Abstract
My paper will examine the relationship between what might be called the Cosmos and the Life of Human beings particularly as it is bodily situated and lived. The Cosmos is not, then, primarily regarded in its astronomical sense, but more like what Husserl speaks about calling it the Earth which is the fundamental environment from which we as bodily situated individuals can never departure. We can, of course, departure from the earth (by getting into a flying plan or even travelling to another planet) but that is not the point – there is another way in which we cannot possibly leave the Earth – it has to do with some inescapable “origin” (the historical Life-world) and it is about it our paper will be inquiring. We start elucidating by shortly taking in the Ancient Greek philosopher Anaximander, then we move on to Husserl and finally comes some synthesis of Merleau-Ponty and Husserl particularly how they view nature in its genuine phenomenological origin.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Edmond Husserl: Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. Second Book, Kluwer Academic Publisher 1989 (hereafter Ideas II).
- 2.
Ideas II p. 6, my italics.
- 3.
Ideas II p. 8, italics by me.
- 4.
Paraphrasing Ideas II p. 36.
- 5.
Ideas II first p. 37 and second p. 38.
- 6.
In more detail these are some of the steps bringing him to this “conclusion”. First, it is “only from the appearances (and intersubjective nexus) that we can draw the sense of what a thing is in “Objective actuality,” [……. But] The Objectively real is not in my “space” or in anyone else’s, as “phenomenon” [..] but exists in Objective space, which is a formal unity of identification in the midst of changing qualities. [……] Pure space […] arises out of my appearing space not through abstraction but through an Objectification which takes as “appearances” any sensuously appearing spatial form endowed with sensuous qualities and posits it in manifolds of appearances which do not belong to an individual consciousness but to a societal consciousness as a total group of possible appearances that is constituted out of individual groups. Each subject has the totality of space […]. In principle, the thing is given and is to be given only through appearances, whose appearing contents can vary with the subjects. [……] subjects stand in a relationship of empathy and, […] can intersubjectively assure themselves of the identity of what appears therein. […] the thing is something intersubjectively identical yet is as such that it has no sensuous-intuitive content [….] it is only an empty identical something as a correlate of the identification possible according to experimental-logical rules and grounded through them […..] by the subjects that stand in the intersubjective nexus along with their corresponding acts appropriate to appearance and to experimental-logical thinking. (Ideas II, pp. 92–93).
- 7.
Ideas II pp. 384–385.
- 8.
This might easily be compared to what Husserl says in The Crisis – in the appendix “The Origin of Geometry” characterizing history (and historicity) in this manner: “[…] history is from the start nothing other than the vital movement of the coexistence and the interweaving of original formations and sedimentations of meaning.” (p. 371) Also my article K. Rokstad: “On the Historicity on Understanding” in A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.) Analecta Husserliana LIX, pp. 401–422, 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
- 9.
Ideas II, p. 385.
- 10.
Published in M. Merleau-Ponty: Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, pp. 117–132, Northwestern University Press 2002.
- 11.
M. Merleau-Ponty: Nature Course Notes, Northwestern University Press, 2003, p. 73.
- 12.
Nature p. 73.
- 13.
Nature p. 75.
- 14.
Op.cit. p. 76. This is, of course, pretty similar to what Husserl said about empathy – saying it is not a mediate but an immediate experience, not as if “the other would be experienced as a psychophysical annex to his corporal body but instead an immediate experience of others,”.
- 15.
Op.cit. p. 77.
- 16.
Op.cit.
- 17.
Op.cit.
- 18.
This is explained with the following: “We cannot deduce from pure things our relation with our body, with the perceived beings, and other perceiving beings. We have to admit then that the world is not as appearance in relation to the appearance of pure things, on the contrary that it is founding in relation to these pure things.”
- 19.
The following is actually Husserl’s argument in its full extent: In the present, I as something present am progressively dying, others die for me when I do not find a present connection with them. But unity by recollection permeates my life – I still live, although in being other, and continue to live the life that lies behind me and where its sense of being behind me lies in reiteration and the ability to reiterate. That the We live in the reiterability and itself continually lives in the form of the reiterability of history while the individual “dies”. That is, the individual can no longer be “remembered” emphatically by others, but “lives” only in historical memory whereby the memory-subject can be substituted for the individual who “dies”. What belongs to constitution is, and is alone, absolute and final necessity. Only on that basis is everything conceivable concerning the constituted world to be determined. What sense could the collapsing mass have in space, in one space constructed a priori as absolute homogenous if the constituting life were eliminated? Indeed, does that elimination itself not have sense, if any at all, as elimination of and in the constituting subjectivity? The ego lives and precedes all actual and possible beings and anything existent whether in a real or irreal sense. Constituted world-time, more particularly, conceals in itself psychological time, and the psychological refers back to the transcendental. But it does not do so in such a way that it can simply convert the objectively psychical into the transcendental and above all such that one converts each manner in which, under the abstractly and relatively justified point of view, one harmoniously presupposes the homogeneous world and more precisely, Nature and the psychical psychophysical attached to it. In practice one can operate very well with that presupposition [e.g. by fashioning and utilizing science for human praxis]. But not even that allows for conversion into the transcendental or for making valid over against phenomenology the paradoxes which arise. (p. 296, Notes to pp. 78–84, my italics).
- 20.
Op.cit. p. 78.
- 21.
Op.cit. p. 78.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rokstad, K. (2014). The Cosmos and Bodily Life on Earth Elucidated Within the Historicity of Human Existence. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Phenomenology of Space and Time. Analecta Husserliana, vol 117. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02039-6_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02039-6_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-02038-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-02039-6
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)