This work develops a phenomenological account of mindfulness, and related phenomena. It is divided into two main parts. The aim of part one is to articulate a pre-phenomenological sketch of mindfulness by drawing on passages from some of the classic works of Western literature and everyday life, through an interpretation of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta and by the means of a critical analysis of the contemporary attempts to account for these phenomena. Part two adds further detail to the sketch by entering (...) a dialogue with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. A key distinctions made here is between the transcendental horizon and the open horizon. This difference allows cultivating mindfulness to be defined as the practice of tuning-out of the transcendental horizon and tuning-in to the open horizon. Mindfulness—the potential fruit of tuning-in-tuning-out—is defined as the feeling of being tuned-in to the open horizon.A key findings of this research is that tuning-in-tuning-out is a difference practice than the phenomenological epoché; whereas the latter discloses the transcendental horizon, the former discloses the open horizon—on which the transcendental horizon is dependent. These findings open up the possibility of a phenomenological description of certain phenomena that are closely related to mindfulness. Some of these phenomena are: Mindful attention, which is defined as the function of foregrounding a sub-horizon within the open horizon and the pushing of the other sub-horizons into the background. Concentration : the narrowing down of the open horizon to one of its sub-horizons. Insight : the activity of isolating a sub-horizon, discerning its thingly possibilities, zooming out, isolating a second sub-horizon and discerning its thingly possibilities, and then contrasting the two in such a way that their difference becomes vividly present. (shrink)

Today the phenomenological concept of the lived body figures centrally in several philosophical and special scientific debates. In these wide and widening fields, the concept is used with multiple different meanings. In order to clarify and delineate the debates, this paper provides an explication of the phenomenological-transcendental methods. It argues that these methods help us remove the most fundamental ambiguities of the concept of embodiment by distinguishing between the main constituents of the lived body and by illuminating their mutual relations.

The fruit borne of the debate concerning the economy of the gift carried out between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion in the 1990s continues to ripen into the present with publications like Anthony Steinbock’s lucid It’s not about the Gift: From Givenness to Loving. I challenge and qualify the fundamental argument of this book in dialogue with two principal French proponents of givenness, Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion, against whom Steinbock promotes his strategy of the gift. While Steinbock wishes to (...) displace our relation to the other from giving to loving, I suggest that the discourse of givenness remains the very movement of loving as such. Steinbock occupies a position reminiscent of, but not reducible to, gift-exchange theory, rooted in reciprocity between lover and beloved, whereas I am inclined to move near to the terrain of the unconditioned gift in which loving need not entail reciprocity. My position is not so much a counterclaim as it is a clarification of the inextricable unity between giving and loving. The final section contends that the I enlarge my horizon when I give myself because I do not grasp the other, nor do I expect or obligate the other’s givenness in return; rather in my growth beyond my own self-interest, I allow the other to be given just as the other likes to be given. (shrink)

This article calls into question recent attempts to move beyond, to ‘post’ phenomenology by highlighting the continued relevance of key phenomenological concepts (intentionality and correlationism) for human geography. I show how these concepts are pivotal to addressing problems raised by post-phenomenologists themselves concerning affects and objects. Drawing on recent phenomenological theory, I develop a spatial account of how subject and object cohere in experience. I argue that the very relation between/entanglement of the human and more-than-/non-human can best be accounted for (...) phenomenologically. Such a phenomenological approach promises new ways of understanding various phenomena such as landscape, weather or climate. (shrink)

Basic self-awareness is the kind of self-awareness reflected in our standard use of the first-person. Patients suffering from severe forms of depersonalization often feel reluctant to use the first-person and can even, in delusional cases, avoid it altogether, systematically referring to themselves in the third-person. Even though it has been neglected since then, depersonalization has been extensively studied, more than a century ago, and used as probe for understanding the nature and the causal mechanisms of basic self-awareness. In this paper, (...) I argue that depersonalized patients indeed have an impaired basic self-awareness, and that their study allows us both to favor one specific theory of basic self-awareness and to understand what is wrong with its rivals. According to the favored theory, which I call Cartesian, we are basically self-aware in virtue of being acquainted with ourselves through introspection. (shrink)

This paper argues that Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical philosophy attempts to reopen the question of human transcendence in contemporary terms. While his conception of language as self-transcending is deeply Husserlian, Ricoeur also responds to the analytical challenge when he deploys a basic distinction in Fregean logic in order to clarify Heidegger’s phenomenology of world. Ricoeur’s commitment to a transcendental view is evident in his conception of narrative, which enables him to emphasize the role of the performative in literary reading. The meaning (...) of the self in time provides Ricoeur with a discursive basis for distinguishing his own position from that of Kant and other philosophers in the transcendental tradition. (shrink)

The thrust of the argument presented in this paper is that phenomenological ontology survives the criticism of “correlationism” as advanced by speculative realism, a movement that has evolved in continental philosophy over the past decade. Correlationism is the position, allegedly occupied by phenomenology, that presupposes the ontological primacy of the human subject. Phenomenology survives this criticism not because the criticism misses its mark, but because phenomenology occupies a position that is broader than that of correlationism. With its critique of correlationism, (...) speculative realism rightly identifies a battle that no longer needs to be fought: the battle against 19th century brands of mechanical realism. Free from the impatient and defensive posturing against the mechanization of the human, phenomenology is also free to explore the world beyond its emphasis on human experience. Doing so requires a return to Husserl's discussion of hylé and the “twofold bed” of phenomenology. Phenomenology may emphasize hylé – that is, material; or it may emphasize nous – the world as it appears to or is transformed by consciousness. By returning to Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, a case is made for hyletic phenomenology. Hyletic phenomenology allows for ontological reversibility and recognizes the “unhuman” elements in things. It is hyletic phenomenology that grounds phenomenological ontology after the critique of correlationism has been assessed. (shrink)

This article presents a decades-long conflict in the upper echelons of postwar French academic philosophy between the self-identifying “Cartesian” Ferdinand Alquié, professor at the Sorbonne, and the “Spinozist” Martial Gueroult of the Collège de France. Tracking the development of this rivalry serves to illuminate the historical drama that occurred in France as phenomenology was integrated into the Cartesian tradition and resisted by a commitment to rationalism grounded in a specifically French understanding of Spinozism. Over the course of Alquié and Gueroult's (...) polemic, however, we nevertheless witness a shared concern to preserve philosophy from the reductive tendencies of historicism and its possible assimilation to theology. What is more, the ultimate impasse of this conflict continues to inform the most innovative projects in French thought in the wake of structuralism and the “theological turn” of French phenomenology. (shrink)

This essay explores the practical significance of Michel Henry’s “material phenomenology.” Commencing with an exposition of his most basic philosophical intuition, i.e., his insight that transcendental affectivity is the primordial mode of revelation of our selfhood, the essay then brings to light how this intuition also establishes our relation to both the world and others. Animated by a radical form of the phenomenological reduction, Henry’s material phenomenology brackets the exterior world in a bid to reach the concrete interior transcendental experience (...) at the base of all exteriority. The essay argues that this “counter reduction,” designed as a practical orientation to the world, suspends all traditional parameters of onto(theo)logical individuation in order to rethink subjectivity in terms of its transcendental corporeality, i.e., in terms of the invisible display of “affective flesh.” The development of this “metaphysics of the individual” anchors his “practical philosophy” as he developed it—under shifting accents—throughout his oeuvre. In particular, the essay brings into focus Henry’s reflections on modernity, the industry of mass culture and their “barbaric” movements. The essay briefly puts these cultural and political areas of Henry’s of thinking into contact with his late “theological turn,” i.e., his Christological account of Life and the (inter)subjective self-realization to which it gives rise. (shrink)

ABSTRACT As a welcome contribution to the burgeoning literature addressing the promising intersection between biology and ontology in contemporary continental philosophy, Marjolein Oele's E-Co-Affectivity: Exploring Pathos at Life's Material Interfaces investigates the themes of affectivity and life in their multiple and divergent forms: photosynthesis and growth in plants, touch and trauma in bird feathers, the ontogenesis of human life through the placenta, the bare interface of human skin, and the porous materiality of soil. By seeking out new unexplored territory through (...) her remarkably erudite interventions into the life sciences, Oele critically interrogates the relationship between affectivity and materiality to uncover their shared depth and potential for cultivating ecological interdependence, ethical responsibility, and a renewed political commitment to the local spaces and places constituting e-co-affective communities. (shrink)

A key phrase in working with horses, “bringing up life” is taken in its literal sense of moving expressively and energetically in order to animate the movements of the horses. The phrase also points to both what the radical phenomenologist Michel Henry referred to as the auto-affectivity of life and the vital powers of an essential hetero-affectivity. “Bringing up life” is the kinetic, kinaesthetic, affective expression of this fundamental impression that life is shared with other animate beings and that it (...) is all the more powerfully felt for being so. Working with horses – in spite of all the human conceits that groundwork, liberty training, and the riding disciplines hold – can thus reveal what it means to “bring up life” as more than a topic of very practical interest and specific phenomenological description. Through the impressional investigation of this expression we may well begin to feel our way toward more life-affirming, life-enhancing interactions with others of our own and many other animal kinds. (shrink)

The mind-body problem lies at the heart of the clinical practice of both psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine. In their recent publication, Schwartz and Wiggins address the question of how to understand life as central to the mind-body problem. Drawing on their own use of the phenomenological method, we propose that the mind-body problem is not resolved by a general, evocative appeal to an all encompassing life-concept, but rather falters precisely at the insurmountable difference between "natural" and a "reflective" experience built (...) into phenomenological method itself. Drawing on the works of phenomenologically oriented thinkers, we describe life as inherently "teleological" without collapsing life with our subjective perspective, or stepping over our epistemological limits. From the phenomenology it can be demonstrated that the hypothetical teleological qualities are a reflective reconstruction modelled on human behavioural structure. (shrink)

In this paper I compare how Michel Henry and Henri Maldiney interpret Kandinsky’s heritage. Henry’s phenomenology is based on a distinction between two main modes of manifestation: the ordinary one, that is, the manifestation of the world, and the “manifestation of life.” For him, Kandinsky’s work provides a paradigmatic example of the second, more original mode of manifestation, which is free from all forms of self-alienation. Henry claims that this living through the work of art is transformative; it is akin (...) to ascetic practice or mystical experience that goes beyond the distinction of the subject and the object. Maldiney acknowledges Kandinsky’s work as an attempt to provide access to an a-cosmic and ahistoric experience of one’s inner self; yet for him this is not a positive characteristic. For Maldiney, the key distinction is not between modes of phenomenalisation, but between the dimensions of meaning. For him there is no radical self-transformation which is not a transformation of one’s being-in-the-world and one’s meaning of the world, and so Kandinsky’s a-cosmic paintings cannot induce a true transformation of the self. I conclude that the disagreement of Henry and Maldiney on Kandinsky does not unfold on the level of phenomenological description of concrete aesthetic experience, but on the level of metaphysics. (shrink)

This paper deals with the question of historical facticity in the phenomenological tradition. I argue that taking historicity into consideration in its factical constitution means transgressing the realm of the primordial or existential temporality. Following Ricoeur’s discussion of the idea of the “referential status of the past,” the question of the material foundation of historical meaning-formation, i.e., relation between temporality and materiality will be brought into the forefront of phenomenological investigations. It is with this context in mind that I argue (...) that exploring the conditions of historicity with regard to its factical and material determinations should assume a realist position in phenomenology. (shrink)

In this paper the complex phenomenon of pain is discussed and analysed along different theoretical paths: cognitivism, hermeneutics, phenomenology. The neuro-cognitive approach is exemplified through Paul and Patricia Churchland’s writings; then H.-G. Gadamer’s hermeneutical approach is evaluated. While apparently opposite, they share a common assumption, namely that the body is basically to be conceived of as not really different from the Cartesian Res extensa. Some problems thus arise: in particular, the aspect of reflexivity implied in any experience of pain is (...) overlooked. Accordingly, an adequate approach to feeling pain must take the phenomenological path. This means to discuss Husserl’s but also Scheler’s and Heidegger’s contributions, in order to bring to the fore the complexity of the phenomenon of pain, which shows a particular and paradoxical structure: exposing the subject feeling pain to its own internal exteriority. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on a central phenomenological concept in Michel Henry’s work that has often been neglected: generation. Generation becomes an especially important conceptual key to understanding not only the relationship between God and human self but also Henry’s adoption of radical interiority and his critical standpoint with respect to much of the phenomenological tradition in which he is working. Thus in pursuing the theme of generation, I shall introduce many phenomenological-theological terms in Henry’s trilogy on Christianity as (...) well as how he understands the relationship between phenomenology and theology. In the final sections of the paper, I turn to positively defining Henry’s notion of divine generation and examine the theological implications of it in light of his confrontation and rejection of the doctrine of creation in the book of Genesis found in his book, Incarnation: une philosophie de la chair. Humans are not created but are eternally generated, a bold claim that brings Henry to the brink of a kind of interiorized pantheism or Gnostic dualism. Finally, I offer some critical comments specifically about Henry’s doctrine of generation in light of the tension between auto-affection and hetero-affection and thus how one might think after Henry in light of the basic Augustinian theological distinction between self and God and the intentionality of faith opened up by that distinction. (shrink)

DEFINING THE LIMITS OF THE FIELD. Because 'consciousness and the body' is central to so many philosophical endeavors, I cannot provide a comprehensive survey of recent work. So we must begin by limiting the scope of our inquiry. First, we will concentrate on work done in English or translated into English, simply to ensure ease of access to the texts under examination. Second, we will concentrate on work done in the last 15 years or so, since the early 1990s. Third, (...) we will concentrate on those philosophers who treat both consciousness and the body together. Thus we will not treat philosophers who look at body representations in culture, nor philosophers who examine socio-political bodily practices with minimal or no reference to consciousness. Finally, even with the philosophers we choose to treat, we cannot be comprehensive and will instead make representative choices among their works. With that being said, we will have a fairly liberal definition of continental philosophy, operationally defined as that which makes (non-exclusive) reference to the classic phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Thus we will include the radical.. (shrink)

In this paper, I compare various theories of perception in relation to the question of the epistemological and ontological status of the qualities that appear in perceptual experience. I group these theories into two main views: quality externalism and quality internalism, and I highlight their contrasting problems in accounting for phenomena such as perceptual relativity, illusions and hallucinations (the “problem of perception”). Then, I propose an alternative view, which I callqualitative relationismand which conceives of the subject and the object of (...) perceptual experience as essentially related to one another (hencerelationism) in a process of co-constitution out of fundamental qualities (hencequalitativerelationism). I lend support to this view by drawing on Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, which I complement with a form of neutral monism. I argue that the investigation of the temporal structure of perceptual experience leads us to find at its heart a qualitative process that is more fundamental than the two relata of perception and that gives rise to them. Then, I extend this account of perception into a general theory of intentionality and experience and I develop its implications into a neutral monist metaphysics. (shrink)

While interactions with other animate beings seem mostly to serve our own human interests, there are, at times, fugitive glimpses, passing contacts, momentary motions, and fleeting feelings of vital connection with other life forms. Life phenomenology attempts to realize these relational, interactive and intercorporeal possibilities. It challenges the language game of presuming the muteness and bruteness of non-human creatures and, at best, of speaking for them. It critiques the capture of non-human species within the inhibiting ring of human functions and (...) forms to reveal feelings and flows of interspecies commonality. It brings to expression the experiences of being moved to act and speak with others who do not share the human tongue. In part a critique of the logocentric, anthropocentric phenomenologies of intentionality, life phenomenology is more positively a means of coming to terms with the life-affirming kinetic, kinesthetic and affective dynamics of interspecies relationality. I take up the interrogation of this phenomenality, this humanimality, with the assistance of phenomenological scholarship that lends fuller credence to the experiences we have of moving in concert with other animate beings. In doing so, I aim to show the important insights that life phenomenology offers us in fostering not only greater appreciation of, responsivenss to and connection with other animals, but also in indicating the qualitative dynamics of relating with greater animate consciousness to one anotherof our own animal kind. (shrink)

The realm of intentionality is definitive of phenomenology as a reflective methodology. Yet it is precisely the focus on the intentionalgiventhat has been condemned recently.Speculative realism argues that phenomenology is unsatisfactory since the reduction to the intentional realm excludes the ‘external’, i.e. reality independent of consciousness. This criticism allows me to clarify the nature of intentionality.Material phenomenologyfinds, in contrast, that the intentional realm excludes the ‘inner’. This criticism allows me to discuss the way in whichipseityenters as an element of experience. (...) Intentionality, viewed psychologically, is rightly the distinct arena of phenomenological psychology. However, there is no doubting the difficulty of maintaining a research focus precisely on the realm of intentionality; there areaporiasof the reduction. I discuss some of the difficulties. (shrink)

In this essay, I develop an affective account of subjectivity that draws on two important philosophers within the phenomenological tradition. Many claim that the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Michel Henry are entirely opposed to one another. Levinas is typically thought of as a philosopher of transcendence, while Henry is typically thought of as a philosopher of immanence. By attending to the role that affect plays in the work of both thinkers, I demonstrate that traces of immanence can be located (...) in Levinas, while traces of transcendence can be located in Henry. What this account shows is that the self, because it is affective, is unique and set apart from the world, but also porous and open to being affected by others. (shrink)

This paper is based on the eco-pedagogical aspiration to live with domesticated animals in accordance with Alphonso Lingis's Community of those who have nothing in common. I draw upon this remarkable text as well as Lingis's animal writings in describing moments and movements of pathic community. Such a community in affective affiliation with one another, where symbiotic relations are possible and bodily kinships are exercised, exemplifies what is possible in more rational human communities where domesticating impulses seek to harness the (...) vital powers of coconstitutive life. Of telling significance are predatory threats, the manner in which they appear, and the protectionist responses they occasion. By recasting these threats and responses in terms of motional affordances, it may well be possible to move with non-human creatures, both literally and figuratively, beyond the anthropocentric confines of domestication. Animals with whom we appear to have nothing specifically, or in species terms, in common can show us how to cultivate more pathic communities of our own kind. (shrink)

Salsa dancing, a partnered dance premised on the felt sense of connection, is well suited to an exploration of Henry’s radical phenomenology of immanence and Heidegger’s facticity of life. Birthed in social celebratory contexts, salsa carries a particular motile freedom. What matters most is not how the dance movements are created from an outer frame of reference, but the experience of interactive responsiveness that emerges from unanticipated acts of giving life to another. Connecting to one’s partner and exuding a presence (...) filled with life is revealed in an indepth interview with two-time world champion salsa dancer, judge, choreographer and coach, Anya Katsevman. This interview attempts to invoke the kinetic, kinesthetic and affective registers of the lividness and livingness of salsa dancing. As a phenomenological inquiry into factical life, the inter-view is presented not so much as a matter of shared perspectives or viewpoints, but more in the way of an inter-feeling, a practice of life engagement. This affectively-oriented approach provides both promise and challenge to the field of phenomenology. It invites us to delve more deeply into feeling acts of seeing. It also helps us understand how, through attending more fully to acts of seeing, we can increase the intensity with which we feel the upsurge of life. (shrink)

We investigate the parallelism between aesthetic experience and the practice of phenomenology using Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of “estrangement”. In his letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Husserl claims that aesthetic and phenomenological experiences are similar; in the perception of a work of art we change our attitude in order to concentrate on how the things appear to us instead of what they are. A work of art “forces us into” the aesthetic attitude in the same way as the phenomenological epoché drives (...) us into the phenomenological one. The change of attitudes is a condition of possibility of aesthetic and/or phenomenological experience. Estrangement is an artistic device that breaks the routinized forms of perception: one sees the thing as new and does not just “recognize” it automatically. Shklovsky insists that it is possible if one experiences or feels the form of the work of art—in an affective and even sensuous way. We claim that this is similar to the phenomenological seeing, or intuition, which, according to Husserl, should be devoid of all understanding. Phenomenological epoché can also be described as a philosophical technique that aims to arrest the “ready-made,” “taken for granted,” “pre-given” meanings in order to access a new meaning which is not yet stabilized, the “meaning-in-formation.” It is not enough to turn from what appears to how it appears; one has to oscillate between these conflicting attitudes, or rather to keep them both at the same time thus gaining a kind of a 3D-vision of meaning in its becoming. This double life in two different attitudes can be clarified in terms of Roman Jakobson’s theory of antinomic coexistence between the poetic and communicative functions of language. The notion of “double life in two attitudes” uncovers the role that ostranenie can play in the philosophical transformation of the subject based on variety and essential mobility of the affective components involved. Proposing a phenomenological interpretation of a passage from Samuel Beckett we show how the radicalization of ostranenie can lead even to “meta-estrangement”: to estrangement of the everyday “lack of estrangement.” We conclude with a remark on the productivity of this form of estrangement in the phenomenological context. (shrink)

Many work on flushing out what our consciousness means in cognitive and phenomenological terms, but no one has yet connected the dots on how consciousness and truth intersect, much less how our phenomenal consciousness can form the ground for most of our models of truth. Here, I connect those dots and argue that the basic structure of our phenomenal consciousness grounds the nature of truth as concordance, to harmonize in agreement, and that most extant theories on truth are well explained (...) in that grounding. Said another way, the unifying and bifurcating intentional structure of phenomenal consciousness is the non-epistemic ground of truth, such that most theories of truth can be explained as particular expressions of concordance based upon the differing aspects of that ground. (shrink)