GE Morton wrote
Like most idealist (and mystical) ontologists you regularly invoke such phrases as "what is REALLY there," what is truly there," etc. But offer no criterion or explanation for the adjectives "really" and "truly," or for the basis of the implied distinction between what is "really" there and what merely appears to be there. And certainly no explanation of how you gained knowledge of what is "really" there.
I agree we can set aside ("distill out") some of the conceptual superstructure we have learned to overlay upon what we perceive, i.e., perceive it eidetically (as a neonate would), without understanding it. Or at least imagine that we can. That is Kant's "sensible intuition." But without understanding it is gratuitous, and contrary to common usage, to call that edetic percept "real" or "true." Those percepts, when embedded in the best conceptual framework we're able to devise, is the only "reality" we're ever going to have. Phenomenologists, like mystics, seem to imagine that if they stare at something long enough, "clear their minds" (perhaps with the aid of fasting, sleep deprivation, or LSD) they will perceive some "reality" that has escaped everyone else's notice.
That conceptual superstructure isn't Kan'ts sensible intuition. It's, in its foundation given the analysis of the structure of logic in judgment, the pure forms reason. Sensible intuitions are the irrational parts of experience, sensation. For Kant, what is true is true propositions; what is real is empirical reality, and concepts without intuitions are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind. Heidegger is working in this structure: to speak about intuitions sans concepts must be an abstraction, for to speak in the first place requires the understanding.
First, it has to be clear that not all phenomenologists think alike. I can defend my derivative position, with my own bent, a composite of what I've read.
As to "what is really there", the question is not without meaning; it is the answer where things gets interesting. Should we forget Husserl's extravagance? There are essays on this that reveal his claims regarding "things themselves' to merely a reference to what one might call "proximal" to thought. I see a bird, and instantly I think, acknowledge, the thing as a bird, replete with its eidetic content. Husserl wanted to capture this unit of presence as it is, once removed from all the phenomenologically arbitrary contextual interference, things there in the presuppositions that clutter the field. He found, says he, that when you do this phenomenological reduction, with practice, there comes out of this something Other than mere theoretical clarity. What this IS would be what many, Husserl included, take as the quasi-mystical. Of course, this makes for bad philosophy (?), But if one actually does this, faithfully...does something come of it? The account goes:
In another
letter from 1919, (Husserl) even confesses that his own move from mathematics
to philosophy ran parallel to and was inspired by his conversion from
Judaism to Christianity, and in private conversations he is to have said
that he saw his philosophical work as a path toward God. The God
mentioned in his philosophical writings is often a philosopher’s God,
a metonym for absolute rationality and intelligibility, as well as a name
for a radical transcendence. But he saw the possibility of a renewed
understanding of religion not in the construction of a rational
theology, but rather in a radicalized exploration of interiority, through
a return to the “inner life
There is a LOT written on this.
This radical exploration of interiority, I find, interesting, and then some. You may not, but just to be clear, the way I see it, it is not a denial of the reason and content that goes into the immediacy of the percept that determines beforehand what can be meaningfully said, but a method of clearing perception to allow other values to step forward, affective value, even transcendental value. But here,we have clearly stepped beyond given possibilities of existing thought in the general philosophical contexts of our culture. But then again, they say Tibetan Buddhist adepts have a language that simply assumes what those navigating through interiority as they do can confirm.
Dismissing this kind of thing out of hand is understandable. One thing a appreciate about phenomenology is that ideas like this can at least be allowed to stand own their own merit. I mean, it removes that interpretative gravity that pulls all meaningful thought toward empirical science.
One of Quine's "Two Dogmas" dealt with the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions, not between idealism and empiricism (the other dealt with reductionism).
But it did have an impact on Kant's claim of synthetic apriori judgment, as with those in geometry and mathematics. Kant was attmpting to show that space and time are apriori forms of intuition, and therefore our empirical playing field must be conceived as the mind's contribution to experience, and his argument looked specifically to the apriority of space and time, the formal intuitive conditions for experience. If Quine were right, and apriority is not qualitatively distinct from the aposteriority judgments we make about gravity, and the rest through induction, then the ground for idealizing space and time is undermined.
I've never written a paper on this, but I think the above right.
That the world has a "presence" we did not invent is itself an epistemological assumption, albeit one that we are forced to make (according to Kant). But the most we can confidently claim is that we did not intentionally, consciously, invent it. There are compelling arguments that that entire "eidetic" world which supplies the foundation for our conceptual understanding of "reality" is an artifact of the structure and functioning of our brains and nervous systems. It is a "virtual model," built of bricks, sticks, glue, and paints concocted by our brains from whole cloth --- from nothing --- of an external "reality" which we must postulate but of of which we can never gain any direct knowledge.
But why call this eidetic "presence" "transcendental"? It certainly doesn't transcend us, its authors, any more than a writers' novel transcends him, except in the sense that we, like the novel, postulate an external world behind it all --- that postulate itself being a construct of our own.
As to the reference to brains and nervous systems, you already know the response to this: In the analysis into what a brain is, we are saddled with the issue of presuppositions: talk bout physical objects, or anything, presupposes language. A language analytic is therefore, the true foundational level of discussion.
Also, someone like Heidegger has no truck with talk about transcendental presence (I read in Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics that Heidegger thought such talk was like "walking on water." Language is the house of Being, and presence is an interpretatively bound idea. But this does not close the door to novel experiences at all, as I see it. In fact, Heidegger thought we, as a thinking culture, have lost something that causes us to be alienated, "not at home" in this world (straight from Kierkegaard, the "religious writer, H called him). Such a thing would appear quite novel if restored to a mundane mentality.
The transcendental talk I have found in Fink, Levinas, MIchel Henry, and others. These are not mystics, but phenomenologists who see (as Wittgenstein did) that the-impossible-to-make-sense-of about our being here is IN immanence. This is why Wittgenstein both felt the need to bring up transcendental/mystical matters and then dismiss them as nonsense. One can reasonably ask, if it is nonsense, then, it is so in a way that the world exceeds language (sense being bound to what language can say, and this is derivative of Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety), or, in a way that both exceeds language AND cannot be denied at once! THIS is how transcendence finds its way into discussion, (and Husserl had introduced a method that makes theory into some partially realized revelatory event).
And if one bothers to give the East some input, and I think this reasonable, there is a lot of testimony to underscore all of this. What Husserl called epoche, a Hindu would call jnana yoga, an exercise in theory that leads to enlightenment, where enlightenment is what happens in a kind of erasure of what names and quantifies the world, making it ordinary, mundane, familiar (interesting to note: how our "sense" of the real anything but reified familiarity?)
So, it is certainly NOT Kant's claim about "something" beyond the limits of empirical reality, for this takes the idea as a pure, impassible boundary, only conceived in the abstract. It is about immanence, what lies there before you minus the imposition of an imposing predelineating interpretation that interferes with a kind of simplcity that is always there already (as a Buddhist speaks of the Buddha nature).
As Faustus5 recently pointed out here, science doesn't claim to define or explain the meanings "of all things;" but only those things within the realm of common experience about which information can be communicated via objective propositions. It reports what is publicly observable and attempts to expain it, i.e., supply causes for observed effects, via theories with predictive power. If science holds a "hegemony" over those explanations it is only because it is the only methodology known which produces communicable and actionable information. Yes, we can set that methodology aside, apprehend some experiential phenomenon eidetically, and ponder other assumptions. But unless those assumptions generate predictions that are publicly confirmable and actionable they will be vacuous; "mental masturbation."
Emphasis on, "If science holds a "hegemony" over those explanations it is only because it is the only methodology known which produces communicable and actionable information."
Well, that IS the point: empirical methods DO work very well in communicable and actionable information, IF the matter at hand is of an empirical scientific nature. Not philosophy. Not sure why this is not clear yet. Analytic philosophy is a slave to empirical assumptions. Phenomenology is not, reflects the openness of interpretation, which IS at the foundation of that is "there" before us.
I get several telling me the point is mute, but then all they have to say about anything whatever in all issues great and small regarding foundational thinking is grounded in empirical science. All such responses are a form of performative contradiction and my only guess is that they dont' know what they're saying. And you say, we CAN set methodology aside, but this doesn't work out, implicitly affirming that science IS the default carrier of all basic understanding of the world. "Of all things": whatever do you mean by this if not all things as scientifically analyzable things. Do you have something else in mind? Something not scientifically analyzable? Are you a mystic?
To me, to say one is unaware of the dominance of science as the accepted definitive analysis of all things (among reasonable people and not the lunatic fringe of religious zeal) is either disingenuousness or...?
Well, we disagree there. Philosophy is not --- or ought not be --- "a priori analysis." Indeed, that term is meaningless. Before you can analyze anything there must be something to analyze; some raw material you're seeking to breakdown and understand. No analysis is possible of the contents of an empty beaker. For epistemology and ontology that raw material is experience, percepts. For Kant what was a priori were some of the tools we use to conduct that analysis, the "categories," which are a priori only in the sense that they are "built-in" to our brains and cannot be ignored or overridden. That is, of course, a theory, that may or may not be the best we can do in explaining our own thought processes.
We can postulate properties of our own thought processes and theorize that we apply them a priori to the analysis of other phenomena. We do, after all, have some direct knowledge of those processes. But we have no direct knowledge of anything presumed to be external to us, and never will. Any properties we predicate of them a priori will be arbitrary, vacuous, and frivolous.
Put is this way, when Kant draws on observations in speaking and meaning making, then abstracts from this the structures that must be in place in order for such speaking to be possible, adn then proceeds discuss time, space, and the pure form of reason, all of which are NOT empirical concepts, that one does not empirically observe time, then such things are apriori, logically prior to experience. If you want to argue that analysis reveals that apriority, on analysis, can be shown to be aposteriori, then I would say you might be right, but not in the terms of their analyses: philosophers study the structure of what is given, not what is given. If you say you know X, philosophy asks, what is the structure of knowing? And structures are not empirical things. Granted, priority in this way is what a speculative scientist does, is it not? No one has ever seen a Big Bang, but it is inferred from the trajectory of stars, a spectral analysis of their light, and so on.
BUT, the Big Bang itself is an explicit empirical construct: an exploding thing on a grand scale. That makes it a piece of (well grounded) scientific speculation, not philosophical. Philosophy draws from wht is empirical (as Kant did) but discusses what is NOT empirical. Philosophy is not an empirical field of analysis, but a presuppositional study, a one of the study of logical presupposition of what what is given: given X, what has to be the case as an analysis yields of X?
The term is not meaningless at all.
You have to drop entirely this Kantian notion of some impossible externality. Phenomenologists do not deal int his kind of thing. They only deal in what is there.
I don't know what you mean by "direct knowledge of thought processes"? Direct? Did you not above berate Husserlians for their mysterious notion of presence? Direct knowledge is an extraordinary claim. Far more extraordinary than apriority.
I'd agree that empirical science is only a part of human experience, but quibble over whether it is a "minor" part. If we measure according to the portions of our waking hours we devote to acting in and upon the empirical world --- the world described by science --- I'd guess it would constitute the dominant part. But a scientific explanation of how and why the sun shines does not purport to be an account of the human dasein, or of the entire "horizon of experience." That criticism is gratuitous.
Sorry, but did you write that you, "agree that empirical science is only a part of human experience"? What would you say is not conditioned by empirical science? What is it that lies outside the field that empirical observation cannot say, but is sufficient to warrant such a deference to it in this utterance?
As to my calling it a minor part, consider (it is not a quibbling matter at all) the reason I called into discussion the issue of metaethics. I am quite aware that no one takes this as an affair of much importance, but then, these are they who know nothing of the issue at all; they know less about metaethics than they know about phenomenology. It is not so much a field abundant in theory and jargon, but an insight, apparently difficult to understand, for reasons I do not understand: Science is about facts, and their are an infinite number of facts, and if you take Wittgenstein's great book of all facts (taken from a position of omniscience) you would not find a single fact of value, for value is not observable, nor is it inherent in logic's tautologies. One cannot speak it. It would be like speaking the color yellow, speaking is aboutness, it is the taking something "as" a construction of language, as Heidegger would put it. When we speak we are taking the world as a token of language.
But value, not the contingent statement's value, as in, this is a fine couch, such that the couch can be discussed for its virtues and failings, but value as such, the kind Wittgenstein will not discuss, because it is not contextual, not therefore contingent but absolute.
One has to keep in mind that Wittgenstein was among those, a particularly influential one, who denied empirical science access to value conditions, for apart from the contingency of circumstances, value and aesthetics cannot be expressed in language at all. That is, the GOOD of the feeling, or the bad of it, when considered abstracted from contingency and context (not unlike the way Kant abstracted reason's form from judgment), appears as, well, non contingently good and bad. Take a spear and run it through my kidney: the pain AS SUCH (again, think Kant's pure reason is reason as such) is a badness that exceeds language and is therefore transcendental.
The point i am making out of this is that science's "small part" is due to its nature as factual merely, and therefore in the final ontology (the OP is about this) stands outside, if you can stand the cliche, the very meaning of life itself. If empirical science is taken as bottom line for any foundational analysis, it necessarily ignores meta value, this transcendence of our affairs that makes everything meaningful.
Religion, as an addendum, has traditionally handled the grounding of value, the metaphysics of value, and done so obliquely, mixing contingencies with absolutes. Philosophy's job, its most authentic purpose, I would say, is to bring this back into primacy. Phenomenology allows for this. Read Levinas.
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