Husserl
Phil Agre (pagre who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Mon, 24 Jun 1996 16:03:44 -0700 (PDT)
I haven't been following the Husserl discussion closely, but to respond
quickly to Michael Glassman, I don't think Husserl could have influenced
Comte since he lived a century later. I'm not sure who Michael could
have in mind. In any case, it seems like it would be hard to draw Husserl
into the CHAT camp, inasmuch as he was strictly Cartesian (or perhaps
more directly Kantian) in his insistence that society and history are
distal phenomena, not constitutive of the objects of experience. It is
true that Schutz started from Husserl in his phenomenology of the social
world, but this Cartesian inheritance means that in practice Schutz has
to spend a great deal of effort trying to solve the problem that emerges
in Anglophone philosophy as the problem of other minds. This effort
was a valuable and sometimes underacknowledged resource for Garfinkel
and Sacks, but its constitution also accounts for the ambivalence that
many anthropologists and CHAT people feel about the foundations of the
indisputably valuable work that G's and S's followers have done. Now, one
does get a whole theory of historicity in Heidegger as part of Heidegger's
turn away from Husserl's bracketing of activity, but what Heidegger is
really doing is generalizing a narrow conception of the historicity of
philosophical ideas into a theory of the historicity of cultural forms
of life. This is an improvement over Husserl, but not over Dilthey,
who is a much more interesting figure for CHAT anyway. I don't know what
interaction, if any, Husserl (or analogous figures such as Brentano and
Frege) might have had with the sociology or culturally tinged psychology
of prewar Germany. It's an interesting historical question, and I'm sure
it has been addressed in the extensive secondary literature on Husserl.
I do know that I can't think of any moments in either Husserl or Heidegger
where one gets even a taste of the stagewise cultural developmentalism
that one finds in the whole early anthropological lineage (Tylor, Levy-
Bruhl, etc) that plainly influenced Engels and to a lesser extent Marx.
Indeed I cannot think of such moments anywhere else besides Engels in the
history of German cultural thought, which tends to be nostalgic rather
than progressive, but there are many authors there that I haven't read.
Phil Agre