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  • Ecology and EgologyHusserl and Rilke on the Natural World
  • Rochelle Tobias (bio)

Husserl believed phenomenology could provide a secure foundation for the world, so that it could be an object of study in turn. This may seem like an odd statement to make regarding a philosopher who declared that we must set aside the assumption that the world exists until we have established the meaning of existence itself. In a less than felicitous turn of phrase, he claimed that the analysis of the world begins with its destruction [Vernichtung]. At the same time he insisted that the destruction of the world represents not a loss but a gain. For instance, in the first volume of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (1913) he states, “Strictly speaking, we have not lost anything, but rather have gained the whole of absolute being, which, rightly understood, contains within itself, ‘constitutes’ within itself, all worldly transcendencies” (113, §50). In setting aside the world apart from us, we open philosophy to a realm of being based in the subject: the world of consciousness.

This is the one indisputable world for Husserl, the “whole of absolute being.” It contains within itself “all worldly transcendencies,” which in his terminology means things as they are given in or present themselves to consciousness without the mediation of concepts or ideas. Husserl’s innovation, if it can be called that, was to turn philosophy back toward things albeit with [End Page 218] the caveat that we can only speak of things to the extent that we intuit them or that they appear to us, which is to say as phenomena that are inextricably bound up with our mental life. Much like Descartes, Husserl argued that everything we perceive (every cogitatum) refers back to us as the perceiving subject (or cogito) that makes this phenomenon possible. In other words, we are the ground for all worldly objects since what defines them as objects in the first place is that they are given in consciousness. This may seem like a circular argument—and a case could be made that it is—but the point worth noting is that what does not appear to us cannot be said to exist; it cannot even be identified as what has yet to be thought. The world we inhabit is in Husserl’s vocabulary an egological sphere because of its foundation in the ego. Rilke called it the Weltinnenraum.

Durch alle Wesen reicht der eine Raum:Weltinnenraum. Die Vögel fliegen stilldurch uns hindurch. O, der ich wachsen will,ich seh hinaus, und in mir wächst der Baum.

Ich sorge mich, und in mir steht das Haus.Ich hüte mich, und in mir ist die Hut.Geliebter, der ich wurde: an mir ruhtder schönen Schöpfung Bild und weint sich aus.

[Werke, II:113]

One space extends through all living things:inner world space. Birds fly silentlythrough us. Oh, I who want to grow,I look outside, and a tree grows inside me.

I am worried, and a home waits inside me.I am wary, and shelter lies inside me.I who have been so passionately loved: the imageof all creation rests inside me, weeping joyful tears.1

Much has been made in recent years of a supposed split in Husserl’s thought between an idealism that concerns itself exclusively with the world as given in consciousness and a realism that seeks to reestablish the empirical world for science. What both sides of this debate [End Page 219] ignore, however, is what Husserl has to say about the nature of the subject. Husserl’s philosophy is, among other things, an eidetic analysis of consciousness, and this means that his interest is not only in the subjective constitution of the world of experience but also in the structure of the self as the condition (or prerequisite) for there to be any conditions (or prerequisites) for experience. Husserl himself believed that this mode of inquiry would be more radical than Kant’s transcendental critique, which shifted the emphasis of philosophy from the known and knowable universe to the conditions of possibility of knowledge as such...

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