Husserl the Greek, Husserl the Modern

Résumé En

Greeks. This judgment, differing from that of partisans of "Husserlian philosophy" -and despite, no less, the adversaries of it -, endures because it reaches in the work of the founder of phenomenology a general signification and a historical scope which go well beyond what this work, insofar as it is also indeed a certain philosophy among others, possesses in itself as "strengths" and as "weaknesses" (generally speaking as "limits" proper to an epoch, to a man and to a school). It reaches, indeed, and recognizes in it an effort to render modern humanity capable of that which no humanity since the Greeks has any longer been capable: life itself as life in and by the "philosophical," that is to say in and by the radical responsibility with respect to the true and to being, center and source of an articulated unification of all practice and of all theory at whatever level to which they belong. This Husserlian project regarding a capacity of humanity with respect to the question of being has been taken up, but outside phenomenology, by Heidegger. And the Heideggerian posterity, in the habitual intersecting of paternal incomprehension and parricidal fidelity, in short this succession which is itself "Greek," altogether tragic, is probably the only one that matters. But it is certainly not the only one which has manifested itself in the public life of the spirit, that is to say in culture and in the university. Numerous, or rather innumerable, are the philosophers who owed it to Husserl to have found the means and the form, the path and the language to be able to be philosophers between the first World War and the ten years which followed the second. That extends from Max Scheler (Le Formalism dans l'éthique, 1916) to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by way of Eugen Fink, Ludwig Landgrebe, Roman Ingarden, Emmanuel Levinas, and the first Sartre, not to mention the philosophy students who in turn read Husserl from 1930 to 1955, as one read Hegel from 1806 to 1835. Today Husserl is enduring the kind of purgatory, or imperceptible effacement rather, which effects as we know 1 Article published in the Encyclopaedia Universalis, Paris, 1971. [Trans.-It originally appeared under the title, "Husserl the Greek, Husserl the Modern." The text, on which this translation is based, was later published in Traditionis traditio, Paris, Gallimard, 1972, p. 71-92.] (but at a moment and for a duration which we do not know) the greatest of works. This time of decline and of relative isolation only signifies that the cutting edge of a new reading of phenomenology is being sharpened, far from any affiliations with schools and any militant refutations, a reading which, in the dismantling of its modern sepulcher, will search piously and accurately for the contour of this "Greek" thought. I. FROM MATHEMATICS AND FRANZ BRENTANO TO PHENOMENOLOGYEdmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was born in Prossnitz (Austro-Hungary), of Adolf Abraham Husserl and of Julie Selinger, both of Jewish ascendency. After his secondary studies at the Deutsche Staatsgymnasium in Olmutz, he followed for three semesters at the University of Leipzig, in 1876-1877, courses in physics, mathematics, astronomy and philosophy.Beginning in April, 1878, he spent six semesters at the University of Berlin where, while continuing his studies in philosophy, he principally studied mathematics, with Leopold Kronecker and Karl Weierstrass as professors. In March of 1881, in Vienna, he followed the teachings of Leo Königsberger, under whose direction, on November 29, 1882, he was promoted to doctor in philosophy with a dissertation entitled Contributions to the Theory of the Calculation of Variations (Beiträge zur Theorie der Variationsrechnung). During the summer semester of 1883, Husserl was an assistant to Weierstrass in Berlin; but in the 1883-1884 semester, he returned to Vienna to pursue his studies in philosophy with Franz Brentano, with whom he quickly became friends. On April 8, 1886, he converted to the Christian faith and entered the Lutheran Evangelical Church, where on August 1 st of the same year he received his baptism. In October, recommended by Franz Brentano, he joined Carl Stumpf at Halle-Wittenberg University where in one year he completed his Habilitationsschrift with a study on the concept of number (Uber den Begriff der Zahl. Psychologische Analysen).On August 6, 1887, he married Malvina Steinschneider, a primary-school teacher of Jewish ascendency who had shortly before converted to Lutheranism, with whom he will have three children. On October 24, 1887, he gave his inaugural lesson at the University of Halle on the ends and the tasks of metaphysics (Die Ziele und Aufgaben der Metaphysik). From the summer semester of 1887 to that of 1894, he taught as privatdozent à the University of Halle,