Subjectivity Viewed as a Process

Husserl, in his late manuscripts, made a number of apparently opposing assertions regarding the subject. These assertions are reconciled once we realize that they apply to the different stages of the genesis of the subject. This means that the subject has to be understood as a process – i.e., as continually proceeding from the living present, which forms its core, to the developed self that each of us is. As such, the subject cannot be identified with any of the particular stages of its genesis. The genetic account of its becoming must be understood accordingly. It is not an account that details the progressive acquisition of features that remain as “sedimented layers” of our selfhood. Rather, such layers, like the selfhood they form, exist as part of the ongoing process, the motion, that is our subjectivity. This view, I argue, is Husserl’s final, if undeveloped, insight into the nature of our selfhood.