The Mark of Beginnings. Husserl and Hegel on the Meaning of Naiveté

In this paper I intend to appraise the meaning of naiveté in Husserl’s phenomenology against the backdrop of Hegel’s philosophy. I will take my cue from an insightful remark by James Dodd in his recent book Crisis and Reflection. Commenting on Husserl’s famous statement that empirical science is intrinsically naïve, Dodd underscores that: “‘Naiveté’ is not meant here to be a term of reproach. There is in fact enormous power in naiveté, and it should be respected” (Dodd, 2004, p. 55). The goal of this paper is to provide a description of naiveté’s power and, in so doing, to articulate the possibility of the respect to be owed to it by philosophy.