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Radical Phenomenology (from the New School Catalog)

Stefano Gonnella



To be a scholar in phenomenology does not mean to be a phenomenologist. To do phenomenology does not mean to know thoroughly the precepts of Husserlian scholarship, but rather to be able to apply the phenomenological method to precise analytical fields. This is not to say that scholarship, history of thought, or philological exegesis of manuscripts are useless; this is merely to say that they are quite different things in regard to the actual practice of phenomenological analysis. The future of phenomenology relies on the understanding of this basic difference.

The Husserlian method requires the purification of all the unexplored assumptions that underlie and support our everyday life. (1) It is the neutralization of background presuppositions, by applying a sophisticated technique of suspension known as epoché, that allows to access a field of investigation where one should apprehend the “things themselves.” This field of manifestation is the field of “pure phenomena.” According to Husserl, “to one truly without prejudice it is immaterial whether certainty comes to us from Kant or Thomas Aquinas, from Darwin or Aristotle, from Helmholtz or Paracelsus.” (2) We have to see with our own eyes and we must not change under the pressure of preconceptions what we plainly see. (3) Here we find, worded in a very precise formulation, the intuitive and descriptive nature of phenomenological method. Nevertheless, while acknowledging Husserl’s thoroughness and exactness, there is further room to raise an essential question: is the epoché really able to hit and to put out of circuit all possible presuppositions, completely purifying the field of investigation from prejudices and not yet acquired assumptions? (4) Can we proceed along the path of phenomenology, trusting its method as a well arranged and reliable theoretical tool, or must we begin instead, as impenitent sceptics, with an attentive critique of phenomenology itself?

These are not new questions, yet they acquire particular meaning for contemporary and future phenomenology. The value of an analytical method, its significance, is located in the ability to transmit the method itself from its founder to other researchers. In this way the method, being employed by quite different scholars to carry on new analyses in the field, can be directly verified and proved with regard to its function and effectiveness. (5) To test a method, one needs to practice it. This sentence, perhaps stating the obvious, may not be the truism it seems. From what other external criteria should the query into the phenomenological method be guided? Could phenomenology be submitted to a non-phenomenological inquiry? Once again, nothing new: phenomenology, as Husserl used to exhort himself, should be submitted to a phenomenological analysis. (6) So, one of the unavoidable tasks for a future phenomenology is to carry out a phenomenology of phenomenology. How could one approach and realize such a paradoxical task?

Once the epoché is performed and the thesis of natural attitude has been bracketed, the sphere of pure phenomena offers itself to the phenomenologist’s eyes. The field of the originary is open, so the analysis and the phenomenological description can finally be developed. Inside the phenomenological practice we find intuition, as the so-called “principle of all principles” teaches us. (7) Intuition is the actual core of phenomenologist’s gaze is. It is the rightly intended intuition, according to Husserlian fundamental rules, that would drive us to the exact phenomenological apprehension of essences.

In a slightly more technical way, what is phenomenologically originary persists as irreducible after the performance of epoché. Without further reference to anything else, this originary manifests itself as self-givenness (Selbstgegebenheit), as something that a peculiar intuition can grasp as its adequate fulfilling (Erfüllung). One of the questions left open by this theoretic engine is just the phenomenological purity of Anschauungen, of the intuitions that would hold and corroborate phenomenologist’s work. In other words, the rigour and the authenticity of phenomenological attitude involves a correct singling out of the horizon of the so-called originary self-givenness, the Selbstgegebenheiten which are the direct objects of intuition and the sole warranty of the validity and the consistency of analysis. To clarify the role of intuition would help us decipher the well-known motto “zurück zu den Sachen selbst!” and to finally grasp the phenomenological sense of that movement backwards (zurückgehen) towards the “things themselves”. (8)

Therefore, proceeding phenomenologically into phenomenology itself primarily implies inquiring into the intuitive ground of Husserl’s method. This is just the task undertaken by Domenico Antonino Conci, an Italian phenomenologist whose work is mainly known to a narrow range of scholars and students. Since the seventies, Conci set up a reform of the classical Husserlian method opening a research stream that could be properly named “Radical Phenomenology”. With “Radical Phenomenology” one intends a kind of analysis dealing with phenomenological residues singled out by radical epoché: this epoché, unlike the Husserlian one, does not only bracket the natural attitude, but also suspends the wider and more complex sphere of objectivation. This sphere is actually the matrix of some obstacles that turned up to vitiate Husserl’s own research.

The risk of aporetic paths inside classical phenomenology has been clearly noticed and then handled by other phenomenologists as well. But, it is precisely this “phenomenology of phenomenological method”(9) that managed to display a week point of the Husserlian analytic, showing how its intuitive ground is affected with some presuppositions of non-phenomenological nature. It has been Conci’s endeavour to bring phenomenology to its utmost consequences, radicalizing the epoché and suspending what can really be suspended in the field of presence, without paying hidden tributes to the Western philosophical tradition. This is exactly what Husserl did not avoid doing and therefore remained imprisoned within what Conci calls “categorial structure” (10). In virtue of this structure, classical phenomenology proceeds to a concealed objectivation of phenomenological data, identifying the origins of sense with immanent lived-experiences (Erlebnisse) of a transcendental ego. (11) The radical epoché extends the classical Husserlian epoché and thereby suspends what according to Husserl was in fact irreducible, i.e., the egological pole, the sphere of the transcendental I. (12)

While the distinction between consciousness and the ego has been established by Husserl himself, radical phenomenology further suggests that the irreducible residue of radical epoché is a basic impersonal lived-experience. It is a non-ego-centered consciousness that manifest itself as actual “self-givenness”, i.e. as a datum that really “gives itself by itself” (always into the phenomenological praxis, certainly not into the physics or the natural sciences): this is identified as the authentic Selbstgegebenheit. (13)

Schematically speaking, the subject appears to be constituted in virtue of the structure that remains invisible through the Husserlian method: the variation/invariance structure. (14) This categorial structure is the basic intentional structure of Western thought, our objectivating logos. It consists of a functional relationship between an invariant pole (eidos) and a plane made by an indefinite sequence of variations (to be intended as individual metamorphosis of the eidos). The variations get their lacking sense, either ontological or logical, from the invariance, meanwhile the invariance works as a principle, as a rule, and as a unity of connection for the whole range of variations.(15)

Radical epoché affects each intentional construction and thus also the I that is enclosed therein. By striking the assessment of the ego as an obvious datum, by placing into question the idea that the ego would be endowed with absolute and exclusive existence, the radical epoché comes to show how the ego is nothing more than the unity pole (eidos) of the sequence of numberless activities (variations) usually referred to consciousness. The ego-centered consciousness then does not enjoy any preferential statute, but rather is constituted like any other object.

In virtue of its radicalization, phenomenology dismantles the idea that the categorial attitude is the only possible attitude (16), the unique and absolute form of consciousness. The Western basic intentional structure, underlying our natural attitude, is an objectifying structure. Radical phenomenological analysis shows how this logos of objectivation, ruling both common and scientific cognitive posture, comes to effect on the basis of the variation/invariance structure. So the possibility of suspending this structure within the analytical domain discloses a further huge field of research. To deal with the impersonal consciousness implies a widening of the traditional phenomenological interests towards the domains of cultural anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, paleoethnology, etc., in other words, of every human science that under some respect deals with cultures and human communities far from the Western logos, in either space or time. (17)

In brief, this new phenomenological frontier marks the land of a transcultural anthropology which can be fruitfully explored only through an analytical method that suspends the absoluteness of Western logical and categorial principles. (18) This means trying to analyze sense-structures bound and embodied in the most dissimilar cultural signs. After all, the question about the method could be taken on and resolved in this way, for in phenomenology there is an unavoidable interaction between method and field of analysis. Usually one begins by employing broad models, and then along the way, tools and techniques undergo improvement through the direct comparison with evidences and signs. But to assert that phenomenological method forms itself through phenomenological analysis is also to say that the real theoretic and technical value of the method can arrive at a critical explication as the phenomenological field of observation extends and fixes itself, and vice versa. (19)

Notes
(1)“Access to phenomenology demands a radical reversal of our total existence reaching into our depths, a change of every prescientifically-immediate comportment to world and things as well as of the disposition of our life lying at the basis of all scientific and traditionally-philosophical attitudes of knowledge.” Eugen Fink, “What Does the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl Want to Accomplish?,” Research in Phenomenology, 2 (1972), p. 6.
(2)Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” Husserl Shorter Works, eds. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press - The Harvester Press, 1981), p. 196.
(3)Cf. ibid.
(4)Cf. Edward G. Ballard, “On the Method of Phenomenological Reduction, Its Presuppositions, and Its Future,” Life-World and Consciousness. Essays for Aron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester E. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 110.
(5)Cf. Domenico A. Conci, Prolegomeni ad una fenomenologia del profondo (Roma: Università di Roma, 1970), p. 11.
(6)Cf. Enzo Paci, Funzione delle scienze e significato dell’uomo (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1963), p. 249.
(7)The principle declares that“every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.” Edmund Husserl, Ideas, First Book (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p. 44f.
(8)Antonio Zirión Q., “The Call ‘Back to the Things Themselves’ and the Notion of Phenomenology,” Husserl Studies 22 (2006), p. 31f.
(9) Cf. Domenico A. Conci, La conclusione della filosofia categoriale. Contributi ad una fenomenologia del metodo fenomenologico (Roma: Edizioni Abete, 1967).
(10) Cf. Domenico A. Conci, L’universo artificiale. Per una epistemologia fenomenologica (Roma: Spada, 1978) n. 3, p. 14.
(11)“This search for an ultimate and final apodictic foundation, which, following the Cartesian paradigm, can only lie in the ego (cogito, ergo sum), is never given up by Husserl, no matter how much his actual emphasis might be directed at other “phenomena.”” Sebastian Luft, “Husserl’s Theory of the Phenomenological Reduction: Between Life-World and Cartesianism,” Research in Phenomenology, 34 (2004), p. 207.
(12)“On what authentically phenomenological basis is the unsuspendable residue to be identified, as Husserl would have it, with the sphere of transcendental subjectivity?” Domenico A. Conci, “Disinterested Praise of Matter: Ideas for Phenomenological Hyletics,” Analecta Husserliana LVII (1998), p. 50.
(13)Cf. ibid., p. 52.
(14)Cf. ibid., p. 53.
(15)Cf. Domenico A. Conci and Angela Ales Bello, “Il tempo e l'originario. Un dibattito fenomenologico,” Il Contributo, II, 5-6 (Roma 1978), p. 16.
(16)“The logos of objectivation (…) is a sense structure polarized in an invariant moment (…) and in a moment to be understood as an orderable sequence of individual variations crossed by the invariant as the unitary principle towards which all these moments must necessarily converge. Functionally related with each other, these polarities constitute an altogether general intentional structure, a structure of connection, order and comprehension,” Domenico A. Conci, “Disinterested Praise”, p. 51.
(17)Domenico A. Conci, La conclusione della filosofia categoriale,p. 79.
(18)“Thus, it is quite evident that the phenomenological residue of a radical epoché is constituted by a true ‘cultural continent’ (…) where the elementary lived experiences reveal a morphology and a lawfulness of connection which go beyond those already visualized by classical analysis, which has confined itself to complex Western experiences.” D. A. Conci and Angela Ales Bello, “Phenomenology as the semiotics of archaic or ‘different’ life experiences. Toward an Analysis of the Sacred,” Phenomenology Inquiry, XV (1991), p. 125.
(19)Cf. ibid., pp. 110ff.