I am indeed saying that, in fact I don’t know how it could be disputed. The kinds of things we see - what we classify as things - is indeed dependent on the kind of sensory and cognitive faculties we possess. If you were a being who’s vision was sensitive to completely different spectra than the human, then the world would appear vastly differently to you. Isn’t this implied in the idea of the lebenswelt and also the umwelt, the meaning-world of humans and of different organisms, respectively?
We as a species, and as cultural-linguistic groups, experience the world in similar ways (although not in identical ways). The world of the 17th Century is vastly different to the world of the 21st Century, and not just in historical terms. The comprehension of what the world is and what it means is also different. In phenomenological terms, the lebenswelt, the world of lived meaning for inhabitants of those worlds, is different. But ideas are what are invariant for all observers, which is why we can communicate using words as signifiers for ideas. We could probably communicate with 17th c people, because they would have enough in common with us to at least communicate, but there would be many of our concepts and assumptions which they wouldn’t understand, and likewise we would find it hard to understand them in some respects.
I think you’re trying to say that there is a world that is just so, irrespective or outside any perspective. Which is true — but nobody knows that world, as a matter of definition. That to me is the real import of the ‘in itself’.
As I understand Husserl (and @Joshs understands him far better than do I), ideas are ‘constituted’ for Husserl, because cognition is active - it draws together the disparate elements of the object and constitutes them in cognition. ‘Edmund Husserl’s concepts of noesis and noema are the two inseparable sides of any conscious, intentional experience. Noesis is the active, subjective process of thinking (e.g., perceiving or judging), while noema is the ideal meaning or object “as it is meant” in that specific act (the perceived-as-perceived)’.
This is why Husserl is generally still regarded as maintaining a transcendental as distinct from a realist philosophy (in the sense that naturalism does.)
I agree that it’s indeed a triviality that how the world manifest to me is functionally-causally related to the state of my nervous system, my education, and so on. Mach’s The Analysis of Sensations focuses on the relationship between sensation and the nervous system. But Mach avoids dualism. “Internal” and “external” are just handy tentative classifications. Both “self” and “non-self” are given in the same “neutral” phenomenal field.
I agree with the first paragraph, which is the major theme of Braver’s A Thing of This World. The second paragraph completely misunderstands my position, but I appreciate your sharing it, so that I can clarify.
I’ve been presenting and defending an ontological perspectivism. The world “as it really is” ( from “no” perspective) is nonsense, in my view. Likewise I think the “idea” of “true” world, the world as “God” sees it, is nonsense. They are non-empirical concepts like absolute space.
To “empty” the subject is to grasp the empirical ego as “transcendent” — a thing in the world with other things, though especially prominent. This “empitied subject” is just the being or presence of a “phenomenal field.” But this is just the presence or being of the rich lifeworld from the point of view of a creature within that lifeworld. You might say that the lifeworld looks at itself with a thousand eyes, or with an infinity of eyes, given a future we cannot predict.
The scientific image is just one more thing in the lifeworld, albeit technologically potent enough to encourage its fetishization as a ( paradoxical) “substrate” reality within the lifeworld.
Sure. And this is fine as psychology. Of course this is a slippery issue, and I respect Husserl. But I think it’s better to not load up consciousness with properties that tend toward its reficiation. The psyche is another thing in the world. Mach studied perception. Consciousness-as-being is “too simple.” If you forget the ontological difference, you are just inventing a quasi-empirical piece of machinery, IMV.
When you say the lifeworld “looks at itself with a thousand eyes” — who is making that observation? From what perspective? Aren’t you one pair of those thousand eyes? You can’t stand outside all particular perspectives to describe the whole, which is precisely the “view from nowhere” you’ve said is not viable.
‘Self-abnegation’ - the negation of ego - was originaly associated with contemplative spirituality. It was the original ground from which the scientific method originally sprung, albeit the latter became exclusively concentrated on what could be expressed in mathematical terms (the basis of Husserl’s criticism of Galileo).
Husserl went to considerable lengths to say it was not. He was criticized for ‘psychologism’ by Frege for his first publication on philosophy of mathematics. But, he then went on to say, psychological acts are temporal, individual, and contingent — a psychological event happens at a particular moment and could in principle have been otherwise. But the content grasped — the ideal object — is none of those things. It’s atemporal, identical across all acts that intend it, and necessarily the case. The act is psychological; the object is not.
That’s the opposite of how phenomenology sees it.
In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role ~ Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology p144
Right. I am still “just me.” But as a person I can try to explicate my situation. I take other humans to also “have the world.” I can’t see through their eyes, but I believe that they can.
It’s not the view from nowhere. It’s the view from over here. It’s a “streaming of the world” that is intensely functionally related to these eyes rather than those.
Yes, and I like that part of Husserl. A stone or a theorem is a “logical interpersonal temporal synthesis” of its manifestations. Husserl is a fundamental influence for me. His “aspect” metaphor is profound.
I’m basically quoting the thesis of Sartre’s first book. I’m no stranger to phenomenology.
And consider this:
This is what I’ve been saying all along, over various threads. What is “disclosure” and how does it relate to time ? How does consciousness relate to time ? How does being relate to time ? Why did Heidegger say that existence is not in time but time itself ? Consciousness is being is time is disclosure. “Time” is not meant of course in the sense of physics. Time is ongoing revelation. As I walk around the chair, new aspects are disclosed, revealed, made present. But the idea of the chair, its unity, is also “there.”
Disclosure is always partial because objects are “transcendent” (exceeding me and exceeding this moment), because objects are the “ideal unities” of their “adumbrations” or (more generally) “moments.” Presence is always also absence, because objects, through “language” or ideas, are “between us,” showing different faces in different “streamings” of the same world. This is the problem of the one and the many. This is Heraclitus talking about the river. We can all step in the same river each of us many times, because that river is “ever-new quality” articulated by the “idea” of that river. Not a “mental stuff.” A “co-lived unity” or identity of that river. Enacted through our signs and otherwise.
Here again a causal role for consciousness as thing is being denied. This, as I said above, would just be engaging in quasi-empirical “astral” psychology. A pseudo-physics of mind-stuff.
Recall that elsewhere I quoted Bluoin who read Husserl as an “ontological phenomenalist.” I’d call this the strongest reading, and it’s basically my own view. But ultimately, we might hope, it’s only indirectly about Husserl and directly about the strongest explication of our existence that we can cooperatively manage.
For context, a summary of my current “research” position.
The consciousness of a organism is the presence or being of the world itselffrom the point of view of that organism within that world.
That “conscious” creature, as entity, is a “site of the world’s streaming” through the intense functional-causal relationships of that creature’s nervous system and how the world manifests “within” the “streaming” associated with that creature. This “stream” is “mine” because the world(-for-me) goes dark when I close “my” eyes.
That organism (not its “consciousness”) is one more entity in the world, given in “moments” or “aspects” like every other entity. Entities are “ideal manifolds” or the “logical-temporal-syntheses” of their “moments.” These moments in visual terms are aspects. But we have moments of theorems, moments of sonatas, moments of a piece of cheesecake.
Plato’s unwritten doctrine and the passage quoted from Timaeus can help us understand that basic articulation of the world into enduring interpersonal entities. Ever-new sensory-affective “pre-stuff” is “recognized” as a “moment” of this or that ideal unity, this or that object. Typically I don’t thematize the moment. I just see the piece of cheesecake. I see the “heads” side of a coin but would say that I am looking at the coin.
We tend to bury or cremate loved ones because we usually don’t think that organisms are sites of the world streaming without a functioning nervous system. So “of course” people are tempted to think of consciousness as a stuff generated by brains. But this forgets that physical objects are perceptual objects and that perception is something that “conscious” entities do. A perception of an object is better described as a “fugitive showing” of that object, a piece of its genuine empirical being, a partial presence that also suggests its “absence” —how others elsewhere and elsewhen might be given that same object. Perceptions should not be thought of as mental-stuff icons “inside” subjects-as-containers.
There is no need to invoke “objective reality” if what is intended is “no perspective” or “God’s perspective.” Objectivity is absence of relevant bias. Because we tend to agree at the level of observation statements, all laden with mostly the same inherited theory, we easily conflate objectivity with objects. But it’s best understood normatively.
We might call this “ontological phenomenalism” or “ontological perspectivism.” I have also called it “ontocubism,” because cubist painters sometimes painted the same object from several perspectives on one canvas. This captures objects as temporal interpersonal syntheses of their aspects.
You are not differentiating between the supposed independent thing, and the sensation. The sensation is within the senser, yet you are assigning it to to the independent thing, as if the sensation of spicy is part of the thing rather than part of the senser.
This is what I apprehend as your mistake. If we assume an independent chair, then we are not given aspects of the chair. The chair in its entirety is independent. What we perceive is within each of us, and not an aspect of the chair. Some will call the perception a representation.
Is the “streaming” of the world possible, if you are not sure of the past of the world? IOW, can streaming be possible when seeing the present moment only?
The discussion has veered far from Plato’s Timaeus. In fact, it veered off from the beginning. While I agree that to some extent that it is true that we bring our own concerns to the text, in doing so we must not be too quick to look past the text itself. We should attend, as best we can, to its terminology. This is a difficult task. We are reliant on translation, but we should be on guard against substituting concepts and terminology and making these concepts and terminology central to our interpretation.
For Husserl the ego as an empirical object, a thing in the world among other things, is a derived idealization. When we perform a radical reduction, the natural attitude within which this empirical, biological ego and all other persons appear is put out of play. What remains is not an object of consciousness but the ego as subjective pole of consciousness. This subjective ego is not perceived by me, it is empty of internal content, is anonymous, and is only an empty zero point of the synthetic processes of time consciousness (retention-protention-presencing).
Heidegger would reject Husserl’s formulation of the ego as subject-pole, but would agree with him that the claim that the ego is an object in the world mistakes a derivative theoretical description for the more primordial phenomenon of being-in-the-world itself. The human being is not an object through which the world looks at itself; rather, the human being is the open region in which world and beings can come into presence.
For Heidegger, the carpenter is not primarily encountered as a thing among things, even a privileged thing. The human being is not simply a viewpoint within the world. The human being is the site at which world appears as world.
For both Husserl and Heidegger, there is not first a world and then perspectives on it. The perspectives generate world, not because a subject or object called self invents a world
from out of itself, but because world is created anew in every relation to it. Karen Barad’s agential realism captures this idea of a world of entities (minds, bodies, rocks) which do not pre-exist their intra-actions.
Let’s talk about what this given means to you. You say the world presences itself via perspectives to an empty ego. This seems to imply that egos attend to a pre-existing world which gives itself perspectivally, rather than it being the case that our involvement PRODUCES the world we interact with. Your view sounds like the blind men and the elephant. Is the world an elephant, and our egos the varying perspectives on this same elephant? Or is the world produced anew as different creatures in every human involvement with it (or intra-actions with itself)?
Let me compare this with the role of attention in enactivist positions and in Husserl’s intentional synthesis. Enactivists describe attention as a multi-phasic activity involving a shifting of focus bringing objects from the margins to the center of awareness. As well as its function as magnification of objects, it is studied as vigilance, orientation, selection, filtering and priming. Embodied writers typically employ the metaphor of a spotlight highlighting pre-existing contents to describe attentive grasping.
But Husserl rejects the spotlight metaphor. For Husserl attention does not merely perspectivally single out or prime the appearance of objects. Rather, the focused attention on an object is a synthesis of creative acts which first constitute and then continue to fulfill the ‘self’ of the object that is being ‘noticed’. The object in itself is transcendent, never seen as an actual whole, but rather from moment to moment as a changing concatenation of retentional memory, protentional anticipation and impressions of immediate sense.
Turning toward and heeding an object implies a belief in its continuity, a continuity which is nothing other than this constantly changing flow of sensations synthetically held together as a unitary object via memory and anticipation. Thus, the initial ‘turning toward’ an object is already a synthetic act of constitution. Attention, as a species of intention, is sense-making, which means it is sense-changing. Attention is affectively, valuatively and meaningfully implicated in what it attends to as co-participant in the synthesis, creation, constitution of objects of regard.
“Attention is one of the chief themes of modern psychology. Nowhere does the predominantly sensualistic [empiricist] character of modern psychology show itself more strikingly than in the treatment of this theme, for not even the essential connection between attention and intentionality–this fundamental fact: that attention of every sort is nothing else than a fundamental species of intentive modifications-- has ever, to my knowledge, been emphasized before.
Merleau-Ponty also treats attention as a form of creation:
We must now show that its intellectualist [idealist] antithesis is on the same level as empiricism itself. Both take the objective world as the object of their analysis, when this comes first neither in time nor in virtue of its meaning; and both are incapable of expressing the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness constitutes its object. Both keep their distance in relation to perception, instead of sticking closely to it. This may be shown by studying the history of the concept of attention.”
“…in a consciousness which constitutes everything, or rather which eternally possesses the intelligible structure of all its objects, just as in empiricist consciousness which constitutes nothing at all, attention remains an abstract and ineffective power, because it has no work to perform. Consciousness is no less intimately linked with objects of which it is unheeding than with those which interest it, and the additional clearness brought by the act of attention does not herald any new relationship. It therefore becomes once more a light which does not change its character with the various objects which it shines upon, and once more empty acts of attention are brought in, in place of ‘the modes and specific directions of intention’.
Merleau-Ponty explains that to attend to any experience is not merely to shine a neutral light on it, but to articulate a new sense, the ‘active constitution of a new object’. It is to identify a new figure and in doing so, to transform the sense of the previous figure along with its background.
“Attention, therefore, as a general and formal activity, does not exist.” Rather than there being a general capacity for neutral observation, a universal kind of attention necessary for any moment of consciousness, “it is literally a question of creation. “ “Attention is “a change of the structure of consciousness, the establishment of a new dimension of experience, the setting forth of an a priori…
To pay attention is not merely further to elucidate pre-existing data, it is to bring about a new articulation of them by taking them as figures. “
“The miracle of consciousness consists in its bringing to light, through attention, phenomena which re-establish the unity of the object in a new dimension at the very moment when they destroy it. Thus attention is neither an association of images, nor the return to itself of thought already in control of its objects, but the active constitution of a new object which makes explicit and articulate what was until then presented as no more than an indeterminate horizon.
For later Husserl, it is intentional acts which are temporal, individual, and contingent, but these are not psychological, they are transcendental-phenomenological. And ideal objects such as logical or geometrical idealities, like all objects, are constituted products of intentional synthesis. As such, they are not primordial but must be reduced to the fundamental structures of time consciousness.
Basically in phenomenological the now is not punctiform. “Meaning” is fundamentally historical and situated. When my cat leaps onto my desk, I see my old loved familiar cat, not a brown blur of who-knows-what. When my wife speaks to me in English and tells me “there’s fresh coffee,” those sounds in the air are “intelligible” to me," and I find myself getting up to grab my coffee cup.
“Being is time.” This is how Gadamer summarizes Heidegger. And it connects to Plato because the object as such “transcends” the moment and its current perceiver. This “transcendence” is there in the way the object shows itself to me as an enduring interpersonal thing.