Gyvūnas – subjektas. Fenomenologinė perspektyva

Abstract

In Western culture, not only in philosophy, nonhuman animals are (were) treated as deficient subjects, as inferior being. Phenomenology, which declared itself as the attention to the experience, where concerned (in Husserl's latest texts this is very evident) about the subjectivity of animals. This change of the attitude toward animals is concomitant with the enlargement of the understanding of the transcendental subjectivity itself: the constitutive side of the subject is not the only one; not less important is the corporeal side. In our lived corporeal experience animals manifest themselves as transcendental subjectivities. We grasp their transcendental subjectivity through the empathy, which is possible because of intersubjectivity - our analogous corporeality and analogous corporeal comportment. Of course, animals are different from human being; Husserl called them - animal subjects, in sense of "different from me". But this marginal subjectivity isn't a poor subjectivity. Moreover they makes us understanding our own animality, they enables us to unclose new dimensions of ourselves, of our world. This phenomenological attitude allows us to speak about the experience of the animals without the reduction to our own experience, because we recognise in it the same style to live the world.