ABSTRACT
The driving force of Husserl’s work was his urge to design a foolproof and fully trustworthy method leading to an equally reliable, ultimate interpretation of meaning. In the course of his search Husserl turned away from the mundane, unmethodical and therefore precarious methods which ordinary men and women employ matter-of-factly to sustain and orient their life-in-the-world. Distrustful of such mundane understanding as notoriously ambivalent and volatile, Husserl postulated, as the only remedy, a radical disengagement of the interpreting subject from its wordly entanglements. We traced his efforts to achieve this, and we saw his ultimate failure; the truly radically disengaged subject turned out to be pure consciousness, incapable of returning to the world, much less of coming to grips with the task of understanding in the only form which counts: as it is posited by, and in, life-in-the-world.
