The possibility of a generative phenomenology

Could the “home-world/alien-world” structure be the new explicative starting point for phenomenology?

Abstract

The main topic of this article is the problem of constituting familiarity and alienness in transcendental phenomenology. However, the very nature of this problem entails a social dimension that must be addressed through recourse to generativity; i.e., the condition of pertaining to a historical intersubjectivity. The article draws primarily on the thesis and concepts of Anthony J. Steinbock, who in his book, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl, seeks to take up and develop in a radical manner certain theses found in Edmund Husserl’s later writings on intersubjectivity. It sets out some of the advantages and implications of an attempt to account for the problem of constituting familiarity and alienness through recourse to the notions of ‘appropriation’ and ‘transgression’, while also discussing the reasons why it is impossible to develop this within the framework of generative phenomenology as posited by Steinbock. Consequently, it contains a proposal to re-think the relationship among static, genetic and generative phenomenology, together with their objects of study. In a certain sense, this proposal constitutes a return to Husserl, though it claims to emerge from the things themselves.