From Transcendental Logic to the Phenomenology of the Life-World

Abstract

While Heraclitus, who observed that one could not step into the same river twice, was ostensibly concerned with how it was that a river, in a constant state of change or flux, could nevertheless be regarded as remaining in some sense unchangingly self-identical, the questions he thus raised, concerning the relation between the absolute and the relative, identity and difference, stasis and change, have been of concern to philosophers ever since. Indeed it is precisely this set of issues which lies at the heart of the phenomenological account of the constitution of unchangingly self-identical objects from the “Heraclitan flux” of different and constantly changing experiences. This same tension is also implicit in the phenomenological view of the relationship between such objects, supposedly constituted in conformity to essential or eidetic, and thus apparently absolute, forms, and the relativism implicit in the notion of the “life-world” (Lebenswelt). And it is upon this issue, and upon the closely related issue of the relationship between Husserl’s phenomenological claim to provide a presuppositionless description of experience, and Heidegger’s insistence that all descriptions are already hermeneutic interpretations, based upon presuppositions, that I wish to focus here.