A Letter to Alfred Schtz concerning Edmund Husserl Part 1

voegelinview.com/letter-to-alfred-schuetz-on-husserl-pt-1/

5/2/2011

This letter has earned a place alongside Voegelins important published essays. It sets forth his analysis of Husserls
achievements and shortcommings as well as Descartes. Because it is a long letter it is presented here in three
parts. Contributor David Walsh makes reference to it in his concurrently appearing essay Voegelin and Heidegger.

903 Camelia Avenue

Baton Rouge, LA.

September 17, 1943

Dear Friend,

Please accept our heartfelt thanks for those fine evenings which we were able to spend with you and your dear
wife. Unfortunately, the time we spent together was all too brief, not allowing us to discuss many things that are
certainly of great interest to both of us . . . .

Even now the impossibility of communicating with you face-to-face causes me great pain. Kaufmann was so kind to
lend me Husserls essay The Crisis of European Sciences, which figures in volume I of the Philosophia. I just
finished reading it and would love to discuss it with you. Allow me to offer just a few brief commentsyou might not
have time to enter into particulars in your answer, but perhaps you might be able to let me know when I might have
misunderstood Husserl.

To start with: The overall impression is magnificentnot only in comparison with other philosophical output of our
time, but also in comparison with many other works by Husserl. It is most gratifying that Husserl does not indulge in
the officious tomfoolery (stupendous and laborious analyses, and so on) that mars a number of pages of the
Ideas; no more than two or three times does he break into a sweat over philosophical existence. In spite of the dry
language the essay moves in the Olympian atmosphere of pure philosophical enthusiasm.

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The handling of the subject matter is masterful; the presentation of the problems of the Galilean world view and of
the occlusions that lead to physicalism is of unparalleled clarity; finally, the problem of transcendental subjectivity as
the theme of philosophy since Descartes has never been revealed to me as clearly as in this case. The critique of
the earlier attempts to formulate the transcendental question seems quite pertinent. Accordingly, the elaboration of
the egological dimension and the founding of the objectivity of the world on the achievements of the transcendental
ego are quite successful.

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I am more than willing to recognize this essay as the most significant achievement in epistemological critique of our
time.

Nevertheless, this essay, too, has disappointed me, just like Husserls other works. The epistemological critique may
well be an eminently important topic of philosophy, but it does not exhaust the entire range of philosophical
endeavor. Within this range epistemological critique is neither an independent topic, nor a sphere, in which all other
philosophical problems are rooted. If this were so, the laying of the foundation of an epistemological critique would
mean also the laying of the foundation of philosophy.

The essay is, just like the Logical Investigations and the Ideas, a preface to a philosophy, but not a well-founded
philosophical enterprise. Naturally this objection could be countered by the argument that great revelations will be
found in Husserls as-yet-unpublished works. Yet I have been hearing this argument for the past twenty years, and
as such it would make me suspicious that a great thinker would not even once touch, in the course of a rich
publication record, a fundamental problem of philosophy, except at the end of his life.

Hence it would appear to me quite justified not to expect from the forthcoming publications of Husserls literary
remains anything that would enrich the already familiar range of Husserls topics in unexpected dimensions, as
valuable as might be the logical and epistemologically critical studies contained in the as-yet-unpublished manu
scripts.

Nevertheless I do believe that, on the strength of the essay under investigation, the reasons become clear as to why
there cannot be expected anything else that would qualify as fundamental in the philosophical sense. Allow me to
make a couple of observations on the subject.

Husserl as Euro-centric Victorian

(1) Husserl unfolds in this essay an image of history that is, in its general features, no different from the image of
history drawn in his Vienna lecture that I had attended. This image is Victorian. The relevant history of mankind
consists of Greek antiquity and the modern age since the Renaissance. Accordingly, Hellenism, Christianity, the
Middle Agesan insignificant time span of no more than two thousand yearsare a superfluous interlude; the Hindus
and the Chinese (whom Husserl puts into quotation marks) are a slightly ridiculous curiosity on the periphery of the
terrestrial globe, in whose center stands Western man as man per se.

Man is a rational creature. Consequently philosophy and science are the historical movement of the revelation of
universal reason, innate in man as such (p. 92). It was in the Greek mankind that the entelechy in mankind
achieved a breakthrough (p. 91). After the initial foundation of philosophy by the Greeks and the interval of two
thousand years, during which this entelechy evidently amused itself elsewhere, its modern reestablishment has
been implemented by Descartes.

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This modern Cartesian reestablishment went awry due to certain imperfections, masterfully analyzed by Husserl.
Kant made a good partial beginning to bring philosophy back on the right track. We skip the philosophy of German
idealism and Romanticism; this brings us to philosophys final foundation, embodied in Husserlian
transcendentalism.

(2) I do not believe that much can be said in defense of this impoverished image of the intellectual history of
mankind. One might indeed object that this impoverishment is due to the forgivable naivete of a great systematic
philosopher which has no bearing on his essential achievements; it might even be improper to belabor this point with
such explicit emphasis. To be sure, I could in turn object that a German post-Hegelian philosopher, unable to handle
any better the problem of the spirits historicityas evident from the essay in questionis for this very reason a
philosopher of dubious substance. Still, I will not have recourse to this argument. It seems more important to me
that, as evidenced by the essay in question, its image of history is not a pardonable systematically inessential
derailment; instead it represents a direct presupposition of Husserls thematic.

Paragraph 15 (pp. 145 ff. ) introduces an instructive reflection concerning the method of our historical way of
thinking. The principles of this method are as follows:

(a) The historical becoming of philosophy has a teleology.

(b) This teleology may be understood from within the historical forms of philosophizing.

(c) It is this teleology understood from within and elucidated that allows the formulation of the telos itself, thus
making it the task of the present-day philosopher (i. e., of Husserl).

(d) Hence the personal philosophical task becomes revealed through the understanding of the telos in the history of
the modern spirit.

(e) This, however, does not result in a historical relativization of the task. What is involved here is not an
arrangement in a merely external causal sequence. The telos is timeless and unfolds only in historical becoming.

(f) The philosophers existence thus acquires a uniquely dialectic character, revealed in the following two Husserlian
theses:

(aa) We are exclusively a product of historically spiritual becoming.

This kind of enlightenment of history as a regression back to the initial foundation of the goals that are links in the
chain of future generations . . . is nothing else but a genuine self-recollection of the philosopher of what it is he is
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actually aiming at, of what constitutes will in him, out of the will and as the will of his spiritual forebears. This means
to revitalize the hidden historical meaning of the sedimented conceptuality which is the taken for granted ground of
his private and unhistorical labors.

(bb) Yet in accordance with its essence, each initial foundation must be associated with a final foundation, which is
the task of the historical process. This final foundation is completed when the task has achieved perfect clarity,
becoming thus an apodictic method that in each step of the process of attainment is a continuous thoroughfare for
new steps, which possess the nature of the absolutely successful, i. e., of the apodictic. Philosophy as an infinite
task would thus reach its apodictic beginning, its horizon of apodictic pursuit. (My emphasis).

(g) The final foundation is to be distinguished from the self-recollections, carried out by every historical philosopher
in order to fix his own attitude to his fellow-philosophers in the past and the present. The self-interpretations of all
other philosophers teach us nothing in respect to what is of the essence in terms of the history of philosophy. The
telos of history is revealed only in the interpretation of the final foundation achieved by Husserl; with its help then the
philosophers of the past might be understood better than they had understood themselves.

(h) It follows from the privileged position of the teleological view of history derived from the final foundation that this
view cannot be refuted by historical arguments (perhaps of the kind that the philosopher, as shown factually and
philologically, had intended something entirely different from what Husserl imputes to him on the strength of his
knowledge of the telos). In the evidence of a critical universal view there shines forth at last from behind the
historical facts of the history of philosophy a meaningful harmony of the historical process.

The Philosopher as Functionary of Mankind

(3) The relationship between the systematic task of the transcendental philosopher and the history of philosophy is
summed up in the following formulas: Hence we are in our philosophizing the functionaries of mankind (p. 93) and:
We are, in fact, what we are, as functionaries of a modern philosophical humanity, as heirs and fellow-bearers of an
unceasingly continuous direction of will, and have this function bestowed on us by an initial foundation, which is,
nevertheless, at the same time a later foundation and alteration of the original Greek foundation. It is the latter that
harbors the teleological inception, and is, as a result, the true birth of the European spirit taken as a whole (p. 146).

This formulation, seen in the context of the principles formulated in paragraph 15, calls for a few observations. And,
as you may well imagine, I feel the urge to voice all kinds of forceful comments. Thus, for instance, I would like to
indicate that I am in general prejudiced against any kind of functionaries; in this respect I do not draw a sufficiently
clear line between the functionaries of the National Socialist Party and the functionaries of mankind; or, I would like
to add that the functionaries of the party slaughter humans, while the functionary of mankind does not cast a
sufficiently penetrating glance into the essence of this evil that might reveal to him at least one of its roots in the
substance of the functionarybut at this point Lissy says that it is boorish on my part to send you, as thanks for the
glorious meal you lavished on us at the Champs Elysees, a critique of Husserl, and that, if I absolutely insisted on
doing this, the critique at least should avoid any humoristic admixtures. Let us then get serious.

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Any serious analysis of Husserls position, however, is beset by difficulties; even though the formulation of his
attitude is linguistically quite clear, it is not so in terms of the thought process. Husserl was no radical philosopher in
the sense that he saw clearly the radices of his thinking. His radicalism, which he never fails to emphasize, is not a
radicalism of philosophical existence; instead, it is a radicalism resulting from his pursuit of a special problem, which
is, specifically, that of transcendental philosophy. It is this special issue that I believe he has pursued right down to
its rootsin this respect the radicalism of his pathos is genuine.

Nevertheless the question whether his advance in the objectivity of the cognition of the worldright down to the roots
within the grounding subjectivity of the egois in fact an advance in the fundamental problems of philosophy, Husserl
did not even come near to touching, as far as I can see, in his published works. It seems to me that in respect to this
point Husserl demonstrates a remarkable naivete. The clarity of the linguistic formulas of the essay under investiga
tion conceals a world of material implications that would have to be thoroughly developed so that Husserls own
position might be adequately understood.

Such a development obviously cannot be undertaken in the letter format and, I am afraid, is not worth the effort of
developing in its requisite extent. I must therefore confine my efforts to laying bare briefly only some of the
concealed layers, leaving to your imagination the completion of the backgrounds and conclusions.

This is the first of three parts. Part 2 may be read HERE.

ANAMNESIS

Vol 6, CW

Ch 2 A Letter to Alfred Schtz concerning Edmund Husserl

pp 45-50

This excerpt is taken from a collection of Voegelin quotations which can be found HERE

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