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Husserl Studies 19: 205–215, 2003.© 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Hyle, Genesis and Noema

LUIS ROMÁN RABANAQUEUniversidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina

1. Introduction

The phenomenological reduction allows us to uncover intentionality as theuniversal correlation between consciousness and world, and it does so by firstdisclosing the correlation between a given act and its object. As is well known,Husserl terms this last relationship in Ideas I as the correlation between noe-sis and noema or, more precisely, between I, noesis and noema. In Cartesianwords, ego – cogito – cogitatum (qua cogitatum). Let me first recall some ofits more prominent features.

From the standpoint of whole-part logic, noesis and noema are momentsof the total act, that is, non-independent or abstract parts. Noesis names themoment of constituting multiplicities, while noema stands for the domainof constituted unities. And if we take into account the manners of temporalgivenness, noesis means flowing, never-identically returning experience, whilenoema stands for identity, for that which returns the same in different possi-ble acts, as well as in their possible modalizations.

A closer examination of the correlation shows that noesis and noema standto one another in a certain relation of parallelism. If we now turn to the ob-ject-side of consciousness, we find there a central core or sense which is thecorrelate of the sense-giving moment of noesis. This core, which in turn com-prises the object itself (the empty X), and its objective determinations, is givenin multifarious manners, for all of which there are corresponding noetic mo-ments. One of these manners concerns the fullness of the sense, its intuitionalcontent, the manner of its original givenness. Its noetic counterpart is not amoment of the act in the sense of an apprehension or meaning-bestowal, buta moment which Husserl characterizes as non-intentional and terms ‘hyle’.Thus noesis at large has two sides: the intentional one, the form, and the non-intentional, the stuff or hyle.

This paper aims, first of all, to recall the main features of hyle in Ideas I,both in its relation to the noema and as critical correction of the concept ofsensation. It deals, secondly, with some conflicts arising from Husserl’s par-allel characterizations of temporal datum, sensation fields, and hyletic back-

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ground. In third place, it outlines two central directions in genetic analysis,which allow the hyle to expand to a more complex notion involving tempo-ral-material syntheses whose flow is governed by kinaesthesis (Genesis I), allof which shows a sedimented history due to the institution of habitualities(Genesis II). Finally, the conclusions advance some topics that should beconsidered in this connection from the standpoint of genetic phenomenology.

2. Sensation in the Logical Investigations

In Ideas I hyle is intended to critically reshape the old view of ‘sensation’ as‘primary content’, which had played a major role in the Logical Investiga-tions. Husserl himself points back to the early work, where he had distin-guished between sensation and intentional object in order to correct Brentano’sview, who conflated both in his idea of a physical phenomenon. For descrip-tive psychology sensation is an immediate, immanent datum of consciousness,over against the object and its objective properties, which are transcendentand are mediately given through the apprehension that sense-data undergo.Husserl claims that in sensation sensing cannot be set apart from what is sensed.The sense datum is therefore not perceived in straightforward experience, andthus is not intentional. Only by performing acts of reflection does sensationbecome an object.

It is worth remembering at this point that Husserl was first led to his ownaccount of intentionality in the context of the analysis of speech acts in the“Psychological Studies On Elementary Logic” (1894). By contrasting theseeing of an arabesque as a mere aesthetical object with the seeing of it as asign or group of signs belonging to a certain language, he can explain thechanges thereby undergone as modifications of consciousness and not of thecontent itself. The intentional structure here disclosed will be called in theLogical Investigations apprehension – content or form – matter schema. Inthis way Husserl criticizes the psychologistic account, after which sensationis a mental response to a bodily given stimulus, whose ‘hidden cause’ lies be-yond consciousness in a ‘world in itself’, which in turn can only be indirectlysurveyed by means of scientific explanation. In the Logical InvestigationsHusserl extends this analysis to perception, thus abandoning further Brentano’sidea of intention as possession of an immanent content, that is, as a pure pas-sive reception of data in the fashion of Locke’s ‘tabula rasa’. This allows himto outline a sharper phenomenological concept of sensation or primary con-tent, as well as to set apart two senses of ‘content’: strictly speaking, sensa-tion is a non-intentional, formless stuff in elementary acts of apprehension,while in a wider sense it refers to anything which may serve as ‘stuff’ ormaterial for higher acts or act-layers. While the second interpretation admitsthat something may function as ‘formless stuff’ in a certain constitution level

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and yet possess a ‘form’ in a lower level, like e.g., the written or spoken sign,which is devoid of any significational sense but already has a perceptual sense,the first one points as it were to a primal institution, prior to which there isproperly speaking no sense at all. In this connection Husserl ponders, in thefirst Investigation, the possibility of a consciousness prior to experience andthus states: “for such a consciousness the sensations mean nothing, they arenot taken as signs for the properties of an object” (Hua XIX/1, p. 80). How-ever, in the same paragraph Husserl asserts that such a consciousness wouldnevertheless sense in the same way we do. This seems to imply that the talkof ‘formless stuff’ has no absolute character and thus material data are notsimply ‘raw’ data: taken in itself, sensation is not object, but a material con-dition for apprehending objects.

Now still within the framework of the Logical Investigations, sensationplays another important role with regard to the acts of knowledge, namely asthe moment by means of which a perceptual apprehension fulfills an emptyintention. Rational positing of a sense is thus motivated by the correspondingsense-data. In this sense the material data build as it were the window throughwhich consciousness reaches outer reality.

3. Hyle in the Ideas I

If we return to our starting point, the Ideas of 1913, we may observe that hylestands there no more purely and simply for sensation, but it accounts now forthe transcendental residuum of sensation. In virtue of the bracketing of thegeneral thesis that underlies the natural attitude, the object may be regardedas pertaining to the phenomenological field. Hyle can be therefore no moreconceived as a kind of ‘window’, but as a moment within the correlation it-self. It’s under this condition that Husserl then draws a parallelism betweenhyletic and noematic adumbrations, and extends to the noema the notion of‘cognitive essence’, that is, the unity of matter, quality (thesis) and sensiblefullness. This is now called ‘sense in the manner of its fullness’ (“Sinn imModus seiner Fülle,” Hua III/1, pp. 304, 305). Here an ambiguity arises, forHusserl speaks of adumbration in both sides of the correlation. There seemsto be a duplication of characters, reinforced moreover by the talk of parallel-ism. But it needs to be stressed that hyletic and noematic adumbrations namedifferent moments of the total act: through that which is immediately given ina certain fullness as a constant flow of manifolds, that is, through the hyle,the identical aspects of the identical object are presented. William McKennahas developed an interesting set of examples which helps to clarify whatHusserl has in mind here.1 The deformations e.g., of the side walls of a corri-dor while I’m walking through it are momentary, hyletic appearances whichsharply contrast with the right-sided walls of the identical object ‘corridor’.

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Hyletic and noematic adumbrations have in common their being manifolds:the former are multiplicities over against the unitary objective properties thatare displayed through them; the latter are multiplicities over against the uni-tary, identical object itself.

But we have already indicated that hyle is not merely a respelling of theold concept of sense data. Although it embraces in principle all non-intentionalconstituents of consciousness, Husserl nevertheless restricts his analysis inIdeas I to the level of the ‘sensuous’ hyle, the ‘stuff’ for elementary appre-hensions of individual objects. For this reason he distinguishes three groupsof hyletic Erlebnisse: (a) ‘sensuous’ contents such as color-, taste-, or sound-data, which function as ‘representative contents’; (b) sensuous sensations likepleasure, pain, or tickling, which are not representative; (c) sensuous momentsfrom the sphere of ‘drives’ (Hua III/1, p. 192). They all agree in that they arenot intentional, and they all share a common function, namely, “to make syn-thetic unity possible” (Hua III/1, p. 197).2

4. Problems Concerning Hyle

In the years between the publication of the Logical Investigations (1901) andIdeas I (1913), Husserl has worked out the problem of sensation in at leastthree contexts that, on the one hand, allow an expansion of the meaning ofhyle but, on the other hand, conflict with the functional notion of a non-in-tentional material for noetic operations.

1. Sensation plays a crucial role in the first phenomenological exposition oftime-consciousness (1904/1905). The favourite example is a violin note thatendures. Husserl proceeds to disconnect all further apprehension strata ex-cept that which constitutes the note as a pure sense-datum. There we findonly a temporal extension abstracted both from spatial and material deter-minations. This datum is now regarded as constituted by the temporal flowof experience through a temporal apprehension which runs parallel to ma-terial objectivation. Sensation as appearance in the inner time flow presentsitself under a formal constitution in coexistence and succession, and thenceis not analysed in a functional manner as stuff but rather described in termsof impression, as the core of the now-phase within inner time conscious-ness.

2. In a second trend of thought (in Ding und Raum of 1907), Husserl advancesan understanding of sensation that goes beyond its contrast to sense-givingoperations. He devotes attention to the sensuous organization of data in sen-sation fields. Flowing data are given in sense-fields which make up con-tinuous contexts provided with a ‘pre’-empirical ‘extension’ (Hua XVI, p.83). This allows him furthermore to single out another type of ‘sensation’,

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one which is neither representative nor a plain sensuous feeling like itch-ing, but makes the ego aware of its own Bodily motions. Kinaesthesis playsan important role here because it accounts for the shaping of material sen-sation as adumbration of a noematic aspect of the thing. The kinaestheticcourse ‘motivates’ the flow of hyletic contents, and thus prescribes arrange-ment patterns for possible adumbrations.

3. Finally, in a third direction closely related to the second, Husserl raises theproblem of the background consciousness. Whereas thematic grasping inouter perception directs the ego’s attentive glimpse to its goal, its thema,i.e., to the object or object-arrangement, there is at once a marginal aware-ness of the surroundings. This margin is normally made up of objects, whichare already constituted and only remain there as potential background, thatis, they can be become thematic by a change in focus (Hua III/1, p. 189).But in an Addition to Ideas I Husserl also considers carefully the possibil-ity of their being not yet constituted in act-intentionality (cf. Hua III/2, p.605). In the first section of Ideas II Husserl discloses the constitutive lay-ers that make up the thing (Ding) as object of sensible experience, turningagain to the example of a violin note (Hua IV, p. 22). The note that comese.g., from the next room has a materiality which includes causal relationsto other things (such as the instrument that produces the sound), all com-prised in the layer of the res materialis (cf. Hua III/1, p. 348; Hua XVI, p.343). Abstracting from this layer we find the note still coming from some-where and having certain qualities, thus displaying a spatial dimension orres extensa (cf. Hua III/1, p. 348; Hua XVI, pp. 341, 342). And abstractingagain from extension we finally meet a pure enduring sound, which is de-void of any further apprehension. This case must be distinguished from thatof a sound that has been previously objectivated (erfasst), but now remainsin the margin (aufgefasst). While the latter stresses the continuity betweenfocal (attentive) and potential objectivation, the first refers to a pre-giveness(Vorgegebenheit) prior to objectivation (Hua IV, p. 23), but nonethelessunified in inner time (Hua IV, p. 24). It seems clear that, in order to be ableto fit such facts, hyle cannot be just a blind bundle of raw data, for this wouldmake it unintelligible even as pre-giveness, but it must be structured in somedefinite way. This leads, consequently, to inquire into the intrinsic organi-zation that hyletic fields thus display.

These strategies assign the hyle a different role than its function as formlessstuff or datum. As Husserl himself will put it later, the structures of conscious-ness are studied in the Ideas on a level where the temporal syntheses have beenbracketed out (cf. Hua XVII, p. 292). If we try to grasp the ultimate constitu-tion of the act-flow, hyle appears as an ordered, constituted moment, in openopposition to the doctrine developed in the Ideas. How is this to be explained?

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My claim is that the ‘genetic turn’, which Husserl endeavours after circa 1917,may provide a clue for solving this problem, even though it is far from beingclear what final picture might emerge from this, and what consequences areto be drawn in order to integrate this development to the whole project of tran-scendental phenomenology.

5. Hyle and Genetic Analysis

In a footnote to the text of the Lectures On Internal Time Consciousness (HuaX, p. 7), Husserl casts a doubt as to whether every constitution should followthe schema apprehension – content. Soon he realizes that temporality under-stood as meaning-bestowal does in fact lead to an infinite regress. As late as1909 he had already fixed his discovery of the two intentionalities comprisedin retention, i.e., one constituting the temporal determinations of Erlebnisse,and the other one constituting the flow itself. Hyle is now the pure actualitymoment, the ‘primal impression’ understood as the limit between retentionaland protentional horizons. Primal impression, retention and protention nametogether the phase-structure of the ultimate flow, and they must not be confusedwith the temporal determinations of the immanent unities, i.e., Erlebnisse. Inthe following years, Husserl will work out the threefold stratification of time-consciousness that emerges from here: (a) the absolute stream, timeless in it-self, (b) the time of Erlebnisse as immanent unities, (c) the objective time ofthe transcendent correlates. It is clear that here, over against act-intentional-ity, a new sort of intentional operation is set to play, a passive one which is atwork prior to active grasping. The hyletic datum undergoes a passive tempo-ral constitution of coexistence and succession within the flow, but it also re-ceives a passive material shaping as a field structured in fore- and background.The kind of analysis that achieves these insights is genetic analysis. However,whereas it is plain that genetic analysis implies for phenomenological inves-tigation a widening in scope and, at the same time, a change in focus, it isdifficult to bring to unity the variety of analyses carried out by Husserl underthat title. I would like now to outline in a brief manner two important dimen-sions3 in the talk of ‘genesis’:

1. On the one hand, ‘genesis’ is the regressive inquiring for the continuousorigin of actual experience. For the sake of simplicity, I will call this Gen-esis I;

2. On the other hand, ‘genesis’ is the regressive inquiring for what is impliedin the horizons of actual experience. This I will call Genesis II.

Both dimensions call in question the genesis of apperceptions in temporality:1. Genesis I takes its point of departure in original givenness and then fol-

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lows the transversal intentionality back to its sources. It proceeds intuitively,as Husserl once remarked.4

At this level we finally find what Husserl in his later years used to call the‘living present’.5 Various sometimes diverging analyses on the hyle concurhere: (1) Husserl deepens his exploration of the threefold time-constitutinghorizon, and seeks therein a primal sense of the passive hyle prior to anyobjectivation, which is bound to kinaestheses and instincts. In the manuscriptshe often speaks, with regard to this, of ‘primal hyle’ (Urhyle), and also of‘primal kinaesthesis’ (Urkinästhese). The analysis follows the structureemptyness – fullness; Husserl indicates that the living present has two sides:one is a pure not-flowing form (time), the other is a flowing fulfilled form(erfüllte Form) (hyle) (Ms. C 3 III, Tr. 36);6 (2) At the same time he radicalizesthe correlation by centering on the ego, and opposing the egological contentto that which is alien to the ego (or ego-alien) (Ichfremdes). This enables himto introduce the problem of affection, and to study the interplay between theaffective character of hyle and the ego’s turning towards that which affectivelycomes to the fore from the passive background. Husserl speaks in this con-text of pull or tension (Zug), of affective force (affektive Kraft), of attraction(Anziehung) and repulsion (Abstoss), and relates them eventually back to in-stinctive drives (Triebe).

By means of Genesis I, and aware of the fact that hyle is constituted in amanifold of strata (cf. Ms. C 10, Tr. 1; 7), Husserl isolates therein a layer of‘natural hyle’ pertaining to the surrounding world of the individual monad (tothe sphere of my ownness, in terms of the Cartesian Meditations). This layeris constituted upon a deeper stratum of ‘sensation-hyle’ (Empfindungshyle),which in turn is: “. . .the phenomenological residuum of the genuine percep-tible sides of worldly real things etc., that is, the sensation-hyle, the primalhyle in its proper temporalization. . .” (Ms. C 6, Tr. 5). In addition to this,Husserl understands here that the relation between both levels of hyle is basedupon the apprehension – content – schema. Nevertheless, the whole talk ofhyle in this manuscript faces an ambiguity, for, on the one hand, sensation-hyle as the moment of actual presence is the genetic elucidation of the sensu-ous hyle of the Ideas I but, on the other hand, natural hyle seems to stand fora central core of the perceptual field. If this be so, then natural hyle conflateswith what the static analysis has disclosed as the momentary noema (as op-posed to the synthetically unified sense which emerges out of the harmoni-ous concordance of momentary noemata).

2. Genesis II in turn begins by taking the world and the ego as already con-stituted wholes in full-fledged experience, in order to trace back their inten-tional ‘history’. This kind of genetic analysis should explicate for both egoand world their implicated horizons. It proceeds in a somewhat constructivemanner, although Husserl remarks that its constructions are not arbitrary ones.7

A genetic analysis of this type may be found, for example, in the Fourth Car-

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tesian Meditation, where Husserl distinguishes the ego as an empty act-polefrom the ego as a substrate of habitualities. Whereas the former is correlatedwith the – equally empty – object = X, to the latter, taken as the precipitation-pole for habitualities, correspond the sedimented senses. The investigationcomes back as it were to the primal instituting (Urstiftung) of the radicalizedcorrelation ego–ego–alien.

Moreover the disclosure of the transcendental, stratified ‘figures’ in thehistory of both the ego and the ego-alien points back to a further question,namely, that of the genesis of the primal institution and of the ego, the prob-lem of the ‘beginning’ (Anfang).8 Although some of the features that Husserltries to single out here overlap to some extent with those we may find inGenesis I, some of those pertaining to hyle take a peculiar direction. Husserlspeaks of a ‘first hyle’ which is bound to hereditary mass (Hua XV, p. 604).One might think here of a first objectivation constituted by a ‘transcendentalchild’: a progressive institution of a world endowed with things and objec-tive properties of things, coming out of a yet undifferentiatied ‘hyle’. In theinitial stages of this ‘transcendental development’, the world is still not theworld, but an “ego-alien, hyletic quasi-world”, that possesses a ‘pre’-being(‘Vor’-sein) (cf. Ms. C 16 V, Tr. 15). In another related manuscript Husserlnames it an “undifferentiated totality,” where the correlative ego-side is de-scribed as “pure” kinaesthesis in the way of an “undifferentiated being-di-rected-towards the undifferentiated hyle” (Ms. C 11 IV, Tr. 10). This wholeproblem, like in the case of Genesis I, leads back to instinctive life and in-stinctive intentionality. In Ms. C 13 I (1934) Husserl sketches an interpreta-tion of the “infantile development” “in the beginning” as a process ruled byinstincts, which in turn shows the interplay between the empty horizon ofdrives and its fulfillment in satisfaction, e.g., of hunger (cf. C 13 I, Tr. 12).This resembles, of course, the early talk of hyle as fullness, but now the latteris seen at play at the level of the ultimate underground of consciousness (atleast within the primordial sphere), prior to the constitution of a world in thesense proper. This opens up for the hyle not only the question of its ‘develop-ment’, but it also announces the problems concerning generativity, with whichwe cannot deal here.

6. Conclusions

The preceding exposition claims only to be an adumbration of the hyleticdimension of consciousness after Husserl. Nevertheless, I think the featuresoutlined above permit us to draw some preliminary conclusions about the hyleand about its relation to the noematic side of consciousness.

The early account of sensation in terms of formless stuff seems still to de-pend upon the psychologistic prejudice of the ‘thing in itself’, the latter be-

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ing the cause (or, for Brentano, the sign) of a mere ‘subjective’, immanentobject whose ‘content’ is supplied by the corresponding stimuli. Husserl stepsbeyond this in the Logical Investigations when he frees sensation from physi-ological presuppositions about stimuli and their causes, yet its status as ‘non-intentional’ content remains there largely unclear.

Ideas I is able to coin a more distinct concept by means of a turning to-wards the reduced sensation, the hyle, which is now functionally interpretedwith the aid of the schema of matter and form. Yet the general validity of thischaracterization is soon called in question by the parallel developments ontemporal constitution, hyletic fields and background consciousness. They showthat hyle is not only constituted by reflection, but that in living experienceitself it is already constituted as temporal-material unity in the flow. This inturn is not supposed to amount to a withdrawal of the schema apprehension –content, but it rather allows to determine its locus in the whole of intentional-ity. As the Lectures on Time would put it, not every intentional reference mustfollow the schema; the schema itself, however, holds good for those types ofexperience which involve active grasping, and for which ‘formless’ means‘devoid of active organization’, as Husserl repeatedly claims (cf. for exam-ple Hua XVII, p. 292). Hyle is in that sense a relative concept.

The task of uncovering the stratified hyle within the living present (Gen-esis I), and the task of disclosing the implied, sedimented horizons of thisexperience (Genesis II), are achievements of the genetic analysis. Althoughthese investigations may significantly vary in their scope and extent, it is clearthat Husserl is faced now with a more complex concept of hyle. In short, ‘hyle’:(1) accounts for the formal constitution in time of material data (impressions),thus correcting the early view of a ‘blind’ stuff; (2) provides a clarification ofthe affective structure of the living present, which helps in turn to throw lightupon some of the conflicting distinctions established by static phenomenol-ogy. For the final section of this paper I would like to sketch just two of thesehints.

1. We see that the early talk of formless stuff is now integrated into a morecomprehensive whole, that of transcendental genesis. From this point ofview, the results attained by static phenomenology can be regarded no moreas the immediate outcome of reduction, as it might appear from the readingof Ideas I, but as a mediate disclosing of an abstract stratum or, better, anabstract structure of strata. This in turn is made possible by a series of re-ductions that clear up for reflection the field of passive constitution in ad-dition and in contrast to act intentionality. Hyle is not intentional if ‘inten-tional’ is meant in the narrow sense of active grasping of objectivities, buthyle is intentional if intentionality – understood at large – encompasses theconstitution in internal time as well. It is also intentional in that the quasi-spatial structure of hyletic fields can now be explained in terms of passive

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associative syntheses of data. In this way one may also take up again thequestion of the pre-constituted perceptual background, which needs not tobe made up of things, but as object-margin is always impressionally pre-constituted.

2. Finally, there is a last topic I’d like to mention. The kind of reduction thatstatic phenomenology performs in order to single out the sensuous hyleticlayer involves a bracketing of the own body (Eigenleib). The temporal con-stitution of the sense datum, e.g., the violin note, equally abstracts fromcorporeity, although it is in all cases presupposed, e.g., for explaining spa-tial orientation. But the transit from static to genetic analysis has providedus as it were with new elements that push towards an examination of theBody. We have spoken above of kinaesthesis and, from the standpoint ofGenesis I, also of sensuous affections and feelings as pertaining to thehyletic sphere. Kinaestheses are closely related to the ego’s movement inand through the body, and they are at the same time a condition of possibil-ity for the material hyletic flow to be constituted as unity. The synthesis ofcoincidence of the momentary states in sensation-hyle that blends theminto the unity of a (also momentary) hyletic adumbration, is due to thekinaesthetical ‘I can’-system in the way of motivation. Kinaestheses thusmotivate the sequence of material appearings, connect them with one an-other and open up a practical horizon of anticipation for possible other ap-pearances.

Notes

1. Cf. William McKenna, “The Problem of Sense Data in Husserl’s Theory of Perception”,in: Lester Embree (Ed.), Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch (Washington: Center forAdvanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1983), pp. 223–239; see specially pp. 232–233. See also his Husserl’s ‘Introductions to Phenomenology’(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), pp. 53, 54.

2. They do so in different ways, for strictly speaking, only the first group directly functionsas representative content in the sense here discussed. Neither tickling nor hunger exhibitthemselves any objective property of a given something.

3. The following distinction is drawn from the second book of the Ideas, where Husserldistinguishes between originary and secondary passivity (Hua IV, p. 12). Originarypassivity is related to primal institution (Urstiftung), while secondary passive synthe-ses refer to subsequent institution (Nachstiftung), cf. Ms. D 16, Tr. 5. This can also beconnected with the contrast: background (Hintergrund) – underground (Untergrund).About the latter cf. Ms. C 3 III, Tr. 28. Husserl speaks there about a preliminary con-sciousness (Vorbewusstsein) “in the fashion of an ultimate hyletic underground.”

4. Cf. Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,1976), p. 24 [XIII, conversation with Fink on August 24th, 1931].

5. “Die konkrete strömende Gegenwart reduziere ich systematisch durch einen ‘Abbau’. Ichreduziere auf die urimpressionale immanente Sachen-Gegenwart, auf das ‘Ichfremde’,

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nämlich die immanente Hyle (Empfindungssphäre)” [“I systematically reduce the con-crete streaming present by means of an ‘unbuilding’. I reduce to the primal-impressionalimmanent thing-present, to that, what is ego-alien, namely, to the immanent hyle (sphereof sensation)”] (Ms. C 6, Tr. 3).

6. I wish to thank Professor Rudolf Bernet, Director of the Husserl-Archives in Louvain,for permission to quote from Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts. My gratitude also ex-tends to Dr. Dieter Lohmar for his kind assistance at the Husserl Archive in Köln.

7. Cf. D. Cairns, op. cit., p. 25.8. “In the genetic retrospective inquiry we construct as beginning the still worldless pre-

field and pre-ego. . .” [“In der genetischen Rückfrage konstruieren wir als Anfang dasnoch weltlose Vorfeld und Vor-Ich. . .”] (Ms. C 16 V, Tr. 18 in finem).

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