Abstract
In 1999, Dan Zahavi’s Self Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation initiated a critique of the standard interpretation of the distinction between the second and third levels of Husserl’s analysis of time-constituting consciousness. At stake was the possibility of a coherent account of self-awareness (Zahavi’s concern), but also the possibility of prereflectively distinguishing the acts of consciousness (Brough and Sokolowski’s rebuttal of Zahavi’s critique). Using insights gained from Husserl’s Analyses Concerning Passive Synthesis rather than the work on time-consciousness, this paper provides a new, more precise vocabulary in which to carry on the debate, in the hopes of bringing it to a mutually satisfactory resolution. After briefly laying out the terms of the Zahavi–Brough/Sokolowski debate (Sect. 2), I then elaborate a three-fold distinction in consciousness from the Analyses (Sect. 3) and relate that back to the issue of objectivity in the debate (Sect. 4). I end by suggesting how this three-fold model from the Analyses helps us preserve the essentially tripartite structure (as Brough and Sokolowski insist we do) while not making one of these levels the object of another (in keeping with Zahavi’s critique) (Sect. 5).
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Notes
Using grammatical terms, John Drummond will say that it puts awareness in the accusative case, rather than the genitive case that properly characterizes self-awareness. See Drummond (2006, pp. 199–201).
Zahavi lays out his problems with a “reflection theory” of self-awareness in SA, pp. 14–37.
This, in turn, can also be mapped onto the distinction between prereflective and reflective self-awareness (cf. SA, p. 71). Later we will see in what ways the notions of functioning and thematized subjectivity can be mapped on to the distinction between passive and active strata of consciousness.
I will argue below that it is passive association, and not inner time-consciousness, that enables acts to be both self- and hetero-manifesting.
I will argue below that this realm of passive affection cannot be equated solely with inner time-consciousness. One must distinguish between inner time-consciousness and passive association.
By positing objectivity as the fundamental aspect of the disagreement, I begin to move beyond Zahavi’s primary concern, self-awareness, so as to highlight the importance of this debate to a wider Husserlian problematic. Zahavi and others debating the issue of self-awareness are not unfamiliar with the issue of objectivity, and especially the “objectivity” of self-awareness. See for example Drummond (2006).
During the panel on Self-Awareness and Alterity at the 2001 meeting of the Husserl Circle, John B. Brough questioned whether acts can in fact be distinguished only via reflection, or whether we do not experience distinct acts also pre-reflectively. See the summary in Drummond (2006, p. 216).
For more on these elements, see also Ryan (1977).
It must be noted that affecting (Affektion) is a living quality belonging to the formal structure of association and constitution; it is not part of the content of what is being intended. See. Hua XI, pp. 167–168, and Ryan (1977, p. 43).
Though it must be emphasized that, as with the “attention” under discussion here, this pull is different from, and in a sense prior to, the ego’s attentively turning toward an object. Reiz is often translated as “stimulus,” which though perhaps misleading in some contexts is helpful to us here in indicating the manner or the level on which this “pull” occurs: just as the heat of the fire is a stimulus that prompts us to remove our hand automatically, reflexively, without the active involvement of the ego, so the allure of the object stimulates the ego to constitute it (i.e., the object), but to do so automatically, like a reflex, before the active involvement of the ego.
This recalling is purely phenomenological, happening within the epochē and hence distinct from the recollection of empirical and psychological notions of association. Cf. Hua XI, pp. 117–118. For those primarily familiar with the Logical Investigations, the use of “association” as a key term in Husserl may be surprising. In that work, Husserl is painstaking in his critique of empiricist and psychologistic uses of association. In this secondary sense, association belongs properly in the realm of “indication,” and hence is accidental, rather than necessary, to the ego (unlike, for example, the eidetic functioning of the ego at work in expression). See Husserl (2001, I.§§ 1–10). Derrida’s reading of Husserl in La Voix et la Phénomène seems to point in the same direction as the later Husserl: association is essential to the ego’s functioning. The point that remains to be clarified, however, is whether association, as it works in these later texts, still belongs in the realm of indication as it does when understood along the lines of the empiricists and psychologists. Husserl seems to suggest that it does (Husserl 1948, p. 78).
Cf., for example, Hua XI, p. 120, where Husserl speaks of passivity as “the founding level of all the active-logical processes.”
Throughout, I use passive synthesis as a wider umbrella term, including both time-consciousness and passive association. This is to mark the fundamental difference between these two levels and the level of active synthesis.
I follow Steinbock (2001, p. xlii) in translating Gegenständlichkeit as “objectlike formations.”
For more on this idea, see Steinbock (1995).
For a more in-depth analysis of these dimensions, see Gyllenhammer (2004).
Cf. Gyllenhammer (2004, pp. 194, 199 n.37).
In Husserl’s words, we could say that, as a “lawful regularity of immanent genesis that constantly belongs to consciousness in general” (Hua XI, p. 117), passive synthesis must conform to time-consciousness, the “universal, formal framework … in which all other possible syntheses must participate” (Hua XI, p. 125).
Ms. L I 15, 24a-b: “The earlier consciousness is protention (i.e., an intention ‘directed’ at what comes later) and the following retention would then be retention of the earlier retention that is characterized at the same time as [its] protention. This newly arriving retention thus reproduces the earlier retention with its protentional tendency and at the same time fulfills it, but it fulfills it in such a way that going through this fulfillment is a protention of the next phase.” Translated in Rodemeyer (2003, p. 131). This constitutes an advance, of sorts, on Husserl’s earlier claims that retentions retain retentions (Hua X, p. 81).
This would suggest a way of explaining the “parallel” between transcendental and empirical subjectivity, if the transcendental stakes of the debate were correctly elaborated above. See, for instance, Derrida (1973, p. 14).
By trying to move beyond the issue of self-awareness through recourse to the Analyses, I have also tried to show, contra Zahavi’s claim on SA, p. 81, that recognizing a difference between pre-reflective and reflective awareness is not the only thing that enables us to distinguish between the second and third levels of constitution elaborated by Husserl.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the participants of the 39th annual International Husserl Circle Meeting for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I would also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), whose support was integral in conducting the research for this paper.
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DeRoo, N. Revisiting the Zahavi–Brough/Sokolowski Debate. Husserl Stud 27, 1–12 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-010-9081-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-010-9081-7