Husserl: Other-Awareness

Zahavi offers a model of ‘I’, You and We consciousness that is grounded in the transcendentality of a minimal pre-reflective self-awareness , which he calls ‘for-meness’. Zahavi’s formulation of transcendental self-belonging as ‘for me-ness’ relies on the notion of a felt non-changing self- identity accompanying all intentional experiences. Zahavi’s treatment of the subject and object poles of experience as, respectively, self-inhering internality and externality, makes of self-awareness an alienating opposition between a purely self-identical felt for-meness and an external object, a (...) fracture between self-identity and otherness.I argue that for Husserl the pure ego’s unchanging in-itself identity over time is merely an anonymous zero point of activity and is not felt or sensed, and thus there is no experienced for-meness to self-awareness. There is instead a relation of ownness between the ego and the object pole, consisting of a constant, that is, essential, underlying structural feature of the ego’s changing relation to objects of intentional acts. I believe that this essential structural intimacy of associative relationship between the noetic and noematic poles of intentional constitution is what Husserl is attempting to capture when he characterizes the constitution of the subject's stream of lived-experience in terms of ‘my ownness’. Zahavi thinks that what gives an intended object its ‘mineness’ is the fact that as foreign to me, it is intended by a ‘me’ that is familiar with itself. But this self-familiarity’ speaks only of my proximity to myself as pure self-identity, not of my proximity to my world. Husserl’s notion of ‘ownness’ understands the subject-object relation not as fracture between self-identity and otherness (“a ruptured structure which is completely foreign to its nature“) but as an intimate synthetic unification and belonging.Heidegger makes an even more radical break with Cartesianism by replacing the subject object structure of intentionality with the self-world temporal structure of Dasein. In different ways , Husserl’s concept of ‘ownness’ and Heidegger’s notion of ‘ownmost’ capture the profound intimacy of relation between self and world that reveals itself after Zahavi’s idealized internal-external binary has been deconstructed. (shrink)

Other people figure in our experience of the world; they strike us as unique and gen- uinely other. This paper explores whether a Husserlian account of empathy as the way in which we constitute an intersubjective world can account for the uniqueness and otherness of other people in our experience. I contend that it can’t. I begin by explicating Husserl’s theory of empathy, paying particular attention to the reduction to a purely egoic sphere and the steps that ostensibly permit a (...) subject to re-inhabit a world of others from out of this sphere. In querying Husserl’s theory, I consider a series of problems, raised by Zhida Luo, concerning the apparent centrality of bod- ily similarity in empathy. I sketch Luo’s solution, which involves a shift to tactile similarity. While it makes for a better theory of empathy, this solution isn’t sufficient to make room for the givenness of another person not originally predicated on simi- larity. To clarify what’s at issue here, I turn to the Husserlian pictures of empathy presented by Heinz Kohut and Edith Stein. I conclude with a remark about what might be required, given the inability of Husserlian empathy to make room for the experience of others as singular and other, for a picture of our phenomenal life to have a shape that accounts for the coexistence of empathy to others who are like oneself and hospitality to others as genuine others. (shrink)

Husserlian phenomenology, as the study of conscious experience, has often been accused of solipsism. Husserl’s method, it is argued, does not have the resources to provide an account of consciousness of other minds. This chapter will address this issue by providing a brief overview of the multiple angles from which Husserl approached the theme of intersubjectivity, with specific focus on the details of his account of the concrete interpersonal encounter – “empathy.” Husserl understood empathy as a direct, quasi-perceptual form of (...) intentionality through which the sense of the Other is constituted. Furthermore, his account of empathy is holistically integrated with his overall theory of intersubjectivity, including his discussions of the objectivity of nature, and the social, historical, and communal aspects of subjectivity. Husserl’s theory of empathy continues to cast a long shadow, influencing both the analytic and continental approaches to the problem of other minds, as well as contemporary account of social cognition in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Previous work in Game Studies has centered on several loci of investigation in seeking to understand virtual gameworlds. First, researchers have scrutinized the concept of the virtual world itself and how it relates to the idea of “the magic circle”. Second, the field has outlined various forms of experienced “presence”. Third, scholarship has noted that the boundaries between the world of everyday life and virtual worlds are porous, and that this fosters a multiplicity of identities as players identify both with (...) themselves-offline and themselves-in-game. Despite widespread agreement that these topics are targets for research, so far those working on these topics do not have mutually agreed-upon framework. Here we draw upon the work of Alfred Schutz to take up this call. We provide a phenomenological framework which can be used to describe the phenomena of interest to Game Studies, as well as open new avenues of inquiry, in a way acceptable and useful to all. This helps to distinguish the core of the field from the supplemental theoretical and critical commitments which characterize diverse approaches within the field. (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es presentar una aproximación fenomenológica a la experiencia intersubjetiva en contraste a las teorías de la mente y a como estas conciben dicho tipo de experiencia. Se identificará un supuesto esencial de estas teorías según el cual todo tipo de intersubjetividad supone una inferencia y, por lo tanto, elementos normativos. Se argumentará que las investigaciones de Husserl a propósito del concepto de “sentido noemático”, en relación con su concepción del horizonte experiencial, revelan un tipo de (...) experiencia constitutiva e intersubjetiva que es condición de posibilidad de la normatividad supuesta por los teóricos de la mente. Esto sugiere un camino a seguir para lograr encontrar soluciones a cuestiones escépticas tales como el solipsismo y la existencia del mundo exterior. -/- The purpose of this paper is to present a phenomenological approach to intersubjective experience contrasting it with the theories of mind and how them conceive such kind of experience. It will be identified an essential presupposition of these theories according to which all kind of intersubjectivity involve an inference, and therefore, normative elements. It will be argued that Husserl’s investigations regarding the notion of “noematic sense”, related with his concept of experiential horizon, disclose a kind of constitutive and intersubjective experiences which serves as a possibility condition of the normativity which is took for granted by the theories of mind. This suggests a road to follow when trying to find solutions to skeptical problems such as solipsism and the existence of the external world. (shrink)

Husserl’s phenomenology of imagination embraces a cluster of different theories and approaches regarding the multi-faced phenomenon of imaginative experience. In this paper I consider one aspect that seems to be crucial to the understanding of a particular form of imagination that Husserl names pure phantasy. I argue that the phenomenon of Ego-splitting discloses the best way to elucidate the peculiarity of pure phantasy with respect to other forms of representative acts and to any simple form of act modification. First, I (...) unravel the phenomenological distinctions which, respectively, oppose phantasy to perception, on the one hand, and phantasy to other forms of the so-called “intuitive re-presentations”. Second, I introduce the difference between presentative and representative acts, arguing that this cannot help us to single out the defining feature of phantasy experiences. The third section draws again an important distinction between pure phantasy and neutrality modification, which allows me to finally determine an internal trait of phantasy experiences, which Husserl refers to as the “Ego-splitting”. In this way, I hope to contribute to a refined characterization of Husserl’s phenomenology of imagination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“An Equivocal Couple Overwhelmed by Life”A Phenomenological Analysis of PregnancySara HeinämaaTwo conceptions of human generativity prevail in contemporary feminist philosophy. First, several contributors argue that the experience of pregnancy, when analyzed by phenomenological tools, undermines several distinctions that are central to Western philosophy, most importantly the subject-object distinction and the self-other and own-alien distinctions. This line of argument was already outlined by Iris Marion Young in her influential essay (...) “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation” (1984). The other dominant argument is related to the first one, and it states that organic birth is the event that establishes the first experiential separation between the self and the other. On this understanding, the mother-fetus relation would not involve any relations between two corporeal selves; all such relations would be postnatal. This notion has been defended, for example, by Christine Schües (1997; 2000) and Johanna Oksala (2003).1On the other hand, classical phenomenology is dominated by the idea that the rigorous first-person methodology that is essential to phenomenology dictates that the sense of birth must be studied primarily by reflection on the structures of our own recollection or memory. Consequently, the primary sense of human birth would be that of an unattainable limit. This is argued on the basis of the existential fact that we all are born but cannot recall our own birth, or else on the basis of the transcendental fact that the structure [End Page 31] of retention ties each living present to an earlier one and implies that the transcendental ego cannot be subject to generation.2 From this perspective, all analyses and reflections of the experiences of labor, gestation, and pregnancy would be secondary since the sense of birth that these experiences involve is the nativity of another human being and not the nativity of the reflecting self.This paper challenges both the feminist and the classical phenomenological approach. I maintain that careful phenomenological analyses of the experience of pregnancy undermine both notions. Such analyses show, on the one hand, that pregnancy does not imply a nondistinction or self-other fusion but on the contrary involves a specific self-other divide. At the same time, they demonstrate that the sense of birth is more complex than the classical recollection-paradigm suggests and that it includes more components than the signification of an unattainable limit. A proper phenomenology of birth must take into account not only the universal fact that we all are born, but also the equally universal fact that each of us is born from another human being, that is, some other human subject.3 This other human being who “gave” us birth or “from whose flesh we were born” provides us with a unique perspective on our own past, beyond the limits of our own recollection. Her perspective is incomparable to any other external perspective; rather than simply giving us an additional third-person viewpoint on our own organic birth, this one person is able to open a second-person perspective on our pre- and postnatal life and the transition between them—all of which is beyond our own recollection.My argument proceeds by the following steps:First, I develop a fresh discourse on the experience of pregnancy, by studying a set of remarks to be found in Julia Kristeva’s postphenomenological discourse on maternity, on the one hand, and in Simone de Beauvoir’s existential-phenomenological discourse on feminine embodiment, on the other hand. I use these remarks as leading clues for a novel phenomenological study of the experience of pregnancy.4 Contra Young’s influential account mentioned above, I argue that gestation, as experienced by women who live it in the first person, includes a separation between two sensory-motor beings in a nesting relation: the pregnant self and the embryonic other. The alternative account that I provide hinges on my analysis of the experience of fetal movements and the role of touch-sensations and kinesthetic sensations in such experiences. Ultimately, I argue that pregnancy does not erode the self-other boundary or the own-alien boundary but reestablishes both divisions.Second, I compare my account of the experience of pregnancy to Merleau... (shrink)

Husserl introduces a phenomenological concept called “motivation” early in the First Investigation of his magnum opus, the Logical Investigations. The importance of this concept has been overlooked since Husserl passes over it rather quickly on his way to an analysis of the meaningful nature of expression. I argue, however, that motivation is essential to Husserl’s overall project, even if it is not essen- tial for defining expression in the First Investigation. For Husserl, motivation is a relation between mental acts whereby (...) the content of one act make some fur- ther meaningful content probable. I explicate the nature of this relation in terms of “evidentiary weight” and differentiate it from Husserl’s notion of Evidenz, often translated as “self-evidence”. I elucidate the importance of motivation in Husserl’s overall phenomenological project by focusing on his analyses of thing-perception and empathy. Through these examples, we can better understand the continuity between the Logical Investigations and Husserl’s later work. (shrink)

Can we find a phenomenological basis for the ethical 'ought'? This essay addresses this question through a reflection on Husserl's fifth Meditation. In the fifth Meditation Husserl endeavors to show the manner in which I constitute the other through an associative pairing of the other with my own subjectivity. This essay argues that this same associative pairing forces me to acknowledge the other as a person of intrinsic worth insofar as I recognize myself as one. Having acknowledged the intrinsic worth (...) of the other in this way, I cannot but acknowledge my obligation to treat the other as I would like to be treated. Thus, the ethical imperative, in the form of the Golden Rule, proves to be implicated in the very constitution of the other in his or her otherness. (shrink)