To FIS Colleagues,
There are common threads running through communications from Mark, Loet,
Jerry, and Marcus that I would like to address. I thank them for their
concerns and the issues they raise. I thank Plamen too for his response,
specifically for upholding the value of phenomenology, though
disagreeing with him in his giving prominence to Merleau-Ponty as a
phenomenologist. I would like to comment on that point of disagreement
first.
(1): I just wrote an invited essay on Merleau-Ponty for an Oxford book
on Phenomenology and Psychopathology. I noted first off that
"Merleau-Ponty’s writings in psychopathology were both exceptional and
non-exceptional. They were exceptional in bringing scientific research
into phenomenology. Husserl had written from time to time on the
abnormal—for example, in Ideas II, Husserl considers what transpires
when a particular sense organ no longer functions normally while others
continue to do so (Husserl 1989, pp. 71ff.)—but he did not delve into
the psychopathological. Heidegger too might be cited: the ‘they’ might
be viewed as metaphysically abnormal, the ‘they’ being those who repress
recognition of their own mortality, who see death as happening only to
others, and whom Heidegger deems ‘inauthentic’. Merleau-Ponty, in
contrast, delved into contemporary studies of psychopathology, in
particular, the extensive studies of Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb. He
also based his own psychopathological analyses to a large extent on the
writings of Sigmund Freud even as he diverged from them. Thus one might
say that he devoted himself assiduously to available contemporary
literature in the then burgeoning fields of neuropsychiatry and
psychoanalysis."
More of Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, and Psychopathology perhaps at
another time. For a later time too, perhaps, Merleau-Ponty’s affiliating
himself with biologist Jakob von Uexküll, undoubtedly because von
Uexküll’s conjunction of animal and world in “functional tones”
connected with Merelau-Ponty’s own conjunction of seer/seen and
touching/touched, and possibly also because Merleau-Ponty’s disavowal of
Darwin’s “origin of species” i.e., Darwin’s theory of natural selection,
straightaway agreed with von Uexküll’s disavowal of Darwin’s “origin of
species.”
What is of preeminent note here is that Merleau-Ponty never engaged in
the actual practice of phenomenology. He thereby threw away the backbone
of phenomenology, namely, its methodology. Phenomenological methodology
is the topic warranting serious address here in our discussion. I’ve
mentioned it in earlier responses but would like to do so here in fuller
detail.
(2): A Clarification of Phenomenology, Specifically in Terms of
Methodology.
Bracketing is only the beginning! Making the familiar strange is only
the first step! The “plunge” into a bona fide phenomenological
investigation” that I mentioned in my ‘response to Salthe’s response’ is
essential to getting at the foundational meaning and nature of any
phenomenon. In short, in turning “to the things themselves,” we
distinguish noesis and noema: consciousness and the object as meant.
The following remarks concerning phenomenological methodology appear in
the opening of an article that will appear in an edited book on
phenomenology and aesthetic experience:
"Phenomenological methodology in its original Husserlian formulation was
in the service of uncovering sense-making, that is, in the service of
uncovering the faculties and processes—the perceptual-cognitive
structures-- by which we come to know the world. How indeed do we come
to know the world? How does perception lead to knowledge? Husserlian
phenomenology is anchored in a strict and rigorous methodology that
requires practice and patience. It is a discipline in the dual sense of
being both a schooled practice and a branch of knowledge. Phenomenology
is thus not something one turns to and does on a lazy Sunday afternoon
nor some general term to be used indiscriminately, as in articles on
bodily awareness or attention that take the body as a ready-made adult
body that already knows the world, in particular, an already learned
body that has learned how to move itself.”
In my original FIS response, I wrote, “we begin by bracketing’ all
assumptions and beliefs, and, in Husserl's words, turn ‘to the things
themselves’." I should have said “.. . AND THEN, in Husserl’s words,
turn ‘to the things themselves’.” In short, making the familiar strange
is only the first step. The “plunge” into a bona fide phenomenological
investigation” that I mentioned in my ‘response to Salthe’s response’ is
essential. It is requisite to understanding the nature, structure,
origin, and meaning of any phenomenon.
A fundamental and sterling example of the plunge and what it uncovers is
evident in Husserl’s meticulously detailed study of meaning. Meaning is
constituted on the basis of horizons, of sedimentations, of active and
passive syntheses, of internal time consciousness, and more. Each of
these aspects of meaning warrants study. I might note in this context
that though no specific book was devoted to horizons or to
sedimentations, for example, Husserl’s Analyses Concerning Passive and
Active Synthesis runs over 600 pages.
(3): In this context of bona fide phenomenological analysis, I would
like to ask the following question:
Might a phenomenological analysis of information be possible?
Is information like a sensation, for example? Is it “news” and in that
sense “spatially pointillist and temporally punctual” as I have
described a sensation? What is the actual experience of information? As
a further example: If neural networks are taken as information networks,
do those informational networks constitute informational repertoires and
do those informational repertoires correlate with what in lived-through,
experiential terms we call habits?
What is wanted in a phenomenological analysis of information is not a
definition of information but a full-blown uncovering of the nature,
structure, origin, and meaning of information. Would a phenomenological
analysis of information prove as insightful and complex as Husserl’s
phenomenological analysis of meaning?
I add the following: I confess that I am not a subscriber to
naturalizing phenomenology, but I am a subscriber to finding and
detailing complementarities between the sciences and phenomenology,
precisely as I described in my FIS article.
(4): In the actual practice of phenomenology, one comes to what I have
termed “the challenge of languaging experience”-- see last chapter
titled same in The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader. I quote
from that chapter:
"The idea that language names things and that its function is to name
things gives precedence to stable items in the world, not to dynamic
events experienced in a directly felt sense by sentient living bodies.
Given this idea, language rightly preserves it function by adhering to
things that are reified or reifiable and that consequently stay in
place, and that moreover continue to stay in place or remain the
integral ‘things’ they are even as they move, as waves rolling or wind
blowing.
I quote a variety of people in documenting the challenge: infant
psychiatrist and clinical psychologist Daniel Stern, Jean Piaget and
Bärbel Inhelder, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Aristotelian scholar
Arthur Peck, Carl Jung. I cite others too, including Husserl and
paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, in the context of showing how
the challenge of languaging experience is clearly illuminated, even
crystallized, in experience itself. Though I did not quote him in the
chapter, an observation of Husserl is telling. In attempting to pinpoint
the metaphysical reality of “flux” in The Phenomenology of Inner Time
Consciousness, Husserl states, “In the lived experience of actuality we
have the primal source-point and a continuity of moments of
reverberation [Nachhallmomenten]. For all this names are lacking” (p.
100).
With reference to (3) above: How would one language the nature,
structure, origin, and meaning of information—or in briefer terms, how
would one language the experience of information? Obvious perhaps is
that whatever the scientific concept of information might be, that
concept is generated in experience and that experience warrants study
and illumination.
I might add in this context that philosopher Dan Lloyd won an award from
the fMRI Institute in New Hampshire several years back for the most
innovative use of fMRI data. Lloyd used it in conjunction with Husserl’s
analysis of inner time consciousness.
(5): The following comments are in relation to Schutz’s statement quoted
by Loet and commented upon by Loet.
The quote from Schutz: “ As long as man is born from woman,
intersubjectivity and the we-relationship will be the foundation for all
other categories of human existence.” Loet’s comment: “Schutz wishes to
bring the body back into the reflection, whereas Husserl’s position is
more abstract.”
I would add two comments:
1. Man is born from woman = intersubjectivity. What of woman born from
woman? What about simply birth, specifically avian and mammalian birth =
intersubjectivity insofar as the newborn is parent-dependent, commonly
female-dependent, but in some instances shared, i.e.,
female/male-dependent?
2. Re Husserl’s position being “more abstract” in relation to the body:
Herewith simply one of a multitude of possible examples one finds in
Husserl: “The Body is, as Body, filled with the soul through and
through. Each movement of the Body is full of soul, the coming and
going, the standing and sitting, the walking and dancing, etc. Likewise,
so is every human performance, every human production” (Ideas II, p.
252).
With respect specifically to a “we-relationship,” see, for example,
Cartesian Meditations, p. 124:
"What I actually see is not a sign and not a mere analogue, a depiction
in any natural sense of the word; on the contrary, it is someone else.
And what is grasped with actual originariness in this seeing—namely that
corporeality over there, or rather only one aspect of its surface—is the
Other’s body itself. . . . According to the sense-constitution involved
in perceiving someone else, what is grasped originaliter is the body of
a psyche essentially inaccessible to me originaliter, and the two are
comprised in the unity of one psychophysical reality.”
The unity of the reality that Husserl describes is a matter of pairing,
a phenomenon he describes earlier.
Of note also is the following in the Fifth Meditation in Cartesian
Meditations, p. 154:
Thus the investigations concerning the transcendental constitution of a
world, which we have roughly indicated in these meditations, are
precisely the beginning of a radical clarification of the sense and
origin (or of the sense in the consequence of the origin) of the
concepts: world, Nature, space, time, psychophysical being, man psyche,
animate organism, social community, culture, and so forth.
Husserl’s concern was precisely with how the world, the world that
definitively includes Others, thus bodies and we-relationships, is
constituted, thus how we come to the concepts, judgements, and meanings
we do. His habit of beginning over and over from the beginning testifies
to a relentless spirit of investigation and at the same time to a
discerning critical perspective and to an awareness of the vastness of
his basic concern: how we put the world together, how consciousness and
object as meant, how soul and body, how I and other, and so on, and so
on, constitute in each instance a distinctive psychophysical reality
warranting exacting study grounded in a rigorous and exacting
phenomenological methodology. That methodology, as pointed out in my FIS
paper, is not different from scientific methodology in terms of
verification. As I noted in that paper, findings in both areas may be
“amended, elaborated, questioned on specific grounds, and so on. Just as
in science one replicates by following the exact method, so in
phenomenology.” I also added a caveat: “one cannot replicate, amend,
elaborate, question, and so on, what one has not oneself ventured to
examine following the same strict methodology.”
Cheers,
Maxine
_______________________________________________
Fis mailing list
Fis@listas.unizar.es
http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
