Overcoming Parallelism: Naturalizing Phenomenology with Goldstein and Merleau-Ponty

Overcoming Parallelism

Overcoming Parallelism:Naturalizing Phenomenology with Goldstein and Merleau-Ponty

Abstract This paper examines two related problems that stand in the

way of the development of an interdisciplinary project that spansbiology and phenomenology. To be sure, each of these disciplinesis interested in the body, but there are two ways through which the body may be understood. Biology examines the corporeal or living body (Kӧrper); phenomenology examines the body of lived experience (Leib). Both problems discussed in this paper stem from this two-fold nature of the body. The first concerns the anti-naturalist position taken by Husserl—a position that emphasizes the lived body and rejects any consideration of the corporeal body. Following Roy et al (2000), I maintain that Husserl’s anti-naturalism is no longer necessary. Kurt Goldstein(1934/1995) is used as an example that demonstrates a biological investigation of the corporeal body that is consonant with a phenomenological perspective, a quality which may also be seen inthe many references it receives from Merleau-Ponty (1942/1963, 1945/1962). The second problem is that of parallelism—also called the body-body problem (Thompson, 2004). A parallelist collaboration between biology and phenomenology maintains the assumption that there are two bodies that must receive special attention. The problem of parallelism is viewed within the research program of neurophenomenology (Varela, 1996). It is argued that this problem dissolves when it is recognized that there are not two bodies— Kӧrper and Leib—but that these are two ways of recognizing one and the same body. Once again, Goldsteinand Merleau-Ponty are used to help describe a two-fold investigation of the body that avoids parallelism and promotes the collaboration which this Special Issue seeks.

[KEYWORDS: Naturalizing Phenomenology, Kurt Goldstein, Merleau-Ponty, holistic biology, flesh]

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Acknowledgments: Sections of this paper were presented at the 2015 Interdisciplinary Coalition of North American Phenomenologists at Brock University, St. Catherines, ONT.1. Introduction

The present Special Issue provides an exciting look at the potential that phenomenological philosophy might have for informing the biological sciences. Indeed, the very formation ofthis Issue is a testament to the work that has already been done to this end. Since both disciplines are concerned with the body,it seems that collaboration would come quite naturally. However,each discipline has historically examined a different conception of the body. Biology examines the corporeal and living body whereas phenomenology examines the body as a vehicle of lived experience. The two problems that will be explored in this paperconcern the different conceptions that the body receives from these two disciplines. The first problem is Husserl’s outright rejection of any science of the corporeal body. The second problem is the parallelist or body-body dualism (Thompson, 2004) that emerges when examinations of the living and lived bodies arebrought together.

From the outset, it appears that any science of the corporeal body would be at odds with the phenomenology described by Husserl (1931/2002). Husserl argues for an anti-naturalistic perspective that rejects any systematic study of the corporeal body, and proposes that an examination of lived experience take

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its place. Such a position would make efforts to naturalize phenomenology impossible. However, following Roy, Petitot, Pauchod, and Varela (2000), I maintain that the naturalistic attitude that Husserl rejected is not that of all his contemporaries. Indeed, the biology of Kurt Goldstein (1934/1995) provides one such example of the amendments that havebeen made to modern biological theory. Like Husserl, Goldstein argues against the mechanization of the organism and proposes a holistic theory of biology to take its place. Despite remaining at the level of the corporeal body, Goldstein’s holistic biology recognizes the dynamic interrelationship between organism and world. Goldstein’s insights are clearly influential to the development of the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (1942/1963, 1945/1962). The application of Goldstein’s analysis in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is used as a first example of the reciprocal relationship between corporeal and lived bodies—that is, a collaboration between biology and phenomenology.

Recognizing that a detailed examination of the lived body isnot necessarily at odds with a science of the corporeal body is an important start for considering the collaboration between phenomenology and biology. However, once one begins to merge them, a new problem arises. This is the problem of parallelism—that is, trying to reconcile two distinct bodies with the one andonly body. Thompson (2004) is tempted to call this the body-bodyproblem and it may be seen in the practice of neurophenomenology.In brief, neurophenomenology attempts to “bridge the gap” betweenthe lived and corporeal bodies (Roy et al, 2000). When practicedas a parallelist project, examinations of the lived body are independent from those of the corporeal body and a new dualism emerges—one between conceptions of the body. The body may be taken as a corporeal entity and examined through third-person methodologies. The body may also be taken as a vehicle of lived experiences and examined through first-person methodologies. This new dualism makes any meaningful collaboration between biology and phenomenology unlikely. Following Thompson, I maintain that the new dualism can be avoided by recognizing that there are not two conceptually distinct bodies— Kӧrper and Leib—butthat these are two ways of recognizing one and the same body.

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That is to say, phenomenology and biology may unite in examining the body. Indeed, this is the position that is maintained by Goldstein (1934/1995) and Merleau-Ponty (1964/1968). Both men argue against a parallelist relationship between corporeal and lived bodies. Once more, the argument is that these provide two ways of recognizing one and the same body and not two independently coherent systems. The neurophenomenology of Varela(1996) is viewed in terms of the parellelist (body-body) problem.While it is easy to find instances of parallelism in neurophenomenology, it is maintained that such a problem is not inherent to neurophenomenology or to the convictions that have guided Varela (Maturana and Varela, 1982; Roy et al, 2000; Varela, 1998; Thompson and Varela, 2001; Thompson, 2004).

Before directly addressing the two problems outlined above, time must be taken to further clarify what is meant by the two conceptions of the body.2. The Corporeal (Kӧrper) and Lived (Leib) Bodies

This paper follows Merleau-Ponty’s (1945/1962) intuition that phenomenology begins with the body. There are, however, twoconceptions of the body: the lived body (Lieb) and the corporeal body (Kӧrper). Roy et al (2000) explain the distinction:

We do not apprehend our body as an external reality among others, but as something we are and live, as whatHusserl terms with the appropriate German word Leib. Heof course does not deny that we can also apprehend our body as a mere object, such as, for instance, when we see our hand as lying on a table instead of seeing it as a moving part of ourselves. In such a case our body is not apprehended as a Leib anymore but as a mere Kӧrper. (p. 36)

The lived body is the prescientific setting where meaningful experience unfolds. It is prescientific because any empirical observation necessarily comes through the vehicle of conscious awareness. The lived body can be explored as the intentional relationship between consciousness and world. Husserl (1931/2002) explains that “what forms the materials into intentional experiences and brings in the specific element of intentionality is the same as that which gives its specific meaning to our use of the term ‘consciousness’…” (p. 176).

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Phenomenology of the lived body also receives Husserl’s endorsement that this is the most interesting place to start (p. 178).

The corporeal body is the scientific, unconscious setting where bodies interact. It can be known from a third-person perspective. Phenomenologists have rejected this conception of abody when it brings with it the assumptions of the naturalistic attitude (defined in Section 3). The corporeal body, when viewedthrough the assumptions of the naturalistic attitude, has been termed “le corps objectif” (the objective body, Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962). Goldstein will be used to demonstrate how the corporeal body is not synonymous with the body as mere object. Indeed, as Roy et al (2000) have explained, few contemporary natural sciences resemble the reductive and mechanistic models against which Husserl (1931/2002), Goldstein (1934/1995), and Merleau-Ponty (1942/1963, 1945/1962) were arguing. However, eager to avoid the assumptions of the naturalistic attitude in the middle of the twentieth century, few phenomenologists have devoted any time to developing a phenomenology that also considers the corporeal body (though examples exist: Merleau-Ponty, 1908-1961, and Jan Patöcka, 1907-1977).

In its refutation of the naturalistic attitude, phenomenology has customarily turned to the lived body. To be sure, the world that I experience through perception does not neatly correspond to the world of stimulus sensation. Gestalt perception psychologist Max Wertheimer explains this in his 1938 paper: “Theoretically I might say there were 327 brightnesses andnuances of colour. Do I have “327”? No. I have sky, house, and trees” (np). Examples like this from Wertheimer line the pages of Husserl’s Ideas and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, demonstratinghow the world that I experience—the world from which scientists make their observations—is not the world that can be divided intoindividual stimuli, each with their independent causal effects.

While turning to the lived body is a useful way of demonstrating the limitations of the naturalistic attitude, its overemphasis gives the impression that phenomenology is only capable of dealing with one thing: the lived body. Its apparent preoccupation with the lived body has led philosophers to draw the project of phenomenology to a close, as Sparrow (2014) has

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done in his book The End of Phenomenology. Such conclusions ignore the thesis central to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology—that the bodyis integral to understanding:

It is the body and it alone, because it is a two-dimensional being, that can bring us to the things themselves, which are themselves not flat beings but beings in depth, inaccessible to a subject that would survey them from above, open to him alone that, if it be possible, would coexist with them in the same world.(Merleau-Ponty, 1964/1968, p. 136)

There are not two bodies that coexist, but one body with two modes of appearance. It is with this in mind that phenomenology may be naturalized—that a collaboration may be found between biology and phenomenology. A naturalized phenomenology attempts to focus on the body in its two-foldness.

I get access to the other by perceiving her body (Kӧrper), but her body, just like mine, is at the same time also apprehended as a Leib, that is, as the basis of an experience or a subjectivity. The duality of our body as Leib and Kӧrper is somehow extended to the otherand plays a key role in the constitution of the other as an alter ego. (Roy et al, 2000, p. 36).What follows is a summary of the chief problem that is faced

by collaborations between phenomenology and biology: it is Husserl’s rejection of the naturalistic attitude. It will be argued that Husserl’s anti-naturalistic perspective must be viewed within its historical and scientific context, specificallywith the state of psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century.3. Phenomenology Rejects the Naturalistic Attitude

Husserl’s (1931/2002; 1970) phenomenology has been built upon a rejection of the naturalistic attitude—that is, the collection of metaphysical assumptions which have dominated the practice of modern science from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. This includes, for example, Newtonian assumptions about objects in space and time. The naturalistic attitude begins with the “world as the universe of realities in the form of mutual exteriority.” Husserl continues,

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Everything real is a body or has a body, but only the body has actual and true coextensio, understood at once temporally and spatially. … Every body [stands] under rules of general causality… so as to be determinable, constructible through truths in themselves according todetermined causal laws which can be discovered inductively. (p. 315)

With the naturalistic attitude, it is first understood that one must begin with bodies in space. Moreover, these relationships are a priori true—that is, determinable in advance of their actual occurrence. Scientific naturalism maintains that the human body may always be understood in this manner. As intimated earlier, phenomenology rejects this position by referring to the lived body—the body of my conscious experience. Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) caricatures a naturalistic account of subjectivity:

Inevitably science, in its general effort towards objectification, evolved a picture of the human organism as a physical system undergoing stimuli which were themselves identified by their physico-chemical properties, and tried to reconstitute actual perceptionon this basis… by establishing an objective science of subjectivity. (pp. 10-11)Phenomenology has argued against the naturalist assumption

that things cause our awareness of them by demonstrating the rolethat persons necessarily play in the process of awareness. Phenomenologists maintain that objects are co-participants in the empirical event of perception. That is, my awareness and the object’s availability to my awareness conspire together in the event of my perception. In the sphere of human perception, this critique of the naturalistic attitude has been so definitive thattoday it seems scarcely conceivable.

Given the phenomenological emphasis on the world of human experience, the critique of the naturalistic attitude has been most compelling in the field of psychology. Naturalist programs of psychology maintain that the intersection between mind and body, which Wundt (1897) describes are two sides of the project of psychology, must necessarily begin with material objects. It follows that my perception is a result of a stimulus in my environment. Wundt would protest having his two-part project

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reduced to the one physical component. Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962)challenges the naturalist rendering of psychology by reminding usthat “the alleged self-evidence of sensation is not based on any testimony of consciousness, but on widely held prejudice” (p. 5).The world does not cause my sensation, Merleau-Ponty argues; the world is my sensation. In my perception, the world and my body are united. Psychology cannot be limited to an analysis of material objects, no matter how thorough or exacting that might be. Doing so only covers half of the project of psychology. Merleau-Ponty explains that psychology had assumed the naturalistic attitude: “The traditional notion of sensation was not a concept born of reflection, but a late product of thought directed towards objects…” (p. 10). Stimulus (sensible) and perception (sentient) do not fit the modern mold of billiard balls on a pool table. “The [sentient] and the sensible do not stand in relation to each other as two mutually external terms, and sensation is not an invasion of the sentient by the sensible (p. 214). Merleau-Ponty explains that instead, “It is my gaze which subtends color, and the movement of my hand which subtends the object’s form…” (p. 214), and so on.

Husserl’s rejection of the naturalistic attitude is understandable when viewed within its historical context. At thebeginning of the twentieth century, the discipline of psychology commits itself to a systematic investigation of human behavior built on a platform of the latter’s mechanical character. Here it is assumed that human behavior is subject to the laws of mechanistic physics. That is, the discipline in the most promising position to investigate consciousness has immediately forsaken its subject matter. Instead, it has systematically reduced human being to discrete processes that can be manipulatedand controlled. For example, behavioral psychologist John Watson(1930) suggests that “consciousness” be left with the “savages” and “mystics” who still believe in voodoo and magic (p. 2). Husserl is speaking out against this kind of procedure. Indeed, he regularly directs his examples towards the practice of psychology. So, too, does Merleau-Ponty in The Structure of Behavior (1942/1963).

While behaviorists can still be found today, they no longer represent the mainstream perspective (though Kelly et al, 2007,

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argue that the current perspectives provide little improvement). Roy et al (2000) argue that Husserl’s fervent rejection of the naturalistic attitude is less salient today because the attitudesof naturalism have transformed considerably over the last century. They write,

The evolution of several of the physical sciences has been dominated by transformations of this kind, that is, by the destruction of an ontological division through the discovery of a new set of properties opening the doors of a unifying level of investigation with a sufficient degree of abstraction and mathematization to be later articulated with lower-level disciplines. They make it possible to reconstructwithin a new single framework phenomena previously seenas belonging to very different regions of reality, and then to proceed to their naturalization. (p. 47)Husserl’s anti-naturalism is important to keep in mind while

moving forward, but it must be remembered that it had been directed towards a different generation of scientists. Indeed, in order to understand even the body of lived experience, the phenomenologist must take into consideration the corporeal body. That is, a change in the corporeal body shapes experience just aslived experience shapes the corporeal body (e.g. Gallagher, 2006). The relationship is reciprocal, like Thompson and Varela (2001) have pointed out. Despite his attention to, and awarenessof the importance of the body in phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty (1964/1968) recognizes that even his analyses fail to acknowledgethe mutual significance of corporeal and lived bodies. He concludes that his preoccupation with the lived body is too limiting. He writes of Phenomenology of Perception:

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The problems posed in Ph.P. [Phenomenology of Perception] areinsoluble because I start there from the “consciousness”-“object” distinction---- Starting from this distinction, one will never understand that a given fact of the “objective” order (a given cerebral lesion) could entail a given disturbance of the relation with the world—a massive disturbance, which seems to prove that the whole “consciousness” is a function of the objective body----it is these very problems that must be disqualified by asking: what is the alleged objective conditioning? Answer: it is a way of expressing and noting an event of the order of brute or wild being which, ontologically, is primary. (pp. 200-201)

In this reflection, Merleau-Ponty acknowledges the mutual significance of the corporeal body (e.g. “a given cerebral lesion”) and the lived body (“relation with the world”). Any earnest analysis must consider both together—that is, they must consider the body in its twofold nature.

The corporeal body does not have to be Merleau-Ponty’s le corps objectif—the body that is reducible to part-processes that interact based on predetermined physical laws. Indeed, the corporeal body of an organism is a living body. Thompson (2004) describes the kind of perspective I will be advancing: “For biology, living being is living organisms; for phenomenology, it is living subjectivity. Where these two meet is in what phenomenologists call the lived body” (p. 384). Goldstein’s (1934/1995) biology will be used to demonstrate a science of the “living organism.”4. The Holistic Biology of Kurt Goldstein

Goldstein (1934/1995) provides a compelling case against theassumptions of the naturalistic attitude without rejecting the investigation of corporeal bodies. Indeed, it is impressive thatGoldstein and Husserl never studied together because both men wound up with strikingly similar criticisms of science practiced with the naturalistic attitude, and both have designed alternative approaches. Goldstein even calls this a crisis: “Thereal crisis arises when, even in the face of new findings, the investigator cannot free himself from the former theory…” (p.

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35). While Husserl has chosen to begin with the lived body, Goldstein has examined the corporeal body.

During his experiences as a military medic, Goldstein had been exposed to a variety of brain-damaged patients who exhibitedmild to severe pathology. During his work, he found it necessaryto revise much of what he had been taught in medical school. Themodern models of medicine in which he had been trained were not only unhelpful, Goldstein found that they actually inhibited him from understanding his patient’s symptoms. If a physician is taught to find a simple cause and effect relationship, then he noticed that many additional behavioral changes get ignored. Forinstance, Goldstein explains how “Even such an apparently simple reaction as the response of the eye to light is by no means limited to the contraction of the iris.” And he continues,

For here we observe a variety of phenomena occurring throughout the body. Although they are perhaps of as much importance for the organism as the contraction of the iris, we usually overlook them because the examination of the pupillary reflex is the purpose of the stimulation. The effect of light on the organism ismanifold, shows itself emphatically, and can be traced in changes in motoric and sensory fields. (p. 173)In order to understand the range of influence or the

unexpected lack thereof, Goldstein finds that the entire patient (and not just the region of interest) and their milieu must be considered. This was contrary to the medical hegemony of the time, which emphasized reductionism (and perhaps still does; see Bendelow, 2011 and Ahn et al, 2006).

Goldstein enters the field of medical biology at a time whenit was customary to reduce an organism to its smallest fundamental parts. “The aim of research, according to this conception” Goldstein explains, “is to dissect the behavior of the organism in order to discover those ‘part processes’ that canbe considered as governed by mechanistic laws and as unambiguous,elementary reactions to definite stimuli” (p. 69). Modern medicine maintains that cells, tissue, organs, and organ-systems can all be best understood if reduced to the smallest parts that make them up. Moreover, it is maintained that these parts interact in a simple, uni-directionally causal manner. Goldstein

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finds this approach fruitless. Instead, he pays his patients thekind of scrupulous attention that has been a hallmark of phenomenological investigation. Through a tireless devotion to understanding them, he develops a new model of medicine—a holistic model—that he finds more adequately addresses the individual cases with which he deals. “The more carefully we investigate…,” he writes, “the more we find that, whenever a change is induced in one region, we can actually observe simultaneous changes in whatever part of the organism we may test” (p. 174). And the changes are not easily circumscribed to the organism proper either. “Each organism lives in a world,” and that world is “by no means something definite and static but is continuously forming commensurably with the development of theorganism and its activity” (p. 85).

Goldstein maintains that to understand a simple biological phenomenon like the contraction of an iris in response to light, one must consult the Gestalt of which it is a part—that is, the entire organism as well as its environmental milieui. While descriptive, a simple cause-effect relationship yields far less information than a description of the Gestalt formation. Goldstein challenges the assumptions of the naturalistic attitudeby demonstrating how the mechanical stimulus-response relationship in biology always leaves important information out. Indeed, any stimulus belongs to a network of environmental stimuli, and any response belongs to a network of organismic responses. This is even true in the case of the patellar reflex:the reflex response that has long been taken for granted by unwitting patients in the examining room.

The “patellar reflex,” for example, has proved to be byno means invariably constant in the same individual. Itvaries, depending, among other things, on the position of the limb, on the behavior of the rest of the organism, and on whether or not attention is paid to it. … This shows that, even under normal conditions, the reflex cannot be properly understood in terms of the isolated mechanism alone. (pp. 70, 71)We have seen that Goldstein was dissatisfied with

naturalistic approaches to medical biology. He amends these by expanding his biological investigation from independent parts to

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broader Gestalts—the unities to which the seemingly independent parts belong. 5. Gestalt Theory and Merleau-Ponty’s Flesh

As it has been applied by Goldstein, Gestalt Theory maintains that organisms operate together in unities or wholes. For biology, this means that a given organic system cannot be thought to occur independently of other organic systems. Each organ-system, organ, tissue, and cell can only be understood within the context of the entire Gestalt of which they are a part, and one can only determine the Gestalt by carefully observing the entire system.

Gestalt theory may be understood through two axioms: first, no Gestalt can be reduced to its smallest divisible units withoutlosing something essential and meaningful from the whole. Second, and as a corollary to the first, no thing can remain unchanged by a change in its environment. Together, these axiomsmaintain that organism-world may be understood as a system wherein every element exists in possible relationship to the others. One immediately sees how the apt demonstration of these axioms is devastating to the nineteenth century naturalistic attitude in two ways. The first is by rejecting the idea that organic relationships can be known in advance. Referring once more to the patellar tendon reflex, we can see that the cause-effect relationship between mallet and tendon does not always result in the latter’s contraction. Even these basic relationships break down, and these breakdowns can be understood when considering their context. The second, by corollary, is a rejection of the assumption that it is always best to reduce an organism to its smallest parts. Doing so maintains that part-processes behave the same way regardless of context—a position which fails to understand meaningful deviations in such behavior.Moreover, these limitations to the naturalistic approach have been derived from Goldstein’s examination of the corporeal body.

That the organism cannot be understood as a collection of individual parts is the thesis of Gestalt Theory. Gestalt psychology (i.e., of Wertheimer, 1938 and Köhler, 1947/1957) begins with a similar thesis, but it is different from what Goldstein has in mind for a couple of reasons that will be important for understanding its significance at present.

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Wertheimer (1938), who was consulted earlier, writes of perception:

When we are presented with a number of stimuli we do not as a rule experience “a number” of individual things, this one and that and that. Instead larger wholes separated from and related to one another are given in experience; their arrangement and division areconcrete and definite. (np)

Gestalt psychology observes that perception cannot be reduced to objective stimuli. A stimulus emerges from a particular context,and can only be understood within this contextual background. While this is a step away from the naturalistic attitude, there remains a relic of the latter. Wertheimer maintains that the arrangement of stimuli is definite. He recognizes that a stimulusmust be taken as a Gestalt, but does not admit the same of the perceiving entity (Goldstein’s organism). Goldstein argues that the gestalt psychologists place the primacy of the gestalt-formation in the stimulus. Take Wertheimer’s law of proximity forexample, which maintains that the more proximity that objects share, the greater the likelihood that they will emerge as a perceptual unity. Due to their proximity, even a random collection of letters will be perceived as a word—as is the case with “xhsorkt.” Gestalt psychologists understand that the proximal congregation of objects is what allows the proximity effect to take place.

Goldstein chooses to keep the term “Gestalt” when he describes his approach to biology, but is careful to discern it from the psychological format. With Wertheimer, Gestalt formation occurs within a particular organization of stimuli in the environment: it is to this arrangement that the Gestalt belongs—that is, the unity exists outside of the perceiving organism. Goldstein does not allow this privilege, and explains that a “good Gestalt, or whatever one chooses to call it, represents a very definite form of coming to terms of the organism with the world…” (p. 287)—this is to say that the unity includes the organism; the relationship is reciprocal and not uni-directional.

Gestalt Theory is useful for understanding the organism’s biology because it recognizes that the organism and environment

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mutually participate in the event of actualization: the organism changes and the environment changes; both must be consulted for understanding the biological event. Goldstein uses the equation [phenomenon = organism + environment] to understand psychopathology, anxiety, courage, as well as psychotherapeutic and pharmacological interventions.

Goldstein leaves behind the naturalistic attitude which assumes that biology can be best understood by reducing an organism to its smallest parts and working out the a priori relationships between them. His alternative recognizes the reciprocal relationship between organism and environment, howeverthis might emerge. He has used the term Gestalt Theory to describe this approach because it does not ontologically privilege organism or environment: both are simultaneous.

Earlier it was argued that Goldstein’s corporeal analyses and Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of lived experience overlap considerably. In addition to the attention that Goldstein receives in Merleau-Ponty’s own scholarship, one also finds a similarity in the recognition of simultaneous processes. For Goldstein, organism and environment are simultaneous and reciprocally related systems; for Merleau-Ponty, corporeal and lived bodies are simultaneous.

Merleau-Ponty introduces his concept of flesh in his final text, The Visible and the Invisible, published posthumously. Flesh is theintersection of subject and object, self and world, and it necessarily includes both: neither can be removed without fundamentally changing the other. This conception is not absent from his (1945/1962) Phenomenology, but as “flesh,” Merleau-Ponty is clear that he does not restrict his analysis to the lived body. Flesh may be understood as the overlapping of lived and corporeal modes of the one and only body.

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The flesh is not matter, in the sense of corpuscles of being which would add up or continue on one another to form beings. Nor is the visible… some “psychic” material that would be—God knows how—brought into beingby the things factually existing and acting on my factual body. …The flesh is not matter, is not mind, isnot substance. To designate it, we should need the old term “element,” in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of ageneral thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an “element” of Being. (p. 139)

Here we can find Merleau-Ponty playing around with the relationship between lived and corporeal bodies, demonstrating that one is never reducible to the other. As flesh, the body is not two independent entities—a corporeal body and a lived body. But it also is not one—either a corporeal or a lived body. It is not one, and it is not two—referring here to Varela’s (1976) paper of a similar title (in Thompson, 2004). It is the body, and the body has two “leaves.” Moreover, Merleau-Ponty characterizes the world of flesh in a manner similar to Goldstein’s organism-environment Gestalt. “The flesh of the world is not explained by the flesh of the body, nor the flesh ofthe body by the negativity or self that inhabits it—the 3 phenomena are simultaneous” (p. 250). 6. Neurophenomenology and the Problem of Parallelism

In addition to providing an example of a science of the corporeal body that satisfies Husserl’s rejection of the naturalistic attitude, Goldstein has also been used to demonstrate how biology and phenomenology might be mutually informative. However, this is precisely where the second problememerges—the problem of parallelism.

The parallelist assumption maintains that the corporeal bodyand lived body occupy two different worlds. This is important tooutline because it is the trap that has ensnared one of the greatest collaborations between phenomenology and biology: neurophenomenology. When the two types of body were presented

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earlier—the lived body and the corporeal body—it could have been argued that this introduces a dualism: that two separate bodies exist and are connected in a predictable, uni-directional manner.This is a parallelist position.

The parallelist assumes that there is a complete, coherent, and consistent lifeworld, and that this co-operates with a complete, coherent, and consistent world that is corporeal. The parallelist assumes that a collaboration between phenomenology (human science) and biology (natural science) succeeds only when it has connected both independent analyses. The parallelist mustexercise due diligence by collecting two separate sets of data—one devoted to the corporeal body through scientific instruments,and another devoted to the lived body through in-depth interviewing.

A parallelist phenomenology seems to be the task of neurophenomenology as it has been described by Francisco Varelaii

(1996). It is here that Varela outlines three basic axioms of a neurophenomenological investigation: 1) the irreducibility of conscious experience; 2) the necessity of using first-person approaches; and 3) the method of combining first- and third-person approaches for studying human experience. The first axiomis perfectly in line with the present paper. However, following Goldstein we would expand the application of “irreducibility” so that it applies to corporeal bodies as well (and not just the body as it manifests in my experience). The second axiom is alsoin line with the present paper: first-personal methods are necessary for yielding phenomenological data. Varela’s parallelism emerges in the third axiom, specifically the manner in which first and third methodologies are combined. Here is a quote that captures the division between the corporeal and lived bodies as he sees it:

Only a balanced and disciplined account of both the external and experiential side of an issue can make us move one step closer to bridging the biological mind—experiential mind gap. … This means that both domains of phenomena have equal status in demanding a full attention and respect for their specificity. (p. 343)In keeping with the parallelist position, one finds the

following in a neurophenomenological study: subjective data that

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is collected in the form of questionnaires or interview questionswhich ask for descriptions about experience. This data is considered alongside the objective data that has been yielded by the brain-scan software. The neurophenomenologist hopes to connect the two independent worlds of human being—living and corporeal—e.g. by looking for the neural signature of certain self-reported subjective states like awe and wonder (Reinerman-Jones et al, 2013), hypnosis (Cardena et al., 2013), social interaction (Froese et al, 2012), and so on.

Insofar as it remains committed to a position of parallelism, neurophenomenology will remain divided: always forced to decide which aspect of the investigation (neuroscientific or phenomenological) will receive the greatest fidelity from the researcher, and which will be appended afterwards. Practiced in a parallelist manner, neurophenomenology maintains that any event can and should be interpreted in terms of the corporeal and the lived body, but that their reciprocal relationship is ignored. The parallelist position succeeds in avoiding the Cartesian mind-body dualism by replacing it with a new body-body dualism. Thompson (2004) summarizies:

[W]e don’t understand how an objective physical processcould be sufficient for or constitutive of the subjective character of a conscious mental process. Butstating the problem this way embeds it within the Cartesian framework of the “mental” versus the “physical,” and this framework actually promotes the explanatory gap, and so is incapable of resolving it. What we need instead is a framework that doesn’t set “mental” and “physical” in opposition to each other, orreduce one to the other.” (p. 384)Goldstein (1934/1995) has found it necessary to reject

parallelism as a starting point because this misses the point: both are abstractions from the bodily event. The corporeal body abstracts the organism from its environmental context with which it is always engaged exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen and so on. The lived body abstracts a meaningful and linear narrative from its historical, environmental, and social contexts. “We considered it necessary,” Goldstein explains, “to reject any

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parallelism between bodily and mental events and maintained that any such relation is conceivable only indirectly by reference to the whole of the organism” (p. 293). There are not two bodies, but two modes of the one body. Merleau-Ponty (1964/1968) similarly rejects parallelism when he writes:

[T]here is no more cause…to envisage a parallelism which is a complete misconception, since it presupposes that the soul and the body contain respectively a bound series of phenomena or of ideas each rigorously continuous. … No correspondence… is to be sought between what takes place “in the body” and what takes place “in the soul” in perception: it is the same misconception to seek in the physical world an exact equivalent of the organisms or in the organisms an integral microcausal explanation…. (pp. 232-233)

7. The Body, Corporeal and Lived The body is not only corporeal—it is not exclusively

analyzable through the tools of biology. The body is also not only the vehicle of lived experience—it is not exclusively analyzable through the tools of phenomenology. This is the body-body problem (Thompson, 2004), and its navigation is important for the successful development of any interdisciplinary project between biology and phenomenology. Like Varela (1996) and Roy etal (2000), Merleau-Ponty was also working on bridging the gap between the two forms the body occupies. He finds their union inthe recognition of the two roles the body plays in the formation of a gestalt.

In his final working notes of the same text that introduces his concept of flesh, Merleau-Ponty is still looking for a way past the parralelist bind in which his phenomenology has found itself. This is where he has left himself the reminder: “My bodyis a Gestalt and it is co-present in every Gestalt” (p. 205). The emphases are on “Gestalt” and the fundamental ontological signifier “is.” After spending many volumes distancing himself from the body of natural science, i.e. le corps objectif (1942/1963), Merleau-Ponty turns to the corporeal body.

By approaching the body as a unity in-itself as well as a constituent of other unities, Merleau-Ponty outlines the starting point for the dialogue between two modes of investigating the body.

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Were he to have instead maintained that the Gestalt formation wasa unique capacity of consciousness, then he would have fallen back into the same trap from his Phenomenology—namely, that one must always begin with consciousness. “Every Psychology that places the Gestalt back into the framework of ‘cognition’ or ‘consciousness’ misses the meaning of the Gestalt” (1964/1968, p. 206). When beginning here, any attempt at neurophenomenology is stuck with the body-body problem of parallelism.

Instead, Merleau-Ponty writes that his “body is a Gestalt and that it is co-present in every Gestalt.” With it, he acknowledges atwofold capacity of being that is afforded through his body. It is not one, and not two (Varela, 1976). First, his body represents a Gestalt: this is his body as a subject. That is to say that he can understand psycho-physical phenomena from the starting point of their congregation about his body. The constituents of his body work together towards a common cause. Were he to stop here, Merleau-Ponty would have simply revisited his thesis from Phenomenology of Perception, but he continues: his body is also co-present in every Gestalt. With this second component, he realizes that his body does operate as a Gestalt in-itself, but that its integrity does not outrank the integrity of other entities in nature. The world does not only exist, as it were, for his body. This is an examination of the lived body.Alternatively, his body participates in an altogether different Gestalt. This is his body as an object—the corporeal or living body.

When Merleau-Ponty’s body is a Gestalt, then he is drawn into a relationship as a subject. This unity can be explored through the traditional dictates of phenomenological investigation. His body may also simultaneously belong to another Gestalt, thus being drawn into a relationship as an object. This is no different from his formulation of the body asflesh:

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We say therefore that our body is a being of two leaves, from one side a thing among things and otherwise what sees them and touches them; we say, because it is evident, that it unites these two properties within itself, and its double belongingness to the order of the “object” and to the order of the “subject” reveals to us quite unexpected relations between the two orders. (p. 137)

Merleau-Ponty finds a new way to reintroduce Gestalt Theory back into phenomenology, this time based on his ontology of flesh. This is precisely where Goldstein has also arrived with his formulation of Gestalt Theory in biology. Goldstein (1934/1995) explains that even the boundary of the organism is an arbitrary boundary for understanding this Gestalt event:

After reading my arguments, one could object: “Why do we stop at the organism as a delimited whole? Is not the organism also only a part, namely, a part of a greater entirety?” One certainly would have to answer this in the affirmative. (p. 302)The question that remains regards the relationship between

subject-object-world, or brain-body-world: to which level is the Gestalt formation attributable? The answer? None of these designations exist without the other! Goldstein writes the following as a section heading: “The ‘psychological’ and the ‘physical’ are indifferent to the real processes. The ‘functional’ significance for the whole is alone relevant” (p. 264). The placeholders ‘mind’ and ‘body,’ ‘corporeal’ and ‘lived’ are merely “auxiliary tools of description” (p. 264). And he continues, specifically addressingthe second problem discussed above (Section 6):

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[T]he problem of the interaction between mind and body appears in [an] entirely different aspect. Neither doesthe mind act on the body, nor the body on the mind, no matter how much this may seem to be the case in superficial observation. We are always dealing with theactivity of the whole organism, the effects of which werefer at one time to something called mind, and anothertime to something called body. In noting an activity, we describe the behavior of the whole organism either through the index of the so-called mind or through the index of the body. (pp. 264-265)

8. Conclusion I have presented two problems that stand in the way of a

collaboration between biology and phenomenology—a collaboration that this Special Issue hopes to develop. To explore these problems, it was first necessary to explicate the two-fold natureof the body. The body may be explored as a corporeal or living entity, and through third-person methodologies. The body may also be explored as the vehicle of lived experience, and through first-person methodologies.

The first problem presented is the oppositional attitude that Husserl (1931/2002, 1970) has taken against the naturalisticattitude. From his vehement rejection of a science of the corporeal body, it seems like any collaboration between phenomenology and biology would be impossible. This problem was examined within its historical and scientific context, and it wasargued that Husserl was arguing against a different generation ofscientists. The rigid adherence to Newtonian assumptions about space and time has dissipated in most scientific disciplines. Goldstein (1934/1995) provides one such example of this. ThroughGoldstein’s example we find a science of the corporeal body that is consonant with the convictions of phenomenology.

Overcoming this first problem indicates the possibility of collaboration between biology and phenomenology. The insights that Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) gleans from Goldstein are used to demonstrate this. However, with this kind of interdisciplinary work, an additional problem emerges: the body-body problem of parallelism. Parallelism is the assumption that analyses of the corporeal and lived bodies are independently coherent and remain

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disconnected from one-another. The collaboration must determine the direction of the relationship between corporeal and lived bodies: is the corporeal body sufficient for understanding experience or is the obverse true. To avoid the body-body problem of parallelism, it has been argued that collaborations must keep in mind that both corporeal and lived modes concern oneand the same body.

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Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/1962). Phenomenology of perception. (C. Smith,Trans.), New York, NY: The Humanities Press.Merleau-Ponty, M. (1942/1963). Structure of behavior. A.L. Fisher (Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Primacy of perception, and other essays on phenomenological psychology, the philosophy of art, history and politics. J.M. Edie (Trans.).Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964/1968). The visible and the invisible. In C. Lefort(Ed.), A. Lingis (Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published in 1964)Merleau-Ponty, M. (1956-60/2003). Nature: Course notes from the Collège de France. R. Vallier, (Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Patöcka, J. (1999). Body, language, community, world. J. Dodd (Ed.), E.Kohak (Trans.). Peru, IL: Open Court.Reinerman-Jones, L., Sollins, B., Gallagher, S., Janz, B. (2013).Neurophenomenology: An integrated approach to exploring awe and wonder. South African Journal of Philosophy, 32(4), 295-309.Roy, J., Petitot, J., Pachoud, B., & Varela, F.J. (1999). Beyond the gap: An introduction to naturalizing phenomenology. In Naturalizing phenomenology: Issues incontemporary phenomenology and cognitive science. J. Roy, F. J. Varela, B. Pachoud, and J. Petitot, (Eds.), 1-80. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Simeonov, P.L. (2010). Integral biomathics: A post-Newtonian viewinto the logos of bios. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 102(2-3), 85-121.

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Sparrow, T. (2014). The end of phenomenology: Metaphysics and the new realism. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.Thompson, E. (2004). Life and mind: From autopoiesis to neurophenomenology. A tribute to Francisco Varela. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 3, 381-398.Thompson, E., & Varela, F. (2001). Radical embodiment: Neural dynamics and consciousness. TRENDS in Cognitive Science, 5(10), 418-425.Varela, F. (1976). Not one, not two. CoEvolution Quarterly, 12, 62-67.Varela, F. (1996). Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3, 330-349.Varela, F.J. (1998). A science of consciousness as if experience mattered. In Toward a science of consciousness II, S.R. Hameroff, A.W. Kaszniak, & A.C. Scott, (Eds.), 31-44. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Watson, J. (1930). Behaviorism. Chicago, IL: University of ChicagoPress.Wertheimer, M. (1938). Laws of organization in perceptual forms. In W. Ellis, (Ed., Trans.). A source book of gestalt psychology (pp 71-88). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. [psychclassics.yorku.ca]. Wundt, W.M. (1897). Outlines of psychology. C.H. Judd (Trans.). Toronto, ON: York University Psychology Classics.

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i Goldstein’s (1934/1995) conception of the organism through Gestalt Theory (organism + environmental milieu) sounds strikingly similar toThompson and Varela’s (2001) “brain-body-world” definition of consciousness in their theory of radical embodiment (pp. 418-425). Afurther comparison would be valuable but is not continued here.ii After a closer reading of Varela (e.g. 1998) and his collaborators (Roy et al, 1999), it is clear that parallelism was not the goal of neurophenomenology, nor was it the goal of the efforts to naturalize phenomenology. However, this is an easy argument to make when one considers only Varela’s (1996) paper.

Overcoming Parallelism: Naturalizing Phenomenology with Goldstein and Merleau-Ponty

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