Body as res materialis

pp. 61-81

in: James Dodd, Idealism and corporeity, Berlin, Springer, 1997

Abstract

To consider a thing only in terms of res extensa is to focus on a very narrow sense of what is meant by "thing." The unity under question in the previous chapter was at least that of time and space, of the manifold of "moments" and "places, " and at most the internal structure of the aestheta as they unfold within these manifolds (whether it be color, warmth, or even the pre-phenomenal unity of the body as a multiplicity of Stellungsdaten). But that does not, for Husserl, fully constitute what a thing "is"; a thing is more than the coordination of a manifold of qualities, or a qualified extension. Along with its givenness in sensuous adumbrations—what we called its physicality—a thing is also a unity within a myriad of causal relations with other things. This being-in-relation to other things represents a higher order of interrelatedness than the sense-schema of the physical thing; for to grasp the world as an interrelatedness of things governed by relations of cause and effect is, ultimately, the basis of the apprehension of "nature."¹