The living present and otherness: A study of the living present and otherness in Edmund Husserl's transcendental phenomenology

My dissertation is concerned with the problem of the living present as regards the question of so-called passive intersubjectivity within Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. In this study, I introduce "the living present" in the broadest sense that encompasses tripartite primordial strata---temporality, bodiliness, and nature. The living present is first of all the primal temporalization, i.e., a retentional-impressional-protentional process. For Husserl, this primordial presentation begins with "the bodily present." Thus such presentation can be understood as a kind of kinesthetic bodily process [Leiblichkeit] that is driven by our own bodily status. Both "the living present" and "the bodily present" are again inseparable from, and united with "primordial nature." Primordial nature that is for Husserl strictly distinct from the nature within the realm of science functions as the source of natural otherness and the primal core of the experiential world. These three strata have always already come into a structural relationship with one another within the sphere of the livingness of world-experiencing life. The livingness itself, so-called "absolute life" is irreducible to the world; however, it becomes the ground of passive intersubjectivity. Thus this study serves to precisely explicate the constituting intersubjectivity, rather than the constitution of intersubjectivity whose starting-point lies in accounting the possibility of a world in general. My dissertation has six chapters: In first three chapters, I deal with tripartite primordial strata; in the final three chapters I analyze the living present and otherness in terms of primordial impression, retention, and protention.