The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy

Volume 13

Burt Hopkins, John Drummond, Burt Hopkins, John Drummond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138819900
• eBook ISBN: 9781317591115
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer.

Part I
Husserl’s Experience and Judgment

Introduction

Pedro M. S. Alves¹

University of Lisbon
[email protected]

Carlos A. Morujão²

Portuguese Catholic University, Lisbon
[email protected]

An international seminar under the general title Contemporary Readings in Husserl’s Erfahrung und Urteil was held in Lisbon from 23 to 27 April 2012. It was organized by the present authors.

The general purposes of the seminar were a reappraisal of the fundamental tenets of Husserlian phenomenology, as exposed in Experience and Judgment,³ and a reworking of particular topics of experience and judgment in the context of contemporary philosophical debates. Although the contributions made to the seminar were also intended to shed some light on the structure of the work published by Landgrebe, as well as its place in the whole of Husserl’s philosophical production, the main purpose of the participants was not of a historical-philosophical kind. Original research about the several issues discussed in Experience and Judgment was anticipated, an anticipation that fortunately was fulfilled in the course of the seminar.

The papers presented to the seminar and now published in this issue of the New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy addressed the following topics:

1. The role of pre-predicative experience in the formation of higher-order intentional acts.
2. The significance of Husserl’s genealogical project for the understanding of logical and mathematical idealities and the relationship of phenomenology to some contemporary trends in philosophy of mathematics.
3. The importance of an analysis of passive experience for the understanding of some psychological disorders.
4. The legitimacy of Husserl’s claims about the possibility to ground scientific achievements (especially in the domain of mathematical physics) in the life-world experience.
5. The relationship between pre-predicative experience in the Husserlian sense and Heidegger’s analysis of being-in-the world.

The essays we offer now to the public have been revised in light of the discussions that took place during the seminar’s four sessions, which provided the occasion for critical engagement with both the written and spoken versions of each author’s presentation. Thus their final versions are shaped by the symphilosophieren that was so cherished by the thinker responsible for bringing us together: Edmund Husserl.

We are grateful to the authors for the high quality of their contributions, and the enthusiasm they put into the working sections, namely to Jairo da Silva (São Paulo), Sérgio Fernandes (Lisboa), Francesc Pereña (Barcelona), Claire Hill (Paris), Mark van Atten (Paris), François de Gandt (Lille), and Denis Fisette (Montréal).

We also express our gratitude to Burt Hopkins and John Drummond for publishing the papers of the Lisbon Seminar in their prestigious The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy.

Notes

1 Pedro M. S. Alves is Associate Professor with tenure at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon. He directs the research group “Phenomenological Thinking” at the Center of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon. He is also editor of Phainomenon—A Journal of Phenomenology. His main interests are Husserlian phenomenology, Kantianism, philosophy of law, and the conceptual foundations of physics.

2 Carlos Morujão has been Associate Professor with tenure at the Portuguese Catholic University (UCP) in Lisbon since 2012. He is a founding member of the Portuguese Association of Phenomenological Philosophy (Affen) and coordinates the Research Unit in Philosophy of the Faculty of Human Sciences of the UCP. Since 2000 he has written and published extensively on Husserlian phenomenology, the relations between phenomenology and neo-Kantianism, and phenomenology and psychoanalysis.

3 Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

1
Passivity and Interest (Experience and Judgment §§15–20)

François De Gandt¹

Université Lille Nord de France, STL
[email protected]

In this paper I provide a commentary on Husserl’s Experience and Judgment, §§15–20, with references to parallel passages from Husserl’s Analysen zur passiven Synthesis (Hua XI). The paper includes a descriptive study of sensory experience before the constitution of objects, trying to discover and formulate laws of experience at a passive level (called pregivenness), as well as a definition and illustration of several conceptual tools: field, salience, association, passivity, awakening, interest, primary belief, and the role of the Ego. I also suggest possible links with pathology (autistic states, lack of basic confidence in cases of schizophrenia).

Keywords: Edmund Husserl, passivity, interest, perception, affection, pregivenness, contrast, field, stimulus, association, concordance, belief, autism, schizophrenia.

Lights along the Rhine Valley

Let us go along with Husserl on his evening walk, his Abendspaziergang. Husserl loved to go for walks on the hills above Freiburg, the Loretto hills. He had a house in the Lorettostrasse until July 1937, and after that found a more remote shelter where he spent the last months of his life. Since the Loretto hills offer a vast view, when the night comes you can see various lights awakening and blinking in the Rhine valley, forming a long trail of light. It is a beautiful evening experience, simple and peaceful.

Husserl recounts this experience in his 1925–6 course for the winter semester, edited under the title Analysen zur passiven Synthesis.² The evening view of the Rhine valley serves as a clear example, capable of shedding light onto an obscure issue:³ the laws of affection. In other words, the big trail of light is used to exemplify the most inferior level of sensory experience. What do we perceive when we perceive not an object, but a color, a pattern, a rhythm? Is there some sort of quasi-perception before perception properly speaking? Is there a structured something before and under the objects, a structured something that is not a thing?

If we follow Husserl through the night for a moment, we will be immersed in a blue dimness, layered by shades of successive backgrounds and by the darker boundaries of the hillside forests, opening to the expanse of a huge sky; there emerges, in the west, where the sun has disappeared, a sort of colored granulation, milky or reddish, which transforms itself into a bright stream, like a long tear of light or a glowing opening.

From the Loretto hills to the Rhine the distance is approximately 15 kilometers—close enough to see lights along the river, but too distant for most of them to be visible as separate dots. A vast something appears and detaches itself, attracting the eye, and either inviting a more focused glance or the pleasure of the vague sensation of the long stretch of light.

If one wants to enjoy the effect more completely, it would be best to arrive before the first lights start blinking; they start one after the other, and then a quantity of them together. The same thing happens with the first stars at twilight: at first you do not notice them, and suddenly a brighter star imposes itself; then, once you have seen one, you see others, which were already there, but which you had missed (we shall hereafter discuss these effects under the technical names of “propagation” and “retro-radiation” of affection).

Before Objects, before the Ego

Shall we say the long trail of light is “something”? Shall we speak of an object, or of a collection of objects? The group of lights is not an object properly speaking, it is more of a structured impression; what Husserl calls a “prominence” or “salience” (Abgehobenheit; in French, saillance), which imposes itself on the eye.

A salience implies a background, a neutral continuum spreading around and behind, against which we can perceive a contrast. From the indifferent homogeneous environment there emerges brightness, a sudden colored pattern, a patch or a group of patches appearing and attracting the eye.

Such an event precedes any object; it is pre-objectual. A stream of light and a sequence of sounds are not circumscribed objects: they lack the duration, the relief, the properties attached to an object. They are just callings captivating the eye or the ear, not objects in which you can believe.

It is also prior to any activity by a subject. From the perspective of the Ego, the appearing of the long and bright impression requires a very rudimentary and low awareness. We are at a very inferior level of vigilance, a dim and quasi-anonymous form of operation by the Ego. It has the form of a vague question: Shall I pay interest to the brightness? Shall I yield to the appeal of this glowing spot? Shall I look at it, turning myself toward it? No special awakening is required, no internal moving, there is just the swinging between seeing and not seeing, between looking at the bright long patch and remaining blind to it. The Ego is passive, but it is solicited or “affected” and it may “awaken.”

Autistic Fascination

Such an example and descriptions may sound too literary, a poetic trifle or, inversely, an experiment of abstraction. But they may be of great interest for psychology and psycho-pathology. One of the most mysterious features of autistic states is the submission to impressions. If a young autistic boy looks at a pond (Truffaut’s film L’enfant sauvage illustrates the situation well) he seems engrossed by the shining surface. He does not see the real pond, since the water is for him predominantly a glimmering, since the surface’s mirroring catches all his attention. His eyes are trapped, so to speak, or gripped by the brightness. In the same manner, when confronted with a sound or a tone, he is captivated as if invaded, softly or violently. Rhythm echoes in his body, he responds to the impression with a swinging behavior, gently oscillating back and forth. In many cases the non-focused, non-centered vision is dominated by peripheral sight, it is not aimed at a precise object (the other striking aspect is the avoidance of directly looking at others). A child who seems totally closed in on himself is at the same time totally and dangerously open, depending on sensory impression, delicious and threatening. The body vibrates without protection under the obtrusive sensuous shocks.

The same thing probably happens with a baby at a very early stage. But during normal maturation, such sensorial fascination is damped—these too-strong “affections” are channeled, integrated, and converted into perceived objects. Impressions are mastered and transformed into objects of invariant features, three-dimensional shapes, which are ready at hand for various manipulations. Correlatively, the Ego awakens and structures itself.

This elementary level is what Husserl calls “affection” and describes as an inferior level of the experience. In normal experience, this level is accessible only through an abstracting vision, a vision which deforms and simplifies usual perception. But elementary affection, d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PART I Husserl’s Experience and Judgment
• PART II Phenomenology and Ancient Philosophy
• PART III Unity of Imagination
• PART IV Plato’s Sophist
• PART V In Memoriam
• Index