The Becoming of Consciousness: 5 Phenomenology and the Lived Body: Husserl to Merleau-Ponty

Phenomenology restores relational embeddedness to consciousness, counterbalancing the Cartesian turn toward isolated subjectivity. Edmund Husserl foregrounds intentionality: consciousness is always consciousness of something, irreducibly directed toward the world. Possibility is thus structured not by abstraction alone, but by the relational field of perception, experience, and meaning-making. Thought and world are co-constitutive; potential arises through the interplay between perceiver and perceived, where horizons of expectation, memory, and anticipation shape what can be experienced and understood.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty extends this relational understanding through the lived body (le corps vécu). The body is not a mere object but the medium through which consciousness engages the world, shaping perception, action, and imagination. Possibility is thus embodied and situated: the horizon of what can be done, seen, or felt emerges from the dynamic interplay of bodily capacities, environmental affordances, and historical context. Consciousness is neither detached nor purely representational; it is pragmatically and relationally co-constituted.

This phenomenological turn emphasises perspectival and contingent horizons of potential. Each act of awareness is shaped by the particularities of situation, history, and embodiment, producing a multiplicity of possible construals. Reflexivity remains central, but it is relationally grounded: self-awareness is inseparable from engagement with the surrounding field of lived experience.

In essence, phenomenology demonstrates that consciousness is not an isolated locus of reflection, but a relational, perspectival field in which possibility is continuously enacted, modulated, and constrained by the co-constitution of subject and world. Thought, perception, and embodiment are mutually enabling, revealing the contingent, historically situated, and dynamically structured nature of consciousness.

Modulatory voices: Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.