本能：一种胡塞尔的解释

Husserl Studies 14: 219–237, 1998. © 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 219 Instincts – A Husserlian Account JAMES R. MENSCH St. Francis Xavier University, PO Box 5000, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada According to the standard, accepted view of Husserl, the notion of a Husser- lian account of the instincts appears paradoxical. Is not Husserl the proponent of a philosophy conducted by a “pure” observer? Instincts relate to the body, but the reduction seems to leave us with a disembodied Cartesian ego. Quo- tations are not lacking to support this view. In his “Afterword to Ideas I,” Husserl writes: “When one performs the transcendental-phenomenological reduction, . . . psychological subjectivity loses precisely that which gives it its validity as a reality in the naively experiencible pregiven world; it loses its sense of being a soul in a body in a pregiven spatial temporal nature.”1 As the Cartesian Meditations puts this, the ego that remains, “is not a piece of the world.”2 That it is not is commonly taken as differentiating Existenz philosophy and phenomenology. The dividing line between the two is that between the engaged and the disengaged “non worldly” observer. Even within phenomenology itself, the contrast is drawn between Husserl’s transcendental ego and Merleau-Ponty’s embodied self. Dismissing the “intellectualism” of the disembodied perceiver, Merleau-Ponty asserts: “External perception and the perception of one’s body vary in conjunction because they are two facets of one and the same act. . . . It is literally the same thing to perceive one single marble, and to use two fingers as one single organ.”3 The perception of the marble includes the grasping fingers. How accurate is this view of Husserl? How fully did Husserl himself embrace the presupposition of a disembodied, “pure” phenomenological ob- server? An examination of the Nachlaß, Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts, indicates that from the 1920’s Husserl began to question it.4 He engaged in a series of examinations of how the body functions in knowing. As part of this, he considered the ways our bodily sensations – the kinesthesia – function in our grasp of objects. The role of these sensations in fulfilling our perceptual intentions points back to the bodily origin of these intentions. As such, it points to the bodily instincts themselves as the source of perceptual 220 intentions. The resulting theory of instincts, developed over several hundred pages of manuscripts, stands in sharp contrast to the accepted view of Husserl. At the very least, it raises the question of how deep Husserl’s commitments were to the Cartesian version of phenomenology. More importantly, as I hope to show, it puts in question the traditional subject-object and mind-body di- chotomies. In doing so, it indicates how self-consciousness in a prereflective, bodily sense is built into consciousness. A General Account of the Instincts Two notions enter into the conception of instincts. In the broad sense an in- stinct signifies a natural impulse or urge. The term can also be used to refer to an inborn organized pattern of behavior, one that proceeds more or less auto- matically to reach its goal without the benefit of prior experience or learning. A classic example of this is the nest building of birds. The first appearance of this instinct, if not perfect, is still sufficient to ensure the survival of the young and the continuance of the species. Such “hard-wired” behavior decreases as organisms become more complex. Inborn patterns become increasingly sup- plemented by experience, habit, learning, and, in the case of humans, acquired culture. This does not mean that the instincts disappear. Although submerged, they remain as powerful impulsions from within, as drives urging the organ- ism to actions which serve biological ends. Two examples will suffice to make my meaning clear. In less complex organisms, the sexual drive results in a fixed pattern of behavior – a courtship ritual – leading to mating. In humans, by contrast, its object can assume the most diverse forms as witnessed by what Freud calls the “perversions.” Here, early childhood experience and learned behavior play their part. The same holds for the drive for nourishment. The particular object of this drive, although it may have originally been satisfied by a mother’s milk, is soon culturally determined. As the individual grows, it becomes more complex. Our experiences of various tastes and foods are combined and the results themselves recombined. Speaking phenomenologi- cally, there is a constitutive process here: fulfillments on one level combine to produce intentions whose fulfillment requires a higher level synthesis, a more elaborate preparation of the meal. Husserl draws a number of points from this general account. The first is the all-pervasive character of the striving that originates in the instincts. He writes: “All life is continuous striving, all satisfaction is transitory.”5 This means that “the ego is what it is essentially in a style of original and acquired needs, in a style of desire and satisfaction, passing from desire to enjoyment, from enjoyment to desire.”6 Thus, for Husserl, there are no “value free” “mere sensations or sensible objects.” On the contrary, “nothing can be given that 221 cannot move the feelings (Gemüt).”7 When it does move the feelings, the ego turns to the source and this turning towards is itself a striving. This does not mean that the object must be given for the original striving to occur. The relation is reversed: for Husserl, the striving is what first motivates the process of grasping the object. The grasp follows the striving. Thus, it is not just in the simpler animals that instincts operate without the organism’s having any initial conception of their intended goal. This also occurs in us. The infant placed at the breast is motivated by smell, then by touching the nipple, then by the kinesthesia of sucking and swallowing before the goal of the drive towards nourishment appears.8 As Husserl states the general princi- ple: “Striving is instinctive and instinctively (thus, at first, secretly) ‘directed’ towards what in the ‘future’ will first be disclosed as worldly unities consti- tuting themselves.”9 This acting before the goal is known is not limited to the original expressions of the instincts. It is present throughout our instinctual life.10 Husserl describes this life as a layered one, with fulfillments on one level providing the materials for intentions to the next. He writes, “Developmental stages – on every level new needs appear, needs formally essential for this level. They appear as dark ‘instinctive’ modes of egological valuation (feel- ings) which first reveal themselves in their attainment . . . .”11 Their attainment gives rise to needs whose fulfillment requires the next level of synthesis. The result, then, is an ongoing series of “levels of instincts, of original drives, needs (which at first do not yet know their goals), systematically ordered, pointing beyond themselves to higher levels.”12 Now, throughout this process, the instincts remain the same. What changes is their fulfillments. The instincts continue to “designate the original, essentially universal primary drives, the primal affections that determine all development.”13 With a particular level of fulfillment, “the instinct is not at an end. It takes on new modes.” “I,” Husserl writes, “continue to be the instinctive ego and the process of revealing continues as an act process.”14 Nonobjectifying and Objectifying Instincts There is an obvious relation to constitution implicit in the above. The layered process just described is that of constitution. Broadly speaking, constitution is the production of synthesis.15 Elements from one level are combined into elements of the next. Thus, in regarding a die, views of its different faces are combined together to produce a grasp of the die as that which shows itself through them. The die itself is not any of the aspects that manifest it. It appears as a three dimensional object, while the aspects (as its perspectives) do not show themselves perspectivally.16 We cannot turn them about as we do 222 the die to see their different sides. Now, if we ask why we do engage in this synthetic activity, Husserl’s answer in the Nachlaß is that we are impelled by our instincts. These primal urges supply the motive force, the energy which pushes the process forward. Two types of instincts are involved in this process. To describe the first, we must note that the reduction is the reverse of constitution. As a synthetic process, constitution may be described as the action of founding. It is the ac- tion of connecting phenomena and of the positing belief in the founded unity that appears through these connections. This synthetic process, at least in its initial stages, is a passive one; it is unconsciously performed. By contrast, the reduction which attempts by analysis to uncover the work of constitution is, by definition, a self-conscious effort. It begins with a deliberate suspension of the positing belief in the appearing unity. Performing it, we no longer take the posited as “there” (da), as “available” (vorhanden), and hence as an “actuality” (Wirklichkeit), to which we can return again and again.17 Our attention is, rather, on what founds this belief. What are the experiences and connections that enter into its positing? In Husserl’s words, our effort is “to discover in this reduction an absolute sphere of materials (Stoffe) and noetic forms to whose determinately structured combinations pertains . . . the mar- vellous consciousness of something determinate . . ., which is something over against consciousness itself, something . . . transcendent” to such materials and forms of combination.18 Thus, in our example, the positing belief in the being of the die is motivated by the appearances of its different sides and the perspectival form of combination that links these aspects. Discovering these in the reduction, we move from the founded to the founding. If these aspects owe their own appearing to the connections occurring between even lower level phenomena, the reduction can be exercised again. We can, for example, suspend the positing belief in the individual aspects of the die. We can ex- amine the forms of connection (essentially those of the retentional process), which found an aspect’s presence as occupying a definite moment in our perceptual experience. We can also examine the impressional material that is subject to these retentions. In doing so, we focus on the “purely hyletic,” i.e., on what provides “possible materials (Stoffe) for intentional formations.”19 This practice of the reduction is not an endless process. Proceeding step by step, it reaches its goal, which is that of discovering the “ultimately consti- tuting” level. With this, the question arises of the ultimate “hyle” or material of the process. What is its relation to the instinctual striving which animates the synthetic process? The hyle affects the ego. The ego, in turn responds by striving. As Husserl describes the situation: “Content is non-ego (das Ich- fremde), feeling is already egological. The ‘address’ of the content is not a call to something, but rather a feeling being-there of the ego. . . . The ego 223 is not something for itself and the non-ego something separate from the ego; between them there is no room for a turning towards. Rather the ego and its non-ego are inseparable; the ego is a feeling ego with every content . . . .”20 There is, in fact, a certain identity between the two. It is one where we can say: “What from the side of the hyletic data is called the affection of the ego is from the side of the ego called tending, striving towards.”21 One way of understanding this is in terms of the analogy of the lock and the key. Only if the key fits will the lock turn. For hyletic data to be recognized as contents by the ego – that is, for the data to count as hyle, as material for its syntheses – the data must affect the ego. This being affected is the ego’s striving. It is what awakens it as an ego.22 Thus, the awake ego, its striving, and the affecting contents are all given together. Each by itself is only an abstraction. To continue the analogy, not every key fits the lock. Similarly not every material affects the ego. What we have is a linking of specific material with specific strivings. In Husserl’s words, we have “determined ways of striving that are originally, ‘instinctively’ one with [their] hyletic complement.” There is a “primal association” between the two.23 Husserl calls the instincts that are these original ways of being affected “nonobjectifying instincts.” As we have seen, they are directed to specific types of contents.24 They determine our being affected, our turning towards some contents rather than others – for example, those contents which indicate what can provide us nourishment. In Husserl’s words, instinct, in this instance designates “the interest in the data and fields of sensation – before the objec- tification of sense data,” that is, before there is “a thematically actualizable object.”25 To obtain a thematic object, something more than simply being af- fected must occur. An “objectifying instinct” must arise. When it does, a drive towards synthesis animates the ego’s turning towards the data. The drive seeks to make objective “sense” of the data. Its goal is a grasp of a one in many, a unity which exhibits itself through the shifting fields of sensation. Husserl terms it “the original instinct of objectification.”26 To speak in this context of “affecting contents” is to see them as a “terminus a quo [a starting point] for instinctive intentions. These ultimately fulfill themselves in the constitution of ‘visual things’ (‘Sehdinge’).”27 In other words, things – not contents – are the goal of this type of instinct. The Body’s Role in the Constitutive Process The discussion of non-objectifying and objectifying instincts shows how inti- mate the relation is between instincts and constitution. Constitution requires both data and synthesis. Both are grounded in instinctive processes. Instincts decide which contents can be present as affecting data. They also determine 224 the syntheses which unify these into affecting objects. Given that instincts are bodily processes, the body, as we should expect, plays a determining role in constitution. Thus, its physical make-up determines which contents can affect us. Eyes are required for visual stimulation, ears for being affected by sounds, and so forth. The actual make up of the sensing organ is obviously related to the type of content that can affect it. There is, then, a bodily basis to the “primal association” between sensation and striving. Beyond this, the body plays an essential role in our synthesis of contents into objects. Here, Husserl’s descriptions begin with the fact that our drives are directed towards satisfying our needs, and the “first, most universal” of these are “bodily.” Through the movement of its members, the body is also the means of their satisfaction.28 Because it is, bodily sensations (the kinesthesia) are mixed with the optical in our grasp of the world. Something catches our attention, we turn our head, focus our eyes, move to get a better look. As we do so, we do not just have “optical sensations.” Mixed in with these are the “oculomotor” and “other systems of kinesthesia.” The instinctive drive to see embraces the whole ensemble.29 As Husserl describes the process, “This [optical] datum changes with the passage of the kinesthesia. It does not run alongside the kinesthetic-hyletic sensations, rather both are instinctive, drive processes . . . the running off of the optical and the change of the kinesthetic [data] do not occur alongside each other, but rather proceed in the unity of an intentionality that goes from the optical datum to the kinesthetic and through the kinesthetic leads to the optical, so that every optical [datum] is a terminus ad quem and, at the same time, functions as a terminus a quo.30 The datum, in other words, is both an end and a beginning in the continuous passage from visual to bodily sensations and back again. Both are required in our grasp of objects. The picture here is the opposite of the standard view I began with. There is no “disembodied perceiver” over against which the objective world appears. Rather, as Husserl writes, “To every system of constitutive appearances . . . there pertains a motivating system of kinesthetic processes . . . .”31 These imply the body insofar as “every particular kinesthetic system is associatively one with a part of the body,” be this the hand that grasps an object, the legs that propel us towards something, or the eye that focuses on it.32 The object synthesized is, thus, a combination of both visual and kinesthetic sensations. Insofar as the kinesthetic refer to me, I am in my bodily being part of every synthesis. On an immediate phenomenological level, this holds for all the features synthesized. On this level, the object is myself focusing my eyes and a specific shape appearing. It is myself moving and a specific flow of perspectival appearing. It is not just that external perception and perception of one’s body vary conjointly. Given the “unity of the intentionality” which unites them, we have to say with Merleau-Ponty that the same act embraces 225 both.33 This implies that even when we are apparently exclusively focused on the object, we have a certain prereflective consciousness of ourselves in our bodily being. All this puts into question the traditional subject-object and mind-body dichotomies. Since kinesthesia supply an essential part of its perceptual material, the mind, qua perceiving, implies the body. Similarly, the object implies subjectivity. This follows since the subject, qua embodied, is a constituent part of the object’s appearing sense. To speak in this context of an “objectifying instinct” is to ask why we engage in those bodily activities such as focusing our eyes, moving to get a better look, and so on, that allow us to grasp the object. One answer is that the satisfaction of an instinctual drive results in pleasure. There is then a certain “pleasurable affection” (Lustaffektion) in seeing regarded as instinctual drive. “Here”, Husserl writes, “Aristotle’s [assertion that] ‘all humans naturally have joy (Freude) in sense perception’ gains its truth.”34 The Question of Reason Because the nonobjectifying and objectifying instincts are somatic, there is a ready, biological interpretation of their origins. The nonobjectifying instinct is the link between content and affection (between stimulus and response). Taking it as genetically determined, we can see it as part of the animal’s evolu- tionary inheritance. This inheritance is made up of those features that allowed a species’ members to survive and reproduce themselves. We can, thus, say that the organism registers and reacts to a particular set of stimuli because of their utility in its preservation. The same holds for the objectifying instinct. An organism could not survive if it could not make appropriate “sense” of its environment. It must, then, perform those syntheses that bring its affecting objects to apprehension. It has to grasp what preys upon it as well as its own prey. It must also grasp the aspects of its environment – for example, the sexual displays of potential mates – it needs in order to reproduce. The epistemological implications drawn from this interpretation have of- ten been quite skeptical. For Nietzsche, for example, it implies that “we have senses for only a selection of perceptions – those with which we have to concern ourselves in order to preserve ourselves.”35 Utility, rather than truth, determines what we see. The same holds for our “knowle