Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction The situation of phenomenology

Chapter 1 What is phenomenology?

Phenomenologies
Historical background and foreground
Death and reincarnation
A different phenomenology
Further reading

Chapter 2 Psychologism, transcendentalism and a new naturalizing

Mathematics and psychology
Naturalistic and transcendental accounts
The new naturalism
Some natural ways of using phenomenology
Formalizing phenomenology
Neurophenomenology
Front-loaded phenomenology
Further reading

Chapter 3 Phenomenological methods and some retooling

The natural attitude
The epoché
The phenomenological reduction
Retooling the eidetic reduction
Some questions about the first person perspective and language
Further reading

Chapter 4 Intentionalities
Husserl’s theory of intentionality
Noesis-noema
Enactive intentionality
Further reading

Chapter 5 Embodiment and the hyletic dimension

Hyle: A sensational concept
The critique of Husserl’s theory
Hyle and quale
Embodiment and hyletic experience
Deepening the enactive interpretation
Further reading
Chapter 6 Time and time again
Experiencing time
Husserl’s analysis
The ubiquity of temporality
One more time: Primal impression and enactive structure
Further reading

Chapter 7 Self and first-person perspective

A tradition of disagreements
Prereflective and minimal aspects of self
The sense of ownership
Schizophrenia
Somatoparaphrenia
Rubber hand illusion and whole body displacement
The NASA robot experience
First-person perspective
Further reading

Chapter 8 Lifeworld, action, narrative

The lifeworld
Turning the tables
Action and agency
The narrative scale
Further reading

Chapter 9 Intersubjectivity and second-person perspective

Transcendental intersubjectivity
Being-with others
Standard views of social cognition
Phenomenologial approaches to social cognition
Developmental studies
Behavioral and phenomenological evidence
Evidence from dynamic systems modeling
The narrative scale in social cognition
Revisiting transcendental intersubjectivity
Further reading
Introduction

The situation of phenomenology

Before you started to read this line of text you were doing something else. Perhaps you
just came back from surfing and are sitting on a beach chair; perhaps you have just found
a spot in the shade and you have two hours to sit and read and sip your wine before the
concert starts in Luxembourg Gardens; perhaps you have just made a cup of tea and are
settling into your armchair in front of your warm hearth. Or maybe you’re in a jet airliner
reading this on the latest electronic text-display gadget. In any and all cases you find
yourself already situated, in the middle of something, or having just done something –
pulled up a chair, taken a seat – and you are now at a point where you are reading these
lines.

Phenomenology begins right here, with one of the oldest problems in philosophy,
which is also one of the most contemporary problems in science. It begins with the fact
that we, as agents who must act, and as thinkers who try to get a grasp on what we are
doing, are always already situated in the world. It’s this problem that leads Aristotle to
acquiesce in accepting the inevitable, namely, in this life we can only live in the second-
best way – the imperfect practical life, since the very best form of life, the life of self-
sufficient contemplation is never fully attainable. We are constantly being interrupted by
the demands of our physical nature and the distractions of the world. If by enormous
effort we turn our attention away from food and sex and survival and attempt to study our
rational capacities – our quest for reasons, our natural inclination to know everything (ala
science and gossip) – we are confronted with the very first fact, which is that there is no
very first fact, and that every fact is preceded by other facts, that every fact, every reason,
every thought, every instance of consciousness is already situated in some contingent
circumstance.

In the history of philosophy it is usually thought that phenomenology informed

the later development of existentialism (in thinkers like Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, etc.).
This is certainly true. But it is also true that the original motivation for phenomenology
was itself an existential one – the already being-in-a-situation, the ‘thrownness’, the
‘facticity’ of our existence. This thought – this situation – is one that phenomenology
begins with, and the one it eventually returns to. In between it is like all great
philosophies, attempting to clear a space, to find a place from which it can survey this
very situation of being situated. In this regard phenomenology both succeeds and fails in
interesting ways. It continues to do so, since it is not merely a piece of history or a
tradition, but is something that continues to be practiced.

In this book I’ll take a pragmatic approach to phenomenology. The focus will be
on phenomenology as a philosophical and interdisciplinary practice. Accordingly, my
primary intention is not to rehearse the history of phenomenology as a philosophical
movement (although I will not ignore this completely). Rather I’ll focus on its methods
and what Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), the founding father of phenomenology, called
‘the things themselves’ – the ways in which the world comes to be experienced within the
various situations that make up our lifeworld. The lifeworld (Lebenswelt) is one of
phenomenology’s basic concepts. It’s connected to the fact that we are already situated
in the world. It is the collection of situations in which we find ourselves involved – it is
the world as we live it, not just the world as it opens up in front of us as perceiving
subjects, but the world which is at the same time something already there operating as
the meaningful background for all of our actions and interactions. The lifeworld is the
world we take for granted, rather than the world as we study it through science, or
represent it through art. The lifeworld, in this sense, is not the world that we take as
object, as something distinct from ourselves, but is rather a specification of our existence.

In a world where there is no very first fact, there are several factors that
nonetheless seem basic and that constitute our human way of being. Let’s call these
‘primary facts’ and note one of these primary facts about the lifeworld (and therefore
about out existence) that will clear away at least one serious misconception about
phenomenology. The lifeworld is, from the start of our existence, already populated with
others. Before we have a chance to think about this – before we have a chance to
theorize, philosophize or ‘phenomenologize’, before we have a chance to stake out a
position of any sort – our capabilities for so doing have already been shaped by other
humans who have been with us even before our birth, who have been talking to us even
before we could respond, and who have been interacting with us even before we could act
on our own. This primary fact, and the natural attitude that we take toward it – that is,
our taking it for granted – is the beginning point for phenomenology.

If we keep this in mind, and if we acknowledge that our experience is already

shaped by this basic phenomenon of intersubjectivity, which makes it impossible to
obtain anything like a presuppositionless starting point for our philosophical
considerations, then we will avoid certain misconceptions about phenomenology. One
such misconception is that the practice of phenomenology leads to a kind of solipsism in
which we find ourselves entirely wrapped up in a reflective and lonely consciousness.
This is simply not the case. Solipsism would only be a problem if one thought of
consciousness (our experience of the world) as an object in the world rather than as an
opening to (or disclosure of) the world. Phenomenology, however, shows that we are not
locked up in some object, or reducible to some objective entity – a brain, or an organism
regarded as a purely physical thing, or a set of strictly functional relations. Rather, we
are, as Heidegger puts it, in-the-world as agents engaged in pragmatically and socially
defined projects.

Phenomenology, as something that is practiced, as both a method and a

philosophy, has a certain starting point and goes in a certain direction. To say that it is a
philosophical practice, however, is not to say that it is a way of life, in the way one might
think that being a Buddhist, or a yogi, or a movie star is a way of life. As a philosophical
practice, it is an approach taken by philosophers in their philosophical considerations, not
an attitude taken up in their everyday life. That phenomenology makes a start and goes
in a certain direction, taking a certain perspective on its subject matter, means that
phenomenology on its own is not in a position to give a full and exhaustive account of
experience. It is not, for example, able to provide causal explanations of subpersonal
(e.g., neuronal) processes that may underpin some aspects of experience. In this regard,
however, phenomenology can play a productive role as part of a scientific and
interdisciplinary practice. As a method, it has been used not just by philosophers, but
also by researchers in a variety of disciplines that pursue both naturalistic and qualitative
investigations. Recent uses of phenomenology in non- or extra-philosophical contexts,
however, are controversial, but also, as I will try to show, productive, not only for
science, but for a continuing reinvigoration of phenomenology.

Some of these controversies go back to the beginnings of phenomenology, to the

situation in which Husserl found motivation to develop a method that was set against
naturalistic and psychologistic explanations. As we’ll see, however, challenging the
relativism involved in scientism does not mean that phenomenology is opposed to the
practice of the natural and social sciences. Rather, phenomenology is opposed to the
reductionistic tendencies of science, and precisely the claims that are sometimes made by
scientists who, ignoring certain lessons learned in the long history of philosophy, suggest
that one science can provide the full and complete explanation of everything. We
sometimes find such claims being made when a particular science first emerges or when
it has had an impressive round of successes. In the history of such things, historicism is
followed by economism, which is followed by psychologism, and so forth. Most recently
neurologism is frequently put forward as the way to explain it all. The recent
neurologizing of disciplines – neuroaesthetics, neuroeconomics, neurophilosophy, and
even neurophenomenology – can go either way; in some cases it looks like neuroscience
will colonize the target discipline (aesthetics, economics, philosophy, or phenomenology,
etc.) and its subject matter; in other cases the discipline at stake has the potential to
modulate any strong claim about what neuroscience can explain on its own. These are
broader issues that I won’t try to resolve here, however.

Chapter outline

In each chapter I will, first, show what in the classical phenomenological accounts
continues to be defining for phenomenology and relevant to contemporary issues, and
second, show how recent developments in practical and scientific uses of
phenomenology are helping to undermine the reductionistic tendencies of science and
at the same time helping to redefine phenomenology. Most chapters, therefore, start
out with a review of classical phenomenology as we find it explicated in the 20th-
century writings of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others. The
chapters then transition to more contemporary, 21st-century applications of
phenomenology, especially in contexts that involve empirical investigations of
cognition.1

What is phenomenology? In Chapter 1 I try to answer this question by reviewing

several definitions. The answer is complicated by the fact that there is more than one
version of phenomenology, and I provide some historical context for understanding this
complexity. Chapter 2 looks back at the classical discussions of psychologism, and the

1
In this respect, this volume offers something different from some of the recent introductions to
phenomenology (e.g., Moran 2000; Sokolowski 2000), and something similar to but completely different
from an older book with the same title, Phenomenology, written by Jean-Francois Lyotard (1991, first
published in 1954). Lyotard also looked at classical concepts in phenomenology and then tried to apply
them to issues that were of great contemporary concern. In his case, the concern was social and political
thought in France (especially Marxism), which is not at all my concern in this book. I focus on questions
that pertain to philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences. For a more comprehensive account of
classical phenomenology I highly recommend Moran’s introduction.
concept of phenomenology as a transcendental enterprise. It also looks forward to
prospects for naturalizing phenomenology. In Chapter 3 I present the basic toolbox of
phenomenological methods – the epoché, phenomenological reduction and eidetic
variation, and I suggest a 21st-century, high-tech retooling of the latter.

Chapter 4 starts to dig into the basic concepts of phenomenological philosophy.

Here I show how the concept of intentionality was, and continues to be central for
understanding phenomenology and several contemporary debates about the nature of
consciousness and the mind. In Chapter 5 I suggest that even one of the more obscure
concepts found in classical phenomenology, the notion of hyletic data, has direct and
important relevance for contemporary discussions of embodied and enactive conceptions
of cognition. Chapter 6 presents Husserl’s classic analysis of the temporal structure of
experience, and introduces distinctions between elemental, integrative, and narrative time
scales that are relevant to analyses found in later chapters. I also offer an enactive-
phenomenological interpretation of temporality.

In the final set of chapters I try to show how phenomenology can help us sort out
issues that pertain to more existential aspects of our personal and interpersonal
experiences. In Chapter 7 I review phenomenological theories about self and self-
consciousness. I then look specifically at how the concept of first-person perspective can
survive a number of pathological and experimental situations even as other aspects of
selfhood are disrupted. Chapter 8 explores concepts of intention formation and action on
the narrative scale, relating these concepts to the phenomenologial concept of lifeworld.
The final chapter, Chapter 9, delivers on certain promissory notes made about
intersubjectivity in previous chapters. Considerations about intersubjectivity are related
to questions about method, the nature of consciousness, action and self. The
phenomenology of intersubjectivity, however, stands on its own as an important topic
related to contemporary debates about social cognition.