Edmund HMusserl PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE CRISIS OF PHILOSOPHY Philosophy as ” Rigorous Science and Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man TRANSLATED WITH NOTES AND AN INTRODUCTION BY QUENTIN LAUER ‘ HARPER TORCHBOOKS The Academy Library HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORKIntroduction by Quentin Lauer PHILOSOPHY AS RIGOROUS SCIENCE PHILOSOPHY AND THE CRISIS OF EUROPEAN MAN PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE CRISIS OF PHILOSOPHY English translation copyright © 1965 by Quentin Lauer Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. 10 East 53rd Street New York, N.Y. 10022 First HARPER TORCHEOOX edition published 1965 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. New York, Evanston, and London. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-8794 Contents cevueeraueanueteaanuaeesnanasuestaa 1 71 149Introduction »v QUENTIN LAUER eusunoueranannasteeaaneseezneate Despite a strong upsurge of interest among English-speaking readers in the work of phenomenologists, we are still faced with a lamentable dearth of material in English devoted to their efforts. Particularly conspicuous is the lack of translations, above all of the work done by the “father of phenomenology,” Edmund Husserl. Chief, perhaps, among the reasons for this absence of translations is the extremely involuted and, therefore, forbidding style of the author. His thought is not extraordinarily difficult to comprehend (for those who are familiar with modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant), but the words in which this thought is expressed resist translation. There is an early translation by Boyce-Gibson of the first volume of Husserl’s Ideas,' whose ac- curacy leaves something to be desired, and there is a recent trans- lation by Dorion Cairns of the Cartesian Meditations,’ which re- veals as well as anything can the difficulty of presenting a readable English version of Husserl’s German. In addition, the present editor has translated for Cross Currents the first of the essays 1 Ideas, tr. W. R. Boyce-Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1941). The preface to this translation was an original essay by Husserl, published in German under the title Nachwort zu meinen Ideen zu. einer reinen Phanome- nologie (Halle: Niemeyer, 1930). 2 Cartesian Meditations, tr. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960). Throughout the present volume references will be to this translation, ac- cording to the original pagination, which is given in the margins. 3 Cross Currents, VI (1956), 228-46, 32444. The translation is reprinted here with slight emendations. 1