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Husserl’s Wandering Wonder: The Tensed Body’s Supple Spirit
(Object Constitution and Synthesis From the Body to Cultural Objects)
At first, to be sure, the possibility of a pure
phenomenology of consciousness seems
highly questionable, since the realm of
phenomena of consciousness is so
truly the realm of a Heraclitean flux.
(Husserl Cartesian Mediations 49)
The object appearing constantly new, constantly different, is
constituted as the same in these exceedingly intricate and
wondrous systems of intention and fulfillment that make up the
appearances. But the object is never finished, never fixed completely.
(Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis 50)
Language as a system of signs...provides us in general and
in many respects with subtle and wondrous problems.(11)
One could show also that Husserl's analysis of the experience
of the body, both of one’s own and of the one belonging to an
alter ego, and of the analogy between the two moves along
the same lines as his treatment of expressive language.
(Rudolf Bernet “Presence and Absence of Meaning” 38)
We attempt here to articulate the fundamental role the Body plays in higher levels of object constitution, in order to clarify why for Husserl there are self-identical objects generated through synthetic constitutional unification, despite their constituent multiplicious contents and interminable phases of alteration. We look first at passive synthesis on the level of the Body’s sensings in the temporal flux of intentional consciousness as the foundation for higher levels of object constitution in the ideal and cultural forms, paying attention especially to the associative relationality at work in synthesis, which might account for both the unification and modifiability of object constitution.
We find in Ideas II that all such possible constituted objects “refer back” to the primal objects which are sense-objects (Husserl Ideas II 19), because they, as passively and aesthetically synthesized objects, serve as substrates for higher level, active categorical synthesis (21), and as constitutive elements, they “enter into” these higher object formations (19-20). Thus, as referring back to sensation, things refer back to the sensing subject’s body (60-61); the “aestheta” depend on the “make-up” of the experiencing subject whose Body is the “organ” and “medium of all perception,” for it is “necessarily involved in all perception” (61). All things, then, in the Ego’s surrounding world are in relation to its Body (61); for the same thing’s appearance changes according to its position in relation to the Body (64), and because the Body is the “null” or “center point” of appearings (166), which are “conditioned by corporeality, ‘on my opening my eyes to look’” (70-71); in fact, even in imagination there is an imagined orientation to the sense organs (61-62). Thus, if we “run backwards” from the higher strata of thing constitution to the lower, we arrive at the “data of sensation” in which is pre-given the ultimate, primitive, primal objects (225-226) that become constituted as objects in higher levels of synthesis for “theoretical-scientific activity, for valuing and practical behavior” (226), and objects constituted on these higher levels are more of a “spiritual” sort. Bodies are “organs” and “expressions” of spirit, because Bodies are “interwoven” with the psychic stratum, and thus possess a “stream of lived experience (or stream of consciousness)” with “no beginning or end” (98) and for this reason, the “psychic Ego” must “take into itself the sensation states of the animate organism” (Ideas III 10). The Body, then, comprises the “fundamental component of the real givenness of the soul and ego” (Ideas II 165) and is in “concrete unity” with them (168).
Objects themselves are unities of all their properties, which are subject to change (49), however, despite this change across the temporal continuity of alteration, there is consciousness of unity, that is, of the “identical as something individual” that endures while changing (49). One reason for this, is that even when something’s properties change, there are laws and regularities to how the properties change, which takes the form of “under certain circumstances, similar consequences;” they change in a “determined way” (51). Thus there is a unity in the change of properties that traverses the property-changes (51). In original perception, the subject perceives the object in its primal presence, and not in “all its inner determinations or proper attributes” (170-171) which might outlie the horizon. Yet, although primary presence does not give all the object’s attributes, the Ego may still bring all properties to primal presence in the object’s continuous originarity throughout the “perceptual continuum” (170-171), which may also help explain the unity across the changes of properties.
The Ego is capable of such awakening of the attributes not primally present, on account of the law of associative passive motivation: as new primal impressions emerge “the existence of the similar part demands the existence of the similar part complementing it” (234-235). What is given brings to mind what is similar by “analogy” (237). This, however, is not a divided consciousness, despite being the plural consciousness of synthetic collecting, because it is “one and one and one taken together” by a singular consciousness that unites the plurality by relating them (Ideas I 336-337). “Relating consciousness” produces a “synthetically constituted relation” that is made into an object, which may be compared to other relations and become the subject for predication (337). The appearings of such a constituted object may very from person to person, but on account of its constitutionality being a matter of the unifying relationality between appearings for each Ego, the object has the same identity despite its variance between Egos (93); this is “intersubjective identification” (92), which comes about when people exchange experiences through communication and thereby come to adjust their constitutional object syntheses by resolving conflicts between apprehensions, and thus the Body’s apprehension plays a central role in the intersubjective constitution of objects apprehended in “one Objective time and one Objective space of the one Objective world” (85-86). When persons, for example, speak with, listen to, work together with, or watch the actions of, other people, the others are grasped as persons as such in a “thoroughly intuitive unity” of the expression belonging to the “essence of all comprehensive unities” (248). Such unities are not limited to the Body-spirit composite, for in the apprehension of such objects as books, we apprehend not merely the physicality of the ink and paper, because bound to its physical appearance is a second spiritual one (249) that animates the physical sense (248). The spiritual sense is not bound to the spatial and temporal limitations of any one physical instantiation, yet it is not entirely a discrete object, for it “animates” and “penetrates” the physical instantiations with which it fuses (249-250). We elaborate these themes regarding the Body by means of some of Husserl’s other writings.
To better explicate Husserl’s notion of the unity in multiplicity, we turn to his Philosophy of Arithmetic, in which he explains that in totalities there are, in addition to their constituent “particular contents,” “a ‘something more,’” which is the “whole” of the contents united by “combining relations,” and thus, two wholes may be similar as wholes, despite completely heterogeneous contents (Philosophy of Arithmetic 19-20). When perceiving a rose, each of its parts is “picked out” or distinguished, while being “held together” through combining relations, which present a “certain ‘more,’ in contrast to the mere totality (75): the unifying relationality is something over and above the sum of its constituent parts, which are self-identical and different from one another, just as the whole is to other unities, because “distinguishing and identifying are reciprocally determining functions” that cannot be disentangled from their mutual interdependence (50-51).
The relations holding together combined contents are unified by “terms” of those relations (71). Collective combinations, in general, may be composed of contents related by an unrestricted variation of terms, but collections that maintain as a species have a limited range of term variability (76). In these cases, we grasp the “simple relations” that join contiguous contents bearing a common term identically the same throughout (218). Yet all instances of collective combination play a central role in our mental lives, because all complex phenomena and all higher mental and emotional activities require the collectively combinatory mental action in which the different contents are thought together in that one act (77) that “picks out” the relational terms and holds them together through a “psychical relation” (76).
Each discrete self-identical content is a certain something, a certain one combined into a collection constituted by one and one and one, etc. (84-85). This grouping has no determinate “upper bound,” however, and can be continually aggregated (85), and in certain collective unities, strikingly similar characteristics might arise out of the fusion, which forms groups of like objects of a certain “kind” whose “characteristic property” of the total unitary intuition is grasped “at one glance” (216). These quasi-qualitative Moments, whose property relations are fused by the common term, are “something other” (216) than the “mere sum” of the contents (218). Moreover, when the constituent relations change, we first notice the alteration in the unified figure (217), thus the unity is given to us at least as originally as its parts. In an “infinite grouping” such as number, the common characteristic or term is the process that determines its contents, in this case of adding one to one, and again adding one to each result, which can be performed in infinitum (232). So long as the common term remains the same, the collection may be aggregated without loss to its unity. Similar to this aggregative combinatory process is “combination-by-continuity,” which unites into wholes spatial and temporal continua that “reciprocally penetrate and connect with each other” either in simultaneous extension or temporal “progression” (20), in the latter of which lies the “mode of becoming” (29).
In Basic Problems, Husserl offers a more phenomenological account of the simultaneous and successive dimensions of time consciousness’ tripartite structure of retention, intention, and expectation, through whose “entanglement” objects unify (Basic Problems of Phenomenology 67). Co-apprehended yet not co-intended objects are given in both simultaneous and successive objective backgrounds (67); identity consciousness constitutes objects across this succession of contemporaneous appearances, which are retended and remembered (68) as well as expected in protention (69).
He explains further in his Cartesian Meditations that identification, the “fundamental form of synthesis,” is a “passively flowing synthesis, in the form of the continuous consciousness of internal time” that unifies objects across their varying modes of appearances (Cartesian Meditations 42). In the structure of internal time, a horizonal continuous protention, the unfulfilled empty intention, develops a new “sense” with each new phase of perception (44); and thus each meant intends beyond itself (46). Through this flowing synthesis, constituted objects are passively generated according to the principle of association unifying objects within the “sensuous configuration” in coexistence and succession (80-81).
Husserl, in his Consciousness of Internal Time, offers further description of the constitutional role played by simultaneity and succession, which are both so intertwined that either is “nothing” without its other (The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time 82). The stream constituted by their integration finds its orientation in the Now point of the primal impression, from which the object recedes or “runs-off” into retention as new nows are continually “entering the scene” (29-30), thereby creating a continuity of retentions following the now-phase which stands at the “limit” of this continuity (35). This now-phase, then, is without extension; “past” and “now” exclude each other, although enduring across their limit is one identical object (36). However he also writes that retentions “continuously joined to one another” are united to primal sensation (83), perhaps because each primal impression changes into a retention; for each new primal impression retains the prior one, which itself retains its prior, and so on (85-86). Across the duration of the object’s appearing, there are successive coincidings of our intendings of it, which unite the appearings into one flowing consciousness of one unified object (46). This unification is a process during which nothing “remains unchanged for even an instant” (78); for, along with retentional contents pointing back to the past, an object is also constituted by protensions that point ahead to the future (89) by “emptily” constituting “what is coming as coming, by “catching” it and bringing it toward fulfillment (54)
Thus, it is a “fiction” that the immanent object endures “absolutely unchanged” (91); its “unbroken unity” turns out to be a “divisible unity” whose blended moments can be distinguished ideally (91). The object’s appearings undergo fluctuations, because one moment’s continuous unity can be connected with another moment’s differentiation, in this way partitioning the unity (91). This break in “qualitative identity,” in which there is a “leap from one quality to another within the same genus of quality,” is the experience of discontinuity and variation (91). As the continuous synthesis progresses, the originally blended undifferentiated object appearances gradually differentiate more and more; “the old and the new no longer appear as in essence entirely the same but as increasingly different and alien” (91). Yet despite this gradual self-differentiation of the object appearings, it maintains a “continuity of identity” (90), because “discontinuity is not possible in every time-point” along the continuum, and thus there is still predominantly self-sameness and self-similarity, and also, discontinuity presupposes continuity (91); it is a modification of continuity, a deterioration of the continuity already in flow. The “homogeneous” unity across the flow of appearings (92) he terms the “substance” which is the “bearer” of continuously changing qualities (128). As a “thing,” the object possesses “properties,” which are “non-self-sufficient” rays of the substantial unity, and these properties also remain identical even though they fade away and are replaced as the object appearance alters along the flux (129).
In Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis Husserl considers the synthetic manifold of “coinciding” appearances (37) that transcends these appearances (38) and their referentially implied co-meant horizon (39-40). Thus intertwined with an identical constant substrate x of the appearances are “pointers into an emptiness” of a non-actualized appearance, which is the “emptiness to be filled-out,” the “determinable indeterminacy” (42). A constant process of anticipatory intention alters and shifts as the process of perceiving streams along; however, the “identical x” spans this altering stream (42-43) of continually progressing fulfillments that are “at the same time” continually progressing emptyings (45). On account of the plus ultra in the empty horizon, there can be no final presentation of an object “in the flesh” (48); because the empty unfulfilled part of its horizonal intention “passes over into the horizon of the new appearance,” and this always incomplete movement persists continually (49), because the “dynamic displacement” of the altering horizon whereby the object’s sense is enriched as well as impoverished (49-50) prevents it from ever being “fixed completely” (50). Thus there can be no perception which could “furnish absolute knowledge of the object;” it is always merely a “flowing approximation” (58) building always incomplete familiarity.
We become familiar with the object through its associative structure of synthesis, by which a “new thing receives the entire epistemic prefiguring” from similar previous ones (47), and in this associative process the unity of the object is “maintained concordantly” (63); unless the harmonious fulfillment is disrupted by “disappointment” in which, rather than acquiring, preserving, and enriching our knowledge in the intended object, our sense of it might be “annulled” (63). In disappointment, a break emerges in the “abiding, unitary content of sense,” as a “lived-experience of ‘otherwise’ springs forth” (64), which alters the object’s sense, and this alteration “radiates back” to its preceding appearances that are then “reinterpreted” as being otherwise than previously considered (65-66). The previous appearances that constituted the object as one sense are negated, annulled, and “crossed out,” and they are superimposed (65) or “painted over” (69) with the newly acquired sense (65), which “overpowers” the former one (68). Yet even as covered-over, the objective sense remains identical, but it has merely come into conflict with another identical sense taking precedence (71-72). Despite there being a “break” across which the object sense alters, its alterational movement remains fluid, because the new sense which paints over the retained one comes onto the scene through the continuous movement of succession which fluidly covers over the previously held sense (72).
Thus even in cases of annulment, there is a continuous harmonization in the unity of synthesis (107), but on account of the horizonal structure of intentionality, synthesis is always open to disappointments that retroactively revise previous object senses (108), because synthesis is always synthesizing with our intentions and retentions the empty intentions of possible appearances which can be defied by differing actual appearances (113). This synthetic connecting of retentions with empty presentations is a “fundamental law of passive genesis” (114); that is, there is a “primordial genesis” within the temporal stream by which retentions are connected to other contents, which makes up the “process of time-constituting becoming” (115). The synthesis that connects perceptual presentations with horizonal retentions and protentions (119) is one whose associative structure characterizes a “form and a lawful regularity of immanent genesis” (162).
It is through “recall” that synthesis attains these associative and genetic features (166). Consolidated multiplicities that constitute unified objects recall other past unities associated according to similarities (166); one unity “points to the other,” even though no indicatory signs are involved, and thereby “awakens” it (166). Each such awakening “goes from an impressional present” toward another reproduced by means of a “bridging term,” which “arches across as a special synthesis by means of similarity" (168). In this way, the present is “transmitted;” it is synthesized with a past present now connected through the bridging term (166). This associative recollection is only one side of the synthesis; on the other side is “inductive, anticipatory association” (169). Thus the “awakening” of the associative synthesis not only awakens contents of previous pasts but also awakens anticipations of the future (419). Associative synthesis, then, comes about through the continuous streaming of the living present’s tripartite structure, and thus as well, these syntheses are ever incomplete (170). Yet despite their incompletion, the momentary structure of intentionality undergoes continual synthesis with its momentary retentional and protentional horizons, thereby constituting temporal objects as identical with themselves (172) across their streaming manifolds (173).
The connections that serve to identify and distinguish objects are connections of similarity (uniformity) and non-similarity, that is, connections of homogeneity and heterogeneity (175). The immanent data of the streaming present are unified according to “kinship,” that is, their similarity to or uniformity with one another (175). There are varying degrees of kinship according to the strength or weakness of the connection: the most complete kinship is uniformity, and is thus homogeneity, and kinship of a lesser degree is similarity (175). In the case of two objects related according to their same contents, the uniform characteristic they share is a “repetition” of the same thing, and in the case of two objects bearing similar contents, sameness “comes to the fore,” yet not as strongly as in same objects (176). In both cases, there is an overlapping of the consciousness of the one with that of the other, despite the modifications these acts of consciousness undergo; and, despite also the resultant duality maintained between the two same or similar objects, an “identity-consciousness” results, which is consciousness of a same “what-content” (176). To bring about the sameness brought out through the “synthetic coinciding in a commonality,” there seems also to be a “synthetic conflict of particular matters of this commonality that repress one another” in their overlapping, and in this repressing, certain differing elements come to be “concealed” (176). In the case of same objects, contents are “fused;” but while similar contents with overlapping similarities do not fuse into a pure unity, there is a lesser fusion providing the ground for the concealment and repression of differences (176-177). In this way, when coinciding occurs, object appearances are “blended,” even if not purely so (185). Thus discrete yet uniform sounds succeeding each other along the streaming living present are repetitions of the same sound (177). These uniform objects coincide par distance (177). When the same sound repeats, the process of awakening retended appearances of that same sound become strengthened, which results in “rhythmatization” (420). Each new repetition acts against the natural fading away of retended appearances which would have “grown old and fallen in the grave” of retention (420). This would suggest that when a sound is repeated, our sense of its identity is strengthened, which as well strengthens our anticipation for coming recurrences; for he explains that according to the law of association, “analogues of the associatively related past” are “projected” not only into the present, but also into a “familiar future,” whose familiarity comes about through its anticipated analogousness to the familiar past (422).
If we examine another sort of case of parings, for example, the case of the “distant affinity” of one red triangle and another, which grounds their fusion as a pair of the same objects, we find that their fused unification is linked by a binding term of identity that homogenizes the two objects (178). Pairs whose term is similar rather than uniform will be a less unified pair (178). Yet despite their differences, distinguishable yet similar “moments” of each similar object “come into relief” by means of a bridging term, which is the way that passive synthesis comes to particularize and divide as well as unify, which passively provides the grounds for judicative activities (179).
Unification can also take the form of a series of gradation, by which contents are connected according to a “graduated term,” in which the “final term of a pair” is the “beginning term of the next pair,” which itself is the “point of departure for a new gradation” (180). Although graduated coinciding is not one of uniformity, it is nonetheless one of a “special intimacy” (180) that results in a “unity of gradation” (181). It is this unity of gradation that underlies the successive nature of time-constituting consciousness in which one present carries over to the next; and this “train of presents” attains a “lasting unity of identity” as they are “linked together temporally,” and thus temporal relations are “from the very beginning and by essential necessity linked together in being constituted” (181). In this way, a unity of identification “runs clean through the flux” of relations of successive moments of object appearances, which form a “unitary series of consistent gradation” (181). Thus, there is a unity of continual fusion “passing from phase to phase” of the temporal continuum, in which the object content “melds” “together continually in the continual process of becoming in the order of time” (188).
We turn to Husserl’s Experience and Judgment to further explore how higher level synthesis proceeds from the field of sense (Experience and Judgment 72), and thus how “everything objective” attains its givenness first on the level of its synthesis in a “sensuous consciousness” uniting the object’s sensuously apprehended temporal duration (157), through unification of the object’s present with its non-present (177). Husserl moves from this lower level of object constitution to the higher ones of “contemplation,” whose own lower level is directed at the familiar object “taken as a whole,” and it precedes explication, which aims to articulate the object’s inner determinations united in the synthetic unity that maintains itself “on the basis of the unified appearance and apprehension of the object” (104-105). Explication is concerned with the object’s internal horizon of determinations as well as the external ones in which “relative determinations arise which display what the object is in its relation to other objects” (105); and these horizons may also be those of the object’s past and future (106). When we take up this next level of objectifying through explicative contemplation, we “disengage and examine” the individual “theses” or determinations of the object S, which become its predicates (112); this is a higher level of object constitution through identity synthesis (116), which occurs when partial apprehensions of the determinations overlap with the total apprehension of the whole (117), by which the "sense-determinations" of S make S become Sa, and so on, while S subsists unaltered (119), despite the “continuous transformation of the act of apprehension” by which S unfolds and is explicated (126).
The associative relations binding together the objects’ properties are those of likeness and similarity, which are not “relations of actuality,” but are more akin to what is traditionally called "relations of ideas," although Husserl terms them "relations of comparison" (184). These relations are "not bound to temporal objects, to individuals, and hence have a relation to time only as mediated by their members” (184); thus it would seem here that the ideal character of the object synthesized on the higher level acquires its ideality from its indeterminate temporality stemming from its being constituted by an always instantial relationality.
Thus judicative propositions based on object explications may be simultaneous with the givenness of their objects, but they do not share the same objective time, and this is the case for all objectivities constituted on the higher level (258). These judicative actions can be repeated, even if with “newly constitutive self-becoming,” “new duration,” or a “new tempo,” yet all the while the proposition remains identically the same, because it is not bound by any temporal position or duration; it is an “irreal object” rather than a real one, thus it is “everywhere and nowhere;” it refers to all times, and is thus supertemporal and omnitemporal (259). To be irreal, determinations, judgments, or objects, including cultural ones, must appear each time as identical and not merely similar (265-266): although there are many printings of Goethe’s Faust, there is but one “mental sense” that is embodied in these real works, but not “individualized by this embodiment;” likewise, a geometrical proposition maintains its same sense throughout its varied utterances; for all these real instances embody the same “ideal” (266). As well, pure essential universal generalized concepts freely generated spontaneously (319) are not bound to any particular actuality and can “go beyond experience” into “free imagination” (329). A uniform universal general type apprehended through an “associatively awakened relation of the likeness of one object with other objects” (332) includes all these associated objects, even though not all the attributes qualifying inclusion in the type will be determined, because both the already acquired attributes and the indeterminate open horizon of unknown ones unify the objects of that type before they are known explicitly (333). To come to a fuller determination of these ideals, we imagine a model of it in its “infinitely open multiplicity” of variation (340) to find the invariable unity running through it – its “general essence” – which is that “without which an object of a particular kind cannot be thought” or “intuitively imagined,” and is thus like the Platonic eidos, except without any such “metaphysical interpretations” (341). In variation, when moving from image to image, the similarities overlap and synthesize passively into the eidos; however, “seeing” the passively preconstituted eidos requires the active intuitive apprehension of it (343). Yet, the actually existing thing, like the physical book, from which the ideal cultural object is constituted, is a sensuous thing, intersubjectively related to “everyone’s sensibility” (363-364), and thus it endures as an altering object becoming new through its “continual springing-up and passing-away” (386).
As we noted, objects come to be constituted and conveyed intersubjectively through communication. Regarding the means of which – language – Husserl, in his Logical Investigations I, prioritizes expressive signs over indicative ones, because indications, which are actual objects or states of affairs that motivate “belief or surmise” in the existence of other objects (270), may create “additional phenomenological characters and unities” without a “necessary, law-determined ground in the experienced contents themselves” (274). When B appears from A’s summons, we feel forced upon us their inter-referential belonging together, and such a relationship of mutual belonging is also the relationality that unites experiences of an object’s “sides and parts” into a phenomenal unity constituting the apparent object (or a part, property, etc of such); on account of this belonging relationship in indication, experience endows contents with a “new phenomenological character” serving to present other objects (273-4). From expressions, Husserl excludes facial expression and gestures that “involuntarily accompany speech without communicative intent,” because these acts are not “phenomenally one” with the contents of the acting subject’s consciousness, as is rather more so in expressive speech (275). Actions have meaning only if their interpretation matches the one the subject intends it to have, otherwise, they at best are merely indications (275). Yet, expressions have a physical part, the sensible sign, as well as a “sequence of mental states” “associatively linked” with the expression giving it its “sense” or “meaning” (276) that the speaker endows to her expressed sign (277).
Yet, communicated expression also function as indication, because the hearer has only an “outer” percept of the speaker’s inner experiences she means to convey (278). However, in soliloquy, there is expression, although of imagined words floating before us, although not existing in reality (278). In such a monologue, the imagined words do not serve to indicate the existence of mental acts, for this would be superfluous to the expression’s immediate meaning intention (279-280). When the meaning-conferring acts of expression are fulfilled by meaning-fulfilling acts, the sign unifies with the signified thing through their fused union in consciousness (282) in which the acts of intending the expression and of intending its meant object coincide (283); and because expressive acts bring about the coincidence of the intentional contents of the speaker and hearer, judgments such as geometrical ones maintain the same identical ideal meaning no matter who asserts it on what occasion (284-285).
In the “Origin of Geometry” appendix to his Crisis, Husserl writes of the temporally unbounded objects (The Crisis of European Sciences 377) that are “spiritual products of the cultural world,” including works of “fine literature” and “scientific constructions,” as for example a geometrical meaning, which is an ideal and supertemporal objectivity “accessible to all men” that remains the same object despite its “newly produced” forms (356-357). The Pythagorean theorem, for example, is identically the same in
Yet, if the cultural object is transmitted through communication, which we find to always bear the indicative function that conveys unintended meanings, and if ideal “spiritual” cultural objects undergo alteration, and also, if their transmission involves significatory embodiments conveyed and constituted through the associative relationality of our Bodies’ “tensed” tripartite temporal time consciousness, then we may wonder if indeed Husserl has grounds to write that there are ideal unitary self-same super- and omni-temporal objects transmissible and constituted intersubjectively, and in such a way that they are generated as something in some way apart from their embodied instantiations. Although, what constitutes the ideal character of these objects is the associative relationality between contents, and for this reason he may perhaps have ground for such an idealization, for a relation would not seem to be a temporalized embodiment. And perhaps also it is this associative structure that may explain the dual self-same super/omni-temporal yet modifiable status of ideal objects, because associative relations are constituted through “bridge terms” that are inductively associative, suggesting that if there is a bridge term between contents, they must also bridge out to an anticipated empty intentional content that could be fulfilled or defied; thus the bridge structure of association would imply a stable linkage that unites contents into a self-same unified identical ideal object while also leaving open the possibility that the identity can be modified retroactively by new primal impressions that do not rigidly fit the expectations entailed by the bridge term. We hope then, that our path through some of Husserl’s writings on the tensed Body’s role in genetic ideal object synthesis will allow us to determine the specific differences between Husserl's temporal synthesis and Deleuze's static genesis.
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