The Affective ‘A Priori’

Abstract

The question of an affective a priori is a pervasive yet generally secondary theme in the history of phenomenology. There are few phenomenologists who refer to an a priori at all who do not also, in some way, include the area of affectivity under that rubric; but very few of these give it any kind of thematic treatment, and then only in schematic form. In short, our theme is a kind of step-child in phenomenology. Moreover, it is a step-child whose very name is a matter of some confusion. Searching in the standard lexicons for definitions of affectivity one concludes that they move in an “uncomfortably tight circle” from “emotion to feeling to affect and back to emotion”.¹ It should suffice here to say that we mean by the affective the domain or range of experience associated with the terms feeling or emotion. But, of course, efforts to refine the notion more carefully will be noted as we proceed with our investigation. The meaning of a priori is probably susceptible to more precision, depending on the context; but to keep it hospitable enough for the variety of approaches found in phenomenology it will be used simply as the equivalent of the essential or eidetic taken in both ‘formal’ and ‘material’ or ‘non-formal’ senses, particularly this latter as extending to what Husserl refers to as the ‘contingent a priori’.² Such an a priori, for Husserl, is “not an a priori of pure reason” but it is still “freed from everything empirically factual”.³