Page 295 - Contribution To Phenomenology

288 JAMES G. HART

that the allegiance they occasion is not founded in original intuitive
evidence. It is not evidence, not filled intentions, etc. which are given
priority and go in advance but rather desire, will, wonder, trust, etc. It
was increasingly evident to Husserl that these forms of "irrationality" were
essential, perhaps dialectical, features of the meaning of rationality. The
remainder of the paper aspires to synthesize his views on this matter.
In a marginal note to Heidegger's Being and Time Husserl noted that
it was not death alone which is our ever insurmountable, fateful horizon.
Rather we Uve in the midst and horizon of a universum of irrationalities
and fatal events. Husserl approached the problem of the surds of life in
the context of the teleological structure of consciousness in its theoretical-
scientific aspirations as weU as in its practical-eutopian nisus. Reflection
on both reveals indeed how we live in a horizon of fate and surds. In
both theory and praxis the precariousness of sustaining the "meaning of
life" becomes evident. In both it becomes clear that being is not
identifiable with reason and that the real is not the rational—and
therefore, as Iso Kern astutely noted, ultimate philosophy cannot be first
philosophy or essence-analysis of the transcendental phenomenological
realm, but rather it must deal with the factual, contingent realm, of the
world and, indeed, with the contingency of reason itself.^^
Rational theory or pure science is sustained by necessity, universality,
identity, sameness, predictability, non-contradiction, the fulfillment of
expectations, theoretical hope of such fulfillment, etc. Indeed it is guided
by the ideal of a divine knowing which is omniscient and, in so far as
control of the theoretic conditions is a presupposition, omnipotent. It
itself becomes a theme in opposition to the finitude and all too
humanness of human knowing. Human knowing is surrounded by the
universality of fate, by the universaUty of the endless and incaculable
surds which destroy the very possibility of theoretical praxis. And,
contrariwise, it is science which gives rational concepts and logical
expression to the irrational and founds its logical consequences. (Cf. A
V 21, 72b-77b.) In these respects rationality and irrationality are contrast
concepts.
As questions are predelineations and pre-conceptualizations as well as
hopes of answers, so the scientific enterprise faces the infinite ideal of
the systematic fulfillment of the endless advance of ever novel questions

^^ Iso Kern, Idee und Methode der Philosophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1976),
342; cf. also "A Precis . . . ," 106 ff.