The Porosity of the Self
provides an original interpretation and comprehensive examination of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl 1859-1938), the founder of phenomenology and one of the most important and influential philosophers of the 19th–20th century. The book is unique in providing an exploration of the philosophical problem of the self, drawn from key texts across Husserl’s work. The book challenges prevailing philosophical accounts of self and personhood that are predominantly one-dimensional and that often fail to capture the intricate double-sidedness of how we experience ourselves, others, and the world. The book demonstrates how Husserl’s philosophy offers an important alternative account of the self as porous. The notion of the porosity of the self emerges through a thematic reconstruction of Husserl that emphasizes elements such as embodiment, habituality, temporality, personhood, intersubjectivity, and sociality. Here, the case is made that the self should be understood as multidimensional, dynamic and complex by highlighting its fundamentally permeable nature. The main argument of the book is that no one element of the self is experienceable in isolation, and that Husserl’s understanding can equally accommodate the uniqueness of subjective experience as well as social, cultural, and historical inflections, without yielding constitutive priority to one dimension over the other. This book is unique as it strives to encourage broad engagement with Husserl’s work by simplifying some of his more complex texts using clear and accessible language. It shows how Husserlian phenomenology can provide a rich supplementary perspective for fields such as critical phenomenology and feminist philosophy, and offers a renewed way of engaging with Husserl’s philosophy.