On the Threshold. Certainty, Doubt, and Research

What is the first move in the phenomenological game? As everybody knows, it is an invitation more than a statement or a question: turn to the things themselves. Husserl’s dictum expresses the ambition to carry philosophy outside of its ivory tower and into the world of everyday life, so rich and variegated, teaming with all kinds of natural and artificial objects: all kinds of beings, human and animal, cities and states, institutions, books, works, good and evil, or rather, the numberless variety of goods and ills which surround us. In short, the world of everyday life that we are all concerned with, each from one’s own particular point of view, here and now, at the “zero point” of our personal coordinates: with our spatial horizon (the boundaries of the visible and, beyond that, the geography of the earth and the immensity of the universe which contains it) and our indefinite temporal horizon (the past, the future, each one’s small story encompassed within the grand story of everyone, human history).