A new prospect of First-Person-Perspective

One central issue in philosophy concerns the relation between subjects and world. While describing this relation the project at issue paves the way for reconciliation of philosophical disciplines and traditions (phenomenology, philosophy of mind, hermeneutics). It also improves our understanding of how scientific, philosophical and every- day life discourses on the issues of subjectivity, reality etc. are related to each other. The main thesis of the project is that a proper understanding of human subjectivity requires to analyse our first-person-experience as the starting point of all our theoretical or non-theoretical activities. It is only by means of carefully describing and analysing the constitutive parts and structures of subjectivity, e.g. of our perceptions or encounters with others, that we shall be able to judge on the prospects and limits of scientific explanations of subjectivity. In contemporary philosophical discussions it is a common practice to speak of cognitive science or neuroscience as possible sciences of subjectivity which replace both our traditional philosophical theories of subjectivity as well as our everyday intuitions concerning our existence as conscious, autonomous subjects. According to the so called "neurophilosophy" human subjectivity is nothing but a brain function or - on a more abstract level - the outcome of a complex information system. Consequently, being a subject is considered in terms of being a very complex object. Challenging this view we argue as follows: (1) In our everyday life there is no "body-mind-problem". Under normal circumstances we are not puzzled by the two-sidedness of our existence as both conscious subjects and bodily objects, nor do we question the existence of an objective world: we live in changing meaningful contexts without questioning them. Accordingly, our first- person-perspective (fpp) does not represent a thing-like entity in the world, but, instead, our way of relating to the world. If we are right in maintaining that fpp is part of the formal structure underlying every single act of referring to something, it is obvious that representing objects and representing the formal structure by means of which objects can be grasped are different activities at different levels of research. (2) It nevertheless is necessary to point to an ambiguity of the term "fpp" which results from the fact that, with regard to every particular instance of an experience, we can direct our attention either to meaning contents or to formal aspects. On the one hand, every experience that is relevant and manifest for a subject represents an fpp. On the other hand, the term "fpp" refers to the general way we perceive the world, namely in perspectives. Laying bare the correlative structures, realized in different kinds of experiences and their correlating manifestations in terms of appearing things and processes, is the main interest of a phenomenological inquiry. In order to phenomenologically analysing the modes of referring to the world, it is required to go beyond our personal involvement with the objects of reference. Insofar as reflection is an intentional experience, too, it is obvious that going beyond our everyday- attitude in favour of a phenomenological attitude does not mean to go beyond the sphere of subjectivity. On the contrary, it means to explicitly refer to the subjective presuppositions of our everyday as well as scientific experiences. Consequently, reflection is considered an indispensable tool to critically analyse our theoretical and non-theoretical activities albeit it does not represent an absolute point of view (which is a highly problematic and self-stultifying idea). In this sense we may say that the fpp is both the point of departure and the end-point of investigation. (3) In contrast to this phenomenological approach, philosophical naturalism uses the results of natural sciences in order to explain the fpp in terms of very complex objects in the world (brain processes, behaviour, information units etc.). This specific research project does not imply and does not promote attempts to radically reflect upon its own presuppositions. Natural science is directed towards and limited to its objects of investigation. Naturalism results from ignoring this limitation by tacitly supposing that reality as a whole is nothing but the sum total of objects accessible to natural scientific investigations. Phenomenology as anti-naturalism does not criticise the natural sciences, it rather questions the attempt to tacitly generalize the scientific attitude and argues that, given this to be the essential bias of naturalistic theories, the onus is on them to justify the generalization at issue. Naturalistic theories cannot explain why and how we should replace the first-person-giveness of our experiences by third- person-descriptions. (4) The irreducibility of the fpp has several implications with regard to philosophical, scientific, ethical and social discourses. It is only by means of critically evaluating the relation between different perspectives within philosophy and science that we shall succeed in withholding a one-sided, monistic thinking which tacitly and rashly replaces our meaningful, conscious life by mental representations, neurons, computer-models etc.