Ying-Chien Yang

McDowell shares with phenomenology the idea that experience is open to the world and that the relation between mind and world is normative. While he claims that conceptual capacities are already passively involved in experience, passive synthesis in Husserl has its own intentional constitution, which originally has a rational and normative character in a primitive sense, yet doesn’t depend on conceptual and linguistic capacities. In my analysis, McDowell’s notion of conceptual capacities enables the formation of experience in two ways: by providing conceptual content, and by building up awareness that is later linked with self-critical reflection. I argue that in Husserl’s phenomenology, experience already has structural content without relying on concepts and that attention already displays a pre-reflective exercise of rationality without relying on self-critical reflection. Husserl’s rationality is not to be linked with conceptual capacities, reflection, or spontaneity. Moreover, Husserl’s notion of experience is broader than McDowell’s. McDowell denies that some second nature could count as conceptualized experience, since it is accomplished without explicit awareness. In contrast, Husserl would admit the rationality of second nature even though it lies beneath attentive awareness at the level of receptivity, because there is a deeper pre-reflective, affective participation of the I in the passive motivation that contributes to the horizonality of experience in an implicit mode. Thus rationality and normativity penetrate more deeply into second nature than McDowell thinks. In comparison to McDowell, Husserl shows how a notion of rationality in a much broader sense is involved in experience.

In der vorliegenden Arbeit befasse ich mich mit der Problematik der Empfindung, bzw. der Hyle, in Husserls Phänomenologie und der entsprechenden Auslegung von Ludwig Landgrebe. Husserl verwendet den Begriff der Empfindung, bzw. der Hyle, sehr weitgehend und als einen Grundbegriff des Bestandteils des Bewusstseins. Trotzdem hat er nie wirklich über die Quelle der Empfindung im transzendentalen phänomenologischen Sinn systematisch aufgeklärt. [...] In diesem Aufsatz wird die Schwierigkeit der Hyle vor allem im Bezug auf die Auslegung Landgrebes behandelt.

In this article, I will elaborate what kind of theory of subjectivity is implied in the practice of mindfulness. This article attempts to explain Husserl’s accounts of the constitution of selfhood (as the person) and of affection in our lifestream of consciousness to develop a more complete view of “who we are” in the practice of mindfulness. The practice of mindfulness provides a path to the well-being of the person’s emotional life. What underlies the practice of mindfulness is a particular image of the human mind, which is not just a brain, but a whole person with a psychic life that includes various types of activity, passivity, and embodied emotion. Moreover, the person’s habituality can still be transformed through mental exercise. If we thoroughly understand the relevant relationships between attention, emotions, and affective feelings in our living experience, we can then further confirm, from the Husserlian phenomenological point of view, the benefits of practicing mindfulness for emotional regulation. Emotion is not only a matter of affective feeling, but is also cognitive and is combined with the function of reason.