A Letter to Alfred Schtz concerning Edmund Husserl Part 2

voegelinview.com/letter-to-alfred-schuetz-on-husserl-pt-2/

5/2/2011

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.

Husserl and Averroes World Soul

In the uppermost and most general layer Husserls historical teleology calls for classification under the category
of Averroist speculation.FN I have addressed this topic in detail in my Authoritarian State as a motive occasioning
the rise of national socialist and fascist speculations. My article on Siger de Brabant, with which you are likely to be
more familiar, should make clear the reasons for this classification. We have to distinguish in Western philosophy
between two fundamental positions concerning the essence of man; they are represented most clearly by the
Christian orthodoxy of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the heterodoxy of Siger. The Thomistic position places emphasis
on the singularity of human substance (intellectus), Sigers on the world soul, of which the singular human
substance is a particle. Both positions can be historically traced back to Aristotles doctrine of the soul (De Anima 3),
which left this question hanging in the balance, so that in fact either one of the two positions can be deduced from
De Anima.

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The assumption of the world soul and of the corresponding nature of the individual soul qua particle of the former I
simply call the Averroist stance, because Averroess commentaries on Aristotle have become in terms of literary
history the most important source in the West of the construction of this position since the thirteenth century. I am of
course clearly aware of the fact that Averroes has not elaborated this position as an original insight. Zenos philos
ophy of the world logos and of its apospasmata [sparks] as individual souls contains it in principle. The Averroist
position has experienced in this sense numerous alterations and derivative formations. The collective soul may be
understood as ranking above the individual souls as a world-transcendent soul, as it was with Zeno, or the collective
may be transferred to the world itself, as, for instance, the rational entelechy of human development toward
perfection, which represents a substantial component of the Kantian philosophy of history; it may also appear in the
guise of a particular, innerworldly collectivity, as is the case with the collectivist speculations of communism, national
socialism, and fascism.

Husserls collectivist telos of philosophical reason could be qualified within the system of coordinates of these
Averroist variations as follows: Insofar as Husserls collectivist telos is a rational or spiritual substance, it is closely
related to the Stoic logos or the Averroist intellectus. The problem of philosophy becomes identified with the problem
of the spirit in general, and insofar as spirit is the substance of man, it becomes identified with the problem of man in
his fully developed form. The true spiritual battles of European humanity as such are fought as the battles of
philosophy (p. 91). Mankind becomes, however, reduced to European mankind, as becomes evident in this
passage and elsewhere (cf. especially p. 92) and differentiated from merely empirical anthropological types such
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as are in evidence in China and India (p. 92).

The problem of mankind thus becomes shifted from Zenonic, Averroist, and Kantian universality to the historical
sphere, and man becomes a finite historical phenomenon of specific periods of human history, i. e., of antiquity and
modernity. (Medieval man might be considered, even though this is not stated expressly, to be also only an
anthropological type, the same as the Chinese and Indian man. )

Due to this reduction of mankind to a community of individuals engaged in philosophizing with one another in
Husserls sense, the philosophical telos is shifted to the neighborhood of particular intramundane collectivities of the
type of the Marxist proletariat, of the Hitlerite German Volk, and of Mussolinis Italiana.

Husserls Bismarckian Progressivism

(b) Husserls historically collectivist metaphysics has consequences for his historical method. The reduction of the
collective to a small, genuinely human segment implies the historical irrelevance of the preponderant quantum of
human history under the title of the merely anthropological. Yet even within this small relevant segment there
occurs a differentiation of relevance. From among the various possibilities that are available to him, Husserl chooses
his own, induced by the spectacle of philosophical systems as they succeed one another, coming and going, without
any one of them qualifying as the definitive one.

Are we to conclude that the history of philosophy (since it is identical with the history of the relevant human spirit) is
meaningless? Or is history ruled by some order and, along with it, by some meaning? His answer is the telos,
which comes into being in the original foundation and then gradually unfolds itself through manifold dramatic paths
ever more clearly, until it reaches the apodictic final foundation.

To translate this from Husserls language into a more ordinary parlance: Husserl is a philosopher of progress in the
best style of the period of the founding of the Bismarckian Reich, about which Nietzsche dropped many pointed
remarks. Every philosophy of progress, which is founded upon the assumption of a self-unfolding telos, is faced with
the solution of a weighty problem of relevance, which early on Kant found deeply disturbing.

Kant, too, runs into the problem of reason in his metaphysics of history as reason unfolds in the course of history in
an infinite progress toward perfection. In An Idea of Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose he brings to
fruition the idea of unfolding, and in a key passage he expresses his bewilderment [das Befremden] that
mankinds earlier generations are so to speak mere stepping stones on which the last, perfect generation climbs to
its goal.

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Is not man, under this assumption, historically merely a means to a goal that can be reached only by humanity in the
last phase of its development? Kant allows the matter to rest there, couched in bewilderment. He would wish to be
indeed systematic, but he is, however, not emotionally impelled to confront this question decisively. In fact,the
Averroist conception is only one component of Kants systematics as a whole, and the meaning of individual human
existence at any given historical point has for him in any case a satisfactory explanation, thanks to his belief in the
immortality of the soul and to its status of fulfillment in the beyond.

In addition, the preference given to later generations asserts itself less crassly in Kant, since under the assumption
of an unending process of perfectibility each empirically historical generation shares with every other generation the
fate of imperfection.

Husserls Final Foundation

Husserl sees this problem in a somewhat different light. He shares Kants belief in the progress of reason as an
unfolding of the telos in the course of history. Yet he does not believe in unending progress. His final foundation does
not lie in an infinitely remote point; instead he sees it achieved in the here and now through his phenomenology.
Through the establishment of phenomenology, philosophy has attained its apodictic beginning (p. 147), and the
unending task of philosophy (which is also his endeavor) plays out within the horizon of apodictic continuation.

Hence we must distinguish two phases in Husserls history of reason: The first extends from the Greek initial
foundation, which was renewed by Descartes, all the way to Husserls final foundation; the second phase starts with
Husserl as an apodictic continuation of his apodictic final foundation. When we recall that the entelechy had broken
through for the first time in Greek humanity (p. 91), so that pre-Greek history is a prehistory of genuine humanity,
we come up with a total of three phases.

Husserls philosophy of history then assumes the form of a typical three-stage philosophy, with the Old Testament
representing the pre-Greek phase, the New Testament, dating from the Greek initial foundation, and the evangelium
aeternum, which begins with Husserls final foundation. The final phase, the unending continuation of
Phenomenological philosophy within the horizon of the apodictic final foundation, has the same philosophical
structure as the Marxist final realm and the Hitlerian millennium.

Husserls position vis-a-vis the New Testament period (from the initial foundation to the final foundation) is worthy of
special consideration. Kant expressed some worries, confessing to a bewilderment, that the generations preceding
the final foundation should be mere transit stations of reason; helpful and perhaps necessary on the way toward
perfection, but lacking any absolute value in themselves.

We find Husserl lacking this trait of Kantian humanity. The fact that the Greeks and modern philosophy since
Descartes are merely to be a historical fertilizer for the soil, from which springs the flower of Husserls final
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foundation, does not seem to astonish him in the least; for him this relationship is quite in order. Raising this
question, however, is in no way meant to be a preliminary step to denying humanity to Husserlthe problem lies
deeper. The absence of Kants humanitarian bewilderment, the absence of an inward resistance to viewing history
as prehistory, and to allow a genuine history (in Lenins words)in Husserls terms an apodictic historyto set in
with the final foundation, places Husserl on the contrary outside the progress-problematic as formulated in the
eighteenth century with all of its humanitarian implications.

Consequently it becomes imperative to group him together with the messianic projections of the end of time that
have emerged in our era. Husserls apodictic history is, just like Communisms genuine history, not a continuation
of empirical history (note Husserls passionate refusal to allow his teleological interpretation of history to be
countered with empirically historical arguments). Instead of being such a continuation, it is a transposition of history
to a new level of revelation of the human spirit, with which begins a new apodicticity.

Husserls radicalism has, aside from a specifically problematic component of transcendental subjectivity, a
messianic component on the strength of which the final foundation becomes, with its apodicticity in the historically
social realm, the establishment of a philosophic sect at the end of time.

In order to elucidate the peculiar structure of Husserls metaphysics it became necessary to refer frequently to
parallel phenomena in the political sphere. Beyond the structural affinity Husserls metaphysics of history has no
more to do with National Socialism or Communism than with Joachim of Flora, whose periodization of history runs a
parallel course.

Seen from a different, i. e., a methodical, point of view Husserls position shows a close affinity to certain
contemporary appearances of the spiritI mean to the historical methodology of the schools of southwestern
Germany; it is even more closely related to the historical works patterned on this methodology.

Works dealing with political history are less relevant in this context than a classic of intellectual history like Gierkes
Genossenschaftsrecht [The Law of Partnership ]. The rationale of this work is Gierkes assumption that the
substance of a political community is its character as a Realperson. Consequently the history of political and juristic
ideas is to proceed selectively, organizing the historical facts as a chain of developments leading to the unfolding of
the idea of a Realperson. Hence from an enormous quantity of historical materials Gierke selects crumbs that may
be more or less suitably interpolated into this sequence, regardless of what these crumbs meant in the context of the
[original] author, and regardless of which of these materials fall under the table.

This is Husserls method, even without the terminological apparatus of entelechy and the initial and final foundations.
Proceeding in this manner Gierke ran into difficulties, and Dunning was tactless enough to shed some light on
Gierkes fantastic violation of Bodin. Subsequently Gierke found himself forced to publish an embarrassed retraction
in the third edition of Althusius. What Dunning did in Bodins case could be done in the case of practically every
author dealt with by Gierke.

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Husserls Messianism rejects Empirical Argument

This calamity could not befall Husserl, because he rejects from the outset empirically historical arguments against
his telos. Hence I venture to say that the demonic obsession of Gierkes era to treat world history as spadework for
the glory of any given present timein this case, Gierkesis raised by Husserl to the level of a messianism that
rejects any correction based on empirical reality. One could still criticize Gierke on account of the materials he chose
for his interpretation; Husserl is not open to this criticism, for his interpretation of history by definition cannot be
wrong.

I am referring here to a demonic historiography, because the historian who proceeds in this manner absolutizes his
own historically conditioned intellectual position; in fact, he does not really write history, but misuses historical
materials by using them to bolster his own position. An intellectual history that avoids the misuse has the task of
penetrating each and every position of intellectual history up to the point on which it is founded, i. e., to where it is
rooted in the experiences of transcendence of the respective thinker. Only when intellectual history is pursued with
its sights set on this methodical goal can it attain its philosophical goal, which is spirit in its historicity; or put
differently, can it understand the historical embodiments of spirit as variations on the theme of the experiences of
transcendence.

These variations succeed one another in an empirically factual manner, not arbitrarily; they do not produce an
anarchic series; they throw into relief series of order, even though this order is somewhat more complicated than
what the metaphysicians of progress would wish it to be. (Needless to say, I cannot here go into detail on any such
concrete types of order. )

A genuine historical reflection does not accept the task, ascribed to it by Gierkes historiographical enterprise and
even more by Husserls theory, of interpreting ones own precious position as a sediment of history (although this
self-interpretation happens to be, incidentally, a valuable secondary result of historical consciousness). Rather, the
primary task is to penetrate the intellectual-historical Gestalt of others all the way to their point of transcendence, and
through such a penetration to school and clarify ones own embodiment of the experience of transcendence.

Spiritual-historical understanding is a catharsis, a purificatio in the mystical sense which has as a personal goal the
illuminatio and the unio mystica; this understanding can indeed lead, if pursued systematically, in great material
chains, to the elaboration of a series of order in the historical revelation of spirit. Finally it can in this way result in a
philosophy of history.

However, the leading thread of this understanding, from which one must not deviate even for an instant, is the
personal testaments of the thinkersthe very testaments that Husserl not only believes he is entitled to ignore, but
that he systematically rejects as disruptions of his teleology.

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Husserl and Descartes

(4) This then would complete the elaboration of the most important implications of the Husserlian position, and all I
need to do now is to address briefly the fundamental material question: Husserls relationship to Descartes. Husserl
is of the opinion that modern philosophy has been initially founded by Descartes and that it owes its final foundation
to himself. It is in this final foundation that the initial one has come to be fully unfolded.

As proof of this thesis Husserl interprets the Cartesian Meditations as an imperfect form of the Phenomenological
reduction that aims at an epoch [bracketing out] of the content of the world in order to reconstruct the world as
objective, viewed from the angle of the ego-logical sphere. This interpretation is partially correct. A methodical
obliteration of the content of the world and the suspension of judgment with the aim to establish an Archimedean
point whence to reconstruct the world as objective is indeed the theme of the Meditations.

Equally correct is Husserls criticism that the epistemologically critical epoche had not been carried out radically, and
that it was the psychological ego instead of the transcendental ego that was made the point of departure for the
reconstruction of the world.

What is wrong is Husserls assertion, justified by an appeal to the historical telos, that the Cartesian reduction has no
other positive significance except as an epistemological theory which is bound, in the final analysis, to produce a
transcendental philosophy. False is, in addition, his assertion that the attainment of certainty regarding the
objectivity of the world by the roundabout route of the certainty of the existence of God collapses because the
Cartesian proof of God is untenable.

This is the second of three parts. Part 3 may be read HERE. Part 1 may be read HERE.

FN. In this letter Voegelin ordered his thoughts into numbered and lettered paragraphs. This part begins with
paragraph 3(a).

ANAMNESIS

Vol 6, CW

Ch 2 A Letter to Alfred Schtz concerning Edmund Husserl

pp 50-57

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This excerpt is taken from a collection of Voegelin quotations which can be found HERE

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