Abstract
In the Logical Investigations, Ideas I and many other texts, Husserl maintains that perceptual consciousness involves the intentional “animation” or interpretation of sensory data or hyle, e.g., “color-data,” “tone-data,” and algedonic data. These data are not intrinsically representational nor are they normally themselves objects of representation, though we can attend to them in reflection. These data are “immanent” in consciousness; they survive the phenomenological reduction. They partly ground the intuitive or “in-the-flesh” aspect of perception, and they have a determinacy of character that we do not create but can only discover. This determinate, non-representational stratum of perceptual consciousness also serves as a bridge between consciousness and the world beyond it. I articulate and defend this conception of perceptual consciousness. I locate the view in the space of contemporary positions on phenomenal character and argue for its superiority. I close by briefly arguing that the Husserlian account is perfectly compatible with physicalism (this involves disarming the Grain Problem).
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Notes
The account, in one form or another, can be found in many of Husserl’s works, early and late. See Gallagher (1986) for extensive references. See Mulligan (1995) for a detailed treatment of the account primarily as it appears in the Logical Investigations and Thing and Space. For more diachronic views, see Sokolowski (1970) and Mooney (2010).
See, e.g., §17 of Thing and Space (Husserl 1997, pp. 46–47).
See, e.g., Thaler, L. et al. (2011).
See, e.g., Hopp (2011, Chap. 7).
See, e.g., Føllesdal (2006).
We leave to the side any metaphysical or particular categorial interpretation of this. See Drummond (2007, p. 107).
Michael Madary (2010, p. 161, n. 11) writes, “Especially in the earlier works, Husserl wrote as if sensations can be devoid of intentional content unless they are ‘animated’ (beseelen) through an interpretation (Auffassung)….For a number of reasons, mostly having to do with Husserl’s work on time-consciousness, the received interpretation of Husserl is that he ultimately rejects non-intentional sensations.” Madary refers to Sokolowski (1970), Gallagher (2003), and Zahavi (2005), among other secondary sources. My own view is that Husserl never abandons the idea that hyletic data themselves are nonintentional. He just develops a more sophisticated view of their organization and relation to time-consciousness and the lived body. See, e.g., Gallagher (1986). One must distinguish the claim that hyle could occur without any accompanying animation at all from the claim that they themselves are intentional, and this issue from the issue of whether or not the form-matter distinction applies at the ultimate level of constitution in time-consciousness. Sokolowski (1970, pp. 110–113) argues that, by 1916, Husserl had come to accept the idea of sensations with no accompanying intentional animation (what Sokolowski calls “non-intentional sensations”); he goes on to argue (e.g., pp. 210–211) that, in the later period, Husserl comes to regard sensations as already possessing “anticipations of sense,” though he still speaks of “pure sensation which precedes objectivation.”
In this regard, I am not alone. See Mooney’s (2009) very useful discussion of the development of Husserl’s view from the period of the Investigations to the “transcendental period.” The discussion also illustrates how different interpreters (in this case, Mulligan 1995 and Cobb-Stevens 1990) can end up emphasizing very different aspects of Husserl’s accounts and thus end up with very different views, either emphasizing the “non-conceptual” element (Mulligan) or making Husserl into an experiential conceptualist (Cobb-Stevens). As Mooney (35) summarizes it, “To be constituted fully in lived experiences, a perceived object must count as a conceptualised unity of cognition. This being said, the transcendental period is distinguished by an archaeological uncovering of non-conceptual syntheses.” I will not enter into the conceptual vs. non-conceptual perceptual content debate in this paper, partly because I think the debate is, as Hopp (2011, p. 130) puts it, “a mess” and partly because it is enough to say, in this context, that the having of sensory hyletic data, no matter how they get organized or conceptualized, is not fundamentally a matter of exercising any concepts. This is a more important issue for Hopp because he does not accept the hyle doctrine and prefers an account in terms of what he calls intuitive nonconceptual content; hence, he must motivate his account by delving into the “messy” literature on nonconceptual content. See Hopp’s (2008, 2011, 206 ff). Hopp’s general discussion of conceptual vs. nonconceptual content (see Hopp 2011, Chap. 5) is one of the clearest in the literature that I know. In the Husserlian context, see also Barber (2008) and Shim (2005). I will also leave aside the issue of the connection between static and genetic phenomenology and their relation to the hyle doctrine. See, e.g., Steinbock (1995, p. 265).
For a recent book that marries analytic philosophy of perception and Husserlian phenomenology in just the right way, see Walter Hopp’s (2011) Perception and Knowledge. This book really shows us how it is to be done.
I surmise that the reason Husserl liked the phenomenon of color constancy in particular was that these flitting colors do not seem to have even a putative place to reside. In case of shape constancy, for example, the quasi-ovoid appearance of a coin held to the eye at a certain angle does not, so to say, float freely from the coin itself. In contrast, the dancing colors on the surface of the cobalt blue sedan have no home in the world of objects. They are not taken as properties of the car or of anything else.
Shim (2011) argues quite convincingly and richly (if somewhat unsurprisingly) that Husserl is not a strong representationlist about sensory content because he “…believes the cognitive content of a perceptual episode can vary despite constancy of sensory qualia [hyle]” and that Husserl is also opposed to weak representationalism because the kinesthetic hyletic data (discussed in depth in Thing and Space) could undergo change despite constancy of representational content. On this latter point, the level of detail you are concerned with is important. Manifestly, the view is that I aim at, say, the same tree across a flux hyletic data as I walk around it. But if we are concerned with exactly how the tree is appearing in detail at each moment of the flux, there will be a difference. cf. Ideas I, §97; Husserl (1982, p. 230), “…any changes of the hyletic content of the perception…must at least result in what appears becoming objectively ‘other’, whether in itself or in the orientation in which it is appearing, or the like.”
See, e.g., Julesz’ classic Foundations of Cyclopean Vision (Julesz 2006).
The “Phänomenologie der Thematik und des reinen Ich” appeared in 1929 in Psychologische Forschung, XII; its English translation is in Gurwitsch (1966). This objection gets elaborated and reiterated in Gurwitsch’s The Field of Consciousness (1964, pp. 265–273). On the history of this “common but mistaken” objection to Husserl, which apparently originated with Scheler, see Mulligan (1995, pp. 186–191 and 230n32 and n33). See also Hopp (2008, pp. 237–239) and Dreyfus (1982).
Immediately after the quote in the text, Mulligan (1995, p. 191) writes, “…this is not Husserl’s view. …[S]ensations, according to Husserl, are of qualities and of spatial forms. It is by virtue of this that they belong to fields. The creatures imagined by Husserl who enjoy only visual sensations but no interpretive content would enjoy structured sensations in fields. It would be with them as though they were aware of rich arrays of qualitative discontinuities and coloured expanses. They would simply lack representations of…aspects of organization, of experiences as of tables and chairs.”
cf. Føllesdal (1982, p. 40).
This could be something akin to perceptual “filling in.” See, e.g., Thompson et al. (1999).
Note that we would have to accept this even if we were to embrace representationalism. We would then have to make a distinction between a generic perceptual representational layer (embedding generic and specific nonconceptual “ways” of representation, etc.) and more articulated or abstract “animating” layer.
cf. de Warren (2009, p. 114).
The only sense in which ego activity is involved at this level is that of consent, which, I would add, is itself not always under voluntary control. See Husserl (1973, p. 79).
cf. §107c. of Formal and Transcendental Logic where Husserl (1969, p. 287) writes, “The constituting of Data in immanent time, a constituting that goes on with rigid regularity, is a continuous evidence, in an extremely broad sense; but it is anything but an active directedness of the Ego to them.”
But it is worth recalling the experience of Sartrean nausea, and there are ways practicing the suspension of animating activity. A favorite method of mine is to (carefully) walk around one’s quarters while looking through binoculars. Every so often you will find some array of visual data that do not spontaneously identify. Try to hold that moment. Eventually, you might spontaneously resolve the data as of a doorknob or as of a coffee cup next to a coffee pot, etc., but with some repetition, you can capture these moments of perceptual nonanimation. Another sort of example occurs when you first turn on the radio and hear the first few seconds of a song (even a familiar one). For a few seconds, you have not identified (animated) the sounds you are hearing as of “Yellow Submarine” or what have you (cf. Appendix V of the lectures on internal time-consciousness, Husserl 1991, pp. 114–115). Some meditative practices are also useful in “suspending animations.”
For example, “…[T]he sensuous data, on which we can always turn our regard as toward the abstract stratum of concrete things, are themselves also already the product of a constitutive synthesis, which, as the lowest level, presupposes the operations of the synthesis in internal time-consciousness.…Time-consciousness is the original seat of the constitution of the unity of identity in general. But it is a consciousness producing only a general form. The result of temporal constitution is only a universal form of order of succession and a form of co-existence of all immanent data. But form is nothing without content.” EJ §16; Husserl (1973, p. 73). On the role his reflections on time-consciousness played in Husserl’s development, see Sokolowski (1970). I am following Sokolowski here, but I do not agree with him that the hyle-morphe distinction is retained in the later works merely as a pedagogical aid for beginners in phenomenology or that that was how Husserl conceived of the distinction in Ideas I (Sokolowski 1970, pp. 177–183). I agree with him that constitution at the level of inner time-consciousness cannot be understood in this way, but this does not mean the distinction has no proper sphere of literal application, even granting the shift toward genetic analyses.
cf. de Warren (2009, p. 114), “…Husserl…characterizes hyletic content as an intrinsic alterity, or ‘non-ego’, within the immanence of consciousness. …[T]he materiality of hyletic content, in terms of which consciousness lives through its experience of the world, can no longer be seen as a ‘medium’ or ‘representation’ in between consciousness and the world. On the contrary, this hyletic dimension of consciousness, when developed under the heading of genetic phenomenology and the theme of affectivity, designates the pre-given ‘facticity’ or ‘situatedness’ of consciousness in the world.”
In §6 of the Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl (1969, p. 30) writes, “…if we define the concept of form, as a principle, by the essentially necessary components of any rational subjectivity whatever, the concept hyle (exemplified by every ‘Datum of sensation’) is a form-concept and not what we shall define as the opposite of this, a contingent concept. On the other hand, there is no essential requirement that a judicatively cognizing subjectivity…be capable of sensing colors or sounds, that it be capable of sensuous feelings having just such and such a differentia, or the like….”
See, e.g., Sokolowski (1970, pp. 195–201).
Shim (2011) is rightly concerned to differentiate Husserl’s view from sense datum theories, but from my point of view, concentrating on the differences can prevent one from seeing a more important similarity.
The theory defended in Hopp (2008, 2011) is, in effect, what you get when you take Husserl’s view and subtract the sensory hyle (see, esp. Hopp 2011, pp. 206–210). Instead of hyle grounding the Leibhaftigkeit (“bodily presence”) so salient in perceptual consciousness, it is the conspiracy of horizonal and “intuitive” contents, both forms of nonconceptual content, that do so. Hopp could be said to be defending a nonreductionist, disjunctivist (see Hopp 2011, 172 ff.) version of intentionalism. One wishes Hopp would say more about the nature of “intuitive” contents, but it seems clear that on his model, the having of this property of “intuitiveness” is what takes over the role of sensory hyle being constituted in immanent time-consciousness—showing up in the flow, so to speak. On the difficulty of fitting Leibhaftigkeit into a representationalist analysis of consciousness (and an attempt to do so anyway), see Pacherie (1999). On Husserl and disjunctivism, see Mulligan (1995, pp. 212–215).
In §17 of Thing and Space (Husserl 1997, p. 46) Husserl says that here, “…the relation of resemblance means nothing else than that certain types of physical data [i.e., here hyletic data] are bound, according to their essence, to corresponding types of objective determinations: the physical datum of the type ‘sound’ cannot present an objective feature of the type ‘color’, the physical datum ‘color’ cannot present an objective feature of the type ‘warmth’, etc.” It may indeed be a matter of essence, but this is not something phenomenology can penetrate, in my view. That said, I think that Hopp (2008, pp. 229–232) is a bit unfair to Husserl on the resemblance of hyletic arrays to quality arrays in physical space. The resemblance relation only needs to be abstract or, if you prefer, the sensory “surface” need only be virtual. There are plenty of ways to encode geometrical information without making a literal, type-identical simulacrum of the space represented. We need to operate at a mathematician’s level of abstraction while simultaneously being sensitive to the concrete phenomenological details. See Petitot (1999); Petitot does exactly this.
cf. Shim (2011).
This is more commonly called the “Phenomenal Principle,” see, e.g., Fish (2010, pp. 5–6).
See, e.g., Tye 2000. Note that here and in the discussion of fictionalist representationalism, I am only considering these as theories of qualitative phenomenal content and am leaving out the issue of subjectivity. One can, of course, marry a representationalist theory of qualitative phenomenal content with a higher-order or same-order (self-representationalist) theory of subjectivity.
See Brentano (1995, pp. 92–94). Brentano, of course, was also a kind of self-representationalist (see previous note). By “fictionalist representationalism” I just mean the view according to which sensory qualities are objects of representation but are never actually instantiated by anything.
The same point is made in Kriegel (2002) and by others as well.
Is it not apparent that what we are doing in the cases of uncertain perception that Husserl liked to meditate upon is similar enough to evaluating competing hypotheses—hypotheses that themselves are candidates because of their prior probabilities—by gathering “data” guided by the predictions of the competing hypotheses and doing Bayesian updating as we observe how the observations turn out? At a certain point—as, say, we see that the “mannequin” is actually breathing—we cross a threshold and the (“subjective”) probability of one of our hypotheses shoots up to 1, for all practical purposes anyway. This gives us that sense of perceptual certainty, and the sense that our perception “fulfills” a certain thought—this is a person in front of me. Perhaps the tradition of phenomenological work on perception should be more explicitly married to the emerging Bayesian paradigm in cognitive neuroscience. See, e.g., Clark (2013), Colombo and Seriès (2012), Bubic et al. (2010), and Hospedales and Vijayakumar (2009). There is reason to think that Husserl himself would have had some serious misgivings about this essentially Helmholtzian construal of perception (see, e.g., Mulligan 1995, p. 170 and 229n27). But as a general rule in phenomenology, it is not legitimate to go straight from not seeming P to not being P. As long as we regard the hidden Bayesian machinery of perception (and its other neuro-computational underpinnings) as essentially causal, the phenomenologist should have no problem in accepting “unconscious inference” as a legitimate category. One can regard this as an “as if” intentional description of the relevant brain processes some of whose inputs and outputs may register in consciousness. On the view figured here, one of the functions of “constitution in internal time-consciousness” is to prime us to take what we perceive as fitting certain priors. At the deepest level, we cannot normally undo the assigning of 1 to the prior probability that there is a world of transcendent objects before us—recall that the epoche does not undo the positing character built into perception—though even this can be “monkeyed with” by certain sorts of damage and by certain pharmacological agents. At the higher and more concept-mediated levels of perception, this spontaneous priming will depend on learning and “sedimentation” of various kinds, much of which is only imperfectly accessible to conscious reflection.
See my 2007 for a fuller articulation of the type of argument I am making here at the level of properties of consciousness. Here, I am extending the analysis to properties of properties of consciousness. One can hold that all apparent properties of consciousness are real properties of it without holding that all real properties of consciousness are apparent properties of it. Likewise, one can hold that all apparent properties of the properties of consciousness are real without holding that all real properties of the properties of consciousness are also apparent. This is enough to undercut the inference from not seeming complex to being simple and thus to disarm the Grain Problem.
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Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Manfred Frank, Maria Gyemant, Chad Kidd, Greg Landini, Charles Nussbaum, David Rudrauf, Marc Schwartz, Peter Simons, David Woodruff Smith, and Gloria Zúñiga y Postigo for conversations about or feedback on the material in this essay. I would like to thank Uriah Kriegel and Harry Reeder for very useful comments on a draft of this paper.
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Williford, K. Husserl’s hyletic data and phenomenal consciousness. Phenom Cogn Sci 12, 501–519 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9297-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9297-z