Ian Rory OwenPhenomenology in Action in PsychotherapyContributions To PhenomenologyIn Cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology7910.1007/978-3-319-13605-9_2

2. Phenomenology and Meaning for Consciousness

Ian Rory Owen¹

(1)

Leeds and York Partnerships NHS Foundation Trust, Leeds, United Kingdom

Ian Rory Owen

Email: ian.owen@nhs.net

Intentionality is Ubiquitous

Overview

And Transcendentalism too

Phenomenological Philosophical Argument

To the Things Themselves of Consciousness

The Limitations of Natural Science and Natural Scientific Psychology can be Superceded

Summary

Keywords

HusserlHusserlian phenomenologyHusserlschen phänomenologiePhenomenological attitudeIntentional attitudeIntentional analysisIntentionalityIntentionalitätNoesis-noema correlationNoetic-noematic senseIntentional correlateNoemaObjectIntentional implicationIntentional referencePresentiationPerceptionIntersubjective intentional implicationIntentional referringIntentional relationsIntentional modificationReproductionTranscendental philosophyEnabling conditions of possibilityCompossibilityIncompossibilityConditions of possibilityPossibilityPossible in the real worldMere possibilityNatural sciencePsychology attentionPhenomenological psychologyHusserlian psychology

Humanity has explored the ocean depths, been to the moon and used its ingenuity to explore the distant universe. However, when it comes to knowing itself with certainty there has been less success. This chapter argues for the place of Husserl’s philosophy in guiding a reformation of psychology and psychotherapy and clarifying their aims and subject matter by creating eidetic ideals : “To every eidetic, as well as to every empirical, constatation… a parallel must correspond… [Evidence] if taken, in the natural attitude , as psychology, as a positive science relating to the pregiven world, is utterly non-philosophical; whereas the “same” content in the transcendental attitude … is a philosophical science”, (V, 147). “Philosophical science” is meant in the sense that it is exact or rigorous in the way that mathematics is. The sequence of topics below introduces a formal approach to intentionality (Brentano 1973; Richardson 1983). Husserl’s philosophy can promote standardisation of the accounts of scientists, researchers and the public around subjective meaningful experience. Husserl’s phenomenology is the great grandmother of qualitative approaches for grounding the concepts of mathematics, the sciences, psychology, philosophy and other disciplines and practices in meaningful experience. The chapter starts with noting the fundamentality of the intentionality of consciousness and provides an overview of the arguments made below. The purpose of transcendental philosophy is noted next in relation to what that means in making phenomenological conclusions from the givennesses of what appears. The chapter closes by considering what it means for Husserl to apply qualitative methods that he had pioneered in creating number theory that he applied to the many types of being aware and how this can be applied in thinking through the methods and interpretative stances of natural sciences. The chapter introduces a means of being precise about intentional being , its motivations and conditioning contexts. The function of the intentional analysis of the intersubjective lifeworld of everyday commonsense is stated as the right way of looking through the microscope. Once this is accepted it becomes possible to understand the senses of natural being, transcendent ideas and people as the contents of consciousness are shared, despite the differences in sense that the same idea , person or natural being can have for two or more people. On closer inspection what comes into sight is consciousness and what it does, because we can analyse what and how we are aware of the contents of our perceptions , memories, imaginings and in doing so what appears are common shapes, patterns, forms and figures that are given a mathematical idealising treatment in a parallel to how numbers refer to natural being. The chapter provides some orienting details about phenomenological argument in order to orient the study.

Intentionality is Ubiquitous

Given that the intentionality of consciousness is fundamental to intellectual and emotional sense and is the heart of shared experience, then the scope of the intentional analysis of it is ambitious. Intentional analysis looks for commonalities of being aware and makes conceptual representations across diverse regions of being and their academic study. For instance, phenomenology and psychotherapy are parallel with cognate science and human studies. Specifically, any drawing of conclusions by therapists is a parallel activity to the drawing of conclusions about consciousness by the practices of cognitive science or phenomenologists. There is only one consciousness transcendentally-considered “in general” or “as such”. Cognitive psychologists might use empirical means such as flashing a word on a computer screen for 20 milli-seconds and then asking participants in the experiment to respond. Phenomenologists might analyse the experiences of association that they or others have experienced (IX, 117–128, 385–389). Psychotherapists ask their clients open questions before formulating their problems to them for discussion. These processes are equivalent in the broader view of considering them as ways of making sense of consciousness. Someone is interpreting meaningful experiential data of some sort, some conscious evidence, and concluding on what has occurred. The point for psychology and psychotherapy is that the overall situation of how consciousness is aware of changing meanings (and changing modes of relating according to that dynamic relationship), enables understanding of the universal feature of human life and variability, leading to the possibility of alterations in a dynamic meaningful relationship of any sort.

There is no topic so central, immediate, tangible, and continually present yet taken for granted as consciousness and its forms of intentionality (III, 152). Starting with the everyday experiences of talking, thinking, dreaming, childcare, driving, loving, relying on habits , wanting to be close with others, sex: all of these concern intentionalities and are wholistically involved in the matrix of meaning, time, intersubjectivity , embodiment, culture and history as well as natural being . Phenomenology is a form of inquiry about how consciousness knows and how meaning exists, regardless of higher intersubjective constructs such as race, gender, class and age-appropriate expectations. Phenomenological inquiry is wholistic, universal and transpersonal. It searches for the most fundamental shared aspects of what it is to experience meaning of any kind. What is required is seeing the constancies between consciousness and experienced objects, contexts, ideas and other people in an attempt at an ontologically-neutral interpretative method entirely dedicated to consciousness itself: A way that is free from the prejudices of past assumptions concerning what exists and how things exist, through bracketing (Einklammerung), setting obscuring influences aside in the mathematical sense , to lessen prior prejudices in favour of finding a way of grasping the world of meaning as others have it. One prejudice to be avoided is the mistaking of one’s own prior assumptions for the truth of the other, a mistake of prejudging how others experience meaning.

Overview

A definitive statement is required to sum up Husserl’s position in regard to the progression between the natural, psychological and transcendental attitudes as he repeatedly claimed that the psychological and the transcendental were parallel (I, 70–71, 159, IX, 294, 342–344). In the natural and naturalistic attitudes , the relation between the biological, psychological and the social has an emphasis on people being separate and a focus on measuring natural-biological processes, as these are assumed to be the only indicators of the causes of consciousness, as an individual experience. When social connection is considered in this view the experience of others can be monitored in various parts of the brain, so again, the biological and physical processes that are measurable show up to fMRI and other techniques. These are naturalistically interpreted as causal of meaningful experience which is why free will, meaning and consciousness are considered by the naturalistic attitude to be products of the brain and biology. However, there are two types of phenomenology. The pure psychological attitude , from the transcendental view, admits natural causes and natural being to the degree that this type of cause is considered in thinking consciousness as consciousness. The aim of pure psychology is grasping consciousness as consciousness, in a worldly context of the really possible, to support theorising and promote empirical research and practice. It makes sense to permit natural-biological causation to be considered and so make collegial contact with colleagues in the natural psychological science disciplines (IV, 295, V, 40, 43, IX, 50, 298). However, there is value in keeping true to consciousness as consciousness revealed entirely through phenomenology’s methods of reflection and idealising eidetic analysis .

In the transcendental attitude , the focus is entirely on the meanings of objects that are intersubjectively shared and available within culture , society and history . The purpose is to take intentionality out of the natural context altogether to find out how it works entirely in its own terms (III, 212, V, 40, XXVII, 177). The context around such considerations are claimed to be non-worldly so that a coherent intentional analysis can be carried out in an open context, free from the influences of what is already known and retained. The transcendental attitude serves a purpose of encouraging free contextualisation about the region of meaning for consciousness in intersubjectivity in the history of civilization and nothing else (VI, 275–276). Because there is fundamentally only one region of understanding, Husserl’s usages of the principles of grounding number theory are applied to it (XII, 210). Thus, the purpose is finding the ideals of consciousness as a whole with its dependent moments construed on its own evidence, where implicit and unconscious processes show themselves. The claim for transcendental phenomenology is that there are no worldly natural attitude influences that can contaminate its analyses. But the pure psychological attitude is a lesser version of the transcendental one. In the pure psychological view, there is a focus on intentionality in intersubjectivity that uses some precautions to minimise worldly naturalistic contamination. What is considered are the cultural senses and cultural objects for intersubjectivity between self and other, contextualised as real instances of the really possible concerning the findings of natural being, through natural science and natural psychological science with their natural causes.

Something needs to be said about the ontology of the lifeworld and its role in overcoming Cartesian Nature-Spirit duality whilst working to include individual self-responsibility, ethics and self-reflexivity in theorising. The function of the analysis of the lifeworld is precisely to return to the origin of the constitution of sense before the realisation of natural being and intersubjective being in culture, society and history (VI, 380). Husserl’s focus on the world or lifeworld is choosing intersubjectivity with its “triangular” infinite series of self, other and manifold views of the cultural object as singly the most important phenomenon to analyse. The point of eidetic analysis of intersubjectivity is identifying the constant relations within the whole, for there is a pattern of ideal relationships. The ontology of the lifeworld can be studied in the psychological or transcendental attitudes . The difference is that in the transcendental attitude there is only a focus on intentionality in intersubjectivity with no permission to include the natural and naturalistic attitudes . In the pure psychological attitude there is a connection to the natural and naturalistic attitudes despite attempts to minimise them (details below). Even in the psychological attitude what can be seen is the irreducible world in retentional consciousness that influences current experiencing in what is an “intersubjective sphere of ownness” , (I, 137, cf 129–130), or primordial world of pre-conceptual nonverbal sense of the “origin of all objective factual sciences or, equivalently, of all sciences of the world, is one and the same… as having been perceived and recalled to memory” , (IX, 58). This attention grounds concepts about experiential universals in order to create new reformed “concrete sciences which take as their theme the concrete and individual forms of the experiential objects and which want to determine them in their theoretical truth”, (IX, 64). Husserl’s vision of philosophical science is achieved as a parallel discipline like theoretical physics and mathematics with respect to experimental physics.

But focusing on solo consciousness is insufficient. The self is non self-sufficient, an abstraction from the intersubjective, which is a self-sufficient whole. No matter the influences in the larger community, the self responds through the accumulation of retained social influences in itself and these contribute to its decisions and preferences . The self makes itself self-reflexively as well as responding to objects, past, present and future. Its personality exists in relation to its connection with a multitude of causes that influence it in relation to the biological and social-intersubjective registers. The self (considered in abstraction) has several options open to it and several influences inside its own being. For instance, a good deal of its emotions and mental processes operate automatically and unconsciously without conscious permission. Within the self, there is the inertia of habits and the effects of past choices that have set a direction and may help it or hinder it. If negative habits and beliefs contribute to feeling overwhelmed in the ability to cope, therapy claims it can change and minimise distress. Recovery from distress and impairment is possible by finding a corrective set of influences in making good decisions and coping with current stress. To take the matter to the psychological sphere of emotions and relationships between people, then it becomes important to grasp what goes on between self and others. Looking at others and hearing their speech makes transcendent meanings in self that belong to others yet occurs in distinctive ways. Phenomenologists can consider the triangular relations of sense for self, others and each other, the “alpha-beta” overlapping views between two or more persons, about cultural objects, ad infinitum (IV, 168, cf I, 140, 142, 144, 147, “overlapping-at-a-distance”). Technically, the empathic experience of other people is called a double object because vision of the other supports empathising their consciousness and their perspective and so participating in all that lies between persons. The consequence is that meaning exists between people.

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