LIFE AND THE REDUCTION TO THE LIFE-WORLD
HORIZON / Fenomenologicheskie issledovanija/ STUDIEN ZUR PHÄNOMENOLOGIE / STUDIES IN PHENOMENOLOGY / ÉTUDES PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIQUES 2017 DOI: 10.21638/2226-5260-2017-6-2-13-29 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Citations | 1 |
| Key points | Argues that Husserl's project of grounding the objective sciences in the life-world and arriving at an ultimately constituting subjectivity is problematic, because the reduction to the life-world yields a sensuous embodied subject who is part of the world and therefore cannot be the world's constituting source. The author turns to Merleau-Ponty and Patočka for alternative conceptions of such an a priori. |
Abstract
Husserl's Crisis contains his final attempt to understand the world in terms of an ultimately constituting consciousness.The path he chooses is that of a reduction to the "life-world," the world that appears when we bracket the results of the objective sciences.His claim is that "the 'objective' a priori [of the natural sciences] is grounded in the 'subjective-relative' a priori of the lifeworld".It is from the latter that he attempts to achieve his vision of "a universal, ultimately functioning subjectivity".In this article, I question whether this is possible.If the world were the product of this functioning subjectivity, the latter could not be part of the world.But, the inherent sense of the reduction to the life-world leaves us with the sensuous embodied subject, who is a part of the world.How can we think of the a priori in terms of this subject?I conclude by considering both Merleau-Ponty's and Patočka's attempts to conceive of such an a priori.