READERS FAMILIAR WITH MY EARLIER BOOK, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991), might be surprised by the importance I give to Husserlian phenomenology here, given the critical attitude toward Husserl that book expressed. What accounts for this change of attitude? The purpose of this Appendix is to clarify this matter.
In The Embodied Mind, we asserted (i) that Husserl was a methodological solipsist (p. 16); (ii) that his theory ignored “both the consensual aspect and the direct embodied aspect of experience” (p. 17); (iii) that his theory of intentionality was a representational theory (p. 68); (iv) that his theory of the life-world was reductionistic and representationalist (that he tried to analyze the life-world “into a more fundamental set of constituents” (p. 117) consisting of beliefs understood as mental representations (p. 18)); and (v) that his phenomenology was a purely abstract, theoretical project lacking a pragmatic dimension (pp. 19, 117). We concluded that the Husserlian project was a “failure” (p. 19) and even wrote about the “breakdown of phenomenology” more generally (p. 19). This assessment then motivated our turn to the tradition of Buddhist philosophy and mindfulness-awareness meditation as a more promising phenomenological partner for cognitive science.
As Chapter 2 indicates, however, I no longer subscribe to this assessment of Husserlian phenomenology. Our earlier interpretation of Husserl was mistaken. Husserlian phenomenology has far more resources than we realized for productive cross-fertilization with both the sciences of mind (Petitot et al. 1999; Varela 1996) and Buddhist thought (Thompson 2005; Varela 2000b; Varela and Depraz 2003). In particular, I now believe (i) that Husserl was not a methodological solipsist; (ii) that he was greatly concerned with the intersubjective and embodied aspects of experience; (iii) that his theory of intentionality was not a representational theory; and (iv) that his theory of the life-world was not reductionistic and representationalist. Furthermore, although I think phenomenology has tended to overemphasize theoretical discussion in the form of textual interpretation (to the neglect of phenomenological pragmatics as well as original phenomenological analyses and philosophical argumentation), I think it is too facile to say simply that phenomenology is a purely abstract, theoretical project lacking a pragmatic dimension. It follows that I would now not characterize Husserlian phenomenology as a “failure.” Nor would I assert that phenomenology suffered a “breakdown” owing to its neglect of phenomenological pragmatics.
My viewpoint has changed for two reasons. The first is that when Varela and I were writing The Embodied Mind (during 1986–1989; Eleanor Rosch joined the project near the end of 1989) our knowledge of Husserl was limited. We were familiar with the main published works in English translation (Logical Investigations, Ideas I, Cartesian Meditations, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology) but had not studied them carefully enough, and we did not know about Husserl’s writings on passive synthesis (then untranslated) and intersubjectivity (still untranslated). We were both more familiar with Heidegger and were influenced by his (largely uncharitable) reading of Husserl. We also had little knowledge of other phenomenological thinkers who were deeply influenced by Husserl (Merleau-Ponty excepted), and we had studied only a little of the secondary literature on Husserl.
The second reason is that we accepted Hubert Dreyfus’s (1982) influential interpretation of Husserl as a representationalist and protocognitivist philosopher, as well as his Heideggerian critique of Husserl thus interpreted. Dreyfus has been a pioneer in bringing the phenomenological tradition into the heartland of the cognitive sciences through his important critique of artificial intelligence (Dreyfus 1972, 1992) and his groundbreaking studies on skillful knowledge and action (Dreyfus 2002; Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986). Yet his work is also marked by a peculiar interpretation of Husserl. Dreyfus presents Husserl’s phenomenology as a form of representationalism that anticipates cognitivist and computational theories of mind. He then rehearses Heidegger’s criticisms of Husserl thus understood and deploys them against cognitivism and artificial intelligence. Dreyfus reads Husserl largely through a combination of Heidegger’s interpretation and a particular analytic (Fregean) reconstruction of one aspect of Husserl’s thought—Husserl’s notion of the noema. Thus the Husserl Dreyfus presents to cognitive science and analytic philosophy of mind is a problematic interpretive construct and should not be taken at face value.
For a while Dreyfus’s interpretation functioned as a received view in the cognitive science community of Husserl’s thought and its relationship to cognitive science. This interpretation has since been seriously challenged by a number of Husserl scholars and philosophers.1 This is not the place to review these controversies at length. Suffice it to say that I take these studies to have demonstrated the following points:
1. Husserl does not subscribe to a representational theory of mind, and certainly not a representational theory of the sort Dreyfus wishes to criticize. Intentional experiences do not acquire their directedness in virtue of “a special realm of representational entities” (Dreyfus 1982, p. 1). Rather, the intentional openness of consciousness is an integral part of its being (Zahavi 2003a, p. 21).2
2. Husserl is not a methodological solipsist. The transcendental phenomenological reduction is not a way of trying to characterize the contents of consciousness purely internally, apart from their relation to the world. It is a way of characterizing the world, namely, at the phenomenal level at which it is experienced, and of studying the relation of the world so characterized to our subjectivity.
3. Husserl does not assimilate all intentionality to object-directed intentionality; he does not “claim that all mental life, even our awareness of practical activity and our sense of existing in a shared world, must be a form of object-directedness” (Dreyfus 1982, p. 9; see also Dreyfus 1988). On the contrary, as the above discussion of passive synthesis indicates, the notion of a precognitive and non-object-directed “operative intentionality” is central to the subject matter of Husserl’s phenomenology in its genetic register.3
4. Husserl does not treat the “background” presupposed by object-directed intentional experiences as simply a system of beliefs understood as mental representations (Dreyfus 1982, p. 23). In Ideas II, for instance, Husserl distinguishes between consciousness of objects and comportment toward objects, and then he states, “The ultimate, however, is a background that is prior to all comportment and is instead presupposed by all comportment” (Husserl 1989, p. 291; emphasis in original). There is no suggestion that this background consists of beliefs in the sense of distinct object-directed mental states. Rather, he goes on to write, “In a certain sense, there is, in the obscure depths, a root soil”; he speaks of this root soil as our “natural side,” “the underlying basis of subjectivity,” and then he states, “To the natural side there belongs immediately the lower life of feelings, the instinctual life, and indeed the function of attention as well . . .” (p. 292). There is no suggestion that this “root soil” of instinctual life is fully recoverable at the level of reflective intentional analysis (see Sheets-Johnstone 1999a, pp. 249–252; see also Mensch 1998).
5. Husserl’s treatment of the life-world cannot be reduced to an attempt to analyze the life-world into a set of sedimented background “assumptions” or “hypotheses” (equivalent to a system of “frames” in artificial intelligence) (Dreyfus 1982, pp. 23–24; 1988). Rather, Husserl recognizes that the life-world as pregiven horizon and ground is precisely not objectifiable in this way. This realization leads him to envision the possibility of a generative phenomenology of the life-world (see Steinbock 1995, pp. 104–122; Welton 2000, pp. 331–392).4
In summary, although Dreyfus is to be credited for bringing Husserl into the purview of cognitive science, it is important to go beyond his interpretation and to reevaluate Husserl’s relationship to cognitive science on the basis of a thorough assessment of his life’s work. This reevaluation is already underway (see Petitot et al. 1999). It can be seen as part of a broader appropriation of phenomenology in contemporary thought, in relation to both other movements of twentieth-century philosophy and the rich potential for cross-fertilization with Asian philosophical traditions.5 These new developments have greatly influenced my thought in this book.