From a phenomenologist’s perspective, then, pre-reflective self-consciousness is not a static self-identity but a dynamic process – a process sometimes described as a ‘self-differentiation’, a pre-reflective ‘mineness’ or even pre-reflective ‘self-affection’. The inner dynamics of protention and retention, which are unnoticeable as such, form what might be called a ‘phenomenal background’. Husserl himself refers to this structuring also as ‘(primal) association’, as an interlacing of subject and object preceding their separation and opposition. And it is worthwhile to emphasize once more that this associative fusion in retention and protention is not identical to the experience of the world as expressed in objective judgments but that it is related to a lived, naive, and speechless experience of the world.
- Norman Sieroka, Leibniz, Husserl and the Brain.