Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation and the Appresentation of the Other in Sport

ABSTRACT

This paper examines a single relevant source regarding Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and his attempt to explain how we perceive and experience the Other. In the fifth chapter of the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl describes our encounters with others through a process of non-inferential analogy and details the ways we ‘appresent’ the Other. This unique and admittedly narrow approach to understanding intersubjectivity, I submit, offers significant insights regarding the nature of interactions between competing athletes and the meanings these experiences generate. The descriptive-explanatory account of the ‘appresentation’ of the Other in sport presented here will not be exhaustive. But it will, I anticipate, be informative, supplement existing works in the phenomenology of sport, and appeal intuitively to some of our intersubjective experiences in competitive sport.

KEYWORDS:

• Husserl
• phenomenology
• the Other
• sport

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Rajiv Kaushik, the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms and suggestions of an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Like Kretchmar (2014, 2019a), I have misgivings about aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology like its transcendental-reductionist methodology, idealism, dualism, Eurocentrism, and certainty to be the foundation of all truth and knowledge. On the other hand, Husserl spent decades identifying and writing about ‘crises’ in the sciences and philosophy and ‘introducing’ phenomenology as a ‘rigorous’ solution to overcome these ‘crises’ which possess some merit. Therefore, without accepting all the tenets of Husserl’s phenomenology, my modest goal is to explain his thoughts about experiencing the Other in one specific and informative source and explore how these ideas may be instantiated within the context of sport.

2. The author acknowledges and is grateful to a reviewer who pointed out that several sources and themes were not addressed in this brief introduction to Husserl’s phenomenology. For example, Ideas II and III were not consulted and the concepts of passive synthesis, inner time consciousness, and retention and protention were not discussed. These were omitted due to the delimitations of the paper and not because these references and ideas are insignificant.

3. The remainder of the fifth chapter of the Cartesian Meditations is devoted to explicating the nature of intersubjectivity as a ‘community of monads’ that establishes an objective world. Describing the shift from an egological phenomenology to an intersubjective one is beyond the scope of this paper; however, this theme preoccupied Husserl in the latter decades of his career. For an extended examination of Husserl’s development of intersubjective transcendental phenomenology, see Zahavi (1996) and Donohoe (2016). For the nature of intersubjectivity, phenomenology and sport, see McLaughlin and Torres (2011). Recall, the main interest of this paper is to examine the individual’s perceptions and experiences of the Other generally and in sport.

4. Due to the high degree of specialisation in many team sports, the likeness of analogous actions may not be precise. Nevertheless, in such sports, some basic movements are required by all team members. For example, quarterbacks and kickers in North American football must know how to block and tackle, ice hockey goalies are proficient stickhandlers, passers and skaters, and baseball pitchers can competently field balls and throw out base runners. The analogous behaviour I observe in the Other lies in the common activity between what I do or can do and the performative actions of the Other, however gross or specialised the actions might be.

5. Throughout this section of the paper I have knowingly avoided speaking about the body of the Other as such to avoid any hint of dualism, unlike Husserl. Instead, I have referred to types and qualities of movements, behaviours, and actions of athletes because these more accurately describe human encounters in sport contests. No one experiences a ‘body’ of an Other or just a ‘living body’ in or out of sport. In an awake state, one encounters moving human beings, ‘living persons’, as a totality who express a range of movement and motile capacities in various horizons. In competitive sport, athletes acutely perceive and respond to moving human beings, not some entity composed of a psychophysical amalgam, who execute remarkable, thoughtful movements as well as unremarkable, underdeveloped, less refined movements. For a critique of dualism and a non-dualistic interpretation of human beings see, Kretchmar (2005).