Tag: Psychopathology

Leswin Laubscher, Derek Hook, Miraj U. Desai (Eds.): Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology, Routledge, 2022

Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology Book Cover Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology
Edited By Leswin Laubscher, Derek Hook, Miraj U. Desai
Routledge
2022
Hardback
304

Reviewed by: Michael Blezy

Introduction

What exactly Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks contributes to the field of phenomenology is difficult to pin down. Although the text conveys its insights in the distinct vocabulary of phenomenology and its description and analysis of experience recognizably parallels the efforts of phenomenologists such as Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, it is not immediately clear how Fanon’s work is supposed to relate to these thinkers or the phenomenological tradition he draws from.

For instance, does Fanon take himself to be merely applying, say, Husserlian or Sartrean phenomenology to a new or underexplored domain of phenomena while leaving the basic tenants of their phenomenology intact? Or is Fanon’s work much more ambitious, aiming not only to expand upon or supplement the work of his fellow phenomenologists, but to offer a fundamental challenge to their work? And if Fanon is offering a fundamental challenge to traditional phenomenology, is this challenge supposed to bring about an immanent transformation of phenomenology? Or is it supposed to call into question the very phenomenological enterprise and what it is capable of achieving?

Due to the lack of clarity on these basic issues, scholarly assessments of Fanon’s contribution to phenomenology vary widely. Reaction to Fanon’s phenomenological work ranges from complete neglect (Fanon’s name is not even mentioned in Moran’s (2000) Introduction to Phenomenology) to disparaging (consider Macy’s (2012, p. 132) assessment that “Fanon is not a terribly sophisticated phenomenologist”), to Fanon’s work being celebrated for its importance and originality and for moving the field of phenomenology in an exciting new direction. For instance, Karera (2020), speaking for a number of contemporary scholars that utilize phenomenology to explore issues of race, gender and politics (Guenther 2020; Weiss, Murphy, & Salamon 2020), heralds Fanon as one the key figures whose work ushered in a new era of politically-informed, “critical” phenomenology.

It is with a longstanding interest in precisely pinning down Fanon’s relationship to phenomenology that I eagerly dove into Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology, a collection of essays organized around Fanon’s contribution to a number of contemporary philosophical topics. In particular, I was encouraged to see that the editors and contributors took Fanon’s relation to phenomenology seriously, and that one of the editors’ main motivations for bringing together the collection was to shed light on the nature of Fanon’s phenomenology:

[A] rigorous exploration of Fanon’s distinctive uses and forms of phe­nomenology  emerged as one of the foremost motivations for this edited collection. As we began the  literature review that formed the first research task of this book, it quickly became apparent that there have been a number of excellent studies of Fanon’s uses of   phenomenology (many of which we have been fortunate enough to include in the pages that follow). The problem with this literature was not its content, but its distribution: Without dedicated searching and access to suitable academic databases and libraries, this literature remained so scattered and inaccessible that it has seemed, historically, as if it had almost completely fallen through the cracks of Fanon studies … [The] the appeal to experience, and more directly yet, the appeal to the lived experience of the Black man, is   an absolutely irreducible and crucial aspect of Black Skin, White Masks. At the risk of    being dramatic: There would be no Black Skin, White Masks without this method of        description and engagement. Fanon’s uses of phenomenology – which, as several of the     following chapters show, did not leave phenomenology unchanged – proved a condition   of possibility for that book, and, extending our argument, for much of what was most    compelling, visceral, and innovative within it. (2022, p. 7-8)

 

In what follows, I want to draw upon the contributions to Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology in order to say a bit more about how it is Fanon stands vis-a-vis phenomenology. I will not offer a summary of each of the articles in the collection. Not only would this be tedious for the reader, but the editors of the collection give an overview of the text and succinctly sum up each of the individual contributions in their introduction (p. 1-10). Instead, I want to specifically draw upon the contributors’ accounts of Fanon’s phenomenology and, further, critically evaluate these accounts, so as to bring new clarity to the relationship between Fanon and phenomenology.

Phenomenology and the Search for Structure

More than simply the fact that scholarly work on Fanon’s phenomenology has been scattered or inaccessible, it is the inherent difficulties with interpreting Fanon’s descriptions of experience and longstanding ambiguities and confusions regarding phenomenology itself that has resulted in a lack of clarity regarding Fanon’s contribution to the field. Black Skin, White Masks in particular, with its semi-autobiographical, fragmented, stream of consciousness way of proceeding, requires a large amount of philosophical reconstruction if something like arguments or positions are to be derived from it (including phenomenological ones).

Fortunately, for my purposes here, an overview of the ways in which Fanon’s phenomenology is characterized by the contributors to Fanon, Phenomenology, and Phenomenology will allow me to quickly get to the heart of the matter. By outlining the ways in which the contributors of the collection characterize (and, unfortunately, mischaracterize) Fanon’s phenomenological approach, the points of contact between Fanon and the phenomenological tradition he engages with will quickly be established.  

Before setting off on such a task, however, I think it will be useful for the reader if I briefly offer an account of how it is I understand phenomenology. By clarifying some of the key characteristics of phenomenology, as well as providing some philosophical distinctions that will allow me to more precisely differentiate between phenomenological accounts, Fanon’s relationship to phenomenology can be more accurately assessed.

In the Introduction to the recently published 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, the editors open the text in the following way:

Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception begins with a question: ‘What is   phenomenology?’ Nearly three-quarters of a century later, this question remains  unanswered. (2020, p. xiii)

Despite the inherent difficulties involved in definitively characterizing a field of philosophical investigation that is continually transforming as it critiques itself and finds new areas of application, I think the above claim is an exaggeration. And, frankly, I don’t believe the editors truly ascribe to it. A few pages later in the Introduction to 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, we are offered the following account of phenomenology which, at least in broad outline, marks out some of the key characteristics that belong to phenomenology:

One of phenomenology’s … methodological commitments is the refusal to accept     the taken-for-grantedness of experience. This commitment entails the perpetual   interrogation of the most familiar features of our everyday experience, not to deny them  but in order to know the better … Phenomenology is marked by a faith that such   descriptions can disclose the most basic structures of human existence … as these structures are brought into relief, our understand of our own experience is transformed, and our deepest assumption about our very being in the world may be challenged. (Ibid.)

Besides the regrettable characterization of phenomenology as marked by a “faith” that its description can disclose fundamental structures (there is no such faith, phenomenology is committed to its descriptions yielding such structures), this account nicely outlines at least three central features of phenomenology. In general, it can be said that phenomenology:

  • Does not accept as true any claim about the nature of our experience unless it is demonstrated by a means of a descriptive interrogation of experience. In part, this is the meaning of Husserl’s call to return to the “things” or “matters” themselves. Only what can be exhibited through the interrogation of experience should be philosophically adhered to.
  • Offers a descriptive interrogation of experience that does not simply lie content with more accurate, or perhaps even more rich and nuanced, descriptions of experience. Its descriptions are undertaken with a certain aim in mind: to reveal the “structures” (indeed, the most fundamental structures) of experience. I will say more about this below.
  • Concretely brings to light the structures of experience – an undertaking that transforms our relation to experience.

I think the main challenge offered by Fanon to traditional phenomenology revolves around a disagreement about how exactly the structures outlined in (2) are to be understood. However, before elaborating on (2), I want to briefly say something about (1) and (3).

Boldly stated, phenomenology’s goal of revealing structures of experience proceeds by way of an interrogative description of experience that concretely makes these structures apparent to the phenomenologist. For this reason, the task of providing better or more accurate accounts of what experience is like is not primary motivated by the goal of simply providing us with more nuanced or insightful accounts of our experience. Rather, phenomenology proceeds with an eye to reveal what makes experiences, and, indeed, experience as such, possible.

I want to suggest that this is the case no matter how important or meaningful the experiences interrogated may be to us. Indeed, “applied” phenomenology may offer us valuable clarifications and correctives regarding everything from what it like to undergo an emotional state to what it is like to sail a boat, to fall in love, play a video game or even give birth. However, such descriptions of what experience is like, although achieved by a descriptive turn to experience itself, do not necessarily satisfy the phenomenological aim of getting at the underlying phenomenological structures that make these experiences or experience itself possible. Indeed, it is the unearthing of structure that ultimately distinguishes phenomenology from mere psychological description, first-person reporting, or what an artist, poet, novelist or naturalist does when they attempt to depict or faithfully describe some aspect of our being in the world. In each of these instances, there is a turn to “things” or “matters” themselves – and in a loose sense, these things or matters provide the standard by which we judge the description – but they are not strictly speaking “phenomenological” in that the uniquely philosophical aim of exhibiting the underlying structures can fail to be undertaken. 

We can begin to understand phenomenology’s transformative dimension ((3) above) by noting that it can operate at two levels. First, it is common knowledge that undergoing experiences – philosophical or otherwise – results in a change in our relation to experience. Colloquially, we describe experiences as “marking us” or “giving a new perspective on life,” where what we are saying is that undergoing certain experiences transform who and what we are, and to such a degree, that they inform how it is we come to be disposed toward our experience. For instance, illness, the death of a loved one, the profound realizations we have in the face of art or nature – these experiences recontextualize lived experience in such a way that features and dimensions of the world are revealed to us that we had not experienced before. In a similar way, engaging in phenomenological descriptions – casting off our assumptions and theories about experience and paying heed to what it is experience itself offers or makes available to us – can occasion an experiential shift, perhaps even an irreversible shift, in how it is we experience ourself and the world.

However, phenomenology’s transformative power can also operate at a second, deeper level. Insofar as phenomenology is not solely concerned with descriptions of what lived experience is like, but interrogates experience in order to unearth structures, phenomenology involves a methodological maneuver that recontextualizes our relation with experience in a way that is not typically experienced when we are dealing with experience on the first level. Whether this maneuver is Husserl’s epoché, Heidegger’s destructive-hermeneutic analytic of Dasein, Sartre’s unearthing “the being of phenomenon” by descriptively mapping out the parameters of the existential situation (the “phenomenon of being”), or Merleau-Ponty’s expounding the worldly correlates of our bodily flesh, phenomenology involves a methodological re-orientation that, more than simply providing a unique kind of philosophical experience, fundamentally transforms our relation to experience itself.

What I am stressing here is that phenomenology reconstrues our relation to experience by turning it into a special field of philosophical investigation: experience as such and its possibility. By so transforming our relation to experience, the possibility arises not only of securing a whole new source of knowledge (that is, a phenomenological knowledge that would simply exist alongside the forms that concern objects found in experience). Rather, what we discover about ourselves and the world can bring about a change in how our experience of the world at the first level is to be understood, and so potentially motivate us to transform the very way we occupy or navigate such a world.

That what phenomenology interrogates is experience as such and its possibility nicely leads to a discussion regarding the all-important second feature of phenomenology ((2) outlined above): that its main aim is to disclose the structures of experience. Indeed, thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty have provided different philosophical accounts regarding how exactly it is that phenomenological structures are to be understood (coming down differently on issues such as how it is the structures and what they structure is to be conceived of, the basis or ultimately ground of such structures, the connection between the structures and ontology, etc.). However, each of these phenomenologists are committed to the phenomenological discovery of structures, where these structures are supposed to account for how certain experiences are possible or, more fundamentally, the very possibility of experience.

Fanon and Phenomenology

Phenomenology takes up the task, arguably first initiated and pursued by thinkers like Descartes and Kant, of expounding the conditions of the possibility of experience, where this is to be understood as expounding the a priori conditions of possibility that allow for there to be something like experience as such and without which there would be no experience (and not just the absence of this or that experience). Whether it is such structures as the intentional nature of consciousness or the unity of apperception in Husserl, “attunement” in Heidegger, the “Look” which Sartre’s argues defines our being with others or Merleau-Ponty’s account of the objectivizing structure of perception, phenomenology aims to reveal the fundamental structures that allow for experience (e.g., intentionality, temporality, affectivity, intersubjectivity, perception, language, etc.) and which enables us to navigate the world.

Now, to a certain extent, many of the contributors to Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology recognize that the search for such structure is the ultimate aim of phenomenology and that Fanon provides his descriptions of experience in order to ultimately reveal such structure. Miraj. U. Desai, for instance, proposes to read Fanon “phenomenologically,” where this involves, crucially, an “attention to structure”: namely, the “invariant” structures that Fanon himself claims to have discovered in Black Skin, White Masks and which Desai’s article proposes to unearth and interrogate anew (2022, p. 75).

However, it is worth noting that when it comes to actually saying something about these structures, Desai (1) narrowly conceives of them as structures that underlie and make possible particular ways of engaging with objects found in experience (specifically, Desai has in mind the experience of creating an artwork or composing a piece of writing) and (2) identifies phenomenological structures with a range of material determinates (historical, social, political and even geographical) that create personal identity, without clarifying in what sense these determinates are “invariant” or what (if anything) they have in common or how they might work together to make experience possible (Ibid., p. 74). The result is that the account of structure here remains merely at the level of objects of experience and the generation of particular sorts of psychological states, without clarifying the nature of the “invariant” conditions that would underpin these very material determinates. Consider the following passage:

            Fanon’s greatest originality came from examining colonialism via the lens of         psychopathology and personal identity via the lens of colonial violence. Hook (2005, 2012) articulated Fanon’s ‘materialist psychology’ that demonstrated how racist  encounters and gazes strip away a person’s embodied subjectivity and resources for personal and cultural identity … social ills like pov­erty, antisemitism, racism, and colonialism [are not to be] minimized to mere mental states. As was suggested above, Fanonian investigations necessarily connected psychological structures to political,  socioeconomic, and geographical ones. (Ibid., p. 80)

To be perfectly clear: Fanon is keen to demonstrate that various social-historical determinates structure experience and lie at the basis of our psychology and personal identity, as well as bring into being different forms of psychopathology. Additionally, phenomenology can be concerned with the structures that inform particular kinds of intentional states and show how concrete, material reality provides intentionality with the matter to occasion its various states. However, at the deepest level, these structural determinates are not to be understood, following Derek Hook’s interpretation (which Desai quotes approvingly above), in straightforward materialist terms. If Fanon was simply interested in straightforwardly enumerating the material conditions that create our identities in a particular social-historical situation, then (1) his account would be far too specific (and so lack the necessary “invariance”) to be strictly phenomenological, and (2) would risk eliding the phenomenological task of articulating the structural conditions that underlie, inform, and govern any and all instances of material reality. Indeed, as Nelson Maldonado Torres points out, the more basic structures that phenomenologists seek to discover—e.g., embodiment, intersubjectivity, language, etc.—are what make possible our very experience of “being,” regardless of its material makeup in any given point in history or social organization:

            [Specific] cultural and structural analyses are not enough to [exhaustively] explore the … formation of subjectivity … and [in particular] of [phenomenological] structures. For this, Fanon takes a philosophical approach that considers … the formation of subjectiv­ity  as subjects relate to basic aspects of human experience: embodiment, intersubjective contact (via language and love), time, and space … Time, space, embodied subjectivity, and intersubjectivity play a key role in the formation of what is often defined as Being. (Ibid., p. 91)

A Torres stresses, these deep phenomenological structures cannot be straightforwardly identified with concrete material conditions. If Fanon’s descriptions of his lived experience are to be understood “phenomenologically,” then the relation between the phenomenological structure and material reality, as well as the sense in which the latter relate to the former, needs to be exhibited.

If a materialist interpretation of Fanonian structural determinates overlooks and presupposes the fundamental structures that his phenomenology is after, then a Hegelian account also fails to help us see what Fanon is up to. First, Fanon does not conceive of the discovery of phenomenological structure as the outcome of a dialectical process whereby consciousness’ one-sided descriptions of thought/being continually force it to reconstrue itself until it is resolved in identity. Second, for Fanon, capturing the basic phenomenological structures does not necessarily result in consciousness that is capable of overcoming its alienation from being—especially, if overcoming alienation does not simply involve consciousness’ overcoming of its distinction from being, but, ultimately, forms of social alienation and oppression. Consider the following passages from Jean Khalfa and Lou Tuner:

 Black Skin, White Masks could be read as a phenomenology of the colonized   consciousness. ‘Phenomenology’ in a Hegelian sense first: It is the narration of the various stations and figures of consciousness through which mind, in history at large as well as in the history of an individual, first experiences and then endeavors to resolve    the various forms of its own alienation. (Ibid., p. 49)

[Hegel allows us to see that] the ‘fact’ of Fanon’s ‘black skin’… doesn’t remain at the  level of perception, but is instead elevated, in the sense of its determination to appear,  and reflected back in the look of the very subject whose bodily schema had been       racialized. Internal intuition breaks down the ontology of the colonial or racialized situation into a process of becoming wherein the inherent defects of the Manichean  world are also [to quote Hegel] ‘endowed with the impulse of self-development’ … This, in Fanon’s terms, represents the agency of the Negro, or that which becomes the revolutionary process of decolonization in his later works. Internal intuition, in short, is the method and means by which Fanon’s comprehension of the ‘colonial situation’  entails both the logic of its existence, i.e., its phenomenology, and the dialectic of its    overcoming. (Ibid., p. 68)

Although these two scholars draw on very different aspects of Hegel, they are both in agreement that Fanon’s phenomenology should be understood in a Hegelian register. The passages suggest that (1) consciousness in Fanon (or rather a particular form of consciousness, colonized consciousness) will work through various stages until it grasps its experience and, moreover, (2) this process will occasion consciousness’ to overcoming its social alienation, which is to say, that there is an impulse to (revolutionary) self-development built into this process.  

Although what consciousness’ comes to learn about its experience by the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit may overlap in certain respects with Black Skin, White Masks (e.g., it may be the case that, say, what we now call discourse is essential dimension of consciousness’ grasp of the world, including how we interpret skin color), the specific way Fanon reveals these structures via phenomenological description, however, bears little to no resemblance to Hegel’s progressive, dialectical account of consciousness’ overcoming its alienation. What is more, coming to knowledge of phenomenological structures for Fanon does not necessarily awaken in consciousness an impulse, much less a social-political program, to achieve recognition of other subjects.

While Fanon certainly argues that colonial situations are unacceptable and ought and can be transformed, he is not committed to the idea that his phenomenological depictions of the colonized subject’s experience are necessarily “endowed with the impulse of self-development.” Indeed, it may be the case that recognizing the structures that underpin experience as such may give us clues or suggest strategies as to how we can bring about such a transformation (e.g., new forms of representation, the reconsidering of language and its importance). However, there is no clear connection between unearthing phenomenological structures and the transforming of the cultural coordinates that imprison consciousness in certain pernicious social forms and self-conceptions. Indeed, it is entirely possible that a transformation of the culture or political situation informed by a knowledge of its underlying structures may come to imprison subjects in new pernicious forms.

Body and Discourse

If Fanon’s phenomenology is not limited to shedding light on a particular material, social-political set up and what it is like to live in such a set up (with its forms of social and political oppressions and accompanying pathologies), but attempts to lay bare the underlying structural conditions that make experience possible (a knowledge that does not necessarily point in any straightforward manner the way to overcoming an intolerable social-political situation), then what exactly is his contribution to this field of knowledge? And what, if any, are the ramifications or consequences this phenomenological account has for politics (broadly construed) if it doesn’t tell us how to overcome social and political forms of alienation and oppression?

These are big questions to tackle, and I will certainly not be able to provide satisfying answers here, especially when it comes to the thorny issue regarding the relation between phenomenology and politics. However, I think an answer to the first question begins to take shape by taking a look at how some of the contributors to Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology helpfully characterize Fanon’s account of two inter-related phenomenological structures in particular: the body and discourse.   

Fanon is certainly not the first phenomenologist to make the case that the body is to be counted amongst the transcendental conditions of experience. Husserl, Sartre, de Beauvoir and, of course, Merleau-Ponty each have offered accounts of the body and its role in structuring the world. More than any other phenomenologist, however, it is clearly Merleau-Ponty that has cast the greatest shadow over Fanon’s thinking about the body. This influence comes through in the very conceptual tools Fanon uses to articulate his insights, as well as in the way scholars depict Fanon’s account of living in a black body under a system of colonialism. Consider the following passages from Jean Khalfa, Derek Hook and Athena V. Coleman:

[T]he body [is] not only … a thing within the world but also as a ‘posture’ or as a condition for a primordial interrogative relationship to the world, a condition for the constitution of the given as world … The system of racism leads to the real loss of    this interrogative body, revealed by phenomenology, which is instantly turned into a thing. (p. 49-51)

            In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his  bodily schema … the black man suffers from his body quite differently from the white     man. (p. 117)

In contrast to the universality of the corporeal schema, Fanon discovers a multiplicity of   schemas that shape those subjects and moments excluded by the corporeal schema …     Fanon’s rereading of phenomenology and psychology opens up the question of [what is responsible for] structuring schemas, which structures … our connections to others. (p. 133)

The main idea is that Fanon, following Merleau-Ponty, is committed to the idea that the body plays a structural role in making our experience of the world possible. The body, understood along these lines, is not to be strictly identified with a thing or with anything thing-like. Things are found in or occupy the world opened up by the body. “Corporeal schema” (sometimes translated as “body schema” or “bodily schema”) is Merleau-Ponty’s term for the fundamental “posture” of bodily being that allows for an openness to the world insofar as it enables an array of possible movements and mobilizing projects that extend from us to our surroundings; a pre-reflective structure that lets the world meaningfully appear as the bodily correlate we competently navigate and in which we discover things that we can seamlessly take up and utilize (“interrogate”).

But not only that. This structure, as condition opens us to a world and lets it be experienced, also opens us up to and exposes us to others, that is to say, to the perspective of other similarly constituted bodily beings. To claim then that Fanon’s account of the black body under colonialism demonstrates (1) that the corporeal schema encounters difficulties in its development, and (2) that the bodily perspective that, fundamentally, opens up the world of things is itself made thing-like, is to draw attention to one of the main conclusions of Black Skin, White Masks: the body, or more precisely, the corporeal schema, despite being a condition of possibility of having a world, cannot be straightforwardly universalized.

It is here that the bodily schema needs to be seen as bound up with another condition of possibility: discourse. Although bodily being is pre-reflective in that the bodily integration and engagement with our surroundings does not necessarily involve the intellectual contribution thinkers such as Kant and Husserl would ascribe to it, the body is in each case bound up with a particular discursive context that delimits and shapes the body’s mobilizing projects. “Discourse,” as I am using the term here, is not limited to the linguistic or conceptual; it does not simply refer to a societies’ possibilities of talking or thinking. It extends to the material deposits of a greater symbolic order: images, spatial arrangements, print media, as well as gestures, comportments and other forms of social signifying all contribute to discourse.

Fanon’s idea is that the discursive milieu established by colonialism – with its binaries, asymmetries, and exclusions – ends up carving up, categorizing and segregating bodies along the lines of colonized/colonized or black/white. This comes to be internalized not only at the level of individual psychologies or self-conceptions, but actually informs the very way bodies come to orient themselves and establish relations with things and people in space. Specifically, the black body, having its exploration of space be in each case mediated through an awareness of how it stands vis-à-vis a white world and its occupants – an awareness, mind you, that does not necessary extend in the other direction. The result is not only that the possibilities for bodily exploration and usage are frustrated or limiting, but continually forced to fold back on itself in consideration of a hostile, yet mostly indifferent, white other. As Helen Ngo puts it:

[R]acism not only becomes interiorized but ‘epidermalized’- or in phenomenological  terms, lived and inhabited bodily … embodiment becomes marked by a kind of bodily schema fragmentation … Everything is anticipated, thought out, demonstrated, made the most of. (p. 194-5)

Indeed, Fanon not only uses his phenomenology to put pressure on the notion of a universal bodily schema, his descriptions of bodily being under colonialism also call into question how it is we should characterize the struggle for recognition: to be for the other as fellow subject and not object or thing. The black body is forced to continually turn its gaze back on itself insofar as its bodily being is one that is shaped through a discursive context that forces it to consider itself in relation to a white other that does not repay it in kind. Everything from lighting a cigarette to finding a seat on a bus becomes conditioned by the asymmetrical colonial relationship that reifies the colonized black as it acknowledges the white. Under such social-political conditions, the struggle to be recognized as a subject via the other is not characterized by the unfolding of any sort of progressive logic, but is already predetermined at a level of the body and its worldly conditioning. The discourse of colonialism seemingly precludes the very possibility that the colonized can initiate a relation between subjects with the colonizer. As Lewis R. Gordan nicely puts this point:

[The] racialized schema below the [vicissitudes and outcomes of the] Hegelian [lordship/bondage relation] addresses contradictions that are not of a dialectical kind. The call for [a distinctly] Black Consciousness already demands addressing a ‘lived reality’ … but one that has not been acknowledged as such … The consequence is the retort: At least the other is an other. To become such initiates ethical relations. (p. 223)

Christian Tewes, Giovanni Stanghellini (Eds.): Time and Body: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Approaches






Time and Body: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Approaches Book Cover




Time and Body: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Approaches





Christian Tewes, Giovanni Stanghellini (Eds.)




Cambridge University Press




2020




Hardback 103,99 €




400

Reviewed by: Emilia Barile  (Alexander von Humboldt fellow – A. von Humboldt Stiftung, Bonn (DE) - Italian Section)

Edited by C. Tewes and G. Stanghellini, Time and Body. Phenomenological and Psychopathological approaches (2021) is concerned with working out the role of phenomenology and embodiment research methodologies and insights in order to explore the interrelation between psychopathology, temporality and the embodied mind. The volume’s emphasis lies in investigating the temporal and intersubjective constitution of the body in phenomenological and psychopathological approaches.

An introductory essay by Tewes and Stanghellini (2021) and a preliminary paper by Fuchs (2021)  ̶  to whose enduring work the book is also dedicated  ̶ open this interdisciplinary collection. Fuchs’s seminal influence over the subsequent researches presented in the volume is thus recognized right from the start. His own hypothesis is that a desynchronization of the intersubjective time experience causing a loss of bodily resonance (2013, 99) lies at the heart of several psychopathologies, such as autism, schizophrenia, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia nervosa (2021). The remaining essays are grouped by pathologies into 4 sections: I. Body and Time (Legrand, 2021; Stanghellini, 2021; Depraz, 2021; Tschacher, 2021); II. Grief and Anxiety (Køster, 2021; Tanaka, 2021); III. Borderline Personality and Eating Disorders (Ratcliffe & Bortolan, 2021; Schmidt, 2021; Rodemeyer, 2021; Doerr-Zegers & Pelegrina-Cetran, 2021); IV. Depression, Schizophrenia and Dementia (Lenzo & Gallagher, 2021; Froese & Krueger, 2021; Van Duppen & Sienaert, 2021; Tewes, 2021). Interesting commentaries follow each article, discussing the item at issue. The book shows how insights and methodologies from phenomenology and enactivism can be applied in clinics (p. 5), especially in suggesting alternative treatments: Dance therapy or music therapy, for example, can induce a re-synchronization, restoring co-temporality in the therapeutic relationship.

Since Gibson’s (1979) and Varela’s (1991) seminal works on the ecological approach to mind and consciousness, embodiment and enactivism have gained an increased following in the cultural (intersubjective) domain too (Durt, Fuchs & Tewes, 2017; Etzelmüller & Tewes, 2016). What is still missing, however, is an investigation into the interconnection between temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity (Fuchs, 2013, 2017, 2018) and its significance for psychopathology (Fuchs, 2021): This is the novel contribution the book aims to provide. The main goals of the volume include increasing understanding of the intertwinement of time and bodily experience as well as in the development of an embodied-based phenomenological psychopathology. Some fundamental phenomenological insights can enlighten the several psychopathologies analyzed: The distinction (and shift) between the body as subject / as object (Merleau-Ponty, 1945); time, as an implicit/explicit feature (Husserl, 1952); intersubjectivity, and the related self/other demarcation (as disrupted in pathologies (Sacks, 1987; Sass, 2003; Tsakiris, Prabhu & Haggard, 2006)) as well as the debates about ‘minimal self’ (Lane, 2020; Zahavi, 2017; Nelson, Parnas & Sass, 2014).

With this in mind, another useful way of carving up the conceptual space of the book is by a further thematic (phenomenological) grouping of the several contributions to the volume. Each essay is concerned with the interrelation between temporality and the embodied/embedded mind in psychopathology. However, it is also possible to recognize a particular focus on some of these fundamental phenomenological insights.

Most of the essays are committed to the grounding role of the body. Section I includes papers focussed on the shift from the subject-body [Leib] to the object-body [Körper] in psychopathology. Stanghellini (2021) points out this shift to an ‘objectified body’ in schizophrenia. The Leib profile, meanwhile, is recognized as related to the borderline disorder  ̶  especially under the outlined profile of the ‘sheer flesh’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, 1968; Henry, 1965). Moreover, Stanghellini identifies the ‘body-for-others’  ̶  i.e., the body under the others’ gaze (Sartre, 1956)  ̶  as being particularly impaired in eating disorders. Beyond the traditional Körper/Leib distinction, he also works out multiple layers of Leib (the ‘lived’ body) as distinct from the ‘living’ body: A crucial difference (but also an intimate relationship between living/lived body), that is further recognizable between just ‘living’ and ‘feeling’ of being alive, Leben and Erleben (Fingerhut & Marienberg – Eds., 2012; Fuchs, 2012; Engelen, 2014, 2012; Barile, forthcoming). In the following sections of the volume, Tanaka (2021) also investigates the role of the body-as-a-object ‘for others’, but in the context of social anxiety. Doerr-Zegers and Pelegrina-Cetran (2021) are concerned with the shift from the body-subject and the body-object in anorexia, as related to implicit/explicit temporality. Van Duppen and Sienaert (2021) examine catatonia  ̶ a psychopathology that is underinvestigated  ̶  particularly body freezing, as ‘objectifying’ the body. Finally, Tewes’s (2021) contribution on dementia offers an embodied approach to selfhood and personal identity over time. Specifically, he assigns a constitutive role of bodily continuity to personhood, in line with other kinds of approaches also in opposition to the brain- and cognitive-centred mainstream view (Damasio, 2021, 2010; Barile, 2016).

A minor part of the essays collected in the volume focuses on the other grounding phenomenological insights of the book: Time (as implicit/explicit temporality), and intersubjectivity. Tschacher (2021) emphasizes the role of time and body in psychotherapy, offering a quantitative approach based on dynamical systems theory. Adopting a microphenomenological methodology, Depraz (2021) instead investigates psychosomatic diseases as related to chronic time. On his side, Rodemeyer (2021) deals with temporality and body involvement in gendered experiences in the context of eating disorders. Lenzo and Gallagher (2021) underline the role of intrinsic temporality and its disruption in depression, schizophrenia and dementia.

As concerning intersubjectivity, Tewes and Stanghellini’s (2021) and Fuchs’s opening articles (2021) on embodiment, temporality and intersubjectivity in phenomenology and psychopathology are seminal contributions. Among the others, Legrand (2021) is the most committed to the very intertwinement of intersubjectivity, time and body in psychopathology. From a phenomenological (Merleau-Ponty, 1945) and a psychoanalytical perspective (Lacan, 1981), she focuses on the fundamental role of body and time (synchronization) for clinics. As concerning body, ‘otherness’ and the self/other demarcation, Legrand argues against Nancy (2000) for the existence of ‘fluctuating’ boundaries between bodies, recognized as at the basis of both singularity and alterity. Also committed to the ‘being-with’ feature, Køster (2021) provides an existential-phenomenological analysis of the feeling of ‘emptiness’. Ratcliffe and Bortolan (2021) deal with borderline disorder (BDP) as related to emotion dysregulation and unstable interpersonal relationships. On his side, Schmidt (2021) offers a holistic account and a multifactor description of BDP. He focusses on self-experience (which all other factors amount to) rather than on interpersonal relationships only. Froese and Krueger (2021) also concentrate their attention on intersubjectivity and the disturbed self/other demarcation, particularly in schizophrenia.

In sum, the volume turns out to be an interdisciplinary collection of essays accomplishing the goals «to sharpen and deepen an understanding of the intertwinement of time and bodily experience» and «to contribute to the further development of an embodied-based phenomenological psychopathology» (p. 4). Furthermore, the book offers some important contributions (particularly, Tewes & Stanghellini, 2021; Fuchs, 2021; Legrand, 2021; Køster, 2021; Ratcliffe & Bortolan, 2021; Schmidt, 2021; Froese & Krueger, 2021) to enlightening the interconnection between temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity (Fuchs, 2013b, 2017, 2018b) and its significance for psychopathology (Fuchs, 2021). This aspect is recognized as «still missing» in embodiment and enactivist researches in the introductory paper by Fuchs (p. 12): Some steps on this direction can be traced back to Fuchs’s seminal work (2013b, 2017, 2018b) as well as a number of others (Durt, Fuchs & Tewes, 2017; Etzelmüller & Tewes, 2016; De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007; Koole & Tschacher, 2016). Disclosing the interconnection of time, body and intersubjectivity in psychopathologies constitutes a key ‘inspiration’ of the volume. However, the innovative approach to the clinical practice, considered in the light of phenomenology and embodiment research methodologies and insights, is where this volume’s main contribution lies.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

References: 

Barile, E. (forthcoming).

Barile, E. (2016). Minding Damasio. Ledizioni, Roma.

Bizzari, V. (2018). Sento quindi Sono. Fenomenologia e Leib nel Dibattito Contemporaneo. Mimesis. Milano.

De Jaegher, H., & Di Paolo, E. A. (2007). Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6 (4), 485–507. doi: 10.1007/s11097-007-9076-9.

Damasio A.R. (2021). Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Damasio, A.R. (2010). Self Comes to Mind. Constructing the Conscious Brain. Pantheon Books: New York.

Durt, C., Fuchs, T. & Tewes, C. (Eds.). (2017). Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World. MIT Press: Cambridge (MA).

Engelen, M.E. (2014). Das Gefühl des Lebendigseins. In: Vom Leben zur Bedeutung. Philosophische Studien zum Verhältnis Von Gefühl, Bewusstsein und Sprache. De Gruyter: Berlin (5-42); first in: Marienberg, S. & Fingerhut, J. – Eds. (2012). Feelings of Being Alive. De Gruyter: Berlin (239-56).

Etzelmüller, G., & Tewes, C. (Eds.). (2016). Embodiment in evolution and culture. Mohr Siebeck: Heidelberg (DE).

Fingerhut, J. & Marienberg, S. (Eds.). (2012). Feelings of Being Alive. De Gruyter: Berlin.

Fuchs, T. (2012). The Feeling of Being Alive. In Marienberg, S. & Fingerhut, J. – Eds. (2012). Feelings of Being Alive. De Gruyter: Berlin.

Fuchs, T. (2013b). Temporality and psychopathology. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 12 (1), 75–104. doi:10.1007/s11097-010-9189-4.

Fuchs, T. (2017). Self across time: The diachronic unity of bodily existence. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 16 (2), 291–315. doi:10.1007/ s11097-015-9449-4.

Fuchs, T. (2018a). Ecology of the brain: The phenomenology and biology of the embodied mind. Oxford University Press: Oxford (UK).

Fuchs, T. (2018b). The cyclical time of the body and its relation to linear time. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25 (7–8), 47–65.

Gibson, J.J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Huoghton-Mifflin: Boston.

Henry, M. (1965) Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps. Presses Universitaire de France: Paris.

Husserl, E. (1952). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie II: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Den Haag: Nijhoff.

Koole, S. L. & Tschacher, W. (2016). Synchrony in psychotherapy: A review and an integrative framework for the therapeutic alliance. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1–17. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00862.

Lacan, J. (1981). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar, Book XI, 1964 (A. Sheridan, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company: New York, London.

Lane, T.J. (2020). The minimal self hypothesis, Consciousness and Cognition, 85, 103029. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2020.103029.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964/1968). The visible and the invisible (A. Lingis, Trans.). Northwestern University Press: Evanston (IL).

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phénoménologie de la Perception. Gallimard: Paris.

Nancy, J.-L. (2000). Being Singular Plural. (Tr. Robert Richardson & Anne O’Byrne). Stanford University Press.

Nelson, B., Parnas, J. & Sass, L.A. (2014). Disturbance of Minimal Self (Ipseity) in Schizophrenia: Clarification and Current Status, Schizophrenia Bulletin, 40 (3), May: 479–482, https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbu034.

Sacks, O. (1987). The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales. Harper and Row: New York.

Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and Nothingness. (H. E. Barnes, Trans.). Philosophical Library: New York, NY. (Original work published 1943).

Sass, L.A. (2003). Negative symptoms, schizophrenia, and the self. International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy, 3 (2), December: 153-180.

Tewes, C. (2018). The phenomenology of habits: Integrating first-person and neuropsychological studies of memory. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01176.

Tewes, C. & Fuchs, T. (2018). Editorial introduction: The formation of body memory. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25 (7–8), 8–19.

Tsakiris, M., Prabhu, G., & Haggard, P. (2006). Having a Body versus Moving Your Body: How Agency Structures Body-Ownership. Consciousness and Cognition, 15: 423-432. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2005.09.004.

Varela, F.J. (1991). Organism: A Mesh work of Selfless Selves. In Albert Tauber (Ed.). Organism and the Origin of Self. Kluwer: Dordrecht (77-107).

Zahavi, D. (2017). Thin, thinner, thinnest: Defining the minimal self. In C. Durt, T. Fuchs & C. Tewes (Eds.), Embodiment, enaction, and culture: Investigating the constitution of the shared world (pp. 193–199). MIT Press: Cambridge (MA).

Conflict of Interest Statement: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Anya Daly, Fred Cummins, James Jardine, Dermot Moran (Eds.): Perception and the Inhuman Gaze, Routledge, 2020






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Perception and the Inhuman Gaze




Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy





Anya Daly, Fred Cummins, James Jardine, Dermot Moran (Eds.)




Routledge




2020




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328

Kevin Aho: Contexts of Suffering: A Heideggerian Approach to Psychopathology, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019






Contexts of Suffering: A Heideggerian Approach to Psychopathology Book Cover




Contexts of Suffering: A Heideggerian Approach to Psychopathology




New Heidegger Research





Kevin Aho




Rowman & Littlefield International




2019




Hardback £90.00




164

Till Grohmann: Corps et Monde dans l’Autisme et la Schizophrénie, Springer, 2019






Corps et Monde dans l’Autisme et la Schizophrénie: Approches ontologiques en psychopathologie Book Cover




Corps et Monde dans l’Autisme et la Schizophrénie: Approches ontologiques en psychopathologie




Phaenomenologica, Volume 227





Till Grohmann




Springer




2019




Hardback 64,06 €

Eugène Minkowski: Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies, Northwestern University Press, 2019






Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies Book Cover




Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies





Eugène Minkowski. Nancy Metzel (Translator), Dan Zahavi (Foreword by)




Northwestern University Press




2019




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Daniel Broschmann: Der unüberquerbare Rubikon: Eine phänomenologische Psychopathologie der Willensstörungen, Verlag Karl Alber, 2018






Der unüberquerbare Rubikon: Eine phänomenologische Psychopathologie der Willensstörungen Book Cover




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2018




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232

Stefan Kristensen: La Machine sensible






La Machine sensible Book Cover




La Machine sensible




Tuchè





Stefan Kristensen




Hermann




2017




Paperback 28,00 €




318

Reviewed by: Louis Schreel (Ghent University, Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences)

  1. Introduction

In his new book, La Machine sensible, Stefan Kristensen conceives the human mind as a sensible machine: a machine that seeks to stabilize incoming fluxes of sensory stimulation, before being rationally reflected. This opens up a thought-provoking discussion with contemporary phenomenological conceptions of the minimal self, which reappears as a technical invention, an artifact produced by the sensible machinery that works beyond our conscious grasp and reflective understanding. Like the technical object, the minimal self is for Kristensen an artifact produced to stabilize the relation between man and his environment. But in La Machine sensible technical invention does not amount to the application of a given system of knowledge. Machinic invention has its roots in the irrational and becomes rational ordering only after having fulfilled its primordial function: the organization of matter by life.

For the sake of brevity, this review will focus strictly on the theoretical issues that animate La Machine sensible. The true strength and originality of Kristensen’s book lies in combining a rich conceptual framework with detailed commentaries of empirical work both in psychopathology and in twentieth century art. Of the three parts that make up the book, I will discuss only the first (“The Self and the Machine”) and the third (“The Essence of the Machine”), the second (“The Machine and the Figuration of the Self”) being entirely devoted to the motive of the machine and the figuration of the self in art brut, James Tilly Matthews, Fernand Deligny, Victor Tausk, Bruce Nauman, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Epstein and Jean-Luc Godard. Kristensen has a deep background both in the phenomenological and psychoanalytical traditions and his astute appreciation of their respective virtues does not make him any less perceptive of their respective weaknesses. Honest about its goals and the unresolved puzzles pertaining to its rather brief examination of phenomena of biological organization, the book is most sharp in its ability to set up a dialogue between Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Szondi, Maldiney and Deleuze & Guattari. With that in mind, La Machine sensible is highly recommendable for anyone interested in the crossovers between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, and the way these can open up an original reflection on contemporary visual art.

  1. Aisthesis Disturbed: Machinic Delusions

The first part of Kristensen’s book begins by turning to the literature on schizophrenia, in which the motif of an ‘influencing machine’ (une machine à influencer) represents a particular kind of delusion that is important for a good understanding of schizophrenia. The delusion of an influencing machine stands for an experience in which the patient is convinced to be manipulated through a machine, which itself remains beyond his or her grasp. Examining the subjective dimension of schizophrenia, Kristensen approaches this delusional experience as a particular kind of feeling. This avoids categorizing schizophrenia as a disturbance of either the psyche or the soma, since feeling usually involves both. Kristensen argues that whatever the person’s predominant schizophrenic symptoms, these can be regarded as instances, appearances, expressions of the same disturbance, the same fundamental kind of psychotic feeling of an influencing machine.

To situate the disturbance at the level of feeling is not to deny, however, the neurobiological basis of schizophrenia. Discussing the early clinical work of Viktor Tausk and Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault in the light of recent work of Alfred Kraus, Thomas Fuchs, Louis A. Sass and Josef Parnas’ phenomenological Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience (EASE), Kristensen acknowledges that neurally based cognitive dysfunctions often play an important role, and indeed that they may often play the causal role in terms of kicking off symptoms. This does not mean, however, that subjective experiential phenomena, together with subjective responses to these phenomena, may not also play a key role. Rather than proposing an either/or dichotomy between neurological explanation and phenomenological description, our author follows Parnas in the viewpoint that phenomenology may just as well offer an explanatory contribution for the understanding of psychotic delusions. Accordingly, ‘the investigation concerns here the sense of this experience of alterity, from the point of view of the subject undergoing it’ (29).

In the most general terms, it is for Kristensen a person’s most immediate and fundamental, affective relationship to self and to world, which is disturbed in schizophrenic psychosis. This disturbance is a feeling of losing contact and connectedness with the world, of withdrawing into a world of one’s own, and of sensing the world as a hostile otherness. In schizophrenia, patients lose their sense of ownership; they seem to have no sense of property, not of a world but also not of themselves, even to the point of owning their bodies. It is this alienating feeling, which the patient’s language is unable to articulate and make sense of, and which may lead to a breakdown of personality, a cleavage of several personalities, and to several kinds of corporeal symptoms.

The sense of losing possession or control, at once over the world and over oneself, implies that possession, power or control lie elsewhere. The delusion of the influencing machine involves ‘the experience of domination, of a relation of asymmetrical force, which the machine is a particularly emblematic image of’ (36). One may certainly have the feeling of great energy and feel compelled to use it, but one seems to have no power to control it. It is as though something else is exercising this control and the patient does not know what this other is: he or she feels it as a foreign power that is mechanically triggered by an external causality.

Whatever form these experiences take, their presence is for the subject always an ordeal that gives rise to different strategies to confront these impulsions, whose essential trait is that the subject cannot escape them. It is due to this experience of passivity and powerlessness on the noetic level that one can speak of a machinic phenomenon on the noematic level (taking up a Husserlian vocabulary here) (30).

In an important concluding passage of the first chapter, Kristensen argues that one shouldn’t understand the schizophrenic delusion only negatively, as the delusional construction of a threat. Following Kraus, Fuchs and the psychoanalyst Ludivine Beillard-Robbert, he argues the schizophrenic delusion is ‘a fundamentally ambiguous phenomenon’ (13, 23) that can be considered at once as a symptom of disturbance and as an act of resistance, offering a certain stabilization. Indeed, ‘the simple fact that a hallucination is produced, that an image be drawn, that a text be written, either in front of the psychiatrist or in the most intimate reclusion, means that the delusional subject is in a process of resistance in the experience that he goes through’ (36). Kristensen emphasizes this point to debut the idea that the delusion would be itself a phenomenon empty of meaning. One must distinguish the patient’s primordial experiences, which appear to him or her as meaningless, and the delusion, which is produced as an attempt to make sense of them. Without this distinction, one cannot account for the fact that the schizophrenic is still a self and that he or she maintains a perspective onto the world. Like the drowning man who cannot swim, the patient continues to struggle[1]:

The creation of an influencing machine in the psychic realm of the schizophrenic subject corresponds to a situation of complete powerlessness within which, nonetheless, the possibility of emancipation is given, although it is remote and inaccessible. This is exactly the paradoxical meaning of the delusion: to express the need of liberation by giving form to the confinement (38).

  1. The Bodily Self and the Sensible Machine

Kristensen’s understanding of the delusion of the influencing machine as at once a passive confrontation to something unknown and an active response to it, is central not only to his analysis of schizophrenia, but also to his philosophical understanding of selfhood (ipseity) in general. Against a conception of the self as characterized by full-fledged autonomy and self-reflective transparency, Kristensen argues the self is ‘structurally constituted by the internal tension between necessity and liberty’ (37). More precisely, Kristensen proposes a two-level model of the self, whereby the higher-level properties (the intentional, cognitive structure which has a degree of autonomy from the world) emerge from lower-level, sub-personal and non-conscious dynamical processes that act deterministically. The reflective, cognitive structure of the self, which is the mark of subjective autonomy, is for our author constituted by three fundamental, pre-reflective dimensions of experience: temporality, embodiment and self-differentiation inherent to pre-reflective experience. For Kristensen, these pre-reflective dimensions manifest dimensions of internal or intra-subjective alterity, which are never fully dominated and controlled by the subject. In Dan Zahavi’s terms, which Kristensen cites approvingly:

Subjectivity seems to be constituted in a way that allows it to relate to itself in an othering way. This self-alteration is something inherent in reflection. It is not something that reflection can ever overcome (Zahavi 2004: 150).

Although the pre-reflective, embodied level of the self is perpetually self-differing within the ‘diachronical’, egoless flow of time-consciousness, Kristensen agrees with Zahavi that one can speak already at this rudimentary level of a ‘minimal self’ (122).[2] However, he disagrees with Zahavi’s view that minimal self does not depend upon social interaction for its development and/or its sustenance. Following Matthew Ratcliffe, Kristensen argues the constitution of minimal self should be re-conceptualized in interpersonal terms: ‘the primitive level of self-experience is always already of an intersubjective nature’ (126).

Our author develops this reconceptualization around two ideas. The first is that minimal self and alterity construct each other reciprocally through a pre-reflective libidinal and social dimension of ‘body schema’ (47, 54, 64). Drawing on the late work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the neurologist and psychoanalyst Paul Schilder (whose influence on Merleau-Ponty he reconstructs in detail), Kristensen conceives bodily ‘sensing itself’ (le sentir lui-même (49)) as a perceptual process that happens independently from conscious intentionality and reflection, and is interdependent on action. According to this account, sensing is a skillful bodily activity in which perception and action are constitutively interdependent, unlike at the personal level, where the action a perception leads to may depend on the agent’s intentions (105, 271). In Schilder’s sense, the body schema designates an integrated set of dynamic sensorimotor processes that organize perception and action in a sub-personal and non-conscious manner. As such, the body schema must be distinguished from what is sometimes called the ‘body-image’, which is the body as an intentional object of consciousness, i.e. the body as experienced as owned by the experiencing subject. For example, the body schema appropriates certain habitual postures and movements automatically. The body schema also incorporates certain significant parts of its environment into its own schema: the painter’s brush becomes an operative extension of her hand; the blind person’s cane becomes a sensing extension of the hand.

At this primordial level, a minimal self emerges from a libidinal, bodily relation to alterity. That is to say, the sensorimotor contribution of the body schema is actually constitutive of selfhood, rather than being merely causally implicated in experiences. But this dimension of embodiment is not of the order of personal ownership: the libidinal production of the bodily self through body schema precedes the constitution of an ego that distinguishes itself from its libidinal investments, and the primordial relation between self and alterity is characterized by a ‘fundamental polymorphism’ (52). This means that the libidinal body forms with the environment a system of reciprocal implication, stimulation and expression, a pre-personal, essentially ‘anonymous and general existence’ in which there is ‘confusion of an individual body schema with that of the other’ (53). Being essentially anonymous, non-personal and non-conscious, the body schema forms a ‘sensible machine’ that is not phenomenologically available to the reflective subject: it is neither the perception or imagination, nor the cognitive understanding, nor the emotional apprehension of ‘my’ body, but rather the libidinal drives that organize the body as it spontaneously interacts with its environment.

From this perspective, the unconscious is this libidinal dimension of my being in the world; if it remains inaccessible to consciousness and to explicit intersubjective sharing, this is not due to its radically intimate [psychic] character, but rather to its pre-reflective, corporeal generality (56).

As Henri Maldiney writes, paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty, the bodily sensing itself forms the ‘untouchable’ side of the self, ‘that of the self which I will never touch [cela de moi que je ne toucherai jamais]’ (Maldiney 2007: 138).

The second idea is that human subjectivity, that is to say, full-fledged selfhood with a degree of ‘ontological depth’ (123), emerges from a cultural-reflective dimension of interpersonal relations and symbolical-cognitive structures, such as language. Our author is fully aware that this second idea, as well as the identification of the libidinal basis of embodiment with the impersonal, non-subjective order of the unconscious, brings him particularly close to the position of Lacan. In fact, one of the strengths of the second chapter of La Machine sensible lies in showing how – despite the different conceptions of the unconscious in the early Merleau-Ponty and Lacan– the late Merleau-Ponty’s identification of the unconscious with the anonymous ‘flesh’ (chair) of the world is compatible with Lacan’s views on the discontinuous, problematic relation between consciousness and the unconscious. Despite valuing this proximity, however, Kristensen is also critical of Lacan. In conceiving the developmental emancipation to the symbolical dimension of subjectivity, Lacan neglected the importance of the productive role of the libidinal body and of affectivity in the constitution of the self. In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, Lacan’s conception of the symbolic led him into an ‘idealist deviation’ (58, 63), conceiving the emergence of subjectivity strictly in terms of the symbolic and conscious mediation of instinctually driven life. For the generative constitution of the self, a model which does not do right to its bodily, affective, emotional and temporal constitution remains incomplete indeed.

By contrast, the psychoanalytically inspired work of the phenomenologist Henri Maldiney and the schizo-analytical work of Félix Guattari (both with and without Gilles Deleuze), demonstrate for Kristensen the possibility of a constructive conversation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, which is in the spirit of Merleau-Ponty’s late project of an ontology of the generativity of the flesh. Reading Guattari, Maldiney, Deleuze and Leopold Szondi in this light (whose influence on Deleuze & Guattari he also reconstructs in detail); our author’s goal is as follows:

… to construct a position from which to sketch a critique of the dominant reception of Merleau-Ponty in the domain of the theory of the self – a reception that draws mostly on the Phenomenology of Perception and leaves aside the objections and new perspectives in his seminars at the Collège de France and in the corpus of The Visible and the Invisible (47).

  1. The Minimal Life of the Self: Three Challenges

There are three general theoretical points that are key to Kristensen’s two-level model of the self that are helpful to see where his challenges lie. These points concern the emergence of self, the relational role of the environment, and the relation between the personal and the sub-personal.

i). Emergence: In thinking about the productive character of the self-organizing dynamics of sensorimotor processes, Kristensen seeks to conceive of a sub-personal level at which the biological and the mental are fundamentally indistinct (108). Against Szondi, who still remained caught in a dualism between blind sub-personal biological processes and the autonomous, mental realm of the self (‘le moi pontifex’ (106)), Kristensen aims to show how minimal self emerges in development from repetitive cycles of sub-personal, ‘infra-subjective’ sensorimotor processes of perception and action (235). In a touching passage on the work of the Feldenkrais therapist and choreographer Mara Vinadia (178-181), Kristensen notes how higher level cognitive processes and symbolical, linguistic forms of communication can be entrapped by sensorimotor disorders; as in the case of an autistic girl of three years and nine months old who expressed herself only by crying and shouting, who didn’t allow any eye contact and who didn’t let anyone get closer to her than three meters.

Faced with any kind of frustration or transgression of these limits, she would respond with immediate violence, bending her body like an arc and hitting her head against the ground. The therapist approaches this situation as follows: keeping her distance from the patient, her face and body averted, she takes on a series of immobile bodily postures, holding each figure for a fixed time interval, followed by a few steps in the room. When Vinadia arrives at her sixth posture, she notices the child has risen and begins to imitate her accurately, step by step. Yet, the patient doesn’t imitate her last posture: rather, she begins with the first, forcing Vinadia to start over from zero, and maintaining a lag of six between her and Vinadia’s postures. Astonishingly, after a number of weeks of repetitive sequences the child allows for more and more proximity, imitating Vinadia’s with lags of 5, 4, 3… up to the point of allowing the therapist to face her, and moving in perfect unison with her, such that it becomes impossible to designate who is initiating and imitating. Eventually, the child allows for more people, even strangers, to approach and address her.

Kristensen emphasizes that the initial refusal to enter into relation is not a sign of indifference but of a hyper-sensibility to the presence of others – an interpretation confirmed by neuro-scientific approaches of autism. The therapist’s work has consisted in establishing a reciprocal relation between the child and herself, a corporeal relation of sensing reciprocity that restored the sensorimotor dynamics constitutive of minimal self. This does not mean, of course, that a sequence of physical gestures alone could implement a cognitive state or a sense of possessing a self. The main takeaway is rather, that aside from higher-level neural processes, sub-personal sensorimotor processes of perception and action make a special, constitutive contribution to the machinery of selfhood.

ii). Environment: The second issue is about the relational role of the biological and social/collective environment and concerns the idea that minimal self is not only intimately embodied, but also intimately embedded in its environment. How does attention to this environmental embedding contribute something important to an understanding of the emergence of minimal self? In this regard, Kristensen distinguishes the kinds of account that typically stress features of organic integration, unitary functioning and sense-making across different levels of bodily embeddedness, from the more radical dynamic viewpoint he finds in Guattari and Deleuze, which stresses features of instability, chaos and heterogeneity characteristic of the energetic dynamics constitutive of minimal self (244-255).

For Kristensen, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of our perceptible integrations with the world in Phenomenology of Perception is exemplary of the first kind of account, as he conceives these integrations as the emergence of one unified ‘flesh’ by means of a reversible ‘chiasmic’ relation between body and environment. This approach emphasizes there is a minimal ‘nucleus’ of stability that constrains and directs the ongoing dynamics, a self-organizing nucleus that enables meaningful interactions to take place between the system and its environment (254, 294). Kristensen refers in this regard to Francisco Varela’s theory of autopoiesis, which defines living ‘autopoietic machines’ by the self-referential organization of the causal interactions taking place in material systems, i.e. the self-referential, recursive organization of the causal loops that determine the particular dynamics within or between systems (254, 260). As the name suggests, autopoietic machines are essentially self-producing: the system produces ‘itself’ through the reciprocal causation between the components of the system and relations between them. One might say that from this viewpoint, one focuses on the product (minimal self) that emerges from dynamic processes: a composed, structured, organizationally closed system of self-production that to a certain extent determines the range and meaningfulness of its material interactions.

On the other hand, Guattari and Deleuze’s approach, which Kristensen is more sympathetic to, places emphasis on a system’s material, intensive dynamics, which are essentially driven by perturbations, ruptures in direction, breakdowns and failures, and which have no meaningfulness at all (they can acquire meaningfulness only for an eventual emergent system capable of controlling these dynamics). For Kristensen, the first, phenomenological point of view, tends to remain too one-sidedly focused upon the result: connections of meaning, autonomy and structure (254).The schizo-analytical viewpoint, however, stresses the primacy of dynamic material processes, and as such it emphasizes the heterogeneity underlying all constructed unity, the initial ‘chaosmos’ from which all order and stability emerge:

The point of view of the schizophrenic reveals the fact that the machinic assemblages [agencements machiniques] do not self-organize according to a meaningful order [selon un ordre sensé], but consist in the coexistence of heterogeneous elements whose mutual presence creates movements, displacements, production of novelty (245).

Within the phenomenological viewpoint, it is difficult to include the dimension of force or intensity. Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the sensible is a philosophy of the birth of meaning [la naissance du sens] and as such it tends to suspend or neglect the dimension of force. (…) The main merit of the notion of the machine within the perspective of a theory of subjectivity is that it allows for the articulation of these two dimensions and to make them appear as reciprocal conditions: the force of the machine is the condition of manifestation of meaningful forms, and the meaningful forms are conditions of apparition of the movements of the machine, which are heterogeneous to the register of meaning and which appear precisely as perturbations of meaningful structures (269).

iii). The relation between the personal and sub-personal: We have seen that instead of assuming minimal self as a kind of a priori form that is necessary for any kind of sensorimotor processing or cognition to take place, Kristensen argues that a better viewpoint on minimal self should help to understand how it might itself emerge from dynamic sensorimotor systems and the role of environmental embeddedness in such systems. These two points about emergence and the role of the environment naturally have consequences on how to view the relation between the personal and the sub-personal.

One way of considering the relation between the sub-personal and the personal is to conceive sub-personal sensorimotor processes as a kind of primordial, mute intentionality of the animal body with regard to the world – a Merleau-Pontian ‘I can’. Again, this insistence on the necessity of a primordial kind of subjective structure that is formally present in organic processes of self-regulation and self-production points to a tension with Kristensen’s point of view. Drawing on the work of Guattari and Deleuze, he stresses that the regulatory structures constitutive of the organism are not only constraining, but are themselves also constrained by material processes of individuation. These are morphodynamic, structure-making processes which grow out of intrinsic physical (thermodynamic, chemical) properties of their material elements. Preceding the passage to functional life, which they organize, these structure-making processes form a kind of static life that is intermediary between inorganic reality and functional life properly speaking. This intermediary order between matter and life fully organized is not a property of a self-referential, organic machine (a homeostatic, autopoietic, or organizational whole), but rather of an inorganic machine (an ontogenetic system of individuation).

Kristensen points out that for Guattari and Deleuze as well the organizational closure of psychic systems manifests itself as the emergence of a minimal self, i.e. an ‘I sense’ (129-130). But this minimal self is always secondary with regard to material processes of individuation, which it emerges from. Unlike Varela, Guattari and Deleuze do not consider the organism’s unity to be derived from a particular type of minimal selfhood or internal unity that is essentially intrinsic to it, over and against the mere aggregates encountered in physical nature. What distinguishes them from the Varelian view of the organism as subjectivity is that they posit rather something like an inorganic machine, which ‘processualizes’ subjectivity. It is not minimal self which is the ground of the process of individuation, but rather it is individuation which grounds minimal self.

La Machine sensible makes a convincing case that in postulating the essence of minimal self is an irreducible first-personness, an intentionality or organizational closure, phenomenological viewpoints risk neglecting the material conditions within which minimal self is produced and meaningful interactions between the self and its environment take place. This is probably due to the fact that these approaches seek to refute reductionist approaches to consciousness, which would reduce the latter to its material basis. Although Kristensen shares this non-reductionist Husserlian spirit, he argues the opposite gesture is no less unfortunate as it risks disregarding the matter and keeping the organizational structure, emptied of all “ontic depth” (121). For Kristensen, psychic phenomena such as minimal self must also be conceived of in materialist terms, which means one must understand sub-personal, generative processes also in terms of specific, concrete mechanisms that are applicable to material elements. The challenge here is to define the continuity between the material, the living and the psychic, whilst acknowledging that material elements are ‘a-signifying’, i.e. heterogeneous to the semiotic domain in which the living and psychic create meaning (65-6, 74). This final challenge, then, is what allows Kristensen to inscribe Guattari’s ‘machinic phenomenology’ (80) into the phenomenological program as formulated by the late Merleau-Ponty:

The ultimate task of phenomenology as philosophy of consciousness is to understand its relationship to non-phenomenology. What resists phenomenology within us – natural being, the ‘barbarous’ source Schelling spoke of – cannot remain outside phenomenology and should have its place within it. The philosopher has his shadow, which is not simply the factual absence of future light (Merleau-Ponty 1960: 176).

References

Maldiney, Henri. 2007. Penser l’homme et la folie. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1960. Signes. Paris: Les Éditions Gallimard.

Stein, Waltraut J. 1970. ‘De-Animation: The Sense of Becoming Psychotic’, p. 87 in: Straus, Erwin W., and Griffith, Richard M. (eds.). 1970. Aisthesis and Aesthetics. The Fourth Lexington Conference on Pure and Applied Phenomenology. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Zahavi, Dan. 2004. ‘Alterity in Self’, p. 150 in: Gallagher, S., Watson, S. , Brun, Ph. and Romanski, Ph. (eds.). 2004. Ipseity and Alterity. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intersubjectivity. Rouen: Presses Universitaires de Rouen.

[1] This metaphor of drowning appears in an article by the phenomenologist Waltraut Stein. She writes: ‘Like the drowning man, the schizophrenic continues to struggle with surprising energy. He tries to “learn to swim” to come to terms with his psychosis in some way. Perhaps if he can go along with it for a time it will cease to disturb him so and he can find a way to overcome it, he thinks. But eventually he finds that it is too late and that there is no going along with it. Whatever he does, this power is always against him. Usually he finds that his efforts even increase his sense of being dispossessed’. (Stein, 1970: 99)

[2] In Zahavi’s characterization, the ‘minimal self’ designates the most fundamental sense of subjective ‘mineness’ or ‘first-personal givenness’ that accompanies all of our experiences and functions as a condition for the spatiotemporal structuring of experience. Cf., Dan Zahavi, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy and Shame. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs, Luca Vanzago (Eds.): Imagination and Social Perspectives






Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology Book Cover




Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology




Routledge Research in Phenomenology





Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs, Luca Vanzago (Eds.)




Routledge




2018




Hardcover £96.00




358

Reviewed by: Mary Edwards (School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University)

In his Philosophical Introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Imagination: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, published in 2004, Jonathan Webber observes that despite the centrality of the imagination to numerous philosophical debates, scant attention has been given to questions such as “What is imagination? What are we actually doing when we imagine? What are we aware of, and what kind of awareness do we have of it?” (2004: xii). The situation has changed dramatically since 2004. Today, questions concerning the character, function, potential, and limits of the imagination are the focus of many exciting debates not only within phenomenology and the philosophy of mind, but also in the fields of psychology, social and political theory, and aesthetics. In short, the imagination is now flourishing as a subject of interdisciplinary scholarship.

Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology takes on the vital task connecting new insights about the nature of the imagination to questions concerning “the meaning and formation of social perspectives” (1). Although it would be incorrect to claim that research into the imagination has hitherto ignored questions about human sociality (see, for example, Castoriadis 1987 [1975]; Lennon 2015; Robinson and Rundell 1994), this edited volume strives to fill some notable gaps in the available research on imaginary dimension of sociality. Specifically, the editors state that their aim is to offer new investigations into the nature of the “interplay between imaginative and social experience” (1), a topic that has been relatively under-researched.

As the subtitle suggests, the volume emphasizes insights from phenomenology and phenomenologically informed research in psychopathology. However, an increased appreciation for centrality of the imagination to human life – along with the recognition that phenomenological methods provide the most satisfactory means to investigate it – means that this emphasis has the potential to furnish a rich interdisciplinary exchange. This potential is realized in this volume, which brings together contributions from leading and emerging scholars working not only in phenomenology and psychopathology, but also in philosophy of mind, epistemology, psychology, social and political philosophy, philosophy of language, and anthropology. What’s more, Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology does some work towards bridging the so-called divide between continental and analytic philosophy by combining insights from thinkers from both traditions.

The volume’s eighteen chapters are divided into five sections: Imagining Oneself; Imagination and Intersubjectivity in Psychopathology; Imagination and the Experience of Others; The Sociality of Imagination; and Aesthetic, Ethical and Social-Political Grounds of Perspective-Taking. These section titles provide an accurate indication of the diversity – in terms of both focus and approach – of the volume’s contents. Although it is impossible to do full justice to all eighteen contributions in the context of a review such as this, in what follows, I shall try to provide a general sense of the achievements of the collection as a whole by discussing it in terms of what I take to be three of its key themes.

Unsurprisingly, empathy is an important theme. What is perhaps more surprising though is that the chapters that offer theorizations and analyses of empathy in are not confined to the third section on Imagination and the Experience of Other but, rather, peppered throughout the volume. Indeed, the idea that our common conception of empathy – as an imaginative action through which one simulates the experience of another in order to feel what s/he feels – is impoverished is continually reinforced throughout the book.

Matthew Ratcliffe’s chapter, titled “Empathy Without Simulation”, is the chapter that most obviously calls our preconceptions about what empathy is into question. Drawing on instances of empathy in clinical practice, Ratcliffe contends that empathy has a “wider applicability” than is generally supposed (199). He criticizes theories of empathy that define it as the (implicit or explicit) simulation of another’s experience for mistaking a characteristic particular to quite sophisticated kinds of empathy – and which is neither necessary nor sufficient for empathy – for the essential characteristic of empathy. Further, he maintains that while phenomenological accounts – such as those defended by Edith Stein and, more recently, Dan Zahavi – correctly underline the centrality of the second-person to empathic experience, they tend to overstate its perceptual (or quasi-perceptual) quality, with the consequence that they render the other’s feelings as visible but vague; they seem incapable of explaining how one subject would be able to “‘see’ why” another feels the way she does (212). Sight is, therefore, gained at the cost of empathetic insight in Ratcliffe’s view. In order to preserve both “the second-person orientation” of empathy and grant its subject insight into another’s perspective, Ratcliffe argues that empathy ought to be characterized as an “openness to potential phenomenological difference between self and other” (205), with more sophisticated forms of it also involving “exploratory” processes, including simulation (202).

Anita Avramides examines simulation and perception accounts of empathy in chapter 11, so as to contrast their respective views on the role of the imagination in “knowing others”, which she takes to be a means not only for predicting others’ behaviour but also for calibrating one’s mental life with regard to theirs (194). She contends that simulation accounts assign a central role to the imagination and perceptual accounts, none at all. This sets the stage for the introduction of Avramides’s own alternative account, which grants the imagination a key role in the process of knowing others, but turns out to be in accordance with perceptual accounts due to its insistence that “the role of the imagination in our coming to know the minds of others is the role it plays in the perception of others, not the simulation of others” (192). Building primarily upon the work of P.F. Strawson, Avramides’s chapter may be of particular interest to readers from continental and phenomenological backgrounds, since it employs an “analytic” frame to defend a perceptual account of perception, which makes an interesting contrast to the phenomenological (quasi-)perceptual accounts of empathy discussed elsewhere in the volume.

Matthias Flatscher and Sergej Seitz’s chapter on “The Ethico-Political Turn of Phenomenology” makes another important contribution to the overarching idea that empathy may function in ways that extend far beyond our conscious efforts to understand others. The authors hold that Husserl’s key insight that “the other is ultimately not a phenomenon in the phenomenological sense” (327) – since the other qua other conscious subject is given to conscious as inaccessible – when considered alongside the “riddle of how empathy becomes indeed possible”, gives us cause to challenge the “two basic assumptions that Husserlian phenomenology shares with the whole tradition of modern Western thought”; namely, the presumed “analytic priority of the subject over the other” and the idea that the “relation between self and other is first and foremost epistemological” (328). Then, through a careful discussion of Emmanuel Levinas’s view that subject’s being is one that “occupied by the other” from the beginning (332), Flatscher and Seitz suggest Levinasian phenomenology – which takes the ethico-political sphere as ontologically more primary than the epistemological – opens up the possibility of conceiving of empathy not as a riddle, but as a the principal ethical event triggered by perception of a face that “speaks” (330).

The idea that intersubjective events play a fundamental role in shaping human experience motivates all the chapters in this collection, in one way or another. It is an idea of central philosophical importance because it prompts us to challenge our preconceptions about the autonomy of the individual, and many of the chapters within this volume attempt – in more or less direct ways – to respond to this challenge. Even Andrea Altobrando’s chapter, titled “Imagining Oneself”, eventually connects the capacity to abstractly conceive of oneself on one’s imagination to the capacity to be a social subject (39). The indispensability of the imagination to social experience is the subject of chapter 8, where Jens Bonnemann seeks to illuminate the fundamental role it plays in Sartre’s conception of intersubjectivity. The novelty of this chapter lies in the fact that rather than examining Sartre’s thought on the imagination in The Imaginary, it focuses on his discussion of “The Look” in Being and Nothingness, in order to highlight the role of the imagination in shaping social experience and, primarily, the experience of being looked at. Bonnemann’s analysis elaborates upon Sartrean insight that when one feels oneself as the object of a look, the “perceptible qualities of the objective Other become the basis for imagining his/her inaccessible view” (161). In the context of Sartre’s phenomenology, it contends that only our interactions with others can show us who we are. This implies that “[w]hen I think about myself, the imagination comes into play as well because I try to imaginarily see myself with the eyes of another” and so the other’s otherness, together with “the inescapability of the first-person perspective”, provide “the basis for the constitutive correlation of interaction and imagination” (165). And, what Sartre sees as being constituted by this correlation is, according to Bonnemann, precisely the subject’s sense of herself as an I.

Fittingly, the chapter that follows Bonnemann’s provides an elucidation of Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to move away from what he regards as overly individualist philosophical accounts of intersubjective experience – which he even finds preserved in Sartre’s phenomenology – by shifting the emphasis from the subjectivity of consciousness to “intercorporeality”. Here, Luca Vanzago explains that intercorporeality for later Merleau-Ponty designates something more than the “incarnated subjectivity” discussed in The Phenomenology of Perception. Although the nature of this “something more” is difficult to define, Vanzago’s suggestion is that it involves a revision of Merleau-Ponty’s earlier sharp distinction between the imagination and perception, as well as “a different articulation between the two” (167). This different articulation is described as being one that presupposes a “relationist” as opposed to a “substantialist” conception of life and nature. It, therefore, gives way to a new relational ontology. This gives us further insight into what the “something more” of Merleau-Ponty’s later notion of intercorporeality consists in, as the “ontologization of the interrelations between subjects” in his later work is described to take “the shape of intercorporeality”, which – rather than deriving from substance – appears to be “more fundamental than substance” (171). But what does this ontological claim have to do with sociality? What does this understanding of intercorporeality imply for intersubjectivity? In responding to these questions, Vanzago underlines the crucial point that if intercorporeality provides the basis for intersubjective experience, then “what a subject is can neither be equated with its own self-consciousness or with its own biological body”, since “Othernes” is “already present as a constitutive part of the subject’s sameness” (172). Why might this view be considered more radical than, for instance, Sartre’s idea that the imagined other is essential to the subject’s capacity to understand herself as an “I-subject”? The answer is because it refuses to posit even a weak sense of self-consciousness as existing prior to the encounter with otherness. The perspective from which the problem of intersubjectivity is considered is, therefore, reversed in Merleau-Ponty’s later work, according to Vanzago. The task for the philosopher approaching this problem is no longer that of accounting for the experience of another but, to the contrary, that of accounting for the experience of the self as an individuated subject.

Silvana Borutti, and Karl Mertens, in chapters 16 and 17 respectively, offer further illuminating changes of perspective in relation to the problem of intersubjectivity. The perspective put forward by Borutti is one that regards “an aesthetical-imaginative relationship with otherness” as “the foundation of meanings comprehension” (288), which is illustrated through an analysis of Kant’s concept of Gemeinsinn (common sense) alongside Wittgenstein’s notion of Übereinstimmung (literally: consonance of voices). Mertens’s chapter asserts that if the perspective that “agents are always already embedded in situations that are fundamentally social” is adopted, “there is no need to transcend the individualistic perspective of the involved agents” and the “problem of explaining how it is possible for individual agents to develop collective intentions that guide their social action no longer arises” (311). Mertens presents “collective social perspectivity” – whereby “the particular social perspectives of social groups and even whole societies are considered in the specificity” (306) – as real possibility, in order to support the adoption of this perspective in analyses of societal change and social progress.

Rudolf Bernet’s chapter, “Spinoza on the Role of Feelings, Imagination and Knowledge in Sex, Love and Social Life”, is an investigation into the possibilities that emerge from considering the metaphysics of intersubjectivity by following Spinoza, for whom “[t]he metaphysical interest in what it means to be a human among other humans and the ethical interest in what it means to lead a good life in relation to other persons are intimately related” (140). Bernet’s close study of Spinoza’s understanding of the passions provides a way of conceiving of “the imagination of others” as something that may be surpassed and transformed into “an intellectual insight into their intrinsic nature” (151).

A different question to that of how the imagination may function in our awareness of others’ experiences is the question of whether we can share imaginative experiences with others. The three chapters comprising section IV, The Sociality of Imagination, take up this question. In chapter 14, Julia Jansen uses a phenomenological approach to consider whether there is “even such a thing as shared imagining” (247). By situating the question concerning the possibility of shared imagining within a phenomenological framework that considers the imagination not merely as a cognitive function that generates private representations “inside” the subject’s mind, but as a dynamic mode of consciousness that can also be embedded in, extended into, and distributed throughout a social world, Jansen shows that the idea of shared imagining is not strange as it might initially seem. What is most illuminating about Jansen’s chapter, is its development of Husserl’s idea that imagined objects are not individual objects (as objects of perception are), but ideal objects that are, in Jansen’s terms, insusceptible to “individuation” (255). When imaginary objects are conceived of in this way, it becomes possible to see how different subjects can still be said to imagine the same thing even if the contents of each subject’s consciousness is not the same: “Despite the different psychological episodes the two [imaginers] may be undergoing, they can still share the content of their imagining because that content is ‘ideal’ insofar as it is irreducible to any real experiences in space and time or any processes underlying them . . . we can both imagine the same (snow white, ‘a just state’) in different ways”, and this “same” turns out to be “merely quasi same” because the imagined object necessarily lacks a distinct position in space and time (256). The possibility of having the quasi same imaginary object as another opens up the further possibility of bringing our imaginings closer together through communication. For instance, if we imagine Madame Bovary together and you tell me that she has brown eyes, so long my imagined Madame Bovary is neutral with regard to eye-colour, I can adjust my image of Madame Bovary to bring it closer to yours. However, Jansen suggests that Husserl’s key insight about sharp distinctions between perception and imagination being phenomenologically unviable is not pushed to its full conclusion in his work, which places too much emphasis on the “creative” aspects of imagination (261). More work must be done then, in Jansen’s view, in order to satisfactorily account for the imaginative aspects of less cerebral forms of collaboration at work in activities such as dancing together, playing music together, etc.

Emanuele Caminada’s exploration of Scheler’s account of the social cognition, in chapter 15, and Thomas Szanto’s normative account of collective imagination, in chapter 13, compliment Jansen’s chapter by investigating the conditions for sharing mental states that are usually construed as “subjective”. First, Caminada’s chapter does a good job of underlining the value of following Scheler when considering different types of social understanding in connection to different forms of sociality, by showing how “paying attention to the role played by different forms of sociality permits to see how direct social perception is constitutively embedded in communities that share a good amount of expression forms” (278). Caminada draws upon Scheler’s famous example of shared grief to provide a typology of social emotions that illustrates how the difficulty in understanding how another feels may be reduced or increased depending on the social situations of both parties, as well as their relation to the object of the emotion in question. Second, Szanto’s chapter considers the phenomenon of “imaginative resistance” – where the subject finds that s/he is unable to engage in imagining a situation s/he finds morally abhorrent – in order to counter the common assumption that there are no limits to what can be imagined. Then, it proceeds to argue that the normative constraints that the imagination is subject to take on a stronger role in collective imaginings. Szanto maintains that an appreciation of the enhanced normative dimension in collective imaginings turns out to be crucial for grasping the ways in which collective imaginings differ from individual imaginings. Drawing on the work of Edith Stein, Szanto reinforces Jansen’s point that subjects can imagine the same object differently, and he helpfully outlines the normative criteria he believes must be satisfied in order for the imagining of an object to be considered collective by developing Kendall Walton’s classic account of collective imagination. A final result of Szanto’s chapter is that it provides a solid basis for more comprehensive accounts of the collective imagination.

The final key theme of this volume, as I see it, is that of the as-if function of the imagination. This function is shown to be essential not only to our theoretical understanding of the imagination, but also to our understanding of certain psychopathological conditions, since the awareness that imaginings merely constitute objects “as if” they were present is vital in distinguishing fiction from reality – as Michela Summa’s chapter “Experiencing Reality in Fiction: Discontinuity and Permeability” superbly illustrates – as well as for separating the real from the unreal within experience. Thus, in addition to revealing the imagination as an essential component of human experience, the volume also offers systematic analyses of its potential to be dangerous and alienating. In chapter 5, Thomas Fuchs provides a fascinating account of the ways in which the as-if function of imaginings may be reduced or altogether lost in schizophrenia by investigating some of its symptoms, including: concretism, defined as “the failure to adequately use an understand the metaphorical or figurative meaning of language”; transitivism, “the loss of self-other distinction or self-demarcation”; and delusion (87-94). Moreover, Fuchs also argues that the transition from the delusional mood – in which aspects of experience take on an unreal character – to full delusion – in which the unreal is mistaken for the real – involves not only a loss of the as-if function, but also a loss of intersubjectivity (92). The centrality of a sense of a shared reality to non-pathological imagining is further explored in the two chapters that follow: Tim Grohmann’s chapter 6, titled, “Intersubjective Expression in Autism and Schizophrenia”, and Zeno Van Duppen’s chapter 7, “The Phenomenology of Intersubjective Reality in Schizophrenia”.

If one expects to find some sustained engagement with Cornelius Castoriadis’s philosophical work on the imaginary institution of society in this volume, one will be disappointed. Castoriadis is mentioned in Szanto’s chapter (224) and briefly discussed in Jansen’s (249-50), but there is no sustained treatment of his work here. As the focus of this volume is on phenomenological analyses of the imagination and social perspectives, it would be unfair to regard the absence of a prolonged engagement with Castoriadis’s work as a flaw. But, it certainly would be a bonus, in my view, particularly as Kathleen Lennon has recently underlined its significance for philosophical investigations into the social imaginary (2015: 71-95). Further, even though Sartrean insights are developed throughout this volume outside of Bonnemann’s chapter in ways that will surely be of interest to Sartre scholars (see, especially, 84, 124-5, 223, 228), some may find it disappointing that there is only one chapter that concentrates on Sartre’s thought on the imagination. My only real issue with this volume, however, is that it has been let down by careless copy-editing in places. Notably, one finds “deem [instead of doom] to failure” on the first page, then “synonymous of [instead of with] ‘supposing’” (2), “how [instead of what] your experience would be like” (11), and “the most evident bias of these current debates consists in its naturalism” (265, emphasis added). Castoriadis’s name is also missing from the Index. Although minor, these errors can distract the reader from the content.

In conclusion, this collection of original articles – some of which were first presented at the 2015 conference “Imagination, Intersubjectivity, and Perspective-Taking”, held at Villa Vigoni, Loveno di Menaggio, Italy – offers a fresh and truly interdisciplinary perspective of on the significance of the imagination in our social lives. But it has much to recommend it beyond its novelty and interdisciplinary scope. First and foremost: it brings together vitally important research on the social features and functions of the imagination that have so far been under-researched. The editors’ helpful introductory chapter outlines the problems raised by the question of the imagination’s role in human life and gives readers a good sense of which chapters will be most relevant to their interests. The chapters themselves each yield new insights into the incredibly complex ways in which the imagination provides structural support for human sociality and indicate areas where further research is required. Altogether, this means that Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology represents an invaluable resource for scholars and advanced students working on the philosophy of the imagination and/or the psychological mechanisms involved in social interaction.

 

References:

Castoriadis, C. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. K. Blamey. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Lennon, K. 2015. Imagination and the Imaginary. New York and London: Routledge.

Robinson, G. and J. Rundell (eds). 1994. Rethinking Imagination: Culture and creativity. New York and London: Routledge.

Webber, J. Philosophical Introduction. In The Imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination, by J.-P. Sartre, trans. Routledge. New York and London: Routledge, 2004.

Rocco J. Gennaro (Ed.): The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness, Routledge, 2018






The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness Book Cover




The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness




Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy





Rocco J. Gennaro (Ed.)




Routledge




2018




Hardcover £175.00




490