An excerpt from Dead End (Chapter 8 ):
A Strong Dose of Madness:
Phenomenology is a kind of trained introspection and self-observation. Our so-called “outer-perception” presents us with nothing that appears the way it really is. We are subject to some serious illusions with respect to rest, motion, figure, and size. All we know are the effects of these physical things on our sense organs.
Enter philosophical movements disguised as jokes or jokes disguised as philosophical movements. These are grim days indeed. Jokes are in high demand, but a few hearty laughs may shake us from our angst so that we might become more focused on the task at hand, whether it is sleeping, feeding, warming, or even contemplating our own death. I wish we could organize a movement to keep writers, scholars, and artists physically alive – to permit them to continue their work in this most difficult century. Studios could be organized where we form our own schools.
Dressed in old coats, chilled and hungry, we could become totally absorbed in discussions of literature, philosophy, comedy, wilderness survival, and “the end of history.” My “true” inner self is different from the self that appears in conversations with others. I need writing to supplement the misleading signs of my speech. In other words, in my speech and action I may seem to be going along with the status-quo, so I need my writing to pick up on the elements within me resisting. I need writing because my speech gets misinterpreted.
The most important lesson the [phenomenological] reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction. The philosopher is the perpetual beginner. The unfinished nature of phenomenology is not a sign of failure. It is inevitable because phenomenology’s task is to reveal the mystery of the world and the impotency of reason when confronted with the depth of our lived experiences (existence itself).
Husserl believed we should not assume any philosophic or scientific theory, and furthermore, must avoid deductive reasoning (which presupposed logic) and mathematics as well as any other speculative theory of psychology and philosophy, in order to concentrate on describing what is given directly in intuition (Anschauung). This involves the most radical form of self-questioning, involving a kind of overthrow of all previous assumptions to knowledge, and a questioning of many of our ‘natural’ (common sense, scientific) intuitions about the nature of our mental processes or the make-up of the so-called objective world.
Husserlian phenomenology focuses totally on what is given in intuition and is not meant to rely on logical inferences, or mediate knowledge of any kind.
Phenomenology must be able to cope with the most radical denial of the world, with the challenge of the most hyperbolic doubt which sees the whole world as a dream or even as non-existent. As Dermot Moran says, “The objects focused on in phenomenological viewing must be neutralized with respect to the question of actuality.”
Phenomenology is riddled with as much paradox and mystery as life itself: How can a science which claims to remain true to experience seek to be a pure science stripped of all experiential elements? Phenomenology is remote from common sense. In the phenomenological reduction, there is a radical upheaval and consciousness even ceases to be human, loses all connection to the empirical, natural, human ego and its psychological states.
And yet, in the conclusion of
Schizophrenia and Common Sense: A Phenomenological Perspective, Valeria Bizzari concludes:
As in schizophrenia, although for different reasons, the subject is no longer able to transcend him/herself and empathize with others, and he remains confined to his present bodily state. S/He cannot perceive his potential to act in the world (his affordances), and space is limited to the surrounding environment: for these reasons, we can define melancholic depression as a “hyperembodiment” (Fuchs 2005; Doerr- Zehers 1995; Doerr- Zehers, Irarrázaval, Mundt & Palette 2017).). Furthermore, the patient loses her/his emotional resonance and falls into an “anaesthetic melancholy”. S/He perceives herself/himself t as if s/he were dead, as if s/he were a mere material body, a corpse. In this case, the subject also loses her/his “common sense” and s/he perceives himself as cut off from the world because he has lost her/his “minimal embodied sense of self”.
Otto Doerr- Zegers has defined this process as a “chrematization” of the body, which becomes so heavy that it can also block its functions: “Why do they call it a ‘mental’ illness? The pain isn‟t just in my head; it’s everywhere, but mainly at my throat and in my heart. Perhaps my heart is broken. Is this what this is? My whole chest feels like it’s being crushed. It’s hard to breathe.” (Brampton,2008, p. 34).
With this in mind, chrema is the inanimate nature of the body, which loses its contact with the world. As a result, even the other structures of subjectivity become impaired. The subject perceives a temporal becoming which is not projected into the future, but rather it is crystallized into the present situation, constantly facing what has just happened (post festum), while space is perceived as too distant. Furthermore, where the schizophrenic complained of a diminished self-consciousness, the depressed registers an excessive identification with a fixed role. Finally, while in schizophrenia there is eccentricity, in melancholia there is a shift to an existential orientation dangerously “centric,” or egodystonic.
In both cases, we can register two types of depersonalization that, albeit diametrically opposed, can be traced back to the same cause: the distortion of the lived body and the consequent loss of common sense.
Contradiction?