Phenomenology and Constructivism

Posted on November 5, 2010 by admin

A six-part conversation between Jonathan Raskin and Brent Dean Robbins on the similarities and distinctions between phenomenology and constructivism. The conversation took place October 2009 at the 3rd Annual Society for Humanistic Psychology Conference at the University of the Rockies in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
http://www.constructivistpsych.org/
Notes:

Science... c.f Journalism 

Connecting the dots - eg whittieker n psychiatry...

1. Phenomenologcal reduction bracketing

presuppositions catagories assumptios not gettin rid of but loosening 

2. Eidetic  essenses not platonic  but emergent from ambiguities of  lived reality approximate to lived experiences

emergent "essences" from description of lifeworld

other ways of construing.

develop emergent essence from descrition

situated structural description - can change?

is this 

essence - irreducible fixed?

eg Heidigger time space language sociality

emergent essense - not arbitary!?  essential ontological validity but could be framed differently... but has some ontlogical validity

Essential aspect of world(world structure) or meaning process..(persons structure)?.

My construction or world ?!!! 

Important question - everyday we dont raise it...? pragmatically 

we fall into world away from authentic mode of being.. (Exploring what it means to be).(Heidigger)

eg at moment do we worry about that. eg slide on ice

(what about climate change) is the question too loaded to ask...?

Humans ask the question about construction - address question of being...

re anxiety  - cant fall into world - so we ask these questions

thrown into world... hailed?

mystery - make sense via our culture...

if those explanations make no sense then we ask...

dasain attempts to get awy from subject oject

epistemology - subject object

empiricisits rationalist

heidiggere tries to get to point before distiinciton and subject object split... (c.f. ecosystem)

isness..

c.f univocity... Deleuze

what assume when operating practically...

do we address it

.c.f everything anything

noise>bracket>essense c.f journalist

journalism > ontological?

c.f falling into everyday understanding

c.f naive realism

how know phenomenological.....gets to ontology essence

what in service of...?

Phenomenological psychology

Empirical phenomenological

Georger

Husserl -  Meaning -?

- constructivist thinks many meanings

c.f Everything anything system ecosystem

c.f movie interpretation scientific - eg rosebud?

world-self relation?

not just any world...

fusion of horizons - Deepwater Horizon?  Ecosystem?

mutual a common world - basis for intelligebility...

> signification, signifying intention gesture - speech (merleau ponty)

Radical Constructionist - only in touch with own processes

only know own triggers never outside of closed system...****

private world...   but some similar  our structure affecting our experience...

private interior space..

all we know is interior space..

(pushing space between subjects - distance)

if there is a world beyond construction then it may place constraints on how triggers us...

structure and water

constructivism - sees observer perspective - interior spaces and construction outside...

stimulus trigger - > system >  disrupted homeostasis> construction > action

dialextic dialog between construction pressuosition embodied intentinon

husserl

intentionality

noesis act of construction  noema product

phenomenology - tries to start from the subject

constructivist - use many - empirical -   goal is always "practical"

pragmatic goal

not methodologically driven...

mixed methods...

phenomenological philosophy -  bracket [pragmatic...]

(re-instrumental rationality)

c.f knowledge . bfafe ..optimum mutual !!!!! where talk about optimum re mutual aims needs?

instrumentalism... c.f. truth

postmodern-pragmatic...

science - instrumental -

c,f Flattening of levels of the postmodern - hieracy holons ?

digital re natural ontology

phenomenological you are the tool report experience...

empirical -

Kuhn - stop asking questions an build body of thought

other times question

gestalt switch- c.f. sequential

 phenomenological not really science...

Fisher B - 

(misses asking if scientists are really being more than this)

narrative .... 

interperative - common threads

(not see subject object split) 

why is phenomenology a science - in service of a theory...

>understanding.. and systematic....

imaginative variation...... c.f meditation... (c.f. visions meditation)

***phenomenology: identify explore - tendencies of meaning constructions that happen in certain situations.."

not rational /emiricist 

nice

phenomenology of perception- Merleau-Ponty.. read

> 3rd Way... beyond subject object?

Heidigger ...

Intersubjectivity and Constructivism

A way of defending constructivism against criticisms of relativist indifference is to see it as a move from "objective values" to intersubjective values based on communicative empathy...

We hence return to phenomenology...

In phenomenology, intersubjectivity performs many functions. It allows empathy, which in phenomenology involves experiencing another person as a subject rather than just as an object among objects. In so doing, one experiences oneself as seen by the Other, and the world in general as a shared world instead of one only available to oneself.

Early studies on the phenomenology of intersubjectivity were done by Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. His student, Edith Stein, extended the concept and its basis in empathy in her 1917 doctoral dissertation On the Problem of Empathy (Zum Problem der Einfühlung).

Intersubjectivity also helps in the constitution of objectivity: in the experience of the world as available not only to oneself, but also to the Other, there is a bridge between the personal and the shared, the self and the Others.

(The great post-modern reference source)

Phenomenology

Phenomenology (against closure?)

Husserl (Culmination of Cartesianism) Subject-Object

The examination of what appears to conciousness, suspend judgement and describe, certainty not found in external world - a place to stand from which to  conciousness - trancendental ego.. 

 Husserl identifies as  the one thing we are certain of, the solid foundations are , the essential structure of experience... what makes the intentionality (directedness to objects)- conciousness is always about something - so in some sense it is object focussed  - Husserl is a Cartesian, things of the world, phenomenology  (experience based) is one thing ontology is another. Phenomenological reduction by bracketing - Horizon brings with it on the one hand modesty on the other political impotence...

Heidigger disagreed about the subject object focus , eager to be normalised (social conditions) as natural - dasein even fleeing from the crowd is  donne as people do it...we are in the world not just observers seperated...from the world not just concious rational - much auomated unconciousness ready to hand everyday (practical coping)  unready to hand  subconcious  also   present to hand... predicatess & laws - science

Ungrounded - anxiety - dasein - conformist  or hold on to anxiety which stems from tech focus nihilism dasein/care existence  action make sense in terms of context significance back ground of world

authenticity - things  important for the sake of  - future oriented towards role/ aim - eg mutualitypoets language changes life eg "laid back" - more than scientists Makesup own vocabulary as he says it isnt altready there

Dreyfus

On the other hand we have the subjectivist, humanist  approachs  I catagorize these as creative", philosophy of phenomenolgy, denying the universal generalisations of positivism,  and  the validity of Comte's (ref) claims, prioritising Experiential Flow (Lebenswelt) (Husserls Phenomenological lifeworld)  above abstraction. ( I believe it is layered from individual  to a collective/universal aspect)

The common core of phenomenology is the rejection of the empirical claims of positivism. a focus on the individuals subjective experience, the aim of bracketing presuppositons in an attempt to get to the phenomeological truth/ground of experience(!)

Lebenswelt

▪ "But now we must note something of the highest importance that occurred as early as Galileo" (Husserl 1961: 48-49). This something is no longer disinterest or inattention, but rather but rather the deliberate carrying out of a "substitution" (Unterschiebung - which implies a replacing of the authentic with the inauthentic). Something has been taken away and something else put in its place: "the only reality, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable - our everyday life-world" has been replaced by "the mathematically substructed world of idealities." Husserl

add Heidigger

Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed his existential philosophy by drawing heavily upon the works of Edmund Husserl. Merleau-Ponty has been categorized as both an phenomenologist and an existentialist, indicating the difficulty of separating the two schools. Each holds as a primary tenet that the individual defines both self and the world experienced. ... while he thought science and emperical data were paths towards the truth, he also rejected the notion that science, as a set of methods, could discover philosophical truths. As Continental philosophers were rejecting “scientism” in the aftermath of the two World Wars, Merleau-Ponty was suggesting there was still a value in science, but not in science alone.

About the only thing clear in Merleau-Ponty’s view is that nothing can be certain. We struggle to define terms like “self” and “body” which are the very basis for philosophy. If we cannot define “person” without creating a tangled web of relationships, then nothing else can be reduced to an ideal. It would seem the one thing we should know, ourselves, is impossible to know. http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/merleau.shtml

Phenomenology: Heidigger

Martin Heidegger began as a recognized authority in the phenomenological movement and became an existentialist with theistic leanings. Heidegger based his philosophy upon the “hermeneutics of existence” — or the science of existence. The “scientific” method was that of phenomenological reduction.

Kierkegaard accepted the paradox of being defining itself. As a scientist, Heidegger could not accept this paradox. According to Heidegger, a concept must be defined without using itself as reference. The difficulty of definition was confronted by defining “Being” as a collection of concepts.

Dasein

According to Heidegger's writings, human being -- as opposed to human beings -- is comprised of four components: concern, being-toward-death, existence, and moods. Dasein is the act of "being there" in essence. Without being something, there is no existence.

Concern, or Sorge, is the ability to care about the self, in relation to phenomena. Being-toward-death, or Sein zum Tode, represents the finite nature of life. This belief that death defines life complements Søren Kierkegaard's thought that God does not exist, but is real. Existence, or Existenz, represents knowing one is and is changing. Finally, moods, or Stimmungen, are reactions to other beings, further allowing one to define the self.

Dasein requires choices and resulting actions to define the self. These choices allow for an almost unlimited combination of the components of being. Each choice represents a pivotal point in the individuals life -- every choice, even the seemingly minor ones, contribute to the larger definition of self. Choices occur in relation to a timeline, universal and personal. These points in time became the topic of Heidegger's Being and Time.

Existence and Essence

As with Kierkegaard and Sartre, Heidegger believed the existence of a physical body preceded the essence of self. At some point in the development process, a being becomes aware that it exists. This pivotal point in time is when essence begins to form; the individual decides to acknowledge and embrace an essence at this moment.

Because man in the only known being in which essence and existence do not appear simultaneously, man is a unique creature on this planet. All things man creates have essence, or definition, before they exist. In other words, an individual thinks about a creation and its purpose before the creation exists.

Dasien Sorge

Dasien Sorge was Heidegger's term for concern and caring about the self and its existence. When confronted with the world and other beings, the individual feels anxiety and dread. The world appears complex and unsafe -- which it is. As a result, the human being, Dasien, must care for itself as no one else can or will.

Taking care of the self is a sign that the individual recognizes dangers in the universe. Recognizing threats demonstrates an understanding of the physical self. It is reasonable to conclude that concern with the physical self precedes the awareness of concern for the emotional self. While a child might instinctively want human contact, it only understands the need for food and other basic physical needs.

Classes of Dasein Existence

Being-there, Dasein, can be expressed in several fashions. The five modes of Dasein described by Heidegger are: authenticity, inauthenticity, everydayness, averageness, and publicness. Authentic being represents a choice of self and achievement. All other modes represent a failing to embrace the individuality available to all people.

Inauthenticity results from business, preoccupation, excitement, and other external forces. An inauthentic being is working to fit the definitions of others. Averageness takes hold when the individual no longer attempts to achieve and accepts a loss of differentiation. Everydayness represents a person no longer changing or making choices, but the individual might still be different from others. Many with achievement become everyday when they no longer attempt to excel.

Publicness is the complete loss of self for a public image. The individual conforms to preconceptions and opinions. Unlike the celebrity with one achievement, this individual repeats the same achievement over and over, thereby withdrawing from independence. An example would be an artist with one style of expression, repeated with minor variations to please others. By avoiding the new, the different, the individual ceases to create and define a self.

Sein zum Tode:

The only proof that an individual understands existence is the understanding and acceptance of death. While a child can understand the physical need for food, the known consequences of not eating are limited to hunger and illness. Death is a complex concept, beyond the grasp of an immature existence.

The moment one accepts death is the point when essence is brought into focus. Knowing that life is finite reinforces the importance of all further decisions. Poor choices result in the "Existential Guilt" of failure. For the existentialist, the worst of natural sins is a failure to define the self using free will. Guilt cannot be avoided, however, because all individuals fail to take some action, to make some choices.

Desire to Be

Though life is filled with dread that the universe is not safe and guilt that life is every complete, the human being has a desire to exist and define the self. The pursuit of authenticity is constant, for the existentialist. While it cannot be perfected, as we coexist with other beings, individuals must work to define themselves.

Individuals make decisions knowing that others might try to change the universe around them. Business is unavoidable, as is a public role in the society. Only the most dedicated existential being can rise above these challenges to define the self, without regard to others.

Phenomenology : Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed his existential philosophy by drawing heavily upon the works of Edmund Husserl. Merleau-Ponty has been categorized as both an phenomenologist and an existentialist, indicating the difficulty of separating the two schools. Each holds as a primary tenet that the individual defines both self and the world experienced. Merleau-Ponty rejected the Western philosophical tradition of ideals and transcendent “truth” to emphasize human experience. For Merleau-Ponty, experience did encompass more than sense / reason: he included nonsense / un-reason.

Merleau-Ponty suggested that philosophers, scientists, and educators of all manner, were limited by their own physical existences and experiences. One of the challenges presented by Merleau-Ponty is that while he thought science and emperical data were paths towards the truth, he also rejected the notion that science, as a set of methods, could discover philosophical truths. As Continental philosophers were rejecting “scientism” in the aftermath of the two World Wars, Merleau-Ponty was suggesting there was still a value in science, but not in science alone.

Immediate Experience: The Lebenswelt

It was Merleau-Ponty’s contention that science and too much abstraction had resulted in a philosophical tendency to reduce every phenomena, every object, every person to nothing more than collected data. Merleau-Ponty believed that philosophers had a duty to relate things as they were viewed, not as science described them.

We must return to the Lebenswelt, the world in which we meet in the lived-in experience, our immediate experience of the world.

In contrast to Sartre’s contention “we are condemned to freedom,” Merleau-Ponty stated “we are condemned to meaning.” According to his theories, since we are only able to know ourselves based upon the input of others, all our actions, thoughts, and statements define us and have historical consequences. In accordance with the idea that true human nature never ceases to change, Merleau-Ponty described philosophy as “like art, the act of bringing truth into being.”

Body and Subject

For Merleau-Ponty, people are both bodies and subjects of thought. The act of self-contemplation is not the same as the tradutional dualism of mind-body; Merleau-Ponty is not discussing the “spirit” when he writes of the body-subject. There is a curious ambiguity, a tension, between bodily existence and the self as a subject of contemplation. The body-self relationship cannot be severed, yet the two are not one thing. Unity was also considered by Merleau-Ponty when he wrote on the relationships of thought-to-speech and fact-to-value.

You must exist physically before you can think about what it means to exist. This extends the notion of self-definition to recognize that you first need a physical body and brain before you can create an “essence” that is you. Merleau-Ponty wrote in The Phenomenology of Perception:

It is the definition of the human body to appropriate in an indefinite series of non-continuous acts “centers of meaning” which go beyond its natural powers and transform it.

Our thoughts move us to act physically. The complication is that even our thought process is a physical, concrete process of chemical and electrical signals in the brain. Without the physical, there is no self-conception. If self-conception itself is a physical act, then we are always at risk of reducing our view of humanity to the empirical study of the brain.

About the only thing clear in Merleau-Ponty’s view is that nothing can be certain. We struggle to define terms like “self” and “body” which are the very basis for philosophy. If we cannot define “person” without creating a tangled web of relationships, then nothing else can be reduced to an ideal. It would seem the one thing we should know, ourselves, is impossible to know.

In The Structure of Behavior, a study of psychological theories, Merleau-Ponty wrote that his aim was “to understand the relations of consciousness and nature: organic, psychological or even social.” According to Merleau-Ponty, humans and our world are interconnected: neither causes the other, instead we shape and are shaped by our environment. Furthermore, we have both a natural (predefined) existence and the ability to change that nature via conscious choice.

[If] one understands by perception the act which makes us know existences, all the problems we have just touched on [in the book] are reducible to the problem of perception.

The Phenomenology of Perception

Merleau-Ponty’s Primacy of Perception, published in 1945, further explained his theory of perception.

[Our experience of perception comes from our being present] at the moment when things, truths, and values are constituted for us; that perception is a nascent Logos; that it teaches us, outside of all dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself; that is summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action. It is not a question of reducing human knowledge to sensation, but of assisting at the birth of this knowledge, to make it as sensible as the sensible, to recover the consciousness of rationality. This experience of rationality is lost when we take it for granted as self-evident, but is, on the contrary, rediscovered when it is made to appear against the background of non-human nature.

Merleau-Ponty’s theories were advanced in his major work The Phenomenology of Perception. The text opens with a preface and long introduction. Merleau-Ponty used these pages to explain his phenomenology, including both its concepts and procedures. Again, Merleau-Ponty was setting his approach apart from that of Husserl.

Phenomenology, as proposed by Merleau-Ponty, is concerned primary with physical existence. The human body, and its perceptions, is the way we relate to and understand existence. Merleau-Ponty suggested meaning therefore begins with perception. Because meaning begins with perception, Merleau-Ponty found it necessary to discuss how perception works. Perception starts, according to Merleau-Ponty, with the preconscious moment the external comes into contact with the body. The conscious interpretation of input, as neurologists have affirmed, follows the experience by a significant lapse.

Free Will

Merleau-Ponty did not advocate a concept of “absolute free will” in his works. Instead, there are limitations on human choice. The Phenomenology of Perception served to illustrate differences between Jean-Paul Sartre’s understanding of free will and that of Merleau-Ponty. Though a simplification, it has been suggested that Sartre’s “free will” is always absolute. As Albert Camus and others have written, the radical interpretation is that even choosing to live each day is a choice. For Merleau-Ponty, the suggestion that reality is created by individuals was too simplistic. Sartre, according to Merleau-Ponty, was too quick to imply that the only obstacles one faces are created by the individual. Absolute free will is impossible, Merleau-Ponty believed, because real barriers to choice are all around us.

In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty developed the argument that humans are “situated” within their environments. There are physical and cultural limits on choice. While Sartre argued one can always reject such limits, especially cultural limits, Merleau-Ponty proposed conditional free will. People can act on their environments, and via these constant interactions the individual and the environment are changed.

http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/merleau.shtml