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Constitution by Movement : Husserl in

Light of Recent Neurobiological Findings[1]

jean-luc PETIT

For Husserl, the movement of an organism, as oriented by its tendencies toward some vital aim from whose attainment it draws satisfaction, is a operative factor in the process of constitution. First of all,  effort and practise is required for the articulation and mastery of the integrated system of kinaesthetic and hyletic circuits which constitute the organism itself. Then, the constitution of the meaning of the being of physical things situated in the physical space surrounding this organism calls for the regulated play of motivating kinaesthesia and of expositive sensations. Finally,  the constitution of an intersubjective world of communal life can only be understood in relation to the organism's capacity for empathy vis a vis  the activities of other organisms, whether human or not.

The primacy of movement in constitution is confirmed when we turn from the transcendental' viewpoint of phenomenology to the naturalistic' viewpoint of the neuro-sciences. As expected, it has gained a first confirmation from holistic bio-mechanical studies (developed in Russian and American schools in the 70s and 80s) on the postural body schema and the experimental disassociation of the perceived and 'real' positions of the body or limbs under artificially induced kinaesthetic illusions.  But it has received a new and more unexpected confirmation from the electro-physiology of the individual recordings of the bio-electrical activity of cortical neurons which, without recourse to elementary reductionism, actually succeeds in bringing to light the neural basis of the practical understanding of the meaning of our own movements and the movements of others.

I.  THE THEORY OF CONSTITUTION

The world, Husserl insists, was not made all by itself without any active, driving participation on the part of the organism for which it exists.  Such an apparently trite remark turns out to be a real challenge for the philosopher insofar as Husserl seeks to make him see how everything is brought into being in and through the absolutely constitutive movements of the organism, presupposing nothing in advance of itself except inherited instincts.  Rather than an obvious mistake,  this turns out to be an evident truth, evidenced in the experience any living being has of itself. What is critical to phenomenology is that,  from the standpoint of the organism, things are endowed with meaning and value only through the comportment adopted towards them and in accordance with the various ways in which such things appear to the subject.

As regards 'being',  we should make it clear that from now on we shall only be concerned with its meaning  as sustained by acts which radiate out from some subjective centre, namely, that of the organism itself.  There is no point in enquiring into the constitution of any other type of being than this, unless it is to show that in fact what one has in mind when one thinks about 'objective' or 'absolute' being is derived from the former, at least as regards its meaning.  For all that,  the programme of constitution is not limited to instrumental things located in the world around us - a quite trivial model for the meaning of being.  By right, it extends to the organism's sense of its own being, - so much so that the 'I' is not exempt from the necessity of having to constitute itself - to the meaning of the being of a common world, as well as to that correlational sense of being which arises out of their interactions and which is bestowed by the latter upon the organism itself as well as upon things and the world. 

I.1. Solipsistic constitution : movement and kinaesthesis.

In manuscripts dating from the 30s,  Husserl addressed the problem of the incarnation of the Cartesian subject. Investigating the rootedness of the acts of the subject in underlying strata of motivation,  he took up again the traditional concept of instinct and interpreted it in terms of his intentional psychology. The development of a new theory of pulsional intentionality made possible a transition from, on the one hand, the dynamism of instinctive impulses and the fundamental inertia of the organism as immediately affected by itself - which has nothing to do with the subject, the pure act - to, on the other, the spontaneous activity of the I, which makes itself known well before conscious representation and voluntary action.

Pushing intentionality back towards the source of action and, in so doing, overcoming the obstacle represented by his own Cartesianism which, as he was well aware, 'created a breach between affection and action', he worked out a concept of affection as 'provisional action', as an 'invitation, a call to the I to act'. He had no hesitation in bringing the vocabulary of affection and action together in such a way that 'in consequence, no distinction could be drawn between desiring and willing and, furthermore, no distinction could be conceived between willing in general and acting [2].'

But the elimination of this essential phenomenological distinction only means that what prevails before action in the more primordial strata of the organism's constitution, what precedes the active intervention of the I, is movement, an ability to move itself experienced internally by that very organism which is motivated by desire. Before becoming, in the full sense of that word, an acting subject, the subject of its acts,  the organism is already 'on the move', because only as already on the move is it capable of finding out about itself, discovering its own capacities and mastering them and indeed of becoming for itself the pole of its own acts,  if not a subject [3],[4].

However, we should not draw premature conclusions from the fact that in this context he fell back upon the term 'kinaesthesia'. To the best of my knowledge,  Husserl did not take part in the famous - and probably mistaken - 'Williams Debate' (Wilhelm Wundt - William James) on the question whether all that we know about our movements is based, a posteriori,  upon afferent and therefore peripheral information - as James' kinaesthesia theory would have it -  or whether, on the contrary, it is based a priori  on a central corrolary efference of the motor command, as indicated by Wundt's Innervationsgefühl. As a phenomenologist, Husserl sticks to the experience of the organism, a subjectively lived experience which keeps the organism constantly informed of the position and movement of its body and limbs. Whatever the origin (central or peripheral) of this information,  our movements are no less related to the I, when they are our acts (whether instinctive or voluntary), and to the not-I, when they are passively undergone.  As regards the neuro-physiological controversy,  recent data (by Dr Gandevia from Sidney [5]) would lead us to believe that the attack launched by James might not have been brought to as definitive a conclusion as some psychologists have claimed.  What can reasonably be said of Husserl's use of the term 'kinaesthesis' is that this use of the term is essential to his theory of constitution, even if it preserves a phenomenological neutrality with regard to ontological hypotheses concerning the central or peripheral source of the internal knowledge of our own movements [6],[7].

In the course of this genetic line of research, references to child psychology are to be found, reference which emphasize the continuity and graduality of intentionality ranging from instinct 'a mode of empty effort lacking any representation of the goal [8]' right up to a willing whose intentions are oriented by just such a representation. In this way,  the stratification of the intentional strata leading up to willed action is brought to light. At the lowest level, we find the simple alternative of an empty intentional desire, together with its satisfaction in pleasure. Then, this alternation forms a chain of intentions and fulfilments which can in their turn be posited as the goal of an intentionality which is less bound by immediacy. From there on, satisfaction can be ever more belated until desire is transformed into a 'preoccupation' which extends to a man's entire life, and even beyond, as the indefinite openness of a project which appears to be foreshadowed by instinctive impulses.

Such an intentional regression towards the origin finds its inaccessible limit in 'hereditary factors' characterised by Husserl as an 'empty horizon [9]' symmetrical with that other empty horizon which characterises the totality of all the means of action available to humanity. These two horizons delimit our life world as a practical field. Their 'emptiness' does not imply any lack of determination but the sedimented foundation of phylogenetic experience [10], from which nothing stands out at first,  even though this horizon is still needed as the indispensable background for our acts. For even if the structural constraints of the species are to be located in it, some activity on the part of the organism is required in order that they be brought to light, in order that openings or closures arise.

Husserl even goes so far as to outline a phenomenology of foetal experience,  claiming that the 'child in its mother's womb already has kinaestheses and through this kinaesthetic mobility, its things.' So that, at birth, the child 'is already an I with a high level of experience (since) such an experience has already been acquired in its intra-uterine existence [11]'. He also gives us some indication as to the importance for a neo-natal phenomenology of movement and kinaesthesis for the constitutional process. A genetic sequence leads from primitive activities motivated solely by the instinct of self-preservation to activities by means of which the organism works towards its own being-constitution. The intentional analysis of the sucking reflex in babies brings to light an instinctive impulse, that of drinking, which is aroused by a specific stimulus, the smell of the mother's breast, and whose strictly prescribed satisfaction is dictated by the sensation of lip contact.  Here, Husserl says, there is no room for manoeuvre, the kinaesthesis which is brought into action being 'originally adapted'. Nevertheless,  continuing with his intentional analysis,  he takes note of an important new stage in the process of constitution. Starting out as a simple instinctual vector, the movement in question becomes an object of enjoyment for its own sake. Rather than going into raptures over the apparently gratuitous playfulness of the baby's contented activity, Husserl sees in it an attempt to actively integrate the kinaesthetic systems of different organs of motion with a view to bringing them under control. As if the child did not so much agitate its limbs by chance but in order to explore the extent of its freedom of articulation or to bring different forms of  movement under its control through repetition [12]  :

'We may therefore conclude that that instinct which is exercised in kinaesthetic activity leads, in the end, to the possibility of being able to reproduce any posture as the unity of an always available structure [13].'

Thus, from its ontogenetic origins, and in the most obvious way,  movement is what makes the organism self-constituting. Relying on the limited fulfilment of instinctual functions, an ever more agile and precise rhythmic movement is set up, a choreography of the living organism in the very process of discovering its own body, a body which it has before it takes possession of it, and whose typical possibilities of moving about have to be acquired through experience. For there is a world of difference between the carrying out of a movement by one who is not aware of its being constrained and the carrying out of the 'same movement' by one who lets its actions be constrained by a just and well founded sense of its insurmountable restrictions.

I.2. Static and Dynamic Constitution : Perception and Action.

By 'aesthetic' is normally meant whatever concerns sensory impressions impacting upon the organism from the environment. The term 'practical' is used to designate whatever concerns spontaneous activity. To be sure, no organism can be exclusively receptive or passive nor exclusively active. However, philosophical tradition has separated aesthetics, or the theory of perception, from the practical, or the theory of action, even while common sense allows for a continuity between feeling and acting, the perceived world and the world of action forming for it one and the same world. Husserl made an attempt to remedy this state of affairs by reintroducing 'praxis' and 'kinesis' into 'aesthesis'. For even if in the realm of the absolute the world is in no way dependent upon us, the same does not hold of 'the world of our experience'. The theory of the constitution of the spatial thing will give us an insight into our active contribution towards the making of this world.

The problem was to transform the analysis of the conditions of the possibility of external experience, our Kantian heritage, into an analysis of the practical conditions under which an object and a world are effectively constituted for an organism, which latter also constitutes itself correlatively. But the organism is not an aggregate of faculties : sensation + intellectual syntheses,  but an entity which is sensorially affected by what is not itself and whose acts include, no doubt, intellectual syntheses but also acts of attention, decision, effective intervention in the surrounding world.

Freeing the structure of our experience from the classical representation of the world which obscured matters for Kant, Husserl reevaluated that primary strata of subjective life which is determinative for the shaping of this experience as one in which sensoriality and activity coexist and are interwoven. His analysis of a priori  structures begins with an almost geometrical description of concrete spatio-temporality. This 'eidetics of experience' can be found in the Lectures on Inner Time Consciousness of 1905 (constitution of the temporal object - a sound, a melody) and in the Lectures on the Thing and Space from 1907 (constitution of the spatial thing).

The Kantian tradition provided the human subject with a faculty of sensation structured in accordance with the infinite, one-dimensional series of time intervals that clocks measure and the infinite, tri-dimensional, homogeneous, isotropic space of surveyors and astronomers - both being required for localizing every possible object and measuring the intervals between them, their trajectories etc. Believing that in this way he had laid bare the formal structure of any experience,  Kant claimed 'that the absence of space can never be represented [14].'

By implication, Husserl took up this challenge. Embarking upon a programme of constitution of the spatial thing, he admitted that this spatiality is a product of the process of constitution, therefore that empirical space is not originary but secondary with regard to a pre-empirical, quasi-space. That this quasi-space is constituted by the movements of the organism might seem absurd if one meant by that objective movements which presuppose the priority of ordinary space but not if, like Husserl, one is only concerned with movements experienced from within, in the act itself, thanks to the kinaestheses of the organs responsible.

Phenomenological analysis brings to light a primary stratum of experience that precedes objective time and space, that is, which does not entail this time nor this space. On the other hand, it does entail some more primitive 'field' of experience that is encompassed by the acts of an 'I', which acts emanate from it and by its affections by what touches it. The formal properties of this field differ significantly from those of classical time and space. Never empty, because always centred on some object constituted therein,  this space can not pretend to be all-inclusive. What gives itself in it is, first of all,  mere appearances (Erscheinungen) : transient or recurring, they tend to be recognised, at most, as being of 'the same thing', a thing which does not as yet exist outside the series of its appearances. The same appearances are finally subject to synthesis, that is, to an active grasping on the part of the I which itself only becomes apparent through its active relationship to this object.

Let us take some examples : a resounding sound appears to me as identical across its constantly changing auditory phases until it fades away entirely; I see only the red sides of a cube which I anticipate as being red all over while still allowing for the possibility that the sides I do not see are blue - without this qualification in any way obliging me to revise my estimation of the cube as the 'same'.

These appearances or ways of givenness of things are not distributed in an isotropic space but include some privileged modes (the optima for each domain in question) and some defective modes (its extrema). For the optical field, the optimum is the focal centre, the point at which the internal determinations of the thing are most apparent. The extremum is the edge of the field, where the details fade away, loose all sharpness and distinction. Alternatively, the optimum is the ideal visual proximity, the extremum, the horizon of perspectival distancing. For the temporal field,  the optimum is the 'living present', the threshold of the on-going activity of the I, with two extrema which represent the limits, respectively, of my retention of the 'just having been' and of my protentional orientation towards the 'about to be'.

But this list of properties of the perceptual field is a static one. It does not give us the thing we have to deal with practically in experience but a 'linear manifold (Manigfaltigkeit) extracted from a pluri-dimensional multiplicity [15]'. It is up to my mathematical colleagues to determine the legitimacy of Husserl's barely concealed borrowing of Riemann's term from his Mannigfaltigkeitslehre. If space is Euclidian, the pre-spatial field might be Riemannian. And there might be some mathematical operation, fundamental to the constitutional process, which would account for the conversion of field into spatial geometry. Intuitively, the manifold which interests us here, a pre-empirical foreshadowing of the thing, is that of the virtual object synthesizing the information given to us by the infinity of the appearances of a given object seen from all possible points of view. One is reminded of the representations of analytic cubism, exactly contemporary with the Lectures on the Thing and Space: a bottle on a table, a guitar, a portrait of Ambroise Vollard, etc. This kind of 'objectivity' is nothing but the objective correlate of all the possible ways of gaining access to the object subjectively, ways which are prescribed in advance in the very structure of the perceptual field - rather like a geometrical schema embodying the more general axioms characterising the properties of perceived objects.

Let us try applying our reductive method by effecting a provisional reduction, through abstraction, of our visual experience to the 'oculo-motor field' by placing in suspense any information which might by made available to us through the movements of our head or of the rest of our body and considering simply what the movements of our eyes enable us to see. The perceptual multiplicity which would be given to us in this way possesses surprising properties. It would be given as being neither three-dimensional nor impenetrable. Appearances pass through each other without obstruction as ghosts pass through walls. They enter the perceptual field at one edge, leave by another, without it even being possible for us to keep them within the bounds of the field. There would no doubt be curved surfaces, but no object would possess a closed surface, since the side on which it rested could not be seen.

So before we have to do with things in space possessing the full status of physical realities,  we are confronted with appearances in the perceptual field, with phantoms. Static phenomenology is limited to determining the properties of fields which are unknown to classical space, with a view to bringing to light the strata subtending the perceptual experience before the manifold gets brought together in the perceived object. Genetic phenomenology goes from this analytic cubism to a synthetic cubism. It follows up the process by which, on the basis of the regularly stratified a priori constraints inherent in multiple fields of appearance, the spatial thing, in the normal sense of that word, gets constituted. This dynamic integration requires the activity of an I which has to intervene in perception not only as the unique pole from which all points of view on a thing radiate out but as an organism capable of bringing about the necessary coordination between this multiplicity of perceptual appearances and another equally powerful multiplicity (von gleicher Mächtigkeit [16]) which is also dependent upon the I in order to be put in action, and which consists in the system of kinaestheses due to the motor or sensori-motor organs of the I, a system which has to be integrated in parallel with the former.

At first Husserl conceived of this perceiving activity of the I as essentially determined by the epistemological ideal of the perfect givenness of the thing under all its aspects, a givenness which fulfils the truth intention of empirical judgment. But he never held the view that perceptual intentions can get to their object without their being brought to them by some movement on the part of the perceiving organism [17]. If 'I want to know more about' appearing things, I bring into play my kinaestheses and the aspects concealed in the original, initial presentation forthwith make their appearance. Which presupposes that the objective aspects of things and the kinaestheses accomplished by my organs of sense are so tightly interlaced that we can speak, interchangeably, of the self-givenness (Selbsgegebenheit) of things or of their 'creation (Schöpfung) through the movements accomplished by the organism - even (and Husserl is ready to abuse language in this way), of the 'creation of nature by consciousness [18].' Seeking to establish his theory of constitution on this basis, Husserl advanced the - rather bold - thesis that the normal match between external sensations and kinaesthetic sensations was a one-to-one correlation between two continuous multiplicities. 'If the stream of kinaestheses K is an alteration stream K₀ ^« K₁, then each difference in the process of alteration motivates a corresponding difference in the alteration of the 'intention to' [19].'

With the result that, taking account of the complex system integrating the kinaesthetic circuits of all the organs of the organism (not just the eyes but also the neck and the rest of the body), one is led to the conclusion that every kinaesthetic alteration of a given organ motivates an alteration in the sensorial field associated with it. A closed kinaesthetic series, starting out from kinaesthetic immobility and coming back to immobility across the intermediary degrees of tension, therefore yields a perceptual multiplicity which is nothing other than the 'thing itself' constituted in the corresponding layers of the complete kinaesthetic system. But with regard to the constituting process which mobilises this complete system, this thing is not the thing in the ordinarily 'objective' sense of that word. It is for example nothing but a simple 'ocular-motor thing', something we are obliged to relativise as a transitional phase in the appearing of a thing endowed with a much richer, multi-dimensional meaning just as soon as we take into account the kinaesthesia furnished by the movements of the neck and the rest of the body, the impact of the global posture of the organism on the perceived world. A something which only retains this meaning on the basis of the well organised complexity of all the movements that an organism is capable of deploying once its interest is aroused by it and it gets involved with it in a practical way [20].

Perhaps there is room here for a distinction between 'kinaesthetic constitution' and 'practical constitution'. The first would stand in much the same relation to the second as does ocular-motor constitution to constitution by the totality of kinaesthetic data,  a simple sedimented layer in the constitution of the objective thing. In which case, in addition to the kinaesthetic motivation of fields of images whose intentionality is guided simply by the desire to know more about the object,  the constitutive process would require that the thing be really invested with signification, that it be the goal of practical activity which bestows meaning upon what it utilises, produces or transforms while withdrawing such meaning from things it rejects or destroys.  It is perhaps the bringing of action (in the strong sense) into the very heart of the theory of constitution which distinguishes the analyses of human praxis in the Lebenswelt, taken from the manuscripts of the 30s, from the formal and almost mathematical analyses of perceptual multiplicities to be found in the Lectures on the Thing and Space, which are themselves written very much in the spirit of the Logical Researches [21],[22],[23].

It is practical activity alone which is capable of introducing new layers of meaning, layers of meaning which are not attributable solely to the vital drives of the isolated organism and which also allow for social meaning - inconceivable as long as the role of intersubjectivity in the process of constitution has not first been determined. For the world contains more than the 'world of things' opened up by perception,  and access to this something more is afforded by action. 'Without my practical intervention, the world would be a world of things. It pertains to the full reality of our world that it is for us a practical world [24].

If we bear in mind that, from my point of view, all my movements unfold in a continual adjustment such that in learning that 'the same thing' seen this way from this angle, is seen that way from that, I at the same time learn that its identity manifests itself in the fact that it 'stands out against' this entire series of modifications. I derive therefrom the feeling of a continuous and harmonious transition from one modification to another, accompanied henceforward by kinaesthetic sensations, sensations that I am even able to anticipate by way of a movement which is itself continuous and harmonious. Hence, by deploying in advance the possible appearances of the thing,  I am able to project it from points of view which have yet to be assumed, points of view which open up on latent possibilities - and this by merely giving free play to my activity. This intimate adjustment of movements, inaugurated by the I and the objective movements of the thing, confers upon the latter a certain ontological consistency in the face of the I - a consistency for which the I is nevertheless responsible, though not in an arbitrary nor capricious way.

Henceforward, one might say,  the thing possesses 'in itself' the norm regulating its movements, its possible appearances and disappearances. The vectors of its displacements and transformations are attached to it. The axes of its rotations and reversals are inscribed in it, not ascribed to the I. It has acquired objectivity to the extent that I grant to it, without qualification, an 'absolute' meaning of being, a meaning which must not be confused, of course, with the independence and the personal autonomy of those very special things which are the bodies of other Is.

I.3. Intersubjective Constitution : empathy with the actions of others.

From the start, the generalisation of the theory of constitution to the other is confronted with the difficulty of distinguishing the appearances which found the 'introjection' of lived experienced into bodies other than my own, from all other appearances and modes of givenness. Such a distinction was not to be found in the positivist analysis of sensations which, in many respects, anticipates that of phenomenology. E. Mach [25] and R. Avenarius [26] could only see such an introjection as a intrusion of the 'metaphysical dualism' into our 'natural concept of the world', because they held to Hume's atomistic conception of experience with its bias in favour of the priority of the simple (assumed to be homogeneous) vis a vis  the complex (and the heterogeneous). Free from this prejudice [27], as also from the opposite prejudice voiced by Heidegger, Husserl had no objection to the notion of Einfühlung introduced into psychological aesthetics in 1903 by Theodore Lipps [28] who was the first to describe the phenomenon of active participation through our kinaesthesia in the movements and actions of others, and this in the very act of perceiving the latter (cf. his famous example of the spectator at the circus and of the trapeze artist on his wire [29]). On the contrary, he was able to make use of this idea to provide a legitimate phenomenological content for the empty notion of introjection offered by Avenarius.

Why does intersubjectivity, or introjection, appear so early in Husserl's writings and even in a 'formalist' context - that of the Lectures of 1907 - where, as he says himself : 'this already escapes from our line of thinking[30]' ?

Because, if he had not taken steps to accommodate it at a sufficiently early phase in his development the specifically phenomenological experience would never have been other than his alone, given that there is only one way to understand subjective activity - whether understood as movement or action - even if I experience it as an effective intervention in the surrounding world. This way goes by way of my body whose perceptual and practical kinaesthesia have to be mobilised again and again,  drawn out of rest into activity, if I want to know what it is to 'fasten upon', 'follow', 'apprehend', 'push', 'thrust', 'resist', 'get up', walk', etc.

Up to this point, it is perfectly in order that the interpretation of action should be solipsist. More, it runs the risk of remaining so unless and until, situated and stabilised within this primordial layer, a body other than my own arises in the world of objects, a body the experience of which forces its way through this solipsistic enclosure. At first sight such an eventuality seems improbable. For every 'external' body owes its meaning of being to the fact that it is presented in a specific'mode of givenness' as an experience lived out passively in a sensational affection and/or lived out actively on the basis of kinaesthetic sensations whose measure of intensity is my own willing, and that these lived experiences are necessarily my lived experiences unfolding in the temporality of my subjective life. However, I also have to take into consideration the narrowness of my basis of observation up to this point, if only with reference to the sphere of my full prmordial experience which is not limited to the strictly defined continuity of that presence of myself to myself which reaches out from my intentions to my kinaesthesia and from my kinaesthesia to the sensational material which results from my being affected by objects.

A real discontinuity prevails between myself and the other self. I can no more have the experiences of the other than he can have mine. Nevertheless, when I am in the presence of an other, I do not normally take him to be an object, a simple external body. For that body over there 'reminds' me of my own. I put myself 'in his place'. 'Empathy' (Einfühlung) enables me to experience directly in the other whatever I might have been able to experience in the way of affections and kinaesthetic data, if it were I who governed in his body. My primordial experience, however reduced it might be, is not just that of a consciousness isolated in a world peopled by inanimate objects. We do actually have an experience of the other. To be sure, although I am denied all access to the perceptual intuiting of the other, I am nevertheless in a position to appresent in some kind of ideal intentionality the lived experiences of the other through empathic presentification. My experience contains the bodies of others in such a way that the experience of each is opened up onto a world of experience alien to itself and which is based upon this body as being that of another.

From this moment on, the perceptual and practical world is peopled by a multiplicity of actors in constant interaction, an interaction mediated by the bodies which each claims as its own. When 'I push', I feel another who 'resists me'. My action is not simply confronted with an inert and lifeless obstacle against which I exhaust my strength in vain. Rather, 'I struggle', I feel him 'giving way', I 'carry the day' or alternatively, 'he recovers'; 'I am beaten' by the action of an other with whom I can also elect to join forces with a view to attaining a common goal,  the goal of an action which is itself common - sometimes even in its very intentions [31].

For all that, I am ready to admit that empathy does not yield everything. It does give us the possibility of replaying the kinaesthetic circuits furnished by the organs of perception and of movement mobilised by others with regard to their acts (as are ours with regard to our own) and so of recognising in the general flux of experience those intersubjective unities which are 'actions'. In this way, and to the extent that the external world, however external it is in its spatio-temporal exteriority, is also (and even especially) composed of human actions (or at least of objects constituted in human action), we obtain a world which is, in a certain sense, practical [32].

But we can not yet be said to live in such a 'practical world'. This world in which we posit actions and which we people with our productions remains as external to us as is that of the objects of perception. The intersubjectivity which results looks more like a multiplicity of interconnected points of view,  where each remains an observer of what he does (or of what others do) rather than an actor. We have still to render intelligible the synthesis of these points of view in a communitarian 'we' which can be set up as the subject of its own world of praxis - but without either detaching itself from, nor overseeing, the latter - because it is integrally constituted in, and indeed at the very same time as, this latter world.

The critical question is that of determining whether just such a phenomenology of praxis is capable of crossing the divide which separates a plurality of subjects (each of which has access to the lived world of the other by way of reciprocal empathy) from a community in the strong sense of that word, one which can not  be reduced to the individuals it contains. As a perceptual subject,  it is possible for me to empathise the interior life of the other. I am free to carry through (or not to) the act by means of which the alien I is presentified, as it overlaps my perception of a certain body which reminds me of my own. But nothing links me empathically in a more special way with 'my' other. On the other hand, a community is a humanity linked together by a concordant course of life.

But surely, whatever holds for perceptual praxis should also hold for social praxis. In perception, I anticipate an object as 'the same' and I link its various aspects under the rule of this presumptive identity - at least until an inassimilable disagreement forces me to try out a new identity.  In my social conduct, I have faith in the presumed agreement of the course of existence - at least until an anomaly disrupts this unity. The communalisation (Vergemeinschaftung) of intersubjectivity therefore depends exclusively on the continuity of the life led in connection with others with mutual preoccupations and interests, such that the 'we' which we form together finishes up by being written into the practical world as an object which endures even while continuing to experience itself as the subject who is familiar with this practical world, who acts in it, who has in it his familiar ways of being and who continually enriches his world with novel productions [33]. But we must be careful not to construct a supra-individual subject equipped with faculties of perception and action in the image of the individual subject.

A 'we' is formed when, together with others as co-subjects in a community of understanding based on regular interaction, I establish certain connections with persons based on social acts, acts which are defined by virtue of the fact that their realisation, as acts, consists uniquely in the establishment of the very links which they constitute as social acts. Here, the praxis in question has nothing to do with natural objects and takes as its object the perpetuation of its own existence. Henceforward, action is no longer confined to the body of each individual actor but is deployed as 'our action' bound by social connections in a new environment which is the domain of what exists for us in a practical way. This domain must not be confused with the external world as the locus of the goals of actors. For, from now on,  these actors, linked together by a social act, constitute themselves as their own goal and therefore no longer have their field of activity outside of themselves but participate in this field both as the source and as the goal of a common action; or, if you prefer, figure both as subjects and as objects [34].

The interiorisation of praxis into a world constituted by the actors themselves, marks a new phase in the intersubjective understanding. While empathy could at most penetrate the subjective life of the other, so to say, against his will, I am obliged to awaken in the other a specific intention to communicate in order to have access to his communicable contents. An infinite reflexivity of intentionalities begins to get tied together, transforming subjects opposed to one another (as I and not-I) into an 'I' who addresses a 'Thou' who is for himself an 'I' having the first 'I' as his 'Thou'. Hence, the 'constitution of a 'we', acting as a personality of a higher order, as the unity of a, so to speak, multi-headed subject of action [35]'.

Action becomes communicational, a kind of 'stratified' (mehrschichtige) action which lies at the root of any sociability. I want to get the other to do or to think certain things. But I can not give him orders in the absence of an already existing convention of obedience, a convention whose existence can not simply be assumed as already binding upon myself and the one I address. In such a situation, communication occurs just as soon as the other understands what I want and this understanding proves capable to be a sufficient motive for doing what I want him to do. If in addition, the communicating subjects are also speaking ones (communication does not have to be verbal - in this regard Husserl appeals to Köhler's apes [36]), discourse results, a discourse which the other understands as such, as addressed to him and as expressive of my intention relative to our mutual behaviour [37]. This community of discourse and its reception functions as a new mode of overlapping between myself with the other. Action has definitely been socialised since 'the acts of one I are reciprocated in the acts of the other I [38]'. On this basis, the habits of the one confirm those of the others 'from within', creating an enduring supra-personality which in turn becomes the source of further acts, concordant or not. Since, in addition, social acts are objective 'as real events experienced by each perceiving subject in a preconstituted intersubjective field of experience, events in which several human subjects participate [39]', all the essential conditions are met for the constitution of social groups (a household, a friendship, an association [40]) in a life world, a common culture.

II. PHYSIOLOGICAL FINDINGS

II.1. Kinaesthetic Illusions and the Corporeal Schema.

Taking advantage of the circonstance - scarcely philosophical - that certain states are sufficiently powerful to be able to devote a part of the resources they squander in rivalry on medically supported athletic competition or the conquest of space, one scientific discipline, the bio-mechanical physiology of movement has developed an original experimental programme aimed at bringing to light, under laboratory conditions, the phenomenon of kinaesthetic perception of bodily posture and this by disassociating it from the real anatomical position of the organism through the creation of kinaesthetic illusions. What relevance does this have for the philosophical themes discussed above ?

A moment's thought enables us to conclude that kinaesthetic posture is founded on Leib, anatomical position, on Körper. At first sight it would seem that this school of physiology has done nothing other - whether deliberately or not - than what phenomenology does (even though by appealing simply to an analysis of the meaning of experience),  namely, struggle against the widespread confusion between Leib and Körper, between the living organic-body and the physical body-thing. In which case we would have hit upon an exceptional instance where instrumental intervention in the external and physical conditions of action (by employing physio-therapeutic vibrators, tables of force, virtual reality helmets, parabolic flights, recumbent rotating devices, etc.) would confirm the sense in which the organism exists as a unity and a totality;  an instance where the artificial production of illusions would have helped us understand the normal mode of access of the subject to his body.

The first half of my thesis therefore indicates that the bio-mechanical physiology stemming from the years 1970-80, can, as a technology of perceptual movement, be understood as applied phenomenology. Let those who are not aware of the relativity of the terms 'pure' and 'applied' in science suspect me of nourishing goodness knows what imperial ambitions on the part of phenomenology with respect to science. I am not talking here of an unconscious phenomenology, a naive or even primitive phenomenology; for the Russian doctors in question are cultivated gentlemen and their not infrequent references to Merleau-Ponty - our French 'last Husserl' - alongside the great classics of humanistic physiology (Lord Adrian, Nicholas Bernstein, Duchêne de Boulogne, etc.) prove that they were not entirely naive about the philosophical significance of their research.

If Husserl had done nothing more than underline the constitutive role of kinaesthesia for the 'body scheme' and the relation of the organism's constitution to its environment, his theory would already have the value of an intuitive premonition. In fact, after a lapse reaching from the beginning of the century to the 70s, physiologists have been brought to revise their attitude [41]. Against the traditional division of the 'five senses' they are now committed to a rehabilitation of kinaesthetic sensations,  reviving the idea of a sixth 'muscular sense' so dear to Sir Charles Sherrington (1900). The sense of movement and the sense of position have been recognised as irreducible sensorial modalities, notwithstanding the identity of their peripheral receptors. Muscles have been raised to the rank of full fledged sensorial organs, the seat of both kinaesthetic reception and the emission of sensori-motor messages directed towards the brain by way of the afferent (not the efferent, motor) nerve system. Kinaesthetic and touch sensations have been pronounced just as essential to the sense of the body as to its orientation in the surrounding world, thereby unifying personal and extra-personal space [42].

A classic experimental formula developed from the work of Goodwin, McCloskey and Matthew, of the Physiological Laboratory at Oxford (1972) requires that one apply a mechanical vibration of low intensity just above the elbow while pressing the head of a physio-therapeutical vibrator against the skin covering the tendon of the biceps (alternatively, the triceps) [43]. The vibrated arm is immobilised and the subject's eyes are covered with a blindfold.  He is asked to use his free limb to 'accompany' the other if he feels it moving under the effect of the vibration.  We know that the application of such a vibration to the biceps produces a reflex contraction of the upper arm. This contraction is usually 'isotonic', that is, takes place without any increase in tonicity but with a shortening of the muscle, - whence the movement of the upper arm. The immobilisation of the arm renders it 'isometric', the resistance opposed to the movement constraining the muscle to contract without shortening,  even while increasing its tonicity [44].

Under these conditions, the subject experiences not a contraction but an extension of his upper arm and, according to the instructions, he extends the other (by several tens of degrees) with reference to the immobile arm subject to vibration, while continuing to believe that he is keeping them parallel. With regard to the position and the movement of his arm, he is the victim of an illusion, an illusion which would be reversed if the vibration were applied to the triceps rather than the biceps. The proof:  his surprise when one removes the blindfold from his eyes.

A highly systematic reading, carried out later by Prof. James Lackner of Brandeis University, Waltham (Massachusetts), using the same method of illusion (to cite only the latter for want of time), has brought to light an illusion of falling forward caused by the vibration of the Achilles tendon, an illusion of falling backward caused by the vibration of quadriceps, an illusion of longitudinal rotation of the body caused by the vibration of the buttock muscles, in addition to a host of illusions of bending, extending or rotating the head caused by the vibration of the neck muscles [45].

But the most elegant experiments are still those conducted by Prof. Victor Gurfinkel, of the Moscow Academy of Science, who managed, from the position of the head with regard to the body, to derive every possible variety of illusion on the reflex extension of the knees through vibration of the Achilles tendon [46]. Not only does he succeed in showing that the rotation of the head inhibits the extension of the leg on the side where the head turns (while it aggravates the extension of the other leg), that this asymmetry also persists as an illusion of movement when one immobilises the leg while making it vibrate,  that it continues to persist when the head is immobilised but subjected to an illusion of rotation provoked by the vibration of the neck, he even succeeds in demonstrating that the asymmetrical reaction of the legs is never so strong as when it is 'caused' by the illusory perception of the movement of the head (rather than its 'real' movement).

From a phenomenological point of view, the most interesting theoretical interpretation to be drawn from this mass of findings on kinaesthetic illusions is that due to Gurfinkel. He is much more emphatic than the other researchers on the need not to reduce postural organisation to an agglomeration of isolated local reflexes, still less to the product of an association of kinaesthetic signals. And if, on occasions,  he does not refuse to make use of a cognitivist language to talk of an 'internal representation in the central nervous system including a list of the parts of the body', this language, as employed by him, is only a way of distancing himself from the associationism of behavioural reflexologists. He is as concerned as his American equivalent Lackner [47] to reject the 'naive objectivism' (this expression is not his) of those who confuse the body scheme with schemas for the activation of those somatotopical sensorial charts plotted by single-neuron recordings. For in such schemas he sees only static structures incapable of reacting to the continual changes provoked by the stimuli which accompany the movement of the organism.

So his conception of the bodily schema as 'a process rather than a structure' comes close to the Husserlian conception of the multi-dimensional multiplicity of kinaesthetic motivation : 'a supra-modal organisation containing information about the cinematic structure of the body, and about the dimensions of its links and their mass-inertial characteristics synthesizing the different types of afferent signals, and presenting the results of this synthesis in the form of spatial coordinates and trajectories of body parts [48]'.

In not wanting to take part in a scientific squabble I hope I have not exposed phenomenology to the suspicion of favouritism with regard to this typically 'holistic' physiology by supporting what some call its conservative resistance to the elementary determinism (neuronal in particular) of a more recent physiology. Be that as it may,  if what we are looking for is a neuro-physiological interpretation of the Husserlian theory of constitution, it is clear that we are already provided with at least a valid approach. Along with the body scheme, this research into kinaesthetic illusions underpins the theory of constitution with a respectable empirical foundation.

II.2.  Neural Correlates of the Understanding of Actions.

The challenge with which we are faced is that of trying to interpret the theory of constitution in terms of recent neuro-physiology. With the aid of the computer, new techniques have been developed for taking encephalographic recordings through micro-electrodes implanted in an active and conscious animal and these techniques have made it possible if not to 'look' into the brain - pace Wittgenstein - at least to 'listen' to the bio-electrical activity of single neurons while carrying out specific tasks. And to such an extent that this approach has even seemed to be doomed to enquire into 'grandma's neuron', the selective destruction of which, neuro-philosophers have predicted, would make it impossible for you to recognise your grandmother.

In fact, it seems that such an atomistic reductionism has not proved fatal. The totality and complexity of the organism has been rediscovered, less in the 'parallel distribution' model suggested by the engineering of artificial neural networks than in the anatomical and functional hierarchy which obtains between the regions of the cerebral cortex, depending on whether they enclose 'low level' neurons which encode the movements of the organism in their full detail or 'high level' neurons which encode actions independently of their concrete modes of realisation.

More especially, I would like to draw the attention of phenomenologists to a recent discovery the philosophical importance of which is likely to be missed due to the poor state of interdisciplinary communication at this time. At the level of the individual neuron, biological support has been uncovered for the understanding of the intentional signification of the actions of an other agent. One might have thought - indeed the first part of my paper might have led you to believe - that such a dimension could only feature as an emergent property, making its appearance solely on the plane of the whole person engaged in communitarian interaction (linguistic and cultural) with other persons.

What makes the corporeal rootedness of such an understanding even more profound is undoubtedly that its origin is neither representational nor 'cognitive' but practical. To the extent that an organism is capable of understanding the intentional signification of its own actions, it acquires the possibility of immediately understanding the signification of the actions of others, that is, without the mediation of any perception of an initially non-interpreted bodily movement followed by a judgment which attributes meaning on the basis of a special interpretation. But despite being non-inferential and pre-predicative, this understanding still has no less an access to the supposedly 'grammatical' aspects of the encoding of the meaning of actions in categories expressing vital values.

From now on it will not be possible to hold that action is a 'grammatical fiction', a composite product devoid of ontological reality, a simple linking of associative reflexes or automatic reactions to external stimuli. Rather, these reaction require integration in a whole which certainly contains the individual organism (in the first instance, a certain collection of neurons in its cerebral cortex) but is not limited either by it or by its social or intraspecific grouping. Its boundaries are to be fixed by a natural hermeneutics of the intentionality of actions, classified according to the type of meaning they convey in the context of a teleology of living beings in their environment. In the same way, just as not every objective movement is understood as action nor, one may assume, will the actions of species too far remove in the phylogenetic tree be so understood, and, going still further in the direction of lifeless artifice, we already know that a virtual reality 'hand' is not perceived as accomplishing actions, at least in this sense, that it does not affect the cerebral metabolism as does the perception of a real hand.

Prof. Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team from the Institute of Human Physiology at the University of Parma discovered in 1992 in the pre-motor cortex of the macaco monkey (area F5, the equivalent of the Broca area in men) a class of neurons which they themselves described as 'surprising' [49]. The characteristic of these 'mirror-neurons' is that they are activated, and display the same structure of activity, both when the animal accomplishes certain hand movements directed towards some goal and  when he observes the experimenter in the process of accomplishing what one is obliged to call the same actions.

For several years this team has been conducting research into the functional complexity of the neurons of the pre-motor cortex by comparison with those of the primary motor cortex. The neurons in question  are not activated when the animal carries out individual, concrete movements - implying privileged nerve pathways and a group of determinate muscles. They are activated only when it carries out an action, where the latter is defined as a series of articulated movements aimed at one and the same goal no matter what the limb, the muscles, or the detail of the movements brought into play, and no matter what the position of the limbs or of the body required for their activation. And to such an extent that it has been possible to classify these neurons according to the type of action associated with their realisation : 'grasp with the hand', 'grasp with the hand and mouth', 'reach', 'catch with precision' or 'with the whole hand' etc. All the neurons of the same type encode actions which meet the same objective. The authors have suggested that the totality of these neurons make up a vocabulary of all the actions necessary for the animal to 'attain, grasp, reach, grasp and bring its food to its mouth'.

The conditions under which these neurons are stimulated have turned out to be of a characteristic complexity. The process responsible for carrying through the movements is not directly selected by the stimulus, whether visual or motivational. Rather, it initiates a motor programme which ends up eventually in action. With regard to visual stimuli and the neurons responsible for reaching and grasping, the response is not  determined by any object presented in any way but is dependent upon the question whether this stimulus does or does not meet a certain expectation on the part of the animal. If it does, it still has to be of the kind : 'object within reach'. It is as if these neurons reacted not to the stimulus as such, that is, to its form or its sensorial appearance, but to its meaning for the animal. But reacting to a meaning is precisely what one means by 'understanding'. Should we not therefore be talking of understanding rather than of simple stimulation ?

What is particularly surprising about this discovery by the team from Parma is that one is even more tempted to talk of an 'understanding of actions' once one appreciates that an action on the part of the experimenter (and which is observed by the animal) also possesses the power to activate the neurons which command an action of the same kind in the animal itself. Hence the title of the article published in 1992 in Experimental Brain Research : 'Understanding motor events'. In the course of a series of tests bearing upon these pre-motor neurons which are brought into play by, or which modify their activity in the course of, a prehensile movement carried out by the monkey with its hand, it was noted that the experimenter's action in gathering food with his hand had the power of activating these neurons, even in the absence of any movements on the part of the monkey. A class of neurons which fires selectively whenever the monkey takes a sunflower seed or a raisin between the thumb and the index finger fires in just as active a fashion whenever the monkey watches the experimenter gathering this seed. A second class of neurons which displays an intense spontaneous activity and is powerfully inhibited during prehension is similarly affected, and in a quite precise fashion, when the monkey sees the experimenter taking the seed - and this at the very moment when he takes it.

In the course of a systematic study of neurons located in area F5 and affected by different types of manual actions accomplished under the gaze of the animal, it was possible to establish a classification of these neurons as a function of the type of similarity between the action observed and the action carried out by the monkey. First, there was a group which was only activated by strictly identical actions : 'grasp with the mouth', 'grasp with the hand' etc. Another group allowed for observed actions which bore a visual resemblance with those of the monkey : 'using the hand to place an object on the table' bears a visual resemblance with 'grasping'. Yet another group allows for actions perceived as standing in a logical relationship with the actions carried out. 'Placing an object on the table' is the necessary condition of 'carrying it to the mouth'. One last group of neurons answer to the actions of the experimenter, whithout their activity bearing any relation to the movements of the animal. None of the neurons belonging to any one of these groups can be correlated with simple movements of the hand or of the object, nor with any act of prehension employing instruments.

In a more recent experiment,  another monkey was placed in the presence of the one which carried the implanted recording device, and a strictly synchronised firing of the neurons of area F5 was noted each time this other monkey grasped the food offered by the experimenter.

Going further and trying to establish the existence of mirror-neurons in man, it has recently been discovered (1995) that observing the experimenter grasping an object induced in the subject an increase in the motor potential evoked by magnetic stimulation of the cortex in the muscles which bring into play the execution of the same movement. But in both cases, tomography by emission of positrons shows a 'highly significant activation' of the sanguin flux in the Broca (area) brain [50]. From an anatomical point of view, the F5 area and the Broca brain are alike in both being responsible for associating a somatotopic representation of the hand - predominant with the monkey - and a somatotopic representation of the muscles of the mouth - predominant with man.

But then, what are we to make of the functional role of these mirror-neurons in man, neurons whose schema of activation seems capable of representing the identity between the meaning of one's own actions and those of the other but not the emotional state nor the predisposition of the subject to action ? For Rizzolatti, the answer is to be sought in a recent anthropological theory according to which speech in primates is not derived from the cry (which is not directed towards a determinate fellow creature and depends upon instinctual behaviour and the emotional state of the subject) but rather from gestural communication with visual contact, in particular, the smacking of the lips which precedes articulation [51].

Conclusion : the comprehension of the actions of others lies at the root of speech. We understand each other through language because, in advance, we have already understood each others actions. Which comprehension of action features as the most basic intersubjective precondition. Without pressing too far this question of an 'empirical confirmation' of phenomenology, it must at least be admitted that the recent findings of neuro-physiology amply justify Husserl's upholding, against Lipps and Max Scheler [52], that our empathic experience of the other is an internal imitation of the movement accomplished by the other, and which implies an actualisation of the kinaesthetic sensations - including thereunder its neural correlates - corresponding to the movement in question and not its effective execution nor even any affective fusion with the other. In addition, Husserl was also amply justified in upholding against his 'former self' that the world is not constituted by the solipsistic subject and that,  as a life world inclusive of nature and culture, its constitution is intersubjective and practical and not subjective and 'cognitive' (representational).

Conclusion

In order to clarify my position on the controversial question of the naturalisation of Husserlian phenomenology, I am going to make a few simple and obvious comparisons.

To start with, there are those who occupy the foreground in the cognitive sciences and in the neurosciences and who aspire to telling others to what tune they should be dancing : these are the "model builders". Without even mentioning their overhead projection films and their flow charts, the value of any segment of which is rarely, if ever, called in question, they are recognisable by the intrepid casualness with which, once they are provided with a functional system, they become indifferent to the question whether this system applies to collections of neurons in the brain of a primate, human or otherwise, or whether, on the contrary, it applies to the wiring of a robot or even to an artifical (virtual) network of neurons. To refer to a philosopher who is presently more in vogue than poor Husserl, I would say that they are situated in the perspective of Tractatus  4, 014 : "A gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the sound waves, all stand to one another in the same internal relation of depicting that holds between language and the world". Against which one has only to appeal to the author of the Investigations, who only admits "the existence of a system of impulses emitted by the brain in correlation with spoken or written thoughts" to the extent that he takes it to be "impossible to read processes of thought into cerebral processes", because he sees "no reason why the system should continue in the direction of the center". ("Why might this order not, so to speak, arise out of chaos53  ? ) And one goes on repeating, with a specious air of exhaustiveness, that the central opposition of our time is between two camps and two camps only : the Gestaltists (who nowdays prefer to call themselves "functionalists") who recommend, if not an isomorphism, at least some kind of program to implementation correspondance between all levels, and the Thomists (no relation to the Father of the Church) who recommend an order emerging out of chaos.

Husserl (strictly speaking, that aspect of his thought which interests me) doesn't seem to me to engage his thinking either in the direction of isomorphism (or program), or that of emergentism. His approach zigzags between archaeology and teleology and is based upon a fundamental intuition : the intuition that form, structure, signification or sense are both prefigured in the being in which they subsist before becoming fully effective and, once they are so prefigured, are projected beyond this being into a futural elsewhere where they will eventually cease to exist. Thus, the institutional forms which together mould the culture of each human community are, to the extent that this is possible, meaning-full structures. To view them as an order potentially isomorphic with every other order at every other level of analysis, or as resulting from underlying mico-movements which are unpredictable at the macro-level, is, in the one case just as in the other, to abstract from the meaning shared by all those who intend these meaning-full structures, to examine them in a cavalier manner from a detached standpoint which is extended to the entire universe, in a word, to objectify an order which is supposed to have been always already in place or which arose fully equipped in some way or other.

Husserl looks at things in a completely different way. His method is to dive right into the lived experience of meaning, even into the flux, not, of course, at the risk of drowning but by trying to draw out of it the meaning, to orient himself with regard to it, to identify its origins ("archai") and its goal ("telos") without any other ambition than to ceaselessly uphold the tension between these two poles of the meaning field. For his intellectual commitments differs radically from that of Köhler, de Saussure, Wittgenstein, Hofstadter, etc. It is his conviction that the grasping of a meaning permits us to actualise the original conditions which make it possible, at the same time that it enables us to accede by right to a world whose horizon is opened up by it. Let me explain. The entire system of human culture is a structure of meaning. To participate in it is possible only subject to certain conditions which are not satisfied by stones, for example, but which humans satisfy as also certain non human species of animals, in any case always living creatures.

One of the most basic conditions is "our experience of others", that is, that we have an experience of the other which is not reducible to the physical thing which its body is. Empiricism can not uncover this experience because it limits itself to sense data, to the bombardment of our sensory terminals with luminous, and pressure, or whatever, stimulation. In a certain sense, our experience of the other includes the experience that the other has of itself and of us. This is the Einfühlung which was unjustly and erroneously dismissed by Heidegger, who imputed quite wrongly to Husserl's attempt to overcome the solipsism inherent in his own Cartesianism, a point of view which was adopted thereafter, if not by the entire phenomenological tradition, at least by those who command the heights in my country. The only way of getting back to the impulsional intentionality of intersubjectivity, located in our dispositions, tendencies and empathix or intropathic kinesthesia, is by getting around any objectifying consciousness or wilful interpretation of action. By becoming aware of the fact that we are responsible for the meaning of the being of the other and by being ready to make a heroic effort to get past positions which could have been - and may still - be held against him in order to render intelligible this very awareness (Cartesian subjectivism, Kantian transcendantalism, Fichtean idealism, etc.), Husserl remains exemplary.

However, empathy is a concept borrowed by early phenomenologists from empirical psychology (T. Lipps). This means that there are psychological, psycho-physiological, vital and natural sources of meaning. Meaning doesn't just arise in being by accident, like a face seen in the clouds or on the sand only to be blotted out soon after without ever recurring. Nor is it eternally imprisoned in a labyrinth of mirrors in which images are reflected back and forth indefinitely. As against Descartes' conception of the man-machine or the brain-machine of those of his ungrateful beneficiaries (who accuse him of making a "mistake" without taking the trouble to read him) our body is, for Husserl, an organism, Leib, not Körper. It "makes sense of", is "oriented towards something (or someone)". The living being which we are can not exist without feeling something at some level no matter how "elementary" - except perhaps the molecular, if not the cellular level. To examine these conditions (mirror neurons, etc.), whether they be ontogenetically acquired or phylogenetically written into the organism, to examine the "living experience of meaning" which may help to explain the meaning-giving activity of the subjective and intersubjective being which this organism is, both this organism and those other organisms it encounters in its environment, this, it seems to me, opens up a legitimate way of understanding "naturalisation".

I therefore have no hesitation in averring that those who seek in Husserl's own declarations grounds for objecting to "naturalism" in psychology and in the other natural sciences (statements which can easily be found in Logical Researches, Ideas I and Crisis and which, as it happens, I am well aware of) fails to make a case which presents any serious objection to this kind of "naturalisation". Phenomenologists should not need to be reminded that this programme of naturalisation presupposes an intentional and phenomenological psychology, not a behaviourist psychology, still less that of cognitivists who mistakenly suppose that they have moved beyond behaviourism. More particularly, it demands a biology capable of surmounting the obstacles represented by the objectivism and the mechanism of the "model-builders", all of which takes us in the direction of that hermeneutical anthropology of the life-world of human communities which is sketched out in Husserl's manuscripts from the 30s. Since no one is the master of the meaning words assume, I am ready to admit that my own words can also be taken in a sense other than that I intended (that, for example, of W.V.O. Quine) - which gives me the right to decline all responsibility for what others may chose to make of my present claims.

Jean-Luc PETIT

Université des Sciences Humaines

de Strasbourg

 

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