Key Arguments

• Husserl explicitly notes that after ownness-purification ‘I have lost my natural sense as Ego, since every sense-relation to a possible Us or We remains excluded, and have lost likewise all my worldliness, in the natural sense.’
• Despite this loss, he insists that ‘in my spiritual ownness, I am nevertheless the identical Ego-pole of my manifold “pure” subjective processes, those of my passive and active intentionality, and the pole of all the habitualities instituted or to be instituted by those processes.’
• He affirms that this abstractive sense-exclusion still ‘leaves us a kind of “world” still, a Nature reduced to what is included in our ownness’ and that predicates such as ‘value’ and ‘works’ also occur in the reduced world, though ‘None of this is worldly in the natural sense … it is all exclusively what is mine in my world-experience, pervading my world-experience through and through and likewise cohering unitarily in my intuition.’
• He points out that the reduced world-phenomenon retains spatiotemporal form and externality between reduced ‘Objects’, underscoring its structured, quasi-worldly character within ownness.
• Crucially, Husserl observes that ‘The psychic life of my Ego (this “psychophysical” Ego), including my whole world-experiencing life and therefore including my actual and possible experience of what is other, is wholly unaffected by screening off what is other.’
• From this, he concludes that ‘there belongs within my psychic being the whole constitution of the world existing for me and, in further consequence, the differentiation of that constitution into the systems that constitute what is included in my peculiar ownness and the systems that constitute what is other.’
• Thus, even after the exclusion of alien sense, the ego’s transcendental life retains the full constitutive articulation of its world, divided into ownness and otherness, within its own psychic being.

Source Quotes

If I reduce other men to what is included in my ownness, I get bodies included therein; if I reduce myself as a man, I get “my animate organism” and “my psyche”, or myself as a psychophysical unity — in the latter, my personal Ego, who operates in this animate organism and, “by means of” it, in the “external world”, who is affected by this world, and who thus in all respects, by virtue of the continual experience of such unique modes of Ego- and life-relatedness, is constituted as psychophysically united with the animate corporeal organism. If ownness-purification of the external world, the animate organism, / and the psychophysical whole, has been effected, I have lost my natural sense as Ego, since every sense-relation to a possible Us or We remains excluded, and have lost likewise all my worldliness, in the natural sense. But, in my spiritual ownness, I am nevertheless the identical Ego-pole of my manifold “pure” subjective processes, those of my passive and active intentionality, and the pole of all the habitualities instituted or to be instituted by those processes.

If ownness-purification of the external world, the animate organism, / and the psychophysical whole, has been effected, I have lost my natural sense as Ego, since every sense-relation to a possible Us or We remains excluded, and have lost likewise all my worldliness, in the natural sense. But, in my spiritual ownness, I am nevertheless the identical Ego-pole of my manifold “pure” subjective processes, those of my passive and active intentionality, and the pole of all the habitualities instituted or to be instituted by those processes. Accordingly this peculiar abstractive sense-exclusion of what is alien leaves us a kind of “world” still, a Nature reduced to what is included in our ownness and, as having its place in this Nature thanks to the bodily organism, the psychophysical Ego, with “body and soul” and personal Ego — utterly unique members of this reduced “world”.

But, in my spiritual ownness, I am nevertheless the identical Ego-pole of my manifold “pure” subjective processes, those of my passive and active intentionality, and the pole of all the habitualities instituted or to be instituted by those processes. Accordingly this peculiar abstractive sense-exclusion of what is alien leaves us a kind of “world” still, a Nature reduced to what is included in our ownness and, as having its place in this Nature thanks to the bodily organism, the psychophysical Ego, with “body and soul” and personal Ego — utterly unique members of this reduced “world”. Manifestly predicates that get significance from this Ego also occur in the reduced world — for example: “value” predicates and predicates of “works” as such.

Accordingly this peculiar abstractive sense-exclusion of what is alien leaves us a kind of “world” still, a Nature reduced to what is included in our ownness and, as having its place in this Nature thanks to the bodily organism, the psychophysical Ego, with “body and soul” and personal Ego — utterly unique members of this reduced “world”. Manifestly predicates that get significance from this Ego also occur in the reduced world — for example: “value” predicates and predicates of “works” as such. None of this is worldly in the natural sense (therefore all the quotation-marks); it is all exclusively what is mine in my world-experience, pervading my world-experience through and through and likewise cohering unitarily in my intuition.

Manifestly predicates that get significance from this Ego also occur in the reduced world — for example: “value” predicates and predicates of “works” as such. None of this is worldly in the natural sense (therefore all the quotation-marks); it is all exclusively what is mine in my world-experience, pervading my world-experience through and through and likewise cohering unitarily in my intuition. Accordingly the members we distinguish in this, my peculiarly own world-phenomenon, are concretely united, as is further shown by the fact that the spatiotemporal form — as reduced, however, to the form included in my ownness — also goes into this reduced world-phenomenon.

Accordingly the members we distinguish in this, my peculiarly own world-phenomenon, are concretely united, as is further shown by the fact that the spatiotemporal form — as reduced, however, to the form included in my ownness — also goes into this reduced world-phenomenon. Hence the reduced “Objects” — the “physical things”, the “psychophysical Ego” — are likewise outside one another. But here something remarkable strikes us: a sequence of evidences that yet, in their sequence, seem paradoxical.

But here something remarkable strikes us: a sequence of evidences that yet, in their sequence, seem paradoxical. The psychic life of my Ego (this “psychophysical” Ego), including my whole world-experiencing life and therefore including my actual and possible experience of what is other, is wholly unaffected by screening off what is other. Consequently there belongs within my psychic being the whole constitution of the world existing for me and, in further consequence, the differentiation of that constitution into the systems that constitute what is included in my peculiar ownness and the systems that constitute what is other.

The psychic life of my Ego (this “psychophysical” Ego), including my whole world-experiencing life and therefore including my actual and possible experience of what is other, is wholly unaffected by screening off what is other. Consequently there belongs within my psychic being the whole constitution of the world existing for me and, in further consequence, the differentiation of that constitution into the systems that constitute what is included in my peculiar ownness and the systems that constitute what is other. I, the reduced “human Ego” (“psychophysical” Ego), am constituted, accordingly, as a member of the “world” with a multiplicity of “objects outside me”.

Key Concepts

• If ownness-purification of the external world, the animate organism, / and the psychophysical whole, has been effected, I have lost my natural sense as Ego, since every sense-relation to a possible Us or We remains excluded, and have lost likewise all my worldliness, in the natural sense.
• But, in my spiritual ownness, I am nevertheless the identical Ego-pole of my manifold “pure” subjective processes, those of my passive and active intentionality, and the pole of all the habitualities instituted or to be instituted by those processes.
• Accordingly this peculiar abstractive sense-exclusion of what is alien leaves us a kind of “world” still, a Nature reduced to what is included in our ownness and, as having its place in this Nature thanks to the bodily organism, the psychophysical Ego, with “body and soul” and personal Ego — utterly unique members of this reduced “world”.
• Manifestly predicates that get significance from this Ego also occur in the reduced world — for example: “value” predicates and predicates of “works” as such.
• None of this is worldly in the natural sense (therefore all the quotation-marks); it is all exclusively what is mine in my world-experience, pervading my world-experience through and through and likewise cohering unitarily in my intuition.
• Hence the reduced “Objects” — the “physical things”, the “psychophysical Ego” — are likewise outside one another.
• The psychic life of my Ego (this “psychophysical” Ego), including my whole world-experiencing life and therefore including my actual and possible experience of what is other, is wholly unaffected by screening off what is other.
• Consequently there belongs within my psychic being the whole constitution of the world existing for me and, in further consequence, the differentiation of that constitution into the systems that constitute what is included in my peculiar ownness and the systems that constitute what is other.

Context

Later part of §44, where Husserl draws the consequences of ownness-purification for the status of the Ego and the reduced world, emphasizing the persistence of the full constitutive articulation of ownness and otherness within the ego’s psychic life despite the methodological exclusion of alien sense.