Appendix III
Appendix III
I had
duly noted in some of the prefatory or introductory matter to the main work the
utility of phenomenological inquiry that had been undertaken before I had begun
my specific point de départ towards
noumenology. Confessedly, those writings were committed to paper ere I had
digested much of what phenomenology’s founder, Edmund Husserl, had written,
including matters very much at variance with positions I had taken in the main
work. These and similar matters are the concern of the instant text.
[I. The alleged nothingness
beyond experience:]
Here, I
think, would be the place to note something else pointed out by Ludwig
Landgrebe, one of Husserl’ s students, who (according to Gibson, the earliest
translator of Ideen into English,
prepared its index) noted the following in dealing with Husserl’s concept of Realität, one of two words Gibson
rendered as “reality” (the other being Wirklichkeit)
— or is this note Gibson’s own? — but I give it from p. 432 of Ideas, at the Analytical Index:
“Realität,”
“Reales,” “real” concern empirical reality only.
With this in mind, I now
draw attention to something Husserl had written in Ideen, at §48, titled “Logical Possibility and Real Absurdity of a
World Outside Our Own”:
The
hypothetical assumption of a Real Something outside this world is indeed a
“logically” possible one, and there is clearly no formal contradiction in
making it. But if we question the
essential conditions of its validity, the kinds of evidence (Ausweisung) demanded by its very
meaning and the nature of the evidential generally as determined in principle
through the thesis of a transcendent — however one may generalize correctly its
essential nature — we perceive that the transcendent must needs be experienceable, and not merely by an Ego
conjured into being as an empty logical possibility but by my actual Ego, in the demonstrable (ausweisbare) unity of its systematic
experience. But we can see (we are indeed not yet far enough advanced here to
be able to give detailed grounds for the view) that what is perceivable by one Ego must in principle be conceivable by every
Ego. And though as a matter of fact it is not true that everyone stands or can
stand in a relation of empathy of inward understanding with every other one as
we ourselves, for instance, are unable to stand with the spirits that may
frequent the remotest starry worlds, yet in point of principle there exist essential possibilities for the setting up
of an understanding, possibilities, therefore, that worlds of experience
sundered in point of fact may still be united together through actual empirical
connexions into a single intersubjective world, the correlate of the unitary
world of minds (of the universal extension of the human community). If we think this over the logical possibility
on formal grounds of realities outside the world, the one spatio-ternporal world which is fixed through our actual experience is seen to be really
nonsense. If there are worlds or real
things at all, the empirical motivations which constitute them must be able to reach into any experience,
and that of every single Ego in the manner which in its general features has
been described above. Things no doubt
exist and worlds of things which cannot be definitely set out in any human experience, but that has its
purely factual grounds in the factual limits of this experience.
I reproduced the whole
section, not merely to be fair, but
to point out a few things. One is that
Husserl has here shown himself not to have escaped totally from the influence
of the positivists or the neopositivists.
I refer specifically to the verifiability criterion of meaning, as
exemplified in Rudolf Carnap’s later text, Pseudoproblems
in Philosophy: The Heteropsychological and the Realism Controversy. But,
beyond that, the next question is how Husserl gets his entitlement to discuss
the intersubjective.
Yet a
third issue will be presented as one reads the next section of Husserl’s Ideas
on towards its end. And, without
giving the whole rest of that section, I should focus specifically on precisely
the part that raised the problem:
On
the other side, the whole spatio-temporal
world, to which man and the human Ego claim to belong as subordinate
singular realities is according to its
own meaning mere intentional Being, a Being, therefore, which has the
merely secondary, relative sense of a Being for a consciousness. It is a Being which consciousness in its own
experiences (Erfahrungen) posits, and
is, in principle, intuitable and determinable only as the element common to the
[harmoniously] motivated appearance-manifolds, but over and beyond this, is just nothing at all.
E. Husserl, Ideas,
§49 (last paragraph). N.B.: The
bracketed word “harmoniously” (einstimmig)
appeared neither in the 1913 original text nor in a 1928 reprint, but only
in the 1922 reprint of the first issue of Jahrbuch
für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung]
In other
words, beyond consciousness and the
world as merely what it posits, there
is nothing. But if so, what is the “intersubjective world” except as a pure positing of
consciousness? Is there really anything but the solus Ipse, whether implicitly as in
Berkeley’s esse est percepi and its
aftermath or explicitly as in the first four of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, prescinding from his anticipations of an
intersubjective community? And does the
world acquire any real objective
legitimacy from its being a world for
myself and others if the others
reduce to consciousness, to my own
consciousness?
When
Husserl opined, in Ideas (§49) and in
Formal and Transcendental Logic (at
pp. 227-34), that there is no “thing in itself’ beyond experience, was he not
in effect unsuspending or unbracketing precisely the issue that was to be bracketed or suspended in order to facilitate phenomenology originally? [I refer to the epoch
invoked in §32 of Ideas.] The other problem with Husserl’s
assertion that there is no “thing in itself’ or noumenon beyond experience is that it seems to defy the common-sense view of external objects as
causing our sensations by affecting our sense-organs, etc. But that, in turn, really hinges on my being
able to apply the category of cause beyond experience.
[II. Husserl and the harmony]
A vague
foreshadowing of the position I take in the main work regarding independent
harmony can be winnowed from the following text Husserl had written in relation
to the synthesis involved in cognition of objective experience:
In
yet another and a much more complicated manner evidences refer us to infinities
of evidences relating to the same object, whereas they make their object
itself-given with an essentially necessary one-sidedness. That is the case with nothing less than
the totality of experiences by virtue of which a real Objective world, as a
state and in respect of any particular Object, is immediately there for us
intuitionally. The evidence pertaining
to particular Objects in a real Objective world is “external experience”; and we can see that, as a matter of
essential necessity, no other mode of self-presentation is conceivable in the
case of such objects. But we can also
see that, on the other hand, this kind of evidence has an essential
“one-sidedness” — stated more precisely: a multiform horizon of unfulfilled
anticipations (which, however, are in need of fulfillment) and, accordingly,
contents of a mere meaning, which refer us to corresponding potential
evidences. This imperfect evidence
becomes more nearly perfect in the actualizing synthetic transition from
evidence to evidence, but necessarily in such a manner that no imaginable
synthesis of this kind is completed as an adequate evidence: any such synthesis must always involve
unfulfilled, expectant and accompanying meanings. At the same time there always remains the
open possibility that the belief in being, which extends into the anticipation,
will not be fulfilled, that what is appearing in the mode “it itself’
nevertheless does not exist or is different.
Yet, as a matter of essential necessity, external experience alone can
verify objects of external experience, though, to be sure, it does so only as
long as the (passively or actively) continuing experience has the form of a harmonious synthesis...
Cartesian Meditations, Third Meditation, §28 (emphasis in
original). This is hardly the only place
where it occurs to Husserl to characterize such a synthesis of experiences of
an object in such a manner. And yet it
seems at this point that Husserl does not make that characteristic so essential a feature alike of logical
laws, categories, and objects, let alone follow up where the possibilities
could take him. Nor, again, did Husserl
really ask why the object must be so,
let alone what privileged the harmony of (e.g.) ordinary consciousness in the
waking state.
In fact,
Husserl showed in the very next paragraph — as also indeed the remainder of
that cited first paragraph of §28 of the Cartesian
Meditations — that we should expect no answer here, either, that would give
or yield a harmony beyond consciousness:
That
the being of the world “transcends” consciousness in this fashion (even with
respect to the evidence in which the world presents itself), and that it
necessarily remains transcendent, in no wise alters the fact that it is
conscious life alone, wherein everything transcendent becomes constituted, as
something inseparable from consciousness, and which specifically, as
world-consciousness, bears within itself inseparably the sense: world — and
indeed: “this actually existing” world.
Only
an uncovering of the horizons of experience ultimately clarifies the
“actuality” and the “transcendency” of the world, at the same time showing the
world to be inseparable from, transcendental subjectivity, which constitutes
actuality of being and sense. The
reference to harmonious infinities of further possible experience, starting
from each world-experience – where “actually existing Object” can have sense
only as a unity meant and meanable in the nexus of consciousness, a unity that
would be given in itself in a perfect experiential evidence – manifestly
signifies that an actual Object
belonging to a world or, all the more so, a
world itself is an infinite idea, related to infinities of harmoniously
combinable experiences – an idea that
is the correlate of the idea of a perfect experiential evidence, a complete
synthesis of possible experiences.
Ibid. (emphasis in original translation).
Husserl
wrote a rather odd passage in §138 of Ideas
(I), one that also deserves special attention:
The
phenomenology of the Reason in the sphere of the types of Being which can on
principle be only adequately given (the sphere of transcendents in the sense of realities (Realitäten)) has therefore to study the different occurrences
within this sphere which have been indicated a priori and in advance. It has to make clear how the inadequate
consciousness of givenness, the partial appearing, is related to one and the
same determinable x, whilst
continuously advancing towards ever-fresh appearances which are continuously
passing over into one another, and also to indicate the essential possibilities
which here present themselves; how, on the one hand, a sequence of experiences
is possible here and constantly motivated on rational lines through the
rational placements [positings] that
are continuously at one’s disposal, namely, the cause of experience in which
the empty places of the appearances that have preceded get filled again, the
indeterminacies more closely determined, moving forward all the time towards a thoroughgoing harmonious filling out, with
the steadily increasing rational power that goes with this. On the other
hand, we have to make clear the opposite possibilities, the cases of the fissions or polythetic
syntheses where there is disagreement or determination otherwise of that x
which we are constantly aware of as one and the same — otherwise, that is, than
in harmony with the original bestowal of meaning. We have to show, moreover,
how positional components of the earlier perceptions suffer cancellation together with their
meaning; how under certain circumstances whole perception explodes, so to speak, and breaks up into “conflicting apprehensions of the Thing,” into suppositions concerning the Thing; how the theses of the
suppositions annul one another, and in such annulling are modified in a
particular way; or how the one thesis, remaining unmodified, “conditions” the
cancelling of the “contrary thesis”; and other contingencies of the same kind.
Ibid (emphasis in original translation). The question I am aching to ask, and here do
ask, is how the perception explodes and breaks up into conflicting apprehensions of what thing under what circumstances. Did
Husserl mean dream-apprehensions? Or
hallucinations? Or other illusions?
Or miracles? Or what? I would think at first blush Husserl owed
us an explanation or, at least, an example.
It did occur to me that perhaps Husserl had in mind (e.g.) what was
stated in §46 about the further experiential course’s forcing us to abandon
what had been set down by prior experiences, or of changes in apprehension into
others that cannot unite harmoniously with the former apprehensions. But here clarity and distinction, even precision
would be desirable, though for whatever reason it is not manifest in the parts
of Husserl’s text exhibited.
It seems
that §28 of the Cartesian Meditations reflects
part of the situation set out in the cited excerpt from §138 of Ideas (I), except that the temporally
later-written part is but “one-sided” in its presentations, in the sense that
it overlooks the possibility of
discordant syntheses. Did Husserl
restrict the synthesis to the “harmonious”
kind in the Cartesian Meditations because
of his not finding a decent discordant
synthesis to exhibit as an example?
Was a shift in doctrine at the foot of the overlooking? Or had I made overmuch of the overlooking?
[III. Solipsism and the question of the other:]
Here I
shall quote at length from Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian
Meditation, at §50, on the
subject of the encounter of one “animate organism” by the meditating ego:
In
the perception of that reduced world, what in particular must be of account
here? . . . What becomes uncovered as involved in the very complicated
intentional performance of the appresentation, which does in fact come about?
Initial
guidance can be furnished by the verbal sense, an Other another Ego. “Alter” signifies alter ego. And the ego involved is I myself, constituted
within my primordial ownness, and uniquely, as the psychophysical unity (the
primordial man): as “personal” Ego, governing immediately in my animate
organism (the only animate organism) and producing effects mediately [immediately — (so the published text,
Typescript C and the French translation)] in the primordial surrounding world;
the subject, moreover, of a concrete intentional life <and (?)> of a
psychic sphere relating to himself and the “world”.
Let
us assume that another man enters our perceptual sphere. Primordially reduced,
that signifies: In the perceptual sphere
pertaining to my primordial Nature, a body is presented, which, as primordial,
is of course only a determining part of myself: as “immanent transcendency”. Since, in this nature and this world, my
animate organism is the only body that is or can be constituted originally as
an animate organism (a functioning organ), the body over there, which is
nevertheless apprehended as animate organism, must have derived this sense by
an apperceptive transfer from my animate
organism, and done so in a manner that excludes an actually direct, and
hence primordial, showing of the predicates belonging to an animate organism
specifically, a showing of them in perception proper. It is clear from the very beginning that only
a similarity connecting, within my primordial sphere, that body over there with
my body can serve as the motivational basis for the “analogizing” apprehension of that body as another animate
organism.
There
would be, accordingly, a certain assimilative apperception; but it by no means
follows that there would by [sic] an
inference from analogy. Apperception is
not inference, not a thinking act…
But the “apperceptive transfer” Husserl posits
seems to be just precisely an
inference. And not only is it a transfer
by inference; it seems to be a covert
causal inference by analogy! How is this idea engendered in my
mind? Thus: I think of how an apparent animate organism
comes to be clothed (as it were) with
the full sense of (apparent) animate organism.
The thing I see looks like a body that feels like mine, looks like mine, and I think, “So, if it looks
like mine, it should operate in like manner.”
The same touching that makes me sense
(e.g.) pain should make sensation of
pain for its putative inhabitant. (Fire
“burns” me; it should hurt by “burning” another
like body; so I reason.) And,
eventually, I do not even think about it. So, when Husserl noted, of a child, in this
vein (ibid):
[t]he child who already sees
physical things understands, let us say, for the first time the final sense of
scissors and from now on he sees scissors at the first glance as scissors – but naturally not in an
explicit reproducing, comparing, and inferring...,
I want to point out that
the inferring and comparing is now implicit in the child’s
thought-processes leading it to recognition of learned objects.
As if the
covert causal inference were not enough a problem, especially insofar as it is
being extended back to a thing outside my
perceptual experience (to-wit: the other as psychophysical unity, as a sensing being) without any warrant for
it (especially given Husserl’s notion that “causality bears the normal sense of
causality as a relation between two realities,” Ideas, §49, given further Husserl’s taking Realität to mean but “empirical reality”), I must also look askance
at something else appearing in the Cartesian
Meditations, in that same problematic Fifth Meditation, at §52:
The
appresentation which gives that component of the Other which is not accessible
originaliter is combined with an original presentation (of “his” body as a part
of the Nature given as included in my ownness).
In this combination, moreover, the Other’s animate body and his
governing Ego are given in the manner that characterizes a unitary transcending experience.
Every experience points to further experiences that would fulfil and
verify the appresented horizons, which include, in the form of non-intuitive
anticipations, potentially verifiable syntheses of harmonious further
experience. Regarding experience of
someone else, it is clear that its fulfillingly verifying continuation can
ensue only by means of new
appresentations that proceed in a synthetically harmonious fashion, and
only by virtue of the manner in which these
appresentations owe their existence-value to their motivational connexion with
the changing presentations proper,
within my ownness, that continually appertains to them.
As
a separate clue to the requisite
clarification, this proposition may suffice:
The experienced animate organism of another continues to prove itself as
actually an animate organism, solely in its changing but incessantly harmonious “behavior”. Such harmonious
behavior (as having a physical side that indicates something psychic
appresentatively) must present itself fulfillingly in original experience, and
do so throughout the continuous change in behavior from phase to phase. The organism becomes experienced as a pseudo-organism,
precisely if there is something discordant about its behavior.
What privileges this harmonious behavior so that I can use it
to confirm my apprehension of body as part of a psychophysical unity called the
Other Person? If this Other is supposed
to fetch Husserl’s phenomenology from the brink of solipsism, to account for an
Other that is real, as real as I am, then why the double
presupposition of causation beyond experience (masquerading as the appresentation or analogous apprehension of the body as an animate organism) and a
transcendent (?) harmony in the
behavior it exhibits?
But has
Husserl in mind really to offer such a transcendent
(!) harmony or, for that matter, a transcendently
applicable causation? Or is he
rather really exhibiting a project of a piece with this excerpt of Nietzsche’s Götzendämmerung/Twilight of the Idols:
6. We have abolished the real world: what world is left?
the apparent one perhaps? . . . But no! with
the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!
(Mid-day; moment of the
shortest shadow; end of the longest error; zenith of mankind; INCIPIT
ZARATHUSTRA.)
Id. at 41 (Tr. R. J. Hollingdale)(Harmondsworth 1968). This would be borne out by the last paragraph
of §49 of Husserl’s Ideas I) above
quoted.
But if
the whole point of the enterprise of finding the other person was at one time to evade
solipsism and to uphold the reality
of the perceived world, one would have to start with the process of finding
a harmony independent of
consciousness. I have not determined
whether Husserl would be satisfied with the method, but I have pointed out
problems with his own. Indeed, one could
view the Fifth Meditation’s assumption of what must be supplied by the noumenology as shortcomings of Husserl’s
phenomenologv requiring the transition to noumenology. But I wonder
whether proof of the other would
really prove the trustworthiness of the world.
For it seems what proof of the other requires is not only what was just
mentioned but also that there be transcendent standing to that on the basis of
which the appresented animate body of the
psychophysical unity is constructed, as it were, by inference, as well as
of the whole question of the one other
who “plays” several parts, as (e.g.) the old Cartesian devil as the real “ghost” moving the appearings of bodily
unities. [One thinks of the “zombie
problem” that historically was put in American academe.]
If there
be only phenomenon, then when I am
fast asleep without the first dream I am nonexistent? What a surprise to the one who should
find me, dead to the world, asleep in bed!
[“I did not know the Nothing could snore
so loudly!” And thereby I freely
confess what they say of me!] I am half
reminded of the joke that follows:
On
Yom Kippur, that most awesome of days, Jeremiah Hershenhorn, that most
successful of merchants, beat his breast and swayed back and forth as he
intoned the Confession, that catalogue of fifty-six categories of sin, and as
was his wont, Jeremiah Hershenhorn would periodically moan, “Forgive me, O
Lord, for I am a nothing, a nothing…”
Next
to Mr. Hershenhorn, the well-known shnorrer
(beggar) of the neighborhood, Itzik Krivitz, boomed out his Confession and,
beating his breast, said, “Forgive me, O Lord, your humble servant, for I – am
a nothing, a nothing.”
Hershenhorn
shot his face toward heaven and, jabbing a finger toward Krivitz, cried, “Look,
look who’s calling himself a nothing!”
Leo Rosten, Hooray for Yiddish, 45 (New York 1982)[noting, inter alia, that “I am a nothing”
appears in the Talmud, Berakot, 17a,
as the paraphrase of the solemn Amida prayer of Yom Kippur].
I am
reminded also of the lines William Cowper directed against Berkeley’s idealism
in his poem Anti-Thelyphthora:
Substances and modes of
every kind
Are mere impressions in the
passive mind;
And he that splits his
cranium, splits at most
A fancied head against a
fancied post.
I know,
when I am asleep, but someone else is
awake, I should be phenomenon (body)
present for the other. But we are of
course assuming that there are others,
and that is far and away a grand assumption, almost requiring the application
of causation or the harmonic laws of A=A, A=~(~A), and the ilk beyond
consciousness. Either way demands what
Husserl cannot deliver and does not recognize. And, while I grant that, in the
hypothetical so set up there is such an other, I note the nonfungibility
between the hypothetical and what situation can be shown to obtain. [The classical question about the sound a
tree makes when it falls in a forest where there is nobody to hear it falls
within this same classification.]
When I
see, e.g., a person who is struck with great force, or a person who has been
burned with fire or acid, I think, “That must hurt.” And I do that always on analogy with my own
personal experience, but implicit in the response is my recognition of
similar behavior with a “descending” causality (as opposed to “ascending” – or
x as effect is given, and it cannot come
from the void, or from whatever was
not theretofore without-x). But are
there not narratives of how individuals endured grievous torture, not with loud
screams of agony (as one might expect) but with some humor and grace? For
example, St. Lawrence of Rome is said to have told those who were roasting him
while he lay prone on a gridiron over a fire, “Turn me over, boys; this side’s
done.” Would not that have been an
example of what Husserl would have labeled “discordant behavior” in §52 of the Cartesian Meditations? [What
if there had been a release of massive
quantities of endorphins? But was that within the biological or
physiological possibility-range?]
[IV. Lauer’s reading of
Husserl:]
I note
that the scholarly Fr. Lauer noticed, besides Husserl’s having missed totally
the significance, for Descartes, of the malin
génie and the veracitas Dei, Quentin
Lauer, S.J., Phenomenology: Its Genesis
and Prospect, 47 n.2 (New York 1965), that Husserl “recognizes no noumenal
being at all,” id. at 61. See
also id. at 73, where Lauer discusses Husserl’s rejection [in Formale und transzendentale Logik, at
227-34] of the Kantian Ding an sich. For anyone who does accept it, the
question then immediately comes to the fore: Can the noumenon, the Ding an sich, be
known, and, if so, how?
I wonder
whether what I have just of late encountered in Lauer’s exposition of Husserl’s
texts and ideas be Lauer’s or Husserl’s apparent contradiction. In so saying I should clarify: Consonant with the end of §49 of Husserl’s Ideas (I), quoted above, Lauer noted in
his main text:
. . . what appears is not
distinct[, Husserl held,] from the appearance in the sense of being other than its appearance; rather, it is the synthesis of modes of appearing,
constituted in experience. It is for
this reason that a strict science of what appears is possible; it is a science
so long as it seeks only to tell us
what experiences are – in themselves and in their objective reference – and
that is all Husserl wants to know.
Lauer, op. cit., p. 137. At this point he inserted
a footnote of significance:
By
a sort of tautology he can call this knowing everything since what can’t be known is, by his definition, nothing.
Cf. Formale und transzendentale Logik, pp. 207-208.
Id. at 137-38 n.41. I would
note that this put Husserl in a rather odd position, of having posited either a
very strange being or of having
posited an even stranger nothing, ex quo
ens fit (!), against any possible harmony along the lines of A=~(~A),
A=A+0, and 0=~(~0). Now, at another
place, Lauer noted that this apparently did
bother Husserl (as well it should have):
Many
of the manuscripts preserved at Louvain reveal that, in later years, Husserl
was much bothered by the problems of birth, death, and sleep. If subject is
constituted as subject by consciousness, what happens when there is no
consciousness? Can subject begin to be and cease to be? Can the reduction
really prescind from such questions? If not, is there an element of
contingency, even in conscious being?
Id. at 65 n.2. But here I have
to get to the text that posed a problem of contradiction, and is the
contradiction Lauer’s or Husserl’s? For
in the same book, Lauer noted something else:
. . . If
experience has a rational explanation – and, according to Husserl, it must –
then the explanation must be sought, and found, within the transcendental
subjectivity. Nor does this mean denying that
there is some sort of reality outside the subject; it simply means refusing to
this sort of reality any being, since
to be authentically is to be absolutely, and to be absolutely is to be for a
subject, and to be for a subject is to be constituted
in subjectivity itself.
Id. at 77. So, then, is
there or is there not a reality
beyond consciousness? Is it perhaps that
Lauer could posit one, though Husserl
would deny recognition to it? [Perhaps
my rule against trusting secondary sources should come into play here.]
One last
element of the contradiction must be noted. Lauer had this to say about
Husserl’s thoughts on God:
Such
a subject is not one which has experience
of the world; it is its experience of
the world. Subjectivity is, in fact, the
complete correlate of the objectivity which is the world; to know it is to know
the world, because the world is only in relation to subjectivity. Here we have in a certain sense the finite
counterpart of scholastic philosophy’s God.
Just as the scholastics recognized that a unified world simply cannot
make sense except as created by a God who is subject; just as Hegel’s intuition of the world order made him
conclude to an original subjective unity which is Absolute Spirit; so Husserl
has recognized that a world of sense must have had that sense given, and to say “giver of sense” is to
say “subject.” Husserl is not thereby denying God as Creator of the world –
although he is singularly indifferent to God in his “philosophic” thought – he
is simply asserting that a world of sense for a subject must be a world subjectively constituted. The world which I know may be created by a
God independently of my knowing it, but it is not a world for me until I know
it, and it is only in constituting it that I know it...
Id. at 85. Indeed, at one
point, Husserl seemed to confess a teleology
in the world, and with it a God, Whose transcendence he promptly
“suspended” in the phenomenological reduction.
Husserl, Ideas (1), §58. But if what must be beyond any possible
consciousness is simply nothing at
all [so Ideas (I), §49], could
the concept of God be allowed?
Lauer
may not have been wrong in at least some of what he had imputed to
Husserl. Note, e.g., the following
footnote Lauer had inserted into his exposition of Husserl’s position on the
constitutive subjectivity as the sole locus
of the world as a constant unity of sense:
There
is something of a tautology here. To understand anything is to grasp its
“sense.” But, by definition a “sense” is confined to the immanent sphere of
consciousness. Therefore, to grasp a “sense” is to grasp what belongs to the
immanent sphere of consciousness.
Lauer, op. cit., 85 n.3. Support for this can be located in the Fourth
of Husserl’ s Cartesian Meditations:
…Every imaginable sense,
every imaginable being, whether the latter is called immanent or transcendent,
falls within the domain of transcendental subjectivity, as the subjectivity
that constitutes sense and being. The
attempt to conceive the universe of true being as something lying outside the
universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, the
two being related to one another merely externally by a rigid law, is
nonsensical. They belong together
essentially; and, as belonging together essentially, they are also concretely
one, one in the only absolute concretion: transcendental subjectivity. If transcendental subjectivity is the
universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely – nonsense. But even nonsense is always a mode of sense
and has its nonsensicalness within the sphere of possible insight. That is true, however, not alone in the case
of the merely de facto ego and what
is in fact (thanks to his own constitution) accessible to him as existing for
him – including an open plurality of other egos who, along with their
constitutive performances, exist for him.
Id., §41. [The last two
sentences were marked as unsatisfactory, and the part of the last sentence
beginning with “and what is in fact” was crossed out.]
[V . Sartre’s views on the other in relation to Husserl’s and to
reality:]
Meanwhile,
I turn to something telling that Sartre had to say about the attempt to show
the reality of the Other:
Formerly
I believed I could escape solipsism by refuting Husserl’s concept of the
Transcendental “Ego” [footnote omitted].
At the time I thought that since I had emptied my consciousness of its
subject, nothing remained there which was privileged as compared to the Other. But actually although I am still persuaded
that the hypothesis of a transcendental subject is useless and disastrous,
abandoning it does not help one bit to solve the question of the existence of
Others. Even if outside the empirical
there is nothing other than the
consciousness of that Ego – that is,
a transcendental field without a subject – the fact remains that my affirmation
of the Other demands and requires the existence beyond the world of a similar
transcendental field. Consequently the
only way to escape solipsism would be here again to prove that my
transcendental consciousness is, in its very being, affected by the
extra-mundane existence of other consciousnesses of the same type. Because Husserl has reduced being to a series
of meanings, the only connection which he has been able to establish between my
being and that of the Other is a connection of knowledge. Therefore Husserl
can not escape solipsism any more than Kant did.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 318 (tr. Hazel
Barnes)(New York 1966).
But,
before one gets involved in Sartre’s entire exposition of “the look” from the
Other, which apparently produced in his subject
a feeling of shame, and before one
reads his discussion of Heidegger and Hegel on the other, one should press this
question. How does Sartre intend to make
a showing of something, viz.: “transcendental consciousness[’] being affected
by extramundane existence” unless he can show causation by something outside my field of consciousness? [That was precisely why I had gone through
the showing of independent harmony.]
Note that
Sartre concedes, in discussing Heidegger’s lore about In-der-Welt-Sein, etc., that Heidegger does not – and indeed cannot
– prove the existence of the Other, as (that is) a subject altogether outside
my experience. Being and Nothingness, 337f.
I should
give Sartre’s words, as translated, a point at which to begin the interrogation
of the text (or its translation):
(1) Such a theory [i.e., that of
Heidegger] can not offer a new proof of the existence of others, or an argument
better than any other against solipsism.
Actually, if solipsism is to be rejected, this can not be because it is
impossible or, if you prefer, because nobody is truly solipsistic. The Other’s existence will always be subject
to doubt, at least if one doubts the Other only in words and abstractly, in the
same way that without really being able to conceive of it, I can write, “I
doubt my own existence.” In short the
Other’s existence can not be a probability. Probability can concern only objects
which appear in our experience and from which new effects can appear in our
experience. There is probability only if a validation or invalidation of it is
at every moment possible. Thus since the Other on principle and in its
“For-itself” is outside my experience, the probability of his existence as Another Self can never be either
validated or invalidated; it can be neither believed nor disbelieved, it can not
even be measured; it loses therefore its very being as probability and becomes
a pure fictional conjecture. In the same
way M. Lalande[] has effectively shown that an hypothesis concerning the
existence of living beings on the planet Mars will remain purely conjectural
with no chance of being either true or false so long as we do not have at our
disposal instruments or scientific theories enabling us to produce facts
validating or invalidating this hypothesis.
But the structure of the Other is on principle such that no new
experiment will ever be able to be conceived, that no new theory will come to
validate or invalidate the hypothesis of his existence, that no instrument will
come to reveal new facts inspiring me to affirm or to reject this hypothesis. Therefore if the Other is not immediately
present to me, and if his existence is not as sure as my own, all conjecture
concerning him is entirely lacking in meaning.
But if I do not conjecture about the Other, then precisely, I affirm
him. A theory of the Other’s existence
must therefore simply question me in my being, must make clear and precise the
meaning of that affirmation; in particular, far from inventing a proof, it must
make explicit the very foundation of that certainty. In other words Descartes has not proved his existence. Actually I have always known that I existed,
I have never ceased to practice the cogito. Similarly my resistance to solipsism –
which is as lively as any I should offer to an attempt to doubt the cogito – proves that I have always known
that the Other existed, that I have always had a total though implicit comprehension of his existence, that
this “pre-ontological” comprehension comprises a surer and deeper understanding
of the notion of the Other and the relation of his being to my being than all
the theories which have been built around it.
If the Other’s existence is not a vain conjecture, a pure fiction, this
is because there is a sort of cogito concerning
it. It is this cogito which we must bring to light by specifying its structures
and determining its scope and its laws.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness (tr. H. Barnes),
337f.
First, I
must wonder whether “probability” is being meant by Sartre in the same sense as
it is in normal English, or whether Barnes had mistranslated by “probability”
what should have been put as “provability.” For the entire meaning of the passage changes once that change is
acknowledged, and what otherwise would have been less clear would become crystal-clear. But the first half of the paragraph reads
like a paean to the logical positivists’ verifiability criterion of meaning;
the neo-positivists would, however, have had to jettison the rest thereof, from
the words “But if I do not conjecture about the Other” onward, as of a piece
with – what, mysticism? Notice that Sartre explored (e.g.)
neither Nietzsche’s rejection of the cogito
as yielding an ego nor
Nietzsche’s rejection of the “true world” in connection herewith. And the non-invocation of that ghost at that
point is very telling (as I think my raising that specter is). [For Nietzsche’s rejection of the cogito as yielding ergo sum, see his (admittedly interpolated) Will to Power: “It is merely
a formulation of our grammatical habits that there must always be something that
thinks when there is thinking and that there must always be a doer when there
is a deed.” Carnap, in The Logical Structure of the World (§64),
cited this text and §§ 276, 309, 367ff of Nietzsche’s said cited work. For the
rejection of the “true world,” see
Twilight of the Idols, supra, quoted above at III, fourth full paragraph.]
I must,
to answer the last half of Sartre’s paragraph (and Nietzsche, I should think),
now dissect the famous cogito, ergo
sum. First, I have the direct
certainty of definitions of consciousness
itself for the actual first part (“I think”).
But what eventuated the “think” in esse? According to A=~(~A), A=A+0, and 0=~(~0), it cannot be the 0, nor did something simply pass
from being “just A (without thought)” to “A with thought.” If the
thoughts had any actual esse, then so also they must issue from
an actual esse. [In so saying I would wonder about
Sartre’s pontification about the nihilation
(!) of the pour-soi at the
beginning of Being and Nothingness.] I realize that all this for transcendent validity depends on the
application of the harmonic rules, especially of the rule ex nihilo nihil fit, beyond experience, to the determining of which
my opusculum had originally been
directed.
[VI. Whether the other proves an intersubjective world or does the veracitas
Dei about the world leads to the reality
of the other.]
But how do I attain a certainty of the cogito (first person singular singularly
intended!) of the opaque Other (third person singular)? I cannot crawl into the other’s cranium, let
alone think her thoughts. Empathy ill assists me here. My only evidence of her thought is her outward expression, in words or in
behavior [in the widest sense, including her entire personal comportment], from
which I can infer her own cogitationem (to be grammatically
precise). And my so doing depends on not
only the application of the harmonic rules above beyond my own field of
experience but also on my being able to trust my perceptions of her in the
first instance. Far from making my
perceptual world reliable and objective
because intersubjectively given, the quest for the Other must depend on the
reliability of my perceptual world. Nothing intrinsic to that world will show its reliability except
negatively, in the sense of its not being disharmonically selfrefuting. At least the original Cartesian idea of the veracitas Dei provided an external
voucher for the world of my senses, whatever Husserl (e.g.) had to say about it
as all but betraying (in his view) Descartes’ original project of presuppositionless
philosophizing out of the cogito with
the rigor arising therefrom. In Husserl’s own words:
How
can evidence (clara et distincta
perceptio) claim to be more than a characteristic of consciousness within
me? Aside from the (perhaps not so unimportant)
exclusion of acceptance of the world as being, it is the Cartesian problem,
which was supposed to be solved by divine veracitas.
What
does phenomenology’s transcendental self-investigation have to say about
this? Nothing less than that the whole
problem is inconsistent. It involves an inconsistency into which Descartes
necessarily fell, because he missed the genuine sense of his reduction to the
indubitable – we were about to say: his transcendental epoché and reduction to
the pure ego. But, precisely because of
its complete disregard of the Cartesian epoché, the usual post-Cartesian way of
thinking is much cruder. . . whereas the answer alone ought to show the
rightness of accepting anything as Objectively valid. Manifestly the conscious execution of
phenomenological reduction is needed, in order to attain that Ego and conscious
life by which transcendental questions, as questions about the possibility of
transcendental knowledge, can be asked.
But as soon as – instead of transiently exercising a phenomenological
epoché – one sets to ask, attempting in a systematic self-investigation and as
the pure ego to uncover this ego’s whole field of consciousness, one recognizes
that all that exists for the pure ego becomes constituted in him himself, furthermore,
that every kind of being – including every kind characterized as, in any sense,
“transcendent” – has its own particular constitution. Transcendency in every form is an immanent
existential characteristic, constituted within the ego…
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §§40 (last
sentence), 41 (beginning). [For the next
part of that paragraph, see this
text, IV, last paragraph, supra.] See also id at § 10, discussing not only the hidden scholasticism, as
unclarified prejudice, lurking in Descartes’ Meditationes de prima philosophia, but also Descartes’ failure to
grasp the “real significance” of his epoché
of methodical doubt and his prejudice-based turning of the ego into substantia cogitans, and the point of
departure for inferences based on causality.
[I note that Descartes did not
have the benefit of independent harmony, of which Husserl was equally
incognizant.]
Lauer (op. cit. at 147) had said, of
Descartes’ resort to the trustworthiness of God,
. . . [w]hen Descartes had pushed
law as far back as it would go he felt constrained to take refuge in the divina veracitas. This Husserl looks upon as a sort of
rational cowardice; he himself will resolutely appeal only to human reason
itself[,]
I half expect someone
else to point out that Lauer had observed, “Husserl did not make the mistake of
interpreting the cogito, ergo sum as
an inference from thought to existence.”
Id at 89 n.15. But is it really a mistake?
If one is willing look upon the ego
as being really just the field of direct
conscious experience, and Lauer had Husserl in another place identifying
the ego with consciousness, thus: “‘I
am’ is given,” and then, in the footnote thereto, “What Husserl actually
recognizes as given is ‘there is consciousness.”’ Id at
134 and n.35. But I had already pointed
out in §16 of the main work (the paragraph discussing the challenge to prove to
another one existed) what a strange problem this must pose.
[“Nothing
intrinsic to that world will show its reliability except negatively”: It might be offered, from my own perspective,
that the perceptual field can be definitely linked to events that are outside
the outer limit of tactile (bodily) sensations.
E.g., glasses’ being brought from behind my head to correct the vision
of things external to that outer limit (or
so appearing) could be so shown, as
could my losing sensation because of a
severing of a limb or nerve (e.g.).
But even then the question of the malin
génie always looms larger, and the veracitas
Dei alone can be trusted to dispel such satanic
interference. Moreover, God has intended me as sensor to know the truth, and only by reliable sensations’ being
generated by authentic stimulators with preemptive activity to avoid
falsifications’ being credited will the sensor come to know the truth.]
Husserl
should perhaps have fleshed out how Descartes’ proceeding from framing his own esse from his being conscious, from his
thinking, to his idea of the ego as substantia cogitans, thence to God’s esse and the reliability of that given
in sensation involved an inconsistency. He left it for the reader to surmise that
he had meant Descartes’ uncritical acceptance of world-interior rules as if
they applied to a conjectural transsensory world, for example. And this should
very well have been an elucidation, from within the charmed circle of consciousness (!), of how, if at all, one could
apply logical rules and the rule A=A+0 to some conjectured transsensory entity,
if there be any such thing. [This was,
of course, the point of the entire travail of the main work.] Might one note, however, that Husserl’s
denying the reality of a Ding an sich effectively
subverts the original suspension of the question of the world posed at the
beginning of his own phenomenological project?
And, additionally, that it is an unsubstantiatable piece of dogmatism? [How,
after all, does one prove the absence of
something?]
posted by davidbaryochanan @ 10:07 AM
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