I am finally getting around to reading Husserl’s Ideas. I should have read this long, long ago. He already developed the language I’ve needed to say what I most need to say.

One important capability of phenomenology — in my opinion, the most important capability — is this: a phenomenological attitude permits us to port an enworldment across multiple differing metaphysical platforms.

The need (which is more often than not nothing less than a compulsion) to maintain compatibility with one metaphysical platform will narrow the range of ideas we are willing to entertain and develop, as well as the range of intuitions and perceptions we take seriously. Consequently we risk neglecting or rejecting regions of being crucial to our humanity.

Not every truth will play nice with an ultimate reality built with the materials of physics, or with a universe spun from divine love, or with a realm of manifested archetypal forms — but we might need those truths anyway, say, if we want to make an electronic device, or to cure a disease, or to feel healthy empathy for our neighbor, or to know viscerally that our life has purpose, or to account for mathematic’s miraculous ability to find order in the most chaotic of chaos, or to be bound to others within binding truths — all at once, all within the same life.

Maybe the first principles of metaphysics should come last in our understanding of our human — all-too-human — condition.