Beyond Phenomenology

The Movement toward Axiology

Abstract

Phenomenology and existentialism, as these philosophical movements find expression in the work of thinkers from Edmund Husserl to Heidegger, Sartre, their contemporaries, and their followers, are often seen as the last manifestation in the evolution of Western thought that moves from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Kant. There are even those who would suggest—echoing Nietzsche and Heidegger in particular—that the high evolution of Western rationalism is actually the “end” or “death” of authentic philosophy and authentic thinking. Phenomenology stakes out a claim that cannot be transcended by rational “thinking.” My claim here is that there is a next stage, and a thoroughly authentic stage, of Western thought that moves beyond historical phenomenology and existentialism, and that this “next stage” is ushered in with the work of Robert S. Hartman’s axiology.