Where Have All the Essences Gone?

When someone finds themselves influenced by a historical thinker, one takes up positions counter to others along shared beliefs with the philosopher in question. However, sometimes, what strikes me most about Husserl is what little is said about a key issue, and the problem left in its wake has an effect. Consider for a moment what we can glean from Husserl's phenomenology about ideal objects, or what I take essences to be.

Essences are eternal, apodictic and eternal. They are non-temporal, and are only described by phenomenology since phenomenology is the descriptive science of phenomenological essences. The descriptive focus is the most attractive thing for being a phenomenologist; it allows me to get to the concrete matters of our lived experience whereas other more naturalistic philosophies often conceal over the elements of our lived experience in which decisive data for philosophical problems can be gleaned (this is the source of dialectic tension between the broad landscape of naturalists in Anglophone philosophy with my non-natural leanings). However, this descriptive emphasis avoids the metaphysical problems associated with ideal objects. These essences have no ground other than they occur within our experience of consciousness in the world and are describable.

At first, I always never thought of these essences as anything more than realized intuitions that appear to us at the end of phenomenological reduction. I thought of them as byproducts, and easily regard them as a coherentist would a series of representations and non-inferential intuitions that mesh together in a series of propositions. For me, the intuition of these essences consists nowhere but their apprehension. I was left with just ideal objects looming in Husserl's system (esp. in Ideas I where Husserl talks about the world could vanish and as long as there appears before consciousness phenomena, phenomenology would be a viable enterprise), and him denying possible grounds, or hypostases as we might call them Julian Marias confirmed this shared suspicion with his chapter on Husserl. I like how he divcides them up:

1. Psychological hypostasis would locate ideal objects in the mind; their existence would be mental and they would exist in my thought.

2. Metaphysical hypostasis would state ideal objects are entities located in an immaterial place, e.g. Platonism

3. Theological hypostasis would locate ideal objects in the mind of God who is constantly thinking them. (Marias, p. 406, The History of Philosophy)

Now, given that Husserl rejects all of these but still maintains the existence of ideal non-temporal objects/essences, then where exactly can we put essences in our ontology? While I think Husserl would avoid the metaphysics of the issue, there is a decisive advantage to 1. For whichever theory of pscyhology pans out as the truest in the discourse of psychology, we could wait for theoretical consensus and be consistent with the result of the science to say we've only been describing the world the whole time. However, that might have the dogmatism of the natural attitude all over it.

If we indulge in 2, committing to a immaterial plane, then the immateriality of God in 3 is but one step away given our interpretation will eventually require God, I think. Yet, the decisive advantage is that we gain that truth is guaranteed by relating to an ultimate Absolute, very much in the spirit of the American philosopher Josiah Royce. For he claimed that truth only occurs by being in reference not to a contingent world of nature, but to an Absolute ground. Our experience of the world would be limited unless it refers to a reality that outstrips it. Husserl would, I think, reject 3 clearly in thinking that emphasizing that ideal objects are the absolute reality we lose a connection to the lived-experience of the concrete world in the very same way that the natural attitude operates. Ideal objects become presentations of God's mind, and we no longer can follow the Husserlian motto: To get back to things themselves if the things themselves (ideal objects) become something other than they are. For Husserl, we are strictly limited to our consciousness of the world, and how it constitutes phenomena. That's it. Plain and simple.

Therefore, it would seem we are left with 2 as long as we don't read into the immateriality of ideas. We would be left with the same place we started from, only sure that what is required is a loosely-based Platonism without any commitment to the content of the ideal object's ontological nature. All we can know of them is that they are epistemologically required via phenomenology qua philosophy. For the other options 1 and 3 lead us away from the very insight as to why we practice phenomenology in the first place.

The Problem of the Lifeworld's Legitimacy as a Philosophical Problem

I am interested in the origins of phenomenology as a way into explicating irreducible structures of our social and historical experience, what we might call the field of the lifeworld. The tendency of the Neo-Kantians to link science with Kant was, as far as I can tell, a similar situation with contemporary philosophy today. Analytically-trained naturalists are skeptical of a philosophy that seeks to explain all fields of experience. What counts as worth talking about is only those categories supported by the natural sciences, or in a way, at least plausible within a narrow scientifically informed window of plausible speculation. In their view, science should not seek to integrate in explanation of our experience sources of artistic, cultural or historical domains. These features are more for the phenomenologist that accepts these features of human existence as irreducible in the sense that the analytically-trained naturalist could not provide a suitable space for them in the first place. We just tend to ignore this refusal to talk. Thus, there is a disagreement between whether or not to treat irreducible features of human existence as real. Instead, our philosophy should only be engaged with what the sciences directly or indirectly support as real.

More specific to the German situation was the relationship of science to culture. To explain this relationship, it is important to first mention something of the term for science since it is peculiar to the German language. The word for 'science' is Wissenschaft. Wissenshaft includes both the natural sciences and humanities under its rubric. Thus, to strive for unity in science in general is to explain how physics or history may relate to each other. This striving-for unity engages in a dialogue with how science relates to culture at large. As far as I can tell, a philosopher that wants to integrate cultural life into science would be forced to equate forms of culture, like art, with the value of science. However, since much of ontology for the analytically-trained naturalist drives the machine of what we should even begin to philosophize about, I wonder if the Divide between Analtyic/Continental should be recast as a problem of legitimacy of the lifeworld.

I find this problematic attractive since I entertain the thought that objects of culture like historical works, literature and art contribute and express insights about humanity. To consider them sources of knowledge would mean that analytic philosophers would have to abandon the professional insight that we can only talk about things that science can support and that are clearly expressed in logical argumentation. We would have to embrace other forms of communicating insights about the human condition in ways other than logical argumentation. For me, this makes legitimate more literary or poetic styles of communicating even philosophical ideas.

Husserlian Themes Again

This is the first two pages of something I am working on. It is for the North American Levinas Society at U of Toronto if I can get it done in time.

The Ethical Subject in Husserl: An Ethical Interpretation of the Fifth Meditation

According to Levinas, ethics starts with the recognition of the otherness of the Other. There is something so radically different about the Other in my experience that no totality, no representation can encompass the Other so understood. The Other is not like an object of my perception couched in terms of modernist epistemology with similar talk of representations. Instead, there is something radically different about the Other As Levinas puts this point,

The Other remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign; his face in which his epiphany is produced and which appeals to me breaks with the world that can be common to us...1

Even more to the point, when I represent the Other in my own understanding, there is an asymmetry between my self and the Other. I can make demands of myself that I cannot make of the Other. There is a lack of reciprocity between both the self and the Other. As Simon Critchley puts this point,

When I totalize, I conceive of the relation to the Other from some imagined point that would be outside of it and I turn myself into a theoretical spectator on the social world of which I am really part, and in which I am an agent. Viewed from the outside, intersubjectivity might appear to be a relation between equals, but from inside that relation, as it takes place at this very moment, you place an obligation on me that makes you higher than me, more than my equal.2

In other words, there is an inadequate understanding of the Other in ethical theories that ‘universalize’ or ‘totalize’ the conceptions of how one moral agent relates to another. Above, Critchley divides the problem in terms of an outer and inner perspective about totalizing ethical conceptions of the subject, the agent. In the former, equality – which I take as having moral status in a moral community – might be exemplified by Kant’s kingdom of ends. We are all rational beings and it is our capacity for rationality that grounds our moral considerations such that we all form a moral community of autonomous subjects.
Within the inner perspective, there is a problem. Within the experience of being a subject, I know myself more fully, more intimately. When I represent the viewpoint of another, the very possibility of intersubjectivity dissipates. I make claims of the Other in my representation of them. My claims of obligation reduce the Other to a logic of sameness rather than considering them in terms of their singular and concrete nature. I respect the idea of someone, not the transcendent person outside of me—not the face that escapes all representation.
In this paper, I want to overcome the inner and outer problematic of ethical subjectivity as it relates to the Other. Those in the company of Levinas are wrong. It is possible to establish the experience of the ethical subject as sharing in an equal relationship both within and without. We must establish the concrete ways in which the ethical subject relates to the Other. This requires us to explore what moral intentionality would look like, and what constitutes such moral intentionality. In order to argue this point, I turn to Husserl’s Fifth Meditation in the Cartesian Meditations.3 I argue that Husserl’s Fifth Meditation can be interpreted as offering avenues for exploring moral intentionality. In so doing, I begin to sketch an account of the ethical subject answering the worries of Levinas and his contemporary defenders.4

New Husserl Themes: Farber Continued

On page 555, Farber writes:

Husserl views an active individual as being in relationship with other persons, who are experienced as psychophysical. The ethical subject, in referring his living-in-the-world to a norm, finds the others with whom he can cooperate. By means of empathy, the ethical subject recognizes that every other subject is given "in the orientation form of the alter," is given in the form of the "ego." The potentiality of this empathy is taken to be the presupposition of a common life in the sense of stages of social organization. The single subjects "in their freedom" and in their social acts direct this activity upon another ego, and thus arises a "connection of ego with ego, of many egos to polysystems, of real and possible activity" (p. 161). Living in this synthesis, every ego, as active ethically, makes its best possible contribution to others, and produces, in connection with other persons, a society in which the egos become a "synthetic pole" of social transactions. A person does not live a "solipsistic life," but rather a "common life, a double-personal and still a unified ethical life." One person has to consider everything that is a true value for another person; the self-satisfaction of his fellow men cannot be a matter of indifference to him. It is only in connection with the "interlaced" life of another person that one can evaluate his own life. Such a life is taken to be "obviously" of higher value than a solipsistic type of life, and is therefore "categorically demanded." There is "no life without love," and every life is just known along with a consciousness of love, a "Liebesdeckung," in Husserl's characteristic language. The highest form of life thus occurs in the pure "spiritual love and community of love."

A moral phenomenology would start in the same place as we encounter the other. Here, Farber explains that Husserl sees active individuals experience each other, that is, are given phenomenologically as empathy opens our potential to experience a common world shared with others. This point of contact is synthesis of this empathic recognition of Others in terms of a single subject acts in relation to another, and those other subjects all act in a shared public world. Ethical activity is, thus, world-producing. Out of our inter-acting, a human world arises (Hannah Arendt is coming to mind), and I find it interesting here that solipsism is mentioned. Husserl, apparently, denies our living a life without inter-actions. Such a life would be solipsistic whereas the true ethical life is a life constituted by various ethical subjects opening up to each other in a real communal sense.

At this mentioning of solipsism, I am wondering now if the Fifth Meditation can be read ethically and not epistemically? Think about it. The same conditions that recognize the Other in terms of empathy (intersubjectivity) would be in place for either ethics or some nascent phenomenology qua epistemology.

New Husserlian Themes 1: Encountering Farber's Discussion

Marvin Farber has an article entitled 'The Phenomenological View of Values' in Philosophy & Phenomenological Research Vol/Issue: 24 (4), Date: 1964, Page: 552. My discussion of Husserl opens with a careful perusal of this article. Just a note before beginning, the article is on JSTOR. You could also reference it here.

Farber opens up what Husserl regarded as the central concern of ethics qua normative science must precede every technology and must as a normative science (Farber translates Husserl) "survey human purposes in a universal manner and judges them from a normative point of view, in other words, investigates whether they are actually as they ought to be" (p. 553, from Husserlian Manuscript). First, I think Husserl is wrong, and lacking here. Being ethical not only involves evaluating normative levels of actions as the deontologist or consequentialist would have us believe. Instead, there are further questions that while associated with action cut deeper, these ethical determinations are agential, what you might call aretaic. As such, I would include in a phenomenological analysis of values directed towards expanding Husserl's notion of "purpose" in the above quote to include virtue ethical considerations. Eudaimonia considerations in virtue ethics concern cultivating agential characteristics (virtues) that lead to state of human flourishing (eudaimonia).

Now, a moral phenomenology in a Husserlian sense is highly influenced by the Husserl in Logical Investigations. Farber informs us that an analogy can be drawn here. Just as formal logic has "the principle of contradiction is the highest law, there is the axiological principle that something to which value is ascribed in some respect, cannot be valueless in the same respect." (Farber, p. 553, taken, I think from LI, p. 79). Let's put this into an example. This principle states that the reasons we value X cannot in principle be reasons that count against reasons for not-valuing X. Hence, the reasons I give for enjoying Star Wars fiction books cannot be reason that count against me finding them valueless. Moreover, when we give reasons for our valuations of X, those valuations find agreement in both willing and reason (Farber, p. 553).

Rationally grounded reasons provide the basis for ideal abstraction of ethics in Husserl. In general, this is also a truth of ethics. Formulated normative theories instruct us, that is, they provide action-guidance only because such action-guidance is grounded in cognitive judgments about which we can be right and wrong about. Practical wisdom comes about only because we can be right or wrong about how certain actions will go, or that something wasn't relevant when we thought it was in our moral acting. Ethics gets its substance from the ideality such practical wisdom takes on, and the ideality of practical action coheres with the body of reasons constituting such ideality.

Farber worries about the level of abstractionism in Husserl's ethics. One can easily be skeptical that there is a "harmonious social life" that remains ideal. Such a thing has never existed, nor ever will. Perhaps, agreement isn't even possible as to what the "harmonious social life" would entail (Farber, p. 554). Yet, this only is a concern if we think the harmonious social life requires strong conditions of moral agreement. I think I'm reaching an impasse here. For one, if we are ethical pluralists (as I am slowly becoming in the Rossian sense), there might be more than one way to achieve moral agreement. We need not be value monists in thinking that different goods cannot be counted in our moral considerations. Virtue, knowledge, pleasantness and consequences are the four goods Ross counts, and I'm uncertain we need more (let's be open about that for a bit).

As I continue, I'm thinking that a moral phenomenology might have to abandon the systematicity of a cohering set of value grounded moral reasons that resemble a formal eidetic science of a purely ideal nature. I'll continue moving in this article with additions to this post.

New Husserlian Themes

Intersubjectivity plays a central role in thinking of ourselves as acting, thinking subjects. Moreover, this type of acting and thinking conception of ourselves is what ethical theories construe as moral agency, but obviously without the capital P phenomenological language. For Husserl, intersubjectivity is part of the transcendental-we-community that co-constitutes elements of the lifeworld. The SEP lists three achievements of intersubjectivity as fundamental.

intersubjective experience plays a fundamental role in our constitution of both ourselves as objectively existing subjects, other experiencing subjects, and the objective spatio-temporal world. Transcendental phenomenology attempts to reconstruct the rational structures underlying — and making possible — these constitutive achievements. (SEP Entry on Husserl)

From this, I gather it is possible to explain what phenomenological structures of experience might be involved in thinking generally about the nature of values, and how such values -- which I define as reasons for acting -- relate to others as part of a moral community. My thought is that while values are ontologically mysterious (or better worded as metaphysically inadequate) in a non-natural way Husserl gives us a way to talk about values in such a way as to provide a cognitive architecture to the types of reasons we invoke in moral justification. I am resistant at strategies in ethics that seek to naturalize various domains of ethical analysis, and realize how much of a first start my effort is here. This is why I will outline what will concern me in the next few posts. The theme is that ethics is phenomenologically grounded and the type of properties used in moral justification and the nature of reasons that purport such properties are, in fact, irreducible. They are the type of thing that cannot be naturalized away under the weird umbrella term "evolutionary mechanism," but are readily manifest in moral experience.

In the next few posts, I will try and establish first exactly what is meant by empathy in the 5th Meditation. I will see what is in there that can help me explain the nature of values, their justification, scope and content.

Some Thoughts on Hard Naturalism

I define hard naturalism as the thesis that only physical entities describable by the natural sciences exist and secondly that in principle descriptions, even if philosophical, must be brought into line with what the natural sciences describe as real. Hard naturalism has the effect of either taking a hard-driven reductionism in which complex notions regarded as irreducible can either be eliminated in explanation by reference to natural parts, or a commitment to pluralism of posited objects. The former is more orthodox, and the latter is more controversial since it fails to explain why there is overlap between scientific theorizing of the various disciplines. Pluralism might be more plausible to its adherents that feel that unifying grounds of explanation in science are moribund. The scientific disciplines have become so thematic, specific and independent that this obsoleteness is not a product of the social organization of knowledge seeking, but revelatory of the phenomena studied. Reality is, after all, complex.

In the following post, I detail how it is that hard naturalism is mistaken. There are some problems it encounters. First, I will deal with hard naturalism qua reductionism. Reductionist naturalism is itself an ideation of the intuition that reality is organized into causal interactions of parts and wholes. They would pretend this is only a generalization of specific cases of the “doings of science”. However, even in generalizations you run into the same problem. Generalizations and ideations require the regulative function of ideals. These ideals are universalizing the specific cases, and generalizing is just a locution to pretend that the generalizations aren’t universal. In order to perform any reduction of explanation, it has to hold that reality is organized into parts and wholes, which of course is a peculiar relationship that cannot be explained away by reference to a smaller part. In this way, logical truths necessary to express generalizing and universal features of explanation, as well as the intuitions, like ‘reality is organized into causal interactions of parts and wholes’, necessitate the irreducibility of the objective categories.

The second form of my brief excursion into naturalism is more problematic. Hard naturalism qua pluralism posits objects as needed in explanation. Such pluralism, I imagine, might be mitigated to Ockham’s razor so that positing would not “get out of hand.” Pluralism will foster the natural attitude that what is posited is real, and corresponds to reality when actually it is our best model up to date. However, most scientists require that explanations are revisable in some fashion. A good pluralist would be a good reviser, making changes where needed. Yet, pluralistic naturalism still ignores the central role that consciousness plays in our knowledge of the world. We can only posit objects as needed because we are conscious of the very need to posit. For the phenomenologist understands rightly that knowledge is a subjective accomplishment, an accomplishment of a particular knower. If the pluralism is open to the phenomenological, then such openness would no longer serve as a problem for the naturalistic pluralism.

On the first account, hard naturalism is defeated since it cannot ignore the very idealism it seeks to eliminate. On the second account, positing is a particular achievement of a subject, and positing cannot be taken to be what the natural attitude would pass over as a third-person feature of explanations themselves. Pluralism can be opened to phenomenology by making the move to incorporate the phenomenological as another level of complexity. On my end, it would be hard to ignore.

A Working Introduction to a Project of Mine

I have been focusing as of late on Heidegger's critique of presence. The critique of presence is hard to pin down for someone of analytic background since by presence Heidegger describes the relation either between the traditional subject relating to an object of experience, or the subject as related to its own awareness of itself. Analytical philosophers often have a hard time with the generality and obtuseness of Heideggerian language. However, there doesn't need to be any confusion. The two descriptions of presence are simply propensities that characterize much of the history of ontology, that is, how various philosophers have described the subject's epistemic relation with objects, and the characterization of the transcendental viewpoint of the Cartesian subject as aware of itself. According to Heidegger's thought, the overlooked propensities of presence are biased unquestioned assumptions in the history of metaphysics that require exposure.

In exposing these common interpretive assumptions, Heidegger feels justified in calling them into question, and so he should since no assumption can be left unturned in philosophy. However, what you find in Heidegger is an anti-metaphysical, or what one might call an uncritical dismissal of philosophies that violate/perpetuate a "metaphysics of presence." This assumption has formed the bedrock of European philosophy for the last century, and on its own merits paints a picture of philosophy unlike anything I would call "philosophy." In fact, it is this very dismissal I take issue with. As such, I disagree with Heidegger's conception of the subject and being-in-the-world. Instead, Husserl offers a much better picture of philosophy's capability to provide insight into the very relations Heidegger denies through his critique of presence. One guiding thought motivating this essay beyond Husserl is that if these are biases of our tradition, then the re-emergence of these biases in the history of ontology might be productive for understanding in the Gadamerian sense of "bias" rather than a historic failing on the canonized metaphysicians of Western thought since Plato.

Recovering the World

Phenomenology is described at an attempt to arrive at the world of immediate contact. In phenomenology, the world is already there prior to any theorizing about it. As many of you may well know, the idea that the world is already there, and that its being there constitutes our relation to it is abandoned in more naturalistic theories. For naturalists, there are entities in the world best described in terms of the natural sciences, and entities are mind-independent. While the world is independent of itself in our field of experience in phenomenology, our experience of the world is something we must retrieve actively.

Now, phenomenology doesn't achieve causal accounts. Instead, phenomenology identifies the fundamental relation of being-in-the-world and attempts to retrieve that understandng for us. I'm wondering whether the fundamental attempt to retrieve essences of the world is in a way causal. How far do you push the thesis that phenomenology identifies constitutive a priori facts that play no causal role because when describing the world?

Some introductory thoughts concerning Husserl

Concerning justificatory standpoints, human agents have two: the first-person standpoint, which I take to be phenomenology in the Husserlian sense and the third-person standpoint of the sciences. In Thomas Nagel's What is it like to be a bat?, Nagel observes the difficulty with reconciling the first person phenomenology with the objective viewpoint. He supports the belief that what is needed is a phenomenology based on the third-person viewpoint.

At present we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience without relying on the imagination-without taking up the point of view of the experiential subject. This should be regarded as a challenge to form new concepts and devise a new method-an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination.¹

In the same vain, others have moved to eliminate the first-person standpoint altogether. Some are eliminativists like Dennett and Churchland. Each sees the first-person as problematic and inconsistent in providing insights into the nature of why we must either abandon completely or simply believe in the first-person pragmatically. They feel that neuroscience can account for subjectivity. For instance, Churchland writes:

Our mutual understanding and even our introspection may then be reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience, a theory we may expect to be more powerful by far than the common-sense psychology it displaces, and more substantially integrated within physical science generally.²

What each of these moves entails is a view of the first-person as incapable of moving beyond the realm of the subjective and offering an exact theoretical picture of what exactly is consciousness in the fullest objective sense. Since the first-person standpoint is incapable of providing an objective account, there must be a problem in that it cannot reach beyond itself. This makes it incapable of other possibilities, namely, intersubjectively demonstrating objective knowledge to others or that the other exists. Solipsism is a consequence of the skepticism concerning the first-person standpoint from the naturalistic third-person standpoint.

Thus, there are two issues at work here; two issues I see as inseparable. First, I see Husserl's suspension of the naturalistic attitude as an answer to the problems of wanting to eliminate the subjective, first-person standpoint altogether. I see his criticism and the phenomenological reduction as a corrective measure against this eliminative impulse. Secondly, the charge of solipsism is interrelated since if one keeps to the naturalistic attitude, then one will eventually opt for the naturalist position regarding how to explain agency.

1Nagel, Thomas, “What is it like to be a bat?” The Philosophical Review 83, No. 4. (Oct., 1974), pp. 449.

2 Churchland, Paul, “Eliminative Materialism and Propositional Attitudes.” Journal of Philosophy 78, No. 2 (Feb., 1981): pp. 67