Cogito and phenomenology
Explanation
Edmund Husserl, a mathematician turned philosopher, founded phenomenology at the start of the twentieth century as a new rigorous science of consciousness. His central intuition: if we want to understand the mind, we must describe experience as it appears, without presupposing metaphysical theories or scientific results. To return to the things themselves, in his famous slogan.
To achieve this, Husserl proposes the phenomenological epoché: bracketing our usual beliefs about the world (the natural attitude) so as to attend to how things present themselves to us. We do not deny that the world exists; we simply suspend judgement about it in order to examine the very structure of appearance. The gesture is analogous to the Cartesian cogito, but without its substantial conclusion: we do not affirm a soul exists, we describe a field of experience.
The key notion is intentionality: all consciousness is always consciousness of something. When I see, I see something; when I remember, I remember something; when I desire, I desire something. This orientation towards an object is the mark of the mental, recovered by Brentano from medieval thought. Husserl makes it the axis of his entire philosophy: studying consciousness is studying the structures of that intentionality.
Husserl distinguishes between noesis (the conscious act: the perceiving, the remembering) and noema (the intentional correlate: the perceived as perceived, the remembered as remembered). Any adequate description of the mind must attend to both poles. He also distinguishes different modalities of intentionality: perception, imagination, judgement, expectation, memory, each with its own logic.
Phenomenology was enormously fertile: it gave rise to Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Ricoeur and many others. Each transformed it (more existential, more embodied, more ethical), but all rest on the founding idea that experience is a primary datum deserving careful description, not something to be immediately explained in terms of something else.
In contemporary cognitive science, phenomenology has returned forcefully through Francisco Varela's neurophenomenology, enactivist approaches and the work of Dan Zahavi or Shaun Gallagher. The aim is to complement objective third-person descriptions (scanners, electrodes) with careful first-person descriptions, recognising that both are indispensable for a complete science of consciousness.
Strengths
- Recovers first-person experience as a primordial, irreducible datum.
- Methodological rigour (eidetic description) versus abstract speculation.
- Concept of intentionality, influential in subsequent analytic philosophy.
- Foundation for neurophenomenology and phenomenological cognitive science.
Main critiques
- The epoché and reduction are procedures opaque to intersubjective verification.
- Risk of transcendental solipsism, which Husserl addresses but does not fully resolve.
- Distance from the empirical science of mind.
- The late 'transcendental ego' falls back into a kind of subjectivism.