Conference | Paper

Husserl holds that that the concept of the self as both a subject for the world and as an object in the world entails a paradox, the “paradox of subjectivity.” My talk shows that the paradox of subjectivity cannot easily be resolved and that it reappears in different interpretations of the relation between the two aspects of the self. The paradox is not the result of a straightforward misconception, such as conceiving the self as a subject for the world as a being different from the self as an embodied person in the world. Rather than constituting a quandary that must be overcome, the paradox reveals a fundamental feature of consciousness. Ordinary consciousness can contain both the awareness of “oneself-as-object” and that of “oneself-as-subject” (Fuchs 2016, 298–299). Whereas the former comes to the fore under the natural attitude, however, the latter is distorted by that very attitude and is fully brought to the fore only by the phenomenological attitude.