Ethics and violence in MMA fighters experience: an ontological examination in the light of Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein phenomenology

Abstract

In light of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein, the project aims at carrying out an ontological analysis of the ethics and violence in the experience of Mixed Martial Arts fighters. To do it, it is important to identify the subjective frontiers, i.e. the psychological experiences, between violence and fighting in the practice of MMA. MMA is a combat sport that emerged just over 10 years. The representations of MMA as violent in its own nature grow from the external point of view and tend to decrease from the internal point of view. From these representations, the problem and the challenge posed, simultaneously methodological and related to the object in question, is to suspend judgments that evaluate the MMA as being violent or not, to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the meanings and psychological implications of the phenomenon. A specific challenge is to avoid predefined evaluations and come to an ontology of ethics (and violence) on fighting. From the natural attitude, corresponding subjective of those pre-defined evaluations, one must change to the personal attitude, and later to the phenomenological attitude, following Husserl (Ideas II). In-depth interviews, and its intentional analysis, seek to explicit how it is constitute the experiences of MMA practicing subjects. Edith Stein´s analysis about empathy and human person, show the centrality of embodiment and intersubjectivity in the stratification of the experiences of the fighters, revealing the need to specify them by the phenomenological reduction. (AU)