The Genetic Return to Experience

Abstract

Judgments, as constitutive products, are “senses that bear within them, as a sense-implicate of their genesis, a sort of historicalness;… therefore each sense-formation can be asked about its essentially necessary sense-history.”¹ Guided by the already formed unity of the object, the analysis in the preceeding section had for its theme the overt sense of the judgment, i.e., the judgment as the “finished product” of the constituting process. In contradistinction to this procedure, the genetic inquiry is concerned with exhibiting the sense-genesis that constitutes the historicalness of the judgment. The task of genetic inquiry consists in uncovering the hidden moments of sense and “‘causal’ sense-relations”² in contrast to overt and disclosed senses. Both procedures, to be sure, aim at an ultimate clarification of the perceptual and cognitive order of the intentional life of consciousness; genetic inquiry, however, encompasses a larger scope : by being concerned with origins and foundations, it must carry out its pursuit until it reaches the all-embracing form of the temporality of consciousness as the province of primordial origins and thus as the ultimate place of return of all constituting processes.