Toward the Extended Phenomenology of the Soul

Abstract

Edmund Husserl brought the notion of the “soul” into particular prominence within the transcendental constitutive system when he set out, in Ideas II,¹ to improve upon Descartes’ conception of consciousness. In fact, in a radical contrast to what has been considered to be the upshot of the Cartesian doubt, namely, the division between the mind and the body, between human functions — intellectual, on the one hand, and affective, sentient, on the other — Husserl assumed from the start that all human functioning remains under the organizing transcendental system of the intellect (Vernunft). From this system, as the center of constitutive consciousness, he maps out four functional zones which ground the life of consciousness subservient to it. With this analysis of consciousness, approached precisely from its object-constituting center, Husserl believes he has overcome any division within the transcendental schema of man and the life-world; he diversifies in this schema several constitutive “territories”: first, my body as organism (that is, objectified); second, my body as experienced by myself; third, the soul, which is intertwined with the functions of the body and yet consists of a sui generis distinctive complex; and lastly, the soul/the spirit, which is intertwined with the soul complex but nevertheless stands out as an autonomous functional system.