Abstract

Corporeality and historicity in our very experience are focal points of the phenomenological movement as it becomes attentive to human existence. In existential and hermeneutic phenomenology, historicity is understood as experienced meaning: temporality. This actualizes the Aristotelian conception of historical development as the realization of power potentials, where culture and reason are associated with human nature. Of interest is also the post-Hegelian thinking of history as both de-centered and centered existence. In the face of contemporary difficulties (ever since Hegel) in grasping historicity as connected nature and reason, phenomenology points to the bodily intentionality, with which meaning as well as experience are structured on different levels of being in human existence: aesthetic presence, body-in-the-world, speech, praxis, action, and thinking.