Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Top o' the Stack.
UPDATE (8/4/2025). Matteo writes, "As for your latest post on Substack about the dehumanization of the ego, there is this Italian philosopher who holds a very similar view (consciousness and the world are the very same thing, we literally ARE the world etc."
https://archive.org/details/spreadmindwhycon0000manz
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There is an open and shorter than a book version with a digest of Manzotti views https://aeon.co/essays/the-question-is-what-are-we-a-conversation-on-consciousness
Hi Bill,
Your post discusses some profound issues. I’ve not read or heard of Butchvarov before so I thank you for bringing him to my attention. I’ve grappled with some of these ideas of Sartre but my understanding is quite tentative, I really need to approach the problematic from as many angles as possible. When I read Transcendence of the Ego I was left with many questions. In particular, in the context of my studying Kant, I found Sartre’s remarks on the Kantian ‘I think’ interesting.
I want to ask about a line of Husserl you quote:
“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“
This claim about ontological validity you claim, probably correctly (though I should check the context) is equivalent to his formulation in another work, from Formal and Transcendental Logic, sec. 94 which is “nothing exists for me otherwise than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness.”
I would guess ‘something existing for me’ is the same as something having ontological validity.
I suppose ‘sense’ and ‘ontological validity’ are essentially relational predicates, if something has sense, it has sense to *someone*, some mind, (either actually or potentially). Something having sense is perhaps equivalent or very closely related to something being intelligible.
I am less comfortable with the ontological validity concept here than I am with the sense concept. I’m not even sure here how to properly gloss what the distinction for Husserl is between something deriving its *sense* from me and something deriving its *ontological validity* from me. If Husserl himself gives good explanation of how he understands the meaning of ‘ontological validity’ feel free to tell me where to look. Did he invent the term, with the meaning he uses, or was it a pre-existing concept? I appreciate anything you can say to help understand Husserl here.
There’s a question as to how trivial or substantive the claim really is. ‘I cannot think something to exist without it being thought by me’ is of course a tautology, even if it’s perhaps more interesting if one insists the ‘me’ at the most fundamental level is something other than the ordinary empirical person.
Ryan,
>>I would guess ‘something existing for me’ is the same as something having ontological validity.<<
That's right. The CM claim and the FTL claim say the same thing.
>>I suppose ‘sense’ and ‘ontological validity’ are essentially relational predicates, if something has sense, it has sense to *someone*, some mind, (either actually or potentially). Something having sense is perhaps equivalent or very closely related to something being intelligible.<<
That's right. If x has Seinsgeltung, then x ‘counts as being, as existent, as real.
>>I am less comfortable with the ontological validity concept here than I am with the sense concept.<<
Assuming that you have read Frege, you may be thinking of sense as an intermediary item that mediates between subject and thing. Frege distinguishes between sense (Sinn) and referent (Bedeutung) and thinks of reference/referring as routed through sense. To use the stock example, the planet Venus, that massive chunk of physical reality, is accessed by us both semantically and epistemically only via senses which Frege describes as modes of presentation (Darstellungsweisen) and ways of being given (Arten des Gegebenseins). Thus the senses of 'morning star' and 'evening star' are different senses that mediate reference to one and the same thing, Venus. These senses belong in Frege's Third Reich of ideal 'Platonic' items. Frege operates with a tripartite ontology. The first realm is the mind and its contents; the second is the realm of physical things; the third is the realm of ideal objects or abstract objects as Quine (mis) uses 'abstract.'
To get a feel for what Husserl is up to (and later Hector Castaneda and Butchvarov) imagine that the tree in the garden is composed of something like Fregean senses brought down to Earth. Husserl calls them noemata, Hector calls them guises, Butch calls them objects. The tree in the garden, then, is a complete system of noemata which is to say: senses do not mediate reference (linguistic or mental) but are themselves referents. The tree itself is a bundle or cluster of these referents
Now if you can wrap your head around this, then you should be able to see how someone could be comfortable with giving senses ontic Geltung. But I am just scratching the surface.
That’s a neat analogy. I’ve heard comparison between Fregean sense and Husserl’s noemata but didn’t realize they were different in this way. The comparison to Castaneda and Butcharov is helpful, it’s always nice to see an idea implemented by a few different philosophers.
I wonder if non-existent objects have noemata or not, I’ll have to find out. In the reception of Frege’s theory by later analytic philosophers I found the idea of an object-dependent sense as developed by Gareth Evans and John McDowell to be interesting, I suppose in part motivated by a desire to not have the sense be a sort of ‘epistemic intermediary’.
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