Phenomenology and Embodiment: Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity
256
Phenomenology and Embodiment: Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity
256Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810129504 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/28/2014 |
| Series: | Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
PHENOMENOLOGY AND EMBODIMENT
Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity
By Joona Taipale
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2014 Northwestern University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2949-8
CHAPTER 1
Self-Awareness and Sensibility
The first task here is to investigate the role of embodiment in the constitution of self-awareness. I will explicate the temporal and affective structure of self-awareness, examine how self-awareness is localized, discuss the role of bodily self-awareness in the constitution of the perceptual environment, and investigate the transcendental and empirical aspects of selfhood. I argue that self-awareness is fundamentally bodily self-awareness, and this argument will serve as a basic clarification upon which the two latter parts of my treatise will be built.
Self-Awareness and Awareness of Self
How is self-awareness constituted, and how is it related to intentionality? These questions can be approached by first investigating the relation between self-awareness and reflection.
The phenomenological reduction discloses experiences as intentional, as experiences of something. This "something"—that is, the intentional object—is foreign to, something else than, the act of experiencing. When we perceive something yellow, sharp, or hot, our act of perceiving is not something yellow, sharp, or hot; there is a difference between our experiencing and the objects of our experiencing. Moreover, intentional experiences are not mere formal relations between a mind and an object, but conscious experiences—"unconscious consciousness" is a contradiction in terms. Namely, all experiences share the common feature that they reveal themselves to the subject that lives through them. Feeling sad, suffering pain, submerging into a novel, falling in love, calling a cab, discussing with friends, solving mathematical problems, and even dreaming—these are not processes to which the subject has an external relation, but something that the subject immediately undergoes. Experiences (Erfahrungen) are essentially something that one lives through, and this is what gives all experiences the feature of being lived experiences (Erlebnisse).
Husserl claims that experiences are "conscious" in two senses. First, experiences are intentional: they intend something and are aware of this something as intended. On the other hand, experiences are also aware of themselves. Husserl writes: "Every experience is conscious of something, but there is also consciousness of every act," an "inner awareness" (inneres Bewusstsein) of experiencing, or "internal experience" (innere Erfahrung). For instance, as we perceive something, we are "conscious" not merely in the sense that our streaming perception presents us with a unitary object; we are also "conscious" in the sense that the streaming perception immanently manifests itself to us as a flow of appearing. That is, while perceiving the unitary object, we are at once aware of the stream of the subjective appearing. This self-awareness is not an additional relation that could be taken away without altering the intentional experience itself. For example, when walking around a building, to be aware of the identical building is precisely to be aware of a unity in the continuing flow of appearances. Without this inner awareness, we could not experience the synthesis of the appearances, and thus we would not experience any unitary objects either. Thus, as Sartre puts it, "every positional consciousness of an object is at the same time a non-positional consciousness of itself." Sartre also specifies that "this self-consciousness we ought to consider not as a new consciousness, but as the only mode of existence which is possible for a consciousness of something. Just as an extended object is compelled to exist according to three dimensions, so an intention, a pleasure, a grief can exist only as immediate self-consciousness." In other words, intentionality is essentially accompanied by self-awareness.
One should avoid confounding this primal self-awareness with a type of reflection. Husserl stresses that we must distinguish between "the pre-phenomenal being of experiences, [i.e.,] their being before we have turned towards them in reflection, and their being as [reflected] phenomena." Indeed, if we maintain that the self-awareness of object-awareness is always reflective, and thereby presents experiences as inner objects, we would fall into an infinite regress: as a type of object-awareness, reflection itself would also have to be aware of itself in a reflectively objectifying manner, and so on ad infinitum. Therefore, all self-awareness cannot be fundamentally an objectifying kind of awareness.
Upon this matter, phenomenologists agree. As Husserl puts it, "being-lived is not being-objectified"; Sartre argues that "consciousness of self is not dual: if we wish to avoid an infinite regress, there must be an immediate, non-cognitive relation of the self to itself"; Levinas similarly suggests that "to live is a sort of transitive verb"; and Merleau-Ponty speaks of "a life present to itself, an openness upon oneself." Experiences are lived before they are reflected upon, and to live one's life is not the same as to observe one's life. In this sense, all experiences, regardless of whether they are reflected or not, are self-aware. As Sartre exemplifies, "pleasure cannot exist 'before' consciousness of pleasure": "There is no more first a consciousness that receives subsequently the affect 'pleasure' like water which one stains, than there is first a pleasure (unconscious or psychological) which receives subsequently the quality of 'conscious.'... There is an indivisible, indissoluble being."
We are not self-aware only when we reflect. And, again, when we do reflect, the act of reflection is itself lived and not reflected upon. Reflection modifies self-awareness that was already operative, and reflection is possible only because we are already self-aware in this manner. As Sartre puts it, "it is the non-reflective consciousness which renders the reflection possible: there is a pre-reflective cogito which is the condition of the Cartesian cogito." Reflection never captures the lived experience as beginning but rather as having already begun, Husserl likewise argues: it does not create its object (the experience) but discovers and objectifies something that we already lived through in a non-reflective and nonobjectifying manner.
It is precisely in the sense of this constant pre-reflective, non-objectifying self-awareness that consciousness is endowed with a primordial sense of selfhood or "ipseity." Experiences are mine, they have a fundamental "mineness," insofar as they are not only externally viewed but lived through by me. Yet, this does not mean that experiences are fundamentally lived as belonging to a self separate from these experiences. We must distinguish between self-awareness and awareness of oneself. Namely, the self is not the object of inner awareness, not an immanent object. Rather, selfhood is this immanence: the pre-reflective mineness of experiencing serves as the minimal form of selfhood. This primordial ipseity is something that cannot be questioned. Even schizophrenic patients who suspect that someone else is thinking their thoughts or controlling their body question only the authorship and not ownership: the person in question remains the subject of the thought that feels alien.
No reflection is accordingly needed for self-awareness. As Husserl puts it, the "life of consciousness ... is at once ... consciously a being-for-itself, constituted as subjective." Because of the incessant self-manifestation, consciousness is essentially subjective: experiences are something that happen to a "me"; they are "mine," they are characterized by fundamental mineness. That is to say, precisely insofar as they are "conscious," experiences are originally labeled by first-person givenness. Accordingly, with Husserl, we can define subjectivity as self-aware consciousness, while selfhood refers to the dimension of self-awareness of consciousness.
Self-Awareness as Temporal Self-Affectivity
Self-awareness is not awareness within an isolated "now." For instance, when being stung by a mosquito, the instantaneous pain emerges against a background horizon with no pain—it begins at some point of time, and fades away—and it is only against this temporally unified self-awareness that the pain appears as something instantaneous. To give another example, when we see a bird flying by, the impression of the bird on the left is replaced by an impression of the bird on the right, but the preceding impression does not thereby vanish without a trace. The preceding impression is still consciously retained as the immediate background of the present one, and this, again, motivates an anticipation of the continuation of movement, a protention, so that, in the moment when the bird is in front of us, it does not appear like in a snapshot: instead we see it moving.
To be sure, as Husserl notes, it is not until reflection that appearances become "differentiated" and "singled out." Originally, before reflection occurs, appearances are "fused" into the stream of consciousness, and their temporal interrelations remain quite implicit. In other words, the retentional, impressional, and protentional moments are unified into a "living present" (lebendige Gegenwart) of experiencing. Nevertheless, the bird does not appear on the left and on the right at the same time, but we are aware of a succession—we see the bird coming from the left and heading to the right. In other words, as we are internally aware of our experiencing, we are at once aware of a continuum. Already in a pre-reflective manner, we are aware of the inner temporality of our experiencing—phenomena are temporally organized. This inner awareness of the temporal form of consciousness is what Husserl calls "inner time-consciousness" (inneren Zeitbewusstsein).
Inner time-consciousness, moreover, is not a mere formal awareness. Husserl stresses that "consciousness is nothing without an impression" and that "the actually present now-point ... is constantly filled in some way." This is not a description of a mere contingent fact, but is based on an essential insight: we cannot be aware of a mere temporal frame "now," "before," or "after" without any "content": insofar as we are aware of temporality, we are aware of something happening now, a while ago, or soon. Husserl emphasizes accordingly that, in the literal sense, the term "time-consciousness" is an abstract notion: "Time-constitution only establishes the universal forms of order—succession and coexistence—in regard to all immanent data. But form is nothing without content. Enduring immanent givenness is [something] enduring only as to the givenness of its content." An awareness of temporal succession without awareness of something succeeding something is unthinkable: should the elementary "temporal content" (Zeitfülle) be taken away, no internal awareness would remain whatsoever, and hence no time-consciousness either. Husserl writes: "the moment of the original temporal position is ... nothing by itself; the [temporal] individuation is nothing in addition to what has individuation"; the temporal continuum is not a continuum as to its form, but "a concrete continuum of content" (ein konkretes, inhaltliches Kontinuum). In other words, time-consciousness cannot be actualized without a feeling of going through, or, if you will, a feeling of existing.
How, then, should we characterize inner time-consciousness without neglecting this elementary material? In what sense are we aware of the procession of our experiencing? If the form (impression–retention–protention) is nothing without content, then what constitutes the necessary material of temporal self-awareness of experiences?
In this regard, Husserl often uses the concepts of "primal impression" and "primal sensation" interchangeably, and explains that "sensation" and "impression" signify the same thing. He argues, accordingly, that "the word 'impression' is appropriate only to original sensations," and that therefore "the now-point itself must ... be defined through original sensation." Accordingly, "every experience is sensed," and inner time-consciousness is fundamentally the form of this "sensible" self-awareness of consciousness.
However, it should be emphasized that the notion of "sensible" self-awareness does not refer to a dyad relation in which a subject, for instance, sees or touches herself. It has been claimed, by Henry and others, that to describe self-awareness in terms of "sensing" is inadequate and misleading, since it gives the impression of a duality between the sensing and the sensed—whereas self-awareness, as already argued, is supposed to be something immediate. In line with Henry and others, I will mainly employ the more general term "self-affectivity" while referring to this immediate material self-awareness. In other words, "self-affectivity" is here taken as another name for the livedness of experiences, that is, a name for that which makes experiences lived experiences.
Conscious life "not only is, but is lived"; there is "something it is like" to be conscious. These are alternative ways of saying that self-affectivity is an essential feature of all consciousness, a condition of possibility for experiencing. Should the impressional phase of consciousness not be affectively present—that is, lived—we could not be internally aware of the temporal succession of appearances, and thus experiencing would not be possible at all. The experiential difference between present and past phases of consciousness is an affective difference. To be sure, when thinking about a mathematical problem, for instance, the sensuous intensity of our experiencing is remarkably different from when tasting a lemon, for instance, but the fact that mathematical thinking is not accompanied with an explicit sensuous feeling does not mean that it lacks affective self-awareness. Sensation is "the primal content" (primären Inhalt) of time-consciousness, and therefore self-affection pertains to all levels of constitution.
The Husserlian notion of sensation is broad in the sense that it not only covers the proper "sensuous experiences" (touching something cold, hearing a piece of music, and so on). As the primal content of self-awareness, sensation pertains to all kinds of presenting acts (that is, to every act that is not mere fantasy)—and hence also to "acts of higher order" even though these are no longer directly and properly localized. In this vein, Husserl argues that "every experience is 'sensed,'" and "sensation is here nothing other than the internal consciousness of the content of sensation." Therefore, as Husserl writes elsewhere, "sensations are the indispensable material for all basic sorts of noeses." With the "internality" of self-sensing Husserl wants to emphasize that the affective self-relation of experiencing is immediate and that we do not live our life from afar: according to Husserl, impression or sensation "must be taken as a primary consciousness that has no further consciousness behind it in which it would be intended." In order to be sensuously self-aware, we do not need to touch or see ourselves—as already argued above, self-awareness is not the same as an awareness of oneself. In themselves, sensations are not yet acts, and self-affectivity is accordingly not yet an active self-relation. In short, intentional experiencing is lived through in a non-intentional manner.
Without this affective self-awareness intentional experiences would not be possible, and in this sense, self-affectivity or self-sensing is a necessary condition of possibility for all experiences. It is worth emphasizing that what is thereby presupposed is not only an abstract form of self-awareness, but a concrete self-awareness—form is not self-sufficient, it is "nothing without a content," as we already saw Husserl arguing. The elementary content, which necessarily accompanies all intentional experiences, is sensation. Therefore, as Zahavi puts it, taken concretely time-consciousness "is a pervasive sensibility, the very sensing of sensations." In this manner, self-affectivity is necessary even in mathematical thinking. Mathematical proof cannot be constituted without the inner temporality of mathematical consciousness, and "a judging consciousness of a mathematical state of affairs is an impression, [even if] the mathematical state ... is not something temporal." Mathematical thinking is a self-aware temporal construction of supra-temporal theorems, proofs, lemmas, and so on—and, as such, mathematical consciousness must be affectively present to itself. The constitution of every kind of identity (be it a geometrical theorem, a spatial object, or a symphony) presupposes the temporality of experiencing, and therefore it presupposes an immediate sensible self-presence of consciousness—even if this self-affectivity may remain implicit and tacit, which is the case in mathematic thinking, for instance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from PHENOMENOLOGY AND EMBODIMENT by Joona Taipale. Copyright © 2014 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
Part 1 Selfhood and the Lived-Body
1 Self-Awareness and Sensibility 21
2 The Environment and the Lived-Body 33
3 The Bodily Self 56
Part 2 Intersubjectivity
4 A Priori Intersubjectivity 69
5 Reciprocity and Sociality 87
6 Historicity and Generativity 99
Part 3 Normality and Objective Reality
7 Primordial and Intersubjective Normality 121
8 Transcendental Consequences 147
9 Paradox of Subjectivity Revisited 156
Concluding Remarks 169
Notes 175
Bibliography 221
Index 239