Ed Buckner writes,
Here is another problem that needs to be carefully phrased.
I want to say that the pitch of a musical note is continuous through time. I mean, at any point in continuous time, i.e. time as specified by the real numbers, the pitch of the note (e.g. middle C) is the same.
However, the “physical” property that grounds the pitch is not continuous, but rather a cycle of different events.
That strikes me as a problem for the kind of physicalism according to which qualities “as we perceive them” are identical with the properties that ground them. For pitch is temporally continuous, the oscillation that grounds it is not temporally continuous, ergo etc.
It is a problem indeed, Ed, although I have questions about your formulation of it.
The problem is known in the trade as the Grain Problem. Whether it surfaces before Sir Arthur Eddington, I don't know, but he raises it, or at least anticipates it with his question about the 'two tables.' A lot of work was done on the Grain Problem by the great American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, son of the rather less distinguished Roy Wood Sellars, but nonetheless a quantity to be reckoned with in his day.
Here is Sellars fils in his seminal essay, "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," reprinted in his Science, Perception, and Reality (Routledge, 1963). The portion I am about to quote is from pp. 35-37. I take the text from Chrucky's online version.
It is worth noting that we have here a recurrence of the essential features of Eddington's 'two tables' problem -- the two tables being, in our terminology, the table of the manifest image and the table of the scientific image. There the problem was to 'fit together' the manifest table with the scientific table. Here the problem is to fit together the manifest sensation with its neurophysiological counterpart. And, interestingly enough, the problem in both cases is essentially the same: how to reconcile the ultimate homogeneity of the manifest image with the ultimate non-homogeneity of the system of scientific objects.
BV: Whether we are discussing colors with Sellars or sounds with Buckner, it is the same problem, that of reconciling the homogeneity of the manifest or phenomenal sensory quality with the non-homogeneity of the underlying scientific explanatory posits. For Sellars, of course, these posits are not mere posits but ultimately real, as you will see if you read below the fold.
Buckner's formulation above leaves something to be desired, however. He cites the continuous perception over time of the same note, middle C, let us say. But then in the very next sentence he reverts to a rarefied mathematical concept of continuity, thereby mixing phenomenological description with a mathematico-scientific construct. He thereby conflates phenomenal continuity with mathematical continuity. When I hear middle C sounding from an organ, say, over a non-zero interval of time, five seconds say, do I hear a series of points of time -- a series of temporally extension-less moments -- the cardinality of which is 2-to-the-aleph-nought? No. (The cardinality of the set of real numbers (cardinality of the continuum) is)
And then Ed goes on to say that "the 'physical' property that grounds the pitch is not continuous, but rather a cycle of different events." But that is not right either. Middle C depicted on an oscilloscope shows up as a sine wave:
Obviously the sine wave is continuous. What Ed wants to say, of course, is that the heard sound, the phenomenal sound, does not fluctuate as does the physical reality does, the physical reality that "grounds the pitch." Ed is equivocating on 'continuous.'
But I know what he is getting at, and it is a genuine problem. I am merely complaining about his formulation of it. Now back to Sellars, whose solution to the problem is not clear to me.
Top o' the Stack. Dennett debunked!
Here again is the famous passage from Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874):
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself...(Brentano PES, 68)
Jedes psychische Phänomen ist durch das charakterisiert, was die Scholastiker des Mittelalters die intentionale (auch wohl mentale) Inexistenz eines Gegenstandes genannt haben, und was wir, obwohl mit nicht ganz unzweideutigen Ausdrücken, die Beziehung auf einen Inhalt, die Richtung auf ein Objekt (worunter hier nicht eine Realität zu verstehen ist), oder die immanente Gegenständlichkeit nennen würden. Jedes enthält etwas als Objekt in sich… (Brentano, PES 124f)
1) For Brentano, intentionality is the mark of the mental: it is what distinguishes the mental from the physical. All and only mental phenomena are intentional. Call this the Brentano Thesis (BT). It presupposes that there are mental items, and that there are physical items. It implies that there is no intentionality below the level of conscious mind and no intentionality above the level of conscious mind. BT both restricts and demarcates. It restricts intentionality to conscious mind and marks off the mental from the physical.
2) BT does the demarcation job tolerably well. Conscious states possess content; non-conscious states do not. My marvelling at the Moon is a contentful state; the Moon's being cratered is not. Going beyond Brentano, I say that there are two ways for a conscious state to have content. One way is for there to be something it is like to be in that state. Thus there is something it like to feel tired, bored, depressed, elated, anxious, etc. even when there is no specifiable object that one feels tired about, bored at, depressed over, elated about, anxious of, etc.
Call such conscious contents non-directed. They do not refer beyond one's mental state to a transcendent object. Other contents are object-directed. Suppose I am anxious over an encroaching forest fire that threatens to engulf my property. The felt anxiety has an object and this object is no part of my conscious state. The content, which is immanent to my mental state, 'points' to a state of affairs that is transcendent of my mental state. In short, there are two types of mental content, object-directed and non-object-directed.
3) 'Every consciousness is a consciousness of something' can then be taken to mean that every conscious state has content. Read in this way, the dictum is immune to such counter examples as pain. That pain is non-directed does not show that pain is not a content of consciousness.
4) Brentano conflates content and object, Inhalt and Gegenstand. The conflation is evident from the above quotation. As a consequence he does not distinguish directed and non-directed contents. This fact renders his theory of intentionality indefensible.
Suppose I am thirsting for a beer. I am in a conscious mental state. This state has a qualitative side: there is something it is like to be in this state. But the state is also directed to a transcendent state of affairs, my downing a bottle of beer, a state of affairs that does not yet exist, but is no less transcendent for that. If Brentano were right, then my thirsting for a bottle of beer would be a process immanent in my conscious life -- which is precisely what it is not.
5) To sum this up. Brentano succeeds with the demarcation project, but fails to explain the directedness of some mental contents, their reference beyond the mind to extramental items. This failure is due to his failure to distinguish content and object, a distinction that first clearly emerges with his student Twardowski.
Brentano was immersed in Aristotle and the scholastics by his philosophical training and his priestly formation. Perhaps this explains his inability to get beyond the notion of intentionality as intentionale Inexistenz (inesse).
This is a re-do of a post from 13 April 2009. The addenda are new.
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I have argued at length for the non-intentionality of some conscious states. Here is an entry that features an uncommonly good comment thread. None of the opposing comments made on the various posts inclined me to modify my view. I was especially pleased recently to stumble upon a passage by the great F. H. Bradley in support of the non-intentionality of some experiences. Please note that the intentionality of my being PLEASED to find the supporting Bradley passage has no tendency to show that PLEASURE is an intentional state, as 'pleasure' is used below by Bradley. No doubt one can be pleased by such-and-such or pained at this-or-that, but these facts are consistent with there being non-intentional pleasures and pains. The passage infra is from Bradley's magisterial "Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake" (Ethical Studies (Selected Essays), LLA, 1951, p. 37, bolding added):
Pleasure and pain are feelings and they are nothing but feelings. It would perhaps be right to call them the two simple modes of self-feeling; but we are not here concerned with psychological accuracy. The point which we wish to emphasize and which we think is not doubtful is that, considered psychically, they are nothing whatever but states of the feeling self. This means that they exist in me only as long as I feel them, and only as I feel them, that beyond this they have no reference to anything else, no validity and no meaning whatsoever. They are 'subjective' because they neither have, nor pretend to, reality beyond this or that subject. They are as they are felt to be, but they tell us nothing. In one word, they have no content; they are as states of us, but they have nothing for us.
How do I know that Bradley is right? By doing a little phenomenology. Right now I am stretching my back in consequence of which I am experiencing a pleasant kinaesthetic sensation. At the same time I am gazing out my window at a blooming palo verde tree. Both the kinaesthetic sensation and the gazing are 'states of me' to adapt a Bradleyan phrase, but only the second 'has anything for me,' i.e., presents an object, pretends to a reality beyond the subject, intends or means something, takes an accusative, has an intentional object, possesses a content, refers beyond itself -- pick your favorite phraseology. The second 'state of me' is object-directed; the first is not. Either you 'see' (with the mind's eye) the distinction between the seeing of the tree (using the eyes in your head) and the feeling of the sensation, or you do not. No amount of argument or dialectic can make you 'see.' At most, argument and dialectic can remove impediments to 'seeing.' And if there were no 'seeing,' how could there be arguments? Arguments need premises, and not all premises can be the conclusions of arguments.
ADDENDA (11 December 2020)
1) The issue is whether Franz Brentano was right to maintain that intentionality is the mark of the mental, and that therefore every mental state is object-directed. I have long held, probably under the influence of Edmund Husserl (Logical Investigations, vol. II, tr. J. N. Findlay, Humanities Press, 1970, 572 ff.) that this is not right, that there are mental states that are not object-directed. From the entry referenced above:
Let's think about Searle's example of an itch, one 'in' the scalp, say. Not every mental item is a conscious item, but this itch I feel right now is a conscious mental item. Attending to this datum, a distinction suggests itself: there is the qualitative character of the itch, its sensory quale or raw feel, and there is its unpleasantness. Since I am attending to the itch, it is the intentional object of a series of acts of phenomenological reflection. At the same time of course, I am 'living' the itch, not just reflecting on it and analyzing it. The itch is an experience, an Erlebnis in something like Husserl's sense; it is something man erlebt, one lives through.
Now the question is whether the itch itself is directed to an object or 'takes an accusative.' Please don't confuse this question with the question whether the itch can itself be made the intentional object of acts of reflection. Of course it can, and I just did. But that is not to say that the itch has an intentional object. Attending carefully to the itch as it presents itself to me, I discern no object to which it points. Surely Searle is right: itches and the like are not about anything in the way a desire to drink a cold beer is about drinking a cold beer, or the seeing of a bobcat is about a bobcat and not a tire iron or nothing at all.
2) I suggest above that some questions in philosophy can be answered phenomenologically, just by carefully attending to what is qiven, the itch sensation in our example, under bracketing of all questions about causes and effects. One compares the felt itch, precisely as felt, with a clearly object-directed conscious mental state such as desiring to be itch-free. The act of desiring is obviously a desiring of something, namely, being itch-free. The act (intentional experience) refers beyond itself to something not contained within it. One cannot just desire; necessarily, to desire is to desire something that is no part of the act of desiring. Having done the comparison, one just 'sees' the difference: it is not intrinsic to sensory qualia that they refer to anything beyond themselves in such a way as to present an object to a subject; but this is intrinsic to intentional states. As Bradley puts it, sensory qualia, "have no reference to anything else . . . ." They have "no meaning whatsoever." That is, they do not mean, signify, intend, or refer. Qualia have content alright, but not intentional or representative content. (Cf. Husserl's distinction between descriptive and intentional content, Log. Inv. II, 576 ff.)
3) Was I able to make my point above with phenomenology alone thereby avoiding dialectic or argument entirely? No, I argued in a way that can be explicitly set forth as follows:
a) Some sensory qualia are not object-directed.
b) All sensory qualia are mental states.
Therefore
c) Some mental states are not object-directed.
I had to reason to my conclusion, but I did so from a premise -- (a) -- the evidence for which is phenomenological. To be precise, (a) itself is a conclusion of an inference from 'This itch sensation is not object-directed.' Phenomenology needs dialectic and vice versa.
4) In the comment thread to the linked entry above, Harry Binswanger, the noted Objectivist (follower of Ayn Rand ), gives essentially the following argument against that thesis that some mental states are non-intentional:
d) An itch is a bodily sensation.
e) The intentional objects of bodily sensations are states of one's body.
Therefore
f) An itch is an intentional mental state.
But in what sense is an itch a bodily sensation? Only in the sense that its cause is physical. In itself, the itch is not bodily or physical but mental. It is a mental state with a physical cause. But one ought not confuse cause with intentional object, a mistake that Husserl exposes at Log. Inv. II, 572. Binswanger's argument commits this very mistake. Whatever the cause in the scalp or elsewhere of the itchy sensation, that cause is not presented by the sensory state. The state has a cause but no intentional object.
I tend to the view that all philosophical problems can be represented as aporetic polyads. What's more, I maintain that philosophical problems ought to be so represented. You haven't begun to philosophize until you have a well-defined puzzle, a putative inconsistency of plausibilities. When you have an aporetic polyad on the table you have something to think your teeth into. (An interesting and auspicious typo, that; I shall let it stand.)
Consider the problem of the existence of consciousness. Nicholas Maxwell formulates it as follows: "Why does sentience or consciousness exist at all?" The trouble with this formulation is that it invites the retort: Why not? Why shouldn't it exist? The question smacks of gratuitousness. Why raise it? To remove the felt gratuitousness a motive has to be supplied for posing the question. Now a most excellent motive is contradiction-avoidance. If a set of plausibilities form an inconsistent set, then we have a problem. For we cannot abide a contradiction. Philosophers love a paradox, but they hate a contradiction. So I suggest we put the problem of the existence of consciousness as follows:
1. Consciousness (sentience) exists.
2. Consciousness is contingent: given that it exists it might not have.
3. If x contingently exists, then x has an explanation of its existence in terms of a y distinct from x.
4. Consciousness has no explanation in terms of anything distinct from it.
A tetrad of plausibilities. Each limb makes a strong claim on our acceptance. Unfortunately, this foursome is logically inconsistent: the conjunction of any three limbs entails the negation of the remaining one. Thus the conjunction of (1) and (2) and (3) entails the negation of (4). So the limbs cannot all be true. But they are all very plausible. Therein lies the problem. Which one ought we reject to remove the contradiction?
Note the superiority of my aporetic formulation over Maxwell's formulation. On my formulation we have a very clear problem that cries out for a solution. But if I merely ask, 'Why does consciousness exist?' there is no clear problem. You could retort, 'Why shouldn't it exist?' 'What's the problem?' There is a problem because the existence of consciousness conflicts with other things we take for granted.
(1) is absolutely datanic and so undeniable. If some crazy eliminativist were to deny (1) I would show him the door and give him the boot. (Life is too short for discussions with lunatics.)
(4) is exceedingly plausible. To explain consciousness in terms of itself would be circular, hence no explanation. So it has to be explained, if it can be explained, in terms of something distinct from it. Since abstract objects cannot be invoked to explain concrete consciousness, consciousness, if it can be explained, must be explained in physical and physiological and chemical and biological terms. But this is also impossible as Maxwell makes clear using a version of the 'knowledge argument' made popular by T. Nagel and F. Jackson:
But physics, and that part of natural science in principle re-ducible to physics, cannot conceivably predict and explain fully the mental, or experiential, aspect of brain processes. Being blind from birth—or being deprived of ever having oneself experienced visual sensations—cannot in itself prevent one from understanding any part of physics. It cannot prevent one from understanding the physics of colour, light, physiology of colour perception and discrimination, just as well as any nor-mally sighted person. In order to understand physical concepts, such as mass, force, wavelength, energy, spin, charge, it is not necessary to have had the experience of any particular kind of sensation, such as the visual sensation of colour. All predictions of physics must also have this feature. In order to understand what it is for a poppy to be red, however, it is necessary to have experienced a special kind of sensation at some time in one’s life, namely the visual sensation of redness. A person blind from birth, who has never experienced any visual sensation, cannot know what redness is, where redness is the perceptual property, what we (normally sighted) see and experience, and not some physical correlate of this, light of such and wave-lengths, or the molecular structure of the surface of an object which causes it to absorb and reflect light of such and such wavelengths. It follows that no set of physical statements, however comprehensive, can predict that a poppy is red, or that a person has the visual experience of redness. Associated with neurological processes going on in our brains, there are mental or experiential features which lie irredeemably beyond the scope of physical description and explanation.
(2) is also exceedingly plausible: how could our consciousness (sentience) exist necessarily? But (3), which is a version of the principle of sufficient reason, is also very plausible despite the glib asseverations of those who think quantum mechanics provides counterexamples to it.
So what will it be? Which of the four limbs will you reject?
(1) and (2) are not reasonably rejected. One might reject (3) and hold that consciousness is a brute fact. Or one might reject (4) and hold that consciousness in us does have an explanation, a divine explanation: the source of consciousness in us is God's consciousness.
But it might be that the problem is genuine but insoluble, that the problem is an aporia in the strongest sense of the term: a conceptual impasse, an intellectual knot that our paltry minds cannot untie. Accordingly, all four limbs are true, but we cannot understand how they could all be true.
But this invites the metaphilosophical rejoinder that all genuine problems are soluble. An insoluble problem would then be a pseudo-problem. Thus arises a metaphilosophical puzzle that can be set forth as an aporetic triad or antilogism:
5. Only soluble problems are genuine.
6. The problem of the existence of consciousness is not soluble.
7. The problem of the existence of consciousness is genuine.
This too is an inconsistent set. But each limb is plausible. Which will you reject? I would reject (5): a problem needn't be soluble to be genuine.
There is no easy answer, ragazzi.
I take Wittgenstein to be saying at 5.63 that the seeing eye is not in the visual field. I can of course see my eyes via a mirror. But these are seen eyes, not seeing eyes. The eyes I see in the mirror are objects of visual consciousness; they are not what do the seeing.
That is not to say that the eyes I see in my visual field, whether the eyes of another person or my own eyes seen in a mirror, are dead eyes or non-functioning eyes. They are living eyes functioning as they should, supplied with blood, properly connected via the neural pathways to the visual cortex, etc. The point is that they are not seeing eyes, subjects of visual consciousness.
If you insist that seeing eyes are indeed objects of outer perception and empirical study, then I will challenge you to show me where the seeing occurs in the eye or where in the entire visual apparatus, which includes eyeglasses, contact lenses, the neural pathways leading from the optic nerve to the visual cortex -- the whole system which serves as the causal basis of vision. Where is the seeing? In the pupil? In the retina? In the optic nerve? Somewhere between the optic nerve and the brain? In the visual cortex?Where exactly? Will you say that it is in no particular place but in the whole system? But this is a very big system including as it does such instruments of vision as sunglasses and night goggles. And let's not leave out the external physical things that are causing certain wavelengths of light to impinge on the eye. And the light itself, and its source whether natural or artificial. Will you tell me that the SEEING is spread out in space over and through all of these items? But then how do you explain the unity of visual consciousness over time or at a time? And how do you explain the intentionality of visual consciousness? Does it make any sense to say that a state of the eyeball is of or about anything? If you say that the SEEING is in the eye or in the brain, then I will demand to know its electro-chemical properties.
I could go on, but perhaps you get the point: the seeing, the visual consciousness-of, is not itself seen or see-able. It is not an object of actual or possible experience. It is not in the world. It is not a part of the eye, or a state of the eye, or a property of the eye or a relation in which the eye stands or an activity of the eye. The same goes for the whole visual system. And yet there is seeing. There is visual consciousness, consciousness of visual objects.
Who or what does the seeing? What is the subject of visual consciousness? Should we posit a self or I or ego that uses the eye as an instrument of vision, so that it is the I that sees and not the eye? No one will say that his eyeglasses do the seeing when he sees something. No one says, "My eyeglasses saw a beautiful sunset last night." We no more say that than we say, "My optic nerve registered a beautiful sunset last night," or "My visual cortex saw a beautiful sunset last night."* We say, "I saw a beautiful sunset last night."
But then who or what is this I? It is no more in the world than the seeing eye is in the visual field. Wittgenstein's little balloon above depicts the visual field. Imagine a Big Balloon that depicts the 'consciousness field,' the totality of objects of consciousness. It does not matter if we think of it as a totality of facts or a totality of things. The I is not in it any more than the eye qua seeing is in the visual field.
So far I am agreeing with Wittgenstein. There is a subject, but it is not in the world. So it is somewhat appropriate to call it a metaphysical subject, although 'transcendental subject' would be a better choice of terms, especially since Wittgenstein says that it is the limit of the world. 'Transcendental' is here being used in roughly the Kantian way. 'Transcendental' does not mean transcendent in the phenomenological sense deriving from Husserl, nor does it mean transcendent in the absolute sense of classical metaphysics as when we say that God is a transcendent being. (That is why you should never say that God is a transcendental being.)
But Wittgenstein also maintains that the transcendental subject is the limit of the world. This implies, first, that it is not nothing, and second, that it is no thing or fact in the world. "The world is all that is the case." (1) "The world is the totality of facts, not of things." (1.1) It follows that the subject is not a thing or fact outside the world. So all the self can be is the limit of the world.
We have to distinguish the world from worldly things/facts. The world is a totality of things or facts, and a totality is distinct from its members both distributively and collectively. So we shouldn't conflate the world-as-totality with its membership (the world taken in extension). So if the metaphysical or rather transcendental subject is the limit of the world as per 5.632, then what this means is that the subject is the limit of worldly things/facts, and as such is the world-as-totality.
This is why Wittgenstein says "I am my world." (5.63)
I take it that Tractatus 5.63 is the central inspiration behind Butchvarov's solution to the Paradox of Antirealism which, in an earlier entry, I formulated as follows:
PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)
The world cannot depend on me if I am a (proper) part of the world. But if "I am my world," then the problem would seem to dissolve. That, very roughly, is Butchvarov's solution.
The solution implies that the philosophical as opposed to the ordinary indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun, those uses that figure into the Augustinian Si fallor sum, the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum, the Kantian Das 'ich denke' muss alle meine Vortsellungen begleiten koennen, the Cartesian Meditations of Husserl, and the debate about realism and antirealism are really impersonal, despite what Augustine, Descartes, Kant, and Husserl think. For then the philosophical uses of 'I' refer to the world-as-totality and not to a person or to something at the metaphysical core of a person such as a noumenal self.
This notion that the philosophical uses of the personal pronoun 'I' are really impersonal is highly problematic, a point I will come back to.
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*People do say things like: "My brain said, 'Stay away from her,' but my little head said, 'Go for it, man!'" Such talk is of course nonsense if taken literally.
From Kant on, transcendental philosophy has been bedeviled by a certain paradox. Here again is the Paradox of Antirealism discussed by Butchvarov, as I construe it, the numbers in parentheses being page references to his 2015 Anthropocentrism in Philosophy:
PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)
As I was mulling this over I was reminded of the Paradox of Human Subjectivity discussed by Edmund 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. Here is the paradox in Husserl's words:
PHS: 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)
What is common to both of the paradoxical formulations is the idea that 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. 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
Interestingly, for both Butchvarov and Husserl, the solution to their respective paradoxes involves a retreat from anthropocentrism and a concomitant 'dehumanization' of subjectivity. For both, there is nothing specifically human about consciousness, although of course in "the natural attitude" (Husserl's natuerliche Einstellung) humans are the prime instances known to us of 'conscious beings.' For present purposes, consciousness is intentionality, consciousness-of, awareness-of, where the 'of' is an objective genitive. For Butchvarov, consciousness-of is not a property of (subjective genitive) human beings or of metaphysical egos somehow associated with human beings. It is not a property of human brains or of human souls or of human soul-body composites. It does not in any way emanate from human subjects. It is not like a ray that shoots forth from a subject toward an object. Consciousness is subject-less. So it is not a relation that connects subjects and objects. It is more like a monadic property of objects, all objects, their apparentness or revealedness.
Husserl and Butchvarov: Brief Contrast and Comparison
Husserl operates in a number of his works (Cartesian Meditations, Paris Lectures, Ideas I) with the following triadic Cartesian shema:
Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum
Subject --------------------> object (where the arrow represents a directed cogitatio, a mental act, an intentional Erlebnis, and where 'object' is in the singular because the noema of a noesis is precisely trhe noema of that very noesis. Got that?)
Butchvarov's schema is not triadic but dyadic along the lines of Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness (where the arrow does not represent a mental act but monadic universal 'of-ness,' Sartre's "wind blowing towards objects" and where 'objects' is in the plural because subject-less consciousness is one to their many):
------------------------------->objects.
For Butchvarov, following Sartre, consciousness is no-thing, no object, other than every object, not in the world, and thus not restricted to the measly specimens of a zoological species. The relevant text is Sartre's early The Transcendence of the Ego, directed against Husserl, according to which the ego is not an 'inhabitant' of consciousness but a transcendent item, an object alongside other objects. (Personal anecdote: when I first espied this title as a young man I thought to myself: "Great! A book that will teach me how to transcend my ego!")
Bear in mind that the phenomenological notion of transcendence is transcendence-in-immanence, not absolute transcendence.
Of course there is a paradox if not a contradiction lurking within the Sartrean, radically externalist, anti-substantialist conception of consciousness: consciousness is nothing, but not a 'mere nothing,' inasmuch as it is that without which objects would not be revealed or manifested or apparent. It is both something and no-thing. It is something inasmuch as without it nothing would appear when it is a plain fact that objects do appear. That objects appear is self-evident even if it is not self-evident that they appear to someone. It is not clear that there is a 'dative of appearing' though it is clear that there are 'accusatives of appearing.' Consciousness is nothing inasmuch as it is no object and does not appear. This apparent contradiction is to my mind real, to Butchvarov's merely apparent. It is clearly a different paradox than the Paradox of Antirealism. It is a paradox that infects a particular solution to the Paradox of Antirealism, Butchvarov's solution.
How does Husserl dehumanize subjectivity?
Here is a crucial passage from Crisis, 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.
Contra Husserl
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). 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.
Husserl's thinking in sections 10-11 of Cartesian Meditations seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn, and avoids the supposed mistake of Descartes, one is left with nothing that can be posited as existing in itself independently of consciousness. 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 absolutely transcendent 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 existent transcendently either.
Descartes thought that he had reached something whose existence cannot be bracketed, eingeklammert, to use Husserl's term, and that that 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 trans-phen reduction is something that can be referred to by 'I'? How does he know that it is anything like a person?
After all, indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun are used by human beings to refer to human beings.
Husserl and Butchvarov: Similarities and Differences
1. Both philosophers espouse versions of antirealism, albeit very different versions.
2. Both philosophers face versions of the Paradox of Antirealism.
3. Both philosophers solve the paradox by retreating from anthropocentrism and advocating the 'dehumanization' of consciousness.
4. Both philosophers oppose (Berkeleyan) idealism if that is the view that "all reality is mental" (Butchvarov, p. 213), a view that entails that "the perception of a tree and the tree perceived are no more distinguishable than are a feeling of pain and the pain felt." (213)
5. Both philosophers hold that there are specifically philosophical indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun.
6. Both philosophers agree that the existence of such uses is, in Butchvarov's words, "evident from the intelligibility of Cartesian doubt. . . ." (196)
7. Both philosophers hold that these uses are referring uses.
8. Both philosophers hold that these referring uses do not refer to human beings.
9. Both philosophers oppose Descartes in holding that the specifically philosophical uses of the indexical 'I' do not refer to anything in the world.
10. Husserl and Butchvarov disagree on what these uses refer to. For Husserl they refer to the factical transcendental ego, which is the constitutive source of everything worldly as to its Seinsgeltung (ontic validity) and Seinsinn (ontic sense or meaning). For Butchvarov, they refer to the world itself, not things in the world, distributively or collectively, but the totality of these things. Butchvarov's theory is essentially that of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "I am my world." (5.63) There is no metaphysical subject in the world. (5.633) There is an ultimate philosophical I but it is not in the world; it is the limit of the world (5.632), or rather the world itself.
11. Husserl and Butchvarov agree that, in Wittgenstein's words, "there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way." (5.641) But of course the ways in which the two philosophers talk about the self non-psychologically are radically different.
12. Another major disagreement is this. Husserl sticks with the Cartesian Ansatz while attempting to radicalize it, but he never succeeds in clarifying the difference between the transcendental and psychological ego. Butchvarov abandons (or never subscribed to) the ego-cogito-cogitatum schema of Descartes, and of Kant too, and in a sense cuts the Gordian knot with Sartrean scissors: there is nothing psychological or egological or 'inner' or personal or subjective about consciousness. And so there is no problem of intersubjectivity such as bedeviled Husserl in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation and elsewhere. Butchvarov goes 'Hegelian.'
There is much more to be said, later. It is Saturday night and time to punch the clock, pour myself a drink, and cue up some oldies.
I am reading Ted Honderich, On Consciousness (Edinburgh UP, 2004) and trying to get a handle on just what his theory of consciousness as existence amounts to. An awkward and quirky writer, he doesn't make things easy on the reader, and doesn't seem to realize that in this very fast brave new world of ours the writer must get to the point without unnecessary circumlocution if he wants to keep his reader glued to the page. Here is an example of Honderich's style, from p. 206:
The other option from spiritualism now deserves the name of being devout physicalism. You can say and write, in a career that keeps an eye on some of science, maybe two, and is forgetful of reflective experience, that being conscious or aware of something is only having certain physical properties in the head. Usually this cranialism is a matter of only neural properties as we know them -- thought of computationally or with microtubules to the fore or in any other way you like.
[Note the awkward placement of "Maybe two." It belongs right after "eye."]
Nobody not on the philosophical job of trying to approximate more to some of science or horse sense believes this either. We all know, to make use of a pefectly proper and enlightening parody, that consciousness, isn't just cells, however fancily or fancifully conceived. Everybody on the job tries to give a place to or register what they know when they're not on the job. But they can't do it if they have it that consciousness has only neural properties or conceivably silicon or otherwise physical properties, no matter how they are conceived additionally.
Honderich's thought is not so much expressed as buried in the above mess of verbiage. Here is the thought which is correct as far as it goes expressed in three sentences.
Devout physicalism is the main alternative to spiritualism, or substance dualism. But only someone who fails to reflect on his actual experience could suppose that being conscious of something is a matter of the instantiation of neural properties in the brain. Both philosopher and layman know that consciousness is not brain cells, but the philosopher trying to be scientific is apt to forget it.
Here is Colin McGinn's savage review of Honderich's book. Be aware that there is personal animus between the two men.
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