On Sat, 10 Jun 1995 PhilMill@xxxxxxx wrote:
> Chris Hargens asked for references to back up my previous
> post on theoretical authenticity in Husserl.
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I've been pursuing this topic for some years now in a way which may or
may not be so tangential to the interests of the participants of this
list that some of you may think of it as a red herring. It is at any rate
one of those 'big' themes which, in my humble opinion, can be ignored by
the Heidegger specialists only at the cost of putting up some pretty
impenetrable disciplinary boundaries to shut out the rest of the world.
It is: the idealism/materialism debate in German philosophy in which
Husserl as well as Heidegger are after all important participants. (As
well as, of course, - although this list gives one a headache - Kant,
Hegel, Marx, Weber, Herman Cohen, the Frankfurt School) (Not to forget:
Darwin and Freud)
My reason for putting my own oar in on the cue 'theoretical authenticity'
is that I've been pursuing this issue in the Horkheimer/Adorno
correspondence, to be published later this year. (Volume 1 of the
'Briefwechsel' - which is vol. 15 of the Horkheimer Gesammelte Schriften
- has already appeared; I'm reading the next volume at the moment: vol. 16)
What is of relevance to the discussion here is that 'theoretical
authenticity' is not only central to Adorno's Husserl-critique of the
fourties (_Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie_), but that the putative
_lack_ of authenticity in 'idealism' is what moves theorists from Hegel
to Horkheimer to posit that it should be 'dialectically superceded' in
order to 'rescue' and 'sublate' it.
This is as true of Hegel's _Phaenomenologie des Geistes_ as it is for
Horkheimer's _Traditionelle und Kritische Theorie_. There's a
_materialist_ version of the same theme, and it takes the form of a very
special emphasis on 'Das Ganze'. ("Das Ganze ist das Wahre" - Hegel, to
which Adorno countered: "Das Ganze ist das Unwahre".) I'm not saying here
that this gives one any special insight into Husserl's conception of
theoretical authenticity, but merely to draw attention to the fact that
this issue has ramifications for what is probably the central issue in
philosophy since Kant: the idealism/materialism debate.
All of this I venture to point out not in order to give anyone a headache
(and force them to retreat to the safer shores of Russell or Quine, or
whatever else contemporary empiricism reads) but to show that this issue
goes about as deep as you can get in philosophy.
Regards to the readers of this list
Dr. Frederik van Gelder
Institut fuer Sozialforschung
Frankfurt University
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