NEO-HUSSERLIAN MEDITATIONS: EXTENDING INTENTIONALITY TO THE OBJECTIVE REALM IN FIRST PHENOMENOLOGY

Abstract

I seek here to return to the original spirit of Edmund Husserl’s “radicalism.” To be radical means to be both rooted in a tradition and to retrace a path back to one’s roots. According to the position I advocate, phenomenology may be reconceived of as an enterprise in realism. Through a creative rereading of one of phenomenology’s founding texts, Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, I suggest that phenomenology can indeed provide us with a semantics applicable to realist ontologies, provided we excise phenomenological concepts from their subjectivist framework, providing a new structure with which to analyze reality. Specifically, Husserl’s eidetic Apriori may be reconceived as denoting the inherent dynamism of existents. Movement would be the basis of manifestation, a universal category unconditioned in itself. That which appears need not be synonymous with all that which is given to experience. The eidos is the manifold of coiled movements awaiting manifestation, whilst the a priori is movement in itself. Following Graham Harman’s lead, I expand the scope of the Husserlian idea of intentionality, reconceptualizing it as the directionality pertaining to any process whatsoever. Following Jaakko Hintikka, I take the cogito to be nothing other than performativity in its emergent state. Several different phenomenal horizons can connect to the same type of intentionality. The nonlinear nature of temporality means that even radically distant horizons are capable of sharing in the same intentionality. Once reenvisioned as a “genuine universal ontology” (this is Husserl’s expression), phenomenological semantics can be extended to include any and all types of existents. First phenomenology need not maintain the primacy of perception or subjectivity.