Free At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell

phenomenology into a branch of ‘idealism’ — the philosophical tradition which denied external reality and defined everything as a kind of private hallucination.
    What led Husserl to do this in the 1910s and 1920s was his longingfor certainty. One might not be sure of much in the world, but one could be sure about what was going on in one’s own head. In a series of lectures in Paris in February 1929, attended by many young French philosophers (though Sartre and Beauvoir missed it), Husserl laid out this idealist interpretation and pointed out how close it brought him to the philosophy of René Descartes, who had said ‘I think, therefore I am’ — an introspective starting point if ever there was one. Anyone who wants to be a philosopher, said Husserl, must at least once try to do as Descartes did:‘withdraw into himself’ and start everything from scratch, on a certain foundation. He concluded his lectures by quoting St.Augustine:
Do not wish to go out; go back into yourself.
Truth dwells in the inner man.
    Husserl would later undergo another shift, turning again towards an outside arena shared with other people in a rich mixture of bodily and social experience. In his last years, he would say less about Descartes’ and Augustine’s inwardness, and more about the ‘world’ in which experience occurs. For now, however, he was almost entirely looking within. Perhaps the crises of the war years had intensified his desire for a private, untouchable zone, although the first stirrings did predate his son’s death in 1916, and the last would continue for a long time after it. Debate continues to this day about how significant Husserl’s changes of direction were, and how far his idealist turn went.
    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— a subject that led her to look for connections and bonds between people in a shared exterior environment, not a withdrawn and solitary one.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.
    She had other reasons for going: she wanted more time for her own work, which Husserl’s demands made difficult. Unfortunately, she struggled to find another post. First she was blocked from one formal position at the University of Göttingen because she was a woman. Then, when another came up inHamburg, she did not even apply because she felt sure that her Jewish origin would be a problem: the department already had two Jewish philosophers and that appeared to be the limit. She returned to her home town, Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland), and worked on her thesis there. She alsoconverted to Christianity, after reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Ávila, and in 1922 become a Carmelite nun — a dramatic transformation. The Order gave her special dispensation to continue her studies and to send out for philosophy books.
    Meanwhile, in Freiburg, her departure left a gap in Husserl’s gang. In 1918 — still long before Sartre had heard of any of them or thought of going to Germany — that gap was filled by another impressive young phenomenologist. His name was Martin Heidegger, and he would prove far more trouble to the master than even the forthright and rebellious Edith Stein had been.
    If Sartre had gone to Freiburg in 1933 and met both Husserl and Heidegger, his thinking might have got off to a different start indeed.

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    THE MAGICIAN FROM MESSKIRCH
In which Martin Heidegger appears, and we become perplexed about Being .
    Martin Heidegger’s challenge to Husserl came in the opening lines of a book, Sein und Zeit ( Being and Time ), which he