Thomas Fuchs. What is phenomenology [The Significance of Phenomenology Today]
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«…the significance of phenomenology today lies not only in being a science of consciousness. Rather, it is the phenomenology of the prereflective, lived body, of our embodied and extended subjectivity that is able to challenge current mainstream paradigms in cognitive neuroscience, social cognition and also in psychiatry.


I have chosen schizophrenia as the paradigm case for an extended and ecological concept of mental disorders. But it may still serve another purpose: The disembodied, detached experience of schizophrenic patients resembles in many respects the disembodied, representationalist concepts of mainstream cognitive science and mainstream social cognition. Let me remind you of Thomas Metzinger’s quotation: «First, our brains generate a world simulation, so perfect that we do not recognize it as an image in our minds. Then, they generate an inner image of ourselves as a whole (…) We are not in direct contact with outside reality or with ourselves (…) We live our conscious lives in the Ego Tunnel.»

Somewhat pointedly, one could say: If we were all schizophrenic, then Thomas Metzinger would be right. We would then feel a split between ourselves and our body which we would have to steer from the outside like a Cartesian Ego. We would not inhabit the world through the medium of our body but we would feel distant to the world, not really present, like on a foreign planet. And (if Metzinger were right) we would not empathically understand others but would have to theorize about them in order to make sense of their puzzling behaviour. We would indeed live our lives the Ego Tunnel.

This is fortunately not the case. Fortunately, we are no movies produced by a brain but we are embodied living beings; fortunately, we do not live in a Matrix world in our heads but in a life-world that we share with one another. The significance of phenomenology today may be seen in helping us to recognize our human condition again and to understand it in a new and deeper way.»