Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

ISSN: 0007-1773 (Print) 2332-0486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbsp20

The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Six

Essays, by Ludwig Landgrebe, edited with an
introduction by Donn Welton

Richard T. Murphy

To cite this article: Richard T. Murphy (1993) The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Six
Essays, by Ludwig Landgrebe, edited with an introduction by Donn Welton, Journal of the British
Society for Phenomenology, 24:3, 286-289, DOI: 10.1080/00071773.1993.11007030

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.1993.11007030

Published online: 21 Oct 2014.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rbsp20

Download by: [University of Helsinki] Date: 15 March 2017, At: 12:59

exegesis of the "Conversation on a Country Path" (1945), the self-critical thrust of
Heidegger' s remarks against his earlier attempt to characterize time as a
"transcendental horizon" of presentation, which contributed directly to the demise of
the project of Being and Time. For beyond the horizon is the opening which
empowers it by "regioning": "It realms, It reaches, It contextualizes," where this
virtually unsayable 'It' is time itself. But N. is more interested in "this side" of the
horizon, in the vistas that it opens and so the objective views that it illustrates (205).
He is, in short, more interested in the· "lighting" of the temporal Lichtung than in its
prior "clearing," which the later Heidegger strives to indicate in order to highlight(!)
the nuanced difference between representational and deliberative (besinnendes)
thinking. It would be a fatal mistake to translate Be-sinnung, sensitivity to sense, and
Heidegger's favored word for the self-referring movement of Dasein in thought, as
"reflection," as the dictionary prompts us to do. This would be but a throwback to the
"metaphysical optic" that Heidegger sought to escape since his habilitation, putting
himself instead on the path of tracking, stalking, retracing the sense intentionally
indigenous to being, by way of the more allusive pointers of 'trailmarkers'. We
would thereby lose Heidegger at his most radical as he takes the step back into the
"poverty of thought" and gives us precious little to draw upon. Deliberative thinking
is not illustrious, illustration loses its luster, radiance, sheen and brilliance here. Or so
it seems. Yet we still yearu for the brilliant illustration suddenly illuminating all, like
the old Plato's startling statement, "Time is the sky!" The nostalgia for metaphysics
dies hard. Is the impersonal "It realms, reaches, contextualizes, worlds" such a happy,
helles thought? It is at least more realistic; and certainly more upbeat than the "It
iterates, dissipates, ebbs, wastes away" of deconstructivist inertial time. Illustration or
indication? Allusion or illusion? What's the difference? Is the difference between
indication and illustration not the difference between Heidegger and metaphysics? Is
there in the end really a difference between illustration and representation, as N.
claims (24)?

Theodore Kisiel
Northern Illinois University

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF EDMUND HUSSERL: SIX ESSAYS, by Ludwig

Landgrebe, edited with an introduction by Donn Welton. Cornell University Press,
London, 1981.

In these judiciously selected essays Ludwig Landgrebe reacts critically and

develops Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. The first group of three essays center
around Husserl's concept of transcendental consciousness; the second group around
the concepts of history and the life-world.
In the first essay, "The Phenomenology of Corporeality and the Problem of
Matter", Landgrebe shows that for Husserl the material thing" is that "primal object"
which is the bearer of personalistic values as well as sensuous qualities. From a
"naturalistic attitude the material thing is constituted in reciprocal relationship to the
kinaesthetic functions of the living body. Since this living body is animated by the
soul (ego), material nature, body, and ego are attuned in reciprocal constitution. From
the "personalistic attitude" ,on the other hand, it is the historically changing idea of
"material nature" which determines experience and praxis in one's life-world.
Since "matter" seemed alien to the ego (spirit), Husserl hesitated to allow material
nature a role in transcendental constitution. To overcome this hesitancy Landgrebe

286
stresses the spontaneous dynamism of kinaesthetic intentionality. Contingently given
in sensation, material nature challenges this force and thereby announces itself to the
ego.
In the second essay, "The Problem of Passive Constitution", Landgrebe clarifies
Husserl's concept of "constitution' which fluctuates between sense-formation (sense-
apperception) and creation. Active synthetic constitution performed by the positing
ego characterizes apperc.eptive sense-bestowing acts. Prior to this are "primal' acts of
passive constitution performed in its kinaesthetic functions by the non-positing ego.
In light of this primal passivity Landgrebe advances three theses.
The first thesis is that "the 'depth dimensions' of the process of constitution cannot
be attained by the phenomenological reflection" (52). On the fundamental level of
primal passivity the ego constitutes and experiences itself as a primal, streaming
present. In this present an anonymous antic sense is constituted temporally, which
can be pointed to but never grasped adequately in reflective intuition.
The second thesis is that "the functions of corporeality belong to the functions of
passive pre-constitution and together with it to 'transcendental subjectivity"' (56).
Passive pre-constitution is creative in the sense of spontaneously arising from the
kinaesthetic functions of the ego's own body. The implicit and practical awareness of
these functions is "the first disclosure of the world" (61). This disclosure precedes all
objectifying reflection and can never be seized totally in its present immediacy. This
raises the question: How can constituting subjectivity be absolute and yet attuned
through its corporeality to material nature?
Landgrebe replies to this question by his third thesis: "the primal streaming
occurrence of 'transcendental subjectivity' is to be understood as a creative process"
(62). In the implicit and practical awareness of its kinaesthetic constitutionality the
ego encounters itself as that absolute primal force which is the origin of and precedes
temporal self-constitution and,accordingly, time and contingency.
In the third essay, "Husserl's Departure from Cartesianism", Landgrebe develops
the implication of the three theses advanced in the second essay by a critical
examination of the second volume of Husser/'s Erste Philosophie (1923-24). The
paradoxical outcome of Husser! attempt in this volume to establish the foundational
role of phenomenology on the apodictic evidence of the "cogito" is "the shipwreck of
transcendental subjectivism, as both a nonhistorical a priorism and as the
consummation of modern rationalism" (68). Husser! will be forced to seek a new way
into transcendental phenomenology in The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology.
For in his search for apodictic evidence the beginning philosopher is led to
transcendental subjectivity as a field of absolute experience to be identified with "the
reflective self-experience of the 'I am"' (83). Reflecting on the individual acts
comprising transcendental life he becomes aware of their temporal horizons and of the
"world" as the ultimate horizon. Thereby the factor of history and historicity is
introduced which nullifies the possibility of an apodictic science of transcendental
subjectivity and which makes mandatory establishing the way of phenomenology
historically (including the history ofphilosophy)" (97). The field of transcendental
subjectivity as the field of absolute being cannot be shown by means of Husser!' s re-
presentifying reduction. Rather it is disclosed in "the demand of the 'beginning
philosopher' for absolute justification and resposibility" (107). In this sense the
transcendental ego is the "ethical ego" which, in its freedom and responsibility, is a
field of an absolute experience of open and indeterminate horizons. This
transcendental ego is anonymous in terms of absolute self-presentification and
discloses itself only in and through its temporalizing self-constitution.

287
 Landgrebe analyses have revealed two obstacles to Husserl's objectivating, re-
presentifying reflection. First, that primal anonymous facticity encountered through
kinaesthetic intentionality on the lower levels of passive constitution resists
objectivating reflection. Secondly, the historicity of the transcendental subject
renders anachronistic an "archaeological" search for an absolute foundation rooted in
the apodictic evidence of the "cogito." The transcendental reduction must become
genetic in terms not only of "primal institution by the living body but also of historical
sedimentation and projection. The reduction must focus on the teleologically oriented
praxis of the transcendental ego who is situated both bodily and historically. The
second group of essays will show how, in the editor's words, "the attempt to integrate
history and the life-world into a structural phenomenology outstrips Husserl's initial
characterization of the world" (18).
In the fourth essay, "The World as a Phenomenological Problem", Landgrebe
examines the two steps Husser! took in order to clarify the correlation between the
pregiven life-world and transcendental subjectivity. The first step is a "mundane
analysis" which seeks to formulate a "natural world-concept." Landgrebe, more
explicitly and clearly than Husser! himself, distinguishes between the life-world
constituted both historically and communally by the individual ego and the "originary
world" constituted in immediate pre-scientific experience by the living body. This
"originary world" is that "natural" world organized spatially through kinaesthetic
intentionality and assimilated into the life-world as a changing idea or image.
The second step is a "transcendental analysis" in which Husser! described
reductively the origination. of the pregiven life-world in· the subjective
accomplishments of the transcendental subject. While he did investigate the temporal
constitution of mundane objects as unities within a predelineated horizon, he failed to
account for the temporal constitution of "world" as such with its all-encompassing
horizon. For that reason Landgrebe questions Husserl's transcendental analysis since
it presupposes the pregiven world as the delineated if comprehensive horizon of what
is familiar.
In the fifth essay, Regions of Being and Regional Ontologies in Husser!' s
Phenomenology", Landgrebe examines how Husser! crossed over from "a
methodological to a metaphysical concept of constitution" (156). Husser! assigned
priority to the life-world which is a "human" world actively constituted by the
transcendental subject in a familiar world of personal communality. This world is
divorced from that "natural world'' constituted passively in kinaesthetic functioning.
Lanndgrebe points out how this transition contradicts the phenomenological principle
of freedom from metaphysical presuppositions.
In the final essay, "The Problem of a Transcendental Science of the A Priori of the
Life-world", Landgrebe relates the contrast between the pregiven and the originary
world to the problem of history and a phenomenological science of the life-world. By
exploring Husserl's later work, especially in the Crisis, Landgrebe will fashion what
the editor rightly calls "a well-circumscribed theory of the life-world and a
transcendental history of the experience of consciousness" (pp. 29-39).
What strikes Landgrebe about the Crisis is its unique interweaving of historical
and systematic investigations. By this time Hus.serl had become more fully aware that
the life-world as ultimate horizon is historical. This introduction of history and
historicity raises the specter of historical relativism. In an ongoing dialogue with
Husser! Landgrebe boldly meets this challenge Genetic constitutional analysis of the
deepest levels of self-experience by the reflecting ego reveals the a priori temporal
self-constitution of the ego and its historical world-horizon. The a priori of history is
"the concept of an invariant style of life-world existence" (197). This life-style is that

288
teleological movement of transcendental life which marks the free praxis of the ego.
This solution to the problem of history and historicity Husserl could not envision
because of his "archaeological", re-presentifying theory that sought to establish
phenomenology as the ultimate foundational science rooted in the apodictic evidence
of the "cogito. Landgrebe has shown convincingly that the transcendental-genetic
reduction must rather be dynamic and teleological. It must strive to reveal the deepest
levels of the a priori temporal self-constitution of the historical ego and its life-world
in the dynamic, telelogically praxis of the "ethical ego."
This is the deep insight which challenges Husserl's commentators, and makes
reading these essays eminently worthwhile if not imperative.

RichardT. Murphy
Boston College

PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE FORMAL SCIENCES. T. Seebohm, D.

F~Z~llesdal and J.N. Mohanty, (eds.), Kluwer: Dordrecht, 1992.

Husserl's philosophy met a curious fate. The phenomenology of ideal objects, and
particularly the work on logic and mathematics, was all but abandoned on the
Continent, where it has remained declasse to this day. This was due, no doubt, to the
tum of thought characteristic of Husserl's principal successor, Heidegger. Husserl's
work in this area is only now being investigated and further developed, but largely by
philosophers with roots in either analytic philosophy or in logic and the foundations of
mathematics. The editors of this volume have done a great service to
phenomenological research by making available a number of papers and comments on
papers that stem from a 1985 conference on Phenomenology and the Formal Sciences
which was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. All but one of the papers are on or are
related to Husserl' s views, and they range over a wide variety of topics in
philosophical logic and the philosophy of mathematics.
The opening paper by Thomas Fay on "Heidegger and the Formalization of
Thought" discusses ideas in Heidegger's thought that led away from Husserl's work
on these topics. Fay concludes, however, by pointing to some areas that might be of
mutual interest to logicians and Heideggerian philosophers. In the next essay, "The
Justification of Logic and Mathematics in Husserl' s Phenomenology", Dagfinn
F~Z~llesdal cites textual evidence to show, correctly I think, that Husserl was not a
foundationalist even in the case of mathematics and logic. Guillermo Rosado
Haddock writes on "Husserl's Distinction Between State of Affairs (Sachverhalt) and
Situation of Affairs (Sachlage)", arguing that interderivable statements in
mathematics, like the Axiom of Choice and Zorn's Lemma, do not express the same
thought and do not assert the same state of affairs, although they still have more in
common than their truth value. He proposes that they designate the same situation.
Some problems for this view are raised by the commentator, David Smith.
In the next paper, "Modalization and Modalities", Charles Harvey and Jaakko
Hintikka follow up on Hintikka's 'possible worlds' interpretation of intentionality and
respond to Mohanty's earlier criticisms of that view. They focus primarily on the
relevance of Husserl' s analyses of disjunction and negation to the semantics of modal
logic. Gilbert Null's comments on the paper provide further background on and
development of the Harvey-Hintikka views. J.N. Mohanty writes on "Husserl's
Formalism", discussing how ideas on formalism mesh with constructivist and
platonist elements in Husserl' s thought. Carl Posy's "Mathematics as a

289