Abstract

This dissertation explores the description of the experience of the alien other person that Edmund Husserl offers in the Cartesian Meditations and presents its three major implications: that the description reveals the transcendental ego to arise as a response to an always already embodied experience; that eidetic intuition and variation is possible only as an activity that involves actual and possible others, even in the self-variation needed to achieve the eidos ego; and that transcendental phenomenology is an inherently ethical endeavor. These three implications reveal themselves once a central Husserlian term, Deckung, which I translate as 'overlaying,' and its cognates are traced through Husserl's corpus and once the description of Fremderfahrung that Husserl offers in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation is situated with respect to his analyses of passive synthesis, judgment, and wholes and parts in other texts. One has intuition at all, and certainly intuition of other persons, only through the incorporation of distance or absence between layers of sense for which one already recognizes oneself as responsible. And this same act of incorporation is precisely what fuels ongoing phenomenological description. For it is the fact that synthesis happens through Deckung or overlaying that causes the possibility for Verdeckung and Aufdeckung or concealment and discovery. Such an entwining of synthesis and concealment, especially in the form of experiences of human conflict, produces the possibility of transcendental reduction and the recognition of the structures of transcendental intersubjectivity as ethical demands