Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person: Husserlian Investigations of Social Experience and the Self (Phaenomenologica, 233) 3030844625, 9783030844622

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Phaenomenologica 233

James Jardine

Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person Husserlian Investigations of Social Experience and the Self

Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person

PHAENOMENOLOGICA SERIES FOUNDED BY H. L. VAN BREDA AND PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE HUSSERL-ARCHIVES 233 Editorial Board Directors: Julia  Jansen (Husserl-Archives, Leuven,  Belgium), Stefano  Micali (Husserl Archives, Leuven,  Belgium). Members: R.  Bernet, (Husserl-Archives, Leuven,  Belgium), R.  Breeur (Husserl Archives, Leuven,  Belgium) H.  Leonardy (Centre d’études phénoménologiques, Louvain-la-Neuve,  Belgium), D.  Lories, (CEP/ISP/Collège Désiré , Louvain-la-Neuve,  Belgium), U.  Melle, (HusserlArchives, Leuven, Belgium), J. Taminiaux, (Centre d’études phénoménologiques, Louvain-la-Neuve,  Belgium), R.  Visker, (Catholic Univerisity Leuven, Leuven, Belgium) Advisory Editors R.  Bernasconi, (Memphis State University, Memphis,  USA), D.  Carr, (Emory University, Atlanta,  USA), E.  S.  Casey, (State University of New  York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, USA), R. Cobb-Stevens, (Boston College, Chestnut Hill, USA), J.  F.  Courtine, (Archives-Husserl, Paris,  France), F.  Dastur, (Université de Paris, Paris,  France), K.  Düsing, (Husserl-Archiv, Köln,  Germany), J.  Hart, (Indiana University, Bloomington, USA), K. Held, (Bergische Universität, Wuppertal, Germany), K. E. Kaehler, (Husserl-Archiv, Köln, Germany), D. Lohmar, (Husserl-Archiv, Köln, Germany), W. R. McKenna, (Miami University, Oxford, USA), J. N. Mohanty, (Temple University, Philadelphia, USA), E. W. Orth, (Universität Trier, Trier, Germany), C. Sini, (Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan,  Italy), R.  Sokolowski, (Catholic University of America, Washington,  DC, USA), B. Waldenfels, (Ruhr-UniversitätDirectors: Bochum, Germany) More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/6409

James Jardine

Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person Husserlian Investigations of Social Experience and the Self

James Jardine Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy University of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä, Finland

ISSN 0079-1350     ISSN 2215-0331 (electronic) Phaenomenologica ISBN 978-3-030-84462-2    ISBN 978-3-030-84463-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84463-9 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   10 2 The Pure Ego: Self-Consciousness, Attention, and Emotion ����������������   15 2.1 The Pure Ego and Transcendental Phenomenology��������������������������   16 2.2 Self-Affection, Time-Consciousness, and Experiential Subjectivity ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   26 2.3 The Pure Ego as Pole of Engagement (I): Spontaneity in Attention���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   32 2.4 The Pure Ego as Pole of Engagement (II): Spontaneity in Emotion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   48 2.5 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   63 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   63 3 The Distinctive Phenomenology of Empathy������������������������������������������   69 3.1 Empathy: A (Very) Brief Historical Overview���������������������������������   69 3.2 Empathy in Husserl and Stein����������������������������������������������������������   75 3.2.1 Empathy as Perceptual (or Perception-Like) Experience����������������������������������������������������������������������������   76 3.2.2 Empathy as Explication of Foreign Intentionality����������������   82 3.2.3 Theunissen on Empathy��������������������������������������������������������   85 3.3 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   88 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   89 4 Nature and Perception������������������������������������������������������������������������������   93 4.1 Regional Ontology and Constitutive Analysis����������������������������������   94 4.2 The Naturalistic and Personalistic Attitudes ������������������������������������   96 4.3 Nature as a Perceptual, Theoretical, and Scientific Theme��������������   97 4.4 Nature as Motivational Ground for Emotion and Action������������������  104 4.5 Perception and the Material Thing����������������������������������������������������  108 4.6 Animate Empathy: A Preliminary Take��������������������������������������������  113 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  118 v

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Contents

5 Animate Empathy and Intercorporeal Nature����������������������������������������  121 5.1 Animals and Things: Ontological Considerations����������������������������  121 5.2 Intersubjective Nature and Living Bodies����������������������������������������  123 5.2.1 Perception and Solipsism������������������������������������������������������  124 5.2.2 Common Nature and Intercorporeal Concordance ��������������  127 5.2.3 Reciprocity and Communication������������������������������������������  134 5.3 Animate Empathy ����������������������������������������������������������������������������  136 5.3.1 Animate Empathy and the Animal of Intuition��������������������  137 5.3.2 Animate Abnormality and the Commonality of Nature��������  141 5.3.3 Animate Empathy and Natural-Scientific Thinking ������������  143 5.4 The Animate Other and the Animate Self ����������������������������������������  146 5.4.1 The Institutive Experience of the Animate Other: Bodily Similarity and Localisation ��������������������������������������  147 5.4.2 Reciprocal Animate Empathy ����������������������������������������������  155 5.5 Summary ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  157 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  158 6 The Personal Self: A First-Personal Approach����������������������������������������  161 6.1 The Embodiment of the Person��������������������������������������������������������  162 6.1.1 Bodily Freedom and Perception�������������������������������������������  162 6.1.2 Voluntary Movement, Agentive Subjectivity, and Affection������������������������������������������������������������������������  166 6.1.3 Freedom as Bodily, Personal, and Pure��������������������������������  168 6.2 From Personal Agency to Personal Selfhood������������������������������������  174 6.2.1 Freedom and Personal Selfhood ������������������������������������������  174 6.2.2 Person, Motivation, and Surrounding World������������������������  178 6.3 Position-Taking, Habituality, and Self-Acquaintance: Husserl and Moran����������������������������������������������������������������������������  183 6.3.1 Convictions and Self-Awareness������������������������������������������  184 6.3.2 Detectivism, Deliberation, and Habituality��������������������������  188 6.3.3 Personal Depth, Memory, and Self-Consciousness��������������  194 6.4 Concluding Remarks������������������������������������������������������������������������  200 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  201 7 Interpersonal Empathy and Levels of Personal Self-constitution ��������  205 7.1 Personal Self-constitution: Life, Style, and Narrative����������������������  206 7.1.1 The Pure Ego, the Personal Ego, and Self-apprehension����������������������������������������������������������  206 7.1.2 Personal Style and Self-consciousness: Association, Induction, and Envisaging����������������������������������������������������  213 7.1.3 Narrative Self-understanding������������������������������������������������  220 7.1.4 Summary ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  223 7.2 The Person as Interpersonal��������������������������������������������������������������  224 7.2.1 Self-understanding and Interpersonal Relations ������������������  224 7.2.2 Personal Agency and the Interpersonal Nexus����������������������  232 7.2.3 Summary ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  241

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7.3 Interpersonal Empathy as Recognition ��������������������������������������������  241 7.3.1 Honneth on Social Visibility and Recognition����������������������  242 7.3.2 Empathy as Elementary Recognition������������������������������������  249 7.3.3 Summary ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  259 7.4 Interpersonal Empathy as Personal Understanding��������������������������  261 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  266 8 Conclusion��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  273 Bibliography ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  277 Author Index����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  291 Subject Index����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  293

About the Author

James  Jardine  is a Postdoctoral Researcher  in Philosophy at the University of Jyväsyklä, Finland. His research focuses on issues of selfhood, intersubjectivity, and emotion from a phenomenological perspective that also seeks to address themes and questions from critical theory, social philosophy, and philosophy of mind. In addition to authoring journal articles and book chapters on such topics, he is the co-­ editor of Perception and the Inhuman Gaze (2020) with Anya Daly, Fred Cummins, and Dermot Moran.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

It is an unfortunate irony that there still persists in some intellectual circles the distant impression that phenomenological philosophy is exclusively grounded upon introspective descriptions, restricted in their scope to an inner domain conceived of as world-detached and asocial.1 For even a cursory glance at recent phenomenological work should suffice to unsettle those who have fallen victim to the time-worn prejudice that phenomenological research remains stubbornly focused on the subjective interiority of the individual psyche. Admittedly, such an appraisal could have been easily refuted even in the early years of the phenomenological movement. Not only does it display a grave misunderstanding of the abiding philosophical aims and methods of phenomenological philosophy. It is also entirely irreconcilable with the searching investigations of sociality found in Scheler’s Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass (1913), Stein’s Zum Problem der Einfühlung (1917), Walther’s Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften (1923), Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927), Schütz’s Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (1932), and Husserl’s Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (1936)—to mention just a few seminal contributions from German phenomenologists pre-dating the Second World War. This notwithstanding, it would be fair to say that, in the phenomenological output from the opening decades of the twenty-first century, a degree of interest and thematic centrality has been devoted to questions of intersubjectivity, communality, and social experience which is very likely unparalleled in the tradition’s history. Not only have foundational questions concerning the transcendental function of intersubjectivity, as well the issues of generativity and the constitutive depth of the life-world,

 Cerbone (2012) offers an excellent response to the depiction of phenomenology as an introspective inquiry. 1

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Jardine, Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person, Phaenomenologica 233, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84463-9_1

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1 Introduction

increasingly become cornerstones for phenomenological investigation.2 There has also been a renewed focus on specifically collective or communal modes of intentional experience, and on the intimate relationship between singular and plural subjects that such experiences manifest.3 Furthermore, phenomenologists have productively inquired into the interpersonal and generative contexts presupposed by various concrete features of embodied existence in the lifeworld, from gender and racial identities to personhood or human life per se. In some cases, this has facilitated critical examinations of a number of contemporary societal, institutional, and political realities that develop phenomenologically rooted insights into various ways in which human subjectivity can be enabled, supported, and injured by intersubjective relationships.4 A further theme that has obtained much recent phenomenological interest—and that is, I think, pertinent to any philosophical investigation of intersubjectivity and sociality—concerns the manner in which other people are experienced within concrete embodied encounters in the human world. Prompted in part by a broader scientific, philosophical, cultural, and political rejuvenation of interest in the topic, the twenty-first century has seen the detailed investigations of empathy (Einfühlung) developed in the first decades of the phenomenological movement being increasingly recognised as resources containing a number of underexplored phenomenological insights. Important work has been done to elaborate and develop the accounts found in the classical phenomenological literature, as well as to argue for their pertinence for contemporary research into empathy. On the whole, the classical and contemporary phenomenological investigations understand empathy to be a distinctive kind of intentional act wherein an experiencing subject becomes intuitively acquainted with the experiential life of another. On this basis, phenomenologists have worked to clarify whether such an experience of foreign mindedness is operative already in our direct perception of other human beings. They have also considered whether certain kinds of empathy, in contrast to such direct intelligibility, require us to more imaginatively place ourselves in the other person’s vantage point, so as to understand the other’s distinctive perspective and motivational context.  Particularly important contributions to the contemporary discussion concerning the transcendental dimensions of intersubjectivity include: Zahavi (2001), Donohoe (2004), Rodemeyer (2006), de Warren (2009, Chapter 7), Taipale (2014a, b, 2018), Staiti (2014, pp. 191–206), Bower (2015), and Shum (2014). Notable recent works on the issues of life-world and generativity include: Held (1991, 2003), Steinbock (1995), Zahavi (2001, pp. 98–104), Waldenfels (1997), Taipale (2014a, b, pp. 99ff.), and Miettinen (2020). 3  In this regard see: Chelstrom (2012), Szanto and Moran (2016), Szanto (2014, 2016, 2020), Zahavi (2014, pp. 241–250, 2021), León and Zahavi (2016), Caminada (2019a, b). 4  For phenomenological analyses of the dependence of personhood on sociality, see: Hart (1992), Zahavi (2014), Steinbock (2014), and Jacobs (2016). Phenomenological accounts of sexuality, gender, and racial identity are found in Young (1990), Heinämaa (2003, 2012), and Alcoff (2006). For phenomenologically informed critiques of racial hierarchisation and solitary confinement, see Gordon (1995), Yancy (2017), and Guenther (2013). Foundational accounts of political phenomenology are developed in Depraz (1995), Held (2012), Loidolt (2018), and Miettinen (2020). Essays that intersect with a number of these issues can be found in Lee (2014) and Dolezal and Petherbridge (2017). 2

1 Introduction

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In tandem with these core questions, phenomenologists have investigated the role that bodily self-awareness, typification, pragmatic context, group membership, and affection play in empathetic experience and understanding.5 The presence of such extensive investigations of sociality, intersubjectivity, and other-experience has not, however, been indicative of a lack of interest in self-­ consciousness and subjectivity in twenty-first century phenomenological scholarship. On the contrary, research into the self has significantly advanced in recent years, spurred by efforts to draw phenomenologically grounded distinctions between different senses and dimensions of selfhood, as well as to examine their interrelations. Moreover, applying the core phenomenological insight that subjectivity cannot be investigated as a discrete entity, but only comes to light in its (self-transcending) intentional experience and engagement, various aspects of the self have been productively explicated via an examination of such phenomena as critical stance-­taking, attention, emotion, habit, mutual recognition, and phenomenal consciousness.6 Despite the significant advances made by phenomenological research into empathy and the self in recent years, the prospect of integrating these two fields of inquiry is one that has barely been pursued. Whereas phenomenological work on empathy has greatly clarified its distinctive intentionality, its manners of givenness, and its preconditions and limits, the specific shapes of (foreign) selfhood that come to manifestation in empathetic experience – as well as the correlation of such shapes with specific levels or aspects of empathy – is a terrain largely unexplored in the recent discussions. Similarly, while it is well understood that various dimensions of selfhood constitutively intertwine with intersubjectivity and world, the specific role that empathy plays for human subjectivity and self-consciousness remains a somewhat obscure issue. To be sure, there are good reasons to be wary of hastily integrating these two themes. An account of empathy that simply grafts self-experience onto the other would be devoid of phenomenological credence, as would an account of the self that draws exclusively from the empathetic givenness of others. But the conviction guiding this book is that this risk is best regarded as productively constraining – rather than altogether inhibiting – exploration of these issues as reciprocally illuminating and interconnected. Moreover, it is clear that if we are to bring research into empathy and the self into fruitful dialogue, full account must be taken of the pervasive and yet heterogeneous role that embodiment plays in both self-­ experience and empathy. Once it is appreciated that self-manifestation and the recognition of others is everywhere a bodily affair, it will come as no surprise that any

5  For important recent phenomenological accounts of empathy, see: Thompson (2001), Moran (2004), Zahavi (2010, 2012, 2014), Zahavi and Overgaard (2012), Dullstein (2013), Taipale (2015a, b), Ratcliffe (2017), Gallagher (2017), Summa (2017), Heinämaa (2019), Breyer (2020), as well as additional citations offered in the third, fifth, and seventh chapters. 6  Excellent phenomenological discussions of selfhood from the last three decades can be found in: Hart (1992), Carr (1999), Zahavi (2005, 2014, 2020), Drummond (2006, 2021), Heinämaa (2007, 2020), de Warren (2009), Jacobs (2010a, b, 2014, 2016, 2021), Rinofner-Kreidl (2011), Moran (2011), and Bernet (2013). See also the references provided in the second, sixth, and seventh chapters.

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1 Introduction

distinctions that bring into relief both self-understanding and the understanding of others will only reveal themselves once we are equipped with a nuanced account of bodily subjectivity. The more concrete contribution of this book resides in seeking to reciprocally clarify these issues on the basis of an engagement with the texts which Husserl composed for the ultimately abandoned project of Ideen II—texts which I regard as offering rich, if open-ended, reflections on empathy, embodiment, and the self, as well as their interrelations. In so doing, I draw upon a forthcoming volume of Husserliana which, for the first time, presents the original manuscripts written by Husserl for the project of Ideen II (Hua IV/V), a now-finished editorial task which was carefully pursued for several years by Dirk Fonfara at the Husserl-Archiv in Köln. The appearance of this volume will constitute an important event for both Husserl scholarship and phenomenological philosophy more generally, in that it exhibits with greater clarity the inner depth and complexity of a text which is vital in understanding the development of phenomenology, from Husserl onwards. While the version of Ideen II posthumously published in 1952 (Hua IV) could aptly be described as a messy masterpiece—in which we find Husserl penetratingly exploring a whole host of different directions for phenomenological inquiry, with an evidently productive (if sometimes bewildering) disregard for systematicity, while at the same time anticipating and sometimes going beyond the more radical ideas of his phenomenological successors7—this description applies all the more for the new edition.8 Mohanty has correctly observed that the importance of Ideen II demands a greater degree of scholarly attention than the text has yet received (Mohanty 2011, p. 60), and this may begin to change with the emergence of the new edition.9 Not only do these freshly excavated texts frequently shed further light on, and significantly complicate, many of the lines of thought familiar from Hua IV. They also present Husserl’s writings free from all editorial elaboration, allowing scholars to engage with his texts without any anxieties regarding their origins, and thereby quashing a worry that has often deterred serious studies of Hua IV—a text wellknown to have been shaped by the editorial work of Stein and Landgrebe.10 Most 7  Notably, both Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger had – years before their most significant contributions to phenomenological philosophy  – studied partial drafts of Ideen II in unpublished form (Bernet 2013, pp. 44–45). 8  That said, I believe that on many issues we find a clearer line of argument in Husserl’s original manuscripts than we do in Hua IV. This holds, for instance, with regard to his account of the constitution of the spiritual world, his analysis of nature, and his reflections of the ego. 9  This is not to say that there has been no good scholarly work on Ideen II. In addition to the excellent study of this text in Mohanty (2011), see the essays collected in Nenon and Embree (1996). While the new edition of Ideen II has not yet been extensively examined in the literature, the great exception to this is Caminada (2019a), which offers a wide-ranging investigation of Hua IV/V that also builds upon Husserl’s analyses to develop a phenomenological account of social ontology and communal intentionality. I hope that my focus on empathy and the self in Hua IV/V can serve to compliment Caminada’s important study. 10  For the history of Ideen II, see the editors introductions contributed by Biemel and Fonfara to the two editions respectively (Biemel 1952; Fonfara Forthcoming).

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important for my purposes here, the new edition offers a richer picture of Husserl’s reflections on empathy and, in particular, selfhood than could be extracted from the text published in 1952. Before outlining the specific investigations of empathy and the self progressively pursued in this book’s successive chapters, it will be necessary to briefly spell out some of the more central and original claims developed across this study as a whole. To begin with, this book presents a detailed reappraisal of the pure ego, bodily subjectivity, and the person, and clarifies the varieties of self-awareness and subjective engagement that are inseparable from these distinguishable but interrelated dimensions of the self. It argues that the formal ipseity and engagement characteristic of Husserl’s account of the pure ego is not only adequately applicable to epistemically interested attention; rather, it also offers a valuable framework for efforts to articulate the involvement of the experiencing subject within the more robustly bodily intentionalities of the emotional and practical spheres. The account of the personal self developed in this book, on the other hand, goes beyond the existing research on this topic by explicating the pre-reflective bases for thematic and reflective self-­ understanding. In particular, it argues that the experiencing subject enjoys a degree of pre-reflective acquaintance with its own habitual depth, and clarifies how this unthematic and minimally personal self-consciousness emerges in the experience of memorially assuming an earlier formed stance. Another development advanced by this book is a proposed distinction between two distinct varieties of social experience, which I term animate and interpersonal empathy respectively. As I develop the concept here, animate empathy points us towards the experience of foreign animality that invariantly characterises our experience of other human beings and of non-human animals alike – even as it adopts significantly different styles in the two cases. Drawing upon Husserl’s analyses of bodily subjectivity and the intersubjective constitution of an intuitively given nature, I motivate and explore in detail the claim that animate empathy involves the broadly perceptual givenness of another embodied subject as experientially engaged in a common perceptual world. Interpersonal empathy, which I regard as founded upon animate empathy, refers by contrast to the fully concrete variety of empathy at play when we advert to another human person within a concrete lifeworldly encounter. As such, interpersonal empathy is complexly intertwined with affectivity and other interpersonal attitudes and styles of engagement. As the basic recognition of another person, interpersonal empathy apprehends, albeit in a highly typified manner, the other’s expressive engagement as embedded in distinctively personal motivational contexts. But it can also take the form of a more discerning understanding of the other person in their personally specific character and life-history. Let me now outline more concretely the themes which will be addressed in the chapters that follow. The second chapter begins by addressing a theme with which any exploration of Husserl’s understanding of the self must begin, namely his account of the pure ego. I begin by highlighting the close connection between the pure ego and Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, with its core procedures of eidetic reduction, epoché, and transcendental-phenomenological reduction. In so doing I also offer a preliminary account of the distinction between the pure and the

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1 Introduction

personal ego, emphasising that neither of these senses of the self should be simply identified with transcendental subjectivity. I then turn to explicate the essential characteristics appealed to within Husserl’s account of the pure ego and the phenomenological analyses undergirding his claims. I argue that the highly minimal subject of experience that comes into view through Husserl’s analyses of self-affection and inner time-consciousness represents a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the presence of a formal and characterless ego within intentional consciousness. In addition to passively living through every experience within a temporal horizon, the experiencing subject manifests a properly egological shape only insofar as it is also capable of engaging within its intentional lived-experiences. The chapter explores in detail what such egoic engagement involves through detailed analyses of attention and emotive valuing, arguing that the minimal agency of the pure ego can be most adequately drawn out when considered in its concrete temporal unfolding, and as everywhere suffused with and tethered to affection. In the third chapter, the focus turns to empathy. I begin by offering a selective overview of the classical and more recent philosophical discussions of empathy, with the aim of highlighting the distinctive conception of empathy operative in Ideen II. I then elaborate a structural account of empathy that distinguishes between two distinct levels of empathetic intentionality, arguing that while a basic mode of empathy is closely aligned with perception, a further variety of empathy is more akin to imagination. Since I regard Husserl’s reflections on empathy from this period to be largely in agreement, and to an extent in reciprocal dialogue, with the analyses of empathy developed by Stein in Zum Problem der Einfühlung—a book that began life as a doctoral dissertation supervised and highly praised by Husserl, who subsequently recruited Stein to assist him with the preparation of Ideen II—I freely draw upon both Husserl and Stein’s analyses of social experience. I then contrast the core account of empathy developed in the chapter with Theunnisen’s influential interpretation of Husserl’s conception of empathy, before outlining how the account of empathy developed in succeeding chapters goes beyond a structural account, complementing the distinction between perception-like and imagination-­ like empathy with an intersecting distinction between animate and interpersonal empathy. The fourth chapter lays the groundwork for my later discussion of animate empathy, by explicating Husserl’s understanding of nature as a domain of perceptible materiality. I first show that Husserl locates nature in the most primordial sense in the things of perception—understood as a layer of the experienced world that underlies and is articulated by emotive, practical, and judicative acts—before considering more closely the phenomenological character of such perceived materiality and the embodied subject for whom it is there. In the fifth chapter, I then develop Husserl’s thought that not only one’s own but also other perceiving bodies are implicated in the perception of material nature. I first attempt to clarify Husserl’s claim that perceptual experience contains an implicit reference to animate others. Building upon this, I then spell out the sense in which such animate others are perceptually given as beings who are both materially immersed in the perceptual world and fellow subjects of it. I go on to suggest that

1 Introduction

7

what these strands of thought lead us towards is a conception of animate empathy that comprises our perceptually-based understanding of animals, whether human or non-human, as bodily beings perceptually sensitive to a common world, before fleshing out this thought by considering the roles of bodily self-awareness, the distinction between normality and abnormality, and mutual recognition, in our experience of animate others and of the nature they co-perceive. The sixth chapter breaks thematically with the previous chapter, in that it temporarily puts empathy aside and returns to an investigation of the self. Building upon the analyses of the pure ego offered in the second chapter, it examines personal subjectivity within an exclusively first-personal framework. I begin by considering Husserl’s phenomenological account of practical engagement, tracing out the forms of self-awareness and egoic involvement that he finds implicated in voluntary movement and action. I then explore the relationship between such agency and the phenomenological account Husserl develops of personal selfhood, contrasting Husserl’s take on this matter with Korsgaard and Frankfurt. Finally, I consider the form of self-awareness that Husserl locates in the formation and habitual acceptance of abiding attitudes, arguing that Husserl anticipates the recent efforts of Moran and Finkelstein to untie our conception of personal self-acquaintance from the dual misconceptions of ‘detectivism’ and ‘constitutivism.’ Furthermore, the chapter shows that Husserl’s reflections go further than recent authors in offering an account of the distinctive variety of self-consciousness that can accompany the habitual functioning of enduring stances or opinions. In so doing, it argues that Husserl doesn’t rigidly separate pre-reflective and personal self-consciousness; and, moreover, that his account of the traces of the latter in the former allow us to see how the personal self can be pre-reflectively alive in its emotions, beliefs, and actions. Whereas the sixth chapter is concerned with offering a solely first-personal account of personal selfhood, the seventh chapter considers together interpersonal empathy and the deeply intersubjective being of the person. I begin by developing Husserl’s remarks regarding personal self-constitution, distinguishing between a variety of different levels and forms this can take, and offering a reappraisal of the relationship between the pure and the personal ego. I then systematically develop Husserl’s claim that the person necessarily exists within a nexus of other persons, spelling out the roles of mutual recognition and the appropriation of others’ attitudes in both pre-reflective personal agency and reflective, narrative-embedded, personal self-understanding. In the third section of the chapter, I address the sense in which, as persons, we  are empathetically acquainted with other personal selves, arguing that such interpersonal empathy both rests upon and transgresses the animate empathy discussed in the fifth chapter. In this regard, I first suggest that a minimal form of interpersonal empathy can be equated with what Honneth has recently called ‘elementary recognition,’ where this designates a perception-like and attentive recognition of another (embodied) personal self, one which grounds and is explicated by concretely emotive and practical forms of interpersonal recognition. I then argue that interpersonal empathy can go beyond such recognition, and aim at a deeper understanding of the ‘who’ of the other’s actions, emotions, and beliefs—of the personal self who ‘lives’ in them—an accomplishment which requires a

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sensitivity to the embeddedness of the person’s acts in her personal history. Accordingly, I suggest that the distinction between perception-like and imagination-­ like empathy, already introduced in the third chapter, requires complementation by the different shades found in animate empathy, interpersonal recognition, and interpersonal understanding. Finally, I end with a concluding chapter that ties together a number of the overarching arguments developed across the book. Before directing our attention to the pure ego in the next chapter, let me first acknowledge that the production of this book was far from a purely egological affair. This study began its life as a doctoral dissertation, the researching and writing of which stretched over a four-year period (2012–2016) based primarily at the Center for Subjectivity Research in the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Copenhagen. I doubt that anywhere else could have provided a better habitat for my work, and the thoughts which I develop here have been ineluctably embedded in the blend of, amongst many other virtuous traits, openness and resistance to traditional boundaries, fascination with sociality and selfhood, and high scholarly standards, distinctive of the CFS. First and foremost, my doctoral research benefited immensely from the supervision of Dan Zahavi, who has been especially patient and generous in providing me with insightful discussion, critique, and encouragement over the years, and has immeasurably influenced my developing ideas. In addition, I owe great thanks to Arne Grøn, whose secondary supervision of my dissertation allowed me to greatly benefit from rewarding conversations on the relationship between empathy and recognition. More generally, many other colleagues who participated in the life of the CFS provided crucial conditions of possibility for the completion of this project, both through friendship and support and by engaging attentively with my evolving research. While there are simply too many people to mention here, colleagues to whom I owe a particular debt of gratitude for the friendly, critical, and productive scrutiny to which they subjected numerous drafts, talks, and ideas include Adam Farley, Zhida Luo, Tatjana Noemi Tömmel, Adrian Alsmith, Simon Høffding, Nivedita Gangopadhyay, Rasmus Thybo Jensen, Søren Overgaard, Alessandro Salice, Thomas Szanto, Joel Krueger, Marek Pokropski, Joseph Neisser, Felipe León, Yuko Ishihara, Carina Staal, Joona Taipale, John Michael and Glenda Satne. I also owe great thanks to Merete Lynnerup for her colossal support and guidance during my doctoral years. I would furthermore like to express warm gratitude to the VELUX FONDEN, which provided funding for my PhD Fellowship within the framework of the “Empathy and Interpersonal Understanding” project led by Dan Zahavi, and to the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen for providing support and an excellent working environment. I am also indebted to Axel Honneth, my faculty sponsor for a research stay at Columbia University in 2013, who kindly agreed to read and offer feedback on my work and permitted me to attend his weekly seminar, both of which provided fertile grounds for philosophical reflection. I owe great thanks too to John Drummond and David Carr, who kindly invited me to attend their seminars and hold personal meetings during my stay in New York, and have decisively influenced my thinking. I also greatly benefitted from a research visit at the University of Vienna in 2016, and

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9

would like to thank Matthew Ratcliffe for inviting me the hugely engaging research meetings he led during my stay. Finally, I am hugely grateful to Dirk Fonfara and Dieter Lohmar at the Husserl-Archiv in Köln, who welcomed me for a research visit in 2012 and kindly granted me access to the developing drafts of Hua IV/V. Furthermore, I owe great thanks to the examiners of my doctoral dissertation – Nicolas de Warren, Tanja Staehler, and Søren Overgaard – for taking time to carefully engage with my thesis and for their hugely rewarding critical commentaries. In more recent years, further work in revising the book and expanding its arguments has been undertaken at the UCD School of Philosophy at University College Dublin and the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväsyklä. I have benefited hugely from discussing central aspects of the book’s arguments with then-UCD colleagues, including Anya Daly, Anna Bortolan, Elisa Magrì, and Danielle Petherbridge. Dermot Moran is owed a special thanks, both for his critical insights into my research, and for mentoring my Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCD. I would like to thank the Irish Research Council for supporting research crucial to my revisions, through granting a One-Year Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship  – entitled “The Constitution of Personal Identity: Self-­ Consciousness, Agency, and Mutual Recognition” – that I undertook in 2017 and 2018. During recent years at the University of Jyväskylä, my work in developing this book has benefitted immeasurably from detailed feedback and guidance from Fredrik Westerlund, Mirja Hartimo, Risto Tiihonen, as well as from numerous participants at the Phenomenology Seminar. Sara Heinämaa in particular has offered crucial discussions and feedback throughout the writing process. My recent work in expanding the book at JYU has been supported by a role as Postdoctoral Researcher within the research project “Marginalization and Experience: Phenomenological Analyses of Normality and Abnormality,” funded by the Academy of Finland and led by Sara Heinämaa. I am warmly grateful to both the Academy of Finland and the University of Jyväskylä for supporting my research. Furthermore, I am hugely grateful to the Phaenomenologica Editors – Stefano Micali, Valeria Bizzari, and above all Julia Jansen – for the feedback, guidance, and patience they have offered me at every stage. I am also indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments on the manuscript, which prompted revisions that I believe have led to a significantly improved work. Crucial support has also been provided by staff at Springer, including Anita Rachmat and Rahul Sharma. I would like to thank Julia Jansen once more, in her capacity as Director of the Husserl-Archives at KU Leuven, for kindly granting me permission to refer to one of Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts. I owe great thanks to the constant support and encouragement that friends and family have provided me during the writing of this book. And a special thanks is owed to Ida, for her patience and enthusiasm even when finishing the book has put all else on hold. Finally, I would like to extend my gratitude to Springer, Routledge, and Metodo for permitting me to reuse, in revised and rewritten form, material in the third and seventh chapters that I have previously published elsewhere. The relevant publications are as follows:

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Jardine, J. (2015). “Stein and Honneth on empathy and emotional recognition,” Human Studies 38: 567–589. Jardine, J. (2017). “Elementary Recognition and Empathy: A Husserlian Account,” Metodo 5(1): 143–170. Jardine, J., & Szanto, T. (2017). “Empathy in the Phenomenological Tradition,” in: Heidi Maibom (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 86–97.

References Alcoff, L. (2006). Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bernet, R. (2013). “The body as a ‘legitimate naturalization of consciousness,’” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 72 (1): 43-65. Biemel, M. (1952). “Einleitung des Herausgebers,” in: Edmund Husserl (auth.), Marly Biemel (ed.), Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen Zur Konstitution. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. xiii–xx. Bower, M. (2015). “Developing open intersubjectivity: On the interpersonal shaping of experience,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14: 455-474. Breyer, T. (2020). “Self-Affection and Perspective-Taking: The Role of Phantasmatic and Imaginatory Consciousness for Empathy,” Topoi 39: 803-809. Caminada, E. (2019a). Vom Gemeingeist zum Habitus: Husserls Ideen II.  Sozialphilosophische Implikationen der Phänomenologie. Phaenomenologica, vol. 225. Cham: Springer. Caminada, E. (2019b). “Husserl on the Common Mind,” in: Frode Kjosavik, Christian Beyer, & Christel Fricke (eds.), Husserl’s Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity: Historical Interpretations and Contemporary Applications. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 263-279. Carr. D. (1999). The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cerbone, D. R. (2012). “Phenomenological Method: Reflection, Introspection, and Skepticism,” in: Dan Zahavi (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 7-24. Chelstrom, E.  S. (2012). Social Phenomenology: Husserl, Intersubjectivity, and Collective Intentionality. Lexington Books. de Warren, N. (2009). Husserl and the promise of time: Subjectivity in transcendental phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Depraz, N. (1995). “Phenomenological reduction and the political,” Husserl Studies 12(1): 1-17. Dolezal, L., & Petherbridge, D. (eds.) (2017). Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters. Albany, NY: State University of New York. Donohoe, J. (2004). Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity: From Static to Genetic Phenomenology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Drummond, J. J. (2006). “The case(s) of (self-)awareness,” in: Uriah Kriegel & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Self-representational approaches to consciousness. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 199-220. Drummond, J. J. (2021). “Self-identity and personal identity,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 20: 235-247. Dullstein, M. (2013). “Direct perception and simulation: Stein’s account of empathy,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4(2): 333–350. Fonfara, D. (Forthcoming). “Einleitung des Herausgebers,” in: D. Fonfara (ed.), E. Husserl (auth.), Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch:

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Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution und Wissenscahftstheorie. Cham: Springer, pp. xxiii–xxx. Gallagher, S. (2017). “Empathy and theories of direct perception,” in: Heidi Maibom (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 158-168. Gordon, L. (1995). Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. London & New York: Routledge. Guenther, L. (2013). Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives. Mineappolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hart, J.  G. (1992). The Person and the Common Life. Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics. Phaenomenologica, vol. 126. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Heinämaa, S. (2003). Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir. Lanham, NY & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Heinämaa, S. (2007). “Selfhood, consciousness, and embodiment: A Husserlian approach,” in: Sara Heinämaa, Vili Lähteenmäki, & Pauliina Remes (eds.), Consciousness: From perception to reflection in the history of philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 311-328. Heinämaa, S. (2012). “Sex, Gender, and Embodiment,” in: Dan Zahavi (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 216-242. Heinämaa, S. (2019). “Two Ways of Understanding Persons: A Husserlian Distinction,” Phenomenology and Mind, 15:92–102. Heinämaa, S. (2020). “Values of love: two forms of infinity characteristic of human persons,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19:431–450. Held, K. (2003) “Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Life-World,” transl. L. Rodemeyer, in: Donn Welton (ed.), The New Husserl: A Critical Reader. Bloomington, IA & Indianapolis, IA: Indiana University Press, pp.  32–62. [Original: Held. K. (1986). “Einleitung,” in: Edmund Husserl: Die Phänomenologie der Lebenswelt, Ausgewählte Tetxe. Stuttgart: Philip Reclam, I: 5–53.] Held, K. (1991). “Heimwelt, Fremdwelt, die eine Welt,” Phänomenologische Forschungen 24/25: 305–337. Held, K. (2012). “Toward a Phenomenology of the Political World,” in: Dan Zahavi (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 442–459. Jacobs, H. (2010a). “I Am Awake: Husserlian reflections on wakefulness and attention,” Alter. Revue de Phénoménologie, 18: 183–201. Jacobs. H. (2010b). “Towards a Phenomenology of Personal Identity,” in: Carlo Ierna, Hanne Jacobs, & Filip Mattens (eds.), Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences: Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 333–361. Jacobs, H. (2014). “Transcendental Subjectivity and the Human Being,” in: Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo, & Timo Miettinen (eds.), Phenomenology and the Transcendental. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 87–105. Jacobs, H. (2016). “Socialization, Reflection, and Personhood,” in: Harald A. Wiltsche & Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl (eds.), Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Methods and Perspectives. Proceedings of the 37th International Wittgenstein Symposium. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 323–336. Jacobs, H. (2021). “Husserl, the active self, and commitment,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 20: 281–298. Lee, E. (ed.) (2014). Living Alterity: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race. Albay, NY: State University of New York Press. León, F., & Zahavi, D. (2016). “Phenomenology of experiential sharing: The contribution of Schutz and Walther,” in: Alessandro Salice, & Hans Bernhard Schmid (eds.), The Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality: History, Concepts, Problems. Cham: Springer, pp. 219–234. Loidolt, S. (2018). Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity. London & New York: Routledge. Miettinen, T. (2020). Husserl and the Idea of Europe. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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Mohanty, J. N. (2011). Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years. 1916-1938. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Moran, D. (2004). “The Problem of Empathy: Lipps, Scheler, Husserl, and Stein,” in: Thomas A. F. Kelly & Philipp W. Rosemann (eds.), Amor amicitiae: On the Love that is Friendship. Essays in Medieval Thought and in Honor of the Rev. Professor James McEvoy. Leuven: Peeters, pp. 269–312. Moran, D. (2011). “Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Habituality and Habitus,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42(1): 53–77. Nenon, T. & Embree, L (eds.) (1996). Issues in Ideas II. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Ratcliffe, M. (2017). “Empathy Without Simulation,” in: Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs, & Luca Vanzago (eds.), Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology. New York: Routledge, pp. 199–220. Rinofner-Kreidl, S. (2011). “Motive, Gründe und Entscheidungen in Husserls intentionaler Handlungstheorie,” in: Verena Mayer, Christopher Erhard, & Marisa Scherini (eds.), Die Aktualität Husserls. Freiburg & Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, pp. 232–277. Rodemeyer, L. M. (2006). Intersubjective Temporality: It’s About Time. Phaenomenologica, vol. 176. Dordrecht: Springer. Shum, P. (2014). “Avoiding Circularities on the Empathic Path to Transcendental Intersubjectivity,” Topoi 33(1): 1–14. Staiti, A. (2014). Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Spirit, and Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinbock, A. J. (1995). Home and beyond. Generative phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Steinbock, A. J. (2014). Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Summa, M. (2017). “Empathy and Anti-Empathy: Which are the Problems?” in: Elisa Magrí & Dermot Moran (eds.), Empathy, Sociality, and Personhood: Essays on Edith Stein’s Phenomenological Investigations. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 94. Cham: Springer, pp. 87–105. Szanto, T. (2014). “How to share a mind: Reconsidering the group mind thesis,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13:99–120. Szanto, T. (2016). “Husserl on collective intentionality,” in: Alessandro Salice & Hans Bernhard Schmid (eds.), The Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality: History, Concepts, Problems. Cham: Springer, pp. 145–172. Szanto, T. (2020). “In hate we trust: The collectivization and habitualization of hatred,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19: 453–480. Szanto, T. and Moran, D. (2016). Discovering the ‘We’: The Phenomenology of Sociality. London & New York: Routledge. Taipale, J. (2014a). Phenomenology and Embodiment: Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Taipale, J. (2014b) “Similarity and asymmetry: Husserl and the transcendental foundations of empathy,” Phänomenologische Forschungen 2014 141–154. Taipale, J. (2015a). “Beyond Cartesianism: Body-perception and the immediacy of empathy,” Continental Philosophy Review 48(2): 161–178. Taipale, J. (2015b). “From types to tokens: Empathy and typification,” in: Thomas Szanto & Dermot Moran (eds.), Phenomenology of sociality: Discovering the ‘we’. London & New York: Routledge. Taipale, J. (2018). “Anonymity of the ‘Anyone.’ The Associative Depths of Open Intersubjectivity,” in: Frode Kjosavik, Christian Beyer, & Christel Fricke (eds.), Husserl’s Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity: Historical Interpretations and Contemporary Applications. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 193–209. Thompson, E. (2001). “Empathy and Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8(5–7): 1–32.

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Waldenfels, B. (1997). “Homeworld and alienworld,” in: Ernst Wolfgang Orth & Chan-Fai Cheung (eds.), Phenomenology of Interculturality and the Lifeworld, Freiburg/Munich: Karl Aber. Yancy, G. (2017). Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. Second Edition. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield. [First Edition: 2008.] Young, I. M. (1990). Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Zahavi, D. (2001). Husserl and transcendental intersubjectivity. A response to the linguistic-­ pragmatic critique. Transl. E.  A. Behnke. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. [Original: Zahavi, D. (1996). Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik. Phaenomenologica, vol. 135. Dordrecht: Kluwer.] Zahavi, D. (2020). Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation. A New Edition. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [First Edition: 1999.] Zahavi, D. (2005). Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press. Zahavi, D. (2010). ‘Empathy, embodiment and interpersonal understanding: From Lipps to Schutz.’ Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53(3), pp. 286–306. Zahavi, D. (2012). “Empathy and Mirroring: Husserl and Gallese,” in: Roland Breeur and Ullrich Melle (eds.), Life, Subjectivity and Art: Essays in Honor of Rudolf Bernet. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 217–254. Zahavi, D. (2014). Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zahavi, D. (2021). “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood,” Journal of Social Ontology 7(1): 1–20. Zahavi, D., & Overgaard, S. (2012). “Empathy without isomorphism: A phenomenological account,” in: Jean Decety (ed.), Empathy: from bench to bedside. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, pp. 3–20.

Chapter 2

The Pure Ego: Self-Consciousness, Attention, and Emotion

The aim of this chapter will be to reconsider a central aspect of Husserl’s analysis of the experiencing subject that many subsequent phenomenologists have regarded as unfounded: namely, his claim that a non-mundane ego-structure can be ascertained as pervading the life of consciousness as it is thematised in phenomenological reflection. Drawing not only upon Husserl’s best known presentation of this view in Ideen I, but also the critical edition of Ideen II, as well as Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins and the recently published Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, I will argue that Husserl’s phenomenological account of the pure ego is supported and further articulated by the results of his concrete analyses of time-consciousness, attentive engagement, and emotional valuing.1 Beginning with the pure ego will not only enable us to make explicit the methodological context of Husserl’s analysis of empathy and the self. Getting a clear grip on the presence of the pure ego within conscious experience – and its intimate relationship to self-consciousness – will also allow us, in the chapters that follow, to elucidate the variety of foreign subjectivity manifest in various forms of empathy, as well as to ultimately appreciate the specificity of the personal self.

1  When referring to Husserl I typically provide only the pagination for the relevant Husserliana volume, with the exceptions Logische Untersuchungen, Ideen I, and Formale und Transzendentale Logic, where pagination in the English translation is subsequently provided. In cases where I refer to Hua IV/V specifically, I follow with both a reference to similar passages in Hua IV or Hua V (where available) and the (known or estimated) year(s) in which Husserl’s original manuscript was written (in square brackets). In contexts where the passages in Hua IV or Hua V are identical or to or only slightly different from the passages cited in Hua IV/V, these immediately follow the reference to Hua IV/V (in the format, e.g., Hua IV/V 617/Hua V 145 [1930]). When, on the other hand, the corresponding passages from Hua IV or Hua V differ more substantially from the passage cited in Hua IV/V, I list the former passages after providing the date of the latter passages (in the format, e.g., Hua IV/V 301–304 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 93–97).

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Jardine, Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person, Phaenomenologica 233, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84463-9_2

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2  The Pure Ego: Self-Consciousness, Attention, and Emotion

2.1  The Pure Ego and Transcendental Phenomenology One of the most famous (and readily mocked) developments in Husserl’s philosophy—taking place between the initial breakthrough into phenomenological thinking offered in Logische Untersuchungen and the more mature transcendental-phenomenological program explicated in Ideen I—is his relinquishing of an initial scepticism regarding the pure ego. But just what is it that Husserl claims to have discovered when he states, in an addition to the 1913 Second Edition of Logische Untersuchungen, that he has “since managed to find” the pure ego that he had previously been unable to locate (Hua XIX/1 374 n./Husserl 2001b, p. 353 n)?2 In addressing this question, an instructive place to begin is by underlining that, in Husserl’s account of the pure ego in Ideen I & II, the ‘purity’ of this ego consists first and foremost in its persistence as an evidently identifiable characteristic of pure consciousness—that is, the structured field of intentional consciousness that is brought into relief through the phenomenological epoché (ἐποχή).3 Husserl describes the ego in question as ‘pure’ above all because he believes that it is unmodified by – and indeed becomes immediately prominent through – the methodological procedure of purifying the subject of experience of every reality-­ affording self-apprehension. And this purification is one of the central accomplishments of the epoché that, for Husserl, is foundational for phenomenological research and philosophy (Hua III/1 6-7, 126/Husserl 2014, pp. 5–6, 107; Hua IV/V 155, 178–179 [1912, 1913]; cf. Hua V 89–90, Hua IV 174). Like the epoché more generally, Husserl’s reference to the purification of consciousness from every mundane construal of itself should not be understood as synonymous with doubting or negating such understandings (Hua III/1 65/Husserl 2014, pp.  55–56). What such purification asks of us is rather a shift of attitude through which our reality as subjects in the world – that is, the reality of the complex human individuals that we otherwise unquestioningly take ourselves to be – is no longer assumed as a self-evident posit, but is rather acknowledged as an enigmatic phenomenon that calls for philosophical clarification.4 Moreover, it is

2  For a concise and illuminating discussion of Husserl’s early non-egological concept of consciousness, and some of the motives underlying his abandonment of this early model and later endorsement of a pure ego, see Zahavi (2005, pp. 31–47); and for a seminal and detailed treatment of this development in Husserl’s thinking, see Marbach (1974). 3  In addition to the passages quoted in depth below, see: Hua III/1 66–67, 178/Husserl 2014, pp. 57, 15. The presentation of Husserl’s phenomenological method and its motivations offered in this section is, needless to say, highly selective and touches only on those aspects of it that are directly relevant for our present concerns. More detailed treatments of this set of issues can be found in, for instance: Kern (1977), Drummond (1975), Held (2003), Ströker (1993, pp. 45–83), Bernet, Kern, & Marbach (1993, pp.  57–87), Drummond (1990, pp.  46–57), Carr (1999, pp.  68–84), Zahavi (2003, pp. 43–77), Smith (2003, pp. 15–59), Brough (2008), Mohanty (2008, pp. 241–261), Jacobs (2013), Cai (2013), Zahavi (2017, pp. 56–76), 4  This enigmatic character of the real human subject is captured well in passages from and directly preceding Husserl’s most sustained discussion of the pure ego in the Ideen II texts. As Husserl observes, in the broadest sense of who we take ourselves to be, we are human selves who “have”

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Husserl’s view that if a genuinely philosophical comprehension of human subjectivity is to be possible, then we cannot simply remain content with our pre-theoretical confidence in the obviousness of our own human reality but must critically inquire into the motivations and presuppositions of this very confidence (Hua IV/V 617/ Hua V 145 [1930]; cf. Hua III/1 §26). In other words, in order to philosophically clarify our mundane self-understanding, we must put out of play and critically examine what Husserl calls the “natural attitude”: namely, the orientation, pervasive within all non-philosophical engagement, wherein we implicitly assume that the world and every worldly reality – our own human reality included – exists with an obvious and inexplicable validity (Hua III/1 56–58, 61–62, 106–107/Husserl 2014, pp. 48–50, 52–53, 91). Furthermore, suspending the natural attitude requires the subject undertaking this suspension to no longer remain uncritically immersed in the acceptance of herself as a worldly reality; instead, she must thematise her own worldly reality as something that is intended, brought to manifestation, and accepted by and for herself. The phenomenological epoché therefore leads to the realisation that the mundane reality of the human individual is not the only or the most fundamental mode of subjective life, but something accepted by an experiencing subject who first carries out the natural attitude and is accordingly not yet, in all respects, subjected to it herself.5 If the phenomenological epoché involves a certain reflective purification of real characteristics, both mental and bodily. Such a mundane human individual  – analysed by Husserl under the heading of “I-as-human-being” (Ich-Mensch) – is what is referred to when we ascribe to ourselves, not only personality traits or mental attitudes (such as “short-tempered” or “pessimistic about the future of social democracy”), but also material-bodily features (such as “rapidly-graying dark hair” or “a weak immune system”). Put differently, in everyday life we operate with a broad understanding of our composition as mundane human selves that is psychophysical rather than exclusively psychological. What is enigmatic here, however, is the unshakeable sense that the psychological aspect of who we are has a certain priority. Namely, it is intuitive to think that when we change ‘our’ minds, there is a specific and core sense in which we really change, and that this pre-eminent change of the real self is not generated by alterations in ‘our’ material properties—or, more precisely, that it is only generated there insofar as the materialbodily features altered, relinquished, or temporally formed possess a particularly intimate relationship to our mental life. Indeed, we can even coherently imagine that a certain core of personal-subjective (albeit not human) reality could be encountered as expressed in a ghostly body: that is, in a spatial phantom that appeared, and expressed a certain mentality, in the public world but lacked all materiality proper (Hua IV/V 301–304 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 93–97). In addition to this ambiguity concerning the primary ontological register of the real human self, Husserl notes a further enigmatic characteristic: namely, while the I-as-human-being is something occurring in the world and thus a possible target of discrete and explicit apprehension, it is simultaneously the case that the “co-appearing” of one’s own human self plays a certain implicit and structuring role within all world-experience (Hua IV/V 316–317/Hua IV 109–110 [1915]). I return to Husserl’s analysis of the I-as-human-being in the second section of the seventh chapter. 5  Husserl formulates this point in “Nachwort zu meinen Ideen,” a later text written as an epilogue for Boyce Gibson’s English translation of Ideen I, as follows: “Within my field of transcendental phenomena, I no longer have theoretical validity as a human ego; I am no longer a real object within the world which has validity for me as existing, but instead I am posited exclusively as subject for this world. And this world is itself posited precisely as I am conscious of it in some fashion or other, as appearing to me in a certain way or as believed, predicatively judged, valued,

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the life of consciousness, then this is therefore not a matter of our simply rejecting all mundane self-conceptions and seeing if anything else remains, but of a radical shift of focus whereby we become aware of the unalloyed consciousness that anonymously operates in every acceptance of reality, including the very apprehending of oneself as a real human being. Husserl argues that the pure ego surfaces already at this early stage of phenomenological inquiry. More specifically, the pure ego can be immediately discerned as an essential structure of the very (pure) consciousness that is naturally oriented towards the world without itself being given as a worldly reality. Indeed, in a number of passages from Ideen I & II, Husserl highlights that the pure ego can be characterised as pure to the extent that it can be reflectively thematised – and just as it can be so thematised  – independently of any mundane construal of subjectivity. Because it is not merely a correlate of any such self-understanding, its acceptance does not rest upon the natural attitude. The pure ego is therefore unaffected by the epoché and the critical distance from every unexamined positing of reality which that reflective procedure demands. As Husserl writes: However, if I carry out the phenomenological ἐποχή, if the “I-as-human-being,” along with the entire world as it is naturally supposed, is suspended, then what still remains is the pure act as lived-experience with its own essence. But I also see that, while the construal of it as human lived-experience, apart from the supposition of its existence, introduces all sorts of things that need not be there along with it, no suspending can supersede the form of the cogito and strike out the “pure” subject of the act. “Being-directed-at,” “being pre-occupied with,” “taking a position toward,” “undergoing, suffering from”—each of these necessarily contains, as part of its essence, that it just proceeds “from the ego towards [something]” or, in the reverse direction, “towards the ego”—and this ego is the pure ego. No reduction can do anything to it (Hua III/1 179/Husserl 2014, p. 154, transl. modified). As long as we live in the naturalistic attitude, then this attitude is not itself given in our field of research; what is posited there is only what is experienced in it, thought in it, etc. But if we carry out reflection, if we make our theme the attitude itself, relate to it what is investigated in it, and lastly carry out an eidetic reduction and purification of all transcending apperceptions, then all our investigations are transformed into purely phenomenological ones. We then have the pure ego, as subject of this new attitude. To be sure, we will at first find ourselves in reflection as empirical ego; we perform the reflection at first precisely as a new naturalistic attitude, which thus, in the case of the phenomenological reduction, belongs in brackets. The ultimate subject, the phenomenological one, which is not subjected to suspension and is itself the subject of all eidetic-phenomenological research, is the pure ego (Hua IV/V 178-179 [1913]; cf. Hua IV 174). Pure ego and pure consciousness: that is the miracle of all miracles. And just this miracle vanishes as soon as the light of phenomenology falls upon it and subjects it to essential analysis. The miracle vanishes, since it is transformed into a great science with its wealth of difficulties and scientific problems. The miracle is something unconceivable, the problem-

etc. Thus it is posited in such a manner that the certainty of its being belongs itself to the “phenomenon,” in a way that is no different from other modes of my consciousness and its “contents.”” (Hua IV/V 618/Hua V 146, transl. modified [1930]).

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atic conceivable; the problematic is something hitherto unconceived that, in the resolution of problems, is established as rationally conceivable (Hua IV-V 140 [1912]; cf. Hua V 75).6

As the intimate link between phenomenological method and the pure ego reveals, it would be a grave error to assume that Husserl’s endorsement of the pure ego commits him to a pre-phenomenological development of a similar theoretical posit, such as the Kantian notion of the I that is by necessity representable, through pure or transcendental apperception, as accompanying each of its representations, or the Cartesian res cogitans.7 For as Husserl writes in Ideen I, “we intend to count the pure ego as a phenomenological datum only so far as its immediate, evidently ascertainable, essential distinctiveness and its cogivenness with pure consciousness reach. Meanwhile, any doctrine regarding the pure ego that extends beyond this framework should fall prey to the suspension” (Hua III/1 124/Husserl 2014, p. 106). This does not entail that Husserl’s account of the pure ego cannot be fruitfully put to use in theoretical contexts – such as empirical or philosophical investigations of the mind that do not follow a transcendental-phenomenological path – where the epoché is not operative.8 What the analysis so far highlights is simply that a full understanding of the phenomenological motivations underlying Husserl’s acceptance of, and concern with, the pure ego cannot be understood independently from his development of a distinctively phenomenological approach to transcendental philosophy. Of course, merely highlighting the methodological context of Husserl’s explication and endorsement of the pure ego does not yet illuminate its phenomenological character, or demonstrate that Husserl was correct in claiming that a non-mundane ego-structure can be evidently discerned in phenomenological reflection. But as is so often the case with the theoretical posits emerging from phenomenological analysis, the best way to establish the phenomenological validity of the pure ego is just to illuminate its essential characteristics; and this task will occupy us for the remainder of this chapter. Before turning to a more concrete explication, it will nevertheless be helpful to offer a preliminary outline of the distinctiveness of the pure ego by contrasting it with two other senses of the I that figure centrally in Husserlian

6  See also: Hua IV/V 220, 617 (Hua IV 325, Hua V 145) [1913, 1930]. In addition, see the selfcritical note included in the 1913 Second Edition of Logische Untersuchungen, in which Husserl states, in contrast to his earlier position, that the suspension of transcending self-construals is what discloses the evidence of the pure ego (Hua XIX/1 368 n./Husserl 2001b, pp. 352 n.) 7  The distinctively phenomenological origins of Husserl’s concept of the pure ego does not entail that there are not continuities (as well as differences) between the accounts of subjectivity developed by, for instance, Kant and Husserl (for an in-depth treatment of this issue, see: Carr 1999). An instance of this that is most relevant in the present context is Husserl’s claim that phenomenological analysis confers some validity to Kant’s thesis that the ego must be able to accompany all of its representations, but that it also demands that this thesis be reinterpreted and qualified (Hua IV/V 6, 315 [1912, 1915]; cf. Hua IV 108. See also: Hua III/1 123/Husserl 2014, pp. 105). 8  Indeed, the possibility of fruitfully applying Husserl’s analysis of the pure ego beyond transcendental phenomenology has been demonstrated by its influence on recent discussions of pre-reflective self-awareness and the minimal self, an influence that has, in particular, been exerted through Zahavi’s contributions to these debates (see, e.g., Zahavi 2005, 2014, 2020).

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phenomenology: namely, the mundane personal self and transcendental subjectivity. Briefly addressing the difference between the pure, the real-personal, and the transcendental subject will, moreover, allow us to shed more light on the specific position occupied by the pure ego within Husserl’s mature phenomenological project. In Husserl’s view, we first acquire a thematic apprehension of ourselves through reflection, and this applies with respect to (the thematisation of) the pure and the mundane-personal ego alike. However, thematising oneself as a real person differs markedly in its manner, presuppositions, and content from the reflective self-­ apprehension of the pure ego. Apprehending myself as a mundane personal ego involves accepting that I have a worldly existence – that I am a real self –, and that ‘who I am,’ in this sense, is something ascertained by way of reflectively focussing on my concrete engagements with the intersubjectively experienceable world of natural and socio-culturally articulated reality. The personal modes of engagement which reveal ‘who I am personally’ derive, moreover, much of their motivation and meaning from various intimate or more distant relationships which I sustain with other persons or social groups (Hua IV/V 186–187, 192–196, 215–217, 220–223 [1913]; cf. Hua IV 181–183, 191–198, 322–324, 325–327). At the same time, Husserl argues, construing myself as a real person essentially implies that I take myself to really have an individual personality or personal style. This real personality is something that I can always get to know better, but I can nevertheless roughly describe it, in a more or less justified fashion, by ascribing to myself generalised character traits as well as more fine-grained cognitive, emotional, and practical dispositions (Hua IV/V 312/Hua IV 104 [1915]; cf. Hua IV/V 31–33).9 Now, we have already seen one way in which the reflective thematising of the pure ego differs from such a personal apprehension of myself: namely, that it is not carried out in the natural attitude wherein all realities, my own included, are straightforwardly accepted as simply existing. More positively formulated, the reflective

9  Husserl’s eidetic analysis of the personal self demonstrates its distinction from the “I-as-humanbeing” mentioned in a preceding footnote. Ultimately, in the new edition of Ideen II we find Husserl outlining three closely affiliated but distinct senses of the real human self. 1) First of all, there is the person as distinctive individual “personality” or “spirit” (Persönlichkeit, Individualität, Geist), a reality which is thematically constituted through a reflective mode of understanding. More specifically we are acquainted with a distinctive personality in this sense when we apprehend certain (first-personally or empathetically accessible) lived-experiences—and, specifically, those in which a subject’s motivated engagement with the surrounding world is lived—as “states” that directly manifest real personal “features” (see Hua IV/V 190, 203–204, 213–214, 215–217, 220–222, 230–231, 247–250, 577–580). 2) From this “absolutely manifest” dimension of the personal I, Husserl distinguishes the comprehensive unity of expressive living-body and the individual personality it expresses—which he also terms the “human being in the spiritual sense,” or the “social human being,” arguing that this sense of the self is one that first emerges through interpersonal experience (Hua IV/V 208–212, 218–219). 3) Finally, we have the I-as-human-being, which is the fully concrete correlate of mundane self- and other-understanding, and thus includes natural (i.e., causally conditioned) as well as personal (i.e., motivationally conditioned and expressively manifested) features (Hua IV/V 212–213, 217–218, 301–304). Further discussion of these distinctions, as well as a reappraisal of the relationship between the pure and the personal ego, is offered in later chapters.

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thematisation of the pure ego involves nothing more than the eminently simple act of drawing out the subject that inhabits every episode of explicit intentional consciousness as purified through the phenomenological epoché. Once our reflective focus has liberated itself from the natural attitude—and the preoccupation of the latter with mundanising everything it touches—then it becomes possible to immediately discern the pure ego, through an uncomplicated procedure that involves, first, taking any subjective experience wherein an intentional object is explicitly attended to, and second, paying heed to the non-mundane subject functioning in this experience (Hua IV/V 305, 312–313, 27/Hua IV 97–98, 104–105, Hua V 113 [1915, 1915, 1912]). In other words, the thematisation of one’s personal selfhood is highly demanding insofar as it requires an openness to the “infinity of experience” – that is, the stream of lived-experience of an individual subject in its temporal entirety and the worldly correlates thereof  – wherein the real personality manifests itself and its developmental history (Hua IV/V 312/Hua IV 104 [1915]. See also: Hua IV/V 579–580 [1915–1917]). Making the pure ego thematic, on the other hand, is demanding in the rather different – and properly philosophical – sense of being an entirely simple act that nevertheless presupposes an exceptionally unnatural shift of focus, namely the epoché that puts out of play all hitherto unexamined acceptance of (one’s own) reality. Whereas Husserl’s positive account of the subject that becomes thematic in the latter scenario will be considered in the remainder of this chapter, we can already see that the pure ego cannot possess anything akin to the abiding dispositions and capacities that make up the real personality of a mundane human self. Such real personal features can only be intelligibly ascribed to something which is itself taken to be a reality embedded within a real environment. More precisely, the self-­ ascription of real personal features involves taking myself as a real person whose intentional engagement brings to manifestation a dispositional character that comes to be, endures, and to some extent changes across the course of a life. The individual character of a real person becomes manifest in the manifold ways in which particular personal conditions – that is, concrete subjective engagements as personally construed – show up as reciprocally related to particular worldly circumstances – that is, to real objects, situations, and other persons within the life-world. By contrast, what we discern in the overwhelmingly primitive reflection disclosive of the pure ego is something that is devoid of all personal substance, being nothing more than an empty and formal pole of engagement and affection (Hua IV/V 220–223/Hua IV 325–327 [1913]). Given the title of this work, it should come as no huge surprise that the reality of the real personal self does not entail that the personal sphere is of no interest for phenomenological research. Quite to the contrary, the real personal subject becomes an index for phenomenological analyses that examine the pre-reflective bases for personal self-understanding, as well as the specific manner of reflection through which real personal subjectivity is brought to explicit manifestation and genuine comprehension—these two themes being treated, respectively, in the sixth and seventh chapters below. Rather than turning away from personal reality, these constitutive investigations deepen our understanding of it. They uncover and investigate a

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number of otherwise unthematic moments of subjective functioning that are necessarily in play whenever personal reality is brought to manifestation (that is, constituted) by and for intentional consciousness. Moreover, by making explicit such otherwise unnoticed modes of subjective functioning, constitutive analysis does not only yield a number of insights concerning the way in which personal reality is given and comprehended; rather, it also philosophically clarifies the very reality of personal reality itself. To see why this is so, we must direct our attention towards two further methodological cornerstones of Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy, distinguishable from but functionally integrated with the epoché: namely the eidetic and transcendental-phenomenological reductions. As we have seen, the implementation of the epoché already entails that the phenomenologist cannot, in her research activities, remain content with unreflectively and straightforwardly accepting the existence of pregiven worldly objects. However, these very realities nevertheless remain within the sphere of phenomenological research as the noematic correlates of intentional consciousness (see, e.g., Hua III/1 107, 209, 310, 336–337/Husserl 2014, pp. 91, 180, 267, 290). Moreover, subjecting our pre-philosophical acceptance of such correlates to critical scrutiny demands, for Husserl, investigations into the specific lived-experiential contexts wherein the positings of the various fundamental kinds of reality actually obtain an evidential grounding. This is a question of determining an essential connection or correlation between manners of givenness and real object, a correlation that holds a priori insofar as it universally and necessarily characterises every possible phenomenon wherein an object of the relevant kind is given in originary fashion (Hua III/1 321, 330/Husserl 2014, pp. 276, 283–284). If an investigation into this a priori correlation is itself to offer us genuine insights ascertained through evidence—rather than mere speculative constructions—Husserl maintains that it can and must employ a procedure that he terms “eidetic reduction” (or eidetic variation). This involves leading back to (reducere) and insightfully discerning the essential characteristics of a particular object-kind (e.g., material thing, perceptual act, or pure ego), by imaginatively varying a concrete instance of the kind in question so as to ascertain which of the concrete object’s features are essential to it being an object of this kind, and which ones are merely contingent and in principle replaceable (Hua III/1 6, 12–13/Husserl 2014, pp. 5, 10–11, Hua IV/V 104–105/Hua V 40–41 [1912]). While surveying the essential correlations between manners of givenness and regions of real object entails, by Husserl’s estimation, remaining at a relatively rudimentary level of phenomenological analysis, the real objects themselves can already be freshly illuminated here. To illustrate with some topics that will be explored in more detail in later chapters, it is at this level that we can begin to see that the specifically material features of something physical are by necessity causal properties, these being intuitively displayed by the object as it enters into causal relationships with co-perceived material circumstances; or that the real character of a person is essentially composed of enduring ways of being motivated, such motivational styles becoming manifest in the person’s concrete engagements with its intentional environment (Hua III/1 344–348/Husserl 2014, pp. 296–299, Hua IV/V 220–221/Hua IV 326–327 [1913]).

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As has already been intimated, Husserl’s mature view is that the comprehensive clarification of worldly being striven for by phenomenological philosophy does not terminate in an eidetic analysis of the basic kinds of reality, or in a simple ascertainment of their a priori correlation with manners of givenness. Beyond the initial suspension of our uncritical immersion in the world enacted by the epoché – and expanding upon the openness to essential structures afforded by the eidetic reduction – transcendental phenomenology ultimately aims to lead back to and comprehend the functioning of transcendental (inter)subjectivity as the ultimate basis of all mundane sense and validity (Hua IV/V 611, 617–618, 625/Hua V 139, 145–146, 153–154 [1930]). The task here is not merely to study real objects in their manners of originary givenness, but to unearth a comprehensive and internally differentiated framework of eidetically regulated and synthetic subjective processes. More concretely, the subjective processes ultimately striven for by transcendental phenomenology are those that are by necessity in play when objects of each kind are brought to experiential manifestation, or “constituted” (Hua III/1 228–229, 310–312, 335–336, 346–353/Husserl 2014, pp.  196–197, 267–268, 288–289, 298–304). In addition to ascertaining the eidetic laws and norms that are a priori operative in the bringing to manifestation of objects of a particular region, transcendental phenomenology also seeks to clarify the necessary relationships of dependency that hold between different constitutive accomplishments (Hua III/1 354–355/Husserl 2014, pp. 304–305). What Husserl ultimately calls the “transcendental-phenomenological reduction” is the laborious process of leading mundane being back to its absolute origins in the eidetically governed functioning of transcendental subjectivity (Hua IV/V 612, 616–619/Hua V 140, 144–147 [1930]). The exploration of processes of constitution leads to a number of hitherto inaccessible insights into real objects and the worldly horizons they inhabit. On the one hand, it reveals that various basic kinds of reality are essentially related to one another, not in the sense of causal dependency or of any other kind of mundane relationship, but rather as constitutively intertwined. An essential relationship of constitutive and ontological interdependence is established between material things and the plurality of real animate subjects to whom they appear; with a similar constitutive interdependency being established between lifeworldly situations and the plurality of real persons who are familiar with and engage in them (Hua IV/V 59, 222–223, 229, 255, 316–317 [1912, 1913, 1913, 1913 1915]; cf. Hua V 128, Hua IV 327, 288, 310, 109–110). Indeed, it is only from a perspective where the constitutive analyses have already been set in motion that Husserl can make assertions such as the following: “The reality of persons demands the reality of things, but the reality of things equally demands the reality of persons” (Hua IV/V 223/Hua IV 327 [1913]). On the other hand, what the constitutive investigations also seek to demonstrate, through painstaking phenomenological analyses, are the often complex ways in which various kinds of reality essentially depend, in their coming to manifestation, upon the otherwise anonymous functioning of transcendental subjectivity. What becomes evident here is that any temptation to identify the pure ego with transcendental subjectivity obscures a relationship that is significantly more subtle and complex. It is true that Husserl’s analysis of the pure ego investigates a

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non-­mundane ego-structure that the suspension of all transcending construals leaves intact, and moreover that this analysis leads back from the factical pure ego of the reflecting philosopher to the pure ego as essential structure of every (phenomenologically purified) intentional act. But while a phenomenological investigation of the pure ego presupposes the epoché and employs a reduction to the eidetic, it is largely unburdened by the transcendental-phenomenological reduction—that is, the significantly more demanding task of drawing out the variegated framework of subjectivity in its transcendental functioning. Put more concretely, what the comprehensive pursuit of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction gradually illuminates – under the heading of the world-constituting, transcendental subject – is an embodied subjectivity, embedded within an open plurality of transcendental others (a “transcendental intersubjectivity”), whose active and passive constitutive functioning has itself come-to-be through a (sedimented) experiential history.10 An eidetic analysis of the pure ego, on the other hand, in principle demands nothing more than firstpersonal acquaintance with a single act of subjectively engaged intentional consciousness, along with a commitment to draw out the immediately discernible essence of the experiencing subject implementing the act in question. Accordingly, the pure ego is something maximally simple and formal, in principle unperturbed by the questions of embodiment, historicity, and sociality that surface in the transcendental inquiries proper. This is not to say, however, that the pure and transcendental subject are not closely affiliated. Indeed, when the transcendental-­phenomenological reduction is pursued, the eidos of the pure ego acquires the additional significance of outlining the skeletal framework of the transcendental ego—that is, of the specifically egoic dimension of the world-­constituting subject, which necessarily presupposes and is complexly intertwined with passive processes of sense-constitution. However, the comprehensive essential structure of the transcendental ego is only fleshed out through the subsequent pursuit of constitutive analyses. It would be fair to say, I think, that Husserl’s own discussions of egoic subjectivity at times prioritise phenomenological exploration over explicit systematic differentiation, and this has no doubt been the source of various misunderstandings amongst his readers. My elaboration of Husserl’s account of the pure ego will accordingly build upon a fruitful systematic model proposed by Zahavi, although I will also show that this tripartite account can be further developed in light of Husserl’s original manuscripts for Ideen II. On this model, the pure ego as structural moment of every discrete cogito is already founded upon a more basic form of

 Regarding the transcendentality of embodiment, see: Landgrebe (1978), Drummond (1979–80), Mohanty (1985, pp.  139–154), Zahavi (2020, pp.  94–112), Depraz (2000), Zahavi (2003, pp. 98–109), Behnke (2009), Taipale (2014, pp. 3–55), Jacobs (2014), Heinämaa (2021). For discussions of Husserl’s account of transcendental intersubjectivity, see: Zahavi (2001), Taipale (2014, pp. 69ff.), and the treatment and additional references offered in the fifth and seventh chapters. On the issue of genetic constitution, see, e.g., Sokolowski (1970, pp. 162 ff.), Bernet, Kern, and Marbach (1993, pp. 195ff.), Steinbock (1995, pp. 29–48), Lohmar (2003), Donohoe (2004). Clearly, this conception of the transcendental subject highlights a certain parallelism between transcendental and personal subjectivity, and it is no accident that in his later writings Husserl occasionally makes reference to the transcendental person (see Luft 2005, Heinämaa 2007, Jacobs 2010b, and the discussion of this issue in the seventh chapter).

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selfhood; whereas the pure ego understood as diachronic pole of formal identity presupposes both the underlying experiential subjectivity and the pure ego as integral feature of each concrete intentional act (Zahavi 2020, pp. 142–156).11 Accordingly, in the following I will consider three respects in which a non-­ mundane self or subject essentially inhabits intentional consciousness. Firstly, a most basic and generic mode of subjectivity within lived-experience comes into view when we consider that every emerging episode of conscious intentional experience is, in addition to being conscious of its noematic correlates, also something self-manifesting or lived through. Whereas this circumstance is one that, at first glance, appears both close to trivial and naggingly miraculous, Husserl’s analyses render it into an intelligible problem, scientifically resolvable by means of a phenomenological account of self-affection and inner time-consciousness (Sect. 2.2). However, the contribution of the subject of experience to the life of consciousness is not merely a matter of passive (self-)manifestation. Rather, this very subject also serves as the point of emanation for egoic engagements that are (actually and potentially) operative in the experiences it lives. It is in such active functioning that a non-mundane subject is most comprehensively involved, and also most immediately discernible, within pure consciousness; and Husserl’s analysis of the pure ego accordingly focusses primarily on active varieties of intentional experience and the non-mundane subject they essentially engage. My approach in this chapter will be to reconsider Husserl’s account by turning to the phenomenological analyses that underlie his egological account of perceptual attention (Sect. 2.3) and emotional stance-taking (Sect. 2.4). Finally, the chapter will also briefly examine the phenomenological grounds for the claim that pure ego does not constantly arise and perish along with the concrete phases of lived-experience in which it is originally discerned, but rather persists as a pole of diachronic identity (Sect. 2.3). Before proceeding, it is also worth highlighting that the foregoing analysis will diverge from Husserl’s at times strict methodological delimiting of what ought to be taken into consideration by an analysis of the pure ego. In my view, a more compelling case can be made for the pure ego – as a legitimate and fruitful phenomenological posit – once constitutive considerations are taken into account, and this justifies a more flexible approach to the pure I, that explicitly draws upon Husserl’s analyses of inner time-consciousness, embodiment, sedimentation, and value-constitution. This approach does not imply a rejection of the very distinction between pure ego and transcendental subjectivity highlighted above; it merely contends that insights afforded by the investigation of the latter can also serve to motivate and clarify our acceptance of the former.

 What bears highlighting here is that the novel and influential account of the minimal or experiential self, developed by Zahavi in numerous publications (but especially in Zahavi 2014), primarily builds upon the first and, in accordingly modified form, third of the “levels of egocentricity” described in his reconstruction of Husserl’s account, whereas the second level—which will primarily occupy us in this chapter (see Sects. 2.3 and 2.4)—plays a much less prominent role.

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2.2  Self-Affection, Time-Consciousness, and Experiential Subjectivity Inaugurating the theory of pre-reflective self-consciousness that was subsequently adopted by a number of later phenomenologists (notably Sartre), Husserl’s analyses demonstrate that episodes of conscious experience necessarily possess a distinctive kind of self-awareness, one that is prior to any reflective thematisation of conscious life and belongs to the inherent structure of the experiences themselves. In doing so, he addresses the manner in which consciously occurring lived-experiences (Erlebnisse) do not merely afford intentional consciousness of their object (as construed and posited in this or that fashion), but are also necessarily lived through subjectively (erlebt), manifesting themselves through a lived-experiencing (Erleben) that precedes their reflective objectification (Hua III/1 126/Husserl 2014, p. 139; Hua X 291). One way of expressing the core tenet of his account is to stipulate that, if we examine an episode of intentional experience as it presently emerges in consciousness, then what can be evidently ascertained is that, in addition to the object-­consciousness this episode provides, there is also a non-reflective awareness that manifests the present object-directed experiential episode itself. In Ideen II, as elsewhere, Husserl labels this non-objectifying and pre-reflective form of self-­awareness “inner consciousness” (innere Bewusstsein), and (somewhat obliquely) indicates its intimate relationship to temporality and the pure ego.12 However, to explicate Husserl’s understanding of this relationship we need to briefly turn to a theme that is not fully elaborated in that text: namely, inner time-consciousness. In his writings on time-consciousness (including those that pre-date the Ideen project), Husserl queries the assumption that pre-reflective awareness simply pertains to the discrete, punctual lived-experience that is currently transpiring, or in other words, that what is lived through subjectively is merely a narrowly defined now-instant.13 Such a description can be evidently repudiated by carefully attending to the streaming temporality of conscious experience. When we reflect upon the flowing perception of a temporal object (such as, to refer to Husserl’s wellknown example, a melody), we find that, at every phase of our perception, what is

 See Hua IV/V 349–353 [1914–1916]; cf. Hua IV 118–119, 111–113. In addition, Husserl highlights the significance of inner time-consciousness in his most sustained discussion of the pure ego in Ideen II, but states that this issue has been intentionally left out of consideration (Hua IV/V 310–311/Hua IV 102–103 [1915]). As is well-known, Husserl also refrained from substantively incorporating the complexities of inner temporality into Ideen I, although in §§81–82 of that text he at least offers a compact survey of (aspects of) his analysis of time-consciousness. This explication is neither repeated nor significantly developed in Ideen II. 13  The account offered here of the intimate relationship between self-awareness, inner time-consciousness, and subjectivity builds, again, upon Zahavi’s work on this issue (in particular: Zahavi 2020, pp. 142–146; 2005, pp. 49–72; 2010). Because Husserl explored a number of different ways of understanding the intentional structure of inner time-consciousness, his writings also permit the development of alternative accounts of the underlying structure of temporal (self-) consciousness (see, in particular, the seminal readings found in Brough 1972; Sokolowski 1974, pp. 138–168; and for further appraisals of the different readings’ interpretive and systematic validity, see: Zahavi (2020, pp. 65–84; 2011), Brough (2010, 2011), Drummond (2006a). 12

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strictly now perceived is experienced as succeeding something that has just been (such as the note that has just passed, and that shapes the affective tenor of the one presently heard). We also find that, while the newly emerging correlates of our perception sometimes confound us, consciousness is constantly attuned to the circumstance that something new is due to perceptually emerge, and in some case roughly typifies what is about to transpire (such as the next note of the melody, or the tense silence that will fleetingly fill the auditorium as the performance comes to an end). Accordingly, our intentional consciousness has, at any and every moment, a usually unnoticed temporal depth and complexity: the perceiving that emerges now, in the narrowly defined and most original sense (the “primal impression”), is accompanied by, and integrated with, on the one side, a tacit awareness of the perceiving that has just been (the “retention”), and on the other, a largely indeterminate awareness of the perceiving that is about to emerge (the “protention”). For the current purposes, the significance of this threefold temporalising structure consists primarily in its implications for pre-reflective self-awareness. Appreciating the essential role of retention and protention in all experience does not only remind us of the temporal breadth of our perceptual and, more generally, intentional grasp of the objects and situations we encounter.14 It also highlights that the manner in which we live through our own lived-experiences—prior to any self-­ thematisation—is itself embedded within temporal horizons. In other words, it is through inner time-consciousness that our very experiential life is manifest to itself, and manifest precisely with a temporal form. This pre-reflective and temporally articulated dimension of self-presencing establishes the field of pregivenness that is essentially presupposed by and constrains thematic modes of self-consciousness— such as the minimally active apprehension of one’s own lived-experiences that Husserl labels inner perception or reflection—and it is for this reason that he occasionally characterises inner (time-)consciousness as a distinctive kind of affection. In a 1911 manuscript, where Husserl is primarily concerned with the role of passivity and activity in the constitution of values, he offers the following formulations: Yes, one may speak of an affection, in a broadened sense, within the complete framework of time-consciousness. What this means is that every immanent-unitary lived-experience “affects,” in so far as it can be object of a possible instance of mere turning-towards and positional apprehension. To say that an immanent-unitary lived-experience affects “inner sense” means nothing more than this: A ray of “inner perception”—a simple focus upon the lived-experience that apprehends and posits what is constituted in a different fashion— takes place or can take place. The sphere of mere affection, the sphere of mere sensibility, means this: There is a sphere of lived-experiences, of immanent temporal contents, which, as temporal-immanent contents, can only undergo revival in one way, and this one way is

 Given the complexity of Husserl’s analyses of inner temporality, I have only been able to highlight here a few core features of his account of time-consciousness, focusing particularly on its intersection with the issues of self-givenness and the pure ego. And even in this regard, the account offered here exclusively addresses the implications of retention, leaving the (potentially very significant) role of protention unthematised.

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2  The Pure Ego: Self-Consciousness, Attention, and Emotion the simple turning-towards them in “inner perception,” i.e., in the simple immanent reflection (Hua XLIII/2 77). What must be considered in this context is that inner perception is called “perception” because the immanent time-consciousness is self-presencing. Perception has the character of a single-rayed turning-towards, of a simple instance of positional, thetic apprehending, with respect to something that is conscious as self-present actuality; and if the presencing is the presencing of time-constituting consciousness, then the perception is “inner” perception. (…) Indeed, this turning-towards of inner reflection is already an actus of freedom, a spontaneity, but a spontaneity of the kind that is throughout tethered to the “pregivennessess” of inner consciousness, to what is constituted in a different fashion, what obtains its necessary apriori form of immanent time in accordance with the most original law of consciousness (Hua XLIII/2 77–78).15

To see the decisive implications that the self-presencing or self-affecting character of inner (time-)consciousness has for an inquiry into the pure ego, it is crucial to take a closer look at the different functions of primal impression and retention within pre-reflective self-awareness. In this context, it must be emphasised that, for Husserl, it is the primal impression specifically that is lived through, or pre-­ reflectively manifest, in the strictest and most original sense.16 Indeed, Husserl introduces the technical concept of “primal consciousness” (Urbewusstsein) to single out the pre-eminent mode of inner consciousness that constantly pertains to the primal impression alone. However, when the phase of intentional experience now lived through is displaced into the past, it is not only its intentional correlate that remains in grip. Rather, the lived-experience is itself retained as that which was just lived through, and this in turn involves a retentional modification of its primal consciousness. In other words, primal consciousness alone cannot account for the streaming manner in which our lived-experiences are pre-reflectively manifest; to account for the latter, it must also be acknowledged that each newly emerging primal impression is lived through as displacing a primal impression that has just elapsed. And this tacit awareness of the elapsed primal impression can be nothing other than a retentional moment of inner consciousness itself. Husserl explicates this thought as follows: Retention is a peculiar modification of the perceptual consciousness, which is primal impression in the original time-constituting consciousness (…). If P(t) is the perception of a sensed tone, apprehending it as an enduring tone, then P(t) changes into a continuity of retentions Rp(t). But P(t) is also given in inner consciousness as lived-experience. If P(t) changes into Rp(t), then precisely the inner consciousness of Rp(t) necessarily changes in inner consciousness. (…) But then the inner consciousness of P(t) also changes into the retentional modification of this inner consciousness; and this retentional modification is in

 For a detailed analysis of Husserl’s reference to self-affection in the context of inner (time-) consciousness, see Zahavi (2020, pp. 69–77, 118–120, 204; 2005, pp. 50–72). 16  See, e.g., Hua X 115: “Multiple primal impressions, primal phantasms, etc. — in short, multiple original moments (we can also say: primal moments of inner consciousness) — can belong to one stratum of inner consciousness. All of the original moments belonging to one stratum have the same character of consciousness, which is essentially constitutive of the respective “now”: the now is the same for all of the constituted contents.” 15

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turn inwardly conscious. It is in this way that the just-having-perceived is conscious (Hua X 117, transl. modified). Consciousness is necessarily consciousness in each of its phases. Just as the retentional phase is conscious of the preceding phase without making it into an object, so too the primal datum is already intended — specifically, in the original form of the “now” — without its being something objective. It is precisely this primal consciousness that passes over into retentional modification – which is then retention of the primal consciousness itself and of the datum originally conscious in it, since the two are inseparably united. (…) Moreover, this primal consciousness is not something inferred on the basis of reasoning; it is rather something that can be intuitively discerned, through reflection on the constituted lived-­ experiencing, as a phase constituting such lived-experiencing, exactly like the retentions (Hua X 119, transl. modified).

If the flowing character of consciousness consists primarily in the relentless passing of originally emerging lived-experiences into retention, then we can now see what enables Husserl to state that the flow of consciousness is fashioned in such a way that “a self-appearance of the flow necessarily exists in it” (Hua X 117, 88). Retention involves a modification of the very lived-experiencing of the retained lived-experience; that is, the retentional surge is itself lived through, and is not simply indirectly displayed by the temporal givenness of the intentional object. Moreover, what is significant here is not only that the momentary flowing of the primal impression into retention participates in the manifestation of lived-­ experience. What significantly complicates matters is that, as a new primal impression emerges, what undergoes retentional modification is not only the just-elapsed primal impression, but rather the entire now-phase just lived through—as something composed of retentional, primal-impressional, and protential aspects. In other words, the retentional aspect of the present phase does not only play a necessary role for the inner consciousness currently functioning; we can also say that the retentional component of the phase is itself retained — as retention of a retention — when the current phase undergoes retentional modification. Consequently, the retention of the just-past phase carries with it a sequence of retained phases, to the effect that, in Husserl’s words, “there extends throughout the flow a longitudinal intentionality that, in the course of the flow, continuously coincides with itself” (Hua X 81, transl. modified; cf. Hua X 379–382). This longitudinal intentionality, which reaches back ‘before’ the just-past phase, is the temporally articulated (self-) awareness of the lived-experiences themselves in their very flowing. To underscore the implications of this line of thought for Husserl’s account of the experiencing subject, it bears highlighting that the temporal self-givenness of lived-­ experiences established by inner time-consciousness—with its temporalising elements of retention, primal impression, and protention—necessarily affords the experiences in question with a distinctive form of ‘mineness’ or first-personal givenness. In Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, Husserl writes that it is due to the “structure of the lived-experiences,” and specifically the law-governed and self-manifesting retentional process of longitudinal intentionality, that phases and stretches of the stream of consciousness are “given in inner consciousness” as identifiable and temporally qualified units. He then adds

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that if this process did not take place, then “a content would be inconceivable as lived-experience; (…) as a matter of principle, lived-experience would not and could not be given as a unity to the subject and consequently would be nothing” (Hua X 116–117, transl. modified). In other words, were it not for the retentional (and protentional) openness to the temporal breadth of the experiential field, then any talk of experiences being subjectively lived through would be entirely without meaning. The subjectively lived character, or first-personal givenness, established by inner time-consciousness pertains exclusively to one’s own lived-experiences. Indeed, it is the most fundamental way in which my experiences are phenomenologically distinct from transcendent objects and from the lived-­experiences of other subjects, neither of which can be given in such a first-personal manner. In the Ideen II texts, Husserl expresses this point by noting, in a manuscript likely dating from 1917 or 1918, that the entirely originary manner in which lived-experiences are given to their subject demarcates an exclusively subjective sphere, a sphere wherein everything is proper to this individual subject and to no other. In that manuscript, Husserl characterises this distinctive mode of self-presencing or givenness in the flesh (erfahrend in ihrer leibhaften Selbstheit, Gegenwärtigung) – which pertains to a subject’s own lived-experiences uniquely, and stands in essential contrast with the empathetic givenness of other subjects and their lived-­experiences – using the phenomenologically ambiguous language of originary perceptive appearing (originäre Perzeption) (Hua IV/V 245–246 [1917/1918]; cf. Hua IV 198–200). He is more precise elsewhere in Ideen I and Ideen II, highlighting that the self-awareness inherent to the (pre-reflective) immanent temporalisation of consciousness is best understood as a non-objectifying “inner consciousness” which makes possible, but must be distinguished from, the (reflective) activity of inner perception (Hua III/1 255–256/ Husserl 2014, p. 220, Hua IV/V 349–350/Hua IV 118–119 [1914–1916]). Husserl’s analysis of inner time-consciousness should, therefore, be understood as offering a phenomenological excavation of the deepest roots of conscious experience—such roots being identified with the temporalising (micro)structure that uniquely enables experiences to be lived through subjectively, that is, to be (intransitively) conscious at all. But what implications might this excavation have for the central concern of this chapter, namely the pure ego? To address this question, we can begin by noting that the temporalising structuration inherent to inner consciousness already generates an appropriately minimal and fundamental variety of self or subjectivity, the latter consisting of nothing more than the very subjective living through incorporated within every phase of conscious experience.17 The direct

 This latter move has been made by Zahavi in a number of writings on inner-time consciousness and the self (see, in particular, Zahavi 2005, pp. 49–72). Zahavi’s contribution here has not only been to identify, to my mind persuasively, this line of thought in Husserl’s work, but also to significantly clarify and develop it. For a clear statement from Husserl’s manuscripts of the claim that pre-reflective self-consciousness suffices to establish a basic form of selfhood or subjectivity, the following is exemplary: “The consciousness in which I am conscious of myself is my consciousness, and my consciousness of myself and I myself are concretely considered identical. To be a subject is to be in the mode of being aware of oneself.” (Hua XIV 151, cited in Zahavi 2005, p. 50).

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consequence of inner (time-)consciousness is that every episode of conscious experience is lived through first-personally; and this alone serves to integrate, within the stream of consciousness, an elusive subject of experience for whom each experience is lived. When delving into the murky depths of the time-constituting flow and identifying the rigid form pervading the flux of the stream, what is revealed as “absolute subjectivity” is nothing more than a passive mode of self-awareness, by virtue of which the occurrent experience becomes first-personally manifest within its temporal horizon (Hua X 75, 371, 114). Moreover, by identifying a basic dimension of subjectivity or selfhood with the temporalising self-awareness inherent to every occurrent experience, it also becomes intelligible how an identical subject of experience can diachronically persist, as new lived-experiences emerge in primal consciousness. While the experiential content presently lived is constantly slipping into retention  – and being replaced by a newly emerging content manifest in primal consciousness  – the very abiding form of inner time-consciousness continuously inheres within the flow of consciousness, in all its phases (Hua X 114, Hua III/1 182–183/Husserl 2014, pp.  156–158). And this pervasive form of temporalising self-manifestation is the abiding experiential subjectivity itself, whose persistent character evades description, being nothing more than the ever-present first-­personal givenness of “the primal source-point and a continuity of moments of reverberation” (Hua X 371).18 In short, the integral presence within the life of consciousness of temporally qualifying first-personal givenness, as invariant form of lived-experiencing, already establishes a minimal, though diachronically persisting, subject of experience. The question that now faces us is, of course, the extent to which this passively generated self should be equated with the pure ego. As the remainder of this chapter will illuminate, Husserl’s view is that the abiding experiential subjectivity (re)produced by inner time-consciousness is a necessary—but not a sufficient—condition for the pure ego in the strict sense. We have seen that a variety of subjectivity emerges simply through the necessary circumstance that intentional lived-experiences are always lived-experiences for someone. But, for Husserl, the experiencing subject that emerges here can only be legitimately characterised as properly egological if its intentional experiences are not only first-personally manifest for an experiencing subject, but also capable of being carried out by an experiencing subject. Differently put, whereas the most basic and minimal aspect of experiential subjectivity becomes prominent when we interrogate the manner in which lived-experiences are subjectively lived through, a further aspect of the experiencing subject only comes into focus only when we reflect upon those elements of our experiential life that are subjectively implemented—and without taking into account both these modes of subjective involvement within experience, the pure ego will evade our full comprehension.19

 For an exceptionally clear account of the sense in which pre-reflective self-awareness comprises the abiding form of the experiential stream, see Drummond (2006a). 19  Husserl highlights this distinction when he writes that “sensations are subjective, but in an entirely different sense to acts. I have sensations – it is in an entirely different way that I implement acts.” (Hua IV/V 247 [1914/1915]; cf. Hua IV 317). 18

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At least two motivations can be identified for Husserl’s insistence on the necessary role of experiential agency for the pure ego. To appreciate these motivations, we should recall that Husserl’s analysis of the pure ego is above all seeking to identify the non-mundane subject that immediately presents itself within the field of pure consciousness brought into focus through the phenomenological epoché. This methodological framing necessitates an emphasis on the role of subjective agency in experience, first of all, because it is within explicitly active modes of intentional consciousness that the presence of subjective functioning is most straightforwardly evident. While an analysis of inner time-consciousness gradually excavates a pervasive and pre-agential dimension of subjective involvement in experience, such excavation demands a far more laborious exercise of phenomenological reflection than the simple procedure of drawing out the subject that explicitly functions in pre-­ eminently engaged modes of intentional consciousness. The second, more substantive, motivation for Husserl’s account of the pure ego as essentially engaged is just his conviction that the pre-reflective involvement of the experiencing subject in its experiences cannot be reduced to the passivity of self-affection, since it also harbours agentive dimensions. The task of the remainder of this chapter will be to clarify this conviction by considering its phenomenological groundwork.

2.3  T  he Pure Ego as Pole of Engagement (I): Spontaneity in Attention In the previous section, it was argued that Husserl identifies the self-affection inherent to the framework of inner time-consciousness with a basic mode of experiential subjectivity. Husserl’s mature analysis of the pure ego should be understood as building upon this insight, albeit not always explicitly. Indeed, a recognition of the selfhood intrinsic to temporally articulated lived-experience may well be part of what underlies Husserl’s statement in Ideen II that, rather than being exhausted by the I that actively implements intentional functions (das reine Ich nicht nur vollziehendes Ich ist), the pure ego is something that cannot be separated from every instance of lived-experiencing (nicht ein von allem Erleben Getrenntes) (Hua IV/V 307/Hua IV 99 [1915]).20 However, what must also be emphasised is that, by describing the ego as being  – even if not in all respects  – an agent of

 Compare the following formulation from Ideen I: “Every lived-experience, as temporal being, is lived-experience of its pure ego. Necessarily inherent in this is the possibility (and this, as we know, is not an empty logical possibility) that the ego focuses purely on this lived-experience and apprehends it as actually being or, better, as enduring in phenomenological time.” (Hua III/1 182/ Husserl 2014, p.  157, transl. modified; cf. Hua III/1 178/Husserl 2014, p.  153). The close link between experiential self-manifestation and the ego is also highlighted in the 1913 H-Blätter, where we find Husserl arguing that that das Ich is pervasively für sich selbst, in sich selbst konstituiert through a pre-reflective mode of self-consciousness (Hua IV-V 205–206 (Hua IV 318) [1912]).

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implementation, Husserl is at the same time intimating that the pure ego is not a mere passive participant in the life of consciousness. Indeed, the agency implied by this formulation clearly goes to the core of Husserl’s understanding of the pure ego. For him, the pure ego is necessarily capable of immersing itself in, holding sway within, reflectively scrutinising, or actively implementing every lived-experience manifesting itself in the stream of consciousness (Hua IV/V 6, 315 [1912, 1915]; cf. Hua IV 108). When Husserl refers to das reine Ich in Ideen II, it is in every case such an (actually or potentially) engaged self that he is directing our attention towards. Consider, for instance, the manner in which Husserl brings the pure ego into view at the beginning of a focussed explication dating from 1915: I take myself as the pure ego insofar as I take myself as that which, in perceiving, is directed to the perceived, in remembering to the remembered, in phantasising to the phantasised, in logical thinking to what is thought, in valuing to the valued, in willing to the willed. In the implementation of each act there lies a ray of directedness, which I cannot describe otherwise than by saying it takes its point of departure in the “ego,” which evidently remains undivided and numerically identical while it lives in these manifold acts, while it spontaneously engages itself in them, and while, by means of ever new rays, it goes through these acts towards what is objective of their sense (Hua IV/V 305-306 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 97-98).21

In clarifying what Husserl has in mind here, a good place to begin is by considering a (philosophically significant) terminological shift that occurs between the account of intentionality Husserl presents in Logische Untersuchungen and the framework he later offers in Ideen I.22 In the earlier work, Husserl subsumes every concrete intentional lived-experience under the general heading of ‘act,’ and employs the term ‘act-character’ to designate the generic experiential feature of intentionally relating or referring to an object (Hua XIX/1 380–383/Husserl 2001b, pp. 96–97). Accordingly, an intentional lived-experience necessarily possesses the universal character of being an act, irrespective of what Husserl calls its ‘act-quality,’ that is, the more specified intentional features by virtue of which it can be classified as an intentional experience of one kind or another (i.e., as an act of perception, memory, or emotion) (Hua XIX/1 425–431/Husserl 2001b, pp. 119–122). Most important for the present purposes, in Logische Untersuchungen the general labels ‘intentional act’ and ‘act-character’ apply to every intentional lived-experience irrespective of whether it is an experience in which attention actively operates, or merely a component of the unthematic intentional background of consciousness (Hua XIX/1

 Although a relatively brief treatment of the issue was already drafted in 1912 (Hua IV/V 5–9), it is really with his detailed and focused presentation of the pure ego from 1915 (Hua IV/V 305–318) that Husserl gets close to fulfilling the promise he made in Ideen I, namely to “devote a separate chapter [of Ideen II] to the difficult questions concerning the pure ego” (Hua III/1 124/Husserl 2014, p. 106). However, Husserl would significantly complicate matters for himself—as well as for his collaborator, Edith Stein—by producing, at some point between 1914 and 1916, an additional manuscript broaching the previously unaddressed question of the relationship between the pure ego and habituality (Hua IV/V 339–358). I discuss the implications of this important manuscript in the third section of the sixth chapter. 22   For Husserl’s developing account of intentionality across both of these works, see Drummond (2003). 21

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391–393, 419, 423–425/Husserl 2001b, pp. 101–102, 116, 118–119). As Husserl writes: “Acts must be present, before we can live in them or be absorbed in implementing them” (Hua XIX/1 423/Husserl 2001b, p. 118, transl. modified). By the time of Ideen I, however, Husserl had found it necessary to distinguish between a narrower and a broader concept of ‘act,’ neither of which can be unequivocally identified with his earlier conception. We will briefly return to the broader concept of ‘act’ introduced in Ideen I at the end of this section, but we should first consider the narrower conception and its relation to the pure ego. On the reformulated model of the Ideen, the “narrow” or “authentic” sense of (intentional) “act”—which Husserl, echoing Descartes, often employs the term ‘cogito’ to designate—refers uniquely to those intentionalities that are actively implemented (vollzogen), thereby excluding any instances of intentional lived-­ experience that function without actual egoic participation. The most simple variety of intentional act in this sense occurs when we simply turn towards and attend to a perceptual object, thereby apprehending the thing perceived, as appearing under a definite orientation and with certain (more or less focally) perceived qualities, and accepting its existence (Hua III/1 71–72/Husserl 2014, pp. 60–61). The specificity of this modality of perceptual experience can be highlighted by contrasting it with the mode of intentionality operative in the perceptual background that constantly engulfs it. For instance, as I focus intensely on visually and tactually inspecting my bicycle tire—with the aim of identifying whether it is punctured, or just needs a good pump—the saddle and frame of the bicycle and the pavement below simultaneously appear to me (quasi-)perceptually, and are accordingly intuitively presented in their own way, through unthematic forms of intentional consciousness. These “background-intuitions” contribute to the horizonal field that always accompanies attentive perception, in the sense that they delineate possible pathways that are always on hand for perceptual attention to explore (Hua III/1 188–189, 71–72/ Husserl 2014, pp. 162, 60–61). Such exploration can take place simply through an attentive implementation of a previously unactualised perceptual intentionality, such as would occur if, after noticing a shard of glass penetrating the bicycle tire, I were to shift my attention towards the pavement below, perhaps noticing the remains of a broken bottle ground into its surface. What is crucial for the present purposes is the great challenge that faces any attempt to phenomenologically thematise the actively implemented intentional acts, such as the case of attentive perceiving depicted above, without making any reference to some kind of I, self, or ego who implements the act in question. Perhaps the central hurdle to such an attempt is that that it is prima facie difficult to deny that, in any instance of focussed attentiveness to a thing, situation, or person in the perceptual environment, a peculiarly subjective form of engagement is in play. Particularly when contrasted with the inactive intentional background of consciousness, something important about attention does seem to be captured by the claim that the specifically attentive modes of consciousness have the phenomenological peculiarity of being intentional experiences that are subjectively carried out. But what more precisely does the subjectivity of attention consist in? In Ideen I, Husserl’s answer is unequivocal:

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In their modes of actualization, the configurations of attention have the character of subjectivity in a pre-eminent manner (…). Attention radiates, and this radiating affords itself as radiating from the pure ego and terminating in something objective, directed at it or deviating from it. The radiating is not separated from the ego but instead is and remains the ego radiating (Hua III/1 214/Husserl 2014, pp. 184).

While Husserl had already appreciated in Logische Untersuchungen that attention is a specific modification or accentuation of intentionality, by the time of Ideen I he is able to acknowledge its phenomenological character as distinctively subject-­ involving (Hua XIX/1 167–169, 423–425/Husserl 2001a, pp.  274–275, Husserl 2001b, pp. 118–119). In other words, he is able to thematise attention as the pre-­ eminent manner in which the experiencing subject engages its focus within a predelineated intentional field. And if we ask why Husserl is justified in describing the subjective engagement involved with attention in the seemingly overtly abstract terms of a ray that emanates from the pure ego, while remaining nothing other than the pure ego itself, then the foregoing analysis readily provides us with the beginnings of an answer. It is, of course, entirely possible to provide a more substantial and concrete characterisation of the subjective engagement involved with attention. For instance, an impersonal and naturalistic explanation of the attentional episode could be offered, perhaps by appealing to the general psychophysical processes of bodily stimulation that elicit and drive attentional responses, or by attempting to identify the neuronal correlates of attending itself. Another possibility would be to offer a more personal description of the concrete attentional activity, through seeking to comprehend the (immediate and more distant) motivational contexts of this specific instance of attentional engagement, and to thereby bring into focus the individual character of the real human person attending—and this latter form of understanding is something that much preoccupied Husserl, as we shall see in later chapters. However, it is clear that such substantial characterisations lead us away from the task of identifying the pure ego and its essential structures. The naturalistic and personalistic approaches to the attending subject intimated above both rest upon a reality-­ affording apprehension of the life of consciousness; an investigation of the pure ego, on the other hand, must suspend all such apprehensions, and focus exclusively on the subject of experience insofar as it can be reflectively discerned in pure consciousness (i.e., irrespectively of the sense-configurations introduced by transcending interpretations of subjectivity). When placed in this context, Husserl’s characterisation of the subjectivity of attending as a single ray of mental focus— through which the pure I actively implements, and thereby engages itself in, certain intentional experiences—begins to appear as little more than a methodologically rigorous elaboration of a relatively simple phenomenological thesis. Namely, it simply asserts that experiencing subject accompanying all temporally articulated lived-­ experience also exerts a certain selective activity within (some of) its lived-experiences; and that such activity is not only encountered when we pay heed to the human being as a natural or personal reality, but can also be ascertained

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purely through a reflective concern with (the invariant character of) attentive perceiving as a field of lived-experience.23 Nevertheless, some readers may still legitimately wonder if Husserl is justified in construing this subjective engagement as (the pure ego’s) “radiating focus,” a phrase that Husserl readily acknowledges is a “simile” (Gleichnis) (Hua III/1 189/Husserl 2014, p. 182). That is, it is certainly worth asking here whether, in accounting for the subjectivity of attention in terms of a radiation that emanates from the pure ego, without being anything other than the pure ego itself, Husserl is ultimately reverting to an explanatorily convenient but phenomenologically impoverished ego-­ metaphysics, instead of merely being guided by the phenomena. Indeed, a number of Husserl’s most discerning readers have been unable to ascertain an evidential basis for his egological account of attentive acts.24 Moreover, the Ideen II manuscripts reveal that, in a text likely dating from the second half of the 1910s, Husserl himself critically appraises the phenomenological grounds for the depiction (Bild) of the ego as the central point from which attention emanates. There Husserl suggests that the understanding of the ego as a central point of departure for rays of attention rests upon an analogy with the “centralisation of sensuous phenomena in relation to the lived-body.” In other words, the conception of an empty and formal pole from which rays of attention proceed, central to Husserl’s claim that a pure ego is engaged in its acts, can only be phenomenologically secured if a compelling analogy can be demonstrated with the manner in which the lived-body constantly operates as the zero-point of orientation for appearing objects. But to what extend does this analogy actually hold? The question here is whether these depictions have a primordial meaning and whether they express a primordial analogy: that is, when we abstract from the spatiality from which the depiction derives, is there present in attending something like a directing that emanates from a point? To be sure, the following is certain: There is a multiplicity of interconnected lived-experiences and intentional givennesses, and to this extent a field is present; and in addition to this field, there are the shifting attentional modifications. But is a centralisation actually also primordially present here? Each attentional series is precisely a series, and to this extent something like a ray, for a ray is precisely also a series. And in each attentional series what is apprehended intentionally is one and the same, and the attentional series is a series of progressively richer and more complete apprehension of what is one and the same. This is analogous to how, when coming closer to an object, hence in the corresponding series of orientations, I acquire a progressively richer cognisance of the object, apprehending ever more of it and apprehending it better. The simile rests upon this: I bring myself closer to the matter (even when it is non-spatial). But if we abstract from this analogy, then what is given is a progressive series in which the apprehension of the object “approaches” the ideal of completeness, and this takes place in every process of attentively apprehending an object. However, the latter does not assert that all these series depart from one and the same point, nor indeed that the identity of a point of departure must have a primordial sense.

 For a complementary discussion, see: Jacobs (2010a), p. 189.  For well-informed critical appraisals of Husserl’s portrayal of the pure ego as centre of attention in Ideen I, see: Gurwitsch (1966); Marbach (1974, pp. 159–175). An important phenomenological critique of Husserl’s introduction of a concept of the pure ego more generally is found in Sartre (2004).

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One could say that, primordially, there is no sense to the assertion: “I, the one who thinks, am the same as I, the one who wills, etc.; I, the one who sees, am the same as I, the one who hears.” Where there is no other, where there is no Thou, there is also no I (Hua IV/V 608-609 [1915-1918]; cf. Hua IV 106).

In this passage, we find a phenomenologically rich challenge to the conception of the pure ego as a point of emanation for egoic acts that was employed throughout Ideen I and Ideen II. In effect, Husserl suspends the conception so as to inquire into its origins and thereby critically assess its validity. Notably, he suggests that the simile of the pure ego as the centre of attentive rays has two sources. The first of these has already been mentioned, namely that the spatial metaphor of a point from which attentive rays emanate tacitly appeals to the function of the lived-body as a central ‘here’ in relation to which all perceived objects are tacitly oriented. The essential role that such an embodied ‘zero-point of orientation’ plays in the underlying perceptual constitution (that is, bringing to manifestation) of spatial objects will be explored in more detail in the fourth chapter, but the basic idea should be clear. Material things are always and essentially perceptually given in a perspectival manner, and part of what this means is that they are experienced as inhabiting certain determinations—such as ‘to my right,’ ‘above my knee,’ or ‘out of reach’—that can only be described as quasi-spatial relations to ‘me’: that is, to my lived-body as an integrated totality of (multi-sensory) perceptual organs. Husserl is, therefore, suggesting that the depiction of the pure ego as an identical centre of emanation for diverse subjective functions derives from an analogy with the bodily self as an identical orienting centre for diverse spatial determinations. However, simply drawing this analogy does not yet establish its veracity; for that would require a demonstration that an analogous centring can actually be found in attentiveness. Husserl’s elaboration of the second source of the simile in the passage cited above attempts the beginnings of such a demonstration, by highlighting an analogy between, on the one hand, the dynamic relationship between bodily self and perceptual object, and on the other, the process of attending and the enrichment of apprehension. The thought here is that, just as our perceptual sense of an object is enriched as the bodily self acquires a greater spatial proximity to the thing perceived, something similar occurs in our attentive apprehension of the object attended to, which is similarly enriched, and approximates an ideal of complete apprehension, through the progressive process of attending. However, as he then observes, identifying this similarity alone falls short of adequately demonstrating the existence of a central point in attention, analogous to an embodied pole of orientation. In fact, it does not get us much further than the non-egological account of attention offered in Logische Untersuchungen. Accordingly, a reliance on these two origins of the conception alone threatens to undermine the basic tenet of his account of the pure ego: that the I is not in all respects an interpersonal achievement, since its basic form can already be discerned ‘primordially,’ that is, solely through a reflective investigation of pure consciousness. Fortunately, in the lines that follow Husserl suggests that a way out of this impasse may be available:

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2  The Pure Ego: Self-Consciousness, Attention, and Emotion Let us take the field of sensuously appearing thing-objects that, as sensuously appearing, are given in orientation, for it is here that the congruency becomes intelligible. There, the courses of adaption (my movements) pertain to the constitution of the thing. It is in parallel with such courses that I apprehend ever more of the thing, and that apprehending is, primordially, a process of attending. This appears to offer us a way to comprehend the ­ego-­centralisation as somewhat analogous to the parallel orientation and, as may be the case, intertwined with it (Hua IV/V 609 [1915-1918]; cf. Hua IV 106).

It must be admitted that this indication of a path towards securing the analogy between the two (purported) centralisations—the orientation of sensuous phenomena in relation to the central lived-body, and the egocentricity of attention—is somewhat opaque, and accordingly permits differing interpretations. In a careful reading of this manuscript that pursues its thematic commonalities with a number of other Husserlian texts from the same period, Marbach has argued that Husserl’s considerations here hinge upon the observation that the series of progressively attending and the series of embodied orientations proceed in parallel in concrete episodes of attentive perception (Marbach 1974, pp.  161–162). It is this parallelism, on Marbach’s reading, that allows Husserl to reaffirm his confidence in the applicability of the image of a central point, derived from the bodily self, to the process of attention. However, what such a consideration actually demonstrates is only that attentiveness and bodily motility are intertwined elements of the unitary process of embodied perception; and this discovery ultimately undermines rather than supports the claim that a central ego inheres within the attentive process: “What becomes still more certain here, as Husserl brings to bear in this text, is that, in the focus on the matter, the parallel series which become congruent—the series of orientation and the series of attention in the case of apprehending sensuously appearing thing-­ objects—ultimately comprise the unitary perceptual process of thing-constitution: this is a unitary apprehending of the thing that runs its course in the series of orientation. In this undifferentiated, simple process there is no distinctive “ego-centre” of attention to be found alongside the lived-body” (Marbach 1974, p. 163). While I find much of value in Marbach’s analysis, it seems to me quite possible that it overlooks the decisive point in Husserl’s analogy between bodily orientation and the ego of attentiveness. To my mind, when Husserl highlights the congruence between the role of movement in the perceptual constitution of spatial phenomena and the process of attending, he should be understood as drawing attention to a spontaneous dynamism, or basic agency, operative in the underlying embodied-­ perceptual constitution of spatial objects and in the specifically egoic attentiveness alike. As will be explored further in subsequent chapters, Husserl maintains that a certain free mobility of the lived-body as totality of sense-organs is necessarily involved with the perceptual exhibition of real things (Hua IV/V 43–44 [1912]; cf. Hua IV 56–57).25 This claim is developed in Ideen II, where Husserl also argues that the spontaneity of kinaesthetic courses is essentially linked to the lived-body becoming “the bearer of the pole of orientation, of the Here and Now out of which the pure

 For a slightly different response to Marbach’s critical analysis of Husserl’s attribution of egocentricity to attentive experiences, see Zahavi (2020, pp. 152–156).

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ego intuits space and the entire world of the senses” (Hua IV/V 43 [1912]; cf. Hua IV 56). A similar emphasis on dynamism and agency is present in Husserl’s account of the pure ego as pole of engagement. In particular, his analysis underscores that the pure ego is spontaneous, not only in discrete acts, but also in its very shifting between the immediately possible noeses that comprise its field of freedom (Hua IV/V 6–7, 306–307 [1912, 1915]; cf. Hua IV 108–109; Hua III/1 179/Husserl 2014, pp. 154)—which, as we will see below, does not at all exclude that the ego often merely surrenders its attention to the alluring character of something passively affecting it. To see how this emphasis on dynamism might lend support to the Husserlian thesis that a pure ego is centrally engaged in attention, we can again briefly return to the experiential character of attentive perception. In the process of attentively perceiving something, it seems incorrect to say that we are dealing with a wholly passive perceptual episode. And it also seems unsatisfactory to contend that the kind of engagement involved with attentive perception merely entails a specific style of bodily activity; after all, our attentiveness can also hold sway in intentional lived-experiences, such as recollection, in which our current kinaesthetic mobility plays a far weaker role. Accordingly, the specificity of attentive perception—in contrast to unthematic forms of perceptual givenness— suggests that, in tandem with the kinaesthetic engagement, a distinctively egoic or subjective dimension of active engagement is simultaneously in play.26 In attentive perception, that is, our advertence to the object does not merely function as an accentuating gleam that makes no contribution to the apprehensive process as such. Rather, at least in thematic and epistemically interested perception, the progressive apprehension of the object is itself something that is, so to speak, attentively enacted; and one (distinctively Husserlian) way of understanding this is to say that a certain spontaneous agency permeates both the egoic process of attending and the kinaesthetic process of embodied perceiving. Appreciating this dynamic and agentive character of attentiveness is, I think, crucial if we are to fully comprehend the subjectivity alive in attention. Moreover, the dynamic character of attending and perceiving alike is not only testimony to their intertwinement in concrete episodes of attentive perception, for it also reveals the essential analogy between the pure ego as pole of attention and the lived-body as pole of orientation. We could put it this way: Just as bringing a spatial object to manifestation in perception is originally achieved through the spontaneous movement of the bodily pole of orientation itself (i.e., the adaptive kinaesthetic courses), the progressive apprehending of a thing is originally achieved through the spontaneous shifting of the pure ego’s attentive focus into new intentional

 Compare Hua III/1  211/Husserl 2014, p.  182. It should be emphasised that the attentiveness analysed in this section is exclusively attention in the particular mode wherein a perceived object is explicitly apprehended by the ego. This selective focus bears emphasising, not only because explicit, egoic attention can be oriented towards objects that are not currently perceptually given, but also because a compelling phenomenological case can be made for other kinds of attentiveness – such as the “dispositional orientation” and “passive discernment” analysed in Steinbock (2004) – that do not involve the pure ego in the same way.

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experiences (i.e., the process of attending). In other words, Husserl can be understood as proposing, in this manuscript, that an indispensable phenomenological motivation for ascribing a centralisation, akin to the embodied pole of orientation, to the pure ego engaged in attending, is that in in both cases we are dealing with a pole that ‘faces beyond itself’ and at the same time ‘sets itself in motion.’ The essential differences between bodily and egoic polarity notwithstanding, in either case we can broadly say that the pole concerned is one that, on the one hand, entails a certain intentional proximity within a horizon of what is relatively distant, and on the other hand, spontaneously engages itself into ever new intentional relations. However, if the depiction of the pure ego as a central pole of attentive engagement is to plausibly be supported by an appeal to a kind of dynamic or mobile spontaneity operative in processes of attending, then the precise character of such spontaneous dynamism calls for urgent clarification. More specifically, the dynamism that is decisive for this depiction cannot simply be equated with the shape of subjective engagement that is found in thematic and epistemically interested attention. After all, in this particular variety of attentive occupation, the twists and turns of attentiveness are embedded within an overarching project that we are undertaking, insofar as our attentive engagement is teleologically guided by our governing interest in perceptually apprehending the object in a sufficiently adequate manner. But there are – as anyone who has attempted an arduous task knows well – many cases where we are not so much guiding our attention, purposively orienting it towards a particular end, as letting it wander or be captured. When this happens, the attending ego is not exactly actively carrying out its own goal-oriented task; instead, as the ego turns towards something that affects it and diverts its focus, it passively follows an allure (Reiz) that reaches it from the unthematic background of consciousness (see, e.g., Hua IV/V 248, 530, 534 [1914/1915, 1917, 1917]; cf. Hua IV 317, 213, 338, 337). Now, if conceiving of the pure ego as a central pole of attentiveness rests upon understanding it as focal point of dynamic engagement in attentive acts of every kind, then we can now see that what acquires a decisive significance is the possibility that the ego manifests a certain kind of subjective agency even when it merely surrenders its attention to something alluring it, something that emerges in passivity as affecting the attentive ego in a particularly forceful manner. And indeed, in his discussion of the pure ego in Ideen II, Husserl cautiously affirms such a possibility: In a certain sense, in its “directedness” to one and the same thing the pure ego is ever a free ego; on the other hand, the depiction of the ego as “directing itself” is imperfect as a descriptive device. To be sure, in a certain general sense, the ego directs itself in every case to the object, but there are times when, in a special sense, an ego-ray springs forth from the pure ego and goes towards the object, and there are times when counter-rays, as it were, issue from the object and come back to the ego. (…) The pure ego does not only hold sway in individual acts as implementing, as engaged, as suffering. Free and yet attracted by the object, it goes forth from act to act, and it experiences allures from the objects constituted in the “background.” It experiences the allures without simultaneously following them, it allows them to intensify, to knock at the door of consciousness; and then it surrenders, perhaps even “without hesitation,” turning from one object to the other (Hua IV/V 306-307/ Hua IV 98-99, transl. modified [1915]).

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Why does Husserl ascribe a certain kind of (pure) egoic agency or freedom to the process of merely surrendering our focus to something that passively affects us? We can shed some light on Husserl’s position by turning to his claim that, when something emerging in the background of consciousness interrupts our current thematic concern and calls for our attention, what thereby affects us is, for the most part, configured with a certain sense  – and implicitly taken to exist  – even before we direct our focus towards it. For example, when my attention is caught by the emerging sound of sirens blaring outside, a certain construal (Auffassung) of the blaring sirens is already in play—such that what is pregiven in the background of consciousness is not a mere impressional episode, devoid of all act-intentionality. This background construal of the sirens is operative before my attention shifts, before I enact an attentive apprehension (Erfassung) of the sirens, and certainly before any further activity in which I contemplate what broader circumstances the apprehended sirens might indicate. Husserl ultimately argues that a genetic-phenomenological approach is needed if we are to adequately clarify what this background construal involves, how it becomes possible in the first place, and finally how pregiven objectivities can become affectively salient so as to capture our attention. While a detailed consideration of Husserl’s genetic explorations of passivity and affection would lead us too far afield, what is of most significance in the present context is the genetic-­ phenomenological thesis that, when a pre-attentive construal emerges in the unthematic background of consciousness, this construal necessarily points back to an earlier act of attentive apprehension, an act that has become sedimented within the passive background of consciousness. More specifically, once an impressional episode has affected the ego and allured it to carry out an attentive act of apprehending – whereby an object with a certain sense is doxically accepted by the ego in an explicit fashion  – then it essentially holds that, if a similar impressional episode subsequently emerges, it will be passively configured in such a way that what is pregiven – what emerges unthematically in the background of consciousness – is not merely an impressional episode after all, but something already intentionally construed before I turn towards and explicitly apprehend it.27 Moreover, what passively emerges in background-consciousness under these circumstances is pregiven with an intentional sense that derives from, and points back to, the original act of apprehension (Hua IV/V 274–275, 526–527, 533–534 [1915, 1917, 1917]; cf. Hua IV 23–24, 333–334, 337). In other words, if we had never before attentively apprehended anything akin to a blaring siren, then no auditory-impressional episode would be able to emerge unthematically as blaring siren. Or as Husserl puts it: “A subject of consciousness that had never yet “perceived” a tone, that had therefore never apprehended, on its own behalf, a tone as an object—to such a subject no

 In his genetic analyses of passivity, Husserl reaches the conclusion that even episodes of livedexperience which are exclusively sensory or impressional  – in the sense that they are not (yet) configured intentionally through currently actual or sedimented egoic apprehensions – involve the passive pregivenness of what is foreign to the ego without yet being an intentional object (see Hua IV/V 533 [1917]; cf. Hua IV 336). I briefly return to this point at the end of this section.

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object-tone could impose itself it as object. But the apprehension (Erfassung) implemented at one time can become mere construal (Auffassung) of an object without the intentionality of turning-towards, whether in the form of memory of the same tone or in the form of a background-consciousness of a newly sounding tone” (Hua IV/V 274–275 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 23). The import of these genetic considerations for our present concern is that they enable us to understand the sense in which the pure ego manifests a certain agency in simply surrendering its attention to something that captures it.28 When something forcefully affects us as, so to speak, demanding our attention, then that which affects is, for the most part, already passively associated with – and intentionally construed in relation to – an object to which we have previously attended. And as soon as it is realised that the intentionalities operating in the background of consciousness necessarily point back to earlier acts of attentive apprehension, it becomes clear that the background construals are always lived through by the pure ego as potential avenues for its thematic engagement. In the specific case where something is not merely unthematically construed in the background of consciousness, but also forcefully affects the ego as alluring its attention, we can also say that the ego experiencing this allure is, in turn, presently inclined to direct its attention to the alluring object; and this possible shift of attentiveness is delineated for the ego by the background-­ construal of the affecting object, insofar as this construal necessarily points back to an original apprehension that the ego is now inclined to reactivate.29 What becomes evident here is the that the generic manner in which the pure ego is free or agentive in its shifting into new acts amounts to a sense of freedom or agency that is – like the pure ego itself – highly formal and minimal. The pure ego is ever free, as it turns from one act-implementation to another, only in a somewhat indeterminate sense: namely, in the sense that, by shifting its attention, the ego actively implements an intentional lived-experience that was already lying dormant – and yet available for egoic actualisation – in the unthematic background of

 In a complementary analysis that engages with discussions of cognitive phenomenology from contemporary philosophy of mind, Jansen (2016) argues that the forms of subjective agency involved with attention – whether the more robust agency involved with epistemically interested attentiveness, or the simple agency manifest in cases where our attention merely follows the pull of an alluring object  – demonstrate that cognitive accomplishments are essentially embedded within the experiential life of a (self-aware) conscious subject. 29  Husserl dramatically expresses this line of thought as follows: “The ego always lives in the medium of its “history,” all its earlier instances of living have sunk down and have a lasting effect in tendencies, in sudden ideas, in transformations of earlier instances of living – or regenerations, assimilations of them  – into new formations, fused together from such assimilations. (…) And almost every act has its side of nature, insofar as the implementation of earlier similar acts ushers with it an associative tendency, a tendency of nature, to implement it again. That is, what is present under the given circumstances of affection is a reproductive tendency directed at the reproduction of the same act-comportment implemented earlier, and not only directed at its reproduction but also at one and the same act-comportment itself.” (Hua IV/V 531 [1917]; cf. Hua IV 338–339). 28

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consciousness.30 This shifting of focus, and the simple ‘freedom’ it exhibits, occurs in subjective processes that are plausibly understood as lacking freedom or agency in a more robust sense, as is highlighted by those cases where our attention merely follows the pull of an alluring object. Indeed, a contention emerges here which the sixth chapter will elaborate in detail, namely that a phenomenological analysis of freedom or subjective agency which moves beyond this minimal sense of freedom – what we could term pure freedom – must, in turn, operate with a conception of the self as engaged in another, more comprehensive way—in other words, a conception of the self as personal subject, rather than as formal pole of activities and affections. I have argued thus far that Husserl’s conception of the pure ego as central pole of attentive engagement (and affection) is phenomenologically grounded through the insight that every currently actualised act of attentive apprehension is necessarily surrounded by a field of latent (i.e., potentially actualisable and implicitly functioning) attentive acts. Since every latent act of attending within this field is tacitly conscious as immediately available for actualisation, it is evidently a field that delineates the shifts of attention that are currently possible. And the distinction emerging here between the attentiveness currently actualised and the nexus of potential attentive shifts engulfing it – a distinction which, as Husserl highlights, belongs to the very structure of all attentive perception (Hua III/1 71–72, 182–183, 257/Husserl 2014, pp. 60–61, 211–213, 221) – cannot be described in a phenomenologically concrete fashion unless reference is made to an attending subject whose current focus is embedded in a field of agentive possibilities. However, to fully address the spontaneity of perceptual attention, what still needs to be made explicit is the precise way in which the pure ego is spontaneously engaged in a currently actual act of attentive apprehension. To address this issue, we only need return to Ideen I, where Husserl argues that the attentive implementation of perceptual intentionality is synonymous with the ego doxically accepting a perceptual object. When we turn towards and perceptually apprehend an object, we are not merely engaged in shifting our attention, but also in accepting the existence of whatever now stands before us with a concrete perceptual sense (Sinn). That is, while objects appearing in the perceptual background are implicitly taken to exist, through a kind of latent perceptual doxa, it is only when our attention focusses on them that this perceptual belief becomes something explicit and currently actual (Hua III/1 256, 257/Husserl 2014, pp. 220, 221). In Ideen II, Husserl describes the element of doxic positing that is actually operative in all attentive perceiving as the most primitive variety of egoic spontaneity, and argues that the ray of ego-activity

 Husserl formulates this thought in the Bleistiftmanuskript as follows: “The ego holds sway only in the implementation, only in the genuine cogitationes; but it can pass its focus through anything that can simply absorb the ego-focus. (…) By virtue of the polarity that belongs to the essence of the cogito, the wakeful ego is related to the objectivities of the cogitationes which it implements in a currently actual manner. (…) But this holds in a potential manner for the objects of those unimplemented noeses that lie dormant in the background and that, so to speak, make up the field of freedom of the ego; and the objects of these unimplemented noeses form the field of focus of the ego.” (Hua IV/V 6–7 [1912]; cf. Hua IV/V 315–316/Hua IV 108–109 [1915]). See also: Hua III/1 71–73, 179, 214–215/Husserl 2014, pp. 60–62, 154, 184–185.

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found here is essential to all genuine receptivity, being what distinguishes it from the sheer passivity of affection.31 He occasionally goes so far as to describe the primitive doxic spontaneity inherent to all attentive perceiving as a “stance” or “instance of position-taking” (Stellungnahme). However, he cautions that that the latter characterisation is only permissible if the concept of position-taking is understood in a maximally broad sense, such that it embraces the simple element of belief already inherent within our underlying perceptual apprehendings, in contrast to a more precise notion that refers only to stances that we take towards pre-constituted objects (such as the varieties of emotional position-taking discussed in the next section), or to the kind of position-taking that occurs when we doxically affirm or negate matters whose existence has become questionable for us (Hua III/1 263, 238–239/Husserl 2014, p.  227, 205–206; cf. Hua XLIII/2 334–335, Hua IV/V 351–352/Hua IV 112 [1914–1916]).32 At this stage, one might nevertheless wonder what grounds there are for understanding the ego that actively implements an attentive apprehension as being the very same self that pre-reflectively lives through (its own) lived-experiences in a temporally articulated fashion. To address this issue, it must be emphasised that egoically implemented acts of attentive apprehension are themselves lived as temporally qualified episodes of lived-experience, and that they are accordingly pre-­ reflectively manifest in inner (time-)consciousness. When our perceptual focus is occupied by something, what we live through pre-reflectively is precisely the perceptual cogito itself—that is, the attentive process wherein an object appearing with a perceptual sense is taken to exist (Hua IV/V 310–311, 349–350 [1915, 1914–1916]; cf. Hua IV 102–103, 118–119). The element of simple positing inherent to the act of perceptual apprehension does not miraculously exist beyond inner time-­ consciousness, but is rather an inherent aspect of the experiential episode manifest in pre-reflective self-awareness. It is on the basis of this pre-reflective self-­ manifestation of attentive perceiving that, on those occasions where we reflect upon our perceptual apprehension, we immediately discern it to be an attentive (rather than an unthematic) mode of perceiving. And not only that, for we also discern, and with equal immediacy, the minimal pole of agency that implements this

 As Husserl writes: “The subject is receptive when it simply takes up a possession, apprehending it and directing its attention towards it.” (Hua IV/V 575 [1915–1917]). And: “The lowest level of spontaneity or activity is “receptivity,” and I sometimes believe that the constitution of space (thus even the constitution of the schema) already presupposes this lowest level of spontaneity.” (Hua IV/V 529 [1917]; cf. Hua IV 335). See also: Hua IV/V 275–276, 248 [1915, 1914/1915] (cf. Hua IV 24, 213); Hua XLIII/2 98. 32  For more detailed examinations of the manner in which the receptivity of attentive perception entails a self that actively takes a stance, in the broad and basic sense highlighted here, see Jacobs (2016a, 2021). On the narrow and broad senses of position-taking employed by Husserl, see Drummond (2007, pp. 165–166) and, in particular, Jacobs (2016a, 2016b, 2021). For a rich account of position-taking and selfhood that ultimately offers a somewhat different reading to Jacobs and Drummond, building upon Husserl’s ethical, political, metaphysical, and religious writings in addition to his more theoretically constrained analyses of the self and its modes of engagement, see Hart (1992, pp. 50–146). 31

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attentiveness: that is, the self or ego currently attending (Hua IV/V 308–309 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 100–101). A way of reformulating this point that ultimately clarifies matters further is to say that the active engagement that the pure ego exhibits in implementing attentive acts is concretely founded upon the temporally articulated self-manifestation found everywhere in the life of consciousness. Husserl can be understood as drawing our attention to this point when he writes that the implementation of acts is itself a particular manner or mode in which the pure ego is living through (Wie im Icherleben) its intentional lived-experiences, namely the manner of actualisation (Aktualität). In contrast, the perceptual construals forming the perceptual background are lived through by the ego in the manner of non-actualisation or latency (Inaktualität, Verborgenheit) (Hua IV/V 307–308 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 99–100). In fact, it is with regard to such background construals that we arrive at something mentioned at the very beginning of this section, namely the broader concept of intentional act that Husserl innovates in Ideen I. In that work, after reaching the conclusion that every intentional act essentially involves a positional element, Husserl ultimately acknowledges that the background-intentionalities operative in the extra-thematic field of intentional consciousness harbour an implicit and latent positionality with respect to what appears in them. They therefore deserve to be classified as latent or unimplemented acts, and this entails a concept of act that is broader than the cogito—since the latter concept refers uniquely to intentional lived-experiences whose thetic component is actually implemented by the ego (Hua III/1 §115). We can therefore say that the difference at the pre-reflective level between, on the one hand, the self-awareness that manifests actualised perceptual acts, and on the other hand, the self-awareness pertaining to perceptual intentionalities that are latent but implicitly operative (and that are therefore acts in the ‘broader sense’ only), is a difference with two aspects. On the one hand, a distinction can be drawn with respect to the kind of act that is lived through in either case (i.e., attentive or non-attentive), and on the other hand, a correlative distinction emerges with respect to the manner in which the pure ego lives through the intentional lived-experience (i.e., current actualisation or latent non-actualisation). However, not only do these two distinctions always and essentially coincide, but they also simply capture two sides of a single difference within the structure of egoic lived-experiencing. In other words, ‘egoic actualisation of perceptual intentionality’ and ‘the inner consciousness of attentive perceiving’ are descriptions that abstractively identify two distinct aspects of a single mode of egoic lived-experiencing—and the same applies with respect to the descriptions ‘egoic non-actualisation of perceptual intentionality’ and ‘the inner consciousness of background quasi-perceiving.’33

 In Husserl’s words, “the distinction between actuality and inactuality refers to intentional livedexperiences that differ in their essential structure, and consequently it at once refers to a distinction, inseparable from the differing lived-experiences, with respect to the how, the manner, in which the ego is living through the lived-experiences.” (Hua IV/V 307–308 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 100).

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This last point does not entail, however, that the basic subjectivity of experience which inner (time-)consciousness passively generates should be simply identified with (actual or potential) egoic implementation. Differentiating between these two levels of subjective involvement in experience obviously remains necessary if we are to account for the self-awareness and experiential subjectivity found in lived-­ experiences that are not lived through as intentional acts at all. The fact remains that there are certain sensory experiences where we – like the child hearing a siren for the first time – are affected by something foreign to the ego (ichfremd) that is not intentionally prefigured through background construals; and such experiences involve us, as experiencing subjects, in the mode of self-affection alone. More precisely, while such pure affections are devoid of any explicit or implicit positionality and thus act-intentionality, they are nevertheless experiences that the experiencing subject lives through and that announce something foreign to it, and that can accordingly be classified as events of auto- and hetero-affection (Hua IV/V 533 [1917]; cf. Hua IV 336).34 Furthermore, the non-active variety of subjective involvement present in these cases also pervades all egoic acts, insofar as such acts necessarily involve a fundamental dimension of passivity (Hua IV/V 246 [1914/1915]; cf. Hua IV 213). However, the experiencing subject lives through its acts in an active as well as a passive fashion; and when it does this, it manifests a variety of experiential involvement irreducible to mere self-affection. Furthermore, appreciating that the pure ego is concretely founded upon the experiential subjectivity of inner time-consciousness enables a reappraisal of a further, so far underemphasised, aspect of Husserl’s account: namely, his claim that the pure ego diachronically persists, throughout the life of consciousness, as a formal pole of identity. We have already seen that Husserl’s analyses call into question the contention that the pure ego is, during any particular experiential phase, immersed only in the intentional act which it is then punctually implementing. When I progressively focus my visual gaze and tactile grasp on the manifold patches of the bicycle tire, or when I let my attention wander over to the clamour emerging from the street below, then the attentional gestalt into which my focus now shifts is one that was previously implied, as a possibility for my imminent attentive engagement. When it comes to discrete and continuous phases of attentive engagement, then, there are compelling phenomenological grounds for understanding the attending subject as a numerically identical pole of engagement. Within attentive episodes, the non-­mundane ego engaged therein does not arise and perish along with every currently implemented act; on the contrary, it merely traverses a horizon of (its own) attentive possibilities, a horizon which belongs to the essential structure of all attentive engagement. However, it is clear that further considerations will be needed in order to support ascribing a more demanding sense of diachronic identity to the pure ego. On what grounds can someone legitimately understand themselves as one and the same formal agent who, in their childhood, was fascinated by the spectacle of fireworks for the first time; who later became viscerally cognisant of the appalling disparities of

 For Husserl’s account of the interdependence of self-affection and hetero-affection, see Zahavi (2020, pp. 118–131).

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wealth in the society around them; and who is presently occupied with philosophically contemplating the elusive character of the self? The response to this question offered by Husserl’s reflections on the pure ego draws upon the phenomenological character of episodic memory (Hua IV/V 308–309/Hua IV 101 [1915]).35 When remembering an earlier episode of engaged conscious experience, the very episode remembered becomes reproductively conscious for the experiencing subject. Moreover, when this happens, it is not as if the subjective involvement that pervaded the experience when it was first lived is somehow stripped away. Nor is it the case that the experiencing subject of the remembered experience is manifest as an anonymous “someone” without any connection to the remembering subject. Rather, when I remember an earlier episode of attentive experience, the latter is reproductively conscious as a past experiential episode that was experientially manifest for and carried out by me. On this basis, it is always possible for the ego to perform a further reflective step, whereby it explicitly focusses on the diachronic identity, already implicitly manifest in memory, of remembering ego and ego remembered, and thereby “apprehends itself as temporally enduring from past now until the actual fleeting present-now” (Hua IV/V 309/Hua IV 101, transl. modified [1915]). While this simple exercise is phenomenological reflection elegantly illustrates the phenomenological evidence for the diachronic identity of the pure ego, a richer understanding of how this formal persistence is possible emerges when we consider the relationship between the pure ego and time-consciousness. As was highlighted in the previous section, the abiding form of time-consciousness is, of its own accord, capable of generating a diachronically persistent subjectivity, for whom every occurrent experience is lived within a temporal horizon. This abiding form of self-­ affection accounts for the very self-constitution and primitive individuation of the stream of consciousness. And not only that, it generates the most basic dimension of subjective involvement, manifest in occurrent and remembered experiences alike, and upon which egoic agency is concretely founded and intertwined. It is on this basis that Husserl can write that the pure ego possesses identity only within immanent time, and that the temporalising self-constitution of the stream of consciousness makes possible the constitution of egoic identity (Hua IV/V 311, 352/Hua IV 103, 112–113 [1915, 1914–1916]).36 In short, whereas memory plays an irreplaceable role in thematically disclosing the diachronic identity of the pure ego, the very persistence of the pure ego as formal agent is rooted in the pre-memorial level of inner time-consciousness.

 See also: Hua IV/V 346–353 [1914–1916]; cf. Hua IV 116–119, 111–113. For Husserl’s account of memory as involving an implicit awareness of oneself as formally identical agent, see Jacobs (2010b, pp. 350–352). Regarding Husserl’s account of memory and its relationship to time-consciousness, see Brough (1975). 36  For an argument that the numerical identity of the (minimal) self over time is generated by inner time-consciousness, see Drummond (2021a). A similar proposal is defended in Zahavi (2014, pp. 63–77), although the latter discussion focuses on the diachronic unity of the minimal self that is explicitly manifest in memory (rather than numerical identity per se). 35

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2.4  T  he Pure Ego as Pole of Engagement (II): Spontaneity in Emotion Husserl’s phenomenological analyses yield the conclusion that is not only in the specific case of perceptually attending that the pure ego can be discerned as operating as a pole of engagement. This is not only because an attentive focus can, of course, also hold sway in varieties of intentional lived-experience that must be distinguished from sensory perception, such as recollection, imagination, or image-­ consciousness (see, e.g., Hua III/1 212/Husserl 2014, p. 182).37 What is more to the point is that the cogito – that is, the intentional act in the narrow and genuine sense introduced in the previous section – is not entirely synonymous with attentive apprehension, for the latter is merely one way in which the pure ego actively functions within its intentional lived-experiences. That is, Husserl’s analyses reveal that distinctive dimensions of egoic engagement function in various intentional acts and processes, and a particularly significant case of this is provided by the stances or instances of position-taking (die Stellungnahmen). We saw in the previous section that egoically implemented acts of perceptual apprehension can, by virtue of their dimension of doxic positionality or acceptance, already be characterised as doxic stances in a broad sense. But beyond the sphere of perceptual apprehension, varieties of position-taking emerge which are founded upon such attentiveness, and which similarly manifest the pure ego as their agent of implementation. These founded stances include such active experiential processes as passing judgement over an object apprehended, emotionally valuing something (or somebody), and deciding to carry out a course of action (Hua IV/V 313, 349–353, 265 [1915, 1914–1916, 1915]; cf. Hua IV 105, 117–119, 111–113).38 Husserl argues that doxic attentiveness necessarily plays an underlying role in egoic processes of this kind, for it is only through

 As Steinbock (2004, pp. 32–33) and Jacobs (2010a, pp. 186–187) vividly demonstrate, perceiving and remembering are very frequently intertwined in concrete episodes of attentiveness. A rich literary illustration of such intertwining—that also points towards the role of attention in emotive experiences—can be found in the following lines from Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red: “Thinking of my childhood, I allowed my attention to be absorbed by the furniture and objects within the house. From twelve years ago, I still remember the blue kilim from Kula covering the floor, the copper ewer, the coffee set and tray, the copper pail and the delicate coffee cups that had come all the way from China by way of Portugal, as my late aunt had boasted numerous times. These effects, like the low X-shaped reading desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the stand for a turban nailed to the wall, the red velvet pillow whose smoothness I recalled as soon as I touched it, were from the house in Aksaray where I’d passed my childhood with Shekure, and they still carried something of the bliss of my days of painting in that house.” (Pamuk 2001, pp. 38–39) 38  See also Hua III/1 263 ff., 214/Husserl 2014, pp. 227ff., 184–185. A further variety of positiontaking emerges in contexts where the ego is required to decisively affirm or negate, on the basis of deliberation, an intentional stance that had initially emerged in a pre-deliberative fashion, but that has become questionable as a result of its discordance with other stances that are pre-deliberatively operative. On this issue, see Jacobs (2010b, 2016a). For a closely related issue, namely the role of founding in Husserl’s pluralistic account of (theoretical, axiological, and practical) reason, see Rinofner-Kreidl (2015). 37

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actually apprehending (Erfassen) the matter concerned that the ego has an explicit grasp on what it takes a position towards (Hua III/1 75–77, 214, 216–217/Husserl 2014, pp.  64–66, 184–187). However, the specific contribution of these founded position-takings is the spontaneous adopting of a novel stance, position, or attitude towards what is apprehended. This very spontaneous process is therefore not simply a matter of explicit apprehension, but like such apprehension it has the phenomenological character of an engagement of the pure ego: “An instance of position-taking, that bears the radiating of the ego in itself, is accordingly an act of the ego itself: the ego acts and suffers, is free and conditioned” (Hua III/1 214/Husserl 2014, p. 184, transl. modified). We can illustrate what Husserl has in mind here by turning to a theme from his phenomenological investigations that has received scant attention from his interpreters thus far, namely his attempts to describe a form of position-taking specific to emotional life.39 This theme surfaces in Ideen I, where we find Husserl arguing that, in episodes of explicit emotional intentionality, a kind of twofold directedness of the pure ego can be discerned. On the one hand, the ego attends to the underlying subject matter (Sache) of its emotive attitude, thereby making salient, to a certain extent, what it is that is targeted by and motivates the emotive stance. On the other hand, the overarching engagement of the pure ego, within the concrete emotive act, is precisely the position-taking process of valuing (the subject matter apprehended); and this dimension of egoic activity is not a process of attending, but of emotively adopting an evaluative stance (towards the subject matter) (Hua III/1 76/Husserl 2014, p. 65; cf. Hua III/1 266–267/Husserl 2014, pp. 229–230; Hua IV/V 265–266 [1915]). As Husserl emphasises in Ideen II, moreover, in the most explicit instances of emotional intentionality the pure ego “lives” in the emotive activity of valuing in a “pre-eminent” fashion. In other words, here the overall intentional engagement of the ego is not primarily theoretically or practically oriented, but rather operates under what Husserl calls “the axiological attitude.” This entails that the spontaneities of emotive valuing represent the pure ego’s primary thematic concern or  For exceptions, however, see the brief discussion provided in Jardine (2020a, pp. 60–61, 2020b, p. 321), and the compact but illuminating treatment of emotional position-taking in Melle (2012, pp. 80, 82–83, 94–98, 2019, pp. 203–206). The relative silence in the secondary literature concerning Husserl’s emphasis on the stance or position-taking character of emotions renders intelligible – which is not to say correct – the recent claim by Müller that Husserl (like Meinong, but unlike von Hildebrand) understands “emotions as a kind of perception or intuition of value” and accordingly as devoid of position-taking (Müller 2020, p. 116). The compelling, Husserl-inspired account of the emotions that Drummond has set out in numerous publications (see, in particular, Drummond 2004, 2006b, 2013, 2018, 2020)  – an account which develops and further motivates Husserl’s claim that emotions are bodily evaluations which respond to the non-axiological significance of the matters they target – could be understood as implicitly elaborating Husserl’s account of the attitudinal or stance character of emotional intentionality, although Drummond avoids the terminology of position-taking due to its association with judgement (see Drummond 2006b, p. 25 n.). While I am in full agreement with Drummond’s concern with sharply distinguishing emotional valuing from the position-taking of judgement, I hope to demonstrate here that there is nevertheless something to be gained from an explicit focus on Husserl’s account of what taking a stance can entail in the emotional sphere specifically. 39

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“interest.” Whatever spontaneities of attention and thinking the subject implements while in the axiological-emotive attitude are, accordingly, either momentary deviations from, or positively subordinated to, the axiological “theme.” Episodes of pre-­ eminent emotive engagement of this kind are to be contrasted with cases in which the emotive spontaneities simply occur alongside a dominant theoretical focus, or merely serve as a source of motivations for a governing interest in practical deliberation and intentional action (Hua IV/V 267–269 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 11–13).40 Now, Husserl’s egological model of explicit emotional intentionality—that is, his characterisation of thematic emotive consciousness as a process of evaluative position-taking, implemented or accomplished by the pure ego—is bound to strike some readers as a likely case of intellectualist preconceptions standing in for the labour of painstaking phenomenological analysis. To begin with, it is initially tempting to understand the claim that emotional comportment is suffused with (evaluative) ego-spontaneity as an endorsement of what we would today call a strongly cognitivist account of the emotions (cf. Solomon 1976, Nussbaum 2001), that is, as stipulating that emotions are states of mind whose intentional character and accomplishment is essentially reducible to a core (value-)judgement. To my mind, this reading would have troubling implications for Husserl’s account of emotional intentionality, insofar as cognitivism in the philosophy of emotion has been convincingly objected to on the basis of its phenomenological implausibility (see Drummond 2013, 2018). Furthermore, Husserl’s emphasis on spontaneity could quite naturally be taken to imply a highly voluntaristic conception of emotional life—in other words, an understanding of emotions as wilfully adopted ‘stances’ that are freely chosen by their subject. These two (mis)apprehensions of Husserl’s account would at least have the merit of cohering somewhat well with one another. While emotional cognitivism does not by necessity entail a voluntaristic understanding of emotional position-taking (or vice versa), it is no accident that its proponents have, at times, also endorsed such a picture.41 However, a closer examination of Husserl’s writings on emotional experience, particularly those recently published in the Second Volume of Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, reveals that both assumptions must be decisively rejected. To begin with, it is crucial to explicitly emphasise something that the preceding section  It is pertinent to ask whether it makes sense to speak of the subject that is “interested,” in the sense described here, as the pure ego, or whether it is rather the case that such interests pertain only to the subject when it is thematised as concrete person (or perhaps, in another context, as transcendental subjectivity). It is clear that Husserl endorses the former position (Hua IV/V 263–264, 307, 313 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 4–5, 99, 105), and this claim can be motivated when we note that the “interests” under consideration here are simply structural features of thematic egoic engagement. We are accordingly dealing with a far more generic and formal phenomenon than the concretely personal interests considered in the sixth chapter. 41  See, in particular, Solomon (1973). This provocatively voluntaristic account of emotional attitudes was somewhat tempered in Solomon (1976), and in the appendix to his original article provided in Solomon (1980). Nussbaum’s account of emotions as value-judgements, on the other hand, explicitly takes a different approach to Solomon’s Sartre-inspired account of emotional valuing (see Nussbuam 2001, p. 22 n. 2). 40

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should have already made clear: namely, that Husserl’s conception of egoic spontaneity is not exclusively tied to the sphere of judgement, but is rather a polyvalent notion encompassing different operations in different contexts. Indeed, as Husserl explicates in a manuscript dating from November 1911, the characterisation of explicit instances of emotive valuing as involving “spontaneity” primarily states that what we are dealing with here are intentional acts in the narrow or “authentic” sense highlighted in the previous section. In other words, episodes of emotional intentionality are spontaneous insofar as they involve “acts springing forth from the ego” (Hua XLIII/2 74 n. 1). Moreover, as he then emphasises, all this need entail is that emotional intentionality in its explicit and spontaneous mode is analogous to the kind of attentive perception discussed in the previous section. In both cases, spontaneity can merely imply a simple turning of the egoic focus that – on the basis of (sensory or affective) passivity – simultaneously (doxically or emotively) characterises what it turns towards (Hua XLIII/2 85–86). In other words, when placed in the context of Husserl’s account of perceptual attention as a pre-judicative mode of doxic spontaneity, any assumption that emotional position-taking must be a matter of (value-)judgement begins to appear highly questionable. But in what sense, then, might we be able to find the spontaneity of egoic position-­ taking within the emotional sphere? And how might such emotive position-­taking contrast with the modes of doxic positionality operative in attention and judgement? For Husserl, the emotive position-takings can be distinguished from comparable spontaneities in the cognitive sphere in both a noematic and a noetic register. On the one hand, the emotive position-takings are the sources of a host of noematic characters which doxic positionality alone simply cannot afford, namely the characters of “being valuable, of valuableness” (Hua III/1 221/Husserl 2014, p. 190; cf. Hua III/1 275/Husserl 2014, p. 237; Hua XLIII/2 69, 124–125; Hua IV/V 267, 590–591 [1915, 1913]; cf. Hua IV 8–9). The noetic aspects intrinsic to emotive spontaneity, on the other hand, are not a matter of doxic acceptance (or of its modifications in doubt, negation, or renewed affirmation), but are rather a particular variety of intentional feeling or, to use a perhaps less misleading phrase, of affective intentionality.42 That is, Husserl’s sustained reflections on emotional experience lead him to the conclusion that a specific variety of affective intentionality – namely, the emotional position-takings – can be insightfully classified as an instance of subjective reaction, in a pre-eminent and phenomenologically clarified sense that does not apply to other (sensory or apperceptive) varieties of affective intentionality. More precisely, the emotional position-takings are embodied stances whereby the ego evaluatively responds to pregiven worldly objects, thereby placing its attentiveness at the service of an overarching emotive-axiological theme (Hua XLIII/2 120–123, 134–136, 174 fn. 3, 155). While a comprehensive investigation of emotional intentionality per se  While Husserl does not yet use the language of emotional position-taking in Logische Untersuchugen, it is notable that the discussion of intentional feelings in that work primarily considers emotional responses that are not only founded upon attentiveness to their object but are themselves, as he at one point notes explicitly, “active” (see Hua XIX/1 403, 407, 409/Husserl 2001b, 107–108, 110, 111).

42

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would require abandoning our present focus on the pure ego, more light will be shed on the distinctive character of emotional position-­taking in the remainder of this section. But what should already be clear is that Husserl’s emphasis on the spontaneous and evaluative dimensions of emotive experience implies a far more subtle and ambitious conception of emotional intentionality than may first appear; and that he is concerned with, not only their similarities and intertwinements, but also the essential differences between emotion and cognition. It was intimated above that while Husserl’s account of emotional life is able to find a place for a certain kind of egoic agency, his conception of emotive spontaneity does not entail an implausible voluntarism. To see why this so, it will be necessary to develop the sense in which, on his account, emotional attitudes comprise a distinctive variety of affective intentionality wherein the emoting subject values one or another pregiven matter. Now, in recent philosophical work on emotion and affect, the concept of affective intentionality is at times used in a broad way, so as to encompass each and every variety of affectivity or feeling that is oriented towards an intentional object.43 Such a conception was certainly not foreign to Husserl, as is demonstrated by his investigations of various modes of affective intentionality that are more ubiquitous and basic than emotional reactions proper.44 However, in his research manuscripts Husserl also analyses a more specific strand of intentional feeling, one that we could term affect-intentionality. In contrast to affective intentionality more broadly, affect-intentionality refers to contexts in which an “affect”— a term that Husserl generally uses to refer to the concrete pattern of bodily feelings involved with a specific emotion or sentiment—is intentionally directed towards an object, person, or situation. This particular theme from Husserl’s studies of emotional life is relevant in the present context due to the emphasis he places in his research manuscripts on experiential episodes where an affect emerges as an egoically implemented intentionality. In a text dating from late 1911, Husserl observes that, in certain cases of affect-intentionality, the affective situation (Gefühlslage) is so fashioned that the ego is immersed in an integrated emotional totality (Gesamtgefühl). This totality of feeling is lived as the affective spreading-out or expansion (affective Ausbreitung)— by way of a pattern of affective sensations with a definite or indefinite bodily localisation—of an emotional core (Kerngefühl), and in such a way that the emotional core serves as the primary intentional vehicle for the emotional totality as a whole.

 See, e.g., Slaby (2008) and Slaby and Stephan (2008). Goldie’s influential concept of feelingtowards constitutes a similarly generalised notion of feeling-intentionality (see Goldie 2000, 2002), and as Drummond (2004) has demonstrated, Goldie’s descriptively rich account of the emotions can be fruitfully brought into dialogue with a Husserlian approach to emotional intentionality. 44  In addition to the analysis offered in this section, see Jardine (2020a, pp.  57–60) for a more explicit discussion of the role played by bodily feelings in value-apperception (Wertapperzeption), and (dis)liking (Gefallen, Missfallen), these being two basic varieties of affective intentionality that are involved with – but can occur independently from – emotional intentionality proper. For Husserl’s account of a related issue, namely the intentionality of moods, see Lee (1998) and Drummond (2020, pp. 246–248). 43

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In the example Husserl considers, the emotional core is an affective act of appreciating (Wohlgefallen) another person that is intertwined with and incorporates an attentive focus on the person and their relevant features. Attentiveness, directly focused intentional feeling, and felt bodily elicitation function together here as distinct but unified aspects of a single experiential whole. And this experiential whole accomplishes a unitary intentional comportment, that in the case under consideration Husserl calls attentive love or, translated more literally, the process of turning towards someone with love (liebende Zuwendung) (Hua XLIII/2 113–114). His analysis concludes as follows: The affect is a unity of manifold feeling. The core within this unity, the appreciation, has a specific intentionality, through which, above all, the turning-oneself-towards takes place. But if the appreciation pulls me, in all my senses, towards the beloved, then every elicitation of passion—as much as they all have to considered precisely elicitations, radiations—nevertheless participates in the turning-towards. If the ego lives in this stream of feeling it, so to speak, expands itself as far the stream reaches, and directs itself to the object through the stream (Hua XLIII/2 114-115).

Husserl reaches a similar conclusion in another manuscript from the same period, highlighting not only the noetic unity of the explicit and ego-involving affect-­ intentionality, but also the affectively enriched noematic correlates of such experiences: Now, the turning-towards-with-passionate love, or the passionate desire, the passionate enjoyment etc., does not consist in turning-towards-with-liking etc. plus a stream of sensory elicitation. While the process of being delighted (das Entzücken) directs itself to the object, while the process of fervent desire directs itself towards something absent, etc., the sensory stream—which, when considered as merely sensory stream, has no such direction at all— precisely co-belongs to the process of directing oneself (Sich-Richtenden). What we are dealing with here is therefore something phenomenologically distinctive; we find, surrounding the act, a certain expansion, a certain radiating stream of elicitation; but one through which the act does not merely obtain a surrounding, but which rather expands and modifies the act itself in a distinctive fashion. The stream and the act are unified as lived-­experience, but in such a way that the stream plays a role akin to that of sensation in the perception of objects, and thus becomes ever more distant from the analogy with intentional lived-experience. It is the process of being delighted, and not a liking without elicitation, that directs itself to the object, and the object does not merely stand there are something liked, but rather (in accordance with the modification of the act) as delightful (Hua XLIII/2 123).

What we see emerging in these passages is a conception of our emotional lives that understands explicit episodes of affect-intentionality—or, to adopt a vocabulary Husserl occasional employs, episodic implementations of reactive emotions (reactive Gefühle) (Hua XLIII/2 115)—as deeply embodied evaluations through which an object or person within one’s intentional focus is encountered as afforded with an emotive character (Gemütscharakter) (Hua XLIII/2 127, 128, 133). On this conception, the type of emotive character instantiated by the object of an episode of affective experience stands in essential correlation with the type of emotion the experiencing subject currently lives through. Thus, in experiences of intentionally focused joy, an entity, event, or situation stands there for us as ‘joyful’; in episodes of attentive love, something or somebody becomes salient as ‘beloved’; whereas the

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object of disgust is experientially characterised as ‘repulsive’ (Hua XLIII/2 112, 132, 113). In order to make explicit the phenomenological grounds for the thought that explicit episodes of reactive emotion involve a crucial element of egoic position-­ taking, we will therefore need to take a closer look at the way in which emotive characters are constituted (that is, brought to manifestation) through emotional intentionality. On the account Husserl develops in the Studien manuscripts, the bringing to manfiestation of emotive characters depends upon two essentially distinct, but experientially unified and intentionally co-functioning, moments of affective intentionality. The first of these two moments is the intentional kernel of the emotional episode, which consists in a core stance of liking or appreciation (Gefallen, Wohlgefallen) — or, alternatively, disliking (Missfallen) — that is oriented towards the underlying subject matter of the emotion. In addition to being an integral aspect of emotional attitudes proper, a stance of liking or appreciation can also operate as a self-standing act; and indeed this occurs whenever anyone recognises a discrete matter as something pleasing or agreeable (to them). A liking of this kind can be directed towards various kinds of intentional object. When attending a musical performance, for instance, my appreciation might focus on the riveting music emanating from the stage, or it may be preoccupied with the sweet stranger who offered me a welcoming grin when I slipped into the crowd; alternatively, my liking may be focussed precisely on tonight’s event as a remarkable social and cultural situation. On Husserl’s account, when such stances of liking are lived in an explicit fashion – that is, when I consciously encounter the relevant subject matter as something I like – what emerges is an affective appraisal of value that is intimately one with the attentive apprehension it builds upon. To explicate this unity of valuing and apprehending within an explicit act of liking, the first thing to note is that when we recognise something as agreeable, we always do so in light of certain features of the matter liked. We can broadly say that these features are ones that are presented  – or, in some cases, horizonally delineated – in our underlying perceptual, memorial, imaginative, or categorical grasp of the object concerned. For the purposes of simplicity, we can limit our focus here to the relatively uncomplicated case in which an explicit attitude of liking is oriented towards a perceptually present matter as such. In this case, Husserl argues, while our liking targets the perceived object as a whole, it positively appraises the object in light of specific features that are either currently perceptually given, or that are non-thematically apperceived by way of the object’s associatively prefigured perceptual horizon.45 However, he also argues that, even in this relatively simple case, our liking does not simply appraise the matter in light of its (co-)perceived features as factual features. Rather, the concrete act of liking a perceived object is already a complex variety of affective value-consciousness, insofar as its specific moment of

 Because ‘what we like’ about an object can be conscious in a non-thematic fashion within the very process of liking, it is entirely possible that the liking subject may not immediately know what, in particular, motivates their appraisal  – a point that has been made more broadly by Drummond in his sophisticated development of Husserl’s founded account of emotional intentionality (see, e.g., Drummond 2013).

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egoic valuing is motivated by features of the object that are already affectively articulated. Husserl characterises the passive dimension of liking that is responsible for such articulation as an “affective apperception” or “apperception of value” (Gemütsapperzeption, Wertappereption), and he highlights its intimate intertwinement with the underlying perceptual apperception (Hua XLIII/2 22–25, 14–17, 211, 8–9). Husserl’s line of though here becomes more readily comprehensible when we note that the features of an object that motivate our appreciation of it are not features that simply leave us cold. Rather, what we like about an object are certain of its properties that we experience (and often verbally express) as bearing an immediate axiological significance. To return to the earlier example, what my liking responds to is the beautiful harmony of the concordant melodies, the charming humour of the stranger, or the excellent atmosphere of the event. Like the factual features of the object they affectively articulate, these “empirical-axiological features” or “value-­ features” (empirisch-axiologischen Eigenschaten, Werteigenschaften) can be more or less optimally given. As I enter the venue and move through the crowd, what is given in a progressively enriched fashion is not only the harmonious interlocking of melodies as sensory-perceptual temporal object, but also the very beauty of this harmony as an affective unity intertwined with and rooted in the auditory phenomenon. We can even say here that, as the alluring din that is vaguely heard as beautiful becomes more richly given in its beauty, we are dealing with a simple and immediate value-perception (Wertwahrnehmung) that acquires an ever-greater degree of intuitive fulfilment — in precise unity and continuity with the underlying sensory perception (Wahrnehmung) of the melodic harmony (Hua XLIII/2 28–29, 1–2, 8–9, 25). However, the apperception and immediate perception of empirical-axiological features only comprises one side of the explicit act of liking, for liking or appreciation as such also necessarily involves an element of egoic value-positing or value-­ appraisal (Wertsetzen, Wertschätzen), through which the object is recognised as agreeable in light of its passively valued features. That is, liking is essentially a stance taken towards the matter liked as a whole, and accordingly it cannot be reduced to an intuitive or apperceptive consciousness of the discrete features of the matter—even when such consciousness is already affectively articulated, such that it passively furnishes these features with a primitive valuableness. As with the moment of value-apperception, the positional element of liking also builds upon, and is analogous to, an element of the underlying object-consciousness: in this case, the element of belief or doxic positing (or a modification of belief, such as doubting or disbelief). For instance, when I turn with appreciation to the friendly stranger in the concert hall, then not only is the empathetic apperception through which the stranger is given experientially to me affectively articulated in various ways. Rather, my doxic acceptance of the (empathetically apperceived) stranger as existing is also accompanied by an affective counterpart, namely my evaluative recognition of the (empathetically and affectively apperceived) stranger as agreeable (Hua XLIII/2 22–25, 28–29, 7–8; see also the third section of the seventh chapter). Husserl ultimately argues that this evaluative recognition is an affective variety of egoic activity and that, in responding to an object given in the passivity of

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value-­apperception, it at the same time brings this object to manifestation with a new character of valuableness. For when we live in appreciation of some matter, it is not only particular features of the matter that are specifically given as valuable. Rather, the matter as a whole stands there for us experientially as, in metaphorical terms, engulfed by or bathed in a certain character of agreeableness (Gefälligkeitscharakter). To continue the metaphor, it is as if an overflow of value rises above the tributaries of the empirical-axiological features, comprehensively flooding the otherwise arid terrain that is the object as such. As Husserl illustrates this point, when we live in active appreciation of an exquisite violin tone – an appreciation that is sensitive to certain beautiful qualities of the tone, such as its pitch, timbre, and texture – then “what is there for consciousness is the agreeable, the tone in the character of agreeableness. And this character pertains to the tone; more precisely, it pertains to the tone in light of this and that moment of it (this and that value-character)” (Hua XLIII/2  139; cf. Hua XLIII/2 30–31, 64, 101–102). The difference between the motivated moment of appreciation and the motivating moment of passive value-­consciousness can perhaps be most clearly discerned in cases where our evaluative stance towards the object changes, and does so in light of the givenness of new empirical-axiological features. In such cases, the passively valued features that initially motivated our liking may continue to be given, but simply lose their function as guiding our evaluative stance. To refer to one of Husserl’s examples, a melody that is passively given as sweet, in certain respects, might initially be heard with liking; and the sweet aspects of the melody can continue to be passively given as sweet, even once the listener’s attitude has turned into one of disliking the melody, on the basis of its increasingly salient triviality (Hua XLIII/2 70–71). It was stressed earlier that, for Husserl,  our emotional stances  – that is, those bodily orientations through which emotive characters become manifest for us – are not always exhausted by the attitudes of liking or disliking just explicated. Rather Husserl’s analyses lead him to recognise that, in explicit episodes of emotional experience, we find a variety of self- and world-experience that essentially involves— but is nevertheless irreducible to—the process of appreciation (or disappreciation) described above. The intentionally and motivationally unified experiential whole that comprises full-blown emotional episodes does not only entail an appreciation or disappreciation of the subject matter that is entirely intertwined with the founding object-consciousness. Rather, it also involves a certain bodily expansion that brings about a (noetic and noematic) modification of the underlying appreciation. For Husserl, this bodily elicitation comprises what is peculiar to explicit episodes of affect-intentionality—in the specific sense highlighted above—and his detailed and subtle analysis of it demands a careful explication that draws out both its noetic and its noematic dimensions. When considering the affective expansion in a noetic register, we can say that the evaluative core of (dis)appreciation is, so to speak, fleshed out through a dimension of embodied elicitation (Erregung) that coalesces into a (concordant or discordant) affect (Affekt)—a term which, in the context, refers specifically to the concrete gestalt of felt, lived-bodily reactions that emerge within an episode of emotional

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intentionality (Hua XLIII/2  113–114, 122–123). For instance, when we live in explicit joy at being in the presence of a particular person, an element of appreciation of the person will be in play. This appreciation evaluatively characterises the familiar person as agreeable on the basis of certain affectively (ap)perceived features – namely, whatever I find particularly likeable in the other person’s character traits, intentional activities, or bodily peculiarities. However, this appreciation only becomes joy proper when the person appreciated is also given as eliciting a further dimension, namely an affect (Hua XLIII/2  102–103; cf. Hua XLIII/2  113, 55). Considered noetically, the affect is a pattern of bodily feelings that, in explicit emotional episodes, possesses an intentional function through its integration with the act of liking. If we abstract from this intentional function, then we can say that the feelings that make up an affect-gestalt largely fall within the category of what Husserl calls “sensory feelings” or “affective sensations” (sinnliche Gefühle, Gefühlsempfindungen). That is, they are instances of embodied pain and pleasure (broadly understood), whose specific phenomenological character – again, on that assumption that their integration within the emotional episode as a whole is disregarded — involves nothing more than immanent contents that are lived through in inner time-consciousness, and that harbour a more or less definite bodily localisation (Hua XLIII/2 123, 50–51). When reflecting upon concrete episodes of explicit joy, for instance, we can become thematically acquainted with a number of such affective-sensory elements, such as “the pleasant sensory feeling that rushes through my body as ‘shiver,’ the feeling of bliss I feel in my chest as a pleasant feeling that is localised there” (Hua XLIII/2 109; cf. Hua XLIII/2 103, 115). In other to fully clarify affect-intentionality, however, this noetic focus must be complemented and deepened through noematic considerations. This is because a phenomenological analysis of affect-intentionality can only be made productive, in Husserl’s view, by taking full account of the feeling-transcendent intentional correlates of explicit emotional episodes, and the constitutive becoming of such correlates through emotional intentionality. To appreciate why this is so, we only need consider a simple thesis that Husserl elaborates in the Ideen II texts: namely, that while the lived-body constantly participates in the functioning of emotive valuing, the intentional apprehension of bodily feelings—or of the lived-body in its affective sensitivity (Gefühlsempfindsamkeit)—plays no role whatsoever within the emotive functions themselves, belonging rather to a different (“somatological”) thematic pathway (Hua IV/V 54, 78/Hua V 124, 15 [1912, 1912]; cf. Hua XLIII/2 172–173). In other words, the primary intentional accomplishment of emotional experiences is not the casting of an inward gaze at bodily events or processes, but rather the (affective and embodied) bringing to manifestation of pregiven objects as valuable (Hua IV/V 44, 267 [1912, 1915]; cf. Hua IV 152–153, 7; see also Hua XLIII/2 102–103, 122–123). Now, Husserl argues that when we pursue the motivational-constitutive dynamics that play out in the affective expansions peculiar to explicit episodes of reactive emotion, what we are confronted with is a remarkable two-sidedness or bidirectionality (Hua XLIII/2 120–121). On the one hand, the emerging gestalt of bodily feelings—that is, the affective expansion—has the phenomenological character of an

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elicitation of feeling that radiates from, or is affected by, the object, person, or situation targeted in the explicit emotional episode. Or to be more precise, a pattern of bodily feelings consciously emerges here as affected by the subject matter at stake in the core moment of appreciation or disappreciation. We can illustrate this relationship of affection by returning to the example of living through a joyful response to another person. In order for such joy to be explicitly lived as an emotional reaction to the other, certain shivers, rhythms, or pangs of bodily feeling must be affected in me as I appreciatively focus on the other person and their style of worldly engagement. The bodily elicitation specific to joy emerges in me while I attentively focus on the other person and their attitudes and characteristics, which become saliently manifest in the person’s words, facial expressions, and tone of voice. However, the other person does not consciously affect joy in us merely by being ‘in focus,’ per se; rather, to elicit intentionally focussed joy, the other must also be given as valuable— that is, they must be salient as manifesting sweet, charming, or excellent characteristics. Or as Husserl formulates the point, when another person consciously affects joy in me, my underlying focus upon the other person and their expressive behaviour is already an affectively accentuated process of “intuiting the person in their habitus of beauty.” Similarly, I explicitly encounter someone as the intentional object of my anger in an experiential situation wherein I focus on the person with disappreciation and, in so doing, become seized by a passionate affective response. In this case, my underlying focus directs to me to a person who “says base things, manifests base sentiments,” and it is precisely these (negative) empirical-­axiological features that consciously afflicts me with an “affect of repulsion” (Hua XLIII/2 102, 113 emphasis mine; cf. Hua XLIII/2 54–56, 61–63, 97, 114, 121–122, 179–181). In short, like the core stance of liking, the affective expansion is lived through as elicited by certain pregiven value-features, although the specific content of such motivating features may differ in the two cases.46 While an examination of emotional elicitation already reveals a peculiar way in which the feeling subject is affected by something valuable, an adequate phenomenological investigation of emotional intentionality must obviously also consider whether, and in what way, this affective elicitation is directed towards the intentional object of the emotional episode. In his manuscripts on emotional

 Although Husserl does not, to my knowledge, explicitly address this issue, his account could be developed further by more closely investigating the difference in content intimated here. This difference can be considered by adapting an illuminating example from Drummond. While my dislike for the meal I am eating is responsive to its unpleasant flavour, this simple dislike develops into an emotional response of disgust in light of my subsequent realisation that the food I am eating is swarming with maggots (Drummond 2020, p. 243; see also the detailed phenomenological analysis of disgust offered in Heinämaa 2020a). In my view, this is best understood as a difference that concerns the already affectively articulated factual content of what motivates the stance. That is, whereas Drummond analyses the difference between what motivates our evaluative attitude in the two cases as a difference in the cognitive or factual content alone, on the account presented here this difference concerns the factual features insofar as they are already pregiven with a passively furnished (dis)value. Needless to say, a closer examination of this question would lead us too far afield.

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intentionality, Husserl highlights the difficulty of satisfactorily addressing this issue and explores at least two different ways of conceptualising the specific manner of directedness that the affect-dimension harbours within explicit emotional episodes.47 Elaborating the different models of explicit affect-intentionality that Husserl explores in these texts – and their respective merits and weaknesses – would lead us too far afield, and I will instead focus here only on that model that strikes me as the most illuminating and productive. This model is the one that takes most seriously a conclusion that Husserl reaches in in a number of manuscripts, namely that when we live through a pattern of bodily feelings affected by the intentional object, the subject matter concerned acquires a deepened evaluative or emotive character — becoming, so to speak, co-fleshed out — in direct correlation with the very bodily elicitation.48 To rephrase this thought, when an affective gestalt emerges as bodily expansion of an act of liking or disliking, then the affect genuinely participates in and further articulates the evaluative directedness of the core element of appreciation. Or as Husserl puts it, in an important passage quoted earlier: “It is the process of being delighted—and not a process of liking without elicitation—that directs itself to the object; and the object does not merely stand there as agreeable, but rather (corresponding to the modification of the act) as delightful” (Hua XLIII/2 123). What Husserl is emphasising here is that, in explicit episodes of affect-­ intentionality, the intentional object of the emotion is not only consciously given as eliciting a gestalt of bodily feelings through its empirical-axiological features; rather, the matter is simultaneously posited with a deepened evaluative character.49 While Husserl typically refers to these axiological qualities as emotive characters (Gemütscharaktere), he is at pains to emphasise that they are not determinations that pertain to the emoting subject and its emotional responses (Hua XLIII/2 126–127, 132). The emotive characters are (feeling-transcendent) value-characteristics of the intentional object, and while they are essentially related to the affective stances of

 As Husserl writes in one manuscript: “When the affect is conscious with the object of emotion that elicits it, then the affect appears intentionally related to this object, and the object then appears as joyous, delightful, sweet, blissful. The full clarification of such intentionalities is difficult, like the intentionalities of emotion in general.” (Hua XLIII/2 112). 48  The two manuscripts where we find this claim being developed and motivated most comprehensively are “Die Arten der Gemütsintentionalität” and “Die Konstitution der Gemütscharaktere” (Hua XLIII/2 97–115, 117–142), both of which date from December 1911. An opposed view is developed in another manuscript from 1911 – “Gefühlsbewusstsein – Bewusstsein von Gefühlen. Gefühl als Akt und als Zustand” (Hua XLIII/2 143–183) – where Husserl argues that affects do not possess the authentic directedness and positionality of intentional acts. See, however, the selfcritical note in which Husserl complains that the argument in the latter manuscript overlooks something crucial, namely “that in affective love, enthusiasm, etc., I am turned-towards-with-love, and that one must say that the sensory expansion, the great mass of affection, itself acquires an intentional function. Accordingly, the object does not merely stand there as pleasing, but rather as superb etc.” (Hua XLIII/2 174 n. 3). 49  Thus, as Husserl puts it, emotional position-takings—encompassing ‘fleshed out’ responses such as love, indignation, and joy, as well the minimally emotive act of appreciation (Hua XLIII/2 118, 120–121, 134–135)—can be classified as “valuing as a reacting to valuableness, hence on the basis of value-apperceptions, in the higher region of emotion” (Hua XLIII/2 120). 47

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the emoting subject, this does not entail that they really belong to or inhere within such stances. Rather, the relationship in question is a relationship of essential correlation between noetic positionality and thetic character. More precisely, the subject matter in its fleshed-out emotive character is specifically correlated with the intentionality of the affectively expanded (dis)appreciation (Hua XLIII/2 112–115, 126–128, 132–136). When we pursue the correlation between the emoting subject and the object as emotively valuable, we are accordingly confronted with a bidirectional web of motivational and constitutive relations: If I relate the object to the lived-experience of love – which belongs to subjectivity in the specific sense shared by all emotive lived-experiences – then while the object appears as target point of the turning-towards-with-love, the love also appears as elicited by the object; the object’s character of belovedness appears as conditioned by the love, it appears as emanating, and so on, from there, and yet the charm of the object also appears as source of the love. (…) The passionate elicitation in which I feel myself moved is something I can consider as elicitation of this or that kind, as phansic phenomenon; but when the upsurge of passion is underway and I am turned towards the object, the elicitation is not objectified or referred to the object through an objective relationship of any kind. The emotive character of the object constitutes itself in the elicitation (Hua XLIII/2 133).

Having described the distinctive kind of intentionality that emerges in reactive emotions, we can now consider afresh the role of the pure ego in explicit emotional episodes. In fact, Husserl argues that the engagement of the pure ego in emotional comportment has a kind of twofold character, both aspects of which require explication. On the one hand, the ego can be understood as engaged in a distinctive process of focussing on, or adverting to, the subject matter in its emotive character; on the other hand, this advertence must also be understood as an egoic stance of valuing, that is, as an instance of emotional position-taking. The concept of emotional advertence (Gemütszuwendung, Zuwendung im Gefühl) emerges from Husserl’s efforts to address the difficult question of how emotive characters are given to the emoting subject within the very episodes of emotional intentionality in which they are originally brought to manifestation. Husserl argues that the emotive characters—and this applies to the underlying characters correlated with the core of (dis)appreciation, as well as the fleshed out characters specific to the affective expansion—are thematically given through a kind of higher-­ order and specifically emotional variety of adverting, focussing, or attending. In explicit emotive episodes, an element of emotional advertence is alive in the appreciation and bodily elicitation alike, and this element builds upon a founding and emotionally subordinated layer of explicit apprehension that correlates with the subject matter and its emotively relevant features. These two elements of egoic attentiveness function together in making the subject matter intuitively salient in its emotive character (Hua XLIII/2 126–131). Husserl illustrates this line of thought as follows: “When I am angry, when passions are elicited in me over the loathsomeness of a person’s way of acting, then the seeing of this loathsomeness must reside precisely in the emotional elicitations themselves and in the ray of attentiveness (turning-towards) that passes through the elicitations” (Hua XLIII/2  128). The enactment of emotional advertence is at the core of what Husserl means when he

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refers to contexts in which the pure ego explicitly lives in or implements an emotional act. Indeed, he ultimately argues that no substantive distinction can be drawn between egoic immersion in emotive acts, emotional advertence, and the intuitive givenness of emotive characters—these simply being three different ways of describing a single phenomenon (Hua XLIII/2  129–131). Accordingly, and as Husserl affirms in a passage quoted earlier, it is a remarkable characteristic of explicit episodes of reactive emotion that we can say without exaggerating that, in such episodes, the focus of the ego expands into and inhabits the bodily elicitations of the affect.50 Husserl explicitly distinguishes emotional advertence from the attentive apprehension analysed in the previous section of this chapter. Emotional advertence intuitively discloses the subject matter in its emotive character and renders this character thematically salient. But unlike perceptual attention, emotional advertence per se does not implement any new explicit apprehension or objectifying construal (Erfassung, Auffassung) (Hua XLIII/2 124–128, 130, 139; cf. Hua III/1 §37). In other words, emotional advertence does not doxically posit what it brings into focus, namely the matter in its emotional character. One conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the concept of emotional advertence – at least as we have developed it here  – falls short of illuminating any sense in which emotional attitudes involve position-taking. Certainly, this conception provides a promising means of accounting for the epistemic function of emotions, since it describes the manner in which emotional episodes enable an intuitive access to lifeworldly objects in their evaluative meaningfulness—initially for the emoting subject, and potentially for others too. But with the concept of emotional advertence alone, we are poorly equipped to elaborate any way in which emotional reactions might embody a specific kind of subjective agency and responsiveness, not merely in the guise of thematic focusing but rather in the richer sense of evaluative stance-taking. Building upon the foregoing analysis, we can rectify this situation by considering the following question: How can explicit emotive acts be insightfully understood as valuing stances of the pure ego, in light of such acts’ inherent aspects of appreciation and affective expansion? In responding to this challenge, it is crucial to recognise that the constitution of emotive characters is not an entirely passive process. Rather, emotive acts involve evaluative position-taking insofar as their directedness to the object brings this object to manifestation with a positive or negative axiological quality—where the kind of quality or character afforded is essentially correlated with the kind of emotion in play (Hua XLIII/2 122, 136). It is relatively simple to identify an element of egoic activity within the act of appreciation: whereas the empirical-axiological features of an object affect the liking ego in a passive fashion, the character of agreeableness that engulfs the object as a whole is,  “But if the appreciation pulls me, in all my senses, towards the beloved, then every elicitation of passion—as much as they all have to considered precisely elicitations, radiations—nevertheless participates in the turning-towards. If the ego lives in this stream of feeling it, so to speak, expands itself as far the stream reaches, and directs itself to the object through the stream.” (Hua XLIII/2 114–115; cf. 122–123).

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by contrast, instituted through an egoic spontaneity that, responding to the pregiven value-features, actively characterises the object as agreeable. In this sense, liking or disliking is an evaluative position-taking in which the pure ego actively posits the subject matter as valuable or disvaluable, in light of its pregiven value-moments (Hua XLIII/2 139). But what about the affective expansion? At first glance, the seemingly passive process through which a feeling-gestalt is elicited or affected within the embodied subject appears entirely irreconcilable with the idea of the pure ego actively taking a position. But as should by now by clear, any conception of the affective expansion that construes it merely as a process of bodily affection will provide us with a profoundly limited understanding of the form of subjective directedness that is operative here. After all, at least in the explicit instances of emotional experience considered above, the affective expansion is not a mere bodily appendage to the act of appreciation, but rather serves to augment or ‘flesh out’ the core evaluative stance towards the object, and in a manner that is similarly motivated by pregiven empirical-­ axiological features. In this sense, the affective expansion deepens and concludes the activity of emotively valuing the subject matter that is initiated by the egoic recognition of its (dis)agreeableness.51 What becomes apparent here is that the reactive emotions involve a remarkable variety of egoic position-taking that is suffused with, even brought to fruition by, a deeply embodied mode of egoic intentionality. Now, there may be strong grounds for saying that, in the very fleshing out of the valuing stance, the pure ego does not specifically exert the pre-eminent—but also wholly simple—variety of evaluative appraisal found in the core moment of liking; and that the affective expansion accordingly represents a certain qualification or complication of the pure ego’s evaluative agency. But this should not divert us from the unavoidable phenomenological datum that the bodily expansion concretely modifies—and thereby contributes to—the evaluative characterisation of the object, and accordingly the emotional position-taking itself. Indeed, what becomes increasingly evident here is simply the essential role that embodiment plays in deepening our likes or dislikes into richer and more sophisticated varieties of egoic valuing. It should by now be obvious that Husserl’s emphasis on the role of evaluative position-taking and egoic spontaneity within emotional life does not entail an excessively voluntaristic account of emotional attitudes. The form of egoic spontaneity involved with emotional reactions does not involve the feeling subject freely deciding to form one or another emotive stance. Rather, the thesis that egoic positionality is present in the emotional sphere simply asserts that the affective-axiological characterisations found there are instituted through egoic responses to pregiven objects. Moreover, far from involving the wilful actualisation of arbitrary possibilities, an essential prerequisite for emotional position-taking is that certain affectively coloured features of the subject matter are given as motivating or soliciting the ego to take a stance towards it.

 For passages where Husserl characterises certain (affectively expanded) reactive emotions as position-taking acts, see: Hua XLIII/2 119–121, 134–136; Hua XX/2 428; Hua XLIII/1 331, 383–384.

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2.5  Conclusion In conclusion, the detailed investigation of the pure ego presented in this chapter has explored several regions of phenomenological evidence for the claim that a non-­ mundane ego-structure is present in acts of explicit intentional consciousness. We have seen that the pure ego cannot be separated from the form of self-affection inherent to the passive-synthetic functioning of inner time-consciousness. However, an analysis of the pure ego is not exhausted by this insight, since the specifically egological character of explicit act-intentionality can only be elucidated if we take full account of the minimal dimension of agency inherent within explicit intentional consciousness, a dimension which is concretely intertwined with but distinguishable from pre-reflective self-awareness as such. This claim was brought out by first considering Husserl’s analysis of attentive intentionality, where we also saw that the depiction of the pure ego as a point of emanation for spontaneous functions fully reveals its phenomenological basis only when the dynamic style and passivity-suffusion of egoic engagement is brought into view. In the final section, we have considered the presence of the pure ego in emotional intentionality, examining in some depth Husserl’s research into affect-intentionality and emotive position-taking. Whereas this chapter has penetrated into the intimate core of the experiencing subject, explicating aspects of the self which are ever manifest and yet only become thematic through exceptionally subtle procedures, our concerns in the next chapter are somewhat different. What will become clear is that transcendental phenomenology is theoretically sensitive to the manner in which a certain variety of intentional experience makes manifest, not only the subject living through the experience, but also another subject as given in the flesh.

References Behnke, E. A. (2009). “Bodily Protentiality,” Husserl Studies, 25: 185–217. Bernet, R., Kern, I., & Marbach, E. (1993). An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Original: Bernet, R., Kern, I., & Marbach, E. (1989). Edmund Husserl Darstellung seines Denkens. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.] Brough, J. B. (1972). “The emergence of an absolute consciousness in Husserl’s early writings on time-consciousness,” Man and World, 5: 298–326. Brough, J. B. (1975). “Husserl on memory,” The Monist, 59(1): 40–62. Brough, J. B. (2008). “Consciousness is not a Bag: Immanence, Transcendence, and Constitution in The Idea of Phenomenology,” Husserl Studies, 24: 177–191. Brough, J.  B. (2010). “Notes on the absolute time-constituting flow of consciousness,” in: Dieter Lohmar & Ichiru Yamaguchi (eds.), On Time  – New contributions to the Husserlian Phenomenology of Time. Phaenomenologica, vol. 197. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 21–49. Brough, J. B. (2011). “‘The Most Difficult of all Phenomenological Problems,’” Husserl Studies, 27: 27–40. Cai, W. (2013). “From Adequacy to Apodicticity. Development of the Notion of Reflection in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” Husserl Studies, 29: 13–27.

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Carr D. (1999). The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Depraz, N. (2000). “Hyletic and Kinetic Facticity of the Absolute Flow and World Creation,” in: John B.  Brough & Lester Embree (eds.), The Many Faces of Time. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol. 41. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 25–35. Donohoe, J. (2004). Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity: From Static to Genetic Phenomenology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Drummond, J. J. (1975). “Husserl on the Ways to the Performance of the Reduction,” Man and World, 8: 47-69. Drummond, J. J. (1979-80). “On seeing a material thing in space: The role of Kinaesthesis in visual perception.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 40: 19-32. Drummond, J. J. (1990). Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism: Noema and Object. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Drummond, J. J. (2003). “The Structure of Intentionality,” in: Donn Welton (ed.), The New Husserl: A Critical Reader. Bloomington, IA & Indianapolis, IA: Indiana University Press pp. 65-92. Drummond, J.  J. (2004). “‘Cognitive Impenetrability’ and the Complex Intentionality of the Emotions,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11(10-11): 109-26. Drummond, J. J. (2006a). “The case(s) of (self-)awareness,” in: Uriah Kriegel & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Self-representational approaches to consciousness. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 199-220. Drummond, J. J. (2006b). “Respect as a Moral Emotion: A Phenomenological Approach,” Husserl Studies, 22: 1-27. Drummond, J.  J. (2007). Historical Dictionary of Husserl’s Phenomenology. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Drummond, J.  J. (2013). “The Intentional Structure of Emotions,” in: Uwe Meixner & Rochus Sowa (eds.), Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy / Philosophiegeschichte und logische Analyse: 16. The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Münster: mentis Verlag, pp. 244–263. Drummond, J.  J. (2018). “Emotions, value, and action,” in: Rodney K.  B. Parker & Ignacio Quepons (eds.), The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: Volume 16. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 3–25. Drummond, J.  J. (2020). “The varieties of affective experience,” in: Thomas Szanto & Hilge Landweer (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 239-249. Drummond, J. J. (2021). “Self-identity and personal identity,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 20: 235-247. Goldie, P. (2000). The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goldie, P. (2002), “Emotions, feelings and intentionality,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1: 235-254. Gurwitsch, A. (1966). “Phenomenology of Thematics and of the Pure Ego: Studies of the Relation Between Gestalt Theory and Phenomenology,” transl. F. Kersten, in: Aron Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 175–286. [Original: Gurwitsch, A. (1929). “Phänomenologie der Thematik und des reines Ich,” Psychologische Forschung, 12: 279–381.] Hart, J.  G. (1992). The Person and the Common Life. Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics. Phaenomenologica, vol. 126. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Heinämaa, S. (2007). “Selfhood, consciousness, and embodiment: A Husserlian approach,” in: Sara Heinämaa, Vili Lähteenmäki, & Pauliina Remes (eds.), Consciousness: From perception to reflection in the history of philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 311-328. Heinämaa, S. (2020). “Disgust,” in: Thomas Szanto & Hilge Landweer (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 380-391. Heinämaa, S. (2021). “On the transcendental undercurrents of phenomenology: The case of the living body,” Continental Philosophy Review. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-­021-­09534-­z

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Held, K. [1985] (2003). “Husserl’s Phenomenological Method,” transl. L. Rodemeyer, in: Donn Welton (ed.), The New Husserl: A Critical Reader. Bloomington, IA & Indianapolis, IA: Indiana University Press, pp. 3-31. [Original: Held. K. (1985). “Einleitung,” in: Edmund Husserl: Die Phänomenologische Methode, Ausgewählte Tetxe. Stuttgart: Philip Reclam, I: 5-51.] Husserl, E. (1952a). Husserliana IV. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie: Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Ed. M. Biemel, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Transl. R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.] Husserl, E. (1952b). Husserliana V. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie: Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften. Ed. M. Biemel, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (1980). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences. Transl. T. E. Klein & W. E. Pohl, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (Hua V 1-137); Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Transl. R.  Rojcewicz & A.  Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (Hua V 138-162).] Husserl, E. (1966). Husserliana X. Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917). Ed. R. Boehm, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (1991). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Transl. J. B. Brough, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.] Husserl, E. (1974). Husserliana III, 1-2. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Ed. K. Schuhmann, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1984). Husserliana XIX, 1-2. Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band: Untersuchungen zue Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Ed. U. Panzer, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (2001a). Logical Investigations: Volume 1. Transl. J. N. Findlay, Ed. D. Moran. London & New York: Routledge. Husserl, E. (2001b). Logical Investigations: Volume 2. Transl. J. N. Findlay, Ed. D. Moran. London & New York: Routledge. Husserl, E. (2002). Husserliana XX-2. Logische Untersuchungen. Ergänzungsband – Zweiter Teil: Texte für die Neufassung der VI Untersuchung. Zur Phänomenologie des Ausdrucks und der Erkenntnis. Ed. U. Melle. Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, E. (2014). Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Transl. D. O. Dahlstrom. Indianapolis, IA: Hackett Publishing Company. Husserl, E. (2020). Husserliana XLIII, 1-4. Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. Ed. U. Melle & T. Vongehr. Cham: Springer. Husserl, E. (Forthcoming). Husserliana IV/V. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution und Wissenscahftstheorie. Ed. D. Fonfara. Cham: Springer. Jacobs, H. (2010a). “I Am Awake: Husserlian reflections on wakefulness and attention,” Alter. Revue de Phénoménologie, 18: 183-201. Jacobs, H. (2010b). “Towards a Phenomenology of Personal Identity,” in: Carlo Ierna, Hanne Jacobs, & Filip Mattens (eds.), Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences: Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 333-361. Jacobs, H. (2013). “Phenomenology as a way of life? Husserl on phenomenological reflection and self-transformation,” Continental Philosophy Review, 46: 349-369.

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Jacobs, H. (2014). “Transcendental Subjectivity and the Human Being,” in: Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo, & Timo Miettinen (eds.), Phenomenology and the Transcendental. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 87-105. Jacobs, H. (2016a). “Husserl on Reason, Reflection, and Attention,” Research in Phenomenology, 46: 257-276. Jacobs, H. (2016b). “Socialization, Reflection, and Personhood,” in: Harald A. Wiltsche & Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl (eds.), Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Methods and Perspectives. Proceedings of the 37th International Wittgenstein Symposium. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 323–336. Jacobs, H. (2021). “Husserl, the active self, and commitment,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 20: 281-298. Jansen, J. (2016). “Kant’s and Husserl’s agentive and proprietary accounts of cognitive phenomenology,” Philosophical Explorations, 19(2): 161-172. Jardine, J. (2020a). “Edmund Husserl,” in: Thomas Szanto & Hilge Landweer (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 53-62. Jardine, J. (2020b). “Social Invisibility and Emotional Blindness,” in: Anya Daly, Fred Cummins, James Jardine, & Dermot Moran (eds.), Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Phenomenology, Philosophy, and the Sciences. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 308-323. Kern, I. (1977). “The Three Ways to the Transcendental Phenomenological Reduction in the Philosophy of Edmund Husserl,” transl. F. Elliston & P. McCormick, in: Frederick Elliston & Peter McCormick (eds.), Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals. South Bend, IN: University or Notre Dame Press, pp. 126–149. [Original: Kern, I. (1967). “Die drei Wege zur transzendental-­ phaenomenologischen Reduktion in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 24(2): 303–349.] Landgrebe, L. (1978). “The Problem of Passive Constitution,” transl. D.  Welton, Analecta Husserliana, 7: 23–26. [Original: Landgrebe, L. (1974). “Problem der passive Konstitution,” Tijdschrift voor Filosophie, 36: 466–482.] Lee, N.-I. (1998), “Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Mood,” in: Natalie Depraz & Dan Zahavi (eds.), Alterity and Facticity: New Perspectives on Husserl. Phaenomenologica, vol. 148. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 103–120. Lohmar, D. (2003). “Husserl’s Type and Kant’s Schemata: Systematic Reasons for their Correlation or Identity,” transl. J. Jansen & G. Zavota, in: Donn Welton (ed.), The New Husserl: A Critical Reader. Bloomington, IA & Indianapolis, IA: Indiana University Press, pp. 93–124. Luft, S. (2005). “Husserl’s concept of the ‘transcendental person’: Another look at the Husserl-­ Heidegger relationship,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 13(2): 141-177. Marbach, E. (1974). Das Problem des Ich in der Phänomenologie Husserls. Phaenomenologica, vol. 59. The Hague: Martinus Mijhoff. Melle, U. (2019). “Objectifying and Nonobjectifying Acts,” transl. P.  Eldridge, in: John J.  Drummond & Otfried Höffe (eds.), Husserl: German Perspectives. New  York: Fordham University Press, pp. 193-208. [Original: Melle, U. “Objektivierende und nicht-­objektivierende Akte,” in: Samuel Ijsseling (ed.), Husserl-Ausgabe und Husserl-Forschung. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 35-49.] Melle, U. (2012). “Husserls descriptive Erforschung der Gefühlserlebnisse,” in: Roland Breeur & Ullrich Melle (eds.), Life, Subjectivity, & Art: Essays in Honor of Rudolf Bernet. Phaenomenologica, vol. 201. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 51-99. Mohanty, J. N. (1985). The Possibility of Transcendental Philosophy. Phaenomenologica, vol. 98. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Mohanty, J.  N. (2008). The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Development. New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press. Müller, J.  M. (2020). “Dietrich von Hildebrand,” in: Thomas Szanto & Hilge Landweer (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion. London & New  York: Routledge, pp. 114-122. Nussbaum, M.  C. (2001). Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Pamuk, Orhan. (2001). My Name is Red. Transl. E. M. Göknar. London: Faber & Faber. Rinofner-Kreidl, S. (2015). “Husserl’s analogical and teleological conception of reason,” in: Andrea Staiti (ed.), Commentary on Husserl’s Ideas I. Berlin & Boston: Walther De Gruyter, pp. 287-326. Sartre, J. P. (2004). The Transcendence of the Ego. London & New York: Routledge. [Original: Sartre, J. P. (1937). “Le transcendence de l’ego,” Recherches philosophiques, 6: 85–124.] Slaby, J. (2008). “Affective Intentionality and the Feeling Body,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7(4): 429-444. Slaby, J. & Stephan, A. (2008). “Affective intentionality and self-consciousness,” Consciousness and Cognition, 17(2): 506-513. Smith, A.  D. (2003). The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations. London & New York: Routledge. Sokolowski, R. (1970). The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution. Phaenomenologica, vol. 18. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Sokolowski, R. (1974). Husserian Meditations: How Words Present Things. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Solomon, R. C. (1973). “Emotions and Choice,” The Review of Metaphysics, 27(1): 20-41. Solomon, R. C. (1976). The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life, Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Solomon, R. C. (1980). “Emotions and Choice,” in: Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 251-281. Steinbock, A. (1995). Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Steinbock, A. (2004). “Affection and attention: On the phenomenology of becoming aware,” Continental Philosophy Review, 37: 21-43. Ströker, E. (1993). Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology. Transl. L.  Hardy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [Original: Ströker, E. (1987). Husserls transzendentale Phänomenologie. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann GmbH.] Taipale, J. (2014). Phenomenology and Embodiment: Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Zahavi, D. (2001). Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity: A Response to the Linguistic-­ Pragmatic Critique. Transl. Elizabeth. A.  Behnke. Athens, OH: Ohio Universiy Press. [Original: Zahavi, D. (1996). Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik. Phaenomenologica, vol. 135. Dordrecht: Kluwer.] Zahavi, D. (2020). Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation. A New Edition. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [First Edition: 1999] Zahavi, D. (2003). Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zahavi, D. (2005). Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press. Zahavi, D. (2010). “Inner (Time-)Consciousness,” in: Dieter Lohmar & Ichiru Yamaguchi (eds.), On Time – New contributions to the Husserlian Phenomenology of Time. Phaenomenologica, vol. 197. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 319–339. Zahavi, D. (2011). “Objects and Levels: Reflections on the Relation Between Time-Consciousness and Self-Consciousness,” Husserl Studies, 27: 13-25. Zahavi, D. (2014). Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zahavi, D. (2017). Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 3

The Distinctive Phenomenology of Empathy

In the following chapter, I offer a preliminary take on one of the central thematic threads of this book: the phenomenology of empathy. I begin by considering one way of thinking about empathy, classically defended by Lipps and recently rehabilitated by ‘simulationist’ accounts of social cognition, that construes it as a kind of imaginative re-enactment that projectively comprehends other minds through imitative capacities. Drawing upon the work of Husserl and his doctoral student and philosophical collaborator Stein, I then outline an alternative approach to empathy, one that is more sensitive to the distinctive way in which others are given. As I try to show, the analyses of Husserl and Stein reveal a basic form of empathy that amounts to a perception-like experience of other embodied subjects, a form of experience that stands in contrast both to the perception of material things and to self-­ consciousness. This basic kind of empathy serves as  the presupposition and motivational basis for a more imagination-like modality of empathy, which re-­ accomplishes the other’s intentional acts and explicates their context in the other’s world-directed experiential life. Contrasting my reading of Husserlian empathy with that offered by Theunissen, I then suggest that a structural account of empathy only gets us so far, and that further clarification requires us to consider a set of further questions. It invites us to explicate the distinctive character of our perception of things and of self-awareness, as well as to clarify the difference between grasping another embodied subjectivity and recognising another person, issues with I address in the remainder of this book.

3.1  Empathy: A (Very) Brief Historical Overview The English term ‘empathy’ only dates back to the beginning of the twentieth Century, when it was first coined by Titchner in 1909 to translate the concept of Einfühlung as employed by the German philosopher and psychologist Theodor

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Lipps.1 While the term was already positively employed in the philosophical writings of Herder in the late eighteenth Century,2 and later used in ninteenth century German aesthetics to designate an ability to ‘feel oneself into’ (sich einfühlen) works of art,3 the now ubiquitous association of empathy with interpersonal relations can be largely traced back to Lipps’ work. Since Lipps was both a source of inspiration and a target of opposition for Husserl and Stein, outlining the basic features of his account can thus be of aid in clarifying their own position. Lipps argued that there are three distinct regions of knowledge, namely, knowledge of the material world, self-knowledge, and knowledge of other selves. While the first region has as its source sensuous perception and the second inner perception, our knowledge of other selves is rooted in empathy, which should accordingly be understood as a basic concept for both psychology and sociology (Lipps 1909, p. 222; 1907, p. 713). Consequently, for Lipps, empathy is “the name for an original and irreducible, yet simultaneously wondrous, state of affairs,” namely the ability to “co-grasp” foreign mental states “in and with” the perceptual apprehension of foreign bodies. Lipps’ claim that empathy is an irreducible source of knowledge of other minds partially stems from his belief that, rather than being rooted in analogical inference, our basic grasp of other minds is a more “immediate” accomplishment. As he hastens to add, however, this should not lead us to believe that we can “see” or “know immediately” the other’s anger itself, since the latter is something non-perceivable which can only be directly known by the person who feels it. Rather, our awareness of another person’s affective state “in” her bodily expressions must be attributed, not to a direct experience of that state, but to what he calls the “instinct of empathy,” which itself has two components, the “instinct of imitation” and the “tendency of expression” (Lipps 1907, pp.  713–714). Lipps’ proposal, briefly, is that when perceptually faced with another’s body as physically contorted in a certain way, the empathiser feels an instinctive tendency to imitate the other’s bodily contortion. If this bodily contortion coincides with one the empathiser has previously performed in instinctively expressing an emotion, then her tendency to imitate it in its turn reproduces an experience she has earlier had of ‘this’ emotion. This recollected affect is then “represented” or “thought into” (vorgestellt, hineingedacht) the other’s gesture as something which belongs to and is intimated in it (Lipps 1907, pp. 718–719; cf. 1909, p. 228). Furthermore, Lipps claims that empathy is not limited to the rather weak and preliminary ability to project one’s own (past) emotional states into other people’s bodily gestures; rather, in a second step, the empathising subject is instinctively moved to express and feel the otherwise merely recollected emotion in the present. Consequently, unless the natural course of empathising is interrupted by internal or external circumstances, empathy instinctively develops into a state of sympathy or emotional sharing (Sympathie, Mitfühlen), 1  The first and second sections of this chapter draw upon and rework material that I have previously published in Jardine & Szanto (2017). 2  See, in particular, his remarkable essay from 1774 ‘This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity’ (Herder, 2004, pp. 291–2). 3  To my knowledge, the earliest use of Einfühlung in aesthetics occurs in Vischer (1873).

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in which the empathising subject not only represents a mental state as belonging to the other’s gesture, but actually feels and lives through the relevant emotion ‘with’ the other (Lipps 1907, pp. 719–720). As Zahavi and others have shown, far from being an antiquated peculiarity from the history of psychology, echoes of Lipps’ work reverberate through the (recently rejuvenated) discussion of empathy in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science, although he is less often referred to.4 While other phenomenologists have made valuable contributions in critically and comprehensively engaging with this discussion, I will consider only one philosopher influential within it, Stueber, whose arguments significantly intersect with those developed in the present work. One of the central claims in Stueber’s (explicitly neo-Lippsian) account is that an adequate theory of interpersonal understanding must recognise a distinction between two different types of empathy. On the one hand, basic empathy involves an ability to quasi-perceptually recognise other persons as minded beings, as well as to identify certain of their more embodied mental states, allowing us to apprehend, in Stueber’s words, “that another person is angry, or that he intends to grasp a cup.” Drawing upon the recent neuroscientific discovery of so-called ‘mirror neurons,’ Stueber argues that this primitive ability to recognise others’ emotions and actions involves “various cross-modal matching mechanisms,” each of which make use of the internal architecture of my own embodied emotions and actions to interpret the other’s body, hence “allowing me directly to map observed bodily movements onto to a motor representation or an observed facial expression onto mechanisms that are involved in the production of my own characteristic expressions of an emotion.” As such, Stueber is surely correct in characterising his theory of basic empathy as an empirically-informer successor to “Lipps’ conception of empathy as mechanisms of inner imitations” (Stueber 2006, pp. 21, 142, 20, 117).5 Reenactive empathy, on the other hand, involves actively imitating the other’s experiences through imagination, a process which aims to achieve a more complex understanding of the other person’s mental states by uncovering the reasons and motives which underlie her thoughts, emotions, and actions, and which allow them to be assessed in terms of their appropriateness with respect to rational norms. Crucially, Stueber claims that reenactive empathy plays a central and unique role in interpersonal understanding, since it is only through reproducing an experiential episode as if were our own that we can understand the subject of the episode as a rational agent. In support of this claim, he appeals to certain distinctive features which he regards as necessary conditions for our mental states exhibiting rationality and norm-responsiveness—namely, their contextuality and indexicality—arguing that understanding mental states in terms of these features necessarily requires situating them within a first-personal perspective. Once this is established, it follows that understanding others’ mental states as enactments of rational agents requires 4  Phenomenological critiques of what could be characterise as neo-Lippsian accounts of empathy can be found in, e.g., Zahavi (2014, Part II), Zahavi & Overgaard (2012), and Ratcliffe (2017). 5  Zahavi (2012) offers a Husserlian assessment of the implications of the discovery of mirror neurons with which I am sympathetic.

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reenactive empathy, since it necessarily requires us to put ourselves “in the other person’s shoes” and seek to understand her mental states as if they were our own, thus providing them with the first-personal framework necessary for their rationality to be comprehended and assessed (Stueber 2006, pp.  21, 152, 160, 164–5).6 Briefly put, Stueber’s thought here is that to construe a person’s thoughts, emotions, and actions as context-appropriate and as motivationally related to other thoughts, emotions, and actions had by the same person—and thus as participating in rational agency—it is necessary to imaginatively reconstruct the other person’s own first personal perspective (reenactive empathy), and not merely to quasi-perceptually identify the other person’s discrete mental states (basic empathy). As in Stueber’s work, a major concern of this study is to offer an account connecting the basic recognition of foreign mindedness to a more complex understanding of others as reasonable agents situated in distinctive motivational contexts. Accordingly, a detailed assessment of reenactive empathy will have to wait until much later (see the fourth section of the seventh chapter). Moreover, it will only be by the end of this chapter that the non-imitative and non-projective take on basic empathy defended by Husserl and Stein will begin to become clear, and even in this regard further refinements will later be necessary. However, it will nevertheless be fruitful here to provisionally consider the continuities and differences relating the Husserl-Stein account of empathy to the kind of theory offered by Lipps and Stueber. At this stage, five issues can be distinguished: (I.) An influential idea in ninteenth and twentieth century philosophy and psychology, associated historically with Mill, stipulates that our knowledge of other minds is rooted in analogical inference (Mill 1872, pp. 243–244); for discussion, see Avramides 2001, pp. 167–169). Unlike introspective knowledge of one’s own mind and perceptual knowledge of the outer world, the analogical inferentialist notes that we are in possession of no faculty which would make possible immediate knowledge of other minds. Consequently, my knowledge of the minds of others must be based upon an inference that concludes, on the basis of a mind-body connection in my own case, and the similarity of my own behaviour with that of another body, that this other body is itself connected to another mind. Like Lipps, Husserl and Stein decisively reject this reasoning. On the one hand, both Lipps and Husserl note that this so-called analogical inference lacks logical validity. Rather than legitimising belief in the existence of other minds, the most that can be inferred from the observation that an event physically resembles an expressive bodily movement of my own is the (somewhat paltry) conclusion that there are worldly events that are physically similar to my expressive movements, but which do not express my psychic life

6  Stueber often presents his arguments for re-enactive empathy as criticisms of the theory-theory approach adopted by, e.g., Wellman (1990) and Gopnik and Meltzoff (1997), as well as of some hybrid theorists such as Nichols and Stitch (2003), as these thinkers deny re-enactive simulation an epistemically central role in social cognition (see Stueber 2006, pp. 165–171).

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(Lipps 1907, pp. 706–707; Hua XIII 36–38).7 On the other hand, Stein argues that the theory of analogical influence simply ignores the “experience of foreign consciousness,” and as such altogether overlooks the “phenomenon” of empathy—an option which is arguably inadvisable for the psychologist and flatly impossible for the phenomenologist. While acknowledging that analogical reasoning is occasionally made use of in interpersonal understanding, Stein points out that its appropriate function is not to yield the bare recognition of foreign bodily movements as mentally expressive. Rather, in our everyday familiarity with others, the analogical use of our own experiential past to understand the mind of the other only comes into play in the formation of probable belief regarding a bodily expression (or personal event) whose specific significance eludes us. As such, it both rests upon and transgresses our ordinary experience of other minded beings, rather than accounting for the very foundation of the latter (Stein 2008, pp. 40–42/1989, pp. 26–27). (II.) More positively, Lipps’ core claim that empathy is a unique and irreducible experiential accomplishment and a basic source of knowledge of other minds was taken over and arguably radicalised by Husserl and Stein. Indeed, Stein is willing to claim that empathy is “a kind of experiential act sui generis,” defining it as “the experience of foreign consciousness in general,” while Husserl characterises empathy as a “special form of empirical experience” wherein the empathising ego experiences the conscious life of another ego (erfährt das einfühlende Ich das Seelenleben, genauer, das Bewusstsein des anderen Ich), but does not live through (erlebt) that life as it does its own (Stein 2008, p. 20/1989, p. 11; Hua XIII 187).8 To anticipate a claim that will be further developed in the next section, Husserl and Stein argue that—like our perceptual contact with material things and, as we saw in the previous chapter, our emotive contact with the value of such things—empathy involves a non-­ inferential mode of experiential access to other minded beings, one which provides a prima facie justificatory basis for those of our judicative beliefs which concern the mental lives of others. However, Husserl and Stein also offer a starkly different construal of this basic experiential and epistemic directedness towards others. One of the most important features of this controversy was their insistence that the immediacy and distinctiveness of empathy was not only a matter of its non-inferential character, but also of its distinction from a Lippsian process which combines elements of body-perception, self-experience, and ultimately projection.

7  Husserl’s elaboration of this criticism of the theory of analogical inference, which he describes as an eminent piece of sophistry (ein Hauptsophisma), occurs in a manuscript from 1907 or 1908, which appears to have been written without any knowledge of Lipps’ objection. 8  This formulation was offered by Husserl in his ground-breaking lectures on the Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie from 1910/1911—lectures which Stein would not have attended, as she did not arrive in Göttingen until April 1913 (see Stein 2008, p. xi).

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(III.) On the one hand, while acknowledging that Lipps was sensitive to the logical inadequacy of analogical inferentialism, Husserl and Stein both question whether his own account offers the measure of explanatory value he finds lacking in the inferential theory. Echoing Lipps’ own critique of analogical inferentialism, Stein notes that someone who perceives a physical entity, the movements of which instinctively evoke a tendency to express and re-live an emotional state of her own, does not thereby “arrive at the phenomenon of foreign lived-experience, but at a lived-experience of her own awoken by the seen foreign gestures” (Stein 2008, p. 36/1989, p. 23). One way of putting Stein’s objection here is that, since one must first have some grasp of what the other is going through in order to recognise a similarity between one’s own experiences and those of the other, it is logically muddled and epistemically inadequate to suggest that the most fundamental way of understanding the emotive state of another could be constituted by the imitative enactment of a state of our own that putatively approximates the other’s (otherwise indiscernible) affect. Consequently, Stein suggests that Lipps’ imitative theory is better equipped to account for emotional contagion or motor mimicry than for an epistemic grasp of other minds (Stein 2008, pp. 36–37/1989, pp. 23–24). In place of Lipps’ explanatory appeal to instinctive imitation, which Husserl dismisses as “a refuge of phenomenological ignorance,” the phenomenologist of empathy must rather reflectively attend to the distinctive kind of “experiential apperception” by means of which the other shows up as other, with the aim of tracing out the typical style of “exhibition and repudiation” implicated in the experience of empathy (Hua XIII 23–24). (IV.) An arguably more fundamental worry Stein and Husserl express regarding Lipps’ view is that in modelling our basic empathetic grasp of other minds on the (projection of) self-experience, one overlooks the phenomenological fact that the givenness of the conscious lives of others is entirely different from the givenness of one’s own conscious life, and that the former givenness has a distinctive manner and structure which phenomenological reflection can tease apart (Stein 2008, pp. 23–24, 28/1989, pp. 13–14, 17). To come face to face with another person’s sadness is, after all, quite different from feeling sad oneself, remembering a sadness one felt earlier, or reflecting upon one’s past or present sadness (Stein 2008, p. 20/1989, p. 11). And if, upon encountering another’s sadness, one finds oneself sharing the other’s sadness or sympathising with it, then this shared or sympathetic sadness is not the basic empathetic access one has to the other’s sadness but something more complex built upon and presupposing it (Stein 2008, pp. 24–25, 28–29/1989, pp. 14–15, 17–18; cf. Hua XIII 24, 38–41). In short, empathy and self-awareness—whether pre-­ reflective, memorial, or reflective—must be distinguished, not only in light of the differing experiential lives they manifest, but also in terms of their essential manners of givenness. Thus, when Lipps postulates that empathetic understanding ultimately requires the empathiser to first-personally feel the other’s emotion through instinctive mimicry, Husserl and Stein accuse him of

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overlooking a central feature of empathetic acquaintance: namely, its contrast with self-experience—an objection which one could also put to Stueber’s later account. (V.) Finally, both Husserl and Stein attack Lipps’ underlying presupposition that all that can be directly experienced of another person are the merely physical features of her body, arguing that such a postulated gap between foreign mindedness and the directly given is completely at odds with our lived acquaintance with others. As Husserl puts it, a basic form of empathy is rather “an immediate experience of others,” in that our perception of another person is not merely instinctively accompanied by, but rather includes a certain “experience [of] the other’s lived experiences,” this being “accomplished as one with the originary experience of the [other’s] living body” (Hua IV/V 513, 245/Hua IV 385, 208, transl. modified [1917, 1917/18]).9 As will become clear in the next section, rather than beginning with the presupposition that other minds are (invisible) entities accessible only through the projection of one’s own mental states into otherwise inanimate bodies (Lipps), the Husserl-­ Stein account of empathy begins by attempting to articulate the sense and manner in which others are directly visible as minded beings.

3.2  Empathy in Husserl and Stein It is possible to say ‘I read timidity in his face’ but at all events the timidity does not seem to be merely associated, outwardly connected, with the face; but fear is there, alive, in the features. L. Wittgenstein10

For Husserl and Stein, then, empathy is both our basic mode of access to other minded beings, and an irreducible form of intentional experience with a unique structure. As we shall see in this section, this unique mode of intentionality is nevertheless multi-layered, incorporating different modes of accomplishment. Moreover, while the claim that empathy has sui generis intentional structure stipulates that empathetic acts are not composed of or identical to other intentional acts, this does not prevent it from exhibiting some of the characteristic features of other modes of intentionality. While the most primitive form of empathy can be described as a perception-like experience, a more active form of empathy is more akin to imagination.

9  Husserl elsewhere appeals to the perceptual character of empathy as a refutation of Lipps’ theory (Hua XIII 40–41), while Stein counters what she regards as Lipps’ fixation on the “symbolic” function of bodily movements by emphasising perceptual modes of empathy (2008, pp. 101–102). 10  Wittgenstein (1968, §537).

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3.2.1  Empathy as Perceptual (or Perception-Like) Experience One of the more intriguing traits of the Husserl-Stein account of empathy is their claim that a basic form of empathy shares important characteristics with the perceptual experience of non-minded entities, without nevertheless being strictly identical to the latter.11 To illustrate this thought, consider a perceptual episode which might be expressed by the following description: (1) “On turning the street corner, I saw a blue car heading straight towards me.” (1) expresses a certain kind of perceptual episode, and by reflecting upon it one may identify certain general features of perceptual experience, of which I will emphasise just three. (i) In perceiving an object, such as ‘a blue car’, or state of affairs, such as ‘a blue car moving towards me,’ what we are directly and immediately acquainted with is just the perceived object or state of affairs itself. In such cases, we take the object which appears to us to be the spatiotemporal object that is really there before us. This differs markedly from the way we experience an object in, say, imagination: in imagining ‘a blue car moving towards me,’ we do not typically take the imaginary object to be identical with an actual clunky entity heading in our direction. We can call this feature of perception its directness. (ii) A further general feature of perceptual experience is its epistemic role, namely that it can provide a prima facie justificatory basis for our (perceptual) judgements. Compare a person who thinks she was almost run over this morning, and does so because she earlier had a perceptual experience as of a car speeding towards her, with a person who holds the same belief but without having had any such experience. The former person surely has a justification for her belief than the latter lacks, even if her belief may ultimately be false. Call this the justificatory import of perception. (iii) A final feature of perception is what is often termed its perspectival character. The perceptual experience expressed in (1) is an experience of a spatiotemporal object in motion, but it is one in which the moving object appears under a certain aspect or perspective, or more accurately, an aspectual series that unfolds as the blue car moves closer to the perceiver. Throughout this series, the perceiver does not experience each new aspect as a new object, but rather precisely sees the car as appearing under ever-new aspects, in that with each aspectual shift certain visible features of an identical object come (more clearly) into view, while others cease to be visible. In short, even in a momentary perceptual appearance one can distinguish phenomenologically between the presence of the object and that of its visible aspect, where the former is irreducible to, and only partially revealed by, the latter.12

 For discussions of the direct or perceptual character of a basic form of empathy that build upon the work of Husserl and Stein, see: Zahavi (2014, pp.  125–132), Zahavi & Overgaard (2012), Gallagher (2017), Taipale (2015), Breyer (2020). 12  This brief sketch of the essential characteristics of perception and its justificatory role is indebted to the Husserlian account of perception developed by Hopp (2011). I return to Husserl’s phenomenology of perception in the fifth section of the next chapter. 11

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We can now consider to what extent empathetic experience might embody these general features. Consider an experience expressed by the following description: (2) “On turning the street corner, I saw someone glare at me angrily.” There is something inadequate in the suggestion that, were one to turn a corner and face such a person, what one would be experientially acquainted with is simply an inanimate entity. One might conclude from this that an empathetic grasp of the other’s angry glare must then be rooted in an additional capacity which projects mental states into the directly given. However, it would also be phenomenologically inaccurate to claim that what appears directly in (2) is essentially the same as in (1), and that the subject turning the corner only thinks that someone is glaring at her angrily because the (wholly physical) entity she perceives is of such a kind as to set in motion a process of inference or simulation. Rather, a more accurate description of this experience would simply claim that what directly appears is just a person staring angrily, and that this is so irrespective of any process of imagining or thinking the subject may perform. In episodes like this, what is immediately there before us experientially is surely not merely a material body, but a person, one whose facial expression displays an emotion. It therefore seems that a compelling description accords to this experience perceptual feature (i), in that here the intentional object of our experience (namely the person glaring at us angrily) directly appears to us, is visibly there. This claim gains further weight when we note that such cases also exhibit feature (ii). The person undergoing experience (2) would surely gain a prima facie justification to believe that ‘a person is glaring at me angrily,’ not that ‘an ‘angry-looking’ lump of flesh stands before me’—indeed, were she to believe the latter and claim to be perceptually justified in so doing, one might suspect her of suffering a pathology (or perhaps of being a particularly obstinate philosopher). It seems plausible, then, to claim that it is not only beliefs about the others’ body, but also at least some which concern the other person as a whole (notably, a belief that she is currently angry), that gain a perceptual-like warrant in such cases. Finally, an encounter with another’s angry glare exhibits feature (iii), in that we can distinguish between the object directly given and the aspect through which it perspectivally appears. While what we see is a person glaring at us angrily, the angrily glaring person is always given under a certain aspect; after all, in any moment of the perceptual episode only certain features of the others’ body are directly visible. One might think, however, that this last point actually counts against the claim that a basic form of empathy shares the directness characteristic of perception. If it is conceded that only certain features of the other’s body can ever be directly visible, then it may seem to follow that a grasp of the other as a minded being could never be accomplished by any direct experience of her alone. The account of empathy developed by Husserl and Stein avoids this objection by insisting that, at least when it comes to the way others directly appear to us, the relationship between body and mind is not taken as a causal link between two separate entities, but as an expressive relation. We do not merely perceive the other person’s directly visible countenances and gestures as unrelated physical events, just as we do not see written words merely

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as meaningless and unrelated squiggles.13 Rather, to have such expressive movements directly in view just is to grasp their sense, that is, to see something of the other’s emotive and practical condition. As Husserl puts it in Ideen II: Empathy is not a mediated experiencing in the sense that the other would be experienced as psychophysical annex to its corporeal living body but is instead an immediate experience of others. (…) The mediacy of expression is not the mediacy of an inference from experience. We “see” the other and not merely the living body of the other; the other itself is present for us, not only in body, but in mind: “in person” (Hua IV/V 513/Hua IV 375, transl. modified [1917]). The unity given in empathy – i.e. in the apprehension of minded being (der Auffassung des geistigen Seins) – is a unity that permits, through a shift in apprehensive attitude, distinction (not splitting apart) into lived-body and sense (psyche). But distinguishing between parts is possible here in another direction too, such that what is again mind-as-object is distinguished as part of mind-as-object (objektiv Geistige), which does not, however, mean that it is or can be split apart. The human being cannot be split apart into human beings, but the unity of the human being permits parts to be distinguished, and these parts are animated or ensouled (beseelt) unities (Hua IV/V 582 [1916/1917]). As to the persons we encounter in society, their living bodies are, of course, given to us intuitively just like the other environing objects, and consequently so are their personalities, at one with their living bodies. But we do not find there two things, entwined with one another in an external way: living bodies and persons. We find unitary human beings, who have dealings with us; and their living bodies participate in the human unity. In the sensory-­ intuitive content of the living bodies—in what is typical of living corporeality in general, and in the many particularies which vary from case to case, those of the play of facial expressions, of the spoken “word,” of the individual’s tone of voice, etc.—is expressed the mental life of persons, their thinking, feeling, desiring, what they do and what they omit to do…. Everything is intuitive here; as are exterior world and living body, so is the bodily-­ mental unity of the human being standing there (Hua IV/V 209/Hua IV 234–235, transl. modified [1913]).

For the most part, we experience the bodily gestures and movements of others as embodying subjectivity, as lived through or accomplished by someone (else); we  By occasionally drawing an analogy between the expressivity of the written word and that of other persons, Husserl means to emphasise two features of bodily expressivity. First, in both cases we directly experience a comprehensive unity of expression and expressed, in which something sensuously perceivable is immediately given, but is not explicitly apprehended as mere physical actuality. Rather, in both cases our thematic regard is focused on broadly socio-cultural or mental (geistig) meaning or sense (Sinn) as embodied or expressed in what sensuously appears (Hua IV/V 209–210 [1913]; cf. Hua IV 236, 320, 244). Second, just as the expressive function of a written word is dependent upon its textual context, another person’s bodily movement functions expressively through its integration with the person’s (temporally and spatially distributed) expressive bodily movements as a whole (Hua IV/V 582 [1916/1917]; cf. Hua IV 244; see also the fourth section of the fifth chapter). However, Husserl acknowledges that there are limits to this analogy. On the one hand, while what is expressed in the other person’s bodily movements is nothing other than his or her embedded and embodied mental life, grasping the “irreal” unity of a written word and its meaning does not typically involve a direct acquaintance with foreign mindedness (Hua IV/V 211/Hua IV 245 [1913]). On the other, while understanding words as meaningful is a highly mediated achievement, requiring the possession of complex linguistic abilities, the the experience of another person—as die Einheit von Leib und Geist im gewöhnlichen und eigentlichsten Sinn— involves a primitive and immediately given form of expressivity, one which more mediated forms presuppose and refer back to (Hua IV/V 210, 361–362/Hua IV 320, 166 [1913, 1922/1923]).

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see them as movements which the other purposively achieves or involuntarily suffers, which bring her perceptual regard into ever-new orientations, or as affective elicitations that display her emotive attitudes (Stein 2008, pp. 79, 85, 93–103/1989, pp.  61–62, 67–68, 75–84; Hua IV/V 22, 25, 215, 484/Hua V 109, 111, Hua IV 322–333, 389–390 [1912, 1912, 1913, 1910–1912]). Similarly, we see the other’s limbs and skin as loci for fields of sensation, such that when an object comes into contact with the others’ body we immediately grasp this contact as tactually lived, and sometimes as painful or pleasurable (Stein 2008, pp. 75, 78/1989, pp. 57–68, 61). To quote again Husserl, the “living body is not only in general a thing but it is indeed expression of the mind and at once organ of the mind” (Hua IV/V 303–304 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 96). The conclusion that other people’s mental states are entirely shielded from perception only follows from the (valid) observation that their bodily features alone are directly visible if we picture the body as a meaningless physical entity. But once we appreciate that foreign bodies are directly visible as fields of expression, such reasoning loses much of its force. While there are similarities between thing-perception and empathetic perception, there are also important differences. It was stressed earlier that perceptual experience is perspectival, and that one can consequently draw a phenomenological distinction between the perceptual object and its aspectual appearance. In the case of perceptual (or perception-like) empathy, then, the aspectual appearance corresponds to certain directly visible aspects of the others’ expressive body, while the (empathetic-)perceptual object is just the person who we see before us. Just as our perceptual experience of non-expressive objects is not limited to the directly visible but aims at a three-dimensional object (such that we do not see a free-floating car bonnet, but exactly an actual car from the front), our perception-like experience of another person aims, not at whatever of her (expressive) body is directly visible, but at the other person as a whole. Put this way, it becomes evident that in both thing-­ perception and empathetic perception, something more complex is operative than the mere having of visual appearances, in that the object intended is grasped as having ‘more to it’ than that of it which strictly appears. Importantly, Husserl argues that an adequate account of this complexity, as something inherent to perceptual intentionality, can only be given if we do not appeal to extra-perceptual capacities. He consequently rules out any suggestion that we are able to perceptually grasp objects ‘through’ their limited profiles due to a tacit set of judgements about, or images of, the aspects of an object which are not currently visible. While tempting, such a proposal would ultimately conflict with our pre-reflective understanding that what we see in perceptual experience is the object itself, and not merely its currently apparent aspects as supplemented by thought or imagination. Briefly, Husserl’s alternative proposal is that our ordinary perceptual grasp of (non-expressive) objects essentially includes both a sensuously rich givenness of its directly visible aspects, and an “inner horizon” of perceptual “co-intentions” which “co-present” or “appresent” its non-visible aspects. While such co-intentions do not sensuously present anything of the object, they nevertheless contribute to its overall perceptual sense

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and inform protentional anticipations which may be satisfied or frustrated in the ongoing course of perceptual experience (see, e.g., Hua XI 3–7).14 When it comes to our perception-like empathetic experience of other persons, on the other hand, the experiential structure is subtly different. As we have seen, the other’s body is not only co-intended as materially more than what meets the eye, but is also seen as an expressive body that displays elements of the other’s experiential life. Consequently, in seeing the other person we are not only acquainted with her body in its materiality through the structures of sensuous presence and appresentation; in understanding the expressivity of her body, Husserl claims, we also implement a certain “presentification” (Vergegenwärtigung) of the other’s experiential life, which is ‘made present’ to us in a certain way. It is crucial not to misunderstand this claim. On the one hand, Husserl is not suddenly conceding that our basic empathetic contact with others is dependent upon imaginative capacities; rather, he often emphasises that the presentification he has in mind is simply a moment in our perception of the other as an expressive, embodied whole, a moment which has an analogous role to that played by appresentation in the perception of material objects (Hua IV/V 71, 104, 245/Hua V 8–9, 39, Hua IV 198 [1912, 1912, 1917/1918]; cf. Stein 2008, p. 20).15 At this level of empathy at least, presentification is thus nothing more than an empty grasp that the other is living through and, in some cases, actively accomplishing an intentional experience of a certain type—namely, that one which is seen as alive before me ‘in’ the others’ facial expressions and bodily movements. On the other hand, Husserl should not be understood as claiming that, while the others’ physical states and features are directly presented, her mental states and

 I return to this aspect of the perception of material objects in the fifth section of the fourth chapter. 15  Summa (2017, pp. 96–98) offers a strong case for a slightly different position on this issue—that she argues Stein and Husserl also share—according to which the strictly perceptual dimension of empathy only pertains to the narrow moment of grasping discrete experiences as concretely displayed in particular shapes of bodily expression. In order to recognise, for instance, that others have a distinct perspective on the world of perception, Summa argues that a presentification is necessary that, on her account, involves imaginative capacities which are irreducible to the appresentation characteristic of perception. I agree with Summa that Husserl typically uses the term ‘presentification’ to refer to a class of intentional consciousness that admits imagination far more readily than perceptual appresentation. However, it is striking that he at times explicitly identifies the appresentation peculiar to empathy with presentification (see, in addition to the above, Hua I 150–1). An alternative, and perhaps less ambiguous, terminology is employed in a manuscript from 1921, where Husserl argues that empathy “as the perception of the human being over there” is “constantly open” insofar as it involves—in addition to the more strictly perceptual givenness of those aspects of the other’s interiority that are “actually and properly appresented”—a distinctive kind of “empty intention.” This empty intention must be distinguished from all subsequent “intuitive illustration” through “presentifying intuition,” but it is nevertheless concretely correlated with “an undetermined halo, informed by the essential type of a concrete inferiority, of an ego and its surrounding, appearing in such and such a way.” (Hua XIII 224–226). On the other hand, referring to an empty intention rather than presentification here would also leave unarticulated the awareness of (foreign) subjective experience involved with perceptual empathy. A more apt (though still imperfect) term might, therefore, be ‘empty presentification.’ 14

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features are only appresented or presentified.16 Such a claim cannot be quite correct, not only because of the ubiquitous role already played by appresentation in the perception of material features, but also because much of what we directly encounter in other people doesn’t fall onto only one side of the mind-body distinction, being rather (given as) immediately embodied and lived through or implemented by someone else. Indeed, there is a sense in which almost every movement of the other’s body is directly visible as, in Husserl’s words, “full of soul”; consider how we see a person’s “standing and sitting,” or her “way of walking, dancing, and speaking” (Hua IV 240).17 The phenomenological claim that a moment of presentification functions in perceptual empathy, then, simply affirms that our perceptual experience of persons as expressive unities necessarily involves a certain inarticulate awareness that the other’s embodied enactments harbour a subjective dimension, that they are not only perceptually evident to the empathising subject but also lived through and engaged by the other. For Husserl, then, any account of empathy that begins with the thought that we first experience another’s body as a sheerly material entity, and must then accomplish an additional empathetic act in order to ‘feel our way into’ the other’s mind, overlooks that the primary datum in our experience of others is neither a material thing nor a disembodied stream of consciousness, but the human person we see before us in the social world (Hua IV/V 207–211, 192 [1913]; cf. Hua IV 319–320, 244–245, 191). Indeed, the thought of body and soul as epistemically and ontologically separate layers of the human being whose occurrences are related to one another only extrinsically comes after the experience of the other person as an expressive unity, and derives from a specific kind of thematic attitude which modifies the other’s intuitive (i.e., empathetic-perceptual) sense (Hua IV/V 211, 210/Hua IV 245, 244 [1913]). Nevertheless, it should always be kept in view that the empathetic form of contact we have with another’s experience differs in important and essential ways from the form of (self-)awareness we have of our own conscious life. To paraphrase Husserl, while it is true that others show themselves to me perceptually as beings both bodily and minded, they do so as embodied experiencers with whom I co-exist, and whose lived-experiences can never truly become mine but will always remain ineluctably other (Hua IV/V 245, 523/Hua IV 198, 419 [1917/1918, 1917]). This statement should not be primarily understood as a plea for the necessity of recognising the unique challenge set for interpersonal understanding by personal  Something akin to this account of the role of co-presence in empathy forms the basis of Smith’s Husserl-inspired account of other-perception (2010, pp. 739–741), and it has, I think, been persuasively criticised by Overgaard, who advocates a more Merleau-Pontian position (Overgaard 2013). While I share Overgaard’s doubts regarding any account of other-perception which operates with a strict  distinction between directly visible physical properties and merely co-presented mental properties, I nevertheless regard it as improbable that an adequate account can be given of empathetic perception that doesn’t allocate a constitutive role to a unique kind of appresentation. 17  The original manuscript for this passage cannot be found, so I cannot determinate whether it was written by Husserl, or by Stein or Landgrebe. However, I take that the texts cited in the next paragraph, which are known to have derived from Husserl’s original manuscripts, confirm that the essential thought expressed here was one he fully endorsed. 16

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differences—although I will argue at the very end of this study that Husserl’s work on empathy is exemplary in understanding and taking seriously just this challenge (see the fourth section of the seventh chapter). Rather, his basic point is that, while one’s own conscious life is lived immediately and originarily through the basic first-­ personal structures of pre-reflective self-awareness and egoic implementation described in the previous chapter, the experiential lives of other persons present themselves as ‘other’ precisely because they are not lived by me in such a fashion. In other words, an invariant structural feature of all empathetic experience is that the experiencing life which the other’s body displays is not lived through or implemented by the empathising subject; indeed, empathised experiences are rather originally comprehended as lived through and accomplished by the other, and by her alone (Hua IV/V 215–216, 22, 25/Hua IV 322–323, Hua V 109, 111 [1913, 1912 1912]; Stein 2008, p. 28/1989, p. 17). As such, they lack the formal selfhood pervading one’s own intentional consciousness, manifesting not only a different personal character but a foreign pure ego (Hua IV/V 317, 27, 253–254/Hua IV 110, Hua V 113, 308–309 [1915, 1912, 1913]; Stein 2008, p.  54/1989, p.  38). Consequently, Husserl and Stein both admit that even the basic mode of empathy discussed above, which participates in the originary self-giving of perceptual experience, involves intrinsically non-originary elements, such that the invariant character of our familiarity with the experiential lives of others is exactly its contrast with self-awareness (Hua IV/V 245, 523/Hua IV 198, 419 [1917/1918, 1917]; Stein 2008, p. 20). Or as Husserl famously puts the point in Cartesianische Meditationen, the verifiable accessibility of others, and with this their existential character for me, consists exactly in their original inaccessibility (Hua I 144).

3.2.2  Empathy as Explication of Foreign Intentionality One misunderstanding which can arise from describing empathetic experience in perceptual terms is that it can lead one to think of the other embodied mind as a self-­enclosed sphere given and contained ‘in’ the other’s body. This thought is not only philosophically disastrous as a general conception of the mind. Crucially for the present purposes, is also fails to capture how others show up for us in pre-­ theoretical experience. For as Stein notes, the empathised other doesn’t merely face us as an object in our visual field; rather, other people are also given as embodied centres of orientation for their own visual fields, and as intentional subjects whose self-transcending experiences are directed towards worldly objects. Moreover, her analyses ultimately show this is the case already at the previously discussed level of empathetic perception. We do not only “see” other people’s bodily members as bearers of foreign sensations of various types—such as, in Stein’s examples, the perceived foreign hand which “‘presses’ against the table more or less strongly,” and “lies there limpid and stretched,” or the person who is seen to be feeling cold “by his ‘goose flesh’ or his blue nose” (Stein 2008, pp. 75, 78/1989, pp. 58, 61). We also directly perceive others as engaging the style of kinaesthetic self-movement

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and attentive immersion characteristic of perceptual experience (Stein 2008, p. 85/1989, pp. 67–8). As such, we simultaneously grasp the other’s living body as a centre of orientation for her perceptual acts. As Stein emphasises, this is not to be confused with an act of imagination (Phantasie), in which I attempt to bring to mind how things would look were I to adopt the other’s posture and position, and nor does it require a detailed understanding of the other’s perceptual field (Stein 2008, p. 79/1989, pp. 61–2). Rather, this empathetic grasp is more accurately described as a perceiving of the other’s bodily movements as intimating a “perceiving consciousness in general,” that is, a certain generic structure (Stein (2008, p. 80/1989, p. 62). Although Stein doesn’t explicitly make this point, we might add that it is also often perceptually evident which specific objects another person is attending to, or at least in which general direction her visual gaze is turned.18 Moreover, Stein notes that the bodily manifestation of another’s perceptual consciousness is not restricted to the passive dimension of perceptual givenness but also encompasses the attentive and egoic apprehension of appearing objects: “the cogito, the purely mental directedness (das rein geistige Gerichtetsein), becomes visible in corporeal directedness” (Stein 2008, p. 102). Consequently, while we can only directly encounter another perceptual life as displayed in bodily expressivity, this life is not given in empathetic perception as contained within an inner realm but as reaching into and subjectively engaging the common perceptual world. Moreover, the experiential possibilities of empathy are not exhausted by our immediate perceptual contact with the other. The lived perception of the other as an embodied subject always implies tendencies towards further empathetic enactments, in which the other’s initial empathetic sense can be explicated, further determined, and potentially superseded. Some of these motivated enactments remain within the realm of empathetic perception. As Stein writes, when “I empathise the pain of the injured in looking at a wound, I tend to look to his face to have my experience confirmed in the expression of suffering” (Stein 2008, p. 103/1989, p. 84). As with our perceptual experience of material objects, empathetic perception contains its own immanent standards of correctness, such that our initial grasp of the other’s subjective life can be confirmed or disconfirmed through the ongoing course of empathetic perception—an observation which also suggests that complex structures of typification and anticipation are already operative in that initial grasp (see the fourth section of the fifth chapter and the third section of the seventh chapter). In other cases, however, the empathetic enactments motivated by our initial perceptual contact with the other, and that serve to explicate its sense, are of an entirely different level of accomplishment (Vollzugsstufe). When the other’s sadness faces us as directly given in her facial expressions, we frequently “feel ourselves led by it,” in that the theme of our empathetic interest becomes not merely that the other is sad, but what she is sad about and why this state of affairs elicits sadness in her (Stein 2008, p. 31/1989, p. 19). In such cases, the other’s sadness “is no longer an object

 This point is, however, made by Husserl in a manuscript written between 1920 and 1922 (Hua XIII 477).

18

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in the proper sense. Rather, it has pulled me into it, and I am now no longer turned to the experience but to its object, I am in the position of its subject” (Stein 2008, p. 19/1989, p. 10). Here, we are not merely directed towards the other in her embodied presence, but enact a more vivid and imagination-like presentification of the other’s world-directed experiential life, bringing it to mind as if we were its subject, in a manner more similar to memory, expectation, or imagination, than to perception. Importantly, Stein emphasises that this modality of empathy, which she characterises as a form of self-displacement or re-accomplishment (Hineinversetzen, Mitvollzug, Nachvollzug), is derivative to and explicates the perceptual empathy discussed above (Stein 2008, pp. 18–20, 32–33/1989, pp. 10–12, 20).19 Moreover, just as the latter is not strictly identical to our perceptual experience of inanimate objects, this active presentification or re-accomplishment should be distinguished from imagination, in that it targets a different domain of experiences (namely, those of the other, not an imaginary modification of oneself), and has a different type of epistemic import and motivation (Stein 2008, pp. 10–11). Here too, then, empathy retains its irreducible and sui generis character. Similar thoughts can be found in Husserl, who emphasises that, from the outset, our empathetic experience recognises the other as “the centre of a surrounding world, appearing to him, presentified to him in memory, thought about, etc.,” such that the other’s living body is not given as the container of an inner realm but as a passageway (Durchgang) which displays the other’s egoically implemented and world-oriented activity. As he puts it, in empathy we are turned towards “the human subject” that, in the understanding of bodily expressivity, becomes manifest as motivationally engaged in its intentional surroundings: “he moves his hand, he reaches for this or that, he strikes, he considers, he is motivated by this or that, he is centre of a surrounding world that appears to him, is present for him in memory, is thought, etc., and that includes a corporeal world which he, to a considerable extent, has in common with me and with others” (Hua IV/V 549/Hua IV 347 [1916/1917]). Despite the radical differences between self-awareness and empathy, then, in both cases we are primarily acquainted with the experiencing subject in its very directedness towards and affection by intentional objects (Hua IV/V 6–7, 221 313–314/Hua IV 108–109, 326, 105, 106–107 [1912, 1913, 1915]). Admittedly, our initial perceptual comprehension of the other’s perceptual, judicative, emotive, and practical intentionality is often rather limited, the other’s bodily movements betraying little more than a generic “type” of embodied, human experience, this “partially determinate content” drawing with it a “horizon of indeterminateness and unknownness” (Hua IV/V 454–458, 209, 537 [1916/1917, 1913, 1916/17]; cf. Hua IV 228, 235, 342). However, this horizon is one that, if one’s practical interests allow it, the ongoing course of empathetic perception can begin to disclose, particularly when embedded within communicative engagement or informed by a familiarity with the other’s personality and personal history. And in this context it is occasionally possible for

 For further discussion of Stein’s distinction between levels of empathy, see: Zahavi (2014, pp. 137–138), Summa (2017), Dullstein (2013), and Jardine (2014).

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us to accomplish a quasi-imaginative form of empathy in which we understand the situatedness of the other’s enactments within her own personal life, a comprehension which Husserl regards as enabling, at least in an ideal case, a most complete and perfect form of interpersonal understanding (see the fourth section of the seventh chapter). To conclude this overview of Husserl and Stein’s analysis of empathy, let us now consider how my interpretation of Husserl’s conception of empathy contrasts with another way of reading him on this issue. This comparison will be made not only for exegetical purposes, but also to bring into view a series of issues addressed in later chapters.

3.2.3  Theunissen on Empathy If one were to single out a book from the secondary literature that has most influenced the received view of Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity, few would dispute the choice of Michael Theunissen’s Der Andere. This seminal work from 1965 critically discusses the various attempts of phenomenologists and dialogical philosophers at developing what the author terms a ‘social ontology,’ with Theunissen effectively arguing that Husserl’s writings contain the most strictly and radically worked out attempt at a transcendental theory of ‘the Other’ and of sociality, with the Fifth Cartesian Meditation in particular fruitfully encapsulating both the value and the inherent limits of the transcendental approach (Theunissen 1984, pp.  3, 7–8). While others have made important contributions in both responding to Theunissen’s critique and offering a more sympathetic and wide-ranging interpretation of Husserl’s work on intersubjectivity and sociality, my aim here will be more modest.20 I will first spell out how Theunissen understands Husserl’s conception of Einfühlung, before illuminating the contrasting reading which I develop here and in later chapters. On Theunissen’s reading, Husserl employs the term ‘empathy’ in a rather narrow fashion. Rather than designating the perceptual recognition of another’s bodily subjectivity, or the immediate acquaintance with another person in the face-to-face encounter, empathy refers to a quite specific kind of accomplishment in which I ‘feel my way into’ the sheer interiority of the other’s mind. Theunissen notes that this form of experience can be understood either from a ‘natural’ point of view, as a specific way in which others minds are represented and understood, or in a ‘transcendental’ register, as the positing by one transcendental ego of another, where this serves as a necessary precondition for the constitution of an intersubjectively  See in this regard Yamaguchi (1982), Steinbock (1995), and Zahavi (2001), as well as the criticism of Theunissen’s understanding of the question which the 5th Meditation seeks to address offered by Staehler (2008, pp. 102–4). I return briefly to Theunissen in the fourth section of the fifth chapter, where I contrast my reading of Husserl’s thesis that empathy is motivated by the recognition of bodily similarity with his.

20

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common, and hence ‘objective,’ world (Theunissen 1984, pp. 71, 121). To focus on the former construal, Theunissen argues that empathetic experience amounts to a rather mediate way of comprehending the style of the other’s bodily movement, one that proceeds by recalling past episodes in my life where similar bodily movements were displayed, before taking my recollected inner state as representing, and similar to, the other’s current inner state. On Theunissen’s reading, then, Husserl conceives of empathy in essentially the same way as Lipps, and he suggests in a footnote that the same applies to the account offered by Stein (Theunissen 1984, pp.  70, 389–390).21 Moreover, Theunissen rejects the thought that Husserl, in his descriptions of the immediate comprehension of other persons from Ideen II, outlines a conception of empathy that goes beyond Lipps. Rather, Theunissen contends that, precisely because Husserl grounded the immediate experience of other persons in Einfühlung, he ultimately took such immediacy to be only acceptable at the level of pre-philosophical naivety. While our everyday encounters with others in the social world may seem to involve a direct understanding of them as persons—particularly when compared to other, more obviously egocentric, forms of social cognition—for Theunissen’s Husserl such an understanding must, once properly clarified, be understood as a projective and mediate act. On the last analysis, Husserl is therefore committed to the view that the extraction of mental significance from the other’s bodily expressions is an accomplishment forged with the (Lippsian) tools of imitation and self-displacement. Theunissen’s reading of Husserl’s conception of empathy is primarily grounded upon the very brief sketch of it Husserl offers in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, an interpretative move that certainly can be challenged.22 For in that text, Husserl is less concerned with explicating the character of our empathetic acquaintance with 21  Steinbock (1995, p. 70) has a similar reading to Theunissen on this issue, in that he also understands Einfühlung in a projective fashion and even pointedly translates it as “intropathy.” In addition, an interpretation of Husserl’s account of empathy along these lines, again drawn primarily from Cartesianische Meditationen, informs Schloßberger’s detailed critique of Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity (2005, pp.  128–130). A comparable portrayal of empathy, which may have been a tacit critique of Husserl’s theory, can be found already in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Heidegger 1967, §26). 22  Beyond the brief passage on empathy from Carestianische Meditationen (Hua I 149), Theunissen (1984, pp. 71–72, 200) also refers to two passages from Ideen II to substantiate his interpretation of Husserl’s Einfühlung. The first passage (Hua IV 274–275) involves Husserl describing empathy as an act of placing myself in the other subject’s perspective, and appears to support Theunissen’s reading. However, in consulting the new edition of Ideen II we find that no original manuscript from this passage can be found, although there is a lengthier text, likely dating from 1916 or 1917, that may have been drawn upon and condensed by Stein or Landgrebe (Hua IV/V 454–458). I argue in the fourth section of the seventh chapter that Husserl’s original text, which describes a specific form of interpersonal empathy, actually emphasises the necessity of recognising personal difference for a more developed understanding of other persons. The second passage Theunissen refers to (Hua IV 200) arose from a manuscript from 1917 or 1918 (Hua IV/V 245–246), in which Husserl does indeed write that, in contrast to our own lived-experiences, the other’s lived experiences are given to me “mediately, in empathy.” However, I understand Husserl here to be merely emphasising that while another’s experiences are only given when perceptually encountered in her living body—a point he emphasises in the same short manuscript (Hua IV/V 245)—my own lived experiences are lived through first-personally, a thought which needn’t be understood in projective terms.

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other persons than with a rather different task—briefly, that of explicating how, and the degree to which, the sense of foreign subjectivity can be originally instituted in the intentionalities of a subject who is (abstractively) thought of as not yet recognising this sense (see Hua I §§42–44).23 Consequently, Husserl’s portrayal of Einfühlung there necessarily proceeds under a radical abstraction, since, in accordance with his self-imposed methodological limitations, he is only able to describe a form of empathy that draws solely upon the past experiences of the empathising subject in order to understand the empathised other. But as Husserl notes elsewhere, this is not at all the normal case of empathetic understanding. Rather than merely projecting one’s own psychological history, our typical empathetic comprehension of others’ living bodies as expressively displaying foreign mentality “develops, as a system of ordered indications, only by means of continuous experience of other human beings, who are already empathetically given” (Hua IV/V 360 [1922/1923]; cf. Hua IV 265). In empathetically recognising shame ‘in’ another’s blushing cheeks, for instance, we can be informed just as much by our past acquaintance with ashamed others than with prior episodes of our own shame (see the fourth section of the fifth chapter). To anticipate an issue discussed in the seventh chapter, Husserl even maintains that one’s own emotional dispositions are, to a significant extent, developed through empathetic contact with and appropriation of the emotive stances of other people, something which remains unintelligible as long as we assume that foreign emotions could only be comprehended through the analogical transfer of one’s own emotive past (see the second section of the seventh chapter). Consequently, when untied from the specific problematic pursued in Cartesianische Meditationen, Husserl’s conception of empathy needn’t be understood as the staunchly egological accomplishment portrayed by Theunissen. But what of Theunissen’s claim that Husserl distinguishes between a form of experience which recognises another living body as such, and the empathetic comprehension of ‘higher’ forms of mentality, such as the other’s emotions and practical intentions? Theunissen is certainly right that a distinction of this kind was endorsed by Husserl, but it seems to me that his way of understanding the difference it invokes is distorted by his misreading of the Husserlian conception of empathy. On the one hand, we already saw in the previous section that, in our empathetic contact with others in the social world, we have a perceptual (or perception-like) experience of other experiencing subjects, insofar as other human bodies typically appear to us as expressing or displaying certain world-directed attendings, emotions, and volitions. As we will later see, the subjectivity that is minimally acknowledged in such experiences cannot be reduced to the formality of another pure ego. Rather, the human others we encounter in everyday interactions are often already taken to have a distinctive personal character and history, and accordingly to be personal (rather than just pure) selves. This variety of empathetic experience will, in the seventh chapter, be analysed under the heading of interpersonal empathy. For the present purposes, what must be emphasised is only that Husserl gives us no reason to conceive of this

23

 In the fifth chapter, I discuss Husserl’s attempt to address a similar question in Ideen II.

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direct recognition of another’s personal subjectivity as a projective transferal of the empathising subject’s prior personal engagement, Indeed, I take it that in characterising such empathy, at least in its basic form, as an intuitive and quasi-perceptual experience, he means to underline that it does not at all dependent upon the recollection and projection of self-experience. On the other hand, both Husserl and Stein do indeed distinguish from interpersonal empathy a more basic form of intersubjective experience, in which the other’s body is recognised as sensitive and mobile, and as a sphere of localisation and orientation for her sensuous-perceptual experience. However, they often characterise such experience as a primitive form of empathy, and unlike Theunissen I will attempt to take this thought seriously (see, e.g., Hua IV/V 22, 71, 582/Hua V 109, 8–9, Hua IV 244 [1916/1917]; Stein 2008, pp.  74–80, 83–85/1989, pp.  57–62, 66–79). One way of understanding this idea, which I pursue in depth in the fifth chapter, is that there are not only important differences between our empathetic experience of other persons and that of (at least some) non-human animals, but also a core of similarity. In both cases, we experience another living body as expressive of a subject who co-perceives, albeit often in a radically different way, the world we have in common. As we shall later see, Husserl claims that this kind of experience— which I term ‘animate empathy’—has important transcendental consequences, in that it enables perceptual experience to come into contact with a common world of material things. However, contra Theunissen I will try to show that this thought does not condemn Husserl to an impoverished understanding of such empathy, but rather enables him to analyse it in a rich and multi-dimensional manner.24 Moreover, once we recognise that the constitution of a common perceptual world is already enabled by animate empathy—without an analysis of the latter being exhausted by our pointing out this function—this allows us to render thematic the specific forms of foreign subjectivity and interpersonal reality that are opened up by interpersonal empathy, which involves but goes far beyond animate empathy. Accordingly, the relevant distinction here is not that between a reifying perception of a foreign living body and empathetic projection (Theunissen), but between two modes of empathy, both of which fundamentally involve a perception-like experience of expressive and embodied foreign subjectivity, but which differ in the dimension of subjectivity they recognise, as well as in the ways they draw in, and affect the sense of, the common experiential world.

3.3  Conclusion In this chapter, I have outlined a number of key features of the structural account of empathetic intentionality developed by Husserl and Stein. In particular, I have elaborated their understanding of empathy as a sui generis class of intentional

24

 For a complementary discussion, see: Staehler (2008, pp. 102–103).

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experience that cannot be reduced to (thing-)perception, imagination, or emotion, nor even to a combination thereof. Moreover, I have explicated their distinction between two levels of empathy, the first of which closely resembles the perception of material objects, with the second being more akin to imagining. In later chapters, I develop a more differentiated and detailed account of empathy that builds upon and fleshes out this structural model. In doing so, an overarching concern will be to clarify the distinction between animate and interpersonal empathy outlined in the previous section. However, it is clear that getting a hold on this distinction requires us to attend to a number of pressing questions. In what sense do we take the world whose validity we naively accept in perceptual experience to be one “shared” with, or “common” to, other embodied perceivers? And what exactly is at stake in our recognising another’s attitudes and responses as engagements of a person, rather than merely as the perceptual experience or embodied conduct of an animal or living body? Finally, how are we to understand the relationship between the other’s empathetically recognised subjectivity as, on the one hand, a formally distinct pure ego, and as, on the other, a personal subject with a different character or style from our own; and how does this relate to a similar distinction with respect to self-­ consciousness? In beginning to reflect on such questions, one soon realises that they cannot be fully captured by a single-minded focus on empathy. Rather, they invite us to consider the ways in which empathy, thing-perception, self-awareness, embodiment, and personal subjectivity are interwoven.

References Avramides, A. (2001). Other Minds. London & New York: Routledge. Breyer, T. (2020). “Self-Affection and Perspective-Taking: The Role of Phantasmatic and Imaginatory Consciousness for Empathy,” Topoi 39: 803-809. Dullstein, M. (2013). “Direct perception and simulation: Stein’s account of empathy,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4(2): 333-350. Gallagher, S. (2017). “Empathy and theories of direct perception,” in: Heidi Maibom (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 158-168. Gopnik, A. & Meltzoff, A. N. (1997). Words, Thoughts and Theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heidegger, M. (1967). Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Herder, J. G. V. (2004). Philosophical Writings. Transl. & ed. M. N. Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hopp, W. (2011). Perception and Knowledge. A Phenomenological Account. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Husserl, E. (1950). Husserliana I. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Ed. S.  Strasser. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (1960). Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Transl. D.  Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (Hua I 43-1834).] Husserl, E. (1952a). Husserliana IV. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie: Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Ed. M. Biemel, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Transl. R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.]

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Husserl, E. (1952b). Husserliana V. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie: Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften. Ed. M. Biemel, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (1980). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences. Transl. T. E. Klein & W. E. Pohl, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (Hua V 1-137); Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Transl. R.  Rojcewicz & A.  Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (Hua V 138-162).] Husserl, E. (1966). Husserliana XI. Analysen zur passiven Synthesis: Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten (1918-1926). Ed. M. Fleischer. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (2001). Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Transl. A. J. Steinbock, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.] Husserl, E. (1973). Husserliana XIII. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlas. Erster Teil: 1905-1920. Ed. I.  Kern. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (2006). The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910-1911. Transl. I. Farin & J. G. Hart, Dordrecht: Springer (Hua XIII 8-9, 77-98, 111-194, 195-235).] Husserl, E. (Forthcoming). Husserliana IV/V. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution und Wissenscahftstheorie. Ed. D. Fonfara. Cham: Springer. Jardine, J. (2014). “Husserl and Stein on the phenomenology of empathy: Perception and explication,” Synthesis Philosophica, 29(3): 273-288. Jardine, J., & Szanto, T. (2017). “Empathy in the Phenomenological Tradition,” in: Heidi Maibom (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy. London & New  York: Routledge, pp. 86-97. Lipps, T. (1907). “Das Wissen von fremden Ichen,” in: Theodor Lipps (ed.), Psychologische Untersuchungen I. Leipzig: Engelmann, pp. 694-722. Lipps, T. (1909). Leitfaden der Psychologie. Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann. Mill, J.  S. (1872). An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. 4th Edition. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer. Nicholas, S. & Stitch, S. (2003). Mindreading. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Overgaard, S. (2012). “Other People,” in: Dan Zahavi (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 460-479. Ratcliffe, M. (2017). “Empathy Without Simulation,” in: Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs, & Luca Vanzago (eds.), Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology. New York: Routledge, pp. 199-220. Schloßberger, M. (2005). Die Erfahrung des Anderen: Gefühle im menschlichen Miteinander. Berlin: Akadamie Verlag. Smith, J. (2010). “Seeing Other People,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81(3): 731-748. Staehler, T. (2008). “What is the Question to Which Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation is the Answer?” Husserl Studies 24: 99-117. Stein, E. (1989). On the Problem of Empathy. Transl. W. Stein. Washington, DC: ICS Publications. Stein, E. (2008). Zum Problem der Einfühlung. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder. Steinbock, A. J. (1995). Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Stueber, K. (2006). Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Summa, M. (2017). “Empathy and Anti-Empathy: Which are the Problems?” in: Elisa Magrí & Dermot Moran (eds.), Empathy, Sociality, and Personhood: Essays on Edith Stein’s Phenomenological Investigations. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 94. Cham: Springer, pp. 87-105.

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Taipale, J. (2015). “Beyond Cartesianism: Body-perception and the immediacy of empathy,” Continental Philosophy Review 48(2): 161-178. Theunissen, M. (1984). The Other. Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber. Transl. C. Macann. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Original: Theunissen, M. (1965). Der Andere: Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart. Berlin: De Gruyter.] Vischer, R. (1873). Über das optische Formgefühl: Ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik. Leipzig: Hermann Credner. Wellman, H. H. (1990). The child’s theory of mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1968). Philosophical Investigations. Transl. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Yamaguchi, I. (1982). Passive Synthesis und Intersubjektivität bei Edmund Husserl. Phaenomenologica, vol. 86. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Zahavi, D. (2001). Husserl and transcendental intersubjectivity. A response to the linguistic pragmatic critique. Transl. E. A. Behnke. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. [Original: Zahavi, D. (1996). Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik. Phaenomenologica, vol. 135. Dordrecht: Kluwer.]. Zahavi, D. (2012). “Empathy and Mirroring: Husserl and Gallese,” in: Roland Breeur and Ullrich Melle (eds.), Life, Subjectivity and Art: Essays in Honor of Rudolf Bernet. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 217-254. Zahavi, D. (2014). Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zahavi, D., & Overgaard, S. (2012). “Empathy without isomorphism: A phenomenological account,” in: Jean Decety (ed.), Empathy: from bench to bedside. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, pp. 3-20.

Chapter 4

Nature and Perception

Constituted together are the physical thing as nature, the lived body as aesthesiological unity, and the psyche as a founded reality, thus a non-selfsufficient one, with the lived body as its subsoil (the lived body always thought constitutively only as an aesthesiological unity). E. Husserl1

In this chapter, I attempt to shed light on Husserl’s thought that nature is already disclosed in the things of perception. While this turn might strike the reader as a diversion from the general direction outlined in previous  chapters, I hope it will become increasingly clear that taking this route is necessary if we are to spell out the manner of givenness involved with animate empathy. The primary reason for this is one conveyed by the quotation above: namely, that the character of bodily subjectivity cannot be elucidated in separation from the perceptual world with which it is constitutively intertwined. As I will argue in the next chapter, this is a rule that applies just as much for other living bodies as it does for one’s own. My discussion begins by bringing into view Husserl’s general project of a transcendental phenomenology of nature (Sect. 4.1), before locating material and animate nature with regard to his distinction between the naturalistic and the personalistic attitudes (Sect. 4.2). I then explicate three generic senses or ‘layers’ of nature distinguished by Husserl and offer a preliminary characterisation of their relation to intersubjectivity (Sect. 4.3), turning next to Husserl’s claim that ‘perceptual nature’ functions as a basic layer of the world of experience, to which affective and practical acts are motivationally responsive (Sect. 4.4). Finally, I sketch some of the discoveries which emerge from Husserl’s detailed phenomenological analyses of such perceptual nature and the embodied subject for whom it is manifest (Sect. 4.5), before critically examining the degree to which animate others conform to this conception of perceptual nature (Sect. 4.6).

1  Hua IV/V 255 / Hua IV 310, transl. modified [1913]. I return to this passage in the first section of the sixth chapter.

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4.1  Regional Ontology and Constitutive Analysis By regional or material ontologies, Husserl means a set of studies which respectively concern themselves with the regions of being (Hua III/1 23/Husserl 2014, p. 20).2 He characterises his usage of the term ‘region’ in two ways. On the one hand, Husserl famously holds that, by means of eidetic variation, one can specify the essential features which an individual object instantiates, and which make it up as the determinate thing which it is, through imaginatively bringing to light the generic character which it shares with other (actual and possible) objects of this kind (Hua III/1 §§3–4). In doing so, one will ultimately be led to one of the “highest essential universalities”, an essential composition which characterises that object as belonging to a “supreme material genus” (Hua III/1 13, 23/Husserl 2014, pp. 10, 20). Thus if we want to exactly describe, for instance, the essential features of a red brick, we will not only have to take note of that which makes it a ceramic object with a chestnut hue, a heavy cuboid, and so forth. We will also have to consider those features which it has just by virtue of being a material thing, thus clarifying the essence, “material thing in general” (materielles Ding überhaupt) (Hua III/1 13/ Husserl 2014, p. 10). This most generic essence Husserl calls a region, and the task of the regional ontologies is to respectively demarcate the regional essences, that is, to specify the essential features pertaining to each of the most basic types of object, in spite of all factual and qualitative difference amongst beings of this region. But Husserl also links the regions (and their ontologies) to the empirical sciences. While each empirical science has a domain of objects (Gegenstandsgebiet) as the sphere which it factually investigates, regional ontology alone allows us to specify the a priori norms, what Husserl calls the “regional axioms”, that an empirical concern presupposes (Hua III/1 10, 37–38/Husserl 2014, pp. 9, 31–32). So, for example, the essential characteristics of ‘the physical’ constitute a norm which the physicist tacitly appeals to in his scientific studies, and which distinguishes the sphere of reality with which he is concerned from that of the biologist or the sociologist. Crucially, Husserl insists that regional ontology only becomes truly realisable when the regional a priori is exhibited within the context of transcendental phenomenology. Husserl maintained that the essence of a region cannot be fully or directly uncovered merely through conceptual analysis—if by this one means a study of the generic meanings articulated in the linguistic employment of the concepts of, for example, ‘thing,’ ‘mind,’ or ‘animal’—since, he argued, such conceptual meanings are not the sole or the primary domain in which the regional essences reside. Rather, a truly self-critical and clarificatory account of thinghood, mindedness, and animaticity, must at some point be informed by things, minds, or animals as we experience them in their bodily presence (leibhaftig) (Hua III/1 15, 45/Husserl 2014, pp. 13, 38). On Husserl’s view, direct experience of this sort presents meaningful realities whose objective senses point, already before the articulation of conceptual thought, 2  For a classical discussion of Husserl’s conception of regions and regional ontologies, see Landgrebe (1981, pp. 149–175).

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towards regional distinctions; and the clarification of regional concepts must accordingly be responsive to the eidos of the objects of intuitive experience as such (see, e.g., Hua IV/V 299–300/Hua IV 91 [1915]). To understand why Husserl regards regional-ontological analysis as ultimately being a transcendental-phenomenological project, we must note a further point, namely that for him the meaningful objects of direct experience are neither (to take two extreme positions) simply received by consciousness in an unaltered and pre-­ packaged form, nor the products of the intellectual engagement of a purely cognitive subject. For instance, in perceiving a red brick as there before us within a broader worldly context, temporally extended manifolds of appearance are synthesised, and in such a way that what directly appears to us is a unitary thing with certain features as given from a certain perspective and within certain surroundings. The nexus of syntheses accomplished here are not wholly active in character but are rather, to a significant extent, functions of the passivity of perceptual manifestation itself. Nevertheless, Husserl claims, what such syntheses reveal is that the perceptual apperception is itself governed by certain imminent rules, frameworks that order the perceptual consciousness of an object as such (Hua III/1 §150). Since this normatively guided experience is necessarily involved in the exhibition of objects which are perceptually meaningful and, as it were, ontologically rich, the task of a regional ontology can be seen as leading into, and becoming more fully accomplished through, a more radical philosophical project—one which reflectively interrogates the space of correlation and motivation which encompasses both experienced objects and the law-governed experience in which they are made manifest or “constituted”. In short, regional ontology opens onto a constitutive or transcendental phenomenology (Hua IV/V 144–145/Hua V 79 [1912]). If the essential sense pertaining to a given “class of regional objectivities” is to be unfolded in a concrete rather than one-sided fashion, it must therefore be analysed as the correlate of a “ruling ‘apperception’” (Hua IV/V 300, 588/Hua IV 91, 2 [1915, 1913]). As we shall see in this chapter and the next, in Husserl’s analyses the class of apperceptions which are constitutive of generic regional senses reveal themselves as genetically developing, essentially embodied, and intersubjectively mediated, and as involving varying degrees of activity and passivity. One consequence of this is that Husserl regards the regional essences themselves as multi-layered, in as much as they are correlated with various levels of subjective and intersubjective accomplishment (Hua III/1 §151). Seen in this light, Husserl’s analyses can be shown to provide an account of the differences and the continuities between, for example, the material thing as originally given in perception, and the material thing as the “physicalistic thing” of natural science, with its idealised and mathematically disclosed determinations—both of which constitute divergent layers of the same regional essence, ‘the material thing in general’ (Hua IV/V 442–446, 372–373/Hua IV 76–77, 84–88 [1905–1910, 1915/1916]). A more general consequence is that regional ontology provides one motivation for a constitutive phenomenology, a philosophical explication of how meaningful objects become manifest for us in experiential life.

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4.2  The Naturalistic and Personalistic Attitudes At this stage, we must consider an important Husserlian distinction, one which aligns the different ontological regions with the issue of different modes of empathy: namely, the distinction between the naturalistic and the personalistic attitude. The naturalistic attitude, which is the orientation towards the world adopted by the natural scientist in their research activities, is guided by the ideal goal of fully determining the real, subject-independent, properties of the totality of physical (and, perhaps, psychophysical) entities. But this task requires the natural scientist to accomplish a certain abstraction, in which the axiological and practical—and, ultimately, sensible—characters of worldly objects as ordinarily experienced are disregarded, or as Husserl also puts it, in which the evaluative and practical intentionalities belonging to the personal sphere are left out of play (Hua IV/V 179, 263, 188, 588, 594–595/Hua IV 174–175, 1, 183–184, 2, 16–17 [1913, 1915, 1913, 1913, 1913]). Such an abstraction is necessary and legitimate within its own domain, since such predicates clearly do not belong to the reality which natural science takes as its sphere of inquiry. To describe a galaxy or organism as ‘beautiful’, the Higgs Boson as ‘gaining a Scotsman the Nobel Prize in Physics’, or to ‘despair’ about the changing climates, is not to contribute to, nor to dispute anything of, our scientific understanding of nature. Rather, nature in this sense is a self-contained totality of entities bearing real or objective-substantial properties alone. Thus the constitutive correlate of the naturalistic attitude is, as Husserl at one point puts it, “the whole of nature as the total domain of the natural sciences”, and the essence, ‘nature as such’, comprises the “pure sense” of this attitude, the norm obscurely operative in all naturalistic thinking and practice (Hua IV/V 178–179/Hua IV 174 [1913]). The personalistic attitude, on the other hand, is just the prior attitude of everyday life that the naturalistic attitude transgresses, in which subjects do not adopt an abstractive orientation towards the objects of their surrounding world (Umwelt), but rather respond to them in their life-worldly concreteness, a concreteness whose sense is to varying degrees articulated by social practices and culturally formed evaluations (Hua IV/V 189–196, 245–246/Hua IV 185–200 [1913, 1917/1918]). Husserl thus maintains that “the naturalistic attitude is subordinated to the personalistic”, and that the natural scientist may only take his or her theoretical activity to bear an exhaustive, absolute and unconditioned cognitive relation to the world by means of “a kind of self-forgetfulness of the personal ego” (Hua IV/V 187–188/Hua IV 183–184 [1913]). He also insists that it is for subjects of the personalistic as opposed to the naturalistic attitude that sociality operates and culture and community can blossom, since it is in this attitude that others are encountered as persons and engaged with communicatively (Hua IV/V 192–196, 226–227, 240–241, 242–243, 245–246 [1913, 1913, 1915–1917, 1913, 1917/1918]; cf. Hua IV 190–200). For our purposes, one complication concerning the naturalistic attitude must be noted. The domain of nature, understood as the correlate of the naturalistic attitude, is in fact comprised of two broad sub-domains, each of which are marked by their

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own regional essences: the domains of material and animate nature (Hua IV/V 276 89–90, 92–93/Hua IV 27–28, Hua V 25–26, 29 [1915, 1912, 1912]). That these are two separate domains is manifest in the division of labour within the sciences of nature; the natural scientist investigates either physical reality, which is to say material things and the laws governing them, or biological reality, that is, the physiological structure, behaviour, and psychological states and dispositions of animate organisms (including, of course, human beings). These two domains, moreover, are not wholly independent of one another, nor can one be reduced to or exhaustively accounted for by the other. Rather, and as I will explain in more detail later, according to Husserl animate nature contains a substratum of material nature with a psychic substratum unidirectionally founded upon it. Briefly put, something cannot be an animate natural being without also being a materially natural being, whereas not all material beings are animate. What is distinctively ‘alive’ about animate natural beings as opposed to sheer inanimate matter—namely that they are “experienced as psychically living things” (Hua IX 103, emphasis mine)—nevertheless only objectively pertains to a natural being insofar as the psychic states of the animal are embodied within a material substratum, by means of which those states acquire a localisation within nature. And this material substratum, while comprising only an abstract layer within the double-sided unity of the animate natural being, is thinkable as a self-sufficient entity, one not interwoven with a psychic stratum (Hua IV/V 181/Hua IV 177 [1913]). In fact, we are intuitively presented with something resembling such an entity when an organism dies—an event, Husserl darkly states in 1925, which is already delineated as a foreseeable possibility in every apperception of animate life (Hua IX 106; cf. Hua IV/V 302, 536/Hua IV 94, 341 [1915, 1916/1917]).

4.3  N  ature as a Perceptual, Theoretical, and Scientific Theme We have seen Husserl claiming that a constitutive correlation holds between, on the one hand, the naturalistic attitude, and on the other, nature as a sphere of reality manifesting a generic regional essence (or, rather, a set of generic regional essences which pertain to material and animate nature and are foundationally related), and that a pre-eminent task of transcendental phenomenology consists in investigating this correlation, as well as the manner in which it develops through our individual experiential histories and intersubjective contact. While some of Husserl’s discoveries in this field will be discussed later (Sect. 4.5), my aim now will be to show how his own analyses ultimately lead him away from the idea of an exhaustive correlation between the naturalistic attitude and nature, and towards the insight, of crucial importance to my argument here, that ‘naturalistic’ nature arises as a modification of a nature more primitively given.

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This line of thought can be stated, in misleadingly brief terms, as follows. The naturalistic attitude is the theoretical orientation towards the world employed in the natural sciences. But natural beings are not first constituted or made manifest as such through scientific theorisation; rather, as we have already seen, Husserl seeks to show that regional-essential distinctions can already emerge when we explicate and compare the pre-predicative sense of the objects given directly in experience (Hua IV/2-V-2 172/Hua V 91 [1912]). Consequently, regional object-types, such as ‘material thing’ and ‘animal,’ are not first breached through our adopting a natural-­ scientific standpoint. To put the point in more Heideggerian terms, inasmuch as naturalistic thinking takes itself to have sole access to the being of material and animate nature, or at least as having the only means to ‘potentially’ gain such access (that is, in a possible future when natural-scientific investigation has been fully worked out), it forgets that natural being first shows itself as (generically) natural in pre-scientific experience. At this stage, some readers, and in particular those familiar with Heidegger’s work, may well suspect Husserl of uncritically grafting the structure of the ‘scientific object’ onto the things and creatures encountered in everyday experience—and thus of violating his own methodological commitment of being guided, in philosophical thinking, solely by die Sachen selbst in their relevant modes of acquaintance.3 It seems all too easy, perhaps, to give a (quasi-foundational) account of natural-scientific objectivity by stipulating that its basic categories are already delineated in the pre-scientific realm, just as it seems inadequate to assume that a phenomenology of everyday world-openness can uncritically appropriate the basic categories of natural science.4 While developing a comprehensive response to this worry would lead us too far afield, it is worth noting, not only that Husserl is keenly aware of this danger, but that he is always attentive to the need to examine the different ‘levels of nature’ in their own terms, and in strict correlation with the modes of perceptual or attitudinal comportment in which they are originally constituted (that is, made manifest as such) (see, e.g.: Hua III/1 §40, §52). Moreover, he repeatedly concerns himself with assessing whether, and in what way, such accomplishments (with their correlative regional layers) are to be found in the everyday personalistic attitude with its familiar world, in which axiological and practical senses are immediately interwoven with ‘factual’ ones, and others are straightforwardly experienced as animals or persons rather than unities of causal properties (see, e.g.: Hua IV/V 31–34, 187–189, 190–192, 199–203, 209, 210–213/ Hua IV 139–143, 182–185, 186–189, 207–211, 234–235, 244–247, 595–596, 26–27 [1912, 1913, 1913, 1913, 1913, 1913, 1913]). In fact, as several commentators have noted, in so doing he uncovers phenomenological insights—concerning, in particular, the structure of embodied, encultured, affective, and practically 3  For statements of this methodological commitment, see: Hua XIX/1 10/Husserl 2001a, p. 168; Hua III/1 §24; Heidegger (1967, pp. 27–29/1962, pp. 49–51). 4  Delineations of such a criticism can be found in Heidegger (1979, pp. 171–2/1985, p. 124; 1967 [1962], §§19–21), Dreyfus (1991, Chapter 6), Crowell (1996, pp. 86–89), and Overgaard (2010); for some recent Husserlian responses, see Theodorou (2005), Staiti (2010), and Jacobs (2018).

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immersed world-­disclosure and its primacy over ‘detached,’ theoretical cognition— more often associated with the existential analytic of Sein und Zeit (see, e.g., Smith 2003, p. 14, Mohanty 2011, p. 462, Bernet 2015, and Jacobs 2018). In beginning to see more clearly what Husserl has in mind here, an explication of his claim that the naturalistic attitude is a theoretical attitude will be of aid. Husserl distinguishes what he calls the theoretical, cognitive, or judgemental attitude from the valuing, emotive, or axiological attitude and the practical attitude (Hua IV/V 589, 590, 267 [1913, 1913, 1915]; cf. Hua IV 2, 8, 7). He helpfully illustrates these three different attitudes by means of the example of a subject who is perceptually confronted with a blue sky. If the subject makes the blue sky the primary theme of her attention and immerses herself responsively ‘in’ it, we can distinguish (at least) three different ways in which this can occur. The subject can, first, be ‘swept away’ by the beauty of the blue sky and “live in the rapture of it”, in which case the dominant egoic comportment is not practical or intellective but emotive. Here, the subject is an (affectively) “valuing subject” who lives in the “valuing attitude, the attitude of liking” (Hua IV/V 589–590/Hua IV 8–9 [1913]). Alternatively, the subject can, when confronted with the blue sky, be primarily and thematically concerned with orienting herself practically in the situation in which she now finds herself, perhaps considering whether she should give in to a desire to take the afternoon off work and enjoy the sun, or rather remain steadfast in her commitment to make progress in her writing, this deliberative process allowing her to form a decision and ultimately act upon it. When orienting ourselves in this way, we “live in wilful self-resolve or else in the deed of actually carrying out that resolve,” and are consequently in the practical attitude (Hua IV/V 591/Hua IV 10 [1913]). Finally, the subject might adopt a theoretical attitude towards the blue sky, in which it “becomes a theoretical object” for the ego (Hua IV/V 592/Hua IV 11 [1913]). What is specific about the theoretical attitude, Husserl writes, is that acts of attention and judgement are implemented, not merely as the foundations for emotive and practical comportment, but rather as carried out with the function of knowledge (der Erkenntnisfunktion) (Hua IV/V 589/Hua IV 3 [1913]). That is, in the theoretical attitude the ego observes an object with an overarching interest in rationally acquiring judgements about what it observes. The ego’s thematic engagement is here circumscribed in such a way that the doxic accomplishments of attention and judgement are all-governing. Something becomes manifest for us as a theoretical object when our apprehension of it—which, as we saw in the second chapter, already involves a minimally active acceptance of its existence—serves as the privileged starting point for further egoic process of judgement that are concerned exclusively with explicitly determining the properties and relations of the apprehended object. Accordingly, theoretical objects are not merely perceived things in general, but are specifically brought to manifestation as “categorical objectivities (in a quite definitive sense: objectivities of thought)”. For instance, the blue sky is here constituted—through “theoretical acts,” actively performed by the ego, of “subjectivating, attributing, collecting, relativising,” etc.—as a categorically structured state of affairs, a subject (‘the sky’) to which a predicate (‘blue’) pertains (Hua IV/V 263–265/Hua IV 4–5 [1915]).

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Husserl emphasises that being in a certain attitude is not simply a matter of spontaneously performing acts of the relevant class, since one can spontaneously perform acts of a certain kind while living in a different kind of attitude. As he notes, a physicist might observe the blue sky in a strictly theoretical attitude while simultaneously feeling its beauty. Or, to take a slightly different case, an art critic may well continue to be touched by the beauty of an art work, despite her attitudinal stance being theoretical, in that her dominant comportment consists in judging the aesthetic value of the work (Hua IV/V 590–591/Hua IV 8–9 [1913]). Similarly, when being in a joyful attitude with regard to an imparted “tiding,” the acts of thinking in which the tiding is constituted as a categorical objectivity serve “only as a foundation for the emotive act in which, by preference, we are living” (Hua IV/V 268/Hua IV 12 [1915]). To be in a certain attitude, then, is not merely a matter of performing a certain kind of act, since such acts can be performed while serving as the underlying basis, or unthematic background, of our attitudinal comportment. Rather, being in an attitude involves living in the relevant act “in a privileged sense” and performing it with a greater “phenomenological dignity,” such that it is a “dominant spontaneity” upon which no other current spontaneous performances are based. The performance of an act functions as comprising our current attitude only when it embodies our current overarching “interest,” and this is only one—as it were, the ‘highest’—way in which an act can be operative in our overall doxic, affective, and practical world-relatedness (Hua IV/V 267–268/Hua IV 11–12 [1915]). We can now directly address the relationship between the theoretical attitude and nature. Consider again the examples of the physicist theoretically attending to a cloud while simultaneously feeling delight in its beauty, and that of the art-critic who continues to feel a painting’s beauty despite her dominant concern being with judicatively assessing its aesthetic value. These two cases serve well to illustrate that adopting a theoretical attitude is a matter of selectively attending to and categorically articulating certain senses which are already constituted pre-theoretically. In the case of the physicist, what acquires theoretical articulation is that of the pre-­ given object which remains when its affective and practical characters are put out of play. In the case of the art-critic, on the other hand, no such theoretical abstraction from the object’s aesthetic value is required, the affective value the painting has for her rather being included in the domain of sense which her acts of thinking articulate categorically. Consequently, adopting a theoretical attitude towards nature, as exemplified in the former but not the latter case, involves disregarding the aesthetic and practical senses which experientially coalesce upon perceived things and situations and categorically articulating the domain of sense which remains after this abstractive disregard. Or, correlatively, it involves the “theoretical regard” going “through only those lived-experiences which are sense-giving or sense-determining for the theoretically apprehended object as such.” At the same time, this involves leaving unthematic the affective and practical lived experiences which, nevertheless, continue to be “lived through” and to bring to manifestation “new objective strata for the object in question, but ones in relation to which the subject is not in the theoretical attitude” (Hua IV/V 263–264/Hua IV 4 [1915]). Indeed, Husserl notes that, rather than being an occasional nuisance, a relegation of ever-functioning

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emotive and practical modes of comportment to the “background” of one’s thematic field occurs in all theoretical research (Hua IV/V 269/Hua IV 13 [1915]). But here the following question arises: what are the objective strata that a natural-­ theoretical attitude takes as pregiven and categorically articulates? Or, put in noetic terms, what is the domain of pre-theoretical intentional consciousness which it actively implements and builds upon in so doing? We have seen that such strata cannot be a matter of the axiological or practical characteristics of the object, as correlated with the emotive and voluntary spheres, these being disregarded by the subject in her theoretical concern with nature. When theoretically engaging with nature, the “object that is given and delimited by a constitutive sense” that the theorising ego relates to is therefore simply the “appearing nature-object” (erscheinende Naturobjekt) that functions as the mundane substrate of all disregarded axiological and practical sense (Hua IV/V 264, 54 [1915, 1912]; cf. Hua IV 5, Hua V 12). These pre-theoretically constituted nature-objects are simply the “real things” that are given to and (doxically) received by the experiencing subject prior to any judicativeepistemic engagement with them in the theoretical attitude (Hua IV/V 265, 273–276/ Hua IV 6, 21–24 [1915]; cf. Hua IV/V 480 n. 1/Hua IV 385 [1910–1912]). In other words, we arrive here at the pre-theoretically manifest worldly object which, apart from its values and uses, serves as the starting point for an eidetic-­phenomenological investigation of nature and its constitution. Such nature-objects reside in a field of perceptual manifestation which precedes and grounds all scientific theorisation. Husserl makes this point clearly in a passage from 1912: Nature, as the nature given immediately in sensuous appearance and appearing with sensuous qualities, is to be distinguished from the nature of mathematical physics. (…) Mathematical nature is, therefore, not the nature which is immediately perceived, not the intersubjectively concordant, immediately experienced and immediately experienceable nature, but rather a nature constituted in thinking on the basis of experience, a “thought” nature (Hua IV/V 256, 258 [1912]).5

Far from a category projected by the sciences, nature is thus first and foremost a generic sense which exhaustively permeates, as basic stratum, the world of pre-­ theoretical experience. And a theoretical attitude is only natural-theoretical—rather than involving a theoretical concern with, say, values, goals, or institutions—in as much as the stratum of the pre-theoretical world which it targets is that which is already delimited by this generic sense. As I understand it, this line of thought comprises the basic axiom of Husserl’s thinking regarding nature.6  See also: Hua IV/V 197–200, 429, 431 [1913, 1913, 1912]; cf. Hua IV 175.  In Husserliana IV, there are two passages in particular that seems to clearly state that Husserl solely equates nature, as the theme of his constitutive analyses, with the direct object of the natural sciences, namely §1 and §11—for a reading along these lines and anchored in these passages, see Crowell (1996, pp. 86–88). It is intriguing to discover, then, that neither of these passages arise from the 1915 draft of Ideen II, “Weiterführende und vertiefende Umarbeitung des ‘Bleistiftmanuskripts,’” wherein Husserl offers his most sustained discussion of theoretical and pre-theoretical constitution and its relationship to nature, but were rather both taken from a text which Husserl prepared in the summer of 1913 for a series of lectures (Hua IV/V 587–602, “Ergändzende Text Nr. 24: Die Idee der Natur überhaupt”; even this manuscript, moreover, does not unambiguously support such a reading; cf. Hua IV/V 587). Furthermore, as Theodorou (2005, p. 185) points out in his illuminating study of Husserl’s

5 6

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While this point may appear relatively simple, complications soon emerge. And here we should note a point at which the results of Husserl’s analyses arguably outmanoeuvre his own conceptual arsenal; namely, in that they complicate the straightforward equation of the natural-theoretical attitude and the natural-scientific one. To see this, consider how the claim that our perceptual contact with the world is already a form of contact with nature immediately leads to the question of how such nature relates to the natural sciences and their domain of inquiry. That is, while we must distinguish between “that nature-object (…) which is the correlate of the idea of natural science” and “immediately experienced nature with its immediately experienced features” (Hua IV/V 588, 431 [1913, 1912]; cf. Hua IV 1–2), and interrogate each on its own terms, a crucial task of the phenomenology of nature is to uncover the intelligible motivations which lead to the positing of natural-scientific nature as a higher-order modification of its perceptual equivalent, as well as understanding the transformed sense and epistemic function acquired by perceptual nature when seen through natural-scientific eyes. To complicate matters further, this clarificatory task ultimately requires the phenomenologist to take account of an ever-perplexing constitutive ingredient, in that she must consider the role played by intersubjectivity. Thus, in his analysis of the personalistic attitude from 1913, Husserl distinguishes nature “as the nature appearing sensuously, in relation to the individual subject” from nature “as the imperfectly objective nature that is apperceptively related to an open nexus of subjects of ‘normal’ experiencing,” and claims that both of these senses of ‘nature’ should not be confused with “nature in the sense of natural science, the ultimately and perfectly objective nature” (Hua IV/V 220/Hua IV 325 [1913]; cf. Hua III/1 §151). That is, the relation between ‘nature’ as perceptually manifest to a solipsistic subject (thought of as an ideal possibility; see the fifth chapter), and nature as a publicly accessible domain accepted by a communicative community, and the relation between intuitive and natural-scientific nature, are distinct issues which should not be squarely equated. Rather than being (manifest as) the law-governed realities of natural science, the “things of our socially common surrounding world, the things of the world of our dialogue and praxis, have precisely those qualities we actually see them as having” (Hua IV/V 258/Hua IV 234 [1913]). For now, the important detail in this regard is as follows. From the perspective of the natural-scientific attitude, Husserl claims, nature understood as a communicatively describable and socially accepted domain of perceivable reality itself has the status of a mere appearance, and the reality which stands ‘behind’ these appearances is the non-perceivable “physicalistic thing-objectivity” of “intersubjective research into nature,” whose determinations are ideal laws that are solely

Naturobjekt, the Textkritische Anmerkungen of Hua IV highlight that Husserl was dissatisfied with the incomplete and misleading formulations of §11 (Hua IV 404–405), and, more, generally, with the entirety of the First Chapter, writing on the draft of Ideen II prepared by Landgrebe: “Dieses Kapitel muβ völlig neu ausgearbeitet werden” (Hua IV 403).

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constituted in thought. In the same manuscript on the personalistic attitude, this claim is expressed with clarity: The objectivity which is intuitively constituted for individual subjects and which comes to expression in their descriptive statements, as well as the objectivity constituted as correlate of a community of persons who mutually assess each other as normal, itself now has the status of a mere “appearance” of a “true” objectivity. And this common nature given in intuitive experience has the status of a mere “appearance” of a nature in itself, unintuitable by essence, of a nature that can indeed be determined intersubjectively but cannot be experienced directly. Hence this nature is not, strictly speaking, describable, and no concepts of immediate experience can go to determine it (Hua IV/V 200/Hua IV 207 [1913]).

The central point that we should take from this is that the natural-scientific attitude cannot simply be identified with what we have earlier called the naturaltheoretical attitude, that is, with any judicative attitude that one thematically takes towards natural beings as such. To illustrate this, we only need to consider that a subject whose dominant activity consists in forming the judgement, “the sky is now blue,” is concerned with categorically articulating a different layer of nature than someone who is swept away in mathematical-physicalistic thinking. While the noematic correlate of the former subject’s dominant attitude is not exactly intuitive, perceptual nature, but a categorically articulated objectivity which draws upon it, her attitudinal activity nevertheless describes intuitive nature. In such a case, that is, the following phenomenological description is apt: “Living in the lowest level of mere sense intuition, and performing it theoretically, we have theoretically grasped a mere thing in the most straightforward manner” (Hua IV/V 591 [1913]; cf. Hua IV 9). Such a theoretical claim retains a descriptive-perceptual character even when it finds acceptance and agreement from others, that is, when the judgement exhibits validity as a description of intersubjectively accessible nature. But the dominant interest of “physicalistic” thinking, on the other hand, consists rather in the formation and application of rigorous and universal laws, such that intersubjectively valid descriptions of perceptual objects have for the natural-scientific subject a ‘merely phenomenological’ significance, so to speak, the results of such descriptions serving, at best, as indirect sources of evidence upon which inferentially formed judgements, targeting a nexus visible to nobody, can be tentatively based. In summary, we have seen that Husserl’s phenomenological reflections regarding the essential character of ‘nature’ leads to a distinction between three different ways in which nature can be objectively present. Nature first announces itself as a rich domain with which we are acquainted in perceptual experience (although we are yet to explicate how this ‘we’ can be invoked in the perceptual experience of an ‘I,’ a matter which will have to wait until the next chapter), and it can then become a theme either of a ‘descriptive’ theoretical attitude, or of properly natural-scientific thinking. The latter mode of thinking, moreover, can only be regarded as giving an account of the world in as much as it bears the promise of more exactly determining the (already descriptively rich) domain of perceptual nature. As Husserl puts the point in Ideen I, for the physicist in her or his theorising the “thing appearing to the senses has its sensory shapes, colours, properties of smell and taste, and hence it is

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anything but a sign of something else; instead it is in a certain way a sign of itself” (Hua III/1 113/Husserl 2014, p. 96). In order to avoid equivocation, I will refrain in the following from using the somewhat ambiguous term, ‘the naturalistic attitude,’ and rather refer to the ‘natural-theoretical attitude,’ with respect to the subject in its description of perceptual nature, and the ‘natural-scientific attitude,’ as exemplified by the attitude in which a subject unearths or appeals to the invisible laws governing natural reality.7

4.4  Nature as Motivational Ground for Emotion and Action It is further clear that valuation, however evanescent, is necessarily consequent on some character or specification which is capable of being distinguished from the value we find in an object, and which is what we value an object for, our reason for finding it precious, etc., such a character or specification being in principle such as could be elsewhere and otherwise exemplified. Even when individuals are valued for being the individuals they are, there is an obscure reference to specifications they fulfil, and occasions on which these specifications are manifest, or at least to occasions on which they can be repeatedly contemplated and assessed. J. N. Findlay8 The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensible external world. It is the stuff (Stoff) in which his labour realises itself, in which it is active and from which and by means of which it produces. K. Marx9

Before considering Husserl’s phenomenology of perceptual nature, we should first consider a further controversial Husserlian claim: namely, that such nature does not only serve as a pregiven basis for the natural-theoretical attitude (and, ultimately, the natural-scientific one too), since it is also presupposed by all evaluative and practical ways of being intentionally oriented towards worldly entities. Husserl’s line of argument here rests upon the claim that emotive and practical modes of intentionality are necessarily founded (fundiert) upon a prior mode of object-­ consciousness (see, e.g., Hua IV/V 191–192 [1913]; cf. Hua IV 186–188). This founding relationship has two key aspects, which we can first draw out by reconsidering the emotional intentionality analysed in more detail in the second chapter. On the one hand, in order for an emotive act to be intentionally related to a particular object or situation, that object must first be doxically posited in one way or another. This positing could occur by means of explicit perceptual apprehension, such as when a person feels fear upon noticing a stranger lurking on a dark street corner, or

7  Of course, it is not the case that all theoretical activity in natural-scientific inquiry is ‘naturalscientific’ in this sense. Husserl refers in this connection to botany, where morphological classification plays just as crucial a role as the application of (more or less physicalistic) factual knowledge regarding anatomy and genetics (Hua IV/V 473–474, 416–417 [1910–1912, 1912]; cf. Hua IV 380). 8  Findlay (1970, p. 7). 9  Marx (1975, p. 325, translation modified; 2009, p. 85). Compare Hua IV/V 506 [1916/1917].

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it could be something accomplished through judgement, as in Husserl’s own example of feeling joy upon becoming cognisant of some departed good news. Here, the perceptual or judicative thesis provides a foundation for the emotive act in that the latter borrows, so to speak, the intentional object and doxic component of the former, adding a new layer of evaluative sense to its noematic correlate (Hua IV/V 268/ Hua IV 12 [1915]). On the other hand, this foundedness comprises a normative or motivational element. As we saw in the fourth section of the second chapter, our acts of emotive valuing do not just arbitrarily ‘latch on’ to objects, but are intelligibly— which is not to say, in all cases rationally—responsive to the determinate sense with which worldly objects are perceived and thought. Indeed, this responsiveness is, to some extent, analogous to the manner in which the claims of perceptual judgement are answerable to the perceptual world. Husserl expresses this point as follows: The acts of emotive valuing and praxis, performed in these attitudes, exactly require their own pregivennesses, towards which they take a position and perform new constitutive accomplishments with phenomenologically distinctive forms. The objects of the pregiving intentional experiences exert, so to speak, allures (Reize) upon the subject, irrespective of whether it is subject of the theoretical, practical, or axiological attitude. Such attitudes respond to the “allure” with the relevant logical, axiological, and practical acts (Hua IV/V 265 [1915]).

Consider again the example of a fear felt when passing a stranger on a street corner. Husserl’s claim here is simply that this fear is not unmotivated by the concrete perceptual sense which the passing stranger has for us; rather, our fear is elicited ‘in light of’ certain of the stranger’s perceptually evident features, say, their aggressive posture or angry mutterings.10 Similarly, the felt beauty of a cloud is surely not unrelated to its very visible presence, the way its white billowing expansion stands in contrast to the blue sky lying ‘behind’ it. Emotive acts, moreover, are obviously not solely responsive to the sensuously given features of perceptual objects. The contents and structure of a philosophical account, or the prose and plot of a literary work, can also affectively strike us as, say, exasperating or elegant.11 Willing and acting are also founded upon pregiven objects in these two ways. On the one hand, to construe a possible bodily event as a possible action, whether as a goal in and of itself or as a means by which certain ends could be achieved, presupposes not only the perceptual presence of the world (and perhaps certain judicative beliefs) but also an imaginative envisaging of the context and nature of the possible future doing, upon which is founded a minimally practical consciousness of that action as something I can do (Hua IV/V 574–575 [1915–1917]; cf. Hua IV 204–205). On the other hand, when deciding which practical possibility to pursue in action (e.g. whether to frolic in the sun or labour in the office), my decision will typically  A complication regarding this particular example is that such perceptual features are given in an empathetic apprehension of the other as a person, and as such are not merely natural, despite being perceptually manifest in a broader sense. See the third section of the seventh chapter. 11  As Husserl frequently emphasises, higher-order objects constituted in theoretical, evaluative, and practical acts can themselves function as pregivennesses for new (theoretical, evaluative, and practical) acts (see, e.g., Hua IV/V 264–265, 191–192 [1915, 1913]; cf. Hua IV 5–6, 188). 10

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take as its justifying motives certain evaluative judgements or emotive stances, whether as explicitly appealed to in thought, or as sedimented in my outlook and thus implicitly operative in my decision. Consequently, willing and acting always presuppose “certain representing acts, perhaps thinking acts of various levels, and valuing acts.” Even when such founding acts are explicitly operative, they are “not ones performed in the eminent sense of the word, they do not have the mode of theoretical acts, the mode of “life” which would be “performed” in such acts.” Rather, here “the true and proper performance lies in the willing and the doing” (Hua IV/V 591 [1913]; cf. Hua IV 10).12 Nevertheless, a background of doxic – and, as founded therein, emotive – theses serve as the intentional groundwork and motivational context for my willing and acting, and partially comprise its inner intelligibility. Now, what certainly bears mentioning here is that a closer look at attentive and emotional intentionality – and, in particular, an examination which recognises the temporal dynamics of attending and emoting from a broadly genetic-­ phenomenological perspective  – generates a number of insights, some of which were highlighted in the second chapter, that invite us to question this foundationalist way of understanding the relationship between cognition and emotion. On the one hand, emotional valuing cannot ultimately be characterised as simply and directly responsive to perception and judgement. This is because the evaluative position-­ takings of the affective sphere – from liking to love – are motivationally responsive to more passive modes of affective experience that are already intimately intertwined with and affectively articulate perceptual givenness (see the fourth section of the second chapter). On the other hand, and even more alarmingly for the self-­ satisfied foundationalist, the simple act of attentive apprehension – which Husserl understands as the necessary precondition for an appearing object to become manifest for the experiencing subject as existing (Hua IV/V 270, 275–276 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 17, 23–24) – similarly presupposes that the attending ego is affected by its pregiven environment, this involving a passive mode of feeling-consciousness (see the third and fourth sections of the second chapter, and the further treatment of this issue in the sixth and seventh chapters). Similar claims could be made regarding the relationship between attention and practical intentionality—to the extent that both are arguably inconceivable without being prompted or driven by a certain practical passivity. Indeed, it was likely considerations of this sort that prompted Husserl to note, in the margins of his discussion of the naturalistic and personalistic attitudes, that “sensory feelings and drives interweave themselves with” the “sensory experience” wherein perceptual nature is brought to manifestation and explicit apprehension (Hua IV/V 196 n. 1 [1913]). However, to my mind these insights do not warrant a wholesale rejection of the claim that emotional and practical modes of intentionality are founded upon doxic positionality, but only its tempering. While they reveal the hidden life of affective and volitional passivity as, to some extent, underlying – rather than presupposing – object-consciousness proper, good reasons remain for

 On Husserl’s analyses of willing and acting, see Melle (1997). I return to some of these issues in connection with the personal self in the sixth chapter.

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understanding the intentional acts of the emotive and volitional spheres as essentially building upon – even if not in a simple and immediate fashion – our broadly doxic grasp of objects, situations, and persons. We have seen, moreover, that the moment of object-consciousness that founds the intentionalities of emotion and the will is not always merely a perceptual openness to nature. While certain modes of affective and practical comportment may take their motivating grounds primarily from the worldly features that are directly manifest in perceptual experience, in other cases the underlying doxic component also incorporates imaginative and memorial elements, as well as drawing upon the subject’s nexus of judicative beliefs (a nexus which will be considered in depth in the sixth chapter). However, and to leave aside the complexities of memory and imagination for now, we saw in the previous section that such judicative stances cannot be understood as wholly divorced from perceptual experience and its correlates, for the origins of our thinking about nature may ultimately be traced back to our actual and possible perceptual experience of it. Even when the doxic component underlying, say, an emotive act consists in a judicative acceptance of a particular state of affairs with which we are perceptually unfamiliar—as in Husserl’s example of our feeling joy regarding an imparted piece of news—our doxically positing the relevant event, our taking it as a real occurrence, involves situating it within the “open horizon” of the perceptual world with which we are constantly in a certain perspectival (i.e., embodied and incomplete) contact (Hua IV/V 6–7, 315–316, 193 [1912, 1915, 1913]; cf. Hua IV 109, 194–195). Ultimately, then, the intentionality and intelligibility of our affective and practical acts can only be fully explicated with reference to our perceptual familiarity with nature. In that perceptual nature comprises the basic doxic layer of the experienced world upon which all senses that arises from emotive and practical acts are directly or indirectly founded, it follows that such nature, when regarded simply as a founding noematic layer, cannot yet involve any element of axiological or practical sense that derives from the acts it founds. That is, just like the sphere of reality investigated by natural science, intuitive nature has a certain independence from valuations and the interests of praxis. However, two qualifications must immediately be added to this statement. First, as we have already emphasised and will see more clearly in the next section, the essential features and modes of acquaintance pertaining to perceptual nature are markedly different from those of its natural-scientific counterpart. Correlatively, these two levels of nature are ‘impermeable’ to affect and the will in quite different ways. Second, it is important to recognise that Husserl’s claim is not that perceptual nature is the sole constituent of the world as we directly experience it, but an abstract and partial layer. In our ‘natural,’ everyday comportment, things are directly and immediately encountered not simply as unities of perceptible causal features, but as things which ‘affect’ us and with which we ‘have to do’: that is, as irritating and beautiful, as pencils and goalposts (see, e.g., Hua III/1 58, 77/ Husserl 2014, pp. 65–66; Hua IV/V 184–186, 237–241 [1913, mid-1920s]; cf. Hua IV 186–189). Indeed, our very sense of what differentiates everyday things is deeply caught up with our enduring emotive style and the social practices in which we are immersed—a point of which Husserl was just as keenly aware as Heidegger (Hua

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IV/V 471–472, 496–497, 549–550, 583–584, 238, 496–498 [1910–1912, 1916/1917, 1916/17, 1917, 1923/24, 1916/17]; cf. Hua IV 378, 347, 268, 188).13 For Husserl, however, the layers of significance at play in such world-disclosure only fully reveal their intelligibility when seen as ultimately responsive to a founding layer of strictly perceptual sense.

4.5  Perception and the Material Thing As we have seen, Husserl locates an originary form of nature in the perceptual object just as perceived, where this comprises a domain of sense that precedes all articulation through judicative, affective, and practical acts. To some extent, this thought is only a point of departure for a transcendental phenomenology of material nature, and indeed Husserl proceeds to actively thematise the things of perceptual nature in their manner of experiential givenness, offering an expansive assembly of analyses that excavate this theme from a variety of different perspectives. In the following, I will limit myself to sketching several discoveries that emerge from these analyses which are of relevance for our concerns here, in that they will later help us to render thematic the specific character of animate others. (1) If perceptual nature comprises a ubiquitous and motivationally basic stratum of the world of experience, then in seeking to render it thematic we must ask what remains of the latter once all senses accruing to judicative, affective, and volitional acts are stripped away. Husserl’s preliminary answer to this question is that we are then left with a sphere of “sense-objects,” these being a domain of “primal objects” which serve as the ultimate motivational basis for all other acts. As he immediately notes, however, the “concept of the sense-object is not univocal, just as, correlatively, the concept of presentation (Vorstellung) in the pregnant sense is not—I mean sensuous presentation (sensuous perception, sensuous remembering, etc.)” (Hua IV/V 270/Hua IV 17–18, transl. modified [1915]). On the one hand, this is because the things as they present themselves prior to judicative articulation have a style or character which shows up by means of a plurality of sensuous modalities. Thus, for instance, the spatial form or shape (Gestalt) of a thing—which is here not an exact and idealised geometrical determination, but simply a corporeal style over which its colours and tactile qualities spread—is something which can be both seen and touched (Hua IV/V 425, 45 [1912]; cf. Hua IV 153). Or to take a slightly more complex case, the weight of a perceived object, again not as an exact measurement but as a rough way of being ‘bulky,’ can present itself either tactually, through my picking the thing up or catching it in mid-air, or visually, by my seeing it crush another object beneath it (Hua XVI 344). Moreover, there are evidently sensuous qualities which only appear through vision or touch, and yet the perceived thing

 See also Husserl’s discussion, in the 1912 Bleistiftmanuskript, of the extended mode of bodily experience involved with using tools (Hua IV/V 70 n. 1; cf. Hua V 7).

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presents itself as a unitary whole to which all such qualities belong. Here we come across the working of primitive passive syntheses which connect different spheres of sensibility, such that the perceived (normally) coheres into a concordant whole (Hua IV/V 272/Hua IV 20 [1915]). (2) Husserl outlines a second respect in which the things of perception lack equivocity, one which involves their intrinsically relational character. To illustrate this, consider that a patch of the white wall in front of me is illuminated by an adjacent window, and that this illumination dampens and reappears as clouds pass overhead. In attempting to describe what we ‘see’ in such a case, we can easily get in quite a muddle. On the one hand, we are inclined to say that the colour of the wall ‘changes’ with the flickering lights. One would suspect someone who was blind to the yellowish tinge that radiates so delightfully over the wall to be blind to colour itself. On the other hand, we are perfectly aware that the wall has not actually ‘changed colour,’ and that what we see is simply a white wall illuminated in varying degrees. For Husserl, this ambiguity is not simply a product of conceptual confusion but reveals the multi-layered character of things as we perceive them. It also illustrates that our perceptual grasp of stable “material features” already recognises ‘real,’ or (for lack of a better word) ‘causal’ relations in which things are immersed. As such a stable feature, the colour of the wall shows itself perceptually through the spectrum of ‘shades’ which spread across its spatial form being (perceptually) taken as ‘caused’ by the lighting conditions and the shadowy presence of occluding objects. Here Husserl upholds what both Hume and Kant famously deemed impossible, namely that certain kinds of causal relation already infuse the objects of sensibility (Hua IV/V 287–288/Hua IV 44 [1915]).14 In this way, the stable perceptual character of a thing shows up in the regular styles of dependency which its changing qualitative states (Zustände) exhibit in relation to its causal circumstances (Umstände) (Hua IV/V 287, 438–439 [1915, 1916/1917]; cf. Hua IV 42–43). With regard to the perceptual exhibition of a material thing, absence of change is not the sole possibility but exactly the limit-case (Grenzfall) of change (Hua IV/V 416 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 42–43). However, Husserl was not content with spelling out this three-strung model of ‘features,’ ‘states,’ and ‘circumstances,’ but regarded it as an enigma in need of clarification. As he puts it, the situation we now have before us is that “an alteration of a thing is only an alteration of a thing if it is dependent upon other alterations of things, which are themselves always alterations of things in such dependencies, and so on. This seems to lead us in a circle” (Hua IV/V 374–375 [1915/16]). Husserl’s worry here is that the insight that materiality and causality are constituted together in perceptual experience appears to leaves us unable to account for how perception recognises causal relations between the things which perceptually appear. In addressing this issue, one cannot simply appeal to the relations evinced between ‘states’ and ‘circumstances’—such as the dependence of the yellowish tinge upon the flickering

 In Ding und Raum, one can find more critical reflections regarding the degree to which all causal powers or capacities are strictly perceptible (Hua XVI 344–245).

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lights—for such elements of the perceptual world only emerge with the causally-real things themselves, and as already related to one another—as the yellowish tinge of the white wall which is caused by the flickering lights. Accordingly, Husserl maintains that there is an underlying layer (Unterschicht) of the perceptual world which motivates the perception of material things as causally immersed, and which consists in a plurality of mere “phantoms” or “schemata” (Hua IV/V 377–378, 513 [1915/16, 1912]; cf. Hua IV 65).15 Defined most rigorously, the phantom of a thing incorporates its total perceptual sense minus those stable features which accrue to it by virtue of its causal relations (Hua IV/V 273–274, 284/Hua IV 22, 36 [1915]). As such, it is a “sensuously filled corporeal form in space,” a definite and mobile spatial spread filled up with a cacophony of sensuous qualities that are not yet taken as causally dependent (Hua IV/V 16 [1912]).16 The passive-synthetic constitution of appearing things accordingly consists in recognising the “functional dependencies” between the schemata, these relations motivating the apprehension of a (material) thing whose features are exhibited in the causally-dependent alterations of its states (Hua IV/V 371, 416–417, 324 [1915/16, 1915, 1915]; cf. Hua IV 42–3). (3) We saw in the second section of the previous chapter that Husserl emphasises the perspectival character of perception. As he puts it in Ideen II, the mode of givenness of perceived things is always such that, at any point in time, “strictly, only very little “of it” is presented in “actual,” “proper,” perception” (Hua IV/V 180/Hua IV 176 [1913]). When I look down at the book on my desk, “[w]hat is properly given, with respect to the form, for example, is only the front-side with its square boundary, and with respect to the colour, only the grey of this part of its surface” (Hua IV/V 282 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 35). But if it is only ever a certain aspect of the object which shows itself sensuously, in what sense can we say that what we see is the thing itself? It is here that Husserl appeals to the thought that we can distinguish two kinds of perceptual presence, which he terms “primal presence” (Urpräsenz) and “appresence” or “co-presence” (Appräsenz, Mitpräsenz, Kopräsenz). At any point in time, only those aspects of the thing which directly appear to the senses are primally present, whereas a partially determinate set of the thing’s other aspects are merely co-present, in that they are “co-meant,” “co-intended,” or “co-apprehended” in the total perceptual act (Hua IV/V 359, 271–272/Hua IV 162, 19–20 [1922/23, 1915]). In this way, perceptual givenness is always characterised by a sensuously or primally presented aspect and a horizon of appresented aspects, where these two components are integrated within one’s perception of the object (Hua IV/V 272, 326–327/Hua IV 20, 127–128 [1915]). Crucially, Husserl correlates this description of the perspectival character of perception with an account of its embodied and dynamic nature. Accordingly, he  See also Merleau-Ponty (2012, p. 228/1945, p. 254). In many passages, Husserl explicitly identifies ‘phantom’ and ‘schema’ or ‘complete schema’ (Vollschema) (see, e.g., Hua IV/V 16, 94, 144, 167 [1912, 1912]; cf. Hua V 30–31, 79, 103). 16  See also Hua IV/V 284–285/Hua IV 37–38 [1915]. For particularly good discussions of Husserl’s concept of the phantom, see Sokolowski (1974, pp. 86–89, 95–97), and Mattens (2006). 15

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suggests that the horizonal structure of perceptual givenness is rooted in the capacity for bodily self-movement. We can see this by noting that getting to know a thing perceptually is not accomplished through a frozen gaze, but by moving closer to and around the object and thereby getting a proper view of more of its sides and material peculiarities (Hua IV/V 282–283, 601–602 [1915, 1913]; cf. Hua IV 35). And in this (normally) smooth process of perceptual exhibition, the transition to the primal presence of a new aspect of the thing is generated by a certain kind of bodily movement, whether this be a matter of walking forward, turning one’s head, rolling one’s eyes, or bending down—or, as is usually the case, an integrated complex of such movements simultaneously transpiring. In explicating this state of affairs, Husserl suggests that “kinaesthetic sensations,” in which bodily movement is lived, and more exactly the actualisation of possible “kinaesthetic constellations” through determinate courses of bodily self-movement, function as the “motivating circumstances” for perceptual experience (Hua XVI 188; cf. Hua IV/V 50–51/Hua IV 57–58 [1912]). Leaving aside the more complex situation of moving things, consider the case in which an object is perceived as resting while I move around it. Here, my perceptual experience ‘takes account of’ the kinaesthetic movement I enact, in that the changes in my appearance-systems are accepted as dependent upon the freshly emerging kinaesthetic constellation, to the effect that the sensuous emergence of a new aspect is taken as a certain kind of transition within the horizon of appresented aspects correlated with my earlier ‘view’ of the object. Accordingly, Husserl claims that “in all perception and perceptual exhibition (experience) the lived body is involved as freely moved sense organ, as freely moved totality of sense organs,” such that, “on this original foundation, all that is thingly-­ real in the surrounding world of the ego has its relation to the lived body” (Hua IV/V 43/Hua IV 56, transl. modified [1912]).17 But in what way does kinaesthetic awareness exactly serve, not merely as perceptually guiding, but also as manifesting one’s own body? In addressing this question, it is important to note the distinction Husserl famously draws between the ‘lived body’ or ‘living body’ (Leib) and the body as a thing in space (Körper).18 While something like the latter construal of our own body can, on occasion, become a (particularly opaque) perceptual object, and becomes particularly salient in our empathetic relations to others (see the third section of the next chapter), the lived body is rather a pervasive element of the perceiving subject. Prior to any perceptual concern with the material reality of our body, the lived body manifests itself as the ‘here’ which I occupy and to which all perceptual, and even imaginary, objects are egocentrically related. Husserl writes:

 This sketch of the role of kinaesthesia in perception only touches upon the depth and complexity of his analyses, particularly in his ground-breaking lectures from 1907 published in Ding und Raum (Hua XVI). See here Drummond (1979-80). 18  Given that no English term matches the German Leib, I have either translated it as “lived body” or “living body.” As a general rule, I have used “lived body” when referring to the body as a field of affection and self-movement that is first-personally ‘lived’ as dimension of subjectivity, and “living body” to refer to the animate body as perceptual object. 17

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[T]he lived body acquires a distinction as bearer of the pole of orientation (Orientierungspole), the bearer of the here and now, out of which the pure ego intuits space and the whole world of the senses. Thus each thing that appears has eo ipso a relation of orientation to the lived body, and this refers not only to what actually appears but to each thing that is supposed to be able to appear. If I am imagining a centaur I cannot help but imagine it as in a certain orientation and in a particular relation to my sense organs: it is “to the right” of me; it is “approaching” me or “moving away;” it is “revolving,” turning towards or away from “me”—from me, i.e., from my lived body, my eye, which is directed at it (Hua IV/V 49 (Hua IV 56, translation modified) [1912]). 19

In claiming that the lived body continually functions as the “zero-point of orientation” or “absolute ‘here,’” Husserl is evidently not suggesting that perception in some way implicitly represents the body as a material thing ‘out there’ in space amongst other things (Hua IV/V 325–326/Hua IV 127 [1915]). As he notes, “‘I am here’ does not mean: ‘I am a nature-object’” (Hua IV/V 224/Hua IV 203 [1913]). We can indeed say that the salience of the lived body in perceptual experience is, in part, a matter of the quasi- or proto-spatial relations it sustains to the things of the perceptual environment. However, given that, like much of our body, our eyes themselves never visually appear as occupying a determinate spatial position – although they may, of course, be occasionally located tactually (cf. Hua IV/V 367 [1908]) – it is clear that the lived relation between bodily here and thingly there is quite unlike the kind of spatial relations perceived things bear to one another. The lived body is ‘here’ in relation to all else in the perceptual world, not in the sense that a perceptually given object stands in an empirical spatial relation to others, but as an a priori and invariant ‘here’ in relation to which all possible perceptual ‘theres’ must stand. However, the universality of the bodily ‘here’ does not prevent it from being essentially dynamic, which is to say, a relation which is intelligible in its concreteness only in terms of possible and actual bodily movement and the perceptual consequences thereof (Hua IV/V 248–249 [1914/15]). For something to show up perceptually as ‘to my right’ or ‘distant,’ or indeed even as ‘appearing from the front,’ certain possible bodily movements in which such kinds of ‘there’ can be transformed into other kinds of ‘there,’ or even into a ‘here,’ are perceptually implied (Hua IV/V 254/Hua IV 308 [1913]). And these kinaesthetic possibilities are both embedded in and partially constitute my present way of being oriented, which is itself lived as having arisen from a kinaesthetic actualisation of the retained past. (4) Summarising the last two points, we can say that a tacit relation to ‘circumstances’ is always involved in thing-perception. On the one hand, the stable features of things are given in the styles of change exhibited in the regular way their ‘states’ alter in relation to ‘causal circumstances.’ On the other hand, in seeing a thing in space an awareness of one’s currently actual kinaesthetic constellation, and the horizon of kinaesthetic possibilities which surrounds it, is always at play, such that things are given in relation to my mobile bodily ‘here’. In this sense, the thing is always given in relation to my kinaesthetic-bodily circumstances (Hua IV/V 272/

19

 See also Hua IV/V 22/Hua V 109 [1912].

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Hua IV 20 [1915]). Husserl accords a primacy to the latter kind of relation, which is involved already in the constitution of the spatial phantom (Hua IV/V 325–323/Hua IV 127–128 [1915]). However, he also argues that kinaesthesia are not solely of import for the perceptual disclosure of the spatiality of things; rather, they also enable perception to have a certain teleological character. As Husserl puts it, our perception of a thing as appearing from a certain side and with certain material features “points us towards a currently invisible backside and ahead to certain courses of perception in which we, in ‘turning the head,’ ‘moving the eyes,’ etc., would bring into view what is ever new of the same thing (the meant thing), of its form, it colour, etc.” In this way, Husserl suggests that our momentary perceptual experience of a thing as exhibiting certain features—these referring, from Husserl’s phenomenological standpoint, to certain sensuous-causal styles—always delineates courses of movement in which those features would be better given, and “which we only have to give ourselves over to, as it were, in order to fashion the appropriate clarity and givenness” (Hua IV/V 282–283 [1915], emphasis mine; cf. Hua IV 35). In perceiving material features, the currently operative perceptual circumstances are always tacitly located somewhere on a spectrum of “optimality,” a spectrum which peaks in those circumstances under which the features would appear optimally, a matter which in its turn depends upon which kind of material feature is in question. And while these optimal circumstances sometimes include a certain kind of causal situation—such that, for instance, “clear daylight” serves as the lighting conditions under which the thing’s true colour directly appears—they also always involve an optimal relation to one’s body, in which the relevant features would be given in the flesh (leibhaftig) (Hua IV/V 402, 370, 396–397, 394 [1915–1917]). It is then possible for the epistemically interested perceiving subject to follow up and more closely determine the perceptual object, through a transition to these (passively delineated) optimal circumstances (Hua IV/V 406–407/Hua IV 60 [1915–1917]).20

4.6  Animate Empathy: A Preliminary Take At this stage, we are sufficiently prepared to highlight the point at which the phenomenological analyses of nature and empathy intersect. As we have seen, Husserl claims that nature announces itself experientially in (at least) three different ways: as a layer of ‘founding’ reality constantly present, as an underlying and perceptible stratum, in worldly objects as experienced in the personalistic attitude (perceptual nature); as the generic essence pertaining to a certain class of categorical objectivities, namely, those constituted in acts of thinking in which perceptual nature is

 Nevertheless, as Husserl often emphasises, the perceptual givenness of a thing always involves a certain unknownness and openness (see, e.g., Hua IV/V 334 [1915]).

20

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described (theoretical nature); and, finally, as a domain investigated by the natural sciences, which is solely accessible to a non-descriptive, indeed rigorously mathematical, style of thinking (scientific nature). With regard to the things of perceptual nature, we have seen that their givenness integrates a plurality of sensory modalities, that their features are manifest in the style of alteration their states exhibit in relation to circumstances, and that perceptual experience recognises these styles on the basis of a pregiven manifold of phantoms or schemata. Finally, we have seen that our perceptual contact with nature has an embodied, dynamic, and teleological character. When it comes to the empathetic experience of other persons, on the other hand, we saw in the previous chapter that we are directly acquainted with expressive unities, that is, unities whose corporeality immediately displays an embodied and world-directed experiential life other than one’s own. This mode of experiential contact with others takes place in the personalistic attitude, in that it is a pre-­ scientific way of relating to others which emerges in and to a significant degree comprises our everyday involvement with the social world. It is not immediately clear how, and indeed whether, these two pictures may be integrated. We have seen that a basic form of empathetic contact with others as persons can be described, once the notion is untied from the perception of material things, as a kind of perceptual experience (see the second section of the third chapter). Such an empathetic grasp of others has certain similarities with our acquaintance with ‘perceptual nature,’ in that it involves a basic mode of doxic intentionality that is directly giving of a certain type of reality (namely, other persons as expressive wholes), and insofar as it serves as founding for those of our (theoretical, affective, and practical) attitudes which concern other persons as such (an issue we will return to in the seventh chapter). But as was also earlier highlighted, the other person as empathetically given also differs from, and in a sense ‘exceeds,’ an object of perceptual nature, in that the dynamics of her bodily reality are not only visibly present but also immediately expressive of the person’s conscious engagement with her surrounding world. The fact that the other person is empathetically experienced with a certain immediacy and directness, but also as exceeding her sensuously presentable bodily features, appears at odds with the claim that perceptual nature operates as a self-enclosed founding layer in all worldly experience. In beginning to see how we might face up to this conceptual hurdle, it is important to note that perceptual nature is not itself ontologically, or indeed phenomenologically, univocal. As was briefly mentioned earlier (Sect. 4.2), Husserl claims that the region of nature permits differentiation into the sub-regions of material and animate nature (see the first section of the fifth chapter). However, Husserl’s account of the difference in perceptual givenness with respect to material and animate nature is more important for our current purposes than his (arguably somewhat rough and preliminary) ontological reflections. Let me now explicate Husserl’s discussion of an inadequate way of considering this difference, before outlining an alternative Husserlian approach that I consider in the next chapter. According to Husserl, like the beings of material nature, animals are also first given as such in a direct and doxic mode of perceptual experience. He explicates this thought in a clear—though naturalistically inflicted—fashion in the context of

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describing the manner in which a theoretically-minded observer perceives a playing cat. His description is worth quoting in depth, since it brings to the fore several crucial issues: I see a playing cat, and I regard it now as something of nature, just as is done in zoology. I see it as a sensing and animated living body, i.e. I see it precisely as a cat. I “see” it in the general sense ordinarily meant when speaking of seeing. (…) In its own way, the cat is itself seen, and in the seeing, its existence as the animal, cat, is experienced. This experience has the kind of imperfections corresponding to the fundamental character of our experience of animals. But, as always, the cat is present there in the flesh—specifically, as a physical thing with sensing surfaces, sense organs, etc. The stratum of sensation is not there as something beside the physical thing; what is there is a living body, a living body which has physical and aesthesiological qualities as one (Hua IV/V 180/Hua IV 175–176, transl. modified [1913]).

The first thing to note about this passage is that Husserl regards the experience of animals to require a broadening of the concept of perceptual nature, such that animate others can be incorporated within it. This is phenomenologically necessary, because, when perceptually confronted with a cat, what exhibits itself directly is exactly the cat itself under a certain mode of imperfect givenness. When naturalistically oriented, we take the appearing cat as a unitary reality which includes two interwoven layers, one of bodily materiality and one of fields of sensations. These two layers are interwoven in that they are not experienced as externally related to one another, but as comprising two dimensions, isolatable only through abstraction, of the straightforwardly given object. In other words, the layer of the cat’s sensibility is simply that dimension of the cat which, when compared with any object of (perceptual) material nature, remains as a surplus of perceptual sense. The second point to note regarding this passage is that, despite the claim regarding the distinctiveness of animals in the domain of perceptual nature, in this scenario the subject seeing the cat as a theoretically interested one: it ‘regards the cat as something of nature, just as is done in zoology.’ In the section of the passage quoted above, the descriptive activity being performed could be understood as a merely ‘natural-theoretical’ one, that is, as a description of the cat’s living body just as it is given in a certain form of perceptual experience. However, this evidently does not hold in the sentences which directly follow: Likewise, the living body is also experienced as living body of a soul, and the world “soul” indicates again a founded stratum of qualities, and of course one that is still higher. The soul is not there as extended over the living body in the manner of being localised in the proper sense; it does not offer itself as something like a complex of psychic fields—thought in analogy with sense fields—which would come, immediately or mediately, to phenomenal coincidence with the extensional components of the living body…. In spite of that, the psychic is, in experience, one—that is, realiter one—with the living body; to that extent it is something at the living body or in it, lacking only distinguishable separate location. One could employ the expression, misleading to be sure of introjection; it would then express precisely this state of affairs. (…) As we can direct our analysing regard onto other properties, so we can also turn to these psychic ones; they then stand out as a “stratum,” as a really inseparable annex, of the physical living body, and of the thing which for its part would be thinkable without such strata (Hua IV/V 180–181/Hua IV 176, transl. modified [1913])

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Involved in some way with the naturalising apprehension of the cat described here is a grasp, not merely of the sensitivity of its body, but also of its soul or psyche  (Seele).  This entails a construal of the cat’s intentional experiences—its perceptions, affects, and desires—as psychological states which, while not directly embodied in the manner of fields of sensations and hence not directly visible in the same way, nevertheless manifest, in their stable dependency upon circumstances, the perceived cat’s real psychological features. Now, it is easy to see why this apprehension operates as a necessary presupposition for (at least a certain kind of) natural-­scientific investigation of animate life, in that it serves up the cat’s psychological life as an additional layer of states that inhere within its total reality as a worldly object (see the third section of the next chapter). Indeed, this is one way of understanding Husserl’s claim that the apprehension of the cat as bearer of psychic states makes possible an ‘analysing regard’ being directed towards the psychic state as a ‘stratum.’ However, with regard to a phenomenology of the animate other this account is, I think, less informative.21 What are we to do with the claim that the nexus of the cat’s psychic states are, for a naturalistically oriented subject, ‘at the living body or in it,’ despite their not belonging to the perceived living body but rather being experienced only through a certain kind of “introjection”—by which Husserl appears to mean: an accomplishment over and above perception? The most we can take from this seems to be that the apprehension of the psychic lives of animate beings transgresses their perceptual givenness, which at best presents their living body as a materially embodied nexus of sensation-fields. But the question still lingers of how a higher-order apprehension of the mental lives of animals as a layer of inner states is motivated. We have seen that this apprehension cannot be merely perceptual, and it must therefore be a categorically  Heidegger was thus partially correct when, in lectures given in Marburg in 1925, he (critically) referred to just this example as one which Husserl employed to depict the naturalistic attitude (1979, pp. 168–169/1985, p. 122). Only partially correct, however, in that Heidegger fails to note that Husserl is in fact highlighting two issues by means of this example: 1) the manner in which foreign animality is directly perceptible, and 2) the (mediate and complex) sense in which such perception serves as a kind of presupposition for natural-scientific thinking regarding animals. Lotz’s more sympathetic and accurate account of Husserl’s take on ‘animate others’ to my mind exhibits a similar blindspot, when he claims that, for Husserl, the sense, ‘animal,’ is “constituted whenever we describe consciousness with the prospect of and regarding its natural and causal circumstances.” (2006, pp. 194) On the view I have been developing here, this alleged essential correlation of animality with a theoretical attitude overlooks Husserl’s sensitivity to the perceivability of animate others as such. Another reading, in stark contrast with Heidegger and Lotz, has recently been offered by Painter. From the (correct) claim that Husserl’s playing cat evinces that, for him, animals are directly perceived as sensitive and self-moving beings, she concludes that animals ought to be understood as fellow ‘personal subjects,’ that is, subjects of the ‘personalistic attitude,’ who therefore demand of us moral care and concern (2007, pp. 98–103). Interestingly, Husserl himself occasionally suggests that the concept of personhood be de-anthropomorphised so as to also cover (some) non-human animals (see, e.g., Hua IX 130, Hua I 101). However, he would also insist, and to my mind correctly, that while animality is a necessary condition for personhood, it is not yet sufficient (see the sixth,  seventh, and eighth  chapters). I cannot discuss the ethical implications of this here, beyond suggesting that univocally personalising animate others may not be the best starting point for explicating the kind of moral claims they make on us.

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rich—even, to a certain extent, metaphorical (Hua IV/V 45 [1912]; cf. Hua IV 153)—way of thinking about the experiential life of a foreign animal and its relation to the perceptually given. It may seem to follow from this that the experiential lives of animals are ultimately only grasped by us through a projective movement of thought (a view apparently evoked by Husserl’s usage of the term ‘introjection’). As should be evident, this conclusion would be problematic for the broader argument of this book. If such a line of thought holds with regard to animals, then it could easily be extended to our experience of human persons. For ‘our’ experiential lives surely bear enough in common with our ‘fellow creatures’ that if the latter are conceived as invisible domains, the intersubjective accessibility of the former will also be called into question. Fortunately, this conclusion doesn’t follow as hastily as might be supposed. Once liberated from the reifying orientation that Husserl uses the observer of the playing cat to illustrate, we can acknowledge that the intentional experiences of other animate beings are only constituted as ‘inner states’ through an extra-perceptual activity, while maintaining that foreign animate experience can be directly encountered in a different way. As I will show in the next chapter, this becomes clear when we note that the perceptual naturality of animals does not only consist in their facing us as a unique type of perceivable nature-object (as sensitive living bodies), but also in that we encounter them as fellow subjects of perceptual nature, as beings who directly experience and indeed co-constitute the same domain of nature with which we are perceptually acquainted. I call the kind of experience which incorporates both of these elements animate empathy. This mode of empathy designates the experience of animate others as intentionally directed towards and responsive to a surrounding world which, as it were, overlaps with our own. So understood, animate empathy has a priority over any naturalistic analysis, in which the experiences of animals are interpreted as interior states that reveal psychological properties through their stable dependencies on circumstances. Such thinking modifies our pretheoretical contact with animate beings as embodied co-subjects, reifying their experiential lives (as pre-theoretically given) by construing them simply as an additional, “inner” layer of the animal-object. Moreover, insofar as naturalistic thinking at least implicitly acknowledges that animate others are singular wholes of body and mind, it preserves and presupposes an insight that can only emerge through the bringing to manifestation of expressive unities in animate empathy.22 The naturalistically-­ minded observer’s confidence that the cat’s psyche is ‘in experience, one—that is, realiter one—with the living body’ of the cat therefore rests upon a concealed and founding dimension of animate empathy that implicitly informs all naturalistic analysis.

 Cf. Hua IV/V 211–222/Hua IV 245–246 [1913]. While Husserl is here discussing the experience of human beings exclusively, we will see in the next chapter that animals are also given as expressive unities in the sense described in this passage.

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References Bernet, R. (2015). “Transcendental Phenomenology?” in: Jeffrey Bloechl & Nicolas de Warren (eds.), Phenomenology in a New Key: Between Analysis and History. Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 115-133. Crowell, S. G. (1996). “The Mythical and the Meaningless: Husserl and the Two Faces of Nature,” in: Thomas Nenon & Lester Embree (eds.), Issues in Husserl’s Ideas II. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 81-106. Dreyfus, H.  L. (1991). Being-in-the-World. A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Drummond, J. J. (1979-80). ‘On Seeing a Material Thing in Space: The Role of Kinaesthesis in Visual Perception.’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 40(1): 19-32. Findlay, J. N. (1970). Axiological Ethics. London: Macmillan. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Transl. J.  Macquarrie & E.  Robinson. Oxford: Basil Bakewell. Heidegger, M. (1967). Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Heidegger, M. (1979). Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. Ed. P. Jaeger. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Heidegger, M. (1985). History of the Concept of Time. Transl. T.  Kisiel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Husserl, E. (1952a). Husserliana IV. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie: Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Ed. M. Biemel, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Transl. R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.] Husserl, E. (1952b). Husserliana V. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie: Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften. Ed. M. Biemel, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (1980). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences. Transl. T. E. Klein & W. E. Pohl, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (Hua V 1-137); Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Transl. R.  Rojcewicz & A.  Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (Hua V 138-162).] Husserl, E. (1962). Husserliana IX. Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925. Ed. W.  Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (1977). Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester, 1925. Transl. J.  Scanlon. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (Hua IX 3-234).] Husserl, E. (1973). Husserliana XVI. Ding und Raum: Vorlesungen 1907. Ed. U. Claesges. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (2010). Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907. Transl. R. Rojcewicz. Dordrecht: Kluwer.] Husserl, E. (1974). Husserliana III, 1-2. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Ed. K. Schuhmann, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1984). Husserliana XIX, 1-2. Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band: Untersuchungen zue Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Ed. U. Panzer, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (2001). Logical Investigations: Volume 1. Transl. J. N. Findlay, Ed. D. Moran. London & New York: Routledge. Husserl, E. (2014). Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Transl. D. O. Dahlstrom. Indianapolis, IA: Hackett Publishing Company

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Jacobs, H. (2018). “Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty on the World of Experience,” in: Dan Zahavi (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 650-675. Landgrebe, L. (1981) “Regions of Being and Regional Ontologies in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” in: Ludwig Landgrebe (auth.), Donn Welton (ed.), The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Six Essays. Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 149-175. [Original: Landgrebe, L. (1956). “Seinsregionen und regionale Ontologien in Husserls Phänomenologie,” Studiium Generale 9: 313–314.] Lotz, C. (2006). “Psyche or Person? Husserl’s Phenomenology of Animals,” in: Dieter Lohmar & Dirk Fonfara (eds.), Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven der Phänomenologie: Neue Felder der Kooperation: Cognitive Science, Neurowissenschaften, Psychologie, Soziologie, Politikwissenschaft und Religionswissenschaft. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 190-202. Marx, K. (1975). Early Writings. Transl. R. Livingstone & G. Benton. London: Penguin. Marx, K. (2009). Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Mattens, F. (2006). “On the Introduction of the Concept of Phantom in Ideas II: A Study in Husserl’s Theory of Constitution,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 6:83-108. Melle, U. (1997). “Husserl’s Phenomenology of Willing,” in: J.  G. Hart & L.  Embree (eds.), Phenomenology of Values and Valuing. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp.  169-192. [Original: Melle, U. (1992). “Husserls Phänomenologie des Willens,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 54(2): 280-305.] Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. D.  A. Landes. London & New York: Routledge. [Original: Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phénomenologie de la Perception. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.] Mohanty, J. N. (2011). Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years. 1916-1938. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Overgaard, S. (2010). “Heidegger’s Early Critique of Husserl,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 11(2): 157-75. Painter, C.  M. (2007). “Appropriating the Philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein: Animal Psyche, Empathy, and Moral Subjectivity.’ In: Corinne Painter & Christian Lotz (eds.) Phenomenology and the Non-Human Animal. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 97-115. Smith, A. D. (2003). Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations. London & New York: Routledge. Sokolowski, R. (1974). Husserlian meditations. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Staiti, A. (2010). “Different Worlds and Tendency to Concordance: Towards a New Perspective on Husserl’s Phenomenology of Culture,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 10: 127-43. Theodorou, P. (2005). “Perceptual and Scientific Thing: On Husserl’s Analysis of ‘Nature-Thing’ in Ideas II,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 5: 165-187.

Chapter 5

Animate Empathy and Intercorporeal Nature

In this chapter, I attempt with Husserl to think through together two discrete but interrelated questions. First, in what way does one’s perceptual contact with material nature involve a tacit appeal to other subjects who co-perceive, or could co-­ perceive, the material things one perceives? And second, what is the generic character of our experience of other animate beings? Both of these matters are hugely complex issues which Husserl returned to repeatedly, and my discussion of them will not be exhaustive. Nevertheless, I hope to show that Husserl’s analyses in Ideen II move towards a conception of animate empathy, understood as a form of intuitive experience of the animate other’s living body as appresenting bodily subjectivity, and that they provide us with the resources to explicate both the distinctive character and transcendental implications of this mode of experience. Unpacking this thought will then provide the necessary groundwork for the discussion of personal ipseity and alterity offered in the two chapters that follow.

5.1  Animals and Things: Ontological Considerations In orienting ourselves towards the two questions mentioned above, it will helpful to first reconsider Husserl’s ontology of animate nature. Husserl maintains that a phenomenology of nature should not be restricted, in its orienting ontological reflections just as much as in its constitutive analyses, to the sole theme of material things. After all, when we think, in a pre-philosophical and naïve register, about the totality of real entities that comprises the universe of nature (das All der “realen” Sachen, das “Weltall”, die Natur), in its factual composition or in terms of the possible entities that could conceivably lurk within it, then there is perhaps no distinction that comes more readily to mind than that between purely material nature and “living nature,” that is, “the nature of animals” (lebendige, animalische Natur) (Hua IV/V 276/Hua IV 27, transl. modified [1915]). Leaving aside the tricky cases of plants, amoeba, and other organisms that are not obviously minded—and consequently of © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Jardine, Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person, Phaenomenologica 233, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84463-9_5

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great interest to those theorists who seek to identify a smooth continuum linking rudimentary forms of life and embodied and socialised human intelligence1— Husserl suggests, as a general and preliminary ontological classification, that animals are living bodies animated by soul or psyche (beseelte Leiber) (Hua IV/V ­280/ Hua IV 32, transl. modified [1915]). This characterisation, which applies without being at all limited to us “human beings (or “rational” living creatures),” specifies that animals are unitary realities with both material and mental strata, each encompassing their own real features (Hua IV/V 357/Hua IV 162 [1916/17]). Thus, animals contain, “in themselves, as their lower stratum, material realities, so-called material living bodies”, but crucially they also have “besides their specifically material qualities, still new systems of qualities (Beschaffenheiten), the “psychic” ones” (Hua IV/V 280/Hua IV 32 [1915]; cf. Hua IV/V 599 [1913]). The point here is simply that it lies within the scope of our truthful thinking about the real nature of animals that we ascribe to them “sensations, representations, feelings, and psychic acts and states of every kind,” and, conversely, that the latter owe their ontological status as real events within nature to their being taken as “activities or conditions of animals or humans and, as such, included in the spatiotemporal world” (Hua IV/V 276/Hua IV 27–28, transl. modified [1915]).2 Husserl describes animate beings as “founded realities,” by which he appears to mean at least three things (Hua IV/V 280/Hua IV 32 [1915]). First, he is drawing our attention to the fact that, when thinking about or perceiving animals as such, body and psyche are not taken as distinct and self-contained entities—however differently they might be thought of within the remit of certain practical and theoretical tasks—but as integrated layers of a concrete whole (konkrete Ganze), the human being or animal itself, layers whose sense is drastically altered when perceived or thought of outside of such an integration (Hua IV/V 600/Hua IV 33, transl. modified [1913]). Second, he is emphasising that, insofar as the states and dispositions which constitute the psyche of an (human or non-human) animal are always saturated with and conditioned by bodily affection, the animate psyche possesses an intimate unity with the living body (Hua IV/V 18–19/Hua IV 134–135 [1912]). Moreover, while psychic qualities do not belong to the animate body in just the same way as the material features which literally extend over it—such as the colours, tactile qualities, muscular strengths, etc., which are spatially distributed amongst its parts—they nevertheless have a certain “spatial integration” or localisation through their “foundation in the living body” (see Sect. 5.4.1). Consequently, unlike material things,

1  See, e.g., Jonas (2001) and Thompson (2007). In the Bleistiftmanuskript, Husserl briefly touches upon the issue of whether plants should be considered members of animate or material nature. His view is that this question cannot be settled by phenomenology alone, and he highlights the role that concrete experience of the plant’s organs and their “sensitivities,” combined with a comparison with more familiar kinds of (animate) expressivity, could play in scientifically resolving this issue (Hua IV/V 72–73 [1912]; cf. Hua V 9–10). 2  To this degree, we might wonder whether the Strawsonian thought that human beings or persons are “basic particulars” (see the second section of the seventh chapter) also applies to non-human animals.

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animate beings cannot undergo “fragmentation”; insofar as their psychic qualities are bodily conditioned and spatially integrated but not literally extended, being more than ways in which space is filled with sensible or causal features, such qualities are not retained when the parts in which they are integrated are broken off from the whole of the organism (Hua IV/V 599–600 (Hua IV 33) [1913]). Finally, by describing the psychic qualities of animate beings as materially founded, Husserl is emphasising that, while the materiality of the animal is intertwined with mentality, one can nevertheless abstractively specify the merely material features of the animate body without any reference to the psyche—although one will not thereby do justice to them as animate. The animate psyche, on the other hand, only participates in the universe of nature through its bodily integration. However, and as with his phenomenological account of the material thing, Husserl’s phenomenology of animate being cannot remain content with regional-­ ontological considerations alone. Rather, to strive towards a phenomenological account of the animate, his inquiry must interrogate animaticity in correlation with the forms of experience in which it is first disclosed. But while Husserl achieved this in his constitutional analysis of material nature by focussing on the material thing as pre-predicatively given in perception, the experience which originally gives the animal as a worldly being is rather a certain form of empathy. It is, after all, only in the experience of foreign animate beings that we directly encounter mindedness objectively, as something embodied within a unified reality that stands there before us. However, empathy is not wholly analogous to perception in this regard, in that it is only a certain level of empathy, what I will call animate empathy, which has as its correlate (another) animate being. Moreover, as we shall see, even this level of empathy is not squarely correlated with the animal just as specified in Husserl’s ontological considerations.

5.2  Intersubjective Nature and Living Bodies The constitution of the sensible world is obviously to be distinguished from the constitution of the “true” world, the world for the scientific subject, who engages itself in spontaneous “free” thinking and, in general, researching. That is to say: if we live passively, in the manner of animals, “in the world” and in reciprocal dealings (Wechselverkehr) with others who are like us, who are as “normal” as we are, then a world of experience constitutes itself common to us all. E. Husserl.3

Before directly treating animate empathy (Sect. 5.3), I will first bring it into view, through a preliminary discussion of the intersubjectivity of the perceptual world, an issue which both makes possible and receives clarification through an analysis of the animate other, and which we will return to later in this chapter. This is not an arbitrary diversion. For as I noted in the sixth section of the previous chapter, a risk inherent in  phenomenological treatments of the animate other is that  Hua IV/V 384/Hua IV 89, transl. modified [1915–1917].

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of metaphorically extending the quasi-spatiality of bodily sensibility to the intentional acts themselves, such that they are thought of as inhering within a nexus of ‘inner states’, located or localisable somewhere inside the animal’s head. This view is not only phenomenologically problematic because—first-personally speaking— we do not live our own acts of thinking as localised within our brain as we do our tactile sensations in our fingers (Hua IV/V 45, 547/Hua IV 153, 218 [1912, 1916/17]; see also Hua IV 164). More importantly, it is not clear that such a view correctly captures our experience of animate others, whose bodily movements display a subjectivity which, rather than being ensconced within an inner domain, is immediately geared towards a perceptual world experientially common to self and other. In order to carefully avoid this pitfall, the current section will gradually ease out the givenness of the animate other by explicating the manner in which our perceptual experience of worldly things permits, and is ultimately made possible by, the co-existence of animate others.

5.2.1  Perception and Solipsism In taking this route, we can simply follow the train of thought which Husserl himself outlines to motivate the transition from material to animate nature as themes of his analyses in the 1915 partial draft of Ideen II. There Husserl notes that what his constitutive studies of material nature have described is “the thing constituted in the continuous-unitary multiplicity of the intuitions of an experiencing ego, or in the manifold of “sense-things” of various levels, manifolds of sensuous adumbrations, of schematic unities, of real states and real features (Eigenschaften) on various levels. It is the thing for the solitary subject, the subject thought of ideally as isolated”. The analyses touched upon in the fifth section of the previous chapter have, in other words, only thematised the material thing of perception in its correlation with the integrated sensory manifolds and motivated apprehensions of an individual subject. Moreover, they have proceeded to do so without recognising, or at least critically reflecting upon, this limitation; the subject whose isolated achievements they describe “in a certain sense remains forgotten to itself and equally forgotten to the one doing the analysis” (Hua IV/V 294/Hua IV 55, transl. modified [1915]). As Husserl then remarks, the limits of this implicit methodological solipsism become evident in the face of the things themselves and their very givenness: Nevertheless, this self-forgetfulness is hardly appropriate for the restoration of the full givenness of a material thing, a givenness in which the thing exhibits its actual reality. We need only consider how a thing exhibits itself as such, according to its essence, in order to recognise that such a construal must contain in its sense, and at the very outset, components which refer back to the subject. Specifically, these components refer back to the human subject (or, conceived purely: the animal subject) in a fixed sense; furthermore, they refer back, in a similar way, to a plurality of subjects who mutually understand, and exchange their experiences with, one another (Hua IV/V 294 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 55).

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Husserl raises at least two important points in this passage. The first is that material objects refer in their sense to a plurality of subjects, in that even the “thing-­ apprehension” lived by a subject presently unaccompanied by others harbours certain “unfulfilled intentions,” which are fulfilled only through a “harmonious exchange of experience” taking place between self and other(s) (Hua IV/V 296/Hua IV 80 [1915]). The second point is that this plurality is a plurality of animal subjects, subjects whose experience is essentially bodily in nature. While both of these thoughts will be unfolded throughout this chapter, I will first offer a preliminary sketch of the first one. On the one hand, and as I will explore in more detail later (see the second section of the seventh chapter), in the abstraction which inaugurates Husserl’s analyses of material nature—that by means of which the sheer materiality of the objects of our perceptual world is taken apart from the axiological and practical senses which the full givenness of those objects exhibit in our ordinary experience of and engagement with them—the senses which are abstractively laid aside do not merely arise from one’s own subjectivity. Rather they also and indeed for the most part originate in those fellow subjects who co-constitute (and have, in the past, co-constituted) the common cultural surrounding world. On the other hand, something analogous applies to the sense of the ‘merely material’ thing which remains after this abstraction. That is, a genuinely fulfilling exhibition of a real thing as objectively real requires “a relation to the apprehension of a multiplicity of subjects sharing a mutual understanding,” since it presupposes the intersubjective concordance of one’s own experiences with others’ (Hua IV/V 297/ Hua IV 81 [1915]). This claim initially appears puzzling since, after all, “when we implement the construal of a thing we do not, it seems, always co-posit and co-think a number of fellow human beings and, specifically, co-posit and co-think them as ones who are to be, as it were, appealed to” (Hua IV/V 296 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 80). But that we do in fact tacitly appeal to the (actual or potential) experiences of others in apprehending worldly things can be made evident by what Husserl calls a “solipsistic thought experiment” (Hua IV/V 297/Hua IV 81 [1915]). Husserl invites us to imagine our experiential history, and the world with which it has made us familiar, as changed in one crucial respect: that we have never encountered another (human or animal) living body. Abstracting from the obvious fact that this lack of socialisation would have profound implications for the way we think, feel, and act in the world—and, accordingly, that this ‘solipsistic world’ would lose much, perhaps even all, of its cultural and personal meaning—Husserl is primarily interested in the question of how, in such an imaginary world, our perceptual apprehension of things in their sheer materiality would be altered. Despite the complete absence of any intersubjective “apperceptive domain”, Husserl claims, it is conceivable that, in the solipsistic world, “I have the same manifolds of sensation and the same schematic manifolds,” and, in as much as functional relations hold between such manifolds, then it may be that “the ‘same’ real things, with the same features, appear to me and, if everything is in harmony, exhibit themselves as ‘actually being’” (Hua IV/V 295 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 80). And yet, if other human living bodies were to then “show up” and be “understood” as such, the feigned reality of our experienced ‘things’ would be called into question:

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Now all of a sudden and for the first time human beings are there for me, with whom I can come to an understanding. And I come to an understanding with them about the things which are there for us in common in this new segment of time. Something very remarkable now comes out: whole complexes of assertions about things, which I made in earlier periods of time on the ground of earlier experiences, experiences which were perfectly concordant throughout, are not corroborated by my current companions, and this not because these experiences are simply lacking to them (after all, one does not need to have seen everything others have seen, and vice versa) but because they thoroughly conflict with what the others experience in experiences, we may suppose, that are necessarily harmonious and that go on being progressively confirmed. (…) As I communicate to my companions my earlier lived-experiences and they become aware of how much these conflict with their world, constituted intersubjectively and continuously exhibited by means of a harmonious exchange of experience, then I become for them an interesting pathological object, and they call my actuality, so beautifully manifest to me, the hallucination of someone who up to this point in time has been mentally ill. One may imagine perfection in the exhibition of my solipsistic world and raise that perfection to any height, still the described state of affairs as an a priori one, the ideal possibility of which is beyond question, would not change at all (Hua IV/V 295–296/Hua IV 79–80, transl. modified [1915]).

The central point I take Husserl to be making with this thought-experiment is that the intra-subjective concordance of the perceptual experiences of a solipsistic subject (conceived here as merely an ideal possibility) is a necessary, but not yet sufficient, condition for an exhibition of things in their objective reality. In the world of the radically isolated perceiver, any distinction between veridical perception and concordant hallucination—that is, the experience of a non-existent intentional object which continues to appear, throughout an episode of dynamic-embodied perception, as if it were a stable ‘thing,’ potentially even responding to changes in its real circumstances in the way that things do—would be unintelligible, since, for the radically isolated, the ‘perceptual’ object would be nothing more than a unity of my concordant, body- and circumstance-related, schematic adumbrations. In order for perceptual experience to even aspire to exhibit material things as such, then, it must ‘aim’ at a more demanding kind of objectivity than the ‘unity’ given to an individual subject in her concordant experiences. And for us non-solipsistic subjects, this appeal to a richer sense of objectivity is operative perceptually even when we are momentarily alone—in as much as we still naively accept our perceptual grasp of reality as a grasp of reality. But what does this appeal consist in? For Husserl, perceptually apprehending a thing as real in the pregnant sense involves taking my own perceptual appearances to participate, not only in an intra-subjective temporal concordance, but in an intersubjective harmony spanning across a plurality of perceiving subjects. This is why he insists that, in the exposure of the imaginary solipsist to others, what gets called into question is not only the specific aspects of her ‘world’ which are non-­ corroborated by her new companions, but her ‘actuality,’ that is, her solipsistically constituted ‘world’ as such. That is, even those elements of her earlier experienced world which go unchallenged by the other embodied beings she now encounters can acquire a totally new sense, becoming, for the first time, taken as genuinely worldly—whether evidently so, through intersubjective corroboration actually taking place, or only presumably, intersubjective harmony typically now being taken

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for granted. Perceiving a thing as such is thus, on the one hand, dependent upon the synthetic manifolds of an egoic and bodily experiential life, without which no object could ever be manifest as something to somebody, and on the other hand, a matter of that subject’s staking a claim to reality, a claim which already moves within a socially embedded space, and which points towards an intersubjective corroboration in which it would be authentically fulfilled.4 Accordingly, a transcendental phenomenology of material nature remains incomplete, failing to explicate the normative claim implicated in perceptual experience, if it construes the perceiving subject as isolated from others.

5.2.2  Common Nature and Intercorporeal Concordance Husserl may not have been the first to recognise intersubjectivity, the way conscious subjects relate to one another, as a topic which is not only of theoretical interest for the empirical sciences but of perennial importance for transcendental philosophy. As many have pointed out, the thought that intersubjective relations cannot be ignored in addressing the conditions of possibility for worldly intelligibility, self-­ consciousness, and freedom of the will, can be traced back as least as far as the German Idealists.5 However, it is almost certain that no other author has yet engaged in the degree of painstaking and multifaceted reflection regarding the relation between transcendentality and intersubjectivity as that which we find documented in the Nachlass of the founder of phenomenology.6 To employ a Husserlian

4  For Husserl, this insight, that a phenomenological treatment of the constitutive relation between subject and world would have to address the (co-)constitutive role played by intersubjectivity, raises issues which cannot be addressed by a single analysis, but which rather demand a rethinking of the entire project of phenomenology. It is consequently unsurprising that the problem of transcendental intersubjectivity would continue to haunt Husserl’s research manuscripts for many years to come. The ‘solipsistic thought experiment’ referred to here would ultimately be understood in terms of a ‘primordial abstraction’ or a ‘reduction to the sphere of ownness’, by means of which the respective roles played by one’s own and foreign subjectivity (whether in its concrete or anonymous guises) in world-(and self-)constitution could be delimited. For valuable discussions of Husserl’s mature position on this issue, see: Held (1972), Franck (2014, pp. 71–135), Yamaguchi (1982 pp. 75ff.), Bernet et al. (1993, pp. 154–165), Steinbock (1995, Chapter 4), Sheets-Johnstone (1999), Zahavi (2001, Chapter 2), Overgaard (2002), Smith (2003, Chapter 5), Donohoe (2004, pp. 71–110), Staehler (2008), de Warren (2009, Chapter 7), Mohanty (2011, Chapter 16), Taipale (2014, Chapter 4), Staiti (2014, pp. 191–206), Heinämaa (2014), Luo (2017). 5  See, in particular, the seminal works of Fichte (2000) and Hegel (1977, 1991), and recent studies by Williams (1992), Neuhouser (2000), Honneth (2000) and Pippin (2008). For excellent comparative studies of Husserl and Hegel on intersubjectivity, see, e.g., Hart (1992, pp. 238–239, 264–268, 370–416), Steinbock (1998), Staehler (2017, pp. 129–208), Miettinen (2020, pp. 174–178). 6  Cf. Zahavi (2014, p. 97). That majority of Husserl’s reflections on intersubjectivity can be found, thanks to the impressive editorial work of Kern, in Husserliana volumes 13–15. An instructive overview of the dizzying array of themes and research topics addressed in these manuscripts is provided by the editor’s introductions (Kern 1973a, b, c).

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metaphor, the account given in the last section of the relation to others implicated in perceptual experience is therefore no more or less than an Abschattung, a sketch of Husserl’s reflections on the topic in question which purports to adumbrate more than the limited textual evidence it directly presents. I will now supplement this sketch with another, this time focussing on Husserl’s claim that the others implied in perceptual experience are essentially other embodied perceivers. I will argue that this latter claim leads us towards an account of animate empathy as the mode of experience which presents other living bodies as perceptually attuned to a common nature. As we shall see in the seventh chapter, the constitutive function of intersubjective relations is not always only an inter-corporeal, but sometimes also an inter-personal matter, and this applies most robustly for the social space of judicative, axiological and practical meanings—not to mention the institutions and communal formations of various kinds—that infuse the surrounding world of, and provide the motivational context for, the lives of persons. But, for Husserl, interpersonal intersubjectivity is essentially rooted in a more primitive bodily intersubjectivity, and the latter has its own constitutive consequences (Hua IV/V 297, 230/Hua IV 81, 297 [1915, 1913]).7 The most primitive and crucial difference, in other words, between the world of ordinary perception and the hypothesised ‘world’ of the solus ipse—even more primitive than and indeed accounting for the difference in ontological status or worldliness—is that that the latter lacks the original constitutive imprint of “human beings and animals,” of “living bodies that I could apprehend as the living bodies of foreign psychic subjects” (Hua IV/V 297, 295/Hua IV 81, 79, transl. modified [1915]). To see why this is so, we can turn to a manuscript from 1913 where Husserl explores in more detail the constitutive function of bodily intersubjectivity. In this text, Husserl emphasises that the living body of the other is the only possible perceptual object which announces a radical transcendence which reaches beyond my synthetic appearances, without the objectivity of the world being yet ‘assumed,’ that is, without intersubjectivity having been established as transcendental structure. He writes: If we bring comprehension and its constitutive accomplishments into the compass of our considerations, then the ego previously thought of as solitary now apprehends, through comprehension, certain of “its” objects as “other living bodies” and in unity with them, other egos, which, however, are not yet thereby constituted as real subjects. At first new “objective” physical things in the pregnant sense, i.e., intersubjective things can be constituted, and subsequently can be constituted living bodies as intersubjectively identifiable unities (Hua IV/V 253 [1913]; cf. Hua IV 307).

7  The terms “intercorporeal” and “intercorporeality,” occasionally employed in this chapter, derive from the concept of intercorporéité as developed by Merleau-Ponty, who notably acknowledges the roots of this conception in Husserl’s analyses: “The passage to intersubjectivity is contradictory only with regard to an insufficient reduction, Husserl was right to say. But a sufficient reduction leads beyond the alleged transcendental “immanence,” it leads to the absolute spirit understood as Weltlichkeit, to Geist as Ineinander of the spontaneities, itself founded on the aesthesiological Ineinander and on the sphere of Einfühlung and intercorporeity” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, p. 172). For an excellent discussion of embodiment and intersubjectivity in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty that further explicates this issue, see Moran (2017).

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Husserl here formulates two important thoughts, both of which I will now try to unpack. The first thought is that a foreign living body as ‘comprehended’ announces a distinct sphere of egoic intentional consciousness, even if we envisage the sense which the foreign living body has for the one comprehending it as not yet claiming objective reality, that is, if we abstract away from its sense any implicit reference to an intersubjective concordance integrating its appearance-for-me and its appearance-­ for-­others. Second, Husserl is suggesting that it is this apprehension of another living or lived body as manifesting foreign subjectivity, but not yet as objectively real, which makes possible the institution of objective-intersubjective nature as a normative framework for perception and thought. This first claim may strike some as phenomenologically ungrounded, or even ungroundable. After all, if one agrees with Husserl that perceptual experience in the pregnant sense is always already normed by intersubjective objectivity, then it might seem to follow that little could be gained from reflecting upon the nature of a putatively quasi-solipsistic perception of another living body. One way of responding to this worry would be as follows. As we saw in the previous chapter, phenomenological analysis can trace out the motivating kinaesthesia, norm-governed syntheses, and phantoms implicated in the perceptual exhibition of material things as such; and it can trace out such constitutive elements as embedded in my subjectivity alone. Admittedly, in not attending to the intersubjective elements of this exhibition, such an analysis fails to fully clarify the objectivity or worldliness of perceived things. Nevertheless, the very intelligibility of the claims made by such an analysis shows that a distinction of some kind can be drawn between the traces of the thing as brought to manifestation through and correlated with my subjective experience alone, and the thing in its objective-intersubjective being. Indeed, I suggested earlier that the objects of concordant hallucinations satisfy the conditions of solipsistic thing-exhibition but without being open to corroboration from (at least bodily and mentally ‘normal’) other perceivers. What the possibility of such hallucinations reveals is not, as some philosophers would have it, that an ontological gulf divorces the (‘inner’) world of perception and (‘outer’) reality, but simply that perceptual experience is both typically world-presenting and a subjectively accomplished process, one that can occasionally ‘misfire.’8 For Husserl, while perceptual contact with

8  Drummond (2012, p. 130) argues that, once we attend to “what happens [to a hallucinatory, nonexistent object] in response to bodily movements over time, what happens with regard to verification by other sense-systems, and what happens at the level of intersubjective verification”, we can begin to contest the thesis that hallucination and perception are indistinguishable—and thereby better motivate the claim that veridical perception (understood as temporal, multi-modal, embodied, contextual, and intersubjectively responsive) is non-representational and world-involving. As should be clear, my interest here lies primarily in those cases, which are surely at least imaginable, where a hallucinatory object exhibits its non-existence—or, in Drummond’s terms, becomes phenomenologically distinguishable from a corresponding object of veridical perception—only through intersubjective contestation. These cases highlight an element of perception that only makes use of the perceiver’s kinaesthetically motivated appearance-systems, an element that can, on occasion, fail to deliver the intersubjectively acceptable objects that perception, as a whole, aims at.

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the world is only intelligible if it involves a tacit appeal to others, it nevertheless contains a subject-relative core, such that we can distinguish, both noetically and noematically, between a subjectively constituted stratum of perceptual experience, and those elements of perceptual intentionality which appeal to (co-perceived or merely possible) other perceivers. Now, in the case of the other’s living body, we can also distinguish between that of it which appears as meaningful in and through my experiential life alone, and the bodily reality with which others are, or at least can be, also familiar. However, it is entirely inconceivable that a foreign living body be given as such, whether as disclosed through my own constitutive syntheses alone or as an intersubjective reality, without it appearing as a locus for another experiential life—a life which, in the ‘solipsistic’ case somewhat paradoxically, outstrips my own sphere of possible and actual experiences as another sphere of this kind. Indeed, if we try to imagine an entirely mindless living body, the best we can do is to picture a corpse, or, perhaps, someone in a coma or a very deep sleep. These possibilities, we might say, exemplify the limits of the bodily mind, and the extent that such objects continue to count as living bodies for those who encounter them depends upon the degree to which the mindedness they ambiguously and problematically embody is perceived or thought of as open to being awakened. To think that a living body could be apprehended as such without it being taken as embodying an experiential life (whether actually, or, at the obscure limits, merely historically or potentially), then, makes as much sense as supposing that a perceived thing could be replaced by a phantom without losing its very materiality. It follows from these considerations that even another living body thought exclusively in terms of its perceptual appearance for me—that is, even in abstraction from the full sense it ordinarily has for me perceptually as an intersubjective-­objective living body perceivable by others—is by necessity comprehended as embodying another subjective life, or as Husserl puts it in the passage above, in unity with another ego.9 The second important thought here is that the intersubjective concordance involved with the exhibition of material things in their (intersubjective) objectivity is rooted in and sustained by precisely this experience, or stratum of experience— that is, the one in which the animate other is comprehended as a  conscious and bodily, but not yet “objectively” real, being. Immediately after the above-quoted lines from 1913, Husserl spells out in detail what this claim involves: We assume first of all a “normal” ego-community and living bodies of “normal,” i.e., typically “concurrent,” formation. We assume them in general in such a way that for all ego-­ subjects the same sense-things and subjective-objective things are constituted, differing only in the way they are given—by way of an orientation that changes from one subject to another. Now, subjects can interchange (vertauschen) their “positions.” If we think such switches as having taken place, then their current appearances (the presently given “things” in the how of their manners of sensuous appearance) also interchange, always presupposing

9  In light of the expansive array of issues addressed here, I have postponed a discussion of the specifically egological character of pre-personal forms of bodily subjectivity to the first section of the next chapter.

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the same “adaption”—taken here in an enlarged sense that is easily understood. In this exchangeability (Austauschbarkeit), resting on comprehension, is founded the possibility of the identification of objects originally relative to isolated subjects: we see the “same object,” each of us from their own position, but also with the mode of appearance which would be ours if we were, instead of here, there in the other’s place (Hua IV/V 253/Hua IV 307–308, translation modified [1913]).

This line of thought is densely formulated but, I believe, rewards careful explication. Perhaps the most basic point here is that, in comprehending another living body, in its mobile materiality, as embodying another alert conscious life, we necessarily take this life to be intentionally related to its own sense-things. That is, comprehending the other’s living body means taking it to embody another sphere of lived perceptual experience, one which comes into its own kind of meaningful perceptual contact with appearing objects. Furthermore, if this recognition of foreign perceiving is to provide us with an initial opening to a genuinely shared perceptual world, then it is necessary that both empathising and empathised subjects are taken to possess a sensibility that is, in certain respects, “normal.” In this context, normality does not refer to any kind of pre-existing ideal, but simply to a common way of perceiving that binds the empathising subject to others who are perceptually acquainted with appearing objects in the same generic way she is (see Sect. 5.3). Accordingly, we can say that for a subject to empathetically grasp another’s living body she must comprehend it as a foreign bodily “here” related to a foreign sphere of sense-things (to which foreign “theres” correspond), where these are recognised as transcending – but also, at least in the case of “normality,” as harmonious with – my own bodily “here” and the sense-things surrounding it. While this way of putting things sounds relatively simple, things become more complex when we try to explicate the guiding structures that are implicated in such comprehension. Husserl suggests that, when the materiality of the other’s body ‘over there’ coincides, in its “general type,” with my own lived body ‘here’ in its familiar self-presence, “then it is “seen” as a lived body, and the potential appearances, which I would have if I were transposed to the ‘there,’ are attributed to as currently actual; that is, an ego is acknowledged in empathy (einverstanden wird) as the subject of the living body, along with those appearances and the rest of the things that pertain to the ego, its lived experiences, acts, etc.” That is, alongside the perceptible similarity of my lived body and the other’s (a problematic issue to which we will return at the end of this chapter), this empathetic apprehension of a foreign sphere of sense-things also rests upon a further structural feature of perceived space; namely, that each ‘there’ is necessarily recognised as a possible ‘here,’ a possibility whose actualisation would rest solely upon my freely executing the relevant course of movement. As Husserl notes, already at the level of spatiality fashioned through my own bodily potentialities alone, each ‘there’ delineates, “in a regulated and motivated way,” kinaesthetic courses through which it would become ‘here,’ and in which my orientation and appearances would be accordingly changed. The empathetic recognition of the other’s living body as embodying another experiential life with kinaesthetic possibilities, appearances, and a perceptual space of its own draws upon but subverts this structure. With the emergence of the other’s body in my

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bodily space, I am faced with something actually ‘there’ that resembles and associatively recalls my body ‘here’ without being it; and it is this incompatibility with and transgression of my corporeal spatiality that motivates my empathetic recognition that another (embodied) ego—whose manifolds of appearance are “similar” to mine but “can never become actual in the unity of the stream of my lived experiences”— stands before me (Hua IV/V 254–255/Hua IV 308–309, transl. modified [1913]). Several complications regarding the just-sketched account of the motivational structure of the comprehension of foreign living bodies will be considered throughout this chapter. But at this stage, we should get clear about how such empathetic comprehension of a similar but irreducibly other embodied-perceptual life ‘there’ makes possible intersubjective concordance and the sense of objectivity that comes with it. As the long passage quoted above evinces, Husserl’s view is that the intersubjective objectivity at issue hinges upon the possibility that, when two subjects interchange (vertauschen) their spatial orientation, an interchange of the subjects’ perceptual objects in their present manner of givenness will also transpire. It is crucial not to misunderstand this argument. Husserl is not suggesting that empathetically recognising another embodied perspective requires one to imaginatively transport oneself into the ‘there,’ a claim which would entail that foreign bodily subjectivity is only given as such through a movement of projection that ‘brings to life’ the other’s merely material body. Indeed, Husserl emphasies that this perspectival exchangeability is not a process which accounts for empathetic comprehension, but something which ultimately rests upon (beruht auf) and further articulates the latter (Hua IV/V 253/Hua IV 307–308, transl. modified [1913]). Rather, his thought is that empathetically comprehending another similar bodily orientation to my own ‘over there’ motivates the acceptance of a certain commonality lying between and enveloping my own and the other’s perceptual surroundings. The commonality Husserl has in mind here is twofold. On the one hand, a new “sense-­content” now accrues to the objects which appear to each subject, since the material things of perception now become “intersubjective—i.e., intersubjectively identifiable—unities”. With the acceptance of commonality, the very sense of a perceived thing can be explicated, with regard to its intersubjective potentialities, as follows: “it is the same thing that I see and that the other sees, it is just that we see this same thing ‘from out of’ different points of space” (Hua IV/V 255/Hua IV 309 [1913]). On the other hand, for Husserl, this worldly publicity finds its roots in a commonality which infuses the very constitutive correlation between subjectivity and world. That is, the intersubjective thing as perceived by me is not simply and straightforwardly correlated with my law-governed and kinaesthetically motivated systems of actual and possible appearances. Rather, in such perception, my own currently actual appearances, as well as the horizon of possible appearances motivationally related to my kinaesthetic possibilities, now function as situated within “the common system of possible appearances” (Hua IV/V 254/Hua IV 309, emphasis mine [1915]). To see what this means, we should first note that, for Husserl, the moment we first empathetically comprehend another lived body as such, we obtain not merely a commonality with this specific other but also the otherwise inconceivable possibility of a commonality that stretches to all possible subjects. And, as he notes in a

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later manuscript, it is with the acceptance of this commonality that perception becomes open to “nature in the first and original sense”, which is to say, “the totality of objects which can be primally present and that make up a domain of primal presence common to all communicating subjects”. Nature in the sense of the totality of things which are recognisable in direct perception by all, and just in the way they are so recognisable, is thus set up as a normative framework for even ‘solitary’ perceptual episodes, in that they too ‘claim’ to gain contact with the world in its publicity. In explicating this claim to perceptual publicity, Husserl maintains, we see that it stipulates that the perceptual object “can be given, in primal presence, and as identical, to each other subject who stands with them as presupposed in possible nexuses of empathy” (Hua IV/V 359–360 [1922/23]; cf. Hua IV 163).10 In seeing a thing as a natural being, then, an implicit appeal is made not only to my possible and actual perceptual experience, but also to the perceptual experience of possible others as correlated with possible empathetic acts (or, as the case may be, to the experience which I now empathetically attribute to concrete others who are currently here with me). This delineation of a plurality of possible others and their own spheres of ‘primal presence’ within perceptual experience both orients such experience towards nature in its perceptual publicity, and opens it to possible confirmation and contestation when concrete others come into view and manifest a perceptual grasp which concords or discords with my own.11 Moreover, a further consequence of this intentional implication of an open plurality of others is that the context in which the perceptual object is embedded and has meaning, rather than being simply a construct of the appresentations that arise through the sedimentation of my own past experiences, is exactly the “open horizon of an unknown world of things” (Hua IV/V 240 [1915–17]; see also Hua IV/V 193, 378, 473/Hua IV 195, 67–68, 380 [1913, 1915/1916, 1910–1912]). In perceiving a thing as there for everyone within an indefinite worldly horizon, then, an “apperceptive relation” to “actual or possible fellow human beings (or fellow animals)” is necessarily operative (Hua IV/V 316–317/Hua IV 110 [1915]). The publicity of nature, for Husserl, is secured through a degree of common concordance and exchangeability holding between one’s own and the other’s perceptual appearances. This holds, albeit in a presumptive and fallible way, when  Husserl at several emphasises the connection between objectivity and an open plurality of others in the Ideen II manuscripts, including in the opening pages of the very first manuscript that he wrote for the project (see, e.g., Hua IV/V 8, 318 [1912, 1915]). 11  There has been an important discussion amongst Husserl scholars concerning whether the form of empathy discussed here, in which the other is given as a concrete foreign subjectivity who coconstitutes the perceptual world, already presupposes a certain a priori or “open” transcendental intersubjectivity, a view defended by Zahavi (2001, Chapter 2) and Taipale (2014, Chapter 4), or whether, as de Warren (2009, Chapter 7) and Staiti (2014, pp. 191–206) suggest, such empathy should rather be regarded as a primitive experience of alterity which opens up the intersubjective horizon of constitution. While I am unable here to address Husserl’s final view on this issue, a task which would require detailed consideration of his wide-ranging reflections on intersubjectivity from the 1920s and 1930s, it should be clear that I take the Husserl of Ideen II to incline more towards the latter view. 10

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others are tacitly appealed to in perception as possible and anonymous companions, but it also holds for the empathetic experience of concrete others. When facing another living body, whose form broadly concurs with my own, I take the other to be in perceptual contact with the very same concrete things and animals that I am, and in such a way that I have a vague empathetic comprehension of the differences of aspect, depth and the like, that are rooted in our contrasting spatial orientations. To this degree, the other’s and my own appearances are taken to participate in a common system, one which unfolds for me through the possibility of our reciprocally interchanging bodily ‘heres’ and the experiential interchange which would thereby occur. Importantly, however, it pertains to the sense of such exchangeability that the “series of appearances (…) are exchanged as the similar is with the similar, not as the identical is with the identical; they are exchanged out of a similar system organised according to a typical content, while each subject yet remains ineluctably distinct from every other by means of an abyss, and no one can acquire identically the same appearances as those of another. Each has his stream of consciousness displaying a regularity (Regelung) that encompasses precisely all streams of consciousness, or rather, all animal subjects (die eben über alle Bewusstseinsströme bzw. Animalischen Subjekte übergreift)” (Hua IV/V 254–255/Hua IV 309, transl. modified [1913]). That is, the difference between my current appearances and the foreign ones expressed in the other’s bodily movements is not simply a difference between how things look from ‘here’ and how they would look from ‘there,’ such that I could literally possess the other’s very lived perceiving through adopting her current position. Rather, for Husserl, the other’s experiences are empathetically comprehended as being ‘the same’ as, or ‘exchangeable’ with, my own, primarily in the sense that the alterity of the other’s embodied perceiving is taken to involve a typical regularity that we share—a regularity which, as he intriguingly puts it, encompasses all streams of consciousness, or rather, all animal subjects. In the next section, I will try to show that explicating this regularity allows us, on the one hand, to render thematic the animate other as the correlate of animate empathy, and on the other, to analyse the implications of the animate other as so experienced for the constitution of oneself as animate.

5.2.3  Reciprocity and Communication Before turning to this issue, however, one final point should be emphasised. Husserl frequently claims that the exhibition of the publicity of perceptual nature depends, not only upon a one-sided empathetic experience of other animate beings, but on what he calls reciprocal understanding, reciprocal empathy, or communication (Wechselverständigung, wechselseitige Einfühlung, Kommunikation) (Hua IV/V 359–360, 8, 318, 255, 277, 437 [1922/23, 1912, 1915, 1913, 1915, 1916/1917]; cf. Hua IV 163, 111, 309, Hua V 115). Moreover, he also claims that reciprocal understanding first makes possible the comprehension of one’s own lived body, and the mental life it embodies, as a worldly reality, and that such self-objectification is

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necessarily tied to the constitution of things as worldly beings within an open spatiotemporal horizon (Hua IV/V 26, 55, 297, 316–317/Hua V 112, 125, Hua IV 81, 110 [1912, 1912, 1915, 1915]). Now, this emphasis on the role of communication and reciprocity might lead us to suspect that the positing of a shared world and the comprehension of oneself as an animate being is ultimately, for Husserl, something dependent upon dialogue, and therefore deeply mediated by linguistic thought and speech. On this reading, my comprehension of reality presupposes, even at the most basic level, my communicatively appropriating from others certain judgements, namely those that concern my own worldly reality and the reality of what appears to me perceptually. Were this in fact Husserl’s view he would then be required to offer an account of how we could begin to understand the other’s utterances as expressions of world-oriented judgements without our having any prior grasp whatsoever of the world to which the other’s thought and speech refers. Moreover, this way of thinking appears to depart from the thesis, so central to both everyday life and Husserl’s philosophy, that perceptual experience counts as a mode of pre-­ theoretical and, when all goes well, epistemically informative contact with the world. If our basic sense of the world originates in judgements we appropriate from others, it is unclear how perception can serve to directly legitimate our beliefs about the way things ‘really’ are. Finally, this reading would be in conflict with the emphasis Husserl elsewhere places on the constitutive implications of the animaticity of the other, in that it would suggest that the publicity of nature unfolds for us exclusively through linguistic and interpersonal engagement, with no important role being allotted to embodiment and empathetic perception. Fortunately, a more plausible interpretation becomes possible when we consider a manuscript likely dating from 1915 or 1917, in which Husserl distinguishes between two different forms of Kommunikation, both of which involve the formation of a bond between self and other through “doxic reciprocal understanding.” While one of these two forms involves the more familiar case of dialogical understanding and interpersonal engagement, the other is more of a hinge between one-­ sided empathy and such socialised communicative activity. Husserl characterises this primitive kind of communication as follows: I do not only understand the other, I do not only apprehend in empathy the other’s personal and psychic being; rather, at one with this, the other conversely apprehends my personal and psychic being. At one with my apprehending the other as a human being in my environment, I also apprehend the other as a human that currently apprehends me as a human being in the other’s environment. I “catch sight” of the other, and the other catches sight of me. And we also see each other doing that. We see ourselves in one another’s eyes and in one another’s souls, and this very looking into one another is now included therein (Hua IV/V 241 [1915/1917]).12

Husserl takes the most primitive form of communication, then, to reside in a certain kind of mutual recognition. What this consists in is my empathetically seeing another embodied self as empathetically seeing me as another embodied self, and fused with this, the other exhibiting a recognition that I am seeing her as another 12

 See also Hua IV/V 513 (Hua IV 375) [1917].

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embodied self.13 My proposal now is that this form of communication has important and irreducible implications for the constitution of self and world. In the event that my own and the other’s eyes meet, there is a sense in which our perceptual spheres mesh into a higher-order intersubjective perceptual nexus, such that we are now able to experience the same objects together. While my perceptual experiences are lived through originally by me alone and remain tied ineluctably to my bodily here, and while I recognise that the same holds for you, in the meeting of our gazes a shared space unfolds between us. This shared perceptual space is irreducible to the delimited nexus of spatial objects that previously comprised my surrounding world of things, in that the objects in my perceptual surroundings now have the immediate sense of being possible or actual perceptual objects for both of us. Crucially, what occurs here goes beyond the acceptance of a common system of appearances as motivated by one-sided empathy. In merely perceiving another embodied perceiver, what emerges is only another nexus of appearances for me, whereas in reciprocal empathy I am immediately faced with another embodied perceiver who simultaneously recognises my perceptual sphere as other than hers. In this sense, the possibility of experiential exchangeability is not merely something which I accept, but which the other also presents herself as accepting, and it is this which brings about a deeper and properly intersubjective acceptance of perceptual publicity. As we shall see later (Sect. 5.4.2), this reciprocal recognition of one another and of a shared world also opens up and is articulated through a novel form of self-­consciousness; and that this is itself not without implications for the constitution of a common nature.

5.3  Animate Empathy Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience. To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference…. D. F. Wallace.14 We have seen Husserl suggesting that the perceptual experience of material things as

worldly objects in the familiar and proper sense makes appeal to a common system of appearances, a system in which my own appearances are taken as having a certain exchangeability with respect to those of actual or possible others. Furthermore, we have seen that this appeal itself hinges upon the empathetic recognition of other  To adopt the terminology later introduced by Alfred Schütz, in the meeting of our gazes we have “a pure We-relationship” where this is nothing more than “a reciprocal form of the Thouorientation,” consisting in “our awareness of each other’s presence and also the knowledge of each that the other is aware of him” (Schutz 1967, p. 168). While Schütz emphasises that such reciprocal understanding is the originating source for “my knowledge that there is a larger world of my contemporaries whom I am not now experiencing directly” (p. 165), he does not address the role it plays in the constitution of the shared natural world. 14  Wallace (2004). I am grateful to Chris Trowell for alerting me to Wallace’s article. 13

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living bodies as embodying foreign spheres of perceptual experience, spheres that display a most basic and generic regularity (Regelung) common to all animate subjects. While Husserl does not spell out explicitly what this regularity involves, it seems plausible to think that he is referring, at least in part, to the forms of dependency the perceptual object exhibits upon the bodily subject who perceives it, or what he elsewhere calls the most primitive elements of “psychophysical conditionality” (Hua IV/V 377/Hua IV 65 [1915/1916]; see also Hua IV/V 274/Hua IV 22 [1915]). This is primarily a matter of the conditioning of the sense of the perceived thing—in its way of being spatially ‘there’ for the subject in relation to its bodily ‘here,’ as well as in its presenting itself as ‘more’ than that of it which currently appears—by a lived awareness of the current kinaesthetic constellation and the possibilities of self-movement which surround it, such possibilities having given birth, in the immediate past, to the current constellation itself (see the fifth section of the previous chapter). Empathetically comprehending the other’s perceptual life as having such a conditional structure, then, is tantamount to taking the other’s living body to function as a mobile ‘here’ around which her perceptual space is centred. This characterisation hits upon the basic structure of what I call animate empathy, and we are now in a position to consider more closely what this is, along with its constitutive presuppositions and consequences.

5.3.1  Animate Empathy and the Animal of Intuition As Husserl notes, both non-human and human animals are, much like material things, realities that are “originally given,” in that they are “constituted for us experientially, before all theoretical research, as unities within the unitary totality: world = nature.” However, to originally experience an animal is not merely to grasp a unity of material features, to merely become acquainted with something that stably alters its states in the causal nexus of other things. It is not merely to perceive an extended object in its causal dependencies, but to animately empathise. This is because animals are “double-unities, unities which allow two strata to be distinguished therein, unities of things and subjects with their subjectivities” (Hua IV/V 358, 357 [1916/17]; cf. Hua IV 162). To originally encounter an animal as an animal, therefore, is to recognise the sensible materiality of its body as simply that of it which most visibly protrudes into the perceptual world. But how are we then to characterise the total givenness of foreign animals as embodied subjects? In a manuscript likely dating from 1916 or 1917, Husserl sketches an answer: The animal of intuition. 1) In the sensuous-intuitive sphere of the givenness of the living body, we have the intuitive living body as a substance, that is, with its sensuously given features. 2) Expressed in this, in the foreign living body (and this expression is an appresentation!), is “psychic life,” another subject with its lived experiences, its surrounding world, etc.

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We do not have 1) and 2) alongside one another, we do not have a living body and, separated from this, a representation of the subjective; rather, we have an intuition of a human being (Hua IV/V 535/Hua IV 340, transl. modified [1916/17]).

For Husserl, the intuitive experience of a foreign animal grasps an expressive unity. On the one hand, this means that the corporeality of the animal incorporates the invariant structures of perceived thinghood outlined in the previous chapter. The most basic layer of the other’s living body, in its perceptual givenness for me, is a schematic unity of aspects. After all, the appearances which bring the different features of this body into view unfold in a kinaesthetically motivated fashion, and in this sense there is a foreign bodily ‘phantom’ which stands in a certain kind of ‘there’ in relation to my bodily ‘here.’ Moreover, our intuitive grasp of another animate body recognises in it material ‘states’ that, in their causal relatedness to ‘circumstances,’ announce stable material features. The fur of the cat presents itself perceptually as tactually soft, as having a definite shade of brown visible in the light of day, and when it jumps onto my lap I feel the weight it exerts on my own living body as exhibiting a real feature of the cat itself. On the other hand, as Husserl notes in the same manuscript, my apperception of the foreign animal or human being is not merely a grasp of materiality but also involves a “system of experiential indications, by means of which an ego-life, with a partially determined content and a horizon of indeterminateness and unknownness, is ‘there,’ given as one with the living body and combined with it” (Hua IV/V 537/Hua IV 342, transl. modified [1916/1917]). That is, my experience of the animal does not merely incorporate a sensuously present aspect fused with a horizon of possible schematic appearances with their kinaesthetic circumstances, and a recognition of certain causal dependencies in which the other’s body is embedded—where this perceptual structuration already involves a degree of appresentation. Rather, the animal other’s bodily alterations and movements are also given, through a novel form of appresentation, as expressive of psychic life. The way that the cat’s head visibly arches upwards as the bird flies above it; its purring response to my caressing the back of its neck; and the sensitivity and self-movement felt in the relaxing of its neck as I run my fingers over it—what shows itself here cannot be adequately described through the language of material states, material circumstances, and material features, at least once we have a clear grip on the perceptual styles these concepts originally serve to express. Rather, here the material features are intertwined with elements announcing the experiential life of the animal, as something foreign and largely unknown, but certainly “there” and not entirely impenetrable. We should dwell a little more closely on this animate expressivity. Husserl emphasises that the expressive unity of foreign living body and psychic life is not merely a matter of certain psychic states directly mapping onto certain visible bodily states. Rather, the relation of expression to expressed consists more in the way the sensuous materiality of the living body serves to articulate the psychic life it appresents. As he puts it, the bodily movements of an animal “manifest the ever more intimate intertwinement of both sides the more articulated in various ways is the expression, or rather the expressing, and the more sensuous parts there are that

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have a meaning-function” (Hua IV/V 536/Hua IV 341 [1916/1917]). In emphasising this articulation, Husserl is drawing attention to the manner in which bodily occurrences typically function expressively in relation to one another, rather than as isolated events. For instance, the cat’s purring expresses pleasure, rather than aggression or fear, not only in virtue of its distinctive auditory quality—which is nearly indistinguishable from some of the noises it makes when distressed—but also and perhaps even primarily in conjunction with the posture of the animal and the way its skin trembles as I run my fingers over it. Indeed, what distinguishes one kind of emotion-expression from others lies more in a complex bodily gestalt than in a solitary symptom—a claim which should not be surprising, given the role of an integrated totality of bodily elicitation within the affect-intentionality that we earlier analysed from a first-personal point of view (see the fourth section of the second chapter). To further illustrate this, consider what Darwin has to say about cats in the opening pages of his classical work on emotional expression: When the animal is threatened by a dog, it arches its back in a surprising manner, erects its hair, opens its mouth and spits. But we are not here concerned with this well-known attitude, expressive of terror combined with anger; we are only concerned with that of rage or anger. (…) The animal assumes a crouching position, with the body extended; and the whole tail, or the tip alone, is lashed or curled from side to side. The hair is not in the least erect. (…) Let us now look at a cat in a directly opposite frame of mind, whilst feeling affectionate and caressing her master; and mark how opposite is her attitude in almost every respect. She now stands upright with her back slightly arched, which makes the hair appear rather rough, but it does not bristle; her tail, instead of being extended and lashed from side, is held quite stiff and perpendicularly upwards; her ears are erect and pointed; her mouth is closed; and she rubs against her master with a purr instead of a growl (Darwin 1998, p. 59).

Now, the expressive features which Darwin refers to here were undoubtedly identified by him through what we earlier called a ‘natural-theoretical’ attitude, in that his hypotheses have clearly been produced through repeated attempts to taxonimise the bodily events typically displayed by cats when emotionally aroused in various ways, and in situations assumed and perhaps even artificially designed to incite such arousal. To this extent, we should be wary of assuming that all of the expressive features he describes, and just in the way he describes them, have an expressive significance (or are even given at all) in our pre-theoretical and perceptual grasp of cats. However, it would surely be phenomenologically inaccurate to stipulate that—to paraphrase an already quoted formulation of Husserl’s—only the material body of the cat is intuitively given, while her emotional states themselves (or the ‘psychological’ element of them) require representation through a separate act. At least when the perceptual and causal conditions are “normal”—that is, when they approximate the norm according to which the spatial form and material features of the cat show themselves optimally, and when our perceiving unfolds through movement over time—we do have some perceptual grasp, if indeterminate and preliminary, of the cat’s posture, facial expressions, hisses and purrs, and the like. (Indeed, these bodily events are not only perceptually discernible even to infants, but can also arouse overwhelming emotive responses in the young perceiver him or herself, as any child who has been too close to a snarling dog will testify—though it remains an open, and intriguing, question whether the fear elicited here is responsive just to the dog’s

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bodily features as such or rather to the affects and inclinations those features express.) And our perceptual grasp of these expressive elements of the animate other’s body is not usually something self-contained; rather, those different styles of integrated movement, spreading across the different parts of the foreign body, will typically appear to us as immediately expressive of or, so to speak, infused with elements of foreign mentality. This is not to say, of course, that we always and from the outset have a detailed understanding of the mental events which are so bodily intimated. As Husserl frequently emphasises, foreign bodily expressivity is just as much characterised by indeterminateness and ambiguity as it is by transparency and insight. But this does not make it any less an experience of foreign embodied subjectivity, which always and necessarily presents itself to us with a horizon of the unknown. Moreover, it would be a mistake to limit the function of bodily expressivity to the domain of affect with which it is most often associated. For Husserl, this expressivity is operative whenever “the interiority of psychic acts” is appresented as belonging to and co-existing (mitseiend) with the other’s perceived living body (Hua IV/V 361, 536/Hua IV 166, 341 [1922/1923, 1916/1917]). By this, Husserl does not mean that expressivity presents a nexus of inter-cranial states; indeed, he emphasises that the foreign psyche is not (given as) spatialised at all, although, as we shall see below, it is co-perceived as having a certain localisation in and boundedness to the other’s sensitive bodily organs (Hua IV/V 363/Hua IV 168 [1922/1923]). Rather, what the other’s living body expressively appresents is first and foremost another experiential life, as correlated with a “surrounding world” appearing for and relative to the other experiencing subject (Hua IV/V 535/Hua IV 340 [1916/17]). To this degree, the most fundamental form of expressivity consists in the animate other’s posture and style of self-movement displaying a mode of perceptual immersion, the intentional objects of which are immediately taken, at least to a certain degree, to overlap and concord with my own. As Husserl notes, if I am looking at a cathedral and I notice another standing by me, “his gaze directed at this cathedral, then I understand this without any further ado. His seeing, which I experience through empathy, is equally an immediate having-over-against: the object is immediately given” (Hua IV/V 510–511/Hua IV 373, transl. modified [1917]). While we normally only take human others to see a cathedral as a cathedral—in that this sense is one generated and sustained by human experience and social praxis—Husserl’s claim that we would empathetically take the other to immediately see the ‘colossal black thing’ (which is a cathedral for us) surely holds with regard to some non-­ human animate others too. Moreover, we do not only empathetically grasp animate others as perceptually and affectively attuned to their environment, but also as relating to their environing objects in a practically significant manner. In seeing a cat playing with a piece of string or running hungrily towards its food or, as the passage from Wallace which introduces this section vividly illustrates, hearing the lobster frantically trying to escape from the pot, we become acquainted with a creature whose environment is structured for it by desires, preferences, and goals—the latter elements being expressively appresented for us through the animate-other’s goal-­ oriented movements. Consequently, the following formulation seems just as apt with regard to non-human animals as for human beings: “Since here the manifold

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expression appresents psychic existence in living corporeality (Leiblichkeit), thus there is constituted with all that an objectivity which is precisely two-sided and unitary: the human being, without introjection” (Hua IV/V 362/Hua IV 166, transl. modified [1922/23]).

5.3.2  Animate Abnormality and the Commonality of Nature The account sketched here of animate empathy has proceeded at the level of the concrete, worldly animate other as the intentional object of such experience—though, since the animate other typically presents itself as a self-transcending subject who consciously relates to its environment in perception, emotion, and action, to claim that the other animal is given in animate empathy as an object is somewhat inaccurate, or at least potentially misleading. However, Husserl does not only treat the intuitive experience of the animate other as a theme for regional phenomenological analysis; he also suggests that it has fundamental implications for the constitution of self and world. As we saw in the last section, the publicity of perceptual nature is exhibited through those empathetic, and ultimately reciprocal, experiences in which another living body manifests a foreign system of perceptual appearances that concords with my own. We also saw Husserl suggesting that the animate other who first functions as a co-perceiver in this way is the “normal” animate other—which is to say, another human being whose sensibility is not radically different from my own. Husserl is not here simply dogmatically treating the case of bodily “normality” as that of sole or primary philosophical interest. Rather, his insistence on the primacy of the so-called normal other is motivated by his interest in tracing out what is implied in my taking a material thing as I perceive it—that is, with the sensible features that my perceptual experience has disclosed and the horizon of indeterminacy still left often—as a public reality that can be perceptually grasped as such by others too. That is, it is only through empathetically encountering others whose sensibility I take to be of the same generic structure as mine that my sense-­things can acquire a preliminary validity (for me) as components of an intersubjective nature. Moreover, with the kind of reciprocal empathy discussed earlier (Sect. 5.2.3), this validity becomes not merely accepted by me but co-accepted by the other. Accordingly, the correlation between the sensible world and embodied perceivers ‘like me’ becomes communalised, and it becomes possible for the material things of my perception, just as I perceive them in their determinate features and causal relations, to become accepted and henceforth habitually assumed as there ‘for us.’ For Husserl, it is only when such a correlation between ‘our’ embodied subjectivity and a common sensible world has already been established that animate others with different forms of embodied sensibility can show up as abnormal.15 While he  Husserl distinguishes three steps here: (1) the plurality of subjects, with a similar sensibility, apprehending their sense-things as intersubjectively identical; (2) the intersubjective apprehension of such sense-things as “subjective-objective thing-unities”, that is, as having a certain relativity to

15

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more often uses the example of human beings with sensory impairments such as colour blindness and congenital deafness, Husserl occasionally implies that non-­ human animals are given as abnormal perceivers too.16 In order that the embodied-­ perceptual accomplishments of ‘abnormal’ perceivers show up for us as perceptual accomplishments, however, he argues that there must be some degree of commonality between ‘our’ and the abnormal other’s perceptual world. For Husserl, it is here that a legitimate distinction emerges between primary and secondary qualities or material features. While the secondary features encompass those sensible features that have a relativity to ‘our’ bodily structuration, such as colours, sounds, and the like, the primary features designate the bare spatial and temporal structure and causal powers of material things, of which perceivers with importantly different living bodies to ‘ours’ can also be cognisant (see, e.g., Hua IV/V 372–373 [1915/1916]). While a sighted human subject recognises an ‘alien’ sensibility and perceptual environment in the bumblebee that obstinately bounces off the glass window in a hopeless struggle to get outdoors, in the bat which gets trapped in the loft and swoops around manically, or in the blind person we pass in the street, what nevertheless unites all of these cases – despite the stark differences between them17 – is that that empathising subject recognises the things as perceived by the other to involve, at the very least, a core of spatiality and temporality, and perhaps certain causal events and features, that unites it with the things as she perceives them—an empathetic acceptance which arguably becomes more richly motivated when the empathiser experiences the empathised other as responding to the empathiser’s lived body as a spatiotemporal reality (or even, in some cases, as another living body). For Husserl, moreover, in taking animate others to be cognisant of the same spatiotemporal world as ‘our’ own we necessarily recognise the other’s experiential grasp of the world as involving some form of sensibility, even if the latter is accepted ‘our’ sensibility; and finally, (3) the emergence of “experiences which are not present as the same in all subjects, and which are hence intersubjectively conflicting with regard to the phenomenal dependence of these differences on a different psychophysical character of the subjects” (Hua IV/V 255/Hua IV 309–31 [1913]). 16  On the relationship between the common perceptual world and human beings of “abnormal” perception, see, e.g., Hua IV/V 253/Hua IV 307–308 [1913]. With regard to the constitutive abnormality of non-human others, Husserl notes that the first “animal” is the “human being,” and characterises the “intuitively substantial thing”—which functions as ““mere appearance”” for the “thing as “objectively” determined through mere “primary qualities”—as “related to human animals” (emphasis mine). It seems to me plausible that these formulations imply the following two claims: (1) that the sensibility and sensuous environment of non-human animals first presents itself in contrast to the sensibility and sensuous world of ‘us’ (normal) human perceivers; and (2) that this recognition of non-human animals as ‘alien’ perceivers ultimately serves to motivate the acceptance of a ‘true’ material nature in which only primary qualities inhere (Hua IV/V 535 [1916–1917]; cf. Hua IV 340). 17  One of the most significant phenomenological difference between these cases is, from a Husserlian perspective, that blind human beings are recognised as other human persons through interpersonal empathy, where they are “apprehended as persons who experience the same things in other ways, in ways that are not empirically realisable by the one understanding within the framework of the motivation now obtaining.” (Hua IV/V 200/Hua IV 207 [1913]).

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as importantly different from ‘our’ own (as in the case of abnormality) (Hua IV/V 443–444/Hua IV 86 [1905–1910]). We can understand this better by noting that primary qualities, on the one hand, are features necessarily given sensibly, and thus as interwoven with secondary features of one or another kind, but on the other, that the givenness of such features is not limited to any specific sensuous modality. As we saw in the fifth section of the previous chapter, the spatial form of a thing can just as much be given tactually as it can visually, and, likewise, its weight can either be visually perceived in its causal effects upon other things, or felt tactually by our attempting to pick it up. While I am not aware of Husserl anywhere explicitly making this point, it could be argued that this coherent fusion of distinct modes of sensibility in the givenness of the “normal” material thing as perceived—the thing which is, as Husserl vividly puts it, simultaneously a unity embedded in causal relations and something “colourful, gleaming, sounding (farbig, glänzend, tönend)” (Hua IV/V 128/Hua V 62–63, transl. modified [1912])—serves as a necessary precondition for the empathetic recognition of the alien perceiving of the bat or the bumblebee as attuned to the intersubjective nature with which I am also perceptually familiar. Moreover, it may be that the intersubjective recognition of the abnormal other as perceptually responsive to nature presupposes and radically modifies an intra-subjective distinction between ‘my’ normal and abnormal bodily functioning, a distinction which can also be broadened to include relative normalities and abnormalities within the normality tied to a community of concurrent perceivers. As Husserl famously notes, when my finger is blistered or I ingest santonin the tactile or visual features of my environing objects undergo an alteration, but this change is usually recognised as one dependent upon an abnormal state of my living body as opposed to evincing a real change in the things themselves (see, e.g., Hua IV/V 374–376, 381–382, 386–387, 405–406, 408, 370–371[1915/1916, 1915/1916, 1915–1917, 1915–1917, 1915/1916]; cf. Hua IV 62–64, 67, 73, 61). This recognition of the stability of reality throughout bodily-relative alterations in schematic qualities may indeed pave the way for the recognition of foreign abnormal experience as co-directed to intersubjectively accessible nature.

5.3.3  Animate Empathy and Natural-Scientific Thinking We can now draw together these lines of thought. In seeing a non-human animal, with perceptual organs that may be quite different to ‘ours,’ moving its living body in a way that exhibits perceptual, affective, and volitional immersion, we will immediately recognise it relating to its environment, not merely as a causally dependent material unity, but also as an embodied psychic life with an intentional surrounding world of its own. And the core of this grasp of the animate other consists in our taking its body as displaying a foreign sensibility attuned to a foreign sphere of abnormal sense-things, that is, to sense-things which, as foreign and given empathetically, are present and can be originally present to this concrete animate other alone, and, as abnormal, are saturated with (secondary) qualities that both differentiate them

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starkly from ‘our’ sense-things and are unknown and perhaps forever unknowable to us. Nevertheless, in as much as such animate others exhibit an oblique sensitivity to the very things with which I am also perceptually aware, Husserl maintains that the identity of intersubjective nature is not collapsed or superseded by the experience of other animals, but sustained and broadened: “The identity of nature for all human beings and animals is also something originally given, and it is ever given anew precisely through the apperception constitutive for those beings” (Hua IV/V 357 [1916/17]; cf. Hua IV 162). That is, experiencing other living beings with abnormal sensibilities serves to cultivate in us an understanding of the world of things as “a concordant intersubjective objectivity,” one that is “valid for any single subject.” This understanding emerges through such alien sensibilities dethroning the sensible features that qualify the ‘normal’ perceptual world, which now fall short of their prior status as qualities of an all-encompassing intersubjective reality and exhibit a certain relativity to our embodied sensibility; a loss which is inextricable from the primary qualities, as thingly features “manifest” in the otherwise discordant sensible appearances of normal and abnormal perceivers alike, acquiring a broader intersubjective validity, that is, becoming prominent as “objectively identical” (Hua IV/V 255/Hua IV 309–310, transl. modified [1913]). It is not difficult to see the connection between this latter kind of understanding and the natural sciences. And indeed Husserl himself repeatedly emphasises that the latter’s claim to validity—the self-professed legitimacy of the different natural sciences as the styles of thought and praxis that are able to rigorously and objectively uncover their respective strata of the natural world—can only be rendered intelligible once we explicate the motives that can lead us to abandon our everyday understanding of things as intersubjective realities disclosed through normal sensibility. Nevertheless, it should be emphasised that while the encounter with abnormal perceivers as inhabiting a common world provides an original motivation for naturalscientific thinking, the former doesn’t yet bring us into contact with the domain of stable and mathematicised laws appealed to by natural science. In working out what this difference involves, it will not be sufficient to simply appeal to a distinction between perception and thought. While, for instance, the bumblebee buzzing against the window may already directly display a peculiar mode of sensitivity to the objects which I see in its surroundings, my activity of singling out certain perceptible features as only there-for-me and others as there-for-the-bumblebee-too is surely one which explicates my initial animate-empathetic grasp of the bumblebee through acts of thinking and imagining. That is, as Husserl emphasises in the 1912 Bleistiftmanuskript, the constitution of an intersubjective nature as identical for normal and abnormal perceivers alike involves a mode of explicative thinking that rests upon but goes beyond mere one-sided and even reciprocal empathy (Hua IV/V 57/ Hua V 126 [1912]). But this mode of thinking marks the outer limits of what, in the third section of the fourth chapter, I called the natural-theoretical attitude, in that it involves little more than the explication of senses disclosed through my own and others’ perceptual experiences. Natural-scientific thinking, on the other hand, goes beyond such explication, in that it requires the “logification of space, of time, and of the materiality that fills space and time” that, for Husserl, “yields the eidos and

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factum of mathematical natural science” (Hua IV/V 438 [1916/1917]). While natural-scientific thought and praxis constantly presupposes the originary epistemic contact with nature found in perception and perceptual judgement, it moves beyond perceptual nature entirely when it construes spatial forms and causal events in terms of geometrical idealities and mathematical laws. Accordingly, the intersubjective community or “ideal sociality” (explicitly or implicitly) appealed to and projected by the project of the natural sciences encompasses anyone—irrespective of their sensibilities—who adopts and engages its methods: “With the founding of natural science, humanity has discovered that the world of occurrent experience, the actual world as subjectively and intersubjectively intuitable, has a “nature” (…) which can only be known through the method of natural research, in empirical-­logical thinking grounded in experience” (Hua IV/V 130/Hua V 65, transl. modified [1912]). Animate empathy does not only play a role in the constitution of intersubjective material nature; it also comprises, perhaps less surprisingly, the basic experience of animate nature. We have already seen Husserl emphasising that non-human animals are typically experienced from the outset as two-sided beings: as both living bodies comprising material features intertwined with sensuous-affective fields (an issue returned to below), and embodied psychic lives who are perceptually, emotively, and practically responsive to a surrounding world. Furthermore, Husserl maintains that all legitimate theoretical investigation of animate life takes its origins in the complex unities presented or presentable in animate empathy. Accordingly, scientific studies of animate nature can either pursue the sheer materiality of the other’s living body, a colossal task encompassing morphological classification, physiology, and many other fine-grained studies of biological phenomena; or the relations of dependence between causal events implicating the living body and the fields of sensation directly embodied in the latter, through a (novel and merely envisioned) theoretical discipline he terms “somatology”; and finally, one can psychologically investigate the perceptual, affective, and volitional responses enacted by animals in relation to their environment (Hua IV/V 68–83/Hua V 5–20 [1912]). To focus on the latter field, Husserl offers a rich analysis which can be summarised, briefly, as follows: the scientific study of the (human and non-human) animal psyche is largely concerned with identifying typical regularities in the manner in which ‘psychic states’ (i.e., conscious lived experiences, understood here as momentary conditions of the animal as a double-sided reality) emerge in relation to the animal’s (past and present) bodily, intrapsychic, and intersubjective ‘circumstances’. Such a study, which can either take its basis in animate empathy or mundane first-personal reflection, seeks to locate in the relation between psychic states and their circumstances certain ‘dispositions’ or psychic features (Eigenschaften), in which the stable nature of the animal or human being reside (Hua IV/V 10–22, 318–329 [1912, 1915]; cf. Hua IV 120–137).18

 To this degree, an analogy can be drawn between material and psychic features, in as much as both are fundamentally relational styles holding between momentary ‘states’ and ‘circumstances,’ although Husserl emphasises that, unlike their material analogues, psychic states are incapable of

18

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While this model of psychic features seems to me to be of some merit, it nevertheless implies a somewhat self-enclosed conception of the animate mind that is at odds with our intuitive-empathetic experience of the foreign psyche as immediately world-embedded. Husserl himself was certainly aware of this problem, and he occasionally suggests an alternative approach to animal psychology which begins with the descriptive study, carried out in the personalistic attitude, of the surrounding world of the animal (tierische Umwelt) (Hua IV/V 473–474/Hua IV 380 [1910–1912]). Especially when one takes into account his nuanced analyses of the intimate connection between experience, embodiment, and world, it thus seems plausible that Husserl would be sympathetic to, and to some degree anticipates, those contemporary theorists who advocate a psychology that begins with the embodied responses of creatures to their meaningful environment, rather than with a putative inner domain of representations cut off from the world. However, as we shall see later, he would also stress that the meaningful behaviour of persons fundamentally differs from that of the animal, exhibiting a novel mode of responsiveness to the surrounding world, along with a different kind of historicity, sociality, and enduring character. It is for this reason that animate empathy falls short of disclosing the other as a person, though it forms a constant underlying basis for interpersonal empathy.

5.4  The Animate Other and the Animate Self As we have already seen, the phenomenology of animate empathy thematically includes, but is not limited to, a description of the concrete animate other as intuitively given. Indeed, to properly explicate the experiential sense of the animate other we must attend to the sense in which the latter presents itself to us as, not only as a distinctive kind of worldly object, but as a fellow subject of perceptual nature. And explicating this requires us to face the thorny issue of the discrete roles played by one’s own and the other’s (possible and actual) experiences in exhibiting the publicity of the perceptual world, a matter which cannot be addressed without attending to the ‘mediating’ roles played by one’s own and the other’s living bodies. In concluding this chapter, I will now consider more closely Husserl’s analyses of the manner in which the constitution of one’s own living body and that of the other are reciprocally interwoven, with the aim both of deepening the account of animate empathy presented so far in this chapter, and, ultimately, of highlighting the role of intercorporeality in the intersubjective constitution of persons, an issue which will only be fully addressed in the seventh chapter. I will begin by illuminating Husserl’s account of the functioning of ‘my’ lived body in animate empathy, before peering at the other side of this coin, considering the irreplaceable function of one-sided and

schematisation and perspectival givenness through adumbrations (Hua IV/V 16, 325, 24 [1912, 1912, 1915]; cf. Hua IV 127, Hua V 111).

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reciprocal animate empathy in the intersubjective constitution of my lived body as a living body.

5.4.1  T  he Institutive Experience of the Animate Other: Bodily Similarity and Localisation As we saw earlier (Sect. 5.2), the Husserl of Ideen II makes use of a phenomenological thought experiment in his attempts to interrogate the sense of the animate other and explicate the constitutive role played by foreign embodied subjectivity in the constitution of common nature, a technique which anticipates the ‘reduction to the sphere of ownness’ (in)famously employed in the fifth and final of his later Cartesianische Meditationen. This technique appeals to those moments of experience which institute the intersubjectivity of the perceptual horizon in and through the givenness of another living body in contrast to my own—where these experiential moments do not only consist in my grasp of the other’s living body as a unique phenomenon in my perceptual horizon, but ultimately also in the other’s (appresented) subjectively lived through and implemented experiences of her perceptual environment and of my living body within it. In as much as such moments of experience make possible the intersubjectivity of the perceptual horizon, they are not simply identical with, but rather presupposed by, the experience of things, animals, and persons in their concrete worldly sense as intersubjectively accessible realities. For Husserl, the most basic moment of this institutive event must consist in the other’s corporeal body showing up as the lived and living body of another pure ego—that is, as a body that is first-personally lived through by foreign experiencing subjectivity, and through which this subjectivity is agentially alive. Controversially, Husserl maintains that this apprehension of the other’s living body is motivationally structured in such a way that the other’s corporeality manifests itself as embodying foreign subjectivity because it exhibits a certain similarity to my own lived body. We can return here to a formulation from 1913: If to me, being now here, is given in the there a corporeal body (Körper) which from here looks like my lived body (Leib) would look (at least according to the general type, as regarded from here) then it is “seen” as a living body (Leib), and the potential appearances, which I would have if I were transposed to the there, are attributed to it as currently actual; i.e., an ego is empathetically understood as subject of the living body, along with those appearances and the rest of the things that pertain to the ego, its lived experiences, acts, etc. (Hua IV/V 254/Hua IV 309, transl. modified [1913]).

As should by now be clear, Husserl does not evoke this motivational ‘if-then’ as an analogical inference that must take place in order for one subject to legitimately judge certain perceived bodies to conceal an inner life, and nor is he advocating a (Lippsian) account of empathy according to which perceived bodily similarity arouses in me an imagined or remembered mental episode of my own that I project onto bodies like mine. As Husserl consistently emphasises, the originary givenness of the other’s living body does not involve an act of body-perception accompanied

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by a separate act of mind-ascribing—irrespective of whether this ‘accompaniment’ is taken to arise through imagination or inference—but is a unitary intentional act in which the other’s bodily subjectivity is appresented and thus already participates in the perceptual sense the other’s living body has for me (Hua IV/V 535–536/Hua IV 340–341 [1916/1917]; see also Hua IV/V 71/Hua V 8–9 [1912]). Moreover, Husserl’s admittedly misleading claim in this passage that we attribute a set of our own potential appearances to the other’s corporeal body should not be taken at face value, since he immediately qualifies it by noting that the foreign perceptual systems which the other’s body appresents are precisely not potential or actual experiences of my own but those of the other, phenomenologically separated from mine “by an abyss”  (Hua IV/V 255/Hua IV 309 [1913]). Rather, the proximity of the other’s empathised perceptual appearances to my own merely consists in, on the one hand, the other’s living body expressing a (mobile) perceptual ‘here’ which recalls my own without being it, and on the other, this foreign perceptual here intimating a correlative field of perceptual ‘theres,’ a field which I typically assume to be concordant with my own field of sense-things. But what of his assertion that the other’s body is only perceived empathetically if it looks like mine, that is, if it exhibits the same general type as my own lived body? One obvious way of understanding what Husserl means by evoking such similarity is that empathy presupposes that our living bodies are both physical things of the general perceptual type: ‘human (physical) body.’ However, this cannot be Husserl’s view, since he maintains that understanding one’s own lived body as a physical thing already requires the contribution of others (Hua IV/V 297, 362/ Hua IV 81, 167 [1915, 1922/23]). This is not only because one’s own lived body is a “remarkably imperfectly constituted thing,”19 since certain patches of my back are beyond the reach of my fingers and vast swathes of my flesh evade my visual gaze. Rather, the more fundamental point is that my own lived body is not a thing for me at all, at least if the constitutive consequences of intersubjectivity are abstractively disregarded.20 My lived body can never be apprehended as something ‘over there,’ whose horizon of co-intended aspects could be brought to fulfilment and further determination in ongoing perception, because in seeing or touching discrete bodily organs my own lived body is constantly functioning imperceptibly as the ‘here’ of the subject perceiving. After all, “in all perceiving, in all experiencing, the lived body is there with its “sense-organs,” and all experienced things have in experience a relation to the lived-body”, such that, in any attempt to apprehend the whole of

 Hua IV 159. In fact, this well-known formulation may be the product of Stein’s editorial work, as there is no known original manuscript for §41 b), and one finds similar formulations in her doctoral dissertation, which according to her own account was written before she had encountered the Ideen manuscripts (Stein 2008, p. 57/1989, p. 41). The closest that Husserl comes to this statement in the manuscripts for Ideen is the (arguably subtler) claim that “the apprehension of one’s own living body is, in many respects, less perfect than that of the foreign living body (whatever privilege the former may have owing to the original apprehending of lived-bodily sensations)” (Hua IV/V 26/Hua V 112, transl. modified [1912]). 20  This point is made eloquently and explored in more depth by Franck (2014, Chapter 8). 19

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one’s own living body as a perceptual object, “we are led back again to possible movements of the lived body” (Hua IV/V 54, 49/Hua V 124, 121, transl. modified [1912]). What is inescapably ‘here’ can never acquire the way of being ‘over there’—that is, ‘there’ in a way which differentiates itself from my mobile ‘here’— that is the mark of the perceived thing. The idea that empathetically grasping another living body can be motivated by the similarity of two physical things is therefore ultimately unhelpful. As several scholars have noted, it may be possible to formulate a more promising version of the claim that bodily similarity plays a role in the basic experience of embodied alterity if we first attend to the lived-experiences that most intimately manifest the lived body as a sphere of affection and self-movement with a certain corporeal spread.21 After all, it would seem that bodily self-consciousness can only play a positive function in the exhibition of the subjectivity of foreign bodies if the former manifests my body, on the one hand, as intimately at one with my experiential life, and on the other, as having a spatiality whose type is recognisable in foreign bodies too. Moreover, while we have seen that an understanding of my lived body as a thing in space—that is, as a living body—is not possible at this stage, this does not yet rule out the possibility that a part of another body might be given with a perceptual style that, in virtue of its overlapping sufficiently with the perceptual style of a ‘part’ of my living body (as given to me alone), motivates an empathetic appresentation of it as displaying foreign subjectivity. To further explore this last suggestion, it is worth reflecting, in a broadly genetic-­ phenomenological manner, upon the dynamic and complex nature of bodily expressivity as it functions in our empathetic comprehension of others. As Husserl notes in a manuscript likely dating from 1922 or 1923, the givenness of the other’s living body as expressive involves a “system of appresentations,” one which “develops, as a system of ordered indications, only by means of continuous experience of other people, who are already empathetically given” (Hua IV/V 360 [1922/1923]; cf. Hua IV 165). In the concrete and temporally unfolding experience of everyday others, the other’s body functions as a field of expression in and across (spatially and temporally) diffuse patterns of bodily movement, which the empathising subject has learnt to grasp through the development of empathetic habitualities. These habitualities are passive-associative experiential structures which, on the one hand, apperceive discrete bodily occurrences as instantiating typical expressive styles—in apperceptions which typically involve anticipation and can accordingly undergo fulfilment, determination, and cancellation—and on the other, appresent typical subjective events as expressed in the relevant bodily patterns. Moreover, even such subjective events are not given as isolated, but as contextualised by and contextualising for distinct but related events in the other’s experiential life. In this sense, the other’s bodily movements do not only function as expressive of her current experiences but “now for their part frequently become new signs, that is, signs for the psychic lived experiences which were indicated or surmised earlier and, in some

21

 See, in this regard, de Warren (2009, pp. 230–237), Bernet (2013), and Luo (2017).

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cases, for those which were not otherwise indicated.” However, it is notable that, before any empathetic understanding of such complex bodily expressivity can get underway—that is, before “different appresented indications, in themselves underdetermined,” can begin to “work together”—“a point of departure for understanding foreign psychic life” must first be given (Hua IV/V 361/Hua IV 166, transl. modified [1922/23]). For the other’s living body to function as a complex and dynamic expressive field, something of her sensibly given body must first awaken my empathetic habitualities and their passive systems of associations and appresentations. In this sense, the empathetic recognition of a foreign corporeal body as an expressive whole is not initially motivated by the perception of the other’s body in its corporeal totality, but by a discrete corporeal movement or group of such movements which set into motion our empathetic regard—whether it be the sound of laughter echoing outside the window, the flickering of foreign eyes in the presence of an environing event, or the emergence of a facial expression. Now, it should not be assumed that the originally institutive experience of embodied alterity which we are here seeking is already sensitive to the integrated expressivity of the everyday other’s bodily movements. But in as much as our rich empathetic grasp of bodily expressivity already sees complex expressive units— with a spatiotemporal corporeal horizon and an immediate type of mentality—‘in’ discrete bodily movements which only partially comprise these units, we are justified in asking whether the original encounter with the other might bear the same motivational structure. Of course, a further complexity here is that, while the experience of the concrete other involves habitualities that have in part developed through the experience of empathy itself, such that I grasp the currently present other in a manner which depends upon my experience of past others, the same does not apply for the originally institutive experience of the embodied other, which can only appresent foreign subjectivity by relating the perceptual style of the other’s body to that of my own body. Intriguingly, in the manuscript just discussed, Husserl appears to suggest that the most original empathetic experience of the animate other proceeds through the perception of the other’s hand as a foreign tactile organ, an accomplishment which, in its turn, implies apprehending the other’s corporeal body as embodying a nexus of subjectivity that relates to this hand as I do to my own. This claim seems to hinge upon the privileged status that pertains to my hand as a bodily organ that is intimately lived as both subjective and corporeal, and which thus makes possible the appresentation of foreign subjectivity ‘in’ the corporeality of the other’s hand. Before turning to Husserl’s instructive formulation of the role of the hand in the institutive experience of foreign subjectivity, then, it will first be instructive to explicate aspects of Husserl’s account of the self-constitution of the lived body. As we have seen in previous chapters, Husserl understands the notion of sensation (Empfindung) in a broad sense so as to include, not only the sensuous (sinnliche) sensations which make up the hyletic matter for perception in its various modalities, but also the entire sphere of bodily feelings—“the “sensuous feelings”, the sensations of pleasure and pain, the sense of well-being that permeates and fills the whole lived body, the general malaise of “corporeal indisposition,” etc.”—some of which serve a hyletic function for emotive acts of valuing, and even those

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“difficult to analyse and discuss,” which “form the material subsoil (stofflichen Unterlagen) for the life of desire and will, sensations of energetic tension and relaxation, sensations of inner restraint, paralysis, liberation, etc.” Moreover, he maintains that all of these sensations are lived as bodily in one way or another, and that, given the ubiquitous role played by sensuous affection and kinaesthetic mobility in conscious life, the “lived body” is thus involved not only with perceptual experience but “in all other conscious functions” (Hua IV/V 44/Hua IV 152–153, transl. modified [1912]). However, while “all sensations whatsoever are experienced in a certain manner as related to the lived body, and could therefore be called bodily sensations (Leibesempfindungen)”, Husserl notes that  there is a certain class of sensations, which he labels ‘sensings’ (Empfindnisse), in which the body is lived in a most intimate manner (Hua IV/V 37/Hua V 118, transl. modified [1912]). The mode of bodily self-awareness involved with the sensings is not captured in a phenomenologically acute fashion if we think of it through the initially tempting (psychologistic) model of a quasi-perceptual (or ‘interoceptive’) consciousness which presents a bodily event as a material process. Rather, it involves a sensory event being lived as immediately localised in my lived body, where the latter is not merely a “thing” but also and primarily a “field of localisation” and “bearer of sensings” (Hua IV/V 53/Hua V 123, transl. modified [1912]). What does this localisation involve? In the first place, it does not consist in the sensing showing up in visual or tactile perception as a material quality or feature which extends over and articulates the material surface of my body, at least in the way that redness spans my knuckles or hardness my fingernails. In feeling the “warmth on the back of [my] hand, coldness in [my] feet, sensations of touch on [my] fingertips” or “the pressure and pull of my clothes”, the bodily ‘qualities’ of which I am aware are clearly not given in the manner of the extended qualities of perceived material things discussed in the fifth section of the previous chapter (Hua IV/V 38/Hua IV 145 [1912]). What is at issue here is the living through of bodily self-affection, rather than the perception of material features qua circumstance-related schematic unities (Hua IV/V 39–40/Hua IV 149–150 [1912]; cf. Zahavi 2020, pp.  109–110; Bernet (2013, pp. 49–51; Taipale 2014, pp. 38–40). On the other hand, the sensings do have a certain localised spatiality, in that they spread out (verbreiten) over my bodily organs in their ‘outwardly’ perceived or perceivable reality. In seeing my hand, or in touching it with my other hand, it is entirely accurate to say that not merely a thing, but “the touching hand appears,” in that those of my current sensings that belong to my hand, while retaining their original intimacy, “are ordered into a new apperception.” And even if we do not actually perceive the feeling hand in this way, we often ‘know where to look’ (or touch), having an “obscure” grasp of the spatial locality of the sensings that already delineates the courses of kinaesthetic movement required for the relevant bodily part to come into view (Hua IV/V 52–53/Hua V 123, transl. modified, emphasis mine [1912]). It is through such sensings, then, that the lived body not only functions anonymously as the motivating kinaesthetic circumstances of perceptual experience, but also feels itself as spreading out through the intimate space it occupies as a mobile ‘here.’ As Husserl puts it, with idiosyncratic subtlety: “Moving my fingers, I have motion

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sensations, whereby a sensation spreads over and traverses, in an ever changing way, the surface of the fingers, but within this sensation-complex there is simultaneously a composition which has its localisation within this digital space” (Hua IV/V 38/Hua IV 145–146 [1912]). Since the visual sensations do not function as sensing in this way, and are therefore localisable only partially and mediately, Husserl maintains that it is only through touch that my own lived body appears as lived body (Hua IV/V 52, 39/Hua IV 150, 148–149 [1912]). Without the touch-­sensings, what I know as my own (perceivable) body would be “an arbitrary material thing” that could, rather oddly, be immediately and freely moved, and that would relate to my sensibility merely through “functional dependencies” (Hua IV/V 35/Hua V 122–123, transl. modified [1912]). As a tactile subject, on the other hand, my body is originally lived as “a system of subjective organs fused with interiority (Innerlichkeit); or all-together a two-sided being”, as he aptly puts it a later text (Hua IX 131–132, transl. modified). Consequently, even the forms of sensitivity which proceed “parallel” to touch, in that they have a degree of immediate localisation unthinkable in the case of vision—the field of warmth and cold, the field of taste, certain bodily feelings, and the like—ultimately owe their lived corporeal spread to their intertwinement with the Urfeld of touch (Hua IV/V 53, 68/Hua V 143, 5) [1912]). The visual or tactual perception of my hand as a feeling hand therefore comprises a basic kind of bodily self-experience, in which the hand’s corporeal exteriority appears as intertwined with a sensitive interiority that I currently live through.22 While Husserl already notes in 1912 that the intuitive localisation of sensings in my corporeal body comprises a mode of bodily self-experience that precedes all socially mediated self-objectification (Hua IV/V 37/Hua V 119 [1912]), it is only later that he carefully works out the role such localisation plays in the institutive experience of foreign subjectivity. In the manuscript from the early twenties discussed earlier in this section, the claim that the perceptual givenness of my own bodily organs exhibits the corporeal spread of my sensory fields is now formulated in terms of the distinction between primal presence (Urpräsenz) and that which is co-given (mitgegeben) in appresence or co-presence (Appräsenz, Kopräsenz). While the concepts of co-presence, co-givenness, and appresentation had, at least in Ideen II, previously only been used only in the case of the experience of the other’s living body (Hua IV/V 246, 523, 535 [1917/1918, 1917, 1916/1917]; cf. Hua IV 199–200, 419), Husserl now applies it to the ‘solipsistic’ experience of one’s own localised bodily sensitivity: “In the case of the solipsistic subject we have the distinctive field

 In this context, it should be emphasised that the visibility of my hand as mine does not only presuppose its tactile sensitivity, but also its free kinaesthetic mobility (cf. Hua IV/V 475/Hua IV 381 [1910–1912]). As Husserl notes elsewhere, tactile sense is also “privileged amongst the contributors to the constitution of a thing.” This is, on the one hand, because the touch-organs are, unlike the eyes, whose functioning becomes superfluous in darkness, continually sensitive to worldly contact (“visually, the world is not continually given; this is rather a privilege of touch”); and on the other, because touch plays a unique role in disclosing spatial things in their orientation to my lived body (“By means of tactile perception [Tastwahrnehmungen], I am always in the world perceptually; oriented in it, I am able to find my way around in it, and I can seize [fassen] and get to know whatever I like.”) Hua IV/V 390/Hua IV 70 [1915–1917].

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of touch in co-presence with the appearing bodily surface and, in union with that, the field of warmth; in second place, and mediated by the localisation of the field of touch, we have the indeterminate localisation of the common feelings” (Hua IV/V 360–361/Hua IV 165, transl. modified [1922/23]). On the basis of this seemingly insignificant reformulation, Husserl offers a fresh account of the originally institutive experience of the other, one that hinges upon the corporeal similarity between the perceptual style of those of my bodily organs which immediately function as localising fields of sensings and certain foreign bodily parts. When something which looks or feels—and moves—like my hand emerges in my perceptual environment but without localising my tactile sense-fields, an appresentation of a foreign tactile interiority (as corporealised in this bodily member) passively emerges.23 And since my localised hand is always accompanied by a horizon of bodily subjectivity that folds in upon and surpasses itself in the very act of localisation, the corporeal whole ‘there,’ of which the foreign hand only forms a part, is accepted as localising a similar kinaesthetic-sensory horizon. Husserl writes: What requires a closer investigation is the system of appresentations which…, in the case of the solipsistic subject, has its original basis in original connections of regular and ordered co-existence in such a way that the connected members and series of members in their co-­ presence are not just there together but refer to one another. […] Solipsistically there belongs to every position of my eyes an “image”-aspect of the seen object and thus an image of the oriented environment; but also, in the case of touching an object, there belongs to every position of my hand and finger a corresponding touch-aspect of the object, just as, on the other side, there is a touch-sensation in the finger, etc., and obviously there is visually a certain image of my touching hand and its touching movements. All that is given for me myself as belonging together in co-presence and is then transferred over in empathy: the other’s touching hand, which I see, appresents to me his solipsistic view of this hand and then also everything that must belong to it in presentified co-presence (Hua IV/V 360–361/ Hua IV 165–166 [1922/23]).

Just as the perceptual givenness of my own hand when touching something already incorporates an appresentation of the tactile self-affection which I currently live through, as well as a touch-aspect of the thing which I touch, so too does a foreign bodily member with the same corporeal style as my hand appresent a foreign sphere of self-affection and a foreign touch-aspect of the thing which it touches. Moreover, the localisation of my tactile sensitivity—the experience of my tactile sensings as the interior of the appearing corporeality of my hand—is itself always lived as a kinaesthetic-sensory accomplishment, one which unfolds through movements of my eyes or of my other hand and the schematic appearances which follow accordingly. Consequently, the appresentation of the foreign hand as a field of localisation for foreign touch-sensings can only be sustained—rather than becoming cancelled out and unveiling a mere lump of hand-like flesh—if other bodily members permit appresentation as functioning within a foreign system of kinaesthetic-sensory organs, one which is capable of its own localisation. Once the original acceptance  As Stein notes, this is not a matter of the other’s hand looking exactly like my hand, but rather of both instantiating the same general and roughly delimited perceptual type (Stein 2008, p. 76/1989, pp. 58–59).

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of the other’s hand as a sensitive organ has emerged, the other’s eyes will typically come to prominence—in virtue of their style of movement and their corporeal proximity to the touching hands opaquely recalling my own case—as exhibiting a foreign gaze, one which participates in the same kind of “regular and ordered co-existence” with the other’s hands as occurs in my sphere of bodily selfhood. On this basis, the other’s corporeal body emerges as a spatial thing quite unlike any other, or better, as the bodily stratum of a foreign embodied subject. By means of empathetic appresentation, the other’s body now presents itself as a corporeal being whose surfaces have a tactile interior, whose movements announce kinaesthetic self-awareness and self-movement, and from which an oriented perceptual contact with other things, and with its own corporeality, radiates. Admittedly, Husserl’s emphasis on the foreign hand as a point of transition from “solipsistic” to intersubjective experience shouldn’t be read too literally. After all, it would seem intuitively (and perhaps empirically) questionable to insist that a child who only came into contact with handless others could thereby never recognise foreign mindedness. A more fruitful reading would rather suggest that what is decisive here is the perception of a foreign bodily part as recalling a tactile organ of mine, or more specifically, a patch of my skin which is visible to or touchable by me and in which fields of touch find an immediate localisation. And indeed, Husserl notes elsewhere that “the entire surface of the living body serves as tactile surface, and the lived body is itself a system of touch-organs, a totality within which the different touch-organs reside” (Hua IV/V 388/Hua IV 68, transl. modified [1915–17]).24 While the hand is undoubtedly the tactile organ which exhibits the most fine-grained and visceral mode of intuitive localisation, it certainly seems possible that a foot, arm, or leg, or even a chest or stomach, could play the constitutive function that Husserl is after. In other words, the view I am suggesting here does not seek to glorify the hand, but rather proposes that the foreign body first manifests itself perceptually by overlapping with and recalling the intimate double-sidedness of my lived body as a tactile body. We can further clarify this reading by comparing it to Theunissen’s interpretation of Husserl’s (in)famous account of the role of bodily pairing (Paarung) in the institutive experience of the other, as developed in Cartesianische Meditationen. For Theunissen, Husserl’s attempt to ground the apperception of the alter ego in bodily similarity can only be made intelligible once we assume that a twofold bodily pairing is operative here, one which first pairs the other’s physical body with my body as physical, and a second and motivationally subsequent pairing of the other’s living body with my lived body. One upshot of this reading is that, since the original function of pairing is seen as that of relating my physical body to the other’s, Husserl’s account remains untouched by the objection that the role he assigns to bodily similarity fails to account for the experiential difference between my own living body and the physical appearance of the other’s body. That is, it is only once my lived  As Husserl adds, while the other tactile organs present the same thingly features as the hands each does so with a different degree of detail and with certain organ-specific “‘colourations’” (Färbungen) (Hua IV/V 388/Hua IV 68 [1915/1917]).

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body has been ‘physicalised’ through its pairing with the other’s physical body that I can (analogically) apprehend the other’s physical body as appresenting a living body; and this in its turn is a presupposition for the pairing of my own and the other’s living body. As this already attests, however, Theunissen’s Husserl ultimately portrays the experience of the other as a highly mediate and egocentric accomplishment, in which the other’s body is first and foremost a physical thing, one that only becomes apperceived as sensitive and mobile through the way it physicalises my lived body (Theunissen 1984, pp. 63–7). As should now be evident, I take it that we find Husserl outlining a somewhat different account in Ideen II.25 Rather than suggesting that bodily similarity first arises as a relation between the other’s physical body as a corporeal whole and the view of my own body that this forces upon me, Husserl there suggests that what is originally ‘paired’—though he does not yet use this language—is something which recalls a bodily member implicated in my own tactile and kinaesthetic bodily system, without itself partaking in that system. It is this which motivates an appresentation, to be confirmed in the ongoing course of experience, of foreign bodily subjectivity as expressed in the corporeal whole to which the foreign bodily member belongs. For the Husserl of Ideen II, that is, the institutive experience of the other does not start from a recognition of a physical thing which resembles my body (whether as intimately lived or as ‘physicalised’), but of a bodily member which recalls but transgresses the fractured and limited grasp I have of my own bodily spatiality. As was suggested earlier in this section, this way of seeing things has the advantage of rendering continuous the roles of bodily similarity and bodily expressivity in empathetic perception. In both cases, we find a movement from a single bodily member to a corporeal whole, this movement in its turn clarifying the empathetic sense of the initial bodily member—such that the other’s quivering hand further exhibits both its very embodied subjectivity and its concrete emotional expressivity when the rest of the bodily system it already intimates is brought into view.

5.4.2  Reciprocal Animate Empathy We have seen that, for Husserl, the institutive experience of the other requires both the perceptual emergence of another corporeal body, or bodily member, and an antecedent form of bodily self-consciousness. In this sense, “empathy already presupposes that each subject has living corporeality (Leiblichkeit) constituted in its surrounding world” (Hua IV/V 360 [1922/1923]). However, it is obvious that the intimate givenness of my body involved in the localisation of sensings is of a markedly different phenomenological character to the appresentation of an analogous  I do not mean to suggest here that Theunissen’s reading, subtle and often incisive though it is, should be taken as the last word on Husserl’s position in Cartesianische Meditationen. For a wellinformed and more charitable reading of Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation which overlaps with many of the themes developed in this chapter, see Smith (2003, Chapter 5).

25

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sphere in the other’s corporeal body. This difference is important, not only because it marks a fundamental and irremovable contour of the self-other relation, but also because it illuminates the role of the other in making possible a novel form of self-­ understanding. The fusion of similarity and difference that constitutively ties the experience of the embodied other to my bodily self-consciousness does not leave the latter unaltered; rather, through it I become aware that my living body is not merely a sphere of orientation and a field of localisation which enters into outer perception only in a fractured manner, but also something visible for others as their living bodies are for me: as a corporeal whole which appresents my bodily subjectivity to others, where this subjectivity is as foreign to them as theirs is for me. More exactly, the empathetic experience of “the psychic life which is appresented along with the other’s living body” makes possible, on the one hand, an acceptance that my own living body has a corporeality and spatiality which is not wholly accessible to me, and on the other, a recognition that my experiential life has a certain appurtenance or conjunction (Zugehörigkeit) with this corporeal body that is only properly accessible to the other—such that, in a single movement, my face and eyes become intelligible as, on the one hand, visible parts of a corporeal totality, and on the other, expressive organs that publically display my visual gaze and affective responses (Hua IV/V 362/Hua IV 167 [1922/23]).26 Furthermore, in as much as bodily expressivity necessarily involves an articulation of mental sense through and across diffuse parts of a corporeal whole, we can now see that the experience of my own bodily expressivity presupposes the recognition of a foreign gaze. It is only through the encounter with another living body that I can recognise my own lived body as an integrated spatial whole comprised of distinct parts, and, on the basis of this, as expressively displaying elements of my experiential life.27 Now, it may be, as Husserl suggests in this manuscript, that this kind of self-­ understanding can emerge in an anticipatory fashion just through my transferring the “closed unity, human being” first empathetically perceived in the other to myself (Hua IV/V 362/Hua IV 167 [1922/23]). However, as he notes in a text written 10  years earlier, such a self-objectification only properly emerges when I find myself as the theme of the other’s empathetic gaze (Hua IV/V 218–219/Hua IV 242 [1913]). In this sense, the recognition of my lived body as a publicly visible corporeal reality is only properly instituted through the form of mutual recognition discussed earlier in this chapter (Sect. 5.2.3). That is, it is only when our eyes meet that the foreign gaze actually fixes upon my bodily ‘here’ and fully reveals to me my own corporeal extension. Moreover, Husserl occasionally suggests that this (reciprocally instituted) self-recognition of my lived body as visible-to-others itself serves to transform my experiential environment. For instance, in his analysis of the solipsistic thought-experiment discussed at the outset of this chapter, Husserl notes that,  Husserl can therefore claim that the “psychic is subjectivity in the experience of empathy; it is there experienced as temporally co-existing with the lived-bodily and physical (LeiblichPhysischen).” Hua IV/V 564/Hua IV 363, transl. modified [1916/1917]. 27  Bernet (2013, pp. 61–2) discusses this point revealingly, although he doesn’t make explicit the connection between corporeal articulation and bodily expressivity which, to my mind, necessarily anchors the latter in alterity. 26

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in ordinary life, each “thing of my experience belongs to my “environment,” and that means first of all that my living body is part of it precisely as living body” (Hua IV/V 297/Hua IV 81, transl. modified, emphasis mine [1915]). As he continues, however, this is “not a matter of essential necessity in any sense.” Without living through the recognition, made possible by reciprocal empathy, of “its own lived body as one understandable for “the other” (eigenen Leib als einem für “Andere” vestehbaren)” Husserl maintains that the experiencing subject “would not know that many subjects can gaze upon the same world, one that simply appears differently to different subjects, such that the appearances are always relative to “their” living bodies, etc.” Husserl’s view appears to be, then, that the intersubjective commonality of the perceptual world can only fully emerge through the recognition of oneself as a “human subject” qua “intersubjective object” (Hua IV/V 297/Hua IV 81, transl. modified [1915]). While Husserl doesn’t fully (so to speak) flesh out this thought, one way of reading it would be as suggesting that the corporealisation of my lived body inaugurated by the other’s gaze, along with the recognition of the other’s bodily here as itself corporealised, first fashions the sense of a spatiality that is not fully reconcilable with either of our egocentric spaces. With the reciprocal corporealisation of self and other, in which my ‘here’ shows up as ‘there’ for the other and something ‘there’ appresents a foreign ‘here,’ a space emerges in which no bodily ‘here’ is absolute.28 In other words, Husserl ultimately leads us to the view that it is with the recognition of my bodily here—which constantly functions as absolute Nullpunkt for my own originary perceptual contact with things (see the fifth section of the fourth chapter)—as an ‘over there’ for the other, that the ‘common system of appearances,’ in which my own appearance-systems merely participate, is first set up as a normative ideal, typically presupposed in my perceptual contact with things and others, and only being called into question when perceptual abnormalities emerge (Sect. 5.2). The fixing of the other’s perceptual gaze upon my body is the only means by which the sense of a unitary perceptual world not tied exclusively to my bodily ‘here’—a spatial world which I traverse rather than egocentrically structure—can emerge in experience as motivated.

5.5  Summary This chapter has covered an expansive array of topics, and it will be necessary at this stage to offer a brief summary, identifying the key claims that run through it. (1) We have seen that a phenomenological clarification of perceptual nature will remain incomplete if it does not strive to explicate the sense of perceived things, and the

 Indeed, in an earlier manuscript, Husserl notes that intersubjectivity has transformative consequences for the primitive spatiality encompassed by the system of ‘theres’ in relation to my mobile bodily ‘here’ (Hua IV/V 445/Hua IV 87–88 [1905–10]). The connection between intersubjectivity and space was later explored by Merleau-Ponty, and has recently been engaged in Lisa Guenther’s phenomenologically-grounded critique of solitary confinement (Guenther 2013, Chapter 7).

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sensuous-material features which articulate them, as valid for other embodied perceivers too. In this way, our perceptual experience of material nature takes for granted that the way in which its objects are given has a certain exchangeability with the perceptual appearances of other embodied subjects. (2) In explicating this sense, we can proceed by attending to the way in which other embodied subjects are given in experience. This is a task which opens up two different directions of inquiry. (2a) On the one hand, we can attempt to explicate the generic character of other animate beings as so given, thereby bringing into view the kind of experience with which animate others are correlated, here termed ‘animate empathy.’ In animate empathy, others are given as unities whose bodily style serves to express a certain kind of world-directed subjectivity. In this way, the movements of the animate other display a form of perceptual contact with material nature, one that is often infused with affective and volitional components—a point to which we shall return in the first section of the next chapter. Upon closer consideration, we can also say that the distinction between normality and abnormality is constantly operative here, in that  those others whose bodily style appresents a similar sensibility to mine, or rather to ‘ours,’ appear as ‘normal perceivers’ in contact with a style of appearing materiality that is more richly ‘in common’ than in other cases. (2b) On the other hand, animate empathy can also be fruitfully analysed from a transcendental standpoint. This involves inquiring into the genetic origins of our acceptance of intersubjective material nature, and thereby treats the experience of the (initially, ‘normal’) animate other as an institutive event that makes possible the opening up of a common perceptual horizon. On the one hand, this requires us to trace out how the sense, ‘animate other,’ first originates through a contrast with my own living body. In this regard, I have argued that the self-constitution of the living body through touch plays an indispensable role. On the other hand, closer reflection reveals that here reciprocity is ultimately decisive. On the last analysis, it is only through being recognised as an animate other by another animate other—which, of course, also has its constitutive implications for self-consciousness—that the acceptance of intersubjective nature becomes motivated experientially.

References Bernet, R. (2013). “The body as a ‘legitimate naturalization of consciousness,’” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 72 (1): 43–65. Bernet, R., Kern, I., & Marbach, E. (1993). An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Original: Bernet, R., Kern, I., & Marbach, E. (1989). Edmund Husserl Darstellung seines Denkens. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.] Darwin, C. (1998). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Warren, N. (2009). Husserl and the promise of time: Subjectivity in transcendental phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Donohoe, J. (2004). Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity: From Static to Genetic Phenomenology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Drummond, J.  J. (2012). “Intentionality without Representationalism,” in: D.  Zahavi (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 115–134.

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Fichte, J. G. (2000). Foundations of Natural Right. Transl. M. Baur, Ed. F. Neuhouser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Franck, D. (2014). Flesh and Body. On the Phenomenology of Husserl. Transl. J.  Rivera & S. Davidson. London: Bloomsbury. [Original: Franck, D. (1981). Chair et corps: Sur la phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.] Guenther, L. (2013). Solitary confinement. Social death and its afterlives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hart, J.  G. (1992). The Person and the Common Life. Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics. Phaenomenologica, vol. 126. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Hegel, G.  W. F. (1977). Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Transl. A.  V. Millar. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1991). Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Ed. A. W. Wood, Transl. H. B. Nisbett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heinämaa, S. (2014). “The Animal and the Infant: From Embodiment to Empathy and Generativity,” in: Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo, & Timo Miettinen (eds.), Phenomenology and the Transcendental. New York: Routledge, pp. 129-146. Held, K. (1972). “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität und die Ideen einer phänomenologischen Transzendentalphilosophie,” in: Ulrich Claesges & Klaus Held (eds.) Perspektiven transzendentalphänomenologischer Forschung. Phaenomenologica, vol. 49. Dordrecht: Springer. Honneth, A. (2000). Suffering from Indeterminacy: An Attempt at a Reactualisation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Spinoza Lectures. Assen: Van Gorcum. Husserl, E. (1952a). Husserliana IV. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie: Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Ed. M. Biemel, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Transl. R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.] Husserl, E. (1952b). Husserliana V. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie: Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften. Ed. M. Biemel, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (1980). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences. Transl. T. E. Klein & W. E. Pohl, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (Hua V 1-137); Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Transl. R.  Rojcewicz & A.  Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (Hua V 138-162).] Husserl, E. (1962). Husserliana IX. Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925. Ed. W.  Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (1977). Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester, 1925. Transl. J.  Scanlon. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (Hua IX 3-234).] Husserl, E. (Forthcoming). Husserliana IV/V. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution und Wissenscahftstheorie. Ed. D. Fonfara. Cham: Springer. Jonas, H. (2001). The Phenomenon of life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kern, I. (1973a). “Einleitung des Herausgebers,” in: Edmund Husserl (auth.), Iso Kern (ed.), Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass. Erster Teil: 1905-1920. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. xvii-xlviii. Kern, I. (1973b). “Einleitung des Herausgebers,” in: Edmund Husserl (auth.), Iso Kern (ed.), Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil: 1921-1928. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. xvii-xxxv. Kern, I. (1973c). “Einleitung des Herausgebers,” in: Edmund Husserl (auth.), Iso Kern (ed.), Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil: 1929-1935. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. xv-lxx. Luo, Z. (2017). “Motivating Empathy: The Problem of Bodily Similarity in Husserl’s Theory of Empathy,” Husserl Studies 33(1): 45–61.

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Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Transl. A. Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Original: Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Le Visible et l’invisible. Paris: Editions Gallimard]. Miettinen, T. (2020). Husserl and the Idea of Europe. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mohanty, J. N. (2011). Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years. 1916-1938. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Moran, D. (2017). “Intercorporeality and Intersubjectivity: A Phenomenological Exploration of Embodiment,” in: Christoph Durt, Thomas Fuchs, & Christian Tewes (eds.) Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Neuhouser, F. (2000). Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Overgaard, S. (2002). “Epoché and solipsistic reduction,” Husserl Studies 18(3): 209–222. Pippin, R. (2008). Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schutz, A. (1967). The phenomenology of the social world. Transl. G.  Walsh & F.  Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Original: Schütz, A. (1932). Der sinnhafte Aufbau der Sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie. Vienna: Springer-­ Verlag Wien.] Sheets-Johnstone, M. (1999). “Re-thinking Husserl’s fifth meditation,” Philosophy Today 43(4): pp. 99–106. Smith, A. D. (2003). Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations. London & New York: Routledge. Staiti, A. (2014). Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Spirit, and Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Staehler, T. (2008). “What is the Question to Which Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation is the Answer?” Husserl Studies 24: 99–117. Staehler, T. (2017). Hegel, Husserl and the Phenomenology of Historical Worlds. London & New York: Rowman & Littlefields. Stein, E. (1989). On the Problem of Empathy. Transl. W. Stein. Washington, DC: ICS Publications. Stein, E. (2008). Zum Problem der Einfühlung. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder. Steinbock, A. J. (1995). Home and Beyond. Generative phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Steinbock, A. J. (1998). “Spirit and Generativity,” in: Natalie Depraz & Dan Zahavi (eds.), Alterity and Facticity: New Perspectives on Husserl. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 163–204. Taipale, J. (2014). Phenomenology and Embodiment. Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Theunissen, M. (1984). The Other. Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber. Transl. C. Macann. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Original: Theunissen, M. (1965). Der Andere: Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart. Berlin: De Gruyter.] Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wallace, D. F. (2004) “Consider the Lobster,” Gourmet (August 2004), pp. 50–64. Williams, R. (1992). Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other. New York: State University of New York. Yamaguchi, I. (1982). Passive Synthesis und Intersubjektivität bei Edmund Husserl. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Zahavi, D. (2001). Husserl and transcendental intersubjectivity: A response to the linguistic-­ pragmatic critique. Transl. E.  A. Behnke. Athens, OH: Ohio Universiy Press. [Original: Zahavi, D. (1996). Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik. Phaenomenologica, vol. 135. Dordrecht: Kluwer.] Zahavi, D. (2014). Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zahavi, D. (2020). Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation. A New Edition. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [First Edition: 1999]

Chapter 6

The Personal Self: A First-Personal Approach

In that we have now offered an account of animate empathy, our thematic concern can begin to fix upon the second mode of empathy delineated in the third chapter, namely interpersonal empathy. But rather than directly considering the manner of givenness of other people, I will now turn to a detailed treatment of personal self-­ consciousness. This may raise suspicions that the account of interpersonal empathy which I ultimately offer will simply transpose the personal self as given first-­ personally onto others, a move which would be inadequate to the task of explicating the manner in which other people are given. The reader will have to determine for themselves whether I commit this error in the seventh chapter, but I would like to emphasise that it is not my aim in beginning with an exclusively first-personal analysis. As we will later see (see the second section of the seventh chapter), the personal self is not something which can be simply transposed from self to other, because its full sense is one that only emerges in and through intersubjective relations, and to this degree a phenomenology of personal selfhood must incorporate a second-­ personal analysis too. Nevertheless, I take it that in pursuing such a phenomenology scant progress will be made until one considers what it is to be a person, to live a personal life. This is because the distinctive character of the personal self is partially a matter of specific contours within the life of subjectivity, contours which can be most richly disclosed through reflection upon one’s own case. In this chapter, I will attempt to bring into view some of these contours on the basis of Husserl’s analyses of the personal self. I will first consider the sense in which voluntary movement and practical inclinations can be appropriated and transformed into chosen actions, thereby manifesting a subject who is not merely a locus of instinctive tendencies but a person who decides (Sect. 6.1). This will then bring into view a conception of the personal self as a living nexus of decisions and stances who has a distinctive kind of motivational dependence upon its surrounding world as well as a certain personal freedom and enduring character (Sect. 6.2). Finally, I will turn to the form of selfawareness and habituality that is implicated in the distinctive experiential unities that Husserl terms persistent opinions (bleibende Meinungen), thereby excavating © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Jardine, Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person, Phaenomenologica 233, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84463-9_6

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one of the most significant pre-reflective bases for personal self-understanding (Sect. 6.3). In so doing, I will try to show that Husserl’s thinking on these issues is remarkably contemporary, cohering with and arguably improving upon some of the recent decades’ most powerful philosophical thoughts regarding agency and selfhood. This will then leave us with a specific pair of tasks in the remaining chapter: first, that of determining the degree to which personal selfhood depends upon empathetic relations to other persons, and second, that of discerning the recognition and understanding of other persons in interpersonal empathy, in its differences and similarities with the personal self-consciousness considered here.

6.1  The Embodiment of the Person As we have seen in previous chapters, Husserl demonstrates that the lived body plays a fundamental role for the dimension of passivity that is interwoven within all experiential life. A primordial form of embodiment is to be found in the sphere of sensation (broadly understood), since this comprises a domain of lived experience in which, on the one hand, one’s own body is immediately lived, and on the other, an affection occurs which comprises the material subsoil for perceptual, affective, and volitional acts. However, Husserl claims that this understanding of the lived body as an ‘aesthesiological unity’ is essentially an abstraction, one which can be lifted by explicating the specific kind of activity which characterises our bodily being. Moreover, it is in lifting this abstraction that the personal ego comes into view: Constituted together are the physical thing as nature, the lived body as aesthesiological unity, and the psyche as a founded reality, thus a non-selfsufficient one, with the lived body as its subsoil (the lived body always thought constitutively only as an aesthesiological unity). In this series we do not come across the personal ego, although each founded psychic subject is a subject of lived experiences of acts. Concerning the constitution of the personal ego, it must be considered as having the lived body as field of its free will, and especially in this respect, that the kinaesthetic processes, which already provide essential contributions towards the constitution of the thing at the lowest level, are characterised as free processes, to which are joined, as dependent, processes of other sorts of aesthesiological data (Hua IV/V 255–256/Hua IV 310, transl. modified [1913]).

In this section, I will follow the line of thought suggested by Husserl in this passage. I will first explicate Husserl’s claim that a certain bodily freedom plays an essential constitutive function for perceptual experience, before indicating the involvement of the active embodiment of the subject in the manifestation and establishment of personal character.

6.1.1  Bodily Freedom and Perception We saw in the fourth chapter that Husserl accords a constitutive role to bodily movement in his transcendental-phenomenological clarification of thing-perception. However, Husserl doesn’t merely claim that bodily movement serves a constitutive

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function in perceptual experience; he also maintains that in virtue of such movement “functions of spontaneity belong to every perception. The processes of the kinaesthetic sensations are free processes here, and this freedom in the consciousness of their unfolding is an essential part of the constitution of spatiality” (Hua IV/V 51/Hua IV 58, emphasis mine [1912]).1 My aim will now be to clarify what this bodily freedom is, as well as to spell out why Husserl regards such freedom as necessary for perceptual experience. As a preliminary characterisation, we can say that what makes certain bodily movements ‘free’ is that they are, in their total unfolding, lived as the actualisation of a set of concrete kinaesthetic possibilities, an actualisation which excludes sets of other, non-actualised, kinaesthetic possibilities of which the subject was also aware. Thus, in leaning backwards, turning my neck to the right and shifting my gaze so as to focus on a specific object outside of the window, I enact a course of movement of which, Husserl insists, I had a certain kind of prior awareness, alongside other possible movement-courses of which I was similarly aware. That is, Husserl maintains that kinaesthetic awareness does not only function in perceptual experience as disclosing those actual bodily movements that are correlated with alterations in the sensuous sphere. Rather, the inner horizon of a perceptual object already implies, as the motivational circumstances for its possible disclosure, courses of possible kinaesthetic enactments (see, e.g., Hua XVI 190). Now, Husserl’s claim is certainly not that bodily activity of this sort necessarily involves a process in which the subject represents in thought or imagination the (significantly expansive) nexus of possible movements which she could bring about, and the perceptual correlates which would emerge through such movements. After all, if a subject’s lived awareness of her current kinaesthetic possibilities and their motivated perceptual correlates amounted to this, then such an awareness would surely be unable to serve the structural and constitutive function for all perceptual experience that Husserl proposes it does. In place of any cognitivistic or imagistic account of bodily movement and perceptual constitution, Husserl claims that within perceptual functioning our possible kinaesthetic courses are primordially there for us, not as possible situations posited in thought or imagination, but just as possibilities of self-movement, which may be actualised in self-movement. The original awareness I have of my bodily possibilities is not a cognitive grasp of logical possibilities, but a “practical consciousness” in which “a horizonal domain of possibilities of free movement—of possibilities as practical possibilities—is most properly present to me” (Hua IV/V 520–521/Hua IV 330 [mid-1920s], Hua IV/V 545 [1916/1917]). This horizon of bodily possibilities is shaped and delimited by my own history of bodily engagement, since its contours depend upon what one is (aware of oneself as) able to do. Husserl emphasises that what brings about this awareness is not an induction from past experience, but rather the development and refinement of precisely the practical consciousness and the possibilities it 1  See also Hua IV/V 49-50/Hua V 121 [1912] My discussion in Sect. 6.1.1 of Husserl’s analysis of bodily freedom, and the role of bodily capacities played therein, builds upon the excellent treatment of this issue found in Jacobs (2014, pp. 15–18).

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constitutes; that is, we are dealing here with a practical rather than a cognitive apperception (Hua IV/V 520–521/Hua IV 330 [mid-1920s]). Hence, he uses the phrase “I can” („Ich Kann“) to refer to the pre-reflective and immediately practical manner in which a subject is acquainted with each of his or her own bodily capabilities (Vermögen) and the practical possibilities they open the subject to.2 Such lived and living capabilities are not solely responsive to contexts in which they have previously been actualised, but also serve to delineate practical possibilities for novel situations: “the transfer of an actually experienced ‘I can and I bring about’ to a new case is not only an inductive existential belief that refers to my ability as fact; rather, I experience a possible ability in practical consciousness itself” (Hua IV/V 521/Hua IV 330, transl. modified [mid-1920s]). The system of such bodily capabilities comprises, for each person, a distinctive “normal freedom” of which the subject is intimately aware, and which is ordinarily brought to thematic attention only when it is interrupted (durchbrochen), namely when I am unable to achieve an attempted activity of which I am normally capable.3 However, there looks to be something inadequate to the claim that bodily freedom simply consists in the actualisation of possible movements, even if these possible movements are specified as ones which were previously lived as embedded within a nexus of practical possibilities that are distinctively mine and as such open for voluntary actualisation. After all, many bodily movements that we would normally consider ‘involuntary’ would appear to fall under this description. Consider two of the examples of involuntary movement offered by Anscombe: “[t]he odd sort of jerk or jump that one’s whole body sometimes gives when one is falling asleep,” and the case of a man who “withdrew his hand in a movement of involuntary recoil.”4 In both cases, we could arguably say that the embodied subject was minimally aware of the relevant movement as a practical possibility prior to its actual emergence, and that this emergence is in its turn lived as in some sense an actualisation of this kinaesthetic possibility. However, such involuntary movements are 2  “Es bedarf hier der Analyse des „Ich kann“, und zwar des Ich kann, wie ich je erfahrungsmäßig weiß bzw. was vor aller Reflexion als „bekanntliches“ „Das kann ich“ charakterisiert ist.“ (Ms. A VI 10/11; cf. Hua IV 254). While related to the Ideen II bundle, this specific manuscript is rather fragmentary and has thus been excluded from Hua IV/V. See also the following formulation, for which a corresponding manuscript has not been located: “A capability is not an empty ability, but rather a positive potentiality, which may now happen to be actualised but which is always ready to pass into activity, into an activity that, as it is lived, refers back to the corresponding subjective ability (Können), the capability” (Hua IV 255; cf. Jacobs 2014, pp. 15-16). 3  „Die intendierte freie Bewegung läuft nicht ab, „es geht nicht“. […] Meine Freiheit als normale Freiheit ist durchbrochen, es geht jetzt gerade nicht.“ (Ms. A VI 10/11). See also the discussion of the “I cannot” and the experience of resistance to bodily activities found at Hua IV 258-259. 4  Anscombe offers more relevant examples: “tics, reflex kicks from the knee, the lift of the arm from one’s side after one has leaned heavily with it up against a wall.” (1979: §7) In a less obvious example of involuntary movement, Husserl—who was reportedly twice hospitalised with nicotine poisoning—discusses the “mechanical doing [Tun]” of reaching for (and even lighting) a cigar on the basis of an “urge to smoke,” “whereas my attention, my egoic activity, indeed my beingaffected consciously, are entirely somewhere else.” (Hua IV/V 531/Hua IV 338, transl. modified [1917]).

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intuitively thought of as deviations from, rather than instantiations of, free bodily movement. What is needed, then, is a further specification of the distinctive way in which voluntary movement involves the free actualisation of kinaesthetic possibilities. As such a further specification, I take it that Husserl would offer the claim that voluntary movements are necessarily consciously goal-oriented. In doing something voluntarily—that is, in my bodily freedom—I am not merely aware of a kinaesthetic constellation of mine emerging, but of the enactment of the kinaesthetic constellation actualising a possibility which I take as its practical end or telos.5 It is important to stress that Husserl’s claim here is not that bodily freedom is manifest exclusively in chosen actions.6 While teleological self-movement is a necessary feature of those actions which are robustly chosen in the sense of being rooted in decision, there are also forms of goal-oriented movement which, as phenomenologists, we cannot describe in such terms. Consequently, chosen actions represent only a certain type of voluntary movement, and it is with regard to the broader class that we can speak of bodily freedom.7 Indeed, in a passage already partially quoted, Husserl points out that bodily movement retains a lived teleological character even when our self-­movement, rather than being based in deliberation and decision, simply and without hesitation alters the perceptual situation in a manner we find desirable or aesthetically pleasing: The object exercises an allure, perhaps by virtue of its pleasing appearance. The “same” object can be given to me in an unpleasing mode of appearance, and then I experience an allure to change my position appropriately, to move my eyes, etc. Presently, a pleasing mode of appearance is given once again, and the telos of the movement has been reached. Here, once more, movements of the body and of the eyes do not enter into the picture as real physical processes, but instead a horizonal domain of possibilities of free movement, as practical possibilities, is most properly present to me, and an “I do” succeeds the “I can” according to the reigning allures and tendencies. Correlatively, the end of the process has the character of a telos, a goal (Hua IV/V 545 [1917]; cf. Hua IV 216–218). 5  As Husserl puts it in the third central manuscript of Ideen II: “The action that now runs its course constitutes itself as process in the sense of my will by virtue of its taking place through me as the one who freely wills. I am constantly present there as bringing about the target of my striving, as purposively achieving in the volitional sense (als willentlich erzielend). And each phase of this purposive achievement is, in turn, a phase in which the pure subject of the willing “reaches” what it wills as such.” (Hua IV/V 306 fn. 2 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 98). 6  I adapt the term “chosen actions” from the excellent phenomenological account of deliberation, decision, and action offered by Drummond (2021b). What Drummond terms “voluntary action” there largely coincides with what it is here characterised as “voluntary movement”; and since, on the account presented here, voluntary movement necessarily involves both subjective agency and an orienting telos, substituting the term “action” for “movement” would not be entirely inappropriate. Indeed, as the passage cited in the preceding footnote demonstrates, Husserl also refers to action (Handlung) in this context. I nevertheless use the term “voluntary movement” here, primarily to highlight the link to kinaesthetic mobility. 7  For an intriguing parallel, consider Anscombe’s claim that voluntary movements are necessarily such that they can be known to their agent non-observationally, and that while not all voluntary movements embody intention, all intentional actions are voluntary in this sense (Anscombe 1979, §49).

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Once the teleological aspect of voluntary movement is emphasised, it becomes clearer why Husserl maintains that perceptual constitution—that is, the bringing to manifestation of perceptual objects—requires free (i.e. voluntary) movement. As we saw in the fifth section of the fourth chapter, perceptual experience is itself teleologically structured, in that the perceptual sense of an object involves a certain kind of claim which is self-corrected and further determined through moving closer to the object and more closely approximating an optimal givenness of its features. Consequently, the ability to accomplish teleological self-movement is a necessary precondition for perceptual constitution. A being who was wholly unacquainted with the possibility of its bodily movement being goal-oriented—and which was thus unable to do anything like, say, purposively turning its eye over there, or lurching towards its food hungrily—could not be experientially acquainted with even the intuitive, perceptual nature discussed in preceding chapters. The ideal of optimal givenness which tacitly functions as a norm in all perceptual experience is inseparable from the practical possibility of its accomplishment, and the sense of the latter is grounded in the lived possibility of teleological self-movement. At this stage, we can summarise Husserl’s account of bodily freedom as follows. The generic character of voluntary activity involves, first, the possession, on behalf of the agent, of bodily capabilities and hence of a nexus of lived practical possibilities attuned to the concrete situation which faces him or her, and second, the actualisation of certain practical possibilities in movements that are lived by their subject as teleologically oriented towards such actualisation. All movements which fulfil these two criteria embody bodily freedom, and a degree of first-personal familiarity with such self-movement is a necessary condition of perceptual experience. To relate this account of bodily freedom or the voluntary to Husserl’s claim that such freedom provides personal selfhood with its underlying basis, we can pursue the interrelation between two issues: on the one hand, the manner in which bodily movements manifest agential subjectivity (Sect. 6.1.2), and on the other, the already-­ mentioned distinction between merely voluntary movements and the chosen actions of persons (Sects. 6.1.3 and 6.2.1).

6.1.2  V  oluntary Movement, Agentive Subjectivity, and Affection Crucially, for Husserl the teleological character of voluntary movement does not merely play a necessary role in the disclosure of perceptual objects; such self-­ movement is also an essential feature of the self-manifestation of embodied subjectivity. Or put differently, the lived body is not only essentially involved in the bringing to manifestation of the perceptual world, but also in the (self-)constitution of the bodily engaged subject. We can clarify this point by noting that voluntary movements are not in every respect a matter of self-affection, but also involve a dimension of subjective engagement. When voluntarily redirecting our gaze, for

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example, we are not only, or primarily, passively (self-)aware of a certain kinaesthetic course being actualised. Rather, this movement would be more accurately described, by the subject who lives it, as an event wherein, perhaps, “I distractedly looked at the book” — that is, as a subjectively engaged process, implemented by an experiencing subject as a response to the affective allure of something lying at the margins of her field of vision. Husserl emphasises this connection between voluntary movement and agentive subjectivity in a manuscript dating from 1914 or 1915, as follows: The ego has as correlate its outer surrounding world, and thereunder its lived body as a field of the allures which penetrate it. However, the lived body is pre-eminent as a field of subjective movements and alterations, which occur in consequence of the allures, and which include the free, active alterations. The lived body is primarily a field of subjective alteration, a field of forms of the “I move” (e.g., I alter my posture, I clench my fist), a field of movements which are of consequence in determining the courses of other appearances (the movements of my eyes in the “I see,” the movements of touching, etc.). The lived body thus has a specific subjectivity (Hua IV/V 248–249 [1914/1915]).8

He goes on to indicate the consequences of this line of thought, in a later note appended to this manuscript: For must it not be said that, “originally,” the field of movement-sensations is the field of a subjective “I do,” and that while further subjective series emerge as coordinated with this field (Hand in Hand gehen), they do so mediately? Furthermore: is the lived body as sensation and field of sensation something intrinsically and originally subjective? But as we later see, it will not do to construe sensations as states of the ego (Hua IV/V 249, fn. 1 [1914/1915]).

The issue which Husserl appears to be raising here is as follows: while voluntary self-movement is lived through kinaesthetically, and can as such be described in sensory terms, the danger of so doing is that it risks overlooking what is utterly distinctive about such self-movement. What is phenomenologically present in the free actualisation of kinaesthetic possibilities, in lived and purposive bodily enactments, is not simply the first-personal givenness of bodily movement; what is also present, as intertwined with but irreducible to the latter, is the embodied subject as locus of living agency. In other words, my voluntary movements do not only passively manifest my changing kinaesthetic constellations, they also embody and actualise my doing. To refer to a distinction developed in the second chapter, the phenomenological character of voluntary movements is not only that of sensory lived-experiences as given first-personally for me, since it also manifests a bodily alteration realised by me. Accordingly, all voluntary movement can be said to have a properly egological structure—but only insofar as the ego putatively operative therein is understood as nothing more than the minimal dimension of agency living within the movement itself, as experiential phenomenon.9

 See also Hua IV/V 51-52/Hua V 122 [1912]; Hua IV/V 574-575 [1915-1917].  Husserl makes this point in the Bleistiftmanuskript as follows: “Only lived-bodies are moveable in an immediately spontaneous (“free”) manner; and, specifically, they are moveable in this way 8 9

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As has already been highlighted, Husserl’s view is that every such voluntary doing of the bodily subject presupposes a form of affection. More precisely, this affection has a twofold noetic-noematic character: it is a bodily self-affection that at once discloses the affective allure of something other than and surrounding the embodied subject.10 It is in this sense that we should understand Husserl’s statement, in the passage quoted above, that beneath the surrounding world transcendingly confronting the ego stands “its lived body as a field of the allures which penetrate it.” Husserl explicates the sense in which voluntary movements respond to passive experiences of being affected by a certain kind of demand or invitation emanating from without as follows: I become motivated to turn towards something, to turn towards it in attention and liking. I experience the allure of beauty. Something reminds me of something else similar to it, the similarity lures me to compare and distinguish them. Something seen incompletely determines me to get up and approach it. The room’s stale air (which I experience as such) lures me to open the window, etc. In each case, we have a “suffering” of something and a passively being determined through something—and the active reaction to it, the transition into conduct (Tun), and this conduct has a goal (Hua IV/V 546 [1916/1917]; cf. Hua IV 217).

We can thus say that lived and purposive bodily enactments—that is, all voluntary movements—manifest a purposive, consciously goal-oriented response to affectively articulated features of the subject’s pregiven environment. Such consciously purposive movements, that is, manifest living embodied subjectivity as a locus of agency that is, nevertheless, constantly affected by its pregiven surroundings. Moreover, the way of responding involved with voluntary movement, dependent upon the agent’s kinaesthetic capabilities, involves a minimal form of egoic engagement that is everywhere founded upon bodily passivity.

6.1.3  Freedom as Bodily, Personal, and Pure In the foregoing account of the self-manifestation of embodied subjectivity in voluntary movement, we have still not entirely clarified Husserl’s claim that the personal ego “must be considered as having the lived body as its field of free will.” After all, the account of bodily freedom and embodied subjectivity so far given is plausibly applicable to those of our fellow creatures whose worldly comportment exhibits by the pure ego belonging to them and by the willing of this ego (und zwar durch das zu ihnen gehörige reine Ich und seinen Willen).” (Hua IV/V 42 [1912]; cf. Hua IV 152). 10  That the affections soliciting embodied engagement themselves involve a dimension of bodily self-awareness is, again, already evident from Husserl’s analysis of the lived-body in the Bleistiftmanusrkipt. As he notes there, included amongst the sensations that have a “localisation given in immediate intuition” and “a relatedness to the lived-body grounded therein” are the sensuous feelings involved with the affective constitution of value, as well as “all kinds of sensation, difficult to analyse and discuss” that “form the material substrate for the life of desire and will: sensations of energetic tension and relaxation, sensations of inner restraint, paralysis, liberation, etc.” (Hua IV/V 44/Hua IV 152-153, transl. modified [1912]).

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a certain form of agency, but not the one which we find ourselves condemned to embody in leading a life as persons.11 To see how it can be that the kind of lived, goal-oriented movement so far described takes on a distinctively personal form, we thus have to distinguish between different ways in which the activities of voluntary self-movement can embody and manifest subjectivity, and to examine these different ways within the broader horizon of personal life. The most relevant Husserlian distinction here is that between those forms of voluntary self-movement which manifest their subject simply as succumbing to a stimulus or allure (Reiz), and those forms which express or fulfil a stance, opinion, or decision (Stellungnahme, Meinung, Entscheidung) embedded within the life of a person—though, as we shall see, this distinction is complicated by the interdependency and interlocking of these two dimensions within personal life.12 Many of the forms of self-movement possible for living beings simply manifest their agent as subject to instincts (Triebe), inclinations (Neigungen), or tendencies (Tendenzen), embodying that element of subjectivity which comprises the underlying layer or subsoil (Unterschicht) of personal agency (Hua IV/V 577–578 [1915–1917]). Many of the movements which we enact are driven by our yielding to or following a course of movement which, in its sheer lived possibility, is delineated prior to any planning or deliberation. Rather than realising reason- and value-­ sensitive practical intentions and goals projected by their agent, such activities are rather lived as embodied responses to invitations or allures exerted by what appears in the margins of her attention. While such activities involve voluntary self-­ movement and manifest a minimally engaged subject who self-moves in yielding to their allure, Husserl notes that from the point of view of the personal subject such activities are nevertheless lived as passive accomplishments, in as much as they require no element of decision or active commitment: From something evinced (vom Gehabten) an allure may emanate, a tendency towards apprehending that encroaches upon the subject (eine auf das Subjekt hingehende Tendenz zum Erfassen): The subject is passive when it follows the allure and resolves the tendency in the form of turning-towards [something]. Pure passivity occurs wherever a subjective tendency issuing from a pregiven and evinced background object is surrendered to, such as when the eyes turn towards something, or the hand grasps something, in consequence of its allure. We have here the allures of originally passive activities, e.g. eating, drinking, and smoking. A thought emerges, and from it a tendency, effective as an obscure intention, to follow a train of thought. I follow it passively. The sunshine beckons me to take “a stroll,” and I yield. Each of the entire host of inclinations is nothing more than an inclination to follow (Hua IV/V 575–576 [1915–1917]). 11  Korsgaard (2009, pp. 109-116) has recently argued that many non-human animals possess a form of agency which, while not intentional and self-expressive in the distinctive sense in which personal agency is, is nevertheless goal-oriented and manifests its agent as an integrated and conscious locus of instincts and perceptions—a conclusion which I take it Husserl would be in full agreement with. 12  On Husserl’s employment of the term Reiz, see Steinbock (2001, pp. xliv-xlvi), as well as Husserl’s own discussion of the “naturalistic” and “personalistic” understandings of Reiz (Hua IV/V 239-240/Hua IV 198-190 [mid-1920s]). For Husserlian accounts of the relationship between position-taking and personhood, see: Hart (1992, pp. 50-146), Jacobs (2010, 2016a, 2016b, 2021).

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Considered in themselves, that is, such cases of voluntary movement reveal the individual character of the subject they engage only insofar they manifest its tendency to self-move in a certain way under specific pregiven intentional circumstances. However, what complicates this picture is that, at least when it comes to persons, what stands out as “alluring” an embodied response, the following through of a volitional tendency, is sometimes dependent upon the subject’s enduring personal interests, upon a deeply embedded nexus of stances specifying what she takes to be worth her doing. In illustrating this point, some examples will be of aid. Consider a parent who sympathetically embraces their crying child, a botanist who leans over to get a closer look at a flower she happens to pass while walking elsewhere, or a socially sensitive person who gives an overtly unhappy glare to an aggressive stranger shouting racist abuse. Each of these persons might live their response as simply driven by an urge to act, one correlated with a felt demand arising from the situation they find themselves in. But in that they involve a certain kind of interest-­ arousal, such responses manifest long-standing principles, values, and resolutions rooted in the agent’s enduring theoretical, evaluative, and practical attitudes.13 They imply something about what the agent takes to be true, about what she holds dearly, about a certain kind of claim she endorses (regarding, perhaps, the overwhelming value of the child for the parent, the importance of understanding one’s organic surroundings, or the necessity of maintaining a social space of solidarity and respect). In short, despite not embodying any immediate element of evaluative assessment or decision, some of the inclination-expressive voluntary movements enacted by persons nevertheless serve to express their agent’s own deeply personal stances. To employ terminology which will be later developed in this chapter, in such cases our actions are rooted in the immediate reawakening of certain evaluative and practical stances which are embedded in our personal lives. The latter belong to the sedimented nexus of positions or attitudes which make up who we are as active and responsive selves of enduring character, and it belongs to their very nature as such habitual stances that they can be immediately reawakened and actualised if intentional circumstances of a certain type are to emerge. As has already been emphasised, the forms of self-movement actualised in inclination-­expressive (i.e. minimally voluntary and purposive) bodily movements are not phenomenologically exhausted by their experienced actualisation. Even as mere possibilities delineated by lived-bodily capabilities, they contribute to a subject’s lived awareness of her embodied space of possible movement. Moreover, the lived awareness of a bodily capability as prefiguring a course of movement which

 See, e.g., Husserl’s remark that theoretical interest, theoretical instincts, and theoretical acts of the will are related to the emotive sphere and belong to the personality (Hua IV/V 402 [1915-1917]). My claim here is not that all activities involving the arousal of interest are person-manifesting in this sense; indeed, it may be that many merely voluntary movements themselves involve the arousal of interest more broadly construed (see Hua IV/V 545-546 [1916/1917]; cf. Hua IV 261). Rather, my claim is that a certain kind of inherently interested response essentially involves the awakening and functioning of personal stances.

13

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can be actualised at any time becomes strengthened through our exercising or practicing that movement. And, especially once it has become so strengthened, a lived bodily capability can ultimately be actualised in a way which goes beyond the mere expression of inclination, being rather fulfilling for a specific kind of willing that is rooted in a practical decision (Hua IV/V 520/Hua IV 330 [mid-1920s]). As Husserl puts it, just as inclination-expressive voluntary movements are not experienced as mere events occurring in one’s surroundings, not all of our voluntary movements are lived as the mere “following of an inclination” (Hua IV/V 576 [1915–1917]). To see what this involves, it is worth first noting that even movements which ultimately remain on the level of inclination-expression can involve something more than merely succumbing to a tendency. I might hesitate about yielding to a tendency, not immediately succumbing to the invitation or allure of an environing object but rather momentarily resisting it, in which case my eventual movement is not merely lived as a yielding to the allure but as an “acceptance” (Zustimmung) of it. Or one might reject the allure in light of the overpowering appeal of a contrary urge, or remain in a state of conflict in which contrary tendencies compete for acceptance (Hua IV/V 576 [1915–1917]). Beyond this, however, it is also possible for the actualisation of a lived tendency to be driven forth by a decision of the will, one which takes into account not merely the allure of a goal predelineated by a tendency, but first and foremost the value which I take that goal to have: I can also be effective myself, a spontaneity of doing can proceed from me. The tendency from the object is still there, but it can be that I move myself freely, that I, on my part, want to do exactly what the tendency draws out of me. I decide for the tendency, and I do not merely let myself be drawn into and yield to it, being too inert to brace myself against it, etc. The goal stands there for me as valuable, and I follow it in light of this. I feel the urge to judge: I have a look and grasp a legitimising ground, and now I judge in the manner of the tendency, though I am not merely yielding to the urge (Hua IV/V 576–577 [1915–1917]).

On Husserl’s view, then, what distinguishes chosen actions proper from mere voluntary enactments is both an element of active decision, as well as the distinctive type of motivational context in which this decision is embedded. Rather than being driven to act simply to satisfy a volitional tendency—a possible movement which is lived as an embodied response to an alluring feature of my environment—my decision is responsive to considerations which strike me as justifying the action of mine which the bodily movement is here construed as constituting. In this case, I am no longer aware of my possible movement as simply something I am able and inclined to do. Rather the issue which my decision settles concerns the practical value of the action, that is, whether the activity which the tendency delineates is worth doing, and why this is so. We can illustrate this point by modifying the examples previously offered of inclination-expressive activities that nevertheless reveal personal stances. Consider a single parent who decides to apply for a less demanding job than their current one in order to be able to spend more time with their child, despite the economic difficulties that will consequently transpire. This decision is not necessarily one which is merely compelled by an urge to spend more time with their child— although such an urge may indeed be a painful aspect of the parent’s current daily life—but may rather be motivated by a deeply felt love for the child and a

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recognition of the value of his or her well-being, and an accordance of greater value to this well-being than to the additional financial stability generated by the parent’s current career. The botanist who decides to pursue one line of investigation over another is in part driven by the value she attributes to the goal of success in her studies, as well as by the features of the chosen line of investigation that seem to make it more amenable to the practical attainment of this goal. Finally, the person who joins a demonstration opposing racial injustice may be motivated by the value which she attributes to the collective task of creating a more just society, as well as perhaps by an assessment of how her participation in this demonstration can contribute to the struggle to attain this goal. As these examples illustrate, what makes a bodily movement free in a personal, and not merely bodily, sense—which is to say, what primarily distinguishes it as a chosen action from a mere voluntary movement—is that, rather than merely manifesting an inclination, it actualises and embodies a decisively formed practical intention that is responsive to practically-relevant reasons. That is, it reveals its subject as having taken a certain degree of critical distance from its embodied inclinations, and as placing the practical consequences of its possible movements in relation to whatever values or disvalues have justificatory relevance. To evoke a familiar phrase from Sellars, it manifests a subject who situates a possible goal, already predelineated to her in a tendency, within a certain space of reasons. Husserl emphasises the connection between, on the one hand, action being responsive to motivating reasons, and on the other, its manifesting personal freedom in passages which are worth quoting in depth: Above all, what must be delimited from the generic and unitary empirical subject is the “person,” understood in a specific sense, the subject of acts which are to be assessed from the standpoint of reason, the subject that is “self-responsible,” the subject that is free and in bondage, unfree; freedom taken in a specific sense, and to be sure in the proper sense (Hua IV/V 516 [1917]; cf. Hua IV 257). All rational engagement is spontaneity and effective activity of the subject. In such engagement the subject is purely autonomous, acting of its own accord. The subject is autonomous, not where it lets itself be determined by the “allure” of the matter, but where it honours its own sense and legitimacy, where the ego is the subject of the intention which fulfils itself. The subject of “opinions,” who takes a position, the subject as subject of reason is active, where it strives towards and achieves its goal, and not where it lets itself be passively pulled along by instincts and inclinations. […] He who frequently lets himself be driven by blind instinct and tendencies (blind in that they do not emanate from the sense of the matters currently operative as allure, i.e. they do not have their source in this sense) is driven irrationally. But if I take something to be true or take a demand to be a moral one— thus as having a source in the corresponding values, etc.—and if I freely pursue the reputed truth or the reputed moral good, then I am being rational—yet only relatively so, for I may indeed be mistaken there (Hua IV/V 577 [1915–1917]; cf. Hua IV 221).

For Husserl, then, a teleological series of bodily movements manifests autonomy as personal (rather than merely bodily) freedom, not when it flows from an allure or urge which the subject simply gives in to, but when it is appropriated from the domain of passive inclination and refashioned as a chosen action, or an element thereof, with a certain rational intentionality, of which justifying grounds can be

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asked and given. The thought that rational actions in this sense are personally free, are expressive of their agent as a person, gains further weight when we note that the justificatory context they imply is partially constituted by the person’s habitually operative nexus of convictions, evaluations, and commitments. Consequently, the degree to which an action is freely performed in this sense—the degree to which, as Husserl puts it in the passage above, the ego is the subject of the intention which the action fulfils—is a function of the degree to which the sense of the action, as it is intended and performed, concords with the person’s other (truth-oriented and person-­manifesting) stances, or at least with a significant segment of such stances.14 The distinction between bodily and personal freedom outlined in this section can, therefore, only become intelligible from a perspective that regards the embodied I engaging in self-movement as concretely inhabiting a personal history, and accordingly as (always) already implicated in a number of personal stances—in short, from a perspective that reckons with the personal (rather than just the pure) ego. The habitual stances proper to the personal I are those that have been formed within the person’s earlier life, and that motivationally frame its current engagement in a largely implicit fashion. We can now better understand the basis for a claim more tentatively advanced in Chapter 2, namely that a more concrete understanding of egoic freedom requires an appreciation of the more comprehensive – and to a significant extent implicit and habitual – depth of egoic engagement. While the pure ego exhibits in all its engagements a highly formal (or ‘pure’) freedom (see the third section of the second chapter), this most generic variety of freedom ultimately applies, in univocal and undifferentiated fashion, to the voluntary movements that characterise bodily and personal freedom alike.15 This is because the spontaneous self-movement of the lived-body is always lived as an “I move” wherein the pure ego is engaged as minimal and formal agent. In the voluntary actualisation of a kinaesthetic constellation, the movement is not only first-personally given for me (a circumstance that also applies to cases where our moveable and sensitive bodily organs are forcefully pushed from without), but is also lived as something accomplished by me. As we are beginning to see, however, this minimalist sense of egoic agency fails to specify what is distinctive about personal freedom—for such freedom can only be accounted for when the historicity of egoic involvement is also taken into account.

 Further explorations of the relationship between personal selfhood, rational consistency, and freedom can be found in Husserl’s research manuscripts on intersubjectivity (see, in particular, Hua XIV 11-34). 15  In addition to formulations quoted in Sect. 6.1.2, further evidence that this is Husserl’s view is represented by a passage, already cited in Sect. 6.1.1, from his most sustained treatment of the pure ego in the Ideen II texts, where voluntary movement is characterised as involving the pure ego, as freely participating throughout, irrespective of the motivational contexts of such movement (Hua IV/V 306 fn. 2/Hua IV 98 [1915]). These specific sentences were appended as an additional note to a series of paragraphs (cited in depth in the third section of the second chapter), where Husserl highlights the necessity of this formal notion of freedom, but also its specificity and incompleteness (Hua IV/V 306-307/Hua IV 98-99 [1915]). 14

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6.2  From Personal Agency to Personal Selfhood According to the universal he is a human person, but his kind as his character, his personhood, is a unity, constituted in the course of his life, of multifarious motivations based upon multifarious presuppositions. E. Husserl16

6.2.1  Freedom and Personal Selfhood A helpful route into the theme of personal selfhood can be found by reconsidering the difference (already discussed in Sect. 6.1.3 above) between person-expressing and -involving acts of the will and the form of lived freedom encapsulated in bodily capabilities and their voluntary actualisation. In a manuscript dating from the twenties, Husserl points out that solely considering such capabilities would fail to provide someone with an evidential basis for their own belief that they, being the person who they are, are thereby unable to commit a murder. The inadequacy of such a consideration stems from the peculiar fact that while many of us are bodily capable of a set of movements that would, when voluntarily performed in the relevant circumstances, lead to the death of another person occurring (e.g., pulling the trigger of a correctly positioned weapon, or the gentle push of a fellow hiker over a cliff), our ability to actually perform the action in question is a different issue altogether. This suggests that while the notion of practical possibility as merely correlated with bodily capacities characterises the essence of bodily freedom, when it comes to our personal lives as concretely lived by us it appears far too broad, failing to capture the space of possibilities that strikes us as relevant to our personal choices. Furthermore, in at least one sense of what a person can mean by claiming to be ‘unable’ to commit a murder, this claim does not rule out the possibility that the person could find themselves unreflectively performing a lethal act as driven by a momentary urge or desire. Rather intriguingly, it seems just about intelligible for a person to claim that “I could never go through with the act of killing someone,” while wearily acknowledging that they may be subject to buried instincts which, were they to momentarily erupt, would have fatally violent consequences. This intelligibility arguably arises because the person making this claim is thereby attesting that, at least in all circumstances she can foresee, there is no possibility of her decisively affirming that goal as one which she could allow her will to aim at. To specify this claim further, there is no foreseeable possibility, or so this person attests, of her actively committing herself to perform the grisly act in light of her own values, projects, and convictions. Or to put the point slightly differently, this particular action is not one which could conceivably concord with and manifest her enduring character as a person of such decisions. Husserl underlines that it is, at least in part, precisely this necessary implication—that, in “committing a murder” in this sense, 16

 Hua IV/V 581/Hua IV 274, transl. modified [1917/18].

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one would be realising an actively formed stance of one’s own and as such expressing oneself—that makes, for many of us, the chilling ideal possibility of murdering someone so difficult to identify with as a practical possibility of one’s own: What is most proper to the person resides in the ego as substrate of decisions and not in the ego of mere capabilities (Vermögen). When I say “I cannot carry out a certain decision, e.g., the decision to commit a murder,” when I say “I cannot do something like that,” I am saying something about the way I am (and perhaps about how I used to be and how I supposedly will be). All the motives pertaining to a murder as ones which could possibly determine it are not, for me, effective ones. The possibility of a murder is a practical possibility to the extent that I, assuming I desired it, had the ability to carry it out. Each action of willing (Willenshandlung) is related to a practical realm and thus so is this one. And in that sense I can perform almost any wrong action (although, stated more precisely, many actions which have been carried out by others go beyond my practical abilities (Können), e.g., climbing up facades). But with regard to position-taking, its possibility does not belong at all in the space of practical possibilities (Hua IV/V 521–522/Hua IV 331, transl. modified [mid-1920s]).17

Husserl’s line of thought here can be easily reformulated in terms of Harry Frankfurt’s more recent claim that a person, in merely having a desire to perform a particular act, does not thereby have a motivating reason to perform the relevant action, since a desire is only able to become a reason, and its respective act a goal, for me as an acting person, through my “practically identifying” with it (Frankfurt 1988, p. 68). As far as persons are concerned, the practically relevant sense of truly wanting a certain goal ought to be distinguished from the mere having of a (first-­ order) desire to bring that goal about (Frankfurt 1988, pp. 163–4)—or, in Husserl’s more complex and phenomenologically detailed language, from feeling a certain goal-oriented practical tendency as issuing from an alluring intentional object. Indeed, in a recent publication Frankfurt gives a compelling description, remarkably similar to the one offered almost a century earlier by Husserl, of the difference between, on the one hand, a person having a murderous desire, and on the other, a person actively identifying the desired murder as a goal they truly want to achieve Frankfurt (2006, pp. 12–3).18 What, then, is required in the transition from a merely desired practical possibility to one which the person freely wills? Or, in Frankfurtian language, what is it exactly to identify with a certain desire, that is, to make it a desire of one’s own? According to Frankfurt, the decisive element here is an activity which is unique to persons, namely that of reflectively “developing higher-order attitudes and responses to oneself”. This occurs when we “disrupt ourselves from an uncritical immersion

 See also Hua IV/V 521/Hua IV 330 [mid-1920s]: “For we need to establish a fundamental essential distinction, distinguishing all other subjective events (according to the type: “I move”) from all position-takings. These are not subordinate to the will…. A position-taking is not a practical possibility like just any kinesthesis in the system of my kinaesthetic “I can.”” 18  As he also makes clear, refusing to approve of or “externalizing” a desire does not thereby prevent that desire from being effective in one’s behaviour. But it does mean that any acts which are driven by this desire are not freely willed, and are consequently not “authentic expressions of ourselves” (Frankfurt 2006, pp. 10, 8). 17

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in our current primary experience, take a look at what is going on it, and arrive at some resolution concerning what we think about it or how it makes us feel” (Frankfurt 2006, p. 6). In cases where this reflective evaluation of our desires leads to our identifying with them, we “accept them as conveying… what we truly desire,” and “consent to having them and being influenced by them” (Frankfurt 2006, p. 8). More exactly, this consists in our having a higher-order volition directed towards our first-order desire, such that we do not merely have a first-order desire to act in a certain way, but a second-order desire that this first-order desire govern our actions (Frankfurt 1988, p. 164). As Frankfurt puts it, “we will freely when what we want is what we want to want—that is, when the will behind what we do is exactly the will by which we want our action to be moved” (Frankfurt 2006, p. 15). Consequently, personal agency can be described as a form of self-constitution, in that it involves not merely acting upon a desire but appropriating that desire as one’s own, as a desire which I want myself to act upon (Frankfurt 1988, p. 170). We have seen that Husserl, too, recognises the distinction between acting upon a desire and acting on the basis of a free decision of the will, and that the latter requires the subject to take a certain critical distance towards her own desires (Sect. 6.1.3). However, the account offered by Husserl of the activity which transforms a merely desired act into an action freely willed is subtly different from that offered by Frankfurt, in at least two respects. On the one hand, unlike Frankfurt Husserl argues that the deciding, willing, and acting characteristic of personal agency does not primarily involve the assesement of which desire one wants to be governed by, but rather with appraising the value of one’s possible action. A detailed treatment of this issue would lead us too far afield, but it should be emphasised here that, for Husserl, an account of the various shapes of motivated practical intentionality characteristic of personal freedom will ultimately need to examine the manifold ways in which the desiring, willing, and acting of persons can be (explicitly or implicitly) motivationally conditioned by the agent’s evaluative stances.19 The latter category is not exhausted by the emotional position-takings explored in the fourth section of the second chapter, but also includes varieties of evaluative judgement and decision that build upon – but are not always reducible to – the personal subject’s specifically emotional relatedness to values.20  See the passages cited below. For Husserl-inspired discussions of the motivational relationship between emotion and action, see Drummond (2018a, 2021b). 20  As Husserl writes in a manuscript likely dating from 1916: “Like any intending, every valueintending can be brought into the modality of something called into question, can pass, from the certainty of value-being, over into doubtfulness etc. The question can be answered (decision) and the answer can obtain grounds – the decision can be insightful, rational decision. (…) Just as true being is not authentically experienced, but is rather acquired through insightful decision in critique, the same applies for true value, which is manifest in reason. (…) The subject of reason does not “experience” value, but rather “decides” in favour of it.” (Hua XLIII/2 509-510). While this formulation may seem excessively intellectualistic, two qualifications should temper this impression. Firstly, Husserl consistently argues that evaluative reasonableness is prefigured and constrained by the modes of valuing that play out in emotional life (see the fourth section of the second chapter). As he puts it in the Ideen II texts: “I have, of course, always said: [first comes] value19

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A second contrast with Frankfurt’s account emerges when we note that, for Husserl, the most primitive case of practical identification does not so much consist in identifying with an accepted desire as it does in facing up to one’s practical possibilities—this being a prerequisite for our appraising what of value would be achieved in accomplishing them. As we have seen Husserl’s transcendental analyses emphasise (Sect. 6.1), the affective force of certain practical possibilities is phenomenologically correlated with certain lived and living inclinations that pertain to the embodied subject. Needless to say, however, the immersed practical agent is obviously not doing exactly what the reflecting philosopher does when she reflectively builds up an account of practical agency. And while the activity of forming a practical decision presupposes some form of self-awareness of one’s desires— exactly that form of pre-reflective self-awareness which is involved in desiring or being inclined towards a certain practical possibility—the thematic concern of one’s practical evaluation is not exactly one’s own volitions but rather the possible actions which one feels inclined towards. Consider the following, decisively world-directed, descriptions that Husserl offers of the deliberative process and its culmination in a decision: This sense is the one by which the beginning of the situation and the assessment of value (Wertbeurteilung) would motivate me, being the one I am, as a sort of consequent, to decide in this or that way and to act accordingly; whereby it is not claimed that it would be the right thing to do, for I can also find the I would decide in favour of the temptation (Hua IV/V 518/ Hua IV 329, transl. modified [mid-1920s]). Suppose I do not yet have a judgement, a will, or a decision concerning value (Wertentscheidung). I can proceed to acquire such. I look around for motives and once I have them the decision follows, not in an arbitrary fashion, but as a motivated consequence. And it arises prior to the question of the insightful foundation, unless I had already made such a foundation my goal (Hua IV/V 521/Hua IV 331, transl. modified [mid-1920s]).

This subtle, even seemingly frivolous, difference between Frankfurt and Husserl’s accounts of the form of self-awareness involved with decision has, it seems to me, important consequences for the latter’s theory of personal selfhood. In the moment of decisive action, my personal character comes to the fore, not as any kind of standard or self-conception which I reflectively integrate my desire into, but as the

reception (Wertnehmung), value-intuition (Werterschauung), and then value-assessment (Wertbeurteilung).” (Hua IV/V 590 fn. 1 [1913]). Secondly, for Husserl the act of deciding in favour of something’s value is, in some cases, itself immanent to the very life of our emotions or sentiments. Indeed, in the above cited manuscript from 1916, the main example Husserl offers of the personal subject deciding for the value of something or someone is the process of falling in love (Hua XLIII/2 507f.). Here, Husserl is exploring the possibility that our affective lives sometimes involve evaluative position-taking in a more robust, decisive, and person-involving sense than the minimal form of evaluative activity explored in the second chapter. For excellent treatments of Husserl’s account of love and its ethical-practical implications, see: Melle (2007), Loidolt (2012), Drummond (2018b), and Heinämaa (2020).

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broader domain in which my very agential response belongs.21 The self which is manifested in my action is a self who ‘exists’ in this action, and its determinate character consists in a certain kind of motivational style, a typical way of actively responding to determinate circumstances. In this way, the domain of personal selfhood involved with freely willed agential accomplishments is not operative as something invoked or appealed to in the approval of a desire but—to paraphrase the passage above—as the “who I am” which my motivated decision flows from, “as a sort of consequent.” Husserl makes this point even more emphatically as follows: “The way I am, as the subject of my previous convictions, and the way within this sphere motives determine me precisely as this ego: that is how my decision is produced” (Hua IV/V 521/Hua IV 331, transl. modified [mid-1920s]). The decision I form, then, is in some manner dependent upon and expressive of ‘who I am’ as an enduring and creative agent of such decisions, and this dependency and expressivity is in place without my needing to appeal to a normatively guiding self-conception in the process of practical deliberation.22

6.2.2  Person, Motivation, and Surrounding World As we have seen, for Husserl there is no conflict between our decisions being on the one hand freely performed, and on the other their being uniquely expressive of, even in a certain sense determined by, one’s personal character.23 That is, in acting freely and on the basis of decision I typically do not radically transcend my personality— understood as a nexus of attitudes and stances which make up my enduring ‘take on things,’ and that ‘character-ise’ both who I am qua active subjectivity, and my surrounding world in its very familiarity (see the second section of the next chapter)— but rather deepen it and occasionally render it more consistent, extending or strengthening certain attitudes while relinquishing others.  While this talk of a standard or self-conception might be a slightly unjust reading of Frankfurt— although he does occasionally use such language (e.g., Frankfurt, 2006, p. 10)—it is fully endorsed by Korsgaard (1996, p. 100-1; see the footnote after the next). It may then be that this second difference between Frankfurt and Husserl is ultimately more terminological than substantial, hinging upon different definitions of “desire” and “reflection.” See here the discussions of Husserl and Frankfurt in Hart (1992, pp. 92-3), Mulligan (2010), and Zahavi (2021). See also Rinofner-Kreidl (2011), a well-argued Husserlian account of intentional action that attributes self-understanding and practical identity a more decisive role for personal agency than I do here. 22  This does not mean that the ideals constitutive of practical identities in a Korsgaardian sense— that is, the practical norms, often socially embedded, which are putatively regulative for a person’s agential life (Korsgaard 2009, pp. 19-26)—cannot be guiding for personal agency on Husserl’s view. But he maintains that this process is secondary to the basic condition of personal agency, allowing for a deepening and a renewal of its condition, rather than comprising its underlying element. I develop this thought in the second section of the next chapter. 23  Indeed, in a passage cited earlier, Husserl goes so far as to say that “freedom taken in a specific sense, indeed the proper sense” is possible only for “the “person” in a specific sense… the subject of acts which are to be judged under the standpoint of reason, the subject that is “self-responsible”” (Hua IV/V 516/Hua IV 257, transl. modified [1917]). 21

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One might quite naturally object to such a line of thought that it is flatly contradictory. To speak of a decision being enacted freely doesn’t appear to be reconcilable with understanding it as being the outcome of something that was already specified in advance, namely the enduring character of the person who makes the decision. For one thing, it seems intuitive that a necessary condition for a decision to be have been made freely is that the person could have chosen otherwise than the way she or he did, in fact, do. Another decision having been possible, however, seems to be ruled out by the stipulation of an overarching character in which each decision is embedded. In response to this worry, which Husserl would likely regard as presupposing a tacitly naturalistic  – that is, “extrinsic” and “inductive” (Hua IV/V 522/Hua IV 331–332 [mid-1920s]) – account of persons and their decisions, we should first note that Husserl’s claim that genuine decisions (unlike the taking of stances by means of uncritical or coerced appropriation from others) are freely performed is not meant to be understood in causal terms. Husserl nowhere defends the view that there is a unique quasi-causal power that intervenes within the (ordinarily causal) functioning of psychic life so as to bring about a unique and uncaused event, and nor does his position commit him to such a view. Rather, Husserl maintains that the sense of freedom which he describes quite literally becomes invisible and unintelligible for us when we adopt a third-personal attitude towards human persons, i.e., an attitude in which all physical and mental events are thought of as caused (and perhaps occasionally and inexplicably uncaused) by prior events in accordance with causal laws (Hua IV/V 227/Hua IV 191 [1913]). In contrast, the sense of freedom which Husserl locates in position-taking acts and decisions, as modes of personal comportment, cannot be understood apart from a self-professed Grundbegriff of Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy: that of motivation (Hua III/1 101 n. 1/Husserl 2014, 86 n. 8). According to Husserl, motivation plays an analogous role within the functioning of the mind of a person (Geist) to that of causality in nature, to such an extent that he occasionally describes motivation as a “subjective-objective “causality””, or a “specifically personal causality”, adding that such Motivationskausalität is not “real causality” but rather something with a sense wholly its own (Hua IV/V 545/Hua IV 216 [1916/17]). As we saw in the fifth section of the fourth chapter, Husserl shows that, even on the level of pre-­ judicative perceptual experience, things of nature manifest their specifically natural properties in the way in which their states (Zustände) alter in accordance with causal circumstances (Umstände). Accordingly, the material thing documents its material reality, as well as its specifically material (i.e., causal) properties, in the thing’s concrete behaviour manifesting stable relations of dependency with respect to causal circumstances.24 Motivational relations, on the other hand, are originally  Husserl also maintains that the psyche or soul (Seele), understood as the real bearer of psychological dispositions, is disclosed through the same basic schema. The documentation of real psychic properties presupposes that a certain reality-affording attitude has been adopted towards the stream of lived experiences, such that it is construed as a real nexus of psychic states (psychische Zustände). Real psychic properties can then be encountered, through the surfacing of real dependency-relations between psychic states and their circumstances within the psychic nexus. See here, in particular: Hua IV/V 10-22, 73-83 [1912]. For an excellent discussion of Husserl’s conception of the real psyche (in Ideen I and in the 1912 ‘Bleistiftmanuskript’ cited here), and its role in clarifying the relationship between psychology and phenomenology, see Jacobs (2015).

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located within the intentional sphere of the mind, as opposed to the natural world. Modes of intentional consciousness are broadly responsive to certain noematic and noetic circumstances, in that they are motivationally (as opposed to causally) related to those circumstances. Such a motivational relatedness to circumstances is a matter of the manner in which modes of intentional comportment (i.e., the ‘motivated’) are enacted—and their respective noematic correlates constituted—in light of certain noematic senses, as well as other modes of awareness such as kinaesthesia (i.e., the ‘motives’). The concrete relationships of motivation (i.e., the ‘motivations’), on the other hand, are simply the (broadly) intelligible wholes: the acts in their relatedness to motivational circumstances.25 Husserl contends, furthermore, that such wholes typically imply a variety of norms or laws, including a priori elements that are of central interest to his transcendental phenomenology.26 In cases of passive motivation, this is a question of specific motivational structures that are necessarily operative in the intentional functioning of subjectivity, as it plays out before any egoic engagement.27 In the case of the motivations pertaining to personal agency, on the

 For a relatively clear statement of this schematic distinction of motive-motivated-motivation, see Hua IV/V 51-52/Hua IV 57-8 [1912]. A slightly different presentation of the analogy between motivation and causality is elaborated in Staiti (2014, p. 215); for a seminal and indepth treatment of this issue, see Rang (1973). It must be noted that no corresponding manuscripts have been found in Husserl’s Nachlass for significant parts of §56 from the 1952 edition of Ideas II (Hua IV 220-247), which addresses motivation in some depth. While there are parts of this section that have indisputable roots in Husserl’s manuscripts (see, in particular: Hua IV/V 203-220, 247-250, 453-466, 574-580 [1913, 1914/1915, 1916/1917, 1915-1917]), it seems likely that significant elaborations were added by Stein, who would later offer a similar presentation (in a section with the same title) in her work Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften (see Stein 1922, pp. 34ff.). But as the citations provided in the following footnotes document, it remains the case that a rich and detailed analysis of motivation was undertaken by Husserl in the manuscripts he authored for Ideen. 26  See, e.g., Hua IV/V 169 / Hua V 105 [1912]. Husserl also regards the investigation of (specifically personal) motivations as an overarching preoccupation of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). As he formulates this point a manuscript likely written between 1910 and 1912: “Human science deals with personal individuality and personal causality, the causality of freedom and motivation.” (Hua IV/V 488/Hua IV 393). 27  Instances of such ‘passive’ motivation discussed in the Ideen II manuscripts include: the motivating function of kinaesthetic circumstances for the constitution of spatial objects (Hua IV/V 43-44, 50-52, 250, 378, 410, 454, 463 [all dating from 1910-1917]); the motivating function of spatial schemata for the constitution of the material thing as a real unity of causal features (Hua IV/V 285-6, 289, 332-333 [1915]); the role of intentionally implied, latent motivations in the horizonal constitution of world (Hua IV/V 7, 193, 199-200, 204, 316 [1912-1915]; see also Ideen I §47); the motivations operative in the constitution of inner temporality (Hua IV/V 453-454, 463 [1916/1917]); and, finally, the motivated functioning of associations and (non-egoic) habits (Hua IV/V 453-454, 455-456, 463 [1916/1917). As Husserl acknowledges, the motivational operations of association and habit are not governed exclusively through eidetic laws, but also evince the ‘unintelligible’ influence of facticity (Hua IV/V 463 [1916/1917]; see also 500 [1910-1912], 579 [1915-1917]). Husserl also discusses the motivational circumstances pertaining to existential positing of a material thing, and to the modal modifications of such positing (Hua IV/V 373-374, 392 fn. 1, 401-404 [1915-1917])—though, as Jacobs (2021) has shown, whether this can be characterised as a matter of passive motivation is no simple matter. 25

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other hand, the subject’s spontaneous accomplishments are answerable—and, in those cases where rationality holds sway, actually responsive—to normative frameworks that centrally include formal “laws of motivational validity” (Hua IV/V 519–520/Hua IV 268, transl. modified [1917]).28 In light of this extremely broad construal—which conceals, in its abstractness, the diversity of modes of motivation operative within subjective and intersubjective life—we can nevertheless say that motivation is analogous to causality in that both involve a form of law-governed responsiveness to circumstances, one without which their respective spheres (mind and nature) would be wholly unintelligible. We have already seen Husserl arguing that the passive functioning of perceptual experience has a complex motivational structure, in that, for instance, the perceptual sense of an object appeals to and takes account of kinaesthetic self-movement. Clearly, this type of motivation is far removed from the kind of active and self-­ involving motivation that distinctively characterises the responsiveness of persons. One pertinent difference between the two cases is that, while the motivational circumstances pertinent for perceptual consciousness are provided by phenomenal fields that are constitutively prior to perceptual reality (such as kinaesthesia and schematic manifolds), the motives effective in personal modes of comportment are, for the most part, simply the things, persons, and social formations of the personal subject’s surrounding world. In texts dating, respectively, from 1912 and 1913, Husserl nicely articulates this aspect of personal activity: Among the things of my environment, that one there steers my focus onto it; its special form “strikes me.” I choose the fabric “for the sake of its beautiful colour or its smoothness.” The noise in the street irritates me; I become determined to close the window. In short, in my (theoretical, emotional, and practical) comportment—in my theoretical experience and thinking, in my stances (Stellungnahmen) of liking, enjoying, hoping, wishing, desiring, wanting—I feel myself conditioned by the matter in question, though this obviously does not mean psychophysically conditioned. Just as in my own case, so I construe everyone else as directly dependent upon such matters. (…) I construe myself as dependent in my comportment, in my acts, on the things themselves, on their beautiful colour, on their special form, on their pleasant or threatening features (Hua IV/V 32/Hua IV 140–141, transl. modified [1912]). As person, I am what I am (and each other person is what he is) as subject of a surrounding world. The concepts of I and surrounding world are related to one another inseparably. (…) The surrounding world is the world that is perceived by the person in his acts, is remembered, grasped in thought, surmised or revealed as such and such, it is the world of which this personal I is conscious, the world which is there for it, to which it relates in this or that

 For discussions of the motivations pertaining to personal engagement in the Ideen II manuscripts, see the following passages, all dating from 1915 to 1917: Hua IV/V 240-241, 497-498, 546-547, 467 fn. 1, 513; as well as the following important contributions from the 1920s: Hua IV/V 239-240, 521. On the relationship between motivation and reason, see also Hua IV/V 352, 453, 493, 531-532 [all dating 1916-1917]. Husserl further clarifies the distinction between passive and rational motivations in other texts (e.g., Hua XXXVII 106-109, 331-332). What should also be stressed in this context is that motivations are, for the most part, relations that evade our awareness in their very functioning, and in such cases they can even be legitimately categorised as “unconscious” (unbewusst) phenomena (Hua IV/V 453-454 [1916/1917]).

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way, e.g., by way of theorising as regards the things appearing in it or by way of feeling, appraising value, acting, shaping technically, etc. (…) The person is precisely the person who presents, feels, evaluates, strives, and acts and who, in every such personal act, stands in relation to something, to objects in his surrounding world (Hua IV/V 190/Hua IV 185–186, transl. modified [1913]).

Personal modes of comportment take as their motives the events and situations that a person has as components of his or her surrounding world. That is, they are enacted in light of such matters and their definite features as experienced (as perceived, valued, desired, judged, etc.); and they accordingly involve specific ways in which a person responds to worldly objects in their noematic sense (Hua IV/V 190, 221–222/Hua IV 186, 326–327 [1913, 1913]). Such comportment evidently, then, naively presupposes that a meaningful world has already been constituted for the subject in one way or another—even if specific pre-given things may, in certain cases, ultimately prove to be misconstrued, illusory, or non-existent. What it contributes, moreover, is a further determination of such objects and states of affairs as elements of the person’s surrounding world, through a diversity of active stances in which worldly objects are taken, in equally diverse ways, to have a certain personal significance. Of course, this is not to say that the noematic correlates which motivate personal modes of comportment always coincide exactly with the objects they directly target and take as having a novel sense. Rather, in many of the most sophisticated personal accomplishments I take an object to have a certain sense in light of certain other noematic correlates which serve as the motives of my act (cf. Sokolowski 1985, Chapter 1). But the central point here is that personal subjectivity is originally manifest in a subject’s way of responding to her pregiven surrounding world—a theme which will be explored in more depth in the second section of the next chapter. However, personal acts are not always thematised as enactments of a person; rather, this only occurs through a certain form of reflection. As Husserl puts it in the above-quoted passage from 1913, “the personal ego “relates” to this world in acts upon which it can reflect at any time, as is the case, for example, when it takes notice of itself as a personal ego” (Hua IV/V 190/Hua IV 185, transl. modified [1913]).29 As we shall see later, what is aimed at in this mode of reflection—which presupposes some degree of prior acquaintance with the motives and meaningful correlate of a certain personal enactment—is a thematic understanding, not of the enactment itself as an isolated experiential complex, but rather of the character of the subject who enacts it (see the first section of the next chapter). To put the point slightly differently, it is one thing to understand what a person decides, feels, or does, and even the motives which account for why this is so, and something else to take this motivated enactment as exhibiting who this person is. On the other hand, while these two issues differ in their direction of inquiry, they cannot be addressed in isolation, but  As Husserl immediately continues, this possibility of personal reflection is not limited to the firstpersonal case, since “any other person can reflect on these same acts, even if in a correspondingly modified way (reflection “in” empathy), when the other apprehends these acts as acts of the person in question, for instance, whenever the other speaks, with clear understanding, of that person precisely as a person.” I consider in detail the nature and experiential preconditions of interpersonal understanding, in this specific sense, in the fourth section of the next chapter.

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are rather dialectically interwoven. In a manuscript written at some point between 1915 and 1917, Husserl explicates just this point: In active comportment—just as in the passive being-driven and being-determined of allures, tendencies, and passions—each and every subjectivity exhibits its individual peculiarity, its acquired and innate character. I get to know this character by understanding specific instances of the subject’s comportment in specific nexuses; through repeated experience of this, I co-grasp his individual type. Certainly, here one goes hand in hand with the other. A sufficiently deep grasp of his nexuses of motivation already requires knowledge of his character, and knowledge of his character requires prior knowledge of his motivational nexuses. But this is not circular. In our ongoing experience of human persons, and with regard to both ourselves and others, we acquire sufficient knowledge of the individual nexus and an immediate assessment of character, one which is then retained and also constantly corrected, etc (Hua IV/V 579–580 [1915–1917]).

We will later return to this deep interconnection between the ‘who’ of a person’s character and their ‘what’ and ‘why’ of her individual attitudes and actions. But first, we must explicate a structural feature of personal subjectivity upon which this very interconnection hinges; namely, the sedimentation of one’s decisions, beliefs, and emotions into personal habitualities, and the distinctive kind of self-awareness which, in some cases, accompanies such habitual depth. Pursuing this habitual dimension of personal subjectivity will, furthermore, ultimately enable us to further clarify the relationship between the pure and the personal ego. It was argued in the second chapter that there are strong phenomenological grounds for understanding the pure ego as a formal pole that does not merely passively live through its intentional lived-experiences but that also, in various ways, actively takes a position therein. However, in its empty formality, the pure ego is essentially devoid of any concrete character; and the subject that manifests habitual depth in its position-­ taking must therefore be personal rather than pure. If we are to develop a phenomenologically compelling account of the distinction between the pure and the personal self – and further clarify the enigmatic relationship between these two dimensions of the self – then what therefore emerges as central to such an undertaking is the question of how instances of position-taking can consciously emerge for us as habituated subjective attitudes—that is, as stances that are not only currently enacted by, but that also positively characterise, their subject. The remainder of this chapter will focus on the latter question, whereas the implications of these considerations for the relationship between the pure and the personal ego will only be fully accounted for in the next chapter.

6.3  P  osition-Taking, Habituality, and Self-Acquaintance: Husserl and Moran In an important manuscript written towards the end of his years spent in Göttingen (likely between 1914 and 1916), Husserl offers a detailed analysis of the manner in which active forms of comportment (judging, grudging, loving, hoping and resolving are among those discussed), when repeatedly accomplished by an individual

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over the course of his or her life, may establish and manifest a distinctive form of self-identity (Hua IV/V 339–356).30 I will consider here aspects of the detailed analysis offered in this manuscript (henceforth: Göttingen Manuscript), particularly focussing on what he has to say about lasting convictions (Überzeugungen) as enduring features of the ego. My aim will be to clarify the sense in which the character of the personal ego manifests itself in active modes of comportment, an aim that will be pursued by considering the way in which abiding convictions or, more generally, what Husserl calls “opinions” (Meinungen)  – a broader category that encompasses not only convictions but also enduring emotional and practical attitudes, and even persistent memories – are sustained by, and occasionally disclosed to their agent through, a specifically habitual variety of position-­taking. I will try to show that Husserl’s account can be helpfully clarified when compared with the recent treatment of self-knowledge offered by Richard Moran, arguing that while Husserl anticipates central features of Moran’s account, his claim that egoic habituality is a condition of possibility for personal self-­understanding permits him to offer a more nuanced picture, one that avoids some problems which arise from Moran’s excessive emphasis on the role of deliberation in self-knowledge.

6.3.1  Convictions and Self-Awareness In the Göttingen manuscript, Husserl begins his reflections by noting that a conviction does not consist simply in a solitary act of judging, understood as a concrete lived experience, or discrete judicative cogito, that is enacted for a certain temporal duration before receding into the lived past. Rather, we ordinarily consider somebody to be convinced of something when they are in the habit of repeatedly assuming an already formed judgement over temporally distinct phases: “We endure in the sphere of the psyche. I make a judgement now; I make ‘the same’ judgement again: I have an abiding conviction” (Hua IV/V 341 [1914–1916]). This description loses its apparent obviousness, however, when we note that two discrete acts of judging, enacted during different temporal phases within a subject’s experiential life, cannot

 Certain parts of this manuscript can be found in Hua IV 112-119; although there these fragments are ordered differently, occasionally modified, and combined with other texts. At this point, an interpretative issue should be highlighted, namely that in the manuscript under discussion Husserl refers to the identity in question as an identity of the pure (rather than the personal) ego (Hua IV/V 351-353 [1914-1916]; cf. Hua IV 111-113). I take it that this choice is motivated by an understanding that the awareness of (the subject of) enduring opinions explicated in this manuscript is a prereflective – rather than a mundane – variety of (self-)awareness (see Hua IV/V 351 [1914-1916]; cf. Hua IV 111). However, the distinctive kind of egoic identity constituted through the habituation of convictions and opinions is evidently irreducible to the formal diachronic identity of the pure ego; rather, what is (pre-reflectively and primitively) manifest here is an egoic identity with a certain personal content and characterisation. My development of Husserl’s analysis in this manuscript therefore contends that the phenomenological insights emerging therein can be fruitfully situated within his analysis of personal (rather than pure) selfhood.

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be “the same” in the strict sense, since they are precisely temporally distinct lived-­ experiences, even if they somehow repeatedly instantiate or manifest something identical (Hua IV/V 341/Hua IV 113 [1914–1916]). Rather, for an individual act of judgement to manifest an enduring conviction, it must emerge in consciousness as having a certain kind of relation to earlier acts of judging from the retained past of a subject’s conscious life: The judgement of definite content as lived-experience endures for a period (immanent duration). Then the lived-experience is irretrievably lost. A similar lived-experience can later reoccur, but not the same lived-experience. But what is possible is that  the judgement emerges in a specific way, such that I am conscious that the old conviction is emerging again, the one that was earlier implemented in a living fashion and is now being so implemented again; and, moreover, such that I am conscious that what is emerging here is this is the one abiding conviction, the conviction I call mine. The various enduring lived-­ experiences, belonging to spans of duration which are discrete within phenomenological time, have a relation to one another and constitute something that lasts and endures (the conviction, the grudge), which once, at such and such a point in time, and from these or those motives, originated. From then on it has been a lasting property of the ego, existing also in those intervals of phenomenological duration in which it was not being constituted as a lived experience (Hua IV/V 341/Hua IV 113–114, transl. modified, emphasis mine [1914–1916]).

Moreover, for two acts of judging to manifest an enduring conviction, it is insufficient that they share a logical identity with respect to the state of affairs which they posit. To use an example of Husserl’s, on two different occasions I may give a logically identical description of a certain landscape when perceptually confronted with it, picking out exactly the same features in exactly the same way on both occasions, my judgemental acts being correlated with the same categorical object in both cases. But I may do all that without the logically identical ‘judgement’ being a conviction in the proper sense, without it counting as an enduring feature of my thinking as such (Hua IV/V 341–342/Hua IV 114) [1914–1916]). Thus, what is necessary for a conviction is not merely that a certain propositional content is repeatedly instantiated in acts of thought, but that the repeated acts of judging manifest a certain enduring feature of the thinking subject, namely the conviction itself. In this sense, enduring convictions cannot be exhaustively characterised simply in terms of the worldly content they pick out, just as much as they are not simply a matter of the individual or repeated acts of lived experience in which they are manifest. Rather, they are better characterised as enduring thought-motifs, unities which are embedded within the enduring character of a person’s world-directed thinking. In light of their non-identity with any specific episode of thinking, one might in fact wonder whether convictions are something directly accessible in experience at all. We might rather suspect that convictions are things that could only be disclosed through a certain kind of reflective or interpretive analysis of a person’s past and present mental life, one which would perhaps seek to identify the invariant theses which her concrete episodes of thinking only vaguely and partially point towards. However, whatever merits such an approach might have in identifying certain consistent themes which our thinking manifests, and perhaps thus indirectly revealing our convictions, Husserl claims that it does not constitute the only or even the most

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basic mode of awareness we have of them. For the most part, he insists, we are aware of our convictions in a way which simply does not presuppose any sort of abstractive or idealising reflection upon our experiential lives, and we can thus distinguish between a conviction as a “concrete unity of lived-experience,” and the same conviction as represented by a “mere abstraction or idea” generated through a process of self-interpretation—even if explicating what this distinction amounts to is far from easy (Hua IV/V 344/Hua IV 116 [1914–1916]). Moreover, just as a conviction is not something merely identical with a concrete experiential episode, nor is it accessible in the same way as the latter; rather it “is a unity with a peculiar phenomenological character and constitution” (Hua IV/V 342 [1914–1916]). Consequently, the transition from a lived to a reflective awareness of one’s own convictions is non-identical to the manner in which an experiential episode (such as an episode of feeling, perceiving, or thinking) is brought to thematisation through a reflective gaze being directed towards that episode in its (currently lived or reproduced) concreteness. To adopt the terminology Husserl employs in this manuscript—terminology that is already familiar from the second chapter, and which I return to below—rendering our convictions thematic does not amount to reflectively attending to an experiential episode already pre-reflectively lived through in inner consciousness. But this should not lead us to conclude that one’s own convictions are gleamed only through a more thoroughgoing survey of what is lived through or observable within the experiential stream, as if rendering our convictions thematic simply involved assembling a multiplicity of experiential episodes and divining what is somehow ‘within’ (or ‘behind’) them. Rather, I am familiar with a conviction of mine in a primitive and irreducible way as something which, as Husserl puts it in only slightly metaphorical terms, “lasts in me, ‘lives away in me’ (so long as it does not undergo its own cancellation)” (Hua IV/V 342 [1914–1916]). While our awareness of our own convictions should not be thought of simply in terms of the form of pre-reflective self-awareness involved with the self-­manifestation of experiential episodes, Husserl nevertheless insists that we enjoy some type of pre-­reflective awareness of our convictions, and he seeks to shed phenomenological light on these distinctive subjective unities exactly by explicating their pre-reflective familiarity. In pursuing this methodological direction, Husserl is led to the view that we are first aware of our own convictions, not as inner objects, but as judicative theses (specifying and categorically articulating some transcendent state of affairs) that we accept (taking the theses to be true) and remain committed to (in that we continue to assume and accept them). Husserl’s formulations of this point are worth quoting at length: If I now “acquire” a conviction, while implementing the appropriate judgement, then the acquired conviction (an enduring acquisition) “remains” with me as long as I can assume (aufnehmen) it again, can bring it “again” to givenness for me (in a new implementation). I may also abandon the conviction, now rejecting the reasons for it, etc. Then again, I can turn back to “the same” conviction, but in truth the conviction has not been persistent throughout. Instead, I have two convictions, the second of which restores the first after it has broken down (Hua IV/V 342 [1914–1916]; cf. Hua IV 114).

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Hence these unities, which we are calling convictions, have their duration; they can cease to be and then again be “instituted” anew. If they are instituted, then they have their “being,” their subjective validity, as long as opposing motives do not arise, as long as they are not “struck out.” If I acquire a conviction and if I represent to myself thereby a future in which I would come back to this conviction, then I am representing myself immediately as “taking part in (mitmachend)” the conviction and not merely as remembering again the lived experience of it (Hua IV/V 347–348/Hua IV 117, transl. modified [1914–1916]).

One could express part of Husserl claim in these passages as follows: we are primarily aware of our convictions as theses that we take to be valid, that is, to whose truth we are committed, and this is because convictions can only be (pre-reflectively lived as) ours, can only be self-revealing—in the specific sense in which one’s own convictions are—in as much as we take part in or endorse them.31 As he further explains, what is at stake in such an endorsement is the accomplishment of the relevant judgement on the basis of motives or reasons which we take to legitimise it, to render its thesis valid; or at least this is ideally so, as we shall see below.32 Similarly, we are most clearly aware that a conviction which we previously felt committed to continues to have a grip on us, that it is still ours and not merely a feature of our past, when we become aware of it as still being ‘convincing,’ when we acknowledge again that it is rationally motivated—whether the grounding motives are the same ones previously appealed to, or the old motives are supplemented, perhaps even replaced, by fresh considerations (Hua IV/V 347/Hua IV 115–116 [1914–1916]). Husserl’s line of thought here anticipates at least one central feature of the rich account of self-knowledge recently developed by Richard Moran.33 Like Husserl, Moran argues that to have a basic and immediate awareness of a conviction as one’s own just is to affirm that conviction’s validity with regard to the way in which it specifies and articulates a transcendent state of affairs, and that any merely observational grasp of a conviction as one’s own is derivative to, and fails to fully capture, the self-intimacy acquired through such an affirmation. In Moran’s words, “as I conceive of myself as a rational agent, my awareness of my belief is awareness of my commitment to its truth, a commitment to something that transcends any description of my psychological state” (Moran 2001, p. 84). For both Husserl and Moran, it is a mistake to understand the unique first-personal epistemic authority we  Husserl notes as follows in a manuscript from January 1917: “all simple or complex acts stand under the point of view of validity or invalidity, and in that way to all of them belongs the idea of truth (which in its universalisation goes beyond the domain of judgement)” (Hua IV/V 526/Hua IV 333). For an insightful and original (though Husserl-inspired) phenomenological study of the connection between truth and personal selfhood, see Sokolowski (2008). On the connection between the rational concern with truth and personhood in Husserl, see: Jacobs (2016a, 2016b) and Drummond (2021a). 32  As Husserl at one point writes, while we do occasionally form convictions without any appeal to motives or reasons being involved, this is precisely a limit case, one which deserves the title of unmotivated only because it deviates from our normal responsiveness to legitimising motives (Hua IV/V 351-352 [1914-1916]; cf. Hua IV 112). 33  Notably, Moran’s account is explicitly indebted to Sartre and Wittgenstein (cf. Moran, 2001, p. xxxiv). In the first section of the next chapter, I briefly return to the relation between Husserl’s and Sartre’s understandings of personal agency. 31

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have with regard to many of our own (theoretical, emotive, or practical) attitudes as being the product of a process in which we observe or perceive our psychological states. Having such distinctively first-personal awareness of our attitudes is rather afforded by our forming and sustaining such attitudes, by our taking a position. Moreover, for both thinkers, such position-taking is importantly connected with what Davidson famously calls the “constitutive ideal” for the mental, namely, rationality.34 To adopt Moran’s language, in ‘making up my mind’ about an issue—in endorsing the truth of a world-directed attitude and thereby becoming aware of that attitude as my own—I typically make some appeal to the motives which rationally ground the possible positions I can take on some matter, and which ultimately settle the issue of which stance I actually take (as mine).

6.3.2  Detectivism, Deliberation, and Habituality However, the accounts offered by Husserl and Moran of such motivated endorsement, or position-taking, differ in important ways. To consider Moran first, his approach emphasises what he calls the Transparency Condition for self-knowledge regarding (judicative, emotive, and practical) attitudes, which specifies that a person’s attitude is transparent (i.e. immediately recognisable by that person as his or her own attitude), when it “is expressed by reflection on its subject matter and not by consideration of the psychological evidence for a particular belief attribution” (Moran 2001, p. 84, emphasis mine). In short, in ordinary (i.e. non-pathological) cases, the direct mode of epistemic access we enjoy with regard to our own attitudes just consists in the outcome of our deliberation concerning the truth of the attitude’s claim. Unless we are alienated from our attitudes to such a degree that our very status as rational agents is under threat, we are able to know whether an attitudinal stance on some issue is our stance (whether it is what we believe, how we truly feel, or what we are resolved to do) through critically assessing whether the world-­ directed claim made by that stance is one we are rationally justified in accepting (see, e.g., Moran 2001, pp. 63, 82, 85, 89–94). As Moran puts it, in “the standard situation of deliberation,” the “person’s conclusion is his belief or intention”, and in the avowal which brings such deliberation to a close we thus find “the fundamental form of self-knowledge, one that gives proper place to the immediacy of self-­ knowledge and the authority with which its claims are delivered” (Moran 2001, pp. 132, 150).

 Davidson (1980, pp. 221–2233). I take it that Husserl would be in sympathy with this thought, though only if by ‘the mental’ one means the intentional and motivational domain of Geist. This caveat is necessary from a Husserlian perspective, since without it one struggles to acknowledge our pre-theoretical (and, as I suggested in the fifth chapter, empathetically motivated) belief that young infants and many non-human animals are in some sense subjects of experience (to refer to another common and legitimate sense of ‘the mental,’ explored in detail in the second chapter).

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One of the appealing features of Moran’s account is that he offers a coherent alternative to what he labels the perceptual model of first-personal authority: the claim, held by sceptics and Cartesians alike, that if one enjoys a privileged access to facets of one’s own mental life, then this distinctively first-personal access must be understood in terms of an ‘inner gaze’ through which such facets are observed, in a manner which embodies the same subject-object structure as our perception of ‘outer’ objects (Moran 2001, pp. 11–14). In his influential book Expression and the Inner, David Finkelstein, who also opposes the perceptual view, dubs this way of thinking ‘detectivism,’ defining a detectivist as “someone who believes that a person’s ability to speak about her own states of mind as easily, accurately, and authoritatively as she does may be explained by appeal to a process by which she finds out about them” (Finkelstein 2003, p. 9). As Finkelstein notes, sophisticated detectivists are nowadays able (at least on the face of things) to avoid making use of any mysterious notion of ‘inner sense’ by appealing, as an explanation for first-personal epistemic authority, to the seemingly more palatable construct of a higher-order process which ‘scans’ the cognitive system, providing it with some degree of information about its own contents (Finkelstein 2003, pp. 17–19). However, Finkelstein argues, if a mental state is such that its agent can think and talk about it with first-personal authority, then that mental state must already be one which is conscious, since we are unable to claim direct epistemic authority with regard to whatever unconscious beliefs, desires, or agendas our conscious states may betray upon closer analysis (Finkelstein 2003, pp. 22–23, 117–119). And as this point already indicates, it is mistaken to think of the conscious status had by mental states which are amenable to first-personal authority as something obtained by any higher-order detective process. While we are required to appeal to (observational) evidence in ascribing mental states to others and unconscious mental states to ourselves, there is no such requirement with regard to our own conscious states, and this is exactly what gives them first-personal authority (Finkelstein 2003, pp. 21, 120; cf. Moran 2001, pp. 33, 135). Consequently, Moran and Finkelstein urge us to look beyond the detectivist assumption that first-personal authority can only be explicated by appeal to a process of inward perceiving through which we become aware of our (otherwise unconscious) mental life. Unfortunately, as with detectivism, Moran’s ‘deliberative’ account of first-­ personal authority easily finds itself confronted with a number of persuasive objections, and it will suffice here to briefly mention three. First, Finkelstein points out that while Moran’s account is of value in offering a non-detectivist account of first-­ person authority with regard to those mental states which are transparent to deliberation (i.e. which can be ‘avowed’ through our deliberatively endorsing their claims on the basis of justifying reasons), it understands the access we have to states which are not so transparent in squarely detectivist terms, thus ruling out the possibility of first-personal authority with regard to such states. This causes difficulties for Moran, because there are several types of mental state which are wholly unaffected by the achievements of deliberation, but which we are nevertheless often able to think and speak about with first-personal authority; namely, our sensations, our past mental states, those attitudes which we have but know to be unjustifiable, or

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those which are neither demanded nor prohibited by justifying reasons, and finally many of our preferences or desires (Finkelstein 2003, pp. 162–168). A second, though related, objection takes issue with Moran’s claim that transparency to deliberation is the ground of first-personal authority even with regard to belief, that is, even for those states which are in principle open to deliberative endorsement or rejection. As Jane Heal points out, many of the beliefs with which we are able to speak with first-personal authority are so deeply rooted that “an enterprise of assembling reasons for accepting them would be a mere charade.” While certain of our beliefs are transparent to deliberation, their status as ours being revealed just through our assessment of whether their claims are justified, other beliefs serve as the basic footing from which deliberation proceeds. These ‘hinge-­ propositions’ may be so deeply embedded in our world-view that we are not only disinclined but unable to call them into question, yet we often have the same first-­ personal access to them as we do to those beliefs that we endorse deliberatively. While in some cases we have, in the past, deliberatively endorsed these deeply held beliefs, in many other cases the origin of such beliefs lies in our uncritically taking them over from trusted other persons, critical reflection having played no essential role in their formation (Heal 2004, p. 429; cf. Wittgenstein 1969, §§341–344). I will return to this issue later, when discussing Husserl’s understanding of the role of sociality in personal self-formation (see the second section of the next chapter). Finally, in an article which covers similar ground to the Husserlian view which I present here, Jonathan Webber argues that Moran’s emphasis on deliberation as the vehicle of transparency leads him to overlook the temporal structure of rational agency. Drawing upon empirical studies of implicit biases, Webber suggests that while deliberation is often able to generate a passing attitudinal stance towards the matter reflected upon, it has severe limitations in disclosing deeply habituated and enduring attitudes, these latter attitudes being more reliably manifest in our immediate judgements, affective responses, and desires. This point is important because, on the one hand, many of these deeply habituated attitudes are not limitations upon our rational agency but important components of it, their claims having a rational basis which is rooted in the past life of the subject, in her earlier experiences, deliberative episodes, etc. On the other hand, such habituated attitudes are plausibly regarded as directly manifesting the enduring character of the rational agent—in a certain sense, who she is, herself—in a way which can only apply for the stances reached through deliberation if those stances have already been habituated, once they have undergone the temporal process of integration into the nexus of attitudes which make up the agent’s personality (Webber 2016). I take that a number of the passages earlier quoted show Husserl to be concerned with offering an alternative to detectivism. Unlike Moran however, Husserl would argue that, in painting a full picture of the varieties of self-acquaintance that emerge from active position-taking, we cannot avoid grappling with the issue of enduring personal character. This is simply because convictions, like other abiding opinions, are not merely ways in which we temporarily fix our view on matters; they are rather unities of consistency (Einheit der Konsequenz), enduring ways in which our thinking maintains, in its very spontaneity, a certain kind of commitment and continuity

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(Hua IV/V 342 [1914–1916]). And importantly, the degree to which my thinking possesses a certain type of self-identity throughout my ongoing life, that is, to which I continue to be who I am qua thinking subject, depends upon the extent to which I remain so consistent in my thinking, to which I continue to hold my convictions and accept their validity. As Husserl puts it, my continued acceptance of a conviction as judicative stance is “something I have a stake in. As long as I am the one I am, then the position-taking cannot but ‘persist,’ and I cannot but persist in it” (Hua IV/V 352/Hua IV 112 [1914–1916]). However, one might wonder whether Husserl’s thought that we endure in our convictions is really compatible with the claim, endorsed in one way or another by both Husserl and Moran, that convictions are positions that we take, that is, features of our mental lives which only properly exist if we endorse them. For this claim appears to leave us with a picture of our opinions as being rather fleeting and transitory mental features, features which are only really ours when we ‘take part’ in them and endorse their validity actively. And were this true, it would be difficult to see how such opinions could sustain and manifest anything like an enduring personal character; rather, they would seem to sustain and manifest nothing more than the fact that, at one point in time, one decided in favour of that attitude, endorsing its theses on the basis of certain legitimising motives. What enables Husserl to avoid this problem is his realisation that, if we are to make philosophically intelligible position-taking and personhood alike, then full account must be taken of the habitual or historical character of concretely self-­ involving, egoic activities (such as becoming convinced, responding emotionally, or willing oneself to act). In order to understand this thought and its implications, we can note that for a previously instituted or endorsed conviction to remain operative for us, it is not always necessary that we, as it were, repeatedly ‘refresh’ our conviction through further deliberation on the matter. Rather, when we are required to take a position on an issue that we have previously made up our mind about, it is often evident to us what our attitude is prior to any deliberation in the present, in that we are immediately aware of our own stance on the matter without it being necessary that we explicitly affirm it on the basis of rational motives. Moreover, if in this context I (non-deceptively) acknowledge the relevant stance as something that I continue to hold, as opposed to merely regarding it as an attitude that I once held in the past, it appears that this acknowledgement cannot be merely a detached observation of what I (can remember having) endorsed on a prior occasion, since such an appeal would provide no insight regarding how my mind is made up in the present.35 To consider an example, if someone were asked their opinion on a novel that they have read at some point in the past, it would be somewhat disappointing if the person were to simply recall the attitudes that they have previously had towards the novel, and to report these to their interlocutor just as recollected attitudes. (One can easily imagine the irritation of a teenager who is patronisingly and evasively told by an  As we will see in more detail later, a further weakness of such a self-observational account is simply that it distorts the manner in which we are consciously familiar with our abiding convictions. As Husserl puts it, there “is no question here of the apprehension of a process from earlier in phenomenological time as an object remembered.” (Hua IV/V 344) [1912].

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elder, “I loved the novel, but I was only your age at the time…”) Surely a more adequate response to this question would involve the person attempting to give expression to her genuine opinion on the novel, thus informing the other, say, what that novel strikes her as truly consisting in, why it does so, and what the merits of this are; even if this could only be achieved in the honest admission of her inability to form a clear and definitive stance (that, for example, “every time I read or think about it I feel differently”, or even “I used to like it, though I thought differently then and I can’t be sure if I still would.”). And if this person has previously formed a definite view on the matter, one which she has had no recourse to abandon in the intermediary period, she will then typically feel herself able to give expression to this opinion as one that is still hers—and not merely as one which she has previously held. Such an appropriation or assumption (Übernahme, in Husserl’s German) of one’s earlier formed stance is not, in and of itself, something that one actively achieves by means of a present reassessment of the rational basis for one’s earlier judgement. In order to keep a hold of one’s earlier formed opinion of a novel, say, one does not have to continually reassess whether that opinion was appropriately motivated by the relevant features of the thing itself. Such an active assessment might occur, of course, if one encountered reasons for doubting the validity of one’s earlier judgement (one of which could be a belief that one’s own judgemental style has changed in some way, an issue I will return to in the next chapter), if one sought to subject to scrutiny or renew one’s already acknowledged stance, or simply if one becomes swept away in intellectual curiosity.36 But such active achievements all, in one way or another, rest upon the more passive, yet nevertheless self-involving (and self-preserving), process of habitually ‘taking over,’ or ‘assuming’ one’s earlier instituted conviction in the present—this habituality being the very medium through which the ego remains consistent in its activity and thereby sustains a certain identity or ipseity. In the Göttingen manuscript, Husserl describes this form of ‘participation’ in one’s earlier endorsement, an achievement which significantly blurs the distinction between passivity and activity, in some detail: The earlier conviction (judgement, experience, etc.) remains valid for me, and this says nothing other than that I “assume it”; by reproducing it, I participate in the belief. It is not an approving or an affirming of the kind that occurs in a question, a doubt, or a simple presumption. And yet I have to do something like give approval, insofar as we can indeed distinguish the two strata: the memory connected with the earlier subject and earlier lived-­ experience, the earlier belief, conviction, experience, etc., with the present subject not taking part in them. And, on the other hand, the same things, but now with participation, whereby, to be sure, the participation is not a proper separate step, not an affirmation in the proper sense, but instead, in a homogenous unity of the memory, the remembered is there

 As Husserl remarks: “The relation to the motives of the judgment can thereby be very unclear, and so can the relation to the various cases of renewal and reinforcement of the conviction. Yet it is clear that the unity constituted here is not the unity of the lived-experience of the one who is judging, but it is the unity of “the” judgment, which persists for the judging subject who grasps it as the same in relation to various cases of remembering again and renewing again—as something proper to this subject, but precisely only as something re-appropriated and re-grasped.” (Hua IV/V 347/Hua IV 116-117 [1914-1916].)

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for me and the quality of the present positing enters into the remembered (Hua IV/V 348/ Hua IV 117, transl. modified [1914–1916]). Alternatively, consider a unitary and persistent joy. The originally instituted joy-thesis is, with its definite content, an enduring theme: we repeatedly come back to it, we assume the joy, we take part in it, surrendering ourselves to the joy, which is old and yet ever new. Or we form a resolution, and we are enduringly resolved. In renewed acts (namely, the reproductive ones) we have recourse to the old resolution and participate in it. We do not strike it out, we do not alter our position; we continue, as it were, to will the old willing. This is not an affirmation in the sense of answering yes to a question. Here, do not call into question a possible volitional theme again, we execute no volitional doubting; the resolution is not something hitherto held in abeyance, to which we would now have to say a decisive yes (a volitional yes). The resolution is rather a continuous “yes”—if one still wishes to employ that word—where this designates the same as “appropriation,” “acceptance,” “willing-­ along-­ with-it,” however imperfect these expressions might also be (Hua IV/V 351 [1914–1916]).

One of the features of the habitual Übernahme of convictions, emotions, and resolutions emphasised in these passages is the constitutive role played therein by reference to one’s past activity. For Husserl, this relation to one’s past is necessarily involved in any episode of lived-experience that manifests the habitual depth of the position-taking I. In such cases, what is particularly essential is a certain awareness of one’s earlier formed stance, an awareness that facilitates the conscious appropriation of its thesis, providing the earlier judgement which one presently assumes. That is, while our habituated attitudes can tacitly determine our active and passive intentionality in various ways, it is only when our present engagement is temporally extended, by a recollecting of our earlier endorsed stance, that a concrete stance becomes conscious as habitually accepted.37 Crucially, this should not mislead us into thinking that the appropriation involves the past endorsement being appealed to as an observed event in one’s past, as might be the case if someone were to adopt a stance, as it were, on the grounds that they can recall having previously endorsed it. What is at issue here is not one’s copying one’s past stances, but rather simply one’s continuing to accept their enduring theses as valid and rationally motivated; and we are only aware of ourselves as so continuing in as much as there is some awareness of our past acceptance co-present ‘in’ our current habitual acceptance. In Husserl’s somewhat dense formulation: That which is posited by an act of the cogito, the theme, is, with reference to repeated reproductions and repositions, which extend “throughout” the chain of reproductions, of the

 For further explications of the role of memory here, see Hua XVII 122-123/Husserl 1969, pp. 117-118; Hua Mat VIII 43-44. Elsewhere, Husserl highlights cases where the subject’s past positings operate, as sedimented habits, in the functioning of subjectivity “without explicit reaccomplishment” (Hua XXXVII 334). This non-memorial—and in this sense unconscious—functioning of habitual attitudes becomes more intelligible once we appreciate the role of retention in enabling us to remain committed to (Festhalten) stances that we have previously actively formed, even before we memorially appropriate them (Hua XLIII/2 166-167; cf. Hua IV/V 265 fn. 1/Hua IV 5-6 [1915]). On the relationship between the functioning of habitual attitudes and memory, see also Heinämaa (2007) and Jacobs (2010).

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original theme reproduced in them, something lasting, at least as long as the reproduction is precisely not just any reproduction but rather a “re-positing,” or better: an actual taking part in, an assumption (Übernahme) of what was posited “earlier” (Hua IV/V 350–351/ Hua IV 119 [1914–1916]).

In light of this, I take it that Husserl would be sympathetic to Moran’s claim that, rather than primarily knowing our theoretical, emotive, and practical stances through viewing our past and present mental life observationally, we are most basically aware of such positions as enduringly ours in as much as we continue to accept their validity and, in so doing, remain answerable to their justifactory grounds (Moran 2001, p. 82).38 But what is quite distinctive in Husserl’s account of (self-awareness within) stance-taking is his claim that there is nothing contradictory in maintaining that this endorsement and answerability endures habitually; that our past (theoretical, practical, and emotional-evaluative) commitments do not persist as ours only in as much as we endorse them deliberatively, but retain a validity for us just until we are moved to relinquish them—this becoming explicit in our ability to immediately assume or adopt these commitments whenever doing so is demanded of us.

6.3.3  Personal Depth, Memory, and Self-Consciousness We can now return to this question of whether, and in what sense, we can be pre-­ reflectively aware of our enduring position-takings as such, and of how this relates to our reflective thematisation of them. As was emphasised earlier, convictions differ from experiential episodes, both in their generic features, and in their basic mode(s) of first-personal acquaintance.39 To summarise a line of thought elaborated in an earlier chapter (see the second section of the second chapter), experiential episodes are pre-reflectively lived through in that the intentional lived-experiences comprising them are, on the one hand, directed towards an object as apprehended or construed in a certain manner, and on the other, first-personally given through a

 As Husserl remarks: “The conviction (Überzeugung) is the same if the testimony (Zeugen) remains the same.” (Hua IV/V 347/Hua IV 116 [1914-16].) 39  Moran emphasises that his ‘deliberative’ account of self-knowledge should be understood as mainly applicable to “attitudes: beliefs, desires, intentions, and various emotional states.” As he then notes, this is a different issue to the question of “whether a person can be said to know his qualitative sensations in a way that is essentially unavailable to another person and if so, how such “knowing” is to be understood” (Moran 2001, p. xxxiii, emphasis mine), admitting a few pages later that his study has “comparatively little to say here about the case of sensations, which I believe raise issues for self-knowledge quite different from the case of attitudes of various kinds.” (Moran 2001, pp. 9-10) I take it that Husserl would be sympathetic to Moran’s distinction between the mode of (self-)awareness pertaining to truth-sensitive attitudes and that for lived experiences, but he would reject the implication that only the former can be considered properly first-personal (see, e.g., Moran 2001, p. 107). Indeed, his view is actually that the pre-reflective givenness of lived experiences is a condition of possibility for the pre-reflective givenness of (both fleeting and abiding) attitudes. 38

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pre-­reflective mode of self-consciousness. In being consciously directed to an object, we are not solely conscious of the object, since we are also first-personally aware of the present object-directed experience itself, as inhering within an ‘inner’ temporal horizon of retained past and protended futural object-directed experiences. These retained and protended lived experiences are themselves given in a nonobjectifying manner, which is to say, as (retained past and protended future) forms of intentional directedness with their own (past and future) objective correlates. And, for Husserl, this total nexus of past, present, and future modes of awareness brings about the very temporal form of consciousness, and as such exactly comprises the first-­personal givenness of experience. In other words, it amounts to the (temporally ‘stretched’) self-awareness essential to all conscious experience, and it thus illuminates the most ubiquitous and basic sense in which an experiencing subject is present in conscious life. Such a mode of self-awareness precedes and makes possible any reproductive manner in which we can become aware of our experiential episodes. In the Göttingen manuscript, Husserl distinguishes between two ways in which such a reproductive awareness can occur. On the one hand, there can be a merely memorial “inner reproduction” of a past lived episode which was, prior to this reproduction, merely retained as an (increasingly distant and obscure) aspect of the pre-reflectively constituted ‘inner’ temporal horizon. On the other hand, there can be a reflecting in the memorial reproduction, such that the remembering subject does not merely reproduce a past experiential episode (as in the former case), but also reflectively scrutinises it, actively acknowledging the reproduced episode as a peculiar kind of experiential item that can be repeatedly returned to and described. In the Göttingen manuscript, Husserl (with some reluctance) uses the terminology of “immanent perception” to capture this reflective consciousness, which presupposes “inner reproduction” and, thus, also “inner consciousness” (that is, the pre-reflective self-awareness in which the very temporal field of experiencing is constituted): To be sure, every act is an “impression,” it is itself something existing in inner temporality, is something constituted in the consciousness that constitutes time originally. We can reflect on each act and in so doing turn it into an object of an act of immanent “perception.” Before this perception (to which belongs the form of the cogito), we have the “inner consciousness” (which lacks this form), and from this arises, as an ideal possibility, the inner reproduction, in which the earlier act again comes to consciousness in a reproductive way, and consequently can become the object of a reflective memory. In other words, the possibility is thereby given of reflecting, in the reproduction, on the earlier having-perceived, or if not the having-perceived in the proper sense, then on the originary having-lived-through as having-had-an-impression (Hua IV/V 349/Hua IV 118 [1914–1916]).

Leaving aside, for now, the issue of our protentional and expectational relatedness to future experiences, we can thus distinguish (at least) four possible basic modes of (self-)awareness with respect to one’s past and present lived-experiences. An experience can either be pre-reflectively lived through in the mode of the present, pre-­ reflectively retained in the mode of the past, re-presented or brought to mind as a past experience through memorial reproduction, or, finally, reflectively identified and thematised as an inner object.

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But what about the case of enduring opinions? As we have seen, Husserl rejects the idea that we are primarily aware of our convictions, emotions, and resolutions from a detached, observational point of view in we which attend to empirical features of our past and present psychological life. Indeed, immediately prior to the just-quoted passage where “inner perception” is referred to, he notes that when it comes to an abiding stance such as a mathematical conviction or an enduring hope, “what institutes the unity is not a perception as an act (a cogito) that posits a temporally fixed being, but rather another act” (Hua IV/V 349 [1914–1916]; cf. Hua IV 118). As he then continues: [In] the case of a mathematical conviction, the originating act is the relevant judging (in inner consciousness it is an act constituted originarily, as an impression, and is of such and such a duration in inner time), a judgement-material along with a positing of being. This material contains nothing of temporality. A non-temporal state of affairs is posited as being. In repeated emergence of the judgement we may have chains of reproductions of the original judgement-impression (Hua IV/V 349–350/Hua IV 118 [1914–1916]).

To understand what Husserl is gesturing towards here, we should recall that our abiding convictions and opinions are in some sense manifest, first, in the initial act institutive of the stance (our actively endorsing the validity of its theses, which articulate a transcendent state of affairs, typically on the basis of motives), and, second, in our appropriation of an attitude previously instituted in a retained, and in principle reproducible, past endorsement-activity.40 However, is at this stage worth recalling Husserl’s insistence (Sect. 6.3.1), that an enduring opinion is a unity which is properly manifest in the relatedness of various different lived experiences to one another (Hua IV/V 341/Hua IV 113–114 [1914–1916]). This is so because an abiding and episode-transcendent conviction, emotion, or resolution is something non-­ identical to a particular lived-experience, having its own form of temporal persistence. It seems highly doubtful, that is, whether an initial act of endorsing an attitude, preceding the habituation of that attitude, could comprise anything like a pre-reflective awareness of an opinion proper—that is, of an attitude with habitual depth. Rather, such an achievement would only seem to involve the experiencing subject consciously avowing a certain thesis on the basis of motivating reasons, at best accompanied by an anticipation that this acceptance will habitually endure in the future (or perhaps, in some cases, a practical resolution towards this end). As these considerations make clear, what would be required for a pre-reflective awareness of an opinion would be an experience wherein more than an individual act is lived. What is necessary here is that the subject somehow non-reflectively lives in

 In other texts, Husserl highlights the phenomenologically distinctive character of egoic engagement. In the life of the subject, he writes, “what is carried out by the ego-subject is a manifold ‘I think,’ ‘I present,’ ‘I judge,’ etc., a manifold ‘undergoing allure,’ ‘being driven,’ and ‘actively taking a position,’ and, as one with this, a continual enrichment of the stream of lived experience; the holding sway of the ego is a lived experiencing that the ego propels forth from itself.” (Hua IV/V 585 [1915-1917]). We have already seen one way of elaborating this claim in the second chapter, where it was argued that egoic engagement is concretely founded upon and intertwined with selfaffection (see the third section of the second chapter).

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the “chain of reproductions,” as Husserl puts it in the above passage, in which the enduring opinion inheres. Moreover, this involvement with one’s own memories would have to occur in such a way that the experiencing subject somehow manifests itself as engaged in its opinion in a distinctively habitual fashion. What I would now like to suggest is that we find something akin to this in certain cases of habitual appropriation. When we habitually assume a past position-taking, we are at times thereby aware of ourselves exactly as remaining committed to the validity of a certain position. It may be that this habitual appropriation can operate without any memorial reproduction of our earlier active institution of this position, a retention of this act rather serving as the opaque point of reference for our now ‘taking part in’ the stance. As I noted earlier, however, in as much as this habitual appropriation involves us being aware of the assumed position as an enduring position with which we are familiar from our past and to which we remain committed, then some element of memorial reproduction must be operative, some directedness to (at least one of) the past acts of institution or appropriation which pertain to it.41 Consequently, if a habitual assumption of a previously instituted position-taking is to comprise an awareness of that position as enduringly mine, then it must involve the reproduction of a past act of endorsement (whether this reproduced act is of the ‘passive’-habitual or active-­ institutive sort). Given, however, that reproduction should be distinguished from the thematic self-consciousness of reflection, and bearing in mind too that it might be inappropriate to conceptualise the modes of awareness we have of our convictions on the same model employed for experiential episodes, we should be wary of extrapolating, from the role of memory in such experiences, the further claim that the basic form of awareness we have of our convictions, in habitually endorsing them, is essentially reflective in nature. Such a conclusion would entail overlooking what I regard as one Husserl’s central insights into the phenomenology of abiding opinions—namely, that the “unity” of our opinions does not always first emerge for us through a reflective observation and comparison of our present and past experiences, since this unity is pre-reflectively manifest already in the present experience of memorially-embedded appropriation. Indeed, once one recalls that abiding opinions are non-identical to lived-experiences, then it becomes clear that there is nothing contradictory in maintaining that we may be pre-reflectively (self-)aware of such opinions—that is, aware of them as our own, and in a manner that does not derive from a detached survey of our mental life—even when that awareness includes, as an inherent aspect, a reproductive awareness of our past experiences that goes beyond the original self-affection integral to inner time-consciousness. To clarify this point, some more general examples will be helpful. In recollecting an episode of my own thinking, feeling, or acting that manifested a certain personal stance that I have taken and continue to hold—say, in recalling a conversation in  To complicate matters further, Husserl occasionally distinguishes between the sheer passivity of retention, the explicit reproduction of memory, and an intermediary level, namely a primitively active directedness towards a retained egoic activity without explicit reproduction (Hua IV/V 526 (Hua IV 333) [1917]).

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which I formulated a subtle point in a way that I felt myself able to wholly identify with, or a witnessed event in which I felt myself wholly convinced, perhaps for the first time, of the truth of a certain sociological theory or political doctrine, or even, to use an example of Husserl’s, the first time I recognised a loved one as someone who has a profound bearing on me (Hua IV/V 351 [1914–1916])—I am indeed, at least implicitly, reproductively aware of this episode as something of my experiential past. Indeed, to remember an experiential episode just is to reproduce that episode as one which I once lived through and carried out, and this involves the awareness of a formally identical self in and through temporal difference. As we saw in the second chapter, the act of remembering manifests both the past I of the remembered experience and the present I of the very remembering, and it also involves an implicit awareness of the diachronic identity of remembering and remembered self. Indeed, it is only through presentifying experiences, such as recollection, that the ego discovers itself as an act-transcendent yet identical unity, as enduring beyond the present temporal field of self-presence which comprises its original and pervasive mode of manifestation (cf. Zahavi 2020, pp.  152–155). Moreover, Husserl emphasises that the possibility of reproducing one’s past experiences and thus becoming aware of one’s formal diachronic identity as a pure ego— i.e. that I, as an experiencing and intentionally engaged subject, transcend and persist between and unite my discrete experiential episodes—is a presupposition for any appropriative relation one might have to one’s earlier instituted position-takings (Hua IV/V 352–353/Hua IV 113 [1914–1916]). That is, to enjoy first-personal access to one’s earlier episodes of position-taking activity is not necessarily a matter of taking part in the thesis of an earlier position-taking; rather, such an appropriative directedness towards one’s past is founded on a more primitive form of a diachronic self-identity, which simply consists in one’s past experiences being manifest in memory as lived through and carried out by me (cf. Jacobs 2010, pp. 350–352). However, in the kind of case exemplified in the preceding examples, something more than the formal diachronic identity of the pure ego is manifest. If the conviction evinced in my past experiential episode is one that I have not rejected during the intermediate period, then I do not merely recollect the act of judgement as one of my past. Rather, I live through my past position-taking as one in which I continue to participate, and we can thus say that I assume its validity(-for-me) “without further ado,” that is, without requiring any further deliberation.42 This acceptance is not a matter of a separate act but is rather something interwoven within the recollection itself, and its nature only becomes evident when contrasted with our way of remembering earlier opinions that we have since rejected. If we compare cases involving a presently enduring stance with, say, an adult recollection of one’s younger self lying awake on Christmas Eve wondering when Father Christmas will finally arrive, then the difference should become clear. What is presumably lacking in the latter case, but present in the previous examples, is a certain unity between the heartfelt positing

 As Husserl writes in the Göttingen manuscript: “Habit means ‘without further ado,’ something which one has in an enduring way.” (Hua IV/V 342 [1914-1916]).

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evident in the recollected episode and the nexus of theses which continue to remain valid for the remembering subject in the present. Crucially, this unity is not something constituted through an explicit activity of contrasting; rather, it is immediately manifest in our reproductive directedness towards the past, in that this very directedness is lived as including appropriation as a constitutive moment (Hua IV/V 348/ Hua IV 117 [1914–1916]). We remember a past way of thinking, feeling, or acting as exemplified in a prior episode in a specific fashion when it remains continuous with our current way of thinking, feeling, or acting. And we remember it in a different fashion if we have since renounced it in favour of another way of thinking, feeling, or acting concerning the same issue. As should be evident, this experience of appropriating-in-remembering is of essentially the same structure as the kind of habitual appropriation accompanied by memory described earlier.43 In such a quasi-active appropriation, we are aware in a primitive way of a unitary position-taking both as stretching back into the past and as still holding sway in us. To really see the sense in which we can legitimately describe this primitive awareness as pre-reflective in nature, one must understand in what sense it grounds and motivates a reflective thematisation of the position-taking which it brings us into contact with. And in fact Husserl attends to just this, immediately after his explication of its pre-reflective givenness in institution and appropriation: In repeated emergence of the judgement we may have chains of reproductions of the original judgement-impression. The regard can be focused on them and can penetrate into them. In that case I have possibilities for memories of various levels. I recall my earlier memory: I now have a reproduction of a second level and can focus on it, and I then have a memory of the memory. Or my regard can penetrate into it; I focus on the state of affairs which was intended in the reproduced reproduction, on the earlier judgement (Hua IV/V 350/Hua IV 118, emphasis mine [1914/1916]).

Husserl’s claim here is that ‘chains of reproductions’ are formed and sustained through habitual appropriation, in that each appropriative endorsement partially involves the reproduction of prior acts of institutive or appropriative position-­taking, the latter of which may themselves constitutively involve reproductive elements. Yet these reproductive chains are not rendered thematic as such in the very act of appropriation, which rather involves the formation of a further ‘ring’ in the chain through a habitual acceptance of the reproduced stance’s theses as continuing to hold. By contrast, the thematisation of the chains of reproduction requires a reflective “regard” being directed towards these chains as such (as Husserl emphasises in the italicised sentence of the above passage). As Husserl goes on to explain, this reflective regard involves bringing into focus the history of appropriations, ultimately leading back to the opinion’s institution, and considering the manner in which they were reproductively related to one another—a task which can also look towards the noematic correlates of those past acts by our attentively “penetrating” them. I will  Though we might think that some distinction could be maintained between these two cases, in that they imply different motivational contexts, the former typically being brought about by an interest in one’s past, and the latter typically arising through a present stance being demanded of the subject.

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argue in the next chapter that this rather abstract account of reflectively thematising one’s enduring opinions can be further fleshed out when we consider the different ways in which it occurs; and indeed that one pre-eminent way is through the weaving of personal narratives. Such a narrative self-understanding involves situating the inner histories of one’s stances within the context of one’s broader personal history, bringing the manner in which our opinions have formed themselves temporally in relation, both to the formation of other stances, and to the situations in which they have been instituted (and, perhaps, sustained, altered or abandoned). To conclude this section, it will be worthwhile considering how the Husserlian picture I have here fleshed out fares with regard to the criticisms levelled at Moran’s position. Finkelstein’s worry that Moran’s account of first-personal authority limits it to a small domain of attitudes—namely, those few cases in which the ‘Transparency Condition’ actually applies—is unproblematic for Husserl, since he claims that the generic basis of first-personal authority is not rooted in our ability to deliberatively approve our attitudes, but rather in our lived-experiences being conscious, that is, lived through pre-reflectively.44 It is only in the special case of egoic stances that some degree of endorsement (or perhaps more accurately, acceptance) is a condition of possibility for the mental item being first-personally accessible. Finally, we have seen that Husserl agrees with Webber that an adequate account of first-­personal authority with regard to egoic stances must be attentive to the fact that the stances that manifest personal depths are enduring and habituated features of a person rather than fleeting conclusions. We will have to wait until the next chapter to determine whether Husserl responds effectively to Heal’s plea for an account of first-personal authority that does not conflict with the social origins of many of our attitudes. But we can already see that Husserl’s nuanced account of the self-awareness of attitudes appears to avoid both the illusion of detectivism and the excess of deliberativism.

6.4  Concluding Remarks In this chapter, I have sought to bring into view the personal self from a set of diverging perspectives. I began by considering the sense in which embodied activity can function within and manifest personal agency, arguing that the personal self presupposes certain bodily abilities and world-responsive practical inclinations, but that it goes beyond such inclinations, appropriating them as components within

 On the face of things, this view is not too dissimilar to that defended by Finkelstein, who also emphasises the deep connection between a mental state’s being conscious and first-personal authority. However, the decisive difference here is that Finkelstein defends what is to my mind a somewhat idiosyncratic understanding of consciousness, summarised by the slogan: “Someone’s mental state is conscious if he has an ability to express it merely by self-ascribing it.” (Finkelstein 2003, p. 120) As Finkelstein acknowledges, this commits him to the claim—which I take it Husserl would reject—that non-human animals have no conscious mental states, since they lack the linguistic capacities required for the self-ascription of such states (Finkelstein 2003, p. 144).

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novel kinds of motivational context. What is decisive here is that one’s (inclination-­ delineated) practical possibilities are affirmed on the basis of a decision which appeals to evaluative grounds, these grounds in their turn being a function of one’s enduring nexus of attitudes. I then tried to shed further light on the connection between such attitudes and the kind of freedom and character unique to persons, as well as the distinctive sort of motivation and world-relatedness implicated in personal life. Finally, in the last and longest section of this chapter, I considered the form of self-awareness peculiar to enduring opinions, arguing that we can speak of a unique variety of pre-reflective awareness that subjects have of their sustaining an attitude habitually. We are now well-prepared to consider how the analysis presented here relates to more thematic and reflective forms of self-understanding, and to consider the social preconditions of personal selfhood  – tasks which the next chapter will grapple with.

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Husserl, E. (1952b). Husserliana V. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie: Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften. Ed. M. Biemel, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (1980). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences. Transl. T. E. Klein & W. E. Pohl, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (Hua V 1-137); Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Transl. R.  Rojcewicz & A.  Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (Hua V 138-162).] Husserl, E. (1966). Husserliana X. Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917). Ed. R. Boehm, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [Eng. Transl.: Husserl, E. (1991). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Transl. J. B. Brough, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.] Husserl, E. (1969). Formal and Transcendental Logic. Transl. D.  Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1973). Husserliana XIV. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil: 1921-1928. Ed. I. Kern. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1974a). Husserliana III, 1-2. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Ed. K. Schuhmann. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1974b). Husserliana XVII. Formale und Transzendentale Logik. Ed. P. Janssen. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (2004). Husserliana XXXVII. Einleitung in die Ethik: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924. Ed. H. Peucker. Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, E. (2006). Husserliana Materialien VIII. Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929-1934): Die C-Manuskripte. Ed. D. Lohmar. Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, E. (2014). Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Transl. D. O. Dahlstrom. Indianapolis, IA: Hackett Publishing Company. Husserl, E. (2020). Husserliana XLIII, 1-4. Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. Ed. U. Melle & T. Vongehr. Cham: Springer. Husserl, E. (Forthcoming). Husserliana IV/V. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution und Wissenscahftstheorie. Ed. D. Fonfara. Cham: Springer. Husserl, E. Unpublished archival manuscript: A VI 10. Jacobs, H. (2010). “Towards a Phenomenology of Personal Identity,” in: Carlo Ierna, Hanne Jacobs, & Filip Mattens (eds.), Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences: Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 333-361. Jacobs, H. (2014). “Husserl on Freedom and Reflection,” in: Susi Ferrarello (ed.), Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity and Values in Edmund Husserl. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 13-24. Jacobs, H. (2015). “From psychology to pure phenomenology” in: Andrea Staiti (ed.), Commentary on Husserl’s Ideas I. Berlin & Boston: Walther De Gruyter, pp. 95-118. Jacobs, H. (2016a). “Husserl on Reason, Reflection, and Attention,” Research in Phenomenology, 46: 257-276. Jacobs, H. (2016b). “Socialization, Reflection, and Personhood,” in: Harald A. Wiltsche & Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl (eds.), Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Methods and Perspectives. Proceedings of the 37th International Wittgenstein Symposium. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 323-336. Jacobs, H. (2021). “Husserl, the active self, and commitment,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 20: 281-298. Korsgaard C. M. (1996). The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Korsgaard, C.  M. (2009). Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Loidolt, S. (2012). “The ‘Daimon’ that speaks through love: A phenomenological ethics of the absolute ought  – Investigating Husserl’s unpublished texts,” in: Mark Sanders & J.  Jeremy Wisnewski (eds.), Ethics and Phenomenology. Lanham, MA: Lexington, pp. 9-38. Melle, U. (2007). “Husserl’s personalist ethics,” Husserl Studies 23: 1-15. Moran, R. (2001). Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mulligan, K. (2010). “Husserls Herz,” in: Manfred Frank & Niels Weidtmann (eds.), Husserl und die Philosophie des Geistes. Berlin: Suhrkamp, pp. 209-238. Rang, B. (1973). Kausalität und Motivation: Untersuchungen zur Verhältnis von Perspektivität und Objektivität in der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls. Phaenomenologica, vol. 53. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Rinofner-Kreidl, S. (2011). “Motive, Gründe und Entscheidungen in Husserls intentionaler Handlungstheorie,” in: Verena Mayer, Christopher Erhard, & Marisa Scherini (eds.), Die Aktualität Husserls. Freiburg & Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, pp. 232-277. Sokolowski, R. (1985). Moral Action. Bloomington, IA: Indiana University Press. Sokolowski, R. (2008). Phenomenology of the Human Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Staiti, A. (2014). Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Spirit, and Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stein, E. (1922). “Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften,” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung 5:1-283. Steinbock, A.  J. (2001). “Translator’s introduction,” in: Edmund Husserl (auth.), Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Transl. A. J. Steinbock. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. xv-lxv. Webber, J. (2016). “Habituation and First-Person Authority,” in: Roman Altschuler & Michael J.  Sigrist (eds.), Time and the Philosophy of Action. London & New  York: Routledge, pp. 189-204. Wittgenstein, L. (1969). On Certainty. Transl. D.  Paul & G.  E. M.  Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Zahavi, D. (2020). Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation. A New Edition. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [First Edition: 1999] Zahavi, D. (2021). "From no ego to pure ego to personal ego," in: H. Jacobs (ed.), The Husserlian Mind. London: Routledge, pp. 269–279.

Chapter 7

Interpersonal Empathy and Levels of Personal Self-constitution

Whereas the sixth chapter was concerned with offering a solely first-personal account of personal selfhood, this (methodologically necessary) shortcoming is corrected in the seventh chapter, which considers together interpersonal empathy and the intersubjective dimensions of human personhood.1 Building upon the findings of the previous chapter, I begin by explicating the analyses of personal self-­ constitution found in Ideen II, arguing that Husserl allows us to distinguish between a range of levels of personal self-manifestation. While Husserl’s reflections, I contend, ultimately lead us towards the thought that narrative constitutes the most apt medium for personal self-understanding, he also argues that there are more primitive ways in which I am aware of myself as a subject of abiding personal character or style. I then develop Husserl’s claim that the person necessarily exists in a nexus of other persons, spelling out the roles of mutual recognition, the constitution of a common surrounding world, and the appropriation of others’ attitudes, in both pre-­ reflective personal agency and reflective, narrative-embedded, personal self-­ understanding. Later, I address the sense in which, as persons, we are empathetically acquainted with other personal selves, arguing that such interpersonal empathy both rests upon and transgresses the animate empathy discussed in the fifth chapter. In this regard, I first suggest that a minimal form of interpersonal empathy can be equated with what Axel Honneth has recently called ‘elementary recognition,’ where this designates a basic and perception-like recognition of another (embodied) personal self that grounds and is explicated by emotive and practical forms of interpersonal recognition. Revisiting the contrast of Husserl and Stein with Stueber, I then argue that interpersonal empathy can go beyond interpersonal recognition, and aim at an understanding of the ‘who’ of the other’s actions, emotions, and beliefs— of the personal self who ‘lives’ in them—an accomplishment which requires a

1  This chapter occasionally draws upon and reworks material that has previously been published in Jardine (2015) and Jardine (2017).

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sensitivity to (rather than a levelling over) the embeddedness of the person’s acts in her own personal history, and their intimate relation to her personal character.

7.1  Personal Self-constitution: Life, Style, and Narrative I. No one in the world feels the weakness of general characterizing more than I. J. G. Herder2

7.1.1  The Pure Ego, the Personal Ego, and Self-apprehension For Husserl, self-consciousness and personhood are intimately interconnected. This is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in his acknowledgement that thematically understanding one’s own personal character involves a certain type of self-­ apprehension or self-understanding, and similarly that in understanding other persons as persons we simultaneously take them to be other selves. Now, what makes this claim philosophically interesting and controversial, and not merely a tautology (what makes it fundamentally different, that is, from the claim that in attributing certain features to an object we take those features to be attributed to the object ‘itself’), lies in the positive content of Husserl’s distinctive account of selfhood, as well as in his claim that a basic and formal selfhood is necessary but insufficient for personhood. We can turn our attention towards this issue by first revisiting the account of the pure ego and its relationship to personal selfhood elaborated in the second chapter. As was argued in more detail there, Husserl directs our attention towards a non-mundane and formal self, or pure ego, that belongs necessarily to every actually implemented intentional act. To the extent that every cogito involves both the passivity of self-affection, and a minimally active focus on the intentional object, it is necessary something that is lived through for, and implemented by, an experiencing subject (see the second, third, and fourth sections of the second chapter). Moreover, we also saw that Husserl seeks to demonstrate that this non-­mundane ego-structure can be drawn out from intentional consciousness through a subtle but simple procedure of phenomenological reflection, and that this procedure is of an entirely different order to mundane self-understanding. Correlatively, whereas the personal self as concrete reality only comes to (full) manifestation through a specific shape of sense-constitution playing out within intentional consciousness, the pure ego as formal structure can be said to inhabit all focused intentional experience quite independently of any process of mundane self-apprehension (see the first section of the second chapter). Indeed, we can even say that an explicit episode of self-­understanding involves the pure ego implementing a self-apperception, selfobjectification, or self-constitution, one of a specifically personalising kind:

 Herder (2004, p. 291)

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What is distinctive to the minded subject (geistige Subjekt) is that “in” this subject the apperception, “I,” arises, an apperception in which this subject is itself the “object” (even when it is not the thematic object). The apperception, “thing,” does not arise in the thing, but only in subjects. We must therefore distinguish the “I” in the “I am” on the side of the subject from the “I” in the “I am” as object for myself, an object which is presented, constituted in the existing “I am,” and which is perhaps intended in the specific sense: the me. What is intended here is “I, the person,” constituted for me: the ego which exists as self-­ conscious (Hua IV/V 553 [1916/1917]; cf. Hua IV 253).

As Husserl emphasises in the just-quoted passage, when it comes to any intentional act in which subjectivity is actively directed towards itself, it is necessary to distinguish the dimension of egoic selfhood manifest in the subject’s very experiential directedness (towards itself) from that dimension which is encountered as the intentional object. The self-as-object must be phenomenologically separated from the self-as-subject in light of their different yet correlated roles within the intentional structure of thematic self-consciousness. On the other hand, thematically self-­ conscious, or reflective, intentional acts obviously differ from all other forms of intentional experience in that the domain which they direct themselves towards is the same domain in which they themselves operate: namely, the reflecting subject’s own sphere of pre-reflectively lived and living intentional consciousness. Indeed, what ultimately enables such acts to be specifically self-oriented is the self-affection or inner (time-)consciousness that univocally pervades, and thereby generates a formal identity between, the act of reflection and the experiences that are pregiven to and constitutively refashioned by it (see the second and third sections of the second chapter). Now, if acts of reflection are indeed able to provide a basis for those judgements, assertions, and questions which have as their theme ‘I, as a person…’, then it should now be clear that such reflective acts must in their turn be motivated by, and seek to thematise, occurrences on the level of pre-reflective (self-)experience. That is, in thematically apprehending ourselves as persons we are engaged in a reflective procedure which differs from other varieties of reflection in light of both its specific intentional accomplishment and the kind of pre-reflective experiences with which it is primarily occupied. More specifically, the personal self comes thematically into view when someone’s reflective focus draws upon and articulates those experiential episodes wherein an engaged I of individual character is concretely manifest. This thought is clearly formulated in a manuscript from the early 1910s: Under the heading, “person,” minded ego (geistige Ich), we do not understand merely a pure ego-point, taken as the subject-point of cogitationes in its stream of experience. Rather, we understand the concretum: the ego with its stream of experience, but this understood as the life of the ego. And what is more, we are here concerned with the ego as manifesting itself empirically – in this life, in its self-comportment towards the surrounding world – as individuum of distinctive character. For we are concerned with the concretum only insofar as it carries the individual (Hua IV/V 490 [1910–1912]).

Moreover, the forms of self-understanding which are oriented towards their subject as individual person cannot be simply concerned with an isolated moment, or even a discrete duration, of lived-experience. Rather, in personal self-understanding I

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seek to uncover—in and through my concrete actions, emotions, or episodes of thought—my enduring ways-of-actively-being-motivated. Indeed, we will later see that such understanding ultimately seeks out the motivational style, embedded within a personal life, that reaches into the immemorial past and is expected to extend into the future, and which consequently ‘out-lives’ even the specific enduring features which currently articulate it. Even if we do not actively traverse the constellation of episodes in which our active habitualities would concretely exhibit themselves, even if we do not delve extensively into the subject’s personal ‘history,’ without at least implicitly recognising this personal horizon we would not be, in self-understanding, concerned with ourselves as persons. And such an understanding obviously gains further insight and a deepening evidential basis the more it interrogates this horizon. I more richly disclose my specific habitual features in their inner complexity and historical development through recollecting how my different modes of comportment are and have been responsive to their motivating circumstances, and in doing this I gradually acquire more insight into the infinitely nuanced, and often conflicted and painful, issue of who I am qua thinker, feeler, and actor. We will shortly return to the ‘what’ and the ‘who’ of such personal self-­ apprehension, but the first point to be emphasised here is that the kind of self-­ disclosure which may be gained through such self-understanding markedly differs from the reflective discernment of the pure ego as structural feature of every explicit intentional act. As Husserl puts it in 1913, the pure ego is simply “the pure subject of each cogito in the unity of the stream of lived-experience” and “the irreal, absolute bearer of all manifestation of reality” (Hua IV/V 220, 218/Hua IV 325, transl. modified [1913]). Unlike the personal self, it is thus evinced irrespective of any awareness of one’s own habitual depth. A further difference between the pure and the personal self lies in their ontological status. At least when it is simply understood as the correlate of our pre-philosophical self-understanding within the personalistic attitude  – which, as we will see below, ultimately does not exhaust the personal ego as a theme of phenomenological inquiry – then the personal self has a reality not enjoyed by its pure counterpart. While the pure ego is the non-mundane I-structure resident within intentional consciousness as purified by the phenomenological epoché, persons are concrete and intelligible unities, unities which can be identified and, in the ideal case, understood in their specificity, as well as in their individual acts (just as they can be so evaluated, recognised, responded to, influenced, theoretically studied, and so on). In acknowledging the reality of the personal ego, Husserl is merely attempting to do justice to our pre-theoretical belief that such features as convictions, emotional dispositions, and enduring practical commitments are real aspects of who we are, and that, in this sense, a person him or herself is the concrete reality which his or her personal features articulate. Like the objects and states of affairs whose ‘natural’ features we are perceptually familiar with, and which we are able to conceptually articulate and convey linguistically, personal features are also intersubjectively accessible and intelligible as such—even if this intelligibility is something unintelligible from the standpoint of the naturalistic attitude. As this last point already implies, however, personal reality should be distinguished from natural reality, despite the two sharing a common, if  highly

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abstract, ontological structure and, correspondingly, being  equally  classifiable as basic modes of reality. As Husserl puts it, “The “substance” of minded beings (geistige „Substanz“) is something fundamentally different to the “substance” of things, whereby substance is here only another expression for “real object,” bearer of real features” (Hua IV/V 220/Hua IV 325, transl. modified [1913]). But perhaps the most complex and controversial aspect of Husserl’s distinction between the pure and the personal ego resides in his occasional statements in Ideen II that, in light of the correlative structural roles these two levels of the ego play within explicit acts of personal self-consciousness, the pure ego must be understood as constituting (itself as) personal subjectivity. To get a grip on this issue, we should turn to the 1913 partial draft of Ideen II.  In this text, Husserl stipulates that any phenomenologically legitimate talk of a self or ego presupposes a relationship to intentional consciousness. Accordingly, we can broadly say that the “ego”—whether considered purely or personally—“has the surrounding world over and against itself” and “carries out, with regard to what is first given in the surrounding world… certain active modes of comportment: it evaluates, it desires, it acts…. Likewise it comports itself as passive… finds itself influenced by persons… etc.” As he immediately continues, however, when we consider how such intentional experience manifests selfhood, the issue of whether we are concerned with the pure or the personal self becomes decisive: From the standpoint of pure consciousness all [such comportment] is reduced to intentional lived-experiences together with their concomitant intentional correlates, and with regard to all these lived experiences the pure ego is something identical. As subject of all such modes of comportment, however, the pure ego adopts a realising construal (realisierende Auffassung), one that can be implemented by a new act of the pure ego in relation to itself and to its past modes of comportment of which it is conscious in memory, or which, alternatively, one pure ego can implement in acts of comprehension in relation to another. That is to say, each pure ego, as identical subject of its pure consciousness, can be apprehended as something which has its determinately specific modes of relating to its surrounding world, its determinate ways of letting itself be motivated by it in active and passive kinds of comportment; and everyone who has developed to maturity construes themselves in this way, discovers themselves as person (Hua IV/V 221/Hua IV 326, transl. modified [1913]).

We have already seen one aspect of what such formulations are meant to show. Since the pure ego is formally present in each and every cogito, it follows that, in the very activity of reflection in which one’s own personhood is thematised, the pure ego is simultaneously manifest as the formal subject of the self-conscious reflecting itself. Moreover, a further condition for personal self-understanding is that the episodes of engaged intentional consciousness which I take to exhibit who I am qua person are implicitly conscious as formally mine, as experiences that are (or were) lived through and carried out by me (see the second and third sections of the second chapter). The pure ego is thus involved, in a double sense, in personal self-apprehension, since it is both evinced in the very act of apprehension itself (being the self which apprehends), and presupposed as the pure subject of whatever lived-experiences serve as its pre-given basis (being the self ‘through’ which the apprehension is directed); indeed, an intentional act only holds a claim to the status of

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self-­apprehension or self-construal in as much as the pure ego is involved in this twofold way. However, Husserl’s claim that an asymmetrical constitutive relation holds between the pure ego and the person can also be read in more problematic terms. After all, in suggesting that the person is the constitutive correlate of a self-­ apperception accomplished by the pure ego, Husserl seems to further imply that the personal self is merely a constituted phenomenon, and that transcendental subjectivity is therefore to be wholly characterised in terms of the pure ego. And indeed, on Crowell’s subtle and critical reading, it is precisely with this point that the constitutive analyses in Ideen II contain a certain tension. While achieving a number of radical insights that anticipate the work of such later transcendental-phenomenologists as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, Crowell’s Husserl is regrettably unable to fully grasp the transformative implications of such insights, due to his uncritical commitment to the postulate that transcendental subjectivity is reducible to absolute consciousness (Crowell 2013, p.  154).3 On the one hand, Crowell notes, Husserl recognises that “the constitution of the spiritual world – the world of expression and meaning” necessarily involves habituality, sociality, and practical immersion; in short, that such constitution is “a function of embodied egos and their practices” (Crowell 2013, p. 160). On the other hand, Crowell maintains that Husserl’s subjectivism hindered him from according the functional role played by embodied and socialised praxis in world-constitution an absolute and properly transcendental status. For if the embodied person is ultimately the result of a “realising apprehension” of the pure ego, then it would appear that personal subjectivity is exclusively a “transcendental product” rather than operating as constitutive (Crowell 2013, p. 163). While a discussion of the transcendentality of the person will have to wait until later (Sect. 7.2.2), of paramount importance at this stage is an assessment of

3  Notably, the references which Crowell gives to substantiate this particular claim in Ideen II lose some of their force when one consults Hua IV/V. Of the three passages which Crowell refers— from Hua IV 281, 289 and 179—the original manuscript for the first two cannot now be located. Moreover, as the Textkritische Anmerkungen of Hua IV testify (Hua IV 414), Husserl was apparently confused when reading the first passage in Landgrebe’s Fassung, inscribing a question mark in the margin. With regard to the second passage, Husserl reportedly wrote in the margins of Landgrebe’s draft that the “multiplicity of monads” which make up “absolute consciousness” must be considered as communicating (ibid.)—an emphasis which incidentally calls into question Crowell’s reading of Husserlian ‘absolute consciousness’ as solitary, disembodied, and disengaged (cf. Zahavi 2010b). While the absence of locatable original manuscripts in these two cases does not wholly rule out that they represent Husserl’s intended formulations, it does suggest that we should be wary of giving them too much interpretive weight. An original manuscript which is near-­ identical to the third passage Crowell refers to has been located (Hua IV/V 183–184), but notably it resides at the rather programmatic opening section of Husserl’s 1913 text on the personalistic attitude, and it thus predates many of the most penetrating analyses of Ideen II. Indeed, in later sections of the same manuscript, Husserl has already begun to offer a different view, claiming that “what gives nature its sense,” and is thus “absolute,” is not the pure ego but rather the concrete, and ultimately embodied and socialised, Geist (Hua IV/V 229/Hua IV 297–298 [1913])—formulations which Crowell notes but somewhat downplays (2013, p. 157).

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Crowell’s construal of the Husserlian personal self as something that is constituted simply through a self-apprehension carried out by the pure ego. Husserl does indeed occasionally illustrate the distinction between the pure and the personal ego by describing the former construing itself as the latter (Hua IV/V 221/Hua IV 326 [1913]).4 However, in other places he characterises the personal ego or spirit (Geist) as the subject which is not merely lain out and disclosed through acts of self-­ apprehension, but which is itself self-conscious. For instance, in a text dating from 1916 or 1917, Husserl asks: “A spirit (Geist) has self-consciousness—what role does that play? A soul does not need to have self-consciousness. What has selfconsciousness is a person, an ego (which are here the same)” (Hua IV/V 554 [1916/1917]).5 In a similar vein, Husserl states that the person in the pregnant sense should be sharply opposed to the empirical subject, being the dimension of subjectivity which responds to its pregiven surrounding world in a manner whose (ideal) character is one of freedom, self-responsibility, and answerability to rational norms (Hua IV/V 516, 572/Hua IV 257, 370 [1917, 1916/1917]). And in earlier manuscripts, he suggests that, rather than being merely something which we understand through reflective acts of self-interpretation, the personal self is originally a “unity of self-­preservation,” a style that pervades my way of actively thinking, feeling and acting, and which is “necessarily developing and developed” (Hua IV/V 489, 551 [1910–1912, 1916/1917]). Seen in this light, the pure and the personal ego are not opposed as the apprehending is to the apprehended, but rather converge as the subject of mental activity: “The unity of the spirit as person, as individuality, is unity of self-­preservation in the surrounding world, the one which is surrounding world for the ego who acts in it, the ego of freedom. This ego is initially pure ego, something identical in a course of cogitationes, and the cogitationes include construals and positings in which things are there for the ego” (Hua IV/V 492 [1910–1912]). More precisely, and as this formulation already attests, the personal ego is not merely the pure ego. Whereas the pure ego is ubiquitously present as the subject implementing and living through every occurrent intentional act, the personal ego is directly manifest only in experiential contexts where the engaged subject displays a certain habitual depth or motivational character. But Husserl nevertheless resists the assumption that personal character only manifests itself at the level of thematic self-understanding. We can make more sense of this position by building upon the account of the distinctive givenness of convictions and opinions offered in the previous chapter. As we saw there, Husserl suggests that the distinction between pre-reflective and reflective self-consciousness as it pertains to experiential episodes cannot be simply 4  It is worth noting that in this passage Husserl also characterises “the personal ego” as “the ego constituting itself as comphrehensive unity” (ibid., emphasis mine). Furthermore, one of the two passages that Crowell refers to as exemplifying this claim (Hua IV 354) is absent from the new edition of Ideen II, despite the pages immediately surrounding it being present (cf. Hua IV/V 556). 5  When using the term ‘Seele’ (soul) here, I take it that Husserl means to designate subjectivity when regarded from an impersonal and naturalistic point of view, as a mere bearer of typical psychophysical and intra-psychological regularities.

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mapped on to our abiding egoic stances. The mere advent of living through an experiential episode already involves a most basic experiencing subject, for whom the lived-experience now transpiring is first-personally given within a temporally articulated experiential horizon (see the second section of the second  chapter). Furthermore, in every actually implemented intentional act this temporalising self-­ affection is concretely intertwined with an element of egoic engagement, such that the intentional experience is phenomenologically characterised as one carried out by, as well as first-personally manifest for, the experiencing subject (see the third section of the second chapter). But in immediately adopting an earlier formed judgement, in the reliving of a familiar emotion, or in honouring a resolution, what engages in such habitual comportment is not merely a pure ego—which is not to deny that a pure ego is present and can be reflectively discerned here—but a more concretely historical and personal I. While the personal depth of the subject engaging itself in such moments is often something largely implicit, there are certain circumstances wherein our habitual activity explicitly manifests an enduring attitude: a feature of me which transgresses the living present, residing just as much in past accomplishments as in my present engagement. In such cases, we can indeed say that an ego of personal character becomes manifest on the pre-reflective level, that the self explicitly alive in the enduring and habitually sustained stance includes, but is irreducible to, an empty and formal agent. And this is the characteristic feature of the peculiar experience, which evidently fascinated Husserl, of memorial acceptance or appropriation (see the third section of the sixth chapter). Moreover, it is not only in the context of this specific kind of (self-)experience that the personal self resists identification with the correlate of a reality-affording self-apprehension. Husserl ultimately maintains that the habitual depths peculiar to the personal ego are not simply the correlates of mundane self-understanding, since they can also be examined, particularly within the framework of a genetic phenomenology, as the very habitual functioning of the transcendental ego (see Sect. 7.2.2). As was already intimated in the previous chapter, I take it that, for Husserl, the functioning of active habitualities, and in particular the appropriative-memorial experience of my already having a position on something, constitutes the most primitive form of personal self-acquaintance. The first traces of personal self-­ consciousness emerge through the awareness of my thinking, feeling, and acting sustaining an attitude, an awareness which is not the end-point of a self-observation but an appropriative avowal of an earlier-formed stance. One consequence of this thought is that a more active, thematic, and reflective mode of personal self-­ understanding is ultimately a way of explicating myself as a subject of abiding stances, an explication which involves reliving my experiential history and shedding light on the motivational contexts through which my attitudes—and myself as their (personal) subject—have come to be. Crucially, as we shall see in the next section, this more reflective variety of (personal) self-understanding is not, and could not be, a wholly solitary affair. On the one hand, the development of egoic attitudes takes place within an interpersonal context, in that it presupposes relations of mutual recognition with other personal egos, the appropriation of their attitudes, and my thereby entering into a (or, initially, ‘their’) shared world of cultural

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meaning. On the other, the activity of personal self-understanding itself aims to understand my individual case through the employment of types and concepts that apply to persons in a more general fashion. In this way, personal self-understanding is not merely a survey of my inner life, but aims at (my) intersubjective personal reality; it aims at explicating the nexus of attitudes which are uniquely lived as mine, but in a way that is in principle intelligible to and recognisable by other persons who can empathetically grasp me as an embodied person (Sect. 7.2).

7.1.2  P  ersonal Style and Self-consciousness: Association, Induction, and Envisaging For Husserl, then, it is important to emphasise that personal self-apprehension ultimately aims to thematise, explicate, and understand features of experiential life that are already evinced on the pre-reflective level, scrutinising them reflectively and tracing their interrelations, developmental contours, and motivational contexts. As has already been emphasised, the central features which such self-apprehension discloses—and those which characterise it as a form of personal self-­understanding— are the habitualities operative in such thoroughly self-involving activities as thinking, emoting, and acting. In a text probably written during the mid-twenties, Husserl succinctly articulates the basic construal of self which personal self-consciousness targets and seeks to understand in its particularity: I as subject of my decisions and my position-takings, my resolutions (Entschiedenheiten) that have arisen from original, from instituting (stiftenden) position-takings, my fixed positions on these or those questions; and with this is connected: I as subject of motivations in the specific sense, that I let myself be motivated by whatever types of motives in such and such a way, i.e., to take such and such a position (Hua IV/V 520/Hua IV 329, transl. modified [mid-1920s]).

As this text emphasises, when thematising myself as a “personal subject of actual and possible decisions” with a “distinctive character (Eigenart)” (Hua IV/V 522/ Hua IV 331–332, transl. modified [mid-1920s]), I specify the manner in which my position-taking acts are both deeply habitual and freely enacted decisions in which I continuously articulate and form myself. But the important point for now is the link which Husserl draws between personal self-apprehension and individual ‘style.’ As he immediately continues: As this subject, I have my more or less fixed style, although I do not retain my position-­ takings in all particulars, a style which necessarily expresses itself, necessarily puts associations into play, necessarily constitutes apperceptions about myself in my life, so that I have always constituted and continue to constitute of myself, according to my distinctive character, an inductive “outer presentation” (Hua IV/V 520/Hua IV 329-330, transl. modified [mid-1920s]).

What does Husserl mean when, in this dense but important passage, he describes self-understanding in terms of the emergence of associative self-apperceptions that

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serve to express one’s own individual style? On the one hand, he is clearly emphasising that not all forms of self-apperception require me to adopt a detached, reflective, or “theoretical” attitude towards myself.6 A person’s sense of his or her enduring style is not fully identifiable with, and need not even require, a conceptually articulated judgement in which specific features of the self are isolated and identified. Rather, it is minimally and basically present in a passive process which provides an evidential basis for any such judgement: namely, the emergence of a complex of (self-)apperceptions in which certain episodes or features of my life become passively associated. I take it that what Husserl is referring to here, at least in part, is the familiar experience of an activity of one’s own bringing to mind certain past enactments of one’s own as being ‘similar’ to it. Consider, for instance, that my failure to intervene in a witnessed act of aggression recalls pasts occasions in which I have acted timidly; that my current desire for chocolate reminds me of my earlier-­ formed commitment to only indulge after lunch; or that an impassioned defence, before surprised companions, of a political movement brings to mind earlier years when I cared more about such matters. The connection between such episodes is not one entirely constituted through association, resting also upon the self-­ temporalisation of the stream of consciousness, as well as the habitual subsistence of my attitudes (and the appropriative mode of self-awareness which sometimes accompanies this). But such cases do involve the functioning of association, in as much as I do not actively seek out and discover the similar past episode; rather, the remembered episode merely emerges as similar, as if propelled from the depths of my past. But what of Husserl’s claim that these passive-associative apperceptions in some way ‘express’ my enduring ‘style’? To address this issue we should first get clear about what Husserl has in mind with this talk of individual style. As Husserl makes clear in this manuscript, my style in this sense is one which “I have as subject of position-takings and habitual convictions”; that is, it is primarily a matter of that way of acting decisively, valuing emotively, and avowing my beliefs with conviction which we considered in the previous chapter (Hua IV/V 522/Hua IV 331 [mid-­1920s]). Importantly, in thematising such habitual character under the heading of style, Husserl evidently means to suggest that it is not something originally correlated with a judgement or evaluation which picks out stable character traits and predicates them of a person—indeed, as he notes elsewhere, the description of a person’s individual style is exactly a “difficult matter” (Hua IV/V 585 [1915/1917]). We saw in an earlier chapter that the perceptual style of a material thing comprises a domain of sense which surpasses and precedes judicative articulation (see the fifth section of the fourth chapter), and this applies all the more here, since the uniqueness and ambiguity of a person’s style downright evades the generality of descriptive conceptualisation. As we shall see shortly, Husserl does maintain that personal style is something which can get to know (kennenlernen), both in our own case and

6  For Husserl’s descriptions of reflection, in the sense of disinterested self-thematisation, as a theoretical attitude, see: Hua IV/V 592–593/Hua IV 14–15 [1913].

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that of others. However, this is not a matter of simply perceiving or judging the person to be the bearer of distinct and readily identifiable features; rather, it involves gradually acquiring a familiarity with the personal subject in her specificity and historicity, a familiarity which can only be approximately expressed through the predication of generic character traits to him or her. Moreover, while, for Husserl, personal style peaks in a subject’s habitual way of actively taking a position (stellungnehmen), it would be misleading to construe it as disconnected from the habitualities through which a person comes into a more passive form of contact with a meaningful world, as well as from the facticity of her particular bodily being and the social and material surroundings in which she is embedded. Indeed, it seems intuitive to think that the individual style of a human subject characterises more than merely an innermost nexus of deeply held attitudes, the peculiarity of a person’s way of being also infusing her bodily habits and sensibility. This intuition was not foreign to Husserl, as this list of suggestive questions makes clear: Those habits which pertain to the ego in its way of comporting itself (e.g. the habit of drinking a glass of wine in the evening) are peculiarities of the subject, acquired peculiarities; but are they features of its individuality? Do not the latter features rather lie on the side of the authentic activities of the ego? And how are we to distinguish individual features—those which characterise mental (geistig) individuality—from other features? Or should we after all say that what comprises individuality is the total style and habitus of the subject, which runs, as a harmonious unity, through all of its modes of comportment, all of its activities and passivities; and to which the entire psychic subsoil, in providing the material composition, contributes? (Hua IV/V 585 [1915/1917]; cf. Hua IV 277)

As this passage nicely evinces, there is a certain tension at the heart of Husserl’s reflections on this matter, which, on the one hand, locate personal style solely in those modes of comportment which actively engage personal subjectivity (in the specific sense discussed in the last chapter), and on the other, recognise that a person’s unique style can also manifest itself in other, non-attitudinal and decision-­ independent, modes of comportment. (To name just a few examples of the latter, consider a subject’s distinctive way of being affected and what invites or demands of her a response; passively emerging thoughts or desires that contrast with the stances that her thoughts and actions typically uphold, and which may even elicit inner resistance; and those ‘arational’ but not entirely ‘impersonal’ bodily activities, which, for instance, merely actualise urges and tendencies, more-or-less involuntarily express affective states, or which evince little more than one’s passive appropriation of the typical bodily style of a specific person or social group.) Is Husserl here merely oscillating between two seemingly impertinent philosophical positions, even arbitrary definitions; or might it rather be that this tension is itself philosophically important and can be put to positive theoretical use? That there may be something to the latter thought becomes clear when we note the deep interrelation and interdependence holding between a subject’s nexus of position-taking acts and her typical way of perceiving and being bodily. As we already saw in the previous chapter, Husserl repeatedly emphasises that personal individuality and freedom is something evinced in the way an embodied subject

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responsively takes positions towards its surrounding world. Crucially, this surrounding world is one which is first constituted through the functioning of ‘pre-­ personal’ modes of perceptual, affective, and practical intentionality; it is, after all, a perspectivally given horizon of things, the perceptual styles of which both affect us as pleasant or discomforting and arouse in us tendencies to engage with them. That is, my surrounding world is, in its genetically prior and ever-present stratum, one which I share with all creatures to the degree that they approximate my bodily constitution, such that a degree of intersubjective concordance can be reached between the typical style of my sensibility, primitive affects, and inclinations, and those of my companions.7 And were it not for the typically stable and harmonious style of such pre-personal world-constitution, then the kind of motivational situation which demands settling through position-taking acts would simply not arise, since no worldly events would be pregiven for judicative construal, motivating of emotive valuation, and demanding of decisive action. In a relatively early manuscript where Husserl discusses the understanding of other persons, he puts the point as follows: If I seek to understand [another’s] motivation and, with this, [his or her] individuality, then I must also be able to empathetically understand the underlying basis of the motivation, that is, the motivating. And must one not say that the person is not only the subject of act-­ motivation and the subject of those of his features which are characterised by this motivation, insofar as motivation presupposes an underlying basis, one which changes in dependence upon “external” circumstances, such that [in understanding another person] I must also get to know the relevant dependencies? (Hua IV/V 290 n. 2 [1910–1912])

Over the years, Husserl would begin to refine this picture. In a manuscript likely dating from 1915 or 1917, he notes that many of our (‘pre-attitudinal’) inclinations are not unrelated to our personal past, but are rather habitual in as much as they have a genesis in our subjective history; and that our practical tendencies “are not only there and operative (they precisely tend me), but I also know that they have acquired their “strength” from repeated yielding. I remember that I have often succumbed, and experience that they have become stronger through repetition (or that resistance to them has become ever harder, that succumbing is ever more likely)” (Hua IV/V 578 [1915–1917]). Husserl’s point here is not merely that my embodied tendencies become, as it were, ‘personalised’ through my reflectively accepting and encouraging those desires and instincts which I rationally endorse while diminishing the force of others through self-restraint. Rather, his thought is that, while some of our immediate inclinations are instinctive in the sense that they lack genetic intelligibility, many others have arisen for, and become sedimented deep within, agential subjectivity in and through the events of its prior practical and affective engagement—whether these events haunt the subject as traumatic or satisfying, as disheartening or enlightening. Moreover, not only is the case that my nexus of 7  I take it that this is part of Husserl is intimating when, in a marginal note intended to expand a sentence beginning “The world of things is, at its lower level, intersubjective material nature”, he writes: “Sensuous feelings and drives interweave themselves with sensuous experience.” (Hua IV/V 196 n. 1 [1913]). See also the fourth section of the fifth chapter.

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inclinations is dependent upon my history of (reason-responsive) personal engagement, but also that “an irrational residue always plays a role” in personal agency. “For instance, the distinctive character of this subject shows itself already in what originally stimulates or allures him, insofar as not all allures are originally effective for all subjects in the same way” (Hua IV/V 579 [1915–1917]). Since neither the habitualities of egoic activity, nor those of embodied ‘passivity,’ owe their origins solely to their respective domains, since the development and inner intelligibility of egoic style is shaped by my passive-habitual familiarity with the world and vice versa, it thus seems evident that a construal of personal style purely in terms of the content of one’s operative position-taking acts would be inadmissibly abstract and one-sided. On the other hand, Husserl would insist that it is only with the (higher-­ order) emergence of a habitual way of taking a position—or at least, as in the intriguing case of young infants, when we recognise dispositions for the futural emergence of such position-takings (Hua IV/V 552–553 [1916/1917]; cf. Hua IV 349, 253)—that it makes sense for us to think of a subject’s (active and passive) comportment as manifesting personal style. In other words, who I am is primarily a matter of my active history, and yet it must be acknowledged that this history is throughout suffused with and conditioned by passivity. With this in mind, we can now see that the clusters of associative self-awareness introduced earlier function as ‘expressive of personal style’ to the degree that they begin to reveal the habitual contours that tie specific episodes of my personal life to my broader personal history. In certain of my active accomplishments and passive affections recalling and becoming associated with others—and thereby obliquely manifesting me as an individual being who endures within and between them—I already have a tacit, fractional, and fractured form of personal self-consciousness. But what of Husserl’s claim in the earlier-quoted passage that such primitive modes of personal self-apperception function together to bring about in subjectivity an external, or inductive, presentation of itself? Husserl’s thought appears to be here that, while a multiplicity of self-apperceptions passively arise, many of which may be conflicting and divergent, at least some of these apperceptions are themselves integrated into a unitary construal of oneself as a being of concordant and enduring style. The features of one’s own active life which are picked out and unified in and through this Vorstellung are retained through sedimentation, and this leads to the development of a domain of sense that articulates who I know myself to be, one that continues to be enriched, and occasionally partially cancelled out or modified, with the emergence and integration of new associative self-apperceptions. In this way, a person who has reached maturity will be familiar with him or herself to a certain degree, and what this familiarity involves is a grasp of oneself as a “unity of determinations,” of “positions and other peculiar characters in them”; a grasp of one’s operative convictions, emotions, and practical commitments, and their developmental history, as articulations of who one is (Hua IV/V 522/Hua IV 331–332 [mid-­1920s]). What makes this self-familiarity inductive, moreover, is that while it takes its evidential basis in associative apperceptions regarding one’s past modes of comportment, it claims to gain insight into ‘who I currently am,’ and not merely

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‘who I was,’ into my habitual character as something still operative, and thus into something which is clearly relevant to how I will act in the future. However, what can be accomplished by such self-understanding, in as much as it remains solely inductive, has serious limits. After all, as Husserl notes, as a personal subject of actual and possible position-takings I am “a unity not based on mere association but preceding it”, and this is exactly what makes me “the one that I am, not only as nature, but as a position-taking ego” (Hua IV/V 522/Hua IV 331–332, transl. modified [mid-1920s]). While my present and future enactments are in some way dependent upon my habitual character, it is not the case that I can acquire any definitive knowledge of how they will unfold simply by means of knowing my character. And this deficiency is not simply due to a limit in one’s factual knowledge, as if one’s knowledge of a future action was limited just by one’s not yet having experienced that action, leading to a consequent inability to specify its factual nature. What makes one’s futural and present actions resistant to inductive prediction is not simply that they are occurrences that we do not yet know enough about, but that our most basic awareness of them is as things that we can do, as issues that we will settle actively as opposed to events that we can observe or predict. In this sense, inductive prediction concerning our current and futural actions is not merely undetermined but inappropriate, in that it fails to address the fundamental issue of what it is that we are to do, and which motives we are to take in doing it. Similarly, to think that an associative grasp of our past life could provide compelling evidence for a prediction of which convictions we will accept or reject, or which emotional episodes we will undergo, would be to underestimate the extent to which intellective and affective engagements enjoy a certain spontaneity and creativity. In thinking, feeling, and acting, we face up to a situation and actively respond to it, and only when we can subsequently obtain some distance from this moment of decision (broadly construed) does it appear relevant to characterise it as the product of a pre-delineated character. Husserl would thus be sympathetic with Sartre’s observation (in probably the best-known section of L’Être et le néant) that only when under the allure of mauvaise foi do we pretend that a unifying self-understanding, rooted in the typical features of our past doings, could disclose the course which our present and futural comportment must take—and that so pretending is to absurdly and insincerely affirm “transcendence as being facticity” (Sartre 2018, pp. 99). However, Husserl insists that this should not constitute the final word on the issue of the relation between self-understanding and present and futural activity. After all, not only is it the case that an inductive self-apprehension, rooted in the ways I have acted in the past, feigns the solidification of my current and future decisions; there are also cases in which such a self-apprehension can lead me to pretend that I will perform actions that I, being the person that I am, really ‘know’ myself unable to perform. Suppose that I compulsively crave and indulge in chocolate, but that I have, in past situations, typically or even universally resisted a repeatedly occurring and overwhelming desire to eat chocolate for breakfast, and that I have ‘drawn the line’ here, not without substantial difficulty, in order to protect my health and social image from the potentially damaging consequences of acting upon that desire. And suppose that,

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one evening, somebody presents me with a particularly delicious box of chocolates. In asking myself whether I will find my habitual resistance to this desire crumbling in the face of temptation tomorrow morning, I can gain some optimism by saying to myself, ‘I have since managed to remain strong all of those previous mornings, I can do so once more.’ But crucially, I can also in some way recognise that this line of thought is in fact mere self-deception, that whatever I have done in the past, and irrespective of whatever consequences it has on my figure and reputation, I will be unable to resist my desire to gorge on chocolates with tomorrow’s morning coffee. Here, it seems that my “empirical hypothesis” regarding what I will do finds itself at odds with and undercut by a more primitive understanding of my projected future actions. I can, in a non-empirical way, “also see that I, as I am factually, cannot summon this power, that it will be beyond me”, and I can thus predict, in a non-empirical manner and with a degree of certainty, that “if the occasion arises” my powers of resistance to this future action “will surely be found wanting and will certainly be overcome by the passive power” of allure exerted by the tempting action (Hua IV/V 518/Hua IV 328 [mid-1920s]). As this example suggests, we can frequently gain a closer insight into how our personal activity would unfold, in possible situations of the future, by a peculiar kind of imaginative (quasi-)‘seeing’ of how we would react in such situations, than we can by simply reflecting upon how we have actually acted in past situations that have been similar in certain respects. It is at least sometimes possible for us, then, to imagine ourselves in situations which are, at this stage, merely possible, and to thereby (quasi-)‘see’ how we would face up to them; and while such an activity does not yield the same of evidence for personal self-understanding that flows from reflection upon our past (in that it thematises not an actual response of ours but only an imaginary one), it nevertheless gives us some preliminary insight into the futural horizon of our personal lives, a horizon which, of course, implicates ourselves in the toil of upholding and developing ourselves throughout changing circumstances. To this degree, envisaging how one would act in possible situations can function as a genuinely informative contrast to an inductive self-understanding that predicts one’s personal future on the basis of its past. On the other hand, we should evidently be wary of treating such an ability as a crystal ball through which we could actually see our future lives. For to do so would not only risk fostering in ourselves a sense of dread and powerlessness over our own future; it would also be to treat our future actions in a way which is only appropriate to those of our past, as settled matters that can be (fallibly) reflectively accessed rather than open possibilities which we must, in the future, identify with actively. Indeed, what interests Husserl here is not primarily the degree of accuracy possessed by such predictions—which are quite clearly not apodictic assertions— but of the very fact that I can form predictions of this kind in a way which is not wholly arbitrary, both in my own case and for others (Hua IV/V 522/Hua IV 331) [mid-1920s]). And I take it that part of his interest in this envisaging lies in what it reveals more generally about personal self-consciousness and interpersonal understanding—namely, that understanding the action of a person requires ‘seeing’ the motivational context as faced by its agent, and thereby taking account of what strikes the agent as decisive in its accomplishment. As we shall see later, this line of

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thought has important implications for interpersonal understanding. But at this stage, we should consider a further form of personal self-understanding, one that, to my mind, goes deeper than the passive-associative, inductive, and imaginative forms considered so far.

7.1.3  Narrative Self-understanding We have seen that seeking to understand an actual or possible action of one’s own requires explicating the motivational situation in which that action was (or would be) embedded, by attending to the relevant worldly events, evaluative meanings, commitments, inclinations, potential ends and means for action, etc., to which my decision responded (or would respond).8 Especially when I compare my action, in its concrete motivational nexus, to other actions accomplished by me, I can begin to glimpse something of my typical motivational style, in that the kind of situations which function for me as motivating for certain kinds of action—or what Husserl also calls the circumstances (Umstände) of my motivational style (Hua IV/V 579 [1915–1917])—can come into view, shedding light on the enduring cares and concerns embedded in my pre-reflective agential life, and generating an informative and valuable form of self-comprehension. When carried out with regard to oneself, this typically involves a reflective form of thought and communicative speech concerned with describing, with detailed reference to concrete cases, my typical ways of thinking, emoting, and acting. Such a mode of reflective thought employs general concepts, appropriated from my linguistic community, so as to explicate and interpret the associative self-apperceptions that already bind together those of my past activities and passivities which exhibit a typical similarity (Hua IV/V 572, 457–458 [1916/1917]; cf. Hua IV 370–371). Yet it is tempting to object that such a mode of understanding only gets us so far, in as much as it simply adopts or ‘assumes’ the current agential outlook of its subject, thus treating my operative nexus of attitudes and tendencies as brute and inexplicable givens. That is, the account it offers of why I acted in the way I did does little more than explicate how the worldly situation that my decision responds to— or a generic kind of worldly situation that elicits a generic kind of response from me—is taken account of by my habitual way of deciding. But a more comprehensive understanding of personal action must shed light on the specific personal history from which (to again exemplify with the case of action) pregiven motivational situation, decision, and action emerge, thereby making possible an understanding of this emergence itself as a phenomenon deeply embedded in a living personal history. As Husserl puts it, “through gradual experience of a subject, I get to know empirically the distinctive character (Eigenart) of its motivations; I understand this

8  In a passage to which we will later return (Sect. 7.4), Husserl formulates this point acutely (Hua IV/V 578 [1915–1917].)

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subject in its comportment under given cases, insofar as I know through experience that he lets himself be motivated in this way under circumstances of this kind. But, of course, I first have a deeper understanding only when I can clarify the ‘origin’ of this manner of motivation; when I can understand the subject himself” (Hua IV/V 579 [1915–1917]). To put the point differently, a richer understanding of my way of acting—an understanding which clarifies not only why I acted as I did, but also why such situations strike me as demanding a certain way of being inclined, of deciding, and of acting—requires support from a certain kind of autobiographical reflection. It requires me to weave a ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ about my own personal history, one which does not only explicate, through the description of particular life-episodes, the motivational style which currently prevails ‘in’ me, but which also describes the lived events implicated in the changes my personality has undergone over the years, as well as my way of living prior to the onset of those changes. It is here that we reach the thought that the ongoing development of a personal narrative constitutes a novel and important form of personal self-understanding. While it should be fairly evident from the previous chapter that Husserl would resist the claim, excitedly pronounced today by some, that the self is something first generated through narratives (a resistance to which I will return below), I take it that his account ultimately tends towards the conclusion that narratives furnish an important and novel form of self-understanding. Not only does he emphasise that biography and history already constitute a kind of pre-philosophical familiarity with the “infinitely rich field of immanent motivations,” by virtue of their concern with rendering ““intelligible” the psychic development of a personality” (Hua IV/V 454 [1916/1917]).9 He also repeatedly emphasises that egoic style and personal individuality is a matter best disclosed, not by a fixed focus on my currently operative stances, but through engaging in the infinite and fallible task of seeking to bring alive my developmental history, through a mode of reflection fed by memory, imagination, and communicative understanding (Hua IV/V 455–456, 459–460, 474, 489–490, 531 [1916/1917, 1916/1917, 1910–1912, 1910–1912, 1917]; cf. Hua IV 275–276, 380–381, 338, 393). Moreover, as the following passages from Phänomenologische Psychologie and Cartesianische Meditationen testify, Husserl was certainly sensitive to the thought that getting to know one’s personal style is not

9  Husserl also stresses that biography plays a central role for the human sciences, as a consequence of the thematic field of the latter encompassing, along with the social reality instituted through interpersonal relations, the persons themselves as units of intelligibility (Hua IV/V 484–485/Hua IV 390 [1910/1912]). In a later manuscript, Husserl again notes the central role of “developmental morphology” for the human sciences, before emphasising that, while one “can intuitively bring alive a personality in its work and in its creations without making any sort of scientific claim”, there is a sense in which truly understanding a person’s motivations already requires and accomplishes so much that “in the corresponding description there is already a scientific understanding” (Hua IV/V 572/Hua IV 371 [1916/1917]). Here it should not be forgotten that Husserl means by the Geisteswissenschaften those (empirical and eidetic) disciplines which seek to systematically understand concrete human beings, not as causally determined natural realities, but as embodied, enworlded, and socialised—and (at least ideally) rational and free—subjectivities (see, e.g., Hua IV/V 568 [1916/1917]).

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limited to recognising the mere endurance of certain attitudes, but ultimately involves acknowledging the (personal, as well as pure) ipseity that remains constant throughout the temporal fluctuation in one’s convictions and decisions: The ego has its mode of continuing through time as an enduring ego amid the fluctuation of its acts, and thus of its convictions, its decisions. But it does not merely endure on in the manner as it were of an empty stage for such fluctuation, or better, in the manner of a mere substrate of this fluctuation. Rather, what we call “I” in the proper sense (abstracting from the communicative relation to a you or we) means a personal individuality. This concept implies an identically persisting unity constituted amid the fluctuation of decisions. It is somewhat analogous to the unity of a real thing vis-à-vis the fluctuation of the thing’s conditions. In the way in which the ego lets itself be motivated to its fluctuating decisions with relation to the surrounding world of which it is conscious, and thus in the particular character of its decisions themselves and of their connections, the ego preserves an individual, recognisable style (einen individuellen und herauserkennbaren Stil). The ego-pole has not only its fluctuating sediments but a unity constituted in this style throughout their fluctuation. The ego has its individuality, its individual total character which identically permeates all its decisions and resolutions; as an individual character it has peculiarities, special features which are called properties of character (Hua IX 214-215, transl. modified). I myself, who am persisting in my abiding will, become changed if I strike out my decisions or repudiate my deeds. The persisting, the temporal enduring, of such egoic features, or the peculiar way the ego itself changes in respect of them, manifestly is not a continuous filling of immanent time with lived experiences—just as the abiding ego himself, as the pole of abiding ego-features, is not a lived experience or a continuity of lived experiences, even though, with such habitual determining features, he is indeed related back to the stream of lived experiences. Since, by his own active genesis, the ego constitutes himself as identical substrate of enduring ego-features, he constitutes himself also as a steadfast and persistent personal ego—in a maximally broad sense, which allows us to speak also of sub-human persons. Though convictions are, in general, only relatively abiding and have their modes of alteration (through modalisation of the active positions—for example, striking out or negation, the nullifying of their validity), the ego shows, in such alterations, an enduring style with a unity of identity throughout all of them: a personal character (Hua I 101, transl. modified).

One of the central thoughts delineated in these passages is that my individual style or personal character is not, after all, wholly defined by the subsistence of my position-­takings. The identity I have as a personal ego spans beyond those convictions, emotions, and resolutions which I am currently in the habit of avowing; indeed, it properly resides in a style which spans my entire personal life, a ‘character’ which my current nexus of sedimented positions exhibit only when placed in relation to my earlier positions and those still yet to come. We can add to this that the elucidation of this style becomes all the richer once we relate the fluctuation of my opinions, affective valuations, and practical ideals, to changes in the motivational situations tied to those attitudes (changes in the worldly events whose perceptual or judicative acceptance they presuppose, the inclinations and desires which they honour or resist, the institutional frameworks in which they respond to or are embedded, etc.), as well as to alterations in the kind of exposure I have had to other

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persons, and to the development or deterioration in me of self-critical habitualities.10 To this degree, it seems highly plausible that the most adequate way to explicate the life-history in which such a style resides is through narrative thinking or speech, and that Arendt and Ricoeur are hence correct in suggesting that the best way to answer questions which concern the “who” of personal action is to tell the story of a life (Arendt 1998, p. 186; Ricoeur 1988, p. 246). However, Husserl would also insist that the import of such narrative understanding is not to construct a self ex nihilo; rather, narrative self-understanding already presupposes—amongst other things—both the streaming self-manifestation of experiential life, and the memorial accessibility of one’s past modes of thinking, emoting, and acting as evincing motivated stances that I either continue to accept or have since given up. That is, it presupposes the functioning of active and passive habitualities, from whence the inclinations embedded in personal agency originate, and a minimal form of personal self-consciousness already flows. To return to a formulation citied in the previous chapter: “If I knew nothing of association and habit, then knowledge of the course of the lived experience of subjectivity, viewing this course comprehensively (Überschau), would be of no avail” (Hua IV/V 579 [1915–1917]). In short, autobiographical narratives offer a highly apt framework for analysing and understanding our attitudes, by locating them within the life-history in which their inner intelligibility, as well as temporal and motivational interrelations, can be thematised. But since the habitualities themselves are not first manifest through narratives, but rather originate in and live away in pre-reflective agential life, it follows that narrativity does not first constitute the personal self, but merely provides a highly appropriate medium for its thematic articulation.

7.1.4  Summary As I hope to have made clear in this section, the analyses of selfhood and self-­awar eness developed by Husserl in Ideen II allow us to distinguish a variety of different levels of personal self-constitution. The first traces of personal self-consciousness originate in the formal ipseity of the pure ego, and more specifically in the habitual subsistence and memorial appropriation of attitudes characteristic of (pre-reflective) personal life. Based upon this, a second level of personal self-consciousness consists in the associative self-apperceptions which tie together certain episodes, stances, or tendencies evinced in my personal life with others that are similar to and

 Husserl himself emphasises the necessity of a change in motives for the abandonment of a position-­taking act to be “rational,” and suggestively writes that in such a case “I am not unfaithful to myself, I am constantly the same”; though he also recognises the possibility that a fluctuation in Stellungnahme can occur through the blind following of others (Hua IV/V 352, 354–356 [1914–1916]; cf. Hua IV 112). He also discusses the relationship between personal development and the inculcation of self-critical habitualities in the Kaizo articles of the 1920s (e.g., Hua XXVII 29–30).

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recall them. This in its turn provides a motivational basis for a more inductive form of self-understanding, which forms conclusions about ‘who I am’ on the basis of the typical way of responding evinced in the previous levels. Another form of self-­ understanding, which can sometimes serve to correct the excesses of induction, involves an imaginative envisaging of how I would ‘face up to’ possible situations in the future. Finally, I have suggested that a deeper form of self-understanding involves reflectively comprehending my personal life by means of autobiographical narrative, and in this way situating particular life-episodes, and even my enduring attitudes, within a developmental history. In addition, we have seen that these modes of self-consciousness are best understood as ways of giving expression to a personal ‘style,’ where this designates an ambiguous form of ipseity that pervades one’s active position-takings, but that only becomes fully manifest once one appreciates the changes that one’s opinions have undergone in the course of one’s life-history.

7.2  The Person as Interpersonal We are now in a position to consider whether, and in what sense, personal subjectivity is to be considered an interpersonal accomplishment, that is, to assess in what way the person might depend, in its very being, upon relations to other personal subjects. In addressing this issue, we can make use of our earlier analyses insofar as they have allowed us to formulate a variety of distinctions pertinent to the theme of personal subjectivity. As we have already seen, getting to know one’s distinctive personal style or unique character (Stil, Eigenart) is a matter best achieved through modes of thinking and speaking with a narrative structure; and yet this reflective mode of self-understanding rests upon a mode of self-acquaintance that emerges in and through the pre-reflective engagement of personal life. With this in mind, I will first consider the extent to which the reflective activity of personal self-­understanding rests upon a social context, before leading back to the question of whether and how sociality is implicated in and makes possible pre-reflective personal life itself.

7.2.1  Self-understanding and Interpersonal Relations I argued earlier in this chapter that the account Husserl offers of personal selfhood lends support to the thesis that narrative thinking or speech provides an appropriate medium for personal self-understanding. In narrating the history of my life, not only can I evoke the habitual character which manifests itself in concrete cases of my thinking and speaking, emoting and valuing, and deciding and acting. I may also shed light on how such habitual character has mutated in and through what ordinary English language would term ‘personal experience.’ As we have also seen, however, Husserl would reject the thought that the act of narrating the experiential life intimately displayed in one’s memories and ongoing experiences literally brings one’s

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personal self into being. In addition to the argument offered in the preceding section, we can now consider a second Husserlian objection to such a strongly narrativist view of the self.11 Were the strongly narrativist thesis true, then the difference between the mode of acquaintance I enjoy with respect to my own personal life and the familiarity I have with the life of another person could not yet be understood as evincing a difference between self and other, this difference only emerging through the formation of two distinct narratives. I take it that this thought is not an easy one to stomach, at least to pre-philosophical thought. For what could appear more innocent and unproblematic than the suggestion that the mental strain of writing a certain book was one lived through uniquely by someone (its author, and perhaps, in a different sense, those close to the author at the time of writing), while the boredom or apprehension it elicits in a reader was lived through uniquely by someone else? Of course, the narrativist can respond at this stage by agreeing that the stresses and strains undergone by an author were lived experientially only by one self, while the task of understanding the book was left to others—it is just that this thought has meaning only at a narrative level of description. But this way of thinking underplays or overlooks the manner in which the difference between self and other pervades pre-reflective experience. Against the strong narrativist, who is committed to the opposed direction of explanation, Husserl would argue that a personal narrative can enable self-understanding because the narrator employs it to explicate that experiential life which, before any narrating has begun, she lives as her own; while narrative can further interpersonal understanding because it is employed (or listened to) to render intelligible another experiential life, that is, because it is of aid in explicating an experiential history with which the narrator is, at best, familiar empathetically. However, this insistence should not be understood as stipulating that narrative understanding is, or could be, an entirely private or solipsistic accomplishment, as if it led us to a shielded domain aloof to the public world or uncontaminated by others. As we will see later, the most basic reason for this is that pre-reflective personal life already evades characterisation in such terms. But first, we should consider the sense in which personal self-understanding is intrinsically connected to sociality. To begin with, Husserl argues that the reflective application of general concepts in thinking or speaking about one’s own mental life already presupposes a degree of intersubjective contact. The concepts I use to describe my own personal life implicitly refer to other persons to which they could jointly apply, and in applying them to my own mental life I have already taken that life to be one recognisable by actual or possible others, as having a certain publicity or worldliness. As Husserl puts it in the 1912 Bleistiftmanuskript, “as soon as we speak of an “individual subject,” as soon as we designate ourselves as, for instance, an “individual human being” with an “individual living body” and “individual soul,” we have already construed ourselves objectively, as an individual against an actual and possible multiplicity, and hence as an object that is experienceable by many and identical in the experiences of

 I have in mind here the positions articulated by MacIntyre (1985), Schechtman (1996), and, perhaps most provocatively, Dennett (1992). For a similar critique, see Zahavi (2014, p. 59).

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many” (Hua IV/V 55/Hua V 125, transl. modified [1912]).12 Husserl later develops this thought by noting that everyday statements regarding persons do not ascribe the states and features they pick out to an interior domain of sheer privacy, nor to a purely material universe of bodies. Furthermore, such discourse sees no difficulty in applying the same general mental concepts first-personally and second- or third-­ personally, despite the divergence in modes of givenness between one’s own mental life and that of others. Rather, the reality which everyday empirical self-descriptions target and describe is first and foremost the “I as a human being” (Ich-Mensch), that is, an individual which is in principle accessible and intelligible to the conceptual thought of others, and to whom all of my bodily and psychological states and features are taken to belong: Let us immediately proceed from this last concept of the ego [i.e., the concept of the “I as a human being”], the ordinary one, which is especially rich in content. Everyone grasps, in “self-perception,” precisely himself, and likewise, in the experiential knowledge of another, precisely this other. When anyone uses the first person, he speaks of his acts and states in the form, “I perceive, I judge, I feel, I will.” Similarly, with the expression, “I am of such a kind,” one speaks of his personal qualities, of his innate or acquired traits of character, his capabilities, and of his transient and only relatively permanent dispositions. Likewise for others: we say that so-and-so is a man of character, virtuous temperament, is in love, etc. (…) Similarly, someone will say that he has been beaten, stabbed, or burnt when it is his living body that has undergone the corresponding actions, when it, as we also say, has been beaten, stabbed or burnt. We say of someone that he is dirty when it is his finger that is covered with dirt; that he is anaemic or full-blooded, weak in the heart, or sick in the stomach, etc. Hence in the normal saying of “I” (or in the normal use of personal pronouns in general), the expression “I” encompasses the whole human being, living body and soul. It can therefore very well be said: I am not my living body, but I have a living body; I am not a soul, but I have a soul. Now, if it is correct that the unity of man encompasses these two components not as two realities externally linked with one another but instead as most intimately interwoven and in a certain way mutually penetrating (as is in fact established), then one can understand that conditions and features of either of these components count as ones of the whole, of the “I as a human being” itself (Hua IV/V 301–302/Hua IV 93–94, transl. modified [1915]).

With his concept of the Ich-Mensch, Husserl anticipates two thoughts which would be influentially articulated nearly half a century later by P. F. Strawson: first, that mental concepts have the same sense in our everyday descriptions of self and other; and second, that the concept of the ‘I as human being’ (Husserl) or ‘person’ (Strawson) has, at least with regard to pre-philosophical thought about individual selves, a logical priority over that of a disembodied mind or a purely physical human body (see Strawson 1959, pp. 99, 101–102).13 In his efforts to further explicate this  As he continues: “We apprehend all that is experienceable in according with this objectivity— things, living bodies, souls or psychic subjects, human beings, and animals. Everything is included within the one objective spatiotemporal world.” 13  Mohanty also notes the proximity between Husserl’s Ideen II and Strawson’s Individuals (2011, p.  61). Intriguingly, however, Husserl would be equally sympathetic to a criticism raised by Frankfurt (1971, p. 5–6), namely that Strawson’s concept of an entity to which both corporeal and psychological predicates can be equally ascribed does not exactly map onto our understanding of ourselves as persons. Indeed, when Husserl employs the term Mensch rather than Person here, his 12

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implicit reference to actual or possible others, both as concrete individuals and recognising companions, in conceptual thought and speech concerning one’s own individual being, Husserl then raises the transcendental issue of how this implication is possible. The question he now poses is the following one: by what means does it comes about that I can think of myself using concepts that apply in a general way to human subjects? In asking this, one does not have to level out the pre-reflective difference between self and other, the “abyss” which separates the manner of givenness of my own experiential life as lived first-personally, and that of the other as only accessible through empathy (Hua IV/V 254–255/Hua IV 309 [1913]). As Avramides has recently argued (following Wittgenstein), it is precisely because I can, for instance, feel my own pain but not the pain of another, that our everyday application of a unified concept of pain to my own and another’s mental life appears, to the philosopher, as problematic and in need of clarification (Avramides 2001, p. 224; cf. Wittgenstein 1968, §§302, 305). And indeed, Husserl’s own attempt to explicate the emergence of a way of seeing oneself as a publically accessible human being, and thus as an appropriate target for empirical conceptualisation, involves tracing out the origins of this mode of self-understanding in pre-predicative modes of self-awareness, empathetic acquaintance, and mutual recognition. In a rather dense passage from 1913, Husserl offers a detailed sketch of how he takes such mundane self-­ understanding to emerge. After noting that the “human being in the personal world” is first given, by means of empathy, as “unity of the living body as expression of mind and of mind as expressed in the living body,” Husserl continues as follows: This apperception of mind (Geisteszapperzeption) is transferred to one’s own ego, which, in apperceiving other minds, obviously does not have to be apperceived for itself in this way, and if it is not apperceived in this way, then it functions as non-objectified pure ego. I arrive at the construal of myself as a human being (in the sense of mind) by way of a comprehension of others, i.e., insofar as I comprehend them as centres not only for the rest of their surrounding world but also for my lived body, which is for them an object of their surrounding world. It is precisely thereby that I comprehend them as construing me similar to the way I construe them, thus as construing me as social human being, as comprehensive unity of living body and mind. Therein is rooted an identification between the ego that I encounter in direct inspection – as ego which has its lived body over and against it – and the ego of the other’s presentation of me, the ego that the other can understand and posit, at one with my living body as, for the other, present “externally,” in acts which I for my part attribute to the other. The comprehensive presentation others have, or can have, of me is of service to me as regards the construal of myself as social “human being,” hence the construal of myself totally different from the way I apprehend myself in direct inspection. By means of this construal, with its complicated structure, I fit myself into the human family (Menschheitsverband), or, rather, I create the constitutive possibility for the sense of this “family.” I can now say “we,” and then for the first time do I become “I” and the other precisely “another” (Hua IV/V 218–219 [1913]; cf. Hua IV 325, 242).14

intention is manifestly not to reduce the empirical individual to a biological organism, but to avoid squarely and unambiguously identifying it with the personal self as the subject of a personal life. 14  See also: Hua XIV 418. Zahavi (2014, p. 248) has argued that this line of thought has important implications for the distinctive phenomenology of we-intentionality.

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Husserl’s bold claim in this passage is that recognising in myself an “I as human being,” a concrete reality to which both corporeal and psychological predicates can be ascribed, presupposes a foreign gaze turning my way and disclosing me as an other for the other. What the other’s gaze exposes me to, and in turn exposes to me, is a presentation (Vorstellung) of myself which is entirely different from anything I can accomplish alone. For in the other’s eyes, my mental life is not the one which she intimately lives but something expressed in a living body ‘over there,’ just as her mental life is for me. It is this identification of, on the one hand, my lived body and experiential life as pre-reflectively lived, and on the other, the sense of myself which the others’ gaze forces upon me, that Husserl regards as pivotal for the constitution of oneself as a ‘comprehensive unity,’ to which, amongst other things, the generality of conceptual thought and speech can apply. To put this thought differently, it is through the experience of a certain kind of mutual recognition that I come to understand myself as an empirical reality to which general concepts can apply. It is through being recognised as an other embodied person by an other (embodied person), and the recognition of oneself, elicited by this, as of the same generic type for others that they are for me, that it becomes intelligible for me to apply the range of concepts reserved for human selves to myself. Evidently, a question emerges here concerning the relationship between this kind of mutual recognition and that discussed in the fifth chaper, by means of which the other’s (animate) gaze discloses me as an animate being, and thereby opens up the perceptual world as one which my living body traverses. Giving an adequate response to this question will have to wait until later on in this chapter (see Sect. 7.3.3), once we have considered the role played by interpersonal sociality in enabling pre-reflective personal life, and once we have subjected this very interpersonal recognition to thematic consideration. But we are now in a position to consider how the generic sense of myself as a human being recognisable by others enables personal self-understanding. I argued in Sect. 7.1 that a reflective form of personal self-understanding must ultimately aim to trace out and disclose one’s personal style by means of explicating one’s life-history. But as Husserl notes, the “individual type of this person” is something which “exhibits itself within the general types of human existence” (Hua IV/V 458 [1916/1917]). While personal narratives aim to intimate the individual personal style glimpsed in a subject’s habitual way of relating to the world, and the intelligible mutations which this way of relating undergoes in the course of a life, it nevertheless does so by employing those general concepts which apply to the ‘I as human being.’ While narrative self-understanding is certainly not exhausted by the self-ascription of thoughts, feelings, actions, character traits, bodily conditions, and the like, it must nevertheless begin with such self-ascriptions as a means of gradually and indirectly bringing to prominence a more ambiguous form of selfhood.15 Or  In a similar fashion, Goldie (2012, p. 9) argues that the process of what Ricoeur (1984) terms ‘emplotment,’ by which a multiplicity of events are given narrative structure, can only get off the ground if “the raw material for emplotment” includes “rich  descriptions” of a person’s mental, cultural, and physical condition at various points in time—“rich descriptions of people’s thoughts,

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to put the point differently, reflectively thematising the ‘who’ opaquely intimated in my actions, feelings, and thoughts, cannot avoid considering ‘what’ those personal events are. And to this degree, the experience of mutual recognition serves as a condition of possibility for narrative self-understanding. In beginning to think about who I might be as a person, I cannot avoid treating myself as someone to whom general descriptions of empirical human selves apply; and in this sense I have already acknowledged a minimal degree of otherness within myself.16 It is not only the descriptive element of narrative thinking and speech which contains the traces of sociality, moreover, but also the very experiential episodes which narrative seeks to describe. Not only is it the case that personal self-understanding in the narrative mode typically incorporates others’ perceptions and evaluations of myself, both in order to provide the context in which my remembered thoughts, emotions, and actions show their intelligibility, and as a means of describing periods of my life which I cannot remember well or even at all (such as my childhood, or a weekend irretrievably ‘lost’ to despair or chemical excess). As Goldie has recently pointed out, many of the autobiographical memories which personal narratives draw upon are so-called ‘field memories,’ that is, they involve remembering my actions and responses ‘from the outside,’ as if seen from the perspective of another (Goldie 2012, pp. 48–53).17 To this we can add that even when memories of this kind do not involve seeing oneself from the perspective of a specific other but more from an anonymous ‘view from the outside,’ they necessarily presuppose a comprehension of oneself as an intersubjectively accessible human subject, this self-recognition in turn only arising through reciprocal empathetic contact with others (cf. Stein 2008, p. 18/1989, p. 10). Before considering the role of sociality in personal modes of comportment, we should dwell for another moment on this last point. It was suggested in the previous section that the perennial task of personal self-understanding lies in giving expression to one’s own personal style. A person’s style in this sense pervades, at least typically if not universally, their way of deciding, forming beliefs, and responding emotionally. As a ‘way’ of responding not tied to any specific stance, personal style it is not negated when a person’s attitude is cancelled out, but can rather be better understood by taking account of such fluctuations. While I have emphasised that the description of such personal style is a social affair, employing linguistic concepts feelings, moods, and emotions,  rich descriptions of people, including their character traits and personality, rich descriptions of people’s actions, and rich descriptions of other things, such as institutions, cultures, cultural practices and customs.” On the other hand, Arendt is surely correct in noting a certain danger that flows from the necessity of beginning with the ‘what’ in explicating the ‘who’ (1998, p. 181). 16  For rich descriptions of the relationship between narrativity and alterity, see Ricoeur (1992). 17  Intriguingly, Goldie suggests that we are particularly prone to remember past events in this way when there is a degree of “irony” between the occasion remembered and the time that the remembering takes place, due to my now knowing things which place my past actions in a new light. He also proposes that a dissonance between my current emotive take on the past action and the emotions I was undergoing while acting can make first-personal memory difficult and tend us towards remembering the event from the outside.

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that apply in a general way to human beings, an issue which has yet to be fully clarified concerns the extent to which such personal style can be intuitively disclosed in an intersubjective fashion. That is, to what degree does personal self-consciousness in this sense rely not only on the self-awareness of habitualities discussed in the preceding chapter, but also on an empathetically acquired grasp of how my individual personal style looks from the outside? This question is not entirely settled by noting that recognising myself as an entity to which general human concepts can be applied requires relations of mutual recognition. At least this cannot be so for Husserl, who maintains that the application of general concepts only functions in personal self-understanding as a means of explication, one that first presupposes a field of intuitive disclosure to explicate.18 And indeed, in an early manuscript Husserl notes that the empathetic givenness of a person to others can play a similar role to self-awareness in providing the pre-predicative givenness for the “intuitive understanding” of “personal being in personal accomplishments.” As he notes: This kind of experience is one which opens up; it is not a conceptual judgemental inference but an intuitive disclosing (Erschließen), the results of which are not propositions but systematically unified intuitions, whereby what is intuitive-objective there is personal being and life itself, as it would be, or could be, directly intuitive to the thematic personality or to others in its nexus (Hua IV/V 470 n. 3/Hua IV 377–8, emphasis mine [1910–12]).19

In the late 1920s, Husserl further develops this thought in a note written in the margins of Landgrebe’s draft of Ideen II.  Expressing discomfort with a passage in Landgrebe’s draft—of which no original manuscript in Husserl’s Nachlass can be found—which suggested that personal self-understanding could be accomplished in abstraction from all relations to others, Husserl poses a suggestive question: “As personal ego, however, I am a human being among other human beings. What is prior here, the formation of the inductive apperception of the personal kind (persönlichen Art) of others or of my own kind?” (Hua IV 249, transl. modified; for context, see Hua IV 412). In a note written immediately afterwards, he gives the beginnings of an answer: The personal ego is the ego of the human being (Menschen-Ich). I experience the comportment of others within the circumstances of their surrounding world, and out of repeated reflection on their similar behaviour under similar circumstances an inductive apperception arises. Insofar as I apperceive myself as a human being in a human nexus and thus find occasion enough to observe my own behaviour and find it to be regulated (i.e., I find habits, active regularities in my behaviour), I get to know (kennenlernen) myself as a personal

 I take it that Husserl has in mind this non-identity of personal style and general descriptive concepts when he notes, in a passage quoted in the previous section, that personal individuality only comes into view when “abstracting from the communicative relation to a you or a we” (Hua IX 214–5)—a brief and ambiguous remark which he regrettably did not unpack. 19  While this remark occurs in the context of Husserl’s reflections on the role of imagination in historical understanding, I take it that the point he makes here—that the intuitive givenness of a personality can occur in empathetic experience—applies just as much to self-awareness and interpersonal empathy as it does to the modes of historical imagination which arguably derive from and modify the latter. 18

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“reality.” The personal reflection which I exercise in this way is therefore a very mediated one in its intentionality (Hua IV 250, transl. modified; cf. Hua IV 413).

As this passage acknowledges, getting to know one’s personal character would be a largely fruitless and perhaps even incomprehensible task if we were not able to notice similarities and differences that hold between ourselves and other persons as given empathetically. And in so doing, we treat ourselves as persons who are, like the others, intersubjectively accessible units, whose expressive behaviour reveals enduring habits. As Husserl remarks later in this note, this should not lead us to conclude that the conscious functioning and first-personal givenness of one’s own bodily abilities and habitual attitudes after all depends upon such a comparison, for an “active capability (Vermögen)” is “not an inductively constituted property, not a mere product of association”. Nevertheless, getting to know one’s personal character involves “an interplay between the observation of others and self-observation, with a continued extension of inductive apperception as a consequence” (Hua IV 250, transl. modified). What emerges from these remarks is the thought that the reciprocal-empathetic givenness of ‘how I am for others’ and the pre-reflective givenness of my experiences and habitual features stand on equal footing as ways of seeing myself as a person. It is not only that I must recognise my intersubjective accessibility in order to apply general concepts to myself; rather, my being-for-others runs so deep that my personal style inhabits the me that others see just as much as it does my self-­ lived egoic responses. For a characteristically impeccable illustration of this thought, one only need consult the example Bernard Williams offers in making a similar point: Suppose a magician is hired to perform the old trick of making the emperor and the peasant become each other. He gets the emperor and the peasant in one room, with the emperor on his throne and the peasant in the corner, and then casts the spell. What will count as success? Clearly not that after the smoke has cleared the old emperor should be in the corner and the old peasant on the throne. That would be a rather boring trick. The requirement is presumably that the emperor’s body, with the peasant’s personality, should be on the throne, and the peasant’s body with the emperor’s personality, in the corner. What does this mean? In particular, what has happened to the voices? The voice presumably ought to count as a bodily function; yet how would the peasant’s gruff blasphemies be uttered in the emperor’s cultivated tones, or the emperor’s witticisms in the peasant’s growl? A similar point holds for the features; the emperor’s body might include the sort of face that just could not express the peasant’s morose suspiciousness, the peasant’s a face no expression of which could be taken for one of fastidious arrogance. These ‘could’s are not just empirical—such expressions on these features might be unthinkable (Williams 1973, pp. 11–12).

What Williams’ example makes clear is arguably not only that the concepts of personality and personal characteristics are applicable just as much in the second- or third-person as they are when applied to one’s own case, but also that what Husserl calls my personal reality becomes accessible only when I recognise myself as an expressive body visible to others. Ultimately, then, the self-awareness involved in one’s attitudes, and the complex of associations and understandings that build upon it, can only contribute to our sense of ourselves as mundane persons by means of the ‘identification’ instituted through interpersonal mutual recognition.

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7.2.2  Personal Agency and the Interpersonal Nexus Having spelled out several respects in which reflective personal self-understanding is intersubjectively mediated, we are now in a position to consider in what manner sociality is presupposed on the level of the pre-reflective activity of personal selves. While this is a huge and complex topic to which an entire book could be dedicated, I will limit my considerations to three central themes. (1) In the first place, it is evident that concepts appropriated from a linguistic community infuse and condition the attitudes of a person. This is not only the case with regard to the more obvious case of judgement. As Drummond has recently emphasised in his Husserl-inspired account of emotive intentionality, it makes sense to regard an emotion as rationally motivated by the object or situation to which it responds only if the subject of that emotion has some understanding of a relevant range of axiological and non-axiological concepts. This holds because the implication of conceptual understanding makes it possible for the subject of the emotion to think self-critically about whether his or her emotion responds appropriately to the situation which elicits it, as well as enabling others to pose the same kind of question (Drummond 2013, pp. 103–105). Moreover, while Husserl would emphasise that the lived experience of willing and acting essentially involves pre-predicative modes of practical intentionality, it is clear that many of the activities involved here—such as projecting oneself into the probable future, considering what counts as means and ends, and weighing up the motivational force of conflicting possibilities and reasons, and so on—would be unrecognisably altered if stripped of all their conceptual content. Schütz and Luckmann put this point aptly: Of course, various extra-societal achievements of consciousness must be presupposed “before” action. Action itself, however, is based on the sociality of the actor. The project, the choice between projects, and the performance of the act—and not only later narratives about the act—presuppose various, mainly linguistic or languagelike social objectivations of subjective processes, objectivations in which the subjective processes take on form and stability (Schutz and Luckmann 1989, p. 67).

The ability to speak and think by means of linguistic concepts, then, counts as one quite general and relatively uncontroversial sense in which the engagement characteristic of persons depends upon socialisation. (2) A less evident, indeed distinctively Husserlian, connection lies in the deep interdependency binding personal activity and interpersonal surrounding world. As we saw in the second section of the previous chapter, Husserl maintains that personal activity depends upon a pregiven surrounding world in as much as our beliefs, emotions, and decisions always take for granted and respond to certain recognised worldly objects or situations. Thus, for instance, my choice to wear a particular shirt is made in light of its smart collar, and with an eye to the stuffy meeting I will be attending later; in getting up to close the window, I seek to shield my thoughts from the irritating noise outside, while grumbling to myself about the deadline awaiting me tomorrow; my hope regarding a political struggle is restored after attending a busy and enthusiastic meeting; or I begin to accept an improbable description of

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what happened at the meeting after I left, once my interlocutor provides me with convincing evidence for her bizarre claims (cf. Hua IV/V 32/Hua IV 140 [1912]). As this list of examples makes clear, the situations that I respond to in my personal acts are to a significant degree interpersonally constituted. To mention just a few possibilities, this can be a matter of specific commitments I have made to others as well as of a recognition of their practical projects and interests (which I may myself share and jointly partake in), of demands which arise from the more anonymous cultural powers of “legal institutions, morals, and religious prescriptions,” or simply of things presenting themselves to me as valuable and usable in typical ways that reveal the cultural practices in which I partake or know others to partake (Hua IV/V 245–246, 32–33, 194/Hua IV 198–200, 141, 195–6 [1916/1917, 1912, 1913]). Indeed, a single personal activity can very well be simultaneously responsive in each of these directions. Moreover, as Husserl is well aware, it makes little sense to maintain here that what is appealed to in personal acts belongs merely to the domain of sense fashioned by the person’s own constitutive accomplishments. Rather, personal comportment relates to “the intersubjectively constituted world,” to the “sole and unique world constituted in intersubjective association” (Hua IV/V 222, 194/ Hua IV 327, 195 [1913, 1913]). In other texts, Husserl analyses more extensively the structure and genesis of this cultural surrounding world, with his thoughts on this issue developing in two, not obviously concordant, directions. On the one hand, Husserl emphasises that a level or dimension of the surrounding world is correlated solely with the personal subjectivity to whom it is pregiven and which responds to it in personal acts: “As person, I am what I am (and each other person is what he is) as subject of a surrounding world” (Hua IV/V 190/Hua IV 185 [1913]). This claim can be understood in both a structural and a genetic fashion. In a structural vein, what functions as pregiven and motivating for a subject’s position-­ taking acts is evidently always a limited selection of worldly affairs, and Husserl’s thought here is that it is the person’s current way of being perceptually, affectively, practically, and intellectively oriented that ultimately delimits the range of phenomena relevant to her act of deciding, her emotional response, or her belief-formation. As he puts it, the “surrounding world is the world that is perceived by the person in his acts, is remembered and grasped in thought, surmised or revealed as such and such; it is the world of which this personal ego is conscious, the world which is there for it, to which it relates in this or that way, e.g., by way of theorising as regards the appearing things or by way of feeling, appraising value, shaping technically, etc.” (Hua IV/V 190/Hua IV 185, transl. modified [1913]). In a genetic-developmental register, Husserl’s suggests that the sense-content of the surrounding world pregiven for my personal acts is typically dependent not only upon my nexus of presently operative intentionalities but also upon my personal history. As he notes, “the surrounding world is in a certain way always in the process of becoming, constantly generating itself anew, by means of transformations of sense and ever new formations of sense along with the concomitant positings and annullings of positings” (Hua IV/V 190–191/Hua IV 186 [1913]). And the developments and alterations which the pregiven surrounding world temporally undergoes

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are, at least to a certain degree, constituted through the sedimentation of the person’s earlier beliefs, emotive responses, and decisions (Hua IV-2/V 190–192/Hua IV 186, 187, 188, 190 [1913]). In an instructive example from a later manuscript, Husserl notes that someone of the right persuasion can immediately see the value of an old Amati violin without it being necessary that she currently feels a liking for the perceived instrument, indeed without her needing to take a good look at it or hear its resounding tone cry out. Here, the perceived violin is given as having “the feature of agreeableness, even if it does not currently please me. It does indeed touch my emotions in the present, though not in an ‘alive’ act but in the analogue of ‘symbolic’ modification, of ‘obscure’ presentation” (Hua IV/V 237 [1923/1924]). This case exemplifies how a person’s judicative, affective and practical habitualities—here, her tendency to appreciate excellent violins in a fine-grained and perceptually senitive manner—can sink down into the passivity of her sensory-perceptual world-constitution, in such a way that things can show up for her as having, in this instance, an evaluative significance which ‘symbolically’ points towards possible emotive acts (and their perceptual circumstances) without such acts being presently alive. And as Husserl continues, this ‘cold’ and yet pre-predicatively evaluative recognition of the violin can in its turn serve as the fundament for a more robustly emotional response, in which “I consider the violin with a loving gaze, with awe for this “work of art,” in light of its noble tone, which is familiar to me from experience, but not actually given or reproduced in the present. Likewise, the awe, the love, can, in its turn, be currently active—though, on the other hand, it also needn’t be” (Hua IV/V 237 [1923/1924], emphasis mine; see also Hua IV/V 193/Hua IV 195 [1913]). The fundamental point which this example brings to the fore is that one’s history of judicative, affective, and practical position-takings ‘creases’ (to employ a phrase from Sokolowski) the surrounding world which is always pregiven for personal acts (Sokolowski 1985, pp. 66, 69; cf. Hart 1992, pp. 53–54). And this leads us to the thought, occasionally endorsed in Husserl’s later writings, that the personal self is not merely a constituted reality but ultimately emerges, through the comprehensive pursuit of the reduction, as agent of transcendental constitution (Hua XXXIV 198–201, Hua I 99–104; cf. Luft 2005; Heinämaa 2007; Jacobs 2010).20 On the other hand, an apparently slightly different picture of the constitution of the surrounding world comes into view once we attend to its social and intersubjectively accepted character. As Husserl notes, the lowest level of the surrounding world is the domain treated in that is, “intersubjective material nature as common field of actual or possible experience of individual minds” (Hua IV/V 195–196/Hua IV 197, transl. modified [1913]). After all, in choosing the smartly-shaped white shirt, shutting out the din from the street below, or responding emotively to the political meeting, it is always taken for granted that certain things and events have  Accordingly, Crowell’s claim that the Husserl of Ideen II ultimately identifies the transcendental solely with the pure ego, rather than with (embodied and socialised) personal subjectivity, is in need of revision. Moreover, particularly given the analyses of the fifth chapter, we can see that Mohanty is not exaggerating when he notes that not only the person but even (animate) nature is disclosed as having a transcendental function in these texts (Mohanty 2011, pp. 60–1).

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those material features which I perceive them as having, and this not just for me but for all other (“normal”) embodied subjects. Building on the arguments of the fifth chapter, we can thus say that being in experiential contact with a surrounding world presupposes that I have undergone the institutive event of being recognised as an embodied perceiver by another embodied perceiver who I recognise as such. But as has already been mentioned, the surrounding world pregiven for personal life is more than mere intersubjective nature, in that it incorporates an array of richly sociocultural phenomena. And for Husserl, the furnishing of a person’s surrounding world with this richly social stratum comes about through empathetic recognition of and engagement with other persons. The full sense of the matters with which I engage in thinking, emotively valuing, and acting—as well as the generic values, normative ideals, and specific goals which guide my personal activity—depends to a large degree upon my participation in both more anonymous interpersonal communities and in specific interpersonal relationships. Taken from this point of view, it is not the surrounding world as such which is squarely correlated with personal subjectivity, but only its specific way of being apprehended: “For every subject that in this way is a member of a social association as a totality, there is constituted one and the same world of spirit, although from the “standpoint” of this or that subject it is apprehended with a corresponding (hence different from subject to subject) apprehensive sense” (Hua IV/V 195/Hua IV 197 [1913]). Consequently, it cannot be the case that the interpersonal surrounding world is built upon a merely personal or solipsistic Umwelt, such that the entirety of the latter could be thought of in separation from the former (a somewhat Cartesian position which Husserl at one point entertains).21 Rather, the ‘creases’ in the surrounding world instituted by my position-taking acts are typically interwoven with and motivationally responsive to features of intersubjectively accepted social reality, whether this be a matter of appealing to scientific theories, evaluating political projects or cultural practices, or deciding to actively participate in collective endeavours. If the constitutive tie binding personal subjectivity and world does not, then, single out a self-enclosed and separable core, how are we to characterise the discrete roles played by self and other(s) in the constitution of the Umwelt? In a previously manuscript from 1916 or 1917, Husserl suggests that the primary phenomenological difference here is simply that between self-manifestation and empathy. On the one hand, there is a pervasive dimension of the surrounding world which the personal subject alone “can experience immediately and in the manner of perceptio— immediately in terms of its own content,” this dimension encompassing the subject’s nexus of actual and possible appearances, as well his egoic activities and their constitutive correlates. On the other hand, there is a second dimension of the surrounding world, intimately interwoven with the first, whose apprehensive sense is furnished by others’ world-directed experiences as given in possible or actual acts of empathetic presentification. As Husserl emphasises, in as much as worldly things

 Hua IV/V 242 (Hua IV 193–194) [1913]; cf. Steinbock (1995, p. 11). As far as I can tell, Husserl appeals to this claim only once in the Ideen II manuscripts.

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are always pregiven for personal engagement as displaying rich soiciocultural senses (Geistesobjekten), this latter dimension is always tacitly operative: “Everywhere in this kind of experience, a moment of presentification (Vergegenwärtigung) through empathy is involved that can never be redeemed through immediate presencing (Gegnwärtigung).” Nevertheless, this moment of presentification always functions as a “co-presence on the basis of what is actually perceptively experienced or what may be perceived in the course of experience, a co-presence that is not perceptible itself and which cannot be converted into the subject’s perceptions, i.e., in terms of his own existential content” (Hua IV/V 246/ Hua IV 198–200, transl. modified [1917/1918]). Thus, while personal activity responds to a surrounding world whose sense necessarily appeals to foreign experience, the way in which foreign experience is appealed to in the pregivenness of these objects constantly exhibits a degree of dependence upon the concrete manner in which matters—including, of course, the other’s expressive living body—show themselves perceptually to me. To this degree, the respective strata of the world correlated with self-givenness and with empathetically grasped others are reciprocally motivated by one another. In fleshing out this rather abstract model, it is worth noting some of the different ways in which an empathetic understanding of others can serve to render accessible the social surrounding world. In the first place, the other’s expressive movements can serve to empathetically display her personal way of being “related to objectivities, to which we are also related; to earth and sky, field and forest, to the room in which “we” dwell communally, to the picture which we see, etc.” (Hua IV/V 192/ Hua IV 191 [1913]; see also Hua IV/V 549/Hua IV 347 [1916/1917]). That is, seeing another person is not a matter of peering into a closed vessel, but of empathetically grasping another world-engaged subject, a subject whose attitudes are thereby recognised both as intelligibly responding to a shared world, and as creasing that world in a way which, at least initially, only the other originally lives (see Sect. 7.3.2). Beyond this rather minimal way in which the sense of the surrounding world can be broadened, a whole sphere of social understanding is opened up through communicative engagement. As Husserl puts it: The common surrounding world acquires communalities of a new and higher sense by means of acts of personal mutual determination which arise on the basis of mutual comprehension. (…) Persons do not only apprehend themselves comprehensively inasmuch as one understands the living corporeality of the other belonging to his surrounding world and its spiritual sense, thereby interpreting the facial expressions, gestures, and spoken worlds as intimations of personal life. In their spiritual activity they direct themselves to one another, they perform acts with the intention of being understood by the other and determining him, in his understanding grasp of these acts (as expressed in this intention), to certain personal modes of comportment. […] In this way relations of mutual understanding are formed: speaking elicits response; the theoretical, valuing, or practical appeal, addressed by the one to the other, elicits, as it were, a response coming back, assent (agreement) or refusal ­(disagreement) and perhaps a counter-proposal, etc. In these relations of mutual understanding, there is produced a conscious mutual relation of persons and at the same time a unitary relation of them to a common surrounding world. Furthermore, this might be not merely a physical and animal (or personal) surrounding world but also an ideal one, e.g., the “world” of mathematics (Hua IV/V 192–193/Hua IV 191–193, transl. modified) [1913]).

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In not merely empathetically grasping the other but also listening to her given voice to her thoughts, emotions, and plans, in then attempting to make myself understood in a similar fashion, and in the mutually accepted agreement and conflict that can arise through this, my personal surrounding world acquires a more deeply social status and is furnished with otherwise inaccessible (ideal and cultural) dimensions. Indeed, Husserl goes so far as to maintain that “sociality is constituted by specifically social, communicative acts” (Hua IV/V 243/Hua IV 194 [1910–1912]). After all, without communicative engagement and the ability to jointly act intimately related to it, it is evident that we could have no grasp of “works as works, as works of the individual and works of the community, but also (...) of thoughts and feelings, etc., of the individual as motivated by his milieu, through the ‘influences’ of others, whether of others in immediate inter-commerce or in the mediate way of understanding their works by way of tradition, etc” (Hua IV/V 549–550/Hua IV 349 [1916/1917]). And once these empathetically and communicatively disclosed senses and types become habitually incorporated into my passively constituted Umwelt, we can indeed say that the worldly situations pregiven for personal acts are always already interpersonally constituted.22 Hence, as Theunissen aptly puts it, for Husserl just as much as Heidegger there is already an ontological rather than merely an ontic presence of others in my world-embracing horizon, and this holds just as much for the surrounding world in its richly sociocultural meaning as it does for its underlying stratum of intersubjective nature (Theunissen [1965] 1984, p. 118). (3) We ought to consider one final sense in which personal agency depends upon interpersonal relations. Here the issue is not so much the roots of conceptual understanding or the sociality of the surrounding world, but rather the social origins of our very opinions or enduring stances.23 In this regard, we can begin to amend a shortcoming of the previous chapter, which primarily explored the individual formation of attitudes through acts of rationally motivated endorsement. However, as we saw Heal emphasising in her objection to Moran (see the third section of the sixth chapter), it is the case that many of our opinions were not first approved by us on the basis of justifying reasons, but were rather at some stage passively taken over from others. Not only is this an issue which any adequate philosophical account of personal stances, and of the kind of awareness and knowledge their subject has of them, must accommodate; it is also a matter which reveals the socially embedded character of personal life. We saw in the previous chapter that Husserl locates a primitive self-awareness of attitudes in the experience of passively taking over or sustaining a judgement, emotion, or resolution that one has previously held. Intriguingly, in the manuscript discussed there, Husserl claims that a process of appropriation is also  exhibited in cases where we take over the attitudes of others, and that this relationship is

 In this regard, see Husserl’s remark that “the regulation of sensibility is (with respect to the sensibility of sensations and also with respect to the sensibility of feeling and every primal sensibility) an intersubjective one.” (Hua IV/V 530/Hua IV 336 [1917]). 23  For further elucidations of this point, see Hart (1992, p. 71) and Jacobs (2016) 22

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structurally analogous to what takes place when we preserve ourselves through habitually assuming our past attitudes: This unity of an opinion can exceed the individual ego and become a unity within a community of communicating subjects. Within a subject a unity of “opinion” is constituted, one which endures in that the originally given opinion (the originarily awakened conviction, the original perception or “experience,” the original decision) “comes to life again” in repeated reproductive acts, and the theme is assumed, hence the thesis is active in the form of appropriation (Übernahme). Now, this may involve one person ‘taking over’ (übernehmen) a conviction from another, it can be a joy passing over from subject to subject, and the same can apply for a wish, an enthusiasm, a will. The conviction, which someone else expresses, can enter into me immediately. The “empathetic, comprehending” presentification plays the role of the authentic reproduction (the memory). I do not only understand and comprehend, I co-judge, co-believe, and the theme with the posited thesis enters into me immediately— irrespective of whether this occurs with insight. Someone presents me with an argument, I understand the argument and participate in it. Someone expresses an axiomatic proposition, I understand and appreciate it with him. Someone else presents me with compelling reasons for the hoped-for victory of our troops: I understand the reasons, I incorporate them (participate in the justification) and take over the hope. Someone expresses a hope, I participate in it, it is now not only in general my wish, but rather a co-accomplished, appropriated wish (Hua IV/V 354 [1914–1916]).

We find ourselves, in certain cases, taking over attitudes that we find taken by other persons whom we empathetically encounter. In so doing, we do not merely take the other’s attitude as something endorsed by the other but endorse it ourselves, accepting the validity of the manner in which it articulates a transcendent state of affairs. The examples offered by Husserl in this passage already indicate that this can occur with varying degrees of passivity. In particularly passive cases, we simply accept the truth of the other’s position-taking without bringing its motives into view. In less passive cases, however, we appropriate the position-taking only once we have been exposed to the motives which the other appeals to as legitimising her position-­ taking, only once she has indicated in one way or another the relevant reasons. As Husserl emphasises, even in cases of the latter sort, where “a secondary constitution, a secondary originality arises,” this is nevertheless something different from “the originality of a conviction, a joy, etc.” that one has formed for one’s own reasons. As he concludes, it is only if we are able to regard such intersubjectively appropriated attitudes as nevertheless attitudes which are lived as our own, that we can distinguish within the domain of our attitudes those which are formed autonomously and those which are not: “True autonomy (Selbständigkeit) pertains only to he who constitutes, from himself and in himself, a conviction, a joy, etc., one which is originarily conceived on the basis of its motives. Where this autonomy is lacking, there is, however, a great difference between wholly passive acceptance in passive following, and acceptance in re-enacting, recreating production, in being carried along by a presented argument” (Hua IV/V 355 [1914–1916]). One intriguing consequence of this line of thought is that there can be varying degrees to which an appropriated attitude is lived as ‘mine,’ and correspondingly, to which I am influenced by others. Thus, on the one hand, when passively appropriating an attitude from another, the very act of appropriating fails to exhibit any enduring and unified features of the self. Of course, the appropriated attitude does exhibit

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a transcendence with regard to the act of appropriation, in that the attitude is simultaneously (empathetically) given as co-accepted by the other—and to this degree a certain intersubjective unity is manifest in such acts. In another manuscript, Husserl terms this intersubjective unity a “connection of involvement” (Verbindung der Ingerenz), and argues that such connections play an analogous role for the development and intelligibility of persons as causal relations do for physical things. Moreover, in a line of thought famously associated with Heidegger—who, being familiar with the Ideen II manuscripts, may have been guided by a certain unacknowledged appropriation on this issue—Husserl notes that such unities are not limited to the manner in which persons can be influenced by the attitudes manifest in the bodily expressions, spoken words, or writings of concrete other persons, but also by stances which have become detached from particular subjects and are rather attributed to an anonymous “someone” (Jemand), thereby articulating what, generically, “one” does as a normal person or type of person within our cultural community. Seen in this light, “General morals and practices appear as indeterminate general imperatives, foreign and characterised as foreign—“one” judges in this way, “one” holds the fork in this way, etc.—these are the demands of the “one (Man),” of the social group, the rank, etc., which is evidently no person” (Hua IV/V 583–584 [1917]; see also Hua IV/V 504 [1916/1917]).24 With these remarks, Husserl is gesturing towards the sense in which a person can, in her appropriated bodily habits just as much in the habituated attitudes she has picked up from others, function as a bearer or carrier of tradition (Hua IV/V 503–504 [1916/1917]). And of course, many of the stances which have passively arisen from a person’s involvement with others lose their foreign character over time, having been habitualised into her own way of being, and perhaps even showing themselves in appropriative-memorial acts as enduring features of who she is. Once could even say that if a conviction appears to be so intimately my own that I cannot remember a time when I did not hold it, it is all the more likely that I have formed that conviction less through rational endorsement than through the influence of others upon my younger self. However, the account which Husserl offers of the effects of sociality upon the person is not limited to this rather gloomy picture of internalisation and anonymisation. On the one hand, he notes that even passive appropriation is typically not a matter of habits seamlessly flowing into an empty vessel, since the ability of a foreign attitude to take hold of me depends not only upon the relevant social and material circumstances but also upon my current nexus of operative habitualities (Hua IV/V 584 [1917]). On the other hand, through critical reflection I can sometimes find my own reasons for endorsing or rejecting a passively appropriated attitude— whether upon initially encountering it in another or after the event of appropriation  Compare the following remarks from Sein und Zeit: “We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as one (man) takes pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as one sees and judges; likewise we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as one shrinks back; we find ‘shocking’ what one finds shocking. The “one”, which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness.” (Heidegger 1962, p. 164, transl. modified/1967, pp. 126–127).

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and even habituation—such that I can “adopt it myself independently, and it then becomes Mine (es wird zu Meinem). It now no longer has the character of an imperative which I have allowed myself to bear, which has determined me from without. Rather, it has become a position-taking which arises and proceeds from my ego (not merely an allure which leads it forward)” (Hua IV/V 584 [1917]). Consequently while there is here, as Husserl puts it, “a tension between authority and freedom”, this does not exclude the possibility of “dedicating myself” to those projects, values, and beliefs I have picked up from others, in a way which exactly involves “following myself,” that is, “acting freely, being rational in my activity, and allowing true autonomy to hold sway” (Hua IV/V 584 [1917]). Moreover, as Husserl emphasises in his Kaizo articles of the 1920s, identifying with and committing oneself to a socio-historically constituted and normatively structured “form of life” can – particularly when motivated by an reflective evaluation of one’s personal life, that strives to identify the ideals and goods whose pursuit would make one’s life most valuable in one’s own eyes – serve as a means of personal renewal and a vehicle for ethical self-constitution. In dedicating myself to a career or artistic project with which I identify intimately, to a political movement whose goals or ideals I cherish, or to a family, community, or communal activity in which I feel at home with myself, I can strive to cultivate a form of concordance in my life which goes beyond the stability of my habits and which may ultimately approximate the ideal of “universal self-regulation” (Hua XXVII 23–30).25 At this point, Husserl comes remarkably close to Korsgaard’s thought that, in identifying ourselves with a normatively guiding “practical identity,” we quite literally constitute ourselves as personal agents (see Korsgaard 1996, pp. 100–103; 2009, pp. 18–21). But as was emphasised in the previous chapter, Husserl would nevertheless insist that such reflectively informed practical “self-constitution” does not bring into existence the personal self; rather, it is more a medium through which the person cultivates and sublimates herself, thereby striving to actualise a “higher level” or “form” of personal existence (Hua XXVII 25, 26–7). In this way, social life can be not merely an imposition of normalising influences, but a scaffolding for self-actualisation and personal freedom; and the degree to which this is the case depends both open the fabric of one’s social conditions—which, of course, shape the space of possibilities open for personal life—and on whether self-critical rationality, and ultimately reflective self-­ understanding, holds sway in one’s thought, speech, and action.

 For more detailed explications of Husserl’s account of the personal values disclosed through love and their relationship to personal renewal, see Melle (2007), Loidolt (2012), Drummond (2018), and Heinämaa (2020).

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7.2.3  Summary Lifting an abstraction under which the analyses preceding it had been conducted, this section has elucidated several ways in which the personal self is embedded in interpersonal relations. Beginning with the social conditions of personal self-­ understanding, we saw that the ability to describe oneself in terms of general empirical concepts rests upon relations of mutual recognition with others. Moreover, the distinctive kind of self-understanding enabled by narrative thought is not only socially dependent in this way, but also in that it involves taking my very life and style as a person as accessible to the empathetic gaze of others. I have then indicated three ways in which the enactments of pre-reflective personal life depend upon a social context. Not only is it the case that my attitudes depend upon (socially mediated) forms of conceptual understanding. It is also the case that the surrounding world pregiven for personal acts is correlated not only with my personal history but also with the lives of others who I know by means of empathy and communication, as well as involving more anonymous forms of social reality. Finally, I emphasised that the nexus of habitualities which make up one’s personal style are, in various ways, appropriated from foreign sources.

7.3  Interpersonal Empathy as Recognition Now that we have considered various kinds of personal self-understanding and elucidated Husserl’s thought that the personal self necessarily lives in an interpersonal nexus, we are well-prepared to consider the nature of our empathetic experience and understanding of other persons. Getting a grip on this issue will obviously require us to investigate whether there is specific variety of empathy – here termed interpersonal empathy  – wherein other personal selves are given and comprehended. Furthermore, and as we already saw in third chapter, in an interpersonal context it is particularly necessary to differentiate between different levels of accomplishment within our empathetic acquaintance with other people. With these aims in mind, I will consider in this section a minimal form of interpersonal empathy, which involves a perception-like recognition of another personal self, before turning in the next section to a more active mode of empathy, which, as a form of inter-personal understanding, displays similarities as well as differences with the forms of personal self-understanding considered in Sect. 7.1. My approach in the present section will be somewhat unorthodox, in that I begin by critically engaging with an analysis of the nature of interpersonal recognition found in the late Frankfurt School critical theory of Axel Honneth. My reasons are doing this do not only reflect a general belief that both phenomenology and critical social theory can mutually benefit from

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an engagement of this kind.26 Rather, a more specific motivation for my approach arises from the impossibility of adequately thematising interpersonal empathy in abstraction from our concrete encounters with others in the midst of the social world. More specifically, I hope to show that the character of a basic form of interpersonal empathy—or what I will here call empathetic recognition—can come more clearly into view once we situate it in the web of other modes of interpersonal responsiveness at play in our encounters with others. And I take it that Honneth’s recent work on ‘emotional’ and ‘elementary recognition,’ building upon decades of sustained and remarkably multi-faceted reflection on this issue, can be of aid in bringing into view the manner in which concrete encounters with others involve these various dimensions of interpersonal recognition. I will begin by singling out a primitive and ubiquitous form of interpersonal recognition indicated, though not unambiguously, in Honneth’s work (Sect. 7.3.1), before arguing that developing Husserl and Stein on empathy allows us to single out a modality of interpersonal empathy that captures the primitive interpersonal recognition which Honneth is after, and indeed does so more aptly than his own suggestions manage (Sect. 7.3.2).

7.3.1  Honneth on Social Visibility and Recognition In a recent work entitled Unsichtbarkeit, Axel Honneth seeks to clarify what he calls the “moral epistemology of recognition” by means of an analysis of “social visibility” (Honneth 2003a, p. 10).27 The initial question guiding his discussion is the following: “what must be added to the perception of a person—to taking cognizance of him—in order to make it into an act of recognition” (Honneth 2001, p. 111)? Honneth raises this issue because he starts from the assumption that for a person to be either socially visible or invisible, her literal visibility must already be established (Honneth 2001, p. 114).—although, as we will see, his discussion ultimately shows that this apparently obvious premise requires nuancing. But what does this alleged distinction between literal and social visibility amount to? Honneth stipulates that someone is literally visible to someone else when that person is correctly identified, by another person who perceptually encounters him or her, as a currently present individual of determinate features. In short, someone’s being literally visible is a matter of her being perceptually present to another person, who in their turn apprehends one in a veridical, and predicative-judgemental, act of cognition or Erkennen (Honneth 2001, p. 113). When it comes to social visibility, on the other

 This idea is not new, for there is a proud tradition of important contributions in this direction. See, e.g., Sartre (1995, 1976), de Beauvoir (2009), Thao (1986), Fanon (2008), Paci [1963] (1972), Gordon (1995), Steinbock (1995), Zahavi [1996] (2001), Heinämaa (2003), Alcoff (2006), Yancy (2017), Guenther (2013), Dolezal and Petherbridge (2017), Weiss, Salamon and Murphy (2019). 27  In regard to Honneth’s broader project of reconstructing a critical social theory based on recognition, see the detailed studies by Petherbridge (2013) and Zurn (2015), as well as Honneth’s own presentation in his inaugural lecture (2007, pp. 63–79). 26

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hand, matters are not so simple. Indeed, we must consider characterisations deriving from two perspectives: that of the socially visible person, and that of the person for whom she is socially visible. To begin with the former, Honneth writes that to be socially visible is a matter of living in a social space of “interactive relationships” in which one is aware of having been accorded a “social validity” (or “affirmed”) with respect to the “role of a specific social type” (whether this be an acquaintance, a cleaning lady, or a fellow traveller in a train carriage) by one’s interactive partners in that social space (Honneth 2001, p. 119). This can be helpfully contrasted with the experience of one’s own social invisibility, which Honneth describes as “non-­ existence in a social sense” (Honneth 2001, p. 111). Despite (indeed, precisely as) being visible to others in the literal sense, the socially invisible person experiences the “humiliation” of encountering others who fail to offer her any visible acknowledgement that she is a person engaged in the social world (Honneth 2001, p. 114). Honneth’s prime example of such invisibility is the first-person narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: a black person who feels himself rendered ‘invisible’ by the near-constant and ritualised manner in which the white people he encounters in his social world ‘look through’ and actively and publicly fail to ‘see’ him as a person.28 A more detailed characterisation of social visibility (and its negative counterpart) is offered by Honneth in his description of the recognitive activity that renders another person ‘socially visible’. Since literal visibility is allegedly necessary for both social visibility and social invisibility and sufficient for neither, and since social invisibility is suffered by subjects who are routinely denied visible acknowledgement, Honneth stipulates that the activity of rendering somebody socially visible must consist, at least in part, in some form of expressive and publicly performed bodily activity directed towards that person in her visible presence. This bodily expression, which comprises the properly public aspect of an act of “recognizing” a perceptually present person, conveys to this person that the one who performs it is aware of her, and is aware of her not merely “cognitively” but in the manner of an “affirmation” (Honneth 2001, p. 115). To illustrate this, Honneth offers the following examples: Even adult persons usually make clear reciprocally in their communications, through a multitude of finely nuanced, expressive responses, that the other is welcome or deserves special attention: a friend at a party is worthy of a sparkling smile or a strongly articulated welcoming gesture, the cleaning lady in one’s apartment is offered a gesture hinting at gratitude that extends beyond the speech act of greeting, and the black person is greeted like all other persons in the train compartment with changing facial expressions or a quick nod of the head (Honneth 2001, p. 119).

In Honneth’s discussion of such recognitive gestures, several intriguing claims emerge. On the one hand, Honneth notes that while such bodily movements are in one sense voluntary actions in and of themselves, in another sense they are better  For more extensive phenomenological analyses of the role of perception and affect in racialising interpersonal encounters, see: Fanon [1952] (2008, pp.  89ff.), Alcoff (2006, pp, 179ff.), Yancy [2008] (2017, pp. 17 ff.), Al-Saji (2014), Petherbridge (2017), Jardine (2020), and Heinämaa and Jardine (2021).

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described as a kind of “meta-action,” in as much as they make it clear to the other person that their agent is willing to act in a particular type of way in the future, hence allowing the other to form an expectation of the kind of treatment she will be in for as the encounter unfolds. Thus, “a welcoming gesture among adults expresses the fact that one can subsequently reckon upon benevolent actions,” while “the absence of gestures of recognition” suggests, in the space of the encounter, that the other “must be prepared for hostile actions” (Honneth 2001, p. 120). Importantly for Honneth, such meta-practical recognition of the other is not merely a matter of a habitual compliance with social codes, as if recognising another person were simply a matter of being willing to act towards another individual in a merely customary fashion; rather, he claims that all “direct” forms of recognition— i.e. those by means of which a perceived other is rendered socially visible in one way or another—possess a “moral core”. This moral dimension of direct recognition appears to stem from the fact that the meta-practical commitments it institutes are rooted in an acknowledgment that the other is a person, an acknowledgement that is partially constituted by a certain kind of evaluation, in which the other’s personhood is taken to be something of moral significance. In performatively recognising the other, the recognising subject makes it clear that she takes the other to be a person and that she is willing to treat the other in a way that persons, and only persons, ought to be treated. As Honneth puts it, the diverse forms of direct recognition each involve an appraisal of the personality of the other as having a certain “worth,” and this appraisal is implicit in the reciprocally understood meaning of the public gesture, since such gestures reveal to the recognised person that their agent is “motivated to treat him in the future according to his worth” (Honneth 2001, p. 122). Furthermore, Honneth notes that the spectrum of different forms of direct recognition is far from homogenous, and that it includes “fine distinctions” insofar as different recognitive gestures betray different types of evaluative appraisal, as well as being directed towards and appraising different aspects of the other’s personal life in its social dimensions. Although acknowledging that these three “possibilities” are far from exhaustive, Honneth offers as examples of direct recognition those gestures which betray love, respect, and solidarity (Honneth 2001, pp. 122–123). Thus, Honneth’s claim here is that recognition involves a certain kind of personal appraisal of the other, one which is simultaneously publically intelligible as something that will serve as guiding for the recognising subject’s practical activity. But what more exactly is the nature of this appraisal? While his account to some extent vacillates on this point, Honneth seems to suggest that the evaluative character of direct recognition arises in part from its being expressive of a specific type of emotional stance, one which is held by the recognising subject and directed towards the other person.29 Thus, what the recognitive gesture most directly expresses is an affectively grounded evaluation of the other (of one or another form), and this

 See the interesting, although apparently slightly different, account offered by Honneth in his discussion of the Kantian notion of respect (2001, p. 222).

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e­ motional stance is furthermore immediately intelligible to the person recognised as having motivational consequences, namely as eliciting in the recognising subject a desire to treat the recognised person in a morally appropriate fashion (in one or another sense). As Honneth writes: “Whether someone smiles lovingly or merely greets one respectfully, whether someone extends his hand emphatically or merely nods his head in a benevolent way, in each case a different type of emotional readiness to engage morally with the addressee is signalled with the expressive gesture” (Honneth 2001, p. 122, my emphasis). This is not to say, of course, that all forms of recognition merely involve a person being affectively moved, or even involve affect at all. Certainly, the examples offered by Honneth in his essay on social invisibility seem to involve the act of recognition being rooted in a certain type of affective stance, in that they each involve a certain type of emotionally expressive gesture or movement (Honneth 2001, p. 119). On the other hand, the recognition of a person’s legal rights, for example, might not require any specific emotional response, personal evaluation, or even bodily gesture, since here an implicit or explicit commitment to act in accordance with certain practical norms is often sufficient.30 Ultimately, Honneth notes that an important consequence of his analysis is that the notion of cognition with which he began is in need of revision. When the manner in which we immediately respond to those who we take as socially visible is considered, it becomes clear that – in such cases at least – our most basic comportment towards others is fused with recognitive elements. Honneth thus suggests that the perception of others is rarely the value-neutral cognition of an identifiable object, but is rather an “evaluative perception in which the worth of other persons is directly given.” Indeed, when it comes to everyday social experience, value-neutral and purely judicative identification is a rather rare case, one that occurs only when “an original recognizing is neutralized” (Honneth 2001, pp. 125–6). In short, recognition is grounded in a form of evaluative intentionality already interwoven with our perceptual awareness of others. Honneth thus wonders whether his initial construal of literal visibility might be in need of revision, given that it now seems questionable to postulate a form of cognition uncontaminated by recognitive elements as a basic and self-sufficient layer in our relations to others. In a later text, Reification, Honneth revisits and deepens his suggestion that affect plays a central role in recognition. Here he is at pains to describe a distinctive and basic form of recognition, one that, he claims, is already presupposed by forms of recognition in which other persons’ cognitive and moral attitudes and social statuses are taken as “a corrective authority” to one’s own (Honneth 2008, p. 42). Drawing on developmental psychology as well as various philosophical resources, Honneth argues that the ability to take over another person’s perspective through communication is “attached to the hardly accessible prerequisite of emotional receptivity or identification” (Honneth 2008, p.  46). He moreover describes such a recognitive stance as a form of sympathy (Anteilnahme), by which he means an emotional mode

 Honneth discusses the different forms of recognition pertaining to love, rights, and solidarity, in his influential book The Struggle for Recognition (1995a, pp. 92–139).

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of comportment in which the rhythm of the other’s emotional life affects the sympathising subject, presenting itself as having a certain primitive value and thus as an “invitation to act” (Honneth 2008, pp. 45, 49 f., 57 f.).31 Accordingly, and following a distinction already present in his discussion of invisibility, Honneth seeks here to distinguish this “emotional recognition,” in which the other is recognised in a sympathetic or benevolent manner, from “that particular form of mutual recognition” in which the “other person’s specific characteristics are affirmed” (Honneth 2008, pp. 46, 51). In other words, this basic sympathetic engagement with others must be distinguished from the more robust, institutionally embedded, and communicatively embodied shapes of recognition which Honneth elsewhere analyses as love, respect, and solidarity (Honneth 2008, p. 152–153; cf. Honneth 1995a, 2003a, b, 2014). But in this text, Honneth also seeks to delineate a certain kind of basic and generic orientation towards other persons, one which is presupposed and articulated by specific acts of recognition and recognitive relationships, and which he thus describes as an “elementary” or even “existential” mode of recognition (Honneth 2008, pp. 51, 90 n. 70). Crucially, this general stance is also taken to be a presupposition for any active denial of recognition more substantively conceived. Accordingly, even staunchly negative or indifferent emotional responses to others are said to presuppose existential recognition: “Love and hate, ambivalence and coldness, can all be expressions of this elementary recognition as long as they can be said to be modes of existential affectedness” (Honneth 2008, p. 152; cf. Honneth 2008 p. 51). In a more complex and contentious move, Honneth even goes so far as to suggest that the extreme case of “reification”—in which the other person is taken and treated “as something that lacks all human properties and capacities”—must be understood as presupposing elementary recognition (Honneth 2008, pp. 148, 58ff.). Differently put, the kind of recognition at issue here is the fundamental “experience that other individuals are fellow humans” which precedes and makes possible any further judgement, evaluation, and action wherein other human persons are responded to as such (Honneth 2008, p. 152). In a further step, one which is on the face of things tempting to follow, Honneth connects the two claims, maintaining that this elementary mode of recognition itself “contains an element of affective sympathy” (Honneth 2005, p. 59/2008, p. 50), or more strongly, that it just is a stance of sympathetic-affective recognition.32 One consequence of this move is that Honneth must then offer an account of how sympathy can indeed comprise a fundamental and universal layer in our other-relations, since this is exactly the role which elementary recognition is supposed to play. After all, it is far from obvious that all of our relations to others, and in particular those  In the English version of this text, published before the German edition (Honneth 2005), the (not readily translatable) German term “Anteilnahme” is mostly rendered as “empathic engagement,” but given my broader use here of the slightly different (phenomenological) notion of empathy, I use here the translation “sympathy.” 32  Thus, to cite one example of many, Honneth writes of “einer vorgängigen Einstellung der Anerkennung oder Anteilnahme” as being prior to all cognitive attitudes with regard to the world of social relations (2005, p. 63, my emphasis). 31

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involving mere indifference or the active denial of positive recognition, are rooted in sympathy. Honneth is certainly aware of this problem, and he claims that an appropriate account can be given for both of the characteristic cases of recognitive denial already mentioned—namely, negative emotional responses, and reification. In enacting a negative emotional response to another person, Honneth writes, “we still always have a residual sense of not having done full justice to their personalities. In such a situation, the element in our recognitional stance which we customarily call ‘conscience’ would be at issue” (Honneth 2008, p. 51).33 Now, I take it that Honneth here identifies a relatively prevalent and philosophically interesting facet of our social and, more broadly, emotional being—namely, the sense in which our emotional responses can be appropriate or inappropriate to the matters which they target, and can moreover be immediately lived as such, through their accompaniment by an element of second-order and self-directed affect (such as pride, embarrassment, shame, or guilt) (see Drummond 2004, pp. 123 f.) However, as a defence of the claim that our other-relations necessarily and universally contain an element of sympathetic recognition, Honneth’s allusion to this phenomenon seems unpersuasive. Perhaps we can concede that, in those instances where we are aware of unsympathetic responses as being normatively inappropriate, a sedimented form of sympathetic recognition thereby shows itself to be operative in our experience. But whatever the merits of this line of thought, it appears to have no bearing upon the diversity of situations in which an individual responds unsympathetically to another person and does so without any sense of her response being inappropriate. Indeed we frequently feel, whether correctly or incorrectly, our negative response to another person to be fully justified. Honneth’s claim that sympathetic recognition plays a ubiquitous and fundamental role in our relations to others thus appears questionable, or at least in need of further argumentation. After all, one would surely have to be an unusually compassionate and self-critical individual to immediately experience all of one’s non-sympathetic feelings for and engagement with others as being inappropriate in nature. And as this observation suggests, not only is it the case that many of our responses to others contain no identifiable trace of sympathy, but the extent to which we do respond to others sympathetically is just as much rooted in our specific emotional personalities, and in the specific nature of the perceived actions and suspected personalities of those that we respond to, as it is in our bare recognition of those others as persons. It follows from this that if we are to hold onto the notion of an elementary recognition underlying even our non-benevolent and merely indifferent responses to others, the terrain in which such recognition is to be located must lie below the level of any specific form of emotional or practical comportment. That is, any attempt to identify elementary recognition with emotional recognition is ultimately unsustainable. On the other hand, and as Honneth has persuasively illustrated, elementary recognition must be such that it can be made intelligible how emotional recognition

 For reasons of space I am unable to discuss here Honneth’s attempt to render cases of reification compatible with his claims regarding elementary recognition (2008, pp. 52–63).

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can function immediately in our relations to others. We should retain our grip on the insight that our basic recognition of others as persons is typically infused with and accompanied by forms of other-directed affect, and while these primitive affective responses to others may not be as unconditionally affirmative as Honneth seems to suggest, his insistence that an element of sympathetic emotional recognition can be operative already at a very basic level of our other-relations—at least in certain cases and under certain conditions—is both intuitively persuasive and in need of further clarification. In the remainder of this section, and taking my basis in Husserl and Stein’s analyses of empathy and other-directed emotions, I will delineate one way in which these two desiderata can be fulfilled. My basic claim will be that if elementary recognition is identified with what I will call interpersonal empathy, then it becomes intelligible how it can provide an immanent basis for emotional recognition, while simultaneously allowing that the details of specific cases of emotional recognition (or its denial) have a certain dependency upon the interpersonal context in which they are enacted (or denied).34 To summarise briefly, Honneth’s suggestive analyses of the relationship between social visibility, recognition, and emotion raise the following points. On the one hand, our lived visibility to one another in a social (as opposed to ‘literal’) sense, is not exhausted by our perceived spatial proximity, but is also shaped by the bodily gestures we direct towards one another, inasmuch as these gestures serve to express recognitive stances. In many cases, such recognitive stances involve the affirmation of the other persons’ social role, and primarily indicate a willingness to take account of this role in one’s ongoing personal engagements. Other recognitive gestures, however, are more accurately understood as primarily expressive of an emotional stance held by the recognising person and directed towards the person recognised. Such expressive stances of emotional recognition also confirm certain moral expectations on behalf of the recognised subject, inasmuch as they convey a certain kind of affective valuation of the other as a person, and a willingness to do justice to the other’s personal value in the ongoing course of the encounter. On the other hand, they are not ordinarily the product of a process of deliberation, nor are they motivated by instrumental or egoistic purposes. Rather, such emotional recognition is a matter of an immediate and affective responsiveness to the personhood of the other, a responsiveness which is intimately intertwined with the very seeing of the recognised person. Finally, I have suggested that, in order to account for the variety of possibilities for emotional recognition, as well as its possible denial, we need to turn to a level of recognition below any emotional stance proper—and this we can find in interpersonal empathy.

 The convergence between existential recognition and empathy has been highlighted by Zahavi (2010a, p.  305), and I offer a slightly more detailed discussion of this relationship in Jardine (2017). Additional phenomenological discussions of Honneth’s account of elementary or existential recognition can be found in: Varga (2010), Varga and Gallagher (2012), Petherbridge (2017), and Gallagher (2017).

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7.3.2  Empathy as Elementary Recognition Our critical engagement with elements of Honneth’s social theory has brought into view a conception of ‘elementary recognition’ characterised by three generic features. Elementary recognition in this sense designates (i) an acknowledgement of the personhood of others which lies below the level of both objectifying judgement and  more robust forms of recognition (i.e., the evaluative appraisal or practical acknowledgement of the other’s specific properties), (ii) the ubiquitous, basic, and fundamental manner in which human beings are socially oriented towards one another, and (iii) a stance which nevertheless functions immediately in our evaluative and practical responses to others and which is hence articulated by more positive and specific acts of emotive or practical recognition. We can now begin to consider whether interpersonal empathy, or a certain level thereof, might satisfy these three conditions. (I.) Let us first consider in what sense interpersonal empathy functions as a pre-­predicative and pre-evaluative recognition of the personhood of the other. To this end, we should first recall the conclusions reached in the second section of the third chapter. We saw there that intuitive experience of other human beings cannot be accurately captured through simply appealing to the model of thing-­perception. Rather than presenting themselves as spatiotemporal unities of strictly sensible material features (see the fifth section of the fourth chapter), other people show up for us perceptually as expressive units, whose bodily movements display elements of a foreign mental life, and where both of these dimensions participate in a unitary whole. Importantly, Husserl suggests that other people’s bodily movements do not merely expressively reveal discrete mental events; rather, from the outset, they coexhibit a personal self of unique character. In a passage already partially quoted in the third chapter, Husserl puts this point as follows: As to the persons we encounter in society, their living bodies are, of course, given to us in intuition just like the other environing objects, and consequently so are their personalities (Personalitäten), at one with their living bodies. But we do not find here two things, intertwined with one another in an external way: living bodies and persons. We find unitary human beings, who have dealings with us; and their living bodies participate in the human unity. In their sensuously intuitive content—in what is typical of living corporeality in general, and in the many particularities which vary from case to case, those of the play of facial expressions, of the spoken “word,” of the individual’s tone of voice, etc.—is expressed the mental life of persons, their thinking, feeling, desiring, what they do and what they omit to do. What is also already expressed here is their individual mental character (individuelle geistige Eigenart), which, to be sure, comes to givenness in an ever more perfect way in the unfolding of the states which become understandable to us in their nexus as well. Everything is intuitive here; as are external world and living body, so is the bodily-mental unity of the human being standing there (Hua IV/V 209/Hua IV 234–235, transl. modified) [1913]).

This passage may appear at first sight to offer a somewhat romanticised interpretation of our experience of other human persons. Nevertheless, my contention is that by relating these remarks to other elements of Husserl’s account of empathy and

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personal selfhood, a phenomenologically compelling account of interpersonal empathy can be developed. To begin with, we should recall that others present themselves empathetically as consciously engaged in a common surrounding world (see the second section of the third chapter). Not only is it the case that the other’s living body manifests a kinaesthetic-­sensory system, in that it is given as directly embodying a foreign perceptual ‘here’ to which various kinds of perceptual ‘theres’ correspond; and that these ‘theres’ are normally taken to cohere with my own bodily-relative ‘theres’ within a common system of perceptual appearances (see the fifth chapter). Rather, the subjective engagement evinced in seeing another human person also incorporates distinctively personal shapes of egoic comportment, and accordingly draws in layers of worldly significance that far outstrip the sensible features of intersubjective nature (Hua IV/V 549, 213–214, 192, 208/Hua IV 347, 321–322, 191–192, 320 [1916/1917, 1913, 1913, 1913])—such that interpersonal empathy builds upon but goes beyond animate empathy (an issue I return to in the eighth chapter). To illustrate this, consider that I see a man across the street from me get out of a car and walk into a pizzeria. Assuming that the lighting conditions and spatial proximity are sufficient for me to get a good look at this unknown other, then there will be a range of descriptive assertions that I can make that merely explicate what is directly given in this experience, and an indefinite plethora of questions, arising from these assertions, which thought and imagination can speculatively traverse. Thus, I can say, and on perceptual (or perception-like) grounds, that the man saw the pizzeria as such and was purposively walking into it; that his facial expressions and posture betrayed an emotive condition in a more or less determinate manner, his gruff scowl and bulky walk manifesting a certain frustration; that the slightly exaggerated way he glares at the watch shows he is not in the mood to be kept waiting, and so forth. And beyond such descriptive assertions, I can think to myself about, for instance, where the man was coming from, what he is after in the pizzeria, and whether there is somewhere he needs to be or if he is ‘always like this.’ Evidently, such assertions and questions only scratch the surface of the man’s personal life, and it can hardly be said that I have a deep understanding of his world-directed thoughts, emotions, and actions and of the personal character which they engage. But what my thoughts do betray is a comprehension of the man’s bodily activity as engaging certain kinds of emotive and practical attitudes. Moreover, even with such an anonymous other I will still have some understanding, whose source is admittedly difficult to determine, that such attitudes respond to and further ‘crease’ a worldly situation, and that they do so in a manner which is implicitly responsive to certain motivational laws. For instance, I might say to myself, “I can see he’s angry about something,” and I will likely at this stage stop staring, fearful of the further irritation and even practical consequences which are bound to emerge if his irritable gaze locks onto mine and sees it is as an affront. As these last considerations evince, it is often extremely difficult to neatly separate out the senses which the other’s expressive movements display perceptually, and the more probable or evaluative sense-articulations that emerge from the

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imaginative, judicative, emotive, and practical activity of the empathising subject.35 However, Husserl would argue that we can only attempt to actively explicate the motivational context of another’s attitudes through thought, imagination, and our own personal responses, once we have become intuitively acquainted with them as the attitudes of persons. One way of motivating this claim is by noting that, when faced with another’s angry behaviour, we do not have to first imagine ourselves being angry, apply a body of general theoretical knowledge, or actively respond to the other in emotion or practice, in order to begin immediately treating the other’s emotive condition as a motivated and world-oriented and attitude. Rather, just as our perspectival experience of a thing as having a certain shape or colour implies appearance-systems in which such features can be further exhibited, our empathetic recognition of another’s anger implies a foreign motivational context in which that anger inheres and actively participates. To employ a Wittgensteinian metaphor, to recognise another’s anger is not to identify an isolated mental state but to become acquainted with a pattern within the weave of a personal life (cf. Wittgenstein 1968, II §i). And while this personal context is evinced in my empathetic grasp of an unknown other only as a “horizon of indeterminateness and unknownness,” it is nevertheless co-accepted in my empathetic-perceptual grasp of the other’s emotive condition (Hua IV/V 537/Hua IV 342 [1916/1917]). Moreover, even if the other’s motivational context is only properly lived through originally, in her emotive and practical engagement, by the other, this does not makes it something wholly inaccessible to me. Not only does the other’s motivational nexus depend upon and articulate the cultural world and its meaningful things, events, practices, and institutions (Sect. 7.2.2); it is also a domain of sense whose distinctively personal ‘creases’ can be gradually disclosed through further empathetic experience (see Sect. 7.4). But what are the implications of this line of thought for the claim that interpersonal empathy already accomplishes a recognition of another personal self? In this connection, Husserl suggests that in witnessing another’s embodied comportment as manifesting certain emotive and practical stances, I often feel myself to have come into a certain kind of ambiguous experiential contact with her unique personal style. For instance, in seeing another’s emotive response, we typically comprehend in the other not merely a momentary episode but an emotional disposition or habituality—that is, what we often simply call an ‘emotion’ that persists beyond its specific episodic appearance—or, in other cases, a more generalised 'character trait' (cf. Goldie 2000, pp. 12–16, 141f.; Drummond 2020). As Stein puts it, “I not only grasp an occurring feeling in the friendly glance, but friendliness as a habitual feature,” just as “an outburst of anger reveals to me a ‘violent temperament’ (Gemütsart)” (Stein 2008, p. 104; 1989, p. 86, transl. modified). Building upon the analyses of the previous chapter, we can say that what this involves is my taking the other’s emotive episode to manifest an abiding emotive attitude, a way of responding emotionally that displays, albeit most minimally and provisionally, the other as a subject of  Matters are evidently more tricky here than they are with the relatively clear-cut case of thing-­ perception, and this is one reason why, as Zahavi has aptly put it, the problem of empathy was for Husserl the “preoccupation of a lifetime” (2014, p. pp. 123–124).

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habitual emotive character. As we shall see below, Husserl maintains that, as a form of interpersonal understanding, this mode of comprehension has a limited veridicality and depth; and the kind of claim it makes regarding the other’s character is one whose rationally motivated acceptance requires fulfilment through ongoing experience. But the important point for now is that it in encountering another’s expressive bodily movements as manifesting an emotive stance—as a genuine outburst of the other’s emotion, rather than merely a set of arbitrary bodily movements—we already accept that the ‘who’ we are in encountering is a person with a specific character. Just as a material thing perceptually displays its enduring features through the circumstance-­relative fluctuation of its ‘states,’ a brick displaying its red hue in the dampening of its colour-states which accompany changes in the lighting conditions, our empathetic grasp of another’s anger as a motivated enactment already manifests ‘something’ of the habitual style of the expressive unity we have before us, even if we cannot really describe ‘what’ it manifests. Or put more acutely, it manifests someone; where this designates not merely a locus of experience but a person with a style and history of their own. As Husserl puts it: “The ego of the person with its stream of lived experience, and with the stream of acts which flow forth with it, is apprehended in empathy; and within the kind of motivations that are thereby co-­ apprehended, in their habitual type, the individuality is also apprehended. The other person is apprehended in his ego-life, his ego-willing, and his ego-working, etc.” (Hua IV/V 484/Hua IV 389–390, transl. modified [1910–12]). (II.) We can now consider the degree of universality with which such an empathetic recognition of another personal self operates. In this regard, Husserl draws an instructive analogy with the case of perceiving an oak tree. The sticking point in this analogy is that becoming perceptually familiar with the individual character of the tree is a gradual process, and that this process involves the perceived tree acquiring a greater specificity with regard to its perceptual type. The shine of a torch reveals the unknown ‘spatial thing’ lurking in the darkness as ‘a tree’; and upon closer inspection I notice its typical height, texture, and shape: it is ‘an oak.’ Eventually I recognise, in its specific features, ‘that tree’; the one which I have gazed up at and clambered upon for years now, but whose labyrinthine branches still contain a universe of possibilities for future exploration. Similarly, when perceiving another person we frequently (even, in the bustle of contemporary life, generally) know (kennen) very little of their individual character, and rather comprehend their bodily comportment and gait “in terms of universal ego-being” (Hua IV/V 454/Hua IV 228, transl. modified [1916/1917]). What this means is that the limit-case of our encounter with a stranger involves recognising the other as instantiating the wholly general type, “a person, a human being,” or in the more normal case, “a human being of this class, of this standing, of this age, etc.” Importantly, this generic and typified grasp of others is not simply a matter of our taking them to be a certain kind of cultural object, as ‘something’ which is evaluated and used for certain ends in our culture. Leaving aside the important question of how, and in what sense, such (reifying) social engagement is possible, Husserl emphasises that our grasp of others as of generic social types informs our empathetic comprehension of their emotional

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expressions and of the intentions and projects guiding their witnessed actions, particularly when we have amassed prior empathetic experience of other individuals of the relevant type (Hua IV/V 454–455 [1916/17]).36 Thus, for instance, while the well-heeled older man walking briskly towards the pizzeria might look to us as hungry and feeling entitled to good service, the younger man with a delivery bag on his shoulder, moving at the same pace and towards the same location and even with a similar gait and posture, instead appears to be reluctantly fulfilling his work duties. The essential point here is that such typified others are originally present to us as exhibiting forms of personal life, as emoting and acting in a way which exhibits typical and socially inculcated motivational structures. In this way, even highly anonymous and typified social encounters involve a certain form of interpersonal recognition. And just as the perceptual grasp of ‘a tree’ can gradually transform itself into one of ‘this familiar tree,’ so too can a generically typified grasp of another person develop into a familiarity with the other’s individual personal character or style (see Sect. 7.4). To what extent, then, should we understand the variety of recognition realised in interpersonal empathy as an all-embracing dimension of our experience of other human beings in the social world? To my mind, a fully satisfying response to this question ultimately cannot be provided without a fine-grained analysis of the various different shapes that our experience of other human beings can take—and such a comprehensive task clearly transcends the confines of the present discussion. There is, after all, a distinct possibility that no interpersonal recognition at all takes place in a number of contexts that arguably deserve to be (very) broadly characterised as experiential encounters with other human beings. These include those cases where we fail to actively direct our empathetic focus towards others—such that they remain entirely within the obscure background of our intentional consciousness— as well as scenarios where we do divert our focus towards the other, but in a way that actively thematises them in a reifying or dehumanising fashion.37 In the absence of a thoroughgoing analysis of these possibilities, it seems to me that we can ­nevertheless confidently assert a less ambitious claim: namely, that an elementary variety of interpersonal recognition is accomplished whenever we explicitly focus upon another person as an expressive unity manifest in interpersonal empathy. This is not to say that this kind of elementary recognition is an entirely active accomplishment. As Husserl notes, before we turn towards and explicitly apprehend other human persons, such others are already pregiven to us as expressive unities. This  The concept of limit-case is not employed explicitly by Husserl here, but is used forcefully in this way by Schutz (1967), who offers a detailed analysis of the role of typification in social encounters. The connection between typification and the phenomenology of empathy has also been illuminatingly discussed by Zahavi (2014, pp.  145–6), Taipale (2015), Summa (2017), and Breyer (2020). 37  For arguments to the effect that reification (or, to adopt a different vocabulary, the objectification of other people) and dehumanisation are two distinct phenomena, see Heinämaa and Jardine (2021) and Mikkola (2021). 36

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pervasive pregivenness of bodily expressivity does not, however, look to be sufficient for (even elementary) interpersonal recognition; indeed, as Husserl points out, being implicitly affected by other persons is a constant lived-experience even for the naturalistically-­oriented observer who, in her theoretical engagements, “sees everywhere only nature” and accordingly “does not see persons” at all (Hua IV/V 211, 227 [1913]; cf. Hua IV 245–246, 190–191). The simple act of attending to another in their personally expressive worldly presence therefore looks to be a good candidate for the most basic variety of interpersonal recognition. It is a fundamental dimension of social engagement, and as such it enables us to distinguish a genuinely interpersonal orientation towards others from cases where we fail to take notice of others, or where a reifying or dehumanising attitude overrides, to one or another degree, our very interpersonal experience and understanding. (III.) We have seen that interpersonal empathy converges with Honneth’s conception of elementary recognition, in that it involves a way of explicitly perceiving and understanding others as persons that is, to a significant extent, pervasive within social life, and which underlies everyday social judgements. A question immediately arises here, however, as regards the relation between interpersonal empathy and emotive recognition. For on the Husserlian view here developed, while empathy may discern the other as personal subject of emotional attitudes, it is in and of itself a non-emotional and evaluatively neutral form of intentionality. In what sense, then, can we say that empathy, as the broadly perceptual givenness of the other as an embodied person, provides an immanent ground for and is immediately articulated by more full-­blooded modes of recognition? In the second chapter, we already saw that Husserl offers a detailed account of the manner in which our emotional responses contribute a new, evaluative dimension to the sense that things, other people, and situations have for us. As was also touched upon in that chapter, Husserl’s analyses of our specifically interpersonal emotions reveal that they build upon our empathetic apprehension of others’ bodily expressivity, and that they harbour both passive and active aspects. This should come as no surprise, since Husserl consistently argues that every explicit act wherein a subject matter is emotionally valued builds upon, and incorporates within itself, an attentive apprehension of that subject matter (see the fourth section of the second chapter). Rather than revisiting Husserl’s investigations, in the following I will sketch an answer to the question raised above by applying the account Stein offers of the relations between empathy and other-directed emotions. My aim here is both to further clarify Honneth’s distinction between emotional and elementary recognition, and to illustrate the intimate intertwinement of interpersonal empathy and affect. As we saw earlier, what distinguishes elementary and emotional recognition, is that instances of the latter involve the recognising subject responding emotionally to the person recognised, while the former is rather the underlying acknowledgement of the other person that is makes possible such (interpersonal) emotional responses. In fact, one can find in Stein a description of how, in various ways, our emotional responses to other people articulate and are grounded in empathy. As Stein points

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out, there is a distinctive class of emotions which are characterised by their uniquely targeting other persons: “Sentiments (Gesinnungen) of love and hate, thankfulness, vengeance, animosity, etc., which have the other person as their object, also belong to the feeling acts in which layers of the person are exposed”. However, she goes on to note that, to the extent that such emotions comprise evaluative and egoic responses to the other person, then they must be based in “the apprehending (Erfassen) of the foreign person,” which is to say in an explicit mode of empathy in which the other person is given and noticed as such (Stein 2008, p.  120/1989, p.  101, transl. modified).38 Thus, if an act of emotional recognition targets another person as another person, or in her personhood, then it must be motivated by interpersonal empathy. Now, one initial worry might be that this line of thought is excessively cognitivistic; indeed, it might appear that we have lost sight altogether of Honneth’s insight that emotional recognition has a certain priority over an evaluatively neutral and purely cognitive stance towards the other.39 To my mind, however, this worry is ultimately misguided. As has already been emphasised, empathy needn’t involve a detached observation of the other in any strong sense, being in its basic form more analogous to attentive perceiving than to any type of judicative attitude. Furthermore, the claim that empathetic givenness grounds or motivates emotional recognition needn’t be understood as the idea that we somehow infer our emotional responses from empathetic data, nor even as entailing that empathy and emotional recognition are always two wholly separate acts. Rather, as Stein explicitly affirms, our concrete experience of the world always contains a constitutive moment of affective evaluation, such that objects are always concretely given with some degree of axiological sense: “A value-constitution goes hand in hand with every object-constitution, every fully constituted object is simultaneously a value-object, and the value-free fact-­ world is ultimately an abstraction” (Stein 2010, p. 134/2000, p. 160, transl. modified). Importantly, this also applies to interpersonal empathy. When we consider our explicit directedness towards other persons in its totality, we discover that empathy is typically infused with both passive and active affective elements, such that the sense others have for us involves, from the outset, not only empathetic apprehension but also emotive valuing. While empathetically grasping another person’s emotional state, for instance, we generally feel an immediate response of our own that contributes to the sense the state has for us, in that, for example, the other’s anger strikes us  In a similar vein, Husserl notes that “persons who belong to the social association are given to each other as ‘companions,’ not as opposed objects but as counter-subjects who live “with” one another, who converse and are related to one another, actually or potentially, in acts of love and counter-love, of hate and counter-hate, of confidence and reciprocated confidence, etc.” (Hua IV/V 242/Hua IV 194 [1910–12]). 39  For a rich and original phenomenological account of moral emotions in the spirit of this critique, see Steinbock (2014). Whereas Steinbock’s treatment builds upon aspects of Scheler’s account of emotional intentionality, the account developed here has a greater affinity with Drummond’s Husserl-inspired phenomenological account of respect (Drummond 2006), which understands respect as a moral emotion of the recognitive strand and as empathetically motivated. 38

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frightening, her pride as irritating. However, it is also the case that the constitutive role played by empathy and that played by the stirrings of affect are in principle different, and moreover that our interpersonal emotive attitudes are motivationally responsive to empathetic senses.40 This line of thought becomes clearer when we consider Stein’s descriptions of such emotional responses. Stein takes the most minimal affective interpersonal response to be a basic form of sympathy (Sympathie) or antipathy (Antipathie) that arises when we feel ourselves being touched by or coming into contact with (Berührtwerden) another person. She moreover claims that such affections “are not sentiments that I hold towards a person for the sake of this or that deed or abiding feature, but rather an attraction or repulsion exerted upon me by a simple quale, his distinctive character (Eigenart)” (Stein 2010, p. 134/2000, p. 160, transl. modified; cf. 2010, p. 137/2000, p. 163). Stein is here suggesting that there is a certain type of elementary other-directed affect that needn’t involve an explicit appraisal of the other in light of her specific personal features, emotional responses, or actions. Rather, to put the point in the now-familiar Husserlian language, we often find ourselves feeling sympathetic or antipathetic towards another embodied person more in light of a certain style already manifest in their expressive and affectively coloured movements, one which is utterly distinctive and difficult to describe. While Stein’s brief account of a sympathetic and antipathetic orientation towards others is not entirely explicit on this question, she can be moreover understood as suggesting that our sympathetic or antipathetic orientation towards others harbours both passive and active elements. On the one hand, sympathy and antipathy involve our being passively pulled towards (Anziehung) or repulsed by (Anstoßung) the other person’s distinctive character or style. On the other hand, both sympathy and

 What somewhat complicates matters here is that, when we examine the manner in which empathetic intentionality in its temporal unfolding is motivated, then a simple foundational relationship between empathy and affect will ultimately become unsustainable. As Stein points out, in general terms we can say that our epistemic interest in getting to know a matter more closely is itself shaped by how that matter affectively strikes us, as well as being dependent upon a more general stance towards the value of a specific type of knowledge (Stein 2008, p. 125–6/1989, p. 108). And with regard to empathy more specifically, what Stein at one point calls the “characteristic stance (Haltung)” of empathy, namely our actively “turning towards and submerging ourselves within foreign lived experience” (Stein 2008, p. 36/1989, p. 23, translation modified)—a stance which I take to characterise the attentive perceiving of other persons, as well as the imagination-like understanding addressed in Sect. 7.4—will itself presuppose our being passively affected by the other (see also the fourth section of the second chapter and the fourth section of the fourth chapter). To this extent, Honneth’s characterisation of elementary recognition as already involving affectivity is ultimately not phenomenologically ungrounded. However, these more genetic-phenomenological considerations do not challenge the central thesis presented here, namely that our explicit emotional evaluations of other people are ultimately founded upon empathetic apprehension. That is, while there are good reasons for regarding our attentiveness towards others as something that is already affectively driven, it remains the case that our explicit, emotional directedness towards others in sympathy, as well as our more discriminating evaluative appraisals of others, are founded upon an empathetic apprehension of them as persons.

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antipathy can be understood as involving an active dimension, insofar as they involve an emotive directedness towards the other person’s unique character as an indivisible whole (Richtung auf dieses schlechthin individuelle unteilbare Ganze), a directedness which, moreover, the interpersonal stances of love and hate grow from (Sympathie und Antipathie [sind] in höchsten Steigerung: Liebe und Haß) (Stein 2010, p. 134/2000, p. 160). Accordingly, Stein’s remarks regarding sympathy and antipathy can be understood as giving an interpersonal twist to Husserl’s generic concept of liking or disliking (Gefallen, Missfallen), the latter designating a primitive mode of egoic valuing that is concretely motivated by the subject matter as both attentively apprehended and already affectively coloured (see the fourth section of the second chapter). Seen in this light, it is clear that being directed towards another’s distinctive character or style in an explicitly sympathetic or antipathetic manner is something that is only possible as founded upon an empathetic apprehension of another person (or upon a modification of such apprehension in memory or imagination). While, in such a scenario, our explicit focus on the other person’s distinctive style is immediately infused with various affective elements, it remains the case that this style is something recognised empathetically—albeit imperfectly, approximately, and falliably—and that our sympathetic stance is exactly elicited by this style and no other. Consequently, even a simple stance of sympathy (or antipathy) towards a perceptually present human being presupposes and articulates the basic interpersonal recognition accomplished by an empathetic focus on the other person. Moreover, Stein distinguishes from such minimal interpersonal affects what she calls “emotional position-takings” with regard to the foreign person, such as approval, admiration, contempt and indignation (which she suggests are based upon or grounded in (aufgebaut) primitive sympathy/antipathy). When it comes to these emotional stances we are dealing with the “moral valuation and assessment of the character of another person, her sentiments and deeds” (Stein 2010, pp. 221–222./2000, p. 265, transl. modified). In such cases, it is also clear that, in quite different and often rather complex ways, our emotional evaluation of the other person can only be motivated if the relevant “persons, personal features, and personal modes of comportment” it targets are themselves given, or at least prefigured on the basis of empathetic typification (Stein 2010, p.  137/2000, p.  163, transl. modified). Furthermore, while higher-order forms of interpersonal affect are sometimes already interwoven in our experience at the level of perceptual empathy, they may gain further motivational import from deeper, and often communication-­ embedded, forms of interpersonal understanding, in which the motivational complexity of the other’s emotional and practical engagement is re-accomplished and explicated (see Sect. 7.4).41 I take it that the foregoing analysis lends some support to the claim that an explicit dimension of interpersonal empathy grounds and motivates a certain class of emotions that are directed towards the other as a person. But a crucial issue

 Stein also claims that emotional sharing (Mitfühlen) is grounded in empathy (2008, pp. 25–6/1989, pp. 14–5); see Zahavi (2014, p. 245).

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remains whether such forms of emotional directedness are sufficient for a genuinely recognitional stance. Here too we can take guidance from Honneth’s examples of the forms of activity that serve to actively render the other socially visible, such as the sparkling smile directed towards a friend, or a gesture serving to welcome the other or express gratitude to her. As we saw earlier (Sect. 7.3.1), such gestures (i) are characterised by their publicity, by having a determinate sense within the social space of the encounter that the recognised subject ought to understand, (ii) serve to express a certain type of evaluative affirmation of the recognised person, and simultaneously (iii) intimate a readiness for a certain type of practical engagement on behalf of the recognising subject. It seems to me that Husserl and Stein’s work can help support and further clarify Honneth’s suggestion that some forms of emotional response might fulfil these criteria. In regard to (i), Stein importantly underlines a specific kind of empathetic possibility that she terms iterative empathy (iterierte Einfühlung). In iterative empathy, an achievement which should remind us of Husserl’s discussion of reciprocal empathy (see the second and fourth sections of the fifth chapter, and the second section of this chapter), I am not simply aware of the other as perceptually, affectively, and practically engaged with her material and cultural environment, but also as empathetically experiencing other embodied persons, including myself—a situation which involves a curious type of self-othering, since I become aware of myself in a wholly new way, namely as an object of empathetic perception for the other (Stein 2008, pp. 30, 80–1, 106–7/1989, pp. 18, 63, 88–9). Now one implication of such iterative empathy is that, in emotionally responding to the other, I often understand that the other is herself empathetically aware of the my emotionally expressive bodily comportment. To this extent, my emotional response to another person, without being communicative in the more strict narrow sense of embodying an intention to convey something to her, may nevertheless be lived as an enactment that is laid open for her gaze. Thus in assessing whether the criteria of (ii) evaluative affirmation and (iii) practical implication may apply for interpersonal affective responses, we should consider more closely the empathetic awareness which a subject responded to emotionally might have of the subject of the emotional response. In fact, Stein’s descriptions of our empathetic grasp of others’ emotions are strikingly relevant here: Just as my own person is constituted in my own mental acts, the foreign person is constituted in acts experienced in the mode of empathy. I experience his every action as proceeding from a will and this, in turn, from an emotion. Simultaneously with this, I am given a stratum of the person and a realm of values in principle experienceable by him, which in turn simultaneously motivates the expectation of future possible volitional acts and actions. Accordingly, a single action and a single bodily expression, such as a look or a laugh can give me a glimpse into the core of the person (Stein 2008, p. 127/1989, p. 109, transl. modified, emphasis mine). I not only grasp an actual feeling in the friendly glance, but friendliness as a habitual feature (Stein 2008, p. 104/1989, p. 86, transl. modified, emphasis mine).

As Stein emphasises in these passages, in seeing another person enact a certain type of glance, grimace or gesticulation, or in hearing her omit a vocal sound of a certain rhythm, we are often immediately aware of her movements as not only having a

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certain affective colouring, but also as immediately embodying a certain type of evaluative stance which this person has taken towards something—something which could be one’s own behaviour or personal style (cf. Honneth 1995b, p.  162–164). While the various types of affective response manifest in this way encompass a broad spectrum, it is surely the case that some of them can be accurately described as satisfying (ii), i.e., as forms of recognitive affirmation. Indeed, not only Stein’s friendly glance, but also Honneth’s sparkling smiles and welcoming gestures seem to illuminate just this connection. Furthermore, Stein also indicates here that the forms of evaluative comportment manifest in the other’s affectively coloured bodily movements ground, in the empathising subject, certain anticipations regarding the possible actions which the other will perform. And in those cases in which the other’s emotional stance is given as a response to oneself, we are typically led to expect that we are in for a certain kind of treatment from the other. This suggests one way in which such interpersonal affective responses may, in certain cases, satisfy recognitional criteria (iii).42

7.3.3  Summary In recent publications Honneth has cast doubt on the assumption that recognising another individual, such that they feel themselves to be affirmed as socially visible, is always an achievement that is substantially constituted by evaluative judgements and practical commitments. Rather, there are forms of person-recognition that are primarily rooted in perception and emotion. While Honneth’s treatment of the issue  It is worth noting a further implication of this line of thought, one which might be significant for broader discussions regarding recognition. We should not overlook here that an act of emotional recognition is itself a publicly accessible manifestation, not merely of a certain type of elementary stance that could in principle be enacted by anyone, but of the distinctive personality of the individual enacting it. In witnessing the sparkling smile of a friend or the welcoming look of a fellow traveller, I do not merely feel myself to be the object of an anonymous evaluation. Rather, I simultaneously become aware of the subject of this stance as a person, with a distinctive affective style that reaches beyond the individual act of recognition, even if my awareness of this determinate personality is often itself somewhat indeterminate and imprecise. While this point might appear inconsequential, it underlines that whether or not an act of emotional recognition emerges is a matter which ‘depends’ upon the emotional character, and ultimately the biographical history, of the recognising subject, as does indeed the denial of such acts. Furthermore, the aspect of personality brought to light in emotional recognition belongs to its social or interpersonal dimensions, since it is a person’s enduring style in her emotional responsiveness to other persons, a style that is itself socially formed to a certain extent (see Sect. 7.2.2). This suggests that a penetrating analysis of the conditions under which emotional recognition can become, in its different forms, a pervasive feature of our social lives—and equally, of the origin of the habitually rooted and socially reproduced forms of recognitive failure characteristic of what Honneth calls ‘social pathologies’ (1996)— would benefit from giving a closer consideration to the role played therein by habitual emotional personality in its social dimensions, as well as to the social conditions under which such personality is shaped. For a development of this line of thought that seeks to clarify the distinction between social visibility and invisibility, see Jardine (2020).

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has tended to conflate perceptual and affective recognition, I have argued that the account of empathy developed by Husserl and Stein allows us demarcate a form of perceptual (or perception-like) recognition that is distinct from and makes possible emotional recognition. Identifying empathy with a basic and largely pervasive form of recognition that does not yet involve any full-blown evaluative or moral stance, it then becomes intelligible how a form of recognition which does involve such a stance can function—or fail to function—immediately in our experience of others. I then suggested that Stein’s account of other-directed emotions, which she understands as evaluative responses to other persons that find a motivational basis in empathy, illuminates the sense in which our basic recognition of others can be intimately interwoven with (without necessarily involving) emotional recognition, i.e., with an expressive and affectively rooted appraisal of the other as a personal self. To put this claim slightly differently, we can actually be social visible to others in (at least) a twofold manner. On the one hand, when being empathetically recognised, we may become aware of ourselves as visible to others as persons who are perceptually, affectively, and practically immersed in the world, and thus as subjects whose personal lives are perceptually accessible and directly intelligible to others, albeit in a complex and often ambiguous way. On the other hand, when being emotionally recognised, we can also become aware of ourselves as being the object of a certain kind of affective appraisal by another person, one which allows us to expect, on the basis of past experience and familiarity with emotive and practical norms, a certain kind of treatment in our dealings with her. It is worth dwelling on the consequences of the line of thought for the case of reciprocal interpersonal empathy discussed earlier in this chapter (Sect. 7.2.1). We can now see that such a mode of reciprocal recognition goes beyond what, in the fifth chapter, I called reciprocal animate empathy, and that it  does so in various ways. Not only does the form of mutual recognition at stake here involve an awareness of myself as a personal self—an embodied subject whose intentional engagement manifests a distinctive personal character—expressively displayed before the gaze of the other. It also involves becoming aware of my vulnerability to the other’s possible or actual emotive evaluations, to a nexus of stances which, in being visibly directed my way, could penetrate uncomfortably far into ‘how I feel,’ ‘what I am doing,’ and ultimately ‘who I am.’ And this vulnerability can destabilise my selfunderstanding in various ways; affecting my claim to have certain rights, to be participating correctly in interpersonal activities, and to be responding appropriately in my emotive and practical life. Moreover, just as being recognised as an animate and perceptually immersed living body is decisive for the accessibility of intersubjective nature, I would suggest that being empathetically recognised as a personal self is a condition of possibility for the emergence of socially constituted senses in my surrounding world. Without being recognised by others as immersed in a common cultural surrounding world, I would be unable to set up culturally-­embedded meanings, norms, and values as guiding for my personal activity, lacking the awareness of myself as ‘someone’ to whom such norms and traditions could be applicable. Relatedly, Husserl explicitly claims that the mutual recognition that is first established through reciprocal interpersonal empathy—and which then becomes further

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articulated and strengthened through communicative engagement—is a necessary precondition for being bound together with others within human social groups, that is, for the establishment of a “we” that I personally inhabit and that transforms my self-understanding and engagement in manifold ways (Hua IV/V 218–219, 243/ Hua IV 242, 194 [1913]; see also Hua IV/V 192–196 [1913]; cf. Hua IV 191–197).43 Indeed, the emergence for me of a common human world would ultimately not be possible without some acknowledgment of, personal visibility within, and participation in a human community of others. In Husserl’s well-known formulation: “According to our presentation, the concepts I and we are relative: the I requires the thou, the we, and the “other.” And furthermore the ego (the ego as person) requires a relation to a world which engages it. Therefore, I, we and world belong together; the world, as communal environing world, thereby bears the stamp of subjectivity” (Hua IV/V 229/Hua IV 288, transl. modified [1913]).

7.4  Interpersonal Empathy as Personal Understanding In the final section of this chapter, I argue that empathy can ground a form of interpersonal understanding that approximates the kind of personal self-understanding discussed in the first section of this chapter. However, this requires empathetic understanding to go beyond a mere perception-like recognition of another personal self and aim at an imagination-like envisaging or explicit presentification (Vergegenwäritung) of the other’s personal engagement from their own distinctive perspective. Distinguishing Stein and Husserl’s account of this from one developed in contemporary simulation theory, I argue that such envisaging requires the recognition of personal difference, and as such functions best when participating in a narratively structured understanding of the other’s personal history, an understanding which is informed by sustained empathetic contact and interpersonal relationships. In order to underline the distinctive character of the conception of empathy developed by Husserl and Stein, we can return again to the sophisticated simulationist account recently offered by Karsten Stueber, which hinges upon a distinction between two different types of empathy. As we briefly saw in the first section of the third chapter, basic empathy involves a quasi-perceptual ability to recognise other persons as minded beings, as well as to identify certain of their more embodied mental states, such as the anger expressed in one’s trembling hands or the intention expressed in the grasping of a cup. Reenactive empathy, on the other hand, involves ‘simulating’ the other’s mental states by imagining myself as their subject, and  I unable to explicate in more detail here the (in my mind, ultimately reciprocal) relationships of dependency that empathy has with we-experience and group-membership. For excellent discussions of collective and communal forms of intentionality from a Husserlian perspective, see: Carr (1987, pp.  267–295), Hart (1992, p.  155ff.), Zahavi (2014, pp.  241–250), Szanto (2016), and Caminada (2019, p. 120ff.).

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thereby seeking to understand the relation of such states to the motives, reasons, and norms that render them intelligible. Importantly, Stueber argues that without reenactive empathy we would be unable to understand others as rational agents. In support of this claim, he highlights two features of the  mentality  of rational agents which, he argues, are on the one hand necessarily appealed to in any description which does justice to the rationality and norm-responsiveness of the relevant mental accomplishments, and on the other, can only be made intelligible through imaginative reenactment. On this basis, Stueber argues that understanding others’ mental states as embedded in rational agency requires reenactive empathy, since it necessarily requires us to put ourselves “in the other person’s shoes” and seek to understand her mental states as if they were our own, thus providing them with the first-personal framework necessary for their rationality to be comprehended and assessed (Stueber 2006, pp. 21, 152, 160, 164–165). The first feature of rational agency which Stueber appeals to is its contextuality. The thought here, briefly, is that in understanding what a person could appropriately specify as a reason for her beliefs, emotions, or actions, reference to a universal framework of norms will typically be insufficient. Rather, what counts appropriately as a reason is largely a context-dependent issue, and this context is only something which we understand through being first-personally immersed in it, or by imagining ourselves to be so immersed (Stueber 2006, pp. 152–161). The second feature of rational agency concerns the essential indexicality of thoughts as reasons. Stueber’s argument here is that in order to understand a thought as a reason for action, that thought must be conceptualised as integrated into a unitary subjective perspective, since it is only then that it can be construed as a thought that is had by an agent and which could thus serve as guiding for (the same agent’s) behaviour. Stueber thus concludes that another person’s thought can only be understood as a thought of a rational agent—as opposed to simply an internally occurring event that one might identify in a quasi-perceptual manner—in as much as the empathising subject understands it as a thought that could be her own, and which could, if it were her own, serve as a reason for her own action. And clearly, this way of understanding an agent’s thoughts involves some form of reenactment (Stueber 2006, pp. 161–165). In short, to construe a person’s thoughts, emotions, and actions as context-appropriate and as motivationally related to other thoughts, emotions, and actions had by the same person—and thus as participating in rational agency—it is necessary to imaginatively reconstruct the other person’s own first personal perspective (reenactive empathy), and not merely to perceptually identify the other person’s discrete mental states (basic empathy). It is worth noting that Stueber’s distinction between basic and reenactive empathy roughly coincides with at least one of the distinctions drawn by Stein in her account of empathy. We have already seen that Stein distinguishes between empathetic perception and empathetic explication (see the second section of the third chapter). While the former involves my ability to directly grasp the mindedness of the other in her expressive bodily movements, the latter involves a form of self-­ displacement (Hineinversetzen) or re-accomplishment (Mitvollzug, Nachvollzug), in which the other’s intentional experiences are understood in their motivational

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interconnectedness, through my bringing them to givenness in a manner that, to some extent, resembles the way my own experiences are lived through by me (see, e.g., Stein 2008, pp. 18–20, 32–3, 39, 51/1989, pp. 10–11, 20, 25, 34, transl. modified). Moreover, Stein would not be unsympathetic to Stueber’s claim that the quasi-­ first-­personal character of reenactment can often serve to deepen our understanding of the rationality of other people’s actions and emotions. As she at one point writes, to understand (Verstehen) a person’s actions and emotions in their own motivational nexus, the empathising subject must “experientially live through (erleben) the transition from one part to another within a totality of lived-experience (which is not the same as having the parts as objects),” and this is presumably something which can only be achieved through re-accomplishing the other’s experiences for oneself (Stein 2008, pp. 102–103/1989, pp. 84, transl. modified). However, the epistemic role that Stein assigns to empathetic presentification differs subtly but importantly from that which Stueber take re-enactive empathy to play. While Stueber claims that we first become acquainted with others as normatively embedded, world-directed, and unitary subjects through reenactment, for Stein these features are already implicit within the empathetic sense others have for us on the perceptual level, and they rather become more richly and precisely understood through our re-accomplishing and explicating the other’s experiences. On her view, empathetic presentification doesn’t first introduce a domain of categories that are wholly lacking on the perceptual level; rather, it merely “allow[s] us to realize what was first vaguely meant” in our perceptually based grasp of the other person’s experiential acts in her expressive bodily movements (Stein 2008, p.  31/1989, p. 20). One benefit of Stein’s account is that it allows us to capture an experience which, it seems to me, is relatively prevalent in our daily lives: namely, those cases in which we perceive another person as being in some way purposively immersed in a motivated practical or emotional attitude, but feel ourselves unable (or simply lack the interest required) to reenact the detailed motivational situation in which the other’s action or emotion is embedded (cf. Stein 2008, p.  113/1989, p.  115). Similarly, Stein’s account might be better equipped to deal with those cases in which one is directly aware of someone else as responding in emotion or action to a situation whose normatively relevant features are evident to both self and other, an awareness which seems to frequently occur without any explicit act of reenactment taking place, one’s empathetic understanding rather resting upon a shared context of normative relevance with which both subjects are familiar. To put this point in the terms of the previous section, our direct empathetic recognition of other persons already takes their embodied (affective and practical) enactments as motivated responses to a personal situation, and as embedded within a (purely and personally) distinct experiential life. Consequently, Stueber’s stipulation that we only recognise the contextuality and indexicality of another’s mental life through imaginatively projecting ourselves into it can be accused of downplaying the manner in which other people’s expressive movements, on the one hand, draw in a richly meaningful surrounding world, and on the other, manifest a conscious and engaged form of subjectivity.

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This is obviously not to reject entirely the claim that quasi-imaginative modes of empathetic re-accomplishment have an important and irreducible function for interpersonal understanding. While contesting the thought that empathetic re-­ accomplishment is necessary for a basic recognition of the other as subject of motivated attitudes, Husserl and Stein would acknowledge the role of an intuitive presentification in acquiring a deeper and more discerning understanding of another’s personal life and the individual style manifest therein. In this context, Husserl notes that the conditions under which we take ourselves to have a sufficient understanding of another person’s emotion or action is largely a matter of our practical interests (Hua IV/V 456 [1916/1917]). In our daily encounters with others we often remain satisfied with empathetically comprehending them merely in accordance with general types, lacking the interest required to go beyond our initial grasp of the other as a token of the universal type, ‘someone,’ or as someone exhibiting a type of comportment (as someone walking briskly, smiling happily, or lost in thought) or embodying a certain socio-cultural type or role. However, if we are so interested, it is also possible for us to aim at a deeper empathetic understanding of the others’ comportment, by uncovering the relevant facets of the motivational situation in which that action was embedded. As Husserl puts it: If we now take an individual nexus—such as a train of theoretical thought, a practical nexus of aims, the setting of means, realisations, a plan, an attempted project, a fluctuation between mediating accomplishments, etc.—then such a nexus is something “intelligible.” This means that if I have someone given over and against me, and if I apprehend through empathy that he has accomplished one or another individual action, then I have still not understood his acting. I have understood this, and have done so entirely, once I have reconstructed the motivational nexus: what stood before him as a goal, what appeared to him as an attainable medium, which inclinations and allures assailed him and which of those he rejected, and why he did this. In short, I everywhere understand the “why” when I apprehend the other as subject, and indeed as subject of passivities and activities, and when I ascertain from this nexus where he was driven passively and where he actively decided, and how things stood with regard to his grounds, which grounds were valid for him. I understand his theorising (which I recognise as false) when I have followed his line of argument in its entirety, and when I see that he has committed this error here and that one there, and where these errors lay, that he confused two different symbols which, due to his bad handwriting, appeared as sensuously very similar, etc. These are therefore nexuses of intelligibility in a specific sense (Hua IV/V 578 [1915–1917]).

It is with regard to this more active and imagination-like form of empathy that Husserl speaks of the necessity of my “re-living” (nachleben) the other’s personal activity, where this means not merely perceptually grasping another embodied person but bringing “to life” intuitively (zur „lebendigen“Anschauung bringen) the motivated subjective engagements wherein the other’s personal character is directly manifest. And as he acknowledges, in doing this “I must be able to, as it were, co-­ feel, co-think, and co-act; and I must do this in such a manner that it is ‘as if’ I actually feel what the person feels, and that I touch upon, and exactly in the manner

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of empathy, the relevant motivations; indeed, it is as if I am myself motivated by them” (Hua IV/V 458 [1916/17]; see also Hua IV/V 581/Hua IV 274 [1917/1918]).44 Importantly however, Husserl also emphasises that in acquiring a genuine understanding of another’s actions I cannot simply imagine what I would think, feel, or do if faced with the other’s situation, or in a situation of a similar kind— although, as we saw in Sect. 7.1.2, such an envisaging may, in some circumstances, contribute to our self-understanding. In interpersonal life we do, of course, sometimes make use of such an egocentric transposition, just as we apply general bodies of psychological knowledge in order to explain another person’s behaviour (cf. Stein 2008, pp. 105–106/1989, pp. 86–87). But in such cases, we should be wary of assuming that we have genuinely understood the other’s activity in its inner intelligibility. For in order to thematise ‘why’ a person’s action, emotion, or belief has emerged, we must not only gleam ‘what’ motivates the subject but also ‘who’ she is; that is, we must be able to understand how the other, as a subject with a distinctive habitual character, ‘saw’ the situation as demanding of her the response which it did. In this way, genuine interpersonal understanding does not involve projecting my own habits onto the other, but requires a prior recognition of personal difference (Hua IV/V 455–456 [1915/1917]).45 More specifically, this means that envisaging another’s personal activity is primarily informed not by how ‘I would behave,’ but by the relevant features of the other’s personal history that render intelligible her habitual way of responding. On the one hand, this means that my knowledge of the person’s past life and her habitual character can inform my understanding of

 In part because it is only through an explicit presentification of the other person’s subjective life that we are able to move beyond an empathetic apprehension operating with generic personal types and gradually become acquainted with the other’s motivational style in the nexus where it is properly manifest (see Hua XIII 477), Husserl in manuscripts from the early twenties characterises this imaginative presentification as “authentic empathy” (eigentliche Einfühlung), thereby distinguishing it from the “inauthentic empathy” that remains only at the level of a typified perceptual recognition of others (see Hua XIII 438–459, 475–479; cf. Hua IV/V 518–519/Hua IV 329 [mid-1920s]). On this aspect of Husserl’s research into empathy, see Heinämaa (2018) and Overgaard (2019). 45  In this respect, there are clear affinities between Husserl’s analysis of this variety of empathy and the account of empathy developed by Goldie (2000, pp. 194–205). Given this similarity, it is certainly worth considering whether the powerful arguments that Goldie ultimately develops against ascribing empathy—as he understands it—any feasible or fruitful role within interpersonal understanding might also have troubling implications for Husserl’s account (see Goldie 2011). While I cannot fully address this issue here, it is worth noting that Husserl and Goldie differ with respect to what they take (this level of) empathy to conceivably achieve. Goldie’s arguments assume that the relevant function of empathy (so understood) is to allow us to predict, explain, or understand specific actions. Husserl, on the other hand, appeals to empathetic re-living as an ongoing task of gradually bringing to life and familiarising oneself with another’s personal character or motivational style. While this occurs in tandem with the understanding of concrete acts, its aims are ultimately more ambitious. One consequence of this is that the empathetic envisaging of another person’s motivated response to particular circumstances is always something more-or-less preliminary and open to future development or repudiation (see Hua IV/V 457–458, 581 [1916/1917, 1917/1918]; cf. Hua IV 274). For a valuable phenomenological response to Goldie’s critique of empathy that elaborates a somewhat different approach to the line of thought sketched here, see Summa (2017). 44

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particular episodes of her life. To cite an example of Husserl’s, my knowledge that a person has previously spent time in Paris enables me to expect that “[t]his image of a Parisian building will soon remind him of his stay, leading his thoughts in this direction,” and perhaps, given his well-known romantic tendencies, arousing in him feelings of nostalgia (Hua IV/V 455 [1915/1917]). On the other hand, we can now see why Husserl regards fully understanding another person as an infinite task, and maintains that reaching its ideal form would require me to relive the other’s personal live in extenso, and to comprehend the developmental contours of her personal character by situating them within an infinitely detailed narrative (Hua IV/V 458 [1916/1917]). A deep understanding of another person’s actions, emotions, and beliefs can always be informed by familiarising oneself with their personal character and the history of its coming-to-be, and on the other hand, such an understanding is exactly a way of acquiring and developing such a familarity (Hua IV/V 579 [1916/17]; see also Hua IV/V 312 (Hua IV 104) [1915]). Consequently, our ability to envisage and understand the motivational context of another’s actions is best seen as embedded within ongoing personal relationships, in which our acquaintance with the other person’s character has gradually developed through repeated empathetic contact, as well as through communicative engagement and, more generally, through participating with the other in a common human world (Hua IV/V 581/Hua IV 274 [1917/18]).46

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 Husserl frequently highlights the role of communication in enabling the empathiser to appreciate distinctive characteristics of another’s mental life and surrounding world (see, e.g., Hua IV/V 199–200, 209 [1913]; cf. Hua IV 206–207, 234–235). Moreover, the role played by communicative engagement in acquiring an intuitively fulfilled understanding of the personal life emptily appresented in interpersonal recognition may be one facet of Husserl’s cryptic remark that the possibility of communication is given eo ipso with the apperception of another human being (Hua IV/V 387/Hua IV 162 [1916/17]). Husserl also emphasises that our interpersonal relatedness to others, as fellow personal subjects within a common human world, is not simply a matter of empathetic perception but also something concretely emotional and practical (Hua IV/V 242/Hua IV 194 [1913]).

46

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Weiss, G., Murphy, A. V., & Salamon, G. (eds). (2019). 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Williams, B. (1973). Problems of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1968). Philosophical Investigations. Transl. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Zahavi, D. (2001). Husserl and transcendental intersubjectivity. A response to the linguistic-­ pragmatic critique. Transl. E.  A. Behnke. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. [Original: Zahavi, D. (1996). Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik. Phaenomenologica, vol. 135. Dordrecht: Kluwer.] Zahavi, D. (2010a). “Empathy, embodiment and interpersonal understanding: From Lipps to Schutz,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53(3): 286–306. Zahavi, D. (2010b). “Husserl and the ‘absolute,’” in: Carlo Ierna, Hanne Jacobs, & Filip Mattens (eds.), Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences: Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 71–92. Zahavi, D. (2014). Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zurn, C. F. (2015). Axel Honneth: A Critical Theory of the Social. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press.

Chapter 8

Conclusion

To bring this book to a close, let me return to the two central distinctions that our investigations have brought into relief—namely, the distinction between the pure and the personal ego, and that between animate and interpersonal empathy. Considering these two distinctions together will also allow us identify their convergence and interlocking, a connection that has emerged in the course of this study but which we have not yet had the opportunity to explicate. Starting from the second chapter, we have seen that what Husserl terms the pure ego (das reine Ich) is the non-mundane and structurally-ingrained subject that is patently engaged in every explicit act of intentional directedness towards an object. Owing to the intimate intertwinement between egoic actualisation and the pervasive self-affection of inner time-consciousness, the experiencing subject lives through each of its currently implemented intentional acts in an active as well as a passive fashion. Correspondingly, the active involvement of the experiencing subject affords the intentional lived-experiences wherein it engages with a distinctive phenomenological character, that of (egoic) actuality or implementation. The pure ego, for Husserl, is nothing more than the abiding and characterless agent that shifts between different implementations within a field of intentional possibilities (see the third section of the second chapter). As the explicitly engaged subject of every cogito, the pure ego ultimately proves to be everywhere conditioned by bodily self-awareness and suffused with embodied functioning. In attentive perception, for instance, the shifting focus of the ego is essentially dependent upon – without being reducible to – the goal-oriented actualisation of kinaesthetic possibilities. Moreover, the very kinaesthetic spontaneity at play in epistemically interested perception also manifests a certain egological structure, its teleological-volitional dynamics being lived as minimally engaged by the experiencing subject (see the third section of the second chapter, the fifth section of the fourth chapter, and the first section of the sixth chapter). In the case of emotional intentionality, on the other hand, we find the remarkable situation that a pattern of bodily self-affection, motivationally elicited through our (affectively articulated) focus upon the object, plays an integral role

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within the very egoic engagement of valuing that object (see the fourth section of the second chapter). In the sixth and seventh chapters of this book, we have seen that the personal ego, in contrast to the pure, exemplifies the engaged self in its fully concrete habitual depth and historical becoming. We make the personal ego thematic when we take full account of the habitual dimension of subjective functioning – when we appreciate the often implicit role of habituated stances within our concrete directedness towards and engagement with worldly situations – and when we acknowledge that the habituated self is not merely an empty pole of engagement. Rather than being eminently and formally visible in every explicit intentional act, the personal self is an individual character or motivational style that we become familiar with only gradually, as we get to know a person’s opinions, resolutions, and tendencies as well as their roots within her personal history (see the second section of the sixth chapter and the first section of the seventh chapter). Moreover, other persons are everywhere implicated in this personal history, both as contributing to and co-constituting the situations wherein our personal attitudes are developed and engaged, and often as providing the very sources from which our longstanding stances were first appropriated (see the second section of the seventh chapter). Finally, while there are good reasons for thinking that narrative understanding provides a highly appropriate medium for thematically comprehending someone’s distinctive personal character, this does not entail that the personal self is merely a narrative construction. Rather, narrativity is only an apt form for the reflective task of personal self-understanding because it is particularly well suited to express and explicate contours and depths that are already experientially manifest in pre-reflective personal life (see the third section of the sixth chapter and the first section of the seventh chapter). Let us now turn to another guiding distinction explored in this book, namely that between animate and interpersonal empathy. According to the development of this concept in the fifth chapter of this book, animate empathy involves the perception-­ like experience of another bodily subjectivity as attuned to a common perceptual world. In interpersonal empathy, on the other hand, what we comprehend are rather the personal responses of others to situations embedded with a common interpersonal or social world (see the third section of the seventh chapter), the latter containing the intercorporeal field of perceptual nature only as a core and partial layer (see the fourth section of the fourth chapter). In interpersonal empathy, we apprehend in empathetic perception the other as a subject with a certain historical-personal depth, as a person whose individual style may already come to the fore in her distinctive way of emotively and purposively comporting herself, and who we often directly encounter as demanding of us manifold forms of recognition, communication, and social action. Now, one complication which emerges here, already highlighted in the fifth chapter, is that our experience of non-human animals as foreign embodied subjects often construes their expressive behaviour as displaying moments of emotion and agency. One only need reconsider the cats observed by Husserl and Darwin – or Wallace’s distressed lobster – to appreciate that the animate other presents itself as affectively and practically relating to its environment just as much as it does

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perceptually. Moreover, the style of kinaesthetic engagement that (at least some) non-­human animals display as they look around and explore their surroundings serves, it seems to me, to immediately express foreign perceiving in a specifically attentive guise. Taking an eager dog for a walk in a park is, after all, often just as much an exercise in distraction as it is in strict discipline. Moreover, the animate other’s affective responses – for instance, the dog’s aggressive barking as it passes rival creatures, or the fervent desire it displays in charging towards the pond – similarly evince something akin to an egoic stance, to the extent that they are perceptually motivated reactions to features of the animal’s environment, reactions that harbour both bodily elicitation and attentive foundation. The conclusion that I would like to draw from these reflections is just that the animate other can display a specifically egological mode of subjective engagement; and that it can do so without thereby being apprehended in a properly interpersonal manner. In light of these considerations, let me return to the question of what differentiates the empathetic apprehension of other persons from the empathising construal of purely animate others. What these two modes of empathy have in common, we can now see, is an acceptance of another pure ego that lives through and functions within the foreign living body as it appears to the empathising subject. In the case of interpersonal empathy, however, the egoic engagement of the other person is recognised as concretely embedded within an indeterminately apperceived personal life. More specifically, the other person is empathetically apprehended as engaged in a personal situation. While the details of this situation are for the most part unknown, it is preliminarily construed as a situation of a more-or-less generic type, through an apperception that draws upon the empathiser’s past familiarity with the lives of persons—that is, with her own life and with the lives of others. Moreover, the typified situation which we see the other engaging is one which is taken to be, on the one hand, anchored in a broader social lifeworld, and on the other, distinctively creased by the person’s individual life-history and the opinions, goals, and values embedded therein (see the second and third sections of the seventh chapter). To this extent, what we encounter in interpersonal empathy is a subject that is concretely, thoroughly, and historically engaged within her situation—in other words, a personal rather than (just) a pure I. It seems to me that this way of understanding the difference between animate and interpersonal empathy also serves to clarify the manner in which the latter may be understood as founded upon the former. Interpersonal empathy represents a founded articulation of animate empathy in the sense that the (pure) egoic engagements that are directly displayed in the other’s expressive movements—as the constitutive correlate of animate empathy—are preserved in interpersonal empathy, but they are also apprehended anew. They are apperceived as integrated aspects of personal agency and as embedded within personal horizons. In its typifying functioning, this distinctively interpersonal apperception draws upon the more intimate ways in which we have become familiar with other people in the past, as well as upon our own history of personal engagement with worldly situations. Accordingly, it is usually implicitly informed by our history of communicative engagement with others, as well as by the imagination-like manner in which we have previously envisaged

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the lives of others. And if we are sufficiently interested in genuinely understanding the somewhat emptily apperceived situation and person that stands before us, then communicating with them and becoming imaginatively familiar with their distinctive motivational style is an ever-present possibility, at least in principle. To this extent, it may even be the case that the ideal possibility of communication and of a deeper personal understanding grounded therein functions as a kind of condition of possibility for interpersonal empathy (see the fourth section of the seventh chapter). But it nevertheless remains the case that the apperception of another personal life is  – for communicatively capable subjects who live within a human lifeworld  – already operative in our perceptual apprehension of the persons we encounter in that lifeworld.

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Husserliana The Husserlian edition is cited with the abbreviation ‘Hua.’ Husserliana I. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Ed. S.  Strasser. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950 [Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Transl. D. Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960 (Hua I 43–1834).] Husserliana III, 1-2. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie Ed. K.  Schuhmann, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974a. Husserliana IV. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie: Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Ed. M.  Biemel, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952. [Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Transl. R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989a] Husserliana IV/V. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution und Wissenscahftstheorie. Ed. D. Fonfara. Cham: Springer, Forthcoming. Husserliana V. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie: Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften. Ed. M. Biemel, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952. [Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences. Transl. T. E. Klein & W. E. Pohl, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980 (Hua V 1-137); Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Transl. R.  Rojcewicz & A.  Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (Hua V 138–162), 1989.] Husserliana IX. Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925. Ed. W.  Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962. [Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester, 1925. Transl. J.  Scanlon. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977 (Hua IX 3–234).] Husserliana X. Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917). Ed. R. Boehm, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. [On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917). Transl. J.  B. Brough, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.] Husserliana XI. Analysen zur passiven Synthesis: Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten (1918–1926). Ed. M.  Fleischer. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. [Analyses Concerning © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Jardine, Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person, Phaenomenologica 233, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84463-9

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Husserliana Materialien Husserliana Materialien VIII. Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934): Die C-Manuskripte. Ed. D. Lohmar. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006.

Cited Unpublished Manuscript A VI 10.

Other Cited Translations of Husserl’s Writings Husserl, E. (1969). Formal and Transcendental Logic. Transl. D.  Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (2001a). Logical Investigations: Volume 1. Transl. J. N. Findlay, Ed. D. Moran. London & New York: Routledge.

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Author Index

A Alcoff, L., 2 Anscombe, G.E.M., 164 Arendt, H., 229 Avramides, A., 72 B Bernet, R., 3, 4, 16, 24, 99, 127, 149, 151, 156 Breyer, T., 3, 76 Brough, J.B., 16, 26, 47 C Caminada, E., 2, 4 Carr, D., 3, 8, 16, 19 Crowell, S.G., 98, 101, 210, 211, 234 D Darwin, C., 139, 274 Davidson, D., 188 Dennett, D., 225 Depraz, N., 2, 24 Descartes, R., 34 de Warren, N., 2, 3, 9, 127, 133, 149 Donohoe, J., 2, 24 Drummond, J., 8, 16, 24, 26, 31, 33, 44, 47, 49, 50, 52, 54, 58, 111, 129, 165, 176, 177, 187, 232, 240, 247, 251, 255 E Ellison, R., 243

F Fanon, F., 242, 243 Fichte, J.G., 127 Findlay, J.N., 104 Finkelstein, D.H., 7, 189, 190, 200 Fonfara, D., 4, 9 Franck, D., 127 Frankfurt, H., 7, 175–178, 226, 241 G Gallagher, S., 3, 76, 248 Goldie, P., 52, 229, 251, 265 Guenther, L., 2, 157, 242 H Hart, J.G., 2, 3, 44, 127, 169, 178, 234, 237, 261 Heal, J., 190, 237 Hegel, G.W.F., 127 Heidegger, M., 1, 4, 98, 107, 116, 210, 237–239 Heinämaa, S., 2, 3, 9, 24, 58, 127, 177, 193, 234, 240, 242, 243, 253, 265 Held, K., 2, 16, 127, 139 Herder, J.G., 70 Honneth, A., 7, 8, 127, 205, 241–248, 254, 255, 258, 259 J Jacobs, H., 2, 3, 16, 24, 36, 44, 47, 48, 98, 99, 163, 164, 169, 179, 180, 187, 193, 198, 234, 237

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Author Index

292 Jansen, J., 9, 42 Jonas, H., 122 K Kant, I., 19, 109 Kern, I., 16, 24, 127 Korsgaard, C., 7, 169, 178, 240 L Landgrebe, L., 4, 24, 81, 86, 94, 102 Lipps, T., 69–75, 86 Loidolt, S., 2, 177, 240 Lotz, C., 116 Luckmann, T., 232 M MacIntyre, A., 225 Marbach, E., 16, 24, 36, 38, 127 Marx, K., 104 Melle, U., 49, 177, 240 Merleau-Ponty, M., 4, 110, 128, 157, 158, 210 Mikkola, M., 253 Mill, J.S., 72 Mohanty, J.N., 4, 16, 24, 99, 127, 226, 234 Moran, D., 2, 3, 7, 9, 128, 237 Moran, R., 183–200 Müller, J.M., 49 N Nussbaum, M., 50 O Overgaard, S., 3, 8, 9, 71, 76, 81, 98, 127, 265 P Painter, C.M., 116 Pamuk, O., 48 Petherbridge, D., 2, 9, 242, 243, 248 R Ricoeur, P., 222, 223, 228 Rinofner-Kreidl, S., 3, 48, 178

S Sartre, J.P., 26, 36, 50, 187, 218, 242 Schechtman, M., 225 Scheler, M., 1, 255 Schloßberger, M., 86 Schütz, A., 1, 136, 232, 253 Smith, A.D., 8, 16, 99, 127, 155 Smith, J., 81 Sokolowski, R., 24, 26, 110, 182, 187, 234 Solomon, R.C., 50 Staiti, A., 2, 98, 127, 133, 180 Stein, E., 1, 4, 6, 10, 33, 69, 70, 72–88, 148, 153, 180, 205, 229, 242, 248, 251, 254–258, 260–265 Steinbock, A.J., 2, 24, 39, 48, 85, 86, 127, 169, 235, 242, 255 Strawson, P.F., 226 Stueber, K., 71, 72, 75, 205, 261–263 Summa, M., 3, 80, 84, 253, 265 Szanto, T., 2, 8, 10, 70, 261 T Taipale, J., 2, 3, 8, 24, 76, 127, 133, 151, 253 Theodorou, P., 98, 101 Theunissen, M., 69, 85–88, 154, 155, 237 Thompson, E., 3, 122 V Vischer, R., 70 W Wallace, D.F., 136, 140, 274 Walther, G., 1 Webber, J., 190, 200 Williams, B., 231 Wittgenstein, L., 75, 187, 190, 227, 251 Y Yamaguchi, I., 85, 127 Yancy, G., 2, 242, 243 Z Zahavi, D., 2, 3, 8, 16, 19, 24–26, 28, 30, 38, 46, 47, 71, 76, 84, 85, 127, 133, 151, 178, 198, 210, 225, 227, 242, 248, 251, 253, 257, 261

Subject Index

A Act emotive, 49, 51, 53, 61, 100, 104, 105, 107, 234 intentional, 2, 24, 25, 33, 34, 45, 46, 48, 53, 57, 105, 107, 148, 207, 209, 212, 273 Action chosen, 171, 172 Activity egoic and habit, 49, 55, 61, 164, 191, 197, 217, 235 Advertence emotional, 60, 61 Affect, 52, 53, 56–59, 61, 70, 74, 116, 140, 216, 245–248, 254, 256, 257 See also Affect-intentionality Affect-intentionality, 52, 53, 56, 57, 59, 63, 139 See also Affect Affection, 3, 6, 21, 27, 41, 43, 44, 46, 58, 62, 84, 111, 122, 149, 151, 162, 166–168, 217, 256 Agency, 6, 7, 9, 32, 33, 38–44, 47, 52, 61–63, 72, 162, 167–169, 173–183, 190, 200, 205, 217, 223, 232–240, 262, 274, 275 Allure (Reiz), 168, 169, 171, 172, 183, 196, 217, 218, 239, 264 Analysis constitutive, 57, 95, 102, 129 (see also Investigation, constitutive) Animal surrounding world of, 146 See also Empathy, animate See also Other, animate

Appearance common system of, 132, 134, 136, 157, 250 Appreciation, 53–62, 173 See also Liking (Gefallen) Appropriation habitual, 193, 197, 199, 223, 239 and memory, 197, 199, 223 and retention, 193, 197 intersubjective, 7, 205, 212, 238, 239 Attention, 3, 5–6, 25, 32–54, 58, 61, 63, 99, 106, 164, 168, 169, 256 and affection, 6, 32, 41, 43, 46, 206 and apprehension (Erfassung), 41, 42, 61 Attitude habitual sustaining of, 188, 201, 212 natural, 20, 97, 98, 102 naturalistic, 18, 96–99, 104, 208 natural-scientific, 98, 102–104 natural-theoretical, 101–104 personalistic, 96, 98, 102, 113, 208 practical, 50, 98–100, 188 theoretical, 50, 98–100, 103, 114, 188, 214 valuing, 99, 105 Authority first-personal, 187, 189, 190, 200 Autonomy, 172, 238, 240 B Body corporeal (Körper), 78, 132, 147, 148, 150, 152, 154–156 lived (Leib) and co-presence of interiority, 152, 153 and kinaesthetic sensations, 111, 163

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294 Body (cont.) and the localisation of sensings, 152, 155 and perception, 162 pole or orientation, 36–39, 83, 112, 130, 132, 155 and touch, 151–153, 158 living (Leib) and empathetic comprehension, 87, 132, 134, 149, 252 and experiential life, 80, 127, 130, 131, 140, 149, 156, 162, 228, 263 and reciprocal empathy, 144, 157, 258 C Capability bodily, 170, 231 Character distinctive, 164 (see also Character, enduring) (see also Character, personal) emotive, 54, 56, 59–62, 252 enduring, 231 (see also Character, distinctive) (see also Character, personal) evaluative, 59, 61, 244 personal, 231 (see also Character, distinctive) (see also Character, personal) Cogito, 18, 24, 34, 44, 45, 48, 83, 184, 193, 195, 196, 206, 208, 209, 273 Commitments, 24, 98, 99, 169, 170, 173, 187, 190, 194, 208, 210, 214, 217, 220, 233, 244, 245, 259 Communal experience, 1 Communication and reciprocal empathy, 134 and world, 136 Communities, 102, 103, 143, 145, 220, 232, 235, 237–240, 261 Conditionality psychophysical, 137, 181 Consciousness inner, 26, 28, 29, 45, 106, 195, 196 (see also pre-reflective) (see also Self-affection) (see also Self-­ awareness) (see also Self-consciousness) practical, 163 primal, 29, 31 pure, 15, 16, 19, 20, 25, 28, 32, 40, 45, 209 Constitution, 4, 5, 9, 23, 27, 37, 38, 47, 61, 85, 88, 101, 110, 123, 133–136, 141, 145–147, 152, 162, 163, 166, 186, 205, 210, 216, 228, 234, 235, 238

Subject Index Constitutivism, 7 Context motivational, 69, 106, 128, 171, 219, 251, 266 Conviction and commitment, 187 and habit, 192, 197, 214 and reason, 186, 196, 238 and self-awareness, 184–188 D Decisions, 99, 105, 106, 161, 165, 169–171, 174–179, 183, 201, 213, 218, 220, 222, 232, 234, 238 Dehumanisation, 253 Deliberation, 50, 165, 169, 178, 184, 188–194, 198, 248 Depth habitual, 173, 183, 211, 274 Desire second-order, 176 Detectivism, 7, 188–194, 200 E Ego personal, 5, 6, 20, 162, 182, 184, 206, 208–212, 222, 230, 233 and habit, 183 and position-taking, 44, 48–52, 61–63 and transcendental ego, 24, 85, 212 (see also Person, transcendental) pure, 5, 7, 8, 16–25, 32–63, 82, 112, 183, 198, 207, 209, 211, 212, 227, 273–275 and affection, 21, 27, 43, 44, 47, 58, 62 and agency, 32, 33, 39–41, 43, 47, 52, 62, 63, 169 and attention, 15–63 and the constitution of the personal ego, 24, 38 and diachronic identity, 25, 46, 47 and emotion, 15–63 and freedom, 28, 39, 41–43, 168–173 and habit, 58 and memory, 33, 42, 47 and personal ego, 20, 96, 162, 168, 183, 184, 206–213, 230, 273 and self-affection, 25, 28, 32, 46, 63 and time-consciousness, 25–32, 46, 63 and transcendental subjectivity, 6, 20, 23, 50, 210

Subject Index and voluntary movement, 7, 161, 164, 168 pure and transcendental subjectivity, 20, 23, 25, 50, 210 (see also Self; Subject, Subjectivity) transcendental, 5, 16–25, 210, 212 Elicitation bodily, 56, 60, 275 Embodiment, 3, 4, 24, 25, 62, 89, 135, 146, 162–173 See also Body, lived See also Body, living See also Subjectivity, bodily Emotion and ego, 15–63 and perception, 49, 106, 141, 259 and valuing, 6, 48–51, 57, 62, 99, 105, 106, 150, 176, 214, 224, 235, 255 Empathy and analogical inference, 70, 72, 73, 147 and appresentation, 80, 81, 133, 137, 138, 149, 150, 152, 153, 155 and appropriation, 7, 87, 179, 192, 193, 196, 205, 212, 215, 237–239 and the common world, 7, 88, 144 and communication, 134–136, 241, 243, 245, 266, 274, 275 and directness, 76, 77, 114 and expression, 58, 70, 71, 73, 77, 136, 149, 227, 250 and horizon, 84, 153, 237, 275 and imitation, 70, 71, 74, 86, 87, 124, 190 and immediacy, 44, 73, 86, 114, 188 and intersubjective concordance, 125, 129, 130, 132, 216 and justification, 76, 77, 238 and mediacy, 78 and mirror neurons, 71 and perception, 93, 96, 113–117 and personal difference, 82, 86, 261, 265 and perspectival exchangeability, 132 and perspectival givenness, 145 and presentification, 80, 81, 84, 235, 238, 261, 263–265 and projection, 73–75, 88, 132 and the pure ego, 5–8, 15, 82, 87, 89 and re-accomplishment, 84, 262, 264 and self-awareness, 5, 7, 69, 74, 81, 82, 84, 89, 151, 154, 214, 217, 223, 227, 229, 231, 237 and subjectivity, 69, 78, 85, 87–89, 121, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130, 132, 133, 140, 141, 147–150, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158

295 and surrounding world, 84, 117, 125, 128, 136, 137, 140, 143, 145, 146, 155, 205, 207, 209, 211, 216, 222, 227, 230, 232–237, 241, 250, 260, 263, 266 and typification, 83, 253, 257 animate and appresentation, 80, 81, 149, 150, 152, 153, 155 and attention, 99 and bodily self-consciousness, 149, 155 and bodily similarity, 85, 147–155 and emotion, 71, 72, 74, 77, 87, 141 and expression, 71, 73, 77–80, 83, 136 and intersubjective nature, 144 and natural science, 95, 96, 98, 101, 102, 107, 114, 144 and normality, 131, 141–143 and the pure ego, 147, 275 and reciprocity, 134–136, 158 and self-understanding, 155, 156, 205, 260, 274 and tactile organ, 150, 154 and volition, 87, 143, 145, 158 basic, 71, 72, 261, 262 imagination-like, 6, 8, 69, 84, 261, 264, 275 interpersonal and animate empathy, 121–158, 205, 250, 260, 274, 275 and attention, 122, 139 and attitudes, 139, 144, 146, 205, 212, 215, 221–223 and communication, 134–136, 241, 243, 245 and cultural world, 251 and emotion, 205, 208, 212, 217, 222, 229, 232, 233, 237, 248, 250, 251, 254 and horizon, 208, 251 and imagination, 221, 250, 251, 257, 264, 275 and interpersonal understanding, 220, 225, 251, 257, 261, 264, 265 and narrative understanding, 220–223, 225, 274 and perception, 229, 235, 238, 242, 245, 259 and personal character, 205, 206, 211, 212, 222, 231, 250, 253, 260, 264–266, 274 (see also Empathy, interpersonal and personal style) and personal difference, 82, 261, 265

296 Empathy (cont.) and the personal ego, 206–213, 222, 230, 233, 273 and personal situation, 263, 275 and personal style, 213–221, 224, 228, 229, 241, 251, 258 (see also Empathy, interpersonal and personal character) and practical interests, 264 and presentification, 235, 238, 261, 263, 264 and the pure ego, 206–213, 223, 234, 273, 275 and re-accomplishment, 262, 264 and recognition, 205, 212, 227–229, 231, 232, 234, 235, 241–261, 265 and typification, 253, 257 iterative, 258 perception-like, 7, 69, 75–82, 87, 88, 205, 241, 260, 261, 274 reciprocal, 134, 136, 141, 144, 157, 258 and common human world, 261, 266 and the “we”, 236, 261 (see also Recognition, mutual) reenactive, 71, 72, 261, 262 Epoché, 5, 16–19, 21–24, 32, 208 Essence regional, 97 Expression and animal, 137, 138, 141 and emotion, 71, 77, 139, 226, 252 and living body, 73, 80, 86, 137, 239 and surrounding world, 137, 138 F Features empirical-axiological, 55, 56, 58, 61 factual, 54, 55, 94 Feeling bodily, 52, 57, 59 intentional, 51, 52, 58 sensory, 51, 57 Founding, 56, 60, 104, 106–108, 113, 114, 117, 145 Freedom bodily, 162–166, 168–174, 215 personal, 43, 162, 168–178, 215 pure, 38, 41, 42, 168–173 H Habit bodily, 215, 239 (see also Activity, Appropriation, Attitude, Conviction, Ego, Stance)

Subject Index Habituality empathetic, 150, 251 Hetero-affection, 46 History personal, 21, 200, 216, 220, 233 I I-as-human-being (Ich-Mensch), 18, 226 Identity gender, 2 practical, 178 racial, 2 Imagination, 6, 48, 71, 75, 76, 79, 83, 84, 88, 107, 148, 163, 221, 250, 251, 257 Impression primal, 28, 29 Inclination (Neigung), 169, 171, 172 Intentionality affective, 51, 52, 58–60, 106, 107 background, 33, 34, 43 implemented, 34, 42 Intercorporeality, 128, 146 Interests, 40, 50, 83, 84, 99, 100, 103, 107, 170, 233, 263, 264 Interest and personal stance, 170, 171, 173, 197, 257 Intersubjectivity and objectivity, 102, 129, 130, 132, 144 and perception, 147 transcendental, 85, 127, 128 and world, 3 Investigation constitutive, 1, 101 (see also Analysis, constitutive) Invisibility social, 243 J Joy, 53, 57, 58, 105, 107, 193, 238 Judgement evaluative, 104, 176, 249 L Life form of, 240 personal, 15, 35, 73, 81, 82, 96, 213, 217, 222–225, 228, 230, 235, 240, 244, 263, 264, 275 personal and language, 224 personal and sociality, 224, 225, 228 personal and social surrounding world, 236 Lifeworld, 2, 275, 276

Subject Index Liking (Gefallen), 53–59, 61, 62, 99, 106, 168, 181, 234, 257 See also Appreciation Liking and sympathy, 256 Lived-experience (Erlebnis), 18, 21, 25–30, 32–36, 42, 44, 45, 48, 53, 60, 74, 86, 185, 186, 192, 193, 196, 207, 208, 212, 254, 263 Living through (Erleben), 26, 30, 32, 45, 58, 63, 80, 151, 157, 211, 212, 263 Love, 53, 60, 106, 171, 226, 234, 244, 246, 255, 257 M Memory and diachronic identity of the pure ego, 47, 184, 198 reflection in, 221 Motivation and causality, 179–181 and laws, 181, 250 passive, 180, 181 and personal agency, 180 Movement involuntary, 164 kinaesthetic, 38, 39, 111, 112, 163–165, 167, 173 voluntary, 7, 161, 164–173 voluntary and affection, 166–168 voluntary and agency, 165, 167, 168 voluntary and perception, 169 voluntary and teleology, 165, 166 N Nature animate, 6, 93, 97, 108, 114, 123 and intersubjectivity, 93 levels of, 107 material, 93, 97, 108, 114, 121–124, 127, 129, 141, 143, 145, 179, 234 and the naturalistic attitude, 96, 97 perceptual, 6, 93, 97–108, 113, 114, 121, 141, 143–145, 179, 274 and the theoretical attitude, 100–104, 139, 144 Nature-object (Naturobjekt), 101, 102, 112, 117 Normality, 7, 9, 131, 141, 143, 158

297 O Ontology regional, 94–95 Opinion (Meinung), 169, 191, 192, 196, 197, 199, 238 Other animate, 5, 6, 115, 116, 121, 123, 128, 134, 137, 138, 143, 146–158, 161, 205, 228, 250, 274, 275 P Pairing, 154, 155 Passivity, 27, 32, 40, 41, 44, 46, 51, 55, 95, 106, 162, 168, 169, 192, 206, 215, 217, 220, 234, 238, 264 Perception attentive, 38, 39, 43, 51, 83, 106, 273 and horizon, 54, 79, 84, 107, 110, 132, 147, 163, 216 inner, 70, 129, 189, 196 and kinaesthetic movement, 111 and optimal circumstances, 113 perspectival character of, 110 Person mundane, 21 (see also Person, real) real, 20, 21, 35, 179, 208 and self-preservation, 211 and sociality, 96, 224, 239 and surrounding world, 181 transcendental, 180 (see also Ego, personal and transcendental ego) Personhood and self-consciousness, 206 (see also Ego, personal) (see also Self, personal) (see also Subject, personal) (see also Subjectivity, personal) Phantom, 110, 113, 114, 129, 130, 138 Phenomenology genetic, 41, 106, 149, 212, 256 transcendental, 23, 63, 97, 108, 127 Positings, 18, 22, 43, 44, 55, 85, 102, 104, 107, 135, 193, 196, 198, 211, 233 Position-taking doxic, 43, 48, 51 emotional, 44, 50, 51, 62, 184, 233 evaluative, 49, 50, 52, 61, 62 (see also Stance) (see also Stance-taking) Possibility kinaesthetic, 163 practical, 105, 165, 166, 174, 175 Psyche, 1, 78, 93, 116, 117, 122, 123, 140, 145, 146, 162, 184

298 Q Qualities primary and secondary, 142 R Reality natural, 17, 18, 107, 114 personal, 21, 96, 181, 231 Recognition elementary, 7, 205, 242, 246, 247, 249, 253, 254 emotional, 62, 234, 242, 244–248, 251, 252, 254, 255, 260, 263 and gesture, 243, 244, 248 and love, respect, and solidarity, 244, 245 mutual, 7, 135, 156, 205, 212, 228, 229, 241, 246, 260 Reduction eidetic, 18, 23, 24 transcendental-phenomenological, 23, 24 Reflection and personal self-understanding, 7, 21, 161, 205, 212, 224, 228, 232, 274 and the pure ego, 18, 20, 21, 24, 33, 47, 184, 208, 209, 212 critical, 190, 239 Reification, 245–247 Renewal personal, 239, 240 Retentions, 27–29, 31, 197 S Science human (Geisteswissenschaft), 180, 221 natural, 95, 96, 98, 101, 102, 107, 114, 144 Sedimentation, 25, 133, 183, 217, 234 Self personal, 5, 7, 15, 20, 21, 106, 205–266 and action, 7, 161, 165, 166, 170–178, 183, 205, 208, 215, 216, 218–220, 223, 226, 228, 229, 232, 240, 243, 246, 250, 252, 256, 258, 262–266 and agency, 7, 162, 165, 167–169, 173, 174, 187, 190, 200, 205, 217, 223, 232–240, 262 and attitude, 7, 170, 175, 178, 179, 183, 184, 188–191, 193, 194, 196, 200, 205, 208, 210, 212, 214, 215, 220–223, 229, 231, 232, 236–239, 241, 245, 246, 250, 251, 254, 255, 263, 264, 274 (see also Self, personal and stance)

Subject Index and decision, 161, 165, 169–171, 174, 176–179, 183, 200, 213, 215, 218, 220, 222, 232, 233, 238 and freedom, 161–166, 168, 172–174, 176, 178–180, 200, 211, 215, 239, 240 and motivation, 174, 178–183, 201, 213, 216, 220, 221, 241, 252, 264 and personality, 170, 178, 190, 220, 221, 230, 231, 244, 247, 249, 259 and reason, 169, 172, 175, 176, 178, 181, 186, 187, 189, 192, 196, 217, 225, 232, 237–239, 241, 247, 251, 256, 261, 262, 274 and reflection, 161, 178, 182, 184, 185, 188, 190, 197, 205–207, 209, 214, 215, 219–221, 230, 239, 242 and stance, 161, 169–171, 173, 174, 176, 178, 179, 181–183, 188, 190–194, 196–200, 212, 215, 221, 223, 229, 239, 244–246, 248, 249, 251, 255–260, 274, 275 (see also Self, personal and attitude) and value, 168–172, 174, 176, 177, 189, 233, 235, 239, 240, 245, 248, 255, 256, 258, 260 (see also Ego; Subject; Subjectivity) Self-affection bodily, 153, 168 (see also Consciousness, inner) (see also Self-awareness, pre-reflective) (see also Self-­ consciousness, pre-reflective) Self-apperception associative, 213 personalising, 206 Self-awareness bodily, 84, 151 pre-reflective, 30, 63, 82, 177, 201 and conviction, 184–188 and experiential episode, 26, 44, 186, 195 and lived-experience, 26, 27, 29, 31, 46, 81, 184, 195, 273 and opinion, 161 (see also Self-­ consciousness, pre-reflective) (see also Consciousness, inner) (see also Self-affection) Self-consciousness bodily, 149, 155 bodily and voluntary movement, 168 personal, 5, 7, 161, 162, 209, 212, 213, 217, 219, 223, 229 pre-reflective, 7, 26, 211, 213, 223 (see also Pre-reflective) (see also Consciousness) (see also Self-­ affection) (see also Self-awareness)

Subject Index Self-constitution personal, 7, 205–266 Self-knowledge, 70, 184, 187, 188, 194 Self-understanding and envisaging, 219 inductive, 218, 219, 224, 230 mundane, 227 narrative and empathy, 220–223, 228, 229 narratives, 200, 223–225, 228, 241, 274 personal, 207, 219, 223, 229, 230, 232, 241, 260, 261 and empathy, 7, 161, 205, 208, 209, 212, 213, 219–221, 224, 225, 228–230, 232, 241, 261, 274 and mental concepts, 226 and mutual recognition, 156, 205, 212, 227, 229, 241, 261 Sensation bodily, 150 fields of, 145 kinaesthetic, 151 Sense axiological, 96, 101, 107, 125, 255 perceptual, 34, 44, 61, 89, 105, 110–112, 125, 126, 129, 130, 133, 136, 138, 146, 148, 157, 181, 214, 263 practical, 96, 100, 101, 104, 107, 108, 114, 122, 125, 161, 175, 200, 251, 258 Sense-object, 108 Sensing (Empfindnis), 115, 151, 152 Sentiments interpersonal, 256, 257 Sociality, 1–3, 8, 24, 85, 96, 145, 146, 190, 210, 224, 225, 228, 229, 232, 237, 239 Solipsism, 124–127 Space, constitution of, 38, 44, 162, 180 Spirit (Geist), 179, 211, 235 Spontaneity doxic, 44, 51 emotional, 52, 273 kinaesthetic, 273 Stance enduring, 174, 190, 193, 198, 212 (see also Conviction) (see also Opinion) (see also Stance, habitual) (see also Stance, personal) evaluative, 55, 244, 259 habitual, 5, 7, 33, 141, 149, 150, 161, 173, 185–201, 212–219, 223, 224, 234, 237, 244, 251, 252, 259, 274 (see also Stance, enduring) (see also Stance, personal) (see also Opinion; Conviction)

299 personal, 248, 259, 260 (see also Stance, enduring) (see also Stance, habitual) (see also Opinion) (see also Conviction) and personality, 259 Stance-taking emotional, 25 (see also Position-­ taking; Stance) State psychic, 97, 116, 122, 138 Style motivational, 108, 216, 220, 274, 276 perceptual, 39, 149, 150, 216 personal, 213–220, 231, 256 and passivity, 162, 169, 206 and position-taking, 183, 184, 188–192, 194–200 Subject animal, 115, 124, 125, 134, 140–142 personal, 89, 162, 169, 182, 213, 215, 233, 235, 237, 254, 274 (see also Ego, personal) (see also Personhood) (see also Self, personal) (see also Subjectivity, personal) Subjectivity absolute, 31, 210 bodily, 5, 35, 39, 93, 124, 129, 132, 142, 147, 155, 166, 168, 215, 274 embodied, 5, 24, 39, 69, 88, 141, 147, 149, 155, 156, 166, 168, 169, 210, 216 embodied and agency, 24, 69, 140, 141, 147, 155, 166, 168 experiential, 23–32, 46, 88, 147, 149, 156, 207, 211 personal, 215 transcendental, 1 Ego, Self, Subjectivity Sympathy, 70, 245–247, 256, 257 Synthesis passive, 63, 95, 109 T Tendency, 70, 74, 83, 161, 165, 169–172, 175, 183, 215, 216, 220, 223, 234, 266, 274 See also Inclination Thing doxic, 41, 105 material and causal relations, 22, 109, 141, 143 and circumstances, 22, 109, 113, 126, 138, 145, 151, 179, 239, 251

300 Thing (cont.) and colour, 108, 109, 113, 122, 142, 143, 251 and material features, 22, 81, 109, 113, 122, 123, 137–139, 142, 145, 151, 158, 235, 249 and phantom, 17, 110, 129, 130, 138 and states, 138 Time-consciousness inner, 6, 25, 27–32, 46, 47 Touch, 21, 108, 151–154, 158, 234, 264 Tradition, 1, 237, 239, 260 V Value-appraisal, 55 Value-decision, 171, 176, 177 Value-features, 55, 58, 62 Value-perception, 55 Value-reception, 176 Value, 27, 38, 52, 54–56, 59, 73, 74, 85, 100, 101, 104, 148, 170–172, 174, 176,

Subject Index 177, 182, 189, 233–235, 240, 246, 248, 258, 260, 275 Valuing, 6, 15, 33, 48, 49, 51, 54, 55, 57, 59–62, 99, 105, 106, 150, 214, 224, 235, 236, 255, 257, 274 Visibility social, 242–248, 261 W Willing, 33, 73, 105, 106, 171, 175, 176, 191, 193, 232, 244 World and intersubjectivity, 3 surrounding and animals, 117, 128, 137, 143–146, 226, 236 and person, 96, 114, 125, 128, 146, 147, 178–183, 205, 209, 211, 232, 233, 235, 236, 241 and sociality, 96, 146, 237