Book Review: Self-awareness, Temporality, and Alterity

Self-awareness, temporality, and alterity

Edited by Dan Zahavi. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. 1998 241pp.

This collection of papers by leading phenomenological philosophers provides important details of current trends within phenomenology and continental philosophy. As far as I can see there is no other English language overview or commentary that lays out the arguments arising from the work of Husserl with respect to the nature of the pre-reflective outside of this present collection of papers. This makes this text an important one for two main reasons. The first I shall deal with is a philosophical question. The second reason is one that has much relevance to the human sciences and psychotherapy practice and theorizing.

One philosophical question which might relegate Husserlian and post-Husserlian research into consciousness, identity and temporality to the sidelines of relevance, is the question concerning how modernist is Husserl The problem is that Husserl sits on the cusp of modernity and postmodernity. Husserl's overt aim was to respond to specific themes from the whole of western philosophy. He cast philosophy as a slow quest that would require a community of phenomenologists working together to create a new science of essences to ground the practice of all academic disciplines. The post-modern critique of modernism shows that modernism's aims are ambitions and chase rainbows that cannot be caught. Consequently a practice or a theory founded on modernist lines would perpetuate the mistakes of modernism. Therefore, the degree to which Husserl can be assessed in his tendency to modernism is an important one. The actual extent to which Husserl was modern or post-modern can be answered by the scrutiny of his lectures. The details of his work showed the immense difficulty of the task he had set himself and its associated steps. In answer to the question "does a psychotherapy founded on the work of Husserl constitute a modernism?" the answer would have to be "not necessarily" Because this selection of papers brings out hidden themes against a modernist understanding of Husserl it places important emphasis on the "post-modern" features of Husserl.

Secondly, there is a much more practical reason why this collection of papers is important for psychotherapists, particularly those of an existential orientation. One of the key distinguishing marks of an existential phenomenology, following Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others, is the focus on the difference between the part of consciousness which reflects and that part which is reflected on. This is perhaps one of the hallmarks of French phenomenology and this distinction forms the key point for this collection of papers. This distinction is ably laid out by Dan Zahavi's own contribution to his which is a book. Sartre's answer to Freud, and to contemporary psychology, is to focus on the difference between the reflected-on knowledge of consciousness, and oppose it to the pre-reflective aspect of consciousness, that which is not yet reflected on, or not reflected on. Husserl argued that this was a way out of one aspect of a misleading understanding of the unconscious (On the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, Appendix XII). Zahavi in his paper recaps a number of German language writers who have focused on this crucial distinction and developed it in new ways beyond the work of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. The implication of the importance of the pre-reflective, in psychology and psychotherapy, is to acknowledge that there are many aspects of living which are already-given, which are there immediately for our conscious inspection. One of particular concern for psychotherapists is the pre-reflective sense we have of other persons: empathic senses appear for us immediately, whether they are accurate or not. It may be a future direction for phenomenological research to focus more on pre-reflective social experience of what occurs while we are involved with others and to compare that to pulling back to reflect on ourselves in contact with the other. For the reason of reasserting and exploring the nature of the reflective/pre-reflective alone, this makes this set of papers an important addition to a therapist's library. The assertion of the centrality of the reflective/pre-reflective distinction establishes a possibly universal concept, as a significant one for delineating a major difference in all attempts at self-knowledge and knowledge of others. The work as a whole underlines the continued relevance and importance of Husserl and phenomenological studies.

Ian Owen