Pre-Predicative Experience and Life-World: Two Distinct Projects in Husserl’s Late Phenomenology.

In this chapter I argue that the movement back to pre-predicative experience in Experience and Judgment and the movement back to the life-world in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology are distinct and should not be conflated. The origin of several instances of conflation in Husserlian scholarship is Ludwig Landgrebe’s equation of the two projects in the introduction to Experience and Judgment, which has been mistakenly attributed to Husserl. After describing the project in Experience and Judgment as a movement from the full-fledged forms of predication to the pre-figuring forms of perceptual experience, I flesh out the specifics of Husserl’s project of de-idealization in Crisis. Subsequently, I turn to the work of post-Husserlian phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty and Derrida and argue that they also succumb to the conflation of the two projects. I conclude with a brief summary of the proposed interpretation.