On individuation and constitutive activity: a view from the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon and phenomenology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.rp.v10n1a06Keywords:
Psychical individuation, Subconsciousness, Pre-reflectivity, Lived body, Animation.Abstract
According to Simondon (2009; 2013), individuation is a phenomenon of integration and differentiation that occurs in all kinds of individuals. He posited that there is a continuum of different levels of individuation. But, regardless of that continuum, each level includes different challenges depending on the complexity of the relationship to the surroundings. In the psychical, the individuation process deals with relations between consciousness and the materiality, regarding both body and world as experienced in the first-person perspective. Here, I attempt to connect Simondon's interest in understanding psychical life through individuation with a more phenomenological concern for understanding consciousness as a phenomenon of a lived body; namely, a body that constitutes meaning while it constitutes itself in navigating the world. The emotional and affective level of experience that Simondon calls subconsciousness here offers the connection between phenomenology and individuation in psychical forms. I posit that this level of subconsciousness could be understood, in terms of the lived body, as connected to the pre-reflective level of consciousness in phenomenological terms. I link subconsciousness and the pre-reflective level though animation as the primal way in which psychical individuals connect themselves with the world.
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