Month: November 2020

Denial of the Lapsus is the Left’s Main Lapse

My title above. A long-time reader sends us his thoughts. Here are some of them, with my  edits and a bit of commentary.

Every so often I reflect on causes of the Leftist mentality, and all the madness it leads to. If we scan across favourite activities of the current woke age, such as racialism and its attendant theories on the left (the evil of colonialism, white privilege, white fragility etc), the socialist project, trans-activism and biological denialism and so on, there lurks a common deep assumption which is that the (authentic) left does not accept the inherent and unavoidably fallen state of man.
Exactly right. As a result, leftists embrace such illusions as man's indefinite malleability and perfectibility.
This is equivalent to denying the human condition as a protracted battle to overcome our own worst instincts and live good lives. According to this assumption, it is possible to be individually sinless, one just has to find the correct Utopian ideology and practice it, and to evangelise it to others. If one thinks one can be personally morally irreproachable, one can be self-righteous, and one may sit on a higher moral plane.
And in judgment of others.  This goes together with a failure to recognize the depth of evil in the human heart, in every human heart, evil whose ultimate source is man's free will, the existence of which leftists also deny.
 
Now of course, only some individuals can attain moral perfection. Leftism is fundamentally  about a two level society: those who know and control the doctrine of the one true way, and those who need to be controlled. If certain chosen individuals can be perfect, there's no need for God, indeed they can create their own church. In Leftist thinking, this is usually something called 'the Party'. Those not in the Party or completely deferential to it are against it and to be castigated, publicly flogged or imprisoned.
 
From the rejection of inherent human baseness and the delusion of perfectibility spring a torrent of other terrible ideas, starting with the idea that everyone can, if correctly enabled, be equal. The idea of innate difference – of intelligence, ambition, diligence, or any other capability – is simply unacceptable. But if a person can be perfect, given the right help, all persons can be equally perfect, and thus perfectly equal. Anyone rejecting difference and thus equality is against the church, and must be punished.
This is crucially important for understanding the mentality of the Left, and in the USA, the mentality of the Democrat Party which is now an openly hard-Left party.  (Its crypto-leftism under the Clintons and Obama is now manifest and brazen.) My type of conservatism accepts the equality of persons as rights-possessors on the normative plane, but insists on the obvious fact of empirical inequality, both of individuals and of groups, on the factual plane.  While we are equal in respect of such rights as the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to acquire (not be given) property, and others, we are manifestly not equal in respect of abilities and virtues and their implementation. We are not all equally intelligent, ambitious, diligent, conscientious, self-controlled, high-minded, sensitive to art and music, respectful, temperate, prudent, courageous, just . . . . It is therefore a fallacy to infer racism from inequality of outcome.
 
Leftists, denying these obvious differences, show no respect for reality. They want to re-make reality in their own image. They confuse the world as it is with the world as they would like it to be.  Hence their vacuous talk of imagining and re-imagining, re-imagining policing, for example, which starts, absurdly, with defunding the police.  Their inability to understand the need for the necessary evil of policing shows  a lack of understanding of human nature, which is not surprising given their denial of human nature  by their acceptance of the notion of indefinite malleability.

On Wasting Time with Philosophy (with a Jab at Pascal)

People talk glibly about wasting time on this, that, and the other thing — but without reflecting on what it is to waste time. People think they know which activities are time-wasters, philosophy for example. But to know what wastes time, one would have to know what is a good, a non-wasteful, use of time. And one would presumably also have to know that one ought to use one's time well. One uses one's time well when one uses it in pursuit of worthy ends. But which ends are worthy? Does this question have an answer? Does it even make sense? And if it does, what sense does it make? And what is the answer? Now these are all philosophical questions.

Someone who holds that philosophy is a waste of time must therefore hold that these questions are a waste of time. He must simply and dogmatically assume answers to them. He must assume that the question about choice-worthy ends makes sense and has an answer. And he must assume that he has the answer. He must assume that he knows, for example, that piling up consumer goods, or chasing after name and fame, is the purpose of human existence. Or he must assume that getting to heaven, or bringing down capitalism, or 'helping other people,' is the purpose of human existence.

Error Invincibilis

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), #691:

Spiritual blindness differs from physical blindness in this, that it is not conscious. That is the essence of error invincibilis.

Compare Blaise Pascal, Pensees #98 (Krailsheimer tr., p. 55):

How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame mind says that it is we who are limping.

Please forgive the following reformulation. Point out to a man that he is crippled, and he won't contradict you, though he might take umbrage at your churlishness. But point out to a man that his thinking is crippled and he is sure to reply, "No! It is your thinking that is crippled."

Happy Thanksgiving

This annus horribilis of 2020 makes my annual Thanksgiving homily ring somewhat hollow, especially the penultimate line:

And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

Still and all, we still have much to be grateful for.  But we will have to redouble our efforts to preserve the objects of our gratitude, in particular, our liberty, our "sweet land of liberty."

Thanksgiving-images

Kierkegaard on the Power and the Powerlessness of Earthly Power

Kierkegaard stampThe following passage from Concluding Unscientific Postscript embodies a penetrating insight:

. . . the legal authority shows its impotence precisely when it shows its power: its power by giving permission, its impotence by not being able to make it permissible. (p. 460, tr. Swenson & Lowrie)

My permitting you to do X does not make X permissible.  My forbidding you to do X does not make X impermissible.  My permitting (forbidding) is justified only if what I permit (forbid) is in itself permissible (impermissible).  And the same goes for any finite agent or collection of finite agents. A finite agent may have the power to permit and forbid, but it cannot have the power to make permissible or impermissible.  Finite agency, then, betrays its impotence in exercising its power.

 

For example, the moral permissibility of killing in self-defense is what it is independently of the State's power to permit or forbid via its laws and their enforcement.  The State cannot make morally permissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that permit it.  Nor can the State make morally impermissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that proscribe it.

Here below Might and Right fall asunder: the powerful are not always just, and the just are not always powerful.  But it would be a mistake to think that the mighty cannot be right, or that the right cannot be mighty.  The falling asunder is consistent with a certain amount of overlap.  But the overlap will always only be partial.

Power does not confer moral justification, but neither does impotence.  (For example, the relative weakness of the Palestinians relative to the Israelis does not confer justification on the Palestinian cause or its methods.)  See The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does Not Justify.

The State is practically necessary and morally justifiable.  Or so I would argue against the anarchists.  But fear of the State is rational: its power is awesome and often misused.  Communist governments murdered some 100 million during the twentieth century alone. This is why the State's power must be hedged round with limits.  The Founders of the United States of America understood this. It is an understanding that is approaching its nadir as 2020 fades.

We don't know whether God exists.  But we do know that nothing is worthy of being called God unless it is the perfect harmonization and coalescence of Might and Right, of Power and Justice, of Will and Reason. 

This coalescence is a mystical unity that cannot be achieved by human effort. The Eschaton cannot be immanentized. If this divine mystical unity exists, it does not exist in the here and now, or in the future of the here and now.  If this unity does not exist, it cannot be for us an ideal.  Only what is realizable by us can serve as an ideal for us.

Kierkegaard the Corrective is an anti-Hegel and an anti-Marx. Hegel held that the unity existed already, here below. Marx, recognizing the professorial bluster for what it was, turned Hegel upon his head, urging that it be brought about. "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it." (The Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach.)  But the conception itself was fatally flawed, already in Hegel.

We saw the sequel. It was a road to slavery and the gulag.

Horribile dictu, having learned nothing, we are about to repeat the same mistakes.

There is no heaven on earth and there cannot be. Because there cannot be, heaven on earth cannot without disaster be pursued as an ideal. If there is heaven, it is Elsewhere, beyond the human horizon. 

Believers and unbelievers can live in peace, or at least in the absence of war, if the unbelievers on the Left eschew their totalitarianism, which is a perversion of the dogmatic certainties of the Age of Belief.  But they cannot be reasonably expected to do so. It is  not 'who they are' in their silly way of speaking.

We who love liberty are in for the burden of a long twilight struggle against forces of darkness in the gloaming.

Is Religion Escapist?

Escapist LadderEscapism is a form of reality-denial.   One seeks to escape from reality into a haven of illusion.  One who flees a burning building we do not call an escapist.  Why not?   Because his escape from the fire is not an escape into unreality, but into a different reality, one decidedly superior to that of being incinerated.  The prisoner in Plato's Cave who ascended to the outer world escaped, but was not an escapist. He was not escaping from, but to, reality.

Is religion escapist?  It is an escape from the 'reality' of time and change, sin and death.  But that does not suffice to make it escapist.  It is escapist only if this life of time and change, sin and death, is all there is.  And that is precisely the question, one not to be begged.

You tell me what reality is, and I'll tell you whether religion is an escape from it. 

You say that you know what reality is? You bluster!

There is a nuance I ought to mention.  In both Platonism and Buddhism, one who has made "the ascent to what is" (Republic 521 b) and sees aright, is enjoined to  return so as to help those who remain below.  This is the return to the Cave mentioned at Republic 519 d.  In Buddhism, the Boddhisattva ideal enjoins a return of the enlightened individual to the samsaric realm to assist in the enlightenment of the sentient beings remaining there.

To return to the image of the burning building.  He who flees a burning building is no escapist: he flees an unsatisfactory predicament, one dripping with dukkha, to a more satisfactory condition.  Once there, if he is granted the courage, he reconnoiters the situation, dons fire-protective gear, and returns to save the trapped.

Both the Cave and the samsaric realm are not wholly unreal, else there would be no point to a return to them.  But they are, shall we say, ontologically and axiologically deficient.

I pity the poor secularist who believes in nothing beyond them.

Image credit. 

Is Anything Ever Settled in Philosophy? Meinong’s Theory of Objects

RyleGilbert Ryle once predicted with absurd confidence, "Gegenstandstheorie . . . is dead, buried, and not going to be resurrected."  (Quoted in G. Priest, Towards Non-Being, Oxford, 2005, p. vi, n. 1.) Ryle was wrong, dead wrong, and shown to be wrong just a few years after his cocky prediction.  Variations on Meinong's Theory of Objects flourish like never before due to the efforts of such brilliant philosophers as Butchvarov, Castaneda, Lambert, Parsons, Priest, Routley/Sylvan, and Zalta, just to mention those that come first to mind. And the Rylean cockiness has had an ironic upshot: his logical behaviorism is temporarily dead while Meinongianism thrives.  But Ryle too will be raised if my parallel law of philosophical experience — Philosophy always resurrects its dead — holds.

Parallel to what?

Parallel to Etienne Gilson's famous observation that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers."  That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) As a metaphilosophical pronunciamento it is hard to beat.  It is equally true that philosophy always resurrects its dead.  Let that be my first law.  The history of natural science is littered with corpses, none of which is an actual or potential Lazarus.  Not so in philosophy.

It may be worth noting that if philosophy resurrects its dead then it can be expected to raise the anti-philosophical (and therefore philosophical) positions of philosophy's would-be undertakers.  Philosophy, she's a wily bitch: you can't outflank her and she always ends up on top.

Another Thought on Psychologism in Logic

Logic is prescriptive and proscriptive.  Logic prescribes how we ought to think if we would arrive at truth. It also proscribes those ways of thinking that lead to error.  But 'ought' implies 'can.' How we ought to think must be really possible, indeed really possible for us, where what is really possible for us is grounded in how we actually and contingently are. A real possibility of thinking this way or that must be based in actual abilities, actual abilities of real minds in the real order.  The logically normative must be psychologically implementable.  The ideal patterns residing in the ὑπερουράνιος τόπος of Plato must be realizable in enmattered minds.

There look to be the makings here of an argument for a defensible psychologism.  (Logic cannot be a part of empirical psychology, but how could it have nothing to do with the latter?)

The above train of thought is from a couple of years ago.  (Journal vol. XXXIII, pp. 22-23, entry of 4 January 2019) Now I find the following in the Martin Kusch SEP article on psychologism, referenced in the immediately preceding entry:

1. Normative-prescriptive disciplines — disciplines that tell us what we ought to do — must be based upon descriptive-explanatory sciences.
2. Logic is a normative-prescriptive discipline concerning human thinking.
3. There is only one science which qualifies as constituting the descriptive-explanatory foundation for logic: empirical psychology.
Ergo, logic must be based upon psychology.

The above is the second of five patterns of psychologistic reasoning that Kusch distinguishes.  He attributes it to Wilhelm Wundt.  My thought above runs along parallel rails.

Logic, prescribing as it does how we OUGHT to think, by the same stroke prescribes how we ought to THINK. The abstract patterns definitive of the oughts and ought nots of inference may reside in Plato's timeless heaven, but thinking and thus judging is in time and takes time.  Inference, in particular, takes time. Its analog up yonder is implication. And so the abstractly logical must touch ground in the matter of minds in time.  An abstract entity can't think.

But a concrete hunk of intracranial meat can't think either. And meat can't mean. Minds mean. If we were just meatheads we couldn't think or mean. Thinking is a psychic function.  Arguably, though, it is not the psyche as objectified and manifest to inner sense that thinks but the psyche as subject, the psyche as pre-objective, pre-mundane, and thus transcendental.  But from Descartes on it has proven to be a bear of a task to get a good solid grip on the transcendental. Husserl struggled with it life-long and  yet couldn't drag it out of the dreck into the clear light of day. And where the great Husserl failed we lesser luminaries and flickering lights are even less likely to succeed.

Must we regress to the spiritual? But how can we get a grip on it without objectifying it?  We cannot help but reify, but the Cogitans is not a res, not  spiritual substance.

The noetic as such embraces the logical, the psychological, the transcendental and the spiritual. 

On that gnomic note I end this meditation.

Related: Martin Kusch, Psychologism (from Ralph Dumain's Autodidact Project)

Has Any Philosophical Problem Been Solved? The case of psychologism in logic.

For Cyrus

……………

A reader is skeptical of my solubility skepticism. He adduces the problem of psychologism in logic which, he suggests, has been definitively settled in favor of the anti-psychologizers.  Here, then, is a problem that supposedly has been solved. There is progress in philosophy after all. My reader is joined by Robert Spaemann who, in his Persons, tr. O'Donovan, Oxford 2006, writes:

The refutation of psychologism in logic, with which Husserl and Frege are associated, is among the very few philosophical achievements that have brought an existing debate to a decisive close. (54)

Would that it were so! But alas it is not.  The existing debate rages on. Having been brought up on Husserl, and influenced by Frege, I was for a long time an opponent of psychologism in logic, and thought the issue resolved. Time to revaluate! Here is a post from August 2004 from my first blog:

ARE THE LAWS OF LOGIC EMPIRICAL GENERALIZATIONS?

Someone on a discussion list recently resurrected the old idea of John Stuart Mill and others that the laws of logic are empirical generalizations from what we do and do not perceive. Thus we never perceive rain and its absence in the same place and at the same time. The temptation is to construe such logic laws as the Law of Non-Contradiction — ~(p & ~p) — as generalizations from psychological facts like these. If this is right, then logical laws lack the a priori character and epistemic ‘dignity’ that some of us are wont to see in them. They rest on psychological facts that might have been otherwise.

But now consider this reductio ad absurdum:

1. The laws of logic are empirical generalizations. (Assumption for reductio)
2. Empirical generalizations, if true, are merely contingently true. (By definition of ‘empirical generalization’: empirical generalizations record what happens to be the case, but might not have been the case.) Therefore,
3. The laws of logic, if true, are merely contingently true. (From 1 and 2)
4. If proposition p is contingently true, then it is possible that p be false. (Def. of ‘contingently true.’)Therefore,
5. The laws of logic, if true, are possibly false. (From 3 and 4)Therefore,
6. LNC is possibly false: there are logically possible worlds in which ‘p&~p’ is true. (From 5 and the fact that LNC is a law of logic.)
7. But (6) is absurd (self-contradictory): it amounts to saying that it is logically possible that the very criterion of logical possibility, namely LNC, be false. Corollary: if laws of logic were empirical generalizations, we would be incapable of defining ‘empirical generalization’: this definition requires the notion of what is the case but (logically) might not have been the case.

The above is a good, but not a compelling, argument. For it presupposes the distinction between necessary and contingent propositions.  Is that distinction objectively self-evident? Martin Kusch, Psychologism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Massey also invokes the stronger form of the claim that logical truths are not necessary (1991, 188). According to this criticism, the very notion of necessity which is presupposed in calling logical laws ‘necessary truths’, is beset with difficulties. The argument leading to this conclusion was developed in a series of well-known papers by Quine. Quine argued that the notions of analyticity, necessity and aprioricity stand or fall together and that the traditional distinction between analytic and synthetic truths is relative rather than absolute. But once this distinction becomes relative, necessity and aprioricity go by the board (Quine 1951, Engel 1991, 268–70). Massey summarises the implications of Quine’s arguments succinctly:

If we reject the concept of necessity … we also forego the concept of contingency. If it makes no sense to say that the truths of mathematics are necessary, it makes no better sense to say that those of psychology or any other so-called empirical science are contingent. But if we may not employ necessity and contingency to demarcate the deliverances of the empirical sciences from those of the formal sciences, how are we to distinguish them in any philosophically interesting way? (1991, 188).

Now I don't much cotton to Quine, but he is no slouch of a logician!  And he is certainly a looming presence in 20th century American philosophy.  So on the basis of his dissent alone, we ought to agree that the psychologism problem has not been solved.   I am assuming that a problem hasn't been solved unless it has been solved to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners.  It hasn't been solved until the debate about it has been brought to a decisive close. Kusch gives several reasons in addition to the one cited above why this is not the case with respect to the psychologism debate. 

Deism, Classical Theism, and Existential Inertia

Nemes and VallicellaOn deism, God starts the universe existing, but then he takes it easy, allowing it to exist on its own in virtue of its 'existential inertia.' The latter is an analog of inertia in physics. Newton's First Law states that a body at rest or in uniform rectilinear motion continues in its state of rest or motion unless acted upon by an external force. Analogously, what could be called the First Law of Deistic Metaphysics states that an existing thing continues to exist on its own without external assistance unless acted upon by an external annihilatory force.  This is but a rough and preliminary formulation of the thesis of existential inertia.  Continuing to exist is the 'default.'  Suppose I bring a primitive table into existence by placing a board on a stump.  The thought behind 'existential inertia' is that the compound object that just came to be does not need something to keep it from blinking out of existence a nanosecond, microsecond, millisecond . . . later.

On classical theism, by contrast with deism, God is no mere cosmic starter-upper: creatures need God not only to begin to exist but to continue existing moment by moment.  A defense of classical theism against deism must therefore include a rejection of existential inertia.

Steven Nemes offers a rejection of existential inertia in his article Deism, Classical Theism, and Existential Inertia. He solicits my comments. I am happy to oblige.

He defines the phrase as follows:

Let’s say that the existence of a thing is “inertial” if and only if it continues to exist over time, in the absence of annihilating factors, without the assistance of anything outside of it.

He gives the example of a cat which, "once in existence, continues to exist over time, so long as nothing intervenes to destroy it, without anything outside of the cat helping it or sustaining it in existence." But surely the cat cannot continue to exist without air, water, food, a tolerable range of temperatures, and so on, factors clearly external to the cat.   Note also that Nemes' definition presupposes that only temporal items are existentially inertial which is not obvious: on a classically theistic scheme even so-called 'abstract objects' are going to have to be existentially inertial.  But I won't worry this second point in this entry.

Here is a better way to convey the notion of existential inertia. Suppose a deistic god creates exactly one iron sphere and nothing else.  In this world there is nothing to cause the sphere to rust or otherwise corrode away into nonexistence.  Nor does it, like a living organism, require anything external to it to continue to exist.  It doesn't need oxygen or water like Nemes' cat. And it has no internal mechanism to self-destruct.  The sphere exists inertially iff its 'default setting' is continued existence which is to say: it has no intrinsic tendency to cease to exist. 

The sphere is of course a contingent being. Hence there is no necessity that it continue to exist.  But while there is no necessity that it continue to exist, it will continue to exist absent some external annihilatory force. The deistic god could zap it out of existence, but if he doesn't, it will continue to exist on its own 'steam.'  He needn't do anything to keep it in existence, and of course he can't if he is truly deistic.

And the same goes for the cat, despite the cat's need for materials in its environment such as oxygen and food.  It too will continue to exist if those things are supplied without the need for a special metaphysical factor to keep it from sliding into nonbeing.  The critter's natural default is to existence.

Nemes's Argument against Existential Inertia

1) The real existence of the cat does not show itself as one of its properties.

2) "The real existence of the cat is thus not a part of that total complex of individuated properties which make up the particular cat which we experience. "

3) "The unexperienceable real existence of the experienceable cat must therefore be something that is somehow “outside” of the cat, and yet “pointed at it” in such a way that the cat exists."

4) "This is easy to understand if we say that the existence of the cat consists in its standing on the receiving end of an existence-endowing relation to “something else.” ". . . a “something else” that is not itself an individual thing with properties but rather pure existence itself. And this “pure existence itself,” according to classical theists, is God."

(1) is true. (2) appears merely to unpack (explicate) (1); if so, it too is true.  The transition to (3), however, is a non sequitur. The real existence of the cat might be hidden within it or an empirically inaccessible feature of it.  Absent further premises, one cannot conclude that the real existence is 'outside' the cat.

Of course, I am not endorsing existential inertia; I am merely pointing out that the above argument, as it stands, is invalid. Perhaps with further work it can be made valid. 

Knowledge of Existence: Is Existence Hidden?

1) I see a tree, a palo verde.  Conditions are optimal for veridical perception.  I see that the tree is green, blooming, swaying slightly in the breeze. The tree is given to my perceptual acts as having these and other properties.  Now while I do not doubt for a second the existence of the tree, let alone deny its existence, the tree is not given as existing.  It is given as green, as blooming, etc., but not as existing. I see the green of the tree, but I don't see the existence of the tree.  If existence is a property of the tree, it is not an observable property thereof.  Whatever existence is, it is not phenomenologically accessible or empirically detectable. And yet the tree exists. We might be tempted to reason as follows:

a) The tree is not exhausted by its quiddity: it is not a mere what, but an existing what.
b) The existing/existence does not appear: only quidditative properties appear.

Therefore

c) The existing/existence of the tree is hidden.

2) Should we conclude that the existing of things is mysterious or hidden, an occult depth dimension beyond our phenomenological ken? P. Butchvarov and others would answer in the negative. And presumably anyone phenomenologically inclined would have to agree. Now there is a class of views according to which the existence of a concrete particular such as a tree is a sort of coherence of the facets, aspects, guises, noemata, intentional objects — pick your term — that are presented to us directly and in their turn present the thing itself.  Following Butchvarov I will use 'object' and distinguish objects from entities. The tree itself is an entity; the various facets, aspects, guises, noemata, are objects.

For example, I am seated on my porch looking at the tree.  I cannot see the whole of it, and I don't see all of the properties of the portions I do see. Seated, I enjoy a visual perception the accusative of which is (incomplete) object O1.  When I stand up, still looking at the tree, I am presented with a slightly different (incomplete) object, O2.  Advancing toward the tree, a series of objects come into view one after another.  (This makes it sound as if  the series is discrete when it is actually continuous.) Arriving at the tree, I put my hands around the trunk. The resulting object is richer than the others by the addition of tactile data, but still incomplete and therefore not identical to the completely determinate entity. But these objects all cohere and 'consubstantiate' (Castaneda) and are of one and the same entity. In their mutual cohesion, they manifest one and the same entity. They present the same infinitely-propertied entity in a manner suitable to a finite mind.

Butchvarov speaks of the material (not formal) identity of the objects.  On such a scheme the existence of an entity is naturally assayed as the indefinite identifiability of its objects.  Existence is indefinite identifiability. By whom? By the subject in question. We could call this a transcendentally-subjective theory of existence, although that is not what Butch calls it.  We find something very similar in Husserl and Hector-Neri Castaneda. In Husserl, existence is 'constituted in consciousness.' Sein reduces to Seinsinn.

On a scheme like this, existence would not be hidden but would itself be accessible, not as a separate monadic property, but as the ongoing relational coherence of objects, noemata, guises, aspects or whatever you want to call them. It would seem that the phenomenologically inclined, those who agree with Heidegger that ontology is possible only as phenomenology, would have to subscribe to some such theory of existence. 

3) On the above approach one could 'bracket' the existence in itself of the tree entity and still have available existence as indefinite identifiability.  But does this 'bracketing' (Husserl's Einklammerung) merely put existence in itself out of play or does it cancel it?I suspect it is the latter.

Let's be clear about the two senses of 'exists.' 

In the phenomenological sense, existence is the mutual cohesion of Butchvarov's objects, Castaneda's guises, Husserl's noemata.  Existence is thus accessible from the first-person point of view. It is in the open and not hidden. The question, How do I know that the tree exists? has a ready answer. I know that the tree exists from the manifest coherence of its objects, their indefinite identifiability in Butchvarov's sense.  

In the second sense, existence is such that what exists exists independently of (finite) consciousness and its synthetic activities. In this second  'realist' sense of 'exists,' things could exist even in the absence of conscious beings. Existence in this second sense is that which makes existents exist outside of their causes and outside the mind and outside of language. In the former 'idealist' sense of 'exist,' nothing could exist in the absence of consciousness. 

4) One conclusion:  if you deny that existence is hidden, then it looks like you will have to embrace some type of idealism, with its attendant problems.

5) How might existence be hidden? Suppose that everything  apart from God is kept in existence by ongoing divine creative activity. If so, each thing apart from God is an effect of the divine cause.  Its being the effect of a hidden Causa Prima is itself hidden.  My tree's being maintained in existence outside of its (secondary) causes and outside the mind  is not manifest to us. Perceiving the tree, I cannot 'read off' its createdness.  Its createdness is its existence and both are hidden.

6) My final conclusion is that no classical theist can adopt a phenomenological theory of existence.

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