Towards a Phenomenology of the Unconscious: Husserl and Fink on Versunkenheit

ABSTRACT As a phenomenological concept, absorption refers to the ego's capacity to experience the world from a displaced standpoint. The paper traces the emergence and development of this concept in Husserl's and Fink's writings and demonstrates that while Fink conceived of absorption as a class of intuitive re-presentations, Husserl transformed it into a limit phenomenon, whose analysis calls for a new method. A careful study of absorption compels us to rethink fundamental themes in phenomenology: it forces us to broaden our understanding of sensuous intuition, reconceptualize the nature of self-awareness, stretch the limits of intuitive re-presentations, and rethink the portrayal of phenomenology as a metaphysics of presence. The paper demonstrates that absorbed experiences are characterized by a specific form of self-awareness, that they constitute a distinct type of intuitive re-presentations, that a new method is needed to investigate them, and that their analysis leads towards a phenomenology of the unconscious.