Phenomenology as an Approach Method in the Neurosciences

Abstract

Phenomenology has attracted great interest from the neurosciences because of its “embodied” analysis of experience, which distinguishes between the body as objectivity [Körper]—spatio-temporally determined and given to subjectivity—and the body as a lived body [Leib]—the “bearer” of an ego as well as a physical body. In the latter sense of the word, “body” refers to the body as the organ of perception because it serves constituent functions, allowing the very access to objects and to others, making the possession of an objective world possible. The lived body also reveals itself as an intentional body in a preeminent way in experiencing pain because it is the person, as an intentional unity, who suffers, and it is not possible to assimilate the sufferer to a neurovegetative third person level. Therefore, motivational connection becomes the fundamental law by which the unity of the entire psychic is comprehended, including the passive strata of the soul, association, feelings, and impulses. The concept of phenomenology and evidence of selfhood as a whole would not lend itself to being assimilated within the program of neurophenomenology, which reduces the phenomenological method to a first-person introspectionist gaze, whose reports must reach a synthesis, find their correlation and their mutual validation with the data provided by third-person neurological studies. On the contrary, phenomenology makes it patent that consciousness does not present any physical localization, but is a “sphere” of convergence of human operations alien to the “first- or third-person” distinction.