Pre-reflective lived experience is clarified in the paper linked below, which also explores the cultural consequences of what Heidegger called 'the forgetfulness of being'. I provided a lengthy extract from this paper in this post from Part 6 of this thread, where the link to the whole paper is embedded
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6
Following here are a few extracts from the extensive quotations from the paper presented in the linked post in Part 6.
Phenomenology of Practice
Max van Manen, University of Alberta
Phenomenology & Practice, Volume 1 (2007), No. 1, pp. 11 – 30.
". . .In his
Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (1964) Edmund Husserl uses the famous example of sound to illustrate how the tones of a piece of music present themselves in the instant of the now; and how the successive retention and protention of melody gives us the experience of time past, present, and future. In Husserl's epistemological language it is the primal impressional consciousness and its retentional and protentional aspects that make our lived experiences potentially available in the form of intentional objects for our reflection. On the one hand, primal impressional consciousness is prereflective and thus it manifests itself as an inexhaustible deposit of primordialities that constitute our experiential existence. On the other hand, the experiences that we live through present themselves to us as accessible to reflection and language, according to Husserl:
"We must distinguish: the prephenomenal being of experiences, their being before we have turned toward them in reflection, and their being as phenomena. When we turn toward the experience attentively and grasp it, it takes on a new mode of being: it becomes "differentiated," "singled out." And this differentiating is precisely nothing other than the grasping; and the differentiatedness is nothing other than being-grasped, being the object of our turning-towards (Husserl 1991, p. 132)."
So when reflection lifts up and out from the prereflective stream of consciousness the lived experiences that give shape and content to our awareness, reflection interprets what in a prereflective sense already presents itself as a primal awareness. Obviously, there are many philosophical issues associated with these distinctions. For example, is the prereflective stream of consciousness already a conscious experiential awareness? And what is the relation between the passive reflection by which consciousness becomes aware of itself as world, and the more active reflection of thinking? Is prereflective experience already experience of meaning, lived meaning? Or does meaning and intelligibility only emerge at a linguistic or more reflective level of the practice of living?
For Husserl the ultimate source of intelligibility seems to be the primal impressional stream of preconscious life that becomes interpretatively available to our understanding as lived experience. In Husserl's words, "the term lived experience signifies givenness of internal consciousness, inward perceivedness" (Husserl, 1964, p. 177). To say that primal impression-retention-protention is preconscious does not mean that it precedes consciousness, but rather that it is conscious in a primal prereflective sense. It points to the realm that for Husserl is the source and the condition for intelligibility of the experience or practice of living.
"Heidegger shows how with Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of the "eternally recurring will-to-power," our (post)modern sensibility of reality has become a metaphysics of nihilistic enframing that treats all entities (including human beings) instrumentally, available for our use. This last historical Western epoch of being is the declared end of metaphysics, and, according to Heidegger, it has led to a thoughtless nihilism that reduces all intelligibility to technological sensibility: viewing anything that exists as infinite, and thus without end, meaning, or purpose. However, in Heidegger's view, Nietzsche's philosophy of will-to-power is still based on a metaphysics — a metaphysics that has forgotten its own forgetfulness of being. Instead, the being of entities is pervasively viewed within a calculative rationality. Even our interest in quality and qualitative concerns tends to become reduced to and absorbed by the instrumental and quantitative preoccupations. In Thomson's words, "our technological understanding of being produces a calculative thinking that quantifies all qualitative relations, reducing entities to bivalent, programmable ‘information'" (Thomson, 2005, p. 56).
. . . Our Nietzschean rejection of reflection on being and ground lets us forget our forgetfulness. At present it is fashionable to level the charge of "foundationalism," the supposition that we can ground our practices in something certain, unchanging or absolute. But the real danger, says Thomson, is not the search for a sense of foundation or ground, but the predicament that we forget that something has been forgotten. According to Thomson shallow antifoundationalism merely surrenders us to a thoughtless and inattentive onto-theology 'that preconceives all entities as intrinsically meaningless.'** . . . . ."
