Irina Rotaru

This interview took place on the 8th of April 2010 in München, at Professor Waldenfels’ house. The questions for this interview were meant to touch the most important ideas of Bernhard Waldenfels’ philosophy—the idea of universal order as a sign for a limited and dictatorial thinking, the respondent that replaces the traditional subject, the idea that an ethics according to which a subject is responsible for something to someone overestimates the unity of the subject and does injustice to all the three instances of a happening (subject—for something—to someone). Waldenfels clarifies some of the problematic implications of these ideas.

This paper discusses two approaches of the relationship between subjectivity and intersubjectivity. The Husserlian one, a transcendental phenomenological investigation of the possibility of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and the Waldenfelsian one, an ethical phenomenological investigation of day to day intersubjective interactions. Both authors pretend to give account of the conditions of possibility of intersubjective interaction. However, Husserl starts with the investigation of the transcendental structure of subjectivity, that is, the fundamental conditions required for the appearance of consciousness. By contrast, Waldenfels looks first at practical interaction and draws conclusions on the deeper structure of subjectivity based on the traces he discovers to be characteristic for this interaction. Our interest lies in determining which of the two approaches should be given priority for the investigation of the constitution of intersubjectivity.