Alice Pugliese

The paper discusses motivation as the inner lawfulness of consciousness and a central methodological principle of genetic phenomenology, highlighting the problem of its ambiguous status oscillating between a historical-empirical and a transcendental account of consciousness. The focus on motivation allows for the practical character of intentionality to emerge, thus presenting genetic phenomenology as a more comprehensive approach to subjective life which takes into account its constitutive indeterminacy.

This paper explores Husserl’s late manuscripts in order to sketch a phenomenological description of drives and the dimension of passive constitution that belongs to them. Although this topic touches upon psychological issues, it will be shown that a specifically phenomenological approach allows us to recognize the transcendental significance of instincts. By means of the phenomenological reduction, drives reveal a peculiar subject, the ‘original child’, which is described not as a figure of developmental psychology but as a transcendental subject pre-forming the way the world appears to us. Drives work constantly and passively as obscure sources of sense, and the original child is always involved in the constitution of the world. Sharpening our understanding of the inner structure of subjectivity by digging into deeper constitutive levels has important consequences for our view of intersubjectivity: it is not only the individual subject’s consciousness but equally the relation between human subjects which is necessarily rooted in the dimension of drives. Accordingly, collective teleology cannot be considered a late product of human cooperation. Instead, it is an original and pre-predicative impulse.

A phenomenological approach to anthropology should not propose a static definition of man, but inquire into specific human motivations, which never occur isolated. Therefore, the autonomy-dependency connection is presented as a possible human motivational ground. The notion of autonomy, presented with reference to the Kantian idea of the self-determining reason and to the Husserlian account of self-constitution, reveals in itself elements of dependency. On the other side, the notion of vulnerability and reliance is displayed through different approaches of Gehlen, MacIntyre and Toombs in order to illustrate dependency not as a mere capitulation of the subject, but as one of its intrinsic possibilities, which does not exclude autonomous will.

The phenomenological notion of person is presented and settled between facticity and eidetic dimension. Through this critical assessment the analysis responds to the classical criticism raised against the alleged abstractness of phenomenology and opens the possibility of a fruitful dialog with ethics and psychology. The enquiry about the idea of person sheds new light on the correlated notions of phenomenological idealism, eidos and constitution that are brought in closer connection with the lived experience of perception and motivation.

The paper takes into consideration the relationship between philosophical anthropology and phenomenology from the point of view provided by Eugen Fink’s philosophical path. Starting with phenomenological researches into the structure of constitution and reduction, after the Second World War Fink puts forth an anthropological theory based on the notion of play. This paper identifies the self-reflective and practical structure of Selbstbesinnung as a constant element of Fink’s analysis of the phenomenological method, of consciousness, and of the anthropological dimension of play, thus suggesting a profound continuity in his philosophical thought.

This paper explores Husserl’s late manuscripts in order to sketch a phenomenological description of drives and the dimension of passive constitution that belongs to them. Although this topic touches upon psychological issues, it will be shown that a specifically phenomenological approach allows us to recognize the transcendental significance of instincts. By means of the phenomenological reduction, drives reveal a peculiar subject, the ‘original child’, which is described not as a figure of developmental psychology but as a transcendental subject pre-forming the way the world appears to us. Drives work constantly and passively as obscure sources of sense, and the original child is always involved in the constitution of the world. Sharpening our understanding of the inner structure of subjectivity by digging into deeper constitutive levels has important consequences for our view of intersubjectivity: it is not only the individual subject’s consciousness but equally the relation between human subjects which is necessarily rooted in the dimension of drives. Accordingly, collective teleology cannot be considered a late product of human cooperation. Instead, it is an original and pre-predicative impulse.