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THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL WORLD

Abstract
The paper examines the possibility, the meaning, and the legitimacy of understanding Husserl’s concept of the life-world as an anthropological world. This understanding lies upon the fact that the life-world is always given to us as a human world, and invites to inquire into the way I always necessarily experience myself as a human person. Nevertheless, even though it is by becoming human that the I enters the world, the self-experience of the human person coincides neither with its self-experience as a transcendental ego, nor with its experience of the life-world. Thus, the question of the anthropological world deeply concerns the relationship between phenomenology as a transcendental philosophy and anthropology. This means that a positive comprehension of the life-world as an anthropological world will only emerge when anthropology will no longer be considered as the mortal enemy of transcendental phenomenology, and consequently the idea of a transcendental anthropology will no longer seem inconsistent or absurd. This demonstration is led by exploring some of Husserl’s late texts, such as the famous 1931 conference on “Phenomenology and Anthropology” and several manuscripts from the 30s published mainly in the XVth and XXIXth volumes of the Husserliana. The interest of speaking of an anthropological world thus appears to lie in the emphasis on the historicity and on the cultural impregnation of the life-world. Ultimately, the anthropological world is the life-world considered in its irreducible facticity; and this allows us to view the ontology of the life-world also as an ontology of facticity. Nevertheless, the specific requirements of transcendental phenomenology will always preserve an irreducible tension between transcendental (rather than human) life and its worldly dimension and horizon.

Key words
Husserl, phenomenology, anthropology, transcendental philosophy, subjectivity, humanity, life-world, history, culture.

References

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