The Origins of Sedimentation in Husserl's Phenomenology

1998

Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 2023

The paper explores the meaning of the phenomenological concept of sedimentation in the framework of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. The analysis I offer suggests that Merleau-Ponty initiates a transition from the constitutional problematic of sedimentations that we come across in Husserl's phenomenology to the analysis of existential sedimentations. Merleau-Ponty accomplishes this transformation by binding the Husserlian conception of sedimentations with the Heideggerian conception of facticity. The distinction Merleau-Ponty draws between originary sedimentations and secondary sedimentations is especially important, for it allows one to claim that Merleau-Ponty recognizes all experiences as sedimented. Against the background of this realization, I offer a reevaluation of Merleau-Ponty's cryptic remarks in the Phenomenology of Perception regarding the "original past," also described as "a past that has never been a present." I argue that these are metaphors for originary sedimentations. In place of a conclusion, I suggest that especially when the concept of sedimentation is universalized, we come to recognize its inherently paradoxical nature. In the final analysis, besides being a genetic concept, sedimentation is also a limit problem and a limit phenomenon.

Social Research, 1968

Husserl Studies, 1990

2014

In my thesis I have tried to develop a phenomenological account of temporality based upon a reading of Husserl’s work and I defend this against the criticism that is directed at Husserl under the heading of a metaphysics of presence. Initially, I offer two models of this absolute consciousness that I find to be in consistent. First, the Hua X, Text No. 54 model describes absolute consciousness as functioning through two types of intentionality: horizontal intentionality, which constitutes the unity of the flow of consciousness, i.e. its self-appearance, and transverse intentionality, which constitutes the unity of the object-point throughout its flowing-away. Because consciousness is intentional there is a difference between the constituting and the constituted. Since Husserl moreover believes that only intentionality can be carried over into intentionality, the self-constitution of this primal consciousness requires that there is an ultimate consciousness that is an unconscious consciousness. The second model, L III, describes the primal presentation as the fulfilment of a protention. Consequently, we can describe immanent time as being constituted on the basis of a retentional and protentional tendency. These flick over at what is called the culmination-point, the point of maximal fulfilment. There is no longer a now-point in this model. With these two models in mind I discuss the criticism of Derrida and Heidegger. Derrida bases his criticism on an understanding of time-consciousness that relies on the conceptual basicness of the primal impression. Derrida argues that since we can only become conscious of what is given through concrete perception, i.e. retention and primal impression, that the primal impression is invested with non-originarity. I show against this reading that the L III model does not succumb to this criticism since it does not rely on a primal impression as source of originarity. Instead, with Rodemeyer I speak here of the zone of originarity, a temporal field as it were, that is constituted by the retentional and protentional tendencies and characterized by a matter of degree, that might have a culmination-point, but which we do not understand as the source of originarity. Heidegger’s critique aims at the supposed preference of immanence over transcendence and of the present albeit in a broad sense over the farther past and future. I argue that his critique is rooted in the epistemological orientation that Heidegger criticizes Husserl on, particularly in his treatment of the phenomenon as being split into that which appears and the appearing. I show however that the notion of pre-consciousness that we discover in the C-manuscripts can be understood as a primordial transcendence, which calls for the epochē. Thus, I show on the one hand that Husserl does recognize the priority of transcendence and on the other hand, I justify his “epistemological” prioritization of the present over the past and future from the necessity of the epochē that I believe the discovery of pre-consciousness gives motivation to.

Continental PhContinental Philosophy Review, 53(4), 401-417, 2020

I advance a phenomenology of forgetting based on Husserl’s accounts of time-consciousness and passive synthesis. This theory of forgetting is crucial for understanding the transcendental constitution of the past. I argue that without forgetting, neither memory nor retention suffice for a consciousness of the past as past, since both are irreducibly connected to the Living Present. After an initial survey of the challenges that confront a phenomenology of forgetting (i.e. the “forgotten” is defined by its lack of phenomenality), I provide a descriptive analysis of forgetting as a complex process that integrates an accomplishment of retention that Husserl called “temporal contraction” with an accomplishment of passive synthesis that Husserl called “affective fusion.” Temporal contraction is the accomplishment that creates a qualitative (not quantitative) distinction between near-retentions and far-retentions. Affective fusion enables us to provide a positive (not privative) phenomenological description of the withdrawal of egoic investment in intentional experiences. Taken together, these two syntheses generate a double concealment in which consciousness both forgets its object and forgets that it has forgotten it, thereby constituting it as part of the truly absent past.

Springer Verlag, 2023

This text examines the many transformations in Husserl’s phenomenology that his discoveries of the nature of appearing lead to. It offers a comprehensive look at the Logical Investigations’ delimitation of the phenomenological field, and continues with Husserl’s account of our consciousness of time. This volume examines Husserl’s turn to transcendental idealism and the problems this raises for our recognition of other subjects. It details Husserl’s account of embodiment and examines his theory of the instincts. Drawing from his published and unpublished manuscripts, it outlines his treatment of our mortality and the teleological character of our existence. The result is a genetic account of our selfhood, one that unifies Husserl’s different claims about who and what we are.

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Implicit Cognition, 2022

In this chapter, I outline the main features of the phenomenological approach to implicit knowing, focusing on embodied cognition, pre-predicative knowledge, habits, and horizonconsciousness. Generally speaking, twentieth-century analytic philosophy approached implicit cognition either under the category of ‘knowing how’, construed as an ability or complex of dispositions (Gilbert Ryle 1949; but see Stanley and Williamson 2001), or as nonverbal, ‘tacit knowledge’ (“we can know more than we can tell,” Polanyi 1966: 4; Fodor 1968). The European phenomenological tradition (especially Husserl, Heidegger, Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Schutz, see Moran 2000), on the other hand, has a longer and more complex tradition of analyses of intuitive, tacit, ‘pre-predicative’ knowledge, centered on embodiment, that developed prior to and independently of recent analytic discussions, although there have been recent attempts to mediate between these traditions (see Dreyfus 2002a, 2002b, 2005, 2007; Dreyfus and Taylor 2015). British philosophy did have some mid twentieth-century connections with phenomenology, largely through Michael Polanyi and Gilbert Ryle, who offered discussions of tacit, skillful, habitual knowledge, but besides these figures, but mainstream analytic philosophy did not have engagement with the phenomenological tradition until recently largely due to a revival of interest in consciousness (Moran 2011).1 Phenomenology focuses especially on intuitively apprehended, embodied, skillful behavior. Husserl’s mature phenomenology, greatly elaborated on by the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (who himself was trained in empirical and Gestalt psychology), specifically focuses on this pre-reflective, pre-predicative level of human experience. Philosophy of mind tended to ignore embodiment completely and now that has changed there is increasing interest in the phenomenological contribution.

The main argument of Husserl’s Phenomenology Revisited is developed in three steps: [1] In the first part of the book, I present reconsiderations of certain basic terms that Husserl introduces in his philosophy. I first show that phenomenological activity can be re-interpreted in anthropological terms. What Husserl calls his “phenomenological method,” which includes reflection, eidetic variation, and the performance of the epoche, is, I claim, an abstract development of concrete life-world experiences such as imagining, playing and wondering. By discovering the concrete anthropological horizon of central Husserlian methodological terms (which have confused readers from the beginning on), their foundation in certain experiences, and the way in which they can be regarded as abstractions from those experiences, is shown. [2] In the second part of the book, I show how subjectivity, in the phenomenological sense according to which it is an area of investigation, evolves out of the sensual sphere, and that as such, subjectivity should not be analyzed apart from the lived body or apart from world experience, as some commentators have suggested. As I show, affectivity and the “openness of the subject” towards what is other than itself, is tied to the experience of other subjects, to proto-ethical experiences, as well as to the lived body. [3] In the last part of the book, I turn to the experience of the past and future, in order to establish them as the most important features of the self’s constitution. In sum, by proceeding in these three steps I am able to outline (in a non-abstractive way) three of the most important levels of human experience and its phenomenological investigation, from Husserl’s point of view.