Animal - Subject. Phenomenological Point of View Cover Image

Gyvūnas - subjektas. Fenomenologinė perspektyva
Animal - Subject. Phenomenological Point of View

Author(s): Donatas Večerskis
Subject(s): Philosophy
Published by: Vytauto Didžiojo Universitetas
Keywords: fenomenologija; gyvūnai; subjektyvumas; empatija; Phenomenology; empathy; change of the attitude toward animals;

Summary/Abstract: In Western culture, not only in philosophy, nonhuman animals are (were) treated as deficient subjects, as inferior being. Phenomenology, which declared itself as the attention to the experience, where concerned (in Husserl's latest texts this is very evident) about the subjectivity of animals. This change of the attitude toward animals is concomitant with the enlargement of the understanding of the transcendental subjectivity itself: the constitutive side of the subject is not the only one; not less important is the corporeal side. In our lived corporeal experience animals manifest themselves as transcendental subjectivities. We grasp their transcendental subjectivity through the empathy, wich is possible because of intersubjectivity - our analogous corporeality and analogous corporeal comportment. Of course, animals are different from human being; Husserl called them - anomal subjects, in sense of "different from me". But this marginal subjectivity isn't a poor subjectivity. Moreover they makes us understending our own animality, they enables us to unclose new dimensions of ourselves, of our world. This phenomenological attitude allows us to speak about the experience of the animals without the reduction to our own experience, because we recognise in it the same style to live the world.

  • Issue Year: 06/2004
  • Issue No: 4
  • Page Range: 3-9
  • Page Count: 7
  • Language: Lithuanian