Husserl’s late turn toward embodiment may have borrowed from Heidegger and Uexküll

Evidence

These late works of Husserl’s are different in spirit from the earlier ones. To Merleau-Ponty, they suggested that Husserl had begun moving away from his inward, idealist interpretation of phenomenology in his last years, towards a less isolated picture of how one exists in a world alongside other people and immersed in sensory experience. Merleau-Ponty even wondered whether Husserl had absorbed some of this from Heidegger — an interpretation with which not everyone agrees. Other influences might be seen too: from sociology, and perhaps from Jakob von Uexküll’s studies of how different species experience their ‘environment’ or Umwelt. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 426

Categorization

• QUESTION: How contested is the Merleau-Ponty reading that Husserl moved toward Heidegger? Worth chasing in Merleau-Ponty scholarship.
• XREF: connects to: Husserl came to regard Heidegger’s philosophy as a dangerous betrayal. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 250; The Sartre-Merleau-Ponty break mirrored the earlier Husserl-Heidegger schism — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 836; Husserl’s phenomenology reified abstractions by forgetting consciousness’s productive role — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2271