Phenomenology Kitten—Husserlian Swirls

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On this day in Round and Square History
3 November 2012—Structure, History, and Culture—The Electoral College (a)
3 November 2011—Middles: Middle Management

[a] Appearing to consciousness RF

Our attainment of enlightenment is something like the reflection of the

moon in water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water cleft apart...

The whole moon and the whole sky find room enough in a single dewdrop...

                             —Dōgen, Conversations

[b] Hidden RF

Immanuel Kant makes the work of understanding into a real chore, so it is with great, um, trepidation that I note here the work of Edmund Husserl. He is indisputably one of the key thinkers in the phenomenological tradition that flowed in fits and starts from the work of Kant. He was also a creative thinker who brought new dimensions to this little corner of the Western philosophical tradition...

...and he is difficult to read.

What else is new? You can't spell phenomenology without o-b-f-u-s-c-a-t-o-r-y (well, actually you can, but it was fun while it lasted).

We'll start down the path tomorrow, but let's take a quick look at one rare and exceptionally clear paragraph. Here, Husserl wrote in anticipation of the attacks that phenomenology would face from critics. It will win out in the end, asserted Husserl.

          Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from 
          on high instead of studying and understanding things from within. They often
          behave toward phenomenology as Berkeley—otherwise a brilliant philosopher
          and psychologist—behaved two centuries ago toward the then newly 
          established infinitesimal calculus. He thought that he could prove, by his
          logically sharp but superficial criticism, this sort of mathematical analysis to be
          a completely groundless extravagance, a vacuous game played with empty 
          abstractions. It is utterly beyond doubt that phenomenology, new and most
          fertile, will overcome all resistance and stupidity and will enjoy enormous 
          development, just as the infinitesimal mathematics that was so alien to its 
          contemporaries did, and just as exact physics, in opposition to the brilliantly
          obscure natural philosophy of the Renaissance, has done since the time of
          Galileo.[1]

Notes
[1] Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney, eds, The Phenomenology Reader (New York: Routledge, 2002), 133.

Bibliography
Moran, Dermot and Timothy Mooney, eds. The Phenomenology Reader. New York: Routledge, 2002.

[c] Phenomena RF

[Originally posted on September 15, 2014]