DIE ANTHROPOLOGISCHE WELT
THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL WORLD

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines the possibility, the meaning, and the legitimacy of understanding Husserl’sconcept of the life-world as an anthropological world. This understanding lies upon the fact thatthe life-world is always given to us as a human world, and invites to inquire into the way I alwaysnecessarily experience myself as a human person. Nevertheless, even though it is by becominghuman that the I enters the world, the self-experience of the human person coincides neither withits self-experience as a transcendental ego, nor with its experience of the life-world. Thus, thequestion of the anthropological world deeply concerns the relationship between phenomenology asa transcendental philosophy and anthropology. This means that a positive comprehension of thelife-world as an anthropological world will only emerge when anthropology will no longer beconsidered as the mortal enemy of transcendental phenomenology, and consequently the idea of atranscendental anthropology will no longer seem inconsistent or absurd. This demonstration is ledby 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 inthe XVth and XXIXth volumes of the Husserliana. The interest of speaking of an anthropologicalworld thus appears to lie in the emphasis on the historicity and on the cultural impregnation of thelife-world. Ultimately, the anthropological world is the life-world considered in its irreduciblefacticity; 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 anirreducible tension between transcendental (rather than human) life and its worldly dimension andhorizon.

• Details
• Contents