Rutina setup

Considering what I have described of the beginnings of phenomenology we can re- describe my account with reference to the problem of intersubjectivity that I have said characterizes the varied approaches to experience. Here I have examined the problem of intersubjectivity as it was encountered by Husserl, and rephrased the problem by bringing

attention to the rupture in Husserl’s work between the idea of the “empirical” ego and the “pure”

ego. This is the tension between that which is natural and that which is transcendent. The early phenomenological tendency that we find in Husserl is a reductive one, where the self is

condensed into a series of individuated and private experiences. This is perhaps reminiscent of a type of romanticism where the “true” self is located in a mysterious place deep inside of the self.

By the end of Husserl’s life we find that an awkward move in the opposite direction is taking place, the self is no longer a stable element that can reflect the experience of the world, as an intersubjective unfolding is underway.

In an assessment that I find agreeable, Ferguson finds that Husserl comes close to reconciling himself to this problem – he is prepared to recognize an intersubjective reality - but ultimately falls short of clearly formulating how this might be possible (Ferguson, 2006, 55). The body and discussions of embodiment have the potential to bring awareness to how experience is an intersubjective affair and how the conflict between the natural and transcendental can be

dissolved. While the earliest strands of phenomenology began with a transcendent reduction of the body whereby consciousness and experience were individuated, Husserl later recognized that this conceptualization was flawed: the body, although initially seen as an exterior “fact”,

contained within it strong elements of sociality. Ferguson demonstrates this by contrasting Husserl’s attitude in the Cartesian Meditations (1929) where he fully embraces the notion of a

“transcendental ego” to his later reflections in the second book of Ideas (1952) where he acknowledges that the body cannot be as unified as we might hope – that it cannot function as what we would now call a “given”. Instead of describing the body as an expression of pure subjectivity, we would do better to describe the body as being part of a “collective subjectivity”.

The manner in which Husserl attempts to arrive at an intersubjective account of

experience is telling for why he was unable to formulate a fully satisfactory understanding of this matter. Husserl makes an uncomfortable compromise between different notions of

intersubjectivity (Ferguson, 2006, 57). There is a confused relationship between interactive subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and Husserl attempts to combine these two concepts in a way that leaves much to be explained. By placing the transcendental ego within the body the first step towards intersubjectivity is taken, yet Husserl develops his idea with reference to a problematic notion of “interactive ego” that exists in the body. Referring specifically to the “Fifth

Meditation” within the Cartesian Meditations Ferguson documents the trajectory of Husserl’s thought that “intersubjectivity is the “pure” collective consciousness upon which the empirical interactive ego is founded” (2006, 57). As cited by Ferguson, Husserl explains as follows:

“Within the limits of my transcendentally reduced pure conscious life, I experience the world (including others) – and, according to its experiential sense, not (so to speak) my private synthetic formation but as other than mine alone, as an intersubjective world, actually there for

everyone, accessible in respect of its Objects to everyone” (Husserl, 1967, 91 as cited in Ferguson, 2006, 57).

Reading this quotation leaves the impression that Husserl has made the issue of

intersubjectivity unnecessarily complex. There is no need for Husserl to cling to the idea of an interactive ego that has an empirical existence apart from the intersubjective self. Such a

construct serves only to reproduce a problematic attachment to naturalism – a reductive habit that Husserl aimed to avoid in most of his work. The interactive ego is construed by Husserl as an

“experiencing monad” that bears no relations to others and experiences the world in a private way (Ferguson, 2006, 58).

To be sure, Ferguson’s reading of Husserl is accompanied by other intepretations of Husserl’s work in this area. Susi Ferrarello has clarified (or added complexity) to the issue by observing that Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity contains three different types of ego, or stated differently, “every ego seems to live many lives at once”: an empirical life, a transcendent life, and an intersubjective life (2012, 6). There is first the “empirical ego” that lives a naïve life rooted in nature and detached from others. This ego experiences the world in terms of the sense data that it collects. Through a process of reduction the empirical ego puts into brackets all the experiences that do not coincide with its own intentional life (the experience of “transcendent objects” that mark the barrier between the self and others). This is the transcendent life of the ego. From here the ego, having already been reduced, rediscovers itself not as an isolated monad, but as an intersubjective being.

I see Ferrarello’s nuanced reading of Husserl’s stumbling path towards intersubjectivty as being additive to the interpretation of Ferguson rather than contradictory. In Ferrarello’s account the relationship between the empirical ego (Ferguson’s interactive ego) and the intersubjective ego is mediated by the transcendental ego. The transcendental ego is what restrains the direct

move towards an intersubjective being, yet it is also necessary as a way of grounding our intersubjective understandings. In Ferguson’s account, recall, the problem of intersubjectivity is presented more simply as the tension between an empirical account of the self that is always at risk of naturalistic reduction, and a transcendent notion of the self that risks idealism.

However we might choose to phrase Husserl’s dilemma, the problem of intersubjectivity is central to how we theorize experience. The problem is not simply a matter of articulating the relationship between Husserl’s confused notions of an empirical interactive ego and a pure transcendental intersubjectivity, for this dilemma is perhaps epiphenomenal to the underlying question of in what sense our experience of the world can be shared among others given that the minds of others remain inaccessible to us. Clearly, we are able to recognize other people as having minds and as carrying out conscious acts despite the fact that we have no access to their minds – we are unable to have immediate access to how they experience their world. This

necessitates that we constitute the world as being an intersubjective reality. All of this is reflected in how we explain our experience of the world as a series of private incommunicable events or as an inevitably social affair in which the subject has become “lost”. The former scenario assumes a type of rigid empiricism that renders experience as paramount in the pursuit of knowledge, while the latter schema embraces the reality of the “linguistic turn” and carries the lamentation that we cannot experience the world independently of the way we have been socialized through the language of our culture. Neither scenario should impress us.