Abstract
This paper aims to address the relevance of the natural sciences for transcendental phenomenology, that is, the issue of naturalism. The first section distinguishes three varieties of naturalism and corresponding forms of naturalization: an ontological one, a methodological one (with strong and weak variants), and an epistemological one (also with strong and weak variants). In light of these distinctions, in the second section, I examine the main projects aiming to “naturalize phenomenology”: neurophenomenology, front-loaded phenomenology, and formalized approaches to phenomenology. The third section then considers the commitments of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology with respect to the three varieties of naturalism previously discussed. I argue that Husserl rejected strong and weak forms of epistemological naturalism, strong methodological naturalism, and ontological naturalism. The fourth section presents the argument that Husserl endorsed a weak, conditional form of methodological naturalism. This point is illustrated with Husserl’s proposal of “somatology,” a natural science apt to study the corporeality of the lived body. The final section addresses the complementarity and respective limits of the transcendental phenomenological and the natural scientific frameworks. I argue that, on Husserl’s account, the function of transcendental phenomenology with respect to the natural sciences is to provide them with an epistemological foundation and an ontological clarification. I suggest that certain natural sciences can be understood, within the transcendental phenomenological framework, as “sciences of constitution,” that is, as sciences investigating the contribution of real structures acting as conditions of possibility for the occurrence of certain kinds of comprehensive unities in lived experience.
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Notes
Of late, this has been an active field of study and has generated a substantial literature. Recent book-length illustrations of the attempt to bridge phenomenology and cognitive science include: Kiverstein and Wheeler (2012); Edelman, Fekete, and Zach (2012); Rowlands (2010); Gallagher and Schmicking (2010); Berthoz and Petit (2008); Thompson (2007); Gallagher and Zahavi (2007); Wheeler (2005); Petitot et al. (1999a). This is not an exhaustive list. I shall use the singular “cognitive science” (rather than the plural form “the cognitive sciences”) throughout to refer to the cluster of disciplines working on cognition, including cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, etc.
A prima facie objection to my account might consist in arguing that the story presented here is of strictly historical or exegetical interest. The claim that contemporary naturalist epistemology might have any interest in transcendental phenomenology is something that itself needs to be justified. An independent argument ought to be made to establish this significance. I agree. That task, however, exceeds the scope of this paper. My aim here is only to evaluate the relevance of the natural sciences for Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological project. I go on the assumption that the contributions of phenomenology are relevant to contemporary naturalist positions.
This distinction is reminiscent of Ayala’s distinction between three domains in which questions of reductionism arise (see Ayala 1974). I am also indebted to Zahavi’s (2010) discussion of metaphysical and methodological naturalism. The varieties of naturalism I describe in what follows are not mutually exclusive, and they can be combined in various ways.
A few examples of epistemological naturalism include P. M. Churchland (1989; 2007), P. S. Churchland (1986), Giere (1990; 1999; 2010), and Giere et al. (2005). These projects are intellectually indebted to the pioneering work of Quine, who first proposed a naturalized epistemology in the contemporary setting. In “Epistemology naturalized” Quine (1969), Quine first argued that the proper construal of contemporary epistemology is “as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science” (Quine 1969, 82). Given the failure of logical empiricism, notably of Carnap’s project of rational reconstruction exemplified by his Carnap (1928), to ground and ultimately justify the doctrinal (i.e. truth- and justification-related) aspects of scientific investigation, the best course of action for philosophy, if it is still to attempt to ground knowledge claims at all, is according to Quine to “settle for psychology” (ibid., 75). This sets the tone for contemporary naturalization projects.
Note that these three approaches are not mutually exclusive. See Gallagher (2012) for a review and discussion of these approaches.
Neurophenomenology is one of the recent attempts to address the need for a systematic integration of “first-person” data into the study of the neurological basis of conscious experience. “Phenomenological data” is another term for first-person introspective data. As Lutz and Thompson write, “Neurophenomenology stresses the importance of gathering first-person data from phenomenologically trained subjects as a heuristic strategy for describing and quantifying the physiological processes relevant to consciousness. The general approach, at a methodological level, is (i) to obtain richer first-person data through disciplined phenomenological explorations of experience, and (ii) to use these original first-person data to uncover new third-person data about the physiological processes crucial for consciousness. Thus one central aim of neurophenomenology is to generate new data by incorporating refined and rigorous phenomenological explorations of experience into the experimental protocols of cognitive neuroscientific research on consciousness.” (Lutz and Thompson 2003, 32). Phenomenological data are thus epistemic objects of a new kind, obtained through the self-observation of a subject’s experience and subsequent verbal report on that self-observation. These data are then correlated with “third-person” data, such as behavioral or neurophysiological data, into an overall mathematic model.
It is not obvious that Husserl would have been open to formalizing the structures of lived experience with mathematical modelling. Husserl described phenomenology as the rigorous study of “inexact essences,” rather than the ideal “exact essences” of mathematics and logic, and he believed that the essences specific to phenomenology admitted of no mathematization. See Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, §§71–75 (hereafter abbreviated Ideen I, and cited as Husserl (1976a); second and third volumes abbreviated Ideen II and Ideen III, and cited as Husserl (1991a) and Husserl (1971), respectively). Any attempt to mathematize the inexact essences of lived experience, he argued, would involve importing mathematical regularities or entities, and as if forcing them on “the things themselves.” However, those who approach phenomenology from a formal point of view wager that Husserl’s sharp distinction between types of essences was due to the limitations of the scientific state of the art in his time. Indeed, Petitot argues that one must betray the Husserlian text if one is to revive his spirit: “Nous sommes conscient du fait que cela ‘trahit’ la lettre de Husserl. Mais c'est la condition sine qua non pour faire revivre son esprit” (Petitot 1993, Introduction, §3).
All page references to Husserl’s works refer to the German edition of Husserliana, unless otherwise noted.
Petitot’s (2004) use of phenomenology illustrates this strategy. He starts from the phenomenological descriptions of III. Logische Untersuchung (Husserl 1984, III) and of Ding und Raum (Husserl 1973b), and proceeds to their mathematization. Other kinds of phenomenological description, e.g., the theory of pure hyletics, might also be used as the descriptive basis from which to carry out such formalizations. For other instances of this mathematical approach to phenomenology, also see Petitot (1993; 1994; 1995; 1999).
Grush’s trajectory estimation model builds on his work in the emulation theory of representation (Grush 2004a, b). It is a kind of internal modelling approach to cognition, formalizing a system’s capacity to estimate forthcoming states using an internal model of the perceived object or situation. See Grush (2005a; 2005b; 2006).
As can be clearly seen from Die Idee der Phänomenologie (Husserl 1973a), Husserl’s “transcendental turn” is motivated by his desire to avoid the “epistemological (erkenntnistheoretisch) confusion” (1973a, 22) caused by naturalism with regard to the epistemological status and validity of knowledge, and to the ontological status of the kind of entities studied by the natural sciences. Husserl criticizes naturalist empiricism for similar reasons in Husserl 1976a, §§18–26.
Space constraints forbid me to unfold all the implications of Husserl’s theory of essences. I restrict my discussion of essences to the minimum required to show that Husserl rejected epistemological naturalism on the basis of the validity of material eidetic investigations. For Husserl’s account of essential laws and how they relate to his doctrine of dependence and foundation, see III. Logische Untersuchung, esp. §§10–17. For the distinction between analytic (or formal) and synthetic (or material) a priori laws, see §§11–12 of that work. For essences and essential laws generally, and their relation to Husserl’s doctrine of regional ontology, see the first chapter of Husserl 1976a (§§1–17). For formalizations of eidetic necessity, as well as dependence and foundation relations among essences, and also between essences and individual things, see, e.g., Correia 2004; Fine 1995.
Husserl uses the term “necessity” to characterize both specifications of general laws (for example in Husserl 1984, §12) and also to characterize the kind of necessity attached to these laws (for instance in Husserl 1976a, §2, where eidetic necessity and correlative eidetic universality are opposed to the contingency or “factualness” of matters of fact). For clarity, I shall use the terms “eidetic necessity” or “essential necessity” as a modal qualification (necessarily true in virtue of what it is to be an A, where A is an essence), and reserve the term “eidetic law” both for generalized and specified forms of eidetic laws.
The independence of eidetic universality and necessity with regard to matters of fact justifies the central role of imagination in eidetic investigations (Husserl 1976a, §4). As indicated, I can imagine an object with no pretensions to its actual existence, but despite this lack of factual positing, the very same eidetic laws still pertain to it as would if it really existed. An object perceived and one imagined, if they are subsumed under the same eidos, necessarily share the same essential properties. I can, for instance, imagine a physical object that does not exist. Although, insofar as it is merely imagined (rather than perceived), the imagined object does not exist in fact, spatiotemporally, it still has all the essential qualities that make it the kind of object it is.
For Husserl’s discussion of regional ontology, see Husserl 1976a, §§9–10. For an illustration of how eidetic analysis can clarify an ontological region prior to naturalistic investigations, see Husserl’s discussion of “rational psychology” in Husserl 1971, §§6–8. Rational psychology elucidates the eidetic laws that pertain the domain of mental realities, and thus prescribed the possible configurations of meaning in experience. The factual sciences then proceed to fill in what possibilities eidetic analysis has left open.
A more fine-grained analysis of the epochē would reveal that this reduction is actually a family of related reductions, which reduce to different levels of pure lived experience. Space constraints forbid me from unfolding these distinctions in a systematic way. For a recent and in-depth analysis of the development of the epochē in Husserl’s thought, see Smith (2010), chapters 2 and 3.
“Evidence” for Husserl is not equivalent to observational evidence in contemporary philosophy of science, i.e. as methodologically justified data corroborating various claims and theories (as in, e.g., Bechtel forthcoming). By “epistemological evidence,” I mean specifically Husserl’s notion of evidence as being given “in person” or “in the flesh” to consciousness. For the phenomenological conception of evidence, see Heffernan (1998); also see Sokolowski (1964), 153 ff.
This question is perhaps the most fundamental of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, and I can only hope to sketch an answer here. As Sokolowski, whose work on constitution remains of interest today, remarks, “There is no other concept that reflects in itself the totality of his thought so completely and so well. The philosophical value of his theory of constitution is the philosophical value of phenomenology as a whole, and the weakness and difficulty attached to this concept are the weakness and difficulty inherent in phenomenology as a philosophical method” (1964, 223). It is generally recognized that Husserl’s theory of constitution moves from the “static” conception of constitution in his earlier works (i.e. the schema of intentions animating content in Logische Untersuchungen (Husserl 1975; 1984) and Ideen I (Husserl 1976a)) to the “genetic” conception in his later works—especially Formale und transzendentale Logik (Husserl 1974), Cartesianische Meditationen (Husserl 1991c), and Erfahrung und Urteil (Husserl 1939); For a contemporary study of the notion of constitution in Husserl’s overall philosophical project, see Sandmeyer (2009).
As Moran (2008) notes, Husserl’s position on naturalism has a complex historical development. Husserl’s critique of naturalism moves from a more methodological orientation in his early career, focusing especially on the naturalization of ideality and normativity, to a more ontological direction in his later career. This shift to ontological arguments is especially marked in in Husserl’s Formale und transzendentale Logik (Husserl 1974), Ideen II (Husserl 1991a), and Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (Husserl 1976b).
Hereafter, cited as Husserl 1969.
It has been argued by Gallagher (2012), Zahavi (2004a; 2010; 2013), and others that these naturalization projects are not naturalizations of transcendental phenomenology, but are better understood (in the best of cases) precisely as forms of what Husserl called “phenomenological psychology.” I agree with this assessment. Indeed, as discussed above, transcendental phenomenology engages consciousness not only as an empirical psychological phenomena (Cn), but as the eidetic necessary structure that acts as the epistemic condition of possibility of the knowledge of anything (as Ce). There is thus a significant disconnect between the naturalistic approaches to phenomenology, which endorse forms of naturalism Husserl rejected, and the transcendental philosophical aims of phenomenology. This is not to say, however, that phenomenology and psychology are completely unrelated. Husserl himself had glimpsed the usefulness of such naturalistic uses of phenomenological description. He had seen that phenomenology and psychology were intimately linked, and had allowed for the possibility of a natural scientific “counterpart” to phenomenology, a naturalistic or mathematized use of the results of phenomenological description in the natural sciences. Alongside transcendental phenomenology, a “phenomenological psychology” could thus be envisioned. The main difference between the two is that while the former is an epistemological investigation carried out in the eidetic and transcendental attitudes, the latter is an natural science carried out in the natural attitude, albeit one informed by phenomenological eidetic analyses. In short, phenomenological psychology is not interested in the epistemic dimension of consciousness (Ce), but rather in consciousness as a natural process (Cn). It employs phenomenological eidetic analysis to determine with precision the object to be analyzed naturalistically thereafter, but it does so within the natural attitude. See volume IX of Husserliana, bearing the title Phänomenologische Psychologie (Husserl 1968).
I preserve for the most part the terminology proposed in the translation of Ideen II by Rojcewicz and Schuwer (Husserl 1989). However, I opt to translate “Seele” as “mind” (rather than as “soul”) and “seelische” as “mental.” Husserl, when discussing the Seele, had in mind that which is studied by psychologists; I employ the more contemporary terminology to stay closer to recent sciences of the mind and avoid the pitfalls associated to doctrines of the soul. I also use “lived body” to translate “Leib,” rather than the uppercase “Body,” to avoid possible ambiguities. English citations of Ideen II employ the translation by Rojcewicz and Schuwer; the first page reference refers to the German edition of Husserliana, and is followed by the reference to the English translation.
To be sure, the mind and the lived body are not exclusively objects pertaining to the ontological region nature. The mind, when considered in its relation to what Husserl called the spirit (Geist) is a “spirit-mind.” Although the term Geist may seem odd to the contemporary reader, Husserl is using it as was commonplace in his time, to refer to the cultural existence of human beings. Hegel had also used the term Geist in this sense, and moreover, the sciences interested in culture and history were referred to as Geisteswissenschaften, or sciences of spirit. When viewed as a spirit-mind, the mind “is not defined as a real unity in relation to circumstances of Objective nature, thus psychophysically,” but Husserl immediately adds, “or at least does not have to be defined that way” (Husserl 1991a, 280; Husserl 1989, 293, emphasis added). Thus, there are ways of apprehending the mind such that it is not understood as a natural object, but rather as a cultural or historical phenomenon. But this does not preclude an understanding of the mind, even as a spiritual or cultural mind, as being related to nature. The regularities of the mind as spiritual, its “immanent lawfulness,” can in principle also be “apprehended as natural” insofar as they are tied to psycho-physical regularities. The lived body, when considered in relation to Geist, also acquires a spiritual status, as a “lived body for the will, the freely moving body,” distinct from the body as physical-aesthesiological unity (Husserl 1991a, 284; Husserl 1989, 297). This is why Husserl can be said to definitively reject ontological naturalism: the mind and the lived body are more than mere natural objects. However, he does endorse the view that the mind and the lived body can legitimately be considered as natural objects, as part of the regional ontological domain of natural entities, so long as we do not conflate this with a metaphysical thesis.
A discussion of the “science of the mind” proposed by Husserl would vastly overshoot my aims here, and so I shall focus on the science of the lived body. However, a few remarks can be made. In Ideen II, Husserl argues that there could be a science apt to study the motivational structure of the mind. He writes that, just as we learn to know objects following their kinds and the lawful behaviors pertaining to those kinds, we can “capture the development of a person if we reconstruct the course of his life and make it intuitive in such a way that the entirety of his development as a man becomes comprehensible in an experiential way, especially with regard to his manner of letting himself be motivated as a subject, together with all the definite actions and passions proper to him” (Husserl 1991a, 272; Husserl 1989, 285). Such a science would be a “science of the mind,” a “psycho-logy.” Husserl argues, however, that such a science could not be carried out in the naturalistic attitude. This is because such a science of the mind is interested in the person or personal ego, only apprehensible in the personalistic attitude; as such, it would investigate motivational relations, invisible to naturalistic apprehension, rather than causal ones. Husserl’s proposal of a science of the mind is not, under this description, a natural science. However, in Ideen III, Husserl suggests that psychology, as a natural science interested in the mind, would investigate relations of “psychological causality,” which suggests that the naturalistic attitude might be appropriate to study the mind on his account (see Husserl 1971, 16). Is Husserl’s science of the mind, his psycho-logy, a natural science? To decide this is well beyond the scope of this paper. I shall thus focus on Husserl’s proposal of a science of the lived body in its relation to the mind that can be unambiguously understood as a natural science.
In a useful footnote, Husserl gives a definition of “substance.” He writes: “Substance signifies here nothing more than the material thing as such, considered to the extent that it is the identical something of real properties, that which actualizes itself temporally in regulated manifolds of states in regulated dependency on concomitant circumstances” (Husserl 1991a, 44, footnote; Husserl 1989, 47). For the relation between materiality and substance, see Husserl 1991a, §§12–15. We should note a debate in contemporary Husserl scholarship over the representational status of the noema, and its relation to the real object. For “West Coast” thinkers (such as Føllesdal, Dreyfus, and McIntyre), the noema is akin to the Fregean sense. It is a kind of mediator entity between the object and the world. This commits West coast interpretations to the idea that Husserl was a representationalist. “East Coast” interpretations (like Sokolowski’s or Drummond’s), on the contrary, claim that the object is a moment in the noema, and understand the relation between object and noema as one of identity to manifold. For East Coast interpretations, the noema is the object seen under a phenomenological lens in its meaningfulness (Seinsinn). See, e.g., Føllesdal (1969; 1974); McIntyre (1982); Sokolowski (1987); Drummond (1990); Drummond and Embree (1992), Zahavi (2004b).
Husserl writes: “The localized sensations are not properties of the [lived body] as a physical thing,” immediately adding, “but on the other hand, they are properties of the thing, [lived body], and indeed they are effect-properties. They arise when the [lived body] is touched, pressed, stung, etc., and they arise there where it is touched and at the time when it is touched […]. Touching refers here to a physical event.” (Husserl 1991a, 146; Husserl 1989, 153–154). Leib and Leibkörper thus form a unity that can only be dissociated in the abstract.
Yoshimi (2010, 30–33) has proposed a formalization of the dependence relation between physical states of the body and sensory states of the mind as presented in Husserl’s account. In order to capture the relation in Husserl’s account, he proposes to define a supervenience function that relates two state sets, which are sets such that the system modelled can only be in one unique state in the set at a given time. Supervenience, in this context, is a relation between state sets, such that a state set A supervenes on another state set B iff objects that are B-indiscernible are also A-indiscernible. A supervenience function f: B → A is a function that relates two state sets, such that when the system is in state b in state set B, it is in a unique supervenient state f(b). (Note that Yoshimi formulates “partial” and “total” versions of the supervenience function, which I cannot go into here, given space constraints). With P as the state set of all possible physical states of a system (say, an organism), and S as the state set of all possible sensory states of that system, Yoshimi captures the dependence relation with a (total) supervenience function f: P → S, such that when the organism is in physical state p (in state set P), it is in a unique sensory state f(p). He further argues that Husserl rejects total supervenience (Yoshimi 2010, 33–36), and that Husserl’s argument against total supervenience fails (Yoshimi 2010, 36–38).
In this passage, Husserl argues that the effect of the body on sensation is synchronic. It is generally accepted that causal relations cannot obtain between two simultaneous events; to the contemporary reader, if Husserl’s account of the dependence relation is correct, that relation cannot be a causal one. This provide support for Yoshimi’s account of psycho-physical dependence as a supervenience relation (discussed in the previous note).
Husserl argues that states of sensation and the lived body are connected “certainly not in the way in which the sensation-content, tone quality, and the sensation-content, intensity, have an essential unity, nor is it the way in which the sensation-content, color, is unified with the moment of spread […]” (Husserl 1991a, 154; Husserl 1989, 161).
Given space constraints, I cannot provide an exhaustive account of the similarities between Husserl’s somatology and contemporary research projects. Research projects such as the enactive or embodied approach, first proposed by Varela et al. (1991), and developed since its inception by thinkers like Gallagher (2005), Noë (2005; 2009; 2012), and Thompson (2007), illustrates both kinds of somatological approaches. The more biologically-oriented approach espoused by Thompson and his collaborators and its close relation to neurophenomenology make it well suited to study the physical-somatological conditionality relations. The more sensorimotor orientation of Gallagher and Noë seems especially well suited to exploring the aesthesiological dimension of conditionality.
The cultural variability of the perception of illusions, such as the Müller-Lyer illusion (see, e.g., Segall et al. 1966), suggests that real factors other than the lived body, such as the cultural and historical situation of the perceiving subject, might also be relevant to study with regard to their effects on constitution. Husserl’s proposal of a “science of the mind,” elucidating the person’s history of sedimented motivations, actions, and passions, could be counted as another example of a “science of constitution”—although admittedly, the status of such an investigation as a natural science remains debatable. See note 25.
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Acknowledgments
I am greatly indebted to Professor Pierre Poirier (Université du Québec à Montréal) and Professor Bettina Bergo (Université de Montréal) for numerous interesting discussions and generous comments that were crucial throughout the writing process. I would like to thank Philippe Blouin (Université de Montréal) for comments on earlier versions of this paper and for a number of stimulating conversations. I am grateful for the many helpful suggestions and interesting remarks provided by Professor Jeffrey Yoshimi (University of California, Merced) and by an anonymous reviewer during the revision process. Thanks also go to William-J. Beauchemin (Université du Québec à Montréal, Exeko) for helping me express my ideas in between two versions of this paper. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture, and the Cognitive Sciences Institute (Université du Québec à Montréal) for their generous funding and support.
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Ramstead, M.J.D. Naturalizing what? Varieties of naturalism and transcendental phenomenology. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 929–971 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9385-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9385-8