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THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY
Volume 54
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Scope
The purpose of this series is to foster the development of phenomenological philosophy through
creative research. Contemporary issues in philosophy, other disciplines and in culture generally,
offer opportunities for the application of phenomenological methods that call for creative responses.
Although the work of several generations of thinkers has provided phenomenology with many results
with which to approach these challenges, a truly successful response to them will require building on
this work with new analyses and methodological innovations.
THE SPHERE OF ATTENTION
Context and Margin
by
P. SVEN ARVIDSON
Seattle University, Seattle, WA, U.S.A.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Published by Springer,
P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
www.springer.com
vii
viii Table of Contents
REFERENCES.............................................................................................................. 191
ix
x Preface
1
2 The Sphere of Attention
from the background. The theme is attended to within a thematic context and
emerges from it. The presentation of content in the thematic context, like the
yard for the thematic dog, is consciousness of whatever is materially relevant for
the theme. In the margin, we are present peripherally to the streaming in
attending, embodied existence, and the environing world, and these orders of
existence are ever-present. The margin also has a crucial role in human
subjectivity.
The three experiential dimensions discussed in this book are inspired by the
work of Aron Gurwitsch (1901–1973) on the field of consciousness. Gurwitsch
taught at the New School for Social Research and has been credited (along with
Dorion Cairns) for bringing phenomenology to the United States (Embree
1989). He had the fortune to study with Edmund Husserl (phenomenology) and
Adhemer Gelb (psychology) and was an astute interpreter, scholar, and critic of
William James’ work. When Gurwitsch taught at the Sorbonne, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty was among those present in his lectures on Gestalt psychology.
(Note that I will capitalize “gestalt” when referring to the discipline of Gestalt
psychology, but not otherwise.) Gurwitsch’s magnum opus is The Field of
Consciousness (1964), in which he analyzes human conscious life from the
perspectives of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. As will become clear, I
see attention as the central feature of human life and of Gurwitsch’s work, and
so I use attention as the touchstone when I interpret and advance Gurwitsch’s
findings about consciousness.
I claim that attention can only be properly researched once it is understood
to be the center of a sphere of attention, a process that presents content in three
dimensions, not one. This means whenever there is thematic (focal) attention,
there is also coordinating contextual and marginal consciousness, each operating
according to different principles of organization. Why then shift the problem of
context from the auspices of the “field of consciousness,” as Gurwitsch would
have it, to the sphere of attention? Or also, why expand any and all accounts of
attention beyond the theme into other dimensions in consciousness (contextual
and marginal)?
Expanding the sense of what attention is creates a parallelism between
current psychological research, including neurological discoveries, and
phenomenology, especially Gurwitsch’s work. As each side advances, each can
gain from the other. These possibilities are discussed below. For example,
Gurwitsch’s philosophy can help interpret experimental data, set research
agendas, and define experimental paradigms in attention research. Lab work can
explore and articulate Gurwitsch’s transformation principles expanded upon and
Theme, Context, Margin 3
and 1964, 414–420). What appears in the margin is irrelevant to the theme, but
is presented nonetheless—namely, as irrelevant. The margin in the sphere of
attention is all that is co-present with the theme and thematic context, but is not
materially relevant to them, not even as context. Anything could be added to the
margin without affecting the unity by relevancy between theme and context. For
example, as I watch the dog in the garden, in the context of the dog minding his
boundaries, an airplane aurally appears on the scene, the gentle roar of the jet
engines grows and then fades, and a whirling breeze shakes the hedge near the
dog. As I am marginally conscious of the plane and the shaking hedge, which is
to say, as they are presented as irrelevant to the thematic dog, their presence
does not enter into the gestalt relation in the sphere of attention between the dog
and his boundaries. Although the plane and the shaking hedge could become
thematic themselves, this would take a substantial transformation in the sphere
of attention (a margin to theme succession of content), so that the dog and its
thematic context was replaced with new content and relations. In short, the
gestalt-connection of unity by relevancy puts marginal content outside the focus
and its context, which is to say, marginal items are presented as peripheral to the
theme, not relevant to it.
It might seem that marginal consciousness is merely accessory to thematic
attention, and so is dispensable. In fact, the margin is indispensable; it is always
presented, there is always marginal content in the sphere of attention. Gurwitsch
dedicated an entire work, published posthumously as Marginal Consciousness
(1985), to the richness of the margin. In it he expands on other formulations
(1964, 1966) to show how the margin consists of three ever-present domains:
the stream of consciousness (phenomenal time), embodied existence, and the
perceptual world. In order to maintain consistency throughout the current study,
the stream of consciousness may also be called “the streaming in the sphere of
attention” or just “streaming in attending,” and the perceptual world may be
called “the environing world,” where the modifier “environing” as gerund for
“environment” in environing world is taken in a very broad sense, as will be
seen. No matter what is thematic, these three “orders of existence,” as Gurwitsch
calls them, are always presented marginally. For example, as the dog is attended
to thematically, and its allowable boundaries in the yard are contextual, there is
a peripheral or marginal consciousness that time is passing and previous
attendings are more or less connected with current ones (streaming), that I am
sitting rather than standing (embodiment), and that the house is behind me
(world). The three marginal realms are presented as irrelevant to the theme. This
marginally presented dynamic embodied attending in the world is the existential
8 The Sphere of Attention
theme under another perspective, but is not relevant under this one (Embree
1985, xxx). Each sector presented in the marginal halo presentationally implies
the marginal horizon as a more or less indefinite context for that sector.
The overall point about the margin for now is that the margin is a necessary
component of the sphere of attention, such that what is presented marginally is
irrelevant to the attentional theme and thematic context. Also, the margin is a
rich dimension in the sphere of attention, and as will be shown, is the “center” of
subjectivity which is not presented as center.
Figure 1. The sphere of attention. The three dimensions are theme, thematic context, and
margin. Each is deep, not flat, and each names a function or process involved in human
attending. Content in the thematic context can be more relevant (near) or less relevant
(remote) to the theme. Content in the margin can be related to the theme (halo) but not
relevant to it, or not related (horizon). The attending subject is the sphere of attention in
these three dimensions. The sphere of attention is not an object for a subject. We do not
have a sphere of attention, we live it in these three dimensions all the time, even in the
special case of reflection or self-attention.
clarify the relation between attention and consciousness. This book is not called
the sphere of consciousness because I take attention to be the significant factor
or central organizational feature of our conscious life. In other words, contextual
and marginal consciousness are so, only as associated with the attentional
theme. Therefore I claim that one can only define attention by taking account of
(contextual and marginal) consciousness, and one can only define consciousness
by taking account of attention. I believe that one could even construe contextual
and marginal consciousness as unique and highly constrained types of attention,
but this argument is difficult to make and musing about it here would cloud the
purpose of this present study (see Arvidson 2004). The approach I take
throughout affirms the almost universal definition of attention as that which is
presented as centrally focal, and allows me to speak most fruitfully to
psychologists, phenomenologists, and others about the rest of the sphere of
attention, which is the innovation of this book, namely, context and margin. In
sum, thematic consciousness just is focal attention, and is the active center of the
sphere of attention, the processing in the other two dimensions of this sphere of
attention are contextual and marginal consciousness.
Since psychologists and cognitive scientists (I will often use both terms in
order to be inclusive, but I will almost always mean both groups even if I say
only one of them) have the most to say about attention, it is appropriate to get an
initial feel for their views. This last section of this chapter does that through the
prism of problems of context.
By this we mean types which are distinguished from one another by virtue of
differences involving the organization principles which prevail in the several
types” (Gurwitsch 1964, 2–3). An analysis of the phenomenon of context in
attention research means throwing the laboratory doors open to more noteworthy
findings and wider applications.
The significance of attention research rises or tumbles on the back of the
problem of context and attention. Historically and in current scientific research,
“unattended stimuli” refers to stimuli that are somehow presented, “irrelevant
data” are often relevant, and “unselected areas of the field” are somehow
noticed. For Gurwitsch and today’s researchers, attention refers exclusively to
the achievement of the target, focus, or theme in the “field” of presentation. But
restricting the conclusions of attention research only to the theme creates the
dilemma of what to do about content outside the theme which is nonetheless
processed. If one understands that focal attention is the center of a three-
dimensional sphere of attention, each dimension with its own organizational
principle, then the content outside the theme is presented either contextually or
marginally. The full relevancy of attention research reveals itself when the
attentional life of a human being, and indeed, its very subjectivity, is
acknowledged to be a unified, dynamic, embodied processing in the world,
which can be seen phenomenologically and experimentally to organize itself in
these three distinct dimensions of a sphere of attention.
In a number of fascinating ways, attention researchers around the world are
struggling with context. This struggle with context is not new, as Jonathan
Crary’s (1999) study on perception and the history of attention research
indicates. It is seen in William James’ work, an author that historically-minded
psychologists studying attention appeal to quite often as the first word on
attention research (see Arvidson 1998), when he distinguishes the focus from the
margin, but also discusses fringes and transitive states. James claims that
attention is selective attention—a withdrawal from or ignoring of some data or
objects and a focusing on others (1983, 19). This claim anticipates the
distinction in much subsequent research between attended and unattended
information, so that one sees journal article titles such as “Detecting gaps with
and without attention” (Shalev and Tsal 2002) and “Differential attentional
guidance by unattended faces expressing positive and negative emotion”
(Eastwood, Smilek and Merikle 2001). The “unattended” frequently turns out to
be the context for the attended, other times it is marginal. Either way, within the
thesis of a three dimension sphere of attention, it is still presented. The context
and margin need more than a mere negative nod (the unattended). This new
Theme, Context, Margin 15
view of attention also helps replace vague terms introduced by James and still
currently used, such as “fringe” and “transitive states” (e.g., Baars, 2003).
Over the last several decades, attention researchers in psychology, in
particular in the cognitive sciences, have examined stimuli that are outside of the
focus of attention, that is, outside of the theme. And this examination is not
always about distractors. There is robust experimental activity concerning
facilitation effects, which is when stimuli occurring outside the focus speed up
the achievement of the target as focus. Early on these effects were called
“flanker effects,” and this term could mean either interfering with or facilitating
the target (Eriksen and Schultz 1979; Miller 1991). The stimulus occurring
outside the focus is active for the processing of the focus, has an effect on it, but
is always defined negatively, e.g., as “unselected,” “unattended,” or “irrelevant.”
The latter word shows the strange twists of locution that are often necessary
when context and margin are not recognized as such. For even though
contextual effects (the “flanker effect,” “facilitation effect,” etc.) are well
established (Arvidson 2003b), the conclusion often amounts to this: irrelevant
data were relevant.
In experimental paradigms, the success of the subject in attending is often
measured by how well the subject has ignored everything but the target or focus.
This means not only ignoring potentially interfering stimuli (i.e., marginal
content), but also ignoring relevant stimuli (i.e., contextual content). At least this
is considered “ignorance” from the experimenter’s point of view, since context
is often invisible in the tally from that view, even though it might be highly
significant for the subject’s achievement. Exceptions will be discussed in the
next chapter. Colin Cherry’s (1953) famous dichotic listening task experiment is
an early, easily repeatable finding that satisfies these expectations of contextual
ignorance. Cherry investigated something like the “cocktail party” phenomenon
of attending only to the relevant conversation in a noisy room. As analyzed and
interpreted, such experiments are about noise, not about relevant context.
Anything that is not designated by the experimenter as focal target, or that
interferes with the achievement of the focal target, is often still considered
“noise,” either explicitly (e.g., Hobson 1994, 176; Braver et al., 2001, 749) or
implicitly as a function of the experimental paradigm.
The key words of “context” and “scene” are used ambiguously in attention
research laboratories. Is the auditory scene everything left over after I have
aurally focused what is relevant, that is, the scene is irrelevant? Or is the scene
the relevant situation within which the theme is segregated as central? Caroline
Bey and Stephen McAdams (2002) tested subjects’ ability to extract an
16 The Sphere of Attention
because other experiments freely use the term to denote something more than
thematic attention.
In experiments that show that object recognition is mediated by extraretinal
information (i.e., as information in context and margin) Daniel Simons, Ranxiao
Wang, and David Roddenberry (2002, 529) note that in object recognition and
detection experiments the “real world” should be more like the real world:
“These studies of individual object recognition illustrate the importance of
considering the conditions under which object recognition naturally occurs.
Studies presenting objects in isolation on a computer display would be unlikely
to discover differences between viewpoint and orientation or effects of
background information. By looking at object recognition in a real-world
context, we can gain a better appreciation for the mechanisms underlying our
ability to recognize the same object from varying perspectives.” I agree. In their
pitch that advanced virtual reality techniques should be used to create virtual
environments for the measure of visual attention within scenes (especially “way-
finding”), Heinrich Bülthoff and Hendrik van Veen (2001, 233) note that “Real
world situations are so different from the stimuli used in classical psychophysics
and the context in which they are presented that applying laboratory results to
daily life situations often becomes impractical, if not impossible.” Their
solution, discussed in a later chapter, is to use virtual reality technology to
enhance the ecological validity of the stimulus, which includes accounting for
the variables of the scene in which thematic attention occurs, instead of
“zeroing-out” these variables.
In addition to “scene,” the use of “context” can be ambiguous, but often it is
not. For example, in examination of lexical processing, context is clearly used to
mean the relevant information for the theme. Presented with a suggestive partial
sentence and instruction to complete the sentence with the first word that comes
to mind, the subject will be more likely to supply one word than another—
“Mary parked her car in the ______.” Given the context, “garage” or “lot” are
more likely to be supplied than “lake.” Lexical processing researchers use the
close tie between lexical context and theme to investigate facilitation and
inhibition effects in attention and memory (Davies and Thomson 1988; Horton
and Mills 1984; Neely 1991), and even humor (Lippman, Sucharski, Bennington
2001).
In contrast, in a series of experiments that also involve attention, Elizabeth
Marsh, Gabriel Edelman, and Gordon Bower (2001) investigated “context
memory” to name what I would call marginal consciousness. The experimenters
varied the “context” to determine the effect of the source of memory generation
18 The Sphere of Attention
on the amount recalled. But the “contexts” varied were different rooms or
different computer screens. The experimenters instructed subjects under the
different conditions to recall where they had studied the words to be remem-
bered, and called this “context memory.” This is clearly a different sense of
context from the lexical processing experiments. It does not ask for information
relevant to the studying of the word, which may or may not have been the
spatio-temporal environment, but information relevant to the current instruction
of the experimenter. So does “context” refer to what was relevant in studying or
what is relevant in recall? It is unlikely that the room was relevant to the word
studied at that time. It is also not relevant to the recall, since it is the theme to be
achieved (the target) in the recall. “Context memory” as used by these
researchers can only mean a memory for what was irrelevant in the studying
situation. This is a very different sense of context from that used by many
lexical processing researchers (e.g., Jordan and Thomas 2002).
A way to try to account for context without calling it that is to bifurcate the
sphere of attention into that which is focally selected on the one hand, and hence
thematic, and general “awareness” or “arousal” on the other. Neuroscientific
examinations of attention processes have long used this distinction and continue
to do so (e.g., Cohen 1993; Coull 1998). The distinction is useful in some
paradigms of attention research because the onset of a change in awareness can
be measured physiologically (Kanwisher 2001). This is one reason why the
orienting in attention is heavily researched by neuroscientists, since it forms a
nexus for brain and cognition (Posner 1995, 617). The terms arousal and
awareness, however, are vague and do not capture the function and importance
of thematic context and margin, or the distinction between them. Some have
tried to make distinctions in “awareness” so that it can be operationally defined
and treated more precisely (Koch and Crick 1994, 108). But I would argue that
what is needed is the delineation of organizational principles comprising context
and margin set forth by Gurwitsch and advanced here, as long as the processing
in each dimension is precisely defined.
Unfortunately, the spotlight metaphor of attention has been influential in
guiding research and is still around. It is unfortunate because if attention is like a
spotlight, then attentional context is doubly dimmed. First, because the spotlight
metaphor only divides the sphere of attention into that which is illuminated (the
target or theme) and that which is not. Second, there is no way to meaningfully
account for presented context by using the spotlight metaphor of attention.
Gurwitsch thoroughly critiqued it in 1929 (1966, 202, 205), and others have
followed (e.g., LaBerge 1995; Arvidson 1996). Still, its long history in
Theme, Context, Margin 19
psychology and philosophy up to the present means that the spotlight metaphor
is a broadly based assumption (see e.g., Pinker 2002). This history includes
Husserl (1982, §92), Posner (1980), Treisman and Gelade (1980), Baars (1997),
Ohman, Flykt, and Esteves (2001), Müller and Hübner (2002), and others. The
spotlight metaphor allows only on/off, illuminated/unilluminated. This one-
dimensional interpretation of the sphere of attention as either focal attention or
marginal “non-attention” squeezes out the phenomenon of context. As an object
of research, attention becomes irrelevant to human life under the light of this
metaphor. Not only is context denied a place in attentional processing but it
becomes impossible to account for the general richness of attention processes,
such as transformations in attending. Following Gurwitsch, I believe that
attention is more about the content of what is attended to, its organization and
transformation of organization, than about the on/off illumination of a target
area (Gurwitsch 1966, 222; Arvidson 2000).
Perhaps realizing the problems of context, some researchers (e.g., Mangun
and Hillyard 1988) tried to account for context but keep the spotlight metaphor.
By postulating a gradient in attention, the co-presented stimuli which constitute
the context for the theme or focus are illuminated less brightly than the focus.
This sort of gradient in the “field” of attention corresponds well also with a
zoom-lens model of attention (Eriksen and St. James 1986), which is still being
used (e.g., Pasto and Burack 2002). Yet the dimensional difference between
thematic attention and its context is not demarcated by a gradient. There is
certainly a gradient in the sphere of attention within each dimension. For
example there is this sort of relation of emphasis between formative and formed
constituents of the theme, and between contents in the thematic context that are
nearer to the theme and those that are more remote, and the same with the
margin. But these are intra-dimensional, and a gradient is not sufficient to
account for inter-dimensional differences, like that between theme and thematic
context (Arvidson 1992b).
Attention research often utilizes cues to prime the subject in some way, and
cues imply context. The classic use of cues is seen in Posner’s (1980) research
on cuing and covert attention (see Arvidson 2003b). In this case it was found
that cuing a spatial location, e.g., on a monitor screen where a target was
expected to appear, facilitated focal attention to the target even though the cue
itself was “covertly” processed, meaning the subject did not turn their eyes
toward it. The cue is not thought to be attended in the proper sense, yet it affects
attention to the target. Writing in 1965, philosopher Errol Harris (1993, 407–
408) had some wonderful observations about the status of cues: “To speak of a
20 The Sphere of Attention
cue is to imply an activity of referring beyond the cue as presented. The word,
therefore, has epistemological implications….In other words, they cannot func-
tion unless they are interpreted; and that can occur only if they somehow
become features of an awareness within which they can be systematically
interrelated. On the physical or merely physiological level they can serve as
cues, but only if apprehended in some epistemological process of referring,
comparing, hypothesizing, and judging.” The point is that when the target is
achieved it is achieved within the context of the cue which preceded it. As we
will see, the temporal context of attention has recently become a more popular
area of attention research, so that perhaps a “cue” can be better recognized as a
constituent of the context for the targeted theme.
In sum, context is a problem in attention research today, and an expanded
definition of attention, namely as a sphere of attention, can help bring context
into phenomenological, theoretical, and experimental focus.
Chapter Two
21
22 The Sphere of Attention
keep the distracting, irrelevant information at bay, the subject must be presented
with this distracting information at some point, namely, as irrelevant. The better
the subject can distinguish what is thematic and contextual in the sphere of
attention, from what is marginal, the better the subject will achieve or maintain
the target (the theme). The point is that a more positive and direct description of
the presence of these distractors for the subject is that these distractors are
presented marginally (cf. Gurwitsch 1964, 282–283; 1966, 272).
For example, in a series of experiments, John Eastwood, Daniel Smilek, and
Philip Merikle (2001 and 2003) report that the emotional expression of a face
can be perceived outside the focus of attention but nonetheless affect focal
attention. The authors (2003) found that subjects were slower to count the
features of faces, if those features were embedded in negative emotional faces
rather than positive or neutral ones. The task was to count the features. The
global face, and whether it is emotionally positive, negative, or neutral, was
task-irrelevant. The point is that the subject must struggle to keep the negative
emotional face from capturing focal attention. As in countless other experiments
that measure interference effects or that use distractors, this struggle is between
thematic attention and its margin. The content is presented in the way that is
appropriate to the margin, namely, as co-present but irrelevant to the theme, and
in the appropriate trials as distracting or interfering. The reason for interference
is that each content, for example, the nose and the negative face, is
discontinuous with the other with respect to experimenter instructions (Arvidson
2003b). The task was to single out or serially attend to the feature, and not to
allow them to be synthesized as constituents of a whole face. As long as the face
as a whole is kept marginal, or to the extent that marginal consciousness is
successful in keeping task-irrelevant information irrelevant, then performance
success will improve.
The margin, like the thematic context, presents gestalts as potential themes
(Gurwitsch 1964, 370–371). The difference is that in the margin, the potential
themes are not materially relevant to the current theme. The gestalt-connection
of unity by relevancy does not obtain between the marginally presented potential
theme and the current theme in focal attention. For example, when the subject is
on-task the face is a potential theme irrelevant to the current theme singled out
as feature, say the nose. The thematic context (that is, the context of the current
theme) presents potential themes that are relevant to the current theme. In this
case, for instance, the next feature to be singled out and counted according to
task instructions, for example an eye, may already be contextually presented and
thus presented as relevant to the currently thematic feature, unlike the face.
Empirical Evidence 23
Joordens and Stolz. 1995; Newman 1997; cf. Snodgrass 2002; Jiang and Chun
2003). But this brings us back to the term “consciousness” as what is negated in
“unconsciousness,” and both terms as they are usually defined are notoriously
vague.
Max Velmans (1995, 257) suggests that consciousness is the late product in
attention processing, and marshals cases of blindsight as evidence. If one can
know but not know an object at the same time, as in the phenomenon of
blindsight, then this shows a difference between attention (knowing) and
“consciousness” (not knowing). But a better explanation is that in addition to
focal attention there is marginal consciousness. In the latter, one is present to
something as irrelevant, and so “does not know it” focally, but nonetheless
“knows it” marginally. What Velmans describes as inhibition is more positively
described as marginal consciousness. When consciousness is defined as
contextual and marginal in relation to focal attention, all within a sphere of
attention, then much of the vagueness of the term “consciousness” dissipates,
and it is operationally defined more easily. Although I will not argue for it in
this work, it is my opinion that the other processes mentioned (e.g., imagination
and cognition) have the sphere of attention as their functional foundation or
spine. In any event, none of these other terms or concepts has more to
recommend it than a precise distinction between thematic attention and marginal
consciousness. The virtue of calling this co-presented content marginal
consciousness, within the perspective of a sphere of attention, is that this phrase
preserves and expresses the fact that this processing is intimately connected with
thematic attending: it presents content simultaneous with the theme though
irrelevant to this content, and often in dynamic tension with the theme.
Even though this marginal dimension is assumed to exist in attention
experiments, and is critical to existing methodology, and is even implicitly
codified (as task-irrelevant processing), it should not be confused with the way
that focal attention works. In many kinds of experiments, subjects are typically
instructed to ignore a potential distractor on a computer screen. The
experimenter measures reaction time to the target and how well the subject
presents the distractor as irrelevant. Usually the interpretation is that the subject
paid no attention to the distractor, although it may have affected attention, for
example, it may have taxed focal attentional capacity (Arvidson 2003b). But in
measures of vigilance and interference effects, often the point is that the subjects
have to constantly make this distractor content irrelevant to the target. The
measure of success or failure on the part of the subject to keep the experimenter-
directed content distinguished in each of these dimensions in the sphere of
26 The Sphere of Attention
attention (in the way appropriate to each) is called “reaction time,” and more
specifically, an “interference effect.” This tension between the theme and
margin most clearly reveals two distinct dimensions in the sphere of attention.
This difference between theme and margin is at least implicitly codified as an
essential part of the processing that occurs and is measured in many standard
cognitive science experiments on attention (Arvidson 2004).
Memory and attention are often found together in theorizing and laboratory
research, and memory researchers assume a distinction between what is
marginal and thematic as well. The same study can test both attention and
memory bringing them together in an experimental paradigm and theoretical
discussion. For example, a series of experiments may manipulate attention by
facilitation or interference in order to arrive at conclusions about memory (e.g.,
Kane et al., 2001; Rockstroh and Schweizer 2001; Kinoshita and Towgood
2001; Olson and Chun 2001; McElree 2001; Dean, Bub, and Masson 2001;
Marks and Dulaney 2001; Troyer and Craik 2000). The connection between
memory and attention is mostly made in memory research, since memory is
defined in a way that includes attention. As Robert Kail and Lynda Hall (2001,
1) note, “WM = STM + attention,” working memory equals short term memory
plus attention. The function of short term memory seems to be contextual (Kail
and Hall 2001), so I will leave that discussion for the next section. The rest of
memory (presumably “long term memory,” Cowan 1995) is marginal in
attending since it presents what is irrelevant. As noted above, some experiments
try to examine the recall for the irrelevant environment within which learning
occurred. Unfortunately, following Alan Baddeley (1982), they call this content
irrelevant to the learning a “context” (e.g., Marsh et al., 2001; Troyer and Craik
2000). This larger portion of memory falling outside of the theme and irrelevant
to it indicates marginal consciousness at the original time of processing. In other
words, research on memory and attention assumes the marginal dimension in the
sphere of attention, or else there could be no probing for recall of irrelevant
content processed at the time of “encoding.”
Attempts by Ronald Rensink, Kevin O’Regan, and James Clark (1997) to
distinguish central-interest aspects of a scene from marginal-interest aspects are
not yet well-developed but could be heading in the right direction. For example,
although O’Regan (2001) discusses the “special role” for scene layout in
attending, he is not quite sure what to do with it. The phenomenon of attending
to scene layout could be either contextual or marginal consciousness and will be
discussed more in the next section, but his tentative approach is not surprising
given the perceived need to keep attention research confined to the focus. But
Empirical Evidence 27
even the sense of what the focus is can blur without a proper gestalt-
phenomenological perspective. In criticizing object-based attention theorists
such as Zenon Pylyshyn, O’Regan (2001, 284) notes that “Despite the literature
on this topic however, the term ‘object’ seems unsatisfactory: Presumably an
observer can, for example, attend to the sky (which is not really an object), or to
a particular aspect of a scene (say, its symmetry or darkness) without encoding
in detail all the attributes that compose it. Awaiting further clarification on this,
it seems safer to suppose that attention can be directed to scene “aspects” rather
than ‘objects’.” If one defines the focus of attention in gestalt terms, as a theme
organized by gestalt-coherence whose constituents have functional significance
for each other, and which may be partial, dim, diffuse, or dynamic and so is not
necessarily well-formed but tending towards it, then there is no problem
between ‘object’ and ‘aspect.’ It is a theme if it is a gestalt presented as central
in this way within a thematic context. A promising notion from this group of
researchers is Rensink’s (2000, 2001) “coherence theory” of focused attention.
His theory seems to include something a lot like gestalt-coherence of the theme,
but is tied too exclusively to visual attention, and the concept of “proto-object”
is interminably vague. In addition, Rensink acknowledges the marginal
dimension only in the traditional way by sticking to the attentional vs. non-
attentional language.
Although it is rare to find a positive description of the marginal dimension
in the sphere of attention, especially by a noted attention researcher, consider the
following. “We eat with knife and fork automatically while we attend closely to
an ongoing conversation; we perceive printed words on the page automatically
while our attention is focused on following the story told by the words. But
clearly there is attentional selection involved in using the knife and fork and in
perceiving the series of words along a line of print on the page” (LaBerge 2002,
223). My way of saying it is that there is a marginal dimension in the sphere of
attention in addition to thematic attention. The further point made here is that
marginal consciousness is not just about interference but is also about
maintenance. When Eastwood, Smilek and Merikle (2003) find that upside
down faces or faces with extremely schematic features do not affect selection of
features, unlike the right side up clearly negative face, this is still marginal
consciousness, even though it is not about interference.
Note that the difference between the halo and the horizon within the
marginal dimension itself in the sphere of attention is a fine area for research.
For example, what are the limits or capacities of the halo, and how is it
distinguished in marginal consciousness from the horizon? I say more about the
28 The Sphere of Attention
marginal halo and psychology in the last section. Also, that there are just three
ever-present orders of existence in marginal consciousness—streaming in
attending, embodied existence, and environing world—is controversial. Alfred
Schutz, for one, suggests others (Grathoff 1989, 159; Embree 1985, xxxvi).
Experiments might be constructed to affirm or deny permanent marginal
consciousness in these three orders, examine their nature and limitations, or to
see if there are others.
“contextual cuing” and mean relevant co-presented content rather than a cuing
effected by “irrelevant information” or “unattended stimuli” (both of which
would be marginal). Still they are looking for cognitive mechanisms involved in
contextual cuing, and so are just as uninterested in establishing the thematic
context as a distinct dimension in the sphere of attention as any other experi-
ment. Hence in defining the mechanisms for contextual cuing, one of the com-
ponents they operationally define is recognition, and they miss the importance of
what they say. “Recognition entails the identification of the current context of
the scene and matching this information with previously stored instances of the
familiar context” (Peterson and Kramer 2001, 1239–1240, emphasis added).
Without stating it this way, these authors claim that the subject is conscious of
the scene contextually, which means that this content is organized in unity by
relevancy for the theme. Of course, the authors found that “recognition”
involved relevance for the achievement of the target, “That is, when recognition
occurred, the eyes were guided directly to the target; otherwise, the eyes went to
another item in the display, with no bias toward the target.” (p. 1249). Thematic
attention is always accompanied by contextual consciousness—a target or theme
is always presented within a thematic context (Gurwitsch 1966, 203). Peterson
and Kramer implicitly use the concept of the context in the sphere of attention,
and even attempt to operationally define contextual consciousness (as
“recognition”), but miss the more significant possibilities of their results.
Namely, in addition to the necessary gestalt-connection of relevancy of the
thematic context for the theme, they miss the fact that thematic context is
another dimension in the sphere of attention, distinct in shape and function from
the theme.
Experiments that describe as “unattended” the information “processed”
outside of the focus but clearly affecting the focus give a stark picture of how
entrenched the definition of the term “attention” is in psychology, so that it can
be taken to refer to nothing more than what is thematic, and thereby often
divorced from context and margin. These experiments also give an indication of
how far the theoretical framework for interpreting results must evolve to open
up to the phenomena of attention. As noted above, Eastwood, Smilek and
Merikle (2001) found that attention to the emotion of a face can guide focal
attention, a kind of cuing, even though that emotion was not presented in focal
attention. The authors (p. 1004) state that “The results suggest that the emotional
expression in a face can be perceived outside the focus of attention and can
guide focal attention to the location of the face.” Following protocol, the authors
refer to this “outside the focus” information, which is nonetheless processed, as
30 The Sphere of Attention
“unattended” (p. 1012). The contextual consciousness of the emotion of the face
guided achievement of the target face, while the target face did not have that
emotion. But in the journal Perception and Psychophysics where this article
appeared, one would not see this term I have just now used, namely, contextual
consciousness, even though it exactly and positively describes the results of
these experiments. The published title of their study is “Differential attentional
guidance by unattended faces expressing positive and negative emotion.” In my
view, the title should read “Differential thematic attentional guidance by faces
expressing positive and negative emotion in the context.”
As seen in the previous section, one way current research establishes and
investigates the nature of the thematic context is by conceptualizing the context
in terms of something already familiar to any attention researcher—cues. Posner
(1980) found that spatial cues could affect the response rate of achieving a
targeted theme, so that the area where the target was to appear was highlighted
and achievement was facilitated. Another way to establish a distinction between
the theme and thematic context is to present the subject with a stream of visual
images that create a certain expectation for the appearance of the target (theme).
The stream of images implicitly becomes the thematic context for this theme,
and the subject is deemed to have changed behavior (“learned”) if the
achievement of the targeted theme is facilitated. This “learning” is then
attributed to some “recognition” of regularity in the stream of distractors
presented, such as rhythm, or as I would say, it is attributed to contextual
consciousness. This experimental paradigm of temporal contextual cuing (Olson
and Chun 2001) is promising since it forces the researcher to consider the effect
of non-focal, contextually relevant information on the target. But Jiang and
Chun (2003, 278) define the term “contextual” in the cuing experiments as a
kind of learning rather than at first as a kind of contextual consciousness, and in
a way that does not properly distinguish between margin and context:
“Contextual refers to the impact of other information, typically co-occurring
items, on the processing of the target.”
Ralph Barnes and Mari Jones (2000) distinguish Posner’s traditional cuing
from a “pattern-based” expectancy, another kind of “cue” which they correctly
call a kind of “local context.” “Pattern-based approaches to expectancy go
beyond local cues and first-order conditional probabilities to view contextual
information in terms of relationships among features or elements” (Barnes and
Jones 2000, 257). Yes, if ‘features or elements’ can be taken to unambiguously
refer to more or less well-formed gestalt content outside the theme or focus,
rather than to formative constituents of the theme. Barnes and Jones (2000, 267)
Empirical Evidence 31
state that they are examining the influence of “serial context” on time
judgments. When the target is achieved it is achieved relevant to a particular
context which the experimenters control. So without trumpeting the radical
break from the usual narrowness of the definition of attention, this sort of
research shows at least that there is a contextual dimension outside the focus in
attending. Like the Peterson and Kramer (2001) research discussed above, this
set of experiments is designed to reveal the dynamic nature of attention. By
definition, therefore, more must be considered than just the focus of attention.
According to Barnes and Jones (2000, 261), “[These dynamic attending models]
place greater emphasis on stimulus-time relationships as determinants of real
time attending and expectancies. Thus, moment-to-moment attending to events
such as speech and music is controlled, in part, by their relational properties,
e.g., rate and rhythm.” That “rate and rhythm” are easily measurable contributes
to their use here as examples. But there are surely more “relational properties” to
any given thematic moment in speech or music. In any event, the “relational
properties” of content surrounding the theme, rightly understood, is the meaning
of thematic context, and so these researchers are essentially on their way to
investigating this second dimension in the sphere of attention without calling it
that.
Research analyzing and interpreting how subjects process a global scene
within which a target is attended yields promising results. This area is relatively
underdeveloped since it clearly aims to discuss scene context, and this is a new
dimension in relation to the target or theme. Following the usual program, these
experiments are looking for facilitation effects or inhibition effects. Facilitation
effects, such as semantic priming, show that the context speeds up achievement
of the target, while inhibition effects show the opposite (Arvidson 2003b). For
example, Katherine Mathis (2002) examined the effects of scene context on
semantic processing of the target and found that whether the object fit with the
background affected word-categorization performance. Such a “fit” can only be
determined through consciousness of the background as background. The
theoretical controversy in this research on context effects concerns whether and
how a scene context affects “object perception.” As Hollingworth and
Henderson (1998. 398) put it, “How is the identification of a visual object
affected by the meaning of the real-world scene in which that object appears?”
Although the “real-world scene” they use in their experiments is a line-drawing
of a barnyard, manipulated with pre- or post-presented labels of missing or
incongruent items (e.g., a mixer instead of a chicken), the point is that the
question of context in the sphere of attention is being asked.
32 The Sphere of Attention
unattended child who responds to strangers at a shopping mall the same way she
has been encouraged to interact with strangers in her home, or the snake-phobic
college student who cannot open a biology textbook for fear of encountering
pictures or descriptions of snakes.” It should be noted that Dougher and
colleagues did not experiment with such real-world phenomena, but instead
trained subjects using computer tasks, operationally defining context as the
background color of the computer monitor.
In a novel examination of what I would call context in the sphere of
attention, Christopher Roney and Lana Trick (2003) found that the gambler’s
fallacy is affected by the context of the event. “The gambler’s fallacy is the
tendency to see a given outcome as less likely if it has just repeatedly occurred,
in this case, leading to the choice of tails following three heads. It is a fallacy to
the extent that the person’s expectancy deviates from the true probability of
getting heads in a coin toss (50%)” (Roney and Trick 2003, 69). Their
examination is novel because they explicitly manipulate the thematic context by
grouping the event of the coin toss within controlled contexts. The critical trial
followed upon three tosses that had the same outcome (e.g., three “heads” or
three “tails”), but this trial was either at the end of a block or the beginning of a
new one. This context replacement affects the character, perspective, or
orientation of the event, and in my view is direct acknowledgement of both
theme and context in a sphere of attention. The next coin toss was attended to as
the last of a series, or the first of a new series. This is the difference between
continuing to gamble or (deciding on) starting to gamble, a possibly decisive
difference in moderating gambling addiction. The grouping of the critical event
(the next coin toss) as last in one context or first in another indicates a unity by
relevancy between the theme and thematic context. In other words, the next toss
is either the last of a series, or the first of a new one, simply as a function of this
context replacement. The coin toss event was thematic, the trial block was
presented as relevant to the theme, i.e., it was the contextual in the sphere of
attention.
A similar though more explicit example of applying context in
experimentation comes from work on aesthetic judgment. Examining rectangle
proportion preference, Philip Russell (2000) presented triangles to be judged in
no-context and context conditions. What concerns us here are not the results but
the assumptions about context. As part of the procedure, Russell implemented
“two context conditions” (p. 35) as participants viewed a rectangular shape. He
instructed participants to imagine that they were making a judgment about a
rectangular painting, or in another condition, about a rectangular ceramic
Empirical Evidence 35
food item will be facilitated within the context of a search for whatever might
present itself as edible. Contextual consciousness is consciousness of “that
which is relevant to what is edible” and thematic attention is attending to “that
which is edible.” This describes the “attention control setting” and the target as
two dimensions in the sphere of attention. The edible item may not actually be
presented (it may be presented as an absence, such that when it is finally
presented attention is captured) or it may be initially presented as edible and turn
out not to be (a “mushroom” that is really a rock). The point here is that the
presentation of the relevant context for whatever might present itself as edible—
an “attention control setting”—is a function of context in the sphere of attention.
Other researchers (e.g., Folk, Remington and Johnston 1992) also use the
phrase “attentional control settings” to refer to preparatory or co-present
emotional or attitudinal orientations that affect or frame focal attention. Pitting
this work against the work of Steven Yantis (e.g., Yantis 1993), Bradley Gibson
and Erin Kelsey (1998) examine the issue of whether an attentional set is needed
for attention capture or whether attention capture can be purely stimulus-driven
(this latter is Yantis’ view). At issue is whether one needs context for thematic
attention. Gibson and Kelsey used color and/or stimulus onset to vary the
conditions signaling the subject that a task-relevant target display was to appear.
The experiment found that this goal-directedness of the subject toward the task-
relevant display, this attentional set or readiness, could not be separated from the
stimulus that captured attention. In other words, “In summary, on the basis of
our research…we conclude that all known instances of attentional capture are
contingent on attentional set and thus ultimately on goal-directed attentional
control processes” (Gibson and Kelsey 1998). This result is predicted by a three
dimension sphere of attention, since one can not have thematic attention without
context, just as one cannot have figure without background, and since marginal
(task-irrelevant) items are also presented.
The popular experimental topic of semantic priming often refers to
contextual consciousness as “activation of the semantic system.” Marilyn Smith,
Shlomo Bentin, and Thomas Spalek (2001, 1289) define semantic priming as
“the facilitated processing of a target word when it is preceded by a related
prime word.” Notice the assumption of gestalt-connection between the theme
and the thematic context, so that there is a contextual or categorial relevance
between the two dimensions of contents. The transformation in the sphere of
attention here is serial-shifting, and since in serial-shifting the same thematic
context endures, the transformation is facilitated (Gurwitsch 1966, 231–232;
Barnes and Jones 2000; Olson and Chun 2001; Chelazzi 1999). Also, these
Empirical Evidence 37
researchers investigate synthesis and singling out. For example, one can attend
to the word level or single out a letter in a word. This singling out involves a
radical change in the presentation of the theme and its relation with the thematic
context. If the task directs attention to the letter level, the context is no longer
relevant and semantic priming is reduced or eliminated (Arvidson 2003b; Smith,
Benton and Spalek 2001). Contextual consciousness has not disappeared, but a
new relevance (a new context) is co-presented with the new theme (Arvidson
1992a). The previous thematic relevance which involved semantic content is
now irrelevant, and so semantic priming is diminished. This robust area of
experimentation implicitly assumes contextual consciousness and is
investigating transformations in attending between the theme and context in the
sphere of attention described in the next chapter.
Investigating vision and attention, Rensink (2001) argues that there are two
“non-attentional setting systems” that use low-level visual information, one to
obtain the “gist” of the scene, and the other to obtain the spatial layout of the
objects in the scene. This setting does not essentially involve focused attention,
but operates with it to help guide it. Together, focused attention and these setting
systems form a “virtual representation” that provides context for the focus.
Rensink (2001, 185) writes, “In regards to the involvement of attention in scene
perception, change-blindness studies show that we do not build up a detailed
picture-like representation of the scene; rather attention provides a coherent
representation of only one object at a time. To account for the fact that we
subjectively experience a large number of coherent objects simultaneously, it is
suggested that scene perception involves a virtual representation which provides
a limited amount of detailed, coherent structure whenever required, making it
seem as if all the detailed, coherent structure is present simultaneously.” Again,
discussion of the dynamic nature of attending forces the researcher to look
outside of the focus in attending for its setting or context. Rensink consistently
uses the “non-attention” or “scene perception” language, as expected, for what I
would call context. But the attempt to account for the change in change-
blindness brings exploration of attentional “setting” in attention research, even if
it is not adequately formulated yet as a distinctive contextual dimension in the
sphere of attention.
Daniel Simons and Stephen Mitroff (2001) also investigate vision, change-
blindness, and attention capture, and propose the distinction between
“intentional” and “incidental” experimental approaches. The difference is one of
expectation. In the intentional approach, the subject expects the change in the
content of the theme. In the incidental approach, the change is unexpected.
38 The Sphere of Attention
Positional Index
A main function of the thematic context is to confer upon the theme a
positional index. Therefore if current research implicitly indicates the contextual
dimension in the sphere attention, there should be some evidence that it is
discussing positional index. The rest of this section will be devoted to sampling
that evidence.
The gestalt-connection of unity by relevancy between the theme and its
context is heavily researched in paradigms that highlight facilitation effects,
42 The Sphere of Attention
such as relatedness effects and semantic priming, and also how these effects are
impeded. As shown above, acknowledging context as part of the sphere of
attention helps clarify the theoretical framework for these experiments. But
research has also attempted to operationally define what Gurwitsch (1964, 358)
calls the positional index. “Understood in the broader sense, the positional index
denotes whatever perspective, orientation, or characterization the thematic field
bestows upon the theme” (Gurwitsch 1964, 362). For a simple example, in
experiments on temporal contextual effects, the targeted theme is attended to as
an event in a series of events, and has a unique and distinct position within that
context. These characteristics of the theme belong to the theme as a mode of
how it is attended, but they are conferred upon the theme by the context within
which it appears. “For instance, when dwelling upon a certain event in a series
of events, the event we choose as our theme may not only point and refer in a
general way to preceding events in whose light it appears but also be
experienced as developing from, continuing or complementing, the preceding
events. This event may also appear as requiring further development and
complementation” (Gurwitsch 1964, 361). Operationally defining positional
index and its modifications could lead to articulating major aspects of the
contextual dimension and of the theme-context relation. This investigation
would advance beyond the mere fact of context effects, namely, that certain
contextual content speeds up or slows down response time of achievement in
thematic attention. It would examine the physiognomy of the theme within the
thematic context, how it is presented in its context. The challenge is how to
operationally define the “perspective, orientation, or characterization the
thematic field bestows upon the theme.”
Hypotheses in the serially ordered recall paradigm fit well within what
Gurwitsch describes as positional index. For example, OSCAR (OSCillator-
based Associative Recall) represents an attempt by Gordon Brown et al. (1999)
to model the development of memory for serial order emphasizing temporal
contextual distinctiveness. The authors analogously compare short term memory
encoding (i.e., contextual consciousness) to a clock face. “An association
between the first list item and the state of the clock face at 2 o’clock is formed,
creating the first item-to-context association. By the time the second list item is
presented, the oscillators (the hands on the clock) will have moved on, to (say)
2:05. The second item-to-context association can then be formed, linking the
second list item to the state of the clock face at 2:05” (Brown et al., 1999, 391).
According to the authors, the set of one, two, three, etc. item-to-context
associations is a representationally stored sequence that can be reconstructed in
Empirical Evidence 43
behavior and lexical processing (e.g., Rawson and Kintsch 2002; Kambe,
Rayner and Duffy 2001), and in other areas. It appears that positional index can
be in part a function of contextual (non-marginal) vestibular and proprioceptive
information. Simons, Wang, and Roddenberry (2002, 521) found that object
recognition is not properly or fully investigated by holding the subject stationary
and rotating the display, as happens in almost every other study of this kind. In
their experiments, they had subjects actually move to change viewpoints, and
this movement contributed to how the theme presented itself within the thematic
context, a change in perspective of the theme in the context (cf. Gallagher 1995).
Hollingworth and Henderson (2002) indicate what Gurwitsch would call
positional index when they describe consciousness of scenes and memory. They
hypothesize that in “scene perception” abstracted representations are spatially
indexed so that an “object file” is formed, which involves visual short term
memory and conceptual short term memory. This information is then indexed in
a long term memory object file. Noting again the caveats mentioned above about
the ambiguity of “scene” and “context” in these experiments, one can easily see
how the position of the theme in the thematic context, orientation, perspective
and characterization of the theme is the topic of these experiments and
hypotheses.
The organizational principle of relevancy not only connects the thematic
context with the theme, but it also unifies content within the thematic context
itself. For example, in the garden the wandering, sniffing dog may be the theme
while the garden setting is presented as the relevant environment for this theme.
But the items in the garden are (non-centralized) gestalts that “hang together” in
relevancy with each other for the theme. Further research, perhaps along the
lines of Pylyshyn and associates, might investigate the nature and limits of this
intra-dimensional connection, in the same way that the intra-dimensional
connection of functional significance among constituents of the theme has been
investigated (Gurwitsch 1964, 1966). Perhaps the items nearer to the theme,
meaning more clearly or more intensely relevant to it, have a “tighter” or more
compacted organizational unity than those items in more “remote zones” from
the theme. The results might be interpreted in light of improving thematic
attention to past events or activities (remembering), so that strategies for
increasing relevance of current events yield better attention to these events once
they are temporally past. Another possibility is interpreting results in light of
depression or attention deficit disorders or other maladies that may respond
positively to the directed enhancement of contextualization for thematic
46 The Sphere of Attention
attention. For example, as noted above, Watkins, Teasdale and Williams (2003)
manipulated context to determine the effect on how sad moods are maintained.
Examining current experimental paradigms, the preceding has shown how
thematic context is already established as another dimension in the sphere of
attention, in addition to the theme and margin, if one looks at the results within a
gestalt-phenomenological framework.
stream of “distractors” (as context) for attention to the target theme. That is, the
subject was likely to form a temporal context (as anticipation) for the direction
in attention to a particular point in time or a particular location for target
achievement. Beyond the possibility of interpreting these results as establishing
two distinct dimensions in the sphere of attention, theme and thematic context,
this particular experiment is fascinating because the marginal dimension in
attending is also part of the experimental paradigm since the stream of images
presented distractors, content irrelevant to the theme. In other words, subjects
were asked to process information in the three dimensions of the sphere of
attention at once, which always happens anyway, but in this experiment the
dimensions were all part of the paradigm. The thematic context in which targets
appeared was (eventually) presented as relevant to the target; exactly what is
meant by “contextual consciousness.” Beyond the initial theoretical framework
of interpreting results in three dimensions rather than just one, each dimension
can be further defined and refined. In this case, Olson and Chun affirm an
important observation Gurwitsch makes about the thematic context. They report
that part of the temporal sequence that was closer to the target was more salient
and provided greater cuing than parts at the beginning of the sequence, although
it does not provide all the cuing (p. 1309). This accords with Gurwitsch’s
observation that the thematic context often features some gradation or difference
within the content of the context with respect to the theme, depending on the
nearness or remoteness of the content from the theme. That is, the content
closest to the theme in terms of relevancy is more intensely related to it than that
which is farther away or is only implied by pointing references (Gurwitsch
1964, 338, 353, 379; 1966, 205).
A recent report by Michael Kane et al. (2001) in the Journal of
Experimental Psychology again shows how one set of experiments can establish
the three dimensions in the sphere of attention when the results are viewed
through an adjusted lens. These authors examine how working memory is
related to attentional control. In attention research, working memory is
important because it is a convenient way for researchers to describe the active
maintenance of information outside the focus of attention. This sounds like
contextual consciousness (and perhaps marginal consciousness), and it is. Kane
et al. claim that working memory capacity is a function of “controlled attention”
(see also, e.g., Rockstroh and Schweizer 2001; and McElree 2001). This
intriguing statement shows that the function of attention has superceded the
limits of achievement of the target or theme, since “controlled attention” is also
responsible for distinguishing relevancy and irrelevancy with respect to the
50 The Sphere of Attention
Dougher et al., 2002). Braver et al. mean for the model to represent the possible
processing control of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. What is interesting here
is the way that what I would call halo is thought to function. They identify three
main features of the model (p. 749). First, there is “a strong recurrent
connectivity” in the context so that information can be actively maintained. This
means that there is contextual consciousness of gestalts that are associated in
unity by relevancy with each other, but also with the theme. And this latter is the
second main feature of the model—“a feedback connection to the direct
pathway….which can modulate the flow of processing within the direct
pathway.” This aspect of the gestalt-connection between the theme and thematic
context is the maintenance of the relevancy between them, what Braver et al.
call a “biasing action” since other possible themes are inhibited from focal
attention, depending upon the strength of this connection. Third, presumably at
the other end of the contextual associations, there is a “gating mechanism” that
regulates noise or other irrelevant inputs, thereby “protecting” contextual
relevancy for the theme. To put it more in gestalt-phenomenological terms of the
sphere of attention, marginal items are co-presented as irrelevant from the
perspective of the marginal halo. The reader will recall that the halo is the in-
between, the locus of non-central, pre-reflective subjectivity (this will be
discussed more in Chapter Five). It is in-between the context as the dimension of
relevancy and the margin as irrelevancy, and related to both. The halo facing in,
so to speak, is the second feature described in Braver et al.’s model, where the
content break with relevancy biases the maintenance of the theme. The halo
facing out is the third feature described, where irrelevant content is distinguished
from what is related to the theme, but not relevant to it. In other words, these
authors are describing the following functions in the sphere of attention: the
gestalt-connection of unity by relevancy among items in the thematic context,
and between the theme and the thematic context, and the connection of
irrelevance between the margin on the one hand, and the theme and its thematic
context on the other. The connection of irrelevance implies some middle
process, which I would call the halo, which for these authors is a gating
mechanism. But given the role of the halo in subjectivity as discussed later, this
“gating mechanism” stipulation is too prosaic.
Klaus Oberauer (2002) offers another three part model of cognitive
processing, especially referring to working memory. His intention is to explain
the limited capacity of focal attention and accessibility to information outside
the focus. Oberauer proposes that working memory is a concentric structure of
representations with three functionally distinct regions. I will not attempt here to
Empirical Evidence 53
square this proposal with what we have already said about memory research and
attention, or to explain it in detail in terms of the sphere of attention. However, it
is worth noting that one would not have to embellish too much to start to see the
way that the three domains of irrelevancy, relevancy, and central focus are
indicated in this proposal. With some work his three regions might be
coordinated respectively with margin, context, and theme. I will insert the
relevant terms into Oberauer’s (2002, 412) passage to give some idea how they
might coordinate:
Keep in mind that Oberauer’s intentions in the study are different from those
here, yet this is another example of the close ties between memory research and
the possible future direction of attention research. Since context and margin are
assumed in memory research by default, attention researchers should naturally
be involved in memory research, and some are. Ultimately, the proper
identification of these two processes as part of the sphere of attention makes
attention research on thematic attention more relevant to human life.
Above we saw that “attentional set” is contextual consciousness. Similarly,
Gesine Dreisbach, Hilde Haider, and Rainer Kluwe (2002) examined prepara-
tory processes in task-switching. They found that in preparing to switch tasks, a
preparation to shift attention to a new theme or target, the preparation itself
inhibited distraction from the new theme. The preparation is equivalent to
contextual consciousness, the inhibition is marginal consciousness (in that
distractors are presented as irrelevant), and the achievement of the new target is
thematic attention. Citing clinical evidence about phases in object realization,
neurologist Jason Brown (1999, 148) concludes rightly that “Phases in the
actualization, from initial to final, are not preparatory to the object but are the
object.” In the same sense, processes that prepare achievement of the focus must
be included in any account of attention as the sphere of attention.
54 The Sphere of Attention
Transformations in Attending
For psychologists or philosophers of attention, the fun begins in the moment that
we realize attention is essentially dynamic. Attention is not as clear and distinct
as the example of the dog in the garden may lead one to believe. Although the
structure of the sphere of attention outlined above is invariant, the shape and
contents are dynamic. For example, was I not thematically attending to
something else before the dog? And after?
Suppose I fall into reverie and detach from thematically attending to the
dog, and instead start attending to the history of scholarship on René Descartes’
cogito argument. The dog is certainly not presented as context for this history,
and so consciousness of the dog is marginal, if the dog is still presented at all.
Suppose I then revert back to thematic attention to the dog, but now I attend to
the dog as a robot, playfully trying to see if Descartes is right in what he says
about animals such as dogs. This context replacement, and the previous reverie,
and the transformations between them are marvelously complex reorganizations
in the sphere of attention in all dimensions, and they happen with incredible
rapidity, usually easily and seamlessly. Still, there are certain organizational
principles in the sphere of attention that apply to the theme in distinction from
those that apply to the thematic context, and again in distinction from the
margin, and these organizational principles obtain no matter the clarity or
shiftiness of the content in these three dimensions. In addition to these unique
organizational principles within each dimension which have already been
discussed in the chapters above, we will see that there are common
transformation principles between the dimensions. The initial point here is that
the sphere of attention is a dynamic tension.
Although there is always thematic attention, contextual consciousness, and
marginal consciousness, the shape of each of these dimensions and the
connections between their contents can change substantially and radically in the
process of attending. So in answer to what some have argued (e.g., Strawson
1997), there is no holiday in attention whereby there are more or less long
periods of “non-consciousness” or theme-less existence (Arvidson 2000).
Adopting, expanding, and recontextualizing what Gurwitsch called “thematic
modifications” (1966, 223–267), I will delineate a number of ways in which the
sphere of attention is a process involving typical and regulated transformations
of presentation. Gurwitsch does not always neatly distinguish and sufficiently
amplify these types, but I do so to align Gurwitsch’s work with current research
on attention and with the hopes of sparking new research paradigms as discussed
56
Transformations in Attention 57
later. I will outline ten transformations in the sphere of attention falling within
four general types. I do not believe these are exhaustive but they should make a
good start for investigation by psychologists and philosophers. Of course, some
of these are already being researched. But the theoretical framework of a sphere
of attention enables useful interpretations of these findings. Proceeding through
each type of transformation, in the following I discuss how empirical research
might establish this taxonomy of transformations in attending and I stress some
practical possibilities associated with doing so.
By typical transformation I mean that there are certain distinguishable
directional and dimensional changes in the process of attending. What follows
are typical also in the sense that they are some of the less subtle transformations
in attending; many of them already have been studied explicitly or implicitly by
psychol-ogists and cognitive scientists. But there are almost certainly more types
possible than I articulate. There is not one type of attention transformation. I
emphasize this because current scholarship often does not. This means that when
one says “thematic attention” and “contextual consciousness” and “marginal
consciousness” these locutions are very generic ways of referring to how items
or content in each dimension of the sphere are processed. But they do not fully
capture the process of the attending process. The four general types of
transformation described here are: contextual shifts (specifically enlargement,
contraction, elucidation, obscuration, and context replacement), simple thematic
shifts, radical thematic shifts (specifically restructuring, singling out, and
synthesis), and margin to theme capture.
By regulated transformation I mean that a gestalt may admit transforma-
tions of a specific type or types. Gurwitsch (1966, 248; see Husserl 1970, 166–
167) puts forward the general transformation law—“To every phenomenal
datum there correspond others into which the former can be ‘transformed’.” If as
Gurwitsch argues, the “field of consciousness” is structured by gestalt-
connections, it makes sense that shifts or transformations in the “field” should
be law-like. The idea of rule-bound transformations in attending is not
unprecedented, and is found in psychoanalysis, Kantian transcendentalism, and
Cartesian Regulae. Gurwitsch’s approach to the lawfulness in attending is
different since his focus is on the theme and its context. Gurwitsch (1966, 223)
states, “[D]efinite essential possibilities for thematic modifications are pre-
traced by the peculiar nature of the theme and the structural organization of its
constituents, by the place which the theme has in its field, by the specific
structure of the field, and its distinctiveness within the domain of the co-given.
The possibility of thematic modifications is grounded in the essential situation
58 The Sphere of Attention
that the theme has constituents and lies within a field.” The point is that not
every theme will admit every type of transformation. For example, while almost
every theme will admit what is called below “restructuring” and also
“synthesis,” not every one will admit singling out” (Gurwitsch 1966, 240–241).
One cannot single out the perception of red, since it always needs a surface with
which to be perceived. Particular transformations are not inevitable; each case is
contingent upon internal conditions (what Gurwitsch calls the growth and
development of the subject’s “stream of experience,”) and external conditions
(see Gurwitsch 1964, 103). However, the fact that the theme and thematic
context are structured in such a way that they may undergo a particular trans-
formation is an essential or “eidetic” possibility (Gurwitsch 1966, 248).
Each transformation has been characterized in simple terms in order to
distinguish them, but it does not take much reflection to recognize that there are
intermediate possibilities within each specific transformation, as well as
numerous hybrid combinations. The examples are meant to convey that attention
is lively and essentially processural, and that these transformations occur almost
instantly and in infinite variations and combinations, depending upon the
content involved, and the internal conditions of the sphere of attention and
external conditions. The transformations in attending described are not
exhaustive of the possibilities, and transformations can be so rapid and varied
that trying to point out typical transformations may seem like a fool’s game.
That is, how can attention be “frozen” and inspected properly if it is by nature a
process, and a lively, messy one at that? But I hope the following will dispel this
skepticism. As psychologists researching attention continue to bring context into
focus, they will provide additional justification for a taxonomy of attention
transformations (Arvidson 1998). In fact, psychologists are already providing
empirical evidence of these attention shifts.
Enlargement
Enlargement is when the thematic context for the theme grows or expands
in significance while the theme remains essentially unchanged (Gurwitsch 1966,
223–227). Researchers and others who adopt a “lens” metaphor of attention
think of this process as “zooming out” (Eriksen and St. James 1986; Pasto and
Burack 2002). But this locution is vague since it would also include the much
different process of synthesis discussed below. Enlargement of material
relevancy between the theme and thematic context is a possibility of almost any
well-formed theme. Gurwitsch (1966, 224) writes:
and a need for accommodation. The vastness of focus refers to synthesis of the
theme, and the need for accommodation (which they argue may or may not be
satisfied) refers to enlargement of the thematic context in order to meaningfully
situate the stimulus. They relate their findings to morality, spirituality, and
aesthetics.
Enlargement may be operative in what is called “social attention” or “joint
attention” (Arvidson 2003b). This research usually investigates how infants or
young children developmentally enter into social attention more readily (Rochat
1999). For example, they may more readily attend to what others are attending
to (e.g., a toy), and then also monitor the other while attending to the toy as
theme. Enlargement can help account for this transformation in attending since
the attention to the other is now included as part of the context for the theme (the
toy) whereas before it was not. Using adults who can report on the transfor-
mation in attending in a controlled environment may help establish enlargement
as a key part of the process of social attention, or as one of the strategies for
social attention.
Contraction
Contraction is when the thematic context for the theme narrows in
significance. Gurwitsch (1966, 224) writes, “Narrowing of the thematic field
[context] purports a narrowing of the horizon, the theme loses connecting links,
the variety of its material relations is reduced.” He notes that this happens less
often than enlargement. The richness of the contextual content is narrowed and
pruned. Gurwitsch offers no examples, but one might imagine a number of
situations that involve disappointment as a contraction of the context. Also the
theme may become so intensively engaging that the thematic context is
narrowed. Fatigued obsession in thematic attention to a problem of some sort
can be accompanied with contraction of the thematic context for the theme (see
Rees and Lavie 2001; and Gurwitsch 1964, 336). For example, attention to the
theme is so intense that the thematic context diminishes in relevance. Or also
imagine being present at an air show, watching the featured jet circling and
banking. Then the jet slowly flies very low over the crowd, bringing a looming,
overwhelming roar. As the crescendo increases to its almost unbearable
pinnacle, the thematic context, whatever it was, most likely condenses and
becomes homogeneous. As the crescendo decreases when the plane has passed,
the context may enlarge.
Contraction may be involved in what we call boredom or monotony, as well
as such serious dispositions as depression (Jacobson, et al 1996). The thematic
62 The Sphere of Attention
attention during skill acquisition on the relation between liquid and container,
rather than on that between liquid and environment.” Instead of the enlarged
(environmental) relevance for the liquid, the training or the strategy for success
in carrying liquid appears to have involved a contracted (container) relevance
for the liquid.
If enlargement and contraction could be operationalized and examined
systematically, information about this increase or decrease in relevance of the
context for the theme may be of practical use in obvious ways like those
mentioned above. Those not accustomed to appreciating culture or the arts, or
professing and practicing dislike of other cultures or arts, no matter how widely
celebrated and appreciated, may be prepared to do so more successfully by
training the sphere of attention to enlarge appropriately. For example,
experiments by Quinn and Olson (2001) demonstrate how researchers use
contextual contraction to manipulate judgments, in this case judgments of
discrimination. Also, investigation of enlargement may have other social
implications, not only in joint attention of infants and young children but in
adult lives as well, e.g., for those who are shy, chronically narcissistic, or also in
commercial applications such as sales presentations where consciousness of the
wider significance or implications of consumer objections dictates the nature of
the next stage of the presentation. Teaching and learning could benefit from
investigations into how enlargement and contraction work, and their function in
the sphere of attention. The teacher preparing or executing a lesson plan might
economically involve enlargement of context in the lesson, and devise ways to
fight contraction (when it is undesirable) for his or her audience. The somewhat
engaged student might take charge of their education and do the same thing
from their side!
Elucidation
Elucidation involves the clearing, to some extent, of an obscurity in the
thematic context. In distinguishing enlargement from elucidation, Gurwitsch
(1966, 224–225) writes, “Along with these modifications must also be
considered those in which the thematic field is not enriched by increase of
components not previously given but in which components which had appeared
in a certain obscurity, nebulosity, and confusedness become elucidated,
clarified, and determined to a higher degree than before.” Enlargement broadens
the thematic context along the lines dictated by the theme-thematic context
gestalt-connection of relevance. Elucidation clarifies what is already presented
contextually. The thematic context in any one case is never completely clarified.
64 The Sphere of Attention
Gurwitsch repeatedly states throughout his works that the context for the theme
always presents at least some obscurity or nebulosity. “There is always obscurity
somewhere in the field….That the thematic field is always affected by obscurity
and contains components only roughly outlined is the result of its not being
precisely delimited but fading into the indefinite. Yet this ‘indefinite’ is always
related to the field; for the obscurity in question is not just any obscurity but one
which affects a particular thematic field” (Gurwitsch 1966, 226). Elucidation,
therefore, is never completely successful, just as enlargement of the context is
always limited by a “more” that is only indicated through what is already
contextually presented.
Like enlargement, elucidation is a common type of transformation in the
sphere of attention. For example, the relevance of the title of a poem or film,
when this title is thematic, may be somewhat obscured or dim. Yet as one dwells
on the title the relevance of the title within the context of the work becomes
more clear. The theme may be significantly reoriented within the thematic
context, and the contextual perspective under which it is attended to may be
immensely sharpened, but the material relevancy in this case between the theme
and context has not changed substantially. The thematic context is clarified but
not broadened. Again, the theme remains essentially constant as the thematic
context changes. Elucidation is easily seen in social encounters. What little I
know of my new colleague may become more clear as I begin to talk to her. As
long as the context is not replaced, in this case it is a matter of clearing up the
already pre-traced relevancies. Certain meditation practices may also involve
elucidation of the thematic context as part of the accomplishment. It is possible
that elucidation is one of the essential attentional shifts involved in the Buddhist
practice of mindfulness-awareness since this practice seems to involve some
clearing up of the context with respect to what is momentarily given as theme,
as well as precise attention to the theme (cf. Varela et al., 1991, 79). Discussing
the method of shamatha-vipashyana meditation, Jeremy Haywood (1998, 612)
exclaims that “Mindfulness is just paying attention.” He goes on to say that
mindfulness-awareness is the kind of attention that air traffic controllers need.
“They need to be able to pay very incrementally precise attention to their own
screen and the planes that they are directly responsible for—mindfulness. But as
well they need to have a constant sense of the broad picture of the airspace
altogether—awareness” (Hayward 1998, 613; see also Wallace 1999, 177). And
the more clarified such awareness becomes, in the practice of mindfulness-
awareness, the more elucidated is the context of attention.
Transformations in Attention 65
Obscuration
Obscuration hides or covers over the relevance of the thematic context for
the theme. The general lines of demarcation of relevance transform from being
multiple to being only a few, and the more clarified context becomes obscured,
dim, nebulous, less definite and defined. One interesting example of obscuration
is what psychoanalysts would call repression. I can attend to my recent boorish
behavior in the context of my fundamental insecurities, perhaps as pointed out
by a trusted friend or counselor. I can also admit that what he or she says is a
fact. Suppose at this point the theme is my boorish character and is attended to
within the context of my fundamental insecurities, and the material relevancy
pertaining between the theme and thematic context is somewhat clear and
elucidated. If repression becomes operative, and is not absolutely complete, then
the next moment can involve obscuring, dimming, or confusing the clear
connections into rough and nebulous ones, so that I no longer give much weight
to the significance of my behavior; the significance is becoming repressed. In
other words, repression can also be described as a transformation in attending.
Obscuration differs from contraction because the breadth of the context is not
significantly reduced in obscuration, just the number or strength of lines of
connection. Obscuration never completely covers over the relevance of the
theme for the thematic context.
Obscuration may play a role in memory. James Worthen and Virginia
Wood (2001) examined the disruptive effect of bizarreness on memory for
contextual details. They argue that it is not the case that bizarre events are less
memorable as a whole, for example as a kind of attenuation of the intensity of
contextual consciousness as a whole. But rather they report that “the present
data indicate that parts of bizarre events are remembered well, but out of context
and with improper relations between parts” (Worthen and Wood 2001, 543).
That is, associations that mark the unity by relevancy of the context for the
theme are obscured so that the appropriate context transforms, becoming less
appropriate; hence the possibility of false memories. Another way of putting it is
that information that ought to be quite relevant to the event becomes much less
relevant or even only remotely implied through obscuration in the contextual
dimension, and if the obscuration is extensive enough then the gestalt-
Transformations in Attention 67
Context replacement
Context replacement is a more radical modification in attending than the
others in this grouping, but it is placed here because the theme remains
essentially constant, even as the context is sometimes dramatically replaced
(Gurwitsch 1964, 322). In this case, the context is not developed or undeveloped
along the same lines as before the transformation. In this transformation, one
context replaces another. For example, I thematically attend to an approaching
bus as my ride home, and then to the fact that it is not the right bus. Thematic
attention still attends to the bus, but the content of contextual consciousness has
switched from those items relevant for the theme and for each other as the
context, perhaps the queue to board, the place where the bus will actually halt,
etc. to how it is blocking my view, paths around it, when it will move. Consider
how different the approaching bus appears in the two moments. Swiftly the
same theme is given under completely different perspectives and is reoriented
68 The Sphere of Attention
within a new thematic context. The theme itself does not change. But the
perspective or orientation under which it is presented, derived from the new
thematic context, does change (Gurwitsch 1964, 359).
In addition to enlargement, joint attention for infants and young children
may involve context replacement whereby the toy the child deliberately chews
on becomes something I am looking at and then something we are both looking
at, establishing joint attention (Arvidson 2003b). Whatever the previous context
for the toy as theme, say pleasure or other bodily relevancies, the context now is
predominately social if joint attention is achieved. If the context is replaced in
this way, it is more than just an enlargement to include the other. The context
replacement involves more genuine or deeper social attention.
What is important in context replacement is not just the speed (reaction
time) with which this transformation might occur, but also what inhibits this
transformation when it might otherwise be desirable. A particular phobia can be
crippling if one has little choice except to be around the object of fear. A field
entomologist affected by arachnophobia is a good example. The spider as theme
is attended to within a context that is overwhelmingly threatening. A context
replacement would be desirable, but difficult. Research on context replacement
might uncover strategies for replacing this context with another, such that
quality of life (and work!) improves. As Chris Brewin (1989, 388) states, “the
therapeutic task is to recreate a plausible context that will enable patients to
encode subsequent experiences in a more discriminating way, rather than
perceiving them as all indicating failure, rejection and so on.” This possibility
was broached above in the discussion of the gambler’s fallacy. If gamblers in
those scenarios can shift contextual consciousness so that what they view as the
next event (a new coin toss) in a continuation of a series (e.g., three heads) is
now contextualized as a new beginning, they can ask themselves if they want to
start gambling now. “Given the role grouping seems to play in biases like the
gambler’s fallacy, a fruitful line for future research is to explore other ways of
manipulating the environment to disrupt this grouping tendency” (Roney and
Trick 2003, 74; see also Diskin and Hodgins 2001).
Matthew Botvinick and David Plaut (2002) use computer modeling to
represent task context in a way that also shows how context replacement may be
involved in error. Basically, between two similar but not the same tasks, such as
tea making and coffee making, shifting the context boundaries causes error by
wrongly contextualizing the task. For example, one might pour cream into the
tea when it was not called for. Lendowski and Kirsner (2000) describe how the
inability to replace the content of the context (they do not call it that) with a new
Transformations in Attention 69
one is linked to error. They found that expert Australia bush fire controllers
made differing predictions under identical physical conditions when context
differed. The authors suggest that experts’ knowledge is partitioned into distinct
packages—each tightly joined (unity by relevancy between contextual content)
and so also with the current theme but nonetheless partitioned from other
possible contexts for the same theme. Thus, when replacing one context with
another for the same physical conditions would be beneficial in predicting the
path of the fire, the experts were unable to switch (since the tie between theme
and context was so strong in the expert’s case). In other words, they were not
very flexible. It makes intuitive sense that flexibility of viewpoint may be
involved in some aspects of creatively solving a problem, and so might involve
context replacement.
We saw above that relational frame theory in the context of behavior
analysis means that relational responding can be derived rather than immediate.
The authors of that study (Roche et al., 2002) suggest what I would call context
replacement as a way to overcome persistent attitudes or stereotypes. For
example, if someone believed all salespeople were liars, the salesperson would
want to achieve an attitude change in this audience. Interestingly, relational
frame theory claims that the effective way to achieve this change is not to
simply shift the context to an opposed set of relations (where the theme is
salesperson and the context is trustworthiness). But rather this theory proposes a
mediated context replacement. “For example, the salesperson might say, ‘you
are under no obligation to buy,’ or ‘if you are not completely satisfied you can
have your money back’ or ‘take it now for free and if you like it you can send us
the money next month.’ Thus, the pitch will participate in a relational network
with other terms (e.g., trustworthy), stimuli (e.g., items purchased in a
department store), and consequences (pleasure of using recently purchased
items) that form part of any normal sales process. In effect, use of these and
similar phrases may transform the functions of the sales pitch so that it does not
evoke functions of dishonesty” (Roche et al., 2002, 87). At first the theme is
attended within an undesirable context, then the context shifts to neutral ground,
and finally to a desirable context, which can then be elucidated or enlarged so
that the original persistent attitude and association is inhibited.
Other modifications of the relevancy of thematic context for the theme are
possible but I will leave them undeveloped. For example, items that were more
remote in the thematic context and hence presenting less significance for the
theme can advance and become more significant, while those that were nearer
the theme recede (see Gurwitsch 1966, 226).
70 The Sphere of Attention
Restructuring
Restructuring is a substantial change in the function of the formative
constituents of the theme. It is a transformation confined to the thematic
dimension, but the same theme is no longer presented. Nothing is physically
added or subtracted in this replacement. Spontaneous reversals in thematic
attention such as with the Necker cube, or other ambiguous, multi-stable figures
as the duck-rabbit figure or the vase-faces figure are restructurations. As in the
“rows of impatiens” or “crowd of people” examples, a given theme may have a
dominant or formative constituent, and other constituents that are dependent
upon this one; these others are formed constituents. In restructuring, a new
theme replaces the old theme, but the new theme is the result of a transformation
of formed constituents into formative ones, and formative ones into formed
ones. Take the vase-faces figure as an example. Restructuring involves the
transformation of a formative constituent of a theme (e.g., the lips in the faces
figure) into a formed constituent (e.g., the ornamental protrusion on the stem in
the vase figure) in the presentation of a new theme, in this case the vase
(Gurwitsch 1966, 237–240 and 14; also 1964, 118–119). Other formative or
dominant constituents may also become formed or less dominant in the
transition to a new theme. The point is that the vase figure is a different theme
from the faces figure. Also, there is likely a new thematic context.
Restructuring has been well-researched by gestalt-oriented experimenters
(for more on gestalt experiments see Henle 1990 and Gurwitsch 1966).
Francisco Varela (1999) has suggested that restructuring is much more common
than is usually considered, and I would agree. Gurwitsch (1966, 241) claims that
restructuring is a universal possibility of any theme, unlike the more radical
transformation of singling out. Since research has already concentrated on the
nature of the focus or theme, examination of the phenomenon of restructuring of
Transformations in Attention 73
the theme would add useful and distinct information to this wealth of
knowledge. Restructuring, like other transformations in attending, such as
synthesis, seems to be important in problem solving (Arvidson 1997). But what
we mean by restructuring here must be distinguished from how the term is used
in research on “insightful problem solving.” For example, Stellan Ohlsson
(1992) described three mechanisms by which restructuring might be achieved—
re-encoding, elaboration, and constraint relaxation. In our terms these refer
respectively to restructuring, elucidation, and synthesis (see also Ansburg and
Dominowski 2000). So “re-encoding” in Ohlsson’s sense comes closest to
restructuration. In some problem solving, the problem will remain unsolved until
the original “encoding,” the original gestalt-coherence of the theme, is “re-
encoded” so that the theme becomes a different gestalt (a different theme) with
the same constituents.
In moral developmental psychology, Carol Gilligan (1986) has argued that
restructuration, what is vaguely termed “gestalt-switch” or “gestalt-shift” (see
also, e.g., DesAutels 1996, and in philosophy of science, Wright 1992; cf.
Arvidson 1998), can have a role in judging or solving moral dilemmas,
especially in terms of care versus justice perspectives. The restructuration of the
same problem from one of care to justice or the converse, is possible for the
researcher (she has Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg in mind) or for the
subject, depending upon the shape of the sphere of attention or the subject’s
stage of moral development. For example, in the moral dilemma of abortion, one
way to focus on the problem is to see it as a question of whether the fetus is a
person, and whether its claims take precedence over those of the pregnant
woman (the justice perspective). Gilligan (1986, 24) writes, “Framed as a
problem of care [instead of justice], the dilemma posed by abortion shifts. The
connection between the fetus and the pregnant woman becomes the focus of
attention and the question becomes whether it is responsible or irresponsible,
caring or careless, to extend or to end this connection.” The whole problem
changes like the ambiguous figure, but with much more at stake.
In studying delay of gratification in children, Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda
and Monica Rodriguez (1989) tested how children might “cool” in the need for a
cookie using restructuring of the theme. Instead of taste, the child focuses on
shape and color. This psychological distancing is a cooling of desire to eat the
cookie. What happens is that the formative constituents of the theme, those that
are dominant within the theme and upon which the formed constituents depend
for their functional significance in the gestalt, become the formed constituents.
That is, the constituents of the theme involved with how the cookie would taste
74 The Sphere of Attention
Singling Out
Singling out is when a constituent of a theme is attended to thematically, so
that this constituent becomes a theme itself (Gurwitsch 1966, 240–243). Under
the heading of “selective attention” and not discussed within a
phenomenological framework, singling out is the most researched
transformation in attending. For many attention researchers singling out is
wholly synonymous with attention and so selective attention is just attention. It
is sometimes called “zooming in” (Metzinger 2003b) and explained using
suspect metaphors of attention such as spotlight (Posner 1980; Treisman and
Gelade 1980; Baars 1997), zoom-lens (Eriksen and St. James 1986), window
(Treisman 1993), channel (Hobson 1994; Broadbent 1958), and so on (cf.
Arvidson 1996; Gurwitsch 1966, 265–267). Considering the two long rows of
flowering impatiens in the garden, I can focus on the right row and make it my
theme instead of the two rows as a whole. I can further single out the third
impatiens plant in that row. Again, I can single out in thematic attention the new
bloom on the left side of that particular plant. Each of these transformations, of
course, could occur without my “willing it.” In any case, we will see later that
“willing it” simply means preparing the sphere of attention to allow the content
to become thematic. What was a constituent (the right row) in the theme of the
rows of impatiens has now become the theme itself.
I stress that this attentional shift includes the replacement of one theme by
another. That is, the new theme, the right row of plants, has a radically different
appearance from before (when it was just a constituent), and has radically
different relation from before to the other row. In fact, the other row may be part
of the thematic context for this new theme, although it may also be marginal
depending upon the thematic context which happens to pertain to the new
theme. So the transition is complete. Even the color, shape, and other details of
the right row of plants itself have changed. Another example is singling out a
table in a living room, then singling out the pictures on the table, then the family
picture, then a mother’s face in that picture (Arvidson 2000). Listening to a
speech, one can single out the point of the speech or an accent or the nasal
tonality. In each singling out the new theme establishes a new center of
reference for a thematic context, the latter may be a continuation of the previous
Transformations in Attention 75
context or it could be new. Finally, turn out your hand and look at it (as if you
were admiring a ring on your finger, but focus more generally on your hand).
Now focus or single out your index finger. The shift is a change of theme (from
hand to finger) and a change of thematic context. The finger, now presented as
thematic, has a different appearance. The wrinkling around the knuckle, the
pores or hair, even the color and other details are likely new. This is not a simple
shift in attending, as current psychology assumes. The presentation of this finger
and its relation to the hand is now quite different. Singling out is more radical
than restructuring since the changes are not simply accomplished within one
dimension (intra-thematic) but are inter-dimensional (theme and context)
(Gurwitsch 1966, 243).
Experiments using global-local stimuli implicitly investigate both singling
out and synthesis (Arvidson 2003b). A global-local stimulus is meant to afford
only one of the two possible themes at a time. A “Navon” letter (Navon 1977) is
an example of this type of stimulus since it presents either a block letter “H” on
the global level, or a number of letter “E’s” on the local level, that make up the
global H. The theme and the potential theme are arranged in global or local
organization, and they are mutually exclusive. Findings so far about the “global-
local shift” involved with these stimuli include asymmetry in interference and
control (Rauschenberger and Yantis 2001), associated brain hemispheric
differences (Posner and Peterson 1990), and differences between this type of
shift and serial-shifting (Fileteo, Freidrich and Stricker 2001). The local to
global shift in attending is “synthesis,” and the global to local shift is “singling
out” (see Gurwitsch 1966, 240–244). In synthesis the theme of an E or a group
of several Es is replaced with the H as thematic; the local is replaced by the
global. Like the rows of impatiens example, except more dramatic, the Es no
longer have the same function in the new presentation. They now function as
constituents in the new gestalt. When attention is transformed in the inverse
direction, so that an E or several Es are singled out and replace the global H as
thematic, there is also a radical change in the theme and its context.
This line of research is important but limited. It is important because it
examines synthesis instead of the just singling out, and it tries to discuss the
relation between them. It is limited because of the highly exclusionary nature of
the two themes presented. By contrast, for example, the row of impatiens
illustration is less artificial and has more ecological validity, although it is still
only an illustration. In addition, without more information on exactly what the
subject is attending to, some cases could be restructuration instead of singling
out and synthesis. This would depend upon the status of the “rest” of the content
76 The Sphere of Attention
presented, that is, whether there is now the whole picture but with a different
emphasis and organization point (formative versus formed constituents in
restructuration), or whether there is now a new theme and context distinction (in
singling out and synthesis).
Synthesis
Synthesis is the transformation of a theme into a constituent of a new theme
(Gurwitsch 1966, 243–248), as when the right row of impatiens becomes a
constituent in the (new) theme of “rows of impatiens,” and is no longer a theme
itself. This is a functional complement of singling out and is sometimes (along
with enlargement) referred to in attention research literature as “zooming out.”
But this is a more radical transformation than recognized in that literature
because a new theme is presented, with new internal relations, and with new
relations to a possibly new thematic context. Gurwitsch (1966, 243) writes about
the (old) theme, “It grows into its ground and merges with it; or, expressed from
the other point of view, the ground absorbs the theme and pervades it. A new
theme results on a new ground.” For example, I could start with the single
impatiens plant in the right row of impatiens plants as my theme, and what is
presented could transform so that the whole right row of impatiens is presented
as my theme. In this new theme, the single impatiens would be a constituent,
perhaps formative perhaps not. This synthesis could continue. Both rows of
plants could become thematic, and the right row would simply be a constituent
in the new theme, and likely a formative constituent in it. “Even as a dominant
constituent it is supported and required by the total theme and, therefore, refers
to other constituents….[It] is now no longer separable from its thematic context,
figuring only as a constituent of context” (Gurwitsch 1966, 244). The point of a
speech, say a political point, could become a constituent in a more inclusive
theme, for example, politics in Central America. “When the act of passing mugs
of tea is embedded in the larger project of hospitality to guests, one’s intentions
extend to that project, but it is rare that one is immediately aware of all of this or
of its significations” (Gallagher and Marcel 1999, 13). When this larger project
itself becomes thematic, with passing the mugs as a constituent in the new
theme, then the “awareness” is a synthesis. It is not clear why such a
transformation would be “rare,” unless the authors literally mean that all of it
becoming thematic would be rare, which is correct. Another example is the
hand/finger example above, moving in the sphere of attention from the thematic
finger to the thematic hand is a synthesis.
Transformations in Attention 77
two “phases” in attending to the scientific theorem, one now marginal since it
was immediately previous, and one now current and ongoing, both are marginal
in the halo. As Merleau-Ponty (1962, 31) puts it, “But at least the act of attention
is rooted in the life of consciousness….This passage from the indeterminate to
the determinate, this recasting at every moment of its own history in the unity of
a new meaning, is thought itself.”
One might raise the difficult question of how a novel gestalt can enter into
thematic attention yet not be precisely presented in the margin. Cognitive
scientists now examine this problem (Folk, Remington and Johnston 1992;
Yantis 1993, Gibson and Kelsey 1998). The following example is adapted from
Arvidson (2000). Suppose that suddenly, as I am writing, the deafening home
alarm system sounds—WONK! WONK! WONK! Eventually I will get a
thematic grip on this rude sonorous interruption. But the question here is how
does this theme enter into attention? When we say it “captured” my attention,
was it first somehow marginal, and then thematic? Or is there just a
disconnected gap between the previous theme and the present one, a “blink” in
attention perhaps marked by fright and adrenaline? (For more on attentional
blink see Duncan, Ward and Shapiro 1994; Shapiro 2001; and Arvidson 2003b.)
There is connectivity in attending, even in cases like this. The alarm almost
immediately supplants what was previously thematic. I say “almost” because
there is still some quickly fading retention of the previous theme. To deny that
this is the case would be to deny that the event has a temporal aspect. In
discussion of the two views of reversible figures as “object-events,” Varela
(1999, 126) states “The link joining both as two-of-the-same demonstrates the
basic fact that there is an underlying temporalization which has a relative
independence of the particular content of the views.” Gurwitsch (1966, 302) is
clear on this point, “The transition from one phase of conscious life to another
never has the character of a sudden break; as though on the one side there were a
brusque end, on the other side a no less sudden beginning, and between these
two brusque events a breach which had to be bridged. Heterogeneous and
indifferent to each other as the contents might be which fill two consecutive
phases of conscious life, there is, at least at the beginning of the second phase, a
certain awareness, though vague, dim, and indistinct, of what has just gone.”
The marginal consciousness in the halo to the streaming in attending, the
anticipation and possibility complemented by retention of what has just passed,
bridges even the most abrupt attention capture (cf. with Yantis 1993). In many
cases, one or more not so well-formed themes may be swiftly interspersed
between the well-formed themes that serve as end points in our example.
80 The Sphere of Attention
Another possibility is that when the alarm sounds there is a sort of phenomenal
resistance or inertia that must be overcome, just as the reversals of the Necker
cube take time, an incompressable “‘depth’ in time” (Varela 1999, 115).
The power the deafening alarm has in attending is immense, such that an
orienting response which almost immediately makes it thematic is seemingly
irresistible. But where was it before it sounded, that is, how was it connected to
the presented configuration in the sphere of attention which had, say, my
unfolding sentence on the computer terminal as thematic? Gurwitsch, Husserl,
Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre might all respond to this question in somewhat
similar ways.
Although Gurwitsch did not seem to ask this kind of question, a Gurwitsch-
inspired response might be that the possibility of the alarm was marginally
attended to as part of the ever-present (marginal) material world or environment.
In Marginal Consciousness, Gurwitsch (1985, 50) writes:
I am not claiming that the alarm must be in any way fully or explicitly presented
in the sphere of attention, even as a marginal possibility. But the marginal
consciousness of the environing world implies at least the possibility of the
alarm sounding, so that when it does sound it is not perceived as utterly novel,
disconnected from everything possible in the world. Gurwitsch (1985, 41)
claims that one can never “shake off” marginal consciousness of the
environment or material world, “The fact that some sector or other of the
perceptual world appears at every moment, that whatever the subject matter of
our thematic activity we never altogether lose sight of the existence of the
perceptual world, is permanent and abiding” (see also Merleau-Ponty 1962, 331
and 338).
Merleau-Ponty (1962, 328) writes that the natural world “...persists on the
horizon of my life as the distant roar of a great city provides the background to
Transformations in Attention 81
is stated as active vs. passive, voluntary vs. involuntary, top-down vs. bottom-
up, controlled vs. automatic, endogenous vs. exogenous. None of these sets of
terms are perfect, but I will use the latter terms here.
In current usage, endogenous control of attention or selection of the target is
the result of the subject’s will, usually following the instruction from the
experimenter (see Hopfinger et al., 2001, for the associated neurology); while in
exogenous selection, attention is “caught” from the periphery (e.g., Chastain and
Cheal 2001; Yantis 1993). The issue of control can be organized and resolved by
recognizing that the subject does not make the targeted content thematic, the
subject allows it to present itself as thematic. Achievement of thematic attention
in any one case involves replacement. And replacement of one theme with
another is not completely willed, as if the sphere of attention were a landscape
and the subject was a landscape architect. The garden never matches the
architect’s vision of what it will be until it already is. That is, the emergence of
the new theme is not completely a function of the subject’s will, regardless if
this new theme was a marginally presented potential theme or a contextually
presented potential theme. Willing or trying to attend as instructed is merely
preparatory to the emergence of the theme from the thematic context or margin,
but it still involves thematic attention to something else. When the new theme is
achieved, this preparation is likely contextual (as Braver 2001 et al., suggest). If
attention is a process of transformations, as I believe it is, then endogenous
“control” already is attention. Research in neuropsychology suggests this
(Driver and Frackowiak 2001). For example, appropriate brain areas are active
even before the designated target is achieved or presented (Driver and Frith
2000), which I would interpret as attention to a different target. But in an
experimental paradigm where the measure of attention is the achievement of the
designated target, endogenous selection can at most prepare the sphere of
attention for the likelihood or inevitability of such a transformation of contents,
just as the architect can prepare the blueprints. As noted above, this preparation
is sometimes called a “control set” or “attentional set” (e.g., Folk, Remington
and Johnston 1992; Ohman, Flykt, and Esteves 2001; Gibson and Kelsey 1998).
In the sphere of attention, endogenous selective attention yields to the
saliency of exogenous selection (Allport and Hsieh 2001; on saliency see
Chastain and Cheal 2001, 989). Exogenous selection can be almost immediate
or it can be more subtle, such as when I look for a person with a watch so I can
ask that individual what time it is. When I spot the person who has a watch this
is the first of many possible “captures of attention” in the interaction in which
one theme or theme-context complex is replaced by another in the process of
Transformations in Attention 83
attention, none of which is exactly reducible to what I willed. In each case, the
thematic content at t1 is saliently replaced by the thematic content at t2. These
replacements can be habitual or have a certain repeatable style or character,
since development and learning change the autochthonous shape of the sphere of
attention, as discussed in Chapter Five. Certain content and constellations of
content are more likely to become thematic or part of the thematic context over
time, establishing a kind of facilitation or inhibition of the success of a particular
endogenously initiated selective attention (see Gurwitsch 1964, 103; Arvidson
1992a; Cf. Ohman et al., 2001, 466–467 on “learning history”; and Cavanagh,
Labianca, and Thornton 2001, on “sprites”). The point is that the three-
dimensional sphere of attention provides an appropriate framework for
advancing the question of attention control.
Margin to theme succession has a number of practical aspects. Manipulating
marginal consciousness has been shown to decrease anxiety in the same sense
that the dentist might hand-pinch near an injection site to offset the pinch of the
injection needle (for a similar effect in the context of post traumatic stress
disorder see Kuiken et al., 2001). Naomi Oliver and Andrew Page (2003) found
that distracting blood-injection fearful participants with conversation during
blood-injection exposure sessions reduced fear. A tension is created between
content vying for thematic status, the blood-injection and the conversation, so
that at least some of the time the conversation is thematic and the blood-
injection is marginally presented, hence irrelevant and so less fearful. This is
coordinate with, but the reverse of, what the philosopher Peter Goldie (2003,
243) describes in his account of fear, “When we think of something as being
dangerous, we might just think of it as meriting fear, and we can do that without
actually feeling fear towards it. Then, when we come to think of it with fear, the
dangerousness of the object and the determinate features towards which the
thought is directed is grasped in a different way. That is to say, the content of the
thought is different; one’s way of thinking of it is completely new.” This is the
sense of replacement that Gurwitsch stresses for more radical transformations in
attending. The trick for subjects in Oliver and Page’s blood-injection experiment
is to allow the fearfulness of the content to remain marginal, and so irrelevant.
Manipulation of marginal consciousness is also useful in creating a
psychological distance needed for success in various tasks where immediate
gratification would produce a negative task result. In addition to the
restructuration strategy with cookies and children in the delay of gratification
study described above, those researchers (Mischel et al., 1989) also manipulated
the margin and thematic attention. So instead of focusing on the taste of the
84 The Sphere of Attention
cookie, the child could be instructed to “cool off” by thinking fun thoughts.
Again, although this new thematic content might be in dynamic and tense
relation with the irrelevant marginal content of the taste of the cookie, and the
sphere of attention can transform so that these contents switch functional
“places,” the taste of the cookie (and the desire to eat it) will still sometimes be
marginal, and so lessened. Ozlem Ayduk, Walter Mischel and Geraldine
Downey (2002) showed that margin to theme attentional shifting could be useful
in quelling hostility if the focus in attending was directed toward distracting and
distancing information. In a complementary way, in a study of children’s
attentional skills and road-crossing behavior, George Dunbar, Ross Hill and
Vicky Lewis (2001, 227) found that “failure to ignore potentially distracting
events outside the current focus of attention…are sources of risk.” In other
words, margin to theme succession is not only useful but failure to become adept
at shaping it in certain environmental situations could be fatal!
86
Gurwitsch and Husserl 87
creates a “two-strata of the theme” problem, and (3) attention is unitary, like a
searchlight or spotlight. These problems are largely shared by what Gurwitsch
calls “the traditional theory of attention,” the psychology and philosophy of
attention in the first three decades of the 20th Century. They are also problems of
the 21st Century. Philosophy discusses attention infrequently, and philosophers
are generally guilty of all three problems. Psychologists and cognitive scientists
of attention are affected more by the second and third problems, since they are
more likely to work within Gurwitsch’s frame of non-ego subjectivity, or at least
non-ego subjectivity is likely to be assumed in setting up experimental controls.
concerned? In case the latter alternative is true, it follows that, whatever else
might be due to the activity of the Ego, that activity cannot bring about the
fundamental organizational articulation of the total field of consciousness into
two domains, better dimensions, namely the thematic field and the margin.”
Below I will discuss Husserl’s work on passive synthesis, which Gurwitsch was
not able to address, to see if that work helps account for the type of organization
for which Gurwitsch is looking in Husserl’s work.
both Stumpf and Husserl: sensory qualities of a higher order, qualities founded
upon ordinary sense-data, are incidental and adventitious to the founding
elements in that these elements are not affected by the quality they found, nor by
the unity which the founded quality bestows upon them. The elements may be
experienced isolatedly. Even when not experienced isolatedly, each one of the
elements retains its distinct phenomenal identity.” Fittingly, this statement
comes in the last paragraph before Gurwitsch formally considers the principles
of Gestalt theory (see also 1964, 88 and 266–269; 1966, 256). It is Gestalt
theory that champions intrinsic rather than extrinsic organization of the theme,
what Gurwitsch calls gestalt-coherence, so that the notion of supervenient
organization denoting a second strata of the theme is unnecessary.
In terms of attention, the second “two-strata of the theme problem” is a
problem of restructuration. The way it is manifested in Husserl’s work,
according to Gurwitsch, is that the postulation of the role of hyletic data in
intentionality or attentional processes means that organization must be bestowed
on this data from without (Gurwitsch 1966, 253–255; for Gurwitsch’s summary
of hyletics see 1974, 100 and 250–251). Gurwitsch (1966, 88) writes “The
important point is that, according to all traditional theories, percepts are asserted
to grow out of mere sense-data owing to supervenient factors (of whatever kind
and description) by means of which sensations are interpreted and meaning is
bestowed upon them.” It is noetic factors that bestow meaning on hyletic data,
which themselves are not specifically organized otherwise. As Gurwitsch (1964,
266) puts it, “Devoid of intentionality in themselves, hyletic data serve as
materials to operating factors by which they are ‘animated’ and receive
meaning. Such factors are denoted by Husserl as intentional or noetic forms or
noeses. When the experienced concrete act as a whole, including both hyletic
data and noetic forms, is an intentional act, that is, when in experiencing that act
the subject is confronted with an object presenting itself in a certain mode, this
is due to noetic factors bestowing form upon hyletic data and endowing them
with meaning.” The organization or meaning is not given autochthonously in
Husserl’s scheme, whereas for Gurwitsch thematic organization is autoch-
thonous in the way a mountain is sprung from the land itself, not added to it
(Arvidson 1992a).
The “two-strata of the theme” problem is not something Gurwitsch believes
that Husserl knowingly commits to. However, since it is incompatible with
Gestalt theory and a phenomenology of the transformations in attending,
Gurwitsch pointedly rejects its usefulness, even denying that there is anything
such as hyletic data at all. “Quite in general, sensuous material is not articulated
90 The Sphere of Attention
structure of its own and presenting special problems. One should not speak at all
of attention in general but should indicate in every concrete case which specific
attentional modification is meant, with its specific noematic accomplishment
belonging only to the modification in question” (Gurwitsch 1966, 266; see also
218). Within the pluralism, however, there is a natural typology and there are
transformation laws; hence the pluralism does not tend toward a chaos in the
phenomenology or science of attention, but rather toward a taxonomy, as seen in
Chapter Three.
In solution to each of the three problems, Gurwitsch invokes the distinction
between what I would call the three dimensions in the sphere of attention, and
the possible transformations within them (e.g., restructuring) or between them
(e.g., synthesis).
1992b). The question is, does Husserl also identify a thematic context and
margin such that relevance to the theme and irrelevance to the theme constitute
distinct dimensions in what is co-given with the theme. And if he does identify
them, does he develop them sufficiently?
I am reasonably sure that to the last question, one can only answer that
Husserl did not sufficiently develop the idea of thematic context, at least
compared to what Gurwitsch was able to do. This insufficiency is not
necessarily a fault. Husserl’s interests lie elsewhere and as founder of
phenomenology there are many insights whose delineation he could only sketch.
As to the question whether or not Husserl identifies thematic context as distinct
from margin, I think one needs to say yes, but the identification is indirect, it
must be teased out of the text. For example, in Ideas I (1982, §122) Husserl
distinguishes relevance or irrelevance to the theme by the presence or absence of
ego activity (see Gurwitsch 1964, 351). Gurwitsch’s view on the matter is clear,
and perhaps justified. Writing about some content in the thematic context (an
“inactuality” for Husserl) becoming actually a theme, Gurwitsch (1966, 229–
230) states “Carrying out in the domain of the co-given the differentiation, not
made by Husserl himself, by means of which the thematic field is delimited as a
partial domain of a special kind, we can refer the aforementioned possibility of
actualization to this partial domain alone….[W]e thus confine the expression of
[Husserl’s] ‘the fringe of consciousness which belongs to the essence of a
(cogitative) perception experienced in the mode of advertence to the object’ to
the thematic field as defined by us.” Did Husserl identify the dimension of
thematic context in the sphere of attention, so that it is recognized as distinct
from the margin? Yes. Did Husserl develop the idea of the contextual dimension
in its own terms and give it the powerful organizational status in attentional life
that it deserves? No.
Yet Gurwitsch’s approach is refreshingly compatibilist. Here is how he tries
to identify exactly how Husserl’s articulations point to the three dimensions of
theme, thematic context, and margin. (For a very different approach to these
questions see Walton 2003.)
Gurwitsch states that Husserl’s cogito is the noetic correlate of the theme
(1964, 349; see Husserl 1970, Vol. 1, §23; Vol. 2, §19). In Husserl’s notion of
cogito, part of its function is to “hold in grasp” (“im Griffe haben”) some
content so that it is actual rather than inactual, thematic rather than not
(Gurwitsch 1966, 179 and 204; see Husserl 1982, §35 and §84). But cogito
should be ascribed to just the theme not the whole process or all the phases as
Husserl does, which also involve “inactualities” (Gurwitsch 1964, 350). This is
Gurwitsch and Husserl 93
because the “inactualities” belong to the thematic context not the theme, as seen
below. Also, Gurwitsch’s use of the term cogito is not an acceptance of
Husserl’s egological conception of attention (1964, 351). In a wonderful
translation from Husserl’s subjectivity-oriented approach to Gurwitsch’s
objectivity-oriented approach to attention, Gurwitsch (1966, 204) describes how
“holding in grasp” comes about in the sphere of attention, a phenomenological
description of what cognitive scientists call orienting in attention:
Here one sees how Gurwitsch correlates the temporal immediacy of Husserl’s
“holding in grasp” with the spatial immediacy of a theme presenting itself within
a context and serving as the center of organization in the sphere of attention.
(Elsewhere I have argued against the implicit idea in the first sentence that only
stable themes are themes, Arvidson 2000; cf., Gurwitsch 1966, 204–205.)
Dismissing the act’s egological character in Husserl’s analysis, Gurwitsch
finds that “maintaining in grasp” (“noch im Griffe behalten”) correlates with
thematic context. Gurwitsch (1966, 235) writes “Thus the mode ‘holding in
grasp’ is identical with ‘being a theme’; ‘grasping’ designates the process of
94 The Sphere of Attention
finds himself in total agreement with what Husserl says about the margin as
phenomenal temporality or “stream of consciousness” (1964, 351).
In sum drawing from Gurwitsch’s sometimes ambivalent writings on the
matter, I think Gurwitsch believes that Husserl’s work points to a distinction
between theme, context, and margin, but that the actual distinction is conceived
inadequately and with too much reliance on ego-activity.
presented into theme, thematic context, and margin, did Husserl also do the
same thing? An examination of Husserl’s Analyses gives conflicting evidence.
Near the beginning of his Analyses, Husserl seems to make a sharp
distinction between theme, thematic context, and margin. Almost always the
distinctions in the “total field” will be from the point of view of the subject or
ego, a noetic perspective. Husserl (2001, 18–19) writes:
When I actually perceive an object, that is, look at it, take note
of it, grasp it, regard it, it will never be without an unnoticed,
ungrasped background of objects. In this case we distinguish
what is secondarily noticed from what actually goes
unnoticed. In general, in addition to the object that is primarily
noticed, with which I am occupied in a privileged way while
viewing it, there are still other single objects that are co-
noticed be they given in a second or third order co-grasping.
This will take place in such a way that in passing over from
the observation of one object to the observation of another, I
am indeed no longer looking at the first one, I am no longer
primarily occupied with it, properly speaking; but I still have a
hold on it, I do not let it slip from my attentive and conceptual
hold, and along with that, everything I had previously grasped;
It continues to belong to me in a modified way, and in this
way I still have a hold on it. I am still present there as the
central, present ego; as a wakeful ego, I still have a relation to
it in an ego cogito. But in contrast to it we have a broad lived-
experiential field, or as we can also say, a field of conscious-
nesses that has not entered into such a relation with the ego or
with which the ego has not entered into such a relation: It may
knock on the door of the ego, but it does not “affect” the ego,
the ego is deaf to it, as it were. (See also Husserl 2001, 276,
292, 316 and 611.)
It is not hard to imagine that “the primarily noticed” is identical to the theme, the
“secondarily noticed” and what is maintained in grasp is the thematic context,
and the “unnoticed” or “broad lived experiential field” is the margin (for
Husserl’s definition of theme see 2001, 290, cf. also 333). So there appears to be
a genuine three-part distinction here in what is presented, with each dimension
marked off from the other by virtue of a central egoic activity.
Gurwitsch and Husserl 97
these thematic actions and of the accomplishments arising through them for the
theme itself. It is the identical element in the manifold of active identifications
that manifest the theme as a point of intersection of manifold judgments and then
as the point of identity of corresponding attributions, as the same again and
again.” Gurwitsch might wish Husserl to make a sharper distinction between the
“presentational object” and the “presentational content” as each is presented, as
they are presented in the sphere of attention, rather than as functions of the
attending process. In other words, Husserl never really seems to describe the
structure of the interconnections in presentational content, what it looks like, its
shape and organization, except in terms of temporality.
Yet in an Appendix to §28 one finds some golden nuggets of object-
oriented context in the mine of passive synthesis. Husserl (2001, 505–506)
writes, “The unity of the field of consciousness is always produced through
sensible interconnections, in a sensible connection of similarity and sensible
contrast. Without this there could be no ‘world.’ We could say that it is
resonance as sensible similarity and sensible contrast (that for its part
presupposes a similarity) that grounds everything that is once constituted. It is a
universal law of consciousness that a resonance proceeds from every special
consciousness or from every special object, and similarity is the unity of the
resonating element. In addition to this, [we have the] special law of individuals
in prominence. Resonance is a way of coinciding in distance, in separation.”
Husserl clearly states here that the field of consciousness is unified in a way that
does not necessarily include ego acts, but may still be for an ego. A “resonance”
(Resonanz) can and must obtain between what is similar in the field. By
resonance he appears to mean that which drives material relevancy between two
contents in the field; the same material relevancy that is the operative concept
for Gurwitsch’s notion of thematic context. Material relevancy is the measure of
“interconnection.” It also seems as if this interconnection is there from the start:
“In a certain way, a sense is self-evidently and necessarily there wherever
something is a theme, and already when something becomes a theme for a
judging for the first time” (Husserl 2001, 330). In a choppy passage in an earlier
Appendix to the same §28, Husserl (2001, 496) writes “What is it that initially
determines separation? Non-similarity (heterogeneity), that which is ‘without’
materially relevant ‘interconnection.’ Similarity is the very first thing that
fashions ‘interconnection,’ ‘interconnection’ in the sense that is a tissue with
regard to relations. (Without interconnection = that which has nothing to do with
the other, that which is alien in a materially relevant manner, heterogeneous).”
Not only is this an example of material relevancy having the meaning of
100 The Sphere of Attention
Thus the distinction between passive and active synthesis does not divide along
the lines of relation to the ego, although it may divide along the lines of ego
inactivity versus activity (see, e.g. 2001, 295 where Husserl describes passive
affection for the “passive ego”).
In summary, Husserl seems to assume flowing, open, and changing context
throughout his Analyses—the syntheses of organization are not marked off co-
herently or sharply from each other. This means that the constitution of
objectlike formations in prominence, or in affection, and what is given in
receptivity and grasped in attention as a thematic object, and finally made a
theme of judgment, is across each operation a telescoping or synthesizing of
contextual relations that is all contextual (not just thematic context), at least
once some primordial or genuine constitution has been accomplished. The
reason for this approach by Husserl, I think, is the emphasis on temporality as an
organizing principle of consciousness. In a sense, temporality is one
dimensional, even though as lived-present it has the three dimensions of past,
future, present. It is one-dimensional because the only relation allowed between
contents from an object-oriented point of view is succession or co-existence.
Given this approach, Husserl often does not address the phenomenon of
organizational relations from an object-oriented analysis despite the idea that a
passive synthesis is accomplished without the activity of the ego. Even when he
does so the results are either limited, as when he describes association within
specific sense-fields such as vision, audition, etc., or they are vague. In short, for
Husserl, as for William James, context is ubiquitous and so its limits are
104 The Sphere of Attention
invisible. Husserl (2001, 573) writes, “We have taken the term ‘whole’ so
broadly that it encompasses every kind of connection that passively connects
objects or that is presented through judicative activity.” This is exactly the point;
it has been taken too broadly. Along with Gurwitsch, I would insist on a
distinction between theme, thematic context, and margin.
Roberto Walton (2003) has denied that Gurwitsch should have made such a
distinction between thematic context and margin. Although his account does not
necessarily center on Husserl’s Analyses, it is appropriate to note it here.
Walton’s point is that the distinction between the thematic context and the
margin, as a distinction between relevancy to the theme and irrelevancy, is
overshadowed, “encased” or “encompassed,” by a more significant opposition,
potentiality/actuality. In addition, Gurwitsch has not recognized “the opposition
of patency/latency,” and stresses in his work only patency, hence Gurwitsch
ignores the importance of latency for that which is outside of the theme. These
“oppositions” are based or grounded in the horizon as an all-encompassing
domain, principled by latency, that marks the perceptual world as a paramount
order of reality. Walton’s argument against Gurwitsch rests on the notion that
there is an all-embracing world horizon, “wordliness,” that overrides the
discontinuation between the thematic context and margin. Walton (2003, 11)
writes, “Whereas objective time is the relevancy-principle that renders possible
the unity of the thematized perceptual sector and its thematic field, worldliness
is the specific relevancy principle building a bridge across the limit between the
theme-thematic-field structure and the margin.” As I will show in the next
chapter, the “bridge across” both is the marginal halo, something Walton does
not mention, but which I believe is crucial for understanding Gurwitsch’s “field-
theory.” Walton (2003, 10) also argues, “The implication of the overlapping of
both domains in the sphere of indeterminateness is that everything, whether
thematic or marginal, appears to consciousness as pertaining to a unique, latent
world.” In the next chapter, I will also show how the margin, properly
conceived, is a kind of ultimate potentiality in the sphere of attention. For now,
however, I will directly respond to Walton’s claim that there is no real
distinction between thematic context and margin.
One can grant that there is potentiality in the thematic context and
potentiality in the margin (“field-potentials” and “potential themes with
potential thematic fields,” Gurwitsch 1964, 370–375), and that both imply
ultimate indeterminateness and potentiality, and not grant Walton’s point. The
“worldliness” of the world is so only in relation to the given theme and thematic
context on the one hand, and in relation to the given theme and the margin on
Gurwitsch and Husserl 105
chapter. Also Walton never mentions Gurwitsch’s account of the halo, which I
take to be crucial for understanding Gurwitsch’s distinction between the
dimensions in the sphere of attention. For now I will just note that the marginal
halo functions as a saddleback or thick limit between the thematic context and
margin, as the existential locus of subjectivity, and functions thereby as a
distinction between relevancy and irrelevancy, between thematic context and
margin.
connection binding up the thematic field to the theme as somehow relaxed [in
serial-shifting]. However, there is an appreciable difference between a gestalt
connection, however relaxed, and a pure “additive sum,” and just this difference
prevents us from speaking here of an “and-connection” (1966, 234). In other
words, the second and third items on the list are materially relevant to each other
in the way that any marginal item, for example, thirstiness, would not be. This is
a transformation in attending that Husserl seems to get right, according to
Gurwitsch, since Husserl advocates the identity of the elements through the
transformations. “Husserl and those in agreement with him had in mind this
identity of elements—here [i.e., in serial-shifting], indeed, one can speak of
“elements”—over against the alteration of the field of consciousness when
advocating the thesis that attention consists merely in giving preference to
certain contents or objects, the function of attention being to throw brighter light
on the items concerned without thereby changing in any way their material
content” (1966, 233). Hence, Husserl describes serial-shifting correctly yet
within an inadequate notion of thematic context (e.g., see Husserl 2001, 292).
Restructuring is when a new theme replaces the old theme, but the new
theme is the result of a transformation of formed constituents into formative
ones, and formative ones into formed ones. Gurwitsch interprets Husserl’s
account of ambiguous perceptions as restructuring of the theme. Ultimately,
Gurwitsch believes that Husserl misses the sense of restructuring because of his
theory of hyletic data. In a number of his works, Husserl is led to examine
ambiguous perceptions, such as when a woman standing next to him in an art
gallery turns out to be a wax figure designed to trick onlookers (2001, 431; see
also 72–75; and 1973, 99–101). One reason for considering these kind of
phenomena is that it sheds light on the nature of conflict and doubt. Gurwitsch’s
critique centers around the claim that the hyletic data can be remade as one
moment a mannequin and the next a person; that the same sense-data can be
either, and the conflict is between which form they will take from the noetic
factors. In other words, the conflict is subjective not objective. The hyletic or
sense-data are ambiguous. “In Husserl’s analysis, the conflict is presented as a
competition between two apperceptual interpretations for the same complex of
sense-data. As one apperception grasps the sense-data, the other is temporarily
superseded, until it reemerges” (Gurwitsch 1964, 270). Gurwitsch (1964, 271)
argues that the only way to assert the identity of the sense-data in the face of the
different perceptual interpretations is to conceive that the organization or
interpretation is imposed, yet does not affect the sense-data intrinsically (a sort
of constancy-hypothesis). In psychology of attention this is the endogenous or
108 The Sphere of Attention
top-down model of attention control. Gurwitsch (1964, 271) asks, “When two
perceptual apperceptions alternate with one another, is not that given in direct
sense-experience so qualified by the different implicit ideas [e.g., person vs.
mannequin] involved in either percept that the two percepts cannot be asserted
to contain identical elements?” It is up to Gurwitsch to demonstrate how these
“same” sense-data cannot be the same when taken up in attention in the way
described.
I will recount two of Gurwitsch’s counterexamples. They differ in that the
first is between two people’s attention to the “same” thing, and the second is
more like restructuring of the theme. “If Chinese letters are presented to me, the
difference between me and one who knows Chinese is not only that he
understands them and I do not, but the letters also look different to him than they
do to me. What is immediately given to either of us, what either perceives, is not
the same object. Holding that hyletic data are organized and articulated by
meaning-bestowing and understanding acts, one cannot say that the appearance
of the word on paper as a physical event is, with respect to its sensuous aspect,
left unchanged by the animating acts. In this case, the mental aspect of the
expression forms and articulates its physical aspect” (Gurwitsch 1966, 255). In a
later and better formulation, since it is more akin to Husserl’s examples,
Gurwitsch examines the phenomenon of restructuring in a natural setting. “In an
unfamiliar mountainous country we see at some altitude a bluish-gray formation
appearing at one moment as a cloud, at others as the sky-line of mountains”
(Gurwitsch 1964, 271). Like in the duck-rabbit figure or vase-faces line
drawings, the functional significance of the constituents undergoes dramatic
change, so that one cannot say the same theme is presented in each case, nor that
the constituents remained the same in their function within the gestalt. For
example, constituents that were formative are now formed, and formed ones are
now formative, in the transformation. Gurwitsch (1964, 271–272) writes, “As
long as the sky-line of mountains appears, the bluish-gray color is consolidated
and attached to a bodily surface. However, when the cloud is perceived, the
spatial localization of the color becomes indeterminate, the color appears to float
in the air.” In short, there are two different gestalts that are competing for the
same space, not for the same sense-data. “Conflict presupposes something
identical for which there is competition. This identical something, we submit, is
a definite location in perceptual space rather than a set of sense-data conceived
to be raw material, devoid of noetic form, and assumed to be contained in
different percepts as common elements” (Gurwitsch 1964, 272).
Gurwitsch and Husserl 109
Husserl does acknowledge that the two presentations are different, and even
that the reversion to the first appearance is not a reversion to the same
presentation. “If the apperception of human being suddenly changes into the
apperception of wax figure, then the human being will stand there first in its
presentation in the flesh and then a wax figure. But in truth neither of them are
there like the human being was prior to the onset of doubt” (Husserl 2001, 74).
Gurwitsch would agree with Husserl here; he gets it right that the human being
presented the second time is not the same as it is presented the first time. For
Husserl, this is a function of doubt becoming a part of the presentation of human
being presented the second time, whereas before it was not. But this correct
description does not reach the level of Gurwitsch’s critique, since it does not
dispute the notion that the same data are being presented in each case.
John Drummond (1990, 159–160) interestingly interprets this sensible
appearance as a “visual phantom,” so that the problem of ambiguous perception
moves up a level noematically, out of reach of Gurwitsch’s critique. On this
account, it is the “visual phantom” that stays the same, and the various
(ambiguous) ways in which it might reveal itself are tied up in associational
syntheses. With respect to attentional restructuration of the theme, which is the
concern here, Drummond’s point would seem to be that for Husserl,
restructuration of the theme is not a legitimate transformation in attending in its
own right, but is really correctly analyzed by Husserl at the level of judgment
and doubt (cf. Sartre 2004, 22, 135–136). One might wonder, however, if this
“visual phantom” is yet assumable under the definition of theme asserted in this
study (see also Arvidson 2000), namely that even partially formulated themes
are themes, just as “pre-attentive” processes still involve thematic attention.
Apparently, it could be a theme in this sense. If it is a theme, then it likely
reduces phenomenologically to thematic restructuring as described in Chapter
Three. If the “visual phantom” is not a theme, then Gurwitsch’s criticism of
Husserl in this case still seems to have merit, since his criticism is aimed at the
thematic level and this thematic phenomenon is not yet accounted for by “visual
phantom.”
In synthesis, unlike enlargement, the previous theme which is now a
constituent in a new theme is not identical in organization and relations since it
now contributes to the functional significance of the new theme. In distinction
from serial-shifting, which Gurwitsch (after Husserl) sometimes calls
“synthesized consciousness,” the transformation in synthesis does not leave
“elements” intact, and neither transformation is founded upon the other. “In
opposition to Husserl’s view, we must insist upon the peculiar nature of
110 The Sphere of Attention
dependent parts. Gurwitsch wants to reserve the use of “independent” for those
constituents that can be singled out, and “dependent” for those that cannot. And
when it actually is singled out its intrinsic organization and relations will not
remain what they were previous to being singled out. Gurwitsch (1966, 262)
writes, “The basic error in Stumpf’s and Husserl’s definition of independent and
dependent parts seems to consist in foisting into a phenomenological datum as
already contained in it that which results from it by virtue of a modification, but
not otherwise. The possibility or impossibility of singling out a constituent from
a contexture is permitted to play a decisive role for the description of the
experience of the constituent within the contexture—that is to say, when it is not
yet singled out. In other words, a given concrete phenomenon is not taken for
what it is in itself but is interpreted under the perspective of another phenom-
enon into which it can be transformed….An item which can be singled out must
be sharply distinguished from one which is singled out actually.” The problem is
that Husserl and Stumpf speak of constituents as if the singling out has already
been accomplished, so that it is the identical “element” within the present
configuration or as a theme on its own. “This is the central point in our
divergence from Stumpf and Husserl, who maintain that an item can merely be
isolated and otherwise remain what it is, whereas according to our analyses a
materially different What, a new theme, results from such isolation” (Gurwitsch
1966, 264). When Husserl discusses what Gurwitsch would call singling out, for
instance in his Analyses (e.g. 2001, 557), he does little to cause a reader to think
that Gurwitsch’s critique of the identity of “elements” is misguided. (Also see
the description of what Gurwitsch would call a “formative constituent”
becoming thematic in singling out, Husserl 2001, 295; and 298 for independent/
dependent.) The other area where Gurwitsch mentions singling out with respect
to Husserl is his critique of Husserl’s theory of hyle. In short, even if one were
to somehow extract hyletic data alone, a “hyletic reflection,” the transformation
boils down to singling out. If true, this means that the datum was already a
constituent in a theme, and hence not devoid of organization (Gurwitsch 1966,
257).
In a fascinating passage, parts of which were already quoted above,
Gurwitsch’s critique of Husserl neatly brings together synthesis, singling out,
and serial-shifting, even though Gurwitsch does not call attention to it this way.
Having already spoken of how polythetic acts can become monothetic acts,
which are syntheses, Gurwitsch (1966, 250) writes, “The law of transformation
is reciprocal: monothetic acts can also be transformed into polythetic acts. Both
112 The Sphere of Attention
One could easily multiply these kinds of passages in Husserl’s other works, and
find echoes in Gurwitsch’ work (see also Husserl 2001, 20, 77, and 152).
Husserl gives concrete descriptions of a marginal content becoming thematic,
Gurwitsch and Husserl 113
115
116 The Sphere of Attention
and subjectivity itself is irrelevant to these focal contents (Gurwitsch 1966, 293).
In other words, in these cases and most of the time the activity of the sphere of
attention, which is subjectivity, is itself presented as marginal. As the lunch
sandwich is attended to thematically within the thematic context of how savory
and satisfying it is, a co-present sector of the activity in the sphere of attention is
presented as irrelevant to the theme and its context. That is, there is attention to
the sandwich within a particular context, not thematic attention to the attending
process. However, the attending process (comprised of thematic attention, and
contextual and marginal consciousness) is presented in the marginal dimension
at any moment, as flowing out of the future and into the past, along with other
marginal content.
As noted above, attention experiments almost universally treat the subject in
the same way: they assume that attention to attention is irrelevant to the task of
attention. Another way to say this is that these experiments assume that
reflection is a distractor. There is no need to think of attention as emanating
from a self, or as having a self as its center or hub, in order to prove hypotheses
about attention processes. It is already assumed that the subject is a thematically
attending subject, and attending to something other than the attention process,
although this latter transformation is possible through reflection. The effect is to
define the subject as usually nothing more than the attending process, exactly
what I take non-egological approaches to the human person like those of
Gurwitsch and Sartre to be doing.
To be more precise about subjectivity and attention, I claim that the region
of the margin called the halo is the existential locus of human being. In my
reading of Gurwitsch, he implicitly makes this claim throughout his work. A
compact and provocative statement is in an article originally published in 1929
(Gurwitsch 1966, 268–269); and a fuller but amazingly implicit account is in
Marginal Consciousness (1985), amazing because the word “halo” is never used
in that work. As suggested in Chapter One, the structure of the margin mimics
the structure of the relationship between the theme and thematic context
(Gurwitsch 1985, 41, 51). In the margin, a certain segment or sector of each of
the three orders of existence—streaming in attending, embodiment, environing
world—is attended to as irrelevant with any theme. Gurwitsch (1985, 51) writes,
“In all cases, the presence before consciousness marginally of the three
mentioned orders of existence consists in some pertinent data being actually and
originally, although not thematically, experienced with their pointing references
to a wider context.” In the margin, the halo implies the horizon as the halo’s
wider context in three domains. First, there is always marginal consciousness of
Subjectivity and Attention 123
the streaming in the sphere of attention—to the fact that attention is an ongoing
process in the present—and the presentation of this sector of the streaming in
attending is a marginal consciousness in the halo. This halo as “pertinent data”
of marginal phenomenal temporality implies the rest of the streaming in the
sphere of attention (as horizon) through presented pointing references (1966,
268). Second, there is marginal consciousness in the halo to certain kinesthetic
facts, implying the horizon of embodiment or corporeity within the material
world. Third, there is marginal consciousness in the halo to an actually presented
sector of the environing world which implies the environing world in general as
horizon, again through pointing references. The point is that the halo is a sort of
dynamic gateway which makes these three domains—the streaming in the
sphere of attention, embodiment, and the environing world—marginally co-
present with the given theme. The halo also gives way to the horizonally
presented indeterminate fullness of these three domains.
The halo is immensely important in subjectivity. Gurwitsch (1985, 59)
states, “Because at every moment of conscious life (whatever our special
attitude and the subject matter of our thematic activity), we are aware of a
certain segment of the stream of consciousness, of our embodied existence, and
of the perceptual world, the belief in the existence of this world and the
apprehension of ourselves as pertaining to it as mundane existents are
permanently present to consciousness.” So the answer to ‘where is the I?’ when
one is not reflecting is that it is the activity of the sphere of attention as
presented in marginal consciousness, in particular as part of the halo for
thematic attention. In attending, subjectivity as the process of attending is
marginally aware of itself and this awareness is permanent and abiding.
Throughout The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre (1990) calls this a “non-
positional consciousness” or “unreflective consciousness of consciousness.” The
content of the marginal halo and the marginal horizon are not some constant set.
Gurwitsch (1966, 268) observes that “The halo is not a set of constant data
surrounding and accompanying every mental state. Rather these data incessantly
emerge and fade away. What alone is constant and permanent is the experienced
pertinence to the halo which characterizes all its components.” But the character
of the sphere of attention changes with learning, as previously noted, so that
some content is more likely to become prominent than other content. In order to
be admitted to the dimension of contextual relevancy, with the dimension of
theme as its center, content must “find its way,” so to speak, across the halo
which divides irrelevancy from relevancy, margin from context, with respect to
a given theme. In addition to the theme, the halo is the saddleback, the thick
124 The Sphere of Attention
between all three dimensions, with the marginal halo as the thick limit between
what is now relevant or irrelevant. Another way of saying it is that the halo is
not at the outer “edge” of the margin, but is in-between relevancy and
irrelevancy—the limit as ending of the context of attention, and the limit as
beginning of the margin of attention.
35–36), who noticed that thinking always has something else as its object, while
it has itself only marginally: “But evidently knowledge and perception and
opinion and understanding have always something else as their object, and
themselves only by the way.” Negation involves a “not,” and in attending the act
of presenting the object is not the same as the object presented. The negation in
the sphere of attention is internal since it is between that which is marginally
presented and that which is attended to focally within a context; the activity of
allowing the sandwich to present itself as figure against a background is not the
same as the sandwich presented. Note additionally that external negation, for
Sartre, is the distinction between theme and thematic context—for example, the
sandwich as thematic is not the paper plate on which it is positioned, etc.
Together internal and external negation name the essential process in
differentiating theme, context, and margin.
This duality of internal negation in the sphere of attention responds to the
paradox on which Gurwitsch comments in his critique of Husserl’s Krisis (1993)
from the 1930s. Gurwitsch (1966, 433– 434) writes, “If—as it seems we must—
we mean by egos human beings, an apparently insuperable paradox is bound to
arise. Human beings are themselves mundane existents among other such
existents; they belong to, and are part of the world. How then is it possible for a
part to constitute and to produce the very whole of which it is a part?….
Obviously, the paradox hinges on the dual role of man, who is at the same time
both a mundane existent among others, an object within the world, and a subject
with respect to the world, i.e., a subject from whose experiences and mental
operations the world derives the sense of its existence.” The negation in internal
negation is a wedge between the subject and object; more exactly, it is the
exclusion of the position of dynamic embodied attending in the world from the
dimension of relevance (context). Said still another way, unless I am reflecting,
the fact that I am attending is presented but as irrelevant. By the negation of
relevance, that which is thematically attended within a thematic context is
distinguished from that which is marginally presented, and one of the “items”
excluded from relevancy is the activity of dynamic embodied attending itself.
Ever-present self-awareness is the sphere of attention present to itself
marginally. Previous to Sartre, Hegel (1971, 196) observes, “Attention contains,
therefore, the negation of one’s self-assertion and also the surrender of oneself
to the matter in hand.” This negation of relevance is what attention researchers
measure in experiments involving distractors and interference effects, and one of
those distractors could be the process of attention vying for thematic attention
itself, what is called “self-focused attention” in psychological literature.
128 The Sphere of Attention
The common sense distinction between our position in the world as subjects
and things out there in the world as objects is given pre-reflectively—a
distinction between dynamic embodied attending as a position in the world
which itself is presented marginally in the halo, and that which is attended to
within a thematic context. Hence there is no need to go outside the activity of
the sphere of attention to find some supervenient activity, operation, or
substance that brings about the sense of object opposed to subject, or also, as
addressed below, the acute sense of subjectivity for a subject revealed in
reflection. Gurwitsch (1966, 292–293) writes, “Consciousness has no egological
structure; it is not owned by the ego; its acts do not spring from a source or
center called the ego. Consciousness is defined by intentionality. It is
consciousness of an object on the one hand and an inner awareness of itself on
the other hand. Being confronted with an object I am at once conscious of this
object and aware of my being conscious of it. This awareness in no way means
reflection.” With intentionality as attentionality (discussed below), the metaphor
of the sphere of attention accounts for the uniqueness of human existence in the
world by including the subject’s distinction from and relation to objects in the
process of attending itself. The inclusiveness or intrinsicalness implied by the
metaphor of a sphere is another advantage of this metaphor. This extension of
Gurwitsch’s philosophy, as a sphere of attention rather than a field of
consciousness, may also more clearly portray Gurwitsch as what Thomas
Natsoulas calls an “intrinsic theorist” rather than an “appendage theorist,” and so
clear up the inconsistency that Natsoulas (1996 and 1998) finds in Gurwitsch’s
work.
One might complain that the sphere of attention is a sort of subjectivism or
representationalism. Perhaps the very notion of a sphere recalls the problem of
solipsism that threatens Descartes’ Meditations. Lamenting the current state of
philosophy, Robert Sokolowski (2000, 10) quotes from Samuel Beckett’s novel
Murphy to synopsize how we are in an “egocentric predicament”: “Murphy’s
mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe
without.” Sokolowski (2000, 11) comments that “The Cartesian predicament
that Beckett describes, with the mind taken as this large, hollow sphere, light-
filled but shading off into darkness, closed off from both the body and the world,
is the unfortunate situation in which philosophy finds itself in our time….This
epistemological dilemma is the target of the doctrine of intentionality.” All one
has is what is inside the sphere. All I can know of the world or of other persons
is how they exist in my mind. The upshot of this representationalism is that I do
not know anything beyond the sphere of attention. I know the “sphere-world”
Subjectivity and Attention 129
that particular attending being in its historical, habitual, and learned develop-
ment, that is, its attentional character, whose existential locus at any time is the
marginal halo. The process of attention is at the same time a disclosing of the
self as marginally ever-present and a disclosing of the world. If what a
phenomenologist means by “intentionality” is at least the pervasive, correlated,
double disclosure of the presenting activity (noesis) and that which is presented
(noema), then just the same, the mutual revelation in the attending process as I
have described it is attentionality.
The above account implicitly relinquishes the Husserlian noesis-noema
terminology, replacing intentionality with attentionality. Some Husserl scholars
have recently debated the place of attention and intention in Husserl’s work
(e.g., Begout 2001; Depraz 2004; Steinbock 2001 and 2004; Vermersch 2004;
and cf. Ryan 1977). Especially interesting is the enigmatic footnote in Ideas I,
§92, where Husserl seems to state that attention is just as fundamental as
intention. In general, it is agreed by these scholars and others that Husserl means
to say that attentionality is not equal to intentionality, but is a mode of
intentionality. In my opinion, Husserl comfortably critiqued the psychology of
attention in his time, but never found a comfortable place within his own system
of philosophy for attention. In an earlier work, Logical Investigations I,
Investigation Two, Husserl (1970, §23) writes, “The range of the unitary notion
of attention is therefore so wide that it doubtless embraces the whole field of
intuitive and cogitative reference [Meinens], the field of presentation
[Vorstellens] in a well-defined but sufficiently wide sense, which comprehends
both intuition and thought. Ultimately it extends as far as the concept:
Consciousness of something.” I believe that Husserl never unambiguously
distinguishes attention (Aufmerksamkeit) from intentionality, so it is very
difficult to go to his work for some clarification of what counts as attention and
what counts as intention, or how the two are to be distinguished. In fact, if one
agrees that contextual and marginal consciousness are processes in the sphere of
attention, and one takes seriously the above statement from the Logical
Investigations, then there is little reason to deny that attentionality should
replace intentionality. It resolves the ambiguity and so unifies the concept of
how we exist as meaning-givers in the world.
Merleau-Ponty seems to inadvertently give attention the same kind of
scope, so that if the sphere of attention is seen as three-dimensional—thematic,
contextual, and marginal—then contextual and marginal consciousness are best
defined in terms of attending. Merleau-Ponty (1962, 31) writes, “But at least the
act of attention is rooted in the life of consciousness, and one can finally
Subjectivity and Attention 131
understand how it emerges from its liberty of indifference and gives itself a
present object. This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this
recasting at every moment of its own history in the unity of a new meaning, is
thought itself.” If his description of marginal content becoming thematic is
interpreted as a shift within the sphere of attention, then the fullest
understanding of the “life of consciousness” is the life of attending.
With his eyes focused on the noema rather than noesis, one can see
Gurwitsch struggle with intentionality and the place of noeses throughout his
work. His main work, The Field of Consciousness (noema) is obviously not
primarily about the “consciousness of field” (noesis). And when noeses are
discussed in his work, their phenomenological role is diminished. In an article
originally published in 1929, Gurwitsch reasons that what follows from his
criticism of Husserl is a “redefinition of the concepts of noesis and
intentionality.” In that article Gurwitsch (1966, 257 ) writes “By the term
‘noesis’ we can no longer denote an organizing and apprehending function
turning hyletic data into a vehicle of sense or meaning, a special and specific
function to which consciousness owes its character of intentionality. After the
distinction between hyle and morphe has been abandoned, the term ‘noesis’
extends to the experienced act of consciousness in its entirety.” It appears that,
for Gurwitsch, the noesis becomes devoid of function except as activity
subordinated to the organization within each dimension of theme, thematic
context, and margin. Noeses—the acts through which objects are presented—
have temporality as their necessary condition (Gurwitsch 1964, 3, 347), and this
temporality serves to unify the three “field of consciousness” dimensions
(Gurwitsch 1964, 10). The temporally ordered activity in attending infuses all
three domains as potentiality (Gurwitsch 1964, 370–371). That is, the theme,
thematic context, and margin, all as future oriented, are noetically equivalent
(Gurwitsch 1966, 277). Any differentiation in what might be considered the
activity of attention is attributed to the noematic side. Even positional index and
existential index are noematic instead of noetic (Gurwitsch 1964, 362, 405). And
of course, subjectivity is not substantial. So noeses have no central home or
control station; subjectivity is simply the temporal chain of events of attending
(Gurwitsch 1966, 265 and 281). A “consciousness of field” as a noetic
perspective on the activity of “consciousness” implies some distance between
the “field,” in particular the theme, and the attending to it. But this distance is
already accounted for completely in the internal negation described above.
Within the sphere of attention, marginal consciousness in the halo accounts for
Gurwitsch’s “noetic component,” and the theme as it presents itself within a
132 The Sphere of Attention
context accounts for the “noematic component.” (Note that Gurwitsch himself
never uses the term noema to refer to content of the margin.)
These terms noetic and noematic are unnecessary, and even misleading
once the sphere of attention is articulated as a dynamic tension of
transformations organized according to the constraints of the three dimensions
of theme, thematic context, and margin. Gurwitsch (1966, 138) writes that
consciousness is not one dimensional, “Rather, it ought to be considered as a
correlation, or correspondence, or parallelism between the plane of acts,
psychical events, noeses, and a second plane which is that of sense (noemata).”
The plane metaphor is intriguing. One of the distinguishing qualities of two
parallel planes is that they do not intersect, although they may each be conjoined
in the same “object,” in this case the sphere of attention (Gurwitsch would say
the “field of consciousness” and consciousness of that field). The sphere
metaphor, instead of the field metaphor, allows a different kind of non-
intersection but conjunction. If the indefinitely extended surface of the sphere
represents the marginal dimension, and the ball of the sphere and its center
represent respectively thematic context and theme, then that domain where the
two conjoin is the halo. Context with theme as its center of reference on the one
hand, distinguished from what is irrelevant as margin but co-present with those
two dimensions on the other hand, with halo in between, is captured better in the
sphere metaphor than it is in the dual-planes metaphor. In the sphere metaphor it
is easier to understand how human existence is a unity since a sphere connotes
unification in a way that two planes cannot. Just as the theme, context, and
margin are all “with” each other in any moment, each as a distinct dimension, so
also the marginal dimension is an ultimate background to any vector in the
sphere that starts from its center (the theme). From any point of view through
the center of it, a sphere will have the surface (margin) as its final layer, and a
vector will pass through the connection between the ball (the ball itself organ-
ized with respect to the theme as center) and surface, that is, through the halo, to
get there. It is important to note that the use of “surface” here does not denote a
closing off from the world in the way that Sokolowski criticizes. The marginal
horizon, by definition, is indefinitely extended, so that looking from inside the
sphere to outside, there is no end to the “surface” as lived.
Reflection
Sartre claims in his analysis of The Transcendence of the Ego (1990/1934)
that the ego or self is not present pre-reflectively. Later in Being and
Nothingness (1956/1943), Sartre develops this to mean that, if considered
Subjectivity and Attention 133
of the marginal orders of existence is thematic, then it is not also marginal. For
example, I have noted above that if a segment of the streaming in attending
becomes thematic, the streaming is still marginally presented. But Gurwitsch
(1985, xlv) writes, “Obviously our theme may belong to one of these orders. In
that case, we have a concomitant marginal consciousness of the other two
orders” (see also 1964, 415–416). This problem is also noticed by Walton
(2003) and is part of the motivation for denying a distinction between thematic
context and margin, which I have argued against above. I also think Gurwitsch
is mistaken here, and claim that no matter the theme, marginal consciousness in
the halo and horizon of the streaming, embodiment, and environing world,
persists.
Philosophical acceptance of the existence of marginal consciousness in the
halo as the existential locus of human subjectivity overcomes the problem that
plagues Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1965), namely, that a perspective or
position that allows such a critique is not found within the critique, the transcen-
dental ego eludes the grasp of the critique (Gurwitsch 1966, 285–286). Hume
woke up Kant, but Kant still slept through the later stages of his own Copernican
revolution in philosophy initiated in the Critique of Pure Reason. Given Kant’s
principles of sensibility and understanding, he cannot account for self-attention
or reflection. The following four claims from Kant’s work are incompatible with
the fifth claim from the same work (Arvidson 1990).
(1) The categories and the sensible intuition are our only two
sources of knowledge, neither giving knowledge by itself.
(2) Intuition is structured by time.
(3) Understanding unifies time determinations.
(4) There is no intellectual intuition (from the “Transcendental
Aesthetic”)
(5) There is an existence, the transcendental unity of appercep-
tion, which cannot appear in time or be thought in it.
devastating it and at the same time calls upon it; in a ‘putting it back in its place’
it puts thought in place. It awakens it. The awakening of thought is not a
welcoming of the Infinite, is not a recollecting, not an assuming, which are
necessary and sufficient for experience. The idea of the Infinite puts these in
question.” What Descartes finally accomplishes in the First and Second Medita-
tions is a description and analysis of the attentional transformation called
singling out, in particular a singling out of attention activity that we call
reflection. In the Third Meditation he manages to ground the sphere of attention
that he discovers, and this grounding is within the sphere itself, as the infinite
margin, which as ultimate potentiality of “the thinking thing” puts attending
back in its place. Therefore, properly attended to, this grounding is not
foundationalism. It is existential process. “In the identity of self-presence—in
the silent tautology of the prereflexive—lies an avowal of difference between
the same and the same, a disphasure, a difference at the heart of intimacy”
(Levinas 1991, 212–213). In the cogito, Descartes singles out a current sector of
the margin—phenomenal temporality (the streaming in attending), embodiment,
and the environing world—and makes it thematic, all the while maintaining a
marginal perspective or point of view on this theme. Hence, in reflection, the
margin as infinite cradles the theme as finite, just as theos cradles Socrates’ soul
in Plato’s Apology. In both cases, the cradling can yield to uneasiness—in one
the Angst of authentic reflection and in the other the aggressive “piety” of
elenchos. Note that although there is officially no body or environing world by
the Third Meditation, Descartes nonetheless must thematize them before he can
doubt them: cogito cogitatum corrects Husserl in Cartesian Meditations (1960,
§14).
Authentic Reflection
Imagine that you have been invited to a party by a friend, hosted by
someone you do not know. You hear music and talking inside as you approach
the house. The door is slightly ajar and so you walk in. Immediately you see
your friend and a number of people warmly greet you, calling out your name.
Without really trying or concentrating on it, you “work the room” with hugs and
handshakes. You spy the refreshments and make your way across the room,
almost dance-walking to the music. Even though you are seeing friends and
meeting new people, you are not very “self-aware.” For example, when you first
come in, perhaps you are thematically attending to the roomful of people as a
gestalt, in which your friend’s smiling face is quickly singled out as new theme.
Then, in synthesis, she and the person standing with her are presented as a
Subjectivity and Attention 139
couple (boyfriend and girlfriend), and the context for this new theme enlarges as
the purpose of the party comes into contextual consciousness (an engagement
party). The transformations in this example could be very rapid. The point is that
as you attend throughout all the transformations, “the self” is not the theme. You
are not reflecting.
You are conscious of yourself in this scenario, but this presentation of self
is irrelevant to the various themes, your friend’s face, etc. This marginal self-
consciousness is the presentation of temporality, embodiment, and the
environing world from the point of view of the current position of attending in
the world, with reference to the body. A number of scholars speak of the body as
center and Gurwitsch gives a similar account. He states that the “I” is an essen-
tially occasional expression related to the body as the permanent center of
reference for the spatial organization of the perceptual world (Gurwitsch 1985,
72). Gurwitsch describes the perceptual world as spatially organized along three
main axes—front and behind, above and below, right and left. Each axis is
determined by the two complementary directions of near and far. Embodied
existence is the center of reference for this spatial organization. Gurwitsch
writes, “‘Here’ is wherever the body is; every other object is ‘there’ in some
direction and at a greater or lesser distance. Variations in the orientational
characters of objects refer to changes in their position with respect to the body”
(1985, 62; see also Husserl 2001, 584). In the scenario above, the streaming,
dynamic consciousness of a sector of the environing world, and from the
position of the body in the world, is presented marginally in the halo. There is
marginal consciousness in the halo to now, here, there—respectively, to a sector
of the streaming in the sphere of attention (temporality), current kinesthetic
sense, and the environing world—all as related to but irrelevant to the theme,
say, your friend’s smiling face. Also, this marginal halo horizonally implies
these three ever-present orders of existence as indefinitely extended in content.
In this example, when you become reflective, the content and orientation of
the sphere of attention changes. Note that “when you become reflective” is a
convenient yet improper abbreviation for a phenomenologically more exact
“when the sphere of attention is made thematic” or “when the sphere of attention
makes itself thematic.” This is because there is no “you” in any substantial sense
as a hub or center prior to reflection. For example, in the scenario above, there is
no thematic attention to attention itself, which is why we would call it
unreflective or pre-reflective attention. At most there is a marginal
consciousness in the halo to the attending process.
140 The Sphere of Attention
Sartre
Reflection can be authentic or inauthentic. In this moment of embarrass-
ment, what is thematically given is the now, here, there of dynamic embodied
processing in the world, the stream, body, world. In this moment, attention
might contextualize itself in a variety of ways. By “contextualize itself” I mean
that attention attends to itself and that this thematic attention to attention is
presented within a context. This theme-context complex is freely chosen (even if
it does not seem so, as Sartre explains in Being and Nothingness). So, for
example, you assume the mantel of pride to fend off the attempts of others to
shame you by looking down on you. As Sartre would say, you thwart their
Subjectivity and Attention 141
Buddhism
Certain Buddhist practices seem to parallel authentic reflection in the sphere
of attention, although they add a moral element in the practice. Almost everyone
in or close to the disciplines of philosophy and psychology has recognized the
explosive interdisciplinary growth of “consciousness studies” since the early
1990s. If it is a “Consciousness Boom,” as Jean Petitot et al. (1999) call it in
their book Naturalizing Phenomenology, then there is within it a “Buddhism
Boom.” The seed for this blooming was planted in the 1960’s, but currently it is
difficult to avoid commenting on Buddhist practices if one wants to give an
interdisciplinary account of attention. But why would one want to avoid it
anyway? The Buddhist tradition has been scientifically studying “conscious-
ness” for millennia and has much to offer, so it does not makes sense to ignore
these practices. The “science” I mean here is systematic, rigorous, disciplined
investigation in the sense of Wissenschaft. One reason for the Buddhism Boom
in “consciousness studies” is the natural parallelism that these practices,
assumptions, and conclusions show for phenomenological practice. Above we
saw how Buddhist practice could be seen as the transformation of elucidation of
the context. Here I will take a more detailed look at how the “mindfulness”
practice in Buddhism, also called shamatha or shamatha-vipashyana, parallels
the Sartrean inspired account of authentic reflection in this section. In both
cases, one sees that authentic reflection is paradoxically the most personal and
most impersonal way for attention to attend to itself.
In On Becoming Aware: A Pragmatics of Experiencing, three French
researchers who are well-known to Husserl scholars interested in cognitive
Subjectivity and Attention 145
gence and subsiding), the body (breathing), and the environing world (more so,
eventually, in the advanced practice of vipashyana). It appears that the “goal” is
to transform attention so that attention to attention is thematic, but this is not
inauthentic reflection; for the “self” that is attended to is no self, not a thing. The
peculiar type of transformation seems to be a serial-shifting-elucidation that
recontextualizes the theme from story or personal narrative to free process; from
personal to impersonal, from self to no-self (anattƗ). The personal identity is
impersonal—“You find yourself going in and out of an identification with a
non-centered, non-ego space with various degrees of expansion.”
In a very real sense, this practice demands a larger philosophical view of
what attention is. It promotes a redistribution in the sphere of attention in all
three dimensions, lightening up the theoretical and practical load on the theme,
assuming therefore that there are other dimensions in the sphere of attention than
just the thematic. In a chapter by Varela and Depraz, genuine attention in
shamatha practice is distinguished from simple attention. “It is a technique of
genuine attentiveness and not just of simple attention. For example, if I am
capable of having a ‘quality of mindfulness’ with regard to a text that I am
reading, of being present to myself at the same time as I am attentive to my
reading, and if a person drops a glass behind me, this does not make me start, for
my attention is not only focalized on the reading but embraces, with a certain
panoramic vision, all of the space that surrounds me. Sometimes, waiters in a
café give us superb demonstrations of mindfulness. They are attentive to not
tipping over platters of dishes, but they never forget the feet of the tables. In the
Kagyupa schools, they say that one must give about 40% of attention to
breathing and 60% to the periphery” (Depraz et al., 2003, 217). As far as I can
tell, the “presence to myself” is a loose way of speaking in this passage, if it is a
description of “genuine attentiveness,” since there is no self in this tradition in a
substantial or essential sense. Regardless, it is clear that this practice of
mindfulness shows the need for a more thoroughgoing theory of attending, of
how it involves context and margin. What is remarkable about this practice is
that all the exercises seem to celebrate what is outside the focus in attending,
trying to strengthen contextual and marginal consciousness, rather than focal
attention, even though focal attention to breathing is usually the first step in
spiritual practices. It certainly does not only involve the focus. For it seems that
Buddhist practice must assume that the human being is a sphere of attention in
these three dimensions. One can advance from the practice of shamatha to
vipashyana, which is the “analytic and panoramic insight into the moment-to-
moment arising of mental states” (Depraz et al., 2003, 220). Vipashyana then is
148 The Sphere of Attention
149
150 The Sphere of Attention
ongoing attending life. For this is exactly what we mean when we say that You
are immediately and directly relevant to me. In encountering You, thematic
attention focuses on You as a singular embodied attending being which is im-
mediately relevant to the sphere of attention’s own ongoing attending activity. In
short, You are in the presence of me, as the theme of my ongoing attending life,
and this life is the context for You which is focal. This compassion—literally
“enduring together”—is a special relevancy-principle in the sphere of attention.
in the world. But sometimes we encounter a person in moral attention, and the
theme is no longer presented as an “it,” a mere component of the world, but is
replaced by a uniquely attended theme—You.
Gurwitsch was interested in the social world, and gives an extended and
sophisticated treatment of human relations in Human Encounters in the Social
World (1979). But one would not call him a moral philosopher, in the way that
one might readily say this of Buber, and so turning to Gurwitsch may seem odd
rather than sensible. Yet in Human Encounters in the Social World Gurwitsch
reveals just the gem one might look for if one wanted to know the shape of the
moral moment.
In discussing the idea of “social world” (Milieuwelt), and without reference
to Buber or morality, Gurwitsch includes an account of an encounter very much
like Buber’s I-You relation, but only as a limit-case of more usual social
encounters. For Gurwitsch, the practical activities of daily life are the setting for
social encounters, and those who encounter each other are also at the same time
tied to their practical activities (Gurwitsch 1979, 35–36; and 1964, 382, 386).
For Buber, these relations with others in the world are of the I-it kind. So the
more unique kind of encounter that moral attention involves would necessarily
have to diminish the importance of the surrounding environment and its
practical concerns. In the sphere of attention, intense absorption in the theme is
negatively correlated with the intensity in contextual and marginal
consciousness (Gurwitsch 1985, 43). This is a limited “contextual cost” and
Gurwitsch applies this correlation in the passage in question below. That is, the
context in moral attention is unique in comparison with non-moral attention.
Gurwitsch writes the surprising passage about the limit-case of “self-sufficient
being-together” as he is discussing the ever-present prominence of the marginal
“horizon” of the surrounding world in human social interaction. Gurwitsch
(1979, 37) notes that “When, in fact, a case of human being-together is made
self-sufficient, then those together withdraw from the world in order to orient
themselves toward each other as individuals. They surrender the relations to the
surrounding world because their being-together finds its meaning in itself.” This
“surrendering” is part of the limited contextual cost. More of the passage (1979,
36–37) follows:
itself, for example, when we are together with a person ‘for his
own sake.’ To that extent a relatively horizonless being-
together is present when the horizon is singly and alone
grounded in people as such who are together for their own
sake, as a consequence of which they find themselves as pure
individuals. Because the sense of this being-together is only
grounded in individuals who encounter themselves in this
way, it is, as being-together, made self-sufficient. It conceals
its sense in itself and does not receive it in the first place from
that horizon in which it occurs. Being-together is absolutized
here, that is, it is absolved from relations to the surrounding
world; it no longer fits into the surrounding world but self-
sufficiently rests in itself.
but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.” Singling
out qualities such as hair color and mannerisms works against the possibility or
maintenance of moral attention. Nothing specific like this is thematically or
contextually presented in the You (see Buber 1970, 175). Buber (1970, 59)
writes, “Even as a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words, nor a
statue of lines—one must pull and tear to turn a unity into a multiplicity—so it is
with the human being to whom I say You. I can abstract from him the color of
his hair or the color of his speech or the color of his graciousness; I have to do
this again and again; but immediately he is no longer You.” Thus this is a unique
theme, since the only possible functional significance of constituents of the
theme is to indicate the existence of this particular attending being as a whole
being in the world, a gestalt-presence in the world that attends to the world.
The two prominent or formative constituents of this centralized gestalt are
solidity and unitary individuality. Solidity is a sort of existential impressiveness
or conclusiveness. You wholly impress me. Unitary individuality is integral
uniqueness. You wholly are not me. As a singular being, the You is not
interchangeable with any other. The You is presented as distinctive and original.
Everything about You, every constituent, is referred to the wholeness or limit of
You. Note that for our purposes, and Buber is explicit here, the I-You relation
does not have to be mutual, unlike Aristotle’s “perfect” friendship.
What is the boundary when the You is attended to as thematic? It is not
readily apparent how such a gestalt has a boundary, which it must have if it is a
gestalt and is thematic. Buber’s descriptions of this boundary appear to be
inconsistent, but are not. For example, he writes, “Whoever says You does not
have something for his object. For wherever there is something there is also
another something; every It borders on other Its; it is only by virtue of bordering
on others. But where You is said there is no something. You has no borders.
Whoever says You does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in
relation” (Buber 1970, 55). When Buber says the “You has no borders” he
means that it does not indicate or imply the environing world as a context for its
presentation. Gurwitsch appears to describe the same phenomenon in the “limit-
case” of “self-sufficient being-together.” The You is not relevant to the everyday
world of things, relations, and qualities, or to other worlds such as the
arithmetical or imaginational. Understood otherwise, the You would be some
magical or mystical theme, a borderless gestalt and so without a context, and
Buber clearly does not mean that the You is mystical in this way. I will show
below that by segregating itself in consolidation the You borders on and is
relevant for a unique thematic context. In another curious passage related to this
154 The Sphere of Attention
problem, Buber writes “Neighborless and seamless, he is You and fills the
firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his
light” (Buber 1970, 59). Again, with respect to material things, other people,
etc., the You is presented as “neighborless.” With respect to singling out
individual detail, like aggressive demeanor or hair color (as in the “tones instead
of the melody” example) the You is presented as “seamless.” Everything “lives
in his light” because the You is presented as a theme—it is the center of
organization for the thematic context. So the You is presented in time and space,
although temporality and spatiality are not relevant as they might be for other
objects (Buber 1970, 81). Buber argues that the real boundary in encountering
You runs between the You and It, between presence and object (Gegenwart und
Gegenstand) (Buber 1970, 63).
The I-You relation itself is not the context for encountering You as
thematic. That we enjoy laughing together, that we have known each other for
years or that we have just met, the fact that we are in the same room right now,
none of this or any other facts of these kinds are the context for encountering
You. The immediacy and directness of the I-You encounter demands a unique
context. This means that the thematic context for attending to You is also not
facts about you, your name, your appearance, your personality, etc. These items
may be given marginally, but they are irrelevant to You as morally relevant to
me.
So what is the relation between theme and context in this case? What is the
relation between the You as bounded or limited, that is, as a centralized gestalt,
and the I which thematically attends to it? As noted above, a limit is both an
ending and a beginning, and both senses are presented here. The You presents
itself as a termination (a limit as ending) of the relevance of the surrounding
perceptual world of material things and practicalities, and as an origination (a
limit as beginning) of the relevance of moral relation. The You is an ending or
termination because it is distinguished from the environing world. It is not
functionally presented within the context of the world of things as another thing,
and so is set off against the world as not a thing. The You is individual and self-
contained, as the formative constituents of solidity and unitary individuality
indicate. As an intensely segregated and consolidated thematic gestalt in the
sphere of attention, the border of the You is an ending or termination of the
relevance of the environing world. This segregation from the space and time
world as it is usually marginally presented, what is called “reality” (see
Gurwitsch 1964, 387) is definitive and so is intense and novel. The You is a
gestalt that is also segregated from that which enacts this segregation, the I as
Morality and Attention 155
relevant context (discussed in the next paragraph). As any theme must, the You
still refers beyond itself to its thematic context, from which it is no less
segregated. Hence the second sense of limit, now as beginning or origination. A
limit indicates a beyond and under certain conditions is a gateway to what is
beyond it. This beginning manifests itself in the presentation of the You as
opening toward the I as relevant context. The You is placed within my world as
this world’s central organizing principle. My world becomes organized around
You in a peculiar way. The expression of this organizing principle is
compassion (discussed in the next section), and “my world” becomes a moral
world.
In encountering You, the I is the thematic context. You and I are materially
relevant to each other, but with You as the focus in attending. The gestalt-
connection between the You as theme and the I as thematic context is a unity by
relevancy. The theme establishes the lines of relevance for all items that are co-
presented in what Gurwitsch (1966, 204) calls “consciousness” and I have called
the sphere of attention. In this case what is relevant to the theme is the I. As the
previous chapter has shown, when one is attending reflectively, so that other-
wise haloic content is made thematic, the “I” as theme involves some particular
story of who I am and at the same time the on-going attending life is marginally
presented. But the case of moral attention is peculiar since the on-going
attending life that I am is contextually and marginally presented. Those items
that are relevant to the theme, to You as presented, are presented as part of the
thematic context. And it is I as an attending being, a sphere of attention, that is
presented as relevant to You, and together we form a unity of relevance,
connection, or relation, with You as the focus in attending.
In response to the question about the nature of context when the You is
thematic, the above answers that the I as on-going attending is the context, such
that the unity by relevancy is between the You and the I. But more must be said
about this theme and its context, specifically, about how subjectivity or on-going
attending activity is presented contextually in the moral moment.
I have followed Gurwitsch and Sartre in arguing for a non-egological
conception of human subjectivity. So there is no core or center to which all acts
or qualities of the human being refer, or from which all desires, acts, thoughts,
etc. originate and emanate. Also, there is no substantial executive or director that
is this hub of what a person is. Since it is crucial for my point here, I will quote
Gurwitsch (1985, 73–74) again on this matter:
156 The Sphere of Attention
perceptible thing presents itself one-sidedly, i.e., from a certain angle and under
a certain aspect but never under the infinite totality of all its possible aspects, so
too the present segment of the stream of consciousness, when grasped by
reflection and apprehended in its pointing to the Ego, appears as that part, side,
or aspect of the Ego which happens to fall under actual experience” (Gurwitsch
1985, 23). So as Gurwitsch writes in a letter to Alfred Schutz, which was
brought to my attention by Lester Embree, “In reflection the margin becomes
the thematic field. The grasped experience finds itself in a new field which
consists merely of constituents of the stream of consciousness” (Grathoff 1989,
48). To this new theme and thematic context, I would add that there is still
marginal content, as argued for in the previous chapter. The point is that
Gurwitsch does not appear to have explicitly discussed the possibility that
phenomenal time (the streaming) could become the context when an object
other than an “act of consciousness” is thematic, that is, when one is not
reflecting.
The streaming in the sphere of attention is one of the two main constituents
of the thematic context in moral attention. The other, discussed below, is
embodied existence. It is impossible for the streaming to be presented in its
wholeness or as fully elucidated and clear (Gurwitsch 1985, 20). In encountering
You, the streaming in attending is presented as materially related to the You—a
relevance that gives a peculiar temporal context to You as theme. In effect, the
sphere of attention is present to its own activity, but not in the mode of reflection
(the strong sense of self-attention) and not only marginally (the ever-present
attention to self). Reflection requires thematic attention to the sphere of
attention, and this theme would then replace You. Also, in the moral case, the
sphere of attention is not present to its own activity merely marginally, for this
would make my on-going attending activity only irrelevant to the theme, which
is You. The mode of being present to attending is contextual, so it is something
in between the thematic and the marginal, but is unlike either.
In encountering You, the sphere of attention thematizes the You as a
singular embodied attending being and as the center of the relevance of this
thematizing activity. In short, You are in the presence of me, as the theme of my
ongoing attentional life. The You presents itself as immediately and materially
relevant to my time: my streaming in attending. This tense and intense relation
between You and I with respect to temporality is what Buber calls presence or,
after Henri Bergson, “duration,” and is what I mean by the use of
“immediately,” as in the previous sentence. An engine for the tension in this
encounter is that my ongoing attending life is at the same time relevant and
158 The Sphere of Attention
“here” in the positioning of attending activity in the world. For Gurwitsch, the I
and the you are essentially occasional expressions related to the body as the
permanent center of reference for the spatial organization of the environment
(Gurwitsch 1985, 72; see also 62). This sets the stage for a discussion of the
second term in Buber’s phrase “exclusive confrontation.”
The moral moment involves a “confrontation” (Gegenuber) between the
You and my lived body. The You is directly relevant for my lived body or, what
is the same, my embodied existence. Morality is a direct encounter between You
and I. I am not reflective in the usual sense. That my embodied existence is a
second main constituent of the thematic context (along with phenomenal time)
in this case does not mean that I am “over there” as the object of reflection,
since encountering You is in that sense pre-reflective (the You, not my act of
attending to the You, is the theme). As thematic, the You establishes the lines of
organization for the thematic context, in this case, for the I as contextually
presented. I am “here,” present, in the way that You put me here. I am present to
my body, but contextually, not thematically. This means that my experience of
my body is organized and oriented around the presentation of You as thematic,
even though the kinesthetic sense is an inner sense. In short, You con-front me,
You and I are faced with each other. The presence of You as thematic is directly
and materially relevant to my embodied existence as context—my (contextual)
consciousness of my kinesthetic presence in the world. This tense and intense
relation between You and I with respect to embodied existence is what Buber
means when he states that the You “confronts me bodily” (“Er leibt mir
gegenuber…” Buber 1970, 58) and is an “unmediated” relation (“unmittelbar,”
1970, 62), and is indicated by the use of “directly” in the previous sentence.
As with phenomenal time, this account of embodied existence in moral
attention extends Gurwitsch’s “field-theory” but is it otherwise compatible or
consistent with it? I believe it is. For Gurwitsch, there is an indistinct correlation
between what presents itself in thematic attention and kinesthetic sense (1985,
34). So when one thematically attends to an object in the world, kinesthetic
sense is marginal. In addition to this usual dimensional difference between
theme and margin in attending, Gurwitsch also claims that these two types of
data or facts belong to two different orders of existence, respectively, external
things and our embodied existence (Gurwitsch 1985, 35–36). Hence it would
seem a stretch to describe embodied existence as a thematic context for the You
as theme. Yet Gurwitsch describes an attitude founded upon a kind of
“reflection” (which in this case he always encloses within quotation marks)
whose essential quality is that it pays equal attention to both orders, the
Morality and Attention 161
perceptual data and the correlated kinesthetic data. Gurwitsch (1985, 33) writes,
“Furthermore, for the correspondence in question to be explicitly established
and formulated, an attitude is required in which the mental activity is not
directed toward the perceived things, either exclusively or preferentially, but
rather toward both the perceptual appearances of things and the kinesthetic
experiences. The subject must adopt a point of view from which, so to speak, he
sees both sets of data and devotes his thematic activity equally to both. Hence
the ‘reflection’ upon the embodied existence is a prerequisite for this attitude.”
Gurwitsch only refers to the thematic attention here, and so is not directly
describing the contextual consciousness of embodied existence in encountering
You that I have been discussing. But Gurwitsch’s consistent use of “reflection”
in quotation marks is telling. He is opening the door for a kind of quasi-
reflection that brings embodied existence into direct relation with that which is
perceived, without the activity being fully reflective (thematic) or exclusively
marginal. It is not fully reflective in the case that he describes because focal
attention is split between the two orders of existence. Again, this is not what I
claim happens in the I-You encounter; it is unique in a different way. But my
description of a kinesthetic sense that is neither exclusively thematic or marginal
appears compatible with what Gurwitsch allows. Gurwitsch also notes that
embodied existence may become more prominent (relevant?) without becoming
thematic. Referring to Scheler, Gurwitsch remarks that in certain feelings such
as sickness or vigor or uneasiness or easiness, “…our embodied existence is
brought more to the fore without thereby being necessarily unfolded and
articulated” (Gurwitsch 1985, 35). This may be analogous to the non-marginal,
non-thematic, yet relevant sense of embodied existence in the moral moment.
Finally, if Gurwitsch’s “limit-case” of “self-sufficient being-together” is taken
seriously it is an extraordinary way of attending in the world. According to
Gurwitsch’s “field-theory,” such a configuration of the “field of consciousness”
would have to resemble a limit-case of normal social encounter, and it does.
The moral moment is a tense and intense moment in the sphere of attention
in which the You presents itself as immediately (in phenomenal time) and
directly (in embodied existence) relevant to the I. In encountering You, I am
also given to myself. This latter is the sphere of attention being presented
contextually to itself. You and I are presented within different dimensions in the
sphere of attention: the You as theme, the I as thematic context. In moral
attention, You confront me in an original way, such that You are attended to as
the immediate and direct center of relevancy in my ongoing attending life. Weil
(1951, 115) puts this idea in her characteristically dark but lyrical manner:
162 The Sphere of Attention
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being
able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’ It is a
recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a
collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled
‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day
stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is
enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in
a certain way. This way of looking is first of all attentive. The
soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive
into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his
truth.
planning this deed. Gurwitsch concludes that every world of imagination can be
considered an order of existence in its own right. By order of existence,
Gurwitsch means that the context within which a theme is presented is extended
along certain lines of relevancy: “What we denote as order of existence is, in the
final analysis, an indefinitely extended thematic field” (1964, 381). Inversely,
the thematic context (Gurwitsch’s “thematic field”) is that part of the order of
existence immediately near the theme and having direct bearing upon the theme.
For example, the blackmailer is thematic within the imaginary world of the
novel. Gurwitsch (1964, 388) writes, “Such a world is the correlate of a
sustained continuous process of imagination, into which the single acts of
imagination enter by virtue of their proper sense. Worlds of imagination as
exemplified by any epic, poem, play, or novel, may exhibit considerable
complexity of events and happenings imagined as inter-meshing with one
another….Contriving a world of imagination, or as in reading, following the
imagination of the author, we proceed from phase to phase. At every moment of
our imagining, whether productive or merely receptive, a certain phase of the
imagined world appears as present and refers both backward to earlier phases
and forward to later ones.” Every world of imagination is an autonomous order
of existence, since its time is a “quasi-time” and its world is a “quasi-world”
(Gurwitsch 1964, 389). It makes no sense to locate the time of the event as a real
coordinate with another event in the history of time, or in my own streaming in
attending. And it makes no sense to try to find the fictional blackmailer in the
real world, although one may find analogues to him. Gurwitsch (Gurwitsch
1964, 389) writes, “Since insertion into real objective time is the necessary
condition for any object to belong to the order of reality, no world of
imagination is a sub-order of reality. Hence, every world of imagination must be
considered as an order of existence in its own right.”
I have used this example of a world of imagination as an autonomous order
of existence to bring out both the notion of order of existence and how an order
of existence can be excluded from “reality,” where this latter means that what
we attend to has objective time and space as its relevancy-principle, such as
applies to the chair over there or the chocolate cake on the counter.
My question concerns a moral world. What is the order of existence and the
relevancy-principle inherent in a moral world, and what is the status of a moral
world with respect to what we might usually call the perceptual world,
environing world, life-world, space and time world, or whatever name we wish
to give it? Since an order of existence is a “systematized context, constituted and
unified with respect to specific relevancy-principles” (Gurwitsch 1964, 383), it
164 The Sphere of Attention
is easy to see that an order of existence is simply the continuation of the gestalt-
phenomenological description of what I would call the context in the sphere of
attention. What the concept of “order” adds here is the distinction and
comparison between the numerous contexts within which items can be attended
as thematic. Gurwitsch (1964, 382) writes, “Orders of existence within the
meaning of our definition are the ‘natural groupings’ in which things present
themselves in pre-scientific and pre-theoretical experience as well as the
explanatory systems constructed in the several sciences for the sake of a rational
explanation in the world, material, historical, and social. We must also mention
purely ideal orders of existence, such as logical systems, the several geometric
systems, the system of natural numbers, the generalized number-systems, and so
on. Finally there are the universes of artistic creation like the universe of music.
To every order of existence belong specific relevancy-principles constitutive of
that order and by virtue of which the order is unified. Differences between
orders of existence may be expressed and defined in terms of the various
relevancy-principles involved in the respective orders.” Gurwitsch appears silent
on the possibility of a moral order of existence.
If, according to Gurwitsch, every object is presented within an order of
existence, such as the perceptual world, the mathematical world, the imagina-
tional world, the world of artistic creation, etc., then one could hypothesize that
a moral object, the You, is presented within a moral world. Gurwitsch claims
that we encounter people in that order of existence called the perceptual world,
or “reality in general” and “objective time” is its relevancy-principle (Gurwitsch
1964, 382). Hence another possibility is that there is no moral world, but there is
only the attention to other persons within “reality in general.” But in the I-You
encounter, as a “limit-case” of social encounters, the consciousness of this
surrounding world diminishes as the thematic attention to the You grows. As
intimated above, I would remove the “limit-case” status and submit that in this
encounter a different order of existence pertains—a moral world . Differences
between orders of existence are accounted for by differences between their
relevancy-principles. In terms of the sphere of attention, the relevancy-principle
of a moral world is compassion.
Compassion is an organizational principle that binds another embodied
attention—the You—to one’s own. In compassion the You is thematically
attended in the context of the I, that is, the You is the focus of all that is
immediately and directly relevant to the I. Compassion denotes an immediate
and direct co-enduring, a com-passion. Gurwitsch notes that “As actually
experienced, relevancy always is qualified and specified in accordance with, and
Morality and Attention 165
in dependence upon, the material contents of both the theme and the thematic
field” (Gurwitsch 1964, 379, emphasis added). Compassion is an appropriate
term for this uniquely attended togetherness. The word “compassion” is from
the Latin com, which means “together,” and pati, which means “to endure or
suffer.” Compassion is often used in ways that I do not mean here. For example,
I do not take compassion to mean pity (a feeling sorry for), sympathy (a
projection of pity), empathy (a projection of compassion), or love. To the extent
that all of these may be emotions they are a magical transformation of the world
into something more easily understood or handled (Sartre 1948). The I-You
encounter is neither magical nor instrumental. Compassion here is related to but
not identical with its use in other philosophical and religious contexts, for
example, as in Christianity or Buddhism. These tend to emphasize compassion
toward humanity as a whole rather than the moral moment. The moral moment
is compatible with these larger senses of compassion, and a connection between
the moral moment and compassion for humanity may be found in how
practicing moral attention begets moral character. But unless the relation in
compassion is conceived as individual to individual, rather than egalitarian, it is
not yet moral attention.
In discussing the I-You encounter as a non-traditional “love,” Buber writes,
“The essential act that here establishes directness is usually understood as a
feeling, and thus misunderstood. Feelings accompany the metaphysical and
metapsychical fact of love, but do not constitute it; and the feelings that
accompany it can be very different….Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in
his love. This is no metaphor but actuality: love does not cling to an I, as if the
You were merely its ‘content’ or object; it is between I and You” (Buber 1970,
66, emphasis added; cf. Gurwitsch 1979, 25). A relevancy-principle is the
gestalt connection between the theme and context, and compassion is the
relevancy-principle between the You as theme and the I as context. As used here
in reference to the I-You encounter, compassion simply means that the You is
given as the center of relevancy for the I, the You orients the lines of relevancy
in my ongoing attending life immediately and directly. Although Buber does not
use the term compassion in this way, Buber claims that the I-You encounter
reveals a “responsibility of an I for a You” (Buber 1970, 66). What matters to
You matters to me, without mediation or instrumentality of feeling or emotion.
In a co-revelation in the sphere of attention between the You and the I as they
present themselves, the You is the center of presence that opens up to the I, and
the I is that which is oriented and directed toward the You. The emphasis on
166 The Sphere of Attention
existence within which it presents itself. In the unique case of the I-You
encounter, the You as such is presented to the extent that irrelevance obtains
between the You and the surrounding environmental world (which must still be
presented as marginal) and relevance obtains between the You and the I as
dynamic embodied attending. Thus a perceptual object becomes an object of
moral attention, without losing its special temporal and spatial character. The
special temporal and spatial character it now has is immediacy (with respect to
the streaming in attending) and directness (with respect to embodied existence).
Immediacy has been articulated as presence or “duration.” Directness has been
articulated as being front and near. Co-presented data or items that mark the You
as part of the spatio-temporal (perceptual) world are presented as marginal. Co-
presented data or items that mark the You as part of a moral world, as the
immediate and direct center of relevance in my ongoing attending life in
compassion, are presented as contextual.
Unlike phenomenal time (streaming), embodied existence, and the environ-
ing world, a moral world is not a permanent part of the structure of marginal
consciousness. That is, it is not always presented marginally in the sphere of
attention. In fact, it is more appropriate to speak of “a” moral world as I have
tried to do throughout, rather than “the” moral world. I suspect that the order of
existence called a moral world is not the same each time it is realized. In
speaking of these three constants, Gurwitsch writes, “For the subject to be
confronted with any order of existence other than the above three, the subject
must explicitly concern himself with data, objects, and items belonging to that
order” (Gurwitsch 1964, 418). So a moral world is confronted only if the You
and I are presented in the way described. Gurwitsch (1964, 380) notes that
experiencing an order of existence involves a specific, appropriate attitude, like
an imaginary attitude, a mathematical attitude or a natural attitude. These
attitudes are really various configurations and organizations in the sphere of
attention. Accordingly, encountering You involves a moral attitude—moral
attention in a moral world.
respect to the theme, along the lines of organization and relevance (compassion)
dictated by the theme. You take on more value; the compassion grows, as the
relevance between us grows. The converse is also possible. The thematic context
can contract, which disables a far-reaching significance for the theme. Buber
writes, “I can place him there [‘in any Somewhere and Sometime’] and have to
do this again and again, but immediately he becomes a He or a She, an It, and no
longer remains my You” (Buber 1970, 59). Contraction of the thematic context
involves a decrease in relevance of You for my ongoing conscious life and an
increase in the relevance for the perceptual world. So the relevance of You for
me—compassion—shrinks and fades.
A Gurwitschian would agree with Buber that the I-It to I-You attentional
transformation can not be entirely prescribed. From Gurwitsch’s point of view,
this is because all achievements in the “field of consciousness” involve
replacement, and replacement involves a radical autochthonous or salient
reorganization in the “field of consciousness.” The non-reductive “whole is
greater than the sum of its parts” concept is at the heart of Gestalt psychology
and humanistic philosophy, and applies classically in the case of the
achievement of a theme as gestalt. The same constituents may appear but they
do not present themselves in the same relations. As noted in the discussion of
attentional control in Chapter Three above, I do not follow some rule
(prescription) to make the single impatiens plant actually present itself as the
center of the sphere of attention instead of the whole row of plants. The most I
can do is create the conditions in which the sphere of attention autochthonously
reorganizes itself (with the gestalt-coherence of the thematic constituents and the
gestalt-connection between the theme and thematic context (relevance) replaced
with new connections) (Gurwitsch 1964, 103–104; see also Arvidson 1992a).
When Buber notes that one cannot just follow some rule or procedure to
encounter the You, and hence shift into moral attention, he is correct. No one
can guarantee an I-You encounter. But what is in our control and what is not can
be clarified in the language of the sphere of attention. Buber writes, “Our
concern, our care must be not for the other side but for our own, not for grace
but for will. Grace concerns us insofar as we proceed toward it and await its
presence; it is not our object” (Buber 1970, 124). In the language of the sphere
of attention, this means something like the following. One must not think that
one can actually assemble, construct or arrange some parts or content in the
sphere of attention to make the You present itself; but one can allow the You to
present itself autochthonously. And one may successfully achieve this shape of
the sphere of attention to the extent that one attends thematically to the person as
a singular being within the context of one’s ongoing attending life,
simultaneously withdrawing from the surrounding environing world as context.
Compassion cannot be prescribed, but one can be more or less disposed to be
compassionate (Arvidson 2003a).
as the death penalty or who he would choose to be president, and his choice of
favorite color, and what to eat for dinner on Friday nights, are all lined up more
or less directly with this original projection of himself, or are fit into the story as
sub-choices based on this original choice, this original project of “father of my
children.”
Suddenly, this father’s beautiful children were senselessly, brutally mur-
dered, and the police were not able to apprehend a suspect (the father clearly did
not do it). It remains unsolved. The newspaper article was mainly about the
father’s vow for justice or vengeance, and how his original project is now
“detective.” This abrupt shift in his original projection of himself in the world,
this fundamental change of “style” of life from doting father to grim detective, is
not superficial but thoroughgoing. It is not hard to imagine that nearly all new
events in his life, most of his thoughts, his sadness and joy, his motivation for
living, now fit into a radically different story of himself from before. Even
though information is still processed in relation to the children, it would be
absurd to suppose that nothing has changed in the way this information is
processed. His world has changed radically. In short, his original projection of
himself in the world has undergone a conversion. In Sartre’s terms, the freedom
that consciousness is has replaced the previous narrative or story of itself with
another. Sartre makes the point that if this new choice of “who I am” can replace
the previous choice, then I am not a thing, not substantial, even though I think I
am. Again, in Sartre’s terms, the original projection of consciousness in the
world, which it lives with all seriousness, is unjustifiable; it is absurdly and
freely chosen. What I am as a character in the world is not permanent, it is not
grounded in a soul or human biology, even if it has inertia. Conversions do not
come easily but are at all times nonetheless possible. I am simply the free
continuation of the choices I make, or more correctly, the character of the
dynamic embodied attending in the world that I am is a function of what I attend
to. You are what is more or less salient in the sphere of attention, and this
saliency is in part influenced by situational events, for example, the tragedy that
befell the father of these children.
Moral character is freely chosen. When I say “moral character” I mean
specifically the propensity to moral moments. This propensity is a part of the
original projection that we are, the shape of the sphere of attention. Moral
character is freely chosen because this original project that we are is freely
chosen, even if we personally deny this is so (a denial that Sartre calls “bad
faith”). This does not mean moral character is empty, or a superficial styling of
some sort, as if I would choose to wear the black belt instead of the brown belt.
174 The Sphere of Attention
Conclusion
The sphere of attention is a dynamic embodied attending in the world organized
according to gestalt principles in the three dimensions of theme, context, and
margin. The sphere of attention is enclosing and inclusive but not a transcend-
ence in immanence. As a sphere of attention, a particular human being is fluid
and active, a meaning-giving activity that is non-substantial, not a thing. Human
beings live the world in terms of theme, context, and margin. The theme is the
central gestalt, coherent, segregated, and consolidated, or striving to be so. The
theme is either a gestalt stabilized, or coming into or going out of central
concern in the sphere of attention. The thematic context is a unity by relevancy
for the theme, a network of non-consolidated gestalts, more or less articulated,
organized by the theme as its center, and materially relevant to that theme. The
margin also consists of non-centralized gestalts, and is irrelevant to the theme
and thematic context; it is external to their unity by relevancy. There is no
material relation between the margin on the one hand, and the context and theme
on the other, but the halo in the margin includes the current sector of the
streaming in attending, kinesthetic sense of embodiment, and the environing
world. The horizon in the margin is the indefinitely continued content that
merely accompanies a given theme and thematic context, and this horizon is
implied by the halo in the margin.
Since the halo in the margin consists in the current sectors of phenomenal
temporality (the streaming), embodiment, and the environing world, it is the
existential locus of subjectivity at a given moment. It is the locus of my
existence as non-central, a marginally ever-present self, which accords with the
lived experience of pre-reflective attending where no “I” or ego is centrally
present. In reflection, the sphere of attention attends to itself thematically as an
ongoing process of attending. The sphere of attention is characterized, has
character, according to its training and learning, its growth and development, so
that certain content is more or less likely to become salient. Also, when
encountering another embodied attending being, one can enter into a momentary
moral relation in a moral world wherein the relevancy-principle operative is not
material relevancy as in the environing world, but is compassion—an immediate
relation between I and You such that You are the theme and I am the context.
The sphere of attention is thematic attention within a context and margin, and a
human being is at any moment this dynamic embodied attending in the world.
177
178 The Sphere of Attention
conscious experience? How could one make sense of the extensive experimental
literature on the differences between preconscious, conscious and unconscious
processing?” No need to ask these questions in this way remains.
There is, of course, the other sense of unconscious in psychology, the
Freudian or analytic sense of some area of the human psyche that grows as we
develop, perhaps in stages, or that is part of our collective ancestry, and that
remains hidden but nonetheless actively affects conscious life (see the critiques
by Sartre 1948 and 1956). This is not the place to engage this myth, but I again
point out that (1) the sphere of attention is that which learns, grows, and
develops in the course of human attending, so that this attending life has a
unique attentional character in how it processes in the world; (2) the existential
locus in attending at any moment, namely, the presentation in the marginal halo
of the current sectors of phenomenal time, embodiment, and the environing
world, open out to the horizon in the sphere of attention, always also presented
marginally, which is these three domains as ultimate potentiality in attending;
and (3) the past attendings are implied in this horizonal continuation of the
ultimate potentiality in the sphere of attention, however dimly. Therefore,
instead of the negative term “the unconscious” I would advocate the positive
phrase “the margin of attention” or the less elegant “the margin in the sphere of
attention.” It would be disingenuous for the defenders of a Freudian unconscious
to admit that the mind is powerful enough to have such a thing as the
unconscious in it, that it is in some part of a mind and is all that a Freudian
unconscious is supposed to be, and yet to also claim that marginal consciousness
is not possible in the way I mean it because we can never have that many
associations and implications in the margin of attention. The margin has depth
and is a genuine dimension in our lives—an ongoing presence in attending life.
Just as everything in the unconscious can never be made conscious, but
nonetheless some of its content may be active in my ongoing life, everything in
the margin can never be made thematic, but nonetheless some of its content may
be active in my ongoing life. One of the challenges of future attention research
is to operationalize the typical and regular transformations that transpire in
human attending between content in the marginal horizon and the theme.
Psychology and the cognitive sciences should take more of molar view of
attention than a molecular view. A typical experiment in attention research aims
too small. The unit of measurement or the unit of behavior is an attentional
blink, a response measured in milliseconds, a saccade, an incredibly brief cue,
etc. This molecularization of human attending is more easily controlled and
analyzed, but is it relevant? In some respects and for some phenomena it is
182 The Sphere of Attention
relevant. But in the larger picture of what a human being is, as an attending
being, it is not so relevant. The problem here parallels the problem of focusing
on the focus—controlling what can be controlled, experimenting it to death, and
letting the rest be interpreted by someone else. Here “the rest” which is ignored
and left to others is context and margin, and more to the point of this paragraph,
the way human attending fits together with our daily lives. I have pointed out in
Chapters Two and Three how some researchers are taking a molar view of
attention to some extent, by hypothesizing about “attentional set” and
“processing of the scene” or “context.” But I have also pointed out how the
account so far is frequently ambiguous and stubbornly holds to the notion that
attention has do to only with the detail of the inner workings of the theme,
measured molecularly. One way to keep attention research moving toward a
molar rather than a molecular view of attention is to stress ecological validity.
Under the strain of trying to match up the experimental world with the world
beyond the computer monitor and outside the lab, attention research is pushed to
produce more meaningful results. The potentially messy results, and the possibly
vague and ambiguous controls in ecologically valid experimental settings, are an
understandable deterrent to molar-oriented research. However, the alternative is
simply unacceptable, namely, the irrelevancy of attention research to what a
human being is and does. A molar view of attention processes expands the sense
of a unit in attending to include context and margin as dimensions in the sphere
of attention, and enables the genuine discussion of the phenomenon of
subjectivity.
Attention research should more actively pursue the phenomenon of
subjectivity. The link between attention and subjectivity in the psychology of
attention is the slow-growing area of research called self-focused attention. A
recent meta-analysis of self-focused attention research shows that the general
concern with this research is with negative affect (Mor and Winquist 2002). For
example, how does ruminating upon who I am negatively affect my ability to
complete certain tasks, or how does it negatively bias my cognitive function.
Self-focused attention research, like current psychology of attention in general,
can be so much more than what it is. Above I have discussed a piece of the rich
area that phenomenologists have demarcated by the term “reflection.” This is
attention to attention in which a self is constituted. Putting aside possible
controversies about my account, or controversies about the place of the ego in
phenomenology in general, this area of attention paying attention to itself is at
least as important as attention paying attention to the world. Issues of
personality, social behavior, personal development, psychosis and rehabilitation,
Conclusion 183
and so on, are waiting for a theory of attention to attention to make its mark. In
other words, attention researchers are missing opportunities to reach beyond
their currently small world of attention—such as measuring the reaction time to
identifying the upside down T on a computer screen that is streaming right-side
up Ts. I believe that attention research has much to say on matters of human
subjectivity, and not just negative affect in private or public anxiety. Reflection,
inauthentic or authentic, is one of the great ever-present possibilities in the
sphere of attention, the other being pre-reflective attention. And the bright minds
that are currently creating paradigms for testing hypotheses of pre-reflective
attention could award the discipline a broadening in significance of attention
results by complementing their efforts with tests of reflective attention hypo-
theses. For example, when attention attends to itself, what is the role of the
context? How does conditioning the context within which the self is attended
affect the story that the self is? Can suicidal contextual consciousness be
modeled or predicted? Is happiness or positive affect a function of a certain
contextual context in reflection? And if so, can it be induced or increased? Are
there gradations of detachment from the world as one becomes reflective, and
can such graded reflection be practiced (e.g., Depraz et al., 2003)? The point is
that some of the opportunities for attention research are squandered or ignored in
the race to deliver results within the same old parameters of attention to things
instead of attention to attention.
Psychology and the cognitive sciences should pay more attention to
advances in phenomenology. Traditionally, cognitive scientists and certain other
experimental psychologists aim at articulating the same thing at which
phenomenologists aim—“consciousness.” Often each group takes their training
in their respective disciplines as home base, and is reluctant to immerse
themselves in the “foreign” territory of the other group. So cognitive scientists
and other experimental psychologists determine the reality of findings about
consciousness by the familiarity of the terms and paradigms involved. In
attention research, these scientists take terms such as target, ANOVA, reaction
time, distractor, statistically significant, etc., as indicative of real results. Also,
phenomenologists who are scientists (in the sense of Wissenschaft) of “con-
sciousness” know when they are on friendly and hence “real” ground when
particular terms appear in a report such as intentionality, being-in-the-world,
noesis and noema, structure, presentation, categorial, epoche and reduction, etc.
Elsewhere I have attempted to translate the terms of the cognitive science of
attention to the terms of a gestalt-oriented phenomenology (Arvidson 2003b), so
I will not engage in that here. But the point is that such a translation is possible
184 The Sphere of Attention
and ongoing, and I believe this communication between the traditional third
person approach to attention and the first person approach can be bridged to the
benefit of both. I also believe that this current study is evidence of how this
might be done.
In the graduate program in phenomenological psychology at Duquesne
University in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s, the only program of its kind at the
time (outside of perhaps the University of Dallas), I was trained to think of the
dominant behaviorist psychology as a warped view of what a human being is.
Not necessarily because of the emphasis on comparative physiology and behav-
ior across species (human, pigeon, Norwegian white rat), or because of the over-
whelming theoretical and experimental concern with learning and behavior
modification. The problem was one of inclusiveness and mutual enlightenment
from other approaches to the phenomenon of what a human being is in the
world. One of the most useful ways of elucidating the extent to which
behaviorist psychology excluded other approaches (such as Gestalt psychology,
cognitive psychology, humanistic psychology) without seriously entertaining
how these other approaches might complement its own results was to study the
history of psychology, as is done in Amadeo Giorgi’s Psychology as a Human
Science (1970). The history of psychology shows that at one time, and at some
times since, psychology was more unified and inclusive than it was in mid-20th
Century, and perhaps than it is now.
I believe it is the responsibility of psychologists working on attention to
take seriously their allegiance to a person like William James, as a kind of hero
of cognitive science of attention. It is not just that he makes the kind of seminal
distinctions that drive work on attention these days; he was also a philosopher.
Phenomenologists admire James as well. Again, in part because he makes some
of the crucial kinds of distinctions that Husserl does. But also I believe
phenomenologists admire his empirical bent, his need to test hypotheses in
experimentation. This mutual admiration for someone like William James, and
the fact that “consciousness” is the shared territory between them, shows that no
matter how psychologists and phenomenologists are trained, and no matter how
they define real results, the truly serious researcher on either side will and
should immerse themselves in the latest findings of the other group, burying his
or her head in the psychology journals and books that present the latest research
on “consciousness,” or in the various journals and books that appreciate or cri-
tique the work of psychology, or in the work of Gurwitsch, Heidegger, Husserl,
Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, etc. themselves. Francisco Varela (1996) even suggests
that psychologists and their subjects train in the Husserlian style of attending to
Conclusion 185
not radical because the self that we feel and think we are can be accounted for in
a number of ways, such as Sartre’s “bad faith,” “storytelling,” or “original
projection,” and since human beings can still have more or less stable character,
as I have outlined above.
Even more importantly, just because we are activity and process without
some Cartesian metaphysical foundational self, this does not mean morality is
impossible. As I have argued, morality is momentary and is constitu-ted and
enabled by free choice. A moral person is not moral because one is destined to
obey divine law, or because one enacts some essential concept of human nature
(as plum), or because one lives out a genetic, biological destiny. A person has
moral character freely chosen, and so can “unchoose” it. And this morality may
be evidenced in the moral moment of I and You described in Chapter Six. There
are moral prohibitions or guides which are generally very influential for
individuals and societies, and which “work” to keep peace and harmony in lives
and States; yet there is no supervenient or underpinning absolute necessity for
being moral. We might wish there was, but there is not. However there is the
free choice to be open to the achievement of a moral moment, to teach this to
others if we think it is important to do so (following Erik Erikson’s notion of
generativity, 1950, 266), and to habitually prepare attention to be in this shape
and so habitualize moral character in Aristotelian fashion.
consciousness, and that the center is the focus of attention. It is not even the case
that the periphery of “consciousness” is exactly the margin of attention, because
the context is also outside of the theme or focus. Hence, this vague way of
talking should be replaced with a more precise phenomenology of human
attending as involving these three dimensions. I should add that I include myself
as one of these people who has relied on the vagueness of “consciousness,”
since in my previous publications and lectures in the phenomenology of
attention I have generally situated attention as a mode of consciousness, rather
than recognizing attention as the center and organizing concept for
consciousness within a sphere of attention.
It is my contention that the way that the word “consciousness” is used in
this new discipline is unnecessarily vague, and that the notion of a sphere of
attention, as defined in this present study, is more precise and generally works
better. For example, this kind of phrase—“paying attention in consciousness”—
is vague and easily found throughout articles in the Journal of Consciousness
Studies, Consciousness and Cognition, Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences, and similar journals, as well as in the books published by the presses
listed in the References section below. The enlarged view of the nature of
attending means that “paying attention in consciousness” becomes more precise.
It is attending thematically along with contextual and marginal consciousness. In
other words, any clear discussion of the concept of attention and any clear
discussion of the concept of consciousness necessarily entails contextual
consciousness and marginal consciousness as part of a sphere of attention. So
the concern of this interdisciplinary area of study becomes unified around an
attending being, rather than a conscious being. Starting with the extant body of
research in attention studies that already exists, interdisciplinary attention
studies can proceed to more uniformly hypothesize and test complicated
concepts such as morality, the relation between the brain and the context of
attention, aesthetic attention, and self-attention.
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References 203
205
206 Name Index
209
210 Subject Index
cuing, contextual, 19, 20, 23, 28, 29-31, 40- evil genius, 126
41, 48, 49, 181 Experience and Judgment, 87, 95
expert training. See expertise
death, 41
expertise, 62-63, 68-69
decision-making, 65
external conditions, 118-119
depression, 46, 61, 62, 77
development, attentional, 40, 58, 83, 115-9, facilitation effect, 15, 16, 17, 19, 26, 29, 30,
124, 129-130, 177; moral, 171-172. See 31, 36-37, 39-40, 42, 48-49, 71, 83-84,
also character, attentional and children 180, 186. See also cuing, contextual
dignity. See moral attention, dignity and false memory. See memory, false
directness. See moral attention, constituents fear, 34, 36, 68, 83, 117
in fiction, 162-163
disabilities, learning, 67 field. See metaphor of attention, field
disclosure, 129-30 Field of Consciousness, 2, 9, 10, 87, 95, 131
distractor, 21-22, 25-26, 48-49; reflection figure and background, 5, 11, 36, 44, 127.
and, 122, 127-128. See also interference See also multi-stability and
effect transformations
duty, Kantian, 175. See also moral attention figure, duck-rabbit. See multi-stability
dynamic tension, 25-26, 48, 56, 78-79, 83- forced-choice task, 65-66
85, 113, 116, 125, 132, 157-158 formative and formed constituents. See
constituents, formative and formed
effects, attentional. See facilitation effect;
foundationalism, 138
inhibition effect; and interference effect
frame problem, 32-33. See also relational
ego, 115-148; Husserl on, 92-95, 97, 99-
frame theory
104; -centric predicament, 11, 128-130;
freedom, 129-130, 141-144, 147, 162, 172-
empirical, 136; inauthenticity and, 141-
176, 188
144; in morality, 156-157, 169; pure, 121;
friendship, 153, 176
subjectivity problem and, 87-88, 96, 182-
fringe, 14-15, 80, 92, 94
183, 187-188; transcendental, 134-136.
front and near. See moral attention,
See also representationalism; self;
constituents in
subjectivity, non-egological; and
functional significance, 3, 23, 27, 45-46, 70-
Transcendence of the Ego
71, 73-74, 100, 108, 109; in morality,
eidetic intuition, 58, 186
150, 153
elucidation, 63-66; Buddhist practice and,
64, 146-147; enlargement and, 63-64; gambler’s fallacy, 34, 38
elaboration and, 73; Husserl and, 106; gating mechanism, 41, 51-53, 137
intuition and; 77; obscuration and, 59, 67; On the Genealogy of Morals, 174
practical applications of, 65-66, 67 generativity, 188
embodiment. See body Gestalt theory, 89-90
encounter, I-You. See moral attention, I-You gestalt-coherence, 3-5, 27, 51, 73, 89, 170.
in See also functional significance
Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, 185 gestalt-connection, 7, 22, 29, 32, 37, 39, 42,
enlargement, 59-61; aesthetic experience 52, 57, 63-64, 66-67; in morality, 155,
and, 60-61; contraction and, 59, 63; 170-171. See also Gestalt-coherence and
Husserl and, 106; moral attention and, relevancy
169-170; practical applications of, 63; gestalt-switch, 73. See also transformations
social attention and, 61, 63 global vs. local stimulus, 22, 75
epoché, 145 God, 137-138. See also subjectivity, infinite
error, 68-69 and
Subject Index 211
good faith. See reflection, authentic interference effect, 16, 22, 25-26, 27, 29, 48,
gradient, attention, 19, 105-106, 106-107, 50, 75, 113, 127-128. See also distractor
186 and inhibition effect
Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, internal conditions. See character, attentional
162, 175 intuition, 77; eidetic, 58, 186, Kantian, 135-
136
halo, 1, 8-9, 10, 12, 21, 24, 28, 50, 52-53,
I-You. See moral attention, I-You in
78-79, 81, 97, 104, 106, 177, 181;
morality and, 155; subjectivity and, 119- joint attention. See social attention
120, 122-126, 128, 130, 131-132, 133- Journal of Consciousness Studies, 189
140. See also horizon and margin Journal of the Experimental Analysis of
horizon, 1, 8-9, 10, 12, 21, 24, 28, 53, 59, Behavior, 54
61, 78, 80-81, 104-106, 177, 181; Journal of Experimental Psychology, 49
subjectivity and, 120, 122-124, 132, 133, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology,
135-139; morality and, 151-152, 156. See 187
also halo and margin justice vs. care morality. See moral
Human Encounters in the Social World, 151 attention, care vs. justice and
humor, 18, 32, 65
kinesthetic sense, 8-9, 123, 137, 139, 159-
hyle, 88-90, 97, 102-103, 107-108, 111, 131
161, 177
I and Thou, 149 Krisis, 127
Ideas I, 86, 87, 92, 106, 110, 115, 130, 187
leadership, 66, 178
identity, personal, 134-135, 147, 187-188.
learning, 26, 30, 40, 41, 43, 63, 71, 77, 179,
See also project, original and subjectivity
184, 186; character and, 83, 116, 118-
I-It. See moral attention, I-It and
119, 123-124; disability and, 67. See also
imagination, 24-25, 35, 153, 161, 162-164,
character, attentional
167, 187
lexical priming. See cuing, contextual and
imaginative variation, 186
facilitation effect
immediacy. See moral attention, constituents
lexical processing, 17-18, 32, 39, 45. See
in
also cuing, contextual and memory
inattention, 24, 35
limit-case, 81, 105-106, 151, 153, 161, 164,
inauthenticity. See reflection, inauthentic
166
index, positional, 42-46, 67, 186; existential
Logical Investigations, 87, 121, 125, 130
index and, 131, 137; moral attention and,
158-159; OSCAR and, 42-43; margin, 1-4, 6-30, 35, 36, 44-54, 57, 66, 74,
subjectivity and, 137, 142-143, 147; 78-85, 87-88, 91-92, 94-97, 100, 104-
visual index and, 43-44 107, 110, 112-113, 116-117, 119-147,
infinite. See God and subjectivity, infinite 151-152, 154-161, 167, 169, 171-172,
and 175, 177-182, 185, 189. See also halo
inhibition effect, 17, 25, 31, 41, 50-54, 68- and horizon
69, 83, 113, 180. See also distractor and Marginal Consciousness, 7, 8, 80, 122
interference effect material relevancy. See relevancy
insight, 65, 73, 77, 174 meditation, 64, 70, 147-148
intentionality, 89, 125-132, 134-135, 185, Meditations, 125, 128, 137, 150. See also
187. See also attentionality vs. cogito
intentionality memory, bizarreness and, 66-67; context in,
interconnection, Husserl on, 98-101 17-18; false, 66-67; long term, 26, 45,
179-180; research on, 26, 53, 54, 71, 179-
212 Subject Index
180; short term, 26, 42-43, 45; working, non-egological subjectivity. See subjectivity,
26, 39-40, 41, 49-51, 53-54, 179-180, 186 non-egological
metaphor of attention, 74, 89-90; field, 5, 9-
object-based attention, 23-24, 27, 77, 118
13, 88, 96, 132; plane, 9-13, 132; sphere,
object file, 45
5, 9-13, 116, 128-130, 132; spotlight, 18-
object recognition, 17, 45, 47
19, 36, 74, 87, 90; zoom-lens, 19, 59, 60,
obscuration, 66-67; elucidation and, 59;
74, 76, 77, 90, 117
memory and, 66-67; repression and, 66;
mindfulness-awareness. See meditation
practical applications of, 67
mood, 41, 46, 62, 77, 117
On Dreams, 67
moral attention, 149-176; Aristotle and, 149,
order of existence, 2, 7-8, 28, 122, 124, 135,
153, 172; care vs. justice and, 73;
139, 160-164, 166-167, 169. See also
categorical imperative and, 175; character
halo; horizon; and margin
and, 149, 156, 165, 171-176; compassion
orienting, 18, 80-81, 93
as, 150, 152, 155, 162-167, 169-170, 171,
OSCAR (OSCillator-based Associative
172, 175, 177; confrontation (Gegenuber)
Recall), 42-43
in, 159-160, 166, 175, 176; constituents
in, 150, 153-154, 156, 157, 159, 165-167, paradigm, molar vs. molecular, 54-55, 181-
168, 171; control and, 171; dignity and, 182
175-176; I-It and, 149-151, 166-171; I- parts, dependent and independent, 110-111
You in, 149-154, 158, 161, 164, 165-171, patency/latency, 104-106
175; Kantian duty and, 175; as moral Perception and Psychophysics, 16, 30
moment, 149, 150-162, 165, 168, 170, perception, 9, 16, 24, 37, 45, 46, 47, 107,
172-175, 188; reflection and, 156-161, 109, 178-179
169, 172; respect and, 174-176; personal identity. See identity, personal
responsibility and, 165-166, 175 pessimism, 62
moral encounter. See moral attention, I-You phantom, 109
in Phaedo, 187
multiple object tracking (MOT), 44, 77 Phenomenological Psychology, 95, 102
multi-stability, 72, 75, 80, 84-85, 108. See Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,
also restructuring 189
Murphy, 128 Phenomenology of Perception, 9
phobia. See fear
Naturalizing Phenomenology, 144
pointing references. See references, pointing
Navon letter. See multi-stability
positional index. See index, positional
Necker cube. See multi-stability
positivism, psychology and, 186-187
negation, external, 127; internal 126-127,
potential theme, 22-23, 44, 75, 82, 104-105,
131-132, 134-135, 143
143, 172
negative priming. See inhibition effect
preparation, 53-54, 77, 82, 170, 172
Nausea, 143
priming. See cuing, contextual and
Nichomachean Ethics, 149
facilitation effect
nine-dot problem, 65
Principles of Psychology, 9, 118,
noema (or noematic), 86-87, 94, 97, 98, 101,
problem solving. See insight
126, 130-132, 185
prohibitions, 175-176, 188
noesis (or noetic), 86, 89, 92, 96-97, 107,
project, original, 172-174. See also
109, 126, 130-132, 183
character, attentional
No Exit, 176
prominence, Husserl on, 98-103
noise, 15, 52. See also distractor and
proto-objects, 23
interference effect
psychoanalysis, 57, 67, 181
Subject Index 213
social encounter, 64, 151-152, 161, 164. See temporality, 78, 99, 101-103, 131, 154, 159,
also moral attention 162-163, 166; as streaming in attending,
social world, 151-152 8, 95, 120, 123, 137-138, 139, 147, 156-
solidity. See moral attention, constituents in 157, 177
solipsism, 128. See also ego, -centric tension. See dynamic tension
predicament and representationalism therapy. See psychotherapy
soul, 120, 121, 138, 162, 173 total field. See metaphor of attention, field
sphere, 5, 9-13, 116, 128-130, 132; ball of, training. See control of attention and
9, 11, 12, 132; depth of, 9-13, 116, 181; expertise
illustration of, 10; vector and, 132. See Transcendence of the Ego, 123, 133
also metaphor of attention transcendence in immanence, 126, 129, 177.
spotlight. See metaphor of attention, See also ego, -centric predicament and
spotlight subjectivity
sprites, 41, 83, 118-119 transformations, 57-86; Gurwitsch and
stimulus, global vs. local, 22, 75 Husserl on, 106-114; law of, 57, 91, 99,
stream of consciousness. See streaming in 110-112; preparation for, 53-54, 77, 82,
attending 170, 172; taxonomy of, 57-58, 91, 186
streaming in attending, 2, 7-9, 12, 28, 47-48, transitive states, 4, 14-15. See also fringe
58, 79, 87, 95, 101, 112, 177; morality transparency, subjective, 116-117. See also
and, 150, 156-159, 163, 167, 172; subjectivity, ever-present self-awareness
subjectivity and, 116, 118-123, 133, 135, and
136-138, 139, 140-141, 143, 147 truth, apodictic, 125
subjectivity, 3, 8-9, 14, 52-53, 87-88, 97,
unconscious, the, 24-25, 180-181
106, 115-148; ever-present self-
unitary individuality. See moral attention,
awareness and, 120-125, 128, 136, 137,
constituents in
138, 141, 156, 169, 177; halo and, 119-
120, 122-126, 128, 130, 131-132, 133- validity, ecological, 17, 55, 75-6, 182
140; infinite and, 137-138; and morality, virtual reality, 17, 46-48
149-176; non-egological, 117-119, 120- visual indexing (or FINST). See index,
125, 155. See also character, attentional; positional
ego; and reflection
switch. See task-switch and transformations Wissenschaft, 144, 183
synthesis, 37, 70, 71-72, 76-78, 139; active worldliness, 104-106
95-104, 110; aesthetic experience and, writer’s block, 67
60-61; constraint relaxation and, 73; zoom-lens. See metaphor of attention, zoom-
Husserl and, 88, 90, 98, 102, 109-110, lens
111-112; intuition and, 77; morality and,
169; passive, 95-104, 110; practical
applications of, 77; singling out and, 75-
77. See also Analyses Concerning
Passive and Active Synthesis
35. R. Cristin: Heidegger and Leibniz. Reason and the Path. 1998
ISBN 0-7923-5137-1
36. B.C. Hopkins (ed.): Phenomenology: Japanese and American Perspectives. 1999
ISBN 0-7923-5336-6
37. L. Embree (ed.): Schutzian Social Science. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-6003-6
38. K. Thompson and L. Embree (eds.): Phenomenology of the Political. 2000
ISBN 0-7923-6163-6
39. O.K. Wiegand, R.J. Dostal, L. Embree, J.J. Kockelmans and J.N. Mohanty (eds.):
Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic. Philosophical
Essays in Honor of Thomas M. Seebohm. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6290-X
40. L. Fisher and L. Embree (eds.): Feminist Phenomenology. 2000
ISBN 0-7923-6580-1
41. J.B. Brough and L. Embree (eds.): The Many Faces of Time. 2000
ISBN 0-7923-6622-0
42. G.B. Madison: The Politics of Postmodernity. Essays in Applied Hermeneutics. 2000
ISBN 0-7923-6859-2
43. W. O’Brien and L. Embree (eds.): The Existential Phenomenology of Simone de
Beauvoir. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-7064-3
44. F. Schalow: Heidegger and the Quest for the Sacred. From Thought to the Sanctuary
of Faith. 2001 ISBN 1-4020-0036-7
45. T. Toadvine and L. Embree (eds.): Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl. 2002
ISBN 1-4020-0469-9
46. J.J. Kockelmans: Ideas for a Hermeneutic Phenomenology of the Natural Sciences.
Vol. 2: On the Importance of Methodical Hermeneutics for a Hermeneutic Phe-
nomenology of the Natural Sciences. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0650-0
47. J.J. Drummond and L. Embree (eds.): Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Phi-
losophy. A Handbook. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0770-1
48. D. Fisette (ed.): Husserl’s Logical Investigations Reconsidered. 2003
ISBN 1-4020-1389-2
49. D. Zahavi, S. Heinämaa and H. Ruin (eds.): Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation.
Phenomenology in the Nordic Countries. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1754-5
Contributions to Phenomenology
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