Husserl’s idealist turn alienated disciples who favored intersubjective experience

Evidence

Husserl certainly turned idealist enough during his long reign in Freiburg to alienate a few key disciples. Among those to complain about it early on was Edith Stein, shortly after she finished her PhD thesis on the phenomenology of empathy — a subject that led her to look for connections and bonds between people in a shared exterior environment, not a withdrawn and solitary one. Early in 1917, she and Husserl had a long debate on the subject, with her sitting in the ‘dear old leather sofa’ where his favourites usually sat in his office. They argued for two hours without reaching agreement, and shortly afterwards Stein resigned as his assistant and left Freiburg. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 166

Categorization

• XREF: Edith Stein’s empathy thesis points toward the intersubjective phenomenology that Husserl himself would later emphasize — a thread worth following. — connects to: Husserl’s noema doctrine reduces being to appearing, a form of Berkeleyan idealism.; Husserl’s late thought abandoned inwardness for a shared social world — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 165; Husserl saw himself as a radical leader whose students were not keeping up — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 228