Phenomenological reduction in Merleau‐Ponty's The Structure of Behavior: An alternative approach to the naturalization of phenomenology

Abstract

Approaches to the naturalization of phenomenology usually understand naturalization as a matter of rendering continuous the methods, epistemologies, and ontologies of phenomenological and natural scientific inquiry. Presupposed in this Philosophy is an idea (in the Kantian sense of a limit idea ) that we cannot totalize. Philosophy remains on the horizon of our thought as the limit of possible operations and is only validated in an open-ended historical process. Thus, philosophy is not the reaffirmation of ancient philosophical entities (e.g., eternal truths and the like), but rather the elaboration of an integral philosophy that is compatible with all research in the human sciences.( Merleau-Ponty, 2010, p. 320) | INTRODUCTION: THE CHALLENGE OF NATURALIZING PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE CARTESIAN REDUCTIONBringing together the philosophy of lived experience with the empirical sciences of life and mind is one of the pressing issues for contemporary cognitive science and philosophy of mind in the search for a gapless theory of the mind.A proposal much discussed in this connection in recent years has been the effort to naturalize phenomenology by reconciling the first-person descriptions of conscious experience developed in the phenomenological tradition with more recent advances in the cognitive sciences. This project is generally discussed as one of rendering continuous the epistemological, methodological, or ontological dimensions of phenomenology and the empirical sciences (e.g., Petitot, Varela, Pachoud, & Roy, 1999;Ramstead, 2015). The unspoken assumption here is that these areas and styles of inquiry are initially discontinuous. My objective in this paper is to show that there is an alternative way of conceiving this problematic, one that points towards original continuity rather than discontinuity, and to explore consequences such an approach might have for contemporary debates surrounding the naturalization of phenomenology and the status of phenomenology as a distinctively transcendental philosophical program. This alternative approach to the understanding of the relationship between phenomenology and the natural sciences can be found in Merleau-Ponty's The Structure of Behavior and other works. However, in order to contextualize this alternative position, in this introductory section, I will present the standard view that phenomenology and the empirical sciences are originallyand perhaps essentially-discontinuous.Let us refer to this way of framing the possibility (or impossibility) of a naturalized phenomenology as the Discontinuity Thesis. Its earliest statement in the history of phenomenology can be found in Husserl's early work.Contrasting sciences of essence with sciences of fact, Husserl places phenomenology among the former, while empirical psychology ranks among the latter. In his most dramatic statement of the Discontinuity Thesis, Ideas I's Cartesian version of the phenomenological reduction, Husserl "brackets" the findings of the empirical sciences along with the external world. The natural scienc...

Pointing the way to social cognition: A phenomenological approach to embodiment, pointing, and imitation in the first year of infancy.

“…Though I maintain that, ultimately, a commitment to the minimalist project of phenomenological psychology should lead phenomenologists and psychologists alike to questions of transcendental philosophy, such concerns can be set aside for present purposes. For discussion, see Kee, 2018Kee, , 2019 achievements in abstract thought, imagination, communication, and social cognition. 2 Why is it important to be phenomenologically accountable when studying infant development?…”

“…Though I maintain that, ultimately, a commitment to the minimalist project of phenomenological psychology should lead phenomenologists and psychologists alike to questions of transcendental philosophy, such concerns can be set aside for present purposes. For discussion, see Kee, 2018, 2019.…”

“…83–84; see also Merleau-Ponty, 1963; Husserl, 1973, pp. 173–185; and, for discussion, Kee, 2018, 2019.…”

The Living Transcendental — An Integrationist View of Naturalized Phenomenology

“… 21 Kee (2020) too draws attention to the significance of Structure for the project of naturalizing phenomenology. As far as I can see, our approaches are largely aligned, although our emphases are somewhat different.…”