Static and genetic phenomenology

Mary J. Larrabee

pp. 166-183

in: Donn Welton, The origins of meaning, Berlin, Springer, 1983

Abstract

In the first part of this work we have presented Husserl's theory of meaning by characterizing and following out the requirements of what we have called logistic phenomenology. Any careful scholar no doubt would object to our analysis, protesting that it is a highly stylized presentation and that it misconstrues the breadth and width of Husserl's thought. To this we reply that he/she would be absolutely correct. Were we to rest with the results of this analysis, as many logistic phenomenologists have, and were we to see the rest of Husserl's thought bound by these distinctions, then we indeed would miss what is most interesting and important about his phenomenology. In the first part of this work we have not so much established doctrines as suggested a problem, a problem which motivates Husserl's ever-deepening concern with the analysis of perception and what he came to call "perceptual sense" (Wahrnehmungssinn). Husserl's development is endogenous and thus all we are claiming for the first part is that we have isolated the primary internal cause of its growth. In this part, therefore, we have a debt to pay. We must make good our neglect of Husserl's own descriptions of perception in favor of his logistic interpretation of those descriptions.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund