Idealism and Realism – Page 2 – Maverick Philosopher

Ruminations on the Dative of Disclosure

Steven Nemes comments on my long Husserl entry:

[Robert] Sokolowski’s reflections in his Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge University Press, 2000) are also helpful. He maintains that the transcendental ego is not substantially different than the empirical ego. In other words, the transcendental ego is not some different substance from the empirical ego, i.e. the [animated] human body. It is simply this empirical ego considered from the point of view of its being a dative of disclosure, a mihi to whom the world is disclosed.

I don't consider this helpful. To be blunt, I consider it confused.

The claim seems to be that the transcendental ego is just the empirical ego when the latter is considered as that to which the world and the objects in it appear, including that very special object which is one's animated body. This gives rise to the question: Who is doing the considering? That is, who is it by whose consideration the empirical ego acquires the property of being the dative of disclosure?

It has to be me. But it cannot be me qua object, since qua object I am not the dative, but the accusative of disclosure. I am one of the objects that appears. So it has to be me qua subject, qua dative but not accusative of disclosure. And let us be clear that there cannot be a dative without a nominative. There cannot be an appearing-to that is not an appearing-to something. There could, however, be an appearing that is wholly non-relational: things just appear, are revealed, manifest themselves, but not to a subject.* But if there is an appearing-to, then there must be that to which the appearance appears. No dative without a nominative. Either non-relational appearing or we go 'whole hog' with Husserl: ego-cogito-cogitata qua cogitata.

From this is follows that the duality self as subject-self as object is (a) inexpungeable, and (b) located within the ego. The duality cannot be collapsed into an abstract unity, nor can the subjectivity of the subject be referred to someone or something external to the ego. I am a subject intrinsically, not relationally, not in virtue of being considered to be a subject. That is to say: the transcendentality of the ego cannot accrue to it ab extra by the the empirical ego's consideration of itself as transcendental. Hysteron proteron! This puts the cart before the horse:** it is because I am a transcendental ego that I can apperceive myself as a human being in nature. As a human being, I simply lack the power to function transcendentally, to execute acts including acts of apperception.

Of course, there cannot be two egos. The empirical ego is an ego only by analogy (equivocation?) The true ego is the transcendental ego. I am being faithful to Husserl here.

So I don't see that Sokolowski, or rather Sokolowski as presented by Nemes, contributes anything to the solution of the problem I posed in my long post.

________________

*This, I take it, is Heidegger's notion of phenomenon which differs markedly from Husserl's.

**Joke: A philosopher took up residence in a bordello, thinking to enlighten the 'sex workers.' He soon left disillusioned after he found that he could not put Descartes before the whores.

Is Classical Theism a Type of Idealism?

I return an affirmative answer.

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 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. ('Out of nothing' is a privative expression that means 'not out of something.') 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.

Corresponding to realism-1, as its opposite, is idealism-1. This is the view that everything other than God is created ex nihilo by God, who is a pure spirit, and who therefore creates in a purely spiritual way. (To simplify the discussion, let us leave to one side the problem of so-called 'abstract objects.') It seems to me, therefore, that there is a very clear sense in which classical theism is a type of idealism. For on classical theism God brings into existence and keeps in existence every concretum other than himself and he does so by his purely mental/spiritual activity. We could call this type of idealism onto-theological absolute idealism. This is not to say that the entire physical cosmos is a content of the divine mind; it is rather an accusative or intentional object of the divine mind. Though not radically transcendent, it is a transcendence-in-immanence, to borrow some Husserlian phraseology.

So if the universe is expanding, that is not to say that the divine mind or any part thereof is expanding. If an intentional object has a property P it does not follow that a mind trained upon this object, or an act of this mind or a content in this mind has P. Perceiving a blue coffee cup, I have as intentional object something blue; but my mind is not blue, nor is the perceiving blue, nor any mental content that mediates the perceiving. If I perceive or imagine or in any way think of an extended sticky surface, neither my mind nor any part of it becomes extended or sticky. Same with God. He retains his difference from the physical cosmos even while said cosmos is nothing more than his merely intentional object incapable of existing on its own.

Actually, what I just wrote is only an approximation to what I really want to say. For just as God is sui generis, I think the relation between God and the world is also sui generis, and as such not an instance of the intentional relation with which we are familiar in our own mental lives. The former is only analogous to the latter. If one takes the divine transcendence seriously, then God cannot be a being among beings; equally, God's relation to the world cannot be a relation among relations. If we achieve any understanding in these lofty precincts, it is not the sort of understanding one achieves by subsuming a new case under an old pattern; God does not fit any pre-existing pattern, nor does his 'relation' to the world fit any pre-existing pattern. The Absolute cannot be an instance of a type. If we achieve any understanding here it will be via various groping analogies. These analogies can only take us so far. In the end we must confess the infirmity of finite reason in respect of the Absolute that is the Paradigm Existent.

There is also the well-known problem that the intentional 'relation' is not, strictly speaking, a relation. It is at best analogous to a relation. So it looks as if we have a double analogy going here. The God-world relation is analogous to something analogous to a relation in the strict sense. Let me explain.

If x stands in relation R to y, then both x, y exist. But x can stand in the intentional 'relation' to y even if y does not exist in reality. It is a plain fact that we sometimes have very definite thoughts about objects that do not exist, the planet Vulcan, for example. What about the creating/sustaining 'relation'? The holding of this 'relation' as between God and Socrates cannot presuppose the existence in reality of both relata. It presupposes the existence of God no doubt, but if it presupposed the existence of Socrates then there would be no need for the creating/sustaining ex nihilo of Socrates. Creating is a producing, a causing to exist, and indeed moment by moment.

For this reason, creation/sustaining cannot be a relation, strictly speaking. It follows that the createdness of a creature cannot be a relational property, strictly speaking. Now the createdness of a creature is its existence or Being. So the existence of a creature cannot be a relational property thereof; but it is like a relational property thereof.

What I have done so far is argue that classical theism is a form of idealism, a form of idealism that is the opposite of an extreme from of metaphysical realism, the form I referred to as 'realism-1.' If you say that no one has ever held such a form of realism, I will point to Ayn Rand. (See Rand and Peikoff on God and Existence.)

Moderate Realism (Realism-2)

Realism holds with respect to some of the objects of finite minds. Not for merely intentional objects, of course, but for things like trees and mountains and cats and chairs and their parts. They exist and have most of their properties independently of the mental activity of finite minds such as ours. We can call this realism-2.

Kant held that empirical realism and transcendental idealism are logically compatible and he subscribed to both. Now the idealism I urge is not a mere transcendental idealism, but a full-throated onto-theological absolute idealism; but it too is compatible, as far as I can see, with the empirical reality of most of the objects of ectypal intellects such as ours. The divine spontaneity makes them exist and renders them available to the receptivity of ectypal intellects. Realism-2 is consistent with idealism-1.

My thesis, then, is that classical theism is a type of idealism; it is onto-theological absolute idealism. If everything concrete is created originally and sustained ongoingly ex nihilo by a purely spiritual being, an Absolute Mind, and by purely spiritual activity, then this is better denominated 'idealism' than 'realism.' Is that not obvious?

But trouble looms as I will argue in the next entry in this series. And so we will have to consider whether the sui generis, absolutely unique status of God and his relation to the world is good reason to withhold both appellations, 'realism' and 'idealism.'

Is the World Inconceivable Apart from Consciousness?

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. I'm an old Husserl man. 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 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. 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.

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 an intolerable form of idealism.

Ad [3] We are now told that this is not idealism. Very good! 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] To be precise, the world as the 'space of disclosure' is inconceivable without consciousness. But this 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 idealism, which is what Husserl in the end does.

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. As OF the world — genitivus objectivus — consciousness is not IN the world. But the world in this sense IS conceivable apart from consciousness.

And so the confusion remains. The world in the specifically pheomenological 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 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 sartisfactory philosophy cannot ignore this. And so, to end on an autobiographical note, this was one of the motives that lead me beyond phenomenology.

How to Make Your Penis Go Away in the Eyes of the Law: Identify as a Woman!

'Karen' White is a man sporting a healthy, nature-made penis. In 2003 and 2016 'she' put the organ in question to work in the rape of two different women. So of course 'she' ended up in a women's prison where — you guessed it — 'she' sexually assaulted women, not 'women,' women.

Rod Dreher reports and concludes, "The world has gone mad."

No, Rod, not the world, but 'liberals,' 'progressives,' 'leftists,' 'libtards,' whatever you want to call these willfully destructive shitheads who, here in the States, have come to dominate the Democrat Party.

The essence of the lunacy is the denial of reality, in this instance, biological reality.

Philosophy is often dismissed as utterly inconsequential. But the times they have a' changed. We now live in an age in which loony notions once only toyed with in ivory towers are now being implemented to the consequential detriment of real people.

I develop the thought of the last paragraph in When Politics Becomes Like Philosophy.

Creation, Existence, and Extreme Metaphysical Realism

This entry is a continuation of the ruminations in The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation.

Recapitulation

Divine creation ex nihilo is a spiritual/mental 'process' whereby an object of the divine consciousness is posited as non-object, as more than a merely intentional object, and thus as a transcendent reality. By 'transcendent reality' I mean an item that is not immanent to consciousness, whether human or divine, but exists on its own. And by 'consciousness' in this discussion I mean intentional (object-directed) consciousness.

(I deny that every instance of consciousness is a consciousness of something: there are, I claim in agreement with Searle, non-intentional conscious states, states not directed upon an object. See Searle on Non-Intentional Mental States and the good ComBox discussion to which Harry Binswanger and David Gordon contribute. Objectivist Binswanger disagrees with Searle and me. And even if every consciousness is a consciousness of something, it does not follow that every consciousness is a conscious of something that exists.)

So God creates independent reals. What he creates exists on its own, independently, an sich. At the same time, however, what he creates he sustains moment-by-moment. At every moment of its existence the creature depends on the Creator for the whole of its Being, for its existence, its nature, as well as for such transcendental determinations as its intelligibility and goodness. Ens et verum convertuntur is grounded in God's being the ultimate source of all truth,and ens et bonum convertuntur is grounded in God's being The Good itself and thus the ultimate source of all goodness in creatures.

Creatures, then, depend for their whole Being on the Creator according to the classical conception of divine creation that involves both an original bringing-into-existence (creatio originans) and an ongoing conservation of what has been brought into existence (creatio continuans). And yet creatures exist on their own, independently. As I emphasized in the earlier post, finite persons are the prime examples of this independence. And yet how is such independence possible given divine conservation? It appears to issue in a contradiction: the creature exists both independently and dependently.

Does it follow that a creator God does not exist? (It would take a separate post to show that a God worth his salt cannot be conceived along deistic lines.)

Rand to the Rescue?

Thinking about this I recalled Ayn Rand and her notorious axiom, "Existence exists." On a charitable reading it is not the tautology that whatever exists, exists, but expresses an extreme metaphysical realism: whatever exists exists independently of all consciousness, including divine consciousness. But then it follows that God cannot exist, and our problem dissolves. Here, then, is a Rand-inspired argument for the nonexistence of God resting on Rand's axiom of existence.

1) To exist is to exist independently of all consciousness. (The notorious axiom)

2) Things other than God exist. (Obviously true)

Therefore

3) Things other than God exist independently of all consciousness. (Follows from 1 and 2)

4) If God exists, then it is not the case that everything that exists exists independently of all consciousness. (True given the classical conception of God as creator)

Therefore

5) God does not exist. (Follows from 3 and 4 by standard logical rules including modus tollens)

Is there any good reason not to accept the above argument?

The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation

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 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 even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway. Lucifer as the father of all perversity.

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?

We are not mere objects for the divine subject, but subjects in our own right. How can we understand creation ex nihilo, together with moment by moment conservation, of a genuine subject, a genuine mind with intellect and free will and autonomy and the power of self-determination even unto rebellion?

This is a mystery of divine creation. It is is above my pay grade. And yours too.

God can do it but we can't. We can't even understand how God could do it. A double infirmity. An infirmity that sires a doubt: Perhaps it can't be done, even by God. Perhaps the whole notion is incoherent and God does not exist. Perhaps it is not a mystery but an impossibility. Perhaps Christian creation is an Unbegriff.

Joseph Ratzinger accurately explains the Christian metaphysical position, and in so doing approaches what I am calling the ultimate paradox of divine creation, but he fails to confront, let alone solve, the problem:

The Christian belief in God is not completely identical with either of these two solutions [materialism and idealism]. To be sure, it, too, will say, being is being-thought. Matter itself points beyond itself to thinking as the earlier and more original factor. But in opposition to idealism, which makes all being into moments of an all-embracing consciousness, the Christian belief in God will say: Being is being-thought — yet not in such a way that it remains only thought and that the appearance of independence proves to be mere appearance to anyone who looks more closely.

On the contrary, Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all things has released what has been thought into the freedom of its own, independent existence. In this it goes beyond any mere idealism. While the latter , as we have just established, explains everything real as the content of a single consciousness, in the Christian view what supports it all is a creative freedom that sets what has been thought in the freedom of its own being, so that, on the one hand, it is the being-thought of a consciousness and yet, on the other hand, is true being itself. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, German original 1968, latest English version Ignatius Press, 2004, p. 157)

And that is where the good Cardinal (later Pope Benedict the XVI) leaves it. He then glides off onto another topic. Not satisfactory! What's the solution to the paradox?

If you tell me that God creates other minds, and then somehow releases them into ontological independence, my reply will be that makes hash of the doctrine of creatio continuans, moment-by-moment conservation. The Christian God is no mere cosmic starter-upper of what exists; his creating is ongoing. In fact, if the universe always existed, then all creation would be creatio continuans, and there would be no starting-up at all.

On Christian metaphysics, "The world is objective mind . . . ." (155) This is what makes it intelligible. This intelligibility has its source in subjective mind: "Credo in Deum expresses the conviction that objective mind is the oproduct of subjective mind . . . ." (Ibid.) So what I call onto-theological idealism gets the nod. You don't understand classical theism unless you understand it to be a form of idealism. But creatures, and in particular other minds, exist on their own, in themselves, and their Being cannot be reduced to their Being-for-God. Therein lies the difficulty.

Is divine creation a mystery or an impossibility?

Wittgenstein and Butchvarov on the Self

This entry supplements the earlier entry on what Wittgenstein in the Tractatus calls the metaphysical subject. (5.633)

Wittgenstein

As I read him, Wittgenstein accepts Hume's famous rejection of the self as an object of experience or as a part of the world. "There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas." (5.631) The reason Wittgenstein gives is that, if he were to write a book called The World as I Found it in which he inventories the objects of experience, he would make mention of his body and its parts, but not of the subject of experience: "for it alone could not be mentioned in that book." The argument is similar to the one we find in Hume: the subject that thinks is not encountered as an object of experience.

But why not? Because it doesn't exist, or because the subject of experience, by its very nature as subject, cannot be an actual or possible object of experience? It has to be the latter for Wittgenstein since he goes on to say at 5.632 that "The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world." So he is not denying that there is a subject; he is telling us what it is, namely, the limit of the world. His thesis is not eliminativist, but identitarian.

From the fact that the metaphysical subject is nowhere in the world, it does not follow that it does not exist. If, however, you think that this is a valid inference, then you would also have to think that from the non-appearance of one's eyes in one's visual field one could validly infer the nonexistence of one's eyes.

As 5.6331 asserts, one's eyes are not in one's visual field. If you say that they can be brought into one's visual field by the use of a mirror, I will point out that seen eyes are not the same as seeing eyes, a point on which I 'dilate' in detail in the earlier entry.

The analogy is clear to me. Just as one's eyes are not in one's visual field, visual consciousness of objects in the world is not itself in the world. Visual consciousness, and consciousness generally, is of the world, not in it, to reverse the New Testament verse in which we are enjoined to be in the world, but not of it. (Needless to say, I am reversing the words, not the sense of the NT saying. And note that the first 'of' is a genitivus objectivus while the second is a genitivus subjectivus.)

Of course, this is not to say that there is a substantial self, a Cartesian res cogitans outside the world. "The world is all that is the case." There is nothing outside it. And of course Wittgenstein is not saying that there are soul substances or substantial selves in the world. Nor is he saying that there is a substantial self at the limit of the world. He is saying that there is a metaphysical (better: transcendental) self and that it is the limit of world. He is stretching the notion of self about as far as it can be stretched, in the direction of a radically externalist, anti-substantialist notion of consciousness, which is later developed by Sartre and Butchvarov.

What we have here is the hyper-attenuation of the Kantian transcendental ego, which is itself an attenuation of substantialist notions of the ego. The Tractarian Wittgenstein is a transcendental philosopher. He may not have read much or any Kant, but he knew the works of the Kantian, Schopenhauer, and was much influenced by them. According to P. M. S. Hacker,

Of the five main philosophical influences on Wittgenstein, Hertz, Frege, Russell, Schopenhauer, and perhaps Brouwer, at least three were deeply indebted to Kant. It is therefore not surprising that Wittgenstein's philosophy bears deepest affinities to Kant's, despite the fact he never studied Kant . . . ." (Insight and Illusion, 139)

Spot on.

Butchvarov

Now to Butchvarov. He writes that his picture and Wittgenstein's share "the rejection of the metaphysical self and thus of subjectivism in all its forms." (Anthropocentrism in Philosophy, Walter de Gruyter, 2015, p. 235) A few pages earlier we read, "Hume in effect denied that there is what Wittgenstein was to call 'the philosophical self' or 'the metaphysical subject'." (226)

Here is where I disagree. While it is certainly true that both Hume and Wittgenstein reject the substantial self of Descartes and of the pre-Critical rational psychologists, Wittgenstein does not reject the metaphysical/transcendental subject. Nor should he, even if he accepts Hume's argument from the non-appearance of the self. For the metaphysical self, as the limit of the world, is not an object in the world and so cannot be expected to appear in the world. Its non-appearance is no argument against it.

That Wittgenstein does not reject the metaphysical/transcendental subject is also clear from Wittgenstein's claim at 5.641 that "there is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way" without, I may add, lapsing into a physiological or naturalistic way of talking about it. He goes on to reiterate that the "philosophical self" is not the human body or the human soul, and therefore no part of the world. It is the "metaphysical subject," the limit of the world.

What I am maintaining, then, in apparent contradiction to Butchvarov, is that, while Wittgenstein rejects the substantial ego of Descartes, he does not reject "the metaphysical subject" or "the philosophical self."

A Dilemma?

There is a serious substantive issue here, however, one that may tell against Butchvarov's solution to the Paradox of Antirealism. (See article referenced below.)

Why call this philosophical self or metaphysical subject a self if it only a limit? Can a limit be conscious of anything? Why should the self be a philosophical as opposed to a psychological or neurophysiological topic? How does the self get into philosophy? Must the self get into philosophy for antirealism to get off the ground? "What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that 'the world is my world'." (5.641) This harks back to the opening antirealist sentence of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation: "The world is my representation." Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung. The world is my world because, tautologically, the only world for me is my world. The only world for me as subject is the world as object. As Butchvarov puts it, though without reference to Schopenhauer, "The tautology is that the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us." (231) This is the gist of what the great pessimist says on the first page of WWR. (Whether it is indeed a tautology needs to be carefully thought through. Or rather, whether it can be both a tautology and a statement of antirealism needs to be thought through. I don't think it can be both as I will argue in a moment.)

Now the possessive pronoun 'my' is parasitic upon the the first-person pronoun 'I' which refers to the self. So my world is the the world thinkable and cognizable by me, by the I which is no more in the 'consciousness field,' the world of objects, than the seeing eye is in the visual field. How can my world be mine without this transcendental I? And if you send the transcendental I packing, what is left of antirealism?

Are we headed for a dilemma? It seems we are.

1. Either (a) antirealism boils down to the tautological thesis that "the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us" (231) or (b) it does not. Please note that the quoted thesis is indeed a tautology. But it is a further question whether it can be identified with a nonvacuous thesis of antirealism. (And surely antirealism must be nonvacuous to be worthy of discussion.) While it is a tautology that the only cats I see are the cats I see, this is consistent with both the realist thesis that cats exist independently of anyone's seeing and the antirealist thesis that their existence is just the indefinite identifiability of cat-noemata by a perceiver.

2. If (a), then antirealism 'says nothing' and does not exclude realism. It is a vacuous thesis. For example, it does not exclude a representational realism according to which there is a world that exists in itself, a world that includes beings like us who represent the world in various ways more or less adequately and whose representations are representations of what, in itself, is not a representation.

3. If (b), and antirealism is to have any non-tautological 'bite,' it must imply that the world is in some respect dependent on a self or selves other than it. But then the "philosophical self" or "metaphysical subject" cannot be either a mere limit of the world as Wittgenstein says or nonexistent as Butchvarov implies. It must be a part of the world. But this leaves us with the Paradox of Antirealism. For it conflicts with what Butchvarov considers "self-evident," namely, that in the context of the realism-antirealism debate, "we cannot coherently regard ourselves as a part, mental (an ego, a colony of egos) or material (a brain, a collection of brains), of that world." (231)

Therefore

4. Antirealism is either vacuous or incoherent. It is vacuous if a tautology. For then it cannot exclude realism. It is incoherent if not a tautology. For then it succumbs to the Paradox of Antirealism.

What Butchvarov wants is a "metaphysics that is antirealist but not anthropocentric." (231) It is not clear to me that he can have both antirealism and non-anthropocentrism. Antirealism cannot get off the ground as a substantive, non-tautological thesis in metaphysics without a self or selves on which the world depends (in some respects, not necessarily all). But the price for that is anthropocentrism in Butchvarov's broad use of that term. He opposes (rightly!) making the world dependent on physical proper parts thereof, but also making it dependent on purely mental/spiritual proper parts and presumably also a divine proper part

One can of course attenuate the subject, retreating from brain to psyche, to transcendental ego, to limit of the world, to a self that shrinks to a point without extension (5.64), to a Sartrean wind blowing towards objects which is, as Sartre says, nothing — but at the limit of this attenuation one arrives at something so thin and next-to-nothing as to be incapable of supporting a robust antirealism.

Questions for Professor Butchvarov

1. Do you agree with me that, while Wittgenstein rejects the Cartesian-type ego that Hume rejects, he does not reject what he calls "the metaphysical subject" and "the philosophical self"?

2. Do you agree with me that, for Wittgenstein, the metaphysical subject construed as limit of the world, exists, is not nothing?

3. Do you agree with me that, while "the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us" (231) is plainly a tautology, it is a further question whether this tautology is the thesis of antirealism that is debated by philosophers? (As opposed to a thesis of antirealism that you have arbitrarily stipulated.)

4. Do you agree with me that the above quoted tautology is logically consistent with both realism and antirealism?

5. Do you agree that rather than solving the Paradox of Antirealism, you dissolve it by eliminating the subject of consciousness entirely?

6. Suppose I grant you that there are no egos, no acts, and that consciousness-of is non-relational along the lines of Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness. Will you grant me that the distinction — the 'Transcendental Difference' if you will — between subjectless consciousness-of and objects is ineliminable and undeniable?

7. If you grant me that, will you grant me that the non-relational appearing of objects does not itself appear?

8. If you grant what I want you to grant in (7) will you grant that something can be real without appearing, without 'showing up' phenomenologically?

9. If you grant me what I want you to grant in (8) will you grant that, if something can be real without appearing, that the transcendental ego and acts can also be real without appearing?

To put it another way, if you hold that there are no egos and acts on the ground that they do not appear, must you not also maintain that there is no nonrelational consciousness-of on the ground that it does not appear?

A Refutation of Metaphysical Idealism?

K. G. presents me with what he calls a conceivability argument against metaphysical idealism:

Let P denote the proposition "I have a body." Then the argument would take the form

1. P is conceivable.

2. If P is conceivable, then P is possible.

3. If P is possible, then metaphysical idealism is false.

Therefore, metaphysical idealism is false.

Premise 1 is uncontroversial because I can see what I consider to be my body, and thus I can form a mental image of it. Premise 3 merely follows from the definition of idealism. Premise 2 is the most controversial, but I think that replacing "conceivable" with "imaginable" will avoid all difficulties associated with this premise. I may be able to conceive of a triangle which is neither isoceles nor scalene, but I cannot imagine one.

What do you think?

I have two objections.

1. You appreciate that there is a problem with validating the inferential move from 'x is conceivable' to 'x is possible.' But you think the move from 'x is imaginable' to 'x is possible' is unproblematic. I disagree. Suppose we agree that 'x is imaginable' means 'There is a human person who has the ability to form a mental image of x.' If this is what we mean by 'imaginable,' then all sorts of things are imaginable that are not possible. For example, I have just now formed the mental image of an ordinary tire iron floating in ordinary water. But this is not a nomologically possible state of affairs: it is ruled out by the (logically contingent) laws of nature.

You need to be careful not to confuse the image with what the image is of or about. The image of floating iron is of course an actual image and therefore a possible image. The question, however, is whether what the image depicts is possible. The mere fact that one can form a mental image of x does not show that x is possible. For the image of x is not x.

To this you might respond that you have in mind broadly logical possibility, not nomological possibility. Take a gander at this M.C. Escher drawing:

What you see is an object of visual perception, but you could imagine the hands easily enough, as presumably Escher himself did before he made the drawing. What the image is of, however, is broadly logically impossible. Two right hands are depicted each of which comes into existence by being drawn by the other.

But apart from examples, why should possibility be tied to what we can conceive or imagine? Our powers of conception and imagination are limited. Besides, if I have the power to imagine such-and-such, then it must be possible that I imagine such-and-such in which case it would be circular to explain possibility in terms of imaginability.

2. Philosophers are not in the business of denying obvious facts. It is an obvious fact that I have a body. It follows straightaway that it is possible that I have a body. But this possibility does not refute idealism. For the obvious fact that there are bodies can be interpreted both realistically and idealistically. A metaphysical idealist such as Berkeley does not deny that there are bodies; he proffers a theory as to what bodies are in their ontological structure. At ontological bottom there are only minds and ideas in the Berkeleyan system, with physical things construed as collections of ideas. His line on bodies is not nihilist or eliminativist, but reductivist: bodies reduce to collections of ideas. For this reason I would reject your premise (3).

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

From Kant on, transcendental philosophy has been bedeviled by a certain paradox. Here again is the Paradox of Antirealism discussed by Butchvarov, as I construe it, the numbers in parentheses being page references to 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 categories of the understanding and the a priori forms of sensibility, space and time) of the sensory manifold, as on the Kantian scheme, and (B) we, the subjects for whom there is a world, are parts of the world. For then the entire vast cosmos depends for its existence and/or nature on transient parts thereof. And surely that would be absurd.

Dehumanizing Subjectivity

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. For Butchvarov, consciousness-of is not a property of (subjective genitive) human beings or of metaphysical egos somehow associated with human beings. 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.

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 trhe 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, other than every object, not in the world, and thus not restricted to the measly specimens of a zoological species. 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,' inasmuch as it 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. 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 merely apparent. 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 epoche has made them into 'phenomena,' so that the philosopher within the epoche has neither himself nor the others naively and straightforwardly valid as human beings but precisely only as 'phenomena,' as poles for transcendental regressive inquiries. Clearly here, in the radical consistency of the epoche, each 'I' is considered purely as the ego-pole of his acts, habitualities, and capacities . . . .

[. . .]

But in the epoche and in the pure focus upon the functioning ego-pole . . . it follows eo ipso that nothing human is to be found, neither soul nor psychic life nor real psychophysical human beings; all this belongs to the 'phenomenon,' to the world as constituted pole.

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 epoche. No absolute transcendence is reachable: every transcendence is at best a transcendence-in-immanence, a constituted transcendence. Everything in the world is a constitutum, and the same holds for the world itself. If Descartes had gone all the way he would have seen that not only his animal body could be doubted, but also his psyche, the psychophysical complex, and indeed any spiritual substance 'behind' the psyche. He would have seen that the cogito does not disclose something 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 epoche." (CM, p. 26. I have translated Seinsgeltung as ontic validity which I consider more accurate than Cairns' "existential status.") In Formal and Transcendental Logic, sec. 94, along the same lines, we read: "nothing exists for me otherwise than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness."

One problem: just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung? Does it exist? And in what sense of 'exist'? It cannot exist as a constituted object for it is the subjective source of all constitutive performances (Leistungen). But if it is not an indubitable piece of the world, then it cannot 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. It is Saturday night and time to punch the clock, pour myself a drink, and cue up some oldies.

The Paradox of Antirealism and Butchvarov’s Solution

In his highly original Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism (Walter de Gruyter 2015) Panayot Butchvarov argues that philosophy in its three main branches, epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics, needs to be freed from its anthropocentrism. Philosophy ought to be “dehumanized.” This entry will examine how Butchvarov proposes to dehumanize metaphysics. These Butchvarov posts are exercises toward a long review article I have been commissioned to write for a European journal.

Anthropocentrism in Metaphysics

In metaphysics, anthropocentrism assumes the form of antirealism. Antirealism is the view that the world, insofar as it is knowable, depends on us and our cognitive capacities. (6) Bishop Berkeley aside, metaphysical antirealism has its source and model in Kant's transcendental idealism. Contemporary antirealism is “the heir of Kant's transcendental idealism.” (189) On Butchvarov's view there can be no return to a pre-Critical, pre-Kantian metaphysics. (225) But surely the world cannot depend on us if 'us' refers to human animals. Butchvarov's task, then, is to develop a version of metaphysical antirealism that is free of anthropocentrism. A central question is whether the characteristic antirealist thesis that the world depends on us and our cognitive capacities can be upheld without 'us' being understood in an anthropocentric way. To answer this question is to resolve the Paradox of Antirealism (PA), a paradox that I would maintain is endemic to every form of transcendental philosophy from Kant, through Husserl and Heidegger, to Butchvarov:

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)

Some will reject the paradox by rejecting its first limb. But that would be to reject antirealism. It would be to dissolve the problem rather than solve it. Let's see if Butchvarov can solve the paradox while upholding antirealism. But what version of antirealism does Butchvarov espouse?

Butchvarov's Metaphysical Antirealism

Metaphysical antirealism is so-called to distinguish it from antirealism in ethics and in epistemology. It is the view that “The world insofar as it is knowable by us depends on our capacities and ways of knowing, our cognitive faculties.” (111) I would have liked to have seen a more careful unpacking of this thesis, but I take the point to be, or at least to imply, the substantive (non-tautological) proposition that the world is not intrinsically knowable as an Aristotelian realist would maintain but knowable only in virtue of certain contributions on our part. If this is not the point, then it is difficult to see how contemporary antirealism could be “the heir of Kant's transcendental idealism.” (189)

Metaphysical antirealism divides into cosmological antirealism and ontological antirealism. A cosmological antirealist denies the reality of the world, but needn't deny the reality of the things in the world. Note that 'world' has multiple meanings and that now we are distinguishing between the world as a sort of totality of what is and the world as the members of the totality.

Butchvarov takes his cue from proposition 1.1 of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus wherein Ludwig Wittgenstein stipulates that by 'world' he means the totality of facts (die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen), not of things (nicht der Dinge). Now if the world is the totality of facts, then one who denies the reality of facts denies the reality of the world, and is thereby a cosmological antirealist. (113) Such an antirealist need not be an ontological antirealist, i.e., one who denies the reality of things. Since Butchvarov does not question the reality of things (169), he is not an ontological metaphysical antirealist. He is a cosmological antirealist who advocates a form of logical antirealism according to which (i) “there are no logical objects even though logic is present in all thought” (114), and (ii) the “cognized world” depends on the logical expressions of our language rather than on our “mental faculties” as in Kant. (189)

At a first approximation, when Butchvarov says that there are no logical objects what he means is that the logical connectives, the quantifiers, the copula 'is,' and whole declarative sentences do not designate or refer to anything. In old-fashioned terminology, they are syncategorematic or synsemantic expressions. Consider the sentence, 'Tom is tall and Mary is short.' As I understand Butchvarov, he is maintaining that the sentence itself, both occurrences of 'is,' and the single occurrence of 'and' are all logical expressions while the proper names 'Tom' and 'Mary,' and the predicates 'tall' and 'short' are non-logical expressions. There are no logical objects corresponding to logical expressions. (This bald assertion needs be qualified in a separate post on semirealism. Butchvarov takes a semirealist line on facts, the logical objects corresponding to some sentences.) That there are no logical objects is perhaps obvious in the case of the propositional connectives. Few will say that 'and,' 'or,' and 'not' designate objects. The meaning of these words has nothing to do with reference. But while there are no logical objects, there can be no “cognized world” without language, or rather human languages. With this we are brought back to the Paradox of Antirealism. Even though the things in the world do not depend on human animals, the world itself does so depend inasmuch as there would be no world at all without language.

Consider the generic sentence, 'Men are taller than women.' For Butchvarov, many generic sentences are true, but there is nothing in the world that makes them true: they have no corresponding logical objects. And yet without truths like these, and other sorts of truths as well, there would be no world. In this sense, the world, but not the things in it, depends on language-users. Butchvarov's position is roughly similar to Kant's. Kant held that one can be both a transcendental idealist and an empirical realist. Butchvarov is like a transcendental idealist in that he holds that the world depends on language and thus on us; but he is like an empirical realist in that he holds that the things in the world do not depend on us. Like Kant, however, he faces a version of the Paradox of Antirealism: surely it is as absurd to maintain that the world depends on the existence of human animals as to maintain that the things in the world depend on human animals.

Butchvarov's Solution to the Antirealism Paradox

The solution involves a re-thinking of the role of the personal pronouns 'I' and 'we' as they function in philosophical as opposed to ordinary contexts. (See article referenced below.) The idea is that 'I' and 'we' as they figure in the realism-antirealism debate do not refer to anything in the world, and so they do not refer to human beings; these grammatically personal pronouns refer impersonally to a view or "cognition" of the world, one that is not owned by any person or group of persons. This view of the world, however, just is the world. Therefore, the world does not depend logically or causally on the view of the world or on us: "the world and our cognition of it . . . are identical." (191) To grasp the thought here, you must realize that "cognition" is subjectless: it is not anyone's cognition.

Now let's dig into the details.

Butchvarov's theory can be divided into negative and positive theses. On the negative side, he claims that (i) "there is no such entity as the philosophical, metaphysical, self or ego." (191) Nor (ii) is there any such thing as consciousness as a property or activity of the metaphysical self, or as a relation (or quasi-relation) that connects such selves to their objects. (191) (ii) is a logical consequence of (i). For if there is no self, then it cannot have properties, stand in relations, or exercise activities. It also follows from (i) that (iii) there is no act-object distinction. Butchvarov would claim phenomenological support for the first and third claims: no self appears and no mental acts appear. Phenomenologically, he is right. But this doesn't decide the matter since there is also a 'dialectical' assumption at work, something like a Principle of Acquaintance:

Only that with which we are or can become acquainted, only that which can be directly experienced or singled out as an object, can be credited as real and as a possible subject of true and false predications.

This Principle of Acquaintance (my formulation) is a bridge principle that connects phenomenology to ontology, and makes of phenomenology more than a study of 'mere appearances.' It would therefore be fair to classify Butchvarov as a phenomenological ontologist along with Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. As opposed to what? As opposed to what could be called a metaphysical ontologist who essays to peer behind the phenomenal scene into a realm of 'positive noumena' to use a Kantian phrase, where God and the soul count as positive noumena. Butch of course will have no truck with positive noumena, nor even with Kant's negative noumenon, the unknowable Ding an sich. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Butchvarov neither affirms nor denies the negative noumenon.

One sort of move that the Butchvarovian approach rules out is a transcendental inference from what is given to transcendental conditions of the given's givenness that cannot themselves be brought to givenness. Someone might say this:

Granted, the subject of experience does not itself appear as just one more object of experience. But this failure to appear is precisely what one ought to expect: for as a necessary condition of any object's appearing it cannot itself appear as an object. The fact that it does not and cannot appear is no argument against its existence. For it is precisely a transcendental condition of objectivity. Just as there must be an 'accusative of manifestation,' something that appears, there must also be a 'dative of manifestation,' an item to which an appearing object appears, but which does not itself appear.

To which Butchvarov might respond that this begs the question by its rejection of the Principle of Acquaintance. The principle disallows any posits that cannot be brought to givenness. No ego appears, and so there is no dative of manifestation. And since there is no ego, appearing is non-relational: it is a monadic feature of that which appears. Objects appear, but not to anything.

But of course this does not end the discussion since one can ask what validates the Principle of Acquaintance. Why should we accept it given that it cannot be brought to givenness? Hume claimed that all meaningful ideas derive from sensory impressions. But what about that (propositional) idea? Is it meaningful? Then which sensory impressions does it derive from? It appears that here we end in a stand-off.

Butchvarov's Sartrean position is opposed to the triadic Cartesian schema that Husserl presupposes:

Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum.

For Butchvarov, there is no ego and there are no cogitationes; there are only the cogitata and their appearing. He speaks of objects and their "lightening" and "revealing." (205) He mentions Sartre by name but alludes to Heidegger as well for whom the world is not the totality of things or the totality of facts but the illuminated space wherein things appear.

For Butchvarov, then, the structure of consciousness is not triadic but dyadic: there is just consciousness and its objects. But it is impersonal: it is not anyone's consciousness. It is the sheer revelation of things, but not to anyone. Consciousness is exhausted in its revelation of objects: it has no inner nature. This is a radically externalist, anti-substantialist view of consciousness. Butchvarov is a Sartrean externalist about consciousness.

If this externalist view is correct then one can understand why Butchvarov thinks he has solved the Paradox of Antirealism. If consciousness is no-thing, then it is no thing upon which anything else can depend either logically or causally. The paradox arises if the things in the world are made dependent for their existence, nature, or intelligibility on any transient parts of the world such as human animals. The paradox vanishes if consciousness is no thing or things.

Toward a Critique

But wait a minute! What has now become of the first limb of the paradox? The first limb reads:

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)

Surely consciousness as no-thing, as a Sartrean wind blowing towards objects, as Mooreanly diaphanous, emanating from nowhere, without a nature of its own, not anchored in a Substantial Mind or in a society of substantial minds, or in animal organisms in nature, ever evacuating itself for the sake of the revelation of objects — surely consciousness as having these properties cannot do any shaping or forming. It cannot engage in any activity. For it is not a substance. It is only in its revelation of what is other than it. All distinctions and all content fall on the side of the object: none come from consciousness itself. On a radically externalist, anti-substantialist view of consciousness/mind, it can't do anything such as impose categorial forms on the relatively chaotic sensory manifold.

Kant is the main man here as Butch well appreciates. Kant's thinking operates under the aegis of a form-matter scheme. Space and time are the a priori forms of sensibility, and the categories are the a priori forms of the understanding. These forms are imposed on the matter of sensation. The vehicle of this imposition is the transcendental unity of apperception. All of this is our doing, our transcendental doing, whatever exactly this means (which is part of the problem). Our making of the world is a transcendental making: it is not an immanent process within the world such as a literal making of something out of pre-given materials — which would presuppose the world as the where-in of all such mundane makings and formings. Nor is this transcendental making a transcendent making by a transcendent deity.

Now who is it, exactly, who does the forming of the sensory manifold? Who imposes the categorial forms on the matter of sensation? It cannot be human animals or their brains. It cannot be anything in the world. Nor can it be anything out of the world either. And what, exactly, is this activity of forming? It cannot be an empirical process in the world. Not can it be a transcendent process such as divine creation. What then?

These problems are part and parcel of the Paradox of Antirealism. The paradox cannot get off the ground without the notions of forming, shaping, imposing, etc. whereas Butchvarov's solution to the paradox in terms of an impersonal, subjectless, non-substantial consciousness without a nature does away with all forming, shaping and imposing. Mind so conceived cannot impose forms since all forms, all distinctions, all content determinations are of the side of the object. How can Mind be spontaneous (a favorite Kantian word) and active if Mind is not a primary substance, an agent?

My suspicion, then, tentatively proffered, is that Butchvarov does not solve the Paradox of Antirealism; he dissolves it by in effect rejecting the first limb. It is clear to me how he removes anthropocentrism from metaphysics; what is not clear to me is hgow what is left over can still be called antirealism.

There is also the question of whether the philosophical uses of 'I' and 'we' that are essential to the formulation of the realism-antirealism debate are really impersonal uses. To that issue I will return in a later entry.

Is New Jersey an Artifact? And Everything Else Too?

We are makers. We make some things physically, other things conceptually. If I hanker after an ‘early undergraduate’ bookshelf, I fabricate it from bricks and boards. But I also make poems, puns, blog posts, and taxonomies. We undoubtedly have the power to make, and very considerable powers when we work in concert with intelligent others; but how far does this power extend?

Some say that it extends unto our being worldmakers. They think the whole world and everything in it is a conceptual fabrication both as to existence and as to essence. I find this sort of conceptual idealism preposterous. The world may be a divine artifact, but it certainly is no human artifact. (I speculate that it is because of the Death of God in Nietzsche’s sense that some philosophers recently have been toying with the wacky idea that we can take over a considerable range of divine tasks. But I won’t develop this speculation here.)

Consider the question whether New Jersey is an artifact. The example is from Robert Schwartz ("I am Going to Make You a Star," Midwest Studies in Philosophy XI (1987), pp. 427-439, p. 431 f.) Schwartz holds that "the world is a product of our conceptualizations. . . ." (427) If so, then New Jersey is a conceptual artifact. Consider

1. New Jersey is on the Atlantic.

As Schwartz points out, there is a sense in which the state of New Jersey is an artifact of legislative and other decisions by human beings. Had there been no human beings, there would have been no state of New Jersey, and had our forefathers decided differently (by drawing boundaries differently, etc.) then NJ would have had different properties than we presently take it to have. Obviously, the number of coal deposits, forests, lakes, etc. in the state of NJ depends on what the boundaries are. So it looks as if NJ is a conceptual fabrication both in its existence and in its properties.

But surely Schwartz makes things too easy for himself here. What we normally intend by (1) is something like

1*. The land mass denoted by ‘New Jersey’ abuts the Atlantic Ocean.

That is, when we assert (1) we have in mind the land mass, not the political entity. The former is not identical to the latter for the simple reason that the former can exist whether or not the latter exists. (Just ask the Indians whose ancestors were native to the region.). Now could it be true of the land mass that it is a conceptual fabrication?

Granted, the political entity exists only in virtue of conceptual decisions. No people, no polis. No polis, no political entities. But it is not the case that the corresponding land mass exists only in virtue of conceptual decisions. It does no good to point out that the phrase ‘land mass,’ the concept land mass, the units of measure (square miles, etc.) used to measure the area land mass, the equipment used by surveryors, etc. derive from us. I’m talking about the land itself, the topsoil, the subsoil, all the way down to the center of the earth. The existence of that chunk of land, pace Schwartz, is a state of affairs "untinged by cognitive intervention."(433) That chunk of land in no way depends on us for its existence. And the same goes for some of its properties. Or rather many of them, though not all. Of course, its being cultivated depends on us. But not so for the antecedent fertility of the land which allows its being cultivated so as to produce crops. By the 'antecedent' fertility,' I mean the fertility of the land prior to its being fertilized by humans.

Schwartz tells us that "the facts about New Jersey are dependent on our activities of categorization and classification." (433). In one sense, this is trivially true. For on one use of 'fact,' a fact is a true proposition known to be true. On this use of 'fact,' facts are mind-involving. But that is only one use of 'fact.'

On another use of 'fact,' a fact is a true proposition whether or not known or believed to be true. Such facts, like the known facts just mentioned, are facts about. For example, the fact that X exists is just the true proposition that X exists. Now if if you think of a proposition as a mental entity, then indeed the facts about NJ depend on minds and their conceptual activities.

But there is a distinction between facts that and facts about on the one hand, and truth-making facts on the other. I call the latter facts of. The fact of the earth’s being spheroid, for example, is not a representational structure. It is not about anything. It is not a truth-bearer but a truth-maker. It is that which makes-true the proposition expressed by ‘The earth is spheroid.’ And this is the case whether the proposition is a mental item or, as many would say, an 'abstract' or 'Platonic' item.

I submit that truth-making facts, facts of, are not, in general, finite-mind-dependent. If you think otherwise, then I humbly suggest that you have lost your mind. (You may want to make me a star, but I want to have you committed.) For then you would be committed (in a different sense) to such preposterous propositions as that the fact of the Moon's existence is dependent on the existence of human beings. One gets the distinct impression that ant-realists of the Schwartzian stripe are simply failing to make some elementary distinctions.

Now consider that we are categorizers and conceptualizers. Is my being a conceptualizer a product of someone’s conceptualization? If yes, then whose? Do I conceptualize myself as a conceptualizer, thereby creating my being a conceptualizer? Or would you prefer a vicious infinite regress: A’s being a conceptualizer derives from B’s conceptualizing A as a conceptualizer, B's from C's, et cetera?

It gets worse when we consider my existence. Does my existence derive from someone’s acts of conceptualizing? Do I ‘bootstrap’ my way into existence by conceptualizing myself as existent? Not even God could bootstrap himself into existence in this way: Causa sui cannot be plausibly interpreted to mean that God causes himself to exist; it is more plausibly taken to mean that God is not caused by another. And if God is not up to the task, then surely your humble correspondent isn’t either. Or would you rather bite into another vicious infinite regress?

If you say that we conceptualizers just exist, then you have an excellent counterexample to the claim that the world "is a product of our conceptualizations." (427) Or do you prefer to say that the world depends on us, but that we are not in the world?

The notion that everything is an artifact, some sort of human construct, whether individually or collectively (socially) is plainly absurd if you think about it carefully.

Consider Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years from earth. Schwartz’ claim implies that this star is a product of a conceptual (not physical) making by human beings. We make it have the properties it has, and we make it exist. Schwartz writes, "Whether there are stars, and what they are like, are facts that can emerge only in our attempts to describe and organize our world." (435)

Read in one way, this sentence is trivially true; read in another way, it is clearly false. The plausibility of Schwartz’s conceptual idealism, I contend, rests on the conflation of these two readings. This is a very common pattern in philosophy. One makes an equivocal statement bearing in its bosom two senses, one that makes the statement appear clearly true, the other that makes it appear informative and substantial.

Reading 1: Whether there are stars, and what they are like, are facts that can BE KNOWN only in our attempts to describe the world and organize our thoughts about it.

Reading 2: Whether there are stars, and what they are like, are facts that can EXIST only in our attempts to describe thre world and organize our thoughts about it.

Now (1) is clearly, indeed trivially, true. That Alpha Centauri exists, and that it is 4.3 light-years from earth, could not possibly be known unless there are beings who desire to know, and prosecute the requisite investigations. (2), however, is a stellar falsehood; or at least there is no reason to believe it.

One problem, of course, is the weasel word (fudge word?) ‘emerge’ that Schwartz employs in the preceding quotation. Being ambiguous, it can mean come to light, come to be known, but also, come to exist. Thus the Schwartzian thesis is fueled by an equivocation.

I cannot know something except by knowing it. I cannot talk about anything except by talking about it. I cannot think about anything except by thinking about it. I cannot refer to tables in English except by using 'table.' But these tautologies and near-tautologies give no aid and comfort to anti-realism. What I refer with is a bit of language, but what I refer to is extralinguistic. The same goes all the more for reference to non-artifacts. This platitude must be upheld at the price of loss of sanity no matter how puzzling the phenomena of linguistic and mental reference.

A second problem is one I mentioned already. A fact that is a true proposition. For example, ‘It is a fact that Chomsky teaches at MIT’ is equivalent in meaning to ‘It is a true proposition that Chomsky teaches at MIT.’ A proposition, however, is a representational entity: it represents something, in the typical case, something distinct from itself. Now propositions can be reasonably viewed as mental entities, entities that exist only ‘in’ minds, i.e., only as the accusatives of mental acts. (Beware the treacherous word ‘in.’) So of course facts require minds if by ‘fact’ is meant ‘fact that.’ But there is another, more robust, notion of fact. Facts in this second sense are not propositional representations, or any kind of representation, but truth-makers of propositional representations. These are not facts that, but facts of. For example, the fact of Chomsky’s being a leftist. It is even clearer if we omit the ‘of’ which here functions as a mere device of apposition rather than as a genitive: the fact, Chomsky’s being a leftist. This concrete fact composed of Chomsky and the property of being a leftist is the truth-maker of ‘Chomsky is a leftist.’

So although it is reasonably held that facts that (i.e., true propositions) are mind-involving or mind-dependent, it does not follow that facts of (truth-making facts) are mind-involving.

Realism, Idealism, and Classical Theism

Dr. James Barham writes,

I have just finished reading your most instructive and thought-provoking book, A Paradigm Theory of Existence.

On p. 257, you write: "(We will have to consider whether our view also undercuts realism.)" However, I did not see any discussion of this issue in the rest of the book.

On its face, the Paradigm Theory of Existence (PTE) seems to be close to Berkeley's position—the being of existents is grounded in the voluntary action/perception of a transcendent Mind (God/Paradigm Existent)—and yet if I understand you correctly, you wish to maintain that your theory is a version of "realism."

I realize, of course, that these are crude characterizations, and that the problem of what constitutes "realism" is a difficult one. Still, there is an apparent tension in your book—indicated by the passage I quoted above, which constitutes an unredeemed promissory note.

So, I was wondering:

1. What I am missing?;

2. Have you published anything else directly addressing how the PTE manages to avoid the charge of "idealism"?

Any help you could give me in understanding your thoughts about the PTE and "realism" would be most appreciated.

These questions are reasonable ones and one of them is easy to answer: No, I haven't published anything about PTE and idealism. I probably should. What follows are some rough thoughts.

1. Is the position of PTE realistic or idealistic? The short answer is that it is realistic with respect to most of the objects of finite minds, but idealistic with respect to all of the objects of Infinite Mind.

First something in defense of the second conjunct of my short answer.

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, namely, a realism that asserts that there are radically transcendent uncreated concrete things in themselves. 'Radically transcendent' means 'transcendent of any mind, finite or infinite.' Radically transcendent items exist and have most of their properties independently of any mind. Call this realism-1. No classical theist could be a realist-1. Corresponding to realism-1, as its opposite, is idealism-1. This is the view that everything other than God is created ex nihilo by God, who is a pure spirit, and who therefore creates in a purely spiritual way. (To simplify the discussion, let us leave to one side the problem of so-called 'abstract objects.') It seems to me, therefore, that there is a very clear sense in which classical theism is a type of idealism. For on classical theism God brings into existence and keeps in existence every concretum other than himself and he does so by his purely mental/spiritual activity. We could call this type of idealism onto-theological absolute idealism. This is not to say that the entire physical cosmos is a content of the divine mind; it is rather an accusative or intentional object of the divine mind. Though not radically transcendent, it is a transcendence-in-immanence, to borrow some Husserlian phraseology. So if the universe is expanding, that is not to say that the divine mind or any part thereof is expanding. If an intentional object has a property P it does not follow that a mind trained upon this object, or an act of this mind or a content in this mind has P. Perceiving a blue coffee cup, I have as intentional object something blue; but my mind is not blue, nor is the perceiving blue, nor any mental content. If I perceive or imagine or in any way think of an extended sticky surface, neither my mind nor any part of it becomes extended or sticky. Same with God. He retains his difference from the physical cosmos even while said cosmos is nothing more than his merely intentional object incapable of existing on its own.

Actually, what I just wrote is only an approximation to what I really want to say. For just as God is sui generis, I think the relation between God and the world is sui generis, and as such not an instance of the intentional relation with which we are familiar in our own mental lives. The former is only analogous to the latter. If one takes the divine transcendence seriously, then God cannot be a being among beings; equally, God's relation to the world cannot be a relation among relations. If we achieve any understanding in these lofty precincts, it is not the sort of understanding one achieves by subsuming a new case under an old pattern; God does not fit any pre-existing pattern, nor does his 'relation' to the world fit any pre-existing pattern. If we achieve any understanding here it will be via various groping analogies. These analogies can only take us so far. In the end we must confess the infirmity of finite reason in respect of the Absolute that is the Paradigm Existent.

There is also the well known problem that the intentional 'relation' is not, strictly speaking, a relation. It is at best analogous to a relation. So it looks as if we have a double analogy going here. The God-world relation is analogous to something analogous to a relation in the strict sense. Let me explain.

2. According to the first conjunct of my short answer, realism holds with respect to some of the objects of finite minds. Not for purely intentional objects, of course, but for things like trees and mountains and cats and chairs. They exist and have most of their properties independently of the mental activity of finite minds such as ours.

3. Kant held that empirical realism and transcendental idealism are logically compatible and he subscribed to both. Now the idealism I urge is not a mere transcendental idealism, but a full-throated onto-theological absolute idealism; but it too is compatible, as far as I can see, with the empirical reality of most of the objects of ectypal intellects such as ours. The divine spontaneity makes them exist and renders them available to the receptivity of ectypal intellects.

Sorry, Manny!

Incompleteness, Completeness, and the External World

David Brightly comments:

I appreciate that in discussing these epistemological issues we must use the non-question-begging, existence-neutral sense of 'see'. My point is that for the distinction between 'complete' and 'incomplete' to make any sense, the epistemological question as to whether seeing is existence-entailing has to have already been settled favourably, though with the caveat that mistakes occur sometimes. In the context of your latest aporetic tetrad,

1. If S sees x, then x exists
2. Seeing is an intentional state
3. Every intentional state is such that its intentional object is incomplete
4. Nothing that exists is incomplete,

this would rule out the escape of denying (1). Indeed, can we not replace 'see' with 'veridically see' in (1) and (2) and obtain a rather more vexing aporia?

If I understand David's point, it is that the very sense of the distinction between an incomplete and a complete object requires that in at least some (if not the vast majority) of cases, the intentional objects of (outer) perceptual experience really exist. Equivalently, if there were no really existent (finite-mind-independent) material meso-particulars (e.g., trees and rocks and stars), then not only would the predicate 'complete' not apply to anything, but also would be bereft of sense or meaning, and with it the distinction between incomplete and complete.

I am afraid I don't agree.

Suppose one were to argue that the very sense of the distinction between God and creatures logically requires that God exist. Surely that person would be wrong. At most, the concept creature logically requires the concept God. But while the concept God is a concept, God is not a concept, and the God concept may or may not be instantiated without prejudice to its being the very concept it is. (Don't confuse this with the very different thesis that the essence of God may or may not be exemplified without prejudice to its being the very essence it is.)

I say, contra David, that it is is the same with incomplete and complete objects. The sense of the distinction does not logically require that there be any complete objects of outer perception; it requires only the concept complete object. This is a concept we form quite easily by extrapolation from the concept incomplete object.

As I always say, the more vexatious an aporetic polyad, the better. I am ever on the hunt for insolubilia. So I thank David for suggesting the following beefed-up tetrad:

1. If S veridically sees x, then x exists
2. Veridical seeing is an intentional state
3. Every intentional state is such that its intentional object is incomplete
4. Nothing that exists is incomplete.

This is more vexing than the original tetrad, but I think it falls short of a genuine aporia (a polyad in which the limbs are individually undeniable but jointly inconsistent). For why can't I deny (1) by claiming that veridical seeing does not logically require the real (extramental) existence of the thing seen but only that the incomplete intentional objects cohere? Coherence versus correspondence as the nature of truth.

Be Afraid

In this fine piece, Marilyn Penn takes Thomas Friedman to task. Her article begins thusly (emphasis added):

In Thomas Friedman’s op ed on the Boston marathon massacre (Bring On the Next Marathon, NYT 4/17), the boldface caption insists “We’re just not afraid anymore.” Perhaps this is true for a traveling journalist who doesn’t use the subway daily or who isn’t forced to spend all his days in the 9/11 city of New York, but for most thinking people who work and live here, there is a great deal to fear. We live in a porous society where criminals roam free yet politicians complain about the “discriminatory” stop and frisk policies of the police, even though they have successfully reduced crime precisely in the neighborhoods that most affect the complaining minorities and their liberal champions. If you ride the subways, you know how many passengers wear enormous back-packs, large enough to conceal an arsenal of weapons. These are allowed to be carried into movie theaters, playgrounds, parks, sports arenas, shopping centers, department stores and restaurants with no security checks whatsoever. On the national front, immigration policies are more concerned with politically correct equality than with the reality of which groups are fomenting most of the terror around the world today. Our northern and southern borders are infiltrated daily by undocumented people slipping in beyond the government’s surveillance or control.

I agree with her entire piece. Read it.

It has been a week since the Boston Marathon bombing. There was a moment of silence today in remembrance of the victims. But let's keep things in perspective. Only three people were killed. I know you are supposed to gush over these relatively minor events and the undoubtedly horrendous suffering of the victims, but most of the gushing is the false and foolish response of feel-good liberals who have no intention of doing what is necessary to protect against the threat of radical Islam. The Patriot's Day event was nothing compared to what could happen. How about half of Manhattan being rendered uninhabitable by dirty bombs?

When that or something similar happens, will you liberals start yammering about how 'unimaginable' it was? Look, I'm imagining it right now. Liberals can imagine the utopian nonsense imagined by John Lennon in his asinine "Imagine." Is their imagination 'selective'? They can imagine the impossible but not the likely. It is worth recalling that Teddy Kennedy's favorite song was Impossible Dream.

Deal with the real. And the likely. There are no impossible ideals. (See Can What is Impossible to Achieve be an Ideal for us?)

Phenomenon and Existence

E. C. writes:

In the recent post Mary Neal’s Out of Body Experiences you state: "No experience, no matter how intense or unusual or protracted, conclusively proves the veridicality of its intentional object. Phenomenology alone won't get you to metaphysics."

I have been attempting to reconstruct your reasoning here, and the following is the best I could come up with.

1) No experience, no matter how intense or unusual or protracted, conclusively proves the veridicality of its intentional object.

2) The subject matter of phenomenology is experience.

3) The subject matter of metaphysics is existence, which includes the quest of proving the veridicality of intentional objects. Therefore:

C) Phenomenology alone won't get you to metaphysics.

I have an issue with (1). Surely, the very meaning of ‘veridical experience’ designates a harmonious pattern of interconnected experiences, the paradigm case being perceptual experiences. Correlatively, when one speaks about the intentional object existing, one means nothing other than the reappearance of the self-same object across this harmonious flow.

Non-veridical experiences, e.g. hallucinations, are then just those experiences that promise, but fail, to endure harmoniously. Whenever non-veridical experiences obtain so do veridical experiences. For example, I was mistaken that there was a cat walking outside on the pavement, and hence had a non-veridical experience of the cat, but I had a veridical experience of the pavement itself. Ultimately, the experience of the world is given as the veridical background that serves as a foundation for all non-veridical experiences. To speak ontologically, the existence of non-veridical experiences depends on veridical experiences and likewise non-existence objects demand existent objects. Therefore, non-veridical experience could never exist on their own, which does not prevent us as talking about them as self-sufficient.

In relation to (2), I would argue that the subject matter of phenomenology is not just experience but also the object experienced just as it is experienced. But if existence is just the reappearance of an object through a harmonious flow of experience, then phenomenology does have metaphysical implication.

I do not think that perceptual experience is the only mode of experience through which existence is experienced; the room is left often for experiences that reveal the divine.

As always, I am very grateful for the existence of your blog.

Thanks for reading, E. C., for the kind words, and for the above response.

First of all, you did a good job of setting forth my reasoning in support of (C). But I take issue with your taking issue with (1). You are in effect begging the question by just assuming that what makes veridical experience veridical is its internal coherence. That is precisely the question. It may well be that coherence is a criterion of truth without being the nature of truth. By a criterion I mean a way of testing for truth. It could be that coherence is a criterion, or even the criterion, of truth, but that correspondence is the nature of truth. One cannot just assume that truth is constituted by coherence. I am not saying the view is wrong; I am saying that it cannot be assumed to be true without argument or consideration of alternatives. Such arguments and considerations, however, move us beyond phenomenology into dialectics.

To say of an experience that it is veridical is to say that it is of or about an object that exists whether or not the experience exists. If so, then the existence of the object in reality cannot be explicated in terms of its manners and modes of appearing. If you say that it can, then you are opting for a form of idealism which, in Husserlian jargon, reduces Sein to Seinsinn. I would insist, however, that it part of the plain sense of outer perception that it is of or about objects whose existence is independent of the existence of perceivers and their experiences. To borrow a turn of phrase from the neglected German philosopher Wolfgang Cramer, it is built into the very structure of outer perception that it is of or about objects as non-objects. That may sound paradoxical, but it is not contradictory. The idea is that the object is intended in the act or noesis as having an ontological status that surpasses the status of a merely intentional object. Whether it does have that additional really existent status is of course a further question.

For example, my seeing of a tree is an intentional experience: it is of or about something that may or may not exist. (Note that, phenomenologically, 'see' is not a verb of success. If I see x in the phenomenological sense of 'see,' it does not follow that there exists an x such that I see it.) Now if you say that the existence of the tree intended in the act reduces to its ongoing 'verification' in the coherent series of Abschattungen that manifest it, then you are opting for a form of idealism. And this seems incompatible with the point I made, namely, that it is part and parcel of the very nature of outer perception that it be directed to an object as non-object. The tree is intended as being such that its existence is not exhausted by its phenomenological manifestation.

But the point is not to get you to agree with this; the point is to get you to see that there is an issue here, one subject to ongoing controversy, and that one cannot uncritically plump for one side. If you haven't read Roman Ingarden on Husserl, I suggest that you do.

As for premse (2), we will agree that there are acts, intentional experiences (Erlebnisse), and that they are of an object. Throughout the sphere of intentionality there is the act-object, noesis-noema correlation. But this leaves wide open the question whether the being of the thing in reality is exhausted by its noematic being, whether its Sein reduces to its Seinsinn. On that very point Ingarden disagreed strenuously with his master, Husserl.

"But if existence is just the reappearance of an object through a harmonious flow of experience, then phenomenology does have metaphysical implications." That is true. But I deny the consequent of your conditional and so I deny the antecedent as well.

My point, in sum, is that you cannot just assume the truth of the antecedent. For that begs the question against realism. From the fact that an object manifests its existence in the manner you describe, it does not follow that the very existence of the object is its manifestation.

It may be methodologically useful to bracket the existence of the object the better to study its manners and modes of appearing, but this very bracketing presupposes that there is more to the existence of the object than its appearing. One could say that Husserl was right to bracket the existence of the object for purposes of phenomenology, but then, in his later idealistic phase, he forgot to remove the brackets.