Husserl demanded total lifelong devotion from his disciples

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

• XREF: Edith Stein’s devoted assistantship and later path could connect to the reader’s broader history-of-ideas interests. — connects to: Husserl backed Heidegger’s career hoping to restore ideological loyalty but lost the succession — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 225

Broader Connections

• Husserl backed Heidegger’s career hoping to restore ideological loyalty but lost the succession #corroborates (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 225