Perhaps this is not surprising, for it is hardly easy
to undertake a personal transformation by throw-
ing off one’s preconceptions and going beyond
conceptualisation back to the things themselves.
It is much easier to talk about it. As Piet Hut notes,
‘Reading about the epoché typically leads a student
to contemplate the concept of the epoché, rather
than really performing the epoché (a danger Husserl
kept warning about)’ (1999, p. 242). In other words,
the first-person method slips all too easily away.
A related problem is that much of the language
of phenomenology is incomprehensible to those
not steeped in it, and difficult language can make
people give up on a different field before they even
begin, which is always a shame. Phenomenology
sometimes gives the impression of relishing lin-
guistic complexity for its own sake. For example,
this is how the French philosopher Natalie Depraz
explains her use of the phenomenological reduc-
tion as an embodied practice.
I am proposing to bring to light a renewed
reductive method, whereby the spectator is
given a specific embodiment, and where the
operation inherent in the reductive gesture
is taken up again through the logic of its own
reflexivity. By thus aggravating the oxymoron
of the practical and the theoretical, internal
to the reduction in its Husserlian heritage, my
point is that, in fact, reflection and incarnation,
contemplation and action are not opposed
until each begins to fertilize the other, thereby
intensifying each other to the point of becoming
virtually indistinguishable from each other.
(Depraz, 1999, p. 97)
Depraz is using the standard vocabulary of her field; we are not suggesting she is
an especially bad writer. But the vocabulary she uses risks taking simple ideas and
making them very hard to understand. Perhaps she means that when you look
deeply into the distinction between subject and object, or between thought and
action, the difference seems to disappear. If so, this is something found in many
traditions, and it is not entirely clear how phenomenology helps.NEUROPHENOMENOLOGY
Neurophenomenology is the name given by Chilean neuroscientist Francisco
Varela to a ‘quest to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach
to human experience’ (1996, p. 330). He agrees with Searle that first-person‘Reading about the
epoché typically leads a
student to contemplate
the concept of the
epoché, rather than
really performing the
epoché’
(Hut, 1999, p. 242)
PRoFILe 17.1
Francisco Varela (1946–
2001)
Born in Chile, Francisco Va-
rela studied biology before
moving to the USA for a PhD
on insect vision at Harvard,
and later worked in France,
Germany, and the United States. He said that he pursued
one question all his life: why do emergent selves or virtual
identities pop up all over the place, whether at the mind/
body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level?
This question motivated his work on three topics: autopoi-
esis or self-organisation in living things, enactive cogni-
tion, and the immune system. Critics claim that his ideas,
though fluently described, make no sense, and even
friends described him as a revolutionary who threw out
too much accepted science. His Buddhist meditation, as
a student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, informed all his
work on embodied cognition and consciousness. Uniquely
both a phenomenologist and a working neuroscientist, he
coined the term neurophenomenology. Reflecting on his
liver transplant, he wrote vividly of the shifting sense of
body and boundaries (Varela, 2001). Until his death he
was Director of Research at the CNRS laboratory of Cogni-
tive Neurosciences and Brain Imaging in Paris.