Abstract
My paper will be concerned with one of the limit problems of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology: death. According to Husserl, death presents a mundane event, which also ends our consciousness of the world.
For that reason, we never experience it as our own, but solely as the demise of others. Additionally, it does not make any sense to speak of death in the case of the absolutely self-given, transcendental subject that precedes the giveness of the world.
The arrival of death interferes in the mundane concretization of transcendental subjectivity, i.e. it touches the psycho-physical being, whose existence it ends. Human therefore necessarily dies.
I would however like to demonstrate that Husserl's phenomenology does not have any means to methodologically grasp this thesis. If death cannot reach the transcendental subjectivity i.e. rationality, it becomes a biological phenomenon.
Yet life is in its core characterized by the instinct of self-preservation, in which death is implied merely as an external fatality. Neither does death play an essential role in the constitution of human historicity: The succession of generations and the possibility of tradition is conditioned by the phenomenon of birth, not the circumstantial fact of death.
Nevertheless, I will not merely deconstruct Husserl's concept, but in the second part of my paper I will also emphasize its implicit preconditions. I will show that the immanent temporality, which leads to the claim of immortality of the transcendental subject, is also the reason why we cannot grasp the human being as essentially mortal.
What will thus emerge is death as a limit problem in much more radical sense than Husserl attributes to it. This problem does not merely exceed the possibilities of phenomenological description, since my death - as such - can never be given to me, but it also brings into question the philosophical concept of subjectivity.