Why Did I Move Away from Phenomenology? Part I

I met with Steven Nemes recently for a productive and intense discussion of people, politics, religion, and in particular the metaphysics of individuality and possibility.  I think of Nemes as my 'philosophical grandson.' Although never formally my student, he discovered my A Paradigm Theory of Existence when he was a freshman at Arizona State University, read it, understood it, and initiated a relationship which has proven profitable and enjoyable for both of us. And while I have had some (good) influence on Nemes, he is independently minded and in no way my 'disciple.'

When we last met, he mentioned his move from analytic philosophy to phenomenology and asked why I had gone in the other direction.  Herewith, the first  in a series of posts  in explanation of my move, which was less of a move away from phenomenology and more of a move into analytic philosophy.  I will also take the occasion to revisit my life-long fascination with Husserl.

As an undergraduate I was introduced to phenomenology by John Maraldo, a freshly-minted Ph.D. from the University of Munich. John was in his late twenties and just starting his teaching career.  (He is now an emeritus at the University of North Florida.) As I recall, in that Winter quarter of 1971 Maraldo assigned difficult readings from Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. It was Husserl who became the cynosure of my interest, although, curiously enough, I have published only one article on Husserl but half-dozen or so on Heidegger.  I was particularly fascinated by Husserl's Ideas I (1913) and his project of founding philosophy as strict science (strenge Wissenschaft) by means of a method that was not argumentative or dialectical or aporetic, but descriptive.

I was an electrical engineering major in love with philosophy. I saw it as a high calling worthy of a life's devotion, and I still do, but I was troubled by the notorious fact that philosophers have never been able to agree on anything despite centuries of intense effort by the best and the brightest.  My youthful question to my youthful self was: Can philosophy be taken seriously as a vocation by one who takes life seriously? So I turned to Husserl for an answer. He became my hero, his picture on my wall, his Persönliche Aufzeichnungen practically memorized.  (His picture is still on my wall, a different picture on a different wall.) For a time, in the '70s, I thought of establishing myself as a Husserl scholar.  Husserl's autobiographical Wie kann ich ein ehrlich Philosoph sein? and his Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben nicht leben! struck a chord in me.  They still do.  "How can I be an honest philosopher?" "Without certainty, I just can't live!"  (See A Meditation on Certainty on Husserl's Birthday.)

But I came to realize that Husserl failed like the great Kant and others before him despite the intensity of his efforts protracted over a lifetime. Like Kant, Husserl failed to set philosophy on "the sure path of science." (CPR Bvii)  He wanted to lay the foundations upon which others would cooperatively set brick by brick.  Nothing like that came to pass. He was blessed with many brilliant students, among them, Martin Heidegger, Roman Ingarden, and Edith Stein, but each trod his own path.  Stein's path led her to Aquinas and onto-theology. She penned a remarkable piece on faith and reason in which she imagines a dialog between her two masters, Husserl and Thomas.  Ingarden broke with the master over the question of idealism and the mode of existence of the real world. Heidegger's "hermeneutic of facticity," among other things, involves a rejection of Husserl's quest for a presuppositionless starting point.  And now my mind drifts back to a remark Maraldo, glossing Heidegger, made in class one day, something along the lines of: presuppositionlessness (Voraussetzungslosigkeit) is the biggest presupposition of them all.  (Maraldo wrote his dissertation on the hermeneutical circle in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Heidegger.)

Few ever practiced Husserlian phenomenology; the creative minds went their own way while the lesser lights occupied themselves with endless exegeses of the master's texts and endless controversies over what he meant or ought to have meant. Husserl himself spent most of his energies on laying the foundations for his would-be strenge Wissenschaft rather than doing phenomenology.  (This is not to discount the wealth of concrete analyses to be found in his Nachlass.) There is a nasty little quip to the effect that Husserl spent so much time sharpening his pencil that he never got around to writing anything.

The Question of Idealism

Alles, was ich je als wahrhaft Seiendes einsehen kann, ist gar nichts anderes als ein intentionales Vorkommnis meines eigenen -- des Erkenneden -- Lebens . . . . (Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil, Theorie der Phaenomenologischen Reduktion, Husserliana Band VIII, S. 184 f.)

A central issue that grabbed my attention early on was the problem of idealism, and the related problem of the status of transcendental subjectivity. Clearly, the status of the object and the status of the subject 'go together' to put it schematically. Maraldo had assigned Husserl's Ideas I (1913). I recall puzzling over the notorious section 49  wherein we read:  "Thus no real thing, none that consciously presents and manifests itself though appearances is necessary for the Being of consciousness . . . ." (Boyce Gibson tr., 137)  Husserl goes on to tell us that consciousness, immanent Being, is absolute in the sense that it needs no real thing in order to exist: nulla res indiget ad existendum.  "The transcendent res," by contrast, "is unreservedly related to consciousness."  Thus the transcendent thing, the tree in the garden, for example, in its perceived "bodily presence" (Leibhaftigkeit) is transcendent, but only in relation to consciousness. Its mode of Being (Seinsweise) is transcendence-in-immanence. The Being of the tree is thus relative to consciousness. The tree does not exist in itself, in the manner of a Kantian thing in itself (Ding an sich) but neither is it a content of consciousness.  A content is something contained in something else, and the tree in the garden is not contained in my consciousness of it. Specifically, it is not a real content (ein reeller Inhalt) of any act or intentional experience (Erlebnis) trained upon it. One 'lives through' (er-lebt) the act, but one does not live through the accusative of the act, the tree as presented to the act in just the way it is presented to the act.  So in that sense the tree, precisely as presented from this angle, in this lighting, with these and these perceived features etc., is transcendent of the act (intentional Erlebnis, cogitatio) and also transcendent of the subject of the act, the ego of the cogitatio. But again, it is a transcendence-in-immanence.  It is not absolutely transcendent, but transcendent in relation to consciousness. 

In sum, we have two modes of Being, absolute and relative.  Absolute Being is immanent Being; relative Being is transcendent Being.  The ego and its cogitationes are on the side of immanent Being and they exist absolutely. They can be brought to adequate and indubitable givenness unlike physical items such as the tree in our example which are given presumptively and inadequately.  The cogitata qua cogitata are on the side of transcendent Being and they exist only for consciousness, although not in consciousness. 

A fundamental insight of Husserl, already in his Fifth Logical Investigation, is that outer perception, the seeing of a tree for example, cannot be assimilated to image-consciousness (Bildbewusstsein).   There is consciousness of things via images, pictures, and the like, as when, looking up now at my framed photograph of Husserl at his writing table, I am put in mind of Husserl himself.  But this pictorial 'presentification' (Vergegenwaertigung) presupposes and is impossible without direct perceptual presentation of the photograph.  We cannot, therefore, understand outer perception in terms of image-consciousness. Perception (Warhnehmung)  is not a species of Bildbewusstsein. Thus there is nothing in the mind or in the brain that mediates the ego's perceptual commerce with the thing.  I explain this rather more clearly in Husserl's Critique of the Image Theory of Consciousness. The theme is repeated by Heidegger and other phenomenologists. I recall a passage in Sein und Zeit (1927) wherein Heidegger remarks that we don't hear sensations; we hear the motorcycle roaring through the alley.  No epistemic deputies need apply.

It was clear to me then and is clear to me now that Husserl is espousing a form of idealism, as he himself states in passage after passage. What was not clear to me then but is clearer to me now is the nature and (un)tenability of Husserl's idealism.  My young self was  confronted with two sets of problems with respect to Husserl's idealism.   The first concerned the status of the subject and the second the status of the intentional object.  In this entry I will discuss only the first set.

The Status of  Subjectivity

What is the nature of the ego to which the world is relative?  Evidently, this ego cannot be another mundane item.  The world whole cannot depend for its appearing/Being on some measly part of the world. But neither can the ego to which the world is relative be extra-mundane: the intentionality of consciousness refers consciousness and its I-pole to the world as to its object, and it does so necessarily.  So the ego to which the world is relative must be pre-mundane or transcendental in roughly the Kantian as opposed to the Scholastic sense of the term.  

On the other hand, this ego must be accessible to the philosopher seeking an absolute foundation for knowledge in intuitive givenness.  (Husserl's overriding, life-long goal was to discover an absolutely indubitable foundation for all knowledge. He viewed the fate of the West as bound up with the attainment of this goal.)  If it is to be directly accessible, the knowing I and its acts cannot be the terminus of an inferential process, a transcendental argument as on a Kantian or neo-Kantian approach. The pure ego cannot be an inferred entity or theoretical posit. The ego and its cogitationes (this latter term taken in its broad Cartesian sense to embrace every type of intentional experience) must be immediately accessible in adequate evidence to the meditating philosopher who is not an eidos-ego but a factical ego.

The problem is one of reconciling  the transcendentality of the ultimate or pure ego with its facticity. How do they 'fit together' if they do?  Once the ego of the natural attitude has been purified of everything mundane, how could there be anything left over that is factical and individual? The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not eo ipso an eidetic reduction, a reduction to the eidos-ego.  The trans-phen reduction is a reduction to the ego that is je meines, in every case my transcendental ego.  This ego somehow survives the bracketing of existence as an individual ego. The problem of reconciling transcendentality and facticity arises because Husserl tries to erect transcendental philosophy on a Cartesian-Brentanian foundation. He is motivated to attempt this by his quest for certainty, for an absolute and indubitable epistemic foundation.

I now proceed to formulate more precisely this problem that exercised me and still does. I will assume, with Husserl, the distinctions articulated in the schema: ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum.   (This assumption is hardly self-evident and was hotly contest by later phenomenologists such as the early Sartre. One can question both phenomenologically and dialectically whether there is an I or ego as the terminus a quo of mental acts, and also whether there are mental acts. Note the irony here. It may be that Husserl the phenomenologist is coming at the phenomena with conceptuality that is not phenomenologically verifiable. If so, he has not gone all the way with the philosophical epoche that he mentions in section 18 of Ideas I.)

In any case, having made the above schematic assumption, I then asked about the existence and nature of the ultimate thinker of my thoughts, the ultimate ego of my cogitationes.  The cogitationes are of the ego (subjective genitive) in that they belong to the latter; the cogitationes are of the cogitata (objective genitive) in that they are directed to the latter.  The problem, precisely put, is to explain what the transcendental ego is if it is none of the items mentioned in the following, (a)-(d).

a) The ego is not an abstraction or mere concept or ideal object or eidos or principle or explanatory posit as in neo-Kantianism. As Husserl says somewhere in Ideas I, it is not something "logically thought up."  Husserl has no truck with the neo-Kantian concept of consciousness-in-general.  Consciousness is not the form, Bewusst-heit, common to all objects of consciousness. Consciousness is in every case my consciousness.  It is in every case something individual, not universal; concrete, not abstract; somehow factical though not mundane.  What's more, consciousness has a 'participial' and thus 'verbal' nature: it is a thinking, a constituting, a giving of sense, a unifying, a synthesizing.  This is another reason why Bewusstsein for Husserl is not Natorp's Bewusstheit, that is, why it is not a form or property of objects. The transcendental ego is a unifying unity, not a merely unified unity.  It is self-unifying, not unified by another. The subjectivity of the ultimate subject is inseparable from this transcendental unifying which is not found on the side of the object.  As we will see in a later entry, the tree in the garden is a unity of noematic senses the unity of which derives from the unifying activity of the transcendental ego: it is a unity of sense, a Sinneseinheit.  The tree's Sein (Being) is nothing other than its Seinsinn (Being-sense), with the latter derivative from the constitutive activities of transcendental consciousness. (Ideas I, sec. 55)

b) My ego is not my empirical psyche in nature. That which thinks in me when BV thinks is not a psychic part of the natural world.  My psyche and its contents are objects of inner perception -- Franz Brentano's innere Wahrnehmung -- and not the I or subject that performs this inner perceiving.  All objects of consciousness succumb to the phenomenological reduction.  The ultimate subject is pre-mundane or transcendental. And the same goes for its acts or cogitationes. Husserl's is a transcendental idealism, not a psychological idealism. The latter is absurd: the constitutive source of all objectivity cannot be that measly object that is my psyche (anima, Seele).

c) My ego is not anything physical such as the brain of an organism in nature.  That which thinks in me when BV thinks is not BV's (embodied) brain. And of course it is not JM's or SN's brain either.  That in me which sees the tree is not my visual cortex.  The brain and all its parts (and their parts, axons, dendrites, synapses, etc.) and the brain's physical adjuncts (lungs, heart, CNS, sensory transducers, e.g., eyes and ears, etc.) are objects of natural-scientific study which of course presupposes ultimate or transcendental subjectivity.  Gehirnidealismus (brain idealism) is obviously absurd.

d) My ego is not a meta-physical thing, a Cartesian res cogitans (thinking thing) or substantia cogitans, (thinking substance). It is not a spiritual substance inhabiting a realm of positive noumena in Kant's sense. In Cartesian Meditations, sec. 10, Husserl alleges that the Frenchman fails to complete the transcendental turn (die transzendentale Wendung).  He stops short at a little tag-end of the world (ein kleines Endchen der Welt), from which he then argues to get back what he had earlier doubted, including the external world of bodies. Despite his radical doubt, Cartesius remains within the world thinking he has found the sole unquestionable part of it.  He is not radical enough. He does not realize that a phenomenological reduction applies to the psychic being who is meditating as much as to anything else. The meditator, when reduced to his pure ego  is no part of the world of objects, whether these be physical, mental, or ideal, and is therefore pre-mundane. (Cf. The Paris Lectures, p. 8 ff. The two lectures were delivered in February 1929.)

Descartes' mistake, according to Husserl, is to conflate the pure or transcendental ego with substantia cogitans, mens sive animus.  This mistake gives rise to what Husserl calls the absurdity of transcendental realism.  (Paris Lectures, p. 9) Husserl's thought seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn, thereby regressing to the pure ego, one is left with no entity existing in itself on which one can base inferences such as a cosmological argument to the existence of God from the world or from anything in it.  For if the existence of every object is bracketed, then the existence of the psychophysical ego is bracketed as well, it being an object in the world, and what is left over is the pure ego, which as pure does not exist in itself. How then does it exist if it doesn't exist in itself?  (Apparently, it exists by constituting itself. The questions that this involves will have to wait.)

Consequently, one cannot argue: if anything exists, then an absolutely necessary being exists; I exist; ergo, an absolutely necessary being exists. (See Kant, CPR A604 B632 ) I exist cannot be used as premise in such an argument since after the reduction, 'I' cannot refer to any physical, psychophysical, psychic, or metaphysical  (spiritual) object.  The true or ultimate or transcendental I is other than every object, even unembodied/disembodied spirits (if there are any).  Everything objective acquires its entire Seinsgeltung (ontic validity) from the transcendental ego, including any thinking substances there are.  It follows that if there are thinking substances in Descartes' sense, they are not transcendental. To repeat, the transcendental ego is other than every object. To put it in the flowery way of the Continental philosopher, transcendental subjectivity 'expels' every object. 

This is of course perplexing. Just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all Seinsgeltung?  Is it at all?  If it is or exists at all, then it is in the world, even if not in the physical world.  It is in the world as the totality of entities. But it can't be inasmuch as the transcendental ego as the constitutive source of all ontic validity is pre-mundane, and thus other than every entity.

The puzzle could be put like this. Either the constitutive source of all Seinsgeltung is pre-mundane or it is not. If the former, then it would appear to be nothing at all. If the latter, then it is not the constitutive source of all Seinsgeltung.  I will come back to this in connection with some remarks by Hans Wagner.

What bugged me was the question of what the transcendental I could be if it is none of items mentioned in (a)-(d). Husserl never came clean on this, although he was aware of the problem as is clear from sec. 53 of Ideas I.

I pause to note that the problem does not arise for a neo-Kantian such as Hans Wagner.  He approves of the reduction to the transcendental:

The reduction leads beyond the entire world to a pure subjectivity which is no longer part of the world. For this also Husserl cannot be sufficiently praised. [. . .] It [the subjectum veritatis, the absolute ground of all truth] can be absolute only if it does not itself belong to the world. ("Husserl's Posthumous Writings," in R. O. Elveton, The Phenomenology of Husserl, Quadrangle 1970, p. 222.)

Wagner goes on to say that subjectivity "is not any kind of being (Seiendes)," and that from the point of view of the world of beings, "it is nothing (and Nothingness)." Shades of Heidegger and Sartre!  This makes sense. Once you regress to a subjectivity purified of everything mundane, such a transcendental subjectivity cannot be a being, ein Seiendes, but must be other than every being, in which case it is Sein/Nichts which for Heidegger are "the same" (das Selbe aber nicht das Gleiche) .  Wagner continues:

. . . subjectivity, as this indispensable absolute ground, is Being and Idea. Being and Idea "are" not but they are the absolute ground for all "that is," that is, for the beingness of beings and the truth of what is true. (222)

Husserl's problem cannot arise for the neo-Kantians.  For Wagner, Husserl's problem of  explaining how transcendental subjectivity can be factical, though not empirical or intra-mundane, is a pseudo-problem predicated on a mistake (though Wagner doesn't put the point as bluntly as I have):

What true subjectivity is, is that I am not, and what I am not is what true subjectivity is.  Husserl understands that these terms . . . are to be connected in a positive way: in the reduction, I, on my own ground, disclose myself as true, pure subjectivity . . . . (223)

This is is a mistake for Wagner since it implies the identity of the rule and what it regulates, the norm and what it 'normatizes,' and the absolute ground of truth and what it makes true.

The Paradox of Human Subjectivity

What I had stumbled upon was the Paradox of Human Subjectivity discussed by Husserl in his  last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, in sections 53 and 54, pp. 178-186 of the Carr translation.  It was published in 1936, a couple of years before Husserl's death in 1938. Here is the paradox in Husserl's words:

How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?

The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole world and thus itself too. What an absurdity! Or is this a paradox which can be sensibly resolved . . . ?    (179-180)

We are at once objects in the world and subjects for whom there is a world.  This by itself is not paradoxical.  For there is nothing paradoxical in the notion that we are physical parts of a physical world that exists and has the nature it has independently of us, and that our knowing ourselves and other things is a physical process.  Problematic, to be sure, and in my view false, but not paradoxical. Paradox ensues if (A) the world is a product of our accomplishments (Leistungen) as Husserl would have it, or a product of our formation (via both the categories of the understanding and the a priori forms of sensibility, space and time) of the sensory manifold, as on the Kantian scheme, and (B) we, the subjects for whom there is a world, are parts of the world.  For then the entire vast cosmos depends for its existence and/or nature on transient parts thereof.  And surely that would be absurd.

Dehumanizing Subjectivity

In order to avoid absurd forms of idealism, such as psychological idealism, Husserl must in a sense 'dehumanize' subjectivity. Here is a another crucial passage from The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, sec. 54, p. 183:

But are the transcendental subjects, i.e., those functioning in the constitution of the world, human beings?  After all, the epoche has made them into 'phenomena,' so that the philosopher within the epoche  has neither himself nor the others naively and straightforwardly valid as human beings but precisely only as 'phenomena,' as poles for transcendental regressive inquiries.  Clearly here, in the radical consistency of the epoche, each 'I' is considered purely as the ego-pole of his acts, habitualities, and capacities . . . .

[. . .]

But in the epoche and in the pure focus upon the functioning ego-pole . . . it follows eo ipso that nothing human is to be found, neither soul nor psychic life nor real psychophysical human beings; all this belongs to the 'phenomenon,' to the world as constituted pole.

Aporetic Conclusion

Husserl is a great philosopher and one cannot do him justice in one blog post or a hundred; but I don't see how his position is tenable.  On the one hand, each transcendental ego functioning as such cannot be a human being in nature.  For nature and everything in it including all animal organisms is an intentional formation constituted by the transcendental ego. But not only can the world-constituting ego not be a physical thing, it cannot be a meta-physical spiritual  thing either. It cannot be a res cogitans or substantia cogitans.  As Husserl sees it, Descartes' identification of his supposedly indubitable ego with a thinking thing shows a failure fully to execute the transcendental turn (transzendentale Wendung).  As already noted, the Frenchman stops short at a little tag-end of the world  (ein kleines Endchen der Welt)  from which, by means of shaky inferences, he tries to get back what his hyperbolic doubt had called into question. 

For Husserl, everything objective succumbs to the epoche.  No absolute transcendence is reachable: every transcendence is at best a transcendence-in-immanence, a constituted transcendence.  Everything in the world is a constitutum, and the same holds for the world itself.  If Descartes had gone all the way he would have seen that not only his animal body could be doubted, but also his psyche, the psychophysical complex, and indeed any spiritual substance 'behind' the psyche.  He would have seen that the cogito does not disclose something ontically absolute and indubitable.  For Husserl, everything objective, whether physical or mental, ". . . derives its whole sense and its ontic validity (Seinsgeltung), which it has for me, from me myself, from me as the transcendental ego, the ego who comes to the fore only with the transcendental-phenomenological epoche." (CM, p. 26. I have translated Seinsgeltung as ontic validity which I consider more accurate than Cairns' "existential status.")  In Formal and Transcendental Logic, sec. 94, along the same lines, we read: "nothing exists for me otherwise than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness."

One problem: just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung?  Does it exist?   And in what sense of 'exist'?  It cannot exist as a constituted object for it is the subjective source of all constitutive performances (Leistungen).  But if it is not an indubitable piece of the world, then it cannot exist at all.

Descartes thought that he had reached something whose existence cannot be bracketed, eingeklammert, to use Husserl's term, and that that thing was himself as thinking thing.  He thought he had hit bedrock, the bedrock of Ansichsein.  Husserl objects: No, the ego's existence must be bracketed as well.  But then nothing is left over.  We are left with no clue as to what the transcendental ego is once it is distinguished from the psychological or psychophysical ego who is doing the meditating.  To appreciate the difficulty one must realize that it is a factical transcendental ego that does the constituting, not an eidos-ego.  The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not an eidetic reduction.  It would be a serious mistake to think that the re-duction (the leading back, the path of regress) from the psychological ego to the transcendental ego is a reduction to an eidos-ego, an ideal ego abstractly common to all factical egos. 

Here is another approach to the problem.  The transcendental-phenomenological reduction regresses from everything objective, everything naively posited as existing in itself, to the subjective sources of the ontic validity (Seinsgeltung) and Being-sense (Seinssinn) of everything objective.  This radical regression, however, must leave behind everything psychological since the psychological co-posits the objective world of nature.  But how can Husserl execute this radical regression and yet hold onto words like 'ego' and 'cogitatio' and 'cogitatum'?  How does he know that it is an I or an ego that is the transcendental-phenomenological residuum?  In simpler terms, how does he know that what he gets to by the transcendental-phenomenological reduction is something that can be referred to by 'I'?  How does he know that it is anything like a person?

Another related but distinct problem could be put like this. The transcendental subject is OF (genitivus objectivus)  the world but not IN the world.  It is OF the world in virtue of its intentionality. The animal wearing my clothes, however, is IN the world but not OF the world.  ('World' here refers to the totality of constituted entities.)  My body is a thing in nature, a tiny bit of its fauna.  It is not aware OF anything; I am aware of things, some but not all of them via my body and its organs.  For example, my visual perception of the tree in the garden  is via my eyes which are constituted bits of the natural world. I see the tree; my eyes no more see the tree that my eyeglasses do.

I am not (identical to) my body, and yet I am in some sense  'incarnated' in it.  (My body is not my body's body; it is my body.  This mineness -- compare Heidegger's Jemeinigkeit in Sein und Zeit -- is not a objective property of an object in nature.) The relation of me and my body is exceedingly intimate, but it is not identity.  My body is the mundane vehicle of my subjectivity, but quite unlike my car or bicycle.  The problem, briefly, is to make sense of the relation of my factical transcendental ego and the body it constitutes.

Comments

[Steven Nemes]

Hi Bill,

Thanks very much for this fascinating post! I loved reading your discussion of this issue. Even if you are not so much a phenomenologist these days, certainly between the two of us you are the expert on Husserl. For that reason, I will leave to the side the question about the interpretation of Husserl’s works and simply address “the things themselves,” viz. the question of what the transcendental ego is supposed to be.

Speaking very generally, a properly phenomenological answer to this question is going to attempt to describe the transcendental ego in terms which are appropriate to it by proceeding from the way in which it (viz., the transcendental ego) discloses itself, rather than attempting to fit it into preexistent categories. With that in mind, I would say that the transcendental ego is properly described as a mihi and not as an ego or as quid. In this matter, I follow Jean-Luc Marion, for whom the Husserlian ego becomes a moi, an adonée, a kind of “screen” against which the phenomenon reveals itself through a kind of impact. The point is to emphasize the fundamental passivity and receptivity of the transcendental ego. To say that the transcendental ego is a mihi is to say that it is that to which the world is disclosed. To say that it is not an ego is to say that it is not properly thought of as merely one more object among others. Rather, transcendental ego qua subject and world qua object must be defined in relation with one another. The transcendental ego is the mihi to which the world is disclosed, whereas the world is that which is antecedently capable of disclosing itself to a subject.

To prove that the transcendental ego is a mihi, consider that even the constituting acts of consciousness are themselves revealed to consciousness once one accedes to the phenomenological attitude. They are not visible from within the natural attitude. One must accede to the phenomenological attitude in order for the constituting acts to be revealed; one’s focus must be adjusted from the object onto the act of consciousness itself. And if the accession to the phenomenological attitude reveals the contribution which subjectivity makes to the content of our experience, then this contributing subjectivity itself, active as it is, must be a part of what it is revealed passively to the phenomenological observer, the true transcendental ego. This shows that the transcendental ego is fundamentally a mihi which does not itself constitute but is rather that to which the constituting ego in the world is revealed.

Sokolowski’s reflections in his Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge University Press, 2000) are also helpful. He maintains that the transcendental ego is not substantially different than the empirical ego. In other words, the transcendental ego is not some different substance from the empirical ego, i.e. the human body. It is simply this empirical ego considered from the point of view of its being a dative of disclosure, a mihi to whom the world is disclosed.

In my opinion, the problem that you raise in this post only arises because you are asking the question, “What is the transcendental ego?” and expecting an answer which posits some kind of object or other. You are attempting to answer a transcendental-phenomenological question from within the natural attitude. But the transcendental ego is not merely one more object. It is a mihi, not a quid, and can only be appreciated for what it is when it is described in those strictly non-objectifying terms.

Such, in any case, is my attempt at an answer. What do you think?

[BV]

Thanks for the detailed comments, Steven. I suspect that we are at crosspurposes to some extent since I am concerned with Husserlian phenomenology as he and Eugen Fink present it, whereas you are concerned with phenomenology in a broader sense that can be put to use for your theological purposes.

>>I would say that the transcendental ego is properly described as a mihi and not as an ego or as quid.<< I can't attach a coherent sense to this. The dative presupposes the nominative. There is of course a serious question about the legitimacy of transforming the the first-personal singular pronoun 'I' into a naming expression, 'the I,' 'the ego.' But that is not the question you are raising. Assuming that it is unproblematic to speak of the ego, the I, das Ich, etc., then if a tree appears to me, it appears to my ego. It would be incoherent to say that the tree appears to me, but there is no me to whom it appears.

You could however say that the tree just appears in which case there is neither a dative or a nominative of manifestation/appearance. Appearing is then non-relational. This, I take it, is roughly Heidegger's view. The transcendental condition of appearing/disclosedness is not egological. Things appear within a clearing or Lichtung which is the Da of Sein. Heidegger too is a transcendental philosopher and he too operates within the phenomenological reduction, as Tugendhat has demonstrated. More later.

[Hector]

Really fascinating post.

The transcendental ego seems, superficially at least, almost like the Atman in the Upanishads. Is that too wild a connection?

I've been meaning to read Husserl for a while, but he seems a bit daunting. Where would you say is the best place to start (for a philosophical amateur who has read some Levinas, Heidegger, etc)? I have Kolakowski's book on him, but wasn't sure whether I ought to read the man himself first.

[BV]

Hector,

There is a similarity between the transcendental ego and the Atman of the Upanishads. Both are 'witnessing' egos 'behind' the mundane ego. So in a Upanishadic form of meditation I would try to realize my identity with the eternal Atman and come to see that I am not this miserable psychophysical complex. The comparison works better with Kant and Fichte than with Husserl. More on this later. I must now exercise my miserable psychophysical complex, my vehicle in the samsaric realm, by extending its power via another vehicle, a mountain bike.

Kolakowski's Husserl's Search for Certitude is very good and worth reading and re-reading. But the translation is bad and incomprehensible in places.

As for the master himself, get a copy of The Paris Lectures. They are short and will introduce some of H's main themes. You can ask me questions about it. I will be blogging on Husserl for some time to come in an attempt to bring Kid Nemesis around to a correct understanding.

[Hector]

Dr Vallicella - thank you.

Alas, I can't find an affordable copy of The Paris Lectures, can't currently get to a university library (lockdown and all that) and I can only find it online in German! I will see if I can make sense of the German - is there another text you'd suggest in the meantime?

[BV]

Hector,

It is available on Amazon, but the price is outrageous. The cheapest used paperback is $30. Go to a local public library and inquire about their interlibrary loan arrangements.

I have it in German and English. For the latter I paid the princely sum of $3.50 in Boston in 1974. But it those days I lived hand-to-mouth, so it was relatively expensive.

You might also read *Cartesian Meditations,* but you will have the same affordability problem, most likely. Amazon advertises a beat-to-shit copy for a palty 890 semolians. Their pricing algorithm makes no sense to me. Who the hell wants to read Husserl except me and five other guys?

But there is a kindle version you can RENT for around 11 bucks.

[Lukáš Novák]

Dear Bill,

you have exactly nailed my fundamental problem with transcendental idealism by this:

What is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung? Does it exist? And in what sense of 'exist'? It cannot exist as a constituted object for it is the subjective source of all constitutive performances (Leistungen). But if it is not an indubitable piece of the world, then it cannot exist at all.

Of course, transcendental idealists will standardly respond something along the lines like:

the problem that you raise in this post only arises because you are asking the question, “What is the transcendental ego?” and expecting an answer which posits some kind of object or other;

but the problem is that the question asked does not "expect some kind of object", it simply asks whether the transcendental ego is something at all, whether it recedes from pure nothingness, or not. Transcendental idealism is an effort to find some room between reality and nothingness, an attempt to declare this basic dichotomy as a mere artifact of the "natural attitude" - as if pure logic could be thus confined.

Now I wonder: you label it "Aporetic Conclusion". Why? Isn't it rather a reductio of transcendental idealism, leaving a clear way out - viz. a rejection of TI? Why can't we just conclude that "transcendental ego" is an incoherent notion and revert back to noetic realism, where both the subject and the object are just ordinary parts of the world?

Another great spot-on your complaint that in phenomenology, we never get the real thing: we never get real transcendence, real objectivity etc., everything is merely constituted-as-such-and-such. I would add here: which deprives us of our epistemic rights to make any claims whatsoever about what the objective matter-of-fact really is with matters we are talking about (the nature of transcendental ego, the mechanisms of consistution, etc., whatever). In all seriously meant philosophical claims a phenomenologist is making statements about what the object of his talk (such as transcendental ego, the various structures and mechanisms claimed to be "described" etc.) is, really, an sich -- and not merely qua constituted by the particular phenomenologist's ego. For else -- why should such subjective constructs be of any relevance to philosophy, or to me?

In other words, the self-destructivity of transcendental idealism reveals itself not only with respect to the transcendental ego, whose Seinsgeltung cannot be merely constituted-by-the-ego but somehow original or genuine; but also with respect to the meta-question, what kind of objectivity is claimed for the transcendental idealist's philosophical statements. Either it is genuine objectivity, but then TI claims its own falsity, or a mere constituted objectivity, and then such statements are not part of philosophical discourse concerning life, universe and everything. In both cases we arrive at the conclusion that TI cannot ever be consistent and throughgoing: there must be a residual of realism, i.e. of a claimed capability to cognize reality as it is in itself, rather than merely qua-constituted, qua-a-priori-formed etc.

But perhaps you would not be willing to go thus far in your critique?

[BV]

Dear Lukáš,

It is indeed a pleasure to find you in agreement with me since you are one of the smartest people I know. I hope you and your family are well. I have fond memories of my time in Prague and the Czech Republic.

>>Transcendental idealism is an effort to find some room between reality and nothingness, an attempt to declare this basic dichotomy as a mere artifact of the "natural attitude" - as if pure logic could be thus confined.<<

That's right. In Sartre, for example, consciousness is no-thing, thus nothing. A "wind blowing towards objects" but blowing from no direction and without any cause or ground. Hence the title *Being and Nothingness.* But of course consciousness is in some sense something since without it no objects would appear. So consciousness is both something and nothing -- which certainly looks like a contradiction.

Butchvarov, too, is tangled up in this problem.

Central to Heidegger's thinking is the ontological difference between das Sein und das Seiende (taken either collectively or distributively). But if Being is other than every being, and from the whole lot of them taken together, then Being is nonbeing, nichtseiend. So Sein und Nichts are the same, although not dialectically as in Hegel. But das Nichts ist kein nichtiges Nichts; it is not a nugatory nothing, but some sort of reality, some sort of positive Nothing -- which is structurally the same problem we find in Husserl, Sartre, and Butchvarov.

Also structurally similar is the notorious 'horse paradox' in Frege: "The concept HORSE is not a concept."

[BV]

Continuing with Dr. Novak:

>>Now I wonder: you label it "Aporetic Conclusion". Why? Isn't it rather a reductio of transcendental idealism, leaving a clear way out - viz. a rejection of TI? Why can't we just conclude that "transcendental ego" is an incoherent notion and revert back to noetic realism, where both the subject and the object are just ordinary parts of the world?<<

Fair question, and the right one to ask. But not easy to answer. Since you are a scholastic realist, perhaps I can soften you up by citing Aristotle, De Anima 431b20: "in a sense the soul is all existing things." Here perhaps is the charter for all subsequent transcendental philosophy. Accordingly, the soul is not merely the life principle of a particular animal organism. It is the transcendental subject to which the body and its states appear as well as the animal's mental states such as fear, lust, etc.

If this is right, then the subject cannot be "just an ordinary part of the world."

I need to hear more about your "noetic realism." Presumably you do not mean we are just parts of the material world and that all of our intellectual and spiritual functions can be accounted for naturalistically. Perhaps you will agree with me that not even sentience can be explained adequately in terms of physics, chemistry and other positive sciences.

[BV]

>>Another great spot-on your complaint that in phenomenology, we never get the real thing: we never get real transcendence, real objectivity etc., everything is merely constituted-as-such-and-such. I would add here: which deprives us of our epistemic rights to make any claims whatsoever about what the objective matter-of-fact really is with matters we are talking about (the nature of transcendental ego, the mechanisms of consistution, etc., whatever). In all seriously meant philosophical claims a phenomenologist is making statements about what the object of his talk (such as transcendental ego, the various structures and mechanisms claimed to be "described" etc.) is, really, an sich -- and not merely qua constituted by the particular phenomenologist's ego. For else -- why should such subjective constructs be of any relevance to philosophy, or to me?

In other words, the self-destructivity of transcendental idealism reveals itself not only with respect to the transcendental ego, whose Seinsgeltung cannot be merely constituted-by-the-ego but somehow original or genuine; but also with respect to the meta-question, what kind of objectivity is claimed for the transcendental idealist's philosophical statements. Either it is genuine objectivity, but then TI claims its own falsity, or a mere constituted objectivity, and then such statements are not part of philosophical discourse concerning life, universe and everything. In both cases we arrive at the conclusion that TI cannot ever be consistent and throughgoing: there must be a residual of realism, i.e. of a claimed capability to cognize reality as it is in itself, rather than merely qua-constituted, qua-a-priori-formed etc.

But perhaps you would not be willing to go thus far in your critique?<<

You raise a good objection. For example, when Husserl makes a claim about outer perception, that it is intentional, presumptive, that it presents its object directly without images or epistemic intermediaries, etc., he means these claims to be eidetic not factual. He aims to make claims that are true even if there are no cases of outer perception. He is concerned with the essence of perception, the essence, f memory, of imaginatin, etc. Now these essences and the propositions about them are ideal objects that cannot depend on factical subjectivity for their Seinsinn.