Abstract

Corporeality and Being-in-the-world are concepts which belong to the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, respectively. Both concepts are indicative of the ontological priority of the spiritual world over the natural world. The principal issue to be dealt with in my investigation, therefore, is transcendental subjectivity and its conception of the body. My point of departure is Husserl's critique of naturalism and historicism in philosophy. Therein I begin with a presupposition of the natural attitude of these sciences; namely, that the body, conceived as a material, physical object, is the vital nexus between consciousness and the world. From this naive supposition the investigation moves progressively through the analysis of corporeality as an organ of spirit and a manifestation of transcendental subjectivity to the primordial ground of this subjectivity in Dasein's Being-in-the-world. ;For Husserl there is in every act of consciousness an element that is irreducible to nature. In his assessment of the naturalistic tendency he demonstrates that spiritual/psychical phenomena cannot simply be reduced to mere epiphenomena of physical or material nature. On the contrary, nature is a correlate of consciousness and the natural world can have its meaning as existing reality only as the intentional meaning-product of transcendental subjectivity. Husserl therefore distinguishes a transcendental sphere from the merely psychological sphere of the natural and human sciences. ;In the transcendental sphere transcendental consciousness cannot be divorced from the idea of corporeality. The body which Husserl calls aesthesiological and an organ of spirit is a body in which an always abiding transcendental ego dwells. Here Husserl carries out Kant's Copernican Revolution and his intentional analysis of corporeality illuminates the manner of comportment of man's being alongside the world at the threshold of the lowest constitutive level of cognition in internal time-consciousness. A level Kant never reached. Corporeality, therefore, does not have its traditional connotation of a material entity existing within a presupposed spatial-temporal world matrix in accordance with the law of natural causality. ;The second part of my investigation examines Being-in-the-world as a possible manifestation of transcendental subjectivity. Intentionality only points to the priority of a transcendental subject over against its environment. It does not completely overcome the dichotomies of traditional philosophy. Intentionality has, however, a more primordial basis in a unified concept of Being which according to Heidegger is Dasein's Being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world is the basis of transcendental subjectivity. This is indicated first through an examination of the intentional poles of Being-in-the-world--the Being of Dasein in its existential constitution and the Being of entities for Dasein. The clue to discovering the unified concept of Being which underlies intentionality is then shown to be the analysis of involvement. ;The second and primordial determinant that shows Dasein's Being-in-the-world to be the ground of transcendental subjectivity is its temporality. I have utilized Heidegger's critique of the three syntheses from Kant's Transcendental Deduction to demonstrate how for Heidegger the ontological priority of the spirit lies not in the intentional comportment of the transcendental subject but in the temporal way of Being of this subject. It is the ecstatic temporality of Dasein's understanding which makes possible the transcendence of Dasein; which transcendence, in turn, makes possible the intentional transcendences of the object and the subject as revealed in the temporality of involvement. ;In conclusion, upon the basis of a unified concept of Dasein's Being-in-the-world, the body as a material, physical entity in the natural attitude, is eclipsed.