The Body as Noematic Bridge between Nature and Culture

POL VANDERVELDE, SEBASTIAN LUFT, LUIS ROMÁN RABANAQUE

Epistemology, Archaeology, Ethics: Current Investigations of Husserl's Corpus

Continuum Press

Lugar: London/ New York; Año: 2010; p. 41 - 52

Husserl’s analysis of the noema in Sections Three and Four of the First Book of the Ideas takes as point of departure the correlate of outer perception and, for reasons associated with the justification of knowledge, remains close to it. A sketchy reference to the connection between percept and Body had been advanced in the Lectures on The Basic Problem of Phenomenology of 1910/11, and the Body is at least implicit in the early description of sense-fields and kinaesthesia made in the course of the Lectures on Thing and Space of 1907. However, in the First Book of the Ideas the topic is scarcely mentioned, and we do not find a noematic account of the role it may play in the constitution of sense. Now such an account can be found in the Second Book, where the general outline of the noematic side of consciousness gives way to a more concrete description focused on the constitution of the world.  Husserl distinguishes between a naturalistic attitude directed towards the world as nature, whose beings are experienced as either inanimate or animate “things”, and a personalistic attitude directed towards the world as spirit, whose beings appear as “cultural works” related to human action und thus to willing and valuing. This rises the question of their mutual connection, and at this point the own Body comes on stage. Husserl’s answer, which he further develops in his Lectures on Nature and Spirit of 1919, is that the Body plays the role of  a “bridge” connecting nature and culture. This function is in turn related to its peculiar twofold condition as a material thing with thinglike properties, and as an organ or instrument of the constituting Ego. Now this paper seeks: 1) to show how natural and cultural noemata are constitutive layers or strata founded one upon the other within an encompassing system of sense-strata, and 2) to explore the corresponding noematic complex of foundations comprising natural (inanimate as well as animated) thing, own Body and cultural work, in order to clarify the sense of this bridge-character assigned to the Body.