A Study Of “Geisteswissenschaften” In Husserl’s Ideas Ⅱ

Husserl’s idea of the phenomenological Geisteswissenschaften originated from the influence of Dilthey and the neo-Kantian south-western school of Wendelband and Rickert on the division between ’Nature’ and ’Spirit’,’natural science’ and’Geisteswissenschaften’ at the end of the 19 th century.Among them,Dilthey’s idea of laying an objective and valid basis for the "Geisteswissenschaften" had a profound influence on Husserl’s mid-term thought,as shown in his discussion of the constitution of the spiritual world in Ideas Ⅱ.The current relationship between Husserl and Dilthey’s late thought needs to be rethought,and in fact Husserl at the time of Ideas Ⅱ did not understand the Dilthey of late hermeneutics.Grounded in the philosophical ideal of phenomenology as a rigorous science,Husserl’s regional ontological analysis of different scientific theories is based on purely primordial experience and intuitive description.Husserl’s idea of the phenomenological Geisteswissenschaften is a reflection and an examination of the theoretical attitude of the Geisteswissenschaften within the transcendental perspective of phenomenological reduction.In the constitutive analysis of the spiritual world of Ideas Ⅱ,Husserl rejects the naturalistic attitude of examining the life of the human psyche solely through positive causality and proposes the attitude of Geisteswissenschaften called the personalistic attitude.Through the phenomenological suspension of the naturalistic attitude,we gain the possibility of turning the gaze of consciousness and discovering a personalistic attitude as a new natural attitude.Geisteswissenschaften is the study of the life of the psyche as the personal self,the intersubjective self.In it the life of the psyche is transformed into a phenomenon of personhood related to the self and the Umwelt.The personality self exists in the Umwelt and adopts a motivated understanding of the experience of the Umwelt,expressed as rational motivation and associative motivation.The personality self is a ’self-subsistent subject’,manifesting itself in the interplay of active and passive behaviour in the experience of the body’s layer and psyche’s layer.The true personal self is the rational,free spiritual self that exists in the Umwelt(the naturalistic world and the spiritual world).In Ideas Ⅱ Husserl also analyzes the ontological relations between nature and spirit,the naturalistic world and the s piritual world,puts forward the idea of the relativity of nature and the absoluteness of spirit,and advocates the ontological priority of the spiritual world over the natur salistic world.However,the reflection on the relationship between nature and spirit has been a source of controversy among scholars.In fact Husserl’s central concern with this issue is to show that spirit,as the life of the psyche,has its own intrinsic lawfulness and is not related to the natural world as a component of the real unity man.In the attitude of Geisteswissenschaften,nature is the intuitive reality of spirit,while spirit itself is absolutely subjectivity,and thus the spiritual world takes precedence over the naturalistic one.In the appendix of Ideas Ⅱ Husserl remarks that,because the conceptions of traditional naturalistic psychology and Geisteswissenschaften are full of fallacies and ambiguities,the phenomenological elucidation of Geisteswissenschaften is based on the Geisteswissenschaften as an essential descriptive science.Geisteswissenschaften as an essential science consists of a universal,essential analysis of the subjectivity of spiritual phenomena or human beings.Husserl found that traditional psychology could not help develop a true transcendental philosophy,providing the "true and final foundation" of the Geisteswissenschaften.In the 1920 s Husserl elucidated the origin of the meaning of Geisteswissenschaften through the study of phenomenological psychology,i.e.,by going back to the transcendental structure of the pre-scientific empirical world.In The Crisis,Husserl had to rethink the problem of the crisis of science and the transcendental phenomenology as an absolute Geisteswissenschaften,providing the final foundation of an objective Geisteswissenschaften.