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Reality, Realness, and the Natural Attitude

Article in Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology June 2012

DOI: 10.1353/ppp.2012.0022

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Reality, Realness, and the Natural Attitude
Matthew Broome

Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, Volume 19, Number 2, June

2012, pp. 115-118 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/ppp.2012.0022

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 Reality, Realness,
and the Natural
Attitude
Keywords: Husserl, phenomenology, reality, delusions,
psychosis
V
arga offers us an impressive account
of the work phenomenological psychopa-
thology has generated in linking experi-
ence 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 commen-
surate 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 realnessthe background sense
of certainty. (2012, 108)
2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
Matthew Broome
If it was the case that the content of the experience
was propositional, it would either be incommu-
nicable or delusional and hence, we would either
not know about it or it would cease to be deper-
sonalization/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 in-
teract 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, 601)
Philosophers can use the transcendental phenom-
enological reduction to free ourselves of the natu-
116 PPP / Vol. 19, No. 2 / June 2012
ral attitude to determine the meaning of entities as
given to us in consciousness. This latter reduction
is given various names throughout Husserls work
by combining the terms phenomenological or
transcendental with either reduction or epoch.
Following Crowell (2009) and Russell (2006),
I refer to this reduction as having two stages:
the psychological stage or epoch, and the latter
stage being the transcendental phenomenological
reduction.
The epoch 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 reduc-
tion, the epoch 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 epoch is
to put belief in the world-horizon to one side and
hence, importantly, all the explanatory theories
that come with it. Thus, the epoch allows the
intentional mental state to be viewed apart from
the reality of what it is intending, and free of be-
lief as to its causal structure, and freeing it from
being merely another entity in the world to be
examined naturalistically. The epoch, 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 re-
duction further, that other phenomenologists, in
particular Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, felt that
the epoch was either unnecessary or impossible,
and that phenomenology need not aspire to on-
tological neutrality. This also relates to a wider,
Wittgensteinian, point relevant to Vargas paper:
even with errors in this world, such as hallucina-
tion and illusions, they can occur only against a
background, or horizon, the world, that remains
constant and firm (Crowell 2009). You can doubt
within the world and the natural attitude, but it
itself cannot be in doubt. This thesis bares some
striking resemblance to the arguments regarding
doubt and belief advanced by Wittgenstein in
On Certainty (1969). Hence, for someone with
depersonalization, saying it is as if I am not real
can only be said against a backdrop, perversely,
of a strong sense of reality and the natural at-
titude. As argued elsewhere, even in those with a
psychotic illness such as schizophrenia, if open to
intersubjectivity, communication, and the giving
and receiving of reasons, then it cannot be claimed
that there is a loss of vital pre-reflective contact
with reality, as Blankenberg and Minkowski claim.
If this contact was lost, so would communication
be, and we as interviewers would be faced with
an epistemological void as to the contents of the
interviewees mental state. We would not even be
able to positively know that they were deluded.
To complete the removal of the natural at-
titude, after first stage in which the epoch strips
away the default meaning we have in the natural
attitude, the transcendental phenomenological
reduction focuses on the meaning of the object as it
is given to us. The reduction allows us to examine
how objects are intentionally constituted, what
their sense or meaning is in consciousness. Fur-
ther, it shows us that there is a radical seperability
from psychical acts from the world, due to the
immanence of mental events. As Crowell puts it:
The basic idea is relatively simple. The same entity can
be experienced in a variety of ways: this rock, which I
kick out of the way as an impediment, is subsequently
picked up by my geologist neighbour as a fine specimen
of Texas granite. The same rock is given each time with
a different meaning. According to Husserl, we must
attribute these differences not solely to the thing itself
(though they belong to it) but to the consciousness
that experiences them in these ways, because only the
conscious act explains why at this moment just these
aspects of the object are experienced, why my experience
has this content. (Crowell 2009, 21)
The transcendental reduction this leaves us with
is a realm to investigate independent of the world,
and in doing so, makes conspicuous facts of the
world that had previously been hidden from us.
Phenomenology sees consciousness as primal and
primary, the object that grants all others their
status, whereas psychology, as part of the natural
attitude, sees consciousness as an object to be
studied alongside others (Russell 2006). Russell
sums up where the reductions leave us:
 Broome / Reality, Realness, and the Natural Attitude
phenomenology is about staying with the conscious
experience of the world itself, tarrying awhile, observ-
ing it in all its variety and in all of its dimensions, and
then describing it according to its structures. (Russell
2006, 73)
For the patientphenomenologist, after conducting
the transcendentalphenomenological reduction
on his or her experiences of depersonalization will
be left of the meaning of their body, their person,
for them: as something perhaps lifeless, ethereal,
or disconnected from others. As such, the disorder
lies in an immanent feature of consciousness and
how that consciousness feels about itself and its
relation with reality and, as such, does not say
anything about reality at all.
Psychopathology and Reality
As Varga points out, depersonalization and
derealization are characterized by feelings of
unreality and a general sense of unfamiliarity
(Varga 2012, 103). Hence, such patients are not
making statement about what does, or does not,
exist; they are talking about how they feel. When
one learns clinical psychopathology, we are taught
that depersonalization and derealization are as if
phenomena. That is to say, a patient with a dere-
alization says, it is as if the world doesnt exist or
is a dream, or with depersonalization it is as if I
am not really here or separated from the real world
by a glass. Hence, it is the affective attunement
with the world and others that seems altered,
rather than any more propositional knowledge or
beliefs as to what does or does not exist. Further,
depersonalization and derealization are normal
states as Varga points out: we can all access them
if anxious, fatigued, intoxicated, or under threat
(Roquentin in Sartres Nausea, for example), in-
deed the links with other psychopathological states
such as dissociation have been under examined.
In addition to being as if, depersonalization and
derealization need to be unpleasant, but apart
from this feature, this emotional distance and
disconnection can be a state that some individuals
aspire to through meditative practices or indeed,
practices we may try and inculcate therapeutically
(such as the use of mindfulness therapy in mood
disorders). As Varga notes, researchers and clini-
117
cians make a distinction between primary and
secondary depersonalization disorders, with the
former occurring in the absence of other psychiat-
ric disorder, whereas the latter occur in the context
of an additional psychopathology. The primary
disorders are relatively uncommon in normal
clinical practice yet are seen in specialist services;
however, secondary depersonalization is quite
common, perhaps because we all can experience
the phenomenon when in certain states, as noted.
Perhaps one of the settings where I increasingly see
patients who report feelings of depersonalization
and/or derealization is in those who are at clinical
high risk of developing psychosis, and indeed such
symptoms are scored as part of the standardized
tools we use for assessing risk of developing a
frank psychotic illness (Broome and Fusar-Poli
2012). Thinking about psychosis, it is worth con-
trasting those who are deluded and hold beliefs
about the existence and realness of themselves and
the world with those who have as if deperson-
alization and derealization. Varga comments that
those with delusions may have derealization and/
or depersonalization, but I would suggest that it
would not so much be that the derealization and/
or depersonalization reached psychotic intensity
or became delusional in its conviction, but rather
that these experiences were present alongside their
psychotic symptoms of delusion and hallucination.
Patients may develop beliefs about themselves not
existing and we would tend to call this a nihilistic
delusion, or eponymously, Cotards. Although I do
not know of any traditional psychopathological
terms that name the phenomena about the world
being unreal or the individual being the only real
entity, but together with colleagues weve referred
to such delusional beliefs variously as Truman
Show/Matrix/Solipsistic delusions (Fusar-Poli et
al. 2008) and they do occur. The latter two terms
point to the idea that only you, the sufferer are
real, and everything else is a simulacrum, a fiction,
typically created by some high technology device
or civilization. The Truman belief carries the
added thought that the individual is also being
continually monitored, kept under surveillance,
and possibly experimented on. The differences
between these patients, who have become deluded,
and those who remain in a delusional mood
118 PPP / Vol. 19, No. 2 / June 2012
prodromally with depersonalization and derealiza-
tion is that for the former dialogue becomes very
difficult. The interviewer, in the solipsistic belief
system, is simply not a person; in Cotards, the very
questions one asks can seem nonsensical or inco-
herent. And this is the point that links Husserls
reflections on the natural attitude with clinical
psychopathology: for those who hold delusional
beliefs about their own existence, that of others or
the world, communication almost stops, whereas
for those who believe as if they or the world may
be unreal, it continues. Hence, as with Hume and
skepticism, bracketing the natural attitude can be
useful if confined to the philosophers study, but
if the attitude is lost wholly then, given its con-
stitutive role in rationality, inter-subjectivity and
communication can vanish. On this account, we
have sympathy with Vargas conceptualization of
depersonalization and derealization as a change
in the feeling of reality rather than in contact or
knowledge of reality. It should not be assumed
that there is a loss of contact with reality. And to
end with the Varga quote with which we opened:
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 realnessthe background sense
of certainty. (2012, 108)
Thus, if it was that the content of the experience
was propositional, it would either be incommu-
nicable or delusional and hence, we would either
not know about it or it would cease to be deper-
sonalization/derealization.
References
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Fusar-Poli, P., O. Howes, L. Valmaggia, and P. McGuire.
2008. Truman signs and vulnerability to psychosis.
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Varga, S. 2012. Depersonalization and the sense of
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