BRYAN SMYTH

ON THE FALSENESS OF ‘FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS’:

REIFICATION AND SCHIZOPHRENIC APPERCEPTION

Introduction

Virtually since its inception, Husserlian phenomenology has consistently

maintained an at least nominal interest in political phenomena. In recent years,
however, many philosophers in this tradition have felt an increased urgency to
address ‘the political’. While this situation may simply reflect a transitory ac-
ademic vogue, it can also be taken as expressing a profound methodological
concern specific to phenomenology—namely, that phenomenology’s distinc-
tive reliance upon the self-evidentness [Evidenz] of phenomenological given-
ness renders it congenitally incapable of undertaking a critical interrogation of
the socio-historical horizons within which this self-evidentness is experienced.
Central to this is the suspicion that even in ‘phenomenologically purified’ expe-
rience, universality can still be parochialism in disguise.1 This calls self-evident-
ness itself into question. In Husserlian terms, the worry is that strict allegiance
to phenomenology’s “principle of principles”2 would trap the phenomenologist,
if not in a state of “transcendental solipsism,”3 then at the very least within the
ideological confines of her “homeworld” [Heimwelt],4 and thus in a position
from which no definitive “self-critique” of her transcendental cognition could
be undertaken.5 And yet it is ultimately only in virtue of such a critique, as Hus-
serl himself clearly recognized, that phenomenology would be in a position to
truly make good on its purported capacity to offer a fundamental philosophical
alternative to realism and idealism. To be clear, this holds with respect, not just
to political phenomena in particular, but to all phenomena. Thus, although it
may not be self-conscious on the part of those involved, I would nonetheless
like to interpret recent phenomenological interest in the political in terms of the
methodological realization that if phenomenology cannot deal critically with
phenomena at this level, then it is ultimately incapable of dealing critically with
any phenomena at all.
This claim – which it is the aim of this paper to develop, at least at a program-
matic level – merits insistence. Even though nowadays within phenomenology,

133
with the exception of relatively small circles of specialists, there is little explicit
discussion of Evidenz and related themes, it cannot be overstated that there is no
such thing as bona fide phenomenological investigation if it does not rely in a
distinctive – and distinctively crucial – way upon a special domain of intuitional
evidence. Nor is it helpful in any way to obscure this fact under the pressure of
contemporary anti-phenomenological trends of thought. Now, it is not the aim
of this paper to examine the nature of this evidentiary domain in any system-
atic way. But I do want to affirm that the disclosure of this domain can only be
understood in terms of the phenomenological reduction. Here, too, however, I
must abstain from any detailed discussion, bracketing out for the time being just
what exactly this methodological performance would concretely involve.6 As far
as the reduction is concerned, I just want to set out two very general claims:
First, the essential sense of the reduction is to overcome what Eugen Fink
called our uncritical “captivation” [Befangenheit]7 in the “world-immanence”
definitive of the ‘natural attitude’, in order thereby to render the “ground” of
the world [Weltgrund] – precisely that which non-phenomenological philosophy
takes for granted – accessible to theoretical experience.8 As Fink argued, the re-
duction is the conditio sine qua non, the essential transcendental “breakthrough”
[Durchbruch] that makes phenomenology possible.9
Second, (and this is massively consequential), the character of phenomeno-
logical evidence is inextricably tied to the character of the reductive perfor-
mance that discloses it.
Drawing these considerations together, we can say that if phenomenology
is to be a coherent project, then its seemingly intrinsic lack of criticalness vis-
à-vis its socio-political horizons must be redressed directly—transcendental
self-critique cannot be postponed to a “second stage” of research.10 If what is
fundamentally at issue is how phenomenology’s evidentiary domain is origi-
nally accessed, then it follows that the overcoming of political uncriticalness
must be built into the reductive performance itself—the overcoming of capti-
vation in the natural attitude must be transgressive in a sense that has yet to be
articulated in the literature on phenomenological methodology.
Specifically, I want to argue that what saves phenomenology, and at the
same time forms its principal contribution to political theory, lies in a critique,
beyond its naturalness, of the naïveté of the ‘natural attitude’. In doing so, I
hope to offer a clearer understanding of the philosophical affinities that obtain
between transcendental phenomenology and historical materialism, affinities
which have to do with the theory of ideology. For I contend that a phenomeno-
logical interrogation of natural-attitudinal naïveté implies a “progressive” cri-
tique of reification [Verdinglichung] that converges with – and which has the
potential to redeem – the core problematic of reified consciousness governing
the tradition of Western Marxism stemming from Lukács.11 To be sure, such a
theoretical convergence was glimpsed by a number of innovative second-gen-
eration phenomenologists of Marxist persuasion, including Merleau-Ponty,
Kosík, and Paci. But on the whole, the problematic of ideological reification
was not clearly identified and grasped on its own terms. For my part, taking

134
phenomenological accounts of schizophrenia as a ‘leading clue’, I argue for
an understanding of reification in terms of apperception, and its relation to the
norms and pathologies of proto-temporalization [Urzeitigung]. On this basis, I
argue that reified consciousness is not to be understood in privative terms, but
rather as a positively restructured form of ‘normal’ self-conscious attention
that can have ‘pathological’ consequences in terms of historical agency.
I first argue that phenomenology needs to ground itself in something like
what Anthony Steinbock, drawing on Husserl, has called “generative phen-
omenology.” I then identify the naïveté of the natural attitude as the key gen-
erative theme to consider. The third step of the argument deals with schizo-
phrenia, to which I turn to show that this naïveté is a positive phenomenon
of apperception. Finally, on the grounds of the structural similarities between
schizophrenia and ideological reification, I bring this result back to the politi-
cal context. Recalling the work of Joseph Gabel, I argue that phenomenology,
retooling itself in this way, can help resolve a central debate within the Marxist
tradition concerning the nature of ideology.

1. Generative Phenomenology

Articulated primarily by Steinbock, building on indications given throughout

various late Husserlian manuscripts, “generative” phenomenology is an auspi-
cious development. It is centrally concerned with what Husserl called “genera-
tivity” [Generativität], understood as the historical generation of normatively
significant, intersubjective meaning. Generative themes – pertaining, for exam-
ple, to political, religious, cultural, and economic structures – in other words,
the concrete totalities within which phenomenology is pursued – are structurally
horizonal to possible intuitional givenness, and thus exceed the scope of both
static and genetic regressive analysis. It is in contrast to this that generative phe-
nomenology is understood as “progressive”.
This is the crucial point: generative phenomenology recognizes that phenom-
enological investigation, precisely in its fidelity to the phenomena, calls into
question the intuitional basis of phenomenological cognition, and thus motivates
a fundamental revision—at least in letter, if not spirit—of Husserl’s ‘principle of
principles’. Generative phenomenology, however, is not the only formulation of
such a (progressive) perspective. Fink once proposed something similar under
the name of “constructive phenomenology.”12 As he put it, what is required is
a “movement out beyond the reductive givenness of transcendental life” to an
examination of what he called its “‘external horizons’.”13 Insofar as it “abandons
the basis of transcendental ‘givenness’, the resulting investigation no longer ex-
hibits things intuitively, but necessarily seeks recourse to speculative resources
and thus proceeds, as Fink put it, “constructively.”14
With respect to the problem of ‘external horizons’ – and this problem is cen-
tral to the development of post-Husserlian phenomenology – constructive and
generative approaches represent, grosso modo, the two fundamentally different

135
ways in which it might be resolvable. For they in effect represent the disjunc-
tive choice between a resolution based on either theoretical or else on practical
reason. To use Kantian terms:15 whereas Fink, presuming that the scientificity
of phenomenological predication requires that it take the form of “determinate”
(or “determining,” bestimmend) judgments, linked the coherence of phenom-
enology to its development within the tradition of speculative idealism, genera-
tive phenomenology would rely, more modestly, on “reflective” (or “reflecting,”
reflectierend) judgments, and this in a way that betrays affinities with Marx’s
critique of speculative idealism. For it shares with it the idea of ‘the realization
of philosophy’—the problem of external horizons is worked out, not in terms of
origination, but rather, if I may put it this way, in terms of purposiveness. That
is, it is not a matter of applying a theoretical corrective to the regressive analy-
sis of what already is, but of participating in its actual generation. As Merleau-
Ponty once put it, directly critiquing Fink’s proposal, “[t]he phenomenological
world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing [préalable]
being, but the laying down [fondation] of being.”16 And, albeit in a different
context, Merleau-Ponty elsewhere expressed the salient difference in this way:
whereas a constructive approach “assumes universality as given […] the prob-
lem is its realization.”17
This “realization” of universality is the basic sense of generativity. Genera-
tive phenomenology is thus related to genetic phenomenology in the same way
that the latter is related to static phenomenology. Just as static analysis of the
structures of intentionality occurs as an abstraction within a given genetic ho-
rizon of egological temporalization, so too does genetic analysis occur within,
while effectively abstracting from, a given generative horizon.18 As a critique
of egology, the generative perspective is thus the culmination of a movement
of increasing phenomenological concreteness. This is tied to what is perhaps
the most striking feature of generative phenomenology, namely, the ineluctable
normative participation of the phenomenologist in the development of the phe-
nomena (thus directly opposed to Fink’s unbeteiligte Zuschauer). As Steinbock
put it, just by inquiring into its constitution, the phenomenologist “must take a
position with respect to the way sense is constituted […] she must be engaged in
how sense should, ought to or must take shape.” This is because the constitution
of sense “concerns the future orientation of sense, which is to say, the generation
of new historical meaning structures.”19
It pertains to the ‘reflective’ character of generative claims that they posit,
heuristically, an open background against which genetic horizons are encoun-
tered as historically dynamic phenomena. And it is on account of this specific
‘progressive’ character that a generative approach recommends itself for the
phenomenological interrogation of the political. The methodological key to this
approach, what it would mean to suspend the natural attitude such as to disclose
generativity, is linked to the recognition of a particular feature of the natural
attitude.

136
 2. Natural-Attitudinal Naïveté

Following a suggestion made by Sebastian Luft,20 I want to distinguish be-

tween the “naturalness” of the natural attitude and its “naïveté,” that is, be-
tween the immediate ‘taken-for-grantedness’ and the uncritical ‘dogmatism’
that characterize antepredicative self-evidence. The former has to do with a
basic condition of practical comportment. Although its specific content is in
constant flux, as a fixture of human existence naturalness per se is norma-
tively benign. This is not the case with naïveté. This is more akin to what Al-
fred Schutz called “the epoché of the natural attitude” – the suspension, not of
belief, but of doubt, that maintains a particular abstraction from phenomenal
concreteness as a ‘natural’ experiential framework.21 The natural attitude is
thus not just a matter of an urdoxic commitment to the existence of the world.
Rather, this Weltglaube itself comprises a certain practical commitment to its
instantiation in the form of a particular ‘homeworld’.
Thus, contrary to Luft, I do not construe naïveté as simply the “flip-side” of
naturalness. For to so construe it would fail to recognize, not only the norma-
tive asymmetry, but also the constitutive difference between these aspects of
the natural attitude, and thus effectively foreclose on the possibility of under-
standing the natural attitude in generative terms. For natural-attitudinal naïveté
can be positively de-generative. The consequence is that at the level of gen-
erativity, it is thus no longer adequate to simply bracket out, in the movement
of phenomenological reduction, ontological or metaphysical presuppositions
concerning the material objectivity or ‘thingliness’ [Dinglichkeit] of the world
as given. Rather, a distinction must be drawn between (i) the constitution of
things occurring within self-temporalization – the most general sense of reifica-
tion, which we might call ‘entification’, and which pertains to naturalness; and
(ii) the constitutive (or better, ‘institutive’) processes, in particular concerning
social phenomena, within which self-temporalization is situated and ultimately
signified. This is the site of reification in its politically interesting sense, and it
is primarily as a critique of this, in terms of natural-attitudinal naïveté, that the
passage from genetic to generative analysis comes into view.
This raises far-reaching questions that challenge the priority that has tra-
ditionally been assigned within phenomenology to the perceived horizons of
the world. The idea is that the generative perspective reveals perceptual phe-
nomenality as being co-constituted by another order of synthesis that is neither
precisely active nor passive, and which has properties quite distinct from the
ordinary, or ‘natural’, constitution of material objectivity. Among other things,
it points to a larger project of clarifying in generative terms the meaning of
‘materiality’ as such. For the moment, though, I merely want to affirm that
these processes of reification only come to appearance through generative-
phenomenological intervention. Naïveté is thus the key focus of the normative
participation of the generative phenomenologist, and this is what gives her
work a transgressive character.

137
 3. Schizophrenia

To develop this, I want to take schizophrenia as a ‘leading clue’ to natural-at-

titudinal naïveté. In this I draw on the tradition of phenomenological psychopa-
thology, a tradition which has historically been one of the most productive areas
of phenomenological research. I would suggest that this is primarily because
here, where hallucination and delusion, for example, are standard fare, the natu-
ral attitude and its horizons are already rigorously problematized. In the effort
to redeem phenomenology as a general project by developing its ability to deal
with political phenomena in generative terms, and doing so in terms of a critique
of reification, it is thus no coincidence that we seek recourse to the realm of psy-
chopathology. We are, after all, dealing with social pathologies (indeed, crises),
as numerous texts of both Marx and Husserl, among others, would say.
As Wolfgang Blankenburg expressed the central and pivotal observation of
phenomenological psychopathology, schizophrenia involves, to a greater or
lesser extent, the loss of natural self-evidence, or simply the loss of naturalness.22
It thus involves a sort of isolation of natural-attitudinal naïveté (which is why it
can serve to disclose it), and thus an intensification of the ‘epoché of the natu-
ral attitude’ that can lead to hallucination or delusion.23 As Straus had argued,
however, and as has been confirmed more recently, such experience is entirely
consistent with unimpaired perceptual capacities.24 This cannot be overempha-
sized. Such experience thus cannot be understood in terms of misperception or
perceptual misjudgment. Rather, it can only be comprehended in terms of pre-
objective or pre-cognitive modifications of sensing.
Following Sass and Parnas, I take schizophrenia as denoting in general terms
a disturbed attunement between self and world in which intentionalities nor-
mally inhabited operatively become objects of “hyperreflexive” thematic aware-
ness (the experience of internal processes of passive synthesis, for example, as
external and alien), and in which there is at the same time a converse weaken-
ing of the self-affective sense of existing as a particular subject of awareness.25
Schizophrenia can thus be described as a disturbance of apperception, a restruc-
turing of the tacit-focal structure of conscious awareness. This manifests itself in
altered boundaries between inner and outer, subject and object, a situation that
can be seen as a response to what R. D. Laing called “ontological insecurity.”26
Consequent to the loss of naturalness, the world is naïvely reconstituted in exag-
geratedly reified ways. However pathological this may be or seem, however, it
is essential to recognize that it is typically directed toward the recovery of ‘on-
tological security’, and thus the ‘existential health’ of the individual concerned,
albeit in the given conditions.
Here three comments are in order. First, I am, needless to say, not directly
interested in etiological questions. Rather, what interests me here is how, as
an “ipseity disorder” of this sort, schizophrenia can be understood in terms of
naïveté, the suspension of doubt vis-à-vis the world, and how the reified ap-
pearance of the latter, despite whatever ontological security it may provide, can
nonetheless react back to destructively impair the nature and ‘robustness’ of

138
self-temporalization—effects manifested primarily in distortions of self-narra-
tive and agency.
Second, it should be stressed that I am using the term naïveté and its cognates
in ways that run contrary to ordinary usage. For in that sense, matters would be
reversed: it is precisely those who, wholly oblivious to the passive processes
subtending their own normality, do not suffer this loss of naturalness and the
consequent need to recourse to reification that would be deemed naïve.
Third, I want to be clear about how I am invoking ‘health’ and ‘pathology’
as normative concepts.27 Phenomenologically considered, norms of experience
are privileged optima, and experiential normality has the dynamic, dialectical
character of normalization.28 That is, normal lived experience does not simply
conform to given norms—it also transcends them and establishes new norms.
As concerns human existence, normativity is at root a qualitative matter of
historical praxis. The sense in which schizophrenia is abnormal or pathologi-
cal is that, owing to a general “impairment of self-temporalization,”29 its naïve
re-normalization of experience is ahistorical—it involves an existential fail-
ure to normalize (or optimalize) experience historically. This is the meaning
of Minkowski’s claim that schizophrenia is essentially a matter of “morbid
rationalism,” a pathological preponderance of spatialized objectivation at the
expense of “lived time,” that is, of the concrete, dialectical interaction char-
acteristic of historical praxis. This is what he famously described, with clear
Bergsonian overtones, as the “loss of vital contact with reality.”30
On this basis, I submit that a phenomenological approach to schizophrenia in
terms of the restructuration of (in particular historical) apperception can reveal
natural-attitudinal naïveté as a spatializing encumbrance on self-temporaliza-
tion, that is, on the transcendental conditions of the unity and coherence of the
flow of an affected individual’s lived existence, and by extension her capacity
for engaging in historical praxis in the world. What we might call ‘proto-tem-
poral vitality’ thus lies at the very heart of generativity.31 Lacking this dialecti-
cal quality, schizophrenia involves excessive reificational compensation that is
– and this is what I want to argue by way of conclusion – structurally and expe-
rientially (if not etiologically) similar to ideologically-reified consciousness that
has been thematized – in particular, but not exclusively – in the Western Marxist
tradition.32

4. Reification

Lukács developed his account of reification as one of a general phenomenon

in the context of the generalized commodity production characteristic of capital-
ism—it is “the central structural problem of capitalist society in all respects.”33
Yet there are striking concrete similarities between his description of reification,
developed as an extension of Marx’s account of ‘commodity fetishism’, and
the phenomenological accounts of schizophrenia discussed above. For example,
there are clear parallels with respect to the depersonalizing, diffusive, and dis-

139
sociative nature of the experience in question. But the similarity is most pro-
nounced with respect to temporalization: the degradation of historical time and
duration into forms of spatiality. As Lukács described it: “time sheds its qualita-
tive, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable
continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified
‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his total human personal-
ity): in short, it becomes space.”34 We can compare this with a typical case stud-
ied by Minkowski: “Everything around me is immobile. Things appear isolated,
each one in itself, without suggesting anything. […] There is an absolute fixity
around me […] the creative power in me is abolished.”35 Many other examples
could be adduced. What they would confirm is that there is a striking conver-
gence between these perspectives with respect to ‘pathological’ self-temporal-
ization and the consequently impaired capacity for historical praxis.
In this regard, Gabel’s audacious (but largely forgotten) attempt to formulate
a general Marxist hermeneutic of both intrapsychic and socio-political alienated
experience may be instructive.36 In La fausse conscience, Gabel attempted to
formulate a general theory of reification in terms of a “socio-pathological paral-
lelism”—a global theory of alienation, psychic and social, the common denomi-
nator of which is the Minkowskian notion of “morbid rationalism.” Based on the
idea that “the world of reification is the center of a decline of dialectical tempo-
ralization with a compensating prevalence of spatial functions,”37 and drawing
in particular on work in phenomenological psychopathology, Gabel argued that
there is a parallel process of what he called the “de-dialecticization” of lived
experience, such that “the mechanisms of ideologization and those of [schizo-
phrenic] restructuration” are, as he put it, “mutually illuminating.”38
The instructiveness of Gabel’s work lies less in the details of the “socio-
pathological parallelism” that it establishes between schizophrenia and ideologi-
cal reification, however, than in the need that it evinces to focus on the positive
aspects of the latter in terms of a pre-cognitive restructuration of apperception
in suboptimal conditions, as opposed to its negative symptomatology as some
kind of cognitive deficiency. (In other words, to do for ideological reification in
the sociological context what has been done for schizophrenia in the psychologi-
cal.) This speaks to outstanding debates within Marxist theory as to the nature
of ideology—in particular, the very basic one which turns on whether ideol-
ogy should be understood in epistemological or else in political-ontological (or
‘functional’) terms. The issue here concerns the relevance of the cognitive status
of ideology: whether ideology is primarily a matter of “false consciousness,”
understood in contrast to a true understanding that a subject could – but doesn’t
– have, and which cashes it out in terms of illusion, distortion, and mystification,
for example.39 Or else whether, as McCarney – following Althusser – argued,
ideology is not an epistemological category at all, but rather is a matter of its af-
fective and performative function in social life, something to which questions of
truth and falsity are irrelevant.
There are worthy considerations either way. On the one hand, the functional
view argues that the epistemological perspective is abstractly psychological, if

140
not actually a specimen of idealism. And not without reason, the notion of ‘false
consciousness’ has been quite out of favor for some time now. Tied as it is to a
framework that opposes the in-itself existence of the proletariat to its existence
for-itself, this notion has traditionally been invoked by Marxists as merely a re-
assuring theoretical alibi for the ‘failure’ of the revolutionary subject to materi-
alize as predicted. Inasmuch as it posits a correspondingly ‘true consciousness’,
the epistemological view places theorists atop a slippery slope to elitism, and
in any event it makes tacit appeal to assumptions about the intelligibility of the
world that typically rest on some sort of dubious providentialism.
On the other hand, though, it may be argued that it must be the case even for
those who discount the relevance of epistemological considerations that they
maintain some rational criteria by which to distinguish between progressive and
reactionary ideology, lest all critique of the latter descend to the level of ad ho-
minem attack against its representatives. The underlying concern here is that the
distinction between rational-scientific and ideological thinking, which no one
wants to surrender, cannot ultimately be maintained on functional grounds, but
rather necessitates an epistemological touchstone of truth.
Perhaps this idea accounts for the tenacity with which the notion of ‘false
consciousness’ remains present, albeit often discomfitingly, in Marxist think-
ing about ideology. I want to suggest, though, that the phenomenological ap-
proach I have very briefly outlined here can provide a way to steer between
these antinomial positions – each of which does surely have important things to
say – by locating the salient dimension of ideological reification on the side of
consciousness, but at the pre-cognitive level (yet without making it constitutive
of subjectivity). ‘False consciousness’ is thus not necessarily, nor even typically,
a conscious phenomenon. What is relevantly “false” is not the content of some
consciousness, but rather that consciousness itself inasmuch as it is a naïvely
structured ‘attitude’ that impedes historical praxis. For what is ultimately im-
portant here is not simply the ‘ideological’ phenomena that one encounters, but
the prior apperceptive background against which they are encountered—the in-
stitution, so to speak, of the conditions of constitution. For it is here, rather than
simply in the things we see, that historical horizonality is determined. In short,
the greater the naïveté, that is, the greater the reificational shift in apperception
away from concrete subjectivity, the narrower the recognizable historical ho-
rizons, and the more securely (or dogmatically) one’s ‘homeworld’ is upheld.
The political issue, then, would then be how to overcome or reduce naïveté—a
project that is, in an extended sense, therapeutic.
Although what is concretely involved in all of this is enormous and enor-
mously complex, it is nevertheless safe to assert that the debate within Marx-
ism between the epistemological and functional views of ideology rests on an
error, namely, the error of treating ideology externally and solely as, in a word,
manipulative. To approach it instead from the side of consciousness and, spe-
cifically, in terms of the intensification of ordinary reifying constitution, as an
active response to the alienating precariousness of a society in which all that is
solid melts into air, is thus in effect at once both epistemological and functional.

141
And this in a way that can support the partial truths of each position. For this
approach tracks how truth and worldviews emerge, and are already freighted
with political consequences, right from our most elementary encounters with
the world.40
If this is right, then transcendental phenomenology has an important and
uniquely insightful role to play in critical political theory. And it is one that
could, as I have argued, involve it in a mutually enriching – and mutually
transforming – philosophical collaboration with historical materialism. What is
most crucial to recognize, however, is that regardless of any such collaboration,
some such ‘political’ development is internally necessary for phenomenology
in order for it to be able to comprehend its own external horizons and thereby
attain methodological coherence. Many claims over the years purporting to
sound the death knell of phenomenology have done so prematurely, inasmuch
as their arguments amount merely to showing - correctly - the transcenden-
tal naïveté of genetic analysis, but without seriously exploring the possibility
of phenomenology redressing this inadequacy by establishing itself within a
more encompassing framework. Pursuing this possibility along the generative
lines sketched out above may not be the only route. But lest it resign itself to
a life of uncritical, and potentially irresponsible, ideological complicity, phe-
nomenology must pursue itself progressively in some such way as this.41

Bryan Smyth
bryan.smyth@mail.mcgill.ca

REFERENCES

ARATO, Andrew, and Paul BREINES. 1979. The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western
Marxism (The Seabury Press).

BINSWANGER, Ludwig. 1957. Schizophrenie (Neske).

BLANKENBURG, Wolfgang. 1971. Der Verlust der natürlichen Selbstverständlichkeit:

Ein Beitrag zur Psychopathologie Symptomarmer Schizophrenien (Ferdinand
Enke Verlag).

BRUZINA, Ronald. 2001. “Construction in Phenomenology,” pp. 46-71 in The Reach

of Reflection: Issues for Phenomenology’s Second Century, eds. S. Crowell, L.
Embree and S. J. Julian (CARP/Electron Press).

BOVET, Pierre, and Josef PARNAS. 1993. “Schizophrenic Delusions: A Phenomenological

Approach,” pp. 579-597 in Schizophrenia Bulletin 19.

CANGUILHEM, Georges. The Normal and the Pathological, trans. C. R. Fawcett, with R.
S. Cohen (Zone, 1991).

142
DASTUR, Françoise. 1989. “Réduction et intersubjectivité,” pp. 43-64 in Husserl, eds. E.
Escoubas and M. Richir (Jérôme Millon).
DEPRAZ, Natalie. 1998. “Das Ethos der Reduktion als leibliche Einstellung,” pp259-270
in Der Anspruch der Anderen: Perspektiven phänomenologischer Ethik, eds. B.
Waldenfels and I. Därmann (Wilhelm Fink Verlag).
– 1999. “The Phenomenological Reduction as Praxis,” pp. 95-110 in Journal of
Consciousness Studies 6.
– 2002. “Qu’est-ce qu’une épochè naturelle? Schütz, praticien de la phénoménologie,”
pp. 9-23 in Studia Phenomenologica 2/3–4.

DEPRAZ, Natalie, and Dan ZAHAVI, eds. 1998. Alterity and Facticity: New Perspectives
on Husserl (Kluwer).

EAGLETON, Terry. Ideology (London, 1991).

FINK, Eugen. 1933. “The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and

Contemporary Criticism,” trans. R. O. Elveton, pp. 73-147 in The Phenomenology
of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings, ed. R. O. Elveton (Quadrangle Books,
1970).
– 1988. Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method,
trans. R. Bruzina (Indiana UP, 1995).

GABEL, Joseph. 1951. “La Réification, essai d’une psychopathologie de la pensée

dialectique,” Esprit (October).
– 1962. La fausse conscience: Essai sur la réification (Les Editions de Minuit).

GIORGI, Amedeo. 2003. “A Phenomenological Psychological Approach to Research on

Hallucinations,” pp. 209-224 in Imagination and its Pathologies, eds. J. Phillips
and J. Morley (MIT).

HELD, Klaus. 1991. “Heimwelt, Fremdwelt, die eine Welt,” pp. 305-337 in
Phänomenologische Forschungen 24/25 (Alber).
HUSSERL, Edmund. 1913 Ideas on a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological
Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (Kluwer, 1982).
– 1929. Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. D. Cairns (Martinus Nijhoff, 1969).
– 1931. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. D. Cairns
(Martinus Nijhoff, 1960).

KANT, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer.

Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (CUP, 2000).

KOSÍK, Karel. 1963. Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World,
trans. K. Kovanda with J. Schmidt (D. Reidel, 1976).

LAING, R. D. 1965. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness
(Penguin).

LUFT, Sebastian. 1998. “Husserl’s Phenomenological Discovery of the Natural Attitude,”

pp. 153-170 in Continental Philosophy Review 31.

143
LUKÁCS, Georg. 1923. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics,
trans. R. Livingstone (MIT, 1971).

MCCARNEY, Joe. The Real World of Ideology (Humanities Press, 1980).

MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice. 1945. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin

Smith, with revisions by Forrest Williams (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962).
– 1947. Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, tr. J. O’Neill
(Beacon, 1969).

MEYERSON, Denise. 1993. False Consciousness (OUP).

MINKOWSKI, Eugène. 1927. La schizophénie: Psychopathologie des schizoïdes et des

schizophrènes (Payot & Rivages, 2002).
– 1933. Le temps vécu: Études phénoménologiques et psychopathologiques (PUF,
1995).

NAUDIN, Jean. 1997. Phénoménologie et psychiatrie: Les voix et la chose (Presses

Universitaires du Mirail).

–, and Jean-Michel AZORIN. 1997. “The Hallucinatory Epoché,” pp. 171-195 in Journal
of Phenomenological Psychology 28:2.

PACI, Enzo. 1963. The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man, trans. P.
Piccone and J. E. Hansen (Northwestern University Press, 1972).

PARNAS, Josef. 2000. “The Self and Intentionality in the Pre-Psychotic Stages of
Schizophrenia: A Phenomenological Study,” in Exploring the Self: Philosophical
and Psychopathological Perspectives on Self-Experience, ed. D. Zahavi (John
Benjamins).
– 2003. “Self and Schizophrenia: A Phenomenological Perspective,” pp. 217-241 in
The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, eds. T. Kircher and A. David (CUP).

PINES, Christopher. 1992. Ideology and False Consciousness.

ROSSI-LANDI, Ferruccio. 1990. Marxism and Ideology, trans. R. Griffin (OUP).

SASS, Louis. 2003. “Self-Disturbance in Schizophrenia: Hyperreflexivity and Diminished

Self-Affection,” pp. 242-271 in The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, eds. T.
Kircher and A. David (Cambridge University Press).

SASS, Louis, and Josef PARNAS. 2003. “Schizophrenia, Consciousness, and the Self,” pp.
427-444 in Schizophrenia Bulletin 29:3.

SCHUTZ, Alfred. 1945. “On Multiple Realities,” pp. 207-259 in Collected Papers 1: The
Problem of Social Reality, ed. M. Natanson (Martinus Nijhoff, 1962).

SHEETS-JOHNSTONE, Maxine. 1999. The Primacy of Movement (John Benjamins).

144
STANGHELLINI, Giovanni. 2004. Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies: The
Psychopathology of Common Sense (Oxford University Press).

STEINBOCK, Anthony. 1995a. Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after

Husserl (Northwestern University Press).
– 1995b. “Phenomenological Concepts of Normality and Abnormality,” pp241-260 in
Man and World 28.
– 1998. “Spirit and Generativity: The Role and Contribution of the Phenomenologist
in Hegel and Husserl,” pp. 163-203 in Alterity and Facticity, eds. N. Depraz and
D. Zahavi (Kluwer).

STRAUS, Erwin. 1935. Von Sinn der Sinne: Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Psychologie
(Springer).

TRÂN DÚC THÁO. 1951. Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique (Minh-Tân).

VAJDA, Mihaly. 1979. “Lukács’ and Husserl’s Critique of Science,” trans. D. Parent,
pp104-118 in Telos 38. Reprinted in Lukács Revalued, ed. A. Heller (Basil
Blackwell, 1983), pp. 107-124.

WIGGINS, Osborne, Micheal SCHWARTZ, and Georg NORTHOFF. 1990. “Toward a

Husserlian Phenomenology of the Initial Stages of Schizophrenia,” pp. 21-34 in
Philosophy and Psychopathology, eds. M. Spitzer and B. A. Maher (Springer).

NOTES

1 For example, the charges of Eurocentrism that have often, and not without grounds,
been raised against Husserl.
2 See Ideas I, §24: “every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing
source of cognition, that everything originarily […] offered to us in
‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but
only within the limits in which it is presented there. […] Every statement
which does no more than confer expression on such [originary] data by
simple explication and by means of significations precisely conforming to
them is […] called upon to serve as a foundation.”
3 See Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, §107.c. Cf. Cartesian Meditations,
§42.
4 On this Husserlian notion, see Held 1991; also, Steinbock 1995a, chapters 12-13.
5 Cf. Cartesian Meditations, §63.
6 In particular, with respect to its intersubjective and embodied dimensions, on
which see Dastur 1989; and Depraz 1998, 1999.
7 Fink, “The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl…,” 105, 113
[Weltbefangenheit].
8 Ibid., 95-99.
9 “All phenomenology passes through the ‘reduction’. A ‘phenomenology’ which
renounced the reduction would in principle signify a mundane philosophy, that

145
 is (understood, of course, phenomenologically), a dogmatic philosophy” (Ibid.,
146n11).
10 As Husserl suggested in Cartesian Meditations (§13). This is in effect the
point Merleau-Ponty made against Husserl at the end of the second part of
Phenomenology of Perception (365n).
11 On Lukács and Western Marxism, see Arato and Breines 1979. It is noteworthy
that in an autobiographical sketch from 1918 Lukács emphasized that Husserl
had had a significant methodological impact on him. See Georg Lukács: Selected
Correspondence, 1902-1920, eds. & trans. J. Marcus and Z. Tar (Columbia UP,
1986), pp286-88. Cf. Vajda 1979.
12 Note that this is not just a historical position, but is one that has contemporary
proponents—see, for example, Bruzina 2001; Sheets-Johnstone 1999, chapter 5.
13 Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, 7, italics altered.
14 Ibid., §7.
15 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:179; cf. 20: 211.
16 Phenomenology of Perception, xx, emphasis added.
17 Humanism and Terror, 35n11, emphasis added.
18 A limitation to the genetic perspective can arguably account for the shortcomings
of previous attempts to synthesize phenomenology and Marxism, and in particular
Trân Dúc Tháo’s argument (1951) that the constitutive analysis of antepredicative
experience necessarily leads phenomenology into intractable contradictions that
can only be resolved within the framework of dialectical materialism.
19 Steinbock 1998, 189f, 196.
20 See Luft 1998.
21 Schutz, “On Multiple Realities” (note that that ‘of’ is genitive). Cf. Depraz 2002.
22 See Blankenburg 1971; cf. Naudin 1997.
23 This is essentially what Naudin and Azorin (1997) term “the hallucinatory
epoché.”
24 Straus 1935. Cf. Parnas 2003; Giorgi 2003.
25 See Sass and Parnas 2003; Sass 2003.
26 See Laing 1965.
27 Needless to say, Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological is a key
source here.
28 Cf. Steinbock 1995b.
29 Bovet and Parnas 1993, 584.
30 Minkowski 1927, 101-110; 1933, 58-64, 255-265. The same idea receives more
extended treatment, and this in terms primarily informed by Husserl and Heidegger,
in Binswanger’s account (1957) of the “mundanizing” character of schizophrenic
proto-temporalization, a theme that has been further developed in more recent work
as well. See, for example, Wiggins et al. 1990; Parnas 2000; Stanghellini 2004.
31 Given the present concern with generativity, it is salutary, if coincidental, that
Minkowski conceived schizophrenia in terms of a fundamental “generating
disturbance” [trouble générateur] (1933, 207-254).
32 Cf. Ferruccio Rossi-Landi: “Schizophrenia is […] false consciousness in its most
total manifestation: the complete abstraction or divorce of a part from its whole,
the pseudo-totalization of the abstracted part, and the elimination or pseudo-
totalization of the other parts of the original whole” (Marxism and Ideology,
189)
33 History and Class Consciousness, 94.

146
34 Ibid., 90.
35 Minkowski, 1933, 276f.
36 Gabel, La fausse conscience: Essai sur la réification (1962). Cf. “La Réification,
essai d’une psychopathologie de la pensée dialectique” (1951), where many of the
key ideas are first laid out.
37 La fausse conscience, 16n2.
38 Ibid., 239.
39 See, for example, Christopher Pines (1992). Also, Denise Meyerson (1993) and
Rossi-Landi (1990).
40 While this may seem to skew the matter conservatively, it must be borne in mind
that the ‘epistemic functionality’, as it were, of ideological reification would be
entirely contingent on the ontological security that it affords.
41 Versions of this paper were presented at the Society for Existential and
Phenomenological Theory and Culture (Toronto, May 2006), on a panel organized
by Neil Braganza; and at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
(Philadelphia, October 2006), on a panel co-organized with Anna Carastathis and
Will Roberts. Many thanks to Neil, Anna, and Will, as well as to all those who
participated in the helpful discussions at these meetings.

147
 Sur la fausseté de la “fausse conscience”:
réification et aperception schizophrénique

Nombreux sont les phénoménologues qui ont récemment éprouvé l’urgence

grandissante d’interroger « le politique ». Si cette situation est sans doute
l’effet d’une mode passagère, elle est aussi l’expression d’une préoccupation
méthodologique concernant le fait que la phénoménologie semble incapable
d’un rapport critique avec les horizons socio-historiques dans lesquels s’atteste
l’auto-évidence. Si la phénoménologie se doit d’être méthodologiquement co-
hérente, alors cette menace de naïveté transcendantale doit être affrontée sans
détour. Dans cet article, je montre que ceci peut être tenté à travers une critique
constructive de la naïveté de « l’attitude naturelle », une critique qui recouvre
l’essentiel de la problématique de la conscience réifiée, telle que la thématise
la tradition « occidentale » du marxisme hégélien. Partant d’une description
phénoménologique de l’expérience schizophrénique considérée comme une
« pièce maîtresse » du dossier, je défends une compréhension normative de la
réification, dans le sens d’une proto-temporalisation de l’aperception de soi. À
partir de là, la conscience réifiée ne peut plus être comprise dans des termes
seulement privatifs ou négatifs, comme une sorte de déficience cognitive, mais
plutôt comme une forme positivement restructurée (même s’il peut y en avoir
une pathologie) d’une attention consciente « normale ». Revenant précisément
sur le travail de Joseph Gabel, je suggère une manière pour la phénoménolo-
gie d’accomplir l’autocritique transcendantale que Husserl considérait comme
méthodologiquement essentielle, tout en offrant une meilleure compréhension
des affinités philosophiques qui ont potentiellement cours entre phénoménolo-
gie transcendantale et matérialisme historique.

148
 Sulla falsità della “falsa coscienza”:
reificazione e appercezione schizofrenica

Molti fenomenologi hanno recentemente avvertito un crescente bisogno

di indirizzarsi al “politico”. Sebbene questa situazione potrebbe rappresen-
tare un’onda passeggera, essa in ogni caso tematizza la preoccupazione met-
odologica per il fatto che la fenomenologia sembra incapace di interrogare
criticamente gli orizzonti storico-sociali all’interno dei quali l’auto-evidenza
è esperita. Se la fenomenologia vuole essere metodologicamente coerente,
allora la minaccia della sua ingenuità trascendentale deve essere affrontata
direttamente.
In questo saggio sostengo che un tale compito può essere realizzato attra-
verso una critica produttiva dell’ingenuità dell’“atteggiamento naturale”, una
critica che coincide con il nucleo problematico della coscienza reificata che
governa la tradizione “occidentale” dell’hegelomarxismo. Assumendo le de-
scrizioni fenomenologiche di esperienze schizofreniche come “tracce-guida”,
parlo della comprensione normativa della reificazione nei termini della proto-
temporalizzazione dell’auto-appercezione. Su queste basi, la coscienza reifi-
cata non deve essere intesa in termini privativi o negativi come fosse una sorta
di deficienza cognitiva, ma piuttosto come una positiva, seppur patologica,
forma ristrutturata di “normale” attenzione auto-cosciente. Riprendendo e am-
pliando il lavoro di Joseph Gabel, questo approccio suggerisce una via per
la fenomenologia che le permetta di impegnarsi in una sorta di auto-critica
trascendentale che lo stesso Husserl riteneva metodologicamente essenziale,
offrendo allo stesso tempo una più chiara comprensione delle affinità filoso-
fiche che potenzialmente intercorrono tra la fenomenologia trascendentale ed
il materialismo storico.

149