I and We: Sedimented Consciousness and Generativity

CFS lecture by Saulius Geniusas, Professor of Philosophy, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

The lecture is open to all and all are welcome

Abstract. Husserl is the philosopher who transformed the geological metaphor of sedimentation into a philosophical concept, which was subsequently taken up by a number of other phenomenologists (Merleau-Ponty, Schutz, Ricoeur, Derrida, etc.). In the framework of Husserlian phenomenology, we can draw a distinction between three conceptions of sedimentation: static, genetic, and generative. In the static sense, sedimentations are modifications of retentions and necessary conditions of episodic memory. In the genetic sense, sedimentations are the conditions that underlie the formation of types, habits and moods. In the generative sense, sedimentations refer to the concatenations of hidden motivations that individuals appropriate from historical traditions. In this talk, I will pay special attention to generative sedimentations, understood as intersubjectively and historically constituted sense accomplishments, which shape the communal background of individual lives. Each ego is a member of an intersubjective and generative community not only, and not primarily, because each ego finds itself surrounded by other egos, but also because our most personal thoughts are always already permeated with sedimented modes of apperception and configurations of meaning, many of which we accept as self-evident, even though we did not generate them ourselves.