The Problems of Reason

Abstract

The explications to which we have devoted ourselves to this point remained on a plane that was still formal. They enabled us to rid ourselves of constructivist temptations: but we still have to subject the transcendental domain to positive analyses. It is only here that the phenomenological task really begins with all of its difficulties. It is not simply a matter of finding the concepts which will allow us to dominate the Heraclitean flux of lived subjectivity; the constituting value of the concrete Ego, inasmuch as it ultimately grounds the objectivity of the object, must still be demonstrated factually. In other words, the phenomenological description must, owing to its very fidelity to the experienced given, elaborate the authentic solution to the problems of reason. We must not, thereby, understand just the traditional problems arranged under the title of the ‘theory of knowledge’. The phenomenology of reason extends to all domains of being: it intends the whole meaning of experienced life — every right of consciousness to posit itself as true, to live rationally and truthfully. Every predicative or antepredicative experience, every intuition of values or ends implies claims that must be criticized and legitimated within the limits of their actual signification. A critique of this sort could not proceed according to abstract categories: it is realized by the very exactitude of the analysis, in which the presence of consciousness to itself guarantees its truth meaning. In a word, what is at issue is a general critique of evidence as the lived experience of truth.