Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation and the Appresentation of the Other in Sport

This paper applies Edmund Husserl's concept of 'appresentation' from his fifth Cartesian Meditation to competitive sports. Husserl describes how we perceive others through a non-inferential analogy, mentally supplementing what we directly see. The author argues this process illuminates how athletes experience and understand each other during competition, generating shared meanings. While not exhaustive, the analysis aims to supplement existing phenomenology of sport and resonate with athletes' own intersubjective experiences.

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Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines a single relevant source regarding Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and his attempt to explain how we perceive and experience the Other. In the fifth chapter of the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl describes our encounters with others through a process of non-inferential analogy and details the ways we ‘appresent’ the Other. This unique and admittedly narrow approach to understanding intersubjectivity, I submit, offers significant insights regarding the nature of interactions between competing athletes and the meanings these experiences generate. The descriptive-explanatory account of the ‘appresentation’ of the Other in sport presented here will not be exhaustive. But it will, I anticipate, be informative, supplement existing works in the phenomenology of sport, and appeal intuitively to some of our intersubjective experiences in competitive sport.