The Art of Free Phantasy in Rigorous Phenomenological Science

Abstract

In section 70 of the first book of his Ideen,¹ Husserl addresses himself to the question of the specific method of apprehending essences — that of “free phantasy.” The process involved in disclosing and examining essence, he consistently held in all his works, is in no sense a process of inferring “from an inductive empeiria” in the manner, say, of an experimental psychologist.² Free variation in phantasy is not at all an “empirical variation,” ³ which could only yield inductive generalizations pertaining to a specific class of empirical states of affairs.⁴ Variation in pure phantasy as executed systematically in phenomenological reflection

must be understood, not as an empirical variation but as a variation carried on with the freedom of pure phantasy and with the consciousness of its purely optional character — the consciousness of the “pure” Anything Whatever.⁵