The Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology (review)

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Reviewed by: The Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology Joseph Shay The Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology. Donn Welton. Studies in Continental Thought series, ed. John Sallis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. xvi + 496 pp. $71.95 h.c. 0-253-33795-X; $52.95 pbk. 0-253-21558-7. "My good Crito, why should we care so much for what the majority think? The most reasonable people, to whom one should pay more attention, will believe that things were done as they were done." —Plato, Crito Donn Welton's mission in this text is to be among the most reasonable people. He carefully surveys the entirety of Husserl's work to see how things were done. To such thorough work, we should pay more attention. Welton traces the evolution of Husserl's attempts to deal with philosophical problems through all of the major stages of his career. He takes care to place Husserl's unpublished and published works on equal footing, showing each work's role in the development of Husserl's thought. He necessarily ends up also revealing ways in which exclusive attention to the published works, or to only some among them, fosters a partial, not to say misleading, picture. Still, the book is not a debate with other [End Page 344] interpreters. "This study, then, aims to provide not so much a refutation as an alternative to the standard portrait of Husserl" (2). Welton's task is positive. The book has three major divisions: (1) an exposition of Husserl's body of work, offering a strong insight into both conceptual and historical continuity in the development of phenomenological method; (2) a critical section highlighting the limitations of and difficulties in the method; and (3) a discussion of the phenomenological theory of the world and the horizon, and how Husserl's ideas provide an opening to future investigations. The first and by far the longest section is titled "The Emergence of Husserl's Phenomenology," indicating Welton's overall objective: to make clear that Husserl's philosophy is a unitary work that evolved over a long period of time. As an intellectual laborer of the highest order, Husserl had his share of false starts and reconsiderations. Welton carefully shows that Husserl's later philosophy was a consistent development from his earlier views, not merely an attempt to shore up a method that was fully settled by the middle of his career, and to which he was attached even though it was fundamentally deficient. The connections between Husserl and several other philosophers receive much attention. Welton situates Husserl's "Cartesian way" of static phenomenology within the broader context of developments in constitutive and genetic phenomenology. Husserl's debt to Kant is stressed in terms of the role these ideas played in getting beyond limitations of the Cartesian way. The discussion of the connection between Husserl and Heidegger is most interesting. Not satisfied with considering the evident differences between the masters, Welton draws out the kinship between Husserl's work on constitutive and genetic phenomenology and Heidegger's methods in Being and Time. Contrary to what one might expect, Heidegger's analysis is discussed as being in some ways a less full account of ordinary human experience. In discussing some of Husserl's basic distinctions and methodological procedures, Welton uses schematic diagrams to supplement the text. This strategy is unorthodox but very welcome. Language as employed in intellectual endeavor is a fundamentally linear tool. The diagrams portray in two dimensions distinctions, methods, and foci of analysis that Husserl employed. They never replace but rather supplement textual expositions and enhance their clarity. The nonlinearity of Husserl's analysis can lead even a careful reader into confusion. Welton's work excels in recognizing this problem and using the explanatory power of diagrams. Among the unresolved problems Welton investigates is Husserl's relation to psychology. An entire chapter is devoted to his continued efforts and final failure to completely escape psychologism. Welton's recognition of the basic limits of Husserl's thought does not preclude his noting its value for future investigations. Welton spends the last chapters of the book working with Husserlian ideas as applied to the phenomenological problem...