Studying philosophy could be looked upon as a neat exempli\ue000cation of the dynamic structure of temporality as analyzed by Husserl and existentially rein- terpreted by Heidegger: we take up reliving the past in order in the present to begin our own future as thinkers. And, as is asserted existentially of this tem- poral dynamic, it is crucially important justhow the present understands its past, for that will indeed set the ground for how philosophic thinking can continue.

So for several decades now our past in phenomenology has been more or less set in its character both by movements of the dedicated interpretation of past masters and by movements of radicalized departure beyond it. On the one hand the study of phenomenology has centered on Edmund Husserl as repre- sented by the scholarship of the Husserliana and Phaenomenologica series, while on the other the Gesamtausgabe of Heidegger\u2019s work forms one core of the impetus of transition beyond Husserl\u2019s quintessential modern period subject-\u201ctranscendentalism\u201d \u2014 and to Martin Heidegger one could tie in the new hermeneutic endeavors, although these also have sources for it other than his work. Beyond these multiply-based radical movements beyond phenomenology as positive transcendental philosophy, one could cite the counter-presentialism1 of the massive continuing output of Jacques Derrida, while further yet there is Michel Foucault or Jacques Lacan as systematic contraveners of the meta- physics of the all-determining subject. Yet despite this multiplicity, these seem- ingly opposing tendencies share broad elements of common acceptance with Husserlian phenomenology, beyond general assent to some kind of \u201cepoch\u00e9,\u201d

the generalizable need for a radical suspension of the acceptance implicitly or explicitly given to hitherto dominant characterizations of principles, beliefs, or procedures that constitute the areas of philosophic inquiry. Thus, for example, the \ue000eld of the play of experientially richmeaning\u2014the analogue of Husserl\u2019s \ue000eld of phenomena\u2014 is implicitly aYrmed widely as both ground and investi- gandum, irreducible and antecedent to whatever determining or causative pow- ers or processes are posited by various kinds of naturalism (e.g., empiricist, natural scienti\ue000c, sociological, neuro-psychological). Or one could point out that, while subjectivity as an individual substantive agency may be considered dissolved, the powers and processes that once were deemed \u201csubjective\u201d have been in many ways largely reassigned; they now are the eVects or functions of some kind of \u201c\ue000eld\u201d-structure, patent or latent, be it language or the \u201csym- bolic,\u201d or social or historical processes, or even a primordial and ever-active originative play that is only nameable by the simultaneous erasure of names.

It is not the character and assertions of any of these various either pro- or post-phenomenological positions that I want to discuss as a basis for taking up the question of thefuture of phenomenology, but rather the character and achievements of thephenomenology they would believe themselves either to be continuing or to have superseded.

It is recognized that not everything that Husserl\u2019s phenomenology was achiev- ing during his lifetime is well known. What was well known while he lived, and has been also since then, is the phenomenology he explained in the writings that he prepared for publication and published before he died (at least in part, in the case of the last in the following list): Logical Investigations (1900\u20131901),Ideas

not one of these was meant as a statement of culmination and completion. They were each anintr oduction to the investigative program that was in actual- ity carried out not in these books, but in Husserl\u2019s vast manuscript studies; and the measure of inclusion of material from those studies in these books always gave onlypre liminar y determinacy to what those studies in their ensemble were achieving. But the reason for this preliminary status in Husserl\u2019s published writings has to be delineated carefully. It is not merely the result of the con- tingent fact that in each case Husserl just had not yet gotten to certain other themes and issues in his studies; the reason lies instead in the very principles of phenomenological inquiry as such.

these procedural moments) that phenomenological method is quintessentially the action ofreinquiring return to conceptions that both enable an investigation to get going and are the matter of investigation in the \ue000rst place. One only need consider \u201cintentionality\u201d in phenomenology to see how true this is. This is the feature of \u201cconsciousness\u201d that both a) speci\ue000es that in terms of which one is going to look at some kind of phenomena under inquiry (any appearing is an appearing-to correlative to a consciousness as consciousness-of ) and b) is the fea- ture that the inquiry is going to allow to be explicated (there are various dimen- sions to intentionality, for example, as according with the \u201cinternal horizonal\u201d and the \u201cexternal horizonal\u201d structures of the appearing \u201cobject\u201d). In this and endless other cases, both initiating conceptions and operational procedures are taken up for consideration again and again, in order to clear away the pre- suppositions and naivet\u00e9 that will unavoidably still remain in regard to them.

It is a constant point in Husserl\u2019s thinking, exempli\ue000ed in the famous \u201czigzag\u201d of hisLogical Investigations (vol. 2, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d \u00a76), in the treatment inIdeas I (\u00a7\u00a765, 84, and 96), and in Husserl\u2019s insightful reconsiderations inErste

form in which it was worked out, detailing the dimensions of radicalizing recon- sideration that made explicit what had hitherto been more implicit in Husserl\u2019s own investigation, is in the long draft that his last assistant, Eugen Fink, pre- pared for him in the context of the extensive new revision of the \u201cCartesian Meditations\u201d that Husserl already in 1929\u2014that is, before even the French translation appeared\u2014decided had to be done.2 The \u201cSixth Meditation\u201d was supposed to be an integral part of the whole revision project, rather than as free-standing, which meant it was supposed to be a critical re\ue001ection on mat- ters of methodological import for the way in which to understand Husserlian phenomenology as a whole enterprise, which in turn was to be presented in r\u00e9sum\u00e9 in the \ue000ve \u201cMeditations\u201d that would precede it, also revised extensively from their earlier form. In other words, the \u201cSixth Meditation\u201d was to be a methodological guide to realizing how, once every level of phenomenological analysis had been worked through, at least in the basics\u2014including crucially the analysis of prototemporalization (Urzeitigung), the reinquiry into which both Husserl and Fink were also doing just then (Husserl in returning to manuscript study, the still unpublished \u201cC\u201d-series, and Fink preparing an edition of time- studies that would include the Bernau manuscripts of 1917\u20131918 as well as the new ones still being produced)\u2014one could \ue000nally determine the full phenome- nological sense of all the matters that phenomenology had already investigated, now that the implications of temporal analysis could be included in that rein- terpretation. Until reinterpretation on the basis of the deepest kind of phe- nomenological analysis, that of temporality as the level of ultimate constitutive origination, were done and its results themselves clari\ue000ed, all investigations had to remain preliminary as a matter ofprincip le.3