Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology

EPILOGUE

EPILOGUE I During his lifetime and especially after his death, Husserl's ideas have had an enormous influence on twentieth-century thought. Husserl may very well have been the most influential philosopher of the century. Toward the end ofhis life he was often discouraged. In addition to the almost unbearable political situation in which he had come to find himself, there was the full realization that there really was nobody willing and able to continue the work he had started. He had hoped that Heidegger would have been this person; yet Heidegger preferred to go his own way. In Husserl's view, the task of transcendental phenomenology is quasi-infinite and can be brought to completion only by a community of like-minded scholars. Yet he realized that he had failed to inspire such a community of scholars. Husserl also realized that he had very few genuine "followers." By a follower, Husserl would not have understood someone who merely would repeat what he had already said; a follower, in his view, would rather be the one who would turn to a task in the enormous domain of phenomenology still to be realized and who would deal with the issues at hand in the spirit oftranscendental phenomenology. On the other hand, there are very few continental European philosophers who were not influenced by HusserI. This is true for the most important ones, such as Jaspers, Hartmann, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and others. But this is true also for numerous lesser-known ones. And yet there are indeed very few, if any, important thinkers who have followed Husserl in his most basic claims. Almost everyone objected' to his transcendental idealism, his methodical solipsism , his demand for presuppositionlessness, his "Cartesianism," and his dem,and that basic insights must be such that they can be presented with apodictic evidence. Yet very few have not been I 347 348 I E P I LOG U E deeply impressed by many otherideas, such as intentionality, synthesis and constitution, intentional analysis, ideation, and his conceptions ofthe a priori and the transcendental. It is too early to come to a more definitive evaluation of his genuinely impressive work. There are still manuscripts he left behind to be published. Various aspects ofhis work have not yet been fully unearthed and understood. Yet we can say that his work has generated a number ofgreat philosophical works in which the seeds planted by the father of the modern phenomenological movement have come to fruition, even though they may have produced fruits of a different kind. ...