On Phenomenological Explanation

Abstract

Phenomenology is to be a science of phenomena conceived to function as transcendental criticism. It is intended to elucidate the bases of scientific thought - the very fact that cognition is cognition of something given, is empirical cognition; then the nature of what is taken as given by the sciences; and the inner structure of the evidence for what is taken as given. But just exactly what is to count as phenomenological elucidation? Is it to be a simple presup-positionless, metaphysic-free intuition into the ultimate data of knowledge, achieved by a neutralizing of the theoretical sediment through which a theoretically committed mind approaches them? Or, on the contrary, is it to be a metaphysically idealist explanation of how the data of cognition originate out of transcendental constitutive consciousness, on the one hand, and out of the pretheoretical data of the Lebenswelt, the world of life, on the other hand? Is phenomenological elucidation intuition, or is it explanation?