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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 April 2013
In this paper I analyse the role of naturalism and objectivism in everyday life according to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Whereas Husserl attributes the naturalistic attitude mainly to science, he defines the objectivist attitude as a naiveté which equally applies to the natural attitude of everyday life. I analyse the relationship between the natural attitude and lived experience and show Husserl's hesitation regarding the task of phenomenology in describing the lived experience of everyday life, since he considers this experience to be too objectivistic. I use Merleau-Ponty's work to argue that objectivism is an essential characteristic of lived experience and that phenomenology should therefore find ways to integrate it into its descriptions while simultaneously suggesting ways to overcome its rigidity in order to renew perception. I finally propose that the project of the naturalisation of phenomenology could be one of the ways to connect lived experience to the objectivism of everyday life.
1 Image reproduced here by permission of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
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18 Husserl, Crisis, 6.
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31 PhP, xvi. See also PhP, 280.
32 PhP, 57, translation modified.
33 ‘True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world’ (PhP, xxiii). See also Dorfman, E., Réapprendre à voir le monde: Merleau-Ponty face au miroir lacanien (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007)Google Scholar.
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35 PhP, 128–130.
36 PhP, 129.
37 PhP, 213–214.
38 For a more detailed analysis of the role of pathology in Phenomenology of Perception see Dorfman, E., ‘Normality and Pathology: Towards a Therapeutic Phenomenology’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 36 (2005): 23–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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41 PhP, 43. Translation modified.
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44 For a similar idea, yet without my emphasis on the truth of the natural and naturalistic attitudes, see Zahavi, Dan, ‘Naturalized Phenomenology’, in Gallagher, S. and Schmicking, D. (eds.), Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 3–20Google Scholar.
