One thought on “Soul as Homunculus: On Homuncular Explanation”
Bill, you are back with the Transcendental Ego! I am happy to see that. Another interesting post on a fascinating subject. I am now working my way through Husserl’s *Ideas* — my second swing at it since college — so this post comes at a nice time for me.
I was struck most by your no-thing ‘fourth approach’, along with your penultimate sentence: “Consciousness is real, but cannot be reified: it is other than every *res*, every being; but it is not nothing either!”
It’s no doubt perilous to use God in an analogy, but God exists and He is not a being-among-beings. God is ‘no-thing’ (in the sense of not being an *ens*, a *res*), but He exists nonetheless. (Of course, He exists as Being Itself, but I’m trying not to make that central to this analogy. He exists, but not as a ‘thing’, not as a *res* – I do not mean to take it any further than that.)
Again, I toss this ‘God analogy’ out with no great confidence, but I have thought of it from time to time. I wonder if you see any plausibility in this as a parallel.
Bill, you are back with the Transcendental Ego! I am happy to see that. Another interesting post on a fascinating subject. I am now working my way through Husserl’s *Ideas* — my second swing at it since college — so this post comes at a nice time for me.
I was struck most by your no-thing ‘fourth approach’, along with your penultimate sentence: “Consciousness is real, but cannot be reified: it is other than every *res*, every being; but it is not nothing either!”
It’s no doubt perilous to use God in an analogy, but God exists and He is not a being-among-beings. God is ‘no-thing’ (in the sense of not being an *ens*, a *res*), but He exists nonetheless. (Of course, He exists as Being Itself, but I’m trying not to make that central to this analogy. He exists, but not as a ‘thing’, not as a *res* – I do not mean to take it any further than that.)
Again, I toss this ‘God analogy’ out with no great confidence, but I have thought of it from time to time. I wonder if you see any plausibility in this as a parallel.