Introduction

Phenomenology is characterized first and foremost by its rejection of purely speculative theories and hollow constructs, which defines its project as resolutely anti-metaphysical. To this end, it requires a return to the thing itself: “To consider the thing itself (Ding selbst) requires […] that, far from adhering to the vague ways of speaking and philosophical prejudices of tradition, we draw directly on the clarity of the datum itself.”¹ But this is not to assert the rights of empiricism against rationalism. At the very least, and this is where the specificity of phenomenology properly lies, this return to things themselves is above all a reduction of what is given to that as which it comes to be given, i.e. the reduction of all transcendent reality to the rank of a mere phenomenon: reality “is not in itself something absolute that binds itself secondarily to something else; it is, in the absolute sense, strictly nothing, it has no ‘absolute essence’; its title of essence is that of something that in principle is only intentional, only conscious, only consciously representable, only appearing.”² This reduction of being to appearing is both what gives the datum its legitimizing value, and, as we shall see, what enables a true datum of the eidetic a priori.