How do you read “this is precisely the problem”? Husserl seems to be naming something still needing to be determined more exactly, whether things have their essence in advance or only relatively. If he’d settled it in favor of open essence all the way down, “the problem” would be a strange thing to write. Is the passage pointing at constitution-all-the-way-down, or holding the question open?
I read it as a relativization of the concept of independence, which doesn’t obviously exclude independent things themselves. A concept being constituted within a framework doesn’t mean there’s nothing outside the framework for the concept to track, once constituted. And if nothing escapes that relativization, including “framework” and “subjectivity” themselves, then the move undermines its own position along with everything else.
If the object pole transcends the concept of identity contributed by the subject pole, what is it that’s doing the transcending? That excess, whatever it is, sounds like exactly what “independent of what the subject pole projects” was pointing at. Something there that the subject-side contribution doesn’t fully capture or determine.
Not objective in the strong sense, not subjective in the sense of being constituted by the subject pole, but something that exceeds what gets constituted of it, the very thing Husserl himself names at the object pole, without needing to determine exactly what it is in advance. Something that makes a difference.
i read Husserl as saying that what it is in the object pole which makes a difference is at the same time construed on a dimension of similarity with respect to the subjective pole. We see the centrality of similarity manifest itself at all levels of constitution, in the subjective achievement of synthetic unities, analogical apperceptive pairing, associative relationality, correlations, harmonious fulfillments, subjective ‘mineness’, variations, flowing multiplicities, congruities, nexuses, coherences, etc. At the the highest constituted level of intersubjective experience, each subjectivity interacts with other subjectivities via their own integral thread of continuous unified experience. Consistent with his subjectivity-based sociality, Husserl’s later writings on ethics is personalistic, striving toward an optimal self-consistency of all subjective values at the highest level. The intersubjective sphere is founded on my aperceptive constitution in empathy of the alter ego. In this apperceptive pairing, my self perception and my apperception of an alter ego “found phenomenologically a unity of similarity” (Cartesian Meditations, p.112)).
At the level of the constitution of objects within my own sphere of ownness, where the adumbrating intentionality proceeds in an objectifying instinct, this striving is founded in an interest in the enrichment of the self [of the object] ), as a unified nexus of appresentations .
“Every apperception in which we apprehend at a glance, and noticingly grasp, objects given beforehand- for example, the already-given everyday world- every apperception in which we understand their sense and its horizons forthwith, points back to a “primal instituting”, in which an object with a similar sense became constituted for the first time. Even the physical things of this world that are unknown to us are, to speak generally, known in respect of their type. We have already seen like things before, though not precisely this thing here. Thus each everyday experience involves an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted objective sense to a new case, with its anticipative apprehension of the object as having a similar sense. To the extent that there is givenness beforehand, there is such a transfer.“ (Cartesian Meditations)
Grounding these higher constituting achievements is the central role of similarity at the lowest stratum of passive pre-rational primal association.
Once a connection is formed in a stream of consciousness, there then exists in this stream the tendency for a newly emerging connection, similar to a portion of the earlier one, to continue in the direction of the similarity and to strive to complete itself in a total nexus similar to the previous total nexus.”(Ideas II)
“…consciousness is connected in the most general way to another consciousness by a commonality that is correlatively noetic and noematic; and all connection is connection through “commonality.” through uniformity and similarity.”(Passive and Active Synth)
The similarity account is right at the level of the taking-up. Primal association, analogizing transfer, apperceptive pairing, even at the most passive, pre-rational stratum, that’s how a conscious being constitutes what’s at the object pole. The living present running through similarity-relations is how objects become stable, identical, shareable things for a subject.
At that most passive level, a conscious being encountering something new doesn’t start from scratch, it brings its own existing structure to the contact, and what registers as similar or different is already shaped by what’s been formed before. Not explicit reasoning, not deliberate comparison, just the structure of the encounter itself pressing against what’s already there. So at that level, Husserl’s primal similarity and what I’d say about how conscious beings first take things up aren’t far apart. The disagreement isn’t about how the taking-up works. It’s about what was already there before any taking-up began.
Something individuated, holding itself apart from what it isn’t, across spacetime, in a directed, irreversible sequence. Not a fixed, complete essence. Not formless flux waiting for subjectivity to give it shape. Something in between, specific enough to constrain what’s consistent with it, open enough that it’s never fully captured by any single constituting act, always underway, always exceeding what gets constituted of it. Making a difference, whether or not any conscious being is there to take it up. That’s what’s there before any similarity-relation runs over it.
Whose interest is that? If it’s the subject pole striving for a richer grasp of the object, that’s consistent with everything you’ve been saying. But if there’s something at the object pole that strives toward fuller expression through successive constitutions, something whose own selfhood gets enriched rather than merely being enriched by the subject’s striving, then the object pole isn’t purely passive material waiting to be shaped. It has its own directedness. And that’s much closer to what I’ve been pointing at than the subject-first account suggests.
The problem Husserl names is real. But there’s a third option he didn’t have available, one that doesn’t require choosing between fixed essence in advance and open essence relative to subjectivity. A thing’s actual configuration constrains what’s consistent with it, bounds what it can become, without fixing a single determinate essence in advance. Not predelineated once and for all, but not open in the purely subject-constituted sense either. Bounded, not selected. The openness is real, the always-underway is real, the spatiotemporal ordering is real, and none of it requires subjectivity as its ground. The rock is always underway whether or not any stream of consciousness is running over it.
Husserl’s account is the right description of the taking-up. The problem he names is what happens before it.
What, in your opinion, is the motivation (and/or justification) for denying that things have a determinate essence in their own right, independently of their uptake into experience, understanding and judgment?
Husserl had this third option available and understood it well. He located it in Brentano, the Gestalt psychologists and the American Pragmatists. But he thought it remained within the natural attitude, which he was trying to burrow beneath. For him, as for philosophers like Karen Barad, Joseph Rouse, Michel Foucault and Heidegger, no thing pre-exists its interactions. If a thing’s actual configuration constrains what’s consistent with it, it’s because this configuration is an amalgam of retentions, protentions and sense impressions.
The new can never be anything other than a variation on a subjectively projected configuration, but a configuration whose sense is modified by the object it encounters. A way in which something new differs from and is like what came before it is not itself a plurality of extant relations or a piece of objective ‘space-time’ which exists first in itself and then is assimilated by a subject. Objective space-time is derivative of subjective space and time.
To say a rock is underway independent of a stream of consciousness is like saying that democracy is underway independent of the consciousnesses who experience its meaning.
While I can appreciate the phenomenological point that you are making here, I am not seeing an argument for the ontological conclusion that you are drawing from it. Even if we grant that Husserl’s analysis of time consciousness is correct, I don’t see that it follows that objective space/time are ontologically dependent on lived space/time. As far as I can tell, all it shows is that, for human beings, the structure of lived space/time is a precondition for knowing the structure of objective space/time. From the fact that a rock can be known as a rock only within an intentional and temporal synthesis, it does not immediately follow that the rock cannot exist independently of that synthesis.
The analogy with democracy seems to assume precisely what is at issue. Everyone agrees that democracy is constitutively dependent on subjects who understand the norms, institutions and offices having a certain meaning. Democracy is not something over and above the intersubjective participation in those meanings. But it’s not clear that this is the case with a rock, which seems capable of executing its lifecycle within its physical context whether or not anyone understands those processes under the concept “rock”.
I take it that your claim is not that human consciousness literally causes geological processes, but that a reality wholly detached from every possible relation interaction or mode of disclosure is an empty abstraction. That is a more plausible relational claim, but it’s different from saying that a rock is dependent on consciousness the way democracy is. Dependence on relations, or on the possiblility of manifestation is not equivalent to dependence on consciousness.
Also, when you say that “the real is a constructed abstraction” and “what is primary isn’t reality but experience”, I wonder whether “the real” means the self-identical object as constituted within experience, or whether you mean that experience is ontologically prior to whatever exists. The former seems safely Husserlian, but the latter seems in need of an argument that I haven’t seen Husserl give (though I admit I am not familiar with his entire canon).
So, in your opinion, what (if anything) licenses the move from the dependence of an object’s sense and validity on consciousness to the dependence of its existence on consciousness?
Consciousness is not prior to or outside of experience. It is the site of interaction, with neither the subjective nor the objective pole having any content which exceeds the interaction. Experience is the product of the alchemy between subject and object poles. Experience is not the subject’s re-presenting to itself a facimile of a thing which is already originally present in the world.
If one chooses to reject Husserl’s notion of consciousness as the sole and original site of the alchemy which produces the real, one can still accept his argument that no thing exists prior to and independent of its interactions within larger configurations. The key idea here, found in writers like Nietzsche, Foucault, Karen Barad and Joseph Rouse, is that the real is not something which exists in itself and then is represented, but is each time produced as something different in each interaction. So whether rocks are constituted solely through Husserlian intentional syntheses or through interactions in relation to which which humans are just one of many participants, rocks don’t simply exist in themselves in any sense.
Thanks, for the reply. I take it that you are rejecting the distinction presupposed by my question. Your proposal seems to be that the existence of the determinate object is not something that can be distinguished from the sense the object acquires in experience. The subjective and objective poles do not have any determinate content outside of the context of the interaction itself.
It seems to me, though, that this just states the correlationist thesis rather than arguing for it. Rejecting a representational or facsimile theory of perception does not seem to entail that nothing determinate exists independently of experience. One could hold that perception is a direct interaction with a mind-independent object rather than an internal representation of it. Husserl himself seems to reject the internal-image model, but that doesn’t tell us whether constitution produces the object’s existence or only discloses and legimates it.
Could you clarify what you mean by saying that neither pole has any “content” exceeding the interaction? Do you mean that it has no content available to knowledge, no determinate sense, no intrinsic properties, no identity, or no existence at all? Those seem like progressively stronger claims, and I’m curious to know which you favor.
Also, in your second paragraph you shifted from dependence upon consciousness to dependence upon relations or interactions more generally. I can readily grant that no rock exists independently of every physical relation or larger configuration. But that still seems different from saying that it depends upon consciousness or that a numerically different rock is produced in each interaction.
Finally, if neither pole contributes any determinate content prior to the interaction between then, what constrains the interaction to produce this particular configuration rather than another? Presumably the larger configuration and its history supply such constraints, but then I wonder what ontological status those inherited structures possess. Are they themselves determinate in some sense prior to the particular interaction?
I think this is the point I’m still trying to understand: how do we get from the unobjectionable claim that things are always relationally situated to the stronger claim that they “don’t exist in themselves in any sense”?
But isn’t the very definition of representation the taking up of something already present in the world? If my taking up the object doesn’t change the nature of that object, then the object persists as itself both before it affects me and as I encounter it by re-presenting it. The same object is present twice, in two different relational contexts. Husserl is among those who dont beleive the world consists of objects which are present in themselves, which subsist or persist as themselves, and then relate to other objects or to subjects who represent them.
For these thinkers differences are not relations among identities. Rather, identities are derivative of differences. An object is a modification, not a subsistence or identity which also happens to modify or affect surrounding identities. To exist is not to subsist but to transcend. There are not first beings and then becomings. To be is to become.
A numerically different rock IS produced in each interaction. By different I mean qualitatively different, not quantitatively. By qualitative I mean a different sense of meaning, not the iteration of a new instance within the same overarching category. Just as for the Gestaltists the whole precedes the parts, each new variation within a configuration is not just an addition to a already existing category, but a transformation of the sense of the configuration as a whole.
The patterns produced by configurations constrain even as they are born anew in each interaction. The continuous qualitative change that marks each interaction is subtle. It doesnt prevent the continually self-reinventing world from appearing to us (or to itself) via relatively stable normative organizations. We are able to make sense of the world, to anticipate new events as variations of previous ones, because of the intimacy of its continual becoming. We live our lives within social and empirical norms whose change is imperceptible enough to allow most of us to believe in such things as identity, equality and subsistence.
For Husserl, all particular empirical facts are subjective, relative and contingent, but this doesn’t prevent them from acting as useful guides to navigating the world.
I believe in numbers. I’d just say they are ways of handling numerals. The number 9 is a “role” for its numerals.
We call apriori knowledge “true” because we believe it. I believe that 3 apples tossed into a basket of 7 apples will result in a basket of 10 apples. I can define each quantity in terms of counting the apples like 1, 2, 3, …
Lots of apriori knowledge claims turns out to be somewhat empirical. We learn that people tend to use the sign “bachelor” so that it’s equivalent, more or less, to the use of “unmarried man.” What I would avoid here is invoking eternal essences that are merely labeled by marks and noises.
But getting rid of this postulation of eternal essences leaves us with a far more situated and empirical position. I can no longer do word math from within the overmind of God.
To me, the in-the-world-ness or the between-us-ness of the object should be emphasized. The object is “transcendent” in the sense of not-inside-a-subject.
IMV, it’s better to constitute subjects through the objects they share. The subject is emptied to become a “eject.” We eject everything psychical and account for it instead as a from-a-point-of-view-ness that is understood to be fundamental. A brute fact. A piece of the given.
Subjectivity goes all the way down, but subjects are empty. So objects only manifest this or that “face.”
EQV mentions a “determinate essence.” Basically I see us as seeking a sharing in situation. For instance, the phenomenologist hopes that structures that he finds in the-world-from-his-POV are also there for others, in the-world-from-their-POV.
The identity of the object is “ideal.” It is always on the way, and essentially social. Science is essentially social. Art is essentially social. But the ideal community will generally not be everyone. But only for those who are basically on the same path. The mathematician writes a proof for peers, and so on. Husserl is famously difficult to read. So it’s only with effort that others can validate one’s discovering invention or inventive discovery.
I tend to relate to what Joshs says, but I’m more reluctant to embrace a lingo that suggests that the subject creates the world. The psychological subject is of course relevant in explaining what is manifest, but this we can leave to psychology. Psychology presupposes ( like every science) a sharing of the world through a sharing of objects. To me it’s best to tentatively sketch the given, the basic situation. Basically the “pre-science” mentioned by Heidegger.
The rock is transcendent. For me its “being” is what is called “consciousness.” But it manifests here and now as “having been busy” between manifestations.
J. S. Mill is already great on this stuff. If I fall asleep before the nice warm fire, I wake up to a pile of ashes. The fire went out without my having to witness it.
Objects manifest themselves in flashes. But they manifest themselves with a ferocious independence.
It’s risky to use the word “consciousness” here. I think you understand me on this issue already. For others, I’ll just say that consciousness isn’t inside us. It’s better to say that “consciousness” is our being inside the world with others. The “presence” and “quality” of a world that is shared.
It sounds like saying the same thing in different words. The number 9 is a concept or word to be labelled for any object, counts or durations representing “Nine-ness” in the world.
Without the ability for labelling in the world, numbers or numerals on their own would not be much meaningful or useful.
Isn’t “a priori” knowledge, the knowledge we have with no reliance to experience? Once you know how to count 1 to 100, you don’t need to keep learning how to count 100 to 1000. You know it by your intuition. You know by heart 10 million$ prize money would be far more desirable than 5$ prize money from the lotto winnings without having to experience it.
They are not mere marks and noises. Aren’t they the agreed and inherited marks and noises, which are the vessels for carrying the meanings? For instance, don’t we still go back to ancient Greek origin of the marks and noises to find out where the word and meanings of word, reason, plan and logic come from, which is λόγος?
We might agree in the long run. Basically I want to explicate what we mean by this sign “concept.”
I say that there are “nine” marbles perhaps. This “means” ( roughly ) that Anyone will get 9 if they count them. I share a tradition of counting with others. I learn as a child certain sounds that come in a fixed order. Eventually I learn to extend this counting. I can come to recognize that the sign 1093489730923480232 is a valid numeral, even before I figure out how to say it.
Of course we label things in the world. What I criticize is the vague, tacit assumption of a “divine mind” that contains immaterial essences. This allows for a “Logic” that is completely non-empirical. Philosophers become the pseudo-mathematicians or theologians of Essences. They offer Eternal Truths as “theorems” derived from their “calculations.”
The demystified version of this is a careful investigation into how we use signs, typically with a normative surplus, where this or that specification of usage is suggested.
Typically we meet the future with expectations developed in the past. Knowledge is fundamentally “a priori” in the sense of expectant and general. Empirical knowledge, once crystallized, tends to be expressed as a law that binds the future. “What goes up, must come down.” We need perception, you might say, to find this plausible.
What about the primality of the large number ? We need sensation here too, because calculation is “material” or “physical.” I prefer the word “qualitative” as less mystified and less associated with this or that seminary ontology that fetishizes a stuff like “matter” or “mind.”
If it is “automatically true” that bachelors are unmarried men, then that looks to me like a fact about the way my tribe uses words. It’s in that sense an empirical belief about how others will react to signs.
I agree that people in my tribe will tend to understand 10 million dollars as more than 5 million dollars.
Right. They are not “just marks and noises.” And the key that opens the door to my house is not “just” a piece of metal. It has the right shape for the job.
We “are” the past of our tribe, leaping into the future, as we use the familiar marks and noises to do their familiar jobs. We might call what we inherit “softwhere.” It is metaphorically software and its location is fuzzy or distributed. Each of us is a “thin client” of this “aloft-ware running on the crowd.”
Apart from some minor details, your ideas on the minor points raised seems to be roughly in line with mine, if I read you correctly. If there are particular parts which are not, then we could discuss further in more detail in due course. If so, please let me know.
If no further points need to be discussed, then perhaps we could revisit the OP, and confirm what “ontocubism” is in clear definition?
What does it say about the world, the objects in the world, and Beings in the world?
As much as I’ve enjoyed your youtube channel, I’m glad to see you to back on TPF.
Doesn’t individual perspective or prejudice draw from a history not directly available from the present object? This history doesn’t transcend the subject but instead is what the subjective pole projects forward to meet the object. This retentional-potential projection isn’t empty of content, but neither is this content anything in and of itself before and without the alchemy of the interaction with an object. You wrote about this earlier in your depiction of past as coming into being through the future . What something ‘was’ is defined by the present object it participates in framing.
Although subjectivity for Husserl is just a structural zero point of activity ( and this temporal structure of retention, impression and protention is empty in the sense that any content constituted in intentionality’s ‘aboutness’ is contingent and relative) , I agree with Heidegger’s move to deconstruct even this remaining nod to Cartesianism.
That leaves the question of the genesis of this world which Dasein is thrown into
“To say that the world is subjective is to say that it belongs to the Dasein so far as this being is in the mode of being-in-the-world. The world is something which the “subject” “projects outward,” as it were, from within itself. But are we permitted to speak here of an inner and an outer? What can this projection mean? Obviously not that the world is a piece of myself in the sense of some other thing present in me as in a thing and that I throw the world out of this subject thing in order to catch hold of the other things with it. Instead, the Dasein itself is as such already projected. So far as the Dasein exists a world is cast-forth with the Dasein’s being. To exist means, among other things, to cast-forth a world, and in fact in such a way that with the thrownness of this projection, with the factical existence of a Dasein, extant entities are always already uncovered.( Basic Problems of Phenomenology)
“Being, the manifestness of being, is only given through the presence of beings. In order that beings can come to presence and, therefore, that being, the manifestness of being, can be given at all, what is needed is the [ecstatic] standing-in of the human being in the Da [there], in the clearing, in the clearedness of being as which the human being exists.
Therefore, there cannot be the being of beings at all without the human being. This assertion stands in gross contradiction to the [following] statement of natural science: Due to the absolutely uniform rate of atomic decay in radioactive substances present in the earth’s crust, it can be calculated and therefore proved that the earth has already existed for about four billion years, whereas the first man appeared only about two million years ago. At the very least, the being we call earth was already here long before human beings appeared. Therefore, beings and the manifestness of being, and therefore being can also exist entirely independently of human beings.(Zollikon)
Ontocubism is an attempt to spell out our basic situation. It tries to bring into focus the way that we already share the world and already vaguely understand how we share the world.
So I’m trying to foreground our pre-theoretical understanding of situation. Ontocubism is anti-speculative like logical positivism and phenomenology. The claims of ontocubism are formal indications — pointing fingers — rather than quasi-empirical conjectures.
I might frame my project this way: what is presupposed by the concept of science or of knowledge as relatively warranted belief ? We share the world through a shared language. That we take for granted. But only in a very blurry way. This ambiguity should be emphasized rather than ignored.
Now for the cubism part. Perceptions are not internal mindstuff icons. Perceptions are “moments” or “aspects” of shared objects. An object is the “unity” or “synthesis” of what are “therefore” its moments or aspects. In the same way, a particular pronunciation of a word, a singular localized sound event in the world, is a pronunciation of a word.
The “belonging together” of a vast plurality of different pronunciations is what I’m trying to point at here. In the same way, the same object “gives itself” in many different ways. Saussure’s acoustic image is a good way to understand Plato. Plato’s “idea” is a generalization of Saussure’s “acoustic image.” It seems to me that this structure is absolutely fundamental.
But my approach is hard to digest if my listener takes for granted the existence of a mind-stuff called “consciousness.”
I suggest that we understand “consciousness” to point at the being or presence of the world. The world is there in a from-a-point-of-view way.
People will be tempted to misread this as idealism. But I don’t believe in the ghost story of consciousness. Or in the ghost story of some primordial “physical” stuff that is other than the mundane perceptual object.
I embrace the primacy of the perceptual in the context of a committed radical pluralism.
But to me this is just pre-theoretical common sense. We live this way already.
Yes. I’m glad you put it that way. We agree. But “the subjective pole” has a psychological function here. I think we agree that there is no pure subject or pure object. “Pole” suggests a kind of limit point in each case. The limits are not in the sequence.
I prefer to emphasize that the projection shines back from the object. If we are lucky, we can separate the projection from the object, assuming the projection was bad in the sense limiting, etc. I guess we are also lucky if our original projection never shakes loose, if further experience solidifies what we expect from the object.
My anxiety here is maybe just rhetorical caution. I really don’t identify with the term “idealism.” The world is terrifyingly and wonderfully “real” — and yet also always from a point of view. So far as I can make out. So the subjective goes all the way down, and yet the subject is empty and consciousness does not exist.
From-a-point-of-view-ness is “in” the object. It is the “character” of the object’s manifestation.
Of course I don’t offer these signs as eternal truths that mirror some truth-maker. It’s more like offering an explicatory strategy and pointing out the advantages ( as I see them ) of this strategy.
For me the issue of tone via lingo is also important. I’m impressed by Peirce and James on this issue. And it’s also a matter of ambition. New words matter. Paraphrases matter.