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.
