That's the spirit, and really not that remote from what I want to convey. — Wayfarer

Probably our differences lie more in the conceptual details—about what can be counted as knowledge and what faith. Other than I've always thought we are not so far apart.

The emergence of organic life marks the beginning of a rudimentary form of awareness. Unlike inanimate matter, living organisms actively maintain themselves, preserving their internal organization while remaining distinct from their environment. This self-maintenance, or autopoiesis, introduces a basic subject-object relationship, where the organism differentiates itself from the "other" that surrounds it. Crucially, this perspective departs from a strictly materialist account, which often focuses solely on physical processes. Instead, it recognizes the primacy of relational dynamics and the concept of "otherness" as foundational to life. Hans Jonas and Evan Thompson highlight this, emphasizing that life is characterized by its orientation toward, and interaction with, the world, laying the groundwork for more developed forms of awareness and cognition. But the point is, it is relational from the get-go.

I've found an extract from Husserl's Critique of Naturalism, copied from the Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology. I was sent that as a .pdf a long time ago, early days on the other Forum, and reading this excerpt, I realise that it comprises most of what I know about Husserl, and also most or all of my own 'critique of naturalism'.

The critique of naturalism

Soon after writing the Logical Investigations, as we have seen, Husserl came to the view that his earlier researches had not completely escaped naturalism. After that Husserl constantly set his face against naturalism, but his most cogent critique is to be found in his 1911 essay, Philosophy as a Rigorous Science. Husserl thinks that all traditional philosophy, including Descartes and Kant, had treated consciousness as something having a completely natural being, a mere part of nature, and a dependent or epiphenomenal part at that. Even Kant had misunderstood transcendental psychology as a psychology. Husserl regards naturalism both as the dominant theoretical outlook of his age and also as deeply embedded in our ordinary assumptions about the world surrounding us. In other words, our pre-theoretical engagement with the world has an inbuilt bias towards naive naturalism. This is fine in our ordinary practices in the world, but when naturalism is elevated into an all-encompassing theoretical outlook, it actually becomes far removed from the natural attitude and in fact grossly distorts it. Husserl’s critique of naturalism is that it is a distorted conception of the fruits of scientific method which in itself is not inextricably wedded to a naturalist construal.

Husserl’s conception of naturalism relates to his understanding of the projects of John Locke, David Hume, and J.S. Mill, as well as nineteenth century positivists, especially Comte and Mach. Naturalism is the view that every phenomenon ultimately is encompassed within, and explained by, the laws of nature; everything real belongs to physical nature or is reducible to it. There are of course many varieties of naturalism, but Husserl’s own account in his 1911 essay more or less correctly summarises the naturalistic outlook:

"Thus the naturalist…sees only nature, and primarily physical nature. Whatever is, is either itself physical, belonging to the unified totality of physical nature, or it is, in fact, psychical, but then merely as a variable dependent on the physical, at best a secondary “parallel accomplishment”. Whatever is belongs to psychophysical nature, which is to say that it is univocally determined by rigid laws."

As naturalism has again become a very central concept primarily in contemporary analytic philosophy, largely due to W.V.O. Quine’s call for a naturalised epistemology, it is worth taking time here to elucidate further Husserl’s conception of naturalism. Indeed, precisely this effort to treat consciousness as part of the natural world is at the basis of many recent studies of consciousness, for example the work of Daniel Dennett or Patricia Churchland. Compare Husserl’s definition with that of David Armstrong for example:

"Naturalism I define as the doctrine that reality consists of nothing but a single all-embracing spatio-temporal system."

In Philosophy as a Rigorous Science, Husserl explicitly identifies and criticises the tendency of all forms of naturalism to seek the naturalisation of consciousness and of all ideas and norms. Naturalism as a theory involves a certain ‘philosophical absolutising’ of the scientific view of the world (Ideas I § 55); “it is a bad theory regarding a good procedure”. Certain characteristic methodological devices of the sciences, chiefly idealisation and objectification, have been misunderstood such that their objects are thought to yield the natural world as it is in itself, for example that nature is treated as a closed system of physical entities obeying laws, and everything else is squeezed out and treated as psychical, possibly even epiphenomenal. Indeed, a new science of psychology, with laws modelled on the mechanical laws of the physical domain, was then brought in to investigate this carved off subdomain, but it was guilty of reifying consciousness and examining it naively. Husserl constantly points out that such a division of the world into physical and psychical makes no sense. For Husserl, naturalism is not just only partial or limited in its explanation of the world, it is in fact self-refuting, because it has collapsed all value and normativity into merely physical or psychical occurrences, precisely the same kind of error made by psychologism when it sought to explain the normativity of logic in terms of actual, occurrent psychological states and the empirical laws governing them. The whole picture is absurd or ‘counter-sensical’ in that it denies the reality of consciousness and yet is based on assuming the existence of consciousness to give rise to the picture in the first place (Ideas I § 55). Or as Husserl says in the 1911 essay: “It is the absurdity of naturalizing something whose essence excludes the kind of being that nature has."

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. — Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology, p139

@Relativist - note the reference to D M Armstrong.

:up: I think I am in agreement with your general thesis - the world is 'created' by our cognitive apparatus, our minds. We are the ones who provide the perspective and a series of contingent interfaces. Which is why for me it seems problematic to provide any totalising claims about meaning or transcendence. Is it coherent to suggest that we can get behind the contingent product of experience? If it is all an act of constructivism, then so is the notion of transcendence. Thoughts?

So, there's two parts to your observation. One being agreement with the general idea of cognitivism or constructivism, but the second being about 'totalising claims about meaning'. I think that can only be a reference to claims about what is beyond or outside the domain of naturalism, which suggests the supernatural, hence 'woo' in today's lexicon.

Here I'm drawn to a Buddhist perspective (and there are Buddhist references in the original post.) The awareness of the world-creating activities of mind is actually the salient point of vipassana, insight meditation. The Dhammapada begins with a line something like 'our life is the creation of our mind'. Throughout the early Buddhist texts, the point that is repeated over and over is awareness of and insight into the chain of dependent origination which gives rise to conditioned consciousness. In this context, It's not so much a matter of 'getting behind' those patterns, as of seeing through them - which is an arduous discipline.

There is an unequivocal statement in the Suttas 'there is that which is unconditioned, that which is unmade, that which is unfabricated' (ref). But in Buddhism, that is not a matter of faith, like 'faith in God' in the West, but one of insight. It does require faith, in that one has to have faith in it in order to take on such a discipline. But Buddhism is generally critical of dogmatic views (dṛṣṭi) one way or the other. That is why mindfulness is compared with the Husserlian epochē, 'bare awareness' of the qualities of consciousness. The connection between Buddhism and phenomenology is quite well documented nowadays. There's a wiki entry on Husserl's readings of Buddhism.

Regrettably the usual reaction is 'oh, you mean religion'. An attitude that I think is very much a product of our specific cultural history and what religion means to us. The answer has to be yes and no - religious in some respects, but not in others, as it has been defined very specifically as to what is included and what isn't, in Western cultural history.

I think that can only be a reference to claims about what is beyond or outside the domain of naturalism, which suggests the supernatural, hence 'woo' in today's lexicon. — Wayfarer

Well, I'm not going to call woo on this. I'm just working through the ideas. I guess my point, at the risk of repetition, is that in a sense, the act of positing transcendence—whether it be metaphysical, epistemic, or existential—may be just another layer of the constructivist project, a narrative that we generate rather than an actual escape from our contingent realities. Yet, there’s a paradox here: the very recognition of our cognitive limitations seems to point to a desire to grasp something beyond them. Does this suggest an innate tension in human thought, or is it simply a reflection of the inherent constraints of our perspectival existence?

Throughout the early Buddhist texts, the point that is repeated over and over is awareness of and insight into the chain of dependent origination which gives rise to conditioned consciousness. In this context, It's not so much a matter of 'getting behind' those patterns, as of seeing through them - which is an arduous discipline. — Wayfarer

Yes, that's my understanding as well, though I come at it from a much less theorised perspective. It strikes me that nearly every other post here delves into the idea of uncovering the deeper reality behind reality we inhabit. It’s fascinating how often discussions circle back to the notion that humans dwell on the surface of something and that there are ways to dive beneath.

Yet, there’s a paradox here: the very recognition of our cognitive limitations seems to point to a desire to grasp something beyond them. Does this suggest an innate tension in human thought, or is it simply a reflection of the inherent constraints of our perspectival existence? — Tom Storm

The former. The 'world-knot'. My feeling is that due to the 'instinctive naturalism' that Husserl calls out in the post above, we've not only lost the connection to 'the unconditioned' but we've forgotten that we've forgotten. Heidegger's 'forgetfulness of being'. Phenomenology and existentialism are both concerned with that.

(There's a well-known anecdote about Heidegger, that one day a colleague found him reading D T Suzuki (who at the time was lecturing at Columbia University and was well-known in the academic world.) Heidegger looked somewhat abashed, but said, 'if I understand this man correctly, this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings'. Of course it would be overly simplistic to say that he was in any meaningful way Buddhist or would adopt Buddhism. But I think both sources have a sense of the existential crisis of modernity. )