Toward a Phenomenological Theory of the Affective Horizon: Embodiment, Situatedness, and Perception
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This article examines whether affectively neutral perception is possible and to what extent affectivity participates, prior to reflection, in the configuration of the perceptual field. To address this question, it develops a phenomenological reconstruction that brings together, without homogenizing them, three contributions from the phenomenological tradition. In Husserl, the analysis of Stimmung, Affektion, passive syntheses, and the noetic-noematic correlation clarifies how certain contents acquire prominence and motivate the ego’s attention. Merleau-Ponty shows that this openness is rooted in the habitual and historically sedimented lived body. Heidegger’s account of Befindlichkeit, in turn, reveals its world-situated dimension. On this basis, the article argues that every perception is affectively articulated through a dual composition: a pre-given bodily composition, constituted by passive sensibility, habits, and bodily sedimentations, and a world-situated composition, corresponding to the subject’s openness within a meaningful world. The term affective horizon designates the dynamic synthesis of these two dimensions. Its structure is constant, since no perception is entirely devoid of affective articulation, whereas its concrete modulations remain variable. Affectivity is therefore not a subsequent interference with an originally neutral perception, but a constitutive dimension that orients and co-configures perceptual appearance.
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