[Buddha-l] The arrow: its removal and examination

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Richard Hayes schreef:
> On Monday 25 June 2007 02:11, Erik Hoogcarspel wrote:
>
>   
>> Richard, I think you mix up poor old Edmund with his teutonic villagepriest
>> pupil Martin Heidegger.
>>     
>
> I am referring to Husserl's address in Vienna in 1935 entitled [in English 
> translation] "Philosophy and the crisis of humanity". There is a good 
> discussion of it, along with a carefully argued rejection of Husserl's claim, 
> in J.N. Mohanty's <cite>Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought</cite>, in 
> which Mohanty also addresses arguments by Heidegger and Rorty for not using 
> the word "philosophy" to discuss what Asians did. It is pretty clear that in 
> that address in 1935 Husserl was claiming that true philosophy, like true 
> science, is theory for the sake of theory and becomes impure when done for 
> any kind of practical end. Obviously, the vast majority of what we call 
> philosophy in the West would also fail to be "pure" philosophy by Husserl's 
> sense.
>
> Husserl's description of pure philosophy comes close to Charles S. Peirce's 
> description of pure science. Mohanty argues that Husserl's notion of 
> philosophy was too narrow, and many people have argued that Peirce's notion 
> of science was too narrow.
>   
You're right Richard, I found a scanned copy of the text at
ftp://ftp.ac-toulouse.fr/pub/*philosophie*/husserldiekrisisdeseuropaischenmenschentumsunddie*philosophie*.rtf 

For those that can read German: don't panic if some words look 
unfamiliar, it has the wellknown mistakes due to OCR-failures.
Husserl thinks every culture has a specific essence and tries to 
identify the essence of European or Western culture. This is the Greek 
concept of philosophy, which is according to H 'theoria', seeking the 
universal truth for its own sake. Husserl makes a nasty mistake here 
when he associates the Greek 'theoria', to behold the truth behind the 
phenomena, with scientific theories, which are explanatory causal 
models. He acknowledges Indian and Chinese philosophy, but denies they 
have the same essence, they are still within a mythological framework. 
Science is the offspring of philosophy and in essence a 
'Geisteswissenschaft', a science of the mind.
There's a  heavy undertone of Hegel here (reason sleeps in the African, 
dreams in the Asian but is awake in the Western person) and his concept 
of Greek culture is typical 19th century German, when everybody there 
was very obsessed with clean Greek white marble rationality.
Obviously Husserl is not familiar with non-western philosophical texts 
and relies on hearsay or on abstracts. This is a pity, because in Indian 
philosophy there's a lot of phenomenology and transcendentalism; he 
would have loved it.

> Erik
>
>
> www.xs4all.nl/~jehms
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>