Maverick Philosopher

Edmund Husserl

A Substack birthday tribute.

Could the Visible Surface of a Physical Thing be a Mental Item?

The Sparring Partner offers the following tetrad for our delectation. 

1) I take this to be the visible surface of a desk.

2) It is almost certain that this in fact [is] the visible surface of a desk, but it is possible that it is not (it may be the result of a highly realistic virtual reality program).

3) If this were not the visible surface, it would be a mental item.

4) It is impossible that the visible surface of a desk could ever be a mental item.

The S. P. thinks that these four are collectively inconsistent.  That is not true. They are consistent on the following theory. 

My man sees something.  One cannot see without seeing something. This is a special case of the thesis of intentionality. What my man sees, the intentional object, has the properties of a desk surface; it has the look of a desk surface. What he sees may or may not exist. (Better: what he sees is possibly such that it exists and possibly such that it does not exist). The intentional object is bipolar or bivalent: either existent or non-existent. In itself, the intentional object is neutral as between these two poles or values.  If the intentional object does not exist, then it is merely intentional. If the intentional object exists, then it is real.

So far I have accommodated (1) and (2). 

If the intentional object is real, then it it part and parcel of the desk itself.  If so, then the intentional object is not a mental content. This should also obvious from the fact that the intentional object is distinct from the corresponding act: it is not contained in the act, and in this sense it is not a content (reeller Inhalt in Husserl's sense) of the act.  The act is mental, but is object is not mental, or at least not mental in the same sense. The act is an Erlebnis. it is something one lives through (er-leben); one does not live through an intentional object. Call the intentional object the noema. The noema is not a mental content but it it also does not exist in itself. It exists only as the objective correlate of the act.  It is other than the act, and not contained in the act, but is nonetheless  necessarily correlated with the act such that, if there were no acts (intentionale Erlebnisse), then there would be no noemata. 

I have just now accommodated (3) and (4).  I have shown how the members of the tetrad could all be true.  An apparently  inconsistent set of propositions can be show to be  consistent by making one or more distinctions. In this instance, a distinction between mental item as content and  mental item as noema. 

The answer to the title question, then, is yes.

Here is a simpler and more familiar example of how this works. The aporetic dyad whose limbs are The coffee is hot and The coffee is not hot is apparently inconsistent.  The inconsistency is removed by making a distinction between two different times one at which the coffee is hot, the other at which it is not.

Is the above theory, which I have only sketched, tenable? Does it definitively solve the problem? I don't believe so. And this for the reason that the solution gives rise to problems of its own. 

If a polyad is solved by the making of a problematic distinction, then the solution is stop-gap and not definitive.

A Hitherto Unknown Portrait of Edmund Husserl and his Relation to Leonard Nelson

 Sketch found in the notebooks of Leonard Nelson. This page offers some insights into the Husserl-Nelson relationship if you want to call it that. Husserl appears in a churlish light as a Fachphilosoph looking down on a lowly dozent and perceived amateur. Husserl apparently ignored or dismissed  Nelson's The Impossibility of the Theory of Knowledge despite its relevance to Husserl's project of founding philosophy als strenge Wissenschaft, as strict science.

Roman Ingarden, Husserl's distinguished student, has  the following to say about Nelson (a German despite his very English surname) in his On the Motives which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism: 

It so happened that in the very years that Husserl jumped into the arena of epistemology, Leonard Nelson directed a sharp attack against the theory of knowledge. (footnote #1o:  Cf. Leonard Nelson, Ueber das sogenannte Erkenntnisproblem. Die Unmoeglichkeit der Erkenntnistheorie, vol. III, Abhandlungen der Friesschen Schule, also in the Acts of the IV International Congress of Philosophy, 1911. Husserl's ideas must have been completely crystallized in this period. Nelson was a Dozent in Goettingen from the year 1909.)

We know that Nelson made an attempt to show the impossibility of epistemology by pointing out that inevitably in it one cannot avoid committing the error of petitio principii. Husserl, as far as I know, never spoke nor wrote about this opinion expressed by Nelson and must have seen this danger clearly for himself, but he certainly knew about Nelson's book. Whatever the relations were between the two thinkers, it is a fact that in the period when I heard Husserl's lectures (with interruptions, from 1912 to 1917) he very often drew attention in his lectures and seminars to the "nonsense" (Widersinn) in the attempt to arrive at an epistemological solution, e.g. concerning the cognitive value of outer perception, by appealing to the existence of qualities in objects given in cognition of the kind which is investigated when, e.g. -- as was usual in the psycho-physiology of the second half of the 19th century -- we appeal to "physical stimuli" which act upon what is called our senses in order to show that sense perception falsely informs us about "secondary" qualities of material objects. It is also a fact that the application of the phenomenological reduction, which Husserl introduced with another aim in mind in Ideas I, eo ipso removes the danger of petitio principii in the investigations into the experiential mode of cognition of the objects of the real world. After having carried out this reduction we find ourselves, nevertheless, ipso facto in the area of pure transcendental consciousness inside which we are to carry out all epistemological investigations; but, in addition, it has to be agreed that every being (real or ideal or purely intentional) is to be deduced from the essence of the operations (acts) of pure consciousness. It seems to be that from the point of view of a valid epistemological methodology a certain kind of priority is to be demanded for pure consciousness, and that this is possible is also shown by the theory of immanent perception and the results of the analysis of primary constitutive consciousness constituting, for example, time. But, along with this, this "priority" of pure consciousness begins to assume a metaphysical character in the form even of a thesis of the absolute existence of pure consciousness, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, of an existential dependence of all other being, and, above all, of the real world, on pure consciousness. The danger of petitio principii in epistemology is removed by the phenomenological reduction but it leads to an account of the existence of the world which (in spite of all differences, from, for example, Berkeley's position, which Husserl himself constantly and emphatically stressed) comes alarmingly close to the Marburgian Neo-Kanti[ani]sm, of which Husserl was often accused on the grounds of similarities between his Ideas and [Paul] Natorp's Allgemeine Psychologie of 1912. (pp. 11-13)

Butchvarov's Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl's Paradox of Human Subjectivity

New and improved! Originally posted in October, 2015. For a longish review and critique of the Butchvarov volume mentioned below, see my "Butchvarov on the Dehumanization of Philosophy," Studia Neoaristotelica, vol. 13, no. 2 (2016), pp. 181-195. Butchvarov and Husserl are clearly related to my present and ongoing rehearsal of the problematic of Kantian transcendental realism. 

............................................................

From Kant on, transcendental philosophy has been bedeviled by a certain paradox.  Here again is the Paradox of Antirealism (PA) discussed by Panayot Butchvarov, as I construe it, where  the numerals in parentheses refer to pages in 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 a priori 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 would depend for its existence and/or nature on transient parts thereof.  And surely that would be absurd.  Butchvarov above mentions the intelligibility of physical reality. If this intelligibility is not intrinsic to nature but imposed by us, then this too would be absurd if we are but physical parts of the physical cosmos.  Butchvarov again: "The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna." For one thing, before we miserable human animals came on the evolutionary scene, the physical cosmos was 'already there.' So the cosmos could not possibly depend for its existence on the existence of measly parts thereof who, in addition, made the scene rather late in the game.  As for intelligibility, the understandability of the cosmos has as a necessary though not sufficient condition its regularity.  The laws of nature are at least regularities. Now if regularity is imposed or bestowed or projected by specimens of h. sapiens, then the universe would have to wait for us to arrive before it could be cosmos as opposed to  chaos. And that is plainly 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. (I leave out of consideration putatively non-intentional states of awareness such as felt pain and felt pleasure.)  For Butchvarov, consciousness-of is not a property of (subjective genitive) human beings or of metaphysical/noumenal/transcendental egos somehow associated with human animals.  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.  The influence of both David Hume and Jean-Paul Sartre on Butchvarov is unmistakable. 

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 the 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, and thus other than every object, not in the world, and hence not restricted to the measly specimens of a zoological species.  It is not restricted to them because not embodied in them. It is not a property of human animals, or something going on in their brains, or something supervenient upon, or epiphenomenal to, or emergent from intracranial goings-on.  Consciousness, again, is a "wind blowing towards objects," a wind that blows from Nowhere and Nowhen. It blows without a blower. Someone might think of God as the Cosmic Blowhard who blows the bubble of space-time-matter from a 'place' outside of space and time, and keeps the bubble inflated for as long as he likes. But of course that is not what Sartre and Butchvarov mean. There is no blower of the intentional wind.  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,' a nugatory nothing, ein nichtiges Nichts (to borrow a phrase from Heidegger) inasmuch as consciousness, which is no-thing,  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 or something.  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 mind merely apparent.  (Via private communication.) 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 epoché  has made them into 'phenomena,' so that the philosopher within the epoché  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 epoché, each 'I' is considered purely as the ego-pole of his acts, habitualities, and capacities . . . .

[. . .]

But in the epoché 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 epoché.  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 epoché." (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.  

Husserl, Thomas, and Sister Adelgundis

Substack latest. A meditation on Husserl's birthday.

A Nice Thing about Philosophy

One nice thing about philosophy is that one can often argue in a pleasant and gentlemanly way because little is at stake. It is unlikely that anyone will get up in arms, literally or figuratively, over the East coast versus the West coast interpretation of the noema in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.  I don't expect any blood to be spilt over this.

Excerpts from Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences

Here

Object-Directedness and Object-Dependence

Intentionality cannot be identified with object-dependence. Here is why.

Suppose that  I begin thinking about some faraway thing such as the Washington Monument (WM) and  that I think of it without interruption through some short interval of time.  Half-way through the interval, unbeknownst to me, the monument is destroyed and ceases to exist.  Question: does my thinking become objectless half-way through the interval? Or does my thinking have an object and the same object throughout the interval?

The answer depends on what is meant by 'object.'  'Object' could mean the infinitely-propertied thing intended in the act of thinking, or it could mean that which is before my mind precisely as such with all and only the properties I think of the thing intended as having.  Either could be called the intentional object, which goes to show that 'intentional object' is ambiguous.  On the first alternative the intentional object = the real object; on the second, the intentional object is some sort of incomplete item that either plays an intermediary role, or else is a proper part of the thing intended.  (Husserl aficionados will gather that I am alluding to the difference between West Coast and  East Coast interpretations of the status and function of the noema .)  To avoid the ambiguity of 'intentional object,' I will distinguish the thing intended from the noema, leaving open how exactly the noema is to be understood. 

One answer to the above question is that, during the entire interval, my thinking has one and the same object, but this object is not the thing intended but the noema.   The noema is the thing-AS- intended in certain ways (under certain incomplete descrioptions) appropriate to finite minds such as we possess, for example, the x such that x is made of marble and honors George Washington. This distinction between noema and thing intended needs  explanation, of course, and it raises some difficult if not insoluble questions, but it fits the phenomenological facts.  When the WM ceases to exist, nothing changes phenomenologically. If the intentional object were the real, extra-mental, physical thing, then, when the WM ceases to exist, my conscious state would become objectless -- which is not what happens.  So we need the distinction, and we must not conflate object-directedness with object-dependence.  

DEP: The objective reference or aboutness of a mental state S is object-dependent =_df S's having objective reference entails the (extra-mental)  existence of the thing intended by S.

DIR:  The objective reference or aboutness of a mental state S is object-directed =_df  S's having objective reference is logically consistent both with the (extra-mental) existence and (extra-mental) nonexistence of the thing intended by S.

If we understand aboutness in terms of (DIR), then the answer to my question is that nothing changes phenomenologically throughout the interval: my thinking has an object and the very same object throughout the interval despite the WM's ceasing to exist half-way though the interval.

(DEP) codifies an externalist understanding  of  'objective reference' whereas (DIR) codifies an internalist understanding.  On (DEP), it is the existence in the external world of the thing intended that grounds S's objective reference or aboutness; without this external ground S would lack aboutness, and S would be objectless.  On (DEP), then, the aboutness of a mental state is a relational property of the state as opposed to an intrinsic property thereof.  On (DIR), intrinsic features of the subject and his acts suffice to ground S's objective reference or aboutness.  This implies a strict act-object correlation: necessarily, every act has an object, and every object is the object of an act.

You will have noticed that 'object' has different senses in the above definitions. In (DEP), 'object' refers to a entity that exists in itself, and thus independently of the existence of minds and their acts. In (DIR), 'object' refers to an intentional correlate which cannot exist apart from minds and their acts.

I'll say a bit more by way of elaboration.

The thing intended is the monument itself, the infinitely-propertied physical thing. Surely that is what my thinking intends when I think about the WM and ask: How tall is it? What is its shape? What is it composed of? I am not asking about any content of my consciousness. So I am not asking about the occurrent episode of thinking itself, the act, or any other contents such as felt sensory data (Husserl's hyletic data).  Contents are immanent to consciousness and nothing immanent to my consciousness is 550 feet tall, made of marble, monolithic, or in the shape of an obelisk.  

Nor am I asking about the noema.  Noemata are akin to Fregean senses.  Like the latter, noemata cannot be made of marble or 550 feet tall. (This is the 'California' or 'West Coast' interpretation sired by Dagfinn Follesdal.) Like Fregean senses, they are not contents of consciousness that the subject experiences or lives through. Senses and noemata are more like objects than like contents, except that they are abstract or ideal objects that serve a mediating function.  The senses of 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' mediate my linguistic reference to that massive chunk of physical reality, the plant Venus. They are neither mental nor physical; they are 'third world' entities albeit more Platonic than Popperian.   Noemata are similar: they mediate thinking reference but are neither mental in the manner of a content of consciousness nor physical.  

But there is an important difference. Fregean senses exist whether or not minds and their contents exist.  They also exist whether or not physical items exist including marks on paper or acoustic disturbances in the air.   But noemata exist only as the correlates of acts or intentional experiencings. They have a curious in-between status. They are not contents of consciousness, but they are also not entities in their own right inasmuch as they exist only as correlates of acts.

Because noemata are ideal or abstract intermediaries, they do not have physical  properties and dispositions.  A tree is disposed to catch on fire if struck by lightning, say.  But no tree-noema can catch on fire. (See Husserl, Ideas I, sec. 89) 

 

Analysis of a Passage from Husserl's Logical Investigations

Ed sends this:

Just found this very odd quote from Logical Investigations:

If I have an idea of the god Jupiter, this god is my presented object, he is ‘immanently present’ in my act, he has ‘mental inexistence’ in the latter, or whatever expression we may use to disguise our true meaning. I have an idea of the god Jupiter: This means that I have a certain presentative experience, the presentation-of-the-god-Jupiter is realized in my consciousness. This intentional experience may be dismembered as one chooses in descriptive analysis, but the god Jupiter naturally will not be found in it. The ‘immanent’, ‘mental object’ is not therefore part of the descriptive or real makeup (deskriptiven reellen Bestand) of the experience, it is in truth not really immanent or mental. But it also does not exist extramentally, it does not exist at all. This does not prevent our-idea-of-the-god-Jupiter from being actual, a particular sort of experience or particular mode of mindedness (Zumutesein), such that he who experiences it may rightly say that the mythical king of the gods is present to him, concerning whom there are such and such stories. If, however, the intended object exists, nothing becomes phenomenologically different. It makes no essential difference to an object presented and given to consciousness whether it exists, or it is fictitious, or is perhaps completely absurd. I think of Jupiter as I think of Bismarck, of the tower of Babel as I think of Cologne Cathedral, of a regular thousand-sided polygon as of a regular thousand-faced solid.

This relates to my earlier question. What is the intentional object here? Is it the idea-of-Jupiter? Or Jupiter himself?

1) Note first that 'inexistence' does not mean non-existence. This is a very common mistake made by most analytic philosophers.  When I am thinking about the god Jupiter, with or without imagery, Jupiter is the intentional object of my act. An act is an intentional (lived) experience, ein intentionales Erlebnis.  It is a mental item I live through, a psychic content if you will, "realized in my consciousness."  But every act has an intentional object (IO), just as every such object is the object of an act.    In the Jupiter case, the intentional object does not exist in reality.  So we say that it is a merely intentional object (MIO).  To say that this IO is inexistent in the act is just to say that the act has an intentional object which may or may not exist (in reality) without prejudice either to the directedness of the act or to the identity of the act.  (The identity of an act token is determined by its IO; equivalently, act tokens are individuated by their IOs.) So don't confuse 'inexistent' with 'non-existent.' Every intentional object is inexistent, but only some are non-existent. If an IO is nonexistent, then we say it is merely intentional.

2) Mental acts, not to be confused with mental (or physical) actions,  are occurrent episodes of object-directed experiencing.  Acts exist in reality. Obviously, Jupiter is not a real part or constituent of my act when I think of Jupiter.  Jupiter, as the object of my act, does not exist in my act as a real constituent thereof. (The same goes for the PLANET  Jupiter. I have a big head, and a broad mind, but not that big of a head or that broad of a mind.)   But neither does the god Jupiter exist in reality, extramentally.  As H. says, "it does not exist at all."  This much is clear. Jupiter is not in my head, nor in my mind as a real constituent of the mental events and processes that occur when I am thinking about Jupiter. It is also not an extramental existent.  Jupiter is before my mind as the intentional object of my act.  This object is what it is whether or not it exists in reality.  Suppose we are all wrong, and the god Jupiter does exist in reality. Nothing would change phenomenologically, as H. says.

3) Ed asks, "What is the intentional object here? Is it the idea-of-Jupiter? Or Jupiter himself?"  

It is not the idea-of-Jupiter because that is the act -- the occurrent episode of object-directed experiencing -- I live through when I think of Jupiter.  We cannot say that because Jupiter does not exist in reality, it must exist in my head or in my mind. That is nonsense as Twardowski made clear.   

The intentional object is also not a really existent extramental thing.

The intentional object is Jupiter himself, a transcendent non-existent item.  The above passage seems headed in a Meinongian direction.  How this comports with the strict correlativity of act and intentional object is surely a problem.

Notes on the Introduction to Michel Henry, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh

I have Steven Nemes to thank for introducing me to the thought of Michel Henry. I recall as a graduate student in the 'seventies  having seen a big fat tome published in 1973 by Martinus Nijhoff entitled The Essence of Manifestation by one Michel Henry. I may have paged through parts of it back then, but I recall nothing about it now except its author, title, physical bulk, and publisher.

I now own three of Henry's books, not including the Manifestation tome for which Amazon is asking a paltry sum in the range of 300-400 semolians.  (I could easily afford it, but my Italian frugality which got me to the place where I can buy any and all books I want, is protesting as we speak; she is one tight-pursed task mistress.)

I have worked through a bit of Henry's  Material Phenomenology, but it is heavy-going due to the awful  French Continental style in which it is written.  The above-captioned Incarnation book is much clearer though still replete with the typical faults of French Continental writing: the overuse of rhetorical questions, the pseudo-literary  pretentiousness and portentousness, the lack of clarity, the misuse of universal quantifiers, the historicist lust to outdo one's predecessors in radicality of questioning and to go beyond, always beyond.  I could go on, and you hope I don't.  But bad style can hide good substance. The ideas are fascinating, and as an old Husserl and Heidegger man I am well-equipped to follow the twists and turns of Henry's meandering through a deep and dark Gallicized Schwarzwald. My credentials also include having thought long and hard about the Incarnation and  having published an article on it.*

Alright. Time to get to work. I am only up to p. 40 of Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh, tr. Karl Hefty, Northwestern UP, 2015, orig. publ. in French in 2000, two years before Henry's death in 2000.  So what follows are preliminary notes and queries and solicitations of help from Nemes and anyone else who knows this subject.  This is an interpretive critical summary: I will put matters in my own way, sympathetically, but with an eye toward separating the sound from the dubious or outright unsound. 

This book is about incarnation in two senses of the term and their relation.  It is about incarnation and the Incarnation of Christian theology.

Like all living beings, we human beings  are incarnate beings, beings of flesh. Most of us are apt to say that all living beings have bodies in a sense of 'body' that does not distinguish between living and non-living embodied beings.  To illustrate with an example of my own, suppose that a rock, a plant, an animal, and a man fall from a cliff at the same time. Apart from wind resistance, the four will fall at the same rate, 32 ft. per sec² in Earth's gravitational field and arrive at the ground at the same time.  From the point of view of physics, the four are bodies in same sense of the term.   And this despite their deep and undeniable differences. There is, therefore, a univocal sense of 'body' in which living and nonliving embodied beings are bodies.

So while it true that animals, and humans in particular, have lived bodies, this important fact does not exclude their having bodies in the sense of physics and the natural sciences built upon physics. By lived body, I don't just mean a living body, an object that is alive in the sense of biology, but a subject of a life, a body that feels, enjoys, and suffers its embodiment.  For Henry, however, 

. . . an abyss separates forever the material bodies that fill the universe, on the one hand, and the body of an "incarnate" being such as man [a man!], on the other. (3)

By "material bodies," H. means the bodies of non-living things.  Now if two things are separated by an abyss, that is naturally taken to mean that the two are mutually exclusive.  So consider a stone and a man. Are they abysmally different? Granted, a stone unlike a man "does not sense itself or feel its own feeling . . . ."(3) Nor does it sense or feel or love or desire anything outside itself.   Henry brings up Heidegger's point about touching in Being and Time. (3-4) We say that a table up against a wall, making physical contact with it, 'touches' the wall. But of course this is quite unlike my touching the table, or my touching a cat, or two cats touching each other, or my touching  myself.  I sense the table by touching it; the table does not sense the wall when it 'touches' the wall. 

What I have just written about touching in agreement with Heidegger is true, but I fear that Henry will push it too far.  I would say that there is something common between the table's touching the wall and my touching the table.  What is common is physical contact. In both cases we have two material bodies (in the sense of physics) in physical/material contact.  My tactile sensing of the table is not possible unless my material finger comes in contact with the table.  The physical contact is necessary, though not sufficient, for the sensing. From the phenomenological fact that there is much more to sentient touching or tactile sensing than there is to non-sentient physical contact, it does not follow that the two are toto caelo different, or abysmally different, i.e., have nothing to do with each other. I hesitate to impute such a blatant non sequitur to Henry. Yet he appears to be denying the common element. He seems to be making a mistake opposite to the one the materialist makes.  The materialist tries to reduce sentient touching to merely physical contact and the causal processes it initiates,; our phenomenologist tries to reduce sentient touching to something wholly non-physical.

Henry seems to be endorsing a flesh-body dualism.  The matter of beings like us he calls flesh, while the matter of stones and such he calls body. And he seems to think of them as mutually exclusive. "To be incarnate is not to have a body . . . . To be incarnate is to have flesh . . . ." (4) Flesh is the "exact opposite" of body. (4) "This difference is so radical that . . . it is is very difficult, even impossible, actually to think it." We are told that the matter of bodies "ultimately escapes us."  (4) The flesh-body dualism would thus appear to be epistemological as well as ontological. We have an "absolute and unbroken knowledge" of flesh but we are "in complete ignorance" "of the inert bodies of material nature." (5)

An obvious objection to this is that if we were in complete ignorance of the bodies of material nature, then we would not have been able to put a man on the moon.  Our technological feats prove that we understand a great deal about material nature.  But long before there was rocketry there was carpentry.  Jesus was a carpenter. He knew how to nail wooden items together in effective and sturdy ways.  The brutal Romans knew how to nail men like Jesus to wooden crosses.  To nail flesh to wood is to nail  the physically material to the physically material and to know what one is doing and to know the nature of the materials with which one is working.  Finally, to speak of the material bodies as "inert," as Henry does, is certainly strange given their causal powers and liabilities.  Chemical reagents in non-living substances and solutions are surely not 'inert.'

But I think I know where Henry is headed: toward a transcendental theory of sentience. Roughly, it is our transcendental auto-affectivity that is a condition of the possibility of our 'sensational' encounter with bodies. When I touch my table, the tactile sensation I experience cannot be explained by the physical contact of fingers and table, or at least it cannot be wholly explained in this way.  For there is not just physical contact, there is also consciousness of physical contact. To be precise, there is conscious physical contact. The difference will emerge in a moment.  Without consciousness there would be no sensing or feeling.  An example of mine: a chocolate bar melting in a hot car does not feel the heat that causes it to melt. But a baby expiring in a hot car does feel the heat that causes it to expire. The baby's horrendous suffering cannot be explained (or not wholly explained) in physical, chemical, electrochemical . . . neuroscientific terms.  I am alluding to what is called the Hard Problem in the philosophy of mind: the problem of integrating sensory qualia into a metaphysically naturalist worldview. It can't be done.  The qualia cannot be denied, pace Danny Dennett the Sophist, but neither can they be identified with anything naturalistically respectable.

Without consciousness, which can neither be eliminated nor naturalistically reduced, there can be no sensation or feeling.  But what about this consciousness? Is it object-directed? Is it intentional consciousness?  Or is it non-intentional consciousness? If every consciousness is a consciousness of something, then, for me to be conscious of my felt sensations, my felt sensations would have to be objects of intentional states, objects to which outward-bound consciousness directs itself.  But this is not phenomenologically the case: I feel my sensations by living through them: they are not objects of awareness but states of awareness, Erlebnisse, lived experiencings.  It is true that I can reflect on my knee pain, say, and objectify it, but it is only because I have pre-reflectively lived though the felt pain that I can reflect on it.  Felt (knee) pain is not felt the way a knee is perceived in outer perception.  The knee is an intentional object of an act of visual perception; the pain as pre-reflectively felt and suffered is not an object of inner objectifying perception.

So where is Henry headed? Toward a transcendentalization of the lived body. (Cf. p. 110) Intentionality by its very nature as consciousness of objects (genitivus objectivus) 'expels' all bodies from the subjective sphere which, for a transcendental philosopher such as Husserl, is a transcendental, not a psychological, sphere.  (The psychic is an intra-mundane region of beings; the transcendental is pre-mundane and pre-regional.)  All bodies including human and animal bodies end up on the side of the object.  But bodies so externalized cannot be sensing bodies. And without sensing bodies no body could be sensed.  So the lived body must sense itself or affect itself. This auto-affection is the transcendental condition of the possibility of  any merely material body's being sensed.  My tactile sensing of my table is possible only because of my transcendentally prior sensing of myself as transcendental flesh.  And so my pre-mundane self is not a mere transcendental I but also a transcendental body.

.....................................

* Vallicella, William F. (2002). Incarnation and Identity. Philo 5 (1):84-93.

A Discussion with Lukas Novak about Transcendental Idealism and the Transcendental Ego

The extended comment thread below began life in the comments to Why Did I Move Away from Phenomenology? (13 October 2020)

.............................

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 [proceeds?] 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 complaint of yours is 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 constitution, 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 thoroughgoing: 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?

Posted by: Lukáš Novák | Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 12:22 PM

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."

Posted by: BV | Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 01:32 PM

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.

Posted by: BV | Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 02:09 PM

>>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 constitution, 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 thoroughgoing: 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 of memory, of imagination, etc. Now these essences and the propositions about them are ideal objects that cannot depend on factical subjectivity for their Seinsinn.

Posted by: BV | Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 02:49 PM

Dr. Novak by e-mail (27 January 2021):

I take also this opportunity to finally respond to your reactions to my

comment on your post

https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2020/10/why-did-i-move-away-from-phenomenology.html

-- I apologize I did not manage to do so in time -- you know, I am always behind my schedule with my work...

 

L.N.:

>>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?<<

 

B.V.:

> 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."

 

LN: Obviously, this hinges on the meaning of "ordinary". I certainly don't

propose reducing cognition and appetition to something merely material

or sub-animal. But why cannot genuine, unreduced cognition and

appetition be part of the reality just as pebbles of quartz are?

 

I agree that soul is a subject of cognitions and appearances and

appetitions. But why "transcendental"? Why must it be pushed out of

the picture, so to speak? When I say "I cognize myself", isn't the "I"

both the real, intramundane subject who does the cognizing, and the

object of this cognizing?

 

BV: >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.

 

LN: Of course I agree with all that. By "noetic realism" I mean that

cognition is (i) non-representationalist (i.e., terminating at reality

itself, not at some representations of reality -- against Locke etc.);

and (ii) receptive, i.e., assimilative to, and measured by, the

object, not vice versa (against all sorts of idealism). Note that (i)

does not imply that cognition cannot err, nor does it exclude the

existence of mental representations as of that _by means of which_

(as opposed to _that which_) we cognize. And it also does not exclude

that reality-qua-cognized may in certain respects differ from

reality-qua-out-there -- but it is one and the same reality which is

both out there and cognized.

 

I would say we are indeed parts of the material world (we are bodies),

but not "just parts" of it. We are not mere bodies, but spirited

bodies. But a spirited body is a body, nevertheless. I am not sure if

this dual nature of man can be analyzed in hylomorphic terms, but I

insist with P.F.Strawson that both bodily and mental predicates are

to be ascribed to one and the same subject (and unlike Strawson, I

take this to be a feature of reality, not just of our conceptual

scheme).

 

Best regards,

 

Lukas

 

BV to LN (28 January 2021): For you, the notion of a transcendental subject is incoherent and should be simply dropped. There is no genuine problem here as I think there is. For you, Husserl took a wrong turn, the transcendental turn, and went down a false path.   For you, the ultimate subject of conscious states is an "ordinary part of the world." But you don't mean this materialistically or physicalistically. You admit the "dual nature of man." Man is an animal, but not just an animal: he is also a spirit.  You are rightly skeptical of hylomorphic dualism. Are you then a substance dualist? It seems not since you say that "both bodily and mental predicates are to be ascribed to one and the same subject."  But what is this subject? Is it the body in nature?  The body is a material thing and the body, qua material, cannot think.  My brain doesn't think any more than my eye glasses see.   The latter are instruments of vision, the former an instrument of thought.  The brain cannot be the ultimate subject of experience.  The same goes for each of my body parts and for my body as a whole. I don't think with my liver or feel with my heart, which is just a pump made out of meat.  The liver is just a filter made of meat.  

 

Could the psyche be the ultimate ego?  No, it is an object of introspection not the subject that introspects. Similarly for the psychophysical complex. It is not the ultimate subject of experience.   You see where I am going with this. I am regressing to the ultimate condition of anything appearing. This ultimate condition is not to be found among the objects of consciousness. We say it is 'transcendental' though not in the Aristotelian-scholastic sense.   Whether or not it is an ego is a further question; but let's assume  that it is. 

 

I have just motivated  -- in a sketchy way --  the introduction of the transcendental ego.   You don't accept this. You will say that one and the same intramundane subject is both cognizer and cognized.  So when I inspect my body, is my body inspecting my body, or some part of my body inspecting some other part of my body?  What part of the body has the power to do this?  Is my hand sensing the soles of my feet? No, I am sensing in tactile fashion the soles of my feet by the instrumentality of a hand.  Is this I a metaphysical self?  If it is, how can it be identical to the physical body?

 

You are trying to think of subjectivity in an objective/objectivistic/objectifying way like a good Aristotelian. But this approach seems as problematic as Husserl's transcendental idealism.

On the Manifold Meanings of 'World'

A reader asked whether the concept world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense is a limit concept.  Before addressing that question, and continuing the series on limit concepts, a survey of the several senses of 'world ' is in order, or at least those senses with some philosophical or proto-philosophical relevance.

1) In the planetary sense, the world is the planet Earth or some other planet such as Mars, as in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.

2) In the cosmological sense, the world is the cosmos, the physical universe, the object of cosmology, a branch of physics.  It is space-time together with whatever physicists discover within it: particles, fields, strings, vacuum fluctuations . . . .

3) In the theological sense, the world is the totality of creatures, where a creature is anything created ex nihilo by God, anything dependent on God for its existence (and presumably also dependent on God for its nature, intelligibility, and value). This includes all contingent beings and arguably also all necessary beings with the exception of God. I am alluding to Aquinas' distinction between God, the necessary being whose necessity is from himself,  and the rest of the necessary beings that have their necessity from another, namely, from God. The latter are creatures, as strange as that might sound.  They are creatures in that they depend on God for their existence despite the impossibility of their non-existence. For if, per impossibile, God did not exist, they would not exist either.

4) In the referential sense, for want of a better name, the world is the totality of extra-linguistic and extra-mental items. Thus daggers are 'in the world' in this sense, but not Macbeth's dagger or any other objects of hallucination, all such items being 'in the mind.' 'World' in the referential sense is a contrastive term and denotes what exists in itself, in reality, as opposed to what exists only in and for minds.  For example, philosophers of language typically tell us that reference is a word-world relation.  The world in the referential sense is the totality of objects of primary reference, whether the reference be what Hector-Neri Castaneda calls thinking reference, which does not require linguistic expression, or linguistic reference via proper names, indexicals, demonstratives, definite descriptions, etc.

NOTE: Although 'world'  carries a suggestion of maximality and all-inclusiveness, (2), (3) and (4) describe senses of 'world' which are non-maximal and contrastive. Thus in (2) the world does not include so-called abstract objects or purely spiritual beings such as God, angels, and unembodied souls.  In (3) the world does not encompass or contain or include God, and is thus other than God, but it does include abstract objects if there are any.   Similarly with (4): the objects of primary reference form a totality that excludes the semantic and intentional apparatus in the mind whereby the items in the world are referenced, although the items in the referential apparatus  exist and can be referred to in reflection and therefore can also claim to be in the world in a wider sense. For example, consider the intentional or object-directed state one is in when one veridically sees a tree. Is this state not in the world? Or what about the words, whether tokens or types, used to refer to things in the world and to the world itself? Are they not in the world in a suitably maximalist sense of the term?  John Searle is in the world, but a token of the proper name 'John Searle' is not?  This is a problem for (4), but not one that can detain us. There are in fact a number of gnarly problems one can pose about (2), (3) and (4), but they are not my problems, at least not now when I am merely cataloging the different philosophically relevant senses of 'world.'

5) In the Christian-existential (existenziell) sense, 'world' refers to a certain attitude or mentality. My reader well describes it as follows:

But there is another sense of the term 'world' — Christians  talk of dying to the world and being in the world but not of it. This world they  speak  of could not be reduced to the world of black holes  and dark matter, of collapsing stars and expanding nebulae. This is the social and moral world that they want to die to. It is the world of spiritual distraction and moral fog, the world of status-seeking and reputation.

To which wonderful formulation I add that worldlings or the worldly live for the here and now alone with its fleeting pleasures and precarious perquisites. They worship idolatrously at the shrine of the Mighty Tetrad: money, power, sex, and recognition. They are blind to the Unseen Order and speak of it only to deny it.  They are the Cave dwellers of Plato who take shadow for substance, and the dimly descried for the optimally illuminated. They do not seek, nor do they find. They are not questers. They live as if they will live forever in a world they regard as the ne plus ultra of reality, repeating the same paltry pleasures and believing them to be the summum bonum.

I seem to have strayed from description to evaluation.  In any case:

6) In the all-inclusive tenselessly ontological sense, the world is the totality of everything that is or exists, of whatever category, whether mental, material, or ideal (abstract), whether past, present, or future, whether in time or outside of time.

7) In the presentist ontological sense, the world is the totality of everything that is or exists, at temporal present, of whatever category, whether mental, material, or ideal (abstract).  This is close to Quentin Smith's (may peace be upon him) notion of the world-whole in The Felt Meanings of the World (Purdue 1986).

8) In the Tractarianly factualist sense, the world is all that is the case; it it is the totality of facts, not of things. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus, 1, 1.1:

Die Welt ist alles was der Fall ist. Die Welt is die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge.

9) On Armstrongian naturalistic factualism, there is only the space-time world and it "is a huge and organized net of states of affairs [concrete facts]" (Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics, Oxford 2010, p. 26). Since thin particulars, properties, and relations are constituents of states of affairs, the world for Armstrong is a totality of facts AND of things . 

David Armstrong offers a useful comment on Wittgenstein (ibid., p. 34):

Wittgenstein said at 1.1 in his Tractatus that the world is the totality of facts, not of things. I think he was echoing here (in a striking way) Russell's idea that the world is a world of facts. I put the same point by saying that the world is a world of states of affairs. To say that the world is a world of things seems to leave out an obvious point: how these things hang together, which must be part of reality.  Interestingly, my own teacher in Sydney, John Anderson, used to argue that reality was 'propositional' and appeared to mean much the same as Russell and Wittgenstein. One could say metaphorically that reality was best grasped as sentence-like rather than list-like. (Hyperlink added!)

10) In the modal-abstractist sense, a possible world is a  maximal Fregean proposition where a maximal such proposition is one that entails every proposition with which it is consistent;  the actual world is the true maximal proposition; a merely possible world is a maximal proposition that is false, but contingently so.  Note that while the worlds in question are maximal, this conception of worlds is not maximalist. For on this scheme, the possible world that happens to be actual is the maximal proposition that happens to be true. True of what? True of the concrete universe that serves as its truthmaker.  The actual world is an abstract object that excludes the concrete universe.

11) In the modal-concretist sense, a possible world is a maximal mereological sum of concreta; every world is actual at itself, which implies that no world is actual absolutely or simpliciter; there are no merely possible worlds given that every world is actual at itself.  This is a maximalist conception of worlds. (See David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, Basil Blackwell, 1986) Finally,

12) In the transcendental-phenomenological sense, the world is, first of all, none of the above.  Let's take a stroll down the via negativa. The world is not the planet Earth, and not just because there are other physical entities: Earth appears within the world and is therefore not the same as the world. The world is not the physical cosmos; the cosmos appears within the world, and is therefore not the same as the world. Creatures are not the world; they too appear within the world. God is not the world; if God is, then God is either a being (a being among beings) or the being, the one and only being. Either way, God is  seiend, ens, being, not reines Sein, esse, pure Be-ing (To Be). Now the world in the transcendental-phenomenological  sense is the ultimate context within which alone beings appear or show themselves as beings. It follows that God, if he is ein Seiendes (a being) or das Seiende (the being), is not the world but is within the world.

The world is not itself a being as if it were a sort of ontic container, but the ultimate transcendental condition -- although 'condition' is not quite the right word -- that allows beings to be.  So if God is either a being or the being, then he is within the world, in which case God cannot be the world.  The world in the transcendental-phenomenological  sense is transcendentally prior to every being including God who, despite his marvellous attributes, is but the highest being.  God may be ontically that than which no greater can be conceived (Anselm), but transcendentally there is a greater, namely, the clearing or Lichtung (Heidegger) within which alone beings show themselves as beings.  Every being, including the highest being, God, is subject to the ultimate transcendental condition of manifestation.

And of course the world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense is not the realm of primary referents or the attitude of worldly people that Christians qua Christians oppose.  Nor is the world a totality in any innerworldly (intramundane) sense of 'totality.' The world is not an ontic whole. It cannot be pieced together out of parts. It is not a collection the existence of which presupposes the items collected. It is not a set, or the extension of a set, a mereological sum or the extension of a mereological sum -- if you care to distinguish a sum from its membership/extension.  The world is not a scattered object, an aggregate of any kind, a maximal conjunction of propositions, a maximal conjunctive fact.  The world has no adequate ontic model.  It is not an instance of a category instantiated within the world. It cannot be assimilated to any abstract item such as a set or a proposition. It cannot be assimilated to any concrete items such as a concrete fact or a concrete individual or an aggregate.

The world is unique.  "The world . . . does not exist as an entity, as an object, but exists with such uniqueness that the plural makes no sense when applied to it. Every plural, and every singular drawn from it, presupposes the world-horizon." (Crisis, Carr tr. 143)  I'll have more to say later.

Husserl and Heidegger

Husserl seems to think that everything can be brought into the light of adequate, indeed apodictic, evidence. The dark and hidden get their revenge in his most distinguished student, Heidegger.

If You Understood, You'd Agree!

There is a privileging of one's position whereby every objection can only be proof of misunderstanding. I get this privileging impression from Eugen Fink. One example is on p. 47 of The Sixth Cartesian Meditation.

Husserl, Thomas, and Sister Adelgundis

Some of us live within the tension between the autonomy of reason and  obedient faith and trust.  On the one side, we are admirers of Edmund Husserl with his  ethos of critical examination, of cautious inquiry  painstaking and protracted, of scholarly sobriety; we share his fear of error, of doxastic over-extension; we subscribe to an ethics of belief, we feel the anxious concern for intellectual honesty. His question, Wie kann ich ein ehrlich Philosoph sein? is ours. On the other side, that of Thomas, we feel the willingness to take doxastic risks, to go beyond what can be strictly known, or even shown to be possible; we desire  truth whether or not it can be philosophically validated; we are open to the  allowing of church authority to override the judgment of the individual, even if in the end we cannot accept the Church's magisterium.

Husserl was drawn to the Catholic Church in his later years. But he felt too old to enter her since he would need at least five years to examine each dogma, as he explained to Sister Adelgundis.  (See John M. Oesterreicher, Walls are Crumbling: Seven Jewish Philosophers Discover Christ, London: Hollis and Carter, 1953, p. 80.)

A comparison with Simone Weil is apt. She lurked outside the Church for years but could not bring herself to enter. Intellectual scruples were part of it. She was strongly opposed to Blaise Pascal's bit about just taking the holy water and going through the motions in the expectation that outer practices would bring inner conviction.

Husserl's attitude was that it would be intellectually irresponsible to accept the dogmas prior to careful examination to see if they are rationally acceptable. To which the believer will say: How dare you question God's revelation? God has revealed himself in the Incarnation and you will waste five years 'examining' whether it is logically possible when it is a foregone conclusion that you with your scrupulosity of method will be unable to 'constitute' in consciousness the Word and its becoming flesh?  It's a fact that lies beyond the sphere of immanence and irrupts into it, and thus cannot be 'constituted' from within it. What can be constituted is at best a transcendence-in-immanence, not an absolute transcendence. What's actual is possible, and what's possible is possible whether you can understand how. If it is actual, then it is possible even if it seems self-contradictory!

Oesterreicher: "But to do so [to examine the dogmas] is to judge the Judge, to try the word of God, forgetting that it is the word of God that tries us." (Walls are Crumbling, p. 80) Oesterreicher goes on to say that Husserl tries to shift "the centre of being and truth" "from God to ourselves." (ibid.) That is exactly right, and this shift is the essence of modern philosophy from Descartes (1596-1650) on.  The 'transcendental turn' does indeed make of man the center, the constitutive source of all meaning and being.

"It is this luminous authority which gives faith its certainty." (p. 81)  But how do you know that this certainty is not merely subjective? Objective certainty alone is of epistemic worth. And how do you know that the authority really is an authority? Josiah Royce's religious paradox is relevant here.

One option is just to accept the faith and seek understanding afterwards. Fides quarens intellectum. And if understanding doesn't come? Well, just keep on believing and practicing. On this approach, faith stands whether or not understanding emerges. "I accept the Incarnation without understanding how it is possible; I accept it despite its seeming impossible."  Faith does not have to pass the tests of reason; reason has no veto power over faith. There is a Truth so far above us  that the only appropriate attitude on our part is like that of the little child. "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." (Matt. 18, 3)

Would this response move Husserl? No. Should it? Not clear.

Perhaps Wittgenstein in his Vermischte Bemerkungen gives the best advice:

Go on, believe! It does no harm.

Believing means submitting to an authority. Having once submitted, you can't then, without rebelling against it, first call it in question and then once again find it acceptable. (Culture and Value, tr. Peter Winch, p. 45e)

Edith Stein on Sister Clara and Edmund Husserl

A search on 'Sister Adelgundis' turned up the following which I reproduce from this interesting weblog.

Pax Christi!

Dear Sister Adelgundis,

Our greetings go from one death-bed to the other.  Our Sister Clara departed today for eternity, very gently, after a year of suffering.  I commended our dear Master [Husserl] to her often, and will do so again tonight at the wake.  I believe one is well taken care of in her company.  She was our eldest lay sister, tireless in the lowliest of tasks, but a strong and manly character who had grasped and lived the Carmelite ideal with complete determination.  So faith turned it into a completely spiritual life.  I am not at all worried about our dear Master.  It has always been far from me to think that God’s mercy allows itself to be circumscribed by the visible church’s boundaries.  God is truth.  All who seek truth seek God, whether this is clear to them or not…

Most cordially, your

Teresa Benedicta a Cruce

Kleingeld meine Herren, Kleingeld!

Edmund Husserl used to say that to his seminarians to keep them careful and wissenschaftlich and away from assertions of the high-flying and sweeping sort.  "Small change, gentlemen, small change!" Unfortunately, the philosophical small change doesn't add up.  Specialization, no matter how narrow and protracted, no matter how carefully pursued, fails to put us on the "sure path of science."

Given that plain fact, learned from hard experience, you may as well go for the throat of the Big Questions.  Aren't they what brought you  to philosophy in the first place?

This line of thought is pursued in Fred Sommers Abandons Whitehead and Metaphysics for Logic.

Edmund Husserl used to say that to his seminarians to keep them careful and wissenschaftlich and away from assertions of the high-flying and sweeping sort.  "Small change, gentlemen, small change!" Unfortunately, the philosophical small change doesn't add up.  Specialization, no matter how narrow and protracted, no matter how carefully pursued, fails to put us on the "sure path of science."

Given that plain fact, learned from hard experience, you may as well go for the throat of the Big Questions.  Aren't they what brought you  to philosophy in the first place?

This line of thought is pursued in Fred Sommers Abandons Whitehead and Metaphysics for Logic.

Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method: Theocentric or Egocentric?

August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.  She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.

In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Husserl and Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

One issue is whether faith gives us access to truth. Stein has Thomas say:

. . . faith is a way to truth. Indeed, in the first place it is a way to truths — plural — which would otherwise be closed to us, and in the second place it is the surest way to truth. For there is no greater certainty than that of faith . . . . (Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, tr. W. Redmond, ICS Publications, Washington, D. C.,  2000, pp. 16-17)

Now comes an important question. What is it that we as philosophers want? We want the ultimate truths about the ultimate matters. If so, it is arguable that we should take these truths from whatever source offers them to us even if the source is not narrowly philosophical. We should not say: I will accept only those truths that can be certified by (natural) reason, but rather all truths whether certified by reason or 'certified' by faith. Thus Stein has Aquinas say:

If faith makes accessible truths unattainable by any other means, philosophy, for one thing, cannot forego them without renouncing its universal claim to truth. [. . .] One consequence, then, is a material dependence of philosophy on faith.

Then too, if faith affords the highest certainty attainable by the human mind, and if philosophy claims to bestow the highest certainty, then philosophy must make the certainty of faith its own. It does so first by absorbing the truths of faith, and further by using them as the final criterion by which to gauge all other truths. Hence, a second consequence is a formal dependence of philosophy on faith. (17-18)

But of course this cannot go unchallenged by Husserl. So Stein has him say:

. . . if faith is the final criterion of all other truth, what is the criterion of faith itself? What guarantees that the certainty of my faith is genuine? (20)

Or in terms of of the distinction between subjective (psychological) and objective (epistemic) certainty: what guarantees that the certainty of faith is objective and not merely subjective? The faiths of Jew, Christian, and Muslim are all different. How can the Christian be sure that the revelation he takes on faith has not been superseded by the revelation the Muslim takes on faith?  And what about contradictory faith-contents? God cannot be both triune (as the normative Christian believes) and not triune (as the normative Muslim believes).  So Christian and Muslim cannot both be objectively certain about their characteristic beliefs; at most they can be subjectively certain. Subjective certainty, however, has no epistemic value.  (This paragraph is my gloss on the preceding quotation.)

Stein's Thomas replies to Husserl as follows:

Probably my best answer is that faith is its own guarantee. I could also say that God, who has given us the revelation, vouches for its truth. But this would only be the other side of the same coin. For if we took the two as separate facts, we would fall into a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle], since God is after all what we become certain about in faith.

[. . .]

All we can do is point out that for the believer such is the certainty of faith that it relativizes all other certainty, and that he can but give up any supposed knowledge which contradicts his faith. The unique certitude of faith is a gift of grace. It is up to the understanding and will to draw the practical consequences therefrom. Constructing a philosophy on faith belongs to the theoretical consequences. (20-22)

For Thomas and Stein, the certainty of faith is a gift of God. As such, it cannot be merely subjective.  It is at once both subjective and objective, subjective as an inner certitude, objective as an effect of divine grace. Husserl, however, will ask how the claim that the certainty of faith is a divine gift can be validated.  It is, after all, a contestable and contested claim.  And not just by sophists and quibblers, but by sincere and brilliant truth seekers such as Husserl. How does one know that it is true? For Husserl, the claims that God exists and that the Christian revelation is divine revelation are but dogmatic presuppositions.  They need validation because of the existence of competing claims such as those made by Jews and Muslims and atheists.

If, as Stein says, "faith is its own guarantee," then, since the faith of the Christian and the faith of the Muslim are contradictory with respect to certain key propositions, it follows that one of these faiths offers a false guarantee.  You can see from this that the Thomas-Stein stance leaves something to be desired.  But Husserl's approach has problems of its own.  Closed up within the sphere of his subjectivity, man cannot reach the truly Transcendent, which must irrupt into this sphere and cannot be constituted (Husserl's term) within it.  The truly Transcendent is not a transcendence-in-immanence.  It cannot be a constituted transcendence.

If man is indeed a creature, there is something absurd about measly man hauling the Creator before the bench of finite reason there to be rudely interrogated about his credentials.  On the other hand, the claim that man is a creature is not objectively self-evident but a claim like any other, and man must satisfy his intellectual conscience with respect to this claim.  It is precisely his freedom, responsibility, and love of truth that drive him to ask: But is it true?  And how do we know?  And isn't it morally shabby to fool oneself and seek consolation in a fairy tale?

Paradoxically, God creates man in his image and likeness, and thus as free, responsible, and truth-loving; it is these characteristics that then motivate man to put God in the dock.

The Incompatibility of Husserl's Egocentrism and Thomas's Theocentrism

Let's give the last word to Stein's Aquinas:

The course that you have followed has led you to posit the subject as the start and center of philosophical inquiry; all else is subject-related. A world constructed by the acts of the subject remains forever a world for the subject. You could not succeed -- and this was the constant objection that your own students raised against you -- in winning back from the realm of immanence that objectivity from which you had after all set out and insuring which was the point. Once existence is redefined as self-identifying for a consciousness -- such was the outcome of the transcendental investigation -- the intellect will never be set at its ease in its search for truth. (31-32)

A brief comment in explanation of the last sentence. For Thomas and other realists, it is built into the very concept of existence that that which exists exists independently of consciousness. Thus if the tree in the garden exists, it exists whether or not it appears to any conscious being. On transcendental-phenomenological idealism, however, the existence of the tree is "redefined as self-identifying for a consciousness," which is to say that its existence is nothing other than the synthetic unity of the noemata in which it appears to the subject, a unity that derives from the unifying activities of transcendental consciousness. This is a thoroughly modern (and idealist) understanding of existence. Compare Butcharov's theory of existence as the indefinite identifiability of what he calls objects and distinguishes from entities, and Hector-Neri Castaneda's theory of existence as "consubstantiation" of "ontological guises."

Now for the crux of the matter as Thomas replies to Husserl

Moreover, this shift in meaning [of existence], especially by relativizing God himself, contradicts faith. (emphasis added) So here we may well have the sharpest contrast between transcendental phenomenology and my philosophy: mine has a theocentric and yours an egocentric orientation. (32)

So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason but which are provided by faith in revelation, a revelation that must simply be accepted in humility and obedience. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.

My task, in this and in related posts, is first and foremost to set forth the problems as clearly as I can. Anyone who thinks this problem has an easy solution does not understand it.  It is part of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. 

Thomism and Husserlian Phenomenology: Combinable?

Over the phone the other night, Steven Nemes told me that his project is to synthesize Thomism and phenomenology. I expressed some skepticism. Here are my reasons.

Part I: Methodological Incompatibility

Essential to Thomism is the belief that the existence of God can be proven a posteriori by human reason unaided by divine revelation.  Thus the Third of Aquinas's Five Ways begins with the premise that there are contingent beings, "things that are possible to be and not to be."  From this starting point, by reasoning we needn't here examine, Aquinas arrives at the conclusion that there exists an absolutely necessary being. "And this all men call God."

The argument moves within what Husserl calls the natural attitude, from contingent beings that are taken to exist in themselves to a causa prima that is taken to exist in itself. Note also that  when the Third Way in enacted by a person who works his way through it, in an attempt to arrive at a justified belief that God exists, the particular judgments and inferences made by the person in question are themselves psychic realities in nature that exist in themselves with the earlier following the later in  objective time. With the suspension of the natural attitude by the phenomenologist, all of this must be eingeklammert, placed within brackets. This includes  the starting point (the existence in themselves of contingent beings), the ending point (the existence in itself of God), and the sequence of judgmental and inferential steps that the person who enacts the argument must run through in order to generate within himself the belief that God exists. No use can be made of any of this by the phenomenologist qua phenomenologist.

It seems we ought to conclude that Thomas's dialectical procedure is unphenomenological both at its starting point and at its ending point.  The dialectical procedure itself, the  arguing with its judgments and inferences, is also unphenomenological in that the judgments are posited as true in themselves, and the inferences as valid in themselves.

To summarize the argument up to this point:

a) Thomists are committed to the proposition that God's existence is provable, equivalently, that there are sound arguments for God's existence, arguments that move from premises that record what to Thomists are obvious facts of sense perception such as that trees and rocks exist in themselves (independently of us and our consciousness of them), that they exist contingently, that they are in motion, etc., arguments that end in a conclusion that records the existence in itself of a divine first cause.

b) Phenomenologists operate under a methodological restriction: the thesis of the natural standpoint is ausgeschaltet, disconnected, and the objects  in the natural attitude are eingeklammert, bracketed. The existence of these objects is not denied, or even doubted; no use is made of their existence. (Cf. Ideas I, secs. 31, 32)  Now if we abstain from affirming the existence of contingent beings, then the question cannot arise within the phenomenological epoche as to whether or not they have a cause of their existence.  But this is a question that Thomists ask and answer by positing the existence of God.

Therefore

c) Thomism and Husserlian phenomenology are incompatible and cannot be synthesized.

Part II: Metaphysical Incompatibility

Things are worse for the proposed synthesis when we consider that Husserlian phenomenology is not just a study of the modes and manners of the appearing of things, but implies transcendental idealism, a theory about the mode of existence of the things themselves. To state the incompatibility bluntly: Husserl is an idealist; Thomas is a realist. 

At its starting point, the argument a contingentia mundi presupposes the existence in themselves of contingent beings.   If these beings existed only for (finite) consciousness, then one could not arrive at an absolutely transcendent divine cause of their existence that exists in itself.  Phenomenology, however,  is committed to transcendental idealism, according to which contingent beings do not exist in themselves but only for transcendental subjectivity.  Here is a characteristic passage from Husserl:

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

Whatever I can recognize as a genuine being is nothing other than an intentional occurrence of my own -- the knower's -- life . . . .

For Husserl, the very Being of beings is their Being for consciousness, their being constituted in and by consciousness.  Their Sein reduces to Seinsinn, and that Sinn points back to the transcendental ego from which all sense derives. So the Sinn is not Original Sinn, pun intended, but derivative Sinn. Therefore, on transcendental idealism, contingent beings have no need for a divine ground of their existence, their existence being adequately accounted for by transcendental subjectivity. And since they have no need of a divine ground, one cannot prove that they must have such a ground.

At its ending point, too, cosmological arguments such as the Third Way are unphenomenological since they posit an absolutely transcendent cause of existence that is not given as it is in itself, and cannot be so given and whose identity and existence cannot be grounded subjectively. It makes some sense to say that the tree in the garden is a unity of noemata the unity of which is brought about by the synthetic, unifying activity of my transcendental ego.  But it makes no sense to say this of God.  This would be tantamount to saying that the unity and existence of the divine being derives from the synthetic activities of the creature's ego. 

The God of classical theism, the numero uno representative of which is the doctor angelicus, is by definition absolutely transcendent. He is not transcendent in relation to our consciousness like the blooming tree in Husserl's garden.  He cannot be transcendentally constituted. Even in the Beatific Vision God will not be given to us as he is in himself.  His reality infinitely surpasses anything we will ever have evidence for. It should therefore be quite clear that Husserlian phenomenology and classical theism are logically incompatible.

.................................

Addendum 10/22. A reader comments,

I've just read your post on Thomism and phenomenology. Subsuming Husserl to a Weltanschauung philosophy is to deeply and badly miss the point and much of the value of his work.

This is a just criticism of Nemes' proposed synthesis.   Husserl sharply distinguishes between world view philosophy and philosophy as strict science.  Thomism is  a worldview philosophy.  This is another reason why the proposed synthesis is dubious.   The issues here are extremely deep and complicated. But to simplify, the specifically philosophical portions of the Thomistic system are in the service of  a body of beliefs that Thomas will hold to no matter what sober philosophical inquiry establishes.  If unaided human reason can be enlisted in the service of the teachings of the Church, well and good; if not, that is no reason to doubt any of the teachings.  Philosophia ancilla theologiae. Perhaps we can say that philosophy in relation to theology is ancillary but not necessary. 

For details on the whole messy problematic, see my Genuine Inquiry and Two Forms of Pseudo-Inquiry: Sham Reasoning and Fake Reasoning.

Excerpts from Enzo Paci, Phenomenological Diary

May 30, 1957

        Glory has no meaning, power has no meaning, your personal success has no meaning. Vanity. That vanity which Husserl always fought. And he was sincere. He did indeed love truth and live for truth. Glory is the mundane, and the meaning of life reveals itself only in the negation of the mundane, in operating within the world without being prisoner of the world. I firmly believe it.

BV: Me too. Sic transit gloria mundi.

February 5, 1958

        Today Father Van Breda arrived. Rognoni and I went to pick him up at the station. In our conversations a slow approach to Husserlian problems, especially through the French interpretations. News about the "Archives."  [The reference is to the Husserl Archives in Louvain.]

February 8, 1958

        Father Van Breda's lectures: in Milan on the 6^th and in Pavia on the 7th. The difficulty of understanding the problem of intentionality in its proper sense. Van Breda says that until the end of his life Husserl refused to interpret phenomenology as a metaphysics. Perhaps it is a metaphysics, but not of the ens qua ens, but of the ens qua verum. I like the formula, but without the ens. In other words, I think that in Husserl being resolves itself in the intentional horizon of truth and therefore that phenomenology can be considered neither a metaphysics nor an ontology in the traditional sense of the two terms. It seems to me that the problem is that of the relation between time and the horizon of truth of time.

Enzo Paci is characteristically Continental in his lack of clarity.  It is almost enough to drive one into the camp of the nuts-and-bolts analysts.  The last of Paci's sentences is rather less than pellucid.

But he is on to something important, and deeply problematic in both Husserl and Heidegger: the reduction of ens qua ens to ens qua verum.

See my "Heidegger's Reduction of Being to Truth," The New Scholasticism, vol. LIX, no. 2 (Spring 1985), pp. 156-176.  I wrote it in 1980.

 

Ruminations on the Dative of Disclosure

Steven Nemes comments on my long Husserl entry:

[Robert] 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 [animated] 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.

I don't consider this helpful. To be blunt, I consider it confused.

The claim seems to be that the transcendental ego is just the empirical ego when the latter is considered as that to which the world and the objects in it appear, including that very special object which  is one's animated body.  This gives rise to the question: Who is doing the considering?  That is, who is it by whose consideration the empirical ego acquires the property of being the dative of disclosure?

It has to be me.  But it cannot be me qua object, since qua object I am not the dative, but the accusative of disclosure.  I am one of the objects that appears. So it has to be me qua subject, qua dative but not accusative of disclosure.  And let us be clear that there cannot be a dative without a nominative. There cannot be an appearing-to that is not an appearing-to something.  There could, however, be an appearing that is wholly non-relational: things just appear, are revealed, manifest themselves, but not to a subject.* But if there is an appearing-to, then there must be that to which the appearance appears. No dative without a nominative.  Either non-relational appearing or we go 'whole hog' with Husserl: ego-cogito-cogitata qua cogitata.

From this is follows that the duality self as subject-self as object is (a) inexpungeable, and (b) located within the ego.  The duality cannot be collapsed into an abstract unity, nor can the subjectivity of the subject be referred to someone or something external to the ego. I am a subject intrinsically, not relationally, not in virtue of being considered to be a subject. That is to say: the transcendentality of the ego cannot accrue to it ab extra by the the empirical ego's consideration of itself as transcendental.  Hysteron proteron! This puts the cart before the horse:**  it is because I am a transcendental ego that I can apperceive myself as a human being in nature.  As a human being, I simply lack the power to function transcendentally, to execute acts including acts of apperception. 

Of course, there cannot be two egos. The empirical ego is an ego only by analogy (equivocation?)  The true ego is the transcendental ego.  I am being faithful to Husserl here.

So I don't see that Sokolowski, or rather Sokolowski as presented by Nemes, contributes anything to the solution of the problem I posed in my long post.

________________

*This, I take it, is Heidegger's  notion of phenomenon which differs markedly from Husserl's.

**Joke: A philosopher took up residence in a bordello, thinking to enlighten the 'sex workers.' He soon left disillusioned after he found that he could not put Descartes before the whores.

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.

Husserl, Knight of Reason

Edmund Husserl was born on this date in 1859. How do we honor a philosopher? By re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically, yet critically. Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas.

Ich muss meinen Weg gehen so sicher, so fest entschlossen und so ernst wie Duerers Ritter, Tod und Teufel.   

"I must go my way as surely, as seriously, and as resolutely as the knight in Duerer's Knight, Death, and Devil."

Edmund Husserl, Persönliche Aufzeichnungen, tr. MavPhil  

Note the castle on the hill, the hour glass in the devil's hand, the serpents entwined in his headpiece, and the human skull on the road. 

Time is running out, death awaits, and a mighty task wants completion. An Adversary stands in the way with temptations galore.  

Husserl, like Ludwig Wittgenstein, was a serious man. I have no time for the unserious. Something is at stake in life, difficult as it is to say what it is.  Related: What I Like About Wittgenstein.

My Husserl category.

Is the World Inconceivable Apart from Consciousness?

That depends. It depends on what 'world' means.

Steven Nemes quotes Dermot Moran on the former's Facebook page:

[1] In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. [2] Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. [3] For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. [4] The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. [5] Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. ( Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, p. 144

This strikes me as confused. I will go through it line by line. I have added numbers in brackets for ease of reference.

Ad [1]. I basically agree. I'm an old Husserl man. But while conscious acts cannot be properly understood from within die natürliche  Einstellung, it doesn't follow that they cannot be understood "at all" from within the natural attitude or outlook. So I would strike the "at all." I will return to this issue at the end.

Ad [2].  Here the trouble begins. I grant that conscious acts cannot be properly understood in wholly materialistic or naturalistic terms. They cannot be understood merely as events in the natural world. For example, my thinking about Boston cannot be reduced to anything going in my brain or body when I am thinking about Boston. Intentionality resists naturalistic reduction. And I grant that there is a sense in which there would not be a world for us in the first place if there were no consciousness. 

But note the equivocation on 'world.' It is first used to refer to nature itself, and then used to refer to the openness or apparentness of nature, nature as it appears to us and has meaning for us.  Obviously, without consciousness, nature would not appear, but this is not to say that consciousness is the reason why there is a natural world in the first place.  To say that would be to embrace an intolerable form of idealism.

Ad [3] We are now told that this is not idealism. Very good!  But note that the world that is disclosed and made meaningful is not the world that is inconceivable without consciousness.  The equivocation on 'world' persists.  There is world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense as the 'space' within which things are disclosed and become manifest, and there is world as the things disclosed.  These are plainly different even if there is no epistemic access to the latter except via the former.

Ad [4] To be precise, the world as the 'space of disclosure' is inconceivable without consciousness. But this is not the same as the natural world, which is not inconceivable without consciousness.  If you say that it is, then you are adopting a form of idealism, which is what Husserl in the end does.

Ad [5] In the final sentence, 'world' clearly refers to the physical realm, nature. I agree that it would be a mistake to reify consciousness, to identify it with any physical thing or process. Consciousness plays a disclosive role. As OF the world -- genitivus objectivus -- consciousness is not IN the world.  But the world in this sense IS conceivable apart from consciousness. 

And so the confusion remains.  The world in the specifically pheomenological sense, the world as the 'space' within which things are disclosed -- compare Heidegger's Lichtung or clearing -- is inconceivable without consciousness. But the world as that which is disclosed, opened up, gelichtet, made manifest and meaningful, is NOT inconceivable apart from consciousness. If you maintain otherwise, then you are embracing a form of idealism.

So I'd say that Moran and plenty of others are doing the 'Continental Shuffle' as I call it: they are sliding back and forth between two senses  of 'world.'  Equivalently, they are conflating the ontic and the broadly epistemic.  I appreciate their brave attempt at undercutting the subject-object dichotomy and the idealism-realism problematic.  But the brave attempt does not succeed.  A mental act of outer perception, say, is intrinsically intentional or object-directed: by its very sense it purports to be of or about something that exists apart from any and all mental acts to which it appears.  To speak like a Continental, the purport is 'inscribed in the very essence of the act."  But there remains the question whether the intentional object really does exist independently of the act. There remains the question whether the intentional object really exists or is merely intentional.  Does it enjoy esse reale, or only esse intentionale?

I recommend to my friend Nemes that he read Roman Ingarden's critique of Husserl's idealism.  I also recommend that he read Husserl himself (in German if possible) rather than the secondary sources he has been citing, sources some of which are not only secondary, but second-rate.

To return to what I said at the outset: Conscious acts cannot be properly understood naturalistically.  But surely a full understanding of them must explain how they relate to the goings-on in the physical organisms in nature that support them.  A sartisfactory philosophy cannot ignore this. And so, to end on an autobiographical note, this was one of the motives that lead me beyond phenomenology.

 

Intentionality in Thomas and Husserl

My Serbian correspondent Milosz sent me a reference to an article in which we read:

What attracted these Catholics to Husserl was his theory of intentionality—the notion that human consciousness is always consciousness “of” something. This appealed to Catholics because it appeared to open a way beyond the idealism of modern philosophy since Kant, which had threatened to undermine the possibility that human beings could possess an objective knowledge of realities outside the mind, including God.

Husserl’s phenomenology seemed to offer a solution to this problem. His promise to return “to the things themselves” sounded to many Catholics like a vindication of medieval scholasticism, which stressed that human beings have the capacity to objectively know reality independent of the mind. This led some Catholics to dub phenomenology a “new scholasticism.” By pointing “beyond” modern philosophy, they hoped that phenomenology could also serve as a path “back” to medieval thought, so that one might begin from the perspective of modern philosophy and end up somewhere closer to Thomas Aquinas. Husserl’s phenomenology thus opened up the possibility that modern, secular philosophy could be converted to Catholicism.

The article is annoyingly superficial, and the last sentence quoted is just silly. Do I need to explain why? At the very most, Husserl's doctrine of intentionality prior to the publication in 1913 of Ideas I could be interpreted as supportive of realism, and was so interpreted by many of his early acolytes, among them, the members of the Goettingen and Munich circles.    And so in some very vague sense, Husserlian intentionality could be taken as pointing back to medieval thought and to Thomas Aquinas in particular, assuming one didn't know much about Thomas or Husserl. But the claim that "Husserl’s phenomenology thus opened up the possibility that modern, secular philosophy could be converted to Catholicism" is risible. Roman Catholicism consists of extremely specific  theological doctrines. No one could reasonably hold that a realistically  interpreted Husserl could soften secular philosophers up for Trinity, Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Transubstantiation, etc.  The most that could be said is that the (arguably merely apparent) realism of the early Husserl was welcomed by Catholic thinkers.

But now let's  get down to brass tacks with a little help from Peter Geach. I will sketch the intentionality doctrine of Thomas. It will then be apparent, if you know your Husserl, that there is nothing like the Thomistic doctrine in Husserl.

A theory of intentionality ought to explain how the objective reference or object-directedness of our thoughts and perceptions is possible. Suppose I am thinking about a cat, a particular cat of my acquaintance whom I have named 'Max Black.' How are we to understand the relation between the mental act of my thinking, which is a transient datable event in my mental life, and its object, namely the cat I am thinking of? What makes my thinking of Max a thinking of Max?  Or perhaps Max is in front of me and I am seeing him.  What makes my seeing a seeing of him?

Here is what Peter Geach has to say, glossing Aquinas:

What makes a sensation or thought of an X to be of an X is that it is an individual occurrence of that very form or nature which occurs in X -- it is thus that our mind 'reaches right up to the reality'; what makes it to be a sensation or thought of an X rather than an actual X or an actual X-ness is that X-ness here occurs in the special way called esse intentionale and not in the 'ordinary' way called esse naturale. This solution resolves the difficulty. It shows how being of an X is not a relation in which the thought or sensation stands, but is simply what the thought or sensation is . . . .(Three Philosophers, Cornell UP, 1961, p. 95)

But what the devil does that mean? Allow me to explain.

The main point here is that of-ness or aboutness is not a relation between a mental act and its object. Thus intentionality is not a relation that relates my thinking of Max and Max. My thinking of Max just is the mental occurrence of the very same form or nature -- felinity -- which occurs physically in Max. Max is a hylomorphic compound, a compound of form and (signate) matter. Old Max himself, fleas and all, is of course not in my mind. It is his form that is in my mind. But if felinity informs my mind, why isn't my mind a cat? Here is where the distinction between esse intentionale and esse naturale comes in. One and the same form -- felinity -- exists in two different modes. Its mode of being in my mind is esse intentionale while its mode of being in Max is esse naturale.

Because my thought of Max just is the intentional occurrence in my mind of the same form or nature that occurs naturally in Max, there is no problem about how my thought reaches Max. There is no gap between mind and world. One could call this an identity theory of intentionality, or perhaps an 'isomorphic' theory.  The knower is not enclosed within the circle of his ideas. There is a logically antecedent community of nature between mind and world that underwrites the latter's intelligibility. 

What if Max were, unbeknownst to me, to cease to exist while I was thinking about him? My thinking would be unaffected: it would still be about Max in exactly the way it was about him before. The Thomist theory would account for this by saying that while the form occurs with esse intentionale in my mind, it does not occur outside my mind with esse reale.

That in a nutshell is the Thomist theory of intentionality. If you can see your way clear to accepting it as the only adequate account of intentionality, then it supplies a reason for the real distinction of essence and existence. For the account requires that there be two distinct modes of esse, an immaterial mode, esse intentionale, and a material mode, esse naturale. Now if F-ness can exist in two different modes, then it cannot be identical to either and must be really distinct from both. (Cf. "Form and Existence" in God and the Soul, pp. 62-64.)

I don't have time to explain in detail how Husserl's approach to the possibility of knowledge differs from the above. But if you consult his The Idea of Phenomenology, which consists of five lectures given in 1907, just a few years after the publication of the Logical Investigations in 1900 which so inspired his early followers, you will soon appreciate how absurd is the notion that Husserl's phenomenology is a "new scholasticism."

The Commonweal article under critique is here. 

 

Philosophische Gesellschaft Göttingen (1912)

Front Row (from Ieft to right): Adolf Reinach, Alexandre Koyre, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Max Scheler, Theodor Conrad.
Back Row: Jean Hering, Heinrich Rickert jr., Ernst Rothschild, Siegfried Hamburger, Fritz Frankfurter, Rudolf Clemens, Hans Lipps, Gustav Hübener, Herbert Leyendecker, Friedrich Neumann.

The Philosopher and the Christian

For Vito Caiati

.......................

George W. Bush once referred to Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher, thereby betraying both a failure to grasp what a philosopher is and who Jesus claimed to be.

Jesus Christ is not a philosopher.  The philosopher is a mere lover of wisdom.  His love is desirous and needy; it is eros, the love of one who lacks for that which he lacks.  But Jesus Christ lacks nothing; he is is the fullness of wisdom, the Word and Wisdom of God embodied.  So Christ is no lover of wisdom in the strict sense in which Socrates is a lover of wisdom.  Divine love is not erotic but agapic.

If a sage is a possessor of wisdom, no philosopher qua philosopher is a sage. If a philosopher were to become a sage, he would thereby cease to be a philosopher: one does not seek what one possesses. Socrates is the embodiment of philosophy but not of wisdom. Socrates, then, is not a sage.

The wisdom of Socrates was largely the wisdom of nescience: he knew that he did not know what he did not know.  In stark contrast, Christ claimed not only to know the truth, but to be the truth as recounted in the via, veritas, vita passage at John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me."  Ego sum via et veritas et vita; nemo venit ad Patrem nisi per me.

Suppose a philosopher comes to accept Christian doctrine.  Does he remain a philosopher in his acceptance of Christian doctrine or does he move beyond philosophy?  I say that a philosopher who accepts the revealed truths characteristic of Christianity has moved beyond philosophy in this acceptance.  Why?

A philosopher is not only one who, lacking wisdom and desiring it, seeks it, but also one who seeks the truth in a certain way, by a certain method.  It is characteristic of philosophy that it is the pursuit of truth by unaided reason.  'Unaided' means: not aided by divine revelation.  (It does not mean that the philosopher does not consult the senses.)  The philosopher operates by reason and seeks reasons for what he believes.  The philosopher relies on discursive reason as he encounters it in himself and accepts only what he can validate by his autonomous use of reason.  Qua philosopher, he accepts no testimony but must verify matters for himself.  The philosopher is like Doubting Thomas Didymus at John 20:25: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the place of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe." 

That is the attitude of the philosopher.  The philosopher is an inquirer into ultimate matters, and doubt is the engine of inquiry. The philosopher qua philosopher asks:  Where's the evidence?  What's the argument?  What you say may be true, my brothers, but how do you know?  What's your justification? 

You say our rabbi rose from the dead?  That sort of thing doesn't happen!  I want knowledge, which is not just true belief but justified true belief.  You expect me to believe that Jesus rose on no evidence but your testimony from probably hallucinatory experiences fueled by your fear and hunger and weakness?  Prove it!  W. K. Clifford takes it to the limit and gives it a moral twist:  "It is wrong always and everywhere to believe anything on insufficient evidence."  Presumably the testimony of a bunch of scared, unlettered, credulous fisherman would not count as sufficient evidence for Thomas Didymus or Clifford.

The Christian, however, operates by faith.  If Reason is the faculty of philosophy, Faith is the faculty of religion.  The philosopher may reason his way to the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, but he cannot qua philosopher arrive at the saving truth that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) by the use of reason.  The saving truths are 'known' by faith and not by reason.  It is also clear that faith for the Christian ranks higher than reason.  As Jesus says to Thomas at John 20:29:  "Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed."

The attitude of the believer who is also a philosopher is fides quarens intellectum, faith seeking understanding.  But what if no understanding is found?  Does the believer reject or suspend his belief?  No.  If he is a genuine believer, he continues to believe whether or not he achieves understanding.  This shows that for the believer, reason has no veto power.  The apparent logical impossibility of the Incarnation does not cause him to reject or suspend his belief in Jesus as his Lord and Savior.  If he finds a way to show the rational acceptability of the Incarnation, well and good; if he fails, no matter.  The Incarnation is a fact 'known' by Revelation; as an actual fact it is possible, and what is possible is possible whether or not we frail reeds can understand how it is possible.  The believer in the end will announce that the saving truths are mysteries impenetrable to us here below even if he does not go to the extreme of a Tertullian, a Kierkegaard, or a Shestov and condemn reason wholesale.

The attitude of the philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation is different.  He feels duty-bound by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept.  This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl.  On his death bed, attended by nuns, open to the Catholic faith, he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation.

There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality.   As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary: 

 

To put it very very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is is the life of autonomous understanding.  The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love.  The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)

So is the Christian the true philosopher?  Only in the sense that philosophy points beyond itself to something that is no longer philosophy but that completes philosophy while cancelling it. I am tempted to reach for an Hegelian trope while turning it on its head:  if Christianity is true, then philosophy is aufgehoben, sublated, in it.  If Christianity is true, then the Christian arrives at the truth that the philosopher at best aims at but cannot arrive at by his method and way of life, the life of autonomous understanding.  To achieve what he aims at, the philosopher would have to be "as a little child" and accept in obedient love the gift of Revelation.  But it is precisely that which he cannot do if he is to remain a philosopher in the strict sense, one who lives the life of autonomous understanding.

That is tension some of us live. The life of autonomous understanding and critical examination? Or the life of child-like trust and obedient love?

The problem in what is perhaps its sharpest form is presented in the story of Abraham and Isaac.  

The Christian life is not the philosophical life.  It lies beyond the philosophical life and, if  true, is superior to it.

 

But is it true?

In the end, you have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.

Lev Shestov on Edmund Husserl

In Memory of a Great Philosopher

It is just at this point that we find the most enigmatic and significant contribution of Husserl's philosophy. For here the question arises: Why did Husserl demand with such extraordinary insistence that I read Kierkegaard? For Kierkegaard, in contrast to Husserl, sought the truth not in reason but in the Absurd. For him the law of contradiction - like an angel with a drawn sword, stationed by God at the entrance to Paradise - bears no witness to the truth and in no way defines the boundaries which separate the possible from the impossible. For Kierkegaard, philosophy (which he calls "existential") begins precisely at that point where reason sees, with the force of self-evidence, that all possibilities have already been exhausted, that everything is finished, that nothing remains but for man to look and grow cold. Kierkegaard here introduces into philosophy what he calls "faith," defined as "an insane struggle for the possible," that is, for the possibility of the impossible - clearly alluding to the words of Scripture: Man's wisdom is folly in the sight of the Lord. 

Men fear folly and madness more than anything else in the world. Kierkegaard knows this; he repeatedly asserts that human frailty is afraid to look into the eyes of death and madness. To be sure, we read in the Phaedo that philosophy is "a preparation for death," that all men who have genuinely devoted themselves to philosophy, although "they may have concealed it from others, have done nothing else than prepare themselves for the act of dying and the fact of death." It seems likely that these extraordinary ideas were suggested to Plato by the death of Socrates. Plato did not return to them; he was wholly absorbed in the Republic and the Laws, even in his extreme old age - thus fulfilling, like ordinary mortals and gladiators, the age-old demand: salve, Caesar, morituri te salutant. Even in the face of death men cannot tear themselves away from "Caesar," from what everyone accepts as "reality." And this is "natural"! For how are we to understand the "preparation for death"? Is it not a beginning of, and preparation for, the struggle against the demonstrative character of proof, against the law of contradiction, against reason s claim to unlimited rights, its seizure of the power of arbitrary definition of the point at which possibility ends and impossibility begins - the struggle against the angel who stands with drawn sword at the gate of Paradise? It seems to the inexperienced gaze that this measureless power rightfully belongs to reason, and that there is nothing dreadful or threatening in the fact that it does. 

Ave Caesar Morituri te Salutant, by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1859), depicting gladiators greeting Vitellius

"Hail Caesar, we who  are about to die salute you."

Edmund Husserl, Tobacco-Logische Untersuchungen

Real philosophers smoke. 

Excerpt:

I. Materials (from Husserl’s letters)1

Husserl asks Johannes Daubert to order cigars from tobacconist Rennert in Munich (November 11, 1906):

For Saturday (for an evening of pleasant company) I would need a good import, say around 40 or 45 DM per thousand, but only a small box of 25. It is probably better if you, with your connoisseur’s eye, make the selection, rather than that I just write to Rennert. Size, big if possible. Would you be so kind? The following could be added, if the opportunity presents itself: 25 pieces 656 (Sumatra), 25 pieces 667 (Mexico), 25 pieces 631. Also Hermann Oldenkott 3/4 pound O, 1/4 pound W, 1/4 R, 1/4 K, as well as 200 grams of Austrian Varinas. Since this is likely to amount to a tidy sum, do you suppose Rennert will apply the usual discount?

Husserl thanks Daubert (November 18, 1906):

So, many thanks for the trouble you have taken. Of course I find everything excellent. The Upmann in particular is worthy of the Elysian Fields. To be sure, it takes nerve to deal with its potency. That my work of the last few weeks has been productive is largely thanks to your “stimulation,” which in this case means: the tobaccological stimulation of your shipment.

I couldn't find an image depicting Husserl smoking a cigar, so enjoy the following in its stead:

A Problem in Husserl

Edmund Husserl has a beef with Descartes. In Cartesian Meditations, sec. 10, Husserl alleges that the Frenchman fails to make 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. Despite his radical doubt, Cartesius remains within the world thinking he has found the sole unquestionable part of it.  

Descartes replaces ego with substantia cogitans, mens sive animus.  This give rise to what Husserl calls the absurdity of transcendental realism.  Husserl's thought seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn one is left with no entity existing in itself on which one can base anything.  Everything objective acquires its entire Seinsgeltung (ontic validity) from the transcendental ego, including any thinking substances there are.

Now I'm perplexed. 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.  

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.

Related articles

Faith, Reason, and Edith Stein

Faith, Reason, and Edith Stein

Today, August 9th, is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.  She is better known to philosophers as the Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.

In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Husserl and Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

One issue is whether faith gives us access to truth. Stein has Thomas say:

. . . faith is a way to truth. Indeed, in the first place it is a way to truths — plural — which would otherwise be closed to us, and in the second place it is the surest way to truth. For there is no greater certainty than that of faith . . . . (Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, tr. Redmond, ICS Publications 2000, pp. 16-17)

Now comes an important question. What is it that we as philosophers want? We want the ultimate truths about the ultimate matters. If so, it is arguable that we should take these truths from whatever source offers them to us even if the source is not narrowly philosophical. We should not say: I will accept only those truths that can be certified by (natural) reason, but rather all truths whether certified by reason or 'certified' by faith. Thus Stein has Aquinas say:

If faith makes accessible truths unattainable by any other means, philosophy, for one thing, cannot forego them without renouncing its universal claim to truth. [. . .] One consequence, then, is a material dependence of philosophy on faith.

Then too, if faith affords the highest certainty attainable by the human mind, and if philosophy claims to bestow the highest certainty, then philosophy must make the certainty of faith its own. It does so first by absorbing the truths of faith, and further by using them as the final criterion by which to gauge all other truths. Hence, a second consequence is a formal dependence of philosophy on faith. (17-18)

But of course this cannot go unchallenged by Husserl. So Stein has him say:

. . . if faith is the final criterion of all other truth, what is the criterion of faith itself? What guarantees that the certainty of my faith is genuine? (20)

Or in terms of of the distinction between subjective (psychological) and objective (epistemic) certainty: what guarantees that the certainty of faith is objective and not merely subjective? The faiths of Jew, Christian, and Muslim are all different. How can the Christian be sure that the revelation he takes on faith has not been superseded by the revelation the Muslim takes on faith?  And what about contradictory faith-contents? God cannot be both triune (as the normative Christian believes) and not triune (as the normative Muslim believes).  So Christian and Muslim cannot both be objectively certain about their characteristic beliefs; at most they can be subjectively certain. Subjective certainty, however, has no epistemic value.  

Stein's Thomas replies to Husserl as follows:

Probably my best answer is that faith is its own guarantee. I could also say that God, who has given us the revelation, vouches for its truth. But this would only be the other side of the same coin. For if we took the two as separate facts, we would fall into a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle], since God is after all what we become certain about in faith.

[. . .]

All we can do is point out that for the believer such is the certainty of faith that it relativizes all other certainty, and that he can but give up any supposed knowledge which contradicts his faith. The unique certitude of faith is a gift of grace. It is up to the understanding and will to draw the practical consequences therefrom. Constructing a philosophy on faith belongs to the theoretical consequences. (20-22)

For Thomas and Stein, the certainty of faith is a gift of God.  As such, it cannot be merely subjective.  It is at once both subjective and objective, subjective as an inner certitude, objective as an effect of divine grace. Husserl, however, will ask how the claim that the certainty of faith is a divine gift can be validated.  It is after all, a contestable and contested claim.  How does one know that it is true? For Husserl, the claims that God exists and that the Christian revelation is his revelation are but dogmatic presuppositions.  They need validation because of the existence of competing claims such as those made by Jews and Muslims and atheists.

If, as Stein says, "faith is its own guarantee," then, since the faith of the Christian and the faith of the Muslim are contradictory with respect to certain key propositions, it follows that one of these faiths offers a false guarantee.  You can see from this that the Thomas-Stein stance leaves something to be desired.  But Husserl's approach has problems of its own.  Closed up within the sphere of his subjectivity, man cannot reach the truly Transcendent, which must irrupt into this sphere and cannot be constituted (Husserl's term) within it.  The truly Transcendent is not a transcendence-in-immanence.  It cannot be a constituted transcendence.

If man is indeed a creature, there is something absurd about measly man hauling the Creator before the bench of finite reason there to be rudely interrogated about his credentials.  On the other hand, the claim that man is a creature is a claim like any other, and man must satisfy his intellectual conscience with respect to this claim.  It is precisely his freedom, responsibility and love of truth that drive him to ask: But is it true?  And how do we know?  And isn't it morally shabby to fool oneself and seek consolation in a fairy tale?

Paradoxically, God creates man in his image and likeness, and thus as free, responsible, and truth-loving; characteristics that then motivate man to put God in the dock.

So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason but which are provided by faith in revelation, a revelation that must simply be accepted in humility and obedience. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.

My task, in this and in related posts, is first and foremost to set forth the problems as clearly as I can. Anyone who thinks this problem has an easy solution does not understand it.  It is part of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. 

Fragment of an Open Letter to Edmund Husserl on His Birthday

Edmund Husserl was born on this date in 1859. 

Philosophy was the mission of my life. I had to philosophize otherwise I could not live in this world. (Here)

Dear Husserl,

It may be that the truth we need cannot be known in a way that satisfies modern scruples. Not everything worth knowing can be validated conclusively and with certainty within the confines of one's own subjectivity. It may be that one pays a high price to satisfy the modern scruples . . . .

Related: Augustine, Husserl, and Certainty

Related articles

Some Philosophical Positions Valuable Only as Foils: Extreme Nominalism and Eliminative Materialism

Edith Stein on Cognitio Fidei: Is Faith a Kind of Knowledge?

One finds the phrase cognitio fidei in Thomas Aquinas and in such Thomist writers as Josef Pieper. It translates as 'knowledge of faith.' The genitive is to be interpreted subjectively, not objectively: faith is not the object of knowledge; faith is a form or type of knowledge. But how can faith be a type of knowledge? One ought to find this puzzling.

On a standard analysis of 'knows,' where propositional knowledge is at issue, subject S knows that p just in case (i) S believes that p; (ii) S is justified in believing that p; and (iii) p is true. This piece of epistemological boilerplate is the starting point for much of the arcana (Gettier counterexamples, etc.) of contemporary epistemology. But its pedigree is ancient, to be found in Plato's Theaetetus.

It is obvious that on the standard analysis mere belief is inferior to knowledge since if I believe what is false I don't have knowledge, and if I believe what is true without justification I don't have knowledge either. How then can mere belief be a form or type of knowledge? It is rather a necessary but not sufficient condition of knowledge. Or so it seems to the modern mind.

Another puzzle has to do with certainty. Whether or not knowledge entails certainty, it seems to the modern mind that belief definitely does not entail certainty: what I believe but do not know I cannot be certain about since if I believe but do not know, then either truth is lacking or justification is lacking or both. How then can mere belief be said to be certain? And yet we read in Aquinas that "It is part of the concept of belief itself that man is certain of that in which he believes." (Quoted from Pieper, Belief and Faith, p. 15).

It is easy to understand how one who believes but does not know that p can be subjectively certain that p; but it is difficult to understand how such a person can be objectively certain that p. Objective certainty, however, alone has epistemic value.

We now turn to the remarkable Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic church. In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Husserl and Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

One issue is whether faith gives us access to truth. Stein has Thomas say:

. . . faith is a way to truth. Indeed, in the first place it is a way to truths — plural — which would otherwise be closed to us, and in the second place it is the surest way to truth. For there is no greater certainty than that of faith . . . . (Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, tr. Redmond, ICS Publications 2000, pp. 16-17)

Now comes an important question. What is it that we as philosophers want? We want the ultimate truths about the ultimate matters. If so, it is arguable that we should take these truths from whatever source offers them to us even if the source is not narrowly philosophical. We should not say: I will accept only those truths that can be certified by (natural) reason, but rather all truths whether certified by reason or 'certified' by faith. Thus Stein has Aquinas say:

If faith makes accessible truths unattainable by any other means, philosophy, for one thing, cannot forego them without renouncing its universal claim to truth. [. . .] One consequence, then, is a material dependence of philosophy on faith.

Then too, if faith affords the highest certainty attainable by the human mind, and if philosophy claims to bestow the highest certainty, then philosophy must make the certainty of faith its own. It does so first by absorbing the truths of faith, and further by using them as the final criterion by which to gauge all other truths. Hence, a second consequence is a formal dependence of philosophy on faith. (17-18)

But of course this cannot go unchallenged by Husserl. So Stein has him say:

. . . if faith is the final criterion of all other truth, what is the criterion of faith itself? What guarantees that the certainty of my faith is genuine? (20)

Or in terms of of the distinction made above between subjective and objective certainty: what guarantees that the certainty of faith is objective and not merely subjective? The faiths of Jew, Christian, and Muslim are all different. How can the Christian be sure that the revelation he takes on faith has not been superseded by the revelation the Muslim takes on faith?  And what about contradictory faith-contents? God cannot be both triune (as the normative Christian believes) and not triune (as the normative Muslim believes).  So Christian and Muslim cannot both be objectively certain about their characteristic beliefs; at most they can be subjectively certain. Subjective certainty, however, has no epistemic value.  

Stein's Thomas replies to Husserl as follows:

Probably my best answer is that faith is its own guarantee. I could also say that God, who has given us the revelation, vouches for its truth. But this would only be the other side of the same coin. For if we took the two as separate facts, we would fall into a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle], since God is after all what we become certain about in faith. [. . .]

All we can do is point out that for the believer such is the certainty of faith that it relativizes all other certainty, and that he can but give up any supposed knowledge which contradicts his faith. The unique certitude of faith is a gift of grace. It is up to the understanding and will to draw the practical consequences therefrom. Constructing a philosophy on faith belongs to the theoretical consequences. (20-22)

For Thomas and Stein, the certainty of faith is a gift of God.  As such, it cannot be merely subjective.  It is at once both subjective and objective, subjective as an inner certitude, objective as an effect of divine grace.  Husserl, however, will ask how the claim that the certainty of faith is a divine gift can be validated.  It is after all, a contestable and contested claim.  How does one know that it is true? For Husserl, the claims that God exists and that the Christian revelation is his revelation are but dogmatic presuppositions.  They need validation because of the existence of competing claims such as those made by Jews and Muslims and atheists.

If, as Stein says, "faith is its own guarantee," then, since the faith of the Christian and the faith of the Muslim are contradictory with respect to certain key propositions, it follows that one of these faiths offers a false guarantee.  You can see from this that the Thomas-Stein stance leaves something to be desired.  But Husserl's approach has problems of its own.  Closed up within the sphere of his subjectivity, man cannot reach the truly Transcendent, which must irrupt into this sphere and cannot be constituted (Husserl's term) within it.  The truly Transcendent is not a transcendence-in-immanence.  It cannot be a constituted transcendence.

If man is indeed a creature, there is something absurd about measly man hauling the Creator before the bench of finite reason there to be rudely interrogated about his credentials.  On the other hand, the claim that man is a creature is a claim like any other, and man must satisfy his intellectual conscience with respect to this claim.  It is precisely his freedom, responsibility and love of truth that drive him to ask: But is it true?  And how do we know?  And isn't it morally shabby to fool oneself and seek consolation in a fairy tale?

Paradoxically, God creates man in his image and likeness, and thus as free, responsible, and truth-loving; characteristics that then motivate man to put God in the dock.

So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason but which are provided by faith in revelation, a revelation that must simply be accepted in humility and obedience. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.

My task, in this and in related posts, is first and foremost to set forth the problems as clearly as I can. Anyone who thinks this problem has an easy solution does not understand it.  It is part of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. 

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On a standard analysis of 'knows,' where propositional knowledge is at issue, subject S knows that p just in case (i) S believes that p; (ii) S is justified in believing that p; and (iii) p is true. This piece of epistemological boilerplate is the starting point for much of the arcana (Gettier counterexamples, etc.) of contemporary epistemology. But its pedigree is ancient, to be found in Plato's Theaetetus.

It is obvious that on the standard analysis mere belief is inferior to knowledge since if I believe what is false I don't have knowledge, and if I believe what is true without justification I don't have knowledge either. How then can mere belief be a form or type of knowledge? It is rather a necessary but not sufficient condition of knowledge. Or so it seems to the modern mind.

Another puzzle has to do with certainty. Whether or not knowledge entails certainty, it seems to the modern mind that belief definitely does not entail certainty: what I believe but do not know I cannot be certain about since if I believe but do not know, then either truth is lacking or justification is lacking or both. How then can mere belief be said to be certain? And yet we read in Aquinas that "It is part of the concept of belief itself that man is certain of that in which he believes." (Quoted from Pieper, Belief and Faith, p. 15).

It is easy to understand how one who believes but does not know that p can be subjectively certain that p; but it is difficult to understand how such a person can be objectively certain that p. Objective certainty, however, alone has epistemic value.

We now turn to the remarkable Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic church. In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Husserl and Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

One issue is whether faith gives us access to truth. Stein has Thomas say:

. . . faith is a way to truth. Indeed, in the first place it is a way to truths — plural — which would otherwise be closed to us, and in the second place it is the surest way to truth. For there is no greater certainty than that of faith . . . . (Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, tr. Redmond, ICS Publications 2000, pp. 16-17)

Now comes an important question. What is it that we as philosophers want? We want the ultimate truths about the ultimate matters. If so, it is arguable that we should take these truths from whatever source offers them to us even if the source is not narrowly philosophical. We should not say: I will accept only those truths that can be certified by (natural) reason, but rather all truths whether certified by reason or 'certified' by faith. Thus Stein has Aquinas say:

If faith makes accessible truths unattainable by any other means, philosophy, for one thing, cannot forego them without renouncing its universal claim to truth. [. . .] One consequence, then, is a material dependence of philosophy on faith.

Then too, if faith affords the highest certainty attainable by the human mind, and if philosophy claims to bestow the highest certainty, then philosophy must make the certainty of faith its own. It does so first by absorbing the truths of faith, and further by using them as the final criterion by which to gauge all other truths. Hence, a second consequence is a formal dependence of philosophy on faith. (17-18)

But of course this cannot go unchallenged by Husserl. So Stein has him say:

. . . if faith is the final criterion of all other truth, what is the criterion of faith itself? What guarantees that the certainty of my faith is genuine? (20)

Or in terms of of the distinction made above between subjective and objective certainty: what guarantees that the certainty of faith is objective and not merely subjective? The faiths of Jew, Christian, and Muslim are all different. How can the Christian be sure that the revelation he takes on faith has not been superseded by the revelation the Muslim takes on faith?  And what about contradictory faith-contents? God cannot be both triune (as the normative Christian believes) and not triune (as the normative Muslim believes).  So Christian and Muslim cannot both be objectively certain about their characteristic beliefs; at most they can be subjectively certain. Subjective certainty, however, has no epistemic value.  

Stein's Thomas replies to Husserl as follows:

Probably my best answer is that faith is its own guarantee. I could also say that God, who has given us the revelation, vouches for its truth. But this would only be the other side of the same coin. For if we took the two as separate facts, we would fall into a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle], since God is after all what we become certain about in faith. [. . .]

All we can do is point out that for the believer such is the certainty of faith that it relativizes all other certainty, and that he can but give up any supposed knowledge which contradicts his faith. The unique certitude of faith is a gift of grace. It is up to the understanding and will to draw the practical consequences therefrom. Constructing a philosophy on faith belongs to the theoretical consequences. (20-22)

For Thomas and Stein, the certainty of faith is a gift of God.  As such, it cannot be merely subjective.  It is at once both subjective and objective, subjective as an inner certitude, objective as an effect of divine grace.  Husserl, however, will ask how the claim that the certainty of faith is a divine gift can be validated.  It is after all, a contestable and contested claim.  How does one know that it is true? For Husserl, the claims that God exists and that the Christian revelation is his revelation are but dogmatic presuppositions.  They need validation because of the existence of competing claims such as those made by Jews and Muslims and atheists.

If, as Stein says, "faith is its own guarantee," then, since the faith of the Christian and the faith of the Muslim are contradictory with respect to certain key propositions, it follows that one of these faiths offers a false guarantee.  You can see from this that the Thomas-Stein stance leaves something to be desired.  But Husserl's approach has problems of its own.  Closed up within the sphere of his subjectivity, man cannot reach the truly Transcendent, which must irrupt into this sphere and cannot be constituted (Husserl's term) within it.  The truly Transcendent is not a transcendence-in-immanence.  It cannot be a constituted transcendence.

If man is indeed a creature, there is something absurd about measly man hauling the Creator before the bench of finite reason there to be rudely interrogated about his credentials.  On the other hand, the claim that man is a creature is a claim like any other, and man must satisfy his intellectual conscience with respect to this claim.  It is precisely his freedom, responsibility and love of truth that drive him to ask: But is it true?  And how do we know?  And isn't it morally shabby to fool oneself and seek consolation in a fairy tale?

Paradoxically, God creates man in his image and likeness, and thus as free, responsible, and truth-loving; characteristics that then motivate man to put God in the dock.

So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason but which are provided by faith in revelation, a revelation that must simply be accepted in humility and obedience. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.

My task, in this and in related posts, is first and foremost to set forth the problems as clearly as I can. Anyone who thinks this problem has an easy solution does not understand it.  It is part of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. 

God and the Transcendental Ego

God does what Husserl's transcendental ego wanted to do but couldn't pull off, namely, constitute beings not as mere unities of sense, but as beings, as "independent reals" to borrow a phrase from Josiah Royce.  Husserl's transcendental idealism never gets the length of Sein; it reaches only as far as Seinsinn.

This leads us to perhaps the ultimate paradox of divine creation.  God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God's creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind.  The extreme case of this is God's free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality.  God creates potential rebels.  He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus.  He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway.  Lucifer as the father of all perversity.

God creates and sustains, moment by moment, an other mind, like unto his own, made in his image, who is yet radically other in its inwardness and freedom.  How is this conceivable?  

We are not objects for the divine subject, but subjects in our own right.  How can we understand creation ex nihilo, together with moment by moment conservation, of a genuine subject, a genuine mind with intellect and free will?

This is the mystery of divine creation.  It is is above my pay grade.  And yours too.

God can do it but we can't.  We can't even understand how God could do it.  A double infirmity.

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Husserl, Knight of Reason

Edmund Husserl was born on this date in 1859.

Ich muss meinen Weg gehen so sicher, so fest entschlossen und so ernst wie Duerers Ritter, Tod und Teufel. (Edmund Husserl, "Persoenliche Aufzeichnungen" )  "I must go my way as surely, as seriously, and as resolutely as the knight in Duerer's Knight, Death, and Devil." (tr. MavPhil)  Note the castle on the hill, the hour glass in the devil's hand, the serpents entwined in his headpiece, and the human skull on the road. 

Time is running out, death awaits, and a mighty task wants completion.

My Husserl category.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Butchvarov's Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl's Paradox of Human Subjectivity

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. 

A Meditation on Certainty on Husserl's Birthday

Edmund Husserl was born on this date in 1859.

In his magisterial Augustine of Hippo, Peter Brown writes of Augustine, "He wanted complete certainty on ultimate questions." (1st ed., p. 88) If you don't thrill to that line, you are no philosopher. Compare Edmund Husserl: "Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben nicht leben." "I just can't live without certainty." Yet he managed to live for years after penning that line into his diary, and presumably without certainty.

I would say that the ability to tolerate uncertainty without abandoning the quest for certainty is a mark of intellectual and spiritual maturity. A truth seeker who can tolerate uncertainty is one who will not seek false refuge in dogmas that provide pseudo-certainty. I cannot help but think of Islamo-terrorism in this connection. Had Muhammad Atta and the boys entertained some doubts about the bevy of black-eyed virgins awaiting them at the portals of paradise, they and three thousand others might still be alive.

The trick is to tolerate uncertainty without becoming either a skeptic or a dogmatist.

There is a difference between subjective and objective certainty. If subject S is subjectively certain that  p, it does not follow that p is true. That would follow only if S were objectively certain that p. But objective certainty appears attainable only with respect to one's own mental states. I am both subjectively and objectively certain that I have a headache now. This is because the esse of the headache = its percipi. Its being is its being perceived. It therefore cannot be intelligibly supposed that I merely seem to have a headache now, while in reality I do not. With respect to a physical object or state, however, appearance and reality can come apart, and what is subjectively certain can turn out to be false: my seeming to see a mountain is no guarantee that there is a mountain. My seeming to feel elated, however, just is my being elated.

What about states of affairs that involve neither mental data nor physical objects? If S is subjectively certain that torture is always morally impermissible, and T is subjectively certain that torture is sometimes morally permissible, then one of the two must be wrong, which shows that subjective certainty is no proof of objective certainty.

What about this last proposition however, namely, the proposition that apart from mental states, subjective certainty does not entail objective certainty? Is its truth merely subjectively certain, or is it also objectively certain? It is objectively certain. One sees that subjective certainty can exist without objective certainty from the fact that two subjects, S and T, can be subjectively certain of contradictory propositions. Here the mind grasps a truth about a state of affairs transcendent of one's mental state and does so with objective certainty.

I conclude that there are some propositions the truth of which can be grasped with objective certainty even though these propositions are not about such mental data as pleasures and pains. The mind has the power to transcend its own states and not only to know, but to know with objective certainty, truths whose truth is independent of mind. That is amazing.

One some days, existence strikes me as the deepest and most fascinating of philosophical topics. On other days, I give the palm to time: "What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who does ask me, I do not know." (Augustine, Confessions, Bk. 11, Ch. 14) But today, the honor goes to knowledge.

 

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Husserl's Critique of the Image-Theory of Consciousness

Do Merely Intentional Objects Have Being of Their Own? With a Little Help from Ingarden

Edmund Husserl was born on this date in 1859.

In his magisterial Augustine of Hippo, Peter Brown writes of Augustine, "He wanted complete certainty on ultimate questions." (1st ed., p. 88) If you don't thrill to that line, you are no philosopher. Compare Edmund Husserl: "Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben nicht leben." "I just can't live without certainty." Yet he managed to live for years after penning that line into his diary, and presumably without certainty.

I would say that the ability to tolerate uncertainty without abandoning the quest for certainty is a mark of intellectual and spiritual maturity. A truth seeker who can tolerate uncertainty is one who will not seek false refuge in dogmas that provide pseudo-certainty. I cannot help but think of Islamo-terrorism in this connection. Had Muhammad Atta and the boys entertained some doubts about the bevy of black-eyed virgins awaiting them at the portals of paradise, they and three thousand others might still be alive.

The trick is to tolerate uncertainty without becoming either a skeptic or a dogmatist.

There is a difference between subjective and objective certainty. If subject S is subjectively certain that  p, it does not follow that p is true. That would follow only if S were objectively certain that p. But objective certainty appears attainable only with respect to one's own mental states. I am both subjectively and objectively certain that I have a headache now. This is because the esse of the headache = its percipi. Its being is its being perceived. It therefore cannot be intelligibly supposed that I merely seem to have a headache now, while in reality I do not. With respect to a physical object or state, however, appearance and reality can come apart, and what is subjectively certain can turn out to be false: my seeming to see a mountain is no guarantee that there is a mountain. My seeming to feel elated, however, just is my being elated.

What about states of affairs that involve neither mental data nor physical objects? If S is subjectively certain that torture is always morally impermissible, and T is subjectively certain that torture is sometimes morally permissible, then one of the two must be wrong, which shows that subjective certainty is no proof of objective certainty.

What about this last proposition however, namely, the proposition that apart from mental states, subjective certainty does not entail objective certainty? Is its truth merely subjectively certain, or is it also objectively certain? It is objectively certain. One sees that subjective certainty can exist without objective certainty from the fact that two subjects, S and T, can be subjectively certain of contradictory propositions. Here the mind grasps a truth about a state of affairs transcendent of one's mental state and does so with objective certainty.

I conclude that there are some propositions the truth of which can be grasped with objective certainty even though these propositions are not about such mental data as pleasures and pains. The mind has the power to transcend its own states and not only to know, but to know with objective certainty, truths whose truth is independent of mind. That is amazing.

One some days, existence strikes me as the deepest and most fascinating of philosophical topics. On other days, I give the palm to time: "What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who does ask me, I do not know." (Augustine, Confessions, Bk. 11, Ch. 14) But today, the honor goes to knowledge.

 

Husserl's Critique of the Image-Theory of Consciousness

Suppose I am conscious of an object in the mode of visual perception:  I see a bobcat in the backyard. Does it make sense to try to analyze  this perceptual situation by saying that 'in my mind' there is an image or picture that represents something 'outside my mind'?

In the Fifth of his Logical Investigations, Edmund Husserl refutes this type of theory. One point he makes (Logical Investigations, vol. II, 593) is that there is a phenomenological difference between a genuine case of image-consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) and ordinary perceptual awareness. Suppose I am looking at a picture of a mountain. The picture appears, but it refers beyond itself to that of which it is a picture, the mountain itself. In a case like this, it is clear that my awareness of the object depicted is mediated by a picture or image. Here it makes clear sense to speak of one thing (the picture) re-presenting another (the mountain). But when I look at the mountain itself, I find no evidence of any picture or image that mediates my perceptual awareness of the mountain. Phenomenologically, there is no evidence of any epistemic intermediary or epistemic deputy. So on phenomenological grounds alone, it would seem to be a mistake to assimilate perceptual consciousness to image-consciousness.  The two are phenomenologically quite different.

A second consideration is that consciousness of a thing via a picture or image presupposes ordinary perceptual consciousness inasmuch as the picture or painting must itself be perceived as a precondition of its functioning as an image.  How then can ordinary perceptual consciousness be explained as involving internal images or pictures? 

Husserl also points out that, no matter how carefully I examine the picture, I will discover no intrinsic feature of it that is its "representative character." (593) That is, there is no intrinsic property of the picture that confers upon it its reference to something beyond itself. So Husserl asks:

     What therefore allows us to go beyond the image which alone is
     present in consciousness, and to refer the latter as an image to a
     certain extraconscious object? To point to the resemblance between
     image and thing will not help. (593, Findlay trans. slightly
     emended.)

Why won't resemblance help? If picture and thing depicted both exist, then of course there will be resemblance. But it cannot be in virtue of X's resemblance to Y that X pictures or images Y. "Only a
presenting ego's power to use a similar as an image-representative of a similar . . . makes the image be an image." (594) Husserl's point is subtle. I'll explain it in my own way. A picture considered by itself is just a physical thing with physical properties. What makes it be an image? Its physical properties cannot account for its being an image. And the fact that it shares physical properties with some other thing cannot make it an image either. A painting of a mountain can be a painting of a mountain even if there is no mountain of which it is the painting. Pictures of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas are pictures of said hotel even though it has been demolished. The intentionality of a photograph can survive the destruction of its 'subject.' A depiction of Cerberus is what it is despite the dog's nonexistence.

But even if there exists something that a picture resembles, that does not suffice to make the picture a picture of a thing it resembles. Suppose I have two qualitatively identical ball bearings. In an Andy Warholish mood, I take a picture of one of them, the one closer to my computer. Gazing fondly at the photo, I say, "This ball bearing is the one that is closer to my computer." Since the photo resembles the other ball bearing as well, but is not of that ball bearing, it cannot be resemblance that confers upon the photo its intentionality.

What Husserl is saying in effect is that pictures, paintings, movie images, and the like possess no intrinsic intentionality: what intentionality they have is derived from conscious beings who possess
intrinsic intentionality. For Husserl, and for me, the project of trying to account for intrinsic intentionality in terms of internal pictures that resemble outer objects is a complete nonstarter. For one thing, it leads to a vicious infinite regress: "Since the interpretation of anything as an image presupposes an object intentionally given to consciousness, we should plainly have a regressus in infinitum were we again to let this latter object be itself constituted through an image . . . ." (594)

There are both phenomenological and dialectical reasons for rejecting the image-theory (Bilder-theorie) of consciousness. Phenomenologically, there is no evidence that ordinary perception is mediated by internal images. In addition,

   1. The image-theory interprets intentionality in terms of resemblance,
   but resemblance cannot explain the intentionality of pictures that (i)
   never had an object, or (ii) lost their object.

   2. The image-theory interprets intentionality in terms of resemblance,
   but resemblance cannot account for a picture's being of the very
   object it is of as opposed to some other one that it merely resembles.

   3. The image-theory is involved in a vicious infinite regress.

   4. Since image-consciousness presupposes ordinary perceptual
   consiousness, it is impossible to explain the latter in terms of the
   former.

   5. The image-theory tries to locate the intentionality of
   consciousness in the intentionality of a picture when it is clear that
   there is nothing intrinsic to any picture that could account for its
   intentionality.

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Phenomenon and Existence

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St. Edith Stein on Phenomenology and Thomas Aquinas 1 - Freda Mary Oben Ph.D.

Phenomenon and Existence

E. C. writes:

In the recent post Mary Neal’s Out of Body Experiences you state: "No experience, no matter how intense or unusual or protracted, conclusively proves the veridicality of its intentional object.  Phenomenology alone won't get you to metaphysics."

I have been attempting to reconstruct your reasoning here, and the following is the best I could come up with.

 1) No experience, no matter how intense or unusual or protracted, conclusively proves the veridicality of its intentional object. 

 2) The subject matter of phenomenology is experience.

 3) The subject matter of metaphysics is existence, which includes the quest of proving the veridicality of intentional objects. Therefore:

 C) Phenomenology alone won't get you to metaphysics.

I have an issue with (1). Surely, the very meaning of ‘veridical experience’ designates a harmonious pattern of interconnected experiences, the paradigm case being perceptual experiences. Correlatively, when one speaks about the intentional object existing, one means nothing other than the reappearance of the self-same object across this harmonious flow.

Non-veridical experiences, e.g. hallucinations, are then just those experiences that promise, but fail, to endure harmoniously. Whenever non-veridical experiences obtain so do veridical experiences. For example, I was mistaken that there was a cat walking outside on the pavement, and hence had a non-veridical experience of the cat, but I had a veridical experience of the pavement itself. Ultimately, the experience of the world is given as the veridical background that serves as a foundation for all non-veridical experiences. To speak ontologically, the existence of non-veridical experiences depends on veridical experiences and likewise non-existence objects demand existent objects. Therefore, non-veridical experience could never exist on their own, which does not prevent us as talking about them as self-sufficient.

In relation to (2), I would argue that the subject matter of phenomenology is not just experience but also the object experienced just as it is experienced. But if existence is just the reappearance of an object through a harmonious flow of experience, then phenomenology does have metaphysical implication.

I do not think that perceptual experience is the only mode of experience through which existence is experienced; the room is left often for experiences that reveal the divine.

As always, I am very grateful for the existence of your blog.

REPLY

Thanks for reading, E. C., for the kind words, and for the above response.

First of all, you did a good job of setting forth my reasoning in support of (C).  But I take issue with your taking issue with (1).  You are in effect begging the question by just assuming that what makes veridical experience veridical is its internal coherence.  That is precisely the question.  It may well be that coherence is a criterion of truth without being the nature of truth.  By a criterion I mean a way of testing for truth.  It could be that coherence is a criterion, or even the criterion, of truth, but that correspondence is the nature of truth.  One cannot just assume that truth is constituted by coherence.  I am not saying the view is wrong; I am saying that it cannot be assumed to be true without argument or consideration of alternatives.  Such arguments and considerations, however, move us beyond phenomenology into dialectics.

To say of an experience that it is veridical is to say that it is of or about an object that exists whether or not the experience exists.  If so, then the existence of the object in reality cannot be explicated in terms of its manners and modes of appearing.  If you say that it can, then you are opting for a form of idealism which, in Husserlian jargon, reduces Sein to Seinsinn.  I would insist, however, that it part of the plain sense of outer perception that it is of or about objects whose existence is independent of the existence of perceivers and their experiences.  To borrow a turn of phrase from the neglected German philosopher Wolfgang Cramer, it is built into the very structure of outer perception that it is of or about objects as non-objects.  That may sound paradoxical, but it is not contradictory.  The idea is that the object is intended in the act or noesis as having an ontological status that surpasses the status of a merely intentional object.  Whether it does have that additional really existent status is of course a further question.

For example, my seeing of a tree is an intentional experience: it is of or about something that may or may not exist.  (Note that, phenomenologically, 'see' is not a verb of success.  If I see x in the phenomenological sense of 'see,' it does not follow that there exists an x such that I see it.)  Now if you say that the existence of the tree intended in the act reduces to its ongoing 'verification' in the coherent series of Abschattungen that manifest it, then you are opting for a form of idealism.  And this seems incompatible with the point I made, namely, that it is part and parcel of the very nature of outer perception that it be directed to an object as non-object.  The tree is intended as being such that its existence is not exhausted by its phenomenological manifestation.

But the point is not to get you to agree with this; the point is to get you to see that there is an issue here, one subject to ongoing controversy, and that one cannot uncritically plump for one side.  If you haven't read Roman Ingarden on Husserl, I suggest that you do.

As for premse (2), we will agree that there are acts, intentional experiences (Erlebnisse), and that they are of an object.  Throughout the sphere of intentionality there is the act-object, noesis-noema correlation.  But this leaves wide open the question whether the being of the thing in reality is exhausted by its noematic being, whether its Sein reduces to its Seinsinn.  On that  very point Ingarden disagreed strenuously with his master, Husserl.

"But if existence is just the reappearance of an object through a harmonious flow of experience, then phenomenology does have metaphysical implications."  That is true.  But I deny the consequent of your conditional and so I deny the antecedent as well.

My point, in sum, is that you cannot just assume the truth of the antecedent.  For that begs the question against realism.  From the fact that an object manifests its existence in the manner you describe, it does not follow that the very existence of the object is its manifestation.

It may be methodologically useful to bracket the existence of the object the better to study its manners and modes of appearing, but this very bracketing presupposes that there is more to the existence of the object than its appearing.  One could say that Husserl was right to bracket the existence of the object for purposes of phenomenology, but then, in his later idealistic phase, he forgot to remove the brackets.

 

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My Body and I

My body is my body and not my body's body.  So I am not my body.  I have a body.  This having, presumably sui generis and unlike any other type of having, is yet a having and not a being.  My body doesn't have a body.  I know that I have a body.  My body doesn't know this.  So again I am not my body.  'This body is this body' is a tautology. 'I am this body' is not a tautology. 

The human body is not a body in the sense of physics alone but an embodiment of subjectivity.  The body of the Other is the body of the Other.

Contra Husserl:  I cannot constitute Paul's body (Leib, nicht Koerper) as a lived body without first constituting him as an Other Mind.  So I cannot explain the constitution of the Other as Other by starting from the constitution of the body.  The Fifth of the Cartesian Meditations ends in shipwreck.

 

On This Day in 1859 . . .

. . . Edmund Husserl was born. 

Husserl, Knight of Reason

Ich muss meinen Weg gehen so sicher, so fest entschlossen und so ernst wie Duerers Ritter, Tod und Teufel. (Edmund Husserl, "Persoenliche Aufzeichnungen" )  "I must go my way as surely, as seriously, and as resolutely as the knight in Duerer's Knight, Death, and Devil." (tr. MavPhil)  Note the castle on the hill, the hour glass in the devil's hand, the serpents entwined in his headpiece, and the human skull on the road. 

Time is running out, death awaits, and a mighty task wants completion.

Kleingeld, Meine Herren, Kleingeld!

Husserl used to say that to his seminarians to keep them careful and wissenschaftlich and away from assertions of the high-flying and sweeping sort.  Unfortunately, the philosophical small change doesn't add up.  Specialization, no matter how narrow and protracted, no matter how carefully pursued, fails to put us on the "sure path of science."

Given that plain fact, you may as well go for the throat of the Big Questions.  Aren't they what brought you  to philosophy in the first place?

This line of thought is pursued in Fred Sommers Abandons Whitehead and Metaphysics for Logic.

Edith Stein on Cognitio Fidei: Is Faith a Kind of Knowledge?

One finds the phrase cognitio fidei in Thomas Aquinas and in such Thomist writers as Josef Pieper. It translates as 'knowledge of faith.' The genitive is to be interpreted subjectively, not objectively: faith is not the object of knowledge; faith is a form or type of knowledge. But how can faith be a type of knowledge? One ought to find this puzzling.

On a standard analysis of 'knows,' where propositional knowledge is at issue, subject S knows that p just in case (i) S believes that p; (ii) S is justified in believing that p; and (iii) p is true. This piece of epistemological boilerplate is the starting-point for much of the arcana (Gettier counterexamples, etc.) of contemporary epistemology. But its pedigree is ancient, to be found in Plato's Theaetetus.

It is obvious that on the standard analysis mere belief is inferior to knowledge since if I believe what is false I don't have knowledge, and if I believe what is true without justification I don't have knowledge either. How then can mere belief be a form or type of knowledge? It is rather a necessary but not sufficient condition of knowledge. Or so it seems to the modern mind.

Another puzzle has to do with certainty. Whether or not knowledge entails certainty, it seems to the modern mind that belief definitely does not entail certainty: what I believe but do not know I cannot be certain about since if I believe but do not know, then either truth is lacking or justification is lacking or both. How then can mere belief be said to be certain? And yet we read in Aquinas that "It is part of the concept of belief itself that man is certain of that in which he believes." (Quoted from Pieper, Belief and Faith, p. 15).

Is easy to understand how one who believes but does not know that p can be subjectively certain that p; but it is difficult to understand how such a person can be objectively certain that p. Objective certainty, however, alone has epistemic value.

We now turn to the remarkable Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic church. In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Husserl and Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

One issue is whether faith gives us access to truth. Stein has Thomas say:

. . . faith is a way to truth. Indeed, in the first place it is a way to truths — plural — which would otherwise be closed to us, and in the second place it is the surest way to truth. For there is no greater certainty than that of faith . . . . (Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, tr. Redmond, ICS Publications 2000, pp. 16-17)

Now comes an important question. What is it that we as philosophers want? We want the ultimate truths about the ultimate matters. If so, it is arguable that we should take these truths from whatever source offers them to us even if the source is not narrowly philosophical. We should not say: I will accept only those truths that can be certified by (natural) reason, but rather all truths whether certified by reason or 'certified' by faith. Thus Stein has Aquinas say:

If faith makes accessible truths unattainable by any other means, philosophy, for one thing, cannot forego them without renouncing its universal claim to truth. [. . .] One consequence, then, is a material dependence of philosophy on faith.

Then too, if faith affords the highest certainty attainable by the human mind, and if philosophy claims to bestow the highest certainty, then philosophy must make the certainty of faith its own. It does so first by absorbing the truths of faith, and further by using them as the final criterion by which to gauge all other truths. Hence, a second consequence is a formal dependence of philosophy on faith. (17-18)

But of course this cannot go unchallenged by Husserl. So Stein has him say:

. . . if faith is the final criterion of all other truth, what is the criterion of faith itself? What guarantees that the certainty of my faith is genuine? (20)

Or in terms of of the distinction made above between subjective and objective certainty: what guarantees that the certainty of faith is objective and not merely subjective? The faiths of Jew, Christian, and Muslim are all different. How can the Christian be sure that the revelation he takes on faith has not been superseded by the revelation the Muslim takes on faith?

Stein's Thomas replies to Husserl as follows:

Probably my best answer is that faith is its own guarantee. I could also say that God, who has given us the revelation, vouches for its truth. But this would only be the other side of the same coin. For if we took the two as separate facts, we would fall into a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle], since God is after all what we become certain about in faith. [. . .]

All we can do is point out that for the believer such is the certainty of faith that it relativizes all other certainty, and that he can but give up any supposed knowledge which contradicts his faith. The unique certitude of faith is a gift of grace. It is up to the understanding and will to draw the practical consequences therefrom. Constructing a philosophy on faith belongs to the theoretical consequences. (20-22)

So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason but which are provided by faith in revelation. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.

My task, in this and in related posts, is first and foremost to set forth the problems as clearly as I can. Anyone who thinks this problem has an easy solution does not understand it.  It is part of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem.

Husserl Introduces Shestov to Kierkegaard

Lev Shestov and Kierkegaard have much in common. Both are irrationalists, to mention the deepest commonality. Husserl and Kierkegaard have almost nothing in common except that both are passionate truth-seekers each in his own way. So I find it amazing that it was Edmund Husserl, of all people, who introduced Shestov to Kierkegaard's writings. As Shestov explains in In Memory of a Great Philosopher:

. . . during my visit to Freiburg [im Breisgau, where Husserl lived], learning that I had never read Kierkegaard, Husserl began not to ask but to demand - with enigmatic insistence - that I acquaint myself with the works of the Danish thinker. How was it that a man whose whole life had been a celebration of reason should have led me to Kierkegaard's hymn to the absurd? Husserl, to be sure, seems to have become acquainted with Kierkegaard only during the last years of his life. There is no evidence in his works of familiarity with any of the writings of the author of Either-Or. But it seems clear that Kierkegaard's ideas deeply impressed him.

It testifies to the stature of both men that they sought each other out for dialogue despite the unbridgeable gulf that separated them.

Augustine, Husserl, and Certainty

In his magisterial Augustine of Hippo, Peter Brown writes of Augustine, "He wanted complete certainty on ultimate questions." (1st ed., p. 88) If you don't thrill to that line, you are no philosopher. Compare Edmund Husserl: "Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben nicht leben." "I just can't live without certainty." Yet he managed to live for years after penning that line, and presumably without certainty.