Husserl, Shorter Works [Paperback]

Edmund Husserl (Author), Peter McCormick (Author), Frederick Elliston (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 440 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Notre Dame Pr (April 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0268010773
• ISBN-13: 978-0268010775
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,091,198 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3.0 out of 5 stars Some experts tried to capture a modern thinker, November 29, 2005

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Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, Minnesota, U.S.A.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Husserl, Shorter Works (Paperback)

By 1981, when HUSSERL SHORTER WORKS was published in Great Britain and the United States, philosophy was a field in which prone thinkers sought anyone who could tell them that they were alright. Long after Husserl's death in 1938, Marly Biemel translated manuscript E-III-5 into English in August 1952. The introduction to this "Universal Teleology" by F. A. Elliston in this book calls it "one of the few occasions on which Husserl comments on a pervasive and consequential dimension of human experience--sexuality." (p. 332). As the introduction makes plain, Husserl was concerned only with normal drives and moral considerations. Perhaps having sex was much less common than the expectation of infinite gradual processes in those days, so intention actually played a large role for people who were otherwise quite content to be considered monads. `Of ' is just a two-letter word which appears numerous times on pages 335-337 in its description of:

The intersubjective drive in each and every subject viewed transcendentally: Relative world of monads, each constituting for itself an objective temporal world and, ultimately, the human monadic world and the temporal world of men.
... of the monadic totality ... (p. 335).

... of all monads ... of a universal development ... of relative worlds of monads ... of constitution ... of the monadic totality ... (Marginal Note, p. 335).

... of procreation. ... of the indeterminate hunger ... of course, of a "food," of a familiar object which can satisfy a hunger). ... of sexual hunger ... "This determinate sexual hunger has its modality of realization in the mode of copulation." ... of abstinence of repugnance. ... of the other.
... of the primary mode ... of each drive ... of the two primordialities. ... (Text, p. 335).

... of the "perceptions of the strange," ... of their world ... of his species.
... of the drive, ... of the world ... of parents, above all those of mother and child. ... of copulation.
... of drives ... of other ego-subjects. ... of the originary modal intention which simply emerges and constantly fulfills its own nucleus. ... of the internal consciousness of time, ... of intentionality of the will). Shouldn't we or musn't we posit a universal intentionality of the drive which unifies every original presence as permanence of a temporalization which concretely moves it forward from presence to presence in such a way that all content is the content of the realization of the drives and it is determined by the goal toward which the drive aims and in such a manner that the superior drives in every primordial presence are transcended and force themselves within every other presence thus connecting all of the presences as monads, while they are all implied in each other--intentionally? ... of every primordiality ... of objectification ... of the world ...
... of a universal teleology ... of fulfilling itself ... of a total system of fulfillment.
... of the centrality of the ego ... of the intentional implication, ... of all monads, of the changing immediate and mediate reciprocal transcending of the drives of the community of the monads. ... of the mediacy of transcendence, ... of monadic degrees ... of development of the ego and of the world. ... of the degrees of animal monads of the animal, ... of the infantile and pre-infantile monads--in the permanence of the "ontogenetic" philogenetic development. (p. 336).
... of the egos ... of acts ... of the constitutions of "beings," and lastly of an horizon of the world ... of a unitary and conscious community of monads. This is the community of universally constituted drives which has, corresponding to it, a world which always brings anew the monads to a new formation and to their "development." In this form the totality of the monads gradually comes to self-consciousness and attains its maximum universality as a human community. (pp. 336-337).
... of the knowledge of the world ... of a transcendental reduction ... of the generative connection of all degrees of monads: ... of their ontogenetic development.
... The question arises concerning the intentionality of copulation. In the fulfillment of the drive, ...
... of the drive ... of the life of the other, of what follows as the act of reproduction ... as an act of copenetration which is in the life of the world.
... of my concrete being ... of the ego ... of intentionality ... of the world ... of the world ... of intersubjective pre-time. The intersubjective "act of reproduction" "motivates" natural processes in the life of the other ... of pregnancy.
Teleology encompasses all of the monads. ...
... the world of my and our experience, ... of this world. (p. 337).

Another two-letter word, `as, ' shows up in "as a man" and "in which the animal experiences itself as having a world, as an animal of his species." (p. 336).

This book might be suitable for an introduction to advanced philosophy, one of the thinkers that Heidegger studied shortly before charting his own path. HUSSERL SHORTER WORKS has 21 selections, each with its own introduction, arranged in five parts. The Glossary on pages 365-370 explains roughly 50 English words, about 40 German words, a few in Latin and Greek, and some like "irreal" which might not belong to any language. The Husserl Bibliography starts with Abbreviations on pages 371-376, then works in chronological order on pages 377-380, followed by Works on Husserl and Phenomenology on pages 381-430.

The second selection's introduction, "On the Misfortunes of Edmund Husserl's ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA Article `Phenomenology' " by Herbert Spiegelberg (pp. 18-20) reveals that the original translator had to reduce the original 7,000 German words to 4,000 English words, and fifteen sub-headings in the German text were dropped. This book did not have such severe space limitations. As printed in this book, the final three paragraphs are called:

"16. The Phenomenological Resolution of All Philosophical Antitheses." (p. 34).