Husserl’s oeuvre was scattered because he constantly abandoned projects for more uncertain ones

Evidence

Husserl had to be possessive about his best followers, for only a few — Stein among them — mastered the art of reading his manuscripts. He used his own adaptation of a popular form of shorthand, the Gabelsberger system, and filled thousands of pages with this idiosyncratic script in a minuscule frenzy. Despite his precision of manner, he was not orderly about his writing. He would leave old projects discarded like shavings while he set off on new ones, which in turn he did not finish. His assistants worked to transcribe his drafts and tease out his arguments, but, each time they returned a document to him to revise, he would rewrite it as a new work. He always wanted to take his thought to some more puzzling and difficult place: somewhere not yet explored. His student (and later translator) Dorion Cairns recalled Husserl saying that his aim was always to work in whatever topic seemed the ‘most distressing and uncertain’ to him at any time — the ones that filled him with most anxiety and self-doubt. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 133

Categorization

• QUESTION: This ‘most distressing and uncertain’ work method — writing in Gabelsberger shorthand, never finishing — raises how such a scattered archive was ever assembled into ‘Husserl’s works’, and whether the task remains ongoing.
• CANDY: A philosopher who deliberately chose to work on whatever topic scared him most, writing thousands of pages in an unreadable private shorthand, is a vivid dinner-table anecdote.
• XREF: connects to: Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts held his most important work — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 434; Husserl saw himself as a radical leader whose students were not keeping up — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 228

Broader Connections

• Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts held his most important work #expands (0.72) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 434