Abstract
Käufer and Chemero’s Phenomenology: An Introduction sets out both to capture one of the most challenging currents in philosophy of the 20th century and to connect it to the contemporary research on the subjects of action, perception, and cognition. In following the works of Kant, Husserl, early Gestalt psychologists, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Gibson, and Dreyfus, this book provides a surprisingly concise and jargon-free summary of these works. For its highly pronounced focus on intentionality – a fundamental phenomenological concept that links one’s perception of a phenomenon with one’s action – this book will have particular value for geographers who focus on the subject of agency.
The book consists of nine chapters. In the first chapter, Käufer and Chemero begin with the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant and its path-breaking contribution: the separation of the sense-impression data of an object and one’s mental concept of that object. This is critical both for the subject and for Käufer and Chemero’s taxonomy of phenomenological works and the phenomenological approach to one’s action as essentially environmental, the result of the situatedness of one’s perception.
In the second chapter, Käufer and Chemero turn to the works of Edmund Husserl and trace the emergence of phenomenology. They begin by elucidating the link in the development of a descriptive approach to mental experiences (as distinct from that of Wilhelm Wundt [Chapter 1]) between Franz Brentano and Husserl, who completed his philosophical dissertation under the supervision of Carl Stumpf (one of Brentano’s students and also one of the pioneers of Gestalt psychology). This link has direct implications for phenomenology and its focus on perception that needs to be grounded in the directed experience of an object rather than any formal knowledge of its properties.
In the subsequent chapters, from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (Chapter 3), Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (Chapter 5), to Sartre’s phenomenology of nothingness (Chapter 6), Käufer and Chemero analyze distinct phenomenological approaches to perception that build on Husserl’s phenomenology but remain clearly different. Distinct from Husserl’s focus on direct mental experience of a phenomenon, these streams of phenomenology lean much more towards situating one’s encounter with transcendental phenomena in an action, albeit on different grounds. In this respect, a brief introduction to Gestalt psychology in Chapter 4 – the analysis of perception as an experience of a phenomenon rather than of atomized sense data – stands out. This introduction, however, is necessary. Gestalt psychology had a definite influence on the development of a specifically experience-focused approach to perception and action.
James Gibson’s ecological psychology is a logical next step in the book (Chapter 7). In discussing the theory of affordances that Gibson developed, Käufer and Chemero reveal the interrelation of ecological psychology and certain streams of phenomenology (in addition to Gibson’s direct references to Gestalt psychology). While bringing the interrelation of perception, action, and context to its most practical resolution with the focus on Gibson’s affordances, in Chapters 8 and 9, Käufer and Chemero set out to address one of the notable challenges that Gibson’s theory of affordances creates: the question of why we act only on some possibilities for an action rather than on all of them.
In Chapter 8, however, Käufer and Chemero begin with the importance of phenomenological thought for cognitive science. They turn to the works of Hubert Dreyfus to show that the exploration of cognition is extremely challenging if cognition is understood to be a form of computation that goes through all possible scenarios step by step. Common sense, which liberates humans from the need to consider every possible option, is essentially phenomenological. In Chapter 9, therefore, they look more specifically into some of the recent developments (e.g. dynamical systems theory) that attempt to explain a human being’s choice of an action while utilizing a phenomenological approach to perception.
Overall, this book is a truly amazing undertaking that covers generations of thought on the subject and brings them all together. It nevertheless does not free a dedicated reader from the necessity to grapple with original texts as well as with commentaries of other scholars (e.g. Casey, 1997; Dreyfus, 1991; Elveton, 1970; Romdenh-Romluc, 2011). To remain concise, Käufer and Chemero excluded certain topics from the original works that, in some cases, might be quite important. For example, little is said about differences in the interpretation of ‘phenomenon' as between Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Gibson. Also, nothing is said about Heidegger’s equally illuminating and confounding analysis of place and space (e.g. in Casey, 1997). More attention could have been given to the discussion of affordances by Gibson and his differentiation of the subject from similar approaches of Gestalt psychologists.
That said, this book is an excellent first step into a challenging subject, and it manages to show competing interpretations of phenomenology as essentially interrelated and contributing to a certain topic. The authors’ efforts to never let differences between divergent streams of phenomenology and its applications out of sight in each chapter is extremely helpful as well. To conclude, this book is an extremely useful point of departure for research on the development of human agency as an outcome of a certain givenness of the world to a perceiving subject.