Affection and Cognition: A Husserlian Sketch
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35494/topsem.2022.2.48.824Keywords:
Affection, Pre-predicative experience, ConstitutionAbstract
The aim of the paper is to turn toward the phenomenon of affection by contrasting it with the theme of (human) cognition, which usually stands in the foreground of philosophical inquiry. In order to achieve this goal I follow these steps: (1) I discuss the Sellarsian thesis according to which ‘the nonpropositional’ (e.g., affection) is ‘epistemically inefficacious’ by bringing into play Edmund Husserl’s theory of pre-predicative experience, especially in the posthumous work Experience and Judgment (1939). (2) I maintain that this experience is ‘nonepistemic,’ and is not liable to be eliminated nor trivialized in favor of the hegemony of the ‘space of reasons’ or of empirical descriptions enframed in the causal order. Within this nonepistemic field, (3) I focus on affection, on the one hand, as something pre-given. On the other hand, I attempt to situate the phenomenon of affection in the context of the so-called “ABCs of the constitution” (Husserl, 1966, p. 125). By doing this, (4) I want to endorse Husserl’s claim that affection plays a crucial role in the constitution of sense in such a way that without it “there would be no objects at all” (Husserl, 1966, p. 164). To conclude, (5) I try to link the notion of affection with a concrete example of being distressed, to wit: the experience of hunger as described by Husserl in some passages of the Limit Problems of Phenomenology (Husserl, 2014).
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