I've paragraphed (and removed the text line numbers from) the first few pages of the Zahavi text I posted earlier and re-post that material in readable form below. I'll continue to improve the readability of the rest of the extract I posted after the news.
Phenomenology and the project of naturalization
DAN ZAHAVI The Danish National Research Foundation, Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (E-mail:
zahavi@cfs.ku.dk) 34
Abstract. In recent years, more and more people have started talking about the necessity of reconciling phenomenology with the project of naturalization. Is it possible to bridge the gap between phenomenological analyses and naturalistic models of consciousness? Is it possible to naturalize phenomenology? Given the transcendental philosophically motivated anti-aturalism found in many phenomenologists such a naturalization proposal might seem doomed from the very start, but in this paper I will examine and evaluate some possible alternatives.
Key words: anti-naturalism, consciousness, naturalization, phenomenology, transcendental
EXTRACT
". . . In my view, it is a serious misunderstanding to suggest that Husserl’s opposition to naturalism is mainly based on his so-called scientific motives, i.e. on his rejection of the attempt to mathematically formalize the structures of experience. Husserl’s opposition to naturalism is not primarily based on what he takes to be the morphological structures of experience. Rather, it is mainly based on a number of philosophical reasons, or to be more exact, on a number of transcendental philosophical reasons, which are more or less ignored by the editors [
of a 1999 volume of essays titled Naturalizing Phenomenology, ed. Jean Petitot et al]. I am here mainly thinking of Husserl’s rejection of objectivism and of his very idea of a transcendental subjectivity.4
It would, of course, be something of a slight exaggeration to claim that the notion of transcendental subjectivity is universally accepted in contemporary philosophy, but in my view much of the criticism is based on something that approaches a complete misunderstanding of the term. Often transcendental subjectivity is taken to be some kind of other-worldly, ghostly, homunculus. Confronted with such ignorance, it is crucial to demythologize the notion.
The empirical subject and the transcendental subject are not two different subjects, but rather two different ways of conceiving one and the same subject. It is a difference between being aware of oneself as a causally determined known object, as a part of the empirical world, and being aware of oneself as a knowing subject, as—to paraphrase Wittgenstein—the limit of the world. In short, it is the difference between being aware of oneself as an object in the world, and being aware of oneself as a subject for the world. As such it is not a notion that is completely foreign to contemporary analytical philosophy. As Thomas Nagel acknowledges in a footnote in
The View from Nowhere his own reflections on the first-person perspective (what he, somewhat paradoxically, calls the “objective self”) has a good deal in common with Husserl’s discussion of the transcendental ego (Nagel 1986, 62).
Part of Husserl’s ambition is to provide an adequate phenomenological description of consciousness. He is not concerned with finding room for consciousness within an already well established materialistic or naturalistic framework. In fact, the very attempt to do the latter, thereby assuming that consciousness is merely yet another object in the world, might very well prevent one from disclosing let alone clarifying some of the most interesting aspects of consciousness, including the true epistemic and ontological significance of the first-person perspective. For Husserl, the problem of consciousness should not be addressed on the background of an unquestioned objectivism, but in connection with overarching transcendental considerations. Frequently, the assumption has been that a better understanding of the physical world will allow us to understand consciousness better and rarely, that a better understanding of consciousness might allow for a better understanding of what it means for something to be real. However, one of the reasons why the theory of intentionality has often assumed a central position in phenomenological thinking is exactly because a study of the world-directedness of consciousness has been claimed to provide us with insights into not only the structure of subjectivity, but also into the nature of objectivity. That something like a conscious appropriation of the world is possible does not merely tell us something about consciousness, but also about the world. But of course, this way of discussing consciousness, as the constitutive dimension, as the place in which the world can reveal and articulate itself, is quite different from any attempt to treat it naturalistically as merely yet another (psychical or physical) object in the world. To rephrase: Phenomenology is not concerned with empirical consciousness, but—to use the traditional term—with transcendental subjectivity. Thus, what needs to be emphasized is that phenomenology aims at disclosing a new, non-psychological dimension of consciousness. As Husserl writes in the early lecture course Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie from 1906–7: “If consciousness ceases to be a human or some other empirical consciousness, then the word loses all psychological meaning, and ultimately one is led back to something absolute that is neither physical nor psychical being in a natural scientific sense. However, in the phenomenological perspective this is the case throughout the field of givenness. It is precisely the apparently so obvious thought, that everything given is either physical or psychical that must be abandoned” (Husserl 1984b, 242).
Phenomenology has affinities with psychology in so far as both disciplines are interested in consciousness. But as Husserl also points out, although the distinction between phenomenology on the one hand and psychology and natural science on the other can be difficult to draw, and might at first even appear as an unnecessarily subtle distinction, we are in fact confronted with an absolute crucial nuance that is fundamental to the very possibility of doing philosophy (Husserl 1984b, 211).
Husserl takes psychology to be an empirical science about the nature of the psyche, and therefore to be a science about psychical life understood as a real occurrent entity in the natural world (Husserl 1987, 75). In contrast, phenomenology is not empirical, but eidetic and a priori. And even more importantly, phenomenology is not interested in consciousness as a natural occurrence. Phenomenology seeks to describe the experiential structures in their phenomenal purity and does not psychologize them, that is, it does not objectify and naturalize them (Husserl 1987, 117). Although phenomenology and psychology differ (and to suggest that phenomenology is in reality merely a kind of descriptive psychology is a momentous error) this does not make them unrelated. Not surprisingly, Husserl characterizes phenomenology (a phenomenology not misled by naturalistic prejudices, as he adds) as a foun- dation and presupposition for a truly scientific psychology (Husserl 1984b, 251 383–384; 1987, 39). Every phenomenological analysis of conscious life is of pertinence to psychology, and can through a change of attitude be transformed into a psychological insight.
The problem at hand cannot only be phrased in terms of a distinction between empirical subjectivity and transcendental subjectivity, but also in terms of the contrast between positive science and (transcendental) philosophy. A traditional way of viewing this contrast has been by saying that the positive sciences are so absorbed in their investigation of the natural (or social/cultural) world that they do not pause to reflect upon their own presuppositions and conditions of possibility. For Husserl, natural science is (philosophically) naive. Its subject matter, nature, is simply taken for granted. Reality is assumed to be out there, waiting to be discovered and investigated. And the aim of natural science is to acquire a strict and objectively valid knowledge about this given realm. But this attitude must be contrasted with the properly philosophical attitude, which critically questions the very foundation of experience and scientific thought (Husserl 1987, 13–14). Philosophy is a discipline which doesn’t simply contribute to or augment the scope of our positive knowledge, but which instead investigates the basis of this knowledge and asks how it is possible. Positivism has denied the existence of a particular philosophical method, and has claimed that philosophy should employ the same method that all strict sciences are using, the natural scientific method. But for Husserl this line of reasoning merely displays that one has failed to understand what philosophy is all about. Philosophy has its own aims and methodological requirements; requirements that for Husserl are epitomized in his notion of phenomenological reduction (Husserl 1984b, 238–239). For Husserl, the reduction is meant to make us maintain the radical difference between philosophical reflection and all other modes of thought. As he writes in 1907: “Thus, the ‘phenomenological reduction’ is simply the requirement always to abide by the sense of the proper investigation, and not to confuse episte- mology with a natural scientific (objectivistic) investigation” (Husserl 1984b, 281 410). Every positive science rests upon a field of givenness or evidence that is presupposed but not investigated by the sciences themselves. In order to make this dimension accessible, a new type of inquiry is called for, a type of inquiry which “precedes all natural knowledge and science and points in a quite different direction than natural science” (Husserl 1984b, 176). To thematize the objects in terms of their givenness, validity, and intelligibility calls for a reflective stance quite unlike the one needed in the positive sciences. This, of course, is one reason why the phenomenological attitude has frequently been described as an unnatural direction of thought (cf. Husserl 1984a, 14). But to describe phenomenology as unnatural is of course also to deny any straightforward continuity between philosophy and natural science.
Given this outlook, it has been customary to consider philosophy as an autonomous discipline whose transcendental investigation of the condition of possibility for knowledge and experience takes place in a sphere which is separate from that of the sciences. But in this case, the very proposal to naturalize phenomenology must strike one as being fundamentally misguided. In a recent article—which actually defends the project of naturalization— Murray has nicely captured this traditional critical attitude:
"[P]henomenological descriptions and neurobiological explanations can not be viewed as a set of mutually enriching methodological options which, together, will allow us to build up a picture of cognition, aspect by aspect, as it were, because the two kinds of accounts have an entirely different status. For in seeking to lay bare the fundamental structures of experience, phenomenology is also seeking to establish the foundations of any possible knowledge. Consequently, phenomenological accounts cannot simply be conjoined to neurobiological ones, because the ultimate purpose of the former is to ascertain the validity of the latter. In other words, to suppose that naturalising phenomenology is simply a matter of overcoming some traditional ontological divide is to fail to see that the difference between phenomenology and neurobiology is not just a difference with respect to the objects of their investigations, but a fundamental difference in their theoretical orientation – a difference which is taken to be typical of philosophical and scientific investigations in general. For while the neuroscientist allegedly takes for granted the possibility of understanding the world, the philosopher believes there is a need for some kind of preliminary investigation into how such an understanding might arise. Consequently, a phenomenologist who em- braced naturalisation might be seen as having, in effect, ceased to be a philosopher. (Murray 314 2002, 30–31).
Where does this leave us? Is the entire naturalization proposal doomed from the very start due to its misunderstanding of what phenomenology is all about? It might look that way, but in the rest of my paper I will briefly sketch some possible ways out. . . . ."
At this point, though I'll continue paragraphing and removing line numbers from the text I copied above, I'd suggest that everyone go to the link and read the paper there.
