My Living Body: The Zero Point of Nature-Mind and the Horizon of Creative Imagination

Abstract

As one who was constantly at pains to clarify his field, its methods, and their results in a manner that was radical and universal, Edmund Husserl, the self-styled perpetual beginner, was explicitly at odds with worldview-oriented philosophy (Weltanschauung) and a scientific project that would assume a natural existence as given (Dasein). He championed an inevitably experiential, pre-theoretical, conditioning life (leib) whose mechanism he described as the life-structure and whose output he demarcated as sense and validity (sinn und geltung). This life-structure is the irreducible composite of my living body, the living social bodies that I have part in, and the lived surrounding world that is the correlate of each (leib, lebendiger generativer Sozialitat und lebensumwelt). Together these form an intersubjective, egosomatical ground manifesting the lifeworld (lebenswelt) and, through it, the natural and human sciences (natur und geist). These strata of Husserl's scientific philosophy are what set apart phenomenology. With the life-structure Husserl established a radical thinking that works systematically to secure the end of systematicity as such in a ruthlessness of inquiry demanding the infinite passage of embodied collectives manifesting, what he called, ``truth in motion{''}-the outer edge of which is the Husserlian philosophy of the event: the in-breaking of the unimaginable something that finds its passage into the imaginal through the life-structure.