Category: Phenomenology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intentionality in Thomas and Husserl and the Question of Realism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Intentionality in Thomas Aquinas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Intentionality in Edmund Husserl

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

The Natural Attitude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But why perform the phenomenological epoché?

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

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

The Ambiguity of ‘Object’

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

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

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

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

Two Uses of ‘See’

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

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

Descartes’ underlying schema is this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q1: Why the Need for the Phenomenological Reduction?

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

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

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

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

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

Q2: Husserl on Descartes’ Lack of Radicality

The reduction in Husserl is a two-step move: from the thing to its appearing to a subject, and then from the subject initially and naively taken to be psychological or psychophysical to the transcendental subject.  The reduction is thus a transcendental-phenomenological reduction.  Husserl’s beef with Descartes is that he doesn’t execute the second step.  In Cartesian Meditations, sec. 10, Husserl alleges that the Frenchman fails to make the transcendental turn (die transzendentale Wendung).  He stops short at a little tag-end of the world (ein kleines Endchen der Welt), from which he then argues to get back what he had earlier doubted, including the external world.

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

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

But this is perplexing. Just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all Seinsgeltung?  Is it at all?  If it is or exists at all, then it is in the world, even if not in the physical world.  It is in the world, the totality of entities. But it can’t be inasmuch as the transcendental ego as the constitutive source of all ontic validity is pre-mundane.

The puzzle could be put like this. Either the constitutive source of all Seinsgeltung is pre-mundane or it is not. If the former, then it would appear to be nothing at all. If the latter, then it is not the constitutive source of all Seinsgeltung.

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

The Commonweal article under critique is here.

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

The Sparring Partner offers the following tetrad for our delectation. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

……………………………………………………

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

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

As I was mulling this over I was reminded of the Paradox of Human Subjectivity discussed by Edmund Husserl in his  last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, in sections 53 and 54, pp. 178-186 of the Carr translation.  Here is the paradox in Husserl's words:

PHS:  How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?

The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole world and thus itself too.  What an absurdity! Or is this a paradox which can be sensibly resolved . . . ?    (179-180)

Husserl mit PfeifeWhat is common to both of the paradoxical formulations is the idea that we are at once objects in the world and subjects for whom there is a world.  This by itself is not paradoxical.  For there is nothing paradoxical in the notion that we are physical parts of a physical world that exists and has the nature it has independently of us, and that our knowing ourselves and other things is a physical process.  Paradox ensues if (A) the world is a product of our accomplishments (Leistungen) as Husserl would have it, or a product of our formation (via both the a priori categories of the understanding and the a priori forms of sensibility, space and time) of the sensory manifold, as on the Kantian scheme, and (B) we, the subjects for whom there is a world, are parts of the world.  For then the entire vast cosmos would depend for its existence and/or nature on transient parts thereof.  And surely that would be absurd.  Butchvarov above mentions the intelligibility of physical reality. If this intelligibility is not intrinsic to nature but imposed by us, then this too would be absurd if we are but physical parts of the physical cosmos.  Butchvarov again: "The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna." For one thing, before we miserable human animals came on the evolutionary scene, the physical cosmos was 'already there.' So the cosmos could not possibly depend for its existence on the existence of measly parts thereof who, in addition, made the scene rather late in the game.  As for intelligibility, the understandability of the cosmos has as a necessary though not sufficient condition its regularity.  The laws of nature are at least regularities. Now if regularity is imposed or bestowed or projected by specimens of h. sapiens, then the universe would have to wait for us to arrive before it could be cosmos as opposed to  chaos. And that is plainly absurd.

Dehumanizing Subjectivity

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

Husserl and Butchvarov: Brief Contrast and Comparison

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

Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum 

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

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

——————————->objects.

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

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

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

How does Husserl dehumanize subjectivity? 

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

But are the transcendental subjects, i.e., those functioning in the constitution of the world, human beings?  After all, the epoché  has made them into 'phenomena,' so that the philosopher within the epoché  has neither himself nor the others naively and straightforwardly valid as human beings but precisely only as 'phenomena,' as poles for transcendental regressive inquiries.  Clearly here, in the radical consistency of the epoché, each 'I' is considered purely as the ego-pole of his acts, habitualities, and capacities . . . .

[. . .]

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

Contra Husserl

Husserl is a great philosopher and one cannot do him justice in one blog post or a hundred; but I don't see how his position is tenable.  On the one hand, each transcendental ego functioning as such cannot be a human being in nature.  For nature and everything in it including all animal organisms is an intentional formation constituted by the transcendental ego. But not only can the world-constituting ego not be a physical thing, it cannot be a meta-physical spiritual  thing either. It cannot be a res cogitans or substantia cogitans.  As Husserl sees it, Descartes' identification of his supposedly indubitable ego with a thinking thing shows a failure fully to execute the transcendental turn (transzendentale Wendung).  The Frenchman stops short at a little tag-end of the world  (ein kleines Endchen der Welt)  from which, by means of shaky inferences, he tries to get back what his hyperbolic doubt had called into question. 

Husserl's thinking in sections 10-11 of Cartesian Meditations seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn, and avoids the supposed mistake of Descartes,  one is left with nothing that can be posited as existing  in itself independently of consciousness.    Everything objective succumbs to the epoché.  No absolute transcendence is reachable: every transcendence is at best a transcendence-in-immanence, a constituted transcendence.  Everything in the world is a constitutum, and the same holds for the world itself.  If Descartes had gone all the way he would have seen that not only his animal body could be doubted, but also his psyche, the psychophysical complex, and indeed any spiritual substance 'behind' the psyche.  He would have seen that the cogito does not disclose something absolutely transcendent and indubitable.  For Husserl, everything objective, whether physical or mental, ". . . derives its whole sense and its ontic validity (Seinsgeltung), which it has for me, from me myself, from me as the transcendental ego, the ego who comes to the fore only with the transcendental-phenomenological epoché." (CM, p. 26. I have translated Seinsgeltung as ontic validity which I consider more accurate than Cairns' "existential status.")  In Formal and Transcendental Logic, sec. 94, along the same lines, we read: "nothing exists for me otherwise than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness."

One problem: just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung?  Does it exist?   And in what sense of 'exist'?  It cannot exist as a constituted object for it is the subjective source of all constitutive performances (Leistungen).  But if it is not an indubitable piece of the world, then it cannot existent transcendently either.  

Descartes thought that he had reached something whose existence cannot be bracketed, eingeklammert, to use Husserl's term, and that that was himself as thinking thing. He thought he had hit bedrock, the bedrock of Ansichsein.  Husserl objects: No, the ego's existence must be bracketed as well.  But then nothing is left over.  We are left with no clue as to what the transcendental ego is once it is distinguished from the psychological or psychophysical ego who is doing the meditating.  To appreciate the difficulty one must realize that it is a factical transcendental ego that does the constituting, not an eidos-ego.  The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not an eidetic reduction.  It would be a serious mistake to think that the re-duction (the leading back, the path of regress) from the psychological ego to the transcendental ego is a reduction to an eidos-ego, an ideal ego abstractly common to all factical egos. 

Here is another approach to the problem.  The transcendental-phenomenological reduction regresses from everything objective, everything naively posited as existing in itself, to the subjective sources of the ontic validity (Seinsgeltung) and Being-sense (Seinssinn) of everything objective.  This radical regression, however, must leave behind everything psychological since the psychological co-posits the objective world of nature.  But how can Husserl execute this radical regression and yet hold onto words like 'ego' and 'cogitatio' and 'cogitatum'?  How does he know that it is an I or an ego that is the transcendental-phenomenological residuum?  In simpler terms, how does he know that what he gets to by the trans-phen reduction is something that can be referred to by 'I'?  How does he know that it is anything like a person?

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

Husserl and Butchvarov: Similarities and Differences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is much more to be said, later.  

Demarcation and Directedness: Notes on Brentano

Here again is the famous passage from Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874):

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself…(Brentano PES, 68)

Jedes psychische Phänomen ist durch das charakterisiert, was die Scholastiker des Mittelalters die intentionale (auch wohl mentale) Inexistenz eines Gegenstandes genannt haben, und was wir, obwohl mit nicht ganz unzweideutigen Ausdrücken, die Beziehung auf einen Inhalt, die Richtung auf ein Objekt (worunter hier nicht eine Realität zu verstehen ist), oder die immanente Gegenständlichkeit nennen würden. Jedes enthält etwas als Objekt in sich… (Brentano, PES 124f)

1) For Brentano, intentionality is the mark of the mental: it is what distinguishes the mental from the physical. All and only mental phenomena are intentional.  Call this the Brentano Thesis (BT). It presupposes that there are mental items, and that there are physical items.  It implies that there is no intentionality below the level of conscious mind and no intentionality above the level of conscious mind.  BT both restricts and demarcates. It restricts intentionality to conscious mind  and marks off the mental from the physical.

2) BT does the demarcation job tolerably well. Conscious states possess content; non-conscious states do not. My marvelling at the Moon is a contentful state; the Moon's being cratered is not. Going beyond Brentano, I say that there are two ways for a conscious state to have content. One way is for there to be something it is like to be in that state.  Thus there is something it  like to feel tired, bored, depressed, elated, anxious, etc.  even when there is no specifiable object that one feels tired about, bored at, depressed over, elated about, anxious of, etc.  

Call such conscious contents non-directed. They do not refer beyond one's mental state to a transcendent object.  Other contents are object-directed. Suppose I am anxious over an encroaching forest fire that threatens to engulf my property. The felt anxiety has an object and this object is no part of my conscious state.  The content, which is immanent to my mental state, 'points' to a state of affairs that is transcendent of my mental state.  In short, there are two types of mental content, object-directed and non-object-directed.

3) 'Every consciousness is a consciousness of something' can then be taken to mean that every conscious state has content.  Read in this way, the dictum is immune to such counter examples as pain.  That pain is non-directed does not show that pain is not a content of consciousness.

4) Brentano conflates content and object, Inhalt and Gegenstand. The conflation is evident from the above quotation. As a consequence he does not distinguish directed and non-directed contents. This fact renders his theory of intentionality indefensible.

Suppose I am thirsting for a beer.  I am in a conscious mental state. This state has a qualitative side: there is something it is like to be in this state.  But the state is also directed to a transcendent state of affairs, my downing a bottle of beer, a state of affairs that does not yet exist, but is no less transcendent for that.  If Brentano were right, then my thirsting for a bottle of beer would be a process immanent in my conscious life — which is precisely what it is not.

5) To sum this up. Brentano succeeds with the demarcation project, but fails to explain the directedness of some mental contents, their reference beyond the mind to extramental items.   This failure is due to his failure to distinguish content and object, a distinction that first clearly emerges with his student Twardowski.

Brentano was immersed in Aristotle and the scholastics by his philosophical training and his priestly formation. Perhaps this explains his inability to get beyond the notion of intentionality as intentionale Inexistenz (inesse).

Brentano-c-470x260

 

 

A Reader Asks about Existence and Instantiation

My responses are in blue.

Hello, Dr. Vallicella. I am a reader of your blog. I just read your article "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics (eds. Novotny and Novak, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75 , and I thought it was fantastic. I will have to read it again at some point. There were some parts in it that I found very interesting, and I was hoping I could ask you about. I want to focus on what you said in section 6.6, page 57. You write: 

 
"It is clear that “Unicorns do not exist” cannot be about unicorns: There are none. So it is reasonably analysed in terms of “ The concept unicorn is not instantiated”. But then the concept must exist, and its existence cannot be its being instantiated." 
 
The question I wanted to ask you was specifically about the final part, "But then the concept must exist, and its existence cannot be its being instantiated". I will try to keep the questions as brief as possible, 
 
The thin theorist might not identify the existence of the concept of a unicorn with its being instantiated, but with the concept of the concept of the unicorn being instantiated, and so on . . .
 
1) If it were possible that there be an infinite number of concepts, would there be any problem with this view?
 
BV:  An infinite regress would arise.
 
2) Clearly, we have a regress here, but is it vicious?
 
BV: Yes, because there would be no explanation of  the existence of the first concept in the infinite series. You might reply by saying that the series is actually, as opposed to potentially, infinite.  If so, then every concept in the series would have an explanation of its existence.  To which my response would be:   what explains the existence of the entire actually infinite series of concepts?
 
(An analogous situation. Suppose the universe is a beginningless actual infinity of continuum-many states with each state caused by earlier ones. If so, every state would have a causal explanation. But if every state of the universe has a causal explanation, then one might plausibly suppose that the universe has a causal explanation, one that is internal to it. Some people have maintained this with an eye toward ruling out the need for a transcendent explainer such as God. "There is no need for God because a universe with an actually infinite past has the resources to explain itself."  My objection would be that this account leaves us with no explanation of why the entire series of states exists in the first place.  Given that the entire series is modally contingent, and thus possibly such as not to exist at all, then any explanation of it, assuming that there is an explanation of it, could only be external or transcendent. Now back to the main thread.)
 
One might also question whether the concept regress could even get started. You want to say that the concept unicorn exists in virtue of its being an instance of the concept concept unicorn. But these two concepts have exactly the same content. How then do they differ? The concept unicorn is an instance of the concept concept, but I fail to see any difference between the concept unicorn and the concept concept unicorn.
 
3) The overall worry is that if we define x's existence in terms of instantiation, and then ask 'what are "x's"', we say things in existence, and, this is circular, but, since we are simply dealing with the analysis of terms, aren't we only dealing with semantic circularity? I am not sure that there is any problem with this sort of circularity (if there is a problem, it would be with the informativeness with the analysis rather than the accuracy).
 
BV: But we are not merely dealing with the analysis of terms; we are seeking to understand what it is for an individual to exist, given that the existence of a thing is extra-linguistic.   Let's keep in mind what the question is.  The question is whether an adequate theory of existence could treat '. . . exist(s)' as a second-level or second-order predicate only, that is, a predicate of concepts, properties, propositional functions,  descriptions (definite or indefinite), or cognate items. That is the Frege-Russell theory that I have in my sights in the portion of text to which my reader refers.
 
Granted, it is  true that Fs exist iff the concept F is instantiated.  For example, it is  true that cats exist iff the concept cat is instantiated. (This assumes that there is the concept cat, which is certainly true in our world if not in all possible worlds: it depends on what we take concepts to be.) But the right-hand-side (RHS) of the biconditional merely specifies a truth-condition on the semantic plane: it does not take us beyond or beneath that plane to the plane of extra-linguistic reality.  The truth of the LHS requires an ontological ground, a truth-maker, not a truth-condition. For consider: if the concept cat is instantiated, then, since it is a first-order concept, and relational as opposed to monadic, it is instantiated by one or more individuals. Individuals by definition are impredicable and uninstantiable. My cat Max Black, for example, is categorially unfit to have any instances, and you can't predicate him of anything. The little rascal is unrepeatable and impredicable.
 
Now either the instantiating individuals exist or they do not. If they do not, then the truth of the biconditional above is not preserved. But if they do exist, then the sense in which the instances exist is toto caelo different from the sense specified by 'is instantiated.' To repeat, by definition, individuals cannot be instantiated; therefore, the existence of an individual –call it singular existence –  cannot be explicated in terms of instantiation.
 
The instantiation account of existence either changes the subject from singular existence to general existence (instantiation) or else it moves in a circle of embarrassingly short diameter.  We want to know what it is for individuals to exist, and we are told that for individuals to exist is for first-level concepts to be instantiated; but for these concepts to be instantiated, their instances must exist singularly and thus in a sense that cannot be explicated in terms of instantiation. To put it another way: the account presupposes what it is trying to get rid of. It wants to reduce singular existence to general existence, thereby eliminating singular existence, but it ends up presupposing singular existence. If you tell me that the instances neither exist nor do not exist and that this contrast first arises at the level of concepts , then I will point out that you are thereby committed to Meinongian objects, to pure Sosein without Dasein.
 
The circularity I allege is the circularity of ontological/metaphysical explanation.  Is 'Tom exists' true because Tom exists, or does Tom exist because 'Tom exists' is true?  If this question makes sense to you and you respond by opting for  the former, then you understand metaphysical explanation.  It is an explanation that is neither empirical nor narrowly logical. Somewhat murky it might be, but nonetheless indispensable for metaphysics.  Similarly with the question: does Tom exist because some concept C is instantiated, or is C instantiated because Tom exists? The question makes sense and the answer is the latter.
 
I want to note that these are questions someone asked me about this view, and I wasn't sure how to respond, even though I ultimately do agree with your analysis of the thin theory. For the third problem, I would have said that that sort of response would merely ignore the fact that the question 'what is existence?' has ontological consequences, and is not merely a question of semantics. [Right!] If that is all we are concerned with (semantics), then we are concerned with something different than what most classical philosophers are concerned with when they are talking about the question 'what is existence?', which is the ontological aspect of that question, and as such, the circularity issue is a real problem. [You got it!]
 
BV: The problem with Frege, Russell, Quine, van Inwagen, and the rest of the 'thin  crew' is that they try to reduce existence to a merely logical topic. An opposite or at least different mistake is made by the phenomenologists who (most of them, not all of them) try to reduce existence to a phenomenological topic.  Heidegger, near the beginning of Sein und Zeit, opines that "Ontology is only possible as phenomenology." 
 
So I got me a two-front war on my hands: against the nuts-and-bolts analysts to the West and against the febrile phenomenologists to the East.
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

……………………………….

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

Too Late Again!

Every once in  while I will get the notion to send  'fan mail' to a philosopher whose work I am reading and for whose work I am grateful.  But I am sometimes too late. The search for an e-mail address turns up an obituary. The last time this occurred was when I wanted to congratulate Robert C. Coburn for his excellent The Strangeness of the Ordinary.  I tell the story here and reproduce the obit.

The other day, Ronald Bruzina's Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology 1928-1938 (Yale UP, 2004) arrived. It's a stomping tome of 627 pages. But it reads like a novel to this old Husserl man who spent a year (1976-1977) in Freiburg im Breisgau where he studied unpublished manuscripts in the Husserl archive there.  Every morning I read a few pages of Bruzina's book hugging myself with mental delight as I am reminded of so many details, people, and places.

I wanted to say to Bruzina, "You have written a wonderful book, man, quite obviously a labor of love, and I am having a blast with it."

But too late again.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to friends and strangers alike who have enriched our lives, wittingly or not, in this way or that. Say it and pay it now if you are so inclined.

Heute rot, morgen tot.

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

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

………………………..

Dear Bill,

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

What is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung? Does it exist? And in what sense of 'exist'? It cannot exist as a constituted object for it is the subjective source of all constitutive performances (Leistungen). But if it is not an indubitable piece of the world, then it cannot exist at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Lukáš,

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

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

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

Butchvarov, too, is tangled up in this problem.

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

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

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

Dr. Novak:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Manifold Meanings of ‘World’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steven Nemes’ Review of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Ethics: Some Questions

The review is a well written and very fair summary of von Hildebrand's book. (I read portions of the latter in graduate school days but I do not currently have it in my library.)  Here is the review's main critical passage together with my remarks.

[Von] Hildebrand’s arguments for the objectivity of value therefore seem unsuccessful. It is true that one experiences an object as possessing some value which motivates a particular form of response to it. But it is another matter whether one has grasped a value in the object on its own or in the object as it is related to oneself in experience. Food is experienced as delicious, but there is no property of gustatory value inhering objectively in chicken tikka masala. It can be appetizing to one but not to another. Or consider that human beings love fruit, but dogs and cats generally do not.

BV: Nemes invokes the fact that for beings capable of gustatory experience, what is appetizing/delicious/tasty can vary across individuals in a species, and across species.  This is because the property of being appetizing is not an intrinsic property of the edible or potable item, but involves a relation to the consumer.  I have been called 'Old Asbestos Tongue' on account of the pleasure I derive from fiery comestibles.  The positive or negative gustatory value resides not in the comestible itself, but in the relation between consumer and comestible between, say, 'Old Asbestos Tongue' and the jalapeno pepper.  My constitution is such as to allow for the enjoyment of what others will find highly disagreeable. Hence, de gustibus non est disputandum. There is nothing to dispute since there is no fact of the matter.  It is 'subjective' in one sense of this polysemous term.

But how negotiate the inferential move from

1) That which has the value of tasting good often varies from individual to individual and from species to species

to

2) The value of tasting good is subjective, not objective.

This looks to be an illicit slide. (1), which is plainly true, is consistent with the negation of (2).  For it could be that the value of tasting good is objectively the same for all despite different edibles being tasty to different people or animals.

That is to say: tasting good could be an objective value despite the fact that different edible items have this value for different people.  The perceiver-relativity of taste, which makes taste subjective, is consistent with the objectivity of gustatory values.

If values are essences and essences are ideal objects that subsist independently of our value responses (Wertantworten), as von Hildebrand maintains, then, while different perceivers find different things appetizing/delicious/tasty, this needn't affect the value itself.  The tasting of an incendiary comestible involves a physical transaction; the intellectual intuition of the value does not. One does not taste the value, one tastes the jalapeno-laden enchilada; and one does not intellectually intuit  the enchilada, one tastes it.

SN: Similarly, a purported moral value can be “noble” in the eyes of the “virtuous” but repellent to the “profligate.” It could well be that the difference in perception is accounted for merely in terms of the different structures of the persons involved.

BV:  It is not the value as ideal object that is noble, but a person who has the value.  The person is noble in virtue of instantiating the value. The base are value-blind (wertblind):  they cannot 'see' or appreciate the value that noble people instantiate.  But that fact is consistent with the value's objective existence in itself apart both from anyone's appreciating it and anything's instantiating it.

My point is that von Hildebrand has the resources to turn aside Nemes' objections. The latter are not rationally compelling. Give von Hildebrand's Platonism about values, Nemes' arguments are non sequiturs.  This is not to say that von Hildebrand's axiology is true; it is to say that Nemes hasn't refuted it.

His review raises for me a fascinating question: does phenomenology by its very nature, and given that intentionality is its central motif, support realism or idealism?  For von Hildebrand and J-P Sartre the former; for Husserl the latter.  I should take this up in a separate entry.

For now I recommend that Nemes study chapter V, "Objectivity and Independence," in von Hildebrand's What is Philosophy? 

Nemes Binity

Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method: Theocentric or Egocentric?

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

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

Probably my best answer is that faith is its own guarantee. I could also say that God, who has given us the revelation, vouches for its truth. But this would only be the other side of the same coin. For if we took the two as separate facts, we would fall into a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle], since God is after all what we become certain about in faith.

Thomism and Husserlian Phenomenology: Combinable?

Over the phone the other night, Steven Nemes told me that his project is to synthesize Thomism and phenomenology. I expressed some skepticism. Here are my reasons.

Part I: Methodological Incompatibility

Essential to Thomism is the belief that the existence of God can be proven a posteriori by human reason unaided by divine revelation.  Thus the Third of Aquinas's Five Ways begins with the premise that there are contingent beings, "things that are possible to be and not to be."  From this starting point, by reasoning we needn't here examine, Aquinas arrives at the conclusion that there exists an absolutely necessary being. "And this all men call God."

The argument moves within what Husserl calls the natural attitude, from contingent beings that are taken to exist in themselves to a causa prima that is taken to exist in itself. Note also that  when the Third Way in enacted by a person who works his way through it, in an attempt to arrive at a justified belief that God exists, the particular judgments and inferences made by the person in question are themselves psychic realities in nature that exist in themselves with the earlier following the later in  objective time. With the suspension of the natural attitude by the phenomenologist, all of this must be eingeklammert, placed within brackets. This includes  the starting point (the existence in themselves of contingent beings), the ending point (the existence in itself of God), and the sequence of judgmental and inferential steps that the person who enacts the argument must run through in order to generate within himself the belief that God exists. No use can be made of any of this by the phenomenologist qua phenomenologist.

It seems we ought to conclude that Thomas's dialectical procedure is unphenomenological both at its starting point and at its ending point.  The dialectical procedure itself, the  arguing with its judgments and inferences, is also unphenomenological in that the judgments are posited as true in themselves, and the inferences as valid in themselves.

To summarize the argument up to this point:

a) Thomists are committed to the proposition that God's existence is provable, equivalently, that there are sound arguments for God's existence, arguments that move from premises that record what to Thomists are obvious facts of sense perception such as that trees and rocks exist in themselves (independently of us and our consciousness of them), that they exist contingently, that they are in motion, etc., arguments that end in a conclusion that records the existence in itself of a divine first cause.

b) Phenomenologists operate under a methodological restriction: the thesis of the natural standpoint is ausgeschaltet, disconnected, and the objects  in the natural attitude are eingeklammert, bracketed. The existence of these objects is not denied, or even doubted; no use is made of their existence. (Cf. Ideas I, secs. 31, 32)  Now if we abstain from affirming the existence of contingent beings, then the question cannot arise within the phenomenological epoche as to whether or not they have a cause of their existence.  But this is a question that Thomists ask and answer by positing the existence of God.

Therefore

c) Thomism and Husserlian phenomenology are incompatible and cannot be synthesized.

Part II: Metaphysical Incompatibility

Things are worse for the proposed synthesis when we consider that Husserlian phenomenology is not just a study of the modes and manners of the appearing of things, but implies transcendental idealism, a theory about the mode of existence of the things themselves. To state the incompatibility bluntly: Husserl is an idealist; Thomas is a realist. 

At its starting point, the argument a contingentia mundi presupposes the existence in themselves of contingent beings.   If these beings existed only for (finite) consciousness, then one could not arrive at an absolutely transcendent divine cause of their existence that exists in itself.  Phenomenology, however,  is committed to transcendental idealism, according to which contingent beings do not exist in themselves but only for transcendental subjectivity.  Here is a characteristic passage from Husserl:

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

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

For Husserl, the very Being of beings is their Being for consciousness, their being constituted in and by consciousness.  Their Sein reduces to Seinsinn, and that Sinn points back to the transcendental ego from which all sense derives. So the Sinn is not Original Sinn, pun intended, but derivative Sinn. Therefore, on transcendental idealism, contingent beings have no need for a divine ground of their existence, their existence being adequately accounted for by transcendental subjectivity. And since they have no need of a divine ground, one cannot prove that they must have such a ground.

At its ending point, too, cosmological arguments such as the Third Way are unphenomenological since they posit an absolutely transcendent cause of existence that is not given as it is in itself, and cannot be so given and whose identity and existence cannot be grounded subjectively. It makes some sense to say that the tree in the garden is a unity of noemata the unity of which is brought about by the synthetic, unifying activity of my transcendental ego.  But it makes no sense to say this of God.  This would be tantamount to saying that the unity and existence of the divine being derives from the synthetic activities of the creature's ego. 

The God of classical theism, the numero uno representative of which is the doctor angelicus, is by definition absolutely transcendent. He is not transcendent in relation to our consciousness like the blooming tree in Husserl's garden.  He cannot be transcendentally constituted. Even in the Beatific Vision God will not be given to us as he is in himself.  His reality infinitely surpasses anything we will ever have evidence for. It should therefore be quite clear that Husserlian phenomenology and classical theism are logically incompatible.

……………………………

Addendum 10/22. A reader comments,

I've just read your post on Thomism and phenomenology. Subsuming Husserl to a Weltanschauung philosophy is to deeply and badly miss the point and much of the value of his work.

This is a just criticism of Nemes' proposed synthesis.   Husserl sharply distinguishes between world view philosophy and philosophy as strict science.  Thomism is  a worldview philosophy.  This is another reason why the proposed synthesis is dubious.   The issues here are extremely deep and complicated. But to simplify, the specifically philosophical portions of the Thomistic system are in the service of  a body of beliefs that Thomas will hold to no matter what sober philosophical inquiry establishes.  If unaided human reason can be enlisted in the service of the teachings of the Church, well and good; if not, that is no reason to doubt any of the teachings.  Philosophia ancilla theologiae. Perhaps we can say that philosophy in relation to theology is ancillary but not necessary. 

For details on the whole messy problematic, see my Genuine Inquiry and Two Forms of Pseudo-Inquiry: Sham Reasoning and Fake Reasoning.

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.

Husserl backyardThe 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.