Communication instinct: Husserl and the embodied temporality of the social
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation revisits the question of the temporal constitution of sociality. What is the role of subjective time-experience in the understanding of other people and the formation of communicative environment? This problem is considered in a generative phenomenological context. The investigation traces analytically the “stages” of communicative constitution: from the explicit intentional modes of interaction back to the pre-affective and habitualized social sense-accomplishments. The task is approached through a systematic exposition of Edmund Husserl's generative concept of communication proper (Mitteilung, Kommunikation). A widespread view in the classical and more recent phenomenological scholarship is that Husserl’s concept of communication must be derivative of the more fundamental categories of empathy and intersubjectivity (Einfühlung and Intersubjektivität; Schütz 1957; Held 1972; Zahavi 1996). The theoretical potential of the concept of communication for a phenomenology of sociality has thus been largely overlooked. The dissertation challenges this long-established model and attempts to reaffirm the central constitutive role of communication, to redefine its function in contradistinction with that of empathy. It does so by considering Husserl’s later “genetic phenomenology” where temporal experiences are construed in the background of the sphere of “primal flowing living present” (urströmende lebendige Gegenwart). On this basis, the notion of communication is uncovered as transcendentally rooted in the structure of pre-conscious instinctual Ineinander. This perspective is radicalized and validated through an extensive analysis of Levinas’s implicit debate with Husserl regarding the temporal constitution of alterity and also translated into a problem of the ethical meaning of objective forms of social communication. The central argument of the dissertation is that an interpretation of Husserl’s concept of communication in connection with the notions of primal temporal flow, instincts, and pre-intentional passive synthesis affords the elaboration of a generative phenomenological concept of “intermonadic communication” which grounds empathy rather than deriving from it. Such an interpretation might further prove productive for the study of both nonverbal interaction (also in relation to treatments of autism) and the developmental basis of social behaviour. Its potential to validate an ethical theory of interpersonal understanding is also affirmed through a comparative analysis of Husserl and Levinas's concepts of subjectivity, sensibility and common time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".