Conversions of Ambiguity

Abstract

Perhaps it will even become manifest that the total phenomenological attitude and the epoche belonging to it are destined in essence to effect, at first, a personal transformation [ eine vollige personale Wandlung ], comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion [ einer religiosen Umkehrung ], which then, however, over and above this, bears within itself the significance of the greatest existential transformation [ der grosten existenziellen Wandlung ] which is assigned as a task to mankind as such. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, #35 In [Beauvoir's] The Blood of Others … we are present at an evolution [ une evolution ] – more than that, at a veritable overturning [ une veritable retournement ], a conversion [ une conversion ]. And everything makes us believe that this conversion [ cette conversion ] will be definitive, it has ‘value’, it designates itself to us as a solution and an end, announcing the deplorable appearance of the Sollen , of that Sollen for which Hegel condemned Fichte to philosophical calamity. Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire Between Edmund Husserl's description in 1937 of the phenomenological epoche as possibly involving a personal transformation, and Maurice Blanchot's disparaging description in 1949 of an ideal of conversion that he identified in the work of Sartre and Beauvoir, a transformation of phenomenology had taken place. Husserlian intentionality had been converted to Heideggerian being-in-the-world, and in turn to the freedom of French existentialism. Husserl's natural attitude – with few implications for ethics or politics – had been converted to Heidegger's fallenness.