THIS CHAPTER INTRODUCES a number of themes from phenomenological philosophy that will appear throughout this book. Phenomenology is important here for two main reasons. First, any attempt to gain a comprehensive understanding of the human mind must at some point consider consciousness and subjectivity—how thinking, perceiving, acting, and feeling are experienced in one’s own case. Mental events do not occur in a vacuum; they are lived by someone. Phenomenology is anchored to the careful description, analysis, and interpretation of lived experience. Second, the enactive approach puts the organism and the body center-stage in mind science, but the human body, unless it is dead, is always the lived body. Phenomenology, in one of its strongest currents flowing from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, is a philosophy of the lived body. For these reasons, phenomenology can guide and clarify scientific research on subjectivity and consciousness, and provide a philosophical framework for assessing the meaning and significance of this research for our self-understanding.
This chapter has two purposes. First, it introduces some core ideas of Husserl’s phenomenology, in particular the phenomenological method of investigating the structure of experience, known as the phenomenological reduction, and the phenomenological concept of intentionality. Second, it sketches three phases of phenomenology, known as static, genetic, and generative phenomenology.
Static phenomenology analyzes the formal structures of consciousness, whereby consciousness is able to constitute (disclose or bring to awareness) its objects. Static phenomenology takes these intentional structures and their correlative objects as given and analyzes them statically or synchronically.
Genetic phenomenology is concerned with how these intentional structures and objects emerge through time; therefore, it cannot take them as given. Instead, it analyzes how certain types of experience motivate later and more complex types—for example, how implicit and prereflective experiences motivate attentive and reflective experiences. From the perspective of genetic phenomenology, experience has a sedimented structure, and the process of sedimentation needs to be understood in relation to the lived body and time-consciousness. Some of the key guiding phenomena for genetic phenomenology—affect, motivation, attention, habit—are familiar from the perspective of mind science, especially developmental psychology, emotion theory, and affective-cognitive neuroscience. These points of convergence and mutual illumination will be taken up in later chapters.
Whereas time-consciousness and the lived body are the guiding threads for genetic phenomenology, for generative phenomenology the guiding thread is the life-world. The subject matter of generative phenomenology is the cultural, historical, and intersubjective constitution of our human world. The importance of generative phenomenology for mind science and the enactive approach in particular will be taken up in the last chapter of this book.
Phenomenology, in its original Husserlian inspiration, grows out of the recognition that we can adopt in our own first-person case different mental attitudes or stances toward the world, life, and experience. In everyday life we are usually straightforwardly immersed in various situations and projects, whether as specialists in scientific, technical, or practical knowledge or as colleagues, friends, and members of families and communities. Besides being directed toward these more-or-less particular, “thematic” matters, we are also directed at the world as an unthematic horizon of all our activity (Husserl 1970, p. 281). Husserl calls this attitude of being straightforwardly immersed in the world “the natural attitude,” and he thinks it is characterized by a kind of unreflective “positing” of the world as something existing “out there” more or less independently of us.
In contrast, the “phenomenological attitude,” arises when we step back from the natural attitude, not to deny it, but in order to investigate the very experiences it comprises. If such an investigation is to be genuinely philosophical, then it must strive to be critical and not dogmatic, and therefore it cannot take the naïve realism of the natural attitude for granted. Yet to deny this realistic attitude would be equally dogmatic. Rather, the realistic positing of the natural attitude must be suspended, neutralized, or put to one side, so that it plays no role in the investigation. In this way, we can focus on the experiences that sustain and animate the natural attitude, but in an open and nondogmatic manner. We can investigate experience in the natural attitude without being prejudiced by an unexamined view of things, which is characteristic of the natural attitude.
Yet how exactly is such an investigation to proceed? What exactly are we supposed to investigate? Husserl’s answer is that our attention should be directed toward the world strictly as we experience it. We are to attend to the world strictly as it appears and as it is phenomenally manifest. Put another way, we should attend to the modes or ways in which things appear to us. We thereby attend to things strictly as correlates of our experience, and the focus of our investigation becomes the correlational structure of our subjectivity and the appearance or disclosure of the world.
The philosophical procedure by which this correlational structure is investigated is known as the phenomenological reduction. “Reduction” in this context does not mean replacing or eliminating one theory or model in favor of another taken to be more fundamental. It signifies rather a “leading back” (reducere) or redirection of thought away from its unreflective and unexamined immersion in the world to the way in which the world appears to us. To redirect our interest in this way does not mean we doubt the things before us or that we somehow try to turn away from the world to look elsewhere. Things remain before us, but we envisage them in a new way, namely, strictly as experienced. Thus, everyday things available for our perception are not doubted or considered as illusions when they are “phenomenologically reduced,” but instead are envisaged and examined simply and precisely as perceived. Remembered things are examined strictly and precisely as remembered, imagined things as imagined. In other words, once we adopt the phenomenological attitude, we are interested not in what things are in some naïve, mind-independent or theory-independent sense, but rather in exactly how they are experienced, and thus as strict relational correlates of our subjectivity.1
As a procedure of working back from the what to the how of experience, the phenomenological reduction has to be performed in the first person. As is true of any such procedure, it is one thing to describe its general theoretical character and another to describe it pragmatically, the concrete steps by which it is carried out. The main methodical step crucial for the phenomenological reduction Husserl called the epoché. This term derives from Greek skepticism, where it means to suspend or refrain from judgment, but Husserl adopted it as a term for the “suspension,” “neutralization,” or “bracketing” of both our natural “positing” attitude and our theoretical beliefs and assertions (whether scientific or philosophical) about “objective reality.” From a more embodied and situated, first-person perspective, however, the epoché can be described as the flexible and trainable mental skill of being able both to suspend one’s inattentive immersion in experience and to turn one’s attention to the manner in which something appears or is given to experience (Depraz 1999b; Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2000; Steinbock 2004). Suspending one’s inattentive immersion in experience implies the capacity to notice such immersion, and thus implies what psychologists call meta-awareness (awareness of awareness). Being able to redirect one’s attention to the manner in which something appears implies flexibility of attention; in particular it implies being able voluntarily to shift one’s attention and stabilize or sustain it on a given mode of presentation. The ultimate aim is not to break the flow of experience, but to reinhabit it in a fresh way, namely, with heightened awareness and attunement.2
Within the phenomenological tradition one can discern a certain ambivalence regarding these theoretical and practical or existential dimensions of the epoché. On the one hand, Husserl’s great concern was to establish phenomenology as a new philosophical foundation for science; thus for him the epoché served largely as a critical tool of theoretical reason.3 On the other hand, because Husserl’s theoretical project was based on a radical reappraisal of experience as the source of meaning and knowledge, it necessitated a constant return to the patient, analytic description of lived experience through phenomenological reduction. This impulse generated a huge corpus of careful phenomenological analyses of human experience—the perceptual experience of space (Husserl 1997), kinesthesis and the experience of one’s own body (Husserl 1989, 1997), time-consciousness (Husserl 1991), affect (Husserl 2001), judgment (Husserl 1975), imagination and memory (Husserl 2006), and intersubjectivity (Husserl 1973), to name just a few.
Nevertheless, the epoché as a practical procedure—as a situated practice carried out in the first person by the phenomenologist—has remained strangely neglected in the phenomenological literature, even by so-called existential phenomenologists such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. They instead took up and then recast in their own ways the method of the phenomenological reduction (see Heidegger 1982, pp.19–23; Merleau-Ponty 1962, pp. xi–xiv). For this reason, one new current in phenomenology aims to develop more explicitly the pragmatics of the epoché as a first-person method for investigating consciousness (Depraz 1999b; Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch, 2000, 2003; Varela and Shear 1999b). This pragmatic approach also involves comparing the epoché to first-person methods in other domains, especially Buddhist philosophy and contemplative mental training (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch, 2003; Lutz, Dunne, and Davidson, 2007). In addition, it explores the relevance of first-person methods for producing more refined first-person reports in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience (Lutz and Thompson 2003). This endeavor is central to the research program known as neurophenomenology, introduced by Francisco Varela (1996) and discussed extensively later in this book.
Let us return to the phenomenological reduction in its original philosophical context. Here the reduction, in its full sense, is a rich mode of analysis, comprising two main steps. The first step leads back from the natural attitude to the phenomenological attitude by neutralizing the realistic positing of the natural attitude and then orienting attention toward the disclosure or appearance of reality to us (this step corresponds to the epoché). The second step leads from this phenomenological attitude to a more radical kind of philosophical attitude. More precisely, this step leads from phenomenology as an empirical and psychological attitude (phenomenological psychology) to phenomenology as a transcendental philosophical attitude (transcendental phenomenology).
The term transcendental is used here in its Kantian sense to mean an investigation concerned with the modes or ways in which objects are experienced and known, and with the a priori conditions for the possibility of such experience and knowledge. Husserl casts these two aspects of transcendental inquiry in a specific form that is clearly related to but nonetheless different from Kant’s (see Steinbock 1995, pp. 12–15). First, transcendental phenomenology focuses not on what things are but on the ways in which things are given. For Husserl, this means focusing on phenomena (appearances) and the senses or meanings they have for us, and then asking how these meaningful phenomena are constituted (brought to awareness). Second, to address this constitutional problem, transcendental phenomenology tries to uncover the essential formal laws under which experience necessarily operates in order to constitute a meaningful world.
In the natural attitude, reality is taken for granted as being simply there without any active engagement on the part of consciousness. In other words, there is no thought that reality involves acts or processes of constitution. Grasped phenomenologically, in the transcendental phenomenological attitude, reality is that which is disclosed to us as real, whether in everyday perception or scientific investigation, and such disclosure is an achievement of consciousness. The point here is not that the world would not exist if not for consciousness. Rather, it is that we have no grip on what reality means apart from what is disclosed to us as real, and such disclosure necessarily involves the intentional activity of consciousness. The point of the transcendental phenomenological reduction is to gain access to this activity and the constitutional role it plays.
It is often said that whereas Husserl’s orientation is transcendental in this way, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty reject the transcendental standpoint and identify the constitutional structures unearthed by phenomenology with existential structures of “being-in-the-world.” (The hyphens indicate that “being,” “in,” and “world” are not ontologically separable, but form one irreducible and unified structure.) But this interpretation is simplistic. First, both Heidegger’s “Dasein” (his term for individual human existence) and Merleau-Ponty’s “lived body” (a concept that comes straight from Husserl) are transcendental in the relevant sense, for they are ways of characterizing that which makes possible the disclosure or manifestation of the world as meaningful. Second, although Husserl in the most well-known portions of his work (the writings published in his lifetime) did focus largely on the constitutional structures of “egological” consciousness (consciousness at the level of the individual reflective “I” or “ego”), recent scholarship indicates that these analyses are not fully representative of his mature philosophical investigations.4 As his thought developed, he greatly expanded his investigations, analyzing constitutional structures belonging to the “nonegological” (or “pre-egological”) depths of the lived body, time-consciousness, and intersubjectivity, as well as the terrain of historical and cultural life.5 The point here is more than an interpretive or textual one; it is philosophical. Transcendental phenomenology cannot be limited to—and indeed goes far beyond—a philosophy of “egological” consciousness or subjectivity. “Transcendental” signifies a radical attitude, one that aims to regress back to the very roots (conditions of possibility) of our experience of a meaningful world. These roots ramify far beyond individual consciousness into the depths of our lived bodies and out into our social and cultural worlds.
The remainder of this chapter sketches a few of these developments of phenomenological thought. My aim is not to give a detailed scholarly account of any particular aspect of phenomenology, but to set forth some themes and ideas important for the chapters to come.
A good place to begin is the phenomenological doctrine of the intentionality of consciousness. According to phenomenology, consciousness is intentional, in the sense that it “aims toward” or “intends” something beyond itself. This sense of intentional should not be confused with the more familiar sense of having a purpose in mind when one acts, which is only one kind of intentionality in the phenomenological sense. Rather, intentionality is a generic term for the pointing-beyond-itself proper to consciousness. (It comes from the Latin intendere, which once referred to drawing a bow and aiming at a target.)
Phenomenologists distinguish different types of intentionality. In a narrow sense, they define intentionality as object-directedness. In a broader sense, they define it as openness to the world or what is “other” (“alterity”). In either case, the emphasis is on denying that consciousness is self-enclosed.6
Object-directed experiences are those in which we are conscious of something in a more-or-less determinate sense. When we see, we see something; when we remember, we remember something; when we hope or fear, we hope for or fear something. These kinds of “transitive consciousness” are characterized by the intending of an object (which need not exist). “Object” in its etymological sense means something that stands before us. Something standing before us lies beyond, over against, or outside of us. Object-directed experiences can thus be understood as experiences in which we are conscious of something distinct from ourselves as a present subject, whether it be a past event remembered, something perceived in the settings around us, a future event feared or hoped for, something imagined, and so on.
Many kinds of everyday experience, however, are not object-directed in this sense. Such experiences include bodily feelings of pain, moods such as undirected anxiety, depression, and elation, and absorbed skillful activity in everyday life. These experiences are not or need not be “about” any intentional object. They are not directed toward a transcendent object, in the sense of something experienced as standing over against oneself as a distinct subject. Put another way, they do not have a clear subject-object structure.7
Philosophers who think of intentionality simply as object-directedness would deny that experiences like these are intentional. Nevertheless, such experiences do qualify as intentional in the broader phenomenological sense of being open to what is other or having a world-involving character. Thus bodily feelings are not self-enclosed without openness to the world. On the contrary, they present things in a certain affective light or atmosphere and thereby deeply influence how we perceive and respond to things. A classic example is Sartre’s discussion of feeling eyestrain and fatigue as a result of reading late into the night (1956, pp. 332–333).8 The feeling first manifests itself not as an intentional object of transitive consciousness but as a trembling of the eyes and a blurriness of the words on the page. One’s body and immediate environment disclose themselves in a certain manner through this feeling. In the case of moods, although they are not object-directed in the same way intentional emotions are—such as a feeling of sympathy for a loved one or a feeling of envy for a rival—they are nonetheless hardly self-enclosed without reference to the world. On the contrary, as Heidegger analyzes at length in Being and Time, moods reveal our embeddedness in the world and (as he sees it) make possible more circumscribed forms of directedness in everyday life. Finally, in absorbed skillful activities, such as driving, dancing, or writing, one’s experience is not that of relating to a distinct intentional object but of being engaged and immersed in a fluid activity. Such experience takes on a subject-object structure only during moments of breakdown or disruption (see Dreyfus 1991, 2002; Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986).
In phenomenology, intentional experiences are described as mental acts—acts of perceiving, remembering, imagining, empathizing, and so on. Phenomenology conceives of mental life as a temporally extended and dynamic process of flowing intentional acts. These acts are animated by precognitive habits and sensibilities of the lived body. Intentional acts are performances of a person, a living bodily subject of experience, whose cognitive and affective life is constituted by communal norms, conventions, and historical traditions. Mental life is animated by an intentional striving that aims toward and finds satisfaction in disclosure of the intentional object. In this way, intentionality is teleological (Held 2003, p. 14).
Given this conception of intentionality, it follows that neither the mental act nor that which it intends can be understood in isolation. Every mental act is the very act it is in virtue of that which it intends, and every object is constituted in and through the temporally extended course of intentional experience. As Donn Welton explains:
There is a genuinely new conception of mental acts here in play . . . On the one hand, acts do not belong to a closed interior realm available only to introspection. Rather, they have their being by virtue of their relationship to that which transcends them. On the other hand, the determinations of “the given” can be fully clarified only by seeing them in relation to certain acts that contribute to their configuration. It is neither the subject nor the object but the relationship that is primary. (Welton 2000, p. 17)
Phenomenologists call this relation the correlational structure of intentionality. “Correlational” does not mean the constant conjunction of two terms that could be imagined to exist apart; rather, it refers to the invariant structure of intentional act/intentional object. Object-directed intentional experiences necessarily comprise these two inseparable poles. In Husserlian phenomenological language, these two poles are known as the “noema” (the object in its givenness) and the “noesis” (the mental act that intends and discloses the object in a certain manner).9
We need to keep this framework in mind when we think about the relation between the phenomenological conception of intentionality and what philosophers of mind today call mental representation. In a broad and theoretically neutral sense, a mental representation is supposed to be a mental structure (concept, thought, image) with semantic properties (content, truth conditions, reference), or a state or process involving such a structure. Usually, a mental representation is not considered to be an object of cognition or awareness, but rather that by which one cognizes or is aware of something in the world. Many phenomenologists would agree that intentional experience is representational in this broad sense of having descriptive content—that in intentional experience the world is represented in some particular way or other. Nevertheless, the phenomenological conception of intentional experience has certain other distinctive features. First, in phenomenology, as mentioned earlier, intentional experiences are conceptualized not as states having content but as acts having directedness. These two conceptions are not necessarily incompatible, but their theoretical orientation and emphasis are different. Second, “re-presentation,” in its technical phenomenological sense, applies only to certain types of intentional acts, namely, those that mentally evoke or bring to presence something that is not present in its bodily being.
Phenomenologists thus draw a crucial distinction between intentional acts of presentation (Gegenwärtigung) and of re-presentation (Vergegenwärtigung) (see Marbach 1993). On the one hand, perceptual experience is presentational: in this type of experience the object is given as present in its very being. In memory or imagination, on the other hand, the object imagined or remembered is not given as present in its very being, but rather as both phenomenally absent and as mentally evoked or called forth. In this way, memory and imagination are said to be re-presentational. Note that the definitive feature of re-presentational experience is that the object is given as absent and as mentally evoked, but not necessarily as re-evoked or called forth again. Re-evoking belongs to memory but not necessarily to visualizing or fantasizing. Note also that re-presentational experiences do not float freely, as it were, but arise in relation to ongoing presentational experiences of one’s surroundings. I discuss this phenomenological conception of mental re-presentation in connection with mental imagery in Chapter 10.
Let us return to the connection between phenomenology and the enactive approach. As we will see in Chapter 3, the main explanatory tool of the enactive approach is the theory of self-organizing and autonomous dynamic systems. Such systems bring forth or enact meaning in continuous reciprocal interaction with their environments. “Inner” and “outer” are not preexisting separate spheres, but mutually specifying domains enacted or brought forth by the structural coupling of the system and its environment. This subpersonal account of cognitive systems echoes the personal-level account of the correlational structure of intentionality.10 As Jean-Pierre Dupuy writes in his philosophical history of cognitive science, discussing the “missed encounter” between phenomenology and mind science in the cybernetic era:
A given [autonomous] network usually possesses a multiplicity of self-behaviors (or, as they are sometimes called, “attractors” . . . ) and converges toward one or another of them depending on the initial conditions of the network. The “life” of a network can thus be conceived as a trajectory through a “landscape” of attractors, passing from one to another as a result of perturbations or shocks from the external world. Note that these external events come to acquire meaning in the context of the network as a result of the network’s own activity: the content—the meaning—that the network attributes to them is precisely the self-behavior, or attractor that results from them. Obviously, then, this content is purely endogenous and not the reflection of some external “transcendent” objectivity.
It should be obvious, too, that this line of argument . . . provides us with at least the germ of a very satisfactory model of what Brentano called “immanent objectivity” . . . The attractor is an entity that both fully participates in the activity of the network and yet in some sense, by virtue of the fact that it results from a higher level of logical complexity, transcends the activity of the network. The dynamics of the network may therefore be said to tend toward an attractor, although the latter is only a product of these dynamics. The network is thus an intentional creature in Brentano and Husserl’s sense. Systems theory was to coin another term to describe this paradoxical relationship between the dynamics of a system and its attractor, referring to it as “autotranscendence.” This is not very different, really, from Husserl’s notion of “transcendence within immanence.” (Dupuy 2000, pp. 104–105)
Because this notion of transcendence-within-immanence is often misunderstood, it bears clarification here. It does not mean that what appears to be beyond or outside the sphere of mental activity is really contained within the mind (in some idealist or internalist sense). Rather, the crucial point is that the transcendent is given as such by virtue of the intentional activities of consciousness. Thus it falls within the sphere of what is phenomenologically constituted (disclosed or brought to awareness by consciousness). Clearly, this point makes sense only at a transcendental level, for at this level the transcendent is understood as a mode of givenness or disclosure (one characterizing things in the world, but not one’s own consciousness). Thus, at a transcendental level, what is really or genuinely transcendent is also phenomenologically immanent (see Crowell, in press, for further discussion).
The correspondence between phenomenology and dynamic systems theory to which Dupuy is pointing should therefore be understood as follows. External events are really transcendent, for they are certainly not contained within the system, nor are they a mere product of what goes inside the system. Nevertheless, they are intentionally immanent, in the following sense: they do not arrive already labeled, as it were, as external events; instead they are constituted or disclosed as such, and with the significance they have, by virtue of the network’s autonomous (self-organizing) dynamics. In other words, their status as external events for the system (as opposed to their status for an observer of the system) is a function of the system’s own activity. Their meaning or significance corresponds to an attractor of the system’s dynamics (a recurrent pattern of activity toward which the system tends), which itself is an emergent product of that very dynamics. The external world is constituted as such for the system by virtue of the system’s self-organizing activity. Dupuy’s proposal, in a nutshell, is that constitutional intentionality corresponds to a kind of self-organization. This proposal, as we will see in later chapters, is one of the key guiding intuitions of the enactive approach and neurophenomenology.
This convergence between phenomenology and the enactive approach can be taken further. The correlational structure of intentionality belongs to what Husserl called static phenomenology. As his thought progressed, however, Husserl found that he needed to articulate a genetic phenomenology, that is, a phenomenology whose point of departure is not the explicit correlational structure of intentional act (noesis) and intentional object (noema), but rather the genesis of intentional experience in time. From the standpoint of genetic phenomenology, we need to account for the correlational structure of intentionality developmentally by understanding how it emerges from inarticulate experience that does not have a clear subject-object structure. One wellspring of this kind of experience is the lived body (Leib); another is time-consciousness. The shift from static to genetic phenomenology thus marks a turn toward the lived body and time-consciousness. Thus it enables us to deepen the connection between phenomenology and the enactive approach.
Static phenomenology makes use of two methodological strategies (Steinbock 1995, pp. 38–39). The first is static analysis or the analysis of invariant formal structures of experience, such as the correlational structure of intentionality, or the difference between presentational and re-presentational mental acts and the ways the latter presuppose the former. The second strategy is constitutional analysis—the analysis of how things are disclosed or brought to awareness by virtue of the intentional activities of consciousness. From a transcendental perspective, the invariant formal structures of experience uncovered by static analysis are precisely the essential formal laws under which experience necessarily operates in order to constitute its objects. An example is Husserl’s investigation in his 1907 lectures, “Thing and Space,” of the conditions of possibility for the perceptual experience of things in space (Husserl 1997). Husserl shows that visual perception depends constitutively on certain invariant functional interdependencies between visual sensation and the experience of moving one’s body (which he calls kinesthesis). These analyses anticipate recent enactive or dynamic sensorimotor accounts of perception (discussed in Chapter 9). According to these accounts, to perceive is to exercise one’s skillful mastery of the ways sensory stimulation varies as a result of bodily movement (Noë 2004; O’Regan and Noë 2001a).
Unlike static phenomenology, genetic phenomenology does not take the already disclosed intentional object as its point of departure, nor is it content to stay at the level of analyzing formal and constitutive structures of experience. Instead, it investigates the genesis and development of those structures themselves. After all, we do not simply drop into the world and open our eyes and see. What we see is a function of how we see, and how we see is a function of previous experience. For genetic phenomenology, what we experience is not a fixed given but something that has come to be given—something emergent—out of previous experience (Bernet, Kern, and Marbach 1993, pp. 200–201). In Chapters 11 and 12, I discuss phenomenological analyses of time-consciousness and affect produced from this genetic orientation and relate them to research in psychology and neuroscience.
Genetic phenomenology also brings with it a different way of thinking about the conscious subject. From a static viewpoint, the “I” is thought of as a kind of “ego-pole” of the noetic-noematic structure, in contraposition to the “object-pole.”11 A fuller articulation of the correlational structure of intentionality would thus be [ego] noesis-noema (I intend the intentional object). From a genetic standpoint, however, this way of thinking remains abstract because it ignores the temporal development and individuation of the subject. The “I” or “ego” is not a mere “empty pole” of selfhood in experience but a concrete subject having habits, interests, convictions, and capabilities as a result of accumulated experience. In other words, the subject has to be seen as having a “life” in all the rich senses of this word—as formed by its individual history, as a living bodily subject of experience (Leib), and as belonging to an intersubjective “life-world” (Lebenswelt).
Genetic phenomenology distinguishes between active genesis and passive genesis. In active genesis subjects play an active and deliberate, productive role in the constitution of objects. The products of active genesis are tools, artworks, scientific theories, experimental interventions, logical judgments, mathematical propositions, and so on. Active genesis, however, always presupposes a passivity by which one is affected beforehand. It must be stressed that “passive” in this context does not mean a state of inactivity, but rather a state of being involuntarily influenced and affected by something. In particular, it means being influenced and affected on an aesthetic level, in the original Greek sense of aisthesis as sense perception, including especially the perception and felt experience of what is attractive and unattractive. Thus the thought behind the active/passive distinction is that our active orientation toward things in practical or theoretical reason, or artistic creation, presupposes a deeper and more fundamental openness to the world. It is an openness to being sensuously affected and solicited by the world through the medium of our living body, and responding by attraction and repulsion. Investigating these sensorimotor and affective depths of experience leads phenomenology to the notion of passive genesis. In passive genesis, the lived body constitutes itself and its surrounding environment through the involuntary formation of habits, motor patterns, associations, dispositions, motivations, emotions, and memories.
At this level of “passive synthesis” in experience, the relevant notion of intentionality is not so much object-directedness as openness to the world, here in the bodily form of an implicit sensibility or sentience that does not have any clear subject-object structure. Intentionality at this level functions anonymously, involuntarily, spontaneously, and receptively. Husserl distinguishes between receptivity and affectivity (2001, pp. 105, 127). As Dan Zahavi explains, “Receptivity is taken to be the first, lowest, and most primitive type of intentional activity, and consists in responding to or paying attention to that which is affecting us passively. Thus, even receptivity understood as a mere ‘I notice’ presupposes a prior affection” (Zahavi 1999, p. 116; see also the Translator’s Introduction to Husserl 2001). Affection here means being affectively influenced or perturbed. The idea is that whatever comes into relief in experience must have already been affecting us and must have some kind of “affective force” or “affective allure” in relation to our attention and motivations. Whatever exercises affective allure without our turning to it attentively is said to be “pregiven,” and whatever succeeds in gaining attention is said to be “given.” Thus the given—the mode or way in which something appears to object-directed consciousness—has to be understood dynamically and teleologically as emergent in relation to the pregiven. Object-directed intentional experiences emerge out of the background of a precognitive “operative intentionality” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. xviii) that involves a dynamic interplay of affective sensibility, motivation, and attention. This affectively “saturated intentionality” (Steinbock 1999) provides our primordial openness to the world.
The phenomenological terrain of “passive synthesis” is rich in potential for illuminating and being illuminated by research in psychology and neuroscience on emotion and cognition. Some of these connections are already discernible in Husserl’s description of passive synthesis as operating according to a principle of association (Husserl 1960, pp. 80–81; 2001, pp. 162–242). For Husserl, association is an intentional process whereby experiences are built up or synthesized into larger, patterned wholes. Using the terminology of emergence, we could say that association is the process by which coherent patterns of experience emerge from conjoined and reciprocally affecting experiences. Here are a few vivid examples given by William James in his Principles of Psychology:
Let a person enter his room in the dark and grope among the objects there. The touch of the matches will instantaneously recall their appearance. If his hand comes in contact with an orange on the table, the golden yellow of the fruit, its savor and perfume will forthwith shoot through his mind. In passing the hand over the sideboard or in jogging the coal-scuttle with the foot, the large glossy dark shape of the one and the irregular blackness of the other awaken in a flash and constitute what we call the recognition of objects. The voice of the violin faintly echoes through the mind as the hand is laid upon it in the dark, and the feeling of the garments or draperies which may hang about the room is not understood till the look correlative to the feeling has in each case been resuscitated . . . But the most notorious and important case of the mental combination of auditory with optical impressions originally experienced together is furnished by language. The child is offered a new and delicious fruit and is at the same time told that it is called a “fig.” Or looking out of the window he exclaims, “What a funny horse!” and is told that it is a “piebald” horse. When learning his letters, the sound of each is repeated to him whilst its shape is before his eye. Thenceforward, long as he may live, he will never see a fig, a piebald horse, or a letter of the alphabet without the name which he first heard in conjunction with each clinging to it in his mind; and inversely he will never hear the name without the faint arousal of the image of the object. (1981, pp. 524–525)
According to the empiricist philosophers Locke and Hume, such associations happen in a completely mechanical way. Association operates as a kind of connective force in the mind that links impressions and ideas simply in virtue of their simultaneous occurrence, proximity, or repeated succession. Hume’s analysis of causation provides a famous example of this way of thinking about association. Hume argued that causal connections are neither directly observable nor provable by reason, but are objects of mere belief based on habit and custom. The belief in a causal connection between A and B arises from the association or “constant conjunction” of A and B in past experience: experiences of A constantly conjoined to experiences of B make the mind habitually expect that the occurrence of A will be followed by the occurrence of B.
For Husserl (and James), however, association is not meaningless and mechanical, but thoroughly intentional. Association is not the mechanical aggregation of complex experiences out of preexisting experience-atoms. Husserl, like James, completely rejects this atomistic conception of experience. Like emergent processes in a self-organizing system, associated experiences reciprocally strengthen and reinforce each other and thereby give rise to new formations that supersede their prior separateness. Association also involves the retention and anticipation of sense or meaning. Earlier experiences are affectively “awakened” by later ones on the basis of their felt similarities, and they motivate the anticipation that what is to come will cohere with the sense or meaning of experience so far. In Husserl’s terminology, there is an “analogical transfer of sense” from earlier to later experience: what is present now is passively apprehended within a sense that has its roots in earlier experience and that has since become habitual (Bernet, Kern, and Marbach 1993, p. 202).
The notion of habit is central to Husserl’s conception of passive genesis, as he states explicitly in a lecture from 1927: “As Hume correctly teaches, habit is not only our nurse, rather it is the function of consciousness that shapes and constantly further shapes the world” (quoted by Bernet, Kern, and Marbach 1993, p. 203; see also Welton 2000, p. 243). Husserl mentions Hume, but the notion of habit was very important to James as well. In his Principles of Psychology James declared that habit is the ground of all association in the stream of consciousness and in brain activity (thereby anticipating Donald Hebb and connectionism).12 Later, in 1945, Merleau-Ponty introduced his notion of the habit-body in his Phenomenology of Perception while discussing the experience of the phantom limb: “our body comprises as it were two distinct layers, that of the habit-body and that of the body at this moment. In the first appear manipulatory movements which have disappeared from the second, and the problem how I can have the sensation of still possessing a limb which I no longer have amounts to finding out how the habitual body can act as guarantee for the body at this moment” (1962, p. 82). To say that the habitual body acts as guarantee for the body at this moment is to say that one’s lived body is a developmental being thick with its own history and sedimented ways of feeling, perceiving, acting, and imagining. These sedimented patterns are not limited to the space enclosed by the body’s membrane; they span and interweave the lived body and its environment, thereby forming a unitary circuit of lived-body-environment (Gallagher 1986b).
In Part III, I will explore this convergence of genetic phenomenology and enactive cognitive science in greater detail. For now let me simply point out how important the dynamic coupling between one’s lived body and the surrounding world is to both perspectives. In this coupling, the motivating undercurrent is the habitual and associative linkage of affective, sensorimotor, and imaginative bodily experiences.
Late in his life Husserl began to move in still another direction—from genetic phenomenology to generative phenomenology. Already in genetic phenomenology intersubjectivity had arisen as an important theme, in the form of the dynamic coupling between self and other on the basis of their lived bodily presence to one another. Generative phenomenology, however, widened the scope of this genetic analysis beyond the self-other relation to include the parameters of birth and death as well as the interconnectedness of generations.
In this context, the term generative has a double meaning: it means both the process of becoming and the process of occurring over the generations (Steinbock 1995, p. 3). Generative phenomenology concerns the historical, social, and cultural becoming of human experience. If static phenomenology is restricted in scope with respect to genetic phenomenology, then genetic phenomenology is restricted in scope with respect to generative phenomenology: the subject matter of generative phenomenology is the historical and intersubjective becoming of human experience, whereas genetic phenomenology focuses on individual development without explicit analysis of its generational and historical embeddedness.
In shifting from a genetic to a generative register, the notion of the lived body is complemented with that of the life-world (Husserl 1970; Steinbock 1995, pp. 86–122; Welton 2000, pp. 331–346). The life-world is the everyday world in which we live. It is “always already pregiven,” serving as the horizon of all our activities, practical and theoretical. Two important aspects of this rich and multifaceted notion need to be mentioned here—the back-and-forth circulation or exchange within the life-world between empirical science and everyday human life, and the life-world as the pregiven horizon and ground of all human activity.
The life-world comprises the everyday world and the things that can be directly experienced within the everyday world—our living bodies, our natural surroundings, and our cultural creations (tools, artworks, and so on). The life-world is subject-relative in the sense that it is relationally bound to human subjectivity. This is in contrast to “objective nature” as conceived by science, which is arrived at through logical and theoretical abstraction. Nature so construed is an objectification and has as its cognitive correlate the objectifying intentional attitude adopted by a community of theorizing subjects. Objective nature presupposes the life-world as its evidential source and ground. In principle it cannot be experienced directly because it is the product of abstraction and idealization. Nevertheless, the propositions, models, logical constructs, and experimental techniques of the sciences are clearly experienceable in another sense: they are human accomplishments that have experiential validity for members of the scientific community, and their effects flow into the everyday world and become tangibly experienced in the form of technology and social practice. Our life-world encompasses science, in addition to other spheres of experience such as art, philosophy, and religion. Hence, there is a necessary “circulation” between everyday experience and scientific experience (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, pp. 10–14). On the one hand, everyday experience provides the sensuous, material contents from which and with which science must work. On the other hand, the scientific analyses built from these contents contribute to the formation of our life-world and provide important leading clues for phenomenological analyses of how our experience of the world is genetically and generatively constituted.
In taking up these phenomenological analyses, Husserl initially conceived of the life-world as a synthetic totality. Hence he treated it on the model of an object, albeit a peculiar all-encompassing one (see Steinbock 1995, pp. 98–102; Welton 2000, pp. 336–346). Eventually, however, it became clear to him that the life-world cannot be given as any kind of intentional object, for it is always already there, pregiven rather than given.13 Thus, in a crucial and famous passage from his last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1970, §37, pp. 142–143), he wrote that the world is always already there, existing in advance for us, as the “ground” and “horizon” of any human activity. He then asserted that the way we are conscious of the world and the way we are conscious of things or objects, though inseparably united, are fundamentally different. We can be conscious of things only as things within the world horizon, and we can be conscious of the world horizon only as a horizon for existing objects. Yet the world is not any kind of entity, nor is it simply the totality of entities, precisely because it is the horizon presupposed by any entity or any totality. It is tempting to say “the world is one,” except that, as Husserl puts it, the world “exists with such uniqueness that the plural makes no sense when applied to it.” In other words, the world is not one in any sense in which it could have been two. To put it another way, to describe the world as “unique,” such that “every singular and every plural drawn from it, presupposes the world horizon,” means that the notion of counting makes no sense or has no application here.14 Given this difference between the manner in which any object is given and the manner in which the world horizon is given (namely, as always already pregiven), it follows that there must be “fundamentally different correlative types of consciousness for them.”
Husserl’s terms horizon and ground are metaphorical, at once visual and geological. A horizon is not a thing “out there” but rather a structure of appearance. It therefore implicates or points back to the perceiver for whom appearances are so structured. In phenomenological language, “horizon” taken noematically as a structure of appearance necessarily implicates “horizon” taken noetically as a structure of consciousness. One could say that a horizon is the precondition for the appearance of anything, except that “precondition” is too static. Stated in a genetic register, a horizon is a dynamic structure of disclosure in which both the object (noema) and consciousness (noesis) partake (Steinbock 1995, p. 107). Anything that comes forth, manifests, or emerges does so in an open clearing or expanse, delimited by a horizon. The horizon of every possible horizon is the world. Yet the world-horizon cannot be the synthesis, totality, or mereological sum of all these possible horizons because it is pregiven or a priori with respect to any of them and thus is sui generis. Similarly, to describe the life-world as ground (Boden) is not to say that it is a static foundation; rather, it is the pregiven soil out of which everything is generated and nourished. This soil includes one’s forebears and culture. We human beings constitute and reconstitute ourselves through cultural traditions, which we experience as our own development in a historical time that spans the generations. To investigate the life-world as horizon and ground of all experience therefore requires investigating none other than generativity—the processes of becoming, of making and remaking, that occur over the generations and within which any individual genesis is always already situated.
Generative phenomenology brings to the fore the intersubjective, social, and cultural aspects of our radical embodiment. Individuals are born and die, they develop and constantly change, and they emerge from their forebears and perpetuate themselves in generations to come. Individual subjectivity is from the outset intersubjectivity, originally engaged with and altered by others in specific geological and cultural environments (Depraz 1999c, p. 482; Steinbock 1995). Individual subjectivity is intersubjectively and culturally embodied, embedded, and emergent.
Classical cognitive science, to the extent that it operated under the assumption that the individual self comes first and the other second, simply left out intersubjectivity and culture. Indeed, it had no real means to analyze their contributions to the “cognitive architecture” of the human mind. As a result, classical cognitive science has offered abstract and reified models of the mind as a disembodied and cultureless physical symbol system or connectionist neural network in the head of a solitary individual. As we will see in the last chapter of this book, however, the enactive approach, particularly when guided by genetic and generative phenomenologies of the lived body, intersubjectivity, and the life-world, offers a different vision. I will argue that self and other enact each other reciprocally through empathy and that human subjectivity emerges from developmental processes of enculturation and is configured by the distributed cognitive web of symbolic culture.