The Relativity of the Soul and the Absolute State of the Pure Ego

Abstract

The body-soul problem, as known from the metaphysical tradition, receives a new dimension resulting from the specific definition of the subject in transcendental phenomenology. If Husserl attempts to describe the personal I as a ‘psycho-physical unity’¹ this is not to be seen as ontological realism, which could imply the equal validity of the observations of the natural sciences and of the human sciences. According to his position of transcendental idealism it would be virtually pointless “to require a psychophysical ‘causal explanation’ of the qualities of mind of an individual as that which is the requirement and the one and only scientific requirement to fulfil the function fulfilled by natural explanation in the physical sphere”.² The purpose of a phenomenological description of the relationship between body and soul must lie on a different level. According to Husserl’s definition “the soul” is the “unity of qualities of mind founded on the basic perceptual qualities”³ and receives its reality due to the fact that as the unity of the life of the soul it stands in combination with the body as the unity of bodily being, which is itself part of nature.⁴ This “interrelationship between the events of mind and body”⁵ implies that matters relating to the soul can never be experienced as separated from the ‘nature’ of bodily experience.⁶ To describe the multiplicity of this interrelationship is the main task of phenomenological description. In his Ideas Husserl tries to show that ‘Nature’ and the body and related to it the soul, are “interrelated with each other and together form a whole”.⁷ In this context he sees the body as the “meeting point of the causality of mind and the causality of nature”,⁸ within which causal relationships are transformed into conditional relationships between the “outer world” and the “subject consisting of the body and the soul”.⁹ The reality of the soul is founded on bodily existence,¹⁰ which is, as it were, the “starting point” of the world view of the subject.¹¹ Thus the whole conscious mind of the human being is due to its material foundation related to the body in a certain way.¹² “My body as a point or departure in the absolute here”¹³ is the precondition of all nature constituted in an intentional relationship to the perceiving body.¹⁴