ABSTRACT
Among all the methodological tools introduced by Edmund Husserl to establish phenomenology as an eidetic science of transcendentally reduced phenomena belonging to the region of pure consciousness, the method of eidetic variation-also said method of "free" or "phantasy" variation-has been for years the subject matter of divergent interpretations. If phenomenology is to be possible as an eidetic science, then there must be a method able to bring its subject matter to the fore: such being the goal of what Husserl labels Selbst-Variation. The method of self-variation is then fundamental in that it makes phenomenology scientifically possible by conveying what the latter, as a science, is about: the eidos transcendental ego. If the problem of explicating the monadic ego “coincides with phenomenology as a whole,” and yet the “scope” of the eidos “ego,” Husserl urges, is “determined by self-variation of ego,” does not this end up affecting, and hence limiting, the universality of the eidos itself “ego uberhaupt”?.
