Abstract This essay concerns two distinct topics in Husserlian phenomenology. The first is “image consciousness” [ Bildbewusstsein ], which concerns the experiential nature of our encounters with pictures and other depictive objects. The second is “historicity” [ Geschichtlichkeit ], which refers to how human subjects, prior to any detailed knowledge of history, are in some sense always already...
Abstract Hermann Schmitz offers one of the most extensive descriptions available of embodied space, characterizing it as pre-sensorial, indivisible, and surfaceless yet capable of disclosing absolute locations. Schmitz nevertheless anchors the felt body’s absolute location in temporal irruption rather than in the ability for lived space to ground itself in rest. This article argues that...
Abstract In this paper, I examine Husserl’s conception of the self as both an identical I-pole ( Ichpol ) for-all experience and as a developing, unfolding unity whose self-explication is its history. As Husserl proclaims in the Cartesian Meditations § 37, “time is the universal form of all egological genesis.” He further states: “The ego constitutes itself for itself in, so to speak, the unity...
Abstract Being born is an undeniable fact of every human life, yet it seems that one’s birth evades any direct phenomenological access. Motivated by this problem, this article proceeds in three main steps. It first examines the problem of birth from the first-person perspective, where birth appears as both presupposed and inaccessible. The second step reverses the perspective by approaching...
Abstract This paper argues for the continued relevance of general, transcendental structures – especially Hannah Arendt’s concepts of natality and plurality – within critical phenomenology. Contrary to recent thinkers like Guenther, Oksala, Herrmann, and Marder, who critique the general as inherently oppressive and/or irrelevant, I propose that general conditions can provide a foundation for...
This article locates an irreducible point of crisis in phenomenology’s attempt to think historically and critically. Using the notion of crisis as my guiding thread, I show how Husserlian phenomenology cannot think history, or historically, without renouncing its fundamental principles. I focus on Merleau-Ponty’s diagnosis of a double crisis of western rationality – the collapse of its...
In his private notes written in 1936 (now published as GA82), Heidegger enumerates three “fundamental deceptions” at play in Being and Time (1927). The thrust of these deceptions is twofold: that Dasein is something given and that the task of phenomenology is to describe Dasein in its givenness. These are deceptions, Heidegger claims in 1936, because Dasein is not something given, but can only...
In the essay, I present the basic principles of Merab Mamardashvili’s phenomenology of ontological maturation. Though Mamardashvili’s thinking has been recently introduced to the West, there is still very little awareness of the uniqueness of his phenomenological insights, allowing him to illuminate contemporary philosophy’s central ontological and existential matters in a novel light. The...
Abstract Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy approaches human transformation as an overcoming of Western metaphysics. The nature of this transformation does not imply a mere change of a worldview, an ethical or spiritual fulfillment, or even self-transcendence. Instead, Heidegger speaks about a dislodgement of human essence. In the article I address the notion of dislodgement as central for...
Abstract This paper takes Zahavi’s view to task that every conscious experience involves a “minimal sense of self.” Zahavi bases his claim on the observation that experience, even on the pre-reflective level, is not only about the object, but also has a distinctive qualitative aspect which is indicative of the fact that it is for me. It has the quality of what he calls “for-meness” or...
The purpose of this paper is threefold: (1) To show the basic contours of transcendental subjectivity in the later work of Edmund Husserl, especially the Cartesian Meditations and the Crisis, and in the strictly phenomenological work of Michel Henry, especially Material Phenomenology; (2) to highlight Henry’s radical critique of Husserlian intersubjectivity and show that such critique, while...
Abstract Merleau-Ponty's reference to "a past which has never been present" at the end of "Le sentir" challenges the typical framework of the Phenomenology of Perception, with its primacy of perception and bodily field of presence. In light of this "original past," I propose a re-reading of the prepersonal as ground of perception that precedes the dichotomies of subject-object and...
Abstract"The conception of 'lived experience' marks my change since L'Etre et le Néant ... L'Etre et le Néant is a monument of rationality. But in the end it becomes an irrationalism, because it cannot account rationally for those processes which are 'below' consciousness and which are also rational, but lived as irrational. Today, the notion of 'lived experience' represents an effort to...
9 The nature of perception* Maurice Merleau-Ponty A new study of perception seems justified by contemporary developments in philosophical and experimental research: - by the appearance, notably in Germany, of new philosophies which call into question the guiding ideas of critical thought, until then dominant in psychology as well as philosophy of perception; - by developments in physiology of...