Conference | Paper

Phenomenology of the Pure I and Personal History

Andrija Jurić

Wednesday 6 September 2023

14:30 - 15:00

 

Within Husserl’s philosophy, there are divergent perspectives regarding the historical dimension and constitution of the I. On the one hand, he explicitly states that the I is an unconstituted element of the pure structure of consciousness, a peculiar „transcendency within immanency” (Ideas I, §57); on the other, he contends that the I or ego is „continuously constituting himself” in the unity of a history (Cartesian Meditations, §31). This discrepancy is further complicated by the notion that this constitution of the I occurs for the I or that the I constitutes itself (Crisis §50; Phenomenological Psychology, §41). Consequently, we are faced with a kind of dialectic of changing and unchanging I (Ideas II, §24; Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität III, XX), its temporal and atemporal character (Crisis, §50), and the problem of whether the I has a history or not. In this paper, I aim to analyze the idea of the constitution of the I through the lens of immediate apprehension and adumbrations, self-consciousness and self-knowledge, habituation, and nunc stans of the living present in order to demonstrate the conflicting nature as necessary. The I acquires its history and identity through sedimentation, an ever-increasing acquisition of new habitual convictions. However, this history is simultaneously for the I as his, in which it remains the same and identical. Appropriately, living present, as the being of this I, has a character of something permanently streaming and simultaneously of nunc stans, “flowingly-statically present” (Crisis, §54). Through self-temporalization, a kind of constitution, the I is both temporal and ahistorical. Our place or point of view, therefore, does not lie in acquired, reflected I as an object, instead in self-identical I as always-subject, albeit the problem if this I-pole, the pole of corresponding habitualities that is grasped in one move, is constituted and does it have a (personal) history, remains unanswered.