© THE BIBLIOGRAPHIA 2013 –1– EDMUND HUSSERL'S FREIBURG YEARS. By J. N. Mohanty. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2012. Pp. ix+501. ISBN: 978-0-300-15221-0. EDMUND HUSSERL'S FREIBURG YEARS IS THE CONCLUSION OF J. N. Mohanty's historical and developmental study of Husserl's oeuvre, and, if the preface is any indication, it concludes his nearly sixty years of Husserl scholarship. Together with the award-winning The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl (Yale University Press, 2008), these two volumes represent the most thorough and up-to-date exposition of the founder of phenomenology's complete works available in English. The first volume is a study that begins with Husserl's earliest mathematical work, follows the evolution of his thought from mathematics to the origins of phenomenology in impressive detail, and concludes with the first systematic formulation of transcendental phenomenology in Ideas I. The new volume picks up with Husserl's inaugural address upon relocating to Freiburg and thoroughly reviews the changing landscape of Husserl's thought from 1916 until his death in 1938. The goal in this review is not to rehash Mohanty's own summary, but rather to focus on the most illuminating points of his analysis and key contributions, especially to the English language secondary-literature. Edmund Husserl's Freiburg Years is divided into twenty-one chapters, which are, in turn, divided into six parts. Part one comprises the completion of the 'first systematization' of Husserl's phenomenology. It begins with the inaugural lecture, "Pure Phenomenology, its Method, and its Field of Research," and includes detailed summaries of Ideas II and III. Mohanty's analyses of Ideas II and III comprise the final four chapters of part one. Chapters three through five focus roughly on the three divisions of Ideas II, and chapter six on Ideas III. The comprehensive study of the constitutional analysis Husserl performs in the second book of Ideas is a welcome addition to the English secondary-literature. In Ideas II, Husserl studies the constitution of the world through the building up of three intertwining and mutually supporting strata: material nature, animal nature, and the spiritual world. Mohanty clearly explicates Husserl's distinctions between the various senses of nature, an equally difficult topic © THE BIBLIOGRAPHIA 2013 –2– for the phenomenologically uninitiated and experienced readers of Husserl alike. Among these senses of nature, we find the following: nature in general as the totality of objects belonging to the world, nature as the correlate of the natural sciences, nature as pure materiality (material nature), nature as living being (animal nature), and nature as found in the personalistic attitude-i.e., nature constituted as and by a social unity and social communication (24). Chapter four focuses on the constitutional analysis of living beings and mind. A significant distinction introduced in this chapter is the notion that the soul (Seele) is not the mind. The soul is connected with the material body and is an object of scientific research (29). It is important to remember that Husserl wants to study phenomenologically reduced mental life. In this way, he follows higher-level theoretical thinking in its course in search of a truly foundational and originary sense of mental life. The soul, "comprehends the mental life of humans and animals" (29). Contrary to those who interpret Husserl as some kind of dogmatic solipsist who maintains that we have no access to the mental life of the other, Mohanty's Husserl understands the mental as given in experience, albeit always given in connection with something else-i.e., with bodies. Material nature, the most fundamental level of nature, plays a foundational role for animal nature (and we find out later that animal or mental nature likewise plays a foundational role for the spiritual world). Mental life is constituted as mingled with and bound to a real body. Here, there arises a distinction to be put in place between the concept of the 'Ihuman' and the 'pure I' (30–1). The I-human corresponds to the everyday conception of the I, with which each person is familiar from inner and outer self-perception. I, qua human, am both a bodily and mental entity, and these two exist in an interpenetrating way within my one identity. However, Husserl focuses on the priority of the mental over the physical; when the mental 'dies,' all that is left is a mere lump of material nature. Still, possession of a body is a necessary condition for the possibility of empathy, through which other minds are apperceived. The pure I is the subject of acts and states constituting the stream of consciousness as mine and, most importantly, it is spoken of in abstraction from the body and does not appear in experience but accompanies it. Chapter four ends with a detailed analysis of the constitution of mental life through the body (Leib), Husserl's highly original phenomenology of the body and perception, and the constitution of mental reality through acts of empathy. © THE BIBLIOGRAPHIA 2013 –3– The subject of chapter five is the constitution of the spiritual world. Here, we find a focus on the spirit (Geist) as opposed the mind (Seele). The distinction between Geist and Seele corresponds to the distinction between the natural sciences and the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften). Physics studies material nature, and psychology studies the mind as a part of nature, but the sciences of spirit should include a field of 'egology,' a science of personality, and a science of the social (43). In this chapter, Mohanty carefully clarifies Husserl's analysis of, and distinction between, spirit and nature as constituted by two different attitudes, the naturalistic and the personalistic. In the previous sections of Ideas II, Husserl follows a phenomenology of the natural attitude; doing so has shown him that this attitude is valid within certain limits. Natural science does not see these limits and takes its attitude to be the one true attitude in which only what is experienceable (in a very peculiar way), measureable, and mathematizeable is truly real. The personalistic attitude is the one in which we live every day when we shake hands, read, and interact in social settings. The person makes its appearance here as the subject of a surrounding world (Umwelt), in which one finds use objects, values, communities, norms, and morals. The person is never found in isolation but is only found in communities of other persons, and, here, Husserl has a theory of social acts as opposed to individual acts. However, Mohanty would have been better served to spend more time elaborating this theory. Whereas the world of spirit is governed by a different rule of coherence than the world of nature, causality determines all of the relations between objects in nature, and motivation is the ruling force of spirit. As opposed to causality, rational motivation is a 'because-therefore' structure that could be otherwise (52). Causality, on the other hand, is necessary. Ultimately, the spiritual world has ontological primacy over the 'natural' world (nature here conceived of as the correlate of the natural sciences). Nature, in this sense, is always an impoverishment of, and abstraction from, the spiritual world. It is in the spiritual world that the very motivations for performing the natural sciences arise. Part two of the book takes the reader through Husserl's research into time and intersubjectivity during the Freiburg period. Husserl came to realize that these two themes were more intimately connected than he first thought. This section is an invaluable resource for the reader of Husserl whose German is not at a full reading level; Husserl's researches into intersubjectivity, especially those beyond the Fifth Meditation, are too often overlooked. © THE BIBLIOGRAPHIA 2013 –4– To begin with time consciousness, among the significant developments noted in this part is the making dynamic of retention and protention. Husserl realizes an intimate interconnection between the two; as he understands is, there is retention in protention and protention in retention. Furthermore, original consciousness is a-temporal and is free from intentionality as pure living. These developments alone mark a significant advance in Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. In leading the reader through the vast volumes of literature on intersubjectivity in Husserl's manuscripts, the author begins with the phenomenology of empathy. Empathy is the first transcendence and the monad's open window to others. From empathy as the first level of intersubjectivity, the reader is then led through the conceptual development that makes possible the formulation, "Transcendental subjectivity is transcendental intersubjectivity" (110). Mohanty's careful readings of volumes XII–XV of the Husserliana are a long-awaited addition to the English language secondary literature. By the time one reaches the end of Part II of this book, it should be clear that (i) there is no sense of Husserl as a solipsist and (ii) that the Fifth Meditation, while an important piece of Husserl's theory of intersubjectivity, must be interpreted against the backdrop of the posthumously published manuscripts. Part three comprises a dense explication of Husserl's transcendental logic, and part four takes the reader through the lectures leading up to Husserl's next systematization of transcendental philosophy. It covers the first and second parts of the currently untranslated Erste Philosophie (Husserliana VII and VIII), Phenomenological Psychology (Phänomenologische Psychologie), and Cartesian Meditations (Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge). Chapter fourteen explores the historical and methodological reflections of Erste Philosophie. In Part I of First Philosophy, through a re-reading and re-telling of the history of philosophy from Socrates to himself, Husserl attempts a historical grounding of phenomenology as first philosophy. Descartes, of course, is the pivotal figure who, having discovered the transcendental ego in a confused and ineffective way, set philosophy off on the correct, immanent, and subjective direction. Those interested in Husserl's ever-evolving reflections on the phenomenological method will be especially interested in sections two and three of chapter © THE BIBLIOGRAPHIA 2013 –5– fourteen. At this point in time, Husserl was expanding the sense of the epoché from a bracketing of individual acts and their objects and toward a universal epoché, in which the validity-positing sense of the world itself is bracketed. The primary topic of chapter fifteen is a detailed reading of Phenomenological Psychology. As with the rest of Mohanty's analyses, it is insightful and clearly sets forth some of Husserl's more difficult concepts in a straightforward manner. Of particular interest to the uninitiated might be the clarification of what, exactly, phenomenological psychology is supposed to be and how it is different from naturalscientific psychology. In short, there are "two kinds of psychology"-the difference between them is one of thematic interest. Natural-scientific psychology is directed, "toward the mental as a layer of physical nature"; spiritual-scientific psychology, on the other hand, is directed, "toward the spiritual realm, the realm of persons, individual and social" (351). Underlying and supporting these two types of psychology, one can understand transcendental phenomenology-investigating as it does the structures and givenness of experience to the transcendental ego-as phenomenological psychology; indeed, it is a psychology of a new, and perhaps the highest, kind. Of course, one must keep in mind that such a psychology is not the psychology of any particular individual psyche in the world but is a science of essences, "[a]bstracting from all psychological facticity, pure psychology will uncover eidetic structures of such experiences [...] based on the method of direct eidetic intuition" (355). The fifth part of this work is dedicated to the final stages of Husserl's academic career. Therein, Mohanty leads the reader through the Vienna and Prague lectures that finally took the form of the work we know as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. The Vienna lecture begins with Husserl taking an apparently new approach, as opposed to that found in the Paris lectures and Cartesian Meditations. He begins by giving a historical account of the emergence of Europe as a distinctly spiritual (note that he is not talking of the political or geographical) entity. He delineates the essence of the European spirit as the idea of pure theory, that which arises in the face of, and consistently challenges and critiques, the already existing power that is tradition (390). © THE BIBLIOGRAPHIA 2013 –6– Central to the Vienna and Prague lectures is the idea of a 'crisis of reason.' What is the crisis of reason, one might ask? Here, we find Husserl at his most Hegelian. The Idea of philosophy itself is Idea of an endless task of critique that can only be realized in stages; thus, it can only be realized one-sidedly. This onesidedness is not a problem so long as one recognizes and admits it, for to ignore the one-sidedness of one's investigation into nature or spirit is to fall prey to a certain naivety. One particular brand of naivety that has become prevalent is 'naturalism,' which Husserl describes as the finitization of nature and spirit that "runs counter to the discovery of mathematical infinity within the heart of nature, not to speak of spirit" (391). The crisis of reason can be described as a forgetfulness of the infinity of spirit. The cause of Europe's crisis is found in "that naturalistic-objectivistic rationalism which does not know of its own presuppositions" (416). It is most notably the natural sciences that fall prey to this naivety, but European culture itself has begun to adopt this objectification of the natural-scientific world. The solution to this crisis requires a true understanding of the nature of spirit (Geist). To this end, phenomenology allows spirit to reflect on itself as "the source of all those subjective acts in which validities of natural sciences are being constituted" (391). Transcendental phenomenology is to allow spirit to examine itself qua spirit without falling victim to the crisis of reason. According to Husserl, the solution to the crisis lies in the resources of transcendental phenomenology, which will allow "scientific reason" to recognize the fact that at its foundation lays the "subjectivity of spirit" and will restore spirit to its autonomy (417). I noted above that we find Husserl here at his most Hegelian. Mohanty does well to note that this is, in fact, the case, while also insisting that Husserl must not be read as Hegel reincarnated. One key difference is the real insistence on intersubjectivity in Husserl. To use Mohanty's own words: "Although Husserl would often speak of spirit as Absolute, the Absolute is not numerically one but a system of community of mutually empathizing but distinct egos" (417). In the final part of his voluminous work, chapters twenty and twenty one, the author provides the reader with two valuable services. First, he places Husserl directly into dialogue with three watershed figures in the history of philosophy. The first two are Husserl's forerunners, Kant and Hegel, and the third his would-be heir turned nemesis, Heidegger. This section is illuminating for the scholar interested in key points of agreement and disagreement between these philosophical giants. However, given that the book is dedicated specifically to Husserl's Freiburg years, it © THE BIBLIOGRAPHIA 2013 –7– might have been more illuminating to situate Husserl in the phenomenological theater that was Germany in the early twentieth century. In my estimation, the influence of Theodore Lipps, Max Scheler, Alexander Pfänder, the prematurely demised Adolf Reinach, Theodor Conrad, Deitrich von Hildebrand, and Hedwig Conrad-Martius (to name but a few) merit acknowledgement. Yes, Husserl influenced these thinkers, but many of them had equal influence on his own thought, a fact that I believe bears mentioning in a work dedicated to Husserl's Freiburg years. For just such a historical contextualization, I can refer the reader to the first chapter of Marianne Sawicki's Body, Text, and Action: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein.1 The second service Mohanty provides is the laying out, in thirty propositions, of a comprehensive Husserlian theory of intentionality. The propositions are divided into three sections: Static Phenomenology, Genetic Phenomenology, and Intentionality in Intersubjectivity. And while a discussion of the accuracy and comprehensiveness of this axiomatization may take us too far afield, its helpfulness for readers pining for such a relatively concise, formulaic breakdown of Husserlian intentionality is nonetheless well worth mentioning. In the end, Professor Mohanty's book is a monumental achievement, even more so when it is considered in tandem with its predecessor, The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Its careful and critical analysis of every one of Husserl's most important lectures, texts, and manuscripts from 1917 to 1938 is a boon to Husserlian scholarship. Timothy BURNS (UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN) 1 M. SAWICKI, Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein (Phaenomenologica 144). Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997.