Abstract
The article examines the development and context of the problem of passive constitution in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. The thematization of passive synthesis arises primarily in the later period of his work — in the Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, the Crisis of European Sciences, the Cartesian Meditations, as well as in the investigations on intersubjectivity (Husserliana XIII–XV). However, the groundwork for this later analysis can already be discerned in Husserl’s earlier writings, such as Ideas I, Ideas II, and the Lectures on the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. In these texts, Husserl distinguishes between the active and passive spheres of consciousness: the proto-synthesis of time, secondary passivity (as the result of past activity of the ego), and auxiliary perceptual syntheses that ensure continuity of experience. Although a systematic thematization of passivity is not yet present, these analyses already reveal a stratified structure of the passive sphere and its role in the constitution of subjectivity. In the later Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, the focus shifts: passivity is understood both as a condition of the normal course of perception and as the associative flow that ensures the continuity of consciousness. Thus, the development of Husserl’s treatment of passivity can be seen as a movement from implicit distinctions to a systematic explication of passive syntheses, thereby opening the way to a genetic phenomenology of subjectivity.
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