Yamina Venuta

My aim in this paper is to reconstruct Edmund Husserl’s views on the differences between human and animal consciousness, with particular attention to the experience of temporality.In the first section, I situate the topic of animal consciousness in the broader context of Husserl’s philosophy. Whereas this connection has been often neglected, I argue that a phenomenological analysis of non-human subjectivities is not only justified, but also essential to the Husserlian project as a whole.In the second section, I introduce two notions Husserl resorts to when describing the essential difference between human and animal subjectivities, namely “strata of consciousness” and “person.” Drawing on textual evidence, I argue that Husserl does not simply see animals as excluded from the sphere of personhood. Rather, he draws a distinction between two modes of personal life, one of which is said to be unique to human adults.What holds these two modes apart, according to Husserl, is a subject’s relation to time. In the third section, I delve deeper into this topic, asking how we should understand Husserl’s claim that animals live in a “restricted temporality.” I argue that this has less to do with an inability to remember, imagine, or anticipate future events, and more with an inability to explore temporal horizons stretching before one’s birth or after one’s death. By contrast, humans gradually overcome these limitations during ontogeny, thanks to the practice of linguistic communication. This also has consequences for our capacity to engage in genuinely theoretical thought.

Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (2012 [1945]) opens with a detailed critique of traditional philosophical accounts of sensation, generally understood as having Husserl's “content-apprehension schema” among its targets. The schema sees perception as resulting from the interpretation (“apprehension” or “apperception”) of “raw” sensory contents (or “hyle”). Both the schema's plausibility and the extent of Husserl's later reliance on it remain subjects of significant debate. In this paper, I reconstruct the schema's evolution across Husserl's corpus and argue—against a popular interpretation by Boehm (1966) and Sokolowski (1970)—that Husserl never completely rejected its validity for an analysis of perception, but simply restricted its scope of application. I argue that this model still offers a plausible framework for understanding perception and provides fertile ground for collaboration between phenomenology and the empirical sciences. I conclude by addressing Merleau-Ponty's objection that sensations, or hyletic data, are undiscoverable through direct reflection, and thus have no place in phenomenological analysis. Rather than forcing a rejection of this notion, I argue this signals that Merleau-Ponty's conception of phenomenology is too narrow: to reconstruct the early genesis of the conscious subject, phenomenologists need to rely on methods other than direct reflection.