Conversation with Fink, 17/8/31

pp. 11-16

in: Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1976

Abstract

I began by asking him what Husserl had meant at the end of my last visit when he suggested that I ask him questions concerning the phenomenological reduction, and he added that he had become aware since the publication of the Ideen of many difficulties in the reduction. To which Fink: The phenomenological reduction is no longer regarded by Husserl as merely a step which frees the transcendental field for investigation. Its significance as making possible a naïve sort of act-analysis, such as one has in the Ideen, remains; but phenomenological investigation cannot, after the phenomenological reduction, proceed as if in a homogeneous field, but must continually exercise further reductions such as those involved in the problems of "genesis". The phenomenological field is not " there" at all, but must first be created. Thus the phenomenological reduction is creative, but of something which bears a necessary relation to that which is "there".