A Letter to Alfred Schtz concerning Edmund Husserl Part 3

voegelinview.com/letter-to-alfred-schuetz-on-husserl-pt-3/

18/2/2011

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.

Husserls Misunderstanding of Descartes

Husserls misinterpretations are due to the fact that he imputes his own philosophic theme, the epoche of the world
with the aim of reaching the transcendental sphere of the ego, to Descartes as the latters exclusive, although only
unclearly and imperfectly realized, intention.

As a matter of fact the Cartesian meditation has a much richer content than the thematic subject matter reduced to
epistemological theory, and only because it has this richer content can it be incidentally utilized for the unfolding of
this set of problems.

First of all, the Cartesian meditation is not so shockingly new in its principal form, as Husserl would have it. The
Cartesian meditation is in principle a Christian meditation in the traditional style; it may be even classified more
specifically as a meditation of the Augustinian type as it has been undertaken in the history of the Christian spirit
hundreds of times since Augustine.

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The anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing (a meditation from the fourteenth century) has formulated the
classical thematic subject matter as well as any other thinker in the following sentence: It is needful for thee to bury
in a cloud of forgetting all creatures that God ever made, that you mayest direct thine intent to God Himself. The
gradual annihilation of the content of the world, moving from the bodily world to the spiritual, in order to reach the
point of transcendence in which, put in the Augustinian manner, the soul can turn in an intentio toward God, is the
purpose of this meditation.

The meditation is primarily a process in the individuals biography that is being produced by it, and the duration of
the point of transcendence and the intentio are a short-lived experience.

On a secondary level the process may be expressed linguistically, which imposes a literary form on the meditation. A
secondary realization of a linguistically recorded meditation is then, conversely, possible as an original meditation on
the part of the reader.

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Hence the Cartesian meditation is a literary deposit of an original meditation of this type; in fact, it is so to the point
that the momentary nature of the duration in the point of transcendence is utilized in a literary fashion for articulation
into a plurality of meditations.

Descartess First Meditation ends with a lament: Je retombe insensiblement de moi-mme dans mes anciennes
opinions [Insensibly I lapse away from myself into my old opinions], namely, into the belief in the objectivity of the
worlds content, although it was precisely the purpose of this meditation to free the self from this content, which
liberation alone makes possible the experience of the realissimum [the ultimately real] in the intentio.

The Novelty in the Cartesian Meditation

Actually there is indeed something new in the Cartesian meditationif this novelty did not exist, Husserls
interpretation would be not only partially, but completely wrong. The meditation of the classical style has the
contemptus mundi as point of departure; the objectivity of the world is regrettably so certain that the meditation
becomes a tool of liberation from it; it is through this meditation that the Christian thinker assures himself, if not of
the unreality, then at least of the irrelevance of the content of the world. The classic Christian thinker wishes not to
recognize the world in his meditation and, therefore, the worlds objectivity presents to him no problem of theoretical
epistemology.

Descartes finds himself in the historical position of wanting to recognize the world without, on account of this,
ceasing to be a Christian thinker. This is why on the one hand he can carry out a Christian meditation and, on the
other, he can utilize this very meditation with its epoch of the world to secure for himself once more, from the angle
of the Archimedean point of the experience of transcendence, the reality of the world that had previously been
annihilated by the meditation.

The Christian experience of transcendence is for Descartes in the same sense an indispensable presupposition of
the worlds objectivity, as Platos mystical view of the ideas is an indispensable presupposition of his idealist
epistemological theory. Hence I would formulate the element of novelty in Descartes in terms of the sentiment of the
contemptus mundi giving way to the sentiment of interest in the world. Therefore, due to his concern for episteme,
the experience of transcendence becomes in this meditation an instrument of assurance of the worlds objectivity.

The Proofs for the Existence of God

Husserl shows a deep misunderstanding of this set of problems, as he stumbles over Descartess proof of God and
fails to see beyond the proof the experiential content of the experience of transcendence. It is a well-known fact of
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the history of philosophythough Husserl is obviously not familiar with itthat the proofs of God of the scholastics,
including its Cartesian variety, do not have the purpose of ascertaining Gods existence for the thinker who makes
use of them.

The existence of God is for Christian thinkers from Anselm of Canterbury to Descartes a certainty derived from
different sources. Yet the proof is the style-form of scholastic thought, and, true to this style, the demonstratio
becomes expanded to include problems that are incapable of a demonstratio and hence have absolutely no need of
it.

The proofs of God are all certainly logically untenablebut not a single one of those striving for this proof was as
foolish as they all appear after one reads Kant.

Descartes Experience of Transcendence

Apart from the proof of God, we naturally find in Descartes the purely descriptive report on the experience of
transcendence, which offers no demonstration. This experience is all that matters in the meditative mode. We read
in the Third Meditation:

Jai en quelque faon en moi la notion premirement de linfini que du fini, cest-a-dire de Dieu que
de moi mme; car comment serait-il possible que je pusse connatre que je doute et que je desire,
cest--dire quil me manque quelque chose et que je ne suis pas tout parfait, si je navais pas en moi
aucune idee dun tre plus parfait que le mien, par la comparaison duquel je connatrais les dfauts
de ma nature?

[I have in some fashion in me the notion of the infinite before that of the finite, meaning of God, rather
than of myself; for how could it be possible that I could know that I doubt and that I desire; that means
that I lack something and that I am not quite perfect, if I did not have in me any idea of a being more
perfect than my own, compared to which I would know the defects of my nature?].

Hence the existence of God is not deduced; instead it is in the experience of the finiteness of the human being that
the infinite becomes a given. God cannot be called in doubt, for God is implicated in the experience of doubt and
imperfection. In the limit situation of finiteness is given, together with this-sidedness, the beyond of the limit.

Descartess ego cogitans [the thinking ego] is, consequently, endowed with a triple signification. Husserl has
correctly recognized two of these significations.

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He saw (1) the transcendental ego, which, turned toward the contents of the world, has in its cogitationes
[cogitations] the intentio [intention] toward the cogitata [content of cogitation, that which is thought]; (2) the
psychological ego, the soul as world content, which Descartes, fully deserving Husserls criticism, allows to slip into
the transcendental ego.

What Husserl has not seen is the third signification of the ego, on which the two first ones are grounded, ego as the
anima animi [the soul of the soul] in the Augustinian sense, whose intentio is directed, not toward the cogitata, but
toward transcendence. In this third signification of the anima animi the meditative process has its primary sense. In
the transcendence of the Augustinian intentio the I is simultaneously certain of itself and of God (not in a dogmatic
sense, but in the mystical sense of transcendence into the ground).

It is exclusively due to this confirmation that the egological sphere in Husserls sense is founded, together with the
intentio that tends in the opposite direction, toward the cogitataregardless of what form this confirmation may then
assume in the metaphysical speculation. (It is worthwhile also to compare the derivation of Hegels dialectics, as one
of the possible constructions of the foundation, from the mysticism of Jacob Boehme, as it is elucidated in Hegels
History of Philosophy. )

Thus Husserl has isolated the egological problem from the Cartesian meditation complex, developing it further
masterfully in his theory of transcendentality. It seems to me that the peculiarities of the Husserlian position are
rooted in this relationship to Descartes. Husserl has never carried out an original meditation in Descartess sense
in spite of his pretense of radicalism and of his postulate of a new beginning for every philosopher.

Husserl follows Descartes but avoids Transcendence

He has historically adopted and developed further the reduction of the world to the cogitating ego; consequently he is
unable to establish his own position of transcendental philosophy upon an originally conceived metaphysics.

The boundary that he is unable to cross is the founding subjectivity of the ego. Whence the ego receives its function
to ground the objectivity of the world on subjectivity remains not only without clarification, but is inevitably not at all
addressed. The higher foundation in the experience of transcendence is replaced by a foundation in an innerworldly
particularity of a set of problems of epistemological theory originated by Descartes.

Whether Husserl was insensible to the experiences of transcendence, whether he was frightened away from them,
or whether the cause was a biographical problem (because he wished to get away from Jewish religiosity and did not
wish to embrace the Christian variety)that I do not profess to know.

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In any case he chose for the foundation of his position entry into the immanence of a historical problematic and
blocked for himself with the greatest care the path to philosophical problems of transcendencewhich are the key
problems of philosophy.

This then accounts for the interpretations of history which, for a ranking philosopher must be regarded as curiosities,
corresponding to the telos revealed by him; this accounts for the justification of his position as functionary of this
telos; this accounts for his inability to find the absolute point, which he could not find by himself, in the philosophy of
others; this accounts for the apparent inhumanity in the disparagement of his predecessors; and this accountsI
am also inclined to believefor the continuously prolegomenous character of his work.

With all this I do not intend to impugn in the leastI do hope I do not have to say it more explicitlyHusserls genial
philosophical talent. What a thinker can achieve within the framework of a significant, historically fixed set of
problems, without entering in an original manner upon the fundamental problems of philosophizing, he has done
certainly with overwhelming success.

I have concluded what I wished to say. As I indicated at the outset, I am afraid you will hardly have the time to
respond to these questions in detail. Even if you should not get to it, this critique may very well serve, once we get
together again, as a basis of a discoursein the meanwhile it was for me a cathartic exercise.

With heartfelt thanks for all the love that you and your wife have shown us and with the best wishes.

Yours,

(Finished on September 20)

This is the third of three parts. Part 1 may be read HERE.

ANAMNESIS

Vol 6, CW

Ch 2 A Letter to Alfred Schtz concerning Edmund Husserl

pp 57-61
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This excerpt is taken from a collection of Voegelin quotations which can be found HERE

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