Category: Husserl

Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method

August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.  She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher in her own right, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.

In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

Read the rest at Substack.

The piece concludes:

So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, and with it the exclusively internal validation of all knowledge claims, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason or subjectively validated but which are provided by faith in revelation, a revelation that must simply be accepted in humility and obedience. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and accept that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.

Addenda (8/9/2025)

  • I say above that there are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, but is that right? Perhaps not. It might be closer to the truth to say that philosophy by its very nature rests on the autonomy of reason, and that the  "other conception" is not philosophy sensu stricto but a worldview. If so, any view according to which "faith is its own guarantee" is not philosophy or a philosophy, but beyond philosophy.
  • Thomas wears at least four 'hats.' He is a philosopher, a Christian, a Christian theologian, and a mystic.  You could be any one of these without being any one of the others. He plays the philosopher in the praeambula fidei of the Summa Theologica wherein he attempts to demonstrate the existence of God in his quinque viae or Five Ways.  These proofs make no appeal to divine revelation via Scripture nor do they rest on the personal deliverances of mystical experience. They proceed by discursive reason alone on the basis of sense experience.
  • So you could say to me that Thomas's theistic worldview is not beyond philosophy inasmuch as the philosophy of the praeambula is an integral part of his defense of the Christian worldview. My response will be that the Five Ways do not conclusively prove the existence of God, let alone provide any support for such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation (which of course they were not intended to do). So in the end, a will-driven leap of faith is required to arrive at Thomas's theistic worldview. So at best, the Five Ways are arguments (not proofs) that render rationally acceptable Christian belief.  Rationally acceptable, but not rationally mandatory. In the end you must decide what to believe and how you will live. My concluding sentence, "the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason" is not quite right. I should have written: the decision to accept the Christian worldview, while neither it, nor the generic theism at its base, can be proven from natural reason operating upon the deliverances of the sense, can nonetheless be rendered rationally acceptable.
  • "Go ahead, believe!" Thus spoke Wittgenstein. "What harm can it do?" I add: you won't be flouting any canons of rationality.

Butchvarov’s Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl’s Paradox of Human Subjectivity

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

 

Could the Visible Surface of a Physical Thing be a Mental Item?

The Sparring Partner offers the following tetrad for our delectation. 

1) I take this to be the visible surface of a desk.

2) It is almost certain that this in fact [is] the visible surface of a desk, but it is possible that it is not (it may be the result of a highly realistic virtual reality program).

3) If this were not the visible surface, it would be a mental item.

4) It is impossible that the visible surface of a desk could ever be a mental item.

The S. P. thinks that these four are collectively inconsistent.  That is not true. They are consistent on the following theory. 

My man sees something.  One cannot see without seeing something. This is a special case of the thesis of intentionality. What my man sees, the intentional object, has the properties of a desk surface; it has the look of a desk surface. What he sees may or may not exist. (Better: what he sees is possibly such that it exists and possibly such that it does not exist). The intentional object is bipolar or bivalent: either existent or non-existent. In itself, the intentional object is neutral as between these two poles or values.  If the intentional object does not exist, then it is merely intentional. If the intentional object exists, then it is real.

So far I have accommodated (1) and (2). 

If the intentional object is real, then it it part and parcel of the desk itself.  If so, then the intentional object is not a mental content. This should also obvious from the fact that the intentional object is distinct from the corresponding act: it is not contained in the act, and in this sense it is not a content (reeller Inhalt in Husserl's sense) of the act.  The act is mental, but is object is not mental, or at least not mental in the same sense. The act is an Erlebnis. it is something one lives through (er-leben); one does not live through an intentional object. Call the intentional object the noema. The noema is not a mental content but it it also does not exist in itself. It exists only as the objective correlate of the act.  It is other than the act, and not contained in the act, but is nonetheless  necessarily correlated with the act such that, if there were no acts (intentionale Erlebnisse), then there would be no noemata. 

I have just now accommodated (3) and (4).  I have shown how the members of the tetrad could all be true.  An apparently  inconsistent set of propositions can be show to be  consistent by making one or more distinctions. In this instance, a distinction between mental item as content and  mental item as noema. 

The answer to the title question, then, is yes.

Here is a simpler and more familiar example of how this works. The aporetic dyad whose limbs are The coffee is hot and The coffee is not hot is apparently inconsistent.  The inconsistency is removed by making a distinction between two different times one at which the coffee is hot, the other at which it is not.

Is the above theory, which I have only sketched, tenable? Does it definitively solve the problem? I don't believe so. And this for the reason that the solution gives rise to problems of its own. 

If a polyad is solved by the making of a problematic distinction, then the solution is stop-gap and not definitive.

A Hitherto Unknown Portrait of Edmund Husserl and his Relation to Leonard Nelson

Husserl Leonard Nelson Sketch found in the notebooks of Leonard Nelson. This page offers some insights into the Husserl-Nelson relationship if you want to call it that. Husserl appears in a churlish light as a Fachphilosoph looking down on a lowly dozent and perceived amateur. Husserl apparently ignored or dismissed  Nelson's The Impossibility of the Theory of Knowledge despite its relevance to Husserl's project of founding philosophy als strenge Wissenschaft, as strict science.

Roman Ingarden, Husserl's distinguished student, has  the following to say about Nelson (a German despite his very English surname) in his On the Motives which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism: 

It so happened that in the very years that Husserl jumped into the arena of epistemology, Leonard Nelson directed a sharp attack against the theory of knowledge. (footnote #1o:  Cf. Leonard Nelson, Ueber das sogenannte Erkenntnisproblem. Die Unmoeglichkeit der Erkenntnistheorie, vol. III, Abhandlungen der Friesschen Schule, also in the Acts of the IV International Congress of Philosophy, 1911. Husserl's ideas must have been completely crystallized in this period. Nelson was a Dozent in Goettingen from the year 1909.)

We know that Nelson made an attempt to show the impossibility of epistemology by pointing out that inevitably in it one cannot avoid committing the error of petitio principii. Husserl, as far as I know, never spoke nor wrote about this opinion expressed by Nelson and must have seen this danger clearly for himself, but he certainly knew about Nelson's book. Whatever the relations were between the two thinkers, it is a fact that in the period when I heard Husserl's lectures (with interruptions, from 1912 to 1917) he very often drew attention in his lectures and seminars to the "nonsense" (Widersinn) in the attempt to arrive at an epistemological solution, e.g. concerning the cognitive value of outer perception, by appealing to the existence of qualities in objects given in cognition of the kind which is investigated when, e.g. — as was usual in the psycho-physiology of the second half of the 19th century — we appeal to "physical stimuli" which act upon what is called our senses in order to show that sense perception falsely informs us about "secondary" qualities of material objects. It is also a fact that the application of the phenomenological reduction, which Husserl introduced with another aim in mind in Ideas I, eo ipso removes the danger of petitio principii in the investigations into the experiential mode of cognition of the objects of the real world. After having carried out this reduction we find ourselves, nevertheless, ipso facto in the area of pure transcendental consciousness inside which we are to carry out all epistemological investigations; but, in addition, it has to be agreed that every being (real or ideal or purely intentional) is to be deduced from the essence of the operations (acts) of pure consciousness. It seems to be that from the point of view of a valid epistemological methodology a certain kind of priority is to be demanded for pure consciousness, and that this is possible is also shown by the theory of immanent perception and the results of the analysis of primary constitutive consciousness constituting, for example, time. But, along with this, this "priority" of pure consciousness begins to assume a metaphysical character in the form even of a thesis of the absolute existence of pure consciousness, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, of an existential dependence of all other being, and, above all, of the real world, on pure consciousness. The danger of petitio principii in epistemology is removed by the phenomenological reduction but it leads to an account of the existence of the world which (in spite of all differences, from, for example, Berkeley's position, which Husserl himself constantly and emphatically stressed) comes alarmingly close to the Marburgian Neo-Kanti[ani]sm, of which Husserl was often accused on the grounds of similarities between his Ideas and [Paul] Natorp's Allgemeine Psychologie of 1912. (pp. 11-13)

Butchvarov’s Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl’s Paradox of Human Subjectivity

New and improved! Originally posted in October, 2015. For a longish review and critique of the Butchvarov volume mentioned below, see my "Butchvarov on the Dehumanization of Philosophy," Studia Neoaristotelica, vol. 13, no. 2 (2016), pp. 181-195. Butchvarov and Husserl are clearly related to my present and ongoing rehearsal of the problematic of Kantian transcendental realism. 

……………………………………………………

From Kant on, transcendental philosophy has been bedeviled by a certain paradox.  Here again is the Paradox of Antirealism (PA) discussed by Panayot Butchvarov, as I construe it, where  the numerals in parentheses refer to pages in his 2015 Anthropocentrism in Philosophy:

PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)

As I was mulling this over I was reminded of the Paradox of Human Subjectivity discussed by Edmund 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.  Here is the paradox in Husserl's words:

PHS:  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)

Husserl mit PfeifeWhat is common to both of the paradoxical formulations is the idea that 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.  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 a priori 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 would depend for its existence and/or nature on transient parts thereof.  And surely that would be absurd.  Butchvarov above mentions the intelligibility of physical reality. If this intelligibility is not intrinsic to nature but imposed by us, then this too would be absurd if we are but physical parts of the physical cosmos.  Butchvarov again: "The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna." For one thing, before we miserable human animals came on the evolutionary scene, the physical cosmos was 'already there.' So the cosmos could not possibly depend for its existence on the existence of measly parts thereof who, in addition, made the scene rather late in the game.  As for intelligibility, the understandability of the cosmos has as a necessary though not sufficient condition its regularity.  The laws of nature are at least regularities. Now if regularity is imposed or bestowed or projected by specimens of h. sapiens, then the universe would have to wait for us to arrive before it could be cosmos as opposed to  chaos. And that is plainly absurd.

Dehumanizing Subjectivity

Interestingly, for both Butchvarov and Husserl, the solution to their respective paradoxes involves a retreat from anthropocentrism and a concomitant 'dehumanization' of subjectivity.  For both, there is nothing specifically human about consciousness, although of course in "the natural attitude" (Husserl's natuerliche Einstellung)  humans are the prime instances known to us of 'conscious beings.'   For present purposes, consciousness is intentionality, consciousness-of, awareness-of, where the 'of' is an objective genitive. (I leave out of consideration putatively non-intentional states of awareness such as felt pain and felt pleasure.)  For Butchvarov, consciousness-of is not a property of (subjective genitive) human beings or of metaphysical/noumenal/transcendental egos somehow associated with human animals.  It is not a property of human brains or of human souls or of human soul-body composites.  It does not in any way emanate from human subjects. It is not like a ray that shoots forth from a subject toward an object.   Consciousness is subject-less.  So it is not a relation that connects subjects and objects.  It is more like a monadic property of objects, all objects, their apparentness or revealedness.  The influence of both David Hume and Jean-Paul Sartre on Butchvarov is unmistakable. 

Husserl and Butchvarov: Brief Contrast and Comparison

Husserl operates in a number of his works (Cartesian Meditations, Paris Lectures, Ideas I)  with the following triadic Cartesian shema:

Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum 

Subject ——————–> object (where the arrow represents a directed cogitatio, a mental act, an intentional Erlebnis, and where 'object' is in the singular because the noema of a noesis is precisely the noema of that very noesis.  Got that?)

Butchvarov's schema is not triadic but dyadic along the lines of Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness (where the arrow does not represent a mental act but monadic universal 'of-ness,' Sartre's "wind blowing towards objects" and where 'objects' is in the plural because subject-less consciousness is one to their many):

——————————->objects.

Butch and booksFor Butchvarov, following Sartre, consciousness is no-thing, no object, and thus other than every object, not in the world, and hence not restricted to the measly specimens of a zoological species.  It is not restricted to them because not embodied in them. It is not a property of human animals, or something going on in their brains, or something supervenient upon, or epiphenomenal to, or emergent from intracranial goings-on.  Consciousness, again, is a "wind blowing towards objects," a wind that blows from Nowhere and Nowhen. It blows without a blower. Someone might think of God as the Cosmic Blowhard who blows the bubble of space-time-matter from a 'place' outside of space and time, and keeps the bubble inflated for as long as he likes. But of course that is not what Sartre and Butchvarov mean. There is no blower of the intentional wind.  The relevant text is Sartre's early The Transcendence of the Ego, directed against Husserl, according to which the ego is not an 'inhabitant' of consciousness but a transcendent item, an object alongside other objects.  (Personal anecdote: when I first espied this title as a young man I thought to myself: "Great! A book that will teach me how to transcend my ego!")

Bear in mind that the phenomenological notion of transcendence is transcendence-in-immanence, not absolute transcendence.

Of course there is a paradox if not a contradiction lurking within the Sartrean, radically externalist, anti-substantialist conception of consciousness: consciousness is nothing, but not a 'mere nothing,' a nugatory nothing, ein nichtiges Nichts (to borrow a phrase from Heidegger) inasmuch as consciousness, which is no-thing,  is that without which objects would not be revealed or manifested or apparent. It is both something and no-thing. It is something inasmuch as without it nothing would appear when it is a plain fact that objects do appear. That objects appear is self-evident even if it is not self-evident that they appear to someone or something.  It is not clear that there is a 'dative of appearing' though it is clear that there are 'accusatives of appearing.'  Consciousness is nothing inasmuch as it is no object and does not appear.  This apparent contradiction is to my mind real, to Butchvarov's mind merely apparent.  (Via private communication.) It is clearly a different paradox than the Paradox of Antirealism.  It is a paradox that infects a particular solution to the Paradox of Antirealism, Butchvarov's solution. 

How does Husserl dehumanize subjectivity? 

Here is a crucial passage from Crisis, sec. 54, p. 183:

But are the transcendental subjects, i.e., those functioning in the constitution of the world, human beings?  After all, the epoché  has made them into 'phenomena,' so that the philosopher within the epoché  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 epoché, each 'I' is considered purely as the ego-pole of his acts, habitualities, and capacities . . . .

[. . .]

But in the epoché 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.

Contra Husserl

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).  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. 

Husserl's thinking in sections 10-11 of Cartesian Meditations seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn, and avoids the supposed mistake of Descartes,  one is left with nothing that can be posited as existing  in itself independently of consciousness.    Everything objective succumbs to the epoché.  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 absolutely transcendent 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 epoché." (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 existent transcendently either.  

Descartes thought that he had reached something whose existence cannot be bracketed, eingeklammert, to use Husserl's term, and that that 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 trans-phen reduction is something that can be referred to by 'I'?  How does he know that it is anything like a person?

After all, indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun are used by human beings to refer to human beings.

Husserl and Butchvarov: Similarities and Differences

1.  Both philosophers espouse versions of antirealism, albeit very different versions.

2.  Both philosophers face versions of the Paradox of Antirealism.

3.  Both philosophers solve the paradox by retreating from anthropocentrism and advocating the 'dehumanization' of consciousness. 

4.  Both philosophers oppose (Berkeleyan) idealism if that is the view that "all reality is mental" (Butchvarov, p. 213), a view that entails that "the perception of a tree and the tree perceived are no more distinguishable than are a feeling of pain and the pain felt." (213)

5. Both philosophers hold that there are specifically philosophical indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun.

6. Both philosophers agree that the existence of such uses is, in Butchvarov's words, "evident from the intelligibility of Cartesian doubt. . . ." (196)

7. Both philosophers hold that these uses are referring uses.

8. Both philosophers hold that these referring uses do not refer to human beings.

9. Both philosophers oppose Descartes in holding that the specifically philosophical uses of the indexical 'I' do not refer to anything in the world.

10. Husserl and Butchvarov disagree on what these uses refer to.  For Husserl they refer to the factical transcendental ego, which is the constitutive source of everything worldly as to its Seinsgeltung (ontic validity) and Seinsinn (ontic sense or meaning). For Butchvarov, they refer to the world itself, not things in the world, distributively or collectively, but the totality of these things.  Butchvarov's  theory is essentially that of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:  "I am my world." (5.63) There is no metaphysical subject in the world. (5.633)  There is an ultimate philosophical I but it is not in the world; it is the limit of the world (5.632), or rather the world itself.

11. Husserl and  Butchvarov agree that, in Wittgenstein's words, "there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way."  (5.641) But of course the ways in which the two philosophers talk about the self non-psychologically are radically different.

12. Another major disagreement is this. Husserl sticks with the Cartesian Ansatz while attempting to radicalize it, but he never succeeds in clarifying the difference between the transcendental and psychological ego.  Butchvarov abandons (or never subscribed to) the ego-cogito-cogitatum schema of Descartes, and of Kant too, and in a sense cuts the Gordian knot with Sartrean scissors: there is nothing psychological or egological or 'inner' or personal or subjective about consciousness.  And so there is no problem of intersubjectivity such as bedeviled Husserl in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation and elsewhere. Butchvarov goes 'Hegelian.'

There is much more to be said, later.  

A Nice Thing about Philosophy

One nice thing about philosophy is that one can often argue in a pleasant and gentlemanly way because little is at stake. It is unlikely that anyone will get up in arms, literally or figuratively, over the East coast versus the West coast interpretation of the noema in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.  I don't expect any blood to be spilt over this.

Object-Directedness and Object-Dependence

Intentionality cannot be identified with object-dependence. Here is why.

Suppose that  I begin thinking about some faraway thing such as the Washington Monument (WM) and  that I think of it without interruption through some short interval of time.  Half-way through the interval, unbeknownst to me, the monument is destroyed and ceases to exist.  Question: does my thinking become objectless half-way through the interval? Or does my thinking have an object and the same object throughout the interval?

The answer depends on what is meant by 'object.'  'Object' could mean the infinitely-propertied thing intended in the act of thinking, or it could mean that which is before my mind precisely as such with all and only the properties I think of the thing intended as having.  Either could be called the intentional object, which goes to show that 'intentional object' is ambiguous.  On the first alternative the intentional object = the real object; on the second, the intentional object is some sort of incomplete item that either plays an intermediary role, or else is a proper part of the thing intended.  (Husserl aficionados will gather that I am alluding to the difference between West Coast and  East Coast interpretations of the status and function of the noema .)  To avoid the ambiguity of 'intentional object,' I will distinguish the thing intended from the noema, leaving open how exactly the noema is to be understood. 

One answer to the above question is that, during the entire interval, my thinking has one and the same object, but this object is not the thing intended but the noema.   The noema is the thing-AS- intended in certain ways (under certain incomplete descrioptions) appropriate to finite minds such as we possess, for example, the x such that x is made of marble and honors George Washington. This distinction between noema and thing intended needs  explanation, of course, and it raises some difficult if not insoluble questions, but it fits the phenomenological facts.  When the WM ceases to exist, nothing changes phenomenologically. If the intentional object were the real, extra-mental, physical thing, then, when the WM ceases to exist, my conscious state would become objectless — which is not what happens.  So we need the distinction, and we must not conflate object-directedness with object-dependence.  

DEP: The objective reference or aboutness of a mental state S is object-dependent =df S's having objective reference entails the (extra-mental)  existence of the thing intended by S.

DIR:  The objective reference or aboutness of a mental state S is object-directed =df  S's having objective reference is logically consistent both with the (extra-mental) existence and (extra-mental) nonexistence of the thing intended by S.

If we understand aboutness in terms of (DIR), then the answer to my question is that nothing changes phenomenologically throughout the interval: my thinking has an object and the very same object throughout the interval despite the WM's ceasing to exist half-way though the interval.

(DEP) codifies an externalist understanding  of  'objective reference' whereas (DIR) codifies an internalist understanding.  On (DEP), it is the existence in the external world of the thing intended that grounds S's objective reference or aboutness; without this external ground S would lack aboutness, and S would be objectless.  On (DEP), then, the aboutness of a mental state is a relational property of the state as opposed to an intrinsic property thereof.  On (DIR), intrinsic features of the subject and his acts suffice to ground S's objective reference or aboutness.  This implies a strict act-object correlation: necessarily, every act has an object, and every object is the object of an act.

You will have noticed that 'object' has different senses in the above definitions. In (DEP), 'object' refers to a entity that exists in itself, and thus independently of the existence of minds and their acts. In (DIR), 'object' refers to an intentional correlate which cannot exist apart from minds and their acts.

I'll say a bit more by way of elaboration.

The thing intended is the monument itself, the infinitely-propertied physical thing. Surely that is what my thinking intends when I think about the WM and ask: How tall is it? What is its shape? What is it composed of? I am not asking about any content of my consciousness. So I am not asking about the occurrent episode of thinking itself, the act, or any other contents such as felt sensory data (Husserl's hyletic data).  Contents are immanent to consciousness and nothing immanent to my consciousness is 550 feet tall, made of marble, monolithic, or in the shape of an obelisk.  

Nor am I asking about the noema.  Noemata are akin to Fregean senses.  Like the latter, noemata cannot be made of marble or 550 feet tall. (This is the 'California' or 'West Coast' interpretation sired by Dagfinn Follesdal.) Like Fregean senses, they are not contents of consciousness that the subject experiences or lives through. Senses and noemata are more like objects than like contents, except that they are abstract or ideal objects that serve a mediating function.  The senses of 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' mediate my linguistic reference to that massive chunk of physical reality, the plant Venus. They are neither mental nor physical; they are 'third world' entities albeit more Platonic than Popperian.   Noemata are similar: they mediate thinking reference but are neither mental in the manner of a content of consciousness nor physical.  

But there is an important difference. Fregean senses exist whether or not minds and their contents exist.  They also exist whether or not physical items exist including marks on paper or acoustic disturbances in the air.   But noemata exist only as the correlates of acts or intentional experiencings. They have a curious in-between status. They are not contents of consciousness, but they are also not entities in their own right inasmuch as they exist only as correlates of acts.

Because noemata are ideal or abstract intermediaries, they do not have physical  properties and dispositions.  A tree is disposed to catch on fire if struck by lightning, say.  But no tree-noema can catch on fire. (See Husserl, Ideas I, sec. 89) 

 

Analysis of a Passage from Husserl’s Logical Investigations

Ed sends this:

Just found this very odd quote from Logical Investigations:

If I have an idea of the god Jupiter, this god is my presented object, he is ‘immanently present’ in my act, he has ‘mental inexistence’ in the latter, or whatever expression we may use to disguise our true meaning. I have an idea of the god Jupiter: This means that I have a certain presentative experience, the presentation-of-the-god-Jupiter is realized in my consciousness. This intentional experience may be dismembered as one chooses in descriptive analysis, but the god Jupiter naturally will not be found in it. The ‘immanent’, ‘mental object’ is not therefore part of the descriptive or real makeup (deskriptiven reellen Bestand) of the experience, it is in truth not really immanent or mental. But it also does not exist extramentally, it does not exist at all. This does not prevent our-idea-of-the-god-Jupiter from being actual, a particular sort of experience or particular mode of mindedness (Zumutesein), such that he who experiences it may rightly say that the mythical king of the gods is present to him, concerning whom there are such and such stories. If, however, the intended object exists, nothing becomes phenomenologically different. It makes no essential difference to an object presented and given to consciousness whether it exists, or it is fictitious, or is perhaps completely absurd. I think of Jupiter as I think of Bismarck, of the tower of Babel as I think of Cologne Cathedral, of a regular thousand-sided polygon as of a regular thousand-faced solid.

This relates to my earlier question. What is the intentional object here? Is it the idea-of-Jupiter? Or Jupiter himself?

1) Note first that 'inexistence' does not mean non-existence. This is a very common mistake made by most analytic philosophers.  When I am thinking about the god Jupiter, with or without imagery, Jupiter is the intentional object of my act. An act is an intentional (lived) experience, ein intentionales Erlebnis.  It is a mental item I live through, a psychic content if you will, "realized in my consciousness."  But every act has an intentional object (IO), just as every such object is the object of an act.    In the Jupiter case, the intentional object does not exist in reality.  So we say that it is a merely intentional object (MIO).  To say that this IO is inexistent in the act is just to say that the act has an intentional object which may or may not exist (in reality) without prejudice either to the directedness of the act or to the identity of the act.  (The identity of an act token is determined by its IO; equivalently, act tokens are individuated by their IOs.) So don't confuse 'inexistent' with 'non-existent.' Every intentional object is inexistent, but only some are non-existent. If an IO is nonexistent, then we say it is merely intentional.

2) Mental acts, not to be confused with mental (or physical) actions,  are occurrent episodes of object-directed experiencing.  Acts exist in reality. Obviously, Jupiter is not a real part or constituent of my act when I think of Jupiter.  Jupiter, as the object of my act, does not exist in my act as a real constituent thereof. (The same goes for the PLANET  Jupiter. I have a big head, and a broad mind, but not that big of a head or that broad of a mind.)   But neither does the god Jupiter exist in reality, extramentally.  As H. says, "it does not exist at all."  This much is clear. Jupiter is not in my head, nor in my mind as a real constituent of the mental events and processes that occur when I am thinking about Jupiter. It is also not an extramental existent.  Jupiter is before my mind as the intentional object of my act.  This object is what it is whether or not it exists in reality.  Suppose we are all wrong, and the god Jupiter does exist in reality. Nothing would change phenomenologically, as H. says.

3) Ed asks, "What is the intentional object here? Is it the idea-of-Jupiter? Or Jupiter himself?"  

It is not the idea-of-Jupiter because that is the act — the occurrent episode of object-directed experiencing — I live through when I think of Jupiter.  We cannot say that because Jupiter does not exist in reality, it must exist in my head or in my mind. That is nonsense as Twardowski made clear.   

The intentional object is also not a really existent extramental thing.

The intentional object is Jupiter himself, a transcendent non-existent item.  The above passage seems headed in a Meinongian direction.  How this comports with the strict correlativity of act and intentional object is surely a problem.

Notes on the Introduction to Michel Henry, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh

I have Steven Nemes to thank for introducing me to the thought of Michel Henry. I recall as a graduate student in the 'seventies  having seen a big fat tome published in 1973 by Martinus Nijhoff entitled The Essence of Manifestation by one Michel Henry. I may have paged through parts of it back then, but I recall nothing about it now except its author, title, physical bulk, and publisher.

Henry MichelI now own three of Henry's books, not including the Manifestation tome for which Amazon is asking a paltry sum in the range of 300-400 semolians.  (I could easily afford it, but my Italian frugality which got me to the place where I can buy any and all books I want, is protesting as we speak; she is one tight-pursed task mistress.)

I have worked through a bit of Henry's  Material Phenomenology, but it is heavy-going due to the awful  French Continental style in which it is written.  The above-captioned Incarnation book is much clearer though still replete with the typical faults of French Continental writing: the overuse of rhetorical questions, the pseudo-literary  pretentiousness and portentousness, the lack of clarity, the misuse of universal quantifiers, the historicist lust to outdo one's predecessors in radicality of questioning and to go beyond, always beyond.  I could go on, and you hope I don't.  But bad style can hide good substance. The ideas are fascinating, and as an old Husserl and Heidegger man I am well-equipped to follow the twists and turns of Henry's meandering through a deep and dark Gallicized Schwarzwald. My credentials also include having thought long and hard about the Incarnation and  having published an article on it.*

Alright. Time to get to work. I am only up to p. 40 of Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh, tr. Karl Hefty, Northwestern UP, 2015, orig. publ. in French in 2000, two years before Henry's death in 2000.  So what follows are preliminary notes and queries and solicitations of help from Nemes and anyone else who knows this subject.  This is an interpretive critical summary: I will put matters in my own way, sympathetically, but with an eye toward separating the sound from the dubious or outright unsound. 

This book is about incarnation in two senses of the term and their relation.  It is about incarnation and the Incarnation of Christian theology.

Like all living beings, we human beings  are incarnate beings, beings of flesh. Most of us are apt to say that all living beings have bodies in a sense of 'body' that does not distinguish between living and non-living embodied beings.  To illustrate with an example of my own, suppose that a rock, a plant, an animal, and a man fall from a cliff at the same time. Apart from wind resistance, the four will fall at the same rate, 32 ft. per sec2 in Earth's gravitational field and arrive at the ground at the same time.  From the point of view of physics, the four are bodies in same sense of the term.   And this despite their deep and undeniable differences. There is, therefore, a univocal sense of 'body' in which living and nonliving embodied beings are bodies.

So while it true that animals, and humans in particular, have lived bodies, this important fact does not exclude their having bodies in the sense of physics and the natural sciences built upon physics. By lived body, I don't just mean a living body, an object that is alive in the sense of biology, but a subject of a life, a body that feels, enjoys, and suffers its embodiment.  For Henry, however, 

. . . an abyss separates forever the material bodies that fill the universe, on the one hand, and the body of an "incarnate" being such as man [a man!], on the other. (3)

By "material bodies," H. means the bodies of non-living things.  Now if two things are separated by an abyss, that is naturally taken to mean that the two are mutually exclusive.  So consider a stone and a man. Are they abysmally different? Granted, a stone unlike a man "does not sense itself or feel its own feeling . . . ."(3) Nor does it sense or feel or love or desire anything outside itself.   Henry brings up Heidegger's point about touching in Being and Time. (3-4) We say that a table up against a wall, making physical contact with it, 'touches' the wall. But of course this is quite unlike my touching the table, or my touching a cat, or two cats touching each other, or my touching  myself.  I sense the table by touching it; the table does not sense the wall when it 'touches' the wall. 

What I have just written about touching in agreement with Heidegger is true, but I fear that Henry will push it too far.  I would say that there is something common between the table's touching the wall and my touching the table.  What is common is physical contact. In both cases we have two material bodies (in the sense of physics) in physical/material contact.  My tactile sensing of the table is not possible unless my material finger comes in contact with the table.  The physical contact is necessary, though not sufficient, for the sensing. From the phenomenological fact that there is much more to sentient touching or tactile sensing than there is to non-sentient physical contact, it does not follow that the two are toto caelo different, or abysmally different, i.e., have nothing to do with each other. I hesitate to impute such a blatant non sequitur to Henry. Yet he appears to be denying the common element. He seems to be making a mistake opposite to the one the materialist makes.  The materialist tries to reduce sentient touching to merely physical contact and the causal processes it initiates,; our phenomenologist tries to reduce sentient touching to something wholly non-physical.

Henry seems to be endorsing a flesh-body dualism.  The matter of beings like us he calls flesh, while the matter of stones and such he calls body. And he seems to think of them as mutually exclusive. "To be incarnate is not to have a body . . . . To be incarnate is to have flesh . . . ." (4) Flesh is the "exact opposite" of body. (4) "This difference is so radical that . . . it is is very difficult, even impossible, actually to think it." We are told that the matter of bodies "ultimately escapes us."  (4) The flesh-body dualism would thus appear to be epistemological as well as ontological. We have an "absolute and unbroken knowledge" of flesh but we are "in complete ignorance" "of the inert bodies of material nature." (5)

An obvious objection to this is that if we were in complete ignorance of the bodies of material nature, then we would not have been able to put a man on the moon.  Our technological feats prove that we understand a great deal about material nature.  But long before there was rocketry there was carpentry.  Jesus was a carpenter. He knew how to nail wooden items together in effective and sturdy ways.  The brutal Romans knew how to nail men like Jesus to wooden crosses.  To nail flesh to wood is to nail  the physically material to the physically material and to know what one is doing and to know the nature of the materials with which one is working.  Finally, to speak of the material bodies as "inert," as Henry does, is certainly strange given their causal powers and liabilities.  Chemical reagents in non-living substances and solutions are surely not 'inert.'

But I think I know where Henry is headed: toward a transcendental theory of sentience. Roughly, it is our transcendental auto-affectivity that is a condition of the possibility of our 'sensational' encounter with bodies. When I touch my table, the tactile sensation I experience cannot be explained by the physical contact of fingers and table, or at least it cannot be wholly explained in this way.  For there is not just physical contact, there is also consciousness of physical contact. To be precise, there is conscious physical contact. The difference will emerge in a moment.  Without consciousness there would be no sensing or feeling.  An example of mine: a chocolate bar melting in a hot car does not feel the heat that causes it to melt. But a baby expiring in a hot car does feel the heat that causes it to expire. The baby's horrendous suffering cannot be explained (or not wholly explained) in physical, chemical, electrochemical . . . neuroscientific terms.  I am alluding to what is called the Hard Problem in the philosophy of mind: the problem of integrating sensory qualia into a metaphysically naturalist worldview. It can't be done.  The qualia cannot be denied, pace Danny Dennett the Sophist, but neither can they be identified with anything naturalistically respectable.

Without consciousness, which can neither be eliminated nor naturalistically reduced, there can be no sensation or feeling.  But what about this consciousness? Is it object-directed? Is it intentional consciousness?  Or is it non-intentional consciousness? If every consciousness is a consciousness of something, then, for me to be conscious of my felt sensations, my felt sensations would have to be objects of intentional states, objects to which outward-bound consciousness directs itself.  But this is not phenomenologically the case: I feel my sensations by living through them: they are not objects of awareness but states of awareness, Erlebnisse, lived experiencings.  It is true that I can reflect on my knee pain, say, and objectify it, but it is only because I have pre-reflectively lived though the felt pain that I can reflect on it.  Felt (knee) pain is not felt the way a knee is perceived in outer perception.  The knee is an intentional object of an act of visual perception; the pain as pre-reflectively felt and suffered is not an object of inner objectifying perception.

So where is Henry headed? Toward a transcendentalization of the lived body. (Cf. p. 110) Intentionality by its very nature as consciousness of objects (genitivus objectivus) 'expels' all bodies from the subjective sphere which, for a transcendental philosopher such as Husserl, is a transcendental, not a psychological, sphere.  (The psychic is an intra-mundane region of beings; the transcendental is pre-mundane and pre-regional.)  All bodies including human and animal bodies end up on the side of the object.  But bodies so externalized cannot be sensing bodies. And without sensing bodies no body could be sensed.  So the lived body must sense itself or affect itself. This auto-affection is the transcendental condition of the possibility of  any merely material body's being sensed.  My tactile sensing of my table is possible only because of my transcendentally prior sensing of myself as transcendental flesh.  And so my pre-mundane self is not a mere transcendental I but also a transcendental body.

……………………………….

* Vallicella, William F. (2002). Incarnation and Identity. Philo 5 (1):84-93.

A Discussion with Lukas Novak about Transcendental Idealism and the Transcendental Ego

The extended comment thread below began life in the comments to Why Did I Move Away from Phenomenology? (13 October 2020)

………………………..

Dear Bill,

You have exactly nailed my fundamental problem with transcendental idealism by this:

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.

Of course, transcendental idealists will standardly respond something along the lines like:

The problem that you raise in this post only arises because you are asking the question, “What is the transcendental ego?” and expecting an answer which posits some kind of object or other;

but the problem is that the question asked does not "expect some kind of object", it simply asks whether the transcendental ego is something at all, whether it recedes [proceeds?] from pure nothingness, or not. Transcendental idealism is an effort to find some room between reality and nothingness, an attempt to declare this basic dichotomy as a mere artifact of the "natural attitude" – as if pure logic could be thus confined.

Now I wonder: you label it "Aporetic Conclusion". Why? Isn't it rather a reductio of transcendental idealism, leaving a clear way out – viz. a rejection of TI? Why can't we just conclude that "transcendental ego" is an incoherent notion and revert back to noetic realism, where both the subject and the object are just ordinary parts of the world?

Another great spot-on complaint of yours is that in phenomenology, we never get the real thing: we never get real transcendence, real objectivity etc., everything is merely constituted-as-such-and-such. I would add here: which deprives us of our epistemic rights to make any claims whatsoever about what the objective matter-of-fact really is with matters we are talking about (the nature of transcendental ego, the mechanisms of constitution, etc., whatever). In all seriously meant philosophical claims a phenomenologist is making statements about what the object of his talk (such as transcendental ego, the various structures and mechanisms claimed to be "described" etc.) is, really, an sich – and not merely qua constituted by the particular phenomenologist's ego. For else — why should such subjective constructs be of any relevance to philosophy, or to me?

In other words, the self-destructivity of transcendental idealism reveals itself not only with respect to the transcendental ego, whose Seinsgeltung cannot be merely constituted-by-the-ego but somehow original or genuine; but also with respect to the meta-question, what kind of objectivity is claimed for the transcendental idealist's philosophical statements. Either it is genuine objectivity, but then TI claims its own falsity, or a mere constituted objectivity, and then such statements are not part of philosophical discourse concerning life, universe and everything. In both cases we arrive at the conclusion that TI cannot ever be consistent and thoroughgoing: there must be a residual of realism, i.e. of a claimed capability to cognize reality as it is in itself, rather than merely qua-constituted, qua-a-priori-formed etc.

But perhaps you would not be willing to go thus far in your critique?

Posted by: Lukáš Novák | Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 12:22 PM

Dear Lukáš,

It is indeed a pleasure to find you in agreement with me since you are one of the smartest people I know. I hope you and your family are well. I have fond memories of my time in Prague and the Czech Republic.

>>Transcendental idealism is an effort to find some room between reality and nothingness, an attempt to declare this basic dichotomy as a mere artifact of the "natural attitude" – as if pure logic could be thus confined.<<

That's right. In Sartre, for example, consciousness is no-thing, thus nothing. A "wind blowing towards objects" but blowing from no direction and without any cause or ground. Hence the title *Being and Nothingness.* But of course consciousness is in some sense something since without it no objects would appear. So consciousness is both something and nothing — which certainly looks like a contradiction.

Butchvarov, too, is tangled up in this problem.

Central to Heidegger's thinking is the ontological difference between das Sein und das Seiende (taken either collectively or distributively). But if Being is other than every being, and from the whole lot of them taken together, then Being is nonbeing, nichtseiend. So Sein und Nichts are the same, although not dialectically as in Hegel. But das Nichts ist kein nichtiges Nichts; it is not a nugatory nothing, but some sort of reality, some sort of positive Nothing — which is structurally the same problem we find in Husserl, Sartre, and Butchvarov.

Also structurally similar is the notorious 'horse paradox' in Frege: "The concept HORSE is not a concept."

Posted by: BV | Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 01:32 PM

Dr. Novak:

>>Now I wonder: you label it "Aporetic Conclusion". Why? Isn't it rather a reductio of transcendental idealism, leaving a clear way out – viz. a rejection of TI? Why can't we just conclude that "transcendental ego" is an incoherent notion and revert back to noetic realism, where both the subject and the object are just ordinary parts of the world?<<

Fair question, and the right one to ask. But not easy to answer. Since you are a scholastic realist, perhaps I can soften you up by citing Aristotle, De Anima 431b20: "in a sense the soul is all existing things." Here perhaps is the charter for all subsequent transcendental philosophy. Accordingly, the soul is not merely the life principle of a particular animal organism. It is the transcendental subject to which the body and its states appear as well as the animal's mental states such as fear, lust, etc.

If this is right, then the subject cannot be "just an ordinary part of the world."

I need to hear more about your "noetic realism." Presumably you do not mean we are just parts of the material world and that all of our intellectual and spiritual functions can be accounted for naturalistically. Perhaps you will agree with me that not even sentience can be explained adequately in terms of physics, chemistry and other positive sciences.

Posted by: BV | Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 02:09 PM

>>Another great spot-on your complaint that in phenomenology, we never get the real thing: we never get real transcendence, real objectivity etc., everything is merely constituted-as-such-and-such. I would add here: which deprives us of our epistemic rights to make any claims whatsoever about what the objective matter-of-fact really is with matters we are talking about (the nature of transcendental ego, the mechanisms of constitution, etc., whatever). In all seriously meant philosophical claims a phenomenologist is making statements about what the object of his talk (such as transcendental ego, the various structures and mechanisms claimed to be "described" etc.) is, really, an sich — and not merely qua constituted by the particular phenomenologist's ego. For else — why should such subjective constructs be of any relevance to philosophy, or to me?

In other words, the self-destructivity of transcendental idealism reveals itself not only with respect to the transcendental ego, whose Seinsgeltung cannot be merely constituted-by-the-ego but somehow original or genuine; but also with respect to the meta-question, what kind of objectivity is claimed for the transcendental idealist's philosophical statements. Either it is genuine objectivity, but then TI claims its own falsity, or a mere constituted objectivity, and then such statements are not part of philosophical discourse concerning life, universe and everything. In both cases we arrive at the conclusion that TI cannot ever be consistent and thoroughgoing: there must be a residual of realism, i.e. of a claimed capability to cognize reality as it is in itself, rather than merely qua-constituted, qua-a-priori-formed etc.

But perhaps you would not be willing to go thus far in your critique?<<

You raise a good objection. For example, when Husserl makes a claim about outer perception, that it is intentional, presumptive, that it presents its object directly without images or epistemic intermediaries, etc., he means these claims to be eidetic not factual. He aims to make claims that are true even if there are no cases of outer perception. He is concerned with the essence of perception, the essence of memory, of imagination, etc. Now these essences and the propositions about them are ideal objects that cannot depend on factical subjectivity for their Seinsinn.

Posted by: BV | Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 02:49 PM

Dr. Novak by e-mail (27 January 2021):

I take also this opportunity to finally respond to your reactions to my
comment on your post
— I apologize I did not manage to do so in time — you know, I am always behind my schedule with my work…
 
L.N.:
>>Now I wonder: you label it "Aporetic Conclusion". Why? Isn't it
>>rather a reductio of transcendental idealism, leaving a clear way
>>out – viz. a rejection of TI? Why can't we just conclude that
>>"transcendental ego" is an incoherent notion and revert back to
>>noetic realism, where both the subject and the object are just
>>ordinary parts of the world?<<
 
B.V.:
> Fair question, and the right one to ask. But not easy to answer.
> Since you are a scholastic realist, perhaps I can soften you up by
> citing Aristotle, De Anima 431b20: "in a sense the soul is all
> existing things." Here perhaps is the charter for all subsequent
> transcendental philosophy. Accordingly, the soul is not merely the
> life principle of a particular animal organism. It is the
> transcendental subject to which the body and its states appear as
> well as the animal's mental states such as fear, lust, etc.
>
>If this is right, then the subject cannot be "just an ordinary part
>of the world."
 
LN: Obviously, this hinges on the meaning of "ordinary". I certainly don't
propose reducing cognition and appetition to something merely material
or sub-animal. But why cannot genuine, unreduced cognition and
appetition be part of the reality just as pebbles of quartz are?
 
I agree that soul is a subject of cognitions and appearances and
appetitions. But why "transcendental"? Why must it be pushed out of
the picture, so to speak? When I say "I cognize myself", isn't the "I"
both the real, intramundane subject who does the cognizing, and the
object of this cognizing?
 
BV: >I need to hear more about your "noetic realism." Presumably you do
>not mean we are just parts of the material world and that all of our
>intellectual and spiritual functions can be accounted for
>naturalistically. Perhaps you will agree with me that not even
>sentience can be explained adequately in terms of physics, chemistry
>and other positive sciences.
 
LN: Of course I agree with all that. By "noetic realism" I mean that
cognition is (i) non-representationalist (i.e., terminating at reality
itself, not at some representations of reality — against Locke etc.);
and (ii) receptive, i.e., assimilative to, and measured by, the
object, not vice versa (against all sorts of idealism). Note that (i)
does not imply that cognition cannot err, nor does it exclude the
existence of mental representations as of that _by means of which_
(as opposed to _that which_) we cognize. And it also does not exclude
that reality-qua-cognized may in certain respects differ from
reality-qua-out-there — but it is one and the same reality which is
both out there and cognized.
 
I would say we are indeed parts of the material world (we are bodies),
but not "just parts" of it. We are not mere bodies, but spirited
bodies. But a spirited body is a body, nevertheless. I am not sure if
this dual nature of man can be analyzed in hylomorphic terms, but I
insist with P.F.Strawson that both bodily and mental predicates are
to be ascribed to one and the same subject (and unlike Strawson, I
take this to be a feature of reality, not just of our conceptual
scheme).
 
Best regards,
 
Lukas
 
BV to LN (28 January 2021): For you, the notion of a transcendental subject is incoherent and should be simply dropped. There is no genuine problem here as I think there is. For you, Husserl took a wrong turn, the transcendental turn, and went down a false path.   For you, the ultimate subject of conscious states is an "ordinary part of the world." But you don't mean this materialistically or physicalistically. You admit the "dual nature of man." Man is an animal, but not just an animal: he is also a spirit.  You are rightly skeptical of hylomorphic dualism. Are you then a substance dualist? It seems not since you say that "both bodily and mental predicates are to be ascribed to one and the same subject."  But what is this subject? Is it the body in nature?  The body is a material thing and the body, qua material, cannot think.  My brain doesn't think any more than my eye glasses see.   The latter are instruments of vision, the former an instrument of thought.  The brain cannot be the ultimate subject of experience.  The same goes for each of my body parts and for my body as a whole. I don't think with my liver or feel with my heart, which is just a pump made out of meat.  The liver is just a filter made of meat.  

 
Could the psyche be the ultimate ego?  No, it is an object of introspection not the subject that introspects. Similarly for the psychophysical complex. It is not the ultimate subject of experience.   You see where I am going with this. I am regressing to the ultimate condition of anything appearing. This ultimate condition is not to be found among the objects of consciousness. We say it is 'transcendental' though not in the Aristotelian-scholastic sense.   Whether or not it is an ego is a further question; but let's assume  that it is. 
 
I have just motivated  — in a sketchy way –  the introduction of the transcendental ego.   You don't accept this. You will say that one and the same intramundane subject is both cognizer and cognized.  So when I inspect my body, is my body inspecting my body, or some part of my body inspecting some other part of my body?  What part of the body has the power to do this?  Is my hand sensing the soles of my feet? No, I am sensing in tactile fashion the soles of my feet by the instrumentality of a hand.  Is this I a metaphysical self?  If it is, how can it be identical to the physical body?
 
You are trying to think of subjectivity in an objective/objectivistic/objectifying way like a good Aristotelian. But this approach seems as problematic as Husserl's transcendental idealism.

On the Manifold Meanings of ‘World’

A reader asked whether the concept world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense is a limit concept.  Before addressing that question, and continuing the series on limit concepts, a survey of the several senses of 'world ' is in order, or at least those senses with some philosophical or proto-philosophical relevance.

1) In the planetary sense, the world is the planet Earth or some other planet such as Mars, as in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.

2) In the cosmological sense, the world is the cosmos, the physical universe, the object of cosmology, a branch of physics.  It is space-time together with whatever physicists discover within it: particles, fields, strings, vacuum fluctuations . . . .

3) In the theological sense, the world is the totality of creatures, where a creature is anything created ex nihilo by God, anything dependent on God for its existence (and presumably also dependent on God for its nature, intelligibility, and value). This includes all contingent beings and arguably also all necessary beings with the exception of God. I am alluding to Aquinas' distinction between God, the necessary being whose necessity is from himself,  and the rest of the necessary beings that have their necessity from another, namely, from God. The latter are creatures, as strange as that might sound.  They are creatures in that they depend on God for their existence despite the impossibility of their non-existence. For if, per impossibile, God did not exist, they would not exist either.

4) In the referential sense, for want of a better name, the world is the totality of extra-linguistic and extra-mental items. Thus daggers are 'in the world' in this sense, but not Macbeth's dagger or any other objects of hallucination, all such items being 'in the mind.' 'World' in the referential sense is a contrastive term and denotes what exists in itself, in reality, as opposed to what exists only in and for minds.  For example, philosophers of language typically tell us that reference is a word-world relation.  The world in the referential sense is the totality of objects of primary reference, whether the reference be what Hector-Neri Castaneda calls thinking reference, which does not require linguistic expression, or linguistic reference via proper names, indexicals, demonstratives, definite descriptions, etc.

NOTE: Although 'world'  carries a suggestion of maximality and all-inclusiveness, (2), (3) and (4) describe senses of 'world' which are non-maximal and contrastive. Thus in (2) the world does not include so-called abstract objects or purely spiritual beings such as God, angels, and unembodied souls.  In (3) the world does not encompass or contain or include God, and is thus other than God, but it does include abstract objects if there are any.   Similarly with (4): the objects of primary reference form a totality that excludes the semantic and intentional apparatus in the mind whereby the items in the world are referenced, although the items in the referential apparatus  exist and can be referred to in reflection and therefore can also claim to be in the world in a wider sense. For example, consider the intentional or object-directed state one is in when one veridically sees a tree. Is this state not in the world? Or what about the words, whether tokens or types, used to refer to things in the world and to the world itself? Are they not in the world in a suitably maximalist sense of the term?  John Searle is in the world, but a token of the proper name 'John Searle' is not?  This is a problem for (4), but not one that can detain us. There are in fact a number of gnarly problems one can pose about (2), (3) and (4), but they are not my problems, at least not now when I am merely cataloging the different philosophically relevant senses of 'world.'

5) In the Christian-existential (existenziell) sense, 'world' refers to a certain attitude or mentality. My reader well describes it as follows:

But there is another sense of the term 'world' — Christians  talk of dying to the world and being in the world but not of it. This world they  speak  of could not be reduced to the world of black holes  and dark matter, of collapsing stars and expanding nebulae. This is the social and moral world that they want to die to. It is the world of spiritual distraction and moral fog, the world of status-seeking and reputation.

To which wonderful formulation I add that worldlings or the worldly live for the here and now alone with its fleeting pleasures and precarious perquisites. They worship idolatrously at the shrine of the Mighty Tetrad: money, power, sex, and recognition. They are blind to the Unseen Order and speak of it only to deny it.  They are the Cave dwellers of Plato who take shadow for substance, and the dimly descried for the optimally illuminated. They do not seek, nor do they find. They are not questers. They live as if they will live forever in a world they regard as the ne plus ultra of reality, repeating the same paltry pleasures and believing them to be the summum bonum.

I seem to have strayed from description to evaluation.  In any case:

6) In the all-inclusive tenselessly ontological sense, the world is the totality of everything that is or exists, of whatever category, whether mental, material, or ideal (abstract), whether past, present, or future, whether in time or outside of time.

7) In the presentist ontological sense, the world is the totality of everything that is or exists, at temporal present, of whatever category, whether mental, material, or ideal (abstract).  This is close to Quentin Smith's (may peace be upon him) notion of the world-whole in The Felt Meanings of the World (Purdue 1986).

8) In the Tractarianly factualist sense, the world is all that is the case; it it is the totality of facts, not of things. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus, 1, 1.1:

Die Welt ist alles was der Fall ist. Die Welt is die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge.

9) On Armstrongian naturalistic factualism, there is only the space-time world and it "is a huge and organized net of states of affairs [concrete facts]" (Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics, Oxford 2010, p. 26). Since thin particulars, properties, and relations are constituents of states of affairs, the world for Armstrong is a totality of facts AND of things . 

David Armstrong offers a useful comment on Wittgenstein (ibid., p. 34):

Wittgenstein said at 1.1 in his Tractatus that the world is the totality of facts, not of things. I think he was echoing here (in a striking way) Russell's idea that the world is a world of facts. I put the same point by saying that the world is a world of states of affairs. To say that the world is a world of things seems to leave out an obvious point: how these things hang together, which must be part of reality.  Interestingly, my own teacher in Sydney, John Anderson, used to argue that reality was 'propositional' and appeared to mean much the same as Russell and Wittgenstein. One could say metaphorically that reality was best grasped as sentence-like rather than list-like. (Hyperlink added!)

10) In the modal-abstractist sense, a possible world is a  maximal Fregean proposition where a maximal such proposition is one that entails every proposition with which it is consistent;  the actual world is the true maximal proposition; a merely possible world is a maximal proposition that is false, but contingently so.  Note that while the worlds in question are maximal, this conception of worlds is not maximalist. For on this scheme, the possible world that happens to be actual is the maximal proposition that happens to be true. True of what? True of the concrete universe that serves as its truthmaker.  The actual world is an abstract object that excludes the concrete universe.

11) In the modal-concretist sense, a possible world is a maximal mereological sum of concreta; every world is actual at itself, which implies that no world is actual absolutely or simpliciter; there are no merely possible worlds given that every world is actual at itself.  This is a maximalist conception of worlds. (See David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, Basil Blackwell, 1986) Finally,

12) In the transcendental-phenomenological sense, the world is, first of all, none of the above.  Let's take a stroll down the via negativa. The world is not the planet Earth, and not just because there are other physical entities: Earth appears within the world and is therefore not the same as the world. The world is not the physical cosmos; the cosmos appears within the world, and is therefore not the same as the world. Creatures are not the world; they too appear within the world. God is not the world; if God is, then God is either a being (a being among beings) or the being, the one and only being. Either way, God is  seiend, ens, being, not reines Sein, esse, pure Be-ing (To Be). Now the world in the transcendental-phenomenological  sense is the ultimate context within which alone beings appear or show themselves as beings. It follows that God, if he is ein Seiendes (a being) or das Seiende (the being), is not the world but is within the world.

The world is not itself a being as if it were a sort of ontic container, but the ultimate transcendental condition — although 'condition' is not quite the right word — that allows beings to be.  So if God is either a being or the being, then he is within the world, in which case God cannot be the world.  The world in the transcendental-phenomenological  sense is transcendentally prior to every being including God who, despite his marvellous attributes, is but the highest being.  God may be ontically that than which no greater can be conceived (Anselm), but transcendentally there is a greater, namely, the clearing or Lichtung (Heidegger) within which alone beings show themselves as beings.  Every being, including the highest being, God, is subject to the ultimate transcendental condition of manifestation.

And of course the world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense is not the realm of primary referents or the attitude of worldly people that Christians qua Christians oppose.  Nor is the world a totality in any innerworldly (intramundane) sense of 'totality.' The world is not an ontic whole. It cannot be pieced together out of parts. It is not a collection the existence of which presupposes the items collected. It is not a set, or the extension of a set, a mereological sum or the extension of a mereological sum — if you care to distinguish a sum from its membership/extension.  The world is not a scattered object, an aggregate of any kind, a maximal conjunction of propositions, a maximal conjunctive fact.  The world has no adequate ontic model.  It is not an instance of a category instantiated within the world. It cannot be assimilated to any abstract item such as a set or a proposition. It cannot be assimilated to any concrete items such as a concrete fact or a concrete individual or an aggregate.

The world is unique.  "The world . . . does not exist as an entity, as an object, but exists with such uniqueness that the plural makes no sense when applied to it. Every plural, and every singular drawn from it, presupposes the world-horizon." (Crisis, Carr tr. 143)  I'll have more to say later.