Re: Husserl

Phil Agre (pagre who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Wed, 26 Jun 1996 04:10:59 -0700 (PDT)

I am afraid that I don't find Piotr Szybek's message very helpful. He
suggests that we disregard the entire secondary literature on Husserl,
and he suggests that I have read nothing else, on the sole ground that my
interpretations agree with this literature and not with his. My accounts
of Husserl's views are entirely conventional, and Piotr offers no evidence
against them, just a series of non sequiturs and challenges to explicate
concepts which I am using in entirely conventional ways. I happen to think
that Husserl's work is enormously valuable, but that its theories of culture
and history are simply not among its greatest strengths. Piotr basically
acknowledges as much, suggesting that we change the subject from culture
and history to the body. I do think there's a useful point of dialogue
there, and my suggestion that Husserl is not usefully construed as a CHAT
author is not meant to preempt it. If Piotr has come to interpretations of
Husserl that differ from the entire secondary literature and that help us
relate it better to CHAT then that is interesting news and it would be great
to hear more about it. But we can't have a constructive discussion based
solely on assertions of authority.

Rereading his message now and trying to find a constructive way forward,
all I can do is agree that we drop the term Cartesian. The conventional
interpretation is that Husserl's earlier work is an attempt to work
through and systematize the phenomenology that Descartes sketches in the
Meditations, that Heidegger's Being and Time was an attempt to correct some
problems in this theory with regard to history and activity, and that The
Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology is Husserl's
reply. I happen to think that TCoESaTT is a great book, for example in
its interpretation of the rise of science. I would be interested to hear
of Piotr's dissents from the conventional interpretation of other aspects
of it.

Phil Agre