Tom 34 (2022): Zeszyt 1 (December 2022)

This paper focuses on Carl Stumpf’s evaluation of Husserl’s phenomenology in his Logical Investigations and in the first book of Ideas. I first examine Stumpf’s reception of the phenomenology of the Logical Investigations. I then turn to §§ 85-86 of Ideas, in which Husserl seeks to distinguish his “pure” phenomenology from Stumpf’s phenomenology. In the third part, I examine Stumpf’s critique of the new version of phenomenology that Husserl develops in his Ideas in §13 of Erkenntnislehre, and, in the fourth part, I examine the Spinozist interpretation of noetic-noematic correlations in Stumpf’s two studies of Spinoza. I conclude by asking whether the version of phenomenology that Husserl elaborates on during the Freiburg period does not anticipate, to some extent, Stumpf’s criticisms while confirming the latter’s diagnosis of the phenomenology of Ideas.

What, if any, are the limits of the Husserlian concept of Gegebenheit? Is there a limit beyond which nothing can be seen by the phenomenologist? In asking these questions, we allude to a distinction typical of Kantian criticism: “Grenze” or “Schranke”, limit or boundary? These same questions are reformulated in a famous review of Ideen I by Paul Natorp, a Marburg neo-Kantian who directly attacks the unlimited scope Husserl gives to the phenomenological principle of intuition. From a phenomenological point of view, however, the Achilles’ heel of the critical method lies in the impossibility of accessing by intuition, beyond phenomena, the thing-in-itself. A major consequence is that the phenomenological dissolution of the “Grenze” prescribes a limitless opening to the horizon of phenomena. But if we can speak of a limitless openness, it is because in a certain way everything gives itself to be seen. What kind of vision is this? And what kind of Gegebenheit is at work here? The Husserlian answer lies in the recovery of a concept, the “idea in the Kantian sense”, without its counterpart, the “limit”, whereas for Kant as well as for Natorp it is precisely the concept of “limit” that characterizes the gnoseological status of the “idea”.

In 1931 Husserl writes and publishes the Epilogue to his Ideas, where he aims to explain the core of his work. Aware that this is his a legacy which must be carried forward, he seeks to preserve it from what he calls “the mistaken views” found in the new ways of conducting phenomenology. Our text underlines the polemic side of Husserl’s project, which is basically but tacitly against Heidegger, and sustains that this auto-interpretive piece is a fundamental key within Husserl’s corpus, where he defines the direction of his phenomenological project. At the center of the controversy are the answers to the objections of intellectualism and solipsism, and the disavowal of all forms of anthropologism in the conception of subjectivity.

This work starts by unfolding Levinas’ legacy from Bergson to phenomenology. Particularly, the article explores how Levinas deeply understood the meaning of Husserl’s transcendental idealism of Ideas I. He adheres to Husserl’s re(con)duction to the transcendental, understood by Levinas as the sense of existence overlooked by the naturalist ontology. Finally, it develops the Levinasian continuation of genetic phenomenology and its conclusion, that is, the irreducibility of ethical responsibility.

An attempt to bring Husserl’s phenomenology and psychopathology closer, based on the text of § 49 of the Ideen. What is an experience of annihilation of the world? How is a world undone? We will focus on the examples of the end of the world described in the stories of Gérard de Nerval and in the patients of Wolfgang Blankenburg.

Countless scholars have wrestled with the ambiguities and complexities in determining the role of the noema in Husserl’s theory of intentionality since his transcendental turn, and consequently converted what was intended to be a structural solution to a problem into a contested problem itself.¹ Shifting emphasis from the ‘whatness’, or ontological concerns of the correlate noesis—noema to the ‘howness’, or methodological force of phenomenology, allows me to discuss two things. The first is theological. Before and since Janicaud’s pronouncement of the ‘theological turn’ in phenomenology, the intentionality thesis has been rejected as a means to account for certain experiences given differently to object-phenomena (Janicaud, 2000). In accounting for religious experience as a complex movement between faith and doubt, my work reaches not for the ‘essence of phenomenality’ (Marion), or a givenness beyond intuition made invisible, nor does it seek to describe a transcendence beyond immanence, or proof in the existence of a god/gods, rather it concerns itself with the processes and underlying structures of belief. Arguably by focusing upon the noetic and noematic structure of intentional acts, intentional analysis is revitalised for delineating the belief modalities of faith and doubt in religious experiences.