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Husserl's Phenomenology

by Dan Zahavi
Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2003
178 pp.
ISBN 0-8047-4546-3

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell
 
pepperell@ntlword.com

There can be few philosophers whose work is more important to the ongoing debates about consciousness than Edmund Husserl, and there is perhaps no more perplexing question than that of the relationship between mind and world, a relationship he tried hard to clarify. In this concise book Dan Zahavi, a widely acknowledged authority on Husserl, offers a clear exposition of Husserlian phenomenology - a hugely influential philosophical method that seeks to grasp the central core of inner thought through a rigorous process of analysis. In doing so, the book describes various strategies Husserl employed to manage the dialectic between the subjective realm of the conscious mind and the objective realm of external objects (including other conscious minds).

Husserl's phenomenological method attempts to isolate those irreducible aspects of mentality by stripping away or suspending naïve appearances, what Husserl calls the 'natural attitude'. This 'pretheoretical' attitude, he argues, is prejudiced and prone to erroneous assumptions, particularly the assumption that there is some kind of 'real' world that exists independently of our own thinking existence. Instead  we suspend all metaphysical speculation and concentrate on the 'giveness' of reality in direct experience, what we really see rather than what we think we see. In an analogous way (although it is  not an analogy suggested by either Husserl or Zahavi) it is easy to get untrained people to improve their drawing skills simply by pointing out to them how they tend to draw what they think they see rather than what is actually there. Hence, "we should . . . not let preconceived theories form our experience, but let our experience determine our theories." (p. 45).

Because of Husserl's emphasis on the giveness of mental experience, and the objects perceived therein, he has been regarded by later critics as essentially an idealist thinker - one who believes that "subjectivity can persist without the world" (p. 71). It is a reading of Husserl that Zahavi works hard to correct, marshalling evidence from previously unpublished material in the manuscripts smuggled out of Germany prior to the second world war. Husserl's Jewishness was grounds for his condemnation by the Nazis, and consequently he was invisible to a whole pre-war generation of German philosophy students who were instead led towards Husserl's former student, Heidegger, with repercussions that persist today.  In his earlier work, Husserl adopted a metaphysically neutral position vis-à-vis the existence of a mind-independent reality. Therefore the question of whether objects presented to the mind are 'real' or 'imaginary' (e.g. hallucinatory) is irrelevant as far as phenomenological analysis is concerned, being instead "methodologically suspended" (p. 40). But this stress on the giveness of the object in our direct experience of it, on its appearance, does not equate, as Zahavi argues, with a dual world composed of separate subjective appearances and objective realities. This would lead to the kind of idealistic, introspective and eventually solipsistic position that is being avoided. Rather, "phenomenology is not a theory about the merely appearing, or to put it differently, appearances are not mere appearances. For how things appear is an integral part of what they really are.. .  The reality of the object is not hidden behind the phenomenon, but unfolds itself in the phenomenon." (p. 55).

Indeed, In the later Husserl  the very idea of a distinction between subject and object (which might give rise to the suggestion of a mind-independent reality) is, so to speak, transcended. It makes no sense, it is argued, to imagine a worldly reality not constituted by a subject, just as it makes no sense to imagine a subject unconstituted by worldly reality. Furthermore, it makes no sense to talk about a subject not constituted by other subjects through a relation of so-called 'intersubjectivity'. Thus, as Zahavi points out, Husserl effectively anticipates later phenomenologists such as Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty by positing a triad of subjectivity-intersubjectivity-worldly reality, none of which exists as an independent condition but takes form only in its relation to the others.

The second half of the book summarises some key ideas in Husserl's latter research; his conception of time and the flow of consciousness, the necessity of embodied kinaesthetic experience in the perception of objects, the intersubjective nature of self-awareness, his critique of the assumption of objectivity in the scientific method and its estrangement from our experience of ordinary reality. In many ways this latter work foreshadows more recent trends in philosophy of mind, such as the 'enactive' approach adopted by current researchers who stress the 'sensorimotor contingencies' of perceptual action (see the review of British Psychological Society conference in the August 2003 issue of Leonardo Reviews). This late work of Husserl, much of it still unpublished or untranslated, is revealed by Zahavi's careful research to be an intricate weave of subtle insights into the nature of being and experience. Just as in the very best literature, one gets the sense here of a mind in the throes of a kind of metaconsciousness, or consciousness of consciousness itself' where the very bounds of self knowledge are being expressed.

Hence Zahavi's claim that the widespread interpretations of Husserl's work as idealistic and solipsistic are inaccurate, partial and outdated. Instead, Husserl emerges as a figure who still has much to offer and whose influence is set to grow rather than recede. Given the nature of the subject matter and the shear breadth of Husserl's output, the author has managed to construct a short volume that rings with clarity, abounds with illuminating examples, and which provokes profound thought. Zahavi expresses the wish that this book will turn the reader towards Husserl's own writings, and one could not imagine a more authoritative and helpful introduction to them than this.

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