Cartesian Meditations by Edmund Husserl

Author:Edmund Husserl [Husserl, Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789400999978
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published: 2012-12-06T06:00:00+00:00

§ 39. Association as a principle of passive genesis

The universal principle of passive genesis, for the constitution of all. objectivities given completely prior to the products of activity1, bears the title association. Association, it should be clearly noted, is a matter of intentionality, descriptively demonstrable as that, in respect of its primal forms, and standing, in respect of its intentional performances, under eidetic laws. Owing to these, each and every passive constitution is to be made understandable — both the constitution of subjective processes, as objects in immanent time, and the constitution of all real natural objects belonging to the Objective spatio-temporal world. Association is a / fundamental concept belonging to transcendental phenomenology (and, in the psychological parallel, a fundamental concept belonging to a purely intentional psychology). The old concepts of association and of laws of association, though they too have usually been related to the coherencies of pure psychic life by Hume and later thinkers, are only naturalistic distortions of the corresponding genuine, intentional concepts. From phenomenology, which was very late in finding avenues to the exploration of association, this concept receives a completely new aspect, an essentially new delimination, with new fundamental forms. Here belongs, for example, sensuous configuration in coexistence and in succession. It is phenomenologically evident, but strange to the tradition-bound, that association is not a title merely for a conformity to empirical laws on the part of complexes of data comprised in a “psyche” — according to the old figure, something like an intrapsychic gravitation — but a title (moreover an extremely comprehensive one) for a conformity to eidetic laws on the part of the constitution of the pure ego. It designates a realm of the “innate” Apriori, without which an ego as such is unthinkable. Only through the phenomenology of genesis does the ego become understandable: as a nexus, connected in the unity of an all-embracing genesis, an infinite nexus of synthetically congruous performances — at levels, all of which fit the universal persisting form, temporality, because the latter itself is built up in a continual, passive and completely universal genesis, which, as a matter of essential necessity, embraces everything new. In the developed ego, this many-leveled structure is conserved as a persistent form-system of apperception and consequently of constituted objectivities — among them, the ones belonging to an Objective universe having a fixed ontological structure; and this conserving is itself only a form of genesis. In all of that, the particular fact is irrational; but it is possible only in the apriori form-system pertaining to it as an egological fact. Nor should it be overlooked here that “fact”, with its “irrationality”, is itself a structural concept within the system of the concrete Apriori.

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