Perception and Passivity

Can the Passive Pre-Givenness Be Phenomenalized?

Pedro M. S. Alves
Universidade de Lisboa
[email protected]

Reception date: 20-9-2017

Acceptance date: 11-10-2017

Abstract
In what follows, I intend to address an issue which is at the boundaries of the phenom-
enological method of reflective explication, and that, in this sense, points to some limitations
of the phenomenological approach to consciousness and mind. I am referring to an aporetic
situation that is at the heart of the phenomenological analysis of passivity. On the one hand,
phenomenology shows, at least indirectly, a passive life that is beyond the first steps of the
activity of the ego in the receptive, affective life. This is something that is beyond the rising
of an ego, and from which a phenomenology of the ego-form of subjective life could be
addressed. On the other hand, the analytic and conceptual tools of the phenomenological
method have no grips on this basic realm of subjective life. As a result, Husserl’s analysis
of passivity starts with the evidence of a pre-affective, pre-egoic realm, from which a
phenomenology of the ego could be developed. However, Husserl’s analyses end up with
the denegation of this dimension, as if it was invisible for the phenomenological method.
As a consequence, the starting point of the analysis is not passivity proper, but rather the
primitive forms of receptivity, which is already a first layer of the activity of the ego. Instead
of an analysis of the ego-polarization (the “birth” of the ego), the egoic layer of conscious
life is simply presupposed. A phenomenology of the ego-form is, thus, at the same time
promised and denied. This aporetic situation is visible in the alteration of the concept of a
passive pre-givenness in Husserl’s Analysis Concerning Passive Synthesis.
Keywords: Genetic Phenomenology, Passivity, Pre-affective Constitution, Activity,
Husserl

DOI: 10.2478/phainomenon-2017-0003
© 2017 Alves. This is an open access article licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
 Nur eine radikale Theorie […] kann das
Rätsel der Assoziation und damit alle Rätsel des
„Unbewussten“ und wechselnden „Bewusstwerdens“ lösen.
Husserl, Husserliana XI, 165

1. Stating the question

The issue I will address revolves around the relationship between both seizing-
upon (Erfassung) and still-holding in grasp (im-Griff-behalten), as lower strata
of the perceptual activity of the ego, and their preconditions in the depths of
passive life. At first glance, the issue appears quite simple: the passive
preconditions are exhausted in their passage to the perceptual activity and noth-
ing more remains there, so that every element of passivity is (or can be) taken
and incorporated in a suitable active lived-process. However, in a closer look,
qualms arise regarding the possible greater richness and extension of the realm
of passive lived-processes, as well as of a passive form of the self that is not yet
an ego, and regarding the way these passive processes connect to active
intentional life, namely, to perceptual activity. Actually, one can wonder if all
passive life is taken by the active strata, and if some passive processes do not
take other routes of development instead of culminating in perceptual acts with
an ego-polarization. In the framework of a phenomenology of perceptual acts,
which are directed to individual objects in their appearing, these passive
preconditions are characterized by Husserl as pre-givenness (Vorgegebenheit).
The general issue I will address concerns, then, a phenomenology of the
pregiven in its own pre-givenness.
As used by Husserl, the concept of “pre-givenness” is double-sided. On the
one hand, it refers to the individual objects that appear in perception as already
being there in advance, before any active seizing-upon of consciousness.
Individual beings are pregiven in the sense that they appear in perception as
already there, regardless of any perceptual activity. Perception only encounters
what exists in advance, although this “being in advance” is a meaning formation
that springs from perceptual intentionality itself. Enlarging this object-centered
approach, Experience and Judgment states that the world-belief is the universal
pre-givenness of all experience, and this pre-givenness is characterized as
signifying that the world is “what is always already there without any attention
of a grasping regard, without any awakening of interest”, prior to “any activity
of cognition” (Husserl, 1939: 24). In such a conception, the world-presence is
not the result of an achievement (Leistung); rather, it is something that has taken
place since always. Without and before any active intervention of conscious-
ness, it is something that simply befalls, lacking any backward-reference to a
constitutive genesis. Every perceptual consciousness is caught in this pre-
givenness of objects appearing as already being there before perception,
referring to an environment (Umgebung) of co-givenness, and lastly referring-
back to the world. These references (Verweisungen) from the individual objects
to the environment, and from the environment to the world, are a structure of
sense that permeates all objectual appearances as a pre-givenness. However,
this objective pre-givenness of the world is posited by perceptual activity, and
is only accessible through it.
In any case, this “presence” of the world is, by itself, not yet an appearance,
and the world-belief is still formless and empty of a definite content. Only
perceptual intentionality can put definite objects before us, giving a determinate
content to the world-belief, and a definite shape to the objects that are pregiven
with it. In perceptual activity, the correlate of the object-pre-givenness are the
strata that underlie the rising of perception itself. In the framework of genetic
phenomenology, they are referred to as the realm of passivity, and described as
a set of sensory fields whose content precedes and prompts perceptual
intentionality and the concrete appearance of individual beings, along with their
horizons of co-givenness (Husserl, 1939: 75). While the pre-givenness of the
world as such has no generative history (in consciousness and for
consciousness, it has happened to it since always), the subjective correlate of
this world-pre-givenness is accounted for as a genetic process in the realm of
passivity, as if the primordial world-belief (Welt-Glaube als Urdoxa) could be
captured in the framework of an “archeology” of perception.
This makes, on the other hand, the subjective-centered concept of a pre-
givenness. If the pre-givenness of the world is a meaning-formation only
accessible by active, perceptual intentionality, the passive strata that underlay
activity have a more complex relationship with perceptual intentionality. This
complexity concerns a double-regime of visibility and invisibility of the passive
realm according to whether one lives in the concrete performance (Vollzug) of
an act or in the reflective objectivation of it. While the Vollzug entails a kind of
invisibility of the proper structure of the lower strata, Reflexion is able to bring
them to the surface. Indeed, as a set of already structured preconditions for per-
ception, they show themselves, from the point of view of the ego’s reflective
awareness of its own receptivity in perception, as a passive field which has the
sense of being always operative “in advance” (not simply “already there” in
advance). By contrast, for the straightforward, object-oriented activity of the
ego in seizing and explicating (i.e., both in receptivity and spontaneity), these
preconditions appear as actual, available, and yet unstructured fields of sheer
sensory data, in which the ego enters in the accomplishment of new meaning-
institutions (Ur-Stiftungen), as if structures were firstly shaped by the apper-
ceptions that “animate” a formless, hyletic stuff.1
Thus, when seized from the vantage point of the ego’s active accom-
plishments (Leistungen), passivity is covered by objectual experience, so that
its proper laws and structures merge with the categorical structures of
predicative synthesis and are not picked-up by themselves. For instance, it is
the golden-yellow of the tea-cup that one perceives, already embedded in the
predicative categorical structure (we see that the tea-cup is golden-yellow, even
before the stratum of expression, Ausdruck), and not the sheer hyletic yellow
affection that is detaching from a background and prompting the turning-
towards (Zuwendung) of the ego. Hence, not only activity covers passivity, but
it also shrinks dramatically its richness, because the only features that are
discerned in it are precisely those that have given rise to the ego’s activities in
perception, predicative judgment, and so on. In a Kantian vein, we could say
that passivity is subsumed under (and covered by) the schematization of the
categorical forms. (I will return to this point).

1
Albeit this is not the crossing-line between genetic and static phenomenology, because
both are reflective approaches to the acts of consciousness, this notion of a formless
content – perhaps imported from the Vollzug sense structure of the acts — is precisely
the point of view of static phenomenology, relying on the contrast between intentional
form (morphe) and sensory matter (hyle), connected by means of an animating
apprehension (beseelenden Auffassung). See Ideen-I, section 85 (Husserl, Hua III/1,
191-196). Nevertheless, Ideen-II thematizes under the title of “esthesic-synthesis” a
realm that will be further developed in the twenties as an analysis of passivity, in the
broader framework of genetic phenomenology.
 Conversely, when reflecting upon the perceptual activity instead of living in
the accomplishment of it, one can put into brackets (“abstract” or “exclude”)
the perceptual constitution as such in order to examine what underlies it as a
precondition. Individual objects are originally given in perception. When the
active constitution is put into brackets, then comes into the foreground what
“precedes” it, since the individual objectivities constituted in perception are
now “dissolved” in their lower strata. The richness of these strata can be
exhibited then, as well as the kind of selection and rearrangement perceptual
activity exerts upon them. These pre-objectual strata are, then, a pre-givenness
as a kind of milieu for perception, i.e., they appear as a larger realm that was
operating in advance for the ego “before” active, objectual constitution took
place, selecting and rearranging some structured elements of it.
In this sense, the more general definition of passivity is a privative one: it
occurs without any “ego-participation” (Ichbeteiligung); i.e., “passive” are all
lived-processes that are not a product of a certain kind of activity referring to
the sphere of the Ich-kann. By means of such wide definition of passivity, one
can retrieve a much richer amount of lived-processes than when one narrowly
defines passivity by reference to the sense-formations that underlie the acts of
the form ego. My point is that the class of lived-processes that run their course
without an ego is presumably much larger than the class of passive lived-
processes that enter on or give rise to acts of the specific ego-form.
Now, can we turn this subjective-centered pre-givenness into a thematic
givenness? It would be a givenness of precisely what?
Let us take some stock of it. Firstly, as is widely known, the temporal order
of these strata is misleading. When one states that passivity “precedes” activity,
or that the passive pre-givenness was there “before” active constitution, this
does not have a literal meaning at all. Rightly understood, the order of
precedence points to an ideal genesis, and not to a factual history of subjec-
tivity, and this ideal precedence is compatible with a constant intermingling and
mutual dependency (not only as a fact, but, more strongly, as an essential law)
between original passivity and activity. For genetic phenomenology, the origin,
Ursprung, is not a beginning, Anfang. Secondly, with this bracketing, instead
of a regression to a primitive form of subjective life, one is pondering the import
of active constitution, and the linkage with some elements that appear in it as
its necessary conditions. It is the content and structure of these layers condition-
ing perception and activity in general that are put together under the designation
of “passive genesis”. Thirdly, the “more fundamental” layers of constitution
have not gone into an unrecoverable past. Quite the contrary, they are accessible
right there in the active constitution by means of a methodic suppression of its
proper achievements. Phenomenologically, origins and its derivatives are
contemporary. Here, what is needed to exhibit them is a kind of zigzag move-
ment, going back and forth from the bracketing of the perceptive world into the
fields that come into the foreground, and then from those fields once again into
the perceptual world, so that the connection between passivity and activity, and
their own constitutive achievements, become apparent by means of this con-
trastive analysis.2
This is what we are roughly told by a first reflection upon the whole issue.
However, the picture that full-fledged phenomenology of passivity would
convey is much more complex, so I believe. When pondered, this greater
complexity would give us good insights into the lessons a phenomenology of
perception could deliver in its linkage to and dependence on the passive lived-
processes.
One feature that turns this general picture into a more complex one concerns
the phenomenological access to passivity and to the subject that undergoes
passive life: as a process that unfolds “before” (that is, independently of) any
import of active intentional life, passivity can be brought to givenness in
phenomenological reflection only in an oblique way. Indeed, reflection
presupposes the ego-form, an act with its intentional content, and then a turning
towards itself of the ego, seizing its own activity and then the passive, pregiven
milieu in which it is entrenched. However, if one endeavors to enter this latter
realm in which there is not yet an ego as active, trying thus to seize directly
what is there in sheer passivity, one faces a perplexing situation. This is so

2
Referring to passivity in the opening section of Active Syntheses, Husserl alludes to
this situation in the following words: „Es liegt in der Natur der Sachlagen, dass man
von diesen Unterstufen nur sprechen kann, wenn man schon das fertig und aktiv
Konstituierte vor Augen hat, und wenn man von der Aktivität abstrahiert, so ist sie
zunächst unvermeidlich eine wesensmäßig noch unbestimmte, so dass erst die
nachkommende Untersuchung der höheren Stufe auch für (die) untere Reinheit des
Verständnisses ihrer Leistung geben kann.“ (Hua XXXI, 3)
because, in the proper sense, there is no direct reflective givenness of what is
pregiven since, here, there are no affection and no appearing objects in the
pregnant sense, no intentional acts, and, even more, no intentional acts of the
form cogito, so that all these processes take place in a “mute” subjective life,
and, we may suppose, are in themselves not from the ego, albeit they remain
there for the ego. Now, not being from the ego but remaining at the disposal
(Vorhanden) of the ego raises the other side of the problem: what is precisely
this “remaining there” and its subjective unity, then the “taking” (i.e., the
moment of “affection”, and the turning-toward), and, most importantly, seen
phenomenologically, what is the ego and its proper achievements, inasmuch as
it its determined by the taking of a realm already operating, and by bringing it
to that particular form of meaning-structuration which we call its “activity”?
Thus, the endeavor to come-back phenomenologically to what always
remains in the background as a precondition (better: a milieu) for the intentional
acts of the ego raises some important issues. To put them straightforwardly, I
ask the following two questions:
1. Can the passive pre-givenness underlying perception be properly
“phenomenalized”, i.e., converted into a pure phenomenon in the sense of
phenomenology?
2. In sheer passivity, is an ego already there centralizing passive life, or must
we adopt a multiplane, decentralized conception of passivity, putting a global
Self that is not already a centralized ego as the subject which lives through it?

2. Some necessary clarifications

The two questions I just posed need some qualifications and complements.
Firstly, they presuppose a clear cutting-line between activity and passivity.
Husserl writes that “passivity is in itself the first” (Hua XXXI, 3). However,
the achievements of activity also sink back into passivity and are deposited in
it as a sediment. They can be reawakened, affecting the ego from a milieu of
“unconscious” life that is still there, while not in the form of explicit awareness.
For instance, this is the case when the remembrance of a former perception that
had completely disappeared from the field of actual intentional life suddenly
comes to mind. Furthermore, the meaning-institutions shape the hyletic fields
and give them unities of form that will return in further affections, which will
have, then, a synthetic unity that springs not from pure passivity alone. As an
example, three blotches of color are apprehended as a flag of a certain country,
or several disparate noises as the single ring-tone of a cellphone. Then, when
similar colors or noises detach from a new environment, even when it is pretty
different from the original one, or when some parts of the colors or noises are
now fused in the background, they carry with them the former unities of form,
so that what strikes the ego is not a sheer passive datum with its idiosyncratic
forms of unification, but already structured unities coming from previous
apperceptions. Passivity can “learn” from activity how to shape its contents. In
his lessons about passive synthesis, Husserl considers the issue en passant,
while discussing the case of a man born blind and suddenly recovering his sight.
Looking around without the mass of previous apperceptions already stored in
his visual field (a kind of secondary passivity in original passivity), he could
not figure out how to shape and interpret the ocular data, which would be
displayed for him as a chaotic juxtaposition of hyletic contents, as if the synthe-
ses proper to passivity were unable to settle an ordered domain without the
guiding lines of former apperceptions.3
Indeed, there is a wide (and loose) concept of passivity that turns the
distinction between passivity and activity into a relative one. If we only retain a
general characterization of passivity as something that (i) is at disposal for the
ego’s activity, or (ii) is an act that underwent the modification of inactuality, or
(iii) is a part of an act of the ego (like the “still-holding in grasp” in perception or
in any other intentional act), then we can state that “the distinction between ac-
tivity and passivity is not a rigid one” (Husserl, 1939: 119). Nevertheless, as
Husserl himself has pointed out, there is also a passivity “before” activity, i.e., an
originary passivity which, contrariwise to the so-called “secondary passivity”,
belongs not to the acts, as a passivity in activity or an activity turned into
passivity, but which is an underlay (Unterlage) or something that lays beneath

3
See Hua XI, 413. The problem which Husserl considers reminds the question that
Molineaux addressed to Locke: if a man born blind and recovering vision suddenly
could distinguish immediately, by means of his new ocular ideas, a globe from a cube,
objects which he easily used to distinguish by means of his haptic ideas. The issue is
discussed at length from a phenomenological perspective by Shaun Gallagher (see
Gallagher, 2005, Chapter 7).
every form of egoic, perceptual activity. This forms the narrow concept of a
passive life. Its domain is not the temporal horizons of the stream of
consciousness, but the apperceptions that take place in the living present. In
entails: (i) not simply to be at the disposal of the ego for reactivation, but to be an
actual pre-givenness that prompts the perceptual life of the ego, (ii) to be in a
particular sense non-egoic or without the participation of the ego (ohne
Ichbeteiligung), (iii) to develop under rules that are proper to it, not only going in
advance regarding the synthetic forms that spring from the ego’s new apper-
ceptions, but also with the type-like apprehensions that permeate normal
perceptual life (for these idiosyncratic rules of unification, Husserl uses the
awkward concept of a “passive synthesis”, which, at first sight, sounds like an
oxymoron). So, as Micali rightly points out albeit referring himself to the
anonymity of the I, “Husserl reveals a passivity that is not based on a regressive
consideration [that is: it does not refer to the temporal horizons of the present],
but appears right in the middle of the activity. This passivity has not to do with
the dormant I, but with the highest mental activity of the ego” (Micali, 2008: 76).
Secondly, the questions I put forth entail that the concept of a transcendental
subjectivity is wider than the concept of a transcendental ego. Indeed, as
Holenstein once remarked, “the ‘carrier’ of the passive constitution is the proto-
flowing life, from which rises the ego of the active positings” (Holenstein,
1972: 213). This distinction has nothing to do with the question Husserl
discussed in the fifth logical investigation, namely, if there is a pure ego as a
phenomenological component of the transcendental constitutive life. As
everybody knows, his position regarding this issue was drastically revised
between the first and the second editions of the Logical Investigations. Nev-
ertheless, while acknowledging with the Husserl of Ideen that, after the
transcendental reduction, a pure ego remains as an identical pole of the acts of
consciousness, a kind of “transcendence in immanence” (Hua III/1, 124), the
problem is whether all life-processes exhibit this ego-polarization, namely
when we move from active to passive life. In Ideen-I, Husserl has no direct
account of passivity. He strictly argues from the point of view of the acts of the
form cogito, and supposes that all life-processes which are not actually of this
form can be turned into it. When addressing the question of the ego as an
identity over and above the flow of consciousness, he writes, “We have spoken
till now of life-processes of the notable form cogito” (Hua III/1, 179). Then, he
recognizes that “certainly, the other life-processes […] lack the ego-reference”
(ibidem) However, he considers that those life-processes are still acts that
experienced the modification of inactuality, so that they “have a share in the
pure ego, and this last on them” (ibidem). Thus, he concludes, “they belong to
it as ‘its own’, they are its consciousness’ background, they belong to it as their
‘realm of freedom’” (ibidem).
However, passive pre-constitution is not a “realm of freedom” for the ego.
Regarding the hyletic contents that fill the living present and their associative
blending, there is neither a reference to an origin in the ego, nor to an ego’s
intervention in framing their specific nature, or to a space of decision regarding
what contents will further emerge in each sensory field. The “freedom”, or the
ego’s participation, gradually starts with the turning-toward that responds to
affections coming from this passive realm. However, the contents
(accompanied or not by a Reiz and an Affektion) spring sponte sua, so to speak,
in the flow of mental life. While acts are characterized by an auto-spontaneity,
passive processes spring from a hetero-spontaneity, pointing to a nucleus of
what is Ichfremd, i.e., alien to the ego. Even if these contents are wholly sub-
jective, they are not ego-like life-processes, so that one must distinguish, as a
matter of principle, between life-processes with an ego-polarization, and mental
processes without an ego, i.e., life-processes where the ego is neither an origin,
nor a constituent.
So, instead of following Husserl in the assumption of a “passive
participation” of the ego as center of affections, as Einstrahlungspunkt, already
present in the realm of original passivity, in my questions I am suggesting
another way of dealing with the difference between the global flow of life-
processes and those that have the sense of being acts of an ego, of having the
form-cogito. Namely,
(i) that the ego as a “convergence center” of affections is already at the
crossroads between sheer passivity and plain activity – indeed, the constitution
of something like an affective center for otherwise disparate sensory processes
(interconnecting parallelly, in the best case) is the very starting point of activity;
(ii) that the subject of passivity is inseparable from the somatic (leiblicher)
organism, which constitutes itself in the stratum of kinesthetic processes that
run their course in connection to the flow of hyletic contents;
 (iii) that the ego that rises in activity and, more precisely, in perceptive life,
as it comes over passive pre-givenness, is already deeply enrooted in the former
constitution of somaticity (Leiblichkeit); thus, even if, contrary to sensations,
egoic acts are not bodily localizable, the ego arises there not as an ego that
“has” a body, but as an egoic higher form of organization (a kind of projection
into a virtual, disembodied center) of a somatic, bodily subject; and finally
(iv) that (a thesis that goes fairly beyond Husserl) not all passive life-pro-
cesses give rise to acts, let alone to acts of the form-cogito, and even when
giving rise to acts, they do not need to be necessarily of the form-cogito, so that
there is a multitude of life-processes in the flow of constitutive life that take
other routes of development instead of culminating in experiences with an ego-
polarization. For the totality of life-processes forming a systematic unity and
displaying a sense of selfhood, in which those that have the form ego are only
a part, a possible name would be precisely the word that Husserl borrowed from
Leibniz: monad. There, like in Leibniz’s lesson, not all perceptions are
apperceptively grasped, and there is plenty of room for those “small
perceptions” (petites perceptions), and “perceptions without apperception”
(perceptions inaperçues) that make-up the rich, concrete content of the mind.
If this proves to be right, then we would be reaching the limit-point where a
phenomenology of life-processes would not be only a phenomenology of
consciousness (Bewusstsein), but would point to what Husserl called a “pheno-
menology of the unconscious”.
This latter assumption, which is implied in my questions above, is not a
denial or a downgrading of the relevance that the ego-polarization has for
subjective life. Certainly, it entails that intentional life and its ego-centering is
embedded into a wider and richer complexity of life-processes than those that
come precisely into the ego’s fore. It also entails that there are intentional acts
which, while they exhibit a directedness toward objects, they do not have the
phenomenal character of a thematic awareness that is proper to the acts of the
form cogito. It finally entails a critique of the image of a self-sufficient subject
which is, or can be, aware of all that happens in its mental life. Nevertheless, as
I have declared, this is not tantamount to downgrading the role of the ego in
mental life. Quite the contrary, the “birth” of the ego displays a sense of sub-
jectivity and personal identity which is the most sophisticated mark of human
mental life. In addition, it gives rise to a kind of atopic, virtual center of mental
life that “detaches” from the body precisely as the “I” – the “eye of the soul”,
so to speak, now in contradistinction to the sheer organic body. Hence, the unity
and difference between Leib and Ich. However, only if we regress to a more
primitive dimension of life-processes that do not yet have the sense of an ego,
while displaying a wider sense of a self, will we be in a productive position to
account for the significance of the emergence of the form cogito and its ego-
polarization in subjective life, as well as the impact this stratum has in bringing
about higher forms of mental organization. Thus, instead of downgrading the
ego, I am searching for its proper accomplishments. Indeed, the ego is not a
thing, and the very word is not a noun, but a pronoun. As such, the ego is not
the mental life itself, but a function that operates in it. The issue is precisely
what this function is.

3. A way of looking through the keyhole…

By itself, passivity has no narrator. It lacks an ego which would “live-in” and
“through” it, which could then reflect upon its own life and report its deeds.
For the ego, original passivity is rather a setting, a milieu, over and against
which its activities are performed. The phenomenology of the ego is the
description of the linkages that give several forms of unity to the passively
pregiven, establishing new noetic structures (the “acts”) along with a new
central reference point for subjective life (the ego as Einstrahlung- and
Ausstrahlungspunkt). Emerging over passivity, the acts of the ego do not
develop against a background of external/transcendent things, but rather against
a milieu of already subjective, although not egoic, life. This is our guiding
thread.
However, one cannot help but wonder if it really makes phenomenological
sense to talk about life-processes that are not by themselves conscious as
“mine” in the first-person perspective. As Husserl himself put it, this kind of
supposition would simply be a “substruction”. (Hua XI, 163). This is the reason
why his phenomenology of passivity properly starts with the concepts of Reiz-
Affektion, Zuwendung-Weckung, and Aufmerksamkeit-Interesse. Even
association is, sometimes, pushed to the side of affection, taking the affective
awakening not as a form of associative synthesis, but as if it covered the whole
associative phenomenon. However, the concepts that range from Reiz to
Interesse are already the beginning of the Ichtendenz that becomes a Tun des
Ich in a broad sense, also including the logical reason. So, in Husserl’s
approach, both the structures of the hyletic fields and the formation of unities
of contents therein, which lie in the background, are only recovered afterwards,
from the vantage point of the first steps of the ego’s emergence in affective
receptivity. As he emphasized, “we can only obtain decisive insights into the
essence of association when we … bring to a lawful understanding the function
of affection” (Hua XI, 163); going a step further, he then tentatively
universalizes the constitutive role of affection, saying that “it is … quite
probable that affection already plays its essential role in the constitution of all
objectlike formations such that [without it] there would be no objects at all and
no present articulated with objects” (Hua XI, 164). Passed on to affection, the
passively pregiven hyletic contents are now experienced as something that is
“mine”, that is “my own” passive-receptive life: the yellow which I see, the
ring-tone which I hear, and so on. Nevertheless, despite this thematic turn to
affection, “before” (better: without) affection, the contents should already be
wholly subjective states instead of nothing. They should form the first
“subjective possession” not of, but for an ego, they should already have “a
subjective being” as a “being for the subject” (not an “an sich”) at the very
thresholds of the latter egoic-centralization, as Husserl suggested it in the
second volume of Ideas (Hua IV, 214-215).
The glimpses we can obtain about this “before” or “without” the ego’s
affective receptivity have an overall importance for a phenomenology of
passivity. The first thing to stress is that this pre-affective stratum is not an
illusion produced by means of a retrospective “substruction”. Affection must
have a “before” (or a “without”), a something that is brought to affective
receptivity or, in a more straightforward rendering (which I will criticize later),
a something that affects. This something is not a thing in a causal connection
with the ego, as in Kant’s doctrine of the Affektion of the Gemüt by a Ding an
sich. Rather, it is a wholly subjective lived-process, already running its course
unnoticed in a zero-degree of allure for the ego, so to speak.
As I said earlier, this pre-affective stratum is only accessible in an oblique
way by a kind of phenomenological “inference”. It will have the general form:
 Inference rule (IR): If x is given, then y was necessarily pregiven, considered
that the givenness of x shows with evidence its relationship of dependence on
y, as its pre-givenness, even though the pregiven as such cannot be turned into
something given.
As I stressed, this back-reference does not amount to establishing a causal
link between allure-affection (Reiz-Affektion) and outer things. It is rather a
sense formation in and of the given as such that points back to life-processes
that were, by themselves, independent of being or not brought to affection. The
dependence which is here pointed as a general connection can signify,
specifically, a part-whole relationship (when the pregiven is contained as a part
of a perceptual act and accessed only within it, for instance); a triggering
relationship (as when some unnoticed visual contents trigger a sudden
movement of the body, for instance, for escaping a menacing object, even
before it is consciously seen), and so on (I will return in detail to this essential
issue). Thus, the obliqueness of the phenomenological seizing is not tantamount
to a losing of evidence. It is not an inference from the known into the unknown.
Really, it is a back- or a downward reference, fully highlighted by itself, which
goes either from what is given in the living present to what was pregiven in a
former living present, or from what is given in the living present into what
underlies this givenness in the very same living present. Even though passivity
without affective allure points to a phenomenological “unconscious”, there is a
conscious evidence that it must be there if some acts are performed, given that
those very acts point to these passive life-processes (even when they cannot be
fully retrieved).

4. Formation of unity and affection: the vicious circle

I will substantiate my point above by means of two remarks.
Firstly, the raising of affection along with its propagation (Fortpflanzung, i.e., all
the affective awakenings that are ruled by associations of the form: “this points to
that”) is not constitutive of the overall structures of prominence (Abgehobenheit), and
contrast (Kontrast) of the sensory fields in the living present. Rather, the opposite is
true: if affection was already a condition for the structuration of the living present,
then the affectio would be creative of its own affectans, it will spring out of nothing,
so to speak.4 Indeed, if affection supposes something detaching itself, and if this very
contrastive detachment is already a function of affection, one faces an embarrassing
vicious circle at the most primitive stratum of objective constitution.
Steinbock has pointed to this difficulty.5 He recognizes that a kind of
circularity is hovering over this issue.6 The solution he proposed, based on the
Husserlian principle of the “relativism of affection” and its “gradualism”,
amounts to a universalization of the constitutive role of affection, so that, in a
strong sense, there are no “neutral”, non-affective objects (1995: 155). More
recently, Bégout refused Steinbock’s construal (which follows one side of
Husserl’s own account) stressing that the gradualism of affection necessarily
presupposes a gradation that decreases till a zero-point, and thus to a realm of
non-affective structuration of the living present, so that the problem remains in
need of an answer, because “it leaves open the possibility of a non-affective
constitution” (Bégout, 2000: 191). Thus, according to Bégout, the problem of
a vicious circle still remains open, as the problem of the relationship between
affective constitution and pre-affective structuration of the living present.

4
For Husserlian, genetic phenomenology, there is not something like an auto-affection.
Affecting itself would be a paradoxical starting point for conscious life. In a sense, the
concept of an auto-affection is a reversal of the Fichtean speculative hypothesis of a
Tathandlung. Whereas, for Fichte, life begins with an unconditioned act of positing itself
for itself, here, life begins not with a hauto poien but with a hauto paschein. Nevertheless,
the circular construal is the very same, and it is not phenomenologically (that is:
positively) verifiable. By contrast, if one considers that what affects is already a sensible
life-process, and not an external thing, there is a sense in which the talk about auto-
affection has a good phenomenological sense. However, the sensory contents, when
affecting, have the sense of delivering something which is Ich-fremd, alien to the ego.
5
In his own words: “When something becomes prominent for me, is it there in its
prominence, awaiting, 'neutrally,' my affirmation or selection; or does it already
exercise some influence on me, luring me to take it up? Or again, are there unities of
sense that could come into being independently of affection if the 'relevant conditions'
of becoming a unity are fulfilled (e.g. concrescence, contrast, etc.); or does a unity of
sense, even the most elementary phase of the living present, co-originate with affection
in order to be precisely this sense-unity? Put more simply, does affective force
presuppose prominence or does prominence presuppose affective force?” (Steinbock,
1995: 153).
6
“… if sense constitution did presuppose affection, would not the very constitution of
sense somehow presuppose, paradoxically, that sense was already constituted so that it
could exert an affective force on me in order to be constituted?” (Steinbock, 1995: 154).
 I consider Bégout’s criticism to be quite accurate. It is, so I believe, tan-
tamount to pushing the genetic analysis to an unconscious (pre-affective) stratum,
recovering the many gradualisms, layers, and directions of the processes by
which it becomes a conscious life. In my opinion, what seems like a paradox —
making conscious life spring from unconsciousness — is rather the very
opportunity to raise the radical questions about what is consciousness as a distinc-
tive property of almost all (but not all) lived-processes. Indeed, the very heart of
the problem is disguised by a badly posed/misguided question when one wonders
how conscious life springs out of unconsciousness; on the contrary, it reveals
itself when one rightly asks about what happens when some subjective structures
of the living present that do not need to be affective in order to exist become
affectively conscious, and then conscious as egoically “mine”.
Further, – and this is my second, quite long remark – that the several sensory
fields have an internal structure which is not dependent upon affection is a
controversial point not only in the literature but even for Husserl himself. In-
deed, he addresses the question in a rather aporetic section of his lectures on
passive syntheses (Hua XI, 159-166, section 34). He tackles the problem in the
form of a relationship between the formation of unity (Einheitsbildund) and
affection. His conclusion is an unstable point of equilibrium between two
opposite trends concerning the constitutive role of affection.
The question addressed in section 34 was raised in section 32. There,
Husserl stated that “affection presupposes prominence above all else”, and that
prominence, in the living present, must be accounted for as “a fusion that takes
place under contrast with respect to content”, so that “contrast is to be
characterized as the most original condition of affection” (Hua XI, 149, my
emphasis). Affection has contrast as its condition, instead of being identical
with it. A few lines earlier, Husserl has even taken the risk to define affection
as “a function of contrast”, while there is not a mechanic causal relation
between the magnitude of contrast and the rising of affection. For this reason,
Husserl then asks directly: “what gives a single prominent datum the priority
of affection?” (ibid., 150). What he has in mind is that the living present is
structured as a complex system of fusions and prominences that relate to each
other, regarding their content (inhaltlich), under contrast. His question is about
how affection connects selectively with one prominence instead of others,
given that the latter also fulfill the “conditions for affection” and one must, thus,
suppose a “relativism of the affective tendencies”. He then deepens his enquiry
by raising the question: “what kind of laws, and ultimately laws of essence, are
here dominant?” (ibid.). However, he only gives a provisional, while interesting
answer, based on the connection between affection and contrasts, feelings
(Gefühle), and even drive (Trieb), proceeding then to another matter.7 Now, the
propagation of affection is his new concern, leaving undecided the fundamental
issue regarding the relationship between prominence and affection.
However, section 33 vacillates. An insidious doubt begins to make its way,
as if the question left behind haunted the further course of the lectures. As a
matter of fact, Husserl falls constantly in the former, unanswered question when
he tackles his new problem of the laws regulating the propagation of affection.
Apparently, he dispenses with the earlier problem, proceeding with the
following words at the very outset of the section: “Suffice it to say that, in the
relativism of affective tendencies, something […] has necessarily become
affective as such.” Then, the new question is raised, which supposedly can be
dealt with independently of the previous one: “[…] are there not laws
concerning the propagation of this first affection?” (Hua XI, 151). However, in
the course of this section dedicated to the phenomenon of the Fortplanzung of
the affective awakening, the previous tension between formation of unity and
affection becomes more and more acute. He wonders explicitly whether what
was described under the concepts of concrescence and contrast is actually
independent of affection, and denies that such an independence exists at least
in the case of successive wholes, like a melody (Hua XI, 152). The case of
successive unities suggests, then, that association is a function of the
propagation of affection. If this situation is generalizable, then the affective
awakening will engulf all associative constitution and the very formation of

7
It is worth noting that Husserl suggests here, precisely where he is explicitly interested
in essential laws, an experimental, qualitative research, opening the gates for a fruitful
interplay between laboratorial experience under controlled conditions and the
establishment of eidetic laws. His words are: „Das wären natürlich eigene Themen für
Untersuchungen, wobei ein passendes Experimentieren, nicht ein induktiv-objektiv
gerichtetes, wohl möglich wäre: Es hätte die Aufgabe, günstige Bedingungen der
Herstellung reiner Fälle fraglicher Art herzustellen“ (Hua XI, 150-151). As far as I
know, the qualitative lab-research conducted by Liliana Albertazzi at the Laboratory of
Experimental Phenomenology, in Trento, goes in this direction.
unity. Indeed, at the middle of section 33, a new, revised position is sketched,
which amounts to (i) rendering every actual formation of unity dependent on
affection; (ii) taking concrescence and contrast, as well as the temporal and
local structure of the impressional fields, as mere conditions of possibility for
affective, objectual constitution; (iii) pushing the phenomenon of association
entirely to the side of affection.8 The culminating point of this new direction is
a reframing of the concept of pre-givenness. This explicitly happens later on,
in section 34, when Husserl writes that “Any kind of constituted sense is pre-
given insofar as it exercises an affective allure [Reiz], it is given insofar as the
I complies with the allure and has turned toward it attentively, laying hold of
it” (Hua XI, 162, my emphasis). In a word: affection would be the most
primitive level of sense formation; there would be nothing like a pre-affective
stratum of constitution, and, therefore, the pregiven and the given would be the
very same thing, depending whether, relative to it, there is only Reiz and
Affektion, or also Zuwendung and Aufmerksamkeit.
However, this is only the new trend of analysis. The older is not suppressed,
but coexists with it in the very same section. Husserl returns to it when, for
describing the phenomenon of affection, he urges his audience to “assume that
the prominent is already constituted, may it already be affective” (Hua XI, 154,
my emphasis). Regarding the accidental or essential role of the accompaniment
of every prominence by a concomitant affection, his answer is nuanced, while
tending to the thesis of its non-essentiality. Indeed, that affection cannot
accompany every prominence as an essential, constitutive feature of it is shown
by the evidence that not all affections arise “trough the awakening of another
affection”, as in the case of a sudden explosion (Husserl’s example). However,

8
„Drücken nicht am Ende die Wesensgesetzmäßigkeiten der immanenten
Einheitsbildung, die wir beschrieben haben, die der Bildung für sich abgeschlossener
einzelner Gegenstände, Ganzer, Gruppen, Konfigurationen bloße Bedingungen der
Möglichkeit solcher Einheiten aus – während das wirkliche Zustandekommen dieser
Einheiten selbst von Affektion und Assoziation abhängt? […] Für uns konnten diese
Einheiten nur da sein entweder als direkte gegebene im Rahmen der Aufmerksamkeit
oder dadurch, dass wir rückgreifend in die Vergangenheitshorizonte einer
Aufmerksamkeitssphäre nachträglich Einheiten erhaschten, die uns ohne und vor der
Aufmerksamkeit gegeben waren, also uns doch zum mindesten affiziert hatten. Also
überall spielt die Affektion und ersichtlicherweise auch die weckende Übertragung von
Affektion, somit Assoziation ihre Rolle.“ (Hua XI, 153, my emphasis)
this only proves that there are several chains of competing affections, instead of
an ever growing one, and not the independence of prominence from affection.
However, the other example of an unarticulated affection of an articulated whole
(a string of lights) shows that there are at the bottom “pre-affective lawful
regularities of the formation of unity” (Hua XI, 154). The articulated string
detaches itself as a whole and affects, letting one infer that a pre-affective
formation of unity (three lights put together as a unity of similarity under contrast)
must exist running its course before the whole formed through it can affect as a
single datum. Formation of unity (prominence under fusion and contrast) is, thus,
different and more fundamental than affection and its propagation. There is a
“zero-point” where affection begins, and a passive process behind it. This
restores the former trend of Husserl’s analysis.
It is at the crossroads of these two trends that section 34 explicitly raises the
question of the relationship between formation of unity and affection. It is a
very intricate section, et pour cause, could one say. The initial dilemma
amounts to (i) presupposing the “object like” structuration of the living present
and to consider that the rise and the propagation of affection are bounded to it,
or (ii) as “suggested previously in our last lecture”, stating tentatively “that
affinity, continuity, contrast are relations that need not yet be viewed as an
actual fusion-in-itself, as actually producing a unity in and through
prominence” (Hua XI, 159). The second horn of the dilemma entails a further
distinction between “unconditionally necessary fusions” that are independent
of affection, like the temporal form and the local form of the field of living
presence, as well as the “streaming” of the hyle, and those “fusions, formations
of unity that are owing first to affection”, where “special unities are
constituted”. In opposition to the first hypothesis, the point is whether the
“object like” structure of the sensory fields in the living present is already a
function of a constitutive role of affection, so that affection will constitute the
unity of its very content. The danger of circularity emerges just here.
Nevertheless, giving expression to the new trend of analysis of the former
section, Husserl takes the decision of examining if “such a theory is tenable”
(Hua XI, 160). After a brief analysis based on the distinction between lower
and higher orders of the formation of unities (prominences related to punctual
fusions in the sensory fields and, then, synthetic unities at a distance, like
similarities), he finds such theory “untenable”, because “it is incomprehensible
that fusion should first be generated through the unity of affection” (Hua XI,
161). Is, then, the first hypothesis the right one? Husserl doubts that, because,
the other way around, the first horn of the dilemma also leads to a dead end.
The reason is a straightforward one. Were the object-like structuration of the
living present already constituted independently of affection, then it will be
“incomprehensible” how “something should gain an affective force at all where
nothing of the sort was available”. In other words, it would be incomprehensible
how “a pure affective nothing should become an affective something for the
first time” (Hua XI, 163).
The aporia is quite clear: the relationship between formation of unity and
affection remains incomprehensible in both cases. Firstly, because a null-point of
affective force, a “neutral” object, as Steinbock says, is certainly something “in
itself”, as Husserl risks to affirm, but it is then hard to find out how, afterwards,
it becomes something for the ego. Secondly, if every constitution of unity was
already a function of affection, then we will have something like an affection that
frames the very content that is affecting it, a circular proto-affection creative of
its very content. To a certain extent, Husserl’s way out is a reframing of the theory
he judged “untenable” a few pages above. It states the co-originality between
Einheitsbildung and Affektion. As he puts it: “for themselves, unities are
constituted according to the principles of concrescence and contrast that we have
demonstrated—as unities for themselves they are eo ipso also for the ego,
affecting it”. (Hua XI, 163, my emphasis). This is the principle of the gradualism
of affective force. It tends asymptotically to a zero-point limit which is never
attainable. Every objectual constitution in the hyletic fields is at the same time
wrapped by an affective allure for the ego, be it quasi unnoticeable. The
associative awakening, Husserl says now, shows that the content that is reached
by the propagation of affection was already something weakly affecting the ego,
and not an “affective nothing”. As a result, Husserl puts forth the methodological
principle that we must “ascribe to every constituted, prominent datum that is for
itself an affective allure [Reiz] acting on the ego” (Hua XI, 163). As I said early,
this is tantamount to reframing the very concept of a pre-givenness. In this
construal, pre-given would be the same as affecting, and the given will mark the
point where turning-towards and attention begin. The traces of a pre-affective
stratum of constitution are erased.
5. A provisional conclusion
This is a very elusive point, indeed. On the one hand, only what affects is there,
exists for the ego. The very concept of a pre-affective stratum would be, then,
devoid of sense. Therefore, there is no für sich sein, only a für mich sein, to use
Husserl’s expressions; there is, then, no question about the way what supposedly
is kath’auto becomes something pros hemas, as Bégout as pointed out (2000:
194-195). However, on the other hand, if there is an allure and an affection, then
an articulated or unarticulated unity strikes the ego, and this unity does not
depend on striking for being there. Quite the contrary: it must first be there in
order to strike. Even though the prominence (or unity) that affects can be noticed
as such only while affecting, and even though it is only through this noticing that
the unity detaches itself as a prominence in a certain sensory field, nevertheless
the affective awakening only catches this structure as being what it is, giving to
it some relief. The sensory fields should have some internal, proper structure in
order for something to become noticeable as a prominence by way of a contrast.
For instance, two colored rectangles on a white background exert an allure and
affect. I turn to them attentively and interpret them as the sensible appearance of
two paintings hanging on the wall. Only while affecting do the sensible colors
and the sensible forms display their status as prominences. This is right.
However, in order to detach and affect the ego they must have been already
configured in the ocular field as colors covering two coexistent rectangular forms.
This is the other, non-obliterable side of the question. We must build an account
that encompasses this pre-affective stratum. This is not tantamount to talking
about a für sich sein of the hyletic data. Indeed, there is a closed interdependency
between the formation of unities and the affective processes, so that the
distinction is not really a separation. In this sense, one would be completely mis-
guided if asking how a unity, that is wholly constituted, affects then the ego,
instead of remaining locked in its “being in itself”. Recognizing a good sense for
talking about a pre-affective stratum does not commit us with such type of
questioning. What it entails is a deeper concept of subjectivity that understands
the pre-given as pre-affective and pro-affective, that is, as something that can be
submitted to the unity of an affection, so that something like a “passive synthesis”
(precisely Husserl’s apparently awkward name) takes place here, joining together
the passively constituted structure of the sense field and its unified relief in
receptivity.
Consequently, what is in need is an account that puts the question of a
phenomenological description of the raising of affection, instead of starting
with it.

Bibliography
BÉGOUT, Bruce (2000). La généalogie de la logique. Husserl, L’antéprédicatif
et le catégorial. Paris: J. Vrin.
BICEAGA, Victor (2010). The Concept of Passivity in Husserl’s
Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Springer.
GALLAGHER, Shaun (2005). How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
HOLENSTEIN, Elmar (1972). Phänomenologie der Assoziation. Zur Struktur
und Funktion eines Grundprinzips der passiven Genesis bei E. Husserl. The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
HUSSERL, Edmund (2000). Aktive Synthesen: Aus der Vorlesung
'Transzendentale Logik' 1920/21. Ergänzungsband zu 'Analysen zur
passiven Synthesis'. Husserliana XXXI. The Hague: Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
— (1977). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen
Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine
Phänomenologie. Husserliana III/1. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
— (1966). Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungs-
manuskripten, 1918-1926. Husserliana XI. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
— (1952). Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen
Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur
Konstitution. Husserliana IV. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
— (1939). Erfahrung und Urteil. Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik.
Prag: Academia.
MICALI, Stefano (2008). Überschüsse der Erfahrung. Grenzdimensionen des
Ich nach Husserl. Dordrecht: Springer.
STEINBOCK, Anthony (1995). Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology
after Husserl. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

PEDRO M. S. ALVES is Associate Professor (tenured) at the Faculty of Arts of

the University of Lisbon. He also is senior-researcher at the Center of
Philosophy of the University of Lisbon (CFUL). His main areas of interest are
husserlian phenomenology, transcendental philosophy, philosophy of nature,
and philosophy of law. He publishes regularly on these fields. His main
monographic studies are: Studia Kantiana. Interpretação e Crítica (2009);
Intersubjectividade e comunicação: Uma abordagem fenomenológica (2009);
Subjectividade e Tempo na Fenomenologia de Husserl (2003); and
Fenomenología del tiempo y de la percepción (2010).