An attempt at phenomenological description

Ignacio Quepons^[2]

Abstract

Different dimensions of the phenomenological analysis of the vulnerable body through the description of the horizons of embodiment are here explored. Starting from a genetically oriented phenomenological analysis, the paper highlights the different levels of co-intentions involved in the constitution of the lived body in relation to the reflection on the consciousness of its vulnerability. By emphasizing the relevance of the practical and affective horizons of embodiment and their relation to vulnerability, we suggest the relevance of a reflection on vulnerability in view of a phenomenological account of moral attitudes from a Husserlian perspective.

    

Keywords: lived body; genetic phenomenology; intentional horizons; vulnerability.

Resumen

El texto explora diferentes dimensiones del análisis fenomenológico del cuerpo vulnerable a través de la descripción de los horizontes de la encarnación. A partir de un análisis fenomenológico de orientación genética, se enfatizan los diferentes niveles de co-intenciones involucradas en la constitución del cuerpo vivido en relación con la reflexión sobre la conciencia de ser vulnerable. Al enfatizar la relevancia de los horizontes prácticos y afectivos de la encarnación y su relación con la vulnerabilidad, se sostiene la importancia de una reflexión sobre la vulnerabilidad para un abordaje fenomenológico de las actitudes morales desde una perspectiva husserliana.

   

Palabras clave: cuerpo vivido; fenomenología genética; horizontes intencionales; vulnerabilidad.

In the natural state, man’s skin is too thin for this world.

   

Bertolt Brecht, Jungle of Cities

§ 1. The intimacy of embodiment

In a manuscript probably written in August 1921, during a vacation at St. Märgen, Husserl develops a long reflection on the problem of the lived body. In this manuscript he writes: “above all the spatial things of my universal practical sphere, ‘my’ lived body is the most originally mine” (Hua XIV: 58), and he further adds that “my lived body is the closest to me above all things—the closest to perception, the closest to my feeling and will” (Hua XIV: 58). The quote recalls Descartes’ description in the Sixth of his Meditations on First Philosophy, where he describes the complex implication between our subjective life and the body that we experience as our own. In this passage, Descartes famously claims: “I am not only lodged in my body, like a pilot in his ship, but, besides that, I am joined to it very closely and indeed so compounded and intermingled with my body, that I form, as it were, a single whole with it” (1993: 53). Additionally, and in a certain way anticipating the so-called “somatological aesthesiology” (Hua V: 18 ff. [16 ff.])^[3] described by Husserl at the beginning of the treatise known as Ideas III, Descartes continues his explanation: “For, if this were not so, when my body is hurt, I would not on that account feel pain, I who am only a thinking thing, but I should perceive the wound by my understanding alone, just as a pilot sees by sight if any damage occurs to his ship”. For Descartes, the “intermingling of the mind and the body” (1993: 53) is grounded in an immediate, sensitive experience that manifests the body, my own body, as the “closest” among all the things I can experience. Descartes ends his description as follows:

[…] similarly, when the body needed food or drink, I should have an explicit understanding of the fact, instead of having confused sensations of hunger and thirst. For these sensations of hunger, thirst, pain and so on are nothing but confused modes of thinking which arise from the union and, as it were, intermingling of the mind and the body (1993: 53).

Furthermore, it is interesting to note that in Descartes’ example, the intermingling between mind and body is presented in terms of the experience of harm and bodily need. Consequently, the body and the sensations manifesting its reality are a source of knowledge not only about the features of my body, but about myself, albeit presented as “confused modes of thinking.” Therefore, I am not only a thinking thing but also something exposed to being harmed precisely because of such “intermingling of the mind and the body.” Thus, when Husserl famously describes the “experiential body,” the lived body, as a unity constituted in an aesthesiological field relatively independent of the physical thing and even of the geometrical abstraction of its figure and form, his description recalls Descartes’ account. However, the relation between the body, understood as a living body, and the corporeal body we are “lodged in,” so to speak, is more complex. In a way, the Husserlian distinction between lived body and corporeal body is anticipated by Descartes himself when he distinguishes between alia corpore (external bodies) and meum corpus, my own body (Marion 2018). Thus, in the passage cited, it is noticeable that the body I own is not reduced to the mechanism of the rest of the external bodies. The need and fragility of my own body, even in the sense of the corporeal and physical body I own, is not experienced, as Descartes holds, as an external damage to a boat, but as a harm to myself. Such harm is not merely a matter of external damage, but is immediately experienced in the most intimate sphere of affection as sensible pain. I experience myself because of this intermingling with my own body as something vulnerable.

With these suggestions as a point of departure, what follows is devoted to our attempt at a phenomenological analysis of the meaning of bodily vulnerability. However, a preliminary survey of the themes can help frame the more detailed analysis below.

§ 2. Preliminary orientation to the dimensions of bodily vulnerability

First of all, vulnerability refers not only to mere physical fragility, but to the situational horizon from which progressive anticipations of “possible harm” or “harm” in general emerge as something possible. Vulnerability is thereby to be considered as an essential dimension in the constitution of subjective embodiment, and it is manifest in a set of relations that can be described in terms of intentional structures and correlations. Here by “embodiment” I mean the constitutive unity of the lived body in terms of the phenomenon of sense and the appropriation of my own corporeal body as “a continuously on-going act” (Zaner 1964: 249) that involves the system of kinaesthetic capabilities as a horizon whose correlate is the understanding of the spatial field as the situation of my body in its experiential context in the broadest sense. In this regard, the condition of being affected by the environment is an essential moment in the condition of being an embodied subjectivity. Therefore, the development of the different layers of experience of the surrounding world is not independent from a dimension of understanding the surrounding world not only as the continuous correlate of fulfillments, but as a field of unpredictable possibilities of being harmed. Hence, it is possible to claim with Boubil that “vulnerability structures the subject’s experience of the world” (2018: 184). Moreover, bodily vulnerability covers other dimensions of emotional awareness of risk involving an intimate sense of self-consciousness as being “susceptible” to being harmed, injured, or even deprived of a practical aim (Harris 1997). Thus, vulnerability refers to the situational horizon of an intimate “fragility” that can be described not only in terms of the anticipation of physical harm, but in terms of the development of a sense of self-awareness grounded in syntheses of motivations and horizons of sedimentations resulting from experiencing resistance to the free flow of self-movement, but also negative fulfillments within the practical sphere. I am aware of my own limitations—limitations that arise from the very constitution of my embodied condition in terms of an affective consciousness of my own vulnerability.

The unfulfilled aims and negative affects motivate the emergence of a system of anticipations of “possible harm” based on prior experiences of deceptions or harmful affections, and this system structures a personal relation with my own body and the surrounding world. In this regard, the awareness of being vulnerable displays a sense of emotional risk connecting the perceptual horizons of embodiment to the practical sphere and revealing an essential link between feeling vulnerable and the development of value-consciousness. Thus, on the one hand, vulnerability reveals a realm of primal passivity connected to the kinaesthetic dimension of embodiment present in the constitution of the perceptual field of the surrounding world (Behnke 2009: 191); on the other hand, vulnerability reveals a deeper dimension of the human condition: the progressive development of a personal sensibility making possible moral emotions like compassion and solidarity. As an intrinsic relation of the self with its own body, then, vulnerability is not grounded in the mere physical “fragility” of the corporeal body; instead, from the point of view of vulnerability understood as a phenomenon of sense, it happens exactly the other way around: the emotional awareness of risk is precisely that which constitutes the primal meaning of feeling vulnerable, because it points to a horizon of possibilities belonging to an individual person and her or his embodiment in a non-transferable dimension.

§ 3. Time-consciousness, capability-consciousness, and modes of disruption

The attempt at a more detailed phenomenological description suggested here begins by outlining the intentional structure involved in the awareness of being vulnerable with regard to our embodied condition. This dimension is rooted in two essential aspects of bodily life: on the one hand, the dynamic structure of time-consciousness (Behnke 2009: 204), and, on the other hand, the ongoing constitution of bodily life understood as the synthetic unity of potentialities of self-motivated movement—the region of so-called corporeality or Leiblichkeit (Landgrebe 1983: 78).

In this regard, it is important to remark that the well-known Husserlian distinction between lived body (Leib) and physical body (Körper) does not correspond to an ontological distinction, but to two possible configurations of meaning. This distinction accordingly corresponds to the kind of synthesis involved in the constitution of each of these and their respective unities. In the case of the lived body, its unity is constituted by motivational syntheses grounded on the capability of self-movement (Behnke 2009: 192). Husserl himself recognizes the preeminence of the potentiality “I move” (Ich bewege) over the potentiality “I can” (Ich kann) (Hua IV: 258 [270]; Landgrebe 1983: 83). On the other hand, the constitution of the physical body is grounded in the realization of a progressive synthesis of causality. Both are forms of associative synthesis; however, the participation of the I in each synthetic nexus involves two different moments. The former progressively increases the sense of having my own movement—and thus the corporeal lived body (Leib-Körper)—at my disposal; the latter, essential for the constitution of the physical body, follows its own synthetic process, bringing out, in different stages of constitution, the progressive development of a stable surrounding horizon of other objects and the regularities of their respective behaviors. Certainly, in either case a kinaesthetic synthesis is involved, but in two different directions: on the one hand, in static-phenomenological terms, the sensible synthesis of self-motivated movement is the constitutive condition for the progressive exhibition of the physical objects through adumbrations, but on the other hand, in genetic-phenomenological terms, such a progressive exhibition of the objects of perception presupposes that the acquisition of the synthesis of the unity of the lived body in its primal potentiality—self-movement—has already been accomplished (Hua XI: 13 ff. [49 ff.]).

Thus, the progression of the experience develops a set of habitualities occasioning in the constitution of different levels of normality and familiarity, resulting in at least two layers. On the one hand, every act of perception not only involves a given content, but is the result of a dynamic horizon of inner relations and external references of each lived content. One of the most important dimensions of such dynamics is the role of bodily motion in the development of the appearances of the many aspects of the correlate of perception. On the other hand, there is another sense of familiarity grounded in the reinforcement of a sense of confidence resulting from accomplishing the continuation of the flow of bodily movement. I can move my eyes or get closer to the object I want to observe, I can move around to discover other dimensions, and in certain contexts I can even take the object into my hands and explore it in many ways, not only visually—I can smell it or feel its textures. Nevertheless, what is common to all this exploration is the possibility of moving myself throughout the entire process of perceptual exploration, and the fulfillment of the motor intentionality in the actual accomplishment of the movement as motivating a sense of confidence in my own bodily movement.

The continuity in the flow of self-motivated movement could be described in terms of kinaesthetic synthesis, which is itself a motivational synthesis that Husserl understands as a practical motivational synthesis (Hua XI: 107 ff. [152 ff.]). Consequently, in phenomenology, sensitive affection is understood not as the mere reception of sensible data, but as the result of a passive synthesis of motivation, linking the incitement of sensations with the awakening of an active disposition. Thus, sensations are not isolated building blocks for the intentional structure of consciousness, but are, in a way, a primitive form of intentional direction synthesized by the self-motivated movement of the body.

Additionally, the display of the potentiality of self-motivated movement and the correlative exhibition of the physical objects brings to light the undeniable relation between the syntheses pertaining to time-consciousness and those pertaining to kinaesthetic motivation in the constitution of space and spatial objects. Furthermore, since bodily movements are always movements towards a certain direction that preserves the sense of the original motivation, it passively anticipates or projects a temporal sequence or cadence of its own movement.

Moreover, the unity of the lived body is the core of an ongoing process of explication of sense through horizons. In the case of the experiential horizon of embodiment, we may elucidate an inner horizon comprising the unity of the kinaesthetic nexus related to the individual body and an external horizon shaped by the spatial field and the relations of proximity and distance among other physical bodies. In this context, the expression “horizon” refers to the field of intentional implications of sense where each lived experience is connected, while it occurs, to a variety of implicit co-intentions (Mitmeinungen) that anticipate and contribute to the process of the explication of meaning as a result of such a complex of references (Hua I: 82 [44]).

The first meaning of vulnerability, then, refers to the possibility of a sudden discontinuity of the set of anticipations regarding the free flow of bodily movement, resulting in the experience of harm. As Agustín Serrano de Haro has noticed, the experience of pain pulls attention to the part of my body that hurts; in addition, however, we feel this disturbance of attention in terms of a discontinuity in the flow of a practical direction (2010: 124).

Thus, on the one hand, the unity of the ongoing process of embodiment involves an inner horizon referring to the inner kinaesthetic system, grounded in a set of potentialities of self-motivated movement; on the other hand, we have an external horizon of the lived body, one that we may describe in terms of its limits and exteriority. This “external limit” corresponds not only to the physical limits of the corporeal body, but to the entire situation of immediate resistance to the free flow of self-motivated movement.

Here we may find one of the most important descriptive clues for a phenomenological account of vulnerability: namely, the horizon of unexpected resistance or sudden unpredicted limitations of the self-motivated movement of the body. Nevertheless, such a limitation is not enough to describe vulnerability completely. The relations of distance and proximity among bodies may result in sudden invasive affections of the lived body that not only deprive us of the capability of self-movement, but result in physical harm and unpleasant sensations. Thus, depending on the circumstances, the anticipation of such sudden affections constitutes the exteriority of the situated lived body, not only in terms of physical limitations, but as subject to being harmed by external causes.

Furthermore, harm could be understood in this regard as an unpleasant affection that is manifested in the sensation of pain and suffering. In terms of the dynamic constitution of the lived body mentioned above, such affection could be described as the frustration of the proto-tendency involved in bodily movement. Harm is therefore mainly experienced as the confirmation of the failure of a practical aim grounded in the tendency of lived-bodily movement, simultaneously experienced with an invasive and unpleasant affection. Thus, the physical pain that belongs to the lived experience of being bodily harmed is not independent from the sense of frustration related to the failure of a passive expectation of self-movement. Hence, even the most basic sensuous pain associated with the experience of suffering harm could be described not as a mere isolated sensuous lived experience, but as if it were surrounded by several layers of associative syntheses, and always in the context of a kinaesthetic motivation.

Moreover, Agustín Serrano de Haro has also noticed how important it is to consider the motion (Regung) of pain in the description of such an experience.

Pain always describes a trajectory, for the moment attentional, but it may vary either in degree, in its corporeal diffusion, in its quality, or even in its own aversive impact. We may perhaps claim that pain is not a static affection, but displays its own type of dynamic movement: there is always a ‘motion’ in pain itself. What may start as a sudden shock, an instantaneous commotion, turns into an affliction that lingers and changes (2010: 136).

The trajectory or route, so to speak, of pain is linked to the kinaesthetic nexus, which is at the same time a condition of possibility of a bodily passive anticipation of harm. Additionally, after a painful experience, there remains not only a reflective memory of the unpleasant event, but also an affective resonance linked to this bodily awareness, an affective “after-echo” that may derive from the progressive realization of my own condition as something vulnerable. As we shall now see, however, the affective resonance also reverberates across further registers of experience.

§ 4. The emotive horizon and the horizon of alterity

The experience of the emotive horizon, related to the emergence of feeling vulnerable, appears through the phenomenon of a resonance of the environment in my body. Nevertheless, since the body is at the same time the expression of my disposition and of my being situated in the surrounding world, such resonance may be experienced in the context of vulnerability as the bodily expression of my feeling exposed to harm.

Therefore, consciousness of vulnerability involves an emotional anticipation of harm, accompanied by such emotive dispositions as fear, concern, or anxiety. In the reflective sphere, the consciousness of vulnerability appears as a belief motivated by former experiences of failure in my practical capabilities to perform actions; of the eventual consequences of such failures; and of the fact of being physically exposed, especially because we expect such failures to lead to external affections. The recognition of self-vulnerability may also give rise to some other complex attitudes such as courage or trust. However, the primal experience of this dimension of sense lies in the intertwining between the practical limits of my bodily capabilities and the anticipation of a limitation of my control over my immediate circumstances (a topic to which we shall return).

The anticipation of the failure of any possible project is an implicit recognition of the limitations not only of my body, but of my entire life, and this results in a pre-reflective and practical awareness of myself as subject to harm. In contradistinction to the reflective movement that discloses transcendental subjectivity for the purposes of the philosophical clarification of the constitution of sense in an epistemological context, there are practical modes of intentional reference that reveal through their own horizons the realm of the worth of our life as a personal and individual life given prior to any theoretical account of ourselves (Steinbock 2014: 11–26).

However, another relevant aspect for the phenomenological clarification of bodily vulnerability is alterity. In the phenomenological context, alterity is an essential dimension for the constitution of the individual person. The constitution of the lived body as a personal body implies interpersonal and social interaction because of its permanent exposure to the world and to others. The body is not the mere objectivation of subjectivity, but the sign of its self-exteriority (Hua XIV: 414–421). The original experience of the other is grounded in the experience of my own exteriority as subject to being affected by others and the corresponding apperception of the body of the others in the same terms. Moreover, since the others experience my body precisely in the way I experience their bodies, I can realize how vulnerable they are in the same way (Hua XIV: 338). Hence, vulnerability shows how concrete and personal subjectivity is intrinsically embedded and immersed in the world as the horizon of its own constitution. The affective horizon is an essential moment of the co-constitution of subjectivity and the surrounding world. This condition of being exposed to the world is an undeniable anthropological dimension of the human person. As Helmuth Plessner remarks, humans do not stand in their center, but find themselves always outside themselves (1928: 424), and perhaps such eccentricity is at the same time the very reason for our need for moral orientation. The vulnerability of our social bonds is the reason for our claim of a moral perspective. Nevertheless, in order to address our concrete problems as human persons, such moral reflections should consider our concrete condition as precarious beings in a hostile world as a starting point. Thus, the very attempt to address the implications of the lived experience of vulnerability for broader moral issues requires returning to our chosen descriptive task, for as we have indicated, the horizon of vulnerability implies yet another level: the loss of control over the circumstances.

§ 5. Vulnerability, control, and dependence

My self-motivated movement, along with the progressive confidence in my “control” over my own movement, has as its correlate the configuration of the perceptual field according to a familiar style whereby the surrounding world appears to me. Such command not only of my own bodily movements but also of the correlative display of the practical field progressively produces a sense of “control” over the circumstances. In contrast, resistance as the external horizon defining the limits of self-motivated movement, is the expression of my lack of control.

In this regard, the progressive feeling of lack of control over the circumstances that comes with the emotional awareness of risk, constitutive of the feeling of vulnerability, displays our connection to elements that we consider important for our well-being, yet exceed our control (Nussbaum 2005: 42). Therefore, vulnerability is always felt as a kind of emotional awareness of risk derived from the lack of control over the circumstances, concurrent with the development of an affective consciousness of the value of something I am afraid of losing. The starting point of such a becoming aware of our essential vulnerability arises from embodiment itself. Thus, for example, the sudden experience of resistance or of the failure of practical kinaesthetic motivations defines a horizon of limitation of movement, which is at the same time the expression of my lack of control; it accordingly manifests the emotional risk related to feeling vulnerable.

Additionally, this description of emotional risk opens the way to the formation of a particular sense of affective “dependence” involved in the experience of feeling vulnerable. At this point, it is interesting to consider the following remark made by Jan Patočka in his explanation of this issue in Husserl’s phenomenology: “The bodily ‘I can’ is the consciousness of freedom. […] It is, however, a freedom in dependence. In order to bring anything whatever about, we depend on this bodily field and on all that opens before us within it” (1996: 144). Additionally, Patočka states:

The dependence of freedom seems to us basic to a crucially important phenomenon that stands at the center of the fundamental layer of our activity. Our bodily existence is dependent on the objectively significant field also because the body here is not identical with itself as a passive datum. The body is not only the act center which initiates action but it is also that at which its dynamics aim: it is hungry or thirsty, it desires air, light, movement […] It is thus the starting point of an action which returns to it in satisfaction, and the polarity of dissatisfaction-satisfaction lies at the root of need. The body is in need in principle, not accidentally; it wants to be constantly cared for, and in this caring-for it is always dependent on its field (1996: 145).

In this regard, it is interesting to point out that in either case, the nexus of anticipation of harm as an integral moment of the emergence of the awareness of upcoming danger and the feeling of dependence have in common a sort of unpleasant experience that comes from different levels of frustration arising from pain and suffering. The constitutive condition of the very unity of this experience, the kinaesthetic nexus, is suddenly frustrated when we are affected with pain. Such a condition immediately makes us realize a factual limitation of our vulnerable condition and an irreducible need in the sense pointed out by Patočka.

Here we must recall that the sense of “dependence” in play is not a relation of “causality”, but a “motivational” relation. According to Husserl, in order to give an account of pure subjectivity we are supposed to bracket the “causal” dependence pertaining to our psychophysical condition in order to gain the realm of experience considered for its own sake. However, the intentional relations laid bare after the transcendental reduction exhibit motivational links that require the constitution of the lived body in order to give an account of the perceptual world. Considered in these terms, then, such a constitution involves an essential sense of vulnerability revealed in terms of pure phenomena of sense.

§ 6. Further descriptive horizons of vulnerability

Vulnerability certainly refers to a relational dimension that belongs to the circumstances. Nevertheless, by describing the phenomenological dimensions of this experience, it is possible to point out that what is affected while feeling vulnerable is neither external nor accidental, but essential to the constitution of the lived body and the perceptual world as such: as long as such vulnerability affects the primal capabilities of the subject expressed in the ongoing kinaesthetic synthesis, it affects the very core of the facticity of subjectivity, its intimacy, which can be described through the transcendental phenomenological method in terms of its own immanence. But there is much more descriptive work to be done here.

For example, thus far we have considered the sense of vulnerability as a situational phenomenon laid open by the temporal dimension of the motivational nexus, focusing on such structures as the anticipation motivated by our confidence in our own capability of self-movement and its disappointment in the form of resistance, attentional discontinuity, and lack of control. But spatial horizons also play a key role in other regards: the specific place where I am is what makes me vulnerable in many respects. The spatiotemporal field of perception is not only a correlate of intentional acts but a horizon, a “play-field” (Spiel-raum) for the lived body as the medium for the exhibition of the world. However, such a “play-field” does not always appear as an “open field” for my freely motivated movement; instead, another original mode of its manifestation is precisely as resisting my movement. In this way, the original constitution of nature involves an interplay between my bodily movement and reality’s resistance against my will and the limits of my control. As Patočka suggests, such limitation is not accidental, but essential. In a way, what vulnerability reveals is how the limits of the experience are constituted at the very same time as the openness of the world-horizon I can engage with is constituted.

This double aspect of vulnerability, with its essentially interrelated moments of openness and limitation, additionally suggests that vulnerability does not necessarily mean weakness, but offers the possibility of the affirmation, through the awareness of such fragility, of a life purpose beyond mere survival instinct. For example, the force for overcoming an integral breakdown of our life may come from our experience of taking care of and loving other persons, and of the fact that others may likewise care about us (Harris 1997: 130). Thus, here the themes of alterity and moral comportment once again emerge in connection with the lived experience of vulnerability. Moreover, it belongs to the sense of our vulnerability that it provides a framework for understanding the individual existential import of certain situations, especially those concerning our own life, and the lives of other persons, as mattering enough to keep fighting for after a tragedy.

Therefore, the anticipation of the possible failure of a project, or even the complete failure of all our enterprises, involves an implicit sense of awareness of our condition—an awareness that discloses, in an eminently practical way, the worth of our own life and of the lives of the people important in our life. Accordingly, vulnerability exposes our condition as precarious beings, which, following authors such as Emmanuel Levinas, is precisely what compels us to take responsibility. Moreover, vulnerability is also evident in the negative assessment of the worth of an individual life, especially in marginalized members of the community. Our awareness that every life does, in fact, have intrinsic value is rooted in our very embodied nature. In consequence, to feel compassion not only involves empathetic acts of perception—for example, of other people suffering—but also the realization that such fragility discloses a common possibility of humanity that serves as a condition of possibility of ethical encounters, recognitions, and a concrete perspective on ethical social bonds.

References

Behnke, Elizabeth A. 2009. Bodily Protentionality. Husserl Studies 25 (3): 185–217.

Boubil, Elodie. 2018. The Ethics of Vulnerability and the Phenomenology of Interdependency. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 49 (3): 183–192.

Burggraeve, Roger. 1999. Violence and the Vulnerable Face of the Other: The Vision of Emmanuel Levinas on Moral Evil and our Responsibility. Journal of Social Philosophy 30 (1): 29–45.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso.

Crespo, Mariano. 2019. From Empathy to Sympathy: On the Importance of Love in the Experience of the Other. In Frode Kjosavik, Christian Beyer and Christel Fricke, Eds. Husserl’s Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity: Historical Interpretations and Contemporary Applications (pp. 235–248). London: Routledge.

Descartes, René. 1993. Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Gilson, Erin C. 2014. The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice. New York: Routledge.

Harris, George W. 1997. Dignity and Vulnerability: Strength and Quality of Character. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hoffmaster, Barry. 2006. What Does Vulnerability Mean?. Hastings Center Report 32 (2): 38–45.

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. Ed. Stefan Strasser = 1960. Cartesian Meditations. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Hua V. 1952. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften. Ed. Marly Biemel = 1980. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundations of Science. Trans. Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Hua XI. 1966. Analysis zur passive Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten 1918-1926. Ed. Margot Fleischer = 2001. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Lectures on Transcendental Logic (pp. 39–274, 425–547, 577–634). Ed. and trans. Anthony Steinbock. Dordrecht, Boston & London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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

Hua XXXIX. 2008. Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916-1937). Ed. Rochus Sowa.

Landgrebe, Ludwig. 1983. Faktizität und Individuation. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.

Marion, Jean-Luc. 2013. Sur la pensée passive de Descartes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France = 2018. On Descartes’ Passive Thought: the Myth of Cartesian Dualism. Trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nussbaum, Martha. 2005. Upheavals of Thought: the Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Patočka, Jan. 1996. An Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology. Ed. James Dodd. Trans. Erazim Kohák. Chicago: Open Court.

Plessner, Helmuth. 1928. Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Quepons, Ignacio. 2014. El temple de ánimo y los horizontes de la vida corporal: esbozo de una sistematización fenomenológica. Anuario Colombiano de Fenomenología 8: 54–72.

Serrano de Haro, Agustín. 2010. Atención y dolor: Análisis fenomenológico. En Cuerpo vivido (pp. 123–161). Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro.

Steinbock, Anthony J. 2014. Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Steinbock, Anthony J. 1999. Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Zaner, Richard M. 1964. The Problem of Embodiment: some Contributions to a Phenomenology of the Body. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

---