Introduction: An Embodied Path at Beginning and End

Abstract

The phenomenological tradition may be seen as a broad but coherent movement that addresses foundational issues in epistemology, ontology, and ethics (Spiegelberg, 1971). Edmund Husserl, considered to be the founder of phenomenology, focused most on epistemological concerns: how knowledge about life and the world can ‘come from’ a reflection on what appears in consciousness. He wanted to heal a split that had been emerging in Western philosophy between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, mind and body, subject and object. Martin Heidegger focused more on ontological concerns: the kind of being who can understand and know, and what this also tells us about the nature of Being per se, the context within which beings arise. Husserl and Heidegger, although concentrating, respectively, on epistemology and ontology, both understood that these concerns are intimately related, and that they also had ethical implications. Within this tradition, Emmanuel Levinas went further to develop a line of thought that articulated the ethical dimension as essentially intrinsic to epistemology and ontology: how the ‘other’, that is always beyond summative knowing, tells us more about the kinds of beings that we openly and intersubjectively are, and how this is already an ethical calling. Merleau-Ponty, a scholar steeped in both Husserl and Heidegger also pursued an allied integrative task: how all this, the place where ontology, epistemology, and ethics meet, is primarily located in our bodily being: that embodiment cannot be considered separately from being and knowing.