We should spend some time contemplating Husserl's hyletic data, the way in which we prereflectively absorb the intrinsic sense of our relatedness with the things we encounter and the gestalts within which we perceive them before we begin to reflect upon them in terms approaching conceptual thinking. Here is a paper that clarifies what Husserl means by "hyle" and its prereflective initiation of meaning out of our palpable and sensible contacts with the physical world we exist in -- experiences in which intentionality makes its first appearance prereflectively.
Kenneth Williford, "Husserl’s hyletic data and phenomenal consciousness"
Abstract: In the
Logical Investigations, Ideas 1, and many other texts, Husserl maintains that perceptual consciousness involves the intentional “animation” or interpretation of sensory data or hyle, e.g., “color-data,” “tone-data,” and algedonic data. These data are not intrinsically representational nor are they normally themselves objects of representation, though we can attend to them in reflection. These data are
“immanent” in consciousness; they survive the phenomenological reduction. They partly ground the intuitive or
“in-the-flesh” aspect of perception, and they have a determinacy of character that we do not create but can only discover. This determinate, non-representational stratum of perceptual consciousness also serves as a bridge between consciousness and the world beyond it. I articulate and defend this conception of perceptual consciousness. I locate the view in the space of contemporary positions on phenomenal character and argue for its superiority. I close by briefly arguing that the Husserlian account is perfectly compatible with physicalism (this involves disarming the Grain Problem).
Keywords: Hyle . Qualia . Time-Consciousness . Representationalism . Sense data . The grain problem . Husserl . Phenomenal consciousness . Intentionality
"Introduction
Husserl held that perceptual consciousness involves the “marriage” of sensory matter (or “hyletic data")
and intentional, animating form.1 Suppose I suddenly feel a pressure encircling my arm. I might, depending on the context, immediately take these tactile data to present “someone grabbing my arm.” If so, I would be spontaneously “animating” them with this intentional or noematic content and paying little or no attention to the varying felt pressures themselves. These “felt pressures” are the sensory matter or hyletic data of this perception. Hyletic data, on the Husserlian view, do not themselves intentionally aim at or represent anything. But they are “brought to life” or imbued with intentional content, and thereby we see, hear, taste, smell, or feel them to present objects or states of affairs.
These data are supposed to account for what is literally
presentational about perceptual experience; they are what differentiate
seeing, say, a dog, live and in the flesh in front of you, from merely thinking of one. But we know of their difference from representational content not only because thoughts and perceptions with the same intentional objects are different, as the latter are presentational and the former are not. We know this also because the same hyletic data can be animated in a variety of ways. That is, their intentional correlates can differ while they remain the same. The exact same distribution of felt pressures encircling my arm, to continue the example, might, in quite different circumstances, be animated as the application of a tourniquet.
But this difference from representational content and this “inertia” should not immediately be taken to mean that hyletic data can, in principle, be animated in any way whatsoever. Husserl thought that there must be some sort of analogy or resemblance between the hyletic data fields, like the visual color spectrum, and the properties their animation allows us to represent, like the proper surface colors of physical objects.2
But synesthesia and the use of certain perceptual prostheses and techniques, like the use of forms of echolocation by the blind,3 raise difficult and unresolved questions about the relationship between hyletic data and the range of ways in which they can be animated, questions we will not attempt to resolve here.
Husserl maintained that there is good
phenomenological evidence for hyletic data, even though we are not normally paying any attention to them as such. Although we do not objectify them prior to reflection, we are nevertheless conscious of them — we experience them. Experience itself is not normally objectified or attended to; nonetheless, experience is always experienced, it is “lived through” (
erlebt).4
One classic phenomenological way of getting at this idea is by contrasting the way in which we experience physical objects with the way in which we experience our experience of them.5 The physical object is given to us over time via a sequence of profiles. We see the selfsame object from a multitude of positions. For every such position, we “live through” a different array of kinesthetic and hyletic data that we do not normally objectify or pay attention to. Different shades will flit across the surface of the object as one walks around it; its outline, qua appearance, will undergo the variations studied objectually in projective geometry; it will take up more or less of the visual field; one will have to crane the neck, squint, tilt the head, etc. The physical object gives itself ever inadequately through this multiplicity of profiles or adumbrations (
Abshattungen).
This connects directly to time-consciousness. As I walk round a table, I retend (retain in “working memory”) the just-past profiles of the table and protend (hold in “working anticipation” and "emptily intend”) the upcoming profiles. And indeed, to see it as a table is to implicitly regard each profile as one of a series of more or less definite actual and possible adumbrations of the table — these are the “horizonal contents” that help to distinguish perceptual content from mere thought content.6 In the normal case, these anticipations are satisfied, and I am given no reason to revise my “perceptual hypothesis” that this is indeed a table I am seeing, though Husserl would not put it that way. If I were to make an explicit prediction about the underside of the table and were to look underneath and see what I predicted I would see, then, as Husserl would say, I would find a perception that fulfills a judgment and is perceptual evidence for the truth of my claim.7
By contrast, no profile gives itself through further profiles, though we do indeed experience them. And the profiles existentially depend on experience in a way that physical objects do not. A physical object is given as
continuing to be even if no one is looking at it. But my visual profile on the object is gone as soon as I close my eyes. And though the profile I get when I open them again a second later may be similar, it is a different token if only because of the passage of time. Profiles on objects, unlike the objects themselves, are, so to say, token-experience bound. They must be experienced to be and they are not, strictly speaking, repeatable, though, evidently, they do admit of various similarities to each other. Husserl held that these profiles on or adumbrations of an object generally fluctuate with fluctuations in hyletic data (see
Ideas I §97; Husserl 1982, pp. 237– 238). Although we may consistently animate them as the visual presentation of the family dog, they are flowing through us moment by moment and disappear as we finish living them through. In a certain sense,their
esse is
percipi, but the
percipi is a nearly Heraclitean river. It is intentionality that allows us to get beyond this flux, but the price of intentionality is the perpetual possibility of error, hence the appropriateness of speaking of “perceptual hypotheses” even in the best of cases.
Hyletic data, and the acts that animate them, survive the phenomenological reduction.8 If something survives the reduction, it is immanent or really inherent in consciousness.9 These “immanental data” are not among the transcendent objects — the objects of representation — that get excluded or “placed in brackets.” They are part of the “phenomenological residuum” and thus part of the proper subject matter of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. One thus attempts to study the hyletic data and the patterns of animation, regardless of the existence of the objects and states of affairs the animations aim at. The point of such a study need not be directly epistemological or metaphysical. It can be, among other things, to get us to think about consciousness at the appropriate level of generality and abstraction. . . ."
continue at:
https://www.academia.edu/34100318/Husserls_hyletic_data_and_phenomenal_consciousness
{ps, this guy is really good.}
