meaning of words and not on things as they actually appear." If this particular mistake were made by a group of Husserl scholars, especially after seriously attending to Husserl's text, then the fact that the same conclusion was reached by several interpreters would incline them to take this coincidence as supportive of their seemingly phenomenologically acquired insight, especially where additional weight is given by some deductive "evidences." Yet these phenomenologists might really be reading only a selective portion of Husserl's words in certain ways and mistaking their meanings for the essences of which Husserl is in fact speaking, essences which are the desired end point of phenomenological attending and the required source for evidential verification. Sokolowski (p. 16) would respond, "Such a wayward procedure"! The abstractum Husserl's words, their meanings, the concepts making do for the essences them? selves, the matters (Sache) that are at issue. And it is a procedure that overlooks the goal of doing phenomenology: the understanding of human existence as constituted out of the richness of transcendental consciousness or perhaps this should be put, the transcen? dental understanding of the richness of human existence and of conscious life. It is a procedure that errantly takes the separate reading of this text and of that text from the Husserlian corpus as giving clarification once the reader provides a consistent conceptual analysis. But if the nature of phenomenology as theory is recognized, it becomes obvious that no one reading of a text, nor even a "satisfactorily" consistent reading of thousands of texts, can yield up that theory. And reading texts together with the usual accompanying linguistic understanding of words does not alone show us that theory. We read Husserl, and then we must do phenomenology, that is, we must in fact reactivate the theory or create it anew in its complexity and contextuality as much as we can in order to achieve Husserl's vision of human existence. Only then can we move beyond the words of Husserl to undertake further concrete analyses that Husserl himself had insufficient time to accomplish, or perhaps insufficient self-awareness to see as neces? sitated. There are many "mistakes" possible for the individual phenomenologist and the communal ones as well, mistakes that need to be avoided and which might be best understood if phenomenologists continually take aim at the contextuality of their enterprise.10 Consequently, an ongoing and thorough This content downloaded from 207.46.13.51 on Tue, 21 Jun 2016 06:43:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms