ABSTRACT
In the Introduction I suggested that by tracing the intuition/concept dichotomy back to a more primordial spontaneous receptivity, phenomenologists made the question, “How is truth disclosed aesthetically?,” more fundamental than the Kantian question, “What can I know?” To do justice to this claim it would be necessary to reconstruct the history of the concept of phenomenology from Kant’s contemporary Johann Heinrich Lambert (17281777)—the first writer to use the German term Phänomenologie-to Husserl and the phenomenological movement which he founded. Lambert took phenomenology to be a science of appearances. Kant borrowed the expression to refer to the doctrine concerning the motion or rest of matter with respect to a perceiving subject (MFNS 191). Hegel went further, conceiving of his “phenomenology of spirit” as a reflection on the process whereby the Kantian doctrine of the transcendental ideality of appearances is first posited and then overcome by a subject who discovers that the concept of the thing in itself is untenable. Hegel criticizes Fichte and Schelling for thinking that Kantian dualisms can be overcome simply by taking the possibility of intellectual intuition for granted. Instead, he seeks to show how a sustained reflection on the difference between intuiting and thinking culminates in an identification of the two in absolute knowing. In contrast to Hegel, Husserl suggests that phenomenology neither ends in absolute knowing nor begins in intellectual intuition per se. By ignoring the contribution that sensible intuition makes to the awareness of particular facts, the practicing phenomenologist discloses an accompanying categorial intuition of the ontological structure of the world. By generalizing the methodological “reduction” by which factual contents are put out of play, Husserl is led to characterize phenomenology as the scientific study of ideal essences disclosed in eidetic intuition. Heidegger’s conception of the aesthetic disclosure of truth is indebted to Husserl’s conception of categorial intuition, but unlike Husserl he comes to emphasize the way in which truth is revealed in works of art. The question of how to reconcile artistic truth with scientific truth is taken up not only by Heidegger but by Bachelard, who objects to Bergson’s overestimation of the epistemic worth of prescientific intuition. Like Bachelard, Sartre focuses on the role played by the imagination in human cognition, reaching a different conclusion than Heidegger did about its ontological import. Merleau-Ponty (like Bergson) defends the view that scientific truth
must be interpreted phenomenologically through the lens of a more primordial perceptual truth. By contrast, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze all reject the phenomenological conception of truth as givenness in favor of a conception of truth as difference.
