Page 335 - Contribution To Phenomenology

328 DAVID CARR

is treated as a "phenomenon" in the sense of phenomenology, a
cogitatum within the overaU scheme Husserl describes as ego-cogito-
cotitatum-qua'Cogitatum, For Husserl the problem is how the other,
understood as a cogitatum cogitans, can be grasped out there in the midst
of the natural world of perceived objects, which includes human bodies.
Many of the problems of the Fifth Meditation derive from the fact that,
here as elsewhere, for Husserl perception is primary. The difficulty then
is to understand how, in this vast surrounding world of things^ I can
locate mon semblable, a fellow ego peeping out of one of those objects
and staring back at me.
Husserl's procedure here, whatever else its problems (and there are
many), indicates clearly the manner in which the intentional approach is
geared to our relation to the natural world, and that in two ways: first
because it starts with perception and the world of things, including bodies;
second, because the other, when he/she emerges, is defined almost
exclusively in negative terms, in opposition or contrast to things. And the
obvious question to be raised here is whether this approach can ever do
justice to the pervasiveness and priority of our social being and the a
priori character of our relation to others.
But there is the further question of whether, in spite of being
contrasted with natural objects as perceived, the other person is not still
being conceived in their image when he/she is treated as phenomenon or
cogitatum. Another way of asking this question is to ask whether the
problem of knowledge is not the central problem in a text like the Fifth
Meditation, and whether the other is being considered chiefly as an
object of knowledge. I have argued elsewhere^ that it is a mistake to
regard Husserl as addressing the classical problem of solipsism in the
Fifth Meditation even though he explicitly uses that term. He is not
trying to prove that others in fact exist. But he might be understood as
tracing the origins of the "concept" alter ego, as if one could somehow
begin without it and then, on the basis of perceptual experience, acquire
such a concept.
The latter, I believe, is what Schutz understands Husserl to be doing
when he speaks of Husserl's "attempt to account for the constitution of
transcendental intersubjectivity in terms of the operations of the
consciousness of the transcendental ego." As is well known, Schutz takes

* David CSLTT, Interpreting Husserl (DordTtchi: M. Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 45ff.