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LIFE AND THE REDUCTION TO THE LIFE-WORLD

Abstract
Husserl’s Crisis contains his final attempt to understand the world in terms of an ultimately constituting consciousness. The path he chooses is that of a reduction to the “life-world,” the world that appears when we bracket the results of the objective sciences. His claim is that “the ‘objective’ a priori [of the natural sciences] is grounded in the ‘subjective-relative’ a priori of the lifeworld”. It is from the latter that he attempts to achieve his vision of “a universal, ultimately functioning subjectivity”. In this article, I question whether this is possible. If the world were the product of this functioning subjectivity, the latter could not be part of the world. But, the inherent sense of the reduction to the life-world leaves us with the sensuous embodied subject, who is a part of the world. How can we think of the a priori in terms of this subject? I conclude by considering both Merleau-Ponty’s and Patočka’s attempts to conceive of such an a priori.

Key words
Life-world, subjectivity, a priori, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Patočka, Hans Jonas.

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