Abstract

ROCHA, Rafael Carneiro. Metaphysical assumptions of phenomenology: an essentialist reading of constitutive transcendentalism in Edith Stein. Rev. abordagem gestalt. [online]. 2018, vol.24, n.spe, pp.472-481. ISSN 1809-6867.  https://doi.org/10.18065/RAG.2018v24ne.6.

The metaphysical question about being seems strange to the phenomenology of Husserlian nuance. The place of inquiry of phenomenology is the life of the ego, which demands a "putting in parenthesis" any existential consideration of the psychophysical world transcendent to the pure consciousness, including the empirical ego. In fact, the phenomenological motto of "going back to the things themselves" does not refer to objects outside consciousness, but rather to the pure immanent objects as they appear in consciousness. Thus, although the phenomenologist is not necessarily prevented from metaphysically thinking or denying the legitimacy of the question about being, his methodological purpose seems to preclude, at first, in his investigations of the life of the ego, any kind of metaphysical positioning. On the other hand, we suggest as hypothesis in this article that husserlian phenomenology seems to have metaphysical presuppositions. The examination of the inquiry into the sense of being in Edith Stein, especially in the work Endliches und Ewiges Sein, gives indications that the very investigation of the life of the ego inevitably involves consideration of certain constitutive units of the transcendental subjectivity: the essentialities that constitute the very meaning of reality as such.

Keywords : Metaphysics; Transcendentalism; Essentiality.

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