The concept of sensuous hyle is one of Husserl’s most widely discussed ideas. Beside such thinkers as Ingarden, Patočka, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre or Henry, one of the critics of the hyletic data theory was Leopold Blaustein. In his 1928 doctoral dissertation on Husserl, Blaustein describes and critically discusses Husserl’s concept of hyletic content. In my paper, I would like to reconstruct Blaustein’s criticism and pose a question not so much about its interpretative legitimacy—as Blaustein in his doctoral thesis focuses almost exclusively on the presentation of Husserl's views from Logische Untersuchungen—but rather about its substantive persuasiveness in the light of Husserl's late philosophy.
One of the main claim of Blaustein’s criticism is that Husserl does not distinguish between “sensing” and “sensed content” and for that reason hyletic data remain something vague and ambiguous, even though they are considered by Husserl to be ichfremd. Using Sartre’s term, this non-intentional hyle seems to be a sort of étre hybride, having both the properties of things and of consciousness.
I would like to argue, however, that the proper understanding of meaning of Ichfremdheit of hyletic data in Husserl depends on taking two factors into account: (1) Husserl’s specific transcendental perspective, and (2) genetic perspective in phenomenology. Both of these perspectives are absent in Blaustein’s reading, who comprehends Husserl through the lens of Brentano’s and Twardowsk’'s psychology, and rejects both the transcendental and eidetic claims of phenomenology. It is possible to show that in the light of Husserl’s late transcendental-genetic concept of consciousness, the thesis about the “belonging of sensuous hyle to consciousness” takes on a meaning that descriptive psychology is unable to spell out. In this way, the systematic and historical value and limits of Blaustein’s criticism will be defined.