From Consciousness to the Body: A Hundred Years of Phenomenology — Part 1 of 2
It Was Not About the Body
I built a page called “Where Does Your “Being” Come From?” It gathers how thinking about the practitioner’s way of being led me to phenomenology.
There is one thing I did not put on that page.
Phenomenology was not, at the start, a philosophy of the body.
When Husserl founded it, what he was working on was consciousness. The body is not at the center. Merleau-Ponty does not put the body in the front of the room until several decades later.
Which means that a bodyworker ending up with phenomenology in his hands is not an accident, but it was not promised from the beginning either. Somewhere along the way, the center moved.
These two parts follow that move.
Part 1 is about the period before the body is in the picture. Why start there? Because this is the period that cleared the space the body would later occupy.
Taking an Assumption Out
The story starts in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century.
The same thing was happening in several fields at once. Take whatever does not show up in experience out of the foundation of the discipline.
Physics is the clearest case.
Newtonian mechanics rests on absolute space and absolute time. There is a container called the world, and things move inside it. But nobody has ever observed the container.
Ernst Mach (1838-1916) took it out. What does not appear in observation does not belong in the foundation of physics. What remains is what appears to the senses, and the relations among those appearances. Einstein started from there and built relativity.
Remove an assumption, and what you can see changes.
Mach himself refused to call this philosophy. He insisted he was doing methodology for natural science, nothing more. What he wanted to keep out was metaphysics — argument about things that never appear in experience.
And he gave his position a name. Phenomenological physics. A physics that drops every metaphysical assumption and confines itself to describing the relations among phenomena as they are directly given.
The word “phenomenology” surfaces here, on the physics side.
When Psychology Tried to Become a Science
At the same moment, in a neighboring field, the opposite was going on.
Psychology was trying to break off from philosophy and become a science. This is the second half of the nineteenth century.
Becoming a science has requirements. So psychology borrowed two assumptions from physics, which had become a science first.
- An objective world exists in itself — a settled world is out there whether or not anyone comes to know it
- Reduction to elements — break the complex into simple parts, and you have explained it once you can reassemble it from them
Accept those two, and the mind has to be broken into elements as well. And each element has to be locatable at a point in space and a point in time. There is no other way to put the mind on the same footing as physics.
A convenient concept that met the requirement was already available. Sensation.
A stimulus excites a sense organ, the excitation travels to the center, and a sensation results. Assume a one-to-one correspondence along that path, and sensation sits neatly inside the objective world. This assumption has a name: the constancy hypothesis.
Experimental psychology was built on that foundation. Wilhelm Wundt opened his laboratory in Leipzig in 1879.
At the level of sensation, it worked. Light intensity against perceived brightness, discrimination of pitch. What could be measured was measured well.
Move up to perception, and it runs aground. In the philosopher Gen Kida’s words: what you run into, unavoidably, is a whole that cannot be reduced to an arithmetic collection of elements — the phenomenon of Gestalt.
What came out of that dead end is the subject of another article (“Looking at the Same Body, Seeing Different Things“). Here I follow the people who went the other way.
Brentano Stopped It at the Door
Franz Brentano (1838-1917). Husserl’s teacher.
In Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) he too set out to ground psychology in experience. But his “experience” was not physiological measurement. It was a description of the workings of the mind themselves.
Where Wundt went toward breaking consciousness into elements, Brentano looked at the way consciousness is directed at something.
His word for that directedness is intentionality. Consciousness is always consciousness of something. Seeing something, feeling something, thinking about something. Remove what it is directed at, and consciousness itself is gone.
Break it into elements and measure them, and the “of something” drops out. The method makes the very thing that makes mind mind invisible.
What Brentano did was stop the methods of physics at the door of psychology. Mach pushed metaphysics out of physics. Brentano kept the method of physics out of psychology. The directions are opposite; both are about what a framework stops you from seeing.
Intentionality, incidentally, comes straight down into the treatment room. Intention and intentionality are not the same thing. Intention is something you set: I am going to do this. Intentionality is the way you are already turned toward the other person before you set anything. It is at work before any technique gets chosen (“The Difference Between Intention and Intentionality“).
Husserl Did the Same Thing, in Psychology
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). Brentano’s student.
Kida explains what Husserl did by setting it against Mach.
Psychology posited physical and physiological processes behind the mind. There is a stimulus, there is excitation, it gets translated into sensation. But nobody experiences that process. What is experienced is the working of the mind as it appears.
The shape is the same as Mach’s move in physics. Take whatever does not appear in experience out of the foundation.
Husserl named the program: descriptive psychology, or phenomenological psychology. A psychology that describes the psychic phenomena one directly experiences, their internal structure, and the relations among them, and does nothing else.
The same name as Mach’s phenomenological physics.
And what was being taken out was the same thing too. What Mach denied by means of his phenomenology, Kida writes, was precisely the assumption that an objective world exists.
Of the two assumptions psychology borrowed from physics, that is the one at the root. An objective world is out there, and the mind ought to be locatable inside it. Reduction to elements and the constancy hypothesis were both demanded by it.
Pull the root and the branches all come loose.
A Repair Job in Psychology Turned into Philosophy
So far this is a story about fixing psychology. Why did it become philosophy?
Kida’s explanation runs like this.
The assumption of an objective world, and the method of reduction to elements that rests on it, were not psychology’s alone. Sociology, history, linguistics — all of the human sciences inherited them from modern physical science, in common, at the same moment in the second half of the nineteenth century, when each of them was breaking off from philosophy to become a science.
Everyone had borrowed the same thing. And every one of those fields was running aground in the same place.
If that is so, Kida continues, then suspending that positing of the world and rethinking matters from the ground up could be a fundamental reform not of psychology alone but of the human sciences in general. And so what Husserl came to conceive was not a mere phenomenological psychology but phenomenology as philosophy — as an attempt at a universal renewal of knowledge.
Repairing one field turned into redoing the whole of inquiry. This is where phenomenology stands up as a philosophy.
And the procedure placed at its center is epoché — the suspension of judgment. Stop asserting, for the moment, that the world is out there existing. Then begin again from what is appearing in experience.
Where Did Epoché Come From?
Kida goes one step further than this.
He has come to think, he writes, that even Husserl’s idea of the phenomenological reduction may be owed in considerable part to Mach’s suggestion.
What he offers in support is the timing.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Summer 1905 | A study meeting with his followers at Seefeld in the Tyrolean Alps. Thought to be when the phenomenological reduction first occurred to him |
| April 1906 | Discussions in Göttingen on “aesthetic objectivity.” Husserl himself acknowledged that these contributed greatly to the idea of the reduction |
| December 1906 | Meets the poet Hofmannsthal, who was likewise under Mach’s influence |
| January 1907 | Writes to Hofmannsthal arguing for a deep kinship between the poet’s “aesthetic intuition” and his own “phenomenological reduction” |
Putting these together, Kida suggests, his claim that Mach’s suggestion exerted a strong influence on the conception of the phenomenological reduction might be granted at least some weight.
He calls it his claim. It is Kida’s own reading, not a settled view. Let it stand here as a view that exists.
The shape is clear enough regardless. Someone took an assumption out of physics, and next door, the same thing happened in psychology and then in philosophy.
What Comes Down into the Treatment Room
Let me come down to the floor for a moment.
In basic Rolfing training you are taught not to judge. You look at the client’s body and you do not decide good or bad. You do not point things out. This is epoché — that much I have written already, in Part 1 of a different series, “What Phenomenology Changes in Practice” (three parts): “When a Name Appears, You Stop Seeing“.
But what is it that you are not judging?
Apply what we have just traced and it comes into focus. What is being taken out is the assumption that a correct body exists in advance, out there.
There is an ideal arrangement of the skeleton, and the closer you are to it the better. If that is how you think, then seeing becomes matching. You compare the body in front of you with the right answer in your head.
Where was that right answer ever observed? It has the same structure as absolute space. Nobody has seen it, and it is taken to be there first.
This is the same point that came up when I worked through the word holistic. The corrective paradigm presupposes that a correct state comes first (“What Is Holistic Healing? — Reexamining Through the Lens of “Paradigms”“).
Suspending judgment turned out to mean putting down the right answer you were holding out in front of you. And starting again from what is appearing now.
The Body Is Not Here Yet
Phenomenology is now standing. Something is still missing.
What Husserl works on is consciousness. Consciousness is directed at something; describe how it is directed.
The body is not at the center there. It can appear as one of the things consciousness is directed at, but it is not treated as the one doing the directing.
Brought into the treatment room, it comes out like this.
You can say: suspend your judgment. But who is doing the suspending? Is it consciousness alone? What are the hands doing? What is happening in how you stand?
What actually happens in training now — being taught your way of being as a way of placing your body — does not follow from phenomenology at this stage.
That changes with the next generation. Before you describe anything, you are already moving in the world — Heidegger says that, and Merleau-Ponty puts the body in the front of the room. Then Varela and Thompson turn it into the language of cognitive science.
Part 2, “A Hundred Years to Reach the Body — How the Body Moved to the Center of Philosophy,” follows that move.
Sources
The sequence running from Mach’s phenomenological physics through Husserl’s phenomenological psychology to phenomenology as philosophy follows Gen Kida, Mach and Nietzsche: A History of Thought at the Turn of the Century (Shinshokan, 2002; Kodansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 2014). The book is in Japanese and has no English edition.
What Kida says above is given as prose rather than as quotation, deliberately. The Japanese edition of this article quotes him directly; turning those passages into English here would produce sentences that are not in the original.
On the link between Mach and the conception of epoché, Kida calls it his own claim. It is not a settled view.
This article is part of the main series for Where Does Your “Being” Come From? — Phenomenology for Bodyworkers. Articles on the themes touched on here are gathered there by group.