Husserlian Meditations by Robert Sokolowski (review)

44~ BOOK REVIEWS has granted the body at best a grudging recognition and that it has thereby created major conflicts in the areas of sexual morality, religious spirituality and the belief in an afterlife? But Davis seldom moves beyond the questions as we actually confront them today and remains mostly content with hinting, in one or two paragraphs, at the direction where a possible solution may lie. He concludes his chapter on sexuality by declaring sexual love the most common path to mystical union and self-transcending dedication (a statement that must remain unconfirmed in any religious faith known to me) and has nothing more to say about the traditional cult of celibacy than " that it is possible to conceive of it as a genuine call, though a rare one" (p. 142). A similar abdication of a genuine critique in Davis's own, tradition-conscious, sense appears in the chapter on death where he simply suggests the possibility of a "conditional immortality," that is, one reserved to those "whose deepest identity is a dynamic relationship to God " (p. 103) . A conclusion as momentous and revolutionary would appear to require some justification of its ability to be incorporated within the Christian tradition. In the interesting chapter on the isolated ego the author advocates as sole remedy for our disastrous objectivism "the expansion of consciousness outward into the world to rediscover God as immanent in reality" (p. 79). This wide-reaching conclusion is made concrete only by a rejection of a renewed emphasis upon spiritual life. Again, some attempt should have been made toward a justification of such a momentous reversal of the entire Christian tradition. I suspect that those repeated instances of avoiding the ultimate issues are not altogether fortuitous in a man of Davis's caliber. To me at least they appear to be the discouraged reaction of a sensitive mind that has been too long shackled to a system of thought which, impervious to problems , made any search for their origin and their solution futile. Davis's book reflects an attitude of fatigue and resignation. Yet its best pages show what he is capable of doing and undoubtedly will do when he is ready for it. Lours DuPRE Yale University New Haven, Connecticut Husserlian Meditations. By RoBERT SOKOLOWSKI. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974.) 296 pages. Index. Professor Sokolowski's first book on Husserl, The Formation of Husserl's Concept of Constitution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhofl', 1964), helped to mark the fruition of Husserl studies in this country. That book's erudition , as exhibited by its easy familiarity with the published and unpublished BOOK REVIEWS 443 texts of this extremely difficult thinker, is matched in Sokolowski's newest book, Husserlian Meditations. But whereas the first book attempts 'primarily to provide a historical sketch of the development of a major concept in Husserl's thinking, the present work has a rather different theme and structure. The principal theme of the book is to show how Husserl tries to define what it means to be human and therefore " truthful." As the title suggests, the book is structured as a series of " meditations " on significant ideas in Husserl's thinking. These meditations have as their guiding thread the .consideration of two major concepts: the idea of presence and absence, and the related idea of parts and wholes. It is impossible in a brief review to do justice to any single chapter or meditation of this book, much less to all nine of them and the interesting appendix on logic and mathematics in Formal and Transcendental Logic. Each chapter takes up a different but crucial aspect of Husserl's thinking and attempts to present Husserl's more or less final view of that aspect. Within these chapters, Sokolowski manages to depict these viewpoints and their development as clearly as anyone who has written on this dense material. Sokolowski's ability to make Husserl both intelligible and appealing is exhibited most evidently in his power to produce excellent examples for Husserl's sometimes almost opaque concepts. In Chapter Two, for example, "Identity in Absence and Presence," Sokolowski provides nine different examples of what Husserl means by his distinction .between "empty" and "filled" intentions. An empty...