Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3: 215228, 2004. C 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Affectivity and movement: The sense of sensing in Erwin Straus RENAUD BARBARAS
Luniversit Blaise Pascal de, Clermont-Ferrand (E-mail: renaud.barbaras@wanadoo.fr) e

Abstract. This paper explores the notion of sensing (Empnden) as developed by Erwin Straus. It argues that the notion of sensing is at the center of Strausss thought about animal and human experience. Strauss originality consists in approaching sensory experience from an existential point of view. Sensing is not a mode of knowing. Sensing is distinguished from perceiving but is still a mode of relation to exteriority, and is situated on the side of what is usually called affectivity. At the same time Strauss redenes the eld of that which is commonly characterized as affectivity. Sensing designates a stratum that lies deeper than the division between perceiving and feeling (s prouver), a self-affection that is not an alternative to the opening upon exteriority. e It corresponds to a mode of immediate communication, to a sympathy with the world that does not entail any thematic dimension, but does not fall back into a blind fusion. Rather, sensing is something in the living beings mode of moving that is irreducible, and that includes a tending toward something. Key words: affectivity, living being, movement, sensing, sentiment, sensation, world

Straus only rarely approaches the question of affectivity thematically, not because it is of secondary importance, but on the contrary because it occupies, under the title of Sensing, the center of his work. Far from designating a circumscribed set of inner experiences, affectivity can only be grasped in terms of the originary relation between the living being and its world, a relation Straus names sensing (Empnden). It follows that Strauss approach to affectivity is absolutely original. For instead of conning affective experience to the sphere of immanence and reducing it to the apprehension of my own states, or of the world considered solely in terms of its vital impact, Straus conceives of it as the very mode in which the world is originarily given, in which something comes forth as there. In contrast to the dominant tradition, affectivity is not subjective in the sense of depending upon a psychic or physical interiority severed from the world; its subjectivity is not an alternative to opening upon a world, because it is on the contrary the very condition for apprehending transcendence. affectivity is not one particular mode of sensing, covering sentiment as opposed to sensation: in its originary modality, it is not to be distinguished from sensing. To be sure, such a statement only makes sense on the basis of a radical transformation of the sense of subjectivity. Thus for Straus, both the characterization of affectivity, which, as we shall see, maintains a constitutive relation with motility, and of the original subjectivity
Translated

by Elizabeth A. Behnke.

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that sustains it requires returning to the question of sensing from two sides, critical and constructive. The problem of the sense of sensory experience lies at the center of Strauss inquiry, and is in truth its sole object. Now arriving at the point of view that will allow us to determine the genuine sense of the experience covered by the term sensing presupposes a radical critique of the term sensation, the term that sums up sensory experience in the dominant philosophical tradition. More precisely, bringing sensing to light as a genuine experience i.e., as a mode of the subjects relation to the world, requires a rigorous characterization of the theoretical decisions governing the misunderstanding of sensory experience that is evident in the turn to the concept of sensation. Thus in Straus, there is indeed a phenomenological reduction that takes the form of a critique of the presupposition that makes both common sense and the philosophical tradition blind to sensing. This presupposition is summed up in the assertion of the extramundaneity of the subject.1 Nevertheless, placing this natural attitude in brackets, an attitude that could equally well be termed an objectivist attitude, takes the form of an extremely precise critique of Cartesianism, which is simultaneously the historical source and the ongoing matrix of a mode of thought that characterizes both empiricism and psychology in the strict sense of the term. The trajectory inaugurated by Cartesian doubt winds up shattering the unity of our existence, draining it of its sense as human existence. By negating the existence of the world, and therefore my own corporeal existence, doubt nds its prime certainty in a subject deprived of its world, a subject who contemplates the world as a world of absolute exteriority: since by reason of essence such a subject does not belong to the world, this subject is absolutely impassive, undergoing no becoming. Nothing can happen to it, since everything that can happen is on the side of the world: all the subject can do is know. Thus as Straus sees it, Cartesianisms initial error lies in splitting human existence into the duality of thinking substance and extended substance. Within this perspective, there is in fact no becoming other than natural becoming, no events other than natural ones i.e., events completely dependent upon extension and motion, and no experience other than thinking, which is accordingly alien to the world. In short, for Descartes, being alive is not a particular mode of Being (9); life, as the unity of experiencing and corporeal becoming, simply cannot be thought. From this it follows that sensory experience has no specic status, and is thus hidden from view from the very beginning. In fact, as subjective, sensibility necessarily depends upon this extramundane cogito, and as a consequence can only be a modality of knowing. Such is the fundamental presupposition, lying so deep that it is not even thematized, that governs the entire classical approach to sensory experience: sensation is a mode of knowledge. This holds true not only for Cartesianism, but also for empiricism, which nevertheless attributes to sensation a dignity

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it doesnt have in Descartes; as Straus so well puts it, sensualism gains the possibility of deriving cognition from sensation only by a preceding tacit assimilation of sensing to knowing. (11) Be that as it may, since the Cartesian subject cannot be a living human being, assigning sensation to the subject signies its assimilation to knowledge. However, even though sensations belong to the mind, they lack the transparency of intellectual knowledge because they are produced by the body, or rather, by the world by means of the body. With the Cartesian system, the unity of sensory experience is dismembered into the duality of an objective movement, foreign to consciousness, and an inner experience, belonging to consciousness but nonetheless obscure or confused by virtue of its relation, which can only be a causal one, with the world of res extensa. Sensation is knowledge of a lower rank, for although it refers, as an effect, to external reality, it does not represent this reality as it is: sensation is deceptive because we spontaneously interpret it as having objective value, even though all it expresses is the way the body reacts to the world. This characterization of sensation as obscure and confused knowledge actually stems from its illegitimate status; it bears witness to the action of the body at the heart of the mind without attributing a specic status to this action, i.e., without conceiving it as a relation. Sensations, Straus writes, do not have any direct communication with the ego. Neither are they in direct communication with the world (8): foreign to the world insofar as they arise within consciousness, they remain foreign to the subject insofar as they cannot be mistaken for thought, which is the essential attribute of consciousness. In Descartes, there is no place for a conception of sensing in its specicity, since there is no way to recognize the originary, irreducible subject-world relation, i.e., an existence prior to the duality of substances. Conversely, for Straus, an authentic account of sensing has as its condition the recognition of a subject existing precisely in the mode of world-relatedness: the Cartesian subject has sensations, the Strausian subject has a world through sensing. In short, to dene sensation as obscure or inferior knowledge is to situate it at the intersection of a double negation; it is to maintain that it cannot belong to an extramundane subject, yet without being a part of the objective world either. Thus one can already understand the central role that the articulation between sensing and moving (self-movement) plays for Straus: Though the abrogation of qualities and substantial forms and with it the dichotomy of the sensations into worldless qualities and qualityless motions opened the door to mathematical physics, the understanding of human existence just as imperatively demanded their reunion. (190) As we have already mentioned, it is the account of sensory experience in terms of Cartesian substances that leads to its characterization in terms of sensations. Insofar as sensing cannot be acknowledged as a mode of relation or communication with the world, it will have to be reduced to a collection of discrete contents. In fact, since it does not arise through the

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inactive act of pure thought (the act of a lumen naturale), sensation is the result of a physiological process, the result of the action of the world upon consciousness, and hence sensations have, Straus says, the character of nite things. Substantive categories are applied to them. (12) Sensation is neither an experience nor a relation, but a content: deprived of the life that animates it, it becomes dead material. In other words, because the sensation cannot be inscribed in a specic mode of existing with a temporality of its own, it inherits the mode of existence belonging to the res extensa where its cause is to be found; objective space/time is its principle of individuation, and it exists in the mode of a thing. More precisely, lacking reference to a mode of existing (i.e., a specic mode of temporalization), sensory experience is subordinated to an abstract, discontinuous conception of time in such a way that the experience dissolves into a sequence of atomistic sensations. Following a characteristic movement of naturalizing thought, the conditions of the objects appearing are described in terms of the object of which they are the condition sensation is constructed in terms of the features of what is sensed. It is clear that since Descartes cannot recognize sensing as a specic mode of existing, all he can attribute to it is the mode of being of the objective world. Thus the positing of an extramundane subject, the characterization of sensing as inferior knowledge, and its determination in the form of atomistic sensory contents are three aspects of the same theoretical decision. It is on the basis of this analysis that Straus develops his own perspective. For Descartes, sensing was apprehended as a mode of knowledge, and nally as a collection of contents, to the precise extent to which the subject was characterized as an extramundane being, i.e., as long as the subjects relation to its body and to the world remained alien to its essence. For a subject divorced from life, the only conceivable relation to the world is the exterior and as it were passive relation of knowledge: for the mind, knowing is the only manner of existing, with the almost incomprehensible result that the very act through which the world comes forth is derived from knowing. Thus the denition of sensing depends upon the way the who of sensing is determined. This is why Straus takes as his point of departure precisely something whose existence Descartes is not even aware of the living human being. Strauss thought, like that of Goldstein, is rooted in the recognition of the irreducibility and thus the indivisibility of the human being. Rather than conceiving the living being as the union of a consciousness and a body, he takes consciousness and body as derived moments, i.e., as modalities of the living beings existing. Strauss entire theory of sensibility proceeds from this initial decision: We conceive sensing as a mode of being alive (lebendiges Sein). (17) Sensibility is not built up out of sensations according to a logic of proceeding from the simple to the complex; in accordance with the phenomenological requirement of respecting the phenomena, sensibility must be apprehended in the form of sensing, understood as a specic mode of relation, as the communication of

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the living being with a world. Sensing is the mode according to which the living being as such is linked with the world (and this is why it denes a common ground between human and animal), it designates the living beings originary mode of existence. We can therefore see that Strauss originality consists in approaching sensory experience from an existential point of view. Instead of attempting to offer an account of this experience on the basis of the determinate entities thought and extension, which would just dissolve sensing into knowledge once again, Straus focuses his inquiry on the specic mode of existing that sensation refers to which presupposes rst bringing its proper subject to light: what type of existing is at stake with sensing, i.e., what type of relation with the world? What is already certain from the outset, without prejudging this mode of existing, is that here it is a matter of an originary relation in the sense that a world is opened up in it, a relation that knowing accordingly presupposes. Thus Strauss thought signies a radicalization of the phenomenological approach in that, as Maldiney remarks, it begins where Husserls intentional analysis leaves off, with the hyletic he named without being able to develop it.2 The rst consequence of this decision is that perhaps for the rst time, sensing is absolutely disengaged from knowing: sensing is not a mode of knowing, nor is knowing a mode of sensing. And indeed, knowing must itself be grasped existentially namely, as another type of communication with the world. Thus far from either of these modes being subordinate to the other, both sensing and knowing are specic, independent moments of the living human being, i.e., they are two ways of being connected with the world. Straus names them respectively the pathic mode and the gnostic mode; this contrast corresponds to the distinction between sensing and perceiving (with the latter as the initial mode of knowing), i.e., to the distinction between the space of landscape and geographic space. He denes these modes as follows: by the pathic moment, we mean the immediate communication we have with things on the basis of their changing mode of sensory givenness. Thus, we do not relate the pathic dimension to the xed or changing properties of the objects, and this means not to objects capable of attracting, frightening, or oppressing us by their properties. The gnostic moment merely develops the what of the given in its object character, the pathic the how of its being as given.3 If we want to understand this difference in terms of particular phenomena, Straus writes that we can distinguish between seeing and viewing, between a complicit and an observational glance, between the lovers caress and diagnostic palpating. (330) Hence by adopting an existential perspective, Straus widens the gap between sensing and perceiving, notions that the tradition had a tendency to place in continuity, or even to identify, as in empiricism. However, instead of distinguishing between immanent material and a transcendent object based on this material, as is usually done, Straus

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distinguishes sensing and perceiving as two modes of relation to exteriority. On the other hand, as the examples chosen conrm, in disengaging sensing from knowing, Straus situates it on the side of what is usually called affectivity, or rather, he manages to redene the eld of that which is commonly characterized as affectivity, as distinct from the relation of knowledge. Instead of corresponding to the cognitive dimension of experience as differentiated from its emotional dimension, as the classic distinction has it, Strausian Sensing designates a stratum that lies deeper than the division between perceiving and feeling (s prouver), a self-affection that is not an alternative to the opening e upon exteriority a catching hold of qualities at the core of the world that is nevertheless not a mere apprehension of properties deprived of emotional impact. Sensing corresponds, in fact, to a mode of immediate communication, to a sympathy with the world that does not entail any thematic dimension, i.e., any apperception or reection on the side of the subject or any objectivation on the side of the object (19798, 32829). Nevertheless, this sympathy does not fall back into a blind fusion; the immediacy of the relation does not preclude an experiencing. In sensing, the thing is grasped as an expressive moment, as the concretion of a perspectival signication i.e., of a vital or affective aspect, in such a way that sensing is always correlatively a feeling in which the subject experiences its own vivid aliveness (Lebendigkeit or in Mich` le Gennarts French translation of The e Forms of Spatiality, vivance). In the pathic relation to the world, the quality is given in the form of its living impact (the terrifying is given in the terror): sensing is always self-sensing, hetero-affection is always auto-affection. Yet we obviously do not live exclusively in the pathic dimension, as animals do; we have always already transcended the strictly empathetic relation in favor of a thematic distance that takes expressive moments as determinations of a thing, and we live in the universe of perception. Strauss procedure therefore has an archaeological sense, for it is a matter of reconstituting an originary dimension of existence that is transcended at the level of perceptual knowledge and thus tends to be hidden from view. We must now characterize this dimension in more detail. In order to do this, it is necessary to begin with the who of sensing, i.e., to characterize the living being more precisely, while strictly respecting the idea of its irreducibility, an idea that governs Strauss entire way of proceeding. He therefore takes the relation of the animal to its milieu as his point of departure. As a living being, the animal is a being that must eat, reproduce, and escape from whatever threatens it in short, a being that is structured according to the polarity of uniting-with and separating-from, of pursuing and eeing. Sensing is rigorously subordinated to this polarity: the living being is not alive because it is sentient, it is sentient because it is alive. Thus the animal grasps whatever is present in its world according to this polarity of opening-toward and closing-off-from, and this is why it understands these

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presences in an absolutely unthematic way, as expressions i.e., as immediately incarnating and indicating the necessity of ight or the possibility of drawing nearer. The animal never grasps these presences in themselves, but according to their relation to its vital needs, i.e., to itself. In the animal world, there are no things or properties; there are the frightening and the attracting, there are dangers and prey. Consequently, the apprehension of these expressions, and this is precisely what sensing consists in has nothing representative or thetic about it; insofar as the movement is not a mechanical reaction, the apprehension is indistinguishable from the movement of ight or pursuit. To grasp something as frightening is not to recognize this as its characteristic, it is to escape it: the presence is grasped in and through the behavior it arouses. As Straus writes, Sensing is, therefore, a sympathetic experiencing. It is directed to the physiognomic characteristics of the alluring and the frightening. And its characteristics are those of the with in its unfolding, of the towards and the away from. (201) Thus Straus understands the living being, and thereby sensing, in terms of the dynamism that characterizes it. Indeed, there is something in the living beings mode of moving that is irreducible, even in the simplest of movement, to motion as a succession of positions across space: the movement of exploration or of ight tends toward something, is oriented, i.e., involves something like an aim that transcends each of the positions achieved in its course. Living movement is always ahead of itself; it goes beyond itself as a physical displacement and has a dimension whereby it outruns its spatial localization. When the animal is advancing toward its prey or exploring its environment, it is clear that this is not a matter of a simple mechanical displacement, although the movement cannot be interpreted as if it were the product of an explicit intention. For in fact, being oriented toward the goal is not obviously distinct from advancing toward it; the goal is delineated as the movement unfolds. As Straus writes, Animal movement is primarily goal directed. It is search or ight, attack or defense, not a mere traversing from one point in a eld to the next. The environment (Umwelt) of the animal is charged with appetitive vectors. (232) Representation of the goal and spatial displacement emerge as two abstract dimensions dimensions that thinking can scarcely escape, of a more profound dynamism, that of the living being as such; the latter is related to its world in a manner proper to it, one that in any case cannot be reduced either to a spatial distance or to a perception. It is this dynamism native to the living being, this living movement as a movement of life itself, that Straus characterizes by the word approach, which is not to be equated with coming closer as spatial displacement, but has a different kind of proximity as its condition of possibility: It is not the physiological functions of the sense organs which make a being into a sensing being, but rather this possibility of a drawing near, which belongs neither to sensation alone nor to motion alone. (235)

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It is evident from this initial description that the living being is not merely in the world like a physical body, but is originarily linked to the world which means that it is not related to the world through the inner experience of a sensory content. This is what Straus means when he speaks of animal movement as primarily goal directed. As the word itself indicates, approach4 which is how Straus characterizes sensing denes an originary and irreducible relation that does not presuppose sensations, but makes them possible. Indeed, one can only approach something with which one is already in relation; without this, orientation itself would be impossible. The living being does not enter into relation with the world, as though it could exist prior to and independently from this relation: it is this relation, in the sense that it is a living being only by virtue of this intimacy. Thus to recognize what is specic to the living being is to acknowledge that it is not in the world like a thing, yet without being deprived of a world like the Cartesian subject; it is to say that it is at the world (au monde) insofar as it is characterized by an original relation with and toward the world, a relation that is none other than the becoming of life itself, from which the two terms of the relation stem, namely, both the organism, which is sustained only by the current that links it to its milieu, and the milieu itself, which is designed for the living being. For Straus, and later for Merleau-Ponty as well, there is no being-at-the-world except for living being and hence carnal being. To put it another way, Straus understands better than anyone that it is impossible to give an account of the sensory relation with the world if one begins with a dualism of sensing being and world, and accordingly attempts to reconstitute the givenness of presence by means of contents, be they sensory or motor. Sensory experience only makes sense as a specication of an originary relation to the world, as a modality of sensing. It is not at all the case that the subject is capable of sensing because it has sensations aroused by the action of the external world; rather, sensations only arise from sensing as an active relation with the world. For as Straus writes, The sensory certainty of the external world cannot be derived from individual sensations; we would never have this certainty if these individual sensations were not what they are: A differentiation and delimitation of the original Iworld relation of sensing. (356) Here we should note, without pausing to dwell on it, that with this the problem of synaesthesia nds a radical solution, or rather, that it is posed in entirely new terms. Indeed, it is no longer a matter of knowing how atomistic sensations can communicate and unite, or which is even more difcult, how sensations and movements can do so. With the relation of sensing, the unity is given from the start, and with the unity, the communication of sensations, and that of sensations and movements, is given as well: all that is necessary is the far easier task of understanding how the differentiations can arise within the heart of this relation itself.

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But now the nature of the originary relation that has been described under the title of approach must be made more explicit. It cannot be grasped in terms of experiential contents, because it is, on the contrary, the relation that makes something like an experience possible. Straus tackles the question by way of the notion of limit, in the Kantian sense. It is intrinsic to the living being to test its own limits, and, more generally, to live every experience as limited or nite, be this in the form of the restless exploration that characterizes animals or in the form of the human consciousness of nitude. Now there can only be an experience of a limit on the basis of a relation to what transcends this limit, i.e., to a totality of which this limit is the negation, which means, more precisely, that a limit can only be experienced by a being that can truly apprehend it as a negation, i.e., one that can reach beyond it toward this totality. As we can already appreciate, sensing is this relation to the totality insofar as sensing is the continual overreaching of the limits through which the totality is given; as Straus bluntly states, Men and animals can experience limits for, as beings which sense and move, they relate to the world in its totality. (247) Thus sensing is dened as the totality relation. (248) This means, rst of all, that the living being is originarily in relation with the totality of the world, which must be understood in the non-extended sense of the very being of the world. This is perfectly coherent: if all experience, of whatever sort, is a particular delimitation (249) of sensing, if every experience is lived as a limit, it must be admitted that the living being is immediately in relation with the totality of possible experience, that sensing opens upon the very being of the world (or being as world). Thus Straus could appropriate the Heideggerian idea that perception requires a prior opening to the very sense of existence (subsistance), except that for Straus, this opening is the work of living sensing. Then again, the totality relation signies that the living being forms a totality with the whole of the world in that this whole is constitutive of its being as a living being. Indeed, the living being is not the already constituted subject of sensing; on the contrary, the living being is constituted in sensing i.e., in the relation to the totality of the world, which means that the world belongs to its being, that the living being forms a totality with the world. Now it goes without saying that the totality of the world is never present as such, that experience never reaches the world itself, but something belonging to the world. By presenting itself in the singularity of a particular experience, the world conceals itself as world; every actualization of the world is at the same time a limitation. In other words, totality only exists in the form of moments where it is denied. It is not prior to what limits it; rather, it is constituted in this limitation itself. Consequently, when Straus characterizes sensing in terms of the totality relation, he is taking this notion in an extremely unusual way. It is not a relation to a pre-existing or already constituted totality, but a relation in which the totality itself is constituted in and as its own limitation. This is tantamount to saying

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that each experience appears as a limit, i.e., as referring to an ever-retreating totality that only truly exists in the form of the dynamism by which the living being overcomes this limit: each experience is a limitation of the totality in the sense that the living being transcends it toward another experience. Hence it is not because the living being already possesses the totality that it transcends each nite experience; rather, it possesses the totality by going beyond each experience. In sum, it comes down to the same thing to say that each experience is a limit, that it lies in its essence to be in relation to a potential totality i.e., a totality hidden by what limits it and to say that the living being only exists as approach, i.e., as transcending each nite experience. Rigorously understood, living movement is the joint constitution of the totality and of that which limits it. As Straus writes, The totality relation is one of the potentialities. It is actualized and specically articulated in individual and specic sensations. In moving himself, the individual presses beyond his present limitations to nd himself enclosed by new boundaries; he passes from one Now to another Now, from Here to another Here. Here and Now belong to every sensation and every movement. The Here and the Now are the expression of the actualization, delimitation, and specicity of the totality relation. (249) In speaking of the totality relation here, Straus wants to indicate that the totality composed of the living being and the world exists only in the form of experience in its transcending itself toward another experience, that this totality remains a broken or potential totality, for the entirety of the world, as one term of the relation, remains absent from it. From this it nally follows that the living being is a being that is necessarily incomplete: to the extent that the entirety of the world is constitutive of its being and that the world is only given as its own absence, the living being has its essence outside of itself or rather, is lacking itself so that, as in Patocka, the exploration of the world is eo ipso conquest of oneself. Approach is thus the originary dynamism through which the world comes to appearance, the living being advances toward completion, and the relation of living being and world is constituted as the totality relation, all in a single movement. This characterization of approach as the totality relation allows us to clarify a number of points to which we have already alluded. First of all, it is easier to understand the sense of the critique addressed to Descartes, to the impassiveness and extramundaneity of the Cartesian subject. What is in fact at stake for Straus here is addressing sensory experience as a moment of living becoming rather than reconstituting it from atomistic sensations situated in the abstract time of physics. This cannot merely be seen as a demand to return to the actual concrete phenomenon of the living being, which is, as such, obviously active. For at a deeper level, Straus takes the living being as a being-in-becoming (346), i.e., as essentially temporal. Indeed, as a relation to a totality that is in essence potential, each present calls forth its transcendence toward a new present: the living beings being-in-becoming corresponds to

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the nonactualizable dimension of the totality, to its irrevocable excess beyond any nite experience, so that temporalization is the response to the everrenewed gap between experience and what it can actualize. Thus, following the path opened by Husserl, Straus places time at the heart of sensing i.e., of living in the sense of lived experiencing (erleben) but unlike Husserl, Straus takes living itself as subordinate to the life of the sensing subject. In other words, the subject of sensing is temporal because it is in becoming and it is in becoming because it is living, to precisely the same extent as every living experience is an actualization of an untotalizable totality. Time is the form of the incompleteness of the vital. Here Strauss perspective would call for a confrontation with Bergson, who in Creative Evolution is led to posit the identity of duration (la dur e) and of life. e In the second place, the relation between sensing and moving can be seen in a new light here. They have appeared to us as intimately interwoven both for descriptive reasons and for a reason of principle: insofar as they are moments of an originary and unitary relation with the world, perception and movement are necessarily in communication, and they are ultimately only two ways of apprehending a single being-at-the-world, in terms of extension and in terms of consciousness. Nevertheless, their articulation is necessary. In fact, since experience only occurs as a limitation of the totality i.e., as calling for its own transcendence, every sensing gives rise to a self-moving, and it is to the precise degree that the sensation is transcended in the movement that the sensation is constituted as an actualization-limitation of the totality. Symmetrically, insofar as the totality remains a potential totality i.e., only exists as vital becoming, there is no movement except as giving rise to sensations and being determined in them, as it were, in such a way that the totality that the movement opens up continually retreats upon itself. In short, the internal relation we have used to characterize approach, the relation of the limit to the totality is specied as an internal relation of mutual reference and reciprocal interchange between sensation and movement. As Straus writes, The unity of sensation and movement is grounded in the totality relation. The animal confronts resistance only insofar as it directs itself, and confronts a limit only insofar as it penetrates beyond the limit. (252) Finally, we are now in a position to understand why pathic experience (sensing) and the givenness of something transcendent are not two alternative options. For to say that sensing and moving are originally conjoined and articulated in approach is to say that there is nothing sensed that is not transcended toward the totality and grasped as a limitation of it: Individual sensations are limits of the totality relation; as these particular limits, they are implicitly related to the totality. (248) Now to articulate what is sensed with the totality, simultaneously joining it to and differentiating it from the totality, which is the work of movement, is to understand that presence can only be present as

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a portion selected out from the world, and thereby retained within the very transcendence it opens up: insofar as it stems from the totality relation, the testimony of the senses is not an alternative to the opening toward the world. This is what Straus wants to say when he characterizes distance (die Ferne) as the spatio-temporal form of sensing. (381ff.) Sensing is sensing at a distance, and what is sensed is essentially grasped as over there because it is shot through at its center by a movement in which the totality of the world is actualized. We are now in a position to return by way of conclusion to the question of affectivity. What is the originary sense of affectivity insofar as it exists in the mode of sensing? What is the genuine sense of pathic experiencing? The preceding analyses lead us to conclude that the affectivity of sensing points back to an originary affecting, beyond activity and passivity, that is nothing other than desire: indeed, this word precisely indicates the mode of relation to the world that underlies sensing. Straus unequivocally recognizes this when he justies the denition of distance as the spatiotemporal form of living movement: Only insofar as I am directed toward the world, striving for and desiring that which I do not have, and in so desiring the other am myself changed, only then can there exist for me the near and the far. Distance is therefore relative to a becoming, desiring being. (384) That Straus chooses the term desire is no accident. He is not referring to the usual way of characterizing the living being in terms of lack: nowhere does he talk of need, nor does he assume that self-preservation is the living beings main or only goal. What is proper to desire is in fact always to exceed anything that could satisfy it, so that the desired reactivates the desire to the very degree to which it lls it; what is desired is always absent from whatever is supposed to incarnate it, and satisfaction is at the same time deception because it calls for further achievements. But this is precisely the relation of the living being to the totality. Insofar as sensing aims at the world, and what is sensed only presents the world by limiting it, every experience is hollowed out with negativity, and gives rise to further experiences for this very reason. Fundamentally, sensing is desire because its own object is only present to it in absenting itself, because the characteristic of the totality is to present itself only in withdrawing into transcendence. It is precisely because sensing is desire that it is originally articulated in self-movement or rather, the appearing of the object of desire is not distinct from the movement toward appropriating it. Thus underlying the pathic moment where singular presences are revealed there is an originary affection, an affection that is identically action since it is affection by the totality, i.e., by what only appears in retreating into ever-receding depth. By opening up the alterity on the basis of which a sensory presence can appear, desire is the originary affect.

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Finally, in emphasizing this way of characterizing sensing, we have undoubtedly found the means for a response to the question of the relationship between the pathic moment and the gnostic moment. Indeed, we have seen that Straus disengages sensing from knowing without inquiring more deeply into the sense of knowing itself, which leads him to distinguish two layers, that of sensing, which is affective, and that of perceiving, which is cognitive, corresponding to two types of attitude toward the world, two modes of existing. Now to the extent to which existence is one, we could legitimately inquire into the mode of unity of these two levels, into the conditions of a possible passage between them. As a matter of fact, in spite of some indications we will turn to in a moment, Straus insists on the rupture rather than on the continuity, and leaves hanging the question of the articulation of the pathic with the gnostic. In our view, the reason is because he remains dependent upon a received conception of knowledge as a thetic relation to a determinate object: he is indeed led to make perceiving and knowing a mode of existing, just as sensing is a mode of existing, without inquiring for himself into the mode of existing that is proper to knowing. But in his characterization of perceiving and knowing, he may be dependent on an illusion inherent to both perception and language, the illusion, brought to light by Merleau-Ponty that they transcend themselves toward a positive term and appear to be a relation to this already constituted term. Thus it would be necessary to apply to knowing the same reduction that Straus applies to sensing. It would seem to be beyond any doubt that perception cannot deliver a determinate object any better than sensing can, and that if it is indeed an object that is intended, this object retreats behind its appearances; the intention toward the object is not so much adequation as it is interrogation. For this very reason, a continuity would emerge across a distinction that Straus undoubtedly draws too radically. The desire we have brought to light at the heart of sensing allows us to think perceiving as interrogation or rather, thought in terms of the phenomenal difference between sensing and perceiving, desiring and interrogating would appear to be two modalities of a more fundamental mode of existing for which we have no name, one that would account for the unity of the subject beyond the difference between affectivity and knowledge. Certain indications provided by Straus himself lead in this direction, which testies once again to the depth of his thinking. We shall content ourselves with furnishing but one example by way of conclusion: For every moving being, the proposition holds true that in its movement it is directed from here to there. Only a being which in its temporal existence is incomplete can will, strive, or move itself. The being incomplete in the particularity of the actual moment is the ontological ground of the possibility of a transition from a Here to a There, from one particularity to another. This being incomplete indeed makes spontaneous motion possible, that is, it makes possible the searching of an animal and the questioning of man. (270)

228 Notes

RENAUD BARBARAS

1. Straus (1935/1963, pp. 8, 10, 380). 2. Maldiney (1973) 134. [A list of the published works of Erwin Straus will be found on pp. 33437 of the latter volume trans]. 3. Straus (1930/1966, p. 12). 4. [The French word is approche; cf. proche, near trans].

References
Maldiney, H. 1973. Le d voilement de la dimension esth tique dans la ph nom nologie de e e e e Erwin Straus, in: Regard Parole Espace, Lausanne: LAge dHomme, 1973. Germ. trans. Die Entdeckung der asthetischen Dimension in der Ph nomenologie von Erwin Straus. trans. a Horst K nkler. In: Walter von Baeyer and Richard M. Grifth (eds), Conditio Humana: u Erwin W. Straus on his 75th Birthday, Berlin: Springer, 1966. Straus, E. 1930. Die Formen des R umlichen, in: Der Nervenarzt 3:11, pp. 633656; Engl. a Trans., The Forms of Spatiality, in: Phenomenological Psychology: The Selected Papers of Erwin W. Straus, trans., in part, Erling Eng, pp. 337. New York: Basic Books. 1966. Straus, E. 1935. Vom Sinn der Sinne, 2nd rev. and enl. ed., Julius Springer, Berlin; engl. trans., The Primary World of Senses: A Vindication of Sensory Experience, trans. Jacob Needleman, New York: Free Press, 1963.