Phenomenology. Anthony Chemero

We are grateful to students in those seminars, and to Jenefer Robinson, for helping us to present the material more clearly.

      We are grateful to Pascal Porcheron and the editorial team at Polity Press for all of their assistance and to Fiona Sewell for careful and thoughtful copyediting. Thanks also to Gui Sanches de Oliveira and Taraneh Wilkinson for their help with the page proofs and index.

      Large portions of the first edition of this book were written during research leaves from Franklin & Marshall College and the University of Cincinnati. We are grateful to these institutions for their support.

      Most of all, we are grateful for the love and support of our families.

Introduction

      Phenomenology is a loosely grouped philosophical tradition that began with Edmund Husserl in the 1890s and is still practiced today, though some of its current instantiations no longer use the name. The tradition is old enough to have a history, and it includes claims that seem odd, quaint, or outdated. And yet it is recent enough that even the work of its founders is alive with ideas that still challenge us and hold great promise. Arguably philosophers are only now beginning to fully appreciate the core insights of phenomenology, as we learn to construct rigorous analyses of perception and cognition in a phenomenological framework.

      This book covers what we believe an interested reader ought to know about phenomenology, its history, its most important authors and works, and its influence on branches of current philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. We discuss the history of phenomenology through the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, their arguments against scientific psychology, and their critical examination of Gestalt psychology. As part of this history, we also include extended discussions of Gurwitsch, Sartre, and the history of psychology. We go on to discuss contemporary developments in critical phenomenology of gender and race, ecological psychology, critiques of cognitivist approaches to artificial intelligence, and embodied cognitive science. This mix of topics and level of detail make this a good textbook for undergraduates studying philosophy, psychology, or cognitive science, and a good starting point for graduate students and academics who are new to phenomenology.

What you will not find in this book

      Here is one way to explain our focus and distinguish it from strains of phenomenology that we will not pursue in this book. One prominent concern of phenomenology has been to provide an account of the structures that make a shared, objective world intelligible. This account focuses on perception and cognition, and recognizes that bodies and skills are fundamental in making up this intelligibility. We consider this to be the central, most important, and most productive strain of phenomenology, and this book is intended to give a clear introduction to it.

      Another strain of phenomenology, which we can only explore briefly in this book, is concerned to give a description of subjective experiences, especially of experiences that are unusual and hard to explain. So, for example, phenomenology might provide an analysis of what it is like to experience religious faith, overpowering sentiments such as love or anxiety, aesthetic highs, inescapable ambiguities and paradoxes, and so forth. This is an important task, and quite often it intermingles with the first task. In Heidegger’s work, in particular, an understanding of anxiety and contingency is part and parcel of his explanation of the intelligibility of the world. In general, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty were broad and innovative thinkers and their writings touch on art, religion, politics, aesthetics, and morality. Existentialism is largely an offshoot of phenomenology, and so is much critical theory in literary studies. Consequently, phenomenology has influenced many different fields, too many to cover in a single book. Browse the faculty pages of a university website, and you may find a large number of people in literature departments, film and theater studies, theology, art, and political science who identify their work as “phenomenology.” We do not deny the importance of this phenomenology in these various fields. But a single book cannot presume to cover all this material. Our choice of topics and authors is motivated primarily by our conviction that contemporary work on embodied cognitive science is a particularly clear and relevant continuation of the most central concerns that Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty were pursuing.

A further preliminary distinction might be helpful. As is well known, English-speaking philosophy has for over half a century perceived a division between so-called “analytic” and “continental” approaches. Some philosophers on either side of the divide want to identify phenomenology with the “continental” approach, either to acclaim or to disparage the entire tradition wholesale. Those who prefer a “continental” approach would probably choose a sequence of authors that leads from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to Sartre, Derrida, and Levinas, and perhaps more current authors such as Badiou. That is a fine sequence of authors to study, and such overviews are available in many other books. But that is not our approach. We do not think the distinction is helpful or accurate at all, even aside from the obvious incongruity that “continental” is a geographic term while “analytic” is a stylistic or methodological one. Much analytic philosophy is done on the continent, and much good work in English-language philosophy consists of using analytic methods to explain the work of European philosophers. That is what we aim to do in this book. The goal of all philosophy, we think, is to give as clear an account as possible of the best available view on the big questions that motivate philosophy in the first place. We think that Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty articulate hard-won insights into the nature of the human ability to make sense of the world. Their writing is sometimes obscure, because they address very fundamental questions, make unexpected proposals that fly in the face of centuries of philosophical tradition, and often invent new language to render their ideas. Our job is to use what scholars have learned over the past decades to try to make it easier for today’s students to appreciate the insights of phenomenology.

Phenomenology now

      A broad range of researchers in philosophy and psychology departments are empirically and conceptually investigating affordances, or the role of our bodies in perception and cognition, or action as a condition for maintaining a sense of the self. We claim that such work is not merely influenced by phenomenology, something that most of these people would readily accede to whether they have read Heidegger or not. We think that they are doing phenomenology, insofar as they are pursuing the basic ideas and insights this tradition was founded on. Still, some readers may be surprised that ecological psychology and embodied cognitive science belong among the proper successors of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. This is understandable, because the chain of influence that leads from Heidegger to, say, Gibson, dynamical systems theory, or enactivism is not clear or well known. It is easier and more common to point out more obvious threads, such as that Merleau-Ponty and Sartre were friends and collaborators for a while, and that Sartre was a giant in post-war French philosophy, from which Levinas, Derrida, and Deleuze emerged as important figures.

We hope that the narrative of this book vindicates our claim in detail, but here are two quick reminders that should make it plausible from the start. Merleau-Ponty’s work is obviously indebted to Husserl, and even more deeply to Heidegger. The third big source of his thought is his sustained critical examination of Gestalt psychology. This also had a major impact on Gibson, who was Kurt Koffka’s colleague at Smith College for several years in the 1930s, just as Gibson was beginning to develop the first ideas of ecological psychology. Beyond this parallel influence of Gestalt psychology on Merleau-Ponty and Gibson, there was possibly a direct influence of the former on the latter. Though Gibson himself would deny it, some of his students recall that later he would often compare his work to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, to the point of trying to ward off prospective graduate students by telling them they should read this impenetrable book first, and only come back when they had understood it.

      More crucial than a common ancestry in Gestalt psychology is the work of Hubert Dreyfus, who brought the views of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty into current philosophy and cognitive science. In the 1960s and 1970s Dreyfus used his unusually insightful understanding of Heidegger’s work to formulate sharp criticisms of the then