Husserl’s Freiburg school operated as a demanding cult of devoted assistants

Evidence

Usually he got himself out of depression by furious work, sometimes writing major treatises in just a few weeks. This time it was harder. Yet he had a lot to distract him in Freiburg. Besides writing and teaching, he now managed an entourage of disciples who formed a sort of Husserlian laboratory. One pictures an array of white-coated phenomenologists tinkering at benches, but mostly their labours took the form of writing, teaching, and pursuing individual research projects. They edited a yearbook in which they published phenomenological texts, and taught basic university classes — ‘phenomenological kindergarten’, as one of the key assistants, Edith Stein, called it. Stein was struck by the extreme devotion Husserl expected from her and other colleagues. She was exaggerating only slightly when she joked to a friend, ‘I am to stay with him until I marry; then I may only accept a man who will also become his assistant, and the same holds for the children.’ — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 132

Categorization

• CANDY: Edith Stein’s joke about having to marry someone willing to become Husserl’s assistant too is a delightfully absurd detail about academic devotion.
• XREF: Echoes the master-disciple structure found later in Heidegger’s circle and Sartre’s groupuscules — the phenomenological tradition repeatedly ran on charismatic intellectual courts. — connects to: Freiburg became phenomenology’s living center through Husserl’s magnetic teaching — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 125; The Freiburg school sought to install an authoritarian competitive order within Nazi Germany. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 542; Husserl saw himself as a radical leader whose students were not keeping up — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 228