Anonymity of the ‘Anyone’ : The Associative Depths of Open Intersubjectivity

Abstract

Husserl’s concept of “open intersubjectivity” expresses the peculiarity that the environment appears as being there for “anyone”. The structurally implicated, potential co-perceivers have been rendered anonymous, unspecified, which is another way of saying that the horizontally implicated “anyone” refers to no one in particular, but to “any alter egos whatever”. My article focuses on this tacit structural referencing to potential others and challenges the claim of anonymity. In the literature, it has been argued that the potential others are implicitly specified as co-members of our community, or “homecomrades”. I will push the idea of specification further, and into a new direction, by arguing that the implicated others (be it co-perceivers or co-members) are also always specified associatively, in the light of our past interactions. My aim is to show how the implicit “co-positing” of others necessarily “echoes”, and is “colored” by, our earlier intersubjective experiences. The way in which our experiences tacitly implicate anyone (i.e., typical co-perceivers) is influenced by the way in which we have interacted with particular others (i.e., particular tokens), who serve as the primal institutors of the idea of “a typical co-perceiver”. Making use of insights from phenomenology, developmental psychology, and psychoanalysis, I will discuss the asymmetric structure of social perception and the sedimentation of experience, and thus challenge the assumption of the anonymity of the “anyone”.