Ever since the 1960s, media and communication studies have abounded in heated debates concerning the psychological and social effects of fictional media violence. Massive empirical research has first tried to tie film violence to cultivating either fear or aggressive tendencies among its viewership, while later research has focused on other media as well (television, video games). The present paper does not aim to settle the factual question of whether or not medial experiences indeed engender real emotional dispositions. Instead, it brings (...) into play the resources of genetic phenomenology in order to ask how the formation of such dispositions would be generally possible. Thus, it aims to further the discussion by overtly employing the framework of Husserl’s later genetic phenomenology to the field of emotional experience. By posing questions with regard to how fictional emotional experiences contribute to the formation of apperceptions and to the specificities of emotional sedimentation, it also points out some shortcomings in Husserl’s account by drawing from Freud’s dynamic theory of drives and emotions. (shrink)

Is the expression “unconscious phenomena” a contradiction in terms? Do psychoanalytic discoveries compel phenomenology to adapt its methods in treating inapparent phenomena? What role does the body play in the manifestation of such phenomena? In this paper, I approach these questions (1) from within the clinical context of a post-traumatic somatization and (2) by spelling out the implications of Heidegger’s critique of Freudian psychoanalysis in the Zollikon Seminars. Drawing new critical attention to Freud’s earliest theories and methods, developed in the (...) context of the investigation into hysteria, I argue that some of his fundamental insights may be read as following basic phenomenological intuitions. Following Heidegger’s reconfiguration of the field of phenomenology, the inapparent (“that which does not show itself as itself”) may be seen as taking center stage as the exhaustive model for phenomena as such. Placing particular emphasis on a set of Heidegger’s critical notions – “semblance” [Schein],” “understanding”, “motive” [Beweggrund] and “bodying-forth” [Leiben] — I argue that somatization could be conceptualized phenomenologically as a “bodying-forth” [Leiben] of an incapacity to understand or be understood, and that a similar mis-understanding may also befall practitioners who struggle to witness trauma, thus becoming the clinician’s own symptom. (shrink)

The paper is guided by three goals. First, it shows that the methodological standpoint of classical Husserlian phenomenology provides us with reliable tools to resist the grand narratives that proliferate during times of war. Second, it demonstrates that phenomenology provides much-needed methodological support for hermeneutically-oriented reflections on war. Third, it shows how the gruesome reality of World War One introduced a practical turn in Husserl’s phenomenology by forcing Husserl to rethink the relation between phenomenology and metaphysics. Tracing the development of (...) phenomenological metaphysics in Husserl’s Fichte lectures, Kaizo articles and private correspondence, the paper shows that, in response to war, Husserl deliberately chose not to engage in straightforward reflections on war, but instead to write about the prospects of peace. Reflections on cultural renewal necessitated him to rethink phenomenology as practical philosophy. The entanglement of praxis and theoria in Husserlian phenomenology relies upon the establishment of a metaphysically-grounded conceptual bond that ties reason to love and faith, which in its own turn suggests that a human being is not merely animal rationale, but also animal amans and animal religiosum. Ultimately, the possibility of cultural renewal relies upon a metaphysical broadening of Husserl’s conception of philosophy as rigorous sciences. (shrink)

This article explores the notion of the unconscious (das Unbewusste) in terms of its nature and constitutive manifestations in consciousness. In contrast to the psychoanalytic formulation, the unconscious is conceptualized here distinctively as sedimentation (die Sedimentierung) within the Husserlian framework. All `experiences sediment and are “stored” in a darkened, affectless region of the psyche, which is nonetheless not in any sense separated from the sphere of consciousness. Rather, the sedimented experiences move dynamically between the unconscious and consciousness, constantly affecting and (...) manifesting in the upcoming conscious activities of the subject. Based on this conceptualization, I suggest a schematic understanding of the manifestations of the unconscious, or sedimentation, in consciousness. The conceptual division of consciousness into the sphere of understanding (Verstandessphäre), sphere of affect (Gemütssphäre) and sphere of volition (Willenssphäre) allows us to speak of the corresponding threefold manifestations of the unconscious in each of these spheres as type (Typus), mood (Stimmung) and habits (Habitus). Having their genetic “origin” in sedimented experiences, these structural moments play a constitutive role in upcoming conscious activities of the intentional subject. Furthermore, I demonstrate that each of these moments is characterized by a distinctive kind of horizonality, in light of which a deepened understanding of the genetic concept of horizon-consciousness (Horizontbewusstsein) is obtained. Despite the conceptual tripartition, I emphasize at the end the essential intertwinement of the three structural moments in such conscious performance as association. (shrink)

Our species of hominin, Homo sapiens, is an extremely social animal. We are born with social brains. The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl is a methodological approach to social consciousness that offers significant advantages in terms of uncovering and describing the essential structures of our social perceptions and actions. This is especially true in this period of post-neuro-turn social science, because the structures described by Husserlian “pure” phenomenology with its emphasis upon “returning to the things,” performing reductions, and developing the skills (...) available to the phenomenological attitude are in synch with neuroscientific research on the neural correlates of consciousness. For the anthropology of consciousness, the Husserlian methodology allows us to explore consciousness in cross-cultural settings in greater detail and depth of understanding. This is especially the case with respect to the experience of intersubjectivity, the roots of which are found to be part of the inherent life-world that all normal humans depend upon to true their experiences of the environing world, regardless of cultural background. The Husserlian approach to intersubjectivity challenges the discipline of anthropology to move past its knee-jerk distinction between nature and nurture, and its erroneous assumption that human experience is somehow “culture all the way down.”. (shrink)

In his later writings, Husserl posits the original life of transcendental consciousness as the ultimate subject of phenomenological inquiry. Through self‐criticism in his work, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Husserl realises that the transcendence of representation remains unnoticed after the transcendental reduction. Consequently, he develops the method of apodictic reduction to reveal what is apodictic in consciousness. This method specifically reveals the living presence, as well as the constitution of immanent consciousness, to which the (...) transcendence of representation belongs. Husserl refers to this transcendence as the first transcendence, in contrast to the second transcendence of the constitution of the world. The constitution of the first transcendence is not separate from the living streaming presence but rather belongs to the life of consciousness itself. And it is only through this transcendence of representation that the identifiable (and re‐identifiable) I with its life is constituted. (shrink)

Husserl is the philosopher who transformed the geological metaphor of sedimentation into a philosophical concept. While tracing the development of Husserl's reflections on sedimentation, I argue that the distinctive feature of Husserl's approach lies in his preoccupation with the question concerning the origins of sedimentations. The paper demonstrates that in different frameworks of analysis, Husserl understood these origins in significantly different ways. In the works concerned with the phenomenology of time consciousness, Husserl searched for the origins of sedimentation in the (...) field of subjective experience, and more precisely, in impressional consciousness. By contrast, in the later works concerned with history, he maintained that the origins of sedimentations lie in the field of historical past that stretches beyond the reach of individual experience. Building on the basis of these resources, I argue that the Husserlian concept of sedimentation has three distinct components of senses: static, genetic, and generative. In the static sense, sedimentations are modifications of retentions and necessary conditions of recollection. In the genetic sense, sedimentations are necessary for the formation of types, habits and moods, and as such, they shape present experiences. In the generative sense, sedimentations refer to what consciousness inherits from the historical tradition. (shrink)