Daniel has already linked to this video in comments, but I wanted to make an actual post about it:
The Husserl discussion here is pretty brief and not very revealing. Dreyfus, for one, is a Heidegger scholar and thinks that Husserl is only important insofar as he influenced Heidegger and showed (through his exemplification of it) the bankruptcy of a tradition going through Descartes and Kant, which entails starting your philosophical project with an analysis of consciousness and wondering how subjective consciousness can reach things out in the objective world when we think of or perceive or desire something. (More discussion of that issue is here.)
This characterization seems to miss the whole innovation of epistemology since Kant, which is to say that no, it's not that the mind is fundamentally divorced from the external world, but that in fact it constitutes the external world. It builds the external world itself. But of course, this picture is problematic: if "the world" is the world of our experience, i.e. is the result of this building process, then what about the building process itself? That would have to be somehow behind the world, its inner workings. But, really, there's no way we can know anything about those inner workings, because on this picture the finished building is all we can have any knowledge about.
So, post-Kantian philosophers like Hegel and Husserl throw away the idea that the world is a result of the unseen interaction between an ego and a thing-in-itself and instead focus on the world as we experience it, in which there do seem to be actors and acts and objectivity and truth and all the rest of it.
All of this gets worked out well before Heidegger, and I interpret Husserl in the Cartesian Meditations to be giving (like Heidegger does) a description that both describes this universe that's fundamentally unified with human understanding (meaning that there's nothing conceivable in this universe which we can't actually conceive, i.e. if it's not the sort of thing our minds can conceive, then we can't conceive it to exist) but which has the objectivity in it necessary to support scientific activity.
As discussed on our Husserl episode, the Cartesian Meditations is only Cartesian in that it starts with the idea that we need to begin philosophy by sitting back and observing our own consciousness to see what can be learned from it. Whereas Descartes thought he discovered indubitable propositions that could then be used to deductively prove the existence of minds and other people, Husserl finds a world of experience that, if interpreted without the injection of some kind of materialist or naturalist theory (which says that the objects we perceive are physical, outside, fundamentally different from us), leads us to see that the existence of the external world, other minds, and scientific objectivity are already indubitably certain to us: that we not only have no reason to doubt these things, but that the act of doubting them is somehow self-contradictory.
I'll admit that there's something unsatisfactory about this to me: Yes, my every experience presupposes a world of human meaning and an environment, so in a sense I can't "really" doubt these things, but Descartes is concerned with the logical relationships between these propositions (e.g. "there is an external world") taken abstractly; real doubt on the part of thinker, in the way I might doubt whether I really have my keys in my pocket or whether I forgot them, is not necessary. If Descartes can show that it's somehow interesting or relevant to determine the logical relationships between these propositions, like if we're trying to program a computer to simulate understanding and need to figure out exactly what explicit "beliefs" we need to encode, then it's a worthwhile project. The real force of the Husserlian (Hegelian/Heideggerian/etc.) argument here is that Descartes's enterprise doesn't really touch our experience as thinking human subjects; it's not going to tell us what we human beings should or shouldn't believe, because in effect, we have a bunch of beliefs (belief in the external world, in other people) just built into us and constantly reinforced, so maybe philosophy, if it's going to be more than just an academic exercise, has to do something else.
(I'll do another post on this series of videos when we publish the Heidegger episode.)
-Mark Linsenmayer
Daniel Horne says
January 18, 2011 at 3:57 amWow, this was good. But your last sentence has me thinking. If the strength of phenomenology is to help us understand that Descartes’ enterprise doesn’t touch our experience, and that philosophy must now move on to something else, I’m not sure what that “something else” is to be.
Exploring how the brain is “hard-wired” to view the external world in particular ways seems to me more fruitfully explored by neuroscience or linguistics a la Steven Pinker and/or Noam Chomsky. But I don’t see the phenomenologists telling us to go that route. Googling around, I do see some attempts to reconcile phenomenology with neuroscience (I guess Dennett is trying to do this?), but after a few open-minded attempts to work my way through Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, etc., I don’t see what phenomenology has to offer that neuroscience doesn’t better accomplish. My suspicion is that phenomenology simply plays a “god of the gaps” role until neuroscience makes more progress…
Mark Linsenmayer says
January 18, 2011 at 10:31 amIt’s not inevitable for philosophy to be stuck in Descartes’s particular problem of the relationship of subjectivity to an external world; virtually all of Continental philosophy post-Heidegger at least is doing other things, as was, I think, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Montaigne, virtually all political philosophers, sociology-types, ethicists, many though not all of current philosophers of mind, pragmatists, theologists, etc., etc.
Re. phenomenology in particular, I’m still exploring. I was interested in it in graduate school but decided at some point that it was an interesting but ultimately pointless exercise. Now with a new appreciation for Kant and Heidegger thanks to this podcast, I more see the point of Husserl’s attempt to give accounts of essences phenomenologically. At some point we’ll read some Merleau-Ponty, which is more applied phenomenology, Sartre, and others.
Phenomenology broadly construed tells what neuroscience what it has to explain. If you start with Descartes’s picture of the mind and think you have to give a neural account of that, you’re not going to get anywhere, because Descartes’s picture of experience, though a good start, is just wrong. Or more precisely, Descartes isn’t really trying to give an exhaustive account of the structures of experience, and an attempt to overgeneralize from some specific images he gives us generates a misleading picture (i.e. the Cartesian theater that Dennett rips on, which according to Wes at least has nothing actually to do with Descartes or any other real philosopher, though it seems to me pretty much what Schopenhauer and hence probably Kant is describing by inner sense).
Daniel Horne says
January 18, 2011 at 1:18 pmHm, good. OK, sure, I spoke too broadly. I guess I meant to ask “What would the phenomenologists in particular have us do now?” which you answered well enough.
I guess my frustration with post-Heideggerian continental philosophy has been the standard Anglo-American complaint, to wit: once you get past the obscure language, most of it feels banal or false. (I’m perhaps unfairly lumping together phenomenology and post-structuralism.) Surely I’m not the first person you’ve heard making this complaint?
But I’ll concede my surliness may stem from a typical Anglo-American unwillingness to “do the work” required by phenomenology. That is to say — in phenomenology’s defense — perhaps we really are required to learn a new language to understand these concepts, and if so, that’s not so different from the task assigned to us by logical positivists their progeny.
Anyway, back to Phenomenologists vs. Neuroscientists: would _neuroscientists_ agree that they need phenomenology to tell them what there is to explain? My suspicion is that most neuroscientists, if polled, would declare both Cartesian and Husserlian thinking moribund, if not quaint. (With a significant number of votes for “Husserl who?”)
Yes, I am trying provoke a response here (and not just from you), hopefully without being rude.