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Reading Levinas as a Husserlian (Might do)Bettina Bergo, Université de Montréal

for Bill OdoSummary of the Article

This essay invites us to take Emmanuel Levinas’s thought in the spirit in which it was

written: a profound engagement with Husserlian’s phenomenology and, secondarily, with

Heidegger’s existential philosophy. Levinas’s central idea, whether called

“responsibility,” “substitution,” or the “other-in-the-same,” has often been criticized as

mere “smoke and mirrors”—an indemonstrable hermeneutics of ethical investiture. The

purpose of this essay is to show how Levinas analyzed and exploited ambiguities in

Husserl’s work on intersubjectivity and sensibility, in view of developing his own

phenomenology. It is organized as follows: Following an initial discussion of Husserl’s

importance as an intersubjective thinker, I situate briefly Husserl’s interest in, and his

approach to ethics. I discuss his early equation of object sensations with sentiments of

value. Section II turns to Husserl’s interest in “intropathy” (Einfühlung), a concept he

appears to have adapted from Theodor Lipps (1851-1914). It was Einfühlung that allowed

Husserl to attempt various phenomenological constitutions of the other person; just as it

was Einfühlung that provided a bridge between his extensive investigations into

intersubjectivity and passive synthesis. Section III develops Husserl’s phenomenology of

passive synthesis in light of the evolution of his conception of the living present and of

transcendental consciousness. Section IV returns to a moment (1908) when Husserl’s

other, like Levinas’s other in 1961, was “absolute”. Section V discusses Einfühlung in

Cartesian Meditation V and Husserl’s notes on intersubjectivity during the period 1921

and 1928. Section VI examines intropathy and pairing with the other’s body in view of

self-objectification and what Husserl occasionally called Ent-fremdung (alienation). It

ventures a rapprochement with concepts in Levinas’s later work (e.g., “recurrence”).

Section VII explores Husserl’s approach to affective forces and a phenomenological

“unconscious,” with an eye on Levinas’s 1974 resistance to the passive spontaneity of

meaning-formation. Section VIII discusses Husserl’s reading of a master-servant

relationship and the fusion of wills in praxis. Section IX examines his subjectivity “thrust

into the interior” of another subjectivity, and the possibility that the Husserlian monad

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might have windows. Section X returns to Husserl’s conception of sensation, this time as

originary (hyletic) contents that ‘feed’ the flow of time-consciousness. It summarizes

Levinas’s interrogation of Husserl’s formalism, notably between 1905 and 1909. In each

section, I emphasize ambiguities in Husserl’s thought and the way in which Levinas

utilized these between 1961 and 1974. My hope is to sketch some of the lesser known,

phenomenological sources of his thought, and thereby encourage discussion of Levinas as

an unorthodox Husserlian—but a Husserlian nevertheless.

Introduction: Husserl’s Research into Intersubjectivity

Within phenomenology, Husserl was perhaps the profoundest thinker of

intersubjectivity in the 20th century. Almost everything we find in Alfred Schutz and

Merleau-Ponty grows out of Husserl’s thirty year meditation (1905-1935) on the meaning

of the other, the way in which her gaze constitutes me as a mind in a unified body, not to

mention his exploration of Einfühlung (feeling-into, translated “intropathy” or

“empathy”).1 In this heritage of influence, Levinas appears to offer us something unique,

which sets an explicit limit on phenomenological (eidetic) constitution, even as it works

out of ambiguities in Husserl’s work. Yet the better we know Husserl, the more

provocative seems Levinas’s contribution. In Totality and Infinity, his “essay on

exteriority” (1961),2 he unfolds interpretations of jouissance and desire reminiscent of

Heidegger’s being-in-the-world (Levinas 1961, 109-175). In 1974, Levinas largely leaves

“exteriority” to dig critically beneath the spontaneous formation of meaning in

consciousness.3 The 1961-1974 passage is from a descriptive phenomenology of joys of

living, dwelling, and fecundity—with the introduction of a moment of “exteriority” that

resists constitution (1961)—to a more profoundly interpretive approach to affects,

notably to suffering and its time structure of recurrence (Levinas 1991, 61-131).

Otherwise than Being, the later work, is concerned with Husserl’s investigations into the

temporalization of consciousness and the operation of passive syntheses, the latter being

a side of Husserl’s oeuvre less well known (to French readers, in 1974 at least).4

Levinas’s two approaches are different, although Levinas’s overarching project is

the same: to reconstruct a pre-intentional dimension of dialogue and intersubjective value

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(responsibility). Nevertheless, while his 1961 approach argues for an intentionality that, if

it aims at the other (who approaches me rather than the reverse, as in Husserl), constitutes

nothing, his 1974 essay amounts to a hermeneutics phenomenology of sensibility and

affective forces. Both themes are found in Husserl, albeit in different works and

elaborated during different periods. In addition to this, Husserl himself took very

extensive notes on intersubjectivity—in relation to the other’s body, to my acquiring an

empirical self, and with regard to ever larger communities of people (and animals). These

notes constitute the other phenomenologically, something Levinas was not concerned to

do. Indeed, Levinas never mentions the three volumes of Husserl’s notes devoted to

intersubjectivity; likely because they were only published in the Gesammelte Werke in

1973 (Hua XIII, XIV, and XV, edited by Iso Kern).

Readers of Husserl’s extensive notes on intersubjectivity (and his Cartesian

Meditation V) know that the human other is intentionally constructed as moving and

acting like me, like a constituting subject. But a few passages suggest that Husserl’s other

also looks at me, at the subject that constitutes objects and ideas. Husserl’s other is quite

capable of speaking to ‘me’ (e.g., Hua XV, 472 and note 51) and, by the 1920s, some

intersubjective situations show our wills even merging into each other, as we will see in

Section VIII. On the other hand, it is the absoluteness of the other’s alterity that Levinas

draws from the face-to-face relation, a claim that Husserl could hardly make, short of

questioning acts of eidetic constitution altogether. Yet the epistemological alienness of

Levinas’s other opens unforeseen questions about levels of constitution in

phenomenology, the limits of my perception of the other as alter ego, and the resources

offered by sensibility (here, pleasure and suffering) within phenomenology. That is not to

mention the (transcendental) challenge of bridging the gap between an object appearing

as phenomenon within experience, and an object (that I posit as) objective, transcendent,

‘out there’.5

If Levinas calls the other absolute, he means that the other is never simply relative

to an I, even to the constituting I of Husserl’s intentional aiming. It is a truism that others’

behavior is often unpredictable and this would hardly have surprised Husserl. In itself,

that does not justify the limit Levinas set on phenomenological constitution of objects,

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ideas, persons, etc. Still, short of making the other into a god, we should ask what is it

that allows Levinas to claim that he is working within phenomenology6 even as he argues

that, for consciousness,7 the other is unconstitutable in the moment of her appearing, in

her living presence. Is this not simply a violation of phenomenological procedure? Is it a

peculiar hermeneutics, or perhaps a recasting of Martin Buber?8 Is there anything in

Husserl’s phenomenology, say, before it took the transcendental form Husserl gave it

explicitly in the Ideas in 1912 to 1913, that resembles or presages the Levinasian ‘limit’?

I will address this question in section IV. First, however, I should make two brief,

contextual remarks: firstly, about Husserl’s concern with “ethics” and secondly, about the

evolution of Husserl’s conceptions of Einfühlung.

I. Husserl’s Ethik Notes of 1902: The Parallel between Cognitive and

Evaluative Sensibility

We tend to consider Levinas as a, if not the, philosopher concerned with an

intersubjective investiture (by the other), that opens a domain prior to any conative or

intentionalist ethics. Yet Husserl, as a young philosopher of arithmetic and logic was

early on interested in questions of ethics.9 This led him to questions of sensibility and the

formation of values. In spring 1902, one year after the publication the third through sixth

Logical Investigations, Husserl took notes for a new summer course in “Ethik,” with a

focus on the consciousness of value, as a specific type of sensuous objectivating

intentionality. Six transcribed pages have survived.10 For the young Husserl, the transition

from moral acts and judgements to aesthetic evaluations was assured by sensibility in the

form of Gefallen (favor, appeal) and as the “Lust- or Unlust-betonungen” (pleasure or

unpleasure emphases) set on any object of judgment. These constituted the basic affective

material of our perceptions and beyond them, our judgments. Moral preferences thus bore

a certain ‘utilitarian’ stamp, being grounded on what act provided the greatest appeal and

pleasure.

Now, while appeal and preference were not the primary contents of cognitive acts

like color-, touch-, and sound- perceptions, appeal and pleasure were themselves

similarly governed by a priori laws analogous to the sensation contents (Empfindung)

found in object perceptions. “There are in general ‘a priori propositions’ [rules] relative

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to affective experiences (Gemütserlebnisse),” he observed.11 What had to be shown,

however, were the connections between sentiments (Gefühle) and values (Werten),

connections that would then ground our judgments of ethical behavior and taste. While

Husserl distinguished between proper and improper sentiments, where the latter

functioned emptily as a mere sentiment of intentional aiming, or a “sentiment substitute,”

with respect to an objective affective quality (which was also itself a sentiment or

feeling), this distinction opened his approach to value intuitions by following the

epistemological method developed in the Logical Investigations (Investigation 3, §11) for

“immanent contents…that are not the objects presented in the act” and therefore not

intentional, not authentic.12 Thus the 1902 notes on ethics unfolded as the application of

ideas already found in the Logical Investigations, establishing a parallel between

sensations of color or tone intensities, and sentiments of favor, tastefulness or

distastefulness. In this way, a difficulty arose due to the parallelism between valuing

(moral or aesthetic acts) and perceptual or object-constituting acts; namely, the

rapprochement between sensations of object-qualities and sentiments of value-qualities in

acts or aesthetic objects.13

At that time, Husserl made little distinction between the inherence of a property in

an “object in itself” and our intentional constitution of the object. For “if the taste-

contents and…their emphases of pleasure and displeasure belonged to the objectivity of

the object in itself (zur Objectivität des Gegenstands an sich)–if they permitted an

objectivation that made them independent of the feeling subject (von dem empfindenden

Subjekt)…and brought to light the existence of an object possessing in itself these

contents as…essential constituents, I could then say…with evidence, that this object is

good… The intensification of pleasure, as well as the appeal, would be necessarily

attached to the adequate perception of the object.”14

For questions of value, the implications of this were somewhat problematic.

“Qualities” (as said of objects) such as pleasantness or pleasure-inducing seem anything

but parallel to qualities such as color-saturation, tactile intensity, tonal strength, etc. Yet

if the adequate perception of the object gives us that object with its “essential

constituents,” and thereby permits its objectivation, then the intentional constitution of

the object and the objective thing ‘out there’, prove to be equivalent, given their circular

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or reciprocal reference. By extension, pleasantness or unpleasantness should already be

found in, say, gustative sensations themselves (Geschmacksempfindungen), and inherent

thereby in a given food. But if taste-contents, for example, belonged (in what he called a

foundational relationship) to the objectivity of the thing in itself (e.g., sourness, hotness,

sharpness), then these contents were independent of the experiencing subject. It followed

that objects with such qualities became good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant in

themselves.15 Husserl’s concern to integrate sentiments, proper and improper, as well as

acts of favoring or preference (das Gefallen), into evaluative judgments turned the latter

into objective claims, as if proposing to derive a certain ‘ought’ from the ‘is’ discerned in

sensuous- contents of objects. I will return to the relationship between the ‘ought’ and the

‘is’ in Husserl shortly. Of course, that a property deemed objective could be readily

juxtaposed to the intentional outcome of an objectivation that bestows on some content a

value independent of any constituting subject was, for value judgements and ethics by

extension, a significant inconvenience.16 In these tentative notes, the formalist tensions in

Husserl’s early “phenomenological” (but still Brentanian)17 efforts at grounding

evaluations in the cognition of objective sensuous contents were clear. Beneath this lay

the thorny question of how best to approach sensations and values practically.18

Husserl’s approach to sensations and evaluations would evolve with the

development of his phenomenology, notably from the genetic investigations in the 1910s

and 1920s, into the succinct historical arguments of the Kaizō articles (1922-1924). Yet

the parallelism between authentic sensations constituting objects (objectively), and the

authentic feelings attaching to acts and states of affairs remained. The Kaizō ethics, for

example, sought the shared ground, in reason and freedom, of the essence of acts,

whether scientific or ethical. In order to keep these two ‘orders’ separate as he does in

1961 (TI 42-52, 194-209), Levinas would have to challenge the foundational character of

intentionality, something he already attempted in his own 1961 discussion of enjoyment

and pleasure (jouissance). “Enjoyment is not a psychological state among others, the

affective tonality of empiricist psychology, but the very pulsation of the I. In enjoyment

we maintain ourselves always at the second power, which, however, is not yet the level of

reflection” (Levinas 1961, 113). For Levinas, before we form judgements of value, we

‘live’ in and through what Husserl described as affective ‘contents’ that aim at and

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constitute no object (recall Husserl’s inauthentic sentiments). Justly phenomenological,

this distinction between the affective life of the I and reflection on it would allow Levinas

to deny a ground common to the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’, setting the good performed above

the ‘is’ of sensuous existence. This preoccupied him into his later ‘phenomenology’ of

obsession and suffering. Something of the seeds of this distinction was already present,

largely as ambiguities, in Husserl, although the latter remained true to the constitution of

the essences of objects, practices, and mental acts. If, after 1902, Husserl’s approach to

1 See Husserl, Gesammelte Werke I “Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge,” ed. Stephan Strasser (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). Hereafter all volumes referred to as Hua, with volume number. I use the German Einfühlung throughout because, as Natalie Depraz argues, for Husserl, Einfühlung is “an immediate relation.” “Intropathy” hardens the distinction interior-exterior, which is bracketed by the transcendental epochē. “Empathy” “colors Einfühlung with a Lippsian affective [psychologistic] tenor… which is not Husserlian.” See Depraz, Transcendance et incarnation: le statut de l’intersubjectivité comme altérité à soi chez Husserl (Paris: Vrin, 1995), 343-344. For some thematic influences drawn from Husserl, see Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), Part III, Chapt. 4 “Others and the Human World,” see esp. 361-72. The enumeration of Merleau-Ponty’s borrowings from Husserl should also include the “presupposition [of] a community of speaking men” in all philosophical acts (p. 377), to the intersubjective ground of even “transcendental subjectivity,” whether this is pure standing-streaming pre-temporality, or the solipsistic form of all consciousness (p. 378). As he puts it in Phenomenology, “we must rediscover the social world…as the permanent field or dimension of existence…deeper than every explicit perception and deeper than every judgment” (p. 379). Also Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of memory, against psychoanalysis (the Dora Case and Gradiva) in L’Institution/ La passivité: Notes de cours au Collège de France 1954-1955 , eds. D. Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort, and S. Ménasé (Paris: Belin, 2003), p. 249. Trans. We find, inter alia, in his discussion of the “phenomenology of association” (Appendix XIX), a discussion comparable to what Husserl also called “awakening.” As if paraphrasing Husserl on perception and apperception, Merleau-Ponty writes: “In the sphere of the present: Difference between the affective background and the foreground. In the affective foreground: a difference between the thematic sphere, that which the I has grasped and has in its grasp (eventually again in its grasp), and a non-thematic sphere. The “foreground” is determined by the fact that the affective ray has reached the I, excites it, and already knocks on its door through awakening, even before the “yes” of the I comes to pass or could come to pass.” I will return to this important parallel in my discussion of Husserl’s “phenomenology of unconsciousness” in section VII. See Husserl, Hua XI, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis, p. 411ff. The distinction between an affective foreground and background become, in Merleau-Ponty, active and passive memory as ongoing construction. As in Husserl, “I” can even “repress” or hold some perceptions from leaving a trace in memory; passively, via affective forces. Merleau writes: “Passivity (operates) in the assimilation or reprise or Nachvollzug [reproducibility]. Following what? [There is] not meaning given with the event: on can use cunning [ruser], maintain the old praxical schema in force, and repress it. But if there is no given meaning, there are events whose historic inscription can only be impeded by refusing to see them, [events] that are unassimilable for our system, which refuse our Sinngebung [meaning donation or conferral]” (p. 250). As if in response, Husserl writes, in the same Appendix, “Unities [of objects and affective force] possess cohesion and the unity of vivacity; the modality of the affectivity of cohesion is determined by functional connections of the awakening [of a remembered object and attention directed to it]. Each particular cohesion is cohesion starting from particular relations of awakening, which are nevertheless determined by the content, by the unitary, internal conditions of continuity and contrast. This is transposed into the continual ‘construction’ in the impressional sphere of the object…” This ongoing construction parallels the dynamics of active and passive memory in Merleau-Ponty, and impacts both our associations, their range and intensity, and certain limits—partly engendered by habit or the “praxical schema”—on what we can and cannot constitute. In this way, notably, Levinas’s arguments about the face fall into what would be recalcitrant to constitution or construction, on the basis of what Husserl called affective forces. Levinas will

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practical reason and evaluative activity found more historic and intersubjective contexts,

formal constitution and the search for the a priori laws of intentional activity were the

lessons Levinas surely received from him. This was the phenomenology to which

Levinas “remained faithful” even as he explicitly “ventured beyond it” in 1974…19

Levinas’s initial innovation, in 1948 and then clearly in Totality and Infinity

(1961), was to propose a phenomenology of world and other, differently structured than

Husserl’s, in which the face “confronts” me, immediately and affectively, and never as an

refer to this as “expression” and its interruptive power. 2 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961); hereafter referred to as TI.3 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991); hereafter referred to as OBBE.4 Husserl’s notes on passive synthesis, Husserliana XI (1966), appeared in a French translation in 1998. De la synthèse passive: Logique transcendantale et constitutions originaires, trs. Bruce Bégout and Jean Kessler (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1998). The English Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, tr. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Springer) appeared in 2001. For Alfred Schutz’s debt to Husserl, and the lifeworld, as ground of social experience, see The Problem of Social Reality, Collected Papers I, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 57ff.5 In Husserl’s three volumes of notes on intersubjectivity, he asks two questions important to me here: First, how to bridge the divide between myself as living being who feels her life as “self-affection” and those around me who move like me and behave as though their consciousness worked the way mine does relatively to their own bodies. The second question is: how does the other impact me and where do I get my sense of self as “a human being,” or again, as another human being with a whole, integrated body and a way of acting that is identifiable, has a style that is human? Also see Jacques English, “Pourquoi la phénoménologie est et ne peut qu’être une philosophie transcendantale?” in Sur l’intentionnalité et ses modes (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2006), 292ff. 6 In Otherwise than Being, Levinas writes: “Our presentation of notions…remains faithful to intentional analysis, in so far as it signifies to locating of notion in the horizon of their appearing, a horizon unrecognized, forgotten or displaced in the exhibition of an object,” (OBBE 183, emph. added). In Totality and Infinity (1961), he speaks of a unique kind of intentionality (pp. 49, 59, 126) at work in the approach of the other, who speaks to me spontaneously. See note 19.7 I use transcendental consciousness following Husserl, as the dimension of pure consciousness attained through the reduction (of consciousness or other immanent object or process) to its supra-empirical sense, as an ideal essence and independently of the sensuous variations of (daily) experience (psychology’s domain). For a discussion of transcendental consciousness and the transcendental ego, see Basic Problems of Phenomenology §§7-10, which contrasts the natural (naïve) attitude with the a priori (or transcendental) attitude (Hua XIII, notes on intersubjectivity, 120-131); Ideas II, § 64 (Hua IV) and the fourth Cartesian Meditation (Hua I). For a discussion, after the Cartesian Meditations of the transcendental function of the ego, between the teleology of nature and that of history, see Hua XV (notes on intersubjectivity, 1929-1935), 387-416, 593-612. Also see Jacques English, Le vocabulaire de Husserl (Paris: Ellipses, 2009), 44-53.8 I pose this question in light of Husserl’s discussion of the “Ich und Du” in 1927, notes taken four years after the publication of Buber’s I and Thou. See section VIII in this article.9 Alois Roth reminds us that Husserl was so dedicated to the project of developing a “scientific ethics” that, between 1890 and 1924, he offered 24 courses on ethics, many of which bore the title “Ground questions” or “Ground Problems” of ethics. See Roth, Edmund Husserls ethische Untersuchung. Dargestellt anhand seiner Vorlesungsmanuskripte (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), IX-X. Also Janet Donohoe, Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity: From Static to Genetic Phenomenology (New York: Humanity Books, 2004).

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object that I can constitute since the ‘axiological’ affectivity he described was not

epistemologically groundable. Nevertheless, as a good Husserlian, Levinas neither denied

intentional aiming, nor the possibility of constituting the other, over there, as an alter ego

physically analogous to me and as acting as though a subjective consciousness governed

his activity. Instead, the novelty Levinas introduced was firstly the limit he set on

constitution. In 1961, the “face” as expression is unconstitutable; in 1974 he argued that

“philosophy is called upon to conceive ambivalence, to conceive it in several times”

10 See Edmund Husserl, A manuscript VI, 7. These are pages 34-38 and 67, dated March 1902. First ethics is discussed, thereafter aesthetics. Cited by Jean-François Lavigne, Husserl et la naissance de la phénoménologie (1900-1913), (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), 276-280.11 Husserl, A manuscript VI, 7, Appendix VII, no. 1; in Lavigne, Husserl et la naissance de la phénoménologie (1900-1913), 277. Also see Logical Investigations § 23 for his discussion of laws of wholes and parts that are synthetically a priori. Logical Investigations, Vol. II, trans. John Findlay, ed. Dermot Moran (New York: Routledge, 2001), 34-41.12 In the Logical Investigations, he reminds us that such immanent contents do belong to the “real make-up of the intentional experiences, [but] are not intentional” (§ 11): I do not hear tone sensations but the singer’s song, he adds. In the A manuscripts he writes, “[Such] sentiments [are] taken, to a certain degree, as symbols for other sentiments. Sentiments that are certainly effectively experienced, but that stand, moreover, in the same relation as empty representations [stand] with their corresponding intuitive representation relative to other sentiments, [themselves] taken as ‘intuitions of value’, sentiments relative to which they (the first sentiments) have be character of mere affective aimings (Gefühlsmeinungen) (of value apperceptions that are simply empty).” (Husserl, A manuscripts, VI, 7/34b), cited by Lavigne, p. 278. See Husserl, Logical Investigation III, §§ 22-23 on the relationship between types of contents and their relation to the ideas of unity and wholes, predicates that are categorical intuitions (“aggregate”) and predicates that are founded and express (real) unity. The idea of proper and improper sensations, one symbolizing or pointing toward another series of sentiments expresses all the difficulty of constitution. It also suggests that a significant range of sentiments, like the feelings attaching to cognitive perception, do not always yield objects; they play a more complex, network-like roll, referring to each other rather than to things. This is close to momentary ‘experience’ Levinas describes in the face-to-face encounter: “The difference between the nakedness of the face that turns to me and the disclosure of the things illuminating by its form does not simply separate two modes of ‘knowledge’. The relation with the face is not an object-cognition….This gaze that supplicates and demands…deprived of everything because entailed to everything, and which one recognizes and giving…is precisely the epiphany of the face as a face….to recognize the other is to recognize a hunger” (TI, 75). 13 I follow Theodor Lipps’s basic definition of sensations versus sentiments (Empfindung versus Gefühle), no doubt as did Husserl. Sensations are “the elements of the world of things that I perceive, including my body…they are ‘objective’ [‘gegenständliche’] contents of consciousness.” Feelings refer to “elements or determinations of myself.” They are immediately experienced and contribute to what we call be experiencing subject. Pleasure and unpleasure belong among them. Sensations contents “have their site” (the red extended on the wall, the tone comes out of the instrument or the record). “Against this feelings never have a site” other than, in a sense, the I itself. See Theodor Lipps, Das Selbstbewusstsein: Empfindung und Gefühl (Wiesbaden: J. F. Bergmann, 1901), chapt. 5 “‘Ich’, Gefühl und Empfindung,” 13-19.14 Husserl, A manuscripts, Appendix VII, no. 3, cited by Lavigne, 279.15 Husserl, A manuscripts, Appendix VII, no. 3.16 Cited in Lavigne, 279.17 See Logical Investigations II, §14 b “Are there non-intentional feelings? Distinction between feeling-sensations and feeling-acts.” The concept of feeling acts are inspired by Brentano’s act psychology.18 Lavigne states it well, observing that “This research text…confirms [that] Husserl’s phenomenology did not have to become transcendental to be idealistic; ontological idealism, that is, the idea that the

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(Levinas 1991, 162), including the (pre-objective) ‘time’ of consciousness that cannot

‘integrate’ every sensation into its flow. This is another way of saying that the face is not

in itself an object, and the affects it elicits do not stand in parallel with sensations like

color or tonal intensity, etc. Indeed, by 1974, the experience of alterity, returning like a

memory or a haunting, challenges the sedimentation of sentiments and perceptions, and

phenomenology’s spontaneous syntheses through which “I” identify an object thanks to

fusions of perceptions built up over time. There would be a ‘logic’—a curious logic

because Levinas argues that the sentiments he describes in 1974 with terms like

“recurrence” and “obsession” are pre-synthetic, i.e., resistant to the phenomenological

syntheses that produce meaning over time—to the returns of alterity, as objectless

memories taking the (non-)form of suffering, and intensifying as they repeat. It is a logic

akin to the psychology of traumatism, where an imageless affect recurs in a ‘time’ whose

order is more concentric or wavelike than linear. That is the difference between Totality

and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974). The first work “constitutes” the

other as a unique type of intentionality (following the initial impact of his facing me),

reminiscent of Husserl’s Gefühle that aim at and constitute no object. The 1974 work

returns to Husserl’s time consciousness research and to his passive syntheses, questioning

whether all affects or sentiments find a place in intentionality, whether cognitive or

evaluative. I return to this in sections VII, IX, and X.

Despite the limit he attempted to place on the constitution of experience as object

perception, Levinas believed that he remained within the parameters of phenomenology.

In describing the experience of the other, he spoke of a curious intentionality of

transcendence of being is but an intentional determination, seems to be, in Husserl, an original metaphysical preconception that not only preceded his passage to a transcendental phenomenology, but even any critical revision of the … theory of knowledge in the Logical Investigations.” See Lavigne, 280.19 “But the appearing of being is not the ultimate legitimation of subjectivity. It is here that the present labors, ventures beyond phenomenology. In the subjective, the notions, and the essence they only articulate, lose the consistency that the theme in which they manifest themselves offers them. Not in finding themselves to be ‘psychic contents’ in a subject opposed to objects. It is on the contrary in…the excellence of signification from which they derive [as spontaneous ‘saying’ to another person]…and which is not a mode of being showing itself in a theme, that notions and the essence they articulate break up…” (OBBE, 183). Also see note 6 and Levinas’s answer to Theo de Boer in “Of God who comes to Mind”: “It is not the word ‘transcendental’ that I would retain, but the notion of intentional analysis. I think that, in spite of everything, what I do is phenomenology, even if there is no reduction, here, according to the rules required by Husserl; even if all of the Husserlian methodology is not respected” (p. 87).

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transcendence,20 which “saw” or forged no object, no thing. Later, he flatly undercut

phenomenological intentionality, identification, and constitution in the ‘moment’ of our

affective investiture by an other. This is important, because Husserl would become

similarly concern with affective (and even drive) ‘grounds’ in the genesis of judgments.21

We have already seen his initial approach to a phenomenology of sensibility in 1902.

With his approach to spontaneous, passive syntheses and time consciousness secured,22

he did not hesitate to inquire into the “intentionality” of drives themselves.23 In short, he

was not uninterested in embodiment, feelings or sensation, although this work went

largely unnoticed in the 1940s and 1950s, when the French reception of Husserl passed

through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, which unabashedly integrated Gestalt

psychology, behaviorism, and psychoanalysis. I am arguing that, Levinas had rich

phenomenological tools with which to work; it was the formalism of Husserl’s approach

that motivated his step outside phenomenology, into what we could consider a depth

psychology of intersubjective encounters, and in 1974, of affective memory. But given

what he knew of Husserl, we might ask whether Levinas had taken sufficient account of

Husserl’s evolving conception of Einfühlung, starting from the latter’s criticism of

Theodor Lipps’s psychology.24

II. Einfühlung in Husserl’s Phenomenology

20 See TI, 49, 59, 126, “The ‘intentionality’ of transcendence is unique in its kind; the difference between objectivity and transcendence will serve as a general guideline for all the analyses of this work. We find that this presence in thought of an idea whose ideatum overflows the capacity of thought is given expression not only in Aristotle’s … agent intellectus, but also…in Plato.”21 To what works am I referring: early (1913) and later (1922). This is clear from both his rewriting of his 1905 time consciousness lectures in the Bernau manuscripts (1917) and in his notes on passive synthesis (written between 1918 and 1926)22 For passive syntheses, the date could be set at the end of the period of his investigations into them, 1926. For his time consciousness research, one could cite the date of the Bernau manuscripts, 1917-1918.23 See “Universal Teleology”, 1933, and texts redacted between 1932 and 1937. In Husserl: Shorter Works, eds. Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 335-337. Also Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie: Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik (Hua XLII), eds. Rochus Sowa and Thomas Vongehr (Dordrecht: Springer 2014), 104-153.24 One of the tools with which Levinas may have worked, and which merits significant development, is Husserl’s double reduction. Part of his “exploratory phenomenology,” the double reduction focus upon “a lived experience within lived experience”: within memory a host of elements that were appresented or horizonal, can be reactivated and scrutinized. This is why Levinas sets so much importance on Husserl’s idea of the horizon. See Hua XIII, 178-179, and Bertrand Bouckaert’s wonderful study L’idée de l’autre. La question de l’idéalité et de l’altérité chez Husserl des Logische Untersuchungen aux Ideen I (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 224-231.

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At the turn of the twentieth century, the function of drives and the behaviors

attaching to affects were connected in many theories about emotions, their reception, and

by extension, about the ‘existence’ of other minds. The question of whether or not

another person can be the object of philosophical construction, or constitution, already

arises in the 1900 with philosophical psychologists like Theodor Lipps, himself

investigating the meaning and foundations of logic. An important dimension of the

constitution debate concerned the possibility of immediate apprehension versus (non-

immediate) representation, and as we will see, analogical construction versus imaginary

constitutions.25 In his discussion of my access to the other, Lipps proposed a

psychologistic Einfühlung that unfolded in three dynamic stages. It consisted of my

perception of the other’s behavior, my analogous understanding of that behavior (I elicit

behaviorally a comparable affect in myself), and my subsequent translation of my

subjective affect with regard to the other person. As a “transfer” of affect, Lipps’s

Einfühlung thus had an active cognitive dimension. This was because Einfühlung for him

was an experience with its own specific essence, which removed it from the class of

cognitive perceptions.26 For Lipps, it would not be possible to model intropathic

sentiments on the cognitive parallelism between sensation and sentiment, which Husserl

had proposed in his course notes on ethics in 1902. Rather, corresponding to an instinct,

Lipps’s stages of Einfühlung were tied to our animal tendency to externalize (Triebes der

Äusserung) our existence (behavior) and to imitate others (Triebes der Nachahmung),

which bore out humans’ ability to introject and project behaviors and, with them, certain

affects.

While Husserl considered the Munich phenomenologists working under Lipps

psychologistic (something Lipps would hardly deny), it remained that, initially at least,

questions of other minds, solipsism, and the intersubjectivity of affects and values was

precisely a psychological one. In Berlin, Hugo Münsterberg (1863-1916), who had been

25 See Hua XXIII [Phantasie; Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung] §5 “The Question of Perceptual Representation and Phantasy Representation…” 10-20; Hua III [Ideen I], § 111 “The Neutrality Modification and Phantasy,” 224-226. Also see Raymond Kassis, De la phénoménologie à la métaphysique. Difficultés de l’intersubjectivité et ressources de l’intropathie chez Husserl (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2001), 75-84.26 Bernard Besnier, “Présentation” in Kassis, De la phénoménologie à la métaphysique, 19-21 (my trans.). By 1907 Lipps was speaking of a “Hineindenken” (a thinking into) that is “grasped with instinctive necessity” in one and the same act, which gives me not only the immediate affect of the other but the conviction that he is “a single individual I” (Lipps, Psychologische Untersuchungen, “Das Wissen von fremden Ichen” [Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1907], 721.

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Wilhelm Wundt’s assistant, and approached affects through introspection, and later

affects and willing through behavior under the subsequent influence of William James,

associated an empiricist doctrine (consciousness as available to scientific observation)

with what he deemed an “ethical requirement” in my relation to the other person. He

argued that the ethical requirement arose thanks to the intersubjective constitution of my

own subjectivity as a “responsible I.” Such responsibility came to light because, for

Münsterberg, the other person was a “subject of recognition” before he was an object of

perception. This has led one commentator to argue that Münsterberg anticipated

Levinas’s approach to intersubjectivity, albeit following the work of James.27

Münsterberg’s compound position was not shared by other members of the debate

on affects and other minds. Although he did not argue for an ethical requirement vis-à-vis

the other, Benno Erdmann (1851-1921), for example, did argue in favor of an immediate

perception rather than recognition through analogy. Like Lipps and his analogical

inference, Erdmann sought (as Husserl would later do in a different way in his notes on

passive synthesis) the mechanism through which complex associations of sensations

contributed to constituting our judgments about others and their affective states.28

Husserl was skeptical about Lipps’s drive to externalization (Lebenäusserung),

his mimesis (Nachahmungstrieb), and above all his argument that Einfühlung unfolded

by my eliciting within me what I perceive of the behavior of the other, in order to

27 Bernard Besnier is a historian of approaches to sensibility and the passions, see his “Présentation” in Raymond Kassis, De la phénoménologie à la métaphysique, 17. Besnier ventures the parallel Münsterberg-Levinas. Münsterberg certainly approaches the other as a subject: “the other, with whose plans I find myself in agreement or disagreement, is for me firstly no object of perception, rather a subject of recognition; no thing that I find, rather a will that I support or fight, in short a part of reality that as such in no way belongs to the system of nature” (Hugo Münsterberg, Philosophie der Werte: Grundzüge einer Weltanschauung, [Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1908], 18-19).28 Lipps, Psychologische Untersuchungen 698ff. Also see Besnier in Kassis (2001), 14-15. Erdmann was one of partisans of notion of immediate perception versus reflective representation, a question of importance to Husserl for whom ‘presentation’ (Vergegenwärtigung) should not be confused with, say, neo-Kantian representations (Vorstellungen). Alexander Schnell argues that the criticism that our presentation of immediate experience is always nachträglich, after the fact, and cannot be united with spontaneous intentionality ceases to hold when Husserl develops the activity of anticipation (protention) in his return to time consciousness in 1917 (Bernau manuscripts). See A. Schnell, “Das Problem der Zeit bei Husserl. Eine Untersuchung über die husserlschen Zeitdiagramme” in Husserl Studies, 18 (2002), 103. The question is important because, in 1961, Levinas will offer a negative phenomenology of the face (which does not appear, cannot be constituted) within a larger context of phenomenological descriptions of the life of the “I”. In Erdmann as in Lipps’s case, the point is that intersubjective apprehension carries a certain immediacy (instinctual, perceptual).

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understand in turn what he is feeling. In notes from 1913, he expressed his skepticism in

terms of limits he perceived on how far one could accede to the affects of the other in our

constitutions. Although it is impossible to determine to what extent this influenced

Levinas (who met Husserl in 1928, over a decade later), we do find Husserl setting limits

on the phenomenological constitution of the other person, thereby acknowledging that in

intersubjective situations some perceptions of value might not be assimilatable into a

cognitive perception. Instead of reproducing Lipps’s immanent mimesis of behavior, with

a view to discerning its supposedly corresponding affect, Husserl argued that it was

impossible to perform an analogical constitution of the other’s immanent states of mind.

Against Lipps he argued that we do not have access to our own externalizations or

behavior. How could we then transfer them from ourself to the other? Indeed, for

Husserl, we access our own affective states provided we can attach them to an image

(Bild) and thereby make them present reflectively to ourselves. That is, we represent our

affective states with the supplement of a memory (image), and only then is it possible to

conjoin these “portraitized” states to a series of memories (forming extended syntheses

and possible associations). We thus gain a representation of affective states thanks to the

supplement of a representable iconic form. Of course, where this is not possible,

perception—of my own affective states or those of others—is necessarily limited. It may

also require the supplement of imagination (phantasia).

That does not mean that Husserl set limits like those of Levinas on the

constitution of the other. However his 1902 isomorphism between object sensations and

affective ones did evolve as he read Lipps. Indeed, when he criticized Lipps’s theory of

Einfühlung in 1913, Husserl proceeded much the way he would do later on in the

Cartesian Meditations. He argued that the constitution of the other begins from the zero-

point that is my body. Through it I experience an ongoing fusion of its appearances

within the field of my bodily movements in space (kinestheses), which I feel and see.

Nevertheless, “it is erroneous to attach the problem of Einfühlung to simple expressive

movements, to bodily expressions, to expressions of the psyche, as we are accustomed to

doing and as Lipps has also done in his valuable developments” (Hua XIII, 70).

We might suppose that Husserl’s “portraitized” supplement, which allows me to

reflect on a sentiment, comes quite close to Lipps’s Einfühlung (Lipps 1907, 700). Both

15

Husserl and Lipps’s stages entail iconic or mimetic mediation to facilitate the

representation of sentiments. Yet to assert, as Lipps did, that I feel my egoic subject in

the foreign body, amounts to presupposing an empirical “I” that was itself already

constituted. Lipps had not determined, however, the genesis, contents, and layers of the I

itself. To the question of how another empirical I is constituted, Lipps could not respond

appropriately until he had adumbrated the constitution of the egoic subject itself, and set

forth the a priori laws of its emergence, as well as its ground as transcendental

consciousness (or pure flow of pre-objective “time”) (Hua III, §§ 76-82). That is why, in

1913, Husserl resisted Lipps’s psychological concept of Einfühlung, insufficiently

founded as it was in the a priori laws of egoic subjectivity.29

Lipps’s psychologism was not unique to him. After the phenomenological turn

(arguably with the introduction of the reduction in 1903),30 however, Husserl moved

decisively away from psychology. For him, before one could define Einfühlung

essentially, one had to determine how the essence of the ego was arrived at, and what was

contained in its ego-life. It was also necessary to be clear, as Husserl long attempted to

do, about the differences between direct and indirect perception, apperception, and object

identifications based on passive syntheses. For Husserl, Einfühlung belonged to

“apperception” of the other (i.e., what is co-given with the other’s body perceived in my

intentional aiming). Apperception thus belongs among those intuitive experiences that

are not direct. For this reason as well, it was impossible to classify Einfühlung as an act I

perform on the basis of the analogy discerned between my expressive self and that of the

other. The behavior of the other may become an interpretive experience by apprehension,

Husserl mused, though that too challenges Lipps’s translation of ‘my’ affect to the other,

ruling out transferential access to his affective life.31 He wrote

How can the translation of the external appearing [äusseren Erscheinung] of the foreign body in the systems of internal appearing [Innenerscheinung] be possible? If we abstract from the genetic dimension [emergence and interconnection of consciousness], we must ask the following question: What “is there” [was “liegt”] in the manner in which the external apparition functions in the apperceptive mode? I am referred to my ‘here’ [my body as point of reference], to which the external appearing of my body is referred,

29 Hua XIII, “Empathy is a false expression,” 335. Note that Husserl himself does not know precisely what Einfühlung means: “Third problem: this ‘Einfühling’ is found in my original sphere: what makes up empathy, essentially according to the content of what constitute the object of empathy and according to its constitutive connections?” For Husserl general criticism see Logical Investigations I, §§ 17-25.

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as well as to the internal apparition that pertains to it, [and] into which the external apparition must be translated in the sense of the apperception effectuated… [This] internal apparition is the analogon of that internal apparition that would result from the transposition of my body over there [to where the other is]. (Hua XIII 336, second emph. added)

Husserl’s analogon sounds surprisingly like Lipps’s Analogieschluẞ; his

“translation,” like Lipps’s transfer. Nevertheless, the latter process remained empirical,

psychologistic, because it did not adequately explain how we pass from external

appearing to internal appearing. Lipps made no clear distinction between perception and

apperception, presentation and appresentation. Instead, for Husserl, the position of my

body “here” is rooted in a space lying between the other and me, and although I can go

where she is, I cannot get from the external appearing of her body to the internal

appearing of my body. And her affective state, part of which I presumably reach through

Husserl’s Einfühlung, is not even perceived with her body; it is apperceived, co-given,

horizonal as Levinas will say.32, 33 Thus, for Husserl, Einfühlung cannot be decomposed in

Lipps’s fashion, no matter how well I transfer my understanding of my own affective

state to her (in 1914). Moreover, although I “see” the other person and even follow her

30 See Lavigne 2005, 287, writing of Husserl’s winter course “General Epistemology” (F Ms, § 35).31 Hua XIII, §§ 38, “Lipps was, though I do not want to take on everything [of his], on the right path in so far as he turned vivaciously into the usual…psychology of Einfühlung. I would say the following here in empirical image consciousness the appearance of an object function (whether or merely an imaginative one), [i.e., an image-object, as the carrier of an analogizing connection to the “subject” of the image. In an immanent image-consciousness must the self-presentifying image consciousness serve as another consciousness; it must thus function as its own experience [Erlebnis], its own act—for example, of rage—as an analogy for the foreign one. However that is non-sense [ein Unsinn]. For, if I empathize [einfühle] with the rage of the you, I am not myself rageful…no more than I am rageful when I imagine rage to myself or merely remember it.” Lipps was right to set Einfühlung among specific acts of consciousness. He was not one of the psychologists of empathy that Husserl attacked. However, Husserl would add that empathy must be subjected to a phenomenological reduction of a presentation (§ 39), alongside other acts of the phenomenologically reduced ego. 32See Totality and Infinity, “Preface,” 28 and “Metaphysics and Transcendence,” 44: “Since Husserl the whole of phenomenology is the promotion of the idea of horizon…and existent arises upon a ground that extends beyond it…But what commands the non-coinciding of thought with the existent…is a phosphorescence, a luminosity, a generous effulgence”; This horizon is co-given apperceived, with the being or object.33 Husserl was aware of the psychological definition of Einfühlung: “ich fühle dem fremden Körper mein Ichsubjekt ein” [“I feel my ego-subject into the foreign body], though he found it imprecise in its conception of the ego. See Hua XIII, 335. Later, integrating the themes of passive synthesis (1932) in light of authentic sociality: “when we understand each other in a unilateral way or in a reciprocal mode (according to empathic experience), then this amounts—if empathy becomes an intuitive appresentation—to producing…a “covering” between me and the other; but the covering…is something entirely new, which corresponds to a personal ‘unity’ between myself and the other” (Hua XV, 471).

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expressions, and although I then “live in a certain way in her” (Hua XIII, 337), it remains

uncertain whether this act is not imaginative rather than perceptual. Whence the

confusion between imagination and perception? Precisely here: can I not just as readily

imagine other worlds while looking at this one, Husserl asks. And what exactly am I

seeing, better apperceiving, in the other’s expression? For Husserl, the ‘process’ of living

the other’s life belongs to a reflective moment in which I impose a life on my own, a life

I may just imagine. This is something like imposing a contrasting visual field upon the

one I presently perceive (like imaginatively changing the color of a red house into green).

For this reason Husserl concludes that “it is not true that the comprehension of the

foreign psychic life, the experience of the existence of other flesh and other minds,

presupposes the empathy that the I experiences with regard to the foreign body” (Hua

XIII, 337-338). Therefore, when it comes to experiencing directly their affects, this

proves impossible because “no [real] analogization takes place, no transference by

analogy” such as I might have when interpreting myself (Hua XIII, 338).

Husserl’s criticism of Lipps’s approach to Einfühlung and his access to others’

minds was fundamental. Lipps left unexplored the meaning of how “I” become an egoic

subject, not to mention Husserl’s crucial distinction between perception and apperception

—what I see and what I ‘see’ without directly seeing it, a kind of pre- or para-

consciousness. Thus, in 1914-1915, Husserl set Einfühlung on an eidetic ground fitting

for a transcendental subject and protected from the skepticism that beset psychologies

like Lipps’s. However, he left open the possibility of a wide ranging “apperception” of

the foreign body as living flesh. I will return in Section V to the ambiguity around

apperception, which proves crucial to Levinas when he argues that I do not experience

the face, understood by him as “expression,” in the way that I constitute an object.34

The implications of this historical excursus for Levinas’ readers are noteworthy.

First, the debate about access to the inner life of other I’s is decidedly older than

Levinas’s original contribution. The other human being is constituted, by Husserl, on a

34 TI, 51: “[the face] does not manifest itself by…qualities, but kath’ auto. It expresses itself….the notion of the face [thus]… opens other perspectives: it brings us to a notion of meaning prior to my Sinngebung [meaning constitution] and thus independent of my initiative and my power.” Expression for Levinas is horizonal, as such it can be likened to Husserlian apperception, “since Husserl the whole of phenomenology is the promotion of the idea of horizon…a luminosity, a generous effulgence” (44-45).

18

partial analogy with my body and thanks to (my) apperception of its movements and

expressions. There may even be a dimension of spontaneous interpretation within

Einfühlung (Hua XIII §38, 188), however this does not follow Lipps’s mechanism of

mimesis and transference, and knowledge of my own inner states requires a

consciousness able to presentify an image (vergegenwärtigen) (of myself) and reflect on

it as present. This is clearly not a direct perceptual experience. We will see what

unfolded in Husserl’s subsequent approaches to Einfühlung. For the moment, however, I

want to underscore the limit he sets on the constitution of the other—even the other as

“expression” in Levinas’s terms—and the ambiguity implicit in apperception as indirect

intuitive ‘experience’. This ambiguity proves fecund for Levinas, who compares the pre-

reflective encounter with the face with Husserl’s horizons—a special kind of

intentionality, as he puts it, (referring to the intersubjective implications of a subject’s

capacities for horizons).35, 36

III. Husserl’s Constitution of the Other, Passive Synthesis, and Temporalization

Let us now examine Husserl’s 1920s approach to Einfühlung, an approach worked

out pragmatically in which object constitutions seem to be preceded by a practical

‘contact’ of wills (also see section VIII). After discussing Cartesian Meditation V, I will

turn to Husserl’s surprising reading of Hegel’s “lordship and bondage” dialectic.

I have argued three points up to now. Firstly, Husserl was early on interested in

sensibility and values, with a view to reflecting on ethics. In 1902, his approach to

sensibility followed the method of the Logical Investigations, aligning sentiments

(Gefühle) and taste sensations (Geschmacksempfindungen) with object sensations

(Empfindungen). Because he then treated as largely equivalent objective qualities and the

qualities constituted through lived experience, the transcendent object constituted

intentionally was hardly different than objects (given) “in themselves.”37 This had a

peculiar consequence for sensations like taste, and the pleasure or displeasure attaching to

them. They were attached to the objectivity of things, in themselves. This was a first

approach to questions of judgments of taste and morality; it evinced what Jean-François 35 See note 20.36 See Dan Zahavi’s discussion of “Horizon and Intersubjectivity” in Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity. A Response to the Linguistic-Pragmatic Critique (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 39-52

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Lavigne called an “idealistic ontology” and gradually led Husserl to rethink the method

of his 1900-1901 Investigations.38

The second point concerns Levinas’s “phenomenology” of alterity. As we know,

it is the gaze of the other that individuates “me,” singles me out, leaving me momentarily

unable to escape.39 Something like an ethical investiture of “me” as responsible, or as

momentarily having to respond, occurs and this led Besnier to see in Hugo Münsterberg’s

psychology an ethical requirement anticipating Levinas’s responsibility. But Levinas’s

phenomenology starts from a strong limitation set on intentional constitution: the other is,

at least in the moment of his coming on the scene, unconstitutable. His “naked face”

elicits a sentiment close to displeasure, which has little to do with the feelings of

displeasure experienced with everyday objects. In this way, Levinas also places a

boundary between the “is” of what appears and is intuited, and the “ought” of his

unintuitionable face-to-face. He works out a certain transition from the ought of

responsibility (which is not consciously normative, but sensuously binding) to the is of

the “Third party,” whereby I do come to “identify” the other intentionally. The transition

concerns temporality and I will return to that in section IX.

After his early notes for courses on ethics (1902, 1908), Husserl returned to

Theodor Lipps’s Einfühlung (around 1913, as he finished the “pencil manuscript” of the

Ideas II). His notes on intersubjectivity contain numerous passages devoted to Lipps’s

concept. Einfühlung seems to open new directions, for him, in questions of

intersubjectivity, and by extension, questions precursive to ethics. Husserl refused the

37 See Lavigne, Husserl et la naissance de la phénoménologie, 279-280. Lavigne writes: “[In 1902] Husserlian phenomenology did not need to be transcendental to be idealistic; ontological idealism that is, the idea transcendence of the being is but an intentional determination, seems indeed to be, for Husserl, an original metaphysical preconception, that preceded not only the passage to a transcendental phenomenology, but even any critical revision of the methodology and the theory of knowledge of the Logical Investigations.”38 Lavigne 2005, 280-292. As Jacques English points out of the young Husserl (from Philosophy of Arithmetic, 1891, to the Logical Investigations): “If there is, in effect, a lesson to be drawn from the notion of the phenomenon in its relations to intentionality (and inasmuch as the only problematic truly appropriate to it must thus be defined as a transcendental problematic), it is that there is no single boundary [pas une frontière unique] that would decisively separate lived experiences and the objects to which these experiences referred, since…from the very beginning of the movement that a phenomenologising intentionality must follow, these objects have to be brought back to the conditions in which they appeared initially [où ils sont primitivement apparus] …” (English 2006, 305; my trans.).39 See, inter alia, Levinas, “Transcendence and Height” in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. A. T. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 29ff.

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transfert of affect from “me” to the “other” because he maintained that an intuitive sense

of my own expressions is lacking (I cannot really perceive my face responding in the way

Lipps described). With Einfühlung came a host of questions concerning what is co-given

with perception, with association, and with the overarching temporalizing consciousness

that Husserl, starting in 1905, called “absolute subjectivity.”40 In working out his

conception of Einfühlung, Husserl encountered a limit on the constitution of the other

person, a limit concerning knowledge of the other’s states of mind, affects, and thoughts.

Yet over the 1920s he would push this limit, attempting to show that the other, who

appears “over there” as a moving body, is more than a mere analogon of myself. As we

will see, some of his notes erase the limit, provisionally. Redolent of Levinas, the notes

would nevertheless stop before the idea of a wholly unconstitutable other.

Where then does Levinas get this claim, which he situates within phenomenology

—despite the fact that it violates the ideal of constitution and phenomenological

intuition?41 Between 1921 and 1928, Husserl proposed eidetic constitutions of

interpersonal encounters that he on one occasion called “the I and Thou.” He explored

the formation of social groups, nations and a vaster, cosmic consciousness called the

Monadenallheit (omni-monadicity)42 Husserl understood that a “phenomenology” of

expression (or of a “face”) corresponds to object constitution only insofar as a viable

understanding of Einfühlung, and later also Paarung [pairing], was established for the

transcendental ego. To that end, we must better understand the meaning of an “egoic

subject,” and so cannot sidestep the question of how such a subject emerges thanks to the

ongoing accumulation of memory (the sedimentation and fusion of retained “present

moments,” etc.) and the operation of passive syntheses and affective forces. I will have

more to say on that in a moment. For now, let me emphasize that the more Husserl 40 Hua X, § 36. By 1913, this had become “transcendental subjectivity” – “the primordial locus of all meaning-giving and validation of being” Hua IV (“Epilogue”), 139.41 As he writes, “[In the fifth Cartesian Meditation], the comprehension of [the] body of the other person [autrui] as an alter ego—this analysis dissimulates, in each of its stages which are taken as an description of constitution, mutations of object constitutions into our relation to the other—which is as original as the constitution from which is it to be derived. The primordial sphere, which corresponds to what we call the Same, turns to the absolutely other only on the appeal of the other. [What we are calling] revelation, relative to objectifying cognition, constitutes a veritable inversion,” Totality and Infinity, 67 (trans. mod).42 See, for the year 1921, and as a simple example the notes on “Common Spirit: Person, Set of persons, Personal communities of action. Community—society,” Hua XIV, 165-184. Also see Hua XLII, for texts on teleology and the “possibility of an omni-consciousness (All-Bewusstsein) beginning in September 1908 and running through 1925, 160-176. Also see Hua XVII, 73: in a late text (1934): “The monadic time, the monad-all-unity is rooted in my primitive present [urtümlichen Gegenwart verwurzelt].”

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explored the depths of affective consciousness, the more he found compelling our

emotional and volitional connections to each other. By 1918, the year in which the now

published notes on passive synthesis begin, his investigations into genetic logic led him

to questions of the range and nature of passive and active syntheses. That is to say that,

within the flow of pre-objective (and pre-reflective) “time,” which Husserl set forth

between 1905-1907 as “absolute consciousness”43—along which the ego itself streams

while always also being present—ideas, affects, and images retained, merge or contrast in

dynamic states of tension or fusion. As the dynamic of association, passive synthesis is

the co-origin of consciousness as temporalization.44 It is the wellspring of meaning and

conceptuality, and it is rooted in the fact that sensibility (understood as sensations and

affects) is never static. In a sense, passive synthesis points toward something like the

intelligence of the lived body.45 Further, syntheses refer to the way in which sensations,

sentiments, and thoughts come into object-constituting consciousness having a form and

significance that appear to have preceded our immediate awareness. This is because his

attention to passive syntheses grew out of Husserl’s deepening understanding of the

interplay between retentions, protentions, and the living present—all of which flowed

back, sedimenting, yet (by the 1917 Bernau manuscripts) all remaining potentially active

or re-activatable.46 Now, although passive syntheses facilitate the recognition of objects

and concept-formation, the particular ‘energy’, or the durability of an object or idea

retained, depends on what Husserl called affective forces [affective Kräfte], running

along the chains of temporalizing consciousness and making recollective awakenings and

associations possible.

That which is constituted on the measure of consciousness is there for the I insofar as it affects [that I]. Every constituted object, whatever it is, is pre-given to the degree that it exerts an affective excitation [affektive Reiz]; and it is given to the degree to which the I has followed up on the excitation, has turned toward it in attention and grasping. These are the fundamental forms of objectivation. (Hua XI, 162)

Associations, remembered objects, and seemingly even certain emotions “make

sense” because they are already formally structured in this (presumably) unceasing flow

that affords us our sense of unified time and self. “We must thus examine whether an

affective vitality is not necessary to all the fusions [of associations] and all the

separations, through which objective unities are born in the field of the present in order

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that they might simply be born” (Hua XI, 165). Among these fusions stands the life of the

I, along with all its activities; the very fact of attending to an object, the awareness of

flowing consciousness, of forgetting, even of affective states, requires the possibility of

attention and with it, the stability and dynamism of an I as a subject “pole.” “Pay careful

attention to the way in which the accentuation of the I is understood [here]. In such

awakened lived experiences…of knowledge, of reasoning, of evaluation, of willing, we

find the I as the specific center of what is lived, as that which is there in activity or which

43 See Hua X §§ 35-36, 40, 73-75: “This flow is something we speak of in conformity with what is constituted, but it is not ‘something in objective time’. It is absolute subjectivity and has the absolute properties of something to be designated metaphorically as ‘flow’; of something that originates in a point of actuality, in a primal source-point…For all this, we lack names.” See note 67. 44 Hua XI, 118: “It very quickly proves to be the case that the phenomenology of association [and with it passive synthesis], is, as it were, a higher extension [höhere Fortführung] of the doctrine of the originary constitution of time. The constitutive operation extends, through association, to every degree [um alle Stufen] of apperception. Through its intermediary, as we already know, specific intentions develop.” For a discussion of the question of primacy—of the ego as present to itself versus it originary “constitution” that is self-temporalization (notably in the protracted notes called the C Manuscripts)—see Jocelyn Benoist, Autour de Husserl: L’Ego et la raison (Paris: Vrin, 1994), 21ff. If in the time consciousness lectures, consciousness constituted itself, in its flow, by the 1920s (Cartesian Meditations and C Manuscript 3), association presides over the constitution of the ego, and in the Cartesian Meditations, the ego “lives in all experienced states of consciousness [including passive ones],” (Benoist 1994, 18).45 Responding to the question of how we (recollectively) constitute unities in the ‘now’ of perceptions, thanks to association and the reawakening of prior perceptions that have moved into latency, Husserl provides the beginning of original analysis. The analysis is surprising, because vastly richer than many of his descriptions of object constitutions. Here, in the chapter on “Association” (§ 33), Husserl integrates “affective forces” able to awaken a tension and largely forgotten association. However an affective force, working within the stream of retentions that belongs to the unity of transcendental consciousness as a flow, also exerts what he calls an excitation. Together, affective force and excitation hold in great proximity the lived body of experience, the ongoing ‘vitality’ of retentions, and something like the excitations (Reiz) of the scientific body. Husserl has not abandoned transcendental phenomenology. But here he seems anything but Cartesian. He writes “for us, these unities [of objects] can only be there in two ways: either directly given in the frame of a tension; or through the fact that we hold, through a retroactive grasp within the horizon of the past of a sphere of attention, and after the fact, unities that were given without our paying attention and even before, and which nevertheless as affected us to a minimal degree. Consequently the affection and…also the transference of awakening affection, and with it association, played their role throughout. Thus the following question is posed to us: Do not affection and association—dependent according to laws on the essential conditions of unity- formation, but also co-determined by laws of essence of a new genre—make possible firstly the constitution of objects existing for themselves? Do not contrary forces exist… [that] slow down and weaken affection and, in so far as they no longer allow it to come to light, also make possible the emergence of unities existing for themselves, unities that could not occur in general without affection? These questions are very difficult to sort out; in particular when we want to pass, as will be necessary later on, from the sphere of a living presence to the sphere of forgetting, and thereby make reproductive awakening intelligible. It goes without saying that we could give to the entirety of these considerations…a famous title that of the ‘unconscious’. It is thus a phenomenology of what one calls the unconscious” (Hua XI, 153-154, emph. added). Also see Didier Franck, “Au-delà de la phénoménologie” in Dramatique des Phénomènes (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001), 122-123. 46 For a useful introduction to the enduring ‘activity’ of protentions and retentions within consciousness that has already ‘flowed back’, see Alexander Schnell, “Das Problem der Zeit bei Husserl. Eine Untersuchung über die husserlschen Zeitdiagramme” and James Dodd, “Reading Husserl’s Time-Diagrams from 1917-1918,” Husserl Studies 21 (2005): 111-137, esp. 121-125. Both essays discuss at length the significant

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undergoes in a conscious mode; it is the identical pole, the center of actions and passions,

the latter corresponding to states such as: I am sad, I am delighted, I feel pleasure. [Thus]

the word ‘I’ is not an empty word…” (Hua XI, 362).

The I is the pole from which radiate intentions and which directs attention. But

the associations that make objects and events meaningful—because identifiable and

conceptualizable—depend on the interactions of retentions and protentions in the flow of

conscious temporalization, themselves shot through by affective forces. But is this the

last word on affective forces?47 Do they always fuse into the finality of meaningful

objects? By 1974, Levinas wrestled with the ambiguities of affective forces, affective

sedimentations, and contested the all-structuring power of time consciousness in Husserl,

in which meaning took form as already meaningful. “Proximity, obsession and [even]

subjectivity, as we have expressed them, are not reducible to phenomena of

consciousness. But their un-consciousness, instead of giving evidence of a pre-conscious

stage or of repression which would oppress them, is one with their…refusal of

manifestation. Inasmuch as essence is not separable [in Husserl] from ostension and thus

from the ideality of the logos and kerygmatic dominance [principauté], [the] exception

[of affects recalcitrant to constitution will be called]…anarchy, prior to the still

ontological alternative of being and nothingness…” (OBBE, 197 n. 26, trans. mod).48

IV. A Moment when Husserl’s Other was “Absolute”

The genetic phenomenology that allowed Husserl to discuss the components of

syntheses (affective forces, affective sedimentations, affective investments, repression

[Verdrängung], and reproductive forces)49 indirectly enriched deeper levels of the

constitution of the other with an associative, affective supplement to Einfühlung.50 So

much so, that, after having constituted the other in spatial-temporal-material nature and

modifications in Husserl’s conception of temporalizing consciousness. 47 For a discussion of protention and affectivity see Lanei Rodemeyer, Intersubjective Temporality: It’s about Time (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 155-160; also see her discussion of intersubjective temporality, 188-195.48 As he says of the ego, and against Husserl and Freud, in the context of suffering “the in-side [l’en-deçà] of the ego lends itself to our speaking only by referring to being, from which it withdraws…The said of language always says being….events happen to subjects that undergo or provoke them. The verbs by which the events are said and the nouns by which the subjects are said are formalized, even the verb being, even the noun being….language thus shows itself to be something quite different from the inner lining [doublure] of thoughts. The oneself [soi-même] and substitution do not enter into this framework” (OBBE, 196 n. 20, trans. mod). Levinas is repeating the Nietzschean intuition that we know.

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having moved through localizations of sense fields, all the way to a transference to co-

presence (Ideas II, §§43-46) almost à la Lipps, Husserl constituted groups, communities,

even nations. Now, the evolving Ideas II, (1913 through 1923, the year of Landgrebe’s

final redaction), made little mention of passive syntheses. But in the 1920s Husserl

expanded both his pursuit of the operation of passive synthesis and his investigation into

intersubjective constitution, mobilizing his distinctions between perception in the flesh,

and apperception, and presentations versus appresentations.

What requires closer examination is the system of appresentations, which…in the case of the solipsistic subject, has it original basis in original connections of regular 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 and…this system develops as a system of ordered indication only by means of continuous experience of other people, who are already constituted by Einfühlung. (Hua IV, §45, 165, emph. added)

The intertwining of perception and apperception, the transferential function of

Einfühlung, and the metaphoric layers of “various sense-fields (field of touch, warmth,

coldness, smell, taste, pain, sensuous pleasure) and sense-regions (sensations of

movement)” (Hua IV, 164) account for the wealth—even the saturation—of data

constituting other bodies and, through apperception, other minds.51 This then is the zero

degree of intersubjective constitution between 1913 and 1923. The extreme density and

inter-referentiality (so complex that Husserl speaks of “a system of indications” bearing a

direct “analogy” to a “system of signs,” Hua IV, 166), allows the solipsistic I access to

49 See Hua XI, §§ 28-31, and chapter 2 “The Phenomenon of Affection,” §§ 32-36. For a discussion of Husserl’s “constitutional” meaning of repression (Verdrängung) see V. Biceaga, The Concept of Passivity in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), §2.3, 24-25. For a discussion of the philosophical sources of Verdrängung, the process of Hinunterdrücken, and the Unterdrückten, see A. Mishara, “Husserl and Freud: Time, Memory and the Unconscious” in Husserl Studies 7 (1990): 29-58, esp. 42-47.50 See for example Hua XI, Section III, chapter 3 “The Operation of Affective Awakening and Reproductive Association,” §§ 36-39. A observation like the following one could not failed to have interested Levinas (however he encountered it): “…already within the living present, we encounter an affective operation altogether peculiar; that is, that of awakening of what is hidden and enveloped in implicit intentionality. An excess of force, which evidently has its origin in the impressional sphere, can cause a totally empty retention, even poor in affective content, to restore anew that which is hidden in it in darkened sense content” (p. 173). 51 See J. English 2006, who reminds us that, all but metaphysical, saturation is a fact of perceptual life: “it is possible to consider that each of the moments through which any intentional life passes possesses, immediately and in itself, a degree of maximal saturation under the effect of this state of interpenetration [of fields and eidetic laws],” p. 329.

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the other. It depends on Husserl’s continuous enrichment of phenomenologically reduced

consciousness, but above all the meaning of that peculiar kind of body memory called

“retention” with its near infinite retentional modifications (just-past, past an hour ago,

etc.).

This marked progress on his earlier constitution of others, such as it came to light

in notes from 1908 (cf. B manuscripts) and in the Fundamental Problems of

Phenomenology (1910-1911). In the B Manuscripts, for example, Husserl opened his

description of the constitution of constituting consciousness and that which is posited in

it: if what is constituted “presupposes constituting consciousness,” and if the thing

constituted is in the sense that it appears, then it is such only insofar as it “appears in the

unity of the intuition” (B I 4/18a).52 The path to constituting consciousness means

discerning a path to consciousness more broadly. This also concerns other minds. “And

when we posit consciousness indirectly, through the mediation of [the] empirical position

of living bodies (Leibern), as things (Dingen) of experience that belong to actual

consciousness, this indirect position posits a being itself, and an absolute being” (B I

4/18b, emph. added).53

If we recall the idealistic ontology evident in the period around the Logical

Investigations, then we should note that what is here posited is another consciousness, not

an object (see Section III). In 1908, it is absolute. I cite this early constitution of the other

starting as a body-thing to underscore that, despite resemblances between us, the body-

mind liaison in question in intersubjective constitution initially led Husserl to speak of

positing the other as an “absolute being”; presumably, a being whose ontological density

makes her non-relative to my acts of constitution. One is tempted, in reading this, to

venture a rapprochement with Levinas in 1961.54 But that would imply that Levinas drew

material for his arguments on manuscript notes by a Husserl still struggling with

intersubjective constitution on the model of object-constitution, and not relative to

passive syntheses. But Levinas encountered Husserl in 1928, at a time when the latter’s

52 See a valuable discussion of this in Lavigne, 687ff.53 Cited by Lavigne, 688.54 See Totality and Infinity: “the Other [Autrui] is not other with a relative alterity as are…even ultimate species…the alterity of the Other [Autrui] does not depend on any quality that would distinguish him from me, for a distinction of this nature would precisely imply between us that community of genus which already nullifies alterity,” 194.

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phenomenology took risks, mature risks (like exploring phenomenologies of childhood,

sexuality, infantile consciousness). What will not change significantly is that the

“absolute other”— elucidated in the B manuscript as an “other flow of consciousness…in

a pre-empirical manner [and thus] posited as absolute”—will be approached by analogy

with memory.

Analogously to the other, a recurrent memory is “not a consciousness actually

recalled…not a consciousness actually perceived and retained in fresh recollection

[retention].”55 The analogy between the other consciousness and recollection underscores

that neither are properly given, directly or in the flesh. That is the sense of Husserl’s 1908

“absolute.” What is not directly given remains surrounded by ambiguity when we attempt

to constitute it. But note that here the absolute other owes its impenetrability to the

absence of apperceptive Einfühlung, thought through passive immediacy. Hence we

should pause before assimilating Husserl’s 1908 absolute other with that of Levinas,

because Levinas was familiar with passive syntheses and spontaneous Einfühlung.56 Even

in 1910-1911 (Ideas I) and 1913 (Ideas II), empathy is not clearly tied to passive

syntheses,57 explored when Husserl took notes for his genetic logic (from 1918).

V. Einfühlung in Cartesian Meditation V and in the Notes on Intersubjectivity

On the other hand, when Husserl presented his Cartesian Meditations in Paris

(1928), much of the three decade-long notes on intersubjectivity had been integrated and

taken a relatively final form. There again, the other is constituted transcendentally by

perception and apperception, wherein the spontaneity of apperception is now a carrying-

over (Übertragung) from the flesh, and primordial (Hua I § 50)—as if correcting Lipps’s

exteriorization and mimesis. Through the Übertragung, our two bodies coincide (Hua I §

51).58 This coinciding appears to parallel the first degree of association through

resemblance in the Notes on Passive Synthesis.59 Like the examples of deep association

explored there (Hua XI § 26), Husserl specifies that Einfühlung is spontaneous and

unbidden. Now the other, as body, is part of those syntheses “by homogeneity” and

55 B I 4/18b, cited by Lavigne, 689.56 He discusses radical passivity in Otherwise than Being, chapt. 5, §2 “The Glory of the Infinite” and Einfühlung in chapt. 4 “Finite Freedom,” respectively, pp. 140-145 and 125. 57 Passive syntheses are discussed in Ideas I, relative to the formation of categorical intuitions (e.g., groups, relations) and to aesthetic syntheses like the constitution of violin tone enduring over time (§§ 9-10).

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similarity that permit a certain recognition and the simultaneous release of an “affective

tendency” (Hua XI, § 28, 131). If one remained there, the other would be anything but

absolute. She would be a kind of reflection of myself. But in Meditation V, Husserl

returns to his 1908 question and asks how it is possible for me to experience the radically

foreign, the alien other, in this way. He has not abandoned the minimal conviction that I

cannot know his thoughts. If the other, as psycho-physical unity (a being with a mind and

body), participates in passive association (as a body like mine; as behavior I can

recognize as subjectively guided), and yet is also foreign to me, then what does it mean

that I can experience the radically foreign? And what is there, if not the human being, that

is radically alien—to the phenomenological gaze? Husserl hesitates over the best mode

of constitution here:

The second ego isn’t purely and simply there, given to us in itself, it is on the contrary, constituted as an alter ego, and the ego, designated as a moment by the expression alter ego, is what I am in my specificity. According to its other constitutive meaning, the other refers back to me, the other is a reflection of myself… (Hua I §44, emph. added)

Initially assimilated to me (Levinas would say “totalized”), the other is another I, with

analogous body and behaviors, ‘over there’ across a space that we share, since I can

readily proceed to where he is and look out over what he must have perceived while

there. But it is just then that Husserl adds, as if wavering between constitutive totalization

and an absolute other:

…and yet, he is not properly a reflection: an analogon of myself, he is nevertheless not an analogon in the habitual sense. If, then…the ego is circumscribed in my specificity, if its content can be covered by my gaze and articulated…then we wonder how my ego, in its specificity, can constitute [in

58 Husserl speaks here of an “originary pairing” (ursprünglicher Paarung).59 See Hua XI, §26, which presents transcendental association (holding out of consideration psychological elements like emotions, or singular objects) according to levels in light of the “genesis of reproductions and their formations” (p. 119). Reproductions imply reproductive memory, via association, which is intimately tied to transcendental consciousness understood as the interactions of flowing retentions and protentions: “It quickly becomes clear that the phenomenology of association is…a higher extension of the doctrine of the originary constitution of time” (118, emph. added). Recollection and association proceed dynamically through a fusion, partial or complete, of objects (bodies) perceived and apperceived, past and present. Section 28 discusses the phenomenological meaning of resemblance and similitude (p. 129). The coincidence of bodies thus belongs to spontaneous association due to their “awakening” through the merging of recollection and perception hic et nunc. Also see Hua XVI, 476-479 and Depraz, Transcendance et incarnation: Le statut de l’intersubjectivité comme altérité à soi chez Husserl, 131.

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a moment], under the heading “experience of the foreign,” precisely something that is foreign [or absolute]…(Hua I §44)

With this question in mind, Husserl recalls his thesis that the embodied self is a monad, a

cogito with the full complement of its cogitationes. But Husserl’s phenomenological

monad seems to have something like windows.60 Why so? My self is a partly visible

being that always exists within the space around its body, as its dynamic body. My

surrounding, kinesthetic space is not objective but personal, belonging to my lived flesh

(Leib). Through vision, however, personal space comes to belong to a more general space

(as my space and the other’s space merge), which provides vision its grasp of spatial

positions: here, over there, near, distant, etc. The other person is herself a body situated in

a space that I come to understand as objective. The other presumably sees it the way I

do.61, 62 Indeed, everything about the movement of the other person confirms and

reciprocates the analogy with my conscious movement. Thus the “world” gradually

emerges as a shared nature that belongs to me qua body and qua pure sensibility (Hua I,

161-162). Nevertheless, despite these windows onto the other, she remains radically

foreign. Yet it is her bodily stance before me, as Levinas also emphasized in 1961, that

contributes to my individuation.63

The experience of my body moving through space does not give me an

‘empirical’ intuition of myself as ‘this man here’. The lived experience of my body as

60 Monads with or without “windows” remains an ambiguous point in Husserl, see Hua XIV, 360 and infra, Section IX. 61 Before discussing these further, recall the phenomenological descriptions that Levinas provides in Totality and Infinity. I believe Derrida’s question of the necessity of light and clearing for the appearance of the other is less interesting than it might seem, here, because Levinas’s 1961 constitutions have a very complex ordering to them. In a sense, nothing, neither world nor element nor insomnia nor other, is radically first, although as the genesis of meaning, the other introduces the only possible hiatus permitting a consolidation of meaning. Things seem similar in Husserl. The world, whether primordial or objective, is first to the degree that I have a body, but not first in the order of possible constitution. I cannot do without the other for such a constitution. We spoke about the originary foundation. Husserl uses the term repeatedly in the fifth Meditation (160-61). It cannot really be thematized, but it is facilitated simultaneously by two things: an apprehension of the other and by Paarung, which is his way past the constitution of the other by analogy. As to the question of time as dynamic, self-constituting consciousness, and originary association as a unifying force, I come back to it in light of the the way Levinas works with Husserl’s preconscious-conscious structure in Section VII.62 This has led to interpretations of Husserl wherein the world has a priority over any other person, any other subject. What seems fairer is that my body simply takes up space, a space that is mine and intersubjective, and spreads it around itself dynamically as it moves.63 See Totality and Infinity, 84-87, 178, 197-201, 215-216.

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psycho-physical unity occurs through multiple iterations, which for Husserl requires the

presence and the gaze of the other ‘over there’. While spontaneous association gives me

the other’s body as like mine, I grasp at the same time that my own body is empirically

personal, unified. Without repeated intersubjective encounters, I might not unify myself

in this way. Indeed, it takes a “self-alienation” (Selbstentfremdung) for me to unfold my

empirical self, i.e., to unite my reduced kinestheses with higher levels of ego activities in

a unified body schema (Hua XV, 634).64 Husserl’s mention of self-alienation appears to

mean a loss of self in the perception of the other person—and in the simultaneous

recognition that I am squarely in her field of vision as she is in mine (Hua XV, 471-473).

This is not reciprocal constitution, because I may not know what the other is thinking or

doing.65 Still, not unlike Levinas’s loss of self in ethical investiture, Husserl’s self-

alienation is not merely a fact of developmental psychology; it is ongoing throughout our

lives. “There thus repeats in every presentified I, the division between the primitive

modal [urmodales] and foreign ‘I’, and all that is from me, from the original primitive I

[dem originalen urmodalen Ich] in existential validity [Seinsgeltung]” (Hua XV, 635).

Thus, the alien other is experienced as giving me my empirical I, while self-alienation

comes to pass at the deepest level of my embodied egoic life. I do not become the other

in a naïve or objective sense, but the transference of meaning is spontaneous, and

ultimately constitutive. Levinas seized hold of this intuition and radicalized it in 1961.66

64 This Husserl calls an urmodale Einfühlung, the originary mode of Einfühlung. Also see Depraz, Transcendance et incarnation, 346: “But the foreign psyche implies Einfühlung, whereas there is, in this, an internal process of self-alienation.” Further, Dan Zahavi, “Husserl’s Intersubjective Transformation of Transcendental Phenomenology,” citing Bernhard Waldenfels, “Erfahrung des Fremden in Husserls Phänomenologie” (Phänomenologische Forschung 22 [1989]). http://cfs.ku.dk/staff/zahavi-publications/Husserl_s_20transformation_20of_20transcendental_20philosophy.pdf. Consulted 12 September 2016.65 Contrasting the “simply objective attitude” with the “personalist attitude,” Husserl ventures that “the situation of actual reciprocal empathy can again contain different modalities…Now, there is something peculiar in the fact that I could understand that he [the other] is reciprocally, actively oriented toward me, explicitly toward what I announce….But how is it presently, if a reciprocal empathy is produced in which the engagement is active? No social unification of communication is yet produced thereby….What is still lacking is the project and the will to declare something” (Hua XV, 472). In that case, the other “becomes for me a Thou” (Ibid). Two levels of reciprocal empathy emerge: the one, in the form of my awareness of his awareness (of me); the other in acts of communication. Though such empathy arises spontaneously, it will not be of direct interest to Levinas, who insisted on searching for a non-synthesizing ‘foundation’ (an-archy, as he puts it, is also an an-archē) that does not first come from my acts of constitution.66 See Zahavi’s remarks on Levinas’s (and Sartre’s) “radicalization” in Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity, 149ff.

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Despite this, the monad that experiences the other as both analogous and foreign

causes Husserl conceptual difficulty. “The other is a reflection of me, and yet he is not

properly a reflection: an analogon of myself, he is nevertheless not an analogon in the

habitual sense” (Hua I, 125-126). If the monad’s ‘windows’ are more than just for seeing

and a vast social universe is given in complex perception and apperception, always

spontaneously there, and changing, then “each apperception through which we

immediately understand their meaning and their horizons refers back intentionally to an

originary foundation, where, for the first time, an object was constituted with an

analogous sense” (Hua I, 141). But is there really an “originary foundation” for

intersubjective contact? Husserl sought one, ongoingly.67 As a passive synthesis,

apperception is liminally conscious and much of this foundation can be provisionally

reconstructed in reflection. But originary foundation or not, as a monad I am always

already surrounded by other monads.

This neither decides the question of the other as analogon versus radically foreign

to me nor does it fully bridge the gap between myself as sentient-kinesthetic and myself

as an empirical ‘this man there’. Yet Husserl reminds us that the originary mode of my

lived ego is to experience divisions (Scheidung) and it is as though Levinas seized the

ambiguity in Husserl’s 1920s approach to alterity, setting it first into a world of desire

and later (1974), investing it with affective forces and sedimentations. He was familiar

enough to take up the repeating, originary Scheidung of I and the other as a problem. But

Husserl did not stop at self-alienation and division, in practice and at higher levels, the

syntheses of Paarung and Einfühlung could reach the point of passive merger in a

concordant, associative “covering” of bodies.68 This is no longer object identification so

much as an intense form of rapprochement (§52). In pairing with the other, and

concomitant with fleeting self-alienation, the body and personal space around that body,

given to me without reflection, build up strata requisite to a shared world and ultimately

one that we call objective.

67 In the 1930s Husserl reflectively reconstructs the beginning of early childhood on the ground of his exploration of drive systems and “Ur-Passivität”. In this approach to an embodied foundation, which he called genesis spontanea, drives evinced the processes of the “Ur-Ich,” they were the historicity of the body, but they were not to be understood as “mechanical forces” (Urinstinkte sind keine mechanischen Kräfte). They were the active-passive source of all abilities” and their experiences. See Hua XLII (Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie), 102 (notes from 1929).68 No need to add that, for Levinas, this becomes “substitution” and its darker, suffering side comes to light.

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The meaning of being of the objective world is constituted in several strata on the basis of my primordial world. The first stratum to put into relief is that of the constitution of the other or others in general, that is, those egos excluded from my concrete, proper being. Simultaneously, and thanks to this, a general stratification of meaning takes place on the basis of my primordial world through which that world becomes the appearance of an objective world, determined as one and the same for whomever, including me. Thus, the absolutely first stranger (the first non-I) is the other-I. (Hua I §49, 137)

With Husserl’s 1928 deepening of Einfühlung, the other becomes complex, if not

paradoxical. Ingredient in my having a world and an empirical self, self-alienation

suggests that before I am fully “I,” I experience repeated divisions, even a transitional

dissolution, at the level of my ego reduced to its body-space-other apperceptions. If I

understand Husserl rightly, he has here done some of the work that Levinas will do

in1961 and 1974, albeit in an epistemological vein and with a view to constantly

rethinking the meaning of humanity and the Gemeingeist (common spirit) of German

idealism (e.g., Hua XIV, 404). It is thus the essence of this constitution, starting from

pure others (who do not yet have a worldly meaning) that others for me do not remain

isolated, but constitute (within my proper sphere) a community of egos that includes

me…finally, a community of monads such that it constitutes a single common world (Hua

I, 137).

Husserl’s “cosmological” process is longer and more complex than this summary

suggests. But the terms: absolutely first, pure, infinite, all denote the transcendental level

and find echoes in Levinas’s 1961 phenomenology of investiture and hospitality. On the

other hand, Levinas’s 1974 arguments maintain that affective tonalities, like obsession,

recurrence, substitution, are not so much psychological emotions as tensions unfolding at

the level of passive synthesis. They raise the question of whether “discordant” syntheses

must necessarily synthesize and make sense.69 “Our philosophical discourse does not pass

from one term to the other only by searching the ‘subjective’ horizons of what shows

itself, but embraces conjunctions of elements in which concepts subtended as presence or

a subject break up” (OBBE 184, emph. added). If the affective forces at work in

Husserl’s passive syntheses revealed similarly profound, but unsynthesizable tensions,

then Levinas could complicate these syntheses in view of his originary ethical

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“susceptiveness” (OBBE 138).70 This would introduce a separation between Husserl’s

alignment of the is and the ought by dissociating aesthetic sensibility from object-

sensibility. Indeed, if we wonder why Husserl did not place more emphasis on the proto-

ethical implications of his constitution of ego and other in 1928, we should recall the

importance for him of rational intersubjectivity for an ethical humanity. The question lay

elsewhere for Husserl, and a dissociation of aesthetic and object sensibility would have

been meaningless. Even his late articles on rational freedom and cultivation (cf. Kaizō

articles, 1922-1923), show the intimate association he sought, heroically, between reason

and the good, not intersubjective affect and the good, as is Levinas.71

VI. Husserl’s “Alienation” and Levinas’s “Recurrence”

At the most fundamental level, Einfühlung and Paarung have the spontaneity of

passive syntheses that would accompany the relation of the self to the other as Ent-

fremdung. Natalie Depraz reminds us that Ent-fremdung (alienation), written with a

hyphen, has two levels: as a becoming-alien (to self), it amounts to becoming a sort of

personal object or object-for-self (a deep part of the process of self-objectification). We

already saw an element of this in the other’s body helping me to unify my own, as

empirical. But the deeper level of Ent-fremdung may actually be a spontaneous

“structural condition of the relation to the other person.”72 This is not far from Levinas’

most controversial idea, that of substitution, which he paraphrases using Paul Celan’s “I

am you when I am I” (OBBE, 99).

Together with the modes of spontaneous association, Ent-fremdung appears to be

one of several dimensions of Paarung and perhaps of Einfühlung, like those spontaneous

syntheses that may obtrude in my conscious activity, distracting me from it like an

unforeseen mnemonic disturbance (e.g., Hua XI, 122). Indeed, because associations all

belong in one way or another to memory, and because Husserl argued that the

connections of lived experience may survive as far back as we can imagine in the form of

traces or “empty retentions” (Hua XI, 169-170), an association can come from the very

distant past.

For a time, Levinas played with similar themes, with a critical eye to Husserl’s

all-unifying flow of temporalizing consciousness and speaking of Paul Valéry’s profond

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jadis (deep yore) in relation to the unsituatable origins of sensuous association. Levinas

supported his wager, observing that “Husserl will have taught us that the reduction of

naivety immediately calls for new reductions,” which suggested that he could extend the

reduction to unforeseen intersubjective, sensuous depths (OBBE 20, 106). His gambit

was that, in primordial intersubjective affectivity, passivity does not always result in

syntheses, and temporalization may contain dimensions other than the ongoing flux that

holds now moments, retentions, and protentions in their ‘place’ as they flow on and back.

Would there not be another pre-objective, perhaps “psychological” time, which repeats

with an affective charge and as if returning from nowhere?73 Levinas argued, “The

uncancelable recurrence to the self [soi-même] in the subject is prior to any distinction

between moments that could offer themselves to a synthesizing activity of identification

and assembly—recollection or awaiting. The recurrence of the self [soi-même] does not

loosen [se desserre] only to tighten again, illuminating itself in this way like a

consciousness that lights up by interrupting itself and finding itself again in the temporal

play of retentions and protentions” (OBBE 104, trans. mod). In the moment of 69 In § 29 of the Hua XI, Husserl observes that different sensuous fields “are heterogeneous relative to each other, and therefore unite only through the temporality of the living present” (138), whereupon he passes to a consideration of “each field by itself” in which unity and homogeneity are found. But the unification of the contrastive (his example is a detonation) with the homogeneous is problematic: fusion here becomes “fusion at a distance (Fernverschmelzung), since the data detached for themselves unify in a discontinuous manner” (139). Simple unifications by fusion, like complex and discontinuous elements moving into unity, depend on the “the universal form of coexistence produced by the temporal constitution itself” (139). If one questions this form, as one, perhaps all-important, transcendental temporalization, then questions like the impact of ‘contrastive’ moments—traumas, Levinas might say—may resist the process of unification. Husserl moves slightly in this direction in Appendix XIX (Hua XI), when he ventures: “Lived experiences of contrast are either ‘coherent’ or incoherent; coherent in the concordance of a constitution: the unity of the constitution of a living present… Conflict is constituted by an intuition without connection” (p. 413).70 If Husserl was uninterested in the distinction crucial to Levinas, between that of the other and the third party, we should not suppose that he was unaware that there were levels in passive synthesis, congealing into thematic consciousness. The repeating experiences of an other in our shared world come with the apperceptively given “harmony of monads” (Hua I, 138). The apperception of a harmony of monads means that without thinking about it, I am like and with others and they do not, at a preconscious level, represent a structural threat—there is no Hobbesian state of nature lurking in apperception and Levinas’s characterization of existence as violence seems to be situated at a different level of constitution—an empirical level?71 “What now may be examined is how far the practical possibility extends ‘to renew’ [ zu ‘erneuern’], in this way, [humanity’s] entire life and thereby to shape itself into a ‘new’, truly rational human being [wahrhaft vernünftigen Menschen]. However [it is] henceforth clear, and clear for those who value universally themselves and their lives, [that] to be able to enact a general (although incomplete in content) determinate possibility ‘following the best awareness and conscience’ [‘nach bestem Wissen und Gewissen’], and thus to be able to appropriate their active lives according to the best means [of] truthfulness, rationality, rectitude…” See Husserl, “Fünf Aufsätze über Erneuerung” [first article for The Kaizō, 1922-1923], Hua XXVII, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922-1937), 87.72 Depraz, 346.

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recurrence, then, intersubjective sensibility does not synthesize in the temporal flow. That

also means that to approach transcendental consciousness from the ‘side’ of sensibility

threatens its status as pure and a priori.

VII. A “Phenomenology” of the Unbewusst (Unconscious)

In his passive synthesis notes’ chapter on association, Husserl makes a surprising,

if passing, remark. “It goes without saying that we could give to these considerations…a

well-known title, that of the ‘unconscious’ [des “Unbewussten”]. It is thus a matter of a

phenomenology of what we call the unconscious” (Hua XI, 154). Husserl’s unconscious

contains empty retentions and ‘objects’ apparently devoid of affective force. Yet he

insists that these are not nothings; they are “zero degrees of awakening, comparable to

the arithmetic zero…counted nevertheless among the numbers” (Hua XI, 154). Almost

everything is awakenable, not by us but by something, maybe some other. Whether it

continues to flow indefinitely or not, our consciousness extends presumably like a

comet’s tail ‘all the way back’, he adds:

The retentional process is a constant process of impoverishment, already in the trajectory of its intuitiveness; despite the ongoing identity of meaning, meaning sees its intuitive fullness always decreasing. That is why we say that intuition [including perception and apperception] becomes less and less pure intuition and more and more a mixture of intuition and empty representations. This is also why we see a progressive decline in affective force, which, when the retention has become a completely empty representation…the original affective force has dimmed and the retentional modifications lead [only] to an empty identity. (Hua XI, §36, my trans.)

This is the phenomenological structure of memory. It is also why the alien quality of

some recollections share the foreignness of the other for Husserl. In truth, however, a

retention is not a memory at all, but the way the present stretches indefinitely into the

past, apparently merging into earlier intuitions (Hua X, 333).74 This is a rather old idea,

whose roots we find in Johann Friedrich Herbart’s “scientific psychology,” where

73 An empty retention is not “nothing” (Hua XI, 167); it is a retention that as flowed back so far that it has lost is affective force. Affection (which at the psychological level would include emotions, anything liable to awaken the attention of the I) flows back, like object-retentions, according to the laws of stable, flowing transcendental consciousness. Husserl writes “the empty retention is ever and again a sphere in which is maintained that object that possesses its originary sphere of institution in the originary impression), Hua XI, 170.

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“representations,” whatever their nature, crowd around the threshold of consciousness

(Schwelle des Bewusstseins), as if vying to resurface.75 Some of Herbart’s vocabulary

enters Husserl’s notes between 1918 and 1926, although not his umbrella concept of

“representations”.76 Still, the fact remains that if a loss of affective force causes

retentional emptying, then affective forces contribute decisively to how well I perceive

something, and what I will recall. Indeed, the affective force of the encounter with the

other person is, as Levinas would argue, unique in its intensity and the way it fills the

living present (cf. Hua XI, 413-414 on “incoherent” contrastive lived experiences in

sedimentation).

Coupled with Einfühlung, Paarung as primitive association forces

phenomenology to its (presumable) limit at the Unbewusst. But the limit is fruitful. The

more Husserl elaborated genetic phenomenology—his description of the origins of

perception and conceptualization through association—the more he argued for the

parallelism between affections and forces in the body. “Forces” (Reiz) similarly dates

from 19th century physiology, though for Husserl, forces are lived, the way instincts are

lived, as intentionalizing. They can be orderly or disorderly, manifold, seeking to

emerge.77 Again, it is on the wager that certain forces resist synthesis as they recur that

Levinas speaks of affections in 1974, using the figure of the other-in-the-same, like an

74 Husserl writes « the retention that exists ‘together’ with a consciousness of the now is not ‘now’, is not simultaneous with the now…The mistake is already made if one characterizes retention in relation to the earlier phases of consciousness as memory….Retention…is an expression used to designate the intentional relation (a fundamentally different relation) of phase of consciousness to phase of consciousness…in this case the phases of consciousness and continuities of consciousness must not be regarded as temporal objects themselves.”75 Herbart considered the threshold of consciousness as having two fundamental aspects. One concerns the fate of tiny apprehensions and perceptions, which merge with each other over time or enter into a certain conflict that blocks the return of some of them. To the degree that representations stabilize in unconscious sedimentation, the distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness is called “static.” To the degree, however, that representations vie directly for a return into a present perception, the threshold must be understood as mechanical or moving. See Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie (Königsberg: August Wilhelm Unzer, 1834), §§16-21, 12-16. English translation “A Textbook in Psychology,” in Significant Contributions to the History of Psychology: 1750-1920, ed. D. N. Robinson (Washington, DC: University Publications of America, 1977), 1-200. Also see Husserl’s deliberation about awakening of lost associations implying something acting on the I, Hua XI, Appendix VIII, no. 10, 378-379.76 See Herbart’s discussion of static and dynamic representations (Herbart 1834), §19.77 Mishara (1990) reminds us that “it is rather the syntheses of contrast relative to each other that determine which hyletic shapes…enter into awareness and which ones do not” (p. 39). If, as Husserl argues, affection is above all a “function of contrast” (Funktion des Kontrastes), then the affections Levinas calls “obsession and persecution” would, beyond questions of psychologism, express powerful affections like Husserl’s example of a “wahnsinniger Schmerz” [a maddening pain] (Hua XI, 415), which would be an “extreme contrast.”

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affective ‘self-alienation’. Such affection would operate prior to, or alongside of,

associations, whether of contrast or fusion. Levinas’s wager is that his reduction to

intersubjective sensibility opens a different side of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology of

affects and association. Yet even for Husserl, when considered with Ent-fremdung,

Paarung does not simply ‘couple’ two beings facing each other, it inaugurates an

“intentional transgression.”

Two data are given in the unity of consciousness according to an intuitive distinction and on the basis of which…in pure passivity…they ground phenomenologically a unity of resemblance as distinct appearances…. [However,] finer analysis shows that there is, here, in an essential manner, an intentional transgression that intervenes genetically…the moment the members of the pairing have become conscious together and distinctly. (Hua I, 142)

Husserl means that the intentional consciousness—which, through the ray of its

attention, slowly builds up the profiles of an object on the basis of the self-giving of that

object—is transgressed. Little may happen consciously in this transgression, but when the

other is there, looking at me, a curious fusion occurs, which Husserl calls “reciprocal

awakening.” I may even lose myself as pole of identifications and receive the other, and

with her the spaces surrounding our two bodies merge. And this intentional transgression

is genetic. It makes possible other intentionalities. It is a transgression in the sense of

going against the grain of my ordinary intentional life. My monad is transgressed, in a

sense. The passage is obscure, but I take Husserl to mean that the vectoral quality of

intentionality, aiming at an object that gives itself, becomes blurred here. Two things

come into being simultaneously, as paired, as one and two in the lapse of time it takes to

form an intuition. Out of these encounters, intentionality parses (constitutes) out bodies in

motion, behaviors, and comes to receive the unity of the other’s body for its empirical

self-unification. All of this seems to take several moments, however infinitesimal. But

how much of this would Levinas have known? Since he co-translated the Cartesian

Meditations the year they were given (they appeared in French in 1931), he was at least

familiar with Husserl’s genetic intentional transgression and his self-alienation.

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I have been arguing that Levinas’ phenomenology, in some ways hermeneutic like

Heidegger’s in 1961, returned to Husserl’s passive synthesis in 1974. Equating

phenomenology with freedom (i.e., to constitute experience and its invariant structures)

and with questions of ontology, Levinas sought a different ‘logic’ for sensibility in his

analyses of intersubjectivity that proceeded all the way to Husserl’s “sphere of

forgetting” (Hua XI, 154). Nevertheless, Husserl’s constitutions of intersubjectivity,

together with his expanding investigation into passive syntheses and time consciousness,

opened the door to the other approaching me (cf. Husserl’s reciprocal constitution, Hua

XV, 471-472). He extended Einfühlung and Paarung to their deepest intuitive levels,

speaking even of ‘my’ spontaneous ‘grasp’ of the other’s internal tumult and psychic

excitation (Hua XV, 472). Indeed, so many of the elements in Levinas’s 1974 work are

present in Husserl in nuce, that I am tempted to say that what Levinas did was investigate

different modalizations of sensibility and memory, running the psychologistic risk that

some affects and emotions might not synthesize but return like traumas or “wahnsinniger

Schmerz” (see note 77).

VIII. Husserl’s 1927 Fusion of Wills

Perhaps this becomes more plausible when we recall that, his genetic analyses

well developed, Husserl extended Einfühlung and Paarung to a fusion of wills, which

allowed him to dig explicitly beneath Hegel’s dialectic of desire. The intersubjective

foundation had to be deeper, and more embodied, than Hegel’s constitutive moment in

the history of self-consciousness.78

Thus, in January 1927, Husserl wrote nine pages of notes entitled “The

Phenomenological Reduction to the Alter-Ego and to Intersubjectivity.” The reduction is

not to consciousness, but to intersubjectivity itself, to a fusion of wills. Considering

“social life”, he starts from a minimal being-together, a Mitsein. However fragile a social

“we” seems to be, it is always already “more than a simple sum of pure isolated subjects”

(Hua XIV, 401). Under these circumstances I may not know the other well, but social

processes are dynamic and my understanding of her can grow. Ultimately, my hope is to 78 For a discussion of Spirit, consciousness and the meaning of phenomenology for Hegel and Husserl, see Anthony Steinbock, “Spirit and Generativity: The Role and Contribution of the Phenomenologist in Hegel and Husserl” in eds. N. Depraz and D. Zahavi, Alterity and Facticity: New Perspective on Husserl (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 163-201.

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reach the “pure subjectivity” of the other, “under constant phenomenological

reduction”—i.e., as the immediate, ongoing experience of the other! I can pursue this

unfolding understanding in light of subjects as diverse as “the entirety of the animal

world,” writes Husserl (Hua XIV, 401). He will work back from social existence toward

a face-to-face encounter, almost at the level Levinas is seeking.

A founding phase of Mitsein takes place between what Husserl calls the I and

Thou (Hua XIV, 404), no doubt aware of Martin Buber’s 1923 work. Herein, I encounter

the will or desire of the other facing me, and in turn, I respond to that desire. We are here

in a relationship of dialogical reciprocity like Buber’s; this is not the other calling firstly

on me, as generally in Levinas.79 Nevertheless, I find a pure reciprocity in my reduced

passive-subjective life. It “naturally forms a part of my pure subjectivity,” writes Husserl,

because “the other is indeed there in this or that objective connection” and he relates, on

his side of things, and “poses a corresponding demand in my regard” (Hua XIV, 401).

Rather than adjusting to Hegel’s model of the self-consciousness that, as a being-

for-itself excludes all that is other from itself, Husserl scrutinizes his experience,

considering Einfühlung at the level of will and praxis.80 In contrast to Hegel, Husserl

ventures, “I have the experience of others as my fellows” (Hua XIV, 400). We may be

beings of desire, and we’re certainly immersed in Hegel’s “being of life”. Consequently, I

might want to exclude the other, as object or negativity, from my field of immediate

experience, but that is not what is primordial. There is no work of the negative, no

Hegelian Aufhebung or sublimation in Husserl; there is Einfühlung and Paarung. He

argues that my understanding of the other “grows increasingly perfect” (Hua XIV, 400),

in a process that Hegel would have called the “recognition” that builds up from the

symmetric negativities of the two desiring consciousnesses seeking acknowledgement in

their sovereignty. Thus, both Husserl and Levinas actually work against the immediacy of

Hegel’s bilateral negativity viewed from without, as a principle in the development of

79 For a discussion of the facticity of the “being-with” (Mit-Daseins) in Husserl and Buber, see Ichiro Yamaguchi, Passive Synthesis und Intersubjectivität bei Edmund Husserl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 131-135.80 Hegel’s Phenomenology reads: The same and the other “are for one another like ordinary objects; independent shapes, individuals submerged in the being [or immediacy] of Life…shapes of consciousness which have not yet accomplished the movement of absolute abstraction, of rooting-out all immediate being” that would be other and would negate it.” See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

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self-consciousness. If there is more suffering in Levinas’s descriptions, it remains that

his suffering proves closer to Husserl’s Einfühlung than we might have expected.

Immediate and spontaneous, the 1927 discussion of Einfühlung does not start so much

with me, as with the intersubjective encounter.

As if echoing Levinas’s 1961 description of the face as unconstitutable

expression, Husserl observes, “Guided by the expression of the foreign subjectivity, in its

fleshly corporeity that appears to me, I posit precisely the existence of this foreign

subjectivity” (Hua XIV, 402). Although I do not directly step into the consciousness of

the stranger, he seems to open the window of my monad.81 However, because the face-to-

face relation involves a “transgression” of object-intentionality, it follows that the

“foreign subjectivity can become increasingly unified with mine” in a way that an object

cannot (Hua XIV, 401). It thus becomes possible to constitute, at the transcendental level,

an intersubjective contact prior to any objective normativity. Merleau-Ponty grasped this

(albeit on a psychological rather than transcendental level) when, in his notes entitled The

Visible and the Invisible, he wrote of the merging of worlds when the I and the other

communicate. For Husserl, verbal communication is a later moment in the consolidation

of this Mitsein. Pre-verbal, this intersubjective contact opens straightaway onto action.

“My will is consciously, at the same time in the will of the other, and vice-versa. This is

particularly clear,” Husserl adds, “in the example of the establishment of a master-servant

relationship” (Hua XIV, 403). Of service to another—let us suppose responsibility in his

regard—at the transcendental level “my will is one with that of the other” (Hua XIV,

402). In this way Husserl’s Hegelian moment unfolds the “intertwining of sociality”

differently than as two autonomous “subjects in-themselves” negating the desire of the

other. This breaks with Hegel’s dialectic of Herr und Knecht, lord and vassal; it also

undermines Sartre’s voyeur-observer dialectic, in favor of what Husserl clearly considers 81 Husserl does not explicitly say, here, that there are windows in my monad. In 1925, he writes that the monad “does not have windows” in an appendix to a course on psychology (Hua XIV, 357). However, “my belief in the foreign lived body (in natural apperception) relative to the perception of the proper flesh and the proper psyche related to it ‘motivates’ the belief in the foreign subjectivity.” This motivation and this belief have to do with “concordant syntheses” and open an option like that developed by Lipps, where I project my self-perception onto the givenness of the foreign subjectivity. Or again, through “internal memory and anticipation” I have come to believe in the similarity of the foreign subjectivity. The centrality of apperception and memory for this association is clear but does not install windows in my monad; it motivates me to a certain belief. But he adds, three pages after, that monads do have “causal windows” [Danach haben die Monaden Fenster der spezifisch monadischen Kausalität füreinander…] (Hua XIV, 360). Also see Section X.

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an everyday example of the dynamics of social Mitsein. The evidence of this fusion of

wills lies in the immediate enactment of tasks. It seems also to reach deeper than did the

associative identifications he described in the notes on passive synthesis (Hua X, §§ 28

and 30). He adds, still thinking of Hegel’s phenomenology,

Instead of a juxtaposition [of two subjects ready, say, to deny the in-itself of the other], we have to do with an interweave of sociality, which is clearly part of the meaning of the terms ‘master’ and ‘servant’…The action of the servant is not an isolated, simply private action, but rather an action taken in the awareness of the fulfillment of the voluntary requirements of his master; the order of the master is a will that is projected into the subjectivity of the servant and, in being executed by the servant, it becomes a will that effectively goes to its end. (Hua XIV, 403)

This remarkable projection of the will is possible thanks to kinestheses (bodily

movements), the surrounding world, and its objects. Yet the important point is that the

two wills—even in a sense the I’s of master and servant respectively—find themselves

merged in the task at hand. Resistance, or hatred of forced labor, would be contents for

subsequent psychological or political analysis. Mutatis mutandis, we are here in a

dynamic living present at the transcendental level. Husserl adds

Now this situation is thoroughly understood by the master and the servant…. Thus, within a given [mode of] sociality, one subjectivity advances beyond itself into the inside of another subjectivity: the individual life of the subject does not remain in itself but finds itself consciously tied, in experiential certainty, to that of another, through which correlative acts relating the one to the other reciprocally, pertain… (Hua XIV, 403)

This would be the view from within, not without; an intersubjective transcendental

constitution that refrains from judging more psychological ‘emotions’, for the time being

at least. Praxis is thus common willing, an immediacy that I need not reduce in order to

constitute it. When I do re-present it reflectively, the merger of one will into another is

certainly open to doubt. We might say that Husserl is examining the way in which desire

and will—and again, in practice, the I—belong to nobody in particular but pass between

the one and the other in the immediacy of the task. It is an immediacy such as this that

Levinas is approaching in 1961. If we reply that what has not been previously possessed

as for-me could hardly pass into another, then we have missed the genetic logic of

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Husserl’s intersubjective constitution (these notes are penned in 1927, the final year of

Husserl’s meditations on passive synthesis).82

A merging of wills sees its most extreme expression in Levinas’s “substitution”,

which he also defined as intentional transgression, or an obsession “that goes against

intentionality” (OBBE, 111). Whether Levinas’s transgression of intentionality refers to

the intentionalism of Hegel’s desire or whether it refers to a backward movement from

Husserl’s intentionality as consciousness-of, Levinas insists:

For the venerable tradition to which Hegel refers, for which the ego is equal with itself and consequently for which the return of the being to itself [is] concrete universality…when seen starting from the obsession of passivity, of the self anarchical [without foundation or archē], there emerges an inequality behind the equality of consciousness. (OBBE 115, trans. mod.)

Husserl had to have been aware of this inequality. Here, one will—through some

transmission of affective force—passes metaphorically into the will of the other. But the

inequality has another side for Husserl. It is the reason why I cannot so much as be

whole, empirically, without the other. The spirits of the philosophies are different, of

course. Husserl will argue that intersubjectivity has always already cast a bridge between

me and the other. We not only come to know each other, rather the will of that other

inhabits me because it is a will already in action with ends. Yet beyond masters and

servants, a multitude of acts, from love to hatred, wishing and desiring, step onto

Husserl’s phenomenological scene “tying us reciprocally, the one to the other and tying

our subjects together as subjects” (Hua XIV, 404).

IX. One Subjectivity “Thrust into the Interior of Another Subjectivity”

This suggests an evolution in Husserl’s Mitsein and, though his is not a dialectic

propelled by the “work of the negative,” playing out between two monads seeking

recognition of their being für-sich, there is a telos. If I constitute my monad as a

transcendent thing (a body perceived), then I begin my constitutional process, which is

“only imperfectly ‘realized in effect’” (Hua XIV, 359). However, the constitutional

process here requires an additional epochē, which Husserl uses to reach “pure

intersubjectivity” (Hua XIV, 360). It is as though, by mobilizing the egological reduction,

82 And the year in which his erstwhile assistant, Heidegger, published Sein und Zeit.

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I find the other in my reduced monad (recall Levinas’s the other-in-the-same). Husserl

writes: “In consequence of which, monads possess windows of reciprocal causality that

are specifically monadic and form a pure ‘world of monads’ as a real causal unity in the

totality [of monads]” (Hua XIV, 360, first emph. added). Taken in themselves monads

may not have windows, but from the intersubjective constitution, ‘causal’ windows are

indeed opened, in practice.

Just as the constitution of my own monad is “imperfectly realized,” the

constitution of the other is similarly an infinite task. The intersubjective epochē is said to

be egological because the ego and the other are intertwined, and Husserl is attempting to

reach a domain deeper than that of the self-identified empirical I, much less the other as a

mere object-body analogous to me. At this metaphoric level, Einfühlung may lead us

back, thanks to the sedimentation and association of pre-reflective apperceptions

(whether of myself or the other), to the immediacy of an other-in-me. Husserl is

addressing the question of how it is that, in practice, “one subjectivity is thrust beyond

itself into the interior of another subjectivity.” He is inquiring into the possibility that,

again in the immediacy of practice, there is a point at which there is neither interior nor

exterior; neither ego nor other.83

If positing my monad is “motivated by that which cannot, for me, in principle be

the object itself of an experience” (Hua XIV, 362), then this is presumably also the case

for the other. In both cases, I can only approach them as “presentified perception (through

Einfühlung)” and this stands as the phenomenological unveiling of immediacy.

Presentation through Einfühlung (Hua XIV, 363) is “the originary phenomenon.” It

motivates my belief in the other as other-I and opens onto the question of a ‘now’ that

would be shared by both the I and the other, even though our respective constitutions

amount to an infinite project. Husserl calls this the “time in general of monads” (Hua

XIV, 360). If he succeeds in showing that this time is more, at the transcendental level,

than the temporalization of an I, then he can found his community of monads on an other-

in-the-same that is neither fully totalized (an infinite task) nor merely analogous.84

Further, if this can be shown, then we shall grasp why willing, in its immediacy, belongs

83 Husserl writes, “life as praxis requires no phenomenological reduction” (Hua XIV, 404).

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ultimately to nobody in particular, a reduction Levinas followed in his fashion (TI, 236-

240).85

For Husserl, the living present opens the possibility of monads consolidating into

vaster assemblies; the addition of spoken communication inaugurates the possibility of

my opening to the other with a word like “thank you” (Hua XV, 476; cf. OBBE 117

“after you, Sir”). This was largely Levinas’s approach in Totality and Infinity: “language

consists in the relationship with a being that in a certain sense is not by relation to me,

or…that is in a relationship with me only inasmuch as he is wholly by relation to himself,

kath’ auto…” (TI, 74). In Otherwise than Being, it is sensuous recurrence, the underside

of the living present (not readily synthesizable into an intentionalized now moment), that

Levinas scrutinizes. Now, as much as Husserl’s memory was comparable to the other

because both were presentified with an obscure horizon around them, Levinas’s affective

recurrence (as unsituatable memory) yields no thing, or not initially. “This ambiguity and

this… function of sensibility, this ambiguity of understanding and intuition that does

exhaust the signifyingness of the sensible [qui n’épuise pas la signifiance du sensible]

and of immediacy, is its play… as consciousness” phenomenologically reduced (OBBE,

36). Consciousness thus contains a sensuous dimension that belongs to the immediacy

Husserl was seeking, yet which does not come to light as Husserl’s Einfühlung. Or again,

it is not Einfühlung if the latter—at whatever the level we intend it—occurs as concordant

synthesis. But we have seen that little about sensuous immediacy or affective forces

necessitates their being “concordant”. Indeed, for Husserl, affection is firstly a “function

of contrast” (Hua XI, 149) rather than concordance or similarity, which contribute to acts

of identification.

Husserl was aware of the limits of syntheses of identification. In 1974, Levinas

refers to intersubjective sensuous immediacy as the Dire (Saying), as vulnerability that

can proceed into a Dit, or words offered. Had Husserl imagined a ‘foundation’ for

84 Husserl speaks here of the effective reality of a lived experience as “momentary originary reality, as a living pulsation of the present, as the effective now.” (Hua XIV, 359). This is a now of Einfühlung and one that transcends the constitution of the I—and even Husserl’s conception of transcendental consciousness in 1905. The task will be to understand this late approach (1925) to the immediacy of Einfühlung and how it succeeds in opening windows in the monad.85 Levinas uses his discussion of “Time and the Will: Patience” to contest the sheer flow of time as consciousness: “One instant does not link up with another to form a present. The identity of the present splits up into an inexhaustible multiplicity of possibles that suspend the instant. And this gives meaning to initiative, which nothing definitive paralyses, and to consolation…” (p. 238).

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intersubjectivity in moments of unanticipated responsiveness, or in Mitleid (suffering) as

non-object-constituting (like Levinas’s ‘recurrence’), then he might have found Levinas’s

wager interesting.86 Nevertheless the ‘ought’ flows from the ‘is’ in Husserl, and in his

notes on intersubjectivity he was interested in a transcendental Mitsein wherein monads

found themselves merged into ever vaster collectivities (leading to a new, universal,

constitution of flowing temporalization as meta- or multi-monadic consciousness). For

Levinas, temporalization, likewise born from the “living present” (Husserl’s temporal

concept of immediacy), should be considered along with a sensuous laps de temps,

“refractory to the simultaneity of the present” (OBBE, 38) and comparable to the

passivity of aging. The wager is that there might be an absolute non-synthetic passivity,

repetitive in character, that accompanied the temporization of intersubjective sensibility,

a sensibility of the flesh grounded on his 1965 critical analysis of Husserl’s lectures on

time consciousness, Appendix 12 (“Internal Consciousness and the Grasping of

Experiences,” 1911 and 1912).87

Levinas’s wager accentuates another ambiguity, sensuous this time, but not unlike

the Unbewusst (unconscious) Husserl struck up against in tracing the phenomenon of

association back to affective forces, which were active along the chain of retentions that

extended back indefinitely. But for the most part, Husserl missed—and even his

transcendental epochē to intersubjectivity missed—the affective power (Levinas’s

“sensibility”) exerted by the ‘other’, and the way this sensibility inhabits ‘me’ like an

alternation between suffering and responding, or like a passivity comparable to aging.

Whether attention to this implies a lapse into psychology or not, we can see that, in 1961

and then in 1974, Levinas repositioned the epochē that opened passive synthesis and a

sensuous level of, or beneath, Husserl’s Einfühlung.

86 Indeed, he does imagine this briefly, as a question. In association (and therefore in identification or contrast), something, an object say, is detached from retentions and aligned with a current perception. “The ego is thus awakened as well. There where there is no detachment, there where the ego sleeps completely, association is not even possible. What we have said is thus incorrect; the constitution of time cannot be founded alone on the possibility of awakening anew, in infinitum, recollection. Something else in intersubjectivity?” (Hua XI, Appendix VIII, no. 10, 379. The “something else” that awakens me and allows me “to associate” could be the other I. Levinas’s wager is that the awakening is affective and pre-reflective.87 See Levinas “Intentionalité et Sensation,” (first published in 1965) in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 145-162) pp. 154-156 (my trans.). In English, Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998). Hereafter IS in the text.

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X. Perplexities of (Immediate) Sensation

In unnoticed communication with sedimented and modal affects, sensibility

(feelings, sometimes more intellectual emotions) is the “medium” of immediacy—and

generally a matter for psychology. It represents one of the greatest ambiguities in

Husserl, as well as in Levinas,88 because it is difficult to argue that, once we represent it,

we grasp as it first emerged.89 We already saw that, for Husserl in 1902, sensibility could

be authentic or inauthentic; it could point toward the experience of a quality in an object.

Or it could point emptily toward another sentiment. I use the term sensibility here to refer

to the entwining of sensation and feelings, and to avoid reducing sensibility to “sense

data.” Wagering that not all sensation is sensation-of something (intentional), Levinas

defined “sensation, [as that] which [forms] the basis of sensuous ‘experience’ and

intuition, [yet] is not reducible to the ‘clarity’ or the idea that one draws from it” (OBBE,

63). Critical of the formalism of Husserl’s approach to sensation, Levinas adds,

“[sensation] is vulnerability—enjoyment and suffering—whose status is not reduced to

the fact of placing itself before a spectator-subject” (OBBE, 63, trans. mod). This is

because, when phenomenologically reduced to pure lived experience, basic sensation, or

hylē, varies in intensity and ‘over time’.90 Yet sensation is not simply structured by the

formal flow of consciousness. It makes the flow itself possible.

By the lectures on time consciousness (1905-1907), Husserl observed that the

“living present” is a “presentation” (Vergegenwärtigung), a now that we live (erleben).

But formally, the now has a “source point” in sensibility, or in a compound of sensations

(felt, seen, heard). Yet this source point arrives as if ex nihilo. When it is ‘there’ for us, it

88 For a discussion of the immediacy and ambiguity of sensibility see Levinas “Intentionalité et sensation.” Also see John Drabinski, Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas (New York: SUNY Press, 2001), esp. chapts. 4 and 5. Levinas’s discussion focuses on Husserl’s lectures on time consciousness, Appendices V and XII.89 Acting and speaking together is thus a pairing-immediacy flowing from and engendering Einfühlung. This produces “subjectivities of a higher order, complex subjectivities” (Hua XIV, 404). Levinas gives us some of the best examples of this in the literature.90 Sensibility invariably accompanies object contents that can be made present when attached to an object anticipated or recollected (cf. Husserl’s example of the theater he experienced yesterday, Hua X, § 27): “I recall the illuminated theater as having been. In the now I see the non-now,” that has returned with the time index of “having been” (Hua X, 58). Husserl argues that a law prevents my confusing yesterday’s theater with the now of ‘today’. The law or a priori concerns the now moment and the flow of every experience retained. “By virtue of the original spontaneity of internal consciousness, each primal moment [or ‘now’] is the source-point for a continuity of productions, and this continuity of one and the same [“rectilinear”] form (Hua X, 115). In this continuity, every now moment with its retentions and protentions, finds a place, even vague, in the rectilinear multiplicity that is the temporalization (not objective time) of consciousness.

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is intentional, a hyletic datum retained and flowing back. This continuous flow is not a

form superimposed on intentional acts, much less on sensibility. At this deep level of

analysis, the source point would be a primal impression devoid of ideality, a pure

sensation whose upsurge ‘I’ grasp only as it is stretching and flowing past. This allows

Levinas to observe that, in Husserl’s investigation of the sources of temporalizing

consciousness, “the unity of sensation, ever becoming, is older and younger than the

instant of the proto-impression, to which the retentions and protentions that constitute this

unity, tie themselves” (IS 155, emph. added). If the sensation does not come from

‘without’, its upwelling ‘in me’ only becomes consciousness-of X once I am able to

present the sensation to ‘myself’. Yet sensation comes from the body. It is part of our

self-affection and, as such, is “older” than its intentionalization as ‘something in time’.

Indeed, because sensation continually alters, it is fair to argue that embodied sensation, as

Urimpression, is older than what I discover in my intentional ‘now’. It was underway

presumably before its stretching in retention, in and as consciousness, allowed it to

become ‘the present’ for me. Yet it is also younger than itself, because the reality of

sensation is what allows the pre-objective temporal flux to flow. The “unforeseeable

novelty of contents that arise from this source of all consciousness and all being—is

original creation (Urzeugung)…creation that merits the name of absolute activity, of

genesis spontanea” (IS, 156). 91

This is “absolute activity” that happens ‘to me’, even as it contributes to

structuring the flow of consciousness by continually modifying, stretching in retention

and anticipating other, subsequent sensations. At this indeterminate horizon, which

parallels the aforementioned affective forces at work in retentions long since flown back,

the dynamics of sensation suggest a tiny lapse (not yet intentionalized as the living

present) between the now I experience, and the X about to arrive. Husserl would address

this lapse in the Bernau manuscripts by emphasizing the ongoing activity of protentions.92

Remaining true to his intentional analyses, Husserl stays with lived experience and does

91The question that is sensation, and its relationship to phenomenology, has been widely discussed. See Levinas, “Intentionalité et sensation,” first published in 1965 (in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger). Also see Drabinski, Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas; Didier Franck, “Au-delà de la phénoménologie” in Dramatique des phénomènes, 105-123; Jocelyn Benoist, “La lucidité et sa face d’ombre: Sur l’immanence de l’Ego” in Autour de Husserl : L’Ego et la raison (Paris: Vrin, 1994), 92-103, using Levinas to criticize Sartre.

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not suggest we investigate the physiological status of embodied sensation. Yet he does

not deny that there is a certain difference between “the pre-phenomenological being of

experiences…and their being as phenomena” (Hua X, Appendix XII, 129). He closes his

1905-1907 reflection with open questions: “What does it mean, then, to reflect on the

moment ‘turning-towards…’ [an object or a sensation pointing to an object]? At one time

the modes of attention run off ‘naïvely’: in their running-off, I am turned towards the

object appearing in them; at another time an objectifying glace is directed towards the

series of modes themselves” (Hua X, 130).

Attention and “turning towards” an object, internal or external, depends on their

intensities and perceptual salience. Certainly, sensation’s continuous alteration is a pre-

temporal movement, a pure activity of embodied beings. But this activity underscores the

profound passivity of the being from whom it comes and to whom it happens. As to the

question of a dissymmetry, or infinitesimal lapse, between the upwelling of sensation and

its becoming an object to which I can attend, this marks a limit at which phenomenology

might open to other considerations of the body, like the foundational science Husserl

called “somatology” in the Ideas III (Hua V, §§ 2-3); that “draws sensation [Empfindung]

out of the texture of its [multiple] understandings [Auffassungsgeflecht].” It is,

nevertheless, on this lapse in continuous change, on the older-younger paradox of

sensation, that Levinas wagers. He argues that it is found in intersubjective encounters in

a unique way: I am affected by another before he becomes an intentional object (which

Levinas called the third party) to me. This poses a challenge to Einfühlung, just as it

illuminates Ent-fremdung in an originary way.

Would that imply that sensibility, with sensations at its evanescent ‘ground’, is

not always fully conscious? Yes, if by fully conscious we mean intentionally conscious,

although Husserl continually extended the spheres of intentionality, ultimately

encompassing the empty intentional aiming of instincts and prayer (e.g., Hua XLII, 249).

92 Husserl writes (Hua XXXIII): “In the observation of the succession in the flow, we could say: First there is an empty anticipation, and then is the point of non-perception [Punkt der Unwahrnehmung], which is itself an intentional experience [ein intentionales Erlebnis]. But this experience thus comes into the flow through the entry of the originary present [Urpräzenzen] as a fulfilling content in the foregoing empty intention, which is thereby transformed into originarily presenting perception [ in urpräsentierende Wahrnehmung],” cited and analyzed by Schnell 2002, 103ff. Not only aware of the problem, Husserl attempted to resolve it through the “empty intentionality” of protention. Yet empty intentionality, before it is filled with content, is affect.

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Object-consciousness, perception and apperception, remained tied to the question of pre-

objective ‘time’ and its flow, and to that of sedimentations, affective forces, and the “dark

sphere of [retentional] transformation” (Hua XLII, 64). He found no ultimate answer to

the endlessness of the flow, or to the pre-temporal lapse between sensuous self-affection

and intentionalization, much less to suffering and inhibition.93

Most important for my purposes are the ambiguities and sticking points in Husserl

that Levinas chose to exploit. Levinas was aware of many of these and wrote extensively

on the question of immediacy and sensibility. But he was also explicit about departing

from Husserl’s formalism and constitutional focus. Much less concerned with the a priori

laws of consciousness, or those concerning the systems of objects that give themselves to

intentional aiming (noemata), Levinas focused on two ‘local’ questions. The first we

might call, with Derrida, the conditions of possibility of hospitality and dialogicality, of

responding to an other. The second concerns the suffering of remembrance and

mourning, or the (eternal?) recurrence of unintegratable affective forces that he would

call ‘the other-in-the-same’. If we acknowledge the difference in the aims of their

projects, perhaps even the ‘psychologism’ implicit in Levinas’s concern with sensibility

(falling outside of transcendental phenomenological constitution), then we may

justifiably read him as phenomenologist, as one of the unorthodox Husserlians.

93 Indeed, by 1934, long aware of Freud’s work, though not much interested in it, he jotted: “every concealed evaluation [verdeckte Geltung] functions with associative and apperceptive depth, which the Freudian method makes possible and assumes” (Hua XLII, 113).