Using a different approach that is more about linking phenomenal experience to cognitive and brain function, Lutz, Lachaux, Martinerie, and Varela ( 2002 ) com- bined phenomenological descriptions by participants with EEG recordings and behavioral measures and were able to show, as described by Gallagher ( 2007 ), “cor- relations between experience (attention level), reaction times, and dynamic descrip- tions of the transient patterns of local and long-distance synchrony occurring between oscillating neural populations, specifi ed as dynamic neural signature (DNS)” (pp. 123–124). For more examples of this type of research, see Gallagher and Sorensen ( 2006 ).
So we are situated at a new frontier in affective neuroscience, and standing at this threshold, phenomenology has a unique opportunity to assert its relevance to the problems that are facing this highly infl uential subfi eld of psychological study. Yet some may question why it matters. Why should psychologists and neuroscientists be interested in a phenomenological approach? Within a reductive neuroscientifi c approach, the aim essentially is to eliminate psychological constructs from the picture. However, in contrast, neurophenomenology demonstrates why such a reductionism is neither possible nor desirable, because the structure of experience is more ontologically primary than physiological facts. To demonstrate this, I will turn to the philosophical work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. By gaining an understanding of the ontological primacy of experience, we can later return to address the benefi ts of an approach to emotion that gives primacy to emo- tional experience prior to examination of the physiological correlates of emotion.
Therefore,
form possesses original properties with regard to those of the parts that can be detached from it. Each moment in it is determined by the grouping of the other moments, and their respective value depends on a state of total equilibrium the formula of which is an intrinsic character of ‘form.’ (p. 91)
Now, if behavior is a structure or form, then this means that mechanical thinking really cannot deal with it. Mechanical thinking cannot deal with form because it is a process of taking wholes and exhaustively analyzing them into parts that are exter- nally related to one another. Yet this is precisely not what behavior is if behavior is structure or form. Because structure or form is the basis of both life processes (the province of biology) and mental processes (the province of psychology), mechani- cal thinking cannot understand such processes (Thompson, 2007 ). Why? First, because we cannot break down these structures into parts without losing the form and, therefore, without losing the very structure that is the behavior by defi nition.
Secondly, mechanical analysis fails to appreciate or disclose the way in which behavior and biological forms are constituted by the reciprocal determination of whole and part. What is needed is a different kind of thinking than mechanical thinking—what we need is what Merleau-Ponty calls dialectical thinking . Dialectical thinking permits analysis of dialectical relations.
Here is how Evan Thompson ( 2007 ) defi nes dialectical relations:
… (1) A determines B, and B determines A (bi-directional dependence or reciprocal deter- mination); and (2) neither A nor B is analyzable into discrete, causally effi cacious elements that stand in a one-to-one correspondence (nondecompsability). Furthermore, dialectical relations are dynamic, not static. Hence (3) A alters B, and B alters A; (4) A is altered by B as determinant of B, and B is altered by A as determinant of A; and (5) it makes sense derivatively to speak of A making what A is via B, and B making what B is via A. Given these kinds of close interdependencies, A and B can also be regarded as parts of a larger global whole or pattern when they are dialectically related. Hence (6) what A is a part of is what B is a part of. (pp. 68–69)
If a living, biological organism or a human being is understood in terms of dialec- tical relations, then, says Merleau-Ponty ( 1983 ), we come to realize that “The genesis of the whole by composition of the parts is fi ctitious. It arbitrarily breaks the chain of reciprocal determinations” (p. 50). What about physical stimuli? Are not organisms causally determined by physical stimuli pressing upon them from the outside and within? Merleau-Ponty rejects this conception. Rather, physical stimuli infl uence the organism not in a linear, cause-and-effect chain of events, but rather by eliciting from the organism a global response. They are “occasions,” not “causes.” In other words,
“the reaction depends on their vital signifi cance rather than on the material properties of the stimuli” (p. 161). In other words, we can say that the organism is responding to an informational stimulus, not a physical stimulus—an informational stimulus in the sense that the stimulus is informed by (the form or structure of) the organism.
Within this context, a stimulus is a triggering condition, not an effi cient cause.
The implication is that organisms do not exist in a linear chain of cause- and- effect relations that can be understood mechanically. They exist in a context of sig- nifi cance in relation to meaning. In other words, meaning is intrinsic to the belonging
together of organism and milieu, and thus behavior cannot be reduced to relations of mutual exteriority. How about that for nondualism? There is not an organism over or against an environment, but a single structure within which the organism and milieu are expressed as behavior, or comportment. Therefore, organism and milieu are not related in a stimulus-reaction relationship but, rather, in terms of situation and response. Brain, body, and environment—all are necessarily integral, essential constituents, of behavior, and therefore it cannot be reduced to something located just inside the nervous system. There is no homunculus.
Once we have established the structure of behavior, Merleau-Ponty’s next task is to articulate the emerging complexity of three ascending orders of the natural world:
the physical, the vital, and the human.
The Physical Order. Even at the physical level, there is form or structure. Think of a soap bubble, or a similar physical structure, in which we have a structural stability.
Even here, says Merleau-Ponty, analytical reductionism is not adequate to the task.
Merleau-Ponty writes that such physical forms possess “internal unity inscribed in a segment of space” and resist “deformation from external infl uences by its circular causality” (p. 137)—thus, the physical form is “an individual.” These insights have been borne out by contemporary science, such as Rene Thom’s ( 1975 ) catastrophe theory and Jean Petitot’s ( 1992 ) morphodynamical “physics of phenomenality”
(Thompson, 2007 ).
The Vital Order . What about the vital order? Here we have the emergence of liv- ing structures in the physical order. The shift here is a shift from matter to life. How does a living structure differ from physical structures? They do so in three ways, according to Evan Thompson ( 2007 ):
1. A living cell dynamically produces and maintains itself through the continual chemical synthesis and breakdown (anabolism and catabolism) of material com- pounds, including those that make up its own membrane boundary. Further, they endogenously control and regulate their own external boundary conditions, whereas physical structures do not. Also, as living structures, they are self-pro- ducing and self-regulating unities (p. 73).
2. The material and energetic demands of this entire process orient the cell of necessity toward the environment, not simply in the sense of real and present conditions but also in the sense of conditions that need to be actualized (effect or procured)—in other words, virtual conditions. Organisms shape the physico- chemical environment into a milieu (an Umwelt ) (p. 74).
3. Whereas physical structures can be expressed by a law, living structures have to be comprehended in relation to norms (p. 74). Or, as Merleau-Ponty ( 1983 ) writes, “each organism, in the presence of a given milieu, has its optimal condi- tions of activity and its proper manner of realizing equilibrium,” and the modifi - cation of the milieu by the organism is done in accordance with the “internal norms of its activity” (pp. 148, 154).
The above qualities can be found even in simple bacterial cells, such as E. coli . They are qualities of a new order of nature that is qualitatively distinct from the
physical order, because within this vital order, the organism is an individual whose relationship to the environment is meaningful and normative.
The Human Order . Now to the third order: the human order. The most typical structures and forms of behavior in the symbolic order are symbolic. Symbols and symbolic structures do not exist in isolation but belong to systems of symbols. In these systems, each symbol is related not simply to what it symbolizes—the thing or event for which it stands—but also to other symbols. Within this order, it becomes possible to express in a wider variety of ways and to represent the same thing in multiple ways. With these new abilities comes the possibility of “representing” as having an invariant structure across a diversity of aspects and perspectives. Only in the symbolic order does a yo-yo, for example, remain the “same” yo-yo despite multiple changes across background contexts. Only within this symbolic order can a doorknob remain a doorknob even for a double amputee, for example. In short, the symbolic, human order makes it possible to grasp something as an object—at least in the sense of phenomenology, by which we mean that which remains invariant throughout variations in perspectives and which is understood to be graspable by other people even if no longer by one’s self. The milieu has changed. No longer merely the situation-response of the vital order, the human milieu is a matter of perceived situation-work. Here, reality is intersubjective, and things become “use objects” by which they are endowed with culturally constituted meanings.
A unique feature of the human milieu is its ambiguous status, which results from its dialectical relations. The social and cultural saturation of the human milieu is created by human beings themselves. We can commit ourselves to cultural perspec- tives as a result of symbolic forms—and even still, we nevertheless tend to refuse to allow ourselves to become completely identifi ed with them. We are always trying to pass beyond these identities, always attempting to create new things, always attempting to be generative.
We have not yet directly addressed the issue of the explanatory gap. So now we turn to the issue of consciousness and the structure of behavior. There are two impli- cations of the above analysis: the traditional notions of exteriority and interiority become highly problematic. The natural world, in a certain sense, can be seen to be not simply a matter of exteriority but has its own interiority, sharing structural ana- logs to the mind. And, likewise, what is usually considered to be pure interiority, the mind, is engaged with the world as form or structure, thus not merely interiority.
In other words, Merleau-Ponty’s work on structure and comportment breaks from the Cartesian understanding of nature, which is to understand nature as “a multiplicity of events external to each other and bound together by relations of cau- sality” (p. 3). Instead, for Merleau-Ponty, forms or structures in nature are analo- gous to a melody, in which all of the particular notes are what they are in their relation to all the other notes in the score. But, interiority does not yet exist at the physical level: it emerges at the organic or vital level, where life emerges. Interiority arises because an organism, by defi nition, is a being, which self-produces an inside—literally a body of some kind—which regulates a relationship with the envi- ronment in terms of some kind of norm or equilibrium.
Now, here is the interesting part: without an inside, there can be no outside. So, technically and speaking very precisely, prior to the emergence of life, there is no inside nor outside of anything—not really. There is no interior nor is there any exte- rior. These types of relationship only become possible at an organic, vital level of existence. Now, that is some serious nondualism. Inside and outside are co-emergent.
However, there is an important point to be made here. The co-emergence of inside and outside is not a symmetrical relationship (Thompson, 2007 ). The produc- tion of an inside takes certain precedence, because it is only by virtue of the creation of a body with an inside to regulate the surrounding milieu that an “outside”
emerges. And this is why we cannot think of life in terms of a mechanism without losing something essential to what life is—maybe the most essential thing about life: that it has a kind of inner life. You might even say that it has a soul or psyche.
Now, given this scenario, how are we then to think of consciousness? What becomes of the Cartesian notion of mind? Well, unlike Descartes, we no longer think about consciousness as some kind of interior state of the mind or brain—at least not in the sense of something in a chain of linear cause-and-effect relations—a chain of sensory input and motor output, as we fi nd in most introductory psychol- ogy textbooks. Rather, mind is understood as comportment, behavior, or form and structure—a perceptual and motor attunement to the world. And in the case of the human order, we go one step beyond this and include a particular kind of attunement to the world, in which the environment takes on the character of being symbolic and in which the actions of others are understood intuitively to be intentional. Thus, for example, emotions such as embarrassment cannot be understood adequately from a purely reductive physiological perspective, because it by defi nition eliminates from its purview the social, experiential, and symbolic context in which such an emotion has its meaning and ground.
Naturalism and the Phenomenological Attitude . When we understand the mind and nature in this nondualistic way, what happens to naturalism? And where does the phenomenological attitude come into play? In the phenomenological approach to philosophy, as articulated by Edmund Husserl ( 1982 ) and elaborated upon by Maurice Merleau-Ponty ( 2002 ), the fi rst moment of the phenomenological process is what Husserl called the phenomenological reduction, or the epoché . In this spe- cial attitude, the phenomenologist suspends or brackets his or her assumptions about the natural world and its status. The phenomenologist places in abeyance all those assumptions we bring with us about what belongs on the subjective side of the equation of consciousness and what belongs on the objective side. The phe- nomenologist, in the attitude of the phenomenological reduction, simply describes how things show up in consciousness and their process of unfolding in experience over time. The second moment of the phenomenological method is the eidetic reduction. Here, the phenomenologist asks what constituents of a phenomenon are essential and what are nonessential by, for example, imaginatively varying these constituents in one’s experience. By discarding nonessential constituents, the phe- nomenologist aims to arrive at invariant, thematic structures of transcendental con- sciousness, which Husserl thought were constitutive of all sciences and all human endeavors.
So why then is the phenomenological reduction necessary? Have we not thus far presented what seems to be a compelling argument from an attitude that comes from the empirical sciences—physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology? What need is there for phenomenology?
The phenomenological move becomes a necessary step, because Merleau- Ponty’s ( 1983 ) argument reveals something quite startling, that we take a step back and examine the way in which form gets constituted as an object for cognition in the fi rst place. In what manner does this form appear? What is the epistemological basis or ground for this appearance? Now, we are suddenly thrust into the necessity for transcendental phenomenology. We are now doing philosophy (not phenomenologi- cal psychology! not yet!) and must step back from the view of the empirical sciences to understand the meaning and ground for the empirical sciences.
From within the perspective of the phenomenological attitude, and the eidetic reduction, Merleau-Ponty ( 1983 ) draws the following conclusions (wonderfully summarized by Evan Thompson, 2007 , p. 81):
1. The notion of form is borrowed from the perceived world.
2. The notion of form is encountered in physics only to the extent that physics refers us back to perceived things.
3. Hence, the notion of “physical form” cannot be the real foundation of the struc- ture of behavior, in particular of behavior’s perceptual structure.
4. The notion of form is conceivable only as an object of perception.
The conclusion is mind-blowing in its implications. To put it succinctly, natural- ism as we know it requires the notion of form to even get started, yet form is irreduc- ibly phenomenal. As a result, naturalism as we know it is incapable, in principle, of ever explaining matter, life, and mind, as long as it continues to purge subjectivity from its worldview and as long as it continues in its attempts to reconstitute subjec- tivity out of a subjectless nature. (Note: For serious skeptics, this argument can also be shown by way of quantum physics, e.g., Barr, 2006 ).
Without a careful consideration of what has just been done, it can appear as if Merleau-Ponty is making a case for metaphysical idealism. The argument could be mistaken for an argument that asserts a view that holds that physical forms are con- structions out of a preexistent consciousness. And this is not the case. Actually, Merleau-Ponty is performing a transcendental line of thought. Any object has to be understood in its relation to the mental activity that intends it, but the object is not reducible to the mental activity that intends it. The physical world is not denied.
What is denied, and undermined in a radical way, is the objectivist view of the physical world. In contrast to objectivism, the natural world is translatable into the sciences and into a world of predictable calculations, not because it is examining only the intrinsic properties of autonomous entities but because it holds true for any (human) active subject.
As Michel Bitbol ( 2003 ) elaborates:
[Science] is not supposed to reveal anything of a preexistent underlying absolute reality, nor is it a more or less random aggregate of effi cient recipes. Science is rather the stabilized byproduct of a dynamic reciprocal relation between reality as a whole and a special fraction of it. Defi ning this special fraction of reality qua subject is the reverse side of its actively extracting objectlike invariant clusters of phenomena. (pp. 336–337)
The upshot of this whole line of argument: for any object to be disclosed, consciousness is always already presupposed as that object’s invariant condition of possibility. This results from the transcendental status of consciousness. In other words, we cannot step outside of experiencing subjectivity in a way that would per- mit us to map it onto an external reality purged of any and all subjectivity. Mind emerges from matter and life at an empirical level, but at a transcendental level every form or structure is necessarily also a form or structure disclosed by con- sciousness. With this reversal, one passes from the natural attitude of the scientist to the transcendental phenomenological attitude; one shifts into the epoché .
Where does phenomenological psychology fall into this big picture? Well, once we adopt the transcendental phenomenological attitude, then the experience of the lifeworld that is not within the purview of other empirical sciences is in need of descriptive elaboration, and empirical phenomenology becomes necessary to describe that lifeworld left out of the physical sciences. This phenomenal world or lifeworld also comes to be understood as having a certain ontological priority, since it is only through the lifeworld—the symbolic world and the vital world of inside- outside—that any science can get started. The lifeworld is that medium through which a transcendent world beyond experience can come to be known gradually through careful observation over long breadths of time in systematic observation of accumulating evidence—and nowhere else is this possible as far as we know, but in the human order.
For research on emotion, this revolutionary paradigm shift has very important implications. It suggests that careful and detailed description of the everyday life- world (not to be confused with folk wisdom and anecdotal explanations, which are abstractions from everyday engagement with the world) has to come fi rst before we can press on to discuss physiology. Physiological events are themselves experienced through scientists engaged in everyday activities in the world, and so all perception of physiological events relies upon human receptivity. Integral to all human activity is mood or emotion, which enables the human agent to perceive how other people and things matter to him or her. And so emotion becomes the essential ground within which all cognition occurs so that the human being can decide what actions to take in order to cope with ongoing events in the world.