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PHAINOMENA XXV/98-99 THE HORIZONS OF EMBODIMENT is supposed to help us grasp the essence (eidos) of a given phenomenon: by imaginatively altering various properties of the phenomenon in question, Husserl believes that we may arrive at its essence, i.e., to a horizon of invariant aspects within which that phenomenon can change without losing its unique identity (Zahavi 2003: 39): 212 “Suppose we are seeking the essence of an act of perception itself, an example Husserl gives in the Cartesian Meditations. We can take any current perception, for example seeing a table, and then seek to alter its constituent parts, while retraining the perceiving element in the act. The essential features are those which cannot be varied in our imagination. Imaginative free variation plays a helpful role in allowing the eidos or essence of the phenomenon to manifest itself as the structure of its essential possibilities. (Moran 2000: 155)” Now, transferred onto somatic perception, eidetic variation might enable me to modify my factual self-givenness as this particular human Leib, in order to ultimately arrive at the essence of being a bodily ego, or the essence of being a Leib in general. For instance, when I face the potted plant on my windowsill, I can eidetically self-modify by imagining myself as being in its place: what would it be like to be a potted plant, to have a plant-shaped body, etc.? The general question here is whether we could, by performing this type of imaginative operation, gain any essential insight into what it’s like to have a Leib for every living being (plants included). Husserl was convinced that the main value of eidetic variation lies in its uncovering of the universal structures of experience, which presumably hold for all conceivable variations of subjectivity. So, for instance, even if I imagine myself being a potted plant, I must conclude that all transcendent objects that enter into a perceptual relation with my vegetal body will still appear to me perspectivally, i.e., they will give themselves to me not in “one fell swoop”, but through a series of perspectives, or “adumbrations” (Abschattungen), as Husserl called them. This holds true for all embodied living beings, be it plant, animal, or human. Furthermore, when applied to the alien plant body, eidetic variation proves beneficial in that it supports the viability of empathy by stimulating my
PETER GAITSCH & SEBASTJAN VÖRÖS capability of imagining alien modes of bodily life. 5 This becomes clearer if we take into account that the process of eidetic variation includes the so-called genetic “dismantling reduction” (Abbaureduktion), which Husserl, drawing on the jellyfish case mentioned above, elucidates as follows: “We can, to a certain extent, systematically dismantle our fullblown experience ([our] perception, [our] originary experiential apperception), [and] we can consider how perception is constituted from its horizons if we exclude certain experiences from the genesis [of the overall experience], that is if we assume that certain groups of experiences are impossible in principle. […] (Hua 14: 115, our translation and emphasis)” And, on another occasion, he writes: “We can only say this much: there is, in the human environment (Umwelt) and in the human being itself, as its subject, a layer that can be abstractly discriminated – a layer of animality (das Tierische), that is to say, that which is shared with the animal (and whose unearthing requires a more in-depth examination). (Hua 15: 180, our translation)” 213 Hence, my attempts to imagine alien modes of bodily life are not entirely ungrounded, but can orientate themselves towards the imaginative “inversion” of my genetic becoming. This would mean that, by progressively dismantling in my imagination various layers of my experiential edifice, I can find, lurking hidden underneath the upper (genetically more recent) strata, the experiential 5 Some authors explicitly deny that imagination plays a central role in empathy (e.g. Zahavi 2012b: 237). However, since Husserl treats imagination in the context of eidetic self-modification in CM IV, which may be read as paving the way for the topic of intersubjectivity in CM V, it seems important to elucidate the exact nature of the link between empathy and imagination. Even if imagination does not play a central role in empathy in general, we might still maintain that there can be various “modifying types of empathy” (Abwandlungsformen der Einfühlung) (Hua 29: 329, our translation), and that it therefore plays a role in a certain type of empathy, e.g. in empathy towards anomalous living beings.
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