The Yearbook on History and Interpretation of Phenomenology 2015

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List of Abbreviations

The list of abbreviations used in the following contributions.

Edmund Husserl

Jürgen Habermas

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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Jana Trajtelová

Introduction

After the normativity and typification issue, the third volume of The Yearbook on History and Interpretation of Phenomenology is mainly dedicated to the closely related question of generativity, and more broadly to the generative aspects of and in contemporary phenomenology. We continue to proceed in Husserlian research as well as to address newly emerging contemporary cultural, political, and ecological phenomena. This invites and welcomes a creative involvement with a generative phenomenological approach, which tries to address such phenomena as the liminality and volatility of experience, interpersonal and intercultural communication, home and alienness, identity and difference, globalization and fundamentalism, migration and interculturalism, and the search for the meaning of authentic sociality, morality or religiosity of human persons.

The notion of generativity (Generativität) in Husserl concerns both “the process of becoming – hence the process of ‘generation’ – and a process that occurs over the ‘generations’ – hence specifically the process of ‘historical’ and social becoming that is circumscribed geologically” (Steinbock, 1995, p. 3); as such, it deals with generative phenomena that are “normative, intersubjective, geological and historical”. The key contribution concerning Husserlian research on generativity was brought out by a contemporary American philosopher, Anthony Joseph Steinbock. That is also why we open the volume with the interview by Iulian Apostolescu: “The Phenomenologist’s Task: Generativity, History, Lifeworld. Interview with Anthony J. Steinbock”. In his book Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (1995), Steinbock made the outspoken formulation of generative phenomenology, alongside static and genetic dimensions; this was based on his subtle study of Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts and further creatively developed. In 1995, when Home and Beyond was published, the philosopher Claude Evans noted that the book is “the most important and original piece of Husserl scholarship and of Husserl-inspired phenomenology to have appeared in many years.” From that time, Steinbock has inquired further into problems concerning “generativity”, wrote several articles where he clarified or developed the issues such as the relation between static, genetic and generative method and matters (e.g. “Limit-Phenomena and the Liminality of Experience”, 1998) or the notion of generativity and Generativity itself (e.g. “From Phenomenological Immortality to Natality”, 2008). In a more applied and concrete manner, Steinbock ← 9 | 10 → later works out implications of generativity and generative phenomenology as he is inquiring more deeply into the personal dimension of human experience (religious, moral, social) in Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (2007) and in his recent book Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart (2014). The interview not only renders a view on Steinbock’s understanding of the “Phenomenologist’s Task” but also it sketches the generation of the generative issues in his own work.

In the article “Generative Problems and Generative Phenomenology: Thinking over Anthony J. Steinbock’s Conception of the Familiar and the Alien by Recourse to a Generative Absolute” Esteban Marín Ávila presents a short discussion of Home and Beyond’s perspective on generative phenomenology and underscores some of its critical points. The author brings up a challenging view on the Steinbock’s elaboration of Husserl’s notion of generativity: he questions the relationship between static, genetic and generative methodological approach, the understanding of the experience of the alien, and he calls for a necessity of rethinking social experience within a genetic framework without reducing honest phenomenological description to its generative structures. He recalls, in this regard, the importance of the notion of “social acts” in Husserl, such as communication: “The idea that consciousness of the alien comes necessarily with a kind of resistance and impact in the familiar horizon is perfectly compatible with the thesis that social acts are responsible for the active constitution of other selves.”