On the Complexity and Wholeness of Human Beings: Husserlian Perspectives

Abstract

At the beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger rejects Husserl’s classical phenomenology on three grounds: he claims that Husserlian phenomenology is impaired by indeterminate concepts, by naïve personalism, and by obscurities in its account of individuation. The paper studies the validity of this early critique by explicating Husserl’s discourse on human persons as bodily-spiritual beings and by clarifying his account of the principles by which such beings can be individuated. The paper offers three types of considerations. After a summary of Heidegger’s early critique of Husserl, the second section of the paper distinguishes between two dimensions of Husserl’s discourse on human persons. It argues that Husserl does not put forward one analysis of the being of humans, but explicates two different accounts and then studies critically their mutual relations of dependency: on the one hand, the naturalistic account of human beings as layered beings and on the other hand the personalistic account of human beings as peculiar kinds of unified wholes in which the mental and the bodily are inextricably intertwined. The third section of the paper clarifies Husserl’s theory of individuation and its consequences for our discourse on human persons. Finally, the fourth section explicates the conceptual means by which Husserl develops his account of human beings as persons. The paper ends in drawing some conclusions for contemporary philosophical anthropology.

Keywords:

• Husserl
• Heidegger
• person
• embodiment
• individuation
• expressive whole

1. Introduction

At the very beginning of the first part of Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes his own Dasein-analytic and the new phenomenological hermeneutics that it motivates from Husserl’s classical phenomenology which, in Heidegger’s reading, is dominated by epistemological interests and misguided by taken-for-granted concepts. Heidegger attacks classical phenomenology as a strayed form of philosophical anthropology, hopelessly entangled with ontic inquiries and with empirical notions of human life. Thus, he argues that his former teacher falls victim to fundamental mistakes that are analogous to those that strain nineteenth- and twentieth-century life philosophies and all philosophical ‘personalism’ (Heidegger [1927] 1993, 47/72).

The fundamental problem that Heidegger identifies in his contemporary philosophy is the neglect of the question that concerns the meaning of being and the crucial and distinctive role that this question plays in our own existence. We are not just one type of being among other types, but more essentially are beings who question the sense of being (der Sinn von Sein) from within unique places and situations in the world and who ask in particular about their own way of being, that is, Da-sein. For Heidegger, the realization of our distinctive relation to being must serve as the transcendental basis for philosophical anthropology, as distinct from all empirical inquiries into human beings and their possessions, material and mental.

Heidegger acknowledges that his contemporary philosophies of life and personhood involve implicit tendencies toward posing the question about our human way of being, but he argues that these philosophies never undertake this task properly, since they do not critically investigate the inherited philosophical terminology of persons, egos, souls and spirits, but take these terms as given: ‘Thus we are not being terminologically idiosyncratic when we avoid these terms as well as the expressions “life” and “human being” in designating the beings that we ourselves are’ (Heidegger [1927] 1993, 46/71–72; cf. GA20 124).

In this context, Heidegger claims that his contemporary philosophy, in all its variations, is still seriously strained and delimited by the influences of Hellenistic philosophy and Christian theology, and most recently by Cartesian subjectivism, pieced together from ancient and medieval concepts: ‘[w]hat obstructs and misleads the basic question of the being of Da-sein is the orientation thoroughly colored by the anthropology of Christianity and ancient world, whose inadequate ontological foundations also personalism and the philosophy of life ignore’ (Heidegger [1927] 1993, 48/73). In Heidegger’s account, the tradition of anthropology seriously burdens and delimits also Husserl’s classical phenomenology: in a similar manner as its philosophical contemporaries and predecessors, Husserl analyses the existence of human beings by concepts that have deep roots in Christian dogma and ancient philosophy, roots that already centuries ago had lost contact with their original sources in concrete phenomena and living experiences of human beings.

But how exactly is this problem manifested in Husserl’s phenomenology? What is the seeming self-evidence that classical phenomenology presupposes, despite all its radicalness and rigour?

The aim of this paper is to answer this question by studying the validity of the critique that Heidegger directs against classical phenomenology and to ask to what extent his presentation of Husserl’s alternative approach holds. Such a comparative inquiry advances the development of contemporary philosophical anthropology by separating between two influential discourses on human being that both are ‘phenomenological’ in the general sense that both describe and analyse conditions of our experiencing. However, instead of the simple opposition that Heidegger’s early critique suggests, we find two alternative approaches that share the phenomenological-transcendental interest in clarifying the conditions of experiencing but divert on crucial matters that concern our experiences of human beings, ourselves and others.

The paper offers three types of considerations. After a short summary of Heidegger’s early critique of Husserl, the second section of the paper distinguishes between two different dimensions of Husserl’s discourse on persons. It argues that Husserl does not put forward one analysis of the being of humans but explicates two different accounts and then studies critically their mutual relations of dependency. So rather than arguing for any one conception of human being, Husserl provides an explication of two different conceptions: on the one hand the naturalistic account of human beings as layered beings, and on the other hand, the personalistic account of human beings as peculiar kinds of unified wholes in which the mental and the sensuous-bodily are inextricably intertwined. The third section of the paper clarifies Husserl’s theory of individuation and its consequences for our discourse on human persons. Finally, the fourth section explicates the conceptual means by which Husserl develops his account of human beings as persons. The paper ends in drawing some conclusions for contemporary philosophical anthropology.

2. Heidegger’s Critical Remarks

For Heidegger, the main problem of classical phenomenology is that it leaves unclarified what the performance (Vollziehung) of acts mean, how acts are given and what their being is (Heidegger [1927] 1993, 48–49/73–75; cf. GA20 170–175/123–125). More precisely, what remains merely presumed is the way in which performed acts relate to performing subjects, and how the subjects are given to themselves. In the 1925 lectures on the history of the concept of time, Heidegger acknowledges that, while studying the constitution of time-consciousness, Husserl does provide explications of the structures of the stream of lived experiencing and of the unity of life that are supposed to constitute the continuum of intentional activity and intentional acts, but despite this, his crucial objection remains: ‘But even if the being of acts and the unity of the experiential stream were determined in their being, the question of the being of the full concrete man would still remain’ (Heidegger GA20 173–174/125).¹

In Heidegger’ account, this fundamental indeterminacy of classical phenomenology manifests most clearly in its ambiguous discourse on persons. For Husserl, he contends, the human person is essentially a performer of acts, but since the concepts of acts remain indeterminate, Husserl and his followers cannot but proceed negatively and argue that the person is not a material thing or a natural organism. In Being and Time, Heidegger formulates his objection as follows:

The person is not a Thing [Ding], not a substance, not an object [Gegenstand]. […] Essentially the person exists only in the performance of intentional acts, and is therefore essentially not an object. […] Acts are performed; the person is a performer of acts. What, however is the ontological meaning of ‘performance’? How is the kind of Being which belongs to a person to ascertained ontologically in a positive way [positiv]? (Heidegger [1927] 1993, 47–48/73)

Thus, Heidegger’s critique emphasizes the fact that classical phenomenological accounts proceed by first stating negatively that the being of a person is not like the being of things and natural entities. As a preparatory step such a characterization would not be a problem, but Heidegger then argues that this intitial negative move is never fully compensated in Husserlian phenomenology by a proper account of the being of persons in positive terms.²

In the 1925 lectures, Heidegger is more explicit in his critique of Husserl. He claims that if we were to ask Husserl what the being of the person is, Husserl would be able to answer by merely pointing out that the being of persons differs from the being of thinglike natural realities. And if we would insist on receiving a more precise and positive determination of personal being, Husserl would just lead us to reflect on the inner structures and processes of pure consciousness: ‘At the bottom, we are being led back to the same basis, to the immanent reflection of acts and lived experiences, without these acts on their part being actually defined’ (Heidegger GA20, 167/120; cf. GA20 170–171/122–123).

There is another crucial problem in Husserl’s ‘personalism’, according to Heidegger, connected to its neglect of the ontologial preconditions of the ideas of personhood and act-performance.³ The mischief is that classical phenomenological discussions of human beings – their souls, minds, spirits, and bodies – implicitly refer back to and draw resources from the natural attitude that the phenomenological-transcendental reduction is supposed to leave behind through the suspensions of the general thesis of being. The classical phenomenologists, so to say, borrow concepts that belong to the natural attitude and use these concepts to flesh out their transcendental accounts of personhood and subjectivity. However, they never pay back this conceptual debt and thus remain bound to supposedly suspended natural notions. In other words, the heroic attempts that Husserl and his followers made for the reinterpretation of the relations between soul, spirit, mind and body irretrievably repeat ancient and early modern conceptualizations, as well as natural empirical notions about our life and existence, and never really break new ground for a philosophical anthropology, and even less for a true ontology of ourselves:

In their turn ‘body’, ‘soul’, and ‘spirit’ may designate phenomenal domains which can be detached as themes for definite investigations; within certain limist their ontological idefiniteness way not be important. When, however, we come to the questions of man’s Being, this is not something we can simply compute by adding together those kinds of Being which body, soul, and spirit respectively possess – kinds of Being whose nature has not as yet been deteremined. And even if we shopuld attempt such an ontological procedure, some idea of the Being of the whole must be presupposed. (Heidegger [1927] 1993, 48/74)

Heidegger thus contends that if we decide to proceed by the methods and concepts of classical Husserlian phenomenology, then we are bound to formulate all philosophical questions that concern our own being by the concepts of person, and since these concepts are inextricaby bound up with ancient and early modern concepts of act, soul, spirit, mind and body as well as with naïve everyday notions about human beings and their lives, we do not really proceed in any philosophical way. The problematic character of these concepts can be properly illuminated only by fundamental-ontological investigations that lead us to pose the questions of our own way of being in a completely new way.

For systematic reasons, it is important to notice that in the 1925 lectures, Heidegger also provides a third formulation for his critique of classical Husserlian phenomenology. This criticism is more specific than his general complaint about the inadequacy of the concepts of persons (as act-performers), and also more specific than his consequent remarks about the indeterminacy of the concepts of act, soul, spirit, mind and body. In the lectures, Heidegger claims that Husserl’s phenomenology is bound to resort to the concepts of body and embodiment in the task of individuating human beings. The point is formulated as follows:

The fundamental stratum is still the naturally real, upon which the psychic is built, and upon the psychic the spiritual. Now comes the question of the constitution of the spiritual world. It is true that the genuine naturality of the personalistic attitude is thematically emphasized, but the actual account still gives precedence to the investigation of nature. The being of the person is not as such experienced in a primary way. The matter instead remains in the reflection on acts, in the inspection sui. Only now the theme is not the pure consciousness and pure ego but instead the isolated individual consciousness and ego. But the isolation is always conditioned by the body. (Heidegger GA20 172/124; cf. Patocka [1995] 1998, 149–178; Dodd [1995] 1998, xxix)

Heidegger does not dismiss the fact that Husserl explicitly argues that consciousness has its own internal or immanent manner of individuation, but he contends that this argument cannot help us with the interpretation of the being of human persons, since persons are not pure consciousnesses but are practically engaged and affectively involved with the worldly objects that they intend and with the world as an integrated context of such objects. Essentially Heidegger’s critical remarks here suggest that the immanent principle of individuation that Husserl presents can merely distinguish the reflecting ego from everything else but cannot differentiate between separate individuals in the experienced plurality of human life. On purely immanent grounds, we can only keep ourselves distinct from everything alien or from a general anonymous other without ever coming to You, He, She, etc.⁴ So, in order to individuate other human beings, and not just themselves, a Husserlian phenomenologist would have to resort to the natural distinctness of human bodies, which goes against the method being employed.

In order to be able to evaluate Heidegger’s dismissal of classical phenomenology, or to see to what extent it may be justified, we need to clarify three central factors in Husserl’s discourse on persons: a distinction between two attitudes, the principles of individuation and the analysis of the structure of expression. This is the task of the three sections below.

3. Psycho-physical Complexes and Unified Persons

In the second volume of Husserl’s Ideas (Ideas II), we find several related accounts and explications of our apprehension of human beings. The main distinction is between two different attitudes with two different kinds of thematic positing: the naturalistic (natural-scientific) attitude that posits nature as a basis of all being, and the personalistic attitude that posits spiritual units and wholes. In other words, Husserl describes two different ways of understanding and studying human beings, which is possible within two different attitudes. The main methodological aim of Ideas II is to carefully distinguish between these two thematizations, and between the two attitudes and interests in which they are formed, and then to study their inner structures respectively as well as their mutual relations of dependency. The reflective phenomenological attitude is supposed to make this critical inquiry possible by suspending all positings operative within the two attitudes under investigation.

More precisely, Husserl argues, that on the one hand human beings can be apprehended as stratified two-layered complexes or psycho-physical systems. On the other hand, human beings can be grasped as persons, that is, as spiritual-bodily wholes with spiritual-bodily constituents and spiritual-bodily relations to the environing world. Ideas II characterizes the difference between these two apprehensions as follows:

In the [naturalistic attitude], the totality of ‘objective’ physical nature was, or is, there for us, founding, scattered therein, living bodies, sensitiveness, and psychic lives. All men and animals we consider in this attitude are, if we pursue theoretical interests, anthropological or, more generally, zoological objects. […] What has been said concerns our fellow men as well as ourselves, to the extent that we consider ourselves theoretically precisely in this attitude: we then are animated living bodies [Leiber], objects of nature, themes of the relevant natural sciences. But it is quite otherwise, as regards the personalistic attitude, the attitude we are always in when we live with one another, talk to one another, shake hands with one another in greeting, or are related to one another in love and aversion, in disposition and action, in discourse and discussion. […] To live as a person is to posit oneself as a person, to find oneself in, and to bring oneself into, conscious relations with a ‘surrounding world’. (Hua4 182–183/192–193)

This means that, in the naturalistic attitude, we have two layers of beings, causally and functionally connected one to the other: the psychic that emerges from and operates on a physical substrate and the physic that supports the psychic and produces it. In the personalistic attitude, we only have one unified being. The spiritual is not a second something emergent on or juxtaposed with its bodily-material ‘basis’ but thoroughly penetrates the body and organizes it according to its own principles. Both attitudes conceive human beings as mental beings with bodily capacities, but whereas the former attitude conceptualizes the mental as an emergent psychic layer of being ontologically dependent on the fundamental ontological layer of the physical, the latter conceives the mental as a formative spiritual power that operates on bodily-sensible materials.

Unlike Heidegger, Husserl does not aim at undermining the naturalistic or natural-scientific attitude or its theories of human beings. In his account, this attitude is integral to many of our practices, from traditional medical therapies to modern neuro-sciences, and thus has its own justification, but also its own limits (Hua4 190–191/200–201). Rather than rejecting the naturalistic attitude, Husserl aims at demonstrating under which conditions this attitude becomes possible and what interests it serves. However, his critical inquiry into the relations between the two attitudes reveals that the naturalistic attitude – with its objects, the merely material thing and the human being as a psycho-physical complex – is not a self-supportive or independent sense-formation. The analyses of Ideas II and The Crisis of European Sciences (Hua6) disclose this attitude as a highly complex sense-accomplishment that necessarily refers to and presupposes a more fundamental attitude in which we grasp human beings as unified wholes with meaningful, expressive bodies. This argument is summarized as follows by Husserl:

Upon closer scrutiny, it will even appear that there are not here two attitudes with equal rights and of the same order, or two perfectly equal apperceptions which at once penetrate one another, but that the naturalistic attitude is in fact subordinated to the personalistic, and that the former only acquires by means of an abstraction or, rather, by means of a kind of self-forgetfulness of the personal ego, a certain autonomy – whereby it proceeds illegitimately to absolutize its world, i.e., nature. (Hua4 183–184/193, emphasis added; cf. Hua6 244–245/297)

Thus, Husserl questions the primacy of the naturalistic attitude and argues that it depends, in its sense, on a more profound attitude, in which we do not apprehend or study human beings – ourselves or others – as psycho-physical compounds but experience them as spiritual-bodily persons with comprehensive motivational, significative and communicative relationships with their surroundings. The problem of the naturalistic apprehension of human beings is not that it would lack sense or legitimation; rather the problem is that it harbours in itself universalizing tendencies that buttress the false notion that everything that appears is ultimately physical.

4. A Problem of Individuation

Husserl’s argument about the primacy of the personalistic attitude and its conception of the human being as a meaningful expressive whole may seem to undermine the natural scientific research paradigm according to which our psychic or mental life, however it is organized as such, results from the purely physical processes of the human brain or the neural make-up of the human organism. However, the opposition here is merely seeming since the relations discussed by Husserl and the natural scientists are different in kind: whereas Husserl studies constitutive dependency relations between different senses of being, the natural scientific conception concerns causal-functional relations between two different types of real properties, mental properties (e.g. aboutness, phenomenality), on the one hand, and physical properties (e.g. weight, intensity, electric charge), on the other.

However, on the basis of the natural scientific paradigm of explanation one can put forward a comprehensive ontological thesis according to which all being – and consequently also all psychic, mental and spiritual being – depends on the fundamental being of purely physical entities and processes. This is not a natural scientific theory but is the ontological position of late modern materialism and physicalism. In their analysis, the mental is either identical with the material-physical or else merely an epiphenomenal and emergent property of the material-physical, without any power to determine the latter.

Against such philosophical programs, Husserl argues that all materialist and physicalistic arguments take for granted the possibility of individuating material-physical being independently of any reference to individual consciousnesses. This, he contends, is a groundless prospect. In his analysis, material-physical individuation in terms of positions in objective space-time and in terms of causal roles remains dependent on individuation by the ‘here’ and the ‘now,’ and these in turn refer to individual subjects, that is, to experiencing selves that are individuated on other grounds. Ideas II conveys this argument as follows:

Objective thinghood is determined physicalistically but is determined as a this [als Dies] only in relation to consciousness and the conscious subject. All determination refers back to a here and now and consequently to some subject or nexus of subjects. (Hua4 301/315; Hua6 222/218; Hua15 99, 150)

Husserl’s treatment here rests on his account of the constitution of the unity of the stream of consciousness and of immanent time as its basic structure. In his account, all individuation of things, events, processes and other types of realities in objective unified space-time rests on the primary individuation of subjects and their acts, and these in turn are grounded in the fundamental individuation of streams of consciousness with their egoic poles. Or, to put it more technically: subjectivity alone is independently individual, and all spatiotemporal individuality is only non-independently individual, i.e. it necessarily presupposes the intrinsic individuality of streams of consciousness.

The main implication of this theory of individuation to philosophical anthropology is the insight that, as conscious subjects, human beings are not originally individuated by their positions in objective space-time or in causal nexuses but are individuated by their subjective modes of taking position and responding to what is given in experience and of yielding to or withstanding what draws them.

But since each subject only lives, and can live, through his or her own experiences, and not those of others (e.g. Hua4 200/210; Hua1 121/89ff.), the situation of individuation is different in one’s own case and in the case of others. This is the dilemma that Heidegger identifies in his 1925 lectures when he argues that classical phenomenology cannot avoid resorting to bodily individuation (Heidegger GA20 172/124): even if the reflecting ego could individuate itself on grounds that are purely immanent to its stream of conscious experiencing, the ego cannot proceed in the same manner when distinguishing and identifying other egos, since other streams are inaccessible to it. Two legitimate alternatives seem to be open here: either one has to conclude that the reflecting ego cannot individuate any other egos than itself or else the ego has to find in its sphere of own-ness grounds for the individuation of others. To see how Husserl handles this dilemma, we need to look more closely into his analysis of the structures of our experience of persons and their living bodies (Leibe).

5. Persons as Expressive Wholes

We have seen that Husserl’s Ideas II argues that in experience we primarily encounter one another as persons, and that the layered notion of human beings is a dependent formation of sense that presupposes the experiential givenness of persons. In Ideas II, Husserl introduces the concepts of expression and expressive whole to characterize and analyse the special type of being that in his account is essential to persons (cf. Heinämaa 2010). He argues when we operate within the personalistic attitude and experience human beings as persons, then we grasp them as expressive wholes, comparable to the units of written and spoken languages, such as words, sentences and texts:

[T]he imprinted page or the spoken lecture is not a connected duality of word-sound and sense, but rather each word has its sense. […] Exactly the same holds for the unity, man. It is not that the living body is an undifferentiated physical unity, undifferentiated from the standpoint of its ‘sense,’ from the standpoint of the spirit. Rather, the physical unity of the living body there […] is multiply articulated. […] And the articulation is that of sense, which means it is not of a kind that is to be found within the physical attitude […] (Hua4 240–241/253)

A few pages later Husserl explicates his main insight according to which the mental life that we capture in the bodily gestures and postures of living beings is not originally given to us as an appendix to physical being but is given as an organizing power:

[T]he spiritual is not a second something, is not an appendix, but is precisely animating; and the unity is not a connection of two, but on the contrary, one and only one is there. Physical being can be grasped for itself (carrying out the existential thesis), by means of the natural attitude, as natural being, as thingly being. […] But what we have here is not a surplus which would be posited on top of the physical, but rather this is spiritual being which essentially includes the sensuous but which, once again, does not include it as part, the way one physical thing is part of another. (Hua4 239/251; cf. Hua15 86–88)

The main point of Husserl’s comparison here is to draw attention to the way in which persons and linguistic units are structured in experience. He argues that in a similar manner as sentences and words, persons appear as thoroughly meaningful wholes. Each part of such an object is a unity of meaning and sensible matter. Even the ultimate parts – phonemes in case of language and organs and limbs in case of persons – have meaning and are able to connect with other meaningful units. So rather than having the spiritual as a layer or as a functional part in a non-spiritual substratum, linguistic units as well as persons are completely permeated by meaning. Each layer and each part that can be discovered or disclosed by analysis is organized by meaning; and no non-signifying ground can be detected. Moreover, each expressive and meaningful whole, and each part of such a whole, has multiple significative relations to other meaningful units. So, persons are not only a central theme of our experience, according to Husserl, but moreover they are experienced in a holistic manner that does not separate a mental layer and a physical layer but presents a unified whole in which all layers are sensuous-spiritual.

Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations develops this analysis further. In the Fifth Meditation, Husserl points out that the other’s conscious life and their lived experiences are given to me necessarily in a different way as they are given to the other: whereas the other lives through their own experiences, I can merely capture the other as an experiencing being but cannot participate in the other’s experiencing. When I see the other, or hear the other talking, I intend the other’s experiences, but this intention of mine necessarily remains unfulfilled, since the other’s experiences cannot be given to me immediately and originarily (originär) but remain forever outside of my reach (Hua1 143/114).

To account for this particular mode of givenness, crucial to all our interpersonal relations and all relations that depend on interpersonal relations, the Fifth Meditation introduces a specific abstractive suspension that excludes from my experience everything that is alien to me or has its constitutive origin in the other. Thus, we exclude all object-references that imply alien egos, for examples all reference to communal, historical and cultural objects. Husserl calls the reduced experiential realm thus achieved ‘the primordial sphere of own-ness’. This is not any type of concrete experience, but is a constitutive element of all concrete experiences abstractly separated from them.

In the primordial sphere of own-ness, the other’s body is given to me without any spiritual and egoic determinants, as a mere physical thing. Through the specific operation of transferring the senses of sensing, moving and living in empathetic pairing, I end up experiencing the other body as a body that belongs to an experiencing self who is not me (Hua1 140/110ff.).

This operation of transferring sense is motivated by the perceptual experience of similarity between my own bodily behaviour and the behaviour of the other body.⁵ In the progression of its movements and postures, as I perceive them, I recognize a stylistic form (Stilform) of moving that ‘is familiar’ (bekannt) to me from my own relations to and with my own body. A body ‘over there’, distinct from me in the sense that I cannot sense anything in it and cannot move it without first moving my own body (my arms, or my lips, tongue and throat), moves in the manner similar to mine: it is not merely tossed around by the forces that work on all bodies around us, but also spontaneously, and quite unexpectedly, takes distance from me or approaches me, turns to this or that direction, and responds to my movements in a rhythmic manner that leaves time for me to take my turn (cf. Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1993, 404/352). The recognition of similarity of movement allows me to grasp the parts of the other body as hands operating in touching and grasping, as feet operating in walking, as eyes operating in seeing, and as face operating in orientating (Hua1 148/119).

In the context of this explication, Husserl emphasizes that the body thus perceived does not indicate the other to me or merely signal his existence. Rather the body is given to me as belonging to the other:

If we stick to our de facto experience, our experience of someone else as it comes to pass at any time, we find that actually the sensuously seen body is experienced forthwith as the body of someone else and not as merely an indication of someone else. (Hua1 150/121, cf. 151/124)

It seems to me that Husserl’s analysis here is the following: If the body of another person would be given to me, in my concrete factual experience, merely or primarily as an indication of the other, as a mere signal of the other’s existence, then the other and the other’s body would appear as separate, independent in their existence, and I would not really be perceptually related to the other but would only know that the other exists. But this is not the case: we touch others, when we touch their bodies, we caress them and we molest them, and not just some things signalling their existence.

Thus, the other’s body is not given to me primarily in experience as an indicative sign, but is given as an expression of the other (not yet by the other). And this means that these two phenomena – the person and the body of the person – are fused together in my experience with the same kind intimacy or interdependence that characterizes the relations between verbal expressions and their meanings (cf. Heinämaa 2010). We do not have two somethings – a signalling body and a signalled meaning – but have a whole in which meaning thoroughly permeates and informs what is given as bodily, so that no meaningless parts or layers of embodiment can be distinguished. This is why Husserl says that the other’s body belongs (gehören) to the other, not in the sense of a possession or a property, but in the sense of a founded moment. Its living form belongs to the wholeness of the other’s life. And this is how I experience the other.

6. Conclusion

We have seen that in Husserl’s account we can apprehend human beings in different ways: we can understand them as layered psycho-physical beings but more fundamentally we experience them as expressive wholes. Thus, two of Heidegger’s complaints prove ill-founded: First, the human being is not a composite being for Husserl but is one unified being. Second, the expressive being of humans is a primary experiential fact, and not any sort of construct. Even though we cannot live through the experiences of others and can originarily grasp only our own experiences, we experience one another essentially and primarily as expressing beings with expressive bodies.

Also, Heidegger’s third complaint, the one on individuation, proves imprecise: According to Husserl, we do not individuate human persons on the basis of the positions of their bodies in objective space or intersubjective space, but on the basis of the character of their movements. Movement of course is a bodily phenomenon, but in Husserl’s analysis the crucial movements needed for the individuation of persons are expressive gestures and not physical processes or natural events.

Thus explicated, our experience of other people as bodily persons is a type of experience in its own right, irreducible to experiences of natural realities and equally irreducible to self-experiences, and non-analysable in either concept.

This implies that Husserlian phenomenology is not a hopeless confusion of empirical and transcendental insights, or useless for the purposes of philosophical anthropology, as Heidegger’s critiques may lead us believe. What Husserl offers is a consistent explication of the being of humans as animated bodies, on the one hand, and as persons, on the other hand. Most fundamentally, he argues, humans are given to us as bodily-spiritual wholes, and as such they relate to one another by sensuous-bodily expressions, by directed movements, signifying gestures, speech and writing. This implies that any research into human beings, be it empirical or philosophical, depends on and is grounded in our experiences of such expressive wholes and of more comprehensive wholes composed of them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

Th is work was supported by Suomen Akatemia [grant number 5410].

Notes

1. Husserl’s early lectures on time-consciousness are published in volumes X ja XXXIII of Husserliana; cf. Brough 1989, 2002; Kortooms 2002; Rodemeyer 2003; Zahavi 2003, 2004.

2. It is important to emphasize that Being and Time does not include a thorough discussion of Husserl’s theory of subjectivity or his analysis of personhood. Heidegger bypasses Husserl’s work on the basis that it is still in a stage of development and most of it remains unpublished (Heidegger [1927] 1993, 47/72). Thus, he ends up directing his critical remarks at Max Scheler’s exposition instead of Husserl’s, and attacks classical phenomenology through a detour. Despite this manner of proceeding, the main thrust of his critique is intended to work in both directions: ‘The phenomenological Interpretation of personality is in principle more radical and more transparent [than philosophies of life]. No matter how much Husserl and Scheler may differ in their respective inquiries, in their methods of conducting them, and in their orientations towards the world as a whole, they are fully in agreement on the negative side of their Interpretations of personality’ (Heidegger [1927] 1993, 47/72).

3. For an account of the relations between the Husserlian concepts of person and those of act and ego, see Heinämaa 2007.

4. On phenomenological accounts of sexual difference, see Heinämaa 2012.

5. In her Philosophische Untersuchungen zum Raum, Elisabeth Ströker emphasizes a crucial aspect of Husserl’s account of embodiment and spatiality: for Husserl, the constitutive grounding of all spatiality is sensory-intuitive (Ströker 1965, 93), and ultimately tactile-kinaesthetic (Heinämaa 2011). Against this Heidegger argues that our bodily-spatial being is fundamentally practical (e.g. Cerbone 2000; Ciocan 2015; Overgaard 2004).