Husserl parody

THIS HUSSERL PARODY is basically very funny, and can be much appreciated for that.

However, many parodies undercut themselves through excessive use of “punch lines,” and this one is no exception. (This topic deserves a full-length essay of its own.)

See for instance the final sentence: “The dispute between Lebenswelter and Gaston-Gaston will very likely come to a head this July in Vienna when, at the annual convention of the Phenomenologists International, the two men will meet in the finals of the world-wide Eidetic Intuition Competition. (15) Whatever the outcome, we may confidently expect a revindication of Husserl’s classic dictum: ‘It is bad to be wrong, but it is worse to be understood.'”

I stopped laughing when I saw the phrase “world-wide Eidetic Intuition Competition,” and actually sighed and rolled my eyes at the final sentence. Why? Substandard comedy always does this, turning into caricature. It’s the equivalent of imitating Arnold Schwarzenegger and improbably saying “I’ll be back” or “Hasta la vista, baby” in even the most grave political scenarios. But that’s not the way to imitate Arnold. The way to do it is to just stick to getting the vowels and grammatical mannerisms right, while translating them into unprecedented settings.

This part of the parody is perfectly excellent, and should have been sustained all the way to the end:

However, the disagreement remains and, to get to the heart of the conflict, let us at once examine a passage in the Seventh Meditation that has been the focal point of the dispute. (6)

“By referring to destitutive analysis, we must not be understood as intending (in the sense of radical directedness-to-a-preliminary-perceived objectivity) to imply that, speaking — as always — strictly within the finite-infinite limits of transcendental apodicticity, the object ‘part-whole synthesis’ is even partially reducible to the noematic correlate of affective suspension (in the sense of ideally intended noesis subsumed and founded by the epoche). (7) For, although this is, of course, the case, our concern is this realm of a fully concrete living of the a priori, is, as we have repeatedly said, solely to lay bare the horizontal quasi-content of this analysis’ teleology. Here we may invoke Descartes’ realization (fundamentally uninformed and absurd as it was, being formulated in a reasonable and intelligible way for the first time in our Logische Untersuchungen and even there still lacking the proto-foundation of a full scale synthetic analysis on the level of transcendent egologicism) that some things (res) are hard to understand.” (8)

Now that’s good Husserl! Here the parodist captures a number of nice features that I’m too lazy to itemize at the moment.

Much can be said about effective and ineffective parody, and there is some real philosophical weight to this problem.