The body maledict: Understanding the method of standpoint phenomenology through the work of Frantz Fanon

In this article, I examine the phenomenological methodology at work in Fanon's revision of the body schema. I argue that he implicitly utilizes a methodology I call standpoint phenomenology and show how this methodology emphasizes experiences that are not “universal” but specific to certain social groups in order to uncover shared ontological structures of experience. Fanon's work illustrates two key theses of standpoint phenomenology: (1) the thesis of situated phenomenology and (2) the thesis of inverted phenomenological privilege. I also draw a deep connection between classical and standpoint phenomenology by showing that it is the phenomenological analysis of breakdown experiences (e.g., corporeal malediction) that enables a standpoint approach to phenomenology. This breakdown methodology is explicitly developed by Heidegger and utilized implicitly by Merleau-Ponty. If I am right, standpoint phenomenology is both a natural development of and a considerable advance on the traditional methodology. This article, then, provides a better understanding of Fanon's place in the phenomenological tradition and, more broadly, makes explicit a new methodology for advancing phenomenological research.     

Can I Be Ill and Happy?

Can one be ill and happy? I use a phenomenological approach to provide an answer to this question, using Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the biological and the lived body. I begin by discussing the rift between the biological body and the ill person’s lived experience, which occurs in illness. The transparent and taken for granted biological body is problematised by illness, which exposes it as different from the lived experience of this body. I argue that because of this rift, the experience of illness cannot be captured within a naturalistic view and propose to supplant this view with a phenomenological approach. The latter approach accounts for changes in the ill person’s relationship to her social and physical world. These changes, I argue, cannot be captured by a naturalistic perspective. I then propose the notion of health within illness as a useful concept for capturing the experience of well-being reported by some ill people. I present empirical evidence for this phenomenon and assess its philosophical significance. Finally, I suggest that adaptability and creativity are two common positive responses to illness, demonstrating that health within illness is possible. The three elements combined – the transformed body, health within illness and adaptability and creativity – serve as the basis for a positive answer to the question posed above.     

Phenomenological reduction in Merleau‐Ponty's The Structure of Behavior: An alternative approach to the naturalization of phenomenology

Approaches to the naturalization of phenomenology usually understand naturalization as a matter of rendering continuous the methods, epistemologies, and ontologies of phenomenological and natural scientific inquiry. Presupposed in this statement of the problematic, however, is that there is an original discontinuity, a rupture between phenomenology and the natural sciences that must be remedied. I propose that this way of thinking about the issue is rooted in a simplistic understanding of the phenomenological reduction that entails certain assumptions about the subject matter of phenomenology and its relationship to the natural sciences. By contrast, Merleau‐Ponty's first work, The Structure of Behavior, presents a radically different approach to the phenomenological reduction, one that traverses the natural sciences and integrates them into phenomenology from the outset. I outline the argument for this position in The Structure of Behavior and then discuss consequences for current methodological issues surrounding the naturalization of phenomenology, focusing on the relationship between empirical sciences of mind, phenomenological psychology, and transcendental phenomenology. This novel exegesis of Merleau‐Ponty's view on the reduction offers new insight into his oft‐quoted remark that the phenomenological reduction is impossible to complete.     

The Phenomenological Film Collective: Introducing a cinematic‐phenomenological research method for social advocacy filmmaking

This paper introduces the vision for the Phenomenological Film Collective ( pfcollective.com ), a research and filmmaking group which utilizes phenomenological research in the service of social advocacy filmmaking. I outline the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of developing a “cinematic‐phenomenological research method” for PFCollective in order to illuminate lived experiences of sociocultural oppression for public viewership via cinematography. The roots of cinematic phenomenology are situated within the theoretical framework of liberation psychology, which calls on psychologists to pursue research that can facilitate consciousness‐raising and social justice across society. The paper provides a methodological overview of existential‐hermeneutic phenomenological research and discusses how its research findings can be disseminated to the widespread public in artistic formats. I demonstrate how filmmaking is an appropriate aesthetic language through which to disseminate phenomenological research about lived experiences of oppression, grounding this proposition in phenomenological philosophy and liberation psychology. I outline the procedural steps for conducting cinematic‐phenomenological research to produce phenomenological films about oppressive sociocultural phenomena. The paper concludes with suggestions for academic disciplines to become more interdisciplinary in our collective pursuit for social advocacy and change.     

The lived experience of disability

In this paper I reflect upon my personal experience of chronic progressive multiple sclerosis in order to provide a phenomenological account of the human experience of disability. In particular, I argue that the phenomenological notion of lived body provides important insights into the profound disruptions of space and time that are an integral element of changed physical capacities such as loss of mobility. In addition, phenomenology discloses the emotional dimension of physical disorder. The lived body disruption engendered by loss of mobility includes a change in the character of surrounding space, an alteration in one's taken-for-granted awareness of (and interaction with) objects, the disruption of corporeal identity, a disturbance in one's relations with others, and a change in the character of temporal experience. The loss of upright posture is of particular significance since it not only concretely diminishes autonomy but affects the way one is treated by others. Such a change in posture is, therefore, particularly disruptive in the social world of everyday life. An understanding of the lived body disruption engendered by disability has important applications for the clinical context in devising effective therapies, as well as for the social arena in determining how best to resolve the various challenges posed by chronic disabling disorders.I should like to thank Frances Chaput Waksler for her helpful comments on my work.     

The Phenomenology of Falling Ill: An Explication,Critique and Improvement of Sartre’s Theory of Embodiment and Alienation

In this paper I develop a phenomenology of falling ill by presenting, interpreting and developing the basic model we find in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1956). The three steps identified by Sartre in this process are analysed, developed further and brought to a five-step model: (1) pre-reflective experience of discomfort, (2) lived, bodily discomfort, (3) suffered illness, (4) disease pondering, and (5) disease state. To fall ill is to fall victim to a gradual process of alienation, and with each step this alienating process is taken to a new qualitative level. Consequently, the five steps of falling ill have not only a contingent chronological order but also a kind of logical order, in that they typically presuppose each other. I adopt Sartre’s focus on embodiment as the core ground of the alienation process, but point out that the alienation of the body in illness is not only the experience of a psychic object, but an experience of the independent life of one’s own body. This facticity of the body is the result neither of the gaze of the other person, nor of a reflection adopting the outer perspective of the other in an indirect way, but is a result of the very otherness of one’s own body, which addresses and plagues us when we fall ill. I use examples of falling ill and being a patient to show how a phenomenology of falling ill can be helpful in educating health-care personnel (and perhaps also patients) about the ways of the lived body.     

医学阐释学--医学哲学研究新视角

医学阐释学是哲学阐释学在医学领域的应用,是医学与哲学交叉的一个新领域.简述哲学阐释学的发展以及其主要观点,并集中讨论了医学阐释学研究的范畴,其中包括:人体的现象学、健康和病患的意义、医患关系、生命伦理学、医学的目的.指出医学阐释学对医学哲学、医学人文科学研究的影响.     

Being at Home: A Feminist Phenomenology of Disorientation in Illness

This article explores the relation among illness, home, and belonging. Through a feminist phenomenological framework, I describe the disorientations of being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and living with mental illness. This research anticipates the consequences of illness and serious (bodily) disorientations for a conception of belonging as seamless body–world compatibility. Instead, this article examines how the (in)stability of bodily dwellings in experiences of disorientation can suggest ways of being in the world that are more attentive to interdependency, unpredictability, and change in human experience. I argue that these types of dwellings function as a more capacious and apposite metaphor to account for variations in belonging. This discussion outlines the ethical importance of building worlds that make room for different ways of being at home in and through our interactions with others. Although my discussion does not supply norms for ethical action, I contend that a feminist phenomenology of illness generates saliences and illuminates sensibilities that can transform our ways of being with others.     

Animal Experience: A Formal-Indicative Approach to Martin Heidegger’s Account of Animality

In the present paper I attempt an interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s analysis of animality, developed in winter semester 1929/1930. My general purpose is to examine Heidegger’s analysis in the wider context of formal-indicative phenomenology as such. Thus I show that in order to develop a phenomenology of animality, Heidegger must tacitly renounce the re-enactment of animal experience in which the formal-indicative concepts of his analysis could gain concreteness, and he resorts instead to scientific concepts and concrete experiments in biology or zoology. This is due to the fact that what I call the a-logical bursts into the field of the phenomenological regard when it is oriented toward animality. I therefore argue that the phenomenology of animality presents us with a paradigmatic case of a tension that is at work in any phenomenon, one between logos and a-logos, between hiddenness and unhiddenness—constituting a basic problem of future research in phenomenology and its approach to intersubjectivity and alterity.     

Phenomenology,Objectivity, and the Explanatory Gap

There has been much recent discussion of whether Husserlian phenomenology might be relevant to the explanatory gap—the problem of explaining how conscious experience arises from nonexperiential events or processes. However, some phenomenologists have argued that the explanatory gap is a confused problem, because it starts by assuming a false distinction between the subjective and the objective. Rather than trying to solve this problem, they claim that phenomenology should dissolve it by undermining the distinction upon which it is based. I shall argue that adopting a phenomenological approach does not provide reason to think that the explanatory gap is not a genuine problem. In assessing the assumptions underlying the gap, we must distinguish between objectivity understood as a stance we can take toward the world and objectivity as the world's having a structure independent of any experience. The explanatory gap can be understood as the problem of finding a place for consciousness in this objective structure. This does not force us to take an objective stance or reduce the methods of phenomenology to those of the natural sciences.     

My body as an object: self-distance and social experience

In phenomenology the body is often referred to as the lived body which makes the world familiar to me. In this paper, however, I discuss bodily self-consciousness in terms of self-distance. Self-distance is the suggestion that bodily self-consciousness consist in a reflective stance where you conceive of your body as a physical thing, an object in the world as well as the subject of bodily experiences. I argue that we are bodily self-conscious because we experience our own body in more than one way and that these ways are not derivative of one another or hierarchically ordered. This latter claim conflicts with certain phenomenological readings of how the body is experienced, one of which I will refer to and discuss as the Familiarity Objection to my idea of self-distance. I end the paper with a discussion of why we need the conception of experienced objectification that is entailed in the notion of self-distance to account for both pathological and non-pathological bodily self-experiences. The notion of self-distance improves our understanding of how the body plays a central role in psychosis for the experience of distorted inter-subjective relations.     

“The Postilion’s Horn Sounds”: A Complementarity Approach to the Phenomenology of Sound-Consciousness?

In the phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time, Edmund Husserl has frequent recourse to sound and melody as illustrations of the processes that give rise to immanent temporal objects. In Husserl’s analysis, there is a philosophically pregnant tension between the geometrical diagrams representing multiple dimensions of immanent time and his intuition that time-points might be no more than fictions leading to absurdities. In this paper, I will address this tension in order to motivate a complementarity approach to temporal objects such as sound and melody that might illuminate the phenomenology of sound-consciousness.     

Gurwitsch’s Phenomenal Holism

Aron Gurwitsch made two main contributions to phenomenology. He showed how to import Gestalt theoretical ideas into Husserl’s framework of constitutive phenomenology. And he explored the light this move sheds on both the overall structure of experience and on particular kinds of experience, especially perceptual experiences and conscious shifts in attention. The primary focus of this paper is the overall structure of experience. I show how Gurwitsch’s Gestalt theoretically informed phenomenological investigations provide a basis for defending what I will call Phenomenal Holism, the view that all the parts of a total phenomenal state metaphysically depend on it. To illustrate how the ideas developed along the way can be used in advancing work on the phenomenology of particular kinds of experience, I draw on them in defending Husserl’s view that we can be aware of abstract objects against a phenomenological objection.     

Expressivity and performativity: Merleau-Ponty and Butler

Until now post-structuralism and phenomenology are widely regarded as opposites. Contrary to this opinion, I am arguing that they have a lot in common. In order to make my argument, I concentrate on Judith Butler’s poststructuralist concept of performativity to confront it with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological concept of expressivity. While Butler claims that phenomenological theories of expression are in danger of essentialism and thus must be replaced by non-essentialist theories of performativity, I hold that Merleau-Ponty’s concept of expressivity must strictly be understood in anti-essentialist terms. Following this line of interpretation, “expressivity” and “performativity”—as well as phenomenology and post-structuralism—are not opposites but partners in the search for an anti-essentialist gender concept. Consequently, feminist phenomenology turns out to be a non-essentialist approach that combines phenomenological and post-structural insights.     

Enacted Others: Specifying Goffman's Phenomenological Omissions and Sociological Accomplishments

Erving Goffman's distinctive contribution to an understanding of others was grounded in his information control and ritual models of the interaction process. This contribution centered on the forms of the interaction order rather than self-other relations as traditionally conceived in phenomenology. Goffman came to phenomenology as a sympathetic but critical outsider who sought resources for the sociological mining of the interaction order. His engagement with phenomenological thinkers (principally Gustav Ichheiser, Jean-Paul Sartre and Alfred Schutz) has to be understood in these terms. The article traces basic differences in analytical focus through a range of phenomenological critiques of Goffman and a comparison of salient aspects of Schutz's and Goffman's writings. While the contrasts have perhaps been overplayed, I conclude that Goffman's thinking about others probably owed more to his pragmatist roots than to his later encounters with phenomenology.Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences in 1992 and 2003. I am grateful to discussions with participants at both meetings, which helped to clarify my ideas on a number of the paper's themes.     

TAKING STOCK OF PHENOMENOLOGY FUTURES

In this paper, I review recent contributions of phenomenology to a variety of disciplines, including the cognitive sciences and psychiatry, and explore (1) controversies about phenomenological methods and naturalization; (2) relations between phenomenology and the enactive and extended mind approaches; and (3) the promise of phenomenology for addressing a number of controversial philosophical issues.     

Back to The Phenomena (of Sport) – or Back to The Phenomenologists? Towards a Phenomenology of (Sports) Phenomenology

Is phenomenology a method or a philosophy (of ‘ontological’ character)? This question is discussed here with a recent philosophical collection of articles about the phenomenology of sport at hand. However, one finds very few concrete phenomena in this volume, but much abstract talk about the authoritative philosophers of ontology and existentialism. This gives the ‘phenomenological school’ a somewhat sectarian character, which is not typical in recent contributions of phenomenology. This review essay broadens out from the current volume under consideration towards a history of phenomenology and a differential phenomenology of phenomenology. It is not clear how much value the volume itself, however, has for the understanding of sport as well as for the understanding of phenomenology. Nevertheless, it documents how phenomenological scholastics approach sport, which may serve as a warning at a time when positivist reductionism seems to have also become mainstream in human and social sciences.