Change of Plans

My plan for this point was to go through books that would prove useful for my first semester courses in grad school. The books are: John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment, and St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica questions 1-26. This has changed, since I've decided I want to do a large work on Heidegger, something beyond the scope of this blog. I would like to discuss Being in Heidegger, and its implications for his philosophy as a whole and his practice (the essay just posted is one dimension of that discussion). Thus I'm going to spend some time going back through his works and writing that essay. After that, I intend to follow business as usual, as listed above.

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Heidegger: Introduction to Metaphysics

(Yale University Press, 2000)

In any book or lecture by Heidegger, it usually appears as though he not only discusses issues in a way that’s unnecessarily difficult; sometimes you’d almost swear that he’s doing it on purpose. There are plenty of people (including philosophers) who would say that this is the case. The reasons they give are often not very kind; the reason Heidegger does what he does, it is said, is because he has nothing to say. Heidegger is obscure for the same reason that Hegel, Sartre, and the lot of them are obscure: because what they’re talking about has no standard, no sense of form or consistency, and so it’s just a lot of talking without anything being said. Who, after all, can figure out what they’re actually saying?

At the current time, I think it strange that philosophers, anyway, might feel this way about Heidegger. By comparison, in the case of Nietzsche, while he was mocked or rejected for some time, the direction in his philosophy and his importance have come to be by and large acknowledged by the philosophical establishment, including by those who disagree with him utterly. It is true that there are those who dismiss Nietzsche off-handedly, but the perception of those people is generally that it is they, and not Nietzsche, who are acting foolish. With Heidegger things have not advanced up to this point. Heidegger’s influence during and after his life to the present has been huge, yet one can still simply ignore or dismiss him, and it is acceptable. The argument given in a case like this is the “common knowledge” argument: it’s Heidegger, so apparently it’s okay to dismiss him, not just as having bad arguments, but as being a bad philosopher. He makes no sense, it would be best if we left him behind.

To go back to Nietzsche for a moment, if one had asked him what he thought about people at large rejecting him . . . well, we already know the answer, since it happened in his lifetime (at its most intense, for that matter). Nietzsche decided to stand on his own, despite what others said, and perhaps in part because of that he’s had a life extending far beyond his lived one. One is tempted to wonder how Heidegger would answer the same question, and how we should take his answer. In fact, he was aware of the question of the relevance of his philosophy, and was so by 1935, when he gave the lectures that comprised Introduction to Metaphysics. At the point I’m referring to, he’s in the middle of a hundred-plus page interpretation of Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, and he’s doing the usual thing. Nowhere will you find an interpretation (or a translation of Greek, for that matter) that matches up to what Heidegger says. Is he aware of this? He is. In something of an aside, he says:

From the point of view of the customary and dominant definitions . . . our interpretation of the saying must appear as a willful interpretation, as one that reads into the saying what an ‘exact exegesis’ can never ascertain. That is correct. According to the usual opinion of today, what we have said is in fact just a result of that violent character and one-sidedness, which has already become proverbial, of the Heideggerian mode of interpretation. (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics 187)

He is certainly aware, and early on, of the general opinion of his work (and this is some time before Rudolph Carnap singles him out for attack in The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language). Amongst the students of his lectures, as well, he saw frequent misunderstanding, as he refers to in this work (which itself was a lecture course). One then feels compelled to ask: couldn’t Heidegger try a bit harder to make himself understood? Did he really feel the need to be so difficult.

The answer is yes, he did. In fact, Heidegger felt that philosophy must precisely not be something refined and clear-cut, straightforward and easy to put together. It must always be new and difficult, for “whenever a philosophy becomes fashion, either there is no actual philosophy or else philosophy is misinterpreted and, according to some intentions alien to it, misused for the needs of the day.” (9) Easy philosophy is not philosophy at all.

Why is this? The answer one might want to call out is, “To protect the jobs of the philosophers,” for of course philosophy would serve no purpose if everybody saw their bullshit for what it was. Philosophy does not produce anything, it does not give us a knowledge which improves the material conditions of life, and as a pastime it’s a whole lot of effort for no tangible payoff outside of smugness. This view is not lost on Heidegger, and in fact he thinks it technically correct. “It is entirely correct and completely in order to say, ‘You can’t do anything with philosophy . . . .’” (13) So why bother? He continues: “The only mistake is to believe that with this, the judgment concerning philosophy is at an end. For a little epilogue arises in the form of a counterquestion: even if we can’t do anything with it, may not philosophy in the end do something with us, provided that we engage ourselves with it?”

Heidegger’s response to the question of the point of philosophy is not simply a matter of justification. His claim comes from a view of history, of human nature, and from Heidegger’s understanding of Being itself. For Heidegger, our answer to the fundamental question of metaphysics, “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” is not the speculation of an idle mind. It is human destiny. To say “It is human destiny” is not to make out some grand human destiny in the cosmos; to say that the understanding of Being is human destiny is to say that our understanding of Being is what decides our understanding of and relationship to the world. Our metaphysics is the ground of our physics, our ethics, and our world itself. But to see this why this is, and to see why the question of metaphysics must necessarily be a difficult one according to Heidegger, we must first know something about Being.

When he wants to make a statement about something, for example, Being, Heidegger can be very straightforward if he feels so inclined. “Being means: to appear in emerging, to step forth out of concealment . . . .” (121) is one of many formulations of the definition of what Being is. Specifically, says Heidegger, Being as emergence/unconcealment is the ancient Greek definition of Being, one which we have taken over and transmuted into simple “presence.” If, as Heidegger says, “this conception, though entirely flattened out and rendered unrecognizable, is the conception that still rules even today in the West – not only in the doctrines of philosophy but in the most everyday routines,” (62) then we must understand our own understanding of Being as, in a word, emergence and unconcealment. That is, a being is such in the act of revealing itself; it emerges; it step forth; it is the unity of the “it” that appears in conflict (that is, distinction and separating the self) from the total. The Being of a being is its emergence.

Yet athough Heidegger offers such definitions in various ways throughout the course of any of his works, he never begins with such a definition nor goes straight to it through argument or inference. Instead he develops interpretations and reevealuations. He takes simple concepts and, before even explaining what they are, goes to great lengths to make them complicated. The reason he does this (for it is certainly intentional) is actually implicit in his definition of Being, properly understood. Being is emergence; that is, a being appears when it reveals itself, when it comes to the fore of our apprehension and, in a manner of speaking, announces its presence (the tie between Being as emergence and Being as presence can be seen here). I can state this in so many words. So can Heidegger. But, given what is to be understood in the very definition of Being given, it absolutely must be understood that Being itself, nor the Being of any being, can never be given by a definition. To understand something by its definition is basically to understand it by the structure of the sentence, which is to say, by the relationship of subject and predicate. ‘Being is . . .’ emergence. The thing, Being, has this trait, emergence. Thus we have a thing that has this act imputed to it. But is Being a thing? It cannot be, for then it would be a being, and Being is what makes beings beings. Rather, Being is emergence itself, the emerging of a being. The problem here is that Being and emergence are not in a relationship of subject and predicate. We can answer questions about Being with definitions, but they don’t actually give the sense of emergence that Heidegger is seeking. We want emergence itself. When something emerges, what does it do? It arises from depths unseen. From an abyss, an object suddenly surfaces. The space around it has to deal with this new thing, which establishes its own rules. The world, in a sense, shifts. Being is the raw experience of an event, one where something is revealed, taken out of concealment and non-presence and revealed as a being – not through definition, not by deduction, but by emergence. This event cannot possibly be given in a definition; “[T]he best professional ability will never replace the authentic strength of seeing and questioning and saying.” (22) Being is only experienced, for the same reason that one can only understand the definition of emergence when one forms in one’s mind the image of something emerging, such as the submarine from water, arising from the depths unseen, and for the same reason that the definitions of “running,” “seeing,” and “eating,” are all empty before one is aware of a runner, a seer, an eater. Being is not a thing to be defined; it happens.

So if Being is emergence (and unconcealment), then it is still legitimate and necessary to ask in greater detail what exactly emergence (and unconcealment) is. My room is full of beings; the door, the desk, the chair. When I look around, according to Heidegger, I see them emerge. I guess they do so, in some sense. When I walk into the room, beings are automatically and without my guidance unconcealed from the chaos of raw existence. But it would have to be an awfully weak conception of emergence if one was to say with truth that my chair “emerges” when I look at what I am sitting on. It certainly doesn’t arise from the depths; at most it floats in a still pond. Heidegger is aware of this, and calls it the fallen sense of Being. Specifically, the causal, uninterested view of objects as just being there, as “constant presence” (216), is Being set into stone and placed in an equally stone world. It is Being when the phenomena that actually constitute Being are ignored, and only “the fact” remains, the fact being the presence of some being. For Heidegger, the problem isn’t that Beings don’t exist in this way: “[T]he subsistence of the building does not depend on this scent [of its Being] that is hovering around somewhere.” (36) The problem, which simply must to be understood in order to understand Heidegger, is that the idea of Being as mere presence, as static, fails to give Being’s fundamental nature as emergence; the emergence, the revelation of Being disappears, and only as this phenomena of emergence, as this actual, flesh-and-blood phenomena, can one know Being.

This state of affairs has consequences. For example: writing books, even difficult ones, is alone insufficient to reveal Being. One cannot offer definitions and deductions that get at Being, because through direct words one is only given a concept, an objectified relation between things in presence. Relations, concepts, and actions are the same: they are given as impersonal events that happen to things, and nothing more. Being is understood in all these cases, but left stilted. Thus the fallacy of the definition gives a building, for example, as a structure with walls and a floor, not as that building, the structure that was built at the height of city expansion and shows signs of lost grandeur, the building that has seen thousands of tenants and one bombing, that has seen the feet of the famous and the bottom of the barrel. One can say that it has seen those things, but of course, that is not the same as having the Being felt first-hand. And Being lies in the latter, not the former. A being’s Being is not its objective, static characteristics, according to Heidegger. It is what is revealed to us in unconcealing emergence:

It is simply a matter of not being seduced by overhasty theories, but instead experiencing things as they are in whatever may be nearest. This piece of chalk here is an extended, relatively stable, definitely formed, grayish-white thing, and, furthermore, a thing for writing . . . . The possibility of being drawn along the blackboard and being used up is not something that we merely add onto the thing with our thought. The chalk itself, as this being, is in this possibility; otherwise it would not be chalk as a writing implement. (32)

If Heidegger wants to give the reader or the listener a genuine understanding of Being, and not a stale scholastic understanding, it would be pointless to give a definition, delineate its characteristics, and give an argument for that definition. To be sure, he actually does that. He defines Being several times, discusses its characteristics and history, and gives reasons that other definitions of Being fail. But that is not all he does. In fact, in his lectures and writings Heidegger has two goals: to delineate what Being is, and, in order to do that properly, to engender the sense for Being within those to whom he speaks. This second mission requires a different sense of education; as he says twenty years later, “what teaching calls for is this: to let learn.” (Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? 15) In simple lectures and books, nothing but facts are transmitted. The name Heidegger gives to this phenomenon, where “how things stand” is given in terms of words that are supposed to link up with a totality of facts, with the world being nothing but the totality of all totalities, the fact of all facts, is idle talk. Idle talk, which Heidegger discusses at length in Being and Time, is a threat to philosophy not because it is impractical (it is eminently practical, of that one can be sure), but because it is static, definite, dull, un-emergent and un-unconcealing. It is the mind as machine, as cog, and thus torn from its humanity as a revealer of beings. Thence emerges Heidegger’s critique of modern society and instrumental thought, which we will not go into here.

Heidegger wants to re-introduce Being as emergence to the world. Is there really anything he can do to bring this about, if we assume that Being is something only experienced? Absolutely. If Being is emergence, then, no matter how far we drift from Being, it is simply impossible that we can lose it altogether, or never have it in the first place. Emergence is the field in which beings first arise in their Being; we simply cannot have beings without Being. Emergence, Being, is not only present, but necessarily at the fore in any act whereby something presents itself to us anew, be it a new being or an old one. The problem is that Being as emergence is stifled in favor of Being as presence; the phenomena, the revelatory manner of Being is ignored in favor of demonstrations or propositions. The new is understood in terms of the old; nothing is given as emergence, but rather everything is explained in terms of causes and impersonal events. The wonder at the world is killed off, basically, and the question of Being ignored. To return to Being as emergence, we must return to where Being emerges in its strongest form, which happens in two cases: (1) When something emerges for the first time, and (2) when something previously “known” emerges as something new. In reality the second is the first; the re-emergence of something in a new light is the emergence of something new. In both cases emergence shatters our old world with the power of its presence. This type of emergence, that which reaches into Being in its greatest conflict and openness, is appropriately called originary. An originary interpretation of a being brings it forth anew and as it emerges, not as a given, not as the definition in idle talk, but in its self-revelatory emergence into unconcealment, and therefore in its Being. Only an originary thinking has the power to break our inauthentic, pre-established world for the sake of genuine emergence, one which is our own and thus not limited to the words which are given to us by a stale history. Thus, for example, “The misinterpretation of thinking and the misuse of misinterpreted thinking can be overcome only by a genuine and originary thinking, and by nothing else.” (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics 129) When we live in a world where all the questions of metaphysics are, if not answered, placed in a framework that already determines the form of the answer, where the explicit goal is to establish the law of the universe and thus render everything simple and therefore impotent, the only way to reestablish the sense of Being is through a questioning that breaks into new territory. When we call something into question, we look closely at it. We ask what it really is, what is revealed as being the thing itself. From a vague and impersonal Being, questioning drags forth a strong sense of emergent Being, of what is actually before ourselves. Therefore we must avoid “the crippling of all passion for questioning, a crippling that has already held us back too long.” (152) The silencing of questioning is not only a tyranny over the mind; it suppresses emergence, and thus a genuine understanding of Being. “This question has today been forgotten.” (Heidegger, Being and Time 3) The only way to respond is to reopen the questioning. One must recall Being, and must do so in a questioning way.

Why does Heidegger make understanding his work so difficult? Because only by forcing us to wretch our minds, by making us step away from what are given uncritically as already finished and see it in its essential being-ness, its emergence. We cannot just say that Being is emergence; Being must emerge. Thus, in Being and Time, “Our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the meaning of Being and to do so correctly.” (1) Yet it is not a question we will ever answer, for recall: “[W]henever a philosophy becomes fashion, either there is no actual philosophy or else philosophy is misinterpreted and, according to some intentions alien to it, misused for the needs of the day.” No, our goal is to ask the question, for only with the question and the search will Being emerge.

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Richard Rorty: Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume II

(Cambridge University Press, 1991)

At the end of the day, there comes a point for many who listen to philosophers when one finally feel compelled to say, “What difference does it make?” The point where one starts to come to the conclusion that, rather than solving problems, philosophy is either useless or itself becomes the problem. This usually comes at one of two points: the former, when the discussion seems to have no relevance or impact, and the latter when a decision has to be made and there is not time to consider the options. In the former case, arguments about whether all experiences are directly intentional, or whether some are based upon intentional experiences but are not themselves intentional, and what that means about intentionality, seems pointless. Who cares about intentionality? In the latter, more pressing case, sometimes one doesn’t have time to draw out all the minute potentialities of an argument about ethical action. One has to act now, or else the hostage dies. What do you do?

Of course, philosophy responds to the two questions above. To the first, it says that these questions very much matter. Without them, we cannot be aware of our own limits. Am I to concede the quest of truth just because I don’t care about the answers, or think that they don’t matter? But don’t I myself believe I have truths, and don’t I want them defended? To the latter argument, philosophy has a simple response: what if you are wrong? An action rushed is always a foolish action, and creates disaster as often (if not more so) than it generates heroes. In both cases one sees that philosophy’s value is not utilitarian or pragmatic, but based upon its quest for truth.

When we took a look at Merleau-Ponty and embodied phenomenology, we saw a new type of response to the first of the above responses from classical philosophy. Merleau-Ponty did not claim that he could answer the questions of classical epistemology to their standards. But, he said, this was because they had bad standards; to ask for certainty about an “objective” world was an error brought about by a particular metaphysical theory. Drop the assumptions and a more sensible view (and one, he thought, that concurs with actual experience) develops. Thus the response to philosophy wasn’t to answer its questions, but to reject the questions as bogus.

Richard Rorty, writing after and about the attacks of Heidegger and post-modernism on conventional philosophy, agrees in spirit with this sort of response. Having been raised in the analytic tradition, Rorty eventually found himself questioning what that tradition could accomplish in a world that was no longer the land of essences that philosophy had thought it to be. Everyone was asking the same old questions and assuming the same standards for answers. As a result, philosophers never found themselves in a position to challenge the enterprise as a whole: “The scientistic approach to philosophy which Husserl shared with Carnap lives on, forming a tacit presupposition of the work of analytic philosophers . . . . However, there is little explicit metaphilosophical defense or development of this . . . .” (Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume II 21) Problems such as that of the external world, of the “essence” of language, of discovering the way in which one can link up with reality, were questions from an ancient time (Plato, specifically). They formed the central issues about which one argued. They were also based on a hope: the hope of the philosopher that there existed a “truth” discoverable in its very selfhood and discernable by the probing philosopher: “All we philosophers have at least a bit of the ascetic priest in us. We all hanker after essence and share a taste for theory as opposed to narrative.” (71) It was this hope that Rorty understood and felt the need to distance himself from.

But if he sought to distance himself from the analytic tradition and its simplistic search for “truth,” Rorty was no more interested in what was happening in the continental tradition. His questioning after the value of truth and consideration of the social and historical context of philosophical arguments seem to give Rorty a post-modernist twinge. Perhaps he wanted to challenge the scheme of things, to advocate a sharp rejection of the system and its eventual overcoming. After all, one should not worship false permanence, when the real is the transitory and the transitory real. And he says, “I have sometimes used ‘postmodern’ myself, in the rather narrow sense defined by Lyotard as ‘distrust of metanarratives.’” Yet, “I now wish that I had not. The term has been so over-used that it is causing more trouble than it is worth.” (1) Rorty declaimed the title of post-modernist. Nor was he a phenomenologist. Though he took a great interest in Heidegger, he was quite critical of Heidegger at times. For Rorty, these individuals and movements fell short of their own principles: upon finding that there is no “essence” to be found, they take their attacks and render them as doctrine. “The post-modern condition” or “intentionality” becomes a new dogma to be distinguished and defended. Against this, Rorty argues that

The trouble with making a big deal out of language, meaning, intentionality, the play of signifiers or différance is that one . . . takes the irreducibility of the intentional – the irreducibility of descriptions of sentential attitudes such as beliefs and desires to the descriptions of the motion of elementary particles – as somehow more philosophically significant than the irreducibility of house descriptions to timber descriptions, or of animal descriptions to cell descriptions. (4)

To criticize universal doctrines by way of a universal doctrine of non-universality does not solve the problem of universals, argues Rorty. The problem of seeking after essences continues so long as one declares that one has found the real story. The only way to get around this is to stop the search.

If one follows Rorty’s argument through, one can’t help but feel that one has arrived at total relativism, if not nihilism itself. The answer appears to be to give up all hope of finding any sort of truth. The last two and a half thousand years of argument have been for nothing, then, not only because there was no Form of the Good to find, but because the very question itself is pointless. In that case, why do philosophy at all?

The problem with the question just posed is that it assumes that philosophy is pointless if it doesn’t search for truth. In other words, it assumes that the only good thing to ever come out of philosophy is truth. Given the conventional understanding of philosophy and its mission, this seems obvious. But when historically considered, it also seems perfectly reasonable to say that philosophy has had and can still have good consequences that have little or nothing at all to do with the truth. Did philosophy not give us the detailed study of ethics? Didn’t logic help us develop the first conceptual computer? Doesn’t philosophy continue to drive societies, direct leaders, and create new worldviews? Certainly, then, philosophy doesn’t do nothing, and this holds true even if philosophy itself has never found a single truth about the world.

It is from this perspective that Rorty engages the philosophical tradition, by way of an rarely considered (within the traditions, anyway) type of philosophy called pragmatism. Pragmatism appeared in the mid-1800s with C.S. Peirce as a different way to think about problems within philosophy. Certainly pragmatism existed before that: who doesn’t think about the best consequences as being the deciders of a course of action more often than not? But to turn it into a complete philosophical position was novel. After the early 1900s, however, not much was heard about it. Instead people moved on with their arguments about language and reality, and about criticisms of that view. But as metaphysico-lingustic theories started to fall apart, Rorty argues, pragmatism started creeping its way back in: “The context in which my essays put post-Nietzschean philosophy, is, predictably enough, pragmatism.” (2) By the latter half of the 1900s, he think, pragmatism became quite fashionable, even if no one admitted to it.

Not only is this what happened to some philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Donald Davidson. According to Rorty, this is how it should be: “The big esoteric problem common to Heidegger and Derrida of how to ‘overcome’ or escape from the ontotheological tradition is an artificial one and needs to be replaced by lots of little pragmatic questions about which bits of that tradition might be used for some current purpose.” (87) On these grounds he criticizes the post-modernists (and Heidegger) for taking a metaphysical stance based on their anti-metaphysical arguments. Instead one should support “a postmodernist form of social life, in which society as a whole asserts itself without bothering to ground itself.” (176) What we decide is right should be pragmatic, based on what works. After all, we have yet to find the philosopher’s thing-in-itself: “[I]t has turned out that the only thing we can be certain about is our own desires.” (29) So why not follow pragmatism?

In order to be accepted by anyone, however, Rorty’s pragmatism will have to respond to the same two questions we posed at the beginning (here stated generally): What will we do without the truth? And how do we decide what is the best way to live? Can Rorty give a sufficient answer to these questions?

In response to the first question, Rorty wants to dispel the universal illusion among philosophers, the idea that, without philosophy, the world wouldn’t know what to do with itself. Where can one go when all truth has disappeared? the philosophers asks. When even the attack on truth seems useless, and one can only resort to a shallow pragmatism, can any human being actually live with herself? Well yes, actually, says Rorty. And not simply, as one might object, because they “don’t know any better.” Even the intellectuals in society, and even the ones among those who accept post-modernist ideas, seem to do quite well. For “most contemporary intellectuals live in a culture which is self-consciously without archai, without telos, without theology, teleology, or ontology.” (100) I know, says the intellectual, that my own “truths” are challenged by other societies, even at their most basic levels. But so what? Does that require me to run around like a chicken with my head cut off? Should I no longer be able to get out of bed in the morning, due to the oppressive weight of the terrible truth crushing my very soul?

This question, “So what?” is Rorty’s challenge to the classical philosophy. It’s a challenge he shares with Nietzsche, Peirce, James, and Dewey. Why should we care so much about truth? Why shouldn’t we change that emphasis, which is itself a historical product? If we can stop obsessing about truth so much, says Rorty, perhaps we can find a better way to spend our energies.

If we ever have the courage to drop the scientistic model of philosophy without falling back into a desire for holiness (as Heidegger did), then, no matter how dark the time, we shall no longer turn to the philosophers for the rescue as our ancestors turned to the priests. We shall turn instead to the poets and engineers, to the people who produce startling new projects for achieving the greatest happiness of the greatest number. (26)

The problem with philosophy, for Rorty, is that it tends to create problems that aren’t there. It talks about “truth” as though it’s somewhere out there, waiting for us. It talks about “the good” and “the just” as though they are real metaphysical entities, and we are more or less moral according to how closely we align ourselves to the entities. Such things have since been refuted. Science doesn’t pierce “true” objects, Quine argued. Nor does language, said Wittgenstein. Philosophy, nor science, nor anything else gets to “the bottom” of things. Yet even in refutation, the principles of philosophers betray their intentions: they want the right method, the right standard, in which to reach the way things should be. Today, in the form of post-modernism, philosophers think they’ve gotten to the bottom of something (namely, the lack of bottoms), and in so doing transcended time and space. In thinking thus they betray their own principles.

But even if one drops the question of a real truth, how can one decide how to live? Can’t I separate the dictator from the democrat? For Rorty the pragmatist, this is a simple question. Let us aim for the best society, where people are treated the best, and are freest to do what they want. This answer sounds simple and unreflective, but is not. If there is no truth, there is certainly no good reason to impose upon others in the name of what is “right.” And if we’re not sure who’s got the right idea, it seems best to let people figure it out on their own, insofar as they are able. People are often quite good at finding a place in life that works for them. If not, we can offer assistance, but have no right to control them; at least so long as they don’t harm others. Humans are already social animals; they won’t fall apart the moment you tell them there’s no metaphysics of morals.

Letting us see the narratives of our own lives as episodes within . . . larger historical narratives is, I think, as much as the intellectuals are able to do in aid of morality. The attempt of religion and metaphysics to do more – to supply a backup for moral intuitions by providing them with ahistorical ‘authority’ – will always be self-defeating. (163)

In allowing the free pursuit of ideas as a way to find the best solutions to problems, Rorty also answers another question, the one we began with: what good is philosophy? For the Rorty philosophy has always been a powerful means of new expression. The greater the experience of the individual and the broader the range of his expression, the greater his abilities to analyze his world and decide what to do with it. With knowledge come options; with options comes power: “it was only the false lead which Descartes gave us (and the resulting overvaluation of scientific theory which, in Kant, produces ‘the philosophy of subjectivity’) that made us think truth and power were separable.” (175) Few things have the power that philosophy does for creating new language and new descriptions of the human experience. Those things that do compete with philosophy in expanding the human experience, such as the novel, might be seen with alarm by philosophers. Frankly, says Rorty, philosophers are just going to have to deal with it, because philosophy long ago lost the right to be as important as it claimed itself to be. Philosophy needs to understand what it does right, which is finding new ways of thinking. We need to remember how deliberation and philosophizing has helped us to become acutely aware of the ethical world: “The availability of a richer vocabulary of moral deliberation is what one chiefly has in mind when one says that we are, morally speaking, more sensitive and sophisticated than our ancestors or than our younger selves.” (155) We need to recall that, even if humans don’t have a “perfect language,” a computer, working within an artificial world, can, and does use its perfect language to great effect. By this standard it is the great creators, those who develop entirely new ways of thinking about the world, who have made the greatest contributions to philosophy. It is they who have a real impact and, by the pragmatist’s standards, have done the most for the world. That none of those thinkers proved to be right doesn’t matter, for philosophy’s contribution to society was never a matter of its being correct; if philosophy has proven anything at all, it is that such correctness doesn’t exist. And for that reason, because it has not failed its mission, but rather has a mission that never ends, it still has the right, even the duty, to exist, to expand our world, just as does the poet. “One of these privileges [that of the poets] is to rejoin ‘What has universal validity to do with me?’ I think that philosophers are as entitled to this privilege as poets, so I think this rejoinder sufficient.” (198)

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Sidebar

Turns out that other day was sooner than I thought. The essays on works are listed alphabetically by author, and then chronologically by work (so, from the author's earliest works to his or her latest). For this reason you find essays from very different dates next to each other. Seeing them side by side, you notice a rapid change in how I write. Interesting, considering I only started this phase of writing about a year and a half ago.

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Update

Finished Phenomenology of Perception, as you can see below. I also did a bit of work on the blog, so that I don't have full posts on the front page anymore (although as I type this, it's only in effect for the most recent essay). This is definitely for the best, though it was a hell of a lot of work fighting with the Blogger template to allow it to work without screwing up all the formatting. Nevertheless, it's all good. All future essays will be like this, only showing the first paragraph, and eventually I'd like to edit past essays to fit (that would allow me to reduce the essay on Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics to one post). Eventually, I'd even like to create a sidebar that has links to the essays, sorted alphabetically by author. But that's a project for another day.

Also, in terms of projects, next is Richard Rorty. I'm reading a set of published essays, so there's no strict unity, but, like Margins of Philosophy, I can still likely develop enough of a theme to at least write about Rorty himself. Time will tell.

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Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception

Epistemology, the philosophical theory of knowledge, is in its broadest sense centered on two questions: What can I know? And how can I come to know it? While these questions look simple enough, hidden within them is a form, a specific direction and background from which they have been conceived: the metaphysics of Descartes. The question, “What can I know?” following the skepticism of Descartes, has been the question of knowledge of the world: is it possible to have knowledge of the things of the world? Can I understand its laws? Can I determine my own nature? The question of the knowledge of these things implies a separation, a reaching outwards towards things other than the self, perhaps part of a different sphere altogether. In this view, when one says, “I don’t know the price of tea in China,” it is because one is blocked off from that state of affairs in the world. One is separated from such knowledge. Thus it has been epistemology’s task to ask precisely what one can achieve knowledge of (which question hinges on a definition of what qualifies as knowledge, an issue that is generally left unnoticed).

The second question, “How can I come to know what it is I can know?” is an extension of the first, not only in subject matter but, so to speak, in worldview as well. Asking how one can come to know some fact which one does not have access to is basically asking how one can bridge the gap implied by the first question: how do I arrive from a total separation to the facts of tea prices in China, to a relation to their state which is one of truth? How can I cross the void? (This question, like the last one, hinges upon what the object of knowledge is, and how one relates to it and its content, a subject rarely noticed.)

The image of human existence which this view of epistemology thus generates is one of the self standing alone in a vast space, with “facts” floating somewhere outside. It is the task of truth-seeking to find these facts and bring them into the light; the ultimate goal is to have all of the facts brought forth. Since the time of Descartes, this form of epistemology has been prominent, not only in those who affirm it and seek to bridge the gap (Descartes himself, for example), but in those who deny it and proclaim skepticism as well (Hume, for instance), since they thereby share the same assumptions, only denying the result. Even as problems with the Cartesian worldview emerged, the epistemological model has survived in some form or another; for example, in the “correspondence theory of truth” and both its heralds and detractors. In the most general sense, epistemology has been about finding “the truth” somewhere out there and bringing the self to awareness of it, and in this sense it has remained Cartesian. Dualism of the self may be no longer taken for granted like it used to be, but dualism of truth, where the truth is in its realm, and the self is separated from it when in error, and connected to it when in truth, has been much more stubborn.

Enter phenomenology. Phenomenology, in a few words, is the philosophical study of experience. But more than just a field of study; it is a movement. Phenomenology has a specific viewpoint from which it addresses its questions, one that has its own assumptions and direction. This direction is fundamentally opposed to dualism. In order to give an appropriate account of experience, phenomenology describes the self not as a bare existent who must reach out into a something else in order to establish connections, but as a being connected with what it experiences. The self is not an abstract system of connections tied together, but a whole greater than its parts. The self and the world, therefore, are not distinct existents; in fact, one cannot exist without the other. The thread that ties the self and the world is experience, and thus does phenomenology gain its orientation.

In re-orientating the relationship between the self and the world, phenomenology opens up a new possibility for knowledge; not just a new way of establishing a connection between subject and fact, but an entirely different understanding of what it means to be “in the truth.” In the 500+ page Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses the phenomenological method, through his special emphasis on the body as the place of lived experience, to determine, among other things, a new sense of epistemology. He directly confronts the Cartesian perspective and all of its spiritual successors, including those that continue to the present day, arguing that they miss the true structure of knowledge. In exchange, he offers what can be called an “embodied” view of knowledge, one that redefines truth itself and how one relates to it.

Merleau-Ponty is part of an evolution of phenomenological thought that began with the “first” phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl. Husserl used phenomenology as a method to get to the essences of things, which he thought could be done through proper analysis of experience. Pure experience, he argued, free of our base assumption, allows us access to things themselves. This was supposed to be possible because of what he termed “intentionality:” our thoughts, Husserl argued, are always about something. If we “bracket” the world of assumptions and interfering thoughts, and get to the bare experience, we would find the thing as it really is, as perceived by us. Martin Heidegger, his student, shifted phenomenology’s purpose while maintaining most of its central ideas: the center of experience, for Heidegger, is not found in a bracketing of the world that isolates the self, but rather in “being-in-the-world.” Our basic experience is anything but pure; it is, rather, of ourselves enveloped in the world and its influences. We are tied into it at our most basic level, and any claim otherwise is unjustified abstraction. It is the concept of being-in-the-world that directs Merleau-Ponty’s thought, and with it his epistemology. “Phenomenology is the study of essences,” he says. “But phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity.’” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception vii) The study of experience cannot possibly be a study of a “pure experience,” abstracted from the world, as Husserl had claimed, for we are factical; that is, we are in a factual situation. We are in the world, and our intentionality is essentially worldly. Experience, which is the core of the self, comes from the world, which “is there before any possible analysis of mine” (x) and guiding experience. The world is the source of all of my thoughts, directly or indirectly: “man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.” (xii)

Just taken to this point, phenomenology might not seem particularly interesting. Of course man is in the world; where else could he be? But it is not this simple sense of facticity that Merleau-Ponty has in mind. For, though one readily admits that we are in a world, one also says that we can take ourselves out of it easily enough. We can stop paying attention to what is going on around us. We can space out. Or, like philosophers, we can abstract ourselves out of the world of sensations and enter a world of pure thought, allowing us to go beyond appearances and reach the essences of thing. But when Merleau-Ponty says that we are “worldly,” he is not merely saying that we live in a world: he is saying that we never, ever leave it, and that all of our thoughts are in it and are directly or indirectly affected by it. There is no leaving the world’s influence.

Before we continue, it needs to be clarified what is meant by “world.” The world, for Merleau-Ponty, is not a physical place in the universe. One has a world; one is already in it. A “world” is essentially a world of meaning, that place where we are where everything has significance and can be identified in relation to the rest. That there is one world, the world and not just a world, means that there is one system within which things fit, rather than a hodge-podge of metaphysical systems in which things have irreconcilable meanings. In this sense “the world is always ‘already there’ before reflection begins – as ‘an inalienable presence’” (vii) In terms of experience, this sort of world is always verifiable; things always have a meaning to me, whether it be the purpose to which we put them in a task, their presence as objects in my sphere of sensation, or merely their lack of clearly discernable meaning in a system of useful things or of objects, in which case their meaning is their conspicuousness. Everything has a meaning, and this meaning is “always ‘already there.’” It is from this base that phenomenological study is conducted.

So one is always in a world where things are given to us with meanings. Fine. What consequences does this have? What difference does it make? After all, it’s not as though people assume there are things that exist completely void of any and all meaning. Objects always mean something. But once again, this statement has to be taken in its full import. For the truth is, people for the most part believe that they can and do see things without meaning; it is called objectivity. When one sees an object, like a chair, one assumes that one is seeing a thing, plain and simple. This “plain and simple” is in fact a claim of purity: one believes oneself to be seeing the chair free of interference from meaning or theory; one just sees what’s there. And what, exactly, is there? Well, a thing made of wood, fabric, and cotton padding, with dimensions x by y by z, and with a weight of such and such. Yet this understanding of the chair is, according to Merleau-Ponty, exactly what one does not experience in the initial (and thus original, grounding) perception. What one experiences is a place in the vision, a feeling when one sits there – further, perhaps the memory of a similar chair seen yesterday, or someone who owns a similar chair, and how they always sat in it at certain times, and so on. This experience, recalling, and so on is the actual perceptual experience of the chair, which is anything but objective: according to Merleau-Ponty, “there is a significance of the percept which has no equivalent in the universe of the understanding, a perceptual domain which is not yet the objective world, a perceptual being which is not yet determinate being.” (54) The perceptual chair, the chair of experience and memory, exists for us before the determinate chair, that is, before the chair of measurements. We do not, in other words, experience the chair with such and such measurements, but, in fact, a chair that exists before its measurements.

Which sounds pretty dumb. Nevertheless this is actually what Merleau-Ponty is saying. The “chair” is not, according to him, something which is determined by its objective properties. In real experience, he argues, we do not see things which have objective properties; what actually happens is that the things we see are understood to have objective properties when seen in such and such fashion, as part of an act of reflection and objectification. But given that reflection, by definition, comes afterwards, the chair we see is not the chair with reflective qualities such as a determinate height, weight, and so on. It is the chair as perceived that we see. Reflection, and with it objectivity, is taken from its pedestal and thereby loses its primacy. Objectivity, it is argued, is one way of viewing the world, but not the only way. Further, it is not the original way, the way from which other forms of experience and perception derive. Nonobjective perception comes first, and determines the subject of the objective, scientific view of the chair, not the other way around. To think otherwise is to hold as an axiom something, the objective nature of the world, which is not axiomatic. In so far as one maintains this axiom, and believes that one is perceiving things that have objective qualities, that they exist with a determinate size, shape, color, etc. one is in error. “We shall no longer hold that perception is incipient science, but conversely that classical science is a form of perception which loses sight of its origins and believes itself complete.” (71)

It should be noted at this point that Merleau-Ponty published Phenomenology of Perception in 1946, and not 1800. How can he defend such a position? His basis is psychology. As he was writing, science had long provided plenty of good answers about the way things are, answers that stood up to scrutiny and observation. It offered answers, and even better, predictions. However, there have always been oddball phenomena, places where the explanations don’t quite fit. How does someone develop a phantom limb, for example, feeling pain in a limb that is no longer there? Is it to be explained by saying that the nerve that formerly went to that location is acting up? Perhaps. But then why does this happen in some patients and not others? Why does the phantom limb often go through the feelings that were felt when the patient lost the limb? Why can some patients “lose” the phantom limb and stop feeling anything? In this last case, certainly the cut nerve doesn’t just “turn off” one day. Rather, the phenomena surrounding the phantom limb suggest that the experience of what seems to the patient to be physically there is tied to the patient’s mental states. The patient’s “world,” defined as a world of significance, influences what is there for the patient. What happened in the past influences what is felt in the present, in spite of the testimony of objective reality. The mind affects the objective body, and vice versa. The two are united through meaning, which is the world.

The case of the phantom limb and other phenomena are used to make the case that the world that is experienced is far from objective. It is a world of meaning in which we do not simply take part, but which determines what exists for us, and how it exists. It is there first and foremost, because it is the baseline for all other thought. In psychology, specifically in the cases where the connection between self and world go awry, the depth of this connection and its “subjectivity” present themselves. “To concern oneself with psychology is necessarily to encounter, beneath objective thought which moves among ready-made things, a first opening upon things without which there would be no objective knowledge.” (111) The world of perception, one already infused with meaning, is what we wake up to and go to sleep to. It is the one in which we make our measurements. It cannot be avoided, and it is there before the world ever becomes objective.

But, the question will (and should) immediately be asked: so what? When we measure things, their measurements reveal their objective nature. Just because I don’t know the measurements before hand, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I can measure the dimensions of the object and it will have a measurement, and that measurement will not change if I am one foot or one hundred feet away. The chair is red, and it will always be so, no matter what the lighting conditions are. Merleau-Ponty denies these claims. We say the chair is red; under what lighting conditions is this so? If I use natural light as my baseline, it will appear slightly different than when I use an indoor light. What if the chair is half in light and half in shadow? We may maintain that the chair is one color, but in terms of pure perception, of what we actually experience, it literally is not one color. It is half red and half a darker red. Even if you want to go down to physical terms, the light reaching our eyes really is different; if it was the same, we would see only one color, after all. Why, then, are we always instantly certain, before even judgment comes in, that it is one color? Because we infer it. We infer it instantaneously, but infer it nonetheless. We have a color which is determined by us as “the real color,” whether because that’s the color we see it in a certain lighting condition we usually see it in, or because it is the color we are told it is, or any other reason. Differences are explained away by the mind immediately by the context: the two reds are there because of the lighting; it’s still red, though perception says otherwise. The same goes for size. When I say the chair is three feet tall, what is that height? If I take a yardstick and hold it directly before my eyes, my vision cannot possibly span such a gap. When it is twenty feet away, the yardstick looks tiny. What is, in fact, for me a “yard” is a general measure in a general situation of my choosing. “I run through appearances and reach the real colour or the real shape when my experience is at its maximum of clarity . . . these different appearances are for me appearances of a certain true spectacle, that in which the perceived configuration, for a sufficient degree of clarity, reaches its maximum richness.” (370) What one pictures is not a literal red or a literal yard, but one’s baseline perception of it. It can be replied quite quickly that this is nonsense, and that they are all the same: one yard is one yard is one yard, it’s just under different conditions. But that’s conceding the point. The conditions change, the “yard” is interpreted into a new set of conditions based on the position of a yardstick in the world relative to our point of view. We see the yardstick and the chair from different distances, and the world assigns their significance based on their relationship in the world and relative to myself, not based on a measure that exists in eternity. ‘The yardstick is four feet away, the chair is twelve, so I can infer a relation between them where the one is perceived bigger than the other but is not really so:’ what this concedes is that the definition of a yard is not “pure,” but based upon situation. A yard is not a measurement, but a set of circumstances: I can look there, and there, and there, and measure out a yard with my mind in a thousand different places, because I take the situation, the distance I am looking, the apparent size of the objects, the size I know them as when seen close up, and understand them within a total situation. If I took the distances isolated, outside of the situation, I would run into problems: “is not a man smaller at two hundred yards than at five yards away? He becomes so if I isolate him from the perceived context and measure his apparent size. Otherwise he is neither smaller nor indeed equal in size: he is anterior to equality and inequality; he is the same man seen from farther away.” (304) Everything, the whole situation as well as its relation to the rest of the world and my experience, is already there before I measure a thing. Everything is there, I see this and it is far away, I see the color of the chair and it is half in shadow, with these relationships being based upon my omnipresent place in and interaction with the world. Red is red, even when the perception is not red, because the total meaning of the world includes with light and shadow, and a chair split between the two.

We now begin to see a deeper meaning in the organization of a field: it is not only colours, but also geometrical forms, all sense-data and the significance of objects which go to form a system. Our perception in its entirety is animated by a logic which assigns to each object its determinate features in virtue of those of the rest, and which ‘cancel out’ as unreal all stray data; it is entirely sustained by the certainty of the world . . . . The constancy of colour is only an abstract component of the constancy of things, which in turn is grounded on the primordial constancy of the world as the horizon of all our experiences. (365)

Objectivity is determined after the fact, and can only be made sense of in terms of its relationship to a world of meaning. And, to push the point further, objectivity is, as a simple matter of experience, not our originating perspective of the world: “the perceived circle,” that most perfect shape, “does not have equal diameters because it has no diameter at all: it is conveyed to me, and is recognizable and distinguishable from any other figure by its circular physiognomy, and not by any of the ‘properties’ which positing thought may subsequently discover in it.” (319) The only circle is the worldly circle, the circle as perceived. We do not see the abstract geometrical circle even when we do geometry: it is only understood through the image of the circle, that perfect roundness whose exemplar is the sun.

So much for the defense of Merleau-Ponty, at least without going too far into details (of which the book has plenty). The essential point is this: the objective world is secondary to the perceived world, the noumenon to the phenomenon, to the point that the former relies upon the latter for its existence. If, from here, we return to our original topic, epistemology, we see that the phenomenological viewpoint begs a rather serious question: does this mean that everything is subjective, and that thus there is no knowledge? We have lost, it appears, our means of determining the nature of anything. We cannot even say when red is red anymore, because we already judge it according to the context of a world of meaning in which we find it! Isn’t all pretense to knowledge gone forever, then?

If we take time to understand the problem from Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, we will see why he argues that not only is the problem not as bad as one would think it is, but in fact there is no problem at all. Here we must find our way back to the Cartesian model of epistemology. The first question epistemology asks is what one can know. But, as mentioned at the beginning, this question must assume a specific idea of what constitutes knowledge. For Descartes and early modern philosophy, one sought to “know” objects existing outside the self. The great problem for Descartes was not confirming the cogito, but getting outside of that cogito and into the world. Knowledge, for him, required access to something completely separate from the self. If one continues to assume this view of knowledge, then certainly phenomenological subjectivity will lead to total skepticism. But Merleau-Ponty does not follow the Cartesian view. For him there is no outside world to understand; the world is already given, and we are already interacting with it before we can even state the fact. The world, as a horizon of meaning, is what’s always there. The “objective” world with which Descartes wanted to make contact is a purely secondary phenomenon, and one unperceived at that. It is inferred from the original objects of experience, which are those objects that make up the perceived world. What Descartes sought was reality. The problem is that he got reality wrong. “Reality” is not a bunch of timeless things, but the world as perceived; there is no other world to refer to, besides secondarily. In fact, reality is not some other-worldly sphere (for that’s exactly how it is presented in Descartes), but a whole, a world. “The ‘real’ is that environment in which each moment is not only inseparable from the rest, but in some way synonymous with them, in which the ‘aspects’ are mutually significatory and absolutely equivalent . . . . The thing is that manner of being for which the complete definition of one of its attributes demands that of the subject in its entirety.” (376) To most of us today, who are raised on objective science that aims for the concrete and eternal (though the more theoretical areas seem to be moving away from this, interestingly enough), this view appears preposterous. But a simply survey of epistemology, viewed from a new perspective, reveals just how odd the standard view actually is. Descartes separated himself from everything that existed, and then tried to find it all again, all in the name of “certainty.” Even though he admitted that thought remained directed, that he was “that same person who now doubts almost everything, who nevertheless understands and conceives certain things, who is sure of and affirms the truth of this one thing alone,” (Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations 85), he denied the worth of those thoughts until he could find a second sphere that was equal with that, and only then would his experiences be justified. For hundreds of years people followed him in either chasing that world or denying we could reach it, and those who denied we could reach it were skeptics, people who said we could have no knowledge. But if we have no knowledge of this second world, why chase after it in the first place? Why believe it could be there: alternatively, why say that one can have no knowledge if one cannot reach such an imaginary (for that is precisely what it is, if we cannot directly experience it) world? That I exist, Descartes said, there can be no doubt. However, he refused to grant such high status to the world, because he had already decided that it was outside of himself, that he was seeing only his own mental states. But if we are embodied, if our experience requires a world, this problem vanishes completely. Instead of the self, the cogito, being the basis of knowledge, the whole world appears as well. Thus the cogito is replaced with: “There is the absolute certainty of the world in general, but not of any one thing in particular.” (Phenomenology of Perception 347) For it is true that everything within the world is viewed only within a perspective and a meaning, and thus not “objectively,” and so not with total certainty (which will be addressed presently). But that that world exists, that there is significance, and that I not only think but think of something, in other words, that I think intentionally, is certain. And in that sense the world is already here with me. I am not invalidated if I cannot find the mythical realm of truth. I am already in truth, insofar as I am in a world.

Thus we have solved part of our epistemological problem, namely, the problem of reaching truth. However, there is one towering issue we have not confronted: the total subjectivity of the world, and with it of truth. People do not simply want experience, they want experience of real things. Are we not left, if we follow phenomenology, with nothing but a subjective world and, even worse, solipsism? In all of Merleau-Ponty’s railing against objective thought, it is easy to make this jump if one does not read carefully, despite the fact that Merleau-Ponty goes to great lengths to separate himself from it. The problem with ascribing solipsism to him is that it posits nothing but the self, and the world then becomes a creation of it. But a question then arises, which Descartes himself asked: if I think, doubt, and judge various things, and if there is not a world that gave them to me, is it then the case that I made all these things up myself? How can I make things up that I am unaware of? How do I decide what I will see in the morning, when it is unexpected? Am I God? “If the cogito reveals to me a new mode of existence owing nothing to time, and if I discover myself as the universal constituent of all being accessible to me, and as a transcendental field with no hidden corners and no outside . . . [i]t must then be said, with no qualification, that my mind is God.” (433) But then how would we be mistaken? For it is certainly true that we can be wrong about things, even within our own thoughts. We hallucinate and have dreams. Some go mad. Are all of these equal realities, instituted by me? If not, how do I create these layers of reality while simultaneously deceiving myself until the last minute, when my head clears and I see I was wrong (or at least, that things are not what they appeared to be)? Can I fool myself, if I am what constitutes everything that is there?

What leads to the above concerns is the forgetting of Merleau-Ponty’s greatest contribution to phenomenology, the concept of embodiment, something which I have neglected up until now but that is central to his work. Saying that “we are in the world,” and that by “world” is meant a world of meaning, is not just saying that we are in a scenario where stuff means stuff, and where we designate that stuff as stuff. Such a view is pure intellectualism, which says that the mind dictates the world. The problem is, the world thereby becomes objective in the sense of submitting to the absolute rule of the mind. In fact, we lack that power, and perception teaches us this. “The mistake of intellectualism is to make it [consciousness] self-subsistent, to remove it from the stuff in which it is realized . . . . [E]verything that separates us from the real world – error, sickness, madness, in short incarnation – is reduced to the status of mere appearance.” (143) If Merleau-Ponty were an intellectualist, then it would be true, for him, that one creates one’s own madness. But being-in-the-world is being completely within that world, not just making a world and living in it. We do not stand above it and dictate its contents; it is simply there, as we said before, before we ever think about it. The real position of the individual is a “third term between the psychic and the physiological, between the for itself and the in itself . . . which we call existence.” (140) Perception and experience are existential, which is to say, irrevocably tied up with concrete existence. Anyone who told you that “existentialism” is talking about French guys in coffee shops brooding about life doesn’t actually know much about philosophy. “Existential,” which received its significance from Heidegger, places us not in a purely objective world nor an idealistic world of our making, but simply in the world: we are in a world where we perceive things from our own perspective, where we cannot control what comes to us but can control what we think of it, where we are free, but not too much. I am not God who creates the world; I am just a member of it. I live in a world which actually exists and from which I receive my experiences, not one which is created by them; that would be impossible, since the world must first be there in order to give me experiences at all. How, one can ask, could I create a world of my own, a solipsistic universe, from scratch? Certainly I would have to be God. Yet, if I am God, I seem to have an annoying tendency to create boulders which I cannot lift, and I can’t seem to get myself to stop doing it. But if I can’t make my world alone, then it must be there; there must be a world. The truth is that there is a natural world, though it is not the world of science. “The natural world is the horizon of all horizons, the style of all possible styles, which guarantees for my experiences a given, not a willed, unity underlying all the disruptions of my personal and historical life.” (385) When I walk around the red chair, I don’t find an empty space behind it which is empty because nothing was posited by me; I find the continuation of the chair. When I back away from it, the chair shrinks in proportion to the rest of the environment. The world doesn’t throw out pits of non-existence or senseless miracles of physics: it remains the same world, lasting through my perspectives, even when (as often happens) I acquire new beliefs or concepts which alter my view. The background remains, but new details jump out. It is this world that I am in, through the existence of my body. Thus the mind-body connection, though not merely objective, is not intellectual, either; it is, if anything, incarnation into the world. I act, and my body acts; the two are one and the same. But I can lose a fingernail or a leg and still be myself. Because of my embodiment in the world, I can’t let go of the world. I am in it.

Against the charge of solipsism, one of the most dangerous charges set against him, Merleau-Ponty employs his explanation of the embodied self. Solipsism argues that there no others because we see only bodies, not people. Yet that assumes that a body is not a self; in other words, that the self is separate from the world. Against this Merleau-Ponty reminds us that we are embodied, and when we see ourselves in the world, we see bodies. I am not a floating consciousness, but one which exists in a world and is defined by my interactions with it. My presence is revealed to the world only by my embodied activity. But this does not mean I exist; I am distinguished by my worldliness, by my acting out of meanings. Others are given in exactly the same way: “if another’s body is not an object for me, nor mine an object for him, if both are manifestations of behaviour, the positing of the other does not reduce me to the status of an object in his field, nor does my perception of the other reduce him to the status of an object in mine.” (411) The other and myself are placed equally in the world, and even though “[i]t is true that the other will never exist for us as we exist ourselves” (503), when one looks to experience, one sees not objects, but others, actors dealing with a world and its meanings. These are people in the same sense that I am a person in the world, and I treat them as such. I could not think otherwise, no matter how hard I might try:

Solipsism would be strictly true only of someone who managed to be tacitly aware of his existence without being or doing anything, which is impossible, since existing is being in and of the world. The philosopher cannot fail to draw others with him into his reflective retreat, because in the uncertainty of the world, he has for ever learned to treat them as consorts, and because all his knowledge is built on this datum of opinion. (421)

There is one final question we must answer, and it relates directly to the second basic question of epistemology, which is how we can know. As we mentioned when asking it, this question depends upon the first, as well as upon a conception of how one relates to truth. If we accept the embodied mind thesis, an answer emerges. Merleau-Ponty answers it through the engagement of some of the classic anti-knowledge arguments in epistemology: the dream, the madman, the hallucination. These questions appear to be forcefully begged against a phenomenological epistemology: if experience is shaped by meaning, how is my experience any more valid than the madman’s? How can I tell I’m not dreaming? When is my perception of the world real? These questions appear damning, because we have just spent seventeen pages arguing that there is no objective world. If there is no world from which our experiences come, then aren’t all perspectives equal?

The answer is a flat no. To make this argument is once again to mistake an embodied phenomenology for a pure intellectualism which independently posits its world. It must be remembered that we do not, we cannot posit the world, because it is already there. Once again, we don’t make the world and then live in it; we find ourselves already in it. We don’t exercise godlike control over the nature of our world; no matter how hard I try, I can’t lift my car. I can decide it’s because I’m not trying, and that if I tried tomorrow I could do it, but that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t lift my car right now. When I walk around the chair, its completed structure presents itself, even if I’m unsure what to expect, because I’ve never seen the back of it before. In fact, it may surprise me: there may be a child’s toy behind it that I didn’t expect to see. But surprises like that happen while still maintaining the integrity of the world itself; what won’t happen is that I look behind the chair and suddenly see my first-grade class, and everyone laughing at me.

The perceived world is not only my world, but the one in which I see the behaviour of other people take shape, for their behaviour equally aims at this world, which is correlative not only of my consciousness, but of any conscious which I can possibly encounter . . . . [O]ther spectacles are implied in mine at this moment, just as the reverse or underneath side of objects is perceived simultaneously with their visible aspect, or as the next room pre-exists in relation to the perception which I should actually have if I walked into it . . . . My perception brings into co-existence an indefinite number of perceptual chains which, if followed up, would confirm it in all respects and accord with it. (394)

Being embodied, we exist as part of a world just as much as we exist as selves; therefore, as we have said, we are subject to the natural world as well as the world of our self-made meanings. Try as we might to over-step the world and create our own meanings, there remains a natural world to remind us of our limits. The problem with dreams, illusions, and madness is that they overstep these boundaries: I find myself talking with my mom as she looks today, and with my old grade-school friends as they looked back then, all the while on a reality TV show. I step off the stage, through a door, and into the Wild West. These events break the rules of the natural world, and when we return from our dreams, we recognize it immediately. We cannot find a coherent world-structure in a dream or hallucination, because the dream-world or hallucination-world is made up by ourselves from the scattered fragments of our experience: “the hallucinatory phenomenon is no part of the world, that is to say, it is not accessible, there is no definite path leading from it to all the remaining experiences of the deluded subject, or to the experience of the same.” (395) Thus there is a difference between the two, and we experience that difference when we switch between dream and reality, between hallucinations and normalcy.

But what if we don’t switch? What if we have a dream where the characters are all from my grade school, as is the environment, and when I open the door of the classroom, I enter the hall? What if I never wake from this dream? Am I not fooled then? Absolutely. Even Merleau-Ponty admits that “[t]he all-important point is that the patients, most of the time, discriminate between their hallucinations and their perceptions.” (389, emphasis mine) But let us take the argument further. Let us say that, instead of being a phenomenologist, you only base your world on what exists objectively. What difference is there in the application of the argument? If you never wake up, when will you be able to detect your illusions? Let us go even further, for the form of the argument allows it. What if the evil genius of Descartes exists, and he corrupts even your most basic knowledge? What if two plus two really equals five? What can you know then, huh? As is shown here, the problem with using the example of a “total illusion” is that all epistemological theories that do not guarantee total certitude are equally subject to it. It has been a long time since epistemology has claimed to have Cartesian certitude, and this is the consequence. Even Descartes required God to prove that he could know he wasn’t dreaming, for at the start he had only the cogito. Thus the criticism fails, for (1) it does not reveal a weakness of phenomenological epistemology which is not a weakness to any other epistemology, and (2) the only epistemology that survives such a criticism is one which promises certitude, which is a difficult, if not indefensible, epistemology. Phenomenology, then, leaves us no worse off than standard modern epistemologies do in terms of arguments from illusion.

When I look at my desk, what do I see? I see a desk, I say, with a computer, speakers, and an external hard drive on it. The desk is brown, the speakers black, the hard drive silver. Yet the desk I’m seeing is in fact all shades of brown, and appears at parts nearly white. The hard drive is bright silver on the top, where it catches the light, and a dark, subdued silver on the side. Yet I call the desk “brown” and the hard drive “black” because I do not simply see a world of objective colors which are them composed into objects. What I see first is a world full of things and phenomena in virtue of which the colors are organized and matched with the conditions of the environment. This brown and this brown and this brown are all the same desk; they appear different colors because of the shadows cast by the speakers and the scratches from wear over time. The size, I say, never changes, because, no matter how big or small the desk appears, I see it as part of a world (my room) where the objects remain in the same evolving context with it, and form a situation that maintains the desk’s size. This is the way we experience the world, according to phenomenology. We experience a world loaded with significance, not one composed of scientifically measurable units. This is not to say that science is not deriving bad numbers; it has done much, and gone far. (Note: Merleau-Ponty does not actually spend any time explaining what science gets right in Phenomenology of Perception, though he whole-heartedly believes in its importance, and so has to spend a great amount of time explaining this in The Primacy of Perception, a lecture given in 1948.) But the world of science is different than the world we perceive. We do not perceive this color, and this smell, and this feeling, and put them together; we recognize a chair, and infer that this color belongs to it, but that this smell is wrong, because it smells like a dog has been laying on it, and so on. Our world, for Merleau-Ponty, is the world of perception, and if we are to explain and understand that world, we need to get it right: “I am a psychological and historical structure, and have received, with existence, a manner of existing, a style. All my actions and thoughts stand in a relationship to this structure, and even a philosopher’s thought is merely a way of making explicit his hold on the world, and what he is.” (529)

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More on the Cogito

To be read after the previous essay.

I am now three pages into the preface of Phenomenology of Perception, and I see this:

Descartes's [sic] methodical doubt does not deprive us of anything, since the whole world, at least in so far as we experience it, is reinstated in the Cogito, enjoying equal certainty, and simply labelled 'thought of . . .'

You can see Mr. Merleau-Ponty and I are on the same level in terms of Descartes.

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On the Cogito

“I think, therefore I am.” This sentence, the most famous of Descartes’, is technically not in his Meditations on First Philosophy, but rather in his later work, Principles of Philosophy. The Principles is in effect a later revision of the Meditations, and as such expresses its major ideas intact but refined and explained in greater detail. As such, it is a vital companion to the Meditations and helps to clarify much that was written in it.

Today what I will seek after is the nature of that statement, “I think, therefore I am.” There is no dispute that it was Descartes who gave epistemology its modern turn, and, through the influence his questions had, dominated it for at least the next 150 years. Even after Kant, who was a unique event in more than one sense, that most basic idea of philosophy, dualism, the idea that mind and body are essentially separate, has lived on. For the budding philosophy student it is the initial question that has to be overcome; what is the relation of myself and the world? Through this question, dualism maintains itself as something of a default position. I, being the avid reader of Nietzsche that I am, have a problem with any position that acquires the position of “default.” Too much is left to tradition and habit in such a position. So let’s discuss the cogito, that most famous and deeply rooted of philosophical doctrines, from a different standpoint, that of phenomenology. Phenomenology will be discussed at length later, when I get to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus, Phenomenology of Perception. For now, a good way to introduce phenomenology is to describe and address that which it most stringently opposes: Cartesian dualism.

As is commonly known, Descartes’ program is an attempt to overcome skepticism and achieve certainty in one’s knowledge, for, according to Descartes, only what is absolutely beyond any and all doubts can count as knowledge (another view which philosophy inherited for a long time, and which still positions itself as something of a default which needs to be addressed). One can easily doubt, according to Descartes, that the external world exists. Certainly we have illusions from time to time, or it is possible that we are merely dreaming without realizing it. Yet even in the act of doubting, one must already believe, nay, is absolutely compelled to believe, that one’s self exists as that which doubts.

[H]e who strives to doubt of all is unable nevertheless to doubt that he is while he doubts, and . . . what reasons thus, in not being able to doubt of itself and doubting nevertheless of everything else, is not that which we call our body, but what we name our mind or thought . . . . (Descartes, Principles of Philosophy xxv)

“I think, therefore I am.” What am I, that is? Something that thinks, and nothing more. How is this demonstrated? By the fact that anything else which I consider to be myself – namely, my physical body – can be doubted, while the mind cannot. That part of the self which thinks is the part, the only part, which cannot be doubted; it is unconditional, and always there, playing the part of essence. It is the thinking self which confirms my existence, not the body; which is only there some of the time at best. Thus, the self has to be thinking in its essence; there is an impenetrable wall, established by the difference between the indubitable and the doubtful, which separates mind and body. One is certain, the other is not. One is the product of dreams, the other creates them. One is subject to the senses, the other is that to which senses defer.

The above are the general ways in which we, along with Descartes, are wont to separate mind (which is to say, thinking mind) and body. The mind is not physically present, or subject to the sense, according to the Cartesian view, whereas the body is an object in space. Those who today do not accept the existence of “mind” as a sort of spirit still have to at least deal with the question of what exactly consciousness is. I know a very smart pre-med student who, no matter what his scientific and philosophical convictions argue, cannot persuade, much less convince, himself that consciousness is only a series of chemical reactions, or, more philosophically important, that the mind is of the same nature as the body. In light of the last hundred years of psychology, we are getting less dogmatic on this score. But the fact remains that the temptation towards dualism is still there. It exists not merely in the dividing line between mind-self and body-self; the whole classical epistemological problem, the problem of the existence of the external world, is built on another dualism of the same type, and another one that was given impetus by Descartes. It is, after all, because the body is ultimately considered of the same class as the external world that it is subject to the same doubts. So, as long as we are in a position where the external world as a whole is an epistemological problem, we are still subject to dualism.

In order to consider this problem at its source, which could provide us with a solution, we must first get back to the sources from which the problem springs. There is one source, one doctrine which allies with dualism, which interests us here: representationalism. “When we further reflect on the various ideas that are in us, it is easy to perceive that there is not much difference among them, when we consider them certain modes of thinking, but that they are widely different, considered in reference to the objects they represent.” (Principles 7, emphasis mine) Representationalism is never discussed explicitly by Descartes, namely because he assumes it from the beginning. It is an essential assumption in his quest; the reason he can doubt the external world is because it is separate from him, and so it must be accessible through representation if it is to be perceived at all. Certainly Descartes experiences things, even without knowledge of an external world; “the sensation itself, or consciousness of seeing or walking, the knowledge is manifestly certain . . . .” (Principles 3) But, for him, this is something altogether different from the experience of a thing itself. The whole section just quoted reads: “and if I understand[, for example,] by vision or walking . . . the work of the body, the conclusion is not absolutely certain . . . . if I mean the sensation itself, or consciousness of seeing or walking, the knowledge is manifestly certain . . . .” (Principles 3) Were Descartes seeking to prove merely the existence of a perceived world, there would be no issue here, and he could stop after having proved the cogito; for, as Descartes knew (and it is a vital point which will be touched upon later), our thinking is often, if not always, tied to something sensed or perceived; he could not, and would not, deny that we think about places, people, and things. Yet he went to all that trouble to prove God’s existence, and to prove that God was not a deceiver, so that he could thereby show that what we perceive must come from an external world. Why? Because it was assumed by him that the only world worth having was an external one; that, because everything has a cause, including ideas, we must show conclusively that our ideas have a cause outside of ourselves; and, because we perceive a world of real objects, for such a world not to exist itself would show God to be a deceiver (since certainly, we think we perceive an external world) and thus imperfect, which cannot be the case. Thus representationalism runs deeply in Descartes’ thought, which is no shock given that he was a dualist; after all, it would be pointless to be a dualist if there was a complete wall between the worlds, and only one was known, the other remaining completely sealed off from any kind of knowledge; this is the reason Kant is not a dualist, though he spoke of noumena and phenomena.

Why the concern over representationalism? After all, everyone assumes that there should be an external world to which our senses correspond. The alternative, it seems, would be solipsism, a self alone, a monad. No one wants that. And if you accept Descartes’ framing of the problem, representationalism does seem to make sense. It is certainly cause for concern if everything is just our thoughts, out there, alone. Yet within Descartes’ thought there is something of a (unintentional) deception, thanks to this representationalism. Descartes affirms that thinking is not just bare thought; “By the word thought, I understand all that which takes place in us that we ourselves are immediately conscious of it . . . even to perceive . . . here the same as to think.” (Principles 3) But at the same time, the image presented of the self doubting everything is that of a thinking self in the most abstract sense. When one tries to picture the self as doubting cogito, one pictures a completely isolated individual, completely free of the senses (because, of course, thinking beings don’t sense). But there’s a problem in the parentheses. Thinking beings do sense; they always sense. In the Meditations, Descartes talks about the experience of liberating the self from the senses, and yet this is literally impossible. The mind is always working through senses, always reaching out, never existing as a static thing isolated from all existence. This is not insignificant; in fact, it is, in a general sense, the basis of the cogito. Merleau-Ponty draws this out of Descartes in his lecture, The Primacy of Perception:

[T]here is a third meaning [of three] of the cogito, the only solid one: the act of doubting in which I put in question all possible objects of my experience. This act grasps itself in its own operation and thus cannot doubt itself . . . . I grasp myself, not as a constituting subject which is transparent to itself [that is, not as a abstract thing], and which constitutes the totality of every possible object of thought and experience, but as a particular thought, as a thought engaged with certain objects, as a thought in act . . . . In this sense I am certain that I am thinking this or that as well as being certain that I am thinking . . . . This thought, which feels itself rather than sees itself, which searches after clarity rather than possess it . . . . (Merleau-Ponty, “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences,” in Dermot Moran, The Phenomenology Reader 443-444)

In the Meditations, despite the image that we generate of the cogito, Descartes confirms Merleau-Ponty’s view:

But what then am I? A thinking being. What is a thinking being? It is a being which doubts, which understands, which conceives, which affirms . . . . Am I not that same person who now doubts almost everything, who nevertheless understands and conceives certain things, who is sure of and affirms the truth of this one thing alone . . . . (Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations 85)

If we are not careful, all of our attention is paid to the image of the isolated self thinking undefined thoughts. In fact, as Descartes himself states, these thoughts are all completely specific, and are about all the things we concern ourselves with. One who doubts can still imagine the tree, the house, the body. In other words, the world is still already there in its fullness. None of our experiences have changed that fact the slightest; this is why Descartes recommends a “provisional morality” to live by while one doubts everything. One can doubt that what one is experiencing is representing something real, but that does not make the experience itself less real. The only problem here is presented by representationalism; what are we to make of the world to which our experiences are supposed to correspond?

Well, if you want a world, outside the self, to which all of our thoughts are supposed to correspond, so long as they are “clear and distinct,” I don’t think Descartes will provide you with one. Later philosophers won’t do much better, either; Kant’s solution to the problem was to deny there was basically to call knowledge of the “external world” a contradiction in terms. What I am advocating is that the problem seen here is a problem generated by dualism and representationalism, one that may not be necessary. Our experience of a world of some sort is not to be denied; for even Descartes, it simply cannot be rejected as it is, by arguments or anything else. Through the thinking self, the world is already there as a brute fact. It is present by way of the cogito, which is itself not an argument, and thus not in need of justification, because it is self-evident. For even when he doubts the ability of reason to prove his own existence, the evil genius “can never make me be nothing as long as I think that I am something.” (Meditations 82) The cogito is thereby affirmed through the act, for Descartes. In the Principles he attacks those who debate the meaning of the terms in the cogito as an argument, saying they miss the point:

And when I said that the proposition, I think, therefore I am, is of all others the first and most certain which occurs to one philosophizing properly, I did not therefore deny that it was necessary to know what thought, existence, and certitude are, and the truth that, in order to think it is necessary to be, and the like; but, because these are the most simple notions, and such as of themselves afford the knowledge of nothing existing, I did not judge it proper there to enumerate them. (Principles, 4)

There is no need to explain all the connections; for Descartes, they are so basic that one simply assents of necessity. And with necessary affirmation of the cogito, the thinking self, comes the content of thought, which is the whole world as experienced.

Thus, with the self, the world is already implied. But is it justified? The answer to this question depends upon whether you accept Cartesian dualism and representationalism. As we have seen, the picture of the mind present in Descartes’ projection of the cogito is a bleak and lonely picture. But in the subtext of Descartes’ philosophy, and even explicit in some cases, is the fact that the mind is neither empty not “worldless.” Because of the nature of the cogito, we experience a world all the same whether there are external objects or not. Our thoughts are always tied to that world; even the cogito is one who “doubts almost everything, who nevertheless understands and conceives certain things, who is sure of and affirms the truth of this one thing alone . . . .” These are specific propositions, referring to content of experience, content which is necessarily concrete and worldly. If we understand this as our interface with the world (For is it not? The challenge, for Descartes, is to prove that there is a world to correspond to it), if we reject dualism and representationalism as Descartes understood it, the skeptical doubts about the world completely disappear. Immediately many people, including many philosophers, would cry foul here. But the fact remains that, according to the assumptions of Cartesian dualism, whether or not the external world exists, the world we experience is the same. If, from here, one chooses to base one’s view of knowledge on experience, on what is actually experienced instead of some outside world that we don’t actually contact except from a distance, the existence of an external world makes no difference. What matters is the world of experience, which is, according to Descartes, indubitable.

What has all of this to do with phenomenology? What I have just proposed is, in essence, a phenomenological epistemology as an alternative to Cartesian epistemology. Descartes based his epistemology on the certainty of what existed. Things could not merely to be present, and thus to at least some degree dependent upon our finite minds, but had to have a real, independent existence, apart from thought, particularly sensation, and its limitations. That is why Descartes needed to prove that God existed and was not a deceiver; only then could he argue that our ideas were caused by an external world, and thus justified. The alternative, which it was the explicit purpose of the Meditations to reject, was that there was no external world outside of our perception. Thus our knowledge had to be based in a concrete world outside of ourselves.

Phenomenology rejects that subject-object distinction. Phenomenology is concerned not with things apart, but with the experience of them. The phenomenon, according to Kant, is the thing as it appears to us, as opposed to the noumenon, that which exists “in itself,” apart from all perception. Descartes and those who followed him focused all their energy on the latter, eventually resulting in Hume, who attacked the noumenon in all its forms and tore down knowledge with it. Kant eliminated knowledge of the noumenon, in a senses siding with Hume. But at the same time he rejected skepticism; not because he thought that there was nothing to know (one cannot confirm or deny the existence of noumenon, according to Kant), but because human knowledge simply doesn’t work that way. Knowledge, for Kant, is dependent upon experience. Not experience of an external world, but experience as understood through the mind and its processes. In this sense, Kant gave phenomenology its first form; what matters is the act of experience, and it is from that that knowledge follows, not from a “real” world, but because experience of the world, influenced as it is by reason, is our only way of understanding it. Kant saw experience as shaped by rules, and the rules were the domain of metaphysics; again, here he predicts a phenomenological viewpoint. Phenomenology is interested in the structure of our experience, how it is we come to perceive things. It does not start with a self isolated from the world and trying to reach it, for such a position is pointless. For this reason the old questions of epistemology are simply thrown out, because they start with bad assumptions. The question of the meaning of the world has to be raised anew, and phenomenology will attempt to do it.

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Next: we make that attempt. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. It’s nearly 550 pages, so expect it to take some time.

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The Snurp Ascendancy

I recall a time long ago, in the darker ages, when this blog was just a lone voice calling out mournfully from the vast depths of the google search engine. A plea for companionship was but a soliloquy of solitude.

However, those times are changing. The Snurp ascendancy is on its way.

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Coming This Summer...

Technically, finals week begins next week, but I am for all intents and purposes done. The last seven weeks were the busiest of my life. As of today, at about 12:30, that immediately and completely ended. 100%. From everything to do, to nothing. I took the rest of today off, but tomorrow I begin what I consider the real work. Undergraduate is over. This summer (that is, starting tomorrow), I improve my German, re-learn logic, and read. Expect Hegel, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Merleau-Ponty, among others. Unlike in the past, my choices have a specific direction, namely, post-Kantian Continential philosophy. Many of those books are very long, but they will be read and discussed. They are also, for the most part, very hard. But that's the choice I've made. I intend to become the best I can possibly be.

The time is 9:52 pm, April 24, 2009. There is thunder outside, and a new period begins.

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