Perception, Affectivity, and Volition in Husserl’s Phenomenology

207 Pages·2017·1.99 MB·English

by  Roberto Walton

Phaenomenologica 222
Roberto Walton
Shigeru Taguchi
Roberto Rubio Editors
Perception,
Affectivity,
and Volition
in Husserl’s
Phenomenology
Perception, Affectivity, and Volition
in Husserl’s Phenomenology
PHAENOMENOLOGICA
SERIES FOUNDED BY H. L. VAN BREDA AND PUBLISHED
UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE HUSSERL-ARCHIVES
222
ROBERTO WALTON
SHIGERU TAGUCHI
ROBERTO RUBIO
PERCEPTION, AFFECTIVITY, AND VOLITION IN HUSSERL’S
PHENOMENOLOGY
Editorial Board:
Director: U. Melle (Husserl-Archief, Leuven) Members: R. Bernet (Husserl-Archief, Leuven),
R. Breeur (Husserl-Archief, Leuven), S. IJsseling (Husserl-Archief, Leuven), H. Leonardy
(Centre d’études phénoménologiques, Louvain-la-Neuve), D. Lories (CEP/ISP/Collège
Désiré Mercier, Louvain-la-Neuve), J. Taminiaux (Centre d’études phénoménologiques,
Louvain-la-Neuve), R. Visker (Catholic University of Leuven, Leuven)
Advisory Board:
R. Bernasconi (The Pennsylvania State University), D. Carr (Emory University, Atlanta),
E.S. Casey (State University of New York at Stony Brook), R. Cobb-Stevens (Boston College),
J.F. Courtine (Archives-Husserl, Paris), F. Dastur (Université de Paris XX), K. Düsing (Husserl-
Archiv, Köln), J. Hart (Indiana University, Bloomington), K. Held (Bergische Universität
Wuppertal), K.E. Kaehler (Husserl-Archiv, Köln), D. Lohmar (Husserl-Archiv, Köln), W.R.
McKenna (Miami University, Oxford, USA), J.N. Mohanty (Temple University, Philadelphia),
E.W. Orth (Universität Trier), C. Sini (Università degli Studi di Milano), R. Sokolowski
(Catholic University of America, Washington D.C.), B. Waldenfels (Ruhr-Universität, Bochum)
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/6409
Roberto Walton • Shigeru Taguchi
Roberto Rubio
Editors
Perception, Affectivity,
and Volition in Husserl’s
Phenomenology
Editors
Roberto Walton Shigeru Taguchi
Philosophy Philosophy and Cultural Sciences
Universidad de Buenos Aires Hokkaido University
Buenos Aires, Argentina Sapporo, Japan
Roberto Rubio
Philosophy
Universidad Alberto Hurtado
Santiago, Chile
ISSN 0079-1350 ISSN 2215-0331 (electronic)
Phaenomenologica
ISBN 978-3-319-55338-2 ISBN 978-3-319-55340-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55340-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938284
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Preface
This volume is the result of a collaborative project whose initial impetus was the
Husserl Colloquium: Perception, Affectivity and Volition, held at the Universidad
Alberto Hurtado in Santiago de Chile in November 2012. Motivated by the immi-
nent publication of the Husserliana volume Verstand, Gemüt und Wille. Studien zur
Struktur des Bewusstseins, the colloquium brought together an international group
of scholars whose research has dealt with the phenomenological insight into the
threefold articulation of reason into perception, affectivity, and volition. The col-
laborative work initiated there was then further developed through the contribution
of other scholars specially invited to the project.
The intertwining of perception, affectivity, and volition qua aspects of reason
acts as the leading thread for the investigations collected in this volume. They focus
on Husserl’s broadened notion of reason, which contains spheres that are tradition-
ally considered to be “irrational” or “prerational.” Part I explores the way in which
these aforementioned aspects of reason mutually belong together. Parts II and III
provide a closer look at each one of them. Part IV examines Husserl’s broadened
notion of reason by inquiring into the rational character of history, world, and
otherness.
Roberto Walton opens Part I by disclosing the interrelationship between the per-
ceptual, affective, and volitional spheres of reason. He focuses on their similarities
by highlighting the following three issues. First, a distinction between empty inten-
tions and their fulfillment, along with processes of modalization, can be shown
within the framework outlined by horizons. Analogous stages regarding the estab-
lishment of meaning and the attainment of truth are common both to theoretical and
practical reason. Husserl speaks of emotional evidence with regard to an emotional
and volitional meaning of the world so that emotion and will are also a peculiar
source of legitimacy. Second, an a priori regulation through standards afforded by
essences and values can also be shown. The three spheres are subject to norms that
regulate the fulfillment of empty intentions. Finally, the progress of knowledge has
its parallel in an open axiological linkage that consists in the attempt to attain the
best possible value at each stage of an approach to infinite ideas. Here it should be
v
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recalled that doxic acts are themselves practical acts that have truth as a goal of the
will, the value of which is apprehended through feeling.
In his contribution, Luis Román Rabanaque examines the connections among the
noematic correlates of perception, affectivity, and volition. From a static point of
view, there is a structural parallelism among the three kinds of acts and a one-sided
foundation of volition on feeling and of feeling on perception. On the other hand,
from a genetic standpoint, an analysis of the lowermost hyletic components points
to the co-originarity of these three spheres in the sense of a foundation that is not
unilateral but rather multilateral or reciprocal. Along with this co-originarity, a cer-
tain preeminence of the affective sphere manifests itself to the extent that it moti-
vates both representation and volition.
Part II, dedicated to the logic of perception, begins with Michael Shim’s chapter
on the spatialization of perceptual consciousness. He argues that, in Husserl’s phe-
nomenology of perception, the consciousness of any perceiving subject can take up
space. According to Husserl, since the noema of perception is immanent to the con-
sciousness of the perceiving subject, the object of perception must also be in some
sense immanent. Yet, in his dispute with Brentano, Husserl claims that no inten-
tional object can be immanent to any intentional act. In order to reconcile these two
affirmations, the author shows that there are two different senses of immanence in
Husserl: the “genuine”-sense and what Steven Crowell (2008) calls the
“phenomenological”-sense. On this disambiguation, any perceptual object can be
genuinely transcendent while remaining phenomenologically immanent. What is
required for the second sense of immanence is a holistic conception of conscious-
ness. Given this distinction, the author offers a spatialist interpretation of Husserl’s
phenomenology of perception. The core of this interpretation lies in the following
argument. First, Husserl is a realist about the objects of perception: the object of
perception is the actual object itself rather than some mental representation of any-
thing like the Kantian thing in-itself. Second, the objects of perception are spatial.
Therefore, if any perceptual object is immanent to some consciousness, then that
consciousness must also be spatial.
In Chap. 4, Pol Vandevelde shows how Husserl’s phenomenology of perception
can help clarify the terms of a long-held debate in the philosophy of perception. In
particular, he argues that Husserl’s notion of horizon and Searle’s notion of back-
ground offer a contextual model of perception that significantly reformulates the
debate regarding the conceptual vs. nonconceptual content of perception. The
author illustrates the model by using a test case: the perception of an ancient Roman
milestone—an example given by Husserl. According to Vandevelde, both Husserl
and Searle consider that the perception of a highly cultural and historical thing hap-
pens at once, without inferential mediation. He further differentiates Husserl’s and
Searle’s views, arguing that Husserl’s model has the advantage of accounting for the
diachronic aspect of perception.
In the final contribution to this section, Sebastian Luft elaborates on how atten-
tion, as located between passive perception and active, synthetic consciousness,
plays a key role in genetic phenomenology, namely, in its attempt to work out the
levels of consciousness from passivity to activity. He turns to Goethe’s comparison
of the primal phenomenon that immediately and forcefully seizes our attention with
Preface vii
“the most beautiful pearls” in a chain of related phenomena. Among the phenomena
appearing to us, some simply are endowed with a special quality that beckons us to
investigate them, very similar to the manner in which Husserl describes the way that
certain phenomena lure us to focus our attention on them. Yet, if it is the world
which “chooses,” as it were, certain phenomena for us to be drawn into their mean-
ingful contexts, this observation has serious consequences for phenomenology as
transcendental idealism. Luft raises the question of whether attention brings us
before the limits of phenomenology as transcendental idealism. This is the problem,
for the theory of world-constitution, of the significance of those privileged phenom-
ena in our world which leap out at us, enticing us to explore it.
In Part III, Mariano Crespo tackles the topic of affectivity by exploring the affec-
tive roots of morality. Engaging with the debate between the “moralists of under-
standing” and “moralists of feeling,” he argues that Husserl provides a third answer
that turns on an a priori theory of moral sentiment. A few main points are advanced.
First, the laws that govern affective acts in the practical sphere do not express regu-
larities in the factual grasping of values but rather have an a priori character that
discloses the essence of the ethically appropriate and inappropriate. Second, a phe-
nomenology of affective consciousness in particular and of ethics in general must
not fall prey to a naturalization of consciousness because the laws of ethics are laws
of reason, i.e., essential or necessary laws. Third, Husserl does not consider, as Kant
does, the conflict between reason and sensibility as a distinctive element of ethics.
The phenomenology of affective consciousness as a central nucleus of ethics is a
moment within an a priori phenomenology of intentional consciousness. Finally,
Crespo stresses that, if the task of phenomenology is to identify the essential struc-
tures of the modes in which objects are given to consciousness, values can only be
elucidated through a description of the affective acts through which they are origi-
nally grasped. The intersubjective implications of this stance are stressed.
Saulius Geniusas develops another angle of the topic of affectivity. He addresses
the oldest controversy in the phenomenology of pain, which concerns the inten-
tional nature of the pain experience. His exposition has a fourfold structure. First, he
offers the central reasons that underlie the view that originates in Carl Stumpf’s
writings, which suggests that pain is a non-intentional feeling-sensation. Secondly,
he presents the evidence that underlies the Brentanian perspective, which suggests
that pain is an irreducibly intentional experience. Thirdly, he argues that Edmund
Husserl’s schema of apprehension – content of apprehension enables one to recon-
cile these positions. In this regard, his argument shows that this schema provides the
conceptual basis to defend two claims: (1) pain is an irreducibly stratified phenom-
enon; (2) while some of its strata are non-intentional, others are marked by inten-
tionality. Fourthly, with the aim of demonstrating the philosophical significance of
this schema in the framework of phenomenological pain research, he opens a brief
dialogue between phenomenology and cognitive science. He shows how this schema
can help clarify the experiential structures of lobotomized, cingulotomized, and
morphinized patients as well as how it can shed light on such syndromes as threat
hypersymbolia, pain asymbolia, and congenital analgesia.
The contributions in Part IV point toward the broadening of rationality character-
istic of Husserl’s phenomenology. Luis Niel examines Husserl’s concept of
viii Preface
Urstiftung and analyzes its development in different contexts, from the most basic
fields of passive constitution up to the realm of history. First, he presents some his-
torical and etymological considerations regarding the German concepts of Stiftung
and stiften. Second, he traces the first references to the concept back to the analyses
of perception and the “I” as correlate. Third, he examines the multiple genetic anal-
yses of passivity. Fourth, he addresses the constitution of the “I,” with special atten-
tion paid to the ethical “I.” Finally, he analyzes the problem of history and the crisis
of European rationality and mankind. By taking as Leitfaden the legal sense of
Stiftung, Niel stresses that the primal institution of sense implies an active commit-
ment that constantly has to be renewed through re-institutions of sense.
Shigeru Taguchi’s contribution analyzes the way in which Husserl’s thesis on the
“annihilation” of the world helps us to rehabilitate the true actuality of the real
world by showing the essential role of subjective agency in the world-constitution.
According to Taguchi, Husserl’s notion of “annihilation,” rather than degrading the
world in contrast to consciousness, serves to work out the most fundamental essence
of reality. The notion does not declare the triumph of subjectivity over the world, but
rather is intended to disrupt the natural tendency of always thinking about objectiv-
ity. Taguchi’s line of thinking goes as follows: what makes the world real and stead-
fast is nothing other than the growing rational force of the self-organizing order of
our experience. This order is not established before our consciousness begins to
experience, but is rather generated when it is experienced by actual living subjects.
If we categorically repudiate this kind of insight, the notion of the world might lose
its reality and degenerate into an abstract ideality. Thus, the “annihilation of the
world” enables us to disclose the reality of the world as a living movement that is
breathing in our experience and, hence, initiates a rehabilitation of the world in its
actual, intrinsically ongoing reality.
Javier San Martín draws the volume to a close by revealing the most significant
challenges phenomenology currently faces. He locates their source in the central
issue of otherness and claims that phenomenology works this out by inquiring into
intersubjectivity and our responsibility for others in the framework of an anthropol-
ogy that encompasses gender, multiculturality, and environment as subject matters.
In particular, he highlights four different ways the rational project of phenomenol-
ogy deals with otherness: first, through the elaboration of the general problematic of
the other; second, by analyzing the issue of the other sex; third, by inquiring into the
otherness of other worlds (multiculturality); and, finally, through a consideration of
the silent others in their two modalities, i.e., on the one hand, those who do not yet
speak, future others, and, on the other hand, those who will never speak, animals.
This last point leads us to the problem of the environment because we are respon-
sible for the lives of the animals and their survival depends on our care of the world
qua our and their home (ecology).
Buenos Aires, Argentina Roberto Walton
Sapporo, Japan Shigeru Taguchi
Santiago, Chile Roberto Rubio
May 20, 2015
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank the Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago de
Chile for providing financial and academic support throughout the organization of
the Husserl Colloquium: Perception, Affectivity and Volition, held there in November
2012. We are also very grateful to the Universidad Alberto Hurtado for offering the
facilities and equipment used in the process of editing this book.
We would also like to extend a special thanks to Mr. Zachary John Hugo who
participated in this project as assistant editor. Without his valuable collaboration, the
edition of this book would not have been possible.
ix