I would rather say we are bound to a level of consciousness — as there are various levels. I argue that ‘being modern’ is itself a state of consciousness, delimited by the things which ‘everyone knows to be true’ — nowadays, mostly scientific in nature.
On the contrary, universals are ‘the same for all who think’.
I’m going to repeat a post I made recently in another thread:
But this also doesn’t mean the concept of triangularity exists as an ‘abstract object’ in an ‘ethereal realm’.
Think of it more as a normative constraint on the operation of reason: the formal representation of a flat plane bounded by three intersecting straight lines.
As Russell says “universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts.”
This is why I say there’s an implied dualism in the usual analyses. Culturally, I think there’s an implicit acceptance that ‘the physical’ is ‘what really exists’, and ‘the mental’ is ‘what is in the mind’ (hence the rejection of ‘mentalism’ in interpretations of physics.) But this is where hylomorphism (matter-form) is completely different to Cartesian dualism (matter-mind) - there’s no ‘mental stuff’ in hylomorphism. There are forms - which are not shapes but something more like ‘principles’ - and the ability of reason to grasp them. But there are neither disembodied minds nor mindless bodies in this philosophy.
Yes it is - and something that Husserl has been criticized for by many since. And while I accept that my reading of Husserl is scanty on this point I’d like to think I have an intuitive affinity with his ideas.
The following is from a review of a textbook Phenomenology, Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics:
Husserl called his position “transcendental” phenomenology, and Tieszen makes sense of this by claiming that it can be seen as an extension of Kant’s transcendental idealism. The act of cognition constitutes its content as objective. Once we recognize the distinctive givenness of essences in our experience, we can extend Kant’s realism about empirical objects grounded in sensible intuition to a broader realism that encompasses objects grounded in categorial intuition, including mathematical objects.
The view is very much like what Kant has to say about empirical objects and empirical realism, except that now it is also applied to mathematical experience. On the object side of his analysis Husserl can still claim to be a kind of realist about mathematical objects, for mathematical objects are not our own ideas (p. 57f.).
This view, Tieszen points out, can preserve all the advantages of Platonism with none of its pitfalls. We can maintain that mathematical objects are mind-independent, self-subsistent and in every sense real, and we can also explain how we are cognitively related to them: they are invariants in our experience, given fulfillments of mathematical intentions. The evidence that justifies our mathematical knowledge is of the same kind as the evidence available for empirical knowledge claims: we are given these objects. And, since they are given, not subjectively constructed, fictionalism, conventionalism, and similar compromise views turn out to be unnecessarily permissive. The only twist we add to a Platonic realism is that ideal objects are transcendentally constituted.
We can evidently say, for example, that mathematical objects are mind-independent and unchanging, but now we always add that they are constituted in consciousness in this manner, or that they are constituted by consciousness as having this sense …. They are constituted in consciousness, nonarbitrarily, in such a way that it is unnecessary to their existence that there be expressions for them or that there ever be awareness of them. (p. 13).
So - do you see the resonance between Russell and Husserl? That ‘the idea of whiteness’ or ‘the idea of triangularity’ is necessarily the same for all who perceived them, but can only be grasped by thought. And that is the meaning of ‘transcendental’. But that dimension of thought is in conflict with empiricism, which gives primacy to the objects of experience, not to the content of it.
What the review refers to as the ‘pitfalls’ of Platonism is precisely the tendency to view universals as ‘existing things’. Like, ‘well, there are white things, is “whiteness” another thing in addition to white things?’ My attitude is: no, but it never meant that in the first place. The reason that misunderstanding came about is because of the loss of an hierarchical ontology within which there are different levels of reality or existence. Without that background, attempting to understand metaphysics is like those ancient paintings which lack the depth dimension. Universals are intelligible realities but not existent as phenomena.