Introduction

In the lengthy section devoted to “will and action” of his recently published Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins—the collection of analyses synoptically charting the various modes and forms of intentional consciousness, which Ludwig Landgrebe assembled after 1927, at Husserl’s request, from his research manuscripts of the mid- to- late 1910s—Husserl repeatedly engages with the question of how involuntary actions can be turned into voluntary performances. In this context, he makes the following principial point with regard to the relationship between involuntary and voluntary behaviors: “By its very essence, every field of involuntary behavior can become a field of voluntary behavior, every possibility of involuntary performance has a corresponding possibility of voluntary performance”.Footnote 1 To be sure, this point was touched upon briefly in other already available Husserlian manuscripts as well, as are the Ideas II or the Analyses Concerning Passive Syntheses. Moreover, it was also received to some extent by contemporary scholars. Thus, for instance, Elisabeth Behnke in her extensive research on what she terms the “operative corporeal infrastructure”Footnote 2—including among other things bodily tonus, and habitual bodily configurations and postures—regards the subject’s capacity to “reactivate” and “inhabit” from within such performances as the main condition of possibility for phenomenologically describing and analyzing them: it is only by appropriating such bits of behavior implicitly haunting our everyday actions that we can actually make them explicit. In contrast to those earlier published notes referenced by Behnke, however, the extensive treatment of the issue now available in the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins anchors Husserl’s understanding of the matter in a more in-depth reflection on the forms, possibilities, and structures of involuntary action, and it is precisely these points that the present paper aims to explore.

A careful consideration of Husserl’s reflections on involuntary action in the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins proves highly relevant in the specific context of the development of his phenomenology during the late 1910s in at least three major regards. For one, I will argue that the analysis of involuntary behavior considerably reshapes Husserl’s theory of action, which was primarily oriented by his discussion of voluntary activity. Secondly, this point gains in weight significantly with the turn towards genetic phenomenology, revealing the fundamental role of passive processes for the constitution of any form of free activity and thus expanding the scope of what Husserl saw as a “subjective act” in general. Finally, these reflections also bear their mark on the Husserlian conception of ethics, at the core of which he places an ideal of self-responsible life, which essentially builds on the subject’s capacity to convert involuntary behavior into voluntary, free, and rational action. In the following paper, I propose a detailed reconstruction of Husserl’s discussion of involuntary behavior as presented in his Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins in order to highlight how they are indicative of some of the key limitations of his phenomenology of action. In doing so, I will subsequently suggest some possible ways in which these reflections can be fruitfully pushed further in contemporary phenomenological research by rethinking the relationship between voluntary action and its “underground” along different lines.

Voluntary and Involuntary Action

While Husserl’s more consistent attempts to come to grips with the question of involuntary action indeed only developed around the late 1910s, they are as such predated and determined by a vast set of reflections on voluntary or “free” acts, which are key within the theoretical framework of the Ideas project and are to a large degree already sketched out well before 1910.Footnote 3 It is useful to briefly reconstruct here the grounding understanding of voluntary action developed in that context since it serves as the explicit background, which guides Husserl’s later forays into the phenomenology of involuntary acts.

In Husserl’s account of the subject matter, as first developed already at the time of the Logical Investigations and then more consistently systematized during his work at the Ideas project, voluntary action is still largely subsumed to the general notion of ego-acts (Ichakte). Thus, in his Ideas I and II, Husserl uses the concept of “ego-acts” to designate those intentional acts, that are explicitly lived through by the ego in full conscious awareness of their object, be they acts of perception, judgment, recollection, feeling, or willing.Footnote 4 This means to say that the ego performatively inhabits those acts and actively engages in their intentionality, having their objects in the foreground of his awareness, in contrast to acts which only remain latent or potential, or retreat into the background of conscious attention. Among such acts considered in the most poignant sense of the term, which Husserl also addresses with the Cartesian term cogito, he highlights from the onset especially those that are performed spontaneously or freely, which means that, unlike mere stimuli that impact on the ego from the outside eliciting a reaction, these acts originate in the ego proper and emanate from its center; they depend continuously on the ego’s engagement and are as such performed in a specific mode of subjective consciousness, which is the consciousness of the “I act” (Ich tue). Husserl also describes these acts on occasion as “centripetal acts,” though this designation may be somewhat misleading, as it suggests an act directed inwards, towards the ego, rather than from the ego towards the world, which is the actual case. Instead, the term is rather meant to stress the continuous close connection that spontaneous acts entertain to their performing I in remaining within the ego’s essential reach and control.

Now, one point that may strike the reader from the outset when sifting through these considerations is that they set forth a theory of voluntary action which refers to the broadest sphere of mental acts in general. Thus, these descriptions apply from the onset for considering everything from the ego’s act of recalling a childhood experience, to passing a judgment, indulging in a fantasy depiction, or even simply turning one’s attention towards an affective stimulus in spontaneous perception, as well as “actions” in the practical sense of the term. Indeed, in Husserl’s view, there doesn’t seem to be any major phenomenological difference beforehand between the act of conjuring up a recollection mentally and that of performing a real-life worldly action like lifting a stone were it not for the latter’s essential dependence on the lived body and its abilities. This point of difference itself, however, does not count much beforehand insofar as Husserl in his Ideas II still interprets bodily movements in general as forms of “cogito” in their own right (see Husserl, 1952: 218). Consequently, social interaction in the real world, and with it a more concrete understanding of action proper, only comes to be viewed in this context as a derived application of a concept of the ego’s intentional activity, which is primarily drawn from the sphere of mental acts.

Now, when considering the question of “involuntary action” in Husserl, it is important to note from the onset that this concept in itself actually contradicts his initial interpretation of what actions really are. Thus, in one of the earliest texts compiled by Landgrebe in the third volume of Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, dated 1909–1910, Husserl explicitly wonders whether it is at all possible to have an action without the will giving its fiat to enact it. His answer, jotted down in a marginal note to this question, plainly states: “no!”.Footnote 5 For, he explains, even though one and the same process, which is wilfully enacted as an action, could well also take place mechanically and devoid of willing, it would as such in fact no longer correspond to our basic understanding of action. The same point comes to the fore in similar reflections around the same time generally contrasting “practical expectations” as the specific type of expectations pertaining to our own wilful actions, to mere empirical expectations, i.e., the expectation I have that some event may or may not occur objectively. Thus, my expectation of having a walk in the evening is based on my own wilful decision: if I would reconsider and stay home, the expectation itself would be canceled. As a consequence, the certainty of my practical expectations entirely depends on my own wilful decision, as Husserl clearly shows already in his early lecture on ethics from 1908/09, for “if it were otherwise certain from the onset, it would be impossible to will it” (Husserl, 1988: 107). On the contrary, an empirical expectation is not relative to my own act of willing, but instead, it is primarily motivated by my experience of similar occurrences in the past. It is in such broad strokes that Husserl then generally delineates between practical possibilities as the consciousness of the “I can” and doxical or empirical possibilities as the consciousness of “it is possible”. Insofar as Husserl thus begins his forays into involuntary action guided by this broad overarching contrast between wilful, practical motivation and sheer empirical motivation, whereby we objectively anticipate something to be the case on the ground of prior occurrences, non-voluntary bodily movements tend to be initially equated to sheer empirical phenomena. This perspective seems to still largely determine Husserl’s views at the time of his work at the Ideas project, and especially his Ideas II, when distinguishing the sphere of free acts as that of the intellectus agens from what he terms the “natural side” of “every spirit” (Husserl, 1952: 279, English translation: 292), the implication here being that everything taking place below the threshold of free and self-responsible action can be assimilated plainly with the empirical processes of nature.

However, already in his aforementioned text from 1909 to 1910, this broad understanding of action considered as a voluntary performance of the ego in sheer contrast to the objective unfolding of empirical events is put to the test when confronted with more concrete examples. This is the case first of all when considering situations of voluntary action, wherein the subject may well give their initial fiat, but the ego doesn’t accompany the action in full and continuous voluntary awareness. For instance, I am eating and this is certainly a wilful performance, but while I sit eating I am no longer focused on my intention as such: I am no longer attentively watching over my action and its wilful accomplishment continuously renewing my commitment to it in full awareness, but instead I let my mind wander, I gaze out the window, or I am absorbed in some conversation, while I continue to eat in a self-forgetful accomplishment of the initial intention. For the moment, however, Husserl is not particularly troubled by this reflection as he can easily show that in such a case the action still unfolds according to my wilful intention and in conformity to its intended sense, without any longer requiring the ongoing control and coordination of the will. In fact, Husserl seems to suggest here, just as my perception can ongoingly intend the object as a whole despite only actually having access to a sketchy and partial aspect of it, so too in the case of wilful action, the will animates the entire process although it only actually intervenes momentarily to set the course. Consequently, these acts can be regarded as wilful actions in their entirety without any reservations. However, these questions become more pressing in Husserl’s subsequent treatments of the issue, which acknowledge the multifarious forms and types of involuntary action by also shedding new light on how involuntary elements pertain to any type of voluntary action as well. And, in this regard, Husserl’s Ideas II also opens the path for a more subtle consideration of involuntary acts as part and parcel of a revised understanding of subjectivity. In this context, he suggests what could be seen as his first attempt at classifying the forms of involuntary action, enumerating as possible phenomena pertaining to the “mind’s underground of nature”: “associations, perseverations, determining tendencies, etc.” (Husserl, 1952: 276f.). Arguably, what is here elliptically termed as “perseverations” in contrast to “tendencies” broadly corresponds to the distinction Husserl will later try to establish between the two main forms of involuntary acts, namely pre-voluntary acts, or instinctive behavior, and post-voluntary acts, or habitual behavior.

The question of instinctive acts is most often addressed by Husserl in the perspective of the subject’s ontogenetic development with specific regard to the formation of kinaesthetic abilities. Thus, in several manuscripts from the early 1930s aiming to situate the question of kinaesthesia within the framework of a phenomenology of drives, Husserl comes to explicitly elaborate on the constitution of kinaesthesia as systems of practical possibilities. In considering this process, which Husserl bluntly designates as “practice,” he takes as his starting point the final stage of this process, namely: the descriptively given, sovereign mastery of the full-grown subject over their body as a free organ of the will. The question is thus how such mastery comes to evolve out of a prior stage of mere instinctive movement, that is: a blind tendency, which still lacks a representation of its destination and target and which only reveals its intentionality with its achieved fulfillment.Footnote 6 Thus, it is only by finding its satisfaction that the instinctive drive becomes aware of its own intentionality, showing itself as a precursory form of a wilful project of action. In his treatment of the matter, two examples stand out in particular. On the one hand, Husserl discusses the infant’s relationship to his mother’s breast, whereby the smell of the breast summons up an “originally adapted kinaesthesia,” which then, in periodical reiteration, gradually grows into the “unity of an oriented intention” (Husserl, 2006: 326f.). On the other hand, he refers to the pedaling movements of the child, taking the pleasure of pedaling as a triggering stimulus equivalent to the complex of hunger and breast in the earlier example.Footnote 7 Similarly, Husserl here describes the process whereby original hyletic processes of instinctive drive fulfillment, having their own innate systematicity, come to evolve, by means of their revealing fulfillment and repeated appropriation, into an actual mastery over those movements and thus into a freely disposable kinaesthetic system proper, which now allows those specific movements to be performed as an actual telos, intended in full awareness. Similar reflections can be found in the manuscripts gathered in Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, whereas Husserl now interestingly leaves open the possibility to also consider in similar terms the impulsive actions of the fully developed subject, for instance, the action of smoking, or in a similar vein impulse purchasing, which largely bases on a similar mechanism of immediate reaction unfiltered by rational deliberations and wilful consent.

Habitual action, the second form of involuntary action discussed in this context, involves what Husserl generally calls “secondary passivity”.Footnote 8 The notion designates actions, which were performed initially as voluntary actions, but have gradually become “mechanized” and turned into automatic performances. If, according to Husserl’s descriptions in one of his manuscript notes from 1918, every sphere of potential activity is a “multidimensional field” (Husserl, 2021/3: 104f.)—since it opens to manifold possible ways of enacting and performing that activity—the crystalization of practical possibilities out of mere pre-voluntary, instinctive performances documents one way in which this proteiform field of praxis becomes articulated, namely through the development of chaotic and unexpected involuntary actions into paths of conscious and self-responsible action. The other way around, insofar as free voluntary actions thus establish a path, a practical trajectory through such a field of activity, they contribute to its habituation, such that this one way of traversing the practical field subsequently sinks into passivity and develops into a tendency to be reiterated in the same fashion. Often, it is the purpose of exercise to arrive at precisely this result: when learning to dance, for instance, the subject performs voluntarily different sets of bodily movements that should eventually come to be performed offhandedly, without any explicit voluntary engagement; similarly, dancers first need to study a new choreography to be subsequently able to appropriate it seamlessly as their inhabited registers of movement. Arguably, the same applies for appropriating a new technology, for instance, the photographic camera or the smartphone, which require the subject to voluntarily acquire the necessary bodily procedures and gestures for making the machine work, while, once habitualized, these open an entire range of embodied possibilities for action, which no longer require an attentive voluntary performance. The main point, in Husserl’s discussion of the matter in Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, concerns the way in which actions performed in an active voluntary manner initially can gradually turn into routine performances which are now triggered and executed without the ego’s attentive participation. When thus engaging in routine behavior like driving, or finding ones way out of an office building, which one needs to appropriate initially in painstaking voluntary practice, one performs actions in ways that are brought to completion automatically both in their implicit voluntary aims and in their particular succession of acts, that is: their trajectory such that one isn’t even able to recollect exactly if one has locked the door or not upon departure, or which way exactly one crossed the field in walking home through a park.

Although Husserl himself emphatically stresses the difference between these two main classes of involuntary action: instinctive and habitual actions, it is plain to see that, when delving into more concrete everyday examples, they in fact frequently interpenetrate. It suffices to think in this regard about how one obsessively checks the phone for social media updates in both involuntarily responding to trigger notificationsFootnote 9 and reproducing habitual patterns of use as one continues to scroll ever further in an act of involuntary “perseveration”. However, Husserl himself is not interested in exploring more nuanced examples, and I will immediately show why this is indeed a vulnerability of his account. Instead, he is, on the one hand, primarily interested in depicting them both in their teleological relationship to voluntary action, since he mainly describes instinctive actions as actions gradually leading to a free wilful performance and habitual actions as ones that call for their free voluntary re-appropriation. On the other hand, Husserl is mostly interested here in elaborating a conceptual framework to properly grasp involuntary actions within the context of his phenomenology of subjective experience. In this latter regard in particular, the development of his thought is quite striking, for if, as shown above, Husserl initially regards involuntary actions plainly as empirical occurrences, that is: as non-subjective phenomena in contrast to free subjective actions, his later manuscript entries delve on the contrary into an in-depth effort to rethink the very understanding of subjectivity implicit in his earlier accounts.

Thus, in a longer note from 1918, written in Bernau, Husserl first begins by acknowledging what he terms “das Ichfremde der subjektiven Sphäre,” (Husserl, 2021/3: 93, fn.) that is: the aspects within subjectivity which are there for a subject but do not proceed from it and are not part and parcel of the ego’s subjective life. This is the case for sensible data, for instance. However, in his view, this characterization definitely does not apply to involuntary actions proper. For, such actions do indeed occur without the explicit intervention of a will, which establishes goals and devises a path to fulfill them, and they indeed happen without the explicit assistance of the ego as a self-responsible and self-conscious doer of the deed, but such actions are nonetheless not something that passively occurs to the ego, as an empirical incident of sorts. Instead, they need to be regarded as a particular form of subjective action in its own right:

The ego is not purely passive in an involuntary action, he is not inactive in all sense. Rather, the involuntary action originates in the ego, but in the arch-ego (not the I-human and you-human). It is something that occurs in the mode of ‘I act’ [Ich tue], stemming from the active ego, and not something that happens by itself. It is—since it is the essence of the subjective ego to be an active I—essentially of the ego, whereas the empirically objective [das Sachliche] is alien to the ego, not sprung from it. (Husserl, 2021/3: 95)

The reference to the “arch-ego” might be somewhat disconcerting in this context. If one thinks of the use made of this concept in the Bernau manuscripts around the same time, for instance, where the notion designates the original pole holding together the hyletic constitution of temporality, it is hard to see how this relates to the above quoted passage. However, Husserl uses the term in a far more flexible manner throughout his later manuscripts. This point is tackled extensively by Dieter Lohmar, in a paper from 2012 aiming to explain why Husserl uses this term in a quite diverging understanding in the Bernau manuscripts, on the one hand, and in the C-manuscripts as well as in the Crisis, on the other hand. In his view, the “arch-ego” does not designate a subjective instance per se, but instead it rather serves as a “functionalized concept,”Footnote 10 which changes meaning according to context while still performing the same function in each of these contexts: that of pointing to an aspect of subjective life in the treatment of which phenomenology is required to penetrate to a deeper level of constitution than is that of conscious acts given immediately to reflection. The same is obviously the case here since involuntary actions are not accessible immediately to subjective reflection, but instead they lead to reconsidering the phenomenology of voluntary ego acts in its entirety by revealing a dimension of pre-voluntary processes, which are recognized to be the genetic fundament of voluntary action in general.

In this regard, involuntary actions turn out to be no longer just a marginal “limit-problem” for a phenomenological theory of willing and action, but instead, they are genetically prior and thus determinant in relation to voluntary action proper, which initially served as the main guiding thread for their analysis. Moreover, they are as such revelatory of a universal of the practical field insofar as aspects of involuntary behavior are one way or another also implicit in any form of voluntary action, as Husserl makes clear by even suggesting at one point that the act of willing itself is primarily an involuntary performance (Husserl, 2021/3: 108)Footnote 11. It is precisely in the context of such insights that Husserl’s theory concerning our general possibility to convert involuntary performances into voluntary actions deserves attention. For this step is indeed crucial both for his theoretical ambitions of fully accounting for the structures of subjective consciousness (since it is only by our ability to convert unconscious processes of involuntary action into self-conscious performances that we can subject them to a phenomenological analysis proper) as well as for the ethical stakes of his phenomenology (which primarily rely on our capacity to adopt a life of full self-responsibility and self-regulation).

Reactivating Involuntary Action

The discussion of this point is explicitly carried out by Husserl on account of a paradigmatic example, namely that of breathing, which is referenced abundantly throughout the volume on will and action of Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins and is also addressed more implicitly in the Bernau analyses quoted above. However, the original and most detailed account of the issue can be found in a short text written around 1914, now published as text Nr. 46 in Husserliana XLIII/3 (Husserl, 2021/3), which seems to broadly settle the matter once and for all in Husserl’s view, given that later mentions of the issue simply refer to the results of this inquiry as an established fact.Footnote 12

Husserl’s account here begins with a detailed description of the activity of breathing, which represents a quite particular case of involuntary action. For one, it is certainly an instinctive behavior, that does not require any prior active instruction on part of the subject to be apprehended but is on the contrary a vital precondition for any active and passive behaviors. Furthermore, it is a continuous, ongoing activity, which can be momentarily halted but not suspended or ceased, as it is a life-supporting activity. As such, it has a rhythmic structure, repeatedly engaging the same order and succession of acts: breathing in and breathing out, etc. Husserl himself in his description also takes note of the peculiar symmetry of the act, which evolves along the same phases, from A to B and back again from B to A, and he also addresses the differences in speed that characterize the act in its normal, implicit and involuntary accomplishment, as it gradually slows down towards the end of each phase. In any case, the important point in this entire description relates to the fact that, when thus considering breathing as a phenomenologically analyzable performance, one no longer lets the act run unawares, but on the contrary the phenomenologist is necessarily dealing with an attentional modification of it, taking notice and attentively following the accomplishment of the act. To be sure, in Husserl’s view, this detail in itself does not yet affect the status of the act as an involuntary action, as we now simply witness the performance attentively without interfering. An action can thus be performed in full awareness, but not yet wilfully, as is the case with involuntary actions that we catch ourselves doing or that we simply cannot refrain from, for instance peeping into the privacy of others. Nonetheless, attention is, in Husserl’s view, a first and necessary step for turning things around and converting the involuntary into a voluntary action, as he makes clear in his lectures on active syntheses: “becoming attentive is, one might say, the passage towards activity, […] all activity proper is performed in the focus of attention” (Husserl, 2000: 4).

However, the actual intervention of the will still requires a further step, and this is primarily taken, in Husserl’s own example, the moment we inhibit our initial involuntary performance and thus wilfully command it to halt. The act of inhibiting is itself, of course, a voluntary action in its own right, performed willingly and in full awareness, and as such it can, in the present case, according to Husserl, be accomplished in a variety of ways: it can intervene sooner or later within the act of breathing, thus producing longer or shorter segments of the initial action; it can intervene in between the phases, halting breath at the end of expiration for instance, or within one and the same phase, which can then continue once the halt is lifted; it can take place during any of the phases of breathing, while breathing in or while breathing out; it can maintain the hold longer or shorter, etc. The main point here is that, once the initial voluntary inhibition is suspended, the act of breathing is wilfully allowed to continue and thus becomes voluntary to a certain degree, though it is still not a voluntary action proper. Husserl himself compares this to the movement of a wheel, which I stop for a short time, but then allow to move on, and as such, of course, I “will it” to move without it actually becoming a free voluntary movement of mine. Instead, Husserl further argues, in the case of breathing my intervention can go further than that. Thus, I can not only halt the process and then suspend my voluntary halt at will, but I can also influence the speed of the process by slowing down the act of breathing or speeding it up. In this case, the impulse of my will supervenes the initial action and takes it over, freely deciding upon when to bring each of the phases of the breathing process to completion and freely halting and reversing from expiration to inspiration and vice versa. Before sleep, for instance, I decide to relax by wilfully setting a slower pace to my breathing, and I do so by voluntarily taking it over and controlling it until, at some point, it of course slips my mind and again goes on without my contributions, regardless of its pace.

Limits to Reactivation

But does this analysis indeed suffice to support Husserl’s claim that involuntary actions are in principle convertible to voluntary actions? Husserl himself does show some hesitations in at least two regards. Thus, he is at one point led to ponder whether, even in such cases as breathing, the ego can indeed do more than simply influence a movement that occurs by itself anyhow. He thus wonders “whether one shouldn’t perhaps distinguish between the inhibition of a subjective drive-based process, which takes place by itself, and a slow voluntary action, in other words: between the will to inhibit which directs itself during breathing at the future and the will to voluntarily perform slow breathing, just as I can at any time either inhibit my fast running pace or voluntarily decide to run or walk slowly” (Husserl, 2021/3: 412). Finally, he decides against establishing such a distinction, insofar as, in his view, an action that is already on course as is the case with breathing can only really turn into a specifically shaped voluntary movement by slowing down or accelerating the already occurring movement, such that the resulting voluntary action is in the end only a function of the degree of inhibition or acceleration applied to it. While this in itself seems to overthrow his entire argument so far, Husserl is visibly keen to downplay the consequences that arise out of this, suggesting that this is merely a terminological debate. Secondly, on several occasions in his notes, Husserl stumbles upon another difficulty when trying to extend his reflections to other examples. Thus, Husserl repeatedly compares the case of breathing to other involuntary actions, which may be converted into voluntary ones, as is for instance the case of an involuntary hand movement responding spontaneously to an itch by scratching. Here as well, I can according to Husserl become aware of the movement and take it over by turning it into a free voluntary action. Similarly, I can, in his view, take over the act of walking by performing it wilfully, or I can help elicit my recollections, which can only be triggered involuntarily (Husserl, 2021/3: 413). Of course, this latter example, in particular, should have raised some questions in Husserl’s perspective since I cannot really come to voluntarily recall something in free performance more than I can immediately move the table without using my body as an intermediary, but he again seems unwilling to take this inquiry any further. Instead, it is precisely in further pursuing such doubts that I want in the following to question Husserl’s thesis and some of its implications. To be more precise, I will first argue that already Husserl’s choice of example to support his claim faces numerous difficulties (A.); secondly, I will show why Husserl is nonetheless led to this theory by his constant parallelization of the practical field with the field of cognition (B.); and finally I will develop a few concluding thoughts as to what an adjusted Husserlian approach, which takes into account the aforementioned limitations, could bring to the analysis of the subject matter (Conclusions).

A. Limits to Husserl’s Choice of Examples

It is clear from the onset that, if one takes Husserl’s very broad understanding of “free acts” as active intentional performances of the ego as one’s main point of reference when analyzing involuntary actions, there are numerous involuntary acts that can only be to a very limited degree appropriated in voluntary performance. It suffices to think of the entire sphere of emotional acts in general: a fit of rage, a fleeting anxiety, a sudden and irrational fear, or even plain full-hearted laughter cannot really pass freely into voluntary performances proper. But even if one would keep with a narrower understanding of voluntary and involuntary acts as bodily actions in concrete worldly contexts, as suggested above, it is plain to see that Husserl’s main example, guiding his analysis, namely the act of breathing, is quite deceiving in at least six decisive regards.

  1. i.

    For one, this example refers to a quite unique vital bodily function, which is accessible to wilful control in ways that other similar vital functions (like digestion, blood circulation, sleep, heartbeat, etc.) are not. Even if one can in various ways arrive at “influencing” the latter as well to a certain degree, they are clearly not available for Husserl’s succession of acts of subjective interference, from inhibiting the act to plainly regulating its speed and arbitrarily setting its limits. While breathing is also a vital function like the others, and similar in its regularity and necessity, it is in no way representative for the ways our bodily processes are open to wilful appropriation, while considering further examples could help point out a large variety of possibilities in this regard, ranging from full voluntary mastery and control to almost complete unawareness with various intermediary degrees.

  2. ii.

    Secondly, breathing is qua this ongoing vital bodily function not really similar to either of the two main classes of involuntary actions that Husserl normally refers to when discussing the subject matter. It is unlike most pre-attentional instinctive actions, driven by urges, drives, or tendencies, which simply trigger a subjective response, as it simply doesn’t seem to share a similar structure of implicit desire. On the other hand, it is not really an example of a mechanized action plain and simple, which is now sunk into secondary passivity after being first enacted and apprehended in voluntary activity, as voluntary control is here certainly subsequent to the automatic performance. In other words, we are dealing with an act of continuously reoccurring primary passivity, as it were, which makes it quite specific and not representative among the aforementioned cases of involuntary actions usually brought up by Husserl.

  3. iii.

    Thirdly, we are dealing here with a repetitive act, which continues ongoingly in a similar and predictable manner. As such, it is quite different—even remaining within the sphere of plain bodily movements—from any type of momentary, singular bodily action. Thus, in the case of breathing, we can at any time become aware of our act of breathing, after having performed it involuntarily for a while, and we can then subsequently switch to interfering with it voluntarily or even perform it willingly as the act continues to unfold. For, of course, there is no significant difference here between one turn of involuntary breathing, with its specific succession of phases, and the next, when one takes charge voluntarily. Instead, things are entirely different in the case of a unique momentary act of say bodily motion: gesturing with the hand, scratching or taking a stroll through the park. Of course, I can here as well surprise myself performing a certain gesture, which I can then repeat broadly along the same lines. But this second repetition is for sure just a subsequent approximation, and it suffices to think of everyday experiences like having dropped something from your pocket unawares and then trying unsuccessfully to retrace one’s path through a park to realize the degree of uncertainty involved in this. The exact steps I took just a minute ago are in no way retrievable in detail so it becomes difficult to comprehend what it would even mean to “reactivate” a singular involuntary action in this regard.

  4. iv.

    Fourthly, in the case of breathing, the entire question of awareness and attentional attendance is harmlessly uncomplicated as it indeed allows to neatly distinguish between our mere epistemic attention towards the involuntary action we have been performing, in reflexively turning towards it, and the subsequent step of voluntarily interfering with it and “taking it over”. Instead, it is precisely at this point that further difficulties can arise, in that attentional awareness can be not only “the passage towards activity,” as in Husserl’s description, that is: a first step in voluntarily appropriating involuntary actions but also a means for complicitly rationalizing that behavior, that is: for continuing to pursue one’s involuntary compulsions in pretending to oneself that they are voluntarily approved. Thus, I am well aware, for instance, that I am again checking my phone for social media updates, but instead of this insight determining me to plainly resist the urge, I can end up again making some flimsy excuse for continuing to act on my bad habit. In other words, consciousness can end up taking the guise of false consciousness, which further relativizes the border between voluntary and involuntary actions under an all-encompassing appearance of pseudo-voluntary action. This entire range of complications, which is presumably most characteristic for addict behavior, is covered up by Husserl’s trivial example.

  5. v.

    Fifthly, breathing is, as such, an overtly solipsistic act, which can be performed in complete imaginary detachment from the outside world, whereas considering the question of involuntary versus voluntary actions in the concrete horizon of social experience brings about further difficulties. For one, acts of social interaction are primarily situated, they are embedded in the “here and now” of an unfolding situation, with its given subtle contextual orientations, its multiple and proteiform inner and outer horizons, with the step-by-step mutual interconnectedness of their momentary intentions, their local saliencies and their constantly shifting dynamics, and they are as such performed, in the heat of the moment, following momentary cues from others and in ways that are most frequently other-oriented in empathetic traction. As routine interactions involving forms of bodily, habituated exchange, casual utterances, etc., these acts are involuntary and unavailable to attention in a very peculiar way, being unremarkable and covered in a “rude indifference” (Garfinkel & Livingston, 2003: 25), which means to say that parties involved in them are even irritatingly unwilling to discoursively account for what they are doing, holding that there is in fact nothing worth noting there from the outset. Thus, for instance, the orientations of players in a game of basketball as teammates or opponents, the prospective dynamics of the ball, and the concrete playfield reshaping constantly with each new situation of play are only given as such to the hands-on, involved playing bodies themselves and are inaccessible to both unknowledgeable bystanders and actors aiming to turn it into a fully voluntary and self-responsible performance.Footnote 13 What would it then mean, under such circumstances, to reactivate an involuntary social action? Performing it again in solitude would hardly amount to the same thing, while re-enacting it under the same social circumstances (which is already an idealization) would greatly modify the phenomenon, provided it would be even possible.

  6. vi.

    Finally, the act of breathing comes with a significant simplification also insofar as it bypasses the entire question of the historicity of action. This point comes to the fore on several occasions throughout Behnke’s remarkable reappropriation of Husserl’s theory of voluntary reactivation in her essay on “ghost gestures”. Thus, Behnke readily admits that the gestural sediments she investigates in her essay are not just the product of personal histories of the individual. On the contrary, her examples frequently venture into larger spheres, as with her reference to infra-political bodily behaviors in colonial contexts bearing the marks of a complex social history, or gendered behavior (Behnke, 1997: 192f.). In her treatment of these examples, however, Behnke does not pose the question of how Husserl’s method of kinaesthetic reactivation, that she embraces, could indeed be applied to the study of gestures sedimented in more complex processes of social and historical appropriation and adaptation. Such acts, one might claim, retain an aspect of involuntary performance that cannot be converted into full self-responsible voluntary action for the sheer reason that their founding evidence, their initial activity of origin is not readily available for reactivation or retrieval. This is the case already with the mimetic adoption of attitudes, postures, and gestures, which constantly weave themselves into the behavior of both children and adults subtly picking up on each other’s tone, pronunciation, or hand gestures in ways ostensibly recognizable to the familiar observer. Similar notes can be made with regard to the myriad of gestural forms generated in the immediate flux of interaction, in reaction to the behaviors of others that they mirror or to which they respond. Towed by the sequentiality of exchange, these gestures are from the onset constituted in the crossfire of mutual engagement, interkinaesthetically performed and interoriented in ways that render them more readily accessible in pragmatic immediacy to the other than to oneself. As a consequence, their habituated sedimentations are in any case not revived in their original form by mere subjective anamnesis of the agent alone, and this problem obviously becomes even more pressing when passing from present intersubjectivity to the field of intergenerativity and historicity in general (see especially Steinbock, 1995:170f.). Thus, gestures can for sure, just like the sedimented judgments discussed by Husserl, pass from one generation to the next, as this certainly applies to the aforementioned colonial behaviors, addressed by Behnke, which are acquired and perpetuated across generations. Such historical sedimentations of bodily patterns also come to leave deep imprints on behaviors performed in contexts that no longer share any of the premises of their initial institution. As a consequence, displays of respect, forms of interaction, and even ways of moving through space can still bear a mark of social situations or objects and contexts that no longer pertain, and they are as such “historically involuntary” in ways that don’t allow for immediate reappropriation like in the case of breathing.Footnote 14 While Husserl’s own works usually only tackle these issues in a static perspective, under the heading of “normality,” as a flexible intersubjective standard regulating the subject’s experience, movements, and actions, the main challenge would be to consider the question of possible reactivation or the retrieval of evidence in these regards in view of genetic phenomenology as forms of gestural sedimentation that need to be tracked in their own convoluted forms of circulation and tradition. What is in any case certain is that, for this, the method of plain kinaesthetic reactivation advocated by Behnke appears as inappropriate as settling the etymology of a word by recollecting the first time one has heard it.

B. Husserl’s Cognitive Bias

Now, one question that needs clarifying, given this huge body of counterarguments, which Husserl himself, as seen above, stumbles upon on occasion, is why he nonetheless persistently stresses the universal possibility of voluntary reactivation in the face of all evidence pointing to the contrary. In what follows, I will suggest one possible explanation for this, which is useful to consider all the more since it opens the path for advancing Husserl’s reflections beyond the visible limitations of his own position. To be more precise, I want to show that Husserl’s unwavering stance in this respect has to do primarily with what I would call the cognitive bias of his treatment of will and action in general, that is: the fact that his reflections on these matters primarily follow the lead of his interest in a phenomenology of cognition by applying in strict parallelism insights originally acquired in that field. Thus, it is this cognitive emphasis of his phenomenological project, shaping the very understanding of the phenomenological method and its concepts, that generally prevents Husserl from more thoroughly thinking through the questions of voluntary and involuntary action.

As Ulrich Melle makes clear in his substantial editor’s introduction to the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, Husserl’s reflections on practical life are from the onset motivated and structured by his desire to unveil the unity of subjective life, that traverses all differences between the various types of acts of consciousness:

The grounding assumption of Husserl’s phenomenological research is the synthetic unity of consciousness: consciousness is not an unruly chaos, or a mass of unrelated and heterogeneous phenomena. This synthetic unity differentiates itself in a temporal, a structural, and a motivational unity of consciousness, as well as in a unity of desire and will, which is discussed extensively in the third volume of the book. All phenomena of consciousness take part and integrate into these forms of unity, and they are as such intimately interwoven. This close interconnection implies a high degree of structural homogeneity and affinity between the phenomena of various types. Husserl’s research strategy in tackling the phenomena of emotion and will, which are particularly difficult to grasp, is guided by this assumption in that he mainly seeks to lay bare in the case of emotional and practical phenomena their parallelism to the structures, which have already been highlighted and secured repeatedly with regard to intellective phenomena. (Melle, 2020: LXVIII)

In other words: when tackling such issues, Husserl is mainly interested in extrapolating his phenomenology of doxic acts, by showing how the same structures can be found universally also in the case of other classes of acts. Indeed, this attempt at parallelizing the practical field to that of cognition traverses Husserl’s reflections on the subject matter from his first lectures on ethics, which explicitly develop the idea of ethics understood as a “formale Praktik” (Husserl, 1988: 3f.) in a step by step analogy to formal logic, and up to his late Kaizo essays, which define the “truly human” ethical life as a “pan-methodism” in direct parallelism to the proceedings of scientific praxis (Husserl, 1989: 39). Moreover, this perspective clearly shows throughout Husserl’s oeuvre in all of his scattered analyses of bodily behavior visibly determining his entire vocabulary on the subject matter. Thus, already in the second book of his Ideas, Husserl explicitly addresses bodily behaviors like pushing or dancing as particular forms of a cogito with the only notable difference that they involve the positing of the body as a worldly reality (Husserl, 1952: 218). Similarly, in later manuscript notations he considers free, wilful movement as a “theme of freedom” (Thema der Freiheit), he discusses inhibited action as “practical negation” (see, e.g., Husserl, 2021/3: 519) or contrasts voluntary and involuntary movement by explicitly referring to parallel modifications of perceptual attention in a permanent programmatic analogy to his doxic considerations on cognition (Husserl, 1989: 26).

Significantly, it is this very parallelism marking Husserl’s reflections on action, gesture, movement and praxis throughout, which also visibly manifests in his treatment of involuntary actions as essentially open to voluntary reactivation. In this regard, their easily recognizable reference in the doxic field is the well-known treatment of potentiality and actuality developed in Ideas I. Thus, according to Husserl’s account here, every cogito is as such, in addition to its intentional actuality, accompanied by a halo of inactuality, which designates its potentialities for further actuality (Husserl, 1977: 71f.). In the case of perception, regularly referred to in this context, this implies the background awareness of perceptual objects, which are implicit in my momentary perception of this specific object here and now, as objects of other possible perceptions that I can actualize at any moment, by turning my gaze from this object here to that other one over there and so forth. In Husserl’s view, the same also applies in the case of recollection and expectation, thought, feeling, as well as willing and action, where I can always extend what I specifically feel, want, and recollect in actuality at a particular moment, by subsequently actualizing what is then only potentially co-felt or co-recollected. As Husserl explains, this operative possibility to turn potentiality into actuality can well take place within the same intentional dimension, as in the case of kinaesthetic movements expanding perception to other potential perceptual objects here and now, or it can well occur in between such dimensions, as is the case when I follow through associations, which depart from perception and point back at recollections, or when I engage in empathic acts that develop within a perceptual context (Husserl, 1977: 77f.). All of this is the work of shifting attention, which turns the various forms of inactuality involved in every particular act into intentional actuality plain and simple. One particular and especially significant form of such an operative shift of attention is reflection itself, which designates in Husserl’s view the specific modification of attitude by which we can seize and analyze our own acts of consciousness (Husserl, 1977: 165f.). Consequently, Husserl sees it as an essential feature pertaining to every lived experience whatsoever, that it can be explicitly perceived as such, by turning an act that was originally performed unreflectedly and thus only implicitly lived through, while being available for the experiencing only I as an inactual potentiality, into explicit consciousness. Of course, Husserl himself is careful throughout these considerations not to reduce everything to mere shifts of doxic attention and reflection, despite his obvious temptation to do so on occasion, but instead, he systematically highlights corresponding acts in the field of praxis or emotions (Husserl, 1977: 78), which are subject to similar regulation. However, in doing so he still universalizes reflection as a structural feature of consciousness, which also serves as the guiding model for conceiving those corresponding acts, while conceding some specificity to the practical and emotional versions of reflection.

This tendency is quite visible in the Kaizo articles, where Husserl develops his most systematic account of reflection in the practical field. In his view, I can thus become aware, on grounds of doxic reflection, of my acts, gestures, or intentions, but also of my feelings, recollections or fantasies, my hopes or fears, or even acts that are already reflective from the onset, for instance, my act of regretting an action. Instead, as the example of regret already makes clear, I can go much further than just elevate the act into consciousness (i.e., doxic reflection), for since I am essentially interested in how I am, was, or will be, my reflection also involves from the onset what Husserl calls reflective emotions: I can be embarrassed at my reaction yesterday, or angry, or sad, just as I can side with a paper I wrote 10 years ago or repudiate it. These are emotions referring to other emotions, which Husserl terms as emotional reflection, distinguishing them from the mere doxic reflective awareness of the emotional act. Moreover, I can, as a further practical possibility, revise my actions, rethink what I have done, and reconsider the opportunity of my actions. By means of such a valorizing reflection, I am not just spontaneously reacting for or against my own action, but I try to self-evaluate and furthermore: to exercise self-determination, which is in Husserl’s view the precise equivalent of reflection in the field of willing and action. It is, in other words, an action upon an action (or correspondingly: a will to will) and thus practical reflection proper in a sense that also needs to be distinguished from the mere doxic reflective awareness of my action. Finally, in Husserl’s view, all of these various forms of reflection allow both for a singular form of momentary assessment, valuation, or willing, as well as for a general form thereof. This means to say that I can not only realize that I have acted wrongly in a certain situation, but that I habitually have that tendency, or that it is “in my nature” to do so. Similarly, I can valuate a certain action, finding it just or blameworthy, but I can also valuate a general tendency of my character, or my habits, which I can embrace or reject in general. Under these circumstances, I can of course also evaluate not just my past actions, but also the future ones along with their entire habitual mindset, so that consequently, in Husserl’s view, I can similarly self-determine my entire future life “from now on,” and not just momentarily in respect to this or that action. In Husserl’s view, thus,

[m]an can acquire a unitary overview of his entire life, albeit only in a more or less determined and clear fashion, and he can evaluate it universally according to its reality and possibility. Subsequently, he can purpose a general life objective and subject himself and his entire life, in all the open infinity of its future, to a regulative demand stemming from his own free will (Husserl, 1989: 24f.).

This is what Husserl calls a “life project,” understood as a universal reflection of the will, that is: an act of self-determination aimed at one’s entire future life, as can be illustrated intuitively with the example of choosing a profession (or giving up meat, showing generosity, etc.).

Maintaining such a decision and the concrete work of implementing it confer a specific character to naive, pre-voluntary life, turning it, as already mentioned before, into “a life of method,” of “self-breeding, respectively self-cultivation, self-governance and self-monitoring” (Husserl, 1989: 39). The concepts Husserl uses here—Selbstzucht, Selbstkultur, Selbstregierung, and Selbsüberwachung—tellingly hint at the difficulties of such self-regulation and at the effort required to voluntarily shape a life that naturally tends to unfold pre-voluntarily and resists reactivation. And indeed Husserl constantly brings out reservations in this regard. Thus, insofar as any free initiative emerges out of passivity and is bound to return to passivity, being embedded in modes of involuntary acting, it is clear that maintaining a life-project automatically also implies assimilating it as a habitual normality, both in its positive side of constant refinement and in its negative aspects of routinization and mechanization. Nonetheless, Husserl is unhinged in maintaining the universal possibility of self-determination, which he explicitly describes in this context in ways that overtly recall his aforementioned analyses of breathing and voluntary reactivation:

[…] man has the capacity to “inhibit” one’s automated accomplishment of one’s passive doings [that is: the way he is plainly driven from one thing to the next in the habitual succession of daily chores] as he can do with regard to the presuppositions (be they inclinations or opinions), which motivate him passively. He can put everything in question, ponder on them correspondingly and only arrive at a decision of the will on grounds of the knowledge thus acquired (Husserl, 1989: 24).

The passage clearly shows how the process of forming and preserving clear judgments serves as the constant term of comparison determining the consideration of processes in the field of volition and action as mere practical analogues of cognition. It is precisely along these lines, I argue, that Husserl also constructs the idea of voluntary reactivation of involuntary actions as a practical equivalent to doxic reflection. This being the case, it is plain to see that the universality of voluntary reactivation deductively translates to the practical field Husserl’s belief in our universal capacity to reflect on our own acts, which he regards as an unalienable feature of consciousness in general.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have focused on a lesser-known aspect of Husserl’s theory of action, namely his understanding of “involuntary behavior” and his thesis concerning our possibility to voluntarily appropriate such behaviors, following the recently published manuscripts gathered in Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. In doing so, I have pointed out some of the merits of this theory, which entirely reshape Husserl’s practical philosophy, but I have also highlighted its important limitations, which originate in a structural shortcoming of Husserl’s theory, namely his presupposition of a rigorous parallelism between cognition, emotion, and action, which leads to a reductive and ultimately phenomenologically inaccurate view of practical experience. How can this shortcoming be surpassed? In an earlier paper, in which I have made a similar argument with regard to Husserl’s analyses of emotion, which are similarly distorted by a cognitive bias, which leads to an overemphasis of their parallelism to the doxic field, I have made the suggestion that complementing Husserl’s reflections with Freud, whose work documents the complexities of the matter and offer abundant examples to expand the scope of phenomenological analysis, might offer a viable solution (see Ferencz-Flatz, 2022). I believe a similar argument can be made here as well, with regard to the phenomenological analysis of practical life and particularly of involuntary action.

This is the case, on the one hand, because in this respect in particular Husserl and Freud share a similar normative assumption. Thus, Husserl’s claim regarding our universal possibility to voluntarily appropriate involuntary behavior and his normative demand to pursue a life of self-accountability and self-responsibility in all respects echoes Freud’s normative view of the task of psychoanalysis, encapsulated in his famous motto: “Where the id was, the ego shall be” (Freud, 2005: 60). As is well known, Freud sees this effort, which he compares to the drainage of the Zuiderzee, as a “work of advancing culture,” thus raising processes of unconscious drive fulfillment to rational wakefulness in a way perfectly compatible with Husserl’s position (Freud, 2005: 60). On the other hand, Freud himself pursues the analysis of these issues not just in the field of emotional impulses, bodily symptoms, and moral resistances, which are object to psychoanalytic therapy, but also, especially in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud, 2000: especially 224f.), in the field of everyday actions and bodily gestures. Here as well, his minute collection of case studies abounds in subtle descriptions that are capable of laying bare the complexities of the relationship between involuntary and voluntary behavior in ways that could definitely benefit a phenomenological approach following in Husserl’s footsteps.

To be more precise, Freud’s account can help deepen Husserl’s discussion of involuntary actions in at least two main regards. For one, it can help complicate the question of how one becomes consciously aware of one’s own involuntary acts and their motivations by pointing to the contorted ways in which these usually tend to evade analysis, requiring to be worked through in a complex process of psychoanalytic assimilation, requiring special techniques and perhaps even intersubjective collaboration, in order to be even properly grasped as such. In other words, acknowledging one’s actions is frequently not just a matter of turning one’s attention in their direction, but also a question of praxis already: of overcoming resistance, of tearing oneself away from what one is doing and inhibiting that behavior, etc. Secondly, Freud’s analysis also vividly shows both the extent of involuntary behavior and the fluid borders pertaining between voluntary and intentional activity, which frequently come to intermingle in various ways: as a result of sheer forgetfulness and inertia, as a form of symptomatic action, as parapraxis, perturbed actions or interferences between diverging intentions. Drawing on Freud’s rich collection of case studies and examples, a phenomenological analysis following Husserl could further augment his analyses by offering a more nuanced and complex account of the possible transitions leading from voluntary to involuntary action: when being absorbed and gripped by the object in a way almost impossible to desist; when being drawn into rash or impulsive behavior; when being distracted and forgetting of one’s intention; when being dazed, torpid, bewildered or fatigued—all of which is not plainly reducible to the contrast between primary and secondary passivity. It is only against the background of such an analysis, which highlights the concrete multitude of intermediary shades separating voluntary and involuntary behavior, making it questionable whether “free and rational voluntary action” as conceived by Husserl can indeed count as anything but an ideal limit concept, that one can indeed come to develop a more concrete phenomenology of voluntary reactivation.

Such an endeavor would consequently need to highlight the multifarious ways in which one can indeed appropriate involuntary, unconscious behavior, turning it into a conscious and wilful performance, either by mere passive processes of sobering up or being bewildered or by actively making an effort to reorient, take over and reactivate one’s sense of purpose, taking into account the necessary limitations and partiality of any such enterprise. Of course, when taking a quick look at the list of limitations pertaining to Husserl’s account in this respect, which I have sketched above, it should become apparent that referring phenomenology to Freudian psychoanalysis might hardly be enough to tackle such an endeavour. Thus, for instance, analyzing the extent to which we can gain mastery over our body and its different functions would obviously require one to also engage with the various forms of bodily techniques and exercises (for instance, Yoga bodywork, Feldenkrais, etc.), which promise to develop our capacity of control over the lived body in its diverse aspects. Similarly, our efforts to re-appropriate and claim ownership of our complex emotional behaviors and stances can benefit from a dialogue with cultural techniques like psychodrama or Stanislavskian acting methodologies, while audiovisual recordings and their interpretation in interaction studies can be of proven use when we want to come to grips with the unnoticed subtleties of our social behavior. Finally, accounting for the historical dimensions of our actions, which frequently elude our wilful control and destabilize the rigid borders between voluntary and involuntary action, may also require one to specifically look at the ways in which a (psychoanalytically informed) phenomenological analysis of individual consciousness ties into aspects of social and historical reflection. A remarkable illustration of such a hybrid approach, which also closely relates to the question of “unfree behavior” touched upon in the present paper, can be found in Erich Fromm’s early essay on “The Feeling of Powerlessness,” published in 1937 (see Fromm, 2020). In this essay, Fromm ostensibly uses the resources of Freudian psychoanalysis to draw a comprehensive map of behaviors driven by the feeling of powerlessness, ranging from inhibition and paralyzing inactivity to rage and anxiousness, rationalization and irrational belief in the saving grace of magical interventions, over-dependence on the suggestions of others and overcompensating pseudo-activity. All of this paints a complex and subtle picture of how concrete contemporary social behaviors can be seen to share in a similar condition of unfreedom, respectively: of how one could possibly conceive of their empowering re-appropriation, which can both readily serve as a model for a phenomenological analysis further expanding on the subject matter. Most significantly, however, Fromm’s analysis doesn’t stop at the level of individual consciousness, but instead he pushes matters into a broader perspective. He does so, on the one hand, by relating the question of powerlessness to the patterns of bourgeois education, which shapes children, by removing them from direct contact with reality and systematically depriving them of a sense of being taken seriously, in ways that cultivate their feeling of powerlessness. On the other hand, Fromm also relates this to the specific social and historical context of inter-war Germany, which stands at the root of an overarching feeling of social impotence. Following along this line, a phenomenological analysis of the voluntary appropriation of involuntary behavior would also arguably have to lead, in a similar fashion, to a critical phenomenology of the contemporary conditions of unfreedom and alienation, which ground our sense of voluntary and involuntary action. But this is certainly a topic for a different paper, which exceeds our limited purpose here, namely that of simply highlighting some of the limitations of Husserl’s phenomenology of action and uncovering their deeper philosophical causes.