Natalie Depraz

Attention is a crucial issue of our time. The historian of society and culture tells us that from its beginnings humanity has been confronted with the changing nature of its ability to pay attention. In this contribution I will show how in history philosophers have paid little attention to attention as a systematic and thorough theme of investigation and when they did so, they either identified it with control and effort, or with a form of passive opening of the mind. By contrast, phenomenology opens the way for a renewed investigation of attention: while working out and questioning the metaphysical binary distinction between activity and passivity and autonomizing it from both perception and reflection, it provides a crucial basis for opening attention as vigilance, that is, as a receptive welcome to whatever is to come. Attention as vigilance appears then clearly as a transversal issue situated at the heart of the problems of our contemporary digital hyper-connected societies and policies.

This chapter seeks to place itself in the lineage of the Husserlian transcendental gesture, which operates the epoché of pregiven positive contents, and to reveal the subjectivation inherent in objectivation. Now, such a becoming aware was taken up again by the recent discipline of microphenomenology, which questions anew what is called subjectivity by placing once more the subject at the core of the living experience, but more acutely this time, of his singular hic et nunc real life, and by proposing a rigorous fine-tuned description of its specific lived experiences.What does it borrow from Husserlian phenomenology, how it establishes its difference, what does the prefix “micro” mean? This is the first step of the presentation. On this basis I will come back to some aspects of the complex situation of phenomenology as a science describing the structures of lived experience in its relationship to the psychologies of introspection (Titchener’s and Külpe’s), and particularly the example of attention, which is situated at their crossroads. This will enable me to testify to the intimate bond between phenomenology and psychology. In a third stage, I will return to the project of microphenomenology, in relation to Varela’s research program on the naturalization of phenomenology.

In this contribution I would like to make a room for another unconscious, which I name the “heart unconscious”. To me it appears as a remarkable possible thread in order to bridge, more, to weave together two already well-known threads; that is, broadly speaking, the physical and the subjective, which first appear ontologically irreducible. Why? Well, one initial argument in favour is that the heart-unconscious allows a pre-conscious continuity of our experiential dynamics because of its very twofold structure, organic (the heart-muscle) and lived (heart-affectivity). In order to reveal the specificity of such an experiential pre-conscious heart-unconscious, I will put to work a very simple and daily experience; namely, the experience of surprise. Why surprise? My idea is that surprise is a remarkable marker of heart-unconscious, insofar as, in a similar structural way, it also appears as a twofold objective-subjective pre-conscious, easily conscious becoming occurrence, manifesting as a physiological-cardiac startle as well as a lived perplexity.

The phenomenology of trauma is a historical, epistemological, and methodic inquiry that wishes to test the validity of an already settled dynamic model of surprise as shock-rupture based on its correlated inner structures of attention and emotion. Thanks to an integrative approach, crossing phenomenological subjective experiences and empirical data, we hope to renew the understanding of the blank lived experience of trauma and the passive preconscious dynamics of traumatism, as well as to generate possible therapeutic effects.

By crossing the interpretation of cardiovascular recordings with the collection of emotional experience, instead of seeking correlative brain oscillations of perceptual illusions, one overcomes the difference in scale that hampered Varela’s method of mutual constraints. Cardiophenomenology provides a dynamic model of surprise associating variations in physiological indices to a Husserlian analysis of lived phases. An experiment with depressive patients undergoing an emotional task combined with the interview of explicitation seems to validate a hypothesis of hyporesponsiveness of depression in response to surprise.

In this contribution, I will focus on Chogyam Trungpa's presentation of the basic practice of samatha-vipassana sitting meditation, assuming that his description is almost scientifically meticulous, similarly to Husserl's phenomenological descriptions, and allows the latter to be endowed with concrete richness and practical operability. Meditation is an activity that develops attentional qualities which are extremely accurate, i.e. both very well-defined and remarkably embodied. I will first detail the different forms of attention inherent to meditation, then show how they surprisingly echo some of the gestures specific to the phenomenological Husserlian reduction. In other words, I will adopt a circular method of random comings and goings between the two, in order to gradually create, in the reader's mind, echoes and resonances between practices that reveal experiential relationships between them.

What is the relationship between the transcendental and the empirical? Thanks to quite a peculiar phenomenon, surprise, I will show how it is possible to shed a new light on the relationship of transcendental philosophy to the empirical. In order to do so, the Kantian anthropological alterity-operator of insociable sociability will be my lever. My leading questions being: under which conditions the empirical as in-sociable for philosophy may be socialized? What is the benefit for the transcendental? How surprise as a phenomenon that is exemplarily un-integrable by transcendental philosophy may play a part in it?

This volume offers perspectives on the theme of surprise crossing philosophical, phenomenological, scientific, psycho-physiology, psychiatric, and linguistic boundaries. The main question it examines is whether surprise is an emotion. It uses two main theoretical frameworks to do so: psychology, in which surprise is commonly considered a primary emotion, and philosophy, in which surprise is related to passions as opposed to reason. The book explores whether these views on surprise are satisfying or sufficient. It looks at the extent to which surprise is also a cognitive phenomenon and primitively embedded in language, and the way in which surprise is connected to personhood, the interpersonal, and moral emotions. Many philosophers of different traditions, a number of experimental studies conducted over the last decades, recent works in linguistics, and ancestral wisdom testimonies refer to surprise as a crucial experience of both rupture and openness in bodily and inner life. However, surprise is a theme that has not been dealt with directly and systematically in philosophy, in the sciences, in linguistics, or in spiritual traditions. This volume accomplishes just that.

The present paper questions the taken-for-granted identity between surprise and emotion, according to its common meaning in psychology. I therefore hypothetize that the introduction of the concept of valence offers a crucial contribution in order to dismantle the above mentioned identity, thus paving the way for a more fruitful understanding of surprise, namely including cognition, bodily experience, time and language.Such a discussion about the emotional valence-character of surprise therefore requires to open up the fitting epistemological background for it. Instead of a mere body-brain interaction I will suggest the necessity of a more encompassing setting, namely: body-heart-brain, descriptible with the double-face rhythm of surprise, both lived emotional and cardio-vascular: hence the hypothesis of cardiophenomenology as an integrated epistemology including heart into the body-brain circulation: far more than the mere one-sided third person neurological level, the heart both in its physiological and in its lived affective aspects thus represents a unique possibility of intertwinning first person lived affections and third person organic pre-conscious sensations.The hypothesis of cardiophenomenology unfolds the general framework of the inquiry into the dynamics of surprise as including an emotional component while not being an emotion as such. In the end surprise will be identified as an encompassing circular phenomenon.

Cardiophenomenology aims at refining the neuro-phenomenological approach created by F. Varela as a new paradigm, jointly based on Husserl’s a priori dynamics of the living present and an experiment on anticipatory time-dynamics of visual motor perception. In order to do so, we will situate the paradigm of neurophenomenology at the cardio-vascular level, focusing on the emotional dynamics of lived experience and thus refining the dialogue, more precisely, the generative mutual constraints between first- and third-person analysis. In this article we present the theoretical hypothesis of cardiophenomenology, which places the bodily-emotional heartsystem at its core, as an intrinsic part of the cognitive system. The latter therefore needs to be enlarged in order to include an enactive embodied cardiac-affective dimension. Here we present five main arguments for the necessary inclusion of the bodily-emotional heartsystem in the cognitive system: first, two pragmatic operational arguments, then three theoretical ones. A direct methodological-pragmatic consequence is the actual operativity of the generative mutual constraints based on an experiential -experimental continuity of the embodied cardiac-affective fold inherent in the subject.

To understand the dynamics of the verbalization of surprise, I will start with the philosophical theoretical place that is, in my opinion, the most remarkable in terms of the descriptive phenomenology of surprise, namely, its approach by Paul Ricœur in Freedom and Nature in terms of what he calls “emotion-surprise.” This theoretical position will lead me to retrace, in a second step, the archeology of what Ricoeur calls the “circular phenomenon” or the “circular process” of surprise, which includes body language in a burst of "shaking" and the language of cognitive as well as aesthetic "shock". There is an a priori antinomy here that is based on a post-Cartesian duality of the body and the mind, but it is circularized by Ricoeur. On the basis of this dual model of surprise, I will retrace its genealogy in a number of authors and will analyze some first-person descriptions that come from “microphenomenological interviews” [ entretiens d’explicitation ].