Magnus Englander

Magnus Englander’s 2012 article, “The Interview,” is an excellent resource for students learning how to conduct phenomenological research. As Englander points out, though Steiner Kvale’s excellent work on interviewing is well known among qualitative researchers, there are important differences between Kvale’s work and a phenomenological perspective. This article clarifies issues such as how to select participants, how many participants to interview (“sample size”), how to frame an interview question to invite rich data that is revelatory of participants’ lived experiences, and how phenomenological research arrives at generalizable results. Englander also conveys the humanistic commitment of this approach research in his description of the relationship between interviewer and interviewee. The full article is available on PhenomenologyBlog’s publications page.

“Language is much more like a sort of being than a means, and that is why it can present something to us so well. A friend’s speech over the telephone brings us the friend himself, as if he were wholly present in that manner of calling and saying goodbye to us, of beginning and ending his sentences, and of carrying on the conversation through things left unsaid” (p. 80).

In so few words Merleau-Ponty evokes the experience of the other’s unique presence with us, through speech.

But what is speech? The presence of the other for us is far more than significations, data, ideas, or “information.” When a friend speaks to me, if I’m present–rather than preoccupied or distracted!–the other person is with me. Any conversation deserving of the name is a being-together. In it is the constitution of what Husserl names the “we-world” (Wir-Welt).

When speaking to far-away colleagues and friends, more often than a telephone I use Skype or Google+. Through these media we have not only the friend’s speech, but a wide range of his or her gestures, tones, a fraction of his home, a piece of her wall, a painting, a window, the light in another country, another time of day.

Is it simulated proximity? Or am I really invited into my friend’s home, his office, his kitchen? A neuroscientist might interestingly inquire into the measurably embodied traces of this experience–the ways in which I respond, mostly nonverbally, to the other’s presence, how my presence in the here-and-now is in dialogue with his or hers, and how this occurs for both of us, mutually, even reciprocally.

As a phenomenologist, it is enough to live these changes attentively, awake to the remarkable phenomenon of the momentary next-door-ness of Tokyo or Rome or Mexico City or Lund. Not only space and time but language is being bridged, somehow, and the everydayness of two world merges in a way that makes the world outside my door feel surprisingly distant–by way of contrast–when I step out of my home. Tokyo was closer to me than Oakland, for the past hour.

So much of poststructuralist thought seems committed to emphasizing ruptures, gaps, discontinuities, incommensurabilities of all kinds–and of course we all experience such lapses, but arguably when they command our attention it is as foreground over and against a background of lived-continuities that is the taken for granted fabric of human being-together, however imperfectly lived.

YOSHIDA Akihiro

In the aftermath of dialoguing with far-away friends, as a phenomenologist, my curiosity awakens–like a virus, almost autonomously!—and seeks, as if of its own accord, to unfold and examine what I’ve lived, to reflectively open up the implicit meanings that fill me–not solipsistically, but out of a conviction that there’s something in the lived-experience, calling to be shared with my fellows.

I’ve been meeting regularly over Skype with Dr. Yoshida Akihiro for some time–he lives near Tokyo, I live near San Francisco–we share stories and thoughts, as fellow travelers in phenomenological philosophy and psychology.

With him I had the experience, as I’ve had  many times before with friends in the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia–that phenomenologists are few and far between! Dialoguing with a classically-trained Japanese scholar evoked, without my fully realizing it, some poems I read years ago of Taigu Ryôkan, a 19th century Soto Zen monk whose poetry described his rural, mendicant life in a poor hut. Here is an example translated by Smith and Huang (2009):

Reply to a Friend

In stubborn stupidity, I live on alone
befriended by trees and herbs.
Too lazy to learn right from wrong,
I laugh at myself, ignoring others.
Lifting my bony shanks, I cross the stream,
a sack in my hand, blessed by spring weather.
Living thus, I want for nothing,
at peace with all the world.

Your finger points to the moon,
but the finger is blind until the moon appears.
What connection has moon and finger?
Are they separate objects or bound?
This is a question for beginners
wrapped in seas of ignorance.
Yet one who looks beyond metaphor
knows there is no finger; there is no moon.

It might surprise those who regard Ryôkan as a “hermit” that he directs his poem toward a friend. But of course intersubjectivity is immediately present in the poetic act, which is a reaching out to others. Half-remembering the images from Ryôkan, I mentioned to Yoshida-san that we phenomenologists are often solitary as well–oftentimes our peers and friends in phenomenology are far away! So, I joked, maybe we are each a little like a monk, living isolated in a poor hut in the mountains, and when we see the traces of the fire of some other monk, even if he is far away, we feel cheered up! The signs of the other’s fire breaks our solitude.

Yoshida-san seemed to find this comparison not only apt, but hilarious: for me, this was a good confirmation.

He had shared with me that for some time he has been composing poems in the tanka style–a poetic form that originated in 8th century Japan. Naturally as phenomenologists we could not bear to simply name something like the tanka: we needed to reflect upon its form–to inquire playfully into the eidos of the tanka–and we arrived at the idea that such poems, which are quite short, aim to express as succinctly and purely as possible what Husserl might call a single intuition. The tanka is an aesthetic expression of the arising of that intuition. And I appreciated the free spirit with which Yoshida-san was writing, not to please an audience, but to find out, as if by accident, what insights emerge through this spontaneous expression through tanka.

So I was surprised when Yoshida-san emailed me this tanka:

Phonetically it reads: Kokohnaru genshougakusha sanchouni ranpu kakagete kokoro kayowasu. His English translation is:

Phenomenologist

Stands noble-mindedly on his own mountain-summit alone

Yearning to have sincere and honest dialogues

Choosing to hold up his lamp high above

His heart enlightens like-minded friends on far-away summits

Even now and ever into the future

Dialogue is most real, I’d say, when one shares oneself with the other person sincerely, and the response one receives is surprising, because it opens up a new horizon for both people. Suddenly we are sitting very close together, despite the distance, and sharing something. And in fact we were both sitting: only one of us was in suburban Tokyo and one in the Bay Area. Both of us were  in our own homes, and at the same time we were at home together. We are what Husserl called “homecomrades” (Heimgenosse).

In the literature of premodern mysticism, it is not uncommon to read stories of adepts who reported experiencing the intimate presence of their fellows despite vast geographic distances. Our own ordinary but nonetheless rich experiences of connection over distance deserve attention, as full of the minor details and accidents of daily life as they are.

Merleau-Ponty writes:

“True speech…speech which signifies, which finally renders “l’absente de tous bouquets” present and frees the meaning captive in the thing–is only silence in respect to empirical usage, for it does not go so far as to become a common noun. Language is oblique and autonomous, and if it sometimes signifies a thought or a thing directly, that is only a secondary power derived from its inner life. Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has to do only with language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by meaning” (p. 82).

 Isn’t what is true of speech generally, also true of our conversations? We talk, we reach out intentionally to our friends: and then sometimes, our words give birth to a meaning that then begins to move us. Freed from our strenuous efforts to signify something preconceived, our only task is to unfold a meaning that’s already emerging, present to both of us, in a world we’ve found together–despite our distance.

 ***

Hermeneutic postscript: In our discussions about this post, Yoshida-san and I found that the tanka itself kept changing; I would play with the English translation, and Dr. Yoshida would respond with a revised Japanese version. The humble campfire morphed into a burning brand in Japanese, then a signal fire, and finally a lantern. This back and forth was its own conversation, and something interesting stood out: the tone of Yoshida-san’s first English version was imperative, a call to the phenomenologist. Working with this feeling-sense, I produced this draft, with him:

However, upon reflection, Yoshida-san felt that althought the original sense of his poem was indeed imperative, it placed a forceful demand. He felt that a different voice was more true to the tanka form: namely, a more peaceful attitude in which the subject of the poem, the phenomenologist, is being purely witnessed in what he (or she) is already doing. The final Japanese version reflects this sensibility.

In our discussions and multiple revisions, he proposed that “The difference between the English poem by you and the Japanese tanka by me should remain, rather than [be] vanished, and certainly be appreciated, from the phenomenological appreciation of the perspective differences of individuals situated in the different life-worlds.” I agree, and in that spirit I have included variations.

Lest the reader think that this is a simple case of two strictly separate and absolutely different life-worlds, I would suggest that Dr. Yoshida’s perspective is too complex to be reduced to a simple dichotomy: reading his essay On Tamamushi-iro Expression: A Phenomenological Explication of Tamamushi-iro-no (Intentionally Ambiguous) Expressive Acts, you will see how he describes his experience of living through  and reflecting upon various culturally-conditioned expressive attitudes when he moved from Japan to the US, for graduate studies, and then returned to Japan. The ongoing dynamism of his point-of-view is evident.

I cannot help but include Yoshida-san’s explanation of his nom de plume, 求道愚童 , which he translates as “a stupid/naïve child seeking after truth.” It is found in the lower right-hand corner above, below the tanka. His commentary upon the four kanjis comprising this pen name is:

“求 Seeking –道 Michi (道(way)＝”do”≒truth) 愚 stupid/naïve, which implies sometimes far better than “clever”, ”shrewd” or even “intelligent”. 愚 is sometimes and by some people more valued/appreciated than “cleverness” and very near to “wise” and “wisdom”. So, 大愚 is regarded as an ideal way of life sometimes and by some people. 童 child, young child, but it is used to be applied even to old people, in the view of life that a man returns to a child when he gets very old. It is a symbol of his humbleness and at the same times his assertion that he has overcome the clever vulgarity of the adult social world. It is apt for an old retired person. So, 求道愚童 is my pen-name.”

References

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1993). The Merleau-Ponty aesthetics reader: Philosophy and painting (G. A. Johnson and M. B. Smith, Trans. Eds.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Ryôkan, T. (2009). The Kanshi poems of Taigu Ryôkan (L. Smith and M.H. L. Huang, Trans.). Huron, OH: Bottom Dog Press.

Photos

Green maple leaves photo credit: tomooka via photopin cc

Personal photo courtesy of Yoshida Akihiro

Red maple leaves photo credit: wwarby via photopin cc

Who’s Afraid of Forms? is an advanced summer program in phenomenological philosophy to be held July 1-4, 2013 at the University of Calabria. Seminars, delivered in English, will be led by Professors De Warren, Hopkins, Majolino and Palombi, and will address topics in the philosophy of science, ontology, ethics and politics. For details consult the program. To participate, please submit your materials by May 15. For registration, travel arrangements, accommodations  and fees can be found on the program website. For more information, email phenomenologyinfo2013@gmail.com.

Program Description

“Phenomenology is the study of essences; and according to it, all problems amount to finding definitions of essences”. It is in such bare terms that Merleau-Ponty introduces, in the Preface of hisPhenomenology of Perception, one of the most crucial and highly problematic issues in phenomenology, i.e. that of so called “phenomenological essentialism,” which has been widely criticized by both post-modern Continental and Analytical philosophers. According to this line of critique, phenomenology as such­-whether due to its ontological presuppositions or its epistemological intuitionism, its defective understanding of the nature of language or its rationalistic assumptions—is defined by philosophical claims that postulate a host of ideal, universal and a priori entities such as “essences”, “eidê”, “categories” etc. Such entities, it is further charged, can also be grasped “in person” by means of an allegedly specific act of direct “grasping” labeled as “essential seeing”, “eidetic intuition”, “categorial intuition” etc.

The activities of the SSPPP will be devoted to a full analysis of the meaning and the scope of such “essentialism,” its historical origins, implications and limits. This seminar will also investigate whether essentialism is in fact, as charged, a necessary component of phenomenology as such-as Merleau-Ponty suggests-or if it is only related to a certain understanding of phenomenology. The implications of such analysis do not just concern questions of ontology, but reach across the full spectrum of philosophical topics: ethics, political philosophy, epistemology and theory of science. By offering a fresh and new approach of the function and status of essentialism in phenomenology, this seminar will provide a unique format for a confrontation with Analytic philosophy (for example, the anti-essentialist linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein and nominalism of Goodman) as well as post-structuralism (Foucault’s archeology of knowledge and Derrida’s deconstruction).

As a psychologist who reads philosophy I sometimes feel I’m living through an interminable, shared philosophical hangover in my teaching life—as if I’m groggily stumbling through popularized, overly simplified versions of philosophical ideas that are presented as somehow new within psychology, though they were penetratingly critiqued by philosophers decades ago! Of course philosophy is prey to  faddism as well…in a laconic footnote to his book Italian Marxism (1983), Piccone remarks that “earlier in the century, discredited philosophical fads used to leave the continent for the greener pastures of the United States, where they would survive for another couple of decades” (p. 119).

This strange zombie afterlife of philosophical fads is close to what I mean by a hangover. My first experience of it was during the popularization of Postmodernism that was rampant on American college campuses in the 1980’s. At that time peers of mine with their dog-eared copy of Madness and Civilization or Writing and Difference breezily claimed to “deconstruct” any argument one attempted to make in something resembling a linear manner. At least, that’s how I remember those days.

To be clear, my point isn’t that the philosophers known as “postmodern” weren’t and aren’t important. For example, I think Foucault’s brilliant work is critical for anyone concerned with grasping the social power of psychiatric diagnosis. It’s not philosophical ideas that are the problem. On the contrary: the problem as I see it is the superficialization of philosophical ideas and their too-casual importation into psychology. This is especially true for those of us who are qualitative researchers, because we already bear the stigma of our marginalization as non-measurers and hence (for the mainstream) non-scientists.

But the corollary to the problem of faddism in philosophy or psychology is our capacity to seek to prematurely transcend our elders’ ideas in order to assert ourselves. OK, this is a psychological interpretation! But I wonder whether the generations that followed Husserl sought to overturn his authority a bit too quickly, and without adequately understanding him?

Regardless, it is undeniable that so much of Husserl’s work remained unpublished (in any language) at the time of his death, that the full picture of the work of the “late Husserl” is still emerging today. So the adequacy of readings of Husserl by distinguished philosophers such as Levinas, Ricoeur, Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, and Gadamer is open to debate. And for example, the “received view”—as Sebastian Luft (2011) describes it—of the value of Husserl’s work in relation to Heidegger’s must be challenged. In this “received view” nicely summarized by Luft, all that was of value in Husserl’s work was incorporated by and transcended by Heidegger–a highly questionable claim.

So the received view that Husserl was eclipsed long ago deserves to be challenged; I find there’s much in Husserl that can be tremendously valuable for psychology. In particular in this post I want to emphasize the value of Husserl’s work for cultural psychology.  Highlighting this for psychologists is important because the intrinsically intercultural dimensions of Husserl’s work, while emphasized by philosophers like J. N. Mohanty, has to my knowledge been largely neglected by psychologists. So what follows is an unsystematic introduction to some aspects of Husserl’s writings that bear directly on cultural psychology—to give a taste of what’s available, not a full exposition.

The life-world

Husserl referred to “the encompassing world of our immediate experience” as the “life-world” (Spiegelberg, 1965, p. 720). For Husserl, the life-world always implies intersubjectivity because it is intersubjectively constituted (Gurwitsch, 1966). Indeed, it can be said that this intersubjectivity is the ego’s opening to world as such (Khosrokhavar, 2001).

For this reason, Husserl (1982) consistently used expressions such as “our” and “for us” when discussing perceptions or knowledge. Intersubjectivity is in its largest sense “the human race in its totality; in the narrower sense, a more or less confined socio-historical group” (Gurwitsch, 1966, p. 433). As Landgrebe (1981) commented, “The life-world is not only a world for me, the single individual; it is a common world, a world for a particular human community” (p. 132). Hence, life-worlds are intentional and shaped by the local “customs and habits of particular communities” (Landgrebe, 1981, p. 133). Furthermore, the life-world is “something that continuously grows and develops . . . something that carries the impress of the communal history” (Kockelmans, 1967/1978, p. 279).

We begin to see the outlines of a phenomenological way into the study of shared cultural life.

Turning explicitly to culture, Husserl (1973) wrote that in daily life, varied communities constitute “different surrounding worlds of culture” (p. 133). One’s “cultural world” is founded upon the life-world but “by no means reducible to it” (Carr, 1974, p. 195).

And of course, in everyday life the cultural world is lived within what Husserl calls a natural attitude: Husserl observed that in the normal state of affairs one tends to regard the objects of everyday experience in communal life such as physical objects, other people, and even implicitly theoretical conceptions as simply real and straightforwardly existent. Husserl (1982) termed this unreflective attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, the “natural attitude” (p. 5).

Exploring the cultural world

A community’s shared cultural world reflects a type of natural attitude replete with unexamined values and narratives most often regarded as self-evidently real. Husserl’s late work was keenly concerned with the constitution of the intersubjective, cultural realm and the way in which individual egos are shaped by and discover freedom within community. So for example Donohoe (2004) argued that Husserl’s later, genetic phenomenology offers “a method endowed with the flexibility to understand the cultural and historical fluctuations of meaning and the ever-changing relationship between the individual and its surrounding world” (p. 180).

Turning specifically to the religious dimension of communal life, Hart (1994) observed that in his correspondence with Dilthey, Husserl asserted that the phenomenology of religion is “an empathic study of the inner life of religious persons and communities in terms of the various motivations and life-forms” in the attempt to explicate the “essential-ideal[s]” intended in a religious tradition (p. 267).

The demanding, descriptive quality of phenomenology, its self-reflectiveness as an approach, keen interest in the other’s life-world, and the stance of ontological neutrality vis-à-vis the other’s experience make Husserlian phenomenology particularly well suited for use in cultural psychological studies. Mohanty (1992) wrote that Husserl’s phenomenology is distinguished by an “openness to phenomena, to the given qua given, to the intended meanings precisely as they are intended” (p. 8). This feature, Mohanty wrote, “Challenges you to face up to the task of understanding the other, the other culture…the other person” (p. 8).

Following Husserl, key figures in the phenomenological movement have been keenly focused on explicating the structure of alterity (Theunissen, 1977/1984). Consequently, phenomenology is particularly well suited to the study of “other cultural worlds” (Mohanty, 1992, p. 9). Moreover, Mohanty (1994) argued, for Husserl knowing another culture “is not simply one-sidedly knowing the other, but ‘mutual’ communication which removes ‘strangeness.’

Mohanty (1994) indicated that Husserl’s discussion of culture undermines the notion of strict cultural otherness, writing that for Husserl “when this one-way track of ‘making sense’ of the native is overcome by the ‘mutuality’ of ‘making sense’ of each other, the foreignness is overcome. A common world, mutually shared, thereby begins to constitute itself” (p. 142).

J. N. Mohanty

Importantly, Mohanty wrote, “The idea of one world for all is constituted through such communication, and may serve as a norm for critiquing one’s home-world” (p. 144). So here we see phenomenology not only as a means of accessing the other’s world, but also of critiquing one’s own society—a project carried forward by Merleau-Ponty (see Coole’s Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics After Anti-Humanism).

Mohanty (1992) acutely pointes out that phenomenological research cannot properly be framed as “comparative” analysis; rather, it is intended as a tool “for understanding the other’s point of view as a noematic structure” meant “to go behind it in order to lay bare the experiential phenomenon that is embodied in this structure” (p. 8). Turning to psychology, then, a phenomenological approach seeks to render the other’s account more fully intelligible as a possible experience by unearthing its implicit structure, while simultaneously bracketing ontological claims concerning that experience. As a result, Giorgi’s (1970) psychological adaptation of Husserl’s work is neither constrained to adopt the Platonizing universalism critiqued by the cultural psychologists nor the methodological relativism they sometimes advocate in its stead (Shweder & Bourne, 1991).

One might even argue that phenomenologists, to the extent they are personally engaged by the problems of globalization,  are intrinsically inter-cultural in their outlook.

References

Carr, D. (1974). Phenomenology and the problem of history: A study of Husserl’s transcendental philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Coole, D. (2007). Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics After Anti-Humanism. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Donohoe, J. (2004). Husserl on ethics and intersubjectivity: From static to genetic phenomenology. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.

Giorgi, A. (1970). Psychology as a human science: A phenomenologically based approach. New York: Harper & Row.

Gurwitsch, A. (1966). Studies in phenomenology and psychology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Hart, J. (1994). The study of religion in Husserl’s writings. In M. Daniel & L. Embree

(Eds.), Phenomenology of the cultural disciplines (pp. 265-296). Boston: Kluwer.

Husserl, E. (1982). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy: First book, General introduction to a pure phenomenology (F. Kersten, Trans.). Boston: Kluwer.

Kockelmans, J. J. (1978). Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological psychology: A historico-critical study. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. (Original work published 1967)

Khosrokhavar, F. (2001). L’instance du sacre: Essay de foundation des sciences sociales. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf.

Landgrebe, L. (1981). The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Six essays by Ludwig Landgrebe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Piccone, P. (1983). Italian Marxism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Luft, S. (2011).Subjectivity and lifeworld in transcendental phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Mohanty, J. N. (1992). Phenomenology and Indian philosophy: The concept of rationality. In D. P. Chattopadhyaya, L. Embree, & J. N. Mohanty (Eds.), Phenomenology and Indian philosophy. New Delhi, India: Indian Council of Philosophical Research.

Mohanty, J. N. (1994). The other culture. In M. Daniel & L. Embree (Eds.), Phenomenology of the cultural disciplines (pp. 135-146). Boston: Kluwer.

Shweder, R. A. & Bourne, E. J. (1991). Does the concept of the person vary cross-culturally? In R. A. Shweder (Ed.), Thinking through cultures: Expeditions in cultural psychology (pp. 113-155). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Spiegelberg, H. (1965). The phenomenological movement: A historical introduction (2nd ed.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Teo, T. & Febbraro, A. R. (2002). Attribution errors in the postmodern landscape. American Psychologist, (57), 458-460.

Teo, T. (1996). Practical reason in psychology: Postmodern discourse and a neo-modern alternative. In W. Tolman, F. Cherry, R. van Hezewijk, I. Lubek (Ed.), Problems of theoretical psychology (pp. 280-290). Ontario, Canada: Captus Press.

Theunissen, M. (1984). The other: Studies in the social ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber (C. Macann, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original work published 1977)

Credits

Coke billboard:photo credit: SeeMidTN.com (aka Brent) via photopin cc

Stone artefacts: photo credit: gbaku via photopin cc

Thanks to J. N. Mohanty for permission to use his photograph

Eu ensino uma introdução à investigação psicológica para estudantes de doutorado que dura um ano. Muitos dos meus alunos são psicoterapeutas ou estão em processo de tornarem-se licenciados, e eu freqüentemente me deparo com as duas hipóteses/suposições seguintes:

1. Nós compreendemos mais profundamente a pessoa individual quando entendemos o que faz com que a sua experiência psicológica seja única, e

2. Isto é assim porque o caráter único de uma pessoa é a própria essência de sua humanidade.

Falando a partir da fenomenologia…

Primeiro, com base na minha perspectiva como um psicólogo fenomenológico, as duas hipóteses acima negligenciam a matriz intersubjetiva dentro da qual todos os significados humanos surgem. Lau Kwok-Ying oferece uma boa discussão desses temas na obra de Merleau-Ponty. Em suma, a expressão do que nós chamamos de “individualidade” é sempre dependente de e enraizada em significados compartilhados – caso contrário, as expressões psicologicamente ricas dos indivíduos seriam incompreensíveis para os outros.

Fenomenólogos reconhecem que os significados psicológicos são vividos pessoalmente, e muitas vezes são expressados em formas únicas. O ser humano individual é valorizado, é claro. Ao mesmo tempo, a nossa humanidade não é um atributo relacional – parte e parcela de pertencer a uma comunidade de outros – ao invés de minha posse solitária? Língua, valores, esperanças, medos – todos estes são vividos em relação a um mundo de outros e no meio deste mundo. Nenhum deles são experienciados em estrito isolamento dos outros, muito menos criados ‘sui generis’ por um indivíduo isolado.

Assim, mesmo no meio de uma crise de depressão, na qual a pessoa talvez se sinta totalmente isolada dos outros e se desespere em conectar-se com qualquer um – ainda que este ainda seja um fenômeno relacional – somente o significado dos outros para o sofredor inclui um senso doloroso e isolado de inacessibilidade.

A partir desta perspectiva, quando estamos compreendendo a experiência do outro, nós estamos fazendo isso porque nós somos capazes de captar, de uma maneira fundamental, o significado intersubjetivo (compartilhado) do que está sendo vivido por essa pessoa, embora em sua própria maneira.

Em outras palavras, no caso de uma condição como a referida pelo diagnóstico “Transtorno de Estresse Pós-traumático” – PTSD, nós absolutamente queremos entender como o indivíduo está experimentando a condição, porque esta pode ser vivida de formas arrogantemente/ importantemente diferentes por pessoas diferentes.

Mas note que há um “algo”, em primeiro lugar, que está sendo vivido diferentemente – em outras palavras, nós aceitamos como verdadeiro que o diagnóstico “PTSD” é uma forma de apontar para uma constelação de fenômenos psíquicos que podem ser descritos.

Precisamente porque pode ser reconhecido e compreendido como um fenômeno à parte dos fatos empíricos específicos de cada experiência individual de estresse pós-traumático, nós somos capazes de reconhecer as maneiras nas quais o PTSD se manifesta de diferentes formas e requer diferentes respostas clínicas sutis.

Meu ponto é que se negligenciarmos o fenômeno de PTSD em si mesmo, ou tomarmos os critérios do manual de diagnóstico como de certo modo auto-evidentes, não históricos, e sem exigir reflexão adicional, então teremos efetivamente medicalizado a condição da pessoa individual: concretizado-a, objetivado-a, e tornado-a um “problema” totalmente compreendido a ser mecanicamente “tratado”. Ao invés do quê? Ao invés de investigar o significado daquilo que está sendo vivido pelo indivíduo como uma experiência intersubjetivamente significativa – não meramente uma experiência idiossincrática única / exclusiva.

Reconhecendo a dimensão intersubjetiva da experiência do outro realmente nos libera para discernir o que é particular e único na forma como isto está sendo vivido por aquele indivíduo.

Crítica à psicologia cultural

As suposições geminadas acima identificadas são, através da lente da psicologia cultural, flagrantemente limitadas pela cultura. Embora fosse ingênuo afirmar que há fronteiras absolutas entre “culturas”, mesmo assim deveria ser evidente que a valorização da individualidade é, acima de tudo, razoavelmente uma perspectiva exclusivamente “ocidental” e, talvez, em alguns aspectos, até mesmo uma perspectiva exclusivamente anglo-saxônica.

Ao invés de ver isso como um fenômeno meramente “cultural” (a palavra “cultura” soa, de certo modo, inocente e sem questionamento!), nós também poderíamos considerar que o individualismo pode igualmente encarnar uma ideologia, algo que Philip Cushman argumentou brilhantemente em seu livro Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy. E, como Slavoj Zizek observou, uma ideologia é caracterizada precisamente pelo fato de que as suas suposições são tão onipresentes que nunca são reconhecidas como suposições. Como educadores, nós devemos isso aos nossos alunos; levantar essas questões neles.

Para demonstrar o que eu quero dizer a respeito da visão individualista ser culturalmente específica, deixe-me esboçar três ideais alternativos a respeito do ser humano essencial: Eu vou referenciar concepções da pessoa humana extraidas das tradições Judaica, Islâmica e Taoísta. Três tradições de pensamento espiritual são mencionadas a fim de indicar como outros ideais culturais colocam muito menos ênfase na importância da singularidade individual como um fim em si mesmo, ou como incorporando o valor de primazia de uma pessoa.

Uma ressalva – Eu não quero sugerir que esses ideais sejam monolíticos, unívocos, ou aceitos, ou percebidos por todos os membros das respectivas comunidades. No entanto, são os pontos de vista que moldaram significativamente as suas culturas circundantes. O que segue são miniaturas, a minha tentativa de transmitir uma noção dessas diversas visões de mundo e desses arquétipos culturais.

Mentschlekhkeyt

Na cultura judaica Ashkenazi, talvez não haja nenhuma glória/honra maior do que ser chamado de um “mensch”. Mensch, literalmente, significa simplesmente “Um ser humano”; que implica ser um ser humano genuíno, ou um ser humano real. É em certo sentido o oposto exato de ser especial ou único – de certa forma, mentschlekhkeyt (literalmente, ser um mensch, “mensch-ness”) significa que ser um ser humano real é o mais alto que qualquer pessoa pode aspirar. Quer dizer: neste contexto cultural, perceber a própria normalidade/ordinariedade absoluta é um ideal. A partir desta perspectiva, o que nos torna mais humanos é o que nos unifica com os outros, não o que nos torna singularmente diferentes e “especiais”. O Editorial de Norman Lear: “A Church for People Like Us” é uma exemplificação brilhante de mentschlekhkeyt em ação.

Martin Buber

A sensação (percepção/compreensão) sentida de mensch, em termos psicológicos, é completamente contrária à auto-importância ou preciosidade. Em vez disso, é humilde – inevitavelmente assim! Maurice Friedman menciona a recordação de Martin Buber do conto popular judaico, que diz que o Messias tão esperado já está de fato presente na terra, esperando na forma de um mendigo que sofre de lepra (oy!) e sentado lá pelas portas de Roma, despercebido no meio do povo de rua. Em outras palavras, no conto popular, o Messias já está aqui, mas é ignorado porque ele é irreconhecível entre os membros da sociedade mais humildes, pobres e fisicamente repugnantes. Da mesma maneira, o mensch é, em certo sentido, completamente banal [que não é singular], precisamente porque ele ou ela é plenamente humano/a e sujeito às fraquezas humanas.

Al-insan al-Kamil

No Sufismo clássico, o caminho místico do Islam, a frase al-insan al-Kamil é usada para designar “o ser humano concluído”. Pode-se dizer que, no Sufismo de Ibn al Arabi (1165-1240), o ideal de inteireza / perfeição humana é representado não como o de alcançar um elevado nível, supremo e fixo, de realização espiritual, mas, em vez disso, como observa Sachiko Murata, como o de quem habita um “ponto de vista de nenhum ponto de vista”: ele ou ela é uma “pessoa de nenhuma estação [fixa]“. Ou seja, eles estão em constante mudança.

De acordo com a tradição clássica esta transparência ao divino é o resultado das aniquilações/obliterações da identidade distinta da pessoa, mudanças que são mediadas pelo relacionamento amoroso dos seres humanos com o relacionamento com Deus (tais pessoas são chamadas de “amigos de Deus“. Freqüentemente citado pelos Sufis, neste contexto, é o hadith (uma declaração atribuída ao Profeta) no qual Deus diz:

“Meu servo continua a aproximar-se de mim com obras supererogatórias para que Eu o ame. Quando Eu o amo Eu sou a sua audição com a qual ele ouve, a sua visão com a qual ele vê, a sua mão com a qual ele golpeia e o seu pé com o qual ele anda.”

A expressão paradigmática disto ocorre no verso 8:27 do Qur’an; uma descrição de uma batalha fazendo referência a um incidente no qual diz-se que o Profeta tenha atirado uma pedra que dispersara as tropas inimigas. O próprio versículo diz, em parte, “que não foi você que atirou, quando você atirou, mas foi Deus quem atirou.” Em outras palavras, a ação heróica em si mesma não pertence nem mesmo ao Profeta mais venerado no Islam.

Este tema é um longo tópico familiar na literatura Sufi clássica: quanto mais completos os seres humanos individuais são, tanto mais “vazios” eles estão em um certo aspecto, porque eles estão aniquilados / obliterados em seu Senhor. Mas, ao mesmo tempo, (e aqui está a ponte, pelo menos em algumas versões do Sufismo, com mensch) tanto mais humanos eles são. Como um ideal cultural de servidão, isto representa uma “redução” do indivíduo em face de algo maior, e é precisamente através deste serviço (as palavras árabes clássicas para servo:‘abd, e para culto:‘ ibadah, ambas vêm da mesma raiz) que o ser humano individual encontra a sua dignidade e o seu propósito. Assim, a servidão em relação ao outro, em vez da individualidade única, é mais valorizada aqui.

Shêng jên

Nos textos taoístas de Chuang-tsu (369 – 298 aC) a seguinte descrição é dada a respeito da pessoa “autêntica” ou “verdadeira” (Shêng jên), aqui traduzido como “o verdadeiro homem”:
“Qual é o verdadeiro homem? O verdadeiro homem de outrora não se opôs à minoria, não lutou por conquistas heróicas, e não maquinou/tramou nos negócios / transações. Sendo esse o caso, não se arrependeu / lamentou quando ele cometeu um erro, nem se sentiu orgulhoso quando ele estava certo… o verdadeiro homem de outrora –

Foi elevando-se em estatura, mas nunca entrou em colapso;

Parecia insuficiente, mas não aceitava nada;

Friamente independente, mas não obstinado;

Amplamente vazio, mas sem ostentação;

Agradável/divertido como se ele fosse feliz;

Contrariado como se estivesse forçado;

Expandido com um charme encantador;

Dotado de uma integridade impressionante;

Austero/inflexível, como se ele fosse mundano;

Arrogante como se ele fosse incontrolável;

Reticente/reservado, como se ele preferisse se calar/fechar;

Distraído como se ele esquecesse o que dizer…” (pp. 52-53)

A imagem da pessoa verdadeira é extraordinariamente comum (não singular) e, a partir de uma perspectiva americana, é inexpressiva (não impressionante). Este não é, obviamente, alguém interessado em “comercializar” ou “estigmatizar” a si mesmo! Pelo contrário, essa pessoa parece estar em necessidade, e ser até um pouco desagradável pelos padrões comuns!

Da mesma forma, Chuang-Tzu conta uma estória usando os personagens de Confúcio e seu discípulo Yen Hui na qual Yen Hui busca permissão para viajar para intervir junto ao governante de Wei, que está oprimindo o seu povo, a fim de melhorar a condição da comunidade de Wei.
No conto, Chuang-Tzu nega todos os argumentos que um “agente de mudança” americano poderia levantar para justificar a intervenção e, inicialmente, ao invés disso, recomenda o “jejum da mente”. Em vez de tentar resumir esta história excelente de Chuang-Tzu, eu vou simplesmente recomendá-la como uma parábola, especialmente para aqueles envolvidos em transformação social – um objetivo com o qual eu tenho grande simpatia (Eu quero dizer literalmente isto: a ‘sympathia’ grega significa uma comunidade de sentimento).

Considerações finais…

Os esboços acima não são exposições remotamente adequadas das tradições que eu referenciei – em vez disso, eles são concebidos como aperitivos cujo propósito é transmitir sabores diferentes de uma série de ideais culturais, nenhum dos quais é consistente com o individualismo estrito.

Isto não é para rejeitar o individualismo, nem é para dizer que não há nenhum individualismo nas culturas variadas que eu mencionei. Muito pelo contrário – há, sem dúvida, exemplos profundos de individualismo – ou, no mínimo, exemplos evidentes de individuação – dentro de movimentos tais como a Primavera Árabe e os movimentos pró-democracia na China. O fenômeno da individuação é a propriedade da não-cultura – embora a valorização exclusiva do individualismo seja, sem dúvida, mais pronunciado em determinados momentos e lugares.

Mas a individuação é equivalente ao “individualismo americano”? Em seu estudo de Jung e Kohut, Mario Jacoby escreve: “para Jung a questão do significado está claramente conectada com a auto-realização em si mesma através do processo de individuação. [Jung escreve:] ‘Em última análise, toda vida é a realização /compreensão de um todo… e a realização de (disso), unicamente, promove o sentido /significado da vida.’”

Enquadrar a realização como uma “realização/compreensão de um todo” de uma pessoa individual deixa a porta aberta para os múltiplos caminhos nos quais a “totalidade” pode ser experienciada, e pareceria permitir uma série de variações culturais além daquelas que podem estar mais perto de casa. Isto é particularmente importante em um tempo quando ser um “cidadão do mundo” (kosmopolitês – uma expressão que teria sido cunhada por Diógenes, o Cínico) requer que a pessoa procure compreender as motivações variadas inspirando a ação social globalmente, de Nova York ao Cairo à Moscou: nenhuma das mobilizações coletivas que estamos testemunhando são monolíticas, nenhuma delas são idênticas, e ainda como a marca do nosso tempo, elas não demandam urgentemente a nossa atenção e compreensão?

Credits

Thanks to the friends who translated this piece, who preferred to do so anonymously.

Brikis photo credit: oranges and lemons via photo pin cc

Martin Buber photo credit: On Being via photopin cc

Cupola calligraphy photo credit: beggs via photopin cc

Lotus photo credit: Anushruti RK via photopin cc

Akihiro Yoshida

Here is a link to a beautiful essay of Akihiro Yoshida’s, On Tamamushi-iro Expression: A Phenomenological Explication of Tamamushi-iro-no (Intendedly Ambiguous) Expressive Acts. Dr. Yoshida is Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo, and Professor of Psychology, Shukutoku University. In Japanese, he writes, tamamushi-iro-no expressions are those that, when spoken, lend themselves to multiple differing interpretations by the one to whom they are spoken…and while tamamushi-iro-no can be translated as “ambiguous” or “equivocal,” neither of these captures the lived meaning of those expressions. Tamamushi-iro-no literally refers to a jewel beetle, Tamamushi (Chrysochroa fulgidissima), whose color changes depending upon the angle from which he is seen.

Yoshida reflects that ambiguity is “one of the conspicuous characteristics of traditional Japanese culture and its people,” and so a phenomenological meditation upon lived-ambiguity is a reflection upon a shared world. In bridging contexts or cultures, and in the context of opening up a genuinely intercultural question in a phenomenological spirit, Yoshida asks: “Does not ambiguity constitute the incommensurable that would necessitate a rite of passage if we were to transgress the boundary between the domains of Japanese culture, in the East, and European cultures, in the West?”

I encourage anyone interested in phenomenology as a path of intercultural inquiry to spend time with this essay, because what is conveyed is not merely psychological nor sociological nor linguistic, but a sense of the world of the other, from the position of an interested witness. So there is a sense of the phenomenon that’s being examined, and that sense permeates the essay.

For example, reflecting on the experience of wordlessness, he writes: “Silence assumes a meaning, when both the person keeping it and the other parties commonly understand that it could  be broken. The meaning  assumed by silence cannot help but be multivocal, thus silence takes the characteristics of tamamushi-iro expression.” Similarly, his reflections upon the multiple ways in which the word dōmo (どうも) is used, are illustrative not only of grammar but of the multiple, feelingful relational states that are conveyed thorough a kind of nuanced ambiguity.

What is  so important for me, as a reader of this essay, is the clear way in which Yoshida points to the dynamism of everyday communication: communicative acts are nothing like mechanical exchanges of fixed signs between static transmitters! And he conveys this in a striking way. Yet in the exploration he doesn’t seek closure, but keeps opening up the question and inviting the reader’s awareness of his or her own experience of the phenomenon in question, and the experience of reading the essay itself, as a window onto another lived-world.

Postscript: Since I am not a scholar of Buddhism, I was initially confused by Yoshida’s contrasting of the Mahayana and Hinayana Buddhism in his article in order to draw a distinction between “Daijou” motives (self-and-other directed) and “Shojou” motives  (solely self-directed) (p. 271). Unfortunately, a number of American sources on Buddhism equate “Hinayana” with Theravada Buddhism, a distortion which would lead to a serious misreading of Yoshida. Yoshida is using “Hinayana” in a classic sense: it refers not to Theravada but to a now-extinct school of  early Buddhist thought which was critiqued as exclusively concerned with enlightening the self and neglecting one’s fellow human beings (see Hirakawa Akira’s A History of Indian Buddhism, 1990). I checked this understanding with Yoshida, who confirmed it: he is using “Hinayana” to refer to a self-concerned attitude. –Marc Applebaum

Photo credits

Tamamushi (Chrysochroa fulgidissima) photo from Brian Adler

photo of Yoshida Akihiro: Marc Applebaum

Frederick J. Wertz

Dear Colleague,

The Interdisciplinary Coalition of North American Phenomenologists (ICNAP) conference, “Understanding Embodiment,” will be taking place May 24 – 26 at Ramapo College, New Jersey with keynote addresses by James Phillips and Lewis R. Gordon.  The deadline for the submission of abstracts has been extended until March 1, and so there is still time to submit proposals. Of course your attendance is also most welcome.

ICNAP  (http://www.icnap.org/) was founded by colleagues from Architecture, Communicology, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology, and the organization extends an invitation to colleagues and students in all academic disciplines who are interested in forging interdisciplinary connections within phenomenology. Now entering its fifth year, we who have been involved find that understanding the work of phenomenological scholars at all levels of expertise across the full spectrum of disciplines is a most informative and enlivening experience.

We hope that you will consider joining us at the conference and encourage you to distribute the attached call for papers to interested students and colleagues. Again, submissions for panels and individual papers are requested by March 1, 2013, and volunteers for panel moderators are also welcome.

With warm regards,

Frederick J. Wertz

Acting Chair, Department of Communication and Media Studies                                                                      Associate Chair and Professor, Department of Psychology, Fordham University

Conference theme: Understanding Embodiment

We welcome works that feature phenomenology in all academic disciplines. In addition
to presentations employing phenomenology in single disciplines, we are interested broadly in issues related to theories of embodiment. This includes, but is not limited to, theoretical expositions of the phenomenological conditions of embodiment as they are (1) developed and contested within the phenomenological tradition, (2) taken up and pursued within specific disciplinary contexts, and (3) applied in research, clinical and other practical contexts.

Keynote Addresses: Friday, May 24^th James Phillips: “Karl Jaspers as Phenomenological Psychiatrist: Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the ‘General Psychopathology’ ”

Saturday, May 25^th Second Annual Husserliana Session: Husserliana 39, Die Lebenswelt: Auslegung der vorgegebenen Welt und Ihre Konstitution (2008) Rochus Sowa, editor, will respond.

Lewis R. Gordon: “Living Phenomenology”

James Phillips is in the private practice of psychiatry, with a focus on medically oriented psychotherapy, and is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in the Yale School of Medicine. He is Secretary and member of the Executive Committee of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry, and is editor of the AAPP Bulletin. He has written extensively in the area of philosophy, psychiatry, and phenomenology and is on the editorial board of the journal, Philosophy, Psychiatry, Psychology. He is co-editor (with James Morley) of Imagination and its Pathologies (MIT Press, 2002), editor of  Philosophical Perspectives on Technology and Psychiatry (Oxford, 2008), and coeditor (with Joel Paris) of Making the DSM-5: Concepts and Controversies (Springer, in press). Since 2004, he has been involved in developing and supporting a psychiatric clinic in Ayacucho, Peru, a rural Andean city, and he travels there regularly.

Lewis R. Gordon teaches in the Department of Philosophy and the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. He previously taught at Temple University, where he founded and directed the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies and the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought, and Brown University, where he was the founding chairperson of the Department of Africana Studies.  Professor Gordon has held several distinguished visiting appointments and is currently Visiting Professor in the French-German Summer School at the University of Toulouse, France.  He is the author of several influential books, including Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995), Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (1995), Her Majesty’s Other Children (1997), Existentia Africana (2000), Disciplinary Decadence (2006), and An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (2008).  The URL for Professor Gordon’s website, which contains an elaborated biography, list of publications, audio and video presentations, and his blog, is: http://lewisrgordon.com/

Call for papers

We welcome works that feature phenomenology in all academic disciplines. In addition
to presentations employing phenomenology in single disciplines, we are interested broadly in issues related to theories of embodiment. This includes, but is not limited to, theoretical expositions of the phenomenological conditions of embodiment as they are (1) developed and contested within the phenomenological tradition, (2) taken up and pursued within specific disciplinary contexts, and (3) applied in research, clinical and other practical contexts.

Submissions

We accept both individual papers and panel proposals.  Participants will have 30 minutes for presentation and 20 minutes for discussion.  Only a limited number of panel proposals will be accepted.

—For individual papers, please submit a 500—750 word abstract, with name, discipline, title of the paper and contact information on the first page.  The second page should contain only the title and abstract for anonymous review.

—For panels, please include the title of the program, the names of the chair and all presenters, and a 200—300 word rationale for the panel and 200—300 word abstract for each presenter (name, discipline, title of the paper and contact information).

—No more than two submissions per person. Please make sure your submission is in Word.doc or docx format (no PDFs) to facilitate anonymous review.

—Volunteers for panel moderators are also welcome.

Deadline: Submissions due by March 1, 2013, acceptances notified by April 1, 2013.

Send all submissions to Jacqueline M. Martinez (jmartinez@asu.edu) as email attachment. Please put ICNAP V Submission in the subject line of the email.

Travel

Note that national and international airline connections are available via New York City and Newark, New Jersey. Lodging at the Fairfield Inn and Suites: ICNAP rate – $99 for double room (single or double occupancy; rooms may be shared at your own discretion.)

Moustakas and Giorgi seek to develop qualitative research approaches that do justice to the human subject. They each make the claim that their methods are based upon Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy. Hence both offer adaptations of Husserl’s philosophy for psychology.  Moustakas seeks to articulate what he terms a “transcendental phenomenological” approach while Giorgi presents an empirical-psychological approach.

Moustakas’ reading of Husserl

I would argue that a close reading of Phenomenological Research Methods (1994) reveals that Moustakas’ approach is not grounded in a good grasp of Husserl’s work–something a phenomenological philosopher would quickly realize in reviewing the book.  As a result, Moustakas’ renderings of key phenomenological terms like  transcendental subjectivity, the reduction, and the epoché are inconsistent with Husserl’s work, as is his account of the critical distinction Husserl makes between the empirical and transcendental ego.

I think Moustakas’ 1994 book is best regarded as representing his own approach to working with people, one based upon a humanistic therapeutic perspective, rather than one well-grounded in Husserl’s philosophy. Moustakas’ statement that his approach not only follows Husserl but is at the same time “heuristic” suggests that Husserl is more a source of inspiration for Moustakas than an actual epistemological foundation.

Examples of misreadings include Moustakas’ equating of transcendental subjectivity with presuppositionlessness (p. 60) and his description of the epoché and reduction as nothing more than the setting aside of personal prejudices. Moustakas describes the phenomenologist’s research attitude in the following way: “presumably this person has set aside biases and has come to a place of readiness to gaze on whatever appears and to remain with that phenomenon until it is understood, until a perceptual closure is realized” (p. 73). Moustakas emphasizes that in phenomenological research “I, the experiencing person, remain present. I, as a conscious person, am not set aside” and “with an open, transcendental consciousness, I carry out the Epoché” (p. 87). There is enough similarity between this representation and Husserl’s words for a beginning student to assume Husserl’s phenomenology is being carefully read and applied. Yet, for one better-acquainted with Husserl’s writings, problems are immediately evident, as will be seen.

The first difficulty is that Moustakas neglects Husserl’s critical distinctions between the various modes of subjectivity, as well as between various types of phenomenological reductions. And whereas these are philosophical distinctions, they are fundamental to understanding what’s meant by a “phenomenological attitude,” and therefore central for adapting Husserl’s philosophy for psychological research.

Why does this matter?

The heart of the matter is this: for Husserl, the empirical and transcendental modes of subjectivity are embodied in the same locus: the individual human being. However, Husserl does not intend to suggest that the transcendental “I” is merely the familiar “me” of everyday life, but with a more humanistic, open-minded attitude, as Moustakas’ formulation implies. This would mean that we can “become” transcendental subjects merely by reflecting and setting aside biases—in other words Moustakas reduces Husserl’s sense of the transcendental to something like “becoming a more enlightened person”—a plain misreading of Husserl. Though this appears to be a more easily understandable, humanistically-rendered version of phenomenology, it contains important flaws.

First and foremost, for Moustakas transcendental subjectivity represents an achievement of the empirical ego. As a result, Moustakas collapses the transcendental into the empirical: he wants to say that the researcher remains present as the person that he or she is, and that he or she has or adds a “transcendental consciousness” to their personal presence by setting aside biases. Hence he claims that once a researcher has “achieved” transcendental consciousness, then “the perceiving self is an authentic self…the self is actually present” (p. 61).

Revealingly, he uses clinical examples to illustrate what he means by authentic presence, and it is tempting to conclude that Moustakas is seeking a clinical and humanistic appropriation of Husserl’s philosophy in order to represent it as a means of self-actualization. But this raises the question: is the interpretation sustainable? In other words, is it compatible with Husserl’s phenomenology? Or instead, it is more accurately viewed as a humanistic, clinical approach to research that isn’t–and perhaps need not be–based upon phenomenology?

Transcendental subjectivity–Gupta and Kohák on Husserl

In Husserl’s philosophy transcendental subjectivity is not an achievement of the empirical ego. For Husserl, transcendental subjectivity is a non-personal mode of consciousness—not an accomplishment of empirical (personal) subjectivity.

On the contrary, the transcendental dimension of subjectivity is always already present, and only stands out when the empirical mode has been bracketed. For Husserl this bracketing is a methodical practice of suspending naïve conceptions of both world and self. Furthermore, for Husserl bracketing is not just one thing—there are many different kinds of bracketing in Husserl, relative to the specific context in which the bracketing is being practiced: the bracketing which yields the transcendental is a specific application of a general practice. Philosopher Bina Gupta (1998) describes the specific practice of phenomenological bracketing that provides access to the transcendental dimension in the following way:

If we succeed in bracketing all presuppositions of our natural conception of the world and of consciousness as a part of the world, then there would result an experience of our own consciousness that is no longer understood as a part of nature in the sense of belonging to this body, or person, or psychophysical organism. Husserl calls consciousness so experienced “purified consciousness” or “transcendental consciousness.”  (p. 154)

As Erazim Kohák wrote, “I can and indeed must bracket myself as what Husserl will later call a ‘natural subject’” (1978, p.  45). In fact Husserl wrote once the epoché has been effected, “I am not an ego” in the sense of an empirical I (1970, p. 184).  The researcher loses the validity (facticity) of the natural attitude and must suspend the “distinction and ordering of the personal pronouns,” since the facticity of I-the-man, you, we, etc., has all been rendered phenomenal, not real.

Hence Husserl wrote: “The ‘I’ that I attain in the epoché…is actually called ‘I’ only by equivocation—though it is an essential equivocation since, when I name it in reflection, I can say nothing other than: it is I who practice the epoché, I who interrogate, as phenomenon, the world…[as] ego-pole of this transcendental life” (1970, p. 184).  This bare ego-pole, Husserl writes, “is not a piece of the world; and if he says ‘I exist, ego cogito,’ that no longer signifies, ‘I, this man, exists.’ No longer am I the man who, in natural self-experience, finds himself as a man” (1973, p. 25). In other words the transformation of perspective that Husserl’s positing, and indeed claiming as a lived-experience, is more profound and has far deeper implications that those acknowledged by Moustakas.

The Transcendental Onlooker, or Witness

Turning to Husserl’s words we see that transcendental reflection is not a mere noting and setting aside of biases. Rather, it requires a mode or dimension of consciousness termed the “transcendental onlooker” which is not equivalent to or subsumed by the empirical ego. As Eugen Fink (1970) wrote, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology describes three egos in the context of the reduction: “the ego which is preoccupied with the world,” which he terms “I, the human being,” the transcendental ego, and the “onlooker” who performs the epoché (p. 115-116). The ego preoccupied with the world is the empirical “I,” the self of the natural attitude. This “I” does not perform the epoché but rather is bracketed by the epoché. Summarizing the Husserlian position Gupta (1998) writes:

Prior to transcendental reflection, a human ego’s reflection upon himself is confined to human self-apperception, and it moves within the parameters of the natural attitude. Bracketing of the world implicitly implies that, for the first time, an attempt is made to establish a reflective ego that is outside human perception from the very beginning. (p. 155)

So when Husserl emphasizes that I am still present, performing the epoché, he does not mean I am present as an empirical self, the “experiencing person” in Moustakas’ words. Rather, I am present in the transcendental mode of subjectivity, which transcends personal modes. The empirical person is, of course, still present—but one is witnessing from within a specific research attitude that places one’s empirical self and life “in brackets.”

From the perspective of my discipline, psychology, we can say that the epoché implies a very important and chosen psychological shift in one’s lived-perspective, a mode of being present that (whether or not one accepts its validity) has much more far-reaching consequences than merely becoming more open-minded.  More than setting aside personal prejudices, Husserl’s epoché requires a qualitatively more substantial bracketing, the setting aside of my habitual mode of being-an-I, that is, one’s empirical ego, what Husserl terms “I the man.”

The personal ego in transcendental phenomenology

We see that the empirical ego, “I the man,” is the point of departure for transcendental phenomenology, not the object of transcendental phenomenological praxis. Having enacted the reduction I discover that I am witnessing, “I the man” from a different standpoint. Phenomenology obliges us to take this shift in perspective seriously, to recognize that the I who can bracket his empirical self does so from a standpoint beyond the facticity of the empirical ego, and it is this standpoint Husserl terms transcendental.

As I’ve noted, Moustakas mistakenly equates transcendental subjectivity with the presuppositionless state aimed at through performance of the epoché, defining the transcendental mode of consciousness as the “person who is open to see what is” (p. 45).  In fact this statement makes an ontological and psychological claim that’s diametrically opposed to Husserl’s philosophy, properly understood: the epoché requires setting aside the question of “what is” in order to explore how presences are present. Moustakas’ aim seems to be self-actualization, personal openness, and authenticity. Moustakas’ discussion of phenomenology as a means of rendering the individual authentically present in their personal self-hood can only refer to the psychological, not the transcendental mode.

Of course phenomenology is not opposed to personal openness and authenticity! But once the transcendental reduction has been employed one is not in the “personal” realm in the sense normally meant by contemporary clinical psychology—and in fact the magnitude of that shift is unaddressed by Moustakas. Nor, as Moustakas seems to imply, is transcendental subjectivity a possession or a tool of the empirical self; as Kohák (1978) remarks in his commentary on Husserl’s Ideas I, “I do not ‘have a transcendental ego’” (p. 181).  Rather, one recognizes the transcendental mode of subjectivity by means of a disciplined, systematic practice of bracketing.

Husserl describes not one but multiple kinds of phenomenological reductions, each with a specific and nuanced meaning: for example, eidetic, phenomenological-psychological, intersubjective, and transcendental reductions. Moustakas neglects to acknowledge these differences and therefore blurs Husserl’s distinctions between the various modes of consciousness. For example, according to Husserl in order to examine psychic subjectivity the researcher must perform a phenomenological-psychological reduction, suspending the “taking-for-grantedness” of psychological phenomena. In the psychological reduction, Husserl wrote, “psychic subjectivity, the concretely grasped ‘I’ and ‘we’ of ordinary conversation, is experienced in its pure psychic owness” (1927/1973, p. 62). But for Husserl it is the “transcendental” reduction that allows transcendental subjectivity to stand out. By omitting the distinction between the psychological and transcendental reductions from his discussion and characterizing his work as transcendental, Moustakas not only misconstrues the transcendental dimension of Husserl’s phenomenology, but mixes this misunderstanding with a more broadly humanistic clinical perspective.

How is this handled in Giorgi’s research approach?

For Husserl the psychological reduction is the means of access to psychological structures of consciousness, whereas the transcendental reduction is the means of access to transcendental structures. In Giorgi’s approach (2000) this issue is handled through a choice to seek psychological and not transcendental structures and hence to employ the psychological, not the transcendental reduction. What this means is that “only the objects of the experience are reduced, not the acts” (Giorgi, 2000, p. 65). Using the psychological reduction, the facticity of the empirical objects described by the participant is bracketed, but not the facticity of the psychological subject. That is to say, “the acts are considered to be correlated with an existing, world subjectivity” (p. 65). The approach remains a psychological one because the participant’s empirical ego, the individual psyche, is regarded as a fact rather than bracketed and regarded as an instance of transcendental subjectivity.

Moustakas’ driving interest appears to be psychotherapeutic work with individuals. But Husserl’s investigations are philosophical rather than therapeutic-psychological. Husserl’s work requires painstaking study and then careful modification in order to be applied in clinical or scientific contexts. For an example of a carefully thought-through clinical application, I would direct readers to Davidson and Solomon’s  (2010) chapter, “The Value of Transcendental Phenomenology for Psychology: The Case of Psychosis” in The Redirection of Psychology: Essays in Honor of Amedeo P. Giorgi.

References

Davidson, L. & Solomon, L. A. (2010). The value of transcendental phenomenology for psychology: The case of psychosis, in The Redirection of Psychology: Essays in Honor of Amedeo P. Giorgi, T. F. Cloonan and C. Thiboutot (Eds.). 99-130. Circle Interdisciplinaire de Recherches Phénoménologiques.

Fink, E. (1970). The phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl and contemporary criticism. In R. O. Elveton (Ed.) The phenomenology of Husserl: Selected critical readings. pp. 73-147. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.

Giorgi, A. (1970). Psychology as a human science: a phenomenologically based        approach.  New York: Harper & Row.

Giorgi, A. (2009). The descriptive phenomenological method in psychology: A modified Husserlian approach. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press

Gupta, B. (1998). The disinterested witness: A fragment of Advaita Vedanta phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Moustakas, C. (1994). Phenomenological research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology: An introduction to phenomenological philosophy. (D. Carr, Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Kohák, E. (1978). Idea & experience: Edmund Husserl’s project of phenomenology in ideas I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

tree photo credit: JourneyVerse via photo pin cc

thanks to SAGE publications for permission to use an image of the book Phenomenological Research Methods

J. N. Mohanty

Reading J. N. Mohanty’s essay “Husserl’s Concept of Intentionality” in Analecta Husserliana I (1971), the following passage, discussing the Logische Untersuchungen, stood out to me:

“The static analysis lays bare the structure of what is called an intentional act whereby the word ‘act’ has to be taken not in its ordinary usage as meaning an activity or a process, but simply standing for all intentional mental states. Intentionality is not a kind of activity, but the ordinary concept of action is itself an intentional concept.” (p. 106)

 Now, this kind of understated brilliance is typical of Mohanty. Perhaps the lovely reversal he makes in this passage would already be self-evident to a good continental philosopher, but as a psychologist, I found it stunning because the notion of “acts” of consciousness always felt awkward to me. Certainly there are lived-experiences in which we are keenly aware of “acting;” for example, looking for my keys, trying to remember when I agreed to call my friend, or seeking to grasp the meaning of a difficult passage in a book.

But more often, the lived-world is the sea I swim in, which shapes me, to which I’m called to respond, not from outside (as if such a thing were possible) but from within the lived-world, in my belonging to it. In the flow of everyday life, I am only rarely self-reflectively aware of “acting” consciously–only retrospectively can I consider how I acted consciously. So in the context of intentionality–the reaching out (intendere) of consciousness toward the world–it never felt quite right to me to conceive of intentionality as a series of “acts” in the sense of activities initiated in some way by an actor, if that actor is meant to be me!

And indeed, a good phenomenological philosopher would quickly point out that chosen acts of consciousness are but one form of intentionality–for example, in conscious position-taking. Etymology, as Ferrarello kindly pointed out, supports this interpretation of “act”: in classical Greek, agein bion (or in Latin, agere vitam) means experiencing or living, so the root meaning of “act” is centered upon participating in being-alive-in-the-world. The root sense of agein, based on ἄγω-, is “to carry on” or “to tend toward something.” With this core sense, with which Husserl was undoubtedly familiar, we return to the lived-sense of intentional acts of consciousness, for phenomenology.

Mohanty’s short statement clarifies that we ought not imagine “intentional act” as a kind of “owned” activity. It is rather that the way we grasp “action” or “activity” in the world is itself intentional. If our everyday intending is not this sort of action, then what is it? How can we describe it? Certainly the Husserliana offers better formulated answers, but here is a spontaneous exploration: is it not the case that our intending is always already in the world, prior even to our recognition of ourselves as present? Isn’t that recognition a byproduct of that already-present intending–the way we see objects in a room only because light is already there for us, the means whereby we see objects and ourselves? Isn’t intending more like this pre-given light, and only within the horizon of a world I see am I able to choose to act–for example, to look for my keys?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty (1996) says something wonderful in his Phenomenology of Perception:

It is a question of recognizing consciousness itself as a project of the world, meant for a world, which it neither embraces nor possesses, but towards which it is perpetually directed–and the world as this pre-objective individual whose imperious unity decrees what knowledge shall take as its goal. (xvii-xviii)

There is something ecstatic in what we call the intentional act, precisely because it is not “my act” or my activity, but rather is the mark of our already-participating in the world as the world’s project, as Merleau-Ponty says. Perceiving is in this way always a discovery rather than an achievement–or, we could say, the world seeing itself through us.

References

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1996). Phenomenology of Perception (C. Smith, Trans.). New York: Routledge.

Mohanty, J. N. (1971).  Husserl’s concept of intentionality. in A.T. Tymieniecka (Ed.)  Analecta Husserliana: The yearbook of phenomenological research, Vol. I. , pp. 100-132. New York: Humanities Press.

photo credits

child running: pasma via photopin cc, bird in flight: john curley via photopin cc

Thanks to J. N. Mohanty for permission to use his photograph