GeneRatinG SenSe: SchizOPhRenia anD PhenOMenOLOGicaL PRaXiS Bryan Smyth university of Memphis basmyth@memphis.edu Abstract: he aim of phenomenology is to provide a critical account of the origins and genesis of the world. his implies that the standpoint of the phenomenological reduction is properly extramundane. But it remains an outstanding task to formulate a credible account of the reduction that would be adequate to this seemingly impossible methodological condition. his paper contributes to rethinking the reduction accordingly. Building on eforts to thematize its intersubjective and corporeal aspects, the reduction is approached as a kind of transcendental practice in the context of generativity. Foregrounding the psychotherapeutic encounter with persons sufering schizophrenic delusion as paradigmatic of the emergence of shared meaning, it is argued that this is where we may best come to terms with the methodological exigencies of phenomenology’s transcendental aim. it follows that phenomenologists across all disciplines may have something important to learn from how phenomenology has been put into practice in the psychotherapeutic domain. Keywords: Phenomenological Reduction, Schizophrenia, Worldhood, Psychotherapy, Generativity 1. intRODuctiOn he basic task and fundamental aim of husserlian phenomenology is to provide a critical account of the world through an exploration and articulation of its origins and genesis. So construed, it follows that phenomenology is—at least in some sense—a transcendental project, and that it requires a methodological ‘Einklammerung’ or ‘bracketing out’ of the world in order to open up the larger realm of phenomenological experience upon which its account would be grounded. his is, of course, the phenomenological reduction. But just what it involves is not clear. husserl himself was continually preoccupied with thinking and rethinking the reduction, and yet even he did not reach a deinitive formulation of it. Phenomenologists ever since have thus continued to address this problem. and for good reason. For inasmuch as the reduction remains methodologically indeterminate, the precise sense in which phenomenology is a transcendental project remains obscure—a situation that has the disquieting implication of directly calling into question the validity of the putatively deeper insightfulness claimed by phenomenology over other approaches. in this paper i ofer a contribution to current eforts to rethink the basic methodological sense of phenomenology. My remarks fall into two main 122 BRyan SMyth parts. he irst part deals with phenomenology in broad terms. here i maintain both that the transcendental character of its basic problem saddles it with a potentially devastating methodological problem, but also that there can be no coherent non-transcendental formulation of phenomenology that might evade the force of the problem. he viability of phenomenology thus depends on a resolution of this problem—which is to say, on an adequate formulation of the reduction. in the second part i take steps toward such a formulation. he basic strategy is to approach the reduction as a kind of transcendental practice. to this end, beyond recognizing its intersubjective and intercorporeal character, i foreground a speciic form of encounter, namely, the psychotherapeutic encounter with persons sufering schizophrenic delusion. it is here, i will claim, that we can perhaps best come to terms with the speciicity of the transcendental character of phenomenology—that is, with what it could possibly mean actually to ‘bracket out’ the world, and truly to face up to the question of its ‘origin’. it is not that this goes on in the psychotherapeutic context exclusively, but rather that it is here manifested paradigmatically, with the result that phenomenologists across all disciplines may have something important to learn methodologically from how phenomenology has been put into practice in this particular domain. By way of conclusion i will briely sketch out in very general terms the substance and direction of this methodological lesson. 2. the MethODOLOGicaL PReDicaMent OF PhenOMenOLOGy it is a truism, albeit an important one, that phenomenology is, irst of all, a descriptive project. he idea is to free ourselves from metaphysical and ontological presuppositions, in order to gain an unbiased, intuitional awareness of what is originally given in pre-scientiic experience. he canonical formulation of this idea is husserl’s ‘principle of all principles’, which states that propositions are scientiically admissible just in case they are demonstrably based on the what and how of the intuitional self-evidence of lived experience.1 hat is, if they do not overstep or otherwise misrepresent the intentional object as such. his principle expresses a commitment to initially consider all experience on equal terms, a commitment that is especially important with respect to those experiences, consideration of the reality or signiicance of which may 1 as husserl expressed it, this principle states “that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily […] ofered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but only within the limits in which it is presented there. […] every statement which does no more than confer expression on such [originary] data by simple explication and by means of signiications precisely conforming to them is […] called upon to serve as a foundation.” See Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book [1913], trans. Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1982), §24. GeneRatinG SenSe: SchizOPhRenia 123 otherwise be unduly discounted by unchecked bias.2 he hope is that such a program of radical description would aford a new ground of irrefragable self-evidentness, on the basis of which theoretical disputes could be lucidly clariied and non-dogmatically resolved. Reaching such a realm of original self-evidence is the matter of the reduction, the idea of which derives from the analysis of sensory experience. here it is clear that experience is not restricted to the discrete phenomenon. Rather, all particular acts of perception are accompanied by and occur within horizons of apperceptive belief bearing upon both the intentional object and its spatio-temporal surroundings. consequently, in order to reach—in accordance with ‘the principle of all principles’—the intentional object as such, it is necessary methodologically to neutralize the role played in experience by these broader horizons inasmuch as they overstep the intentional object. he reduction simply generalizes this necessity, based on the recognition that the neutralization in question must ultimately bear upon the common basis of all possible horizons—the world as the ‘horizon of horizons’.3 hus it is that the reduction comes to be seen as a suspension of the apperceptive belief in the existence of the world—the setting out of action of the primordial, passive Urdoxa according to which, simply, the world is.4 his means that deinitive for phenomenology is the boundary between mundane and extramundane (or worldly and extra-worldly).5 On the one hand, non-phenomenology is essentially mundane, in that despite whatever critical insight it may achieve with regard to intra-mundane things, it still takes the world itself uncritically for granted and grounds itself upon it. Phenomenology, on the other hand, in pursuit of its basic task, surpasses the world by making its ground—that is to say, the world’s ground—the object of its concern.6 hus understood as a radical efort critically to comprehend the world itself, phenomenology has, i think, a certain prima facie attractiveness. (and i would say that any serious enthusiasm for phenomenology must be at least implicitly committed to something like this.) it is, at any rate, an ambitious project. But perhaps overly ambitious. indeed, it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the predominant view among critical observers is that the project so construed 2 cf. husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” [1911], in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (new york: harper & Row, 1965), p. 147. 3 cf. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception [1945], trans colin Smith [rev. Forrest Williams] (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 330. 4 See Ideas I, §30; cf. Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Zweiter Teil: heorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, ed. Rudolf Boehm (he hague: Martinus nijhof, 1959), pp. 44-50. 5 cf. Gaston Berger, “Les thèmes principaux de la phénoménologie de husserl,” Études de métaphysique et de morale 49 (1944), p. 39. 6 his line of reasoning was developed by eugen Fink in “he Phenomenological Philosophy of edmund husserl and contemporary criticism,” [1933], trans. R. O. elveton, in he Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings (chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 73-147. But whereas Fink understood it in objective theoretical terms—that is, in his view the world’s ground would become “the object of theoretical experience and knowledge” (p. 97)—the account that i will outline approaches phenomenology in intersubjectively and intercorporeally practical terms. 124 BRyan SMyth is sheer lunacy. he basic objection is that it would be methodologically impossible to attain an appropriate extramundane standpoint from which to carry out the ostensible program—that such a reduction is a practical impossibility because all living experience, including phenomenological experience, occurs within horizons.7 Or, what efectively amounts to the same thing, that actually to reach a realm of original experience beyond all worldly horizons would in any case leave one trapped in a state of ‘transcendental solipsism’.8 Phenomenology thus threatens to founder on the tension within the being of the phenomenologist as both (a) an empirical, mundanely-situated individual, and (b) as an extramundane phenomenological spectator.9 his represents what Fink once called phenomenology’s “methodological ‘schizophrenia’” [methodische ‘Schizophrenie’]—the radical Ich-Spaltung, or splitting of the i, at the heart of phenomenology.10 his might seem to recommend the rejection of the transcendental path and settling for some form of mundane hermeneutic phenomenology. his, however, would be misguided. For if phenomenology remains, to use a husserlian phrase, ‘transcendentally naïve’ with respect to the world as ultimate horizon, then by implication it would remain so with respect to all subordinate horizons. it would thus be incapable—in principle—of undertaking any sort of reliable self-critique of any of its phenomenological claims.11 Phenomenology would, in other words, be left naïve—transcendentally or otherwise—all the way down. it is for this reason that if phenomenology is to have any critical coherence at all, then a ‘complete’ reduction must be possible in some sense, and a methodological basis must be worked out on which to reconcile its dual foci—in other words, deal with (or ‘cure’) its ‘methodological schizophrenia’. yet how to do this? how to ‘transcend’ the world in a way that does not founder on the sort of objection i just mentioned? he key here will be to 7 Rightly or wrongly, this idea is often associated with Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion that a ‘complete’ reduction is impossible—see Phenomenology of Perception, xiv. 8 See husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic [1929], trans. Dorian cairns (he hague: Martinus nijhof, 1969), §107.c; and Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology [1931], trans. Dorian cairns (he hague: Martinus nijhof, 1960), §42. 9 See Sebastian Luft, “husserl’s heory of the Phenomenological Reduction: Between LifeWorld and cartesianism,” Research in Phenomenology 34 (2004), 198-234. 10 eugen Fink, “Operative Begrife in husserls Phänomenologie” [1957], in Nähe und Distanz (Freiburg: Karl alber, 1976), p. 192 11 husserl was unequivocal about the importance for phenomenology of such second-order self-critique. See Formal and Transcendental Logic, §107.c, where he writes: “he intrinsically irst criticism of cognition, the one in which all others are rooted, is transcendental self-criticism on the part of phenomenological cognition itself” (p289). See also Cartesian Meditations, §13 (p29), where husserl airms that the “second stage of phenomenological research would be precisely the criticism of transcendental experience and then the criticism of all transcendental cognition.” and §63 (pp151f ): all transcendental-philosophical theory of knowledge as ‘criticism of knowledge’, leads back ultimately to criticism of transcendental-phenomenological knowledge (in the irst place, criticism of transcendental experience). On this, cf. Sebastian Luft, Phänomenologie der Phänomenologie: Systematik und Methodologie der Phänomenologie in der Auseinandersetzung zwischen Husserl und Fink (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), pp. 8-22. GeneRatinG SenSe: SchizOPhRenia 125 recognize that this transcendence need not be positive, and that there may be a negative sense to the idea of phenomenological ‘extra-worldliness’ that can actually supply the reduction—understood as the suspension of the ‘general thesis’ of the natural attitude—with a meaning that is at once both philosophically radical yet also practicable. 3. PhenOMenOLOGy aS tRanScenDentaL PRactice although even some phenomenologists may hold that the reduction is merely a vague regulative ideal, to take it seriously surely implies regarding it as something that can in fact be performed. We should therefore not expect any solution in strictly theoretical terms. Rather, we should approach it as a kind of philosophical practice that may itself embody appropriate methodological principles. consider, for example, the problem of transcendental solipsism. his is linked to the prevalent idea that phenomenological experience is quintessentially subjective—an idea that is reinforced by the emphasis commonly placed, in thinking about the reduction, on the move from the natural to the transcendental attitude. here is, of course, some truth to this. But if we consider how phenomenology is actually done, then there is no good reason, irst of all, not to conceive of the reduction in terms of the ‘round trip’, so to speak—that is, in terms of the move from the natural to the transcendental attitude and back again (and so on, ‘zig-zag’ style). and, along with that, we can recognize the mundane moment as a discursive matter of intersubjective dialogue (in various forms), in which individuals express their phenomenological experience and consider that of others. here is where subjective perspectives can be transformed into commonly agreed-upon views that are amenable to corroboration and can serve as a secure foundation for further inquiry. crucially, the predicative results of this process can and do play an integral role in phenomenological experience itself. Phenomenological ‘seeing’ is no solitary contemplation puriied of all resources, but is instead intersubjectively mediated by the shared accumulated insights of the phenomenological community.12 Such considerations that highlight the intersubjective role of language in phenomenology are a step in the right direction.13 But this does not yet ofer the account of phenomenological practice that we need. taking this further, recent work by nathalie Depraz aims to show that in addition to having an intersubjective character, the phenomenological reduction is a “disciplined embodied practice.”14 an important motivating idea here See David Koukal, “he Rhetorical impulse in husserl’s Phenomenology,” Continental Philosophy Review 34 (2001), 21-43. 13 cf. Françoise Dastur, “Réduction et intersubjectivité,” in Husserl, eds. eliane escoubas and Marc Richir (Grenoble : Jérôme Million, 1989), 43-64. 14 nathalie Depraz, “he Phenomenological Reduction as Praxis,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (1999), 95-110. See also “What about the Praxis of Reduction? Between husserl and Merleau-Ponty,” in Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl, eds. ted toadvine and Lester embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 115-125. 12 126 BRyan SMyth is that the reduction must be more than a relective conversion: “the power of the mind alone is not enough to render [the] experience efective if corporality and afect do not contribute their share.”15 Depraz thus approaches the reduction on the basis of what she calls a “reductive community” understood in terms of an intercorporeal sort of primordial praxis or Urpraxis. his allows Depraz to describe the reduction as a concrete self-transformation which, because it is based on “an immersion in an embodied sensibility in which we all share as incarnate subjects,” de-centres individual experience, thereby opening up speciically transindividual dimensions of the reductive experience.16 he reduction is thus in principle a co-reduction, in that the intuitional capacities it actualizes simultaneously invoke radically inter-afective and co-empathic capacities of communication.17 his communicativity—which, being deeper than discursive language, ensures the defeat of transcendental solipsism—relects that the being of the phenomenologist is now plural—or, as Depraz puts it, “co-singular”—which is a deeper way of situating the ‘double life’ of phenomenology.18 he point of Depraz’s account of the reduction is to show how the dual foci of phenomenology can be brought together in terms of embodied praxis. and there is much to recommend such a view. however, i would argue that her account, while satisfying in a certain formal sense, remains abstract. it is fair say, i think, that it amounts to a sophisticated elaboration of MerleauPonty’s repeated call to ‘plunge’ [s’enfoncer] into ‘the living present’.19 he idea is that the structures of mutual insight and understanding requisite for phenomenological cognition and communication are already there, latent in our co-existence—that is, in the intercorporeal Urpraxis on which our co-existence in the pre-scientiic lifeworld is based—and that we just need to attune ourselves properly and return to this. Where the abstraction lies, as it often does, is in the irst-person plural pronoun—the question of this ‘we’. he assumption is of a certain degree of sameness in terms of social attunement—as Depraz herself put it, she is talking about “an immersion in an embodied sensibility in which we all share as incarnate subjects.”20 in other words, a considerable measure of ‘common sense’ is being taken for granted, making this co-reduction little more than an 15 Depraz, “he Phenomenological Reduction as Praxis,” p. 105. Ibid. 17 Ibid. cf. Depraz, Transcendance et incarnation. Le statut de l’intersubjectivité comme alterité à soi chez Edmund Husserl (Paris: Vrin, 1995), 198-238. See also herbert Spiegelberg, Doing Phenomenology: Essays On and In Phenomenology (he hague: Martinus nijhof, 1975), 24-34. 18 Depraz, “he Phenomenological Reduction as Praxis,” p. 107. cf. Rudolf Bernet, “Phenomenological Reduction and the Double Life of the Subject,” trans. François Renaud, in Reading Heidegger From the Start: Essays in his Earliest hought, eds. heodore Kisiel and John van Buren (albany: Suny, 1994), 245-267. 19 it is “by living my time,” he wrote, “by plunging into [m’enfonçant] the present and the world [...] that i am able to understand other times,” i.e., accede to the universal—for “the solution of all problems of transcendence is to be sought in the thickness of the pre-objective present” (Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 456, 433). 20 Depraz, “he Phenomenological Reduction as Praxis,” p. 105 (emphasis added). 16 GeneRatinG SenSe: SchizOPhRenia 127 iteration and multiplication of my reduction. (Or hers.) Doubtless there are some such homogeneous communities into which it could very well make sense in terms of doing phenomenology to ‘plunge’ in. But these are by no means the standard case, and such a special state of afairs can never be legitimately assumed—especially in the course of phenomenological work. We can conclude from this that the kind of Urpraxis that Depraz invokes is not ultimately primordial, and that how it is constituted is no less important for phenomenology to consider. (in fact, as will become clear, i would contend that investigating the conditions of such intercorporeal we-ness is tantamount to phenomenology’s fundamental task regarding the origin of the world.) 3.1 Concerning the natural attitude Before continuing, some brief remarks on the natural attitude are required. (1) it is useful in this context to consider husserl’s notion of Heimwelten, or ‘homeworlds’.21 in particular, it is useful to observe that what we typically call ‘the lifeworld’ actually takes concrete form as so many geo-historically and normatively speciic ‘homeworlds’. hese are constituted in mutual relation, and by those living in them, whom husserl termed the Heimgenosse, the “home-comrades.” now, without making any strong commitment to the general cogency and validity of these ideas, i would want to maintain that they are helpful because they foreground concrete normative considerations when thinking about the lifeworld and the natural attitude. For example, they allow us easily to locate the abstractness of Depraz’s view in its failure to account for the normative speciicity of the lifeworld (as a particular homeworld). (2) Following a suggestion by Sebastian Luft,22 i want to distinguish between the “naturalness” of the natural attitude and its “naïveté”—that is, between its immediate ‘taken-for-grantedness’ and its uncritical ‘dogmatism’. he former has to do with a basic condition of perception and practical comportment, and as such is normatively benign. his is not the case with naïveté. his is more akin to what Schutz called “the epochē of the natural attitude”— the suspension, not of belief, but of doubt, that serves to maintain a particular, normatively reiied abstraction from phenomenal concreteness as a ‘natural’ experiential framework.23 he natural attitude is thus not simply a matter of an urdoxic commitment to the existence of the world. Rather, the primordial belief involved implies a practical commitment to its speciic instantiation as a ‘homeworld’. 21 See Klaus held, “heimwelt, Fremdwelt, die eine Welt,” in Phänomenologische Forschungen 24 (1991), 305-337. cf. anthony Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (evanston: northwestern university Press, 1995), 173-185. 22 Sebastian Luft, “husserl’s Phenomenological Discovery of the natural attitude,” Continental Philosophy Review 31:2 (1998), 153-170. 23 alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities” [1945], in Collected Papers 1: he Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice natanson (he hague: Martinus nijhof, 1962), 207-259. 128 BRyan SMyth (3) Scrutiny of the natural attitude thus shows that issues of world-origin—or of what Steinbock (following husserl) calls ‘generativity’—are vitally alive at its core.24 and this in such a way that in transgressing naïveté phenomenological intervention, far from engaging in any sort of immersion, necessarily takes on, not simply a normative, but also what i would describe as an institutive character. For at this level phenomenology cannot but work within the phenomena it considers, with the result that it ineluctably participates within and contributes to their development. as Steinbock put it, just by inquiring into its constitution, the phenomenologist “must take a position with respect to the way sense is constituted […] she must be engaged in how sense should, ought to or must take shape.” his is because, on account of its normative and teleological character, the constitution of sense “concerns the future orientation of sense, which is to say, the generation of new historical meaning structures.”25 Recognition of this conception of generativity and its signiicance for phenomenology is especially crucial when the world as such is what is at issue. But the urgent methodological question is: how are we to think about the reduction in this context? 3.2 Encountering schizophrenia to answer this question, i want to consider (in broad terms) the practice of phenomenological psychotherapy, in particular with regard to schizophrenic delusion. First of all, following Sass and Parnas, among others, i take schizophrenia as denoting in general terms a spectrum of disturbed attunement between self and world in which intentionalities normally inhabited operatively become objects of “hyperrelexive” thematic awareness (the experience of internal processes of passive synthesis, for example, as external and alien), combined with a converse weakening of the self-afective sense of existing as a particular subject of awareness.26 Schizophrenia can thus be described as a disorder of apperception, a restructuring of the tacit-focal structure of conscious awareness, that manifests itself in altered boundaries between inner and outer, subject and object. as a result, suferers may undergo a disruption of the naïve selfevidence of the natural attitude—leading to a kind of reduction quite a bit like the methodical reduction of the phenomenologist, albeit involuntary and possibly (relatively more) delusional. 24 See anthony Steinbock, “Generativity and Generative Phenomenology,” Husserl Studies 12:1 (1995), 55-79 25 anthony Steinbock, “Spirit and Generativity: he Role and contribution of the Phenomenologist in hegel and husserl,” in Alterity and Facticity, eds. nathalie Depraz and Dan zahavi (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), pp. 189f, 196. 26 See, for example, Louis Sass, “Self-Disturbance in Schizophrenia: hyperrelexivity and Diminished Self-afection,” in he Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, eds. tilo Kircher and anthony David (cambridge: cambridge university Press, 2003), 242-271; Louis Sass and Josef Parnas, “Schizophrenia, consciousness, and the Self,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 29:3 (2003), 427-444. GeneRatinG SenSe: SchizOPhRenia 129 it is in terms of the core disorder of schizophrenia that schizophrenic delusion must be understood.27 as erwin Straus had originally argued, such delusions are not problems of perception or perceptual judgment, but rather transcendental modiications of sensing that occur at the pre-objective level.28 For in these cases, schizophrenia can be thought of as involving the loss, not simply of ‘perceptual faith’ about the world, but of a deeper ‘ontological faith’,29 the Urdoxa of having a stable world at all (this is related to the idea of a ‘complete reduction’). For it is not the case, at least at pre-psychotic stages, that schizophrenics believe without reservation in the reality of their delusional experience, nor even that they cannot clearly distinguish the delusional from the real.30 Rather, as Jaspers had argued, and others have elaborated since, schizophrenics live out a “double orientation to reality,” at once believing and disbelieving both the realm of intersubjectively validated phenomena and that of their own delusions.31 his is tied to what Laing called the “ontological insecurity” sufered by schizophrenics: caught, as it were, between worlds, their attempts to formulate and embody a robust irst-person perspective are without ground, and there can be an anxious tendency toward a non-perspectival solipsism.32 Schizophrenic delusion can thus be described as the loss of naturalness, and hence the isolation of natural-attitudinal naïveté—and thus an intensiication of the ‘epochē of the natural attitude’.33 consequent to the loss of naturalness, the world is naïvely reconstituted in exaggeratedly reiied ways (although in the ordinary sense there’s nothing naïve about it). Schizophrenic delusion is 27 See Pierre Bovet and Josef Parnas, “Schizophrenic Delusions: a Phenomenological approach,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 19 (1993), 579-597; Josef Parnas, “he Self and intentionality in the Pre-Psychotic Stages of Schizophrenia: a Phenomenological Study,” in Exploring the Self: Philosophical and Psychopathological Perspectives on Self-Experience, ed. Dan zahavi (amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000), 115-147. 28 erwin Straus, Von Sinn der Sinne: Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Psychologie (Berlin: Springer, 1935). See Josef Parnas, “Self and Schizophrenia: a Phenomenological Perspective,” in he Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, 217-241; amedeo Giorgi, “a Phenomenological Psychological approach to Research on hallucinations,” in Imagination and its Pathologies, eds. James Phillips and James Morley (cambridge, Ma: Mit Press, 2003), 209-224. 29 See James Morley, “he texture of the Real: Merleau-Ponty on imagination and Psychopathology,” in Imagination and its Pathologies, 93-108. 30 See Osborne Wiggins, Micheal Schwartz, and Georg northof. “toward a husserlian Phenomenology of the initial Stages of Schizophrenia,” in Philosophy and Psychopathology, eds. Manfred Spitzer and Brendan a. Maher (Berlin: Springer, 1990), 21-34. 31 Karl Jaspers, Allgemeine Psychopathologie, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1923). See Micheal Schwartz and Osborne Wiggins, “he Phenomenology of Schizophrenic Delusions,” in Phenomenology, Language and Schizophrenia, eds. Manfred Spitzer, et al (Berlin: Springer, 1992), 305-318. 32 R. D. Laing, he Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). cf. Josef Parnas and Louis Sass, “Self, Solipsism, and Schizophrenic Delusions,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 8:2/3 (2001), 101-120. 33 cf. Jean naudin and Jean-Michel azorin, “he hallucinatory epochē,” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 28:2 (1997), 171-195. his idea stems originally from Wolfgang Blankenburg, Der Verlust der natürlichen Selbstverständlichkeit: Ein Beitrag zur Psychopathologie Symptomarmer Schizophrenien (Stuttgart: Ferdinand enke, 1971). 130 BRyan SMyth thus ‘abnormal’ inasmuch as it represents a kind of exaggerated normative reiication as part of an attempt to make or remake a world by way of recovering some measure of the sort of ‘ontological security’ that underlies ‘normal’ (or ‘normalized’) existence. his ultimately points back to an impairment of temporal integration that leaves the individual in the relatively ahistorical stasis of a prolonged or distended present,34 a situation that manifests itself in particular in a lack of coherent self-narrative.35 although i cannot explore these aspects here, i would suggest that what is fundamentally disturbed by the core disorder of schizophrenia is the historicity of the afected individual’s narrative self-identity. 3.3 Worldhood as an intersubjective achievement By challenging the priority that phenomenologists (among others) have traditionally assigned to the perceptual horizons of reality, the psychotherapeutic encounter with schizophrenic delusion radically calls into question the existence of a shared interpersonal world. his is why it is so methodologically signiicant—it represents what i would call a negative transcendence of the world. For here there is no shared world (or lifeworld), the structures of which could be taken for granted and uncritically put to work in terms of mutual comprehension. his situation thus presents in a more—if not the most— general and paradigmatic way, the problem faced by phenomenology. For this encounter occurs in a dialogical space where perception is precisely contested, thus prompting an exploration of pre-categorial ambiguity in which the distinction between the real and the imaginary is still radically at issue.36 common ground for communication is not to be found so much as it is to be made—or generated—through dialogical exchange that negotiates what may be called “the imaginary texture of the real.”37 in other words, this situation casts into the sharpest relief the fact that a shared world is an intersubjective achievement, and that its normative constitution presupposes internal processes of normalization that determine who participates in its generation. ultimately, this is the question of the identiication of ‘homecomrades’, that is, of who belongs to ‘our world’ as an 34 Osborne Wiggins, Micheal Schwartz, and Georg northof, “toward a husserlian Phenomenology of the initial Stages of Schizophrenia,” p. 29. 35 See Shaun Gallagher, “Self-narrative in Schizophrenia,” in he Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, 336-357; James Phillips, “Schizophrenia and the narrative Self,” in he Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, 319-335; and “Psychopathology and the narrative Self,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10:4 (2003), 313-328. 36 See, for example, Merleau-Ponty, L’Institution dans l’histoire personnelle et publique. Le problème de la passivité: Le sommeil, l’inconscient, la mémoire. Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954-1955), eds. D. Darmaillacq et al (Paris: Belin, 2003), pp. 198, 208, 213. 37 Merleau-Ponty, “eye and Mind” [1961], trans. carleton Dallery, pp. 159-190 in he Primacy of Perception, and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James edie (evanston: northwestern university Press, 1964), p. 165; cf. James Morley, “he texture of the Real: Merleau-Ponty on imagination and Psychopathology,” p. 105. GeneRatinG SenSe: SchizOPhRenia 131 intersubjective sphere of ownness—the we are those who participate in the generation of this world, in particular in its shared narrative constitution’38 i would therefore submit that the historical self-narrativity that is disrupted in schizophrenia, along with the dialogical praxis that seeks to revitalize it, should be seen as elementary to questions of the origin and generation of the world. 4. cOncLuSiOn taking seriously the transcendental problem of the world as the ultimate envelope of phenomenological inquiry compels us to take up the problematic of the reduction anew, and to critically scrutinize the possibility of this as both intersubjectively and corporeally participatory, and yet also normatively transgressive vis-à-vis natural-attitudinal naiveté. he point in looking at phenomenological psychotherapy is not to ind an approach that could simply be itted directly onto phenomenology in general. Rather, it is to look for an appropriate model of the creative praxis that is implied by the transcendental parameters of phenomenology—a model for the generation of sense through the institution of common (especially narrative) horizons of meaningfulness.39 it might be objected that this would wrongly make of phenomenology a ‘therapeutic’ discipline. While that certainly could be very problematic—in ways, perhaps, that are analogous to certain problems, say, in psychiatric disciplines—i think that it could just as well be a quite salutary result, one that could even be helpfully conducive to the articulation of an approach to various social pathologies or pathologies of reason.40 hat is something at which husserl strongly hinted in referring to crisis-ridden modern society as ‘sick’,41 and i doubt that any phenomenological approach that genuinely engages with the problem of the world could ever be anything essentially diferent from this, i.e., could ever fail to recognize that this problem normatively implies the world’s being otherwise. at any rate, what is fundamentally at issue could be posed in terms of a debate between those who would rigorously uphold the letter of husserl’s ‘principle of all principles’ with respect to intuition, and those who recognize that the work of phenomenology, precisely in its concern for the worldliness of lived experience, itself pushes beyond this principle and necessitates a fundamental methodological revision. his debate would pivot on the question of the primacy of perception, which is tantamount to the primacy of a common natural world. it is this that is subverted in the encounter with schizophrenic delusion, and it seems that the basic orientation of phenomenology cf. Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl, 213-219 cf. aaron Mishara, “narrative and Psychotherapy: he Phenomenology of healing,” he American Journal of Psychotherapy 49:2 (1995), 67-78. 40 hus suggesting the possibility of some sort of productive convergence between contemporary phenomenology and critical theory—see for example axel honneth, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical heory, trans. James ingram (new york: columbia university Press, 2009). 41 See “Philosophy and the crisis of european Man,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, 149-192. 38 39 132 BRyan SMyth must be committed to the same sort of subversion, that is, it must encourage an analogous problematization of the world, if it is to do justice to the actual horizons of perceptual experience.42 he methodological question this raises thus concerns the limits of phenomenological cognition: do these coincide with the limits of intuitional givenness? Or can we gain a critical standpoint beyond intuition that would encompass it within a larger frame of experience—while still remaining true to the basic spirit of phenomenology? although historical consensus has favored the irst alternative (thus upholding the ‘principle of all principles’), the implied limitation would, as i have argued, necessarily retain an unacceptable transcendental naïveté. his means that what the reduction involves is not so much the suspension of the belief that the world is, i.e., not the neutralization of that belief in order more clearly to grasp what its correlate (the world) positively is. Rather, what the reduction centrally involves is the recognition that the latter, the world, is not—other than negatively as an (as yet) unilled horizon of possibility, which as such can only present us with a practical rather than a theoretical task. he former (traditional) view is insuiciently radical, relecting the still-naïve assumption of a singular universal worldliness actually already obtaining in some positive objective sense—even the sort of Urpraxis presumed to exist by Depraz relects this. We should rather recognize as a basic fact, and as the necessary starting point for any phenomenological project, a multiplicity of homeworlds, alongside cases of worldlessness, all against the background of that larger but as yet unrealized—and, indeed, perhaps ultimately unrealizable—horizon of the world. in other words, it involves recognizing the material falsity, in this important sense, of the Weltglaube of the natural attitude. to be clear, this is in no way an endorsement of any sort of relativism. On the contrary, it takes universality seriously, and this because it does not take it (and its conditions of possibility) for granted, but rather addresses itself directly to the task of its realization. his is why the psychotherapeutic encounter could be so potentially illuminating. For such an encounter—at least when successful—is paradigmatic of phenomenological practice inasmuch as it presents, as it were, the molecular structure of achieved universality. he space of shared and mutually transformative understanding that can result from this encounter preigures the world of which a self-consciously historical intersubjective community would be the living embodiment. in this sense, it may be paradigmatic, not just of phenomenology, but of human historical co-existence in general. For it precisely manifests the move from non-sense to sense that is—or was, or will be, or at any rate would be, for better or worse—the realization of the world.43 42 cf. Jean naudin, Jean-Michel azorin, caroline Gros-azorin, aaron Mishara, Osborne P. Wiggins, and Michael a. Schwartz, “he use of the husserlian Reduction as a Method of investigation in Psychiatry,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (1999), 155-171. 43 a version of this paper was presented at the inaugural meeting of the interdisciplinary coalition north american Phenomenologists held at Ramapo college of new Jersey in May 2009.