Abstract
In taking the Ego as an empirical object, we are no longer justified in leaving its corporeity out of account. That would be justified and even required in an egological conception of consciousness. Roughly defined, the task of phenomenology consists in accounting for objects of all kinds in terms of those experiences, acts, and act-systems through which these objects appear to consciousness and present themselves as they are for us, both in common life and in special attitudes, such as those of science, art, etc. The Ego must be included among the objects to be accounted for. In an egological conception of consciousness, every act is assumed to be experienced as springing or emerging from the Ego and as intrinsically connected with the latter and this connection, whatever its more precise nature, is assumed to be represented in the act as one of its describable features. But the egological conception must allow for the Ego also becoming an object for consciousness.
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- 1.
Husserl, Log. Unt., (2nd ed.), vol. II, p. 353: “Das Ich im Sinne der gewönlichen Rede ist empirischer Gegenstand, das eigene Ich ist es ebenso gut wie das fremde, und jedwedes Ich ebenso wie ein beliebiges psychisches Ding, wie ein Haus oder Baum, usw.” [The Ego in the sense of common discourse is an empirical object, one’s own ego as much as someone else’s, and each ego as much as any physical thing, a house or a tree, etc. (Findlay trans., II, 540)].
- 2.
Wilhelm Wundt, Grundzüge der Physiologischen Psychologie (6th ed.), 1911, vol. III, pp. 353 f.
- 3.
Stout, Analytic Psychology, vol. I, p. 181.
- 4.
James, Principles, vol. I, p. 235: “Our own bodily position, attitude, condition, is one of the things of which some awareness, however inattentive, invariably accompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know.”
- 5.
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §51.
- 6.
James, Principles, vol. I, pp. 284 ff.
- 7.
Ibid., pp. 235 and 316 f.
- 8.
Ibid., pp. 322 ff.
- 9.
William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 37.
- 10.
James, Principles, vol. I, pp. 185 ff.
- 11.
[The following note was composed by the author, revised, and then marked for deletion, but seems worth restoring: “The thesis of the priority of consciousness is fundamental to phenomenology and motivates the systematic investigation of consciousness, acts being considered not as events that take place but as experiences of objects, experiences in and through which objects appear and are apprehended. Husserl has formulated this thesis repeatedly. Among the more impressive formulations, cf. Ideen, §§47 ff. and 142; Formale und transzendentale Logik, §§61, 94 f., and 194; and Cartesian Meditations, §§40 f.”].
- 12.
James, Principles, vol. I, p. 288.
- 13.
Köhler, Gestalt Psychology, pp. 221 ff. and 241 ff.
- 14.
Stout, Analytic Psychology, Book II, Chapter II, 7; cf. also Stout’s critical comments on James’s “cephalic movement theory,” Ibid., vol. I, pp. 161 ff.
- 15.
On the margin of the manuscript opposite this sentence, Schutz wrote, “Klavier spielen” (piano playing).
- 16.
The term inner consciousness applies to these and only these potential kinesthetic experiences that we have of our body apart from all actual kinesthetic experiences, sensations of pain, titillation, etc. (Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, Ges. Werke, vol. 2, 5th ed., p. 421. [Cf. Formalism in Ethics and a Non-Formal Ethics of Value, trans. M. S. Frings and R. L. Funke (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 404.]) According to Scheler, the inner consciousness would subsist even when by some artifice all of our perceptual functions would be put out of action, so that we could no longer touch or see our body and its organs, nor hear our voice, etc. It is difficult to see what the inner consciousness of our body is under this assumption, except the consciousness that the body is at our disposal and that we can freely use our organs. Cf. also Chapter V, below.
- 17.
[It should be considered that perceptual field in this paragraph signifies a thematic field that is smaller than the whole of the perceptual world and hence that the perceiver’s body remains part of that world even when it is not part of such a field.—Ed.].
- 18.
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, pp. 96 ff.
- 19.
On the one hand, there is the distinction between experienced motor adjustments owing to which the subject is able to execute the right movements for satisfying his perceptual interests without the correspondence of the perceptual apperances of the things and kinesthetic experiences being accounted for and, on the other hand, this correspondence as established and formulated or at least represented. This difference seems to us substantially the same as that maintained by Maurice Pradines with respect to the representation of space between réaction du lieu and répresentation du lieu in Philosophie de la sensation (Paris, 1928), Book II, Part I, Chapters I, II, and III.
- 20.
Scheler, Formalismus, p. 340 ff. [trans., pp. 338 ff.].
- 21.
We have dwelt neither upon the “vital feelings” nor upon such specific bodily sensations as pains, titillations, itches, etc., since all of these experiences occur rather occasionally. Trying to set forth the permanent although marginal awareness of our embodied existence, we have stressed those bodily experiences that are given at almost every moment.
- 22.
pp. 483 ff. above.
- 23.
Scheler, Formalismus, p. 402 [trans., pp. 398 ff.].
- 24.
Ibid., p. 399 [trans., pp. 400 f.].
- 25.
Ibid., p. 340 [trans., p. 338] and p. 401 f. [trans., 403 f.].
- 26.
Ibid., p. 399 [trans., p. 400] and p. 401 [trans., p. 403].
- 27.
Ibid., p. 483, n. 16 above.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 472 f.
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Gurwitsch*, A. (2010). The Awareness Of Embodied Existence. In: Zaner, R. (eds) The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch (1901-1973). Phaenomenologica, vol 194. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3346-8_14
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