36
PARTISAN REVIEW
Such a reconstruction of the world from consciousness would equal
a second creation, since in this reconstruction its contingent character,
which is at the same time its character as reality, would be removed
from the world, which would thus no longer appear as something
given to man but as something created by him.
In this fundamental claim of phenomenology lies the most pro–
perly permanent and most modern attempt to find a new foundation
for humanism. Hofmannsthal's famous farewell letter to Stefan
George, in which he espouses "the little things" against big words,
since precisely in these small things the secret of reality lies hidden, is
most intimately bound up with the feeling of life from which pheno–
menology has arisen. Husserl and Hofmannsthal are equally classicists,
if classicism is the attempt-through an imitation, consistent to the
end, of the classic, founded upon man's being at home in the world–
to evoke magically a home again out of the world which has become
alien. Husserl's "to the things themselves" is no less a magic formula
than Hofmannsthal's "little things."
If
one could still achieve some–
thing with magic-in an age whose only good is that it has forsworn
all magic-then one would surely have to begin with the littlest and
apparently most modest things, with homely "little things," with
homely words.
It was due to this magical homeliness that Husserl's analysis of
consciousness (which Jaspers, since he inclined neither to magic nor
to classicism, found unimportant for philosophy) decisively influenced
both Heidegger and Scheler in their youth, although Husser! was able
to contribute little of its concrete content to Existenz philosophy.
Contrary to the widespread opinion that Husserl's influence was only
methodologically important, the fact is that he freed modern philo–
sophy, to which he himself did not properly belong, from the .fetters
of historicism. Following Hegel and under the influence of an extra–
ordinarily intensified interest in history, philosophy threatened to
degenerate into speculation as to whether the historical flux exhibited
possible laws or not. Here it is not relevant whether such speculations
were optimistically or pessimistically colored, whether they sought to
reckon progress as unavoidable or decline as predestined. The essential
thing was that in both cases Man, in Herder's words, was like the
ant that only crawls on the wheel of destiny. Husserl's insistence on
"the things themselves," which eliminates such empty speculation and
goes on to separate the phenomenally given content of a process from
its genesis, had a liberating influence in that Man himself, and not
the historical or natural or biological or psychological flux into
