Kant and the Scandal of Intersubjectivity: Alfred Schutz’s Anthropology of Transcendence

Straßheim, Jan

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-66857-0_7

Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism

2021

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-66857-0_7

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Kant and the Scandal of Intersubjectivity: Alfred Schutz’s Anthropology of Transcendence

Jan Straßheim

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2024

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The lifeworld and the world of life: the concept of relevance and its foundation in organic nature

Strassheim

2024

Semiotica

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This paper relates the concept of relevance to its biological foundations by combining Alfred Schutz’s social phenomenology and Helmuth Plessner’s theory of organic life and philosophical anthropology. Relevance interlinks human sign use with the human “lifeworld” (Husserl) as a whole. The biological foundations of relevance, in turn, interlink that lifeworld with the “world of life” that includes us among other lifeforms. I analyze human relevance as an interplay of two tendencies, termed “closedness” and “openness,” that underlies our production of “meaning” (Schutz). Relevance in this general sense involves not only the mind, but also the body of homo sapiens. To provide a unified theoretical framework, I reconstruct Plessner’s “philosophical biology.” According to Plessner, organic life consists in a tension between closedness and openness. This tension unfolds through the “levels” of plants, animals, and humans. Plessner’s analysis of humans as “excentric” animals helps explain the two tendencies that drive human relevance and distinguish our experience from that of our closest animal relatives. At the same time, Plessner traces a robust continuity between us and other lifeforms. The human “level” merely makes “explicit” certain elements (including the Cartesian distinction between “mind” and “body”) that all organisms implicitly possess.

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The lifeworld and the world of life: the concept of relevance and its foundation in organic nature

Strassheim

2024

Semiotica

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Relevance as the Moving Ground of Semiosis

Straßheim

2022

Philosophies

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All levels of semiosis, from the materiality of signs to their contents and the contexts of their application, are structured by a selectivity in human experience and action that foregrounds only a fraction of the situation here and now. Before Sperber and Wilson, concepts of “relevance” were proposed in both semiotics and phenomenology to analyze this selectivity. Building critically on Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology, I suggest that a productive way to capture the fundamental role of relevance in processes of meaning-making is to see relevance as the outcome of an interplay between two antagonistic tendencies. On the one hand, socially stabilized and individually sedimented “types” guide our experience and action along established patterns. On the other hand, we are actively open to new and unexpected aspects; we are ready to deviate from types and to change typical patterns. Only both tendencies taken together account for our semiotic behavior in context. Spatial metaphors such as “ground” illuminate only a part of this interplay. Due to the double movement in what becomes relevant to us, the typical ground on which we produce and interpret signs is constantly being shifted and re-grounded, which keeps driving on an endless process of semiosis.

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Kant and the Scandal of Intersubjectivity: Alfred Schutz’s Anthropology of Transcendence

Cited by 2 publications

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The lifeworld and the world of life: the concept of relevance and its foundation in organic nature

The lifeworld and the world of life: the concept of relevance and its foundation in organic nature

Relevance as the Moving Ground of Semiosis

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