A non-genetic genesis

Abstract

In this article, I describe the phenomenological motivations that led Edmund Husserl to elucidate a set of phenomena grouped under the label of “generativity,” such as birth, the animality of the human being, or her belonging to a generation or cultural tradition. I will take Anthony J. Steinbock’s Home and Beyond (1995) as a guiding thread, which proposes a generative mode of access – distinct from the static and the genetic ones – to thematizing this kind of phenomena. To do so, I will first analyze the meaning of the genesis of experience, and then I will scrutinize the methodological status of a generation of experience understood as a “non-genetic genesis”, along with the possibility for generative phenomenology to become a non-foundational or co-foundational transcendental phenomenology.