The vitality of the monad: the concept of life in Husserl’s phenomenology

Abstract

This paper examines the concept of life in Husserl’s phenomenology, highlighting its centrality and conceptual ambiguity within the transcendental project. It begins from the premise that the human being, as a living body, provides the original site for the experience of life. From this basis, it becomes possible to deconstruct constitutive layers of our own experience and, through a transfer of sense, to interpret non-human forms of life. Building on this framework, the paper proposes three phenomenological approaches to life: (1) a privative approach, in which human life serves as the normative standard of experience; (2) an aporetic approach, which recognizes the radical originality of life as a form of temporality; and (3) an intentional-monadic approach, in which life is understood within a pulsional community of monads. The paper concludes that a phenomenology of life requires an expansion of Husserl’s monadology to include non-human forms of subjectivity.