The Concept of Life in Meister Eckhart and Husserl

The concept of life is virtually omnipresent in present-day scientific and societal discourse. Its precise meaning, however, varies greatly from one context to another. Modern Life Sciences tend to understand life exclusively as an empirical-biological fact, while contemporary philosophy and theology focus more specifically on human life and the ethical problems related to it. Certain contemporary phenomenologists, in turn, consider life in an almost mystical way, i.e. as absolute indistinction that precedes all conceptual differences and can therefore never be scientifically known but only directly experienced. The present project intends to examine the concept of life in Meister Eckhart and Edmund Husserl in order to prove that, far from being synonymous with irrationality, it has a precise and differentiated meaning. Both Eckhart and Husserl take into account the biological dimension of life, as well as the question concerning the specifically human life form and the life of consciousness in its absolute sense. Our guiding hypothesis is that this multiple meaning of the concept of life in Eckhart and Husserl is the result of their reception of Aristotelian philosophy and that Husserls specific understanding of life has also been influenced by his reception of Eckharts writings. In a first step, our project will examine the philosophical-historical situation in which Meister Eckhart and Husserl develop their respective approaches to this topic. In a second step, we shall analyse the systematic function that the concept of life plays with regard to their whole thought. We shall pay particular attention to the way in which they use the various meanings of life in order to bridge the trenches between the different scientific disciplines. As a result, life is not only an objective topic of research, but scientific knowledge as a whole appears as a living and yet differentiated unity. Our project is innovative in that it does not reduce the topic of life to only one of its possible meanings (biological, ethical, etc.) but intends to show how these various aspects are intrinsically related to one another. In particular, we shall challenge the thesis according to which life and knowledge are mutually exclusive. By contrast, Eckharts and Husserls philosophical approaches are based on the conviction that human life in the world is always already structured in a way that points towards possible scientific knowledge without being completely absorbed by it. Based on this insight, our project will attempt to lay a new foundation for the present-day debate between, on the one hand, empirical Life Sciences, and on the other hand, the various approaches to the problem of life in the domain of human sciences.

The leading hypothesis of this project was the assumption that, contrary to what contemporary phenomenology affirms, the concept of "life" in Meister Eckhart and Husserl is not synonymous with absolute indistinction but on the contrary, synonymous with a specific form of unity in difference. Regarding Meister Eckhart, I was able to show that his understanding of "life" as unity of a manifold proves to be a combination of Platonic and Aristotelian elements. On the one hand, Eckhart relies heavily on Aristotle's conception of the soul as unifying principle of the body in order to elucidate his own view of the immanent presence of God in all of creation. The relationship between the Creator and the created world is, therefore, not conceived in terms of "fabrication" but in terms of live-giving "animation" from within. When it comes to the status of the eternal ideas in the divine intellect, however, Eckhart conceives these intelligible essences not as static structures but in a Platonic perspective, as a living fabric in which each element is intrinsically linked to all the others and cannot be grasped without its dialectical relationship to the whole. As regards human life (bios) in the ethical sense, Eckhart applies the philosophical concept of "unity in difference" to the Biblical notion of original sin. By interpreting the "tree of life" in the book of Genesis as synonym of the intellect, he can define the essence of sin as the separation of the individual, empirical being from its universal principle. Husserl's concept of "life" proves to have undergone significant changes with regard to his phenomenological interpretation of the soul. In the earlier stages of his philosophical development, he considers the soul as an "inner-worldly" aspect of the subject, which has to be put into brackets through the epoché. Thanks to his later analyses of genetic phenomenology and intersubjectivity, however, Husserl regains a positive understanding of the soul as intermediary between the absolute unity of the pure "I" (ego) and the differentiated multiplicity of the human organism as instrument of world-constitution. In much the same ways as Nietzsche, Husserl reverses the hierarchy between the vivo ("I live") and the cogito ("I think"). Only to the extent that pre-reflexive consciousness is in itself streaming life ("strömendes Leben") that possesses the teleological ability to transform hyletic impressions into stable, objective unities can transcendental phenomenology subsequently establish itself as "scientific philosophy of life" in both the biological and the historical sense. Ultimately, Husserl's concept of the "life-world" (Lebenswelt) overcomes the solipsistic tendencies of his earlier phenomenology in favor of an a priori intersubjectivity that is reminiscent of Meister Eckhart's understanding of human individuals as so many limbs and organs in the universal body of "divine life".