Phenomenology

Phenomenology enters the depth-psychology corpus along several converging but non-identical vectors. In its classical Husserlian form it appears as a rigorous first-person science of experience—a disciplined investigation of how consciousness constitutes its objects—deployed here chiefly by Evan Thompson to ground the enactive approach to mind in biology and neuroscience. Thompson distinguishes three registers of Husserlian analysis (static, genetic, and generative phenomenology), arguing that the shift from static to genetic phenomenology enables a productive convergence with embodied, self-organizing life. Merleau-Ponty radicalises this inheritance by insisting that the lived body is the irreducible locus of all perception, and that ‘true philosophy consists in re-learning to look at the world’—a claim that allies phenomenology with depth psychology’s suspicion of purely representationalist accounts of mind. Heidegger’s contribution is methodological and ontological: phenomenology names not a subject-matter but the ‘how’ by which beings show themselves, pressing inquiry toward the structure of Dasein and Being. David Abram draws on Merleau-Ponty to argue that phenomenology must ground the natural sciences in lived sensory reciprocity with a more-than-human world. Jung’s use of the term—most explicitly in the subtitle of Aion (‘Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self’)—is descriptive rather than philosophical: phenomenology as careful mapping of psychic appearances. Across these positions, a central tension obtains between phenomenology as rigorous philosophical method and phenomenology as a broadly descriptive, first-person sensitivity to experience that depth psychology can appropriate for its own imaginal and hermeneutical ends.

In the library 18 passages

Static phenomenology analyzes the formal structures of consciousness, whereby consciousness is able to constitute (disclose or bring to awareness) its objects… Genetic phenomenology is concerned with how these intentional structures and objects emerge through time.

Thompson provides the foundational taxonomy of Husserlian phenomenology—static, genetic, and generative—that structures his entire enactive integration of biology and philosophy of mind.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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One common thread running through the following chapters is a reliance on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and developed in various directions by numerous others, most notably for my purposes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Thompson announces phenomenology, centred on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, as the unifying philosophical thread of his project to integrate biology, neuroscience, and the sciences of mind.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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phenomenology would articulate the ground of the other sciences. It was Husserl’s hope that phenomenology, as a rigorous ‘science of experience,’ would establish the other sciences at last upon a firm footing.

Abram presents Husserlian phenomenology as the foundational science of lived experience that must underwrite all other sciences, citing Merleau-Ponty’s call to ‘return to things themselves.’

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis

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the epoché can be described as the flexible and trainable mental skill of being able both to suspend one’s inattentive immersion in experience and to turn one’s attention to the manner in which something appears or is given to experience.

Thompson renders Husserl’s epoché as a pragmatic, trainable first-person skill rather than a purely theoretical gesture, linking phenomenological method to embodied practice.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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The shift from static to genetic phenomenology thus marks a turn toward the lived body and time-consciousness. Thus it enables us to deepen the connection between phenomenology and the enactive approach.

Thompson argues that the internal development of Husserlian phenomenology from static to genetic analysis is what permits its productive convergence with the enactive, embodied account of mind.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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‘Phenomenology’ neither designates the object of its researches, nor characterizes the subject-matter thus comprised. The word merely informs us of the ‘how’ with which what is to be treated in this science gets exhibited and handled.

Heidegger defines phenomenology not by its subject-matter but by its methodological character—the mode of showing or letting-be-seen—distinguishing it sharply from any positive science.

Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, 1962thesis

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We had to frequent the phenomenal field and become acquainted, through psychological descriptions, with the subject of phenomena, if we were to avoid placing ourselves from the start… in a transcendental dimension assumed to be eternally given.

Merleau-Ponty argues that phenomenology must pass through the phenomenal field via psychological description before any transcendental move, rejecting the short-circuit of reflective philosophy.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis

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True philosophy consists in re-learning to look at the world, and in this sense a historical account can give meaning to the world quite as ‘deeply’ as a philosophical treatise.

Merleau-Ponty encapsulates the phenomenological imperative as a recovery of the pre-given world, privileging renewed perception over systematic philosophical construction.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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the sort of phenomenology I am concerned with in the context of this chapter is static phenomenology… To equate phenomenology with one particular way of doing phenomenology would be a leveling misrepresentation. Different ways of doing phenomenology are appropriate in different contexts.

Thompson warns against conflating the plurality of phenomenological methods, insisting that static, genetic, and generative approaches each have distinct appropriate domains.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting

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Like emergent processes in a self-organizing system, associated experiences reciprocally strengthen and reinforce each other and thereby give rise to new formations that supersede their prior separateness.

Thompson links Husserl’s genetic phenomenology of passive synthesis and association to emergence in self-organizing systems, bridging phenomenological and biological vocabularies.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting

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a dialectic whereby perception hides itself from itself. But although it is of the essence of consciousness to forget its own phenomena thus enabling ‘things’ to be constituted, this forgetfulness is not mere absence.

Merleau-Ponty describes the self-concealing character of perceptual consciousness as a structural feature that phenomenological attention must recover, not eliminate.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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what thus shows itself (the ‘phenomenon’ in the genuine primordial sense) is at the same time an ‘appearance’ as an emanation of something which hides itself in that appearance.

Heidegger distinguishes the phenomenological concept of phenomenon—what shows itself from itself—from mere appearance, grounding phenomenology in ontological self-disclosure.

Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, 1962supporting

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The naturalism of science and the spiritualism of the universal constituting subject… had this in common, that they levelled out experience: in face of the constituting I, the empirical selves are objects.

Merleau-Ponty identifies the shared failing of scientific naturalism and idealist phenomenology—the levelling of lived, embodied experience—as the problem phenomenology must overcome.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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if we stick to phenomena, none of these ‘signs’ is clearly given to consciousness, and since there could be no reasoning where the premises are lacking.

Merleau-Ponty argues from phenomenological fidelity that intellectualist accounts of perception fail because the alleged inferential premises are not in fact phenomenally present.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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an imaginal approach to re-search that would attend to the unfinished business of the ancestors in the work is a hermeneutical science and not an empirical one.

Romanyshyn positions imaginal, depth-psychological research as hermeneutical rather than empirical, implicitly differentiating it from phenomenological method while sharing phenomenology’s turn away from positivist science.

Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007aside

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‘Phenomenology and neurobiology of self disorder in schizophrenia’… ‘Phenomenological and neurocognitive perspectives on delusions’… ‘Phenomenology of self-disturbances in schizophrenia’.

McGilchrist’s bibliographic cluster demonstrates the consolidation of phenomenological method in psychiatry, applied to schizophrenic self-disorder and the comparative phenomenology of affective states.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside

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