Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, one of the most original trends of 20th century philosophical thought, proposed, in his Ideen II, the concept of "person" as fundamental to the human and social sciences. The subtitle of Ideen II — Phaenomenolo-gische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution — shows that the most important preoccupation of Husserl in this book is the question of constitution. This is taken by Husserl to be the key problem for delineating the relation between the natural and human sciences . In his analysis of this problem, Husserl’s discussion of the concept of person gives a criteria of discerning these two kinds of science. He writes, in a letter to Albrecht dated August 2, 1917: "Duty demands that I bring to completion and publication my labors of so many years, especially since they provide the scientific foundation for a reconciliation between the naturalistic world view that dominated the epoch just expired and the teleological world view. But the teleological world view is the definitively truer one."1

This is a critical continuation of Dilthey’s position. Through an epistemological approach he made a distinction between Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft. He claimed that the epistemological operation of the natural sciences consists in explanation, which is a causal determination of a particular natural phenomenon by a universal natural law. As to human sciences, their epistemological operation consists in understanding, which is a mental grasp of the unique meaning implied in human activities and their products. Meaning is constituted in the expression of the life of each individual, society or historical epic. The process from life to expression is creativity, whereas the inverse process from expression to life is understanding. Dilthey’s epistemological approach has also some metaphysical and anthropological implications: that nature is a system of causality, in which all natural phenomena are determined in a causal way; whereas the human person is a teleological being, whose life has to realize itself through all kinds of expressions.2

He who sees everywhere only nature, nature in the sense of, and, as it were, through the eyes of, natural science, is precisely blind to the spiritual sphere, the special domain of the human sciences. Such a one does not see persons and does not see the Objects which depend for their sense on personal accomplishments, i.e., Objects of "culture". Properly speaking, he sees no person at all, even as he has to do with persons in his attitude as a naturalist psychologist.3

 

Dilthey already feels the need to get rid of the naturalist and psychologist attitude of looking at the person in order to grasp the objects of the human sciences. But his methodology is not radical enough to the extent of retreating the problem of constitution through the method of phenomenological reduction. Husserl points out that: "Only a radical investigation, directed to the phenomenological sources of the constitution of the ideas of nature, body, and soul, and of the various ideas of ego and person can here deliver decisive elucidations and at the same time further the rights of the valid motives of all such investigations."4

Upon closer scrutiny, it will even appear that there are not here two attitude with equal rights and of the same order, or two perfect apperceptions which at once penetrate one another, but that the naturalist attitude is in fact subordinated to the personalistic, and that the former is acquired only by means of an abstraction or, rather, by means of a kind of self-forgetfulness of the personal ego."5

 

According to Husserl, the person is constituted of three levels: of body, of ego and of intersubjectivity.6 In its strict sense, person is limited to that of subjectivity, but in its broad sense his ego must be concretized spatio-temporally in a body and live with others in a kind of intersubjective relationship. This is quite different from the idealist and egologist position that we find in Husserl’s "Ideen I" and "Cartesian Meditations." Compared with the positions of these works, the ego of Ideen II is a more worldly, not unworldly ego; it is a being-with-others, a dialogical ego rather than an isolated Self or ego of monologue. Here, any discussion on the social dimension of man must be derived from the intersubjective relationship between the human persons. Now, let us explore successively the dimensions of body, of ego and of society according to the discovery of Husserl in Ideen II

Discussion of the constitution of person must begin from its bodily dimension. The main reason for this is that when we study the human, the phenomenon of the human person as such cannot appear without the human body. In other words, man is also his body appearing hic et nunc, even though our attitude towards it should not be limited to the naturalist position. On the one hand, if there were no body, then no human person would appear.On the other hand, to see man as person, we should switch from our naturalist to our transcendental attitude through the method of phenomenological reduction. A human person’s body is not limited to a mere physical thing with sensible organs. Body, as living expression of the person, has many psychic and spiritual characteristics which could not happen elsewhere, but only here in the body. Body is the locus in which these psychic and spiritual characteristics appear. But the reality of these psychic and spiritual phenomena is not limited to body. Husserl is quite aware of this paradoxical situation. He says, "The excess of reality beyond the mere physical thing is not something that can be separated by itself, not something juxtaposed, but something in the physical thing."7 Those psychic and spiritual properties could have their physical expressions only in the body; that is why the natural scientists would try to determine those psychic and spiritual phenomena by spatial and physical properties. In fact, although those psychic and spiritual phenomena must manifest themselves through the body, their reality seems truer and finer. Only by switching from the naturalist to the transcendental attitude could one grasp the truer and finer reality in the same locus of phenomena.

The soul is in the Body and is there where the Body presently happens to be. What also is there are such and such groups of states of consciousness, such and such representations, stirrings of thought, judgements, etc.; consciousness in itself . . . is thinkable without a nature . . . and consciousness is not positable as something of nature; it is absolutely non-spatial.8

 

Pure consciousness is a genuine temporal field, a field of ‘phenomenological’ time. This must not be confused with "Objective" time, which is constituted, along with nature, by consciousness.9

The states of consciousness then have, in conformity with the constitutive sense of the coincidence of their time with the time of physical nature, a time that is measurable through primordial manifestation by the use of instruments.10

 

Husserl’s second contrasting thesis concerning the relation between Body and Person is that, on the one hand, the body is mine, and, on the other, it is in some sense the other for my Ego. The Body is mine, mineness is its first characteristic. "The body is my body, and it is mine in the first place as mine `over and against’ my object, just as the house is my object, something I see or can see, something I touch or can touch, etc. These things are mine, but not as component pieces of the ego."11 In other words, I can possess many things, for example, house, money, clothes . . . etc., but these objects are not part of my ego. On the contrary, my body is part of my ego. I am my body and my body is mine. The mineness of my body is beyond everything else I own. But, seen from the other side, my body is different from my Self. In Paul Ricoeur’s words, "My body is the original other of my Self." Not every experience of my self could be reduced to the experience of my body. Sometimes the capacity of my body does not follow the wish of my heart. My experiences of bodily resistance and insufficiency prove the otherness of my body.

In his Soi-meme comme un autre, Paul Ricoeur points out two intriguing insights on the relation between body and person: 1. Our body shows that otherness is also constitutive of the Ego, not as added from the outside as the egologist would proclaim;12 2. The experiences of our body consist mainly of passive experiences through which our Ego is mediated to the world.13 In fact, Ricoeur’s position has its origin in the Ideen II of Husserl which most clearly articulated the phenomenological description of the contrast between the mineness and the otherness of our Body.

Transferring from the bodily dimension to the ego in its proper sense, is in fact, according to Husserl, to step from the passive to the active ego. "We find, as the originally and specifically subjective, the Ego in the proper sense, the Ego of `freedom’, the attending, considering, comparing, distinguishing, judging, valuing, attracted, repulsed, inclined, disinclined, desiring, and willing ego: the ego that in any sense is ‘active’ and takes a position. . . . Opposed to the active ego stands the passive."14 This means that ego in the proper sense is the active, free ego. This is the center of the subjectivity of a person, of which no empirical data are available. Only intuition through phenomenological reduction could be aware of its existence. Therefore, we need a radical change to the transcendental attitude in order to grasp the phenomenon of person in its proper sense. The above-mentioned otherness or alterity of body demonstrates only the transcendence of the phenomenon of person over that of body. Person in the proper sense is to function as the subjectivity of the surrounding world. As a person, I am the subject of my Umwelt. That is why Husserl says:

The concepts of Ego and surrounding world are related to one another inseparably. Thereby to each person belongs his surrounding world, while at the same time a plurality of persons in communication with one another has a common surrounding world. The surrounding world is the world that is perceived by the person in his acts, is remembered, grasped in thought, surmised or revealed as such and such; it is the world of which this personal ego is conscious.15

As the subject of his surrounding world, Ego corresponds to his surrounding world. The so-called "person" is just this subject which perceives, feels, evaluates, struggles with and acts in this world. Husserl gives his first definition of the term "person" in correlation with the surrounding world: "A person is precisely a person who represents, feels, evaluates, strives, and acts, and who, in every such personal act, stands in relation to something, to objects in his surrounding world." For the person, the surrounding world does not have an in-itself status, as in the case of everyday belief and in the natural sciences. The Umwelt is a world not in itself, but for me. Only in a subject is the status of the world completely changed in this way: from in itself to for-me. In other words, it becomes an object of my intuition, representation and evaluation. This is also the world that Heidegger characterized as Zuhandenheit which emphasizes the usability of the things in the Umwelt.16 But Husserl is more scrupulous in that he considers the Umwelt as object of intuition, representation and evaluation. It is only when it serves as the object of evaluation that we can derive the usability of the Umwelt.

This position of Husserl in Ideen II on person as the center of my activities excludes any interpretation of Husserl’s subjectivity as unworldly, static, pure ego. For instance, Ludwig Landgrebe in his Major Problems in Contemporary Philosophy criticizes Husserl that, first, Husserl’s philosophy is a kind of philosophy of subjectivity; second, Husserl’s egology neglects the existential facticity of man; and third, the Husserlian ego has a static, speculative tendency.17 Landgrebe uses the Heideggerian concept of facticity as remedy to Husserlian egology, and he refers to Max Scheller’s idea of person as the center of acts to replace the Husserlian static, speculative ego. But, in fact, as we could see from Husserl’s analysis in Ideen II, person for Husserl is the center of the execution of acts. What Scheller does is not, as Landgrebe would suggest, the fulfillment of Husserl’s project, but its application.

As stated above, the Husserlian person is not limited to the egologist philosophy of subjectivity, but is now situated in the surrounding world. But in this surrounding world, there are not only things, but other humans. Besides one’s relation to things, there is one’s relation to other humans. In other words, one is situated not only in subject-object relationship, but also in subject-subject relationships, that is, in intersubjective relationships. Under the naturalist attitude, this relationship is not seen as interpersonal, but as a kind of subject-object relationship for the human is seen and studied as an object. For Husserl, this attitude commits three errors: first, on the moral dimension, it treats a human being as a mere thing, not as person related to the moral order or as a member of a moral association; second, on the legal dimension, it treats a human person not as a subject of rights, but instead as without rights, just like a mere thing; third, on the theoretical dimension, it treats a human person not as subject of a common surrounding world, but as a mere annex of natural objects.18

In this way relations of mutual understanding are formed: speaking elicits response; the theoretical, valuing, or practical appeal, addressed by the one to the other, elicits, as it were, a response coming back, assent or refusal, and perhaps a counter-proposal, etc. In these relations of mutual under-standing, there is produced a conscious mutual relation of persons19 at the same time as a unitary relation of them to a common surrounding world.

 

Husserl’s idea about "communicative acts" in Ideen II proves that, first, he is not limited to the egologist philosophy of subjectivity but even criticizes that kind of philosophy. For him, it is by abstracting mutual understanding and communicative acts that we think of a sheer solitary subject and therefore also of a purely egoist surrounding world.20 Second, it shows that Husserl situates "communication" in the relation of one person to another. I suppose we could retrace J. Habermas’s theory of communicative action to Husserl’s discussion in Ideen II. For Habermas, the relation between man and nature is that of technical control, whereas the relation between man and man is communication. But communication in Habermas’s sense is merely linguistic and intellectual; the process of argumentation is taken by him as the model of communication. Communication in Habermas’s sense is a kind of argumentative communication, a process of confronting thesis with antithesis and of searching for consensus in a commonly acceptable higher proposition. But communication in Husserl’s sense is not merely intellectual and linguistic, it includes also evaluative and practical processes such as love and counter-love, hate and counter-hate, confidence and reciprocal confidence. Husserl says:

The persons who belong to the social association are given to each other as ‘companions’, not as opposed objects but as counter-subjects who live ‘with’ one another, actually or potentially, in acts of love and counter-love, of hate and counter-hate, of confidence and reciprocated confidence, etc.21

 

These words of Husserl give us a clear ethical dimension of communication, not only a description of an intellectual debate. Husserl uses the term "communicative acts" precisely for the process constitutive of the social dimension of the human person: "Sociality is constituted by specifically social, communicative acts in which the ego turns to others and in which the ego is conscious of these others as ones toward which it is turning, and ones which, furthermore, understand this turning, perhaps adjust their behaviour to it and reciprocate by turning toward that ego in acts of agreement or disagreement, etc."22 On the level of communicative acts, our relation with nature and the physical world suffers also a radical change. Here the physical world becomes the common object of our dialogue and our studying- together. "Even the physical world has a social character in this apperceptive inclusion; it is a world that has a spiritual significance."23 In other words, nature could become, on the personalist level, the surrounding world constituted by our common projects of scientific research and artistic creativity.

Communicative acts are not limited to interpersonal relationship, but could be extended also to inter-community relationship. "It should be noted here that the idea of communication obviously extends from the single personal subject even to the social associations of subjects, which, for their part, present personal unities of a higher level."24 Step by step, Husserl’s vision becomes clear: it is by the personalist attitude, after a radical change through phenomenological reduction, that humans should reconstitute authentically their relationships with things and other humans. Then, as authentic subjects, they should communicate with other authentic subjects in order to form an authentic social community. Through this authentic social community, human culture and history could be authentically reconstituted. This is quite similar to the procedure Husserl proposes in the "Cartesian Meditations". The ways of thinking in these two books differs in that the "Cartesian Meditations" emphasizes more the egologist approach and is more on the side of transcendental idealism, whereas Ideen II takes the position that society, culture and history are to be constituted in the process of intersubjective communication.

If we compare Husserl’s discussion of communicative acts with that of Habermas, we find easily that the ideal conditions of communication proposed by Habermas — legitimacy, sincerity, truth, and understandability — are but formal conditions. On the contrary, Husserl proposes in Ideen II the act of empathy as a transcendental condition of communication. Husserlian empathy is quite similar to Confucian Jen through which man could easily understand the motivations of others: "It is a matter for the experience of empathy, in its unfolding to instruct me about a man’s character, about his knowledge and abilities, etc."25 Besides, a person could also grasp, through empathy, something like the Hegelian Objective spirit and understand the unity of meaning: "To perform an act of empathy means to grasp an Objective spirit, to see a human being, to see a crowd of people, etc."26 In other words, the empathy between man and other men functions as an existential substantial condition in Husserl’s theory of communication action. In this sense, it is much more touchable and realist than those formal and argumentative conditions in Habermas’s theory.