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The distinctive feature of the body as res materialis was that it functioned as the locus or "turning point" wherein events in the irreal sphere are affected by and in turn have an effect on events in material reality. This description, however, would be ultimately misleading if we took it as the starting point of our analysis of consciousness. For Husserl, to understand consciousness is to understand it in its purity. The thesis that purity is a possible manifestation of intentional consciousness is a key step in the demonstration of consciousness as independent, self-enclosed being. The consequence of this is that the being of consciousness cannot be thought of as a reality that runs parallel to that of the "real world"; both the empirical subject and nature as such are unities constituted in the closed fold of pure subjectivity. That the material world appears as phenomenon does not mean that the body translates the real into the language of the irreal; it is not a bridge between two different senses of being. Rather, the problem of the animated body is a question of the interdependency of two types of phenomena, and that means two different systems of identity and difference, both of which are constituted "in" pure subjectivity. It is from the perspective of pure subjectivity that we understand that the identity of the object through the differentiations of appearance is radically different from the identity of the "I" through its states of consciousness—as indicated in the previous chapter, the latter is the unity of a history. Thus the question with which we closed Chapter Three ran thus: in what sense is there an interdependence between the historical and the historyless, and how can this dependency be elucidated phenomenologically? Further: how does the body act as the space in which this interdependency plays itself out?

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-5658-5_5

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