Repository | Book | Chapter

Since this paper mainly deals with levels and strata, let me begin by incidentally sketching three levels or stages one can distinguish in phenomenological investigation, namely, a founding level of primary evidencing, or what Lester Embree calls direct experiencing in its proper sense, a founded lower-level of scholarship, or what he terms indirect experiencing, whereby phenomenological evidence is conveyed or, better, guided by evidences taken from other thinkers (e.g., philosophers or scientists), and still a further founded upper-level that could perhaps be called construction, a kind of stepping beyond the given and projecting what, in a certain good sense, one might call metaphysical over-arching guidelines. Now unlike the steps in a stairway, these stages are not simply left behind while one is climbing up, but they rather resemble M. E. Escher's never-ending stairways, where the uppermost step is at the same time the lowest one, and hence the end becomes a new beginning (like his 1960s lithograph "Ascending and Descending"). The present essay is largely confined to the second stage, i.e., to scholarship.

DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-9286-1_5

Full citation: