Radical Phenomenology

Stefano Gonnella

To be a scholar of phenomenology doesn’t mean to be a phenomenologist. To do

phenomenology doesn’t mean to know thoroughly the precepts of Husserlian scholarship, but rather
to be able to apply the phenomenological method to precise analytical fields. This is not to say that
scholarship, history of thought or philological exegesis of manuscripts are useless at all: this is
merely to say that they are quite different things in regard to the actual practice of
phenomenological analysis. The future of phenomenology relies on the understanding of this basic
difference.
The Husserlian method requires the purification by all the unexplored assumptions that underlie
and support our everyday life.1 It is actually the neutralization of this sphere of background
presuppositions, by applying sophisticated techniques of suspension known as epoché, that finally
allows the access to a field of investigation where one should apprehend the «things themselves».
This field of manifestations, opened by the inaugural move of epoché, is exactly the field of «pure
phenomena». According to the Husserl’s words, «To one truly without prejudice it is immaterial
whether a certainty comes to us from Kant or Thomas Aquinas, from Darwin or Aristotle, from
Helmholtz or Paracelsus.»2 We have to see with our own eyes and we must not change under the
pressure of preconceptions what we plainly see.3 Here we find, worded in a very narrow
formulation, the intuitive and descriptive nature of phenomenological method. Nevertheless, while
acknowledging Husserl’s thoroughness and exactness, there is further room to raise an essential
question: is the epoché, the specific suspension requested by this method, really able to hit and to
put out of circuit all the possible presuppositions, completely purifying the field of investigation
from prejudices and not yet acquired assumptions?4 Can we proceed along the path of
phenomenology, trusting its method as a well arranged and reliable theoretical tool, or must we
begin instead, as impenitent sceptics, with a preventive critic of the phenomenology itself?
These are not new questions at all, nonetheless they acquire particular meaning for contemporary
and future phenomenology. We must remember that the value of an analytical method, its greatness,
is located in the ability to transmit the method itself from its creator to other researchers. In this way
the method, being employed by quite different scholars to carry on new analysis in the field, can be
directly verified and proved with regard to its functionality and effectiveness.5 In other words, to
test the method one needs to practice it: but this sentence, perhaps stating the obvious, may not be
the truism it seems. From which other external criteria should the query about phenomenological
method be guided? Could phenomenology be submitted to a non-phenomenological inquiry? Once
more, nothing new: phenomenology, as Husserl used to exhort itself, should be submitted to a
phenomenological analysis.6 So, one of the unavoidable tasks for a future phenomenology seems to
be again to carry on a phenomenology of phenomenology. How could one approach and realize
such a paradoxical task?
While the epoché is performing and the thesis of natural attitude has been bracketed, the sphere
of pure phenomena − as unsuspendable residue − offer itself to the phenomenologist’s eyes. The
field of originary is open, so the analysis and the phenomenological description can finally be
developed. Inside the phenomenological practice we find the intuition, as the so-called “principle of
all principles” teaches us.7 The actual core of phenomenologist’s gaze is in fact the intuition. Again,
it is the rightly intended intuition, according to Husserlian fundamental rules, that would drive us to
the exact phenomenological apprehension of essences.
In a slightly more technical way, the phenomenological originary is what of non-suspendable
remains during the performance of epoché. Without further reference to anything else, this originary
manifests itself as a self-givenness (Selbstgegebenheit), as something that a peculiar intuition can
grasp like its adequate fulfilling (Erfüllung). Now, one of the questions left open by this theoric
engine is just the phenomenological purity of Anschauungen, of the intuitions that would hold and
corroborate the whole phenomenologist’s work. In other words, the rigour and the authenticity of
phenomenological attitude involves a correct singling out of the horizon of the so-called originary
self-givenness, the Selbstgegebenheiten which are the direct objects of intuition and the sole
warranters of the validity and the consistency of analysis. By the way, to clarify the role of intuition
would perhaps help us to decipher the well known motto «zurück zu den Sachen selbst!» and to
finally grasp the phenomenological sense of that “climb up again” − zurückgehen − towards the
“things themselves”.8
Therefore, proceeding phenomenologically into the phenomenology itself primarily implies
checking the real intuitive ground of Husserlian method. This is just the task undertaken by
Domenico Antonino Conci, an Italian phenomenologist whose work is mainly known to a narrow
range of scholars and students. Since the seventies, Conci set up a reform of the classical Husserlian
method opening a research stream that could be properly named “Radical Phenomenology”. With
“Radical Phenomenology” one intends a kind of analysis dealing with phenomenological residues
singled out by performing a radical epoché: this epoché, unlike the Husserlian one, doesn’t simply
bracket the natural attitude, but rather suspends the wider and more complex sphere of

2
objectivation. This sphere is actually the matrix of some obstacles that turned up to vitiate Husserl’s
researches.
The risk of aporethic paths inside classical phenomenology has been clearly noticed and then
handled by other phenomenologists as well. But, it is precisely this “phenomenology of
phenomenological method”9 that managed to display a week point of the Husserlian analytic,
showing how its intuitive ground has been affected with some presuppositions of non-
phenomenological nature. It has been Conci’s endeavour to bring phenomenology to its utmost
consequences, radicalizing the epoché and suspending what can really be suspended in the presence
field, without paying hidden tributes to the Western philosophical tradition. Exactly what Husserl
didn’t avoid doing, therefore remaining imprisoned from what Conci calls «categorial structure» 10.
Through this structure the classical phenomenology proceeds to a concealed objectivation of
phenomenological data, identifying the originary of sense with the immanent lived experiences
(Erlebnisse) of a transcendental ego.11 Otherwise the radical epoché, by an extension of the classical
Husserlian epoché, succeeds in suspending what according to Husserl was in fact non-suspendable,
that is to say the egological pole, the sphere of the transcendental I.12 How is it possible this
seeming nonsense?
The distinction between consciousness and the ego has been established already by Husserl
himself. We find a similar distinction in radical phenomenology, yet its meaning is not the same as
in Husserl. Radical phenomenology strengthens the point that “consciousness” and “ego” are not
entirely synonymous.13 The unsuspendable residue of a radical epoché is a basic impersonal lived
experience, a non ego-centered consciousness that manifest itself as actual “self-givenness”, i.e. as a
datum that really “gives itself by itself” (always into the phenomenological praxis, certainly not into
the physics or the natural sciences): this should be the authentic Selbstgegebenheit.14
Schematically speaking, the subject appears to be constituted by a deep structure that remains
invisible through the Husserlian method: the variation/invariance structure.15 This categorial
structure is the basic intentional structure of Western thought, our objectivating logos. It consists of
a functional relationship between an invariant pole (eidos) and a plane made by an indefinite
sequence of variations (to be intended as individual metamorphosis of the eidos). The variations get
their lacking sense, either ontological and logical, from the invariance, meanwhile the invariance
works as the principle, as the rule, and as the unity of connection for the whole range of variations.16
Radical epoché hits each intentional construction, therein enclosed the I. By striking the
assessment of the ego as obvious datum, by putting at issue the idea that the ego would be endowed
with absolute and exclusive existence, the radical epoché comes to show how the ego is nothing
more than the unity pole (eidos) of the sequence of numberless activities (variations) usually

3
referred to the consciousness. The ego-centered consciousness then doesn’t enjoy any preferential
statute, as Husserl held, yet it turns out to be constituted like the thing: the subject is constituted like
the object.
Thanks to its radicalization, phenomenology pulls down the idea that the categorial attitude was
the only possible attitude17, the unique and absolute form of consciousness. The Western basic
intentional structure, underlying our natural attitude, is an objectifying structure. Radical
phenomenological analysis shows how this logos of objectivation, ruling both common and
scientific cognitive posture, works following the variation/invariance structure. So the possibility of
suspending this structure inside the analytical domain discloses a further huge field of research. To
deal with the impersonal consciousness, once assessed the phenomenological non-originality of
ego, and its very nature of constituted instead of constituting, implies a widening of the traditional
phenomenological interests towards the domains of cultural anthropology, ethnology, archaeology,
paleoethnology, etc., in other words, of every human sciences that under some respect deal with
cultures and human communities far from the Western logos, in either space or time.18
Shortly, this new phenomenological frontier marks the land of a transcultural anthropology
which can be fruitfully explored only through an analytical method that suspends the absoluteness
of Western logical and categorial principles.19 This means that trying to analyze sense structures
bound and embodied into the most dissimilar cultural signs, because the effectiveness of
phenomenology, intended as anti-speculative and non-objectifying attitude, could be tested just on
the field, through a close work of analysis. After all, the question about the method could be taken
on and resolved in this way, for in phenomenology there is an unavoidable interaction between
method and field of analysis. Usually one begins by employing broad models, and then along the
way, tools and techniques could be improved, through the direct comparison with evidences and
signs. But to assert that phenomenological method forms itself through phenomenological analysis,
is also to say that the real theoric and technical values of the method could arrive at a critical
explication, meanwhile the phenomenological field of observation extends and fixes itself, and vice
versa.20

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1
«Access to phenomenology demands a radical reversal of our total existence reaching into our depths,
a change of every prescientifically-immediate comportment to world and things as well as of the
disposition of our life lying at the basis of all scientific and traditionally-philosophical attitudes of
knowledge.» Eugen Fink, “What Does the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl Want to Accomplish?,”
Research in Phenomenology, 2 (1972), p. 6.
2
Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” Husserl Shorter Works, eds. Peter McCormick
and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press - The Harvester
Press, 1981), p. 196.
3
Cf. ibid.
4
Cf. Edward G. Ballard, “On the Method of Phenomenological Reduction, Its Presuppositions, and Its
Future,” Life-World and Consciousness. Essays for Aron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester E. Embree (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 110.
5
Cf. Domenico A. Conci, Prolegomeni ad una fenomenologia del profondo (Roma: Università di
Roma, 1970), p. 11.
6
Cf. Enzo Paci, Funzione delle scienze e significato dell’uomo (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1963), p. 249.
7
The principle declares «that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition,
that everything originarily offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as
being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.» Edmund Husserl, Ideas, First Book
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p. 44f.
8
Antonio Zirión Q., “The Call ‘Back to the Things Themselves’ and the Notion of Phenomenology,”
Husserl Studies 22 (2006), p. 31f.
9
Cf. Domenico A. Conci, La conclusione della filosofia categoriale. Contributi ad una fenomenologia
del metodo fenomenologico (Roma: Edizioni Abete, 1967).
10
Cf. Domenico A. Conci, L’universo artificiale. Per una epistemologia fenomenologica (Roma: Spada,
1978) n. 3, p. 14.
11
«This search for an ultimate and final apodictic foundation, which, following the Cartesian paradigm,
can only lie in the ego (cogito, ergo sum), is never given up by Husserl, no matter how much his actual
emphasis might be directed at other “phenomena.”» Sebastian Luft, “Husserl’s Theory of the
Phenomenological Reduction: Between Life-World and Cartesianism,” Research in Phenomenology,
34 (2004), p. 207.
12
«On what authentically phenomenological basis is the unsuspendable residue to be identified, as
Husserl would have it, with the sphere of transcendental subjectivity?» Domenico A. Conci,
“Disinterested Praise of Matter: Ideas for Phenomenological Hyletics,” Analecta Husserliana LVII
(1998), p. 50.
13
Cf. ibid., p. 52.
14
Cf. ibid., p. 53.
15
Cf. Domenico A. Conci and Angela Ales Bello, “Il tempo e l'originario. Un dibattito
fenomenologico,” Il Contributo, II, 5-6 (Roma 1978), p. 16.
16
«The logos of objectivation (…) is a sense structure polarized in an invariant moment (…) and in a
moment to be understood as an orderable sequence of individual variations crossed by the invariant as
the unitary principle towards which all these moments must necessarily converge. Functionally related
with each other, these polarities constitute an altogether general intentional structure, a structure of
connection, order and comprehension», Domenico A. Conci, “Disinterested Praise”, p. 51.
17
Domenico A. Conci, La conclusione della filosofia categoriale, p. 79.
18
«Thus, it is quite evident that the phenomenological residue of a radical epoché is constituted by a
true ‘cultural continent’ (…) where the elementary lived experiences reveal a morphology and a
lawfulness of connection which go beyond those already visualized by classical analysis, which has
confined itself to complex Western experiences.» D. A. Conci and Angela Ales Bello,
“Phenomenology as the semiotics of archaic or ‘different’ life experiences. Toward an Analysis of the
Sacred,” Phenomenology Inquiry, XV (1991), p. 125.
19
Cf. ibid., pp. 110ff.
20
Cf. Domenico A. Conci, Prolegomeni, p. 14.