The Phenomenology of Forgetting

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Edmund Husserl's early and explicit turn towards an egological phenomenology of intentional constitution clouded the waters of the promising phenomenological movement even before it entered the mainstream of philosophical research. A method that Heidegger and others had thought philosophically neutral, especially as it was expressed in the first edition of the Logische Untersuchungen,' all to soon came to reflect a philosophical commitment to a subject of conscious constitutive activity, Husserl's now infamous transcendental ego.' More than one thinker has cut his wisdom teeth convincingly criticizing this move.3 But if such critiques are largely negative - and surely Husserl's critics have mostly failed to match the positive originality and penetration of the analyses he continued to conduct under the aegis of phenomenology - a lacuna is opened up within phenomenology, threatening the continuity and integration of the field. In the search for a positive counterthrust to idealism, phenomenologists have often looked elsewhere, to existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalytic theory and even to a logical pragmatics, to supply the corrective to what has seemed to be Husserl's