Phenomenology, Pragmatism and the Question of Monism. Husserl, James, and Mead in Comparison.

The aim of this article is to highlight some fundamental similarities between Husserl’s phenomenology, on one hand, and the pragmatism of James and Mead, on the other hand, which revolve around the common critique of the dualism of subject and object and the valorization of the empirical quality of experience, namely the priority of perception over the operations of abstraction and objectivation typical of positive science. These common assumptions contribute to delineating in all three authors a position that we define here, with reference to Russell’s well-known label, as “monistic”; however, these are three variants of monism that present crucial differences. While in the case of James and Mead it is correct to speak of a radical neutral monism – where the very duality or polarity of subject and object is called into question – in Husserl, we should rather speak of a tempered experiential monism, in which a polarity or tension between subject and object is maintained while simultaneously affirming the priority of the unity of subjective experience. Our goal is to substantiate a monistic interpretation of intentionality and experience, which allows for a richer description of knowledge as a process. The proposed reading assumes that the authors analyzed are actively attempting to move from an ontology of substances (static) to an ontology of processes (dynamic).