Dennett and phenomenology

Over at the NewApps blog, there’s an exchange going on following THIS POST by Jethro Masis on how Dennett gets phenomenology wrong.

My position is different from any of the others I’m seeing there. While I agree with Masis that Dennett and Metzinger do not grasp phenomenology very well, I’m afraid I cannot agree with this part of the post:

“I really don’t want to get into technicalities. Suffice it to say that there’s nothing easier than weeding out Dennett’s interpretation of phenomenology as introspection because —as Dan Zahavi has consistently pointed out— ‘all the major figures in the phenomenological tradition have openly and unequivocally denied that they are engaged in some kind of introspective psychology and that the method they employ is a method of introspection’ (for example, Husserl, Heidegger, Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty in several passages). Moreover, introspection is actually antiphenomenological from the outset for the very point of departure of phenomenology in Husserl’s breakthrough work, Logische Untersuchungen (1900-1901), was precisely a call to abandon the dichotomy (Scheidung) between inner and outer perceptions, which Husserl associated with a naïve commonsensical metaphysics left behind with the concept of intentionality. And of course, introspection is parasitic of this Scheidung which endorses the idea that consciousness is somewhat inside the head and the world outside.”

I see this as a dangerous argument that endorses the weaknesses of phenomenology while overlooking its strengths.

As I read it, Masis’ point here is roughly that “you can’t accuse phenomenology of idealism, because it’s already beyond the realism/idealism divide.”

No, it isn’t. Husserlian intentionality does not overcome the distinction between inner and outer perception. It is totally and completely idealist in character. And until this is admitted and rectified, there will always be an opening for the Dennetts and the Metzingers to take shots at phenomenology.

Husserl’s originality lies not in some mythical overcoming of the realism/idealism divide (which he simply never achieves) but in his being the first person I can think of to theorize an object/quality dualism within the phenomenal sphere. As far as I can tell, it was simply assumed by everyone that the realm of experience contains nothing but qualities, bundled or attached in some other fashion. Any true unity to the thing must lie outside experience, in the outer world.

Husserl, by contrast, identifies an object/quality strife in the phenomenal realm itself. The phenomenal tree remains the same tree despite a swirling patina of shifting adumbrations through which it is encountered. We don’t even see this insight in Brentano or Twardowski, who as far as I can tell remain too much under the distant influence of British Empiricism when describing the phenomenal sphere: it’s all about “content” for them, whereas for Husserl phenomenal experience is about something deeper than content, since contents shift constantly without intentional objects necessarily changing.

And I don’t think Husserl would have been under any pressure to see this if not for his idealism. By confining himself to phenomenal experience as if to a prison, he had strong motivations to find interesting and previously unnoticed features of that prison.

Which is not the same thing as saying that he “overcame” the prison, which he didn’t. He was trapped within it more and more as time went by.

We should appreciate Husserl far more than he’s appreciated by mainstream continental hipsterism at the moment, but we shouldn’t credit him with transcending a dispute in which he is thoroughly inscribed in one of the two opposing positions, far from being beyond it.