A Renewal of Husserl's Critique of Naturalism: Towards the Via Media of Ecological

Phenomenology
Author(s): Adam Konopka
Source: Environmental Philosophy , Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 2008), pp. 37-60
Published by: Philosophy Documentation Center
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26167968

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 A Renewal of Husserl’s
Critique of Naturalism: Towards the
Via Media of Ecological Phenomenology
Adam Konopka
Department of Philosophy, Fordham University, Collins Hall 101, 441 East Fordham
Road, Bronx, NY 10458, USA; konopka@fordham.edu

This essay argues that phenomenology is uniquely suited to critique

naturalism without lapsing into a romantic, anti-scientific, or dystopian
view of modern science. This argument situates Husserl’s retrieval of the
environmental relation in the Vienna Lecture between two alternative
tendencies in contemporary ecological phenomenology: 1) the rejection
of or indifference to the positive sciences, and 2) the adoption of natu-
ralism in phenomenological methodology. On the one hand, the claim is
that the phenomenological return to the environment should not imply
a rejection of methodological naturalism. On the other hand, while an
ecological phenomenology is consistent with naturalistic investigation,
there is nevertheless a heterogeneity between the two. In short, phenom-
enology need not become naturalized in order for it to be ecological.

The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between
walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from
shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a
camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own sil-
ver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Introduction
In this essay I will argue that phenomenology is uniquely suited to critique
naturalism without lapsing into a romantic, anti-scientific, or dystopian view of
modern science. In making this argument, I will situate Edmund Husserl’s re-
trieval of the environmental relation in the Vienna Lecture1 between two alter-
native tendencies in contemporary ecological phenomenology: 1) the rejection

1.  Edmund Husserl, “The Vienna Lecture” in The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy,
trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 269–299.

Environmental Philosophy 5 (1), 37–60.

Copyright © 2008 by The International Association for Environmental Philosophy.
Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved.

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38 Adam Konopka

of or indifference to the positive sciences, and 2) the adoption of naturalism

in phenomenological methodology. On the one hand, the claim will be that
the phenomenological return to the environment should not imply a rejection
of methodological naturalism. On the other hand, while an ecological phe-
nomenology is consistent with naturalistic investigation, there is nevertheless
a heterogeneity between the two. In short, phenomenology need not become
naturalized in order for it to be ecological.
Methodological naturalism limits itself to the consideration of only the
physical or material characteristics of objects and states of affairs. A long-stand-
ing convention in modern science, this methodological device neutralizes sub-
jective accomplishments in experience in order to isolate objective correlates
for causal investigation and explanation. This procedure can be distinguished
from the stronger ontological claim that entities posited by methodological
naturalism (physical and material states of affairs) are the only genuine enti-
ties which are properly said to exist. Ontological naturalism (sometimes called
metaphysical or philosophical naturalism) argues for this materialist monism
against dualistic ontology, whether it be of a Cartesian (mind/body) or theis-
tic (supernatural/natural) variety. Ontological and methodological naturalism,
in principle, need not be interchangeable. For instance, one can maintain an
ontological naturalism on purely philosophical grounds without subscribing
to modern scientific procedures while someone else could employ naturalistic
methodology as a working scientific hypothesis without ontological commit-
ment. Moreover, within both of these versions of naturalism there is a plurality
of different naturalisms, making it increasingly difficult to speak of naturalism
in the singular.2
While Husserl admired the scientific advances made possible by method-
ological naturalism, he adamantly resisted its appropriation in the human sci-
ences. Throughout his career, this opposition took many forms as he worked to
establish the methodological principles of phenomenology as an alternative to
the naturalization of consciousness. From his critique of psychologism in the
“Prolegomena” to the Logical Investigations, through his navigation between
the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften in “Philosophy as Rig-
orous Science,” Ideas II, and various seminars, to his broader critique of the
mathematization of nature in his later work, Husserl remained committed to
defending the autonomy of a first-person perspective as a legitimate source of
knowledge.3 This essay focuses on Husserl’s critique of naturalism in his 1935

2.  For a sampling of the most recent philosophical affirmation of these naturalisms,
see Naturalism in Question, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2004). For a recent collection of anti-naturalistic arguments,
see Naturalism: A Critical Analysis, ed. William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland (London
and New York: Routledge Publishers, 2000).
3.  Edmund Husserl, “Prolegomena,” in Logical Investigations, Volume I, trans. J.N.
Findlay (London: Routledge Publishers, 2001). Hereafter “Prolegomena.” “Philosophy

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 Husserl’s Critique of Naturalism 39

Vienna Lecture, where the diagnosis of the one-sided rationality of the modern
sciences is countered with a clarification of the environmental relation as the
basis of all scientific knowledge. In renewing this clarification in the context of
contemporary ecological phenomenology, I hope to begin to establish the rel-
evancy of Husserl’s critique for the development of this field of scholarship.4
This retrieval of the Umwelt is not that of the Lebenswelt. While the “sur-
rounding” or “environing world” and the “life-world” are fundamentally in-
terconnected in Husserl’s development, they are nevertheless significantly dif-
ferent. The concept of the life-world in Husserl’s later work has a complexity
which poses unique challenges for its appropriation in ecological phenomenol-
ogy. This complexity stems from a basic ambiguity at the heart of Husserl’s ar-
ticulation of the life-world in the Crisis and related texts from his later writing.
On the one hand, the life-world refers to the immediate, pre-scientific horizon
of reference which grounds science, culture and history. On the other hand,
the life-world is the inclusive of the scientific, cultural, and historical achieve-
ments which “flow into it” (einzuströmen) and, in turn, determine immediate
experience. While there is no mainstream acceptance in Husserlian scholar-
ship of a resolution to this problem of the life-world, the ambiguity itself is
well documented.5 Husserl’s articulation of the Umwelt, however, does not
have this ambiguity. In the Vienna Lecture, Husserl exclusively uses the term
Umwelt (environing world) in his critique of methodological naturalism. The

as Rigorous Science,” in Husserl: Shorter Works, ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick
A. Elliston (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). Hereafter, PRS. Ideas
Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second
Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1989). Hereafter, Ideas II. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcen-
dental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David
Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). Hereafter, Crisis.
4.  This attempt to cross-fertilize Husserlian phenomenology and environmental phi-
losophy has yet to be successfully accomplished. As Lester Embree notes, “Unfortu-
nately . . . little has been done thus far within [constitutive phenomenology] with re-
spect to the environment.” “The Possibility of a Constitutive Phenomenology of the
Environment” in Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, ed. Charles S. Brown
and Ted Toadvine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 37.
5.  For the central studies see the following: Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of Conscious-
ness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964), and “Problems of the Life-world,”
in Phenomenology and Social Reality: Essays in Memory of Alfred Schutz, ed. Maurice
Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 35–61; David Carr, Phenomenology
and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy (Evan-
ston: Northwestern University Press, 1974); Anthony Steinbock, Home and Beyond:
Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1995); Dieter Lohmar, “The Role of Life-World in Husserl’s Critique of Idealizations,”
in Phenomenology, Interpretation, and Community, ed. Lenore Langsdorf (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1996).

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40 Adam Konopka

term “life-world” does not appear in this text.6 Husserl’s central argument in
the Vienna Lecture critiques the one-sided rationality of modernity by sifting
through the sedimentations of ideality which have occurred through the mathe-
matization of nature. These layers of mediation have resulted in a forgetfulness
of the immediate encounter with the Umwelt and have, in turn, produced a fis-
sure between the goals and achievements of scientific research and the horizon
upon which they rest. By clarifying the historical development of mathematics,
Husserl demonstrates that the environmental relation is the ground upon which
methodological naturalism is built up (constituted). This clarification affords
the opportunity for a retrieval of a pre-modern environmental relation within
the modern scientific framework that can thereby repair the break between the
Umwelt and methodological naturalism. By making this continuity between
the environmental relation and the natural sciences explicit while at the same
time maintaining the methodological heteronomy proper to each, Husserlian
phenomenology offers an invaluable paradigm for the development of an eco-
logical phenomenology and its relation to the natural sciences. This paradigm
is a negotiation of the two alternative tendencies in ecological phenomenology
mentioned above, which is to say that it represents a via media between the re-
jection or indifference to the positive sciences and the call for a naturalization
of phenomenology in an ecological context.

Methodological Naturalism and Ecological Phenomenology

The youth and proliferation of contemporary ecological phenomenology make
it difficult to ascertain its morphological features. However, there is one issue
that cuts like a knife through the ambiguities of this maturing field of schol-
arship. Either explicitly or implicitly, each movement and individual writer
within it is situated in relation to the naturalistic methodology of the modern
natural sciences. Given that the discipline of phenomenology was constructed
as an alternative to methodological naturalism, the phenomenological tradi-

6.  There are two references to the term “Lebensumwelt” or “the environing world of
life,” but they play an ancillary role in Husserl’s argument. As I argue in a forthcoming
essay, this term is eventually crucial for understanding the relationship between Umwelt
and Lebenswelt in the Crisis. However, the intimate relationship in which Umwelt and
Lebenswelt function in Husserl’s corpus should not preclude a proper demarcation of
these concepts. Scholarship on Husserl’s notion of the life-world often collapses this
distinction and has a bad habit of inserting the category of life-world into texts where
the term does not appear. For instances where the life-world is read into the Vienna
Lecture, see Daniel Videla, “On the Narratives of Science: The Critique of Modernity
in Husserl and Heidegger,” Human Studies 17, no. 2, (April 1994): 189–202; Patrick
A. Heelan, “Husserl’s Later Philosophy of Natural Science,” Philosophy of Science 54,
no. 3 (September 1987): 368–390; and Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, “Phenomenology, Psy-
chology, and the World: Toward a Manifesto,” Essays in Celebration of the Founding
of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations, ed. Ivan Chvatik et. al., web
published at www.o-p-o.net, 2003.

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 Husserl’s Critique of Naturalism 41

tion and the appropriation of it in various contexts retains a tenuous relation to

the application of methodological naturalism in domains of investigation now
identified within the human sciences.
In contemporary ecological phenomenology this tension has become es-
pecially acute and has produced significantly contrasting views regarding the
relationship between phenomenology and naturalism. On the one hand, there
is a rejection of naturalistic approaches to nature which results in an effort
to construct an alternative conception of the natural world through phenom-
enological investigation. On the other hand, there are some who are calling
for a naturalization of phenomenology as it becomes increasingly attentive to
ecological concerns. In this section, I will briefly survey these respective posi-
tions as preparation for a comparison and contrast with a Husserlian analysis
of the relationship between methodological naturalism and the environmental
relation.
Some ecological phenomenology is often animated by an anti-naturalistic
orientation. For instance, Michael Zimmerman has drawn a comparison be-
tween Heidegger’s critique of the en-framing (Ge-stell) of nature by scien-
tific technology and the rejection of the natural sciences by deep ecology and
eco-feminism.7 For Heidegger and these radical ecologists, naturalistic meth-
odology is a significant part of the problem which has given rise to the envi-
ronmental crisis.8 The confluence of methodological naturalism and modern
technology (and capitalism for the radical ecologists) is a recipe which is fated
toward dystopia. Bruce Foltz and Robert Frodeman have characterized this
Heideggerian critique of naturalism as follows:

7.  See Michael Zimmerman’s chapter entitled “Deep Ecology, Heidegger, and Post-
modern Theory,” in Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 91–149. Deep ecologists Bill Devall
and George Sessions also make this comparison in Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City: G.M.
Smith, 1985), 98.
8.  “Modern humanity began defining itself in terms of scientific naturalism. Blind to
the fact that human existence constitutes an ontological clearing in which entities can
manifest themselves, modern humanity views itself rather as an elaborate mechanical
entity, or as a ‘clever animal.’ For Heidegger, then, Western metaphysics led not to hu-
man ‘progress,’ but instead to technological nihilism in which everything—including
humankind—stands revealed as raw material for the goal of greater power and security.
According to Heidegger, this arrogant anthropocentric humanism (whether capitalist or
communist) not only diminishes humankind, but also wreaks havoc on nature. Human
efforts to reform existing practices cannot succeed and in fact will make matters worse,
because widespread cultural, social, and ecological crises are symptoms of modern hu-
manity’s obsession with control. Hence, Heidegger concluded, humankind can be saved
only if there arises an alternative to modern technology’s one-dimensional disclosure of
the being of entities. In 1966, he said that ‘Only a god can save us now.’” Michael Zim-
merman, “Deep Ecology,” in The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Lester Embree
et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 138.

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42 Adam Konopka

Is the scientific understanding of nature itself part of the problem? As Heide-

gger has maintained . . . modern science may be itself an integral part of the
very problem that is defined as “environmental crisis.” If Heidegger is even
partly right in his claims that science is inseparably bound up with the modern
project of the technological domination of nature—that science like technol-
ogy “sets upon” nature aggressively and (as the rhetoric of Bacon and Kant
would have it) “tortures” nature to give answers to questions of their own
devising—then an exclusively, or even predominantly scientific understand-
ing of nature would prevent us from even comprehending what is at stake, let
alone arriving at a salutary solution.9

Heidegger’s displacement of the primacy of Vorhandenes (present-to-hand)

to Zuhandenes (ready-to-hand) in Being and Time provides a trajectory for
these commentators to develop a pre-scientific philosophy of nature that is,
if not radically opposed to, at the least stylistically estranged from natural-
ism.10 Heidegger understands the essence of modern technology as preced-

9.  “Introduction: The Nature of Environmental Philosophy,” in Rethinking Nature:

Essays in Environmental Philosophy, ed. Bruce Foltz and Robert Frodeman (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 5. In this essay, Foltz and Frodeman seem to
endorse the invalidity of naturalism, “Perhaps most suggestively, the German philoso-
pher Martin Heidegger develops strategies through which the ‘material’ or contentful
encounter with nature . . . can be ‘retrieved’ through an ontological project that is both
phenomenological and ontological. . . . Heidegger presents the earth as a thought (and
as what is to-be-thought) that must not be approached theoretically or intellectually”
(6). In their other writing, they are careful to avoid the anti-naturalistic trajectory of
Heidegger’s work. For instance, Foltz states, “Heidegger’s work provides an alternative
interpretation of our environmental crisis. It is not, however, one that contradicts the
scientific standpoint or even those reflections that are oriented by it. If his answers are
different, it is because his questions, in asking what the sciences cannot in principle ask,
are of an entirely different character. If his thinking, in turn, leads us to question the sci-
ences themselves, it is not in order to render them invalid but to grasp their limitations”
(Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature
[Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1995], 16). In describing his cross-fertilization
of phenomenology and geology, Frodeman describes his relation to the natural sciences
as follows: “I hoped to develop a scientifically informed phenomenology of the Earth
that united geologic knowledge with philosophic insight to help us understand how to
live on Earth. . . . The goal had become to provide an ontology of the Earth sciences:
to describe how the various domains of knowledge (science, ethics, politics, aesthetics,
metaphysics, and theology) are revealed within the discipline, and how these domains
relate to one another in various environmental concerns” (Geo-logic: Breaking Ground
Between Philosophy and the Earth Sciences [Albany: State University of New York,
2003], 14).
10.  Theodore Kisiel makes this point as follows: “it is well known that Heidegger’s
displacement of the primacy from Vorhandenes to Zuhandenes moves toward a less
scientifically oriented problematic” (“Phenomenology as the Science of Science,” in
Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences: Essays and Translations, ed. Joseph Kock-
elmans and Theodore J. Kisiel [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970], 26.

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 Husserl’s Critique of Naturalism 43

ing and founding the essence of modern science—which is to say, naturalistic

science—is inherently and irreducibly technological.11
Not all Heideggerians are anti-naturalistic, anti-scientific, or anti-techno-
logical. Nor will any careful reader of Heidegger understand his own position
as necessarily anti-scientific or anti-technological. Nevertheless, Heideggerian
appropriations in ecological phenomenology have a tendency to juxtapose
Heidegger’s discussion of “dwelling” and the “fourfold” with methodological
naturalism such that the two appear irreconcilable. The goal of this research is
to construct a philosophy of nature as an alternative to methodological natu-
ralism, a task that has resonance with the romanticism of Friedrich Schelling’s
Naturphilosophie. Where these Heideggerian appropriations may not be anti-
naturalistic, they at least remain indifferent or aloof to the investigations of the
natural scientist.
A second and more recent position regarding the relationship between
ecological phenomenology and naturalism is calling for a rapprochement be-
tween the traditional methodological opposition between the two. David Wood
has recently argued that if phenomenology is to make a contribution to en-
vironmental philosophy, it must “work out a new relationship to what it had
perceived as the danger of naturalism.”12 His claim is that phenomenology
should compromise its theory of intentionality in order to address the causal
explanations of the natural sciences. “I would like to develop a sense of the
middle ground of relationality, a space neither governed by simple causality
nor by simple intentionality, and suggest that in this space phenomenology
can recover from the trauma of its birth in opposition to naturalism.”13 While
it is not entirely clear what this “middle ground” would involve for Wood, it is
nevertheless apparent that he sees an opposition to naturalism to be one of the
deficiencies of a phenomenological approach to the environment.
Ted Toadvine also sees a phenomenological opposition to naturalism as
problematic in an environmental context: “such a description demands that
certain commitments of phenomenological methodology be modified. This
modified version of phenomenology, as my title suggests, could be called a
‘naturalized phenomenology.’”14 While Toadvine is careful to point out that he
is not proposing that classical phenomenology should be developed into a na-
ïve philosophical naturalism, he does claim that it needs to progress from what
he takes to be its latent anthropocentric presumption. He understands the tran-
scendental dimension of phenomenology as an “insistence on the difference

11.  Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Con-
cerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and
Row, 1977), 21–23.
12.  David Wood, “What is Eco-Phenomenology?,” in Eco-phenomenology: Back to
the Earth Itself, ed. Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2003), 211.
13.  Ibid., 213.
14.  Ted Toadvine, “Naturalizing Phenomenology,” Philosophy Today 43 (1999): 125.

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44 Adam Konopka

between two senses of ‘self’: the transcendental ego, subject of the world, and
the mundane ego, embodied soul within the world.”15 While Toadvine claims
that phenomenology has an important contribution to make in environmental
philosophy, this contribution would necessitate a revision of what he under-
stands to be the dichotomous relation between the natural and transcendental
attitudes:
phenomenology needs environmental thinking . . . it requires the insights
inspired by our current ecological consciousness to revise its own method-
ological procedures. In fact, a thoroughgoing phenomenology of nature leads
inevitably into a phenomenology of phenomenology, since it must provide an
account of the relation between the transcendental and mundane subjects, be-
tween reflective and pre-reflective experience, and between ontological and
ontic modalities of the world.16

This naturalization of phenomenology thus implies a modification of the tradi-

tional methodological procedures of the epochē and reduction that give rise to
the distinction between the natural and transcendental attitudes.17
In what follows, I will argue that the development of an ecological phe-
nomenology need not be anti-naturalistic nor does it require a rapprochement
with methodological naturalism. A renewal of Husserl’s critique of naturalism
can offer a justification for the unique role that ecological phenomenology can
play vis-a-vis the natural sciences in the contemporary environmental crisis,
one that implies a partnership with naturalistic investigation while maintaining
a methodological heterogeneity with it. By revisiting the connection between a
phenomenology of the environmental relation and methodological naturalism
in the Vienna Lecture, we will then be in a position to defend a third, middle
way between the alternative tendencies outlined above.

Revisiting Husserl’s Critique of Naturalism

Throughout his corpus, Husserl appreciated the plurality of roles the various
sciences played in working out a unified theory of knowing. There are proper
regions of knowledge which are demarcated by the content of investigation,
the attitude undertaken by the researcher, and the respective kinds of evidence
proper to each field. In the “Prolegomena” to the Logical Investigations, Hus-
serl characterizes the typical working scientist as an artist whose interest, ac-

15.  Ibid., 124.

16.  Ibid., 125.
17.  Irene Klaver is another voice that is calling for the development of phenomeno-
logical methodology: “This renewed focus [on the dynamic relations involved in the
process of sedimentation and reactivation of pre-scientific experience, especially the
apprehension of materiality and embodiment] puts phenomenology in its traditional
form on the rocks: a philosophy of primordial constitution based on intentionality of
the subject gives way to a thinking in terms of co-constitution and a so-called operative
intentionality” (“Phenomenology on [the] Rocks,” in Eco-phenomenology, 158).

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 Husserl’s Critique of Naturalism 45

tivity, and expertise can be fully absorbed in the advancement of her artistic
production. Like the artist who need not possess the theoretical principles that
underlie her craft and genre, the scientist does not necessarily need to look over
her shoulder to clarify the intrinsic rationality of her craft.18
This clarification of the techniques and methodological procedures of the
sciences is one of the roles of the philosopher. By supplementing the tech-
nological advances of the sciences through the clarification of its theoretical
aims, the philosopher “does not seek to meddle in the work of the specialist,
but to achieve insight in regard to the sense and essence of his achievements as
regards to their method and manner.”19 This task involves a different attitude
and interest from that of the scientist. Rather than being guided by the poten-
tial for pragmatic application, prediction of future events, or reconstruction of
the past, the philosopher inquires into the intrinsic principles that animate the
scientific craft. Rather than asking the question of how reliable application of
scientific methodology is achieved within a given investigation, the question
becomes: by what justification does science affirm the truth of its findings?
Husserl understands these different questions and the alternative prac-
tices which emerge from them as “mutually complementary.”20 This mutual
cooperation has a trajectory arising from the common goal inaugurated by the
Greeks—to work out a unified scientific theory of the world. The Greek dis-
covery of a new theoretical attitude, ultimately embodied by mathematics, is
the common heritage of Western science. Despite the sharp dichotomy between
their respective methods and scope, the positive sciences and phenomenology
are profoundly intertwined in this unified legacy.21 Moreover, the commonality
and unification of the sciences is not limited to this historical origin, but given
in principle insofar as this new attitude was made possible by the discovery
of infinity. As is well known, the Greek art of surveying land for agricultural
purposes led to the development of geometry. Everyday mechanical concerns
were transformed into mathematical mechanics and the art of number gave rise
to more sophisticated forms of arithmetic. As Husserl indicates in the Vienna
Lecture:
Quite rapidly, a first and great step of discovery is taken, namely, the over-
coming of the finitude of nature already conceived as an objective in-itself,
a finitude in spite of its open endlessness. Infinity is discovered, first in the
form of the idealization of magnitudes, of measures, of numbers, figures,
straight lines, poles, surfaces, etc. Nature, space, time, become extendable
idealiter to infinity and divisible idealiter to infinity. . . . Antiquity led the
way: in its mathematics was accomplished the first discovery of both infinite

18.  “Prolegomena,” §4, 15.

19.  Ibid., §71, 159.
20.  Ibid., §71, 160.
21.  Husserl underscores this point in his letter to Lévy-Bruhl, dated March 11, 1935.
This letter is published in French in Gradhiva 4 (1988): 63–72. Also see Kisiel, 9.

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46 Adam Konopka

ideals and infinite tasks. This becomes for all later times the guiding star of
the sciences.22

This discovery brought about a revolution by which the technological innova-

tions involved in immediate practical concerns prior to it (such as the pro-
duction of artifacts, agriculture, and the domestic arts) were transformed into
infinite tasks for theoretical discovery. A new kind of attention was born that
enabled the ideal representation of objects and their interrelations to be deter-
mined with mathematical exactness. By abstracting from their finite surround-
ings, the Greeks opened a new, endless plane of reflection that, while derived
from the patterns and organization of their world, allowed them to critically
master the principles which operate within it.
The measurement made possible by this mathematical breakthrough is
what unifies the sciences: “Science, then, signifies the idea of an infinity of
tasks, of which at any time a finite number have been disposed of and are
retained as persisting validities. These make up at the same time the fund of
premises for an infinite horizon of tasks as the unity of one all-encompassing
task.”23 Modern mathematics, logic, the exact natural sciences, the human sci-
ences, and philosophy are all partners, each with their own role, in the ever
deepening and expanding field of research. One role of philosophy, according
to Husserl, has become the elucidation of the essential components of scientific
theory: “the ingenious, methodological work of the special sciences, more con-
cerned with practical results and mastery than with essential insight, is in need
of a continuous ‘epistemological’ reflection which only the philosopher can
provide, which allows only the interest of pure theory to dominate, and helps
it to claim its rights.”24 In one sense, the philosopher is content with working
behind the scenes, doing the dirty work that no one else wants to do, acting
as the handmaid of the other sciences. In another important sense, the modern
philosophical vocation is governed by a deep discontentment regarding the
incomplete character of scientific rationality and labors to provide the ultimate
grounding upon which it is constituted.
This later role becomes especially acute in times of crisis and, as we will
see, the contemporary environmental crisis is directly related to the one Hus-
serl identified in his own age. In the scientific revolution of the 17th century, a
new application of mathematics was introduced that made possible an inver-
sion of the mathematical procedure of the Greeks. For the ancients, ideal “ob-
jects” (such as the number “5,” or a geometrical triangle) were “lifted off the
face of things” and apprehended in their ideal purity. For the modern natural
sciences, these pure idealities were re-applied to spatio-temporal materiality.
As Husserl states in Ideas I,

22.  Husserl, Vienna Lecture, 293.

23.  Ibid., 278.
24.  Prolegomena, §71, 159.

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 Husserl’s Critique of Naturalism 47

Their [the natural sciences] great era begins in the modern age precisely when
the geometry which has already been highly developed as a pure eidetics in
antiquity (and chiefly the Platonic school) was all at once made fruitful in the
grand style for the method of physics. People made clear to themselves that
the material thing is essentially res extensa and that geometry is therefore
the ontological discipline relating to an essential moment of material thing-
hood, namely the spatial form. But, in addition, people also made it clear to
themselves that the universal . . . essence of the material thing extends much
further. This is shown by the fact that the development followed at the same
time along the line that led to the elaborating of a series of new disciplines
coordinate with geometry and called on to perform the same function, that of
rationalizing the empirical.25

This double movement of ideality was made possible by the mathematical de-
velopment of analytic geometry and has had “intoxicating” and “unbridled”
success.26 This mathematization of nature, of bringing ideal objectivity back to
bear on material objectivity through the experimental method, allows the natu-
ral scientist to go beyond the mere intuitive descriptions of empirical objects
to establish “unconditionally universal elements and laws.”27 Husserl is repeat-
edly profuse in his praise for this “true revolution” in the natural sciences,
claiming, “As an accomplishment it is a triumph of human spirit.”28
However, something was lost in this revolution. Modern scientific de-
velopment has been lop-sided because, while analytic geometry proved to be
remarkably efficient with regard to physical objects, its application for “spiri-
tual” (geistig) entities (such as animals, people, cultures, and political spheres)
was encumbered. The human sciences lagged behind their counterparts in the
clarification of their methodological principles because, unlike the natural sci-
ences, non-material components of experience (such as value, utility, and emo-
tions) cannot be closed off in an isolated domain of investigation (as is the
case with the natural sciences).29 While the natural scientist is able to isolate
spatio-temporal materiality from other aspects of experience, the human sci-
entist cannot enclose “spirit” (Geist) from the inherent unity with its physical
instantiation:
only nature can be treated by itself as a closed world; only natural science
can abstract with unbroken consistency from everything spiritual and investi-
gate nature purely as nature. On the other hand, vice versa, such a consistent
abstraction from nature does not lead the humanist, interested solely in what

25.  Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy,

First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans F. Kersten (Dor-
drecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), §9, 19. Hereafter, Ideas I.
26.  Vienna Lecture, 294.
27.  Ibid., 270.
28.  Ibid., 271, 295.
29.  In this sense, the human sciences, and psychology in particular, remain “pre-Gal-
ilean.” See PRS, 177.

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48 Adam Konopka

is spiritual, to a self-enclosed, purely spiritual coherent “world” which could

become the subject matter of a pure and universal humanistic science as a
parallel to pure natural science.30

Animals, people, and cultures, while not reducible to their physical existence,
cannot be seriously studied apart from their corporeality. This “fragmentary”31
character of the subject matter of humanistic investigation is thus enormously
more complex and less conducive to mathematization.
The failure of the human scientists to solidify the methodological prin-
ciples corresponding to their own domain of investigation has produced a crisis
in the Western sciences and even Western social and political life. “Blinded
by naturalism,”32 the human scientists have given up their birthright for au-
tonomous investigation and appropriated methodological naturalism as its own
endeavor. This attempt to “naturalize spirit” is today most profoundly mani-
fested in psychology, where the empirical investigations of neurobiology have
struggled to narrow the “explanatory gap” between physiological processes
and first-person accounts of experience.33 The attempt is to provide a unified
theory of knowing on the basis of methodological naturalism that is built up
from the mathematically exact sciences of physics and chemistry. In studying
mental processes, a first-person description of the experience of logical cogni-
tion is exchanged for a third-person account of physiological processes: “the
psychic sphere of self-experience [becomes] alien to the psychic; the external
path, the path of physics and chemistry, must be taken.”34 When this project
comes around to the clarification and grounding of mathematics and logic
(which are rooted in mental activity), these naturalized psychologies seem like
the reasonable choice in the selection of a discipline that can explain the men-
tal processes involved in mathematical and logical cognition. In Husserl’s day
(and even more so in our own), the hope was that methodological naturalism
would some day be able to come full circle and offer a “physics of thought”35
for the mathematical and logical underpinnings which it presupposes. If a natu-
ralized psychology could ground mathematics and logic, then methodological
naturalism would be able to offer a complete and self-critical rationality.
The discipline of phenomenology was constructed to provide an alterna-
tive to this naturalization project. It was meant to accomplish the task that psy-
chology could not perform, given its methodological limitations. The central

30.  Vienna Lecture, 271.

31.  Ibid., 294.
32.  Ibid., 273.
33.  The term “explanatory gap” is borrowed from contemporary discussions of the
philosophy of mind and cognitive science. It has its origin in Joseph Levine’s “Materi-
alism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (1983):
354–61.
34.  Vienna Lecture, 294.
35.  Prolegomena, §19, 42.

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 Husserl’s Critique of Naturalism 49

problem that plagued the attempt to reduce logical cognition to the laws that
govern psychological acts was that it ignored a category distinction between
the act of knowing and the ideality, apodicticity (indubitable certainty), and
aprioricity (non-empirical validity) that characterize laws of logic. The fun-
damental mistake of psychologism, according to Husserl, was that it did not
adequately distinguish between the psychological act of knowing and the ideal
objects which comprise mathematics and logic. The simplest test case of the
difference between the two components of logical experience is that repeti-
tion of the same logical meaning in numerically different acts does not render
a different meaning. While the act of knowing is temporally determined, the
ideal object is trans-temporal. Furthermore, this trans-temporal object has an
identity that is shared intersubjectively—e.g., the Pythagorean Theorem not
only has an identity persisting through time and history, but it also has an in-
tersubjective identity.
While this argument alone is enough to refute psychologism (and actually
made Husserl famous), Husserl vehemently opposed the trend of his “psycho-
logically obsessed age”36 with other arguments as well. For instance, one of
the charges that he levels against the methodological naturalism inherent in the
psychologistic project is that it leads to relativism. This argument, based on the
consequences of psychologism, is made in light of the fact that it does not ac-
count for the universal and necessary validity of logical laws. “Every doctrine
is ipso facto relativistic . . . if it treats the pure laws of logic as empirical, psy-
chological laws.”37 By reducing ideal objects and the laws which govern them
to psychological acts, the universal applicability of these laws are relegated
to their individual production. A second argument that Husserl uses against
methodological naturalism makes reference to the methodological foundations
upon which the sciences rest. For science to be self-critical, for it to be scien-
tific with regard to itself, it must account for its movement from empirical evi-
dence to ideal meaning. Each science, if it is indeed a science, takes recourse to
idealities. The justification of this movement rests on the clarification not only
of the concepts and laws that provide theoretical unity to scientific rationality
but also the evidence that is proper to the manner in which these ideal objects
are built up from everyday experience. A third argument which Husserl levels
against his opponent makes use of the nineteenth-century Natur/Geist distinc-
tion. Insofar as methodological naturalism involves a community of research-
ers working together and sharing their findings, it is a “spiritual” (geistig) en-
terprise. The only possible way to account for the modern scientific endeavor,
to fully ground it, would be to subscribe to the principles proper to the human
sciences. “Now is it not absurd and circular to want to explain the historical
event ‘natural science’ in a natural-scientific way, to explain it by bringing in
natural science and its natural laws, which, as spiritual accomplishment, them-

36.  Prolegomena, 64.

37.  Ibid., §38, 83.

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50 Adam Konopka

selves belong to the problem?”38 In order to avoid scientific naïveté with regard
to science, one cannot operate according to methodological naturalism because
the scientific project is not itself physical, but comprised of communication
among researchers within a specific historical culture. Thus, the task proper to
“the science of science” belongs to the human scientist.
At different moments throughout Husserl’s career, he elaborates each of
these arguments. But in the remainder of this section, I would like to consider
another argument which has not received much attention in the secondary lit-
erature. This other argument is the focus of Husserl’s critique of methodologi-
cal naturalism in the Vienna Lecture and is centered on the immediate relation
to the Umwelt. Here, he argues that the relation between a person and his or
her environment is the original experience of nature and the one which founds
all other conceptions of it. To say this means that the environmental relation is
presupposed by and forms a unity with every possible conception of nature. In
order for methodological naturalism to be considered fully warranted scientific
rationality, the pre-scientific experience of the environmental relation must
first be analyzed prior to its mathematical idealization.
Husserl opens the lecture by posing the problems which arise with the
failure of the human sciences and the one-sided rationality of methodological
naturalism. While these problems have led to a crisis in modern rationality,
this does not imply a problematization of the ideal of rationality itself. Hus-
serl points to the Greeks for an example of a healthy functioning rational life
rooted in communities of researchers devoted to scientific theory. The central
feature of this rationality is a certain conception of nature, one arising from the
environmental relation:
But this nature is not nature in the sense of natural science but rather that
which for the ancient Greeks counted as nature, that which confronted them
as natural reality in their environment. To express it more fully: the historical
environment of the Greeks is not the objective world in our sense but rather
their . . . own subjective validity with all the actualities which are valid for
them within it. . . . 39

Greek science understood nature as built upon their encounter with their en-
vironment and this encounter was inclusive of a variety of perceptual, practi-
cal, affective, and axiological accomplishments. The theoretical interest that
characterized this “orientation toward the environment” was not that of “the
nonparticipating spectator of the world,” but one in which “the field of his life
and his work is the environment spread out spatiotemporally around him, of
which he counts himself a part.”40 The person and the environment were thus
conceived as internally unified, not externally related.

38.  Vienna Lecture, 273.

39.  Ibid., 272.
40.  Ibid., 292.

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 Husserl’s Critique of Naturalism 51

The theoretical attitude inaugurated in Greece sought to ascertain the

patterns and regularities operative in the environing world. The discovery of
certain homogeneous features among corporeal bodies allowed for their inter-
relations to be characterized by principles, such as the principles of causality.
This homogeneity, and the principles that govern it, provided the motivation to
generalize beyond the finitude of the environmental relation. Accompanied by
the discovery of mathematical infinity, the structures operative in the environ-
ment came to be ideally extended to form an endless, interrelated whole.
However, the cosmologies that resulted retained an intuitive and immedi-
ate relation to the environment. This multidimensional environmental relation
remained the basis upon which the various cosmologies were built up. The
theoretical shift to the ideal principles that governed the interrelations of nature
preserved the immediate context in which it arose. Thus, a dual theoretical
attention was required. On the one hand, a regard was given to the intuitive
apprehension of the various modalities (perceptual, practical, affective, and
axiological) operative in the shared environment. On the other hand, reflection
was directed toward the universal application of abstracted idealities.
The environmental relation was thus the grounding soil upon which Greek
theoria rested. Husserl contrasts this configuration of the theoretical attitude
with the methodological naturalism characteristic of modernity, where the in-
tuitive apprehension of the environment is bypassed in favor of an objectified
understanding of nature. Husserl goes as far as to say that the concept of an
environment does not and indeed cannot arise within these methodological
constrictions.41 This is not to say that the notion of an environment cannot be
employed by the natural sciences, but its full elucidation would require a non-
naturalistic investigation. Of course, an environment is comprised of spatio-
temporal materiality and does not occur without this physical manifestation.
But an environment is not reducible to chemistry and physics because it is a
fundamentally relational concept, centered on an organism around which it
encircles. To put it in Cartesian language, this horizon of relationality is com-
prised both of res extensa and res cogitans.
The strict dichotomy of these Cartesian categories has cut the environ-
mental relation in two. The science of nature no longer occurs as centered,
but rather is mediated by the dissemination of atomistic ideal objects, scat-
tered across sheer geometrical planes. This development can be represented
by Galileo’s pronouncement of the mathematization of nature: “The book of
nature . . . is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are tri-
angles, circles, and other geometrical figures without which it is humanly im-
possible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in
a dark labyrinth.”42 A mathematized nature becomes the only sense in which

41.  Ibid., 272.

42.  Quoted in S. Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (New York: Doubleday/
Anchor, 1957).

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52 Adam Konopka

nature can be validly investigated. Under the confines of methodological

naturalism, a first-person account of the environment does not have scientific
validity. “Someone who is raised on natural science takes it for granted that
everything merely subjective must be excluded and that the natural-scientific
method, exhibiting itself in subjective manners of representation, determines
objectivity.”43 A society indoctrinated by methodological naturalism naïvely
assumes that the first-person experience within the environmental relation has
no theoretical validity. Knowledge of nature consists purely of an objectivity
that is mediated by mathematics, as is the case with physics and chemistry.44
Because the environmental relation is infused with first-person subjective ac-
complishments, it falls outside the margins of naturalistic methodology.
Once Husserl establishes the contrast between Greek theoria and method-
ological naturalism, his strategy is to emphasize the importance of a retrieval
of the environmental relation in the context of modern rationality. The limita-
tions of methodological naturalism do not imply that it does not have validity
within its own proper sphere of investigation. However, this validity is not a
substitute for the immediate encounter with the environment and is therefore
relative to it:
But the researcher of nature does not make clear to himself that the constant
fundament of his—after all subjective—work of thought is the vital environ-
ing world; it is always presupposed as the ground, a the field of work upon
which alone his questions, his methods of thought, make sense. Where is that
huge piece of method subjected to critique and clarification [whereby it] leads
from the intuitively given environment to the idealization of mathematics and
to the interpretation of these idealizations as objective being?45

The answer to this question, of course, is transcendental phenomenology, and

during the 1930s Husserl’s almost exclusive effort was the development of a
new transcendental aesthetic and logic that would examine the way in which
logical and mathematical idealizations are built up from the environmental
relation. Husserl fervently believed that this project was necessary for the self-
justification of modern scientific rationality, “But everywhere, in our time, the
burning need for an understanding of spirit (Geist) announces itself; and lack
of clarity about the methodological and material relation between the natural
sciences and the humanistic disciplines has become almost unbearable.”46 Nat-
uralistic psychologies can be of no help here. While they may be able to over-
come the problems of introspection, they have not acknowledged the distinc-

43.  Vienna Lecture, 295.

44.  Husserl repeatedly uses the language of mediation in PRS. See, for instance, 174.
45.  Vienna Lecture, 295. The translation of Lebensumwelt is altered in this quotation
from “surrounding world of life” to “vital environing world” in keeping with the con-
ventions of the translation of Umwelt as environing world.
46.  Ibid., 296.

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 Husserl’s Critique of Naturalism 53

tion between real psycho-physical processes and the ideal laws of logic. Even
an introspective psychology lacks secure footing because it does not account
for the psycho-physical dimension inherent in the environmental relation. The
only solution to the crisis of modern rationality that Husserl sees in this lecture
is a retrieval of the environmental relation.
But the situation can never improve so long as the objectivism arising out of a
natural attitude toward the environment is not seen through its naïveté and so
long as the recognition has not emerged that the dualistic view of the world,
in which nature and spirit (Geist) are to count as realities in a similar sense,
though one is built on the other causally, is a mistake.47

This retrieval is neither anti-naturalistic nor a romantic nostalgia. Husserl’s

praise for methodological naturalism stems from his affirmation of the modern
scientific project and the promise of a mathesis universalis. The return to the
things themselves, and in this case the environmental relation, is a clarification
of the foundations of the positive sciences. A science is only truly a science
if it can rigorously clarify its presuppositions, and the kind of evidence that
arises in the environmental relation not only leads to a clarification of scientific
assumptions but also a critique of experience that finally becomes a critique
of reason itself.48 Just as Husserl’s articulation of the environmental relation
was never meant to supplant methodological naturalism but to supplement and
ground it, his return to pre-modern scientific experience was not nostalgic.
When Husserl goes back to the Greeks to reveal the environmental relation
prior to the mathematization of nature, he is not suggesting a reversion to pre-
modern cultures. Rather, his genetic analysis is meant to traverse the layers of
sedimentation that are operative in our contemporary experience of nature. The
retrieval of the environmental relation is thus thoroughly progressive in that it
advances the project of modern rationality with essential insight, not merely
technical proficiency.

Towards the Via Media of Ecological Phenomenology

A renewal of Husserl’s critique of naturalism provides an opportunity to form
an alliance with the natural sciences in addressing the contemporary environ-
mental crisis while preserving the methodological autonomy of phenomeno-
logical description in relation to them. This renewal marks out a middle way,

47.  Ibid., 297.

48.  “But this is precisely what is new about phenomenology which, having emerged
from the concern for a clarification and deepening of traditional logic, has placed these
most universal and ultimate problems of science and of knowledge in general on their
true intuitive grounds and thus has been the first to grasp them in their concrete full-
ness.” Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923–24), Book II: Theorie der phanome-
nologischen Reduktion, Husserliana VIII, ed. R. Boehm (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1959),
259.

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54 Adam Konopka

even a Holzweg if you will, between the rejection of methodological naturalism

and the naturalization of phenomenology. This path is comprised of a return to
the environmental relation as the grounding soil of modern rationality and the
place where the implications of this rationality are ultimately legitimated. In
what follows in this section, the trajectory of this path will be briefly indicated
through a contrast with the two alternative tendencies highlighted above.
Eighteenth-century romanticism was a reaction to modern rationalism and
emphasized an imaginative and creative response to the awe and sublimity of
nature in opposition to the reductionism of modern naturalism. But as Schell-
ing pointed out, romanticism need not be limited to a historical movement,
but rather can characterize a variety of impulses throughout history insofar as
they are expressive of a plenitude of significance within a holistic sensibility.49
While both Husserl and the romantics return to pre-scientific experience, they
do so for different reasons, which have different implications.50 Rather than
merely developing an alternative to the one-sided rationality of the modern
sciences, Husserl’s call for a return to the environmental relation was animated
by the desire for a corrective to the modern scientific project. While Husserl
too was critical of the deprivation of methodological naturalism, he remained
committed throughout to the ideal of scientific responsibility. This kind of
responsibility to the historical cultural achievement of the West requires an
engagement with the positive sciences in order that they might be properly
grounded. While phenomenology can theoretically justify a nostalgic retrieval
of the environmental relation, if this nostalgia merely remains a reaction to and
rejection of methodological naturalism, then it is too conservative. Husserl’s
radicality of a self-responsible rationality, satisfied only by essential insight,
not only involves a critique of methodological naturalism, but also offers a
critique of experience that can reconnect the principles of the positive sciences
with their vital horizon. In short, methodological naturalism may be part of the
problem, but it must also be part of the solution.51
The contrasting view in ecological phenomenology with regard to meth-
odological naturalism calls for a rapprochement between the alternative meth-
odological principles. This “naturalized phenomenology” has an analogue to
another naturalization project occurring in the philosophy of mind, where the
integration of classical phenomenology into contemporary cognitive science is

49.  See F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Scott (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989,) 35, 62.
50.  Merleau-Ponty rightly makes this comparison between Husserl and romanticism
in Nature: Course Notes from the College de France, ed. Dominique Seglard, trans.
Robert Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 3–80.
51.  For an analogous critique of the romantic impulse with regard to nature, see Steven
Galt Crowell, “The Mythical and the Meaningless: Husserl and the Two Faces of Na-
ture,” in Issues in Husserl’s Ideas II, ed. Thomas Nenon and Lester Embree (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), 81–105.

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 Husserl’s Critique of Naturalism 55

attempting to narrow the “explanatory gap” between neurobiological processes

and first-person experience.52 While the promise of a successful naturalization
of consciousness remains confined to the distant future, there are a plurality of
different strategies being employed that bring together the insights of phenom-
enology and methodological naturalism.53 The naturalization of phenomenol-
ogy that Wood and Toadvine respectfully propose clearly does not share an
affinity with the majority of these strategies. For instance, they both dismiss an
account of consciousness that reduces mental activity to physiological process-
es.54 Nevertheless, there is one strategy in which there is a remarkable similar-
ity. It consists in “generalizing the concept of nature in such a way as to in-
clude processes involving a phenomenalization of physical objectivity.”55 This
“naturalization” of intentional achievements as an enlargement of the concept
of nature attempts to overcome the nineteenth-century Natur/Geist distinction
by framing Geist (“spirit” or “culture”) as a subcategory of Natur. In short, this
naturalization of “spirit” understands everything to be natural, wherein mental
activity is considered as one unique form of nature.56

52.  For an overview of this project, see Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Con-
temporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. Jean Petitot, Francisco J. Varela,
Bernard Pachoud, and Jean-Michel Roy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
53.  The editors of the volume highlight five different approaches in the extended in-
troduction. See “Beyond the Gap: An Introduction to Naturalizing Phenomenology,” in
Naturalizing Phenomenology, 63–72.
54.  “The resistance to naturalism is a principles resistance, in various senses. If natu-
ralism means that the phenomena in question are fundamentally governed by causal
laws, with the possible addition of functional explanations, and relations of succes-
sion, conjunction, and concatenation, resistance takes the form of limiting the scope
of such phenomena, or showing that even in those domains in which naturalism might
seem wholly appropriate—the realm of what is obviously Nature—naturalism is fatally
flawed as a standpoint” (Wood, “What is Eco-Phenomenology?,” 211); “certainly there
is no intention here of reducing phenomenology to what is commonly called a ‘natural-
istic’ philosophy” (Toadvine, “Naturalizing Phenomenology,” 125).
55.  “Beyond the Gap,” 68.
56.  Barry Smith’s appropriation of J. J. Gibson’s ecological psychology is an exem-
plary case of this naturalization of phenomenology. See for instance “Truth and the
Visual Field,” in Naturalizing Phenomenology, 317–329. Smith attempts to show how
Gibsonian ecologism makes it possible to develop a realist interpretation of constitutive
phenomenology: “for constitution is not, from the Gibsonian point of view, a creation
of a new domain of entities in some spurious ‘transcendental’ realm: rather, it is the
carving out of a new sort of niche from within the already existing surrounding world”
(319). In brief, Smith argues that the constitutive achievements of an intentional subject
arise by way of evolutionary adaptation. As humans developed within the context of
their environments, the qualitative structure of their environments became intrinsically
significant for them. The constitution of these qualitative structures within mental life
became a unique “niche” for human experience, but by no means comprises an autono-
mous transcendental realm outside evolutionary adaptation.

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56 Adam Konopka

Wood and Toadvine share in this general strategy of enlarging the con-
cept of nature to be inclusive of intentional life. As Wood states, “We have
tried so far to show that the gap between naturalism and phenomenology is
in an important way dependent on how one thinks of nature.”57 Wood thinks
of intentionality as “naturalistically embedded, but is itself an indirect natural
relation. It is indirect because it is mediated by such functions as imagination,
transformation, delay, and memory, which are often but misleadingly associ-
ated with interiority.”58 For Wood, the rapprochement between naturalism and
phenomenology seems ultimately to amount to the recognition that intentional-
ity indirectly but inherently functions in a naturalistic horizon, one that renders
the move to interiority as not merely illegitimate, but implausible.
Toadvine’s form of naturalization further develops the illegitimacy of this
move to interiority as a problematic anthropocentric presumption on the part
of classical phenomenology:
this distinction [between the transcendental and the mundane]—absolutely
crucial for classical phenomenology—appears to be the height of anthropo-
centrism, as it makes the autonomous transcendental ego, source of all mean-
ing, essential while the natural world, lacking any transcendental sense, is
entirely contingent.59

In short, a naturalized phenomenology requires a new critique of what Toad-

vine understands as various dualisms harbored in various phenomenological
distinctions such as the transcendental/mundane, reflective/pre-reflective, and
ego/world. Phenomenology thus needs ecological thinking in order to provide
a fresh new critique of the latent anthropocentrism that still lurks in the phe-
nomenological tradition.
The middle way charted by Husserl’s call for the retrieval of the envi-
ronmental relation is distanced from this naturalization of phenomenology in
at least two important senses. First, it is distanced by a rather different un-
derstanding of the theory of intentionality than that presented by Wood and
Toadvine. While an adequate treatment of this difference would take us beyond
the confines of this essay, a brief clarification of the epochē and phenomeno-
logical reduction can nevertheless serve our purposes. The reduction charac-
terizes a phenomenological form of first-person reflection, whereby we can
explore more fully that which presents itself in experience. The reduction is
thus simply a phenomenological understanding of reflection, whereby one di-
rects her or his attention back from the straightforward apprehension of objects
and states of affairs in ordinary experience to the apprehension of how these
objects and states of affairs are given in experience. In the process, attention
is still inclusive of straightforward experience, except now in a philosophi-

57.  “What is Eco-Phenomenology?,” 221.

58.  Ibid., 222.
59.  “Naturalizing Phenomenology,” 124.

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 Husserl’s Critique of Naturalism 57

cal mode whereby its significance can be explored more fully. This reflective
procedure issues a specific modification of our ordinary pre-reflective and un-
critical style of relating to the world around us. When we ordinarily go about
business and live our lives from day to day, we take for granted how we come
to know and rely on any number of features in our environments. When we
become interested in how we have pre-reflectively come to know, be affected
by, and value these features, we assume a different attitude toward them. In
so doing, we suspend our participation in the assumptions and belief charac-
teristics though which we normally operate. In this epochē, we do not deny
the existence of the world, nor do we transform our ordinary experience into
ideas or representations. Rather, when we reflect phenomenologically, we are
interested in how it is that we have come to accept the significance of our ordi-
nary experience (the “natural attitude” or the “average everydayness”). More
specifically, the modification which the epochē accomplishes is merely a sus-
pension of the thetic or belief characteristics of the natural attitude. We do not
discard the “content” of ordinary experience nor do we introspectively attend
to our “inner” mental processes. In short, when we perform the epochē, we
merely modify our stance or posture so that we can attend to the significance
of what is given in experience.
By carefully characterizing the process of reflection in this way, phenom-
enology is able to avoid the subject/object distinction that plagues much of
modern philosophy. The notion of subjectivity produced by this distinction is
a psychological subject, one that is removed from the natural embeddedness
of life. My suspicion is that this is what Wood and Toadvine are criticizing
when they speak of “interiority,” “the transcendental ego,” and “anthropocen-
trism.” I am in full agreement with their criticism insofar as this is its proper
target. There is a real sense in which one of the central tasks of ecological
phenomenology is to overcome the “psychological subject” by clarifying the
irreducible integrity of the environmental relation and demonstrating just how
fundamental our environments are for all dimensions of experience. Neverthe-
less, the psychological subject is not the intentional subject of phenomenology.
The difference between the two is precisely that the latter is apprehended as
internally yoked with its environment, not externally related to it. As Husserl
puts it, “The concepts of ego and environing world are related to one another
inseparably.”60 Husserl was able to overcome the psychological subject, in
part, because he so delicately thematized the process of reflection through the
epochē and reduction. The result is a practice of attending to experience so that
its full significance can be explored without getting lost in interiority by mis-
takenly separating the experience of an environment and the environment of
experience. When phenomenology is understood in this way, there is no need

60.  Ideas II, 195.

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58 Adam Konopka

to naturalize it by enlarging the notion of nature because it is already “natural”

through and through.61
The second sense in which the middle way afforded by Husserl’s critique
of naturalism is distanced from the naturalization project in ecological phe-
nomenology concerns the appropriation of the Natur/Geist distinction implicit
in naturalism. Briefly, in order for phenomenology to give an authentic account
of the environmental relation as the vital horizon of modern scientific rational-
ity, this account must operate prior to the Natur/Geist distinction of nineteenth-
century science. While a phenomenology of the environmental relation could
in correlative senses be called a “naturalization of spirit” and a “spiritualization
of nature” through the appropriation of the Natur/Geist distinction, this charac-
terization is appropriate only insofar as it points to a more basic phenomenon.
This phenomenon is, in outline, the immediate encounter between the lived
body and environing world, one that is pregnant with perceptual, practical, af-
fective, and axiological modalities. As we have seen, this encounter underlies
and is presupposed by our modern conceptions of nature and “spirit.” To put it
differently, the environmental relation maintains a founding/founded relation-
ship with the Natur/Geist distinction. Thus, to employ a distinction that arises
at a derivative level of constitution to characterize a more fundamental stratum
of experience is, strictly speaking, a category mistake. As Husserl points out,
what underlies our use of the term “nature” is “always an idea of the essence of
nature, if only an implicit one.”62 Given that our conceptions of nature emerge
from and are built upon our environmental relations, attributing a form of the
term “nature” to the descriptive procedures proper to this relation (“naturalized
phenomenology”) is at best redundant and is at worst misleading.

Conclusion
This essay has been concerned with the relationship between ecological phe-
nomenology and methodological naturalism. In arguing for a via media be-
tween two alternative tendencies in ecological phenomenology, it has prelimi-
narily pointed to the environmental relation as the grounding soil of modern
scientific rationality and the place where the merits of this rationality are ulti-

61.  This apology for “classical phenomenology,” made through the distinction be-
tween the psychological and intentional subjects, mirrors that of the young Jacques
Derrida’s defense of Husserl against the criticisms of Jean Cavailles (which, in broad
terms, is similar to Wood and Toadvine’s). “Perhaps this objection is valid only for
an empirical and psychological subjectivity which is not originarily and intentionally
oriented toward objective truth, which it creates only through ‘intuition’” (125). “The
intentional lived experience is no longer a simple ‘unreal’ constituting the meaning of
the ‘real.’. . .The noetico-noematic synthesis is not theoretical. It is existential experi-
ence. Intentionality is then no longer what links an ideal ‘ego’ to the world. It is the
mediating moment of a properly ontological synthesis” (128). Derrida, The Problem of
Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, trans. Marian Hobson (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2003).
62.  Ideas II, 3.

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 Husserl’s Critique of Naturalism 59

mately legitimated. I have suggested, in outline, that the environmental rela-

tion is comprised of perceptual, practical, affective, and axiological modalities
inherent in the pre-reflective relation between the lived body and environing
world. While the development of this outline takes us beyond the scope of this
essay, I will nevertheless conclude by briefly highlighting two general dimen-
sions of the trajectory of the middle way staked out above.
First, the implication of Husserl’s critique of naturalism for the develop-
ment of an ecological phenomenology is that the purpose of a revitalization of
the environmental relation is to further account for the connection between the
technical proficiency of the natural sciences and the vital horizon upon which
they rest. While the individual sciences need not concern themselves with the
justification of their presuppositions, the clarification of how they are “built
up” from the environmental relation can serve the further establishment of
the basic significance of the environment for theoretical interest. Second, this
engagement with the theoretical interests of the sciences has an ethical dimen-
sion which is reflected in Husserl’s call for scientific responsibility. This re-
sponsibility, while founded on the immediate encounter with the Other, refers
to the scientific and technological achievements handed down through cultural
traditions. Whether we like it or not, as Westerners we have received these
historical achievements in such a way that they fundamentally shape our lives
and the lives of others. To be responsible with regard to them means not only
to be critical of them, but to contribute to their improvement.63

63.  I would like to thank Anne Ozar, Stephen Minister, Steve Chamberlain, John
Drummond, John van Buren, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments
on this essay.

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60 

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