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ABSTRACT
The present research contributes to the elucidation of an important aspect of Husserl’s interpretation of the history of philosophy, that is, his reading of the beginning of Western thought. In particular, it aims to clarify the sense in which Husserl deems Plato the father of the idea itself of philosophy as a science. As will be maintained, Husserl thinks of Socrates and Plato together as providing the first reform of philosophy, whose overall goal is to give reason (Vernunft) a universal method of self-justification against the general skepticism of the sophists. The analysis will be both systematically and historically oriented, for, it will try to both reconstruct Husserl’s interpretation of the background against which Plato first introduces the idea of philosophy as a science, and to show that what is truly at stake for Husserl is the nature of philosophy itself.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewer for the comments and his/her help to improve the present text.
Notes
1 We are referring to Hussel’s conception of “first philosophy” and the interpretation of the history of philosophy that he developed based upon it.
2 For the full list of the Husserliana volumes and the translations quoted in the present article, see the bibliography at the end of the paper.
3 See A. Lasks and C. Louguet, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie présocratique?; M. Sassi, Gli inizi della filosofia.
4 See F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy; M. West, Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient.
5 “auf den konkreten Gehalt seiner Philosophie darf ich nicht eingehen” (Hua-Mat IX, 28). As we will see, Husserl de facto takes into account a specific content of Plato’s philosophy (dialectics), but only in order to show that this is the content out of which the “ideal” of philosophy was born.
6 “Nicht eine Philosophie, sondern eine Vielheit < von > miteinander streitenden Philosophien erwachsen in rascher Folge und dabei von Philosophien, die zwar weltumspannend, aber inhaltlich sehr arm sind.”
7 In opposition to E. Severino, La filosofia antica, 17–19.
8 Husserl resorts to the Platonic expression ὄντως ὄν to simply designate the overall correlate of reason. In short, reason is understood by Husserl as the ability to properly grasp beings according to their specific mode of being and existence.
9 It might be assumed that a reference is here implicit to the following passage from Sophist: “Theaetetus: Express your meaning more clearly. Stranger: It seems to me that Parmenides and all who ever undertook a critical definition (διορίσασθαι) of the number and nature of beings (τὰ ὄντα) have talked to us rather carelessly. Theaetetus: How so? Stranger: Every one of them seems to tell us a story (μῦθόν τινα ἕκαστος ϕαίνεταί), as if we were children. One says there are three beings (τρία τὰ ὂντα), that some of them are sometimes waging a sort of war with each other, and sometimes become friends and marry and have children and bring them up; and another says there are two, wet and dry or hot and cold, which he settles together and unites in marriage. And the Eleatic sect in our region, beginning with Xenophanes and even earlier, have their story (τοῖς μὺθοις) that everything (τῶν πάντων), as they are called, is really one. Then some Ionian and later some Sicilian Muses reflected that it was safest to combine the two tales and to say that being is many and one (τό ὂν πολλά τε καὶ ἕν ἐστιν), and is (or are) held together by enmity and friendship” (242C-E).
10 In sum, with the sophists “reason” becomes aware of the self-contradictory situation in which it has fallen.
11 See the recent systematic analyses by D. De Santis, “The Practical Reformer.”
12 N. Notomi, “Dialectics as Ars Combinatoria,” 152.
13 Based on Husserl’s account of the transition from Socrates to Plato, the difference between Greek and Indian thought consists in that Buddha is a Socrates who nevertheless never gave birth to a corresponding Plato: “Has Indian thought produced a science of being? Did it ever have that in view?” (E. Husserl, “Sokrates-Buddha,” 5).
14 Even if contemporary English-speaking scholarship on Plato tends to speak of “form” rather than “ideas,” we opt for the latter instead in order to stay closer to Husserl’s terminology. Husserl speaks in fact of Ideen and Ideenwissenschaft.
15 Reference should be then made to the Sophist, where the question is tackled as to whether there exists false speech and what its difference from true speech is (which for Husserl represents the condition of possibility of philosophy): “Our object was to establish λόγον as one of our classes of being. For, if we were deprived of this, we should be deprived of philosophy (ϕιλοσοϕίας ἂν στερηθεῖμεν), which would be the great calamity” (260A) (A. Havlíček, “Die Aufgabe der Dialektik,” 174–75). For a research addressing the textual roots of Husserl’s reading of Plato, which is something that goes beyond the scope of this paper, see the work by T. Arnold, Phänomenologie als Platonismus.
16 For an analysis of why Plato himself could not fully realize such an ideal, see C. Majolino, “The Infinite Academy,” 176.