Individuum and Region of Being

Abstract

The sign above Plato’s Academy allegedly read: “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter herein.” The sign put above the entrance of Husserl’s “pure phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy” reads instead: “Fact and Essence—or: let no one ignorant of formal ontology enter herein.” The legend of Plato’s sign doesn’t relate whether anyone was actually prevented from joining his school, let alone understanding his philosophy; but we do know for sure that Husserl’s warning worked all too well—for a whole host of readers, in the last century, have definitively given up joining the club of the “descriptive scientists of transcendentally reduced pure Erlebnisse” because of the abstruse ontological subtleties gathered in this opening chapter. As for the others, both friends and foes of Ideas I have mostly moved into transcendental phenomenology from a backward entrance, as it were. Most analytically inclined philosophers have found in Fact and Essence something like Husserl’s answer to Quine’s question “What is there?” and started drawing long lists of Husserl’s purported “categories” of entities; as for many of the continental bent, they couldn’t find any answer to Heidegger’s question of Being, and concluded that Husserl surreptitiously equates being with being an object. In both cases, Husserl’s sign has been either misunderstood or ignored.

He rushed forward and seized it in his arms, when, to his horror, the head slipped off and rolled on the floor, the body assumed a recumbent posture, and he found himself clasping a white dimity bed-curtain, with a sweeping-brush, a kitchen cleaver, and a hollow turnip lying at his feet! Unable to understand this curious transformation, he clutched the placard with feverish haste, and there, in the grey morning light, he read these fearful words:—YE OTIS GHOSTE |Ye Onlie True and Originale Spook, | Beware of Ye Imitationes. | All others are counterfeite.

Oscar Wilde