Conclusion

Amy E. Varela

pp. 203-204

in: Gail Soffer, Husserl and the question of relativism, Berlin, Springer, 1991

Abstract

Phenomenology itself cannot be employed to derive a totalizing relativism, a relativism which everywhere forsakes or denies the universal. Rather, the relativist denial of all universals is only the reverse side of the dogmatic, unphenomenological absolutism characteristic of objectivism. The objectivist correspondence theory of truth dogmatically posits the non-relative character of truth, without regard for the possibility of knowledge, or for the nature of the truth that informs actual intentional experience. The relativist rejects the absolutism of objectivism as pre-critical and naïve, but only to substitute a naivete of his own. For the relativist's conviction of the relativity of all truth arises from a conception of knowledge and reality as "formed "— and hence relative to — a contingent subjective cognitive background (whether this background be conceived as empirical psychological constitution, historico-cultural world-view, or "transcendental' faculties). Yet this conception naively hypostatizes and absolutizes the subject background itself, and approaches subjectivity with precisely the same pre-critical dogmatism that characterizes objectivism's approach to the object. By contrast, when subjectivity is not treated as some invisible "thing' — something which exists and possesses a determinate nature independently of any actual or possible givenness in experience — when subjectivity itself is approached as a phenomenon, then it reveals itself to contain universal as well as contingent features.