@Pharoah, are you still in the vicinity?
@Soupie seems to have gone in search of other pastures and
@smcder is occupied with the care of a relative for a few days. I've located the paper on Kant and Husserl that I mentioned to you recently, which might come in handy as you read Husserl and references to him by the other phenomenologists:
Taking a Transcendental Stance: Anti-Representationalism and Direct Realism in Kant and Husserl | Julia Jansen - Academia.edu
EXTRACTS
“The whole point of Kant’s notion of a
transcendental synthesis of the imagination – understood as an influence of the understanding on inner sense – is to explain the necessity of what in experience is only observable as a contingent fact: that in conscious intuitions we are always given objects (or, to be more precise, we are always given undetermined appearances that are determinable in judgments as objects), and not mere sensations. Moreover, the very plausibility of such an empirical doctrine of representations is itself largely based on a further confusion of empirical and transcendental levels of analysis. It ‘naturally’ follows from an empirical reading of claims repeatedly made by Kant, that appearances are ‘mere representations’ and, as such, ‘in us’. In the empirical sense of the expression, this would distinguish things ‘in us’ (understood as internal representations) from things ‘outside us’ (understood as external objects). However, in Kant’s
transcendental sense of the expression, it distinguishes things not distinct from us (and our ways of cognizing them) from things distinct from us (and our ways of cognizing them); that is, it distinguishes things as appearances from things in themselves (cf. Allison, 2004; Allais, 2011, p. 384). I say more about the impact of this distinction on Kant’s notion of realism below, but its impact on Kant’s anti-representationalist theory of intuitions is already clear: Due to Kant’s distinction between the empirical and the transcendental senses of the expression, it holds without contradiction that objects of outer sense are both (empirically) ‘outside us’ and (transcendentally) ‘in us’, i.e., they are both external and mind-dependent. In conclusion, intuitions are, as Derk Pereboom puts it, “immediate awarenesses” of objects (Pereboom, 1988, pp. 326, 338).
This holds both for empirical intuitions, which are our immediate awarenesses of empirical objects (of outer or inner sense), and for pure intuitions, which are our immediate awarenesses of formal objects (of space or time as objects). The fact that Kant is still accused of advancing a representationalist theory of representations betrays the force the post-Cartesian legacy of the ‘way of ideas’ continues to hold over debates in philosophy of mind, consciousness and cognition more generally. It is also symptomatic of a persisting confusion of empirical and transcendental levels of analysis, which continues to obscure the radicality with which Kant reconfigured the post-Cartesian philosophical landscape once and for all.
[6 This is, of course, not to deny that intuition “takes place only insofar as the object is given to us” and that this “is possible only […] by the mind’s being affected in a certain manner” (KrV, A 19/B 33). It is just to make the point that, for Kant, the mind’s sensibility is not merely passive but in virtue of the imagination also spontaneous. Contrary to representationalisms that, as Rorty (1979) famously put it, consider the mind’s sensibility a passive ‘mirror of nature’, Kant’s transcendental idealism involves the claim that the way objects are given to us in intuition is already under the “effect of the understanding”(Rorty, of course, misses that both Kant and Husserl reject a ‘mirroring’ representationalism.) To call the synthesis of the imagination that is the “first application” (KrV, B 152) of the understanding’s effect on sensibility “transcendental” is also to say that the mind does not, in a first step, merely receive sensations, and then, in a second step, empirically synthesize them into intuitions. The same empirical fallacy is committed by interpretations that locate the second step not in the imagination but in judgement (for the most recent attempt see Abela, 2002). It is committed by any interpretation that involves a theory of two steps and thus turns Kant’s transcendental theory into the description of an empirical process.]
… Despite the ubiquity of ‘representation’ in the philosophical and psychological discourse of his day, Husserl observed the lack of consensus in its use and meaning. In the
Logical Investigations, Husserl counts no less than thirteen different senses of ‘representation’ (5th Inv., § 44). His is a very broad understanding of the term; all consciousness is a case of ‘representing’ (
Vorstellen) (2nd Inv., § 23). Consciousness in its broadest sense, he writes, is “a comprehensive designation for ‘mental acts’, or ‘intentional experiences [
Erlebnisse]’”, i.e., representations, “of all sorts” (5th Inv.:Hua XIX/1, § 1, p. 356). However, by characterizing representations as ‘lived through (
erlebte)’ acts of consciousness, Husserl rejects Brentano’s and, for that matter, any other notion of representations as ‘internal objects’ or ‘psychological entities’. {NB Stevens’s “poem in the act of finding what will suffice.”} In opposition to such theories, Husserl considers representations as
modes of being conscious of something, i.e.,
as modes of intentionality (for example, ‘perceptual representation’ is ‘perceptual consciousness’, ‘phantasy representation(
Phantasievorstellung )’ is ‘phantasy consciousness’, etc.). In short, even for the early Husserl,
having a representation of a particular kind (e.g., an intuitive representation)
is being conscious of an object in a particular mode (e.g., intuitively). With his distinction between intuitive presentations and signitive (or symbolic)representations, Husserl reappropriates the Kantian distinction between intuitions and concepts.
Intuitive representations are sensory or quasi-sensory representations, e.g, perceptions, memories, phantasies. Having intuitive representations means intuiting(e.g., seeing, touching, hearing, etc.) objects in their spatio-temporal specifications and with their determining sensible (visual, haptic, audial etc.) features. Husserl, like Kant, considers them immediate, albeit not necessarily veridical, awarenesses of actual objects, which are thus given ‘in the flesh’ or ‘in person’.
7 Intuitions, in this sense, are thus precisely not internal objects that mediate our experience of the world. Rather, they are our experiences of external, or, in Husserl’s language, ‘transcendent’objects, i.e., of objects that are different from us and our mental states.
Accordingly, already in the Logical Investigations
Husserl forcefully condemns the theory of internal objects as “one of the worst conceptual distortions known to philosophy” which “is without doubt responsible for an untold legion of epistemological and psychological errors” (2nd Inv.: Hua XIX/1, § 23, p. 170). In an appendix to the fifth Investigation, which is unambiguously entititled “Critique of the ‘image theory’ and of the doctrine of the ‘immanent’ objects of acts”, Husserl makes it perfectly clear “that the intentional object of a representation is the same as its actual object, and on occasion as its external object, and that it is absurd to distinguish between them” (5thInv., Appendix to § 11 and § 20: Hua XIX/1, p. 439).]
In Husserl’s view, as long as “one deals with mental processes as ‘contents’ or as psychical ‘elements’ which are still regarded as bits of things [
Sächelchen]” (
Ideas I :Hua III/1, § 112, p. 253), no progress towards an adequate theory of consciousness can be made.
Thus Husserl (like Kant) rejects an empirical doctrine of representations and considers a representation not as something one apprehends (as itself an object, a ‘Sächelchen’), but as something in virtue of which one apprehends an object. In Ideas I, in the context of an explicitly transcendental analysis, Husserl speaks of a relation between ‘transcendental’ (i.e., constituting) consciousness and ‘transcendent’ (i.e.,constituted) object. In the case of perceptual consciousness, Husserl claims, this object is nothing other than the ‘physical thing’ perceived, which simply “cannot be given in any possible perception as something really [
reell ] inherently immanent,” but is “in itself, unqualifiedly
transcendent ” (Hua III/1, § 42, p. 87). Again, Husserl (like Kant) rejects an empirical idea of perceptual objects as ‘mere representations’ as ‘really inherently immanent’ (‘in us’). In his
transcendental sense of the expression, ‘intentional objects’ refers to things that are not distinct from us (and our ways of cognizing them); that is, it refers to transcendent things
insofar as
they stand in a relation to consciousness.
With his transcendental standpoint in place, Husserl begins to avoid the term ‘representation’, which is so difficult to divest of empirical confusions, and replaces it with a pair of technical terms that are meant to capture both the subjective and the objective moments of intentionality: ‘noesis’ (the act of intention) and ‘noema’ (the object as it is intended). And yet, the noema, no less than the old-fashioned ‘representation’, has motivated representationalist interpretations. The contentious issue is Husserl’s distinction between the noema and the intended object. In
Ideas I he famously writes:
“The tree simpliciter, the thing in nature, could not be more different from the perceived tree as such that, as perceptual sense, inseparably belongs to the perception. The tree simpliciter can burn down, can be reduced to its chemical elements, etc. But the sense—the sense of this perception, something that necessarily belongs to its essential being—can not burn down (Hua III/1, § 89, p. 205).”
Husserl thereby returns to a distinction that he already makes in the
Logical Investigations, namely a distinction “between the object
tout court [
schlechthin], which is intended on a given occasion, and the object
as it is then intended” (5th Inv.:Hua XIX/1, § 17, p. 414). This distinction is often interpreted as a clear expression of Husserl’s representationalism because it appears to posit the noema as a third entity between consciousness and the ‘object
tout court’. However, the following passage can also be found in
Ideas I:
“I perceive the physical thing, the Object belonging to Nature, the tree there in the garden; that and nothing else is the actual Object of the perceptual ‘intention.’ A second immanental tree, or even an ‘internal image’ of the actual tree standing out there before me, is in no way given, and to suppose that hypothetically leads to an absurdity (Hua III/1, § 90, pp. 207-208).”
Here Husserl affirms the identity of the noema with the intended object – a view that can be described as anti-representationalist in the sense in which I have been using it. The apparent conflict between the two passages is again due to a confusion of empirical and transcendental levels of analysis.
[8 This confusion also results in the conflicting ‘East Coast’ and ‘West Coast’ interpretations of the noema; the former is a transcendental, the latter is an empirical reading.]
When Husserl speaks of an inflammable ‘tree
simpliciter’ and opposes it to the non-inflammable ‘sense’ of its perception, he makes the empirical distinction between a ‘thing in itself’, i.e., a thing considered independently from its appearance to a consciousness, and an ‘intentional object’, i.e., a thing considered in its relation to consciousness (in the ‘sense’ it has
for consciousness). In transcendental analysis, however, the object of analysis is not the tree as physical thing but
the same tree as an object for consciousness. Its transcendental analysis does not say anything about its physical properties (e.g.,whether it is inflammable or not), but investigates the tree as it is given in conscious experience (the tree as noema).
This neither denies the existence of the physical tree nor posits the existence of the noema as a new third ‘intensional’ entity between consciousness and object. It simply clarifies the complexity of what, in natural analysis, we consider ‘ordinary perception’. There is, then, also a transcendental-phenomenological sense of a ‘thing itself’. Any perception of a real tree includes both the awareness of different profiles of the tree (due to different angles, different lighting conditions, etc.) and, at the same time, the awareness of these different profiles as different profiles of the same tree, which is thus irreducible to any specific sense in which it is presented and thus ‘transcendent’ in the Husserlian sense. This complex experience of the tree, however, does not require an internal representation of the tree. The tree, as we experience it (the noema), is the same tree that we experience (the physical thing). As Sartre reminds us, Husserl does not think that this experience is ‘in consciousness’, but that we experience the tree “just where it is: at the side of the road, in the midst of the dust” (Sartre, 2002, p.382). To construe perception as a case in which a noema is, so to speak, entertained while its reference is yet to be established is to commit not only “a mentalistic misinterpretation of the phenomenological dimension”, which misinterprets noemata “as part of the mental inventory” (Zahavi, 2004, p. 58), it is also to commit an empirical misinterpretation of a transcendental analysis, which misinterprets noemata as part of an empirical theory.
Direct Realism in Kant and Husserl: Some Essential Agreements and Disagreements
My claim that Kant and Husserl are anti-representationalists about sensible representation commits both of them to the view that cognition is, in virtue of these representations, immediately related to objects, which are not themselves mere representations but, in a sense to be qualified, mind-independent. This reference to mind-independent objects constitutes the direct realism I thereby attribute to both of them. However, direct realism is usually understood – under the name of ‘naïve realism’ – as a purely empirical, even commonsensical view, which, for Husserl, is characteristic of the ‘natural attitude’. Clearly, neither Kant nor Husserl was a naïve realist. On the contrary, they both regarded themselves as transcendental idealists. Hence, an anti-representationalist interpretation must show how it is compatible with their respective accounts of transcendental idealism, which is usually understood as the thesis that we only know objects as they appear to us, and not as they are in themselves. This claim is often used interchangeably with yet another one, namely that there are ‘for us’ no mind-independent objects but only appearances. Kant’s project of transcendental idealism was already suspected of being an ordinary idealism in new clothes before it could even get off the ground. The same suspicion now persists after more than two hundred years of scholarship, which has led Ameriks to refer to it as “a stray dog that refuses to go home” (Ameriks, 1996, p.67). Husserl’s transcendental idealism has fared no better. Many of Husserl’s contemporary followers saw in his ‘dipping into idealism’ enough of a reason to turn away from their master. This disappointment lingers, as is evident from recent demands for a final “break with any transcendental scheme” (Romano, 2012, p. 444; Romano, 2011, 19 f.). In a manner of speaking, there are thus two dogs on the loose,and it might prove more effective to pursue them together than in isolation, especially because the lack of clarity regarding their relation tends to make it even more difficult to catch them. I contribute to this greater end in a small way by focusing on direct implications of the anti-representationalist views I attribute to both Kant and Husserl.
2.1 Some Essential Agreements Concerning Transcendental Idealism
The most important agreement between Kant and Husserl is also what sets them apart from all other direct realists, both past and present, who fail to make a critical problem of their position, a problem whose explanation or clarification must be philosophical, and not empirical, because any empirical explanation would have to rely on the very realism it is meant to explain or clarify.
Since ‘philosophical’ is here opposed to ‘empirical’ or ‘natural’, this implies that the explanation or clarification sought must be in some sense a priori (which can be interpreted in different ways, e.g., as formal, material, ontological, or historical). I take it that this constitutes the ‘transcendental stance’ in its most general form (which need not be Kantian or Husserlian),
and that it necessarily involves realism as its explanandum. . . . .
[9This means that it is possible to ‘naturalize’ phenomenology but impossible to do so without going against Husserl on this specific point, which is unproblematic as long as one is aware of it.
10The list of ‘transcendentalists’ in this very broad sense could be surprisingly long and may include thinkers as varied as Plato, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Mark Rowlands and many others (whether it actually does is a contentious issue).
11This explains to some extent Kant’s and Husserl’s frustration with the persistence of the idealism charges leveled against them. It also explains why the much more recent label of ‘anti-realism’ is, to put it mildly, misleading.]
Note: if it turns out that you wish to quote or cite it, note that this version is her 'penultimate draft', which she does not want quoted. The final version of the paper is available in this book: Husserl und die klassische deutsche Philosophie: Husserl and Classical German Philosophy (Phaenomenologica) (German Edition): Faustino Fabbianelli, Sebastian Luft: 9783319017099: Amazon.com: Books
