Phenomenology repudiates every philosophical “renaissance”; as a philosophy of self-reflection at its most original and its most universal, it is directed to concepts, problems and insights that one achieves by oneself, and yet it does get stimulation from the great men and women of the past, whose earlier intuitions it corroborates while transposing them to the firm ground of concrete research that one can take up and carry through. It demands of the phenomenologist that he or she personally renounce the ideal of a philosophy that would be only one’s own and, instead, as a modest worker in a community with others, live for a philosophia perennis.

Edmund Husserl, “Phenomenology”, draft A, translated by Thomas Sheehan, in Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931), edited by Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer