The awareness of embodied existence

pp. 477-491

in: Aron Gurwitsch, The collected works of Aron Gurwitsch (1901-1973) III, Berlin, Springer, 2010

Abstract

In taking the Ego as an empirical object, we are no longer justified in leaving its corporeity out of account. That would be justified and even required in an egological conception of consciousness. Roughly defined, the task of phenomenology consists in accounting for objects of all kinds in terms of those experiences, acts, and act-systems through which these objects appear to consciousness and present themselves as they are for us, both in common life and in special attitudes, such as those of science, art, etc. The Ego must be included among the objects to be accounted for. In an egological conception of consciousness, every act is assumed to be experienced as springing or emerging from the Ego and as intrinsically connected with the latter and this connection, whatever its more precise nature, is assumed to be represented in the act as one of its describable features. But the egological conception must allow for the Ego also becoming an object for consciousness.