Irene Breuer 

Thinking the Float Tank – Thursday, August 24, 2023 (Day 1)

Limit Phenomena: Primal Hyle, Consciousness, and God as the Constituents of a Phenomenological Teleology

Speaker Bio:

Irene Breuer has a degree both in Architecture and in Philosophy from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina, and a PhD in Philosophy from the Bergische University Wuppertal (BUW), Germany. She was first a lecturer, then professor for Architectural Design and Theory at the UBA and later a lecturer for Theoretical Philosophy and Phenomenology at the BUW. As part of a DAAD scholarship, she has conducted research on the reception of the German Philosophical Anthropology in Argentina. She is presently working on mentioned research subject, with the support of the BUW.

Cf: https://uni-wuppertal.academia.edu/IreneBreuer

Abstract:

My contribution deals with Husserl’s conception of a Phenomenological Metaphysics, its realm of primal facts and the teleology involved therein. It claims that the necessary positing of the embodied Ego, which in Ideas I is merely methodologically necessary such as to allow for eidetic variation, is later on posited on ontological grounds as the content, along with other primal facts, of this newly conceived Metaphysics. This involves an inversion of the order of foundation, since now eidetic phenomenology comes to ground on the former. As to metaphysical teleology, which runs from the primal hyle to God as guiding principle, it will specially enquire into the conception of theological phenomenology as a rational faith (Vernunftglaube) and disclose the different meanings attributed to facticity and the absolute, to finally reach the ultimate ground of a phenomenological Absolute, which accounts for the genesis of the transcendental life of consciousness: Consciousness awakens to life from the most original depth of the absolute life that ‘hosts’ the pre-being of consciousness. At this limit case of life or genesis we grasp consciousness and self-consciousness in statu nascendi: to exist is to discover oneself as being existent. Hence, the primary form of self-awareness consists in the sudden realization of being alive. This is the starting point of the genetical process of constitution of body and consciousness, whose unity is made possible by the affective force of bodily drives onto an originally, pre-reflective bodily consciousness. The ensuing stages of this phenomenological teleology involve the emergence of affective self-awareness engendered by both the self-affection of the body through the reflexive process of touch and the kinesthetic freedom of the body, which latter ultimately constitutes the sense of its surrounding space, objectivity and living world.