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‘Let's Look at It Objectively’: Why Phenomenology Cannot be Naturalized

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2013

Dermot Moran
Dermot Moran*
Affiliation:
University College Dublindermot.moran@ucd.ie
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Abstract

In recent years there have been attempts to integrate first-person phenomenology into naturalistic science. Traditionally, however, Husserlian phenomenology has been resolutely anti-naturalist. Husserl identified naturalism as the dominant tendency of twentieth-century science and philosophy and he regarded it as an essentially self-refuting doctrine. Naturalism is a point of view or attitude (a reification of the natural attitude into the naturalistic attitude) that does not know that it is an attitude. For phenomenology, naturalism is objectivism. But phenomenology maintains that objectivity is constituted through the intentional activity of cooperating subjects. Understanding the role of cooperating subjects in producing the experience of the one, shared, objective world keeps phenomenology committed to a resolutely anti-naturalist (or ‘transcendental’) philosophy.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 72: Phenomenology and Naturalism , July 2013 , pp. 89 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2013

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References

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3 See Keil, Geert, ‘Naturalism’ in Moran, Dermot (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy (London & NY: Routledge, 2008), 254–307Google Scholar. Aside from denying their very existence, at least part of the naturalist argument to accommodate qualia turns on whether qualia are representations or information- or content-bearing states. The assumption here is that objective third-person information can be extracted even from first-person states.

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10 PRS, 253; Hua XXV, 8.

11 Crisis, 194; Hua VI, 197.

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17 Crisis, 299; Hua VI, 348.

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19 Crisis, 150; Hua VI, 153.

20 Crisis, 337; Hua VI, 271.

21 The full commitment of Husserl to transcendental idealism can be seen from the texts gathered in Husserl, E., Transzendentaler Idealismus. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1921), Husserliana XXXVI, Rollinger, R. and Sowa, R. (eds.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and also in Husserl's Afterword to Boyce Gibson's translation of Ideas I, see Husserl, E., ‘Nachwort zu meinen Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie’, Jahrbuch für Philosophic und phänomenologische Forschung vol. XI (1930), 549–70Google Scholar; reprinted in Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Buch, Drittes: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, Husserliana V, Biemel, M. (ed.) (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1952), 138–62Google Scholar; trans. as ‘Epilogue’, in Ideas II, 405–30.

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26 Curiously Husserl sees Hume as a transcendental thinker and even thinks the transcendental motif as kept alive in a strange way even in Mill, and especially in Avenarius (Crisis, 195; Hua VI 198).

27 PRS, 253; Hua XXV, 8.

28 Crisis §14.

29 Crisis, 62–63; Hua VI, 63–64.

30 Crisis, 63; Hua VI, 63.

31 Crisis, 315–16; Hua VI 294.

32 E. Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Teil, Erster: Kritische Ideengeschichte, Husserliana VII, Boehm, R. (ed.) (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965), 150Google Scholar.

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34 Hua VII, 155.

35 The German reads: ‘So löst der Bewußtseinsnaturalismus die Subjektivität in ähnlicher Weise in Bewußtseinsatome auf, in letzte sachliche Elemente, unter bloß sachlichen Gesetzen der Koexistenz und Sukzession’ (Hua VII 158).

36 Husserl, Kant and the Idea of Transcendental Philosophy', 17–18.

37 Crisis, §68, 234; Hua VI, 236.

38 Crisis, 232; Hua VI, 235.

39 Hua III/1, 395.

40 Ideas I, xxii; Hua III/1, 8.

41 Ideas I, 35; Hua III/1, 41.

42 Ideas I, §20.

43 Ideas III, 33; Hua V, 38, cf. 43; V, 50.

44 See Maakreel, R.A. and Luft, S. (eds.), Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana U. P., 2010)Google Scholar.

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46 See Moran, D., Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction, Cambridge Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts Series (Cambridge & New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012), especially 178–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 See Husserl, E., Phänomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, Husserliana IX, Biemel, W. (ed.) (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1968)Google Scholar, trans. Scanlon, John, Phenomenological Psychology. Lectures, Summer Semester 1925 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977)Google Scholar, esp. §16.

48 Crisis, 362; Hua VI, 372.

49 Crisis, 367; Hua VI, 377.

50 Crisis, 52; Hua VI, 52. Husserl usually employs the verb ‘to sediment’ (sedimentieren) or the verbal noun ‘sedimentation’ (Sedimentierung), see, e.g., Crisis, 149; Hua VI, 152; Crisis, 246; Hua VI, 249; Crisis, 362; Hua VI, 373.

51 Crisis §40.

52 Crisis, 362; VI, 373.

53 My translation, Hua VII, 125. The German reads: ‘Ohne Überwindung des “Psychologismus” und des Objektivismus (<ohne> Positivismus in einem guten Sinn) überhaupt ist freilich keine Philosophie der Vernunft möglich – und das sagt ebensoviel wie eine Philosophie schlechthin. Aber ohne die Überwindung des Sensualismus, des Bewußtseins-Naturalismus, ist nicht einmal eine Psychologie als echte objektive Wissenschaft möglich. Eine Psychologie, die das Grundfeld aller psychologischen Erfahrungstatsachen, das des Bewußtseins, nur in naturalistischer Mißdeutung, also seinem ursprünglichen Wesen nach überhaupt nicht kennt, werden wir uns weigern müssen, als eigentliche Wissenschaft anzuerkennen,’ in Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24), 215.

54 Crisis, 208; Hua VI, 212.

55 Crisis, 205; Hua VI, 209.

56 Ideas I, 129; Hua III/1, 107; see also Hua XXXIV, 258 where he accuses anthropologism of ‘falsely absolutizing a positivistic world’.

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62 See, for instance, Paul Natorp, ‘On the Subjective and Objective Grounding of Knowledge’, trans. L Phillips and D. Kolb, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 12 (1981), 245–266CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 See, for instance, Longino, H., Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

64 Husserl, E., Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen 1907, Husserliana XVI, Claesges, U. (ed.) (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973)Google Scholar, trans. Rojcewicz, R.; Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, Husserl Collected Works VII (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hereafter ‘DR’ with the English pagination followed by the Husserliana volume and page number.

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68 Ideas I, 362; Hua III/1, 315.

69 DR, 55; Hua XVI, 65.

70 Crisis, 251; Hua VI, 254–55.

71 Ideas II, 192; Hua IV, 183.

72 Crisis 139–40; Hua VI, 142–43.

73 See Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis (1929); translated as ‘The Scientific Conception of the World. The Vienna Circle’, in Sarkar, S. (ed.), The Emergence of Logical Empiricism: from 1900 to the Vienna Circle (New York, NY: Garland Publishing, 1996), 321–40Google Scholar.

74 ‘The Scientific Conception of the World. The Vienna Circle’, quoting Russell, B., Our Knowledge of the External World (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1914, reprinted 1922)Google Scholar, 14.

75 See, for instance Churchland, P.S., Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

76 Ideas II, 311; Hua IV, 297.

77 Crisis, 204; VI, 208.

78 CM, 85; Hua I, 118.

79 CM, 137; Hua I, 164.

80 CM §60.

81 It has to be recognised that a number of naturalist philosophers, e.g. John R. Searle, have attempted an account of social constitution that remains within the naturalist perspective. Searle, for instance, defends the existence of a mind-independent world and argues that ‘it simply does not follow from the fact that all cognition is within a cognitive system that no cognition is ever directly of a reality that exists independently of all cognition’, Searle, J.The Construction of Social Reality (London: Allen Lane, 1995), 175Google Scholar. But it is precisely the claim of phenomenology that the ‘mind-independent world’ is an achievement of transcendental constitution.

82 Husserl, E., Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil. 1921–1928, Husserliana XIV, Kern, Iso (ed.) (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 90Google Scholar.

83 Hua XXXIX 320, my translation. See Husserl, E., Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), Husserliana XXXIX, Sowa, R. (ed.) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008)Google Scholar, see especially 404.

84 Trans. Phen., 98; Hua IX, 250.