Abstract

This dissertation is a study and reconstruction of the ontological strain in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. Its project is motivated by a surprising turn in the development of the phenomenological movement. Husserl offered phenomenology as a solution to the European crisis of rationality. For him, the core of the crisis lay in the estrangement of symbolic "technology" from the "things themselves." The evacuation of meaning that stems from such estrangement was to be rectified through the phenomenological return to den Sachen. But contrary to Husserl's own programmatic intentions, the phenomenological movement, along with its various derivatives have ignored the call to den Sachen, and focused increasingly on the linguistic medium in which philosophizing takes place. This dissertation raises the following central question: how was the triumph of language-oriented philosophy possible in the wake of Husserl's theoretical efforts? It argues that, in spite of his programmatic intentions, Husserl's own ontology involves an absolutization of language. This absolutization consists in taking as a paradigm of being in general the model of ideality and the transcendental conditions of its genesis. Through a close reading of several texts, the dissertation unpacks the opposition between Husserl's "linguicism" and his call to the things themselves in the form of a series of aporias. It then attempts to resolve these aporias by reconstructing Husserlian ontology