As I understand it, phenomenology is non-committal on questions of metaphysics or ontology. It takes the self and world at their word; how it all seems is to be unearthed and examined with a richly metaphorical eye, prior to any metaphysical commitments based on this or that assumption about the nature of reality.

Have you read M-P's Phenomenology of Perception? The entire book is nothing other than a series of demonstrations as to how to cash out the statement of his you quoted: space, time, depth, colour, movement, orientation, freedom, scale, intersubjectivity - all shown to depend on the body. At the very least the book's negative results, it's 'dispatching', as you say, of what M-P calls 'empiricism' and 'intellectualism', are timeless contributions.

And if you haven't read it, why the anticipation of 'additional befuddlement' in advance?

Edit: Also, M-P is easily among my favorite prose stylists in philosophy. Reading him makes one feel aerial.

Consciousness - the spirit - is a shape that we cannot know concisely.

You can understand 'consciousness' (the spirit), as such by its conscious' facet, and further facets, it's numbness, it's external forfeit, sense.

Understanding through observation or perception, is not knowing concisely, we cannot be intellectual about consciousness.

Consciousness like nature is not known concisely, it's understood impartially and wisdom is jotted.

The embedded cognition solution is very consistent with a systems-theoretical approach to reality - i.e. recasting our understanding of the nature reality in terms of embedded-embedding systems which conform to certain features like autopoeisis, and modelling of behaviours using fractal/chaotic mathematics. For me, it is an excellent approach to recasting the mind-body problem in a way that attempts to reconcile and not reduce one to the other.

I imagine the intricate and oracular prose would frustrate some readers. — Tom Storm

I'm French, and yet I find his prose too convoluted. This said, MP is usually quite reliable and enlightening a writer. I'm a big fan.

‘I experience through my body therefore I am.” — Tom Storm

So.....I am not if I do not experience?

Or, I am iff I experience?

IknowIknowIknow.....it’s just me, but I find it quite absurd, that just because “I” is not always active and participatory, re: absent experience, and it cannot be explained where it goes when it isn’t, re: deep sleep, then there must not have been one in the first place, re: final and irrevocable dissolution of the Cartesian mind/body dualism.

Yet no one has ever functioned as a standard issue, run-of-the-mill human being, without it.

Go figure.

As I understand it, phenomenology is non-committal on questions of metaphysics or ontology. It takes the self and world at their word; how it all seems is to be unearthed and examined with a richly metaphorical eye, prior to any metaphysical commitments based on this or that assumption about the nature of reality. — Janus

“Our monadological results are metaphysical, if it be true that ultimate cognitions of being should be called metaphysical. On the other hand, what we have here is anything but metaphysics in the customary sense: a historically degenerate metaphysics, which by no means conforms to the sense with which meta­physics, as "first philosophy", was instituted originally.”(Husserl, Cartesian Meditations)

it cannot be explained where it goes when it isn’t, re: deep sleep — Mww

It sure can, and it has been done on enactivist terms directly inspired by M-P too.

Well, let's all agree that we all come from a singular Perspective. Granted, these Perspectives are infinite, as is apparent. Personality, as seen under Perspective, is just as rational. But what I do not see many in agreement with, is that these Perspectives are all founded on Belief. Each and every Perspective is merely through the lens of agreements held.... better known as Belief. I have often made the comparison that one does not get up to get something from the fridge, without BELIEVING there is something there that is wanted. Belief clearly comes before Will, and we could also say that Will determines Experience.... when placed under the Laws of Motion.

The Experience of the many, may not be as justified as we have been taught for centuries now. Perspective alone proves this. Once the Momentum of Belief is taken into account, placed under the concept of Perspective, the Belief of the many is more likely to be Experienced than the Belief of the singular. Not to say the singular has no chance to affect his own Realm of Experience.

Experience is Perspective. Determined by Agreements held. So when Agreements held are based on the Experience of the Agreements held, this shifts Focus from the True Source and shifts it to the Experience.

I know there are billions who would oppose this idea. Does that change the fact that it is an idea? Does it not need Agreement in order to Experience? How do we Experience anything?? Perspective.

Ok, now, throw in the Experience of "solidity".... That Experience alone attests to the Reality of Truth. But it is the only reliable manifestation, able to be used to build upon. All else would be a Water, of sorts. But this Water, depending upon Agreements, can be Experienced as Solid.... This is a "thought experiment" that proves the theory. This "proof" is what is required for the Faith aspect of the Law of the Experience of Belief.

Edit: Also, M-P is easily among my favorite prose stylists in philosophy. Reading him makes one feel aerial. — StreetlightX

From what I've read so far the prose is exceptional but dense. Prose is like attraction - you can't help who you are drawn to. Or not.

At the very least the book's negative results, it's 'dispatching', as you say, of what M-P calls 'empiricism' and 'intellectualism', are timeless contributions. — StreetlightX

Good to hear.



For you, is M-P an enhancement of Husserl's work or a heretical adaptation of it?

Interesting, so....thanks for that.

“...We enact a self in the process of awareness, and this self comes and goes depending on how we are aware....”
(Précis of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, https://evanthompsondotme.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/thompson.pdf)

“...I argue that although the self is a construction—or rather a process that is under constant construction—it isn’t an illusion. A self is an ongoing process that enacts an “I” and in which the “I” is no different from the process itself, rather like the way dancing is a process that enacts a dance and in which the dance is no different from the dancing....”
(ibid)
————-

Enaction: "....to emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs" (Varela, et al, 1992)

How far do you think “a growing conviction” is, from a metaphysical theory? How provable is a conviction?

If on the basis of a history, wouldn’t it be a reenactment? There is a precedent for reenactment, under different conditions and terminology, but still extant and philosophically relevant.

Anyway....interesting read. Took me into three hours of some of this, some of that, some I knew, some I didn't. Still....good to hear confirmation that the self is a construction, and at the same time, isn’t an illusion.

Ever since Thomas Nagel wrote his influential essay What is it Like to Be a Bat (1974), many philosophers and associated hangers on have been preoccupied with understanding phenomenal consciousness as physicalism’s potential coup de grâce. — Tom Storm

I'm grateful that Nagel took his stand to defend the fact of subjectivity in those dark times. But I don't think mere acknowledgement of the subjective character of experience should be threatening to anyone with reasonable expectations about the "completeness" of philosophical "explanation". Perhaps many reductive physicalists have unreasonable expectations about theoretical completeness. So does Nagel, as evidenced by his commitment to an egregiously inflated conception of the principle of sufficient reason in his more recent Mind and Cosmos.

Why assume that meat like us can achieve an "explanation of everything" integrated in the manner of the formal sciences? As a humble skeptic, it seems to me that philosophy is deranged by such far-flung assumptions.

I presume there are physicalists with moderate expectations about the reach of human explanation.
Can any philosophical doctrine "completely explain" the subjective character of experience? If not, then when does it count against a doctrine that it fails to do so?

I’d be interested to hear what members thoughts are about what an understanding of phenomenology can bring to the hoary mind/body question. And can the hard problem of consciousness be restated coherently by the phenomenological approach?

Looking over some writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, (much of whose project seems to have been a protracted swing dance with Descartes) it appears he believes that the issue of dualism can be dissolved by a recasting the cogito as, ‘I experience through my body therefore I am.”

But does this accomplish much more than change the language without altering the problem? — Tom Storm

I suppose some phenomenologists get carried away with their brackets. Cartesians make theoretical mountains from molehills of conceivability. Too many modern philosophers treat phenomena, appearances, experiences, sense-data, or "ideas" like streams of disembodied pictures floating through a void or through our heads. Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of perception seems a valuable correction to such biases in the philosophical tradition, in emphasizing the originally integrated character of phenomena. We do not find ourselves in experience as immaterial minds enjoying a picture show. We find ourselves as "embodied subjects" living in a world among others.

I haven't read his work in decades, but I was powerfully influenced by my encounter with his magnum opus back in school. I suspect it was in part on the wind of that influence that I began to think of empirical science as a sort of phenomenology; and eventually to think of the discourse of a good skeptic like Sextus as pointing the way to something like a phenomenological naturalism.

Personally, I don't find much philosophical interest in the mind/body problem or in the hard problem of consciousness. If you do think there's a lot of value in such discourses, I expect it's unlikely that any sort of phenomenology is going to provide arguments that "solve" those problems for you. But I do think there's a tendency for work like Merleau-Ponty's to attract some readers who are fascinated by the "possibilities" suggested by such traditional problems, and occasionally to draw them toward more moderate philosophical views. McDowell's Mind and World is another such flycatcher, discharged from squarely within the contemporary Anglophone tradition.

I suppose you're right to suggest that such work may also serve as a "pathway to some additional befuddlement". Are there any canonical works in philosophy that aren't attended by that risk?

But I am unclear how transformative this really is and whether it might not also be a pathway to some additional befuddlement. — Tom Storm

I just posted in another thread about phenomenology. And as I've already said in my post there, it is not an argument, but a declaration. It doesn't try to connect to any basis of the claim. It's the self and consciousness and the experience. But no effort given to defend it.

That description doesn't make it sound much more than a self-involved indulgence.

I suppose you're right to suggest that such work may also serve as a "pathway to some additional befuddlement". Are there any canonical works in philosophy that aren't attended by that risk? — Cabbage Farmer

Indeed so it would be just like the other systems...

By the way I was asking the question about befuddlement not insisting it was the case.

Personally, I don't find much philosophical interest in the mind/body problem or in the hard problem of consciousness. If you do think there's a lot of value in such discourses, I expect it's unlikely that any sort of phenomenology is going to provide arguments that "solve" those problems for you. But I do think there's a tendency for work like Merleau-Ponty's to attract some readers who are fascinated by the "possibilities" suggested by such traditional problems, and occasionally to draw them toward more moderate philosophical views. McDowell's Mind and World is another such flycatcher, discharged from squarely within the contemporary Anglophone tradition. — Cabbage Farmer

That's an interesting thing to say. Your not interested in mind/body because you feel it is unanswerable? Is there another option? Don't care? I'm only interested in the question because it seems to inform the current discussions about physicalism versus idealism.

Why assume that meat like us can achieve an "explanation of everything" integrated in the manner of the formal sciences? As a humble skeptic, it seems to me that philosophy is deranged by such far-flung assumptions. — Cabbage Farmer

Nicely put and I largely agree.

I'm French, and yet I find his prose too convoluted. — Olivier5

Wow. I apologize for my reference to French writing. I hope I wasn't out of line.

Still....good to hear confirmation that the self is a construction, and at the same time, isn’t an illusion. — Mww

Dennett with a tender afterglow.

That description doesn't make it sound much more than a self-involved indulgence. — Tom Storm

And why would you say this?

Because of what you said. But I was just being flip. Sorry. I guess one unkind reading of a statement like

It's the self and consciousness and the experience. But no effort given to defend it. — Caldwell

makes it sound like self-involved indulgence.

makes it sound like self-involved indulgence. — Tom Storm

It's okay if it sounds self-involved indulgence. But I was speaking in terms of a philosophical argument.
Actually, if we're only speaking of Descartes's cogito, there's not much to argue about it. He nailed it. His argument of existence is a passive proof-positive generating statement.

But phenomenology is another thing. If one wants to speak of experiences and consciousness, I need more than enumeration of subjective descriptions. I want to be able to say, so we have this, what now? Where is the challenge to this? Everyone has it.

I need more than enumeration of subjective descriptions. I want to be able to say, so we have this, what now? Where is the challenge to this? Everyone has it. — Caldwell

Indeed. Good point.

I'm thinking of a good explanation to criticize phenomenology -- trivial, preaching to the choir, stating the obvious, over explaining. Not sure.

Phenomenology as metaphysics and ontology: Heidegger presents something similar, with the addition of historicity and hermeneutics. Do you think Heidegger's critique of Husserl for neglecting the two Aitches is sound?

And what about Merleau-Ponty's correction of Heidegger's (and Husserl's?) neglect of the body?

I hope I wasn't out of line. — Tom Storm

No, it is a style not-too-loosely connected to French 20th century intellectuals. But he's among the best of them I think. He uses his style to convey or fix his ideas really, it's never gratuitous. Sometimes he struggles with his ideas on the page.

For you, is M-P an enhancement of Husserl's work or a heretical adaptation of it? — Tom Storm

Good question. Here’s the intro to a part I wrote comparing the two authors:

“ In recent years, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty have become valuable sources of inspiration for philosophers and psychologists embracing embodied approaches to consciousness. A common tendency within this scholarly community is to judge the success of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology by how closely it aligns with Merleau-Ponty's project. Some believe that Merleau-Ponty nudged phenomenology further along in the direction that Husserl was aiming toward in his later years, the implication being that Merleau-Ponty's project is a more radical one than Husserl's and that Husserl was not able to overcome a tendency to fall back into transcendental solipsism, subjectivism, Kantian idealism. Others claim that a reading of the entire Husserlian ouvre including unpublished manuscripts reveals Husserl to have escaped these charges of Cartesianism. In either case it is Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology that is often used as the yardstick by which to measure Husserl's account.

The thesis I will argue here is that a crucial dimension of Husserl's philosophy is being missed when we read Husserl using Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception as a normative frame of reference. Instead, I offer a reading of Husserl that shows him to have undertaken a deconstruction of Merleau-Ponty's starting point in the structuralism of gestalt corporeality. Following from this, Husserl's approach offers a decisive alternative to Merleau-Ponty's explanation of the role of alterity in one's relationship to one's body as well as intersubjective engagements.”


I find it interesting that , although French was his native language, Derrida ignored M-P till late in his career, except to critique his interpretation of Husserl. In contrast , Derrida’s first works focused heavily on Husserl. One can only speculate why this was so, but my belief is that M-P’s approach, while consonant with the ideas of many other phenomenologists, fell short of the radicality of Husserl from Derrida’s vantage. Those who dislike Derrida may see his preference for Husserl as an affirmation of M-P’s superiority.

Here’s a Derridean critique of M-P’s reading of Husserl:

“ I can never have access to the body (Leib) of the other except in an indirect fashion, through appresentation, comparison, analogy, projection, and introjection. That is a motif to which Husserl remains particularly and fiercely faithful. And when he says "without introjection," indeed, this is not to qualify our access to the other's living body, but the access that others have-that they have, just as I have to their own proper bodies ("without introjection") . But this access that others have without introjection to their bodies, I can have-to their own proper bodies-only by introjection or appresentation. Husserl would never have subscribed to this "It is in no different fashion . . . [ce n'est pas autrement . . . ] " ("It is in no different fashion that the other's body becomes animate before me when I shake another man's hand or just look at him" [Signs, p. I68] ) , which assimilates the touching-the-touching [Ie touchant toucher] of my own proper body or my two hands with the contact of the other's hand.”(On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy, p.190)

Husserl writes: "Since here this manifold expression appresents psychic existence in [carnal] Corporeality, thus there is constituted with all that an objectivity which is precisely double and unitary: the man-without 'introjection'" (Husserl, Ideas II, p. I75) .

"Without introjection": these words do not describe my relation to the other's carnal "corporeality" (Leiblichkeit) , which, as Husserl always says unambiguously, is present for me only indirectly and by way of analogical "introjection," which is to say appresented, as this passage clearly puts it. However, what this appresentation delivers to me is another man, and what for him is inscribed-in his phenomenon, which he has, for his part, and which will never be mine-is an originary relation, "without introjection, " to his own proper body, which is the relation I have with my body but will never have with his. There we can find the appresentative analogy between two heres. Husserl had continually insisted-be it only in the two preceding pages-on indirect appresentation and even on the fact that the other's hand, such as I see it while it is touching, "appresents to me his solipsistic view of this hand. " (Let us be quite clear that without this unbridgeable abyss, there would be no handshake, nor blow or caress, nor, in general, any experience of the other's body as such.)

“... at the moment when it is a matter of orienting Husserl and making him take the other into account in a more audacious way (the other who is originarily in me, or for me, and so forth)-at the expense of a Husserl who is more classical, more ego-centered, and so forth-there is a risk of the exact opposite resulting. One runs the risk of reconstituting an intuitionism of immediate access to the other, as originary as my access to my own most properly proper-and in one blow, doing without appresentation, indirection, Einfohlung, one also runs the risk of reappropriating the alterity of the other more surely, more blindly, or even more violently than ever. In this respect Husserl's cautious approach will always remain before us as a model of vigilance. (P.191)

Even between me and me, if I may put it this way, between my body and my body, there is no such "original" contemporaneity, this "confusion" between the other's body and mine, that Merleau-Ponty
believes he can recognize there, while pretending he is following Husserl-for example, when he follows the thread of the same analysis and writes: "The constitution of others does not come after that of the body [with which Husserl could agree, but without inferring what follows.-J. D.] ; others and my body are born together from the original ecstasy. The corporeality to which the primordial thing belongs is more corporeality in general; as the child's egocentricity, the 'solipsist layer' is both transitivity and confusion of self and other" (Merleau-Ponty, Signs, p. 174; my emphasis-J. D.). This "confusion" would be as originary as the "primordial thing" and would make possible the substitutions (that we have noted are impossible) between the other and me, between our two bodies, in what Merleau-Ponty unhesitatingly terms "the absolute presence of origins. " In another example, he writes:

“The reason why I am able to understand the other person's body and existence "beginning with" the body proper, the reason why the com presence of my "consciousness" and my "body" is prolonged into the compresence of my self and the other person, is that the "I am able to" and the "the other person exists" belong here and now to the same world, that the body proper is a premonition of the other person, the Einfuhlung an echo of my incarnation, and that a flash of meaning makes them substitutable in the absolute presence of origins.” (Merleau-Ponry, Signs, p. I75)

And so, must we not think, and think otherwise (without objecting to it frontally and integrally) , that the said "same world" (if there is some such world, and if it is indeed necessary to account for it, and account for its "effect," as "sense of the world") is not and will never be the "same world"?(On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy, p.193).

Thank you Joshs, that's useful. Questions to follow.

But phenomenology is another thing. If one wants to speak of experiences and consciousness, I need more than enumeration of subjective descriptions. I want to be able to say, so we have this, what now? Where is the challenge to this? Everyone has it. — Caldwell

It sounds like you are reading phenomenology as subjective introspection. That’s a common misperception.
Phenomenology is just as much about objectivity and intersubjectivity and the way they are inextricably bound together with subjectivity such that no science can escape the fact that its grounding and condition of possibility leads empiricism back to phenomenology.

Phenomenology is just as much about objectivity and intersubjectivity and the way they are inextricably bound together with subjectivity such that no science can escape the fact that its grounding and condition of possibility leads empiricism back to phenomenology. — Joshs

Good. And it is this aspect of it I was hoping to tease out a little more.

Phenomenology as metaphysics and ontology: Heidegger presents something similar, with the addition of historicity and hermeneutics. Do you think Heidegger's critique of Husserl for neglecting the two Aitches is sound?

And what about Merleau-Ponty's correction of Heidegger's (and Husserl's?) neglect of the b — Janus

Husserl begins from perception, but he connects this back to the subject’s history of prior intentions such that one is always encountering the world in relation to pre-acquired habitualities and tendencies. So there is always a context of larger goals and concerns that are involved when we see the world of perceptual objects.

What Heidegger did was to radicalize the pragmatic, goal-oriented aspect of experience. We don’t see a tree and then connect our perception back up with prior concerns in a series of additional acts. Rather, an perception is immediately a taking something with respect to how it matters to us in a global way. This being ‘for the sake of which’ is what makes Heidegger’s work historical and hermeneutic.

As to the body, I think Heidegger did something more radical than M-P and this results in the notion of body playing an odd and seemingly secondary role in his work.

As to the body, I think Heidegger did something more radical than M-P and this results in the notion of body playing an odd and seemingly secondary role in his work. — Joshs

Is this reading of Heidegger unusual or well established?