Deissi, evolution, intersubjectivity. The theme of the body in Hans Blumenberg's anthropological phenomenology

Abstract

The essay outlines the conceptual tools needed to frame the transcendental stance according to Blumenberg's anthropological phenomenology. The start-ing point of the analysis coincides with the central role that both the human body and intersubjectivity play within Blumenberg's attempt to force Husserl's phenomenology toward a radicalization “meant as a naturalization“ of the transcendental  stance. The  theoretical  core  of  Blumenberg's  argument  consists in a philosophical reassessment of evolutionary biology, which leads to interpreting  human  reason  and  its  function  as  a  byproduct  of the  evolution  of Homo sapiens.  Blumenberg's  efforts  aiming  at  an anthropological  foundation of phenomenology, however, does not usher in a dismissal of the transcendental stance “such an outcome would imply, in fact, self-destruction of philosophy as a theoretical undertaking. In this context, it is worth taking into consideration the deixis, i.e. the act of indicating an object in front of a peer; the deixis reveals a peculiar structure of intersubjective encounter with the  sensible  world  and,  at  the  same  time,  testifies  that  the  logical domain  of  the  indexicals  pertains  to a  sphere  that  cannot  be  reduced  to  the  natural  world. This peculiar intertwinement of the transcendental and the empirical constitutes precisely the paradoxical way of articulating phenomenologically the question of the transcendental foundation. The essay concludes by refer-ring to Luhmann's system theory, which offers fruitful arguments in order to understand the inevitability of paradox when the phenomenological founda-tion is in the present context.