Looks like another paper we should read if we are to understand L's affair with modal logic. Thanks for this link.
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 10
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Looks like another paper we should read if we are to understand L's affair with modal logic. Thanks for this link.
This should be most interesting.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I've not finished it yet but it's off to a good start. I'll try to find the Heidegger text for us.
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"Of course, but then again this "irreducibility" is consciousness falling (colliding) into itself through the world."
That's a very interesting statement. Could you flesh it out with some examples of what you mean -- how consciousness both 'falls' through the world and "collides into itself" in its lived experience in the world?
You add:
"Modal logic is only going to add "necessity" and "possibility" as operators to an already decrepit family of symbols and noises emitted by the very same creatures that attempt to formulate a complete story (a complete foundation) to express their own existence."
"Symbols and noises"? Also do you think that all human "creatures" working in and through philosophy have "attempted to formulate a complete story (a complete foundation) to express their own existence"?
Wouldn't that interpretation apply only to philosophers presupposing the world to be a closed system? Many philosophies do not begin with that presupposition.
"We're going to need a lot more operators--and the most important operators may be incomprehensible (to consciousness)."
I too wonder what kind(s) of 'operators' you have in mind.
Varieties of Modality (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
"What metaphysical necessity, nomic necessity and the other grades of necessity have in common is that each of them is the property of having a degree of possibility that is above a certain threshold. What distinguishes them is a difference in their associated thresholds."
"What metaphysical necessity, nomic necessity and the other grades of necessity have in common is that each of them is the property of having a degree of possibility that is above a certain threshold. What distinguishes them is a difference in their associated thresholds."
I came across this book review from NDPR this afternoon and post the text of it because it reviews so many topics and approaches in interdisciplinary consciousness studies that we have taken up in this thread and also responds to significant recent contributions by many philosophers that we have spent time reading and discussing and some we haven't.
2006.12.16
David Woodruff Smith and Amie L. Thomasson (eds.), Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind, Oxford University Press, 2005, 322pp. $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-19-927245-7.
Reviewed by Shaun Gallagher, University of Central Florida
A volume dedicated to exploring connections between phenomenology and the philosophy of mind is especially welcome at this point since there has been so much recent interest in relating phenomenology to the cognitive sciences and to issues in the analytic philosophy of mind. As the introduction by Smith and Thomasson makes clear, both phenomenology and philosophy of mind can be understood as disciplines and as traditions.
As a tradition, Phenomenology (I’ll capitalize the term when used in this sense) is associated with continental thinkers like Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. As a discipline the editors define phenomenology (I’ll use lower case for this sense) as “the study of conscious experience as lived, as experienced from the first-person point of view …” (p. 1, but see pp. 7-8 for a slightly broader view). Of course, if the tradition of Phenomenology has any say in what constitutes the discipline of phenomenology, then the proposed definition signals a narrow view of that discipline. There is an enormous wealth of discussion, analysis, and argumentation in the Phenomenological tradition that is not focused on conscious experience. In Husserl’s Logical Investigations, for example, one finds a critique of psychologism; a defense of the irreducibility of logic and the ideality of meaning; an analysis of pictorial representations; a theory of the part-whole relation; a sophisticated account of intentionality; and an epistemological clarification of the relation between concepts and intuitions. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty certainly add to the list of topics that are simply not reducible to a concern with first-person experience.
Furthermore, one might be motivated to ask, after reading the editors’ Introduction, whether Phenomenology as a tradition is over and done with. All of the figures listed by the editors – Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ingarden, Gurwitsch – are dead, and the editors’ grammar and vocabulary suggest a post-mortem: references to the tradition itself are in the past tense, prefixed by the term ‘classical’. In contrast, most of the figures listed as part of the “contemporary” philosophy-of-mind tradition are alive and relatively well – Armstrong, Putnam, Fodor, Dennett, Searle, and the Churchlands. Are there any living Phenomenologists who could be included in a tradition that may be more alive than the list of names would lead us to believe. How about Dreyfus, Føllesdal, Petitot, Tugendhat, Waldenfels, or Zahavi? Isn’t the tradition just as alive as the discipline, which the editors suggest is “ongoing” (p. 2)?
The collection is composed of 14 essays, and I will not be able to comment on all of them in the detail they deserve. At best I can give a brief indication of the contents of these chapters, and a few critical comments.
The first essay, by Paul Livingston, investigates the relations between functionalism and Phenomenology. His historical analysis is insightful, but it also pushes into clarity an issue that seems to plague both houses, and if unresolved may lead to an undesirable dead end. If we take functionalism to be inspired by an attempt to analyze and explain psychological states by analyzing the vocabulary of mentalistic description, and if we understand Phenomenology as a logical and conceptual analysis of the structure of experience, then these two approaches are close cousins. The difference seems to be in functionalism’s openness to naturalistic and empirical causal explanation, in contrast to Phenomenology’s withdrawal from ("bracketing", in Husserl's terminology) such descriptions. Practically speaking, however, since functionalist theory developed almost exclusively as a logical and conceptual analysis, with little reference to empirical data, this is not a large difference. Such conceptual analyses, Livingston suggests, may thwart the study of consciousness precisely because they are conceptual and theoretical. That consciousness resists both functionalist and Phenomenological analysis is “one instance of a more general and perennial phenomenon: the resistance of subjective experience to broadly structuralist practices of conceptual and logical analysis” (37).
Livingston doesn’t suggest a way forward, but if we set aside the kind of mysterianism that one finds in someone like McGinn, where we are simply not up to the task of explaining consciousness given the finite possibilities of the way that we can conceptualize things, then one possibility is for both functionalist and Phenomenological approaches to pay closer attention to the empirical sciences. I think that this is precisely what many contemporary Phenomenologists and phenomenologists and philosophers of mind are doing today, including some of the contributors to this volume. Taylor Carman, for example. In his essay on the inescapability of phenomenology, he suggests that, in contrast to the claims of someone like Dennett, phenomenology is a necessary component of any full scientific account of consciousness and cognition. He worries about recent considerations that border on behaviorism and eliminativism, including not only Dennett’s heterophenomenology, but also the enactive theorists, such as Noë and O’Regan, and contends that they miss something important insofar as they fail to consider certain normative and intentional aspects of experience. He appeals to the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Charles Taylor as an alternative that takes these aspects seriously.
David Woodruff Smith, in a section on self-awareness and self-knowledge, offers a critique of higher-order representational theories of consciousness and examines the traditional Phenomenological alternative, namely, a concept of a same-level (or first-order) pre-reflective self-awareness, which he calls a reflexive inner awareness. He integrates this with a discussion of language and John Perry’s analysis of indexicals, and shows that reflexive inner awareness is a modal character of intentional experience rather than a second or higher-order act of self-awareness. The phenomenological account thus fits well with the semantics of indexical expressions as analyzed in analytic philosophy of mind.
If inner self-awareness is pre- or non-reflective insofar as it is not the result of a reflective observation of our own experience, this raises the question of how we gain more explicit knowledge of our own experience. Amie Thomasson explores this question and considers the difference between observational introspection and the kind of Phenomenological method proposed by Husserl. She outlines the argument against equating Phenomenological analysis with introspection, and shows that the former actually takes its start from world-oriented experience. Indeed, Thomasson suggests that Sellars’ idea that our self-knowledge is better understood as an aspect of our knowledge of the world actually derives from Husserl, and that Sellars borrowed some aspects of Husserl’s method. Thomasson goes on to develop an innovative way of understanding the laws that allow one to move, methodically, from first-order world experiences to knowledge of our own mental experiences.
Galen Strawson’s paper is seriously concerned with vocabulary, and the way terminological choices can mislead us in our thinking about something like intentionality. His analysis is phenomenological in the non-traditional sense, and perhaps more precisely, it is predominantly a linguistic analysis about phenomenological issues. Although Strawson denies he is a “linguistic perscriptivist”, he certainly takes a turn at being a linguistic “stipulativist,” freely stipulating the meanings of words for use in his analysis. Some Phenomenenologists would surely embrace his claims that intentionality is a mark of the mental, or, is essentially experiential, and that we shouldn’t call non-experiential states, e.g., states found in robots or thermostats, or representational aspects of pictures or words, intentional. They would also agree with Strawson’s claim that there is something it is like to think of the concept of justice in the abstract, and this is experientially different from what it is like to think that grapes grow on vines; and this difference is not simply one of semantic content. Phenomenologists are quite familiar with the point that qualitative aspects of experience are not limited to sensory experiences, not the least from struggling with the texts of Husserl and Heidegger. There is something it is like to understand Husserl, and that is very different from what it is like to understand Heidegger.
Strawson argues against too much intentionality, which we might get if we follow philosophers of mind who would make everything about cognition representational and attribute intentionality to non-conscious states.It may be, however, that Strawson ends up with too little intentionality since he limits it to what is occurrently conscious. Conscious beliefs are intentional; but unconscious beliefs are not. Non-conscious beliefs are better regarded as dispositions to behave in certain ways, and as such they “are not properly counted as intentional phenomena” (45). Strawson, like many philosophers of mind, believes that there is a large number of such unconscious beliefs – “tens, hundreds of thousands of dispositions to behave in all sorts of ways, verbal and non-verbal, and to go into all sorts of states, mental and non-mental” (58). Actually, if we think of beliefs in this way, then “hundreds of thousands” is a serious underestimation. For example, if I know that the world population is somewhere between 6.5 and 7 billion (see World Population), then I have at least 6.5 billion beliefs about the world population. For example, I believe that the world population is greater than 1; and I believe the world population is greater than 2; …. and I believe the world population is greater than 6.5 billion, etc. Indeed, I have at least an infinity of beliefs concerning the concept of infinity, since I believe that 1< ∞, that 2< ∞, and so on. Given all of these unconscious belief dispositions, there seems to be a serious overcrowding of beliefs inside my head. Inside my head? Yes, because when we ask what precisely a belief disposition that is not currently conscious is, Strawson considers the “standard naturalist physicalist answer is: a certain arrangement of neurons” (58). I agree that the brain is complex, but even if the various possible neuronal combinations approach infinity, I find it difficult to believe that in my short lifetime I’ve been able to amass so many beliefs. Rather, it seems much more parsimonious to think that I have learned how to formulate answers to whether 6.5 billion is less than infinity, and I do so whenever I’m asked. I don’t need to have this belief stored away all the time; I only need the skill to answer the question, and then, as a belief, I can let it go.
The same for “having” dispositions that shape my behavioral responses to specific environmental demands. Are my dispositions stored in my brain, simpliciter; or are they episodic, that is, do they come and go according to circumstances that involve a distribution of neuronal states, body states, and broadly (to included social and cultural aspects) environmental states? I think there are complicated issues here about externalism (about which Strawson doesn’t seem too enthusiastic). Perhaps we need to think about dispositions to behave as finite, but also as encompassing something more than just beliefs, and more than what can be contained in a neuronal storehouse. This gets us back to the issue of just how much intentionality is the right amount. I would summarize Strawson’s position as: too many beliefs, and too little intentionality. Certainly not all non-conscious dispositions are beliefs, and not all non-conscious dispositions are reducible to neuronal states. Picking up on a point made by Dreyfus and Kelly against Dennett,[1] I suggest that Strawson underpopulates the intentional realm even as he overestimates the belief contents of mind. Neither perceiving nor skilled coping is equivalent to believing, but perceiving and coping belong to the intentional realm, even if much of our coping behavior, or many aspects of coping behavior, go on non-consciously.
On the other side of this discussion, Johannes Brandl wants to overpopulate the intentional realm with “mental representations,” immanent vehicular objects that mediate a relation between the experiencing subject and the intentional object. He explores many of the distinctions that Strawson wants to dismiss. Although it is not clear what the term ‘real’ could mean in this context, and, as Brandl admits (p. 179) it is not clear how such mental representations could be realized in the brain, and setting aside a variety of arguments against Fodorian mental representations, Brandl claims that these entities are “definitely real” (179). This seems to be one version of internalism – no need to go outside of the mind to find something that is the real basis for intentionality – and a far cry from Thomasson’s view that Phenomenology understands the structure of experience in terms of its world-relatedness.
A different form of internalism, however, which seems more threatening to certain externalist views of Phenomenology can be found in Bickle and Ellis’s essay on “Phenomenology and Cortical Microstimulation.”This is a curious essay in which the co-authors seem to underestimate the nature of the serious challenge they pose vis-à-vis Phenomenology. Microstimulation of specific cortical areas can induce experiences that seem world-related. This is familiar from the well-known Penfield experiments. Bickle updates the reader with the latest experiments along this line conducted by Newsome and colleagues at Stanford. The fact that microstimulation of certain neuronal areas can generate consciousness of specific kinds clearly supports Bickle’s reductionist views.
Ellis, who confesses to being a non-reductionist, treats these experiments as perfectly consistent with Phenomenology. In one sense this is correct. The Phenomenological Reduction (which, of course, is a different sense of reduction, so I’ll capitalize it and keep it consistent with my capitalization policy on Phenomenology) brackets all metaphysical theories, including reductionistic ones. Phenomenology may thus be consistent with a number of metaphysical positions, including neural reductionism. At the same time, Ellis takes Husserl’s analysis, and Phenomenology more generally, to be exclusive of causal analysis. To claim that X (some object in the world) causes Y (some intentional experience) is to say more than Phenomenology is licensed to say, precisely because of the Reduction. What makes the microstimulation experiments interesting and useful for Phenomenology, according to Ellis, is precisely the fact that the experiments demonstrate that one does not need an external object in order to cause intentional content. For there to be intentional content, there is no causal requirement that there be an external real object that has an effect on the psychophysical subject. We can experience things that are simply not there, e.g., when we imagine a unicorn, or in the case of hallucination.
But if the microstimulation experiments motivate a bracketing of the sort of causal account that some 18th-century empiricists might have given, they certainly do not motivate a bracketing of the sort of causal account that 21st-century neuroscientists seem inclined to give, namely, that intentional content is generated by neuronal processes which are sufficient unto themselves – no world required, at least not as intended object. Here we have internalist tendencies coming at us from both sides: no need to be in-the-world (in contrast to what Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty might claim), since we, and the world, are already in our brains. In this regard Ellis is happy to make Husserl an internalist – certainly one possible reading of the Phenomenological Reduction, but certainly not the only one (see, e.g., Thomasson’s essay).
Bickle and Ellis are equally happy to eliminate folk psychological causal accounts. They indicate that when we apply causal concepts to experience, “we end up with the problems of ‘folk psychology’ that both serious phenomenology and contemporary neuroscience are interested in avoiding” (p. 156). They are thus quite happy to team Husserl with Paul Churchland, despite Churchland’s misunderstanding of the Phenomenological Reduction (p. 156). But we have to note that there are different ways to be eliminativist in regard to folk psychology. Churchland, and perhaps Bickle, would clearly champion a reductive translation of folk explanation to neuronal explanation--but they are also motivated to do the same with phenomenology; Husserl, and perhaps Ellis, would champion a Reduction of folk explanation in favor of a close Phenomenological description of experience, but Husserl, at least, may also be motivated to do the same with neuroscientific causal explanation.
One thing that complicates any staking of claims in the internalist or externalist camp is precisely what seems to be lacking in the cortical microstimulation experiments, namely, a clear Phenomenological report of the subject’s experience. The subjects in Newsome’s lab were rhesus monkeys, and, well, they apparently not only refused to provide Phenomenological reports, but they weren’t even forthcoming with phenomenological reports. Penfield’s patients were likely giving folk phenomenological reports, and it is not always clear how to judge such reports. This is ignored by Bickle and Ellis: “what is most remarkable about induced phenomenology is that the experience may appear to the subject not merely as a mental image, as in daydreams and conjured fantasies, but as an actual percept that seems to be actually present. When D.F.’s temporal lobe was stimulated she heard music not as if she were imagining or remembering it, but as if it were actually playing on a radio” (p. 157). Certainly, this may be what D.F. reported--literally, “I hear music again. It is like the radio … actually heard it” (p. 142); but is this a Phenomenological description or a folk psychological claim? Bickle and Ellis go even further. Although they note some serious limitations in Penfield’s experiments (p. 143), they suggest that D.F.’s descriptions were so precise that they rule out what Sartre had claimed for the Phenomenological method, namely that “careful reflection will reveal the difference between a mental image and a percept …” (157). It apparently seems obvious to them that if the epileptic patient D.F. is unable to tell the difference between an experience generated by neural stimulation and an experience generated by a worldly encounter, then there is no improvement on this description to be made through the use of Phenomenological method. So it is perhaps surprising that they nonetheless conclude that Phenomenology may be a useful tool in neuroscientific study. “When searching for mechanisms, a useful heuristic is to know something about the phenomena we seek to explain” (161).
The chapter by Richard Tiezen takes up the question of how we can be conscious of abstract objects and how the concept of intentionality is important for sorting out this question. Someone like Penrose, who tries to explain consciousness of abstract objects in terms of brain processes is working at the wrong level of description and overlooks the significance of intentionality in this regard. Tiezen is partial to the contrasting view of Gödel, who was familiar with Husserl’s work, and who seems to recognize the intentionality of mental processes as essential for consciousness of abstract objects. Tiezen then produces an analysis of this process in terms of noematic shifts from perceptual experience to something that is an abstract object or state of affairs, similar to the Heideggerian shift from everyday dealings with Zuhanden instruments, to a more conceptually informed Vorhandenheit, a shift, moreover, that is important for doing science. Such shifts involve idealizations and abstractions of different types, and the task of Phenomenology is to identify and analyze these cognitive states.
Wayne Martin’s essay explores the “logic of consciousness,” a phrase that Martin uses to refer to Husserl’s idea that conscious states legitimate and correct one another in “evidentiary relations of confirmation, refutation, legitimation, and the like” (p. 204). It is not just that conscious states replace one another in succession, but that they seem to involve logical relations (such as consistency) vis-à-vis their intentional relations. Martin attempts to cash this out in terms of mereological relations that suggest a holistic approach to consciousness (in opposition to an atomistic approach in which we would think of consciousness “as a kind of dynamic mosaic, with the identity of each tile fixed by its own specific quality, quite independently of the role it plays in the mosaic as a whole” [210]). Intentional determinacy and appropriate forms of consistency for specific kinds of intentionality (consistency in belief is differentiated from consistency in fear or desire) point to such holistic relations. Martin concludes by providing a helpful discussion of how these concepts relate to the critique of psychologism and to contemporary cognitive science.
The chapters by Tiezen and Martin raise issues that are ignored in most discussions of consciousness found in the philosophy of mind. Sean Kelly’s chapter also takes up a topic that is infrequently discussed in recent studies of consciousness, although it was often discussed in the first part of the 20th century--the question of the temporal structure of awareness. He examines the theory of the specious present, as found in James, Broad, and others, and he contrasts this theory with a theory of retention, the roots of which he traces to Locke and Hume, although the best expression of it is found in Husserl. Kelly provides some interesting historical notes on these approaches, and a critique of the notion of the specious present, which leads him to suggest that Husserl’s model of retention is superior to the specious present account. Kelly concludes by suggesting that further thinking about Merleau-Ponty’s notions of gaining and losing a perceptual grip on an indeterminate scene might help to give us a feel for what it is to experience something as just-about-to-be or as just-having-been.
Kay Mathiesen adds a discussion of a different sort of unity to the logical and temporal kinds explored by Martin and Kelly, namely, an intersubjective unity that might be found in collective consciousness. She explores different models of collective consciousness as inadequate: the group mind, which fails to capture plurality; the emergent mind, which, defined as a second-order consciousness that emerges from the interaction of individuals, runs into the problem that no one is aware of it; and the socially embedded mind, which fails to provide an account of collectivity. Mathiesen turns to Husserl and Alfred Schutz to discover a better model, although these too appear to be inadequate. Mathiesen finally turns to concepts of empathy (Stein) and, something more familiar to philosophers of mind, a somewhat standard view of the mentalistic task of how we understand “mental states of others” (243), specifically a version of simulation theory. I think that Mathiesen does put simulation theory to an innovative use, however. In this regard, let me mention Matthew Ratcliffe’s recent book, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology, in which he makes a similar move.[2]He suggests that in our attempts to understand others we do not attempt to simulate/mindread the other’s mental state; rather we simulate our possible relationship to the other person--a relationship that is better described in terms of embodied interactions. In addressing the question of collective subjectivity, Mathiesen suggests that “we are able to simulate the states of a collective subject of which we are members” (247).Mathiesen, however, continues to conceive of this process as one of simulating minds--a collective mind--collective beliefs, thoughts, and attitudes. In contrast, one could develop Ratcliffe’s suggestion in the direction taken by Mathiesen. That is, one could conceive of a collective intersubjectivity in terms of simulating how “we” as embodied subjects would typically behave and interact with one another. This way of putting it would actually be more faithful to Husserl’s example of an interpersonal unity, insofar as “ideals, values, and goals are embedded in our practices, habits … [and] We often say such things as ‘We should do such and such’” (247). No need to talk about a collective “consciousness” in this case, or to try to determine whether we mean that literally or metaphorically.
The final section of the volume concerns perception, sensation, and action. Clotilde Calabi offers an account of how to think of reasons for action in terms of perceptual saliences rather than in terms of internal beliefs. I act in a certain way, not because I have a certain belief or desire, but because the environment elicits the action. She cites the recent work of Noë on enactive perception, as well as Gibson’s notion of affordances, to develop an object theory of reasons. In the Gibsonian model, for example, perceptual saliencies are part of the objective world. But Calabi argues that saliences are normative properties, by which I take her to mean that they are properties that arise through my perceptual interactions with the world, and are guides for my action. In her turn of phrase, “My idea is that, for this class of reasons, it is the world that wears the trousers, although the world is a world that the agent has in view” (264).
Charles Siewert’s essay on sensorimotor intentionality strikes me as very consistent with Calabi’s general phenomenological approach, but builds more directly on the work of the Phenomenological tradition from Merleau-Ponty through Dreyfus. It also links up to Kelly’s discussion of temporality. Both Kelly and Siewert cite the same example of perceptual indeterminacy from Merleau-Ponty. If I am walking along a beach and see in the distance a ship that has run aground against the background of a forest that borders on the sand dune, it may at first appear that what later becomes clear as the ship’s mast indeterminately blends into the forest in a way that I could see it as the mast or as a tree. Kelly cites this as an example of an experience of something that is just-about-to-be, since I anticipate that it is in fact the mast, but the perception is not yet clear. Siewert also takes this experience to involve anticipation, but he is interested in what makes seeing the mast as a tree a mistaken perception. The anticipation, and whether it is fulfilled or proven wrong, is closely linked to what one does (p. 285), where what one does is some kind of activity that allows a better look, and this is based on sensorimotor skills. The intentionality involved in this experience is not best described as forming mental representations and comparing content. For Siewert, it is the kind of sensorimotor intentionality that Merleau-Ponty was trying to get at. What is interesting, given that Kelly and Siewert appeal to the same example, is to ask whether temporality, especially the temporality that is captured in Husserl’s retentional-protentional model, is intimately connected with our sensorimotor abilities. If so, it seems that Husserl’s model might also serve neuroscientists who insist on the anticipatory nature of sensory-motor processes.[3] Siewert suggests that doing the requisite action (and being prepared to do it) is not “a consequence or result of my anticipation of further visual appearances; it constitutes such anticipation” (290).Siewert may be right, but I think that this is a claim that deserves much more consideration. If he is right, then it is not so much that something like Husserl’s retentional-protentional model, which is primarily thought of as a model of mental experience, can mapped onto sensory-motor processes, but that that temporal structure of our mental experience is already shaped by the embodied processes connected with action possibilities. Thus, at the end of his essay, Siewert rightly raises the question of whether such experiences are possible for a disembodied (e.g., brain-in-the-vat) entity.
This leads us to the final chapter by José Luis Bermúdez on the phenomenology of bodily awareness. He focuses on certain distinctive modes of awareness of our own bodies, some more conscious than others, and some shaped by non-conscious proprioceptive information. Where Merleau-Ponty appears to place certain limitations on what natural science can tell us about the lived body, Bermúdez attempts to show how science may not be so limited, and may be able to work with Phenomenology to capture essential aspects of the experienced and experiencing body. He focuses specifically on understanding the experienced spatiality of the lived body as categorically different from the experienced spatiality of the world. As Merleau-Ponty well knew, we can develop an understanding of this difference from the study of various pathologies, and Bermúdez follows the same route in order to specify a number of different sources of information about the body, especially in the context of action. This provides the means for a more detailed interpretation of the famous Schneider example in the Phenomenology of Perception, but more importantly, it leads to a better understanding of the difference between the proprioceptive frame of reference within which one experiences one’s body, and the egocentric frame of reference for perception and action. This differentiation of spatiality not only clarifies our phenomenological experience and certain pathological cases, it also is consistent with scientific explanations of motor control, which further facilitates our understanding of bodily experience and action.
The scope of this collection of essays is important to note. By attending to and developing the contributions of Phenomenological analysis we not only gain rich insights into many of the standard issues explored by philosophy of mind, we also open new areas of consideration. The themes covered in this book range from the usual questions about phenomenal consciousness, self-awareness, intentionality, representation, perception, action and higher orders of cognition, to topics that are less frequently discussed in philosophy of mind, such as the temporality of experience, consciousness of abstract objects, the logical unity of consciousness, and the notion of collective consciousness. The essays are engaging and certainly worth studying. They also suggest that the Phenomenological tradition is alive and well.
Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame
2006.12.16
David Woodruff Smith and Amie L. Thomasson (eds.), Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind, Oxford University Press, 2005, 322pp. $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-19-927245-7.
Reviewed by Shaun Gallagher, University of Central Florida
A volume dedicated to exploring connections between phenomenology and the philosophy of mind is especially welcome at this point since there has been so much recent interest in relating phenomenology to the cognitive sciences and to issues in the analytic philosophy of mind. As the introduction by Smith and Thomasson makes clear, both phenomenology and philosophy of mind can be understood as disciplines and as traditions.
As a tradition, Phenomenology (I’ll capitalize the term when used in this sense) is associated with continental thinkers like Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. As a discipline the editors define phenomenology (I’ll use lower case for this sense) as “the study of conscious experience as lived, as experienced from the first-person point of view …” (p. 1, but see pp. 7-8 for a slightly broader view). Of course, if the tradition of Phenomenology has any say in what constitutes the discipline of phenomenology, then the proposed definition signals a narrow view of that discipline. There is an enormous wealth of discussion, analysis, and argumentation in the Phenomenological tradition that is not focused on conscious experience. In Husserl’s Logical Investigations, for example, one finds a critique of psychologism; a defense of the irreducibility of logic and the ideality of meaning; an analysis of pictorial representations; a theory of the part-whole relation; a sophisticated account of intentionality; and an epistemological clarification of the relation between concepts and intuitions. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty certainly add to the list of topics that are simply not reducible to a concern with first-person experience.
Furthermore, one might be motivated to ask, after reading the editors’ Introduction, whether Phenomenology as a tradition is over and done with. All of the figures listed by the editors – Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ingarden, Gurwitsch – are dead, and the editors’ grammar and vocabulary suggest a post-mortem: references to the tradition itself are in the past tense, prefixed by the term ‘classical’. In contrast, most of the figures listed as part of the “contemporary” philosophy-of-mind tradition are alive and relatively well – Armstrong, Putnam, Fodor, Dennett, Searle, and the Churchlands. Are there any living Phenomenologists who could be included in a tradition that may be more alive than the list of names would lead us to believe. How about Dreyfus, Føllesdal, Petitot, Tugendhat, Waldenfels, or Zahavi? Isn’t the tradition just as alive as the discipline, which the editors suggest is “ongoing” (p. 2)?
The collection is composed of 14 essays, and I will not be able to comment on all of them in the detail they deserve. At best I can give a brief indication of the contents of these chapters, and a few critical comments.
The first essay, by Paul Livingston, investigates the relations between functionalism and Phenomenology. His historical analysis is insightful, but it also pushes into clarity an issue that seems to plague both houses, and if unresolved may lead to an undesirable dead end. If we take functionalism to be inspired by an attempt to analyze and explain psychological states by analyzing the vocabulary of mentalistic description, and if we understand Phenomenology as a logical and conceptual analysis of the structure of experience, then these two approaches are close cousins. The difference seems to be in functionalism’s openness to naturalistic and empirical causal explanation, in contrast to Phenomenology’s withdrawal from ("bracketing", in Husserl's terminology) such descriptions. Practically speaking, however, since functionalist theory developed almost exclusively as a logical and conceptual analysis, with little reference to empirical data, this is not a large difference. Such conceptual analyses, Livingston suggests, may thwart the study of consciousness precisely because they are conceptual and theoretical. That consciousness resists both functionalist and Phenomenological analysis is “one instance of a more general and perennial phenomenon: the resistance of subjective experience to broadly structuralist practices of conceptual and logical analysis” (37).
Livingston doesn’t suggest a way forward, but if we set aside the kind of mysterianism that one finds in someone like McGinn, where we are simply not up to the task of explaining consciousness given the finite possibilities of the way that we can conceptualize things, then one possibility is for both functionalist and Phenomenological approaches to pay closer attention to the empirical sciences. I think that this is precisely what many contemporary Phenomenologists and phenomenologists and philosophers of mind are doing today, including some of the contributors to this volume. Taylor Carman, for example. In his essay on the inescapability of phenomenology, he suggests that, in contrast to the claims of someone like Dennett, phenomenology is a necessary component of any full scientific account of consciousness and cognition. He worries about recent considerations that border on behaviorism and eliminativism, including not only Dennett’s heterophenomenology, but also the enactive theorists, such as Noë and O’Regan, and contends that they miss something important insofar as they fail to consider certain normative and intentional aspects of experience. He appeals to the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Charles Taylor as an alternative that takes these aspects seriously.
David Woodruff Smith, in a section on self-awareness and self-knowledge, offers a critique of higher-order representational theories of consciousness and examines the traditional Phenomenological alternative, namely, a concept of a same-level (or first-order) pre-reflective self-awareness, which he calls a reflexive inner awareness. He integrates this with a discussion of language and John Perry’s analysis of indexicals, and shows that reflexive inner awareness is a modal character of intentional experience rather than a second or higher-order act of self-awareness. The phenomenological account thus fits well with the semantics of indexical expressions as analyzed in analytic philosophy of mind.
If inner self-awareness is pre- or non-reflective insofar as it is not the result of a reflective observation of our own experience, this raises the question of how we gain more explicit knowledge of our own experience. Amie Thomasson explores this question and considers the difference between observational introspection and the kind of Phenomenological method proposed by Husserl. She outlines the argument against equating Phenomenological analysis with introspection, and shows that the former actually takes its start from world-oriented experience. Indeed, Thomasson suggests that Sellars’ idea that our self-knowledge is better understood as an aspect of our knowledge of the world actually derives from Husserl, and that Sellars borrowed some aspects of Husserl’s method. Thomasson goes on to develop an innovative way of understanding the laws that allow one to move, methodically, from first-order world experiences to knowledge of our own mental experiences.
Galen Strawson’s paper is seriously concerned with vocabulary, and the way terminological choices can mislead us in our thinking about something like intentionality. His analysis is phenomenological in the non-traditional sense, and perhaps more precisely, it is predominantly a linguistic analysis about phenomenological issues. Although Strawson denies he is a “linguistic perscriptivist”, he certainly takes a turn at being a linguistic “stipulativist,” freely stipulating the meanings of words for use in his analysis. Some Phenomenenologists would surely embrace his claims that intentionality is a mark of the mental, or, is essentially experiential, and that we shouldn’t call non-experiential states, e.g., states found in robots or thermostats, or representational aspects of pictures or words, intentional. They would also agree with Strawson’s claim that there is something it is like to think of the concept of justice in the abstract, and this is experientially different from what it is like to think that grapes grow on vines; and this difference is not simply one of semantic content. Phenomenologists are quite familiar with the point that qualitative aspects of experience are not limited to sensory experiences, not the least from struggling with the texts of Husserl and Heidegger. There is something it is like to understand Husserl, and that is very different from what it is like to understand Heidegger.
Strawson argues against too much intentionality, which we might get if we follow philosophers of mind who would make everything about cognition representational and attribute intentionality to non-conscious states.It may be, however, that Strawson ends up with too little intentionality since he limits it to what is occurrently conscious. Conscious beliefs are intentional; but unconscious beliefs are not. Non-conscious beliefs are better regarded as dispositions to behave in certain ways, and as such they “are not properly counted as intentional phenomena” (45). Strawson, like many philosophers of mind, believes that there is a large number of such unconscious beliefs – “tens, hundreds of thousands of dispositions to behave in all sorts of ways, verbal and non-verbal, and to go into all sorts of states, mental and non-mental” (58). Actually, if we think of beliefs in this way, then “hundreds of thousands” is a serious underestimation. For example, if I know that the world population is somewhere between 6.5 and 7 billion (see World Population), then I have at least 6.5 billion beliefs about the world population. For example, I believe that the world population is greater than 1; and I believe the world population is greater than 2; …. and I believe the world population is greater than 6.5 billion, etc. Indeed, I have at least an infinity of beliefs concerning the concept of infinity, since I believe that 1< ∞, that 2< ∞, and so on. Given all of these unconscious belief dispositions, there seems to be a serious overcrowding of beliefs inside my head. Inside my head? Yes, because when we ask what precisely a belief disposition that is not currently conscious is, Strawson considers the “standard naturalist physicalist answer is: a certain arrangement of neurons” (58). I agree that the brain is complex, but even if the various possible neuronal combinations approach infinity, I find it difficult to believe that in my short lifetime I’ve been able to amass so many beliefs. Rather, it seems much more parsimonious to think that I have learned how to formulate answers to whether 6.5 billion is less than infinity, and I do so whenever I’m asked. I don’t need to have this belief stored away all the time; I only need the skill to answer the question, and then, as a belief, I can let it go.
The same for “having” dispositions that shape my behavioral responses to specific environmental demands. Are my dispositions stored in my brain, simpliciter; or are they episodic, that is, do they come and go according to circumstances that involve a distribution of neuronal states, body states, and broadly (to included social and cultural aspects) environmental states? I think there are complicated issues here about externalism (about which Strawson doesn’t seem too enthusiastic). Perhaps we need to think about dispositions to behave as finite, but also as encompassing something more than just beliefs, and more than what can be contained in a neuronal storehouse. This gets us back to the issue of just how much intentionality is the right amount. I would summarize Strawson’s position as: too many beliefs, and too little intentionality. Certainly not all non-conscious dispositions are beliefs, and not all non-conscious dispositions are reducible to neuronal states. Picking up on a point made by Dreyfus and Kelly against Dennett,[1] I suggest that Strawson underpopulates the intentional realm even as he overestimates the belief contents of mind. Neither perceiving nor skilled coping is equivalent to believing, but perceiving and coping belong to the intentional realm, even if much of our coping behavior, or many aspects of coping behavior, go on non-consciously.
On the other side of this discussion, Johannes Brandl wants to overpopulate the intentional realm with “mental representations,” immanent vehicular objects that mediate a relation between the experiencing subject and the intentional object. He explores many of the distinctions that Strawson wants to dismiss. Although it is not clear what the term ‘real’ could mean in this context, and, as Brandl admits (p. 179) it is not clear how such mental representations could be realized in the brain, and setting aside a variety of arguments against Fodorian mental representations, Brandl claims that these entities are “definitely real” (179). This seems to be one version of internalism – no need to go outside of the mind to find something that is the real basis for intentionality – and a far cry from Thomasson’s view that Phenomenology understands the structure of experience in terms of its world-relatedness.
A different form of internalism, however, which seems more threatening to certain externalist views of Phenomenology can be found in Bickle and Ellis’s essay on “Phenomenology and Cortical Microstimulation.”This is a curious essay in which the co-authors seem to underestimate the nature of the serious challenge they pose vis-à-vis Phenomenology. Microstimulation of specific cortical areas can induce experiences that seem world-related. This is familiar from the well-known Penfield experiments. Bickle updates the reader with the latest experiments along this line conducted by Newsome and colleagues at Stanford. The fact that microstimulation of certain neuronal areas can generate consciousness of specific kinds clearly supports Bickle’s reductionist views.
Ellis, who confesses to being a non-reductionist, treats these experiments as perfectly consistent with Phenomenology. In one sense this is correct. The Phenomenological Reduction (which, of course, is a different sense of reduction, so I’ll capitalize it and keep it consistent with my capitalization policy on Phenomenology) brackets all metaphysical theories, including reductionistic ones. Phenomenology may thus be consistent with a number of metaphysical positions, including neural reductionism. At the same time, Ellis takes Husserl’s analysis, and Phenomenology more generally, to be exclusive of causal analysis. To claim that X (some object in the world) causes Y (some intentional experience) is to say more than Phenomenology is licensed to say, precisely because of the Reduction. What makes the microstimulation experiments interesting and useful for Phenomenology, according to Ellis, is precisely the fact that the experiments demonstrate that one does not need an external object in order to cause intentional content. For there to be intentional content, there is no causal requirement that there be an external real object that has an effect on the psychophysical subject. We can experience things that are simply not there, e.g., when we imagine a unicorn, or in the case of hallucination.
But if the microstimulation experiments motivate a bracketing of the sort of causal account that some 18th-century empiricists might have given, they certainly do not motivate a bracketing of the sort of causal account that 21st-century neuroscientists seem inclined to give, namely, that intentional content is generated by neuronal processes which are sufficient unto themselves – no world required, at least not as intended object. Here we have internalist tendencies coming at us from both sides: no need to be in-the-world (in contrast to what Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty might claim), since we, and the world, are already in our brains. In this regard Ellis is happy to make Husserl an internalist – certainly one possible reading of the Phenomenological Reduction, but certainly not the only one (see, e.g., Thomasson’s essay).
Bickle and Ellis are equally happy to eliminate folk psychological causal accounts. They indicate that when we apply causal concepts to experience, “we end up with the problems of ‘folk psychology’ that both serious phenomenology and contemporary neuroscience are interested in avoiding” (p. 156). They are thus quite happy to team Husserl with Paul Churchland, despite Churchland’s misunderstanding of the Phenomenological Reduction (p. 156). But we have to note that there are different ways to be eliminativist in regard to folk psychology. Churchland, and perhaps Bickle, would clearly champion a reductive translation of folk explanation to neuronal explanation--but they are also motivated to do the same with phenomenology; Husserl, and perhaps Ellis, would champion a Reduction of folk explanation in favor of a close Phenomenological description of experience, but Husserl, at least, may also be motivated to do the same with neuroscientific causal explanation.
One thing that complicates any staking of claims in the internalist or externalist camp is precisely what seems to be lacking in the cortical microstimulation experiments, namely, a clear Phenomenological report of the subject’s experience. The subjects in Newsome’s lab were rhesus monkeys, and, well, they apparently not only refused to provide Phenomenological reports, but they weren’t even forthcoming with phenomenological reports. Penfield’s patients were likely giving folk phenomenological reports, and it is not always clear how to judge such reports. This is ignored by Bickle and Ellis: “what is most remarkable about induced phenomenology is that the experience may appear to the subject not merely as a mental image, as in daydreams and conjured fantasies, but as an actual percept that seems to be actually present. When D.F.’s temporal lobe was stimulated she heard music not as if she were imagining or remembering it, but as if it were actually playing on a radio” (p. 157). Certainly, this may be what D.F. reported--literally, “I hear music again. It is like the radio … actually heard it” (p. 142); but is this a Phenomenological description or a folk psychological claim? Bickle and Ellis go even further. Although they note some serious limitations in Penfield’s experiments (p. 143), they suggest that D.F.’s descriptions were so precise that they rule out what Sartre had claimed for the Phenomenological method, namely that “careful reflection will reveal the difference between a mental image and a percept …” (157). It apparently seems obvious to them that if the epileptic patient D.F. is unable to tell the difference between an experience generated by neural stimulation and an experience generated by a worldly encounter, then there is no improvement on this description to be made through the use of Phenomenological method. So it is perhaps surprising that they nonetheless conclude that Phenomenology may be a useful tool in neuroscientific study. “When searching for mechanisms, a useful heuristic is to know something about the phenomena we seek to explain” (161).
The chapter by Richard Tiezen takes up the question of how we can be conscious of abstract objects and how the concept of intentionality is important for sorting out this question. Someone like Penrose, who tries to explain consciousness of abstract objects in terms of brain processes is working at the wrong level of description and overlooks the significance of intentionality in this regard. Tiezen is partial to the contrasting view of Gödel, who was familiar with Husserl’s work, and who seems to recognize the intentionality of mental processes as essential for consciousness of abstract objects. Tiezen then produces an analysis of this process in terms of noematic shifts from perceptual experience to something that is an abstract object or state of affairs, similar to the Heideggerian shift from everyday dealings with Zuhanden instruments, to a more conceptually informed Vorhandenheit, a shift, moreover, that is important for doing science. Such shifts involve idealizations and abstractions of different types, and the task of Phenomenology is to identify and analyze these cognitive states.
Wayne Martin’s essay explores the “logic of consciousness,” a phrase that Martin uses to refer to Husserl’s idea that conscious states legitimate and correct one another in “evidentiary relations of confirmation, refutation, legitimation, and the like” (p. 204). It is not just that conscious states replace one another in succession, but that they seem to involve logical relations (such as consistency) vis-à-vis their intentional relations. Martin attempts to cash this out in terms of mereological relations that suggest a holistic approach to consciousness (in opposition to an atomistic approach in which we would think of consciousness “as a kind of dynamic mosaic, with the identity of each tile fixed by its own specific quality, quite independently of the role it plays in the mosaic as a whole” [210]). Intentional determinacy and appropriate forms of consistency for specific kinds of intentionality (consistency in belief is differentiated from consistency in fear or desire) point to such holistic relations. Martin concludes by providing a helpful discussion of how these concepts relate to the critique of psychologism and to contemporary cognitive science.
The chapters by Tiezen and Martin raise issues that are ignored in most discussions of consciousness found in the philosophy of mind. Sean Kelly’s chapter also takes up a topic that is infrequently discussed in recent studies of consciousness, although it was often discussed in the first part of the 20th century--the question of the temporal structure of awareness. He examines the theory of the specious present, as found in James, Broad, and others, and he contrasts this theory with a theory of retention, the roots of which he traces to Locke and Hume, although the best expression of it is found in Husserl. Kelly provides some interesting historical notes on these approaches, and a critique of the notion of the specious present, which leads him to suggest that Husserl’s model of retention is superior to the specious present account. Kelly concludes by suggesting that further thinking about Merleau-Ponty’s notions of gaining and losing a perceptual grip on an indeterminate scene might help to give us a feel for what it is to experience something as just-about-to-be or as just-having-been.
Kay Mathiesen adds a discussion of a different sort of unity to the logical and temporal kinds explored by Martin and Kelly, namely, an intersubjective unity that might be found in collective consciousness. She explores different models of collective consciousness as inadequate: the group mind, which fails to capture plurality; the emergent mind, which, defined as a second-order consciousness that emerges from the interaction of individuals, runs into the problem that no one is aware of it; and the socially embedded mind, which fails to provide an account of collectivity. Mathiesen turns to Husserl and Alfred Schutz to discover a better model, although these too appear to be inadequate. Mathiesen finally turns to concepts of empathy (Stein) and, something more familiar to philosophers of mind, a somewhat standard view of the mentalistic task of how we understand “mental states of others” (243), specifically a version of simulation theory. I think that Mathiesen does put simulation theory to an innovative use, however. In this regard, let me mention Matthew Ratcliffe’s recent book, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology, in which he makes a similar move.[2]He suggests that in our attempts to understand others we do not attempt to simulate/mindread the other’s mental state; rather we simulate our possible relationship to the other person--a relationship that is better described in terms of embodied interactions. In addressing the question of collective subjectivity, Mathiesen suggests that “we are able to simulate the states of a collective subject of which we are members” (247).Mathiesen, however, continues to conceive of this process as one of simulating minds--a collective mind--collective beliefs, thoughts, and attitudes. In contrast, one could develop Ratcliffe’s suggestion in the direction taken by Mathiesen. That is, one could conceive of a collective intersubjectivity in terms of simulating how “we” as embodied subjects would typically behave and interact with one another. This way of putting it would actually be more faithful to Husserl’s example of an interpersonal unity, insofar as “ideals, values, and goals are embedded in our practices, habits … [and] We often say such things as ‘We should do such and such’” (247). No need to talk about a collective “consciousness” in this case, or to try to determine whether we mean that literally or metaphorically.
The final section of the volume concerns perception, sensation, and action. Clotilde Calabi offers an account of how to think of reasons for action in terms of perceptual saliences rather than in terms of internal beliefs. I act in a certain way, not because I have a certain belief or desire, but because the environment elicits the action. She cites the recent work of Noë on enactive perception, as well as Gibson’s notion of affordances, to develop an object theory of reasons. In the Gibsonian model, for example, perceptual saliencies are part of the objective world. But Calabi argues that saliences are normative properties, by which I take her to mean that they are properties that arise through my perceptual interactions with the world, and are guides for my action. In her turn of phrase, “My idea is that, for this class of reasons, it is the world that wears the trousers, although the world is a world that the agent has in view” (264).
Charles Siewert’s essay on sensorimotor intentionality strikes me as very consistent with Calabi’s general phenomenological approach, but builds more directly on the work of the Phenomenological tradition from Merleau-Ponty through Dreyfus. It also links up to Kelly’s discussion of temporality. Both Kelly and Siewert cite the same example of perceptual indeterminacy from Merleau-Ponty. If I am walking along a beach and see in the distance a ship that has run aground against the background of a forest that borders on the sand dune, it may at first appear that what later becomes clear as the ship’s mast indeterminately blends into the forest in a way that I could see it as the mast or as a tree. Kelly cites this as an example of an experience of something that is just-about-to-be, since I anticipate that it is in fact the mast, but the perception is not yet clear. Siewert also takes this experience to involve anticipation, but he is interested in what makes seeing the mast as a tree a mistaken perception. The anticipation, and whether it is fulfilled or proven wrong, is closely linked to what one does (p. 285), where what one does is some kind of activity that allows a better look, and this is based on sensorimotor skills. The intentionality involved in this experience is not best described as forming mental representations and comparing content. For Siewert, it is the kind of sensorimotor intentionality that Merleau-Ponty was trying to get at. What is interesting, given that Kelly and Siewert appeal to the same example, is to ask whether temporality, especially the temporality that is captured in Husserl’s retentional-protentional model, is intimately connected with our sensorimotor abilities. If so, it seems that Husserl’s model might also serve neuroscientists who insist on the anticipatory nature of sensory-motor processes.[3] Siewert suggests that doing the requisite action (and being prepared to do it) is not “a consequence or result of my anticipation of further visual appearances; it constitutes such anticipation” (290).Siewert may be right, but I think that this is a claim that deserves much more consideration. If he is right, then it is not so much that something like Husserl’s retentional-protentional model, which is primarily thought of as a model of mental experience, can mapped onto sensory-motor processes, but that that temporal structure of our mental experience is already shaped by the embodied processes connected with action possibilities. Thus, at the end of his essay, Siewert rightly raises the question of whether such experiences are possible for a disembodied (e.g., brain-in-the-vat) entity.
This leads us to the final chapter by José Luis Bermúdez on the phenomenology of bodily awareness. He focuses on certain distinctive modes of awareness of our own bodies, some more conscious than others, and some shaped by non-conscious proprioceptive information. Where Merleau-Ponty appears to place certain limitations on what natural science can tell us about the lived body, Bermúdez attempts to show how science may not be so limited, and may be able to work with Phenomenology to capture essential aspects of the experienced and experiencing body. He focuses specifically on understanding the experienced spatiality of the lived body as categorically different from the experienced spatiality of the world. As Merleau-Ponty well knew, we can develop an understanding of this difference from the study of various pathologies, and Bermúdez follows the same route in order to specify a number of different sources of information about the body, especially in the context of action. This provides the means for a more detailed interpretation of the famous Schneider example in the Phenomenology of Perception, but more importantly, it leads to a better understanding of the difference between the proprioceptive frame of reference within which one experiences one’s body, and the egocentric frame of reference for perception and action. This differentiation of spatiality not only clarifies our phenomenological experience and certain pathological cases, it also is consistent with scientific explanations of motor control, which further facilitates our understanding of bodily experience and action.
The scope of this collection of essays is important to note. By attending to and developing the contributions of Phenomenological analysis we not only gain rich insights into many of the standard issues explored by philosophy of mind, we also open new areas of consideration. The themes covered in this book range from the usual questions about phenomenal consciousness, self-awareness, intentionality, representation, perception, action and higher orders of cognition, to topics that are less frequently discussed in philosophy of mind, such as the temporality of experience, consciousness of abstract objects, the logical unity of consciousness, and the notion of collective consciousness. The essays are engaging and certainly worth studying. They also suggest that the Phenomenological tradition is alive and well.
Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
I don't think Livingston is attempting to fully explain the relationship of mind and body using modal logic; rather, I take it that he is using modal logic to show why the mind and body seem to consist of different stuff and to show that this needn't be the case though it strongly seems to be the case from our subjective point of view.
Edit: Note that Livingston is suggesting that consciousness cannot reduce itself to the physical using its own terms to map the physical. Livingston suggests that it doesn't follow that consciousness cannot be reduced to the physical, only that consciousness cannot do it using the terms/concepts it has access to from its pov. (At least that's what I understand him to be concluding.)
Livingston: "On the other, this irreducibility is then not to be accorded in the first instance to any supposed difference in metaphysical composition or substance between the physical and the phenomenal, or between matter and mind,**** but rather to the “transcendental” difference between the facts of the world, on the one hand, and the perspective from which it is possible to present these facts in general."******"
This is where I have said that we must not confuse our perception of reality, for reality.
That is to say, there is an objective reality—which we perceive and conceive as "the physical"—which is the ground of consciousness (subjectivity), but we (subjective beings) can't fully access it (objective Being) from our pov. We are a subsystem within the supersystem of reality.
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Michael Allen
Paranormal Adept
Quick reply... (from my phone)...so not complete. Answering the question with a question: are open systems complete? I other words is it possible to have a comprehensible and believable story of consciousness unfurl within the same world as that which gives consciousness it's ability to experience it's own unfurling? Do philosophers run away from closed systems?
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Michael Allen
Paranormal Adept
Regarding the collision.
We regard our experience by some preservation of a self-model in an already existing world for (and from) which we are already intimately involved. Prior to our understanding of ourselves we need relationships and connections -- which at first resolve as though we are the "reality creators" and the world of things is just a "means." First we have stories of the world and other beings, then we write stories about ourselves in disguise (myths). Every time "we" sense our own "being," is a collision of our world with itself through us. Consciousness through verfallen (Heidegger's term usually translated as "to fall")
smcder
Paranormal Adept
A couple of @Michael Allen 's posts from part 9 of this thread that may be helpful.
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 9
Conscious Robots: If We Really Had Free Will, What Would We Do All Day? - Kindle edition by Paul Kwatz. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 9
Conscious Robots: If We Really Had Free Will, What Would We Do All Day? - Kindle edition by Paul Kwatz. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
http://www07.homepage.villanova.edu/paul.livingston/Thinking and Being.pdf
Machination echoes being in an age that has completely forgotten it. Coming to the fore alongside the abandonment of being, machination fosters what is not proper to being (das Unwesen des Seins), what furthers its withdrawal and brings it to completion. But because it does nevertheless echo the essential sway of being, machination can also prepare the way for the event of Ereignis, in which be-ing (Seyn) comes into its own. The character of machination is thus deeply ambiguous; machination comes to the fore as an aspect of the absence and withdrawal of being, but nevertheless does so as an expression or aspect of being itself, and therefore harbors within itself the possibility of giving us a new understanding of it. This notion of the twofold or ambiguous nature of technology is a familiar theme of Heidegger’s later writings about technology. In all of these writings, technology retains a fundamental rootedness in being, even though it unfolds in alienation from what is proper to being. Thus, in Die Frage Nach Technik, Heidegger defines the essence of technology as ‘a revealing that conceals’. Technology is, first and foremost, a way that beings and the overall character of beings are revealed. But it is also a way of revealing that hides itself, concealing the interpretation of being that is at its basis. This ambiguity in the essence of technology leads, as well, to a deep ambiguity in its bearing on the future. For though technology is the utmost development of the forgetting and abandonment of being, it is also the site of an utmost danger that conceals the ‘saving power’, the possibility of a new beginning.17
17. The essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e., of truth. On the one hand, enframing challenges forth into the frenziedness of ordering that blocks every view into the propriative event of revealing and so radically endangers the relation to the essence of truth. On the other hand, enframing propriates for its part in the granting that lets man endure – as yet inexperienced, but perhaps more experienced in the future – that he may be the one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the essence of truth. Thus the rising of the saving power appears’. (‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in D. Ferrell Krell (ed.), Basic Writings (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), p. 338.)
Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind
Edited by David Woodruff Smith and Amie L. Thomasson
Description: Philosophical work on the mind flowed in two streams through the 20th century: phenomenology and analytic philosophy. This volume aims to bring them together again, by demonstrating how work in phenomenology may lead to significant progress on problems central to current analytic research, and how analytical philosophy of mind may shed light on phenomenological concerns. Leading figures from both traditions contribute specially written essays on such central topics as consciousness, intentionality, perception, action, self-knowledge, temporal awareness, and mental content. Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind demonstrates that these different approaches to the mind should not stand in opposition to each other, but can be mutually illuminating.
I. The Place of Phenomenology in Philosophy of Mind
1. Functionalism and Logical Analysis, Paul Livingston
2. Intentionality and Experience: Terminological Preliminaries, Galen Strawson
3. The Inescapability of Phenomenology, Taylor Carman
II: Self-Awareness and Self-Knowledge
4. Consciousness with Reflexive Content, David Woodruff Smith
5. First-Person Knowledge in Phenomenology, Amie L. Thomasson
6. Phenomenology and Cortical Microstimulation, John Bickle & Ralph Ellis
III. Intentionality
7. The Immanence Theory of Intentionality, Johannes L. Brandl
8. Consciousness of Abstract Objects, Richard Tieszen
IV. Unities of Consciousness
9. Husserl and the Logic of Consciousness, Wayne M. Martin
10. Temporal Awareness, Sean Dorrance Kelly
11. Collective Consciousness, Kay Mathieson
V. Perception, Sensation, and Action
12. Perceptual Saliences, Clothilde Calabi
13. Attention and Sensorimotor Intentionality, Charles Siewert
14. The Phenomenology of Bodily Awareness, Jose Luis Bermudez
Edited by David Woodruff Smith and Amie L. Thomasson
Description: Philosophical work on the mind flowed in two streams through the 20th century: phenomenology and analytic philosophy. This volume aims to bring them together again, by demonstrating how work in phenomenology may lead to significant progress on problems central to current analytic research, and how analytical philosophy of mind may shed light on phenomenological concerns. Leading figures from both traditions contribute specially written essays on such central topics as consciousness, intentionality, perception, action, self-knowledge, temporal awareness, and mental content. Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind demonstrates that these different approaches to the mind should not stand in opposition to each other, but can be mutually illuminating.
I. The Place of Phenomenology in Philosophy of Mind
1. Functionalism and Logical Analysis, Paul Livingston
2. Intentionality and Experience: Terminological Preliminaries, Galen Strawson
3. The Inescapability of Phenomenology, Taylor Carman
II: Self-Awareness and Self-Knowledge
4. Consciousness with Reflexive Content, David Woodruff Smith
5. First-Person Knowledge in Phenomenology, Amie L. Thomasson
6. Phenomenology and Cortical Microstimulation, John Bickle & Ralph Ellis
III. Intentionality
7. The Immanence Theory of Intentionality, Johannes L. Brandl
8. Consciousness of Abstract Objects, Richard Tieszen
IV. Unities of Consciousness
9. Husserl and the Logic of Consciousness, Wayne M. Martin
10. Temporal Awareness, Sean Dorrance Kelly
11. Collective Consciousness, Kay Mathieson
V. Perception, Sensation, and Action
12. Perceptual Saliences, Clothilde Calabi
13. Attention and Sensorimotor Intentionality, Charles Siewert
14. The Phenomenology of Bodily Awareness, Jose Luis Bermudez
Here is the beginning of a very interesting paper . . . . .
Unsaying Non-Knowledge: Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Writing
Ben Brewer, Pacific University
Abstract: Georges Bataille’s writing seems to teethe with something utterly foreign to the discipline of philosophy. In this paper, I investigate what Jason Wirth calls Bataille’s “mad game of writing” in order to show that Bataille’s bizarre writing style is actually an extension of his ethical and philosophical commitments. Bataille’s writing attempts to produce a state within the reader rather than simply transmit information. I trace the justifications and roots for such a writing from his own system, as well as showing how such a style of writing has its roots in Kantian aesthetics and in Hegel’s Phenomenology.
"I live by tangible experience and not by logical explanation. I have of the divine an experience so mad that one will laugh at me if I speak of it. I enter into a dead end. There all possibilities are exhausted; the “possible” slips away and the impossible prevails. To face the impossible — exorbitant, indubitable — when nothing possible any longer is in my eyes is to have an experience of the divine." --Inner Experience
How should, rather how can, one approach the work of Georges Bataille? Though exhilarating and refreshing, Bataille’s writing seems to resist philosophizing in any rigorous way: he makes wildly contradictory claims throughout his texts, peppers bizarre aphorisms and graphic accounts of sexual escapades and alcohol abuse throughout otherwise carefully argued essays, and seems to delight in the abuse of language rather than the science of argumentation. Bataille’s “mad game of writing” resists the very discipline within which it is situated (“The Dark Night” 129). This mad writing, however, is not an idiosyncratic form of expression of an otherwise unremarkable philosophical project. Rather, it serves a critical function and is a necessary consequence of Bataille’s ethical commitment to the critique of a mode of subjectivity he terms “project.”
Project, broadly speaking, is a mode of being-in-the-world in which we experience the world and the things that populate it as distinct from ourselves and as defined by their use. The division of the subject and the object introduced by project degrades the object by making it valuable only to some higher end, and degrades the subject. In entering the world of project, the subject “puts off existence” indefinitely (Inner Experience 46). The present becomes valuable only insofar as it is relatable to a future to come. Thus, to live in project, for Bataille, is “not to die but to be dead.” (46).
In response to this, Bataille attempts a performative writing capable of enacting, rather than describing, a unification of subject and object. He does this by bringing the reader to maddening experiences of aporia that call into question the apparatus of discursive reason and that provide an opening for the unification of subject and object. In this way, Bataille radically undermines the classic conception of what it means to do ethics or to act ethically and undertakes a writing that would not just describe, but would perform, enact, and breathe.
This analysis will require a close reading of Bataille’s thought, beginning with the intimacy of animality and the critique of project. Once the outline of Bataille’s thought and critiques have been traced, I will turn to Kant and Hegel to find the roots of Bataille’s commitment to the sovereignty of experience, and to track intimations of the possibility of a writing that would enact thought.
Animality
Let us begin, then, with Bataille’s conception of animality:
"animality is immediacy or immanence…the goshawk eating the hen does not distinguish it clearly from itself, in the same way that we distinguish an object from ourselves. The distinction requires a positing of the object as such. There does not exist any discernible difference if the object has not been posited…Between the animal that is eaten and the one that eats, there is no relation of subordination like that connecting an object, a thing, to man who refuses to be viewed as a thing (Theory of Religion 17-18).
Two remarkable themes emerge in this passage. The first is the claim that animality is “immanence.” This means the animal does not distinguish between itself as subject and its surroundings as objects or tools. Consequently, for Bataille, animals are conscious but not self-conscious. The animal does not plan to eat another animal with malice, calculation, guilt, hatred, or shame. It simply eats: “That one animal eats another scarcely alters a fundamental situation: every animal is in the world like water in water” (19). In the same way that one cannot distinguish in any rigorous way between different sections of a body of water, one cannot rigorously impose divisions of human reason and self-consciousness onto the animal world.
The passage also points to a consequence of the basic lack of determinacy: the absence of relations of reified power. The lion is not the king of the animals precisely because to be a king requires that one be acknowledged as such: “for a tiger to be a tiger, it does not first need tigertude. It just pounces” (“Animal Desiring” 99). A tiger does not think it has a “right” to eat the animals it eats, nor does it think in its eating it has secured its place of power over those animals lower than itself. It simply eats. Jason Wirth points out that this distinction corresponds to the distinction in German between essen and fressen. Essen is to eat in the everyday (i.e. “human”) sense of the term, while fressen refers to devouring and is applied to animals (100).
Bataille addresses this contrast between human and animal consumption, between essen and fressen, in Theory of Religion. For Bataille, the purpose of the preparation of meat, so unique to humanity, “is not pirmarily connected with a gastronomical pursuit” (Theory of Religion 39). Rather, it addresses the basic need of a discontinuous subject to “not eat anything before he has made an object of it” (39). If this seems like an abstract claim one need only consider the complete disconnect between the presentation of a foie grois desert in a $100 prixe-fixe restaruant versus the experiential reality of a factory foie grois farm where ducks are force-fed with tubes stuck down their throats. This making-object of essen stands in stark contrast to the simply-eating of fressen. Bataille’s animality, then, lacks the distinction between subject and object that defines the way we eat, and more broadly, the way we experience the world.
A Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing
Bataille is concerned with the possibility of living in the world “like water in water.” Is it possible for human beings to live in immanence, to live in “a world in which the beings are indiscriminately lost…[a world that] is superfluous, serves no purpose, has nothing to do, and means nothing: it only has a value in itself, not with a view to something else?” (Theory of Religion 13). In order to describe the difficulties of such a goal1 , Bataille carries out several critiques of projective (transcendent) subjectivity.
Though the critiques of project and rationality follow similar structures and are equiprimordial, it is easiest to begin with the critique of utility. According to utility, an object must have reference to some external end in order to be considered meaningful. In this mode of being-in-the-world, the tool is the primary example of meaning. Importantly, the tool “has no value in itself” and is only meaningful “in relation to an anticipated result” (Theory of Religion 28). While the truth of the tool lies in its usefulness towards a given end, the end is itself also grounded in utility. The tools of agriculture, to use Bataille’s example from Theory of Religion, are defined in terms of their usefulness to the cultivation of crops: a plow is only a plow so long as it accomplishes the goal of preparing soil for planting. The resulting food is, in turn, only valuable to the end of being eaten2 , which is only valuable in terms of its ability to sustain human life, which is only valuable in its ability to do work, etc.
The absurdity of this “endless deferral” is matched by the equal absurdity of “a true end, which would serve no purpose” (29). Either utility continues indefinitely such that no individual thing is valuable in itself, or the utility is grounded in something which is not itself useful. A “true end,” must be something with no use-value at all. This is true for two reasons. The first is clearly explicit in my preceding explanation: there must be something at the end of the line, so to speak, which grounds meaning. This is a purely logical objection. Meaning based in utility makes impossible the very thing it purports to offer: grounded meaning. The second necessity deals instead with Bataille’s ethical commitment to immanent subjectivity: “What a ‘true end’ reintroduces is the continuous being, lost in the world like water is lost in water” (29). The structure of the tool introduces a break into the continuity of animal experiencing. In order for me to use something as a tool, it must first be distinct from me. Once it is distinct from me, I am no longer in an immanent state of continuity with my world. The introduction of discontinuity into the indiscriminate immanence of existence is the condition of the possibility of a tool. To use a tool, therefore, is already to be in the realm of project.3
Bataille then introduces the dimension of temporality to the critique of utility in order to critique what he calls “project,” though it could easily be referred to as desire. Project denotes a mode of being-in-the-world in which time itself is experienced as an object to be enlisted in the favor of utility. The present becomes meaningful only insofar as its occurrences are useful in relation to the accomplishment of a (future) goal. The critique of this mode of being-in-the-world runs similarly to the critique of utility. First of all, I will never be fulfilled. This is the basic problem of desire or projection: desire is constituted on a lack. I can only desire something I do not have. More importantly, it will not actually fulfill my desire; my desire, instead, will simply reconstitute itself with a new object-cause, which will be equally unsatisfactory upon its acquisition. The infinite regress of utility-based meaning manifests itself here as the impossibility of satisfying desire.
The ethical problem of discontinuity, however, also reappears with the introduction of temporality. Right after the above-quoted passage about animality, Bataille also notes that the goshawk eating the hen exists in a way “in which nothing is given in time…in which nothing is given beyond the present” (18). For Bataille, the very division of time into past, present, and future introduces discontinuity and transcendence into the continuous oneness of immanence. This discontinuity is, for Bataille, the underlying problem of utility as well. The idea of discontinuity, either between subject and object or among past, present, and future, is the condition of the possibility of utility’s emergence. Nick Land explains, “Bataille’s thought of discontinuity is more intricate than his fluent deployment of the word might indicate. It is the condition for transcendent illusion” (Land 64). In this way the same critique of deferral applies to discontinuity: “Discontinuity is not ontologically grounded but positively fabricated” (64). The groundlessness of discontinuity is not, then, accidental to the groundlessness of deferral, but rather constitutive of it.
Finally, Bataille applies the critiques of utility and project to the practice of discursive reason. Broadly speaking, discursive reason is the practice of philosophy understood as explanation. Insofar as discursive reasoning always occurs within the context of elucidating something for a higher end, usually “truth,” it is based in project and utility. In contradistinction to this approach to philosophy, Bataille poses “sovereign nonknowledge”—a way of philosophizing that does not attempt to elucidate transcendent truths, but rather forces the reader into an experience (“Nonknowledge” 196).
Discursive reason also rests on the distinction between subject and object. In order to define something for explication or exploration, one must first delimit it from the manifold. I cannot give an account of what a chair is without first designating that a chair is some object distinct from all other possible objects in the world. This ontological problem of discursive reason points to the role that language plays in Bataille’s thought. Language rests on this same dividing up of the world. It rests on the ability to define a subject as distinct from an object. Even if I proclaim that I am thinking about myself, syntax necessitates that there is an “I” who is thinking (subject) and an “I” which is being thought about (object). This structural necessity is, for Bataille, “one of the most fateful aberrations of language” (Theory of Religion 28). Bataille’s non-knowledge, then, cannot simply be expressed in discursive language. Instead Bataille engages what Michael Sells calls “unsaying,” perverting and twisting language against itself in order to “engage the ineffable” (Sells 3).
In these critiques Bataille attempts to elucidate and undermine the very basis of transcendent subjectivity—discontinuity. The calling into question of the structure of discontinuity, between subject and world, between I and thou, undergirds all of Bataille’s thought.
Inner Experience
If the above critiques underlie and provide the basis for Bataille’s thought, then the possibility of overcoming these structures motivates it. In light of the critiques of the structures of transcendent subjectivity and in distinction to immanent animality, Bataille posits “inner experience” as the human possibility of being in the world “like water in water.” Inner experience, for Bataille, is a mode of being-in-the-world “in [which] transcendence is abolished” (On Nietzsche xxvi). This mode of being-in-the world would be one in which the ego the subject-object distinction are dissolved.
Given his critiques of transcendent subjectivity, it seems Bataille is setting up an argument for a return to nature or a return to animality. Though at times Bataille’s writing exhibits a profound nostalgia for the lost continuity of animality, inner experience is not a “return” to animality. Bataille’s writings clutch at the extreme limit of human experience, not an ascetic renouncement of experience’s possibilities. Though Bataille describes inner experience as immanence and intimacy, it is not—and cannot be—the intimacy of animality. In the discussion of animality in Theory of Religion, Bataille claims that “the animal cannot realize” moving through the world as water in water, implying that it is a distinctly human possibility to “realize” animality. Though this might initially sound like a value-claim about human truth over the mute existence of animality, it is in fact a logical necessity of Bataille’s commitment to immanence. Animality must always-already be part of humanity, or else it would succumb to the same fallacy as religion:
"Religion in general answered the desire that man always had to find himself, to regain an intimacy that was always strangely lost. But the mistake of all religion is to always give man a contradictory answer: an external form of intimacy (Accursed Share 129)."
For Bataille, religion addressed the very real yearning for intimacy and immanence, but did so by positing a transcendent and external god. Instead, inner experience must be a coming-forth of something latent in the subject. In this way, inner experience avoids the religious fallacy with which Bataille takes issue. Inner experience, then, is a state of immanence (intimacy) with the world reached not through external searching, but through a maieutic 4 bringing-to-knowledge of what was always-already latent within the subject.
The Hell of Desire . . . ."
http://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1082&context=rescogitans
Unsaying Non-Knowledge: Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Writing
Ben Brewer, Pacific University
Abstract: Georges Bataille’s writing seems to teethe with something utterly foreign to the discipline of philosophy. In this paper, I investigate what Jason Wirth calls Bataille’s “mad game of writing” in order to show that Bataille’s bizarre writing style is actually an extension of his ethical and philosophical commitments. Bataille’s writing attempts to produce a state within the reader rather than simply transmit information. I trace the justifications and roots for such a writing from his own system, as well as showing how such a style of writing has its roots in Kantian aesthetics and in Hegel’s Phenomenology.
"I live by tangible experience and not by logical explanation. I have of the divine an experience so mad that one will laugh at me if I speak of it. I enter into a dead end. There all possibilities are exhausted; the “possible” slips away and the impossible prevails. To face the impossible — exorbitant, indubitable — when nothing possible any longer is in my eyes is to have an experience of the divine." --Inner Experience
How should, rather how can, one approach the work of Georges Bataille? Though exhilarating and refreshing, Bataille’s writing seems to resist philosophizing in any rigorous way: he makes wildly contradictory claims throughout his texts, peppers bizarre aphorisms and graphic accounts of sexual escapades and alcohol abuse throughout otherwise carefully argued essays, and seems to delight in the abuse of language rather than the science of argumentation. Bataille’s “mad game of writing” resists the very discipline within which it is situated (“The Dark Night” 129). This mad writing, however, is not an idiosyncratic form of expression of an otherwise unremarkable philosophical project. Rather, it serves a critical function and is a necessary consequence of Bataille’s ethical commitment to the critique of a mode of subjectivity he terms “project.”
Project, broadly speaking, is a mode of being-in-the-world in which we experience the world and the things that populate it as distinct from ourselves and as defined by their use. The division of the subject and the object introduced by project degrades the object by making it valuable only to some higher end, and degrades the subject. In entering the world of project, the subject “puts off existence” indefinitely (Inner Experience 46). The present becomes valuable only insofar as it is relatable to a future to come. Thus, to live in project, for Bataille, is “not to die but to be dead.” (46).
In response to this, Bataille attempts a performative writing capable of enacting, rather than describing, a unification of subject and object. He does this by bringing the reader to maddening experiences of aporia that call into question the apparatus of discursive reason and that provide an opening for the unification of subject and object. In this way, Bataille radically undermines the classic conception of what it means to do ethics or to act ethically and undertakes a writing that would not just describe, but would perform, enact, and breathe.
This analysis will require a close reading of Bataille’s thought, beginning with the intimacy of animality and the critique of project. Once the outline of Bataille’s thought and critiques have been traced, I will turn to Kant and Hegel to find the roots of Bataille’s commitment to the sovereignty of experience, and to track intimations of the possibility of a writing that would enact thought.
Animality
Let us begin, then, with Bataille’s conception of animality:
"animality is immediacy or immanence…the goshawk eating the hen does not distinguish it clearly from itself, in the same way that we distinguish an object from ourselves. The distinction requires a positing of the object as such. There does not exist any discernible difference if the object has not been posited…Between the animal that is eaten and the one that eats, there is no relation of subordination like that connecting an object, a thing, to man who refuses to be viewed as a thing (Theory of Religion 17-18).
Two remarkable themes emerge in this passage. The first is the claim that animality is “immanence.” This means the animal does not distinguish between itself as subject and its surroundings as objects or tools. Consequently, for Bataille, animals are conscious but not self-conscious. The animal does not plan to eat another animal with malice, calculation, guilt, hatred, or shame. It simply eats: “That one animal eats another scarcely alters a fundamental situation: every animal is in the world like water in water” (19). In the same way that one cannot distinguish in any rigorous way between different sections of a body of water, one cannot rigorously impose divisions of human reason and self-consciousness onto the animal world.
The passage also points to a consequence of the basic lack of determinacy: the absence of relations of reified power. The lion is not the king of the animals precisely because to be a king requires that one be acknowledged as such: “for a tiger to be a tiger, it does not first need tigertude. It just pounces” (“Animal Desiring” 99). A tiger does not think it has a “right” to eat the animals it eats, nor does it think in its eating it has secured its place of power over those animals lower than itself. It simply eats. Jason Wirth points out that this distinction corresponds to the distinction in German between essen and fressen. Essen is to eat in the everyday (i.e. “human”) sense of the term, while fressen refers to devouring and is applied to animals (100).
Bataille addresses this contrast between human and animal consumption, between essen and fressen, in Theory of Religion. For Bataille, the purpose of the preparation of meat, so unique to humanity, “is not pirmarily connected with a gastronomical pursuit” (Theory of Religion 39). Rather, it addresses the basic need of a discontinuous subject to “not eat anything before he has made an object of it” (39). If this seems like an abstract claim one need only consider the complete disconnect between the presentation of a foie grois desert in a $100 prixe-fixe restaruant versus the experiential reality of a factory foie grois farm where ducks are force-fed with tubes stuck down their throats. This making-object of essen stands in stark contrast to the simply-eating of fressen. Bataille’s animality, then, lacks the distinction between subject and object that defines the way we eat, and more broadly, the way we experience the world.
A Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing
Bataille is concerned with the possibility of living in the world “like water in water.” Is it possible for human beings to live in immanence, to live in “a world in which the beings are indiscriminately lost…[a world that] is superfluous, serves no purpose, has nothing to do, and means nothing: it only has a value in itself, not with a view to something else?” (Theory of Religion 13). In order to describe the difficulties of such a goal1 , Bataille carries out several critiques of projective (transcendent) subjectivity.
Though the critiques of project and rationality follow similar structures and are equiprimordial, it is easiest to begin with the critique of utility. According to utility, an object must have reference to some external end in order to be considered meaningful. In this mode of being-in-the-world, the tool is the primary example of meaning. Importantly, the tool “has no value in itself” and is only meaningful “in relation to an anticipated result” (Theory of Religion 28). While the truth of the tool lies in its usefulness towards a given end, the end is itself also grounded in utility. The tools of agriculture, to use Bataille’s example from Theory of Religion, are defined in terms of their usefulness to the cultivation of crops: a plow is only a plow so long as it accomplishes the goal of preparing soil for planting. The resulting food is, in turn, only valuable to the end of being eaten2 , which is only valuable in terms of its ability to sustain human life, which is only valuable in its ability to do work, etc.
The absurdity of this “endless deferral” is matched by the equal absurdity of “a true end, which would serve no purpose” (29). Either utility continues indefinitely such that no individual thing is valuable in itself, or the utility is grounded in something which is not itself useful. A “true end,” must be something with no use-value at all. This is true for two reasons. The first is clearly explicit in my preceding explanation: there must be something at the end of the line, so to speak, which grounds meaning. This is a purely logical objection. Meaning based in utility makes impossible the very thing it purports to offer: grounded meaning. The second necessity deals instead with Bataille’s ethical commitment to immanent subjectivity: “What a ‘true end’ reintroduces is the continuous being, lost in the world like water is lost in water” (29). The structure of the tool introduces a break into the continuity of animal experiencing. In order for me to use something as a tool, it must first be distinct from me. Once it is distinct from me, I am no longer in an immanent state of continuity with my world. The introduction of discontinuity into the indiscriminate immanence of existence is the condition of the possibility of a tool. To use a tool, therefore, is already to be in the realm of project.3
Bataille then introduces the dimension of temporality to the critique of utility in order to critique what he calls “project,” though it could easily be referred to as desire. Project denotes a mode of being-in-the-world in which time itself is experienced as an object to be enlisted in the favor of utility. The present becomes meaningful only insofar as its occurrences are useful in relation to the accomplishment of a (future) goal. The critique of this mode of being-in-the-world runs similarly to the critique of utility. First of all, I will never be fulfilled. This is the basic problem of desire or projection: desire is constituted on a lack. I can only desire something I do not have. More importantly, it will not actually fulfill my desire; my desire, instead, will simply reconstitute itself with a new object-cause, which will be equally unsatisfactory upon its acquisition. The infinite regress of utility-based meaning manifests itself here as the impossibility of satisfying desire.
The ethical problem of discontinuity, however, also reappears with the introduction of temporality. Right after the above-quoted passage about animality, Bataille also notes that the goshawk eating the hen exists in a way “in which nothing is given in time…in which nothing is given beyond the present” (18). For Bataille, the very division of time into past, present, and future introduces discontinuity and transcendence into the continuous oneness of immanence. This discontinuity is, for Bataille, the underlying problem of utility as well. The idea of discontinuity, either between subject and object or among past, present, and future, is the condition of the possibility of utility’s emergence. Nick Land explains, “Bataille’s thought of discontinuity is more intricate than his fluent deployment of the word might indicate. It is the condition for transcendent illusion” (Land 64). In this way the same critique of deferral applies to discontinuity: “Discontinuity is not ontologically grounded but positively fabricated” (64). The groundlessness of discontinuity is not, then, accidental to the groundlessness of deferral, but rather constitutive of it.
Finally, Bataille applies the critiques of utility and project to the practice of discursive reason. Broadly speaking, discursive reason is the practice of philosophy understood as explanation. Insofar as discursive reasoning always occurs within the context of elucidating something for a higher end, usually “truth,” it is based in project and utility. In contradistinction to this approach to philosophy, Bataille poses “sovereign nonknowledge”—a way of philosophizing that does not attempt to elucidate transcendent truths, but rather forces the reader into an experience (“Nonknowledge” 196).
Discursive reason also rests on the distinction between subject and object. In order to define something for explication or exploration, one must first delimit it from the manifold. I cannot give an account of what a chair is without first designating that a chair is some object distinct from all other possible objects in the world. This ontological problem of discursive reason points to the role that language plays in Bataille’s thought. Language rests on this same dividing up of the world. It rests on the ability to define a subject as distinct from an object. Even if I proclaim that I am thinking about myself, syntax necessitates that there is an “I” who is thinking (subject) and an “I” which is being thought about (object). This structural necessity is, for Bataille, “one of the most fateful aberrations of language” (Theory of Religion 28). Bataille’s non-knowledge, then, cannot simply be expressed in discursive language. Instead Bataille engages what Michael Sells calls “unsaying,” perverting and twisting language against itself in order to “engage the ineffable” (Sells 3).
In these critiques Bataille attempts to elucidate and undermine the very basis of transcendent subjectivity—discontinuity. The calling into question of the structure of discontinuity, between subject and world, between I and thou, undergirds all of Bataille’s thought.
Inner Experience
If the above critiques underlie and provide the basis for Bataille’s thought, then the possibility of overcoming these structures motivates it. In light of the critiques of the structures of transcendent subjectivity and in distinction to immanent animality, Bataille posits “inner experience” as the human possibility of being in the world “like water in water.” Inner experience, for Bataille, is a mode of being-in-the-world “in [which] transcendence is abolished” (On Nietzsche xxvi). This mode of being-in-the world would be one in which the ego the subject-object distinction are dissolved.
Given his critiques of transcendent subjectivity, it seems Bataille is setting up an argument for a return to nature or a return to animality. Though at times Bataille’s writing exhibits a profound nostalgia for the lost continuity of animality, inner experience is not a “return” to animality. Bataille’s writings clutch at the extreme limit of human experience, not an ascetic renouncement of experience’s possibilities. Though Bataille describes inner experience as immanence and intimacy, it is not—and cannot be—the intimacy of animality. In the discussion of animality in Theory of Religion, Bataille claims that “the animal cannot realize” moving through the world as water in water, implying that it is a distinctly human possibility to “realize” animality. Though this might initially sound like a value-claim about human truth over the mute existence of animality, it is in fact a logical necessity of Bataille’s commitment to immanence. Animality must always-already be part of humanity, or else it would succumb to the same fallacy as religion:
"Religion in general answered the desire that man always had to find himself, to regain an intimacy that was always strangely lost. But the mistake of all religion is to always give man a contradictory answer: an external form of intimacy (Accursed Share 129)."
For Bataille, religion addressed the very real yearning for intimacy and immanence, but did so by positing a transcendent and external god. Instead, inner experience must be a coming-forth of something latent in the subject. In this way, inner experience avoids the religious fallacy with which Bataille takes issue. Inner experience, then, is a state of immanence (intimacy) with the world reached not through external searching, but through a maieutic 4 bringing-to-knowledge of what was always-already latent within the subject.
The Hell of Desire . . . ."
http://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1082&context=rescogitans
Last edited:
From the last paragraph quoted from the Brewer paper on Bataille above:
1. "Inner experience . . . is a state of immanence (intimacy) with the world reached not through external searching, but through a maieutic bringing-to-knowledge of what was always-already latent within the subject."
2. From Merriam-Webster:
"maieutic: relating to or resembling the Socratic method of eliciting new ideas from another.
Explication: Dialectic is a term used in philosophy, and the fact that it is closely connected to the ideas of Socrates and Plato is completely logical—even from an etymological point of view. Plato’s famous dialogues frequently presented Socrates playing a leading role, and dialogue comes from the Greek roots dia- (“through” or “across”) and -logue (“discourse” or “talk”). Dialect and dialectic come from dialecktos (“conversation” or “dialect”) and ultimately back to the Greek word dialegesthai, meaning “to converse.”
Conversation or dialogue was indeed at the heart of the “Socratic method,” through which Socrates would ask probing questions which cumulatively revealed his students’ unsupported assumptions and misconceptions. The goal, according to the definition in our Unabridged Dictionary, was to “elicit a clear and consistent expression of something supposed to be implicitly known by all rational beings.”
Other philosophers had specific uses of the term dialectic, including Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, and Marxism. Asking a series of questions was considered by Socrates a method of “giving birth” to the truth, and a related word, maieutic, defined as “relating to or resembling the Socratic method of eliciting new ideas from another,” comes from the Greek word meaning “of midwifery.”
Maieutic comes from "maieutikos," the Greek word for "of midwifery." In one of Plato's "Dialogues," Socrates applies "maieutikos" to his method of bringing forth new ideas by reasoning and dialogue; he thought the technique analogous to those a midwife uses in delivering a baby (Socrates’ mother was a midwife). A teacher who uses maieutic methods can be thought of as an intellectual midwife who assists students in bringing forth ideas and conceptions previously latent in their minds."
3. "For Bataille, religion addressed the very real yearning for intimacy and immanence, but did so by positing a transcendent and external god. Instead, inner experience must be a coming-forth of something latent in the subject. In this way, inner experience avoids the religious fallacy with which Bataille takes issue. Inner experience, then, is a state of immanence (intimacy) with the world reached not through external searching, but through a maieutic bringing-to-knowledge of what was always-already latent within the subject.
4. Merleau-Ponty: "The world is pregnant with meaning."
1. "Inner experience . . . is a state of immanence (intimacy) with the world reached not through external searching, but through a maieutic bringing-to-knowledge of what was always-already latent within the subject."
2. From Merriam-Webster:
"maieutic: relating to or resembling the Socratic method of eliciting new ideas from another.
Explication: Dialectic is a term used in philosophy, and the fact that it is closely connected to the ideas of Socrates and Plato is completely logical—even from an etymological point of view. Plato’s famous dialogues frequently presented Socrates playing a leading role, and dialogue comes from the Greek roots dia- (“through” or “across”) and -logue (“discourse” or “talk”). Dialect and dialectic come from dialecktos (“conversation” or “dialect”) and ultimately back to the Greek word dialegesthai, meaning “to converse.”
Conversation or dialogue was indeed at the heart of the “Socratic method,” through which Socrates would ask probing questions which cumulatively revealed his students’ unsupported assumptions and misconceptions. The goal, according to the definition in our Unabridged Dictionary, was to “elicit a clear and consistent expression of something supposed to be implicitly known by all rational beings.”
Other philosophers had specific uses of the term dialectic, including Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, and Marxism. Asking a series of questions was considered by Socrates a method of “giving birth” to the truth, and a related word, maieutic, defined as “relating to or resembling the Socratic method of eliciting new ideas from another,” comes from the Greek word meaning “of midwifery.”
Maieutic comes from "maieutikos," the Greek word for "of midwifery." In one of Plato's "Dialogues," Socrates applies "maieutikos" to his method of bringing forth new ideas by reasoning and dialogue; he thought the technique analogous to those a midwife uses in delivering a baby (Socrates’ mother was a midwife). A teacher who uses maieutic methods can be thought of as an intellectual midwife who assists students in bringing forth ideas and conceptions previously latent in their minds."
3. "For Bataille, religion addressed the very real yearning for intimacy and immanence, but did so by positing a transcendent and external god. Instead, inner experience must be a coming-forth of something latent in the subject. In this way, inner experience avoids the religious fallacy with which Bataille takes issue. Inner experience, then, is a state of immanence (intimacy) with the world reached not through external searching, but through a maieutic bringing-to-knowledge of what was always-already latent within the subject.
4. Merleau-Ponty: "The world is pregnant with meaning."
I'm hoping to read responses to Bataille's ideas from all of you. I have a feeling that @Michael Allen might be able to identify with much of Bataille's thinking except perhaps Bataille's primary drive toward the disclosure and understanding of immanence as our escape from the vexations of dualistic habits of thought.
Reposting this poem by Stevens, one of many in which he evokes the sense of immanence that occasionally arises for us even in the midst of abstract discourse.
ON THE ROAD HOME
It was when I said,
"There is no such thing as the truth,"
That the grapes seemed fatter.
The fox ran out of his hole.
You . . . You said,
"There are many truths,
But they are not parts of a truth."
Then the tree, at night, began to change,
Smoking through green and smoking blue.
We were two figures in a wood.
We said we stood alone.
It was when I said,
"Words are not forms of a single word.
In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
The world must be measured by eye."
It was when you said,
"The idols have seen lots of poverty,
Snakes and gold and lice,
But not the truth";
It was at that time, that the silence was largest,
And longest, the night was roundest.
The fragrance of the autumn warmest,
Closest, and strongest.
ON THE ROAD HOME
It was when I said,
"There is no such thing as the truth,"
That the grapes seemed fatter.
The fox ran out of his hole.
You . . . You said,
"There are many truths,
But they are not parts of a truth."
Then the tree, at night, began to change,
Smoking through green and smoking blue.
We were two figures in a wood.
We said we stood alone.
It was when I said,
"Words are not forms of a single word.
In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
The world must be measured by eye."
It was when you said,
"The idols have seen lots of poverty,
Snakes and gold and lice,
But not the truth";
It was at that time, that the silence was largest,
And longest, the night was roundest.
The fragrance of the autumn warmest,
Closest, and strongest.
Is it 'consciousness' or 'mind' that "falls into itself" or "collides with itself through[?] the world"? Why not "in-the-world" rather than "through it"? 'Through' suggests a dualism in which consciousness is presupposed to be ontologically separate from the physical and biological world that produces it/out of which it emerges. The irreducibility of consciousness consists in the multivalent aspects of lived experience in the world which overflows categories/categorical thinking. It is in the development of 'mind' that the ineffable fullness of experience is reduced by systematic thinking. Or so it seems to me.
I wonder why you reduce the historical [and prehistorical] panorama of questions evoked by the plenitude, variety, and complexity of conscious experiences expressed by our species {and preconscious experiences bearing upon them} to "symbols and noises." Would you provide examples to support your viewpoint. Language evolves out of grunts and gestures used to express meanings by our prelinguistic forebears. Once in language, our species thinks in terms of symbols to express experiences and meanings that surpass complete understanding. WS surveyed the significance of human symbols taken up and discarded over time and arrived at an insight into the significance of symbols as consisting not in the succession of symbols themselves but "in that for which the symbol stands" -- i.e., for the very nature of ontological questioning that originated long before our time and continues into it.
What do you think those 'operators' will be, consist in? And what do you suppose their origins are or will be?
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ETA: Scratch that phrase in red. It seems rather that we humans have predominantly built in our thinking from the limited categorical structures of our species' prior thought -- ie., not from the full range, depth, and ambiguity of our experiences in-the-world, but from rationalizations of that experience.
Questions for both Steve [correction: @Soupie] and @Michael Allen regarding these posts . . .
Steve wrote in response to MA:
"As always, the caveat that the meaning I take from your writing is likely not the meaning you mean it to mean. In any case, the apparent fundamental inability of the questioner to ask relevant questions regarding the nature of its ability to question is not unlike, I think, the problem I've been articulating of the perceiver attempting to accurately perceive the nature of its perceptual apparatus."
Would you [and also MA] explain the basis for this claim: "the apparent fundamental inability of the questioner to ask relevant questions regarding the nature of its ability to question"?
which you go on to liken to: "the problem I've been articulating of the perceiver attempting to accurately perceive the nature of its perceptual apparatus."
Re the first claim, I think we have, over much of the history of human philosophy, asked "relevant questions regarding the nature of [our] ability to question," and that we are still attempting to ground adequate answers to those questions in both analytic and phenomenological philosophy. The plain fact is that our species has been moved to think beyond what we experience in the world to the question of the relation of our experience to the nature of the world/World in which we find ourselves existing.
Re the second problem you (Steve) [correction: @Soupie] see concerning our "ability to accurately perceive the nature of [our] perceptual apparatus," I'm supposing from the word 'apparatus' that you are referring to some contemporary postulations concerning human perception derived from information theory, computational theories of mind, and the resulting matrix meme. Might these objectifying and remote theories concerning the nature of human perception turn out to be valid? Maybe, but we have to ignore the entire nature of perception as analyzed and explicated in phenomenological philosophy in order to think so. My usual complaint: one cannot reasonably set aside phenomenological insights into the nature of human perception before understanding what they are in detail, as expressed in the major texts of phenomenology.
You continued to MA:
"I'd still like you to attempt to articulate why you insist that misunderstanding is a necessary condition of being and/or consciousness. I have my own ideas of why this might be, but they're likely worlds away from your conception. I think of it in terms of singularity versus differentiation."
I too would like to hear MA's articulation of the grounds on which he "insist that misunderstanding is a necessary condition of being and/or consciousness." And also what you mean by construing the same misunderstanding in terms of "singularity versus differentiation."
ETA: I don't know why the strike-throughs showed in the last few lines above, nor how to fix it.
Steve wrote in response to MA:
"As always, the caveat that the meaning I take from your writing is likely not the meaning you mean it to mean. In any case, the apparent fundamental inability of the questioner to ask relevant questions regarding the nature of its ability to question is not unlike, I think, the problem I've been articulating of the perceiver attempting to accurately perceive the nature of its perceptual apparatus."
Would you [and also MA] explain the basis for this claim: "the apparent fundamental inability of the questioner to ask relevant questions regarding the nature of its ability to question"?
which you go on to liken to: "the problem I've been articulating of the perceiver attempting to accurately perceive the nature of its perceptual apparatus."
Re the first claim, I think we have, over much of the history of human philosophy, asked "relevant questions regarding the nature of [our] ability to question," and that we are still attempting to ground adequate answers to those questions in both analytic and phenomenological philosophy. The plain fact is that our species has been moved to think beyond what we experience in the world to the question of the relation of our experience to the nature of the world/World in which we find ourselves existing.
Re the second problem you (Steve) [correction: @Soupie] see concerning our "ability to accurately perceive the nature of [our] perceptual apparatus," I'm supposing from the word 'apparatus' that you are referring to some contemporary postulations concerning human perception derived from information theory, computational theories of mind, and the resulting matrix meme. Might these objectifying and remote theories concerning the nature of human perception turn out to be valid? Maybe, but we have to ignore the entire nature of perception as analyzed and explicated in phenomenological philosophy in order to think so. My usual complaint: one cannot reasonably set aside phenomenological insights into the nature of human perception before understanding what they are in detail, as expressed in the major texts of phenomenology.
You continued to MA:
"I'd still like you to attempt to articulate why you insist that misunderstanding is a necessary condition of being and/or consciousness. I have my own ideas of why this might be, but they're likely worlds away from your conception. I think of it in terms of singularity versus differentiation."
I too would like to hear MA's articulation of the grounds on which he "insist
ETA: I don't know why the strike-throughs showed in the last few lines above, nor how to fix it.
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