in general, and you specifically, are a different kind of entity than you might have thought. In particular, you might think that you experience the world by passively and reflectively cognizing objects; the phenomenologist, however, argues that you experience it through competent, unreflective action. At the more lively end, the authors and theories we discuss here provide a host of thought-provoking examples to make you question some basic assumptions about what we perceive. We do not see the shapes and sizes of objects, but the possible actions they afford us, invitations to act shaped by our own bodily capabilities. Such examples make reading about phenomenology both rewarding and entertaining.
If phenomenology is an important and influential school of thought, this is because the main phenomenologists think and write with remarkable insight and creativity. So another good reason to study phenomenology is to become familiar with Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty as authors. Though their writing can sometimes be unclear and frustrating, it is ultimately exhilarating.
Overview
This book proceeds in roughly chronological order and most chapters cover one main figure or movement. The chapters stand on their own, so if you are short on time or more interested in some topics than others, you can pick and choose. However, the overall narrative is richer than a collection of individual portraits.
We have aimed to make this book easy to read without sacrificing accuracy or detail. We avoid jargon. While we use and define key technical terms proffered by the various authors, we think their insights are independent of any particular way of expressing them. In fact, you can only appreciate that phenomenology is alive and ongoing insofar as you can recognize that the same approach and the same basic views animate the different styles of the authors you will encounter in this book. We provide a glossary of key technical terms at the end of each chapter for reference.
Notes on the second edition
For the second edition, we have revised, reorganized, and expanded substantially. A list of the most important changes follows.
Chapter 2 “The Rise of Experimental Psychology” is a new chapter, collecting material that was spread across several chapters in the first edition, and with an additional section on the structuralism–functionalism debate in psychology. In its current form, it is better in keeping with the chronological structure employed in most of the rest of the book.
Chapter 3 “Edmund Husserl and Transcendental Phenomenology” has a new section on Husserl’s writings on the body (section 3.5), the purpose of which is to draw closer connections between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
Chapter 5 “Gestalt Psychology” collects material that was distributed across several chapters in the first edition.
Chapter 6 “Aron Gurwitsch: Merging Gestalt Psychology and Phenomenology” is entirely new. Gurwitsch is a key figure in the history of phenomenology, and was a major influence on Merleau-Ponty.
Chapter 7 “Jean-Paul Sartre: Phenomenological Existentialism” is significantly expanded from the first edition. It now includes in-depth discussion of three more of Sartre’s major works, The Transcendence of the Ego, The Imagination, and The Imaginary.
Chapter 9 “Critical Phenomenology” is new to this edition. It collects and expands upon the discussions of the phenomenology of gender and race from the first edition, and includes new discussions of Frantz Fanon and trans phenomenology.
Chapter 12 “Enactivism and the Embodied Mind” is also new to this edition. It includes an expanded version of the basic discussion of enactivism from the first edition. It also includes new sections on 4E cognitive science and enactivist approaches to social cognition and language.
All citations give the date of the first edition listed in the references. Where English translations of foreign works are listed, they are the source of our quotations. Where no English translations are listed, the translations are our own.
1 Immanuel Kant: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Background
Husserl thinks phenomenology is a new beginning in philosophy, a budding new science. At the same time he acknowledges the deep influence of the philosophical tradition. For most of his career he thinks of his work as “transcendental phenomenology,” thus locating it within Kant’s broad philosophical project. Heidegger similarly thinks he is making a new start, reawakening questions whose meaning, he claims, has been lost since antiquity. But he, too, knows that his work owes much to the tradition. Much of the first part of his most important book, Being and Time, has its origins in his earlier lectures on Aristotle. And in a lecture course in 1927 – the year Being and Time was published – he describes his deep involvement in Kant’s work: “When, a few years ago, I studied the Critique of Pure Reason again and read it against the background of Husserl’s phenomenology, it was as if the scales fell from my eyes, and Kant became for me an essential confirmation of the correctness of the path on which I was seeking” (Heidegger 1927/1928, p. 431). Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception is no less ambitious than the books of his two predecessors, although he is more modest in characterizing its revolutionary nature. He cites and refers to a vast literature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy and psychology and develops his ideas in an active dialog with his contemporaries. At several points he, too, singles out the importance of Kant’s transcendental framework.
It would be an endless exercise to attempt to explicate all the historical influences that shaped phenomenology. But we think it is important to spend a few pages reviewing central concepts from Kant’s critical philosophy, because many of Kant’s ideas have a very direct influence on Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. While, for the most part, these authors toil within Kant’s overall framework, they are not Kantians in a strict sense. Kant comes in for some trenchant criticism. Heidegger sharply rejects Kant’s focus on cognition through representations, and Merleau-Ponty similarly condemns Kant for ignoring the importance of the body and the indeterminateness of things in our experience. Gibson rails stridently against Kant’s distinction between concepts and intuitions. Still, some of Kant’s key arguments have clear successors in the work of the phenomenologists, and a quick overview of these arguments will prove helpful. For readers with some background in the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy, most of this will be familiar.
1.1 Kant’s critical philosophy
Kant is fond of astronomy. He thinks of it as an example of a discipline that struggled for a long time to produce theories and predictions with certainty, until Copernicus’ revision of its foundation put it on what Kant calls “the secure path of a science.” Kant likes to compare the main insight of his Critique of Pure Reason to this Copernican revolution. In the preface to the B edition (published in 1787), he writes:
Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition. (Bxvi)
Copernicus
