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3 Introduction Preface: The History of Husserl’s Reception as the Unfolding History of the Publication of Husserl’s Works We are now in the seventh decade after the death of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the founder of phenomenology, and 150 years after his birth. Now is the time to look back and venture a certain assessment, and there are reasons why this time gap was necessary for a proper view and evaluation of his work. If Gadamer is right that to be a classic requires a certain time gap between what is to count as classic and us today, then one can argue that we are only now beginning to be in a position to view Husserl as a classic author. But let us focus, for a moment, on the time gap itself and what has happened between Husserl’s death and today. The story to be told here is by no means trivial but is part of the reception that made Husserl a classic philosopher of modernity. There is something very curious about the unquestioned importance of Husserl on the one hand and, on the other, his reception, both of which are quite incongruent. When his first programmatic work, the Logical Investigations, appeared in 1900–01, Husserl was immediately heralded as founding a promising new philosophy with its novel method and programmatic outlook. After that, his philosophical contemporaries witnessed a series of further, primarily programmatic, works—Ideas I, Formal and Transcendental Logic, Cartesian Meditations (published “only” in French translation), and finally, the fragment of the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology—in which the founder of phenomenology portrayed himself as laying ever-new foundations, drafting ever-new introductions, repeating programmatic statements and grand announcements. But these promises were never fulfilled during Husserl’s lifetime. The “detailed analyses” that supposedly make up the “body” of phenomenology were at best mere announcements, with the exception of the small publication of the lectures on time-consciousness, published in 1928 by Heidegger (at a time when Husserl’s most famous pupil was already estranged philosophically from his teacher). Husserl did present some of his descriptions in his lecture courses as a university professor (all written out in full and read off without any rhetorical pomp), but as 4 I N T R O D U C T I O N these are for the most part published now, one can immediately see that the students must have been utterly lost as to what Husserl was presenting from the lectern. It was no surprise, then, that the “phenomenological movement,” as Husserl was fond of calling his following, turned out to be a group of heretics, who built their own philosophical edifices by taking some building blocks from the “quarry” of Husserl’s oeuvre, not infrequently mocking their founding father for his shortcomings and biased views in his allegedly “naive” descriptions. However, only Husserl’s closest pupils and assistants were aware of the philosophical mountain range (to use a metaphor from James Hart) that Husserl was heaping up in his daily private meditations, carried out in his famous “research manuscripts.” But the situation was even worse: neither Husserl nor his last assistants, Landgrebe and Fink, when they made an arrangement of the manuscripts for the purposes of setting up an “archive” in 1935, had the faintest idea of the amount, extent, and thematic range of manuscripts, which they guessed as being at “a few thousand pages.” The more exact amount is, as we now know, at around 40,000 pages of research manuscripts written over the course of more than forty years. Most of these texts and the topics with which they dealt were unknown to the public. It was a hidden treasure that not even its creator wholly oversaw. Hence there was a profound disconnect, as mentioned above, between Husserl as he was publicly known and the “real” Husserl as he presented himself (to himself only) in these private texts. The disconnect also extended to the style of philosophizing itself. Opposed to the public figure who proudly and boldly presents a new research program and style of method, there is in his private notes a philosopher who is forever searching, always tentative, brutally honest to and hard on himself , at times almost timid and halting and, above all, always inscrutably self-critical. And this disconnect accounts, just as profoundly, for the way Husserl was received by his contemporaries and successors. Hence, the reception of Husserl is not a trivial story concerning the...

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