Husserl states in Ideas II that “The concept of self and the concept of Umwelt are inseparably and mutually related” (Husserl, 1952: 185). The self that constitutes the world is the personal self, and the Umwelt represents as a “for me” world from a first-person perspective, which Husserl also refers to as the “first world concept”. The central question of this study is how individuals construct their Umwelt through their facultative possibility and further participate in the dynamic constitution of the community world. By suspending the natural attitude, Umwelt appears as an “intuitive Umwelt,” whose constitution relies on the apperception of the “personal self” and the practical transformation of the “I can” system. The personal self establishes two predication relations with others: the parallel another me and mein Du in the Umwelt. The former achieves mutual recognition through empathy, while the latter constructs a network of meaning centered around itself through the subject’s motivational structure. The community, through the governance of a “common spirit,” integrates all its members into the community world, elevating individual practices into collective praxis. In essence, it constitutes an unity of expression.The revelation of the concept of the personal self and Umwelt not only provides a phenomenological perspective that challenges the community-first view but also argues that individual subjectivity is the transcendental condition for the generation of meaning. It offers a crucial insight: if one detaches from the personal self and its embodied construction of Umwelt, one risks falling into a void of meaning.
