Husserl’s Way to Authentic Being

Abstract

In a journal entry from 1906, Husserl complains of lacking ''internal stability'' and of his desire to ''achieve'' it. My claim in this paper is that the ''phenomenological method,'' which he made public in his 1907 lectures Die Idee der Pha¨nomenologie was, and is, a means to achieve the inner harmony that Husserl longed for. I do not provide an analysis of why Husserl might have felt the way he did; my aim is to show what internal stability might be and how one might achieve it. I conclude that the phenomenological method is the means, the ''how,'' to internal stability, which I characterize as ''clarity'' and ''harmony'' regarding our beliefs and, and ultimately, our authentic comportment.

Authenticity, Community, and Modernity

“…Sanchez (2007, p. 381) describes Husserl's reductive method as “involving the bracketing and suspension of all of our everyday beliefs,” which reveals the subjectively constituted and experientially finite nature of our world. The act of placing the world in ‘brackets’ effectively replaces things or phenomena, as given “in simple absoluteness” (i.e., natural attitude ) with “the respective meaning of each in consciousness .…”