates in formsthat correspond to purely logical laws. Pure logic embraces all the conceptsand propositions without which science would not be possible, would not haveany sense or validity.14 While all of natural science is an a posteriori disciplinegrounded in experience with its actual occurrences, the world of the purelylogical is a world of ideal objects, a world of “concepts.” Pure logic is an apriori discipline entirely grounded in conceptual essentialities. There all truthis nothing other than the analysis of essences or concepts. With them, we arejust not in psychology, in any sphere of empiricism and probability.15


The empirical sciences, the natural sciences, Husserl tried to explain toBrentano in 1905, are sciences of “matters of fact.” The whole sphere of thegenuine a priori is, however, free of all matter of fact suppositions. There westand not within the realm of nature, but within that of Ideas, not within therealm of empirical generalities, but within that of the ideal, apodictic, generalsystem of laws, not within the realm of causality, but within that of rationality.Purely logical laws are laws of essence. He wanted it understood that he was“far from any mystico-metaphysical exploitation of “Ideas”, ideal possibilitiesand such” of the kind Brentano despised.16

A S C I E N C E O F I D E A L B E I N G

A rediscovery of metaphysics took place at the end of the nineteenth cen-tury, which had seen a positivistic revolt against idealism and Kantian inspiredpsychologism and a yearning for the real and the palpable that turned thethoughts of many in the direction of the natural world of perceptible facts andevents. There had also been a revolt against the various forms of positivism,empiricism, naturalism and materialism that others felt the modern age wasfoisting upon them. Subsequently, still others wanted to unite what seemed tobe two contradictory worlds. They wanted a scientific metaphysics, a scientificidealism.

Lotze played an preeminent role in rehabilitating the respectability ofmetaphysical inquiry. Trained in medicine, he was initially caught up in thenaturalistic movement that sought to extend natural science and its methodsover the entire realm of intelligible existence. It taught that what science couldnot know, could not be. It did not admit any unknowable, supra-sensuousreality and easily evolved into materialistic philosophy that denied it.

Lotze rebelled. He judged the basic ideas of the natural sciences inadequate,disconnected, and often inconsistent. His antagonism was directed toward theirpretensions to deal with all the phenomena of human experience. He believedthat they had nothing to say about what was most worth knowing. He wantedto show their inadequacy and that there was room and need for philosophy sideby side with science.

However, Lotze’s genuine respect for the methods and results of the natu-ral sciences, as long as they confined themselves to their own proper domain,deepened his aversion to Idealism, which he saw as having turned its back uponthe realm of facts and as having lost itself in the realm of empty thoughts. Soto create his new philosophical outlook, Lotze had to clear the way by com-bating the errors of both philosophers inspired by the natural sciences and theidealists.17


In a 1902 Paris doctoral thesis on Lotze’s metaphysics, Henri Schoenexplains how Lotze inspired courage in worried and tormented consciences andcommunicated faith in the triumph of a spiritualistic conception of the worldto young people whose confidence had been shaken by the ineffectiveness ofidealism and the successes of materialism. To those impressed by positivism,Schoen explains, Lotze gave an exact method starting from observation andnot a priori reasoning. He taught a generation disgusted with abstractions tostart from given facts.

Schoen saw his generation as being disgusted with materialism, with vagueand confused aspirations and disposed to accept a metaphysics not in contra-diction with its scientific views. He explains how he was guided and had triedto guide students through the philosophical and psychological crisis of Germanmetaphysics, how he considered a return to the old dogmatism impossible, butsaw the inadequacy of pure reason, how eclipsed by idealism, Kant’s realismwrought vengeance on the modern metaphysics that aimed to develop the seedsof realism contained in his theory, and not the idealism there as well.

For Schoen, an equal balance had to be maintained between ideality andreality, between the supra-sensible world and the real world. He was com-pletely confident about the future of metaphysics. It was a matter of creating anew philosophical outlook that could satisfy both the modern need for realityand concrete facts and the idealistic and mystical needs of the times.18

In his eccentric way, Georg Cantor too was part of the post-Kantian move-ment to reconcile the findings of modern science with metaphysical views.He made no secret of his intention to supply his new transfinite numbers withadequate philosophical and metaphysical foundations. His views were deeplypro-idealistic. He was an avowed enemy of the new empiricism, of all psy-chologism, empiricism, positivism, naturalism, sensualism, skepticism, andKantianism. In 1894, he confided that “in the realm of the spirit” mathematicshad no longer been “the essential love of his soul” for more than twenty years.Metaphysics and theology, he “openly confessed”, had taken possession of hissoul.19

Pope Leo XIII was also intent upon reconciling modern science and meta-physics. His influential encyclical Aeterni Patris of 1879 captured Cantor’sattention and Cantor’s work captured the attention of a number of Catholicphilosophers involved in the revival of scholastic philosophy in the spirit of theencyclical. Cantor scholar Joseph Dauben has described the interest generatedby Aeterni Patris as a tonic for Cantor’s declining spirits.20

In talking about what Husserl’s contemporaries were searching for, it isimportant to realize that, while the end of the 19th century witnessed attemptsto rehabilitate the respectability of metaphysical inquiry and to situate itcentrally on the philosophical agenda alongside rigorous, rational, scientific


thinking, alongside this metaphysical revival there was an occult revival. Likeour times, the end of the 19th century witnessed a rise in cults, spiritism,Satanism, the occult, magic, witchcraft, and so on. As many were hard atwork destroying the superstition of religion, some were indulging in irrational,superstitious, and unsavory pursuits, something that surely fanned antagonismtowards any uncritical, unscientific metaphysics, or even a fear of it.

Carl Jung once described the times as having prepared the way for crime. Ashe saw it, people were living in a lifeless nature bereft of gods. Enlightenmentmight have destroyed the spirits of nature, but it did not destroy the psychicfactors corresponding to them, such as suggestibility, an uncritical attitude,fearfulness, propensity to superstition and prejudice. Even though nature isdepsychized, demons do not really disappear, Jung insisted. He saw the psychicconditions breeding them to be as actively at work as ever. “Just when peoplewere congratulating themselves on having abolished all spooks, it turned outthat instead of haunting the attic or old ruins, the spooks were flitting about inthe heads of apparently normal Europeans. Tyrannical obsessive, intoxicatingideas and delusions were abroad everywhere, and people began to believe themost absurd things . . .”.21

Historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke explains that, though there were manyforms of modern occultism, its function was relatively uniform. Behind themantic systems of astrology, and palmistry, the doctrines of theosophy, thequasi-sciences of animal magnetism and hypnotism, the study of the eso-teric literature of Cabalists, Rosicrucians, and alchemists, there was a strongdesire to reconcile the findings of modern natural science with a religiousview. Occult science strove to counter materialist science, with its emphasisupon tangible and measurable phenomena and its neglect of invisible qualitiesrespecting the spirit and the emotions.22 Cantor’s unpublished correspondenceshows that he was a Rosicrucian.23

I N T E N T I O N A L I T Y, A S I G N O F C O N T R A D I C T I O N

Into this intellectual climate, Husserl introduced a science of intentionalitythat was suitably ambiguous because intentionality points in two directions,towards the world of subjectivity and towards the world of objects. I said thatHusserl’s paradox about subjectivity and objectivity harbors one of the secretsof phenomenology’s impact, because I think that his science of intentionalityhad, and still has, the impact that signs of contradiction have.

According to Brentano’s definition of intentionality, every mental phe-nomenon is characterized by the intentional or mental inexistence of an object,by relation to a content, direction to an object or an immanent objectivity.24


Husserl considered that by indicating the uniqueness of mental phenomena,Brentano blazed the way for the development of phenomenology and madeit possible, but that the idea of a pure phenomenology was beyond his reach,because he held fast to his ideal of a strict philosophical science based on theexact natural sciences.25

The entire approach whereby the overcoming of psychologism was phe-nomenologically accomplished, Husserl maintained in 1913, showed thatanalyses of immanent consciousness had to be seen as pure a priori analy-ses of essence, that it was in this way that the immense fields of the givens ofconsciousness as fields for “ontological” “investigations” were opened up forthe first time.26 What was new in the Logical Investigations, he maintained inCrisis, was “found not at all in the merely ontological investigations . . ., butrather in the subjectively directed investigations . . . in which for the first timethe cogitata qua cogitata, as essential moments of each conscious experienceas it is given in genuine inner experience, come into their own and immediatelycome to dominate the whole method of intentional analysis”.27

So Husserl’s science of intentionality produced masterpieces as diverse asEdith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being and Science of the Cross, EmmanuelLevinas’ Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’sPhenomenology of Perception, and even strongly anti-metaphysical workslike Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being andNothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism.

Levinas saw phenomenology as reversing the scientific attitude that turnedaway from the subject for the greater glory of the object and decreed the expul-sion of every so-called subjective element from the object,28 In comparison,Sartre considered that for centuries there had not been a philosophical move-ment that so “plunged human beings back into the world”.29 He proposed thatthe profound meaning of the discovery expressed by, “All consciousness is con-sciousness of something” could be grasped by imagining “a connected seriesof bursts that tear us out of ourselves, throw us beyond them into the dry dustof the world, onto the plain earth, amidst things . . .”.30

The great mathematician David Hilbert wrote of how Husserl was a productof Brentano’s school, which was oriented toward the creation of an exact theoryof acts of judgment and logic with the goal of constructing a theory of scienceof the kind Bolzano had in mind, but how, in contrast to other representativesof the school, Husserl had adopted an a priori method and rejected psycholo-gism. From this theoretical stance, Hilbert continued, Husserl befriended thespeculative trend in philosophy by strengthening it enormously. For since hehad expounded a far-reaching grounding of logic and related sciences, after hecame out in favor of the methods of speculative dogmatics, he deflected thecriticism of sterility normally attached to its application in the exact sciences.


But, the problem was solved only apparently. For his method was in fact psy-chological, and only owing to misunderstandings about its true nature was heable to post successes on the “a priori dogmatism” side of the ledger.31

The democratic socialist Leonard Nelson complained to Hilbert that even ifHusserl himself remained protected from mystical degeneration by inhibitionsand restraints imposed by secure connections to mathematics that he couldnot strip away, after his school had burned its bridges to mathematics, it wasfrightening to see how unrestrainedly his students fell victim to every excessof Neo-platonic mysticism.32

M E TA P H Y S I C S , T H E O RY O F K N O W L E D G E

A N D T H E N AT U R A L S C I E N C E S

Husserl communicated the new vision of metaphysics, theory of knowledgeand the natural sciences that he developed during the 1890s to the new gener-ation of students in search of a scientific of metaphysics that could stand up tothe challenges of the natural sciences. He told them of how he saw the meta-physical needs of his time going unmet and gave this as an explanation as towhy spiritism and the occult were thriving and superstition of every kind wasspreading.33

He blamed the overriding role and authoritative influence that the naturalsciences had acquired in the lives of educated people for the prevailing con-tempt for metaphysics and its transformation into “a kind of a hobgoblin”,or its being considered a relic of scientifically backward times on a par withalchemy and astrology. As he saw it, the natural sciences had taken abundantrevenge for the injustice they endured from the pseudo-scientific natural phi-losophy of the Romantics, but in speaking of metaphysics, natural scientistsstill had in mind a kind of philosophizing that was up to the old tricks of theHegelian school.34

As Husserl told the story, after the collapse of idealistic philosophy in themid-19th century, a great awkward lull set in when the philosophical race ofTitans of Romanticism, with their extravagant promises and flaunting of therequirements of rigorous science, trained to storm the Mount Olympus of phi-losophy with their dialectical tricks, were flung down into the dark Tartarusof dissension and unclarity, and uneasy disenchantment, even disillusionment,followed the earlier exuberance. Then sounded ever louder the call back toKant, who had set limits on the presumptuousness of uncritical metaphysicsand established the critique of knowledge as the true foundation for philosophy.With the revival of Kantianism, for which an a priori science of concepts wasimpossible, the word “metaphysics” took on ominous overtones and peoplepreferred not to use it.35


The extent to which the hard questions about the objectivity of knowledgeraised by Kant’s work could determine one’s entire conception of being in theworld was a matter of concern to Husserl,36 for whom such problems couldonly be solved through a pure phenomenological elucidation of knowledge forwhich it was completely obvious that theory of knowledge was prior to allnatural knowledge and science and on an entirely different plane.

As long as we are in the state of epistemological innocence and have not bit-ten the fateful apple of the tree of philosophical knowledge, then every sciencesuits us fine, Husserl taught. But, the moment the sphinx of critique of knowl-edge asks its questions, all sciences, no matter how beautiful, are nothing tous. All the puzzling questions combined signify that we do not understand sci-ences in general. No naturally obtained scientific result is free of the worm ofdoubt or unclarity. Therefore, we cannot use any as a premise from which toderive the answer to these questions.37

Husserl called for a science of metaphysics to study problems lying beyondempirical investigation, to engage in the exploration of what is realiter in theultimate and absolute sense, and so provide ultimate and deepest knowledge ofreality. He believed that such a science of metaphysics was possible, justifiable,and that human beings could attain knowledge of reality.38

Husserl taught that the sciences were in need of metaphysical foundations.But, he strove to make it perfectly clear that by that he “meant anything buta dialectical spinning of the concrete results of these sciences out of someabstract conceptual mysticism”.39 He proposed to have metaphysics under-stood in a broad sense as radical ontology, as the radical science of Beingin the absolute sense, instead of the science of Being in the empirical sense,which we think we know, but upon closer inspection at times turns out to bedeceptive and an illusion.40

It is certain, he argued, that the knowledge of the world provided by the nat-ural sciences is not definitive knowledge of reality. They are merely sciences ofbeing in the relative, provisional sense sufficient for practical orientation in thephenomenal world. Through them, we attain the practical mastery of nature, afar-reaching orienting of empirical reality, the possibility of formulating lawsby which we exactly foresee, foretell and redirect the course of empiricalprocesses, but we are not in possession of definitive knowledge, of ultimate,conclusive knowledge of the essence of nature. Lack of critical insight intothe meaning of fundamental concepts and principles makes it impossible to beclear about what has been ultimately achieved and so about the sense in whichthe results may be considered expressions of ultimate Being.41

Husserl believed that it was certain that a most universal concept of whatis real in general, of the particularities grounded in the essence of what isreal, can and must be delineated. He reasoned that concepts like that of an


individual real thing, Being for itself, or thing in the broadest sense, real prop-erty in the broadest sense, real relation, time, cause, and effect, are surelynecessary thoughts concerning possible reality and require a study of the anal-ysis of essence and of essential laws. There must therefore be, he concluded,a science of real Being as such in the most universal universality, and this apriori metaphysics would be the necessary foundation for empirically basedmetaphysics, which not only claims to know what lies in the idea of reality ingeneral, but claims to know what is now actually actual.42

Husserl saw a science of metaphysics as being so necessary for sciencethat even natural scientists could not do without it. The empirical sciences,he taught, are not creations of a purely theoretical mind. They are not based onabsolutely scrupulously lain foundations in accordance with a rigorous logicalmethod. They are subject to principles that govern thinking and research inthe natural sciences, that make them possible, and that consequently cannot besearched for by investigations into the natural sciences. Even the most highlydeveloped, most exact natural sciences uncritically use concepts and presup-positions originating in a prescientific understanding of the world. In fact, assoon as they begin reflecting on the principles of their science, natural scien-tists fall into metaphysics, though they most certainly do not want to call it bythat forbidden name.43

The realm of truth, Husserl insisted, is no disorderly hodgepodge. Truths areconnected in systematic ways, governed by consistent laws and theories, andso the inquiry into truth and its exposition must be systematic. The systematicrepresentation of knowledge must to a certain degree reflect the systematicrepresentation grounded in the things themselves. All invention and discoveryinvolves formal patterns without which there is no testing of given propositionsand proofs, no methodical construction of new proofs, no methodical buildingof theories and whole systems. No blind omnipotent power has heaped togethersome pile of propositions P, Q, R, strung them together with a proposition S,and then organized the human mind so that the knowledge of the truth of Punfailingly must entail knowledge of S. Not blind chance, but the reason andorder of governing laws reigns in argumentation.44

Wherever it is a question of reality, in life and in all empirical sciences,he explained, we apply concepts like thing, real property, real relation, state,process, coming into being and passing away, cause and effect, space and time,that seem to belong necessarily to the idea of a reality. Whether or not allthese concepts are actually intrinsic to the idea of reality, there surely are suchconcepts, the basic categories in which what is real as such is to be understoodin terms of its essence. Thus, investigations must be possible that simply reflecteverything without which reality in general cannot be conceived. This is wherethe idea of a metaphysical a priori ontology comes in.45


For Husserl, the most radical reason why the natural sciences do not pro-vide definitive knowledge of physical and mental reality and therefore requirea metaphysics as the science of absolute being is that the possibility and mean-ing of the objective validity of knowledge is a mystery to us. So, the ultimatemeaning of any reality, which for knowledge is just what it posits as real andhas determined in a given way, is also problematical for us. In spite of all ofnatural science, we therefore do not know what reality is and in what sensewe may claim to take the results of the natural sciences as being definitivefor reality. Therefore, only by theory of knowledge and critique of knowledgepracticed upon the natural sciences does metaphysics become possible.46

He warned against caving into the old temptation of grounding theoryof knowledge upon metaphysics and wanting to solve the radical problemsof the elucidation of knowledge by metaphysical underpinnings. Drawing inpremises from metaphysics means radically missing the meaning of the gen-uine problems of theory of knowledge. Metaphysics presupposes theory ofknowledge. Therefore, it cannot undergird theory of knowledge.47 And thatbrings us back to the paradox about the science of subjectivity being thescience of objectivity.

Paris

N O T E S

1 Edmund Husserl, Allgemeine Erkenntnistheorie, Vorlesung 1902/03, Elisabeth Schuhmann(ed.), Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001, p. 200.2 Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgement, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973(1939), §11.3 Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978(1929), §§7, 8.4 Claire Ortiz Hill, “From Empirical Psychology to Phenomenology Edmund Husserl onthe ‘Brentano Puzzle’ ”, The Brentano Puzzle, Roberto Poli (ed.), Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998,pp. 151–67; Edmund Husserl, “Recollections of Franz Brentano”, in Husserl: Shorter Works,P. McCormick and F. Elliston (eds.), Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981,pp. 342–49. (Also translated by Linda McAlister in her The Philosophy of Brentano, London:Duckworth, 1976, pp. 47–55).5 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, J. N. Findlay (tr.), London: Routledge and KeganPaul, 1970, p. 42; Edmund Husserl, Introduction to the Logical Investigations, A Draft of a Pref-ace to the Logical Investigations, Eugen Fink (ed.), P. Bossert and C. Peters (trs.), The Hague:Martinus Nijhoff, 1975, pp. 34–35.6 Edmund Husserl, Early Writings in the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics, Dallas Willard(tr.), Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994, pp. 490–91.7 Husserl, Early Writings, pp. 37, 167–69; Husserl, Introduction to the Logical Investigations,pp. 21–22, 35.


8 Husserl, Early Writings, pp. 167–69, 492–93, 497–98; Husserl, Introduction to the LogicalInvestigations, p. 17; Husserl, Logical Investigations, pp. 42–43.9 Malvine Husserl, “Skizze eines Lebensbildes von E. Husserl”, Husserl Studies 5, 1988,pp. 105–25.

10 Claire Ortiz Hill, “Did Georg Cantor Influence Edmund Husserl?” Synthese 113 (October1997), pp. 145–70 and “Abstraction and Idealization in Georg Cantor and Edmund Husserl”,in Idealization IV. Historical Studies on Abstraction and Idealization, Poznan Studies 82,F. Coniglione, R. Poli, R. Rollinger (eds.), Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004, pp. 217–43. Both papers areanthologized in Claire Ortiz Hill and Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock, Husserl or Frege, Meaning,Objectivity, and Mathematics, La Salle IL: Open Court, 2000.11 Husserl, Introduction to the Logical Investigations, pp. 36–38, 46–49; Husserl Early Writings,pp. 200–03, 209; Hermann Lotze, Logic, New York: Garland, 1980 (reprint of B. Bosanquet’stranslation of his Logik of 1888), Chapter II.12 Edmund Husserl, Alte und neue Logik, Vorlesung 1908/09, Elisabeth Schuhmann (ed.),Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003, pp. 45, 47, 241.13 Edmund Husserl, Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge, Lectures 1906/07, ClaireOrtiz Hill (tr.), Dordrecht: Springer, 2008, §12.14 Husserl, Allgemeine Erkenntnistheorie, Vorlesung 1902/03, p. 47.15 Husserl, Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge, Lectures 1906/07, §13c.16 Edmund Husserl, “Husserl an Brentano, 27. III. 1905”, Briefwechsel, Die Brentanoschule I,Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994, pp. 37–39.17 Henry Jones, A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Lotze, the Doctrine of Thought, Glasgow:James Maclehouse and Sons, pp. 8, 28, 29.18 Henri Schoen, La Métaphysique de Hermann Lotze, ou la philosophie des actions et desréactions réciproques, Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1902, pp. 8–9, 18, 22–23.19 George Cantor, Georg Cantor Briefe, H. Meschkowski and W. Nilson (eds.), Springer, NewYork, 1991, p. 350; Hill, “Did Georg Cantor Influence Edmund Husserl?” and “Abstraction andIdealization in Georg Cantor and Edmund Husserl.”20 Joseph Dauben, Georg Cantor, His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite, Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. 140–48.21 Carl Jung, Jung on Evil, Murray Stein (ed.), London: Routledge, 1995, p. 194.22 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, Secret Aryan Cults and theirInfluence on Nazi Ideology, New York: I. B. Tauris 1985, p. 29.23 Cantor’s letter books as found in the Niedersächsische Staats-und UniversitätsbibliothekGöttingen, Abteilung Handschriften und Seltene Drücke reveal this.24 Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. London: Routledge and KeganPaul, 1973 (1874), p. 88.25 Edmund Husserl, Ideas. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. New York: CollierBooks, 1962 (1913), p. 229. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology andto a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution.Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989, p. 422 Husserl, Logical Investigations, p. 554. Husserl, Introduction tothe Logical Investigations, p. 61.26 Husserl, Introduction to the Logical Investigations, p. 42.27 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.Evanston: Northwestern University, 1970, §68.28 Richard Sugarman, “Emmanuel Levinas: the Ethics of ‘Face to Face’/the Religious Turn”, inPhenomenology World Wide, A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002, p. 412.


29 Yvanka B. Raynova, “Jean-Paul Sartre, A Profound Revision of Husserlian Phenomenology”,in Phenomenology World Wide, Tymieniecka (ed.), p. 324.30 Jean Paul Sartre, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology”, Journalof the British Society of Phenomenology 1, 2, May 1970, pp. 4–5.31 Unpublished Extracts from Hilbert’s Denkschrift for Leonard Nelson, undated, found inthe Niedersächsische Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, Abteilung Handschriften undSeltene Drücke.32 Leonard Nelson, letter of December 29, 1916 to David Hilbert found in the NiedersächsischeStaats-und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, Abteilung Handschriften und Seltene Drücke.33 See for example, Edmund Husserl, “Aus der Einleitung der Vorlesung ‘Erkenntnistheorie undHauptpunkte der Metaphysik 1898/99”’, in Husserl, Allgemeine Erkenntnistheorie, pp. 225–55.34 Ibid., pp. 230–33.35 Husserl, Allgemeine Erkennthistheorie, Vorlesung 1902/03, pp. 9; 229, 232–33; EdmundHusserl, Logik, Vorlesung 1902/03, Elisabeth Schuhmann (ed.), Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001,pp. 12–13.36 See for example, Husserl, “Aus der Einleitung der Vorlesung ‘Erkenntnistheorie und Haupt-punkte der Metaphysik 1898/99’ ”, p. 232.37 Husserl, Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge, Lectures 1906/07, 32c.38 Husserl, “Aus der Einleitung der Vorlesung ‘Erkenntnistheorie und Hauptpunkte der Meta-physik’ ”, pp. 232, 233, 252; Husserl, Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge, Lectures1906/07, §§20, 21.39 Edmund Husserl, Logik, Vorlesung 1896, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001, p. 5. Husserl, Logik,Vorlesung 1902/03, pp. 12–13.40 Husserl, Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge, Lectures 1906/07, §20.41 Husserl, Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge, Lectures 1906/07, §20. Husserl,Logik, Vorlesung 1902/03, pp. 12–13.42 Husserl, Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge, Lectures 1906/07, §21.43 Husserl, Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge, Lectures 1906/07, §20. Husserl,Allgemeine Erkennthistheorie, Vorlesung 1902/03, p. 233.44 Husserl, Logik, Vorlesung 1896, pp. 9, 13, 16–17.45 Husserl, Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge, Lectures 1906/07, §21.46 Ibid., 32c.47 Ibid.

A N G È L E K R E M E R - M A R I E T T I

J E A N WA H L T H E P R E C U R S O R : K I E R K E G A A R D

A N D E X I S T E N T I A L I S M

A B S T R A C T

For Jean Wahl (1888–1974), Kierkegaard was the first “subjective thinker”,without whom we could not conceive any prefigurations of philosophy of theexistence, which starts up the Christian existentialism. Jean Wahl began hiscareer as a follower of Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and the American pluralistphilosophers. Kierkegaard is a hero of the existence and an ally in the criticismof Hegel and his speculative thought. Going like Descartes, starting not withthe doubt but anxiety, Kierkegaard went to a new sort of issue, not the thoughtor cogito, but existence. Evocating also Martin Heidegger, Jean Wahl drawsthe big moments of Heidegger’s reflection, but presenting him as « a negationof Kierkegaardian individualism ». For Kierkegaard reviewed by Jean Wahl,the Myth of Adam embodies the original sin as a condition of possibility forany individual, guilty, as told in the language of psychoanalysis, in the subor-dination to the Autority of the Name of Father. Wahl presented Kierkegaard asbeing always in a state of choice: « Everything or nothing » (« tout ou rien »),« Of two things the one » (« de deux choses l’une »). Nietzsches’s dominantidea, for Wahl, is the will of overpassing, the first idea of transcendence. Wahlthinks that, in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, modernity refuses itself. In a nega-tive theology, we see how a quest of fully reflective justification is undertakenat the same moment in which we are anyway justified.

Classic philosophy considered the essence as the supreme, unchangingand constant value, and lets it precede the existence. Sören Kierkegaard(1813–1855) was one of the first to oppose to the philosophies which deniedthe individuality, the subjectivity and the value of the human experience. ForJean Wahl (1888–1974), Kierkegaard was the first “subjective thinker”, with-out whom we could not conceive any prefigurations of philosophy of theexistence, which starts up the Christian existentialism.∗

∗ Jean Wahl was a French philosopher, a professor in Sorbonne from 1936 till 1967. During theSecond World War, having been interned as Jew to the concentration camp of Drancy, where from

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