The Outside’s Inside: The Phenomenology of the External World in Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ Thought

On the Ontology and Doctrine of Appearance of the Real External World (1916) is the first publication from a vast corpus of writings by Hedwig Conrad-Martius (CM), a phenomenologist from the Munich School. The phenomenon of “the real external world” encloses within itself everything that “exists outside” (Daraußenseinde) and that is “of the external world” (Außenweltliches). The “self-presentation” that deeply characterizes the sensory givenness is an essential foundation in the phenomenon of the reality, to the extent that it distinguishes it from everything that “lacks a Being- for-itself” and thus misses what might be presented externally. Although sensory appearance is not itself the totality of the external world, CM determines that the pure observation of what the sensory appearance presents by itself and in itself, and not of what is above and beyond it, provides the “framework for the whole” of the research, since by sensory presentation “the book of the real world is being opened”. The paper proposes a critical explication of both constitutive phenomena of the sensory givenness, “feeling’s givenness” and “manifest appearance givenness”, and suggests a metaphysical interpretation that explicates them in terms of the relation between immanence and transcendence that seems to be a key to the understanding the phenomenology of reality that that unifies the entirety of CM’s writings.