The passive genesis of phenomenal reality. A cross- disciplinary approach to the study of perception, between Husserlian phenomenology and Gestalt theory

Summary In the years between 1920 and 1926 Husserl dedicated three university courses to the analysis of the passive structuring of experience, therefore to those syntheses among the contents of perception that are constituted before spontaneity and any categorial operation of the subject. The fundamental idea that emerges from the “Analyses Concerning Passive Synthesis” ( Analyzen zur Passiven Synthesis ) is that of the presence of an internal normativity to the contents of experience which is not actively imposed on the latter by the subject but which shines a priori and in a completely passive way throughout those same contents. The forms found on the level of thought and judgment can already be found – precategorially – on the ground of empirical experience. These therefore need nothing but getting “explicited”, going back genetically from those pre-categorial processes of passive constitution of the perceptive sphere to the higher-order cognitive-categorial operations that are typically found in discursive and scientific thought (categorization, interpretation, production of inferences, predication ecc.). In other words, for Husserl, there is a “logic of experience”, transcendental and pre-reflective, which would act as a starting point for the autonomous structuring of the subject’s cognitive processes and thus, in a broad sense, of his experience of the world. In the present intervention I therefore propose to briefly retrace some of the main theoretical points of these husserlian lectures with the aim of showing, in particular, how the notion of ‘passive genesis’ of experience, as it emerges from those, is essentially compatible with the Gestaltist one of perceptual organization. Similarly to what Husserl claimed, for Gestalt psychologists perception is configured as a mechanism of “dynamic self- distribution” of segmentation processes of the perceptive field that obey precise “factors” or “laws” (Gestalt laws), that are a priori and immanent to the very domain of perceptual experience.