Toward a phenomenological anthropology

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, the rise of anthropology as a topic in European philosophy, the increasing significance of “philosophical anthropology” among philosophers and more specifically the rediscovery, especially in Germany, France and Italy, of the so-called “German philosophical anthropology” raise the question of the role that phenomenology may play in this matter. What does phenomenology bring to anthropology? What does it contribute that other disciplines such as evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, or cognitive neuroscience do not necessarily contribute? Here, we will show that phenomenology allows us to see what a strictly objective point of view cannot see, namely, a stark yet non-metaphysical difference between, on the one hand, a vital or egocentric intentionality and, on the other, an objective or detached intentionality. In this respect, phenomenology reveals what a non-phenomenological gaze can only see from afar, namely, a revolution or a radical shift in human life toward the common world : a world believed to be the same for all possible living beings. Phenomenology thus converges with evolutionary psychology and its hypothesis of human “ultra-sociality.” But it does so through an “ipseity” method that engages the subject of knowledge in an original way. The anthropological knowledge induced by phenomenology is a very particular kind of knowledge: a knowledge that I can miss through lack of presence to myself and my own experiences; a knowledge under an ethical condition.