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PHAINOMENA XXV/98-99 THE HORIZONS OF EMBODIMENT that world, but the system of anonymous ‘functions’ which draw every particular focus into a general project. (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 296)” 222 Thus, we can take up what was said earlier regarding the role of genetic dismantling (Abbau) in the context of imaginative variation (see section 2.1) and say that, by a personal (egoic) enactment of the dismantling reduction, I may discover, within myself, a pre-personal (non-egoic) basic layer of experience, “another subject beneath me”. This finding provides me with the semantic resources that are needed for appresenting an elementary kind of subjectivity; however, this time the imaginative variation is not free-floating, but motivated and restrained by the way the encountered body is given to me. Put simply, by facing up to my own genetic (temporal, multi-layered) constitution, I get a basic idea of what it would mean to attribute elementary subjectivity to a plant body. 12 Of course, the bio-phenomenological idea of appresentation does not resolve all the problems that are in potential conflict with this account. Above all, there remains the pressing question of whether our human capacities for eidetic self-modification, coupled with the well-founded motivations gained through intercorporeal pairing, will ever turn out to be sufficient for experientially appresenting elementary subjectivity in any specific entity – say, in the case of the potted plant resting silently on my windowsill. This, it would seem, remains a matter of contingency, a mere hypothetical speculation. In order, however, to at least partly mitigate this worry, we may recall that the human Leib serves only as a contrast foil and that the anticipated outcome of said appresentation is therefore not to adequately represent the supposed elementary subjectivity – the “originary inaccessibility” of foreign subjectivity remains an ineradicable fact – but rather to experience oneself in the presence of another subjectivity. We may call this a Levinasian-inspired turn, which tentatively goes beyond what was originally intended by Husserl in the direction of practically inverting the meaning of appresentation (Marder 2014). Applied to the vegetative body I am currently perceiving this interpretation of appresentation would imply what is 12 Accordingly, to meet the challenges of “pre-animal monads” (vortierische Monaden), Husserl, in his later reflections (around 1933), assumes that there exists an “infinity of monadic levels” (Unendlichkeit von Monadenstufen) (Hua 15: 595, our translation).
PETER GAITSCH & SEBASTJAN VÖRÖS called a “counter-experience” (Marion 2002: 215) in similar examples of limit phenomena: it is not so much the plant that enters my field of presence, but rather, in a quite uncanny experience, me who is entering its field of presence. 3. Conclusion Such, then, is the general outline of botanical somatology as conceived through the lens of the “biological rendition” of the tripartite empathic procedure in Husserl’s CM. The first step, eidetic self-modification, is a methodological tool that enables me to imaginatively modify my self-givenness as this particular human Leib so as to arrive at the essence of lived corporeality, and thus shed light on the living body which I am currently perceiving. However, due to its unconstrained (imaginative) nature, its main usefulness, particularly when confronted with an anomalous life form, is in supporting the empathic process by initiating the “dismantling reduction”, and thus paving the way to later steps, in which it must find its ultimate grounding. The second step, intercorporeal pairing, denotes a pre-reflective synchrony or resonance between my lived body and that of the encountered alien being. The most important point here is that such intercorporeal resonance is not a matter of inference or projection, but rather of an on-going, dynamic interplay between the two bodies that occurs on a pre-reflective level. Finally, appresentation of an alien field of experience is the direct experience of elementary subjectivity (another “stream of presence”) in the encountered being: grounded in the on-going process of the intercorporeal pairing, I apperceive the other human being as yet another sphere of lived experience. This apperception, however, is not meant to be an adequate representation, but rather a co-presentation or co-experience: the subjectivity of the other is presented to me through the presentation of my subjectivity to the other. The common thread that has been weaving through all three steps is the necessity of the pre-egoic (pre-reflective) and bilateral construal of empathy: the empathic process is no longer a matter of my trying to reflectively subsume the foreign embodiment under my particular mode of embodied being, but rather a matter of a pre-reflective resonance and co-presentation at the most rudimentary level of (co)being: an on-going, pulsating corporeal congruence at 223
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