The Hidden Dialectic in Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology

Abstract

As is well known, Husserl was throughout his life quite disdainful of Hegelian philosophy. It was only with great reluctance that he even mentioned Hegel a few times, even in those sections of his work in which he necessarily gave his own summary of the development of Western philosophy, namely in Erste Philosophic and in Krisis. And even when he was constrained to mention the philosophical contribution of Hegel, there was never any full discussion of dialectical logic. For a philosopher with such a deep concern for logic and the transcendental foundations of logic, this refusal to engage Hegel is puzzling, but certain. As my own early teachers of Husserl correctly insisted: If there is ever any doubt as to Husserl’s logical position on any disputed question, one will never go wrong in interpreting him in an anti-Hegelian sense. In the very few places where he forced himself to say something positive about Hegel, the best he could come up with was that Hegel’s thought provides us more with a Weltanschauung than with a strict philosophy.¹