Probably the chief gain from phenomenology is to have united
extreme subjectivism and extreme objectivism in its notion of the
world or of rationality. Rationality is precisely proportioned to the
experiences in which it is disclosed. To say that there exists rationality is
to say that perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other, a meaning
emerges. But it should not be set in a realm apart, transposed into
absolute Spirit, or into a world in the realist sense. The phenomenological
world is not pure being, but the sense which is revealed where
the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own
and other people’s intersect and engage each other like gears. It is thus
inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which find their
unity when I either take up my past experiences in those of the present,
or other people’s in my own. For the first time the philosopher’s thinking
is sufficiently conscious not to anticipate itself and endow its own
results with reified form in the world. The philosopher tries to conceive
the world, others and himself and their interrelations. But the meditating
Ego, the ‘impartial spectator’ (uninteressierter Zuschauer)12 do not
rediscover an already given rationality, they ‘establish themselves’,13
and establish it, by an act of initiative which has no guarantee in being,
its justification resting entirely on the effective power which it confers
on us of taking our own history upon ourselves.
The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression
of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not
the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of
bringing truth into being. One may well ask how this creation is
possible, and if it does not recapture in things a pre-existing Reason. The
answer is that the only pre-existent Logos is the world itself, and that
the philosophy which brings it into visible existence does not begin by
being possible; it is actual or real like the world of which it is a part, and
no explanatory hypothesis is clearer than the act whereby we take up
this unfinished world in an effort to complete and conceive it. Rationality
is not a problem. There is behind it no unknown quantity which has
to be determined by deduction, or, beginning with it, demonstrated
inductively. We witness every minute the miracle of related experience,
and yet nobody knows better than we do how this miracle is worked,
for we are ourselves this network of relationships. The world and reason
are not problematical. We may say, if we wish, that they are mysterious,
but their mystery defines them: there can be no question of
dispelling it by some ‘solution’, it is on the hither side of all solutions.
True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world, and in this
sense a historical account can give meaning to the world quite as
‘deeply’ as a philosophical treatise. We take our fate in our hands, we
become responsible for our history through reflection, but equally by a
decision on which we stake our life, and in both cases what is involved
is a violent act which is validated by being performed.
Phenomenology, as a disclosure of the world, rests on itself, or
rather provides its own foundation.14 All cognitions are sustained by a
‘ground’ of postulates and finally by our communication with the
world as primary embodiment of rationality. Philosophy, as radical
reflection, dispenses in principle with this resource. As, however, it too
is in history, it too exploits the world and constituted reason. It must
therefore put to itself the question which it puts to all branches of
knowledge, and so duplicate itself infinitely, being, as Husserl says, a
dialogue or infinite meditation, and, in so far as it remains faithful to its
intention, never knowing where it is going. The unfinished nature of
phenomenology and the inchoative atmosphere which has surrounded it
are not to be taken as a sign of failure, they were inevitable because
phenomenology’s task was to reveal the mystery of the world and
of reason.15 If phenomenology was a movement before becoming a
doctrine or a philosophical system, this was attributable neither to
accident, nor to fraudulent intent. It is as painstaking as the works of
Balzac, Proust, Valéry or Cézanne—by reason of the same kind of
attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same
will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning
comes into being. In this way it merges into the general effort of
modern thought.
