The mediate aim of this essay is to make good two related claims: that phenomenology in Husserl’s sense is adequate to the task of describing the most concrete structures of subjectivity; and that the universal may be apprehended directly through the concrete.

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There are, traditionally, four purely philosophical solutions to this question: 1) the Cartesian solution—I, Descartes, am the first one to bend my will to the dictates of the God-given reason I have; the errors of others are best explained by their heedlessness; anyone who exercises his reason in the way I have prescribed, and no further, will perforce arrive at the truth. 2) the empiricist solution—There is nothing in the mind that did not first come through the senses; whatever imperfections (...) may have been introduced by the senses can be corrected at any time through further experimentation; the indefinite perfectibility of experience explains both any error and any progress. 3) the dialectical solution —In this solution, the problem of the errors of others is not introduced as simply a matter of personal deficiencies: the individual's claim to truth is given full recognition; the dialectician argues, however, that, although the individual saw the truth, he saw only a partial glimpse of it because the unfolding of the truth is an historical movement. Truth is one and eternal, but it reveals itself in place and time by limited glimpses, according to a movement all its own that can only be detected at the proper time and in the proper place. 4) the phenomenological solution—This is a hybrid of the Cartesian and of the empiricist solutions, and, in some of Husserl's followers, it takes on some of the trappings of the dialectic. (shrink)