The Wild Region in Life-History

The Wild Region in Life-History Synopsis

A tour de force by one of Hungary's most interesting contemporary philosophers, this work outlines a phenomenological approach to some of the main topics of theoretical philosophy, such as meaning, sense, temporality, unity of life, narrative history, self-identity, and intersubjectivity, as well as an ethics of alterity. In his investigations, Laszlo Tengelyi's point of departure is a critical examination of what is commonly referred to as the narrative view of the self, which tends to equate life-history and personal identity. Challenging this view as too one-dimensional and reflective, Tengelyi reveals a hidden area of sense-formation in life-history - an area in which force and meaning do not merely blend but in many ways undermine each other. It is this hidden area that The Wild Region in Life-History describes. Husserl sought to constitute the meaning of the other as a modification of the self. Tengelyi turns to Heidegger and Levinas to expose Husserl's model of ""ownness"" as an illusion, and he appeals to Merleau-Ponty to point to the invisible in the visible. His work calls attention to the ethical claim arising from a meeting of self and other, and to the dramatic split of the self that such a claim entails. This drama, Tengelyi contends, cannot be narrated as a part of some life-history. The ethic of responsibility is primarily one of responding to such claims and only secondarily one of obeying a law. Finally, not even the immediate ethical consequences of an encounter with another human being transcend the wild region in life-history; on the contrary, they include, as Tengelyi shows, a whole range of elementary claims that precede duty, law, justice, and obligation, without, however, being integrated into a moral order of aims and goals.