Yang Li / The Other Within Ourselves?

yang-liEven before the publication of his Logical Investigations, Husserl had begun to analyze intentional consciousness as a matter-form complex: Perceptual intentionality, for instance, comes about when immanent non-intentional sensations are animated by an intentional apprehension.

Some praised this ‘matter-form model’ as a ‘Copernican revolution’ in the theory of perception, since natural attitude tend to take the external object as the cause of our sensations, whereas phenomenology takes the immanent sensations as a constitutive presupposition for a perceptual object. Like a stuffed dumpling, sensations ‘coated’ with meaning becomes the unperceivable ‘hard-core’ of what is perceived.

However, many have also criticized this model. One criticism has been that there is a tension in the claim that sensations are both unintentional in nature and essential for certain forms of intentionality. At the same time, Husserl also characterizes the hyle as foreign to consciousness and at the same time as belonging to the immanence of consciousness. The sensation’s mode of being consequently turns out to be enigmatic.

My doctoral research at CFS will engage with these classical ‘enigmas’. In the light of Husserl and his successors’ explorations, I will attempt to show how an analysis of hyle can illuminate central themes in transcendental phenomenology, including corporeality, temporality, selfhood and transcendental ego. Ultimately, my aim is to show that only a proper understanding of the hyle can lead to proper understanding of Husserl’s ‘transcendental idealism’.

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