Existence and the life-world
pp. 151-167
in: Leroy Rouner (ed), Philosophy, religion, and the coming world civilization, Berlin, Springer, 1966Abstract
Twenty-two years ago the present writer inscribed an essay on "Types of Unity and the Problem of Monism" to William Ernest Hocking on the occasion of his 70th birthday.1 Just as the earlier essay was concerned with problems of deep significance to the distinguished idealist, the present contribution to a Festschrift for him seems appropriate in its reference to the thought of Edmund Husserl. Hocking studied with Husserl for a time in Göttingen, a generation before the present writer went to him in his Freiburg period. Husserl recalled him with pleasure, regretting that his stay in Göttingen had not been longer. The early Husserl was concerned with the development of a pure "eidetic" phenomenology of experience. It was inevitable that the question of its relationship to the world of lived and living experience arose in later years, especially in view of the interest of such writers as Heidegger and Jaspers in the concept of existence. Professor Hocking would undoubtedly have felt more affinity to the Husserl of the "life-world" than he had to the stage of "transcendental egology," with its retirement to the pure experience of a solitary ego.
