GIVENNESS AS PROBLEM OF PHENOMENOLOGY

According to principle of all principles, formulated in §24 of Ideas I, every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of all cognition. The principle is the one of givenness, and, as such, it seems to show the limits of philosophical problematization, since the true givenness leaves no room for sensible questions and is, as Husserl puts it, the absolute matter of course. Proceeding from the key differences and intuitions of Husserlian phenomenology, I show instead that bringing phenomena to phenomenological givenness does not eliminate them, but, on the contrary, constitutes them as problematic. In grounding this thesis in the first section of the article I start with analyzing differences underlying the problematics of givenness in phenomenology. These are the correlative differences between empty and fulfilled intention and between meaning and fulfilling sense, which are introduced in Logical Investigations. In the second section I show that the Husserlian idea of final fulfillment as strict phenomenological evidence—eliminating the surplus of meaning in relation to the givenness and hence, at first sight, depriving the phenomenon of its problematical character—is, at the same time, the idea of final ‘emptying' of meaning which turns it into the problem. In view of this, the article puts together the Husserlian description of final fulfillment with the analysis of the phenomenon of death in Heidegger's Being and Time to demonstrate their affinity. In the third section, relying on Hans Jonas' description of metabolism, I draw an analogy between the relation between organism and matter and the one between problem and givenness to substantiate the thesis that problematicity is not a philosophical dead end, but the constitutive feature of life and life-world.