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7. Life-World, Historical Reduction, and the Structure of the Crisis
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7 / Life-World, Historical Reduction, and the Structure of the Crisis WE HAVE ARGUED that the theory of the life-world in the Crisis is developed in and through a criticism which is directed not only at past philosophers, Kant in particular, but also, even primarily, at Husserl's own earlier views. In the foregoing chapter we have tried to demonstrate the ambiguities and lack of clarity surrounding the concept of world which the theory of the Crisis, in our view, is designed to rectify. Let us now summarize our account of Husserl's earlier views in order to contrast them with the later theory. It is in his early statement of "the fundamental phenomenological outlook" (Ideas I, second section, first chapter) that Husserl comes closest to the view which ultimately prevails in the Crisis. Here the world itself is directly experienced as a horizon "in every waking moment," in every perception. And it is experienced as reality (Wirklichkeit). But Husserl's interest in grounding the sciences ultimately leads him away from this conception. On the one hand, in the further development of the Ideas (including Volumes II and III) and in the later period of the Cartesian Meditations and Formal and Transcendental Logic, the notion of the world as experienced horizon is simply neglected , and the world becomes identified with the thought horizon of a theoretical investigation which is ideally (though perhaps impossibly) completed.1 What is assumed here is the I. Frederick J. Crosson makes a very similar criticism in "Phenomenology and Realism," International Philosophical Quarterly, VI, no. 3 (1966),455-64. esp. p. 458. The Structure of the Crisis / 163 presence in consciousness of a scientific or theoretical interest. But such an interest, when considered materially rather than formally, envisages not a unified world but rather a particular region of reality. At this level the concept of reality is not concrete except as correlated to the material a priori of some region. Reality is "fragmented," and the only remaining concept of the world-as-such as reality is that of a summation or Inbegriff of the various material regions. Thus, because of Husserl's preoccupation with the theoretical interest, the world is conceived as neither an experienced nor a unitary horizon.2 And when he does consider in those works the level of experiential consciousness underlying the theoretical interest (in the theory of a "passive genesis"), the concept of world seems not to figure at all. On the other hand, we have seen that the idea of the world as an experienced, unitary horizon is not entirely neglected in all of Husserl's writings prior to the Crisis. In his remarks on the naturlicher Weltbegriff and the "world of immediate experience ," especially in the lectures on phenomenological psychology, Husserl seems to have just such a world in mind and to remain true to the early conception of the Ideas. But even here, Husserl does not go as far as he obviously wishes to go in the Crisis. For one thing, the "world of immediate experience," though it is a unitary horizon prior to the adoption of scientific interests, is discussed almost exclusively in terms of its relation to those very interests. Husserl's only reason for mentioning this horizon seems to be his own interest in discovering how the sciences arise out of the natural attitude and take their basic concepts from the pregiven structures of its world. These structures, and the attitude that relates to them, tend to be described as protoscientific , i.e., as tending toward science even if they are not yet scientific themselves. Furthermore, we find here no emphasis 2. Only at the level of fonnal ontology, which abstracts from material differentiations, is the world maintained as a unity even for thought in the natural attitude: fonnal ontology deals not with a region of reality but with the whole of reality from a formal point of view. Thus its domain is not a region but only a "quasi-region" (Husserliana III, p. 140 [Ideas, p. 175]; see also Husserliana III, p. 27 [Ideas, p. 67]). But since the concept of experience is irrelevant here (experienceability only enters in when differentiated materially), there is some question as to whether the "horizon"-sense of reality has any relevance at this level. Reality becomes a formal manifold (Mannigfaltigkeit) given all at once in the unity of a system, rather than something presenting itself by horizons. [54.144.95.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:57...