Husserl’s Theory of Experience in Genetic Phenomenology: Passivity, Rationality, and Normativity

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.