Wesen, Eidos and Normativity in Husserl's Phenomenology

Abstract

Edmund Husserl’s eidetic phenomenologyhas attracted many criticisms, even from within the phenomenological tradition. This dissertation moves from the idea that these criticisms are to a greater or a lesser extent challenges for eidetic phenomenology; and, accordingly, they must be taken seriously before accepting Husserl’s eidetics or rejecting it and attempting to overcome it. As such, the two primary objectives of this dissertation are to clarify how the notion of essence is to be understood according to Husserl, and to show that, once properly understood, the notion of essence is worthy of a place within phenomenology. The first three chapters of this dissertation intend to achieve the first of the primary objectives; that is, to clarify Husserl’s notion of essence. The first chapter takes the move from an analysis of the notion of essence as it is gradually presented in the course of lectures of 1902–1903 titled Allgemeine Erkenntistheorie, where Husserl introduces it for the first time as a technical notion. From there, the chapter ventures to uncover the ancestors of the notion of essence in the Logische Untersuchungen, and to reconstruct the reasons leading Husserl to introduce the new term and its cognates in place of the term ‘species’. The second chapter continues this examination, focusing, instead, on the first sections of Ideen I, where Husserl introduces for the first time the notion of pure essence or eidos; which Husserl arrives at after several years of continuous work on this issue. The third chapter adds some important elements for the discussion of Husserl’s eidetics. In particular, it investigates what it means for an essence to be pure. Once this investigation is concluded, this chapter addresses the question concerning how to grasp pure essences. More precisely, it presents Husserl’s account of the method of eidetic variation, and it shows how one’s use of imagination deeply affects the end result of the variation and its purity. Lastly, this chapter shows that perfectly pure essences are very thin, where the adjective ‘thin’ is intended to refer to an essence that features very few properties. All these clarifications and explanations are put into play in the fourth and final chapter of this dissertation. This chapter addresses some of the most central objections leveled against Husserl’s eidetics. These objections are lumped into two main classes: the Betrayal Objection and the Skeptical Objection. According to the Betrayal Objection, even if it was successful, Husserl’s eidetic project constitutes a betrayal of phenomenology and of his original aspiration to clarify all possible phenomena through intuition. The Skeptical Objection cast doubts, instead, on the possibility of attaining pure essences because of the impossibility to transcend one’s subjective point of view through phantasy. The core of the reply advanced against the Skeptical Objection relies on the advantages of preserving the distinction between essences and concepts, and, consequently, a kind of normativity that is materially grounded, and that it would be lost if one decided to reject essences. Indeed, if considered essences as mere subjective constructs, one would fail to appreciate the difference between concepts and essences; and the possibility of accounting for the richness and complexity of experience. At the same time, this chapter argues against the Betrayal Objection on the basis of the idea that analyses of essences can only shed light on minimal truths about experiential phenomena, and, therefore, they do not aim (nor are meant) to substitute other kinds of analyses within phenomenology. In other words, phenomenological eidetics offers a minimal structure of experiential objects that does not imply forgetting any of their subtleties, but that, instead, adds to the phenomenological description of our experience, precisely in terms of accuracy and faithfulness to experience.