A Person Cannot Lie to Oneself

This chapter delves into the workings of perception, focusing on the concepts of retention and protention in phenomenology. Retention refers to the temporal consciousness where something remains while passing away, while protention involves anticipating what happens unconsciously, without paying special attention. The chapter discusses the difference between unconscious and conscious retention and protention, illustrating how through unconscious retention and protention, sense- and value-giving have already occurred. Furthermore, it explains how changes in others’ expressions influence one's own emotions and lead to affective evaluations of their actions. These workings of consciousness, including unconscious processes, are termed intentionality. Husserl terms the kind of intentionality that does not arise to consciousness and merely accepts what happens, passive intentionality, and contrasts this to intentionality that is conscious and is accompanied with the ego awareness, active intentionality. Additionally, in this chapter, everyday life in phenomenology is referred to as the lifeworld, where relationships therein are depicted as a dual structure of passive and active intentionality.