Autobiographical – Page 5 – Maverick Philosopher

A Vocation, not a Job

Heading out the door for a walk, the wife invited me along. I told her I had too much to do, that the clock was running, the format sudden death, the time-control unknown.

"But you're retired."

I reminded her that philosophy is my vocation. One can be retired from the largely meaningless job of teaching the unteachable, but one can never be retired from one's vocation in the proper sense of that term.

I hope to have my boots on when the flag falls.

In what state will death find you when the Reaper's scythe cuts you down? Will it matter? Is that a question that needs to be investigated?

I Didn’t Start Out Conservative

Like many conservatives, I didn't start out as one. My background is working class, my parents were Democrats, and so was I until the age of 41. I came of age in the '60s. One of my heroes was John F. Kennedy, "the intrepid skipper of the PT 109" as I described him in a school essay written in the fifth grade. I was all for the Civil Rights movement. Musically my heroes were Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. I thrilled to his Blowin' in the Wind and his other civil rights anthems.

As I see it, those civil rights battles were fought and they were won. But then the rot set in as the party of JFK liberals became the extremists and the destructive leftists that they are today. For example, Affirmative Action in its original sense gave way to reverse discrimination, race-norming, minority set-asides, identity politics and the betrayal of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream that people be judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." To judge people by the content of their character is to judge them as individuals which is precisely the opposite of what tribalists and identity politicians do.

As liberals have become extremists, people with moderate views such as myself have become conservatives.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. day, a good day to read his Letter from a Birmingham Jail and reflect on how the race-delusional totalitarians who now infest the Democrat Party have strayed from King's ideas and vision.

The Introvert Advantage

Social distancing? I've been doing it all my life. O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo! Happy solitude, the sole beatitude. How sweet it is, and made sweeter still by a little socializing.

Full lockdown? I could easily take it, and put it to good use. It provides an excellent excuse to avoid meaningless holiday socializing with its empty and idle talk.

Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, Schocken 1948, p. 199:

In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort. It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility.

I have read this passage many times, and what delights me each time is the droll understatement of it: "there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort." No indeed. There is no progress because the conversations are not seriously about anything worth talking about. There is no Verantwortlichkeit (responsibility): the talk does not answer (antworten) to anything real in the world or anything real in the interlocutors. It is jaw-flapping for its own sake, mere linguistic behavior which, if it conveys anything, conveys: ‘I like you, you like me, and everything’s fine.’

The interlocutors float along in the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) of what Martin Heidegger calls das Man, the ‘they self.’ Compare Heidegger’s analysis of idle talk (Gerede) in Sein und Zeit (1927), sec. 35.

Am I suggesting that one should absolutely avoid idle talk? That would be to take things to an unnecessary and perhaps imprudent extreme. It is prudent to get yourself perceived as a regular guy — especially if you are an 'irregular guy.'

I am not under full lockdown like the Canadians in Ontario province. But the weight room now allows only six at a time and for one hour only, and you have to book each session in advance. This Christmas Eve should be very nice. I booked a 3-4 pm slot. I expect no one else to be there; I can overstay into the 4-5 pm slot. I can sing, talk to myself, grunt, groan, and use any machine. The TVs will be on; I can crank the fans way up. I shall commandeer the stationary bike upon which I will pedal while reading J. J. Valberg's superb The Puzzle of Experience. Ditto tomorrow.

Ganz man selbst sein, kann man nur wenn man allein ist. (Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena) "Only when one is alone can one be entirely oneself." (tr. BV)

I wouldn't make a very good socialist.

Oh happy solitude, sole beatitude! The introvert comes most fully into his own and most deeply savors his psychological good fortune, in old age, as Einstein attests.

Albert Einstein, "Self-Portrait" in Out of My Later Years (Citadel Press, 1956), p. 5:

. . . For the most part I do the thing which my own nature drives me to do. It is embarrassing to earn so much respect and love for it. Arrows of hate have been shot at me too; but they never hit me, because somehow they belonged to another world, with which I have no connection whatsoever.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Intimations of Elsewhere Ignored

A colleague once reported an out-of-body experience. He had been resting on his back on a couch when he came suddenly to view himself from the perspective of the ceiling. He dismissed the experience. He had too much class to use the phrase 'brain fart,' but that is what I suspect he thought it was: a weird occurrence of no significance. Vouchsafed a hint of what might be a reality beyond the ordinary, he chose to ignore it as if it were not worth the trouble of investigating. That sort of dismissive attitude is one I have trouble understanding.

It would be as if the prisoner in Plato's Cave who was freed of his shackles and was able to turn his head and see an opening and a light suggestive of a route out of the enclosure wherein he found himself were simply to have dismissed the sight as an insignificant illusion and then went back to 'reality,' the shadows on the wall.

I have no trouble understanding someone who, never having had any religious or mystical experiences, cannot bring himself to take religion seriously. And I have no trouble understanding someone who, having had such experiences, and having seriously examined their epistemic credentials, comes to the conclusion that they are none of them veridical. But to have the experiences, and not think them worth investigating — that puzzles me.

So maybe some things human are foreign to me after all.

Thoughts in and of Ancient Lycia, Asia Minor

From my Turkish journal, 22 February 1996:

Phaselis is a romantic tangle of Graeco-Roman ruins in a beautiful natural setting. I hiked back into the brush, got scratched up, but was rewarded by ruins and views out to the Mediterranean, and up to snow-capped mountains.

From Phaselis to the resort town of Kemer. I am sitting at the moment facing the sea drinking beer at an 'Italian' bistro. Table set on the lawn. Vegetation like Arizona: prickly pear cactus, rosemary in bloom, a palm or two, oleander, ice plant. Overcast and a bit cool. The cactus pads have names carved into them: Hasan, Samer, Erkan.

Living life versus thinking and reflecting on it and its 'meaning.' Surely this is a bogus distinction? For a man to live thoughtlessly is not to live, and to live the thinker's life is to live in a certain way. So what is the valid content of the distinction? Thought interferes with the immediacy of experience. Thought distances, and distance is distortion. But total immediacy would be blindness.

Thought without life is empty; life without thought is blind. The true life is a thinking life infused with experience broad and deep. So travel and suffer and get scratched up by the brambles of experience, but take good notes! Press the grapes of experience for the wine of wisdom. Stomp them for their juice.

Breathe and feel and take a good snort of the sea breeze. Play the fool; better to love and have lost than never to have loved. Take your best shot, put your ass on the line, go deep, pay your dues, sing the blues.

Above all, take risks! Calculated, deep thought risks. You learned long ago in your Thoreauvian adolescence that a man sits as many risks as he runs. Go to the brink, but with cautious steps. Take it to the limit, but know the limit. Dissolution into the Apeiron can wait for later. Travel and act but don't neglect to meet the mat of meditation often to quell both action and thought.

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.

Rebel with a Cause

"The eighty-year-old mystery of the murder of Sheldon Robert Harte, Leon Trotsky’s most controversial bodyguard."

Jean van Heijenoort was another of the Old Man's bodyguards. I met van Heijenoort in the mid-70s when he came to Boston College on the invitation of my quondam girlfriend, Charaine H., a student at Brandeis University where van Heijenoort taught. I had arranged for Robert Sokolowski to come and read a paper on Husserl. Comrade Van attended the talk. By then, however, the political enthusiasms of his youth were a thing of the distant past. He had given up politics for logic and love. My entry tells the tale of his murder by a crazed lover in Mexico City where Lev Davidovich Bronstein met his grisly end.

Moral? Stick to logic if you want to play it safe. But there is more of life (and death) in politics and love.

A comment from Joseph:

I regularly read your blog, but I never comment because I do not know how. Anyway, I wanted to send a note about the Monsignor — what an incredible man. He is one of my personal models for how an academic should be. He is not only brilliant but also patient with students not so gifted (99.99% of them) — and he has quite a knack for teaching to several levels simultaneously. He is also funny (and not just for a priest). I'm glad that you have had the chance to meet him.

The Hyphenated American

One may gather from my surname that I am of Italian extraction. Indeed, that is the case in both paternal and maternal lines: my mother was born near Rome in a place called San Vito Romano, and my paternal grandfather near Verona in the wine region whence comes Valpollicella. Given these facts, some will refer to me as Italian-American.

I myself, however, refer to myself as an American, and I reject the hyphenated phrase as a coinage born of confusion and contributing to division. Suppose we reflect on this for a moment. What does it mean to be an Italian-American as the phrase is currently used ? Does it imply dual citizenship? No. Does it imply being bilingual? No. Does it entail being bi-cultural? No again. As the phrase is currently used it does not imply any of these things. And the same goes for 'Polish-American' and related coinages. My mother was both bilingual and bi-cultural, but I’m not. To refer to her as Italian-American makes some sense, but not to me. I am not Italian culturally, linguistically or by citizenship. I am Italian only by extraction.

And that doesn’t make a difference, or at least should not make a difference to a rational person. Indeed, I identify myself as a rational being first and foremost, which implies nothing about ‘blood.’ The liberal-left emphasis on blood and ethnicity and origins and social class is dangerous and divisive. Suppose you come from Croatia. Is that something to be proud of? You had to be born somewhere of some set of parents. It wasn't your doing. It is an element of your facticity. Be proud of the accomplishments that individuate you, that make you an individual, as opposed to a member of a tribe. Celebrate your freedom, not your facticity.

If you must celebrate diversity, celebrate a diversity of ideas and a diversity of individuals, not a diversity of races and ethnicities and groups. Celebrate individual thinking, not 'group-think.' The Left in its perversity has it backwards. They emphasize the wrong sort of diversity while ignoring the right kind. They go to crazy lengths to promote the wrong kind while squelching diversity of thought and expression with their speech codes and political correctness.

So I am an American. Note that that word does not pick out a language or a race; it picks out a set of ideas and values. Even before I am an American, I am animal metaphysicum and zoon logikon. Of course, I mean this to apply to everyone, especially those most in need of this message, namely blacks and Hispanics. For a black dude born in Philly to refer to himself as African-American borders on the absurd. Does he know Swahili? Is he culturally African? Does he enjoy dual citizenship?

If he wants me to treat him as an individual, as a unique person with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto, and to judge him by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin, why does he identify himself with a group? Why does he try to secure advantages in virtue of this group membership? Is he so devoid of self-esteem and self-reliance that he cannot stand on his own two feet? Why does he need a Black caucus? Do Poles need a Polish caucus? Jim Crow is dead. There is no 'institutional racism.' There may be a few racists out there, but they are few and far between except in the febrile imaginations of race-baiting and race-card dealing liberals. Man up and move forward. Don't blame others for your problems. That's the mark of a loser. Take responsibility. We honkies want you to do well. The better you do, the happier you will be and the less trouble you will cause.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguishes between transcendence and facticity and identifies one form of bad faith as a person’s attempted identification of himself with an element of his facticity, such as race. But that is what the hyphenators and the Balkanizers and the identity-politicians and the race-baiters and the Marxist class warfare instigators want us to do: to identify ourselves in terms extraneous to our true being. Yet another reason never to vote for a liberal.

It must also be said that the alt-Right identity-political counter to POC tribalism is just as bad, although it may be excusable as a pro tem tactic on some occasions.

The Old Man Wakes Up . . .

. . . from the first nap of the day to the soothing strains of The Who.

Two minutes into it, he's banging on all eight, the iced coffee is working its reliable quotidian magic, and soon after some more of this bloggity-blog ephemera, and a few 3-min Internet chess games, he will be ready to slam his paltry pate once again against the rocks of Time, Existence, and Death.

The Most Boring Philosophers

Nowadays philosophy so absorbs me in all its branches and movements that I find no philosopher boring. Indeed, no subject is boring except to the bored who make it so. Dry texts, like dry wines, are often delightfully subtle and simply require an educable and educated palate. Although no philosophers now bore me, here is a list of philosophers who bored me, or would have bored me, when I was one and twenty:

   1. G. E. Moore
   2. Elizabeth Anscombe
   3. Paul Ziff
   4. Norman Malcolm
   5. John Wisdom
   6. Roderick Chisholm

Philosophers who excited my 21-year-old self:

   1. Nicholas Berdyaev
   2. Miguel de Unamuno
   3. Karl Jaspers
   4. Friedrich Nietzsche
   5. Martin Heidegger
   6. Jean-Paul Sartre

Now imagine a philosophy department composed of the twelve aforementioned. Do you think it would split into two factions? What, if anything, do they have in common that justifies subsuming them under the rubric, philosophers?

I have become in many ways more analytic and less Continental over the years. I tend to think that this is a lot like becoming less liberal and more conservative, as these terms are popularly understood. One becomes more cautious, careful, precise, piece-meal, rigorous, attentive to details and differences and empirical data, less romantic, more patient, more logical, less impressionistic, less sanguine about big sweeping once-and-for-all solutions. . . .

In sum, and in a manner to elicit howls of protest: In philosophy, the trajectory of maturation is from Continental to analytic. In politics, from liberal to conservative.

Howl on, muchachos.

Cognitive Dissonance on Good Friday

It was Good Friday. I was 11 or 12 years old, possibly 13. I was with the boy next door, also raised Catholic. He wanted to play. It was around two in the afternoon. Christ had been on the cross for two hours according to the account we had been taught. I recall to this day the cognitive dissonance induced by the collision of the worldliness of my playmate and the Catholicism inculcated in me by my pious Italian mother and the priests and nuns in the days before Vatican II.

An acquaintance of mine, a former altar boy with a similar upbringing, told me he never believed a word of it. I would guess that most of those who attended the Catholic schools for 8-12 years mainly just went long to get along and then dropped it all when the world issued its call. The etymology of 'inculcate' suggests that it is not the right word. The teaching wasn't stamped into me, but planted in me, in soil fertile and receptive unlike the stony and weed-choked psychic soil of most of my classmates. In compensation, they were spared the cognitive dissonance.

The Great Blizzard of ’78 and How I Got my Dissertation Done

Reader Josh E. asks for tips on how to get a dissertation done. Here is how I did it.

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I had an odd schedule in those days. I hit the sack at four in the afternoon and got up at midnight. I caught the last trolley of the night to the end of the line, Boston College station. I got off and hiked up the hill to my office where I worked all night on my dissertation while listening to a classical music station out of Waltham, Mass. Then I prepared my lectures, taught a couple of classes, went for a run, played a game of chess with my apartment mate, Quentin Smith, and was in bed by four again. That was my schedule early fall '77 to late spring '78 every single day holidays included.

That's how I got my dissertation done. I ruthlessly cut out everything from my life except the essential. I told one girlfriend, "See you at my dissertation defense." She later expressed doubts about marrying a man given to occasional interludes of "hibernation." Another girlfriend complained that I kept "odd hours." True enough. And I still do. I don't get up at midnight any more. I get up at 2 AM. I've become a slacker.

One night in early February the snow was coming down pretty thick as I caught the last trolley of the night. The trip up the hill to my office was quite a slog. A big drift against the main door to Carney Hall made it difficult to get the door open. But I made it inside and holed up in my windowless office for two or three days as the Great Blizzard of '78 raged. I got a lot of work done and finished the dissertation on schedule.

Addendum. An excerpt from Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant's Birthday:

So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic. Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30.

Are You an Introvert? Take this Test!

This is a re-post from April 2012 with minor edits and additions.

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The bolded material below is taken verbatim from Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking (Crown 2012), p. 13. I then give my responses. The more affirmative responses, the more of an introvert you are.

1. I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities. Absolutely! Especially in philosophical discussions. As Roderick Chisholm once said, "In philosophy, three's a crowd."

2. I often prefer to express myself in writing. Yes.

3. I enjoy solitude. Is the Pope Catholic? Beata solitudo, sola beatitudo. Happy solitude, the sole beatitude.

4. I seem to care less than my peers about wealth, fame, and status. Seem? Do!

Money is a mere means. To pursue it as an end in itself is perverse. And once you have enough, you stop acquiring more and turn to higher pursuits.

As for fame, it is a fool's cynosure. Obscurity is delicious. To be able to walk down the street and pass as an ordinary schmuck is wonderful. The value of fame and celebrity is directly proportional to the value of the fools and know-nothings who confer it. And doesn't Aristotle say that to be famous you need other people, which fact renders you dependent on them? He does indeed, in his Nicomachean Ethics.

Similarly with social status. Who confers it? And what is their judgment worth?

5. I dislike small talk, but I enjoy talking in depth about topics that matter to me. More than once in these pages have I ranted about the endless yap, yap, yap, about noth, noth, nothing.

6. People tell me I'm a good listener. Yes. My mind drifts back to a girl I knew when I was fifteen. She called me her 'analyst' when she wasn't calling me 'Dr. Freud.'

7. I'm not a big risk-taker. That's right. I recently took a three-day motorcycle course, passed it, and got my license. I had been eyeing the Harley-Davidson 883 Iron. But then I asked myself how riding a motorcycle would further my life tasks and whether it makes sense, having come this far, to risk my life and physical integrity in pursuit of cheap thrills.

8. I enjoy work that allows me to "dive in" with few interruptions. Right. No instant messaging. Only recently acquired a cell phone. I keep it turned off. Call me the uncalled caller. Still don't have a smart phone. My wife is presently in a faraway land on a Fulbright. That allows me to unplug the land-line. I love e-mail; fast but unintrusive. I'll answer when I feel like it and get around to it. I don't allow myself to be rushed or interrupted.

9. I like to celebrate birthdays on a small scale, with only one or two close friends or family members. I don't see the point of celebrating birthdays at all. What's to celebrate? First, birth is not unequivocally good. Second, it is not something you brought about. It befell you. Better to celebrate some good thing that you made happen.

10. People describe me as "soft-spoken" or "mellow." I'm too intense to be called 'mellow,' but sotto voce applies.

11. I prefer not to show or discuss my work with others until it is finished. Pretty much, with the exception of these blog scribblings.

12. I dislike conflict. Can't stand it. I hate onesidedness. I look at a problem from all angles and try to mediate oppositions when possible. I thoroughly hate, reject, and abjure the blood sport approach to philosophy. Polemic has no place in philosophy. This is not to say that it does not have a place elsewhere, in politics for example. Don't confuse politics with political philosophy.

13. I do my best work on my own. Yes. A former colleague, a superficial extrovert, once described me as 'lone wolf.' 'Superficial extrovert' smacks of pleonasm. An extrovert is like a mirror: nothing in himself, he is only what reflects. Is that fair? Fair enough for a blog post. Or an extrovert is like an onion: peel away the last skin and arrive at — precisely nothing. The extrovert manages to be surface all the way down. Or you could say that he is merely a node in a social network. He is constituted by his social relations, and nothing apart from them; hence no substance that enters into social relations.

14. I tend to think before I speak. Yes.

15. I feel drained after being out and about, even if I've enjoyed myself. Yes. This is a common complaint of introverts. They can take only so much social interaction. It depletes their energy and they need to go off by themselves to 'recharge their batteries.' In my case, it is not just an energy depletion but a draining away of my 'spiritual substance.' It is as if one's interiority has been compromised and one has entered into inauthenticity, Heidegger's Uneigentlichkeit. The best expression of this sense of spiritual depletion is probably Kierkegaard's remark in one of his early journal entries about a party he attended:

I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; witty banter flowed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me — but I came away, indeed that dash should be as along as the radii of the earth's orbit ———————————————————- wanting to shoot myself. (1836)

16. I often let calls go through to e-mail. Yes. See comment to #8 above.

17. If I had to choose, I'd prefer a weekend with absolutely nothing to do to one with too many things scheduled. I love huge blocks of time, days at a stretch, with no commitments whatsoever. Dolce far niente. Sweet to do nothing.

18. I don't enjoy multitasking. Right. One thing at a time.

19. I can concentrate easily. Obviously, and for long stretches of time.

20. In classroom situations, I prefer lecture to seminars. Especially if I'm doing the lecturing.

Here is a description of the Myers-Briggs INTP. And here is another.

Life’s Fugacity

As we age, the passage of time seems to accelerate. This is a mere seeming since, if time passes at all, which itself may be a mere seeming, time presumably passes at a constant rate. When we are young, the evanescence of our lives does not strike us. But to us mid-streamers and late-streamers the fluxious fugacity of this life is all too apparent.

Why does time's tempo seem to speed up as the years roll on? Part of the explanation must be that there is less change and more stasis from decade to decade. Dramatic changes in body and mind and environment occur in the first two decades of life. You go from being a helpless infant to a cocky youth. Your horizon expands from the family circle to the wide world. In the third decade, biological growth over with, one typically finishes one's education and gets settled in a career. But there are still plenty of changes. From age 20 to 30, I lived in about 15 different places in California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Austria, and Germany, studied at half a dozen universities, and worked as a guitar player, logger, tree planter, furniture mover, factory worker, mailman, taxi driver, exterminator, grave digger, and philosophy professor. But from 30 to 40, I lived in only five different places with exactly one job, and from 40 to 50 in three places, and from ages 49 to the present I have had exactly one permanent address. And it won't be long, subjectively speaking, before I have exactly one address that is permanent in the absolute as opposed to the relative sense.

A Cure for Infatuation?

One of the very best is marriage.

Infatuation is a form of idolatry that cannot last long in a marriage. Marriage cures it. That's an argument for marriage. There was no cure for Don Quixote's romantic fantasies because their object, the fair Dulcinea del Toboso, existed only in his imagination.*

But while infatuation lasts, it is blissful. One is made silly, often harmlessly so. One walks on air and can think of nothing but the beloved. The moon hits your eye like a bigga pizza pie. The world starts to shine like you've had too much wine. So smitten was I in the early days of my relationship to the woman I married that I sat in my carrel at the university one day and just thought about her for eight hours straight when I was supposed to be finishing an article on Frege. Life is both love and logic. But sometimes hot love trumps cold logic.

The best marriages begin with the romantic transports of infatuation, but a marriage lasts only if the Rousseauian transports are undergirded by good solid reasons of the big head without interference from the heart or the little head. The love then matures. Real love replaces illusory idealization. The big head ought to be the ruling element in a man.

It takes an Italian to capture the aforementioned romantic transports, and Dean Martin (Dino Crocetti) does the job well in the schmaltzy That's Amore.

Il Mio Mondo is a good expression of the idolatry of infatuation. Cilla Black's 1964 rendition of the Italian song is You're My World.

But whence the idealization, the infatuation, the idolatry? And why the perennial popularity of silly love songs? What we really want in the deepest depths of the heart no man or woman can provide. That is known to all who know their own hearts and have seen through the idols. What we want is an infinite and eternal love. This infinite desire may have no object in reality. Arguments from desire are not rationally compelling.

But given the fact of the desire, a fact that does not entail the reality of its object, we have what we need to explain the idealization, the infatuation, and the idolatry of the sexual other. We substitute an immanent object for Transcendence inaccessible.

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*The great novel of Miguel Cervantes is a work of fiction. And so both Don Quixote/Quijote and Dulcinea are fictional characters. But the first is posited as real within the fiction while the other is posited as imaginary, as Don Quixote's fiction, even if based upon the posited-in-the-fiction real Aldonza Lorenzo. Herewith a bit of grist for the mill of the philosophy of fiction. The real-imaginary distinction operates within an imaginary construct.