COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN PHENOMENOLOGY

COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN PHENOMENOLOGY

For Eduard Baumgarten

COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN PHENOMENOLOGY by MICHAEL SUKALE MARTINUS NI]HOFF - THE HAGUE - 1976

I976 by Martinus Nijhotf, The Hague, Netherlands Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st Edition 1976 All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form ISBN-13: 978-90-247-1789-7 DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-9999-2 e-isbn-13: 978-94-009-9999-2

TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface VII I. INTRODUCTIO~ I II. THE PROBLEM OF PSYCHOLOGISM 22 III. HUSSERL'SPHILOSOPHY OF ARITHMETIC: ARE-EvALUATION 50 IV. SARTRE AND THE CARTESIAN EGO 68 V. THE EGO AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN RIVAL PERSPECTIVES: SARTRE AND HUSSERL 80 VI. WORLD AND EpOCHE IN HUSSERL AND HEIDEGGER 101 VII. HEIDEGGER AND DEWEY 121 Bibliography 152

PREFACE The essays which are collected in this book were written at various intervals during the last seven years. The essay "Heidegger and Dewey," which is the last one to be printed in the book, was actually the first one I wrote. It was written as a seminar paper for John D. Goheen's course on Dewey in the Spring of 1968 at Stanford University where I was a second-year graduate student. The paper went unchanged into my thesis "Four Studies in Phenomenology and Pragmatism," which I eventually submitted in 1971, and it is here reprinted with no alteration except for the title. A first version of the two essays on Sartre was written in the Spring of 1969 during my first year of teaching at Princeton University. Eventually I decided to break the essay into two parts. A shortened version of "Sartre and the Cartesian Ego" was read at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in December 1973. John Donnelly from Fordham University was my commentator. A Hebrew version of "The Ego and Consciousness in Rival Perspectives: Sartre and HusserI" appeared in Volume 22, Number 4 of the Hebrew Philosophical Quarterly!YYUN. My friend and translator Yirmiahu Yovel who, together with Hava Shorr, is responsible for the Hebrew text has also criticised the earlier English version and thus contributed to the present version by relentlessly substituting better arguments in some places for the eariier ones of his penitent author. I shall not forget the atmosphere permeated with a delightful mixture of cigar smoke, typewriter noises, and more abstract objects like time pressure and arguments, which prevailed in his apartment as the three of us worked our way into the nights. The essays "HusserI's Philosophy of Arithmetic" and "World and Epoche in HusserI and Heidegger" originated during weekly seminars on phenomenology during the summer and fall of 1969 at Stanford where John Lad, Ron McIntyre, David Smith and I presented our

VIII PREFACE philosophical beginnings in this field to the sympathetic ears of Dagfinn F011esdal and John D. Goheen. These seminars were an intellectual delight and I will always gratefully remember them. The essay "The Problem of Psychologism" is the outcome of a paper which I read at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at Bar nan University in Tel Aviv in the Spring of 1973. The "Introduction" was written this month and is partially based on a talk which I gave in December 1974 to the members of the philosophy department of the University of New Hampshire at Durham. Their lively and congenial response has finally prompted me to give this book to the press after it had been overdue for almost a year. Finally, I thank Anne Willard, who read the proofs and caught at the last minute some gross mistakes -linguistic and extra-linguistic. My thanks go to all these persons mentioned. But now I would like to record the intellectual debt which lowe to Eduard Baumgarten. Baumgarten was my teacher in philosophy and sociology since my freshman year at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He himself had been in the United States as a student, lecturer and assistant professor from 1924 to 1929. At that time he absorbed Pragmatism and studied Dewey. Later, during 1932, he studied with Heidegger, but had to leave because of the tension which developed between him and Heidegger. At that time he tried to convince Heidegger of the worth of Dewey's work but met with no success. Three years before, he had shown Heidegger's Sein und Zeit to John Dewey, who looked through the table of contents, had Baumgarten explain to him some parts of the book, and then said that the book "contains important thought." I thought that this story was significant and it provided the reason for trying a comparison of Dewey and Heidegger finally prompted by John D. Goheen's seminar on Dewey. Baumgarten is also indirectly responsible for my essay on Psychologism. He gave me his copy of Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen as a Christmas gift in 1968 but remarked that he was suspicious of the Prolegomena since he did not believe that logic could be conceived of as being independent from the human mind. I did not really listen and my first course in Princeton began with a defence of Husserl's view. But not much later I read F0llesdal's small book Husserl und Frege and began to doubt. I hope to have now shown that Baumgarten's casual remark could be correct. I consider myself as trying to do much the same in the contemporary philosophical scene as Baumgarten did in the thirties: I try to

PREFACE IX reconcile Continental European with American philosophy. But whereas Baumgarten defended American philosophers against the Germans I try to do the reverse: it seems that times do change. In a very special sense have I written this book tor Eduard Baumgarten; may it then please him as his birthday present for 1975. MICHAEL SUKALE Princeton, January 1975