Beyond panpsychism
the radicality of phenomenology
pp. 337-356
in: Sangeetha Menon, Nithin Nagaraj, Binoy (eds), Self, culture and consciousness, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
A central presupposition of science is that objectivity is universal. Although this presupposition is the basis of the success of scientific inquiry, it also creates a blind spot in which the conscious knower/objectifier is hidden, ignored or surreptitiously objectified (which is tantamount to being ignored). Several strategies were accordingly adopted in the West to overcome this induced ignorance. One of them is Phenomenology, with its project of performing a complete suspension of judgements (epochè) about the alleged objective world, and evaluating any claim of knowledge, together with its activity of objectification, on the basis of lived experience. Another one is panpsychist, or rather pan-experientialist metaphysics, that puts back lived experience in the very domain that was deprived of it by the act of objectifying. I will compare these approaches, thereby establishing a hierarchy of radicality between avoiding the blind spot from the outset and compensating for it retrospectively.