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ABSTRACT
As a phenomenological concept, absorption refers to the ego's capacity to experience the world from a displaced standpoint. The paper traces the emergence and development of this concept in Husserl's and Fink's writings and demonstrates that while Fink conceived of absorption as a class of intuitive re-presentations, Husserl transformed it into a limit phenomenon, whose analysis calls for a new method. A careful study of absorption compels us to rethink fundamental themes in phenomenology: it forces us to broaden our understanding of sensuous intuition, reconceptualize the nature of self-awareness, stretch the limits of intuitive re-presentations, and rethink the portrayal of phenomenology as a metaphysics of presence. The paper demonstrates that absorbed experiences are characterized by a specific form of self-awareness, that they constitute a distinct type of intuitive re-presentations, that a new method is needed to investigate them, and that their analysis leads towards a phenomenology of the unconscious.
Notes
1 See Fink Citation1966, §22 and Hua XLII, especially Text No. 3, Beilage IX, and Text No. 36.
2 See Sartre 2006, 37–50 and 148–175.
3 See Conrad Citation1968. Arguably, Conrad's study, which is based on many of his earlier works on the topic, is more detailed than of any other author in the phenomenological tradition as a whole.
4 To be more precise, while impressional consciousness is original, retentional consciousness is a modification of impressional consciousness; a reproductive consciousness, which Husserl qualifies as a memory (Erinnerung), and which must be further conceived in its three modalities, as a memory of the past (Wiedererinnerung), memory of the present (Miterinnerung), and memory of the future (Vorerinnerung), is a further modification of retentional consciousness. Following such a logic, phantasy could be qualified as a non-positional modification of memory (Erinnerung).
5 In phenomenological literature, this structural feature is identified as the splitting of the ego (Ichspaltung). See especially Husserl's classical analysis of this phenomenon in Hua VI. Jan Broeckman has provided a classical commentary on this phenomenon (See Broeckman 1963). For more recent analysis of Ichspaltung in Husserl's phenomenology and other theoretical frameworks, see especially Bernet Citation2002, Luft Citation2003, Averchi Citation2015, and Cavallaro Citation2016.
6 The distinction sometimes drawn between sensuous and conceptual phantasy equally applies to other modes of intuitive re-presentation. Sensuous intuitive re-presentations take the following form: I remember, anticipate, or phantasize x, y, or z; by contrast, conceptual re-presentations take a different form: I remember that, anticipate that, or phantasize that. It is one thing to remember, anticipate or phantasize that roses bloom in spring, it is an altogether different matter to remember, phantasize or anticipate them in bloom. In the present context, I am only concerned with the second type of re-presentations, i.e. intuitive, or sensuous recollections, anticipations, and phantasies.
7 It would be incorrect to claim that this inner split is a duplication of the ego. I can remember myself remembering, just as I can anticipate myself anticipating, or phantasize myself phantasizing. So also, I can remember myself anticipating or phantasizing, anticipate myself remembering or phantasizing, or phantasize myself remembering or anticipating. In all these cases, we are confronted with a triplicity of the ego. All modes of intuitive re-presentation require at least two egos, the re-presenting and the re-presented. While the re-presenting ego can be but one, the number of re-presented egos can be indefinite.
8 More precisely, according to the view, which is almost unanimously endorsed by all classical and contemporary phenomenologists, all consciousness is characterized by a tacit, immediate, prereflective and non-objectifying self-awareness. In the present context, a few references will have to suffice. As Husserl has it, “to be a subject is to be in the mode of being aware of oneself” (Hua XV, 151). So also, in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty maintains that consciousness is always affected by itself, so much so that it has no meaning independent of self-affection. In the same vein, Sartre contends that self-consciousness is “not a new consciousness, but the only mode of existence which is possible for a consciousness of something” (Sartre Citation1989, 10). Or as Dan Zahavi has put it more recently, “literally all the major figures in phenomenology defend the view that the experiential dimension is characterized by a tacit self-consciousness” (Zahavi 2005, 11).
9 Let me remark, although only in passing, that this realization is of great importance in the framework of the discussions of the minimal self, or the core self, that we come across in contemporary phenomenology (see, for instance, Strawson Citation2009, Gallagher Citation2010, and especially Zahavi Citation1999, 2005 and 2014). Here we are confronted with a complex argument, which in the present context, I will reproduce in six major steps. (1) It is not possible to be conscious of an object without also, and simultaneously, being conscious of experiencing it. This is the sense in which consciousness is always and necessarily self-conscious. (2) Experiences do not float in the air, i.e. they are never given anonymously. They can only be given as mine. What distinguishes my own experiences from those of everyone else is the phenomenological fact that they are given to me as mine. (3) Yet if experiences are given as mine, then they are also given, and necessarily, to some kind of a self, for it is meaningless to speak of mineness in the absence of selfhood. (4) The self of which we speak here need not refer to a human being, since many other beings could also have experiences marked by mineness. (5) To make sense of this dimension of mineness, it becomes important to devise a minimal conception of the self, in the absence of which experience as such would not be possible. (6) Yet what is this minimal self? We can identify it as the core self and further maintain that any conception of selfhood must include this core dimension. This means: the sense of mineness inscribed in each and every experience forms the foundation of personhood. Yet if it is indeed true that, as I have been arguing, different kind of experiences are accompanied with different forms of self-awareness, then we come across the paradoxical realization that some experiences, such as conscious re-presentations, entail the awareness of more than one core self, while other experiences, described under the heading of a “third life of subjectivity,” entail the awareness of a core self that does not shape the basis of our own personhood.
10 Fink speaks not of the freedom of consciousness per se, but of the freedom of the pure ego (Freiheit des reinen Ich) (See Fink Citation1966, 51 ff). However, the concept of the pure ego does not refer here to a different entity besides consciousness, but to the centering point of consciousness. For this reason, so as to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings, in the present context I have chosen to speak of the freedom of consciousness rather than the freedom of the ego.
11 In the present context, we cannot enter into an extended discussion of the relation between the freedom of consciousness, on the one hand, and motivations and associations, on the other hand, which play a central role I transferring the ego from the impressional to the re-presentational sphere. Suffice it not that motivation is that kind of non-mechanistic causality that rules over those beings, which we identify as free.
12 What is said here of absorption in general also characterizes Finks’ account of the most extreme form of absorption, viz., the dream, which he addresses separately in §26 of Vergegenwärtigung und Bild. Fink conceives of the dream as an absorbed re-presentation and he maintains that a phenomenological account of the dream must first and foremost rely on the phenomenology of sleep. In his account of sleep, Fink argues against the view that sleeping consciousness is a worldless consciousness and maintains that sleep, conceived as the most extreme form of absorption, is to be understood as the actual ego's specific relation to the actual world, a relation that is characterized by a determined mode of having the world, viz., as having it in the mode of a loss (“Traum ist ein … ‘Weltverlorenhaben’” [Fink Citation1966, 64]). To express this insight in those terms which I have employed in my foregoing analysis, for Fink, sleep represents the most radical manner in which consciousness can de-present the impressional world. This radical form of de-presentation constitutes a necessary condition that underlies the possibility of the dream. In the present context, a detailed analysis of Fink's conception of the dream would take us too far afield.
13 More precisely, in the manuscripts collected in Hua XXIII, Husserl speaks of absorption in the phantasy world (Hua XXIII, 67), of absorption in the consideration of a picture (Hua XXIII, 121), so also of absorption in the consideration of a perceptual object (Hua XXIII, 200). In all cases, Husserl stresses that absorption of any kind does not eliminate actual self-consciousness as well as the consciousness of the surrounding world. That is, when consciousness is absorbed in the there and then, it remains tacitly aware of the here and now. In a manuscript from the early 1920s, Husserl contends that absorption in intuitive re-presentations is exactly what allows us to qualify consciousness of re-presentations as consciousness in the mode of the as if. When I am absorbed in a phantasy, I become the phantasy ego, which allows me to “experience” in phantasy as if I were experiencing in reality (See Hua XXIII, 562).
14 Upon completing his doctorate, which was subsequently published as Vergegenwärtigung und Bild in Husserl's own Jahrbuch 9 (1930), Fink became Husserl's assistant in October 1928. However, as Dermot Moran has rightly observed, “Fink was actually not really suited to the role of assistant, and, in fact, such was his mastery of Husserlian themes and his deep insight into what was problematic in them, he quickly became Husserl's creative ‘co-worker’ (Mitarbeiter) and even at times his ‘teacher’, who helped stimulate Husserl's late phenomenology in a more creative, speculative direction” (Moran Citation2007, 5). For a most detailed account of Husserl's collaboration with Fink after the completion of Fink's dissertation, see Bruzina Citation2004.
15 Not only that, and for Husserl this is especially important: we are confronted here with transcendental problems, which concern such questions as the following: how can experience retain its unity despite the breaks and interruptions that are signalled by dreamless sleep or fainting? So also, how can the beginning and end of experience be rendered understandable? Furthermore, what significance all of this has for the world, conceived as a transcendental accomplishment?
16 See Husserl's letter to Gerda Walther, that was written in 1920 (and quite likely wasn't sent out), published in Briefwechsel Bd. III, Teil 2, 260–265).
17 How reliable is such a reconstructive method? As Husserl himself admits in Mat. VIII, Text No. 43, such a reconstructive method delivers what is evidently reconstructable (“evident rekonstruierbar”), yet he also adds that it might be reconstructable only in vague determinacy.
18 For a more detailed account of these issues, see Chapters I and II in Steinbock Citation2017.
19 To illustrate this point with another example, should dreamless sleep be conceptualized as a limit phenomenon, then other forms of absorption – viz., absorption into intuitive re-presentations and into dreams – will play the role of transitional phenomena. Yet dreamless sleep can also be conceptualized as a transitional phenomenon on the basis of which one could study birth or death.
20 For recent accounts of the unconscious in phenomenology, see Bernet Citation2002, Lohmar and Brudzinska Citation2012, Legrand and Trigg Citation2017, Lanfredini 2019.
21 Self-awareness-in-the-then is always and necessarily founded in the self-awareness-in-the-now. This does not mean, however, that consciousness must be always conscious of the founded nature of its experiences. Unconsciousness marks the modality of consciousness that is characterized by a peculiar kind of self-forgetfulness, which cuts the former from the latter and thereby enables consciousness to undergo experiences from a displaced standpoint.
22 Admittedly, it remains unclear in Husserl's manuscripts what exactly pure absorption refers to. Does it refer to daydreams or nocturnal dreams? Or does it refer to dreamless sleep? Or does it refer to death, conceived as absorption in complete nothingness? It seems to me that the most compelling answer suggests that consciousness can be either partly, or fully absorbed in memories, phantasies, (day)dreams or dreamless sleep (a phenomenon for which Husserl often reserves another term, viz., Entsunkenheit [See Hua XLII, Text No. 36]). Otherwise put, the distinction between pure and impure absorption is not meant to capture differences between types of experience, but concerns the way in which consciousness immerses itself in its own re-presentations.
23 Regarding the first domain, within the sphere of what positively affects us, which refers to the domain of wakefulness, we can draw a distinction between primary, secondary, tertiary, etc. interests. That is, when a particular object attracts our interest and attention, whatever remains in the background of our perceptual field still affects us positively. The field of wakefulness, however, extends beyond the perceptual field. In the final analysis, to be awake is to be awake for the world.
24 Should one wonder, why de-presentations are not addressed in this framework, the answer would lie in the fact that they are, as Fink has put it, “absolutely non-independent intentions” (Fink Citation1966, 25). This means, among other things, that they cannot be characterized by an independent type of self-awareness. Rather, self-awareness that accompanies them is the one that characterizes the form of consciousness to which de-presentations are adjoined. They can be adjoined either to presentations, or to re-presentations, or to absorbed experiences.