[Fis] _ Response to several commentators:

[Maxine Sheets-Johnstone]

To FIS Colleagues,

There are common threads running through communications from Mark, Loet, 
Jerry, and Marcus that I would like to address. I thank them for their 
concerns and the issues they raise. I thank Plamen too for his response, 
specifically for upholding the value of phenomenology, though 
disagreeing with him in his giving prominence to Merleau-Ponty as a 
phenomenologist. I would like to comment on that point of disagreement 
first.

(1): I just wrote an invited essay on Merleau-Ponty for an Oxford book 
on Phenomenology and Psychopathology. I noted first off that
"Merleau-Ponty’s writings in psychopathology were both exceptional and 
non-exceptional. They were exceptional in bringing scientific research 
into phenomenology. Husserl had written from time to time on the 
abnormal—for example, in Ideas II, Husserl considers what transpires 
when a particular sense organ no longer functions normally while others 
continue to do so (Husserl 1989, pp. 71ff.)—but he did not delve into 
the psychopathological.  Heidegger too might be cited: the ‘they’ might 
be viewed as metaphysically abnormal, the ‘they’ being those who repress 
recognition of their own mortality, who see death as happening only to 
others, and whom Heidegger deems ‘inauthentic’. Merleau-Ponty, in 
contrast, delved into contemporary studies of psychopathology, in 
particular, the extensive studies of Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb. He 
also based his own psychopathological analyses to a large extent on the 
writings of Sigmund Freud even as he diverged from them. Thus one might 
say that he devoted himself assiduously to available contemporary 
literature in the then burgeoning fields of neuropsychiatry and 
psychoanalysis."

More of Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, and Psychopathology perhaps at 
another time. For a later time too, perhaps, Merleau-Ponty’s affiliating 
himself with biologist Jakob von Uexküll, undoubtedly because von 
Uexküll’s conjunction of animal and world in “functional tones” 
connected with Merelau-Ponty’s own conjunction of seer/seen and 
touching/touched, and possibly also because Merleau-Ponty’s disavowal of 
Darwin’s “origin of species” i.e., Darwin’s theory of natural selection, 
straightaway agreed with  von Uexküll’s disavowal of Darwin’s “origin of 
species.”

What is of preeminent note here is that Merleau-Ponty never engaged in 
the actual practice of phenomenology. He thereby threw away the backbone 
of phenomenology, namely, its methodology. Phenomenological methodology 
is the topic warranting serious address here in our discussion. I’ve 
mentioned it in earlier responses but would like to do so here in fuller 
detail.

(2): A Clarification of Phenomenology, Specifically in Terms of 
Methodology.

Bracketing is only the beginning! Making the familiar strange is only 
the first step! The “plunge” into a bona fide phenomenological 
investigation” that I mentioned in my ‘response to Salthe’s response’ is 
essential to getting at the foundational meaning and nature of any 
phenomenon. In short, in turning “to the things themselves,” we 
distinguish noesis and noema: consciousness and the object as meant.

The following remarks concerning phenomenological methodology appear in 
the opening of an article that will appear in an edited book on 
phenomenology and aesthetic experience:

"Phenomenological methodology in its original Husserlian formulation was 
in the service of uncovering sense-making, that is, in the service of 
uncovering the faculties and processes—the perceptual-cognitive 
structures-- by which we come to know the world. How indeed do we come 
to know the world? How does perception lead to knowledge? Husserlian 
phenomenology is anchored in a strict and rigorous methodology that 
requires practice and patience. It is a discipline in the dual sense of 
being both a schooled practice and a branch of knowledge. Phenomenology 
is thus not something one turns to and does on a lazy Sunday afternoon 
nor some general term to be used indiscriminately, as in articles on 
bodily awareness or attention that take the body as a ready-made adult 
body that already knows the world, in particular, an already learned 
body that has learned how to move itself.”

In my original FIS response, I wrote, “we begin by bracketing’ all 
assumptions and beliefs, and, in Husserl's words, turn ‘to the things 
themselves’." I should have said “.. . AND THEN, in Husserl’s words, 
turn ‘to the things themselves’.” In short, making the familiar strange 
is only the first step. The “plunge” into a bona fide phenomenological 
investigation” that I mentioned in my ‘response to Salthe’s response’ is 
essential. It is requisite to understanding the nature, structure, 
origin, and meaning of any phenomenon.

A fundamental and sterling example of the plunge and what it uncovers is 
evident in Husserl’s meticulously detailed study of meaning. Meaning is 
constituted on the basis of horizons, of sedimentations, of active and 
passive syntheses, of internal time consciousness, and more. Each of 
these aspects of meaning warrants study. I might note in this context 
that though no specific book was devoted to horizons or to 
sedimentations, for example, Husserl’s Analyses Concerning Passive and 
Active Synthesis runs over 600 pages.

(3): In this context of bona fide phenomenological analysis, I would 
like to ask the following question:

Might a phenomenological analysis of information be possible?

Is information like a sensation, for example? Is it “news” and in that 
sense “spatially pointillist and temporally punctual” as I have 
described a sensation? What is the actual experience of information? As 
a further example: If neural networks are taken as information networks, 
do those informational networks constitute informational repertoires and 
do those informational repertoires correlate with what in lived-through, 
experiential terms we call habits?

What is wanted in a phenomenological analysis of information is not a 
definition of information but a full-blown uncovering of the nature, 
structure, origin, and meaning of information. Would a phenomenological 
analysis of information prove as insightful and complex as Husserl’s 
phenomenological analysis of meaning?

I add the following: I confess that I am not a subscriber to 
naturalizing phenomenology, but I am a subscriber to finding and 
detailing complementarities between the sciences and phenomenology, 
precisely as I described in my FIS article.

(4): In the actual practice of phenomenology, one comes to what I have 
termed “the challenge of languaging experience”-- see last chapter 
titled same in The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader. I quote 
from that chapter:

"The idea that language names things and that its function is to name 
things gives precedence to stable items in the world, not to dynamic 
events experienced in a directly felt sense by sentient living bodies. 
Given this idea, language rightly preserves it function by adhering to 
things that are reified or reifiable and that consequently stay in 
place, and that moreover continue to stay in place or remain the 
integral ‘things’ they are even as they move, as waves rolling or wind 
blowing.

I quote a variety of people in documenting the challenge: infant 
psychiatrist and clinical psychologist Daniel Stern, Jean Piaget and 
Bärbel Inhelder, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Aristotelian scholar 
Arthur Peck, Carl Jung. I cite others too, including Husserl and 
paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, in the context of showing how 
the challenge of languaging experience is clearly illuminated, even 
crystallized, in experience itself. Though I did not quote him in the 
chapter, an observation of Husserl is telling. In attempting to pinpoint 
the metaphysical reality of “flux” in The Phenomenology of Inner Time 
Consciousness, Husserl states, “In the lived experience of actuality we 
have the primal source-point and a continuity of moments of 
reverberation [Nachhallmomenten]. For all this names are lacking” (p. 
100).

With reference to (3) above: How would one language the nature, 
structure, origin, and meaning of information—or in briefer terms, how 
would one language the experience of information? Obvious perhaps is 
that whatever the scientific concept of information might be, that 
concept is generated in experience and that experience warrants study 
and illumination.

I might add in this context that philosopher Dan Lloyd won an award from 
the fMRI Institute in New Hampshire several years back for the most 
innovative use of fMRI data. Lloyd used it in conjunction with Husserl’s 
analysis of inner time consciousness.

(5): The following comments are in relation to Schutz’s statement quoted 
by Loet and commented upon by Loet.
The quote from Schutz: “ As long as man is born from woman, 
intersubjectivity and the we-relationship will be the foundation for all 
other categories of human existence.” Loet’s comment: “Schutz wishes to 
bring the body back into the reflection, whereas Husserl’s position is 
more abstract.”

I would add two comments:

1.	Man is born from woman = intersubjectivity. What of woman born from 
woman? What about simply birth, specifically avian and mammalian birth = 
intersubjectivity insofar as the newborn is parent-dependent, commonly 
female-dependent, but in some instances shared, i.e., 
female/male-dependent?

2.	Re Husserl’s position being “more abstract” in relation to the body: 
Herewith simply one of a multitude of possible examples one finds in 
Husserl: “The Body is, as Body, filled with the soul through and 
through. Each movement of the Body is full of soul, the coming and 
going, the standing and sitting, the walking and dancing, etc. Likewise, 
so is every human performance, every human production” (Ideas II, p. 
252).

With respect specifically to a “we-relationship,” see, for example, 
Cartesian Meditations, p. 124:

"What I actually see is not a sign and not a mere analogue, a depiction 
in any natural sense of the word; on the contrary, it is someone else. 
And what is grasped with actual originariness in this seeing—namely that 
corporeality over there, or rather only one aspect of its surface—is the 
Other’s body itself.  . . . According to the sense-constitution involved 
in perceiving someone else, what is grasped originaliter is the body of 
a psyche essentially inaccessible to me originaliter, and the two are 
comprised in the unity of one psychophysical reality.”

The unity of the reality that Husserl describes is a matter of pairing, 
a phenomenon he describes earlier.

Of note also is the following in the Fifth Meditation in Cartesian 
Meditations, p. 154:

Thus the investigations concerning the transcendental constitution of a 
world, which we have roughly indicated in these meditations, are 
precisely the beginning of a radical clarification of the sense and 
origin (or of the sense in the consequence of the origin) of the 
concepts: world, Nature, space, time, psychophysical being, man psyche, 
animate organism, social community, culture, and so forth.

Husserl’s concern was precisely with how the world, the world that 
definitively includes Others, thus bodies and we-relationships, is 
constituted, thus how we come to the concepts, judgements, and meanings 
we do. His habit of beginning over and over from the beginning testifies 
to a relentless spirit of investigation and at the same time to a 
discerning critical perspective and to an awareness of the vastness of 
his basic concern: how we put the world together, how consciousness and 
object as meant, how soul and body, how I and other, and so on, and so 
on, constitute in each instance a distinctive psychophysical reality 
warranting exacting study grounded in a rigorous and exacting 
phenomenological methodology. That methodology, as pointed out in my FIS 
paper, is not different from scientific methodology in terms of 
verification. As I noted in that paper, findings in both areas may be 
“amended, elaborated, questioned on specific grounds, and so on. Just as 
in science one replicates by following the exact method, so in 
phenomenology.” I also added a caveat: “one cannot replicate, amend, 
elaborate, question, and so on, what one has not oneself ventured to 
examine following the same strict methodology.”

Cheers,
Maxine