Abstract
The main purpose of the paper is point out to Wilhelm Dilthey's analysis of pre-reflective experience of resistance which can enrich the debate on many topics of contemporary phenomenology including the problem of pre-reflective self-awareness and first-person perspective. Dilthey analyses concept of resistance in his shorter work Beiträge zur Lösung der Frage vom Ursprung unseres Glaubens an die Realität der Außenwelt und seinem Recht as a part of the solution of the problem articulated in the title and conceives it (inter alia) as an experience of separation of the self and the outer world.
Very important accent lies on pre-reflective character of this "experience". Dilthey demonstrates it on the interesting medical case reports of his period and claims that experience of resistance emerges in the very early stages of ontogenesis.
Dilthey's concept of resistance met with explicit response from Martin Heidegger and Max Scheler and became one of the main topics of their debate triggered by Scheler's response to Being and Time. Scheler revises the original Dilthey's concept, defends it against criticism of Martin Heidegger, who rejects the concept as ontic, emphasises the primacy of disclosure of the world and existential structure of Sorge.
Scheler tries to ground resistance ontologically and examines it as spontaneous, involuntary, immediate and impulsive process of ecstatic relating to the world, which cannot be reduced to a mere content of consciousness or to inhibition of the impulse of our will. Scheler's approach to resistance as an ontological element (but still incidental to a dynamic metaphysical field of identification) enables us to elaborate specific hermeneutics of resistance and show its interconnections with efforts of later phenomenology, especially Jan Patočka's personal philosophy and late manuscripts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Pre-reflexive phenomenology tries to work with a broader phenomenal field including an implicit sphere of concealment. Metaphysics violates this sphere, tries to control it and subordinate it to an elucidating principle.
Pre-reflexive phenomenology awards certain autonomy to this sphere and opens it by means of specific boundary-concepts such as corporeality etc. Phenomenologically revised concept of resistance can be one of them.