Reality, Realness, and the Natural Attitude

Varga offers us an impressive account of the work phenomenological psychopathology has generated in linking experience of realness with intersubjectivity and goes further in relating this work to depersonalization and derealization. There are two points in this excellent paper that I would like to explore a little. First, how essential is a strong sense of reality for rationality and communication, or rather, can total suspension of the natural attitude be commensurate with communication? Second, and more clinically, should we interpret what those with depersonalization say literally? A uniting theme in these comments is the thought that, although patients complain of a change in their sense of reality, it should not be assumed that there is a loss of contact with reality. Rather, as Varga writes

Reports of DP patients who communicate experiences of unreality must be understood as referring to an altered pre-intentional background, a changed relatedness to the world, which in turn diminishes the basic sense of realness that gives us a sense of what it is for something to be. Instead of merely being propositional attitudes, such reports are first and foremost expressions of the (diminished) sense of realness—the background sense of certainty.

(2012, 108)

If it was the case that the content of the experience was propositional, it would either be incommunicable or delusional and hence, we would either not know about it or it would cease to be depersonalization/derealization.

Reality and the Natural Attitude

For Husserl and phenomenology, the natural attitude is nothing terribly obscure, ultimately: it is simply the default common sense view of the world we all share. We believe, for example, that things we encounter in our day-to-day world are as they present themselves, are real, and will interact in our common-sense, physical conception of the world. The world of the natural attitude is there for all of us, not just me (Russell 2006). For Husserl, the natural attitude is thus positing the world as the horizon of being: as Russell puts it,

essential to the natural attitude is the positing of the world itself (not just individual entities) as independent of my experience of it, as extending beyond my field of spatial experience, as extending beyond my temporal experience, and so forth. This ‘positing’ of the world, which sets up the ‘universal horizon,’ is what Husserl calls ‘the general positing which characterises he natural attitude.’

(2006, 60–1)

Philosophers can use the transcendental phenomenological reduction to free ourselves of the natural attitude to determine the meaning of entities as given to us in consciousness. This latter reduction is given various names throughout Husserl’s work by combining the terms phenomenological or transcendental with either reduction or epoché. Following Crowell (2009) and Russell (2006), I refer to this reduction as having two stages: the psychological stage or epoché, and the latter stage being the transcendental phenomenological reduction.

The epoché or psychological reduction is the first step to peel back the natural attitude. It is not so much an attempt at extreme doubt and skepticism, for example as in Descartes, but rather, as the first step in the phenomenological reduction, the epoché takes the existence of objects we encounter no longer for granted: it ‘brackets’ world belief and sets aside the real being of what presents itself to us. The purpose of the epoché is to put belief in the world-horizon to one side and hence, importantly, all the explanatory theories that come with it. Thus, the epoché allows the intentional mental state to be viewed apart from the reality of what it is intending, and free of belief as to its causal structure, and freeing it from being merely another entity in the world to be examined naturalistically. The epoché, if you will, is a ‘brake,’ something to be applied to stop our default ontological and causal assumption from running free. It brackets out all aspects of being ‘outside,’ leaving only immanent mental acts as the subject matter for phenomenology. Consciousness becomes everything and the world drops away.

It is worth noting, before addressing the reduction further, that...