“Until the End of the World”: Eidetic Variation and Absolute Being of Consciousness—A Reconsideration

This paper suggests interpreting Husserl’s thesis of the “fictional destruction of the world” ( gedankliche Destruktion der Welt ) in the light of the eidetic method of variation. After having reconstructed Husserl’s argument and shown how it relies on the methodologically regimented joint venture of free fantasy and bounded concepts, the author concludes that (1) the a priori of a world, namely its empirical (more or less rational) style, is tantamount to the a priori of a world that can be possibly experienced by some conceivable form of consciousness. (2) If consciousness is a priori bound to transcendence, such transcendence is not necessarily supposed to be the transcendence of a world, for a non-world would be enough to entertain the intentional directedness. This twofold claim allows for a novel interpretation of Husserl’s principle of the asymmetry between world and consciousness.