Page 89 - Contribution To Phenomenology

82 OSBORNE WIGGINS

charges of relativism will continue as long as they view the mind as
world-constituting and they deem this mind a human mind.
Early and late in his career Husserl criticized anthropologisms that
imply relativism (Husserl, 1970 and 1987). His solution lay in distinguish-
ing between essential (necessary) features of mental life and empirical
(contingent) features. For Husserl, philosophy was the science of the
essential; and the empirical sciences—both natural and social—^were
disciplines devoted to the contingent. Lakoff and Johnson make much use
of findings in the empirical sciences, especially psychology; and yet they
draw philosophical conclusions from these findings. Aron Gurwitsch and
Merleau-Ponty also thought it possible to appropriate some of the results
of empirical science ~ Gestalt psychology in particular ~ for use in
philosophical reasoning (Gurwitsch, 1964 and 1966; Merleau-Ponty, 1962).
Clearly there should be some methodological lines of connection between
philosophy and empirical science. The difficulty lies in securing those
connections in ways that do not result in a metaphysical anthropologism
and an epistemological relativism.
The similarities between the phenomenologies of Husserl, Gurwitsch,
and Merleau-Ponty and the experiential realisms of Lakoff and Johnson
are manifold and profound. The differences, I think, force us to think
strenuously about foundational issues in both phenomenology and
experiential realism. Such thinking, if successful, could in the long run
render the similarities even more evident and fruitful.

References

Gurwitsch, Aron. The Field of Consciousness, Duquesne University Press,
Pittsburgh, 1964.
Gurwitsch, Aron. Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, Northwest-
ern University Press, Evanston, 1966.
Gurwitsch, Aron. Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, Edited by
Lester Embree, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1974.
Gurwitsch, Aron. Human Encounters in the Social World, Edited by
Alexandre Metraux. Translated by Fred Kersten. Duquesne University
Press, 1979.
Gurwitsch, Aron. Marginal Consciousness, Edited by Lester Embree.
Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985.
Husserl, Edmund. Ideen zu einer reinen phiinomenologie und phanomen-
ologischen philosophiCj Zweites Buch: Phctnomenologische untersuchungen