The Sphere of Attention

THE SPHERE OF ATTENTION
CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHENOMENOLOGY
IN COOPERATION WITH
THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY
Volume 54
Editor:
John J. Drummond, Fordham University
Editorial Board:
Elizabeth A. Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA

David Carr, Emory University
Steven Galt Crowell, Rice University
Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University
Burt Hopkins, Seattle University
José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University
Joseph J. Kockelmans, The Pennsylvania State University
William R. McKenna, Miami University
Algis Mickunas, Ohio University
J. N. Mohanty, Temple University
Tom Nenon, The University of Memphis
Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz
Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy
Richard M. Zaner, Rome, Italy
Scope
The purpose of this series is to foster the development of phenomenological philosophy through
creative research. Contemporary issues in philosophy, other disciplines and in culture generally,
offer opportunities for the application of phenomenological methods that call for creative responses.
Although the work of several generations of thinkers has provided phenomenology with many results
with which to approach these challenges, a truly successful response to them will require building on
this work with new analyses and methodological innovations.
THE SPHERE OF ATTENTION
Context and Margin
by
P. SVEN ARVIDSON
Seattle University, Seattle, WA, U.S.A.
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To Julie
Table of Contents
PREFACE........................................................................................................................ ix
CHAPTER 1: THE SPHERE OF ATTENTION IS THEME,

CONTEXT, AND MARGIN.................................................................1
Theme is Central Focus ...............................................................................................3
Thematic Context is Relevancy ...................................................................................5
Margin is Streaming, Body, and Environing World ....................................................6
The Field vs. Sphere Metaphor of Attention ...............................................................9
Problems of Context in Psychology and Cognitive Science..................................... 13
CHAPTER 2: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR THE SPHERE OF

ATTENTION ...................................................................................... 21
Theme and Margin in the Sphere of Attention ......................................................... 21
Context in the Sphere of Attention ........................................................................... 28
Bringing Context into Focus............................................................................. 28
Positional Index ................................................................................................ 41
Theme, Context, and Margin in the Sphere of Attention.......................................... 46
CHAPTER 3: TRANSFORMATIONS IN ATTENDING .......................................... 56

How Context Shifts in Attending.............................................................................. 58
Enlargement ...................................................................................................... 59
Contraction........................................................................................................ 61
Elucidation ........................................................................................................ 63
Obscuration ....................................................................................................... 66
Context-replacement ......................................................................................... 67
How Thematic Attention Shifts Simply.................................................................... 70
How Thematic Attention Shifts Radically................................................................ 71
Restructuring..................................................................................................... 72
Singling out....................................................................................................... 74
Synthesis ........................................................................................................... 76
How Attention Captures Marginal Content .............................................................. 78
Attending is a Dynamic Tension............................................................................... 84
vii
viii Table of Contents
CHAPTER 4: GURWITSCH AND HUSSERL ON ATTENTION ........................... 86

Gurwitsch’s Critique of Husserl ............................................................................... 86
The Ego and Subjectivity Problem ................................................................... 87
Two-Strata of the Theme Problem.................................................................... 88
The Unitary Attention Problem ........................................................................ 90
Does Husserl Distinguish Theme, Context, and Margin?......................................... 91
Evidence from Husserl’s Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis......... 95
Husserl and Gurwitsch on Transformations in Attending ...................................... 106
CHAPTER 5: SUBJECTIVITY AND THE SPHERE OF ATTENTION .............. 115

The Ever-Present Self ............................................................................................. 120
Attentionality Replaces Intentionality .................................................................... 125
Reflection................................................................................................................ 132
Authentic Reflection ............................................................................................... 138
Sartre ............................................................................................................... 140
Buddhism ........................................................................................................ 144
CHAPTER 6: MORALITY AND THE SPHERE OF ATTENTION .................... 149

The Moral Moment ................................................................................................. 150
Moral Attention is Compassion .............................................................................. 162
Shifting Out of Moral Attention ............................................................................. 167
Shifting Into Moral Attention ................................................................................. 170
Moral Character in the Sphere of Attention............................................................ 171
CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION .................................................................................... 177

Implications for Psychology and the Cognitive Sciences....................................... 178
Implications for Phenomenology............................................................................ 185
Interdisciplinary Attention Studies ......................................................................... 188
REFERENCES.............................................................................................................. 191
NAME INDEX .............................................................................................................. 205
SUBJECT INDEX......................................................................................................... 209

Preface
The phone call came mid-afternoon in February of 1996. The program chair for
the annual meeting for the Southern Society of Philosophy and Psychology
wanted to make sure he had the facts right. “This is somewhat unusual…” he
began. “You’re a philosophy professor who wants to present to psychologists in
the psychology portion of the meeting.” “That’s right.” “Well your paper was
accepted for that part of the program but the others just wanted me to check and
make sure that’s where you want to be presenting.” “That’s right.” Reassured,
the professor wished me luck and said good-bye.
In my session at the meeting, I was the last to present. As my time
approached, the medium-sized room slowly became crowded. I dreamed that
these psychologists had left their other meetings early to make sure to catch my
presentation on the use of metaphors in attention research. As I arose to present I
noticed that the half-full room had become standing room only! Finally, after
years of feeling as if I was struggling alone in promoting and defending a
phenomenology of attention, I had an eager audience for my message. My
persistence had paid off. I delivered my message with passion.
After I fielded some questions, and my time was up, the action started. A
woman rolled back the room divider to double the room size. A man wheeled in
a projector and another started bringing in extra folding chairs. I escaped to the
hallway and took a closer look at the program schedule. Michael Posner. The
next program in my room was headed by an eminent psychologist of attention.
This is what attention researchers call inattentional blindness, it was there on the
program when I read it before, and I saw it, but I did not really see it.
Not a fool, I quickly shrugged off my fantasy of psychologists streaming
into the room to get a good seat to hear me, and went back into the room to grab
a decent seat to hear him. In the midst of his commentary on brain slides, Posner
said something very peculiar. “We now believe there is an area around the focus
of attention, a kind of ambient area that affects attention.” When pressed for
more about “the ambience of attention” he was reluctant to speculate, since this
was a “new discovery.” It is not clear what Posner meant by ambience of
attention, but it is likely he was referring in some sense to what I call the context
of attention.
Years before that meeting, and years since, I have researched and published
on context and attention. But the events of this meeting taught me more than
humility. I understood that phenomenologists and psychologists of attention are
working toward the same truths. This contrasted with my training as a
phenomenological psychologist and as a phenomenological philosopher. It
consistently harped on the idea that most experimental research was
ix
x Preface
reductionist in the worst way, which for me meant that experimentally-minded

psychologists ignored the “difficult to measure” phenomenon of context in their
laboratories (Arvidson 1996). Yet phenomenologists should not be ignorant of
or opposed to what goes on in the experimental psychologist’s laboratory. For
too long, phenomenologists have believed that psychologists are not really
interested in getting it right, but just interested in getting measurable results. If
there is a war between the more philosophical and the more experimental
approaches to human existence, then I cannot warrant its continuation or even
see its basis. On one level, this book can be taken as an extended example,
through investigations of attention, context, and margin, of how phenomenology
and psychology are actively complementary, not just compatible.
Context is slowly finding its place in attention experiments and attention
experiments are finding a place for context, even though the evidence for
substantial contextual and marginal processing still must be teased from the
experimenter’s own theories, assumptions, and interpretations. While current
research assumes and verifies that there is more to attention than focal attention,
the framework for interpreting these laboratory results within psychology is not
yet properly global and descriptive. The bridging between phenomenology and
psychology exemplified throughout The Sphere of Attention is made from gestalt
principles—principles of organization that connect psychology and phenome-
nology in a way that traditional Gestalt psychology could not. A gestalt is a
structural whole, or is wanting to be whole, so bringing these two together
through a gestalt-phenomenology is fitting.
The Sphere of Attention is a culmination of my attempt to integrate the
findings from the psychology laboratory (experimental psychology, cognitive
science, and neuropsychology) with the gestalt-phenomenological approach to
attention taken by Aron Gurwitsch. In writing this book, I may have violated
both the psychologists’ interpretation of their own work and some of
Gurwitsch’s most central tenets. That is the cost. The payoff, I hope, is some
unification of what we now know about attention, so that a new view of the
human subject emerges, one in which attention is the most fundamental and
pervasive factor in human existence. This thesis would be empty and false if
attention really is defined adequately as focal attention. But as The Sphere of
Attention shows, both psychology and phenomenology continue to provide
strong evidence for the powerful role of contextual and marginal consciousness
along with focal attending. Yet they do not know it. Furthermore, the dynamism
of the three dimensions in the sphere of attention—theme, context, margin—is a
unifying process that reveals the structure of many things peculiarly human,
Preface xi
such as an ever-present sense of self, the nature of self-attention in reflection,

and the possibility of moral moments.
Chapter One draws from the work of Aron Gurwitsch to introduce and
describe the three dimensions in the sphere of attention—theme, context, and
margin. It unveils the sphere metaphor of attention and discusses how
psychology of attention struggles with the problem of context.
Chapter Two shows that psychologists assume attending involves these
three dimensions, and they demonstrate these dimensions in their experiments.
Chapter Three articulates the dynamic aspect of the sphere of attention,
backing up the phenomenology with empirical findings from the psychologists’
laboratory. It classifies the persistent transformations within and between the
theme, context, and margin, and relates these findings to applied psychology.
Chapter Four compares Gurwitsch and Husserl on attention, featuring
Husserl’s recently translated Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis.
Chapter Five uses Jean-Paul Sartre’s work to argue that self and embodi-
ment are a function of the margin of attention. It also reformulates intentionality
as attentionality and introduces the notion of authentic reflection.
Chapter Six shows how moral character is shaped in the sphere of attention,
as moral attention in moral moments, by drawing primarily upon the work of
existentialist-theologian Martin Buber.
Chapter Seven concludes by concisely examining what all this means in
general for psychology, phenomenology, and interdisciplinary attention studies,
as well as for attention researchers in these disciplines specifically.
I thank Dr. Paul Kidder and Kate Reynolds of Seattle University for their
support in this project, and also many of my students there who have helped me
question about the nature of the human person. Also, I thank the following who
have bestowed gifts changing the character of my sphere of attention pertinent to
this project: Dr. Henry Rosemont for inspiration, Mr. Geoffrey Abdian, Dr. Jack
Hettinger, Dr. Michael Klabunde, and Dr. Ron White for edifying discussions
about writing, Dr. John Reuscher for Kant, Dr. Lester Embree for Gurwitsch,
Dr. Francis Ambrosio for helping me appreciate mystery, Dr. John Drummond
for helping me appreciate clarity, and Dr. John Brough for exemplifying how to
be an academic and still have fun. Most of all I thank Julie Arvidson, my lovely
bride of 18 years to whom this book is dedicated, for her love and support.
P. SVEN ARVIDSON
Seattle, Washington, USA
January 2005
Chapter One
The Sphere of Attention is

Theme, Context, and Margin
First thing in the morning, I shuffle downstairs to greet the dog and let him
outside. He spins a couple times while I unlock the door, then he bounds into the
garden. I sit on the stoop to keep an eye on him. What have I attended to in these
30 seconds? How many items have captured my attention, and is there anything
invariant in the way this information has been processed?
When something captures our attention, or when we concentrate or pay
attention to something, it is presented within a context. There is attention to the
dog as focus within the context of the boundary of the yard. I attend to the dog
under the perspective and orientation of the boundary of the yard within which
he is allowed to roam. So I am conscious of this context, but not in the same
way as I focus on the dog. Beyond my concern with the yard, there is a much
larger “context” as well. My activity happens within the world in general. I
infrequently wonder about this fact; nonetheless this all-encompassing horizon
of the world forms a sort of ultimate experiential backdrop for this mundane
drama of watching the dog. This all-encompassing world is subtly announced in
the margin in the sphere of attention—the house next door, the sky, the birds
rustling through the hedge, the hill as it unfolds toward the street. All of these
are somewhat removed from my concern with the yard which is the immediate
context for the dog, and I hardly pay attention to them, if this means that I focus
on them or that they form the immediate context for the focus. Items like the
house next door are peripheral, marginal, and they seem to quietly announce a
general world as the horizon for what I attend to. What else is marginally
presented in this mundane scenario? My corporeity and existence as a temporal
being are announced in the same way. For example, the facts that I am sitting,
slightly uncomfortable, chilly, etc., and that time is passing are presented
marginally.
Working from the center of the sphere of attention to its outer shell, there
are three dimensions, each distinct but related to the others in ways that will be
shown: thematic attention (attention in the dimension of theme or focus), the
context of attention (consciousness in the dimension of thematic context), and
the margin of attention (consciousness in the dimension of margin as halo and
horizon).
Like the dog in the example, the theme is the focus of attention. It presents
more or less unitary content, centrally consolidated and segregated
1
2 The Sphere of Attention
from the background. The theme is attended to within a thematic context and
emerges from it. The presentation of content in the thematic context, like the
yard for the thematic dog, is consciousness of whatever is materially relevant for
the theme. In the margin, we are present peripherally to the streaming in
attending, embodied existence, and the environing world, and these orders of
existence are ever-present. The margin also has a crucial role in human
subjectivity.
The three experiential dimensions discussed in this book are inspired by the
work of Aron Gurwitsch (1901–1973) on the field of consciousness. Gurwitsch
taught at the New School for Social Research and has been credited (along with
Dorion Cairns) for bringing phenomenology to the United States (Embree
1989). He had the fortune to study with Edmund Husserl (phenomenology) and
Adhemer Gelb (psychology) and was an astute interpreter, scholar, and critic of
William James’ work. When Gurwitsch taught at the Sorbonne, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty was among those present in his lectures on Gestalt psychology.
(Note that I will capitalize “gestalt” when referring to the discipline of Gestalt
psychology, but not otherwise.) Gurwitsch’s magnum opus is The Field of
Consciousness (1964), in which he analyzes human conscious life from the
perspectives of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. As will become clear, I
see attention as the central feature of human life and of Gurwitsch’s work, and
so I use attention as the touchstone when I interpret and advance Gurwitsch’s
findings about consciousness.
I claim that attention can only be properly researched once it is understood
to be the center of a sphere of attention, a process that presents content in three
dimensions, not one. This means whenever there is thematic (focal) attention,
there is also coordinating contextual and marginal consciousness, each operating
according to different principles of organization. Why then shift the problem of
context from the auspices of the “field of consciousness,” as Gurwitsch would
have it, to the sphere of attention? Or also, why expand any and all accounts of
attention beyond the theme into other dimensions in consciousness (contextual
and marginal)?
Expanding the sense of what attention is creates a parallelism between
current psychological research, including neurological discoveries, and
phenomenology, especially Gurwitsch’s work. As each side advances, each can
gain from the other. These possibilities are discussed below. For example,
Gurwitsch’s philosophy can help interpret experimental data, set research
agendas, and define experimental paradigms in attention research. Lab work can
explore and articulate Gurwitsch’s transformation principles expanded upon and
Theme, Context, Margin 3
discussed in Chapter Three, which are principles of modification that involve

each of the three dimensions. Researchers can analyze the nature of the thematic
context and margin so that the regions, modifications, and conditions of these
domains and processes are unveiled in a way that is only possible with the
recognition of these two domains as part of the overall picture of thematic
attention. Moreover, as discussed later, identifying the essential relation of
marginal consciousness to thematic attention helps researchers make sense of
non-egological subjectivity. When Gurwitsch’s philosophy of consciousness
becomes a philosophy of attention in this expanded sense, the relation between
attention and consciousness is clarified and his philosophy becomes more
evidently systematic, and accords better with current attention research. In a
complementary way, the new definition of attention as necessarily involving
three dimensions makes psychological laboratory results more relevant and
unifies what we know about attention. But the main reason to expand the
account of attention to necessarily include what is beyond the attentional focus
is that empirical research is already expanding it. Empirical research in the
leading psychology and cognitive science laboratories supports the claim that
attention unavoidably involves contextual and marginal consciousness as
described here. Thus one of the goals of this book is to bring to light the gold
that already has been mined. Chapter Two provides the evidence for this claim.
Theme is Central Focus

The theme is that which forms the center of activity in the sphere of
attention. Inspired by William James, current empirical researchers call it the
focus of attention, and it is the “target” for the subject in an experiment. To say
that content, information, or data is attended to thematically means that this
content attempts to consolidate as a unit, as a center in attention segregated from
its background. This coherence that enlivens and is always the end for
constituents in thematic attention is called gestalt-coherence—a functional
significance of the constituents of the theme for the whole (Gurwitsch 1964, 138
and 358). The dog in the example is not reducible to its parts, as long as the dog
as a whole is the theme. Also, I may notice that the dog’s leg has an arresting
wound, but now the wound is thematic not the dog as a whole, and a significant
transformation in the contents of attention has been achieved in singling out this
wound. I will talk about attention transformations in Chapter Three. As long as
the dog is my theme, even while he wanders in the garden, everything about him
that is achieved in thematic attention, no matter how vague, clear, complete,
incomplete, etc., contributes to maintaining the consolidation and segregation of

the dog as the central unit within a thematic context.
A quick reflection on any segment of our own experience probably reveals
the “jumpiness” or “shiftiness” of this central dimension in attention. Sometimes
we dwell on a topic, often we move or bounce from one semi-complete thought
to another. What counts for achievement in thematic attention is not only a well-
formed theme, which means a fully explicit, clear and complete whole
(Gurwitsch 1964, 103, 336n). In a sense, this well-formed theme is the “goal” of
gestalt-coherence, although we must be careful here since some content may not
admit of completeness or stability simply based on the nature of the content.
Anyway, the theme is often interrupted by a distracting marginal item that
captures thematic attention, like the surprising wound on the dog’s leg or the
sudden high decibel whirring of a gas-engine weed-cutter next door, or in a
different vein, the fantasy that grows into thematic attention of being able to talk
to dogs, or the thematic attention to the Cartesian concept of dogs as robots. A
theme may be incomplete, somewhat fragmented, evanescent, or alternatively
almost instantly well-formed.
Embodied attending in the world is essentially active and lively—in fact it
is our life!—so that we can’t help but keep moving forward attentively. Jean-
Paul Sartre’s metaphor for this essential activity of the human being is skiing or
sliding (glissement), as if one was on a slope of life and had no choice but to
project forward down the slope (1956, 582–585). One can linger as one moves
forward, one can try to neatly complete and tie up all the things one pays
thematic attention to along the way, but to do so perfectly is impossible. For
even the transformation between two well-formed themes, what William James
called “transitive states,” is thematic attention (James 1981; see Gurwitsch
1966). Still, in each case of theme formation, and we never stop attending
thematically, some content is focal; it is central, consolidated, and segregated
from the thematic context, or becoming so.
Within the theme itself, the content is not necessarily homogenous or
horizontalized. Some content can take a more dominant or chief role than others.
For example, suppose as I glance around the garden the two long rows of
flowering impatiens capture focal attention, I attend to the grouping themati-
cally. The double row is one thing, as may be my friend’s recited poem, a stretch
of ocean, or a crowd of people, that is to say, it is a theme organized by gestalt-
coherence. Yet the rows of impatiens may have constituents which are formative
for the whole, such as the first several flowers in each row. These are not
separate themes, but they do have a privileged position in the gestalt-coherence
of the theme, so that other constituents are organized or formed according to

these. This difference of emphasis which may be presented within the dimension
of the theme (or perhaps in any more or less well-formed gestalt) is the
difference between formative constituents and formed constituents (Gurwitsch
1966, 190 and 209; cf., Vecera, Behrmann and Filapek 2001, 319). But selecting
these several flowers in one of the rows is a transformation in attending.
Singling out these several as theme replaces the rows of flowers with a new
theme (i.e., this smaller grouping of several flowers) that now has new formative
and formed constituents (as well as new thematic context relations).
Thematic Context is Relevancy

The thematic context consists in all that is presented as relevant for the
theme. The theme emerges from the context as a figure emerges from a
background. And as it does so, it segregates itself as distinct from the context
but relevant to it, and organizes the context (Gurwitsch 1964, 342). Items in the
thematic context are directed toward the theme as center. Gurwitsch most often
calls the thematic context “thematic field,” but I prefer the former (or simply
“context”) because it is more descriptive, it squares better with the language of
psychology on attention, and it discontinues the field metaphor (see Gurwitsch
1964, 354–355).
The organization that pertains to the thematic context is unity by relevancy.
Relevancy here means that the contextual contents have some material relation
between them, that they have mutual concern and are not indifferent to each
other (Gurwitsch 1964, 341; on relevancy see Embree 2004c). After all, a con-
text cannot be a context without some integration and togetherness at a more
fundamental level than simply being presented at the same time with the theme.
The theme and thematic context are unified by the material relevancy of the
context for the theme. Also, any content in the thematic context is unified with
other content in the thematic context by their shared relevancy. Material relation
or material relevancy designates an “intrinsic” relationship between the contents
of the theme and thematic context. Gurwitsch (1964, 341) writes, “A theme
presents itself as pertaining to a certain thematic field because the material
contents of both the theme and what appears in the thematic field concern each
other. The theme refers to items other than itself which are relevant to it and, in
being referred to, are experienced as relevant” (see also 1966, 212). The
thematic context is a network of non-central gestalts which have mutual implica-
tions between each other, and between themselves and the theme as central
gestalt. This context extends indefinitely by pointing references and implication

(Gurwitsch 1964, 379–380).
The content nearer the theme is experienced as more important or more
intensely related to the theme than the content in the more remote zones
(Gurwitsch 1964, 338, 353, 379; cf. Husserl 2001, 180). We can simultaneously
be conscious of content that is more relevant to the theme and to other content
less relevant. However, even the more remote zones of the thematic context
present or presentationally imply content that is relevant to the theme and to the
rest of the thematic context. In this way the thematic context is a whole, even
though there may be a gradation of intensity within it. The thematic context does
not have to be completely elucidated, and it rarely is. It may present itself as
compact, diffuse, dim, and the gestalts which constitute it may be complete or
incomplete, stable or evanescent, etc. When one adds to this the fact that all
dimensions in the sphere of attention are essentially dynamic and active it is
easy to see that the content of the thematic context does not have to be fixed; it
may transform, shift, and fluctuate. Above all, the thematic context is not the
theme, or a secondary theme. It is defined by its relation to the theme, a more or
less elucidated unity by relevancy for the theme.
As I watch the dog within the context of the garden and he nears the tree
with the robin’s nest, I may be conscious of many things. But as long as the dog
is presented as thematic, the context is organized around the lines dictated by
that theme. If we suppose that I am contextually conscious of the dog’s relation
with other wildlife, and am attending to the dog as focal within this perspective
and orientation, then the bird’s nest is likely to be part of the thematic context
more intensely attended to. Other robins, or the species as a whole, may also be
relevant within this context, but may be only dimly implied, as perhaps with
mammals, reptiles, etc. Yet if a sparrow suddenly swoops in and splashes into
the birdbath, this new item may be accommodated within the context without
any major modifications of it (unless it has captured thematic attention). This is
because the unity by relevancy extends indefinitely along general lines, and in
this case those lines include the contextual consciousness of this new gestalt,
which is now part of the thematic context zone closer to the theme. I have not
made the sparrow thematic in this example; it so happens that the sparrow has
not captured my focal attention, which is still centered on the dog.
Margin is Streaming, Body, and Environing World

The margin presents content that is external to the relevancy that holds
between the theme and thematic context (Gurwitsch 1985; and 1966, 267–286;
and 1964, 414–420). What appears in the margin is irrelevant to the theme, but
is presented nonetheless—namely, as irrelevant. The margin in the sphere of
attention is all that is co-present with the theme and thematic context, but is not
materially relevant to them, not even as context. Anything could be added to the
margin without affecting the unity by relevancy between theme and context. For
example, as I watch the dog in the garden, in the context of the dog minding his
boundaries, an airplane aurally appears on the scene, the gentle roar of the jet
engines grows and then fades, and a whirling breeze shakes the hedge near the
dog. As I am marginally conscious of the plane and the shaking hedge, which is
to say, as they are presented as irrelevant to the thematic dog, their presence
does not enter into the gestalt relation in the sphere of attention between the dog
and his boundaries. Although the plane and the shaking hedge could become
thematic themselves, this would take a substantial transformation in the sphere
of attention (a margin to theme succession of content), so that the dog and its
thematic context was replaced with new content and relations. In short, the
gestalt-connection of unity by relevancy puts marginal content outside the focus
and its context, which is to say, marginal items are presented as peripheral to the
theme, not relevant to it.
It might seem that marginal consciousness is merely accessory to thematic
attention, and so is dispensable. In fact, the margin is indispensable; it is always
presented, there is always marginal content in the sphere of attention. Gurwitsch
dedicated an entire work, published posthumously as Marginal Consciousness
(1985), to the richness of the margin. In it he expands on other formulations
(1964, 1966) to show how the margin consists of three ever-present domains:
the stream of consciousness (phenomenal time), embodied existence, and the
perceptual world. In order to maintain consistency throughout the current study,
the stream of consciousness may also be called “the streaming in the sphere of
attention” or just “streaming in attending,” and the perceptual world may be
called “the environing world,” where the modifier “environing” as gerund for
“environment” in environing world is taken in a very broad sense, as will be
seen. No matter what is thematic, these three “orders of existence,” as Gurwitsch
calls them, are always presented marginally. For example, as the dog is attended
to thematically, and its allowable boundaries in the yard are contextual, there is
a peripheral or marginal consciousness that time is passing and previous
attendings are more or less connected with current ones (streaming), that I am
sitting rather than standing (embodiment), and that the house is behind me
(world). The three marginal realms are presented as irrelevant to the theme. This
marginally presented dynamic embodied attending in the world is the existential
locus of subjectivity—dynamic (marginally presented sector of phenomenal time

or the streaming in the sphere of attention), embodied (marginally presented
sector of embodied existence or kinesthetic sense), in the world (marginally
presented sector of the environment). I take up the issue of subjectivity and the
sphere of attention in Chapter Five.
The margin is made up of these three domains, the streaming in the sphere
of attention (phenomenal temporality), embodiment, and the environing world.
Each of these three domains has two regions, the halo (implied by the term
“sector” just above) and the horizon. The whole streaming in the sphere of
attention, the whole of embodiment, and the whole environing world are not
marginally presented. A sector of each is marginally presented in the halo, and
this sector implies the whole in the horizon. Gurwitsch introduces this
distinction between halo and horizon in a shorter treatment of the margin (1966,
268), but does not keep it in the longer treatment in Marginal Consciousness
(1985, xliii-xiv). The two treatments might not be compatible, as Lester Embree
the editor of Marginal Consciousness points out in his “Editor’s Introduction.”
The halo is a certain segment or sector of each order of existence and is always
marginally presented within the context of the order of existence as a whole,
which is the horizon. Gurwitsch (1985, xliii) writes, “There is no limit on the
marginal data which may be co-present with a theme at any moment in our
conscious life….These include a certain sector of our environment and some of
the things which happen to be found there; a non-perceptual knowledge of those
parts of our actual environment which do not happen to be perceived, such as
the things behind our back; a more or less distinct awareness of our embodied
existence, e.g., our bodily posture, etc.” This marginal consciousness in the halo
presents a sector of the horizon of that order of the existence.
Consciousness of marginal content has an inner/outer structure. Gurwitsch
did not put it this way, but I see it assumed in his work Marginal Consciousness
(1985). The halo as “inner” and the horizon as “outer” is not the same as the
center/context structure of the theme and thematic context, since the content of
the halo and horizon are intra-dimensional not inter-dimensional. For example,
when I am marginally conscious of the hedge and sky, these halo presentations
have pointing references to the world in general, however diffuse or
indiscriminate that larger horizon may be. The same holds for the marginal
consciousness of the current moment as part of the streaming in the sphere of
attention; and the kinesthetic sense as pointing to the fact of my corporeity, no
matter how indistinctly the latter is presented. The halo is that part of the margin
that most closely adjoins the thematic context, and might be relevant to the
theme under another perspective, but is not relevant under this one (Embree
1985, xxx). Each sector presented in the marginal halo presentationally implies
the marginal horizon as a more or less indefinite context for that sector.
The overall point about the margin for now is that the margin is a necessary
component of the sphere of attention, such that what is presented marginally is
irrelevant to the attentional theme and thematic context. Also, the margin is a
rich dimension in the sphere of attention, and as will be shown, is the “center” of
subjectivity which is not presented as center.
The Field vs. Sphere Metaphor of Attention

Psychologists, including cognitive scientists, and other experimental
psychologists and neuroscientists, use the field metaphor in discussing
perception, consciousness, attention, etc. Perhaps the emphasis on vision in all
this research and so on the visual field is the reason the metaphor is pervasive
(for a historical perspective, see Crary 1999, 190–196). Of course, Gestalt
psychologists such as Kurt Koffka made the field a central working metaphor,
and William James invokes it in his famous Principles of Psychology.
Philosophers not in the continental, phenomenological tradition freely use the
field metaphor, for example John Searle and others. But Gurwitsch, Husserl,
Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and other phenomenological philosophers use it as well.
As noted, Gurwitsch’s major work is titled The Field of Consciousness.
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception includes a chapter titled “The
Phenomenal Field.” In a chapter on attention and judgment Merleau-Ponty
(1962, 29) notes that “The first operation of attention is to create for itself a
field, either perceptual or mental, which can be ‘surveyed’ (überschauen), in
which movements of the exploratory organ or elaborations of thought are
possible” (see also 1962, 406). Philosopher Richard Aquila (1998) has recently
tried to rehabilitate the notion of the “field of consciousness” in an intriguing
examination of Sartre and Husserl, so that it has more depth and vitality. But the
account is limited by the field metaphor itself. Generally speaking, the field
metaphor can be misleading since it denotes only an object-orientation of the
process of attending, and a sort of flatness or two-dimensionality. For conveying
the fullness of attention processes, which includes subjectivity as a function of
the sphere of attention, the sphere metaphor is superior in the way that a ball has
more depth than a disk.
Figure 1. The sphere of attention. The three dimensions are theme, thematic context, and
margin. Each is deep, not flat, and each names a function or process involved in human
attending. Content in the thematic context can be more relevant (near) or less relevant
(remote) to the theme. Content in the margin can be related to the theme (halo) but not
relevant to it, or not related (horizon). The attending subject is the sphere of attention in
these three dimensions. The sphere of attention is not an object for a subject. We do not
have a sphere of attention, we live it in these three dimensions all the time, even in the
special case of reflection or self-attention.
Gurwitsch’s The Field of Consciousness (1964) presents the most

systematic statement of his philosophy. Yet a close reading shows that what he
means by “total field” is much more than the word usually conveys (1964, 4,
320), and his other works on the same topic of the field of consciousness also
reveal an unnecessary distance between the metaphor and the phenomena being
described. Gurwitsch (1966, 267–268) writes that the total field of conscious-
ness can be symbolized by a circle: “The theme with which we are dealing
occupies the center of this circle; it stands in the thematic field, which—to abide
by the metaphor—forms the area of the circle; and around the thematic field, at
the periphery as it were, the objects of marginal consciousness are arranged.”
Following what Gurwitsch actually says about each of these three dimensions,
their make-up, depth, and relational arrangements, I would rehabilitate this
statement to say that attentional processes can be symbolized by a sphere: The
theme with which we are dealing occupies the central dimension of the sphere; it
stands in the thematic context, which—to abide by the metaphor—forms the

surrounding ball; and around the thematic context, at the periphery of the sphere,
the objects of marginal consciousness are arranged. Figure one presents a
rendering of the dimensions in the sphere of attention.
A circle is a planar cross-section of a sphere. Mathematicians call the
largest circle whose plane passes through the diameter of the sphere a “great
circle.” There are infinitely many great circles for any sphere. For example,
imagine passing a wooden ball snugly through a metal 0-ring. The outer surface
of the ball in contact with the ring at the most snug point is a great circle of the
sphere. Gurwitsch’s “total field” as a circle metaphor is too easy to imagine as a
great circle of a sphere. In other words, the field metaphor can lead to
associations and conclusions about attention or consciousness that implicitly
assume that the total area of concern is a planar cross-section of what it should
be. One may be led to envision that the plane of the great circle is the subject of
discussion, when it is the three-dimensional sphere that should be envisioned
(see Gurwitsch 1966, 138, on the metaphor of consciousness as dual parallel
planes). Later I will discuss how the sphere metaphor does not lead to the sort of
subjectivism that plagues Cartesian-inspired philosophy and strong
representationalism in general, or to some “ego-centric predicament” as Soko-
lowski (2000, 9) puts it.
It is a simple matter to recognize that the emergence of a theme from a
thematic context, like a figure emerging from a background, necessarily
involves the kind of depth that the metaphor of a sphere of attention (rather than
a field) seems to capture best. As Merleau-Ponty (1962, 13) pointed out, the
background does not stop at the figure, but goes behind it. Also, the margin
recedes, envelops and pervades in a way that makes it distinct from the theme
and its context, thus adding another dimension of depth and thickness to the
moment of attention. But each dimension also has a depth. The theme, unless it
is extremely evanescent or fleeting, has dominant constituents that “mark” its
physiognomy, as in the flowering impatiens example above. Gurwitsch called
these the “formative constituents” of the theme, and they have a sort of prece-
dence over “formed constituents” of the same theme. For example, a crowd of
people may be marked by two or three individuals or smaller groupings of
people. As a whole, it is one gestalt—a crowd—but there is already a sort of
depth built into the theme here.
In the thematic context, the contents are usually not arranged as a horizontal
background in terms of position, value, or intensity, as if they were in a field.
For a simple visual example, the context can be background and foreground
simultaneously, as when the statue I am admiring is attended to as placed behind

the formal boxwood hedge and in front of the gnarly apple trees, which
themselves are framed by the old brick buildings. Also, as Gurwitsch described
(Gurwitsch 1964, 338, 353, 379) and as Ingrid Olson and Marvin Chun (2001,
1309) have shown, content nearer the theme has more effect on the theme, and
this contributes to the depth, subtlety, and thickness appropriate to the sphere
metaphor. In thematic contexts that are sufficiently elucidated, there is a
gradation of intensity of relevance, from more intense nearer the theme to less
intense farther away from the theme. For example, it may so happen that the
contextually presented boxwoods are more relevant to the statue as theme than
the sidewalk near my feet which is also contextual. But the depth of the thematic
context never ends. It extends indefinitely by pointing references, so that the
whole of possible relevant content extends into a “more” that becomes implied
by what is more intensely presented (Gurwitsch 1964, 379). Here we really get a
sense of the utility of the sphere metaphor. For the truth is that each item of the
thematic context is tinged with association to other thematic content and
possible thematic content, and this pointing is in every direction. The connection
in the thematic context is not just a multi-rayed, planar, outward progression
from the points near the theme, like the extension of an open disk along the lines
of the plane of a great circle. The “depth” of the thematic context, what
Gurwitsch calls the thematic field, is the dynamic ball of the sphere whose
contents ultimately imply the indefinite but relevant.
Since it presents content irrelevant to the theme and thematic context, the
margin adds another significant dimension of depth. The margin is a region of
exclusion and inclusion. It is excluded from the relevance that the theme and
thematic context have for each other. As noted above, this does not mean that
the margin is dispensable. It is inclusive because marginal consciousness is a
sense of the environment or material world, of embodiment, and of the
streaming in attending. These three are ever-present marginally with the theme.
Halo and horizon present another level of depth and thickness for the margin. In
contrast to the marginal horizon, the halo connotes a domain of the margin
where some items are externally related to the theme or thematic context, but are
not relevant to their content (Gurwitsch 1966, 268). The overall point here is
that the margin not only presents another level of depth with respect to theme
and thematic context that makes the sphere metaphor more appropriate than the
field metaphor, but that the margin itself is not planar; it is rich and deep.
There is much more to be said about the sphere of attention, and I reserve
these discussions for later chapters. Before moving on, however, I should briefly
clarify the relation between attention and consciousness. This book is not called
the sphere of consciousness because I take attention to be the significant factor
or central organizational feature of our conscious life. In other words, contextual
and marginal consciousness are so, only as associated with the attentional
theme. Therefore I claim that one can only define attention by taking account of
(contextual and marginal) consciousness, and one can only define consciousness
by taking account of attention. I believe that one could even construe contextual
and marginal consciousness as unique and highly constrained types of attention,
but this argument is difficult to make and musing about it here would cloud the
purpose of this present study (see Arvidson 2004). The approach I take
throughout affirms the almost universal definition of attention as that which is
presented as centrally focal, and allows me to speak most fruitfully to
psychologists, phenomenologists, and others about the rest of the sphere of
attention, which is the innovation of this book, namely, context and margin. In
sum, thematic consciousness just is focal attention, and is the active center of the
sphere of attention, the processing in the other two dimensions of this sphere of
attention are contextual and marginal consciousness.
Since psychologists and cognitive scientists (I will often use both terms in
order to be inclusive, but I will almost always mean both groups even if I say
only one of them) have the most to say about attention, it is appropriate to get an
initial feel for their views. This last section of this chapter does that through the
prism of problems of context.
Problems of Context in Psychology and Cognitive Science

Let me restate the three dimensions in the sphere of attention that are the
focus of this study. Thematic attention is centrally focal attention. Thematic
attending allows content to become segregated from the thematic context and
centralized within this context. The context of thematic attention allows content
to become consolidated as non-centralized gestalts, relevant to the theme and to
other thematic context content (rather than being thematic themselves). The
margin also allows content to become consolidated as non-centralized gestalts,
but segregated from the theme and thematic context, and co-present yet
irrelevant to them.
I agree with Gurwitsch when he says that a full and fruitful treatment of
what he calls “consciousness” and what I would call the sphere of attention must
address context as the central problem. “To develop a field-theory of
consciousness is to embark upon an analysis of the phenomenon of context in
general, as well as upon the eventual disclosure of different types of contexts.
By this we mean types which are distinguished from one another by virtue of
differences involving the organization principles which prevail in the several
types” (Gurwitsch 1964, 2–3). An analysis of the phenomenon of context in
attention research means throwing the laboratory doors open to more noteworthy
findings and wider applications.
The significance of attention research rises or tumbles on the back of the
problem of context and attention. Historically and in current scientific research,
“unattended stimuli” refers to stimuli that are somehow presented, “irrelevant
data” are often relevant, and “unselected areas of the field” are somehow
noticed. For Gurwitsch and today’s researchers, attention refers exclusively to
the achievement of the target, focus, or theme in the “field” of presentation. But
restricting the conclusions of attention research only to the theme creates the
dilemma of what to do about content outside the theme which is nonetheless
processed. If one understands that focal attention is the center of a three-
dimensional sphere of attention, each dimension with its own organizational
principle, then the content outside the theme is presented either contextually or
marginally. The full relevancy of attention research reveals itself when the
attentional life of a human being, and indeed, its very subjectivity, is
acknowledged to be a unified, dynamic, embodied processing in the world,
which can be seen phenomenologically and experimentally to organize itself in
these three distinct dimensions of a sphere of attention.
In a number of fascinating ways, attention researchers around the world are
struggling with context. This struggle with context is not new, as Jonathan
Crary’s (1999) study on perception and the history of attention research
indicates. It is seen in William James’ work, an author that historically-minded
psychologists studying attention appeal to quite often as the first word on
attention research (see Arvidson 1998), when he distinguishes the focus from the
margin, but also discusses fringes and transitive states. James claims that
attention is selective attention—a withdrawal from or ignoring of some data or
objects and a focusing on others (1983, 19). This claim anticipates the
distinction in much subsequent research between attended and unattended
information, so that one sees journal article titles such as “Detecting gaps with
and without attention” (Shalev and Tsal 2002) and “Differential attentional
guidance by unattended faces expressing positive and negative emotion”
(Eastwood, Smilek and Merikle 2001). The “unattended” frequently turns out to
be the context for the attended, other times it is marginal. Either way, within the
thesis of a three dimension sphere of attention, it is still presented. The context
and margin need more than a mere negative nod (the unattended). This new
view of attention also helps replace vague terms introduced by James and still
currently used, such as “fringe” and “transitive states” (e.g., Baars, 2003).
Over the last several decades, attention researchers in psychology, in
particular in the cognitive sciences, have examined stimuli that are outside of the
focus of attention, that is, outside of the theme. And this examination is not
always about distractors. There is robust experimental activity concerning
facilitation effects, which is when stimuli occurring outside the focus speed up
the achievement of the target as focus. Early on these effects were called
“flanker effects,” and this term could mean either interfering with or facilitating
the target (Eriksen and Schultz 1979; Miller 1991). The stimulus occurring
outside the focus is active for the processing of the focus, has an effect on it, but
is always defined negatively, e.g., as “unselected,” “unattended,” or “irrelevant.”
The latter word shows the strange twists of locution that are often necessary
when context and margin are not recognized as such. For even though
contextual effects (the “flanker effect,” “facilitation effect,” etc.) are well
established (Arvidson 2003b), the conclusion often amounts to this: irrelevant
data were relevant.
In experimental paradigms, the success of the subject in attending is often
measured by how well the subject has ignored everything but the target or focus.
This means not only ignoring potentially interfering stimuli (i.e., marginal
content), but also ignoring relevant stimuli (i.e., contextual content). At least this
is considered “ignorance” from the experimenter’s point of view, since context
is often invisible in the tally from that view, even though it might be highly
significant for the subject’s achievement. Exceptions will be discussed in the
next chapter. Colin Cherry’s (1953) famous dichotic listening task experiment is
an early, easily repeatable finding that satisfies these expectations of contextual
ignorance. Cherry investigated something like the “cocktail party” phenomenon
of attending only to the relevant conversation in a noisy room. As analyzed and
interpreted, such experiments are about noise, not about relevant context.
Anything that is not designated by the experimenter as focal target, or that
interferes with the achievement of the focal target, is often still considered
“noise,” either explicitly (e.g., Hobson 1994, 176; Braver et al., 2001, 749) or
implicitly as a function of the experimental paradigm.
The key words of “context” and “scene” are used ambiguously in attention
research laboratories. Is the auditory scene everything left over after I have
aurally focused what is relevant, that is, the scene is irrelevant? Or is the scene
the relevant situation within which the theme is segregated as central? Caroline
Bey and Stephen McAdams (2002) tested subjects’ ability to extract an
unfamiliar melody from an auditory “scene” under a number of conditions, such

as priming and distraction. Generally speaking, the prime can be any stimulus or
condition that facilitates (facilitation effect) or interferes with (interference
effect) the processing of the target stimulus (Arvidson 2003b). The title of the
Bey and McAdams (2002) article, “Schema-based processing in auditory scene
analysis,” suggests that the experiments will examine the relation between
theme and context, between the focus and the relevant information, situation, or
co-processed scene for that focus. Instead the emphasis is on “analysis,” the
analysis of thematic attention and its margin, excluding context (and scene in
that sense). These experimenters certainly have a right not to test for relevancy
and to ignore context, but the problem is that the word “scene” suggests some
context relevant to focal processing. Should “scene” mean the relevant or
irrelevant information co-presented with the theme? What makes a scene a mere
environment rather than, say, a situation or context?
In the same journal, Perception and Psychophysics, researchers David Irwin
and Gregory Zelinsky (2002) tested subjects’ ability to visually remember a
“scene” operationally defined as seven objects (such as a teddy bear) in one of
seven fixed locations in a baby’s crib. The experimenters state that “scene
perception” involves noting and remembering the items in the crib (rather than
the crib itself). The subjects looked at the scene and tried to remember which
object was in which position before the scene disappeared. In this experiment
the “scene” is really defined by the researchers as each individual object or their
various possible groupings, without the crib! The experimenters assume a scene
as relevant context (the crib) and discuss various transformations of thematic
attention (e.g., the grouping that occurs through synthesis or singling out), as if
this context was irrelevant to thematic attention. In other words, the
experimenters are not measuring scene perception, if that is understood as
something more than thematic attention, but simply thematic attention.
John Henderson and Andrew Hollingworth (2003, 61) similarly manipulate
what they call “complex real world scenes” to examine eye movement (atten-
tion) and visual memory. As in Irwin and Zelinsky (2002), the scene perception
is perception within the scene, serial themes within one scene, without
recognition of this context as context. Also, unless we are in a very odd world,
“complex real world scenes” are not displayed in “800 x 600 pixels x 256 colors
on an NEC Multisync P750 monitor driven by a Hercules Dynamite 128/Video
graphics card” while the observer of the “real world” chomps on a bite bar
(Henderson and Hollingworth 2003, 61). The use of “scene” is ambiguous
because other experiments freely use the term to denote something more than
thematic attention.
In experiments that show that object recognition is mediated by extraretinal
information (i.e., as information in context and margin) Daniel Simons, Ranxiao
Wang, and David Roddenberry (2002, 529) note that in object recognition and
detection experiments the “real world” should be more like the real world:
“These studies of individual object recognition illustrate the importance of
considering the conditions under which object recognition naturally occurs.
Studies presenting objects in isolation on a computer display would be unlikely
to discover differences between viewpoint and orientation or effects of
background information. By looking at object recognition in a real-world
context, we can gain a better appreciation for the mechanisms underlying our
ability to recognize the same object from varying perspectives.” I agree. In their
pitch that advanced virtual reality techniques should be used to create virtual
environments for the measure of visual attention within scenes (especially “way-
finding”), Heinrich Bülthoff and Hendrik van Veen (2001, 233) note that “Real
world situations are so different from the stimuli used in classical psychophysics
and the context in which they are presented that applying laboratory results to
daily life situations often becomes impractical, if not impossible.” Their
solution, discussed in a later chapter, is to use virtual reality technology to
enhance the ecological validity of the stimulus, which includes accounting for
the variables of the scene in which thematic attention occurs, instead of
“zeroing-out” these variables.
In addition to “scene,” the use of “context” can be ambiguous, but often it is
not. For example, in examination of lexical processing, context is clearly used to
mean the relevant information for the theme. Presented with a suggestive partial
sentence and instruction to complete the sentence with the first word that comes
to mind, the subject will be more likely to supply one word than another—
“Mary parked her car in the ______.” Given the context, “garage” or “lot” are
more likely to be supplied than “lake.” Lexical processing researchers use the
close tie between lexical context and theme to investigate facilitation and
inhibition effects in attention and memory (Davies and Thomson 1988; Horton
and Mills 1984; Neely 1991), and even humor (Lippman, Sucharski, Bennington
2001).
In contrast, in a series of experiments that also involve attention, Elizabeth
Marsh, Gabriel Edelman, and Gordon Bower (2001) investigated “context
memory” to name what I would call marginal consciousness. The experimenters
varied the “context” to determine the effect of the source of memory generation
on the amount recalled. But the “contexts” varied were different rooms or
different computer screens. The experimenters instructed subjects under the
different conditions to recall where they had studied the words to be remem-
bered, and called this “context memory.” This is clearly a different sense of
context from the lexical processing experiments. It does not ask for information
relevant to the studying of the word, which may or may not have been the
spatio-temporal environment, but information relevant to the current instruction
of the experimenter. So does “context” refer to what was relevant in studying or
what is relevant in recall? It is unlikely that the room was relevant to the word
studied at that time. It is also not relevant to the recall, since it is the theme to be
achieved (the target) in the recall. “Context memory” as used by these
researchers can only mean a memory for what was irrelevant in the studying
situation. This is a very different sense of context from that used by many
lexical processing researchers (e.g., Jordan and Thomas 2002).
A way to try to account for context without calling it that is to bifurcate the
sphere of attention into that which is focally selected on the one hand, and hence
thematic, and general “awareness” or “arousal” on the other. Neuroscientific
examinations of attention processes have long used this distinction and continue
to do so (e.g., Cohen 1993; Coull 1998). The distinction is useful in some
paradigms of attention research because the onset of a change in awareness can
be measured physiologically (Kanwisher 2001). This is one reason why the
orienting in attention is heavily researched by neuroscientists, since it forms a
nexus for brain and cognition (Posner 1995, 617). The terms arousal and
awareness, however, are vague and do not capture the function and importance
of thematic context and margin, or the distinction between them. Some have
tried to make distinctions in “awareness” so that it can be operationally defined
and treated more precisely (Koch and Crick 1994, 108). But I would argue that
what is needed is the delineation of organizational principles comprising context
and margin set forth by Gurwitsch and advanced here, as long as the processing
in each dimension is precisely defined.
Unfortunately, the spotlight metaphor of attention has been influential in
guiding research and is still around. It is unfortunate because if attention is like a
spotlight, then attentional context is doubly dimmed. First, because the spotlight
metaphor only divides the sphere of attention into that which is illuminated (the
target or theme) and that which is not. Second, there is no way to meaningfully
account for presented context by using the spotlight metaphor of attention.
Gurwitsch thoroughly critiqued it in 1929 (1966, 202, 205), and others have
followed (e.g., LaBerge 1995; Arvidson 1996). Still, its long history in
psychology and philosophy up to the present means that the spotlight metaphor
is a broadly based assumption (see e.g., Pinker 2002). This history includes
Husserl (1982, §92), Posner (1980), Treisman and Gelade (1980), Baars (1997),
Ohman, Flykt, and Esteves (2001), Müller and Hübner (2002), and others. The
spotlight metaphor allows only on/off, illuminated/unilluminated. This one-
dimensional interpretation of the sphere of attention as either focal attention or
marginal “non-attention” squeezes out the phenomenon of context. As an object
of research, attention becomes irrelevant to human life under the light of this
metaphor. Not only is context denied a place in attentional processing but it
becomes impossible to account for the general richness of attention processes,
such as transformations in attending. Following Gurwitsch, I believe that
attention is more about the content of what is attended to, its organization and
transformation of organization, than about the on/off illumination of a target
area (Gurwitsch 1966, 222; Arvidson 2000).
Perhaps realizing the problems of context, some researchers (e.g., Mangun
and Hillyard 1988) tried to account for context but keep the spotlight metaphor.
By postulating a gradient in attention, the co-presented stimuli which constitute
the context for the theme or focus are illuminated less brightly than the focus.
This sort of gradient in the “field” of attention corresponds well also with a
zoom-lens model of attention (Eriksen and St. James 1986), which is still being
used (e.g., Pasto and Burack 2002). Yet the dimensional difference between
thematic attention and its context is not demarcated by a gradient. There is
certainly a gradient in the sphere of attention within each dimension. For
example there is this sort of relation of emphasis between formative and formed
constituents of the theme, and between contents in the thematic context that are
nearer to the theme and those that are more remote, and the same with the
margin. But these are intra-dimensional, and a gradient is not sufficient to
account for inter-dimensional differences, like that between theme and thematic
context (Arvidson 1992b).
Attention research often utilizes cues to prime the subject in some way, and
cues imply context. The classic use of cues is seen in Posner’s (1980) research
on cuing and covert attention (see Arvidson 2003b). In this case it was found
that cuing a spatial location, e.g., on a monitor screen where a target was
expected to appear, facilitated focal attention to the target even though the cue
itself was “covertly” processed, meaning the subject did not turn their eyes
toward it. The cue is not thought to be attended in the proper sense, yet it affects
attention to the target. Writing in 1965, philosopher Errol Harris (1993, 407–
408) had some wonderful observations about the status of cues: “To speak of a
cue is to imply an activity of referring beyond the cue as presented. The word,
therefore, has epistemological implications….In other words, they cannot func-
tion unless they are interpreted; and that can occur only if they somehow
become features of an awareness within which they can be systematically
interrelated. On the physical or merely physiological level they can serve as
cues, but only if apprehended in some epistemological process of referring,
comparing, hypothesizing, and judging.” The point is that when the target is
achieved it is achieved within the context of the cue which preceded it. As we
will see, the temporal context of attention has recently become a more popular
area of attention research, so that perhaps a “cue” can be better recognized as a
constituent of the context for the targeted theme.
In sum, context is a problem in attention research today, and an expanded
definition of attention, namely as a sphere of attention, can help bring context
into phenomenological, theoretical, and experimental focus.
Chapter Two
Empirical Evidence for the Sphere of Attention

There is a story that the gold-oriented 49ers near Sutter’s Mill threw away the
silver in their search for gold. I take the majority of attention researchers to be
doing something similar: digging for thematic gold and discarding contextual
and marginal silver, which are also precious in human attending. Demarcating
the area of the focus of attention, its general and specific qualities, has been a
fruitful area of research for some time. Also, some research paradigms are
already revealing the role of context and margin in attending, but the theoretical
framework for interpreting the results is too often one-dimensionally focused on
the theme, instead of three-dimensional. If I am correct in differentiating the
three dimensions in the sphere of attention, then non-focal processing would
have to fit the description of either contextual or marginal consciousness. The
bulk of this chapter centers on the next big thing for attention research—the
context of attention. But it opens by discussing thematic attending and the
margin, and closes by illustrating and discussing how some researchers are
implicitly investigating all three dimensions in the sphere of attention.
Theme and Margin in the Sphere of Attention

Marginal consciousness is the process whereby distracting or neutral
information is presented outside the focus of attention as not relevant to that
focus. Marginal consciousness is pervasive in experimental results even though
it goes by other names. Research paradigms assume and preserve William
James’s distinction between focus (theme) and margin (James 1983, 19–22;
Arvidson 1992b). This margin dimension in the sphere of attention is defined
only negatively in relation to the theme, for example as where “task-irrelevant
processing” occurs. The contents of the margin are “unattended stimuli” or
“irrelevant information.” Following Gurwitsch, I also define the margin as the
dimension of irrelevance for the theme, which seems a negative definition. But
we both positively describe it as a dimension with its own organizational
principles, and distinguish halo and horizon within it, and I define it in relation
to the theme within a sphere of attention.
Research on attention assumes the existence of a marginal dimension, it is
implicit in laboratory work and theorizing. In the experimental situation, the
subject is instructed or expected not to pay attention to the distracting marginal
information. In order to attend more vigilantly to the theme, and more vigilantly
21
keep the distracting, irrelevant information at bay, the subject must be presented
with this distracting information at some point, namely, as irrelevant. The better
the subject can distinguish what is thematic and contextual in the sphere of
attention, from what is marginal, the better the subject will achieve or maintain
the target (the theme). The point is that a more positive and direct description of
the presence of these distractors for the subject is that these distractors are
presented marginally (cf. Gurwitsch 1964, 282–283; 1966, 272).
For example, in a series of experiments, John Eastwood, Daniel Smilek, and
Philip Merikle (2001 and 2003) report that the emotional expression of a face
can be perceived outside the focus of attention but nonetheless affect focal
attention. The authors (2003) found that subjects were slower to count the
features of faces, if those features were embedded in negative emotional faces
rather than positive or neutral ones. The task was to count the features. The
global face, and whether it is emotionally positive, negative, or neutral, was
task-irrelevant. The point is that the subject must struggle to keep the negative
emotional face from capturing focal attention. As in countless other experiments
that measure interference effects or that use distractors, this struggle is between
thematic attention and its margin. The content is presented in the way that is
appropriate to the margin, namely, as co-present but irrelevant to the theme, and
in the appropriate trials as distracting or interfering. The reason for interference
is that each content, for example, the nose and the negative face, is
discontinuous with the other with respect to experimenter instructions (Arvidson
2003b). The task was to single out or serially attend to the feature, and not to
allow them to be synthesized as constituents of a whole face. As long as the face
as a whole is kept marginal, or to the extent that marginal consciousness is
successful in keeping task-irrelevant information irrelevant, then performance
success will improve.
The margin, like the thematic context, presents gestalts as potential themes
(Gurwitsch 1964, 370–371). The difference is that in the margin, the potential
themes are not materially relevant to the current theme. The gestalt-connection
of unity by relevancy does not obtain between the marginally presented potential
theme and the current theme in focal attention. For example, when the subject is
on-task the face is a potential theme irrelevant to the current theme singled out
as feature, say the nose. The thematic context (that is, the context of the current
theme) presents potential themes that are relevant to the current theme. In this
case, for instance, the next feature to be singled out and counted according to
task instructions, for example an eye, may already be contextually presented and
thus presented as relevant to the currently thematic feature, unlike the face.
Empirical Evidence 23
This concept of margin potentials can be linked to other current attention

research and theorizing. Cueing paradigms assume the existence of marginal
consciousness and manipulate the fact that the sphere of attention is usually ripe
with potential themes. An invalid cue is marginally presented at the moment it
transforms from valid to invalid (Arvidson 1998, 2003b). For example, in
Posner’s (1980) classic spatial attention research, the appearance of an object on
a computer screen prior to the appearance of the target in the same place on the
screen cued or sped up reaction time to the target (see e.g., Kawahara and
Miyatani 2001, Fournier and Shorter 2001; for a neurological view, see
Hopfinger et al., 2001, and Kato et al., 2001). This valid cue or prime is
discussed below since it provides context for the target. But reaction time to the
target slows with an invalid cue, a cue that appears in a different spot from the
subsequent target. When the target appears somewhere else, in contrast to the
cue-anticipated area of appearance, the cue is instantly invalid and marginal.
The cue has transformed in the sphere of attention from being relevant to the
appearance of the target (expectancy) to irrelevant to it (merely co-present). I
call this irrelevant presented content the marginal dimension in the sphere of
attention.
In a review article on object-based attention, Brian Scholl (2001, 20) notes
that “In general, segmentation processes—that is, processes that bundle parts of
the visual field together as units—probably exist at all levels of visual
processing….In this scheme, it is these ‘proto-objects’ which serve as the
potential units of attention.” What is “segmented” are gestalts or constituents
that are tending toward such functional significance in grouping. In the strained
language of current attention research, objects appearing outside the focus of
attention must not be objects, but “proto-objects.” These units as more or less
formulated gestalts are presented contextually or marginally, and are presented
as potential themes. Scholl (2001, 21) seems to differentiate between focal
attention and other types (context and margin?) when he conjectures “The units
of some segmentation processes may serve as the focus of attention, while the
units of other segmentation processes may be in part the result of (proto-)object-
based attention.” More to the point, Jon Driver and Richard Frackowiak (2001,
70) present their work as supporting gestalt grouping processes outside the focus
in attending. This backs up Gurwitsch’s claim that the context and margin
present more or less formulated gestalts as potential themes.
Similar to the problem of context, ignoring the margin as a dimension in the
sphere of attention makes for strange reporting of results. Because of the
advances in neurological technology and the absence of parallel advances in the
theory of attention, neurological studies offer fascinating examples of syntax-

bending accounts. For example, using fMRI and MEG, Paul Downing, Jia Liu,
and Nancy Kanwisher (2001, 1336) found that there are attentional effects seen
in cortical areas related to task irrelevant stimuli. But how can “…the resulting
spread of attention to irrelevant stimuli” (p. 1336) be possible if there is no
attention outside of the theme? Although not focally selected, how else can one
talk about this marginal information except as some special “attentional
selection” (LaBerge 2002, 223)? Note that the stimuli are “irrelevant” because
they are off-task, according to the view of the experimenter, but the phenom-
enology of the subject’s experience is not recorded. In any event, in light of
neuropsychological experiments like these (see Driver and Frackowiak 2001),
my way of putting it is that the focus necessarily refers to other dimensions
outside the focus of attention, but which are not themselves focal attention.
The point here is that current experimental evidence points to the existence
of a dimension in the sphere of attention where marginal processing of content
occurs along with thematic attention. While research assumes and verifies this
dimension in the sphere of attention, the framework for interpreting the
laboratory results is not yet properly global and descriptive. The concept of
attention must be enlarged beyond the target or theme so that marginal
processing of content is not a simple negation of focal attention—unattended
stimuli, irrelevant information, task-irrelevant processing.
We need a positive way to describe this marginal co-processing because any
instance of attending involves this marginal dimension as well. I believe one can
admit that marginal content is still connected to the theme, even though it is not
attention to the theme. Later it will be shown how the marginal halo connects
the farthest most indefinite reaches of the margin in the horizon to the central
most formative constituents of the theme. As suggested in the first chapter,
marginal content is peripheral and irrelevant in connection with a given theme,
with the halo as the in-between of this relation. So we could call the margin the
domain of inattention, but this negation in the sphere of attention de-emphasizes
that it is a connected process that occurs along with thematic attention. If we call
this marginal processing memory, we would be restricted only to retentions and
not the living present, which includes protentions (Husserl 1991). If we call it
imagination, we are restricted to images. Perception and cognition restrict us to
sense and categorizations or concepts. It is not enough to say that we are “dimly
conscious” of this content (Lockwood 1989, 163). What could this mean? We
could call this marginal processing unconsciousness, either in Sigmund Freud’s
sense, Husserl’s sense, or the sense used by some cognitive scientists (Merikle,
Joordens and Stolz. 1995; Newman 1997; cf. Snodgrass 2002; Jiang and Chun
2003). But this brings us back to the term “consciousness” as what is negated in
“unconsciousness,” and both terms as they are usually defined are notoriously
vague.
Max Velmans (1995, 257) suggests that consciousness is the late product in
attention processing, and marshals cases of blindsight as evidence. If one can
know but not know an object at the same time, as in the phenomenon of
blindsight, then this shows a difference between attention (knowing) and
“consciousness” (not knowing). But a better explanation is that in addition to
focal attention there is marginal consciousness. In the latter, one is present to
something as irrelevant, and so “does not know it” focally, but nonetheless
“knows it” marginally. What Velmans describes as inhibition is more positively
described as marginal consciousness. When consciousness is defined as
contextual and marginal in relation to focal attention, all within a sphere of
attention, then much of the vagueness of the term “consciousness” dissipates,
and it is operationally defined more easily. Although I will not argue for it in
this work, it is my opinion that the other processes mentioned (e.g., imagination
and cognition) have the sphere of attention as their functional foundation or
spine. In any event, none of these other terms or concepts has more to
recommend it than a precise distinction between thematic attention and marginal
consciousness. The virtue of calling this co-presented content marginal
consciousness, within the perspective of a sphere of attention, is that this phrase
preserves and expresses the fact that this processing is intimately connected with
thematic attending: it presents content simultaneous with the theme though
irrelevant to this content, and often in dynamic tension with the theme.
Even though this marginal dimension is assumed to exist in attention
experiments, and is critical to existing methodology, and is even implicitly
codified (as task-irrelevant processing), it should not be confused with the way
that focal attention works. In many kinds of experiments, subjects are typically
instructed to ignore a potential distractor on a computer screen. The
experimenter measures reaction time to the target and how well the subject
presents the distractor as irrelevant. Usually the interpretation is that the subject
paid no attention to the distractor, although it may have affected attention, for
example, it may have taxed focal attentional capacity (Arvidson 2003b). But in
measures of vigilance and interference effects, often the point is that the subjects
have to constantly make this distractor content irrelevant to the target. The
measure of success or failure on the part of the subject to keep the experimenter-
directed content distinguished in each of these dimensions in the sphere of
attention (in the way appropriate to each) is called “reaction time,” and more
specifically, an “interference effect.” This tension between the theme and
margin most clearly reveals two distinct dimensions in the sphere of attention.
This difference between theme and margin is at least implicitly codified as an
essential part of the processing that occurs and is measured in many standard
cognitive science experiments on attention (Arvidson 2004).
Memory and attention are often found together in theorizing and laboratory
research, and memory researchers assume a distinction between what is
marginal and thematic as well. The same study can test both attention and
memory bringing them together in an experimental paradigm and theoretical
discussion. For example, a series of experiments may manipulate attention by
facilitation or interference in order to arrive at conclusions about memory (e.g.,
Kane et al., 2001; Rockstroh and Schweizer 2001; Kinoshita and Towgood
2001; Olson and Chun 2001; McElree 2001; Dean, Bub, and Masson 2001;
Marks and Dulaney 2001; Troyer and Craik 2000). The connection between
memory and attention is mostly made in memory research, since memory is
defined in a way that includes attention. As Robert Kail and Lynda Hall (2001,
1) note, “WM = STM + attention,” working memory equals short term memory
plus attention. The function of short term memory seems to be contextual (Kail
and Hall 2001), so I will leave that discussion for the next section. The rest of
memory (presumably “long term memory,” Cowan 1995) is marginal in
attending since it presents what is irrelevant. As noted above, some experiments
try to examine the recall for the irrelevant environment within which learning
occurred. Unfortunately, following Alan Baddeley (1982), they call this content
irrelevant to the learning a “context” (e.g., Marsh et al., 2001; Troyer and Craik
2000). This larger portion of memory falling outside of the theme and irrelevant
to it indicates marginal consciousness at the original time of processing. In other
words, research on memory and attention assumes the marginal dimension in the
sphere of attention, or else there could be no probing for recall of irrelevant
content processed at the time of “encoding.”
Attempts by Ronald Rensink, Kevin O’Regan, and James Clark (1997) to
distinguish central-interest aspects of a scene from marginal-interest aspects are
not yet well-developed but could be heading in the right direction. For example,
although O’Regan (2001) discusses the “special role” for scene layout in
attending, he is not quite sure what to do with it. The phenomenon of attending
to scene layout could be either contextual or marginal consciousness and will be
discussed more in the next section, but his tentative approach is not surprising
given the perceived need to keep attention research confined to the focus. But
even the sense of what the focus is can blur without a proper gestalt-
phenomenological perspective. In criticizing object-based attention theorists
such as Zenon Pylyshyn, O’Regan (2001, 284) notes that “Despite the literature
on this topic however, the term ‘object’ seems unsatisfactory: Presumably an
observer can, for example, attend to the sky (which is not really an object), or to
a particular aspect of a scene (say, its symmetry or darkness) without encoding
in detail all the attributes that compose it. Awaiting further clarification on this,
it seems safer to suppose that attention can be directed to scene “aspects” rather
than ‘objects’.” If one defines the focus of attention in gestalt terms, as a theme
organized by gestalt-coherence whose constituents have functional significance
for each other, and which may be partial, dim, diffuse, or dynamic and so is not
necessarily well-formed but tending towards it, then there is no problem
between ‘object’ and ‘aspect.’ It is a theme if it is a gestalt presented as central
in this way within a thematic context. A promising notion from this group of
researchers is Rensink’s (2000, 2001) “coherence theory” of focused attention.
His theory seems to include something a lot like gestalt-coherence of the theme,
but is tied too exclusively to visual attention, and the concept of “proto-object”
is interminably vague. In addition, Rensink acknowledges the marginal
dimension only in the traditional way by sticking to the attentional vs. non-
attentional language.
Although it is rare to find a positive description of the marginal dimension
in the sphere of attention, especially by a noted attention researcher, consider the
following. “We eat with knife and fork automatically while we attend closely to
an ongoing conversation; we perceive printed words on the page automatically
while our attention is focused on following the story told by the words. But
clearly there is attentional selection involved in using the knife and fork and in
perceiving the series of words along a line of print on the page” (LaBerge 2002,
223). My way of saying it is that there is a marginal dimension in the sphere of
attention in addition to thematic attention. The further point made here is that
marginal consciousness is not just about interference but is also about
maintenance. When Eastwood, Smilek and Merikle (2003) find that upside
down faces or faces with extremely schematic features do not affect selection of
features, unlike the right side up clearly negative face, this is still marginal
consciousness, even though it is not about interference.
Note that the difference between the halo and the horizon within the
marginal dimension itself in the sphere of attention is a fine area for research.
For example, what are the limits or capacities of the halo, and how is it
distinguished in marginal consciousness from the horizon? I say more about the
marginal halo and psychology in the last section. Also, that there are just three
ever-present orders of existence in marginal consciousness—streaming in
attending, embodied existence, and environing world—is controversial. Alfred
Schutz, for one, suggests others (Grathoff 1989, 159; Embree 1985, xxxvi).
Experiments might be constructed to affirm or deny permanent marginal
consciousness in these three orders, examine their nature and limitations, or to
see if there are others.
Context in the Sphere of Attention

Attention research has focused primarily on visual spatial attention. Spatial
attention is still the main concern of researchers, but investigating attention
temporally and other manifestations in attention as dynamic are now in vogue
(see e.g., Shapiro 2001). Also, unlike the paradigm of spatial cuing experiments
established 25 years ago (Posner 1980), contextual cuing (Chun and Jiang 1998,
1999) is more likely to invoke context in interpreting results, freely using the
words “context” and “scene” in mainstream journal article titles (e.g.,
“Temporal Contextual Cuing of Visual Attention,” Olson and Chun 2001; “Does
Consistent Scene Context Facilitate Object Perception?” Hollingworth and
Henderson 1998), even though these words are often used ambiguously as
pointed out in Chapter One (cf. Bey and McAdams 2002; and Marsh et al., 2001
with the studies just mentioned). The result is that context is slowly finding its
place in attention experiments and attention experiments are finding a place for
context, even though this conclusion still must be teased from the
experimenters’ own theories, assumptions, and interpretations. Also, bringing
context into the attention picture makes the picture messy, since in addition to
the focus there is now the “unfocused.” Using “consciousness” for “focal
attention,” Jaron Lanier (1997, 182) describes the challenge of context
delightfully: “To consider consciousness by itself is entirely undemanding. It is
a pea. There is nothing to describe. An attempt to account for it in context,
however, forces the construction of ever shifting, elaborate adventures of
thought.”
Bringing Context into Focus

Following up on Marvin Chun and Yuhong Jiang’s (1998, 1999) research
on contextual cuing, Matthew Peterson and Arthur Kramer (2001) try to define
the mechanisms by which “contextual cuing” guides attention. Their goal is
similar to many other experiments that investigate facilitation or interference
effects. But the theoretical framework is already updated since they use the term
“contextual cuing” and mean relevant co-presented content rather than a cuing
effected by “irrelevant information” or “unattended stimuli” (both of which
would be marginal). Still they are looking for cognitive mechanisms involved in
contextual cuing, and so are just as uninterested in establishing the thematic
context as a distinct dimension in the sphere of attention as any other experi-
ment. Hence in defining the mechanisms for contextual cuing, one of the com-
ponents they operationally define is recognition, and they miss the importance of
what they say. “Recognition entails the identification of the current context of
the scene and matching this information with previously stored instances of the
familiar context” (Peterson and Kramer 2001, 1239–1240, emphasis added).
Without stating it this way, these authors claim that the subject is conscious of
the scene contextually, which means that this content is organized in unity by
relevancy for the theme. Of course, the authors found that “recognition”
involved relevance for the achievement of the target, “That is, when recognition
occurred, the eyes were guided directly to the target; otherwise, the eyes went to
another item in the display, with no bias toward the target.” (p. 1249). Thematic
attention is always accompanied by contextual consciousness—a target or theme
is always presented within a thematic context (Gurwitsch 1966, 203). Peterson
and Kramer implicitly use the concept of the context in the sphere of attention,
and even attempt to operationally define contextual consciousness (as
“recognition”), but miss the more significant possibilities of their results.
Namely, in addition to the necessary gestalt-connection of relevancy of the
thematic context for the theme, they miss the fact that thematic context is
another dimension in the sphere of attention, distinct in shape and function from
the theme.
Experiments that describe as “unattended” the information “processed”
outside of the focus but clearly affecting the focus give a stark picture of how
entrenched the definition of the term “attention” is in psychology, so that it can
be taken to refer to nothing more than what is thematic, and thereby often
divorced from context and margin. These experiments also give an indication of
how far the theoretical framework for interpreting results must evolve to open
up to the phenomena of attention. As noted above, Eastwood, Smilek and
Merikle (2001) found that attention to the emotion of a face can guide focal
attention, a kind of cuing, even though that emotion was not presented in focal
attention. The authors (p. 1004) state that “The results suggest that the emotional
expression in a face can be perceived outside the focus of attention and can
guide focal attention to the location of the face.” Following protocol, the authors
refer to this “outside the focus” information, which is nonetheless processed, as
“unattended” (p. 1012). The contextual consciousness of the emotion of the face
guided achievement of the target face, while the target face did not have that
emotion. But in the journal Perception and Psychophysics where this article
appeared, one would not see this term I have just now used, namely, contextual
consciousness, even though it exactly and positively describes the results of
these experiments. The published title of their study is “Differential attentional
guidance by unattended faces expressing positive and negative emotion.” In my
view, the title should read “Differential thematic attentional guidance by faces
expressing positive and negative emotion in the context.”
As seen in the previous section, one way current research establishes and
investigates the nature of the thematic context is by conceptualizing the context
in terms of something already familiar to any attention researcher—cues. Posner
(1980) found that spatial cues could affect the response rate of achieving a
targeted theme, so that the area where the target was to appear was highlighted
and achievement was facilitated. Another way to establish a distinction between
the theme and thematic context is to present the subject with a stream of visual
images that create a certain expectation for the appearance of the target (theme).
The stream of images implicitly becomes the thematic context for this theme,
and the subject is deemed to have changed behavior (“learned”) if the
achievement of the targeted theme is facilitated. This “learning” is then
attributed to some “recognition” of regularity in the stream of distractors
presented, such as rhythm, or as I would say, it is attributed to contextual
consciousness. This experimental paradigm of temporal contextual cuing (Olson
and Chun 2001) is promising since it forces the researcher to consider the effect
of non-focal, contextually relevant information on the target. But Jiang and
Chun (2003, 278) define the term “contextual” in the cuing experiments as a
kind of learning rather than at first as a kind of contextual consciousness, and in
a way that does not properly distinguish between margin and context:
“Contextual refers to the impact of other information, typically co-occurring
items, on the processing of the target.”
Ralph Barnes and Mari Jones (2000) distinguish Posner’s traditional cuing
from a “pattern-based” expectancy, another kind of “cue” which they correctly
call a kind of “local context.” “Pattern-based approaches to expectancy go
beyond local cues and first-order conditional probabilities to view contextual
information in terms of relationships among features or elements” (Barnes and
Jones 2000, 257). Yes, if ‘features or elements’ can be taken to unambiguously
refer to more or less well-formed gestalt content outside the theme or focus,
rather than to formative constituents of the theme. Barnes and Jones (2000, 267)
state that they are examining the influence of “serial context” on time
judgments. When the target is achieved it is achieved relevant to a particular
context which the experimenters control. So without trumpeting the radical
break from the usual narrowness of the definition of attention, this sort of
research shows at least that there is a contextual dimension outside the focus in
attending. Like the Peterson and Kramer (2001) research discussed above, this
set of experiments is designed to reveal the dynamic nature of attention. By
definition, therefore, more must be considered than just the focus of attention.
According to Barnes and Jones (2000, 261), “[These dynamic attending models]
place greater emphasis on stimulus-time relationships as determinants of real
time attending and expectancies. Thus, moment-to-moment attending to events
such as speech and music is controlled, in part, by their relational properties,
e.g., rate and rhythm.” That “rate and rhythm” are easily measurable contributes
to their use here as examples. But there are surely more “relational properties” to
any given thematic moment in speech or music. In any event, the “relational
properties” of content surrounding the theme, rightly understood, is the meaning
of thematic context, and so these researchers are essentially on their way to
investigating this second dimension in the sphere of attention without calling it
that.
Research analyzing and interpreting how subjects process a global scene
within which a target is attended yields promising results. This area is relatively
underdeveloped since it clearly aims to discuss scene context, and this is a new
dimension in relation to the target or theme. Following the usual program, these
experiments are looking for facilitation effects or inhibition effects. Facilitation
effects, such as semantic priming, show that the context speeds up achievement
of the target, while inhibition effects show the opposite (Arvidson 2003b). For
example, Katherine Mathis (2002) examined the effects of scene context on
semantic processing of the target and found that whether the object fit with the
background affected word-categorization performance. Such a “fit” can only be
determined through consciousness of the background as background. The
theoretical controversy in this research on context effects concerns whether and
how a scene context affects “object perception.” As Hollingworth and
Henderson (1998. 398) put it, “How is the identification of a visual object
affected by the meaning of the real-world scene in which that object appears?”
Although the “real-world scene” they use in their experiments is a line-drawing
of a barnyard, manipulated with pre- or post-presented labels of missing or
incongruent items (e.g., a mixer instead of a chicken), the point is that the
question of context in the sphere of attention is being asked.
It is clear that context is important in how attention works in lexical

processing and memory (Davies and Thomson 1988; Horton and Mills 1984;
Neely 1991). As a sentence unfolds for a reader, what has gone before frames
what is expected to fallow, which is why the word “fallow” instead of the
expected “follow” has likely captured the reader’s attention, possibly requiring a
transformation or reaffirmation of context. This tight connection, a unity by
relevancy that the thematic context content has for the theme, appears to be
operative in some types of humor (Lippman, Sucharski, Bennington 2001). We
intuitively assume this knowledge of the gestalt-connection between theme and
context in our everyday life. For example, some professors faced with a possible
plagiarist student black out every fifth word or so on the paper in question, to
see if the student can supply the missing word or a word closely related within
the overall context. This test is based on the same principle of the tight
connection of relevancy between context and theme. Even if the student cannot
remember the exact word he or she chose when writing the paper, the sense of
the context for the word as theme remains strong enough for the student to
successfully fill in the blank (that is, if the student wrote the paper in the first
place!).
Another feature in many studies of context in attending is the reliance on
computer modeling (e.g., Botvinick and Plaut 2002; Braver et al., 2001; Brown,
Vousden, and McCormack 1999; Henderson and Hollingworth 1998). Computer
modeling is conspicuous in attention research in part because of the challenge of
the frame problem in artificial intelligence (Pylyshyn 1987). As Joseph Neisser
(2003, 47) succinctly states it, “The problem is that representations only gain
significance within an enframing situation or against a lived background that is
never fully represented in itself” (see also, Gurwitsch 1966, 226). A philosopher
interested in simulation theory spells it out a bit more: “Artificial intelligence
(AI) researchers attempting to build and program computers that could mimic
intelligent human behavior soon faced two problems which collectively go
under the name of the frame problem: (1) getting a system to have information
stored in such a way that it can access the right and relevant information in the
time necessary to complete its task, and (2) getting the system to notice the
salient features of the environment given its required task” (Wilkerson 2001,
144). Another way of saying it is that the problem is one of organization or
storage and access. For example, in the transformation called “serial-shifting”
discussed in the next chapter, step two of figuring taxes is presented within the
context of step one which is now past but likely still relevant and step three
which is also relevant but as the “next target” or contextually anticipated theme.
To come closer to modeling human thinking, computer modeling needs to

explain how information is connected or relevant to other information on two
levels, the level of application and the level of that which is related to what is
applied but is not yet applied. That is, computer modeling in attention research
naturally takes up the question of context since its crucial problem has become
explaining these interconnections between the theme and context, in this case
between what is actually accessed and what is organized for access (see e.g.,
Braver, et al., 2001).
There is also a radical behaviorist approach to the problem of framing. This
research asks the question of how what is given thematically is related to the
development of functional, verbal, and social contexts for what we attend to.
“Relational frame theory” aims to describe how thematically presented content
is contextually qualified, for example, in equivalence, difference, opposition,
more than, less than, etc. Examining context in logic, Gurwitsch (1964, 327)
discusses similar qualifications of the theme under the heading of contextual
characters. Bryan Roche et al. (2002, 76) write “Relational frame theory is a
conservative account of derived relational activity. This theory adopts the basic
position that derived relational responding is generalized operant behavior.
From this perspective, the act of relating is a contextually controlled overarching
response class that can occur with an infinite variety of stimulus topographies.
Relational frame theory suggests that contextual control for relational
responding is established for humans during early language interaction.”
Whether or not one subscribes to the notion that observable behavior and its
reinforcement is the unit of measure of human science or whether there are also
“private events” (Anderson et al., 2000), Roche and associates are to be
acknowledged for seriously trying to work out the nature of content relevancy
for the theme, and in the first place, for putting the idea of frame or context in
the forefront of what it means to be a human being attending to something, even
if the word attention is not used as often in this approach as it is in the cognitive
sciences. In my way of putting it, “derived relational responding” describes
various ways of contextually presenting content through transformations in
attending. I analyze an example of these attentional transformations described
by Roche and colleagues in Chapter Three. Since behaviorism is by definition
concerned with the environment (as stimulus) within which a behavior occurs,
research and theory should naturally address contextual effects (“contextual
control”) and attentional transformations (“function transformations”). Pointing
out the practical and everyday importance of such transformations and relevant
context, Michael Dougher et al. (2002, 65) note “As examples, consider the
unattended child who responds to strangers at a shopping mall the same way she
has been encouraged to interact with strangers in her home, or the snake-phobic
college student who cannot open a biology textbook for fear of encountering
pictures or descriptions of snakes.” It should be noted that Dougher and
colleagues did not experiment with such real-world phenomena, but instead
trained subjects using computer tasks, operationally defining context as the
background color of the computer monitor.
In a novel examination of what I would call context in the sphere of
attention, Christopher Roney and Lana Trick (2003) found that the gambler’s
fallacy is affected by the context of the event. “The gambler’s fallacy is the
tendency to see a given outcome as less likely if it has just repeatedly occurred,
in this case, leading to the choice of tails following three heads. It is a fallacy to
the extent that the person’s expectancy deviates from the true probability of
getting heads in a coin toss (50%)” (Roney and Trick 2003, 69). Their
examination is novel because they explicitly manipulate the thematic context by
grouping the event of the coin toss within controlled contexts. The critical trial
followed upon three tosses that had the same outcome (e.g., three “heads” or
three “tails”), but this trial was either at the end of a block or the beginning of a
new one. This context replacement affects the character, perspective, or
orientation of the event, and in my view is direct acknowledgement of both
theme and context in a sphere of attention. The next coin toss was attended to as
the last of a series, or the first of a new series. This is the difference between
continuing to gamble or (deciding on) starting to gamble, a possibly decisive
difference in moderating gambling addiction. The grouping of the critical event
(the next coin toss) as last in one context or first in another indicates a unity by
relevancy between the theme and thematic context. In other words, the next toss
is either the last of a series, or the first of a new one, simply as a function of this
context replacement. The coin toss event was thematic, the trial block was
presented as relevant to the theme, i.e., it was the contextual in the sphere of
attention.
A similar though more explicit example of applying context in
experimentation comes from work on aesthetic judgment. Examining rectangle
proportion preference, Philip Russell (2000) presented triangles to be judged in
no-context and context conditions. What concerns us here are not the results but
the assumptions about context. As part of the procedure, Russell implemented
“two context conditions” (p. 35) as participants viewed a rectangular shape. He
instructed participants to imagine that they were making a judgment about a
rectangular painting, or in another condition, about a rectangular ceramic
kitchen wall tile. This is explicit manipulation of context in the sphere of

attention. There are a number of similar examples. Robert Kunzendorf et al.
(2000) combined quantitative and qualitative methods to show how emotion can
be contextualized, and David Mandel (2003) examined counterfactual thinking
and emotions within an academic context vs. an interpersonal context. Also in
“Multiple Uses of Mental Imagery by Professional Modern Dancers,” Christine
Hanrahan and Ineke Vergeer (2000) show how imagery is mostly used to
contextualize the body and its movements—body as theme within imaginary
contexts.
Some attempts to make sense of non-focal processes in attending (which is
typically called “inattention”) lead to very unusual hypotheses. Yehoshua Tsal
and Lilach Shalev (1996) have proposed that the “unattended visual field” is
composed of attentional receptive fields (ARFs). After noting that a line falling
outside the focus of attention is “perceived” differently, Shalev and Tsal (2002,
4) write “Since ARFs composing the unattended field are larger than those
composing the attended field, the unattended line is systematically perceived as
longer than the attended one.” What kind of work is the word “perceived” doing
in this statement? Why is this not contextual (or marginal) consciousness? A
casual observer cannot help but notice that although ARFs are supposed to be
part of the “unattended” visual field, the A in the acronym stands for attentional.
This indicates that there is more relation between what is focal and what is not
than merely negation. Still, such oddness aside, like many experimental reports
the authors are possibly talking about contextual consciousness as defined here
(if not, then about marginal consciousness) without saying it, and their
hypotheses and results can illuminate the nature of the three dimensions in the
sphere of attention (e.g., see Shalev and Tsal 2002, 22).
A euphemism for contextual consciousness is “attention control settings” or
“attentional set.” Arne Ohman, Anders Flykt, and Francisco Esteves (2001, 466)
prefer to use this phrase when describing the perceptual processes that detect
relevant (in this case “threatening”) events outside the focus of attention,
although they also use the term “surroundings.” They claim that “To detect
threatening events outside the spotlight of focused, conscious attention, there
must be perceptual processes that automatically scan and analyze the perceptual
field” (p. 466). What are these perceptual processes? Contextual consciousness.
Extrapolating from their findings on fear-relevant stimuli Ohman et al. (2001,
475) note “[O]ne would expect other emotional or motivational states to involve
different attention control settings, for example, resulting in a bias for food-
relevant items in the surroundings when one is hungry.” Attention capture for a
food item will be facilitated within the context of a search for whatever might
present itself as edible. Contextual consciousness is consciousness of “that
which is relevant to what is edible” and thematic attention is attending to “that
which is edible.” This describes the “attention control setting” and the target as
two dimensions in the sphere of attention. The edible item may not actually be
presented (it may be presented as an absence, such that when it is finally
presented attention is captured) or it may be initially presented as edible and turn
out not to be (a “mushroom” that is really a rock). The point here is that the
presentation of the relevant context for whatever might present itself as edible—
an “attention control setting”—is a function of context in the sphere of attention.
Other researchers (e.g., Folk, Remington and Johnston 1992) also use the
phrase “attentional control settings” to refer to preparatory or co-present
emotional or attitudinal orientations that affect or frame focal attention. Pitting
this work against the work of Steven Yantis (e.g., Yantis 1993), Bradley Gibson
and Erin Kelsey (1998) examine the issue of whether an attentional set is needed
for attention capture or whether attention capture can be purely stimulus-driven
(this latter is Yantis’ view). At issue is whether one needs context for thematic
attention. Gibson and Kelsey used color and/or stimulus onset to vary the
conditions signaling the subject that a task-relevant target display was to appear.
The experiment found that this goal-directedness of the subject toward the task-
relevant display, this attentional set or readiness, could not be separated from the
stimulus that captured attention. In other words, “In summary, on the basis of
our research…we conclude that all known instances of attentional capture are
contingent on attentional set and thus ultimately on goal-directed attentional
control processes” (Gibson and Kelsey 1998). This result is predicted by a three
dimension sphere of attention, since one can not have thematic attention without
context, just as one cannot have figure without background, and since marginal
(task-irrelevant) items are also presented.
The popular experimental topic of semantic priming often refers to
contextual consciousness as “activation of the semantic system.” Marilyn Smith,
Shlomo Bentin, and Thomas Spalek (2001, 1289) define semantic priming as
“the facilitated processing of a target word when it is preceded by a related
prime word.” Notice the assumption of gestalt-connection between the theme
and the thematic context, so that there is a contextual or categorial relevance
between the two dimensions of contents. The transformation in the sphere of
attention here is serial-shifting, and since in serial-shifting the same thematic
context endures, the transformation is facilitated (Gurwitsch 1966, 231–232;
Barnes and Jones 2000; Olson and Chun 2001; Chelazzi 1999). Also, these
researchers investigate synthesis and singling out. For example, one can attend
to the word level or single out a letter in a word. This singling out involves a
radical change in the presentation of the theme and its relation with the thematic
context. If the task directs attention to the letter level, the context is no longer
relevant and semantic priming is reduced or eliminated (Arvidson 2003b; Smith,
Benton and Spalek 2001). Contextual consciousness has not disappeared, but a
new relevance (a new context) is co-presented with the new theme (Arvidson
1992a). The previous thematic relevance which involved semantic content is
now irrelevant, and so semantic priming is diminished. This robust area of
experimentation implicitly assumes contextual consciousness and is
investigating transformations in attending between the theme and context in the
sphere of attention described in the next chapter.
Investigating vision and attention, Rensink (2001) argues that there are two
“non-attentional setting systems” that use low-level visual information, one to
obtain the “gist” of the scene, and the other to obtain the spatial layout of the
objects in the scene. This setting does not essentially involve focused attention,
but operates with it to help guide it. Together, focused attention and these setting
systems form a “virtual representation” that provides context for the focus.
Rensink (2001, 185) writes, “In regards to the involvement of attention in scene
perception, change-blindness studies show that we do not build up a detailed
picture-like representation of the scene; rather attention provides a coherent
representation of only one object at a time. To account for the fact that we
subjectively experience a large number of coherent objects simultaneously, it is
suggested that scene perception involves a virtual representation which provides
a limited amount of detailed, coherent structure whenever required, making it
seem as if all the detailed, coherent structure is present simultaneously.” Again,
discussion of the dynamic nature of attending forces the researcher to look
outside of the focus in attending for its setting or context. Rensink consistently
uses the “non-attention” or “scene perception” language, as expected, for what I
would call context. But the attempt to account for the change in change-
blindness brings exploration of attentional “setting” in attention research, even if
it is not adequately formulated yet as a distinctive contextual dimension in the
sphere of attention.
Daniel Simons and Stephen Mitroff (2001) also investigate vision, change-
blindness, and attention capture, and propose the distinction between
“intentional” and “incidental” experimental approaches. The difference is one of
expectation. In the intentional approach, the subject expects the change in the
content of the theme. In the incidental approach, the change is unexpected.
Using the incidental approach to change-blindness and attentional capture, these

researchers report that “encoding” of the meaning of the theme, for example, a
stranger asking for directions, is different when the subject is not expecting a
change from when expecting one. This difference of expectation is a difference
in the presented context. In the intentional approach, when presented with the
contextual instruction that ‘there is going to be a change, so try to notice it,’ the
subject is apt to focus on specific visual details. But in the incidental approach,
“When observers are not actively searching for a change, they tend to focus on
the meaning of a scene—what is important for their immediate actions and
goals. Such encoding is unlikely to lead subjects to focus on specific visual
details. As a result they are even less likely to detect changes, even if the
changes are to central objects” (Simons and Mitroff 2001, 195). If the only
difference is the context for the theme, namely, the expectation of change, and
this is what the incidental approach to change-blindness and attention capture
introduces to the study of attention, then these researchers are investigating
contextual consciousness. Specifically, these experiments are as concerned
about the contextual dimension in the sphere of attention as they are about
thematic attention, since the conclusions about thematic attention capture are
tied directly to conclusions about expectations in contextual consciousness.
Douglas Nelson, Nan Zhang and Vanesa McKinney (2001) investigated
how prior knowledge can form a concurrent context for targeted word
recognition. What is noteworthy is that the authors are directly investigating
how gestalt content in the thematic context are associated with each other, and
with the theme (target), and how this affects target achievement. Using a large
group of participants, they indexed pairs of words through free association to
determine strong and weak associations between words. For example, for a
significant number of participants, the word “dinner” begets “supper.” These
connections were then used to examine how “implicit processing” (i.e.,
contextual consciousness) affects word recognition. They found that pre-existing
connections between associated words and between the target word and the
associate words facilitate target achievement. The point is that these connections
are pre-existing in the same sense as Merleau-Ponty (1962) proclaims that we
see meaningfully (already), rather than building up meaning. That is, context is
always already given with theme, and many attention experiments try to ignore
or squelch this gestalt-connection.
Gretchen Kambe, Keith Rayner, and Susan Duffy (2001) tested the
distinction between local and global context in lexical processing. They used
paragraphs rather than the customary one or two sentences to see how the larger
context enabled subjects to disambiguate ambiguous words. They defined

context in two ways: the global context was the topic sentence that provides a
general idea of what is going to be discussed, and the local context provides
specific information about ideas discussed in the paragraph. What they call
“global context” has an immediate effect, of course, on resolving the lexical
ambiguity. This “lexical processing” is contextual consciousness, that is,
consciousness of context as relevant to the theme. Also, they found that with the
global context in place, additional information provided by local context
consistent with the global context had no additional disambiguating effect. This
exemplifies how context is heterogeneous and yet a unity by relevancy. It is a
unity within the “global context” even though that contextual consciousness is
open ended, so that the “local context” information does not break up that unity
or modify it significantly but rather fits in. As Gurwitsch (1966, 204) puts it,
“Whatever is experienced as pertaining to the thematic field has ‘directedness to
the center’,” directedness, that is, toward the theme. But this does not mean that
the context is homogenous, since in the words of Kambe and associates, the
local context is not reducible to the global or the converse. And these
experiments also show how the context is dynamic, as in the temporal
sequencing experiments, since the context is an “attentional set” but is also
unfolding as the subject reads. Contextual consciousness is not linear and fixed,
but full, varied, and subtle. About recognizing the butcher on the bus (rather
than the shop) Nelson, Zhang, and McKinney (2001, 1156) state “His recogni-
tion is also likely to be affected by the implicitly activated knowledge that both
of our wives are members of the woman’s league of voters, that he creates
especially fine Italian sausage, and so on. Now that we have good models for
explaining the effects of how often we see the butcher, we need models that
simultaneously incorporate what we know about him” (emphasis added).
Studying expectancy and the temporal aspect in attending, Brian McElree
(2001) identifies the “nonattended” stimulus as being represented in working
memory. McElree (p. 817) writes “Whenever information exceeds the span of
attention, successful execution of a cognitive operation requires shunting infor-
mation between memory and focal attention.” This framework for interpreting
the phenomenon of attention in this case is unnecessarily convoluted since his
claim is that whatever occurs outside the focus but affects “executive control
processes” occurs in working memory. There is no doubt that what is in
“working memory” can affect target achievement (e.g., Dean, Bub and Masson,
2001; Marks and Dulaney 2001). But it is economical and appropriate to stay
with the process of the sphere of attention and recognize the two dimensions of
theme and thematic context, instead of postulating executive control processes

and another faculty (memory). The current context is co-processed along with
the theme, as relevant to it, in what Peterson and Kramer (2001) call
“recognition.” The thematic context gives character, perspective, and orientation
to what is currently achieved in thematic attention and may facilitate or prime
attention, or in a transformation in attending, negatively prime attention. Serial-
shifting tasks are a good example of positively primed thematic attention
(Chelazzi 1999).
The character of the sphere of attention morphs and grows with time so that
some objects are more likely to be salient than others (Gurwitsch 1964, 102–
103), and this saliency involves developmental changes in the character of
contextual consciousness. For example, learning and applying associations, such
as readily associating “supper” with “dinner,” is the creation and maintenance of
diverse contextual relevancies that shape the possibilities and probabilities of
what will be presented in the sphere of attention. This developmental aspect in
attending is supported in attention research carried out by Linda Smith et al.
(2002). In a longitudinal study they trained children to attend to shape in
naming, and the children learned object names more rapidly. Thus, in what they
call “on-the-job” training for attention, a change in context coordinates with a
change in thematic attention (see also Roche et al., 2002). There also appear to
be learned cultural differences in contextual consciousness. Shinobu Kitayama
et al. (2003) conducted experiments on the cultural differences of “perceiving an
object and its context” and their findings suggest that individuals engaging in
Asian cultures are more capable of incorporating contextual information and
those engaging in North American cultures are more capable of ignoring
contextual information. A philosopher, Yoko Arisaka (2001, 199), argues that in
contrast to North American cultures, self-identity in Japanese culture is highly
context dependent. One would suppose then that “self-development” would
involve contextual consciousness more intensely in this culture. Further support
for the ability to learn what to attend to and the role of contextual consciousness
in attending comes in experiments by Kimberly Quinn and James Olson (2001)
who demonstrate how researchers use the knowledge of contextual cues to show
how it affects social discriminations. Paul Downing (2000, 472) similarly
invokes saliency changes in the theme and context in the sphere of attention,
without calling it that, by examining the interactions between visual working
memory and selective attention and concluded that it is not just that attention is a
gateway for what enters into working memory, but that “working memory
shapes the action of the attentional filter as well.” I do not think the claim that
attention changes over time is controversial, since it is well established that

training and learning can change what is attended to. The more controversial
claim, to be taken up in later chapters, is that this change in saliency can involve
a change in the character of contextual consciousness over time, or in general, of
the sphere of attention as a whole (Arvidson 2000; see also the concept of
“sprites” in Cavanagh, Labianca, and Thornton, 2001, 48).
Research on self-focused attention also implicitly points to a context of
attention. Nilly Mor and Jennifer Winquist (2002) use a meta-analysis on the
self-focused attention and negative affect literature to determine that self-
focused attention, for example in depressed individuals, varies according to
context. One form of self-focused attention, rumination, appears to be a kind of
looped serial-shifting in which attention repetitively and unproductively makes
salient one’s own mood, especially negative mood (p. 641). Although it is not
reported this way by the researchers, this thematic attention to self is processed
within a unity by relevancy that makes salient in contextual consciousness the
negative attitude or mood that the researchers observe or that the subjects self-
report. Similarly, Watkins, Teasdale and Williams (2003) used contextual
questions to manipulate the maintenance of sad moods. One theme often
associated with sadness is death, and some researchers, especially in light of
more recent international awareness of terrorism, are interested in how humans
deal with attention to death. Jamie Arndt, Alison Cook, and Jeff Greenberg
(2002) measured context as a sort of gating mechanism in mortality salience
experiments. With death as theme, the experiments measured how “world-view”
could be accessed or inhibited, for example, as “nationality constructs.”
Implicitly referring to contextual consciousness, Arndt et al. (p. 322) conclude
“Thus, the pattern of beliefs that is activated by mortality salience depends in
part on the degree to which situational and individual factors render those beliefs
particularly cognitively available.” Later I will argue that the dimensions of
context and margin are key to these kinds of self-reflection as well as others.
Positional Index
A main function of the thematic context is to confer upon the theme a
positional index. Therefore if current research implicitly indicates the contextual
dimension in the sphere attention, there should be some evidence that it is
discussing positional index. The rest of this section will be devoted to sampling
that evidence.
The gestalt-connection of unity by relevancy between the theme and its
context is heavily researched in paradigms that highlight facilitation effects,
such as relatedness effects and semantic priming, and also how these effects are
impeded. As shown above, acknowledging context as part of the sphere of
attention helps clarify the theoretical framework for these experiments. But
research has also attempted to operationally define what Gurwitsch (1964, 358)
calls the positional index. “Understood in the broader sense, the positional index
denotes whatever perspective, orientation, or characterization the thematic field
bestows upon the theme” (Gurwitsch 1964, 362). For a simple example, in
experiments on temporal contextual effects, the targeted theme is attended to as
an event in a series of events, and has a unique and distinct position within that
context. These characteristics of the theme belong to the theme as a mode of
how it is attended, but they are conferred upon the theme by the context within
which it appears. “For instance, when dwelling upon a certain event in a series
of events, the event we choose as our theme may not only point and refer in a
general way to preceding events in whose light it appears but also be
experienced as developing from, continuing or complementing, the preceding
events. This event may also appear as requiring further development and
complementation” (Gurwitsch 1964, 361). Operationally defining positional
index and its modifications could lead to articulating major aspects of the
contextual dimension and of the theme-context relation. This investigation
would advance beyond the mere fact of context effects, namely, that certain
contextual content speeds up or slows down response time of achievement in
thematic attention. It would examine the physiognomy of the theme within the
thematic context, how it is presented in its context. The challenge is how to
operationally define the “perspective, orientation, or characterization the
thematic field bestows upon the theme.”
Hypotheses in the serially ordered recall paradigm fit well within what
Gurwitsch describes as positional index. For example, OSCAR (OSCillator-
based Associative Recall) represents an attempt by Gordon Brown et al. (1999)
to model the development of memory for serial order emphasizing temporal
contextual distinctiveness. The authors analogously compare short term memory
encoding (i.e., contextual consciousness) to a clock face. “An association
between the first list item and the state of the clock face at 2 o’clock is formed,
creating the first item-to-context association. By the time the second list item is
presented, the oscillators (the hands on the clock) will have moved on, to (say)
2:05. The second item-to-context association can then be formed, linking the
second list item to the state of the clock face at 2:05” (Brown et al., 1999, 391).
According to the authors, the set of one, two, three, etc. item-to-context
associations is a representationally stored sequence that can be reconstructed in
the right “learning context.” “Thus there is no need to maintain an explicit

memory of the dynamic contexts associated with each list position” (Brown et
al., 1999, 391). The general idea of OSCAR appears to be that the item and the
context of each item in a serial list at the time of “encoding” is indexed in a way
that identifies the characteristics of that item within the sequence context. In
other words, the item is positioned within an overall dynamic context with other
items as thematic attention serially shifts from item to item in the list. This
positioning is a function of the theme-context relation, a positional indexing in
which the theme gets its orientation and character from the context, which in
cases of recall includes previously attended serial items which are now
presented contextually.
Recently, instead of saying that there is a context for attention—
consciousness of non-focal content relevant to the theme—a number of
researchers are saying that there is a pre-attentive process called visual indexing
(or FINST, see Pylyshyn 2003, 2001; Sears and Pylyshyn 2000; Scholl,
Pylyshyn and Feldman 2001). The relation between contextual consciousness
and thematic attention involves a positional index, and this is what I take these
studies to be researching (although I am not claiming that their findings yet
reveal established organizational principles about context). The general idea of
the visual index that Pylyshyn and associates are investigating is that there is a
difference between items outside the focus in attending that must be searched for
to be made focal, and items that can be made focal “directly.” “According to that
model [of visual indexing], certain salient properties—a sudden onset being the
obvious such property—result in an index or pointer being assigned to the
objects. There is a limit of four or five such indexes available. The indexes are
object-based in that they do not point to the locations of objects but to the
objects themselves, and, as a result, indexes keep referencing objects as the
latter move around. The purpose of indexes is to bind objects to internal
references or names” (Sears and Pylyshyn 2001, 11). Furthermore, the objects in
the context of attention compete for these limited number of indexes so that one
object may gain an index as another loses it (Pylyshyn 2001, 46). For Gurwitsch,
the theme has a positional index bestowed upon it by the thematic context.
Pylyshyn’s and Gurwitsch’s way of looking at it may be somewhat compatible.
For Pylyshyn the index is given in relation to the focus in attending, and for
Gurwitsch it is as well. Following Gurwitsch, my way of saying it is that some
items are relevant to the theme as potential themes, and others are less relevant
(but still part of the thematic context) and still others are irrelevant (and so
presented marginally). The marginal items and the less relevant contextual items
must be “actively searched” in Pylyshyn’s terms in order to be made focal, while

the items more relevant to the theme as potential themes garner indexes.
Gurwitsch stresses the perspective, orientation or character that the theme gets
from how it is positioned in the thematic context; Pylyshyn and associates stress
the position of the thematic context content in relation to the theme. This all may
amount to the same phenomena described from the perspective of theme in one
case and thematic context in the other, but it is difficult to tell at this early stage
in the visual indexing work.
These researchers are assuming that attention is more holistic in function
than previously thought. Gestaltists would agree that objects are the coin of the
attention realm rather than features. That is, there can be attention to objects as
objects, rather than objects as a bottom-up composition from features. As in the
temporal sequencing studies, another promising result of these studies is that
attention is seen as dynamic (a popular paradigm is MOT or multiple object
tracking, Sears and Pylyshyn 2000), and so memory and other outside the focus
processes are likely to be discussed. One of the main problems to be solved is
how subjects can keep track of a number of objects that are not currently focal,
and are possibly changing positions in the “field of vision.” This is a problem of
orientation of the theme in the thematic context, since the theme is the main
reference point for other objects presented.
Other psychologists appear to be investigating the phenomenon of
positional index from a variety of approaches. In experiments on judgment
involving quantifiers, Stephen Newstead and Kenny Coventry (2000) found that
the quantifier is highly dependent upon the context, just as a theme will be
“positioned” very differently in one context than another. They (2000, 257)
relate their findings to language behavior: “[W]hen two nouns are used, the
relationship between the entities is important; the interpretation of the statement
‘There are lots of people outside the cinema’ depends not just on the figure (the
first noun, ‘people’) nor on the ground (the second noun, ‘cinema’) but on the
relationship between them. Relative size is one factor which contributes to
interpretation, but there are others. One would expect the number signified to
vary depending upon whether the film showing is the latest Hollywood
blockbuster or some obscure art-house film.” The point is that the theme and
context are intimately related through unity by relevancy and this relation is
influenced by a number of factors, some of which Gurwitsch’s concept of
positional index is meant to signify. These experiments seem to address how the
theme gets its character from the context. Researchers are also investigating
positional index in decision making (e.g., Sharps and Martin 2002), in reading
behavior and lexical processing (e.g., Rawson and Kintsch 2002; Kambe,
Rayner and Duffy 2001), and in other areas. It appears that positional index can
be in part a function of contextual (non-marginal) vestibular and proprioceptive
information. Simons, Wang, and Roddenberry (2002, 521) found that object
recognition is not properly or fully investigated by holding the subject stationary
and rotating the display, as happens in almost every other study of this kind. In
their experiments, they had subjects actually move to change viewpoints, and
this movement contributed to how the theme presented itself within the thematic
context, a change in perspective of the theme in the context (cf. Gallagher 1995).
Hollingworth and Henderson (2002) indicate what Gurwitsch would call
positional index when they describe consciousness of scenes and memory. They
hypothesize that in “scene perception” abstracted representations are spatially
indexed so that an “object file” is formed, which involves visual short term
memory and conceptual short term memory. This information is then indexed in
a long term memory object file. Noting again the caveats mentioned above about
the ambiguity of “scene” and “context” in these experiments, one can easily see
how the position of the theme in the thematic context, orientation, perspective
and characterization of the theme is the topic of these experiments and
hypotheses.
The organizational principle of relevancy not only connects the thematic
context with the theme, but it also unifies content within the thematic context
itself. For example, in the garden the wandering, sniffing dog may be the theme
while the garden setting is presented as the relevant environment for this theme.
But the items in the garden are (non-centralized) gestalts that “hang together” in
relevancy with each other for the theme. Further research, perhaps along the
lines of Pylyshyn and associates, might investigate the nature and limits of this
intra-dimensional connection, in the same way that the intra-dimensional
connection of functional significance among constituents of the theme has been
investigated (Gurwitsch 1964, 1966). Perhaps the items nearer to the theme,
meaning more clearly or more intensely relevant to it, have a “tighter” or more
compacted organizational unity than those items in more “remote zones” from
the theme. The results might be interpreted in light of improving thematic
attention to past events or activities (remembering), so that strategies for
increasing relevance of current events yield better attention to these events once
they are temporally past. Another possibility is interpreting results in light of
depression or attention deficit disorders or other maladies that may respond
positively to the directed enhancement of contextualization for thematic
attention. For example, as noted above, Watkins, Teasdale and Williams (2003)
manipulated context to determine the effect on how sad moods are maintained.
Examining current experimental paradigms, the preceding has shown how
thematic context is already established as another dimension in the sphere of
attention, in addition to the theme and margin, if one looks at the results within a
gestalt-phenomenological framework.
Theme, Context, and Margin in the Sphere of Attention

I believe attention research, and research on memory, perception and the
associated neurology, are all meandering toward a genuinely new and important
paradigmatic breakthrough wherein all three dimensions in the sphere of
attention will be recognized as such, even if problematically, which is to say
hypothetically and experimentally. This is not the kind of “dispersal of
attention” or “countermodel” to selective attention that Crary (1999, 368)
discusses. The sphere of attention does not indicate a fragmentation of the
theory of thematic attention, but a contextualization of it. In an editorial in the
journal Psychological Research, Bernhard Hommel, Richard Ridderinkhof and
Jan Theeuwes (2002, 215) acknowledge that “In some way, people must be able
to configure and re-configure their cognitive system in a way that task-relevant
information is picked up, maintained and stored efficiently, and that appropriate
actions are prepared, planned, and then executed in the light of the available
information. But we are only beginning to understand how this configuration
works.” I end this chapter with some intriguing implicitly articulated
breakthroughs in experimental paradigm, language, or attitude in attention
research today. The authors would not see their results in the light that is now to
be shed upon them, but in my opinion these experimenters address the three
dimensions in the sphere of attention and this is noteworthy.
Some experimenters are using virtual reality technology to bring context
back into the laboratory and into attention research. But since the virtual reality
approach is something between the well-established classical reductionist
approach and the holistic natural world approach, these experimenters must
argue their case against skeptics such as Jan Koenderink (1999). Virtual reality
experimenters Bülthoff and van Veen (2001, 234) write, “The classical
psychophysical methods that are used to investigate perception are characterized
by the use of well-controlled but, compared to the real world, strongly simplified
laboratory stimuli such as dots, plaid patterns, or random-dot stereograms. These
abstracted stimuli often bear little resemblance to those occurring in the real
world, but are nevertheless very useful for identifying low-level perceptual
mechanisms. The study of higher-level cognitive behaviors such as object

recognition, visual scene analysis, and navigation requires a different
methodology.” These other “cognitive behaviors” tend to point to the activity of
contextual and marginal consciousness. These experimenters take the usual
projection or monitor display and make it feel more like the subject is in a real
physical environment, e.g., the city of Tübingen. The virtual environment is
created using special panoramic screen displays and feedback loops between the
subject’s movements and perceptions, and the stimulus. Bülthoff and van Veen
stress that the virtual environment is not a substitute for the real environment,
and that there are limitations in the paradigm, such as incompleteness, feedback
delays, and distortions. Yet they argue that a finding in classical psychophysics
or in a natural world experiment is substantiated when careful virtual reality
techniques are used, and I think they are right. Also, results in the virtual reality
approach can be verified using the other techniques. As noted in Chapter One,
the problem in general with current attention research is the relevance of the
results.
Bülthoff and van Veen (2001, 245) point out that most of the “extra”
parameters in the classical psychophysical reductionist approach, concerning
what I would call contextual and marginal consciousness, are purposely
equalized so that they are functionally invisible: “The level at which all these
other parameters are kept is often best described by ‘zero.’ However, perturbing
the stimulus around ‘zero’ is not a very ecologically interesting condition….A
much more relevant approach, at least in terms of understanding perception and
behavior in natural environments, would be to set all nonvaried stimulus aspects
equal to a level typical of the natural environment. That obviously poses a
stimulus-control problem because the number of parameters that would need to
be considered is unimaginatively large. However, what we gain with such an
approach is that we can assume that the perturbations in which we are interested
are studied in a realistic context. In essence, we have greatly improved stimulus
relevance.” By putting the subjects into the environment, at least virtually, the
experimenters are acknowledging the importance of the margin in the sphere of
attention (marginal consciousness of the stream, body, world). For example the
subject may be asked to move within the virtual reality of streets and alleys
using a stationary bicycle with steering and appropriate peddle-resistance. Also,
the experimenters are acknowledging the importance of context in obvious
ways, since the dynamic scene analysis that might surround thematic attention is
their reason for moving beyond the classical psychophysical approach in the
first place.
Experiments on negative priming also assume the existence of three

dimensions in the sphere of attention. The priming is negative because
contextual consciousness for achievement of the target interferes with achieve-
ment. In negative priming, the theme as target is achieved more slowly if the
current target is relevant for a previous target that was to be ignored. For
instance, the word TREE is presented at t1, and the word MOTHER is presented
as a distractor (that is, it is presented marginally). At t2, the achievement of the
word DAUGHTER as target is slowed because of the previous marginal
presentation of the word MOTHER. If the association between DAUGHTER
and MOTHER is strong in the sphere of attention, which is likely, then there is a
tension at t2 between the two, which shows up as increased reaction time (a
negative priming). As seen above, this kind of association, as between “supper”
and “dinner,” is learned and is a saliency in the sphere of attention (Nelson,
Zhang and McKinney 2001). The relevance between the presented words
MOTHER and DAUGHTER interfere with achievement of the target at t2
because that category of words (or objects) was actively marginalized at t1. I
give a more thorough account of negative priming effects elsewhere (Arvidson
2003b). The point here is that these documented effects of negative priming
cannot be interpreted without assuming the existence of two other dimensions in
the sphere of attention. In fact, the experiments cannot even be designed without
admitting that there is context and margin. Michael Dean, Daniel Bub, and
Michael Masson (2001) include the notion of relation (which more correctly
turns out to be relevance) in the title of their article examining the effects just
discussed: “Interference from Related Items in Object Identification.” Of course
the authors do not explicitly acknowledge contextual consciousness but instead
refer to “dynamic, memory-based representations.”
As noted in the last section, the experimental paradigm of temporal
contextual cuing is promising since it forces the researcher to consider the effect
of non-focal, contextually relevant information on the target. For example,
Olson and Chun (2001, 1300) report that temporality in the context can facilitate
or cue focal attention: “This paradigm, termed temporal contextual cuing,
involves searching for a target in a rapidly changing stream of distractors. The
sequential organization of the distractors preceding the target contains invariant
temporal information.” Subjects were shown objects on a screen in a certain
rhythm, a subtle but invariant temporal sequencing. The subjects were not asked
to attend to the rhythm, and in fact, the contents for the sequence were present in
the experiment as distractors (i.e., as marginal). Still, subjects somehow
presented the rhythm contextually and this facilitated the relevance of this
stream of “distractors” (as context) for attention to the target theme. That is, the
subject was likely to form a temporal context (as anticipation) for the direction
in attention to a particular point in time or a particular location for target
achievement. Beyond the possibility of interpreting these results as establishing
two distinct dimensions in the sphere of attention, theme and thematic context,
this particular experiment is fascinating because the marginal dimension in
attending is also part of the experimental paradigm since the stream of images
presented distractors, content irrelevant to the theme. In other words, subjects
were asked to process information in the three dimensions of the sphere of
attention at once, which always happens anyway, but in this experiment the
dimensions were all part of the paradigm. The thematic context in which targets
appeared was (eventually) presented as relevant to the target; exactly what is
meant by “contextual consciousness.” Beyond the initial theoretical framework
of interpreting results in three dimensions rather than just one, each dimension
can be further defined and refined. In this case, Olson and Chun affirm an
important observation Gurwitsch makes about the thematic context. They report
that part of the temporal sequence that was closer to the target was more salient
and provided greater cuing than parts at the beginning of the sequence, although
it does not provide all the cuing (p. 1309). This accords with Gurwitsch’s
observation that the thematic context often features some gradation or difference
within the content of the context with respect to the theme, depending on the
nearness or remoteness of the content from the theme. That is, the content
closest to the theme in terms of relevancy is more intensely related to it than that
which is farther away or is only implied by pointing references (Gurwitsch
1964, 338, 353, 379; 1966, 205).
A recent report by Michael Kane et al. (2001) in the Journal of
Experimental Psychology again shows how one set of experiments can establish
the three dimensions in the sphere of attention when the results are viewed
through an adjusted lens. These authors examine how working memory is
related to attentional control. In attention research, working memory is
important because it is a convenient way for researchers to describe the active
maintenance of information outside the focus of attention. This sounds like
contextual consciousness (and perhaps marginal consciousness), and it is. Kane
et al. claim that working memory capacity is a function of “controlled attention”
(see also, e.g., Rockstroh and Schweizer 2001; and McElree 2001). This
intriguing statement shows that the function of attention has superceded the
limits of achievement of the target or theme, since “controlled attention” is also
responsible for distinguishing relevancy and irrelevancy with respect to the
target. “Responsible for distinguishing” here might be too strong a phrase as we

will see later when we take up the function of the halo. But these kind of
experiments are distinguishing relevancy with respect to the target, which is
context, and irrelevancy, which is margin. Kane et al. (2001, 180) write, “By
‘controlled attention’ we generally mean an executive control capability; that is,
an ability to effectively maintain stimulus, goal, or context information in an
active, easily accessible state in the face of interference, to effectively inhibit
goal irrelevant stimuli or responses, or both” (emphasis added). The way I read
this there is a sphere of attention with the focus as center; and whether the
dynamism here is called “controlled attention” or “working memory,”
nonetheless theme, thematic context, and margin are distinguished (Arvidson
2004). Implicitly referring to all three regions, Kane, et al (2001, 170) conclude
“Thus, coherent and goal oriented behavior [thematic attention] in interference-
rich conditions [margin] requires both the active maintenance of relevant
information [context] and the blocking of or inhibition of irrelevant information
[margin].” Later we will see that the “blocking or inhibition” are functions of the
marginal halo.
There are a number of other attention and memory studies that could be
interpreted similarly. Todd Braver et al. (2001) examined “context processing”
in older adults. They present an important formulation of what context
processing is and a connectionist computational-based model that coordinates
nicely with a three dimension sphere of attention. Since it is computer-based
modeling, the authors define context in terms of “internal representation,” a
Cartesian formulation which is common in cognitive science but philosophically
unfortunate. But the important thing is the centrality they give to the concept of
presented relevance, which is what contextual consciousness is about. They
(Braver, et al 2001, 747) write:
We define context as any task-relevant information that is

internally represented in such a form that it can bias process-
ing in the pathways responsible for task performance. Goal
representations are one form of such information, which have
their influence on planning and overt behavior. However, we
use the more general term context to include representations
that may have their effect earlier in the processing stream, on
interpretive or attentional processes. For example, in the
Stroop task, the context provided by the task instructions must
be actively represented and maintained to bias attentional
allocation and response selection toward the ink color

dimension of a visually processed word. Thus, context
representations may include a specific prior stimulus or the
result of processing a sequence of stimuli, as well as task
instructions or a particular intended action.
They also discuss the selection of task-relevant information as context (Braver,

et al 2001, 749–750). Is this not contextual consciousness, the selection of what
is relevant for the theme? In any event, the breadth of what counts as context for
these researchers (e.g., sequence, task instructions) and the specific requirement
that context involves relevancy is refreshing and noteworthy. Braver et al. divide
cognitive processing into three “cognitive domains” or “cognitive functions”:
attention, active memory, and inhibition. Understood correctly, these three can
coordinate roughly with thematic attention, contextual consciousness, and
marginal consciousness. Context on their model is a common mechanism
underlying the three functions, but operating differently in each dimension
depending on the conditions of that domain. So, for example, there is no
particular mechanism for inhibition (being present to what is irrelevant as
irrelevant), since “contextual representations” would govern or gate what is
relevant or irrelevant.
What is significant is that the model that Braver et al. (2001, 758) propose
suggests “that context processing is a central mechanism that underlies both
working memory and inhibitory function.” In other words, since working
memory includes focal attention, “context processing” underlies all three
dimensions of the sphere of attention. This is true only if “context processing” is
understood as association through the distinct organizational principles of what
presents itself in each of the three dimensions differentiated within the sphere of
attention. These organizational principles are gestalt-coherence of the theme,
unity by relevancy of the thematic context, and the existential organization
(stream, embodiment, world) of the margin. In other words, their term “context
processing” seems to refer to gestalt principles in all three dimensions, not just
context. Braver et al. would likely disagree with my way of putting it. My main
point is that their experiments and modeling of the results support the notion of
three dimensions in a sphere of attention.
A further comment on Braver et al. (2001) is required. The theory of
cognitive control that they propose can be understood in terms of the marginal
halo (see also ironic processes theory in thought suppression, Wegner 1994;
Wenzlaff et al., 2001; and contextual control of function transformation,
Dougher et al., 2002). Braver et al. mean for the model to represent the possible
processing control of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. What is interesting here
is the way that what I would call halo is thought to function. They identify three
main features of the model (p. 749). First, there is “a strong recurrent
connectivity” in the context so that information can be actively maintained. This
means that there is contextual consciousness of gestalts that are associated in
unity by relevancy with each other, but also with the theme. And this latter is the
second main feature of the model—“a feedback connection to the direct
pathway….which can modulate the flow of processing within the direct
pathway.” This aspect of the gestalt-connection between the theme and thematic
context is the maintenance of the relevancy between them, what Braver et al.
call a “biasing action” since other possible themes are inhibited from focal
attention, depending upon the strength of this connection. Third, presumably at
the other end of the contextual associations, there is a “gating mechanism” that
regulates noise or other irrelevant inputs, thereby “protecting” contextual
relevancy for the theme. To put it more in gestalt-phenomenological terms of the
sphere of attention, marginal items are co-presented as irrelevant from the
perspective of the marginal halo. The reader will recall that the halo is the in-
between, the locus of non-central, pre-reflective subjectivity (this will be
discussed more in Chapter Five). It is in-between the context as the dimension of
relevancy and the margin as irrelevancy, and related to both. The halo facing in,
so to speak, is the second feature described in Braver et al.’s model, where the
content break with relevancy biases the maintenance of the theme. The halo
facing out is the third feature described, where irrelevant content is distinguished
from what is related to the theme, but not relevant to it. In other words, these
authors are describing the following functions in the sphere of attention: the
gestalt-connection of unity by relevancy among items in the thematic context,
and between the theme and the thematic context, and the connection of
irrelevance between the margin on the one hand, and the theme and its thematic
context on the other. The connection of irrelevance implies some middle
process, which I would call the halo, which for these authors is a gating
mechanism. But given the role of the halo in subjectivity as discussed later, this
“gating mechanism” stipulation is too prosaic.
Klaus Oberauer (2002) offers another three part model of cognitive
processing, especially referring to working memory. His intention is to explain
the limited capacity of focal attention and accessibility to information outside
the focus. Oberauer proposes that working memory is a concentric structure of
representations with three functionally distinct regions. I will not attempt here to
square this proposal with what we have already said about memory research and
attention, or to explain it in detail in terms of the sphere of attention. However, it
is worth noting that one would not have to embellish too much to start to see the
way that the three domains of irrelevancy, relevancy, and central focus are
indicated in this proposal. With some work his three regions might be
coordinated respectively with margin, context, and theme. I will insert the
relevant terms into Oberauer’s (2002, 412) passage to give some idea how they
might coordinate:
(1) The activated part [marginal halo] of long-term memory

[marginal horizon] can serve, among other things, to memo-
rize information over brief periods for later recall.
(2) The region of direct access [context] holds a limited
number of chunks available to be used in ongoing cognitive
processes.
(3) The focus of attention [theme] holds at any time the one
chunk that is actually selected as the object of the next
cognitive operation.
Keep in mind that Oberauer’s intentions in the study are different from those
here, yet this is another example of the close ties between memory research and
the possible future direction of attention research. Since context and margin are
assumed in memory research by default, attention researchers should naturally
be involved in memory research, and some are. Ultimately, the proper
identification of these two processes as part of the sphere of attention makes
attention research on thematic attention more relevant to human life.
Above we saw that “attentional set” is contextual consciousness. Similarly,
Gesine Dreisbach, Hilde Haider, and Rainer Kluwe (2002) examined prepara-
tory processes in task-switching. They found that in preparing to switch tasks, a
preparation to shift attention to a new theme or target, the preparation itself
inhibited distraction from the new theme. The preparation is equivalent to
contextual consciousness, the inhibition is marginal consciousness (in that
distractors are presented as irrelevant), and the achievement of the new target is
thematic attention. Citing clinical evidence about phases in object realization,
neurologist Jason Brown (1999, 148) concludes rightly that “Phases in the
actualization, from initial to final, are not preparatory to the object but are the
object.” In the same sense, processes that prepare achievement of the focus must
be included in any account of attention as the sphere of attention.
I am sure there are other descriptions in experiments on cognition, neurol-

ogy, and memory that seem to coordinate well with a three part sphere of
attention (e.g., Bichot 2001, 225). But my aim in this section was just to show
examples of how work currently being done might acknowledge what seems
plain to me. There is more to attention than the focus in attending, and whatever
this more is it is not reducible to memory. One of the main virtues of Braver et
al. (2001, 757) is that they explicitly define context such that it does not
necessarily coordinate with working memory, since the latter involves
identification, but “contextual processing” may not (see also Engle et al., 1999).
In general, attention researchers who maintain a narrow focus on the attentional
focus risk having the meaningful and relevant findings about human attending
stolen away from them by memory researchers. As noted before, memory
researchers define working memory to include attention, since they must
recognize item identification (attention) and context identification—the element
of time involved in memory exceeds any one theme, just as context exceeds the
theme.
Perhaps in psychology and cognitive science of attention it is time for the
same kind of paradigm shift that William Baum and others call for or have
announced in radical behaviorism. In “From Molecular to Molar: A Paradigm
Shift in Behavior Analysis” which appeared in the Journal of the Experimental
Analysis of Behavior, Baum questions the idea that experimenters can capture a
meaningful unit of behavior. Baum (2002, 100) writes “In the molar view, an
activity like building a house entails a pattern of activities such as pouring the
foundation, framing the structure, insulating, putting in windows and doors, and
finishing the interior. House construction seems like a unit only because it is
labeled as such, as one may call an episode of napping a nap or bout of walking
a walk. To a building contractor, construction of one house would seem more
like an episode of building than a discrete unit. Against the molecular view, one
might argue that behavioral chains sometimes bear little resemblance to
extended behavior in the real world. Is it plausible to treat obtaining a bachelor’s
degree as a behavioral chain?” One could also question the meaningfulness of
units in cognitive science: an attentional blink, a cue, reaction time in milli-
seconds, or a saccade. These only become meaningful within a context. This is
why this chapter has stressed contextual consciousness. Perhaps attention
researchers can take a cue from the controversy that Baum and his supporters
are raising in behavior analysis and at least raise the question of context more
explicitly. Baum argues that the molecular view of behavior views life as a time
line of discrete events, serially ordered. This sounds very close to a central
assumption in many paradigms in attention research. “To the molarist, such a

characterization, though possible, appears impoverished and to resemble little
the way people actually talk about their lives (i.e., inelegant and low on external
validity)” (Baum 2002, 111). Researchers sometimes note the need for
“ecological validity” (e.g., Pashler 2000), and I think they often strive to gain
“ecological validity,” for example, extending findings from two dimensional
drawings to drawings with more depth (Chua and Chun 2003), or noticing that
in the real world the observer may actively move in order to change a scene
rather than just that the scene moves while the subject is stationary (Simons,
Wang, and Roddenberry 2002). Still, this striving for ecological validity is often
too strongly counterbalanced by the need for clean rather than potentially messy
results, that is, by the need to focus on the focus rather than conceiving it as the
center of a sphere of attention.
Chapter Three
Transformations in Attending
For psychologists or philosophers of attention, the fun begins in the moment that
we realize attention is essentially dynamic. Attention is not as clear and distinct
as the example of the dog in the garden may lead one to believe. Although the
structure of the sphere of attention outlined above is invariant, the shape and
contents are dynamic. For example, was I not thematically attending to
something else before the dog? And after?
Suppose I fall into reverie and detach from thematically attending to the
dog, and instead start attending to the history of scholarship on René Descartes’
cogito argument. The dog is certainly not presented as context for this history,
and so consciousness of the dog is marginal, if the dog is still presented at all.
Suppose I then revert back to thematic attention to the dog, but now I attend to
the dog as a robot, playfully trying to see if Descartes is right in what he says
about animals such as dogs. This context replacement, and the previous reverie,
and the transformations between them are marvelously complex reorganizations
in the sphere of attention in all dimensions, and they happen with incredible
rapidity, usually easily and seamlessly. Still, there are certain organizational
principles in the sphere of attention that apply to the theme in distinction from
those that apply to the thematic context, and again in distinction from the
margin, and these organizational principles obtain no matter the clarity or
shiftiness of the content in these three dimensions. In addition to these unique
organizational principles within each dimension which have already been
discussed in the chapters above, we will see that there are common
transformation principles between the dimensions. The initial point here is that
the sphere of attention is a dynamic tension.
Although there is always thematic attention, contextual consciousness, and
marginal consciousness, the shape of each of these dimensions and the
connections between their contents can change substantially and radically in the
process of attending. So in answer to what some have argued (e.g., Strawson
1997), there is no holiday in attention whereby there are more or less long
periods of “non-consciousness” or theme-less existence (Arvidson 2000).
Adopting, expanding, and recontextualizing what Gurwitsch called “thematic
modifications” (1966, 223–267), I will delineate a number of ways in which the
sphere of attention is a process involving typical and regulated transformations
of presentation. Gurwitsch does not always neatly distinguish and sufficiently
amplify these types, but I do so to align Gurwitsch’s work with current research
on attention and with the hopes of sparking new research paradigms as discussed
56
Transformations in Attention 57
later. I will outline ten transformations in the sphere of attention falling within
four general types. I do not believe these are exhaustive but they should make a
good start for investigation by psychologists and philosophers. Of course, some
of these are already being researched. But the theoretical framework of a sphere
of attention enables useful interpretations of these findings. Proceeding through
each type of transformation, in the following I discuss how empirical research
might establish this taxonomy of transformations in attending and I stress some
practical possibilities associated with doing so.
By typical transformation I mean that there are certain distinguishable
directional and dimensional changes in the process of attending. What follows
are typical also in the sense that they are some of the less subtle transformations
in attending; many of them already have been studied explicitly or implicitly by
psychol-ogists and cognitive scientists. But there are almost certainly more types
possible than I articulate. There is not one type of attention transformation. I
emphasize this because current scholarship often does not. This means that when
one says “thematic attention” and “contextual consciousness” and “marginal
consciousness” these locutions are very generic ways of referring to how items
or content in each dimension of the sphere are processed. But they do not fully
capture the process of the attending process. The four general types of
transformation described here are: contextual shifts (specifically enlargement,
contraction, elucidation, obscuration, and context replacement), simple thematic
shifts, radical thematic shifts (specifically restructuring, singling out, and
synthesis), and margin to theme capture.
By regulated transformation I mean that a gestalt may admit transforma-
tions of a specific type or types. Gurwitsch (1966, 248; see Husserl 1970, 166–
167) puts forward the general transformation law—“To every phenomenal
datum there correspond others into which the former can be ‘transformed’.” If as
Gurwitsch argues, the “field of consciousness” is structured by gestalt-
connections, it makes sense that shifts or transformations in the “field” should
be law-like. The idea of rule-bound transformations in attending is not
unprecedented, and is found in psychoanalysis, Kantian transcendentalism, and
Cartesian Regulae. Gurwitsch’s approach to the lawfulness in attending is
different since his focus is on the theme and its context. Gurwitsch (1966, 223)
states, “[D]efinite essential possibilities for thematic modifications are pre-
traced by the peculiar nature of the theme and the structural organization of its
constituents, by the place which the theme has in its field, by the specific
structure of the field, and its distinctiveness within the domain of the co-given.
The possibility of thematic modifications is grounded in the essential situation
that the theme has constituents and lies within a field.” The point is that not
every theme will admit every type of transformation. For example, while almost
every theme will admit what is called below “restructuring” and also
“synthesis,” not every one will admit singling out” (Gurwitsch 1966, 240–241).
One cannot single out the perception of red, since it always needs a surface with
which to be perceived. Particular transformations are not inevitable; each case is
contingent upon internal conditions (what Gurwitsch calls the growth and
development of the subject’s “stream of experience,”) and external conditions
(see Gurwitsch 1964, 103). However, the fact that the theme and thematic
context are structured in such a way that they may undergo a particular trans-
formation is an essential or “eidetic” possibility (Gurwitsch 1966, 248).
Each transformation has been characterized in simple terms in order to
distinguish them, but it does not take much reflection to recognize that there are
intermediate possibilities within each specific transformation, as well as
numerous hybrid combinations. The examples are meant to convey that attention
is lively and essentially processural, and that these transformations occur almost
instantly and in infinite variations and combinations, depending upon the
content involved, and the internal conditions of the sphere of attention and
external conditions. The transformations in attending described are not
exhaustive of the possibilities, and transformations can be so rapid and varied
that trying to point out typical transformations may seem like a fool’s game.
That is, how can attention be “frozen” and inspected properly if it is by nature a
process, and a lively, messy one at that? But I hope the following will dispel this
skepticism. As psychologists researching attention continue to bring context into
focus, they will provide additional justification for a taxonomy of attention
transformations (Arvidson 1998). In fact, psychologists are already providing
empirical evidence of these attention shifts.
How Context Shifts in Attending

The five kinds of contextual shifts described below are enlargement,
contraction, elucidation, obscuration, and context replacement. A defining
characteristic of these transformations is the duration of the theme through the
changes. This duration of the theme makes this group of attention shifts the least
radical type of transformation in attending. The theme remains essentially
unchanged throughout the transformation, which means that this type of
transformation most commonly involves a well-formed stable theme. Note that a
change in the orientation of the theme within the thematic context is not thereby
a substantial change in the content of thematic attention itself (Gurwitsch 1966,
223–227). Also, in some sense enlargement and contraction are inversely

related, as are elucidation and obscuration. But this inversion is not linear or
mathematical. That is, enlargement and contraction, for example, are not oppo-
sites; with respect to their effect in the sphere of attention they work in generally
complementary directions of revelation.
Enlargement
Enlargement is when the thematic context for the theme grows or expands
in significance while the theme remains essentially unchanged (Gurwitsch 1966,
223–227). Researchers and others who adopt a “lens” metaphor of attention
think of this process as “zooming out” (Eriksen and St. James 1986; Pasto and
Burack 2002). But this locution is vague since it would also include the much
different process of synthesis discussed below. Enlargement of material
relevancy between the theme and thematic context is a possibility of almost any
well-formed theme. Gurwitsch (1966, 224) writes:
In conjunction with the broadening perceptual field in which

the thing is situated, the relations and relational possibilities
multiply. Or the horizon of memories belonging to a certain
thing broadens: again the same thing continues being given,
but it has acquired a new ‘meaning,’ a new significance for the
whole of my life, it appears in a new light; I see it—the
noematically same thing—in a different attitude. Only its
perspective has changed; it itself remains identically the same.
The modifications concern only its history, say; or, perhaps,
the thing appears now for the first time under the perspective
of my life-history.
We implore those we think are insensitive or narrow-minded to realize the

implications of their actions or positions, or to take off the blinders and expand
their horizons with respect to a certain state of affairs. Teachers ask students to
exercise the process of enlargement when writing term papers, so that the
student’s thesis bites into something of wider significance than the frame
proposed. With the dog as theme and its safe boundaries within the garden as
context, the context as the dog sniffs around could enlarge. For example, with
the dog as theme, the context could expand to include contextual consciousness
of the general control I have over the dog, and this enlarges the relevant frame
for this theme.
This enlargement, like all enlargements within our definition, is effected

along lines of implication already dictated by the theme as it is attended to
within the thematic context. The material relevancy is enlarged, not switched.
But enlargement of the context can be a significant transformation. For example,
the theme of dog has a different look and appears within the thematic context
with a different orientation when this context is enlarged to feature “control.” So
Gurwitsch advises against thinking of enlargement as simply zooming-out be-
yond what is already attended to, leaving everything else the same, but just
adding more relevant items. Gurwitsch (1966, 226) writes, “The expression
‘increase (or decrease) of field-components’ is to be construed with a certain
caution: it must not be taken to mean that further components are simply
superadded and the previously given possible connections remain what they
have been all along, while new ones appear in addition to them.” What is
important to remember about enlargement (and all transformations of this type)
is that the theme remains essentially the same through these transformations in
the sphere of attention; the theme is still the dog, although perhaps appearing
under a different light or perspective (on this change of perspective see
Gurwitsch 1964, 364).
Enlargement is also essentially involved in certain types of aesthetic
experience where the relevance of the aesthetic object in the thematic context
rapidly and persistently enlarges (Arvidson 1997). In admiring a painting or a
flower, it is possible for the previous context to expand swiftly, although not all
at once. If this enlargement is rapid and persistent then this event could
constitute a significant aesthetic experience. Each successive contextual
expansion, each more meaningful signification of the work, almost immediately
gives way to the next; each enlargement in attentional context is founded upon
the previous one, although not tied down by it. This type of aesthetic experience
is momentary but not fragmentary. That is, it is a committed perceptual
experience involving the subject as embodied attention in a radical transforma-
tion of the contextual dimension, even though the theme endures. The aesthetic
experience slows, is suspended, or ends when a particular contextual
configuration is more or less fixed in place as background for the previously
aesthetic object as theme; for example, when the painting is presented as part of
its historical context, and this context “sticks” as background for the theme.
Controlling variables in research of such a transformation of contextual con-
sciousness may not be easy, but the pay-off, say for public education or cultural
enrichment programs, could be considerable. For example, Dacher Keltner and
Jonathan Haidt (2003) examine how awe experiences involve vastness of focus
and a need for accommodation. The vastness of focus refers to synthesis of the
theme, and the need for accommodation (which they argue may or may not be
satisfied) refers to enlargement of the thematic context in order to meaningfully
situate the stimulus. They relate their findings to morality, spirituality, and
aesthetics.
Enlargement may be operative in what is called “social attention” or “joint
attention” (Arvidson 2003b). This research usually investigates how infants or
young children developmentally enter into social attention more readily (Rochat
1999). For example, they may more readily attend to what others are attending
to (e.g., a toy), and then also monitor the other while attending to the toy as
theme. Enlargement can help account for this transformation in attending since
the attention to the other is now included as part of the context for the theme (the
toy) whereas before it was not. Using adults who can report on the transfor-
mation in attending in a controlled environment may help establish enlargement
as a key part of the process of social attention, or as one of the strategies for
social attention.
Contraction
Contraction is when the thematic context for the theme narrows in
significance. Gurwitsch (1966, 224) writes, “Narrowing of the thematic field
[context] purports a narrowing of the horizon, the theme loses connecting links,
the variety of its material relations is reduced.” He notes that this happens less
often than enlargement. The richness of the contextual content is narrowed and
pruned. Gurwitsch offers no examples, but one might imagine a number of
situations that involve disappointment as a contraction of the context. Also the
theme may become so intensively engaging that the thematic context is
narrowed. Fatigued obsession in thematic attention to a problem of some sort
can be accompanied with contraction of the thematic context for the theme (see
Rees and Lavie 2001; and Gurwitsch 1964, 336). For example, attention to the
theme is so intense that the thematic context diminishes in relevance. Or also
imagine being present at an air show, watching the featured jet circling and
banking. Then the jet slowly flies very low over the crowd, bringing a looming,
overwhelming roar. As the crescendo increases to its almost unbearable
pinnacle, the thematic context, whatever it was, most likely condenses and
becomes homogeneous. As the crescendo decreases when the plane has passed,
the context may enlarge.
Contraction may be involved in what we call boredom or monotony, as well
as such serious dispositions as depression (Jacobson, et al 1996). The thematic
context shrinks so that relevance of the theme is insignificant. This

transformation could become habitual so that perhaps any theme and its context
becomes shallow and almost flat. Research by Andrew MacLeod and Eva
Salaminiou (2001) suggests that in depressive thinking a contracted relevancy of
a positive future (pessimism) gives rise to the reduced ability to anticipate
positive experiences. In other words, depending on preceding conditions and the
current shape of the sphere of attention, depressive behavior may have
contextual contraction as its key transformation (and hence enlargement or
synthesis as its therapy, e.g., Gasper and Clore 2002). Scott Terry and Jennifer
Burns (2001) produce evidence that supports the hypothesis that repressors
contract the relevant context when the theme threatens self-evaluation (see also
Mendolia, Moore and Tesser 1996). When the focus in attending gets too
“personal,” the relevancy in contextual consciousness contracts, thereby
flattening the significance of the stimulus. Watkins, Teasdale, and Williams
(2003) used contextual questions to manipulate the maintenance of sad moods.
In particular, they were interested in trying to increase the awareness of context
to reduce the sad mood. “We used contextual questions designed to increase
awareness of a wider temporal and personal context relevant to current mood
(e.g., ‘How long does any mood last?’ and ‘How does this one moment fit into
my whole life?’)” (Watkins et al., 2003, 459). This enlargment of the content of
the context is an increase in the extent and value of information that is relevant
for the theme, and it was found to have a positive effect on depressed moods.
Contraction of context seems to be involved in the movement from planning
an action to controlling the action, especially in uncertain environmental
contexts. The “spread” of relevant content contracts as action goes from
planning to control, such as planning to pick something up that is vaguely
oriented against a background and then controlling the reach as the hand gets
close (Glover and Dixon 2001). In other words, what is relevant for picking up
the item shrinks as the hand gets closer. Contraction in the context may also be a
part of expert training in certain movements or activities. Stephan Lendowski
and Kim Kirsner (2000, 296) report a real-world example of what is probably
contextual contraction in the attention training investigated by Heiko Hecht and
Dennis Proffitt. “Hecht and Proffitt (1995) identified expediency among expert
waitresses and bartenders, who were asked to indicate the expected surface
orientation of liquid in a tilted container. Despite their extensive relevant
experience, the experts predicted surface orientation to deviate more from the
horizontal than did unpracticed control subjects. This bias probably reflected an
occupational emphasis on preventing spillage, which, in turn, may have focused
attention during skill acquisition on the relation between liquid and container,
rather than on that between liquid and environment.” Instead of the enlarged
(environmental) relevance for the liquid, the training or the strategy for success
in carrying liquid appears to have involved a contracted (container) relevance
for the liquid.
If enlargement and contraction could be operationalized and examined
systematically, information about this increase or decrease in relevance of the
context for the theme may be of practical use in obvious ways like those
mentioned above. Those not accustomed to appreciating culture or the arts, or
professing and practicing dislike of other cultures or arts, no matter how widely
celebrated and appreciated, may be prepared to do so more successfully by
training the sphere of attention to enlarge appropriately. For example,
experiments by Quinn and Olson (2001) demonstrate how researchers use
contextual contraction to manipulate judgments, in this case judgments of
discrimination. Also, investigation of enlargement may have other social
implications, not only in joint attention of infants and young children but in
adult lives as well, e.g., for those who are shy, chronically narcissistic, or also in
commercial applications such as sales presentations where consciousness of the
wider significance or implications of consumer objections dictates the nature of
the next stage of the presentation. Teaching and learning could benefit from
investigations into how enlargement and contraction work, and their function in
the sphere of attention. The teacher preparing or executing a lesson plan might
economically involve enlargement of context in the lesson, and devise ways to
fight contraction (when it is undesirable) for his or her audience. The somewhat
engaged student might take charge of their education and do the same thing
from their side!
Elucidation
Elucidation involves the clearing, to some extent, of an obscurity in the
thematic context. In distinguishing enlargement from elucidation, Gurwitsch
(1966, 224–225) writes, “Along with these modifications must also be
considered those in which the thematic field is not enriched by increase of
components not previously given but in which components which had appeared
in a certain obscurity, nebulosity, and confusedness become elucidated,
clarified, and determined to a higher degree than before.” Enlargement broadens
the thematic context along the lines dictated by the theme-thematic context
gestalt-connection of relevance. Elucidation clarifies what is already presented
contextually. The thematic context in any one case is never completely clarified.
Gurwitsch repeatedly states throughout his works that the context for the theme
always presents at least some obscurity or nebulosity. “There is always obscurity
somewhere in the field….That the thematic field is always affected by obscurity
and contains components only roughly outlined is the result of its not being
precisely delimited but fading into the indefinite. Yet this ‘indefinite’ is always
related to the field; for the obscurity in question is not just any obscurity but one
which affects a particular thematic field” (Gurwitsch 1966, 226). Elucidation,
therefore, is never completely successful, just as enlargement of the context is
always limited by a “more” that is only indicated through what is already
contextually presented.
Like enlargement, elucidation is a common type of transformation in the
sphere of attention. For example, the relevance of the title of a poem or film,
when this title is thematic, may be somewhat obscured or dim. Yet as one dwells
on the title the relevance of the title within the context of the work becomes
more clear. The theme may be significantly reoriented within the thematic
context, and the contextual perspective under which it is attended to may be
immensely sharpened, but the material relevancy in this case between the theme
and context has not changed substantially. The thematic context is clarified but
not broadened. Again, the theme remains essentially constant as the thematic
context changes. Elucidation is easily seen in social encounters. What little I
know of my new colleague may become more clear as I begin to talk to her. As
long as the context is not replaced, in this case it is a matter of clearing up the
already pre-traced relevancies. Certain meditation practices may also involve
elucidation of the thematic context as part of the accomplishment. It is possible
that elucidation is one of the essential attentional shifts involved in the Buddhist
practice of mindfulness-awareness since this practice seems to involve some
clearing up of the context with respect to what is momentarily given as theme,
as well as precise attention to the theme (cf. Varela et al., 1991, 79). Discussing
the method of shamatha-vipashyana meditation, Jeremy Haywood (1998, 612)
exclaims that “Mindfulness is just paying attention.” He goes on to say that
mindfulness-awareness is the kind of attention that air traffic controllers need.
“They need to be able to pay very incrementally precise attention to their own
screen and the planes that they are directly responsible for—mindfulness. But as
well they need to have a constant sense of the broad picture of the airspace
altogether—awareness” (Hayward 1998, 613; see also Wallace 1999, 177). And
the more clarified such awareness becomes, in the practice of mindfulness-
awareness, the more elucidated is the context of attention.
Not all insightful problem solving involves elucidation (Arvidson 1997),

but some appears to. James MacGregor, Thomas Ormerod, and Edward
Chronicle (2001) examined a process model of performance on the nine-dot
problem. They suggest that salient information from unsuccessful attempts are
retained in further attempts in a way that emphasizes these alternatives in the
thematic context of solving the problem (cf. with Ohlsson 1992, who describes
this “constraint relaxation” in the nine-dot problem as more akin to what I would
call synthesis). These “alternative operators” (p. 192) are what become nearer or
more clearly presented in the thematic context than others; they become more
relevant. Elucidation also seems apparent in other realms. Louis Lippman, Ivan
Sucharski, and Kristine Bennington (2001) found that adding context to a pun in
a way that elucidates the context led to greater perceived humor. Irit
Hershkowitz et al. (2001) investigated the effects of “mental context reinstate-
ment” on children’s accounts of sexual abuse. Mental context reinstatement is an
interview technique that guides the interviewee to reconstruct the setting in
which the event occurred. In this case, it was used in forensic interviews with
alleged victims. What is important here is the practical application of contextual
elucidation in recall, a kind of probing and training of contextual consciousness.
Investigating elucidation could be part of a research agenda that examines
how this transformation in attending is involved in everyday decision-making.
There is extensive literature on decision-making and choice but it is relatively
disconnected from the attention research literature. Examination of this
transformation could form a bridge because clarification of the context for a
state of affairs as theme would appear to be an essential part of the decision-
making process. After deliberation we say, “The decision is clear.” What we
mean is, “Between alternatives, this choice has the clearest context, it is most
justifiable within the relevant context, this choice ties strongly to that context.”
For example, Matthew Sharps and Sandy Martin (2002) investigated “mindless”
decision-making as a failure of contextual reasoning, and by implication,
“mindful” decision-making as a success of elucidating context. They found that
providing subjects with “relevant information on the immediate context of the
decision” elucidated the context for decision making and significantly helped
subjects recognize negative quality decisions (Sharps and Martin 2002, 274). In
these experiments, the additional contextual information amounted to a kind of
elucidation in the contextual dimension of the sphere of attention, possibly
involving an intra-contextual shift, which emphasized what was relevant for the
theme (for the decision), rather than leaving it obscure in relation to the theme or
more remote from it. This research is about the quality of the choice, so is only
marginally akin to forced-choice conditions in attention research, since these are

usually about reaction time. There are, of course, many other practical
applications. For example, a large part of successful leadership appears to in-
volve “clear vision” as an elucidation of context, not just “vision.”
Obscuration
Obscuration hides or covers over the relevance of the thematic context for
the theme. The general lines of demarcation of relevance transform from being
multiple to being only a few, and the more clarified context becomes obscured,
dim, nebulous, less definite and defined. One interesting example of obscuration
is what psychoanalysts would call repression. I can attend to my recent boorish
behavior in the context of my fundamental insecurities, perhaps as pointed out
by a trusted friend or counselor. I can also admit that what he or she says is a
fact. Suppose at this point the theme is my boorish character and is attended to
within the context of my fundamental insecurities, and the material relevancy
pertaining between the theme and thematic context is somewhat clear and
elucidated. If repression becomes operative, and is not absolutely complete, then
the next moment can involve obscuring, dimming, or confusing the clear
connections into rough and nebulous ones, so that I no longer give much weight
to the significance of my behavior; the significance is becoming repressed. In
other words, repression can also be described as a transformation in attending.
Obscuration differs from contraction because the breadth of the context is not
significantly reduced in obscuration, just the number or strength of lines of
connection. Obscuration never completely covers over the relevance of the
theme for the thematic context.
Obscuration may play a role in memory. James Worthen and Virginia
Wood (2001) examined the disruptive effect of bizarreness on memory for
contextual details. They argue that it is not the case that bizarre events are less
memorable as a whole, for example as a kind of attenuation of the intensity of
contextual consciousness as a whole. But rather they report that “the present
data indicate that parts of bizarre events are remembered well, but out of context
and with improper relations between parts” (Worthen and Wood 2001, 543).
That is, associations that mark the unity by relevancy of the context for the
theme are obscured so that the appropriate context transforms, becoming less
appropriate; hence the possibility of false memories. Another way of putting it is
that information that ought to be quite relevant to the event becomes much less
relevant or even only remotely implied through obscuration in the contextual
dimension, and if the obscuration is extensive enough then the gestalt-
connection of that particular context for the theme is disrupted—“bizarreness

disrupts ‘binding’ of elements within events” (Worthen and Wood 2001, 543).
Researching elucidation and obscuration as correlations could prove
beneficial. For example, so called “writer’s block” or other expressive or
learning disabilities may essentially involve obscuration. Perhaps it is possible
to operationally define obscuration in such a way that its process can be
disrupted, overcome, or reversed, with training. If so, the results may contribute
to the field of the psychology of learning and disabilities, and have very
practical applications. Katherine Rawson and Walter Kintsch (2002) found that
an elucidation of the context improved memory for text content in reading. They
interpret their findings as support for the notion that “background information”
influences the organization of content so that accessibility of text content is
improved when probed by the experimenter. In other words, elucidation of
context sharpens the positional indexing of thematic content. This fact may be
very practical when applied in academic settings with children or adults. Finally,
the usefulness of research results on these two transformations is obvious for
psychoanalysis or other approaches to psychotherapy that assume the need for
elucidation of the relevant context for a life-event, such as a dream or childhood
experience, and take the obscuration of the event as a symptom, as classically
put forth in Freud’s On Dreams (1952). In other words, it may be possible for
attention research on transformations to contribute to the practice and theory of
psychoanalysis and similar types of therapies where elucidation of context
seems key.
Context replacement
Context replacement is a more radical modification in attending than the
others in this grouping, but it is placed here because the theme remains
essentially constant, even as the context is sometimes dramatically replaced
(Gurwitsch 1964, 322). In this case, the context is not developed or undeveloped
along the same lines as before the transformation. In this transformation, one
context replaces another. For example, I thematically attend to an approaching
bus as my ride home, and then to the fact that it is not the right bus. Thematic
attention still attends to the bus, but the content of contextual consciousness has
switched from those items relevant for the theme and for each other as the
context, perhaps the queue to board, the place where the bus will actually halt,
etc. to how it is blocking my view, paths around it, when it will move. Consider
how different the approaching bus appears in the two moments. Swiftly the
same theme is given under completely different perspectives and is reoriented
within a new thematic context. The theme itself does not change. But the
perspective or orientation under which it is presented, derived from the new
thematic context, does change (Gurwitsch 1964, 359).
In addition to enlargement, joint attention for infants and young children
may involve context replacement whereby the toy the child deliberately chews
on becomes something I am looking at and then something we are both looking
at, establishing joint attention (Arvidson 2003b). Whatever the previous context
for the toy as theme, say pleasure or other bodily relevancies, the context now is
predominately social if joint attention is achieved. If the context is replaced in
this way, it is more than just an enlargement to include the other. The context
replacement involves more genuine or deeper social attention.
What is important in context replacement is not just the speed (reaction
time) with which this transformation might occur, but also what inhibits this
transformation when it might otherwise be desirable. A particular phobia can be
crippling if one has little choice except to be around the object of fear. A field
entomologist affected by arachnophobia is a good example. The spider as theme
is attended to within a context that is overwhelmingly threatening. A context
replacement would be desirable, but difficult. Research on context replacement
might uncover strategies for replacing this context with another, such that
quality of life (and work!) improves. As Chris Brewin (1989, 388) states, “the
therapeutic task is to recreate a plausible context that will enable patients to
encode subsequent experiences in a more discriminating way, rather than
perceiving them as all indicating failure, rejection and so on.” This possibility
was broached above in the discussion of the gambler’s fallacy. If gamblers in
those scenarios can shift contextual consciousness so that what they view as the
next event (a new coin toss) in a continuation of a series (e.g., three heads) is
now contextualized as a new beginning, they can ask themselves if they want to
start gambling now. “Given the role grouping seems to play in biases like the
gambler’s fallacy, a fruitful line for future research is to explore other ways of
manipulating the environment to disrupt this grouping tendency” (Roney and
Trick 2003, 74; see also Diskin and Hodgins 2001).
Matthew Botvinick and David Plaut (2002) use computer modeling to
represent task context in a way that also shows how context replacement may be
involved in error. Basically, between two similar but not the same tasks, such as
tea making and coffee making, shifting the context boundaries causes error by
wrongly contextualizing the task. For example, one might pour cream into the
tea when it was not called for. Lendowski and Kirsner (2000) describe how the
inability to replace the content of the context (they do not call it that) with a new
one is linked to error. They found that expert Australia bush fire controllers
made differing predictions under identical physical conditions when context
differed. The authors suggest that experts’ knowledge is partitioned into distinct
packages—each tightly joined (unity by relevancy between contextual content)
and so also with the current theme but nonetheless partitioned from other
possible contexts for the same theme. Thus, when replacing one context with
another for the same physical conditions would be beneficial in predicting the
path of the fire, the experts were unable to switch (since the tie between theme
and context was so strong in the expert’s case). In other words, they were not
very flexible. It makes intuitive sense that flexibility of viewpoint may be
involved in some aspects of creatively solving a problem, and so might involve
context replacement.
We saw above that relational frame theory in the context of behavior
analysis means that relational responding can be derived rather than immediate.
The authors of that study (Roche et al., 2002) suggest what I would call context
replacement as a way to overcome persistent attitudes or stereotypes. For
example, if someone believed all salespeople were liars, the salesperson would
want to achieve an attitude change in this audience. Interestingly, relational
frame theory claims that the effective way to achieve this change is not to
simply shift the context to an opposed set of relations (where the theme is
salesperson and the context is trustworthiness). But rather this theory proposes a
mediated context replacement. “For example, the salesperson might say, ‘you
are under no obligation to buy,’ or ‘if you are not completely satisfied you can
have your money back’ or ‘take it now for free and if you like it you can send us
the money next month.’ Thus, the pitch will participate in a relational network
with other terms (e.g., trustworthy), stimuli (e.g., items purchased in a
department store), and consequences (pleasure of using recently purchased
items) that form part of any normal sales process. In effect, use of these and
similar phrases may transform the functions of the sales pitch so that it does not
evoke functions of dishonesty” (Roche et al., 2002, 87). At first the theme is
attended within an undesirable context, then the context shifts to neutral ground,
and finally to a desirable context, which can then be elucidated or enlarged so
that the original persistent attitude and association is inhibited.
Other modifications of the relevancy of thematic context for the theme are
possible but I will leave them undeveloped. For example, items that were more
remote in the thematic context and hence presenting less significance for the
theme can advance and become more significant, while those that were nearer
the theme recede (see Gurwitsch 1966, 226).
How Thematic Attention Shifts Simply

Serial-shifting occurs when the theme is replaced by a new theme that is
relevant to it (Gurwitsch 1964, 345; 1966, 230–232). Essentially, the shift here
is that the relevant context for the old theme provides the item that will become
the new theme. Gurwitsch (1966, 231) writes, “Here we progress from one
theme to another; however, to a theme which was materially related to the one
‘held in grasp’ before, both belonging to one and the same sphere of objects.” So
in serial-shifting, the new theme was previously a gestalt in the thematic context
of the old theme; and the old theme becomes a gestalt in the thematic context of
the new theme. For example, the current step of computing the family budget,
say step three, may have been part of the thematic context of the former theme,
which was step two. The family’s budget is not itself made a theme (this
transformation is possible, but is a synthesis not serial-shifting). Although the
theme is switched out in the serial-shifting transformation, there is no lapse or
gap of consciousness here. And the switched out theme remains a presented
gestalt, but now in a different dimension, namely, as a relevant context item.
There is always a theme, whether it is thematic content as coming into presence
(e.g., in the transition from step two to step three) or the content as more fully
present (e.g., step three itself). Other examples might include listening to a story
or musical composition unfold. Jensine Andresen (2000, 21) distinguishes types
of meditational practices by distinguishing between serial attending, which she
calls “discursive,” and holding a theme in grasp, which she calls “non-
discursive.” Discursive practices involve a series of themes, such as in ritual
gestures and movements in groups or recitative invocations and homages to
deities.
Gurwitsch makes two main observations about serial-shifting. First, he
suggests that counting and other mathematical enterprises are serial-shifting. He
emphasizes that the step by step processes involved in mathematics also involve
a sort of movement from old theme to new theme that preserves the content of
each gestalt even while it changes its dimensional position. He (1966, 233)
writes, “[T]he field in which I move undergoes at every step from theme to
theme an alteration, so far as its center of reference and organization, and
accordingly, its ‘physiognomy’ changes.” So serial-shifting is particularly
important for accomplishing procedures or other step by step tasks. It is a
transformation of the status of certain gestalts within the dimensions of theme
and context, but it also preserves the consolidation and functional significance of
the individual gestalts involved. The second observation Gurwitsch (1966, 235)
makes about serial-shifting is that this process has long been taken as the
standard accomplishment in attending, historically by Husserl and others. I

would add 20th Century psychology to this list.
This simple succession in the sphere of attention has been well-researched
over the years, but not in these terms. Findings here have significant
implications for everything from instruction manuals for power tools to
procedural textbooks and all kinds of instruction for procedural and process
learning (Clark 1999), and many applications outside the lab have already been
made. The temporal context experiments discussed above were examples of
serial-shifting research (e.g., Olson and Chun 2001). The relatedness effect or
the semantic priming effect also examine serial-shifting between content of the
context and the theme (Rafal and Henik 1994; Smith, Benton, and Spalek 2001;
see Arvidson 2003b). Serial-shifting is an especially vital area of research, in my
opinion, because it already consistently assumes a context for the theme, even if
it is implicit. This is one reason why memory research finds an important place
in this book. The classic experiment in memory research is the recall of serial
ordered lists.
How Thematic Attention Shifts Radically

Restructuring, singling out, and synthesis are “radical” because they involve
a substantial change in the configuration of the theme itself (Gurwitsch 1966,
237–248). The latter two are more radical than restructuring because they are
inter-dimensional. They entail a change in material relevancy, an internal relat-
edness between contents attended to thematically and presented contextually.
These three shifts in attending are the least understood in the history of
experimental attention research, even though singling out (“selective attention”)
is the most researched. The reason is that attention research, with few
exceptions, has attended only to the theme or focus in attending, and not to the
relation of relevancy between the theme and thematic context. However, my
prediction and hope is that psychology and phenomenology are poised to change
this narrow view (see also Arvidson 1998). The problem has been that the
transformations that occur in attending are not seen to involve the presentation
of a new theme with a new thematic context in the course of achievement (on
achievement see Gurwitsch 1964, 103; see also Husserl 2001, 57). And so in
psychology, and also particularly in the philosophy of science, the vague term
“gestalt-shifts” denotes these transformations without capturing their
uniqueness, since these three transformations are distinct within this type, yet
are all in some sense “gestalt-shifts” (Arvidson 1998). It is more correct to think
in terms of replacement of one theme by another. This is even the case when the
theme is evanescent, as in Sartre’s famous example of looking for Pierre in the

café, and he is not there. Everywhere in the café what is attended to is Pierre
presented as absent against the contextual background of the cafe (Sartre 1956,
10). It is like searching for the hidden weeds amongst a thick lawn cover. The
content in thematic attention is not nothing, it is something. And as soon as the
weed presents itself as theme, the previous theme of weed presented as absent,
an evanescent flickering of thematic content, is replaced by the weed as present.
Yet as Plotinus noted, the potential is not the same as the actual—“the potential
does not really become the actual: all that happens is that an actual entity takes
the place of a potential” (quoted in Brown 1999).
Restructuring
Restructuring is a substantial change in the function of the formative
constituents of the theme. It is a transformation confined to the thematic
dimension, but the same theme is no longer presented. Nothing is physically
added or subtracted in this replacement. Spontaneous reversals in thematic
attention such as with the Necker cube, or other ambiguous, multi-stable figures
as the duck-rabbit figure or the vase-faces figure are restructurations. As in the
“rows of impatiens” or “crowd of people” examples, a given theme may have a
dominant or formative constituent, and other constituents that are dependent
upon this one; these others are formed constituents. In restructuring, a new
theme replaces the old theme, but the new theme is the result of a transformation
of formed constituents into formative ones, and formative ones into formed
ones. Take the vase-faces figure as an example. Restructuring involves the
transformation of a formative constituent of a theme (e.g., the lips in the faces
figure) into a formed constituent (e.g., the ornamental protrusion on the stem in
the vase figure) in the presentation of a new theme, in this case the vase
(Gurwitsch 1966, 237–240 and 14; also 1964, 118–119). Other formative or
dominant constituents may also become formed or less dominant in the
transition to a new theme. The point is that the vase figure is a different theme
from the faces figure. Also, there is likely a new thematic context.
Restructuring has been well-researched by gestalt-oriented experimenters
(for more on gestalt experiments see Henle 1990 and Gurwitsch 1966).
Francisco Varela (1999) has suggested that restructuring is much more common
than is usually considered, and I would agree. Gurwitsch (1966, 241) claims that
restructuring is a universal possibility of any theme, unlike the more radical
transformation of singling out. Since research has already concentrated on the
nature of the focus or theme, examination of the phenomenon of restructuring of
the theme would add useful and distinct information to this wealth of
knowledge. Restructuring, like other transformations in attending, such as
synthesis, seems to be important in problem solving (Arvidson 1997). But what
we mean by restructuring here must be distinguished from how the term is used
in research on “insightful problem solving.” For example, Stellan Ohlsson
(1992) described three mechanisms by which restructuring might be achieved—
re-encoding, elaboration, and constraint relaxation. In our terms these refer
respectively to restructuring, elucidation, and synthesis (see also Ansburg and
Dominowski 2000). So “re-encoding” in Ohlsson’s sense comes closest to
restructuration. In some problem solving, the problem will remain unsolved until
the original “encoding,” the original gestalt-coherence of the theme, is “re-
encoded” so that the theme becomes a different gestalt (a different theme) with
the same constituents.
In moral developmental psychology, Carol Gilligan (1986) has argued that
restructuration, what is vaguely termed “gestalt-switch” or “gestalt-shift” (see
also, e.g., DesAutels 1996, and in philosophy of science, Wright 1992; cf.
Arvidson 1998), can have a role in judging or solving moral dilemmas,
especially in terms of care versus justice perspectives. The restructuration of the
same problem from one of care to justice or the converse, is possible for the
researcher (she has Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg in mind) or for the
subject, depending upon the shape of the sphere of attention or the subject’s
stage of moral development. For example, in the moral dilemma of abortion, one
way to focus on the problem is to see it as a question of whether the fetus is a
person, and whether its claims take precedence over those of the pregnant
woman (the justice perspective). Gilligan (1986, 24) writes, “Framed as a
problem of care [instead of justice], the dilemma posed by abortion shifts. The
connection between the fetus and the pregnant woman becomes the focus of
attention and the question becomes whether it is responsible or irresponsible,
caring or careless, to extend or to end this connection.” The whole problem
changes like the ambiguous figure, but with much more at stake.
In studying delay of gratification in children, Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda
and Monica Rodriguez (1989) tested how children might “cool” in the need for a
cookie using restructuring of the theme. Instead of taste, the child focuses on
shape and color. This psychological distancing is a cooling of desire to eat the
cookie. What happens is that the formative constituents of the theme, those that
are dominant within the theme and upon which the formed constituents depend
for their functional significance in the gestalt, become the formed constituents.
That is, the constituents of the theme involved with how the cookie would taste
become formed constituents, and the previously formed constituents of color

and shape become formative constituents. If achieved, this restructuration
changes the theme radically. Formed constituents are similar to what Baddeley
(1982) calls “intrinsic context.”
Singling Out
Singling out is when a constituent of a theme is attended to thematically, so
that this constituent becomes a theme itself (Gurwitsch 1966, 240–243). Under
the heading of “selective attention” and not discussed within a
phenomenological framework, singling out is the most researched
transformation in attending. For many attention researchers singling out is
wholly synonymous with attention and so selective attention is just attention. It
is sometimes called “zooming in” (Metzinger 2003b) and explained using
suspect metaphors of attention such as spotlight (Posner 1980; Treisman and
Gelade 1980; Baars 1997), zoom-lens (Eriksen and St. James 1986), window
(Treisman 1993), channel (Hobson 1994; Broadbent 1958), and so on (cf.
Arvidson 1996; Gurwitsch 1966, 265–267). Considering the two long rows of
flowering impatiens in the garden, I can focus on the right row and make it my
theme instead of the two rows as a whole. I can further single out the third
impatiens plant in that row. Again, I can single out in thematic attention the new
bloom on the left side of that particular plant. Each of these transformations, of
course, could occur without my “willing it.” In any case, we will see later that
“willing it” simply means preparing the sphere of attention to allow the content
to become thematic. What was a constituent (the right row) in the theme of the
rows of impatiens has now become the theme itself.
I stress that this attentional shift includes the replacement of one theme by
another. That is, the new theme, the right row of plants, has a radically different
appearance from before (when it was just a constituent), and has radically
different relation from before to the other row. In fact, the other row may be part
of the thematic context for this new theme, although it may also be marginal
depending upon the thematic context which happens to pertain to the new
theme. So the transition is complete. Even the color, shape, and other details of
the right row of plants itself have changed. Another example is singling out a
table in a living room, then singling out the pictures on the table, then the family
picture, then a mother’s face in that picture (Arvidson 2000). Listening to a
speech, one can single out the point of the speech or an accent or the nasal
tonality. In each singling out the new theme establishes a new center of
reference for a thematic context, the latter may be a continuation of the previous
context or it could be new. Finally, turn out your hand and look at it (as if you
were admiring a ring on your finger, but focus more generally on your hand).
Now focus or single out your index finger. The shift is a change of theme (from
hand to finger) and a change of thematic context. The finger, now presented as
thematic, has a different appearance. The wrinkling around the knuckle, the
pores or hair, even the color and other details are likely new. This is not a simple
shift in attending, as current psychology assumes. The presentation of this finger
and its relation to the hand is now quite different. Singling out is more radical
than restructuring since the changes are not simply accomplished within one
dimension (intra-thematic) but are inter-dimensional (theme and context)
(Gurwitsch 1966, 243).
Experiments using global-local stimuli implicitly investigate both singling
out and synthesis (Arvidson 2003b). A global-local stimulus is meant to afford
only one of the two possible themes at a time. A “Navon” letter (Navon 1977) is
an example of this type of stimulus since it presents either a block letter “H” on
the global level, or a number of letter “E’s” on the local level, that make up the
global H. The theme and the potential theme are arranged in global or local
organization, and they are mutually exclusive. Findings so far about the “global-
local shift” involved with these stimuli include asymmetry in interference and
control (Rauschenberger and Yantis 2001), associated brain hemispheric
differences (Posner and Peterson 1990), and differences between this type of
shift and serial-shifting (Fileteo, Freidrich and Stricker 2001). The local to
global shift in attending is “synthesis,” and the global to local shift is “singling
out” (see Gurwitsch 1966, 240–244). In synthesis the theme of an E or a group
of several Es is replaced with the H as thematic; the local is replaced by the
global. Like the rows of impatiens example, except more dramatic, the Es no
longer have the same function in the new presentation. They now function as
constituents in the new gestalt. When attention is transformed in the inverse
direction, so that an E or several Es are singled out and replace the global H as
thematic, there is also a radical change in the theme and its context.
This line of research is important but limited. It is important because it
examines synthesis instead of the just singling out, and it tries to discuss the
relation between them. It is limited because of the highly exclusionary nature of
the two themes presented. By contrast, for example, the row of impatiens
illustration is less artificial and has more ecological validity, although it is still
only an illustration. In addition, without more information on exactly what the
subject is attending to, some cases could be restructuration instead of singling
out and synthesis. This would depend upon the status of the “rest” of the content
presented, that is, whether there is now the whole picture but with a different
emphasis and organization point (formative versus formed constituents in
restructuration), or whether there is now a new theme and context distinction (in
singling out and synthesis).
Synthesis
Synthesis is the transformation of a theme into a constituent of a new theme
(Gurwitsch 1966, 243–248), as when the right row of impatiens becomes a
constituent in the (new) theme of “rows of impatiens,” and is no longer a theme
itself. This is a functional complement of singling out and is sometimes (along
with enlargement) referred to in attention research literature as “zooming out.”
But this is a more radical transformation than recognized in that literature
because a new theme is presented, with new internal relations, and with new
relations to a possibly new thematic context. Gurwitsch (1966, 243) writes about
the (old) theme, “It grows into its ground and merges with it; or, expressed from
the other point of view, the ground absorbs the theme and pervades it. A new
theme results on a new ground.” For example, I could start with the single
impatiens plant in the right row of impatiens plants as my theme, and what is
presented could transform so that the whole right row of impatiens is presented
as my theme. In this new theme, the single impatiens would be a constituent,
perhaps formative perhaps not. This synthesis could continue. Both rows of
plants could become thematic, and the right row would simply be a constituent
in the new theme, and likely a formative constituent in it. “Even as a dominant
constituent it is supported and required by the total theme and, therefore, refers
to other constituents….[It] is now no longer separable from its thematic context,
figuring only as a constituent of context” (Gurwitsch 1966, 244). The point of a
speech, say a political point, could become a constituent in a more inclusive
theme, for example, politics in Central America. “When the act of passing mugs
of tea is embedded in the larger project of hospitality to guests, one’s intentions
extend to that project, but it is rare that one is immediately aware of all of this or
of its significations” (Gallagher and Marcel 1999, 13). When this larger project
itself becomes thematic, with passing the mugs as a constituent in the new
theme, then the “awareness” is a synthesis. It is not clear why such a
transformation would be “rare,” unless the authors literally mean that all of it
becoming thematic would be rare, which is correct. Another example is the
hand/finger example above, moving in the sphere of attention from the thematic
finger to the thematic hand is a synthesis.
There are a number of ways in which current research is investigating

synthesis, and it grows out of the natural inversion of the more familiar
experimental viewpoint on singling out. Although they use the zoom-lens
model, studies using persons with schizophrenia have tried to determine whether
singling out and synthesis are impaired in this group (Mizuno, Umitá and Sartori
1998) or not (Pasto and Burack 2002). Also, Luigi Pasto and Jacob Burack
(2002) interpret their results to suggest that deficits in attention control (the
possibility of transformations in attending) among persons with major
depressive disorder involve the inability to properly single out when required,
that is, when it is task-relevant to do so. In an interesting complement, Karen
Gasper and Gerald Clore (2002) found that subjects who reported mood sadness
and were asked to perform the somewhat contrasting task of synthesis were
hindered in this attentional transformation compared to those who reported
mood happiness. In the object-based attention theories and in the multiple object
tracking paradigm, researchers implicitly assume or explicitly argue that
synthesis does or must occur for objects to be attended to. Attending to a
constituent as thematic is not possible in some circumstances, and so a synthesis
is effected (Driver and Baylis 1998). For example, “Attention involuntarily
spreads to the entire rubber band, for instance, even though subjects are
attempting to track only the end of the rubber band” (Scholl, Pylyshyn, and
Feldman 2001, 172; but cf. Gibson and Kelsey (1998) for a critique of “spread”
of attention). In other circumstances, shifting between synthesis and singling out
contributes to success in learning and teaching (Clark 1999, 188).
Elsewhere (Arvidson 1997) I have shown how intuition or insight involves
synthesis, especially in “clicking-in” and “eureka” experiences (Bastick 1982).
In intuition of this type the shape of the sphere of attention is suddenly
reorganized so that a new theme is given within a new thematic context, and the
old theme is now merely a constituent in the new theme. The synthesis in
intuition is marked by its rapidity, and by the relatively dramatic and clear
elucidation of the theme and thematic context relation. For another take on
intuition as synthesis see Isenberg (1991). Along these lines, synthesis may also
have importance for creativity (Raidl and Lubart 2001). In what we might call
creative performance, such as pianists’ preparations and concert execution, the
interplay between synthesis and singling out seems key (Williamon, Valentine
and Valentine 2002; Clarke 1988).
How Attention Captures Marginal Content

Some previous marginal content may now be captured in thematic attention
(Gurwitsch 1966, 272). This possibility of margin to theme succession was
illustrated above in the airplane overhead in the garden example, or also the
wind announcing itself in shaking the hedges. In the context of showing that
temporality is a necessary but not sufficient condition for “consciousness,” since
temporality cannot account for the difference between presented relevance for
the theme (the context) and presented irrelevance (the margin), Gurwitsch
(1966, 327) gives the following example:
When a proposition appears as a conclusion, previous phases

of thought are retained. When we interrupt our dealing with a
scientific topic to pay attention to something which happens in
our environment, we also retain a certain awareness of our
previous activity, at least at the beginning of the present one.
There is, however, a sensible difference between the two
cases. In the former case, what is retained is experienced to be
relevant to what we are dealing with presently; whereas from
the latter case any such experience of relevancy is altogether
absent.
Gurwitsch means to speak here of the continuity between the thematic

presentation of the scientific theory and the thematic presentation of the
environmental object only in terms of temporality. So the initial relation
between the current theme and the interrupting content is that the interrupting
content is an object of marginal consciousness in the horizon. By contrast, the
previous activity and the present one are both objects of marginal consciousness
in the halo since there is some relatedness between them, not mere co-
temporality. As the transformation occurs and the previously marginal item
becomes thematic, and a new theme with a new thematic context is attended to,
the previous theme is still attended to; this previous theme is marginally
presented in the halo as “having-been-thematic.” In the margin to theme
transformation, the themes themselves (e.g., the overhead airplane which, say,
replaces the dog) are discontinuous in their presented content, which is to say
that the second theme is irrelevant to the first. There is a push and pull between
them as they move out of and into thematic attention. The process in the sphere
of attention in this case is a dynamic tension between these two contents, one as
going out of and one as coming into thematic attention. But in the case of the
two “phases” in attending to the scientific theorem, one now marginal since it
was immediately previous, and one now current and ongoing, both are marginal
in the halo. As Merleau-Ponty (1962, 31) puts it, “But at least the act of attention
is rooted in the life of consciousness….This passage from the indeterminate to
the determinate, this recasting at every moment of its own history in the unity of
a new meaning, is thought itself.”
One might raise the difficult question of how a novel gestalt can enter into
thematic attention yet not be precisely presented in the margin. Cognitive
scientists now examine this problem (Folk, Remington and Johnston 1992;
Yantis 1993, Gibson and Kelsey 1998). The following example is adapted from
Arvidson (2000). Suppose that suddenly, as I am writing, the deafening home
alarm system sounds—WONK! WONK! WONK! Eventually I will get a
thematic grip on this rude sonorous interruption. But the question here is how
does this theme enter into attention? When we say it “captured” my attention,
was it first somehow marginal, and then thematic? Or is there just a
disconnected gap between the previous theme and the present one, a “blink” in
attention perhaps marked by fright and adrenaline? (For more on attentional
blink see Duncan, Ward and Shapiro 1994; Shapiro 2001; and Arvidson 2003b.)
There is connectivity in attending, even in cases like this. The alarm almost
immediately supplants what was previously thematic. I say “almost” because
there is still some quickly fading retention of the previous theme. To deny that
this is the case would be to deny that the event has a temporal aspect. In
discussion of the two views of reversible figures as “object-events,” Varela
(1999, 126) states “The link joining both as two-of-the-same demonstrates the
basic fact that there is an underlying temporalization which has a relative
independence of the particular content of the views.” Gurwitsch (1966, 302) is
clear on this point, “The transition from one phase of conscious life to another
never has the character of a sudden break; as though on the one side there were a
brusque end, on the other side a no less sudden beginning, and between these
two brusque events a breach which had to be bridged. Heterogeneous and
indifferent to each other as the contents might be which fill two consecutive
phases of conscious life, there is, at least at the beginning of the second phase, a
certain awareness, though vague, dim, and indistinct, of what has just gone.”
The marginal consciousness in the halo to the streaming in attending, the
anticipation and possibility complemented by retention of what has just passed,
bridges even the most abrupt attention capture (cf. with Yantis 1993). In many
cases, one or more not so well-formed themes may be swiftly interspersed
between the well-formed themes that serve as end points in our example.
Another possibility is that when the alarm sounds there is a sort of phenomenal
resistance or inertia that must be overcome, just as the reversals of the Necker
cube take time, an incompressable “‘depth’ in time” (Varela 1999, 115).
The power the deafening alarm has in attending is immense, such that an
orienting response which almost immediately makes it thematic is seemingly
irresistible. But where was it before it sounded, that is, how was it connected to
the presented configuration in the sphere of attention which had, say, my
unfolding sentence on the computer terminal as thematic? Gurwitsch, Husserl,
Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre might all respond to this question in somewhat
similar ways.
Although Gurwitsch did not seem to ask this kind of question, a Gurwitsch-
inspired response might be that the possibility of the alarm was marginally
attended to as part of the ever-present (marginal) material world or environment.
In Marginal Consciousness, Gurwitsch (1985, 50) writes:
The appearance of the facts pertaining to these realms in

marginal consciousness means that they are disconnected and
detached [in terms of relevance] from the thematic activity of
the moment. Though given in marginal consciousness, the
facts in question do not present themselves as scattered and
isolated but, on the contrary, as pertaining to some coherent
order or other, as fringed by pointing references, the term
fringe being understood as experience of context, no matter
how vague and inarticulate.
I am not claiming that the alarm must be in any way fully or explicitly presented
in the sphere of attention, even as a marginal possibility. But the marginal
consciousness of the environing world implies at least the possibility of the
alarm sounding, so that when it does sound it is not perceived as utterly novel,
disconnected from everything possible in the world. Gurwitsch (1985, 41)
claims that one can never “shake off” marginal consciousness of the
environment or material world, “The fact that some sector or other of the
perceptual world appears at every moment, that whatever the subject matter of
our thematic activity we never altogether lose sight of the existence of the
perceptual world, is permanent and abiding” (see also Merleau-Ponty 1962, 331
and 338).
Merleau-Ponty (1962, 328) writes that the natural world “...persists on the
horizon of my life as the distant roar of a great city provides the background to
everything we do in it.” Attention to the alarm as thematic, and attention to the

previous theme which had with it the environment at least marginally presented,
are both connected within the horizon of the permanently presented material
world. “My experiences of the world are integrated into one single world as the
double image merges into one thing, when my finger stops pressing upon my
eyeball. I do not have one perspective then another, and between them a link
brought about by the understanding, but each perspective merges into the other
and, in so far as it is still possible to speak of a synthesis, we are concerned with
a ‘transitional synthesis’” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 328). In the imagined case of
the alarm as the disruption that rapidly captures and inserts itself into thematic
attention: it is the insertion into the focus of attention (almost at an instant) of
something that is (almost immediately recognized as) a part of the world already
marginally presented. “The natural world is the horizon of all horizons, the style
of all possible styles, which guarantees for my experiences a given, not a willed,
unity underlying all the disruptions of my personal and historical life” (Merleau-
Ponty 1962, 330).
Psychologists have studied this reaction in detail under the heading of
orienting response, or exogenous orienting, but without this phenomenological
framework to give a larger meaning to that work. The continuously present
margin in the sphere of attention, here marginal consciousness in the halo to a
sector of the environment, actually supplies the horizonal connections to the
item that becomes thematic. We do not lose contact with the world, even
approaching the limit-case of the world presented as chaotic or too much to bear
in attending (see Gurwitsch 1974, 204; Sokolowski 1974, 96; cf. Husserl 1967,
137). Sartre (1956, 21) puts it this way: “Nothingness [i.e. consciousness] lies
coiled in the heart of Being [i.e., the world]—like a worm;” or also
“Nothingness carries being in its heart” (1956, 18) Amidst interruptions of
thematic attention of the most abrupt kinds, there is still a continuity between the
outgoing and the incoming with respect to the theme.
Margin to theme succession is thematic attention capture. In the extensive
literature on attention capture, the terms margin and theme are not used, rather,
“what is unattended becomes attended to.” Margin to theme succession is
usually discussed in the context of control, automaticity, and saliency. Adding
the framework and descriptive power of the language of the sphere of attention
clears up a number of issues in the thorny brush of “attention control,”
especially whether attention, usually meaning selective attention or singling out,
is actively controlled or is passive. Does the subject actively select what is
attended to or is the subject’s attention captured by the stimulus? The difference
is stated as active vs. passive, voluntary vs. involuntary, top-down vs. bottom-
up, controlled vs. automatic, endogenous vs. exogenous. None of these sets of
terms are perfect, but I will use the latter terms here.
In current usage, endogenous control of attention or selection of the target is
the result of the subject’s will, usually following the instruction from the
experimenter (see Hopfinger et al., 2001, for the associated neurology); while in
exogenous selection, attention is “caught” from the periphery (e.g., Chastain and
Cheal 2001; Yantis 1993). The issue of control can be organized and resolved by
recognizing that the subject does not make the targeted content thematic, the
subject allows it to present itself as thematic. Achievement of thematic attention
in any one case involves replacement. And replacement of one theme with
another is not completely willed, as if the sphere of attention were a landscape
and the subject was a landscape architect. The garden never matches the
architect’s vision of what it will be until it already is. That is, the emergence of
the new theme is not completely a function of the subject’s will, regardless if
this new theme was a marginally presented potential theme or a contextually
presented potential theme. Willing or trying to attend as instructed is merely
preparatory to the emergence of the theme from the thematic context or margin,
but it still involves thematic attention to something else. When the new theme is
achieved, this preparation is likely contextual (as Braver 2001 et al., suggest). If
attention is a process of transformations, as I believe it is, then endogenous
“control” already is attention. Research in neuropsychology suggests this
(Driver and Frackowiak 2001). For example, appropriate brain areas are active
even before the designated target is achieved or presented (Driver and Frith
2000), which I would interpret as attention to a different target. But in an
experimental paradigm where the measure of attention is the achievement of the
designated target, endogenous selection can at most prepare the sphere of
attention for the likelihood or inevitability of such a transformation of contents,
just as the architect can prepare the blueprints. As noted above, this preparation
is sometimes called a “control set” or “attentional set” (e.g., Folk, Remington
and Johnston 1992; Ohman, Flykt, and Esteves 2001; Gibson and Kelsey 1998).
In the sphere of attention, endogenous selective attention yields to the
saliency of exogenous selection (Allport and Hsieh 2001; on saliency see
Chastain and Cheal 2001, 989). Exogenous selection can be almost immediate
or it can be more subtle, such as when I look for a person with a watch so I can
ask that individual what time it is. When I spot the person who has a watch this
is the first of many possible “captures of attention” in the interaction in which
one theme or theme-context complex is replaced by another in the process of
attention, none of which is exactly reducible to what I willed. In each case, the
thematic content at t1 is saliently replaced by the thematic content at t2. These
replacements can be habitual or have a certain repeatable style or character,
since development and learning change the autochthonous shape of the sphere of
attention, as discussed in Chapter Five. Certain content and constellations of
content are more likely to become thematic or part of the thematic context over
time, establishing a kind of facilitation or inhibition of the success of a particular
endogenously initiated selective attention (see Gurwitsch 1964, 103; Arvidson
1992a; Cf. Ohman et al., 2001, 466–467 on “learning history”; and Cavanagh,
Labianca, and Thornton 2001, on “sprites”). The point is that the three-
dimensional sphere of attention provides an appropriate framework for
advancing the question of attention control.
Margin to theme succession has a number of practical aspects. Manipulating
marginal consciousness has been shown to decrease anxiety in the same sense
that the dentist might hand-pinch near an injection site to offset the pinch of the
injection needle (for a similar effect in the context of post traumatic stress
disorder see Kuiken et al., 2001). Naomi Oliver and Andrew Page (2003) found
that distracting blood-injection fearful participants with conversation during
blood-injection exposure sessions reduced fear. A tension is created between
content vying for thematic status, the blood-injection and the conversation, so
that at least some of the time the conversation is thematic and the blood-
injection is marginally presented, hence irrelevant and so less fearful. This is
coordinate with, but the reverse of, what the philosopher Peter Goldie (2003,
243) describes in his account of fear, “When we think of something as being
dangerous, we might just think of it as meriting fear, and we can do that without
actually feeling fear towards it. Then, when we come to think of it with fear, the
dangerousness of the object and the determinate features towards which the
thought is directed is grasped in a different way. That is to say, the content of the
thought is different; one’s way of thinking of it is completely new.” This is the
sense of replacement that Gurwitsch stresses for more radical transformations in
attending. The trick for subjects in Oliver and Page’s blood-injection experiment
is to allow the fearfulness of the content to remain marginal, and so irrelevant.
Manipulation of marginal consciousness is also useful in creating a
psychological distance needed for success in various tasks where immediate
gratification would produce a negative task result. In addition to the
restructuration strategy with cookies and children in the delay of gratification
study described above, those researchers (Mischel et al., 1989) also manipulated
the margin and thematic attention. So instead of focusing on the taste of the
cookie, the child could be instructed to “cool off” by thinking fun thoughts.
Again, although this new thematic content might be in dynamic and tense
relation with the irrelevant marginal content of the taste of the cookie, and the
sphere of attention can transform so that these contents switch functional
“places,” the taste of the cookie (and the desire to eat it) will still sometimes be
marginal, and so lessened. Ozlem Ayduk, Walter Mischel and Geraldine
Downey (2002) showed that margin to theme attentional shifting could be useful
in quelling hostility if the focus in attending was directed toward distracting and
distancing information. In a complementary way, in a study of children’s
attentional skills and road-crossing behavior, George Dunbar, Ross Hill and
Vicky Lewis (2001, 227) found that “failure to ignore potentially distracting
events outside the current focus of attention…are sources of risk.” In other
words, margin to theme succession is not only useful but failure to become adept
at shaping it in certain environmental situations could be fatal!
Attending is a Dynamic Tension

The sphere of attention is a dynamic embodied attending in the world, and
can be articulated as a dynamic tension between contents within and between the
three dimensions, theme, thematic context, and margin. In the discussion of
serial-shifting above, I noted that Gurwitsch (1966, 233) sees the “field of
consciousness” as dynamic: a “field in which I move” while considering each
item in a step-by-step process. In restructuration, I also noted that the two views,
for example of the duck-rabbit figure, can be tensely connected. Also the
account of margin to theme succession displayed the tense connection possible
in attention transformation. Now that a taxonomy of attention transformations
has been introduced, it is appropriate to be more precise about how attention
involves “movement” by introducing the important concepts of dynamism and
tension (Arvidson 2000). My account goes beyond what Gurwitsch might mean
by these terms. To demonstrate how attention is a dynamic tension, I will zero in
on restructuring.
The shift or transformation from face to vases in that famous ambiguous
line drawing is a movement or motion. The subject is not physically or
emotionally “moved,” and scientific instruments would detect no change in the
material world that affords attention to this line drawing. The dynamism is
between presented content. In this case, it is in the thematic dimension. The
object as presented, the phenomenal object, is dynamic. The almost
instantaneous transformation or transition into another appearance is experi-
enced as a movement or motion in attending. The dynamism is not separate from
the two presentations. It marks a central feature of the transformation of the

presentation of the object, that is, of the transformation of thematic attention in
this case. The vase presentation “pops out” and is a new achievement which is
not dependent upon the faces presentation. To say that there is no connection
between the two moments in attending does not do justice to the phenomenon
(Arvidson 2000). In other words, the particular motion or movement of
restructuring is the replacement of one theme with another in such a way that
each theme is presented as belonging to a dynamic process that moves from one
terminal “view” to another. That attention is dynamic is important because later
we will see how the subject simply is the dynamic, embodied process of
attending in the world.
Another feature of the process of attention, and particular transformations in
the sphere of attention, is tension. Tension is a push and pull connection where
two or more constituents or gestalts are held together, or give way to each other
in any number of transformations within and between dimensions in the sphere
of attention. For example, a reversible or multi-stable phenomenon presents a
tension between the “views” that wholly includes each. Where there is tension
there is connection, and to the extent that they are multi-stable it is hard to deny
that multi-stable objects involve a tension in the views (Arvidson 2000; Kelso et
al., 1994; see also Sartre 1956, 20). For another example, the transformation in
the margin to theme succession involves tension. In the inertia of the present
theme and the encroachment from the margin of the impinging gestalt, there is a
yielding in thematic attention. This yielding is a temporally taut connection
between what was and what will be thematic. In sum, attending activity is a
process of transformations that is more or less dynamic and tense at each
moment.
Chapter Four
Gurwitsch and Husserl on Attention

Aron Gurwitsch studied Edmund Husserl’s work closely, and persistently found
philosophical points worth recapping, interpreting, and amplifying. He also
critiqued Husserl where he felt it warranted. In this chapter, I condense and
simplify Gurwitsch’s report of how his own insights on attention parallel
Husserl’s, and how they contradict. I also feature a Gurwitschian reading of
Husserl’s Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis (2001), which it
appears Gurwitsch himself did not read, but which is important for phenom-
enology of attention. All this further grounds the articulation of the sphere of
attention, and marks a shift to considering phenomenological evidence rather
than primarily experimental psychological evidence. We will also be poised to
explore more fully subjectivity and morality in subsequent chapters.
Husserl overwhelmingly preferred to analyze attention from the point of
view of the act of attention, the subjective or noetic angle. Gurwitsch
emphasized the objective or noematic side. About Husserl’s approach to
consciousness, Gurwitsch (1974, 251n) observes, “With the possible exception
of Ideas [First Book], Husserl’s analyses move for the most part along noetic
rather than noematic lines. This does not mean that the noematic aspect of
consciousness is disregarded or neglected but that it is almost always
approached from the noetic side and with closest reference to the latter, and not
sufficiently in its own right.” Since Husserl is so well-known, one might be
tempted to characterize Gurwitsch’s work as addressing and developing what
Husserl leaves sketchy, in this case the organization of the content in attention,
attention from the objective or noematic angle. But Gurwitsch does not just fill
gaps. Drawing on Gestalt psychology and theory, he grows the idea of objective
organization so that it becomes more important and decisive for human life than
I think Husserl would allow. This is a real philosophical difference between
them. I will first assemble Gurwitsch’s critique of Husserl on attention, and then
report the common ground between them concerning the dimensions in the
sphere of attention, and transformations in attending.
Gurwitsch’s Critique of Husserl

Writing as early as 1929, several years before Husserl’s death, Gurwitsch
finds three main problems with Husserl’s philosophy as it relates to attention.
Husserl holds that (1) attention emanates from an ego, (2) the content or
noematic core remains identical through attentional transformations and so
86
Gurwitsch and Husserl 87
creates a “two-strata of the theme” problem, and (3) attention is unitary, like a
searchlight or spotlight. These problems are largely shared by what Gurwitsch
calls “the traditional theory of attention,” the psychology and philosophy of
attention in the first three decades of the 20th Century. They are also problems of
the 21st Century. Philosophy discusses attention infrequently, and philosophers
are generally guilty of all three problems. Psychologists and cognitive scientists
of attention are affected more by the second and third problems, since they are
more likely to work within Gurwitsch’s frame of non-ego subjectivity, or at least
non-ego subjectivity is likely to be assumed in setting up experimental controls.
The Ego and Subjectivity Problem

The first problem with Husserl’s treatment of attention is a problem of
subjectivity: the ego is at the center of “conscious activity,” and therefore of
attentional activity, as originator and organizer (Gurwitsch 1985, 17). As is well-
known to Husserl scholars, in his Logical Investigations (1970, first published in
1900–1901) Husserl argued against the notion that an ego was central in this
way. In his later work, especially Ideas I (1982, e.g. §§57, 80, 92) and thereafter
(e.g., in Experience and Judgment 1973, §17), he gave the ego a more central
role and noted the change from his earlier position. Gurwitsch drew much
inspiration from Husserl’s Ideas I, Cartesian Mediations, Experience and
Judgment and from other later works, and even sees the first two as the frame
for his own major work, The Field of Consciousness (1964, 5). But when writing
about Husserl’s theory of the ego and cogito, Gurwitsch is clear that he prefers
the Logical Investigations, and is in full agreement with Husserl’s arguments
there against the centrality and permanence of the ego (e.g., Gurwitsch 1966,
215; 288–289; 1985, 17–18).
Gurwitsch wants to restrict the role of the ego in attending. We can become
aware of the ego in reflection, as an “embodied stream of consciousness”
(Gurwitsch 1985) but it is not otherwise present in attending, except marginally
(Gurwitsch 1985, 22; 1966, 219–220). For Husserl, the activity of the ego
determines the relevance and irrelevance of presented content (1982, §122). This
means that the activity of the ego is responsible for organizing the sphere of
attention into context and margin. Gurwitsch argues that it is the material
relations among presented content that guide the organization of that content
(1964, 351). Specifically, these relations are the pertinence of the content to the
theme; if it is relevant it is part of the thematic context, if not, then it is marginal.
Gurwitsch (1964, 351) asks, “Is the apprehending activity of the Ego entirely
free or does it need to be guided by material relationships between the contents
concerned? In case the latter alternative is true, it follows that, whatever else
might be due to the activity of the Ego, that activity cannot bring about the
fundamental organizational articulation of the total field of consciousness into
two domains, better dimensions, namely the thematic field and the margin.”
Below I will discuss Husserl’s work on passive synthesis, which Gurwitsch was
not able to address, to see if that work helps account for the type of organization
for which Gurwitsch is looking in Husserl’s work.
Two-Strata of the Theme Problem

The second problem Gurwitsch has with Husserl’s treatment of attention is
that throughout transformations in attending, some nucleus or core of what is
presented is thought to remain identically the same, unaffected in its core by the
transformations (1966, 219–220). This complaint especially targets more radical
transformations of the theme such as restructuration and synthesis. Gurwitsch
sees this “two strata of the theme problem” manifested in Husserl’s work in two
ways. One is that organization is bestowed on elements so that a new
configuration is thematic but the underlying elements remain unchanged, as in
the case of the melody in relation to its constituent notes. The second is that
Husserl’s notion of hyletic data—sense data themselves devoid of intrinsic
organization—means organization must be extrinsically imposed or bestowed in
top-down fashion, rather than that organization is autochthonous.
In terms of attention, the first “two-strata of the theme” problem is a
problem of synthesis. Gurwitsch argues that Husserl does not appreciate the
radical nature of the transformation in attending from notes to the formation of a
melody, or from lines to composition of a configuration, etc. Gurwitsch includes
Christian von Ehrenfels and Carl Stumpf in his critique, and with respect to
Husserl, traces the problem to Husserl’s notion of whole and parts, namely, that
their relationship is one of foundation (Husserl 1970, Vol. 2, 34–35). In some
cases, there is no need for unification among the “elements” of the theme, since
they are always necessarily unified, for example, color and extension. Other
cases are different. Gurwitsch (1964, 84) writes, “On the contrary, in the case of
notes forming a melody or of lines composing a configuration, separation exists.
Here the elements are not in need of each other for their existence; they exist
separately under certain circumstances; they are independent of each other.
Because there is no essential unification, unification must be accomplished.
Unification between independent elements cannot be established except by
means of a new and specific datum, founded by, and dependent upon, the
elements….The implicit assertion of von Ehrenfels’ theory is stated explicitly by
both Stumpf and Husserl: sensory qualities of a higher order, qualities founded
upon ordinary sense-data, are incidental and adventitious to the founding
elements in that these elements are not affected by the quality they found, nor by
the unity which the founded quality bestows upon them. The elements may be
experienced isolatedly. Even when not experienced isolatedly, each one of the
elements retains its distinct phenomenal identity.” Fittingly, this statement
comes in the last paragraph before Gurwitsch formally considers the principles
of Gestalt theory (see also 1964, 88 and 266–269; 1966, 256). It is Gestalt
theory that champions intrinsic rather than extrinsic organization of the theme,
what Gurwitsch calls gestalt-coherence, so that the notion of supervenient
organization denoting a second strata of the theme is unnecessary.
In terms of attention, the second “two-strata of the theme problem” is a
problem of restructuration. The way it is manifested in Husserl’s work,
according to Gurwitsch, is that the postulation of the role of hyletic data in
intentionality or attentional processes means that organization must be bestowed
on this data from without (Gurwitsch 1966, 253–255; for Gurwitsch’s summary
of hyletics see 1974, 100 and 250–251). Gurwitsch (1966, 88) writes “The
important point is that, according to all traditional theories, percepts are asserted
to grow out of mere sense-data owing to supervenient factors (of whatever kind
and description) by means of which sensations are interpreted and meaning is
bestowed upon them.” It is noetic factors that bestow meaning on hyletic data,
which themselves are not specifically organized otherwise. As Gurwitsch (1964,
266) puts it, “Devoid of intentionality in themselves, hyletic data serve as
materials to operating factors by which they are ‘animated’ and receive
meaning. Such factors are denoted by Husserl as intentional or noetic forms or
noeses. When the experienced concrete act as a whole, including both hyletic
data and noetic forms, is an intentional act, that is, when in experiencing that act
the subject is confronted with an object presenting itself in a certain mode, this
is due to noetic factors bestowing form upon hyletic data and endowing them
with meaning.” The organization or meaning is not given autochthonously in
Husserl’s scheme, whereas for Gurwitsch thematic organization is autoch-
thonous in the way a mountain is sprung from the land itself, not added to it
(Arvidson 1992a).
The “two-strata of the theme” problem is not something Gurwitsch believes
that Husserl knowingly commits to. However, since it is incompatible with
Gestalt theory and a phenomenology of the transformations in attending,
Gurwitsch pointedly rejects its usefulness, even denying that there is anything
such as hyletic data at all. “Quite in general, sensuous material is not articulated
by means of higher functions. What is immediately given, the phenomenological

primal material, is given only as articulated and structured. Data devoid of all
articulation, hyletic data in the strict sense, do not exist at all. What is given
depends on the structural connections within which it appears. There are no data
remaining unaffected by changes in organization, articulation, etc. Nor does the
‘same material complex admit of multiple apprehensions discretely shifting into
one another.’ In each case there is not the ‘same material complex’; under
certain conditions, each component may undergo a profound change”
(Gurwitsch 1966, 256–257, see also 265–266). Attentional synthesis and
restructuring are the “certain conditions” Gurwitsch must have in mind, and this
discussion will be continued later in this chapter. (For a sense in which singling
out is also misinterpreted within the two-strata problem by Husserl and Stumpf
see Gurwitsch 1966, 262).
The Unitary Attention Problem

In addition to the problems of subjectivity and the two-strata theme,
Gurwitsch is opposed to the treatment of attention as if it were unitary. He
approvingly quotes Kurt Koffka’s observation that “what had been considered as
a mere variation of attention, a variation of clarity concerning parts, the total
situation remaining otherwise unchanged, proves to be an actual division
entailing far-reaching consequences” (Gurwitsch 1966, 266). Gurwitsch is
especially opposed to the unitary notion of attention that treats it as if it were
like a spotlight or searchlight illuminating some content and not others.
Gurwitsch believes that attention has more to do with the content of what is
attended to, that is, its organization in any given case and its transformation of
organization, than with the one dimensional, on/off, illuminated/unilluminated
metaphor. He (1966, 222) writes, “However the function of attention may be
specified in the several theories, all of them agree in considering the
accomplishment of attention not to depend in any way on the objects to which
attention is directed or on the sense in which it is turned to them. The same is
held concerning attentional modifications, the variation in attention or change of
its direction.” In Chapter Two, I critiqued the notion that attention is a one-
dimensional gradient, such as in the metaphors of window, spotlight, zoom-lens,
or channel. Gurwitsch’s characterization of attention and how it should be
approached is pluralistic, since he wants to carefully distinguish each case of
attention and its transformation from another. “As the term is customarily used,
attention is an equivocal collective name for several heterogeneous phenomena
which must be distinguished from one another, each of them exhibiting a
structure of its own and presenting special problems. One should not speak at all
of attention in general but should indicate in every concrete case which specific
attentional modification is meant, with its specific noematic accomplishment
belonging only to the modification in question” (Gurwitsch 1966, 266; see also
218). Within the pluralism, however, there is a natural typology and there are
transformation laws; hence the pluralism does not tend toward a chaos in the
phenomenology or science of attention, but rather toward a taxonomy, as seen in
Chapter Three.
In solution to each of the three problems, Gurwitsch invokes the distinction
between what I would call the three dimensions in the sphere of attention, and
the possible transformations within them (e.g., restructuring) or between them
(e.g., synthesis).
Does Husserl Distinguish Theme, Context, and Margin?

This section gives a general answer to the title question. The next section
specifically examines the same question in light of Husserl’s unique Analyses
Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, published posthumously in German in
1966, seven years before Gurwitsch’s death, and recently (2001) translated into
English. It is unique because the Analyses possibly addresses in greatest detail
the kind of phenomena of context that most concerned Gurwitsch, and because it
is doubtful that Gurwitsch was able to read it. Also he did not officially
comment on this “new” work of Husserl’s, as he had previous works. Because
Gurwitsch himself was unable to make an assessment of the Analyses, I treat it
separately next. Hence this section is propaedeutic to the next and examines
what Gurwitsch claimed, and the next updates it, adding what he might have
claimed in light of Husserl’s Analyses.
Gurwitsch states that Husserl never made the distinctions between the three
dimensions of theme, context, and margin. As with most claims like this in the
history of philosophy, the answer to the question of whether or not Gurwitsch is
right is, yes and no. Gurwitsch’s statements range from the general to the
specific; from “Husserl has not formally discussed the problem of organization
concerning us here” (1964, 269; see also 1966, 188) to “Husserl has, however,
not made the distinction between the thematic field and the margin” (1966, 272n
and 229), and again, “As to the distinction between the thematic field and
margin, it was never made by Husserl” (1985, 22). No one will deny that
Husserl identifies and defines a theme as that which is “held in grasp” or that
with which “consciousness” is “busied.” He also identifies that which is
marginal as items that are not thematic, much as William James does (Arvidson,
1992b). The question is, does Husserl also identify a thematic context and
margin such that relevance to the theme and irrelevance to the theme constitute
distinct dimensions in what is co-given with the theme. And if he does identify
them, does he develop them sufficiently?
I am reasonably sure that to the last question, one can only answer that
Husserl did not sufficiently develop the idea of thematic context, at least
compared to what Gurwitsch was able to do. This insufficiency is not
necessarily a fault. Husserl’s interests lie elsewhere and as founder of
phenomenology there are many insights whose delineation he could only sketch.
As to the question whether or not Husserl identifies thematic context as distinct
from margin, I think one needs to say yes, but the identification is indirect, it
must be teased out of the text. For example, in Ideas I (1982, §122) Husserl
distinguishes relevance or irrelevance to the theme by the presence or absence of
ego activity (see Gurwitsch 1964, 351). Gurwitsch’s view on the matter is clear,
and perhaps justified. Writing about some content in the thematic context (an
“inactuality” for Husserl) becoming actually a theme, Gurwitsch (1966, 229–
230) states “Carrying out in the domain of the co-given the differentiation, not
made by Husserl himself, by means of which the thematic field is delimited as a
partial domain of a special kind, we can refer the aforementioned possibility of
actualization to this partial domain alone….[W]e thus confine the expression of
[Husserl’s] ‘the fringe of consciousness which belongs to the essence of a
(cogitative) perception experienced in the mode of advertence to the object’ to
the thematic field as defined by us.” Did Husserl identify the dimension of
thematic context in the sphere of attention, so that it is recognized as distinct
from the margin? Yes. Did Husserl develop the idea of the contextual dimension
in its own terms and give it the powerful organizational status in attentional life
that it deserves? No.
Yet Gurwitsch’s approach is refreshingly compatibilist. Here is how he tries
to identify exactly how Husserl’s articulations point to the three dimensions of
theme, thematic context, and margin. (For a very different approach to these
questions see Walton 2003.)
Gurwitsch states that Husserl’s cogito is the noetic correlate of the theme
(1964, 349; see Husserl 1970, Vol. 1, §23; Vol. 2, §19). In Husserl’s notion of
cogito, part of its function is to “hold in grasp” (“im Griffe haben”) some
content so that it is actual rather than inactual, thematic rather than not
(Gurwitsch 1966, 179 and 204; see Husserl 1982, §35 and §84). But cogito
should be ascribed to just the theme not the whole process or all the phases as
Husserl does, which also involve “inactualities” (Gurwitsch 1964, 350). This is
because the “inactualities” belong to the thematic context not the theme, as seen
below. Also, Gurwitsch’s use of the term cogito is not an acceptance of
Husserl’s egological conception of attention (1964, 351). In a wonderful
translation from Husserl’s subjectivity-oriented approach to Gurwitsch’s
objectivity-oriented approach to attention, Gurwitsch (1966, 204) describes how
“holding in grasp” comes about in the sphere of attention, a phenomenological
description of what cognitive scientists call orienting in attention:
How are we now to formulate the descriptive nature of ‘taking

into grasp’ and ‘holding in grasp?’ I sit here and allow
thoughts to ‘cross my mind’; mathematical theorems, for
instance, present themselves to me without my thematically
dealing with any one of them. I am aware of a variety of
propositions, of obscure, confused, and unarticulated thoughts
in a more or less nascent state. Suddenly an orientation comes
into [the] unordered train of mathematical “phantasies” and
musings; what was still simply floating by acquires
relatedness to a thought of which I am aware clearly and
articulately as my theme and which dominates my field of
consciousness, centralizing and directing it.
That earlier, wandering train of thought is now no longer
experienced. In accordance with its material connectedness
with the theme, that which pertains to the background of
consciousness acquires a definite place within the thematic
field. We say that an orientation has been brought about, and
this involves two things: the field of consciousness has
acquired a center, and the thematic field is organized with
respect to it.
Here one sees how Gurwitsch correlates the temporal immediacy of Husserl’s
“holding in grasp” with the spatial immediacy of a theme presenting itself within
a context and serving as the center of organization in the sphere of attention.
(Elsewhere I have argued against the implicit idea in the first sentence that only
stable themes are themes, Arvidson 2000; cf., Gurwitsch 1966, 204–205.)
Dismissing the act’s egological character in Husserl’s analysis, Gurwitsch
finds that “maintaining in grasp” (“noch im Griffe behalten”) correlates with
thematic context. Gurwitsch (1966, 235) writes “Thus the mode ‘holding in
grasp’ is identical with ‘being a theme’; ‘grasping’ designates the process of
turning to a theme, the ‘becoming a theme’; the ‘still maintaining in grasp’

refers to the case…in which what was the theme is now given as a component of
the thematic field belonging to a new theme now ‘held in grasp’.” Gurwitsch
also identifies theme and thematic context as correlates of Husserl’s
differentiation between being “primarily concerned” with something versus
being “incidentally concerned.” Gurwitsch (1966, 214–215) writes:
I am “primarily” concerned with my theme, “incidentally”

dealing with items pertaining to the thematic field. I am
“absorbed” in my theme while “living” in those acts which
make the theme present. But I am not “absorbed” in the
thematic field, nor do I “live” in those acts through which it is
given to me. That is to say: acts in which something is
primarily noticed, acts of attention in the pregnant sense, in
which attention is directed to something, grasps something, or
in whatever other psychological terms it might be expressed
(quite in general, consciousness in the form cogito) is
consciousness whose objective correlate presents itself as
theme. The concept of cogitatively dealing with something
thus purports that this something is a theme over against both
its thematic field and whatever else is co-given.
As noted just above, Gurwitsch (1966, 230) correlates Husserl’s notion of

“fringe” to thematic context (for Gurwitsch and James on fringe see Arvidson
1992b). We will see that it is very difficult to find in Husserl’s work a genuine
and thoroughgoing description of thematic context as such, from a noematic or
object-oriented point of view, even in his work on active and passive synthesis.
What Husserl identified as “release from grasp” (“aus dem Griff entlassen”)
of that which was formerly maintained in grasp, correlates with the margin for
Gurwitsch (1964, 350–351; see Husserl 1973, §23b). Something that is
“released from grasp” does not necessarily disappear from consciousness
completely, since it can be presented. But it is now irrelevant to the theme. This
is another occasion for Gurwitsch to demarcate the thematic context from the
margin. Husserl’s way of demarcated the difference is utterly unsatisfactory for
Gurwitsch, since Husserl attributes the difference to the activity of the ego
(Husserl 1973, §23b). Gurwitsch wants to attribute the difference to the
organizational and transformational principles of the invariant structural
organization in what they both call “the field of consciousness.” Still Gurwitsch
finds himself in total agreement with what Husserl says about the margin as
phenomenal temporality or “stream of consciousness” (1964, 351).
In sum drawing from Gurwitsch’s sometimes ambivalent writings on the
matter, I think Gurwitsch believes that Husserl’s work points to a distinction
between theme, context, and margin, but that the actual distinction is conceived
inadequately and with too much reliance on ego-activity.
Evidence from Husserl’s Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis

As mentioned above, in the beginning of The Field of Consciousness,
Gurwitsch identifies “context” as the theme of the book. “To develop a field-
theory of consciousness is to embark upon an analysis of the phenomenon of
context in general, as well as upon the eventual disclosure of different types of
contexts” (Gurwitsch 1964, 2–3). One could extend this focus on context and
say that nearly all of Gurwitsch’s philosophy has context as its theme, since by
context he means specific and general organizational principles, including but
not limited to context in the specific sense of thematic context as a dimension in
the sphere of attention. However, as we have seen, it is just this thematic context
that he claims Husserl did not articulate well and should have. Because
Husserl’s lectures gathered together as Analyses Concerning Passive and Active
Synthesis (2001) appear to most directly address the issues with which
Gurwitsch is uniquely concerned, it is possible that this work could redeem
Husserl in Gurwitsch’s eyes on the problem of context. The promising phrase
here is “passive synthesis” since it seems to convey an ego-less processing or
organization in attending. These lectures were published in German in 1966,
seven years before Gurwitsch’s death, but apparently Gurwitsch did not read
them since I cannot find them cited anywhere in his later work. In an email
message to the author on September 23, 2002, Lester Embree, a former student
of Gurwitsch, and a philosopher and historian of phenomenology, doubts that
Gurwitsch read this work. And although Gurwitsch’s correspondent Alfred
Schutz questioned Gurwitsch in 1959 on “passive synthesis,” it appears that
Gurwitsch did not respond in writing to Schutz’s specific points (Grathoff 1989,
276). Even so, Gurwitsch knows about Husserl’s general distinction between
passive and active synthesis, which he could have obtained from other works he
read and commented on such as Experience and Judgment and
Phenomenological Psychology (1977) (see e.g., Gurwitsch 1966, 154; 1974, 95
and 106–107).
As in the previous section, but now with our sights on Husserl’s Analyses,
the question is, assuming Gurwitsch is right about organizing all that is
presented into theme, thematic context, and margin, did Husserl also do the
same thing? An examination of Husserl’s Analyses gives conflicting evidence.
Near the beginning of his Analyses, Husserl seems to make a sharp
distinction between theme, thematic context, and margin. Almost always the
distinctions in the “total field” will be from the point of view of the subject or
ego, a noetic perspective. Husserl (2001, 18–19) writes:
When I actually perceive an object, that is, look at it, take note
of it, grasp it, regard it, it will never be without an unnoticed,
ungrasped background of objects. In this case we distinguish
what is secondarily noticed from what actually goes
unnoticed. In general, in addition to the object that is primarily
noticed, with which I am occupied in a privileged way while
viewing it, there are still other single objects that are co-
noticed be they given in a second or third order co-grasping.
This will take place in such a way that in passing over from
the observation of one object to the observation of another, I
am indeed no longer looking at the first one, I am no longer
primarily occupied with it, properly speaking; but I still have a
hold on it, I do not let it slip from my attentive and conceptual
hold, and along with that, everything I had previously grasped;
It continues to belong to me in a modified way, and in this
way I still have a hold on it. I am still present there as the
central, present ego; as a wakeful ego, I still have a relation to
it in an ego cogito. But in contrast to it we have a broad lived-
experiential field, or as we can also say, a field of conscious-
nesses that has not entered into such a relation with the ego or
with which the ego has not entered into such a relation: It may
knock on the door of the ego, but it does not “affect” the ego,
the ego is deaf to it, as it were. (See also Husserl 2001, 276,
292, 316 and 611.)
It is not hard to imagine that “the primarily noticed” is identical to the theme, the
“secondarily noticed” and what is maintained in grasp is the thematic context,
and the “unnoticed” or “broad lived experiential field” is the margin (for
Husserl’s definition of theme see 2001, 290, cf. also 333). So there appears to be
a genuine three-part distinction here in what is presented, with each dimension
marked off from the other by virtue of a central egoic activity.
One of Gurwitsch’s complaints would be that the distinction between the

context and margin is made by the presence or absence of egoic activity, rather
than through organizational principles inherent within and between the
presented content. (Note that this complaint is not aimed at my claim, spelled
out in the next chapter, that the marginal halo is also the existential locus of
subjectivity since on my account subjectivity is not centrally active in attention.)
But a promising description of what might be the three parts of the field is also
given in terms of passive synthesis, synthesis prior to ego activity. Husserl
(2001, 217) writes, “The affective relief has as a materially relevant support the
structural nexuses of the present; by affection proceeding from a point and being
distributed in an awakening manner along these lines, the entire relief is
accentuated along these lines. Further…a background or subsoil of non-vivacity,
of affective ineffectiveness (nil) belongs to every present.” It may be appropriate
to interpret Husserl’s “point,” “structural nexuses,” and “background” as theme,
thematic context, and margin. There would be a number of cautions however:
Husserl’s terms indicate what is prior to attention (Aufmerksamkeit), the point of
view is still noetic, the “structural nexuses” are probably meant as within just
one sense-field (e.g., vision), and the distinction between the three terms for
Husserl can be made primarily because of the gradient of vivacity rather than
inherent organization. Husserl (2001, 199) explicitly recognizes associations
within sense-fields, “[E]very sense-field forms for itself a unique, self-contained
realm of affective tendencies, capable of forming organizing unities by means of
association.” But the question is, what is the relation of any given theme, or
even before Husserlian “attention,” any prominence as affection, to the whole
context within which it is given?
There is no doubt that Gurwitsch would want to ask the question of
thematic context if he were to read Husserl’s Analyses. But in some ways it is
never going to be answered in Husserl’s work to Gurwitsch’s satisfaction,
because even in the so-called “passive” syntheses, which by definition do not
involve the activity of the ego, Husserl’s approach is distinctively noetic not
noematic. Also, as long as the doctrine of hyle remains, and it does in this work
(see e.g., Husserl 2001, 210 and 213), Gurwitsch cannot get satisfaction.
Essentially unorganized in themselves, except perhaps along the lines of sense-
fields (e.g., vision, hearing, etc.), hyle thwart the possibility of genuine and
autochthonous organization in what Gurwitsch would call the field of conscious-
ness. Still, it is possible to tease out some of Husserl’s formulations to try to
determine some directions along which Gurwitsch might get a response to his
question of context.
Husserl describes the “interconnection” between what is thematic and what

is relevant. He (2001, 325) writes, “Once a thematic interest is put into
play…then an open infinity of thematic interconnections is unfolded from
there.” But the description of the actual nature of the interconnection is vague:
“From the ever new objects that break through to attentiveness, only those
objects in their thematic acts, their judgments, are connected to the thematic
feature that is already put into play, expanding its unity—only those objects that
have something in common with the previous ones and that have something to
do with them” (325–326; see also 625n). What is the “something in common”
that successive themes have with each other? Husserl’s overriding interest in
this work is synthesis, and he sees judgments as thematic accomplishments
given as active syntheses complete in themselves, but also synthetically
connected to other judgments. “[E]very judgment has a thematic completion, is
something thematically complete. And yet it is an element of an open
connection, and according to an ideal possibility, a constantly expanding
thematic interconnection, and is thus not self-contained. This interconnection is
built completely out of judgments, and with every new judicative step, fashions
a unity of accomplishment out of particular accomplishments, a unity of
satisfaction from satisfactions that have already been gained” (Husserl 2001,
326–327). Gurwitsch might agree that a thematic judgment is given within a
context of previous and possible thematic judgments. But here he might also ask
the question of synthesis. Namely, Husserl’s account appears ambiguously to
describe both the case of a theme appearing within a thematic context, and a
theme becoming a constituent in a new theme (that is, synthesis in Gurwitsch’s
sense). If it is the latter, then Husserl misses the necessary transformation of the
“element” when it is taken up in a “new judicative step.” We will discuss this
ambiguity between context and synthesis below, where synthesis means
something more narrow for Gurwitsch.
Another way that Husserl appears to discuss thematic context is with the
term objective sense, or as he says more precisely, “presentational content”
(Vorstellungsinhalt). He distinguishes the presentational object from the
presentational content, apparently the theme from the thematic context. I say
apparently because again it is a matter of trying to account for the organization
of the objective or noematic in terms of the subjective act. For example, Husserl
(2001, 332) gives the following description of the theme and its act context:
“But when the house is the thoroughgoing theme, it is the identical object in the
context of thematic actions, no longer as the unity of its sensible manifolds and
of it changing presentational contents, but as the identical element precisely of
these thematic actions and of the accomplishments arising through them for the
theme itself. It is the identical element in the manifold of active identifications
that manifest the theme as a point of intersection of manifold judgments and then
as the point of identity of corresponding attributions, as the same again and
again.” Gurwitsch might wish Husserl to make a sharper distinction between the
“presentational object” and the “presentational content” as each is presented, as
they are presented in the sphere of attention, rather than as functions of the
attending process. In other words, Husserl never really seems to describe the
structure of the interconnections in presentational content, what it looks like, its
shape and organization, except in terms of temporality.
Yet in an Appendix to §28 one finds some golden nuggets of object-
oriented context in the mine of passive synthesis. Husserl (2001, 505–506)
writes, “The unity of the field of consciousness is always produced through
sensible interconnections, in a sensible connection of similarity and sensible
contrast. Without this there could be no ‘world.’ We could say that it is
resonance as sensible similarity and sensible contrast (that for its part
presupposes a similarity) that grounds everything that is once constituted. It is a
universal law of consciousness that a resonance proceeds from every special
consciousness or from every special object, and similarity is the unity of the
resonating element. In addition to this, [we have the] special law of individuals
in prominence. Resonance is a way of coinciding in distance, in separation.”
Husserl clearly states here that the field of consciousness is unified in a way that
does not necessarily include ego acts, but may still be for an ego. A “resonance”
(Resonanz) can and must obtain between what is similar in the field. By
resonance he appears to mean that which drives material relevancy between two
contents in the field; the same material relevancy that is the operative concept
for Gurwitsch’s notion of thematic context. Material relevancy is the measure of
“interconnection.” It also seems as if this interconnection is there from the start:
“In a certain way, a sense is self-evidently and necessarily there wherever
something is a theme, and already when something becomes a theme for a
judging for the first time” (Husserl 2001, 330). In a choppy passage in an earlier
Appendix to the same §28, Husserl (2001, 496) writes “What is it that initially
determines separation? Non-similarity (heterogeneity), that which is ‘without’
materially relevant ‘interconnection.’ Similarity is the very first thing that
fashions ‘interconnection,’ ‘interconnection’ in the sense that is a tissue with
regard to relations. (Without interconnection = that which has nothing to do with
the other, that which is alien in a materially relevant manner, heterogeneous).”
Not only is this an example of material relevancy having the meaning of
interconnection (Zusammenhang), but it also claims that what is without mate-

rial relevancy is “heterogeneous,” “alien,” and hence marginal in Gurwitsch’s
terms, while what has material relevancy is homogeneous and “thematic” for
Husserl, which here would also include “thematic field” in Gurwitsch’s terms.
In an Appendix to §63 and §64 Husserl (2001, 570) writes, “As the interest
expands, the unitary examination can lead from one object to another, and in
these transitions interest varies its object; but it is borne by a unity of connected
interest because there is already a previously constituted ‘materially relevant
unity’ within passivity, or it gradually comes to the fore as constituted.” I think
that with the ideas of resonance and material relevancy, even though they are
still vaguely defined and not on center stage, Husserl comes close to providing
what Gurwitsch is looking for.
However, this recognition of interconnection as necessary and possible,
apparently without the activity of the ego or some other supervenient factors,
gives Husserl a fascinating tension expressed in an Appendix footnote to §59.
After considering whether wholes are possibly collections, Husserl (2001, 565n)
notes, “Still unsatisfactory. Indeed, why is the concept of connection avoided
and it is avoidable?! The set is united through collection, but a whole has parts,
and they are connected. The connection can be a categorial one or a real one.
Every explication of an object in an interconnection of disjunctive connected
parts, which are equivalent to the whole object (disjunctive parts are no longer
possible outside of connection)—every explication of an object is graspable as a
set, whose members have ‘connection’.” The tension in this passage seems to be
between disconnection and connection, between taking a whole as made up of
elements in a collection and taking a whole as made up of coherent constituents
in connection. Gurwitsch calls the coherence of constituents in a theme
“functional significance” (see also Husserl’s parenthetical definition of
apperception 2001, 627). In the following passage, Husserl (2001, 224) seems to
come close to what Gurwitsch means by functional significance of the theme:
“Affective communication would mean that every contribution of affective force
by any ‘member’ of something connected in distance through homogeneity and
prominence augments the force of all its ‘comrades’….The extent to which the
conditions of near-connection and distant-connection proper to the intuitions’
‘content,’ to their objective sense, are fulfilled is the extent to which the
interconnection comes about; only that depending upon the affective relief, there
will exist differences of salience, differences of affective intensity of the
prominence of these or those particular objects and of these or those particular
interconnections.” These passages show that connection and interconnection,

apparently without the ego, is something Husserl considers.
Throughout his works, Gurwitsch reminds the reader that a solely temporal
analysis of consciousness is insufficient. For example, “Besides the temporal
organization of consciousness, problems which concern organization and
organizational forms of what is experienced, taken exactly as it is experienced,
must be considered” (1964, 4). In traditional phenomenological terms,
Gurwitsch is talking about the noema, objective sense or content, presentational
content, etc., and this object-oriented approach to phenomena marks
Gurwitsch’s distinction from Husserl. So the question becomes, does Husserl
attempt in the Analyses a thoroughgoing analysis of “that which is experienced,
taken exactly as it is experienced?” The answer is no.
While Husserl calls attention to the fact that temporality is necessary but
insufficient to account for “consciousness,” he never proceeds to systematically
account for the object from what might be called Gurwitsch’s object-oriented
point of view. Husserl raises the question but then does not follow through.
There are a couple of places in Husserl’s Analyses that point to the insufficiency
of a temporal analysis alone, that is to say, an insufficiency in the analysis of
“consciousness” from Husserl’s preferred standpoint. For example, “But what
gives unity to the particular object with respect to content, what makes up the
differences between each of them with respect to content (and specifically for
consciousness and from its own constitutive accomplishment), what makes
division possible and the relation between parts in consciousness, and so forth—
the analysis of time alone cannot tell us, for it abstracts precisely from content.
Thus, it does not give us any idea of the necessary synthetic structures of the
streaming present and of the unitary stream of the presents—which in some way
concerns the particularity of content” (Husserl 2001, 174). One would suppose
that in his remarks on association and passive synthesis we could find a more
fulfilling treatment. But as far as I can see, what is quoted above from the
Appendix is representative of the sketchy treatment. In another Appendix
passage, Husserl (2001, 621–622) writes “[T]he content of this form, that which
is extended in the temporal form, that which fulfills it in different temporal
shapes, the content of this form, also has its modes of appearance. It does not
merely have modifications of appearance that accrue to it by being adumbrated
according to temporal perspectives with its temporal shape.” In the paragraph
that follows this quote he affirms the distinction between temporality and
“temporal content” and that in pursuing the distinction “the investigation
necessarily splits” (Husserl 2001, 622). He does not pursue it.
One might argue that Gurwitsch’s criticisms of Husserl’s conception of

consciousness as ego-centered do not hold with respect to passive synthesis.
That is, Husserl’s Analyses does indeed develop the organization of the “field of
consciousness” in Gurwitsch’s sense, and as a passive constitution—passive
precisely because it is constituted without ego activity or centeredness.
Gurwitsch might respond that even this “passive” synthesis is oriented
around and given for the ego according to Husserl, if not explicitly an ego
activity. Gurwitsch does not claim this directly, but when recapping Husserl’s
view of synthesis Gurwitsch adds that the ego is always the center of
organization for Husserl. In a study of Husserl’s Phenomenological Psychology
(1977), Gurwitsch (1974, 106) writes, “The reference of experiences to the ego
can assume two forms. In the first place, the ego can be solicited by objects
constituted, that is, constituted through intentional experiences in which the ego
does not partake. Second, the ego can yield to such solicitation and turn to
passively constituted objects, attend to and deal with them. In that case the ego
is active.” From what I can see, this is also a good summary of the function of
the ego in the Analyses. Gurwitsch (1974, 107) further observes “The ego proves
the source (Quellpunkt) of all accomplishments, generations, and creations. But
his activities are contingent on—because they presuppose—passive affections
and solicitations, that is, intentional experiences in the mode of passivity.”
Gurwitsch is rightly claiming that for Husserl, affections, allures, or
prominences are so only for the ego, even if the ego does not thematically attend
to them. Husserl identifies the prominence of particular content in passive
constitution as “a special affection” (2001, 527). Husserl (2001, 211) writes,
“According to this methodological principle, we thus ascribe to every
constituted, prominent datum that is for itself an affective allure [acting] on the
ego.” This lowest level of passive constitution seems to be the level in which
hyletic data become prominent in separating themselves off from other
simultaneously presented data (see Husserl 2001, 210 and 213). And again, “By
affection we understand the allure given to consciousness, the peculiar pull that
an object given to consciousness exercises on the ego” (Husserl 2001, 196).
Husserl raises for himself the question of the unification of the object and
the role of passive affection. In answering it he shows how the ego is not active
but nonetheless central or teleologically implied in even the simplest intentional
constitution. He (2001, 210) writes:
I would like to respond to this question by stating that it is the

accomplishment of passivity, and as the lowest level within
passivity, the accomplishment of hyletic passivity, that

fashions a constant field of pregiven objectlike formations for
the ego, and subsequently, potentially a field of objectlike
formations given to the ego. What is constituted is constituted
for the ego, and ultimately, an environing-world that is
completely actual is to be constituted in which the ego lives,
acts, and which, on the other hand, constantly motivates the
ego. What is constituted for consciousness exists for the ego
only insofar as it affects me, the ego. Any kind of constituted
sense is pregiven insofar as it exercises an affective allure, it is
given insofar as the ego complies with the allure and has
turned toward it attentively, laying hold of it. These are
fundamental forms of the way in which something becomes an
object.
Thus the distinction between passive and active synthesis does not divide along
the lines of relation to the ego, although it may divide along the lines of ego
inactivity versus activity (see, e.g. 2001, 295 where Husserl describes passive
affection for the “passive ego”).
In summary, Husserl seems to assume flowing, open, and changing context
throughout his Analyses—the syntheses of organization are not marked off co-
herently or sharply from each other. This means that the constitution of
objectlike formations in prominence, or in affection, and what is given in
receptivity and grasped in attention as a thematic object, and finally made a
theme of judgment, is across each operation a telescoping or synthesizing of
contextual relations that is all contextual (not just thematic context), at least
once some primordial or genuine constitution has been accomplished. The
reason for this approach by Husserl, I think, is the emphasis on temporality as an
organizing principle of consciousness. In a sense, temporality is one
dimensional, even though as lived-present it has the three dimensions of past,
future, present. It is one-dimensional because the only relation allowed between
contents from an object-oriented point of view is succession or co-existence.
Given this approach, Husserl often does not address the phenomenon of
organizational relations from an object-oriented analysis despite the idea that a
passive synthesis is accomplished without the activity of the ego. Even when he
does so the results are either limited, as when he describes association within
specific sense-fields such as vision, audition, etc., or they are vague. In short, for
Husserl, as for William James, context is ubiquitous and so its limits are
invisible. Husserl (2001, 573) writes, “We have taken the term ‘whole’ so
broadly that it encompasses every kind of connection that passively connects
objects or that is presented through judicative activity.” This is exactly the point;
it has been taken too broadly. Along with Gurwitsch, I would insist on a
distinction between theme, thematic context, and margin.
Roberto Walton (2003) has denied that Gurwitsch should have made such a
distinction between thematic context and margin. Although his account does not
necessarily center on Husserl’s Analyses, it is appropriate to note it here.
Walton’s point is that the distinction between the thematic context and the
margin, as a distinction between relevancy to the theme and irrelevancy, is
overshadowed, “encased” or “encompassed,” by a more significant opposition,
potentiality/actuality. In addition, Gurwitsch has not recognized “the opposition
of patency/latency,” and stresses in his work only patency, hence Gurwitsch
ignores the importance of latency for that which is outside of the theme. These
“oppositions” are based or grounded in the horizon as an all-encompassing
domain, principled by latency, that marks the perceptual world as a paramount
order of reality. Walton’s argument against Gurwitsch rests on the notion that
there is an all-embracing world horizon, “wordliness,” that overrides the
discontinuation between the thematic context and margin. Walton (2003, 11)
writes, “Whereas objective time is the relevancy-principle that renders possible
the unity of the thematized perceptual sector and its thematic field, worldliness
is the specific relevancy principle building a bridge across the limit between the
theme-thematic-field structure and the margin.” As I will show in the next
chapter, the “bridge across” both is the marginal halo, something Walton does
not mention, but which I believe is crucial for understanding Gurwitsch’s “field-
theory.” Walton (2003, 10) also argues, “The implication of the overlapping of
both domains in the sphere of indeterminateness is that everything, whether
thematic or marginal, appears to consciousness as pertaining to a unique, latent
world.” In the next chapter, I will also show how the margin, properly
conceived, is a kind of ultimate potentiality in the sphere of attention. For now,
however, I will directly respond to Walton’s claim that there is no real
distinction between thematic context and margin.
One can grant that there is potentiality in the thematic context and
potentiality in the margin (“field-potentials” and “potential themes with
potential thematic fields,” Gurwitsch 1964, 370–375), and that both imply
ultimate indeterminateness and potentiality, and not grant Walton’s point. The
“worldliness” of the world is so only in relation to the given theme and thematic
context on the one hand, and in relation to the given theme and the margin on
the other. Therefore, the latency or potentiality of the world is so only in

connection with these dimensions. I know my argument appears to assume
already that there is a distinction between context and margin, but it does not.
What is assumed is a point of view—the theme as organizing center—which
Walton misses. Starting from the theme, there is a distinction between what is
relevant and what is irrelevant to it, while starting from the horizon, the
importance to the theme of this distinction between thematic context and margin
is glossed over or buried. But as Gurwitsch points out, the theme is the center of
organization for the “field of consciousness” (1964, 342). Also, one could argue
for the distinction between the thematic context and margin in just the way that I
have in Chapter Two, by an appeal to the experimental evidence, which I think
overwhelmingly and decisively supports the primacy of Gurwitsch’s distinc-
tions.
Walton states that both the thematic context extended, and the outer reaches
of the margin, “lead to the limit-case of complete inarticulation and
indeterminateness”; he (2003, 22) continues in the same place, “It becomes clear
that degrees of relevancy lead within the thematic field to the limit-case of
irrelevancy, which then belongs to the horizons of the margin.” Therefore, he
concludes, the thematic context and the margin amount to the same thing, a
more or less actual, patent, determinate horizon, with just differences in degree
of potentiality, latency, and indeterminacy. I would counter that the indefinite
continuation is always tied to the thematic context in the one case, and to the
margin in the other. This makes them distinct, or it continues their distinction. In
this matter, Walton takes the outermost horizon as his starting point, and
Gurwitsch (and I) take the theme as the starting point of the organization of
relevancy. From his direction, when Walton arrives at the thematic context, the
domain of irrelevancy as irrelevant is not significant because the starting point is
too generalized or emptied. Moreover, since thematic context extends
indefinitely, the very idea of a limit-case of irrelevancy of (relevant) thematic
context, marks the difference between thematic context and margin. As Georg
Hegel wonderfully illustrates in his Science of Logic (1969, 127–128), a limit is
both a beginning and an ending, or it marks a within and a beyond, or inside and
outside. If there is irrelevancy there is also relevancy, and this distinction is not
captured by a gradient of “worldliness,” although it is compatible with it. The
distinction is compatible with “worldliness” because the potentiality of the
thematic context indicates this horizon, but from the point of view of being
relevant to the theme, and marginal potentiality also indicates this horizon, but
from the point of view of the theme-margin relation, as discussed in the next
chapter. Also Walton never mentions Gurwitsch’s account of the halo, which I
take to be crucial for understanding Gurwitsch’s distinction between the
dimensions in the sphere of attention. For now I will just note that the marginal
halo functions as a saddleback or thick limit between the thematic context and
margin, as the existential locus of subjectivity, and functions thereby as a
distinction between relevancy and irrelevancy, between thematic context and
margin.
Husserl and Gurwitsch on Transformations in Attending

Husserl’s Ideas I (1982, e.g., §92) and other works give motivation and
insight for Gurwitsch’s account of attentional transformations, although this
motivation is not confined to Husserl (Gurwitsch 1966, 179). This section pulls
together the correlations between these two philosophers’ views of transform-
ations in attending, mostly from the point of view of Gurwitsch’s critique of
Husserl. For more on Gurwitsch’s sense of these transformations, refer to the
previous chapter.
Enlargement and elucidation are transformations in attending in which the
theme persists essentially unchanged and the thematic context is respectively
broadened or clarified. According to Gurwitsch (1966, 266), Husserl’s
descriptions of “non-genuine clarification” (1982, §67) and “clarification of
‘natural surrounding world’” (1982, §27) can be interpreted as transformations
of enlargement and elucidation. Gurwitsch, however, does not limit the latter
clarification to the “natural surrounding world.” “This limitation is not essential;
mutatis mutandis, what is said there can be transferred to consciousness of every
kind” (1966, 226n). The appropriate and necessary changes indicated by the
Latin phrase are that the sphere of attention would have to be demarcated into
theme and thematic context, with all that this articulation entails.
Serial-shifting is sequential thematic attention to consecutive content, so
that the gestalt now thematic is attended to within a thematic context that
includes the previous theme and the future theme as serially related to the
current theme. In this transformation, as the item shifts from thematic attention
to contextual consciousness, the identity of the item remains unchanged. For
example, in memorizing a list, when I move from the second item in a list to the
third, the second item only changes in its status, not its core. This is not the case
for restructuring, singling out, and synthesis. But Gurwitsch does not allow that
the difference between the presentation of item two as thematic or as contextual
is merely a gradient within attention, a matter of degree rather than dimension.
“Perhaps one does justice to this state of affairs only by considering the gestalt
connection binding up the thematic field to the theme as somehow relaxed [in
serial-shifting]. However, there is an appreciable difference between a gestalt
connection, however relaxed, and a pure “additive sum,” and just this difference
prevents us from speaking here of an “and-connection” (1966, 234). In other
words, the second and third items on the list are materially relevant to each other
in the way that any marginal item, for example, thirstiness, would not be. This is
a transformation in attending that Husserl seems to get right, according to
Gurwitsch, since Husserl advocates the identity of the elements through the
transformations. “Husserl and those in agreement with him had in mind this
identity of elements—here [i.e., in serial-shifting], indeed, one can speak of
“elements”—over against the alteration of the field of consciousness when
advocating the thesis that attention consists merely in giving preference to
certain contents or objects, the function of attention being to throw brighter light
on the items concerned without thereby changing in any way their material
content” (1966, 233). Hence, Husserl describes serial-shifting correctly yet
within an inadequate notion of thematic context (e.g., see Husserl 2001, 292).
Restructuring is when a new theme replaces the old theme, but the new
theme is the result of a transformation of formed constituents into formative
ones, and formative ones into formed ones. Gurwitsch interprets Husserl’s
account of ambiguous perceptions as restructuring of the theme. Ultimately,
Gurwitsch believes that Husserl misses the sense of restructuring because of his
theory of hyletic data. In a number of his works, Husserl is led to examine
ambiguous perceptions, such as when a woman standing next to him in an art
gallery turns out to be a wax figure designed to trick onlookers (2001, 431; see
also 72–75; and 1973, 99–101). One reason for considering these kind of
phenomena is that it sheds light on the nature of conflict and doubt. Gurwitsch’s
critique centers around the claim that the hyletic data can be remade as one
moment a mannequin and the next a person; that the same sense-data can be
either, and the conflict is between which form they will take from the noetic
factors. In other words, the conflict is subjective not objective. The hyletic or
sense-data are ambiguous. “In Husserl’s analysis, the conflict is presented as a
competition between two apperceptual interpretations for the same complex of
sense-data. As one apperception grasps the sense-data, the other is temporarily
superseded, until it reemerges” (Gurwitsch 1964, 270). Gurwitsch (1964, 271)
argues that the only way to assert the identity of the sense-data in the face of the
different perceptual interpretations is to conceive that the organization or
interpretation is imposed, yet does not affect the sense-data intrinsically (a sort
of constancy-hypothesis). In psychology of attention this is the endogenous or
top-down model of attention control. Gurwitsch (1964, 271) asks, “When two
perceptual apperceptions alternate with one another, is not that given in direct
sense-experience so qualified by the different implicit ideas [e.g., person vs.
mannequin] involved in either percept that the two percepts cannot be asserted
to contain identical elements?” It is up to Gurwitsch to demonstrate how these
“same” sense-data cannot be the same when taken up in attention in the way
described.
I will recount two of Gurwitsch’s counterexamples. They differ in that the
first is between two people’s attention to the “same” thing, and the second is
more like restructuring of the theme. “If Chinese letters are presented to me, the
difference between me and one who knows Chinese is not only that he
understands them and I do not, but the letters also look different to him than they
do to me. What is immediately given to either of us, what either perceives, is not
the same object. Holding that hyletic data are organized and articulated by
meaning-bestowing and understanding acts, one cannot say that the appearance
of the word on paper as a physical event is, with respect to its sensuous aspect,
left unchanged by the animating acts. In this case, the mental aspect of the
expression forms and articulates its physical aspect” (Gurwitsch 1966, 255). In a
later and better formulation, since it is more akin to Husserl’s examples,
Gurwitsch examines the phenomenon of restructuring in a natural setting. “In an
unfamiliar mountainous country we see at some altitude a bluish-gray formation
appearing at one moment as a cloud, at others as the sky-line of mountains”
(Gurwitsch 1964, 271). Like in the duck-rabbit figure or vase-faces line
drawings, the functional significance of the constituents undergoes dramatic
change, so that one cannot say the same theme is presented in each case, nor that
the constituents remained the same in their function within the gestalt. For
example, constituents that were formative are now formed, and formed ones are
now formative, in the transformation. Gurwitsch (1964, 271–272) writes, “As
long as the sky-line of mountains appears, the bluish-gray color is consolidated
and attached to a bodily surface. However, when the cloud is perceived, the
spatial localization of the color becomes indeterminate, the color appears to float
in the air.” In short, there are two different gestalts that are competing for the
same space, not for the same sense-data. “Conflict presupposes something
identical for which there is competition. This identical something, we submit, is
a definite location in perceptual space rather than a set of sense-data conceived
to be raw material, devoid of noetic form, and assumed to be contained in
different percepts as common elements” (Gurwitsch 1964, 272).
Husserl does acknowledge that the two presentations are different, and even
that the reversion to the first appearance is not a reversion to the same
presentation. “If the apperception of human being suddenly changes into the
apperception of wax figure, then the human being will stand there first in its
presentation in the flesh and then a wax figure. But in truth neither of them are
there like the human being was prior to the onset of doubt” (Husserl 2001, 74).
Gurwitsch would agree with Husserl here; he gets it right that the human being
presented the second time is not the same as it is presented the first time. For
Husserl, this is a function of doubt becoming a part of the presentation of human
being presented the second time, whereas before it was not. But this correct
description does not reach the level of Gurwitsch’s critique, since it does not
dispute the notion that the same data are being presented in each case.
John Drummond (1990, 159–160) interestingly interprets this sensible
appearance as a “visual phantom,” so that the problem of ambiguous perception
moves up a level noematically, out of reach of Gurwitsch’s critique. On this
account, it is the “visual phantom” that stays the same, and the various
(ambiguous) ways in which it might reveal itself are tied up in associational
syntheses. With respect to attentional restructuration of the theme, which is the
concern here, Drummond’s point would seem to be that for Husserl,
restructuration of the theme is not a legitimate transformation in attending in its
own right, but is really correctly analyzed by Husserl at the level of judgment
and doubt (cf. Sartre 2004, 22, 135–136). One might wonder, however, if this
“visual phantom” is yet assumable under the definition of theme asserted in this
study (see also Arvidson 2000), namely that even partially formulated themes
are themes, just as “pre-attentive” processes still involve thematic attention.
Apparently, it could be a theme in this sense. If it is a theme, then it likely
reduces phenomenologically to thematic restructuring as described in Chapter
Three. If the “visual phantom” is not a theme, then Gurwitsch’s criticism of
Husserl in this case still seems to have merit, since his criticism is aimed at the
thematic level and this thematic phenomenon is not yet accounted for by “visual
phantom.”
In synthesis, unlike enlargement, the previous theme which is now a
constituent in a new theme is not identical in organization and relations since it
now contributes to the functional significance of the new theme. In distinction
from serial-shifting, which Gurwitsch (after Husserl) sometimes calls
“synthesized consciousness,” the transformation in synthesis does not leave
“elements” intact, and neither transformation is founded upon the other. “In
opposition to Husserl’s view, we must insist upon the peculiar nature of
synthesized consciousness in contradistinction to synthetic consciousness.

Precisely the noematic What differs from one to the other….Their difference is
not one of obscurity and distinctness, as though what is given as synthesized
were unarticulated and obscure and, when unfolded step by step, would become
distinct and articulated without its material content undergoing any change”
(1966, 250; see Husserl 1982, §123). Gurwitsch’s point is that the elements that
are “synthetic” and then become synthesized are not the same elements in the
resulting synthesis. Another way Gurwitsch relates his point to Husserl’s work is
by speaking of polythetic acts and monothetic acts, an additional locution used
by Husserl, for example, in Ideas I (1982, §119). A plurality becoming a unity is
exactly what synthesis is: “We consider it as a special case of the general law of
transformation. The transformation of polythetic acts into monothetic ones is
synthesizing and has to be understood accordingly” (Gurwitsch 1966, 249–250).
As one might expect in a work titled Analyses Concerning Active and
Passive Synthesis, Husserl provides some straightforward descriptions of what
Gurwitsch would call synthesis (e.g. Husserl 2001, 176 and 206). But the
problem is that everything for Husserl is a sort of (active or passive) synthesis. If
everything is an ongoing synthesis, whether active or passive, then the
distinction between theme and context becomes blurred, as well as the
distinction between context and margin (see the discussion of Walton 2003
above). For example, in Husserl’s (2001, 203) discussion of a melody that was
at first marginal and now has come into attention, perhaps through noticing “an
especially mellifluous sound,” the question of context is not sharply drawn, and
becomes rather a question of the transformation of synthesis in Gurwitsch’s
terms, yet without any account of the necessary transformation of what is now
the constituent (the mellifluous sound) in the new theme (the melody) (see also
Husserl 2001, 325–326). “The particularity of the sound has made me attentive.
And through this I became attentive to the entire melody, and, understandably,
the particularities thus became alive to me” (Husserl 2001, 203). This is indeed
the particular notion of synthesis that Gurwitsch describes as well. Husserl
(2001, 204) gives another example, “If the lights in the string of lights were to
radiate in a temporal succession, then the string as a whole in its givenness
would naturally follow upon the givenness of its parts.” The problem remains,
however, that Husserl considers the “parts” essentially unchanged in these new
configurations.
Singling out involves the transformation of a constituent of a theme into a
theme itself. The aim of Gurwitsch’s discussion of what singling out is for
Husserl is the latter’s (along with Stumpf) distinction between independent and
dependent parts. Gurwitsch wants to reserve the use of “independent” for those
constituents that can be singled out, and “dependent” for those that cannot. And
when it actually is singled out its intrinsic organization and relations will not
remain what they were previous to being singled out. Gurwitsch (1966, 262)
writes, “The basic error in Stumpf’s and Husserl’s definition of independent and
dependent parts seems to consist in foisting into a phenomenological datum as
already contained in it that which results from it by virtue of a modification, but
not otherwise. The possibility or impossibility of singling out a constituent from
a contexture is permitted to play a decisive role for the description of the
experience of the constituent within the contexture—that is to say, when it is not
yet singled out. In other words, a given concrete phenomenon is not taken for
what it is in itself but is interpreted under the perspective of another phenom-
enon into which it can be transformed….An item which can be singled out must
be sharply distinguished from one which is singled out actually.” The problem is
that Husserl and Stumpf speak of constituents as if the singling out has already
been accomplished, so that it is the identical “element” within the present
configuration or as a theme on its own. “This is the central point in our
divergence from Stumpf and Husserl, who maintain that an item can merely be
isolated and otherwise remain what it is, whereas according to our analyses a
materially different What, a new theme, results from such isolation” (Gurwitsch
1966, 264). When Husserl discusses what Gurwitsch would call singling out, for
instance in his Analyses (e.g. 2001, 557), he does little to cause a reader to think
that Gurwitsch’s critique of the identity of “elements” is misguided. (Also see
the description of what Gurwitsch would call a “formative constituent”
becoming thematic in singling out, Husserl 2001, 295; and 298 for independent/
dependent.) The other area where Gurwitsch mentions singling out with respect
to Husserl is his critique of Husserl’s theory of hyle. In short, even if one were
to somehow extract hyletic data alone, a “hyletic reflection,” the transformation
boils down to singling out. If true, this means that the datum was already a
constituent in a theme, and hence not devoid of organization (Gurwitsch 1966,
257).
In a fascinating passage, parts of which were already quoted above,
Gurwitsch’s critique of Husserl neatly brings together synthesis, singling out,
and serial-shifting, even though Gurwitsch does not call attention to it this way.
Having already spoken of how polythetic acts can become monothetic acts,
which are syntheses, Gurwitsch (1966, 250) writes, “The law of transformation
is reciprocal: monothetic acts can also be transformed into polythetic acts. Both
kinds of consciousness are independent of one another; to neither can primacy or

originarity be attributed. Their difference is not one of obscurity and
distinctness, as though what is given as synthesized were unarticulated and
obscure and, when unfolded step by step, would become distinct and articulated
without its material content undergoing any change” (see also Husserl 1982,
§123). Attention can transform from “polythetic acts to monothetic acts” in
synthesis, and can transform from “monothetic acts to polythetic acts” in
singling out and serial-shifting. The process of sequentially attending to what
was previously synthesized and has become singled out in this case is serial-
shifting.
In margin to theme succession some content becomes salient and replaces
what was previously thematic. Gurwitsch and Husserl seem to be in broad
agreement about this transformation, and about the nature of the margin. On the
latter Husserl (2001, 145–146) writes:
That we have a consciousness of our own life as a life

endlessly streaming along; that we continually have an
experiencing consciousness in this life, but in connection to
this in the widest parameters, an emptily presenting conscious-
ness of an environing-world—this is the accomplishment of
unity out of manifold, multifariously changing intentions,
intuitive and non-intuitive intentions that are nonetheless
concordant with one another: intentions that in their
particularity coalesce to form concrete syntheses again and
again. But these complex syntheses cannot remain isolated.
All particular syntheses, through which things in perception,
in memory, etc., are given, are surrounded by a general milieu
of empty intentions being ever newly awakened; and they do
not float there in an isolated manner, but rather, are
themselves synthetically intertwined with one another. For us
the universal synthesis of harmonizing intentional syntheses
corresponds to “the” world, and belonging to it is a universal
belief-certainty.
One could easily multiply these kinds of passages in Husserl’s other works, and
find echoes in Gurwitsch’ work (see also Husserl 2001, 20, 77, and 152).
Husserl gives concrete descriptions of a marginal content becoming thematic,
and of thematic content becoming marginal. In a general description of the

process, Husserl (2001, 127) writes “If we now regard the ego as comporting
itself merely receptively, and if we do this within a genetic analysis, then we are
obliged to observe that an affection precedes the receptive action. A presentation
occurring in the background, a directed one, affects the ego, which is to say, a
tendency heads toward the ego; the ego reacts by turning toward, the
presentation assumes the shape of a grasping in which the egoic regard is
directed toward the object.” In an illustrative example, Husserl (2001, 197)
states “For example, particular colored figures becoming quite prominent affect
us; affecting us at the same time are noises like the sound of a passing car, the
notes of a song, prominent odors, etc. All of this takes place at the same time,
and insofar as we turn to it alone, listening to it, the song wins out. But the rest
still exercises an allure. But when a violent blast breaks in, like the blast of an
explosion, it drowns out not only the affective particularities of the acoustic
field, but also the particularities of all other fields. What otherwise spoke to us,
no matter how little we paid attention to it, can no longer make it through to us”
(see also Husserl 2001, 59). In the midst of this clear description of margin to
theme transformation (although without any note of context and the appropriate
transformation of the “elements” involved) Husserl has noted a phenomenon
that can frequently occur in attention capture which I described in a previous
chapter with the example of the low flying airplane at the air show. The theme,
whether through attention capture or otherwise, becomes so intense that there is
little room for relevant context. The theme becomes almost “all that is.” Context
is hyper–contracted (for related examples see Gurwitsch, 1964, 112-113).
Another interaction between the theme and margin for Husserl occurs in
“repression”—Husserl’s description of conflict and what cognitive scientists call
distraction, inhibition, or interference. “Repressing means that the one conceals
the other, that the concealed element tends toward unconcealment, then breaking
through conceals the previously unconcealed element, etc.” (Husserl 2001, 176;
see also 197, 497, and 518; Cf. 65). One must suppose that the concealed, as
long as it is concealed, is relegated to the margin in a dynamic tension between
content in theme and margin.
This chapter has shown how Husserl implicitly and sometimes explicitly
made the distinction between the three kinds of organization in “consciousness”
that are the focus of Gurwitsch’s work and of this book as three dimensions in
the sphere of attention. However, Husserl’s position is ultimately ambiguous,
while Gurwitsch’s is not. Also, Gurwitsch establishes and articulates the

functions of theme, context, and margin as the essential structures in
“consciousness” in a way that was not available to Husserl, who maintains a
subject-oriented approach.
Chapter Five
Subjectivity and the Sphere of Attention

Human subjectivity is attending activity. This way of speaking may sound
dramatic and even strange, but I think it is a clear way of saying what we are and
what we do, and I believe it captures the spirit of Gurwitsch’s phenomenology
of consciousness, except that it all becomes oriented around a phenomenology
of attention. Noting Husserl’s Ideas I (1982), Gurwitsch (1964, 419) writes
“Considered as to its specific nature, consciousness is a domain closed in itself,
a domain into which nothing can enter and from which nothing can escape.”
Such a “domain” is all that is meaningful in human life. I have called this the
sphere of attention. Being “closed in itself” means fully inclusive, enclosing, not
closed-off. The fact that the sphere of attention is “a domain into which nothing
can enter and nothing can escape” indicates that the attending process is the
fundamental and essential way we give meaning to the world and to ourselves in
it. If, as Sartre (1956, 25) claims, existence precedes essence for human beings
(and with some qualifications I think it does) then we are not primarily a thing,
an ego, a self, a personality, etc. We are a process, an attending process.
What we make of ourselves, the “essence” we identify ourselves as, is a
function of attending. The sphere of attention is not a substantial essence, but it
is formed and shaped, it grows, it is our unique existential style achieved
through habits and consistencies in attending. The idea of mental growth and
development is not new in the psychology of human nature. Freud, Piaget,
Erikson, Kohlberg, Gilligan, and others give now classic accounts. But what is
new is predicating this development on attention. After a discussion of James,
Piaget, Koffka and other psychologists, Gurwitsch notes his own view of
development in terms of the organization of “consciousness” and “experience.”
Gurwitsch (1964, 103–104) writes:
Emphasizing the dependence of perception and all acts of

consciousness upon both external and internal conditions, and
interpreting achievement as establishing and reinforcing
internal conditions, we are led to conceive of mental
development and the growth of the mind, brought about by and
through achievement, as reorganization, reconstruction, and
transformation of experience itself. Accordingly, when a
certain stage of development is attained, forms of organization
pertaining to earlier stages and actually having been
experienced at those earlier stages, are superseded by such
115
forms of organization as correspond to the present stage. By

virtue of achievements in the course of mental development,
the stream of experience is substantially transformed so as to
exhibit features varying according to the stages of mental
development.
Translating Gurwitsch’s phrases such as “growth of the mind” and “stream of

experience” into terms of the sphere of attention puts a heavy load on the
metaphor of the sphere and the process of attention. Yet I think the sphere
metaphor is uniquely suited to handle the load, as claimed in the introductory
chapter above, because it is enclosing and inclusive, and deep rather than flat.
When attention is understood as an embodied dynamic tension in the world
between contents in the three dimensions, its depth allows a fullness of meaning
for “attention.” At the most specific level, growth involves learning or
transformation of some sort, and a stabilization of the effect. The way Gurwitsch
(1964, 102–103) puts it is that “Practice in discrimination has the effect of
stabilizing internal conditions and, therefore, of stabilizing certain organizational
forms to the detriment of others.” My way of putting it is that we are identified
in our human being by what we attend to and how we attend. Simone Weil
(1951), discussed in the next chapter on morality, similarly argues for a central
and enlarged role for attention in subjectivity, although ultimately in the context
of religious experience.
In much attention research, the self is “transparent.” This is a term used
most recently by Thomas Metzinger (2003a) to mean that the self is something
we see through, but not look at, unless it is a representation. Since for him the
representation of the self is false, or a kind of trick, this position has a lot in
common with Sartre. Yet it should be said that it is unlikely that Sartre means
that the self is re-presented in the way that Metzinger means representation.
Also, although Metzinger seems to allow a weak sense of self, he does not have
the notion of marginal consciousness to account for it. Moreover, we can be
authentically aware of ourselves as attending beings, and as moral, and
Metzinger’s conception of self and attention (as only focal attention rather than a
sphere of attention) seems to deny these possibilities. This is not surprising since
the meaning of attention for Metzinger is incredibly traditional—incredible
given his nontraditional way of conceiving the role of the self in our “conscious”
life. For example, Metzinger (2003b, 356) writes, “What is attention? In short,
attention is a process of subsymbolic resource allocation taking place within a
representational system exhibiting phenomenal states. It is a form of non-
Subjectivity and Attention 117
conceptual metarepresentation operating on certain parts of the currently active,

internal model of reality, the conscious model of the world. By guiding our
attention towards a perceived object, we achieve a selection and an
enhancement. By turning towards the phenomenal representation of this object,
we automatically intensify the information processing in the brain, which
underlies it.” He goes on in the same place to note that attention “segments a
scene” and later that attention is a “zooming in” (365). Metzinger’s
representationalism, focus on the focus, disregard for the richness of contextual
and marginal consciousness, and for the variety and effects of transformations in
attending will not yield a sustainable account of the self and attention. And
without this, Metzinger’s (2003a) overall account of the self suffers, even if the
account that we are “being no one” is otherwise on the right track.
By subjective transparency in attention research, then, I mean that a non-
egological conception of self seems to pervade experiments on attention so that
the research subject is treated as a quantity rather than a self. This makes sense
because to get quantitative results the subject’s responses must be quantified.
And I am not complaining, since it should be obvious to the reader that I think a
natural scientific psychology is strongly complementary to phenomenology. In
these experiments, the subject may be interviewed or trained, but if so it is rarely
an in-depth interview because their experimental reaction time, type of response,
etc. tells the pertinent story (see Lutz 2002 and Lambert 2003, for exceptions).
Even if the subject is interviewed at some length, the point is not usually a
longitudinal view of the history of the person’s development, nor is it a wide
cross-sectional view of their current personality. If any information beyond the
usual gender, age, health (especially eyesight), etc. is required, that information
is likely to be task-oriented. For example, the subject may take a test to
determine general mood (happy or sad), or a specific disposition (fear of
snakes), or the subject may be in the study because of a previous diagnosis
(chronic depression, schizophrenia), and so on. Sometimes the occupation of the
subject is pertinent, for example, that they are a college student, a pianist, an
expert fire-fighter, or a professional dancer. But self-focused attention experi-
ments aside, in the majority of cases the relation between the subject’s sense of
self and all the rest—age, gender, mood, disposition, traits, occupations,
infirmities—is irrelevant to the experiment, unless that very item is the focus of
the experiment, which rarely is the case.
My purpose here is not to call for more interviews in psychological
experiments. My point is that Gurwitsch shares the non-egological assumptions
of much of psychology and the cognitive sciences. For Gurwitsch and these
experimenters, a permanent self or ego is not the foundation or core of human

nature, as a pit is the core of a plum. Human nature or personality is a process.
Quoting James’ Principles of Psychology, a justified favorite of attention
researchers, Gurwitsch (1985, 18–19) writes, “We may safely personify the
‘procession’ of our thoughts, provided that by ‘the notion of personality’ we
mean nothing ‘essentially different from anything to be found in the mental
procession. But if that procession be itself the very ‘original’ of the notion of
personality, it cannot possibly be wrong to personify it. It is already
personified.’” Such a self is never complete or permanent in content, and it is
not always given as some pole from which attention (or “consciousness” or
“perception”) is supposed to emanate and towards which objects present
themselves. With the exception of self-focused attention research (e.g., Mor and
Winquist 2002), the self is not supposed to be the object of attention in research,
and is generally assumed not to be the originator of attention processing.
What is crucial for Gurwitsch in subjectivity is what is crucial for many
psychologists, namely, the development and growth of self through learning.
Personality is fashioned in the process of human existence. Now and then there
are allusions in attention research to this process of learning to attend, and
attending in the way one has learned. A number have been noted already: for
example, the lexical association of “supper” with “dinner” (Nelson, Zhang and
McKinney 2001), the “on-the-job” training for attention in children to make
object names more salient (Smith et al., 2002), learned cultural differences in
contextual consciousness (Kitayama et al., 2003), changes in contextual
consciousness for social discriminations (Quinn and Olson 2001), and the effect
of memory on what becomes a focus of attention (Downing 2000).
The advent of research on object-based attention instead of just spatial
attention brings with it the possibility of better accounts of the relation between
subjectivity and the effect of learning in attending. For example, the concept of
“sprites” points to events in attention that become segmented as gestalt wholes
now salient in future attending given certain external conditions. In other words,
the internal conditions of the “stream of experience,” as Gurwitsch describes it,
have changed, and certain themes will be presented given the right external
conditions. As Patrick Cavanagh, Angela Labianca, and Ian Thornton (2001)
explain it, a “sprite” is a high-level animation routine or pattern in attention,
such as a door closing or a butterfly in flight. They (2001, 48) write, “Each
different characteristic motion pattern would have its own ‘sprite’ that would be
built up over many exposures to the pattern. These stored recognition and
animation routines then allow sparse inputs to support rich dynamic percepts.”
Setting aside the controversies involved in computer modeling assumptions

(e.g., “modeling,” “inputs”) the “sprites” signify attentive learning episodes that
have become relatively permanent changes in attending behavior. If these
patterns and others can be generally discerned in attention research, then
attention research will be illustrating the development of subjectivity more
widely than currently achieved.
Since the streaming in attending is shaped in a certain style for any given
individual, certain saliencies are apparent and others are not. Attending comes to
follow a pattern or routine, perhaps analogous to the concept of a sprite. For
Gurwitsch, this content is determined by causation (learning based on previous
attending) and is changeable, but the fact that there are dispositions and qualities
is constant. Gurwitsch (1985, 15) writes:
To be sure, to account for the Ego, one must allow for

permanent dispositions such as attitudes of love, admiration,
esteem, hatred, etc., which one person adopts with regard to
another person, and for the no less permanent qualities of
character and temper, such as likings and dislikings,
tendencies, interests, gifts, talents, etc. Both dispositions and
qualities have it in common that they may be said to exist
permanently, although none manifests itself uninterruptedly.
When I feel admiration for a certain person or have a certain
leaning, this does not mean that thoughts concerning the
admired person or mental states related to the leaning in
question exist at every moment in my conscious life. Both
dispositions and qualities designate psychic constants, i.e.,
regularities of experience, action, reaction, behavior, etc.,
rather than mental facts which themselves fall under direct
experience.
When Gurwitsch states that dispositions and qualities of character are

“permanent” this is ambiguous. It could mean that your specific disposition and
character is unchangeable. For example, you are doomed to be bad with money,
or to be a perfectionist. But I take Gurwitsch to mean that one always has a
disposition or character, and it is changeable. The question of subjectivity is in
large part the question of these “psychic constants.” How can one have a non-
egological conception of human nature while admitting that there is nonetheless
human character and the possibility of self-attention in reflection? The answer

will especially involve the halo in the margin, as we will now see.
If human subjectivity is attending activity, then this concept of human
nature as attending process would have to account for at least three phenomena:
(1) the ever-present self—the weak sense of self or subjectivity co-present with
every moment of thematic attention; (2) attentionality (previously
intentionality)—the distance or distinction between what is often called the
object and the subject; between the content attended to as theme and the process
of allowing the content to be attended to as theme; and (3) reflective attention—
the strong sense of self, the ego as an object in attending without appeal to
something (homunculus, soul, etc.) outside of the attending process. Each of
these three form a heading for a section below. The chapter ends with a
discussion of authentic reflection.
The Ever-Present Self

Like Sartre, Gurwitsch has a non-egological conception of “consciousness.”
With respect to attention, “non-egological” means that there is no metaphysical
or material center which directs or executes attention processes, or out of which
attentional acts flow as if from a hub or substantial core. Gurwitsch writes
(1985, 73–74):
Used in a given case by a determinate speaker, the word I does
not refer to the biography of the speaker or to his Ego in the
sense of a causal unity. Rather, it refers to that awareness
which the speaker like every conscious subject permanently
has of himself…viz., the inner awareness of the present
segment of the stream of consciousness with its intrinsic
phenomenal temporality. To this must be added the awareness
of embodied existence, taken as it is actually given in
experience, i.e., awareness of those somatic facts which at the
moment happen to present themselves with their pointing
reference to the more or less confused horizon of corporeity;
and, finally, the awareness of that sector of the perceptual
world in which the speaker experiences himself as placed.
Thus the specific meaning of the word I varies not only from
one speaker to another but also with respect to the same
person, according to the occasion on which this word is
uttered.
Where Gurwitsch uses “embodied consciousness” to refer to the psychic and

somatic aspects of the whole of “consciousness” (Gurwitsch 1985, 26), I will
use the term embodied attending within the notion of the sphere of attention.
There is no permanent foundation supporting the sphere of attention, or
locatable within the sphere of attention, such as a Platonic indestructible soul,
Cartesian substantial cogito, or Husserlian (post Logical Investigations) pure
ego. In criticizing the latter, Gurwitsch (1966, 282) writes, “One has to abandon
the conception of the pure ego as an enduring center within the flux of
appearances, as being opposed to the flux in such a way as not to be concerned
by it, as somehow standing above the flux. It is the sum total of whatever acts of
experience emerge; it is involved in the flux without thereby losing its identity.
Indeed, the ego is the flux itself, that one well determined identical totality
which, however, is never accomplished or finished, but rather involved in
perpetual growth” (emphasis added). As noted above, learning and development
of what is usually called character is still possible under this non-egological
conception of attention (Arvidson 2000, 22–24; Cf. Gurwitsch 1985, 15–16 and
18–19; 1964, 103–104; Husserl 2001, 77) and there is an ongoing sense of my
centrality in the world (Gurwitsch 1985, 62–63).
For Gurwitsch, as for Sartre (1990) and others, when “consciousness”
directs its attention to itself in reflection, it reveals a self. As I would put it, a
self is allowed to become thematic when the sphere of attention attends
thematically to itself. So instead of being only marginally conscious of the flow
or process in the sphere of attention, the subject singles out a sector of the
“stream” or process, attending thematically to it. What this self-attention in
reflection looks like is addressed in the next section. Where the subject was
before this transformation is addressed now.
Subjectivity is never absent in the sphere of attention. Subjectivity is not
created ex nihilo, but it is also not usually an object of thematic attention. In
most of our attending, we do not acutely attend to our subjectivity or selfness,
we are present to it marginally. The self is irrelevant to the book I am writing,
the appointment I must keep, the lunch I eat, my thought of the history of
Descartes’ cogito. Sartre (1956, 1990) calls regular everyday attention process-
ing pre-reflective or unreflective consciousness. So it is more accurate to remove
the “I” and “my” and say there is a book being written, there is an appointment
to keep, there is lunch being eaten, there is a thought of the history of Descartes’
cogito. As Stephen Laycock (1998, 150) puts it, “For Sartre, to be positionally
consciousness is to be non-positionally conscious of being positionally
conscious.” The subject is not the focus of these moments or shifts in attending,
and subjectivity itself is irrelevant to these focal contents (Gurwitsch 1966, 293).
In other words, in these cases and most of the time the activity of the sphere of
attention, which is subjectivity, is itself presented as marginal. As the lunch
sandwich is attended to thematically within the thematic context of how savory
and satisfying it is, a co-present sector of the activity in the sphere of attention is
presented as irrelevant to the theme and its context. That is, there is attention to
the sandwich within a particular context, not thematic attention to the attending
process. However, the attending process (comprised of thematic attention, and
contextual and marginal consciousness) is presented in the marginal dimension
at any moment, as flowing out of the future and into the past, along with other
marginal content.
As noted above, attention experiments almost universally treat the subject in
the same way: they assume that attention to attention is irrelevant to the task of
attention. Another way to say this is that these experiments assume that
reflection is a distractor. There is no need to think of attention as emanating
from a self, or as having a self as its center or hub, in order to prove hypotheses
about attention processes. It is already assumed that the subject is a thematically
attending subject, and attending to something other than the attention process,
although this latter transformation is possible through reflection. The effect is to
define the subject as usually nothing more than the attending process, exactly
what I take non-egological approaches to the human person like those of
Gurwitsch and Sartre to be doing.
To be more precise about subjectivity and attention, I claim that the region
of the margin called the halo is the existential locus of human being. In my
reading of Gurwitsch, he implicitly makes this claim throughout his work. A
compact and provocative statement is in an article originally published in 1929
(Gurwitsch 1966, 268–269); and a fuller but amazingly implicit account is in
Marginal Consciousness (1985), amazing because the word “halo” is never used
in that work. As suggested in Chapter One, the structure of the margin mimics
the structure of the relationship between the theme and thematic context
(Gurwitsch 1985, 41, 51). In the margin, a certain segment or sector of each of
the three orders of existence—streaming in attending, embodiment, environing
world—is attended to as irrelevant with any theme. Gurwitsch (1985, 51) writes,
“In all cases, the presence before consciousness marginally of the three
mentioned orders of existence consists in some pertinent data being actually and
originally, although not thematically, experienced with their pointing references
to a wider context.” In the margin, the halo implies the horizon as the halo’s
wider context in three domains. First, there is always marginal consciousness of
the streaming in the sphere of attention—to the fact that attention is an ongoing
process in the present—and the presentation of this sector of the streaming in
attending is a marginal consciousness in the halo. This halo as “pertinent data”
of marginal phenomenal temporality implies the rest of the streaming in the
sphere of attention (as horizon) through presented pointing references (1966,
268). Second, there is marginal consciousness in the halo to certain kinesthetic
facts, implying the horizon of embodiment or corporeity within the material
world. Third, there is marginal consciousness in the halo to an actually presented
sector of the environing world which implies the environing world in general as
horizon, again through pointing references. The point is that the halo is a sort of
dynamic gateway which makes these three domains—the streaming in the
sphere of attention, embodiment, and the environing world—marginally co-
present with the given theme. The halo also gives way to the horizonally
presented indeterminate fullness of these three domains.
The halo is immensely important in subjectivity. Gurwitsch (1985, 59)
states, “Because at every moment of conscious life (whatever our special
attitude and the subject matter of our thematic activity), we are aware of a
certain segment of the stream of consciousness, of our embodied existence, and
of the perceptual world, the belief in the existence of this world and the
apprehension of ourselves as pertaining to it as mundane existents are
permanently present to consciousness.” So the answer to ‘where is the I?’ when
one is not reflecting is that it is the activity of the sphere of attention as
presented in marginal consciousness, in particular as part of the halo for
thematic attention. In attending, subjectivity as the process of attending is
marginally aware of itself and this awareness is permanent and abiding.
Throughout The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre (1990) calls this a “non-
positional consciousness” or “unreflective consciousness of consciousness.” The
content of the marginal halo and the marginal horizon are not some constant set.
Gurwitsch (1966, 268) observes that “The halo is not a set of constant data
surrounding and accompanying every mental state. Rather these data incessantly
emerge and fade away. What alone is constant and permanent is the experienced
pertinence to the halo which characterizes all its components.” But the character
of the sphere of attention changes with learning, as previously noted, so that
some content is more likely to become prominent than other content. In order to
be admitted to the dimension of contextual relevancy, with the dimension of
theme as its center, content must “find its way,” so to speak, across the halo
which divides irrelevancy from relevancy, margin from context, with respect to
a given theme. In addition to the theme, the halo is the saddleback, the thick
limit, that significantly characterizes the sphere of attention in a certain moment.

I am not suggesting that the halo is another central organizing principle in
addition to the current theme. The halo is the part of the sphere of attention that
most continuously structures what is relevant and irrelevant, but always in
relation to the current theme as center of the sphere of attention. Marginal
consciousness in the halo is relatively fluid, depending upon the learning and
growth of the sphere of attention as a whole. In other words, the content in the
margin may not be “constant” or permanent, yet marginal presentations in the
halo involve a brief consistency or shallow sedimentation of the more or less
recent history of the attending process as a whole. The human being as a sphere
of attention develops and expresses a characteristic attending style whose non-
subsistent locus is operative in the marginal halo. We have character, and it is a
function of the growth and development of the sphere of attention as a whole,
yet its expression at any moment in pre-reflective attending is marginal.
Attentional character as character is “behind the scenes,” so to speak. It is not
thematic or contextual. The locus of this character is marginal and non-
subsistent—marginal since attentional character is attended to as a haloic ever-
present self which accompanies the current thematic attention, and non-
subsistent since human being is the attending process itself and the character or
characteristic style of attending is fundamentally changeable, as the possibility
of authentic reflection reveals. The structural changes that come with the growth
and development of the sphere of attention as a whole, which are also
marginally presented at any moment in the halo as the brief consistency or
shallow sedimentation of an attending style, are nothing less than what is usually
referred to as self-development.
The marginal halo is the existential locus of subjectivity as the peripheral
living-through of embodied attending in the world (cf., Gurwitsch 1966, 285).
As related to the theme, though not materially relevant under the current
perspective, and as presenting relevant pointing references to the horizonal three
orders of existence, the marginal halo is that which is in-between relevance and
irrelevance in the sphere of attention. This means the halo is that which is in-
between what matters in any particular moment in a life and what does not.
Marginal consciousness in the halo places subjectivity in the attention process
without this subjectivity being the center in the sphere of attention. Hence an
ever-present self does not entail an ever-thematic self. Also, I am not claiming
that marginal consciousness is the location of attention or is the essence of
attention itself, an impossibility that Laycock (1998, 150–151) addresses nicely
in reference to “consciousness.” The sphere of attention is a dynamic tension
between all three dimensions, with the marginal halo as the thick limit between
what is now relevant or irrelevant. Another way of saying it is that the halo is
not at the outer “edge” of the margin, but is in-between relevancy and
irrelevancy—the limit as ending of the context of attention, and the limit as
beginning of the margin of attention.
Attentionality Replaces Intentionality

Phenomenological philosophers seldom use such vague terms as subject and
object regularly in their professional writing, unless it is part of a polemic. But I
use them here temporarily to get at the common sense notion that if there is an
object over there, say a statue, then I must be over here as a subject. Our
everyday way of telling the story about the world and ourselves in it assumes a
distinction between the kinds of things that can be objects and the kind of thing
we are. Gurwitsch (1979, 40–41) writes, “In perceptual experience, let us say, a
cabinet in my room is given. I perceive it as something that confronts me; I am
here and look at it standing over there….The being-over-against, which
comprises the sense of objectivity, signifies that I always dwell at a distance
from my surroundings. This confrontation thus occurs in the mode of being-at-a-
distance. The object is continuously the other, something that does not belong to
me—namely, in the most ‘fundamental’ opposition which there is for me: while
I am being turned toward and busied with it, it is shown as ‘not=I.’” Objects are
presented for me; I am the subject they are presented for. I know I am not the
statue, and I know I am not like it. As Descartes might have put it, the truth that
the statue cannot be identical with the subject that knows the statue is clear and
distinct. In fact, even an evil genius with divine power cannot dispel the
apodictic truth that subjectivity is distinguished from whatever else might exist.
With Husserl’s Logical Investigations, phenomenology established a new
sense of the traditional relation between object and subject in philosophy. This
doctrine of intentionality in phenomenology asserts that the subject (as
consciousness) is always already directed toward or involved with an object,
when object is understood in the very general sense as anything that is
presented. The subject and object are part of a structure of relations in which
meaning is revealed between them. Gurwitsch also describes consciousness in
terms of intentionality. When describing conscious organization, Gurwitsch
distinguishes between the field of consciousness (all that is presented or
intended in consciousness) and the consciousness of field (the presenting or
intending activity). Outside of the phenomenological frame, this distinction
refers to that between contents (objects) and acts (subject). Intentionality is the
correlation between the field of consciousness (noemata) and the consciousness

of field (noeses). For Gurwitsch, investigation of the field of consciousness
involves articulating the organization of what is presented in consciousness as it
is presented. As Martin Heidegger (1962, 58) put it, “Thus ‘phenomenology’
means…to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in
which it shows itself from itself.” Although they are correlated, continuity in the
“consciousness of field” is traditionally articulated in terms of temporal
transformations (Husserl 1991), and continuity in the “field of consciousness” is
articulated in terms of attentional transformations (Arvidson 2000).
The sphere of attention is responsible for the distinction between subject
and object, “consciousness of field and field of consciousness,” noema and
noesis, or however one wants to put it. This process of distinction in attending is
the same as what Sartre calls internal negation—attention to the statue is not the
same as the statue itself—the attentional process detaches or “unsticks”
(désenglue) itself from Being (Sartre 1956, 24; see also 184). The word
“internal” does not signify something subjective or immanent, because there is
no substantial subject, there is no transcendence in immanence (see Gurwitsch’s
1966, 283, in criticism of Husserl). Internal negation is the pre-reflective
distinction in the sphere of attention between, on the one hand, the dimensions
of theme and thematic context, and on the other, the margin.
The distinction is “internal” because it is between two positions in the
sphere of attention. One is the marginal position that embodied attending has in
the world, the marginal consciousness of embodied attending described in the
above section. The subject, as dynamic being-in-the-world, processes the world
from the perspective of an “irrelevant here,” irrelevant because the process is
conscious of itself from the perspective of the halo within the margin. This is the
marginal self as ever-present. The other position in the internal negation is the
position of the theme within a thematic context as “relevant there.” Every
attention researcher must eventually recognize this duality in what I would call
the sphere of attention. For example, in an argument attempting to reconcile
neurobiological findings and phenomenology, Jean-Luc Petit describes focal
attention to an object in a way that shows there is more to the attending process
than just the focus. For Petit (2004, 284) that something more is kinesthesia, but
notice the duality: “The thing is there, right at the center of our attention. We are
directed toward it….Even though we remain fully alert we are, so to speak,
deflected, torn away from ourselves. In not being present to ourselves we are for
this very reason both absent from ourselves and present to something which is
not our self.” This idea goes back to Aristotle (1979, Metaphysics 12.9, 1074b
35–36), who noticed that thinking always has something else as its object, while
it has itself only marginally: “But evidently knowledge and perception and
opinion and understanding have always something else as their object, and
themselves only by the way.” Negation involves a “not,” and in attending the act
of presenting the object is not the same as the object presented. The negation in
the sphere of attention is internal since it is between that which is marginally
presented and that which is attended to focally within a context; the activity of
allowing the sandwich to present itself as figure against a background is not the
same as the sandwich presented. Note additionally that external negation, for
Sartre, is the distinction between theme and thematic context—for example, the
sandwich as thematic is not the paper plate on which it is positioned, etc.
Together internal and external negation name the essential process in
differentiating theme, context, and margin.
This duality of internal negation in the sphere of attention responds to the
paradox on which Gurwitsch comments in his critique of Husserl’s Krisis (1993)
from the 1930s. Gurwitsch (1966, 433– 434) writes, “If—as it seems we must—
we mean by egos human beings, an apparently insuperable paradox is bound to
arise. Human beings are themselves mundane existents among other such
existents; they belong to, and are part of the world. How then is it possible for a
part to constitute and to produce the very whole of which it is a part?….
Obviously, the paradox hinges on the dual role of man, who is at the same time
both a mundane existent among others, an object within the world, and a subject
with respect to the world, i.e., a subject from whose experiences and mental
operations the world derives the sense of its existence.” The negation in internal
negation is a wedge between the subject and object; more exactly, it is the
exclusion of the position of dynamic embodied attending in the world from the
dimension of relevance (context). Said still another way, unless I am reflecting,
the fact that I am attending is presented but as irrelevant. By the negation of
relevance, that which is thematically attended within a thematic context is
distinguished from that which is marginally presented, and one of the “items”
excluded from relevancy is the activity of dynamic embodied attending itself.
Ever-present self-awareness is the sphere of attention present to itself
marginally. Previous to Sartre, Hegel (1971, 196) observes, “Attention contains,
therefore, the negation of one’s self-assertion and also the surrender of oneself
to the matter in hand.” This negation of relevance is what attention researchers
measure in experiments involving distractors and interference effects, and one of
those distractors could be the process of attention vying for thematic attention
itself, what is called “self-focused attention” in psychological literature.
The common sense distinction between our position in the world as subjects
and things out there in the world as objects is given pre-reflectively—a
distinction between dynamic embodied attending as a position in the world
which itself is presented marginally in the halo, and that which is attended to
within a thematic context. Hence there is no need to go outside the activity of
the sphere of attention to find some supervenient activity, operation, or
substance that brings about the sense of object opposed to subject, or also, as
addressed below, the acute sense of subjectivity for a subject revealed in
reflection. Gurwitsch (1966, 292–293) writes, “Consciousness has no egological
structure; it is not owned by the ego; its acts do not spring from a source or
center called the ego. Consciousness is defined by intentionality. It is
consciousness of an object on the one hand and an inner awareness of itself on
the other hand. Being confronted with an object I am at once conscious of this
object and aware of my being conscious of it. This awareness in no way means
reflection.” With intentionality as attentionality (discussed below), the metaphor
of the sphere of attention accounts for the uniqueness of human existence in the
world by including the subject’s distinction from and relation to objects in the
process of attending itself. The inclusiveness or intrinsicalness implied by the
metaphor of a sphere is another advantage of this metaphor. This extension of
Gurwitsch’s philosophy, as a sphere of attention rather than a field of
consciousness, may also more clearly portray Gurwitsch as what Thomas
Natsoulas calls an “intrinsic theorist” rather than an “appendage theorist,” and so
clear up the inconsistency that Natsoulas (1996 and 1998) finds in Gurwitsch’s
work.
One might complain that the sphere of attention is a sort of subjectivism or
representationalism. Perhaps the very notion of a sphere recalls the problem of
solipsism that threatens Descartes’ Meditations. Lamenting the current state of
philosophy, Robert Sokolowski (2000, 10) quotes from Samuel Beckett’s novel
Murphy to synopsize how we are in an “egocentric predicament”: “Murphy’s
mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe
without.” Sokolowski (2000, 11) comments that “The Cartesian predicament
that Beckett describes, with the mind taken as this large, hollow sphere, light-
filled but shading off into darkness, closed off from both the body and the world,
is the unfortunate situation in which philosophy finds itself in our time….This
epistemological dilemma is the target of the doctrine of intentionality.” All one
has is what is inside the sphere. All I can know of the world or of other persons
is how they exist in my mind. The upshot of this representationalism is that I do
not know anything beyond the sphere of attention. I know the “sphere-world”
which may or may not correlate to whatever is outside it in the “real-world.” In

other words, it might appear that my use of the metaphor of the sphere of
attention resurrects the worst problems usually associated with representation-
alism.
For the Cartesian cogito, the mind has the power to hold things in it. The
sun as it exists in my mind is not the same sun as it exists outside my mind, and
may or may not accurately represent the sun outside my mind. But the sun as it
exists in my mind is a real thing, this idea of the sun has “objective reality”
(Descartes 1982, 10). Unlike the Cartesian thing that thinks, the sphere of
attention is not a thing. It is not a thing that can contain other things. Following
Sartre’s language in Being and Nothingness (1956, 18 and 21), the sphere of
attention is the negativity that allows there to be meaning in being. It is more
akin to the spaces between being, and is not itself a substantial being. Merleau-
Ponty (1962, 28) observes, “The first operation of attention is, then, to create for
itself a field,” where “field” means a kind of nothingness that is an opening
toward things. Since there is no subjective “thing” over against objective things,
there is no “transcendence in immanence.” As Sartre claims, human being is not
a thing; it is no-thing-ness. My way of putting it is that we are dynamic, a
process of attending. There is a world only for an attending being. One of
Sartre’s main points in Being and Nothingness (1956, 23) is that the being of
consciousness is the consciousness of being. By replacing “consciousness” with
“attention”, I would modify this to say that the being of the human being, as a
sphere of attention, just is the attending to being.
As descriptive of human life, the sphere of attention is an inclusive and
enclosing metaphor because the world presents itself for us. It is as if objectivity
gathers itself together for an attending subject that is prepared through more or
less habitual transformations in attending to include and enclose it according to a
particular style, which above I have called attentional character. The sphere of
attention is how this gathering is structured, how it is organized, namely, in
theme, thematic context, and margin. Our function as attending beings is to
enclose and include content within these three dimensions, and to do this from
an ever-changeable or freely chosen marginal position in the world. An
equivalent way to look at it is that we disclose the world. Since human being as
a sphere of attention is not a thing, the process of attention exhausts itself in this
activity. There is no-thing left over on the subjective side in the sense of hub or
center; the subject is nothingness. There is only an ongoing enclosing within the
sphere of attention according to (1) the universal functional organization of the
three dimensions according to gestalt-principles, and (2) the unique patterning of
that particular attending being in its historical, habitual, and learned develop-
ment, that is, its attentional character, whose existential locus at any time is the
marginal halo. The process of attention is at the same time a disclosing of the
self as marginally ever-present and a disclosing of the world. If what a
phenomenologist means by “intentionality” is at least the pervasive, correlated,
double disclosure of the presenting activity (noesis) and that which is presented
(noema), then just the same, the mutual revelation in the attending process as I
have described it is attentionality.
The above account implicitly relinquishes the Husserlian noesis-noema
terminology, replacing intentionality with attentionality. Some Husserl scholars
have recently debated the place of attention and intention in Husserl’s work
(e.g., Begout 2001; Depraz 2004; Steinbock 2001 and 2004; Vermersch 2004;
and cf. Ryan 1977). Especially interesting is the enigmatic footnote in Ideas I,
§92, where Husserl seems to state that attention is just as fundamental as
intention. In general, it is agreed by these scholars and others that Husserl means
to say that attentionality is not equal to intentionality, but is a mode of
intentionality. In my opinion, Husserl comfortably critiqued the psychology of
attention in his time, but never found a comfortable place within his own system
of philosophy for attention. In an earlier work, Logical Investigations I,
Investigation Two, Husserl (1970, §23) writes, “The range of the unitary notion
of attention is therefore so wide that it doubtless embraces the whole field of
intuitive and cogitative reference [Meinens], the field of presentation
[Vorstellens] in a well-defined but sufficiently wide sense, which comprehends
both intuition and thought. Ultimately it extends as far as the concept:
Consciousness of something.” I believe that Husserl never unambiguously
distinguishes attention (Aufmerksamkeit) from intentionality, so it is very
difficult to go to his work for some clarification of what counts as attention and
what counts as intention, or how the two are to be distinguished. In fact, if one
agrees that contextual and marginal consciousness are processes in the sphere of
attention, and one takes seriously the above statement from the Logical
Investigations, then there is little reason to deny that attentionality should
replace intentionality. It resolves the ambiguity and so unifies the concept of
how we exist as meaning-givers in the world.
Merleau-Ponty seems to inadvertently give attention the same kind of
scope, so that if the sphere of attention is seen as three-dimensional—thematic,
contextual, and marginal—then contextual and marginal consciousness are best
defined in terms of attending. Merleau-Ponty (1962, 31) writes, “But at least the
act of attention is rooted in the life of consciousness, and one can finally
understand how it emerges from its liberty of indifference and gives itself a
present object. This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this
recasting at every moment of its own history in the unity of a new meaning, is
thought itself.” If his description of marginal content becoming thematic is
interpreted as a shift within the sphere of attention, then the fullest
understanding of the “life of consciousness” is the life of attending.
With his eyes focused on the noema rather than noesis, one can see
Gurwitsch struggle with intentionality and the place of noeses throughout his
work. His main work, The Field of Consciousness (noema) is obviously not
primarily about the “consciousness of field” (noesis). And when noeses are
discussed in his work, their phenomenological role is diminished. In an article
originally published in 1929, Gurwitsch reasons that what follows from his
criticism of Husserl is a “redefinition of the concepts of noesis and
intentionality.” In that article Gurwitsch (1966, 257 ) writes “By the term
‘noesis’ we can no longer denote an organizing and apprehending function
turning hyletic data into a vehicle of sense or meaning, a special and specific
function to which consciousness owes its character of intentionality. After the
distinction between hyle and morphe has been abandoned, the term ‘noesis’
extends to the experienced act of consciousness in its entirety.” It appears that,
for Gurwitsch, the noesis becomes devoid of function except as activity
subordinated to the organization within each dimension of theme, thematic
context, and margin. Noeses—the acts through which objects are presented—
have temporality as their necessary condition (Gurwitsch 1964, 3, 347), and this
temporality serves to unify the three “field of consciousness” dimensions
(Gurwitsch 1964, 10). The temporally ordered activity in attending infuses all
three domains as potentiality (Gurwitsch 1964, 370–371). That is, the theme,
thematic context, and margin, all as future oriented, are noetically equivalent
(Gurwitsch 1966, 277). Any differentiation in what might be considered the
activity of attention is attributed to the noematic side. Even positional index and
existential index are noematic instead of noetic (Gurwitsch 1964, 362, 405). And
of course, subjectivity is not substantial. So noeses have no central home or
control station; subjectivity is simply the temporal chain of events of attending
(Gurwitsch 1966, 265 and 281). A “consciousness of field” as a noetic
perspective on the activity of “consciousness” implies some distance between
the “field,” in particular the theme, and the attending to it. But this distance is
already accounted for completely in the internal negation described above.
Within the sphere of attention, marginal consciousness in the halo accounts for
Gurwitsch’s “noetic component,” and the theme as it presents itself within a
context accounts for the “noematic component.” (Note that Gurwitsch himself
never uses the term noema to refer to content of the margin.)
These terms noetic and noematic are unnecessary, and even misleading
once the sphere of attention is articulated as a dynamic tension of
transformations organized according to the constraints of the three dimensions
of theme, thematic context, and margin. Gurwitsch (1966, 138) writes that
consciousness is not one dimensional, “Rather, it ought to be considered as a
correlation, or correspondence, or parallelism between the plane of acts,
psychical events, noeses, and a second plane which is that of sense (noemata).”
The plane metaphor is intriguing. One of the distinguishing qualities of two
parallel planes is that they do not intersect, although they may each be conjoined
in the same “object,” in this case the sphere of attention (Gurwitsch would say
the “field of consciousness” and consciousness of that field). The sphere
metaphor, instead of the field metaphor, allows a different kind of non-
intersection but conjunction. If the indefinitely extended surface of the sphere
represents the marginal dimension, and the ball of the sphere and its center
represent respectively thematic context and theme, then that domain where the
two conjoin is the halo. Context with theme as its center of reference on the one
hand, distinguished from what is irrelevant as margin but co-present with those
two dimensions on the other hand, with halo in between, is captured better in the
sphere metaphor than it is in the dual-planes metaphor. In the sphere metaphor it
is easier to understand how human existence is a unity since a sphere connotes
unification in a way that two planes cannot. Just as the theme, context, and
margin are all “with” each other in any moment, each as a distinct dimension, so
also the marginal dimension is an ultimate background to any vector in the
sphere that starts from its center (the theme). From any point of view through
the center of it, a sphere will have the surface (margin) as its final layer, and a
vector will pass through the connection between the ball (the ball itself organ-
ized with respect to the theme as center) and surface, that is, through the halo, to
get there. It is important to note that the use of “surface” here does not denote a
closing off from the world in the way that Sokolowski criticizes. The marginal
horizon, by definition, is indefinitely extended, so that looking from inside the
sphere to outside, there is no end to the “surface” as lived.
Reflection
Sartre claims in his analysis of The Transcendence of the Ego (1990/1934)
that the ego or self is not present pre-reflectively. Later in Being and
Nothingness (1956/1943), Sartre develops this to mean that, if considered
authentically, the self is created or invented as utterly novel upon each

appearance. Gurwitsch agrees with much of what Sartre says in The
Transcendence of the Ego but critiques Sartre’s claim that the self is created
absolutely anew each time it appears in an act of reflective “consciousness” (i.e.,
reflective attention). Reflective attention means the process of attending is
thematic, so that dynamic embodied attending in the world attends to itself as
thematic rather than only presented as marginal in the halo. Traditionally, this is
conveyed by stating that the cognitively grasping act is made the grasped act by
a consequently new grasping act. Gurwitsch questions why reflection must
“superinduce” a new object—an ego—over and above the revelation of this very
same object. He writes (1966, 295) “It [the ego] offers itself as a permanent
entity, as continuing to exist, beyond the grasped act which, like all mental
states, is substantially perishing. The ego thus appears through rather than in the
grasped act. All this is in conformity with the ego’s being a transcendent
existent.” Gurwitsch does not mean that the ego is always present in its
wholeness as a theme or in the context of attention. He means that in reflection
we thematically attend to a segment of our attentional life (an aspect of the ego)
while the rest is forever only implied horizonally. The halo, which Gurwitsch
(1966, 272–276) rightly claims makes reflection possible, delineates the possible
elucidation of the ego as a unity, although not as a whole. Maurice Natanson
(1997) argues that the position of Sartre and Gurwitsch amount to the same
position. I tend to agree.
Reflection is when the sphere of attention becomes acutely aware of its
dynamic existence in the world—its subjectivity. In reflection, the sphere of
attention presents itself focally and marginally. This “and-connection” is
characteristic of how marginal content is related to thematic content and to other
marginal content (Gurwitsch 1966, 269). A sector of the streaming in attending,
not the indefinite entirety of the stream, becomes focal instead of marginal
(Gurwitsch 1985, 20). Reflection involves making the sphere of attention appear
unified; but the sphere of attention is presented thematically only from a
particular point of view (i.e., from the marginal halo) which is not itself
thematic. There is no double sphere, one nested in another. The sphere of
attention as dynamic embodied activity in the world is presented to itself from
within the sphere of attention, and so this transcendent object is presented as one
phase of a process. In short, in reflection, attention is faced with itself as
essentially dynamic embodied activity, which means that in this case the theme
is the living of the sphere of attention. By contrast pre-reflective attention
involves not thematically attending to living the sphere, that is, not attending
thematically to embodied attention in the world, but to something else. What is

central in reflection, as with any theme, may be more or less vague, clear,
fleeting, sluggish, complete, incomplete, etc. But assuming a well-formed
theme, David Hume was right in the sense that the theme in reflection presents a
self engaged in the world, an activity defined in some way. “I never can catch
myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the
perception” (Hume 1978, 252). But one need not follow Hume into a fluctuating
disconnectedness of subjectivity (see also Strawson 1997; cf. Gurwitsch 1966,
312; Arvidson 2000). One also need not follow Immanuel Kant and the later
Husserl and posit a transcendental ego as outside the flux (Gurwitsch 1966).
Consider the dog in the garden example. In reflection, attending-to-the-dog
becomes the theme in attention, rather than the dog, so the dog has not dis-
appeared. What is remarkable about reflection is the role of the margin. For a
dog may become the theme in attention but this does not mean that the
attentional process of allowing it to become thematic must also become the
focus. That is, we do not have to become reflective. Likewise, the attention
process itself (attending to the dog) may become the theme and this is reflection.
But this does not mean that the attention process of allowing attention to become
thematic must itself become thematic, a regressive attention to attention to
attention. There is just marginal consciousness and thematic attention, although
the contents change. Said another way, there is no infinite regress of reflections
in which the marginal activity becomes the focus in turn in an additive way. In
reflection, there is marginal consciousness of attending, and focal attention to
attending. The point is that the internal negation discussed above holds for
reflective attending. There is a distinction maintained between that which is
focused upon and the focusing process. So what is remarkable is that the
reflective move still maintains a subjective perspective of a related but
“irrelevant here” even as attention processes itself as an objective “relevant
there.” The identity in personal identity must have prior and ongoing distinction
for the identity. This distinction is between attention in the dimension of theme,
a presented “self” in this case, and the existential locus of the sphere of attention
in the marginal halo. Dan Zahavi (2002, 16) remarks that “Any convincing
theory of consciousness has to be able to explain this distinction between
intentionality, which is characterized by a difference between the subject and
object of experience, and self-consciousness, which implies some form of iden-
tity.” This account of human life as a sphere of attention is able to do just that.
This account differs from Gurwitsch’s writing in some ways that have
already been pointed out. Additionally, Gurwitsch states very clearly that if one
of the marginal orders of existence is thematic, then it is not also marginal. For
example, I have noted above that if a segment of the streaming in attending
becomes thematic, the streaming is still marginally presented. But Gurwitsch
(1985, xlv) writes, “Obviously our theme may belong to one of these orders. In
that case, we have a concomitant marginal consciousness of the other two
orders” (see also 1964, 415–416). This problem is also noticed by Walton
(2003) and is part of the motivation for denying a distinction between thematic
context and margin, which I have argued against above. I also think Gurwitsch
is mistaken here, and claim that no matter the theme, marginal consciousness in
the halo and horizon of the streaming, embodiment, and environing world,
persists.
Philosophical acceptance of the existence of marginal consciousness in the
halo as the existential locus of human subjectivity overcomes the problem that
plagues Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1965), namely, that a perspective or
position that allows such a critique is not found within the critique, the transcen-
dental ego eludes the grasp of the critique (Gurwitsch 1966, 285–286). Hume
woke up Kant, but Kant still slept through the later stages of his own Copernican
revolution in philosophy initiated in the Critique of Pure Reason. Given Kant’s
principles of sensibility and understanding, he cannot account for self-attention
or reflection. The following four claims from Kant’s work are incompatible with
the fifth claim from the same work (Arvidson 1990).
(1) The categories and the sensible intuition are our only two
sources of knowledge, neither giving knowledge by itself.
(2) Intuition is structured by time.
(3) Understanding unifies time determinations.
(4) There is no intellectual intuition (from the “Transcendental
Aesthetic”)
(5) There is an existence, the transcendental unity of appercep-
tion, which cannot appear in time or be thought in it.
Subjectivity is an atemporal existence (according to (5) above); but as atemporal

it cannot be presented in attending (according to (4) above). Saying that the “I
think” contains the determination “I exist” (Kant 1965, B423), but not as an
inference, does not solve the problem, unless Kant allows an indeterminate
empirical intuition (contradicting claim (4) above). This is exactly what he does
in a fascinating footnote, of which I will quote a part. Kant (1965, B158n)
writes, “…I cannot determine my existence as that of a self-active being; all that
I can do is to represent to myself the spontaneity of my thought, that is, of the

determination; and my existence is still only determinable sensibly, that is, as
the existence of an appearance. But it is owing to this spontaneity that I entitle
myself an intelligence.” In other words, there is something that is not the object
but which spontaneously differentiates itself from the object. This something is
the ever-present self as marginal, and this is true whether the object is a table or,
reflectively, attentional activity itself. In Kant’s terms, the transcendental ego is
responsible for the phenomenal appearance of the table or for the appearance of
the empirical ego; the transcendental ego is “contained” in the “I think” as that
which is marginally present as the ever-present self, even in reflection. Alan
Thomas (2003, 174) seems to be interpreting Kant this way when he writes,
“Our experience has a perspectival character that points beyond itself to the
‘vanishing point’ that is the non-perspectival ground that makes all these
perspectival experiences experiences for me.” The ‘vanishing point’ is the
margin. But it must be understood that the viewpoint from which one reflects
and the self reflected on are both of the dynamic attentional sphere. Merleau-
Ponty (1962, 426) rightly notes that the reflecting subject and the subject
reflected upon, in their identification, are still part of the “flux”: “The fact that
even our purest reflection on the flux is actually inserted into that flux, shows
that the most precise consciousness of which we are capable is always, as it
were, affected by itself or given to itself, and that the word consciousness has no
meaning independently of this duality.”
Reflection maintains the following three differentiations in the sphere of
attention. Respectively, the differentiations refer to the presentation of the
streaming in attending, embodiment, and the environing world. Each is a
differentiation between the theme with its context, and the marginal halo with its
horizon.
(1) The differentiation between a moment of the streaming in

attending as thematic content within the indefinite context of
the chain of such moments, and the sector of the streaming as
marginal in the halo which itself also implies the horizon of
phenomenal temporality.
(2) The differentiation between actual kinesthetic facts as
thematic content within the indefinite context of corporeity,
and the kinesthetic facts presented as marginal in the halo
which itself also implies the horizon of corporeity.
(3) The differentiation between a sector of the environing

world as thematic content within the indefinite context of the
environing world, and the sector of the environing world
presented as marginal in the halo which itself also implies the
indefinite continuation of the world in general.
There is a duality built into reflective attention, just as pre-reflectively there is a

duality between the marginally ever-present self and the thematic object.
Merleau-Ponty (1962, 345) observes, “I know myself only in so far as I am
inherent in time and in the world, that is, I know myself only in my ambiguity.”
The sphere of attention is infinitely extended, but we are not infinite. We
are finite beings because our existential locus is the marginal halo, that is, we are
in time, embodied, and in the world. So when Descartes asks the question of
infinity in his Third Meditation—where does the idea of infinite substance come
from if not from the mind—Descartes’ answer is that God as infinite being must
have given us this idea of God. Another possibility is that we are already faced
with what is infinite, already engaged with it as marginal horizon. Emmanuel
Levinas (1996) argues that the idea of the infinite is a kind of disruption of the
existence of subjectivity. Its place in the life of the mind is prior to the gating
mechanism that determines meaning in the world, that determines what comes
into mind and what it means. The infinite is something that is discovered by a
subjectivity as its unaccountable foundation. Hence, Levinas concludes, the
Third Meditation in which God is discovered is the real foundation and
motivation for the First Meditation and then the Second Meditation in which the
self is questioned. This is not the place to debate the question of the existence of
God. However, in terms of the sphere of attention, this important historical
connection between Descartes and Levinas on infinite being and self is worth
commenting on.
In the cogito, Descartes discovers himself as an existential index within the
sphere of attention. Attention attends to itself as the ongoing process or activity
it is, and we call this reflection. Descartes sees himself as a thing that thinks, a
substance to which adheres the essential quality or function of thinking. This
attention to attention may present a thematic self, a story of ourselves, but the
marginally ever-present self in the halo, as a point of view on this thematic self,
yields to and infers the infinite horizon, the indefinite extension of the sphere in
the margin. In short, our existence is never settled, even though one may try to
think of oneself as “the real me” or some other more or less permanent
personality. Levinas (1996, 138) writes, “The Infinite affects thought by
devastating it and at the same time calls upon it; in a ‘putting it back in its place’
it puts thought in place. It awakens it. The awakening of thought is not a
welcoming of the Infinite, is not a recollecting, not an assuming, which are
necessary and sufficient for experience. The idea of the Infinite puts these in
question.” What Descartes finally accomplishes in the First and Second Medita-
tions is a description and analysis of the attentional transformation called
singling out, in particular a singling out of attention activity that we call
reflection. In the Third Meditation he manages to ground the sphere of attention
that he discovers, and this grounding is within the sphere itself, as the infinite
margin, which as ultimate potentiality of “the thinking thing” puts attending
back in its place. Therefore, properly attended to, this grounding is not
foundationalism. It is existential process. “In the identity of self-presence—in
the silent tautology of the prereflexive—lies an avowal of difference between
the same and the same, a disphasure, a difference at the heart of intimacy”
(Levinas 1991, 212–213). In the cogito, Descartes singles out a current sector of
the margin—phenomenal temporality (the streaming in attending), embodiment,
and the environing world—and makes it thematic, all the while maintaining a
marginal perspective or point of view on this theme. Hence, in reflection, the
margin as infinite cradles the theme as finite, just as theos cradles Socrates’ soul
in Plato’s Apology. In both cases, the cradling can yield to uneasiness—in one
the Angst of authentic reflection and in the other the aggressive “piety” of
elenchos. Note that although there is officially no body or environing world by
the Third Meditation, Descartes nonetheless must thematize them before he can
doubt them: cogito cogitatum corrects Husserl in Cartesian Meditations (1960,
§14).
Authentic Reflection
Imagine that you have been invited to a party by a friend, hosted by
someone you do not know. You hear music and talking inside as you approach
the house. The door is slightly ajar and so you walk in. Immediately you see
your friend and a number of people warmly greet you, calling out your name.
Without really trying or concentrating on it, you “work the room” with hugs and
handshakes. You spy the refreshments and make your way across the room,
almost dance-walking to the music. Even though you are seeing friends and
meeting new people, you are not very “self-aware.” For example, when you first
come in, perhaps you are thematically attending to the roomful of people as a
gestalt, in which your friend’s smiling face is quickly singled out as new theme.
Then, in synthesis, she and the person standing with her are presented as a
couple (boyfriend and girlfriend), and the context for this new theme enlarges as
the purpose of the party comes into contextual consciousness (an engagement
party). The transformations in this example could be very rapid. The point is that
as you attend throughout all the transformations, “the self” is not the theme. You
are not reflecting.
You are conscious of yourself in this scenario, but this presentation of self
is irrelevant to the various themes, your friend’s face, etc. This marginal self-
consciousness is the presentation of temporality, embodiment, and the
environing world from the point of view of the current position of attending in
the world, with reference to the body. A number of scholars speak of the body as
center and Gurwitsch gives a similar account. He states that the “I” is an essen-
tially occasional expression related to the body as the permanent center of
reference for the spatial organization of the perceptual world (Gurwitsch 1985,
72). Gurwitsch describes the perceptual world as spatially organized along three
main axes—front and behind, above and below, right and left. Each axis is
determined by the two complementary directions of near and far. Embodied
existence is the center of reference for this spatial organization. Gurwitsch
writes, “‘Here’ is wherever the body is; every other object is ‘there’ in some
direction and at a greater or lesser distance. Variations in the orientational
characters of objects refer to changes in their position with respect to the body”
(1985, 62; see also Husserl 2001, 584). In the scenario above, the streaming,
dynamic consciousness of a sector of the environing world, and from the
position of the body in the world, is presented marginally in the halo. There is
marginal consciousness in the halo to now, here, there—respectively, to a sector
of the streaming in the sphere of attention (temporality), current kinesthetic
sense, and the environing world—all as related to but irrelevant to the theme,
say, your friend’s smiling face. Also, this marginal halo horizonally implies
these three ever-present orders of existence as indefinitely extended in content.
In this example, when you become reflective, the content and orientation of
the sphere of attention changes. Note that “when you become reflective” is a
convenient yet improper abbreviation for a phenomenologically more exact
“when the sphere of attention is made thematic” or “when the sphere of attention
makes itself thematic.” This is because there is no “you” in any substantial sense
as a hub or center prior to reflection. For example, in the scenario above, there is
no thematic attention to attention itself, which is why we would call it
unreflective or pre-reflective attention. At most there is a marginal
consciousness in the halo to the attending process.
Let us imagine now a reflective scenario to see the changes and

possibilities. Again, you hear music and talking inside as you approach. The
door is slightly ajar, so you walk in. You do not see anyone right away, and as
you enter the music stops abruptly. You wonder if you are in the right house.
Then you see some people sitting on a couch in another room; they have just
now stopped talking and started whispering as they look through the hallway at
you. A host whom you do not know appears and cordially greets you, and
invites you to come in and introduce yourself around. You now see that there are
other people milling about, apparently stealing glances at you while talking in
little groups. You still do not see your friend or anyone else you know. You are
uncomfortable and consider leaving. You make your way to the refreshment
table. Leaving the table, as you cross the large room, you stumble, spilling
punch all over yourself and the white rug.
Although there may have been occasion for reflection throughout this new
scenario, let us suppose that after stumbling you are now acutely reflective. Such
acute reflection does not have to be embarrassment, such as this example or
Sartre’s famous peeping-Tom at the keyhole (Sartre, 1956, 259), but this kind of
example is useful here. Now, in reflection, you are attending thematically to the
sphere of attention. This means that dynamic embodied processing in the world,
which just is the sphere of attention, is thematic. What is at stake is the meaning
of this sphere of attention, that is, your story is at stake. What will be the
relevant context for your self, what meaning (on earth) will you give yourself?
The point is that the story we live in reflection (the way we see ourselves) is
most immediately a function of the thematic context. Another way of saying this
is that the context of attention constitutes the story or narrative of which
thematic attention has made itself the center as that which points to or indicates
this relevant story.
Sartre
Reflection can be authentic or inauthentic. In this moment of embarrass-
ment, what is thematically given is the now, here, there of dynamic embodied
processing in the world, the stream, body, world. In this moment, attention
might contextualize itself in a variety of ways. By “contextualize itself” I mean
that attention attends to itself and that this thematic attention to attention is
presented within a context. This theme-context complex is freely chosen (even if
it does not seem so, as Sartre explains in Being and Nothingness). So, for
example, you assume the mantel of pride to fend off the attempts of others to
shame you by looking down on you. As Sartre would say, you thwart their
attempts to continue making you into an object (a klutz) by looking at you.

(Since we are focusing on the moment of wresting back the ego from the other,
the peculiarity in Sartre’s account of the shameful “reflection” in which the ego
is “owned” by the other is irrelevant here as will be seen.) You focus on your
ongoing attending life within a story about yourself—“I am not a bumbling
idiot, I lettered in college sports, THESE PEOPLE DON’T KNOW ME!” You
present yourself to yourself in a certain context; you tell yourself a story about
yourself. This story places a self or ego at the center of attending activity, that is,
at the center of the sphere of attention. It is suddenly as if all attending activity
now and always has referred back to this substantial, storied, individual, who is
propelled through life with a certain unchangeable and unshakable personality or
moral fiber, which shows through in all things done—a core, “the real me.” One
might ask, however, where “the real me” was in the first scenario, or when the
embarrassment first took hold, or right now while you are reading what I have
written? When this issue of the ever-present self was addressed above in this
chapter, I noted how it is present marginally, as a “center” that is not the center.
So in the sense that attention tries to make itself into a thing at the core of all
that is attended to, for example a pride thing (a college athlete), it is just a story,
not an authentic reflection. Authentically, we are a process, not a thing. As
Sartre (1990, 81) describes it, “consciousness” is an impersonal spontaneity. In
inauthentic reflection it licenses its spontaneity to the ego, as a “virtual locus of
unity,” so that “consciousness” now invents itself as a personal spontaneity, a
“person” or core that apparently has always been present foundationally.
Sartre (1956, 30) describes a hiker facing a narrow trail along a precipice
with no guardrail. The hiker is afraid. Let us say the hiker becomes reflective
and yet proceeds along the narrow path. If the reflection is inauthentic (what
Sartre calls mauvaise foi or “bad faith”) the hiker will deny his or her absolute
freedom. The hiker will see the action as determined in some way, rather than
freely chosen. For example, he or she may think, “I must proceed forward
because I have never quit anything in my life” or “challenging ourselves is part
of human nature, I am human, and so I must take this challenge.” This is similar
to Sartre’s example of the reformed gambler. Faced anew with a gambling table
after many years dedicated to not gambling, the gambler denies he has the
ability to choose to gamble. He says he is not free to gamble. Really? No matter
how dedicated he has been over the decades, attending gambling reform
meetings and apologizing to those whose lives he ruined, the choice is still not
yet made, nor is it made for him in some determined way since the future is not
yet determined. Sartre (1956, 32) writes “I perceive with anguish that nothing
prevents me from gambling.” The “nothing” Sartre highlights is the human

activity he would call “consciousness” or “freedom,” and I would call the sphere
of attention. The reformed gambler is free to gamble, the hiker is free to quit the
fearful trail. In Sartre’s terms, our past self does not determine our future self—I
am the self that I am not yet, and I am not yet the self that I am (1956, 32). In
fact, the hiker is free to throw himself over the cliff, even though this would be
“against his character,” which is to say, against the attending that characterizes
this uniquely historic sphere of attention.
Let us see exactly what inauthenticity and authenticity look like in terms of
the sphere of attention. In reflection, the sphere of attention attends to itself
thematically (and is marginal as always). The context of this theme determines
the authenticity or inauthenticity of the reflection. In inauthentic reflection, the
context for the theme is a relatively stable, narrative or story, and if there are
attention transformations they either restructure, single out, or synthesize the
thematic attending activity and its context, replacing the current self and its story
with a relatively stable, well-formed new one, or they transform the presented
story as context, enlarging, contracting, elucidating, or obscuring the context,
leaving the “self” or “ego” as theme essentially unchanged. For example, within
the context of lettering in college sports, the sphere of attention attends
thematically to itself as a dynamic processing in the world—a prideful “self”
constituted in now, here, there. This context could change without the theme
essentially changing. For instance, lettering in college sports becomes elucidated
to reveal the now intensely relevant (but still contextual) gestalt of being elected
most valuable player on the team as contextually near the theme.
In authentic reflection, the context for the theme is not stable or well-
formed. Attention rides itself as riding its own wave. The theme is still ongoing
attentional life, the ongoing dynamic embodied processing in the world as a
now, here, there. And this gestalt is not otherwise peculiar. But the positional
index given this theme by its thematic context makes all the difference. In
authentic reflection the context is unsettled and possibly unsettling. (If too
unsettling, then often the reflection more quickly reverts to inauthenticity.) The
openness of the attending process, its projection as dynamically future-oriented,
is attended to contextually while the attending activity is theme. This means that
there is no sensible biography, narrative, or stable story for the existence of
dynamic attending in the world. The way Sartre would report this instability of
contextual content in authentic reflection is that “consciousness” has no faith in
the ego which it has created (paradoxically, a “good faith,” for Sartre). Said
inexactly, I have no meaning except that meaning I impose upon myself, and in
authentic reflection, this nothingness that I am is evident. The positional index

for the theme in reflection, which is the theme’s perspective and orientation in
relation to the context, is not settled or settle-able. This marks the theme as not
necessarily relevant in any particular way. As Sartre puts it in his 1933 novel
Nausea (1964, 128), I am superfluous (de trop), in the way, extra, in excess,
contingent. There is a context, but it is extraordinarily indefinite, with potential
themes in this context that seem to be evanescent, transparent, or weightless.
Like inauthentic reflection, authentic reflection is thematic attention to the now,
here, there of the attending process, which is dynamic embodied processing in
the world. But in authentic reflection there is also contextual consciousness of
no-thing-ness. With its positional index gotten from this thematic context, the
perspective and orientation of the theme is the negation of its positionality as
necessarily central, as substantial core. The “virtual locus of unity” of self is
attended to as virtual. Existentialists call this Angst or anguish, and in terms of
the sphere of attention it is a kind of self-focused attention, attention attending to
itself within a context of no-thing-ness; hence to a self that is essentially not a
thing, nothingness, free, undetermined, an ongoing process chronically opening
upon the future. In authentic reflection, the sectors of the marginal streaming,
corporeality, and environing world which are made thematic at the given
moment of reflection and together constitute what we normally call “self” (and
which I have also called now, here, there) are presented within a contextual
consciousness of insubstantiality. In other words, we do not attend to ourselves
as having freedom, as if we were a substance to which adhered the quality of
freedom. We attend to ourselves as freedom.
As Sartre often notes, inauthenticity is how attention tries to avoid the fact
that it is absolute freedom by making itself into an object. It avoids that it is only
the meaning-giving negation of the world, that it is only process, by defining
itself as something substantial. When I follow Sartre and say “absolute
freedom,” I also follow his account of facticity—there are certain facts about
being human which cannot be otherwise, being embodied, situated, desirous,
free, etc. So although I did not freely choose my birth, the family I was born
into, or the crease in my earlobes, I am absolutely free to choose how I attend to
these things, what they mean for me. Merleau-Ponty (1962, 453) writes, “What
then is freedom? To be born is both to be born of the world and to be born into
the world. The world is already constituted, but also never completely
constituted; in the first case we are acted upon, in the second we are open to an
infinite number of possibilities. But this analysis is still abstract, for we exist in
both ways at once. There is therefore, never determinism and never absolute
choice, I am never a thing and never bare consciousness.” If “absolute choice”

here means “bare consciousness” without a world that makes demands on
attention in all dimensions then this is not what I take Sartre to mean by absolute
freedom, and it is not what I mean by it in this section. However, I take
Merleau-Ponty’s point as support for what I mean by authentic reflection. In
authentic reflection, the sphere of attention attends to itself as a dynamic process
that momentarily lives within the context of freedom, more exactly, it attends to
itself as free. Merleau-Ponty states in the quote above that in the human
condition in general “we are open to an infinite number of possibilities.” In
authentic reflection, we are as open to an infinite number of possibilities. Note
that I follow Sartre in claiming that there is no moral advantage to achieving
authentic versus inauthentic reflection. It is just something that the sphere of
attention can do, not that it necessarily should do.
Buddhism
Certain Buddhist practices seem to parallel authentic reflection in the sphere
of attention, although they add a moral element in the practice. Almost everyone
in or close to the disciplines of philosophy and psychology has recognized the
explosive interdisciplinary growth of “consciousness studies” since the early
1990s. If it is a “Consciousness Boom,” as Jean Petitot et al. (1999) call it in
their book Naturalizing Phenomenology, then there is within it a “Buddhism
Boom.” The seed for this blooming was planted in the 1960’s, but currently it is
difficult to avoid commenting on Buddhist practices if one wants to give an
interdisciplinary account of attention. But why would one want to avoid it
anyway? The Buddhist tradition has been scientifically studying “conscious-
ness” for millennia and has much to offer, so it does not makes sense to ignore
these practices. The “science” I mean here is systematic, rigorous, disciplined
investigation in the sense of Wissenschaft. One reason for the Buddhism Boom
in “consciousness studies” is the natural parallelism that these practices,
assumptions, and conclusions show for phenomenological practice. Above we
saw how Buddhist practice could be seen as the transformation of elucidation of
the context. Here I will take a more detailed look at how the “mindfulness”
practice in Buddhism, also called shamatha or shamatha-vipashyana, parallels
the Sartrean inspired account of authentic reflection in this section. In both
cases, one sees that authentic reflection is paradoxically the most personal and
most impersonal way for attention to attend to itself.
In On Becoming Aware: A Pragmatics of Experiencing, three French
researchers who are well-known to Husserl scholars interested in cognitive
science, Natalie Depraz, Francisco Varela, and Pierre Vermersch, describe a

number of practices having to do with “awareness.” The authors (2003, 6) write,
“Our main contribution is the formulation of a research program: A common
ground for a multiplicity of approaches to becoming aware.” The book is
remarkable for its usefulness to researchers, for example, crossing Buddhist
practice with brain science and the phenomenological epoche, and not just for its
creative scholarship. My use of it here is to interpret these authors’ descriptions
of mindfulness practice as a peculiar transformation in the sphere of attention
that parallels the above account of authentic reflection.
I will present their description of a daily practice session of shamatha-
vipashyana (“mindfulness” but which they also call “présence attentive”), in
which the practitioner is in the traditional pose of relaxed sitting with straight
posture, eyes open. I have italicized the three steps included below as headings
for that step: Redirection, Letting-go, Looping through cycles. Notice through-
out the roles of the context and margin (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003,
33):
Redirection: Once you’ve settled into the basic posture, you

explicitly decide to ‘merely’ follow what is going on without
engaging it. Since you have to keep breathing, your breath
becomes a guideline or a track for your attention. Although
this doesn’t mean all other sensations, thoughts, and emotions
stop, you should consider them from afar, as an abstract
observer would, like clouds in the background; the foreground
is the breath as you follow it into the lungs and out the
nostrils. This is in a nutshell just the sort of presence you’re
trying to cultivate: you’re mindful of what’s happening in the
present. (As all kinds of experience appear within this
attentive space, you explicitly avoid engaging in their
contents, but rather pay attention to their arising, their
emergence into full form, and then their subsiding into the
background.)
Letting-go: As you get distracted you’re suddenly aware that
you have not been simply following your breath and so forth,
but attending to thoughts, images, daydreams, bodily
discomfort and the like. As soon as the sudden jolt of realizing
that you have not been following instructions passes, you
simply let go of the distraction and come back to the

breathing.
Looping through cycles: As the session unfolds you relax as
much as you can the position of being an abstract observer,
and use a lighter touch regarding thoughts, merely watching
them arise, present themselves, and subside. As you watch
your mind, you see it moving through various ‘positive’ or
‘negative’ states; it either swims with content or is empty as it
can be, you’re either dull as dishwater or sharp as a tack or
anywhere in between. You glimpse the constant imperma-
nence of your thoughts, regardless of content and texture. You
clearly see the composite nature of your mind and sense of
self. You find yourself going in and out of an identification
with a non-centered, non-ego space with various degrees of
expansion. Now if your attentiveness begins to become
discursive, you start all over again with your basic technique
of focusing on your breathing, reminding yourself that your
main goal is to distance yourself from your thoughts.
The emphasis in attending in this practice shifts from thematic attention to

context and margin. The theme is breathing, or whatever other content presents
itself. If content other than breathing presents itself thematically it is to be
attended to “from afar, as an abstract observer would.” The context in this
transformation undergoes a kind of elucidation of the relevance of the thematic
content. It has the job of “paying attention to their arising, their emergence into
full form, and then subsiding into the background.” This elucidation of the
coming into and going out of thematic presence is being present to the
mechanics of the serial-shifting attention process, and possibly to the protention
and retention of content in the margin as well. The combination in this case of
the two transformations in the context, elucidation and serial-shifting, promote
the diminishing of intensity, meaningfulness, and relevance of the context for
the theme—“as the session unfolds you relax as much as you can the position of
being an abstract observer, and use a lighter touch regarding thoughts, merely
watching them arise, present themselves, and subside.” As in the above account
of authentic reflection, the positional index, the orientation and perspective that
the thematic context confers upon the theme as the theme emerges, is dispersed.
The theme involves attention to attention and so is reflective. The theme is the
now, here, there: the streaming in attending (the temporality of theme emer-
gence and subsiding), the body (breathing), and the environing world (more so,
eventually, in the advanced practice of vipashyana). It appears that the “goal” is
to transform attention so that attention to attention is thematic, but this is not
inauthentic reflection; for the “self” that is attended to is no self, not a thing. The
peculiar type of transformation seems to be a serial-shifting-elucidation that
recontextualizes the theme from story or personal narrative to free process; from
personal to impersonal, from self to no-self (anattƗ). The personal identity is
impersonal—“You find yourself going in and out of an identification with a
non-centered, non-ego space with various degrees of expansion.”
In a very real sense, this practice demands a larger philosophical view of
what attention is. It promotes a redistribution in the sphere of attention in all
three dimensions, lightening up the theoretical and practical load on the theme,
assuming therefore that there are other dimensions in the sphere of attention than
just the thematic. In a chapter by Varela and Depraz, genuine attention in
shamatha practice is distinguished from simple attention. “It is a technique of
genuine attentiveness and not just of simple attention. For example, if I am
capable of having a ‘quality of mindfulness’ with regard to a text that I am
reading, of being present to myself at the same time as I am attentive to my
reading, and if a person drops a glass behind me, this does not make me start, for
my attention is not only focalized on the reading but embraces, with a certain
panoramic vision, all of the space that surrounds me. Sometimes, waiters in a
café give us superb demonstrations of mindfulness. They are attentive to not
tipping over platters of dishes, but they never forget the feet of the tables. In the
Kagyupa schools, they say that one must give about 40% of attention to
breathing and 60% to the periphery” (Depraz et al., 2003, 217). As far as I can
tell, the “presence to myself” is a loose way of speaking in this passage, if it is a
description of “genuine attentiveness,” since there is no self in this tradition in a
substantial or essential sense. Regardless, it is clear that this practice of
mindfulness shows the need for a more thoroughgoing theory of attending, of
how it involves context and margin. What is remarkable about this practice is
that all the exercises seem to celebrate what is outside the focus in attending,
trying to strengthen contextual and marginal consciousness, rather than focal
attention, even though focal attention to breathing is usually the first step in
spiritual practices. It certainly does not only involve the focus. For it seems that
Buddhist practice must assume that the human being is a sphere of attention in
these three dimensions. One can advance from the practice of shamatha to
vipashyana, which is the “analytic and panoramic insight into the moment-to-
moment arising of mental states” (Depraz et al., 2003, 220). Vipashyana then is
cultivated especially in post-meditation periods of shamatha, when one goes

about one’s ordinary life. What is unique is the special push for a wider scope
for attention. About this advanced practice, Depraz and Varela (Depraz et al.,
2003, 221) write that “The larger field of view makes it possible to examine all
of our experience in minute detail. It is important to notice that space is a central
notion in vipashyana, since the entire exercise is predicated on a de-centering of
one’s position, an expansion of one’s attentional scope.”
This kind of practice not only indicates the need for rethinking what
attention is, but it also parallels the Sartrean-inspired account of authentic
reflection above. The main difference seems to be the prescriptive, moral
element that is present in Buddhist practice, which also may alleviate the
possibly unsettling feelings often associated with authentic reflection. The
account of morality in the next chapter may be compatible with what Buddhist
practice prescribes, but it is not immediately evident how the Buddhist practice
of recognizing what I am is the same as a moral attention to the other.
Chapter Six
Morality and the Sphere of Attention

We are born, we attend, we die—but what then of morality? If existence
precedes essence and if human being is a sphere of attention, so that our
“essence” is simply a dynamic embodied processing in the world, then there
seems to be little room to argue that we can live our lives with others in a way
that is genuinely moral. My approach will be different from Sartre’s infamous
Kantian-like proposal delivered as a speech in France, ideas which he later
acknowledged as half-baked thoughts on ethics and existentialism (Sartre 1976
and 1985). It will also not involve the embrace of a socialistic ethics, as Sartre
tended to do later in his career. Instead, this chapter draws its primary
inspiration from existentialist philosopher and theologian Martin Buber.
All human beings are capable of moral moments, and moral moments
become the sedimented constituents of moral character. As Aristotle argues in
Nichomachean Ethics, acting morally begets being moral. But the acting is not
initially or primarily a matter of overt behavior; it is a matter of attention. A
moral moment is temporary but distinctive; it is born in a transformation in
attending and grows or is killed in a transformation in attending. Hence I will
approach morality from the perspective of what kind of transformation in
attending it is.
This chapter is stimulated by Martin Buber’s I and Thou (1970) (Ich und
Du). Buber was not directly concerned with attention, but his famous distinction
between the I-You encounter and the I-it relation frames the nature of morality
in the sphere of attention. According to Buber, a person can be thematically
presented as a thing, an It in an I-It relation; or a person can be presented as a
being, a You in an I-You relation. The latter is the moral moment and involves
moral attention. In this chapter I will use “You” to refer to the theme in the
moral moment, and “encounter” will always refer to I-You, and not I-it. “I” is
not reflective self-attention unless otherwise noted.
If we are to talk of morality and moral attention, we must mean that another
human being has some special relevance for the subject. Also we must not mean
that this relevance is practical or emotional, in the sense that someone uses
another, appreciates them, is fascinated by them, feels sorry for them, is
outraged for them, etc. This kind of attending involves the usual contextual
relevancies that fall short of the peculiar transformation in attending that the
moral moment demands. Instead, the relevancy between the theme and context
in moral attention must be such that the theme is You within the context of my
149
ongoing attending life. For this is exactly what we mean when we say that You
are immediately and directly relevant to me. In encountering You, thematic
attention focuses on You as a singular embodied attending being which is im-
mediately relevant to the sphere of attention’s own ongoing attending activity. In
short, You are in the presence of me, as the theme of my ongoing attending life,
and this life is the context for You which is focal. This compassion—literally
“enduring together”—is a special relevancy-principle in the sphere of attention.
The Moral Moment

The moral moment is an immediate and direct encounter with another
person, and so I must articulate the meaning of these two emphasized concepts
in moral attention. But first we must see more clearly how the I-it relation
differs from the I-You encounter by examining Gurwitsch and Buber.
If in the moral moment the You is the theme, then it must be like any other
theme in many respects. That is, it must be a centrally presented gestalt whose
constituents have a functional significance for each other. This functional
significance is a mutual interdependence and qualification in presenting the You
as a gestalt. Gurwitsch (1979, 50) writes that like any other theme, “We
encounter other people as living beings belonging to the world. They are
components of the world like all physical things, animals, and so forth.” One
could argue at some length about how and why we recognize other beings as
human beings like us. As Descartes (1981, 155) famously notes in his
Meditations, the men I see walking may be robots, since all I really see are coats
and hats and boots. But if we admit that there are other persons in the world, and
that there is some kind of commonality or community among us, even if only
biologically as a species, then when another is confronted what is usually
presented in attention? Gurwitsch writes that when another person is confronted,
we at least apprehend that this person is subjective and embodied. We attend to
them at some level as having a streaming in attending and physically being in
the world. “That is to say, one apprehends the other as a subject endowed with a
stream of consciousness such as one experiences in himself and one apprehends
the other as a subject to whom the perceptual world also presents itself in its
organizational aspect but with reference to a different center of orientation [a
different embodiment], namely, that organizational aspect in which it would
appear if one were in the place of the speaker” (Gurwitsch 1985, 74, see also
1979, 30–31; and Embree 1985, xxxviii). Gurwitsch’s point is that when another
person is presented it is both a psychic and somatic presentation of the other, as
a unity; the other is presented as a somatopsychic unity, an embodied attending
Morality and Attention 151
in the world. But sometimes we encounter a person in moral attention, and the
theme is no longer presented as an “it,” a mere component of the world, but is
replaced by a uniquely attended theme—You.
Gurwitsch was interested in the social world, and gives an extended and
sophisticated treatment of human relations in Human Encounters in the Social
World (1979). But one would not call him a moral philosopher, in the way that
one might readily say this of Buber, and so turning to Gurwitsch may seem odd
rather than sensible. Yet in Human Encounters in the Social World Gurwitsch
reveals just the gem one might look for if one wanted to know the shape of the
moral moment.
In discussing the idea of “social world” (Milieuwelt), and without reference
to Buber or morality, Gurwitsch includes an account of an encounter very much
like Buber’s I-You relation, but only as a limit-case of more usual social
encounters. For Gurwitsch, the practical activities of daily life are the setting for
social encounters, and those who encounter each other are also at the same time
tied to their practical activities (Gurwitsch 1979, 35–36; and 1964, 382, 386).
For Buber, these relations with others in the world are of the I-it kind. So the
more unique kind of encounter that moral attention involves would necessarily
have to diminish the importance of the surrounding environment and its
practical concerns. In the sphere of attention, intense absorption in the theme is
negatively correlated with the intensity in contextual and marginal
consciousness (Gurwitsch 1985, 43). This is a limited “contextual cost” and
Gurwitsch applies this correlation in the passage in question below. That is, the
context in moral attention is unique in comparison with non-moral attention.
Gurwitsch writes the surprising passage about the limit-case of “self-sufficient
being-together” as he is discussing the ever-present prominence of the marginal
“horizon” of the surrounding world in human social interaction. Gurwitsch
(1979, 37) notes that “When, in fact, a case of human being-together is made
self-sufficient, then those together withdraw from the world in order to orient
themselves toward each other as individuals. They surrender the relations to the
surrounding world because their being-together finds its meaning in itself.” This
“surrendering” is part of the limited contextual cost. More of the passage (1979,
36–37) follows:
It is true that this horizon in which we encounter fellow human

beings can withdraw; human being-together can be so
emancipated from the horizon that the horizon becomes
meaningless. In that case, being-together finds its meaning in
itself, for example, when we are together with a person ‘for his
own sake.’ To that extent a relatively horizonless being-
together is present when the horizon is singly and alone
grounded in people as such who are together for their own
sake, as a consequence of which they find themselves as pure
individuals. Because the sense of this being-together is only
grounded in individuals who encounter themselves in this
way, it is, as being-together, made self-sufficient. It conceals
its sense in itself and does not receive it in the first place from
that horizon in which it occurs. Being-together is absolutized
here, that is, it is absolved from relations to the surrounding
world; it no longer fits into the surrounding world but self-
sufficiently rests in itself.
In moral attention, the person is attended to as a whole, and the environing

world fades. It is as if the person is suddenly and truly three-dimensional and the
rest of the environment is flat. Directors achieve an effect loosely analogous
when they make the subject in the scene dramatically stand out—a “Hitchcock-
zoom”—by simultaneously zooming in on the subject and backing out the dolly,
for example, in the film Vertigo (I am not saying here that attention is like a
zoom-lens).
In the I-You encounter, the You is given with a rounded independence and
exclusiveness (Arvidson 2003a). Buber writes, “No purpose intervenes between
I and You, no greed and no anticipation;…Every means is an obstacle. Only
where all means have disintegrated [do] encounters occur” (Buber 1970, 62–63).
The environing world as practical world is replaced by a moral world. It now
does not matter, if it did before, that you have blond hair, black hair, or no hair.
Your name, the way you wink too much, and the gentle tone of your voice may
still be presented, but only marginally. These are irrelevant to the You as theme.
Simone Weil (1951, 111–112) seems to describe this compassionate attending in
her definition of attention: “Attention consists of suspending our thought,
leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means
holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not
in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced
to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already
formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees
also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and
plains. Above all, our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything,
but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.” Singling
out qualities such as hair color and mannerisms works against the possibility or
maintenance of moral attention. Nothing specific like this is thematically or
contextually presented in the You (see Buber 1970, 175). Buber (1970, 59)
writes, “Even as a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words, nor a
statue of lines—one must pull and tear to turn a unity into a multiplicity—so it is
with the human being to whom I say You. I can abstract from him the color of
his hair or the color of his speech or the color of his graciousness; I have to do
this again and again; but immediately he is no longer You.” Thus this is a unique
theme, since the only possible functional significance of constituents of the
theme is to indicate the existence of this particular attending being as a whole
being in the world, a gestalt-presence in the world that attends to the world.
The two prominent or formative constituents of this centralized gestalt are
solidity and unitary individuality. Solidity is a sort of existential impressiveness
or conclusiveness. You wholly impress me. Unitary individuality is integral
uniqueness. You wholly are not me. As a singular being, the You is not
interchangeable with any other. The You is presented as distinctive and original.
Everything about You, every constituent, is referred to the wholeness or limit of
You. Note that for our purposes, and Buber is explicit here, the I-You relation
does not have to be mutual, unlike Aristotle’s “perfect” friendship.
What is the boundary when the You is attended to as thematic? It is not
readily apparent how such a gestalt has a boundary, which it must have if it is a
gestalt and is thematic. Buber’s descriptions of this boundary appear to be
inconsistent, but are not. For example, he writes, “Whoever says You does not
have something for his object. For wherever there is something there is also
another something; every It borders on other Its; it is only by virtue of bordering
on others. But where You is said there is no something. You has no borders.
Whoever says You does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in
relation” (Buber 1970, 55). When Buber says the “You has no borders” he
means that it does not indicate or imply the environing world as a context for its
presentation. Gurwitsch appears to describe the same phenomenon in the “limit-
case” of “self-sufficient being-together.” The You is not relevant to the everyday
world of things, relations, and qualities, or to other worlds such as the
arithmetical or imaginational. Understood otherwise, the You would be some
magical or mystical theme, a borderless gestalt and so without a context, and
Buber clearly does not mean that the You is mystical in this way. I will show
below that by segregating itself in consolidation the You borders on and is
relevant for a unique thematic context. In another curious passage related to this
problem, Buber writes “Neighborless and seamless, he is You and fills the
firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his
light” (Buber 1970, 59). Again, with respect to material things, other people,
etc., the You is presented as “neighborless.” With respect to singling out
individual detail, like aggressive demeanor or hair color (as in the “tones instead
of the melody” example) the You is presented as “seamless.” Everything “lives
in his light” because the You is presented as a theme—it is the center of
organization for the thematic context. So the You is presented in time and space,
although temporality and spatiality are not relevant as they might be for other
objects (Buber 1970, 81). Buber argues that the real boundary in encountering
You runs between the You and It, between presence and object (Gegenwart und
Gegenstand) (Buber 1970, 63).
The I-You relation itself is not the context for encountering You as
thematic. That we enjoy laughing together, that we have known each other for
years or that we have just met, the fact that we are in the same room right now,
none of this or any other facts of these kinds are the context for encountering
You. The immediacy and directness of the I-You encounter demands a unique
context. This means that the thematic context for attending to You is also not
facts about you, your name, your appearance, your personality, etc. These items
may be given marginally, but they are irrelevant to You as morally relevant to
me.
So what is the relation between theme and context in this case? What is the
relation between the You as bounded or limited, that is, as a centralized gestalt,
and the I which thematically attends to it? As noted above, a limit is both an
ending and a beginning, and both senses are presented here. The You presents
itself as a termination (a limit as ending) of the relevance of the surrounding
perceptual world of material things and practicalities, and as an origination (a
limit as beginning) of the relevance of moral relation. The You is an ending or
termination because it is distinguished from the environing world. It is not
functionally presented within the context of the world of things as another thing,
and so is set off against the world as not a thing. The You is individual and self-
contained, as the formative constituents of solidity and unitary individuality
indicate. As an intensely segregated and consolidated thematic gestalt in the
sphere of attention, the border of the You is an ending or termination of the
relevance of the environing world. This segregation from the space and time
world as it is usually marginally presented, what is called “reality” (see
Gurwitsch 1964, 387) is definitive and so is intense and novel. The You is a
gestalt that is also segregated from that which enacts this segregation, the I as
relevant context (discussed in the next paragraph). As any theme must, the You
still refers beyond itself to its thematic context, from which it is no less
segregated. Hence the second sense of limit, now as beginning or origination. A
limit indicates a beyond and under certain conditions is a gateway to what is
beyond it. This beginning manifests itself in the presentation of the You as
opening toward the I as relevant context. The You is placed within my world as
this world’s central organizing principle. My world becomes organized around
You in a peculiar way. The expression of this organizing principle is
compassion (discussed in the next section), and “my world” becomes a moral
world.
In encountering You, the I is the thematic context. You and I are materially
relevant to each other, but with You as the focus in attending. The gestalt-
connection between the You as theme and the I as thematic context is a unity by
relevancy. The theme establishes the lines of relevance for all items that are co-
presented in what Gurwitsch (1966, 204) calls “consciousness” and I have called
the sphere of attention. In this case what is relevant to the theme is the I. As the
previous chapter has shown, when one is attending reflectively, so that other-
wise haloic content is made thematic, the “I” as theme involves some particular
story of who I am and at the same time the on-going attending life is marginally
presented. But the case of moral attention is peculiar since the on-going
attending life that I am is contextually and marginally presented. Those items
that are relevant to the theme, to You as presented, are presented as part of the
thematic context. And it is I as an attending being, a sphere of attention, that is
presented as relevant to You, and together we form a unity of relevance,
connection, or relation, with You as the focus in attending.
In response to the question about the nature of context when the You is
thematic, the above answers that the I as on-going attending is the context, such
that the unity by relevancy is between the You and the I. But more must be said
about this theme and its context, specifically, about how subjectivity or on-going
attending activity is presented contextually in the moral moment.
I have followed Gurwitsch and Sartre in arguing for a non-egological
conception of human subjectivity. So there is no core or center to which all acts
or qualities of the human being refer, or from which all desires, acts, thoughts,
etc. originate and emanate. Also, there is no substantial executive or director that
is this hub of what a person is. Since it is crucial for my point here, I will quote
Gurwitsch (1985, 73–74) again on this matter:
Used in a given case by a determinate speaker, the word I does

not refer to the biography of the speaker or to his Ego in the
sense of a causal unity. Rather, it refers to that awareness
which the speaker like every conscious subject permanently
has of himself…viz., the inner awareness of the present
segment of the stream of consciousness with its intrinsic
phenomenal temporality. To this must be added the awareness
of embodied existence, taken as it is actually given in exper-
ience, i.e., awareness of those somatic facts which at the
moment happen to present themselves with their pointing
reference to the more or less confused horizon of corporeity;
and, finally, the awareness of that sector of the perceptual
world in which the speaker experiences himself as placed.
Thus the specific meaning of the word I varies not only from
one speaker to another but also with respect to the same
person, according to the occasion on which this word is
uttered.
There is no self as the permanent foundation of attending life, but there is

developed, intrinsically interrelated, and meaningful personal experience.
Hence, Gurwitsch’s “I” is not the “I” of Hume. This implies that the sphere of
attention may have some moral character, and I will discuss moral character
below. According to Gurwitsch, embodied attending (which he calls “embodied
consciousness”) is a whole, although we can discuss it in its psychic and somatic
aspects (Gurwitsch 1985, 26). These aspects—the streaming in attending
(phenomenal time) and embodied existence—will be discussed in turn. The
question now becomes the following. What would it look like and what would it
mean for embodied attending, whose aspects are the streaming in attending and
embodied existence, to present itself not only marginally (as ever-present self)
but also as the thematic context? Also, is such a presentation consistent with
Gurwitsch’s philosophy?
As in the work of James and Husserl, the streaming in the sphere of
attention is experienced temporality, phenomenal time. Gurwitsch usually
discusses this streaming in terms of margin or theme. The streaming in attending
or phenomenal time is always presented marginally, as pointed out above (see
also Gurwitsch 1985, 13, 22; and Gurwitsch 1964, 415). Thematic attention to a
sector of the streaming is reflection, also described above (Gurwitsch 1985, 20;
and 1964, 416). Gurwitsch writes, “Just as in a particular perception the
perceptible thing presents itself one-sidedly, i.e., from a certain angle and under
a certain aspect but never under the infinite totality of all its possible aspects, so
too the present segment of the stream of consciousness, when grasped by
reflection and apprehended in its pointing to the Ego, appears as that part, side,
or aspect of the Ego which happens to fall under actual experience” (Gurwitsch
1985, 23). So as Gurwitsch writes in a letter to Alfred Schutz, which was
brought to my attention by Lester Embree, “In reflection the margin becomes
the thematic field. The grasped experience finds itself in a new field which
consists merely of constituents of the stream of consciousness” (Grathoff 1989,
48). To this new theme and thematic context, I would add that there is still
marginal content, as argued for in the previous chapter. The point is that
Gurwitsch does not appear to have explicitly discussed the possibility that
phenomenal time (the streaming) could become the context when an object
other than an “act of consciousness” is thematic, that is, when one is not
reflecting.
The streaming in the sphere of attention is one of the two main constituents
of the thematic context in moral attention. The other, discussed below, is
embodied existence. It is impossible for the streaming to be presented in its
wholeness or as fully elucidated and clear (Gurwitsch 1985, 20). In encountering
You, the streaming in attending is presented as materially related to the You—a
relevance that gives a peculiar temporal context to You as theme. In effect, the
sphere of attention is present to its own activity, but not in the mode of reflection
(the strong sense of self-attention) and not only marginally (the ever-present
attention to self). Reflection requires thematic attention to the sphere of
attention, and this theme would then replace You. Also, in the moral case, the
sphere of attention is not present to its own activity merely marginally, for this
would make my on-going attending activity only irrelevant to the theme, which
is You. The mode of being present to attending is contextual, so it is something
in between the thematic and the marginal, but is unlike either.
In encountering You, the sphere of attention thematizes the You as a
singular embodied attending being and as the center of the relevance of this
thematizing activity. In short, You are in the presence of me, as the theme of my
ongoing attentional life. The You presents itself as immediately and materially
relevant to my time: my streaming in attending. This tense and intense relation
between You and I with respect to temporality is what Buber calls presence or,
after Henri Bergson, “duration,” and is what I mean by the use of
“immediately,” as in the previous sentence. An engine for the tension in this
encounter is that my ongoing attending life is at the same time relevant and
irrelevant for You, since as I am contextually conscious of the streaming I am

also marginally conscious of it. In other words, the I-You encounter is not an
ecstasy or complete abandoning of the now, here, there in attending. As Buber’s
translator and interpreter notes, the moral moment is not restricted to a surrender
of total being, but is more likely a becoming (Kaufman 1970, 17). I doubt that
such a surrender of the whole being is possible, since there must be an I in the I-
You encounter. Note that moral attention is not the same as authentic reflection,
since in authentic reflection the I is the theme, not You.
In observing how an It cannot be relevant in this way, Buber writes,
“Presence is not what is evanescent and passes but what confronts us, waiting
and enduring. And the object [an It] is not duration but standing still, ceasing,
breaking off, becoming rigid, standing out, the lack of relation, the lack of
presence” (Buber 1970, 64). The following is to the point: “The You appears in
time, but in that of a process that is fulfilled in itself—a process lived through
not as a piece that is a part of a constant and organized sequence but in a
‘duration’ whose purely intensive dimension can be determined only by starting
from the You” (Buber 1970, 81). The moral moment is an immediate and direct
encounter with another person as another embodied sphere of attention. It is
immediate since, when presented with You as thematic, the context for You is
my ongoing attentional life, the now of the streaming in attending. It is direct
since the context for You is also my own embodied attending. This directness
will be discussed below.
I have no doubt that it would take a lot of convincing for Gurwitsch to agree
with this use of his insights. Indeed, as I have indicated, Gurwitsch would
probably find it hard to accept the translation of his “field of consciousness” into
a sphere of attention in the first place. But the account of the moral moment just
given extends Gurwitsch’s philosophy in ways that are consistent with his
overall gestalt-phenomenological approach to human being, and adds a moral
dimension to his thought. The question here is, does it make any sense within
Gurwitsch’s “field-theory” to say that phenomenal time can be presented as an
essential aspect of the thematic context when the You is thematic? In the
previous discussion of the context in attending, I focused on how the positional
index is the character bestowed upon the theme by the thematic context. The
positional index, what Pylyshyn, and others call a visual index (with respect to
that sensory mode) is a function of the thematic context. It is not a part of the
theme but it affects the way the theme presents itself. Gurwitsch (1964, 359)
writes, “By analyzing any example, we find the tinge derived by the theme from
the thematic field to be the perspective under which, the light and orientation in
which, the point of view from which, it appears to consciousness.” I think it

makes sense to say that phenomenal time can be presented as context for the
You, such that the You is indicated by a positional index. This positional index
does three things. It presents the You under the perspective of its immediate
relation to my ongoing attending life; it presents the You in light of and in
orientation toward this activity; and it presents the You from a particular
standpoint in relation to this activity. When discussing how the streaming might
be presented, Gurwitsch emphasizes only thematic or marginal possibilities. Or
he discusses context possibilities only with reference to reflection, that is, when
a sector of the streaming becomes focal. But my description of the moral
moment is not automatically incommensurate with Gurwitsch’s work simply
because he is silent on this possibility. I believe that the presentation of the I as
context for the You is compatible with Gurwitsch’s “field theory,” as
demonstrated in the application of positional index to this case. This compati-
bility within extension becomes even more evident when marginal orders of
existence are discussed below.
In the moral moment, with the You as thematic and the I as contextual, this
context presents the unity of embodied attention whose main constituent, in
addition to the streaming in attending just discussed, is embodied existence.
Gurwitsch describes embodied existence as the kinesthetic sense or the inner
sense of the body (1985, 36). There is not only an immediacy (in terms of
temporality) but also a directness or confrontation in the moral moment. A
number of times, Buber states that the You is presented in an “exclusive
confrontation.” For example, he (1970, 81) states “The You also appears in
space, but only in an exclusive confrontation in which everything else can only
be background from which it emerges, not its boundary and measure”
(“…ausschliesslichen Gegenuber…”). As with the streaming, Gurwitsch em-
phasizes only the possibility of marginal or thematic presentation of embodied
existence (Gurwitsch 1985, 28–29). In light of Gurwitsch’s philosophy, I
interpret Buber’s term “exclusive” to have two meanings. First, as discussed
above, the perceptual world is excluded as relevant, that is, it is presented as
irrelevant to You as theme. Second, “exclusive” refers to the relationship
denoted by the use of I and You. Gurwitsch (1985, 76) writes, “Words for I and
you must be applicable to every individual, for any individual may become an I
or a you; the difference between the I and the you must clearly appear as a
correlational difference in such a way that they stand in opposition to a possible
third term.” A “possible third term” might be he or she or them. The terms I and
you are relational, and related to embodied existence, since the body is the
“here” in the positioning of attending activity in the world. For Gurwitsch, the I
and the you are essentially occasional expressions related to the body as the
permanent center of reference for the spatial organization of the environment
(Gurwitsch 1985, 72; see also 62). This sets the stage for a discussion of the
second term in Buber’s phrase “exclusive confrontation.”
The moral moment involves a “confrontation” (Gegenuber) between the
You and my lived body. The You is directly relevant for my lived body or, what
is the same, my embodied existence. Morality is a direct encounter between You
and I. I am not reflective in the usual sense. That my embodied existence is a
second main constituent of the thematic context (along with phenomenal time)
in this case does not mean that I am “over there” as the object of reflection,
since encountering You is in that sense pre-reflective (the You, not my act of
attending to the You, is the theme). As thematic, the You establishes the lines of
organization for the thematic context, in this case, for the I as contextually
presented. I am “here,” present, in the way that You put me here. I am present to
my body, but contextually, not thematically. This means that my experience of
my body is organized and oriented around the presentation of You as thematic,
even though the kinesthetic sense is an inner sense. In short, You con-front me,
You and I are faced with each other. The presence of You as thematic is directly
and materially relevant to my embodied existence as context—my (contextual)
consciousness of my kinesthetic presence in the world. This tense and intense
relation between You and I with respect to embodied existence is what Buber
means when he states that the You “confronts me bodily” (“Er leibt mir
gegenuber…” Buber 1970, 58) and is an “unmediated” relation (“unmittelbar,”
1970, 62), and is indicated by the use of “directly” in the previous sentence.
As with phenomenal time, this account of embodied existence in moral
attention extends Gurwitsch’s “field-theory” but is it otherwise compatible or
consistent with it? I believe it is. For Gurwitsch, there is an indistinct correlation
between what presents itself in thematic attention and kinesthetic sense (1985,
34). So when one thematically attends to an object in the world, kinesthetic
sense is marginal. In addition to this usual dimensional difference between
theme and margin in attending, Gurwitsch also claims that these two types of
data or facts belong to two different orders of existence, respectively, external
things and our embodied existence (Gurwitsch 1985, 35–36). Hence it would
seem a stretch to describe embodied existence as a thematic context for the You
as theme. Yet Gurwitsch describes an attitude founded upon a kind of
“reflection” (which in this case he always encloses within quotation marks)
whose essential quality is that it pays equal attention to both orders, the
perceptual data and the correlated kinesthetic data. Gurwitsch (1985, 33) writes,
“Furthermore, for the correspondence in question to be explicitly established
and formulated, an attitude is required in which the mental activity is not
directed toward the perceived things, either exclusively or preferentially, but
rather toward both the perceptual appearances of things and the kinesthetic
experiences. The subject must adopt a point of view from which, so to speak, he
sees both sets of data and devotes his thematic activity equally to both. Hence
the ‘reflection’ upon the embodied existence is a prerequisite for this attitude.”
Gurwitsch only refers to the thematic attention here, and so is not directly
describing the contextual consciousness of embodied existence in encountering
You that I have been discussing. But Gurwitsch’s consistent use of “reflection”
in quotation marks is telling. He is opening the door for a kind of quasi-
reflection that brings embodied existence into direct relation with that which is
perceived, without the activity being fully reflective (thematic) or exclusively
marginal. It is not fully reflective in the case that he describes because focal
attention is split between the two orders of existence. Again, this is not what I
claim happens in the I-You encounter; it is unique in a different way. But my
description of a kinesthetic sense that is neither exclusively thematic or marginal
appears compatible with what Gurwitsch allows. Gurwitsch also notes that
embodied existence may become more prominent (relevant?) without becoming
thematic. Referring to Scheler, Gurwitsch remarks that in certain feelings such
as sickness or vigor or uneasiness or easiness, “…our embodied existence is
brought more to the fore without thereby being necessarily unfolded and
articulated” (Gurwitsch 1985, 35). This may be analogous to the non-marginal,
non-thematic, yet relevant sense of embodied existence in the moral moment.
Finally, if Gurwitsch’s “limit-case” of “self-sufficient being-together” is taken
seriously it is an extraordinary way of attending in the world. According to
Gurwitsch’s “field-theory,” such a configuration of the “field of consciousness”
would have to resemble a limit-case of normal social encounter, and it does.
The moral moment is a tense and intense moment in the sphere of attention
in which the You presents itself as immediately (in phenomenal time) and
directly (in embodied existence) relevant to the I. In encountering You, I am
also given to myself. This latter is the sphere of attention being presented
contextually to itself. You and I are presented within different dimensions in the
sphere of attention: the You as theme, the I as thematic context. In moral
attention, You confront me in an original way, such that You are attended to as
the immediate and direct center of relevancy in my ongoing attending life. Weil
(1951, 115) puts this idea in her characteristically dark but lyrical manner:
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being
able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’ It is a
recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a
collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled
‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day
stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is
enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in
a certain way. This way of looking is first of all attentive. The
soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive
into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his
truth.
This “emptying” is described by Iris Murdoch as a kind of obedience of the will.

She (1970, 40) writes, “The idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a
person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not as unimpeded movement but as
something very much more like ‘obedience.’” Margaret Holland (1998, 309)
explains that “By invoking obedience Murdoch indicates that attention involves
training the will not to interfere with what is given through the effort of astute
discernment. This construal of the will is quite different from the notion of the
will as free and unimpeded. The aspect of attention which is analogous to
obedience, the effort to discern the actual characteristics of the object, is what
leads me to suggest that moral attention shows a point at which moral agency
runs up against a limit.” If one identifies this limit in a way compatible with
Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, this limit is the other as an
autonomous being, a limit (or guide) in my formulation of the moral law. (As
will become apparent, I should note that in contrast to Holland, Murdoch, and
Weil, I do not think that moral attention is best defined as an “inner” activity of
mental life, since it involves attentionality, which means a sphere of attention
that also discloses the world.)
Moral Attention is Compassion

The blackmailer is devising the final phase of his plan, the murder of the
victim, and the heroic detective might not make it in time. When one is absorbed
in the world of fiction, as when reading a detective novel, the most relevant
world or “order of existence” is the imaginary world of the novel. This world is
not a suborder of the space and time world, what Gurwitsch calls “reality,” since
the relevancy-principle of the space and time world is temporality, and it does
not make sense to ask if the imagined blackmailer is really in the world now
planning this deed. Gurwitsch concludes that every world of imagination can be
considered an order of existence in its own right. By order of existence,
Gurwitsch means that the context within which a theme is presented is extended
along certain lines of relevancy: “What we denote as order of existence is, in the
final analysis, an indefinitely extended thematic field” (1964, 381). Inversely,
the thematic context (Gurwitsch’s “thematic field”) is that part of the order of
existence immediately near the theme and having direct bearing upon the theme.
For example, the blackmailer is thematic within the imaginary world of the
novel. Gurwitsch (1964, 388) writes, “Such a world is the correlate of a
sustained continuous process of imagination, into which the single acts of
imagination enter by virtue of their proper sense. Worlds of imagination as
exemplified by any epic, poem, play, or novel, may exhibit considerable
complexity of events and happenings imagined as inter-meshing with one
another….Contriving a world of imagination, or as in reading, following the
imagination of the author, we proceed from phase to phase. At every moment of
our imagining, whether productive or merely receptive, a certain phase of the
imagined world appears as present and refers both backward to earlier phases
and forward to later ones.” Every world of imagination is an autonomous order
of existence, since its time is a “quasi-time” and its world is a “quasi-world”
(Gurwitsch 1964, 389). It makes no sense to locate the time of the event as a real
coordinate with another event in the history of time, or in my own streaming in
attending. And it makes no sense to try to find the fictional blackmailer in the
real world, although one may find analogues to him. Gurwitsch (Gurwitsch
1964, 389) writes, “Since insertion into real objective time is the necessary
condition for any object to belong to the order of reality, no world of
imagination is a sub-order of reality. Hence, every world of imagination must be
considered as an order of existence in its own right.”
I have used this example of a world of imagination as an autonomous order
of existence to bring out both the notion of order of existence and how an order
of existence can be excluded from “reality,” where this latter means that what
we attend to has objective time and space as its relevancy-principle, such as
applies to the chair over there or the chocolate cake on the counter.
My question concerns a moral world. What is the order of existence and the
relevancy-principle inherent in a moral world, and what is the status of a moral
world with respect to what we might usually call the perceptual world,
environing world, life-world, space and time world, or whatever name we wish
to give it? Since an order of existence is a “systematized context, constituted and
unified with respect to specific relevancy-principles” (Gurwitsch 1964, 383), it
is easy to see that an order of existence is simply the continuation of the gestalt-
phenomenological description of what I would call the context in the sphere of
attention. What the concept of “order” adds here is the distinction and
comparison between the numerous contexts within which items can be attended
as thematic. Gurwitsch (1964, 382) writes, “Orders of existence within the
meaning of our definition are the ‘natural groupings’ in which things present
themselves in pre-scientific and pre-theoretical experience as well as the
explanatory systems constructed in the several sciences for the sake of a rational
explanation in the world, material, historical, and social. We must also mention
purely ideal orders of existence, such as logical systems, the several geometric
systems, the system of natural numbers, the generalized number-systems, and so
on. Finally there are the universes of artistic creation like the universe of music.
To every order of existence belong specific relevancy-principles constitutive of
that order and by virtue of which the order is unified. Differences between
orders of existence may be expressed and defined in terms of the various
relevancy-principles involved in the respective orders.” Gurwitsch appears silent
on the possibility of a moral order of existence.
If, according to Gurwitsch, every object is presented within an order of
existence, such as the perceptual world, the mathematical world, the imagina-
tional world, the world of artistic creation, etc., then one could hypothesize that
a moral object, the You, is presented within a moral world. Gurwitsch claims
that we encounter people in that order of existence called the perceptual world,
or “reality in general” and “objective time” is its relevancy-principle (Gurwitsch
1964, 382). Hence another possibility is that there is no moral world, but there is
only the attention to other persons within “reality in general.” But in the I-You
encounter, as a “limit-case” of social encounters, the consciousness of this
surrounding world diminishes as the thematic attention to the You grows. As
intimated above, I would remove the “limit-case” status and submit that in this
encounter a different order of existence pertains—a moral world . Differences
between orders of existence are accounted for by differences between their
relevancy-principles. In terms of the sphere of attention, the relevancy-principle
of a moral world is compassion.
Compassion is an organizational principle that binds another embodied
attention—the You—to one’s own. In compassion the You is thematically
attended in the context of the I, that is, the You is the focus of all that is
immediately and directly relevant to the I. Compassion denotes an immediate
and direct co-enduring, a com-passion. Gurwitsch notes that “As actually
experienced, relevancy always is qualified and specified in accordance with, and
in dependence upon, the material contents of both the theme and the thematic
field” (Gurwitsch 1964, 379, emphasis added). Compassion is an appropriate
term for this uniquely attended togetherness. The word “compassion” is from
the Latin com, which means “together,” and pati, which means “to endure or
suffer.” Compassion is often used in ways that I do not mean here. For example,
I do not take compassion to mean pity (a feeling sorry for), sympathy (a
projection of pity), empathy (a projection of compassion), or love. To the extent
that all of these may be emotions they are a magical transformation of the world
into something more easily understood or handled (Sartre 1948). The I-You
encounter is neither magical nor instrumental. Compassion here is related to but
not identical with its use in other philosophical and religious contexts, for
example, as in Christianity or Buddhism. These tend to emphasize compassion
toward humanity as a whole rather than the moral moment. The moral moment
is compatible with these larger senses of compassion, and a connection between
the moral moment and compassion for humanity may be found in how
practicing moral attention begets moral character. But unless the relation in
compassion is conceived as individual to individual, rather than egalitarian, it is
not yet moral attention.
In discussing the I-You encounter as a non-traditional “love,” Buber writes,
“The essential act that here establishes directness is usually understood as a
feeling, and thus misunderstood. Feelings accompany the metaphysical and
metapsychical fact of love, but do not constitute it; and the feelings that
accompany it can be very different….Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in
his love. This is no metaphor but actuality: love does not cling to an I, as if the
You were merely its ‘content’ or object; it is between I and You” (Buber 1970,
66, emphasis added; cf. Gurwitsch 1979, 25). A relevancy-principle is the
gestalt connection between the theme and context, and compassion is the
relevancy-principle between the You as theme and the I as context. As used here
in reference to the I-You encounter, compassion simply means that the You is
given as the center of relevancy for the I, the You orients the lines of relevancy
in my ongoing attending life immediately and directly. Although Buber does not
use the term compassion in this way, Buber claims that the I-You encounter
reveals a “responsibility of an I for a You” (Buber 1970, 66). What matters to
You matters to me, without mediation or instrumentality of feeling or emotion.
In a co-revelation in the sphere of attention between the You and the I as they
present themselves, the You is the center of presence that opens up to the I, and
the I is that which is oriented and directed toward the You. The emphasis on
presence without mediation has been articulated as the immediacy that is

distinctive and necessary for compassion as relevance.
In addition to immediacy, compassion involves directness. The You
presents itself as front and near to the I. This directness is the confrontation in
compassion. As noted in the previous chapter, Gurwitsch describes the
perceptual world as spatially organized along three main axes—front and
behind, above and below, right and left. Each axis is determined by the two
complementary directions of near and far. Embodied existence is the center of
reference for this spatial organization. In encountering You, the I is confronted
with the You, the You is in front of me and near me. I suspect that this would
even be the case when the You is presented as absent, analogous to Sartre’s
example of Pierre presented as absent in the café (Sartre 1956, 9–10; see also
Buber 1970, 174–175). Gurwitsch (1985, 62) writes, “‘Here’ is wherever the
body is; every other object is ‘there’ in some direction and at a greater or lesser
distance. Variations in the orientational characters of objects refer to changes in
their position with respect to the body” (see also 1979, 41). Embodied existence
is the contextual aspect in encountering You which enables in compassion a
distinctive directness. This directness is captured in the spatial orientation of the
theme in the sphere of attention, the You, as front and near. You are presented as
front and near to my body—you confront me. This is unlike attending to the
chocolate cake on the counter or the dog in the garden, since in moral attention
the contextual aspect of my embodiment is directly, not indirectly, presented as
relevant. You are presented within the context of my embodiment, not as an
object of “reality in general” which also happens to be related to my body.
Moving from I-It to I-You is not an actual change in position in objective space,
but an attentional change. This coordinates with the You and the I as essentially
occasional expressions related to the body (Gurwitsch 1985, 72).
One might object to this description of the structure of the sphere of
attention in compassion by pointing out that the You cannot be a “front and
near” object since the environing world as context recedes in this “limit-case.”
Furthermore, the You must be an attended object in the world. How can the You
be attended to as an object but not a real object, if “real” means belonging to the
order of existence of reality with temporality as its relevancy-principle?
Like a chocolate cake or a building attended to as front and near, the You is
attended to as a singular item. Unlike these other things though, the temporal
and spatial context for the You is not the surrounding environing world, it is my
ongoing attending life. So in the mundane case of chocolate cake as front and
near, it may be referred to a sector of the environing world as that order of
existence within which it presents itself. In the unique case of the I-You
encounter, the You as such is presented to the extent that irrelevance obtains
between the You and the surrounding environmental world (which must still be
presented as marginal) and relevance obtains between the You and the I as
dynamic embodied attending. Thus a perceptual object becomes an object of
moral attention, without losing its special temporal and spatial character. The
special temporal and spatial character it now has is immediacy (with respect to
the streaming in attending) and directness (with respect to embodied existence).
Immediacy has been articulated as presence or “duration.” Directness has been
articulated as being front and near. Co-presented data or items that mark the You
as part of the spatio-temporal (perceptual) world are presented as marginal. Co-
presented data or items that mark the You as part of a moral world, as the
immediate and direct center of relevance in my ongoing attending life in
compassion, are presented as contextual.
Unlike phenomenal time (streaming), embodied existence, and the environ-
ing world, a moral world is not a permanent part of the structure of marginal
consciousness. That is, it is not always presented marginally in the sphere of
attention. In fact, it is more appropriate to speak of “a” moral world as I have
tried to do throughout, rather than “the” moral world. I suspect that the order of
existence called a moral world is not the same each time it is realized. In
speaking of these three constants, Gurwitsch writes, “For the subject to be
confronted with any order of existence other than the above three, the subject
must explicitly concern himself with data, objects, and items belonging to that
order” (Gurwitsch 1964, 418). So a moral world is confronted only if the You
and I are presented in the way described. Gurwitsch (1964, 380) notes that
experiencing an order of existence involves a specific, appropriate attitude, like
an imaginary attitude, a mathematical attitude or a natural attitude. These
attitudes are really various configurations and organizations in the sphere of
attention. Accordingly, encountering You involves a moral attitude—moral
attention in a moral world.
Shifting Out of Moral Attention

Like any other event in the sphere of attention, moral attention is a
transformation or shift. In one direction, the I-You encounter replaces the I-It, in
another the I-It replaces the I-You encounter. This section looks at the latter,
how the You might be replaced as theme. The next looks at the shift from I-It to
I-You. However, I must first make an important observation that applies to both
transformations.
Buber sometimes refers to the I-You encounter as all or none, as either a

completely well-formed theme or as not an I-You encounter at all. For example,
Buber (1970, 54) writes, “The basic word I-You can only be spoken with one’s
whole being. The basic word I-It can never be spoken with one’s whole being.”
But the You as theme is not necessarily born adult. In other places Buber
describes the thematic You as more nuanced, with shades of “becoming” (e.g.
1970, 68). Walter Kaufmann, Buber’s translator and interpreter, is direct about
the possible meanings here: “The total encounter in which You is spoken with
one’s whole being is but one mode of I-You. And it is misleading if we
assimilate all the other modes of I-You to I-It” (Kaufmann 1970, 17). Like any
other thematic attending, the moral moment is an achievement. This means that
the You as centralized gestalt can be fully or partially formed, even though
solidity and unitary individuality remain its formative constituents. If partially
formed, the stability of these constituents of the theme is still the vector of the
achievement, even if not fully achieved. In short, the I-You encounter can be
achieved abruptly or grow into being, and it can diminish abruptly or over
several moments. It is impossible to draw a line between when moral attention is
achieved and when not, but I do not reserve the name moral attention only for
the perfectly well-formed theme of the You attended within the nearly fully
elucidated or enlarged context of the I. Various achievements that fall short of
this also deserve the name. As with other achievements in the sphere of atten-
tion, this endpoint in the transformation in attending is fragile, fluid, and
temporary. Buber writes, “But when something does emerge from among things,
something living, and becomes a being for me, and comes to me, near and
eloquent, how unavoidably briefly it is for nothing but You!” (Buber 1970, 147;
see also 68 and 69). Since the sphere of attention is essentially a process it
makes sense that no event in attending will be completely stable or everlasting.
Singling out destroys or threatens to destroy moral attention, transforming it
into the more usual shape of non-moral attention. As seen in Chapter Three,
singling out is selective attention; it is focally attending to a constituent in the
sphere of attention, usually of a theme, thereby creating a new theme with a new
relation to the thematic context. For example, instead of a row of impatiens in
the garden, one can single out one of the plants. Thematizing an It interferes
with thematizing the You, in the same way that I have difficulty following what
you are saying as I thematically shift attention to your face, and then this theme
is supplanted in turn. For example, I thematically shift attention from your face
or countenance to monitor the drop of perspiration that is making its way down
your face. Singling out threatens the stability of the You as theme because it
ushers in the perceptual world as relevant context and order of existence,

weakening the relevance of You for me, and thereby mediating the immediacy
and directness which is compassion. As quoted above in this chapter, “I can
abstract from him the color of his hair or the color of his speech or the color of
his graciousness; I have to do this again and again; but immediately he is no
longer You” (Buber 1970, 59; see also 80 and 175). To the extent that one is
tempted or prepared to single out some item in the sphere of attention which is
anything less than the You as embodied attention, it weakens the I-You
relevancy. You threaten to become less front and center, and not as near and
pertinent to my ongoing attending life. Synthesis can have the same effect.
Recall that synthesis is the inverse of singling out—a theme is made into a
constituent in a new theme with new relations to the new thematic context, for
instance the row of impatiens becomes thematic instead of the single plant in
that row. Hence I can envision You now as a member of a family or as part of
what is exciting in the room. To that extent I no longer encounter You. (These
transformations described here likely also involve a previous margin to theme
succession, an “attention capture,” since this transformation seems propaedeutic
in this case, but the ultimate point is the same.)
Reflection, or the temptation or threat of it, also diminishes the I-You
encounter and can transform it into an I-It event. Reflection is attending focally
to the attention process. If dynamic embodied attending in the world makes
itself thematic, then it cannot be contextual, and the latter is a requirement of
moral attention. Hence reflection diminishes or destroys the I-You encounter by
replacing the You with the I. This possibility of reflection, which is always
present as a possibility, also refers to the special attitude I can take toward my
own body, when in “inner sense” I make the body thematic by focally attending
to some somatic aspect or item about it. There is a mode of self-presence in
moral attention, but it is not the ever-present self in the mode of marginal
consciousness, nor is it the ego as reflected in the mode of thematic attention to
attending. If the self is dynamic embodied attending in the world, which is
presented variously depending on the dimension or mode in attending, then self-
presence in moral attention is primarily the presence to self through the You as
the center of that self-presence, since the I is presented in the mode of contextual
consciousness.
The enlargement of the thematic context is an enabler of compassion or
relevance in the I-You encounter, while contraction has the opposite effect. An
enlargement of the thematic context occurs when the relevance of the theme for
the thematic context becomes increased. The thematic context is expanded with
respect to the theme, along the lines of organization and relevance (compassion)
dictated by the theme. You take on more value; the compassion grows, as the
relevance between us grows. The converse is also possible. The thematic context
can contract, which disables a far-reaching significance for the theme. Buber
writes, “I can place him there [‘in any Somewhere and Sometime’] and have to
do this again and again, but immediately he becomes a He or a She, an It, and no
longer remains my You” (Buber 1970, 59). Contraction of the thematic context
involves a decrease in relevance of You for my ongoing conscious life and an
increase in the relevance for the perceptual world. So the relevance of You for
me—compassion—shrinks and fades.
Shifting Into Moral Attention

How does one move from an I-It to an I-You encounter? If this could be
articulated, then perhaps we could use it as a heuristic to increase the number of
moral moments in our lives, or perhaps develop more moral lives in general,
becoming more compassionate. Buber insists against the possibility of distilling
this transformation from I-It to I-You into some sort of prescription. He writes,
“No prescription can lead us to the encounter, and none leads from it” (Buber
1970, 159; also 124 and 126; see Weil 1951, 112). I would like to put this
concept of “no prescription” in the context of Gurwitsch’s phenomenology and
the sphere of attention, and suggest that attentional training or preparation may
make encountering You more likely (see also Arvidson 2003a).
Encountering You involves, in part, a thematic transformation in attending
that replaces whatever thematic gestalt-coherence had previously been presented
as constitutive of It, with a new gestalt-coherence constitutive of the You. The
gestalt-connection (the relevance) between the theme and thematic context is
also replaced. Replacement involves a thorough reorganization of the sphere of
attention in the transformation from the I-It to the I-You relation. The You as the
new theme is given within an entirely new thematic context with new
connections and relevancies. In the sphere of attention, what is presented in the
I-It relation has been transformed in the I-You relation. The old theme-thematic
context organization has been replaced with a new theme and thematic context
organization (on replacement see Gurwitsch 1966; Arvidson 1996, 1998).
Replacement of content does not necessarily mean items appear and disappear.
In the case of encountering You, a new thematic context means that some
constituents of the old theme will not be relevant to the new theme, and hence
may be marginally presented as “just having been.”
A Gurwitschian would agree with Buber that the I-It to I-You attentional
transformation can not be entirely prescribed. From Gurwitsch’s point of view,
this is because all achievements in the “field of consciousness” involve
replacement, and replacement involves a radical autochthonous or salient
reorganization in the “field of consciousness.” The non-reductive “whole is
greater than the sum of its parts” concept is at the heart of Gestalt psychology
and humanistic philosophy, and applies classically in the case of the
achievement of a theme as gestalt. The same constituents may appear but they
do not present themselves in the same relations. As noted in the discussion of
attentional control in Chapter Three above, I do not follow some rule
(prescription) to make the single impatiens plant actually present itself as the
center of the sphere of attention instead of the whole row of plants. The most I
can do is create the conditions in which the sphere of attention autochthonously
reorganizes itself (with the gestalt-coherence of the thematic constituents and the
gestalt-connection between the theme and thematic context (relevance) replaced
with new connections) (Gurwitsch 1964, 103–104; see also Arvidson 1992a).
When Buber notes that one cannot just follow some rule or procedure to
encounter the You, and hence shift into moral attention, he is correct. No one
can guarantee an I-You encounter. But what is in our control and what is not can
be clarified in the language of the sphere of attention. Buber writes, “Our
concern, our care must be not for the other side but for our own, not for grace
but for will. Grace concerns us insofar as we proceed toward it and await its
presence; it is not our object” (Buber 1970, 124). In the language of the sphere
of attention, this means something like the following. One must not think that
one can actually assemble, construct or arrange some parts or content in the
sphere of attention to make the You present itself; but one can allow the You to
present itself autochthonously. And one may successfully achieve this shape of
the sphere of attention to the extent that one attends thematically to the person as
a singular being within the context of one’s ongoing attending life,
simultaneously withdrawing from the surrounding environing world as context.
Compassion cannot be prescribed, but one can be more or less disposed to be
compassionate (Arvidson 2003a).
Moral Character in the Sphere of Attention

Practicing compassion can lead to a change in the shape of the sphere of
attention. This change or development over a life-time would make it more
likely for the subject to attend to the You. As achievements unfold through
maturity, certain attentional structures and forms of organization prevail over
others: “By virtue of achievements in the course of mental development, the

stream of experience is substantially transformed so as to exhibit features
varying according to the stages of mental development” (Gurwitsch 1964, 103–
104). In other words, such a transformation in what is more or less likely to be
attended to in the sphere of attention is a development of character, and hence,
aligns nicely in some ways with Aristotelian moral theory. For Aristotle, one
becomes brave by doing what the brave person does, gentle by doing what the
gentle person does, and so on for any virtue. In general, one becomes good by
modeling the behavior of the good person in that culture or society. I am not
arguing that if Gurwitsch had developed an ethics it would be an Aristotelian
one. My point here is that the practice of compassion, in the way I have defined
it, can change what is salient in the sphere of attention, so that compassion
becomes more likely. The professional chef, trained to recognize a dull carving
blade, would find it extremely difficult to ignore a dull knife in his or her
kitchen. The person disposed to be compassionate through the preparation for
and practice of compassionate moral moments would find it difficult to ignore
the You when this theme begins to emerge in attention, or when it is presented
contextually or marginally as a potential theme.
One may or may not be what one eats, but one is what one attends to.
According to Sartre (1956, 1990), human “consciousness” is a continuously
unfolding project or projection in the world. Since we are not a thing, but a no-
thing, a nothingness, this project is never completed. One key to why we think
we are a thing, rather than a nothing, is our initial or original project. Sartre
(1956, 463) argues that each human being is an original projection in the world,
such that the free choices he or she makes seem built on the previous choices
and connected with them. These free choices are sub-choices of the original
choice of who we are. The foundation for this original choice itself is freedom,
that is, nothingness, but this realization is only apparent in authentic reflection.
A few years ago a newspaper described the following in connection with
the fact that two children were brutally murdered. The single father of the
children was a carpenter who adored and worshipped his boy and girl, ages 9
and 11. By all accounts, his life, his work, seemed to be oriented around their
well-being and happiness. One could imagine that his original projection of
himself in the world, the way he was in the world, the shape of his sphere of
attention, grew out of and reflected this original choice of “father of my
children.” So answers to questions like, “Who are you,” or “Why do you work
so hard” or “What would make you happy” would refer either explicitly or
implicitly to this original choice. Perhaps even his position on social issues, such
as the death penalty or who he would choose to be president, and his choice of
favorite color, and what to eat for dinner on Friday nights, are all lined up more
or less directly with this original projection of himself, or are fit into the story as
sub-choices based on this original choice, this original project of “father of my
children.”
Suddenly, this father’s beautiful children were senselessly, brutally mur-
dered, and the police were not able to apprehend a suspect (the father clearly did
not do it). It remains unsolved. The newspaper article was mainly about the
father’s vow for justice or vengeance, and how his original project is now
“detective.” This abrupt shift in his original projection of himself in the world,
this fundamental change of “style” of life from doting father to grim detective, is
not superficial but thoroughgoing. It is not hard to imagine that nearly all new
events in his life, most of his thoughts, his sadness and joy, his motivation for
living, now fit into a radically different story of himself from before. Even
though information is still processed in relation to the children, it would be
absurd to suppose that nothing has changed in the way this information is
processed. His world has changed radically. In short, his original projection of
himself in the world has undergone a conversion. In Sartre’s terms, the freedom
that consciousness is has replaced the previous narrative or story of itself with
another. Sartre makes the point that if this new choice of “who I am” can replace
the previous choice, then I am not a thing, not substantial, even though I think I
am. Again, in Sartre’s terms, the original projection of consciousness in the
world, which it lives with all seriousness, is unjustifiable; it is absurdly and
freely chosen. What I am as a character in the world is not permanent, it is not
grounded in a soul or human biology, even if it has inertia. Conversions do not
come easily but are at all times nonetheless possible. I am simply the free
continuation of the choices I make, or more correctly, the character of the
dynamic embodied attending in the world that I am is a function of what I attend
to. You are what is more or less salient in the sphere of attention, and this
saliency is in part influenced by situational events, for example, the tragedy that
befell the father of these children.
Moral character is freely chosen. When I say “moral character” I mean
specifically the propensity to moral moments. This propensity is a part of the
original projection that we are, the shape of the sphere of attention. Moral
character is freely chosen because this original project that we are is freely
chosen, even if we personally deny this is so (a denial that Sartre calls “bad
faith”). This does not mean moral character is empty, or a superficial styling of
some sort, as if I would choose to wear the black belt instead of the brown belt.
Moral character is a real choice, even though it is ultimately foundationless.

Echoing Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (1967), Sartre
(1956, 38) writes, “The bourgeois who call themselves ‘respectable citizens’ do
not become respectable as the result of contemplating moral values. Rather from
the moment of their emerging in the world they are thrown into a pattern of
behavior the meaning of which is respectability. Thus respectability acquires a
being: it is not put into question. Values are sown on my path as thousands of
little real requirements, like the signs which order us to keep off the grass.” The
foundationless nature of “moral consciousness” for Sartre can lead to moments
of insight or authenticity that he would call ethical anguish. Sartre (1956, 38)
observes “It follows that my freedom is the unique foundation of values and that
nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies me in adopting this or that particular value,
this or that particular scale of values. As a being by whom values exist, I am
unjustifiable. My freedom is anguished at being the foundation of values while
itself without foundation.” Moral character is a free choice, and ultimately foun-
dationless, which is to say it has freedom as its foundation. Yet moral character
and moral attention are effective in the world. In the moral moment there is a
direct and immediate material relevancy (a “mattering”) between the two
people, at least from the point of view of the I, and if morality is to mean
anything it must mean this: That you matter to me in the most immediate and
direct way possible.
So is there a specific motivation to have moral character? The great
Athenian moralist Plato gives as good a motivation as any. In Book IX of the
Republic he responds to Glaucon’s question raised in Book II of “Why bother
being good?” irrespective of material rewards or punishments (these being
coordinate with selfishness). His answer is that if one is good it yields the
“spiritual” rewards of a sense of genuine autonomy, fulfillment, and tranquility,
rather than being a slave to desires, insubstantial, and conflicted. These rewards
are significant and could serve as motivation for being good. Moral character is
the more or less salient possibility or actuality of thematizing the You. Hence it
is reasonable to hypothesize that moral attention works against the kind of
attention to oneself called selfishness, which is noted implicitly or explicitly as
the main moral problem by all the great moral philosophers and traditions,
including those as diverse as Socrates, Kant, Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha. So
it is possible for one to affirm human freedom and the possibility of ethical
anguish, and to set this against the educational, socio-cultural, and possibly
psychological and biological prohibitions on selfishness, and to discover in these
prohibitions motivation for moral character, or a reason to seek moral moments.
But even when I discover such motivation, my attending activity is responsible

for its meaningfulness—this motivation is still freely chosen. As Sartre (1956,
34) puts it, a motive is never in consciousness, it is a motive for consciousness.
Moral character works against thematizing another person in a way that
“unreasonably” (in Kant’s sense) feeds a self and its concerns. As in Kant,
compassion in a moral world in the I-You encounter is completely distinctive
from happiness, if the latter is defined as fulfillment of incentives or inclinations
other than duty. In moral attention, the You is not there for me to use, but I
understand the I that I am from the point of view of the You as central and
thematic in my ongoing attending life. Kant makes the point in Grounding for
the Metaphysics of Morals that the categorical imperative is marked by not
treating others as a means to an end, but as ends in themselves. The means-
oriented context for attention to another withdraws. Also, compassion, as
described here, aligns nicely with Kantian duty since compassion is not idle.
Compassion is not an arms-length ability or attitude. It specifically involves a
desire for action, desire understood as potentialities in attending, in this case to
be present to the other or to be a part of the other’s life in some immediate and
direct way. So, as noted above, the I-You encounter involves a responsibility of
the I for the You (Buber 1970, 66).
In moral attention the You has dignity. In the Kantian doctrine, dignity is a
wholeness that is violated by making oneself an exception to the categorical
imperative as universal law, that is, by using the other for one’s own ends.
Above in this chapter, I have signaled this dignity by the term “solidity,” an
inviolable unity and wholeness, the existential impressiveness or conclusiveness
that is one main aspect of the You as a singular embodied attending being. Also
in moral attention the You has or demands respect. In the Kantian doctrine,
respect is an awesomeness that marks the limits of my freedom as I act in the
moral world. I have termed this other formative constituent of the You “unitary
individuality,” an integral uniqueness that highlights the distance or distinction
between us in the I-You encounter, and that I also develop as “confrontation.”
Respect is marked in the moral moment by the confrontation with the You as
front and near, as described above, and the withdrawal from the surrounding
environment, which becomes marginally presented and hence irrelevant. The
You is attended to in respect and dignity as a singular embodied attending being.
Sartre misinterpreted this notion of respect and saw it as conflict rather than
encounter, portraying in his 1940’s play No Exit that “hell is other people”
(1989), and in Being and Nothingness (1956, 245) that the appearance of the
other on the scene is the “disintegration” of my meaning-giving activity. Sartre
interprets the confrontation of two freedoms (my “consciousness” and the

other’s “consciousness”) as conflict because I must take account of the other in
my world as one who can give meaning to my world. First, I would argue that
the fact that the other can give meaning to my world is potentially beneficial and
positive, as a way to help me navigate my world. Second, I would argue that this
“conflict” is better understood as some gradient of respect. I respect the other as
a freedom, and as the limit of my freedom. That is, my freedom extends as far as
the other, and their freedom extends as far as me. This is primarily some form of
mutual respect, not conflict. Third, respect for other freedoms can be solidified
or codified in law, politics, custom, family, friendship, etc., so that a general
idea of human dignity emerges, effecting moral prohibitions or guides, but
whose value is ultimately freely chosen by each individual.
Chapter Seven
Conclusion
The sphere of attention is a dynamic embodied attending in the world organized
according to gestalt principles in the three dimensions of theme, context, and
margin. The sphere of attention is enclosing and inclusive but not a transcend-
ence in immanence. As a sphere of attention, a particular human being is fluid
and active, a meaning-giving activity that is non-substantial, not a thing. Human
beings live the world in terms of theme, context, and margin. The theme is the
central gestalt, coherent, segregated, and consolidated, or striving to be so. The
theme is either a gestalt stabilized, or coming into or going out of central
concern in the sphere of attention. The thematic context is a unity by relevancy
for the theme, a network of non-consolidated gestalts, more or less articulated,
organized by the theme as its center, and materially relevant to that theme. The
margin also consists of non-centralized gestalts, and is irrelevant to the theme
and thematic context; it is external to their unity by relevancy. There is no
material relation between the margin on the one hand, and the context and theme
on the other, but the halo in the margin includes the current sector of the
streaming in attending, kinesthetic sense of embodiment, and the environing
world. The horizon in the margin is the indefinitely continued content that
merely accompanies a given theme and thematic context, and this horizon is
implied by the halo in the margin.
Since the halo in the margin consists in the current sectors of phenomenal
temporality (the streaming), embodiment, and the environing world, it is the
existential locus of subjectivity at a given moment. It is the locus of my
existence as non-central, a marginally ever-present self, which accords with the
lived experience of pre-reflective attending where no “I” or ego is centrally
present. In reflection, the sphere of attention attends to itself thematically as an
ongoing process of attending. The sphere of attention is characterized, has
character, according to its training and learning, its growth and development, so
that certain content is more or less likely to become salient. Also, when
encountering another embodied attending being, one can enter into a momentary
moral relation in a moral world wherein the relevancy-principle operative is not
material relevancy as in the environing world, but is compassion—an immediate
relation between I and You such that You are the theme and I am the context.
The sphere of attention is thematic attention within a context and margin, and a
human being is at any moment this dynamic embodied attending in the world.
177
In this chapter I will briefly describe some relevancies of the concept of

human being as a sphere of attention for psychology and the cognitive sciences,
phenomenology, and interdisciplinary attention studies.
Implications for Psychology and the Cognitive Sciences

Seven emphasized implications follow as paragraph topic sentences.
Psychology and cognitive science should directly pursue the nature of the
context and margin of attention. I have shown how psychology and cognitive
science discuss the nature of the context and margin in attending without calling
them this. Currently, discussions of attention are overwhelmingly restricted to
the focus or theme in the sphere of attention. The processing of content outside
the focus is a fact in any theory of attention, yet experimenters seem befuddled
on what to name it. Let us just call it what it is, the attentional context and
margin—what is relevant to the focus but not focal attention, and what is
irrelevant to the focus but not focal or contextual. Once the full range of
attentional dimensions are identified and named as such, continuity within the
field of attention research becomes apparent, enabling more direct comparison
between competing experimentally tested hypotheses and theories in general.
Also attention research will become more relevant to how human beings live
their lives, to what human beings are as attending beings. I believe that almost
any current researcher would report that attention research is a powerful area of
psychology and cognitive science, where results are well-grounded and con-
trolled, research is vital and develops quickly to take advantage of new findings,
where the community of researchers has a solid network for reporting results,
and often the findings are dramatic. The problem is that the attention researchers
themselves seem to believe, implicitly or explicitly, that the focus on the focus
of attention is the reason and foundation for this special status of attention
research. This is a false belief. I think attention researchers can acknowledge
context and margin as co-present with focal attention, and do so without many
protests, and in a way that will enhance current work. In fact, they are already
implicitly doing so as I have pointed out in Chapter Two. In neglecting these
other two dimensions, attention researchers cede important research oppor-
tunities to those working on memory, learning, and perception. Hence rather
than assuming the mantle of leadership and rightful rewards for such careful
research developed over a number of decades, many attention researchers stay
safe, focused, and blinded to the context within which they work, inadequately
theorizing about what might be outside of that focus.
Conclusion 179
Integrate attention research into research on perception, learning, and

memory. There are some faint calls to better integrate attention research with
research in perception and other areas (e.g., Scholl 2001). But few are shouting
about it. With an expanded notion of what attention is—a sphere of attention—
psychology and cognitive science can lessen the severe compart-mentalization
that plagues experimental research. For example, “scene percep-tion” becomes
the thematic context, and learning as a relatively permanent change in behavior
becomes the conditioning of the character of the sphere of attention rather than a
change in “attentional set,” a notion which currently has little or no theoretical
support.
Most importantly, memory and attention research share the same area of
concern, namely, the thematic context, yet without much meaningful consoli-
dation of findings. For the memory researcher, the context within which the
target is presented is crucial. Manipulation of the context of attention helps
resolve hypothetical proposals about the dynamics and nature of memory. For
the attention researcher, the context is also becoming crucial, but only recently,
as noted in Chapter One. So the same area of human processing, the context of
attention, intrigues both the attention researcher and memory researcher, except
from very different points of view. The memory researcher explores the
relevancy between the context and focus primarily from the point of view of the
context; while the attention researcher explores the relevancy between them
primarily from the point of view of the focus or theme. For example, as pointed
out in Chapter Two, working memory is often defined in a way that I would
identify as the thematic context, and this definition includes thematic attention
(e.g., Kail and Hall 2001). Long term memory seems to be defined as marginal
consciousness. So memory researchers are able to place the main concern of
attention researchers, the focus of attention, within an overall scheme that
includes what I would call the context and margin. Moreover, even the shape of
the attentional focus itself is regarded as more or less a function of working
memory, so that the encroaching shadow of memory research almost completely
eclipses sleeping attention research. For instance, as noted above, Paul Downing
(2000, 472) concludes that attention is not the only determining gateway for
what enters into working memory, but that “working memory shapes the action
of the attentional filter as well.” Gregory Ashby and Michael Casale (2003, 111)
observe that “In fact, because of its close association to executive attention, a
strong argument can be made that the contents of working memory define our
conscious awareness.” From the attention researcher’s point of view, memory
research is an adjunct to attention research. However, a more positive and I
think better formulation of the situation is that working memory is a function of

the context of attention, and long term memory is a function of the margin. Once
this already assumed demarcation is made explicit, the excellent experimental
paradigms of attention research can be utilized to show how memory research is
better organized around attention research. Rather than the item remembered
being simply “attended,” it is thematically attended. Instead of working memory
we have context of attention; and instead of long term memory we have margin
of attention. Hence, from the point of view of attention research, psychology and
cognitive science could have a unified approach to content temporally past and
present, and to the possible relevancies or irrelevancies between past and
presently attended content.
Researchers should no longer assume there is an unconscious or that there
is unconscious content and important unconscious processes. A number of
attention researchers identify the focus of attention as consciousness, and this
means that when the subject is conscious of something, then that something is
focal. According to this way of speaking, that which is outside the focus of
attention is unconscious (e.g., Merikle, Joordens and Stolz 1995; Velmans 1997;
Destrebecqz and Cleeremans 2003). I predict that fewer attention researchers
will use this terminology in the future, but it is still plainly evident in the
literature, especially in the neurological and psycho-physical literature. I predict
the diminished use of “unconscious” because as attention researchers struggle
with the problem of context, and as the findings of memory researchers put
pressure on the tie between the focus in attending and context, the term
“unconscious” is more clearly inapplicable. Experiments reveal that there is
some “awareness” of what is outside the focus in attending, and new
experimental paradigms and computer modeling theories of attention build in
the notion of this awareness. Hence the “un” of “unconscious” is mal-
descriptive. It is a relic. In its place, we now have contextual and marginal
consciousness. Usually, attention researchers mean by “unconscious” some
irrelevant process or content which may have facilitation or inhibition effects on
the target or theme. I have accounted for these processes or contents in my
discussion of the margin in attending. Sometimes they also mean that which
precedes “consciousness” (e.g., Velmans 1995, 111), which again is accounted
for much more believably in the gestalt-phenomenological account put forward
in this work. In defending the idea of unconscious processes, Max Velmans
(1997, 59) asks, “If the conscious/nonconscious distinction cannot be made, how
could one investigate the conditions for consciousness in the human brain—
which rely on contrasts between neural conditions adequate or not adequate for
Conclusion 181
conscious experience? How could one make sense of the extensive experimental
literature on the differences between preconscious, conscious and unconscious
processing?” No need to ask these questions in this way remains.
There is, of course, the other sense of unconscious in psychology, the
Freudian or analytic sense of some area of the human psyche that grows as we
develop, perhaps in stages, or that is part of our collective ancestry, and that
remains hidden but nonetheless actively affects conscious life (see the critiques
by Sartre 1948 and 1956). This is not the place to engage this myth, but I again
point out that (1) the sphere of attention is that which learns, grows, and
develops in the course of human attending, so that this attending life has a
unique attentional character in how it processes in the world; (2) the existential
locus in attending at any moment, namely, the presentation in the marginal halo
of the current sectors of phenomenal time, embodiment, and the environing
world, open out to the horizon in the sphere of attention, always also presented
marginally, which is these three domains as ultimate potentiality in attending;
and (3) the past attendings are implied in this horizonal continuation of the
ultimate potentiality in the sphere of attention, however dimly. Therefore,
instead of the negative term “the unconscious” I would advocate the positive
phrase “the margin of attention” or the less elegant “the margin in the sphere of
attention.” It would be disingenuous for the defenders of a Freudian unconscious
to admit that the mind is powerful enough to have such a thing as the
unconscious in it, that it is in some part of a mind and is all that a Freudian
unconscious is supposed to be, and yet to also claim that marginal consciousness
is not possible in the way I mean it because we can never have that many
associations and implications in the margin of attention. The margin has depth
and is a genuine dimension in our lives—an ongoing presence in attending life.
Just as everything in the unconscious can never be made conscious, but
nonetheless some of its content may be active in my ongoing life, everything in
the margin can never be made thematic, but nonetheless some of its content may
be active in my ongoing life. One of the challenges of future attention research
is to operationalize the typical and regular transformations that transpire in
human attending between content in the marginal horizon and the theme.
Psychology and the cognitive sciences should take more of molar view of
attention than a molecular view. A typical experiment in attention research aims
too small. The unit of measurement or the unit of behavior is an attentional
blink, a response measured in milliseconds, a saccade, an incredibly brief cue,
etc. This molecularization of human attending is more easily controlled and
analyzed, but is it relevant? In some respects and for some phenomena it is
relevant. But in the larger picture of what a human being is, as an attending
being, it is not so relevant. The problem here parallels the problem of focusing
on the focus—controlling what can be controlled, experimenting it to death, and
letting the rest be interpreted by someone else. Here “the rest” which is ignored
and left to others is context and margin, and more to the point of this paragraph,
the way human attending fits together with our daily lives. I have pointed out in
Chapters Two and Three how some researchers are taking a molar view of
attention to some extent, by hypothesizing about “attentional set” and
“processing of the scene” or “context.” But I have also pointed out how the
account so far is frequently ambiguous and stubbornly holds to the notion that
attention has do to only with the detail of the inner workings of the theme,
measured molecularly. One way to keep attention research moving toward a
molar rather than a molecular view of attention is to stress ecological validity.
Under the strain of trying to match up the experimental world with the world
beyond the computer monitor and outside the lab, attention research is pushed to
produce more meaningful results. The potentially messy results, and the possibly
vague and ambiguous controls in ecologically valid experimental settings, are an
understandable deterrent to molar-oriented research. However, the alternative is
simply unacceptable, namely, the irrelevancy of attention research to what a
human being is and does. A molar view of attention processes expands the sense
of a unit in attending to include context and margin as dimensions in the sphere
of attention, and enables the genuine discussion of the phenomenon of
subjectivity.
Attention research should more actively pursue the phenomenon of
subjectivity. The link between attention and subjectivity in the psychology of
attention is the slow-growing area of research called self-focused attention. A
recent meta-analysis of self-focused attention research shows that the general
concern with this research is with negative affect (Mor and Winquist 2002). For
example, how does ruminating upon who I am negatively affect my ability to
complete certain tasks, or how does it negatively bias my cognitive function.
Self-focused attention research, like current psychology of attention in general,
can be so much more than what it is. Above I have discussed a piece of the rich
area that phenomenologists have demarcated by the term “reflection.” This is
attention to attention in which a self is constituted. Putting aside possible
controversies about my account, or controversies about the place of the ego in
phenomenology in general, this area of attention paying attention to itself is at
least as important as attention paying attention to the world. Issues of
personality, social behavior, personal development, psychosis and rehabilitation,
Conclusion 183
and so on, are waiting for a theory of attention to attention to make its mark. In
other words, attention researchers are missing opportunities to reach beyond
their currently small world of attention—such as measuring the reaction time to
identifying the upside down T on a computer screen that is streaming right-side
up Ts. I believe that attention research has much to say on matters of human
subjectivity, and not just negative affect in private or public anxiety. Reflection,
inauthentic or authentic, is one of the great ever-present possibilities in the
sphere of attention, the other being pre-reflective attention. And the bright minds
that are currently creating paradigms for testing hypotheses of pre-reflective
attention could award the discipline a broadening in significance of attention
results by complementing their efforts with tests of reflective attention hypo-
theses. For example, when attention attends to itself, what is the role of the
context? How does conditioning the context within which the self is attended
affect the story that the self is? Can suicidal contextual consciousness be
modeled or predicted? Is happiness or positive affect a function of a certain
contextual context in reflection? And if so, can it be induced or increased? Are
there gradations of detachment from the world as one becomes reflective, and
can such graded reflection be practiced (e.g., Depraz et al., 2003)? The point is
that some of the opportunities for attention research are squandered or ignored in
the race to deliver results within the same old parameters of attention to things
instead of attention to attention.
Psychology and the cognitive sciences should pay more attention to
advances in phenomenology. Traditionally, cognitive scientists and certain other
experimental psychologists aim at articulating the same thing at which
phenomenologists aim—“consciousness.” Often each group takes their training
in their respective disciplines as home base, and is reluctant to immerse
themselves in the “foreign” territory of the other group. So cognitive scientists
and other experimental psychologists determine the reality of findings about
consciousness by the familiarity of the terms and paradigms involved. In
attention research, these scientists take terms such as target, ANOVA, reaction
time, distractor, statistically significant, etc., as indicative of real results. Also,
phenomenologists who are scientists (in the sense of Wissenschaft) of “con-
sciousness” know when they are on friendly and hence “real” ground when
particular terms appear in a report such as intentionality, being-in-the-world,
noesis and noema, structure, presentation, categorial, epoche and reduction, etc.
Elsewhere I have attempted to translate the terms of the cognitive science of
attention to the terms of a gestalt-oriented phenomenology (Arvidson 2003b), so
I will not engage in that here. But the point is that such a translation is possible
and ongoing, and I believe this communication between the traditional third
person approach to attention and the first person approach can be bridged to the
benefit of both. I also believe that this current study is evidence of how this
might be done.
In the graduate program in phenomenological psychology at Duquesne
University in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s, the only program of its kind at the
time (outside of perhaps the University of Dallas), I was trained to think of the
dominant behaviorist psychology as a warped view of what a human being is.
Not necessarily because of the emphasis on comparative physiology and behav-
ior across species (human, pigeon, Norwegian white rat), or because of the over-
whelming theoretical and experimental concern with learning and behavior
modification. The problem was one of inclusiveness and mutual enlightenment
from other approaches to the phenomenon of what a human being is in the
world. One of the most useful ways of elucidating the extent to which
behaviorist psychology excluded other approaches (such as Gestalt psychology,
cognitive psychology, humanistic psychology) without seriously entertaining
how these other approaches might complement its own results was to study the
history of psychology, as is done in Amadeo Giorgi’s Psychology as a Human
Science (1970). The history of psychology shows that at one time, and at some
times since, psychology was more unified and inclusive than it was in mid-20th
Century, and perhaps than it is now.
I believe it is the responsibility of psychologists working on attention to
take seriously their allegiance to a person like William James, as a kind of hero
of cognitive science of attention. It is not just that he makes the kind of seminal
distinctions that drive work on attention these days; he was also a philosopher.
Phenomenologists admire James as well. Again, in part because he makes some
of the crucial kinds of distinctions that Husserl does. But also I believe
phenomenologists admire his empirical bent, his need to test hypotheses in
experimentation. This mutual admiration for someone like William James, and
the fact that “consciousness” is the shared territory between them, shows that no
matter how psychologists and phenomenologists are trained, and no matter how
they define real results, the truly serious researcher on either side will and
should immerse themselves in the latest findings of the other group, burying his
or her head in the psychology journals and books that present the latest research
on “consciousness,” or in the various journals and books that appreciate or cri-
tique the work of psychology, or in the work of Gurwitsch, Heidegger, Husserl,
Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, etc. themselves. Francisco Varela (1996) even suggests
that psychologists and their subjects train in the Husserlian style of attending to
Conclusion 185
phenomena. Some 20th Century phenomenologists, especially Gurwitsch,

Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, freely used the psychological laboratory research of
their times to make their points to an audience of phenomenologists. Such
activity would make the summary dismissal of the importance of any laboratory
results, a position taken by phenomenologists more often than they would be
likely to admit, a thing of the past. It would also belay such misguided dismiss-
als of “phenomenology” wrongly construed by psychologists, such as by Jon
Driver, et al. (2001, 63).
Implications for Phenomenology

Attentionality replaces intentionality. As argued in Chapter Five, once
attention is understood as a dynamic embodied attending in the world in the
three dimensions of theme, thematic context, and margin, not only must
discussions of intentionality include attention, but investigations of
intentionality ultimately come down to attention. The point is not just that
attention is a better name for the same concept, although it is. Rather the point is
that the phenomena that the term intentionality is meant to address are really a
matter of attending, and so attentionality should replace intentionality. This also
means that terms such as noesis and noema have only historical importance.
Perhaps most significantly, once attentionality replaces intentionality the area of
possible phenomenological communication with psychology and cognitive
science grows immensely. By recognizing attentionality for what it is,
phenomenologists and psychologists can argue about and investigate the same
thing more clearly. Also the well-documented findings made by attention
experimenters (interpreted in the expanded three dimension sense I have argued
for) can be used more readily by phenomenologists when it is realized that these
experimenters are empirically investigating what a traditional phenomenologist
would call intentionality.
Allow phenomenological insights to be guided by empirical results. In the
“Cognitive Science” entry of the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Osborne
Wiggins and Manfred Spitzer (1999, 104) write, “Recent discussions in cog-
nitive science offer phenomenologists much new material regarding precisely
the province within which they claim to be most at home, namely, the province
of human experience. This new scientific material would therefore seem to
demand serious phenomenological consideration.” The sentiment is laudable but
in my opinion it is still too guarded. I believe it is difficult to find very many
Husserlian phenomenologists who would admit that phenomeno-logical results
can be closely tied to empirical results, such that phenomenology could take
cues from psychology or cognitive science. No doubt, many experimental

psychologists feel the same way from their perspective, namely, that
phenomenology cannot guide their work in any significant way. There are recent
attempts to naturalize phenomenology (Petitot et al., 1999), and attempts to push
back on this naturalization by citing Husserl (Bruzina 2004). Also, a few
philosophers such as Shaun Gallagher (2003) are pressing the case that
phenomenology and experimental method can mutually and explicitly inform
each other at a number of levels. This book is evidence that I would also press
this case (see also Embree 2004a). For example, I have shown above that in
attention research, contextual consciousness is assumed and included, even
though it is called something else (pre-attentive processes, working memory,
attentional set, etc.). Psychologists such as Zenon Pylyshyn and Ronald Rensink
and their associates are working to quantify how many items can be contextually
presented at any one time, their relation to thematic attention, the limits of
contextual consciousness, etc. In this case, I think the phenomenologist can take
direction from their direction. In eidetic intuition, the phenomenologist can
determine through imaginative variation the invariant structure of contextual
consciousness, for example that the context is indefinitely extended, organized
through unity by relevancy, and presents items near and remote to the theme.
But this essential finding as essential is necessarily very general. Exactly how
are near and remote demarcated and what determines this difference in gradient?
Perhaps the psychologists’ tests of the hypothesis of a visual index leads to
better phenomenological formulations of transformations involving the context,
hence establishing or enlarging a taxonomy for these shifts in attending. In
another area, Gurwitsch (1964, 102) notes that “When the subject tries to
discriminate a datum or group of data, the fact that such discrimination has
already been accomplished influences the present process by facilitating it.”
This conclusion, which Gurwitsch puts forth in an ongoing critique of Piaget, is
countered in cases of negative priming (Arvidson 2003b). In these cases, the
immediately preceding discrimination interferes with the current discrimination.
The transformation in attending involved in negative priming, which possibly
has implications for addiction studies or other intervention techniques in
learning, becomes then an area of research for phenomenology of attention,
when previously phenomenology would be silent on this phenomena or get it
wrong.
Stop dismissing psychology as natural science. It is traditional for
phenomenology to distinguish itself from psychology by noting that psychology
aspires to be a positivistic or natural science, and so uses experiments, statistical
Conclusion 187
analyses, and certain physicalistic assumptions in its methodology. A large part

of how phenomenology has defined itself as a method has been in reaction to the
growth of psychology as a natural science. As noted just above, there have been
recent attempts to naturalize phenomenology. There have also been attempts to
phenomenologize psychology, for example the Journal of Phenomenology
Psychology has published for a half century, originally powered by the
phenomenological psychology and philosophy programs at Duquesne Univer-
sity. Also, existential psychotherapy has been established in the 20th Century,
drawing from Heidegger, Binswanger, Sartre, van Kaam, and numerous others,
so that there are now a number of graduate programs in phenomenological-
existential psychotherapy and research throughout the United States. Gurwitsch
himself identified Gestalt psychology, with certain modifications, as a pheno-
menologically oriented investigation of “intentionality,” and taught Gestalt
psychology at the Sorbonne (hence influencing Merleau-Ponty). Gurwitsch also
worked with Adhémar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein researching brain-injured vet-
erans at Frankfurt in the 1920s (Embree 2004b). The present study is just one
example of the cross-fertilization that can occur when psychology and neurology
are no longer thought of as irrelevant to human nature. For example, I believe it
is true that we are not our brain, but the brain is necessary for attention as an
“auxiliary cause” in Plato’s sense in the Phaedo (97c–99c). Therefore third-
person and first-person examination of what the brain is and its role in human
subjectivity can reveal some truths about the exact phenomena that
phenomenologists are interested in, attentionality, perception, imagination,
memory, etc. (see Gallagher 2003 for a brief, critical review of attempts at this).
The ego needs to be put in its place. When teaching human nature courses
to undergraduates, professors often use the plum vs. onion metaphor, or some
variation of it, to point out the distinctive attitude about the ego in the history of
ideas. The plum has a core, the onion does not. If one favors the onion view as I
do, where there is no substantial core as hub or center from which every attend-
ing emanates and to which each refers, then the problem is to account for the
personal identity that we nonetheless feel. Agreeing with Sartre, Gurwitsch,
Merleau-Ponty and others, a number of staunch Husserlians admit that the move
toward a substantialized ego in Ideas I, an ego that is the core of the human
being like the pit is the core of the plum, was mistaken. It is not clear, though,
that they are ready to embrace the view that the human being is more like an
onion, no core, no center, no hub, nothing which remains substantially
consistent or constant in human life. This view is not as radical as it seems at
first, and certainly is old (note the Buddhist concept of anattƗ or no-self). It is
not radical because the self that we feel and think we are can be accounted for in
a number of ways, such as Sartre’s “bad faith,” “storytelling,” or “original
projection,” and since human beings can still have more or less stable character,
as I have outlined above.
Even more importantly, just because we are activity and process without
some Cartesian metaphysical foundational self, this does not mean morality is
impossible. As I have argued, morality is momentary and is constitu-ted and
enabled by free choice. A moral person is not moral because one is destined to
obey divine law, or because one enacts some essential concept of human nature
(as plum), or because one lives out a genetic, biological destiny. A person has
moral character freely chosen, and so can “unchoose” it. And this morality may
be evidenced in the moral moment of I and You described in Chapter Six. There
are moral prohibitions or guides which are generally very influential for
individuals and societies, and which “work” to keep peace and harmony in lives
and States; yet there is no supervenient or underpinning absolute necessity for
being moral. We might wish there was, but there is not. However there is the
free choice to be open to the achievement of a moral moment, to teach this to
others if we think it is important to do so (following Erik Erikson’s notion of
generativity, 1950, 266), and to habitually prepare attention to be in this shape
and so habitualize moral character in Aristotelian fashion.
Interdisciplinary Attention Studies

It is hard to ignore the acceptance once more in psychology of the concept
of “consciousness,” now that behavioral psychology has ceded its power to
cognitive psychology across the United States. Another large phenomenon has
blossomed in the last decade or so, called interdisciplinary consciousness
studies. This area of active research includes neurologists, physicists,
theologians, animal behaviorists, computer modelers, geneticists, mathemati-
cians, biologists, and of course philosophers of all kinds, such as epistemol-
ogists, philosophers of mind, philosophers of science, continental philosophers,
and again, of course, psychologists of all kinds, including developmentalists,
cognitive scientists, neurologists, and various brands of experimental psychol-
ogists. In my opinion, interpreting our conscious lives in terms of attention puts
attention into its proper place in “consciousness studies.” Of course, it could no
longer be called this! The prevailing view is that attention is something that
happens in the “field of consciousness,” a kind of restricting or amplifying of
what is important at the moment. Searle (1992) for example, echoing James is
typical in his claim that we must distinguish between a center and periphery of
Conclusion 189
consciousness, and that the center is the focus of attention. It is not even the case
that the periphery of “consciousness” is exactly the margin of attention, because
the context is also outside of the theme or focus. Hence, this vague way of
talking should be replaced with a more precise phenomenology of human
attending as involving these three dimensions. I should add that I include myself
as one of these people who has relied on the vagueness of “consciousness,”
since in my previous publications and lectures in the phenomenology of
attention I have generally situated attention as a mode of consciousness, rather
than recognizing attention as the center and organizing concept for
consciousness within a sphere of attention.
It is my contention that the way that the word “consciousness” is used in
this new discipline is unnecessarily vague, and that the notion of a sphere of
attention, as defined in this present study, is more precise and generally works
better. For example, this kind of phrase—“paying attention in consciousness”—
is vague and easily found throughout articles in the Journal of Consciousness
Studies, Consciousness and Cognition, Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences, and similar journals, as well as in the books published by the presses
listed in the References section below. The enlarged view of the nature of
attending means that “paying attention in consciousness” becomes more precise.
It is attending thematically along with contextual and marginal consciousness. In
other words, any clear discussion of the concept of attention and any clear
discussion of the concept of consciousness necessarily entails contextual
consciousness and marginal consciousness as part of a sphere of attention. So
the concern of this interdisciplinary area of study becomes unified around an
attending being, rather than a conscious being. Starting with the extant body of
research in attention studies that already exists, interdisciplinary attention
studies can proceed to more uniformly hypothesize and test complicated
concepts such as morality, the relation between the brain and the context of
attention, aesthetic attention, and self-attention.
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Name Index
If a work has more than three authors, this index refers only to the first author listed in the study, and
the main text refers to the other authors as “et al.” For more information on additional authors of a
particular study see References.
Allport, Alan, 82 Burns, Jennifer S., 62

Anderson, Cynthia M., 33
Cairns, Dorion, 2
Andresen, Jensine, 70
Casale, Michael B., 179
Ansburg, Pamela, 73
Cavanagh, Patrick, 41, 83, 118
Aquila, Richard, 9
Chastain, Garvin, 82
Arisaka, Yoko, 40
Cheal, MaryLou, 82
Aristotle, 126-127, 149, 153, 172
Chelazzi, Leonardo, 36-37, 40
Arndt, Jamie, 41
Cherry, E. Colin, 15
Arvidson, P. Sven, x, xi, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19,
Chronicle, Edward P., 65
21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 31, 37, 41, 48, 50, 57,
Chua, Kao-Ping, 55
58, 60, 61, 65, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77,
Chun, Marvin M, 12, 25, 26, 28, 30, 36-37,
79, 83, 84, 85, 89, 91, 93, 94, 109, 121,
48, 49, 55, 71
126, 134, 135, 152, 170, 171, 183, 186,
Clark, James J., 26
189
Clark, Ruth Colvin, 71, 77
Ashby, Gregory F., 179
Clarke, Eric F., 77
Ayduk, Ozlem, 84
Cleeremans, Axel, 180
Baars, Bernard J., 15, 19, 74 Clore, Gerald L., 62, 77
Baddeley, Alan D., 26, 74 Cohen, Ronald A., 18
Barnes, Ralph, 30, 31, 36 Cook, Alison, 41
Bastick, Tony, 77 Coull, J. T., 18
Baum, William, 54, 55 Coventry, Kenny R., 44
Baylis, Gordon C., 77 Cowan, Nelson, 26
Beckett, Samuel, 128 Craik, Fergus I. M., 26
Begout, Bruce, 130 Crary, Jonathan, 9, 14, 46
Behrmann, Marlene, 5 Crick, Francis, 18
Bennington, Kristine, 17, 32, 65
Davies, Graham, 17, 32
Benton, Shlomo, 71
Dean, Michael, 26, 39, 48
Bergson, Henri, 157
Depraz, Natalie, 130, 144-148, 183
Bey, Caroline, 15-16, 28
DesAutels, Peggy, 73
Bichot, Narcisse, 54
Descartes, René, 57, 121, 125, 128-129,
Botvinick, Matthew, 32, 68
137-138, 150
Bower, Gordon H., 17
Destrebecqz, Arnaud, 180
Braver, Todd, 15, 32-33, 50-52, 54, 82
Diskin, Katherine, 68
Brewin, Chris R., 68
Dixon, Peter, 62
Broadbent, Donald E., 74
Dominowski, Roger L., 73
Brown, Gordon, 32, 42-43
Dougher, Michael, 33-34, 52
Brown, Jason W., 53, 72
Downey, Geraldine, 84
Bruzina, Ronald, 186
Downing, Paul, 24, 40, 118, 179
Bub, Daniel, 26, 39, 48
Dreisbach, Gesine, 53
Buber, Martin, xi, 149-154, 157-160, 165-
Driver, Jon, 23, 24, 77, 82, 185
166, 168-171, 175
Drummond, John, 109
Bülthoff, Heinrich, 17, 46-47
Duffy, Susan A., 38
Burack, Jacob A., 19, 59, 77
205
206 Name Index
Dulaney, Cynthia, 26, 39 Hecht, Heiko, 62

Dunbar, George, 84 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 105, 127
Duncan, John, 79 Heidegger, Martin, 126, 184, 187
Henderson, John M., 16, 28, 31, 32, 45
Eastwood, John, 14, 22, 27, 29
Henik, Avishai, 71
Edelman, Gabriel, 17
Henle, Mary, 72
Embree, Lester, 2, 8, 9, 19, 28, 95, 150, 157,
Hershkowitz, Irit, 65
186, 187
Hill, Ross, 84
Engle, Randall, 54
Hillyard, Steven, 19
Eriksen, Charles W., 15, 19, 59, 74,
Hobson, J. Allan, 15, 74
Erikson, Erik, 115, 188
Hodgins, David C., 68
Esteves, Francisco, 19, 35, 82
Holland, Margaret G., 162
Feldman, Jacob, 43, 77 Hollingworth, Andrew, 16, 28, 31, 32, 45
Filapek, Joseph C., 5 Hommel, Bernhard, 46
Fileteo, J. Vincent, 75 Hopfinger, Joseph B., 23, 82
Flykt, Anders, 19, 35, 82 Horton, D. L., 17, 32
Folk, Charles, 36, 79, 82 Hsieh, Shulan, 82
Fournier, Lisa R., 23 Hübner, Ronald, 19
Frackowiak, Richard, 23, 24, 82 Hume, David, 134, 135, 156
Freidrich, Francis J., 75 Husserl, Edmund, xi, 2, 6, 9, 19, 24, 57, 71,
Freud, Sigmund, 23-24, 67, 115, 181 80, 81, 86-104, 106-113, 115, 121, 125,
Frith, Colin, 82 126, 127, 130-131, 134, 138, 139, 144,
156, 184-187
Gallagher, Shaun, 45, 76, 186, 187
Gasper, Karen, 62, 77 Irwin, David E., 16
Gelade, G., 19, 74 Isenberg, Daniel J., 77
Gelb, Adhémar, 2, 187
Jacobson, Neil S., 61
Gibson, Bradley S., 36, 77, 79, 82
James, William, 2, 3, 4, 9, 14, 15, 21, 91, 94,
Gilligan, Carol, 73, 115
103-104, 115, 118, 156, 184, 189
Giorgi, Amadeo, 184
Jesus, 174
Glaucon, 174
Jiang, Yuhong, 25, 28, 30
Glover, Scott, 62,
Johnston, J. C. , 36, 79, 82
Goldie, Peter, 83
Jones, Mari Riess, 30, 31, 36
Goldstein, Kurt, 187
Joordens, Steve, 180
Grathoff, Richard, 28, 95, 157
Jordan, Timothy R., 18
Greenberg, Jeff, 41
Gurwitsch, Aron, x, xi, 2-14, 18-23, 29, 32, Kail, Robert, 26, 179
33, 36, 39, 40, 42-45, 49, 57-61, 63-64, Kambe, Gretchen, 38, 39, 45
67-68, 70-73, 74-76, 78-81, 83, 84, 86- Kane, Michael, 26, 49, 50
95, 97-102, 104-113, 115-128, 131-135, Kant, Immanuel, 57, 134-136, 149, 162,
139, 150-151, 153, 154, 155-172, 184- 174, 175
185, 186, 187 Kanwisher, Nancy, 18, 24
Kato, Chikako, 23
Haider, Hilde, 53
Kaufmann, Walter, 158, 168
Haidt, Jonathan, 60
Kawahara, Jun-Ichiro, 23
Hall, Lynda K., 26, 179
Kelsey, Erin M., 36, 77, 79, 82
Hanrahan, Christine, 35
Kelso, J. A. Scott, 85
Harris, Errol, 119-120
Keltner, Dacher, 60-61
Haywood, Jeremy, 64
Name Index 207
Kinoshita, Sachiko, 26 Mischel, Walter, 84

Kintsch, Walter, 45, 67 Mitroff, Stephen R., 37-38
Kirsner, Kim, 62, 68-69 Miyatani, Makoto, 23
Kitayama, Shinobu, 40, 118 Mizuno, Masafumi, 77
Kluwe, Rainer H., 53 Mohammed, 174
Koch, Chris, 18 Moore, J., 62
Koenderink, Jan J., 46 Mor, Nilly, 41, 118, 182
Koffka, Kurt, 9, 90, 115 Müller, Matthias M., 15, 19
Kohlberg, Lawrence, 73, 115 Murdoch, Iris, 162
Kramer, Arthur, 28-29, 31, 40
Natanson, Maurice, 133
Kuiken, Don, 40, 83
Natsoulas, Thomas, 128
Kunzendorf, Robert, 35
Navon, David, 75
LaBerge, David, 18, 24, 27 Neely, James H., 17, 32
Labianca, Angela T., 41, 83, 118 Neisser, Joseph U., 32
Lambert, Tony, 117 Nelson, Douglas L., 38-39, 48, 118
Lanier, Jaron, 28 Newman, James, 25
Lavie, Nilli N., 61 Newstead, Stephen E., 44
Laycock, Stephen W., 121, 124 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 174
Lendowski, Stephan, 62, 68-69 O’Regan, J. Kevin, 26-27
Levinas, Emmanuel, 137-138 Oberauer, Klaus, 52-53
Lewis, Vicky, 84 Ohlsson, Stellan, 65-73
Lippman, Louis G., 17, 32, 65 Ohman Arne, 19, 35, 82
Liu, Jia, 24 Oliver, Naomi S., 83
Lockwood, Michael, 24 Olson, Ingrid, 12, 26, 28, 30, 36-37, 48-49,
Lubart, Todd I., 77 71
Lutz, Antoine, 117 Olson, James M., 40, 63, 118
Ormerod, Thomas C., 65
MacGregor, James N., 65
Page, Andrew C., 83
MacLeod, Andrew K., 62
Pashler, Harold, 55
Mandel, David R., 35
Pasto, Luigi, 19, 59, 77
Mangun, George, 19
Peterson, Mathew, 28-29, 31, 40
Marcel, Anthony J., 76
Peterson, Steven, 75
Marks, William, 26, 39
Petit, Jean-Luc, 126
Marsh, Elizabeth, 17, 26, 28
Petitot, Jean, 144, 186
Martin, Sandy S., 44, 65
Piaget, Jean, 73, 115, 186
Masson, Michael, 26, 39, 48
Pinker, Stephen, 19
Mathis, Katherine, 31
Plato, 121, 138, 174, 187
McAdams, Stephen, 15-16, 28
Plaut, David C., 32, 68
McCormack, Teresa, 32, 42-43
Posner, Michael, ix, 18, 19, 23, 28, 30, 75,
McElree, Brian, 26, 39, 49
75
McKinney, Vanesa M., 38
Proffitt, Dennis R., 62
Mendolia, Marilyn, 62
Pylyshyn, Zenon W., 27, 32, 43-44, 45, 77,
Merikle, Philip, 14, 22, 24-25, 27, 29, 180
158, 186
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2, 9, 11, 38, 79,
80-81, 129, 130-131, 136, 137, 143-144, Quinn, Kimberly A., 40, 63, 118
184-185, 187 Rafal, Robert, 71
Metzinger, Thomas, 74, 116-117 Raidl, Marie-Helene, 77
Mills, C. B., 17, 32 Rauschenberger, Robert, 75
208 Name Index
Rawson, Katherine, 45, 67 Teasdale, John D., 41, 46, 62

Rayner, Keith, 38, 45 Terry, W. Scott, 62
Rees, Geriant, 61 Tesser, Abraham, 62
Remington, Roger, 36, 79, 82 Theeuwes, Jan, 46
Rensink, Ronald A., 26, 27, 37, 186 Thomas, Alan, 136
Ridderinkhof, K. Richard, 46 Thomas, Sharon M., 18
Rochat, Philippe, 61 Thomson, Donald M., 17, 32
Roche, Bryan, 33, 40, 69 Thornton, Ian M., 43, 83, 118
Rockstroh, Sybille, 26, 49 Towgood, Karren, 26
Roddenberry, David, 17, 45, 55 Treisman Ann, 19, 74
Rodriguez, Monica L., 73 Trick, Lana M., 34, 68
Roney, Christopher J. R., 34, 68 Troyer, Angela K., 26
Russell, Philip A., 34-35 Tsal, Yehoshua, 14, 35
Ryan, William F., 130
Umitá, Carlo, 77
Salaminiou, Eva, 62
Valentine, Elizabeth, 77
Sartori, Guiseppe, 77
Valentine, John, 77
Sartre, Jean-Paul, xi, 4, 9, 72, 80, 81, 85,
van Veen, Hendrik A. H.C., 17, 46-47
109, 115-116, 120, 121-123, 126-127,
Varela, Francisco J., 64, 72, 79, 80, 144-
129, 132-133, 140-144, 148, 149, 155,
145, 147, 148, 184-185
165, 166, 172-176, 181, 184-185, 187-
Vecera, Shaun, 5
188
Velmans, Max, 25, 180-181
Scholl, Brian, 23, 43, 77, 179
Vergeer, Ineke, 35
Schultz, Derek W., 15
Vermersch, Pierre, 130, 140-141, 145
Schweizer, Karl, 26, 49
von Ehrenfels, Christian, 88-89
Searle, John R., 9, 189
Vousden, Janet I., 32, 42-43
Sears, Christopher R., 43-44
Shalev, Lilach, 14, 35 Wallace, B. Alan, 64
Shapiro, Kimron, 28, 79 Walton, Roberto, 92, 104-106, 110, 135
Sharps, Matthew, 44, 65 Wang, Ranxiao Frances, 17, 45, 55
Shoda, Yuichi, 73 Ward, Robert, 79
Shorter, S., 23 Watkins, Ed, 41, 46, 62
Simons, Daniel, 17, 37, 38, 45, 55 Wegner, Daniel M., 51
Smilek, Daniel, 14, 22, 27, 29 Weil, Simone, 116, 152, 161-162, 170
Smith, Linda B., 40, 118 Wenzlaff, Richard M., 51
Smith, Marilyn, 36, 71 Wiggins, Osborne P., 185
Snodgrass, Michael, 25 Wilkerson, William, S., 32
Socrates, 138, 174 Williamon, Aaron, 77
Sokolowski, Robert, 11, 81, 128, 132 Williams, Ruth M., 41, 46, 62
Spalek, Thomas, 36, 37, 71 Winquist, Jennifer, 41, 118, 182
Spitzer, Manfred, 185 Wood, Virginia V., 66-67
St. James, J. D., 19, 59, 74 Worthen, James B., 66-67
Steinbock, Anthony, 130 Wright, Edmund, 73
Stolz, Jennifer A., 25, 180
Strawson, Galen, 57, 134 Yantis, Steven, 36, 75, 79, 82
Stricker, John L., 75 Zahavi, Dan, 134
Stumpf, Carl, 88-90, 110-11 Zelinsky, Gregory H., 16
Sucharski, Ivan Laars, 17, 32, 65 Zhang, Nan, 38, 39, 48, 118
Subject Index
achievement, 4, 14-15, 38-39, 53-54, 71-72, capture, attention, 1, 4, 6, 32, 36, 38, 78-84,
82, 84-85, 115-116, 168, 171-172, 188 113, 169
action, 62, 141-142, 175 care vs. justice morality. See moral
acts, polythetic and monothetic, 110, 111- attention, care vs. justice and
112 Cartesian Meditations, 87, 138
addiction, 34, 186 change-blindness, 37-38
aesthetic experience, 60-61. See also awe character, attentional, 40, 83, 119, 121, 123-
affection, passive synthesis and, 97, 102, 124, 129-130, 140-144, 177, 179, 181,
103 187-188
Analyses Concerning Passive and Active character, contextual, 33, 34, 40, 41, 43-45,
Synthesis, 86, 91, 95-106, 110, 111. See 139, 158-159. See also character,
also synthesis attentional and moral attention, character
anattƗ (no self), 147, 188. See also and
Buddhism children, attention and, 41, 61, 63, 65, 67,
Angst, 138, 142, 143, 174 68, 73, 83-84
Apology, 138 Christianity, 165
Aristotelian moral theory. See moral cogito, 11, 50, 87, 92-93, 121, 128-9, 137-
attention, Aristotle and 138, 188. See also Meditations
arousal, 18 cognitive science. See psychology
attention deficit disorder, 46 coherence theory, 27
attention studies, 188-189 compassion. See moral attention,
attention vs. consciousness, x, 2-3, 13, 25, compassion as
188-189 computer modeling, 32-33, 119, 180
attentional receptive fields (ARFs), 35 confrontation (Gegenuber). See moral
attentionality vs. intentionality, 125-132, attention, confrontation in
134-135, 185 Consciousness and Cognition, 189
authenticity. See reflection, authentic consciousness vs. attention, x, 2-3, 12-13,
autonomy. See freedom 25, 188-189
awareness, 18, 76, 145, 180. See also constancy-hypothesis, 107-108
mindfulness-awareness and subjectivity, constituents, 22, 27, 100, 111; formative and
ever-present self-awareness and formed, 3-4, 11, 19, 24, 31, 72-74, 76,
awe, 60-61, 175 107-108, 168. See also moral attention,
constituents in
bad faith. See reflection, inauthentic
context, global vs. local, 31, 39
On Becoming Aware, 145
context, intrinsic, 74
behaviorism, 34, 54
continuity, 78, 81, 126
Being and Nothingness, 129, 133, 141, 176
contraction, 59, 61-63, 66, 169-170
bizarreness. See memory, bizarreness and
control of attention, 31, 33-36, 40, 49-50,
blink, attentional, 55, 79, 181
52, 75, 77, 131; exogenous (bottom-up)
body, 7-9, 35, 120-121, 123, 136-137, 138,
vs. endogenous (top-down), 81-83, 108;
139, 147, 177, 181; morality and, 150-
and moral moment, 171; settings, 35-36,
151, 156, 159-160, 166, 169
37, 39, 53, 82, 179, 182, 186,
boredom, 61-62
conversion, 173
brain, 18, 52, 75, 82, 180, 187
cost, contextual, 151
Buddhism boom, 144
covert attention, 19
Buddhism, 144-148, 165, 188
creativity, 69, 77, 164
capacity, attentional, 25, 53 Critique of Pure Reason, 135
cue. See cuing, contextual
209
210 Subject Index
cuing, contextual, 19, 20, 23, 28, 29-31, 40- evil genius, 126
41, 48, 49, 181 Experience and Judgment, 87, 95
expert training. See expertise
death, 41
expertise, 62-63, 68-69
decision-making, 65
external conditions, 118-119
depression, 46, 61, 62, 77
development, attentional, 40, 58, 83, 115-9, facilitation effect, 15, 16, 17, 19, 26, 29, 30,
124, 129-130, 177; moral, 171-172. See 31, 36-37, 39-40, 42, 48-49, 71, 83-84,
also character, attentional and children 180, 186. See also cuing, contextual
dignity. See moral attention, dignity and false memory. See memory, false
directness. See moral attention, constituents fear, 34, 36, 68, 83, 117
in fiction, 162-163
disabilities, learning, 67 field. See metaphor of attention, field
disclosure, 129-30 Field of Consciousness, 2, 9, 10, 87, 95, 131
distractor, 21-22, 25-26, 48-49; reflection figure and background, 5, 11, 36, 44, 127.
and, 122, 127-128. See also interference See also multi-stability and
effect transformations
duty, Kantian, 175. See also moral attention figure, duck-rabbit. See multi-stability
dynamic tension, 25-26, 48, 56, 78-79, 83- forced-choice task, 65-66
85, 113, 116, 125, 132, 157-158 formative and formed constituents. See
constituents, formative and formed
effects, attentional. See facilitation effect;
foundationalism, 138
inhibition effect; and interference effect
frame problem, 32-33. See also relational
ego, 115-148; Husserl on, 92-95, 97, 99-
frame theory
104; -centric predicament, 11, 128-130;
freedom, 129-130, 141-144, 147, 162, 172-
empirical, 136; inauthenticity and, 141-
176, 188
144; in morality, 156-157, 169; pure, 121;
friendship, 153, 176
subjectivity problem and, 87-88, 96, 182-
fringe, 14-15, 80, 92, 94
183, 187-188; transcendental, 134-136.
front and near. See moral attention,
See also representationalism; self;
constituents in
subjectivity, non-egological; and
functional significance, 3, 23, 27, 45-46, 70-
Transcendence of the Ego
71, 73-74, 100, 108, 109; in morality,
eidetic intuition, 58, 186
150, 153
elucidation, 63-66; Buddhist practice and,
64, 146-147; enlargement and, 63-64; gambler’s fallacy, 34, 38
elaboration and, 73; Husserl and, 106; gating mechanism, 41, 51-53, 137
intuition and; 77; obscuration and, 59, 67; On the Genealogy of Morals, 174
practical applications of, 65-66, 67 generativity, 188
embodiment. See body Gestalt theory, 89-90
encounter, I-You. See moral attention, I-You gestalt-coherence, 3-5, 27, 51, 73, 89, 170.
in See also functional significance
Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, 185 gestalt-connection, 7, 22, 29, 32, 37, 39, 42,
enlargement, 59-61; aesthetic experience 52, 57, 63-64, 66-67; in morality, 155,
and, 60-61; contraction and, 59, 63; 170-171. See also Gestalt-coherence and
Husserl and, 106; moral attention and, relevancy
169-170; practical applications of, 63; gestalt-switch, 73. See also transformations
social attention and, 61, 63 global vs. local stimulus, 22, 75
epoché, 145 God, 137-138. See also subjectivity, infinite
error, 68-69 and
Subject Index 211
good faith. See reflection, authentic interference effect, 16, 22, 25-26, 27, 29, 48,
gradient, attention, 19, 105-106, 106-107, 50, 75, 113, 127-128. See also distractor
186 and inhibition effect
Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, internal conditions. See character, attentional
162, 175 intuition, 77; eidetic, 58, 186, Kantian, 135-
136
halo, 1, 8-9, 10, 12, 21, 24, 28, 50, 52-53,
I-You. See moral attention, I-You in
78-79, 81, 97, 104, 106, 177, 181;
morality and, 155; subjectivity and, 119- joint attention. See social attention
120, 122-126, 128, 130, 131-132, 133- Journal of Consciousness Studies, 189
140. See also horizon and margin Journal of the Experimental Analysis of
horizon, 1, 8-9, 10, 12, 21, 24, 28, 53, 59, Behavior, 54
61, 78, 80-81, 104-106, 177, 181; Journal of Experimental Psychology, 49
subjectivity and, 120, 122-124, 132, 133, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology,
135-139; morality and, 151-152, 156. See 187
also halo and margin justice vs. care morality. See moral
Human Encounters in the Social World, 151 attention, care vs. justice and
humor, 18, 32, 65
kinesthetic sense, 8-9, 123, 137, 139, 159-
hyle, 88-90, 97, 102-103, 107-108, 111, 131
161, 177
I and Thou, 149 Krisis, 127
Ideas I, 86, 87, 92, 106, 110, 115, 130, 187
leadership, 66, 178
identity, personal, 134-135, 147, 187-188.
learning, 26, 30, 40, 41, 43, 63, 71, 77, 179,
See also project, original and subjectivity
184, 186; character and, 83, 116, 118-
I-It. See moral attention, I-It and
119, 123-124; disability and, 67. See also
imagination, 24-25, 35, 153, 161, 162-164,
character, attentional
167, 187
lexical priming. See cuing, contextual and
imaginative variation, 186
facilitation effect
immediacy. See moral attention, constituents
lexical processing, 17-18, 32, 39, 45. See
in
also cuing, contextual and memory
inattention, 24, 35
limit-case, 81, 105-106, 151, 153, 161, 164,
inauthenticity. See reflection, inauthentic
166
index, positional, 42-46, 67, 186; existential
Logical Investigations, 87, 121, 125, 130
index and, 131, 137; moral attention and,
158-159; OSCAR and, 42-43; margin, 1-4, 6-30, 35, 36, 44-54, 57, 66, 74,
subjectivity and, 137, 142-143, 147; 78-85, 87-88, 91-92, 94-97, 100, 104-
visual index and, 43-44 107, 110, 112-113, 116-117, 119-147,
infinite. See God and subjectivity, infinite 151-152, 154-161, 167, 169, 171-172,
and 175, 177-182, 185, 189. See also halo
inhibition effect, 17, 25, 31, 41, 50-54, 68- and horizon
69, 83, 113, 180. See also distractor and Marginal Consciousness, 7, 8, 80, 122
interference effect material relevancy. See relevancy
insight, 65, 73, 77, 174 meditation, 64, 70, 147-148
intentionality, 89, 125-132, 134-135, 185, Meditations, 125, 128, 137, 150. See also
187. See also attentionality vs. cogito
intentionality memory, bizarreness and, 66-67; context in,
interconnection, Husserl on, 98-101 17-18; false, 66-67; long term, 26, 45,
179-180; research on, 26, 53, 54, 71, 179-
212 Subject Index
180; short term, 26, 42-43, 45; working, non-egological subjectivity. See subjectivity,
26, 39-40, 41, 49-51, 53-54, 179-180, 186 non-egological
metaphor of attention, 74, 89-90; field, 5, 9-
object-based attention, 23-24, 27, 77, 118
13, 88, 96, 132; plane, 9-13, 132; sphere,
object file, 45
5, 9-13, 116, 128-130, 132; spotlight, 18-
object recognition, 17, 45, 47
19, 36, 74, 87, 90; zoom-lens, 19, 59, 60,
obscuration, 66-67; elucidation and, 59;
74, 76, 77, 90, 117
memory and, 66-67; repression and, 66;
mindfulness-awareness. See meditation
practical applications of, 67
mood, 41, 46, 62, 77, 117
On Dreams, 67
moral attention, 149-176; Aristotle and, 149,
order of existence, 2, 7-8, 28, 122, 124, 135,
153, 172; care vs. justice and, 73;
139, 160-164, 166-167, 169. See also
categorical imperative and, 175; character
halo; horizon; and margin
and, 149, 156, 165, 171-176; compassion
orienting, 18, 80-81, 93
as, 150, 152, 155, 162-167, 169-170, 171,
OSCAR (OSCillator-based Associative
172, 175, 177; confrontation (Gegenuber)
Recall), 42-43
in, 159-160, 166, 175, 176; constituents
in, 150, 153-154, 156, 157, 159, 165-167, paradigm, molar vs. molecular, 54-55, 181-
168, 171; control and, 171; dignity and, 182
175-176; I-It and, 149-151, 166-171; I- parts, dependent and independent, 110-111
You in, 149-154, 158, 161, 164, 165-171, patency/latency, 104-106
175; Kantian duty and, 175; as moral Perception and Psychophysics, 16, 30
moment, 149, 150-162, 165, 168, 170, perception, 9, 16, 24, 37, 45, 46, 47, 107,
172-175, 188; reflection and, 156-161, 109, 178-179
169, 172; respect and, 174-176; personal identity. See identity, personal
responsibility and, 165-166, 175 pessimism, 62
moral encounter. See moral attention, I-You phantom, 109
in Phaedo, 187
multiple object tracking (MOT), 44, 77 Phenomenological Psychology, 95, 102
multi-stability, 72, 75, 80, 84-85, 108. See Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,
also restructuring 189
Murphy, 128 Phenomenology of Perception, 9
phobia. See fear
Naturalizing Phenomenology, 144
pointing references. See references, pointing
Navon letter. See multi-stability
positional index. See index, positional
Necker cube. See multi-stability
positivism, psychology and, 186-187
negation, external, 127; internal 126-127,
potential theme, 22-23, 44, 75, 82, 104-105,
131-132, 134-135, 143
143, 172
negative priming. See inhibition effect
preparation, 53-54, 77, 82, 170, 172
Nausea, 143
priming. See cuing, contextual and
Nichomachean Ethics, 149
facilitation effect
nine-dot problem, 65
Principles of Psychology, 9, 118,
noema (or noematic), 86-87, 94, 97, 98, 101,
problem solving. See insight
126, 130-132, 185
prohibitions, 175-176, 188
noesis (or noetic), 86, 89, 92, 96-97, 107,
project, original, 172-174. See also
109, 126, 130-132, 183
character, attentional
No Exit, 176
prominence, Husserl on, 98-103
noise, 15, 52. See also distractor and
proto-objects, 23
interference effect
psychoanalysis, 57, 67, 181
Subject Index 213
psychology (or cognitive science), x, 3, 13- Republic, 174

20, 26, 34, 54-55, 71, 86-87, 117-118, research, molar vs. molecular, 54-55, 181-
171, 178-185, 188; moral developmental, 182
73; as natural science, 117, 184, 186-187 resonance, Husserl on, 99-100
Psychological Research, 46 respect. See moral attention, respect and
Psychology as a Human Science, 184 responsibility. See moral attention, and
psychosis, 77, 117, 182-183 responsibility
psychotherapy, 62, 67, 68; existential, 187; restructuring, 71-74; dynamic tension and,
Freudian, 67 84-85; Husserl on, 107-109; moral
psychology and, 73; practical applications
reaction time, 23, 25-26, 48, 55, 66, 68, 117,
of, 73-74; re-encoding and, 73
183
reading, 45, 67, 162-163 saccade, 55, 181
recognition, 17, 29-30, 38-39, 40, 45, 47, sales, 63, 69
118-119, 162 saliency, 40-41, 48, 81-82, 173
references, pointing, 6, 8, 12, 49, 80, 122- scene, 15-17, 26-29, 31-32, 37-38, 45, 47-
124. See also gestalt-connection; margin; 48, 55, 117, 179, 181-182
and relevancy schizophrenia. See psychosis
reflection, 87, 118-119, 121-122, 128, 133- Science of Logic, 105
148, 177, 182-183; authentic, 116, 124, science, philosophy of, 71-73. See also
138-148, 158, 172, 174, 183; hyletic, 111; psychology
inauthentic, 140-144, 147, 173-174, 183, selective attention. See singling out
188; and moral attention, 156-161, 169, self-attention. See reflection
172 self-awareness, ever-present. See reflection
Regulae, 57. See also cogito and and subjectivity, ever-present self
Meditations awareness and
relational frame theory, 33, 69 self-development. See character, attentional
relevancy, unity by, 5-7, 16, 22-23, 29, 32- and development, attentional
34, 39, 41, 42, 44-46, 49, 50, 51-53, 177; selfishness, 174-175. See also moral
halo, and 123-125, 127; Husserl and, 99- attention
100; morality and, 149-150, 155, 161- semantic priming. See cuing, contextual and
162, 164-165, 169, 174; near and remote facilitation effect
zones and, 6, 19, 46, 49, 65-66, 69-70, serial-shifting, 33, 37, 40, 70-71; Buddhism
186; order of existence and, 163; and, 146-147; global-local stimulus and,
transformations and, 59-60, 62, 64, 66, 75; Husserl on, 106-107, 111-112;
68, 71, 78; Walton’s critique of, 104-106. practical applications of, 71; self-
See also gestalt-connection attention and, 41; synthesis and, 109-110
relevancy-principle, 150, 162-165, 166-167. settings, attention control. See control of
See also moral attention, compassion as attention, settings
and order of existence shamatha-vipashyana. See meditation
replacement, 70-85; context, 34, 57, 64, 67- shame, 140-141
70; control and, 7, 78, 82-83, 112; moral short term memory. See memory, short term
attention and, 151, 152, 157, 167-168, singling out, 3, 5, 37, 71-72, 74-76; creative
170-171, 173; restructuring and, 72, 85, performance and, 77; Husserl on, 110-
107; serial-shifting and, 70-71; singling 112; morality and, 152-153, 168-169;
out and, 5, 74-75 reflection and, 138; synthesis and, 75-77
representationalism, 11, 117, 128, 129 social attention, 61, 63, 68
repression, 66, 113. See also psychoanalysis
214 Subject Index
social encounter, 64, 151-152, 161, 164. See temporality, 78, 99, 101-103, 131, 154, 159,
also moral attention 162-163, 166; as streaming in attending,
social world, 151-152 8, 95, 120, 123, 137-138, 139, 147, 156-
solidity. See moral attention, constituents in 157, 177
solipsism, 128. See also ego, -centric tension. See dynamic tension
predicament and representationalism therapy. See psychotherapy
soul, 120, 121, 138, 162, 173 total field. See metaphor of attention, field
sphere, 5, 9-13, 116, 128-130, 132; ball of, training. See control of attention and
9, 11, 12, 132; depth of, 9-13, 116, 181; expertise
illustration of, 10; vector and, 132. See Transcendence of the Ego, 123, 133
also metaphor of attention transcendence in immanence, 126, 129, 177.
spotlight. See metaphor of attention, See also ego, -centric predicament and
spotlight subjectivity
sprites, 41, 83, 118-119 transformations, 57-86; Gurwitsch and
stimulus, global vs. local, 22, 75 Husserl on, 106-114; law of, 57, 91, 99,
stream of consciousness. See streaming in 110-112; preparation for, 53-54, 77, 82,
attending 170, 172; taxonomy of, 57-58, 91, 186
streaming in attending, 2, 7-9, 12, 28, 47-48, transitive states, 4, 14-15. See also fringe
58, 79, 87, 95, 101, 112, 177; morality transparency, subjective, 116-117. See also
and, 150, 156-159, 163, 167, 172; subjectivity, ever-present self-awareness
subjectivity and, 116, 118-123, 133, 135, and
136-138, 139, 140-141, 143, 147 truth, apodictic, 125
subjectivity, 3, 8-9, 14, 52-53, 87-88, 97,
unconscious, the, 24-25, 180-181
106, 115-148; ever-present self-
unitary individuality. See moral attention,
awareness and, 120-125, 128, 136, 137,
constituents in
138, 141, 156, 169, 177; halo and, 119-
120, 122-126, 128, 130, 131-132, 133- validity, ecological, 17, 55, 75-6, 182
140; infinite and, 137-138; and morality, virtual reality, 17, 46-48
149-176; non-egological, 117-119, 120- visual indexing (or FINST). See index,
125, 155. See also character, attentional; positional
ego; and reflection
switch. See task-switch and transformations Wissenschaft, 144, 183
synthesis, 37, 70, 71-72, 76-78, 139; active worldliness, 104-106
95-104, 110; aesthetic experience and, writer’s block, 67
60-61; constraint relaxation and, 73; zoom-lens. See metaphor of attention, zoom-
Husserl and, 88, 90, 98, 102, 109-110, lens
111-112; intuition and, 77; morality and,
169; passive, 95-104, 110; practical
applications of, 77; singling out and, 75-
77. See also Analyses Concerning
Passive and Active Synthesis
target, 3, 14-16, 19-20, 22-26, 29-33, 36-42,

48-50, 52-54, 82, 179-180
task-switching, 53-54
teaching, 63, 77
temporal contextual cuing. See cuing,
contextual
Contributions to Phenomenology
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THE SPHERE OF ATTENTION

John J. Drummond, Fordham University

Elizabeth A. Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA

ISBN-10 1-4020-3571-3 (HB)

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CHAPTER 1: THE SPHERE OF ATTENTION IS THEME,

CHAPTER 2: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR THE SPHERE OF

CHAPTER 3: TRANSFORMATIONS IN ATTENDING .......................................... 56

CHAPTER 4: GURWITSCH AND HUSSERL ON ATTENTION ........................... 86

CHAPTER 5: SUBJECTIVITY AND THE SPHERE OF ATTENTION .............. 115

CHAPTER 6: MORALITY AND THE SPHERE OF ATTENTION .................... 149

CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION .................................................................................... 177

NAME INDEX .............................................................................................................. 205

SUBJECT INDEX......................................................................................................... 209

reductionist in the worst way, which for me meant that experimentally-minded

such as an ever-present sense of self, the nature of self-attention in reflection,

The Sphere of Attention is

discussed in Chapter Three, which are principles of modification that involve

Theme is Central Focus

incomplete, etc., contributes to maintaining the consolidation and segregation of

of the theme, so that other constituents are organized or formed according to

Thematic Context is Relevancy

gestalt. This context extends indefinitely by pointing references and implication

Margin is Streaming, Body, and Environing World

locus of subjectivity—dynamic (marginally presented sector of phenomenal time

The Field vs. Sphere Metaphor of Attention

Gurwitsch’s The Field of Consciousness (1964) presents the most

stands in the thematic context, which—to abide by the metaphor—forms the

simultaneously, as when the statue I am admiring is attended to as placed behind

Problems of Context in Psychology and Cognitive Science

unfamiliar melody from an auditory “scene” under a number of conditions, such

Empirical Evidence for the Sphere of Attention

Theme and Margin in the Sphere of Attention

This concept of margin potentials can be linked to other current attention

theory of attention, neurological studies offer fascinating examples of syntax-

Context in the Sphere of Attention

Bringing Context into Focus

It is clear that context is important in how attention works in lexical

To come closer to modeling human thinking, computer modeling needs to

kitchen wall tile. This is explicit manipulation of context in the sphere of

Using the incidental approach to change-blindness and attentional capture, these

context enabled subjects to disambiguate ambiguous words. They defined

theme and thematic context, instead of postulating executive control processes

attention changes over time is controversial, since it is well established that

the right “learning context.” “Thus there is no need to maintain an explicit

must be “actively searched” in Pylyshyn’s terms in order to be made focal, while

Theme, Context, and Margin in the Sphere of Attention

mechanisms. The study of higher-level cognitive behaviors such as object

Experiments on negative priming also assume the existence of three

target. “Responsible for distinguishing” here might be too strong a phrase as we

We define context as any task-relevant information that is

allocation and response selection toward the ink color

They also discuss the selection of task-relevant information as context (Braver,

(1) The activated part [marginal halo] of long-term memory

I am sure there are other descriptions in experiments on cognition, neurol-

assumption in many paradigms in attention research. “To the molarist, such a

How Context Shifts in Attending

223–227). Also, in some sense enlargement and contraction are inversely

In conjunction with the broadening perceptual field in which

We implore those we think are insensitive or narrow-minded to realize the

This enlargement, like all enlargements within our definition, is effected