Abstract
What is the relationship between phenomenology, psychology, and natural science? This chapter addresses questions about Husserl’s differentiation between phenomenology understood as a transcendental project and the idea that phenomenology can be ‘naturalized’ in the form of a phenomenological psychology and as a partner to cognitive science. It explores the phenomenological concepts of ‘lifeworld’ and Heidegger’s concept of the ‘ready-to-hand’. Finally, it explains the notion of ‘mutual constraints’ between phenomenology and cognitive science.
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Notes
- 1.
Although Husserl studied mathematics in Berlin from 1878–1880, he wasn’t in Berlin in the 1930s when Sartre studied there, and Sartre never met Husserl. Husserl’s ideas about phenomenology likely originated when he went to Vienna in 1881 to finish his Ph.D. in mathematics and started to attend Brentano’s lectures. On Brentano’s advice, he then went to study with the psychologist Carl Stumpf at University of Halle in 1886.
- 2.
The concept of lifeworld is taken up by sociology via the work of Alfred Schutz (one of Husserl’s students) and Thomas Luckmann in their book Structures of the Life-World (1973; 1983). It also makes its way into critical theory, via Habermas (1987) and his distinction between system and lifeworld and the notion of the colonization of the lifeworld.
- 3.
We can also mention a fourth table, described by Husserl. Call it the table as strictly perceived. ‘When we view the table, we view it from some particular side, and this side is thereby what is genuinely seen. Yet the table has still other sides. It has a non-visible back side, it has a non-visible interior; and these are actually indexes for a variety of sides, a variety of complexes of possible visibility [.…] But this thing is not [merely] the side genuinely seen in this moment; rather (according to the very sense of perception) the thing is precisely the full-thing that has still other sides, sides that are not brought to genuine perception in this perception, but that would be brought to genuine perception in other perspectives’ (Husserl, 2012, 40). We’ll see in the next chapter that we may also discern a transcendental table, or the table as pure phenomenon, which we get to by means of the phenomenological reduction. Thus, speaking about his own table, Husserl says, that as we employ the phenomenological method of the reduction (or the epoché), ‘the perception of this table still is, as it was before, precisely a perception of this table” (1960, 33–32).
- 4.
Similarly, see De Preester (2002), who suggests that if phenomenology accepts the assumptions of cognitive science, then phenomenology self-destructs. “A naturalized phenomenology is no longer phenomenology” (De Preester, 2002, 645). This would only be the case, however, if we supposed a positive answer to Shimon Edelman’s (2002, 125) question: “Is a new phenomenology, which would completely eschew transcendentalism in favor of computational principles, possible?” The issue really goes the other way. That is, the introduction of phenomenology into cognitive science has critically challenged the basic assumptions of cognitive science, including computationalism, and indeed the very concepts of nature and naturalism, and has moved cognitive science towards a view that is more consistent with the views of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on intentionality, intersubjectvity, action, and embodiment. See Gallagher (2018), Gallagher and Varela (2003), Thompson (2007), Varela et al. (1991).
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Gallagher, S. (2022). Naturalism, Transcendentalism, and a New Naturalizing. In: Phenomenology. Palgrave Philosophy Today. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11586-8_2
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