Abstract

This paper focuses on Erwin Straus' phenomenology of life. I start by clarifying its object - the human being - and its purpose - to found a human nosology. I then reframe two well-known aspects of his thought. First, the "primary animal situation" which includes many conceptual dualities (animal/human, sensing/perceiving, landscape/geography, life-world/world of perception, schizophrenia/melancholy) as well as a major philosophical proposition: the identity between sensing and movement. Second, I took at the I-World relation, understood by Straus as a relation to and within totality. Third, I examine his little known conception of existence as verticality, which leads the human being to the status of a privileged living being. Only human beings can oppose resistance to the world and realize their individuality.