5. On learning to move oneself
A constructive phenomenology
A method, after all, is nothing which is, or which can be, brought in from the outside…. [A] determinate method … is a norm which arises from the fundamental regional specificity and the universal structures of the province in question …Edmund Husserl (1983:173)
[I]t is not only the worldly facts of birth and death through which transcendental questions about a genesis are to be “constructed,” but also the world phenomena of early childhood development, insofar as precisely this early period lies beyond the reach of our memory; these are all questions that are raised in psychology under the titles “the origin of the idea of space, of the idea of time,” etc., and of course at the essentially inadequate level of the natural attitude. The transcendental response to all these questions cannot proceed in intuitive fashion, i.e. it cannot bring the archaic building processes actually to a present or recollective self-givenness, it can only “construct” them…. [Constructive phenomenology] begins in quite different problem regions … and in every case does so in a style of “construction” that is in each case particular, that is only understandable in view of each problem situation. It thus shows an intrinsic multiplicity of methods …
Eugen Fink (1995:63)