Affect as Transcendental Condition of Activity Versus Passivity, and of Natural Science

Abstract

Distinctions between activity and passivity structure ancient Greek thinking about society, politics, and sexual relations—and also deeply inform ancient Greek philosophy.¹ For example, Aristotle’s innovative concepts of form and matter, and energeia (actuality) and dunamis (potentiality), reflect as well as elaborate the activity–passivity distinction. In turn, concepts such as these, and the underlying activity–passivity distinction, inform and are transformed in later philosophy and science—and not without prejudicial effects.² It is not surprising that the activity–passivity distinction figures so prominently in our conceptual frameworks: it seems a basic, clear, and obvious feature of everyday reality itself. Here I pursue a transcendental, phenomenological argument that the distinction is in fact not so clear or obvious, specifically that it cannot be wholly and determinately defined via a purely abstract, discursive procedure, since specifying which of two interacting terms is the active one entails an implicit orientation to and by a pre-scientific, affective experience. Nonetheless, I think the distinction is conceptually fundamental for key domains of natural science, despite scientific imperatives to abstract from it. Together these arguments highlight, within science itself, Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s point that life is a transcendental condition of science; that is, science is not simply an activity conducted by living beings, rather, our living, as inherently oriented by affect, provides us with a pre-scientific feel and criterion for the activity–passivity distinction, without which, I argue, we could not grasp key issues in biology and quantum mechanics.