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13 Gnostic Phenomenology: Eugen Fink and the Critique of Transcendental Reason N o friend of transcendental phenomenology can contemplate the face it reveals in that hybrid text, the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, without a profound sense of uneasiness.1 Like Scrooge confronting the vision conjured by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, one recognizes oneself in it but hopes that it is only a dream, that the future is not fixed, that there is still time to reform. Here the philosophy that emerged in the Logical Investigations promising to bring clarity to fundamental problems in philosophy—and did bring clarity in abundance— gets entangled in speculations so murky and outlandish that they often sound like a parody of Derrida.2 Once presented as a liberation from the constraints of old systems of thought and well-worn philosophical language games, phenomenological appeal to the intuitive self-showing of “the things themselves” is here felt to be unacceptably constraining, a mere first stage infected with “Cartesian” naïveté. And here too the thought that found a path from the natural attitude to its transcendental ground, having admitted one fundamental paradox (namely, that man, subject within the world, is also constituting subject of the world), explodes into an endless shower of paradoxes, indeed, embraces paradox as its proper discursive modality. The culprit in all this, the maker of all this mischief, is of course the phenomenological reduction, and for someone who defends the reduction as an indispensable feature of transcendental phenomenological reflection, as I do, a glimpse into Fink’s text must have a chilling effect. And yet, one sees precisely the motives that produce such thoughts; it is out of the question to suppose that they are Fink’s alone. The desire for something more than what transcendental reflection on experience 244 245 G N O S T I C P H E N O M E N O L O G Y seems able to provide has long been part of the heritage of phenomenology , and one need look no further than Husserl himself to find it. The “Nachwort zu meiner ‘Ideen’ ” (1931) reveals well enough how Husserl chafed under the characterization of phenomenology as an “intellectualism ” that skirts the “so-called problem of ‘existence.’ ” He seemed to believe that “all questions” are contained within the field of phenomenology , including “all so-called metaphysical questions, insofar as they have possible sense in the first place” (Hua V:140–41),3 and perhaps he was right. The problem is to say whether a metaphysical question, after its “possible sense” has been established in genuinely phenomenological terms, remains a metaphysical question. Or perhaps Husserl was wrong, perhaps metaphysics transcends phenomenology. This was Alfred Schutz’s view of the matter, and his verdict on Husserl’s efforts to move into metaphysics was harsh. Transcendental phenomenology “begins with the construction of the world of experience by consciousness and ends up with the creation of the world by the ego-become-god,” an outcome for which Schutz holds Fink responsible: “What I have heard from him about so-called ‘constructive phenomenology’ (dealing with birth and death, life and aging, and other genuinely metaphysical questions) has not made me confident that the publication of the literary estate of Husserl will offer a solution to the metaphysical questions.”4 The publication of Ronald Bruzina’s superb translation of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation provides an appropriate occasion for revisiting the provocation contained in Schutz’s dismissal. For we can hardly read that text without taking a stand on the question of whether what is found there is on the way toward the formulation of metaphysical problems “insofar as they have possible sense in the first place,” or whether it takes phenomenology to a place where it loses all sense and ceases to be phenomenology. And if the latter is the case, is this an idiosyncrasy of Fink’s interpretation, as Schutz suggests, or is it inherent in the very nature of transcendental phenomenology? Toward the end of his extraordinarily sensitive “Translator’s Introduction ,” Bruzina raises the decisive question. Having laid out the textually apparent difference between Husserl and Fink on “the question of being,” he asks: “Does the difference result from development within phenomenology, or must it be accountable to importation from outside it?” Does it “corrode and negate, or does it consolidate and reestablish? It is not,” he continues, “a simple matter” (SCM lix). Nor shall a definitive answer be given here. Still, fully...

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