Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Affection and Attention On The Phenomeno PDF
Affection and Attention On The Phenomeno PDF
C 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
ANTHONY J. STEINBOCK
Department of Philosophy, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Carbondale,
IL 62901-4505, USA (e-mail: steinboc@siu.edu)
1. Introduction
2.1. Passivity
2.2. Affection
coming into relief is always already an affective relief suggests three things:
(a) there is never a pure “nothing” of affection, rather, we can meaningfully
only speak of a gradation of affection; (b) even if we do not explicitly notice
something being affective and have not turned to it attentively, we can still
have an affection exerting its pull on us; (c) just because the affective force
is no longer at its peak in the present and is not intuitively available, it does
not mean that there is nil of affective force. Even though the affection may
be slight, it can still reunite with a present sense and be reconstituted so as to
exert a new force on the perceiver.
Third, in the living present there is not just one single ray of affective
force on me; rather, there are many things exercising an affection, rivaling for
my attention to some degree or other. For example, a mural on the side of a
building may be particularly prominent, affecting us, and as we turn toward it
a train passes by, blowing its horn, and when starting to turn toward the train,
we smell the miasma of a broken sewer line. If we turn to the odor and look
around to examine it more fully, the other affective tendencies fade back. All
of them still exercise an allure, but they no longer make it through to us.
Fourth, as situated in a dynamic context, I encounter these rivaling
forces with a prereflective preferential directedness that is always selec-
tive/exclusive; in a field of affective tendencies that rival one another for
attention, some will be more or less significant than others, and these rivalries
can occur within the same sense field or across sense fields (ACPAS, 193–
195). For example, while climbing a rock face certain grips for hands and feet
are perceived, tactilely and visually. Depending upon how fresh or fatigued,
how confident or intimidated I am, certain passages and certain contours will
lure the fingers this way or that, the feet left or right, as an invitation to climb.
In fact, the formations demand literally that one take a stand on them; depend-
ing upon the circumstances, some formations may not even stand out as such,
and the emergence of a figure may only be on the verge of becoming some-
thing determinate, i.e., this “grip” on the rock face as a possibility to climb
higher. If, say, I am particularly fatigued, a certain fortuitous rock formation
may become prominent with an inherent tension that I do not fully understand
or “see.” I reach for it and as it moves, the whole organization of my field is
“recast” both in a way that disappoints my bodily intentions and that satisfies
my vague and implicit visual anticipation of the moving spectacle.4 It is a
copperhead that slithers away. Only upon reflection do I parcel out the affec-
tive tendencies and keep them in their place as non-rivals, and confirm that it
was a copperhead there all the time as this determinate phenomenon.
Finally, a completely undifferentiated field of affective forces is only pos-
sible after once having been “present” in the living present; the zero of
affective force takes place in the retentional past that becomes completely
26 ANTHONY J. STEINBOCK
2.3. Affect-consciousness
It is beyond the scope of this paper to show how all modes of conscious-
ness are implicitly or explicitly affect-consciousness [Gemütsbewußtsein –
pleasure-, displeasure-, joy-, disappointment-, feeling-consciousness, etc.]
This is a problematic issue for Husserl because within his static phenomenol-
ogy, he views affect-consciousness as one-sidedly founded upon a layer of
consciousness that is “neutrally” epistemic, subsidiary to a founding objec-
tivating consciousness. I have hinted above and shown elsewhere that this
characterization of the relation between the founding and the founded stems
from prejudices of methodological procedure – prejudices that privilege the
putative “simple” over the “complex.” Still, by reinterpreting this procedure
(as Husserl himself does), the former is now regarded as abstract, and the
latter, the “complex,” are understood as concrete.6 Here are the reasons one
would have to revise the initial claim with respect to affect-consciousness
and pursue an analysis in which all consciousness is to some degree affect-
consciousness.
First, because intentionality is a correlative structure, being able to be struck
by an affective prominence of any kind presupposes that consciousness is
in principle an affective openness. Here the affectively charged “givenness”
guides the (affectively significant) perception such that something can be
“seen,” or “heard,” epistemically or otherwise. We do not first have a quality,
then the substrate, confined, for example, to the eyes or ears; there is not
a disassociation of a so-called physical nature from affective or emotional
life. Like Scheler, Merleau-Ponty observes that before being “seen,” the color
betrays itself through the experience of a certain attentive bodily comportment
that is appropriate to that color such that I adopt an affective attitude, e.g.,
of blue.7 Thus, there is an order of affective perception that “precedes” or
AFFECTION AND ATTENTION 27
is “coeval” with the givenness of the object as object, such that the object is
perceived as enticing or disgusting, beautiful or ugly, etc.8
Second, one can show, as N. Depraz and F. Varela9 have done, that the
affective quality of perception is at the heart even of time-consciousness.
By focusing on the micro-futural dimension, or protention, it is possible to
describe the genesis of fulfillment as laden with emotional coloration. The
pro-tention/pro-tension is affectively charged: It is literally a pre-sentiment
of what is to come: with uncertainty, with hope, fear, surprise, etc. Whereas
Husserl does tend to view the protention as projected on the basis of a past
and present, the protention is actually more original; even if we were to as-
cribe to perception an impressional status, we would have a givenness with
a protentional orientation “before” it is retended, and such that the retention
would bear in its hold the emotional coloration of the protention-present.
Third, it is not insignificant that when Husserl describes the relation be-
tween intention and fulfillment, even on cognitive andjudicative levels, he
depicts the relation in the very terms of Gemütsbewußtsein, namely, as a striv-
ing toward or desiring deeper epistemic content, and the attainment of the
aim as a relaxation. In terms of Husserl’s own descriptions (and not neces-
sarily in terms of his assertions), we find that the higher the cognitive mo-
tivation, the less neutral is the cognitive activity, the more the affect-laden
is the consciousness that comes into play as an epistemic striving, a driving
at, a willing. No givenness is an entirely “adequate” givenness, but rather,
is expressive of a simultaneous tension/relaxation/tension structure imbued
with affective coloration. Consciousness has to be seen most fundamentally
as affect-consciousness (ACPAS, p. 275 f.).
force, since we are busy doing something else; it does not even register as a
disturbance. Now there is a phrase that arouses either a particular pleasure or
displeasure. The entire melody in the immediate present is accentuated, and
in one stroke (similar to the example of climbing given above), the affection
and the pleasure or displeasure radiates back into the past retentional phase,
affectively highlighting it as a unity.14 Again, it is not only the present that
gives the past an affective force that it never had before, but the whole melody
gives even the instigating present a new affective prominence as a part of the
whole melody.15
As in the case of a series of hammer blows, an affective awakening goes
back into senses that are uniform; the affective awakening need not bring the
single uniform sense to givenness, but it does elicit a kind of “un-covering”
in the sense that the reanimated past hammer blow has its own affective force
just like the new hammer blow. We experience it as a chain of hammer blows
extending relatively far back by virtue of the synthesis of awakening that
radiates back. Moreover, not only does this take place within one sense field
at a time, but there can be a transgressive awakening between the sense fields.
For example, one color can awaken a pronounced sound, and one rhythm,
say, knocking blows can awaken a similar rhythm, e.g., a string of flashing
lights.
Finally, there is a dispositional orientation seen in relation to the passive
propagation of affection in the protentional future. As noted above, on the
one hand, the motivation for a particular futural present is prefigured by the
present since when something is given, a world and its possibilities potentially
conforming to a style intimated by it are already sketched out. As this particular
givenness “lingers,”16 and the new affective force of the present reanimates the
retentional flow by virtue of a retroactive transference of sense, the call for this
particular futural course of things is intensified. To this extent, one could say
that the future does not fashion the unities of experience in the original sense,
but presupposes them, allowing something similar to be expected (ACPAS,
p. 204, 235).
But because the protention actually co-arises with the present, a constitutive
teleology is in play such that the affective force of a future occurrence confers
its force upon present “possibilities” allowing some to be given and allowing
others not to be able to be seen. The force radiates out from it in such a way
that it accentuates objects that will fulfill the conditions for forming a uniform
configuration. For example, on a baseball field, the teleology of “ball” guides
my perception of the object coming at me to be seen as “ball,” both when it is
a ball and when it is the ice from a snowcone. A perceptual crisis arises when
a current perception does not accord to this teleological orientation.17
AFFECTION AND ATTENTION 31
reproductions is the doctrine of association in the first and most genuine sense
– “first” in relation to expectations, and not in relation to passive associations
– association is described as the process of something recalling something
else by awakening something that is past (ACPAS, pp. 163–164, 168 ff.,
232).
For example, the thought of the boulders at Fountainbleau suddenly pops
into mind when I am talking to my friend about Hegel. She used a peculiar
expression that immediately recalled a similar expression used by my climbing
partner after we successfully made a particularly difficult climb. The thought
of Fountainbleau comes to the fore as affectively prominent; but even it does
not remain isolated since other pasts live off of its affective force; indeed a
whole scene of events spreading associatively into the retentional past, like the
pasta we had that night, the small windows in the stone houses in the village,
and then the painters of Barbizon all become prominent, and in some cases
rival for attention. Now the re-presented past exercises the strongest affective
force; it is brought out of the zero-affective horizon of the “unconscious,”
and by a striking reversal, drowns out my present conversation of the living
present which aroused the past in the first place, and which otherwise would
have exercised the stronger affective force!
These descriptions of remembering, while certainly within the sphere of
egoic activity, do not exhaust the level of active remembering; they only
pertain to remembering as turning toward. There is another level of egoic
remembering where one strives consciously to remember something: a word
on the tip of one’s tongue, the name of a person with whom one is talking, a
dramatic scene or the characters in a movie, etc.
Not only is attention directed backward in remembering, but the ego is also
active in turning toward the future. In the case of protention, the directedness
is a basic “living ahead of oneself,” integrated into the structure of kinaesthetic
habituality and understood as a passive prefiguring of the future. For example,
the given sense of the door protends the back side of the door, and certain
specific possibilities of the presently unobserved hall on the other side of the
door.
In the case of “expectation,” which is a “higher” level of futural orientation,
what is expected gets expected according to a concordant style or type (the
taste of a particular wine, the sighting of a dog, though one has never seen
this particular dog before, etc. Although something is often expected in co-
existence and in succession on the basis of the past, expectation is somewhat
“freer” from the past than protention: I can “look forward to” seeing someone
I have never seen before, I can expect someone to come through the door any
time now, either in hope or in trepidation; I can expect this particular cat to
eat that mouse in the field, etc.
34 ANTHONY J. STEINBOCK
To make all these differentiations explicit is far beyond the scope of this
paper, and accordingly I make no pretensions to exhaustiveness. My intent
is to suggest the motivations for various kinds of attentiveness within the so-
called active domain and to point out their affective dimensions, and then to
consider phenomenological reflective attentiveness.
We have just seen that receptivity is the bridge, as it were, from passivity to
activity, and that this awakening initially entails a submission that motivates an
active turning toward. Cognitive interest goes beyond receptivity by not merely
focusing on a theme, but by taking it as an object that is in principle explicable
as object. Thus, cognitive interest need not be a full-fledged investigation into
the object; for cognitive interest is interest in an object where this object is
in principle repeatable, that is, is identical with itself, and stands there for
observation. For this reason cognitive interest is a mode of giving, a giving of
the Self of the object where the self-giving is creative (ACPAS, pp. 311–316).
way of clarifying “S,” the synthesis that determines their relation is not active,
rather, it is a result of a special passive synthesis (ACPAS, pp. 294 ff., 339 ff.).
Moreover, this passing from object to object that is held together by passive
syntheses are excitations for possible determinations, but it itself is not yet
the activity of determinative synthesis, it is not a judging.
I began this paper by discussing the role of affection and the role it plays in
attention, tracing it from passive modes of proto-attention like dispositional
orientation and passive discernment, to turning toward, cognitive interest,
active judication, and the constitution of essences. Each in their own ways,
they are dimensions of experience that are attentive to the world through an
interaction with solicitous affective forces.
Considered in terms of their attentive postures, however, these attitudes,
all the way up to conceptualizing reflection and eidetic variation remain what
phenomenology would call “mundane” because they are still tied to the “what”
of experience. Phenomenology, of course, will deem all these other modes
of attention, even the higher ones we dealt with here, to be naive (mundane)
AFFECTION AND ATTENTION 39
on the natural attitude as a shift from what something is plain and simple to
modes of givenness and pre-givenness. Phenomenology is a special kind of
reflective attentiveness.
The question I would like to pose now is the following: When the phenome-
nologist brackets presuppositions, is he or she free from affective forces? Is
the phenomenologist neutral in relation to the world? What kind of attentive-
ness is it that claims not to participate in the world’s validities? Finally, is
there a motivation for phenomenological reflective attentiveness like there is
in other cases of attentiveness?
Contrary to what might be thought to be the case for phenomenology, I sug-
gest that phenomenological reflective attentiveness is an active dis-position,
and as such is the most receptive to affection of all the attentive attitudes.
Phenomenology is a type of reflective attentiveness that occurs within the
experiencing itself. As phenomenologists, we describe the experience of the
“object” only within the experiencing of the object, while simultaneously
glancing at a distance, as it were, out of the corner of one eye.26 It is only when
these putative descriptions of experience appear outside of the experiencing
altogether that they can be merely “theoretical” or constructed.
In order to reflect within the very experiencing itself, as phenomenology
does, and in order to describe the experiencing as it unfolds, we cannot ar-
bitrarily limit the way in which phenomena appear. To accomplish this non-
limitation or openness on the part of the phenomenologist, one often appeals
to phenomenological reflective attention as neutral or as disinterested in order
to stave the tide of prejudices. But what we really mean by this is not that we
move from one theme to another or that we bracket the world altogether as an
object, but that we bracket a mundane attitude toward the world.
I suggest that by this we mean that the phenomenologist must actively
dis-position him- or herself in two ways: (1) dispose oneself toward the phe-
nomena in an open disposition, and (2) disposition him- or herself from the
event, i.e., dispose of the self. The interest at stake in phenomenological dis-
interestedness, in other words, I maintain, is self-interest, the preconceptions
in question concern the pre-conceptions of the self with which one comes
to the phenomena, the self’s interest in the world that intrudes on the scene
and imposes its-self on the phenomena. What phenomenology really wants
to bracket, then, is a self-imposition so as to let the phenomena flash forth
as they give themselves; what we become dispassionate about is ourselves
through a literal dis-position of the self from the scene, and by so doing,
dispose ourselves to be struck in which ever way the phenomena give them-
selves. This is not idle or random curiosity in things that we generate from
ourselves, but an active remaining open while stepping back, a dis-position
that has a directedness because it is motivated by the self-givenness of the
AFFECTION AND ATTENTION 41
postures, is the most attentive disposition, and in this sense the most yielding,
the most dis-positioned.
Notes
1. See Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Tran-
scendental Logic, trans., Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
2001); hereafter, ACPAS. See “Translator’s Introduction,” xv–1x.
2. See ACPAS, 115, and D manuscripts entitled “Urkonstitution.”
3. Because active linguistic constitution can become sedimented in the form of passive acqui-
sitions, the prereflective sphere of experience does not necessarily preclude the linguistic,
though it can exclude the propositional.
4. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945),
p. 24; hereafter Phénoménologie.
5. See ACPAS, pp. 201, pp. 213 f., 216, 218–22, 228 f. On the Unconscious in Husserl, see
esp., Rudolf Bernet, “Unconscious Consciousness in Husserl and Freud,” ed. Donn Wel-
ton, The New Husserl. A Critical Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003),
pp. 199–219.
6. Anthony J. Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl
(Northwestern University Press, 1995).
7. See Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, pp. 244–245.
8. See Max Scheler, Formalismus in der Ethik und die Materiale Wertethik, [Gesammelte
Werke Vol. 2], ed. Maria Scheler (Bern: Francke, 1966); Scheler, Formalismus, pp. 42, 159
f, 164–66, 265; hereafter, Formalismus. See also Husserl, ACPAS, pp. 210, 214 ff.
9. See L’émotion au coeur du temps: l’auto-antécedance,“ Intellektika 36/37, March 2004.
10. Accordingly, Husserl will hesitate in interpreting what does not grip my attention as some-
thing that does not exercise an affection at all. There are sense-unities that are not yet
themselves objects, primordial associations (or “awakenings”) where there is no question
of cognitive interest. See ACPAS, pp. 167–168, 197 f., 206, 211.
11. See Dan Zahavi, “Reflection and Attention” ed. H. R. Sepp, Husserl Heute. Thesen
junger Forscher (Königshausen & Neumann, forthcoming, 2004).
12. “We are quite comfortable in characterizing such cases of unawakened affection as awak-
enings, if we characterize them as the zero-point of awakening, similar to the way in which
the arithmetician counts zero, the negation of number, among numbers” (ACPAS, p. 201).
13. On Husserl’s concept of pairing, see ACPAS, pp. 178–179.
14. Here we have a similar occurrence to what Husserl calls earlier in the Analyses a retroactive
crossing out. For example, we see a bird flapping its wings on a tree branch and move toward
it. It turns out that this spectacle is really leaves being blown by the wind. The former sense
“bird flapping” is retained (we do not forget we saw it as bird), but is crossed out such that
it is retained precisely as leaves being blown on a twig. The present perception radiates
back into the retentional past and is transformed; not deleted, but crossed out with the new
sense (see ACPAS, p. 68 ff.).
15. ACPAS, pp. 202–204, 223–230).
16. I take this term from N. Depraz, a term that has a much more dynamic sense than “retention.”
17. To illustrate this, one would need a description of the role of optimality. See my “Phe-
nomenological Concepts of Normality and Abnormality” in Man and World, 28/3 (1995):
241–260.
AFFECTION AND ATTENTION 43
18. Husserl accounts for this level of attention that I am calling “passive discernment” by
describing the case in which there is a pull proceeding from a noise that strikes me, but
only comes into relief in the “antechamber of the ego.” I may “detect” it in its particularity
even though I qua ego do not yet pay attention to it in a reflective manner. This “already
detecting,” he continues, suggests a positive tendency of an explicit turning-toward that is
not yet such an explicit turning toward (see ACPAS, pp. 214 ff.)
19. Here silence can exercise a profound affective force, making one uneasy, for example, as
John Cage has shown.
20. “The investigation into the active accomplishments of the ego, through which the forma-
tions of the genuine logos come about, operate in the medium of an attentive turning toward
and its derivatives. Turing our attention toward is, as it were, the bridge to activity, or the
bridge is the beginning or mis en scène of activity, and it is the constant way in which
consciousness is carried out for activity to progress: All genuine activity is carried out in
the scope of attentiveness” (ACPAS, p. 276).
21. While I cannot take up this issue, none of the forms of remembering or anticipation are
entirely free from motivation.
22. ACPAS, 180 f.; cf. cf. Appendix 26: (To §45) <Repetition and Essential Identity of Re-
memberings>.
23. See my “Whitehead’s ‘Theory’ of Propositions,” Process Studies, 18, 1 (Spring 1989):
19–29.
24. See Zahavi, “Reflection and Attention.”
25. “der ‘uninteressierte’ Betrachter.” See Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäschen
Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Einleitung in die
phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana VI (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), p. 178. English translation by David Carr, The Crisis of the Eu-
ropean Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: Introduction in Phenomenological
Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 174 f.).
26. See, for example, A. R. Luther, Persons in Love: A Study of Max Scheler’s Wesen und For-
men der Sympathie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), p. 14. This is particularly evident
in experiences of the emotional life, for example; we can only describe love, for example,
within the experience of loving such that to understand loving phenomenologically one
has to be in a loving relationship.
27. On a similar notion of the forgetfulness of the self as the practice of the reduction, see
Michel Henry, L’essence de la manifestation; and see my “The Problem of Forgetfulness”
in Michel Henry, Continental Philosophy Review, special edition, The Philosophy of Michel
Henry, ed. Anthony J. Steinbock, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1999), pp. 271–302.
28. See Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) GA 65 (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1989), 8, 14 ff., 396. See also Klaus Held, “Fundamental Moods
and Heidegger’s Critique of Culture,” trans., Anthony J. Steinbock in Reading Heidegger:
Commemorations, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 286–
303.
29. See Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delàde l’essence (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1974), esp. chapters II and V.
30. Scheler, Formalismus, p. 482.