Exile and return: from phenomenology to naturalism (and back again)

Abstract

Naturalism in twentieth century philosophy is founded on the rejection of ‘first philosophy’, as can be seen in Quine’s rejection of what he calls ‘cosmic exile’. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology falls within the scope of what naturalism rejects, but I argue that the opposition between phenomenology and naturalism is less straightforward than it appears. This is so not because transcendental phenomenology does not involve a problematic form of exile, but because naturalism, in its recoil from transcendental philosophy, creates a new form of exile, what I call in the paper ‘exile from within’. These different forms of exile are the result of shared epistemological aspirations, which, if set aside, leave open the possibility of phenomenology without exile. In the conclusion of the paper, I appeal to Merleau-Ponty as an example of what phenomenology without epistemology might look like.

Keywords:

• Husserl
• Quine
• Merleau-Ponty
• phenomenology
• naturalism, epistemology
• transcendental philosophy

Notes

1 The claim will be less surprising to those familiar with Barry Stroud’s writings on Quine, upon which I will be drawing heavily in the discussion to follow. See especially Chapter VI (‘Naturalized Epistemology’) of Stroud 1984, as well as Stroud 2000a and Stroud 2000b. While I have learned a great deal from all these sources, my discussion in Section 3 below will make most use of the first.

2 Recall Husserl’s fundamental question in ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science.’ There Husserl asks: ‘How can experience as consciousness give or contact an object?’ Husserl might be understood as sketching an answer to that question in § 49 of Husserl (1982) when he writes: ‘A something transcendent is given by virtue of certain concatenations of experience. As given directly and with increasing perfection in perceptual continua which show themselves to be harmonious and in certain and methodical forms of thinking based on experience, a something transcendent acquires, more or less immediately, its insightful, continually progressive determination’ (110). The dilemma I am posing in this paragraph concerns this appeal to ‘concatenations of experience’. If such concatenations are understood from the start as being of or about transcendent objects, then they do not provide a non-circular answer to Husserl’s question. But if they are not so understood, then it is entirely unclear how they ever come to be about anything at all. In other words, the dilemma is meant to expose the difficulties inherent in Husserl’s talk in this section about the so-called annihilation of the world.

3 This appeal to activity alludes in a very compressed way to what Husserl calls ‘noesis’. What I am questioning here is the ability of this ‘process’ to provide any kind of genuine explanation, as it would appear to presuppose precisely what it is meant to explain.

4 See Stroud 1984, 242–45 for a fuller discussion of the ramifications of this moment of appreciation in Quine’s naturalized epistemology.

5 Quine uses these three notions interchangeably. All of them are problematic insofar as Quine’s naturalized epistemology is meant to make any kind of headway against traditional forms of skepticism.

6 Merleau-Ponty uses this phrase in the course of making sense of the way the perceived object is always presented such that there is more to it to perceive. To say the object is present as ‘in my vicinity’ is part of an account of the way the object engages me in a bodily way, rather than primarily as an object of thought. As he notes, the givenness of the object is a ‘practical synthesis’, rather than an intellectual one.