We should distinguish between two traditions within phenomenology: realist phenomenology and idealist phenomenology (fathered by Heidegger and Husserl respectively). The distinguishing feature is how they treat their ‘pre-bracketed’ and ‘post-bracketed’ states: in the realist case when we interpret (describe) the world we can bracket the truth of the claims epistemologically: we can say ‘there is a table there’ regardless of whether there is really. In the idealist case we can metaphysically bracket claims: we say the description ‘there is a table’ has no commitments at all about what is real or not, and indeed we can come up with a system of such ‘impoverished descriptions’ with no metaphysical commitments – and in Husserl’s case, use these statements as a foundation for science.
So the realist phenomenologist says ‘there is a table there’ is a useful interpretation, it does certain things (coordinates our behaviour, engagement with the world, etc.) and it can do this while being true or false – but it nevertheless is about the world – it says that a table exists. The idealist phenomenologist says, rather, that it cannot be false because it has no metaphysical content, is a mysterious kind of description that does not posit the existence of anything.
How does idealist phenomenology accomplish this? In The Idea of Phenomenology , Husserl outlines the key idealist move:
"Every intellectual experience, indeed every experience ever, can be made into an object of pure seeing and apprehension while it is occurring… [therefore,] it would make no sense at all to doubt its being." (Lecture II).
The metaphysical trick here is to assert that the world we encounter is just a series of partial objects within consciousness (ie. pure phenomena) rather than aspects of total objects which consciousness encounters. Thus, our global picture is this: consciousness is a container of objects of a special kind - phenomenal objects - when we believe we have seen a bent stick (cf. refraction) we are "really" just encountering a series of bent-sticky phenomena within consciousness, and hence make no mistake at all.
Phenomenology thus transposes the problem of failed judgement ("there is a bent stick before me") into metaphysical theatre: it isn’t a failure of judgement, it's that you're only in contact with phenomenal objects, not real ones - so you are certain, correct and not failing in anyway when you say "I saw a bent stick" if we interpret this as phenomenological puppetry on the stage of The Mind.
Idealist phenomenology thus believes there is a privileged class of descriptions (interpretations of the world) which are immune from failures of judgement, which are true in virtue of being about phenomenal objects. I cannot myself, even granting idealist metaphysics, think of any description of the world which doesn't, in its particular ontological carving-up, make itself immune from a hermeneutic critique: that, at least, there is no “privileged” way to carve up the world and many terrible ones (such as those immediate ones which come to mind sat in an arm chair).
However the foundational problem here is that consciousness is not a container for objects; this assertion mostly derives from another: that the world itself seems to be one way but is another, thus in its initial state of “seeming to be” it cannot be itself real (that illusion is metaphysical). The world, however, never seems to be other than it is. When there's a "bent stick" in some water, The World isn’t in a state of "seeming" where it has changed its nature - the world is exactly as it should be: light is being refracted through water. Our judgement that this effect is not refraction but a bending of the stick is the error. "Perception" (and seeming, illusion) is a property of judgement, not the world: the world only seems to seem. We perceive only in the sense that our encountering objects is not epistemologically determinative: we don't always know what it is we're encountering that does not imply, whatsoever, that the world is thus itself "seeming to be" and so, in effect, is "really" inside consciousness.
Husserl’s reply to the metaphysical sceptic is thus to assert that we can have non-metaphysical interpretations of the world, by asserting that what we are interpreting isn’t the world but an ideal theatre – and thus just either eliminates reality or turns it into ideality, and in either case, neither bypasses metaphysics nor successfully replies to the sceptic.
So, what guarantees knowledge? Given that the response to this question in the idealist-phenomenal tradition has been to perform metametaphysical acrobatics (transforming consciousness into a container; objects into phenomenal spectres there in, and encountering objects as a constitutive of them) - can we do better? What exactly is the comparison here however, scepticism about knowledge lead idealists to do what exactly? Merely, to assert that knowledge was certain. Rather than say our judgements about the world could be foundationally in error we assert that judgement is foundationally certain, and that the world thus bends to its abilities - so we bring the world under the umbrella of knowledge, within consciousness, and say "there is no problem of scepticism, because knowing makes things the case!".
The idealist tradition has, in each stage of its developmental reply to scepticism just asserted new things about the power of judgement, which incidentally only ever prompted a reformulation of scepticism in higher-order terms - rather than "that stick might not be bent!", the sceptic says "there's no way of deciding whether your knowledge is determined by your judgement or of the world itself or of some corrosive mixture!", and here too we might just offer Nietzsche's rebuttal to Kant:
'How are synthetic a priori judgements possible?' Kant asks himself - and what is really his answer? 'By means of a means' - but unfortunately not in five words."
The problem to those who take knowledge to require higher-order justification is that there’s always a higher-order the sceptic can go to: idealist epistemology says that you can only claim “I know there is a table there” if you can also explain how you’ve come to know that, so the idealist builds up a metaphysical picture which guarantees the how, but then the sceptic replies: and how do we know your metaphysics is true? The realist however will simply say: go ahead claim to know things, knowledge only collapses in toto if the radical sceptic is right, in all other cases it doesn’t – and since we’ve no reason to believe the radical sceptic, we’ve no reason to throw away knowledge claims.
Thus the realist phenomenologist says only that the world is, in the general case, itself, and only itself. If it "seems" to be a delusion, the world isn’t changing, our judgements are. The world is not "external", as though it could ever have been "internal": the mind is not a container, but a process (of encountering). We are embedded in the world, as water runs through soil, the light of bent-sticks runs through us. We don’t have any "absolute, creative, ideal freedom" to run it a different way. The stick isn’t made by our heads, the light isn’t a spectre of our mind – it’s running through us. The mind, insofar as it does anything, casts its own shadow on the world - a shadow which aids our judgement but is neither identical to it or the world.
Thus knowledge is provided contingently: whether we are actually correctly describing the world is determined by how things are, not as a necessary property, artificially guaranteed by judgement. If a person looks out over a desert and sees a mirage then his judgement is wrong about the world, and if another person looks out and sees an oasis, then his judgement is right. Neither person can alone and a priori give any certainty to their knowledge. There is "certainty" but it’s a property of states of affairs (of my body, the world, our relationship), not of the mental. The mirage-man does not have certainty, but the oasis-man does - as a feature of their relationship to the world, not as a feature of their knowledge: oasis-light is flowing through the oasis-man, but there is no mirage-light flowing through the mirage-man.
There can be no reply to the encircling sceptic, other than to turn his scenarios around on him, and ask, "but what would have to be the case for your alternative possibility to be true?". And we always find a great mess which cannot be justified. In a field of alternatives where none can win out against the others on certain grounds, we’re compelled to the one which invents the least. And as far as metaphysical gymnastics goes, the least assertive is that which says, "my hand here, is my hand, in the world in which I am in, and I know this if, and only if, it is the case".
The observation on which all scepticism rests is that judgement never comes with a judgement of itself, that to know a thing is not to know that you are knowing it or how you are knowing it. And scepticism only forces us to concede this minor point, and none other: not that their Rube Goldberg metaphysics is worth consideration, and especially not that we have to become Goldbergs ourselves.
http://slipperyrock.academia.edu/TomSparrow
The oasis-man neither has certainty; pending on the morrow’s discovery. Human Certainty is the peak of knowledge within context; of time and subject-New time brings newer discovery and other Subjects lend knowledge to the subject in focus.
Having browsed the pel comments for sometime I’ve come to the conclusion that “dmf” is actually high functioning Ai probably developed by Dylan in his secret particle physics lair. That or dmf has read the Internet and communicates in hyperlinks
I’m a William James fan and so it’s very striking to consider phenomenology as these two types: Idealism and Realism. James invented his own brand of phenomenology in opposition to BOTH of those schools. (He was earlier than Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and they had all read James.) Even further, James’s phenomenology rejected the basic ontological assumptions upon which both of those schools are predicated.
I imagine you or your readers might be interested to see how this works, Sir Micheal of Burgess.
James uses a different vocabulary than the Germans (James doesn’t even use the word “phenomenology,” as far as I know) but the basic ideas of phenomenology are quite recognizable. Here is an easy-to-read draft of a paper that presents Husserl and James side by side, so to speak: http://www.academia.edu/7733482/William_James_Pure_Experience_and_Phenomenology
The interesting thing, I think, is that James isn’t just taking a very close look at experience as such, although that’s true too. He’s also saying something quite radical: that experience IS reality – and everything we take to be ontologically distinct like mind and matter, inner and outer, thought and thing, are features of experience, are known within experience. Thus he avoids falling into idealism or realism. In that respect, experience is ontologically neutral or pluralistic.
They say Husserl was the last of the great Cartesians. I suppose that’s what sunk his boat.
> James invented his own brand of phenomenology in opposition to BOTH of those schools.
Everyone invents a phenomenology in opposition to both idealism and realism. That’s the “political-rhetorical” point of it: that we have overcome realism-idealism. My claim here is that this is never accomplished, phenomenology just splits the ideal into two (consciousness and subjectivity) and claims that descriptions of “objects within consciousness” is not metaphysics. It is, and the global split that phenomenology effects in the ideal is the most egregious kind of metaphysics.
> THe’s also saying something quite radical: that experience IS reality – and everything we take to be ontologically distinct like mind and matter, inner and outer, thought and thing, are features of experience, are known within experience.
This is *exactly* what I’m refering to.
> Thus he avoids falling into idealism or realism. In that respect, experience is ontologically neutral or pluralistic.
Nope. That’s just another kind of asserted metaphysics.
Your claim is that “phenomenology just splits the ideal into two (consciousness and subjectivity)” and “the global split that phenomenology effects in the ideal is the most egregious kind of metaphysics”?
I’m fairly certain that your claim cannot rightly be applied to James’s phenomenology, not least of all because one of his central essays (Does Consciousness Exist?) denies the existence of consciousness as an entity, denies the distinction between consciousness and its content, and the other central essay (A world of Pure Experience) he denies the ontological distinction between subject and object or knower and known.
The “subject-object” frame that phenomenology claims to bypass is not the same subject-object distinction that needs to be addressed, or they were trying to address. Phenomenology splits the ideal in two: consciousness and subjectivity. And then claims the subject-object distinction has been over come by occupying a third place, that of consciousness, which is external to (or the background of, etc.) the subject-object split.
However in splitting the ideal, they have just split the subject and have not resolved the sceptical and metaphysical problems therein. The mental without the subjective – the conscious – is just part of the Ideal of earlier metaphysics. Phenomenology is still fully within idealism, hence “experience IS reality” – but all phenomenologists add is “but not *subjective* experience” – to which I say: who cares? A metaphysics nonetheless, idealism nonetheless, and wrong nonetheless.
Thanks for sharing my James and Husserl lecture I delivered at the Center for Inquiry, and intended for the OPA. The refined version of this paper is coming out in Philo, the official journal of the Center, and of course, there’s always Bruce Wilshire and James Edie’s books on James and Husserl as secondary material. Sometimes, it feels like nobody will ever read what I write. I’ll also be blogging over at Philosophical Percolations starting mid-May, Jon Cogburn’s new cohort blog. I’ve pitched a book idea on James and phenomenology to Oxford UP. Here’s to hoping… Again thank you.
Best,
Ed
I love this post. I’m not sure I agree with it entirely, but it is clear direct and to the point. I think I Personally agree about the strict idealist form, it’s running in circles, and that it is nonsensical. I’m not sure this constitutes a justification for the title and tossing out all phenomenology. But the title sure does does draw in angry readers and angry readers are still readers!
But more to the point as a younger regular here this was very enlightening for me. I’ve read Husserl (and James) and listened to the relevant PEL and done some limited secondary reading, but having done those things this provided me with a lot of clarity on how the realist and idealists differ. And, the tone sat really well in terms of the “god damn it this is just stupid.”
Thanks, I really enjoyed this. It is a really good articulation of a good objection.
I rarely do anything without provoking a reaction, and I usually expect the reaction to be from those who disagree the most (at least, that’s the aim). But it is nevertheless nice to see that someone without any anger has understood it.
Yes, Husserelian phenomenology suffers from the same epistemic problem that the Kantian transcendental deduction suffers from: judgment is idealistically determined to be what makes knowledge possible–epistemic skepticism’s defeat of idealist phenomenology.
Heidegger’s “realist” phenomenology is much more complex in that he never conflates the subjective with the objective, and avoids the reliance on the knower to ground the knowing which is the transcendental trap of Husserl. Rather, in the absence of such grounding, the phenomena of beings and being are described by fundamental ontology and existentiality. Does Heidegger make judgments about ontology? If so, how so, and how do your say so? So I would say, that ontological skepticism does not prevail against Heidegger as you suggest.
> avoids the reliance on the knower to ground the knowing which is the transcendental trap of Husserl
> Does Heidegger make judgments about ontology? If so, how so, and how do your say so? So I would say, that ontological skepticism does not prevail against Heidegger as you suggest
I’m, at the moment, reserving judgement on Heidegger’s phenomenology. Certainly it can be read in a way which is not liable to the criticisms here – whether people actually read it that way, most of the time, I’m doubtful. Much phenomenology is closer to Husserl than Heidegger in the sense above.
I have another article I’ll be writing offering a criticism of Heidegger’s notion of Being.
For Heidegger truth is never spoken of as just subjective or objective but in ontological terms of the being of aletheia. You do not claim truth, and truth is not the objective or subjective thing that you can therefore dismiss as “untrue.” Heidegger does well to put being into questioning rather than answering. My problem with him is that he approaches existence as originating from the same, from what he eventually metaphysicially speculates in S&Z as the primordial, or Beying, or Being from which being, beings and Dasein originate.
Thank you for this great post, and all the comments which I have just discovered. As a recent MFA post graduate in Art in the Contemporary World at NCAD, I’m not qualified to add anything of value here, other than that much post modern theory seems to embrace phenomenology, from Husserl to Merleau Ponty. While I respect both of these contributions for the times they were written, I would question phenomenology*s dated view of perception which we know to be largely predictive, creative and a culturally learned process. (See Anil Seth’s paper here) https://www.dropbox.com/s/fniqeqr7pn6kpbs/Seth_EURREV2019%5B1%5D.pdf?dl=0
In my view this makes the phenomenological Reduction redundant, as any obvious or offensive learned biases can be unlearned where appropriate. Having read Graham Harman’s object oriented ontology (which runs into problems around vicarious causation) and a criticism of this by Levi Bryant in his his paper The Interior of Things :The Origami of being, I am still forming my own criticism of phenomenology in search of a flat un-tiered ontology. I look forward to hopefully reading more of your work and any further recommendations. Many thanks,
Come over to the other side, oh my brother, the phenomenological water is just fine.
Your blog post is filled with a lot of ad hominem and dismissive language, words like “trick”, “puppetry”, “acrobatics”, “theater”, “delusion” and even “Rube Goldberg metaphysics”, and all of this against what is arguably the most influential philosophical movement of the 20th century. I understand that Phenomenology is quite radical in its approach, and therefore poses an existential threat, but this most fundamental kind of questioning is the very soul of philosophy itself. On this ground, both Husserl and Heidegger present us with profound and challenging questions about the meaning of consciousness, and about the meaning of Being. Both of these philosophers regard Phenomenology as the proper philosophical attitude, that is, one that is open to Being and seeks not to answer, but to ask. In this, their phenomenologies share a common source in that both “begin” with the suspension of Being. Husserl achieves this through his methodological “epoche” or bracketing, and Heidegger through the questioning of Being as a whole. As such, they are both the “letting be” of Being, and not the positing of either “real” or “ideal” worlds.
I was an idealist for two years and a phenomenologist for the last two – only recently have I changed my opinion. I understand the position, I understand its propaganda (over coming idealism-realism, etc.) since I’ve written articles on this very blog pushing it on these grounds – but I was just confused. I’m not at all “afraid of its radicalness” I’m merely convinced of its falsity. And falsehoods do not gain merit by being “influential” – else we might as well replace science with superstition.
Husserlian phenomenology is descriptive, and as such, it takes up a descriptive stance. This stance is distant from and uninvolved in what it describes. Taking up this stance is the very idea and spirit of phenomenology itself. It doesn’t take this stance so that it can later return from it, but rather, it must never return. That means it never commits itself to an outcome, and by that I mean a judgment of being. This is the meaning of the “epoche”. Phenomenology describes this outcome in the life of consciousness, but is not and is never committed to it. This spirit is manifested as the historical unity of the phenomenological movement. Phenomenology, I would argue, is not Metaphysics. Now if Phenomenology is not Metaphysics, then to ask if it is right or wrong is to ask whether it is right or wrong to take up this stance at all.
> if it is right or wrong is to ask whether it is right or wrong to take up this stance at all.
I’m asking whether this stance is *possible*: my position is that it isnt. There are no non-metaphysical descriptions.
Wow. You are quick! Give me a little time to think about and respond to your question. It’s a good one.
If your criticism is that this taking up of the stance itself posits a new kind of being, that is, a being conceived as ontologically irrelevant, then you are correct. However, Phenomenology does not make the further claim that this being so revealed is the “real”. That would be to make a judgment of being. Phenomenology makes no ontological claims, even about itself.
Let’s compare it to the scientific attitude. It takes up a position of its own, and in fact makes somewhat similar claims. Science is an objective look at the world that attempts to remove any subjectivity from consideration. An object appears as what Heidegger called present-at-hand. Certainly, this particular taking-up of a stance is possible and quite valuable. Phenomenology, on the other hand, is different in that the object of Phenomenology is itself, it’s own consciousness, or rather, consciousness as it appears as lived. Phenomenology is possible because it takes the being of this lived consciousness and its contents out of consideration. It sets it aside. It is precisely this setting-aside which is at the same time the taking-up of the stance. How does it do this? It accepts no statements that are assertions of being. It is not a question of whether or not consciousness is capable of “truly” doing this or not, to the science of Phenomenology those kind of statements about being do not matter; they are not allowed in the same way Mathematics does not allow nor concern itself with the actual number of apples in the basket.
> Phenomenology makes no ontological claims, even about itself.
It has to in order to effect the split between ‘the real’ and ‘the conscious’. It’s this asserted split (point to it for me?) that confuses the phenomenologist: they’ve created a split and called one half of it Reality so that their descriptions arent about reality.
First I dont think this split exists. Even if however, it does, then still descriptions of consciousness are descriptions of reality. To say “there is a phenomenal table” *is* to say there is something about ‘the real’ in virtue of which there is a phenomenal table.
We should just set aside this confusion that metaphysics is about the “underneath” of things however: metaphysics is about what exists. All descriptions of the world posit the existence of entities regardless if they “end up” as dreams or whatever in the (invented, asserted) noumena.
Phenomenology is wrong IMHO because facts didn’t matter to Hegel’s Post-Modernism, bypassing Kant in pre-Kantian, revised-Kantian and post-Kantian terms all at once (Redding 2010). Kant, the central figure of philosophical Modernism (Rohlf 2010), needs the noumenon as much as the phenoumenon. “Here and now”, the noumenon or the environment/other/reality reflects itself as what-is-sensed in sensing, and knowing reflects itself in what-is-known. Independence between the two may not be absolute, however it is enough to accept their independent confirmation as positive verification and negative falsification.
Husserlian phenomenology is not Hegelian phenomenology, of course, but a comparison would be informative and a fun read. Maybe this? http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-2016-9_7 Just found it. However, I do not understand when you say “it is enough to accept their independent confirmation as positive verification and negative falsification.” Maybe you could elaborate?
If and when the noumenon reflects itself as the environment/other/reality or what-is-sensed in sensing and independently confirms the phenoumenon reflecting itself as the organism/self/belief or knowing in what-is-known, then the noumenon (what-is-sensed) positively verifies the reflected phenoumenon (what-is-known), proving it reliable, while the reflected noumenon (sensing) negatively falsifies the phenoumenon (knowing), proving it valid.
In phenomenological terms, you seem to be describing what Husserl called fulfillment, which is an important element in his theory of truth. Consciousness can have a (more or less) empty intention of its object, I am now simply thinking about my son, or a (more or less) fulfilled one, that is, my son is standing here before me right now and I have an immediate perception of him (asking for money). For Husserl, truth and falsity have to do with the adequation or non-adequation of the fulfilled intention to some other (empty) intention. That is oversimplified, of course, so let’s just say truth is grounded in the intentional structure of consciousness. If you are saying something similar, then that is not a criticism of phenomenology; that is phenomenology. Husserl’s book Experience and Judgment is a wonderful phenomenological study of how judgment (asserting what is true or false) is grounded in the intentional life of consciousness.
Perhaps I could translate fulfilled- or empty intentions into form and content. Content shapes form in sensing what-is-sensed while form shapes content in knowing what-is-known, before form continuously processes content. Social interaction externalizes content from idea into fact through spontaneous gestures and living expressions in behavior, which may be internalized again from fact to idea through cognition, by other forms. All the time, the phenoumenon needs the independent (rational-, emotional- and/or compassionate) confirmation of the reflected noumenon, which cannot stem from the same intentional source. If it did, confirmation bias or independence bias would be accidents waiting to happen.
The “split” is simply this. In our everyday life, the perceiving is not what is perceived. The remembering is not what is remembered. The imagining is not what is imagined. Certainly you would agree that when you examine your own conscious life that you can make this distinction. That is simply a description of what is the fundamental structure of consciousness. Intentionality. The weight of the object as real varies with the type of lived consciousness. For example, perception of what is actually here and now is more “real” than what is vaguely remembered. But we as phenomenologists, as those who examine these acts of consciousness, are not concerned with the validity of the claim the act of consciousness makes, we are only interested in the fact of the claim and in describing that fact.
You criticisms of phenomenology may well be valid. However, they do not directly follow from the Husserl quote that you provided:
“Every intellectual experience, indeed every experience ever, can be made into an object of pure seeing and apprehension while it is occurring… [therefore,] it would make no sense at all to doubt its being.”
You follow this Husserl quote with the following statement which is not directly entailed by the above:
“The metaphysical trick here is to assert that the world we encounter is just a series of partial objects within consciousness (ie. pure phenomena) rather than aspects of total objects which consciousness encounters. Thus, our global picture is this: consciousness is a container of objects of a special kind – phenomenal objects – when we believe we have seen a bent stick (cf. refraction) we are “really” just encountering a series of bent-sticky phenomena within consciousness, and hence make no mistake at all.”
Perhaps you think that Husserl is saying that the original perceptual object (eg a bent stick) is made an object of pure seeing? If that were the case, then every thing that you say would follow. But that is not what Husserl is saying. Husserl is making the form or structure of that experience an ‘object of pure seeing’, NOT the original perceptual object (not the apparently bent stick). By reflecting upon experience, Husserl does NOT put perceptual objects (bent sticks) into the ‘container’ of consciousness thereby making it them ‘phenomenal objects’. Husserl is not interested in the original perceptual object. The ‘object of pure seeing’ that he is interested in is the form that our ‘intellectual experience’ takes. He is interested in describing the structures of consciousness that make experience possible. The certainty that the phenomenologist is meant to apprehend is NOT of the bent stick but of the experience of the bent stick. We can be completely wrong about the bent stick (and know that we are wrong) but still reflect upon the (certain) experience of that stick.
Does Husserl ultimately succumb to idealism? Yes, I believe so. But the story is more complicated than you have presented and Husserl deserves a more charitable reading.
This comment is exactly right, and correctly criticizes the orignal post by pointing to a common misunderstanding of phenomenology. Phenomenology makes no ontological judgements about the objects of the consciousness that it describes. It does this while all the while fully aware that for the consciousness being described, these judgements have an urgent existential import.
But I want to talk about the word “succumb”. “Does Husserl ultimately succumb to idealism?” The word “succumb” has a pejorative context meaning to fail, to be overwhelmed, and it points to a possible weakness, maybe physically unable to continue, or maybe not having the moral character or the intellectual fortitude to hold on and assert one’s will. A drowning person succumbs to the cold and the water, gives up at some point, and is lost. Regardless of how brave and strong we might be, we are all susceptible to being overwhelmed and having to succumb. Note that succumbing is the opposite of asserting. It is the letting go, the end of the fight, and the acceptance of whatever may come. Succumbing is easy compared to asserting precisely because of this letting go. Succumbing therefore is tempting, it pulls us toward itself and offers an end to struggle.
Husserl’s Transcendental Idealism is not the same as Berkeley’s divine guarantee of empirical idealism, or Hegelian idealism of Absolute Spirit, or Platonic idealism of the forms, but to say that Husserl succumbed to idealism is an admonishment against all forms of idealism, regardless of the particular flavor. Idealism is to be avoided. We must not be overwhelmed or beguiled by the temptations of the idealist arguments. To do so would be to give up and to let go on our grasp of reality. That must not be challenged.
“We should not succumb”. This negative normative claim lights up our existential loyalty to our own understanding of Being, and as such, it is limit and a closing off of possibility. I am not here arguing that idealism is true or correct, Rather I am arguing that an openness to idealism is at the same time an openness to questioning our deepest understanding and most cherished way of being-in-the-world. It is that openness that is at the heart of phenomenology, and therefore, at the heart of philosophy itself.
My apologies. My intention was not to belittle idealists or idealism. I only meant to suggest that Husserl may have originally been trying to avoid idealism.
I might add that it is the tenacious clinging to ontological commitments that is the source of the misunderstanding of Phenomenology that you correctly criticized in your original reply above.