A contribution to detranscendentalize phenomenology

Germán Vargas Guillén^[2]

Abstract

This study takes five steps. The first one characterizes the origins of reflective analysis. Under the heading “origin” are mainly included motivations and the field to which they are applied. The second stage presents the traits of reflective analysis, particularly in terms of assumptions and how it relates to the Husserlian lineage’s phenomenological canon. The third step values the application’s scope of the reflective analysis technique; in a sense, it examines how it can function both with and without phenomenology as an approach, as a theory, or as a full-blown research tool. The fourth step establishes how reflective analysis has encountered some application alternatives thanks to Lester Embree. Above all, the link it may have with individuation, in line with a reading of Husserl’s Ideas II. As a conclusion, in the fifth phase, the breadth of the reflective analysis and the possibilities it offers for the advancement or continuation of phenomenology are critically established, in the context of current phenomenological developments.

   

Key words: reflective analysis; phenomenologizing; phenomenologizing ego; phenomenological method; Lester Embree.

Resumen

Este estudio da cinco pasos. En el primero, se caracterizan los orígenes del análisis reflexivo. Bajo el título “origen”, se incluyen, principalmente, las motivaciones y el campo de aplicación al cual están referidas. En el segundo paso, se presentan las características del análisis reflexivo, sobre todo en términos de supuestos y de la relación de este con el canon fenomenológico de estirpe husserliana. En el tercer paso, se valora el alcance del análisis reflexivo como técnica; en cierto modo, se estudia cómo puede operar con y sin la fenomenología como enfoque, teoría o método integral dentro de la investigación. En el cuarto paso, se establece cómo el análisis reflexivo ha encontrado alternativas de aplicación por parte de Lester Embree. Sobre todo, se mira el enlace que tiene o puede tener con la individuación al tenor de la lectura de Ideas II de Husserl. Como cierre, en el quinto paso, se establece críticamente el alcance del análisis reflexivo y las posibilidades que ofrece para el desarrollo o la continuación de la fenomenología, en el contexto de las vertientes contemporáneas sobre este enfoque.

   

Palabras clave: análisis reflexivo; fenomenologización; yo fenomenologizante; método fenomenológico; Lester Embree.

Preliminary remark^[3]

Inasmuch now as the theme of the theoretical experience of the phenomenologizing I is world-constitution, the phenomenological onlooker relates cognitively to a constitutive strata-structure the uppermost stratum of which (world) is borne by all the others else and, in a natural sense, is alone existent.

Fink VI CM (Hua Dok II/1 [1995: 76])^[4]

The concept “phenomenologizing” offers, at the very least, a connection between the empirical ego and the transcendental ego. How is this possible? We find non-transcendental or empirical phenomenology in the first direction, and transcendental or reflective phenomenology in the second. This methodological problem creates a number of possibilities. The ego is, in fact, the pole of natural phenomenologizing.

Beginning in 2015, our research group on Philosophy and the Teaching of Philosophy at the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional (Bogotá, Colombia) began to study Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation, in order to delve into Husserl’s doctrine of method. In this process, we developed a special interest in Husserl’s use of terms such as capabilities (Vermögen), phenomenological onlooker, and, in particular, the meanings of “phenomenologizing” and the phenomenologizing ego.

We were in the middle of this process when we received the news of Lester’s passing. If something characterizes the act of phenomenologizing, it is the fact that it can be executed by the phenomenologizing I, either as an empirical existence, or explicitly by taking a stance. However, what should we understand by phenomenologizing? Briefly put, it is the process whereby phenomena are constituted: in their appearance and deployment. The processes whereby phenomena come forth are only partly voluntary—but most of it is involuntary.

So, the remarkable issue of phenomenologizing is that it first takes place within the natural attitude, and thus can be found within that attitude. This is what, according to Fink, makes possible the communication between phenomenologists and those who aren’t experts in this discipline (whether philosophers, artists, scientists, technicians, or “ordinary citizens”).

I believe that the main contribution of Lester Embree lies in the study of this phenomenologizing act—which, for the sake of brevity, we shall denominate empirical, non-transcendental phenomenology; or, in our research’s terms, the detranscendentalizing of phenomenology. It is not true that mundane phenomenologizing does not allow the access to the transcendental sphere. The steps taken by Embree through algorithms in the reflective analysis are typically phenomenological and are valid in general. My hypothesis is the following: if Embree provides “algorithms” for reflective analysis, with phenomenological validity, then he establishes a common ground for the communication between phenomenologists and other researchers—and human beings in general.

According to my hypothesis, this is the position of reflective analysis. This is the reason why Embree tried to influence several disciplines. This is not the place to assess his success in this task. Following Embree’s example, phenomenological researchers can converge with psychology, sociology, and other sciences’ researchers. This should be an opportunity to meet with specialists of health care and nursing sciences. According to my reading, the task that Embree left us is to follow the track of a “mundanization” or detranscendentalization of phenomenology.

Reflective analysis is a method. It could even be seen as a technique. Whether taken as a method or as a technique, its value lies in the fact that it is in itself a presentation and an exercise of phenomenology. Lester Embree’s book, Reflective Analysis. A First Introduction into Phenomenological Investigation (translated into Spanish by Luis Román Rabanaque in 2003), is an attempt to systematically and progressively deploy the phenomenological practice. The book is a handbook. It is written for phenomenology teachers and students. The text is directed both to philosophy students and to students of other research fields in social sciences, cultural sciences, humanities, and health-care sciences.

The research on reflective analysis is located inside the framework known as the phenomenology of phenomenology. This area concentrates, especially, on the problem of method. Such an orientation has its “founding” moment in Eugen Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation (Hua Dok II/1 [1988]). Although the discussion of Embree’s work within this context could certainly be valuable, here I merely wish to point out its thematic relation to this framework.

For Colombians, Lester Embree’s book and his presence as a teacher were a way of promoting the study of phenomenology in the context of the PhD Programme of the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional. Amongst the many dialogues that it promoted, I wish to highlight the exchange between José Francisco Rodríguez Latorre—through his paper “Letter from a Positivist to a Phenomenologist”—and myself—through my “Reply to an Epistle from a Positivist to a Phenomenologist.” These papers were published in 2006 in the Journal Cuadernos de Filosofía Latinoamericana, and each of them includes a review and a critical assessment of Embree’s work.

Personally, I approached reflective analysis with the aim of teaching the phenomenological method. I especially valued its contribution to the debate concerning the phenomenology of phenomenology—as I have shown in the first part of my book Phenomenology, Formation and Life-World. Theoretical and Methodological Problems of Phenomenology, published in 2012 (Fenomenología, formación y mundo de la vida. Problemas teóricos y metodológicos de la fenomenología).

I met Lester Embree in 1999 when we founded the Latin-American Circle of Phenomenology —together with Antonio Zirión Q., Rosemary RP Lerner, Guillermo Hoyos, Roberto Walton, and others—on Monday, August 16th, in Puebla, Mexico. We met again on August 16-20, 2005, at the II OPO-Meeting^[5] that took place at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, in Lima. Later, in 2006, he gently accepted our teaching invitation to direct the Seminar Phenomenological Technique, at the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional (at Fusagasugá, Finca 7 Cueros, November 6-10). We met once more in 2007 at the Latin-American Phenomenology Colloquium that took place in Bogotá, Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, on August 29 to September 1).

I saw Lester for the last time in 2011 during the IV OPO-Meeting that took place in Segovia, Spain, on September 19-23. On that occasion he also talked about reflective analysis. He specifically discussed its connections with Dorion Cairn’s “phenomenology of appearing.”

I speak of Lester as a friend in phenomenology, a tireless researcher, and a promoter of the internationalization of phenomenology. In fact, Harry P. Reeder, friend and follower of Embree, always claimed jokingly when we chatted that, if possible, “Lester would take phenomenology to other galaxies. And to other possible worlds”. It was true.

I would like to present an assessment of reflective analysis as a way of continuing with phenomenology, as Lester would have wished. I value reflective analysis as one of the most visible aspects of this audacious and heterodox philosopher, a polyglot, a sociable and loyal man. I see reflective analysis as part of his most beloved legacy.

To Lester Embree, rest in peace.

§ 1. The origins of reflective analysis

Lester Embree, distinguished promoter of phenomenology, had the fortune of having Dorion Cairns as his teacher—he always referred to him as his mentor. Amongst his many occupations, Embree oversaw the organization of Alfred Schutz’s Archive (Nachlaß). This legacy is stored at Memphis University, under the care of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology (CARP). Embree was one of its active members. There are many relevant aspects of Embree’s life. We only mention here the ones that can contribute to a better understanding of reflective analysis.

His relationship with Schutz’s legacy and his positions as methodologist placed Embree on the road of a phenomenology oriented towards the social world; and, in general, towards the understanding of life-worldly experiences: health care-sciences, nursing. Schutz’s phenomenology not only taught Embree how this discipline intertwines with sociology and psychology, but also offered him the clarity of the exposition of seeing, the clarity of what is given to experience without turning to the transcendental ego.

In a certain way, the background of the emergence of reflective analysis is the following question: How to proceed, step by step, in order to achieve a phenomenological description of experiences’ order in the social lifeworld? Or, complementarily: How to contribute to the clarification of the structures of the social lifeworld? These questions hang over Embree’s thinking. The central point of reflective analysis is—without rejecting the expertise and education of phenomenological scholars—to enable the newcomer the access to phenomenological descriptions, their development, and practice. Ultimately, the motto “to the things themselves!” is not, according to Embree, a mere issue of specialists; rather, it is a challenge that can be faced without the itinerary and the weight of all the phenomenological scholasticism.

Thus, one element in the scope of reflective analysis was and is what can be called phenomenological practice. Those who execute reflective analysis ought to understand themselves, at the same time, as practicing phenomenologists. It is an essential part of the method that this should allow or even promote that the researcher—whether a newcomer, an expert, or a specialist—be open to confront his/her own descriptions, their perfectibility. Embree continuously, and in several ways, suggested that the weight of erudition could prevent the return “to the things themselves!” However, at the origin of this issue lies the distinction between the fundamental motto of phenomenology and the motto “to the texts themselves”—whether the texts of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, or Husserl. Both Husserl and the phenomenological movement rose against the latter motto, as Spiegelberg’s book The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (1982) and Edith Stein’s autobiography show (Stein’s autobiography was translated into Spanish as Estrellas amarillas in 1992).

The main characteristic of the origin of reflective analysis is that it understands the social world not as a mere object of the sociological, psychological, and psychosocial gaze—as, partly, presented by Schutz—, but also as the world where each and everyone of the members of the communities are meaning-giving lives. Thus, for example, a community of meaning is created between the users of the public transport system—the public servants of such a system, and the drivers of buses and other vehicles on the road. This is described by Embree in his paper “The Where and the When of Appearances,” published in Spanish in the first volume of the Colombian Yearbook of Phenomenology (2007b: 171–178), and later in his book Environment, Technology, Justification (2008: 133–142). Each one of the participants of this scene is, in his/her own way, a main character. However, none of the perspectives exhaust the meaning: rather, they offer a perspective, they contribute to the understanding of the horizon.

The community of meaning is composed by the subjects who participate in it. However, each one of the participants retains his/her first-person character. This is a position that cannot be delegated. Of course, communication dominates, opening the possibility of dialogue. The extent of the implication of the subject determines the extent to which harmony and a deployment of their point of view is achieved through reflective analysis.

Public transport is a relevant case. We experience it and carry out value-assessments of it before every kind of explicit statement. Reflective analysis comes into play when we aren’t only before the naked lived-experience, but when we take the step to establish both how this experience is given and when we are able to relativise our own perspective and see it from other possibilities inside the same horizon.

Likewise, Embree, with his phenomenological descriptions, shows our experience of care, of our body, of our health. Embree’s return to the sciences of care, to their application in the field of nursing, shows the power of this “to the things themselves!”. Sure, the doctor and the nurse have a lot to say about our care. They are practitioners of forms of knowledge, of a group of sciences. However, ultimately each one is, in the first person, the agent of the understanding of oneself, of the action on oneself. In a field of experience, the variety of perspectives of the participants enrich the horizon. This allows us to amplify the meaning about ourselves, about our body. This widening of meaning implies the possibility of both understanding ourselves and acting on ourselves. Here lies the origin of reflective analysis: In the intimate understanding of our being agents, in the first person, of meaning; of being able to come into contact with the visions of others; ultimately, of validating the lived meaning in community, through the generation of a community of meaning.

The following piece of information has, therefore, a special relevance: reflective analysis does not begin with any of Husserl’s works nor with the works of other members of the phenomenological movement. It begins with those who decide to describe their constitution of meaning. Above all, phenomenology is not a doctrine, or at least not at first. Phenomenology is, primordially, a method. If one wishes it, it could be learned as a technique. It could be followed step by step. These steps can, of course, validate the reach of what is given to each other in first-person modus.

Yes, there can be and there are phenomenology experts. However, what decides the validity of reflective analysis is not, under any circumstance, the principle of authority. The beginning and the end of the phenomenological investigation is intersubjective validation. In its origin, reflective analysis is an open field and who arrives to it has also to open themselves in many ways: strip themselves of the texts, of the principle of authority, understand that their own perspective is a perspective in a horizon, able to be validated, but not in itself true; get ready to describe other perspectives and, therefore, other meanings that are different and enrich the horizon.

In short, the origin of reflective analysis lies in taking seriously the motto “To the things themselves!” and in practicing Phenomenology (description, based on seeing—Embree prefers to call it observing); in abandoning expertocracy. Phenomenology, under the shelter of reflective analysis, can be executed and practiced by the average citizen, the common citizen, by persons of flesh and blood. Here lies its accessibility, here lies also its difficulty. Therefore, everyone is capable of practicing phenomenology. However, this does not mean that we are phenomenologists “spontaneously” or, in terms of the phenomenological canon, in the “natural attitude.” Rather, it is necessary to transit, explicitly and consciously, from this attitude to the attitude of reflection, the “reflective attitude.” The path to operate such a transit is reflective analysis.

It is possible to make a plan in order to start this journey or path and also to arrive at the expected destination. The task of reflective analysis can be outlined in each of its steps and, likewise, be critically controlled. Thus, phenomenological research is not the research of a transcendental ego that, locked up in the prison of conscience, is able to reach the eidos, the truth. What opens the variety of possibilities of acting together is the relationship with others, in face of the variety of perspectives that configure their meaning, their validity; it is there where knowledge is validated.

§ 2. The characteristics of reflective analysis

Reflective analysis has a subjective calling, anchored in the first-person. However, it is at the same time intersubjective. It lives through corrigibility and validation, since it cannot be given without these two poles: the demand for clarity lies at its base. Everything expressed through reflective analysis must refer to a shared and lived life-world. Its clarity is, to a large extent, associated with the referent, with the possibility of indicating the field of reference. Of course, it is impossible to progress in it without language, without semantic and syntactic structures, but it cannot limit itself to the clarification of language. As in Horatio’s Epistle to the Pisones, “language is the use,” and, therefore, the difficulties of communication or in communication are resolved pragmatically, that is, through the reference to a correlate, to experience, to the givenness of the world.

We ought to pay special attention to one term: analysis. Of course, it refers to a long philosophical tradition, also a mathematical one, in which a whole is decomposed in its parts. The whole is the lived-experience, but it is given to us only in structures of meaning. The analysis is of lived-experiences of meaning that must be decomposed in their constitutive elements; however, an “ingredient” of each lived-experience is its genesis, its becoming. Thus, to analyze is not only to describe a set of elements that converge in a lived-experience until this experience turns into a unity of meaning; it is also the account of its becoming, of how its meaning-giving is reached, of how this giving is encroached in traditions and cultural contexts with their having-been, their current being, and their possible becoming. Canonically speaking, description takes place in and from temporality, with its bundle of retentions and protentions, always in and from a lived present—hic et nunc.

Paradoxically, analysis is possible because, originally, the experience is given to us as a united, bonded whole. Experience, or more exactly the meaning that is offered to us in it, shows itself in the modality of a synthesis. We have arrived at this synthesis actively, through concrete experiences or lived-experiences, through sentences that allow us to give it meaning. A synthesis has been actively built—an active synthesis—that becomes for each and everyone of us a background, a sort of tacit assumption. It is so to such an extent, that this background operates without our awareness, in a variety of ways: prejudices, judgments; notions, categories, concepts; values, norms, habits. This background also offers itself as a synthesis. But this synthesis operates passively. The background is passivity, passive synthesis.

The role of analysis is to expose such double synthesis. It is preferable to go from the passive synthesis in which the world is pre-comprehended to the bundle of active synthesis which functions, lively or experientially, as the base for the configuration of the background, of that which our vision of the world entails. The important issue is that analysis should operate on what is bound together and should give an account of its constitution. This can only be understood in the dynamism of becoming, of what has been lived and experienced by each one, in a first-person modus; and can only be understood in this dimension. Only this way can the field of intersubjective validity be opened.

Analysis implies to return to oneself, in our actual position, in our living present, over what has been lived. Thus, it is the I in its living present who operates—reflectively—on the previous I, on its becoming. In trying to understand its being, its having-been, its possible becoming, something escapes it and something is added. Therefore, the task of analysis lies in a sort of prophylaxis which cleans or clears the field of lived-experiences. It is for this reason that the means to access such a field is, structurally, description. According to Embree, this has nothing to do with narration, nor with interpretation, since that would imply that the subject immerses itself in fiction. Also, it has nothing to do with arguing, since this would mean that the subject contrives a procedure to justify its actions, understandings, world-assumptions, and ways of understanding itself within it. On the contrary, descriptions can certainly be “obvious,” but they can be controlled and improved as an understanding that can be accounted for, its references explained—again, there is a turning to the “referent”—and that can be validated through devices—chronology, history, fact, data, etc. Ultimately, if there is something characteristic of the analysis in reflective analysis, it is the fact that it refers permanently to the thing itself: a lived-experience, an experience, a matter of fact, etc. This is, speaking with the expressions proper to the phenomenological canon, the noematical pole.

However, analysis cannot be disconnected from reflection. Thus, each one is as valuable as the other. And it is possible to direct the attention to the latter. Reflection introduces the field of variations. It is, in itself, openness and deployment of the noetic pole. The issue is not only what is given, but also the way in which it is given. It is not only the production of meaning, but of ever new possibilities of meaning that open up when we live, when we have an experience. It is not only the way in which we understand meaning, but also the multiple horizons in which meanings can be understood and fulfilled.

Only through reflection, only reflectively, what is in this way—according to a manner of understanding a lived-experience, an experience or a meaning—could be in another way. It is the openness to possible worlds. Then, the other meanings are not only possible but are also open to the comprehension of others, who understand the world in a different manner from ours. First-person experiences—in us, for each one of us—are intersubjective conditions of meaning: “I live this so, concerning this experience, but it could also be lived so […] and in other ways”. It is not a fictional field, it is not as if I were living it, but as if I could be living it. Citing Husserl, “I carry the others in me” (quoted in Iribarne 1987: 139), I bear them reflectively, the possibilities of their experience are given to me.

Reflectiveness is the condition of intersubjectivity that opens me up to lived-experiences that I don’t have hic et nunc, but that I could eventually have. Then, by its own nature, reflectiveness de-dogmatizes, i.e., breaks the flow of the natural attitude, relativizes one’s own point of view. However, it does not imply abandoning what is effectively given to me. Thanks to reflectiveness there are alternative visions of the world. It is due to reflectiveness that consensuses and dissensuses are possible. Reflectiveness opens the field of imaginative variations.

Reflective analysis is the structural conjunction of both the noematic and the noetic poles, hence, of the first-person and of the second-person experiences. Thus, it is only with it that a detranscendentalized meaning is possible: there is no place for the solitary ego. If there is something characteristic of reflective analysis is the fact that it is not transcendental. This characteristic brings it always nearer to the idea of a rigorous science and it is a “type” of research method that can face any demand both of rigor and validity, of comparison and appeal to the referent. However, it is a method proper to phenomenology understood as a science with a personal, social, and cultural core. This way, what characterizes reflective analysis is the fact that it is defined by its methodological structure and leaves aside any claim of being a doctrine.

Even if it is true that Embree maintains this whole foundation of reflective analysis, it is possible to claim that, following the core aspects of the phenomenological canon, the way he presents it uses a simple and direct language. Therefore, he calls observing what Husserl establishes as “seeing” since his 1907 lessons on the Idea of Phenomenology (Hua II), as as aforementioned. He also maintains its structure as a founding element of phenomenological practice. Consequently, this observation gives rise to informing, whereby Lester returns to Husserl’s canonical sentence according to which “the life-world is given to us linguistically sedimented.” Only after these two steps have been taken, he highlights reflecting, which—as shown—opens the field of imaginative variations. But where is this whole procedure applied? This is the place where Embree deals with loving, valuing, and believing, as well as with everything that has passively become an effect of activity. He thus lays the methodical foundations and assumptions of reflective analysis, and its direction. This itinerary concludes, as Embree shows, with the problem of validity, under the aegis of what he names examining.

§ 3. The scope of reflective analysis as a technique

In his book Reflective Analysis, Embree insists that phenomenology is not a matter of erudition. Indeed, he calls “scholarship” the “first vice” of most phenomenologists. For him, this includes “editing, interpreting, reviewing, and translating” (Embree 2003: 10–11). The “second vice” in his view is to believe that phenomenology amounts to “argumentation”, since “genuine phenomenologists do not as a rule produce arguments. Rather, they produce ‘analyses’” (Embree 2003: 12–13).

For Embree, a significant fact that should be taken into account is that “phenomenology” is not “exclusively a tradition in the modern discipline of philosophy, i.e. philosophy conceived as a speciality alongside others” (Embree 2003: 12–13). On the contrary, “there has been a phenomenological tendency in psychiatry since before World War I, and it has recently proven easy to identify phenomenological tendencies in over a score of other non-philosophical disciplines during phenomenology’s first century” (Embree 2003: 12–13).

Embree’s book contains an especially important “Preface for Instructors,” under the light of Aristotle’s thesis according to which science’s specific characteristic is that it is teachable. This is the central motive of this work. Therefore, according to Embree, “colleagues may appreciate my pleasure in using the textbook form” (Embree 2003: 28–29). In sum, Embree uses phenomenology as a technique. It has also been called so by Levinas at Edmund Husserl’s Royaumont Colloque (Levinas 1959: 114).

Unlike Levinas, however, Embree’s achievement lies in the fact that he does not call phenomenology only a technique, but he also provides a handbook so that this technique might be studied, appropriated, and used in several fields of knowledge. Therefore, besides graphics, his book on Reflective Analysis also includes conceptual and operative syntheses of what it exposes, as well as text boxes with tasks for learners to solve. In the same vein, the book offers text boxes with questions as reading quizzes or as learning exercises. An example is found in figure 7.1, in the section on Examining. Here, the learner must answer the following questions:

4. How is one disposed to will or act in this attitude?

3. What is valued positively or negatively, absolutely or comparatively, etc.?

2. In this attitude, what is believed or believed in and how?

1. What types of experiencing and objects as experienced pertain to this attitude?

(Embree 2003: 500–501).

Didactically, it is notable that the text box begins with question number 4, the answer to which can only be solved after answering the three previous questions. The point is to learn how to examine attitudes. Both the “natural” and the “reflective” attitudes are implied, but the main purpose is that the learner identifies how these attitudes operate, so to say passively, as a flow or a current, or rather how they have been constituted.

Embree is confident that becoming a competent phenomenologist is above all a matter of practice. He also believes that phenomenology, as reflective analysis, can be practiced in every field of knowledge, given that the subject, from the first-person perspective, is always implied in its relationship to its subject-matter. In this way, as in the case of any other device, such as an artifact, the scope of the phenomenological reflective technique depends on its being brought into play. If the instructions are followed, it is feasible to use it. Practitioners are not required to publicly endorse phenomenology as a doctrine in order to achieve this. Even if they use it as a technique, they do not have to focus their research on phenomenology. Instead, they can view it as a component, a stage, a step, or a procedure within a design that, in the end, supports an alternative approach, another theory, or methodology.

One may argue that the issue at stake here is the detranscendentalization of phenomenology under the guise of a heterodoxy born at the core of the canon. Embree disagrees that reflective analysis begins uniquely and exclusively with Husserl, with all the countersigns of the Husserlian canon. On the contrary, he assumes that reflective analysis combines elements from the work of authors such as Henri Bergson, William James, Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Alfred Schutz, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre; of his teachers Edward G. Ballard, Dorion Cairns, and Aron Gurtwitsch, as well as of his colleagues Maurice Natanson and Elisabeth Ströker, among others (Embree 2003: 26–27). Therefore, Reflective Analysis includes an important, and yes, very significant dose of “phenomenologies,” but it also exhibits accents and emphases that come from pragmatism. If the dialogue between phenomenology and pragmatism is here particularly fruitful—more because of the things themselves than due to erudition—it is thanks to this work and, especially, due to the value given to the referent, regardless of whether it is called thing itself, matter-of-fact, lived-experience, experience, or meaning.

Perhaps the canonical, orthodox phenomenologist could be skeptical regarding the use of expressions such as “technique” and “phenomenological technique.” Embree’s handbook gives new meaning and value to these expressions. In this way, it becomes accessible to research fields such as social sciences, humanities, culture sciences, and health-care sciences. This is the path to desacralize phenomenology, an attempt to overcome the all-to common “expertocracy” within it. The return “to the things themselves!” is the condition of possibility for an interdisciplinary dialogue that nourishes description, its key factor. This can be carried out “technically.” It can also be modified “technically.” Therefore, it is possible to carry out a dialogue between several topics and disciplines thanks to the things themselves.

To sum up, Embree’s book—by exposing how reflective analysis is applicable as a “technique”—takes a step forward beyond the crude opposition between phenomenology and the all-too common presentation of social, cultural, and health-care sciences, as well as of their theories and methods, as positivist. It also renders possible a certain level of cooperation and dialogue between these disciplines, to their mutual benefit. In the same way, this cooperation fosters the transformation of phenomenology into a project to expand scientific rationality, based on the subjects’ perspectives and experiences in the lived-world.

Whether this was Embree’s deliberate aim or not, reflective analysis presents itself as a field of intersection between phenomenology and other research practices that have at their core human world-experiences, their rationalization, and the widening of their meanings.

§ 4. Fields of application

Fenomenología continuada. Contribuciones al análisis reflexivo de la cultura (2007a) is a book that gathers a series of Embree’s essays written in different periods of his research itinerary. Applications are discussed in the book. The first section addresses generational disparities, American ethnophobia, class attitudes, genre dialectology, fictions of civility, and the health of ecosystems. It assumes that these are dimensions of the “life-world” that have not been sufficiently explored. The book’s second part, oriented towards philosophical reflections, deals with the constitution of basic culture, the reflection on cultural disciplines, the Gurwitschean model to explain culture, and the advancements concerning valuing and action—according to Husserl’s Ideas II.

What is Embree’s interest concerning the application of reflective analysis? One can answer succinctly: (1) “[…] Showing that the famous life-world phenomenology is entirely sociocultural;” and (2) “[…] Seeing how phenomenology can be continued” (Embree 2007a: 9). However, from a theoretical standpoint, Embree’s main contribution lies in the passage where he observes that every tool—he considers the example of a nutcracker—can be “analyzed in terms of individual habits, there are cultural models of action in which a multitude of persons participate” (Embree 2007a: 173). Ultimately, he wishes to highlight that “cultural life is practical rather than valuing or cognitive” (Embree 2007a: 174). For Embree, the constitution of a “basic culture” implies acknowledging that “there is a stratum in conscious life and in the world that lies below the stratum of categorial forms, of common sense constructions, of thought and interpretation, and which at the same time lies beyond sense perception of natural things” (Embree 2007a: 176). Here comes into play the vision of individuation, of phenomenon and of the phenomenology of individuation, since “this stratum can be called ‘basic culture,’ and can be abstracted together with the categorial stratum in order to reach the level of natural things, which, by the way, are physical, lively or biological, or somatopsychic” (Embree 2007a: 176).

The robust thesis of reflective analysis is that culture—and specifically that which this approach calls “basic culture”—is the environment of individuation. It is evident at each step that this takes place in the modus essendi as well as in the modus cognoscendi. However, its multiple givennesses, in one and other realms, could be simultaneous or successive: on the one side, something can be given in the first mode without being known; on the other side, it can be given in the modus cognoscendi and, through this, it can have an impact in the essendi order or implicate it.

Pure phenomenality is physical. If it deploys a phenomenologization, this is due to life, to the deployment of biological processes. However, the phenomenological field opens itself when psychic individuation comes into play, which never ceases to be somatic. Therefore, it could be claimed that the phenomenological field is the field of psychosomatic individuation.

What is the order of this individuation? In the somatopsychic order, it presents itself both in the pathic and the praxic dimensions. Here value is constituted. “Concerning that which has a positive value, it could be easily claimed not only that it is good, but also, like a positum, that it is a good” (Embree 2007a: 236). This good is something proper, what is properly given. It is no “property” nor an “extension.” Good as positum is what appears or what gives itself; and it appears or gives itself as a value. What is lived is so to the extent that it is valued, to the extent that it is a “good,” to the extent that it is given properly. Here individuation operates as a founding structure of the psychosomatic c order.

Embree reads Husserl’s Ideas II in order to see how these individuation levels integrate themselves. Ultimately, his approach shows how the world of culture, as the environment of individuation, is based on the biological and physical strata as its condition of possibility. If the life-world is linguistically sedimented this is due to its support on the biological and physical strata, which are individuated in the passivity of the modus essendi.

In sum, the field of application of reflective analysis depends (according to Ideas II) on the physical and biological givenness of the hyle. These forms of givenness are the condition of possibility of culture’s givenness, and of culture’s function as an individuation environment.

For Embree, one of the places where we can observe this operation is in the valuations concerning ecosystems and their health. “The complexity of the issue can be approached at the level of the ends and means that ought to be wanted regarding the good of general health, and through the consideration of the means—for example, time and effort—and the ends beyond it—for instance, to be an environmental example in society” (Embree 2007a: 153). In these valuations not only hyle comes into play, but also the constituted sense over it—habitualities, beliefs, values, etc.

§ 5. Limits of reflective analysis

Embree is perfectly aware that “Phenomenology is an approach that can be described very succinctly as reflective analysis” (2007a: 194–195). Moreover, he knows that “this approach can be undertaken in several disciplines” (194–195). However, according to his point of view, “it cannot be adopted in formal disciplines such as mathematics or naturalist sciences, like chemistry, although it can be adopted in the posterior efforts to understand what is done in such disciplines” (194–195). In any case, for Embree, reflective analysis “can be effectively carried out, however, […] in the disciplines which thematize aspects of the sociocultural world” (195), with the goal of answering the following questions: “¿How can a world be cultural due to valuing and volition and how can it be social having in it others, non-humans and humans?” (94–95).

At least two observations ought to be made: (1) Reflective analysis does not account for how phenomenology is possible in fields of sciences that do not manifestly and directly discuss culture, the social world. (2) Ultimately, reflective analysis deals with values, volition, relationships between human beings, and between human beings and their environment. Its scope, as shown, is at the same time its limitation. It is a canonical characteristic of Husserl’s work and of the phenomenological tradition to direct its attention towards geometry, logic, and mathematics. In principle, these are not fields of reflective analysis, since in this formal realm the experience related to the social world, the world of culture, values, and will does not come into play. In a certain way, reflective analysis is a phenomenology only and exclusively of the social and cultural world.

As we have seen, space is not discussed either. The studies opened by works such as Thing and Space (Hua XVI) fall outside the margins of the explicit considerations of reflective analysis. Thus, we are dealing with a phenomenology that prioritizes time, the lived experience of time, the social and cultural world of temporality. But what happens with the system of places? How is it constituted on the basis of the body? How does a phenomenology of the body, a phenomenology of place—isolated or all of them as a set—enable the foundation of intersubjective experience and, ultimately, the understanding of meaning? All of this, it seems, falls outside reflective analysis.

There is still one final issue which is not clear: Can reflective analysis be at the margins, that is, outside every consideration? Or, rather, on the margins of psychology, of the study of the structure of the mind? Maybe the fields of phenomenology of mind and cognition has not yet explained the sui generis processes and the relation between these structures and those of the social and cultural life—the mutual interrelation between cognitive phenomenology and/or phenomenology of the social and cultural life-world. Reflective analysis could be or is, according to Embree’s version, at the margins. My hypothesis is that both reflective analysis and the phenomenology of the structures of the social and cultural life-world, à la Schutz or à la Embree, respectively, contribute to moderate the naturalization of phenomenology. This can, in turn, lead to a rich notion of cognition, of phenomenological psychology (Hernández 2007), of understanding, not only as embodied understanding, but as an understanding that uses the distinction between body and flesh, that digs deeply into the difference between Körper and Leib, that commits itself both to material phenomenology and to the phenomenology of individuation.

The richness of reflective analysis, such as it is developed by Embree—and, to a large extent, as a continuation of the tradition started by Cairns and Schutz—, lies in the self-limitation that confines phenomenology to a sociological and culturalist approach. However, there is an open task—at least as a hypothesis—that implies rereading phenomenology as reflective analysis towards four dialogues: with the formal sciences and the realm of thought structures; with natural sciences, and the realm of the physio psychological dimensions of thought-processes; with the material structures—hyle, space, system of places—that phenomenally underlie every possibility of phenomenology; and with physical, biological and psychic individuation.

Reflective analysis has the possibility of acknowledging a methodological reductionism in order to initiate its systematization and formalization. However, it is equally confronted with the powerful possibility of generating its resignification through a dialogue with “the phenomenologies” that are part of our current age and thus enrich the phenomenological movement.

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