The Larger Conversation by Lilburn Tim;

Author:Lilburn, Tim; [Tim Lilburn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781772123586
Publisher: University of Alberta Press

11

Negative Theological Meditations

Apophasis and Its Politics

I

Edmund Husserl gave two lectures at the Sorbonne in late February, 1929, on transcendental phenomenology, his new way of doing philosophy, the latest of the fresh twentieth-century philosophical sciences. Husserl told his audience how deeply pleased he was to speak at the home of French science because he believed the true father of this new philosophy had been none other than France’s greatest thinker, René Descartes. But phenomenology was neo-Cartesianism, Husserl announced to his no doubt surprised listeners, without “nearly all the well-known doctrinal content of Cartesian philosophy” (1).

Husserl’s new thinking was Cartesian only in ambition and in its utter preoccupation with subjectivity. Like Descartes, Husserl wished to provide all the sciences with an unshakeable grounding, a set of absolute insights “behind which one cannot go back any further” (2). To do this, he believed, philosophy needed to be radically rebuilt following a complete destruction of all previously held philosophical positions; this operation would require, as well, he added, the dismantling of the self of the philosopher.

“First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must ‘once in his life’ withdraw into himself, and attempt, within himsef, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting,” Husserl said.

Philosophy—wisdom—is the philosophizer’s quite personal affair. It must arise as his wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute insights. If I have decided to live with this as my aim—the decision that alone can start me on the course of philosophical development—I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge. (2)

Then Husserl adds, echoing Descartes once more, the scientifically grounding insights of philosophy were to be the positions, if any, remaining in the completely effaced psyche of the radical philosopher. The true beginning of all real knowledge was to be the appearance of consciousness in its most harrowed state.

Like Descartes in retirement in Holland, Husserl, in his Sorbonne lectures, later published as Cartesian Meditations, selected a single moment to reflect on how he “might find a method for going on” (2). This method, if uncovered with sufficient rigor, would be a prototype for any philosophical initiate following him. It would be, that is, a “transcendental subjectivism” (4), that would leap beyond solipsism and relativism and become a model for all other subjectivities.

|| January 5, 2008, St. Peter’s Abbey. I am having difficulty moving on the Husserl essay because I am acutely aware now that I no longer know what my allegiances are, what I love, what I desire. I am unmoored. My present distance from an earlier reading in patristics, I suspect, contributes to this state. My distance from the sacraments, together with my no longer living in the aspen parkland of north central Saskatchewan, does as well.

|| The Cartesian ego dissolves, with its convictions, under the pressure of doubt; what Descartes wants is the pure diamond of certitude.

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