Beyond Panpsychism : the radicality of phenomenology

Beyond Panpsychism : the radicality of phenomenology

Michel Bitbol

Abstract: A central presupposition of science is that objectivity is universal. Although this presupposition is the basis of the success of scientific inquiry, it also creates a blindspot in which the conscious knower/objectifier is hidden, ignored, or surreptitiously objectified (which is tantamount to ignore it). Several strategies were accordingly adopted in the West to overcome this induced ignorance. One of them is Phenomenology, with its project of performing a complete suspension of judgments (epochè) about the alleged objective world, and evaluating any claim of knowledge, together with its activity of objectification, on the basis of lived experience. Another one is panpsychist, or rather pan-experientialist metaphysics, that puts back lived experience in the very domain that was deprived of it by the act of objectifying. I will compare these approaches, thereby establishing a hierarchy of radicality  between avoiding the blindspot from the outset and compensating for it retrospectively.

I am not likely to be mistaken as a scholar, so it may not be reasonable for me to expect to see the sensibility in his first sentence: "Pure experience is beyond (or below) the level of being, and has no essence, namely no property that would distinguish “it” from anything else."

The article goes on like that.

As I understand his point, he is ignoring emerging understanding that there may be no such thing as "pure experience." Instead, there is always colored experience based on personal truth.

I am not likely to be mistaken as a scholar, so it may not be reasonable for me to expect to see the sensibility in his first sentence: "Pure experience is beyond (or below) the level of being, and has no essence, namely no property that would distinguish “it” from anything else."

The article goes on like that.

As I understand his point, he is ignoring emerging understanding that there may be no such thing as "pure experience." Instead, there is always colored experience based on personal truth.

I don't think he's arguing against biases coloring our PoVs, rather by pure experience I think he just means in that first sentence that there's experience prior to self-reflection.