"Underlying Reality" for Husserl
This is a quick spin-off from the Objectivity and Detachment thread, which is and should be focused on @Wayfarers paper. The following issue came up in conversation there with @Joshs. Ive moved it so as not to interfere with the other thread.
Josh writes:
Quoting Joshs
You want to know what is out there as the underlying reality for Husserl, apart from iintentionally constituted objects? An utterly formless, structureless flow of change.
Quoting Joshs
. So now I can ask: Is the utterly formless, structureless flow nevertheless constraining, in some degree, of what we can constitute as an object or event? How is this flow not "whole cloth," as it were?
J
"It is not as though this flow were devoid of textures, of consonances and dissonances. When we slap abstractions like self-identical spatial object and effluent causation over the flow, we are not producing such distinctions out of thin air, but forming idealizations out of the constants and affordances which emerge from our own activities.
Ill try to restate this with as little technical terminology as possible, even at the risk of imprecision. The suggestion, as I read it, is that there is some thing or process a flow -- that serves as raw material for our abstractions of ordinary objects and perceptions. This flow can be characterized using descriptions such as texture, consonance, dissonance, and affordance. Thus we are collectively constrained, to some degree, in what we can make out of the flow. The flow is not whole cloth; whatever we constitute must respect the various textures, etc., which we encounter. Furthermore, it is in part our own activities which generate the textural items in question.
There are three obvious questions about this:
1) Why are the suggested terms exempt from the criticisms you make about any other supposedly external term? Why is OK to acknowledge the non-arbitrary existence of a consonance but not a tree or some other self-identical spatial object?
2) Why, and in what way, would an affordance, e.g., be constraining? Why couldnt it be ignored? Does this have to do with the role that our own activities play in this process?
3) Are these terms actually meaningful? Is it possible, e.g., to have texture without its being of anything? This seems like a predicate without a subject. Surely textures and consonances need to inhere somewhere, otherwise what organ of perception are we using to identify them?
Before going further I want to say something about how this sort of discussion should not be carried out (IMHO, of course). There is a type of philosopher some of them are on TPF who would regard what I just wrote as an attempt, however unsuccessful, at a knockdown argument of some kind. The idea is supposed to be that I think my questions are unanswerable, and I have thus refuted this interpretation of the Husserlian scheme. Moreover, the philosopher who had put forth that interpretation joshs, in this case is supposed to respond with something like, Wow, I never thought of that! How could I have overlooked such elementary difficulties in my theory?! Thank you for pointing them out to me.
Im poking a little fun, but theres a serious point. I know that joshs is an experienced and well-read philosopher. It would be frankly incredible to me if he had not already considered the points I just raised. Therefore, I raise them in an entirely different spirit from one of refutation, of heres what youve ignored or misunderstood. Rather, I assume that both of us already know that these are points that have to be addressed, and my desire is to hear how that might be done. Theres nothing disingenuous about this attitude. Im quite certain that if Husserl was wrong in some silly way about this, he would long ago have been corrected. He may still be wrong, but the mistake will be deeper, and more interesting.
All that said, my guess is that theres a way to sharpen up the suggested terminology that will help address my questions. It may merely be a matter of correcting my own imprecisions and misunderstandings of what @Joshs has said. In any event, we need a robust description of how intentionally constituted objects arise out of an utterly formless, structureless flow of change, which would include a way of giving content to the quoted phrase. I also believe that the important issue here is about ontological primitives, but we cant get to that via a shortcut. We have to look at some actual doctrine about how subjectivity and objectivity may meet in the lifeworld, and understand what issues are raised.
Comments (75)
Quoting J
The nature of the flow that Husserl described is not without order, even though it lacks formal features. How can this be? Husserl is not the only philosopher who has depicted the primordial basis of reality in these terms. We find such thinking also in Nietzsche , Deleuze, Foucault, Heidegger , Derrida and others. What is common to them is the idea that no entity in the world pre-exists its interactions with other entities. The patterns that arise obey no analogies or categorical placements. Things are not identities , they only continue to exist the same differently.
Quoting J
We cannot ignore events which thwart our purposes, even though what stands in the way of our goals emerges by way of those very goals.
Quoting J
The subject is itself produced as a continually shifting effect of organism-environment interactions. The person-world dynamic isnt a subject-predicate propositional structure, with a subject representing a world to itself. Instead, both the subject and the object inhere as the result of their interaction.
Quoting Joshs
That would be what is traditionally called chaos, would it not?
Quoting Wayfarer
Husserl certainly grants subjectivity ontological primacy, but the content of the ego changes with its acts.
What is unchanging about it is its structural role as center from which the retentional and protentional horizons extend backward to the past and forward to the future, respectively.
As pure Ego it does not harbor any hidden inner richness; it is absolutely simple and it lies there absolutely clear. All richness lies in the cogito and in the mode of the function which can be adequately grasped therein.(Ideas II). Husserl describes this pure ego pole as non-perceivable, non-graspable and anonymous. This suggests that the pure ego may function as nothing but an empty zero point or center of activity rather than a consciously sensed feeling of any kind.
Traditionally, chaos is defined by its opposition to order. But
the constituting temporal flow is not without all order. Heidegger says:
I've bolded the question above. We want to understand how something called a flow can have order and patterns while lacking formal features. We also want to understand how this flow is not an entity, nor is it composed of entities. Would an analogy with water help? -- it's the first thing that comes to mind when I think of "flow." The problem here would be that water is composed of entities, and the ways in which water is ordered and patterned give rise to features such as depth, velocity, waves, eddies, etc. (Arguably, these are not formal features, but then we need an account of what a formal feature would be.) We could say that the "entities" of which water is composed -- I'm thinking of molecules -- are themselves composed of smaller entities, right down to the subatomic level, at which it's unclear whether we can speak of entities at all. Might this level be closer to Husserlian "flow"? But do we really perceive that flow? If we could imagine -- and I'm not sure we can -- an epoché that bracketed everything, would we get the quantum world?
Quoting Joshs
OK.
Quoting Joshs
There's some unwitting ambiguity here, I think, brought on by the term "subject". I didn't mean "subject" as opposed to "object". Let me rephrase without that term:Quoting J
This now looks like a version of the first question about flow. We might ask, Is flow ontologically primitive? That fits with @Wayfarer's remark above about chaos. It may also fit with current scientific speculation about how to represent an abstraction such as "quantity" in strictly physical terms. Here's a very good recent paper on that. The question discussed is whether quantity is simply a primitive property of the physical world, or whether it can be explained in non-mathematical terms. The relevance here would be that quantity might be an example -- like texture and consonance -- of something that appears ontologically primitive, part of the "flow" we encounter in the lifeworld. But maybe not, as the paper discusses.
My remarks above about ontological primitives shouldn't be read as excluding this possibility as well. Subjectivity may be as primary as "flow".
This question is the nut of philosophy to me, reframed since before the time of Platos cave.
You just raised an analogy with water to describe the flow. Thales ears perked up.
The fact that we havent been able to answer it plainly after all this feeds the predicament. It may be instructive that we seem to have beat around the bush here but continually miss the target.
Because of the linear function of logical thought that we cant escape in order to even merely form a sentence (or just say consonance as not-flow), when we speak or think of this question, we automatically separate consonance from the flow. And, we make a new consonance out of the flow itself and pit it against consonance itself. All so we can speak of whatever we are speaking of.
But it is one thing, any one moment, we first and plainly sought to speak of, so we contradict ourselves and our goals by merely positing the question and identifying a subject to examine (such as consonance), and by trying to say just one thing consonance we have to say two things consonance in flow.
So there will never be a satisfactory answer to this in the form of linear thinking and our concepts. This, to me is why this basic question has remained unanswered.
Although not an answer, I see what Heraclitus said as addressing this in a plain way, because he wasnt being linear in his words (the path of writing is both crooked and straight.). We arent drawing a line between consonance and flow; we have to see them together at once to see either at all.
Heraclitus said it rests from change. This would be the most analytic framing of this observation, but it might also just be taken as mysticism or nonsense. So what does it say?
His best description of what to make of the appearance of consonance was this: the barley-drink stands still, only while stirring. ) This is a a more faithful translation of his aphorism at 125.
The barley/ drink is a mixture of barley, wine, cheese and maybe some oil. Its a like a vinaigrette you can drink. And like a vinaigrette, if it sits in a cup or bottle it separates. In order to bring the barley-drink into existence, for a consonance to appear, you must stir the ingredients and only while the ingredients are stirring in motion can the barley drink be drunk - otherwise you still have not-barley-drink, but cheese and barley, or wine and oil.
Flow and consonance reveal each other in the instant of experience.
So the barley-drink, the consonance, stands out in existence as a thing for the first time, only in the motion.
Linear thinking places the motion first and the barley-drink second. But they have to be seen together in the moments the stirring is happening. There is no prior or post or cause or effect between them. The consonance points immediately to its stirring in the instant the stirring is consonant as a barley-drink.
So this doesnt really answer the question, but I think it reframes the object we are investigating.
Another observation here is that this is paradox. We are trying to nail down nailing down - or undo doing by doing something as if it was already done. We are cracking open what neither can be cracked nor is it not already open. It rests is the same as it changes now in our speech, so how on earth can we be logical about things grounded in illogical paradox?
So I dont have an answer, but spiral towards one anyway treating the above moving parts.
We always try to grab a subject, a motionless object, and then predicate it, fixing properties to it. But the fixing, the predicating is as much before the object predicated, as the object predicated appears first in out sentences.
In the end, I dont think these are linguistic tricks hiding self-delusion, nor do I think Plato fee ally explained the existence of essences, nor Aristotle though he did better to account for the flow, nor Nietzsche though he did even better to account for the flow. But I do think consonance is something we minded-beings sense, from out in the flow; even though we do not see the thing in itself as it is in itself, we see that it is, that it is flowing, that there is consonance and flow.
It is a different thing to say that we do not know what any of the phenomena in experience really are by continuing to use the eyeballs and minds that make them phenomena, from saying separate, self consonant things apart from us do not exist.
Its a triangulating dance we dance when we say consonance at all.
Quoting J
In order to understand the basis of quantity, we have to see its relation to quantity. We can only count instances of something that remains qualitatively the same over the course of the counting. For instance, if we define change in terms of spatial displacement of a body, we are defining change in terms of motion. Motion is a formal notion of change, because it relies on the form of a quality, which remains self-identical as we measure its temporal movement in space. Contrast this to Husserls temporal flow, which contains within itself no self-identical qualities, and thus cannot be measured like motion can, and which is why it doesnt make sense to talk about the flow moving faster or slower. Each new phase of the flow varies qualitatively with respect to the previous phase, but this doesnt prevent there being dimensions of similarity and resonances within the differentiations of the flow.
Put differently, if every change in degree is at the same time a difference in kind, then both quality and quantity are in a sense illusions or abstractions we place over the flow.
Nathan Widder reveals a similar way of thinking in what Deleuze borrows from Nietzsche:
I'm not an expert on Husserl; my perspective on this topic comes from sociology - in particular from Helmut Plessner, Alfred Schütz, and Berger/Luckmann, all of whom were heavily leaning on Husserl. I've never read Husserl (except in the form of quotes); but what this reminded me of is Husserl's distinction between "Leib" and "Körper" (two German words for "body"), which Plessner discussed as "being a body" (Leib) and "having a body" (Körper). As far as I remember, this is a lived duality: you attend to one or the other and relate to that relation thus creating a tension field (from which, among other things, the subject-object distinction emerges).
While refreshing my memory, I stumbled on a pretty interesting article about this, which I'll save here for myself (and I hope it's interesting for the topic at hand):
Being a Body and Having a Body. The Twofold Temporality of Embodied Intentionality - WEHRLE, Maren
I find the body to be the best topic to think about this, because it's basically the locus of our perspective: the structure of our bodies (eyes facing forward, ears on the side of our heads...) determine our perceptive within a broader world we're part of. But the borders between body/not body emerge through some sort of worldly process. The very concept of "entities" wouldn't make sense if that difference didn't emerge.
At what moment does the air in your lungs become part of you? This feels like a pretty silly and inconsequential question, but if we assume "entities", we'd need to answer that, or at least figure out in what we can't. If we don't normally even ask this sort of question, it's because our daily praxis doesn't recognise this as thematic. It's also the reason why losing a finger is somewhat more relevant than losing a hair, and so on. There's a tension field here that never pins things down enough to make full sense, but remains within a certain perimater so that we can just experience the equivalent of a tip-of-the-tongue experience.
Or to sum it up: if we think of the flow, we are tempted to think of it in terms of "object/subject" - but we're actually engulfed - we're part of it. Metaphorically, we're maybe ripples that fall in on themselves and disappear - but it's all water. Trying to answer this question feels to me like a cartoon coyote running on air until he looks down... I can still reason, but nothing underpins it anymore. At some point reason stops being meaningful to me.
i.e. classical atomists' swirling void or (in contemporary physical terms) random acausal vacuum fluctuations
Quoting Dawnstorm
:fire:
From Thales to Heraclitus & Democritus ... to Spinoza & Nietzsche ... to Deleuze, Badiou & Meillassoux ...
There's a book-length article on IEP, The Phenomenological Reduction. I'm still going through it but it's a dense and rich entry. The passage I'll mention in this context is under the heading, The Epoch?:
[quote=IEP;https://iep.utm.edu/phen-red/#SSSH5a.i.1]Husserls insight is that we live our lives in what he terms a captivation-in-an-acceptedness; that is to say, we live our lives in an unquestioning sort of way by being wholly taken up in the unbroken belief-performance of our customary life in the world. We take for granted our bodies, the culture, gravity, our everyday language, logic and a myriad other facets of our existence. All of this together is present to every individual in every moment and makes up what Fink terms human immanence; everyone accepts it and this acceptance is what keeps us in captivity. The epoch? is a procedure whereby we no longer accept it. Hence, Fink notes in Sixth Cartesian Meditation: This self consciousness develops in that the onlooker that comes to himself in the epoch? reduces bracketed human immanence by explicit inquiry back behind the acceptednesses in self-apperception that hold regarding humanness, that is, regarding ones belonging to the world; and thus he lays bare transcendental experiential life and the transcendental having of the world (p.40). Husserl has referred to this variously as bracketing or putting out of action but it boils down to the same thing, we must somehow come to see ourselves as no longer of this world, where this world means to capture all that we currently accept.
...Here it is important to realize two things: the first is that withdrawal of belief in the world is not a denial of the world. It should not be considered that the abstention of belief in the worlds existence is the same as the denial of its existence; indeed, the whole point of the epoch? is that it is neither an affirmation nor a denial in the existence of the world. [/quote]
I was struck by something I read in a wikipedia entry on the Buddhist teaching of 'two truths' (conventional and transcendental):
[quote=The Kacc?yana Sutta]By and large, Kacc?yana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "non-existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one.[/quote]
This is is making an essentially similar point; because here 'the world' is not the objective physical cosmos, but the totality of experience, or in other words, the world as it exists in experience (another Wikipedia entry discusses the resonances between Husserl and Buddhist philosophy.)
Personally, I think this is a far more practical line of enquiry than the metaphysics of objects or quantity, because it is grounded in the real nature of existence, not in grappling with abstract concepts.
-----
Quoting IEP
Which sounds awfully like habituation, doesn't it? I bought a book over Christmas on exactly this topic, Look Again, although I have a habit of buying self-improvement books and then not reading them. :yikes:
I have the feeling that youre incorrect in this analysis although Im not well versed enough in Husserl to put my finger on why. Perhaps you might consider glancing at the IEP Phenomenological Reduction article I mentioned above and find something in that which you consider to provide an example of where Husserl goes wrong with the epoch??
:up: :up:
The article barely discusses eidetic intuition and original evidence (in the epoche) and Husserl's intuitionism in general. What I am referring to is what links intuitionism in Husserl with his claim of objectivity and ideality of phenomenology as a science of essences (unconventional Platonism as Husserl himself would say).
An example is given by Derrida: when I say "I am" in the epoche. Husserl would tell us that it has a full evidence or that we have an intuition of full and ideal essence (which can be understood universally) , however for being in the epoche the "I am" has a possible meaning without object in the world (since the world is put in parenthesis). So the "I am" has full meaning and evidence even if in fact I am dead. How is this possible? Well, it is not simply because of the epoche because the epoche is still made by me being alive. It is language that makes such a thing possible, that "I am" means even if I am in fact dead. Language here gives ideality to expression because language is transmitted and repeated.
I can't see that at all. The paragraphs that I've just been studying are those concerning his critique of naturalism:
[hide][/hide]
Here, he's saying that while logical laws have a priori justifications, so-called 'natural laws' can only be inductive. He's dealing with the paradox of how consciousness, which is always perspectival and structured by intentionality, can give us access to an objective world at all. He challenges the naïve realism of natural science, which assumes that it simply describes a world that exists independently of any observer. So in a key sense, it confuses observed with logical causality, and then mistakenly attributes to the former, the certainty that properly only belongs to the latter.
One of Husserls key insights here is that the structure of consciousness itself is not incidental to how things appear to usit constitutes the manner in which objects are given. The naturalist assumption that there is a reality in itself, wholly independent of the mind, runs into difficulty when we ask how it is that we can know this reality at all. As the passage suggests, merely accumulating experiences does not in itself explain the coherence of knowledge, nor does it explain why subjective acts of consciousness can make statements that claim objective validity.
This is where Husserls phenomenology originatesnot in denying the reality of the world, but in questioning how the world is disclosed to us. His method, the epoch? or phenomenological reduction, brackets assumptions about the apparently mind-independent existence of objects in order to examine the object-as-experienced. What he reveals is that objectivity is not something simply found in the world but something constituted through intentional acts of consciousness.
I am speaking "in fact". By bracketing the world I include my worldly self. That is why in the epoche it is said that the "I am" has full evidence. Which means that I can be dead (the worldly self) and the "I am" is still originally self-evident. But in fact the epoche is made from a singularity that gives the specific sense to the "I am", with which the "I am" remains anchored to worldliness if it is not for the language that here saves ideality.
Thanks, I will check it out.
Quoting Dawnstorm
It isn't silly at all. Along with many other similar questions we could ask (what about all those microbes that live inside us?), it reveals that entity-talk is always going to be loose talk, more or less appropriate for particular contexts. A pulmonologist may need a very specific answer to the question you pose; ordinarily we don't need such an answer; our sense of "human as entity" varies accordingly.
Does this give indirect support to the Husserlian flow? Possibly, as it suggests that even our rough-grain constituted objects ("your body") are not as obvious or "common-sense" as we suppose them to be.
1) Is this theory meant to be a psychological description of how infants begin to constitute objects? If so, how do infants replace the shared-lifeworld aspect that seems so necessary to the description? Some equivalent of a Chomskian universal grammar?
2) Does Husserl mean that what we encounter in the lifeworld must be as he describes, or only that it may be, for all we know? A similar question can be posed about Kantian noumena: Do we know that noumena do not resemble phenomena at all, or is it merely the case that we can't know either way?
Another version of this second question, posed by a realist, would be something like: If we grant that consciousness plays a vital role in constituting the objects and events of our experience, must it be the case that the result is different from what might obtain in the absence of consciousness? Suppose objects like trees are "really out there"; we couldn't know this, of course, but do we know they aren't? Do we have a transcendental argument that can show this?
Quoting JuanZu
By world, Husserl means any notion of an entity ( world, reality, universe, etc) presupposed by the natural attitude. I. his 5th Cartesian mediation, where he imagines the destruction of the world without the elimination of the transcendental ego, he does not mean the elimination of exposure to an outside. There can be no subjectivity, no ego, without time consciousness , and time consciousness is always about something. What is left when we bracket out all concepts of world is phenomena.
Husserl here isnt eliminating all worlds, just the world of fulfilled adumbrations that the natural sciences call real objects. There is still a world of subjectively experienced sensate data after the bracketing of the natural world. But what is annihilated along with the world of physical objects and nature is the world of human beings and alter egos, my own psychological ego included.
You keep using the word objective to describe Husserls goal of grounding the sciences, but objectivity has a specific, derivative meaning for him. Empirical objectivity is the outcome of intesubjective processes of relation among individual subjectivities. The fundamental ground that phenomenology strives for is in the associative processes of constitution, which can only be achieved by bracketing the higher levels of constitution. The apodictic certainty that is achieved through this method is not itself objective, since objectivity refers to the constituted product of associative processes of objectivation rather than the universality of those processes themselves. The objective facts of the natural world are secondary, relative and contingent for Husserl. Objectivity is an irreal product of constituting idealizations.
This is a difficult question for me. Back then I didn't quite understand some of this stuff, and now I don't have enough memory about it. It's made even more difficult, given that the institutionalisation of psychology and academic differentiation has progressed quite a bit since Husserl's time, so even if I knew whether he talked about psychology (I vaguely think he did; or that at least someone said he did...), we'd probably have to dive into the history of what the term would have meant in academic circles back then and how that impacts now.
In any case, I don't think infants "replace" anything under the theory. Rather, this is an ongoing process and not stable. So for example, when a new-born child cries... is it already in a shared-lifeworld-to-be? Something to be developed from that moment on? I mean, usually a crying baby is going to be comforted by physical contact quite soon. It's not like you delevop something you replace later; it's that you just develop, and left to your own devices you just... die.
It's an interesting question, though.
Quoting J
Again, take everything here with a grain of salt, since I'm out of the loop, but as far as I remember Husserl's phenomenology didn't have much to do with the thing-in-itself. As far as I remember, where Kant speaks of noeuma, Husserl speaks of noesis which results in "nouma", which are part of the stream of consciousness rather than part of the world.
I think Husserl might have said that resemblance is relation between phenomena, and to ask if a phenomenon "resembles" some putative thing-in-itself is a category error. Also, the "shared life-world" in (1) is a phenomenon, something that emerges from the process of noesis. At the thing-in-itself level, if we posit something like that, the world isn't yet differentiated into perceiver-perceived to begin with.
Personally, I think "flow" is a metaphor something we can't grasp without metaphor, and as such it might not be the only applicable metaphor. You can easily imagine that objects exist as we see them, too, but that, too, would be a mataphor, and imagining an undifferentiated flow instead has the advantage of being different - so it's harder to forget that it's a metaphor for something otherwise ungraspable.
Or differently speaking: there's one tree and there's another, and they're both alike in some ways and different in others, so we can tell them apart and also categorise them together. You cannot make the same sort of comparison to something you can't experience. You can make any number of working assumptions - ideal forms, a material level of existance, an undifferentiated flow... The differences will relate to who you few the world: what's intuitive here is different for different people. Phenomenology needn't make any working assumption, because they start "later". But that "starting later" has to be conceptualised to ground the ideas - say with the concept of "noesis".
Basically, I think question (2) lies outside the scope of phenomenology, and I'm not sure in what framework to treat the quesion. (I have a hunch I'd have to solve "the hard problem" to even begin having an approach.)
You are forgetting that there is a passage from the naturalized ego to the transcendental ego. Therefore, the two cannot be confused. The transcendental ego is a sort of eidetic reduction of the ego that we begin with in the natural attitude and which is dealt with by psychology, for example. Thus this natural ego is also reduced, put in parentheses. I know that the reduction and epoche does not mean that literally the world of the natural attitude ceases to exist. But there is an ego of the natural attitude which is taken care of by psychology. Therefore, by rights, the self-evident and essential sense of "I am" would be worth and have all its transcendental eidetic value even if the natural ego disappears or is bracketed out of existence. It is a necessary possibility. But a possibility that is no longer safeguarded by the transcendental ego itself but by the language that allows signification beyond a living or dead subjectivity.
The ego as the subject of psychological experiences is not the pure ego of transcendental phenomenology. The latter is not an object in the world but the source of all world-constitution.
Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book (1913)
My point stands because there is in fact a reduction of one's own psychological ego or empirical self. Otherwise all transcendentality would be ruined.
Quoting JuanZu
I agree with what you said in general, but I want to put into question the quote above. What exactly does I am mean to you here? It isnt a static substance for Husserl but a synthetic structure. The ego is but a pole of an indissociable interaction with an object pole , and this is as true of the transcendental I as it is of the natural I. The I has no existence in and of itself.
"Replace" may not be quite the right word. I'm asking into whether an infant, when she sees a shape, is already constrained by the textures of "flow" to see it in a particular manner, quite apart from how the human community (which she will join, but has not yet) sees it.
Quoting tim wood
For Husserl, things as they are is utterly contingent and relative, so there is nothing for phenomenology to state about apples in themselves which is philosophical grounding. His goal is to strip away not only the redness of apples , but everything else about apples and all other objects which define them as entities, in order to reveal the PROCESS OF CONSTITUTING objects in universal certainty.
As an historical analog, you might consider why Heraclitus felt the need to provide for a Logos at work in a world of unceasing, inchoate flux. The charge of Aristotle, which perhaps could be laid at the feet of some modern analogs of Heraclitus, is that this is simply a post-hoc explanation for the apparent order at work in reality.
Yet I think the more pressing concerns lie around the Problem of the One and the Many. Does the "soup" of flux and constraints/regularities that lies prior to the constructions of the human intellect include things or is it just one thing, a single process?
There is a lot of overlap here with the "classical metaphysical tradition," even in the need to speak of the "soup" (God in the earlier tradition) by way of analogy.
So, as a contrast consider:
This obviously contrasts starkly with the common modern view of the consciousness as a contingent/accidental re-presentation of being, and of things and matter as self-subsistent building blocks of reality. But it also contrasts with Post-Kantian philosophy that heads in the other direction, which tends to assign to the specifically human intellect the power to bestow intelligibility on the world of experience, whereas in the older view the human intellect is not the ground of this intelligibility. Another difference is that the "pre-experiential soup" is often described as arational, irrational, or pre-rational, whereas God is said to be "super-rational" (this distinction in turn implies the much greater role for finite, and specifically human intellects).
Of course, the other big difference would be a conception of reality where consciousness can be contingent, being without "whatness" or intentionality.
The old Scholastic adage that "everything is received in the mode of the receiver" becomes dominant in Kant and later thinkers. I suppose that what tends to be obscured from sight by the inflation of this principle is the role of ecstasis in knowing, knowing as primarily union, a "going beyond and outside the self." This second principle, when taken with the first, notes that while "everything is received in the mode of the receiver," the mode of the receiver itself is determined by this joining with being.
IDK, there are a lot of parallels between the Kantian noumena and its development in later thinkers and earlier conceptions of God, and in some ways they are very similar and in others they could not be more unlike.
Here is one I like:
John Deely also has a lot of interesting stuff on the emergence of the lebenswelt, and his semiotic approach bridges the gap on some of the thorny epistemic issues that come up in representationalist readings of perception. Nathan Lyons has some interesting stuff here too that I've shared before. It tries to get at what is prior to individual instances of perception:
What does the bolded phrase mean, exactly? And is this what happens for an infant (which was my original question)? I hope you can fill this out a bit more; it sounds interesting.
Things are present to us whenever we are experiencing them in any way. So, a thing might be present through sense experience, through memory, through imagination, etc.
Sokolowski gives a certain primacy to names/words as "calling forth the intelligibility of things," and "making them present to us." The "intelligibility of a thing" is "the sum total of true things we can say about it," and not "we" as individuals, but rather what all of mankind can say about something through all our investigations, across the history of the collective "human conversation" (so inclusive of the arts, sciences, etc.). Following Aquinas, he doesn't think we can ever fully exhaust the intelligibility of any one object, since we can always come to experience it in new contexts.
Names call forth a thing and make it present to us. The syntax required for the "human conversation" relies on human biology, but also develops due to the "way consciousness is." A child, in developing language (and the intellect more broadly), is in some sense gaining access to things, to being. The structure here is in part due to the way experience is.
It's a really great book though and I might not be doing it justice in trying to stay brief.
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I should probably add that in my first comment I was thinking mostly about later advocates of the "soup" view (for lack of a better term lol). I haven't read much about Husserl's thoughts on religion except that he was a convert and committed Lutheran. His prize student, Edith Stein (a nun and later Catholic saint) found phenomenology to flow well with her later work on Christian metaphysics, particularly Dionysius the Areopagite as far as I know, but I'm not super familiar with her work. Or Pope/Saint JPJ II, who was big on phenomenology before his poping stint.
Thomas Nail defines a flow as a fundamental concept of a new historical ontology
of the present:
Flows are an active and creative process that one can never see in a pure or incomposite state,
since they are not a state at all but a process. A flow is something that can only be known immanently
as the ontological condition of the things that flow. The visible will always have as its condition a relatively or not fully isolatable kinetic substratum that distributes it for observation. Things never appear on their own or fully present but in relation and in motion. Since motion is not a thing but a process, kinetic relations are not strictly empirical, because one cannot directly sense a process as such, but only the fragmentary sense perceptions within that relational process are not metaphysical either, since they are material processes, not substances. The conditions of the empirical cannot be anything empirical in themselves, but this does not mean that the kinetic conditions are not thoroughly real. It only means
that flows in themselves are not necessarily and fully empirically present or sensible discrete things.
(Nail, Being and Motion, p 67).
Thomas Nail is an advocate of Karen Barads
agential realism brand of new materialism, which I think provides us with a way to unite inorganic matter and living consciousness on the shared basis of material agency.
I read his Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions -- first-rate essays.
It is related to the sphere of expressivity of sense or meaning where the pure self of the transcendental reduction shows itself self-evident to consciousness. The sense of this pure I is self-evident. But as sense it has a linguistic value (see phenomenology of language in Husserl) , as "I am". "I am" is the sense of the self-evidence of the pure self.
Quoting tim wood
Its good you put psychological in scare quotes, because Husserl took pains to avoid the accusation of psychologism. The difference between treating subjective processes as psychological vs transcendental is that the former reduces those processes to contingent features of a physiological system, while the latter grounds those processes in principles that are ontologically prior to any empirical facts about human beings as biological or psychological organisms.
Quoting tim wood
What sorts of concepts must be understood in order to make sense of ideas like contingency and relativity? Are concepts like past, present and future, or time in general, utterly contingent and relative, or they the irreducible ground for thinking about anything contingent and relative? This is what Husserl meant by apodictic certainty, that which must always be presumed in order to think anything.
transcendental unity of apperception.
Is this at all related to the immortality of the soul?
Quoting Number2018
And there's the rub: what are "the things that flow"?
:up:
Of course, this has been taken in two ways. As the mind's construction of intelligible reality, or as the mind's union and co-identity with reality. Reminds me of Perl's comments in Thinking Being:
An excellent question. I don't know Nail, but in general this would tend to be "anything that is mutable." The question then is: "is anything immutable?"
I have always thought some things do seem quite immutable. For instance, "Adolf Hitler was the first US President" or "the USA had 76 states in 2018" are currently false. This does not seem like the sort of thing that can become true in the future.
This seems somewhat akin to Hume's pronouncement that one cannot observe causation. I would imagine this conclusion depends on some key assumptions about what observing motion or cause would entail. It seems to me that, in at least some sense, seeing a rock sail through a window and shatter it simply is to observe both motion and causation.
This is maybe also akin to statements to the effect that "matter" and "energy" are "unobservable." On the view that this is all that there is, it would rather be that we never experience anything other than matter and energy.
I am not sure why we should assume that only substances are received through the senses. It is true that one cannot have a "fast motion" with nothing moving, but even given a substance-centric ontology it still seems possible for the senses to capture and transmit relation. At the opening of the Phenomenology, Hegel (IMO fairly convincingly) demonstrates how sheer sense certainty would be contentless. However, I would take it that "observation" relevant to empiricism would be broader than "sense certainty," else we would have a quite impoverished view of what sensation does for us. If "nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses," then relation, universals, etc. must be at least virtually present in sensation.
Quoting Wayfarer
This all gets very complicated, but the upshot is that what is immortal is not an individual I am , but a pre-individual ego. This absolute ego has more to do with the structure of the immortal flow of time than with the traditional notion of the soul.
James Mensch explains:
Are there substances which are not moving, or more exactly, vibrating?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Nathan Widder provides an account of Hegel's dialectical solution to the problem of the genesis of propositional thought and meaning from the flow of perception:
Phenomenology is literally the science of phenomena or appearances. Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit begins with a dialectical analysis of appearances as they are given to an individual consciousness. It examines them specifically to determine the conditions that endow these appearances with truth. This Dialectic of Consciousness comprises three main stages. The first, called sense certainty, presents the immediate sensuous experience of an external thing appearing to consciousness. Hegel argues here that the assertion that truth is found in the things immediate appearance is self-negating. The negation within sense certainty is thereby negated in the realization that every seemingly immediate experience is mediated by categories of perception. If one asserts that the truth of a perception is found immediately
within its conceptual object, this again is self-contradictory. This self-contradiction in the object of perception can only be overcome through a new concept that encompasses both a moment of unity and a moment of relation-to-others. Hegel shows that the condition for the truth of an immediate experience is that the things that appear to consciousness are perceived as objects whose identities are constituted by a forceful dynamic of negative and reciprocal relations, with the conscious subject being absorbed into these relations. (Widder, 'Political after Deleuze" p 36)
The experienced identities and differences presuppose the dynamics of dialectical progression, which make these experiences meaningful. However, they are grounded in underlying forceful relations that are not directly present in sensuous experience itself. Consequently, we can conclude that an immanent network of relations virtually constitutes the sense of actual experience. This conclusion contradicts Sokolowskis account of the Husserlian genesis of propositional thought and meaning arising from the flow of perception. On this account, it is not clear how 'the formal structure of experience' differs from 'the imposition of a priori form on experience.'
No. It is related to the sense of expression. "I am" has meaning beyond whether I am alive or not, but no longer because it is said in the epoche but because it is a function of language. Husserl needed language to found the expressivity of the epoche. He tried to make language something pure given in the epoche. But he did not succeed, since he needed to justify ideality as repetition in the sense in the epoche.
Quoting JuanZu
The pure ego only shows itself to consciousness by reflection, that is, by treating the ego as an object. One has no direct, pre-reflective awareness of the pure I.
Quoting Number2018
But we still need to ask: Relations among what? I don't think we can talk of "relations" that have no relata.
But it has intentional sense. That's my point. And therefore it is related to the expressiveness of language. The pure self as an object for consciousness is intentional and therefore it is expressive. My emphasis is Husserl's need for pure language for a description of the phenomena in the epoche Including pure ego.
Again, this doctrine is remarkably like the traditional distinction between "soul" and "spirit" (psyche and pneuma). The one is individual, particular; the other is the "stuff" of which all living beings are made.
I don't think the two views are necessarily in conflict. Sokolowski has syntactical structure emerging from the phenomenological character of experience. Hegel ultimately traces this back to being, to the Absolute (in SoL). Sokolowski's inquiry is just significantly more bracketed.
Relations between the objects we perceive, ourselves, the world, our own abstractions, etc. Hegelian "objective idealism" doesn't deny that such thing exist or are "real." They are just not subsistent, and not "as real" because they are not subsistent.
Note:For instance, one cannot understand red atomically, but rather it depends on other notions such as color and the things (substances) that can be red, etc. to be intelligible. This notion is similar to how the Patristics (e.g., St. Maximus) developed Aristotle in light of the apparent truth that even "proper beings" (e.g., a horse) are not fully intelligible in terms of themselves.
Or perhaps the agent/actual intellect, more so in the hands of Averroes. I've heard of interpretations of Kant on an Averroist line where the "mind" in question is a sort of pan-European intellect.
In the context of this thread, intentional conscious acts (cognitives) could be considered as relata. What is important is that each of these relata can be decomposed into a bundle of interrelated mental activities.
Every phenomenon has its own total form of intention [intentionale Gesamtform], but at the same time it has a structure, which in intentional analysis leads always again to components which are themselves also intentional. So for example in starting from a perception of something (for example, a die), phenomenological reflection leads to a multiple and yet synthetically unified intentionality. There are continually varying differences in the modes of appearing of objects, which are caused by the changing of "orientation"-of right and left, nearness and farness, with the consequent differences in perspective
involved. There are further differences in appearance between the "actually seen front" and the "unseeable"["unanschaulichen"] and relatively "undetermined" reverse side, which is nevertheless "meant along with it." Observing the flux of modes of appearing and the manner of their "synthesis," one finds that every phase and portion [of the flux] is already in itself "consciousness-of '-but in such a
manner that there is formed within the constant emerging of new phases the synthetically unified awareness that this is one and the same object. Article
Sokolowski does not obscure the difficulty of Husserlian transitioning from the flow of immediate experience to the domain of universal thought. The flow of meaning is constituted within a play of specific perspectives and is always unfolding and expanding. As such, it can never be fully revealed or accomplished. The process can be interrupted and annulled, but it immediately gives rise to a new meaning. It is always a meaning of something, the experience of which can change, but will always be experience in its constituting dynamic process. Husserl points out that Constitution of the existence-sense, Objective world based on my primordial "world", involves a number of levels. As the first of these, there is to be distinguished the constitutional level pertaining to the "other ego" or to any "other egos" whatever that is: to egos excluded from my own concrete being (from me as the "primordial ego"). In connection with that and, indeed, motivated by it, there occurs a universal superaddition of sense to my primordial world, whereby the latter becomes the appearance "of" a determinate "Objective" world, as the identical world for everyone, myself included. Accordingly, the intrinsically first other (the first "non-Ego") is the other Ego. Elaborating on this argument, Deleuze notes that Husserl grounds the constitution of the universal ego in the pre-given common sense. In contrast, the Hegelian dialectical movement from perception to the Absolute is based on the notion of force, which sublates the contradictions within the process of perceiving. The relations of forces become constitutive and reciprocal with relations of opposition and contradiction.
OK, let's try to plug that in to the quotes:
"Hegel shows that the condition for the truth of an immediate experience is that the things that appear to consciousness are perceived as objects whose identities are constituted by a forceful dynamic of negative and reciprocal relations among intentional conscious acts (cognitives)."
Does that really work? We're talking about what constitutes the identities of apparent "objects" -- why we perceive them that way. But now the quote seems to be saying that it's all within the intentional conscious acts themselves. Either I'm misunderstanding, or we haven't left any room for the "flow," the "things that appear to consciousness."
"The experienced identities and differences presuppose the dynamics of dialectical progression, which make these experiences meaningful. However, they are grounded in underlying forceful relations among intentional conscious acts (cognitives) that are not directly present in sensuous experience itself."
This seems to exhibit the same problem. The experienced identities and differences, which are required to make experience meaningful, are grounded strictly in relations among conscious acts. How could this answer the question about the role of "flow" in our constituting consciousness?
I want to return to this passage as I'd like to discuss it some more.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is the process whereby all of the various aspects and forms of an object are aggregated into a unity - we see the object not as a set of disparate forms, shapes and colours, but as an object. Plainly that is intrinsic to the process of appercerption, which Oliver Sachs noted in his books can be radically disrupted by various neural conditions. I think this is also what was articulated by Kant as 'the synthetic unity of apperception'.
There are two things I like to explore. The first is the relation of this fact to the 'neural binding problem'. This is the well-known problem of accounting for the synthetic unity of apperception and the inability of neuroscience to identify a neural sub-system that accounts for it:
[quote="The Neural Binding Problem, Jerome S. Feldman;https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3538094/#Sec3" ]There are intractable problems in all branches of science; for Neuroscience a major one is the mystery of subjective personal experience. This is one instance of the famous mindbody problem (Chalmers 1996, 'Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness') concerning the relation of our subjective experience (aka qualia) to neural function. ...Traditionally, the neural binding problem concerns instantaneous perception and does not consider integration over saccades (rapid movement of the eye between fixation points). But in both cases the hard problem is explaining why we experience the world the way we do. ...There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion....But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene...[/quote]
Maybe because this ability literally transcends the neurophysiological basis which is employed by it, through which:
What we've moved into is what Charles Pinter calls 'gestalts'. In Pinters framework ('Mind and the Cosmic Order'), gestalts are not just patterns in perception but higher-level cognitive structures that allow us to engage in reasoning, abstraction, and judgment. This connects directly to the phenomenological account of perception as an intentional act that synthesizes meaning suggested by sensory input.
The second idea I'd like to explore, is whether this ability or faculty is an aspect of the same process by which organic life attains and maintains unity. Life itself exhibits a kind of synthetic unitya self-organizing coherence that cannot be reduced to mere molecular interactions. In enactivism (Varela, Thompson, Rosch), cognition is not just something that happens in the brain but is an emergent property of the organism as a whole, including its sensorimotor and metabolic interactions with the environment.
Just as conscious experience integrates multiple sensory modalities into a singular world, life integrates biochemical and environmental interactions into a singular, self-maintaining unity. Both perceptual synthesis and biological unity resist full reduction to mechanistic explanations as they're intrinsically holistic. Phenomenology sees that perceptual unity transcends neurophysiology, while philosophical biologists like Varela argue that organisms exhibit a self-producing (autopoietic) unity that is irreducible to molecular interactions. This points to a structural parallel between mind and life as different facets of the same underlying logos.
@Joshs
Quoting Wayfarer
This is a major reason why I suspect it will turn out that only living things can be conscious. Sorry, AI!
More to follow . . .
Hence the soul as the form/actuality of man and the notion of essence/nature/formal causality (and thus final causality) :cool: .
Quoting The Neural Binding Problem, Jerome S. Feldman
I don't think he's formulating it radically enough. Yes, this is part of the hard problem, but even more basic is the question, Why do we experience the world at all? Why aren't we robots, or philosophical zombies? If all we want is "a plausible functional story," what would be wrong with organisms that just react to stimuli without experience? What we want to say about this, of course, is that it's impossible -- the idea of an organism "just reacting" without any form of subjectivity is offensive somehow. Or maybe we want to say that the very concept of "reacting" presupposes experience. But none of this is obvious; we can't just declare this picture it to be impossible. If it is, we need to know why -- back to the hard problem.
(Sokolowski)
Once again I want to raise the question of infants and psychological development. Sokolowski clearly means, by "we", fully-functioning adult humans. Infants do not do what he describes. They don't have a recognizable "thoughtful activity," and they don't reach anything that enters logical or rational space. So what story must we tell about this? None of this standard phenomenological/Kantian picture can be said to obtain until a certain developmental point has been reached. James's "blooming buzzing confusion" has to give way to something like what Sokolowski is describing.
So why does it happen? And is there some way to transform what looks like a scientific question into a phenomenological one? That is, we want an account of brain development that will explain the emergence of our "higher" capacities. Yet at the same time we'd like a transcendental argument that shows why all this must characterize human being-in-the-world. Are the two desires mutually exclusive? Or the same thing, on some basic level?
More worrying, will a semi-naturalistic account of this development tend to reduce Sokolowski's "space of reasons" to a strictly functional concept? I'd like a way to understand rationality as both a biologically inevitable phenomenon and a doorway into knowledge that really does provide reasons and justifications. This is a tall order, and thus far unreached, as far as I know.
I tried to respond to this when you rephrased yourself in response to me, but I didn't know how. This is fiendishly difficult to get a hold of. I'll try to get a few things in here; not sure how relevant they'll be, though.
Quoting J
I want to emphasise, here, that Husserl didn't hold with the Kantian idea of a "thing in itself". The world we live in constitutes in the mind. It's probably possible to give a phenomenological account of the psychological development of a child, but this wouldn't be addressing the "underlying reality".
During the reading of this thread, it struck me that Husserl's ego seemed very much like Descartes' cogito, so I googled what Husserl had to say on Descartes, and I found a text called "Cartesian Meditations"; apparently only published in French during Husserl's life time. The text I skimmed over was in German (my mother tongue).
Basically, both Descartes and Husserl start out with radical doubt; but Husserl that the phenomena present themselves in a particular way no matter whether there's an underlying reality or not: the world we live in is always and forever consituted in our consciousness. This is the starting point, and it gets ever more complex from here on out. (One problem, for example, is the other: we construe them of having a consciouness of their own, much like we do.)
What you're interested in just seems outside of the scope of phenomenological analysis, so we'd need some other frame of reference. I'm not sure what could apply, given that - to me - the singular strength of phenomenology (as it occurred in sociological theory) has always been that you don't really need to make up your mind about the underlying reality before drawing conclusions.
That may well be right. I was alluding to that possibility when I speculated that "an account of brain development that will explain the emergence of our 'higher' capacities" might be incompatible with phenomenological method -- that the two approaches are mutually exclusive. To me, it remains an open question, but your point of view has a lot of merit.
As for Kant vs. Husserl, it's true that Husserl didn't feel the need to postulate any noumena. The reason I linked the two philosophers together in this context was that both seem to favor an account of subjective experience that lacks development; both noumena and the lifeworld are somehow "present to consciousness" (or deducible from it, if you prefer) whenever there is consciousness. This is questionable, I think.
I think the point of the neural binding problem and its relationship to Chalmers paper is that it has a specific scope. Its not a philosophical analysis of why is there something and not nothing. In that sense, it validates Chalmers argument. But it also validates the Aristotelian principle of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. That is the point I was really homing in on. The principle of holism, if you like - that all of the exquisitely orchestrated activity of the billions of cellular activities of the brain somehow gives rise to what is known in philosophy as the subjective unity of experience, by means stil unknown. No specific system can be identified which accounts for it. And it seems very much like an expression of the same principle which both differentiates and integrates the functionality of organic life right from the appearance of its most rudimentary forms. Hence the reference to enactivism in biology.
Quoting J
Isnt that where Jean Piaget enters the picture? Developmental psychology? The point about human infants is that they come into the world only partially formed. Unlike a deer which has to hit the ground running and basically is born as a small adult, the human child has an 18 year period of extra-somatic learning to become adult. H.sapiens is unique among species in that regard.
Quoting Dawnstorm
For what its worth, my view is that the underlying reality neither does nor does not exist. To say of anything that it exists is already to imbue it with some form of intelligibility - even if it exists as hot plasma immediately after the singularity. The in itself, what exists before or beyond or outside the scope of any cognitive and intellectual activity, is not anything of the kind. Hence, in my specific philosophical hermeneutic, the significance of unknowing. We cant peer behind the curtain so to speak, but only be aware that knowledge is limited in this fundamental respect. (That shouldnt be taken as positivism, by the way - we intuit levels of being beyond what can be empirically known.)
Further to this thought-provoking question - I have been considering the idea that the appearance of organisms just is the appearance of the rudimentary forms of intentionality. Not that primitive life forms have a meaningful form of consciousness, but that the key thing which differentiates an organism from a mineral is that it maintains in itself a distinction from the environment. Hans Jonas, in The Phenomenon of Life, makes a similar point, suggesting that the organism is not just matter in motion but something that cares about its own persistence, something for which its own being matters in a way that is absent in the purely physical realm.
Yes! But . . . no! For me, a good example of how inadequate our current concepts are for thinking about these questions. A microbe "cares"? Absurd! we say. And yet it certainly behaves as if it does. Well, it must just be a machine then, that "acts as if." But it's alive, and a machine is not . . .
(I'm deploring the paucity of our philosophical talk in general here, not targeting you own [always interesting] thoughts in particular.)
The image that comes to my mind is of a toddler trying to arrange blocks to her satisfaction, while adults look on at this charming stab at set theory. Some day, if the species survives, we will be the adults, looking back on our kiddy selves and saying, "So cute! They thought they could understand what they called 'life' and 'consciousness' with terms like 'care', 'behave', 'causality' . . . adorable!"
I posed that question to Grok, which returned the following slop(?)
"Husserl didnt deny the existence of other minds outright; rather, he approached the issue phenomenologically, focusing on how we experience and constitute the "other" within consciousness. He argued that we cannot directly access another persons mind as we do our ownour own consciousness is given to us immediately through self-awareness. However, he posited that we encounter others indirectly through their bodies, which appear in our perceptual field as more than mere physical objects. This is what he called the experience of "alterity" (otherness).
In the Fifth Meditation, Husserl explores this through the concept of empathy (Einfühlung). He suggests that we "appresent" or co-present the others mind: we perceive another body as similar to our own and, by analogy, attribute to it a consciousness like ours. This isnt a naive belief or a logical inference but a fundamental structure of experience. For Husserl, the other is not just a theoretical construct; the others existence as a minded being is given in a unique, indirect way within our intentional acts.
So, yes, Husserl did believe in the existence of other minds in a literal senseas distinct, conscious entities separate from oneselfbut he reframed this belief within the limits of phenomenological evidence. He didnt take it as an unexamined assumption (as in everyday realism) but sought to show how this "otherness" is constituted in our subjective experience without stepping outside his transcendental method."
I'm not sure that I follow... In my opinion, "other" minds are a misnomer, because i consider my conception of "other" minds to logically reduce to my personal thoughts, feelings and observations. So I accept that "other minds" exist in a manner of speaking, but i am an anti-realist with respect to their existence. Therefore I am not troubled by disagreements or uncertainty with regards to whether a given machine, animal, vegetable or mineral is conscious or not, and I feel no compulsion to settle the matter one way or another. As I understand it, if Bob questions whether Alice has experiences, he is ultimately questioning the course of his experiences, for Bob doesn't possess a concept of Alice's experiences that is distinct from his own.
Is that what Husserl thought?
Anyway it makes perfect intuitive sense to me. Even though I don't know other people in the same way I know myself, I know they are persons like myself. 'Husserl explores this through the concept of empathy (Einfühlung). He suggests that we "appresent" or co-present the others mind: we perceive another body as similar to our own and, by analogy, attribute to it a consciousness like ours.' I've often opined that empathy is the natural antidote to solipsism.
Certainly empathy is an antidote to psychological solipsism. But does empathy refer to other minds 'in themselves' that possess an existence that is independent of one's experiences of empathy? Didn't Husserl appreciate that methodological solipsism cannot establish the metaphysical realism of other minds?
If we consider borderline cases in the animal kingdom or in AI, the public make wildly different judgements as to the sentience that they ascribe to the entities concerned. Suppose that Alice and Bob are two equally brilliant and informed cognitive scientists who nevertheless disagree as to the sentience they each ascribe to a borderline case 'X'. Are they disagreeing about the same thing? Or is their disagreement akin to an aesthetic disagreement about X that isn't expected to have an objective answer?
According to the anti-realist, Alice and Bob's disagreement as to the sentience of X is only an objective disagreement in so far that their disagreement is the product of different scientific understandings of X. So if Bob and Alice are assumed to have a full and equal scientific understanding of X but nevertheless disagree as to its sentience, then the anti-realist considers their disagreement to be a subjective disagreement that only expresses the fact that Alice and Bob are in different psychological relationships to X. The anti-realist can consider disagreements over the sentience of X to be ethically important, without considering the disagreements to have epistemological or metaphysical significance, at least not from a public perspective.
Quoting Wayfarer
For Husserl such recognition requires a constituting synthesis , an analogizing transfer of sense from what has already been constituted as my immediate sphere of own-ness ( my self-reflecting ego, and my sensing and sensing body) to that of another subject.
There is an interesting interpretation based on the temporality in which subjectivity unfolds. It refers to the absolute novelty of the future now that becomes the present. This absolute novelty makes the non-present now constitutive of subjectivity. Is this not what the other has always meant, another perception as another absolute now? This would restore the possibility of another subjectivity as equally originary.
As does that.
Also:
[quote=The Blind Spot, Evan Thompson, Marcello Gleiser, Adam Frank, Pp 198-9] Our experience of time depends on the flow of cosmic time that we measure through our experience of time, and only life can know life. Like the ouroboros, the serpent swallowing its own tail, we are in the universe and the universe is in us. This is the strange loop.
Merleau-Ponty puts his finger on the strange loop when he writes in Phenomenology of Perception: The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects. This statement is meant to clear a path between two extremes. One is the idea that there is a world only for or in consciousness (idealism). The other is the idea that the world exists ready-made and comes presorted into kinds or categories apart from experience (realism). Instead of these two extremes, Merleau-Ponty proposes that each one of the two terms, the conscious subject and the world, makes the other one what it is, and thus they inseparably form a larger whole. In philosophical terms, their relationship is dialectical.
The world Merleau-Ponty is talking about is the life-world (lebenswel), the world were able to perceive, investigate, and act in. The subject projects the world because it brings forth the world as a space of meaning and relevance. But the subject can project the world only because the subject inheres in a body already oriented to and engaged with a world that surpasses it. The bodily subject is not just in the world but also of the world. The bodily subject is a project of the world, a way the world locally self-organizes and self-individuates to constitute a living being.
You may want to say that the universethe whole cosmos or all of naturesubsumes the life-world, so the strange loop pertains only to us and our life-world, not to us and the universe altogether. But quarantining the strange loop this way wont work. Its true that our life-world is a minuscule part of an immensely vaster cosmos. The cosmos contains our life-world. But its also true that the life-world contains the universe. What we mean is that the universe is always disclosed to us from within the life-world. The life-world sets the horizon within which anything is observable, measurable, and thinkable. So the life-world and the universe themselves are caught up in a strange loop.[/quote]
It depends what you mean by apodictic. Anti-realism doesn't necessarily deny the possibility of logical certainty with regards to the existence of other minds - on the contrary, if 'other' minds are considered to refer to a psychological aspect of the observer who interprets phenomena , then anti-realism could provide a more compelling account than Cartesian minded realism as to why the existence of other minds cannot be denied. On the other hand, such apodicity would be relative to the observer, perhaps with one observer insisting that a chat bot is conscious and the other insisting otherwise, without there existing an observer-transcendent matter of fact to settle the issue.
The meaning of apodictic is not subject to qualification. Something cannot be relatively apodictic.
The point at issue is that sentient beings are, in fact, beings.