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Phenomenology: Philosophical Aspects
Phenomenology: Philosophical Aspects Christian Gru¨ny, Universität Witten/Herdecke, Witten, Germany Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This article is a replacement of the previous edition article by K. Mulligan, volume 17, pp. 11363–11369, Ó 2001, Elsevier Ltd.
Abstract Even though phenomenology had a single founder, Edmund Husserl, it has developed into a diverse tradition that warrants speaking of phenomenologies in the plural. Transforming the objects and actions of everyday experience into phenomena, it aims at clarifying the ways of givenness of the world in relation to an experiencing subject. From the very beginning, sociality has been among its areas of research, ranging from the question of other minds and emotions and of embodiment as the basic human condition, to an investigation of the lifeworld as the ground and horizon of all experience and the other as a fundamental challenge to the autonomous subject. In this way, it has inspired research in various other disciplines including cognitive science.
Phenomenology and Phenomenologies Phenomenology was one of the most influential philosophical traditions of the twentieth century and continues to influence philosophical thought and various other fields (sociology, political theory, art studies, theory of architecture, pedagogy, among others) today. While its roots lie in the same contexts and discussions in philosophy, logic, and psychology in the nineteenth century that were the foundations of analytic philosophy, this tie was severed long ago. Only recently the debate in the cognitive sciences has revitalized phenomenology in an area that had long been dominated by analytic approaches, promising a new dialogue between the two. Besides this, there have been various parallels to and convergences with developments in the pragmatist tradition. Unlike many other philosophical traditions, phenomenology can be said to have a single founder: Edmund Husserl. Husserl (1859–1938) studied philosophy, mathematics, and psychology and devoted his first books to the theory of mathematics. In these books, he defended a theory that he was to oppose vehemently in later years, namely a psychologistic explanation of mathematics and logic. The publication of his Logical Investigations 1900–1901 amounted to a complete reversion of this earlier position, and it marks the beginning of phenomenology in the modern sense, which has little in common with earlier uses of the word (e.g., in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit). Husserl’s basic insight was inspired by one of his philosophical teachers, Franz von Brentano: the fact of intentionality. Consciousness is always consciousness of something, just as symbolic reference is reference to something. Any investigation of the objects of consciousness has to be complemented by an investigation of the consciousness of objects and vice versa. In this relation, the objects are not constructed by consciousness but rather intuited as independent, and the task of phenomenology is to investigate these objects – among them logical and mathematical sentences – in the way they are given as phenomena (Husserl, 1901: pt. V). Since the publication of the Logical Investigations, phenomenology has undergone several fundamental transformations, and as early as 1953 Paul Ricoeur called its history a history of heresies (Ricœur, 1953: p. 836). Considering this, it might be
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more appropriate to speak of phenomenologies in the plural. The first of these heretics, however, was Husserl himself, whose transcendental turn in 1913 many of his earlier followers and collaborators (Adolph Reinach, Moritz Geiger, Max Scheler, among others) were not willing to go along with. The ‘realist phenomenology’ they adhered to did not consider the meticulous analysis of the a priori structures of consciousness Husserl undertook in the first volume of his Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (Husserl, 1913) to be warranted or necessary. Instead, they devoted their attention to social and legal phenomena, art, literature, and a variety of other topics that appeared in Husserl’s own writings only much later. The major figure after Husserl who even tended to outshine his former teacher appeared on the scene in the 1920s: Martin Heidegger. His existential and ontological transformation of phenomenology paved the ground for subsequent modifications that are associated with names like Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty who stressed the role of the body and brought into play political topics. Phenomenological heritage can even be detected in those French philosophers whose background lay in phenomenology but who decided to distance themselves from it, including Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and others. In his Ideas, Husserl introduced a basic methodical tool he called ‘phenomenological’ or ‘transcendental reduction,’ meaning a fundamental change of attitude toward the world (Husserl, 1913: sections 31–32). Without giving up his worldly activities, the researcher was supposed to turn himself into an observer who withdrew from all involvement, methodically transforming things and actions into phenomena and thereby making them accessible in the way they show themselves – a shift from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’ of the world, as it were. Even though later theoreticians have expressed doubts about the feasibility of this operation, the necessity of some kind of break between the everyday attitude toward the world and its phenomenological treatment is generally accepted. Husserl’s early writings were primarily concerned with consciousness in a singular sense but the subject of intersubjectivity and social relations figured in his manuscripts and lectures from very early on. The concept of lifeworld that he
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 18
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introduced in his later texts proved to be a fruitful starting point for sociological analyses. More fundamental, the question of how we can know or have access to others’ minds and emotions has been an important phenomenological topic, and phenomenology’s contributions to these questions have recently been adopted and developed in cognitive science. In phenomenological theory, the topics of other minds, the body, the lifeworld, and the other are all intertwined.
Minds and Emotions In the beginning of the twentieth century, Theodor Lipps developed a concept of empathy (‘Einfühlung,’ literally ‘feeling into’) to explain not only our knowledge of other persons but also our understanding of art (Lipps, 1903: pp. 107–141). He posited the coupled natural drives of imitation and expression leading to a tendency to imitate perceived expressive movements, thereby reliving the content of their expression and finally ‘feeling’ this content ‘into’ the perceived body or work of art. To Lipps this was not an act but an unconscious instinct functioning automatically. Husserl and other phenomenological writers such as Edith Stein (Stein, 1917) drew upon this concept, modifying and criticizing it. According to Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (Husserl, 1931: sections 49–62), I perceive others’ bodies and their gestures not as symbols but as immediate expressions of an inner life that is ‘appresented,’ i.e., given along with the visibility of their bodies without ever being truly present to me. Still there is an act of analogy or ‘pairing’ at the bottom of this which is not based on an actual comparison and judgment of similarity but still makes me the model and ‘norm’ of the others and lets them appear secondary to and dependent on the sphere of my own self. On the other hand, the objectivity of the world and its objects is based on their being objects not just for myself but for everyone. Even though this reconstruction was meant to counter the alleged solipsistic tendencies of transcendental phenomenology, the problems of reaching an intersubjective and cultural world from a transcendental subjectivity conceptualized as ‘monadic’ become very apparent. Before Husserl, Max Scheler had proposed a theory that avoided any reference to ‘Einfühlung,’ instead relying on the observation of an immediate ‘Nachfühlen’ – correctly but misleadingly translated as ‘empathy’ as well – which formed the basis of any act of actual sympathy (‘Mitfühlen’), i.e., compassion as an act of not only perceiving the other’s sadness and remaining neutral toward it but sympathizing with other (Scheler, 1923: Chapter A 2). He sharply distinguished empathy and sympathy from mere contagion (‘Ansteckung’) where a person is affected by another’s yawn or an infant by another’s cries, and which contains no real reference to the other’s feelings at all but comes close to a causal reaction. In neither case, however, do we first perceive a physical body which is then provided with an inner life, be it felt into, projected by analogy or inferred by an act of interpretation. To Scheler, this description was a fiction produced by scientific psychology. As for Lipps and Husserl, emotions are referred to as the most salient instances of human expression while the argument is directed toward the more general question of how we perceive others as agents with an emotional and mental life.
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Scheler’s basic point, which was later taken up by MerleauPonty and others and was endorsed by Wittgenstein (1967: sections 220, 225) is that there is no ontological gap between the visible body and the ‘inner’ life of a person, in a way that Cartesian theory would define it. Even though we do not actually feel the others’ emotions, we do not infer them from outward signs or reconstruct them within ourselves either – rather, we see them in their behavior. We neither see an animated physical object nor an animated body but a person that exhibits sensible behavior. Theories that posit some kind of act of inference or analogy have difficulties explaining how these mechanisms can be at work even in early infancy where conscious acts of making inferences seem very unlikely. Recently, this phenomenological position has been revitalized in the discussion on the theory of mind that has involved developmental psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science (Carruthers and Smith, 1996; Davies and Stone, 1995). The two most important theoretical approaches in this debate have been labeled ‘theory theory’ and ‘simulation theory,’ the latter of which bears some resemblance to the old theory of ‘Einfühlung.’ It proposes that we reconstruct others’ mental and emotional states by simulating them within our own minds, performing an imaginary representation of what it would be like to be in their position (Gordon, 1986). Recently, the research on mirror neurons has been cited to support this view, providing it with a neuronal basis (Gallese and Goldman, 1998). The ‘theory theory,’ on the other hand, defends the view that we construct theories or folk psychologies concerning the inner life of others, inferring their beliefs, thoughts, and emotions on the basis of these theories. The strongest and most widely held claim by proponents of both theories is that simulation or theory are our primary means of accessing the mental state of others and that they are acquired early in childhood (Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997) or are even innate (Baron-Cohen, 1995). Both these theories have been criticized from a phenomenological point of view, aiming at their very premises (Gallagher, 2005: Chapter 9). The basic assumptions of the whole debate are Cartesian, conceptualizing the mind as a closed entity distinct from the body, and its focus has been explanation and prediction as primary goals of understanding others. All of these presuppositions can be contested on the grounds that they fundamentally misconstrue our basic stance toward the world which is characterized by pragmatic bodily interaction. Hence Shaun Gallagher proposes a third reconstruction which he calls ‘interaction theory’ (Gallagher, 2005: p. 208). In everyday interaction, our aim is not to theorize about the mind of others or to simulate its content but to make sense of what they do in a particular situation, being part of that situation ourselves, in order to respond to it and enter into interaction and/or communication. There is a primary intersubjectivity of bodily interaction that is accessible even to very young infants who show a pragmatic understanding of the motives and beliefs of others as they are manifested in their actions. This understanding precedes the explicit and rather detached reconstructions that are tested in the classical false belief experiments. Of course this does not mean that we never resort to theory or simulation at all but rather that these modes of reconstruction are not what our interaction with others as persons are based on. What
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becomes obvious, however, is the basic role of our bodies in our interaction with and understanding of the world and other human beings.
The Body In the posthumously published second part of his Ideas, Husserl granted the body a much more important position than he had in his previous writings (Husserl, 1952: sections 18, 35–42). He drew on the difference of ‘Leib’ and ‘Körper’ that is made in the German language, distinguishing ‘Körper’ as a physical entity considered from a detached point of view from ‘Leib’ (usually translated as ‘lived body’) as the primary way our own body and the bodies of others are given to us experientially. The lived body is that by means of which we experience the world and thus can never be completely objectified, and even though the bodies of others offer the possibility of objectification, we primarily experience them as experiencing the world as well. This entails a shift in the conception of consciousness: the lived body is not an object of consciousness but part of it, as it were. It is our primary mode of dealing with the world. The operation of withdrawal into a region of pure consciousness that characterized transcendental phenomenology thus becomes increasingly implausible. There is a continuity between mind and the lived body rather than an ontological gap, and the distinction between the lived body and the physical body, ‘Leib’ and ‘Körper,’ does not distinguish ontologically distinct entities but rather different perspectives on the same thing. A similar position in a somewhat different theoretical context can be found in the work of Helmuth Plessner who studied medicine and zoology as well as philosophy with Husserl. Plessner’s aim was anthropological but he argued from a phenomenological background (Plessner, 1928). On his view, humans are characterized by a dual way of relating to themselves and to the world, which he called eccentric positionality. They relate to the world from a centered position analogous to that of an animal, but they also relate to this relationship from a position that is not centered but situates itself on the border of self and world. This entails a dual relationship to one’s body: we are a ‘Leib’ and have a ‘Körper.’ According to this theory, consciousness and reflexivity are firmly rooted in biology. It was Merleau-Ponty who drew the consequences of these positions within phenomenology. Drawing on contemporary psychology, psychopathology and neuroscience, as well as on Husserlian phenomenology, he outlined a theory of the lived body as a relation to the world, an ‘être-au-monde,’ which is usually translated with Heidegger’s term ‘being-in-the-world’ but could also be rendered as ‘being-towards-the-world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1945). According to him, it’s not the Cartesian ‘I think’ but the Husserlian ‘I can’ (move, perceive, act, etc.) that must be placed at the center of subjectivity, and the subject must be conceived as an embodied agent. While Husserl kept his distance toward science in general and contemporary psychology in particular, Merleau-Ponty was an avid reader of psychological, neurological, biological, and later linguistic research, trying to integrate it into a philosophical account of perception. Gestalt psychology and
neurology provided him with the insight that the functions of the body cannot be viewed in isolation and have to be understood within the context of its perceiving and acting in the world. From this it follows that an adequate theory of perception must also be a theory of the lived body and vice versa. As a consequence, Merleau-Ponty conceived of mind neither as an entity in itself nor as a mere function of neuronal structures and operations, but rather as the situated activity of bodily beings in interaction with each other and the world. This position is as far from Cartesian dualism as it is from a simple monism. There is a relative independence of higher processes of mind that cannot be reduced to functions of the lived body nor completely severed from it. Many of the research perspectives Merleau-Ponty relied on and developed were discontinued in the years after the Phenomenology of Perception was published, and in the new cognitive science the computational model of the mind was virtually undisputed. Only recently has cognitive science turned toward an account of cognition that has been labeled as ‘enactive’ or ‘embodied,’ returning to some of Merleau-Ponty’s central theses. In what has been called the ‘third wave’ in the development of cognitive science, the role of body in cognition is increasingly being acknowledged (Varela et al., 1992; Noe, 2004). From the side of phenomenological philosophy, there have been attempts to follow Merleau-Ponty in critically interpreting the findings of cognitive science and fitting them into a phenomenological framework which in turn has to be modified (Gallagher, 2005; Gallagher and Schmicking, 2010). The question of naturalization is being debated once again but its premises have changed. Various proposals have been made about how phenomenology and neuroscience can mutually inform each other, dropping the idea of a complete convergence (Petitot et al., 2000; Gallagher, 2012: Chapter 1).
The Lifeworld Husserl first used the term ‘Lebenswelt’ in a manuscript in 1917 but the topic of the everyday world of the ‘natural attitude’ was present long before that. Not until 1935, however, did the lifeworld figure in his published writings. Before that, important contributions to a theory of the lifeworld were made by two of his followers, Martin Heidegger and Alfred Schütz. In Being and Time, Heidegger introduced the concept of ‘Zeug’ (‘equipment’) to describe the primary givenness of things in the everyday world (Heidegger, 1927: sections 14–18). According to Heidegger, our world is not populated by objects of contemplation but by things of practice that form a web or nexus of tools and equipment (‘Zeugzusammenhang’) where every one thing refers to others and to the practical context it belongs to and can be used in. Consequently, it is not theoretical cognition that marks our primary approach to the world but a practical kind of knowledge of handling things. Primarily the world is that which we find ourselves in, in the horizon of which we act, not a collection of objects; space is characterized by proximity and remoteness, not by a neutral measuring of distance. When he calls the ‘Dasein’ (i.e., human beings) ‘being-in-the-world,’ this is not to be understood as the presence of a physical entity within a container-like world but a type of being involved, of handling things, a presence to the world. According to Heidegger, this is
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what ontology must take as its starting point, not a neutralized theoretical view. Husserl’s own point of departure in the Crisis of European Sciences was similar but somewhat more urgent: he diagnosed a fatal disappearance of the problems of humanity within the prevailing scientific ontology, resulting in the danger of radical skepticism and nihilism, and proceeded to work out a genealogy of natural science from the lifeworld (Husserl, 1954). He did not consider the series of subsequent abstractions in itself to be problematic, but the fact that this genealogy tended to be forgotten and its endpoint taken as a truer reality. A phenomenological ‘science’ of the lifeworld was supposed to counter these tendencies and ground our self-conception in a deeper understanding of our primary reality. The lifeworld as he described it is a sphere of praxis where science and philosophy must be counted as a particular form of theoretical practice. It is the ‘universal field’ in which we live, move, communicate, and theorize, and must be considered the ultimate foundation of any theory. It is objective only in that it is intersubjective, relating to the acts of those that inhabit it, but for every one of us it is pregiven, always already there. Even though the world of human life is characterized by great diversity, according to Husserl there are fundamental structures of sense that guarantee its unity – no matter how distant a culture may be from mine, there is always some common ground that lets me interact with its inhabitants. The lifeworld does not exist in the plural. What was remarkable was Husserl’s willingness to take intersubjectivity as a starting point, not as a result to be deduced from individual consciousness: the transcendental must be conceived as collective. Still, the question of mediation between the individual and the social that had not been solved in the Cartesian meditations remained a problem. In his Phenomenology of the social world, Alfred Schütz had provided a firmly Husserlian account of this mediation, taking individual consciousness as a starting point (Schütz, 1932). Even though the philosophical ambitions of the book are obvious, Schütz understood it as a contribution to sociology, and its scope is somewhat more modest than that of Husserl’s Crisis where the lifeworld has no natural world or world of science beside it but is meant to encompass every kind of worldly phenomenon. The social world as Schütz analyzed it is a specific field within the world as such, and even when he later adopted the term lifeworld, this understanding remains in place (Schütz and Luckmann, 1973). His aim was to clarify Max Weber’s concept of meaningful social action by an analysis of the genesis of meaning or sense in relation to the individual, the other, and society, effectively basing society on the individual. By distinguishing ‘in-order-to-motives’ and ‘because-motives’ as the sole types of motivation, Schütz significantly narrowed the range of possible descriptions and explanation of social phenomena. On this view, sense as the fundamental property of social action only comes into play in a retroactive explicit interpretation of one’s own and the others’ actions. One might compare this position with the sociological works of Pierre Bourdieu (1971). Even though Bourdieu somewhat aggressively denounced philosophy, he relied heavily on the work of Husserl and especially Merleau-Ponty and developed a theory of the social world that has rather strong philosophical implications. His basic concept of
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‘habitus’ as incarnated social meaning can be read as a sociological elaboration of the latter’s notion of the lived body. As elaborated earlier, the body as Merleau-Ponty conceived it is not a given entity but rather our primary means of relating to the world. In this way it is shaped by its interactions just as much as by its innate structure, and the acquisition of skills like manipulating complex tools or playing a musical instrument must be considered as an extension and modification of it. In social interaction, the habitus shapes our way of acting, itself being shaped by previous interactions. The mediation between individual and society does not take place in the constitution and reconstruction of meanings as motives but in the incarnation and reenactment of social meaning by the habitus. Consequently, action should be considered as situated rather than subjective in the traditional sense. According to Bourdieu, social change is always possible because social action is never completely determined, but it is difficult because it is not a matter of mere reinterpretation of social meanings but has to deal with the inertia of the habitus.
The Other In the phenomenological description of intersubjectivity and sociality presented so far, one aspect was all but absent: the active role of the other. In Husserl’s as well as in Scheler’s and Schütz’ reconstructions, the other appears viewed from the perspective of the self, as someone who must be intuited or understood. Jean-Paul Sartre offered a different perspective. In his Being and Nothingness, the gaze of the other opens up a whole new dimension: it objectifies me and pins me down, as it were, transforming me from an essentially indeterminate and free subject into this particular bodily being that can be seen and defined (Sartre, 1943: pt. 3, Chapter 1, IV). Also, the other’s gaze upon the world that for Husserl guaranteed its objectivity appears much more dramatic, as a radical reorientation of every object away from me and toward him. Even though Sartre’s account of the gaze might seem overdramatized, his insistence on the irreducibility of my being affected by the other to my sphere of consciousness is an important contribution to phenomenology, reminding us that the inaccessibility of other minds might not be the only problem phenomenology has to deal with when it comes to intersubjectivity. Emmanuel Levinas followed an even more radical path of inquiry. The other with a capital O as he construed him is not primarily an objectifying gaze but a face that issues a demand. In itself, this demand is unconditional, calling me into responsibility for the other in a way that I cannot evade or escape (Levinas, 1961). By describing this relation as primordial and irreversible, Levinas completely reinterprets the relationship between self and other as it was conceived by Husserl. Now it is not the Other who is dependent on me, being a vis-à-vis that I have to intuit or understand, but it is me who is exposed to the demand of his face before I can think of myself as a competent individual who can freely decide what he wants to concern himself with. Even if I am not bound by the demand I have to relate to it in some way, and even if in the end I turn away, I cannot deny it; Levinas speaks of nonindifference (Levinas, 1974: Chapter V 1. e). The primordial
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relationship is not one of cognition, and the Other will not be made into an object and cannot be dealt with in the categories phenomenology has to offer – a fact that can only be stated in phenomenological terms. The situation Levinas describes is one of radical asymmetry: even though he speaks of a face-to-face situation, the relation cannot be turned around so there would be a complementarity of perspectives, and neither is there a common category the other and myself can be subsumed under. The asymmetry in Husserl’s version of intersubjectivity ran the other way, with the subject being the norm of the other and the locus, if not the agent of his constitution as other. Even so, there is a process of ‘othering’ of the self, as Michael Theunissen called it, leading to a situation where I am one among others (Theunissen, 1965: sections 11–14). For Levinas, there is no such operation of leveling myself and the Other, and his alterity is irrevocable. My responsibility stemming from his demand cannot be countered by my rights toward him. It is unconditional and has no natural bounds. Following the tradition of Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas considered this theory of the other ‘first philosophy,’ i.e., heir to metaphysics, and contrasted it with ontology which suggests an order of being(s) that can be rationally ordered and comprehended. Ethics in the radical sense he gave it is the true first philosophy because the asymmetrical relation to the other is primordial in the sense that subjectivity and cognition of the world is based on it and it cannot be conceived in neutral terms. Levinas’ position entails some obvious questions concerning the possibility of ethics in the more mundane sense of how we are supposed to act in different situations and of politics as the art of balancing interests where the unconditional has no place. He himself speaks of the ‘third party’ with whose appearance the question of justice arises, but does little more than state the problem. Others have taken this lead: Burkhard Liebsch calls for a culture of hospitality, calling into question the primacy of rootedness and cultural identity in the face of others whose appeal is urgent and real (Liebsch, 2008). Simon Critchley has offered an interpretation of politics that stresses an ethics based on the Levinasian demand of the other as a potential element of unrest within the political sphere, persistently calling into question any established order, and as an inspiration for resistance and, finally, an anarchist stance (Critchley, 2007). Robert Bernasconi has pursued the topic of race and racism from a Levinasian background (Bernasconi, 2001). Bernhard Waldenfels has been following a different path, drawing on Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and others to work out a phenomenology of the alien (‘der Fremde,’ which might also be translated as ‘the stranger’ or ‘the foreigner’) (Waldenfels, 1994, 2006). He adheres to the idea of an irrevocable asymmetry but insists on differentiating between different ways of being addressed or appealed to and different registers of responding. Still, there is always a gap between address and response, an element of discontinuity and belatedness or deferment that makes it impossible to simply fulfill a demand or to respond exhaustively. The Other as alien always escapes my attempts to pin him down, to understand him or, most importantly, to do him justice. Phenomenology in its different varieties has made contributions to various fields of philosophy and related disciplines.
Even though aspirations for developing a new version of first philosophy that the tradition has inherited from its founder Edmund Husserl have come to be viewed critically, its productivity remains unbroken. In philosophy, the topics of other minds, the body, the lifeworld, the Other, and others that could not be elaborated here have provided inspirations for thinkers from diverse backgrounds and continue to be a challenge today.
See also: Embodied Social Cognition; Embodiment Theory; Husserl, Edmund (1859–1938); Mind, Theories of; Mirror Neurons, Theory of; Phenomenology in Sociology; Pragmatism: Philosophical Aspects.
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Liebsch, Burkhard, 2008. Für eine Kultur der Gastlichkeit. Alber, Freiburg and Munich. Lipps, Theodor, 1903. Ästhetik: Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst. In: Grundlegung der Ästhetik, vol. 1. Voss, Hamburg. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1945. Phénomenologie de la perception. Gallimard, Paris (Trans. Smith, Colin. Phenomenology of perception. Humanities Press, New York.). Noe, Alva, 2004. Action in Perception. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Petitot, Jean, Varela, Francisco, Pachoud, Bernard, Roy, Jean-Michel (Eds.), 2000. Naturalizing Phenomenology. Stanford University Press, Stanford. Plessner, Helmuth, 1928. Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie. de Gruyter, Berlin. Ricœur, Paul, 1953. Sur la phénoménologie. Esprit 21, 821–839. Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1943. L’être et le néant: Essai sur l’ontologie phénoménologique. Gallimard, Paris (Trans. Barnes, Hazel E., 1956. Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Philosophical Library, New York.). Scheler, Max, 1923 and 1973. Wesen und Formen der Sympathie. Francke, Bern (Trans. Heath, Peter, 1954. The Nature of Sympathy. Routledge and Kegan, London.). Schütz, Alfred, 1932 and 1995. Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main (Trans. Walsh, George, Lehnert, Fredrick 1967. Phenomenology of the social world. Northwestern University Press, Evanston.).
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Schütz, Alfred, Luckmann, Thomas, 1973. Structures of the Lifeworld (Richard M. Zaner, J. Tristram Engelhardt Jr., trans.). Northwestern University Press, Evanston (German edition (1975). Strukturen der Lebenswelt. Luchterhand, Neuwied.). Stein, Edith, 1917 and 2008. Zum Problem der Einfühlung. Herder, Freiburg (Trans. Stein, Waltraud, 1964. On the Problem of Empathy. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague.). Theunissen, Michael, 1965. Der Andere. Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart. de Gruyter, Berlin (Trans. Macann, Christopher, 1986. The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.). Varela, Francisco J., Thompson, Evan, Rosch, Eleanor, 1992. The Embodied Mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Waldenfels, Bernhard, 1994. Antwortregister. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. Waldenfels, Bernhard, 2006. Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main (Trans. Stähler, Tanja, Kozon, Alexander, 2011. Phenomenology of the alien: basic concepts. Northwestern University Press, Evanston.). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1967. Zettel (G.E.M. Anscombe, trans.). Blackwell, Oxford.
Abstract Even though phenomenology had a single founder, Edmund Husserl, it has developed into a diverse tradition that warrants speaking of phenomenologies in the plural. Transforming the objects and actions of everyday experience into phenomena, it aims at clarifying the ways of givenness of the world in relation to an experiencing subject. From the very beginning, sociality has been among its areas of research, ranging from the question of other minds and emotions and of embodiment as the basic human condition, to an investigation of the lifeworld as the ground and horizon of all experience and the other as a fundamental challenge to the autonomous subject. In this way, it has inspired research in various other disciplines including cognitive science.
Phenomenology and Phenomenologies Phenomenology was one of the most influential philosophical traditions of the twentieth century and continues to influence philosophical thought and various other fields (sociology, political theory, art studies, theory of architecture, pedagogy, among others) today. While its roots lie in the same contexts and discussions in philosophy, logic, and psychology in the nineteenth century that were the foundations of analytic philosophy, this tie was severed long ago. Only recently the debate in the cognitive sciences has revitalized phenomenology in an area that had long been dominated by analytic approaches, promising a new dialogue between the two. Besides this, there have been various parallels to and convergences with developments in the pragmatist tradition. Unlike many other philosophical traditions, phenomenology can be said to have a single founder: Edmund Husserl. Husserl (1859–1938) studied philosophy, mathematics, and psychology and devoted his first books to the theory of mathematics. In these books, he defended a theory that he was to oppose vehemently in later years, namely a psychologistic explanation of mathematics and logic. The publication of his Logical Investigations 1900–1901 amounted to a complete reversion of this earlier position, and it marks the beginning of phenomenology in the modern sense, which has little in common with earlier uses of the word (e.g., in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit). Husserl’s basic insight was inspired by one of his philosophical teachers, Franz von Brentano: the fact of intentionality. Consciousness is always consciousness of something, just as symbolic reference is reference to something. Any investigation of the objects of consciousness has to be complemented by an investigation of the consciousness of objects and vice versa. In this relation, the objects are not constructed by consciousness but rather intuited as independent, and the task of phenomenology is to investigate these objects – among them logical and mathematical sentences – in the way they are given as phenomena (Husserl, 1901: pt. V). Since the publication of the Logical Investigations, phenomenology has undergone several fundamental transformations, and as early as 1953 Paul Ricoeur called its history a history of heresies (Ricœur, 1953: p. 836). Considering this, it might be
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more appropriate to speak of phenomenologies in the plural. The first of these heretics, however, was Husserl himself, whose transcendental turn in 1913 many of his earlier followers and collaborators (Adolph Reinach, Moritz Geiger, Max Scheler, among others) were not willing to go along with. The ‘realist phenomenology’ they adhered to did not consider the meticulous analysis of the a priori structures of consciousness Husserl undertook in the first volume of his Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (Husserl, 1913) to be warranted or necessary. Instead, they devoted their attention to social and legal phenomena, art, literature, and a variety of other topics that appeared in Husserl’s own writings only much later. The major figure after Husserl who even tended to outshine his former teacher appeared on the scene in the 1920s: Martin Heidegger. His existential and ontological transformation of phenomenology paved the ground for subsequent modifications that are associated with names like Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty who stressed the role of the body and brought into play political topics. Phenomenological heritage can even be detected in those French philosophers whose background lay in phenomenology but who decided to distance themselves from it, including Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and others. In his Ideas, Husserl introduced a basic methodical tool he called ‘phenomenological’ or ‘transcendental reduction,’ meaning a fundamental change of attitude toward the world (Husserl, 1913: sections 31–32). Without giving up his worldly activities, the researcher was supposed to turn himself into an observer who withdrew from all involvement, methodically transforming things and actions into phenomena and thereby making them accessible in the way they show themselves – a shift from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’ of the world, as it were. Even though later theoreticians have expressed doubts about the feasibility of this operation, the necessity of some kind of break between the everyday attitude toward the world and its phenomenological treatment is generally accepted. Husserl’s early writings were primarily concerned with consciousness in a singular sense but the subject of intersubjectivity and social relations figured in his manuscripts and lectures from very early on. The concept of lifeworld that he
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introduced in his later texts proved to be a fruitful starting point for sociological analyses. More fundamental, the question of how we can know or have access to others’ minds and emotions has been an important phenomenological topic, and phenomenology’s contributions to these questions have recently been adopted and developed in cognitive science. In phenomenological theory, the topics of other minds, the body, the lifeworld, and the other are all intertwined.
Minds and Emotions In the beginning of the twentieth century, Theodor Lipps developed a concept of empathy (‘Einfühlung,’ literally ‘feeling into’) to explain not only our knowledge of other persons but also our understanding of art (Lipps, 1903: pp. 107–141). He posited the coupled natural drives of imitation and expression leading to a tendency to imitate perceived expressive movements, thereby reliving the content of their expression and finally ‘feeling’ this content ‘into’ the perceived body or work of art. To Lipps this was not an act but an unconscious instinct functioning automatically. Husserl and other phenomenological writers such as Edith Stein (Stein, 1917) drew upon this concept, modifying and criticizing it. According to Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (Husserl, 1931: sections 49–62), I perceive others’ bodies and their gestures not as symbols but as immediate expressions of an inner life that is ‘appresented,’ i.e., given along with the visibility of their bodies without ever being truly present to me. Still there is an act of analogy or ‘pairing’ at the bottom of this which is not based on an actual comparison and judgment of similarity but still makes me the model and ‘norm’ of the others and lets them appear secondary to and dependent on the sphere of my own self. On the other hand, the objectivity of the world and its objects is based on their being objects not just for myself but for everyone. Even though this reconstruction was meant to counter the alleged solipsistic tendencies of transcendental phenomenology, the problems of reaching an intersubjective and cultural world from a transcendental subjectivity conceptualized as ‘monadic’ become very apparent. Before Husserl, Max Scheler had proposed a theory that avoided any reference to ‘Einfühlung,’ instead relying on the observation of an immediate ‘Nachfühlen’ – correctly but misleadingly translated as ‘empathy’ as well – which formed the basis of any act of actual sympathy (‘Mitfühlen’), i.e., compassion as an act of not only perceiving the other’s sadness and remaining neutral toward it but sympathizing with other (Scheler, 1923: Chapter A 2). He sharply distinguished empathy and sympathy from mere contagion (‘Ansteckung’) where a person is affected by another’s yawn or an infant by another’s cries, and which contains no real reference to the other’s feelings at all but comes close to a causal reaction. In neither case, however, do we first perceive a physical body which is then provided with an inner life, be it felt into, projected by analogy or inferred by an act of interpretation. To Scheler, this description was a fiction produced by scientific psychology. As for Lipps and Husserl, emotions are referred to as the most salient instances of human expression while the argument is directed toward the more general question of how we perceive others as agents with an emotional and mental life.
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Scheler’s basic point, which was later taken up by MerleauPonty and others and was endorsed by Wittgenstein (1967: sections 220, 225) is that there is no ontological gap between the visible body and the ‘inner’ life of a person, in a way that Cartesian theory would define it. Even though we do not actually feel the others’ emotions, we do not infer them from outward signs or reconstruct them within ourselves either – rather, we see them in their behavior. We neither see an animated physical object nor an animated body but a person that exhibits sensible behavior. Theories that posit some kind of act of inference or analogy have difficulties explaining how these mechanisms can be at work even in early infancy where conscious acts of making inferences seem very unlikely. Recently, this phenomenological position has been revitalized in the discussion on the theory of mind that has involved developmental psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science (Carruthers and Smith, 1996; Davies and Stone, 1995). The two most important theoretical approaches in this debate have been labeled ‘theory theory’ and ‘simulation theory,’ the latter of which bears some resemblance to the old theory of ‘Einfühlung.’ It proposes that we reconstruct others’ mental and emotional states by simulating them within our own minds, performing an imaginary representation of what it would be like to be in their position (Gordon, 1986). Recently, the research on mirror neurons has been cited to support this view, providing it with a neuronal basis (Gallese and Goldman, 1998). The ‘theory theory,’ on the other hand, defends the view that we construct theories or folk psychologies concerning the inner life of others, inferring their beliefs, thoughts, and emotions on the basis of these theories. The strongest and most widely held claim by proponents of both theories is that simulation or theory are our primary means of accessing the mental state of others and that they are acquired early in childhood (Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997) or are even innate (Baron-Cohen, 1995). Both these theories have been criticized from a phenomenological point of view, aiming at their very premises (Gallagher, 2005: Chapter 9). The basic assumptions of the whole debate are Cartesian, conceptualizing the mind as a closed entity distinct from the body, and its focus has been explanation and prediction as primary goals of understanding others. All of these presuppositions can be contested on the grounds that they fundamentally misconstrue our basic stance toward the world which is characterized by pragmatic bodily interaction. Hence Shaun Gallagher proposes a third reconstruction which he calls ‘interaction theory’ (Gallagher, 2005: p. 208). In everyday interaction, our aim is not to theorize about the mind of others or to simulate its content but to make sense of what they do in a particular situation, being part of that situation ourselves, in order to respond to it and enter into interaction and/or communication. There is a primary intersubjectivity of bodily interaction that is accessible even to very young infants who show a pragmatic understanding of the motives and beliefs of others as they are manifested in their actions. This understanding precedes the explicit and rather detached reconstructions that are tested in the classical false belief experiments. Of course this does not mean that we never resort to theory or simulation at all but rather that these modes of reconstruction are not what our interaction with others as persons are based on. What
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becomes obvious, however, is the basic role of our bodies in our interaction with and understanding of the world and other human beings.
The Body In the posthumously published second part of his Ideas, Husserl granted the body a much more important position than he had in his previous writings (Husserl, 1952: sections 18, 35–42). He drew on the difference of ‘Leib’ and ‘Körper’ that is made in the German language, distinguishing ‘Körper’ as a physical entity considered from a detached point of view from ‘Leib’ (usually translated as ‘lived body’) as the primary way our own body and the bodies of others are given to us experientially. The lived body is that by means of which we experience the world and thus can never be completely objectified, and even though the bodies of others offer the possibility of objectification, we primarily experience them as experiencing the world as well. This entails a shift in the conception of consciousness: the lived body is not an object of consciousness but part of it, as it were. It is our primary mode of dealing with the world. The operation of withdrawal into a region of pure consciousness that characterized transcendental phenomenology thus becomes increasingly implausible. There is a continuity between mind and the lived body rather than an ontological gap, and the distinction between the lived body and the physical body, ‘Leib’ and ‘Körper,’ does not distinguish ontologically distinct entities but rather different perspectives on the same thing. A similar position in a somewhat different theoretical context can be found in the work of Helmuth Plessner who studied medicine and zoology as well as philosophy with Husserl. Plessner’s aim was anthropological but he argued from a phenomenological background (Plessner, 1928). On his view, humans are characterized by a dual way of relating to themselves and to the world, which he called eccentric positionality. They relate to the world from a centered position analogous to that of an animal, but they also relate to this relationship from a position that is not centered but situates itself on the border of self and world. This entails a dual relationship to one’s body: we are a ‘Leib’ and have a ‘Körper.’ According to this theory, consciousness and reflexivity are firmly rooted in biology. It was Merleau-Ponty who drew the consequences of these positions within phenomenology. Drawing on contemporary psychology, psychopathology and neuroscience, as well as on Husserlian phenomenology, he outlined a theory of the lived body as a relation to the world, an ‘être-au-monde,’ which is usually translated with Heidegger’s term ‘being-in-the-world’ but could also be rendered as ‘being-towards-the-world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1945). According to him, it’s not the Cartesian ‘I think’ but the Husserlian ‘I can’ (move, perceive, act, etc.) that must be placed at the center of subjectivity, and the subject must be conceived as an embodied agent. While Husserl kept his distance toward science in general and contemporary psychology in particular, Merleau-Ponty was an avid reader of psychological, neurological, biological, and later linguistic research, trying to integrate it into a philosophical account of perception. Gestalt psychology and
neurology provided him with the insight that the functions of the body cannot be viewed in isolation and have to be understood within the context of its perceiving and acting in the world. From this it follows that an adequate theory of perception must also be a theory of the lived body and vice versa. As a consequence, Merleau-Ponty conceived of mind neither as an entity in itself nor as a mere function of neuronal structures and operations, but rather as the situated activity of bodily beings in interaction with each other and the world. This position is as far from Cartesian dualism as it is from a simple monism. There is a relative independence of higher processes of mind that cannot be reduced to functions of the lived body nor completely severed from it. Many of the research perspectives Merleau-Ponty relied on and developed were discontinued in the years after the Phenomenology of Perception was published, and in the new cognitive science the computational model of the mind was virtually undisputed. Only recently has cognitive science turned toward an account of cognition that has been labeled as ‘enactive’ or ‘embodied,’ returning to some of Merleau-Ponty’s central theses. In what has been called the ‘third wave’ in the development of cognitive science, the role of body in cognition is increasingly being acknowledged (Varela et al., 1992; Noe, 2004). From the side of phenomenological philosophy, there have been attempts to follow Merleau-Ponty in critically interpreting the findings of cognitive science and fitting them into a phenomenological framework which in turn has to be modified (Gallagher, 2005; Gallagher and Schmicking, 2010). The question of naturalization is being debated once again but its premises have changed. Various proposals have been made about how phenomenology and neuroscience can mutually inform each other, dropping the idea of a complete convergence (Petitot et al., 2000; Gallagher, 2012: Chapter 1).
The Lifeworld Husserl first used the term ‘Lebenswelt’ in a manuscript in 1917 but the topic of the everyday world of the ‘natural attitude’ was present long before that. Not until 1935, however, did the lifeworld figure in his published writings. Before that, important contributions to a theory of the lifeworld were made by two of his followers, Martin Heidegger and Alfred Schütz. In Being and Time, Heidegger introduced the concept of ‘Zeug’ (‘equipment’) to describe the primary givenness of things in the everyday world (Heidegger, 1927: sections 14–18). According to Heidegger, our world is not populated by objects of contemplation but by things of practice that form a web or nexus of tools and equipment (‘Zeugzusammenhang’) where every one thing refers to others and to the practical context it belongs to and can be used in. Consequently, it is not theoretical cognition that marks our primary approach to the world but a practical kind of knowledge of handling things. Primarily the world is that which we find ourselves in, in the horizon of which we act, not a collection of objects; space is characterized by proximity and remoteness, not by a neutral measuring of distance. When he calls the ‘Dasein’ (i.e., human beings) ‘being-in-the-world,’ this is not to be understood as the presence of a physical entity within a container-like world but a type of being involved, of handling things, a presence to the world. According to Heidegger, this is
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what ontology must take as its starting point, not a neutralized theoretical view. Husserl’s own point of departure in the Crisis of European Sciences was similar but somewhat more urgent: he diagnosed a fatal disappearance of the problems of humanity within the prevailing scientific ontology, resulting in the danger of radical skepticism and nihilism, and proceeded to work out a genealogy of natural science from the lifeworld (Husserl, 1954). He did not consider the series of subsequent abstractions in itself to be problematic, but the fact that this genealogy tended to be forgotten and its endpoint taken as a truer reality. A phenomenological ‘science’ of the lifeworld was supposed to counter these tendencies and ground our self-conception in a deeper understanding of our primary reality. The lifeworld as he described it is a sphere of praxis where science and philosophy must be counted as a particular form of theoretical practice. It is the ‘universal field’ in which we live, move, communicate, and theorize, and must be considered the ultimate foundation of any theory. It is objective only in that it is intersubjective, relating to the acts of those that inhabit it, but for every one of us it is pregiven, always already there. Even though the world of human life is characterized by great diversity, according to Husserl there are fundamental structures of sense that guarantee its unity – no matter how distant a culture may be from mine, there is always some common ground that lets me interact with its inhabitants. The lifeworld does not exist in the plural. What was remarkable was Husserl’s willingness to take intersubjectivity as a starting point, not as a result to be deduced from individual consciousness: the transcendental must be conceived as collective. Still, the question of mediation between the individual and the social that had not been solved in the Cartesian meditations remained a problem. In his Phenomenology of the social world, Alfred Schütz had provided a firmly Husserlian account of this mediation, taking individual consciousness as a starting point (Schütz, 1932). Even though the philosophical ambitions of the book are obvious, Schütz understood it as a contribution to sociology, and its scope is somewhat more modest than that of Husserl’s Crisis where the lifeworld has no natural world or world of science beside it but is meant to encompass every kind of worldly phenomenon. The social world as Schütz analyzed it is a specific field within the world as such, and even when he later adopted the term lifeworld, this understanding remains in place (Schütz and Luckmann, 1973). His aim was to clarify Max Weber’s concept of meaningful social action by an analysis of the genesis of meaning or sense in relation to the individual, the other, and society, effectively basing society on the individual. By distinguishing ‘in-order-to-motives’ and ‘because-motives’ as the sole types of motivation, Schütz significantly narrowed the range of possible descriptions and explanation of social phenomena. On this view, sense as the fundamental property of social action only comes into play in a retroactive explicit interpretation of one’s own and the others’ actions. One might compare this position with the sociological works of Pierre Bourdieu (1971). Even though Bourdieu somewhat aggressively denounced philosophy, he relied heavily on the work of Husserl and especially Merleau-Ponty and developed a theory of the social world that has rather strong philosophical implications. His basic concept of
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‘habitus’ as incarnated social meaning can be read as a sociological elaboration of the latter’s notion of the lived body. As elaborated earlier, the body as Merleau-Ponty conceived it is not a given entity but rather our primary means of relating to the world. In this way it is shaped by its interactions just as much as by its innate structure, and the acquisition of skills like manipulating complex tools or playing a musical instrument must be considered as an extension and modification of it. In social interaction, the habitus shapes our way of acting, itself being shaped by previous interactions. The mediation between individual and society does not take place in the constitution and reconstruction of meanings as motives but in the incarnation and reenactment of social meaning by the habitus. Consequently, action should be considered as situated rather than subjective in the traditional sense. According to Bourdieu, social change is always possible because social action is never completely determined, but it is difficult because it is not a matter of mere reinterpretation of social meanings but has to deal with the inertia of the habitus.
The Other In the phenomenological description of intersubjectivity and sociality presented so far, one aspect was all but absent: the active role of the other. In Husserl’s as well as in Scheler’s and Schütz’ reconstructions, the other appears viewed from the perspective of the self, as someone who must be intuited or understood. Jean-Paul Sartre offered a different perspective. In his Being and Nothingness, the gaze of the other opens up a whole new dimension: it objectifies me and pins me down, as it were, transforming me from an essentially indeterminate and free subject into this particular bodily being that can be seen and defined (Sartre, 1943: pt. 3, Chapter 1, IV). Also, the other’s gaze upon the world that for Husserl guaranteed its objectivity appears much more dramatic, as a radical reorientation of every object away from me and toward him. Even though Sartre’s account of the gaze might seem overdramatized, his insistence on the irreducibility of my being affected by the other to my sphere of consciousness is an important contribution to phenomenology, reminding us that the inaccessibility of other minds might not be the only problem phenomenology has to deal with when it comes to intersubjectivity. Emmanuel Levinas followed an even more radical path of inquiry. The other with a capital O as he construed him is not primarily an objectifying gaze but a face that issues a demand. In itself, this demand is unconditional, calling me into responsibility for the other in a way that I cannot evade or escape (Levinas, 1961). By describing this relation as primordial and irreversible, Levinas completely reinterprets the relationship between self and other as it was conceived by Husserl. Now it is not the Other who is dependent on me, being a vis-à-vis that I have to intuit or understand, but it is me who is exposed to the demand of his face before I can think of myself as a competent individual who can freely decide what he wants to concern himself with. Even if I am not bound by the demand I have to relate to it in some way, and even if in the end I turn away, I cannot deny it; Levinas speaks of nonindifference (Levinas, 1974: Chapter V 1. e). The primordial
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relationship is not one of cognition, and the Other will not be made into an object and cannot be dealt with in the categories phenomenology has to offer – a fact that can only be stated in phenomenological terms. The situation Levinas describes is one of radical asymmetry: even though he speaks of a face-to-face situation, the relation cannot be turned around so there would be a complementarity of perspectives, and neither is there a common category the other and myself can be subsumed under. The asymmetry in Husserl’s version of intersubjectivity ran the other way, with the subject being the norm of the other and the locus, if not the agent of his constitution as other. Even so, there is a process of ‘othering’ of the self, as Michael Theunissen called it, leading to a situation where I am one among others (Theunissen, 1965: sections 11–14). For Levinas, there is no such operation of leveling myself and the Other, and his alterity is irrevocable. My responsibility stemming from his demand cannot be countered by my rights toward him. It is unconditional and has no natural bounds. Following the tradition of Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas considered this theory of the other ‘first philosophy,’ i.e., heir to metaphysics, and contrasted it with ontology which suggests an order of being(s) that can be rationally ordered and comprehended. Ethics in the radical sense he gave it is the true first philosophy because the asymmetrical relation to the other is primordial in the sense that subjectivity and cognition of the world is based on it and it cannot be conceived in neutral terms. Levinas’ position entails some obvious questions concerning the possibility of ethics in the more mundane sense of how we are supposed to act in different situations and of politics as the art of balancing interests where the unconditional has no place. He himself speaks of the ‘third party’ with whose appearance the question of justice arises, but does little more than state the problem. Others have taken this lead: Burkhard Liebsch calls for a culture of hospitality, calling into question the primacy of rootedness and cultural identity in the face of others whose appeal is urgent and real (Liebsch, 2008). Simon Critchley has offered an interpretation of politics that stresses an ethics based on the Levinasian demand of the other as a potential element of unrest within the political sphere, persistently calling into question any established order, and as an inspiration for resistance and, finally, an anarchist stance (Critchley, 2007). Robert Bernasconi has pursued the topic of race and racism from a Levinasian background (Bernasconi, 2001). Bernhard Waldenfels has been following a different path, drawing on Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and others to work out a phenomenology of the alien (‘der Fremde,’ which might also be translated as ‘the stranger’ or ‘the foreigner’) (Waldenfels, 1994, 2006). He adheres to the idea of an irrevocable asymmetry but insists on differentiating between different ways of being addressed or appealed to and different registers of responding. Still, there is always a gap between address and response, an element of discontinuity and belatedness or deferment that makes it impossible to simply fulfill a demand or to respond exhaustively. The Other as alien always escapes my attempts to pin him down, to understand him or, most importantly, to do him justice. Phenomenology in its different varieties has made contributions to various fields of philosophy and related disciplines.
Even though aspirations for developing a new version of first philosophy that the tradition has inherited from its founder Edmund Husserl have come to be viewed critically, its productivity remains unbroken. In philosophy, the topics of other minds, the body, the lifeworld, the Other, and others that could not be elaborated here have provided inspirations for thinkers from diverse backgrounds and continue to be a challenge today.
See also: Embodied Social Cognition; Embodiment Theory; Husserl, Edmund (1859–1938); Mind, Theories of; Mirror Neurons, Theory of; Phenomenology in Sociology; Pragmatism: Philosophical Aspects.
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