On the Full Concretion of Subjectivity in Husserl’s Phenomenology

Contingency and the Transcendental Person

Bibliographic Data

ID8410693
AuthorsMérédith Laferté-Coutu (0000-0002-6306-5050, Concordia University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume54
Issue2
Pages113-131
Publication date2023-04-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-1773 • E-ISSN: 2332-0486
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00071773.2022.2164736
OpenAlexW4313649337
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited15

This paper argues that Husserl’s personalist ethics provides a new way to understand the meaning of the full concretion of the transcendental ego in his mature phenomenology. Husserl’s late ethics introduces, at the core of his thinking, a notion of contingency that he associates with irrationality and facticity. This central aspect of human life, namely that contingency traverses it through and through and which ethics makes painfully visible, is usually obscured by the phenomenological attitude, insofar as the phenomenological reduction brackets all matters of fact. Yet the concrete is not the same as the factual, for Husserl. This paper shows that, when fully concretely understood, the transcendental ego is a person who is correlated to a practical world, whose life as a whole has a personal style, and who struggles against what Husserl calls the contingency of destiny

Contingency · Epistemology · Id, ego and super-ego · Phenomenology (philosophy) · Subjectivity · Transcendental number · Transcendental philosophy · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy · Philosophy and Historical Thought · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Social Psychology

Tools

Open DOI