Phenomenology at the border of empathy

Antonio Zirión Quijano^[2]

Abstract

A first approach of transcendental phenomenology to the topic of subjectivity and consciousness of nonhuman animals is developed in eight points. Animal subjectivity and consciousness are understood as transcendental and are intimately linked to animal corporeality and the constitution of the animal world. The diversity of possible world constitutions is examined, which is due to the interrelation between subjectivity, corporeality and the world. Such diversity of constitutions is understood as the same true world’s various modes of appearing (a diversity of intuitive worlds), whereby the human constitution is deemed as the normal constitution. A “practical” truth in animals is acknowledged; but it is also recognized that the intuitive human world has no prerogative as to the possibility of discovering the world’s truth. The aspects of empathic experience with animals, the phenomenological strategy of “dismantling” that enables a relative access to the animal world, and the reasons why animal life will always keep an enigmatic reserve are also exposed.

     

Keywords: animality; animal consciousness; animal world; corporality; dismantling; empathy; intuitive world; normality; practical truth; transcendental subjectivity; world.

Resumen

Se desarrolla en ocho puntos un primer acercamiento de la fenomenología trascendental a la temática de la subjetividad y la conciencia de los animales no humanos, las cuales pueden comprenderse como trascendentales y están íntimamente enlazadas con la corporalidad animal y con la constitución del mundo animal. Se indaga la diversidad de constituciones de mundo posibles debido a la interrelación entre subjetividad, corporalidad y mundo. Tal diversidad de constituciones se entiende como diversidad de modos de aparecer del mismo mundo verdadero (diversidad de mundos intuitivos), y la constitución humana destaca como la constitución normal. Se admite la posibilidad en los animales de una verdad “práctica”; pero también se reconoce que ni siquiera el mundo intuitivo humano tiene ninguna prerrogativa en cuanto a la posibilidad de descubrir la verdad del mundo. Se exponen los rasgos de la experiencia empática con los animales y la estrategia fenomenológica del “desmontaje”, la cual permite un acceso relativo al mundo animal, y a la vez las razones por las cuales la vida animal guardará siempre una reserva enigmática.

    

Palabras clave: animalidad; conciencia animal; corporalidad; desmontaje; empatía; mundo; mundo animal; mundo intuitivo; normalidad; subjetividad trascendental; verdad práctica.

Alles Philosophieren führt auf Widersinn, wenn nicht der letzte Sinn aller hier fraglichen Begriffe geklärt ist, der letzte Sinn des Seins von Bewusstsein, des Seins von Dingen, von Leibern, von Tieren etc.

    

Edmund Husserl, Hua XIII: 8^[3]

In the spirit of the text used here as an epigraph, I assume that all philosophical or theoretical discourse on animal life, even (or mainly) the ethical discourse that wishes to initiate a new or a renewed meditation about our human behavior and our human practices before or with non-human animals, would surely benefit from a phenomenological theory of animal life, therefore, from a phenomenological theory of animal consciousness or animal subjectivity, its intentional correlate, the animal world, and what can be called the intentional mediator of the constitution of this world, that is, the animal body. My approach here wants to contribute to this complex theory, suggesting only some tentative reflections based on Husserl insights.

I divide my exposition into several issues or points. I will restrict myself here to a sober statement of these issues, and let their justification and/or their development aside.

§ 1.

Not only human consciousness or human subjectivity can be phenomenologically understood as transcendental. Also, animal consciousness or subjectivity in general, and specifically non-human animal consciousness or subjectivity can be conceived or apperceived as transcendental. In other words, transcendental subjectivity can be reached not only from a transcendental reduction accomplished upon our human subjectivity, but also from a reduction carried out upon an animal or a brute animal subjectivity. Of course, in many cases of animal subjectivities, the reduction could not be accomplished by the subject itself whose subjectivity is being considered, but by another subjectivity, or a subjectivity of another kind or pertaining to another species of animals. This intersubjective and interspecific reduction is precisely what we are carrying through, in general terms, at this moment. When we consider these possibilities, we are naturally led to the question whether there is only one essence, “transcendental subjectivity,” or whether it is a genus encompassing different species, i.e., whether it can diversify itself, so that it encompasses a variety of transcendental subjectivities. If this last possibility is accepted, we should ask, then, whether the proper theme or the proper subject matter of transcendental phenomenology is not a “generic” transcendental subjectivity, but rather this subjectivity in all of its possible, or real (wirklich), types. Looking at another aspect of the same issue, we can say that, even if the phenomenological and eidetic description of transcendental subjectivity’s life or lived- experiences—carried out by Husserl in many texts—may be in a great part common to all possible subjectivities, there may be many other aspects of this description that should be specifically diversified. This diversification must also mean, if we correctly conceive a transcendental subjectivity as a constituting subjectivity, a diversification of constitutive subjective performances. This takes us to the following point.

§ 2.

It belongs to the essence of transcendental subjectivity to constitute a world intentionally. Talking about different transcendental subjectivities leads one to talk about different intentional constitutions of the world or different world-constitutions. Now, this constituted world, whatever it is, is the world in which subjectivity constitutes itself as living, that is, it is the world in which it lives, in which it “mundanizes” itself. Brute animals, then, have a world constituted in and by their intentional life, and this constitution, and also this world as constituted, is in a functional relationship with their corporeality as a lived corporeality (a Leiblichkeit)—just as in the human case the human world is in “reference to” human corporeality. Of course, we may also add to these equations the different “souls,” or the different “psyches,” and we may also talk about their different and varied psychophysical conditions or organizations. To simplify the exposition, and considering that, on one hand, a soul is intimately linked to a body (as Leib), and, on the other hand, that a corporeality is always a subjectively lived corporeality, I will henceforth refer directly to this corporeality precisely as the embodiment of a subjectivity or a soul, as an animated corporeality. The main dimension to be considered regarding this corporeality and its role in world-constitution is sensibility (or sensitivity)—namely, the peculiar set and articulation of senses and sensations—for this dimension is in correlation to the sensible configuration of the world.

§ 3.

There might be (and in fact we think there is) a wide variety of sensibilities, along with a copious diversity of corporealities appertaining to an abundant diversity of animal species (real, and also possible). Hence, it is to be assumed that there is a wide variety of world-constitutions and, therefore, in a sense, a copious diversity of worlds. Insofar as we can talk in this way of a diversity of worlds, we are not referring to the true world (to true nature), to the objective world (objective nature). This true world or true nature, the objective world or nature, in a sense previous to the world of physics (which is precisely the world built to overcome any correlation to an embodied subjectivity), is the correlate of the normal human sensibility-corporeality-subjectivity. But, of course, not of a single isolated human individual, but of a plurality of subjects or, as they are referred to by Husserl, a plurality of monads, or a “compossible totality” of monads. Ideally (eidetically) we can abstain from specifying this plurality of monads as human; and even from the fact that this plurality has been itself constituted in the world as (a) humanity. There might be, possibly, other species of animals—rational animals, to be sure—that could be co-bearers of this true world, that is, that could be, with us, co-constituents of the true world. This human plurality, in the strict sense or in the extended sense that embraces other possible rational animals with which we could enter into communication (according to what Husserl calls an “essential concept of human”) (Hua XV: 163–164), has the constitutional privilege of being the norm for the constitution of the world and of the things in the world. Against it, all other world-constitutions—by the subjectivity of brute animals, real or possible—must be understood as anomalous variations.

Relative to the brute, man is, constitutionally speaking, the normal case—just as I myself am the primal norm constitutionally for all other men. Brutes are essentially constituted for me as abnormal “variants” of my humanness, even though among them in turn normality and abnormality may be differentiated (Hua I: 154 [126]).

The brute’s world is then an anomalous variation of the (human) world, of the true world. The same, or something similar, occurs with the world of the infant.

§ 4.

The “copious diversity of worlds” is not in truth a diversity of true or real worlds. They appear to me, or better, to us human beings as intentional modifications of the world that we already have and that already has for us a sense of being, of true existence. Thus, they appear to us as a diversity of “modes of appearing” of the only world there is, as variations or even deviations from the way in which the world appears to us. Now, if we maintain ourselves at the level of these “modes of appearing,” at the level of the world’s “intuitive truth,” or of the “intuitive world,” we must say that the human normal “mode of appearing” (the human intuitive or sensible world), the human normal sensible “representation” of the world, is only one among many possible others, and that there cannot be any real normality, any real optimum, among the different “worlds” of the different species of animals. We may find that human normality and the human “world” are in certain respects “superior” among those we are acquainted with, or that they are “richer” than the world of brutes, but we cannot assert—and no species of animals could assert for themselves—that we possess the “ultimate truth as the truth of intuition,” or a system of experiences whereby all properties of things would be exhibited, nor that that would be the ultimate—optimal—norm for all conceivable beings. The different species of animals, or brutes, have their own sensible, perceptive normality and abnormality (or abnormalities), and there is no sense (and it is also utterly impossible) to impose on them, so to say, our human normality. When we consider now the human capacity to reach, intersubjectively and only intersubjectively, the true world, the real world in which all those animals live and have their “representations” or “modes of appearing” of this same world or of certain dimensions of it, we can see that those representations cannot be made a part or a fragment of the human world, and therefore that they cannot contribute to its intersubjective constitution. In other words, in fact, only humans take part in the intersubjective constitution of our human world—although in idea, as said, other possible rational animals could also partake in it.

Furthermore, we must also recognize that brute animals do not really live in mere “world representations,” or in a world of mere appearances, in a sort of phantom world, but that they live in a world that has, for them, all the reality and the truth that they need. Husserl calls this truth “practical truth.” This extra-theoretical and pre-theoretical truth is previous (and also perhaps a condition) for the theoretical-predicative truth that emerges in a rational animal as the correlate of certain interests and certain attitudes. In any case, brutes have, or better, live, this kind of practical truth: “brutes, animal beings,” Husserl writes, “are like us subjects of a conscious life, wherein to them is also given, in a certain way, a ‘surrounding world’ as their own in certainty of being” (Hua XV: 177).

§ 5.

(1) Even if this phenomenological conception of a single true world against a diversity of intuitive worlds or world-representations with a practical truth solves the main ontological problem concerning the diversity of animal life, Husserl still sees (in Die Krisis) a transcendental problem in the sense of an “analogy” that traverses the different intentional modifications of those different intuitive worlds. It is the problem of precisely how can we attribute transcendentality to a multiplicity of living beings, beings with a conscious “life.” There are many different diversities that could be considered, and many different ways in which the “analogy” operates or works. The one we already mentioned, the one that holds between a rational and a brute animal, is only one of them, however important and decisive it may be. But the multiplicity and diversity of animal life—that is, again, of animal worlds, animal corporealities and sensibilities…—invites a somehow more detailed approach. How is it that we can talk about “inferior souls” without a waking life? How is it that we can think of the possibility of a mutual recognition (mutual empathy) between different animal species, but also of the possibility of a single-sided or unilateral recognition (unilateral empathy)? How could the diversity of animal life be ordered or classified from a phenomenological point of view? Which are the main divisions and the criteria to establish them that can be settled between animals (kinds, groups, etc.). How can we talk of higher and lower brutes, superior and inferior animals? The answers to all of these questions, and many others regarding the sense of the analogy of subjective, animal life, can only be attempted by means of delving into the experience of empathy. If empathy is after all a subject’s sense-giving experience and knowledge regarding the existence and nature of other subjects, then the phenomenological study of empathy should help us to theoretically acknowledge several open possibilities with respect to different capacities, corporealities, or worlds, in their relationship to ours.

(2) Although their givenness presupposes the primal presence of their body (their Körper), animals (animate beings, “animalia”) cannot be given to others in “primal presence” because they include or they are subjectivities. Just as human beings, they are also unities of corporeal bodies (Leibkörper) and souls (Seele); souls’ inner lives (or psyches), may be experienced only in appresentations that can never be resolved in presentations (Hua I: 139 [109]). In the experience of others there is—Husserl says—an accessibility “of what is not originally accessible” (Hua I: 144 [114]). Normally, in the case of the empathy of all other human beings this is the only inaccessibility that there is, whereas in the case of the empathy of other animate beings that we know, we find a second inaccessibility, or a second level of inaccessibility. Besides being the accessibility of what is originally inaccessible, empathy in this case may be seen also as the uncovering of a radical closure, which brings with itself a radical uncertainty… This is what makes the empathy of non-human animals abnormal. “All beings accessible to me through ‘empathic’ experiences are ‘intentional modifications’ of myself” (Hua XV: 162). With men, this modification is the modification of a subjectivity having the same sense, or belonging to the same originary type—the “Urtypus Mensch” (Hua XIV: 126)—, whereas, with other animals, the modification crosses the boundary of this sense, and falls onto a new type of subjectivity. This is prescribed, so to say, by the apperception of my own corporeal body (Leibkörper), with its stock of senses and sensibilities. The perception of the similarities and dissimilarities of the animal’s or brute’s body opens for me, and determines, a new type that in a certain sense remains closed for me, because we do not share a similar Leibkörper and what goes with it psychically and psychophysically (subjectively). Now, within this closure, there is a gradient of distance and indetermination, depending on the interpretation of the animal life that the analogy of its body allows. In the case of superior animals (and this seems to be its phenomenological definition) we can perform some imaginative actions of “stretching” ourselves or “snuggling up,” “in coincidence with the essential organs and groups of organs, with the corresponding kinesthetic systems, etc.” (Hua XIV: 117). This possibility is a sort of phenomenological evidence of the analogy among our types of subjectivity. With inferior animals, with which the apprehension of the body does not give us a basis to perform those actions, we come closer to the limits of empathy.

(3) In this situation, it might be thought that physics, the science of nature, could give us some help since any scientific determination gives the world “a sense that is identically the same for every subject involved in natural-scientific research,” and this determination can be referred back to the appearances (to intuitive lived experiences) of this subject and also, ideally, to the appearances of every subject, even of brute subjects (Hua IV: 171 [179]). This reference of scientific determinations to the appearances in non-human animals (appearances that depend on their corporeality and subjectivity) would give us—it might be expected—a clue to disclose their subjective life. In a certain measure, empathy allows brutes (or certain ones) to identify things intersubjectively and live in a common world, at least among the members of the same species. But this identification cannot reach an exact determination, and the exact determination that we rational humans can establish may be put in correspondence with the brute’s appearances or with other of its lived-experiences. While this is true, it cannot give us more, as I said, than a clue. The fact that the brute cannot express its life (lived-experiences, appearances, etc.) linguistically, or using other means of communication, determines that this correspondence established by us (by our science) will always have a margin of indetermination and uncertainty, precisely regarding the subjective life of the brute. The brute—the subject of appearances—cannot collaborate in putting them in relation with the things or their determinations, precisely because of the lack of an appropriate language. In this case, then, “‘Objective’ nature which is determinable as the intersubjective that belongs to all subjective existences (unities of appearance), as what ‘appears’ there in a higher sense,” can still be, of course, the “index of the intersubjective regulation of the unities of appearance in relation to their subjects,” but this very regulation will always maintain a conjectural character. These very unities of appearances must also be conjecturally inferred on the basis of the already objectified nature, already determined in science (Hua IV: 171 [180]). The conclusion is that the second inaccessibility of animal life will remain always an insurmountable limit, and brutes’ subjective life will always remain a shrouded area, an enigmatic field.

§ 6.

Husserl proposes a certain type of operation which he names “deconstruction” (Abbau), or, perhaps better, “dismantling” as a means to study animal consciousness or subjectivity (mainly non-human ones), along or within the type of empathy we may have of them. This dismantling is conceived of as a way of dealing with the problem of an ontology of experience, when I cannot use ontological propositions that are valid for other subjects. Genetically, our experiences are gradually structured towards higher, more complex ones with wider horizons. Then, we can systematically dismount our full experience: we can remove from us a determinate group of experiences and ask for the remaining horizons. I can refer to my lower stratum of experience and nature with regards to my embrionary or infantile development. The child sees the same things, but lacks a completely formed apperception, as well as many higher horizons. It still cannot embrace certain motivations. And the same takes place regarding inferior brutes. In an animate, organic individual we empathize levels of apperception, namely, of somatological apprehension, that correspond to its corporeality’s modifications, which are similar to modifications of our own corporeality; and we assign to its surrounding world certain levels of our apprehension of nature that constitutively correspond in us with those levels. There is a functional link between somatological understanding and the understanding of the kind of “surrounding world” for the subject. Dismantling is then a sort of adjustment of the correlation between a subject’s corporeality and its surrounding world. To each organ in me corresponds an organ of the same type in the body of the other, and the order and functional linkage of our organs corresponds to those that can be found or can be presumed in the other. The apprehension of the other follows exactly the apprehension of our body, not as a mere thing (as Körper) but as a system of functioning organs. What is apperceptively determinant is precisely the identity of this type of function, for instance (a very important instance), of the species homo. It seems to me that this determination contrasts with the already mentioned “essential concept” of humans, based solely on their rational capacity (or any other “higher” feature). We could even say that rationality always exercises itself within a certain functional corporeality. This peculiar corporeality, or this peculiar type of functional corporeality, is in correlation with the peculiar world, or the peculiar intuitive world, of that type of animal. We must acknowledge, then, that animal experience, animal empathy (empathy with animals), does not consist—as in our case between humans—of filling an ontological structure that already lies in our horizon, but in the new formation of an appropriate horizon with an appropriate formal structure. Therefore, the method of “dismantling” our own apperception-of-body-and-surrounding-world, necessarily has a constructive moment. It does not merely break down certain somatic functions in order to see what is left; it is a constructive device to build new systems of somatic functions and their worldly correlates.

§ 7.

An important, or perhaps decisive, key in the consideration of brutes (and brute life and world) is the distinction between passive and active life, that is, between a dormant conscious life and a waking conscious life. This distinction is perhaps the most acute step separating brutes and men. In terms of the dismantling method, it could be asked how and in what measure we must disconnect the active stratum of our consciousness’ life to reach the conscious life of brutes. Is the life of non-human animals a purely passive life, or can some activity be seen in it? With Husserl, we can discard in the brute animal life, to be sure, certain active experiences: in “the soul of the brute animal” “the stratum of theoretical thought in the pregnant sense is lacking” (Hua IV: 134 [142]). This is precisely why the objective correlates of the brute’s life lack their corresponding stratum of truth. Husserl also insists that we cannot find proper memories, proper remembrances, proper identifications of individual things and facts, proper expectations in brutes, but only a certain habitual, and passive recognition of things, places, and fellow subjects. We could refer, also with Husserl, to the most obvious features that characterizes human life as spiritual, cultural, personal life: brutes do not reflect, consider means and ends, nor have social deliberations and communitary goals, symbolic languages, history, and so on. We could extend this list indefinitely, but the problem is the precise demarcation of each “side.” The very concepts of activity and passivity—of actual and non-actual life—are at stake here. By all means, if the life of brute animals may be defined by its passivity, we need new concepts to understand their waking life: their way of paying attention, of taking certain initiatives, their so-called “intelligence” in solving tasks, sometimes rather complex tasks, etc. When Husserl characterizes a “waking” Ego in Ideas I, he explicitly includes brute animals: “We can define a ‘waking’ Ego as one which, within its stream of mental processes, continuously effects consciousness in the specific form of the cogito; which naturally does not mean that it continually gives, or is able to give at all, predicative expression to these mental processes. There are, after all, brute animal Ego-subjects” (Hua III/1: 73 [72]). In other texts he recognizes that the life of brutes is, in an analogous way to our own life, ego-centered, or “has something as an I-structure” (Hua XV: 177). And he also declares that we do not have “adequate words for this” (Hua XV: 177). That we are here at the frontiers of phenomenology is also shown by Husserl’s hesitations before deciding that brutes’ lives are led only by instincts and dragged by impulses, and, on the other hand, also by the instability of concepts such as “person” or “personal.” This term normally refers to humans: in some texts precisely the “I-structure” of human life is characterized as “personal,” in distinction to brutish life. But in the Cartesian Meditations he allows the existence of “infrahuman persons.” Here and there he writes that domestic animals are “humanized” brutes (Hua XV: 421), and, on the other hand, he also refers in other passages to “brutified” (vertierte) human beings (Hua XV: 158). How are these possibilities to be described?

§ 8.

Husserl’s distinction between inferior and superior brute animals, as well as his belief that humans are superior to all brutes, along with the dismantling idea and its implication that certain animality levels are somehow preserved within human organization, and thus open to discovery, strongly suggests its affiliation with the view of evolution as a single, progressive scale that progresses from the simplest unicellular organisms, or even from inorganic matter, until man as the culmination and summit of the entire process, and as the most perfected animal creature, at least on Earth. This affiliation has been able to suggest, at its turn, the possibility of a “transcendental theory of evolution” (San Martín 2007: 54–55), which assumes, not only that transcendental subjectivity is “the entire intersubjectivity,” all that “appears in the world as animal life,” but also that this intersubjectivity has as such a development over time. The diversity of animal life, and the differences between normality and abnormality, should be integrated into a “transcendental articulation” (Gliederung) as different stages of a teleological development (San Martín and Peñaranda 2001: 350). Sometimes Husserlian reflections on animal life approach a monadology—sometimes a sort of Leibnizian universal monadology—wherein a teleology is grafted as an integral aspect that at the level of human beings is revealed as a teleology of reason. These ideas are also intimately related to reflections attempting to prove or demonstrate transcendental idealism (Hua XXXVI), or related to a transcendental deduction of animal life (or of humanity’s past as a brutish past), or finally to the need of psychophysical beings for a world to be really existent.

Quite apart from the need to distinguish between what is still phenomenology and what is essentially a metaphysical construction in these reflections, I wish to emphasize here the need for a Husserlian phenomenology to start a dialogue with scientific research—paleontological, taxonomical, ethological, evolutionary, etc.—on animals and mainly brute animals. Without denying the justification, and in many cases the acuity, of Husserlian descriptions and observations concerning animals, perhaps phenomenology could display much more its capabilities if it used scientific research as a guiding thread (Leitfaden). Such vague distinctions as the one of lower and higher animals, for instance, could surely be greatly refined, if not completely overcome. In a certain sense, to be sure, there is no point in the idea of a phenomenological classification of animals. It would be silly and useless to try to repeat or refine in some way the task of the ethologist or the taxonomist, but it is not a silly task, I acquiesce, the program of phenomenologically reviewing the vast array of faces or roles that animals exhibit in our life. It is a humble, but indispensable, beginning in this direction the division between domestic and non-domestic animals, in which Husserl sees some quite interesting features. The “humanization” that he sees in the first class of this division deserves a phenomenological explanation, which concerns the animals involved in both groups. Furthermore, we have the many and varied aspects of our encounters with animals—tenderness, awe, panic, vulnerability, fun, curiosity, etc.—; they all deserve to be reviewed with a phenomenological eye. The same with their roles in human life: they are our friends, our toys, our tools, our slaves, our guides, our company, our therapeutical support; some we care about, some we sacralize, some we eat, some we torture with a purpose, others we torture without any purpose; some, perhaps to their relief, we ignore; and some, to their sorrow (perhaps, for some say non-human animals cannot really suffer) and (perhaps) to our shame, we also ignore…

A similar consideration could be made about the effective disregard of the theory of evolution, in its real complexity and detail. Husserl’s view—the classic view in his time and still prevailing today in common culture—of a single scale of development has been radically questioned, to say the least, as also the very idea of a scale, and even the consideration of humans as the end or highest stage of life’s evolution. Finally, even if Husserl’s teleological doctrine would not be put seriously into question by mere factual science, there are many motives in contemporary theory of evolution that can provide phenomenology with elements to enrich and develop its own retrospective, and constitutive, questioning. If I could name just one motive, I would mention the astonishing, even marvelous diversity and complexity of life (animal life) forms, which, in my view, offer the phenomenologist, as guiding threads, an imposing and fantastic laboratory in which to practice imaginative variations with empathy, or at the borders of empathy, so long as they are approached with the right attitude. But there are many other motives as well. Another instance of a serious motive for phenomenological reflections is the multiplicity of evolutionary lines, many of which are not located in the same lineage that has man as its last member. How it is that the phylum arthropoda, the most varied and abundant group of animals (brutes, to be sure) on Earth (about 80% of all known animals pertain to it), not only is not an antecedent of man, but it has not shown in millions of years any development to a “superior” nervous system, any thrust to reach an age of reason, in spite of the vastness of its evolutionary changes? On the other side, we find in cephalopods (octopuses, cuttlefish, squids) an intelligence that is far from our own, not only for its limitations, but also because it is built on a nervous system with remarkable peculiarities absent from our system. This fact might mean nothing in the end, but to me it means at least that the transcendental theory of evolution, or even the transcendental deduction of animal life and animal bodies, has not an easy task… It is certainly true, phenomenologically speaking, that I cannot interrogate brutes and cannot base my knowledge (Husserl refers to knowledge about the animal past) on the representations and the experiences of brutes; and that I can only make human science on the basis of human experience and human formations of knowledge (Hua Mat VIII: 444). But it is also true that to leave animal life, animal consciousness, animal corporeality and subjectivity aside, as if it were something already and long ago surpassed and therefore deprived of interest, can only mean a serious impoverishment of our phenomenological science and of our philosophy.

References

Husserl, Edmund. 1950 ff. Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke. Den Haag/Dordrecht/London/New York: Martinus Nijhoff/Kluwer Academic Publishers/Springer.

Hua I. 1950. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (pp. 1–39). Ed. Stephan Strasser = 1977. Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Hua III/1. 1976. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Ed. Karl Schuhmann = 1982. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Hua IV. 1952. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Ed. Marly Biemel = 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht / Boston / London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Hua XIII. 1973. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Erster Teil (1905-1920). Ed. Iso Kern.

Hua XIV. 1973. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil: 1921-1928. Ed. Iso Kern.

Hua XV. 1973. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil: 1929–1935. Ed. Iso Kern.

Husserl, Edmund. 2001 ff. Husserliana: Husserliana Materialien. Dordrecht/London/New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers/Springer.

Hua Mat VIII. Späte Texte zur Zeitkonstitution (1929-1934). Die C-Manuskripten. Ed. Dieter Lohmar.

San Martín, Javier. 2007. La subjetividad trascendental animal. In Para una filosofía de Europa. Ensayos de fenomenología de la historia (pp. 39–67). Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva/UNED.

San Martín, Javier and Mariluz Pintos Peñaranda. 2001. Animal Life and Phenomenology. Iin Steven Crowell, Lester Embree, Samuel J. Julian, Eds., The Reach of Reflection: Issues for Phenomenology’s Second Century. Vol. 2 (pp. 342–363). Boca Raton: Electron Press. www.electronpress.com.

---