Lifeworld and Historicity: The Fate of Phenomenology

On the occasion of the Spanish edition of Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl, by Anthony J. Steinbock, this essay reflects on the dynamism of Husserl’s phenomenology. Dominated by his aspiration to turn phenomenology into a self-sufficient philosophical science, Husserl was confronted with the inevitability of an originary unconscious dimension, the retentional zero that complicates self-conscious life with the impenetrability of passive syntheses. After analyzing the static and genetic dimension of phenomenology, the essay studies the meaning of the generative program that Husserl mentioned in some texts starting from Cartesian Meditations, reconstructed by Steinbock with a firm hand, I try to show that this generative program implies a new understanding of phylogenetics of consciousness. Husserl only announced it and the proposal of the structures of the familiar world and the foreign world do not seem sufficient to achieve it. My final proposal is that this program can only be deployed as something more than a proposal under the inspiration of the imposing work of Hans Blumenberg.