About the Work
Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger is a collection of materials by Edmund Husserl, edited and translated by Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer, and published in the Husserl Collected Works series. The volume brings together texts written between 1927 and 1931, a period that coincides with Husserl’s approaching retirement and the deepening philosophical divergence between him and his former student Martin Heidegger.
The book is organized around three principal bodies of material. The first is Husserl’s article on phenomenology for the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, composed between September and early December 1927. This article went through multiple drafts—designated A, B, C, and D—with two further editorial condensations (E and F). The published version that appeared in 1929 was a heavily condensed paraphrase prepared by Dr. Christopher V. Salmon of Oxford, which scholars have characterized as unreliable. The volume includes the various drafts, Heidegger’s marginal notes on Drafts A and B, Heidegger’s contributed pages to Draft B, and Heidegger’s letter to Husserl of October 22, 1927.
The second body of material consists of the Amsterdam Lectures, two linked lectures that Husserl composed in early 1928 and delivered to the Amsterdamse Vereniging voor Wijsbegeerte on April 23 and 29, 1928. Husserl considered these lectures a further, expanded version of the Britannica article, describing them as a reworking of the typed draft for the Encyclopaedia. The lectures remained unpublished during his lifetime.
The third body of material comprises Husserl’s marginal notes on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, made between 1927 and 1929, along with several appendices. These appendices include Heidegger’s speech at Husserl’s emeritus celebration on April 8, 1929, Husserl’s letter to Alexander Pfänder dated January 6, 1931, and Husserl’s lecture “Phenomenology and Anthropology” from June 1931.
The volume also contains a substantial general introduction by the editors covering the early relationship between Husserl and Heidegger and the eventual breakup of their friendship and philosophical collaboration.
Context
The materials in this volume document a pivotal moment in the history of twentieth-century philosophy. Husserl and Heidegger had enjoyed a close professional and personal relationship for nearly a decade. Heidegger began reading Husserl by mistake in the fall of 1909 during his theology studies at Freiburg, having been drawn to philosophy through Franz Brentano’s work on the several senses of being in Aristotle. He read Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen hoping for help with the question of being, though initially his efforts were in vain. In 1911, reading Husserl’s “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” Heidegger wrote in the margin of a passage about research taking its start from issues and problems: “We take Husserl at his word.”
Heidegger studied under Heinrich Rickert at Freiburg from 1911 to 1913, and through Rickert’s seminars he encountered the work of Emil Lask, whose writings led him to a closer study of the second volume of the Logical Investigations, particularly Investigation VI on categorial intuition and evidence. Heidegger’s 1913 dissertation on the doctrine of judgment in psychologism showed only Husserl’s refutation of psychologism, while his 1915 habilitation thesis continued his engagement with these themes.
By 1919, Heidegger was already developing criticisms of Husserl’s position. In a declaration made in Husserl’s presence on June 21, 1919, Heidegger argued that the pure ego was derived from the historical ego by way of repressing all historicity and quality, making it merely the subject of acts directed to theoretical objects. His private remarks became increasingly harsh. In February 1923, he wrote to Karl Löwith that he had publicly burned and destroyed Husserl’s Ideen, declaring that Husserl was never a philosopher, not even for one second in his life. In May 1923, he wrote again to Löwith that his course on the hermeneutics of facticity struck the main blows against phenomenology, adding that he was wringing Husserl’s neck.
Despite these private sentiments, Heidegger continued to present himself publicly as Husserl’s loyal student. When Sein und Zeit was published in April 1927, it bore a dedication to Husserl in grateful respect and friendship, dated April 8, 1926, at Todtnauberg in the Black Forest. Husserl initially expressed satisfaction with the work, though he later recalled its newfangled language and unclarified intellectual energy. Heidegger himself wrote to Karl Jaspers in December 1926 that if the treatise had been written against anyone, it had been written against Husserl.
The collaboration on the Britannica article in October 1927 marked the turning point in their relationship. Husserl asked Heidegger to criticize his draft, and they spent eleven days discussing it. Heidegger saw constitution as embedded in factical Dasein rather than in the transcendental ego. The working visit produced a new draft and, in the editors’ words, spelled the beginning of the end of their professional relationship.
Husserl chose Heidegger as his successor at Freiburg, a decision he later called blindness arising from feeling isolated, like an appointed leader without followers. After Heidegger took the chair, their exchanges lasted about two months and then ended amicably, with Heidegger removing himself from professional discussion. By 1931, Husserl concluded that he had nothing to do with Heideggerian profundity, calling Heidegger a brilliant unscientific genius whose criticism was based on gross misunderstanding.
Structure of the Book
The volume is organized into several major sections. It opens with a preface by the editors explaining the provenance and dating of the materials. A general introduction by Thomas Sheehan provides an extensive historical account of the Husserl-Heidegger relationship, covering the early years to 1918 and the breakup from 1927 to 1931.
The first major body of text is the Encyclopaedia Britannica article, presented in its various drafts. Draft A, written in September 1927, divides formally into two parts: “Psychological Phenomenology as ‘Pure’ Phenomenology” and “Transcendental Phenomenology as Contrasted with Psychological Phenomenology,” though it actually treats three topics: pure phenomenological psychology as the basis for rigorous empirical psychology, the historical intertwining of psychological and transcendental phenomenology, and transcendental experience via the transcendental reduction. Draft B, composed during the October 10-22 working visit, comprises four new sections, with Section i drafted by Heidegger and the remaining sections by Husserl. Draft C and Draft D followed, with Draft D never published in Husserl’s lifetime. The volume also includes Draft E, Salmon’s translation, and the published version that appeared in the Encyclopaedia.
The second major body of text is the Amsterdam Lectures, which Husserl composed as an expanded version of the Britannica article. The lectures were planned as a three-part work, though the third part was never fully realized in the lectures themselves. The two delivered lectures present a general introduction to phenomenology through pure phenomenological psychology as a propaedeutic to transcendental phenomenology, representing a third approach distinct from the Cartesian and ontological approaches.
The third major body of text consists of Husserl’s marginal notes on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. These notes are presented with editorial apparatus, including references to the Husserliana edition and explanatory notes identifying persons and events mentioned in the margins.
The volume concludes with several appendices: Heidegger’s speech at Husserl’s emeritus celebration, Husserl’s letter to Alexander Pfänder, and Husserl’s lecture “Phenomenology and Anthropology.” The letter to Pfänder is a remarkable personal document in which Husserl recounts his life history, his hopes for Heidegger, and his eventual disillusionment. The lecture on phenomenology and anthropology criticizes the trend among younger German philosophers toward philosophical anthropology and what Husserl saw as a complete reversal of phenomenology’s fundamental standpoint.
Detailed Section-by-Section Summary
Preface: The Scope of the Confrontation
The editors’ preface establishes the documentary foundation for the volume, situating the materials within the final years of Husserl’s active career and the simultaneous rupture with his most famous student. The texts collected here date from 1927 to 1931, a period bracketed by Husserl’s composition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica article and the Amsterdam Lectures (both written between September 1927 and April 1928, with a brief contribution from Heidegger), his marginal annotations to Sein und Zeit and Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (made between 1927 and 1929), and a series of appendices from 1929 to 1931. This chronology coincides with Husserl’s approach to emeritus status, effective March 31, 1928, and with the widening philosophical chasm between him and Heidegger. The preface thus frames the volume not merely as a collection of texts but as a document of a personal and intellectual parting of ways.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica Article: A History of Drafts and Distortions
The first major text is Husserl’s ill-fated introduction to phenomenology for the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Composed under contract between September and early December 1927, the article went through four distinct drafts (A, B, C, and D) plus two editorial condensations (E and F). Draft D was never published in Husserl’s lifetime, and the German edition only appeared in 1962. The Britannica itself published a 4,000-word entry titled “Phenomenology” over the signature “E. Hu.,” translated by Dr. Christopher V. Salmon of Oxford. This published version, however, was not a translation but an unreliable paraphrase of Husserl’s 7,000-word fourth draft. Husserl had commissioned Salmon to cut the draft in half and translate it, but it remains unclear whether he ever licensed the gross paraphrase and rearrangement that resulted. Scholars have since challenged the legitimacy of the published text: Biemel called it “very free,” and Spiegelberg dismissed it as a “wild paraphrase” and a “semblance.” The present volume translates all drafts except Draft C (which is only partially included), along with Draft E as Salmon left it, Heidegger’s notes on Drafts A and B, Heidegger’s contributed pages to Draft B, and Heidegger’s letter to Husserl of October 22, 1927.
The Amsterdam Lectures: A Third Approach
The second major text consists of two linked lectures Husserl composed in early 1928, finishing the draft in Göttingen on April 17, 1928, and delivering them to the Amsterdamse Vereniging voor Wijsbegeerte on April 23 and 29 of that year. These lectures are closely related to the Britannica article; both serve as general introductions to phenomenology via pure phenomenological psychology as a propaedeutic to transcendental phenomenology. This represents a third approach, distinct from the “Cartesian” and the “ontological” (or “Kantian”) routes. Husserl himself considered the lectures a further, expanded version of the Britannica article, describing them as a “reworking of the typed draft for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”
Marginal Notes and Appendices
The volume also includes Husserl’s marginal notes from his two readings of Sein und Zeit (published in early April 1927) between April 1927 and September 1929, as well as his study of Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik from the summer of 1929. The margins of his copies are filled with critical annotations. The translation of the notes to the Kant book follows Roland Breeur’s 1994 German edition, while the notes to Sein und Zeit have been newly edited from Husserl’s own copy in the Husserl Archives. The appendices include Heidegger’s speech at Husserl’s emeritus celebration on April 8, 1929, Husserl’s letter to Alexander Pfänder of January 6, 1931, and Husserl’s lecture “Phenomenology and Anthropology” from June 1931, which criticizes Heidegger and others.
General Introduction: The Bitter End
The general introduction by the editor traces the relationship’s trajectory, which ended bitterly between 1928 and 1929. Philosophically, a happy convergence split into two irreconcilable visions of phenomenology; personally, friendship turned to sour enmity. Heidegger privately sneered at Husserl’s “sham philosophy,” while Husserl charged deception, betrayal, and even anti-Semitism. Since the 1960s, the historical record has expanded through Heidegger’s late publications, the Gesamtausgabe (beginning in 1976), the 1962 publication of the four Britannica drafts, and Husserl’s correspondence (1994). The introduction covers the early years up to 1918 and the breakup from 1927 to 1931, leaving the middle years (1919–1926) to other scholars such as Kisiel and Van Buren.
Early Years: Heidegger’s Accidental Discovery
Heidegger’s engagement with Husserl began by mistake in the fall of 1909, during his theology studies at Freiburg. He was puzzling over the meaning of being, a question awakened by Franz Brentano’s On the Several Senses of ‘Being’ in Aristotle, which he had read in 1907 and which remained his “rod and staff.” He turned to Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen hoping for help, but his efforts were “in vain” because he did not yet know how to use phenomenology. In 1911, reading Husserl’s “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” he wrote in the margin of the line “The impulse to research must take its start not from philosophies but from issues and problems”: “We take Husserl at his word.” He withdrew from theology in 1911 and wanted to study with Husserl at Göttingen but lacked the funds, so he studied under Heinrich Rickert at Freiburg from 1911 to 1913. Rickert’s seminars introduced him to Emil Lask, whose works led Heidegger to a closer study of Logical Investigations vol. 2, especially Investigation VI on categorial intuition and evidence. In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger credited Lask’s Logik der Philosophie (1911) and Lehre vom Urteil (1912). His 1913 dissertation, The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism, showed only Husserl’s refutation of psychologism, and his 1915 Habilitationsschrift continued in a similar vein.
Heidegger’s Early Phenomenological Position (1919)
In his early post-war teaching, Heidegger began to articulate a position that diverged sharply from Husserl’s. Citing his Gesamtausgabe volume 56/57, he critiqued Husserl’s Ideas I, section 24, arguing that first-hand intuition is not a theoretical comportment but rather an “understanding intuition, a hermeneutical intuition” from which theory is merely a “precipitate.” This hermeneutical intuition is “the aboriginal intention of authentic living… the absolute sympathy with life.” It cannot be reached by conceptual systems; only “phenomenological living” can attain it. This fundamental habitus cannot be acquired “like putting on a uniform”; it is not a method, and adopting “standpoints” would be the “mortal sin.” Phenomenology, for Heidegger, “can authenticate and prove itself only through itself.”
Heidegger’s Early Criticisms of Husserl
Heidegger’s criticisms became increasingly pointed. On June 21, 1919, he declared in Husserl’s presence that the pure ego was “derived from the ‘historical ego’ by way of repressing all historicity and quality,” being merely “the subject only of acts directed to theoretical objects.” By June 12, 1925, he told Marburg students that Husserl was aware of his objections. However, in a letter to Karl Löwith on February 20, 1923, Heidegger wrote that he had “publicly burned and destroyed the Ideas,” declaring that “Husserl was never a philosopher, not even for one second in his life.” On May 8, 1923, he wrote again to Löwith that his course Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität “strikes the main blows against phenomenology,” adding, “I am wringing his neck.” A letter from Gerda Walther to Alexander Pfänder on June 20, 1919, describes a planned attack on the pure ego to be spearheaded by Julius Ebbinghaus and followed by Heidegger. Writing to Jaspers on July 14, 1923, Heidegger said Husserl “has come entirely unglued… uttering trivialities that would make you weep.”
The Parting of the Ways
The question of the differences between Husserl and Heidegger from 1919 to 1928 lies beyond the scope of this introduction, which refers to Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis of Being and Time. A list of Heidegger’s criticisms of Husserl spanning 1920 to 1928 includes critiques of constitution, the primacy of the theoretical, philosophy as science, mathematical rigor, certitude, consciousness, truth, phenomenological reduction, intentionality, and being as consciousness.
Sein und Zeit, 1926–1927
Heidegger had been teaching at Marburg’s Philipps University since autumn 1923. On July 8, 1925, with Husserl’s support, he became the sole nominee to succeed Nicolai Hartmann. On January 27, 1926, however, Minister Carl Heinrich Becker blocked the appointment due to insufficient publications. Dean Max Deutschbein advised Heidegger to publish quickly, and on February 25, 1926, Heidegger promised the manuscript by April 1. In early March 1926, Husserl joined Heidegger in Todtnauberg. On April 1, Heidegger sent the first thirty-eight sections to Niemeyer Publishers. On April 8, Husserl’s sixty-seventh birthday, Heidegger presented him with flowers and a handwritten page bearing the Plato epigraph from Sophist 244a and the dedication: “To Edmund Husserl in grateful respect and friendship. Todtnauberg in the Black Forest, April 8, 1926.” In December 1926, the Minister found the work “inadequate.” In April 1927, Sein und Zeit appeared as a Sonderdruck and in Husserl’s Jahrbuch, vol. VIII. Heidegger gave Husserl a copy inscribed with a Lessing quote: “For me the greatest clarity was always the greatest beauty,” dated April 8, 1927. Husserl initially expressed satisfaction but later recalled the “newfangled language” and “unclarified intellectual energy.” Heidegger wrote to Jaspers on May 24, 1926, that Husserl found the book “quite odd” and could “no longer welcome it under the roof” of mainstream phenomenology.
Adumbrations of Conflict
Heidegger wrote to Jaspers on December 26, 1926: “If the treatise has been written ‘against’ anyone, then it has been written against Husserl.” Husserl later told Pfänder that he had been warned that Heidegger’s work was “open or veiled attacks.” Husserl doubted himself rather than Heidegger. On August 3, 1927, Husserl told Dietrich Mahnke that Sein und Zeit “distances itself entirely from my analytic phenomenology.”
The EB Article Collaboration, October 10–22, 1927
Husserl asked Heidegger to criticize his Encyclopaedia Britannica article “Phenomenology.” They spent eleven days discussing it. Heidegger saw constitution embedded in “factical Dasein” rather than the transcendental ego. This marked “the turning point in the relation.” Husserl wrote to Roman Ingarden on November 19, 1927, regretting that “there is still no bridge between him and” Heidegger.
Draft A (September 1927)
Husserl wrote Draft A in September 1927, beginning during a Swiss vacation from September 1 to 15 and finishing at his Freiburg home. The original text, written in Gabelsberg shorthand, ran approximately 5,000 words and has since been lost (designated Draft A0). Research assistant Ludwig Landgrebe typed this into twenty-five double-spaced pages with two carbon copies. Husserl added pages “5a” and “7a,” totaling twenty-seven pages. The original typescript (A00) is lost, but both carbons survive as Drafts A1 and A2. Draft A divides formally into two parts: “Psychological Phenomenology as ‘Pure’ Phenomenology” and “Transcendental Phenomenology as Contrasted with Psychological Phenomenology.” However, it actually treats three topics: pure phenomenological psychology as the basis for rigorous empirical psychology; the historical intertwining of psychological and transcendental phenomenology requiring distinction to avoid psychologism; and transcendental experience via transcendental reduction and universal transcendental philosophy. The historical treatment is awkwardly split between Parts I and II.
Heidegger’s Involvement
In September 1927, Heidegger was at Todtnauberg. Before leaving for Switzerland, Husserl requested that Heidegger read and comment on the EB Article, read the “Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins,” and visit Freiburg beginning October 10. Heidegger read the “Studien”
The Transcendental Problem and the Turn from Psychology
The new phenomenology that emerged was not destined to remain a mere psychology, even a pure one. It arose as “transcendental phenomenology,” with the ambitious aim of reforming all philosophy into a strict science. While a simple change in focus might allow the “same” phenomena and eidetic insights to appear in both a psychological and a transcendental context, they must be kept rigorously distinct, for their fundamental meanings are entirely different. The historical roots of this distinction lie in Locke, whose interest was never primarily in a pure psychology for its own sake, but rather in solving the problem of the “understanding”—the enigma of how knowledge functions within subjectivity can claim objective validity. His Essay was intended as a theory of knowledge, a transcendental philosophy, and it is precisely this conflation of psychology and epistemology that charges him and his school with “psychologism.”
The insight was already prepared in Descartes’ Meditations: everything that is declared to be is only as something believed-in within subjective beliefs. Subjective conscious life in its pure immanence is the locus where all sense is bestowed and being is posited. Clarifying this requires a systematic self-understanding of the knower via “inner experience.” Locke, however, lacked this basic purity and fell into psychologism. It was absurd to presuppose objective experiences when their validity was precisely the problem at hand. Psychology, even pure psychology, cannot ground transcendental philosophy, for it remains a positive science with the world as its pre-given foundation; pure psyches belong to presupposed bodies in nature. Transcendental philosophy requires a broadened, universal phenomenological reduction—a transcendental reduction—that practices an “epoché” regarding the whole world, transforming everything into transcendental phenomena. Descartes touched on this by putting the world out of play and recognizing the ego cogito as the universum of pure subjectivity, presupposed by all positive cognition.
Adding Locke’s recognition of the need to describe cognitive life, Brentano’s discovery of intentionality, and the necessity of an a priori method yields the theme and method of transcendental phenomenology. The reduction is to transcendental subjectivity, not merely psychic subjectivity, leaving valid only the universum of “transcendentally pure” subjectivity with all its phenomena. This radical method avoids the epistemological circle. Psychological phenomenology coincides with transcendental phenomenology proposition for proposition, with the sole exception that the former treats the psychic as a stratum of the world, while the latter treats the transcendental-subjective where the world’s validity originates. The transcendental reduction opens a new kind of experience, bringing absolute subjectivity to light and yielding the thematic field of an absolute phenomenological science. This encompasses all transcendental inquiries, with the transcendental theory of reason distinguished only by its starting point.
All positive sciences function in a state of transcendental naïveté, hiding the constituting life that makes them possible. Transcendental phenomenology’s idealism makes possible sciences that understand and justify themselves. Its theme is any possible subjectivity in whose conscious life a possible objective world comes to consciousness. Through free ideal variation of factual experience, one arrives at the idea of possible experience and a possible world. There is an a priori ontology of the structures of a possible world, and a phenomenological correlation-research that explores the possible bestowal of sense. Transcendental phenomenology thus encompasses a universal, concrete ontology. Historical a priori sciences deal only with the logical form and eidetic form of physical nature, remaining in transcendental naïveté. Their “basic concepts” lack clarity, transmitting their defects to the positive sciences. The crisis of foundations in arithmetic, chronology, and other fields shows that positive sciences can no longer be considered genuine; only phenomenological reform can liberate modern science.
Transcendental phenomenology is called to develop a universal ontology at the transcendental level—the science of eidetic forms of every possible world and the correlative forms of intentional constitution. It is the original locus of basic concepts for all sciences. An important step is founding an a priori pure psychology for empirical psychology, just as geometry serves physics—a task for the next one hundred years. This includes a phenomenological interpretation of history. The phenomenology of emotional and volitional life encompasses the a priori of culture and sociality. All normative and philosophical disciplines belong within it. Phenomenology is anti-metaphysical regarding purely formal hypotheses, but metaphysical problems return to a phenomenological base. It is not a system-philosophy but works via systematic, concrete investigations. The old antitheses—rationalism vs. empiricism, subjectivism vs. objectivism, idealism vs. realism—are resolved without dialectical tricks. Subjectivism is overcome only by the most universal subjectivism, which is also objectivism. Empiricism is overcome by the most universal empiricism, positing a broadened concept of experience. Phenomenology as eidetics overcomes dogmatic rationalism with the most universal rationalism. It purifies Hume’s discoveries on association, showing transcendental subjectivity as thoroughly teleological. Its transcendental idealism harbors natural realism. It joins Kant against shallow ontologism but is itself an ontology from transcendental “experience.” It repudiates philosophical “renaissance,” demanding one renounce a merely personal philosophy and work as a modest worker for a philosophia perennis.
The Confrontation with Heidegger: Draft B and the Question of Being
The universe of entities is the field of positive sciences, but philosophy asks not about entities but about their being. Greek philosophy sought to understand entities as entities. Philosophy’s turn to consciousness, from Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle through Descartes and Kant, is demanded by the problem of “being.” Phenomenology is the radical determination of this inquiry. The passage opens with questions concerning the mode of being of the absolute ego, its sameness and difference from the factical “I,” and the character of the positing in which the absolute ego is something posited, asking to what extent there is no positivity here. A phrase from the text notes that “a cloud of unintelligibility spreads over the whole world.”
In an appendix, Husserl’s transcription of seven numbered points states agreement that entities called “world” cannot be explained by returning to an entity of the same mode of being. The problem arises of the mode of being of the entity in which “world” is constituted. Dasein’s mode of being differs totally from other entities. Transcendental constitution is a possibility of the eksistence of the factical self. Somatology’s and pure psychology’s “one-sided” treatments are possible only on the basis of concrete human wholeness. The “pure psychic” arose from epistemological concerns since Descartes. That which constitutes is not nothing, though not in the sense of something positive. A shorthand note discusses objective sense, possible perception, manifolds of perceptions, one-sidedness and all-sidedness, the “X” of undisclosed horizons, the “I can” system, and the problem of completeness regarding horizonal disclosures.
The third draft of the Encyclopaedia Britannica article reiterates that the world is the field of positive sciences. Greek science sought entities as such—a “first philosophy.” Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant are traced. Phenomenology is the science of conscious subjectivity. Pure psychology cannot ground First Philosophy. Transcendental phenomenology is the universal ontology, encompassing all conceivable transcendental phenomena. Leibniz’s insight that knowledge of possibilities precedes actualities is noted. The crisis of foundations in mathematics and the exact sciences is discussed. Eidetic phenomenology is the first phenomenology; empirical phenomenology is the second.
The Transcendental Problem and the Natural Focus
The transcendental designates an all-embracing universal related to the cosmos and all sciences dealing with our world, but it points to a fully new dimension in contrast with the natural focus. The problem arises from a general turning around of the focus in which the whole of daily life operates; positive sciences continue operating in this natural focus. In this focus, the real world is pregiven to us on the basis of ongoing experience. Everything that exists for us belongs to it—not only minds but also irreal determinations like linguistic meanings, scientific theories, and ideal constructions of art, which exist as irreal determinations of physical signs, marble, and the like. The constantly present and accepted world serves as the universal theme of all practical and theoretical interests, including positive science.
This remained all-pervasive until a motivation became operative suited to put the natural focus out of play and compel a new focus called transcendental. Such motivation arose when, under the aegis of philosophy, a truly all-embracing universal theoretical interest developed, posing questions about the universe as cosmos comprising every existing thing whatsoever. It arose also through philosophical attention directed toward the life of consciousness, becoming aware that the world exists for us as something appearing, meant, and determined according to our cognitional situation, enclosed in the innerness of our own life-process. Every acceptance of validity, every determination, is carried out within our consciousness on grounds habitually motivating us. Once we become aware that every meaning the world has for us—both its undetermined general sense and its particulars—is intentional meaning taking shape within our consciousness, we are in a new cognitional situation. The world’s mode of being acquires a dimension of unintelligibility and questionability requiring clarification. The first awareness of the radical relatedness of world to consciousness does not yield understanding of how consciousness contrives that perception yields persisting real objectivity transcendent to consciousness, how recollection makes us conscious of a not-present event as past, how the perceptual present contains co-presence beyond immediate perceivedness, or how it carries the sense of an infinite plus ultra.
The demonstrated relativity of consciousness concerns not just our world as factum but every conceivable world whatsoever. In free fantasy varying our factual world, we inevitably vary ourselves as possible subjectivity. Thus the transcendental problem becomes an eidetic problem. For ideal worlds like pure mathematics, fantasy variation leads to cancellation of possibility; invariance belongs to their mode of being, but they are not tied to us as factual cognizing subjects.
The Psychologistic Solution and the Semblance of Doubling
A priori psychological phenomenology could disclose in eidetic generality the essence of mental subjectivity, including essential types for all forms of evidentness and the structural system of human reason. Phenomenological psychology would seem to encompass the totality of research on correlations between objective being and consciousness. However, psychology belongs to the positive sciences, carried out in the natural focus where the world is pregiven. Even eidetically, the psychologist remains transcendentally naïve. Psychology cannot make available any of its premises to transcendental philosophy.
The task is to clarify the correlation between constituting subjectivity and constituted objectivity. The transcendental question presupposes a ground of unquestioned being. The universal domain of transcendental questionability is the totality of transcendental naïveté. The world is put in parenthesis; all positive sciences are subjected to the transcendental epochē. It would be a transcendental circle to base transcendental philosophy on psychology. The subjectivity constituting all objectivity cannot be psychological subjectivity. The paradox of doubling arises: we are fated as human beings to be psychophysical subjects in the real world and transcendentally world-constituting subjects. The apperceiving conscious life-process is not what is apperceived. The transcendental-phenomenological reduction proceeds stepwise from the psychological reduction. The psychologist who radically inhibits his apperception undergoes a Copernican revolution, becoming a transcendental spectator for whom the world is mere phenomenon.
A remarkable parallelism and overlap exists between the two disciplines; one is implicitly concealed in the other. Transcendental intersubjectivity is the absolute and only self-sufficient ontological foundation. Psychologism’s power lies in transcendental semblance. The breakdown in conceptualizing transcendental subjectivity prevented separation from psychological subjectivity. Transcendental psychologism remained unscathed by refutations of psychologism in formal logic. One can proceed directly to transcendental phenomenology, as Husserl attempted in Ideas, or indirectly through psychological phenomenology, which has propaedeutic advantages. Two fundamental difficulties exist: understanding pure inner experience, and understanding the transcendental standpoint.
Marginal Remarks on Sein und Zeit and the Question of Justification
In his copy of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, Husserl left extensive marginal remarks. On death and certainty, he notes that death’s certainty as “possible at any moment” involves, in phenomenological terms, something else: death is intertwined with chance and the “contingency” of life’s duration. He places an N.B. next to Heidegger’s claim that certainty about death is not a truth about something “just-there” and does not belong on the scale of evidence about the just-there. On resoluteness, Husserl questions Heidegger’s claim that the Everyone preempts Dasein’s grasp of its being-possibilities, noting “Obviously that holds for the ‘tradition.'” Where Heidegger discusses retrieving a choice, Husserl asks “What kind of choice?” and notes that retrieval “can take place even in the Everyone. But precisely one’s ‘own self’ is in question. I would place the problem of justification in the forefront.”
On conscience, Husserl asks “Why merely to Everyone?” regarding the call shattering deafness, noting conscience is “essentially related to the Everyone.” He marks N.B. extensively. Regarding being-guilty not resulting from indebtedness, Husserl notes “Again, the inversion.” He questions whether Heidegger’s presentation of not-ness is “possible,” and marks “the not [Nicht]” in the margin. On the ordinary construal of conscience, Husserl notes the four characteristics refuted one after another, marks objections, and underlines “rule-bound business procedure.” On resolution and authenticity, Husserl asks whether “resolution” in its natural meaning equals decision. He questions why situation relates exclusively to “authenticity,” and regarding accidents asks “Is this the concept of accident?!” On temporality and method, Husserl notes Heidegger’s repeated attacks on the “just-there.” He marks N.B. where Heidegger admits an ontic conception underlies his interpretation. Regarding the “circle” in understanding, Husserl notes “charge of circularity.”
Husserl’s Marginal Notes on Heidegger
Husserl’s marginal annotations on Heidegger’s texts reveal a fundamental and growing divergence. While Husserl insisted that the pregiven world must be described, he was adamant that the proper method for this was phenomenology, not what he dismissed as “subjective reflection.” He located the obscurity of the meaning of the Seiendem—the being or existent thing—in an unclarity about how the essence of the being could be held free from the incongruities that arise from such subjective reflection. The editor notes that Husserl saw Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s preconceptual comprehension of Being as “an anthropology disguised as ontology,” a mislabeling that obscured its true, non-phenomenological character.
When Heidegger asserted, “We understand Being, but as yet we lack the concept,” Husserl’s reaction was one of sharp incredulity, exclaiming, “We lack it? When would we need it?” For Husserl, the quest for the meaning of Being was not merely premature but fundamentally irrelevant and unnecessary to the task of philosophy. The editor observes that Heidegger’s subsequent path—leading him into Nietzsche, reflections on the “origin” of the work of art, the poetry of Hölderlin, and down “forest paths”—would have been seen by Husserl as a dead end. The two thinkers held irreconcilable visions: Heidegger’s had affinities with metaphysical speculation and theology, seeking to overhaul Western metaphysics, while Husserl’s longed for mathematical certainty and sought to analyze “the crisis of the European sciences.”
In a marginal note, Husserl stated he could not see why purified transcendental subjectivity was an unacceptable basis for phenomenology, feeling that Heidegger never truly understood transcendental subjectivity or the transcendental ego. The editor notes that Heidegger’s later essays, such as “The Age of the World Picture” (1938) and “Letter on Humanism” (1946), show he could not anchor reflection in subjectivity. Husserl’s marginal notes throughout this period express disappointment but never abandon the horizon of subjectivity as the only viable foundation for philosophy.
Husserl to Pfander (Letter, Jan. 6, 1931)
In a deeply personal letter to Pfander, Husserl confessed that the recipient’s correspondence had shaken him profoundly. He laid out his life history, explaining that he had realized his Ideas Parts II and III were inadequate and that, from autumn 1912, he had begun a vast array of new investigations covering the phenomenology of the person, culture, transcendental intersubjectivity, the “transcendental aesthetic,” time, individuation, association, the logos, and “metaphysics.” These manuscripts grew unmanageable, leading to depression and a collapse of confidence.
During this period, Heidegger matured as Husserl’s close assistant, behaving as a devoted student of Husserl’s work. Husserl placed great hopes in him, seeing him as his one true student and heir. When Heidegger went to Marburg, Husserl regarded his success as his own, even as Heidegger remained vague about his own developing ideas. When Being and Time appeared in 1927, Husserl was surprised by its language but trusted Heidegger’s declaration that it was a continuation of his research, doubting himself rather than Heidegger. He entrusted Heidegger with editing his 1905 lectures on time and submitted his Encyclopaedia Britannica draft for criticism. Though warned that Heidegger’s phenomenology was an attack on his own work, Heidegger laughed off such concerns. Husserl chose Heidegger as his successor, appeasing his misgivings with the thought that Heidegger would mature back in Freiburg. He later called this “blindness,” arising from feeling isolated, “like an appointed leader (Führer) without followers.”
Regarding Pfander himself, Husserl affirmed that his friendship and esteem were unchanged, but he had lost faith that Pfander recognized the revolutionary significance of the phenomenological reduction. He noted Pfander’s age played a role in the chair question, as the faculty mood favored only Heidegger and Cassirer. After Heidegger took the chair, their exchanges lasted about two months before ending amicably, with Heidegger removing himself from professional discussion. The success of the Paris lectures and Formal and Transcendental Logic restored Husserl’s confidence. He then studied Being and Time for two months and concluded he had “nothing to do with this Heideggerian profundity… this brilliant unscientific genius,” believing Heidegger’s criticism was based on gross misunderstanding. Husserl stated that Heidegger had been his closest friend for almost a decade, but concluded, “Inability to understand each other precludes friendship,” asking Pfander to treat the letter with discretion.
Phenomenology and Anthropology (Lecture, June 1931)
In his lecture, Husserl observed that younger German philosophers were gravitating toward philosophical anthropology, with Dilthey’s philosophy of life being particularly influential. The “phenomenological movement” had been caught up in this trend, alleging that the true foundation of philosophy lies in human being’s concrete worldly Dasein. Husserl called this “a complete reversal of phenomenology’s fundamental standpoint.” Original transcendental phenomenology, he insisted, denies any science of human being a share in laying philosophy’s foundations, opposing such attempts as “anthropologism or psychologism.” He framed the conflict as a return of old oppositions: the anthropological (or psychological) direction versus the transcendental direction.
Husserl argued that the method philosophy requires must be prefigured in the essence of philosophy itself. He contrasted pre-Cartesian (objectivistic) and post-Cartesian (subjective-transcendental) philosophy, noting that science in the European sense is a creation of the Greek spirit, originally called philosophy. Philosophy strives for absolute, definitive truths and requires a universal a priori knowledge of the world—a universal ontology—grasping the invariant essential form, the pure ratio of the world. Beginning with Descartes, a new motif transformed philosophy’s material sense: the naïveté of presupposing the world is lost, and the self-evidentness of the world becomes an enigma.
Ontological Idealism and the Parallelism of Psychologies
Husserl criticized ontological idealism, particularly Scheler’s, which claimed that his Logical Investigations—with its renewed justification of eidos and a priori/ontological knowledge—licensed a naive metaphysics rather than following the book’s inner tendency toward investigations of subjective constitution. He rejected any return to metaphysics in the old style, calling such a return a failure to confront the task of the present age: bringing the meaning of modern philosophy to clarity and truth.
He then touched briefly on the parallelism between the human being and the transcendental Ego, between psychology of consciousness and transcendental phenomenology. Psychology did not develop as a specialized positive science; until well into the nineteenth century it aimed at providing transcendental grounding for philosophy. Even after becoming autonomous, many maintained this function. Radical reform efforts—introducing intentionality into descriptive psychology and Dilthey’s stimulus toward a psychology of personality in social-historical existence—created preconditions for understanding the transcendental problem. Conversely, transcendental phenomenology’s breakthrough retroactively affected psychology’s reform. The guiding problem of psychological-phenomenological constitution of the world as human “objectivation” emerged for the first time, with the method of explicating consciousness’s horizon following clues from the cogitatum. This remained terra incognita to Brentano and his school.
This parallelism requires clarification on ultimate transcendental grounds: why psychology is not merely a positive science but has an intrinsic affinity with transcendental philosophy. When interior psychology reveals intersubjectivity and develops as rational science in unconditioned universality, a spontaneous tendency impels psychologists to abandon naive world-orientedness and understand themselves as transcendental philosophers. Any positive science of the world, thought through to ultimate grounding, changes into transcendental science.
The Transcendental Ego and the Puzzle of Relativity
The being of the world possesses self-evidentness only insofar as it is the ego’s own, within its experience, issuing from its consciousness. All worldly entities—including the ego’s human existence—exist for it only as content of apperception with the modality of certitude-about-being. As transcendental Ego, one performs this apperception, wherein world and human persons are first constituted. All evidence for worldly things resides primarily in the transcendental Ego. Others are “others for me,” receiving meaning and validity from me; as transcendental ego, one is the absolute subject responsible for all validations of being.
Through the transcendental reduction, one assumes a position above all worldly being, above one’s own human being—this absolute position is necessarily the philosophical position. Nothing is lost from the naive state; what showed itself as existing reality is recognized as a transcendental phenomenon. The world’s validity in the natural attitude was that of the whole of what simply is, but its truth is only transcendentally relative; absolute being pertains only to transcendental subjectivity. In the ego is formed the “representation of the world” from transcendental passivity and activity, while outside is the world itself. The transcendental puzzle consists in the unintelligibility of this transcendental relativity.
The ego must take as scientific theme its own self and entire consciousness sphere—essential structures and performances of sense and validity. One must comprehend the stream of cogitationes as intentional lived experiences. Each individual cogito and every synthesis into a new cogito has its own cogitatum, essentially inseparable from the cogito. The “I can,” “I am doing,” and “I have an abiding faculty for” are essential occurrences. The ego, appearing as empty center, is a transcendental problem concerning faculties. The first issue is researching the correlation between consciousness as lived experience and its cogitatum. What is naively given as one thing becomes a transcendental clue for studying manifolds of consciousness. The discovery of apodictic laws of correlation was completely new and unprecedented.
Genuine analysis of consciousness is a hermeneutic of conscious life—that which continuously intends entities and constitutes them in essential manifolds. This problematic remained hidden because the ego in natural attitude is always directed to given objects; the flow of life’s enactments of unity remains anonymous. But the ego can reflectively turn its gaze, intentionally bend the question back, and make its enactment of unity visible. This turn to transcendental egological self-investigation does not mean turning away from the world; it makes possible radical investigation of the world and of the absolute entity. It is the only path to radically grounded philosophy. One must abstract from transcendental production of empathy at a first level to understand its presuppositions and overcome the illusion of transcendental solipsism—not by empty argumentation but concrete intentional explanation.
The Amsterdam Lectures: Two Senses of Phenomenology
The editor’s introduction notes that the planned three-part structure of the Amsterdam Lectures was not fully realized, as Part III is only found in the Britannica article. The Lectures remained unpublished in Husserl’s lifetime. The main text begins with a discussion of the two senses of phenomenology. At the turn of the century, a new science and method arose, developed through a radicalizing of an existing phenomenological method used by natural scientists like Mach and Hering. In psychology, Brentano made a systematic effort to create a rigorous science based on pure internal experience. The phenomenological movement presents a double sense: psychological phenomenology, serving as the radical science fundamental to psychology, and transcendental phenomenology, which functions as First Philosophy.
Modern psychology is the science of real events in the concrete world called “mental.” The mental is a dependent stratum of being for man and beast, who are physical realities. Psychology is thus a dependent branch of anthropology or zoology. One can abstract from all extra-physical determinations, viewing the world purely as physical Nature. The question arises whether a consistent and pure psychology is possible in parallel with pure natural science. This is answered in the negative: psychology cannot be a pure science of mental fact purified of everything physical. The purely mental has spatiotemporal determinations in the real world, and spatiotemporality belongs primordially to physical nature. Everything mental can belong to the spatiotemporal situation only through a foundedness in physical corporality. However, investigation into the purely mental is possible and necessary for rigorous scientific concepts, opening the prospect of an a priori science of essences belonging to the mental purely as such.
The method of pure psychology involves intuition and reflection. A priori truths arise from original sources in intuition. Every experiencing of the mental takes place in the mode of reflection. To live as ego-subject is to “live through” the mental, but this life is anonymous. Only reflection makes mental life itself the object of thematic gaze. Whatever becomes accessible through reflection has the character of being consciousness of something, which is intentionality—the essential character of mental life. Pure psychology would be designated as “phenomenology,” an a priori phenomenology. The concept of purity means being free of all that is psychophysical. The persistent prejudices arise from the natural sciences serving as models, seen in Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. Brentano’s discovery broke through the blindness but did not overcome naturalism. The deep source of errors lies in equating immanent temporality with objective, concrete temporality. Intentional analysis of immanent temporality destroys this image.
A Priori Concepts and the Copernican Turn
Concepts and propositions arising through eidetic variation are a priori in the same sense as logical and mathematical truths. Genuine apriority requires that variation and transition to unconditioned generality move into actual intuitions, not vague thinking of ideational projections fabricated from words. Practicing variation in the egological focus first produces the system of invariants in one’s own ego, unrelated to intersubjective accessibility. Bringing the experience of others into consideration reveals that it belongs a priori to the objective sense of that experience that the other be analogous in essence with my ego. Thus egological phenomenology is valid for every ego. After the reduction is broadened to include phenomenologically pure intersubjectivity, a universal a priori for communities of subjects becomes apparent.
Main Arguments
The central argument of the volume concerns the relationship between psychological phenomenology and transcendental phenomenology. Husserl maintains that these two disciplines, while dealing with the same phenomena and arriving at the same eidetic insights, must be kept rigorously distinct because they have fundamentally different meanings. Psychological phenomenology treats the psychic as a stratum of the world, while transcendental phenomenology treats the transcendental-subjective realm where the world’s validity originates.
Husserl argues that pure psychology, even in its eidetic form, remains a positive science. It has the world as a pre-given foundation, and pure psyches belong to presupposed bodies in nature. Psychology cannot ground transcendental philosophy because it operates within the natural focus, where the world is pregiven. Even an a priori psychological phenomenology that discloses the essence of mental subjectivity in eidetic generality remains transcendentally naïve. The psychologist cannot make available any of psychology’s premises to transcendental philosophy.
The transcendental reduction is presented as the method that opens a new kind of experience, bringing absolute subjectivity to light. Through this reduction, the world is put in parenthesis, and all positive sciences are subjected to the transcendental epochē. The reduction is to transcendental subjectivity, not merely to psychic subjectivity, leaving valid only the universum of transcendentally pure subjectivity with all its phenomena. Husserl insists that it would be a transcendental circle to base transcendental philosophy on psychology, since the subjectivity constituting all objectivity cannot be psychological subjectivity.
A remarkable parallelism exists between phenomenological psychology and transcendental phenomenology. Husserl argues that one is implicitly concealed in the other, and that transcendental intersubjectivity is the absolute and only self-sufficient ontological foundation. The two disciplines coincide proposition for proposition, except that psychological phenomenology treats the psychic as a stratum of the world while transcendental phenomenology treats the transcendental-subjective realm where the world’s validity originates.
Husserl argues that psychologism’s power lies in transcendental semblance. The breakdown in conceptualizing transcendental subjectivity prevented the separation of transcendental from psychological subjectivity, and transcendental psychologism remained unscathed by refutations of psychologism in formal logic. The task is to clarify the correlation between constituting subjectivity and constituted objectivity, a task that presupposes a ground of unquestioned being.
The volume also presents Husserl’s argument that transcendental phenomenology is called to develop a universal ontology at the transcendental level—the science of eidetic forms of every possible world and correlative forms of intentional constitution. It is the original locus of basic concepts for all sciences. An important step is founding an a priori pure psychology for empirical psychology, just as geometry serves physics. Husserl describes this as a task for the next one hundred years.
Against Heidegger, Husserl argues that the quest for the meaning of being is irrelevant and unnecessary. When Heidegger asserts that we understand being but lack the concept, Husserl exclaims, “We lack it? When would we need it?” Husserl insists that purified transcendental subjectivity is an acceptable basis for phenomenology, and he feels that Heidegger never understood transcendental subjectivity or the transcendental ego. He sees Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s preconceptual comprehension of being as an anthropology disguised as ontology, not true phenomenological investigation.
Key Concepts
Phenomenological reduction: The method by which one assumes a position above all worldly being, including one’s own human being. Through the transcendental reduction, the world is put in parenthesis, and all positive sciences are subjected to the transcendental epochē. Nothing is lost from the naive state; what showed itself as existing reality is recognized as a transcendental phenomenon.
Transcendental subjectivity: The absolute and only self-sufficient ontological foundation. The being of the world possesses self-evidentness only insofar as it is the ego’s own, within its experience, issuing from its consciousness. All worldly entities exist for the ego only as content of apperception with the modality of certitude-about-being. As transcendental ego, one performs this apperception, wherein world and human persons are first constituted.
Intentionality: The essential character of mental life, introduced by Brentano as the basic descriptive characteristic of the mental. Perceiving is of something, remembering is of something, thinking is of something. Phenomenality in a broadened sense is the fundamental characteristic of the mental. However, the meaning and method for a pure analysis of consciousness remained hidden from Brentano.
Eidetic variation: The method of free variation of examples, attending to what preserves itself. A priori truths arise from original sources in intuition. Genuine apriority requires that variation and transition to unconditioned generality move into actual intuitions, not vague thinking of ideational projections fabricated from words. Practicing variation in the egological focus first produces the system of invariants in one’s own ego.
Correlation research: The investigation of the correlation between consciousness as lived experience and its cogitatum. What is naively given as one thing becomes a transcendental clue for studying manifolds of consciousness. The discovery of apodictic laws of correlation was completely new and unprecedented.
Hermeneutic of conscious life: Genuine analysis of consciousness is a hermeneutic of conscious life—that which continuously intends entities and constitutes them in essential manifolds. This problematic remained hidden because the ego in natural attitude is always directed to given objects; the flow of life’s enactments of unity remains anonymous.
Transcendental epochē: The suspension of the natural focus in which the real world is pregiven on the basis of ongoing experience. The universal domain of transcendental questionability is the totality of transcendental naïveté.
Psychologism: The error of grounding transcendental philosophy on psychology. Locke and his school are charged with psychologism for presupposing objective experiences when their validity was the problem. Transcendental psychologism remained unscathed by refutations of psychologism in formal logic.
Pure psychology: A phenomenological psychology that serves as the radical science fundamental to empirical psychology. It is the unconditionally necessary foundation for a rigorously scientific psychology, the genuine analogue of exact natural science. The a priori here is quantitative due to Nature’s essence.
Transcendental parallelism: The remarkable parallelism and overlap between phenomenological psychology and transcendental phenomenology, where one is implicitly concealed in the other.
The natural focus: The focus in which the whole of daily life operates, and in which positive sciences continue to operate. In this focus, the real world is pregiven on the basis of ongoing experience, and everything that exists belongs to it.
The transcendental puzzle: The unintelligibility of transcendental relativity, striking us from the start and when discovering the transcendental attitude and ego.
The “I can”: An essential occurrence in the stream of cogitationes. The ego, appearing as empty center, is a transcendental problem concerning faculties.
Themes
A central theme of the volume is the conflict between two visions of phenomenology. Husserl’s vision sought mathematical certainty and the analysis of the crisis of the European sciences, while Heidegger’s had affinities with metaphysical speculation and theology. Heidegger sought to overhaul Western metaphysics, while Husserl sought to ground philosophy as a strict science. The editors note that Heidegger’s quest later led him into Nietzsche, reflection on the origin of the work of art, the poetry of Hölderlin, and down forest paths—a direction Husserl would have called a dead end.
The theme of betrayal and disillusionment runs through the personal documents in the volume. Husserl’s letter to Pfänder is a remarkable confession of what he calls his blindness. He had placed great hopes in Heidegger, seeing him as his one true student and heir. When Heidegger went to Marburg, Husserl regarded his success as his own. When Being and Time appeared, Husserl was surprised by the language but trusted Heidegger’s declaration that it was a continuation of his research. He doubted himself rather than Heidegger. He was warned that Heidegger’s phenomenology was an attack on his work, but Heidegger laughed it off. Husserl chose Heidegger as his successor, appeasing his misgivings with the thought that Heidegger would mature back in Freiburg. He calls this blindness arising from feeling isolated, like an appointed leader without followers.
The theme of the crisis of foundations appears in Husserl’s discussion of the positive sciences. Historical a priori sciences deal only with logical form and eidetic form of physical nature, remaining in transcendental naïveté. Their basic concepts lack clarity, transmitting defects to positive sciences. The crisis of foundations in arithmetic, chronology, and other fields shows that positive sciences can no longer be considered genuine; only phenomenological reform can liberate modern science.
The theme of the overcoming of old antitheses is prominent. Husserl argues that phenomenology resolves the old oppositions—rationalism versus empiricism, subjectivism versus objectivism, idealism versus realism—without dialectical tricks. Subjectivism is overcome only by the most universal subjectivism, which is also objectivism. Empiricism is overcome by the most universal empiricism positing a broadened concept of experience. Phenomenology as eidetics overcomes dogmatic rationalism with the most universal rationalism.
The theme of the philosopher as modest worker appears in Husserl’s rejection of philosophical renaissance. He demands that one renounce a merely personal philosophy and work as a modest worker for a philosophia perennis. This stands in implicit contrast to Heidegger’s path, which Husserl saw as brilliant but unscientific.
The theme of the naturalization of the mental is explored through the history of psychology. The persistent prejudices arise from the natural sciences serving as models. The naturalization of the mental is seen in Descartes, Hobbes, Locke’s tabula rasa interpretation, and Hume’s concept of consciousness as a bundle of mental data. Brentano’s discovery broke through the blindness but did not overcome naturalism. The deep source of errors lies in equating immanent temporality with objective, concrete temporality.
The theme of the paradox of doubling concerns the human fate of being both psychophysical subjects in the real world and transcendentally world-constituting subjects. The apperceiving conscious life-process is not what is apperceived. The transcendental-phenomenological reduction proceeds stepwise from the psychological reduction, and the psychologist who radically inhibits his apperception undergoes a Copernican revolution, becoming a transcendental spectator for whom the world is mere phenomenon.
The Author’s Conclusions
Husserl’s conclusions in this volume are both philosophical and personal. Philosophically, he maintains that transcendental phenomenology is the only path to radically grounded philosophy. The turn to transcendental egological self-investigation does not mean turning away from the world; it makes possible radical investigation of the world and of the absolute entity. The transcendental reduction opens a new kind of experience, bringing absolute subjectivity to light, and yields the thematic field of an absolute phenomenological science.
Husserl concludes that the old antitheses of philosophy are resolved within transcendental phenomenology. It is anti-metaphysical regarding purely formal hypotheses, but metaphysical problems return to a phenomenological base. It is not a system-philosophy but works via systematic, concrete investigations. Its transcendental idealism harbors natural realism. It joins Kant against shallow ontologism but is itself an ontology from transcendental experience.
Against Heidegger, Husserl concludes that the quest for the meaning of being is unnecessary. He could not see why purified transcendental subjectivity was an unacceptable basis for phenomenology. He felt that Heidegger never understood transcendental subjectivity or the transcendental ego. He saw Heidegger’s analysis as an anthropology disguised as ontology. His marginal notes show disappointment but never abandon the horizon of subjectivity.
Personally, Husserl concludes that Heidegger’s criticism is based on gross misunderstanding. After studying Being and Time for two months, he concluded that he had nothing to do with this Heideggerian profundity, this brilliant unscientific genius. He writes that Heidegger was his closest friend for almost a decade, but that inability to understand each other precludes friendship.
The volume ends with Husserl’s lecture “Phenomenology and Anthropology,” in which he criticizes the trend among younger German philosophers toward philosophical anthropology. He calls this a complete reversal of phenomenology’s fundamental standpoint. Original transcendental phenomenology denies any science of human being a share in laying philosophy’s foundations, opposing such attempts as anthropologism or psychologism. He frames the conflict as a return of old oppositions: the anthropological direction versus the transcendental direction. He argues that the method philosophy requires must be prefigured in the essence of philosophy, and he attempts to show that constitutive phenomenology provides the insights for a definitive decision.
Significance
This volume is significant for several reasons. It makes available for the first time in English the complete set of drafts of Husserl’s Encyclopaedia Britannica article, including Heidegger’s contributions and marginal notes. The publication of these materials in 1962 transformed scholarly understanding of the Husserl-Heidegger relationship, and this volume builds on that transformation by presenting the full textual evidence.
The volume documents the philosophical parting of the ways between Husserl and Heidegger, a split that shaped the subsequent history of continental philosophy. The editors describe how a happy convergence split into two visions of phenomenology, and how a personal friendship turned sour. The materials show Husserl’s growing realization of Heidegger’s apostasy, from his initial satisfaction with Being and Time to his eventual conclusion that he had nothing to do with Heideggerian profundity.
The Amsterdam Lectures are significant as Husserl’s most extended attempt to present phenomenology through the route of pure phenomenological psychology as a propaedeutic to transcendental phenomenology. This represents a third approach distinct from the Cartesian and ontological approaches, and Husserl considered it a further, expanded version of the Britannica article. The lectures remained unpublished in his lifetime, making their appearance in this volume particularly valuable.
The marginal notes on Sein und Zeit and Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik provide unique insight into Husserl’s reading of Heidegger’s major works. They show Husserl questioning Heidegger’s claims about death, conscience, resoluteness, and temporality, and objecting to what he saw as Heidegger’s repeated attacks on the just-there. The notes on the Kant book, dating from Tremezzo in September 1929, show Husserl’s realization of Heidegger’s apostasy. For Husserl, Kant’s First Critique is epistemology, not fundamental ontology, and Descartes, not Kant, was decisive.
The personal documents in the volume—Heidegger’s speech at Husserl’s emeritus celebration, Husserl’s letter to Pfänder, and the lecture on phenomenology and anthropology—provide a human dimension to the philosophical conflict. The letter to Pfänder is particularly remarkable for its candor about Husserl’s hopes for Heidegger, his sense of isolation, and his eventual disillusionment.
The volume also contributes to the history of the Encyclopaedia Britannica article itself, documenting the complex process by which Husserl’s 7000-word draft became a 4000-word published entry that scholars have characterized as an unreliable paraphrase. The editors’ reconstruction of the draft chronology, from the lost shorthand original through the two carbon copies to the final published version, is a model of textual scholarship.
The significance of the volume lies finally in its demonstration of the fundamental issues at stake in the Husserl-Heidegger confrontation: the nature of subjectivity, the possibility of philosophy as a strict science, the role of the transcendental reduction, and the question of whether the meaning of being is a legitimate philosophical problem. These issues continue to animate philosophical debate, and this volume makes available the primary texts in which they were first joined.
