Meanings and Ideals: Elements of an Husserlian Axiology

Abstract

The phenomenological reduction, as conceived by Husserl, is the sustained reflective revelation of the human quest for meaningfulness, the reflective investigation of the meaning of meaning, the meaning of “minding” (meinen), the “sense” (Sinn) or significance of the human activity of “meaning bestowal” (Sinngebung), understood as the “projection” of meaning upon the World in an effect to discover a transcendent Meaning “beyond” and uniting human meanings thus created. The phenomenological reduction involves the attempt to describe the necessary structures of consciousness, the attempt, that is, to investigate those structures of experience which are not merely contingent “projections”, “creations” or “inventions”. In complete consistency with this project, Viktor Frankl asserts that “the meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but [is] rather detected”.¹ Indeed, as Dr. Frankl points out:

... logos, or “meaning”, is not only an emergence from existence but rather something confronting existence. If the meaning that is waiting to be fulfilled by man were really nothing but a mere expression of self, or no more than a projection of his wishful thinking, it would immediately lose its demanding and challenging character; it could no longer call man forth or summon him.²

That Husserlian phenomenology is a “theory” (theoria), hence, a “vision”, of meaning and of meaningfulness, a “vision” of what it means to be “full” of meaning, is generally recognized even by those who take issue with the methodological praxis or “theoretical” results of phenomenology.