Here's a conference-lecture by Dan Zahavi (of the "Center for Subjectivity Research" at the University of Copenhagen/Danish National Research Foundation) that asks whether it's a good idea to try to "naturalize" phenomenology.
He distinguishes early on what Flanagan means by phenomenology (referring to Owen by name), i.e. reports on what things seem like to us, and what Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and the rest of that tradition meant by it.
Husserl's founding motivation was against psychologism, which involved understanding phenomenology as introspection by the kind of being already roughly understood by this science of psychology. Following Frege, he argued that you can't understand, for instance, a number by analyzing it as an occurrence in the head; this approach completely prevents understanding of the system of logic involved in mathematics. Likewise, for Sartre, phenomenology is not introspection, which implies looking within oneself, because for Sartre, the self is not the object of the phenomenological gaze except during reflective consciousness, i.e. when analyzing our attitudes towards the self. We are instead describing the world, and we can't prejudge that things as experienced will line up with categories predefined by science.
Flanagan's approach in our discussion with him seemed pretty reasonable: when phenomenology makes claims about things that empirical science also has something to say about, you need to compare those, and the science is typically going to win out. I am in a sense free, in that for the purposes of planning my own actions, it works best for me to act this way, but when designing a system of punishment for society, or reproaching myself retrospectively for my failings, or predicting even my own future behavior (e.g. I set up some rewards for myself should I achieve my goals) or any number of other purposes, the science that acknowledges determinism should win out.
Still, the way Flanagan put it still seems troublesome if you're really committed to some form of pragmatism or transcendental phenomenology: you have to decide whether the scientific or the phenomenological claim is true. For William James, truth itself is defined by experience, such that empirical truth is something that we understand through familiar patterns of empirical verification (i.e. we go look at something, or at least we understand that one could go look at something), while the truth of other types of statements (such as the one about our personal freedom, or religious claims) is established in other ways, and so, in effect, "truth" means something somewhat different when applied to those claims. So it may not really be sensible to ask which of two very different types of claims is true, assuming them to be mutually exclusive. If truth is defined as a matter of some kind of verification process (not defining "verification" narrowly here as in the logical positivists), then two truth claims involving very different kinds of verification aren't necessarily comparable at all; they're in effect talking about different things. You can say, as Flanagan did, that the two facts about free will are appearance (our phenomenological experience of our freedom) and reality (what science tells us), the grounds for this epistemic hierarchy are within the assumption of science, i.e. of naturalism, whereas a phenomenologist like Merleau-Ponty is going to say that naturalism itself has only phenomenology to justify it, so the phenomenology can't just be dismissed as "mere appearance" even when it seems to conflict with some verdict of science.
All of this may be preliminary to Zahavi's first step. He's concerned with various attempts people have made more recently to make phenomenology serve empirical science. I'll let you watch the video to see his presentation of the issue, though.
-Mark Linsenmayer
(Thanks to DMF for referring me to this.)
my approach as a neo-pragmatist is not to worry about whether phenomenologies or scientific methods in general have some special purchase/grip on the way things really are deep down but rather to work out of the assumption that they might, and we need to experiment, be more or less useful for different human projects, some times to the exclusion of one or the other sometimes in concert. I do think that DZ is right about what Husserl was intending to do and when we are using his author-ity we should be careful to accurately portray his work. Sometime soonish perhaps we should talk about the use of “transcendental” in philosophies as this might be part of what makes philosophy not a branch of the sciences, if ‘it’ is not.
Naturalized seems like one of those terms that means something different to different readers and as applied to different entities.
But so is the word phenomenology, I guess.
sure and these kinds of generalizations often cause many levels of confusion, which is why we should really limit our use of them, like saying “Buddhism” for example when of course there are as many buddhisms as there are buddhists and even those are not stable/consistent.
better I think to give working definitions and specific examples.
I think Zahavi asks a very key question (as part of his second alternative): Why do metaphysical realists get to monopolize the concept of nature? When that happens, to “naturalize” a thing is to reduce it to underlying physical structures and processes. This metaphysical bias is going to lead physicalists to try to solve the hard problem by eliminating the mind talk in exchange for brain talk exclusively. Presto, the mind is just what just whatever brains do.
It seems that Flanagan leans in that direction, insofar as he would drop the manifest image in favor of the scientific image if they were in conflict. These two images are, more or less, another version of appearance and reality. To put it another way, this metaphysical position assumes that subjective experience is never quite as true as objective reality. I’m sure that James rejected these assumptions as a preliminary move and it’s pretty clear that Husserl wanted to, at least, bracket out or suspend this natural attitude. So in that sense, I think Zahavi is quite right to raise the question of now you can intelligibly naturalize phenomenology. It’s like saying you want to study subjectivity, but only to the extent that it is objective. (Flanagan is using a much looser definition of phenomenology so I’m not saying his position is as incoherent as all that.) But Sellars has him leaning far enough in that realist direction that he supposes natural means physical and objective, which in turn means truer.
I’d like some version of the first alternative, wherein neither perspective is privileged over the other but rather both science and phenomenology are both understand as resting on experience, as two kinds of empirically based investigation. The kind of mutual illumination and exchange that Merleau-Ponty was calling for would work well if they were seen as more or less equal partners. We want a pluralistic notion of truth here and a kind of epistemological pluralism capable of recognizing that third-person observation is not always the appropriate method. We want to know about experiences that can’t be experienced that way.
It’s not hard to imagine that a single individual researcher could become a neurological scientist AND an expert meditator. (I’m thinking of the Dali Lama’s friends in dialogue with the brain scientists at M.I.T.) That person could look at the experience of meditating from the outside and the inside – and that would be a fully empirical view but it would provide a richer, more complex understanding. And I’m certainly not saying there are only two valid perspectives. I would want to limit the number of valid ways in advance because it depends what you’re looking at and why you’re looking at it but surely multiple perspectives are better than one.
Without the metaphysical realism (usually in the form of scientific physicalism), there is not good reason to suppose that the third person perspective is truer than the first-person perspective and it even becomes downright objectionable, mostly for being way too narrow, for excluding all kinds of realities for metaphysical reasons, not scientific or empirical reasons.
Please forgive all the typos. Dinner is ready and I’m hungry.
When I first heard of Husserl’s idea of bracketing (correct me if I am wrong saying it means focusing on a limited domain of unified experience), I thought it nothing more than how any scientist or engineer goes about the business of formulating an equation that can be used to solve a specific problem. It is always an abstraction, and in teaching the formula, the assumptions are always laid out first, so as to say “be sure this is your situation.”
In subjectivity, we experience through the medium of our flesh and bone bodies. These wonders of nature evolved and are adapted to a specific human umvelt (experiential environment – different than that of my dogs or a dolphin). But we know from science that of the full spectrum of all the electromagnetic waves we see, hear and touch; all the chemicals we smell, taste, and touch (including interioception); all the (as yet unknown) forces of gravity (effecting our proprioception), chemical tempering of axions and dendrons (emotions) – in all these activities of our bodies – we are only capable of taking in a small spectrum of what nature affords.
This limited affordance (a Deleuze expression, I think) is natural bracketing. So, ala Husserl, we are already subjectively bracketed, and probably should be very careful when we choose to leave out anything our experience can deliver to us.
This, I just now understand as I type, is what James (and Whitehead) saw: they preached to hold ALL experience as dear. Also, ANW pointed to the importance of those elements of the natural spectra that our five senses do not detect – this he called non-sensory perception. And it too ought not be subject to bracketing, as it is that part of nature that our senses cannot absorb, but nevertheless exerts causal influence (such as our qualia of extensiveness and temporality – Kant’s thinking of how we get space and time).
This was a therapeutic post!
I’m pretty sure that you have the wrong idea about bracketing, Burl. Bracketing isn’t supposed to leave out anything experience delivers but rather focus on experience as such by suspending beliefs in or questions about the external world. As the SEP article on Phenomenology puts it, “We are to practice phenomenology, Husserl proposed, by “bracketing” the question of the existence of the natural world around us. We thereby turn our attention, in reflection, to the structure of our own conscious experience.”
Stanford’s article on Husserl says that he “developed the method of epoché or “bracketing” around 1906. It may be regarded as a radicalization of the methodological constraint, already to be found in Logical Investigations, that any phenomenological description proper is to be performed from a first person point of view, so as to ensure that the respective item is described exactly as is experienced, or intended, by the subject. Now from a first-person point of view, one cannot, of course, decide whether in a case of what one takes to be, say, an act of perception one is currently performing, there actually is an object that one is perceptually confronted with. […] Husserl demanded that in a phenomenological description proper the existence of the object(s) (if any) satisfying the content of the intentional act described must be “bracketed”. That is to say, the phenomenological description of a given act and, in particular, the phenomenological specification of its intentional content, must not rely upon the correctness of any existence assumption concerning the object(s) (if any) the respective act is about. Thus, the epoché has us focus on those aspects of our intentional acts and their contents that do not depend on the existence of a represented object out there in the extra-mental world.”
i hope that’s helpful.
Thanks, man. I was way off.
So epoche is sorta like free association? If so, it really seems like phenomenology is very close to psychology (as Law said in his race ‘cast).
Husserl’s phenomenology was intended as an antidote to mere “psychologism”, as he called it. (It was an attack on his own former view. Frege, the essentialist mathematician scolded Husserl for his “psychologism”. Apparently, he took this criticism to heart and he also took some of Frege’s essentialism on board so that his phenomenology is something like the search for the essential structures of consciousness. Psychology, he thought, was dependent on the natural attitude that he wanted to bracket out of his phenomenology. (Somewhat similarly, William James had to adopt this attitude as a psychologist but attacked it as a philosopher.) …But they both study the mind in some sense and can be counted as rivals in some some sense but they’re not quite in the same discipline and there are different kinds of both.
Free association? I know almost nothing about it and mistook it for a kind of meditation when I first encountered the idea but I’d say it’s more like highly technical and tedious onion peeling, wherein you suppose the onion’s essence can be discovered by this peeling.
“I’d say it’s more like highly technical and tedious onion peeling, wherein you suppose the onion’s essence can be discovered by this peeling.”
That sounds Buddhist – sorta like practices like walking slowly, sand-paintings finished then erased, etc.
Do you know of a vid where someone shows the epoche being applied to get a something, and perhaps contrasting that with psychological technique(s)?
I see better what Husserl meant by bracketing, and how he later sees that it is not so good a thing to bracket, as it shuts out the ‘lived world’. Is this really a surprise revelation to him? Any realist could have helped him out in the first place.
TimMorton on phenomenology vs psychologism and the way to an object-oriented-ontology:
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/search/label/mp3
Dr. Zahavi speaks quietly, but his words are load and clear. The attempt to naturalize phenomenology is “sheer nonsense”, “perverse”, “preposterous”, “fundamentally misguided”, and “flawed”, and would be to “abandon the philosophical transcendental endeavor” and to “cease to be a philosopher”. Strong words indeed! Husserl, of course, fought against the naturalizing misconception of his philosophy his entire career, but apparently to no avail. Quite astonishing, really, considering phenomenology begins with a methodological bracketing of all that is posited by the natural attitude. Naturalizing phenomenology is neither desideratum nor the naive beguiling of language and grammar of a category mistake. Instead, this attempt is a failure to even recognize, let alone break, the ontological chains that bind us all.