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Notes
This formulation is found in Husserl’s Antrittsvorlesung at the University of Freiburg, cf. (Husserl, 1987).
For a summary of Husserl’s dismissal of system-building ambition, cf. the passages assembled in the editor’s introduction to (Husserl, 2002a).
The texts in vol. I stem from between 1909 and 1927, thus Husserl continued to work on this text corpus until his very late period. However, the bulk of his work stems from between 1909 and the beginning of the Great War (1914), and the later work is also partly inspired by his assistant Ludwig Landgrebe’s renewed work on these texts as of 1927.
See the passages assembled in the editor’s introduction to the present volume. On the idea of a “critique of reason,” see also Husserl’s diary, published in (Husserl, 1984).
All translations from the German are by the author.
The volume was edited together with Thomas Vongehr, who was mainly responsible for the technical and philological aspects of this edition. Suffice it to say that this is another model edition from an editorial standpoint, as one is used to from volumes in the Husserliana.
Especially in volumes II and III, the edition publishes most texts penned by Husserl, while volume I features a selection due to the varying quality of the material as well as it being in part repetitions of other texts already published in the Husserliana.
An anonymous reviewer has pointed out that it is possible, after all, that Husserl decided to carry out these investigations as a “means to ground his critique of reason” and cites the following passage in support of this option: “Simply for the reasons of an easier accessibility of the problems discussed here and of the method necessary for them it is useful to leave out all philosophical issues [alles Philosophische]. Perhaps it will become clear […] that also for philosophical interests a preliminary, as it were unphilosophical phenomenology—namely a purely psychological one—will be of great value.” (469) But this passage is just another example of Husserl skirting the real issue here. Why would this leaving out of the true philosophical issues be useful (apart from easier accessibility of the uninitiated reader), why of great value? What is the value? Apart from almost insulting the philosophically interested reader, I take this quotation as being just another instance of Husserl’s reluctance to engage in philosophical issues. The problematic parallel between transcendental phenomenology and what Husserl calls “intentional psychology” has been discussed and critiqued many times (as an example, cf. Crowell, 2002) and leaves more question marks than helps clarify anything.
Thanks to Philipp Berghofer, Ullrich Melle, and Andrew Krema for comments on an earlier version of the text. I also thank an anonymous reviewer for his/her comments, which I sought to address in the present version of this review (cf. esp. note 9).
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Luft, S. Review of Edmund Husserl’s Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, Teilband I: Verstand und Gegenstand. Husserl Stud 39, 217–231 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-022-09322-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-022-09322-4