8 thoughts on “I: Smith on Gestalt Theory”

1. Hi! I found this text extremely interesting mainly for two reasons that are related to the idea of bringing cognitive science together with phenomenology, and Gestalt psychology. The first thing that caught my attention is the different treatment of Gestalten as something that is grasped directly or indirectly. It seems that the Austro-Italian tradition argues, in general, that there must be some intellectual process going on that accounts for the variation of the perceived Gestalten on the basis of the same experienced data. Perception, on this account, would seem to be understood as direct perception of data, on top of which, an intellectual process (the act of production) produces a complex whole. Perception is distinguishable from the intellectual process responsible for the production of Gestalten. Gestalten are experienced indirectly as the result of an intellectual process. The ontological consequence of this view is that Gestalten are ideal objects.
   On the other hand, for Koffka and Wertheimer, such distinction is not clear. For them, Gestalten seem to be perceived directly. Their argument has a different structure from the one of the Austro-Italian tradition. One of the arguments, for instance, is that, a stimulus is such only in relation to a perceiver. Given that a stimulus has a complex structure in that it involves necessarily the perceiver (and other aspects of the environment and of the context), Gestalten are experienced directly. The ontological consequence is that they are real objects that have a relational structure.
   As it is indicated in the reading, the first view is closer to Husserlian phenomenology. While the latter, the view of the Berlin school, is closer to current enactivist theories. For instance, because it seems to leave aside the “sandwich view” of the mind that separates perception from action and from cognition. But also because of its influence on Gibson’s account of affordances. My question is how to overcome these differences within the frame of an approach that brings together these views that, with respect to this issue, appear to be tensional.
   The second reason, I thought that this reading was extremely productive is because it indicates the distinctive naturalism that permeates these views. According to Smith’s final remarks, in the background of these ideas lied the notion of philosophical experimentation: “a variety of experimentation that can test the strength of ideas in a way that is independent of and complementary to what takes place in the laboratory”. According to this idea, philosophical ideas are prone to experimental proving or disproving. The spirit behind these approaches is that psychological research might serve as a guide for ontology.

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2. Hi everyone, I hope you’re all doing well! I was a bit late on getting to read this so only finished it the other day. I’m not entirely sure how best to do this, but I thought I would just pick out something from the chapter which I thought was sort of thematically relevant and that I had some worries about.

   So, amongst other things, I found the sections dealing with veridicality in perception and the reality of Gestalten interesting. On (p.47), Smith’s ‘Diagram 3’ shows a simplified relation between subject and environment with the Gestalt as a middle part of the perceptual process dependent for its nature on the particular features of the subject and environment at a given time. A worry is then raised about idealism: if perceptual content is characterised by Gestalten, then we might worry that the ‘autonomous formation’ underlying Gestalten and which do not depend on the subject is actually only equivalent to the Kantian noumena and therefore plays no role in Gestalt production. Smith worries that Gestalt ontology implies a kind of transcendental idealism. He also worries that this entails that perception might lack veridicality – how could perception be accurate if it never includes or represents the autonomous formations underlying Gestalten?

   I suppose this does seem like a worry, and the route Smith takes us out of it is fruitful and interesting, but I think it actually compounds the – at least supposed – problem. Smith talks about conceiving of Gestalten as Gibson, Wertheimer, and Koffka do: as transparent to different degrees. They don’t block out the world’s objective features, but include them as parts or ‘overlap’ (I’m not sure quite how this is supposed to work!) I think the basic idea is that when a Gestalt is well-formed (given Rausch’s Prägnanz principles starting on p.62) it allows us the clearest and most transparent view of the objective properties of the environment. So, a good Gestalt is one which allows the subject to best see that part of the objective world. This is followed by the idea that when there is a misleading Gestalt like the Müller-Lyer illusion, one can sometimes get a more accurate or ‘transparent’ picture of the objective length of the lines if one puts those lines in the context of a more complex Gestalt involving a ruler.

   I think the idea that Gestalten are transparent is at least a bad metaphor: we do not look through them to detect the way the world is beneath them. Given the principles of Gestalt psychology, I’m not even sure this makes sense since those properties could themselves appear only as Gestalten. But the idea of clarity does make sense: illusions are often where a Gestalt has formed which is ambiguous and impossible to interpret without altering some of its Gestalt features or one’s own ‘mental set’ or bodily position. So we do need normative notions in order to understand Gestalten. However it looks like, having dismissed the notion of transparency, this normativity has to be grounded in the subject – Gestalten are always and only clear relative *to a given subject*. This will depend upon all sorts of things, not least physiological facts about subjects, but also psychological features like their intentions. When viewing a painting, standing 10 feet away is a good Gestalt for some agent at t1, and a bad Gestalt for the same agent at t2, since at t1 they want to see the whole structure and at t2 just a specific detail. If how good a Gestalt is depends on psychological features like this, then this once again poses the question as to how plausible it is to be realists about Gestalten, as well as the question of veridicality. What counts as a veridical perception when perceptual processes are normatively evaluated in terms of how well a subject can realise their perceptual goals rather than the more third-personal relation of mere representational accuracy? I do think there is a pretty thick notion of accuracy that can still play a part in this sort of picture, but it surely has to be put in the context of evaluating Gestalten relative to the perceiver’s goals etc.

   As to whether this induces idealism proper, I don’t think this worry was actually very well placed in the first place. The reason Kant faces problems regarding the relation between the in-itself and the for-itself is that he posits the in-itself only as transcendental condition on the phenomena, when one might reasonably think that there needs to be some strong relation of grounding or production between them. But Kant (at least on some readings) can’t commit to those relations since the noumena cannot bear spatio-temporal relations because these are categories of the mind which structure the phenomenal world, not the noumenal. But Gestalt psychology need not think this. So we can say that there is some real matter of the world which plays an objective causal role (my intuition is that it will structurally cause perceptions by providing conditions which structure the possibilities for perception) in perception, so there is no worry about a complete severing of the connection between mind and world. So we can admit that Gestalt are evaluable only relative to subjects, that they are not ‘transparent’, *and* that we don’t have perceptual access to the ‘autonomous features’, whilst at the same time thinking that these features play a real causal role in structuring perception and in playing this role thereby affect what counts as a good Gestalt in a situation, even if they are not ultimate determinants of it.

   Anyway, they were just a few thoughts about some of the themes I found interesting, though there were lots of great ideas in that chapter – I’d love to hear what everyone else thought about this stuff, or any of the other parts! The penultimate section on Prägnanz principles was also especially interesting to me, as well as the morphologies.

   Best,

   Will Hornett

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3. Hello Jimena and Will – glad to have you both on board!

   I want to echo Jimena’s point about the apparent similarity between Berlin-style gestalt ideas and the enactivist tradition — this was one of the motivations for the group we hope to follow up on in future readings.

   I also want to put out a general call for suggestions on a Husserl reading. Smith certainly establishes a close link between Husserl’s perspective and the Graz school, so it would be good to read something representative by him. However, I’m not familiar enough with Husserl’s work to know of any passages that are (i) relevant to our theme; (ii) short enough to read for a single session; and (iii) suitably self-contained.

   Will picked up on a collection of issues that struck me as well, namely the Kantian implications (or not) of the gestalt view, the notion of the transparency of gestalt, and the realism of the Berlin school. First, of course, I would reject the idea that Kantianism constitutes a “danger,” but I would also suggest that the Berlin school can be seen as closer to Kant than Smith gives credit. On my reading, the rejection of Kant is not a rejection of his basic framework, which seems to me to fit quite closely with that of the Berlin school — for instance, Koffka’s distinction between the behavioral and geographical environments seems to reconstruct the phenomenal / noumenal distinction in a realist framework. This framework may be both “realist” and “Kantian” in part because the realism of Koffka is not the direct or materialistic realism often meant by that term. Koffka takes great pains to reject “materialism” (in the very chapter Smith cites), and emphasizes the importance of allowing both the mental and the meaningful into our scientific ontology.

   Where then is “transparency” in all this? I agree with Will that the idea is puzzling, and I find it somewhat frustrating that Smith hasn’t given any explicit primary references on it. If the realism of Koffka encompasses both physical and phenomenal states (as I read it), then I don’t see how gestalts need to be transparent in the sense of “overlap[ping] materially with … objects” in order to avoid idealism. My understanding is that structural correspondence does the necessary epistemic work here, and the three way isomorphism between perceptual experiences, brain states, and states in the world is what characterizes the sense in which perception may be veridical.

   A different issue: Smith has succeed in making me intrigued about Rausch, but it is a pity his work has not been translated. I did find the analysis of Prägnanz into discrete features extremely thought-provoking, yet given that each of these features themselves is highly ambiguous / context-dependent, it seems but a small step toward making sense of the notion.

   Two final thoughts on this: first, there does seem some very close connection between Prägnanz and aesthetic value, yet I’m skeptical the former will explain the latter; rather they seem to me parallel problems — progress on one should inform the other. Second, I wonder about the status of Smith’s claim (p.68) that “there are no laws as to how the various factors of objectual Prägnanz will react in combination.” This is stated as if it is a principled result, yet it seems to me the real point is that no such laws have yet been successfully proposed. If Prägnanz is to have value as an explanatory concept in psychology, then we should assume that there are such laws and that they can be discovered.

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4. Hi everyone,

   I’m very late to the party, and I still lack have a proper response to Smith. What I wanted to focus on was his discussion of Husserl, but I wanted to revisit Husserl before weighing in. Following Alistair’s suggestion, it may be that we all eventually read something from Husserl — if so, then I would likely revisit Smith and put in my intended response at that time.

   Finding a reading that meets Alistair’s criteria is tricky. We want a piece by Husserl that’s:
   (i) relevant to our theme;
   (ii) short enough to read for a single session; and
   (iii) suitably self-contained.
   One option is Investigation III of The Logical Investigations(1900/1901) : “On the Theory of Wholes and Parts.” I could provide a PDF. I think this meets criteria (i) and (iii) — all the Investigations are quasi-self-standing. Whether it meets (ii) is debatable — it is 45 pages, and dense. Smith discussed it in some detail. (Smith also discussed the Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891), but I am less familiar with that text, and am not certain pieces of it would meet criterion (iii).) There exists also an “abridged” version of Inv. III (published in “The Shorter Logical Investigations”) which is only 17 pages — a lot is lost.

   One issue with the idea of appealing to either PA or LI for an understanding of Husserl’s phenomenology is that he changes his mind more, again, after LI, coming to regard phenomenology is a transcendental enterprise. This was one of the main worries I had with Smith: I am not confident we get a clean picture of what the mature Husserl regards as phenomenology by looking back to PA & LI, and so I am also not confident that this affords us a clean route from Gestalt theory to phenomenology. (At least, we shouldn’t assume that Husserl’s views in PA & LI don’t undergo some modification, and would have to look and see whether/how they are carried over). That said, I don’t have any good leads at the moment on later pieces from Husserl’s transcendental phase which clearly meet our criteria — especially (iii). I just don’t know of any prolonged and self-contained discussions of the topics in the major works. This makes it difficult to assess how much of his earlier views are carried over. But I’ll keep looking, and report back if I find anything.

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5. Hi everybody,

   Barry Smith did a great job by providing an overview of the whole “Gestalt movement”, so to speak, with its many traditions which were more or less loosely interconnected and which, for a part of them, stayed out of sight for a very long time. But as any seminal work and as any wide overview, it also contains gaps, approximations and overinterpretations (I will mention only few of them here after). To some extent, this is inevitable regarding the enormity of this task and at first sight one should not blame him for that. As he puts it himself very clearly, his essay should be considered as “a first rough, historical survey of the wider Gestalt tradition” (p. 13).

   However, given that his main concern is to bring forward and reinvigorate the Austro-Italian tradition, his real intent is not to present the whole Gestalt tradition in itself but mainly from the Austrian point of view, to analyze the Gestalt issue through Austrian glasses. Therefore, “this essay does not deal with those early developments in the direction of a Gestalt theory which occurred independently of the work of Ehrenfels and his fellow students of Brentano.” (p. 13)

   What is at stake here is not only to examine the “ramifications of the transition from the Austrian theory of Gestalt as quality to the Berlin theory of Gestalt as whole” (p. 13) but also to show the superiority of the Austrian Gestalt philosophy over the German Gestalt psychology, in the sense that something fundamental has been lost throughout this transition.

   As already mentioned in the title, Smith’ approach is philosophical. I agree that there is some way of writing history that can respect these two aspects: to be oriented towards intrinsically philosophical issues and to highlight the relevance of past theories for contemporary debates. I personally share this view. History can be useful to deal with present-day problems. But it is really hard to succeed in both tasks. To speak bluntly, I think that from a purely historical point of view, the Gestalt issue is enough complicated as such to deserve a specific and purely historiographic treatment. It should not have been made from his very determinate angle of analysis. For the sake of clarity, local theoretical applications should not have been introduced, especially because the paper is supposed to give a “first raw historical survey”.

   Some clarifications on the Graz circle would have been more relevant to the historical task the author intended to perform. Indeed, instead of mentioning contemporary applications (Thom’s morphodynamics approach in linguistics) in the course of the historical report, the reader would have benefit from a deeper analysis of Meinong’s evolution because of his reading of Ehrenfels’ article (that would have made sense regarding its unique position conferred by Smith), the reason why the process of production is not specified in Meinong’ works (is it not the mere consequence of his purely ontological approach? This lack of explanation was already addressed by Husserl), a presentation (even brief) of Witasek’ experimental works (as done for Benussi) etc.

   Section 5.2 would have required many other materials to be really understandable, section 6 embraces to many different topics: phenomenal causality, attribution of emotions to movements … We are lost in some coarse informations about secondary or related issues and further applications. The synthesis proposed by Kanizsa between the Graz school and the Berlin School cannot be understood without introducing another key figure, namely Wolfgang Metzger, etc. etc.

   Smith switches permanently from some historical considerations to theoretical concerns and the reader doesn’t have the key to properly understand what was really at stake, what were all the options available at that time. Another representative example: while promoting the intermediate views on Gestalt such as those advocated by Kanisza and Rausch, Smith doesn’t even mention that this job was already done few decades before by Karl Bühler or Adhémar Gelb.

   Smith claims not to make a historically detailed survey but instead to reconstruct the steps which are precisely helpful and necessary for his personal theoretical interest and understanding of the philosophical issue in the Gestalt literature. So you can be easily misguided between the different options and Smith’ own interpretation.

   Moreover – from a thematic point of view – he is not all the time absolutely clear about the very issue at stake: for instance, concerning the nature or the formation of Gestalt issues. The ones should have been sharply distinguished. Concerning the second issue (Gestalt formation), at which level this genetic aspect should be treated in priority? There is no single answer to this question, as you can imagine: should it be at the psychological, constitutional (Husserl), physiological or ontological level?

   Smith’ interests are only oriented towards ontological issues. That’s what he means when he claims to speak of Gestalt theory from a philosophical point of view. Thus, when he devotes a lot of pages to the issue of Gestalt formation, he simply ignores all the options except the ontological one. Even when he quickly deals with Husserl’s 3rd Logical Investigation and insists on the “distinction between phenomenological and objective moments of unity” (p. 21) he underestimates its significance on the phenomenological versus ontological treatment of relationships of dependency and he deliberately lets aside the analysis proposed by Husserl on a purely phenomenological (and not ontological) level in his later lectures on Passive Synthesis during the 20s. That will appear surprising only to those who ignore or underestimate the heavy role played by the alleged intellectual and cultural gap between the group of bad German idealists and the group of good Austrian realists (to which Husserl seems to belong until LI) in Smith’ own reasoning.

   Smith devotes a section to Carl Stumpf but only with regards to his late and posthumous Theory of knowledge in which the section about Gestalt is mainly written against his own students (Köhler etc.). I think that Smith generally underestimates the key role played by Stumpf in the whole story:

   – Stumpf was the first to systematically deal with perceptual configurational effects by presenting the phenomenon of tonal fusion in the first volume of his Tonpsychologie (1883) and by systematically investigating it on a conceptual and experimental ground in the second volume published in 1890…

   – This work directly shaped Husserl’ thought in his Philosophy of Arithmetics, 3rd LI etc. Stumpf is his source of inspiration and influence, not Ehrenfels. Please note that Husserl remained always highly critical towards any form of Gestalttheory (Cartesian meditations §16, Husserliana I, p. 77; Formal and transcendental logic § 107c in Husserliana XVII, 291-292; First Philosophy, vol. 1, section II, chap. II, 15th Lesson, in Husserliana VII, p. 109; see also E. Holenstein Phänomenologie der Assoziation, §§ 55 & 60; “Philosophy and the crisis of european man” in Phenomenology and the crisis of philosophy, transl. Quentin Lauer, 1965, p. 88 (critics is here more specifically addressed to Ganzeitpsychologie); Phänomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925 in Husserliana IX, p. 310; “Nachwort zu meinem Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie”, Husserliana V, p. 156). On the phenomenological side, Husserl always favored the description of fusion and not Gestalt phenomena.

   – It also deeply influenced Meinong (who reported the two volumes in highly positive terms).

   – In most debates of that period, it was mainly Stumpf and not Ehrenfels who was almost systematically at the core of debates on the “Gestalt issue”.

   However, the point of departure in Ehrenfels’ 1890 article is understandable because of its particular significance on Meinong’s theory of higher-order object and correlatively Smith’s own. Contrary to Stumpf who stays at a perceptual level of investigation, Ehrenfels provides no restriction? This enlargement is crucial for Smith because by extending the concept of Gestalt beyond sensory contents, he can also consider part/whole relations of dependency or independency in a very general way, as belonging to a pure objects theory or formal ontology. But this enlargement is in itself highly debatable: to what extent can it be applied beyond perception: Cosmogony, Social sciences Aesthetics, epistemology, physics, mathematics, linguistics etc.? It’s precisely that attitude that leads Stumpf and Bühler to consider the very concept of Gestalt as a risky “catch-all-term”…

   A brief historical note: contrary to what is said (Smith, pp. 48-49), Köhler should not be considered as realism friendly. Let me add that he did in no way influence Gibson’s realism. Quite the contrary! Gibson introduced his concept of affordance in contrast with the behavioural/geographical distinction (introduced by Koffka but also admitted by Köhler or Lewin) that he thought too akin to some kind of phenomenalism.

   Generally speaking I am not sure that his fundamental ontological orientation is the only philosophical one (as admitted by Smith) and that it is the most relevant one. Smith would certainly contest such an assumption, but no doubt that for him a genuine philosophical approach requires an ontological analysis and that such an analysis has to be ultimately formal. He clearly put his cards on the table when he claims the philosophical superiority of Graz school over the Berlin school of Gestalt: “ […] even the proponents of the Berlin theory lacked a wider philosophical framework of the sort that had been provided for the Graz psychologists by Meinong and by Brentano.” What has been lost by the Berlin School? “Such philosophical, and above all ontological, clarification is needed, for, without an awareness of the nature and interrelations of the objects with which it deals, an empirical science is in certain sense performing experiments in the dark.” (p. 69). Many of these claims are debatable.

   Furthermore, he writes that it is “in virtue of the lack of such clarification that the Gestalt idea has failed to establish itself securely within the mainstream psychology”. Such a claim does not only provide any evidence for the need of such an ontological clarification, but it is also historically untrue.

   It is first doubtful that any experimental inquiry requires a prior formal ontology to be performed on grounded reasons. This looks like a transcendental – at least foundationalist and infaillibilist – understanding of the role of philosophy towards sciences. But, why such a clarification is needed? How formal ontology could really help empirical sciences? How could it enlighten experimentation for real? This remains particularly unclear, especially because in most of cases Smith extrapolate, generalize ontological properties from ready-made experimental results. The last ones keep priority on knowledge-producing. So, why should they need an ontological analysis? One could also ask: when does Smith make the way back (from ontology to experimentation)? I can’t see such a thing which is yet required to support his philosophical proposal. This is obvious in the note 50, p. 76, when Smith “confesses” that Rausch’ work is limited to “phenomenally given properties” and that “he [Rausch] would almost certainly have reservations in regard of the more general applications which his ideas receive in the text.”

   It is to be feared that, by a lack of philosophical humility and theoretical modesty, Smith’ claim for interdisciplinary remains out of reach. According to me it would have been more relevant and fruitful to show how empirical sciences permanently elaborate their own regional ontologies, that these ones have some clear-cut applications when they are investigated from the ground of contextualized analysis of part/whole relationships for different kinds of patterns.

   The appeal of a “philosophical experimentation” remains also problematic and not really convincing. Smith claims that such experimentation “can test the strength of ideas in a way that is independent of and complementary to what takes place in the laboratory”. What does it really mean? I am a little bit confused… The ontological clarification of Gestalt can only be made locally on the ground of a continuous variation of different and specific types of configural effects and this cannot be made by an alleged “philosophical experimentation”, but with the help of experimental psychology’ methods.

   The main reason for his ontologically oriented view on the concept and the history of Gestalt is easy to find: Smith gives too much weight to Brentano’ ontological apparatus. However, one simple question needs to be addressed here: Why did Brentano never accept the very idea of Gestalt that has been promoted and discussed by his main students? An alleged influence of Brentano on his students is hard to maintain in absence of any justification and its ontological interpretation remains one among other possibilities.

   Even at the methodological level, how much did Brentano actually influence his students on the way to make experimental research? That would have been also interested also to investigate. Smith writes: “Brentano we might say, had set forth a means by which psychology can be made fruitful for the purposes of ontology (…). Brentano showed his students first of all how to notice psychologically given distinctions – for example between the various different sorts of simple and complex mental acts, between the intuitive and non-intuitive components in psychic phenomena of different sorts, between different sorts of phenomenally given boundaries and continuity – but then he showed also how to take these distinctions seriously as the basis of an ontology.” (p. 12) My question is the following one: How did Brentano’s students notice the phenomenon of Gestalt? If Gestalt is a given property of our experience which is noticed, how it is given? Is it given in the evidence of inner perception? But, if it’s evident why did they advocate different conceptions? Do these differences result from different ways to notice and/or from intrinsic different kind of phenomena wrongly put under the same coarse category?

   Anyway, what I find really interesting in the late quotation is its first part (the how issue) more that its second part (the what issue).

   Indeed, from a purely descriptive or phenomenological point of view, the ontological question about the nature of what is seen doesn’t really matter. Issues such as “veridicality” or “truth” have no place in phenomenological accounts of perception theory. As an observer-dependent qualitative science or pre-science, phenomenology of perception is restricted to the circle of perceptual phenomena, phenomena as they appear – per definition – to someone who sees them in a way or another. These ones are considered as objective, having their own structural laws which, at first sight, have to be distinguished from causal laws. Phenomenological properties are existentially dependent on physical properties, but it is not its job to determinate this kind of relationship. It is a basic distinction in phenomenology. Phenomenology is indifferent to the question of an alleged “underlying reality” which would be more real or less objective than the properties highlighted by phenomenological observations and analyses. Phenomenology is first indifferent to the realism/idealism issue.

   This feature has some significant consequences on the way one should address questions about the concept of Gestalt and the kind of responses one should expect from it: Properties investigated by phenomenology, such as Gestalt, don’t have to be transparent, because as it is the case for any phenomenological property, it is no question here to go beyond the circle of phenomena. Phenomenology is the science of phenomena qua phenomena.

   At a phenomenological level, Gestalts are not objects. I would personally suggest that they play the role of a norm under which many objects appear. Gestalts are some kind of perceptual format to what appears. Gestalts are not made of objects but of their manifestation in the field of consciousness. Maybe we should say that objects have a special Gestalt but not that Gestalts are objects (except in a misguided sense).

   In short, according to me, it would have been more intriguing to focus on the how. How do you know that Gestalt phenomena exist? Where do they come from? How do you catch sight of them? How can you describe them? Do the different conceptions of the phenomenon result from different fineness between our perceptual sensitivity and our ability to describe them as they are?
   Concerning Husserl I would suggest the reading of the following section entitled “Primordial Phenomena and Forms of Order within Passive Synthesis” in Analyses concerning passive and active synthesis. Lectures on Transcendantal Logic, pp. 162-195 (I have only access to the German text).

   Now, if our reading group is motivated by the enactivist tradition (to put it quickly), I doubt that the ontological issue on Gestalt is so helpful and even necessary. I would rather suggest some readings in Husserl’s Ding und Raum and some chapters on sensory-motor account of perception by Koffka, Köhler or Heinz Werner.

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   • Hi Charles,

     Thanks for your lengthy contribution – it’s interesting to have some of the historical details of Smith’s account clarified. Certainly he places emphases on people and theories about which not everyone will think it appropriate, and that is interesting to debate in terms of historiography. However, I am not convinced that the chapter is made weaker by the fact that his historical focuses were in large part determined by his philosophical interests and ideas. In fact, this seems like just the way to write a piece like this!

     A more substantive point however is that I disagree with some of your comments in the latter part of your post about the relationship between phenomenology and ontology. In particular, the claims you make such as the following:

     “Indeed, from a purely descriptive or phenomenological point of view, the ontological question about the nature of what is seen doesn’t really matter. Issues such as “veridicality” or “truth” have no place in phenomenological accounts of perception theory. […] Phenomenological properties are existentially dependent on physical properties, but it is not its job to determinate this kind of relationship. It is a basic distinction in phenomenology. Phenomenology is indifferent to the question of an alleged “underlying reality” which would be more real or less objective than the properties highlighted by phenomenological observations and analyses. Phenomenology is first indifferent to the realism/idealism issue.”

     This seems quite seriously out of step with the phenomenological tradition, at least as it understands itself. For example, it is very hard to see how one can “indifferent” to the underlying structure of reality if one’s whole methodological starting point is to bracket various assumptions about that reality. Take Merleau-Ponty’s bracketing of objective thought; the idea that the world is essentially a determinate, mind-independent, causally determined world of partes-extra-partes. His argument in ‘The Phenomenology of Perception’ is that such a set of ontological ideas about the world are in fact unwarranted assumptions derived from a problematic mechanistic scientism, and that – if we buy these assumptions – we cannot explain perception. He therefore brackets them, and looks at the psychological and philosophical data anew. This is Merleau-Ponty’s way of doing phenomenology. Given that this is just one variant of a method which all classical phenomenologists buy into, it seems impossible to reconcile this with the idea that they are indifferent to or neutral on the question of idealism and realism, the status of science as an epistemic project, or the underlying nature of the world. Indeed, there are all sorts of places in Merleau-Ponty’s work where he argues we need to actively move away from this ontological view of the world and discover it anew (for example, the last few pages of the chapter called ‘Association and the Projection of Memories’).

     I think it is important to stress this last point, because one way of thinking of the bracketing that goes on in phenomenology is as bracketing some assumptions which will, after the phenomenological analysis, be let back into the world-view and allowed to roam free. But I don’t think that’s right at all. For starters, we need a reason to be suspicious of some assumptions in order to bracket them. For Merleau-Ponty, it is that objective thought seems unable to give any good account of perception. This already counts so far as I can see as a substantive argument against objective thought. In which case, we might think of the bracketing as the active attempt to avoid letting these ideas into one’s thinking. If this is the case, then phenomenologists display perhaps more concern than others for the nature of the underlying structure of reality! For these reasons I am rather skeptical of arguments which attempt to show that all that’s going in phenopmenology is making explicit some prosaic features of perception without any implications for ontology. In his lectures on Merleau-Ponty, Hubert Dreyfus pushes this line and this leads him to some very strange readings of some of the passages in that book.

     And I suppose this relates to another point I wanted to make about your comment: you say that if we are coming from the enactivist tradition, broadly speaking, the ontology of Gestalten should not concern us. But this seems to precisely pre-judge the claim made by phenomenologists that we can gain some understanding of ontology by doing phenomenology. Given the Gestalt is a structural feature of perception, and reflection on perception is supposed to at least affect our ontology, the ontology of Gestalten seem to matter for anyone who takes themselves to follow the phenomenological tradition’s tenets.

     Lastly, I am not sure about the claim that notions of veridicality and truth are not of interest to phenomenology. This seems a little off to me. For example, one use that Merleau-Ponty has for the notion of the Gestalt is to argue that fundamentally perception is normatively structured such that there are better and worse perceptual epistemic actions. For example, if I want to see the details of a painting that is far away, I should move in, and I am in fact solicited by the situation to do so as to best see it. We can see this idea of moving to get a better view as moving to allow one’s perceptual experience to be more veridical. Both are normative relations and seem quite tightly tied. So insofar as phenomenology notices these normative features of perception, there will be some relationship between these and notions like truth and veridicality. I obviously haven’t said an awful lot about these connections, but it seems to me that there is one.

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     • Thanks Will for your comments!

       Actually, we disagree about the nature of phenomenology. I give you only few sketchy responses:

       *My remarks are indeed quite seriously out of step with the phenomenological …. “movement” – so to speak quite optimistically (we can also speak later about this optimistic or illusory stance if you wish) – but certainly not with what you wrongly mention as the “phenomenological tradition”. You have to be careful here not to confuse between the two and I invite you to keep your distance with this unfortunate but popular tendency to think that phenomenology (as a method and/or as a discipline, it doesn’t matter here) was founded at the beginning of the XXth century with the work of Husserl and his heirs (with whom, by the way, he remained highly critical during his entire life, except with few of his closest students such as Eugen Fink or Dorion Cairns. It would be instructive, by the way, to understand why, even though the answer will always be painful for the mainstream philosophico-phenomenologists).
       Husserl himself explicitly disagreed with that interpretation. In some Conferences held in Amsterdam in 1928 [Hua vol. IX, p. 302], he declares that his own philosophy has to be interpreted as a radicalization of an already existing approach that can be found in the writings of physiologists such as Ernst Mach (one more time!), Ewald Hering and in Brentano’s psychology. Husserl labels this approach or method as “phenomenological”. Let me briefly precise that Mach and Hering (the Prag School where Ehrenfels graduated) introduced a phenomenological approach because they were reacting against the lack of theoretical foundations in natural sciences and against the naturalist reductionism which coincided with some metaphysical assumption. In his “Philosophy as a rigorous science” [Hua vol. XXV, p. 20), Husserl mentions Theodor Lipps and Carl Stumpf as two living examples of psychologists performing phenomenology. In Ideen III [Hua vol. V, p. 58], Husserl mentions Lotze as a phenomenologist. I cannot here multiply the examples.

       From the point of view of the history of psychology – to which belongs Ehrenfels – one can say that until the 1940s the two founding and key-figures of phenomenology for most of experimental psychologists – from David Katz to Karl Bühler or Ernst Jaensch among many others – are Ewald Hering and Carl Stumpf. On the other side –the philosophico-philosophical interpretation of phenomenology – it was actually Heidegger (and not Husserl who was still alive at that time!) who became – from 1929 with the publication of Sein und Zeit – the effective key-figure of the so-called “phenomenological movement”.

       *So, yes, I will intentionally 🙂 stay out of the so-called “phenomenological movement” as such. But I understand how obscure and even understandable my point of view can appear from a transcendental-constitutive approach that is yours and according to which there is a “problem of reality”.

       *According to me, phenomenology is a transdisciplinary discipline. It is not strictly philosophical, not strictly scientific. However, depending on the perspective promoted, issues at stake are not really the same.

       Personally, I would say that purely philosophical approach of phenomenology, investigating the ESSENCE of phenomena, asking more the question of the ESSENCE of phenomenology than performing phenomenology itself, tends to push phenomena themselves (the ones we are supposed to come back!) a little bit out of sight and, not surprisingly, to underestimate correlatively the theoretical significance of psychology and natural sciences in general. Most of philosophical phenomenologists speak, DISCUSS of phenomena discovered by psychologists and other natural scientists, they refer to them as second-hand phenomena. They only rarely make some effort to stay some time among them, to discover them, to describe them. When they make it, I really doubt that a transcendental attitude is required. Most of Husserl’s fundamental phenomenological results were obtained before his transcendental turn. This is far from being a surprise, since this turn is a response to the issue that concerns the status of phenomenology as a philosophical discipline. “What is phenomenology? Under which conditions can phenomenology be considered as a philosophical discipline?” are maybe the more important and – in any case – the most debated questions among philosophical phenomenologists during the XXth century.

       In §13 of his Erkenntislehre, Stumpf already criticized Husserl’s phenomenology for being ultimately a “phenomenology without phenomena” (and yet Stumpf also promoted what Husserl did before). I believe that he was right and, more importantly, that he represents a genuine trend in phenomenology which represents an alternative to the “philosophical movement” and the traditional way to write history of phenomenology.

       *Once more, phenomenology will never be in position to EXPLAIN anything. That is simply not its subject-matter.

       *When you speak of bracketing, you also have to pay attention to what extent this reduction (according to Husserl’s terminology) is applied. For instance, still from a Husserlian perspective, there are at least three kinds of reductions: 1) eidetic reduction, 2) psycho-phenomenological reduction, 3) transcendental reduction. If you stay focused on the first period of development of Husserl’s thought you can speak of phenomenology without reaching the third step. What I mean here is that there is not a single interpretation of what phenomenology is, how it should be performed, what one should expect from it etc. even from the perspective of a purely philosophical interpretation. Even in the so-called “phenomenological movement”, many of Husserl’s “heirs” criticized the transcendental step (for instance, Ricoeur in his study about the will).

       *It’s not an accident that you are inclined to adopt Merleau-Ponty’s perspective. There would be a lot of things to tell about him, but one point needs first to be reminded: MP belongs to a tiny circle of Husserl’s heirs – in which we find also Oskar Becker, Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schutz – that is not representative to the so-called “phenomenological movement” in the sense that he kept alive this scientific orientation of phenomenology that remained so fundamental in Husserl’s entire work.

       There is of course no doubt that Merleau-Ponty progressively and always more developed an ontological approach but he did it in order to OVERPASS the standpoint of phenomenology. This is particularly obvious in The visible and the invisible (1964). The word ontology came up in his mind while he was exploring the LIMITS of phenomenology. At that point, phenomenology needed to be transformed in its approach and intent.

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       • For those interested in Merleau-Ponty and his ontological approach I recommend the works of the two French philosophers and specialists of MP: Renaud Barbaras and Emmanuel de Saint Aubert. Only few texts from Barbaras are available in English:
         – Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception (Stanford University Press, 2005)
         – The Being of Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Indiana University Press, 2004)
         And unfortunately none from Saint-Aubert in English. For those who read the French:
         – Vers une ontologie indirecte. Sources et enjeux critiques de l’appel à l’ontologie chez Merleau-Ponty, Paris, Vrin, 2006
         – Du corps au désir. L’habilitation ontologique de la chair, I, Paris, Vrin, 2013

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