ABSTRACT
At no time since its “breakthrough” in Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900–01) has phenomenology been absent from the world’s philosophical stage, but today there are remarkable signs of the continuing vitality of this philosophical approach. 1 It thus seems appropriate to ask just what it is that makes phenomenology a distinctive way of philosophizing. And with its centenary year recently behind us, it is also appropriate that this question be posed to the Logical Investigations, a work that Robert Sokolowski has described as “literally a new beginning” since what Husserl started here “cannot be considered as continuing a tradition that had taken shape before him.” 2 Just what was the breakthrough that occurred in the Investigations, and what claim does it have on us today? These questions matter not only because they are important for Husserl scholarship, but because they are much disputed now, and upon their answer depend our expectations of what phenomenological philosophy can accomplish and what, if anything, lies beyond its scope. For if there is renewed interest in phenomenology today, this has brought with it—or is it the consequence of?—a tendency to inflate the very concept of phenomenology. Today the borders between phenomenological philosophy, metaphysical speculation, and neo-Kantian construction show signs of collapsing. One reason for this is clear enough: the ascetic, anti-metaphysical “positivism” of Husserl’s early writings belongs to a cultural and philosophical milieu that is no longer our own, and if its residue cannot be excised from the phenomenological program, that program will be felt by some to be too restrictive. Yet Dominique Janicaud seems to speak well when he says that “[p]henomenology is not all philosophy. It has nothing to win … by an overestimation of its possibilities.” 3 Must a renewal of phenomenology involve its overestimation?
