2/16/2023

PHENOMENOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
AND PERCEPTION
Dr. Hanna Poikonen
ETH Zurich

Describe to your partner the way you got to the lecture as detailed as possible.

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• All major phenomenologists defend the view that a minimal for of self-consciousness is a constant structural
feature of conscious experience.
• Experience happens for the experiencing subject in an immediate way and as part of this immediacy, it is
implicitly marked as my experience.
• This immediate first-personal character of experiential phenomena must be accounted for in terms of a “pre-
reflective” self-consciousness.
• This emphasizes that this type of self-consciousness does not involve an additional second-order mental state
that in some way is directed in an explicit manner toward the experience in question.
• Pre-reflective consciousness as an intrinsic feature of the primary experience, non-observational and non-
objectifying.
• In the pre-reflective or non-observational self-consciousness , experience is given, not as an object but
precisely as subjective experience.
• My intentional experience is lived through (erlebt), but it does not appear to me in an objectified manner, it is
neither seen nor heard not thought about.

“Whenever I reflect, I find myself “in relation” to something, as affected or active. That which I am
related to is experientially conscious – it is already there for me as a “lived-experience” in order for me
to be able to relate myself to it.” – Husserl
• Phenomenologists refer to the idea that our consciousness is of or about something as the
intentionality of consciousness.
• Sartre claims that each intentional experience is characterized by self-consciousness.
• Sartre took the pre-reflective self-consciousness to constitute a necessary condition for being
conscious of something. An experience does not simply exist, it exists in such a way that it is implicitly
self-given, for-itself.
• An ontological analysis of consciousness, that is, an analysis of the very being of consciousness, shows
that it always involves self-consciousness – the mode of being of intentional consciousness is to be
for-itself.
“We should not regard this consciousness of self as a new act of consciousness, but as the only possible
mode of existence for any consciousness of something.” – Sartre

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• To undergo a conscious experience necessarily mean that there is something it is like for the
subject to have the experience (like feeling pain, imagine tasting a chocolate, remember what is
it like to run etc.)
• All these experiences are characterized by their distinct first-personal character: “what-is-it-
like-for-me” – without any contrasting other.
• Every experience is characterized by perspectival ownership.
• Consciousness and self-consciousness are not identical: (phenomena) consciousness entails (a
weak or thin) self-consciousness.
• Phenomenological investigation of the relation between consciousness and self-consciousness
is characterized by the fact that it is integrated into and can be found in the context of a
simultaneous examination of a number of related issues, like embodiment, action, attention and
sociality.

• Illustration of the guiding idea of this approach: consciousness as a spotlight

• Some mental states are illuminated; others do their work in the dark.
• What makes a mental state conscious (illuminated) is the fact that it is taken as an
object by a relevant higher-order state.
• It is the occurrence of the higher-order representation that makes use of the first-order
mental state.
• Consciousness as a question of the mind directing its intentional aim upon its own states
and operations.
• Consciousness does not exist without the world.

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Blind man’s cane, part 1

• With regard to cognition and action generally, perception is basic and primary.
• The object can be experienced more or less directly, it can be more or less present (talk about my pen,
see a picture of my pen, or see my pen myself – the same pen given in three different ways).
• Signitive acts are the lowest and most empty way in which the object can be intended. They have a
reference, but apart from that, they are not given in any fleshed-out manner.
• Pictorial acts have a certain intuitive content, but they intend the object indirectly bearing a certain
resemblance of the object from a certain perspective.
• Perceptual acts give us the object directly presenting us with the object itself in its bodily presence.
• If I see my pen from afar, the pen is intuitively present, but it is not optimally given.
• Optimal perception refers to a kind of perception that offers us the object with as much information
and in as differentiated a manner as possible.

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• Starting from the experience itself.

• Careful description of that experience:
• What perceptual experience is like?
• How does it differ from, for example, imagination or recollection?

• Intentionality captures the “being-in-the-world” unlike Cartesian subject-world dualism.

• By a descriptive analysis of the structures of conscious intentionality, the phenomenologists seek to clarify the
relation between mind and world.
• My visual perception has a certain structure that characterizes all conscious acts, namely, an intentional
structure.
• When I see a particular object on the street, I see it as my car.
• Perception is not a simple reception of information, rather, it involves an interpretation, which frequently
changes according to context.
• To see my car as my car suggests that perception is informed by previous experience.
• Perception is enriched by previous experience and by habitual ways of experiencing things.
• To say that perception involves interpretation does not mean that first we perceive an entity, and then we add
interpretation – something above perception that bestows meaning on it.
• On the contrary, perception is interpretational: I see the car already as mine.

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• In addition to contextual background, spatial aspects can be explored phenomenologically.

• My embodied position places limitations on what I can see and what I cannot.
• For example, from where I am standing, I can see the driver’s side of the car occluding other aspects or
profiles of the car – they are not in my visual field. However, I see the car as having another side to it.
• In any perception of a physical object, my perception is always incomplete in regard to the object, I
never see a complete object at once.
• Perspectival incompleteness: There is always something more to see that is implicitly there.
• In a synthetic process, disjointed fragments of various profiles of the object (gained by me moving
around it), are perceived as integrated moments.
• Gestalt features of perception: Something is always in focus while the rest is not. I can shift my focus
and make something else come into the foreground with a cost of shifting the first object attended to
out of focus and to the horizon.

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• According to one classical view of the representational view, our mind cannot on its own reach
all the way to the object themselves – need to introduce some kind of interface (mental
representations) between the mind and the world to understand and explain perception.
• There is no intermediary (image or representation) between perceiver and object perceived.
• Rather than saying that the perceiving brain constructs an internal representation of the
perceived world, it would be far less controversial simply to claim that our brain enable us to
see a visual scene.
“The ego is not a tiny man in a box that looks at the pictures and then occasionally leaves his box
in order to compare the external objects with the internal ones, etc. For such a picture-observing
ego, the picture would itself be something external; it would require its own matching internal
picture, and so on ad infinitum.” – Husserl

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“For in presenting perceptual experience as a kind of involvement with or entanglement with

situations and things, the phenomenology presents experience as something that could not occur
in the absence of situations and things.” – Alva Noë
• Subpersonal representations (which may mean simply, neuronal activation patterns that co-
vary with stimuli) are among the internal enabling conditions of perception but perception
itself is not a representational in character -> Is the brain treated as a representational
construct, too?
• The phenomenologists’ non-representational idea views perception as a direct embodied
involvement with the world.
• Perception is always situated in some physical environment, and normally within social and
cultural environments.
• It is also a temporal process in which meaning, including our recognition of the thing perceived,
is constrained by our past experience and our present anticipations.

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“We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g. tones and noises, in the
appearance of things… Much closer to us than all sensations are the things themselves. We
never really hear the door shut I the house and ever hear acoustical sensation of even mere
sounds. In order to hear a bare sound, we have to listen away from things, divert our ear
from them, i.e. listen abstractly.” – Heidegger
• We should not think about perception as being built up out of small atoms of sense data;
nor can we think of it as collection of separate sense modalities.
• Perception itself is a part of a larger whole – we perceive gestalt where each point, and
the object itself, are against a background.

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• The perceived object is always contextualized, not just by physical surroundings but by
the particular projects and interests of the perceiver, and particular actions and potential
actions that the perceiver is engaged in or could be engaged in, and other aspects of
experience that are constituted across sense modalities and emotional dimensions.
• Only in relation to such intermodal experiences, emotions, actions and contexts can we
capture the nature of perception.

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Müller-Lyer illusion Ebbinghaus illusion

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• When I see an object, the object is never given in its totality but always incompletely, in a
certain restricted profile.
• Despite this, the object of my perception is exactly the appearing object.
• Our perceptual consciousness is consequently characterized by the fact that we persistently
transcend the perspectivally appearing profile in order to grasp the object itself.
• Our intuitive consciousness of the present profile of the object is always accompanied by an
intentional consciousness of the object’s horizon of absent profiles.
• In order for a perception to be a perception-of-an-object (visual, tactile, etc.), it must be
permeated by horizontal intentionality which intends the absent profiles, bringing them to a
certain appresentation.
• The other objects in the background are in the outer horizontal structure.

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• We have to go after information, and we do so as we need it (e.g. eye movement when

reading text).
• In general, we move our eyes, turn our heads, reposture our bodies, reach, grab, pull
closer and manipulate objects to examine them, or walk over to them.
• Perception and movement are always united.
• Kinesthetic horizon refers to my capacity for possible movement.
• Perceptual intentionality presupposes a moving and therefore embodied subject.
• Vision and perception more generally are forms of action.

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Blind man’s cane, part 2

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”The blind man’s cane has ceased to be an object for him, it is no longer perceived for
itself; rather, the cane’s furthest point is transformed into a sensitive zone, it increases
the scope and the radius of the act of touching and has become analogous to gaze.”
– Merleau-Ponty

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• The world makes itself available for the perceiver through physical movement and interaction.
• We enact our perceptual experience; we act it out.
• Environment can aid our cognitive capacities: example of expert and novice bartenders.
• The world is experienced, not as fully formed presence but as a set of possibilities determined
by an ongoing dynamic interplay of environmental opportunities and sensorimotor abilities – I
am in-the-world.
• In perception, whatever becomes noticeable to me must already have been affecting me; it
must have pre-established an affective force that manifests itself as it captures my attention.
• Perception is more about the landscape of actions than about the space of reasons.

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• In experience one takes in that things are thus and so, that is, they fit into some
conceptual framework.
• Conceptuality is to be seen not as a layer added on tip of an extra existing structure but
as something that radically transforms that pre-existing structure.
• The initiation into conceptual capacities may be as a question of Bildung, the
transformation occurring as a results of being initiated into a language and a tradition.

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• Consciousness and self-consciousness are not identical: (phenomena) consciousness

entails (a weak or thin) self-consciousness.
• Pre-reflective self-consciousness and higher-level accounts of consciousness.
• It is the occurrence of the higher-order representation that makes use of the first-order
mental state.
• Consciousness does not exist without the world.

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• The phenomenologists’ non-representational idea views perception as a direct embodied

involvement with the world.
• Perception is always situated in some physical environment, and normally within social
and cultural environments.
• It is also a temporal process in which meaning, including our recognition of the thing
perceived, is constrained by our past experience and our present anticipations.
• The world is experienced, not as fully formed presence but as a set of possibilities
determined by an ongoing dynamic interplay of environmental opportunities and
sensorimotor abilities – I am in-the-world.

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