This introduction to the special issue “What is Sedimentation? Consciousness, History, Language” clarifies the central role of sedimentation in Husserlian and post-Husserlian phenomenology and sets the stage for the essays that follow. Borrowed from geology, sedimentation functions in phenomenology as a concept-metaphor for the temporal layering of experience, habit, and meaning, linking static, genetic, and generative phenomenology. It names both the formation of a sedimented unconscious and the possibility of reactivation, thereby grounding phenomenological accounts of historicity, tradition, and critique. The introduction focuses on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, Gadamer, and Derrida, while also indicating later reinterpretations in figures such as Stiegler and in political theory. It then presents the individual contributions, which explore sedimentation across embodiment, language, narrative, institutions, surprise, gesture, and psychopathology, showing how it conditions continuity while opening possibilities of transformation.
In The Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard presents both his famous relational ontology of the self and a fourfold typology of the forms of despair grounded on the idea that the self is a synthesis of finitude-infinitude and necessity-possibility. However, commentators have often failed to find any significant differences between these two polarities, with the result that the categories of infinitude and possibility on the one hand, and the categories of necessity and finitude on the other, are thought to be equivalent. Consequently, the fourfold typology of despair is in effect reduced to just two forms: the despair of infinitude/possibility and the despair of necessity/finitude. Against this widely held interpretative consensus, in this paper I offer an interpretation of both Kierkegaard’s ontology of the self and of the fourfold typology of despair aimed at showing that the constitutive polarities of the self are not equivalent and, accordingly, that there are subtle but undeniable differences among the forms of despair he diagnoses.
The concept of sedimentation, developed in phenomenology, provides a bridge between recent discussions of habit in embodied-enactive theories of cognition and skilled performance and conceptions of how habit and routine function in social practices and institutional formation. Although the notion of habit is little discussed in mainstream neoclassical economics, various theorists of institutional economics rightly suggest that institutional structures can shape individual and social habits and routines. At the same time they ignore or say very little about how individual habits and social interactions evolve into institutions. I argue that the analysis of sedimentation can provide a fuller account of the dynamical interrelations between habitual and institutional processes. With a specific focus on the way sedimentation works, I make two suggestions. First, although sedimented habits can be structurally rigid, and often difficult to change, they are also performatively flexible and adaptive in situated action. Second, this performative flexibility reflects principles of transactional plasticity that carry over to institutions.
This paper presents a phenomenological account of heroism based on Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception. Through account, I demonstrate that he provides a novel conceptual framework for understanding cases in which people perform heroic actions on the basis of a perceptual experience. To be clear, the kind of heroism I discuss is civilian, spontaneous and unprecedented. These are sacrificial and untrained altruistic acts that also include a clear lack of selfawareness. Considering that there has not been any description of civilian heroic sacrifice in phenomenology so far, I believe it would make sense to begin with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception because of its remarkable fittingness for this kind of experience as well as his own philosophical connections to heroism which can be found at the end of the Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and in later texts such as “The War Has Taken Place” (1945) and “Man, The Hero” (1948). By way of firsthand testimonials, I take up certain features of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception to demonstrate how they can apply to these kinds of heroic experiences – namely, the spontaneous and prepersonal characters of perception and his notion of the body-schema. These features, I argue, map out the fundamental conditions required for performing a heroic action in some cases such as the ones I present throughout this paper. I conclude by explaining the relevance of these features to issues of freedom and moral meaning that are especially at play in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of heroism. Freedom is the condition for all morality according to him and heroism, a moral act par excellence, is the ultimate act of sustaining other people’s freedom. Therefore, my phenomenological description also aims to unpack how this claim operates on a perceptual level.
This paper examines the different ways in which the metaphor and concept of sedimentation play a decisive function in Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness. Through an examination of the different layers and implications of meaning in Husserl’s image of sedimentation, the entangled significance of this crucial metaphor is connected to other metaphors in Husserl’s thinking, including, most significantly, the master-metaphor of “stream.” The argument of this paper consists in developing the claim that sedimentation and other cognate senses in which the pastness of consciousness abides in the living present contributes to a phenomenological understanding of having a life rather than merely being alive. The life of consciousness, on this argument, is impossible without the constitutive sense in which consciousness possesses a life of its own becoming.
This paper explicates the concept of an institution of nature, a notion hinted at but never fully developed in Merleau-Ponty’s Collège de France lectures. The study begins by distinguishing institution from sedimentation, arguing for the protean, malleable character of institution as a model for temporality within consciousness, culture, and embodiment. The paper then critically contrasts Descartes’s divine “institution of nature” with Merleau-Ponty’s naturalized alternative, in which nature self-institutes through the autoproduction of sense over deep, evolutionary time. An illustration and proof of concept is the human body, conceived as a primordial institution of nature whose intercorporeality—anatomical, sensory, and affective—grounds higher modes of human intersubjectivity, culture, and language. Through analyses of the intercorporeity of sight, hearing, touch, and affectivity, the paper illustrates how naturally instituted bodily structures both enable and limit culturally elaborated forms of sense-making. Finally, it advocates for an expanded “generative phenomenology” that incorporates evolutionary biology, suggesting that the foundations of human experience, culture, and intersubjectivity are rooted in natural institutions laid down through evolutionary processes. While traditional phenomenology has often remained silent on evolution, the Merleau-Pontian concept of an “institution of nature” offers a promising framework for integrating evolutionary and phenomenological perspectives. This approach bridges phenomenology and the life sciences by embedding the genesis of meaning in both culture and natural evolution.
Building on the Husserlian discourse, this article explores the pathological modification of sedimentation within the context of phenomenological psychopathology. It begins with a recapitulation of Husserl’s original account of sedimentation, which is characterized by an implicit temporal stratification of experiential contents and the harmonious nature of their return in the subsequent course of experience. I argue that this formulation faces substantial challenges when pathological phenomena come into play. Anomalous experiences demonstrate that one’s past does not necessarily sediment as truly past, and its later re-emergence is predominantly intrusive and disruptive. In order to account for such phenomena, I devise the idea of pathological sedimentation and expound its corresponding modes of manifestation. Pathological sedimentation differs from typical sedimentation in terms of (i) its disorganized stratification of the internal aspects of an experience and (ii) its dissociation from subjective consciousness. Correspondingly, pathologically sedimented contents manifest in the later course of the experience of the existentially vulnerable subject in a way that is (i) fragmentary and (ii) contrarious to ongoing intentional acts. By the end of this exposition, the conceptual gaps within Husserl’s understanding of sedimentation are provisionally addressed.
This article argues that compromise requires a distinctive form of imaginative work—one that bears striking resemblance to the creative processes underlying metaphorical innovation. This connection is explored through Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy, whose theory of productive imagination provides compelling resources for reconceptualizing compromise as a creative ethical practice. Taking as its point of departure Ricoeur’s 1991 assertion that “the primary lack is always a lack of imagination” in matters of compromise, the paper demonstrates that compromise relies on similar processes to those of metaphor—both maintain a tension between reproduction and production, absence and presence, difference and similarity. Through the analysis of Ricoeur’s distinctive use of visual schemas and his account of semantic innovation, it is shown that metaphorical imagination offers interpretive and ethical resources that can deepen and renew our understanding of the roles compromise plays in social and political life.
In contrast to the early versions of his phenomenological ethics, the concepts of “love” and “personal value” assume an increasingly central role in Husserl’s later ethical reflections. Among the various forms of love, this paper argues that - according to Husserl’s descriptions - generative love functions as the primal institution of personal value. The discussion unfolds in three parts. The first section clarifies the notion of personal value and its intrinsic link to love, and outlines how the question of the primal institution of personal value appears both in Husserl’s own texts and in existing secondary literature. The second part examines this question through the lens of generative love, which essentially exhibits an asymmetrical structure. Drawing on Husserl’s analyses, this structure allows us to understand generative love as the awakening of an ethical subject. The third part then adopts a teleological perspective to reveal the “transcendental” dimension of generative love. Husserl’s conception of personal value clearly displays a teleological tendency. Because the realization of the ultimate ethical aim remains unattainable within a single individual life, generative development offers the hope of approaching ultimate value. Generative love thereby acquires a significance that surpasses individual life and death. Through an analysis of personal value and generative love, this paper shows how Husserl develops a distinct new direction in phenomenology, one that clearly diverges from his earlier concepts.
This article explores the underexamined political dimensions of Alphonso Lingis’ philosophy, with a focus on his understanding of community, alterity, and passion as a possibility for political action. I show how Lingis’ work departs from liberal individualism in order to emphasize “community” as a condition for political engagement rooted in the ethical imperative evoked by the singularity and suffering of others. I then present a speculative account of Lingisian politics which builds on the possible reasons for his admiration of revolutionary figures such as Gandhi and Ché Guevara as exemplars of a passionate, compassionate, and dynamic political praxis.
In the framework of Husserl’s phenomenology, we can distinguish three conceptions of sedimentation: static, genetic, and generative. After briefly sketching the static and genetic conceptions, this paper offers a detailed examination of generative sedimentations, showing how present consciousness is shaped not only by its own past but also by intersubjective and intergenerational formations. It distinguishes four partially overlapping frameworks of generative sedimentations: (1) phylogenetic sedimentations, which designate inherited bodily, instinctual, and developmental potentialities; (2) generative historicity, which concerns chains of motivation springing from communal traditions and constituting an intersubjective history of sense; (3) material sedimentations, which involve the externalization, stabilization, and intergenerational transmission of meaning in enduring artifacts, such as writing; and (4) philosophical sedimentations, which concern the historical development of philosophy itself, wherein norms and tasks of rationality are instituted, sedimented, and reactivated through critique. Taken together, these four frameworks articulate complementary axes for interrogating the generative lifeworld and clarify how inherited formations function as pregiven horizons that both condition experience and call for phenomenological reactivation and transformation.
This manuscript is submitted to CPR for the special issue on sedimentation edited by Saulius Geniusas. In this paper, I examine how the mature Husserl explicates the meaning and role of sedimentation in its various dimensions, ranging from individual self-development within the ego (the layering of time-consciousness), through habit and tradition to the formation of the concrete person, and ultimately outwards to the broader intersubjective processes of acculturation and historicization in the working of traditions. “Precipitation” [Niederschlag] and “sedimentation” [Sedimentierung] are terms employed in Husserl’s later work to express how original experiences bed down to provide a layer of presumed context. Thus, in Experience and Judgement, Husserl explains sedimentation as: “[T]he continuous transformation of what has been originally acquired and has become a habitual possession and thus something non-original” (Experience and Judgment § 67). Sedimentation is increasingly important in Husserl’s understanding of the relation between what is implicitly assumed and what can be ventured in culture and tradition.
This paper advocates for an “evolutionary turn” in the philosophy of technology, emphasizing the biological dimension of our relation to technology. Rather than replacing the well-established empirical turn, this approach aims to enrich it by addressing overlooked aspects of the role played by technology in human evolution. First, I argue that adopting an evolutionary viewpoint strengthens the relationship between philosophy and scientific practice by both necessitating analyses that align with up-to-date scientific paradigms like the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and scrutinizing how technologies also constitute scientific insights into our evolution. Second, I show that technology shapes human biology even today and, therefore, this perspective also contributes to elucidating current debates about technological interventions in the human lifeform and the biopolitical implications of our evolutionary self-representations. Third, I emphasize the limitations of the human–technology relations approach exemplified by postphenomenology and, by drawing on Stiegler’s “general organology,” I propose to reconceptualize the human lifeform as the evolving negotiation between biological organs, technologies and social organizations and their historically situated reconstruction.
This article undertakes a genealogical analysis of the concept of freedom elaborated by the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. It particularly examines the relevance of the insights contained in the incomplete project of the Negative Platonism, elaborated around 1953. In this seminal work, Patočka endeavors to illuminate a “negative” path for philosophical discourse, one that embraces the character of the negative, not as negation but as distancing. Through a nuanced reconceptualization of Plato’s chorismós and Husserl’s epoché, Patočka argues how this “positive negativity” illuminates the very structure of the experience of freedom. This article discusses how the theoretical impetus of the Negative Platonism gained considerable momentum in Patočka’s 1970s reflections. During these years, the idea of freedom acquired a more pronounced ethical-political dimension, primarily through its interaction with the concept of Pólemos. It then advances the hypothesis that, at this stage, Patočka’s understanding of freedom became indissociable from the notion of responsibility. A connection crucially elaborated in correspondence with his prominent engagement in the dissident experience of Charta 77. By analyzing the intricate constellation of concepts surrounding Patočka’s notion of freedom, this article ultimately aims to demonstrate the enduring relevance of this paradigm for interpreting our present.
Gadamer rarely spoke of sedimentation and is not known as a philosopher who had much to say about the issue. This article would like to make the case that he is an important thinker of sedimentation and one who stands, in this regard as in others, in the best tradition of phenomenology. If one understands by sedimentation what is “deposited” in consciousness and determines it, but of which it is not always aware of, nor can become fully conscious of, one does find in Gadamer’s thinking quite a few instances of what could also be called the immemorial in consciousness. One has to think here first of the subterranean work of history in the Wirkungsgeschichte which culminates in a conception of consciousness which is affected by this “effective history,” a consciousness of which Gadamer says that it is more “Being than consciousness,” i.e., more sedimented than conscious of its sedimentations. This sedimented influence of history on consciousness operates through the prejudices and traditions that determine us and that say more about us than our conscious judgements. Ultimately, this sedimentation is at work in the language that we speak and the dialogue that we are which are always more inherited than they are created by consciousness.
This paper develops a phenomenology of we as home, integrating Edmund Husserl’s concept of the homeworld (Heimwelt) with a new account of presubjective relationality. It argues that selfhood is not founded in an isolated ego but in an originary we-condition—a relational field that precedes and grounds individual subjectivity. Drawing on Husserl’s threefold distinction of static, genetic, and generative phenomenology, the study adopts a generative orientation to show how meaning, embodiment, and belonging arise within a historical and communal horizon. The presubjective self designates the level of lived relatedness prior to reflective self-awareness, where the “I” and the “we” co-emerge in mutual dependence rather than opposition. Through close reading of Husserl’s later manuscripts—especially Umwelt, Heimwelt and the C-Manuscripts—the paper reconstructs the idea that the “lowest stratum” of subjectivity is not the ego, but the home to which the ego belongs. The homeworld is thus understood as the generative soil of selfhood: a network of intersubjective, cultural, and historical relations through which personal identity and normality take shape. Extending this insight, the article elaborates the notion of we as home to describe the ontological, embodied, and ethical dimensions of belonging. Embodiment is treated as the medium in which this relational structure becomes lived and tangible: the body of the individual is always part of a larger communal body. Memory, likewise, functions as the temporal mode in which the we endures, transmitting shared meaning across generations. Finally, the ethical horizon of we as home lies in its openness—the recognition that genuine dwelling is achieved only when the boundaries of home expand to include the stranger. By uniting phenomenological, ontological, and ethical analyses, the paper proposes that we as home offers a generative paradigm for understanding selfhood, community, and universality. It shows that to be human is to dwell together in a shared world—to be, from the beginning, each other’s home.
“To be,” this little word at the root of western culture is generally underrated, ignored, and even forgotten in its use and its meaning. This causes uncertainty and drowsiness in our way of being, thinking and sharing. All the more so since we are enclosed in a totality of beings which has been composed by a part of humanity at a certain moment of history, and is thus partial, does not include all beings and, furthermore, combines beings which cannot form the same sort of whole such as living beings and fabricated beings. The question is then how to remain open to the cosmos as a gathering of living beings and not only to a totality composed by human beings. I came to know that after my exclusion from the sociocultural world following the publication of my book Speculum. There is no doubt that this exclusion repeated a more original one, this of my subjectivity as feminine. I, nevertheless, was left on my own, being out of the world in which I had grown, deprived of the historical shaping of my being. Fortunately, as a woman, I remained more faithful to the cosmos as my dwelling and to a sharing with other living beings. This has not suppressed pain but has safeguarded my life and avoided me being confronted with nothingness. Besides, this has compelled me to come into the world anew, to discover the potential of my original “to be” and the manner of developing it in its singularity. Sent back in the natural world, I have also been led to practice a sensitive transcendence towards other living beings respected in their difference and to long otherwise for the Absolute. All that results in the outline of a phenomenology of “to be” which is founded on life and relations between living beings prior to a human elaboration dependent on logos and peculiar space and time.
