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In the First of the Logical Investigations, Section 4, the theme of association is brought up in the context of a discussion of the phenomenon of indication. The starting point of this short but dense section is the view according to which association refers to situations in which a content of consciousness reminds one of or calls up another content of consciousness. Seemingly straightforward, this statement does, in fact, raise many problems. Consciousness associates A with B because A points to B and somehow belongs to it. As Husserl says, "we feel their connection forcing itself upon us" (LI 1. 274). The relations of "pointing" and "belonging" are at the core of Husserl's theory of parts and wholes, which informs his account of perceptual experience. It is not because A and B coexist or succeed one another that consciousness associates them; rather it is because association has already established their mutual pertinence that contents are experienced as either successive or simultaneous. Associative syntheses confer "a new phenomenological character" upon distinct or discrete contents; inasmuch as the latter appear as sides or profiles of the same intentional object, associations bring about new intentional unities. Jay Lampert notes that, in Husserl's conception, association is a "double constitution of unit and unity."¹ The association of A with B presupposes that consciousness extricates a part from the whole to which it belongs while passing over the borders of that part toward other parts belonging to the same whole. From the perspective of the whole, independent objects of consciousness exceed themselves in the sense that they carry along implicit differentiations that pass unnoticed in the actual perceptual now. From the perspective of the part, non-saturated contents of consciousness pass over into their perceptual contexts in relation to which their position within a whole is determined. But if consciousness were to connect a sense datum with any other sense datum, nothing would prevent associations from collapsing into unruly plasticity and arbitrary flexibility instead of providing a basis for coherent perceptual experiences. If concrete intuitions are to fulfill objective meanings, then there must be rules limiting the range of sense data any given datum can associate with.²

DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-3915-6_2

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