Phenomenology and the Mind Body Question
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.
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?
Even in translation Merleau-Ponty writes (with spectacular Frenchness it seems to me) and I imagine the intricate and oracular prose would frustrate some readers. In Phenomenology and Perception he despatches the subject-object relationship;
“True reflection presents me to myself not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical with my presence in the world and to others, as I am now realizing it: I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and though them, all the rest.
Viewing philosophical problems (identity, intentionality, qualia) through the lens of embodied cognition will surely alter how we can conceptualise those problems. MP calls it ‘relearning how to see the world’. But I am unclear how transformative this really is and whether it might not also be a pathway to some additional befuddlement.
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?
Even in translation Merleau-Ponty writes (with spectacular Frenchness it seems to me) and I imagine the intricate and oracular prose would frustrate some readers. In Phenomenology and Perception he despatches the subject-object relationship;
“True reflection presents me to myself not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical with my presence in the world and to others, as I am now realizing it: I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and though them, all the rest.
Viewing philosophical problems (identity, intentionality, qualia) through the lens of embodied cognition will surely alter how we can conceptualise those problems. MP calls it ‘relearning how to see the world’. But I am unclear how transformative this really is and whether it might not also be a pathway to some additional befuddlement.
Comments (100)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Quoting 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 sure can, and it has been done on enactivist terms directly inspired by M-P too.
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.
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.
Quoting 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....”
(Pre?cis 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.
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?
Quoting Tom StormI 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?
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.
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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Nicely put and I largely agree.
Wow. I apologize for my reference to French writing. I hope I wasn't out of line.
Dennett with a tender afterglow.
And why would you say this?
Quoting Caldwell
makes it sound like self-involved indulgence.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
Good. And it is this aspect of it I was hoping to tease out a little more.
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.
Is this reading of Heidegger unusual or well established?
I'm much interested in expanding on the notion of the given. But I don't want to go through Sellar's route, way too much epistemology and not enough "metaphysics".
I very much like Lewis' ideas on the given, in which he attempts to clarify the notion of the given in relation to the a-priori. That's likely my next big personal task, to read that in great detail.
Whom do you recommend that speaks of the given? Remember that I tend to prefer clearer writing, in as much as possible. Although I'm aware that this topic is very hard.
Do you have any suggestions? I'm quite interested.
It’s consistent with Derrida’s reading of him and Eugene Gendlin’s. Gendlin bases his whole approach on the body, but it’s a different notion of embodiment than most of those floating around in embodied cognitive science.
Those approaches rely on reciprocal causality, whereas Gendlin, Heidegger and Derrida abandon causal thinking in favor of a radical understanding of temporality.
I haven't.
Which book?
Thanks!
No, it is not misperception, or misunderstanding. If I may borrow the quotes in your post -- please explain introjection and appresentation. They might have coined words ingeniously, but the fact remains that they could not escape a sort of psychoanalysis method of explaining. One has to speak in a vacuum in order to make it at best, a narrative.
Quoting Joshs
Please explain objectivity in phenomenology. We know what is objectivity in epistemology.
Here’s a summary of Husserl on the origin of the ‘real’ object:
Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenological philosophy, attempted to chart a course between realism and idealism by grounding all experience in perception and grounding perception in structures of intentionality in which the subjective and objective aspects(what he called the noetic and noematic poles) are inextricably dependent on each other and inseparable. He was very much influenced in his project by the work of Franz Brentano, but went beyond Brentano's notion of inentionality by abandoning Brrentano's naturalism.
One of the key aspects of Husserl's approach was his explanation of the origin of spatial objects. Rather than defining an object in terms of its self-subsistence over time with its properties and attributes, he believed such entities to be , not fictions, but idealities. That is to say, what we , in a naive naturalist attitude, point to as this 'real' table in front of us, is the constantly changing product of a process of progressive constitution in consciousness. The real object is in fact an idealization.This process begins at the most primordial level with what he called primal impressions, which we can imagine as the simplest whiffs of sensation(these he calls actual, rather than real. Actual impressions only appear once in time as what they are. When we see something like a table, all that we actually perceive in front of us is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience.
We fill in the rest of experience in two ways. Al experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, th4 retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. We retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. A the same time, we protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for us, based on prior experience with it. For example, we only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is tends toward toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.
Thus , through a process of progress adumbration of partial views, we constitute what we call and object. It must be added that not just the sens of sight, but all other sense modalities can come into play in constituting the object. And most importantly, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it.
In sum, what the naive realist calls an external object of perception, Husserl treats as a relative product of constantly changing correlated modes of givenness and adumbrations composed of retentions and protentions. The 'thing' is a tentative , evolving achievement of memory , anticipation and voluntary movement.
From this vantage, attempting to explain this constituting process in psychophysiological terms by reducing it to the language of naive realism is an attempt to explain the constituting on the basis of the constituted. The synthetic structure of temporal constitution is irreducible to 'physical' terms. On the contrary, it is the 'physicai' that rests on a complex constitutive subjective process that is ignored in the naive attitude.
The real object is in fact an idealization, so they say. And I think objectivity in this sense doesn't fit with Husserl's explanation of spatial objects. Because as much as he or any other phenomenologist wants to make his narrative as objective as possible, he inadvertently implicates his own explanation, thereby exposing his own idealization of the phenomenon. They should not have started with the denial of objects in itself and the denial of access to other minds. They should have, for all intents and purposes, admitted that the "kinaesthetics sensation of our voluntary movement" is indeed physical and material, therefore, no matter how much we call it idealization, we are inextricably made of matter.
But wait, there's the explanation of how our organs act as checkpoints so that we really don't experience the organs themselves, but what's filtered through these checkpoints. But the checkpoints are physical themselves.
The brakes of phenomenology cannot be disengaged to make it work like Descartes's cogito, I'm afraid. The cogito has a built-in protection against fatal counter-argument because look at what Descartes's "constraint" is-- existence itself. If all else fails in top-heavy realism narrative, there's existence. Once you start doubting your own consciousness or mind--because you are just probably being deceived -- you inextricably admit existence.
You might want to check out some of the recent work on perception in cognitive science(Noe and O’Regan) or the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. You will see that many empirical researchers in perception find the work of Husserl and Merleau-Pontu extremely relevant and valuable to their work.
How ironic!
But thank you. Will do.
Like Chalmer's "hard problem of consciousness" (re: the "p-zombie"), I've always found Nagel's intuition pump (Dennett) "what is it like to be a bat" to be incoherent. The problematic "like to be" presupposes a comparison, but to what? No one, Nagel or any of us, can aptly say what it is "like to be" a human being since each one of us only has a single data-point: an individual human being, like an individual bat, does not "know" what it is like to be other than what s/he, or it, is, so there's no comparison, or differentiation, from the inside-out, so to speak. (E.g. what it's like to ride a motor cycle isn't adequately described until one also rides a bicycle (tricycle or unicycle) with which to compare and contrast.) Again, like Chalmers, Nagel doesn't touch physicalism except maybe to encourage more conceptual clarity and descriptive precision by physicalists.
My philosophical position is closest to Spinoza's dissolution of the so-called "MBP" over three and a half centuries ago; scientifically, I think, embodied cognition explains much better the phenomenal subject (e.g. T. Metzinger, R.S. Bakker, A. Damasio, D. Dennett) than phenomenology itself does.
Yes, that resonates with me. I can't even describe coherently what it is to be me if I'm honest.
Thanks for this. My mum was a reader of Spinoza - from the same country - her books and notes were thrown out after she died, unfortunately. They were in Dutch. From memory, you view Spinoza as part of the tradition of acosmism?
My view is that Spinoza's thought (plural-aspect holism / dialectical monism) is more consistent with acosmism than any other conception of divinity (or stance toward a/the deity). Of late, however, I've more narrowly interpreted him sub specie durationis through the (epicurean-compatible) lens of pandeism. Benny's only "tradition", so to speak, is rationalism (e.g. Euclid, Descartes & Maimonides).
:up: Was your mother a teacher?
No, she was an autodidact.
But that's just it: Ordinary people have no trouble imagining and taking for granted what it is like to be this or that. (It's what usually passes for "empathy".) It's why Nagel wrote the essay -- to address precisely this popular notion and show how problematic it is.
Phenomenology can be a stepping stone toward Buddhism.
If you search https://pathpress.org/ by the keywords phenomenology, phenomenological, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, you'll get many finds.
[i]Every reductionist has his favorite analogy from modern
science. It is most unlikely that any of these unrelated examples
of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of mind to
brain. But philosophers share the general human weakness for
explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for
what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different.
This has led to the acceptance of implausible accounts of the
mental largely because they would permit familiar kinds of
reduction. I shall try to explain why the usual examples do not
help us to understand the relation between mind and body
why, indeed, we have at present no conception of what an expla-
nation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be.[/i]
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf
I agree; there is nothing it is like to be a bat or a human, in this sense of comparison you are alluding to. Since I encountered this question of Nagel's 'what is it like to be a bat?'. I've always thought the "like" should be dropped, and the question should become 'what is it to be a bat?', since that is what the incoherently phrased question is really asking anyway; and I guess the answer is that we can only guess about the one major perceptual difference with us (unless we are one of those blind people who are able to use echo-location, who might have an inkling).
Phenomenology attempts to deal with the question: 'what is it to be a human?'. At least we have more hope of coming up with something there!
In these very contentious philosophical subjects, people get worked up over the exact phrasing of words. Semantics, I guess. "What it's like", is just a way of phrasing subjective feels as opposed to behavioral or functional aspects of perception. Someone acting like they are in pain is different from being in pain, which is again different from a description of the neural correlates of pain.
The idea here is that when we relate to the world there is both an experience of what the world is like for us and at the same time an experience of the self that is having the experience.
Zahavi(2005) says “Any convincing theory of consciousness has to respect the difference between our consciousness of an object, and our consciousness of our own subjectivity, and must be able to explain the distinction between intentionality, which is characterized by a difference between the subject and the object of experience, and self-awareness, which implies some form of identity.”(Zahavi 2004)
“Normally, the “what it is like” aspect is taken to designate experiential properties. If, however, our experiences are to have qualities of their own, they must be qualities over and above whatever qualities the intentional object has. It is exactly the silk that is red, and not my perception of it. Likewise, it is the lemon that is bitter, and not my experience of it.” (Zahavi 2005)
But Zahavi doesn’t mean to make the self into a static entity. It is only a pole of the subject-object relation.
“Although these two sides can be distinguished conceptually, they cannot be separated. It is not as if the two sides or aspects of phenomenal experience can be detached and encountered in isolation from one other. When I touch the cold surface of a refrigerator, is the sensation of coldness that I then feel a property of the experienced object or a property of the experience of the object? The correct answer is that the sensory experience contains two dimensions, namely one of the sensing and one of the sensed, and that we can focus on either.”
What it is to be human, is dealt with by phenomenology, but also by music, the arts, poetry, literature, architecture, religion and so on. What it is to be human is enacted within those pursuits; it is not like there could be a simply encapsulated answer to the question.
I agree with what you've said, but again I think the phrasing would be better, less apt to mislead, if you had said "when we relate to the world there both an experience of what the world is for us and at the same time an experience of the self that is having the experience.".
The point is as to what work the "like" is doing there.
The comparison would be one of color for someone born blind from birth. "What it's like" is meant in the literature to denote there is a subjective sensation. There is nothing it's like for a blind person regarding vision, just like there is nothing it's like for humans to echolochate.
Nagel was arguing there is a subjective aspect to perceiving creatures which is not captured by objective descriptions.
What is the word "like" doing there, though?
"The comparison would be one of color for someone born blind from birth. "What it is" is meant in the literature to denote there is a subjective sensation. There is nothing it is for a blind person regarding vision, just like there is nothing it is for humans to echolochate."
Does that change of phrasing make a difference? I think it is less prone to foster reification. Admittedly the second sentence sounds a little strange and would be better written as: Vision is nothing for a blind person, just like echolocation is nothing for (most) humans.
You know, "bewitchment by means of language" and all that?
I think that’s true. I should note that at least for Zahavi it is not the sense object that is the source of the ‘feeling of what it is like’, not the echolalic input for the bat, but a aubjective component that is paired with that imput. So for example, tie people could both be experiencing the same semantic content in almost identical ways , and yet there would still be a subjective ‘feel’ of mineness that is unique to each of them which also belongs to the experience.
I don't think Wittgenstein is of much help when it comes to consciousness. There is something it is to have experiences, and this is not easily accounted for in the sciences.
I agree that it is something to have experiences; it is to have experiences. But there is nothing it is like to have experiences, because anything that was like having experiences would be having experiences.
I could simplify this further and say 'to experience is something'; it is something different than not to experience. Any explanation as to how we are able to experience would have to be given in material, in physical, terms, otherwise it could not be a cogent (testable) explanation. But all explanation, all science, presupposes experience.
It doesn't seem to me that what it is (what it is like, if you prefer) to experience could be explained by science. We actually don't really explain what it is to experience; we describe it, or evoke it. Phenomenology and poetry serve here, not science.
That's well put. :up:
"Is there something it is like to be a snail?" just means "Are snails conscious?"
Of course it's amusing to say that any canonical text in philosophy runs the risk of increasing the perplexity of many readers, but I suppose it may be hardly an exaggeration. In which case that ironic claim should have serious implications for our conception of philosophy and human understanding, as well as for our conception of the social role and obligations of prominent authors and interpreters of philosophical texts.
Quoting Tom Storm
Right, something like that. What sort of empirical evidence or discursive gymnastics could ever put a definitive end to such controversies? In the meantime, what's gained by constructing "metaphysical theories" one way or another along such lines?
Even if the reductive physicalist could predict every observable phenomenon in the record, down to the next words out of my mouth, would this amount to conclusive disproof of philosophical idealism or theism, or make them any less likely? Would it amount to conclusive proof of philosophical materialism or atheism, or make them any more likely? So far as I reckon, it would only show that someone had gotten hold of an extremely useful scientific model of the universe as it has been observed to date.
It seems that no matter how far empirical science may advance, it could never blot out the range of conceivable alternatives that things like us project beyond the balance of appearances.
As a wholehearted skeptic, I sympathize with materialists and atheists who argue it's unreasonable to bear down on any of those merely conceivable alternatives as if they were warranted claims. But I depart from them where they neglect to note or to give due weight to the proposition that metaphysical materialism and atheism are located among those fantastic projections. Why seek to weigh anchor in imaginary waters? Why strain to answer questions that cannot be answered on reasonable grounds?
I suppose the prevalence of that dogmatic metaphysical tendency is one symptom of the immoderate scientism of the 20th-century naturalists, still alive and kicking in our time. We might trace the tendency further, to the Gothic quest for certainty, with roots in medieval dogmatism and formalism. Perhaps it's no accident that the immoderate scientism of our time emerged within an Anglophone tradition that had inherited a mangled view of skepticism, which seems better understood by Gassendi at the start of the "modern" era than by Moore at the end. The negative force of the arguments of the materialist and atheist may be just as well applied from a skeptical point of view, with less intellectual hubris, less unwarranted bias, and less overbearing bullshit.
Consider the rhetorical strategy of duplicity adopted by some leading advocates for atheism, for instance. Russell says he prefers to call himself agnostic when he's addressing "a purely philosophical audience", and to call himself an atheist when he's addressing "the ordinary man in the street". I recall Dawkins (I think in an early passage of The God Delusion) drawing a distinction between two sorts of theism, and claiming he objects to only one of those two sorts -- yet he spends the rest of his life calling himself an atheist and promoting a view he calls atheism. It might be more fitting to call him a theologian who contributes to a theological distinction between reasonable and unreasonable theology.
I don't mean to suggest there's no legitimate role for such pig-headed rhetoric. In the short run, it may function as a counterweight to egregious excesses on the other side of a popular debate. But there's also room, and arguably urgent need today, for more complete devotion to the practice of truth, sincerity, and integrity in reasonable discourse. So far as I can tell, it's the skeptic, not the materialist or atheist, who more accurately marks the boundaries of that space. Though public intellectuals like Russell and Dawkins may well intend for their doubletalk to nudge us in the long run toward that very place.
Could be. You raise some interesting points. I would have thought the atheist properly makes just one claim about God and as for the rest of their views, they could believe in astrology or the Loch Ness Monster (like some atheists I have known).
I am an atheist - I am probably not disciplined enough to call my self a skeptic. I am a methodological naturalist - only in so far as the case for the non-natural hasn't been made coherently.
I see figures like Dawkins as essentially fundamentalist busters. I don't think he is doing philosophy, he is simply taking on the literalists. Given how many literalists there are and how influential they can be in politics, law and social policy, the work is not without merit.
I don’t know about that. Zahavi reads Husserl as saying that the ‘something it is like’ is a ‘for-meness’ present in all experiences. Essentially Zahavi is claiming that for Husserl the subjective pole of every subject object relation has its own ‘feel’, as if each of us has a kind of affective signature that accompanies all our experiences, the feeling of being ‘me’.
I don’t think this is what Husserl is saying. He is instead arguing that they is a certain normative dimension to all my experiences. They are organized by me on the basis of likeness , similarity, commonality with respect to my previous knowing. So this ‘feeling of being me’ isn’t a static intrinsic quality at all. It is just the perspectival nature of each of our encounters with the world.
Wittgenstein recognizes this personal, perspectival , situated basis of experiencing. I don’t think he and Husserl are all that far apart.
Exactly! But the point is that the "what is it like" question fosters the illusion that there could be a comparison.
Also when you ask "how does it feel to be a seagull", what kind of answer would you expect? The question needs to be asked in specific ways. How does it feel for a seagull when it dives into the water after a fish? We know how it feels for us to dive into the water; how would it be different for a seagull? We have bare skin and the seagull has feathers; what kind of difference would that make to the feeling of diving into the water? How would it feel to eat with a beak instead of lips and teeth? What difference does it make to how the world looks to have eyes on each side of the head? And so on. Would the question "how does it feel to be a seagull" have any meaning beyond these specific inquiries?
Probably not. I wouldn't really expect any answer to that query. Yet one may still idly wonder what it would feel like to be a seagull, even though the question is impossible to answer. One could guess at approximations, as you say, based on comparisons with human experience. So yeah, I agree with you.
The whole comparison thing comes up every time the phrase 'what it is like' is discussed, and it's a total red herring, but an understandable one. I think it's revealing though, as it is an indicator of whether or not the concept of consciousness has actually been grasped. Stephen Priest has often said "Some philosophers have not noticed they are conscious." I always used to think that this was an uncharitable and ridiculous. But now I think he might have been right.
The interesting thing about "the whole comparison thing" is that. on the one hand we can say that being human or being a bat is not like anything, in the sense that neither are comparable with anything else, as I've said. On the other hand the only way to answer the question as to what it is to be some animal or other would be by specific comparisons with the human. So, being a bat is not like being a human, obviously, but how it might feel to be a bat may be guessed at by noting specific differences with how it might feel for a human. For example if I hung upside down and urinated all over myself I might get some inkling of how that particular dimension of bat experience feels...or not, since I am not covered in fur.
We all forget we are conscious much of the time. Is not remembering that we are conscious simply to repeat to ourselves "I am conscious"? I mean doesn't it just consist in entertaining, in that moment of remembering that I am conscious, a specific conception of myself?
Yes, although if, say, Banno said that, he would likely just mean that he was awake. If I say that when I'm in a philosophical mood, I would mean "I am a centre of experience" or something like that. But Banno rejects these other definitions. It's baffling to me, but one explanation is that he hasn't noticed he is conscious in that sense. I struggle to believe that though.
I can't answer for @Banno, but I suspect he is quite capable of the thought: "I am conscious"; which would mean that he is capable of remembering that he is conscious, but like the rest of us, he is not remembering that he is conscious, when he is not thinking that thought.
He might come and correct me and explain that he is not capable of that thought, though; but that would be surprising, and I doubt I would be capable of believing him. :wink:
Good question.
I don't think the way to argue about phenomenology's idealism is to disprove it. Nor is it reasonable to do so in favor of materialism. You might want to read an essay by Patrick Heelan - Perceived Worlds Are Interpreted Worlds .
An excerpt:
He defines hermeneutical phenomenology as: "all human understanding - and perception is included in this - is existentially and methodologically interpretative."
You might disagree with him on some points, but he does provide 3 analytical questions to satisfy the problem of perception:
- the semantics of a perceptual world
- the epistemic validity
- ontology of a perceptual world
From this, he explains that the individual perceivers, with or without the aid of an instrument, are a "community of skilled interpreters", and provides an explanation of a "paradigmatically scientific inquiry leading into, among other things, neurophysiological networks, instruments, and readable technologies."
And from it, I'm hoping that we can agree that materialism stays and can be reconciled with phenomenology.
I like my phenomenology simple, which is why I really like Tallis here. He doesn't call it "phenomenology", but that's what he seems to do.
The problem from the outset is one that continues to plague us even if we know better already, for over 100 years: we assume that by "matter" we mean what was referred to as "dead and stupid" matter. We perceive matter as solid, when we see tables and chairs or trees and statues. Yet we know that deep down, matter is insubstantial not solid at all.
And then we have a brain, from which our minds emerge and we can do phenomenology. We discover that this specific matter "in the head" has intentionality, which can consider objects outside of the given context.
Furthermore we can "tear them apart" from where we see them (a flower in a garden) and analyze that flower in the context of its color compared to this other flower in some garden in a different part of the world.
The puzzles come in, at least for me, is when we try to think away these sense qualities and try to imagine what's left. It becomes an object of the intellect of sorts, but we intuit that there has to be something behind these qualities which we can't perceive.
In any case, there's lots of rich territory here to explore.
Husserl doesn't 'deny' any such thing. Husserl cares about the experience of some 'object' as an experience of some 'object'. If I see a table it doesn't matter if it is there or not for the purposes of looking at conscious experience. If I 'experience' a table I cannot deny that I experience a table. The 'existence' of the table is not important other than as an item of cognition.
He wasn't interested in dualistic arguments only to frame phenomenology as a Science of Consciousness. There is no attempt to make any narrative objective because that isn't anything like what Husserl had in mind. He states this is various ways multiple times (probably because people didn't get it at first) which led to a lot of confusion.
I don't think you understand my contention.
Quoting I like sushi
Please direct this to Josh's post.
I don't think you understand the point of what Husserl was trying to achieve (that is a SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS). He says so plain and clear. If you think it is 'ironic' that cognitive neuroscience makes use of his work/ideas you missed that the whole point of his endeavor was to aid scientific research into consciousness.
I have no more comment for you.
But thank you for the effort.
:up: I wonder how that differs from the what is common knowledge viz. exploring perspectives, points of view?
Does phenomenology offer something immensely beneficial, exhilirating? Does it put on offer nirvana itself?
My recollection of phenomenology, from an article I read about half a year ago, is that,
1. Discard all (other) theories i.e. wipe the slate clean and give oneself a fresh start and experience the world as it appears to us. So, as an example, forget about the astronomical fact that the earth revolves around the sun and just look up at the sky - what do you see? The sun going around the earth. The world as it appears to us is gets all our attention, the limelight as it were. It's quite radical - phenomonelogy - for the simple reason that it goes against the grain. All this while appearance was treated as inferior, removed from the truth, to be penetrated as quickly and as forcefully as possible in order that we may get to the bottom of the mystery.
2. Bring the description of reality, until now a poor substitute, up to the level of actual experience of reality itself. In other words, descriptions now must match reality in terms of how intense and rich the real deal is.
For the mind-body question, it means go with, run with how the mind and the body appear to you - Do they seem distinct? Then they are distinct. :joke:
Well, it does seem to offer a different way of seeing the world and that in itself may be beneficial, possibly exhilarating, given how often we seem to get suck using the familiar approaches. But it seems to me you need to be an academic, a theorist or serious student of philosophy to acquire a robust understanding of phenomenology.
Quoting TheMadFool
Yes, I think that could be one reading.
I think that, for practical intents and purposes, a major downside of phenomenology is that taking it up as the way to view the world, it has an alienating effect on one's interpersonal relationships and it makes daily work hard to the point of impossible to do. Because in order to meaningfully pursue relationships with others and meaningfully do work, one, generally, has to think as an objectivist, one has to take for granted that there are other people who really exist out there, and that there are real objects out there with which one can do things. In contrast, seeing everything as somehow being a matter of one's own experience is downright debilitating.
Phenomenology is actually incorporated into some Dharmic religions. But where the Western phenomenologists leave off, the Dharmic religions pick up. But from here on, the discussion would necessarily need to get very techincal in and on Dharmic terms.
Quoting baker
I shudder at the thought of this.
Appreciate your perspective.
I don't believe the atheist has the privilege of committing to only one substantive claim -- not a reasonable and honest atheist who's acquainted with the wide variety of theological views in the world. Words like "deity" and "divinity" are used in various ways by various speakers. Ultimately the atheist needs to tell us which conception they're rejecting, which alleged thing "there's no such thing as" on their account.
Some speakers employ a conception of deity in keeping with which the word "God" refers to the whole of existence -- for instance, along the lines of Spinoza's identification of God and Nature. I doubt whether many atheists nowadays mean for their arguments to imply that the world does not exist; but that's what it would amount to say that the thing called God by such philosophers does not exist.
Flying Spaghetti Monster atheism doesn't hold water in such cases. Accordingly, it seems the atheist needs at least two sorts of account to handle two different sorts of theism; and I expect there are more distinctions to be drawn, and many specific claims to be considered, as such conversations proceed.
As I noted above, leading advocates of atheism like Russell and Dawkins acknowledge this problem in the margins of their discourse on rare occasions, then proceed to neglect it as if somehow it's not relevant to the conversation they're having about a philosophical position they call "atheism". I suppose Russell doesn't really call his position atheism; he only markets it that way for "the ordinary man in the street". Dawkins seems to implicate a similar concession.
Quoting Tom StormI'd say it's a much broader target, and includes "moderate" opinions held, often vaguely and uncritically, by many people who count themselves members and believers of traditional religions but who do not consider themselves fundamentalists. The same sort of criticism works just as well against many varieties of new age spiritual belief and magical thinking, for instance.
Quoting Tom Storm
I've considered myself a methodological naturalist for decades, though I entered that path on what I thought of as phenomenological grounds. For many years I was puzzled and confused about those grounds. During that period I was powerfully attracted to materialism and atheism, though I never quite made it all the way. My sense of perplexity, at least, has diminished since my thoughts took a skeptical turn nearly a decade ago.
By now it seems that a robust skepticism like that indicated in the Outlines of Sextus Empiricus supports or indeed amounts to a methodological naturalism on phenomenological grounds. Such skeptics learn to train the unruly powers of discourse and belief to "follow appearances quietly", without disturbance from unwarranted claims.
Generally an atheist will do precisely this whenever a new variation of a deity is raised. But it is one idea they are rejecting; a god - even if there are a range of variations of this idea.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
i would think most atheists see this use of the word god as more of a linguistic quirk. God as nature or as 'love' or as 'energy' is vague and leaves little to respond to.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
How so?
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
I agree, I'm not arguing they have no broader intent or use, I was simply highlighting their most prominent. They also do 'preventative work' with less severe believers.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Can you expand briefly on this last point?
On my use of the term, phenomenology -- the study of phenomena, the discourse on appearances -- avoids entanglement with such "metaphysical" doctrines.
Quoting Caldwell
I agree that our interests and judgments as perceivers are determined in part by conceptual capacities acquired and transformed through the medium of culture, including practices that result in a sort of "perceptual training", practices that guide us to acquire a repertoire of observational concepts, customs of "reasoning" and investigation, customs of fantasy and fiction, and so on. Thankfully, such culturally and conceptually mediated variation in the exercise of our perceptual powers seems radically constrained by physiological and other physical factors of perception.
Accordingly, I'd prefer to reformulate Heelan's characterization of perception more moderately, without the emphatic bias: Like all human activity, perception is historical and cultural as well as physical and biological. Like all human experience, it involves interpretation from a point of view, but is nonetheless rooted in and constrained by physical and biological processes. So it seems, in keeping with the balance of appearances.
I'm never sure what to make of talk of Peirce's notion of "abduction". So far it strikes me as a puffy and superfluous neologism. I tend to become wary wherever it's given much weight. Of course I'd be grateful if someone were to improve my appreciation for good uses of that term.
How does Heelan's hermeneutical phenomenology, and his bold emphasis on the historicity of perceptual skills, help us remedy "recalcitrant problems in the philosophy of science"? Which "recalcitrant problems" does he have in mind?
Quoting Caldwell
Long ago it occurred to me that the path forward for "continental philosophy" should fuse the horizons of Gadamer's Truth and Method with Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. I suspect anyone who's read those two books may have been similarly inspired. Maybe Heelan's barking up the same tree.
Quoting Caldwell
What questions are these?
Quoting Caldwell
How is this a refinement or improvement of more customary ways of describing the interrelations of perception, science, and technology? Does it help us solve those "recalcitrant problems" mentioned above?
Quoting Caldwell
As I indicated at the outset, it seems to me that phenomenology is indifferent with respect to "metaphysical" doctrines like materialism and idealism. So far as I reckon, disciplined phenomenology would remain compatible with materialism, compatible with idealism, compatible with the rejection of both of those doctrines, and compatible with skeptical suspension of judgment in such matters.
Are we agreed on this point? Or do you have something else in mind when you say that "materialism... can be reconciled with phenomenology"?
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Was this your conclusion from reading Phenomenology of Perception, or are you taking issue with it? In it
Merleau-Ponty critiques both empiricism, which in his hands I believe encompasses materialism , and what he calls intellectualism , his term for Kantian Idealism.
“We must now show that its intellectualist [idealist] antithesis is on the same level as empiricism itself. Both take the objective world as the object of their analysis, when this comes first neither in time nor in virtue of its meaning; and both are incapable of expressing the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness constitutes its object. Both keep their distance in relation to perception, instead of sticking closely to it.”
In Husserl you will also find an explicit critique of idealism and materialism.
In sum, I think that the phenomenological projects of Husserl and MP are far from indifferent to the metaphysical doctrines of materialism and idealism. So
much so that it could be said their entire focus is on revealing the limits of these approaches.
Okay.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Those are his analysis tests to come up with his theory on perception. Semantics (the meaning we attribute to what we perceive), the epistemic validity (how do we support our assertions), ontology of the perceptual world (what actually exists, or what's real in our world as perceivers.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
According to him, yes. See my points above this.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Absolutely not indifferent. Phenomenology cannot exist without disowning materialism, the staple of realism.
Where in Husserl's writings would you look for that?
Quoting baker
See this article.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is from Crisis of European Sciences:
“One has expected the same objectivity from psychology as from physics, and because of this a psychology in the full and actual sense has been quite impossible; for an objectivity after the fashion of natural science is downright absurd when applied to the soul, to subjectivity, whether as individual subjectivity, individual person, and individual life or as communally
historical subjectivity, as social subjectivity in the broadest sense.
This is the ultimate sense of the objection that one must
make to the philosophies of all times—with the exception of the philosophy of idealism, which of course failed in its method: that it was not able to overcome the naturalistic objectivism which was from the beginning and always remained a very natural temptation. As I said, only idealism, in all its forms, attempts to lay hold of subjectivity as subjectivity and to do justice to the fact that the world is never given to the subject and the communities of subjects in any other way than as the subjectively relative valid world with particular experiential content and as a world which, in and through subjectivity, takes on ever new transformations of meaning; and that even the apodictically persisting conviction of one and the same world, exhibiting itself
subjectively in changing ways, is a conviction motivated purely within subjectivity, a conviction whose sense—the world itself, the actually existing world—never surpasses the subjectivity that brings it about. But idealism was always too quick with its theories and for the most part could not free itself from hidden objectivistic presuppositions; or else, as speculative idealism, it
passed over the task of interrogating, concretely and analytically, actual subjectivity, i.e., subjectivity as having the actual phenomenal world in intuitive validity—which, properly understood, is nothing other than carrying out the phenomenological reduction and putting transcendental phenomenology into action.”
:up: Great topic and excellent description; very eloquent and purposeful! :up:
I have well established views on the subject of mind-body but little knowledge on the subject of Phenomenology. This is maybe the right moment and an opportunity to study it! I will then come back here! :smile:
Actually, it's the ideas about what Western culture and Westerners are like that I find more peculiar.
On the one hand, we have folk wisdom sayings like "People see what they want to see" and disagreement is expressed in terms of "there is something wrong with you". While on the other hand, it is assumed there is a real world "out there" and that beings and objects have "inherent nature", each their own.
An interesting distinction to draw out would be the one between phenomenology and solipsism. In what ways is phenomenology like solipsism and in what ways is it not.
As for your article: At a major Buddhist online forum, there used to be a main section of the forum called "Buddhist phenomenology" (or something similar, it had the word "phenomenology" in it, but it's since been renamed). There is a circle of Buddhists very knowledgeable of phenomenology.
[i]For a puthujjana the world exists. He can perceive things in that world, see them appear and disappear, he can see them changing. A puthujjana can also affect his surroundings and modify things according to own preferences, pursue the desirable experiences and avoid the undesirable ones—the puthujjana is involved. This ‘involvement’ with things represents the very core of the puthujjana‘s ‘experience as a whole’. Most people spend the majority of their lives obliviously absorbed in it, taking the course of ‘involvement’ for granted.[1]
It needs to be understood that these ‘objects’, which the puthujjana is fundamentally involved with, are things which his experience is inseparable from, for the simple virtue of being his experience of those things. For this reason we have to broaden the meaning of the term ‘things’, from usually denominating ‘objects’ in one’s surroundings, to include any experience whatsoever that arises and can be discerned internally or externally (whether it is ‘objects’, ‘tools’, emotions’ or ‘thoughts’). In that way the term ‘things’ would correspond to what is meant by P?li term ‘dhamma’. Thus, the experience of the puthujjana’s everyday world, his possessions, his desires and fears, anxieties and happiness are all things or phenomena. All these phenomena are completely unknown in their nature. This is why it is crucial for a puthujjana to recognize that a nature of a thing exists. This existence is not ‘in’ the world of the objects that are ready-to-hand, not ‘in’ his mind, not even between the two—but, a thing exists as an experience. Strictly speaking that’s all that can be truthfully said, without resorting to presupposed theories, inductive observations and explanations of the experience—the only thing that a puthujjana can know for certain is that ‘there is an experience’.[/i]
https://pathpress.org/appearance-and-existence/
For giving usefull aid to people with mental problems, an understanding is obviously required. And it's here that the PA is most usefull as one is not hindered by explanatory schemes to explain it.
What use is an approach which views the mind as an illusion emerging from complicated neural activity in the brain (an approach which might be an illusion itself), what use is this approach to a depressed person (and I can tell by experience that it's an be an all-consuming feeling, almost paralyzing even)? Is the person involved in need of an explanation of the mind?
Explanation isn't tantamount to understanding. Trying to solve the depression by giving medicines based on the materialistic approach, explaining depression as a disturbance of a balance of neurotransmitters between neurons and re-uptake of them, might have a value, like any materialistic approach to the feeling might have (cutting neuronal connections, administering drugs to get in a Prosacious state of mind, or even lobotomy), though there is no understanding involved. Just the observation that there is a depression, and that this can go away by intervening with it in the ways mentioned.
Now, this might be helpful to some. But the approach takes away the broader space in which the depression finds itself, and there are many complaints of patients that the depression even gets worse. I know for a fact that it did in my case. Luckily, in my case, the depression has evaporated by itself. Lobotomy might have done the trick, but I have the feeling my whole brain would had to be lobotomized from itself.
Phenomenology tries to understand from within. It's an attempt to understand from where the depression comes (and I use the depression here generically), an attempt to find the origins, and to free people from these origins or make them aware of them.
On this base, understanding a depression like in phenomenology, understanding the phenomenon from within and looking at its origins, people can be made aware of it and act accordingly.
Now this might overlook the true nature of a depression, as materialists or whoever tries to explain the mind in an explanatory scheme. For the people experiencing the depression this approach will not be very useful. Maybe temporary measures can help and give relief. It didn't in my case but it could.
An explanatory approach might be useful thus. There is no understanding though about the feeling of the depression, like it is impossible to know how it is to be a rat. But people (and animals, for that matter) have mental phenomena in common, and as such an understanding can be achieved. Trying to find out where a mental phenomenon originates is a powerful approach in dealing with mental disorders, and the materialistic approach usually is an attempt to look at a mental phenomenon as an independent state which can be analyzed and explained from the outside and can be altered or "dissolved" on the base of the analysis and the explanatory scheme. There is no attempt to an internal understanding and usually there is no attempt made to place the phenomenon in a broader context like the world in which the mental phenomena are embedded, which in the particular case of a depression might be indispensable.
(Re: Phenomenology and the Mind Body Question)
:up: Great topic and excellent description; very eloquent and purposeful! :up:
— Alkis Piskas
Thank you!! :smile:
Good.