The Significance of the Transcendental Ego for the Problem of Body and Soul in Husserlian Phenomenology

Abstract

Any description of soul and body or of their relationship in Husserl’s phenomenology should begin with a description of transcendental subjectivity. But “Who or what is this transcendental subjectivity?” This question runs through the text of Ludwig Landgrebe’s ‘The problem of Passive Constitution’;¹ it is posed from many different angles, and testifies both to the centrality of this theme in Husserl’s phenomenology and to the fact that its ability to puzzle and sometimes bewilder the reader is not yet at an end. The main difficulty is that transcendental subjectivity holds the key for the description and solution of another large number of vital problems: the positing of realism or of idealism or the overcoming of both, the concreteness and the individuality of the ego as a human subject, our relationship with others, that is, the problem of intersubjectivity,historicity, the definition of transcendental and of transcendental life, and so on.