An Anthropophenomenological Inquiery into Ideality

Abstract

This research examines the influence of ideality on human life, both in its constitutive role in understanding what it means to be human and in attempts to dispense with it. It explores what is meant by ideality and how it paradoxically introduces its own dispensability into human experience. This paradox manifests itself on two levels: the discursive, that is, in how we understand the human, and in our very practice of the human. From its roots in modern subjectivity, ideality has burst into our understanding and practices of the human in such a way that it has disposed us to what is here called a “phenomenological laziness” that keeps us passive in the face of it. Faced with this scenario, there is a need to address this inescapable aspect of the human through a third element that, until now, has remained in the shadows: the other.