Abstract
The mind-body relation or, more particularly, the mind-brain relation 1 has been a perennial puzzle for philosophers—how can things so different be intimately related? Husserl dealt with the mind-brain relation in Section 63 of Ideen II, “Psychophysischer Parallelismus and Wechselwirkung,” 2 where he gave a critique of psychophysical parallelism. For Husserl, the mind-brain relation is to be understood not as a material or metaphysical relation, but as a relation between the presented sense or significance of two varieties of appearances. Husserl’s account in this section will be examined and the following points will be discussed: (1) Husserl’s argument that the significance of brain states is basic to the full sense of a mind operating in an objective world; (2) Husserl’s view that a strict parallelism between the psyche and brain is an eidetic impossibility; (3) Husserl’s treatment of these questions, in so far as he raises but does not adequately resolve the issue, whether states of consciousness precede or follow brain states; (4) Husserl’s somewhat Cartesian failure to distinguish the phenomenological priority of consciousness from the metaphysical question of the possibility of an existent mind apart from a body.
“The brain and the mind constitute a unity, and we may leave to the philosophers, who have separated them in thought, the task of putting them together again.” Lord Brain
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For the sake of ease, the term “mind-brain” rather than the term “mind-central nervous system” will be employed. The reader should understand the first to be used here with the broader meaning of the second. Further, the term “mind” is used broadly to encompass much of the sense of Geist, Psyche and Seele. In my translations, though, when Geist is rendered as mind, the German is given in brackets. Further, in this general treatment of the mind-brain relation, the subtle but important distinctions between Geist and Seele or Psyche will not be considered, The issues basic to the mind-brain relation are independent of these distinctions.
E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie and phänomenologischen Philosophie,Buch II, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1952. This will be referred to as Ideen II. All translations of Ideen II, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften and die transzendentale Phänomenologie and Erste Philosophie are mine. Though other passages in Husserl’s work touch on the mind-brain relations, only this section will be treated in any detail by this essay.
“At the phenomenological standpoint (phänomenologische Einstellung), acting on lines of general principle, we tie up the performance of all such cogitative theses, i.e., we ‘place in brackets’ what has been carried out, ‘we do not associate these theses’ with our new inquiries; instead of living in them and carrying them out, we carry out acts of reflexion directed towards them, and these we apprehend as the absolute Being which they are. We now live entirely in such acts of the second level, whose datum is the infinte field of absolute experiences—the basic field of Phenomenology.” E. Husserl, Ideas, tr. by W. R.Boyce Gibson, George Allen, London, 1958, p. 155. German in brackets my addition.
“Reality and world, here used, are just the titles for certain valid unities of meaning (Sinn),namely, unities of ‘meaning’ related to certain organizations of pure absolute consciousness which dispense meaning and show forth its validity in certain essentially fixed, specific ways.” Ibid.,p. 168. German in brackets my addition. Note, in this paper “sense” is used to designate “presented meaning.” Also, for the sake of brevity, “mind” and “body” when used in the context of Husserl’s opinions, stand for “the sense of mind” or “the sense of body”, respectively. The same also holds for Husserl’s treatment of the central nervous system, etc.; the investigation is in short phenomenological.
“It is accepted that it is, thus, as it happens in reality: my organism is a system of sense organs, related to the central organ C. The occurrence of sensations and sense phantasmata are dependent upon it.” Husserl, Ideen II,p. 290.
Ibid.,p.342.
Ibid., p. 289.
The reader should be advised that the relations between strata of meaning indicate founding-founded relations or relations between senses or meanings, such that one is prior, relatively primordial, or founding with respect to the founded sense or meaning which presupposes the latter. This is the meaning to be given to phrases such as “prior” or “founding-founded” in this essay. As Husserl states towards the end of Ideas I, “These inquiries are essentially determined by the different formations and strata in the constituting of the Thing within the limits of the primordial empirical consciousness. Each formation and each stratum in it has this character, that it constitutes a unity of its own, which on its side is a necessary connecting-link in the full constituting of the Thing.” Husserl, Ideas, tr. by W. R. Boyce Gibson, The Macmillan Co., New York, 1958, p. 419.
Husserl, Ideen II,pp. 290–291.
W. Penfield, The Excitable Cortex in Conscious Man, Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, Ill., 1967.
R. Heath, “Pleasure and Brain Activity in Man,” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 151, 1972, pp. 3–18; C. Moan and R. Heath, “Septal Stimulation for the Initiation of Heterosexual Behavior in a Homosexual Male,” Journal of Behavioral Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 3, 1972, pp. 23–30.
E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, 2nd Ed., Ed. by W. Biemel, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1962, p. 220.
Husserl, Ideen II,pp. 235, 286, 374.
Ibid.,Sec. 61, p. 290.
“It is, indeed, an absolutely unquestionable truth that there are essential laws of consciousness.” Ibid.,p. 293.
Ibid.,p. 293.
Ibid.,p. 293.
“1) Ontology constructs the Logos of a possible world as such or, rather, it is the science of the possible forms, of the disjunctively necessary forms of possible worlds which could definitively obtain. 2) The factual given world demands an ontology of this world, the determination of the Logos that belongs to it. It requires a determination of the factual, ontological form which is a condition for the possibility of its definitive being.” E. Husserl, Erste Philosophie, Zweiter Teil, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1959, p. 213.
“The natural object man is not a subject, a person, but every such object accords with a person. Thus, we can also say that every such object ‘implies’ a person….” Husserl, Ideen II, pp. 287–288.
Ibid., p. 294.
Ibid.,p. 294.
Ibid.,p. 294.
Selected Writings of John Hughlings Jackson,ed. by James Taylor, Staples Press, London, 1958. See the unpublished M.D. thesis of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Tulane, 1972, “John Hughlings Jackson and the Concept of Cerebral Localization.”
Husserl, Ideen II,pp. 295–296.
Ibid.,p. 295.
Ibid.,p. 291.
Ibid.,p. 295.
E. Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. by M. Heidegger, tr. by J. S. Churchill, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Ind., 1966, p. 164.
E. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins,ed. by R. Boehm, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1966, p. 287, my translation.
Husserl, Ideen II, p. 296.
Ibid., p. 296.
Husserl, Die Krisis,p. 478.
Husserl, Ideen II,p. 294.
E. Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, ed. by W. Biomel, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1968, p. 109.
Husserl Ideen II,p. 297.
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Engelhardt, H.T. (1977). Husserl and the Mind-Brain Relation. In: Ihde, D., Zaner, R.M. (eds) Interdisciplinary Phenomenology. Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-6893-7_3
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