Features and Periods of Edmund Husserl’s Concept of Metaphysics

How to Discuss the 'Highest and Ultimate Questions' from a Phenomenological Point of View?

Abstract

In the present paper we will try to give an overview of the main stages of the development of Edmund Husserl’s conception of metaphysics, and its most important characteristics. As we will try to show, one can speak about three main stages in Husserl’s views on metaphysics. 1) From the early 1890s until his so-called ‘transcendental turn’ around 1906/07. 2) From his ‘transcendental turn’ until the late 1920s, and finally 3) the metaphysical conception of the 1930s, which one can call – following the interpretation of László Tengelyi – with a good reason as a ‘metaphysics of the primal facts (Urfakta, Urtatsache).’ We will make the attempt to demonstrate that Husserl’s considerations concerning metaphysics – throughout his entire work of life – had three essential levels. 1) The epistemological, and in particular phenomenological preparation and foundation of metaphysics. 2) Metaphysics as the universal and ultimate science of reality, and last, but not least, 3) metaphysics as a proper field of phenomenological investigations concerning the ‘highest and ultimate questions’ (such as God and immortality). As we will try to show it in this study in a detailed way, Husserl attempted to make this field – which utterly exceeds the terrain of possible intuitions (Anschauungen) and direct experience – accessible for a legitimate phenomenological treatment by the method of phenomenological constructions, prior to Eugen Fink.