Husserl, the active self, and commitment
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Husserl, the active self, and commitment Hanne Jacobs 1 Accepted: 8 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In “On what matters: Personal identity as a phenomenological problem” (2020), Steven Crowell engages a number of contemporary interpretations of Husserl’s account of the person and personal identity by noting that they lack a phenomenological elucidation of the self as commitment. In this article, in response to Crowell, I aim to show that such an account of the self as commitment can be drawn from Husserl’s work by looking more closely at his descriptions from the time of Ideas and after of the self as ego or I and egoic experience as attentive experience. I specifically aim to sketch the beginning of a response to three questions I take Crowell to be posing to a Husserlian account of the person and personal identity: (1) What more than pre-reflective self-awareness can be attributed to the self on phenomenological grounds so that we can understand, phenomenologically speaking, how selves become persons? (2) How can what characterizes the self in addition to pre-reflective self-awareness be discerned in both our commitment to truth and our feeling bound by love and other emotive commitments that cannot be fully rationally justified, which Husserl acknowledges are both sources of personal self-constitution? And (3), do all selves become persons? In the paper I elaborate how my answers to the first two questions turn on the self not just being selfaware but active in a particular sense. And to begin to address the third question, I suggest that while any form of wakeful conscious experience is both self-aware and active, this activity of the self makes a difference for those who are socio-historically embedded in the way we are. Specifically, on the proposed Husserlian account, selves that are socio-historically embedded become persons in and through their active relating to what they attentively experience. In concluding, I indicate how this Husserlian account might compare to Crowell’s claim that “self-identity (ipseity) is not mere logical identity (A=A) but a normative achievement […] which makes a ‘personal’ kind of identity possible” (2020). Keywords Husserl . Phenomenology . Personhood . Self . Attention
* Hanne Jacobs [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
H. Jacobs
1 Self, personhood, and commitment There are several aspects of Husserl’s work that one might draw on to develop a sophisticated account of persons. The aspect of Husserl’s account of personhood that I have been particularly interested in is his account of personal self-constitution in and through the acquisition of standing convictions and enduring practical engagements by means of “position-takings” or “stances” (Stellungnahmen) (see Jacobs 2010a, 2016a, and b).1 According to this view, persons are embodied and socially embedded selves that make up their own minds or take a position with regard to some aspect of the world and others. Specifically, by taking stances we acquire
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