Abstract

The definitive epistemological problem, according to Husserl, was to reconcile the subjectivity of the knower with the objectivity of what is known. The solution, he claimed, lay in a return to the originary evidence of experience, to the self-experience of the knowing subject. To avoid the absurdities that attend the reduction of the being of the world to the experiences of a particular subject, Husserl turned to a radical subjectivity which was not itself a part of the world, a transcendental subjectivity which constituted the world for itself in evidential processes. The embodied subject who experienced itself as part of the world, was to be clearly distinguished from the ego which was the transcendental condition for the being of the world. Part I of this study explicates the motives for the "transcendental turn" and the important role of the epoche in securing this transcendental ground. ;Careful and faithful attention to the actual processes of experience, however, reveal that the animate body of the subject is an absolute precondition for the possibility of world-constitution. As Willensorgan and Sinnesorgan, as expression of the pure will of the ego and as bearer of localized sensations, the body is given with every perceptual experience as necessary ground. The kinesthetic sensations of the freely moving organism motivate the profile-appearances in which objects of perception are constituted. The phenomenological descriptions which detail the role of the body in intentional constitution are examined in Part II. ;But the embodiment of the subject, whose necessity is revealed^in the investigations into constitution, cannot be reconciled with^the transcendental imperative. The transcendental ego cannot be^embodied, yet it is shown that apart from its embodiment it can^perform no function. Husserl did not acknowledge this paradoxical^relationship between the body and the transcendental ego, nor did^he integrate the descriptive investigations into constitution with the^texts whose aim was to establish the transcendental-mundane^distinction. We have tried to effect this integration, claiming that^the logic of Husserl's analyses demands that the transcendental ;condition of experience be an embodied one. ;*All degree requirements completed in 1982, but degree will be granted in 1983