Ka-yu Hui

Rather than a monolithic or unitary concept, personhood is best approached as an open, phenomenological constellation. The concept’s vitality is exhibited through its deployment across diverse contexts, where it serves various argumentative roles and allows for nuanced descriptive precision. Generally, the concept captures concretely living subjectivity in contrast to a mere physical thing or psychic soul. It is the concrete subject to which values are given and to whom an ethical call is addressed; it is the locus of the temporal and habitual formation of individuality; and it is the center of diversed social and communal relationships.

In this introduction, I situate Husserl and classical phenomenology within the current surge of interest in critical phenomenology. I argue that critical phenomenology is not a rupture but a movement of reorientation and thematization, making explicit the critical impulses already present in classical phenomenology and directing them toward contemporary social and political questions. I also emphasize the continued relevance of Husserl, especially his phenomenology of imagination, for critical projects. The three contributions together show how Husserl's analyses of imagination offer important resources for rethinking normativity and possibilities for social transformation.

This paper elucidates Ricoeur’s use of genetic phenomenology in his analysis of ideology and utopia, and how genetic phenomenology contributes to ideology critique. I argue that Ricoeur’s analysis, examined through the lens of genetic phenomenology, unveils the genesis of the experience of ideology. I propose a model of ideology critique emphasizing the liberation of individuals from ideological delusion without proclaiming an ideology-free position. Additionally, I explore the strategic use of utopian imagination to incite liberating experiences. In conclusion, I underscore the role of social identity constitution as an implicit counterforce to ideology critique.

The paper argues that the structure of expression prevails in Husserl’s social phenomenology. We begin by considering Husserl’s concepts of _Individuum_ and _Urgegenstand_, and his project of grounding the human sciences. We then explore the expressive structure of the person in three interrelated aspects. First, expression indicates the peculiar manner of the constitution of the person as a spiritual subject. Second, there is an essential relationship between the person and her surrounding world, and hence not only is the person always given as a system of expressions, but also is a cultural object given as such. Third, the system “person–surrounding world” can also be an expression of communal spiritual life and culture—what Husserl calls “higher order personal unities”—once they are constituted through appropriate communal acts.

The validity of Husserl’s early apprehension/content of apprehension schema (_Auffassung/Auffassungsinhalt Schema_) of intentionality has long been a subject of dispute. In the case of phantasy (_Phantasie_), commentators often assert that the talk of “non-intentional content,” i.e. the phantasm, is abandoned in Husserl’s mature phenomenology of phantasy, and his subsequent theory of reproductive consciousness aims precisely to replace the previous schema. Against the current dismissive stance in the literature, this paper argues for the centrality of the concept of phantasm in the phenomenology of phantasy. This is achieved in three steps. First, I argue for a functional interpretation of the schema, which maintains that it is not an empirical-genetic account of how non-intentional “sense-data” is transformed into presentations of intentional objects, but a structural exposition of the essential moments of objectifying consciousness. Second, I revisit Husserl’s theory of reproductive consciousness, arguing that in reproduction, what is reproduced is not only the noetic experience but also the hyletic substrate. Hence, the theory of reproductive consciousness, far from calling for an abandonment of the concept of phantasm, instead clarifies this concept and its function in phantasy. To fortify the point that the phantasm is crucial for the phenomenology of phantasy, I examine two features of phantasy, namely the perspectivalness of phantasized objects and the experience of my phantasy Ego being the “zero point of orientation” in phantasy, arguing that these two essential features can only be accounted for by appealing to the concept of phantasm.