Eagleton on Husserl

 

Brentano, a former Catholic priest who resurrected a scholastic notion of 'intentionality', after rejecting Papal infallibility, created the problem of 'buck stopping' for logicism. For the faithful, the Pope is where the buck stops. He decides on matters of dogma. Can philosophy independently arrive at the same thing? Perhaps- if everyone has the right 'intentionality' and Darwin was wrong. We live in a Universe created by an Occasionalist God. Also P must equal NP which is less likely than pigs sprouting wings and flying around the place shitting on everything.  

Husserl studied Math under Weierstrass- whose theorem (with Bolzano) states that each infinite bounded sequence in finite dimensional Euclidean space has a convergent subsequence- but, sadly, Husserl didn't stop there. He also studied philosophy under Brentano. Could 'intentionalities' too converge? Might that be the way to get from what is material and contingent to that which is spiritual and self-subsistent? Husserl converted to Lutheranism when he was 27. As with LEJ Brouwer, there was a strong religious element to his thinking. But Brouwer made great discoveries in mathematics. His 'Intuitionism' turned out to be very useful. Husserl was seeking something of universal application. Sadly, there was nothing to find. Indeed, Heidegger's 'existentialism' gained currency precisely because it seemed a salutary rebellion against a Sciencey 'essentialism' though both were equally stupid. This is not to say proper Neo-Kantianism- e.g. in the hands of Grete Hermann- couldn't say sensible things about the new Epistemological problems raised by Quantum theory. But, this wasn't the case with Husserl's phenomenology. Still, a Theist like Godel was bound to return to it in the hope of finding some way to ground his own notion of an absolute proof- or, indeed, his own proof of the existence of God. 

I suppose one could say that different professions have different 'life-worlds' and there may be periods when a particular profession, glimpsing vast new horizons, seeks a foundational philosophy so as to speed things up or avoid costly detours. In the case of  Mathematics, over the inter-war period, smart people like Hermann Weyl, Alan Turing, Alonzo Church etc.  found Brouwer's intuitionism (of a constructive sort) better grounded in that 'life-world' than 'ideals' or Husserlian essences. Why? Perhaps it was because technology was changing. Digital computation was becoming a possibility. But, if people believed there was some 'spiritual' way to arrive at irrefragable truth, why would they invest in machines which would merely increase productivity? The trick would be to show the limits of pure reason regardless of its assumptions, axioms, or angle of approach.  This was achieved by Godel, Tarski & the Church/ Turing thesis which used Brouwer's overlapping choice sequences to lay the foundation of a robust theory of computability. The pay off was that computers could take over much of the mathematician's donkey work irrespective of the philosophical school he favoured. It turned out, for any useful purpose, there were always good enough 'univalent foundations' to promote greater productivity across the board. 

Of course, theory could be considered productive even if yields nothing useful. It could just mindlessly turn out iterations of itself. I suppose that is what happened to literary theory. But, when this happens, quality control goes out of the window. The discipline becomes adversely selective of paranoid imbecility or gesture politics. 

Eagleton in the second chapter of his 'Literary Theory- an introduction' pretends that Husserl was reacting to social changes or Capitalism's crisis or some such shit. This simply isn't true. Husserl was a Protestant trying to establish the superior and absolute nature of Geist- the realm of the Spirit. 

It was in this context of widespread ideological crisis,

Eagleton means the Bolshevik revolution and various similar outbreaks in Germany, Hungary etc, after the Great War.  

one which long pre-dated the First World War itself,

it predated the War of the Roses 

that the German philosopher Edmund Husserl sought to develop a new philosophical method which would lend absolute certainty to a disintegrating civilization.

He should have quietly fucked off to America and gotten a teaching gig in the Bible belt. America's civilization was rising rapidly.  

It was a choice, Husserl was to write later in his The Crisis of the European Sciences (1935), between irrationalist barbarity on the one hand, and spiritual rebirth through an 'absolutely self-sufficient science of the spirit' on the other.

He was wrong. Germany's choice was between being depopulated and deindustrialized under the Morgenthau plan or being partitioned and occupied by the the Allies. The latter course was preferable. 

Catholics are now content to say Faith rests upon a mystery. Maybe 'natural reason' can give us knowledge of God but who is to say what is natural or, indeed, what is reason? For practical matters, the Pope is infallible in the same sense that the decision of the Supreme Court is final. This is like what Kripke calls 'buck stopping'. Husserl was trying to shit higher than his arsehole. Heidegger- a spoiled Catholic but not a fucking Proddie bastid- had the advantage precisely because he wasn't Mathsy and had no pseudo-Scientific pretensions. Indeed, he could claim to be authentically rustic and totes retarded. 

...the aim of phenomenology was in fact the precise opposite of abstraction:

it was like Voodoo in that respect 

it was a return to the concrete, to solid ground, as its famous slogan 'Back to the things themselves!' suggested.

If one thing can be understood in its entirety- e.g. if its essence (what it would be in all possible worlds) were known- then everything about everything else could be deduced. We would be as Gods. Sadly, the essence of an intelligence which evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape can't involve knowledge of essences otherwise the fitness landscape would not be uncertain (i.e. not all possible states of the world are knowable). But to say the fitness landscape is not uncertain is an argument from design. Basically, you have a proof of God. There are other ways to get it- e.g. Godel's- but they assume something like 'absolute proof' or no unknown states of the world. This is fine if you are a Theist. But, if so, you don't need some pseudo-mathsy shite which is logically flawed (a computer found the error in Godel's proof of God) and as stupid as fuck.  

Philosophy had been too concerned with concepts and too little with hard data:

Philosophy is shit. It is adversely selective of imbecility.  

it had thus built its precarious, top-heavy intellectual systems on the frailest of foundations. 

Some people got paid a little money for teaching this shite. There are plenty of kids who get their first and second degree in a STEM subject but are too stupid to go any further. Shunt them off to the Philosophy or Sociology Department. Unlike real Science, the University doesn't have to spend money on laboratory facilities. It can turn a profit on selling sheepskins to credential seeking swine.  

Phenomenology, by seizing what we could be experientially sure of, could furnish the basis on which genuinely reliable knowledge could be constructed. It could be a 'science of sciences', providing a method for the study of anything whatsoever: memory, matchboxes, mathematics. If offered itself as nothing less than a science of human consciousness - human consciousness conceived not just as the empirical experience of particular people, but as the very 'deep structures' of the mind itself.

If I knew all that can be known about a dog turd, I would also know everything about everything including how I know what I know. This may also mean that I retrospectively create the Universe and myself and everything that is. This is because, for all we know, Knowledge itself may be essentially 'constructivist'. 

Unlike the sciences, it asked not about this or that particular form of knowledge, but about the conditions which made any sort of knowledge possible in the first place.

Intentionality. But where did that come from? Biology. We need to do useful stuff to survive- unless the only way we earn a crust is by teaching useless shite.  

It was thus, like the philosophy of Kant before it, a 'transcendental' mode of enquiry; and the human subject, or individual consciousness, which preoccupied it was a 'transcendental' subject.

Kant, in his final years, was seeking to ground metaphysics in physics. But metaphysics is merely the 'displacement activity' of savants facing an 'open problem' which hasn't yet been empirically closed. If it is scrupulous in avoiding elementary logical fallacies - e.g. the 'masked man' or intensional fallacy which has been known since the 4th Century BC- then it won't get to excited about 'intensions'- e.g. 'intentionality'- whose extension is epistemic, impredicative, and thus not well-defined. This means, no logical operation can be performed using the term. All you have is 'ex faslo quodlibet'- an explosion of nonsense.

Eagleton shrewdly detects the same 'magical thinking' in F.R. Leavis as in Husserl or Heidegger.

It all seems a far cry from Leavis and the organic society. But is it? After all, the return to 'things in themselves', the impatient dismissal of theories unrooted in 'concrete' life, is not so far from Leavis's naively mimetic theory of poetic language as embodying the very stuff of reality itself. Leavis and Husserl both turn to the consolations of the concrete, of what can be known on the pulses, in a period of major ideological crisis;

blood-letting, not crisis. Ideologies calcified though, no doubt, Governments had to act strategically to win wars or put down insurrections.  

and this recourse to 'things themselves' involves in both cases a thoroughgoing irrationalism.

Magical thinking.  

For Husserl, knowledge of phenomena is absolutely certain,

By 1935, smart people were worrying about Schrodinger's cat. Nothing was certain.  Grete Hermann showed the flaw in Von Neumann's 'no hidden variables' theorem in the same year that Husserl published his cretinous 'Crisis'. 

or as he says 'apodictic', because it is intuitive: I can doubt such things no more than I can doubt a sharp tap on the skull.

It might be caused by hypnotic suggestion. 

If phenomenology secured a knowable world with one hand, it established the centrality of the human subject with the other.

No. It sublates the merely human subject. To be fair, the French tended to reject Husserl's transcendental ego. 

The paranoid aspect of Husserl, Leavis, Eagleton and other savants of stupid shite is that they claim that most of their colleagues are very evil and are spreading a very evil ideology which is causing man to become alienated, disenchanted, economically exploited, politically oppressed and subject to incessant sodomy and slut-shaming by Neo-Liberalism.  

Indeed it promised nothing less than a science of subjectivity itself.

It delivered shit.  

The world is what I posit or 'intend': it is to be grasped in relation to me, as a correlate of my consciousness, and that consciousness is not just fallibly empirical but transcendental. This was a reassuring sort of thing to learn about oneself.

But it wasn't what Husserl was saying. He was super-special. You weren't.  

The crass positivism of nineteenth-century science had threatened to rob the world of subjectivity altogether,

but the crass materialism of folk who preferred riding in railway carriages or steam ships prevailed. Subjectively, you were welcome to read Ruskin or Morris and whine about how much nicer things were in days of yore. Indeed, you might make money out of it. Laissez faire was all about 'subjectivity' and found its 'ideological form' in the Marginal Revolution in Economics.  

and neo-Kantian philosophy had tamely followed suit;

It had many strands. Leonard Nelson's strand looked like it was doing okay.  

the course of European history from the later nineteenth century onwards appeared to cast grave doubt on the traditional presumption that 'man' was in control of his destiny,

This is a very modern, not a traditional, presumption.  

that he was any longer the creative centre of his world.

Pussycats are secretly running things.  

Phenomenology, in reaction, restored the transcendental subject to its rightful throne.

Marxists are obsessed with thrones and restorations.  

The subject was to be seen as the source and origin of all meaning: it was not really itself part of the world, since it brought that world to be in the first place. In this sense, phenomenology recovered and refurbished the old dream of classical bourgeois ideology.

Which was to make money, not talk bollocks. True, if your son is a nitwit, you may have to send him to Grad Skool. Being a Professor may not be well paid, but it is more prestigious than earning your crust by sucking off sailors at the docks.  

For such ideology had pivoted on the belief that 'man' was somehow prior to his history and social conditions, which flowed from him as water shoots forth from a fountain.

Why the fuck do the bourgeoisie gas on about 'Humanity'? Why don't they simply slit their own throats instead? Also, fuck is with this God business? Pope should be sucking off sailors not living large in Vatican City. 

 For Husserl... meaning is something which pre-dates language:

which it obviously does on the basis of phylogenetic & ontogenetic evidence. Our distant ancestors had no language. Baby isn't born with language. Mummy knows what he means and initially uses the sounds he makes. At a later stage, baby starts to learn the words Mummy and everybody else uses.  

language is no more than a secondary activity which gives names to meanings I somehow already possess.

Because you have intentionality- just like the baby.  

How I can possibly come to possess meanings without already having a language is a question which Husserl's system is incapable of answering.

Meaning is related to the means used to gain various ends. Baby wants milk. The meaning of its cry is interpreted by Mummy.  

The hallmark of the 'linguistic revolution' of the twentieth century, from Saussure and Wittgenstein to contemporary literary theory, is

utter uselessness.  

the recognition that meaning is not simply something 'expressed' or 'reflected' in language: it is actually produced by it.

Language speaks us. Also it makes me fart a lot. This is highly subversive of the Neo-Liberal literary canon.  

It is not as though we have meanings, or experiences, which we then proceed to cloak with words; we can only have the meanings and experiences in the first place because we have a language to have them in.

This is why if babies are taken away from Mummies and raised speaking a properly Communist language, they will show no egotism or desire for private property. Why do Mummies object to our confiscating their new-born infants? Is it because Neo-Liberalism has brainwashed them?  

What this suggests, moreover, is that our experience as individuals is social to its roots; for there can be no such thing as a private language, and to imagine a language is to imagine a whole form of social life.

The same argument Witless used to show a private language is impossible also rules out public language. There is no fool-proof verification protocol for the same reason that no atomic propositions exist.  

Phenomenology, by contrast, wishes to keep certain 'pure' internal experiences free from the social contaminations of language - or alternatively to see language as no more than a convenient system for 'fixing' meanings which have been formed independently of it.

But, the thing was useless. What wasn't useless was computer languages and Gentzen natural deduction systems etc.  It appears there is a law of increasing functional information at work in all complex systems. What is functional is what is useful. It boosts productivity and even profitability. It gets selected for while useless shite ends up getting relegated to the Literature Dept or some other such dumping ground for imbeciles. 

Husserl himself, in a revealing phrase, writes of language as 'conforming in a pure measure to what is seen in its full clarity'.

I point and say 'look at the orlux!' You look but say 'I can't see clearly through the fog. What is an orlux? I've heard the word before but have no clue as to what sort of animal it is. ' Then the fog lifts. You see what I am pointing at clearly. You may say 'oh! The orlux is a type of bear'. This is the manner in which language 'conforms' to what is clearly seen. 

But how is one able to see something clearly at all, without the conceptual resources of a language at one's disposal?

Because we evolved in a manner consistent with the law of increasing functional information.  

Aware that language poses a severe problem for his theory,

It didn't. The big problem was that what Brouwer & Weyl were doing was useful. What Husserl was doing was useless. Even Heidi & Witless might be said to have some sort of poetic quality.  

Husserl tries to resolve the dilemma by imagining a language which would be purely expressive of consciousness - which would be freed from any burden of having to indicate meanings exterior to our minds at the time of speaking. The attempt is doomed to failure: the only imaginable such 'language' would be purely solitary, interior utterances which would signify nothing whatsoever.

Nope. It would signify everything. You would have one Absolute Proof which soon generated proofs for everything because we'd know how to 'carve up reality along its joints' and thus have access to all true atomic propositions. After that we could create nice nice Universes for ourselves. Nobody would be forced to teach stupid shite so as to earn a crust. 

Meanwhile, in interwar Germany, intellectuals (including Frege) were inclined to believe the country would starve unless it conquered land to its East. This meant, as Thomas Mann had said during the Great War, that it needed to turn its back on 'Western Civilization' and privilege some supposed 'German Culture' based on the blonde beast butchering inferior races and grabbing 'living-space'. The result was that Germans were raped, butchered and ethnically cleansed from a good bit of their own historical territory. 

Heidi was part of this stupidity. 'Necessity' not 'Reason' was the new God to which the German University must pay homage. 

The recognition that meaning is historical was what led Husserl's most celebrated pupil, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, to break with his system of thought. Husserl begins with the transcendental subject; Heidegger rejects this starting-point and sets out instead from a reflection on the irreducible 'givenness' of human existence, or Dasein as he calls it.

Inter-war German Dasein was shitty. What Heidi didn't get was that it would get a lot shittier if the Germans went to war with both the US and the USSR. Thankfully, he was on the right side of the Berlin Wall and was able to live comfortably enough.  

It is for this reason that his work is often characterized as 'existentialist', in contrast to the remorseless 'essentialism' of his mentor. To move from Husserl to Heidegger is to move from

a stupid, but mathsy, guy to a stupid spoiled Catholic with a weak grasp of Classical Philology.  

the terrain of pure intellect to a philosophy which meditates on what it feels like to be alive.

Coz Professors are experts on that- right?  

Whereas English philosophy is usually modestly content to enquire into acts of promising or contrast the grammar of the phrases 'nothing matters' and 'nothing chatters',

i.e. it has a light leavening of wit 

Heidegger's major work Being and Time (1927) addresses itself to nothing less than the question of Being itself - more particularly, to that mode of being which is specifically human.

as opposed to being a lesbian cabbage.  

Such existence, Heidegger argues, is in the first place always being-in-the-world:

actually, we are a 'self-domesticated' species which thanks to the complexity of our 'co-evolved' systems are relatively independent- at least in the medium term- from the fitness landscape 

we are human subjects only because we are practically bound up with others

No. We are human even if we aren't bound to anybody. Germans of the period may not have understood this. 

and the material world, and these relations are constitutive of our life rather than accidental to it.

No. They are accidental because we can change our position in the material world. It is a different matter that we may currently lack the technology and resources to do anything very radical in this matter but it is fucking obvious that the 'material world' isn't constituting us in any particular. Otherwise something like the Lamarckian theory of evolution would be true.  

To be fair, Husserl appeared to be part and parcel of epistemological house-cleaning within Math. But the thing just added to the clutter. It was useless. 

. Husserl's enthroning of the transcendental ego is merely the latest phase of a rationalist Enlightenment philosophy for which 'man' imperiously stamps his own image on the world.

No. Husserl was a devout Christian- not a Deist. Nor was he Catherine the Great in drag. He was a Mathsy guy whom some people thought was clarifying the foundations of STEM subjects. They were mistaken.  

Heidegger, by contrast, will partly decentre the human subject from this imaginary position of dominance.

Professors of shite don't dominate shit.  

Human existence is a dialogue with the world, and the more reverent activity is to listen rather than to speak.

Says a fucking lecturer.  

Human knowledge always departs from and moves within what Heidegger calls 'pre-understanding'.

Who gives a fuck? Knowledge is what it is useful to know. It isn't shite about what Knowledge really really is.  

Before we have come to think systematically at all, we already

think systematically. The problem here is that the word 'systematic' is 'epistemic' and doesn't have a well defined 'extension'.  

share a host of tacit assumptions gleaned from our practical bound-upness with the world, and science or theory are never more than partial abstractions from these concrete concerns, as a map is an abstraction of a real landscape.

No. It is a representation of features of that landscape which are salient for a particular purpose. 

Understanding is not first of all a matter of isolatable 'cognition',

yes it is- for any useful purpose.  

a particular act I perform, but part of the very structure of human existence.

Nobody knows what the structure might be. 

For I live humanly only by constantly 'projecting' myself forwards,

Nonsense! You can live very humanly while drunk off your head.  

recognizing and realizing fresh possibilities of being; I am never purely identical with myself, so to speak,

because the intension 'myself' does not have a well-defined 'extension'. It is epistemic and impredicative. This is cool if you are in the business of generating facile paradoxes a la Wilde or Chesterton.  

but a being always already thrown forwards in advance of myself. My existence is never something which I can grasp as a finished object,

nor is it the planet Jupiter. Sad.  

but always a question of fresh possibility, always problematic; and this is equivalent to saying that a human being is constituted by history, or time. Time is not a medium we move in as a bottle might move in a river: it is the very structure of human life itself, 

Kurt Lewin came up with a notion of genidentity-  the existential relationship underlying the genesis of an object from one moment to the next- around 1922. This had some influence in the philosophy of science but Heidi laid an egg as far the useful Sciences were concerned. 

something I am made out of before it is something I measure. Understanding, then, before it is a question of understanding anything in particular, is a dimension of  Dasein, the inner dynamic of my constant self-transcendence. Understanding is radically historical: it is always caught up with the concrete situation I am in, and that I am trying to surpass.

The concrete situation was that what Einstein and Heisenberg and Dirac was doing was useful. They did surpass what had gone before in their field. Heidi & Husserl didn't. Phenomenology was shit. So was Hermeneutics though one or two good philologists were involved in it. 'Reception' is about utility. Ignore useless shite. Be attentive to what is potentially useful.  You may need to draft in a Turing or Robert Flowers to do the deciphering. But that's how wars are won. Even the Nazis didn't want Heidi, or Carl Schmitt's, help. 

What is valuable in (Heidi's) philosophy, among other things, is its insistence that theoretical knowledge always emerges from a context of practical social interests.

One could, with far greater truth, say it never does. It emerges from a context of theoretical knowledge gaining funding or appearing remunerative to pursue. This is a matter of economic, not a social, interests. Take a man out of society and he still has economic interests. Robinson Crusoe is the paradigm of the economist. 

Heidegger's model of a knowable object is, significantly, a tool:

We use all sorts of tools of which we know little other than what button to press or where to plug the thing in.  

we know the world not contemplatively, but as a system of interrelated things which, like a hammer, are 'to hand', elements in some practical project.

Animals can use tools. Heidi might be considered a great philosopher- if he were a chimpanzee.  

Knowing is deeply related to doing.

So is booing. Heidi said boo to Democracy and the Rule of Law.  

But the other side of that peasant-like practicality is a contemplative mysticism: when the hammer breaks, when we cease to take it for granted, its familiarity is stripped from it and it yields up to us its authentic being.

No it doesn't unless you are a fucking Zen master and into wabi-sabi and seeing the ultimate emptiness of all things.  

A broken hammer is more of a hammer than an unbroken one. Heidegger shares with the Formalists the belief that art is such a defamiliarization: when van Gogh shows us a pair of peasant shoes he estranges them, allowing their profoundly authentic shoeness to shine forth.

Van Gogh was influenced by the Japanese who kept gassing on about Basho remarking the worn out sandal abandoned in Yamaguchi Sodoo's famous Chrysanthemum gardens. There is a theory that Heidi had read Okakura's book of tea. 

Indeed for the later Heidegger it is in art alone that such phenomenological truth is able to manifest itself, just as for Leavis literature comes to stand in for a mode of being which modern society has supposedly lost.

To truly become a medieval peasant, you need to spend many years in Grad School.  

Art, like language, is not to be seen as the expression of an individual subject: the subject is just the place or medium where the truth of the world speaks itself, and it is this truth which the reader of a poem must attentively hear.

Only if he has nothing better to do.  

Literary interpretation for Heidegger is not grounded in human activity: it is not first of all something we do, but something we must let happen. We must open ourselves passively to the text, submitting ourselves to its mysteriously inexhaustible being, allowing ourselves to be interrogated by it. Our posture before art, in other words, must have something of the servility which Heidegger advocated for the German people before the Fiihrer.

The other side of the coin of Führerprinzip was  Auftragstaktik. Hitler defined the broad strategy. Individuals were supposed to proactively devise and implement tactics in furtherance of it.  No wonder the Nazis thought Heidi was useless. 

The only alternative to the imperious reason of bourgeois industrial society, it would appear, is a slavish self-abnegation.

This isn't how it appeared to Gentzen, an actual Nazi. Natural deduction systems are pretty useful. Prawitz did a lot to transport much from 'Sequent calculus' into that form. But syntactic consequence isn't the same thing as semantic consequence. Meaning is a function of information. Greater informativity means more data which in turn means some functional types of meaning burgeon- which entails more resources being devoted to signalling, transmission and reception. But resources may be speculatively allocated. Sparse but highly functional information will be given more sophisticated semantic interpretation. There can be an arms race if the information is strategic. 

The computer revolution got a kickstart when people like Turing & Flowers were put to work deciphering the Enigma transmissions. But game theory, too, received a fillip. One outcome not anticipated in the Fifties and into the Sixties, was that 'I-language' (internal, ideal or intensional) became a mirage. Only E-language (extensional or external) exists. Statistical methods & machine learning type reinforcement triumphed. 

 Meaning is something which the author wills: it is a ghostly, wordless mental act which is then 'fixed' for all time in a particular set of material signs.

This is the 'I-language' fable. If it were true you could easily program a computer to do high fidelity translation between languages. Also, your Computer could talk to you in the way that HAL does in Kubrik's 2001. 

It is an affair of consciousness, rather than of words. Quite what such a wordless consciousness consists in is not made plain. Perhaps the reader would care to experiment here by looking up from the book for a moment and 'meaning' something silently in his or her head. What did you 'mean'? And was it different from the words in which you have just formulated the response? To believe that meaning consists of words plus a wordless act of willing or intending is rather like believing that every time I open the door 'on purpose' I make a silent act of willing while opening it. There are obvious problems with trying to determine what is going on in somebody's head and then claiming that this is the meaning of a piece of writing.

Motivation does matter. It needn't be reduced to 'willing'. The thing may be habitual or unconscious.  

 it would doubtless be impossible to recover exactly what Shakespeare meant by 'cream-fac'd loon',

Not really. Macbeth follows it up with similar imprecations addressed at the scared servant 

so we have to settle for what he might generally have had in mind.

What we 'settle for' depends on the costs and benefits involved. There are diminishing returns to literary theory. There are increasing returns to the theory behind STEM subjects. 

Marxism is an economic theory. In essence, it is about how things are managed. The opposite of economia is akreibia- the fault of seeking for a greater precision than the subject matter affords. Reception or Hermeneutics is a mysterious economy- just like the invisible hand of the market place. There are coordination games and discoordination games and there is arbitrage between them. But if the game is not worth the candle, you merely have a separating equilibrium or paranoid imbecility. That is what happened to literary theory. In so far as Husserl influenced Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida &c, that is his legacy.