METHOD

Philosophical reflection regarding affectivity is concerned with lived experience in order to understand its existential ("existentiels") features. These can be the subject of both descriptive and genetic anthropology, indeed what is lived affectively can be seen only afterwards in its effects upon behavior in the world. Thus, eidetic analysis of the data regarding existence points back to a structural analysis ("Die existentiale Analyse") of ontological foundations.

Hermeneutic investigation can make evident this capacity of being to be unveiling by directing attention to affectivity. As the originary pathetic sense or feeling of the logos, affectivity manifests existence as receiving the "gift" of Being: as "passivity receiving itself".

Phenomenology aims to give an account of existence in this radical manifestation. In order to capture the structure of the phenomenon it attempts to understand the constitution of the ex-isting being, that is, the concrete foundation of its transcendence or emergence as being-in-the-world, precisely as it exists. Thus, affectivity, along with perception, imagination or even categorial experience, are apt objects of eidetic analysis.

Comparison with perception can illuminate this. As a fundamental dimension of existence, perception is not manifest of itself but only in the concrete acts by which we perceive something. Hence, we must employ phenomenological reduction in order to analyze acts of perception and uncover their original conditions of possibility.

In the same way, affectivity is a fundamental aspect of existing being, but it has its effect only in the concrete, lived state of being. Thematic analysis can separate out the specific existential modalities in one's integrated behavior pattern. This shows that, as lived in the body, perception is always linked with affects and vice versa; the same is true of imagination which situates perception. Such lived experience of qualities and affective states is indispensable for access to the conditions of their constitution and hence to the "sense" or eidos of affectivity.

The conditions for a thematization of affective experience as properly immanent match its expression in language. Phenomenologically, the art of reflecting is always already present in the meaning which is thematized. Reciprocally, every spoken word always already exists in the innermost reaches of affect: there is always an unsaid dimension in what is said just as there is an invisible in the visible. Signification or meaning reflects this pre-understanding of lived experience.

Here, phenomenology faces a paradox. As a method of constitution, it employs intentional consciousness as meaning-giving and depends upon the constitution of transcendental knowledge. But it does not thematize ordinary sense data⁽⁸⁵⁾ for here its aim of objective truth encounters the more originary element of receptivity essential to sense meaning.

This is precisely what Michel Henry noted when, for affectivity, he turned to the originary process of ectatic donation (or reception) presupposed by intentional consciousness: "pain teaches me about pain". Perception does not present it to me as a being to be seen; rather, the painful impression is the very presention of the pain. (We do not follow this author in every respect, for we consider otherness and hence the originality of the encounter to be decisive, rather than merely a founding moment of radical self-affection or subjectivity. Nevertheless, we acknowledge the phenomenological impact of the sense of life.)⁽⁸⁶⁾

BODY, SPACE AND TIME

Fundamentally, the structure of temporality, as the relational and "ecstatic", is revealed through affectivity, while spatializing temporality unfolds its different dimensions of affectivity: one's body is the foundation of both dimensions. Merleau-Ponty transposes Husserl's (Ideen II) analysis of the body--Leib (in contrast to Korper) as "flesh" and as support of sensations--abandoning the intentionality of consciousness in favor of the transcendence of being in the world. He does this in order to appreciate the reversible character of one's body as both immanence-in and transcendence-of-the-world. This means that sense organs have reversibility such that, for example, the finger while touching is itself touched.⁽⁸⁷⁾ This duality of lived activity-passivity echoes the gestaltist scheme of a figure upon a background whose poles condition each other. Such reflective configurations of one's body apply, not only to the five senses in relation to one another, but to every lived signification, whether motor, gesture, or expressive. In this manner the body is reciprocally both self-constituting in receiving itself from an originary passivity, and at the same time an exteriorizing presence to itself.

Such feeling-awareness is a modality of temporality. As an interiorization of oneself, in the "living present" an existing being includes at the same time: (1) awareness of the perceived object, which is temporalized in successive phases according to past memories and the pretensions of what is yet to come, each surmounting the other in the longitudinal flow of objective time, and (2) the longitudinal temporal flux or distensio in tension towards the past and towards the future.⁽⁸⁸⁾ As an exteriorization of oneself, the present is realized concretely in producing affects; for being transcends itself towards things which show themselves as favorable or threatening, hence perception is immediately affective or feeling-aware.

The manifestation of the self (Selbsterscheinung) as the presence to itself of its own body depends upon a double temporal manifestation or twin distancing both from past and future and from the lived present. It is in the lived present as a "passive synthesis of a relation of the self to itself" that ipseity or selfhood is identified. In this sense, what affects and what is affected are one in the flow of time, which "is nothing other than the transition from one present to another."⁽⁸⁹⁾ Affectivity manifests the fact that existence presents itself to itself according to this double horizon, retentional and protentional.

Even the past retains the affective coloration of a lost past, whether an originary paradise of desire or the anguish of loss. This is paradoxical, because I am what I have been, but in such a way that the present which I am is always "just past". In the same way, the protention of the present makes the future always to be a promise of what existence has not succeeded in being: it is the totality of my possibilities to come, but it exists in the desire and in the anguish of the project-to-be. Most fundamentally, it is in terms of temporal retention, of "life-death", that the existing being experiences the polarized and reversible affect of anguish and desire.

Phenomenology can uncover the affective manifestations of the conditions of temporalization and spatialization which constitute the "act of existing" of one's body. Affectivity reveals the structure of temporality both as an "ex-static" relational dimension or self-constituting openness of being-in-the-world, and as opening perpendicularly to its own flow or spatializing depth. Hence there is a double reference to presence to the world: the affective dimension crosses, so to speak, the relational modality of time and of lived space, and inscribes itself structurally at the intersection of lived time and space.

AFFECTIVITY AND OTHERNESS

What is experienced in the retentional and protentional distentio from birth until death cuts across what is experienced in the intentio which opens existing being to the threat or welcome of the world in every encounter. At the intersection of lived time and space the affective tenor (quale) of life is experienced. This renders present the reversibility of the passive synthesis in tearing apart the self where the intensity of feeling or "difference" is not the cause of the affect, but the affect itself.

One's body unfolds the relational difference of lived time. On the one hand, that difference is the longitudinal dimension of the existential flux which opens itself to past and future by a circular interplay of retention and protention. This "distention" is sense awareness as the reversible relation of feeling, that is, of action and passion, which is the generalized background of life. But, on the other hand, that longitudinal dimension can be lived properly as mine only on the condition of the "intention" which gives the present its intensity. Only the encounter of an actual being can give rise to the emotional event by which an existing being transcends itself in the pro-ject of ex-isting as being-in-the-world. The concrete concept of encounter implies that the escaping of the present from itself--one's proper body--is lived in interaction with the world of things and of others. Through this interrelational experience the affective experience of feeling--which is awareness as ex-static passivity--experiences itself totally and at all levels.

Thus, affective qualities are perceptions precisely as susceptible of degrees inasmuch as they are constituted according to space and time. They belong to the data of sensation and are themselves constituted most primitively in originary time consciousness.⁽⁹⁰⁾ Things present themselves in their perceptible qualities and form the texture of the perceptible universe. Affection depends, to be sure, upon their concrete qualitative impact, but reciprocally the perceived qualities depend upon the degree of intensity of the experienced affect. This intensive magnitude gives sense awareness its dimension of feeling. Hence perception is affective only in the active mode of present passivity which is reflected properly by the body.

Consider Proust's example of the biscuit called "little Madelaine". The sense qualities which are present manifest a lived "original difference" to which the body resonates: thus the flavor and smell extend one's existence into the past and the forgotten places of childhood (all of Combray in a cup of tea).⁽⁹¹⁾ The perceptible aura of a lost past has impact upon the body. What is of concern here is not the fact of the quality, but its intensity, for this challenges my lived time by acting on my receptivity as a repetition of the past or an anticipation of a future. For example, hearing the little phrase of Vinteuil is an appeal to authentic existence.⁽⁹²⁾ Hence, once again, qualities in perception are not the cause of the affect, but the affect itself, which exists only by virtue of its concretization. Here the thing encountered creates in me a resonance of its existence.

Such qualities open the surrounding world to a wider temporality, enlarging to the degree possible the actual present to the full extent of the past and of the future. This provokes the emotion of enjoyment, on the one hand, by reincorporating bodily powers into a lost temporality, and, on the other hand, by evoking the affectivity of a childhood when one believed in the "true reality". Against that latent horizon of original affectivity, the perceptible quality provokes a feeling of joy in the wonder of a recovered object, or a feeling of sorrow in the nostalgia of something lost.

Affective states are subject to analysis in terms of bodiliness and lived temporality. Emotion arises in the unexpected event-like emergence of an encounter. Then, bereft of all worldly landmarks, the lived body can lose all its relations with the world and even its own transcendence. Positively petrified, in surprise or horror it can feel itself annihilated or fainting, or can even flee the situation. In the face of this magical inversion of the vector of the world,⁽⁹³⁾ the reality of passion reveals that under the sudden emotional power of the event there is global commitment to existence; passion brings this into play in the temporality of a whole life. In contrast, to freeze the sense of duration by turning it toward the lost past would make passion literally disappear in repetition, imagination or the march of time.

Finally, feeling is connected with character. Here it is possible to sublimate an original affective state due to the capacity for imagining; this, in turn, is subject to the judgment of the self and attests to selfhood.

The body then measures, in the things themselves, the favorable or threatening affect of encounter and recognizes in the degrees of affective polarity their many expressions. But why does such or such a perceptible quality have precisely such or such specific intensity?

Affects inform persons more than do things, for they are borne by the cultural world. In a privileged manner, affective experience manifests itself in the encounter of persons. More radical than the perception of sense qualities, the perception of the other as acting in my "living present" immediately sets in motion the wellsprings of affectivity in their bipolarity of anguish and desire. In the intersubjective constitution of encounter, the other founds this ambivalence of my lived present. Husserl uses the concept of intropathy (Einfühlung) in order to designate that acknowledgment by which my body (Leib) lives perceptively the body of the other.

Taking this concept, but in terms of its character of fleshly reversibility, Merleau-Ponty underlines the active-passive polarity of our manner of being-in-the-world. It is the lived body, as a relationship of being in the spatializing and temporalizing interplay of encounter, which founds the unreflective exchange of the "lived relations" of one body with respect to another. This is not "fusion-like sameness", but a lived "analogon". In intropathy, I situate myself both here and there, as the other of the other but with an otherness which is mine, because "to feel one's body, is also to feel it as for the other".⁽⁹⁴⁾ Thus, in encounter, I not only discover the behavior of another one, whose expression I can live from the interior of my own bodiliness. I also can live this from his live center, whence the other in turn poses me as the pole of his transcendence. Intropathy, to be sure, is not the originary intuition of bodiliness present to itself, but it gives the "appresentation" of the other.⁽⁹⁵⁾

Intropathy makes it possible for my body to recognize itself in the other; it lives directly that exteriorization of itself in the other, but in such a way that the other retains its secret in an unforeseeable and uncontrollable manner. This openness of the self in the history of others is at once both threatening and welcoming. "Hell is other people" precisely because the "I" is no longer the center of the world but is implied by the existence of others.⁽⁹⁶⁾ Otherness is, thus, the losing of a lived totality; it is a position of objective subjectivation. Being the condition of my being acknowledged, the other is also, in a reversal of poles, the one who "steals my world from me". His point of view and his enjoyment partially escape me. Nevertheless, our perceptions cross each other in the world, which henceforth is common to us, as much because it separates us through jealousy as because it unites us as interrelated.

BODILINESS AND SEXUALITY

Effectively, the body recognizes itself in the other by gesture and word. As an affective manifestation, the gesture announces in an unreflected mode what the word is saying in such a way that the word implies gesture, and indeed originally is gesture. Gesture and word are thus articulated in the same affective intentionality because the body is a power of natural expression: it is "that silent and permanent question" addressed to another body and which desire understands blindly. According to Freud, as every human act has a meaning,⁽⁹⁷⁾ sexuality is linked to the whole of the knowing and acting being.

The primary meaning is already assumed by the "first word" which enables the child to receive himself into being. Encounter is thus a positing of oneself in interrelation. Henceforth, the existing being is affectively mediated by the presence of the other: one is other for the other, and a stranger for himself. The aspect of otherness, lived by the bodily mediation of the other in me, reveals to me that I am the same, that is to say, "myself". This "me", revealed as another, institutes subjectivity; the reversibility constitutes my existence as "mine". Thus, it is in encounter that the bipolar structure of affectivity, desire-anguish, finds the conditions of its manifestation.

Affective differentiation not only is connected to the objective order of constituting intentionality, but is immanent in the event created by the encounter of other existing beings. Affectivity is the anthropological dimension which manifests in all its expressions what is really radical in the emergence of the lived realm. Therefore, the phenomenological method must engage the event-like, historical, fact-like moment of the genesis of that lived world. The existence structure of being-in-the-world can be thematized only from the existential experience of affective life. Just as phenomenology is able to arrive at such essential structures of affectivity as temporality and spatialization, event-like affectivity will show itself in the encounter where the "sense" of otherness emerges as the dynamic and energetic force of life.

But phenomenology is not limited to thematizing; at least in the descriptive mode we can turn to dynamic psychoanalytic discourse. Genetically received as ex-istence in the form of "sexual differentiation", the sense of life is not produced by a biological factuality, but is received from the dynamic affectivity of mutual recognition in encounter. At the origin of existence, the sexual relation between the parents constitutes, from birth onward, the openness of life. It carries the child towards his objective finality by the creative movement of desire, which in every human relation is the dynamic expressivity of the relational otherness of a couple. This brings immediately into play the resources of bodiliness. The child is borne along by the originary affect of desire, which enables him, in turn, to be able to enter into the life of desire and to situate himself in the meaning of finite existence. This anterior desire will permit the child to overcome the Oedipal stage, for he recognizes himself as objectively before the positive relationship of his parents and, by identification with respect to the parent of the same sex, inscribes himself or herself in the existence assigned properly to him or her.

Affective life is genetically determined from birth according to the self-giving desire of the parents, which is a "gift" of meaning. This generates in the child, by its polarity of anguish and desire, an understanding of existence as open to the horizon of its finitude, namely, death. In this manner sexual difference is the prime meaning which gives life; by its affective polarity it constitutes the teleological sense of unified becoming for the person. As the most original indication of distanciation, the sexual "difference" induces the constitutively interrelational affective truth of human existence: man is masculine only by his relation to woman, and woman is feminine only by her relation to man. It is on the basis of the structural truth of reciprocal constitution that human truth is realized in each of its manifestations and at all levels, both of sense and of intellect. The acknowledgment of the "differentiated relationality" of parental desire is lived affectively as real entrance into the "sense" of life, that is to say, in the effective relationship of bodiliness inscribed into the "flesh of the world".⁽⁹⁸⁾ It is by the mediation of the affective experience of that sense relationship, concretely recognized, that the child is able also to introduce him or herself into the chain of meaningful relations, and experiences him or herself affectively as already inscribed in language.⁽⁹⁹⁾

The sexed difference constitutes the being-projects of man and woman, which, in intersecting with each other, reveal the properly human dimension of meaning, the affective logos of natural orientation and of cultural meaning. On their reversibility man emerges in his masculinity and woman in her femininity.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ That sexed otherness, which is quite singular and more originary than simply individual otherness, as "difference" or interdependent existential relationality, is constitutive of the relational growth of the person.⁽¹⁰¹⁾

Individualization as "man" and "woman" constitutes concrete affectivity; that is, it gives affectivity its specific concrete status by determining it relationally. There is, for example, a correlation between the anguish as experienced by man as man and as experienced by woman as woman. Nevertheless, inamuch as it brings into play a manner of being-in-the-world which is conditionally reversible, affectivity makes manifest the "shaping" of a meaning, that is to say, a relationship in meaning or sexual difference as "différence".

Taken as such, this teaches the child the symbolic dimension of a sense relationship. In the experience of Oedipal jealousy, by living affectively the reality of the sexual difference the child discovers the meaning of the notion of "difference" in general, that is to say, the notions of relationship, connection and symbolic meaning. He or she grasps the field of meaning as such and what underlies every form of rationality.

SOCIAL RELATEDNESS

The relationship of the originary sexual difference henceforth will concern not only the mode of sexual otherness, but all the modes of social or personal encounter. The lived affective difference is the moment of emergence towards the specifically human dimension of objective "signifying understanding". It underlies potentially the natural possibilities related to generation and the cultural possibilities at all levels. This implies in "existential difference" the totality of singular existence. Hence, the sexed otherness is reflected affectively on all the beings encountered, in the perception of things and even in categorical and theoretical approaches. Consequently, the truth of the cultural world--material, scientific, technical or aesthetic--and of the different civilizations in all their ethical and political social manifestations has its roots in that "originary affective sense" which is the sexed différence.⁽¹⁰²⁾

Through the affective mediation of desire, which is also anguish, the child introduces himself to the conditions of the world of common sense where he or she is to realize his or her life project, to "speak" his or her proper subjectivity. This manifests itself inside the horizontal field of the life world, which itself is unveiled by the affective position given to it by the existing being inasmuch as one receives oneself from the source of life. On this genetic base, affectivity engenders an oriented active character. It recollects itself as an assumption that is not susceptible to being thematized as such, but recognizes itself laterally in the relational sense of the bodiliness and the expressivity in the proper dynamics of finite existence.

Parallel to the internal horizon of lived temporality, there is an external horizon which is not intuitive, but extends to remote distances whence "the I can be intentionally `affected'."⁽¹⁰³⁾ That empty horizon embraces the world as a unique horizon of possible experience. This is Nature as the surroundings of those affected by it; it is transfigured in Culture through reciprocal constitution.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ The intersubjective life inscribes itself in this: "we are taken in the monadic universe of an unceasing life system, in the infinity of our proper life and of intersubjective historical life."⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ This phenomenological datum reveals a new sphere of experience: the latent implications of the horizons as an immanent system of correlations of experience wnich refers back to the transcendence of the world.

From that point of view, the "World" manifests itself radically as the affective horizon which is "humor".⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ The ex-isting being experiences the humor or state of mind (Stimmung) which proceeds from the manner (or "present disposition": Befindlichkeit) according to which he receives himself in the openness of Being and is present to his own being and to others. Disposition is a fundamental mode of the openness of Dasein, by which we discover the world and of which anguish is the paramount mode.⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ But in understanding one's mortal being, the anguish of "being thrown away" as submitted to facticity is inseparable from the corresponding structure of existence, namely, the "project" of being-in-the-world. Yet, existence does not assert itself only in the "dwelling place" of the world. The Lebenswelt or life world which is always already signifying makes the depth of existence more radically manifest as distance and proximity. Those structural dimensions, determining existence, make possible the foundation of the lived existential feelings which link together anguish and desire as the affective condition in the genesis of the individual.

The World which, as horizon, is the constitutive element of the existing being is always the totality given to affective experience: it is "Primeval Nature, a beginning of a world".⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ As it concretizes itself in the diversity of living beings it evokes the affects of the persons, for the existing being living in the world is always already cultural. There is a "reversibility" or passive synthesis in the very fabric of the world or of "flesh", interlacing action-passion or a reversibility of the perceptible.⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ We could say that the life powers of the world bear anthropic significance: the world is the horizon of all our encounters, it gives rise to the depth of absence and presence, it opens the affective dimensions of anguish and desire.

CONCLUSION

Lived temporality and interrelated otherness intersect at the existential level of anguish and desiring. This is realized concretely from birth until death against the original background of giving life from generation to generation. This implies for Being a personal and, therefore, affective dimension. Transposing the Heideggerian context, this evokes the Being which "loves" man and gives him meaning.⁽¹¹⁰⁾

The affective dimension of the possibility of giving in man proceeds from a presence more interior to oneself than the very self.⁽¹¹¹⁾ The ontological donation of meaning endows the existing being with the capacity for "giving". Thus, the notion of "gift" has an ethical meaning which teleologically grounds human responsibility in personal affectivity. It is in the nature of gift that an affective dimension appears and the properly singular realization of the person is achieved.

Here, phenomenology must give way to the hermeneutics of gift. The personalizing act of giving finds its condition of possibility in the ultimate act of the self, which is to manifest the ultimate passivity of the reception of the self: "to acknowledge the gift by which one has received one's its own being". Here we go beyond ontology in the measure that we aim at an eminently personal reality. It is precisely that infinite personal reality which gives desire its teleological sense. Reciprocally, it is affectivity in act which induces the dimension of personal relationship. In that horizon-- of donation coming from Being and of reception as the call to answer it in each authentic encounter--everyone becomes the "neighbor" of the other.

Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium