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It is a matter of history that few of Husserl’s former students from the Göttingen and Freiburg era were willing to follow him into the perspective of transcendental phenomenology.1 To be sure, as Husserl remarked in a letter to Roman Ingarden,2 a whole generation had passed by and former students had moved on to their own special areas of interest; now they were unable or unwilling to comprehend the new development. While Ingarden had moved to a formulation of his own in Das Literarische Kunstwerk,3 he was nevertheless considered by Husserl as one of the latter’s most faithful and devoted students.4 Perhaps because of this respect and trust, Ingarden was asked to comment on Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and he obliged with critical remarks on the first four meditations.5 Husserl was so impressed by these that he demanded that they be included along with the text in the German edition. The richness and scope of Ingarden’s remarks have not been fully appreciated by the English-speaking world, no doubt in large part to the fact that they were not translated. I propose to comment on some of these in so far as they illuminate the nature of the difference between the two phenomenologies. At the same time they will bring into sharper focus the development of what has been called ‘The Second Phenomenology’

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-2882-0_4

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