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5 1 Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings InPhenomenology and the Return to Beginnings,1 phenomenology has two guiding characteristics. First, phenomenology gives the name to the way of philosophizing, inaugurated by Husserl, which has “to the things themselves !” as its banner. Of course, earlier philosophers such as Hegel have used the term “phenomenology” to indicate a doctrine of appearances. However, Husserl’s conception was fundamentally different. He understood it as both a descriptive method and an a priori science capable of resolving the foundation crises in the sciences. Sallis continually addresses himself to these features, and to the issues connected with them. As we shall soon see, his attention to them is detailed and thorough. However, the other and less frequently noted aspect of the Husserlian heritage holds a special attraction for Sallis, which he treats in his first chapter, titled “The Question of the Return to Beginnings.” This is Husserl’s acknowledgment of the questionableness that belongs essentially to the activity of philosophy. Sallis cites a passage from the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology in which Husserl admits (Socratically) that, despite his awareness of his goal and his field, “I do not know.”2 He characterizes his philosophical life, and the life of other “autonomous thinkers,” as an “enigma.” Philosophy is not only in question, but it is always in question to itself. With the exception of Hegel and Hegel’s most significant systematic forebear, Spinoza, the intrinsically unavoidable ignorance to which philosophy is given over has been a trademark of it since the Platonic dialogues, through the great moderns in England and on the Continent, and in different ways into the present amid all kinds of philosophical divisions. Husserl’s phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological challenge to it provide an occasion for Sallis to enter this consequential turning point in twentieth-century thought, and to carry it forward. While preserving its basic contours, he will redirect its path by incorporating other resources into it. The overarching task for which MerleauPonty ’s revision of Husserl serves as the occasion is the question of the return to beginnings. “Question” deserves special attention here. Sallis speaks here of radical philosophy as “a peculiar return to beginnings, a 6 P H E N O M E N O L O G Y turning towards what already determines it” (17). It is therefore reflexive by nature. Thus, in some sense philosophy is always already past its beginning at the moment the question concerning its beginning is raised. However, its beginning can never be simply past, given that the beginning has determined and continues to determine all that has issued from it. Thus, the unique nature of the question of the return to beginnings must be delineated. This question requires a direct answer, and in a sense both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty have provided such an answer. For Husserl, philosophy begins in transcendental subjectivity. This original stance is achieved through the epochē, the phenomenological reduction that brackets both the natural attitude and the data of psychological life, yielding pure eidetic consciousness. In this way, subjective consciousness constitutes the realm of objectivity through its variations. Merleau-Ponty locates what Sallis calls “a third dimension beneath the level of the distinction between constituting subjectivity and constituted objectivity, the retrieve of the pre-theoretical, pre-objective order which is precisely such as to upset the distinction between constituting and constituted” (21). Still further, by virtue of its task as executing a return to beginnings , philosophy and human finitude are drawn together. This is so because its being a task precludes any infinitely posited unity between the onset of philosophy and its coincidence with its beginning. Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sallis agree that this task is an “archeology.” Sallis indicates his approval of Merleau-Ponty’s calling phenomenology “an everrenewed experiment in making its own beginning.”3 Thus, the more or less straightforward, surface answer to the question of the return to beginnings always involves a deeper excavation into regions that grow more obscure even as the work goes forward more effectively. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is both the straightforward answer to the question of beginning and announces what is most questionable and most in need of excavation. Perception provides access to that preconceptual substructure alluded to above, and puts that very substructure in question, in need of an archeological account. Sallis will trace this account in the thought of Merleau-Ponty, but not before suggesting that a new and different beginning will emerge...

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