The meaning of Husserl's idealism in the light of his development

Theodorus de Boer

pp. 3322-332

in: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed), The later Husserl and the idea of phenomenology, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1972

Abstract

It is well known that Husserl’s transition to transcendental idealism around 1908 came as a great surprise for his students. It was alleged to be a repudiation of the earlier realism and its concentration on the object (Wendung zum Objekt). And many, if not all, students of the Goettingen-period were unable to follow the master at this point. It is remarkable, however, that precisely the later students from the Freiburg-period, e.g. Heidegger, Fink, Landgrebe and the French existential phenomenologists, likewise rejecting idealism, adhered precisely to the late Husserl and reproached the earlier students for not having understood the real intention of the master. In the first part of this paper we shall try to understand Husserl’s transition to idealism as a perfectly natural outcome of his development since the time he published the Philosophy of Arithmetic and the Logical Investigations. The idealism characteristic of the first volume of the Ideas does not signify a break with the past, but, on the contrary, a solution to problems that remained unsolved in the Logical Investigations.1 In a second part I hope to make clear that the existential phenomenologists, in spite of their rejection of idealism, could nevertheless link up their ideas with Husserl.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund

Heidegger Martin