Digging out the roots of affective fallacy

Resumen

The underestimation of the method of parallelisation implemented by Husserl in his analysis of objectifying intentionality and affective intentionality has triggered endless chains of misunderstandings and misinterpretations on the existence and content of Husserl’s phenomenology of feelings and will, and consequently on the laws of composition of the parallel sphere of objectifying acts (modes of representation and judgement), and on the formal laws derivable from them (formal logic in a larger and reformed sense). After a conceptual disentanglement and terminological clarification of key concepts such as affectivity, sensation, passivity or empathy, and as an illustration and a defence of the method mentioned above, I propose some hypothesis regarding the theoretical and affective roots of this particular rejection by commentators. Two major confusions are thus revealed: one between passivity and affectivity, another between different layers or dimensions of the transcendental aesthetic sphere (passivity as the residue of the exclusion of activity and ownness or primordiality as the residue of the abstractive reduction of intersubjective constitution) with their correlative methodological operations (reduction to the sphere of passivity and reduction to the sphere of the primordial). 329 SEPTIEMBRE 2016 The implementation of the method of parallelisation onto both spheres provides two different concepts of pure nature: “nature” as the residue of limitation, within the first sphere to the pre-objectifying modes of passivity, excluding all modes of affectivity, and their passive axiological correlates; “nature” of the monad as the residue of the limitation to the modes of objectification accessible before intersubjective constitution comes into play. Finally, while digging the roots of this position, what is disclosed represents a more radical ethical dimension of phenomenology than that currently advocated by the tenants of the “ethical turn of phenomenology”.