Abstract
This chapter will concentrate on insights from Husserl’s extensive research manuscripts on the topic of the “life-world” primarily from the 1920s and early 1930s that were recently published in Husserliana, Volume XXXIX. One striking feature of these studies is the emphasis on what Husserl calls “realities,” concrete individual objects that exist in space and time. This suggests that his ontology is actually closer to Aristotle’s than it is to Plato’s. Another prominent theme is the essential role of embodiment and in particular certain features of embodiment such as affectivity and serving as a zero-point for orientation that are at the bottom of any life-worldly experience of the various kinds of objects that are encountered in this world. This essay traces out some of those features as a kind of “transcendental deduction” of embodiment from Husserl’s perspective, showing how this establishes a necessary relativity of all life-worldly experience and yet how Husserl accommodates these embodied relativities not just as hurdles to be overcome on the way to intersubjective understanding and to genuine scientific knowledge, but rather as the fundamental building-blocks of all intersubjective understanding and knowledge, including scientific knowledge, and sociality in general.
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- 1.
Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution, edited by Rochus Sowa as Volume XXXIX of the Husserliana (Springer: Dordrecht, 2008). Citations from this volume will be listed by page numbers in parentheses within the text or in footnotes. All translations are my own. For passages where the German text is particularly important, the German original will also be included in a footnote.
- 2.
One other important and helpful text about the genesis of value judgments and of normative standards of reason in the life-world is an excursus to the lectures Einleitung in die Ethik. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924 (Hua XXVII), pp. 259–320.
- 3.
Ideas I, §49 (Hua III, 104).
- 4.
Compare on this point Simo Pulkkinens’ chapter in this volume, “Lifeworld as an Embodiment of Spiritual Meaning: The Constitutive Dynamics of Activity and Passivity in Husserl,” p. 22.
- 5.
See Text 29, §2 (pp. 298–300).
- 6.
“If I am a human ego, then I am one as the ego of this one single body in which I operate, and operating in it I not only have it, but, by means of it, I have the world in general as existing for me and, as a further consequence, the world as the realm of my actual and enabling practice (vermöglichenden Praxis)” (247). Text 24 (pp. 243–250) makes clear that embodiment is not merely one of the essential structures of the life-world as a fundamental structure of egoic life, but also that it involves being affected, stimulated, and involved in practices by and with the world.
- 7.
Ignacio de los Reyes Melero describes this phenomenon in terms of the notion of “concordance”. See his contribution to this volume, The Body as a System of Concordance and the Perceptual World”.
- 8.
This is true, by the way, not just for bodily states. Husserl describes how changes in my mental states, for instance, when I take “Santonin”, also influence the way that objects appear to us.
- 9.
“Die konkrete Tatsache des Lebens trägt in sich selbst die Grundentscheidung zwischen dem Ich, dem identischen Ich des Lebens, seiend als Ich in seinen ichliches Verhaltungsweisen, des von etwas Berührtwerdens, von etwas Erregt-, Geweckt-, Affiziert-, Betroffen-, kurz gesprochen: Affiziertwerdens, und daraufhin des Tuns, des Aktiv-sich Verhaltens in verschiedenen Modis.”
- 10.
For a more extensive discussion of the notion of “pure passivity,” see Pulkkinen’s chapter in this volume, pp. 17 ff.
- 11.
“Ich ist immer schon Ich von Vermögen. Ich von Kinästhesen, aber auch immer schon Ich, das ein Nicht-Ichliches, ein Hyletisches hat, das es in der Weise des ‘Gemüts’ affiziert in Freude und Leid, und wogegen es aktiv, zunächst kinästhetisch reagiert.”
- 12.
“Ist die Empfindungssinnlichkeit nicht zugleich Instinktsinnlichkeit und dabei mit Gefühlsintentionalität verwoben? Ist darin nicht eine Habitualität, die eine Schicht des habituellen Genesis aus fortgehenden Erfüllung oder Nichterfüllung annimmt, also innerhalb der Form der Zeitigung und Assoziation, und doch immer schon da ist?”
- 13.
For a more comprehensive study of Husserl’s theory of instincts from a phenomenological perspective, see Lee (1993).
- 14.
For a more detailed discussion of passivity, see also Pulkkinen’s chapter in this volume.
- 15.
De los Reyes Melero, in his chapter in this volume, discusses “normality” and “optimality”; Sara Heinämaa, in her contributions to this volume, offers a detailed discussion of the different kinds of anomalies and abnormalities that can be distinguished within Husserl’s account of the constitution of the life-world.
- 16.
For a detailed discussion of association and pairing, see Pulkkinen’s chapter in this volume.
- 17.
See FN 3, above.
- 18.
See for instance, Text 25, pp. 251–258.
- 19.
In her chapter in this volume, Sara Heinämaa offers an extensive discussion of the ways that for Husserl animals do and the ways they do not belong to a common world with adult humans.
- 20.
De los Reyes Melero explains why the notion of a complete collapse is nonetheless not unintelligible in his contribution to this volume.
- 21.
See, for instance, p. 32: “The world becomes a human world, divided into communities, the communities [each] related to a historical tradition that belongs essentially to it, in which a common culture arose that is accessible to every one of them and as a whole is identifiable, commonly valid for all.”
- 22.
The life-world manuscripts build on Husserl’s general conception of reason that I have described in another essay, Nenon (2003).
References
Lee, N. (1993). Husserls Phänomenologie der Instinkte. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Nenon, T. (2003). Husserl’s conception of reason as authenticity. Philosophy Today, 47, 63–70.
Smith, B. (1994). Austrian philosophy: The legacy of Franz Brentano. La Salle: Open Court.
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Nenon, T. (2013). Intersubjectivity, Interculturality, and Realities in Husserl’s Research Manuscripts on the Life-World (Hua XXXIX). In: Jensen, R., Moran, D. (eds) The Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 71. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01616-0_8
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