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Depraz, N., Where Is The Phenomenology of Attention That Husserl Intended To Perform PDF
Depraz, N., Where Is The Phenomenology of Attention That Husserl Intended To Perform PDF
C 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
NATALIE DEPRAZ
Philosophy, College International de Philosophie, University of Sorbonne (Paris IV), Paris,
France (e-mail: frj@jussieu.fr)
Abstract. For the most part, attention occurs as a theme adjacent to much more topical and
innovatingly operating acts: first, the intentional act, which represents a destitution of the
abstract opposition between subject and object and which paves the way for a detailed analysis
of our perceptive horizontal subjective life; second, the reductive act, specified in a psycho-
phenomenological sense as a reflective conversion of the way I am looking at things; third,
the genetic method understood as a genealogy of logic based on our experiential affective pre-
discursive world-life. In this respect, here are some of the leading questions of my investigation:
What are the differences and the proximities between these methods and attentional activity?
Why is the latter not put to the fore as a method? To what extent is this secondary part played
by attention linked to the constitution of phenomenology as opposed to psychology (for which
attention is a central theme), and what does it mean for the impossibility of phenomenology to
freeing itself completely from psychology?
1. Introduction
At the very end of Section 92 of Ideas I, the title of which is The Noetic
and Noematic Aspects of Attentional Changes, Husserl claims the necessity
of performing a systematic phenomenology of attention.2 I quote the
last sentence of the paragraph, which is written at the very end of a first
analysis of these attentional modifications: So much by way of a general
characterization of the noetic-neomatic themes which must be treated with
systematic thoroughness in the phenomenology of attention (Ideas I, p. 226).
Now, such an explicit claim appears to be quite unique in Husserls work,
even though the attentional experience quietly accompanies and softly
permeates most analysis of perception, analyses that form the basis of
each phenomenological description. Our leading question therefore is the
following: Where is the phenomenology of attention that Husserl intended to
perform and, more precisely, as it seems to be both central and hidden, how
is it possible to lay it out?
When one examines Husserls analyses more closely, we note that the
theme of attention is spread widely throughout his writings, namely in the
6 NATALIE DEPRAZ
remains caught in a too narrow view of transcendentality, one that owes too
much to the Kantian heritage. We claim on the contrary what we call a tran-
scendental empiricism as a theoretical background.5 Second, while stressing
the operative and performative side of the descriptive method, we want to
study the attentional experience from the point of view of its praxis and not of
its theory, therefore suggesting the relevance of pragmatism as a philosophical
background, more in the sense of J. Dewey in his Human Nature and Conduct6
than in Peirces or in Rortys perspectives. We hope to show concretely as we
progress how much these two comments are relevant and legitimate.7
In the framework of this confrontation between attentional activity with in-
tentionality, I will proceed in three main steps: (1) I will show the ambivalence
of Husserls way of relegating attention to a sheer intentional modification
among others; (2) I will unfold in more detail two main concrete gestures
through which attention appears in a lateral way both as an intuitive act and as
a signitive act; (3) I will lay out the hypothesis that attention may be in fact a
generic modulator of every intentional act; this may contribute to explaining
the initial ambivalence I pointed out initially.
the third chapter dealing specifically with noema, the attentional changes
correspond to a second extension of the notion, after a first perceptual one
(Sections 8991) and a third more complex prectical one (Sections 9396).
So just a look at the organization of the argument shows how much attention
is only one possible extended application of the intentional structure squeezed
in among others (e.g., perceptual, practical).
Let us focus on the Section 92 and notice in the first place the paradoxical
turn of the sentence, which is straightforwardly revealing for Husserls am-
bivalence with regard to attention: (1) attention is nothing else than (nichts
anderes ist als) a kind of intentional modification; (2) attention is a funda-
mental kind (Grundart) of intentional modification. Husserls contention is
therefore double-sided: First, attention must of course be analyzed within the
intentional structure. Outside of this it has no relevance. Second, it is promised
to play a prominent role within such a framework, as it is a fundamental kind
of intentional modification. Another indication of such an ambivalence can be
read in the following sentence found at the beginning of the paragraph after
a few introductory sentences: In this context it is a question of . . . changes
which . . . do not alter the correlative noematic productions but, nevertheless,
exhibit alterations of the whole mental process with respect to both its noetic
and noematic sides.11 We can observe here quite a subtle way of showing
how attention partially affects and alters [wandelt ab] the lived experiential
intentionality of consciousness without radically transforming [verandern] it.
In short, the whole development is indicative of a dependence of attention
on the general intentional methodology. Again, at the end of the paragraph,
Husserl explains: . . . [We] stand here at the first and radical beginning of
the theory of attention . . . the rest of the study must be achieved within the
framework of intentionality and be dealt with not as an empirical study, but
first of all as an eidetic one.12 So Husserl excludes here any other possibility
to broach the theme of attention: It is necessarily an intentional act and, as
such, it has an eidetic dimension. At once Husserl makes here two decisions,
which amount for him to the same one but could well have been separated in
other contexts: (1) Attention is subjected to intentionlity; (2) Intentionality is
necessarily an eidetic intentionality. Such a twofold contention is intended to
create a clear separation between phenomenology and psychology. (1) Atten-
tion is not a mental activity by which some sensations and psychic states get
intensified due to more or less strong imprints on my consciousness of sen-
sory inputs of stimuli. J. Locke and then the Abbot Condillac first described
it as a plus de conscience or a conscience differentielle, namely, in his
Essai sur lorigine des connaissances humaines (1746).13 On the contrary, it
is a lived act of my consciousness that is directed towards specific objects.
(2) Attention is not a contingent and factual conscious act that is all the same
10 NATALIE DEPRAZ
Right at the beginning of the Section 92, after having said that the atten-
tional modification refers to a sui generis structure of consciousness, Husserl
mentions two gestures as being our specific correlated way of speaking of the
PHENOMENOLOGY OF ATTENTION 11
the object is favored and, in another case, another; or of the fact that one
and the same moment is paid attention to primarily at one time and only
secondarily at another time, or just barely noticed still, if not indeed com-
pletely unnoticed though still appearing. Those are indeed different modes
belonging specifically to attention as such. Among them the group of action-
ality modes are separated from the non-actionality mode, from what we call
complete inattention, the mode which is, so to speak, dead consciousness of
something.21
Now, such a gradual temporal perceiving process of modes of noticing had
already been extended and, more precisely, applied by Husserl to its signitive
and verbal dimension. As early as 1908, in the Lectures on the Theory of Mean-
ing, within the framework of the central distinction between the consciousness
of meaning [Bedeutungsbewutsein] and the verbal consciousness [Wortlaut-
bewutsein], Husserl comes back to the different usual (so he says) functions
of attention, primary noticing [primares Bemerken] and thematic intend-
ing [thematisches Meinen] (Hua, 1822). The general framework is the same
as the one of 1913 already, that is, intentionality. Husserls idea is to show the
intricacy of my being attentive to the words and to the meaning of the words:
Consciousness of meaning is intertwined with verbal consciousness.22 In
order to do so, he unfolds in quite an illuminating way the different strata of
noticing the meaning instead of the word in its materiality or vice versa, and
the different experiences we have of a double attention with a stronger em-
phasis on the one side or the other: primary noticing, secondary noticing,
remarking, adjuct intending [nebenbei Meinen], thematic intending.
Husserl presents his analysis of the interweaving of word-consciousness
and meaning-consciousness as an applied extension of the perceptual inten-
tional model. My question however is this: To what extent is the whole analysis
not also permeated by a fundamental lato sensu signitive experience, insofar
as, along with a bodily anchored one, as we already shown, the vocabulary
used to describe the multifarious folds of the attentional modes of conscious-
ness is a signitive vocabulary of marks and indications?
As a provisory conclusion: Attention as an intentional act of consciousness
needs to be reanchored in its bodily postures (kinetic, visual and affective) and
in its noticing qua signitive scope (indicative, both verbal and meaningful)
in order to delineate more precisely the experiential praxis which provides it
with its phenomenal impulse. By laying out these two bodily and signitive
gestures of attention, we do not want to say that Husserl claimed explicitly
such practical anchorages, but that his descriptions are full of such concrete
indications, which need to be unfolded and uncovered as such. Hence we aim
at de-centering the reading from the claim of a de jure thematic intentional
model reigning over each act of consciousness to the hypothesis of an operative
14 NATALIE DEPRAZ
while James is more akin to Wundts experiments. Now, Husserl in later ge-
netic works, and above all in his Analyses Concerning Passive and Active
Synthesis (from 19181926)32 will give a central importance to the gradual
emergence of attention, to the becoming attentive and to the different modes,
forms and effects of attentionality. He will obviously take into account in a far
more accurate way what has been gained from empiricism and psychology in
order to analyze attention in relation to its affective genesis.33 Never will he
however include the necessity of doing justice as such to psycho- and neuro-
logical experiments as James and Stumpf did, in order not to explain attention
one-sidedly, but even to give more meaning to the complexity of the pheno-
menon.34
Now, the recent studies in neuroscience show clearly how much attention
is a complex act that integrates a great amount of competences of the subject,
that is, perception, memory, imagination. On the basis of an early psycho-
logical analysis of attention understood as a mental effort and an ability to
select,35 attention has been more and more considered as a basic mechanism of
consciousness36 and, today, the neuro-scientific studies have been able to iden-
tify three different attentional networks thanks to electric registering or more
specifically thanks to IRM (Functional Cerebral Imaging): either the attention
of a subject is oriented toward a sensory stimulation, or attention is activated
by the work of the memory, or attention corresponds to a maintained state of
vigilance. Such results show that the sub-personal mechanisms of attention
refer to a specific complex of unconscious cognitive processes that can neither
be localized in a few neurons nor put into action the whole of the brain. In the
same vein, P. Buser in his recent book Cerveau de soi, cerveau delautre,37
shows very well how the attentional activity is situated at the crossroads of
many other cognitive activities: perception, memory, action, etc. In addition,
he underlines that attention is not a monolithic activity but involves what he
calls attentional states and does not belong only to our clear consciousness,
but has to do with unconscious processes related to pre-attentional activities.
In short, he insists on the genesis and the transitions inherent in the attentional
dynamics.
From a phenomenological point of view, these neuro-scientific and cogni-
tive psychologist thrusts are quite valuable, since (1) they confirm the idea
that the description of attention needs to be anchored in the study of its ge-
netic emergence, that is, of its graduality, its different modes and states, its
multifarious effects; (2) they indicate that the hypothesis of attention as a tran-
scendental (both functional and material) modulator of the intentional acts of
my consciousness is a strong hypothesis, insofar as attentional sub-personal
processes also seem to be transversal to many other cognitive activities of the
brain.
18 NATALIE DEPRAZ
5. Conclusion
As early as 1936, Minkowski in his book Vers une cosmologie38 made two
quite relevant observations: (1) attention contains quite essentially in itself
inattention: it is an illusion to try to focus ones attention. It is the death
of attention. Referring to James, he then spoke of tres fins mouvements
oscillatoires de distraction, so as to suggest that distraction is the better
way to broach the theme of attention rather than attention itself. This remark
is quite in agreement with Husserls initial description of the changes of
attention, and its constitutive variability, but also goes one step further, since
it brings to the fore distraction and modes of inattention as a more relevant
access to a phenomenology of attention; (2) attention is a phenomenon that
exists in addition, i.e., that has to be added [qui se surajoute] to the other
perceptual and thought-phenomena and specifies them. It has to be studied,
not in relation with its object, but with regard to other connected phenomena.
Such a comment echoes quite finely our hypothesis of modulation and
concurs with the global functionality of attention neuroscientists pointed out
recently. He also had another comment about attention: Attention as function
has been much studied by psychologists, how to remain attentive, what is the
organ of attention; attention as phenomenon is embedded in the intentional
correlation: noetically, how to turn toward/away; noematically, how an object
becomes salient for me. This last observation should be a good indication
for us to keep in mind the necessity to braid together (without exclusion)
the Husserlian phenomenological approach (here intentional, eidetic and
transcendental, both reductive and constitutive), the cognitive psychological
approach (practical, empirical genetic) and the neuro-scientific one, which
provides us with parallel thrusts in terms of sub-personal processes.
Notes
1. The following inquiry presupposes a first step (and chapter) which focuses on the reduction
as a concrete practical method: it was published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies,
Special Issue entitled The View from Within: First-Person Approaches to the Study of
Consciousness, eds. F. Varela & J. Shear 6/2-3 (1999). We present here a further step
(and second chapter): Intentionality and Attentionality, was presented at SPEP, 2000,
in the framework of a workshop co-organized with Anthony Steinbock; a second one,
Husserls Phenomenology of the Micro-genesis of Attention in the Light of C. Stumpfs
and W. James Accounts on Attention, was presented at Southern Illinois University at
Carbondale in April, 2001, at a Conference on attention organized by N. Depraz and A.
Steinbock and corresponds to a third chapter of a forthcoming book.
2. See Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomeno-
logical Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983);
hereafter, Ideas I.
PHENOMENOLOGY OF ATTENTION 19