The Veil of Appearance Phenomenological Inquiries on Husserlian Methodology

This paper explores the role of appearance in Husserl’s theory of knowledge, stressing its importance and its necessity. Far from being an accident that clarity, evidence or reality can evacuate, appearance is constitutive of our experience and of our approach of its grounding principles. In the light of this idea of appearance, the contingent aspects of our lived experience become an expression of the sense-formation process supporting and transforming it. This paper is a contribution to a larger discussion – including, among others, Eugen Fink, Michel Henry and Jean-Paul Sartre – about the relationship between phenomenology and ontology, about the nature of our knowledge and our experience of freedom.