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.

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.

Posted

December 19, 2012

Existence, Husserl, Idealism and Realism, Paranormal, Phenomenology

Bill Vallicella

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One response to “Phenomenon and Existence”

Erol Copelj

December 21, 2012

Thanks for the response. There is a lot in the above and, due to other commitments (i.e. thesis work), I am only able to touch on a few points at this time. I will note that I was particularly interested in discussing the relation between truth and coherent experiences (which arose in your post), especially in connection between two sense of truth, found both in Heidegger and Husserl: truth as correspondence and truth as ‘uncovering’. However, I could not get my thoughts together on these matters so as to make a succinct post.
I hope the following stimulates some thought.
I do not think that I simply assumed that ‘veridical experience’ is just coherent experience. Rather, my view is that the meaning of the term ‘veridical experience’ finds its ‘fulfillment’ in the experience of coherent experiences. You define ‘veridical experience’ as an experience that is about or of an object that exists whether or not the experience exists. From this definition, you claim, it follows that the existence of the object cannot be explain by it manner of appearing. We may not disagree on this point, and perhaps I will agree that phenomenology is incapable of analyzing all aspects of existence, but I maintain that it can tell us a lot. It is important to highlight the distinction between actual appearances and possible appearances. Not all actual objects are objects of actual appearances but surely all actual object are objects of possible appearances, and possible coherent appearances (I am leaving aside the ‘problem’ with scientific posits such as electrons). That actual objects can become objects of coherent experiences, I take it, is a necessary condition of all objects that can be known about. This is because all cases of knowing include such coherent experiences as necessary components. Since phenomenology, as conceived by Husserl, is an eidetic science, and thereby is the study of possibilia, then certain necessary properties of actual objects, i.e. that they can be experienced, is well within the domain of phenomenology. Nevertheless this is not all there is to actual object and to existence.
The possibility that phenomenology is limited as a study of existence arises when we consider that there is nothing within the essence of an experience that demand that it be harmonious. In other words, the actual harmony of the world is a contingent, a remarkable, fact. Can phenomenology say anything about this facticity? If we follow Husserl, and descend from the noesis-noema correlation towards more fundamental structures, we reach the ‘world’ of the hyle. The question becomes: why do these sets of hyle motivate these interpretive forms so as to lead to the constitution of a coherent world? Even here, however, all that is phenomenologically possible is more descriptions of *how* this occurs. Perhaps this is the place where philosophy break off and religion takes over? That is what I tend to think. I am especially doubtful that logical analysis can shed light on these levels, primarily because I take logical analysis to be concerned with constituted objects and to be incapable of describing these foundational levels (if you accept that there are such). The risk is that such an analysis turn the pre-objective into the objective; the constituting world into the constituted world. Michel Henry, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, for me, are the philosophers that have tried to wrestle with these levels prior to the constituted objects. I am not saying that this constitution is occurring from the side of the subject; precisely not because the subject is itself something constituted in relation to the object.
It is this surplus, this contingency, that leads me to think that phenomenology does not lead to idealism. After all, subjectivity is not sufficient to constitute the world, and this implies that there must be more to it than that.

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Phenomenon and Existence

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