Dasein - Monoskop

84 PART II
all other ontological commitments vis-à-vis areas of experience E-2
to E-n in force. Husserl will then hold that our investigation of E-
1 is still not ontologically neutral: since all areas of experience are
interconnected in various ways, we are likely to rely on ontological
commitments (that is, those vis-à-vis E-2 to E-n) even when neutralizing
those with respect to E-l. Husserl's central argument is thus
that we cannot just drop ontological commitments with respect to
one, or some, experience(s), since all experiences are interconnected:
"Each singular experience 9 reflects 9 the totality of experiences"} 1 *
In other words, in order to understand the self-evidences for one
single transcendent object of some experience (Erlebnis), it is not
enough to drop the ontological commitments with respect to only
this object. Since each experience is connected to numerous other,
further, experiences, dropping ontological commitments merely locally
inevitably relies on similar commitments within neighbouring
experiences. To avoid this kind of circularity, ontological commitments
have thus to be dropped or neutralized at one fell swoop.
In lectures given in 1923/24 Husserl tries to make this move
palatable by an interesting comparison with ethical criticism. Elaborating
upon this account, the following argument seems to suggest
itself. If I want to determine what is right or wrong to do in a given
situation, I might search for an answer on the basis of my given general
values and beliefs. However, instead of searching for the answer
in this limited way, I may also move—leaving aside Alasdaire Maclntyre's
well-known counterarguments 279 —to a more radical reflective
stance by asking myself which values I should accept and which interests
I should develop in the first place. Asking this question, I can
no longer make use of any of my earlier actually adopted values. 280
Even though Husserl does not parallel phenomenology and ethics
this explicitly in other places, it seems that his characterization of
the transcendental standpoint as one where we drop at once all ontological
commitments of the natural attitude is somehow modelled on
moral ideas; especially Husserl's repeated talk of becoming a "pure,
disinterested onlooker" 2 * 1 , and his speaking of dropping "every interest
in objective existence" 282 is often reminiscent of the "moral
point of view".
What we have above called the dropping or neutralization of