Idealism and Realism – Maverick Philosopher

Is the World Inconceivable Apart from Consciousness? (Version 2.0)

That depends. It depends on what ‘world’ means.

Steven Nemes quotes Dermot Moran on the former’s Facebook page:

[1] In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. [2] Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. [3] For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. [4] The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. [5] Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. (Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, p. 144.)

This strikes me as confused. I will go through it line by line. I have added numbers in brackets for ease of reference.

Ad [1]. I basically agree. But while conscious acts cannot be properly understood from within die natürliche Einstellung, it doesn’t follow that they cannot be understood “at all” from within the natural attitude or what Moran is calling the natural outlook. So I would strike the “at all.” I will return to this issue at the end.

Ad [2]. Here the trouble begins. I grant that conscious acts cannot be properly understood in wholly materialistic or naturalistic terms. They cannot be understood merely as events in the natural world. For example, my thinking about Boston cannot be reduced to anything going in my brain or body when I am thinking about Boston. Conscious acts are object-directed. They have the property philosophers call ‘intentionality.’ Intentionality resists naturalistic reduction.

And I grant that there is a sense in which there would not be a world for us in the first place if there were no consciousness. A world for us is a world that appears to us as conscious beings.

But note the equivocation on ‘world.’ It is first used to refer to nature itself, and then used to refer to the openness or apparentness of nature, nature as it appears to us and has meaning for us. Obviously, without consciousness, nature would not appear, but this is not to say that consciousness is the reason why there is a natural world in the first place. To say that would be to embrace a form of idealism.

Ad [3] We are now told that this is not “a subjective idealism.” I agree. But note that the world that is disclosed and made meaningful is not the world that is inconceivable without consciousness. The equivocation on ‘world’ persists. There is world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense as the ‘space’ within which things are disclosed and become manifest, and there is world as the things disclosed. These are plainly different even if there is no epistemic access to the latter except via the former.

Ad [4] Therefore, to be precise, we should say that the world as the ‘space of disclosure’ is inconceivable without consciousness. But this ‘space of disclosure’ is not the same as the natural world, which is not inconceivable without consciousness. If you say that it is, then you are adopting a form of metaphysical idealism, which is what Husserl in the end does.

In the end, he reduces Being to Meaning (Sein to Seinsinn) or Being (Sein) to ontic validity (Seinsgeltung). Accordingly, beings in the world are constituted (a piece of Husserlian jargon) as beings by transcendental consciousness. This is the upshot of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. What we naively take in the natural attitude to exist in themselves, on their ontological own, so to speak, things like rocks and planets and galaxies, are in truth intentional objectivities constituted in transcendental consciousness.

Ad [5] In the final sentence, ‘world’ clearly refers to the physical realm, nature. I agree that it would be a mistake to reify consciousness, to identify it with any physical thing or process. Consciousness plays a disclosive role. It is pre-mundane, transcendental. As OF the world — genitivus objectivus — consciousness is not IN the world. But the world in this sense, the world that consciousness is not IN, is conceivable apart from consciousness. If it were not, then Roman Ingarden’s realism and Thomist realism, and other types, would not be conceivable, which they plainly are.

And so the confusion remains. The world in the specifically phenomenological sense, the world as the ‘space’ within which things are disclosed — compare Heidegger’s Lichtung or clearing — is inconceivable without consciousness. But the world as that which is disclosed, opened up, gelichtet, made manifest and meaningful, is NOT inconceivable apart from consciousness. If you maintain otherwise, then you are embracing a form of metaphysical idealism.

So I’d say that Moran and plenty of others are doing the ‘Continental Shuffle’ as I call it: they are sliding back and forth between two senses of ‘world.’ Equivalently, they are conflating the ontic and the broadly epistemic. I appreciate their brave attempt at undercutting the subject-object dichotomy and the idealism-realism problematic. But the brave attempt does not succeed. A mental act of outer perception, say, is intrinsically intentional or object-directed: by its very sense it purports to be of or about something that exists apart from any and all mental acts to which it appears. To speak like a Continental, the purport is ‘inscribed in the very essence of the act.’ But there remains the question whether the intentional object really does exist independently of the act. There remains the question whether the intentional object really exists or is merely intentional. Does it enjoy esse reale, or only esse intentionale?

I recommend to my friend Nemes that he read Roman Ingarden’s critique of Husserl’s idealism. I also recommend that he read Husserl himself (in German if possible) rather than the secondary sources he has been citing, sources some of which are not only secondary, but second-rate.

To return to what I said at the outset: Conscious acts cannot be properly understood naturalistically. But surely a full understanding of them must explain how they relate to the goings-on in the physical organisms in nature that support them. A satisfactory philosophy cannot ignore this. And so, to end on an autobiographical note, this was one of the motives that lead me beyond phenomenology.

Intentionality in Thomas and Husserl and the Question of Realism

This entry raises the question whether Husserl’s theory of intentionality supports the sort of realism Thomists embrace. I argue that it doesn’t.

My Serbian correspondent Milosz sent me a reference to an article in Commonweal in which we read:

What attracted these Catholics to Husserl was his theory of intentionality—the notion that human consciousness is always consciousness “of” something. This appealed to Catholics because it appeared to open a way beyond the idealism of modern philosophy since Kant, which had threatened to undermine the possibility that human beings could possess an objective knowledge of realities outside the mind, including God.

Husserl’s phenomenology seemed to offer a solution to this problem. His promise to return “to the things themselves” sounded to many Catholics like a vindication of medieval scholasticism, which stressed that human beings have the capacity to objectively know reality independent of the mind. This led some Catholics to dub phenomenology a “new scholasticism.” By pointing “beyond” modern philosophy, they hoped that phenomenology could also serve as a path “back” to medieval thought, so that one might begin from the perspective of modern philosophy and end up somewhere closer to Thomas Aquinas. Husserl’s phenomenology thus opened up the possibility that modern, secular philosophy could be converted to Catholicism.

The Commonweal article is annoyingly superficial, and the last sentence quoted is just silly. Do I need to explain why? At the very most, Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality prior to the publication in 1913 of Ideas I could be interpreted as supportive of realism, and was so interpreted by many of his early acolytes, among them, the members of the Göttingen and Munich circles. And so in some very vague sense, Husserlian intentionality could be taken as pointing back, via Franz Brentano, to medieval thought and to Thomas Aquinas in particular, assuming one doesn’t know much about Thomas or Husserl. But the claim that “Husserl’s phenomenology thus opened up the possibility that modern, secular philosophy could be converted to Catholicism” is risible.

Undiluted Roman Catholicism consists of extremely specific theological doctrines. No one could reasonably hold that a realistically interpreted Husserl could soften secular philosophers up for Trinity, Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Transubstantiation, Papal Infallibility, etc. (I will note in passing that it was the promulgation of the Infallibility doctrine that triggered Brentano’s leaving of the priesthood.) The most that could be said is that the (merely apparent) realism of the early Husserl was welcomed by Catholic thinkers. In any case, Husserl was not a realist, but a transcendental idealist as I will argue below.

But now let’s get down to brass tacks with a little help from Peter Geach. I will first sketch the intentionality doctrine of Thomas. It will then become apparent, if you know your Husserl, that there is nothing like the Thomistic doctrine in Husserl. In the second main section I will explain how Husserl’s theory differs and how it leads him to transcendental idealism.

A theory of intentionality ought to explain how the objective reference or object-directedness of our thoughts and perceptions is possible. How do our thoughts and perceptions reach things in reality ‘outside’ the mind? Suppose I am thinking about a cat, a particular cat of my acquaintance who I have named ‘Max Black.’ How are we to understand the relation between my mental act of thinking, which is a transient datable event in my mental life, and its object, the cat I am thinking of? What makes my thinking of Max a thinking of Max? Or perhaps Max is in front of me and I am not merely thinking about him but seeing him. What makes my seeing a seeing of him? What makes these mental acts, whether of sense or intellect, take an object, and not just any object, but the very object they do take? Please note that, while I have set up the problem as one concerning the relation of intentionality, it is not obvious that intentionality is a relation sensu stricto as we will see in a moment.

1. Intentionality in Thomas Aquinas

Here is what Peter Geach has to say, glossing Aquinas:

What makes a sensation or thought of an X to be of an X is that it is an individual occurrence of that very form or nature which occurs in X — it is thus that our mind ‘reaches right up to the reality’; what makes it to be a sensation or thought of an X rather than an actual X or an actual X-ness is that X-ness here occurs in the special way called esse intentionale and not in the ‘ordinary’ way called esse naturale. This solution resolves the difficulty. It shows how being of an X is not a relation in which the thought or sensation stands, but is simply what the thought or sensation is . . . .(Three Philosophers, Cornell UP, 1961, p. 95)

But what the devil does that mean? Allow me to explain.

The main point here is that of-ness or aboutness is not a relation between a mental act and its object. Thus intentionality is not a relation that relates my occurrent thinking of Max and Max. My thinking of Max just is the immaterial occurrence in my mind of the very same form or nature — felinity — which occurs physically and thus materially in Max. One and the same form occurs immaterially in my mind and materially in Max. The form itself is as it were ‘amphibious’ as between these two different modes of realization.

Aquinas, following Aristotle, views a concrete spatiotemporal particular such as Max as a hylomorphic compound, a compound of (substantial) form and (signate) matter. Old Max himself, fleas and all, is of course not in my mind, let alone in my head. It is his form alone that is in my mind. ‘In my mind,’ of course, is not to be taken spatially. If felinity informs my mind, however, why isn’t my mind a cat?

Here is where the distinction between esse intentionale and esse naturale comes in. One and the same form — felinity — exists in two different ways or modes. The form’s mode of being in my mind is esse intentionale while its mode of being in Max is esse naturale. You will note that the Thomistic doctrine of intentionality presupposes what I call the MOB-doctrine, namely, the theory that there are modes of being. Said doctrine is hardly obvious and is widely denied by distinguished contemporaries. I myself am open to the MOB-doctrine.

Because my thinking of Max just is the intentional occurrence in my mind of the same form or nature that occurs naturally in Max, there is no problem about how my thought reaches Max. There is no gap between mind and world. One could call the Thomistic theory an identity theory of intentionality, or better, an ‘isomorphic’ theory. One and the same form occurs in the mind and in the thing but in two different ways: with esse intentionale in the mind but with esse reale/naturale in the thing. This isomorphism insures that the knower is not enclosed within the circle of his ideas and cut off from the world. It puts paid to the ‘gap problem’ that bedevils post-Cartesian philosophy. For Thomas, there is a metaphysically antecedent community of nature between mind and world that underwrites the latter’s intelligibility to the former. Extramental beings are knowable by us because of this antecedent community of nature.

This view can be traced back to Aristotle’s De Anima 431b20: “The soul (psyche, anima) is in a certain sense all things . . .” and a little before that, at 431b15 we read, “the mind when actively thinking is identical to its objects.” (emphasis added) No gap, no bridge, identity!

In sum, the sameness of form explains how the mind contacts reality outside the mind; the difference in modes of being or existence explains why the knower is not the known. Knower and known are identical in respect of the common nature or form; knower and known are different in respect of how the common form exists in the knower and in the known. The common nature, as common, is neither immaterial nor immaterial, neither intentionally existent nor really existent.

That in a nutshell is the Thomist theory of intentionality. If you can see your way clear to accepting it as the only adequate account of intentionality, then it provides a bonus by supplying a reason for the celebrated real distinction (distinctio realis) of essence and existence. For the account requires that there be two distinct modes of esse, an immaterial mode, esse intentionale, and a material mode, esse naturale. Now if a form F-ness can exist in two different modes, then it cannot be identical to either and must be really distinct from both. (Cf. Peter Geach, “Form and Existence” in God and the Soul, Thoemmes Press 1994, pp. 62-64, orig. publ. 1969)

I have some questions about the Thomist theory, but I won’t raise them here because my present purpose is not to evaluate the Thomist theory but merely to contrast it with the theory of HusserI.

2. Intentionality in Edmund Husserl

We must now ask how Husserl’s approach to intentionality and thus to the possibility of knowledge differs from the above. I say it does differ and that Husserl’s phenomenology gives no aid or comfort to Thomist realism. This is a large and controversial topic and I cannot say much about it in one weblog entry. But I must say something. I am not concerned at present with the tenability of either position. My sole present concern is to show that (i) Husserl is a transcendental idealist, and that therefore (ii) Husserl’s position is incompatible with Thomist realism.

The Natural Attitude

The realism of Thomas was developed and is maintained within what Husserl calls the natural attitude (die natürliche Einstellung). In the natural attitude the world we experience, live in, and act upon is naively taken as unquestionably given. It is uncritically accepted as the ultimate backdrop of all our concerns, practical and theoretical. Within the world so taken there are knowers and things known. It also includes all intentional (object-directed) mental states, whether sensible or intellectual, of humans and animals. They too are taken to occur in the world of the natural attitude. My seeing the cat or the mat on which he sits is then explained under the presupposition that there really are, extra-mentally, knowing beings and known beings. A knower is a psychophysical complex, a minded organism. Its mental or psychic states are naively taken as states or processes within the same spatiotemporal world in which the knowers’ bodily states occur. This is all uncritically accepted and not put into question from within the natural attitude.

The natural attitude is not a philosophical theory, but is prior to any philosophical theory one might adopt. It is the pre-theoretical basis from which philosophical theories arise. So one must not conflate the natural attitude with the philosophical theory of metaphysical naturalism, according to which reality is exhausted by the spacetime system and its contents.

And while one needn’t philosophize within the natural attitude, and most don’t, one can. One who philosophizes within the natural attitude may ask how objective knowledge is possible and may also ask about the relation in a knower between mental/psychic states and physical states. Let’s briefly consider some natural-attitude solutions to the second problem, the mind-body problem.

If our natural-attitude philosopher is an Aristotelian he will hold that a knower is a hylomorphic compound in which anima forma corporis, the soul or psyche is the (substantial) form of the body. The same goes for the Thomist, mutatis mutandis. If our natural-attitude philosopher is a hard-core materialist/physicalist, however, he will say that mental states are just states of the brain. If our natural-attitude philosopher is a Cartesian substance dualist, he will reject all three of the foregoing positions and tell us that the soul/psyche/mind is an immaterial primary substance (and thus not a form or state) really distinct from bodily primary substances. (There are of course other positions in the philosophy of mind such as epiphenomenalism, emergentism, supervenientism, panpsychism, functionalism, occasionalism, parallelism, and so on, all of them developed within the natural attitude.)

The four positions just sketched are all realist in the sense that the things the mind knows are taken to exist independently of the minds that know them. On realism, the being of the things known is not reducible to their being-known, let alone their being thought-of. But there is nothing to stop a natural-attitude philosopher from being an idealist who holds, like Berkeley, that esse est percipi, that to be = to be perceived. On an idealism like this, which Husserl calls ‘psychological’ to distinguish it from his transcendental idealism, the things known do not exist independently of knowers.

The main point, however, is that all of this theorizing, whether realist or idealist, is being done within the natural attitude. So just as one must not confuse the natural attitude with any version of metaphysical naturalism, one must also not confuse it with any pre-Husserlian version of realism or idealism. Within the natural attitude, mundane idealists oppose mundane realists; Husserl’s idealism, however, is, or is supposed to be, transcendental or pre-mundane. We will have to come back to this later.

Another point that needs to be made before proceeding is that, within the natural attitude, one can perform an epoché or suspension of belief in the manner of such Pyrrhonian skeptics of late antiquity as Sextus Empiricus. There is such a thing as a natural-attitude epoché. Suppose you tell me that Thomas Merton was assassinated by the CIA. There are three main attitudes I can take up with respect to this proposition: Accept, Reject, Suspend. If I suspend judgment, I take no position with respect to the truth-value of the proposition you assert. I merely entertain it without affirming it or denying it. I put it ‘within brackets,’ if you will. It is then, in Husserlian lingo, eingeklammert. But this Pyrrhonian bracketing is piecemeal and partial; it does not put the whole world of the natural attitude within brackets, as does Husserl’s, as we shall see.

The Pyrrhonian skeptic also advocates a sort of ‘reduction,’ a leading back, not from the thing taken naively as existing in itself to its appearing, but from the propositional content affirmed as true or rejected as false, to the propositional content itself under bracketing of its truth-value.

Epoché and reduction in Husserl have a far more radical sense.

To understand Husserl, you must understand that his aim is to thematize what had been, before he came along, tacit and pre-thematic, namely the natural attitude and to show that it presupposes something deeper, transcendental subjectivity, a pre-mundane region of Being. He proposes to uncover this region of Being by way of a radicalization and purification of the Cartesian project of universal doubt. As he puts it in his late Paris Lectures, “The methodology of purified Cartesianism demands . . . the phenomenological epoché. This epoché eliminates as worldly facts from my field of judgment both the reality [Seinsgeltung] of the objective world in general and the sciences of the world.” (The Paris Lectures, Koestenbaum tr., 10) The word Koestenbaum translates ineptly as ‘eliminates’ is ausschalten. Its relevant meanings in this context include switch off, disconnect, set aside, make no use of. The idea is that if one aspires to be truly radical in one’s philosophizing, and go to the root (radix) of the matter, one must set aside the reality or ontic validity [Seinsgeltung] of the world given in the natural attitude and make no use of any of its facts. In addition, radicality demands that we make no use of the positive sciences that investigate these facts.

But why perform the phenomenological epoché?

Before I can answer this question we need a quick Descartes review. Renatus Cartesius (1596-1650), troubled as he was by the cacophony of conflicting beliefs, sought objective certainty. He sought a fundamentum inconcussum, an unshakable foundation for his beliefs. His method of search was by doubting everything that he could possibly doubt to see if there is anything that he could not doubt. He sought the utterly indubitable. What he found was the cogito, the ‘I think,’ where thinking (cogitation, from L. cogitare, to think) ) is understood sensu lato to embrace every type of object-directed consciousness, whether perceptual, imaginative, memorial, judgmental, etc. He found that he could not doubt his thinkings (occurrent episodes or acts of thinking, cogitationes). He could doubt particular objects of thinkings, particular cogitata, whether they exist in reality, and whether in reality they have the properties they appear to have, but he could not doubt the cogitationes directed upon these cogitata. For example, if I see a tree, I can doubt whether there exists in reality, i.e., extra-mentally, a tree that I see, and I can doubt whether it really possesses the attributes (being in bloom, say) that it is seen to have. What I cannot doubt is the existence of an object-directed visual experiencing as of a tree in bloom.

There are, however, not just one but two items I cannot doubt. I cannot doubt the cogitatio, the occurrent episode of object-directed visual awareness, but I also cannot doubt what could be called the CONTENT of this awareness, what Husserl calls the noema of this noesis, namely the cogitatum qua cogitatum. (Side note: Some philosophers in the analytic tradition assimilate Husserl’s noema to Frege’s Sinn (sense) which mediates linguistic reference. If for Frege, linguistic reference is routed through sense (Sinn), for Husserl, thinking reference is routed through the noema. I do not endorse this interpretation, but cannot discuss it further here. It is known in the trade as the West Coast interpretation of the noema.)

The Ambiguity of ‘Object’

There is an ambiguity here that must be carefully noted, and it is relevant to the idealism question. A cogitatum is an object of thought. But ‘object’ is ambiguous. Do we mean the thing in reality that presumably exists and has properties whether or not anyone is aware of it or its properties? Or do we mean the thing precisely as it appears to a conscious being with only the properties it appears to have when it appears? The latter alone is the cogitatum qua cogitatum, the object of thought just insofar as it is the accusative of an act of thinking, that is, just insofar as it is a correlate of a cogitatio, the noema of a noesis. The cogitatum qua cogitatum is what I will call the PURE OBJECT. It is distinct from the ego, from the ego’s cogitationes, and from the thing itself in mind-independent reality, should there be one. We can then call the cogitatum simpliciter the THING.

‘Object,’ then, is ambiguous as between pure object and thing. This parallels the ambiguity of ‘Every consciousness is a consciousness of something’ as between ‘Every consciousness is a consciousness of a pure object‘ and ‘Every consciousness is a consciousness of a thing.’ Suppose I am imagining a winged horse. Am I imagining something or nothing? Something, obviously, but something that does not exist. In this case, the cogitatum, object of thought, is a pure object, not a thing (res). A pure object is a Gegenstand inasmuch as it stands over against consciousness-of. A thing, as I am using the term, is not a Gegenstand, but a thing the being of which is not exhausted by its standing over against consciousness-of. But I don’t call it a Ding-an-sich because, for Kant, the Ding-an-sich is unknowable whereas for Thomist realists the thing is knowable as it is in itself. In passing, I will also note that we should beware of confusing Husserl’s transcendental idealism with Kant’s. The main point of difference is that Husserl’s transcendental idealism requires the epoché whereas there is no epoché in Kant. I cannot pause to explain this now.

We must, therefore, distinguish the pure object from the thing. For example, when I look at Max, I see a cat, which is to say: I live through (er-leben) a conscious state that is object-directed, but is this actual experience (Erlebnis) of seeing directed to, and terminate at, a pure object? Or is directed to, and terminate at, an extra-mental thing? In the first case the directedness terminates at a pure object. In the second case it goes through the pure object and terminates at the thing. In the second case the pure object is an epistemic intermediary, and not the thing known.

In the first case, my living through the experience as of seeing a cat does not guarantee the extra-mental existence of a cat that I see. For it may be — it is epistemically possible — that nothing in reality corresponds to the pure object or even to an ensemble of mutually coherent objects that appear to successive acts. In the second case the experience latches onto the thing itself, grasping it in its mind-independent being.

Two Uses of ‘See’

The difference between the two cases is reflected linguistically in the difference between a phenomenological use of ‘see’ according to which subject S’s seeing of x is consistent with the nonexistence of x, and a ‘verb of success’ use according to which S’s seeing of x entails the existence of x. We find both uses in ordinary English. If I tell you that you are ‘seeing things’ I am telling you that what you are seeing isn’t really there, i.e., doesn’t exist. And in dreams we do see things that aren’t there. This is the phenomenological use of ‘see.’ The verb of success use, however, is at home in the natural attitude.

Now back to our Descartes review. From Husserl’s point of view, Descartes, with his universal doubt is on the right track, but he doesn’t go far enough. He is still partially stuck in the natural attitude, and fails to execute, or fully execute, the ‘transcendental turn.’

Descartes’ underlying schema is this:

D. Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum-res.

Husserl’s underlying schema is similar but also importantly different in one respect:

H. Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum-[res].

In (H) ‘res’ or ‘thing’ is bracketed, in (D) it is not. Let the thing be the paloverde tree in my backyard presently in glorious yellow bloom in the Sonoran spring. In the natural attitude we take the tree to exist in itself whether or not I or anyone make(s) it the object of an intentional (object-directed) act, whether a perceiving, a remembering, whatever.

But are we justified in taking the tree to exist in itself?

Granted, my seeing is an intrinsically object-directed state that purports to reveal a thing that exists and has the properties it is seen to possess whether or not I or anyone see it. This purport is intrinsic to the conscious directedness. To put it paradoxically, the intentional state intends the object as non-object. (I borrow this formulation from Wolfgang Cramer. It is paradoxical but non-contradictory. The paradox is rooted in the ambiguity of ‘object’ which I have already explained.)

To put it non-paradoxically, the intentional state intends a thing (purports to reveal a thing) the being of which exceeds its being a merely intentional object for a subject. Consciousness-of, by its very nature, purports or ‘wants’ to reach things transcendent of consciousness. This, I claim, is part of the phenomenology of the situation. I am pretty sure that Husserl would agree with this. Whether or not he agrees, the point I am making can be put in Husserlian jargon: what is intended is intended to be more than a mere noematic correlate of a noesis, and indeed more than an entire ensemble of mutually coherent noemata. As it seems to me, what is intended in an intentional state is intended as existing an sich, in itself, and not merely for me or for us. Consciousness-of, by an inner necessity, desires its own transcendence. Every noesis is a nisus, a mental striving or perfective endeavor. These last two formulations are mine, not Husserl’s, but in line with his views. But in the interests of strenge Wissenschaft (rigorous science), this lust for transcendence, which is endemic to the natural attitude, must be chastened and inhibited.

The purport to reveal a thing as it is in itself may also be expressed in terms Descartes borrows from the scholastics. Accordingly, what is intended in an intentional state is the thing in its formal reality (realitas formalis), its formal or trans-objective reality, and not merely in its its objective reality (realitas objectiva) as an object for a subject. ‘Objective reality’ refers to the reality the thing enjoys when its stands in relation to a conscious subject. ‘Formal reality’ refers to the reality that the thing has in itself whether or not it stands in relation to a conscious subject.

Of course, the purported reference of an intentional state beyond itself to a thing in reality may not pan out. Usually it does, but sometimes it doesn’t. It may be that there exists in reality no tree such as the one the directedness purports to reveal. In the natural attitude, we naturally go along with these purports in the vast majority of cases; we do not inhibit them as we do when we are doing phenomenology in the Husserlian style.

From this example we can begin to see what the phenomenological reduction or phenomenological epoché is all about. It is about inhibiting the natural tendency of mind to posit its objects as existing in themselves. The thing is bracketed as in schema (H): it is re-duced to its appearing. Ducere in Latin means to lead; a reduction, then is a leading back, a regression.

Before we get to the question of Husserl’s putative idealism, we need to ask and answer two questions: (Q1) why would he want to put the world of the natural attitude within brackets, and (Q2) why does he think that Descartes did not go far enough?

Q1: Why the Need for the Phenomenological Reduction?

The short answer is to avoid the epistemological circle. Husserl appreciates that one cannot answer the epistemological question of how objective knowledge of real beings is possible if one presupposes what one wants an account of, namely, objective knowledge of real beings. Let me explain.

Consider again my seeing of Max the cat. What makes my seeing a seeing of Max and thus a sensory knowing of Max? How do I know that he exists extra-mentally and has the properties extra-mentally that I see him to have? A natural-attitude answer might be in terms of causal actions of physical things spatially external to my body that act upon my body’s optical transducers (eyes), which in turn convert photons into neural information which is then transmitted by electrochemical means to the visual cortex in my brain, and voila! a cat appears. Such an account is epistemologically worthless because circular: it presupposes that we have knowledge of both (i) the existence of mind-independent things and of (ii) the truth of the sciences of the natural attitude (physics, physiology, electrochemistry, etc.). Husserl’s intention is not to deny or doubt any of this. His point is that no use may be made of it in epistemology. A radical critique of knowledge cannot presuppose knowledge.

W. V. Quine would disagree. See his Epistemology Naturalized.

One objection to Quine from a SEP article has an Husserlian flavor:

(2) A second objection is that Quinean naturalism is viciously circular. Among the central tasks of epistemology, it’s said, is to establish that empirical knowledge is possible—that we may, for example, legitimately rely upon empirical science as a source of knowledge. However, Quine would have epistemologists make “free use” of the results of science from the start.

Q2: Husserl on Descartes’ Lack of Radicality

The reduction in Husserl is a two-step move: from the thing to its appearing to a subject, and then from the subject initially and naively taken to be psychological or psychophysical to the transcendental subject. The reduction is thus a transcendental-phenomenological reduction. Husserl’s beef with Descartes is that he doesn’t execute the second step. In Cartesian Meditations, sec. 10, Husserl alleges that the Frenchman fails to make 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.

Despite his universal doubt, Cartesius remains within the world thinking he has found the sole unquestionable part of it. Although he achieves something very much like a phenomenological reduction, the Frenchman fails to inaugurate a transcendental-phenomenological reduction. He reduces things to their appearances, but fails to properly identify that to which they appear, the transcendental ego. He misidentifies it as something within the world of things, not a material thing, but an immaterial thing. As I would put, Descartes reifies the transcendental ego. A thing is a thing whether material or immaterial.

The reification consists in the misconstrual of the transcendental ego as substantia cogitans, mens sive animus. This gives rise to what Husserl calls the absurdity of transcendental realism. Husserl’s thought seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn one is left with no entity (res) in the world that can serve as the subject for whom there is a world. If everything in the world receives its Seinsgeltung (ontic validity) from the transcendental ego, then this ego cannot be a thinking thing or substance. It cannot be either the empirical ego (the animated body that psychology and physiology studies) nor can it be a soul substance as it is for Thomas and his followers. It has to be the source of the ontic or existential validity (Seinsgeltung) of the objects that appear.

But this is 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, 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.

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.

Conclusion

In a later post I may come back to the problem just posed, which concerns the tenability of Husserl’s final position, but for now, I believe I have said enough to scotch the notion that Husserl’s position supports Thomist realism. Husserl’s phenomenology is committed to transcendental idealism, according to which beings do not exist in themselves but only for transcendental subjectivity. Here is a characteristic passage:

Alles, was ich je als wahrhaft Seiendes einsehen kann, ist gar nichts anderes als ein intentionales Vorkommnis meines eigenen — des Erkennenden — Lebens . . . . (Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil, Theorie der Phaenomenologischen Reduktion, Husserliana Band VIII, S. 184 f.)

Whatever I can recognize as a genuine being is nothing other than an intentional occurrence of my own — the knower’s — life . . . .

For Husserl, the very Being of beings is their Being for consciousness, their being constituted in and by consciousness. Their Sein reduces to Seinsinn, and that Sinn points back to the transcendental ego from which all sense derives. So the Sinn is not Original Sinn, pun intended, but derivative Sinn. Therefore, on transcendental idealism, contingent beings have no need for a divine ground of their existence, their existence being adequately accounted for by transcendental subjectivity. And since they have no need of a divine ground, one cannot prove that they must have such a ground. Husserl’s phenomenology lends no support to Thomist realism such as we find in Gilson and Maritain. It is indeed incompatible with it.

The Commonweal article under critique is here.

The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation

Substack latest.

This entry continues the line of thought in Is Classical Theism a Type of Idealism?

God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God’s creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind. The extreme case of this is God’s free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite yet autonomous free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality. God creates potential rebels. He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source himself even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway. He creates Lucifer who became the father of all perversity. The “Father of lights” (James 1:17) creates the father of lies.

God creates and sustains, moment by moment, other minds, like unto his own, made in his image, who are yet radically other in their inwardness and freedom. He creates subjects who exist in their own right and not merely as objects of divine thought. How is this conceivable?

Is Classical Theism a Type of Idealism?

I return an affirmative answer in my latest Substack entry. Opening two paragraphs:

If God creates ex nihilo, and everything concrete other than God is created by God, and God is a pure spirit, then one type of metaphysical realism can be excluded at the outset. This type of realism asserts that there are radically transcendent uncreated concrete things other than God. ‘Radically transcendent’ means ‘transcendent of any mind, finite or infinite.’ On this view, radically transcendent items exist and have most of their properties independently of any mind, including the divine mind. Call this realism-1. We could also call it extreme metaphysical realism.

No classical theist could be a realist-1. For on classical theism, everything other than God is created by God, created out of nothing, mind you, and not out of Avicennian mere possibles or any cognate sort of item. God creates out of nothing, not out of possibles. (’Out of nothing’ is a privative expression that means ‘not out of something.’ It does not mean ‘out of something called nothing.’) We also note that on classical theism God is not merely an originating cause of things other than himself, but a continuing cause that keeps these things in existence moment-by-moment. He is not a mere cosmic starter-upper. That would be deism, not classical theism. Whom do I have in mind? Thomas Aquinas for one. But I am not interested in playing the exegete with respect to his texts. I am thinking things through for myself. Unlike the mere scholar, a philosopher thinks for himself.

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

Berkeley’s Unperceived Table

Ed writes,

A question: if Berkeley is out of his study, and says ‘My table is in my study’, is he speaking truly or falsely? If truly, then ‘my table’ and ‘my study’ must have referents, and the referents must stand in the relation ‘in’. But neither referent is perceived, so neither exists, according to B’s first definition of ‘exist’, and so ‘My table is in my study’ is false. According to B’s second (counterfactual) definition of ‘exist’, the statement can be true, but then we have to drop the first definition. Then what else do we lose of B’s philosophical system?

For example, is the statement ‘the table in my study is brown’ true or false, given that if B were seeing the table, he would perceive it to have the sensible quality of brown, and given that B is now outside his study? If true, then he must concede that the referent of ‘the table in my study’ is bearing the visible quality signified by ‘brown’, and so concede that everything he says about the impossibility of material substance is wrong, e.g. in §9 of the Treatise.

Indeed the whole project of Idealism collapses once we allow the possibility of language, and thence the possibility of successfully referring to objects and states of affairs that are not perceived.

My valued interlocutor is being a bit quick here. Let's sift through this carefully starting with definitions of 'exist(s)' either found in or suggested by a charitable reading of Berkeley's writings.

D1. X exists =_df x is being perceived. (Esse est percipi.)

D2. X exists =_df x is such that, were a perceiver P on the scene, P would perceive x.

D3. X exists =_df either x is being perceived or x is such that, were a perceiver P on the scene, P would perceive x.

(D3) is the disjunction of (D1) and (D2). It is suggested by this passage:

The table I write on, I say, exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed, meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it. (PHK 3, quoted here)

God would be the best candidate for 'some other spirit.' The author of the SEP entry, Lisa Downing, writes,

If the other spirit in question is God, an omnipresent being, then perhaps his perception can be used to guarantee a completely continuous existence to every physical object. In the Three Dialogues, Berkeley very clearly invokes God in this context. Interestingly, whereas in the Principles, as we have seen above, he argued that God must exist in order to cause our ideas of sense, in the Dialogues (212, 214–5) he argues that our ideas must exist in God when not perceived by us.^[20] If our ideas exist in God, then they presumably exist continuously. Indeed, they must exist continuously, since standard Christian doctrine dictates that God is unchanging.

There is much more to it than this, of course, but what I have said suffices to neutralize Ed's objection. He thinks he has refuted Berkeleyan idealism. He has done no such thing. He ignores (D3).

I must also object to Ed's apparent identification of idealism with Berkeleyan idealism. Ed is being unduly insular. A little to the East of where he lives there is this land mass called The Continent where other forms of idealism have been known to thrive.

I am also puzzled by Ed's talk of phrases like 'my table' needing referents when he himself denies (in his book) that there is extra-linguistic reference and affirms that all reference is intra-linguistic. As I read him, Ed is a linguistic idealist. Linguistic idealism, however, is by my lights much less credible than Berkeleyan idealism.

Can one see that one is not a brain-in-a-vat?

This is a repost from 21 December 2009, slightly emended. I've added a clarifying addendum.

…………………………..

John Greco, How to Reid Moore:

So how does one know that one is not a brain in a vat, or that one is not deceived by an evil demon? Moore and Reid are for the most part silent on this issue. But a natural extension of their view is that one knows it by perceiving it. In other words, I know that I am not a brain in a vat because I can see that I am not. [. . .] Just as I can perceive that some animal is not a dog, one might think, I can perceive that I am not a brain in a vat. (21)

Really?

A bobcat just walked past my study window. I see that the critter is a bobcat, and seeing that it is a bobcat, I see that it is not a dog, or a deer or a javelina. So far, so good. But then John Greco comes along and tells me that in the same sense of 'see' — the ordinary visual-perceptual sense — I can see that I am not a brain-in-a-vat, a BIV. But 'surely' one cannot see or otherwise perceive such a fact. Or so I will argue.

Perception: An Inconsistent Triad

London Ed writes,

I am making great progress on the perception book. I have borrowed your idea of an aporia, which I use to illustrate the central problem of perception:

(1) Transparency: This is the surface of my desk.

(2) Continuity: When I shut my eyes, the surface of my desk does not cease to exist

(3) Discontinuity: When I shut my eyes, this ceases to exist

Here is how I 'see' it. The problem concerns the nature and status of the referent of the demonstrative pronoun 'this' when uttered by a person as he looks at a physical object such as a desk and says, 'This is the surface of my desk.' To what, exactly, does 'this' refer? There are two main possibilities. Roughly, either 'this' refers to something physical that exists in itself or it refers to something non-physical or mental that does not exist in itself.

P1. The referent of the pronoun is a proper physical part of a physical thing that exists whether or not any person is looking at it. (Note that if the thing exists whether or not perceived, then so do its parts.)

P2. The referent of the pronoun is not a physical part of the desk but an item that exists only as a correlate of the act of visual awareness of the person who is looking at the desk at a given time. This correlate is an epistemic intermediary that has (or encodes) all and only the properties of the desk the person has before his mind at the time of his perceiving.

On (P1), the solution to the aporetic triad is by rejecting (3) while accepting (1) and (2). On (P2), the solution is by rejecting (2) while accepting (1) and (3)

I assume that Ed will plump for (P1). That makes Ed a kind of direct realist. The other type of view can be developed in a realist way as a type of indirect realism or in an idealist way. But no more about that for now.

Well, why not be a direct realist? Are there any considerations that speak against it?

Philosophically Salient Senses of ‘See’

This entry is relevant to my ongoing discussion with Dr. Buckner.

It is plain that 'sees' has many senses in English. Of these many senses, some are philosophically salient. Of the philosophical salient senses, two are paramount. Call the one 'existence-entailing.' (EE) Call the other 'existence-neutral.' (EN) On the one, 'sees' is a so-called verb of success. On the other, it isn't, which not to say that it is a 'verb of failure.'

EE: Necessarily, if subject S sees x, then x exists.

EN: Possibly, subject S sees x, but it is not the case that x exists.

Now one question is whether both senses of 'see' can be found in ordinary English. The answer is yes. "I know that feral cat still exists; I just now saw him" illustrates the first. "You look like you've just seen a ghost" illustrates the second. If I know that the feral cat exists on the basis of seeing him, then 'sees' (or a cognate thereof) is being used in the (EE) sense as a 'verb of success.' If ghosts do not exist, as I am assuming, then one who sees a ghost literally sees something that does not exist. We call this second sense of 'sees' the phenomenological sense.

So far, I don't think I've said anything controversial. I have simply pointed out two different senses and thus two different uses of 'sees' in ordinary, non-philosophical English.

We advance to a philosophical question, and embroil ourselves in controversy, when we ask whether, corresponding to the existence-neutral sense of 'sees,' there is a type of seeing, a type of seeing that does not entail the existence of the object seen. One might grant that there is a legitimate use of 'sees' (or a cognate thereof) in English according to which what is seen does not exist without granting that in reality there is a type of seeing that is the seeing of the nonexistent.

One might insist that all seeing is the seeing of what exists, and that one cannot literally see what does not exist. So, assuming that there are no ghosts, one cannot see a ghost. As Joe Biden might say, "Come on man, you can't see what ain't there!"

But suppose a sincere, frightened person reports that she has seen a ghost of such-and-such a ghastly description. Because of the behavioral evidence, you cannot reasonably deny that the person has had an experience, and indeed an object-directed (intentional) experience. You cannot deny, given her fear-indicating behavior, verbal and non-verbal, that she had a visual experience as of something ghastly. You cannot reasonably say, "Because there are no ghosts, your experience had no object." For it did have an object, indeed a material (albeit nonexistent) object having various ghastly properties. After all, she saw something, not nothing. Not only that, she saw something quite definite with definite properties. She didn't see Casper the Friendly Ghost but a ghastly ghost.

You might object, "No, she merely thought she saw something." But there was no thinking or doubting or considering going on; she saw something and it scared the crap out of her.

This example suggests that we sometimes literally see what does not exist, and that seeing therefore does not entail the existence of that which is seen. If this is right, then the epistemologically primary sense of 'see' is given by (EN) supra. If so, then problems arise for realism about the external world. For example, how do I know that the tree I see in good light (etc.) exists in itself whether or not I or anyone see it?

Henessey's response: "I grant the reality of her experience, with the reservation that it was not an experience based in vision, but one with a basis in imagination, imagination as distinguished from vision." The point, I take it, is that what we have in my example of a person claiming to see a ghost is not a genuine case of seeing, of visual perception, but a case of imagining. The terrified person imagined a ghost; she did not see one.

I think Hennessey's response gets the phenomenology wrong. Imagination and perception are phenomenologically different. For one thing, what we imagine is up to us: we are free to imagine almost anything we want; what we perceive, however, is not up to us. When Ebeneezer Scrooge saw the ghost of Marley, he tried to dismiss the apparition as "a bit of bad beef, a blot of mustard, a fragment of an underdone potato," but he found he could not. Marley: "Do you believe in me or not?" Scrooge: "I do, I must!" This exchange brings out nicely what C. S. Peirce called the compulsive character of perception. Imagination is not like this at all. Whether or not Scrooge saw Marley, he did not imagine him for the reason that the object of his experience was not under the control of his will.

The fact that what one imagines does not exist is not a good reason to to assimilate perception of what may or may not exist to imagination.

Second, if a subject imagines x, then it follows that x does not exist. Everything imagined is nonexistent. But it is not the case that if a subject perceives x, then x does not exist. Perception either entails the existence of the object perceived, or is consistent with both the existence and the nonexistence of the object perceived.

Third, one knows the identity of an object of imagination simply by willing the object in question. The subject creates the identity so that there can be no question of re-identifying or re-cognizing an object of imagination. But perception is not like this at all. In perception there is re-identification and recognition. Scrooge did not imagine Marley's ghost for the reason that he was able to identify and re-identify the ghost as it changed positions in Scrooge's chamber. So even if you balk at admitting that Scrooge saw Marley's ghost, you ought to admit that he wasn't imaging him.

I conclude that Hennessey has not refuted my example. To see a ghost is not to imagine a ghost, even if there aren't any. Besides, one can imagine a ghost without having the experience that one reports when one sincerely states that one has seen a ghost. Whether or not this experience is perception, it surely is not imagination.

But I admit that this is a very murky topic!

Notes on Idealism, Realism, Frege, and Prichard

Ed Buckner sent me a pdf the first couple pages of which I reproduce below. Bibliographical data here. Emphases added. My commentary is in blue.

…………………………………….

Twentieth Century Oxford Realism

Mark Eli Kalderon and Charles Travis

1 Introduction

This is a story of roughly a century of Oxford philosophy told by two outsiders.
Neither of us has ever either studied or taught there. Nor are we specially privy to
some oral tradition. Our story is based on texts. It is, moreover, a very brief, and
very highly selective, story. We mean to trace the unfolding, across roughly the
last century, of one particular line of thought—a sort of anti-idealism, and also a
sort of anti-empiricism. By focussing in this way we will, inevitably, omit, or give
short shrift to, more than one more than worthwhile Oxford philosopher. We will
mention a few counter-currents to the main flow of 20th century Oxford thought.
But much must be omitted entirely.

Our story begins with a turn away from idealism. Frege’s case against idealism, so far as it exists in print, was made, for the most part, between 1893 (in the preface to Grundgesetze volume 1) and 1918-1919 (in “Der Gedanke”). Within that same time span, at Oxford, John Cook Wilson, and his student, H.A. Prichard, developed, independently, their own case against idealism (and for what might
plausibly be called—and they themselves regarded as—a form of “realism”). Because of the way in which Cook Wilson left a written legacy it is difficult at best to give exact dates for the various components of this view. But the main ideas were probably in place by 1904, certainly before 1909, which marked the publication of Prichard’s beautiful study, “Kant’s Theory of Knowledge”. It is also quite probably seriously misleading to suggest that either Cook Wilson or Prichard produced a uniform corpus from the whole of their career—uniform either in content or in quality. But if we select the brightest spots, we find a view which overlaps with Frege’s at most key points, and which continued to be unfolded in the main lines of thought at Oxford for the rest of the century.

Frege’s main brief against idealism could be put this way: It placed the scope of experience (or awareness) outside of the scope of judgement. In doing that, it left us nothing to judge about. A central question about perception is: How can it make the world bear on what one is to think—how can it give me what are then my reasons for thinking things one way or another? The idealist answer to that, Frege showed, would have to be, “It cannot”.

BV: This is not at all clear. An example would be nice. Let me supply one. I see a tree. The seeing is a perceiving and this perceiving is a mental state of me, the perceiver. I see that the tree is green. Seeing that the tree is green I come to think that the tree is "one way or another," e.g., green as opposed to not green. The authors seem to be asking the following question: How can perceiving something — a tree in my example — make the world give me the perceiver a reason for thinking the tree to be "one way or another," green for example?

This is a very strange question, one that has no clear sense. Or at least I don't know what the authors are asking. If the question has no clear sense, then the supposedly idealist answer has no clear sense either. The authors are presumably defending some sort of realism about the objects of sense perception. If so, then it is not my perceiving that makes the world do anything. Their question ought to be: how do physical things in the external world, things that exist and have (most of) the properties they have independently of my or anyone's perceivings, make our perceivings of these things have the content that they in fact have? How does the green tree over there bring it about that I am now having an experience as of a green tree? Or is this perhaps the very question the authors are trying to ask their convoluted way?

But let's read on.

What, in Frege’s terms, “belongs to the contents of my consciousness”—what, for its presence needs someone to be aware of it, where, further, that someone must be me—cannot, just in being as it is, be what might be held, truly, to be thus and so. (This is one point Prichard retained throughout his career, and which, later on, he directed against others who he termed “sense-datum theorists”. It is also a point Cook Wilson directed, around 1904, against Stout (see section 4).

BV: There is a solid point here, but it needs to be put clearly. The tree is in space and is green. No content of consciousness is in space or is green. Therefore, the tree is not a content of consciousness. This syllogism refutes a form of subjective or psychological idealism. But who holds it? Certainly not Kant. But let's leave Kant out of the discussion for now. More important than Koenigsbergian exegesis is the deep and fascinating question of idealism versus realism.

What I said in the preceding paragraph needs a bit of refining. If I see a tree, then I am aware of something. That awareness-of or consciousness-of is an episode in my conscious, mental life. So it is appropriately referred to as a 'content of consciousness.' Now consider that awareness-of just as such. (Of course, you cannot consider my awareness, but you can consider your own similar but numerically different awareness.) Is it green? No. It is colorless. The awareness-of, as such, is not the sort of 'thing' that could have a color.

The awareness of green is not a green awareness. If it were green it would have to be extended in space. No color without extension. But the awareness-of, though it is in time, is not in space. So here we have a content of consciousness that is neither colored nor in space.

We should all will agree, then, that a perceiving as of a green tree is not a green perceiving. This is so even if the perceiving is not merely as of the tree, but of it in the sense that implies that there exists a tree that is being perceived. Again, all colors are extended in space. But no mental act is extended in space. Ergo, no mental act is colored. A fortiori if mental acts are as G. E. Moore once said, "diaphanous."

What about the content of a mental act? It too is a 'content of consciousness.' Macbeth had an hallucinatory visual experience as of a dagger. The dagger-appearance is what I am now calling the content. It is clearly distinct (though not separable) from the hallucinatory experiencing. The hallucinatory act/experiencing is not spatially extended. What about the dagger-appearance? Did it not seem extended to Macbeth? Don't pink rats look to be extended in space by that drunks who hallucinate them? Yes they do. What we can say here is that while the dagger-appearance is phenomenologically extended, it is not extended in objective space.

But there is a deeper reason for opposing subjective idealism. This I believe to be the solid point that Prichard makes.

If I judge a tree to be green, I judge it to be green whether or not I or anyone so judge it. So if the tree is green, it is green in itself whether or not there are any perceivers. The point is quite general: to judge of anything x that it is F is to judge that it is F in itself whether or not there are any judgers. It doesn't matter whether the judgment is true or false: a judgment that x is F purports to lay bare the way things are independently of judgers, whether or not in fact things are as the judgment states.

So if I say that the perceiving is green, I thereby commit myself to saying that the perceiving is green in itself whether or not there are any perceivers. But it is contradictory to maintain that something that can exist only as a content of consciousness, and thus cannot exist in itself, can also exist in itself apart from any consciousness.

What I am calling 'the solid point 'puts paid to any form of idealism that identifies physical objects with contents of consciousness if those contents exist only in contingent minded organisms such as human animals. If there exists a tree that I perceive, it is as little in my consciousness as it is inside my head. But please note that the point just made presupposes the reality of the external world and thus begs the question against those forms of idealism that avoid the mistakes that subjective/psychological idealists make.

So, in particular, it was crucial to Frege that a thought could not be an idea (“Vorstellung”), in the sense of “idea” in which to be one is to belong to someone’s consciousness. The positive sides of these coins are: all there is for us to judge about—all there is which, in being as it is might be a way we could judge it to be—is that environment we all jointly inhabit; to be a thought is, intrinsically, to be sharable and communicable. All these are central points in Cook Wilson’s, and Prichard’s, Oxford realism. So, as they both held (early in the century), perception must afford awareness of, and relate us to, objects in our cohabited environment.

BV: The authors seem to be saying that it is not about ideas, Vorstellungen, contents of consciousness, etc. that we make judgments, but about the common physical environment in which we human animals live. This remains vague, however, if we aren't told what "the environment" is. Do they mean particular things in the physical world, or are they referring to the physical world as a whole? And while it is true that thoughts (either Frege's Gedanken or something very much like them) are communicable and thus sharable — unlike contents of consciousness that are numerically different for numerically different people — what does this have to do with "the environment"? Fregean and Frege-like thoughts are abstract objects; hence, not to be found in the physical "environment." Of course, for Frege, thoughts/propositions are not contents of consciousness; it does not follow, however, they are in the "environment." There are in Frege's third realm, that of abstracta. (I promise to avoid tasteless jokes about the supposedly anti-Semitic Fege and the Third Reich.)

There is another point which Prichard, at least, shared with Frege. As Prichard
put it:

There seems to be no way of distinguishing perception and conception
as the apprehension of different realities except as the apprehension
of the individual and the universal respectively. Distinguished in this
way, the faculty of perception is that in virtue of which we apprehend
the individual, and the faculty of conception is that power of reflection
in virtue of which a universal is made the explicit object of thought.
(Prichard, 1909, 44)

Compare Frege:

A thought always contains something which reaches out beyond the
particular case, by means of which it presents this to consciousness as
falling under some given generality. (1882: Kernsatz 4) But don’t we see that the sun has set? And don’t we also thereby see that this is true? That the sun has set is no object which emits rays which arrive in our eyes, is no visible thing like the sun itself. That the sun has set is recognized as true on the basis of sensory input. (1918: 64)

For the sun to have set is a way for things to be; that it has set is the way things are according to a certain thought. A way for things to be is a generality, instanced
by things being as they are (where the sun has just set). Recognizing its instancing
is recognizing the truth of a certain thought; an exercise of a faculty of thought.

By contrast, what instances a way for things to be, what makes for that thought’s
truth, does not itself have that generality Frege points to in a thought—any more
than, on a different level, which Frege calls “Bedeutung”, what falls under a (first-level) concept might be the sort of thing things fall under. What perception affords is awareness of the sort of thing that instances a way for things to be. Perception’s role is thus, for Frege, as for Prichard, to bring the particular, or individual, in view—so as, in a favorable case, to make recognizable its instancing (some of) the ways for things to be it does. The distinction Prichard points to here is as fundamental both to him and to Frege as is, for Frege, the distinction between objects and concepts.

BV: Now things are now getting interestingly 'aporetic.' How do I know that the sun has set? I see the sun, and I see the horizon, but I don't literally see (with my eyes) that the sun has set. If the italicized words pick out an entity, it is an invisible one. As Frege says, "That the sun has set is no object that emits rays . . . ."

How do I know that the tree is green? I see the tree, and I see green at the tree, but I don't see that the tree is green. Why not? Well, 'That tree is green' is logically equivalent to 'That green tree exists.' So if I can see that the tree is green, then I can see that the green tree exists. But existence is not empirically detectable. I can sense green, but I cannot sense existence. So I cannot see that the green tree exists. Therefore, I cannot see that the tree is green. Existence and property-possession are invisible. More generally, they are insensible, and not because of our sensory limitations, but because existence and property-possession are not empirically detectable by any manner of critter or by any device.

And yet I know that the tree is green and I know that the sun has set. But how? Frege's answer, "on the basis of sensory input" is lame. Sure, there has to be sensory input for me to know what I know in these cases, but how does it work? Such input is necessary, but it cannot be sufficient. Here is what Frege says in Der Gedanke:

Das Haben von Sinneseindruecken ist zwar noetig zum Sehen der Dinge, aber nicht hinreichend. Was noch hinzukommen muss, ist nichts Sinnliches. (Logische Untersuchungen, 51)

To be sure, the having of sensory impressions is necessary for seeing things, but not sufficient. What yet must be added is nothing sensory.

Necessary, because seeing (with the eyes) is a sensory function that cannot occur without sensory data, which is to say, sensory givenness, sensory input. Not sufficient, because what I need to know to know that that the tree is green, is that the physical individual/object does in reality instantiate the concept/property. The problem is that I cannot see the copulative linkage in the green tree any more than I can see the existence of the green tree. For again, to see either the linkage or the existence I would have to be able to sense them when there is no sensory awareness of either.

What Frege adds that is not sensory is the thought/proposition. But this item is off by itself in a platonic topos ouranios. How on Earth or in Plato's Heaven can Fregean thoughts avail anything for the solution of our problem? To know that the tree is green in reality I need to know the sublunary unity of thing and property here below. How is that knowledge aided by the positing of a 'ouranic' item, the thought/proposition, whose subject constituent is an abstract item as abstract as the thought itself? The Fregean thought brings together a subject-constituent, a sense, with a predicate-constituent, also a sense. It does not bring together the concrete tree and its properties.

What the authors say above on behalf of Frege and Prichard is thus no answer at all. We are told, "Perception’s role is thus, for Frege, as for Prichard, to bring the particular, or individual, in view—so as, in a favorable case, to make recognizable its instancing (some of) the ways for things to be it does." Are they joking? This glides right past the problem. What I need to know to know that the tree is green is the linkage or togetherness of individual and property in the thing in the external world. The thing is a this-such or a something-which. You cannot split the this from the such. You cannot split perception from conception assigning to the first the job of supplying bare individuals and assigning to the second the job of providing universals. For the problem, again, is 'methectical,' a problem of methexis: how do sensory individual and intelligible universal meet to form the sublunary this-such?

Kant has an answer (whatever you think of it): the synthesis of individual and property/concept is achieved by the transcendental unity of apperception!

I will have more to say about this in a later post.

Against H. A. Prichard and the ‘Standard Picture’ of Kant

In an earlier post, drawing on the work of Henry E. Allison, I wrote:

The standard picture opens Kant to the devastating objection that by limiting knowledge to appearances construed as mental contents he makes knowledge impossible when his stated aim is to justify the objective knowledge of nature and oppose Humean skepticism. Allison reports that Prichard "construes Kant's distinction between appearances and things in themselves in terms of the classic example of perceptual illusion: the straight stick that appears bent to an observer when it is immersed in water." (p. 6) But then knowledge is rendered impossible, and Kant is reduced to absurdity.

Anyone who studies Kant in depth and in context and with an open mind should be able to see that his transcendental idealism is not intended as a subjective idealism. A related mistake is to think that subjective idealism is the only kind of idealism. The "standard picture" is fundamentally mistaken. Appearances (Erscheinungen) for Kant are not the private data of particular minds, and thus not ideas in the Cartesian-Lockean sense, or any other sort of content of a particular mind. Kant distinguishes crucially between Erscheinung and Schein/Apparenz between appearance and illusion/semblance. Because of this distinction, appearances [in the specifically Kantian sense] cannot be assimilated to perceptual illusions in the way Prichard and the "standard picture" try to assimilate them.

In this entry I will expand upon the above by taking a close look at the stretch of text in H.A. Prichard's Kant's Theory of Knowledge (1909) in which he discusses the straight stick that appears bent when immersed in water. This is a classical example of perceptual illusion. It illustrates how an appearance (in one sense of the term) may distort reality (in one sense of the term). Call the first the A1 sense and the second the R1 sense. My claim, of course, is that this empirical A1-R1 distinction is not the same as Kant's distinction between phenomena and things in themselves, and that anyone who, like Prichard, thinks otherwise has simply failed to understand what Kant is maintaining. Kant's distinction between phenomena and things in themselves is the distinction between empirically real, intersubjectively accessible, public, causally interacting things in space and time, on the one hand, and those same things considered apart from the a priori conditions of our sensibility. The Earth and its one natural satellite, the Moon, are examples of phenomena in Kant's sense. Neither is a private, mental item in a particular mind as a modification of such a mind or an item internal to it. The Earth and the Moon are not mental phenomena in any Cartesian, Humean, or Brentanian sense, but empirically real, physical things. But though they are empirically real, they are transcendentally ideal when considered independently of the conditions of our sensibility.

In sum, there are two distinctions. The first is the distinction between private mental contents of particular minds and real things external to such minds. For example, Ed is enjoying a visual experience of his by-now-famous desk. Neither the desk as a whole nor any part of it is literally in Ed's mind, let alone in his head. The desk, like his head and the rest of his body, is in the publicly accessible external world. Now let 'A1' denote Ed's experience/experiencing whereby his desk appears to him, and let 'R1' denote the desk itself which is external to Ed's mind/consciousness. Prichard's mistake is to conflate this A1-R1 distinction with Kant's distinction between phenomena and things in themselves. The R1 of the first distinction is the A2 of Kant's distinction which, again, is the distinction between intersubjectively accessible objects in space and time and those same objects viewed independently of the conditions of our sensibility.

I now turn to Chapter IV of Prichard's book. The chapter is entitled "Phenomena and Things in Themselves." Prichard takes Kant to be saying that spatial and temporal relations are "relations which belong to things only as perceived." (p. 79.) Prichard goes on to say, "The thought of a property or a relation that belongs to things as perceived involves a contradiction." He brings up the submerged stick which is in reality straight, but appears to a perceiver as bent. Prichard then makes the unexceptionable point that

. . . the assertion that something is so and so implies that it is so and so in itself, whether it be perceived or not, and therefore the assertion that something is so and so to us as perceiving, though not in itself, is a contradiction in terms.

This is certainly true. After I explain why it is true, I will explain why it has nothing to do with Kant. One cannot assert of anything x that it is F without thereby asserting that x is F in reality. What one asserts to be the case one asserts to be the case whether or not anyone asserts it. (Of course, it doesn't follow that what one asserts to be the case is the case. All that follows is that what one asserts to be the case purports to be the case independently of anyone's act of assertion. Saying this I am merely unpacking the concept of assertion.) So if I assert of x that it is bent, then I assert that x is bent in itself or in reality whether or not there are any assertors or perceivers. To assert that x is bent is to assert that a mind-independent item is bent. (Of course, it does not follow that there is a mind-independent item that is bent; all that follows is that if some item is bent or straight or has any property, then it is mind-independent.) Therefore, if I assert of an illusory appearance that it is bent, then I fall into contradiction. For what I am then asserting is that something that is mind-dependent — because it is illusory — is not mind-dependent but exists in reality.

This is what I take Prichard to be maintaining in the passage quoted. Thus charitably interpreted, what he is saying is (by my lights) true. But what does this have to do with Kant? Kant is not not talking about private mental items internal to particular minds such as an illusory appearance as of a bent stick. He is not saying of such an appearance (Apparenz) or semblance (Schein) that it is the subject of spatial and temporal relations. If he were, then he would stand refuted by Prichard's unexceptionable point. But it strains credulity to think that a great philosopher could blunder so badly.

Note also that to read Kant as if his phenomena (Erscheinungen) in space and time are private mental phenomena is to impute to him the sophomoric absurdity that mental data which are unextended are extended as they must be if they stand in physical relations. Such an imputation would be exegetically uncharitable in excelsis.

Finally, if space and time and everything in it is mental in Prichard's sense, and internal to particular minds like ours, then the upshot would be an utterly absurd form of subjective idealism.

…………………………………….

Further tangential ruminations.

How do I know that the visual datum is an illusory appearance? If I know that what appears to me — the immersed-stick visual datum — is illusory, then I know that what appears to me cannot be bent or straight or have any spatial property. For what is illusory does not exist, and what does not exist cannot have properties. But how do I know that the visual datum does not exist?

That is precisely what I don't know in the cases of perceptual illusion in which I am really fooled — unlike the classic stick case above that fools no adult. No adult is 'taken in' by acquatic refraction phenomena. "Damn that boatman! He gave me a bent oar!" Here is a real-life example.

Hiking in twilight, I experience a visual datum as of a rattlesnake. I jump back and say to my partner, "There's a rattler on the trail." I assert the visual datum to be a rattler, which of course implies that in reality there is a rattler. (And that I jumped back shows that my assertion was sincere.) A closer look, however, shows that I mistook a tree root for a snake. What I initially saw (in the phenomenological sense of 'see') was only an illusory appearance. If I then say that the illusory appearance is a rattler or is venomous, etc. then I fall into contradiction. The point is that illusory appearances do not exist and therefore cannot have properties: they cannot be bent or straight or venomous or of the species crotalus atrox, etc.

Berkeleyan and Kantian Idealism: How Do They Differ?

The good bishop, as Kant called him, held that reality is exhausted by "spirits" and their ideas. Thus on Berkeley's scheme everything is either a spiritual substance or mind, whether finite or infinite (God), or else an idea 'in' a mind. Ideas are thus modes or modifications of minds. As such they do not exist independently of minds. That's what 'in' conveys. If everything is either a mind or an idea in a mind, then bodies are not substances given that a substance is an entity capable of independent existence. Berkeley's ontology is thus a one (type of) substance ontology. This makes for a contrast with Descartes' dualism of substances, thinking and extended.

Now the gross facts are not in dispute and no (sane) philosopher is in the business of denying them. So every sane person will agree that there are rocks and trees, tables and turnips. You haven't understood Berkeley if you think that he is an eliminativist about such things. That is why you cannot refute him by kicking a stone. Anyone who thinks that he can be so refuted is utterly bereft of philosophical aptitude. The question is not whether there are bodies, trees and such; the question is what they are, and what the good bishop is telling us is that they are coherent, cohesive, bundles of ideas. Trees and such exist alright; it's just that their esse est percipi, their being/existence is (identically) their being perceived by some spirit.

The standard picture assimilates Kant to Berkeley, as I wrote earlier:

P.F. Strawson and H. A. Prichard are exponents of this reading along with many others in the Anglosphere. The standard picture makes of Kant an inconsistent Berkeley who limits knowledge to appearances, these being understood as "mere representations" (blosse Vorstellungen), while at the same time positing an unknowable realm of things in themselves. Mere representations are assimilated to Berkeleian ideas so that when Kant states that we know only appearances, what he is telling us is that we know only the contents of our minds.

The standard picture shows a failure to grasp what Kant intends with his transcendental idealism. (Note, however, that whether Kant achieves what he intends is an entirely different question.) When I taught Kant in the 1980s I used the following three-level schema in order to clarify what Kant means by 'appearance' (Erscheinung) when he is using it in his special transcendentally idealist sense. There are at least three senses of 'appearance' in Kant. We may call them the manifest, the scientific, and the transcendental. The empirical embraces both the manifest and the scientific and stands opposed to the transcendental. Correspondingly, there are three senses of 'reality,' the manifest, the scientific, and the transcendental.

Level One: We start with the ordinary 'manifest image' appearance-reality distinction. One day I was hiking Jacob's Crosscut along the base of Superstition Mountain. Off in the brush I espied what appeared to be some big black dogs. In reality, however, they were black bears as a closer look revealed. This is a familiar sort of case. An initial appearance is shown to be a perceptual mistake, one correctable and in this case corrected by further perception. The initial, non-veridical appearance was not nothing, but its 'reality' was merely intra-mental, a momentary private datum not amenable to public verification, or even ongoing private verification. It was a mere seeming or semblance, an instance of what Kant calls Schein and distinguishes from Erscheinung. Kantian appearances are not private mental data.

Let 'A1' denote an appearance at Level One, and 'R1' a reality or real thing at Level One. An A1 may or may not be veridical. If I jump back from what I take to be a snake but is in reality a tree root, then the A1 is non-veridical. But when I see a tree root and my partner confirms that what I saw was a tree root, then my A1 and his numerically different A1 are veridical. So an A1 need not be illusory. Every A1 purports to be of or about an R1, but the purport does not always 'pan out.'

At A 45 = B63, Kant gives his rainbow example. He tells us that a rainbow may be called a mere appearance and the rain the thing in itself. This is an example of the Level One appearance-reality distinction. In that same obscure passage, the careful reader can discern the Level Three appearance-reality distinction. For he tells us that the rain drops, together with such primary qualities as shape, are themselves appearances of a "transcendental object" that "remains unknown to us." It follows that the rainbow is an appearance of an appearance. The empirical object (rain water refracting sunlight) that is the reality behind the rainbow is itself an appearance of something that does not appear to us as it is in itself.

Level Two. We now wheel the primary versus secondary quality distinction onto the field. An R1 at Level One has both primary and secondary qualities. The tree I see when I look out my window has both primary and secondary qualities. To mention just two of its primary qualities, it has a size and a shape. To mention just one of its secondary qualities it is green in color. At Level Two, R1 is stripped of its secondary qualities, and left with its primary qualities alone. We are now operating within the 'scientific image.' What was R1 at Level One is now A2 at Level Two. The real extra-mental tree of Level One is now taken to be an appearance of a deeper reality R2 at Level Two. Thus:

A1 ——————-> R1

(R1 = A2) ——————–> R2

A1 is a representation 'in' the mind of a psychophysical being, a human animal for example. The arrows stand for the representing relation. There is difference between the two relations depicted, but I cannot go into this now. What A1 represents (or presents, stellt vor) is an empirical object R1 endowed with primary and secondary qualities. The secondary qualities are perceived at the object even though, at Level Two, they are understood to be merely relational properties of R2 due to the affection (causal impact) of the thing R2 upon the sensory receptors of the psychophysical subject. Thus R2 in itself is not colored, etc. But R2 is in space and possesses a location, a size, a shape, a volume, etc. It is either at rest or in motion which implies the possibility of translation and rotation, etc. which motions bring objective time into the picture.

Level Three. At this level we arrive at the phenomenon or appearance in the specifically Kantian sense. Space and time (and thus all primary qualities) are now stripped from R2 and made out to be a priori forms (or schematizations of such forms), forms that characterize the standpoint of an ectypal intellect, one whose sole mode of intuition (Anschauung) is sensible and thus receptive unlike the intellectual and thus non-sensible mode of intuition of the archetypal intellect whose intuition is creative of its objects. What exactly this standpoint of the ectypal is is a vexing question. We can say this much with assurance: it is nothing internal to the mind of a psychophysical being such as a human animal, nor is it necessarily dependent on the existence of psychophysical beings. Extending the above diagram:

(R1 = A2) ——————–> R2

(R2 = A3) ———————–> R3 (negative noumenon)

(R2 = A3) is an intersubjective object. It is the objective correlate of the epistemic standpoint of an ectypal intellect. Nature for Kant is the sum-total of all such phenomena as intersubjective objects. The objectivity of R3, by contrast, is not intersubjective but absolute as befits the objective correlate of the absolute mind of the archetypal intellect, "which all men call God," to adapt a phrase from Aquinas.

The above schema leaves us with a lot of thorny questions. One such concerns double affection (Erich Adickes). Do both R3 and R2 cause sensations in psychophysical beings?

The main point, however, it is that no one who understands what Kant is trying to do could possibly assimilate his idealism to Berkeley's. There is much more to be said.

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)

What 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.

For 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.

The Standard Picture of Kant’s Idealism

This entry draws on Henry E. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, Yale University Press, 1983. "According to the standard picture, Kant's transcendental idealism is a metaphysical theory that affirms the unknowability of the 'real' (things in themselves) and relegates knowledge to the purely subjective realm of representations (appearances)." (p. 3) P.F. Strawson and H. A. Prichard are exponents of this reading along with many others in the Anglosphere. The standard picture makes of Kant an inconsistent Berkeley who limits knowledge to appearances, these being understood as "mere representations" (blosse Vorstellungen), while at the same time positing an unknowable realm of things in themselves. Mere representations are assimilated to Berkeleian ideas so that when Kant states that we know only appearances, what he is telling us is that we know only the contents of our minds.

The standard picture opens Kant to the devastating objection that by limiting knowledge to appearances construed as mental contents he makes knowledge impossible when his stated aim was to justify the objective knowledge of nature and oppose Humean skepticism. Allison reports that Prichard "construes Kant's distinction between appearances and things in themselves in terms of the classic example of perceptual illusion: the straight stick that appears bent to an observer when it is immersed in water." (p. 6) But then knowledge is rendered impossible, and Kant is reduced to absurdity.

Anyone who studies Kant in depth and in context and with an open mind should be able to see that his transcendental idealism is not intended as a subjective idealism. A related mistake is to think that subjective idealism is the only kind of idealism. The "standard picture" is fundamentally mistaken. Appearances (Erscheinungen) for Kant are not the private data of particular minds, and thus not ideas in the Cartesian-Lockean sense, or any other sort of content of a particular mind. Kant distinguishes crucially between Erscheinung and Schein/Apparenz between appearance and illusion/semblance. Because of this distinction, appearances cannot be assimilated to perceptual illusions in the way Prichard and the "standard picture" try to assimilate them.

For Kant, the world of phenomena or appearances is a world of public, intersubjectively accessible, objects. If you don't understand this you will never understand what Kant is maintaining. So the straight stick lately mentioned is for Kant a phenomenon, a public object, not a private mental item, whereas its seeming bent is an illusory private content of those particular embodied minds who, because of accidental factors, are unable to perceive the stick as it is in empirical reality.

The publicly accessible objects of the outer senses are said to be "empirically real, but transcendentally ideal." To understand this signature Kantian phrase, one needs to understand two distinctions, that between the ideal and the real, and that between the empirical and the transcendental. The ideal is that which is 'inside the mind' and thus mind-dependent whereas the real is that which is 'outside the mind' and thus mind-independent. The inverted commas signal that these phrases are not to be taken spatially.

What is ideal is either empirically ideal or transcendentally ideal. The empirically ideal embraces the "private data of an individual mind." (Allison, p. 6) Included therein are what are normally taken to be mental contents and "ideas in the Cartesian-Lockean sense." The empirically real embraces the totality of public, intersubjectively knowable objects in space and time. In a word, the natural world. Kant's claim that he is an empirical realist, but not an empirical idealist, amounts to the affirmation that that "our experience is not limited to the private domain of our own representations . . . ." (7). It should now be perfectly obvious that Kant is not espousing a subjective idealism.

The planets and indeed everything in nature are empirically real. What then could it mean to say that these objects are transcendentally ideal? It is to say that they are subject to certain "epistemic conditions" — I borrow the phrase from Allison — that make possible our knowledge of them. Kant is clearly committed to there being a set of epistemic conditions without which empirical knowledge of empirically real objects would not be possible. Now in my humble opinion, Kant's theory of these epistemic conditions leaves a lot to be desired and is indeed without one univocal sense. But this is not the issue at present. The issue is solely whether Kant's intent is to affirm a form of subjective idealism. The answer is that he is not. That is not his intent despite the existence of some passages that invite a subjectively-idealist reading. The proof that Kant is not promoting a subjective idealism is that his epistemic conditions, whatever they are, are not psychological or physiological.

A psychological condition is

. . . some mechanism or aspect of the human cognitive apparatus that is appealed to in order to provide a genetic account of a belief or an empirical explanation of why we perceive things in a certain way. [. . .] Custom or habit, as used by Hume in his account of causality, is a prime example of such a psychological condition. As is well known, Kant was insistent in claiming that, although the appeal to such factors may be necessary to explain the origin of our beliefs and perceptions, or even of our knowledge "in the order of time" (der Zeit nach), it cannot account for its objective validity. In Kant's terms it can answer the quaestio facti but not the quaestio juris. The latter is the proper concern of the Critique, and this requires an appeal to epistemic conditions. (Allison, p. 11)

It should now be quite clear that Kant is not promoting a subjective or psychological idealism. His project, or rather a large part of it, is to secure the objectivity of our knowledge of nature in the teeth of Humean skepticism, and to do so without a deus ex machina, without bringing God into the picture as both Descartes and Berkeley do. (The other main part of his project is to show that rationalist metaphysics is not a source of objective knowledge.) Whether Kant succeeds in his project is a further question. I don't believe he does.

But if the question is whether Kant is espousing a subjective or psychological idealism, the answer is a resounding No.

Idealism: Subjective, Objective, Transcendental

This from a recent comment thread:

I think we should all agree on what counts as ‘subjective idealism’. I characterise it as the view that the objects we commonly take to be physical objects are in some way, or wholly, mind dependent. This a reasonable interpretation of Kant.

Let's leave the interpretation of Kant for later. The definition on offer raises questions.

1) Does the 'in some way' render the definition vacuous? I see a tree. The tree exists whether or not I am looking at it. But while I am looking at it, the tree has the relational property of being seen by me. This property depends on my seeing which is a mental act of my mind. (An act is not an action, but an intentional, or object-directed, experience.) So there is a way in which the tree is mind-dependent. It is dependent on me for its being-seen. There is a whole range of such properties. The tree is such that: it is deemed beautiful by me; falsely believed by me to be a mesquite; thought by me to have been planted too close to the house, thought by you to have been planted just the right distance from the house, etc.

Or consider money. What makes a piece of paper or a piece of metal money? Obviously, money to be money, i.e., a means of exchange, depends on minded organisms who so treat it.

2) If, on the other hand, physical things are wholly mind-dependent, then that presumably means that trees and such are dependent on one or more minds for all of their properties, whether essential or accidental, whether monadic or relational, and also dependent on minds for their very existence. This leads ineluctably to the question as to who these minds are. Surely the physical universe in all its unspeakable vastness does not depend on my mind or yours or any finite mind or any collection of finite minds.

So the question arises: has there ever been a subjective idealist (as defined above) among the 'name' philosophers? George Berkeley, you say? But the good bishop brought God into the picture to secure the existence of the tree in the quad when no one was about:

Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd
I am always about in the Quad
And that’s why the tree
continues to be
since observed by, Yours faithfully, God

If the other spirit in question is God, an omnipresent being, then perhaps his perception can be used to guarantee a completely continuous existence to every physical object. In the Three Dialogues, Berkeley very clearly invokes God in this context. Interestingly, whereas in the Principles, as we have seen above, he argued that God must exist in order to cause our ideas of sense, in the Dialogues (212, 214–5) he argues that our ideas must exist in God when not perceived by us.^[20] If our ideas exist in God, then they presumably exist continuously. Indeed, they must exist continuously, since standard Christian doctrine dictates that God is unchanging. (SEP Berkeley entry)

Now if the ultimate subject of subjective idealism is God, who exists of absolute metaphysical necessity and who creates and ongoing sustains in existence everything other than himself, then such an idealism is better described as objective.

Kant's brand of idealism is neither subjective nor objective, but transcendental. What this means I will explain later.