Husserl’s phenomenology in front of the problem of the understanding of the true man

Abstract

Taking from the very beginning the question “what is men?” as theoretical basis, our major concern in the present work was to demonstrate that the epistemic gap, which is traditionally opposed to naturalistic models of mind, is not yet everything there is to know when it comes to explain the reasons for our disagreement regarding such models. If we are right, the key criterion that will show how much reductive materialism is unsustainable as a solution for the mind/body problem, is not a dispute in the epistemic domain, but, rather, a criterion that we could entitle as “the comprehension of human”, that is, the particular way we feel as a human. In fact, one must ask if the conception we make of ourselves as such human beings (or as a true men, to evoke the most famous expression of Descartes) can be included in the straightforward presentation of a vast assembly of organs. Furthermore, from an understanding of men as such an organic and material thing (a “pack of neurons”, as Francis Crick suggested), one can establish the idea of a Corporeal I (a Körper, according to the terminology of Husserl’s Ideen II), but that’s precisely the one which rules out the possibility on some kind of inner experience, that is, of an “auto-perception” or “inner-perception”: it will be, at the end, a body, but not consciousness of having such body, given that to consider this very last possibility of inner-perception requires the reintroduction of the difference – and therefore, of the relation – between minds and bodies, quite that particular distinction that was neglected by the reductive materialism as the only approach capable of circumvent the dualistic thesis for the mind-body relation.