Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Top o' the Stack.
UPDATE (8/4/2025). Matteo writes, "As for your latest post on Substack about the dehumanization of the ego, there is this Italian philosopher who holds a very similar view (consciousness and the world are the very same thing, we literally ARE the world etc."
https://archive.org/details/spreadmindwhycon0000manz
The following quotation is reproduced verbatim from Michael Gilleland's classics blog, Laudator Temporis Acti:
Augustine, Sermons 241.2 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 38, col. 1134; tr. Edmund Hill):
They could see their bodies, they couldn't see their souls. But they could only see the body from the soul. I mean, they saw with their eyes, but inside there was someone looking out through these windows. Finally, when the occupant departs, the house lies still; when the controller departs, what was being controlled falls down; and because it falls down, it's called a cadaver, a corpse. Aren't the eyes complete in it? Even if they're open, they see nothing. There are ears there, but the hearer has moved on; the instrument of the tongue remains, but the musician who used to play it has withdrawn. (emphasis added by BV)
Videbant corpus, animam non videbant. Sed corpus nisi de anima non videbant. Videbant enim per oculum, sed intus erat qui per fenestras aspiciebat. Denique discedente habitatore, iacet domus: discedente qui regebat, cadit quod regebatur: et quoniam cadit, cadaver vocatur. Nonne ibi oculi integri? Etsi pateant, nihil vident. Aures adsunt; sed migravit auditor: linguae organum manet; sed abscessit musicus qui movebat.
Read uncharitably, Augustine is anthropomorphizing the soul: he is telling us that the soul is a little man in your head. This uncharitable eisegesis is suggested by inside there was someone looking out through these windows. A couple of sentences later the suggestion is that the open eyes of a dead man see nothing because no one is looking through these un-shuttered windows — as if there had to be someone looking through them for anything to be seen.
The uncharitable reading is obviously false. The one who sees when I see something cannot be a little man in my head. There is obviously no little man in my head looking through my eyes or hearing through my ears. Nor is there any little man in my head sitting at the controls, driving my body. Neither the thinker of my thoughts nor the agent of my actions is a little man in my head. And even if there were a little man in my head, what would explain his seeing, hearing, controlling etc.? A second homunculus in his head?
A vicious infinite explanatory regress would then be up and running. Now not every infinite regress is vicious; some are, if not virtuous, benign. The homuncular regress, however, is vicious. It doesn't get the length of a final explanation, which is what we want in philosophy.
Charitably read, however, the Augustinian passage raises legitimate and important questions.
Who are the seers when we see something? Who or what is doing the seeing? Not the eyes, since they are mere instruments of vision. We see with our eyes, says Augustine, likening the eyes to windows through which we peer. There is something right about this inasmuch as it is not my eyes that see the sunset, any more than my glasses see the sunset. Put eyeglasses on a statue and visual experiences will accrue neither to the glasses nor to the statue. Eyeglasses, binoculars, telescopes, etc., are clearly instruments of vision, but they themselves see nothing.
But then the same must also be true of the eyes in my head, their parts, the optic nerve, the neural pathways, the visual cortex, and every other material element in the instrumentality of vision. None of these items, taken individually or taken collectively, taken separately or taken in synergy, is the subject of visual experience. Similarly for ears and tongue. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. But it is not these auditory transducers that hear; you hear and understand — or else you don't. You cannot speak without a tongue, but it is not the tongue that speaks. You speak using your tongue.
Question is: what does 'you' refer to in the immediately preceding sentence? Who are you? Who or what am I? Substituting a third-person designator for the first-person singular pronoun won't get us anywhere. I am BV. No doubt. But 'BV' refers to a publicly accessible animated body who (or rather that) instantiates various social roles. You could of course say that the animal bearing my name is the subject of my experiences. That would involve no violation of ordinary language. And it makes sense from a third-person point of view (POV). It does not, however, make sense from a first-person POV. I see the sunset, not the animal that wears my clothes or bears my name.
And please note that the first-person POV takes precedence over, since it is presupposed by, the third-person POV. For it is I who adopts the third-person POV. The third-person POV without an I, an ego, who adopts it is a view from nowhere by nobody. There is no view of anything without an I whose view it is.
So I ask again: who or what is this I? Who or what is the ultimate subject of my experience? Who or what is the seer of my sights, the thinker of my thoughts, the agent of my actions, the patient of my pleasures and pains? Two things seem clear: the ultimate subject of my experience, the transcendental subject, is not this hairy beast sitting in my chair, and the ultimate subject, the transcendental subject, is not an homunculus.
Should we therefore follow Augustine and postulate an immaterial soul substance as the ultimate subject of visual and other experiences? Should we speak with Descartes of a thinking thing, res cogitans, as the source and seat of our cogitationes? Is the res cogitans literally a res, a thing, or is this an illicit reification ('thingification')? On this third approach, call it Platonic-Augustinian-Cartesian, there is a thing that is conscious when I am conscious of something, but it is not a little man in my head, nor is it my body or my brain or any part of my brain. It cannot be my body or brain or any part thereof because these items one and all are actual or possible objects of experience and therefore cannot be the ultimate subject of experience. And so one is tempted to conclude that, since it cannot be anything physical, the ultimate subject of experience must be something meta-physical.
This third approach, however, has difficulties of its own. The dialectic issues in the thought that the ultimate subject of experience, the transcendental ego, is unobjectifiable. But if so, how could it be a meta-physical thing? Would that not be just another object, an immaterial, purely spiritual, object? Are we not, with the meta-physical move, engaging in an illicit reification just as we would be if we identified the ultimate subject with the brain or with an homunculus? And what would a spiritual thing be if not a subtle body composed of rarefied matter, ghostly matter, geistige Materie. Reification of the ultimate subject appears to terminate in 'spiritual materialism,' which smacks of contradiction.
But maybe there is no contradiction. There may well be ghosts, spooks made of spook stuff. I told you about my eldritch experience in the Charles Doughty Memorial Suite in which, one night, someone switched on my radio and tuned it to the AM band that I never listened to. Maybe it was the ghost of the bitter old man who had recently had a heart attack and who had threatened to kill me. But who was the seer of that ghost's sights and the agent of his actions?
Do you see the problem? The regress to the ultimate subject of experience is a regress to the wholly unobjectifiable, to 'something' utterly un-thing-like composed of no sort of matter gross or subtle.
Should we adopt a fourth approach and say, instead, that the ultimate subject of experience is no thing at all whether physical or meta-physical? If we go down this road, we end up in the company of Jean-Paul Sartre and Panayot Butchvarov.
But there is fifth approach, homuncular functionalism, which cannot be explained here. The idea is that there is a regress of stupider and stupider homunculi until we get to a level of homunculi so stupid that they are indistinguishable from mindless matter. See here and here.
Had enough of doom and gloom, politics and perfidy? Try this Substack article on for size.
I examine a point of dispute between Alvin Plantinga and John Hick, two distinguished contributors to the philosophy of religion.
The Substack article also relates to my earlier discussion with Tom the Canadian, here.
(I am protective of my commenters, especially the young guys; I don't demand that they use their real and/or full names. I don't want them to get in trouble with the thought police. Never underestimate the scumbaggery of leftists.)
I thank Anthony G. Flood for his The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God Revisited: Toward a Response to Bill Vallicella. Herewith, a first installment by way of rejoinder. Convergence upon agreement is not to be expected, but clarification of differences is an attainable goal. In any case, philosophy is a joy to its true acolytes, and in dark times a great consolation as well. Now let's get to work.
Tony introduces the theme skillfully:
Preamble: if the God of the Bible, who created human beings in his image to know and love him and to know, value, and rule the rest of creation under him (hereafter, “God”), exists, then we know one way that the conditions of intelligible predication (IP) can be met. The preceding sentence includes key aspects of the Christian worldview (CW)—the Theos-anthropos-kosmos relationship—expressed on the pages of the Bible.
If no alternative explanation for IP is possible, then Biblical theism is necessarily true (which is what the CW predicts).
[. . .]
If no worldview other than the Christian (CW) can account for IP, if (as I now hold) an alternative to the CW when it comes to accounting for IP cannot even be conceived, then to hold out for an alternative, as though doing so were an expression of rational exigency (“demandingness”)—that to reserve judgment somehow accords with epistemic duty—models only dogmatic stubbornness, not tolerant liberality.
Given the actual fact of intelligible predication, which is not in dispute, and assuming, as we must, the modal axiom ab esse ad posse valet illatio, it follows that intelligible predication (IP) is possible. Necessarily, whatever is actual is possible. So we ask the transcendental question: under what conditions is IP possible? What condition or conditions would have to obtain for it to be possible that there be actual cases of intelligible predication? An example of an intelligible predication is any true or false statement, such as 'The Moon is presently uninhabited' which happens to be true, or its negation which happens to be false.
Now I agree with Flood that if the God of the Christian Bible (hereafter 'God') exists, then the condition or conditions of the possibility of IP are satisfied. The existence of God suffices for the possibility of intelligible predication. But here we need to remind ourselves of a couple or three simple points of logic.
The first is that if X is sufficient for Y, it does not follow that X is necessary for Y. So if the existence of God is not only a sufficient but also a necessary condition of IP, this will require further argumentation. The second point is that to assert a conditional is not to assert either its antecedent/protasis or its consequent/apodosis. To assert or affirm a conditional is to assert or affirm a connection between antecedent and consequent, the nature of the connection depending on the type of conditional it is, whether logical or nomological or whatever. The third point is that some conditionals are true despite having a false antecedent and a false consequent.
And although it is not self-evident, I also agree with Flood that there is and must be some condition or set of conditions that make IP possible. Let 'TC' stand for this transcendental condition or set of conditions. We agree then that the TC necessarily exists.
We seem to have found some common — dare I say 'neutral'? — ground: (a) there are actual cases of IP; (b) given that they are actual, they are possible; (c) it is legitimate to launch a regressive (transcendental) inquiry into the condition or conditions of the possibility of these actual cases; (d) there must be such a transcendental condition; (e) the existence of God suffices for the possibility of IP.
This leaves us with the question whether the God of the Christian Bible = TC. Is God's existence not only sufficient but also both necessary for the possibility of IP? Flood will answer with alacrity in the affirmative: yes, God and God alone is (numerically) identical to the ultimate transcendental condition of all intelligible predication. This of course implies that it is not possible that anything distinct from God be the TC. God necessarily exists, and is necessarily identical to the ultimate transcendental condition of intelligible predication.
But wait, there's more! Flood tells us that "an alternative to the CW [the Christian worldview] when it comes to accounting for IP cannot even be conceived." So it is not just impossible that anything other than God be identical to the TC; this is inconceivable as well.
Here is one of the places where Flood blunders: he confuses the epistemic modality inconceivability with the ontic modality impossibility. Conceivability and inconceivability are tied to the thinking powers of such finite and limited intellects as ours. By contrast, what is possible and impossible in reality are independent of what we frail reeds are able to think and unable to think. I will have more to say about this in subsequent posts since it appears to be a trademark mistake of presuppositionalists to conflate epistemic and ontic modality.
In any case, it is very easy to conceive of alternatives to Flood's candidate for TC status. Here is a partial catalog of candidates in which (B), (C), and (D) are alternatives to Flood's candidate, (A).
A. Intelligible predication presupposes the truth of the Christian worldview (Van Til & Co.) as the transcendental condition of IP's very possibility.
B. Intelligible predication presupposes the existence of God, but not the Christian worldview as the Calvinist Van Til and his followers calvinistically understand it, the essential commitments of which include such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity, Incarnation, etc. as well as the specifically Calvinist TULIP doctrines. Some who call themselves Christians are unitarians and deniers of the divinity of Christ. Our friend Dale Tuggy is such a one. And those the presuppositionalists refer to as 'Romanists' who do accept Trinity and Incarnation don't accept the specifically Calvinist add-ons.
C. Intelligible predication presupposes the truth of Kant's transcendental idealism according to which "The understanding is the law-giver of nature," and space and time are a priori forms of our sensibility. For Kant the ultimate transcendental condition of the objective validity of every judgment, and thus of every intelligible predication, is located in the transcendental unity of apperception which is assuredly not God, whatever exactly it is.
D. Intelligible predication presupposes, not the God of the Christian Bible, but an immanent order and teleology in nature along the lines of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos (Oxford 2012). On Nagel's view, the rational order of nature is self-explanatory, a necessary feature of anything that could count as a cosmos. Nagel views the intelligibility of the world as "itself part of the deepest explanation why things are as they are." (17). Now part of the way things are is that they are understandable by us. Given that the way things are is intelligible, it follows that the intelligibility of the world is self-explanatory or self-grounding. "The intelligibility of the world is no accident." (17) But neither is it due to theistic intervention or imposition. "Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings." (17) See my overview of Nagel's book for details.
I am not endorsing any of the above-listed alternatives to (A). They all have their problems as does (A). My point is that they are conceivable alternatives to (A). This being the case, Flood's asseveration, "an alternative to the CW [the Christian worldview] when it comes to accounting for IP cannot even be conceived" is false.
It is quite clear that what Van Til & Co. want is a rationally compelling, 'knock-down,' argument for the existence of the God of the Christian Bible calvininstically interpreted. But they know (deep down even as they suppress the knowledge) that no circular argument is probative. So they essay the above transcendental argument.
What I have shown, however, is that the transcendental argument is not probative. It fails to establish that the God of the Christian Bible is both sufficient and necessary for the possibility of intelligible predication. At most, it renders rationally acceptable the conclusion that the God of the Christian Bible exists.
I am not denying that the God of the Christian Bible exists. Nor am I denying that if said God exists, then he flawlessly executes all the transcendental functions that need executing. How could he fail to? In particular, how could he fail to be the ultimate ungrounded transcendental-ontological ground of intelligible predication? My point is that the presuppositionalists have not proven, i.e., established with objective certainty, that God alone could play the transcendental role.
The day before yesterday, re: presuppositionalism, I wrote:
We need to bear in mind that arguments have premises and that no argument can prove its own premises. An argument of the form p therefore p is an argument valid in point of logical form in which premise and conclusion are identical, but no one will take an argument of this form as proving that p. Every circular argument of the above form is valid, and some are sound; but none are probative. By that I mean that no such argument constitutes a proof. That ought to be perfectly obvious.
'Circularity' in respect of arguments is of course a metaphor: no argument is literally a geometrical circle. But it is a useful metaphor and I propose we extend it by speaking of the 'diameter' of a circular argument. The logical form italicized above — p therefore p — has a 'diameter' than which no shorter can be conceived. Its 'diameter' is zero. If a geometrical circle has a diameter of zero, then it is not a circle but a point. The diameter of a circular argument of the above form is also a 'point,' figuratively speaking, the point being the one proposition that serves as both premise and conclusion.
A circular argument of zero diameter is said to be 'vicious.' Are there then 'virtuous' or if not positively virtuous then 'non-vicious' circular arguments? Can one argue in a way that is circular but logically acceptable? Brian Bosse brought up this issue over lunch Sunday as we were discussing my longish entry on presuppositionalism. He may have had John M. Frame in mind.
Presuppositionalists such as Frame take the Word of God as set forth in the Protestant Christian Bible as their "ultimate presupposition." (Five Views on Apologetics, Zondervan 2000, 209) It is their "ultimate criterion of truth." (209) This commitment of theirs is faith-based:
. . . for Christians, faith governs reasoning just as it governs all other human activities. Reasoning is not in some realm that is neutral between faith and unbelief. There is no such realm, since God's standards apply to all of life. (209)
What causes faith? ". . . God causes faith by his own free grace." (209) What is the rational basis of faith? ". . . the answer is that faith is based on reality, on truth. It is in accord with all the facts of God's universe and all the laws of thought that God has ordained. . . . The faith he gives us agrees with God's own perfect rationality." (209-210)
We want to know what rationally justifies faith in God and in his Word as found in the Bible. We are told that this faith is justified because it is true, agreeing as it does with all of the laws of thought that God has ordained. God himself, as the ultimate source of all things, including rationality, is the ultimate rational justification of our faith in him and his Word. The reasoning here is plainly circular as Frame admits:
There is a kind of circularity here, but the circularity is not vicious. It sounds circular to say that faith governs reasoning and also that it is based on rationality. It is therefore important to remember that the rationality that serves as the rational basis for faith is God's own rationality. The sequence is: God's rationality –>human faith –>human reasoning. The arrows may be read "is the rational basis for." That sequence is linear, not circular. (210)
Frame's fancy footwork here is unavailing, an exercise in sophistry. He is obviously reasoning in a circle by presupposing the very thing whose existence he wants to prove. But he is loathe to admit that this is what he is doing. So he introduces a bogus distinction between vicious circles and linear circles. But just as 'linear circle' in geometry is a contradictio in adjecto , so too is 'linear circle' in logic.
You are either arguing in a circle or you are not. You are either presupposing what you are trying to prove or you are not. You are either begging the question or you are not. You are either committing the formal fallacy of petitio principii (hysteron proteron) or you are not. That is the long and the short of it. One or the other and no weaseling out via some bogus distinction between vicious and non-vicious circular arguments.
What Frame wants is a 'knock-down' (rationally compelling or rationally coercive) argument for the existence of the God of the Protestant Christian Bible interpreted along Calvinist lines. He thinks he can get what wants by way of a transcendental argument, one that issues in God "not merely as the conclusion of an argument, but as the one who makes argument possible." (220) He wants God to play a transcendental role as the ultimate and unconditioned condition of the possibility of all our intellectual operations including reasoning, whether valid or invalid, sound or unsound. (If his God does play the transcendental role, then Frame can say that the arguments of atheists, just insofar as they are arguments, prove the existence of God!)
Now it must be granted, as I granted to Brian over lunch, that if Frame's God exists, then he does play the transcendental role. The question, however, is whether it can be proven that nothing other than Frame's God could play the transcendental role. It can be proven that there is a transcendental condition of all our intellectual operations. (See my earlier entry.) Where Frame goes wrong is in thinking that from the fact that there is a rationally compelling argument for the existence of a transcendental condition of the possibility of all our intellectual operations (forming concepts, defining terms, making judgments, giving arguments, replying to objections offering hypotheses, etc.) it follows immediately that his God exists beyond the shadow of a rational doubt. How does he know that his God alone could play the transcendental role? Frame may be taxed with giving the following invalid argument:
a) If the God of the Protestant Christian Bible exists, then he plays the transcendental role;
b) It is objectively certain that something plays the transcendental role;
ergo
c) It is objectively certain that the God of the Protestant Christian Bible plays the transcendental role.
The premises are true, but the conclusion does not follow from them. For it is not objectively certain that nothing other than the God of the Christian Bible could play the transcendental role. This is because no non-transcendental argument — Frame mentions the "causal argument" — for the existence of God is rationally compelling. Hence no non-transcendental God argument can assure us that the existence of God is objectively certain.
Here is another way to see the matter. It is rationally demonstrable that there is a total and unique way things are. (For if you assert that there is no way things are, then you are asserting that the way things are is that there is no way things are.) Now if Frame's God exists, then he is the concrete and personal metaphysical ground of the way things are. But how do we know that Frame's God exists? We cannot simply assume that the transcendental proof of the existence of the way things are is also a proof of Frame's God. So non-transcendental arguments must be brought into to take us to Frame's God, Frame's "causal argument" for example. But these arguments are none of them rationally compelling. They do not generate objective certainty. So how do we know that something else is not the metaphysical ground of the way things are?
In an earlier post, drawing on the work of Henry E. Allison, I wrote:
The standard picture opens Kant to the devastating objection that by limiting knowledge to appearances construed as mental contents he makes knowledge impossible when his stated aim is to justify the objective knowledge of nature and oppose Humean skepticism. Allison reports that Prichard "construes Kant's distinction between appearances and things in themselves in terms of the classic example of perceptual illusion: the straight stick that appears bent to an observer when it is immersed in water." (p. 6) But then knowledge is rendered impossible, and Kant is reduced to absurdity.
Anyone who studies Kant in depth and in context and with an open mind should be able to see that his transcendental idealism is not intended as a subjective idealism. A related mistake is to think that subjective idealism is the only kind of idealism. The "standard picture" is fundamentally mistaken. Appearances (Erscheinungen) for Kant are not the private data of particular minds, and thus not ideas in the Cartesian-Lockean sense, or any other sort of content of a particular mind. Kant distinguishes crucially between Erscheinung and Schein/Apparenz between appearance and illusion/semblance. Because of this distinction, appearances [in the specifically Kantian sense] cannot be assimilated to perceptual illusions in the way Prichard and the "standard picture" try to assimilate them.
In this entry I will expand upon the above by taking a close look at the stretch of text in H.A. Prichard's Kant's Theory of Knowledge (1909) in which he discusses the straight stick that appears bent when immersed in water. This is a classical example of perceptual illusion. It illustrates how an appearance (in one sense of the term) may distort reality (in one sense of the term). Call the first the A1 sense and the second the R1 sense. My claim, of course, is that this empirical A1-R1 distinction is not the same as Kant's distinction between phenomena and things in themselves, and that anyone who, like Prichard, thinks otherwise has simply failed to understand what Kant is maintaining. Kant's distinction between phenomena and things in themselves is the distinction between empirically real, intersubjectively accessible, public, causally interacting things in space and time, on the one hand, and those same things considered apart from the a priori conditions of our sensibility. The Earth and its one natural satellite, the Moon, are examples of phenomena in Kant's sense. Neither is a private, mental item in a particular mind as a modification of such a mind or an item internal to it. The Earth and the Moon are not mental phenomena in any Cartesian, Humean, or Brentanian sense, but empirically real, physical things. But though they are empirically real, they are transcendentally ideal when considered independently of the conditions of our sensibility.
In sum, there are two distinctions. The first is the distinction between private mental contents of particular minds and real things external to such minds. For example, Ed is enjoying a visual experience of his by-now-famous desk. Neither the desk as a whole nor any part of it is literally in Ed's mind, let alone in his head. The desk, like his head and the rest of his body, is in the publicly accessible external world. Now let 'A1' denote Ed's experience/experiencing whereby his desk appears to him, and let 'R1' denote the desk itself which is external to Ed's mind/consciousness. Prichard's mistake is to conflate this A1-R1 distinction with Kant's distinction between phenomena and things in themselves. The R1 of the first distinction is the A2 of Kant's distinction which, again, is the distinction between intersubjectively accessible objects in space and time and those same objects viewed independently of the conditions of our sensibility.
I now turn to Chapter IV of Prichard's book. The chapter is entitled "Phenomena and Things in Themselves." Prichard takes Kant to be saying that spatial and temporal relations are "relations which belong to things only as perceived." (p. 79.) Prichard goes on to say, "The thought of a property or a relation that belongs to things as perceived involves a contradiction." He brings up the submerged stick which is in reality straight, but appears to a perceiver as bent. Prichard then makes the unexceptionable point that
. . . the assertion that something is so and so implies that it is so and so in itself, whether it be perceived or not, and therefore the assertion that something is so and so to us as perceiving, though not in itself, is a contradiction in terms.
This is certainly true. After I explain why it is true, I will explain why it has nothing to do with Kant. One cannot assert of anything x that it is F without thereby asserting that x is F in reality. What one asserts to be the case one asserts to be the case whether or not anyone asserts it. (Of course, it doesn't follow that what one asserts to be the case is the case. All that follows is that what one asserts to be the case purports to be the case independently of anyone's act of assertion. Saying this I am merely unpacking the concept of assertion.) So if I assert of x that it is bent, then I assert that x is bent in itself or in reality whether or not there are any assertors or perceivers. To assert that x is bent is to assert that a mind-independent item is bent. (Of course, it does not follow that there is a mind-independent item that is bent; all that follows is that if some item is bent or straight or has any property, then it is mind-independent.) Therefore, if I assert of an illusory appearance that it is bent, then I fall into contradiction. For what I am then asserting is that something that is mind-dependent — because it is illusory — is not mind-dependent but exists in reality.
This is what I take Prichard to be maintaining in the passage quoted. Thus charitably interpreted, what he is saying is (by my lights) true. But what does this have to do with Kant? Kant is not not talking about private mental items internal to particular minds such as an illusory appearance as of a bent stick. He is not saying of such an appearance (Apparenz) or semblance (Schein) that it is the subject of spatial and temporal relations. If he were, then he would stand refuted by Prichard's unexceptionable point. But it strains credulity to think that a great philosopher could blunder so badly.
Note also that to read Kant as if his phenomena (Erscheinungen) in space and time are private mental phenomena is to impute to him the sophomoric absurdity that mental data which are unextended are extended as they must be if they stand in physical relations. Such an imputation would be exegetically uncharitable in excelsis.
Finally, if space and time and everything in it is mental in Prichard's sense, and internal to particular minds like ours, then the upshot would be an utterly absurd form of subjective idealism.
…………………………………….
Further tangential ruminations.
How do I know that the visual datum is an illusory appearance? If I know that what appears to me — the immersed-stick visual datum — is illusory, then I know that what appears to me cannot be bent or straight or have any spatial property. For what is illusory does not exist, and what does not exist cannot have properties. But how do I know that the visual datum does not exist?
That is precisely what I don't know in the cases of perceptual illusion in which I am really fooled — unlike the classic stick case above that fools no adult. No adult is 'taken in' by acquatic refraction phenomena. "Damn that boatman! He gave me a bent oar!" Here is a real-life example.
Hiking in twilight, I experience a visual datum as of a rattlesnake. I jump back and say to my partner, "There's a rattler on the trail." I assert the visual datum to be a rattler, which of course implies that in reality there is a rattler. (And that I jumped back shows that my assertion was sincere.) A closer look, however, shows that I mistook a tree root for a snake. What I initially saw (in the phenomenological sense of 'see') was only an illusory appearance. If I then say that the illusory appearance is a rattler or is venomous, etc. then I fall into contradiction. The point is that illusory appearances do not exist and therefore cannot have properties: they cannot be bent or straight or venomous or of the species crotalus atrox, etc.
The good bishop, as Kant called him, held that reality is exhausted by "spirits" and their ideas. Thus on Berkeley's scheme everything is either a spiritual substance or mind, whether finite or infinite (God), or else an idea 'in' a mind. Ideas are thus modes or modifications of minds. As such they do not exist independently of minds. That's what 'in' conveys. If everything is either a mind or an idea in a mind, then bodies are not substances given that a substance is an entity capable of independent existence. Berkeley's ontology is thus a one (type of) substance ontology. This makes for a contrast with Descartes' dualism of substances, thinking and extended.
Now the gross facts are not in dispute and no (sane) philosopher is in the business of denying them. So every sane person will agree that there are rocks and trees, tables and turnips. You haven't understood Berkeley if you think that he is an eliminativist about such things. That is why you cannot refute him by kicking a stone. Anyone who thinks that he can be so refuted is utterly bereft of philosophical aptitude. The question is not whether there are bodies, trees and such; the question is what they are, and what the good bishop is telling us is that they are coherent, cohesive, bundles of ideas. Trees and such exist alright; it's just that their esse est percipi, their being/existence is (identically) their being perceived by some spirit.
The standard picture assimilates Kant to Berkeley, as I wrote earlier:
P.F. Strawson and H. A. Prichard are exponents of this reading along with many others in the Anglosphere. The standard picture makes of Kant an inconsistent Berkeley who limits knowledge to appearances, these being understood as "mere representations" (blosse Vorstellungen), while at the same time positing an unknowable realm of things in themselves. Mere representations are assimilated to Berkeleian ideas so that when Kant states that we know only appearances, what he is telling us is that we know only the contents of our minds.
The standard picture shows a failure to grasp what Kant intends with his transcendental idealism. (Note, however, that whether Kant achieves what he intends is an entirely different question.) When I taught Kant in the 1980s I used the following three-level schema in order to clarify what Kant means by 'appearance' (Erscheinung) when he is using it in his special transcendentally idealist sense. There are at least three senses of 'appearance' in Kant. We may call them the manifest, the scientific, and the transcendental. The empirical embraces both the manifest and the scientific and stands opposed to the transcendental. Correspondingly, there are three senses of 'reality,' the manifest, the scientific, and the transcendental.
Level One: We start with the ordinary 'manifest image' appearance-reality distinction. One day I was hiking Jacob's Crosscut along the base of Superstition Mountain. Off in the brush I espied what appeared to be some big black dogs. In reality, however, they were black bears as a closer look revealed. This is a familiar sort of case. An initial appearance is shown to be a perceptual mistake, one correctable and in this case corrected by further perception. The initial, non-veridical appearance was not nothing, but its 'reality' was merely intra-mental, a momentary private datum not amenable to public verification, or even ongoing private verification. It was a mere seeming or semblance, an instance of what Kant calls Schein and distinguishes from Erscheinung. Kantian appearances are not private mental data.
Let 'A1' denote an appearance at Level One, and 'R1' a reality or real thing at Level One. An A1 may or may not be veridical. If I jump back from what I take to be a snake but is in reality a tree root, then the A1 is non-veridical. But when I see a tree root and my partner confirms that what I saw was a tree root, then my A1 and his numerically different A1 are veridical. So an A1 need not be illusory. Every A1 purports to be of or about an R1, but the purport does not always 'pan out.'
At A 45 = B63, Kant gives his rainbow example. He tells us that a rainbow may be called a mere appearance and the rain the thing in itself. This is an example of the Level One appearance-reality distinction. In that same obscure passage, the careful reader can discern the Level Three appearance-reality distinction. For he tells us that the rain drops, together with such primary qualities as shape, are themselves appearances of a "transcendental object" that "remains unknown to us." It follows that the rainbow is an appearance of an appearance. The empirical object (rain water refracting sunlight) that is the reality behind the rainbow is itself an appearance of something that does not appear to us as it is in itself.
Level Two. We now wheel the primary versus secondary quality distinction onto the field. An R1 at Level One has both primary and secondary qualities. The tree I see when I look out my window has both primary and secondary qualities. To mention just two of its primary qualities, it has a size and a shape. To mention just one of its secondary qualities it is green in color. At Level Two, R1 is stripped of its secondary qualities, and left with its primary qualities alone. We are now operating within the 'scientific image.' What was R1 at Level One is now A2 at Level Two. The real extra-mental tree of Level One is now taken to be an appearance of a deeper reality R2 at Level Two. Thus:
A1 ——————-> R1
(R1 = A2) ——————–> R2
A1 is a representation 'in' the mind of a psychophysical being, a human animal for example. The arrows stand for the representing relation. There is difference between the two relations depicted, but I cannot go into this now. What A1 represents (or presents, stellt vor) is an empirical object R1 endowed with primary and secondary qualities. The secondary qualities are perceived at the object even though, at Level Two, they are understood to be merely relational properties of R2 due to the affection (causal impact) of the thing R2 upon the sensory receptors of the psychophysical subject. Thus R2 in itself is not colored, etc. But R2 is in space and possesses a location, a size, a shape, a volume, etc. It is either at rest or in motion which implies the possibility of translation and rotation, etc. which motions bring objective time into the picture.
Level Three. At this level we arrive at the phenomenon or appearance in the specifically Kantian sense. Space and time (and thus all primary qualities) are now stripped from R2 and made out to be a priori forms (or schematizations of such forms), forms that characterize the standpoint of an ectypal intellect, one whose sole mode of intuition (Anschauung) is sensible and thus receptive unlike the intellectual and thus non-sensible mode of intuition of the archetypal intellect whose intuition is creative of its objects. What exactly this standpoint of the ectypal is is a vexing question. We can say this much with assurance: it is nothing internal to the mind of a psychophysical being such as a human animal, nor is it necessarily dependent on the existence of psychophysical beings. Extending the above diagram:
(R1 = A2) ——————–> R2
(R2 = A3) ———————–> R3 (negative noumenon)
(R2 = A3) is an intersubjective object. It is the objective correlate of the epistemic standpoint of an ectypal intellect. Nature for Kant is the sum-total of all such phenomena as intersubjective objects. The objectivity of R3, by contrast, is not intersubjective but absolute as befits the objective correlate of the absolute mind of the archetypal intellect, "which all men call God," to adapt a phrase from Aquinas.
The above schema leaves us with a lot of thorny questions. One such concerns double affection (Erich Adickes). Do both R3 and R2 cause sensations in psychophysical beings?
The main point, however, it is that no one who understands what Kant is trying to do could possibly assimilate his idealism to Berkeley's. There is much more to be said.
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.
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From Kant on, transcendental philosophy has been bedeviled by a certain paradox. Here again is the Paradox of Antirealism (PA) discussed by Panayot Butchvarov, as I construe it, where the numerals in parentheses refer to pages in his 2015 Anthropocentrism in Philosophy:
PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)
As I was mulling this over I was reminded of the Paradox of Human Subjectivity discussed by Edmund Husserl in his last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, in sections 53 and 54, pp. 178-186 of the Carr translation. Here is the paradox in Husserl's words:
PHS: How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?
The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole world and thus itself too. What an absurdity! Or is this a paradox which can be sensibly resolved . . . ? (179-180)
What is common to both of the paradoxical formulations is the idea that we are at once objects in the world and subjects for whom there is a world. This by itself is not paradoxical. For there is nothing paradoxical in the notion that we are physical parts of a physical world that exists and has the nature it has independently of us, and that our knowing ourselves and other things is a physical process. Paradox ensues if (A) the world is a product of our accomplishments (Leistungen) as Husserl would have it, or a product of our formation (via both the a priori categories of the understanding and the a priori forms of sensibility, space and time) of the sensory manifold, as on the Kantian scheme, and (B) we, the subjects for whom there is a world, are parts of the world. For then the entire vast cosmos would depend for its existence and/or nature on transient parts thereof. And surely that would be absurd. Butchvarov above mentions the intelligibility of physical reality. If this intelligibility is not intrinsic to nature but imposed by us, then this too would be absurd if we are but physical parts of the physical cosmos. Butchvarov again: "The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna." For one thing, before we miserable human animals came on the evolutionary scene, the physical cosmos was 'already there.' So the cosmos could not possibly depend for its existence on the existence of measly parts thereof who, in addition, made the scene rather late in the game. As for intelligibility, the understandability of the cosmos has as a necessary though not sufficient condition its regularity. The laws of nature are at least regularities. Now if regularity is imposed or bestowed or projected by specimens of h. sapiens, then the universe would have to wait for us to arrive before it could be cosmos as opposed to chaos. And that is plainly absurd.
Dehumanizing Subjectivity
Interestingly, for both Butchvarov and Husserl, the solution to their respective paradoxes involves a retreat from anthropocentrism and a concomitant 'dehumanization' of subjectivity. For both, there is nothing specifically human about consciousness, although of course in "the natural attitude" (Husserl's natuerliche Einstellung) humans are the prime instances known to us of 'conscious beings.' For present purposes, consciousness is intentionality, consciousness-of, awareness-of, where the 'of' is an objective genitive. (I leave out of consideration putatively non-intentional states of awareness such as felt pain and felt pleasure.) For Butchvarov, consciousness-of is not a property of (subjective genitive) human beings or of metaphysical/noumenal/transcendental egos somehow associated with human animals. It is not a property of human brains or of human souls or of human soul-body composites. It does not in any way emanate from human subjects. It is not like a ray that shoots forth from a subject toward an object. Consciousness is subject-less. So it is not a relation that connects subjects and objects. It is more like a monadic property of objects, all objects, their apparentness or revealedness. The influence of both David Hume and Jean-Paul Sartre on Butchvarov is unmistakable.
Husserl and Butchvarov: Brief Contrast and Comparison
Husserl operates in a number of his works (Cartesian Meditations, Paris Lectures, Ideas I) with the following triadic Cartesian shema:
Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum
Subject ——————–> object (where the arrow represents a directed cogitatio, a mental act, an intentional Erlebnis, and where 'object' is in the singular because the noema of a noesis is precisely the noema of that very noesis. Got that?)
Butchvarov's schema is not triadic but dyadic along the lines of Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness (where the arrow does not represent a mental act but monadic universal 'of-ness,' Sartre's "wind blowing towards objects" and where 'objects' is in the plural because subject-less consciousness is one to their many):
——————————->objects.
For Butchvarov, following Sartre, consciousness is no-thing, no object, and thus other than every object, not in the world, and hence not restricted to the measly specimens of a zoological species. It is not restricted to them because not embodied in them. It is not a property of human animals, or something going on in their brains, or something supervenient upon, or epiphenomenal to, or emergent from intracranial goings-on. Consciousness, again, is a "wind blowing towards objects," a wind that blows from Nowhere and Nowhen. It blows without a blower. Someone might think of God as the Cosmic Blowhard who blows the bubble of space-time-matter from a 'place' outside of space and time, and keeps the bubble inflated for as long as he likes. But of course that is not what Sartre and Butchvarov mean. There is no blower of the intentional wind. The relevant text is Sartre's early The Transcendence of the Ego, directed against Husserl, according to which the ego is not an 'inhabitant' of consciousness but a transcendent item, an object alongside other objects. (Personal anecdote: when I first espied this title as a young man I thought to myself: "Great! A book that will teach me how to transcend my ego!")
Bear in mind that the phenomenological notion of transcendence is transcendence-in-immanence, not absolute transcendence.
Of course there is a paradox if not a contradiction lurking within the Sartrean, radically externalist, anti-substantialist conception of consciousness: consciousness is nothing, but not a 'mere nothing,' a nugatory nothing, ein nichtiges Nichts (to borrow a phrase from Heidegger) inasmuch as consciousness, which is no-thing, is that without which objects would not be revealed or manifested or apparent. It is both something and no-thing. It is something inasmuch as without it nothing would appear when it is a plain fact that objects do appear. That objects appear is self-evident even if it is not self-evident that they appear to someone or something. It is not clear that there is a 'dative of appearing' though it is clear that there are 'accusatives of appearing.' Consciousness is nothing inasmuch as it is no object and does not appear. This apparent contradiction is to my mind real, to Butchvarov's mind merely apparent. (Via private communication.) It is clearly a different paradox than the Paradox of Antirealism. It is a paradox that infects a particular solution to the Paradox of Antirealism, Butchvarov's solution.
How does Husserl dehumanize subjectivity?
Here is a crucial passage from Crisis, sec. 54, p. 183:
But are the transcendental subjects, i.e., those functioning in the constitution of the world, human beings? After all, the epoché has made them into 'phenomena,' so that the philosopher within the epoché has neither himself nor the others naively and straightforwardly valid as human beings but precisely only as 'phenomena,' as poles for transcendental regressive inquiries. Clearly here, in the radical consistency of the epoché, each 'I' is considered purely as the ego-pole of his acts, habitualities, and capacities . . . .
[. . .]
But in the epoché and in the pure focus upon the functioning ego-pole . . . it follows eo ipso that nothing human is to be found, neither soul nor psychic life nor real psychophysical human beings; all this belongs to the 'phenomenon,' to the world as constituted pole.
Contra Husserl
Husserl is a great philosopher and one cannot do him justice in one blog post or a hundred; but I don't see how his position is tenable. On the one hand, each transcendental ego functioning as such cannot be a human being in nature. For nature and everything in it including all animal organisms is an intentional formation constituted by the transcendental ego. But not only can the world-constituting ego not be a physical thing, it cannot be a meta-physical spiritual thing either. It cannot be a res cogitans or substantia cogitans. As Husserl sees it, Descartes' identification of his supposedly indubitable ego with a thinking thing shows a failure fully to execute the transcendental turn (transzendentale Wendung). The Frenchman stops short at a little tag-end of the world (ein kleines Endchen der Welt) from which, by means of shaky inferences, he tries to get back what his hyperbolic doubt had called into question.
Husserl's thinking in sections 10-11 of Cartesian Meditations seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn, and avoids the supposed mistake of Descartes, one is left with nothing that can be posited as existing in itself independently of consciousness. Everything objective succumbs to the epoché. No absolute transcendence is reachable: every transcendence is at best a transcendence-in-immanence, a constituted transcendence. Everything in the world is a constitutum, and the same holds for the world itself. If Descartes had gone all the way he would have seen that not only his animal body could be doubted, but also his psyche, the psychophysical complex, and indeed any spiritual substance 'behind' the psyche. He would have seen that the cogito does not disclose something absolutely transcendent and indubitable. For Husserl, everything objective, whether physical or mental, ". . . derives its whole sense and its ontic validity (Seinsgeltung), which it has for me, from me myself, from me as the transcendental ego, the ego who comes to the fore only with the transcendental-phenomenological epoché." (CM, p. 26. I have translated Seinsgeltung as ontic validity which I consider more accurate than Cairns' "existential status.") In Formal and Transcendental Logic, sec. 94, along the same lines, we read: "nothing exists for me otherwise than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness."
One problem: just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung? Does it exist? And in what sense of 'exist'? It cannot exist as a constituted object for it is the subjective source of all constitutive performances (Leistungen). But if it is not an indubitable piece of the world, then it cannot existent transcendently either.
Descartes thought that he had reached something whose existence cannot be bracketed, eingeklammert, to use Husserl's term, and that that was himself as thinking thing. He thought he had hit bedrock, the bedrock of Ansichsein. Husserl objects: No, the ego's existence must be bracketed as well. But then nothing is left over. We are left with no clue as to what the transcendental ego is once it is distinguished from the psychological or psychophysical ego who is doing the meditating. To appreciate the difficulty one must realize that it is a factical transcendental ego that does the constituting, not an eidos-ego. The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not an eidetic reduction. It would be a serious mistake to think that the re-duction (the leading back, the path of regress) from the psychological ego to the transcendental ego is a reduction to an eidos-ego, an ideal ego abstractly common to all factical egos.
Here is another approach to the problem. The transcendental-phenomenological reduction regresses from everything objective, everything naively posited as existing in itself, to the subjective sources of the ontic validity (Seinsgeltung) and Being-sense (Seinssinn) of everything objective. This radical regression, however, must leave behind everything psychological since the psychological co-posits the objective world of nature. But how can Husserl execute this radical regression and yet hold onto words like 'ego' and 'cogitatio' and 'cogitatum'? How does he know that it is an I or an ego that is the transcendental-phenomenological residuum? In simpler terms, how does he know that what he gets to by the trans-phen reduction is something that can be referred to by 'I'? How does he know that it is anything like a person?
After all, indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun are used by human beings to refer to human beings.
Husserl and Butchvarov: Similarities and Differences
1. Both philosophers espouse versions of antirealism, albeit very different versions.
2. Both philosophers face versions of the Paradox of Antirealism.
3. Both philosophers solve the paradox by retreating from anthropocentrism and advocating the 'dehumanization' of consciousness.
4. Both philosophers oppose (Berkeleyan) idealism if that is the view that "all reality is mental" (Butchvarov, p. 213), a view that entails that "the perception of a tree and the tree perceived are no more distinguishable than are a feeling of pain and the pain felt." (213)
5. Both philosophers hold that there are specifically philosophical indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun.
6. Both philosophers agree that the existence of such uses is, in Butchvarov's words, "evident from the intelligibility of Cartesian doubt. . . ." (196)
7. Both philosophers hold that these uses are referring uses.
8. Both philosophers hold that these referring uses do not refer to human beings.
9. Both philosophers oppose Descartes in holding that the specifically philosophical uses of the indexical 'I' do not refer to anything in the world.
10. Husserl and Butchvarov disagree on what these uses refer to. For Husserl they refer to the factical transcendental ego, which is the constitutive source of everything worldly as to its Seinsgeltung (ontic validity) and Seinsinn (ontic sense or meaning). For Butchvarov, they refer to the world itself, not things in the world, distributively or collectively, but the totality of these things. Butchvarov's theory is essentially that of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "I am my world." (5.63) There is no metaphysical subject in the world. (5.633) There is an ultimate philosophical I but it is not in the world; it is the limit of the world (5.632), or rather the world itself.
11. Husserl and Butchvarov agree that, in Wittgenstein's words, "there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way." (5.641) But of course the ways in which the two philosophers talk about the self non-psychologically are radically different.
12. Another major disagreement is this. Husserl sticks with the Cartesian Ansatz while attempting to radicalize it, but he never succeeds in clarifying the difference between the transcendental and psychological ego. Butchvarov abandons (or never subscribed to) the ego-cogito-cogitatum schema of Descartes, and of Kant too, and in a sense cuts the Gordian knot with Sartrean scissors: there is nothing psychological or egological or 'inner' or personal or subjective about consciousness. And so there is no problem of intersubjectivity such as bedeviled Husserl in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation and elsewhere. Butchvarov goes 'Hegelian.'
There is much more to be said, later.
Objectively viewed, an individual human life is next-to-nothing: a fleeting occurrence in the natural world. But we know this, and we know it as subjects for whom there is a world of nature. If objectively we are next-to-nothing, subjectively we are everything.
"When I die, the world ends."
The thought expressed by this sentence is not the absurdity that when a measly specimen of an animal species dies, the whole of nature collapses into nonbeing. The thought is that when I as subject die, assuming that I as subject will cease to exist, the entire universe ceases to be for me: it ceases to appear, this appearing being a necessary condition of anything having meaning for me and of anything being objectively knowable by me. (Note that while it is objectively certain that the animal that I am will die and thereby cease to exist, it is not objectively certain that I precisely as subject will cease to exist.)
Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung wrote Arthur Schopenhauer in the first sentence of his magnum opus. "The world is my representation." He means by 'world' the world as object, the world as phenomenon in Immanuel Kant's sense, the world that appears to the subject and is knowable by the subject and is knowable only to a subject. No object without a subject. Herein lies the perennial, if partial, truth of idealism. It runs like the proverbial red thread (roter Faden) though the entire history of philosophy.
But the idealistic motif is partial and wants completion. The aporetician in me doubts that this completion is achievable here below. What do I mean?
One cannot reduce object to subject or subject to object; nor can one eliminate either. The objective point of view (POV) is a POV — so it seems that the (transcendental) subject takes priority both in the order of being and in the order of knowing. But this subject, despite its transcendental spectator function, is undeniably a factical subject embedded in the natural and social worlds.
And so there is a strong temptation to say that the thinking and knowing subject 'emerges' — to avail myself of that weasel word — from the natural and social orders and can be understood only in terms of them. Thus is the priority reversed, at least in the order of being. If we adopt the objective POV, then the ontological prius is nature, the material universe splayed out in space-time. In the fullness of objective time certain highly advanced critters evolve with the power to know things, including themselves, and the power to pose the questions now being posed. This power 'emerges.' The weasel word papers over the how of the process of 'emergence' and is essentially only a naming of the puzzle as opposed to a solution it. It explains nothing.
So on the one hand you have the ontic and epistemic priority of the thinking and knowing subject while on the other you have the ontic. if not the epistemic, priority of the object which, as ontically prior, is not a mere object for a subject, but an independent real. (Note that if thinking and knowing could be adequately accounted for in terms of brain functioning, then the objective POV would enjoy both ontic and epistemic priority. That would consummate the marriage of realism with physicalism/materialism.)
The idealistic motif counters and is countered by the realistic motif. My natural tendency is to give the palm to the former. It has always seemed to me easier to get matter out of mind, than mind out of matter. Why? Well, I have the power to fictionalize and imagine. I can imagine material things that do not exist. Imagining them I imagine them to exist. Flying horses, talking donkeys. of course, I cannot make them exist by imagining them, but perhaps a divine intellect could. It makes sense — whether or not it is true — to say, as ome distinguished philosophers have said, that God is to creatures as fiction author to (wholly fictional) characters.
But I can attach no sense to the conceit that mind is a 'creation' of matter.
For now I end on an aporetic note. Despite what I just wrote, how do we integrate transcendental mind with the brain and CNS of this stinking animal that I am? The great Husserl sweated over a version of this puzzle but he could not solve it. It was questions like this one that made me appreciate the limits of phenomenology and convinced me that I had to come to grips with the bracing currents of the analytic-Anglophonic mainstream.
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.
I 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.
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* Vallicella, William F. (2002). Incarnation and Identity. Philo 5 (1):84-93.
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."
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.
>>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.
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.
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.
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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.
The main point of Peter Geach's paper, "Assertion" (Logic Matters, Basil Blackwell, 1972, pp. 254-269) is what he calls the Frege point: A thought may have just the same content whether you assent to its truth or not; a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, now unasserted, and yet be recognizably the same proposition. This seems unassailably correct. One will fail to get the Frege point, however, if one confuses statements and propositions. An unstated statement is a contradiction in terms, but an unasserted proposition is not. The need for unasserted propositions can be seen from the fact that many of our compound assertions (a compound assertion being one whose content is propositionally compound) have components that are unasserted.
To assert a conditional, for example, is not to assert its antecedent or its consequent. If I assert that if Tom is drunk, then he is unfit to drive, I do not thereby assert that he is drunk, nor do I assert that he is unfit to drive. I assert a compound proposition the components of which I do not assert. I assert a relation between two propositions without asserting either of them.
The same goes for disjunctive propositions. To assert a disjunction is not to assert its disjuncts. Neither propositional component of Either Tom is sober or he is unfit to drive is asserted by one who merely asserts the compound disjunctive proposition.
On one view of logic, it studies propositions and the relations between them such as entailment, consistency, and inconsistency in abstraction from the concrete mental acts in which the propositions are accepted, rejected, or merely entertained. Logic is thus kept apart from psychology. If so, then assertion, as a speech act founded in the mental act of acceptance, is external to logic. If this were not the case, then how would one account for the validity of the following obviously valid argument?
a) If Tom is drunk, then Tom is unfit to drive
b) Tom is drunk
Therefore
c) Tom is unfit to drive.
For the argument to be an instance of the valid argument form modus ponendo ponens, the protasis of (a) must be the same proposition as is expressed by (b). But then the assertoric force that (b) carries when the argument is given by someone cannot be part of the proposition. For the assertoric force is no part of the proposition that is the protasis of (a).
So if formal logic studies propositions in abstraction from the concrete episodes of thinking in which they are brought before minds, then assertion is external to formal logic.
But according to the NYT, a philosopher with a cult following among the cognoscenti rejects the above view:
[Irad] Kimhi argues that this view is wrong, and that the distinction between psychology and logic has led our understanding of thinking astray. Consider that the following statement does not, according to the standard view, constitute a logical contradiction: “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining.” Why? Because the first part of the sentence concerns a state of affairs in the world (“it’s raining”), whereas the second part concerns someone’s state of mind (“I don’t believe it’s raining”).
Kimhi wants to rescue the intuition that it is a logical contradiction to say, “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining.” But to do this, he has to reject the idea that when you assert a proposition, what you are doing is adding psychological force (“I think … ”) to abstract content (“it’s raining”). Instead, Kimhi argues that a self-conscious, first-person perspective — an “I” — is internal to logic. For him, to judge that “it’s raining” is the same as judging “I believe it’s raining,” which is the same as judging “it’s false that it’s not raining.” All are facets of a single act of mind.
I haven't read Kimhi's book, and I am not sure I should trust the NYT account, but Kimhi seems to be recycling Kant in a confused way. At B 132 of Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes, "It must be possible for the 'I think' to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me." (NKS tr.)
Consider a propositional representation. One's awareness that it is raining need not be accompanied by an explicit act of reflection, the one expressed by 'I think that it is raining,' but it must be possible that this reflection occur. Thus there is a necessary connection between the propositional representation 'It is raining' and Kant's transcendental unity of apperception. The latter could be described as " a self-conscious, first-person perspective — an “I” — [that] is internal to logic." But it is a transcendental I, one common to all cognitive subjects, and not the psychological I of a particular cognitive subject. Kimhi seems to be speaking of the latter.
Kant's Ich denke points us back to Descartes' cogito. The Frenchman discovers that while he can doubt many things, he cannot doubt that he is doubting these things. He can doubt the existence of the cat he 'sees' — using 'see' in a strictly phenomenological way — but he cannot doubt the existence of his 'seeing' as a mental act or cogitatio. His doubting is a thinking, but it is not a believing. The Dubito ergo sum is but a special case of the generic Cogito ergo sum. His doubting that he has a body is not a believing that he has a body but it is a thinking in the broad Cartesian sense that subsumes all intentional states or mental acts.
Accordingly, the 'I think' that must be able to accompany all my representations does not have the specific sense of 'I believe.' Belief is one type of mental act among many. One who believes does not doubt, and conversely. But both think. The 'I think' expresses an explicit reflection on the occurrent intentional state one is in, whether one is doubting, believing, wishing, hoping remembering, etc.
So there is a defensible sense in which there is an I internal to logic, but this is the transcendental I of the original synthetic unity of apperception, not the I of the psychophysical subject in nature. If there is an I internal to logic, it is the I of the transcendental prefix, the 'I think ___' which must be able to accompany all my representation. But this 'I think ___' of the transcendental prefix does not have the sense of the ordinary language 'I think so' which means 'I believe so.'
One consequence of Kimhi’s view is that “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining” becomes a logical contradiction. Another consequence is that a contradiction becomes something that you cannot believe, as opposed to something that you psychologically can but logically ought not to believe (as the traditional cleavage between psychology and logic might suggest). A final consequence is that thinking is not just a cognitive psychological act, but also one that is governed by logical law.
In other words, the distinction between psychology and logic collapses. Logic is not a set of rules for how to think; it is how we think, just not in a way that can be captured in conventional scientific terms. Thinking emerges as a unique and peculiar activity, something that is part of the natural world, but which cannot be understood in the manner of other events in the natural world. Indeed, Kimhi sees his book, in large part, as lamenting “the different ways in which philosophers have failed to acknowledge — or even denied — the uniqueness of thinking.”
The above strikes me as based on a confusion of the transcendental 'I think' with the psychological 'I believe.' It seems to me that one can have a reflective awareness as of rain falling without believing that rain is falling. What is impossible, and contradictory, is to have a reflective awareness as of rain falling without thinking (in the broad Cartesian sense that subsumes specific types of mental act) that rain is falling.
The transcendental I's thinking is governed by logical law, but not the thinking of the empirical I in nature. So the distinction between psychology and logic does not collapse. To the extent that I can make sense of what Kimhi is saying on the basis of the NYT article he seems to be trying to naturalizer Kant's transcendental ego. Good luck with that.
Perhaps talk of a transcendental I is nonsense if it is supposed to be a real entity that thinks; but only a transcendental I could be internal to formal logic.
If anyone has read Kimhi's book, his comments would be appreciated.
John D. Caputo has recently made the fashionably outlandish claim that "what modern philosophers call 'pure' reason . . . is a white male Euro-Christian construction." Making this claim, Caputo purports to be saying something that is true. Moreover, his making of the claim in public is presumably for the purpose of convincing us that it is true. If so, he presupposes truth, in which case truth cannot be a social construct, as I said in my critique. A commenter responded:
To say that Caputo "presupposes truth" is not to say that he presupposes some sort of absolutist notion of truth. Why is the latter a necessary condition for the activity of "trying to convince"?
The short answer is that there is no notion of truth other than the absolutist notion. Truth is absolute by its very nature. The phrase 'relative truth' names a confusion. I won't go over this ground again, having trod it before. But there is a wrinkle, and that is what I want to explore in this entry. Is absolute truth the same as objective truth? Perhaps not. It might be like this. If there is truth, then it is the same for all cognizers: it is intersubjectively binding on all. It is in this sense objective. It does not vary from person to person, social class to social class, historical epoch to historical epoch, race to race, etc. But how can we be sure that truth in this objective sense is not a mere transcendental presupposition of intelligible discourse and rational debate? If truth is a mere transcendental presupposition, then it is not absolute. For what 'absolute' means is: not relative to or dependent on anything at all. Of course, if truth is absolute, it follows that it is objective in the sense of intersubjectively binding on all. But there is a logical gap in the converse. If truth is objective, it does not straightaway follow that it is absolute. For it might be transcendentally relative: relative to beings like us who cannot think or judge or speak intelligibly without presupposing truth. It might be transcendentally realtive while remaining the same for all in such a way as to exclude as meaningless such phrases as 'proletarian truth,' bourgeois truth,' 'Protestant truth,' 'Catholic truth,' 'White man's truth,' 'black female's truth,' and other similalry nonsensical constructions.
I will return to the objective-absolute distinction near the end of this entry.
While there may be a problem in showing that truth is more than a transcendental presupposition, and thus absolute, it is fairly easy to show that truth is objective. And so it is easy to show that Caputo presupposes objective truth when he makes his fashionably outlandish PoMo claims.
But what do I mean when I say that truth is objective? I mean that there is a total way things are, and that this total way things are does not depend on the beliefs, desires, wishes, hopes, etc. of finite rational beings like ourselves, whether human or extraterrestrial or angelic. So what I mean by 'Truth is objective' is close to what John Searle means by external realism.
According to John Searle, "external realism [ER] is the thesis that there is a way that things are that is independent of all representations of how things are." (The Construction of Social Reality, p. 182) Is it possible to prove this attractive thesis? And how would the proof go?
We will recall G. E. Moore's attempt to prove the external world by waving his hands. His idea was that it is a plain fact, as anyone can see, that his hands exist, and so it straightaway follows that external objects in space exist. This sounds more like a joke than a philosophical argument. Or if not a joke, then clear proof, not of the external world, but that Moore did not understand the issue. But let's leave Moore to one side for the space of this post. See my aptly entitled Moore category for more on Moore.
The realism issue really has nothing to do with spatially external objects. There unproblematically are such objects whatever their ultimate ontological status. Note also that ER can be true even if there are no spatially external objects. ER is simply the claim that there is a way things are independent of us: it says nothing specifically about spatial individuals.
As Searle interprets it, ER sets forth a condition on the intelligibility of discourse and thought rather than a truth condition of discourse and thought:
There are conditions on the intelligibility of discourse . . . that
are not like paradigmatic cases of truth conditions. In the normal
understanding of discourse we take these conditions for granted;
and unless we took them for granted, we could not understand
utterances the way we do . . . . (181)
Among these conditions on intelligibility is ER. It is a necessary presupposition of a large chunk of thought and discourse. What Searle is doing is giving a transcendental argument for ER. He takes it as given that a sentence like 'Mt Everest has ice and snow near the summit' is intelligible. He then inquires into what must be presupposed for it to be intelligible. For the sentence to be true, Mt. Everest must exist, and it must have ice and snow near the summit. But for the sentence to be intelligible, it is not necessary that Mt. Everest exist, or if it does exist that it have ice and snow near the summit. What is necessary is that ER be true: that there be a way things are independent of human representations. If the mountain exists, then that is (part of) the way things are, and if it does not exist, that too is (part of) the way things are. The way things are, then, is not a truth condition of any such statement as 'Mt Everest has ice and snow near the summit.' It is a condition of the intelligibility of such statements and their negations. So even if every statement asserting or implying the existence of a physical object is false, and there is no spatially external world, it is still the case that ER is true. For it is still the case that there is a way things are independent of human representations. The way things are would include the nonexistence of a spatially external world.
For Searle, then, external realism (ER) is a transcendental condition of the intelligibility of large portions of public discourse. He is aware that to have shown this is not to have shown that ER is true. (194) Speaking as we do, we are committed to its being true, but that is not to say that it is true. That there is a way things are independent of human representations is presupposed by the intelligibility of much of what we think or say, but it doesn't follow that it is true.
Why not? Because its truth is conditional upon the fact that our thought and speech is intelligible. If ER is true, then it is true whether or not human representations and their intelligibility exist. But if ER is argued to transcendentally as a condition of intelligibility, then ER's truth is conditional upon the existence of human beings and their representations. So we cannot say that ER is true, but only that we must presuppose it to be true. This is not to say that without us it would be false, but what without us it would be neither true nor false.
Is Searle's position satisfactory? I'm not sure. I want to be able to say that ER is true simpliciter, or true unconditionally (i.e., not conditional upon the fact of the intelligibility of our discourse.)
But does my desire to be able to say that ER is true unconditionally make sense? Maybe not. We cannot not presuppose that there is a way things are assuming that we continue to think and talk as before. But is there a way things are? Yes, it might be said, in the only sense in which it would make sense to assert it, namely, as a presupposition of our thought and talk. That is, what we as rational beings must presuppose as being the case IS the case. The 'possibility' that it not be the case is unmeaning. No sort of wedge can be driven between the presupposing and the being. But this seems to land us in a form of transcendental idealism.
A fascinating labyrinth, this. Collateral reading: Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, section 44 (c), Die Seinsart der Wahrheit und die Wahrheitsvoraussetzung.
The main thing, however, is that Caputo presupposes objective truth when he makes his ridiculous PeeCee assertions.
The extended comment thread below began life in the comments to Why Did I Move Away from Phenomenology? (13 October 2020)
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Dear Bill,
You have exactly nailed my fundamental problem with transcendental idealism by this:
Of course, transcendental idealists will standardly respond something along the lines like:
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?