Published in American Imago, vol. 72, Summer 2015/2, pp. 177-196. 

Sergio Benvenuto

Abstract

The author analyzes and deconstructs the 12 or more pages the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote on hallucinations in his book on 1945 Phenomenology of Perception. He tries to show that his phenomenological rigorous description of the hallucinatory phenomena at a certain point contradicts some phenomenological basic assumptions, that is, its aim to transcendentally “describe” rather than scientifically “explain” hallucinations. This reading tries to focus the limits of a purely descriptive method like the phenomenological one in psychiatry, and shows how, in the end, phenomenological description of hallucinations and of psychosis continues and strengthen the traditional psychiatric task to find sound discriminatory criteria between the normal and the pathological in a mind. The author shows, getting very close to Merleau-Ponty’s text, how the phenomenological ideal of “comprehension” resolves in the end in criteria to discriminate the morbid subjects as “failed existences” in relation to normal (authentic) subjects according to the phenomenological model of subjectivity.

 

I. Not Constructing, But Living

I offer here a rereading of the pages Maurice Merleau-Ponty dedicated to hallucinations in his Phenomenology of Perception; in particular because they effectively illustrate the phenomenological approach to a psychiatric symptom. As we know, phenomenology was very successful in the psychiatric field (especially in continental Europe) throughout the twentieth century. I will prove, however, that this analysis of hallucinations clearly shows the philosophical limits of the phenomenological approach in psychiatry and in subjectivity in general. I will also try to draft a deconstruction of phenomenological discourse that tries to question the deep sense of phenomenological psychiatry and its theoretical assumptions.

In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty devotes several pages to hallucination. In his opinion hallucinations play a philosophically strategic role: they are “counter evidence” for his reflections in the chapter “The Thing and the Natural World.” In other words, hallucinations are alternative proof of what he has already proved, for we call hallucination the (apparent) perception of things that do not exist. According to Merleau-Ponty, this borderline case of our ‘being in the world,’ if described correctly, proves the phenomenological description of our perceptive relation to the natural world (1945, pp. 391-402; 1945/1978, pp. 299-345).

Merleau-Ponty counterpoints the phenomenological description of hallucinatory states to those by two classical philosophical approaches, which he calls “Empiricism” and “Intellectualism.” In fact he means the offspring of the two main philosophical traditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: British Empiricism and Cartesian Rationalism. The former rests on the scientific explanations to hallucination, the latter focuses on the relation between hallucinatory belief and cogito.

Yet he notices a profound relationship between the “Empiricist explanation” and the “Intellectualist reflection”: “Both construct the hallucinatory phenomenon instead of living it” (1945, p. 394; 1945/1978, p. 336). This opposition between constructing and living goes well beyond the case of hallucination: on the one hand we have the construction of the classical philosophies—empiricist and rationalist—and on the other phenomenological ‘living’ (Erlebnis) in the face of every experience. In other words, phenomenology never reconstructs our experience because it does not take it as something constructed, which could be deconstructed, fragmented: it describes our experience in its immediate givenness, whole, undividable to our consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s formulation is however equivocal, insofar as the phenomenologist, as a philosopher, does not “experience” hallucination any more than the Empiricist or the Cartesian philosopher. 

In any case, Merleau-Ponty does not restrict his examination to hallucination in psychotic states; rather he considers all hallucinatory states, including those of hallucinogenic drug takers and alcoholics. The philosopher “experiences” the hallucination “alive” in the sense that he reproduces it in our own so-called normal experience of things and of the world on the presumption that it is experienced by (almost) everyone—because, as we shall see, even if hallucination is a very special experience, it becomes comprehensible (not explainable!) if we refer to something he calls the “antepredicative world.” This world affirmed itself in a period, perhaps earliest childhood, when the world was not yet stably constituted by the intentionality of consciousness.

Our philosopher recognizes the intellectualistic tradition’s merit in psychiatry in making a fundamental distinction: that hallucinations are something absolutely different from perceptions. In other words, hallucinations are not perceptions of nonexistent objects. The neurosciences confute this thesis, at least for the hallucinations of non-psychotics known as Charles Bonnet syndrome. When these visions or hearing of voices are produced, the exact same areas and pathways as when we perceive are activated in the brain (see Ffytche, 2007; Sacks, 2013). (But, indeed, is phenomenology’s “perception” the same perception the neuroscientist deals with? Is it the same object, or is it something the phenomenologist thematizes differently from that object observed by the scientist?) It is true, however, that hallucinated psychotics distinguish between perceptions and hallucinations in their discourse: they do not situate them on the same ontological level. Either they separate them as belonging to two entirely different levels of contact with the real or they describe them as contact with a reality of a different order from the reality with which perceptions put us into contact. “The victim of hallucinations,” Merleau-Ponty specifies, “cannot hear or see in the genuine sense of these words.” And he writes:

The fact that patients so often say that someone is talking to them by telephone or radio, is to be taken precisely as expressing that the morbid world is artificial, and that it lacks something needed to become a ‘reality.’ (1945, p. 393; 1945/1978, p. 436)

Today’s psychotic hallucinations have been updated compared to when Merleau-Ponty wrote about them: they involve computers, lasers and other ultramodern electronic devices. The important point is that the persecutor always uses state-of-the-art machinery. In any case, according to Merleau-Ponty, Cartesian rationalists—even if they do realize that the victims of hallucination do not perceive—describe hallucination as an unfounded judgment or belief. Merleau-Ponty retorts, “the insane do not believe they see” the objects of their hallucinations. As the sufferer of hallucinations does not present the hallucination as real, we should not judge it as a judgment or belief. 

Of course, we could object to Merleau-Ponty that the term “belief” is rather problematic and that it expresses very different subjective positions. Merleau-Ponty gives the term “belief” a semantic precision that it is not given in experience and in concrete language. For example, hallucination victims often describe what they see or hear in a hallucinatory way as certainties. What relation is there between certainty and belief? Not necessarily is certainty an extreme case of belief. Not necessarily is it, in other words, a belief without doubts. After all, if someone says they are “certain” about the existence of God, does certainty here have the same sense when the same person says she is certain that she will sooner or later die? Here resorting to the term “certainty” relates to “beliefs” that do not invest the same ontic level. We can, in short, suspect a homonymy in the qualification of different experiences as “certain.” So, if it is true that hallucination victims do not believe they are seeing, is hallucinatory evidence something in the order of faith for the psychotic? We cannot safely state this either. Merleau-Ponty writes:

When the victim of hallucinations declares that he sees and hears, we must not believe him, since he also declares the opposite; what we must do is understand him. (1945, p. 394; 1945/1978, 336-337)

Understanding: this is the project of every phenomenological description. And the phenomenological understanding of the hallucinated person does not mean at all to understand what she believes in. We shall then try to understand the true sense of the phenomenological understanding.

II. Geographical World and Landscape

Hallucination, therefore, is not a belief. It is, Merleau-Ponty states again and again, an imposture. This does not of course mean that the hallucination sufferer is an impostor, but that hallucination is essentially an imposture. It is an imposture, according to Merleau-Ponty, because it is experienced and described as if it were a perception without it being such. But if it is not the perception of something, what is its noema?

The fundamental act of phenomenology is the epoché, that is, the suspension of assent to the beliefs of common sense, what scientific knowledge is also based on. Yet, the world that common sense and science—I shall call them both Good Knowledge—claim really exists independent from our consciousness does not for this reason disappear in the eyes of the phenomenologist. This external world and our consciousness are both original data of our intuition and can be rigorously described starting from their evidence, that is, from the living experience (Erlebnis) we have of them. The content of phenomenology is then in some way double: on the one hand, we have the world as it shows itself within Good Knowledge and its beliefs (even though phenomenology suspends all beliefs connected to it); on the other, we have the world as it appears in an “originary presentive intuition” (Husserl’s concept) from the flow of Erlebnisse. Husserl called noema the world thematized by phenomenology. On the one hand, therefore, the world thematized by Good Knowledge, and on the other, the world as a “residue” of the phenomenological epoché, the noema.

In fact, the world of Common Good Knowledge and the noema are twins that few can distinguish between; we need mother phenomenology to differentiate them without committing a fault. Practically every phenomenological analysis is always on the edge of a very subtle discrimination, so on the one hand we have the world as all of us, philosophers and non-philosophers, know it and think it, and on the other the same world, but in some way refined, transfigured by the phenomenological reduction that distills it into a noema. What phenomenology renews is then a sort of Aufhebung in Hegel’s sense. In other words, the banal world of Common Good Knowledge is cancelled out, lifted and preserved in the phenomenological transfiguration. This distillation is the pride of all phenomenologists, but it is also, as we shall see, the misery of their job: the ultra-purified world of this transcendental reduction is still the pale shadow of that impure, dirty, pre-judged, “superstitious” world we humans all dabble in. In the case of hallucination, therefore, the phenomenologist carries out an Aufhebung of empiricist and intellectualist conceptions (expressions of Common Good Knowledge) thematizing hallucination as a noema. But the point is this: How do we describe as a noema a mode of consciousness, such as hallucinatory experience, which is void of world—“world” even in the sense of common sense? If hallucination is neither a perception nor a judgment, where does it find a place? In what place of being? Not in the “geographical world,” our philosopher writes, not in the cartographical world of Good Knowledge; rather, he says, in the “individual landscape.” He refers to the distinction made by psychiatrist Erwin Straus (1935) between a “geographical world” and “landscape.” The landscape is a geographical area we stand before but that touches us; it is a topographical world we experience, that is, the part of world specifically given to me on the basis of my position in the world. 

“A woman patient,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “declares that someone looked at her at the market, and that she felt the gaze fall upon her like a blow, but could not say whence it came.” He continues:

For her it is not a matter of what happens in the objective world, but of what she encounters, what touches her or strikes her…The hallucination is not a perception, but it has the value of reality, and it alone counts for the victim. The world has lost its expressive force, and the hallucinatory system has usurped it. (1945, pp. 399-400; 1945/1978, p. 342)

The latter sentence and other similar ones risk creating misunderstandings: not always, nor usually, does the expressive force of hallucination usurp the expressiveness of the perceived world. Nor can we say that for hallucination sufferers of this kind only hallucinations count; in this case, the objective world still counts. Let us say instead that hallucination, when it is psychotic, always involves subjects and addresses them by emerging from the objective world as an excess of it: the world over-means for the subject.

If hallucination is neither an intuition about the world nor a judgment that affirms a belief, how is it related to perception? In fact, despite structural differences, hallucination and perception have a common trait: when subjects talk about either their experiences of perception or their hallucinations, in both cases they set themselves as witnesses. When the woman patient mentioned above says she can “perceive” a gaze she cannot see but that she feels like a blow, she is describing herself as a passive object of something from an external world, even if this external world does not coincide with the “geographical.” In fact, as Merleau-Ponty writes, hallucination and perception are modalities of one single primordial function, through which we arrange round about us a setting of definite structure and through which we are enabled to place ourselves at one time fairly and squarely in the world and at another time marginally to it.

In this way hallucinated subjects situate themselves on the fringes of the world that this primordial function constitutes. This being at the fringes resolves itself “in the solitary constitution of a fictitious milieu.” (1945, p. 400; 1945/1978, p. 342) Note that here the philosopher uses the term milieu, not environnement. In French, milieu also means ‘center,’ hence ‘being in the middle of’ or ‘being at the center of,’ as in ‘je suis au milieu de mes enfants’ (‘I am among my children’). The milieu is neither the world nor the environment we inhabit without being conscious of it; rather it is the ‘being in the middle’ of a part of the world for which in a certain sense we are the center. The milieu—as the part of the world that personally touches us, with which we interact—is reminiscent of Straus’s “landscape.” It too is inextricably connected to a point of view, which is always my own. Milieu for Merleau-Ponty seems to be a sort of intermediate level between landscape and the world. On the subject of fictitious environment, however, he writes:

But this fiction can have the value of reality only because in the normal subject reality itself suffers through an analogous process. (1945, p. 400; 1945/1978, p. 342)

The author himself places this sentence in italics: it seems essential to him.

Up to this point, Merleau-Ponty has criticized all approaches that lead hallucinations back to normal experiences of relations with the world, such as perception and judgment. Still, to account for the fact that an index of reality still operates in hallucinations, he is forced to hypothesize a “primordial function” common to both types of relations with objects, according to which hallucinations express a possibility of being in reality from which also those who do not suffer from hallucination cannot completely exclude themselves. Normal subjects too are “afflicted with this gaping wound through which illusion can make its way in” (1945, p. 400; 1945/1978, p. 342). Normal subjects conceal a wound that is revealed in hallucination. Of what does this primordial function or wound consist? Is it a temporal primordiality, as something that happens precociously, in early childhood? A rigorous phenomenology should exclude any “evolutionist” interpretation, because evolution implies an objective history that we should turn into epoché. Yet, as we shall see, Merleau-Ponty appeals precisely to an evolutional history of our being-in-the-world.

In what way and in what sense does this primordial function, which operates universally in all human beings, constitute a basic vulnerability for any subjectivity? The primordial function is simply that function thanks to which we believe in what we see. Good Knowledge takes this belief for granted, even if Descartes dared to doubt it. On the one hand, phenomenology took up the Cartesian doubt as an epoché action of every constituted knowledge; on the other, it rejected it, asserting that perception makes us certain of a world it makes no sense to doubt, about which we can “doubt” only intellectually, only when we philosophize. The existence of the world we live in is not an inference based on subjective sensations but immediate evidence given to us by our consciousness. Does phenomenology then agree with Good Knowledge? Apparently so, yet for phenomenology too this belief in the reality of what we perceive is not obvious. In fact, without evoking specific psychotic experiences such as ‘end of the world,’ normal subjectivities can occasionally produce feelings of unreality, or derealization as psychiatry calls it. Freud (1936) described his own feeling of unreality when he climbed to the Athenian Acropolis for the first time. By no means do we believe in the world that we perceive because of some intellectual verification. Instead:

The normal person does not find satisfaction in subjectivity, he runs away from it. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 400; 1945/1978, pp. 342-343) 

Heidegger said that every great thinker has built his works around a single great thought. “Every thinker thinks one only thought…” (1976, p. 50) For me, the sentence “Le normal ne jouit pas [does not enjoy]…de la subjectivité, il la fuit” sums up very well the single great thought of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, a thought that pursues Husserl’s project to go “back to the things themselves.” Merleau-Ponty wants to “free us from internal life” (1945, p. 400; 1945/1978, pp. 342-343).

Merleau-Ponty’s great thought asserts that every psychopathology is remaining and even basking in subjectivity. Pathology means enjoying your subjectivity. By contrast, normality is always a vocation to delight in enjoy the world, even when delighting in enjoying yourself as your own world. The normal subject thus moves continuously between landscape and geographical world, that is, the world others also perceive and inhabit. This going beyond the subjective landscape is the transcendentality of consciousness, which always goes beyond our subjectivity and plunges us into the world without any verification and prior to any constituted knowledge. According to Merleau-Ponty, this transcendentality derives from a “deeper function”—he characterizes it as “primordial”—that gives perceived objects their reality indices. Evidently referring to derealization experiences, he explains that schizophrenics lack such indices. Husserl had called this function “Urdoxa” or “Urglaube,” a “primordial faith”—a faith of the religious type—in the reality of the world we perceive. In this “realm of primary opinion,” Merleau-Pointy now seems to admit, “hallucinatory illusion is possible.” This is so because, as he writes, “we are still in the antepredicative world” (1945, p. 401; 1945/1978, p. 343, emphasis added). Still, ante: temporal terms that seem to indicate a primary moment at which the basic difference between landscape (which can also be hallucinated) and geographical world has yet to emerge. Merleau-Ponty here seems to hypothesize a time prior to this primary separation between subject and world, a time when being proposed itself overwhelmingly—with no differences between modes of being, between the imagined and the perceived, between subjective and objective.

III. “I Have a Body, But I Do Not Believe In It”

Thematizing Urdoxa is a fundamental point in phenomenology, especially considering that in other modern philosophies such thematization cannot be taken into account. This is the case of Wittgenstein (1953) when in the Philosophical Investigations he discusses “Moore’s paradox.” According to the paradox, we can say only other people have false beliefs; one can never say it about oneself. Put another way: I cannot both describe what is before my very eyes and state that I believe in it, because the negation of the belief in what I describe in front of me has no sense. I can only believe or disbelieve in something that can be doubted—when, in other words, a certain distance exists between what I perceive and what I say. Moore’s paradox allows Wittgenstein to reject Cartesian doubt: it can make no sense to doubt what is before my very eyes, unless of course I suffer from Bonnet syndrome, in which case subjects usually know they are hallucinating. This paradoxical line of thought undermines the foundations of the Husserlian concept of Urdoxa. What I see cannot be the object of any primary belief: I can believe that God exists, but I cannot believe, for example, that I have a body here and now.

            To a phenomenologist, psychotic phenomena have importance precisely because they demonstrate that what Moore considered a paradox is instead a concrete experience. Many psychotic experiences can be described with statements like: “I have a body, but I don’t believe in it.” This describes what actually happens with sufferers of Cotard’s syndrome, deeply depressed subjects who think that they are no longer in possession of a body and are in fact already dead. Their certainty paradoxically leads them to harboring suicidal projects, to a wish to kill their dead body. In short, psychotic language and experience dissociate what Wittgenstein’s grammatical analysis asserts to be indissoluble: they deny that my immediate experience is so entwined with my belief in it that disbelief in what I see here and now does not make any sense. Instead, psychotics speak of their immediate experience as if they were at once an-other with regard to that experience.

Whereas Wittgenstein does not regard psychotic propositions as real propositions, phenomenology takes them very seriously: they express a way of being-in-the-world thanks to which we can prove that experience, however immediate, still must be accepted by the subject. In other words, subjects still need to believe in their own experiences. Not only does what seems to make no sense to the non-psychotic make perfect sense to the psychotic, it legitimizes the philosophic presumption of the existence of a primary belief in our first-hand [at first person ?] experiences. Phenomenology is not straightforward empiricism. According to the phenomenologists our perceptual experience and the propositions that describe it are not the result of passive reception but imply a going towards the world, an active disposition toward caring for the world. Further, in certain experiences—such as the psychotic—this disposition can be lacking.

IV. A Primordial Consciousness?

            How does one describe this pre-world, this deeper primordial function that authorizes us to talk of our belief in the world around us? At first Merleau-Ponty says that in any case “the connection between appearance and total experience is merely implicit and presumptive, even in the case of true perception” (1945, p. 401; 1945/1978, p. 343). In other words, hallucination presumably arises on the grounds of a primary imperfection in perception that prevents our perception from coinciding with an absolute certainty regarding the objects with which we are confronted. I am, for example, certain about the existence of the table I am writing on, but of this table I see only certain parts in certain moments. In fact, Husserl could speak of a “primary faith” in the reality of the world precisely because of an alleged gap between perception and belief. Yet, this hypothesis by Merleau-Ponty is dangerous for phenomenology: Does it mean that hallucination finds its space in the unbridgeable and necessary gap between perceiving and believing? Does hallucination then not risk being reduced to a form of perceptual delusion? If so, Merleau-Ponty would be drastically trivializing the hallucinatory experience and we would be returning to that intellectualistic empiricism he himself denounced. Merleau-Ponty, however, immediately quotes data from a study by Piaget (1929/1971):

The child attributes his dreams, no less than his perceptions, to the world; he believes that the dream is enacted in his room, at the foot of his bed, the sole difference from perception being that the dream is visible to sleepers alone. (as cited in Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 401; 1945/1978, p. 343)

By referring to developmental psychology, does Merleau-Ponty not betray the anti-psychological postulate of phenomenology? Is a “phenomenological psychology” possible or is it a contradiction in terms?

Here Merleau-Ponty does not betray a transcendentalist commitment, insofar as here Piaget does not really present a theory explaining the evolution of the representation of dreams in childhood: he simply reports the statements of children of different ages. He is informing, not explaining anything. In fact, Merleau-Ponty adds, “The world is still the vague theatre of all experiences” (1945, p. 401; 1945/1978, p. 343, author’s emphasis). We again find the same temporal term—still—here connected to the time of childhood. In fact, the reference to beliefs and representations in childhood has the same function as the references to beliefs and representations in subjects from epochs and cultures far removed from us: two ways of being human that, however, do not seem to be a full, resolved humanity. We are aware of the extent to which we Westerners have been long inclined to read cultural differences in terms of “primitivism,” that is, in terms of a precedence in social and developmental paths—and we also know to what extent this is a discredited vision today. In any event, Merleau-Ponty reads in this childish belief about dreams an “antepredicative world,” that is, an indistinct world where what counts—we would say—is not that objects are either imaginary or real, subjective or objective, but simply that they are objects:

To have hallucinations and more generally to imagine, is to exploit this tolerance on the part of the antepredicative world, and our bewildering proximity to the whole of being in syncretic experience. (1945, p. 401; 1945/1978, p. 343)

As expected, hallucination is led to the same level as imagination. Syncretic experience—where objects still have not found their statute, insofar as they are not images or perceptions, and tertium non datur (a third option is not given)—would then bring together children and hallucination sufferers. The wound and vulnerability he refers to in the page before reveals itself to simply be a “bewildering proximity” between objects in a primitive world or, we would say, in a pre-world. A proximity where the ways of being of objects (and subjects) merge, do not stand out as heterogeneous, although they appear radically heterogeneous to our rationalist Western adult minds.

            Again, is there, according to phenomenologists, a developmental history of consciousness? Does the intentional consciousness they describe lead us back to a sort of Urbewusstsein, a primary consciousness from which the possibility of hallucination takes its roots? In short, should we imagine a sort of primordial consciousness that thematizes something not yet distinguishable as imaginary or real? Or is there a primitive enjoyment of one’s subjectivity (objective genitive) not yet separated from the escape from subjectivity, as if the enjoyment—infantile or hallucinated—of one’s own subjectivity coincided with the escape from it?

V. The Phenomenological Denunciation

            As we know, phenomenology does not set out to explain, but to understand. Understand whom and what? Evidently the other—and ourselves when sometimes, if hallucinated, we become other to ourselves. And for phenomenology, what do we understand of the other’s understanding? The most interesting comprehension is the one that is challenged by discourses that appear incomprehensible, in the same sense as when we say to someone “I don’t understand you,” a euphemistic way of saying: “I really don’t agree with what you’re doing or saying.”

            I am neither hallucinatory nor a Nazi nor an Islamic fundamentalist nor a cannibal nor a psychotic. Phenomenology tells me I have to understand the hallucinated subject, the Nazi, the Islamic fundamentalist, the cannibal, the psychotic, meaning that these human modes of thinking, being, and acting are inscribed within the essential possibilities thanks to which every human being relates to the world, perhaps even to the “ante-predicative world.” But if everything human—even psychosis, hallucinations, and cruelty—trace back to a relationship with being that is still syncretic, intelligible “at source,” then the risk is that phenomenological comprehension can become a night in which all cows are black. To avoid a banal, flat “comprehension,” phenomenology—within the same movement thanks to which it commits itself to understanding the incomprehensible—distinguishes and separates. As we have seen Merleau-Ponty do with hallucination, in the end it is made comprehensible but at the price of radically excluding it from the normal field of perception. He does understand it, but as an imposture, and because hallucinated subjects by no means understand it as an imposture, they are profoundly and essentially discriminated from the normal, as they have always been. This essential discrimination between normal and pathological ultimately becomes all that phenomenology “takes home.” This is not to assert a “politically correct,” non-discriminative anti-psychiatry, which today is even outdated, but instead to unmask the discriminative task in which phenomenology indulges when it gives shape to its project of understanding.

To discriminate is to supply a tool with which to legitimately differentiate between things, while the difference between hallucination and non-hallucination is given d’emblée, from the very start, anyone is capable of distinguishing between a hallucination and a perception if this anyone is not a psychotic. But, perhaps, it is more important—rather than to give a transcendentalist foundation to these differences—to start from these differences, which do in fact exist between humans, to situate the various ways of being-in-the-world in their diversity. It would seem important not to stigmatize hallucination as an imposture—identifying it with a sort of essential dishonesty in which phenomenological description and moral reproach tacitly support each other—but to adopt it as a genuine opportunity for possibility of he human being, something that can be explained or understood, understood and explained, and that should above all be correlated to much else that we experience and know and that concerns us and others. Phenomenological comprehension de facto resolves itself in a condemnation of the other, whether as a hallucinated subject, a Nazi, an Islamic fundamentalist, or a cannibal.

At this point I would like to draw upon an example taken not from Merleau-Ponty but from Ludwig Binswanger, the existential psychoanalyst who traveled very much in Merleau-Ponty’s direction. In his description of “eccentricity,” Binswanger cites this case: “A father puts under the Christmas tree, as a present for his daughter suffering from cancer, a coffin” (1956, p. 58, author’s translation). How do we “understand” such behavior that for us, as Binswanger says, is “like being punched in the face”? The author reminds us that every authentic gift contains an opening to communication and coexistence (in this case between the one who gives and the one who receives and accepts the gift), but by presenting his daughter with a coffin—on the basis of the indisputable argument “the only thing she could possibly need now is a coffin”—both communication and existence seem annihilated. Yet, with that Christmas gift the subject seems to accept a communicational opening, which here “deviates” towards a communicative occlusion. In other words, for me as a phenomenologist this eccentricity will never be a genuine way of being-with-the-other, because for phenomenology our relationship to the other is always, originally, one of communication and coexistence (Dasein is Mit-sein). According to phenomenology, the other subject is neither a cultural construction, nor the effect of an inference, nor a judgment generated by my repeated experiences with other human beings. The other subject is something I capture originally in my being-with—a being-with here explicated as “communication” and “coexistence.” Understanding the “oddball” therefore consists in understanding d’emblée that he or she does not understand communication between subjects, that he or she is a “failed Dasein.” Indeed, Binswanger here describes eccentricity, together with fixed elation and mannerism, as three forms of missglückten Daseins, of “failed forms of being there”—or “failed existences,” as some translations put it. In short, his phenomenological descriptions of “pathological” subjects also and above all denounce existential failures.

According to phenomenology, the possibility that the eccentric gentleman in question actualizes is the fiasco of an authentic being-with-the-other. What appeared a mighty effort by phenomenology to understand what is most incomprehensible to us actually resolves itself in a condemnation of the “understood” party as someone who does not understand “humanly.” Mutatis mutandis, we could argue that something similar could be demonstrated for other forms of life that “I don’t understand”: I the phenomenologist shall always come to the conclusion that it is a question of failed Dasein. In short, all of phenomenological psychiatry is a disguised philosophical and moral condemnation of the “psychopathological.” Significantly, Binswanger himself, discussing that “insensitive and brutal” father, writes: “wejudge according to that totality of satisfactibility which here is the Christmas celebrations” (1956, p. 58). I would instead write: “we judge,” in the sense that phenomenological analysis ultimately amounts, as in this case, always to a judgmental description.

The other’s loss failure is highlighted in contrast to my—the phenomenologist’s—existential success. Let us say that thanks to a phenomenological description I understand, for example, the cannibal as someone who intends other human beings as food. To be sure, film and literature have made us sympathize even with a figure like Hannibal Lecter, an insane but avenging cannibal, but as a phenomenologist I cannot conclude that cannibalism is a genuine human possibility for “being-with-the-other.”[1] In phenomenology our relationship with the other is always, from the origins, with an other subject, not with an object and even less so with a food-object. Understanding the cannibal resolves into understanding straight away that the latter does not understand the subjective otherness of fellow creatures, that he or she is a “failed Dasein.” In other words, according to phenomenology, the possibility that the cannibal actualizes is the failure of an authentic being-with-the-other: our fundamental being-with excludes the fact that I can intend the other human being as my food. What appeared as a mighty effort by phenomenology to understand what is most incomprehensible to us, actually resolves itself in a condemnation of the “understood,” insofar as s/he does not understand humanly. With the necessary modifications, something similar could also be proved for other forms of life that “I don’t understand”: I, the phenomenologist, will ultimately always conclude that they are failed Dasein. Again, all phenomenological psychiatry is a disguised philosophical and moral condemnation of the “psychopathological.”

We can thus understand why psychiatrists are still seduced by phenomenology much more than they are by psychoanalysis. It supplies them with noble tools—philosophical and ontological ones—to continue doing what they, as psychiatrists, have always done since the beginning of psychiatry, that is, even before trying to cure: separating the pathological from the normal, those who need psychiatric care from those who can do without it. After all, what does it matter whether psychopathology is explained through causal processes (for example, through brain lesions) or described through a transcendental reduction? All that counts is that, in the end, the separation between normal and pathological can be justified, that a foundation can be found for it. The ideal of understanding, therefore, in psychiatric practice—and in health-care politics—turns into an indirect, disguised, refined form of ethnocentricity. My “not oddball” way of being-in-the-world becomes the criterion thanks to which I discriminate my authentic way of being against “inauthenticity” and “imposture.”

What kind of approach should we take toward psychotic, ethical, or political ab-normality? We should not be devoting our greatest efforts to giving a transcendental foundation, in Husserl’s sense, to these abnormalities—to transfiguring their pitiful diversity into a checkmate for [failure of ?] intentionality—but should try instead to reconstruct how and why these life possibilities, these ways of being in the world, take on these specific forms. We should return to science, in other words, but not to a reductionist science. We must “parenthesize” the project of understanding the other, and rather accept the fact that humanity is made up of differences, that every form of life is an experiment, an attempt at being human based on faiths, certainties, acts, and passions. The difference from me, whatever it may be, should not be recovered [reabsorbed ?] and cancelled out on an ante-predicative background. Perhaps in the case of ethical pathologies (like Nazism and cannibalism) we can appeal to an ante-evaluative or ante-deontic dimension, a time when good and evil were not exclusive. What remains important is acknowledging the irreducible multiplicity of forms of life. Psychological science is not a question of understanding the “eccentric” act with the aid of philosophical approvals; the question is recognizing the “eccentric” possibility of being in the world and with others as one of many human possibilities, even if a socially dangerous one and one that must be countered.

VI. The Hiatus Between Being and World

            Much more could be said about Merleau-Ponty’s examples of hallucinations. We could propose—opening the way to a Lacanian reading—that the difference in representation between hallucination sufferers and children on the one hand and normal adults on the other could reside in a difference between their respective languages, a difference in ontologies implicit in those different languages. Merleau-Ponty claims, “The sun ‘rises’ for the scientist in the same way as it does for the uneducated person,” thereby assuming that modern science has imposed beliefs that differ from those dictated by our spontaneous perception of the world (1945, pp. 401-402; 1945/1978, p. 344). But is such an assumption really true? After all, I believe I see the sun rise only because the English language still uses the term “rise.” Without this usage, I am not certain we would still see the sun rising. Is it really true, as Merleau-Ponty writes, that some of our beliefs are based on our perceptions rather than on the way we were taught to talk about some of our perceptions? What phenomenology interprets as an immediate belief, one prior to any socially constituted knowledge, is very often nothing more than a belief mediated by a vision of the world set within our language. Perhaps if a child talks about dreams as if they were taking place in his bedroom, this simply registers the fact that for a child of that age the implicit ontology in the language he is still learning is not yet clear to him. The ontic status of dreams in his culture is still not clear to him. After all, it is language that gives us the opportunity for making childish “mistakes,” as when we say “I had a dream last night,” as we might say, “I had an omelet.” If our language instead made us say, “A dream was sent to me last night” or “I entered a dream last night,” children and adults alike might perceive dreams an entirely different way. And returning to the woman who felt that gaze as a blow, we cannot help but think of metaphors such as “an aggressive look,” “a penetrating gaze,” “an electrifying gaze,” or “a hurtful scornful gaze.” Was this not simply a question of the lady in question taking her language’s metaphors literally? Both the child who talks about his bedroom as a “room full of dreams” and the woman who feels an anonymous gaze as a blow relate to us what they experienced. Is their tale faithfully registering the way they experience as something really so very different from what we experience? Is their tale told as it is because their relationship with language is such that this is the only way they can talk to us about their experiences?

An old, distinguished moralist tradition sensed that feelings and passions were not entirely original or spontaneous but were at least partially shaped by culture. As La Rochefoucauld said: “There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing” (2008, p. 136). We could find endless similar examples quotations. From a non-phenomenological point of view, on the one hand, drives without a name look for a shape, while on the other, to an extent still entirely to be determined, our languages, or the historical interpretations from which even our most private and delicate feelings are picked, give us the shape of our Erlebnis. The way an affective state was named is not without influence over the shape or strength that this affective state will acquire for us.

Beyond phenomenology, it is necessary to pose ourselves this great, and as yet unanswered, question: Are the various languages we use to talk about the world and about human subjects only stages of linguistic evolution or are they instead the signs that the worlds in which human beings live, or could live, are different—not absolutely different, as certain forms of caricatural relativism would have it, but different enough to prevent us from hurriedly universalizing our way of being-in-the-world. After all, we are dealing with the same question Kant asked in a different way: Is language—or the categories of mind, as he called it—really a neutral medium between the world and subjectivity? His answer was that what we call “world” is not comprised of things-in-themselves but of objects to which we have already given (unconsciously) a particular shape. From this point of view, not consciousness, but rather language—Kant would say the a-priori synthesis—is transcendental. In short, we have to recognize that a hiatus exists between being and the world and that in the end the world is always constructed historically. From this perspective, the phenomenological description appears in a new light as a form of ethnocentricity. It seems to generalize on being-in-the-world starting from a precise historical configuration of subjectivity—the one we have today.

 

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Notes