Practice as the Epistemology of Phenomenology (1)

Natalie Depraz


“In fact, we are all pragmatists, but we figure out that we are theoreticians, just to be considered as 'serious' by a community of philosophers which in reality is quite mythical.” Nietzsche could have written such a sentence; as a matter of fact, it is by William James, who identifies pragmatism 1) as a method of the freeing of the conscious mind and 2) as a quality of transformation of our relationship to the phenomenal reality.(2) Now, these two features remarkably coincide with Husserl's revolutionary method of the épochē 1) as a move of freeing oneself from the alienating resistance of the world-pregivenness and 2) as a resulting radical change of attitude of the subject with regards to the appearing objects, the emerging events and the other subjects one may encounter in given situations.
    Hence my contention about phenomenology: It is not primarily a (new, that is, post-Cartesian or post-Kantian) transcendental theory of knowledge, even though it intrinsically contains an inherent dimension of knowledge of the phenomena, in the sense of a noetic intuition of invariant essences. The intuited essence, however, is not a universal representation of an object; it is a movement into a specifically directed action. The process of reflecting upon one's own conceptual elaboration therefore amounts to nothing else than to the practicing of how we are involved as subjects in what we are elaborating. In short, there is no rational knowledge before acting: Knowing is knowing-how to handle what appears in a particular and concretely individuated situation.
    The failure of rationalist philosophy is to enclose knowledge within itself without developing it further into a practice: It creates concepts that are abstract closed-up totalities instead of insisting on their relatedness to each other. On the contrary, pragmatism invents a method for what is just being done, not for what is already done or has to be done. Whereas the theoretical point of view relies on the fact that knowledge contains in itself its own aim, the point of view of practice considers knowledge as intrinsically incomplete, indeterminate, open to multifarious possibilities of the future. As a practician, the philosopher works at freeing us from the theoretical closedness. Hence the requirement of alterity as an exemplary structure of openness, being as such the leading thread of the philosophical research. In this respect, alterity is endowed with a double and correlative aspect, either as a self-alterity (one may think here of the many forms of consciousness as a dynamical relationship to oneself, well illustrated in the methodologies in the first person), or as the alterity of others (the interaction with other disciplines as well). Now, such a method founded on alterity as openness is best revealed in the priority given to praxis. Indeed, praxis corresponds to the exemplary “otherness” of the philosopher, which he often does not dare acknowledge, since he or she is most frequently closed up in theoretical arguments and rational contentions.
    However, straightaway I would like to do away with a remnant misunderstanding concerning the distinction between theory and practice. Such a misunderstanding could easily lead to a founded objection of the philosopher in favor of the defense of reason. From my point of view, theory and practice are not opposed as if they were two different activities carried out in the field of science and speculation theoretically and in the useful and technical field practically. On the contrary: They both indicate kinds of attitude or ways of doing, the first one being always “retrospective,” that is, arising in the aftermath (as a reflection upon the action once the latter is completed and achieved), the second one being “prospective,” appearing within the coming action itself, literally coinciding with it. The attitude of the philosopher as a practician therefore amounts to using the concepts as so many guides, or again, as leading instructions, as orienting panels for the action in the very course of its development, rather than considering these concepts as closed-up a priori representations of action. In this respect, the phenomenologist is such a practician: He or she relies on philosophical texts and categorial arguments as so many accurate supports of the description of his or her experience (not as goals in themselves). In fact, lived-experience remains the unique criterion of the lived truth, that is, of the interest of the subject for “evidence” (where we find the echo of the Latin “videre”: to see) in the elaboration of a philosophical problem.
    If the concept brings us to action (to living, thinking, dreaming, speaking, etc.), it means that we do not conceptualize for the sake of conceptualizing. At the very least, we build up concepts in order to build others, that is, in order to produce new ideas and to renew our way of thinking. Conceptualizing therefore is an activity, a process, which means that we do not control what is going to happen: It might be that we produce or construct a concept that was not expected or foreseen first. Thinking, like any other activity, has to do with the risk of not obtaining what was to be expected, but of welcoming something else that could be referred to as the surprise inherent in any undertaking: The risk of action is the risk of indeterminacy, that is, of not knowing apodictically where the running of thoughts are going to lead us. Such a risk has to do with the immersion into and the merging with the “other,” this being other than what we usually identify as ourselves. Now, such a risk intrinsically belongs to life: It is also an essential part of philosophical research, which is then hardly identifiable with the idealistic security of conceptual closure.
    In short, the very process of knowing amounts to a remarkable practice: How is it that knowledge is made of constructed series? How is it that an idea without ceasing brings about other ideas which are linked to each other in a mostly unexpected way? Of course, we may “explain” in the aftermath, in short “rationalize” the kind of connection at work between these ideas, but such a reconstruction does not account for the dynamics of the continual emergence and relations of the thoughts between them. If the thoughts, as so many actions, if the acts, as so many emerging ideas, follow an unceasing process of producing each other and renewing each other, one may think that the dynamic transition between them is the very concern of the phenomenologist as a practician. Reflexion and rationality as closed-up models of thinking are unable to account for such a plastic dynamics. We need something else. Another such thing than the rational closure is what radically modifies the meaning of truth by putting it to work in the framework of the very practice of the subject.
    Now, phenomenology quite uniquely paves the way for such a putting to practice of truth and reason.
    First, Husserl himself calls for such a priority of practice over theory: “Die Praxis steht überall und immer voran der ‘Theorie’.”  (Hua XIV, p. 61).(3) Now, the core of Husserl's method, the reduction, is to be seen entirely under the light of its praxis, and not of its theoretical a priori justification of knowledge.(4)
    In this respect, the phenomenological reduction amounts to operating thanks to three different but related gestures: 1) a suspension of preconceived beliefs; 2) a conversion of my way of looking at the objects; 3) a variation of the different features of the object in order to discriminate its invariant structure.
    Suspending one's own beliefs amounts to observing one's natural tendency to judge and to contend without questioning what is judged and contended. In order to make such an observation, one needs to stop the inner flow of thoughts and to look at what is going on. It does not mean that I will not judge anymore but I will develop the ability to look at my judgements in a different way; in fact, such a conversion of my way of looking at things corresponds to the second correlative gesture of the phenomenological reduction: in order to do so, I redirect my attention from the object as I see it in its content and in its objective properties to the lived act through which I am intending it. In short, I achieve a double inner move (both proprioceptive and kinetic) of putting away (the object in itself) and of coming back to the lived act. In other words, my modality of attention changes radically, insofar as I do not intend the object any longer but the subjective way I am looking at it; in order to situate such gestures of suspension and conversion at a universal level, one still needs to achieve what Husserl calls a “variation”: It literally consists in the procedure of discrimination between the intrinsic properties of an object (an armchair necessarily has “arms”) and its contingent ones (an armchair is not necessarily made of wood). The more features you produce (while using both imagination and perception), the more you are able to refine the inherent quality of the object. While so doing, you are able to lay out the stability of the object (both universal and necessary).
    Now, one further step will aim at embodying such a phenomenological praxis of épochè in a more radical way. It is our thrust toward in On Becoming Aware: An Experiential Pragmatics,(5) where we lay out a threefold dynamical structure of the épochè. The three principal phases are the following:



 
A0. Suspending your “realist” prejudice that what appears to you is truly the state of the world. This is the only way you can change the way you pay attention to your own lived-experience. In other words, you must break with the “natural attitude.”
A1. Redirecting your attention from the “exterior” to the “interior.”
A2. Letting-go or accepting your experience.
    We call épochè the organic whole of the three phases, because phases A1 and A2 imply that the phase A0 is always reactivated at each step. Moreover, this gesture of suspension is also at work, albeit with different qualities, at each of the other steps of the reflecting act (i.e., evidence, expression and validation, which are discussed in the following chapters of the book).

Notes

(1) About this issue, see the coming book by Armand Colin, La phénoménologie comme pratique (Paris, 2006).
(2) W. James, Pragmatism (1907), Indianapolis, Cambridge, Hackett Publishing Compagny, 1981, Lecture II: "What pragmatism means", pp. 25-43, and Lecture VI: "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth", pp. 91-109.
(3) A first step in this direction was taken by N. Depraz in "La phénoménologie, une pratique concrète", Magazine littéraire, Numéro spécial "La phénoménologie", octobre 2000.
(4) See N. Depraz, "The Phenomenological Reduction as Praxis", in: Journal of Consciousness Studies, The View from Within, N°2/3 (F. Varela & J. Shear eds.), 1999, pp. 95-110.
(5) About this pragmatical renewal of phenomenology, see On becoming aware. An Experiential Pragmatics, Amsterdam-Boston, Benjamins Press, 2003, p. 25.