Mike Gutierrez

• Loyola University Philosophy Department
• Phenomenology Research Group
• ASAGE
• Academia.edu

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  • Online Philosophy (and other) Resources

    May 17, 13

    Rummaging through some lists of online philosophy resources.
    
    First I looked through here, "Tada,"which seems to be some sort of online dissertation project management resource, but also has a number of links to online research tools and resources.
    
    That led me to the Guide to Philosophy on the Internet, which appears to have gone defunct around 2004. Some of the links still work, but the site manager directs interested parties elsewhere...
    
    Specifically, to EpistemeLinks, which doesn't look to be as wide-ranging or ambitious as the old Guide, but is more up-to-date.
    
    Note: "Tada" includes some Classics links, among other links I find useful.
    
    All this seems sort of haphazard. Is there a better, more authoritative, more comprehensive list of online philosophy resources out there?

  • 13th Annual Phenomenology Roundtable ::: May 19th- 21st at Loyola University Chicago

    May 14, 13

    
    

    
    

    13th Annual Phenomenology Roundtable

    May 19th- 21st, at Loyola University Chicago

    
    

    The philosophy department at Loyola University Chicago invites interested parties to attend this three day workshop on topics in phenomenology. This year’s event features two invited speakers, Dr. Lisa Guenther (Vanderbilt) and Dr. Lewis Gordon (UCONN), along with the regular host of faculty and graduate contributions. Attendance is free for non-presenters, but those individuals wishing to attend the entire workshop are asked to make a small contribution. An abbreviated schedule is included below.

    
    

    For the full schedule, registration information, and all other details, visit the website at: http://phenomenologyroundtable.wordpress.com/. Questions may be addressed to: phenomenology_roundtable@yahoo.com.

    
    
    

    Sunday, May 19th

    LUC, Lake Shore Campus

    Crown Center, Room 530

    
    

    11:30-12:15 Registration

    12:15-5:00 Program

    (4:00-5:00 Dr. Lewis Gordon “Phenomenology and the Decolonization of Normative Life”)

    
    

    ~~~

    
    

    Monday, May 20th

    LUC, Lake Shore Campus

    Richard J. Klarchek Information Commons, 4th Floor

    
    

    9:00-12:00 Morning Program

    1:30-5:00 Afternoon Program

    (1:30-2:30 Dr. Lisa Guenther “Phenomenology and the Prison Industrial Complex”)

    
    

    ~~~

    
    

    Tuesday, May 21st

    LUC, Lake Shore Campus

    Richard J. Klarchek Information Commons, 4th Floor

    
    

    9:35-12:00 Morning Program

    
    
    
    
  • Draft: Epochal Thinking/Seeing

    May 13, 13

    
    

    Preparatory reading:

    
    

    -Husserl, The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, especially section 9a-e.

    -Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution

    
    

    Opening remark: Husserl’s Crisis (The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), unfinished at the time of his death in 1938) represents a peculiarly historical turn in his phenomenological project.

    Earlier attempts at an introduction to phenomenology were methodically and methodologically punctuated by a freely-performed epochē that marked a shift from the natural to the phenomenological attitude; this epochē, although always situated in the historical context of the individual who performed it, did not seem to be motivated by the extended narrative of that history, but rather only by the contemporary result of such a narrative. The epochē, as the launching pad into transcendental phenomenology, seemed to be itself transcendental, indifferent to the history of its possible employment.

    On the contrary, in the Crisis both the phenomenological epochē and the theoretical difficulty, the loss of science’s meaning for life, the “crisis,” to which it responds, come at the end of a long historical narrative spanning the philosophy of the Ancient Greeks to Husserl’s contemporary philosophical scene. This history was not a mere accidental prelude, but rather told the story of the essential philosophico-theoretical steps involved in precipitating the crisis, a story of a continual sedimentation of scientific theory over the pre-scientific, pre-given lifeworld which constituted the practical ground for meaningful theoretical activity. The history Husserl describes is that of a continual layering over, concealment of, sedimentation upon the lifeworld, resulting in a steady drift of the theoretical project away from its source of meaning. This drift can be charted according to five major periods relating to the historical narrative of the Crisis. Proceeding chronologically, we have:

    
    

    (0) lifeworld: the pre-scientific, pre-given matrix of the practical, social, cultural meanings that lend an initial orientation to any subsequent human projects, theoretical or otherwise. Time: pre-history to the theoretical turn (~300 BC, Euclid)

    (1) mathematical and geometrical idealization (think Euclid): ideal limit-shapes (circles, triangles, etc.) are taken as regulative of empirical praxis. The ideal limit-shape of the circle instructs us how to round wheels “perfectly.” Mathematical and geometrical ideals, as a complete and coherent system of interrelations, can be folded back into empirical praxis as an increasingly applied science, substructing empirical reality with mathematical and geometrical idealities.

    (2) mathematization of nature (think Galileo): sense plena are submitted to the same regulative ideality to which the shape-strata had been initially submitted. This was the beginning of the quest for a universal inductive causality although Husserl emphasizes that Galileo, operating with the same inherited ideal interpretive framework, “saw” his hypotheses as carrying the same indubitable force as mathematical idealities. So: Nature, both shape-strata and sense plena, are mathematizable and the relations between the two are regular, ordered, and universally determinable according to (inductive) hypotheses whose ideal certainty is evinced through verification. The “laws of nature” follow.

    (3) arithmetization and algebraicization (think late modern and contemporary exact sciences, split off from the human sciences): already incipient in the praxis of theorizing, arithmetization takes up the task of a universal formalization of scientific practice. The mathematized entities of (2) are folded over into equations attempting to represent their interrelations as a complete and coherent scientific account of the world. This is, arguably, still the situation of science today, which is in search of something like a universally determinative physics on which it could ground the results of the separate sciences.

    (∞) the infinite task of the science of the lifeworld: responding to what Husserl saw as a crisis of meaning for the sciences, he breaks off the narrative of linear theoretical advance in trade for a sort of return to the lifeworld. This is not a repudiation of modern science, whose technical prowess Husserl recognizes; rather, it is a demand that the formal emptiness of the results of modern science be filled out through a reactivation of the historical chain of evidencing that led to the results. In other words, the multi-layered edifice of modern science needs to be secured from its foundation in the lifeworld, upwards to its highest accomplishments.

    
    

    Periods (1) through (3) roughly correspond to a rote history of Western philosophy, divided into the three periods of ancient, medieval, and modern. Husserl’s creative interpretation of the history of science and philosophy derived from a fairly conventional understanding of that history (as can be seen in the timeline). The Crisis highlights key moments in the ancient and modern periods, while leaving almost one thousand years of the Dark Ages in the dark. More surprising is the use Husserl makes of the periods “outside” that history, the (0) lifeworld and the (∞) science of the lifeworld. The former transcends the history of (1) through (3) from “below” by grounding the meaning of theoretical activity; the latter transcends the history from “above” by forming the regulative ideal by which theoretical activity charts its course.

    How/where does the methodological move of the epochē enter into this history? I’m considering two options: (i) as the “one time only” inaugurating move into the science of the lifeworld (or into the “phenomenological attitude” in general), or (ii) as a repeatable jointure connecting the separate moments of the Crisis narrative (0) through (∞).

    In regards to (i). Pro: This seems to be the more reliable option insofar as Husserl develops phenomenology as the contemporary “solution” to the progressively built up crisis of theoretical science. Phenomenology, and any of its methodological procedures, including the epochē, would only have applicability to the contemporary crisis here and now. There was no phenomenology in the ancient world, nor in the medieval era, etc. -- the methodological epochē can only be done “once”. The epochē is, of course, repeatable -- new individuals can perform it, or the same individuals can perform it again -- but the context is not repeatable, stays the same, and is historically-rooted to philosophical and scientific scene Husserl described at the time of the Crisis.

    Contra: the discipline of phenomenology may be historically-rooted to a specific time and place, but do we have to say the same of the epochē? It would be strange if a technique that supposedly opened us up to the lifeworld enjoyed by the ancient Greeks before the history of theoretical science could not be used by those same ancient Greeks. Do we need to lose something (originary experience of the lifeworld) before we can cultivate a technique (epochē) for regaining it? Perhaps. Or perhaps before the epochē becomes a technique for regaining what is lost, it is a form of life that enjoys what one has in hand? It would be strange if one possessed a skill before possessing any need to employ it, like a bird with wings that never bothers to fly (like a penguin -- a strange bird!).

    In regards to (ii). Pro: can we think of the epochē as an even more radical gesture than the phenomenological practice it inaugurates? Do we even need to think of the epochē as part of the phenomenological procedure proper? Remember: the basic meaning of the epochē is a suspension of the natural beliefs of the natural attitude in order to afford a break into a phenomenological attitude that can describe what appears, as it appears, without any presuppositions, metaphysical or otherwise, redirecting the description along predetermined lines independently of what appears in the appearance. The epochē, as suspension, is the break between the natural and phenomenological attitude, and it does not belong properly to either of them. Thus, even if the discipline of phenomenology is historically-rooted to a specific period in the Crisis narrative, the method of epochē need not be. And we can immediately see what needs a historically-unbound epochē could meet: the decisive thinkers of the Crisis narrative (Euclid, Galileo, etc.) all needed to suspend their natural beliefs (certainly theoretical -- but practical beliefs as well?) in order to open up a space in which the novelty of their mathematical and scientific contributions could take up residence.

    Contra: why should these “epochal” thinkers throughout the Crisis narrative need to suspend any other beliefs besides the theoretical ones? Indeed, Husserl gives us reason to think in section 9d -- a discussion of what motivated Galileo’s conception of nature -- that Galileo’s novel use of hypotheses, in search of a universal inductivity, was still animated by inherited theoretical and practical beliefs: “To be sure, this inductivity was not understood by Galileo as a hypothesis. For him a physics was immediately almost as certain as the previous pure and applied mathematics” (39). Galileo somehow found his way into a radically new scientific project, but it was not by way of a radical suspension of natural beliefs.

    
    

    What sort of history is Husserl’s history in the Crisis?

    
    

    Second remark: What sort of history is Husserl’s history in the Crisis? I offer three styles of historical narratives to get the discussion rolling: (i) the necessity narrative, (ii) the contingency narrative, and (iii) the interpretive narrative.

    In regards to (i): I take this to be the preferred style of history for philosophers (at least when that history is taken to have philosophical importance). In the necessity narrative, effort is made to excise some or all contingency from history, or otherwise subordinate what is contingent to a necessity that has been philosophically clarified. The figures and events described in the necessity narrative often read like stand-ins for the philosophical views motivating the action. The limit case of the necessity narrative might be something like a Platonic philosophical myth. A more average case might be represented by Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit or Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. Insofar as specialization in the present day has discouraged cross-disciplinary efforts, the currency of philosophical history has been somewhat devalued.

    In regards to (ii): I take the contingency narrative to be the preferred style of history for historians, and increasingly so as the discipline becomes ever more specialized. In the contingency narrative, effort is made to track the unfolding of events irrespective of philosophical dogma. Such an effort is bound to a sort of naivety, but nevertheless, whatever philosophical presuppositions might be at work are taken to organize the narrative, not drive it. One helpful example here is Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789). I mention this book, out of many others, because of its parallels with Nietzsche’s Genealogy. The following thesis can be found in both texts: basically, that ascetic values were poisonous to the virtues of ancient humanity. But we can observe how differently the thesis is argued. Nietzsche presents us with a short necessity narrative that is supposed to tell us something vital about how the human species exerts its will on nature and its own human nature, with the help of a loosely-drawn series of “creditors/debtors,” “masters/slaves,” “Romans/Jews,” etc. Gibbon, on the other hand, takes six volumes to narrate one moment of Nietzsche’s narrative, in order to include a level of detail that a philosopher would regard as inessential.

    In regards to (iii): I take the interpretive narrative to hold the promise of overcoming some of the difficulties inherent in both (i) and (ii), which only become more pronounced as specialization in the academic disciplines intensifies. In the interpretive narrative, effort is made to expose how different interpretive frameworks can shine different lights on the same data sets. We might draw on Nietzsche here, once again, as a sort of inspiration to this style of history narrative insofar as the “masters,” the “slaves,” the “modern ascetics” of the Genealogy all had their respective “worldviews” which shaped their reception of the world and their comportment within it. Or, alternatively, the different interpretive frameworks that derive from Marx’s history of material production. Or, pursuant to our interest in Husserl’s Crisis narrative as a history of theoretical advance, we might consider the even more contemporary iteration of the interpretative narrative in Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), in which paradigm shifts mark revolutionary transitions between dominant scientific interpretive frameworks.

    Of the three styles, we can safely eliminate (ii) from consideration. Husserl was not interested in spelling out the details of the history of the european sciences; and the details he does highlight are picked out on the basis of their philosophical salience, not because they help string together an empirically-verifiable history of contingent facts.

    Deciding between (i) and (iii) presents more difficulty. On the one hand, the Crisis narrative seems to follow the necessity narrative insofar as Husserl attempts to uncover a single chain of objective validity through the entire history of theoretical science. Whatever endures throughout that chain of evidencing is the essential, necessary core of the narrative that militates against a more pluralist, interpretive reading of the narrative. On the other hand, the “links” in that chain of objective validity don’t seem to be reducible to each other in the way that share an identical essence should be reducible to each other. The tokens ‘pug’ and ‘poodle’, for example, can both be reduced to the type ‘dog’; however, the Euclidean and Galilean perspectives are not objects with essences, but rather ways of seeing the world, which, in turn, pick out what is essential, necessary and objective in the world. The move from one period to another in the Crisis narrative seems to describe the shift between these interpretive perspectives. And the interpretive style of history offers us ways to think about what motivates the transition between perspectives; consider the following from Kuhn: “...scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way” (SSR, 92). Compare this to Galileo’s transition from the late period of applied mathematics and geometry, in which the shape strata and the sense plena were co-substructed but only haphazardly correlated, to the full mathematization of nature, in which hypotheses led the way toward the goal of a universal inductive causality. The growing imbalance between what we knew about the shape strata and what we knew about its correlation to the sense plena motivated this advance, or inaugurated a scientific revolution, to use the Kuhnian terminology.

    Thus, there is something of promise in reading Husserl’s Crisis as an interpretive style of history, perhaps even in a specifically Kuhnian style. But I’d like to make one major qualification. Kuhn seems to leave the ontological status of “nature” (or “aspect of nature,” see above quote) unclarified. The tension that builds up in scientific practice, the accumulation of anomalous findings counter to the results expected according to the dominant paradigm, which leads to the scientific revolt, seems to covertly bifurcate the concept of nature into two strands: one “pure” nature that acts as a sort of “always already there” substrate for interpretation, and the other “interpreted” nature that covers over this “pure” givenness. The “pure” nature is the horizon along which anomalous findings appear, and it’s required as the hub around which the scientific revolution revolves, from one dominant paradigm to another. Yet, despite the importance of such a passively-received understanding of nature, Kuhn passes over this givenness of nature for what looks like a strictly active conception of the history of science in which one theory after another is actively imposed on the world in a battle for dominance.

    I’d like to suggest that Husserl’s Crisis narrative solves some of this difficulty by asking us to think of the history of science as ongoing interpretive layering, rather than ongoing interpretive revolution. In interpretive layering, the previous layer becomes a motivation for the present layer by allowing its essential theoretical motifs to be re-appropriated into fields of phenomenal givenness that were previously not in view. This is the basic phenomenological truth lying behind Kuhn’s “anomalies,” which are not negative phenomena at all, but rather positive indications of new horizons in theoretical thought. The “periods” charted out in the Crisis narrative, therefore, do more or less mark out bygone paradigms of scientific investigation, but not in the sense that we depose bygone paradigms like a disgraced and unloved monarch. The bygone “periods” remain as founding layers whose essential motivations still provide direction, inspiration, and motivation for new theoretical activity -- and must be called upon to do so, if subsequent paradigms of scientific investigation are to be genuinely thought of as advances. Such theoretical advance always forms on the practical basis of previous accomplishments, which forms our perception of the world. We do not merely “think up” scientific revolutions; we “see” them, “hear” them, “feel” them, and so on.

    
    

    Concluding remark: what is the past, present, and future of the epochē?

    
    

    In the opening remark, I explored two ways we might think about the role of the epochē in the Crisis narrative: (i) as the “one time only,” historically-rooted completion of a certain limited history of theoretical activity, which inaugurates the entrance into a radically new style of theoretical activity -- the infinite task of the science of the lifeworld; and (ii) as a repeatable method, deployable throughout the history of the Crisis narrative. I favored option (ii), more or less on the premise that the epochē, as a suspension of natural beliefs, did not favor the suspension of any particular historical collection of natural beliefs (such as those phenomenology targets in the 20th century).

    In the second remark, I attempt to make that premise look a little more compelling by pointing out the serial nature of the Crisis narrative. Layer upon layer of theoretical activity, from (0) to (1) to (2) to (3) to (∞), builds up the scientific edifice to greater heights of precision. To motivate that forward progress, to motivate the active taking-up of one paradigm and the passive sedimentation of another, the epochē could serve as that respite from theoretical and practical activity that invites the scientist, past and present, to look again at the phenomena and see whether the phenomenal givenness of nature is still done justice by whatsoever the inherited conception of nature might impose upon it.

    In this concluding remark, I will suggest that the “drift” of the Crisis narrative, described as the wayward tendency of scientific thinking to cover over the pre-theoretical, pre-scientific givenness of the lifeworld, is true of the part as well as of the whole narrative. Each decisive thinker of each “period” wrestled with the drift inherent in his or her contemporary moment. Major advances in scientific thought, (1) through (3), were triggered by a style of epochal thinking equally as radical as the one performed by Husserl to shift into what we think of today as the phenomenological attitude. Thus, if this line of thought is correct, there is a history of the epochē. The epochē has a past, but it did not lead to phenomenology. The epochē has a present, which leads to phenomenology. Finally, the epochē perhaps has a future, which will include whatever is essential in phenomenology (as Galileo carried over what was essential in Euclid), but almost certainly will not include “phenomenology.” What then? Perhaps the radicality of the epochē, if it permits itself to be explored, will render up something even more radical out of the slumbering earth of what we think we know about phenomenology. Perhaps the “infinite task of the science of the lifeworld” already pushes beyond what has become second nature, and therefore dormant, in phenomenology, exposing us to experiences whose proper name we can’t yet speak.

    
    
    
    
  • Draw!

    May 12, 13

    Fantastico!

    
    
  • Heidegger In Three Easy Steps

    May 12, 13

    1. Take any noun.
    2. Turn the noun into a verb.
    3. Verb the noun.

    Ex. The cup cups. The table tables. The image images.

    Tune in next week for "How to Perform Open Heart Surgery with a Plastic Spoon."

  • Excerpts from Dilthey's "Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology" (1894)

    May 10, 13

    Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding

    
    

    The following are pulled from the text Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding (Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), translated by Zaner and Heiges. The text contains two long essays by Dilthey: the one mentioned in the post title, and "The Understanding of Other Persons and their Expressions of Life." Only the former is excerpted here. Page numbers supplied for English and German collected works text (GS, V) as follows: (E/G).

    
    

    "Explanatory psychology, which currently stimulates so much interest and work, sets up a causal system claiming to make all the manifestations of mental life intelligible....The distinction between explanatory sciences and descriptive sciences on which we here rely corresponds to the common usage" (23/139). Setting up the opposition: explanatory versus descriptive.

    
    

    "When the calculus of probability was introduced by Laplace in the examination of inductive inferences, the degree of certainty of our knowledge of nature became a measurable affair" (25-6/142). Another Laplace reference! See the last page of Husserl's Crisis (the Carr 1970 edition).

    
    

    "However, when explanatory psychology transports into the domain of psychic life the manner in which the natural sciences form hypotheses by adding causal connections to the givens, the question arises whether this transfer is legitimate" (26/142). This question is folded over almost identically into Husserl's work, see Ideas II.

    
    

    "When we seek to establish complete causal knowledge, we therefore find ourselves transported by a kind of spell into a maze of hypotheses with which one can in no sense hope to confront psychical states of affairs" (26/142). The problem is always with arriving at a COMPLETE description. Causal thinking, which begins quite innocently, can't help but tangle itself up for the long haul.

    
    

    "Those who represent explanatory psychology have the habit of invoking the example of physical and natural science [Naturwissenschaften] in order to legitimate such a large employment of hypotheses. But we are going to establish here at the outset of our investigation that the human studies [Geisteswissenschaften] have the right to determine their methods independently corresponding to their object” (27/143). Natur- versus Geistes-; Dilthey stakes out a polemical position. Namely, that human studies requires its own methods and, as we will see, its own forms of evidencing.

    
    

    “The human studies are distinguished from the sciences of nature first of all in that the latter have for their objects facts which are presented to consciousness as from outside, as phenomena and given in isolation, while the objects of the former are given originaliter from within as real and as a living continuum [Zusammenhang]” (27/143).

    
    

    “Thus we are forced to the question concerning whether or not another psychological method - which we will call descriptive and analytic - can avoid basing our understanding of all psychic life on a collection of hypotheses” (29/145). The possibility of, and need for, a descriptive and analytic psychology emerges.

    
    

    “Only the formation of a science which I will call descriptive and analytic psychology, in opposition to the explanatory or constructive psychology, can remove all the indicated difficulties. By descriptive psychology I understand the presentation of the components and continua which one finds uniformly throughout all developed modes of human psychic life, where these components form a unique nexus which is neither added nor deduced, but rather is concretely lived [erlebt]. This psychology has for its object what one regularly finds in the nexus of adult psychic life. It describes this nexus of the inner life of a typical man. It examines, analyzes, experiments and compares. It makes use of all the possible devices in order to resolve its problem. But its importance in the complex of sciences derives precisely from the fact that every connection [Zusammenhang] utilized by it can be verified unequivocally by inner perception, and from the fact that each such ensemble can be shown to be a member of a larger whole, not as a result of deduction, but as given originally in life” (35-6/152). Descriptive psychology, what? And here we see why Husserl used the term, and in what sense he used, whether or not it described his project perfectly. Note that the description will describe the typical, the adult, the regular.

    
    

    “Descriptive psychology has, corresponding to the sciences of organic life, the following methodical resources: description, analysis, classification, comparison and the theory of evolution...Explanatory or natural scientific psychology works with the materials which descriptive psychology furnished; it studies the general laws of such materials, laws which govern the evolution and the course of psychic life, and it sets out the relations of dependence of mental life to irs organism and the external world” (38/155). More on the descriptive versus explanatory: the latter looks to be derivative of the former.

    
    

    “For, the social and historical reality, however complex, can be analyzed only after having been broken down into its different purposive systems of ends [Zwecksysteme]; each of these purposive systems, such as economic life, law, art and religion, then permits, due to its homogeneity, an analysis of its own proper coherence [Zusammenhang]. But the ensemble of such a system is nothing other than the psychic nexus of the people who cooperate in it. It is therefore, in the end, psychological” (40/156-7). On the one hand, cultural phenomena boils down to psychological phenomena -- on the other hand, this reduction will only be properly understood if we use a descriptive psychology to account for the different forms of evidencing supplied by these disparate cultural phenomena. If we default to the natural scientific explanations of explanatory psychology, we have effaced what is distinctive in the cultural phenomena.

    
    

    “When we then place the object in the relations of cause and effect, the sensory impressions prompt us to apprehend that relatedness only by means of the regularity of their succession, whereas the causal relation itself results, to repeat, from our inner synthesis. The validity of the assertion stands, whether one seeks the origin of this synthesis in the understanding, or whether the relation of cause and effect, as I have stated in an earlier essay,* is derived only from the living conduct of the will experiencing the pressure of another will....” (52-3/169-170). *The earlier essay is “On Our Belief in the Reality of the External World,” Part One of Die Geistige Welt (GS, V). Strange statement with regard to causality -- that it could be determined based upon the experience of the pressure of one will upon another.

    
    

    “In whatever fashion one conceives the formation of objective representations and their causal relations, their totality is in no way whatever in the sensory excitations, nor in their coexistence and succession. How different is our knowledge of psychic life! Contrary to outer perception, inner perception rests on an inner awareness [Innenwerden], a lived experience; it is immediately given” (53/170).

    
    

    “When the premises give birth in us to a conclusion, we experience [erleben] a wider nexus: here a whole stands out which leads from causes to effects, but this also has its origin in us and is given in lived experience as reality” (53/170). The emphasis on lived reality, both in the sense of a lived experience and a lifeworld.

    
    

    “Descriptive and analytic psychology ends with hypotheses, whereas explanatory psychology begins with them” (57-8/175). This symmetry might be a little too cute to be believed.

    
    

    [Descriptive psychology] “does not first concern itself with the stones, the mortar, nor the hands which work with them, but the inner coherence of the parts. It is therefore necessary that one find the structural law through which the intelligence, emotive and instinctive life, and the volitions, are connected to the organized totality of psychic life. The nexus which is expressed by the structural law is composed only of living experiences of the individual combinations of psychic elements. Its importance is given to us in the most penetrating way by inner experience. Accordingly, its character is for us at once teleological and causal” (58-9/176). Teleological and causal, as one would expect of an embodied human subject. The constant emphasis on inner versus outer, if not properly clarified and qualified, will lead to problems.

    
    

    “From the teleological character of this nexus results the second fundamental law of psychic life, a law which operates longitudinally as it were - that of development” (59/176). Having trouble finding all the fundamental laws gestured to - I think there are three in all?

    
    

    “Man does not apprehend what he is by musing over himself, nor by doing psychological experiments, but rather by history. This analysis of the products of human spirit...must, in addition to the analysis of historical products, observe and collect everything which it can seize of the historical processes wherein such a nexus becomes constituted” (63/180). Hegel is mentioned right before this quote, but it seems more the gesture toward the spirit of Hegel rather than Hegelianism.

    
    

    “I have tried to show in another place, moreover, how the relations of causality are originally given with aggregates of sensations within the living reality of processes” (65/183). Again, the “Our Belief” essay. A statement against reduction of lived reality to natural scientific processes.

    
    

    OVERALL NOTE: three large systems bound up in the structure of psychic life (62/180): what is the first? Second: the system of instincts and feelings (67/185). Third: human volitions (70/188).

    
    

    “A psychology which follows a descriptive and analytic method, and which makes use of explanatory constructions only secondarily, conscious of their limits, and by eschewing these hypotheses which serve, in turn, as the basis for other hypothetical explanations, is therefore at once necessary and possible. It will become the foundation of the human studies, as mathematics is that of the natural sciences” (74/193). The programmatic ambition of Husserl is here,  more or less fully developed.

    
    

    “The procedure of explanatory psychology is born from the unwarranted extension of the concepts of the natural sciences into the domain of psychic life and history. The knowledge of nature became a science when it established relations of cause and effect in the domain of processes of motion” (76-7/195). Followed by some remarks on the pre-Socratics.

    
    

    (To the contrary of relations of external nature) “The living psychic nexus, to the contrary, has not been gradually obtained by us after many groping attempts. It constitutes the life which is there before all knowledge. Its characteristic features are vivacity, historicality, freedom, evolution. If we analyze this psychic nexus, we meet there with nothing like a thing or substance...” (77/196).

    
    

    “We complete inner perception by the apprehension of other persons. We apprehend their inwardness. That occurs by means of a spiritual process which is equivalent to a conclusion from analogy. The shortcomings of this performance come from the fact that we accomplish it only by carrying over our own psychic life into the other” (80/198-9). Empathy and analogical grasping.

    
    

    “...descriptive psychology discovers the principle of coherence which connects the psychic series into a whole. This whole is life” (81-82/200).

    
    

    “Psychic life-process is originally and above all, from its most elementary forms to the highest,  a unity. Psychic life does not grow together from parts; it is not composed of elements; it is not a composite nor is it a result of the collaboration of sensory or affective atoms; it is originally and always a comprehensive unity” (92/211).

    
    

    “These two sorts of nexus reciprocally condition each other” (94/213). That is, the developmental and structural nexuses (nexi? whatevs).

    
    

    “When a nexus of the components of psychic life has such an influence on the fullness of life, the satisfaction of drives and achieving of happiness, we call it purposive” (96/215). Purposive, what?

    
    

    “The structural psychic nexus is purposive because it tends to develop, to preserve, and to increase the values of life” (97/217).

    
    

    “But a scientific treatment of the history of human development is still to be done. It must examine the influence of three classes of conditions: the development of the body, the influence of physical environs, the environing spiritual world” (105/225).

    
    

    Of particular, incalculable, isolated, quantitative (if they are quantitative, how are they incalculable): “They constitute, so to speak, the hyle which, through this unitarily fashioned principle, as a kind of eidos, makes up the whole of individuality” (112/232). Could/would Husserl have cribbed his understanding and usage of Greek terminology from sources like this?

    
    

    “The fact that coherence in psychic life is a primary given provides the fundamental difference between psychological knowledge and that of nature...” (117/237).

    
    
    

    *****

    
    

    A few notes from the Introduction by Rudolf Makkreel:

    
    

    The Dilthey/Ebbinghaus controversy (8).

    
    
  • The Life Worth Living Is Also the Death Worth Dying

    May 09, 13
  • HoZac Blackout Fest 2013

    May 07, 13

    Huzzah! Missed last year's Blackout Fest after having a great time the year before that. Will hit it this year. Wrote some copy for QRO Magazine, below. Buy tickets here, and checkout the awesome poster.
    
    "Blackout Fest returns to Chicago this May 16th-19th, courtesy of the folks at HoZac Records. We’ve come to expect a connoisseur’s touch with these bills, interweaving punk classic with punk contemporary for a crash course in noisy fun. The beer will be flowing. The merch tables will be overflowing. The toilets will flush most of the time. Stop in on the 16th for the Art Show, showcasing underground aesthetics and oddball delights. Then catch the next three days of ruckus, featuring bands from coast to coast, and from as far away as South Africa (Make-Overs). That’s a long way plane ride, right? Legacy acts include punk pioneers Chrome and Boston’s Unnatural Axe. And the usual bag of HoZac chestnuts, like personal favorite Wizzard Sleeve, will keep the fest wall-to-wall rocking. No points off for actually blacking out, just don’t hurt yourself."
    
    
    

    
    
  • Proper Names from Husserl's Crisis

    May 07, 13

    
    

    (From index) Proper Names from the Crisis (tr. Carr; Northwestern University Press, 1970)

    Includes, more generally, persons, movements, periods, civilizations, and a number of other elements that don’t quite fit into any of these categories. This list is a rough approximation of what historical names of note are to be found in the Crisis.

    
    
    

    Aquinas, Thomas (132, 181) P,

    Aristotle (21, 132, 181, 285, 293, 393) P,

    Avenarius, Richard (195) P,

    Berkeley, George (67, 83, 86-7, 89, 90, 96, 192, 196, 208, 231, 337) P,

    Bolzano, Bernard (130) P,

    Brentano, Franz (222, 233-35, 245, 298) P,

    Chinese philosophy (279, 280, 284)

    Democritus (293) P,

    Descartes, Rene (8, 15, 21, 58, 60-2, 63, 73-83, 89, 90, 93, 97, 116, 171, 192, 194, 214, 229, 233, 294, 339-40; Meditations 74-5, 81, 84-5, 91, 155, 192, 199)

    Dilthey, Wilhelm (222, 245, 296)

    Egyptians (279)

    Einstein, Albert (4, 125-26, 295)

    Empiricism (logical (Vienna Circle), 62)

    Enlightenment, Age of(192, 197, 201, 290)

    Euclid (357)

    Europe (299, 269, 299, 274, 289)

    European civilization, entelechy of (275)

    Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (201, 202)

    Galileo (23-59, 60, 62, 73, 117, 353-4)

    German Idealism (99, 192, 194-195, 292, 340)

    God (55, 62, 64, 66, 75, 81, 90, 93, 180, 288, 389)

    Gorgias (76)

    Greece (276-77, 284)

    Greek philosophy (15, 279, 311, 338; and the origin of science 301)

    Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (132, 192, 194, 198, 201)

    Helmholtz, Hermann von (119)

    Heraclitean flux (156, 177, 343)

    Heraclitus (170)

    Hobbes, Thomas (54, 62-63, 83, 204, 231)

    Hume, David (11, 67, 83, 87-90, 91, 93, 95-6, 115, 117, 147, 192-93, 195-6, 199, 231, 262, 265, 337, 339, 368; Essay 88; Treatise 87, 88, 93, 96, 207-8)

    Husserl, Edmund (46n, 155, 167n, 242, 165, 234, 243)

    Indian philosophy (279-80, 284)

    James, William (264)

    Kant, Immanuel (11, 55-6, 81, 83, 91-104, 111-21, 132, 147, 192, 194-196, 198, 199, 202, 207-8, 211, 262, 292, 295, 337, 339; critique of method of 114-116; Critique of Pure Reason 104)

    La Place, Pierre Simon, Marquis (265)

    Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von (45, 55, 64, 74, 83, 91, 92, 97, 265)

    Locke, John (30, 63, 83-86, 87, 91, 117, 201, 204, 207, 231-32, 261)

    Malebranche, Nicolas (83)

    Menghin, Oswald, Weltgeschichte der Steinzeit (274)

    Michelson, Albert A. (125-6)

    Mill, John Stuart (195)

    Neo-Friesianism (Fries, Jakob Friedrich) (196)

    Newton, Isaac (4, 42, 117)

    Planck, Max (4)

    Plato (285, 293, 393; doctrine of Ideas of 21)

    Platonism (59, 313)

    Positivism (5-7, 9)

    Pre-Socratic philosophy (165)

    Protagoras (76)

    Pythagoreans (37)

    Rationalism (65-67, 73, 89, 197, 289-90, 292, 299, 313, 338, 339-40, 16, 62, 103)

    Renaissance (33, 38, 197, 213, 354, 8)

    Rickert, Heinrich (296)

    Scholasticism (64)

    Schuppe (195)

    Sensationalism, in Locke (85)

    Skepticism (3, 13-14, 68, 89, 262, 302-3, 340; ancient 69, 86, 165, 167n; in Hume 67,88, 91, 99, 115)

    Socrates (293, 302)

    Solipsism (262; in Hume 88)

    Sophists (165)

    Spinoza, Baruch (64, 83, 232, 65)

    Thales (286)

    Vienna Circle (63n)

    Vieta (Francoise Viete) (44)

    Windelband, Wilhelm (296)

    Wolff, Christian (64, 83, 91, 97)

    Wundt, Wilhelm (232)
    
    I've also compiled this data, and more, into a spreadsheet for easier cross-comparisons. Have a look here.
  • Some Thoughts on the Dissertation

    May 06, 13

    
    

    Eggs

    Below are some disconnected thoughts on what my dissertation project is and where it's at, pulled from a research award application. I don't think all the claims made below would stand up to scrutiny, but this is part of the process of researching, writing, refining the dissertation research proposal. I would love to have the proposal written by the beginning of the fall and defended by the end of the fall/winter semester. We'll see how it goes. Circumstances internal and external to the project might push things out farther, but end of fall/winter semester is the goal.

    
    

    One criticism I'd make straight off the bat is that I need to be less Hume-centric in setting up the problem I hope to address. Hume makes for a nice shorthand when rattling off the premise of the research to non-specialists, but I need to dig deeper for the proposal.

    
    

    (a) a description of the project

    
    

    In overview, my project concerns Husserl’s phenomenological critique of contemporary natural scientific accounts of causality. Such accounts are modeled on an “event-event” paradigm in which one discrete, empirically-verifiable event (the cause) takes priority over another discrete, empirically-verifiable event (the effect). Although this paradigm has resulted in extraordinary technological productivity, it has also saddled us with persistent questions regarding the rigor of our causal explanations. These questions are at the heart of philosopher David Hume’s remark that, though we observe both “cause” and “effect,” we still perceive no necessary connection between the two. The causal explanation, thus, is afforded authority on the basis of mere habit : an insecure and scientifically-ungrounded state of affairs.

    
    

    The contemporary “solution” to this problem has been largely to avoid the problem. More advanced techniques of mathematically modeling the natural world have allowed scientists, on behalf of the sciences (and often the humanities as well), to sketch pictures of the world in ever greater detail on the basis of ever ascending orders of formalized probabilities utilizing empirical, quantifiable inputs and/or ontologically-unclarified variables. The proliferation of scientific breakthroughs and technological achievements borne of this strategy is taken as proof that it works. And this great success has put unlikely pressure on the human arts and sciences, in fields as diverse as ethics and aesthetics, to produce “results” in a similar style and tempo. The difficulty remains, however, that we are still very much in the dark about why this “solution” works. The causal relation -- the basic element of any natural scientific explanation of the world -- remains as mysterious for us as it was for Hume. As a result of this uncertainty, we lack fundamental insight into how this extraordinarily productive technological apparatus might aid (or inhibit) our highest task: the pursuit of the good and the best human life.

    
    

    My project will explore the phenomenological response to this ongoing problematic from a Husserlian perspective. I will highlight a few key insights from a few key Husserl texts to indicate how phenomenological investigation can help address these questions.

    
    

    From Cartesian Meditations (1931) I draw the insight that certain, apodictic evidence is the necessary foundation for any rigorous, scientific discipline. Furthermore, Husserl describes a method -- the transcendental reduction -- by which this apodictic evidence can be encountered, described, verified as the intentional correlate of the transcendental ego in any given act of consciousness. If Husserl is correct, it means that even probabilistic sciences -- such as those developing within the framework of mathematically-modeled realities, mentioned above -- need to have their grounds phenomenologically-clarified. In other words, pure, “ground up” probability is not an methodological option for any science worthy of the name. The character of the inputs of formalized probabilities, empirical or otherwise, requires phenomenological clarification -- glossing over the cause/effect problem is not an option.

    
    

    From Ideas II (1952), and elsewhere, I draw the insight that the objective correlates of the ego can have a variety of characters ranging across a variety of intentional modes. Experience provides us with more than the empirical phenomena of the perceptual mode of intentionality. In remembering, we encounter memories. In anticipation, we encounter the object of anticipation. In phantasizing, we encounter phantasy. In valuation, we encounter the object, good, bad, or otherwise. All of these different intentionalities lend themselves to different “styles” of causal explanation, but, arguably, they don’t all fit into the “event-event” model of causality. Husserl draws an especially significant distinction between causal and motivational accounts: the former takes precedence in natural, material explanation, but does not cover the full range of human experience; the latter takes precedence in explanation of the so-called “spiritual world” of the social, cultural world. This distinction helps us begin to assign the appropriate style of causal explanation to the appropriate ontological regions. Natural scientific causal accounts are appropriate to one region of experience, but other regions require other styles of causal explanation, are equally apodictic, and are not reducible to the natural scientific account.

    
    

    From The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936) I draw the insight that we can dissect causal theory not only laterally (between the more or less contemporary natural causal and motivational accounts), but also longitudinally along its historical development. In the Crisis Husserl attempts to reconstruct a phenomenological history of objective validity in the sciences, from the present day back to ancient Greece, in order to “re-activate” the chain of evidentiary procedures by virtue of which sciences of the present day have meaning and apodictic certainty. In other words, the apodictic grounding for scientific disciplines that Husserl called for in Cartesian Meditations gets rethought in the Crisis as a necessity for the grounding procedure itself, which has its own history. Causality, as one basic component of scientific evidentiary procedures, thus, admits of its own longitudinal, historical reading in order to situate the cause/effect problem in a certain scientific framework, as a result of a certain scientific framework and history of causal thinking. This would prove particularly interesting if the historical genesis of causal thinking were able to provide an account for our present day problematics, which I hold to be the case. Indeed, the ancient Greeks were much more versatile in their causal thinking, which could encompass grounds as diverse as ethical, moral, and aesthetic reasoning. Phenomenology holds the promise of reconsolidating the explanatory power of causation beyond merely empirical grounds, across the whole field of human experience and inquiry.

    
    

    Taken together, these three trajectories of thought suggest that (i) there is a rigorous, apodictic ground to be won for science, and causal thinking must not disown this task if it’s to be scientific; (ii) that we can draw lateral distinctions between different causal styles according to different modes of intentionality; and (iii) that what looks to be insoluble difficulties for causal theory in the present day are the product of theoretical sedimentation, which, once exposed, defuses certain problematics, and renews the validity and meaning of the natural and human sciences.

    
    

    (b) Abstracts

    
    

    “Epochal Thinking/Seeing” Phenomenology Roundtable (LUC): In this paper I will examine Husserl’s Krisis-period, historical phenomenological approach as a dynamic interlacing of different perspectives on epochal scientific transformation. The “epoch” is roughly equivalent to a sustained period of a dominant interpretive scientific paradigm in the Kuhnian sense. The difference between the Kuhnian and the Husserlian account, however, is that Husserl wants to account for the phenomenologically experiential aspect of scientific revolutions. We not only think paradigm shifts, and apply these new frameworks to old data sets -- we also “see” paradigms and paradigm shifts. How does that “seeing” operate at inter-, intra-, post-, and pre-epochal work?

    
    

    “Gelassenheit and Greasing the Wheel of Theoretical Advance in Husserl’s Philosophy of Science” Collegium Phaenomenologicum (Umbria, Italy):  In this paper I will pick up the thread of the previous paper, except I will be concentrating on the inter-epochal moment. What motivates us at the phenomenological, experiential level to move from an old paradigm to a new one? The answers are many, and a surprising number of them involve extra-scientific, social, cultural motivational accounts. I will appeal to Heidegger’s appropriation of Meister Eckhardt’s notion of Gelassenheit(awkwardly translated as ‘releasement’), as a willed non-willing, to explain the complex motivations at the heart of paradigm shifts. Willed non-willing describes the openness to and recognition of evolving phenomena that shifts the ground beneath the feet of a theoretical framework. To foment a paradigm shift requires a certain relinquishing of theoretical activity, a passivity, that is nevertheless, like willed non-willing, an active engagement with the phenomena.

    
    

    (c) a description of the project’s significance and originality

    
    

    I framed the description of the project in terms of a response to Hume’s problematic of causality. I can frame the significance of my project in terms of another Humean conundrum; that is, the is/ought distinction, which states that we can make no claims about what ought to be on the basis of what is. In the key of causal thinking, this translates to the claim that we can make no claims about what ought to cause us to do something on the basis of what does cause us to do something. But the expanded description of causality beyond the realm of material nature, as we’ve seen in Ideas II, gives us reason to think that Hume has thought this is/ought distinction too narrowly by confining his observations of ‘what is’ to merely empirical phenomenal correlates of consciousness. An expanded description of different modes of intentionality shows that different experiences invite different styles of equally valid causal and motivational explanations. Furthermore, tracking the historical genesis of the Humean problematic shows that the plurality of causal explanatory styles emerge from a single source in Greek thought: aitia (variously translated as cause, responsibility, guilt, accusation), which comfortably conformed to causal and motivation accounts located on both sides of the is/ought distinction. A more conciliatory relationship between the natural and human sciences has the potential to make the humanities relevant again to the “hard” sciences, cultivating wisdom where before the juggernaut of technological achievement only knew power.

    
    

    The originality of the project is reflected in the relatively sparse Anglo-American literature on the subject of causality and phenomenology together. Most of the English-language literature on the philosophy of causality has largely accepted without protest Hume’s empirico-metaphysical presuppositions. A comprehensive reappraisal of causality (and motivation) from a Husserlian phenomenological perspective is waiting to be written. As one might expect, there is more literature on this outside the Anglo-American sphere, but it is mostly limited to essays and articles. Bernard Rang’s Kausalität und Motivation is the only book length appraisal specific to the subject, and it’s mostly an exegetical work pulling from Ideas II. My historical phenomenological perspective, pulling from the Krisis,would be, as far as I know, exploring new ground in any language. The prospect for original work is also compounded by the fact that the Husserliana series will issue a new, revised, extended edition of Ideas, a text central to Husserl’s thoughts on causality and motivation, meaning that there will be a good opportunity to levy fresh interpretations on significant strands of Husserl’s thought in this area.

    
    
    
    
  • Noë’s Action-Based Theory of Perception and the Role of Representation

    May 05, 13

    In recent years a spate of experiential “blindness” studies has reinvigorated the debate in the contentious borderland of philosophy, psychology and cognitive science over how far consciousness, and the action of attention in consciousness, can be naturalized. Psychological experiments targeting kinds of attention “blindness” -- purporting to show that perceiving subjects, to their surprise, often fail to register non-trivial aspects of their environments -- have attempted to demonstrate that we are misled in various ways about what is available to us in experience. That we could be in error about our experience is troublesome for philosophy (and especially phenomenology) in view of the fact that many of our philosophical investigations either proceed from the fact of experience, or, at the very least, allow background assumptions about the givenness of experience guide the application of philosophical. If natural limitations inherent to our brains stifled the rich givenness of experience that philosophers tend to think we enjoy, denying us a starting point for investigations and/or a reliable world to which we might apply the results, then the discipline of philosophy would strain to supply the accounts of consciousness it thinks itself capable of supplying. The charge of “blindness,” therefore, forms a newer, smaller front in the older, larger “war” over whether philosophy is a boon or a boondoggle for humanity.

    The philosopher Alva Noë makes a brief, yet spirited, defense of the philosophy of consciousness with his article “Inattentional Blindness, Change Blindness, and Consciousness” (2007). In the article, Noë considers two ominous (for philosophy) responses to the empirical results of these “blindness” studies; rebuts them with, among other tactics, compelling phenomenological descriptions that expose unwarranted philosophical presuppositions in these studies; and, finally, provides his own action-based theory of perception (ABP) in the attempt to disambiguate what there is of philosophical versus natural scientific value in the studies.

    In this paper I will (a) review, and largely endorse, Noë’s reading of the standoff between philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science in these two responses and his attempt to reframe “blindness” in terms of ABP. However, I will (b) argue that his methodological appeal to phenomenological description, even in its limited extent, necessitates the assumption of a much larger phenomenological task than his ABP is prepared to assume. Finally, I will (c) present two objections to his ABP: one that I expect to be easily defeated, in order to show where Noë has been scoring many of his philosophical points against the natural science “crowd,” and another I expect to cause more difficulties, in order to show the direction where ABP will need to develop.^[1]

    
    

    (a) Contra “grand illusion,” contra New Skepticism, pro ABP

    
    

    The two rhetorical opponents^[2] -- the “grand illusion” hypothesis and the so-called New Skepticism -- are chosen by virtue of the fact that they both, to Noë’s reading: (i) insist that the philosopher of consciousness must be relying on a robust model of internal representation in order to explain how what is “out there” (phenomena of the external world) come to consciousness “in here” (the brain); and (ii) insist that experiential “blindness,” which Noë gathers under the umbrella term ‘detail blindness’ (DB), deals a fatal blow to the richness or veridicality of internal representation, and by extension, to the philosophy of consciousness. Noë ultimately will want to disown (i) as too phenomenologically naive to count as philosophical explanation, “What is is about the 3-D model thanks to which we are phenomenally conscious of the world around us? After all, we don’t seethe model....Representations in the head, however detailed, do not (would not) explain visual consciousness” (2007: 509). First, though, he will attempt to show that the two rhetorical opponents fail in regards to (ii).

                The “grand illusion” hypothesis denies that a perceiver is aware of the perceptual richness of his or her environment, contrary to what he or she might think (2007: 504).^[3] This claim is vividly supported by “gorilla” experiment (Simons and Chabris 1999) in which observing subjects, intently counting the number of times a basketball passes between a collection of youths, frequently fail to register the presence of a gorilla-costumed interloper wending its way through the scene.[4]We might equally well verify this lack of attention from a less clinical example -- say, we’re picking a friend up at the airport and, expecting the friend to emerge from one door, we fail to notice that our friend has emerges from another door and stands in plain view. In these cases neither the gorilla nor the friend were concealed. We possessed a full, unobstructed view of the scene and yet we missed non-trivial details of the scene; the gorilla being non-trivial because its presence so thoroughly disrupts the coherence of the scene, the friend being non-trivial because in this case we are familiar with what we are looking for and still miss it. Experiments of all manner could be run to verify different sorts of DB. The takeaway point for the “grand illusion” hypothesis is that the perceiver is misled about his or her grasp of the richness of the scene. There is a failure to take in, by means of internal representation, all the detail in the world we behold. As a result our attention latches onto only a small amount of this detail and we hold in reserve no rich internal representation which we might consult in order to draw out further detail.

                This “blindness” demands that we rethink how consciousness works, but Noë does not immediately concede that the results, however surprising or disappointing, entail that we lack rich representations of our world, internal or otherwise. He supplies two alternate readings of the “blindness” results that save the possibility of rich internal representations (even if he will ultimately argue against (i)) (Noë 2007: 506). First, that the results could just as easily be accounted for by more nimble theories explaining the mechanics of how we bring these representations to mind -- a “grand illusion” reading of the “blindness” results assumes that we have unadulterated access to our internal representations at all times and in every way, but perhaps there are structural limits on what we can recall at any given time that, once elaborated, will make the “blindness” results look less blind. Second, that perhaps we have a rich internal representation of the world, but it fades quickly. Both of these counters essentially ask the experimental psychologist to be more explicit about the philosophical presuppositions at work in the notion of internal representation: either support and elucidate this presupposition with experimental data, or don’t presuppose it at all.

                Another line of response to the “blindness” results takes the form of what Noë calls the New Skepticism, whose chief proponent Noë identifies as Daniel Dennett. On Noë’s reading, New Skepticism is a novel form of traditional skepticism which nourishes doubts not about whether we grasp things as they are, but rather whether we even grasp things as they seem. The added twist discards the old Platonic bugbear of ‘being versus seeming’ in favor of a direct attack on the veridicality of seeming. The same “grand illusion” experiments can be used to argue in favor of New Skepticism that we are misled about our understanding of the world. Empirical assessments of the comprehensiveness of the visual field also show that our visual perception is constitutively “imperfect”: the ability to focus is not evenly distributed over the range of the visual field (we focus sharper in the center of our visual field, as opposed to the margins; our retina is almost color-blind; our eyes are in constant movement (Noë 2002: 2). Despite these disadvantages, our experience of the world remains persuasively full, continuous, rich, uniform. We know our sensory apparatus is not built to provide this optimal experience, and yet this is how we experience the world. For the new skeptic, this is a troubling disconnect. We are like the emperor with no clothes, strutting about confident in our assessment of the world, waiting for the cold precision of hard science to point out our ridiculousness.

    It’s a grim line of thought. There are certain inescapable ways in which our brain and sensory apparatus are deficient and cannot live up to the task of perceiving the world with the sort of detail. The best we can do is map out the constitutive gaps in our experience with the right sorts of experiments. These gaps can be pointed at with certain negative phenomenological indicators, such as surprise, that trigger when we realize our self-assessment of our perceptual abilities has overreached the mark (Dennett 1991: 356). But surprise only serves to alert us to our error, not to correct it.

                Noë’s rebuttal is simplistic on its face, though it invites complication as we will see in (b). He denies that the average perceiver bears any theoretical commitment to the internal representation model, or what Noë calls elsewhere the “snapshot” conception of experience (Noë 2002: 4). So the surprise of misled perceivers is not a sign of some constitutive, ongoing disconnect with the world -- a failure to register some putative “snapshot” in full detail. It’s simply a sign that we “overestimate how good we are at noticing changes” (Noë 2007: 508); an overestimation, however, that offers the possibility of non-skeptical redress.

    For the average perceiver this overestimation is not a sign of theoretical deficiency, but rather a deficiency of our practical techniques of looking. Here Noë is making an appeal to the common sense know-how of the average perceiver, a common strategy for rebutting skepticism of the traditional sort.[5]In the context of rebutting New Skepticism, Noë asks us to reflect on how the average, everyday perceiver recognizes that, on the one hand, his or her attentiveness to the details of his or her environment may be limited; but also recognizes that, on the other hand, his or her grasp of the environment can be modified for the better by recalibrating one’s habit of seeing to meet new challenges in perceptual awareness.^[6]Awareness of DB does not generally trigger the same reaction in the experimental scientist as it does the average perceiver; the former either confirms or disproves a theoretical hypothesis, the latter tries to adjust his or her practical comportment towards the object or scene.

    The theoretical/practical distinction is more difficult to see in the clinical environment of experimental psychology, wherein the “blindness” studies are often designed to strip the trial of practical context. In the “gorilla” experiment, what the perceiver fails to register is an element that does not belong in the scene according to any habit of seeing. Nor is there any opportunity  to adjust one’s habit of seeing in the normal flow of lived attitudinal adjustments -- once the gorilla has been spotted, the experiment is over for the scientist. For the average perceiver, on the other hand, this is precisely where the effort of learning new habits of seeing begins. In the example of picking the friend up at the airport, for example, I will remember next time to attend to both doorways so as not to be surprised if my friend emerges from the second and not the first. Noë takes the fact that our practical knowledge of the world often steers us in the right direction (and provides detours of learning new habits of comportment when old habits lead us astray) as a sufficiently compelling evidence against New Skepticism. And he places the burden back on his interlocutors to justify why we should impose such a high-level of theoretical commitment on the average perceiver (as the source of surprise), or why we should accept that being wrong occasionally about what appears to us entails a skeptical condemnation of the entire perceptual apparatus.

    The action-based theory of perception (ABP) encapsulates into a positive account some of Noë’s main points of criticism against the “grand illusion” hypothesis and New Skepticism. In matters of perceptual comportment we are practical subjects first and theoretical subjects second: before we formulate a visual theory, we need to acknowledge our visual praxis in everyday life. We perceive the world as a real world, not as a representation of a real world. As Noë writes, “Perceptual experience is directed to the world, not to the brain” (Noë 2002: 6). If perceptual experience were directed to the brain, we might reasonably expect the sort of high level intimacy with perceptual objects that the internal representation model, or the “snapshot,” demands. After all, I have a sort of direct access to my own brain that nobody else can have. If the perceiver can’t conjure up a “snapshot” of his or her own visual experience, who can? The question, however, confuses the privilege of perspective with the privilege of content. As practical, first-person subjects we each have a privileged perspective on the world that is ours alone. But that privilege is not accorded in the same way to the objects of perception enjoyed according to that perspective. The objects themselves are not “in here” (the brain), they are “out there” (the world). Therefore, the partial views we get on objects of perception are precisely what we should expect if they were real and not part of a “grand illusion.” Whether the partial views are provided by our circumnavigation of a 3-D object, or through the rapid sacaddic movements of the eye, the partialness of the view appears to be no obstacle to engaging the world. Nor should we forget to counterbalance the surprise we feel at being occasionally misled by perceptual experience with the overwhelming confidence we demonstrate in the perceptual activity of our daily life.

    There remains the worry, however, that Noë’s move will not fully satisfy the “grand illusion” crowd or the new skeptic because they were expecting a theoretical solution (not a practical one) to a theoretical complaint. It might be the case that certain kinds of skepticism do not merit a response, or do not require one, insofar as they are self-defeating.[7]But Noë nevertheless attempts to bridge the gap between what his opponents might expect and what he has to offer with the theory of amodal perception. He borrows the theory from experimental psychology; briefly, it states that we have the ability to perceive as perceptually present what is not wholly in view (Noë 2002: 9). When we see the partial outline of a triangle, we perceive as perceptually present the whole triangle; when we see a 3-D object in a discontinuous series of saccadic eye movements, we perceive the 3-D object as stable and enduring; when we see a cat in partial view behind a picket fence, we perceive the cat as a unity. In all these cases we enjoy a perceptual experience of wholeness despite the fact that the view of the object is only given in parts. Such an ability on behalf of perceiving subjects would discard the need for the rich internal representation, or “snapshot,” of experience because overcoming DB would not be a matter of having all of the perceptual object or scene in view, rather it would be a matter of viewing from the right perspective (as determined by interest, habit, etc.). Whether or not amodal perception can be definitively, empirically verified is another unsettled issue, but it is at least comforting to the philosopher of consciousness to know that the internal representation model is not a foregone conclusion among experimental psychologists. Philosophy might yet have something to offer the world in the way of explicating consciousness and attention.

    
    

    (b) Noë commits to more than he thinks: the saccadic eye (constitutively unaware of gaps) versus the picket fence cat (aware, or potentially aware, of gaps)

    
    

    Not just philosophy, also phenomenology. The crucial move against the reductive and/or skeptical response to DB issued out of phenomenological considerations of our experience. We don’t require internal models of experience to engage with the world in a veridical manner; a phenomenological consideration shows that we are, as practical subjects, already operating in the midst of multiple partial perspectives on objects and scenes, and doing so with remarkable success. Amodal perception is offered to the experimental psychologist as justification for this success.

    And if amodal perception sounds familiar (and attractive) to the phenomenology crowd as well, there is good reason. The theory runs parallel to perceptual experience as it is described in the theory of intentionality, one of the core structures contained in Husserlian phenomenology. In the theory of intentionality, as with amodal perception, we find the basic recognition that perception provides the perceiver with a grasp of the whole through the medium of the part: “...perception is essentially the presumptive apprehension of some object, not its adequate intuition. Perception itself, though part of the ego’s phenomenological being, naturally falls, like so much else in consciousness that evades notice, beyond the glance of perception, much as ungrasped, yet apparent, aspects of a perceived external thing are not themselves perceived” (Husserl, LI:5:8 (93)).^[8] The demand for “adequate intuition” of a perceptual object or scene would be the demand for the “snapshot” of experience. The practical subject, however, functions without such a “snapshot”; both Noë and Husserl are in agreement that the phenomenological evidence shows us that perception “sees through” the part, or the aspect [Abschattung], to the whole.

    Yet how far does this agreement extend? For every perceptual aspect that is seen, there are unseen aspects of the same object, either on the obverse side of the object, or “in plain view”, as we’ve seen in the DB studies. It does not seem to make a difference to Noë whether the unseen aspects are (i) the result of intrinsic mechanical shortcomings of our perceptual faculties (the instability and discontinuity of saccadic eye movements, for example) or (ii) the result of obstructed views of an object within an adequately intuited scene (the cat behind the picket fence, for example). I would like to suggest that this is a philosophically and phenomenologically salient difference for Husserl. Noë’s failure to make this distinction results in, I argue, two latent and subtly competing theories of perception within ABP: (i) causal ABP and (ii) motivational ABP, which correspond to the distinction made by Husserl in Ideas II between the experiential regions of material nature and the spiritual world, respectively.

    Taking Husserl’s distinction as our guiding clue, we can determine the two theories as follows.

    Causal ABP (cABP) describes the activity of action-based perception from within the natural, material causal nexus in which the perceptual relation of perceiver to the object or scene is regulated by our acquired sensorimotor skills. These sensorimotor skills constitute a “practical knowledge of the ways what we do gives rise to sensory stimulation” (Noë 2002: 10). Contrary to the “snapshot” conception, sensorimotor skills do not offer us a model to which we might consciously attend, but rather provide the habits of seeing through which we exercise the strengths and cope with the shortcomings of our perception. “We peer, squint, lean forward, adjust lighting, put on glasses, and we do so automatically” (Noë 2002: 7). All these adjustments arise out of passive habitualities that, for the most part, pass beneath the threshold of our attentive awareness. This activity, thus, is pre-intentional insofar as it is unattended to (though the right sort of reflection could, theoretically, bring the practical activity into view).

    Motivational ABP, on the other hand, describes the activity of action-based perception from within the motivated relations of the spiritual world -- or, to give Husserl’s idiom a more contemporary inflection, from within the motivated relations of a meaningful social and cultural environment. Unlike the pre-intentional activity of causal ABP, motivational ABP is characterized by our intentional “reading” of the clues and context of our cultural surroundings. When a police officer, for example, surveys a political demonstration in the process of threat assessment, it’s important that he or she possess a conscious awareness of what he or she is doing and why it is being done. If violence erupts, the police officer will be forced to act in ways that will demands justification later. When it comes time to write the report it will presumably not be sufficient for the officer to respond that he or she was merely acting on (pre-intentional) instincts and habits. Motivational ABP accounts for cases like this where awareness of the social and cultural reasons for adopting certain perceptual perspectives makes a difference.

    Noë hints at the philosophical importance of social and cultural valences for ABP in reference to the work of “artists, magicians, stage designers and cinematographers” (Noë 2002: 7). But no attempt is made to distinguish mABP from cABP. The unstated assumption is that this class of people, who specialize in the presentation and manipulation of images as images, have simply mastered the rules of cABP and use these rules to play various sorts of tricks on the senses of their naive audiences. Such an assumption would hold that all “mABP” phenomena ultimately reduce to, and can be explained in terms of, cABP. But is this the case? To ask the phenomenological question whereby Noë distinguished himself from the “grand illusion” crowd and the new skeptics: does such a reduction accord with descriptions of our experience? The grouping together of disparate types like “artists” and “magicians” should already raise a red flag that we are overlooking important phenomenological differences among the various ways of perceptual activity. Further consideration of the disparate phenomena might reveal that more is lurking beneath the surface of Noë’s general motto “perceiving is a way of acting” (Noë 2004: 1) than he is ready to admit.

    
    

    (c) Two objections: duck/rabbit and Holbein’s The Ambassadors

    
    

    I will offer two objections to the reduction of mABP to cABP. But, first, let’s recall the reason why such a reduction seems inevitable for Noë. His primary interlocutors in the discourse on consciousness and attention, as we’ve sketched it, have been either experimental psychology (the “grand illusion” crowd, broadly construed) or the new skeptics (Dennett et al.). Both used the results of the DB studies to mount an attack on the veridicality of perceptual experience as we describe it (that is, as rich, full, complete, detailed, and so on). If Noë wants to rebut his opponents with yet more (phenomenological) descriptions of experience, he needs those descriptions to hook up with the realm of natural science in a real, impactful, empirically-verifiable manner, lest he simply beg the question by supplying his opponents with descriptions they believe they already have demonstrated to be constitutively inadequate. The treatment of amodal perception is one indication that he believes results of phenomenological description can be folded back into natural science. Noë is a cagey enough thinker that he doesn’t let his argument rest on amodal perception alone, but he clearly has left an open invitation for empirical psychologists and philosophers alike to come up with a knockdown argument that every mAPB reduces to cABP.

                The two objections will be broached in reference to (i) Wittgenstein’s duck/rabbit and (ii) Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors.I expect the first objection to fail and the second to provide more difficulty. Why bother with posing an objection I think is bound to fail? Because I think (i) highlights the point at which ABP is designed to be attacked, whereas (ii) shows us where it should be attacked according to the merits of the theory.

    
    

    (i) the duck/rabbit

    
    

    Towards the “end” of the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein develops a number of thoughts on the question of “seeing as....” To put the question one way: what is the difference between seeing something and seeing something assomething? The sorts of figures and illustrations appealed to, including the duck/rabbit, offer themselves in full and open availability to the perceiving subject (similar to the visuals of DB studies: nothing is concealed). This full availability sets us up for a surprise when we discover that we can attend to the same markings on the page (the duck/rabbit) in two different ways, either conjuring up an image of a rabbit, or a duck. We are all the more amazed when we reflect on the fact that attending to the markings in different ways required no apparent shift in our physical perspective, no leaning forward, no squinting, no putting on our glasses. Nevertheless, the change from duck to rabbit happens, at our will. When we attend to the markings as a duck, we are “blind” to the rabbit; when we attend to the markings as a rabbit, we are “blind” to the duck. In short, we don’t see markings that can be read as duck or rabbit -- we see the duck or rabbit.

    
    

    Duck/Rabbit

    
    

                The objection to Noë, then, runs as follows: since there was no apparent physical activity involved in the attentive switch from the duck to the rabbit then we must be relying on some sort of mABP-based functionality such as our acquired cultural awareness of what markings can count as a duck and what markings can count as a rabbit. This is not to say that, during the shift, the perceiving subject somehow slips out the the causal realm of natural science into direct contact with, say, the Forms of duck and rabbit. We remain bodily organisms in a causal chain of material nature. Yet it is not the cABP-based functionality, which arises out of this natural causal chain, that triggers the shift between duck and rabbit. Indeed, how could this be possible? The markings provide the eye with the same sense data input in the case of the duck as the rabbit. Without a change in the input, cABP has no basis on which to explain the shift of attention. But since we know the shift in attention occurred, mABP looks like the only remaining explanatory option.

                Why does this objection fail? First (but less importantly, I think), it fails because the empirical psychologist (and Noë) can provide a more detailed scientific, empirical account of how seeing works that might persuade us of a tighter correspondence between the attention shift and a cABP reading of our bodily comportment. The saccadic movements of the eye, for example, will likely target different patterns of the markings. If we reduce our perception of the duck, or rabbit, to these corresponding patterns of saccadic movements, then we have successfully reduced mABP to cABP. Although it does not appear that we are moving, our eyes have never stopped moving: perception remains, essentially, a way of (sub-intentionally) acting. Second (more importantly, I think), the objection fails because it nurtures an unlikely idealism in regards to object of perception. As embodied perceivers, it’s unlikely that an account of how we see what we see can ever be entirely divorced from the natural, bodily mechanics that set the stage for perception. There’s no (human) seeing of the rabbit/duck without eyes, brain, body, etc. To deny that we can track a correlation between a cABP account and a mABP account is not supported by experience.

    
    

    (ii) Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors[9]

    
    

    But correlation does not imply causation. A brief consideration of The Ambassadors (1533) will attempt to show that, correlation or not, mABP is phenomenologically irreducible to cABP. The painting is a double portrait of Jean de Dinteville, a landowner, and George de Selve, the Bishop of Lavaur, rendered in the richly-detailed manner of Netherlandish painting. According to the traditional reading, Jean de Dinteville, with his hand fixed on the blade at his hip, represents the the life of action; while George de Selve, his elbow resting on a book, represents the life of contemplation. Together they form the classic dichotomous pairing of the theoretical versus practical life and present the viewer with a suitably straightforward object of aesthetic and intellectual edification.

    
    

    Figure 1 “The Ambassadors” Hans Holbein (National Gallery, London)

    
    

                One significant detail, however, remains hidden to the typical viewer who expects a typical portrait and faces it in the typical way: the image of a skull is anamorphically included at the base of the portrait. This skull, visually-elongated in such a manner so as to obscure its meaning from a headlong perspective, is only visible if the viewer situates himself from a particular vantage point at the lower-right of the painting. Headlong the skull looks like an awkward piece of driftwood, a log. The viewer must “enact” his or her perception of the painting by breaking with the inherited visual praxis of gazing headlong at 2-D painting and recognize that flat plane portraiture takes place within a 3-D environment. When the perceiver does so, he or she discovers a new element represented within the picture plane. Not a new part of the same whole, but rather a new part of a new whole.

    
    

    Figure 2 Detail of Anamorphic Skull (The Ambassadors)

    
    

                So the objection to Noë, then, runs as follows: practical comportment matters here for seeing, but it is an intentional, practical comportment that is motivated by cultural norms that stand alongside, without being reduced to, the sub-intentional habits of seeing that guide us in our average and familiar perceptual exploration of our world. Without the existence of a cultural practice of facing pictures headlong, Holbein could never have “hid” the skull. This pictorial norm eventually becomes absorbed into the sub-intentional viewing habits of the average perceiver (cABP) -- Holbein counts on precisely this absorption in order to lull the viewer into complacency. The viewer is very much like a link in a causal chain, passively responding to stimulus in a pre-determined manner and producing a predictable result. But this is only the first step in the viewing process. Only when the viewer transcends this passivity and takes an active stance on how one sees is there the possibility of seeing something new in the painting.

                Where does this promise of novelty lie? If visual praxis is simply a matter of habits, it’s not clear how these habits are formed or overcome. cABP-based explanations tell a good story about our tendency to repeat a perceptual praxis that works for us, but it does not tell us very much about the motivations that drive habit formation and relinquishing. Could the motivation simply be one further habit that adds another link to the causal nexus percolating beneath the unexamined drama of perception? I find this unsatisfactory because it neglects to recognize that the shifts in visual praxis not only produce shifts in the meaning of visual objects (duck/rabbit, log/skull), but also the shifts themselves are meaningful. The violation of the headlong pictorial gaze tradition is itself part of the explanation of how we see what we see. mABP accounts explains the meaning of the shifts in visual practice -- cAPB accounts merely correlate to these shifts.

    
    

    Conclusion: the return of representation

    
    

    The main thrust of Noë’s objection to the “grand illusion” hypothesis and New Skepticism consisted in using phenomenological description to make the philosophical presuppositions of the representation model of consciousness less persuasive. Our perceptual comportment towards, and in, the world does not resemble that of an individual navigating his or her world by means of a theoretical representation of it. Rather, we are practical subjects first; we learn practical skills of perceptual comportment with our environment; and the style of our success and our failure is consistent with an embodied subjectivity that does not know the world in a theoretical manner in advance, but is gifted with the practical ability to piece together such a theoretical model if so desired.

                This rejection of the representation model of consciousness seems right. And insofar as it is a rejection of internalrepresentation, Noë has added another iteration to the longstanding plaint of phenomenology against the empiricist and neo-empiricist notion of the “theatre of inner consciousness.” But this paper tries to suggest in (b) and show in (c) that the phenomenological critique of empiricist theories of consciousness ranges further than intentionality in the mode of perception. No two phenomenologist have an identical account of consciousness (the same could be said of empirical psychologists, of course), but a consistent touchpoint is that consciousness is above all directed towards meaning primarily, not the “vehicle” of meaning. In other words, in everyday consciousness we are directed to the sense of sense data, not the sense data itself. Sometimes it is difficult to tell these apart. When we look at a red wall and say, “Look, red!”, it seems like our attention will accommodate explanation in cABP terms (and perhaps it will). But when we consider more complex examples involving the nuances of our cultural world, we require an explanation in terms of mABP to justify claims such as “Look up on stage, Hamlet is a tragic figure!” Why is that?

                I would like to offer that what Noë inadequately addresses, in his attempt to be taken seriously by empirical psychology by sticking to sense data, is that practices of attentive awareness include more layers than that of perception. We might mention imaging, for example, which Sartre treated in L’imaginaire. When we image -- when we watch Hamlet perform upon the stage -- we direct ourselves attentively to an object that is empirically absent in important respects. This absence shapes how we comport ourselves to the object. Amodal perception, of course, makes a similar point, but notice the difference between the absence of perception and the absence of imaging. In perception, we negotiate the absence in order to better cope with what is present; in imaging, we negotiate the absence in order to to better cope with what is absent.

    The absence of imaging shows up in the fact that we address ourselves to the mABP-functional object, or scene, as a representation. Not the internal representation of the “grand illusion” hypothesis, to be sure, but a representation nonetheless. We might grant Noë’s opponents a notable, though unclarified, phenomenological point. The “grand illusion” hypothesis and New Skepticism both recognize, if not require, consciousness in the form of imaging and representation. But rather than awaken them to the ways in which this imagine is a positive phenomenological feature of conscious awareness, Noë highlights it in order to scare empirical psychology away from its philosophical pretensions and back to the data. That’s a useful gesture in the short term. In the long term, however, the problem remains to account for mABP in ways that do not diminish extra-perceptual modes of intentionality at work in imaging, as well as all the other manners of experience (willing, remembering, hoping), that reductive cABP accounts can only dream of.

    
    

    
    

    ---

    
    

    ^[1] Full disclosure: this direction will be aesthetic understanding, which Noë tackles in a new book, Varieties of Presence. My paper, thus, can be read as outdated, or, more charitably, as a student’s attempt to gain  a fuller understanding of the grounds of a contemporary philosophical debate.

    ^[2] Noë grouped these two rhetorical opponents together in an earlier article “Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion” (2002). In the earlier article the two positions are articulated as two aspects of the same basic position. So the fact that the later article (2007) sorts one position into two (related) positions may indicate a meaningful trend in Noë’s thoughts on the matter. Or it may not.

    ^[3] Noë refers us to the work of Blackmore et al. (1995) and O’Regan (1992) in this vein.

    [4] Participants failed to observe the unexpected event 46% of the time (“Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events” Simons and Chabris, 1999). A minority figure, nonetheless impressive for such a supposedly exotic disruption of the scene.

    [5] G. E. Moore’s “here is one hand” move in the essay “Proof of an External World” (1939) is one of the most  famous contemporary examples, but many rebuttals against skepticism before and after have made similar gestures.

    ^[6] Christopher Mole makes a similar appeal to “common sense” understanding of consciousness and attention (Mole 2008). He uses the example of the mother (un)reflectively attending to the cry of her child to show that we are conscious of everything that we pay attention to, but do not need to pay attention to everything that we are conscious of. The scope of what we are conscious of is potentially larger than the scope of what we attend to. The “extra room” allotted to consciousness above and beyond attention is the basis of our ability to shift into other modes of attending to the same experience, or more fully appreciating what we are conscious of in the same mode of attending.

    [7] Self-defeating in the usual manner of profoundly skeptical arguments: by requiring a premise of the sort that they ultimately wish to defeat. To wit, skeptics about the veridicality of intuition presuppose intuition in order to reject it.

    ^[8] Later in (c) I will want to problematize the “like so much else in consciousness” with respect to what I see as Noë’s blindness to other modes of consciousness beyond perceptual consciousness.

    [9]For background on painting,see the following short video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQZUIGzinZA.

  • A Proto-Phenomenological Reading of Kantian Causality in the Critical Period

    May 04, 13

    Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)

    
    

    In this paper I would like to consider three different ways to read the nature of causality in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by testing these readings against the challenge posed by the Third Antinomy concerning determinism and freedom. A convincing reading of Kantian causality in the Critical period must avoid the metaphysical excess of both the antinomy’s thesis (appearances reduce to spontaneous causal events) and antithesis (there is no freedom, only a rigid determinism). The first two readings to be considered – the “event-event” model and the “causal powers” model – builds on the causality discussion in Eric Watkins’s illuminating book Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality. Watkins argues against the “event-event” model on the grounds that it conflicts with some requirements of temporal relations according to the First Analogy; and he takes the “causal powers” reading to capture a more primordial common ground between the (at first glance) contradictory demands of the Second and Third Analogies. While accepting that Watkins’s “causal powers” reading of causality serves as a useful tonic against the reductive empiricism of the “event-event” model, I will deny that it successfully satisfies the demands of all three Analogies.           

    I will introduce a third reading, which I’ll call the “subject-object” reading, to argue that the first two models correspond to irreducible phenomenal moments of causal explanation captured in the Analogies: “causal powers” to the persistence of the First, and “event-event” to the succession of the Second. The “subject-object” reading aims to show that the principle of simultaneity outlined in the Third Analogy is meant to hold and preserve this irreducibility. It is the very irreducibility of these separate moments that reminds us that Kant’s project aimed at uncovering the condition of the possibility for objective knowledge through experience, not at replacing experience with proximate, theoretical models. If appearances in time were things in themselves, then the threefold proliferation of the Analogies would indeed be a philosophical inconsistency. But the Analogies, as regulative and not constitutive, have a descriptive rather than determinative project, describing the “existence of appearances under rules a priori” (B 221) in a proto-phenomenological vein made possible by a transcendental subjectivity able to disentangle the intelligible from the empirical character of objective cognition. Persistence, succession, and community are the formal principles by which causality can be described as the objective correlate of the transcendental subject. With this correlation between the noumenal subject and the empirical object, Kantian causality avoids both the rigid determinism and the unhinged spontaneity of the Third Antinomy.

    
    

    (1) three moments

    
    

    As my irreducibility argument values all three moments, I will provide an overview of all three according to the diverse readings – (a) “event-event”, (b) “causal powers”, and (c) “subject-object” – including (1.1) a brief account of the model, (1.2) its persuasiveness as a theoretical proxy for the causality described in the Analogies, and (1.3) how it fares against the challenge of the Third Antinomy.

    
    

    (a) the “event-event” model

    
    

    (a1.1) We begin with what Watkins has called the “event-event” model of causality. Although he describes simple and complex versions of the model, both versions maintain two central and underlying presuppositions. First, that causality consists of a relation between two discrete and determinable events: the cause and effect. Second, that what distinguishes the cause from the effect is that the former has priority over the latter. The precise nature of the priority is a source of controversy for “event-event” theory (as will be treated below); nevertheless, these two presuppositions clearly point to an ontological asymmetry between cause and effect. There is no effect without a cause – and both must be discretely determinable; for example, the heated stove is determinable as the cause and the warmed air is determinable as the effect (B 247-8).[1] Given A -- where A is the cause and B the effect – B will succeed A. The relation between cause and effect, therefore, can be characterized as a successive “one following on another”.[2]

    
    

    (a1.2) The characterization of Kantian causality in the Critical period as “event-event” finds its main source of inspiration in the Second Analogy’s discussion of succession. There is both a historical argument for looking to the Second Analogy in this case as well as an argument internal to the design of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

    Historically, Kant makes the memorable assertion in the Prolegomena that it was David Hume’s skeptical puzzling over the connection of cause and effect that provided the initial motivation for the Critical project (Pro. 257-262), which could be subsequently interpreted, and not entirely without reason, as Kant’s response to Humean skepticism. This still leaves open the question of whether Kant’s taking up of Hume’s puzzle – the lack of necessary connection between cause and effect – also necessitated taking up his metaphysical and ontological presuppositions. For Hume the problem of necessary connection was articulable only on the basis of metaphysical picture of the world that took the two poles of that necessary connection for granted; cause and effect were non-problematic insofar as empirical intuitions provided us, without demanding any sort of deduction, everything we could ever know about them. Not because what was the cause and what was the effect in any given cause-effect relation was always obvious – if it were, science would be a set of finite propositions and complete body of knowledge instead of an ongoing task. On the contrary, determining the cause-effect relation could be difficult indeed, but knowing where to look is obvious: empirical intuition. Even the experience of time is contingent upon objects of empirical intuition. Time is nothing in itself besides, “…some perceivable succession of changeable objects.”[3] That the “changeable objects” appeared, and did so in “succession”, was not a philosophical mystery for Hume – what concerned him more deeply was how to objectively sew together the succession of changeable objects on the basis of empirical evidence. Unless the succession bore some observable necessity, the connection between this and that intuited object was relegated to the status of subjectively speculative linkage based on habit.

    Hume’s problematic of the necessary connection, and the metaphysical picture of the world on which it is based, does not capture the breadth of Kant’s transcendental response. With the introduction of the forms of sensibility and the categories of the understanding, Kant is clearly interested in laying bare the conditions for the possibility of experience – of causality and more – whereas Hume’s questioning stops at the habit of experience without penetrating into its grounds. Yet, Hume’s and Kant’s accounts of causality do align at least this far: our consciousness of the successiveness of temporal experience is a necessary condition for causal expression. The discussion of succession in the Second Analogy, therefore, provides a suitable “foot in the door” to the question of Kantian causality in the Critical period; but only a foot – until the objects of experience, the putative causes and effects, are subjected to a “deeper investigation” one can vouch for only a superficial likeness between the concept of succession in Hume and Kant.[4]

                Yet, what if a superficial likeness was all that was required? What if the breadth of Kant’s transcendental response to Hume’s skepticism merely added an extra explanatory level (filling out the condition of possibility of experience in general, and of causality in particular) that made no significant alteration to the “event-event” model? That is, in each and every case of true causality what we, scientists and laymen alike, should look for is the succession of distinct, determinate, empirically-available events. The architectonic of Kant’s argument in the Critique of Pure Reason lends some minimal level of plausibility to this claim by arranging the table of categories (of pure understanding) and the table of principles (of pure understanding) such that the former’s category of relation (the second moment: of causality and dependence) precisely aligns with the latter’s principle of the analogy of experience (the second moment: the Second Analogy). If we followed this architectonic as a rubric for interpretation, then we might privilege succession as the key pattern for understanding causality. The problem would still remain of properly distinguishing between subjective and objective succession, but we would, in any case, know what to look for when we looked for causal relations.

                Kant himself raises a complication for this view while still writing within the Second Analogy. That is, in some cases of successive causality the cause is determined simultaneously with the effect. The cause still enjoys ontological priority over the effect, but the time between the two is “vanishing” such that the priority is not empirically observable according to sequential ordering. The heated stove, for example, warms the air; the former is the cause, the latter the effect; the heated stove enjoys priority over the warmed air, but, Kant insists, the connection of these appearances is not successive but rather simultaneous (B 247-8). It is as if the ontological priority of one being (the cause: heated stove) over another (the effect: the warmed air) had withdrawn into a merely logical priority and that the separate events of the “event-event” model has withdrawn into a single “hybrid” event consisting of both heated stove and warmed air. The problem of discerning causality, then, becomes the problem of justifying the logical priority of cause over effect, which (to bring us back to the Humean puzzle) cannot be accomplished by mere observation.

    
    

    (a1.3) But perhaps we’re simply looking in the wrong place for the cause in the above example. Can we lump together the heated stove and the warmed air as various manifestations of the same event, then look for a distinct and prior event that caused this later effect, thus preserving the successiveness of the succession model? Although starting such an open-ended regressive inquiry always remains an option, Kant gives us reason to think in the Third Antinomy that such a course will not satisfy the deep curiosity we have about the structure of causality. The (i) thesis and (ii) antithesis of the Third Antinomy present us with two conflicting views on how causality plays out in the world.

    (i) The thesis maintains that causality “in accordance with laws of nature” is punctuated by causality “through freedom” (B 472). In this case the regressive inquiry through the causal chain of nature would ultimately lead the observer back to a spontaneous event that upset the very regularity and order the inquiry into causes was supposed to  reveal in nature. The spontaneous event would be unpredictable, belying any attempt to determine succession between cause and effect in a rigorous and necessary manner that can effectively forecast future causal events.

    (ii) The antithesis subtracts the spontaneous causality “through freedom” and maintains a strict determinism “in accordance with the laws of nature” (B 473). On the one hand, the regressive inquiry encounters no spontaneous irregularities that might upset the regularity of the causal chain; on the other hand, the inquiry finds no absolute genesis that would ground the causal chain. Without an ultimate ground the regressive causal inquiry could potentially continue ad infinitum. And finding this ultimate ground is not merely an inconvenient project that can be saved for a later date – the causal reasoning that relies on an incomplete sequence of causal explanation is vulnerable to the same unknowns as the causal reasoning that relies on spontaneous causality. All the putatively known relations in the causal chain, AàBàCàD, face the problem of closure. Some unknown X must be posited according to “event-event” model of causality as the  genesis of A without yet being known itself and without the relation XàA being determined. The uncertainty of XàA is subsequently passed on to every relation in the causal series.

    
    

    (b) “Causal Powers”

    
    

    The succession of the “event-event” model, then, fails to offer a completely satisfying account of the structure of causality. Watkins offers an alternative “causal powers” reading of Kantian causality in the Critical period. We will follow Watkins this far: that the “causal powers” reading provides a broadening of the account of Kantian causality needed to cover the wider variety of temporal determinations described in the Analogies outside of the Second. However, I will break with Watkins on this point: whereas he introduces the “causal powers” alternative in order to explain the “mutual interaction” of causal relations in the Third Analogy, I claim that the alternative model better accounts for the style of existence of appearances described in the First Analogy, that is, persistence (with the accompanying claim that the “subject-object” reading is needed to explain the Third Analogy, and the connection of all three Analogies, as will be treated in (c)).[5]

    
    

    (b1.1) What is the “causal powers” model? It is a description of causality as a relation between ground and effect where the former acts as a persistent substrate of alternations evidenced by the latter. We may also think of it as the relation of substance and accident, as Kant characterizes the temporal existence of appearances in the First Analogy (B 225-232). The persistent substance undergirds the transitory accidents. The general metaphysical theory of substance/accident is almost as old as philosophy itself, and remained a live option in physical accounts of nature in Kant’s time, though the philosophical inheritance was to receive a reshaping in the course of the Critical project.[6]

    
    

    (b1.2) Similar to the “event-event” model, the causality of the “causal powers” model also consists of two central presuppositions. First, that causality must be thought in two moments wherein the cause (the substance, in this case) is related to the effect (the accident, in this case). Second, that a fundamental asymmetry inheres in the relation such that the former is responsible for the latter. Unlike the “event-event” model, however, the two moments of the “causal powers” model are not both temporally determinate – the ground  remains temporally indeterminate while the effect is determined in time. Watkins insists on this point[7] and the text of the First Analogy supports it.[8] The peculiar asymmetry of the “causal powers” relation inheres in a substance that enjoys a propensity to admit certain accidents according to its nature. Watkins will immediately want to cash in this insight to explain how simultaneity of cause and effect (formalized as community in the Third Analogy) can neatly accord with the succession of cause and effect; namely, that the temporal causal sequence that we observe is the ground of one substance X causing an effect in another substance Y, and, vice versa, Y causes an effect in X. He argues for this causally inter-substantial interpretation because it’s unclear to him what explanatory power the persistence of the First Analogy could hold in an intra-substantial reading: “How can the mere existence of a thing bring about an effect?”[9] In other words, where does the impetus for alteration of a substance issue from if not from outside the substance as described in the phenomena of succession and community? While not denying that the arguments of the First Analogy can help clarify the causality discussion in the Second and Third, I claim that the power of the “causal powers” model exerts a real intra-substantial effect: the effect of persistence is this very impetus.

    Yet can the mere persistence of a substance count, in some or any sense, as the cause of its alterations? The notion is not so very different from Aristotle’s formal cause or a certain interpretation of Plato’s theory of forms. In regards to Aristotle’s account, the form [to eidos] of the formal cause is that which determines the being [ti en einai] and the sort of being [ta toutou gene] of the object under consideration (Phy. II.3 194b28-9). Other causal aspects, such as material, final, efficient, may be taken into account when describing the genesis of an object, but nevertheless, nothing is what it is without formal cause. In regards to the Platonic theory of forms,[10] though not a substance metaphysics, we see a similar fundamental, ontological root of causation. Socrates speaks: “…for I think that, if there is anything beautiful besides the beautiful itself [auto to kalon], it is beautiful for no other reason than that it shares in that beautiful, and I say so with everything. Do you agree to this sort of cause [aitia]? – I do” (Phaedo 100c). The beautiful itself [auto to kalon] is the form [to eidos] of beauty [to kalon] on account of which everything that is beautiful is beautiful. In both the Aristotelian and Platonic accounts, then, we are presented with an aspect of causality that accomplishes nothing besides, in each and every moment, sustains the existence, or being, of the object, or being, in its own manner and no other. The power of the “causal powers” model is this power of sustaining, or persistence, that maintains the object, or being, as what it is and no other.

    Is the “causal powers” model, therefore, a return  to the ancients for Kant? Not quite. Kant introduces the table of categories with a nod to Aristotle: “Following Aristotle, we will call these concepts categories, for our aim is basically identical with his although very distant in its execution” (B 105). The implication is that although Kant takes himself to be fulfilling the essential project of philosophy, the modern philosophical and scientific apparatus he finds ready to hand no longer allow the work to be performed in manner that would produce the results of an Aristotle or Plato. That is quite correct and could be part of the reason that Watkins is unwilling to allow the principle of persistence in the First Analogy to speak for itself in an account of Kantian causality, but rather folds the “causal powers” model into an explanatory account mediating the differences between the Second and Third Analogy. What antiquated notion of substance metaphysics, as it appears in the First Analogy, does a modern scientific understanding find so repugnant? I will suggest that it is the indeterminacy of the ground in the ground/effect relation that modern scientific accounts of find objectionable. If the ground of a causal relation cannot be determined, then does not all our causal explanations reduce to ‘some unknown object X (substance as indeterminate ground) = some known appearance (accident as determinate effect)? If this were the case, the principle of persistence would not offer any contribution towards a scientifically verifiable account of causality because the ‘unknown object X’ would always be out of reach. But we have reason to think that this is not the case; namely, that there is a difference between knowing an object and determining it in an objective cognition. We clearly don’t determine the ground of the ground/effect relation in an objective cognition, unlike the effects (B 225). We do, on the other hand, know the ground in the simple, yet profound, sense that we know what it is: of the beautiful object, we know that it is beautiful; of the automobile, we know that it is an automobile; of the red apple, we know that it is red. That is no little accomplishment – with the persistence of the object of cognition  we are provided the locus for all future causal investigation. Whatever story we want to tell about how the redness of the red apple appears, for example, will be told on the basis of the persisting “this”, the tode ti, of the ground. To say that the ground is indeterminate, therefore, is not to say that it serves no function in the explanatory causal account of an object of cognition, but rather only that it does not do so in the fashion of a thematized spatio-temporal determination.

    
    

    (b1.3) Given the persistence of the ground in the “causal powers” model, have we discovered the bedrock that would lend chains of natural causality a stable and certain foundation that would, in a transitive fashion, endorse all subsequent causal relations in the chain? As we recall from (a1.3) the difficulty of the “event-event” model was securing closure for the causal sequence. For every causal relation between two determinate events, BàC, an earlier relation would need to be discovered, AàBàC, lest the certainty of causal chain be undone by the uncertainty of its foundation. Yet this regressive procedure has no satisfactory conclusion: either the regression must go on ad infinitum, or must find its completion in a spontaneity that admits of no prior cause. The former commits us to an infinite task that finite humans cannot complete, the latter disowns the task of spelling out causal regularity altogether by founding  the entire sequence, AàBàC, on some unknown spontaneous X. With the “causal powers” model, however, we have a new way to think of spontaneity that could potentially solve both difficulties. First, causal investigation according to this model has a clear foundation – the substance itself – beyond which  no further regressive inquiry would be required to proceed. Second, the ground of this sort of causal relation would, indeed, be spontaneous, but not unpredictable and irregular in the sense that we found worrisome in (a1.3) because the spatio-temporally determined accidents correlate in each and every case to their substance as ground.

                There is, then, some basic plausibility to spelling out Kantian causality in the Critical period according to the “causal powers” model. Whatever his ultimate  motivation, Watkins appears correct to highlight the presuppositions of substance/accident metaphysics latent in Kant’s Analogies since they solve the closure problem for the “event-event” model. Can we therefore secure the objectivity of objective causality by tying every effect to its ground? Once again we turn to the Third Antinomy as a sort of trial through which a model of causality must pass successfully to prove its soundness; and once again we have reason to believe that the model in question fails to provide a full story of Kantian causality.

                (i) In the thesis we are presented with two sorts of causality: that according to the laws of nature, and that according to an absolute causal spontaneity beginning from itself (B 472, 474). Although this “absolute causal spontaneity” could be treated in terms of the freedom of a transcendental subject (we will treat it thus in (c)), we will here treat spontaneity in terms of the substance as object. The spontaneity of substance is precisely the causal powers that ground causal effects in the irreducibility of the substance’s being and its way of being. Such a grounding and its concomitant “two tiered” causality prove helpful in avoiding infinite regresses in our causal investigation; but a difficulty emerges, however, when we try to say anything about the nature of inter-substantial and inter-accidental sequences. For example, where A and B are substances, and X, Y, Z are accidents, how do we distinguish the sequence (AàX, AàY, AàZ) from (AàX, AàY, BàZ)? If the primary evidence of the persistence of the substance is the accident, can we not be misled as to what the substance is according to the overlapping causal possibilities of the substances? Even if the underlying metaphysical presupposition held true – that every effect issued from a ground, every accident from a substance – this truth would not help us in our actual causal investigations because we would have no insight, according to the limits of our understanding, into the causal behavior of indeterminate substances at this “higher tier” of interaction.

                (ii) In the antithesis, on the other hand, transcendental freedom is excised from the causal picture – there is only causality in accordance with the laws of nature. At first glance this decision would seem to discount the “causal powers” model from the start because it was the free spontaneity of the irreducible causal powers of the substance that gets every causal story in motion. On reflection, however, we seem to be in the same bind indicated in (i) above. The spontaneity of the causal powers can equally well be understood as inscribed into natural law by virtue of their irreducibility – but we would still be in the same difficulty of linking the correct ground to the correct effect. The action of the spatio-temporally indeterminate substances could proceed perfectly well according to the laws of nature, but would do so behind a veil of spatio-temporal effects that concealed the very condition of their own appearance, and made any rigorous, modern, scientific account of causality impossible.

    
    

    (c) the “subject-object” reading

    
    

    When put to the test of the Third Antinomy both the “event-event” model and the “causal powers” encountered difficulties. The “event-event” model lead to an infinite regression when we tried to trace back the causal chain to its origin – and the demand to perform such a tracing back could not simply be dropped, lest the regularity and order of the entire causal chain be put into doubt. The “causal powers” model led to uncertainty as to how the spontaneous powers of the substances, as grounds, gave rise to their accidents, as effects – and the spontaneity could not simply be domesticated under some external rule imposed on the substance from without, lest the nullified spontaneity give rise again to the problem of

    origins that we observed in the “event-event” model. The “subject-object” reading will be an attempt to preserve the key phenomenal moments – (a) succession, (b) persistence, and (c) simultaneity – while discarding the theoretical models that house them.

    
    

    (c1.1) What is the “subject-object” reading? It is a philosophical description of causality according to the givenness of the object to the subject, and the subject to the object. As Kant emphasizes throughout the Critique, cognition is the work of both the sensibility and the understanding together. The understanding alone is empty thought, the sensibility alone is blind intuition. Therefore, in order for causal understanding to count as cognition, there must be some concrete objectivity to which the subject may direct its attention. In fact, in the world we find many such concrete objectivities. In the Third Analogy, Kant glosses this givenness of the objectivities from both the object-side and subject-side as a co-presence in empirical intuition: “Things are simultaneous if in empirical intuition the perception of one can follow the perception of the other reciprocally” (B 256-7). We have here the elements of persistence and succession, but their complexity has been compounded by the fact that Kant asks us to think of them from both the object-side and the subject-side. “Simultaneity” describes the state of affairs in which the separate moments of causal explanation hang together in community without reducing to one  or the other. The community affords the subject a view of persistence in virtue of  succession, and vice versa. As such the Third Analogy describes an overall style of experience, from which moments of causal explanation can be abstracted, rather than describing what causality is in-itself. This is central because, according to the “subject-object” reading, causality is nothing in-itself.

    
    

    (c1.2) If causality is nothing in-itself, then the “subject-object” reading does not provide any proxy theoretical model in the vein of (a) or (b). It does, however, give us an expanded description of the phenomena of causality. And this expanded description can show us how the “event-event” model and the “causal powers” model fall short by hewing too far towards the object-side and subject-side of causal explanation, respectively.

                First, the “event-event” model privileges the object-side of succession as a phenomenon inhering primarily in object relations. Thus, the succession of A à B à C is primarily understood as changes unfolding in an object, such as a piece of wood that successively turns to ash in virtue of fire. However, Kant supplies a subject-side reading to succession in the Third Analogy: “Thus I can direct my perception first to the moon and subsequently to the earth…” (B 257). Conversely, the “event-event” model privileges the subject-side of persistence by covertly presupposing an eternal, neutral gaze that would hold fast while the objects of a determinate nature unfold objectively.

                Second, the “causal powers” model privileges the subject-side of succession as a phenomenon inhering primarily in subject relations. As we’ve seen, the problem for this model was which indeterminate grounds caused which determinate effects. Wherever the subject turned its gaze also, apparently, determined the sequence of succession. Without an objective rule for interpretation or insight into the grounds themselves, there was no certain way to distinguish (AàX, AàY, AàZ) from (AàX, AàY, BàZ). As we might expect, conversely, the “causal powers” model privileges the object-side of persistence by withdrawing the grounds of the effects from the purview of human determination. Only the effects were temporally- and spatially-available; the grounds were left indeterminate, meaning that human cognition was at the mercy of powers it constitutively could not fathom.

                What remedy does the “subject-object” reading provide? It brackets the metaphysical question of persistence versus succession, and instead draws our attention to the formal experiential structures of causal cognition in which the subject and object are held in a unity. This formal structure can be filled out experientially according to either the subject-side or the object-side of causal explanation. Since cognition requires the givenness of the subject to the object, and vice versa, the reversibility of causal explanations should not surprise us.

                A worry arises here that reversibility of causal explanations (object-side ßà subject-side) also means there is an ambivalence as to which side of the explanatory story takes the lead. A brief consideration of concrete examples should show that this worry is unfounded.

    One example: if we take Kant’s example of the heated stove/warm room, we are presented with what is supposed to be a curious case of simultaneous succession. The heated stove causes the warm room according to the “event-event” model of succession – and yet the cause and effect unfold simultaneously with only a “vanishing degree” of temporal separation. However, if we make the distinction between object-side and subject-side succession, we see that the causal event is simultaneous only from the object-side. From the subject-side, on the contrary, the subject is attending to the heated stove, or the warmth of the room, in succession. It’s clear that this subject-side succession does not cause the warmth of the warm room, but it does provide the basis for the causal explanation. If the subject only ever experienced the heated stove/warm room as a unity, the causal question would never arise. Another example: in grading student papers, I am caused pain by reading poor ones intermixed with good ones. To spare myself further pain I restrict my attention to a small batch of papers from students I know produce consistently excellent work. The succession of excellent papers, engineered by my selective attention, causes me pleasure. To really understand what is going on here, we need a subject-side causal explanation, although, of course, the object-side explanation remains a basis for the possibility of providing an explanation at all.

    In these examples, we see that the reversibility of causal explanation, underwritten by the co-givenness of subject and object, does not unduly distract us from the most salient causal explanatory features of the experience. The first example is clearly better explained along the lines of a natural scientific causal account. The second example, along the lines of a psychological account. The causal experience itself is determinative of its own explanation in  a way that the “one-size-fits-all” models of causation would not permit. Thus, the “subject-object” reading does not substitute a model for another model, but rather functions as a guide to let the experience of causality interpret itself.

    
    

    (c1.3) Since the “subject-object” reading is not another model, it makes less sense to “test” it against the challenge of the Third Antinomy. Kant considered the Antinomies to be constitutive difficulties for metaphysical questions, which were not to be overcome from within the boundaries of the metaphysical inheritance hitherto. The trick was to adopt the properly critical attitude that would shine a light on the apparatus of cognition in a manner sufficient to expose how and why certain metaphysical questions continuously arise and re-arise. The success of the “subject-object” reading can be judged according to whether it adopts this critical attitude towards the extremes of the Third Antinomy.

                In regards to (i) the thesis, the “subject-object” reading recognizes a causal spontaneity that is, indeed, absolute within its proper domain: namely, subject-side spontaneity. Every causal relation that enters into cognition requires a subjectivity to frame and shape the objectivity of the unfolding chain of causal determinations. That is the condition for the comprehensibility of intuition and the fulfillment of understanding. Such a requirement does not mean that the subjectivity triggers the causal chain of objective determinations any more than the causal chain triggers the subject-side causality. Both sides are required and both are given in the co-givenness of the subject and object in cognition. As a result, the problem of the thesis, concerning absolute causal spontaneity upsetting the regularity of the causal chain, does not arise and cannot arise in cognition. It remains a problem only for metaphysics hitherto – the critical attitude of the “subject-object” reading reminds us that no empirical solution to it will be found.

                In regards to (ii) the antithesis, the “subject-object” reading supplies the same response from the opposite direction. Everything in the world does, indeed, happen solely in  accordance with the laws of nature. But in order for such state of affairs to be cognized in empirical cognition, there must be a subjectivity given with objectivity so that the former knows the latter in accordance with the aforementioned laws. With reference to causality, the “subject-object” reading describes the phenomenal moments of such a subjectivity coming to know causality in an objective and lawful nature: persistence, succession, and their dialectical unity in the principle of simultaneity. Without objectivity in accordance with the laws of nature, there would be nothing for the subject to cognize. This does not mean, however, that the subject is directed towards the same causal chain at all times. The cognitive faculties that bring certain causal regularities into view also conceal others at the same time: just so we saw the subject described in the Third Analogy as turning now towards the moon, now towards the earth, without these subject-side probabilities undermining the objectivity of the world according to the law of community. Once again, the search for the absolute origin of the causal chain falls outside of any questioning that could be answered through cognition.

    
    

    Conclusion: Two steps forward (to phenomenology) and one step back (away from phenomenology)

    
    

    In this paper, following  Watkins, we’ve considered two notable theoretical models for characterizing Kantian causality in the Critical period, the “event-event” model the “causal powers” model. Both models have a certain persuasiveness, both on a historical basis (how the philosophical tradition, or contemporary  debates, might have led Kant to think causality in just this way) and on the basis of arguments internal to the Critique. However, I’ve attempted to show that both models fall into the pitfalls Kant lays out in the Third Antinomy. Accompanying this rejection of the first two models, I have endeavored to show that there may be something wrong about thinking of causality in the form of a theoretical model detachable from the larger philosophical enterprise of the Critique. In the “subject-object” reading I argue that the key moments of the Analogies should be understood as key, irreducible moments of causal experience. It is only in experience, wherein cognition inaugurates the co-givenness of subject of knowledge and object of knowledge, that causality finds its reality. And it is the simultaneous freedom and determinateness of this lived reality that dispels the threats posed by the extremes of the Third Antinomy.

                If the “subject-object” reading is correct, then Kant uses a kind of nascent phenomenological method to draw out the formal, experiential structures of causal experience, rather than substitute the givenness of experience with a theoretical proxy as some of his commenters have done. The proto-phenomenological reading of Kantian causality is the one that seeks to describe the moments of causal experience rather than the models of causal experience.

                One final word on the “proto” of proto-phenomenological: if the reading of persistence and succession as phenomenological moments, not models, constitutes two steps towards phenomenology in a Kantian mold, then the equivocation in the term ‘appearance’ [Erscheinung] must count as one step back. There are at least two senses in which ‘appearance’ appears for Kant. In one sense, things appear in experience by being experienced. The color red appears, your pet dog appears, and even more abstract items like unity and causality appear insofar as empirical intuition is shaped, formed, paraded before our human conscious intelligence as filled out experience. We don’t experience the category of unity and causality in themselves, of course, because they are the conditions of the possibility of their respective phenomena – we do, however, experience them as filled out cognitions: as the gas stove and the heated room, for example. On the other hand, in a second sense, things appear as a form of manifestation to be opposed to intelligible manifestation. In Kant’s resolution of the Antinomies, he makes just such a distinction: “I call intelligible that in  an object of sense which is not itself appearance [Erscheinung]” (B 566). Kant bifurcates the sense of ‘appearance’ into a “double aspect” in order to make coherent the extremes of freedom and necessity opposed in the Third Antinomy: it is the intelligible aspect that accounts for causality according to freedom, and it is the sensible aspect that accounts for the effects according to the laws of necessity. The intelligible aspect does not “appear” as the sensible aspect “appears,” which means that one end of the causal explanation always veers off into territory that does not look to be in community with one another in a phenomenally-available manner. What lies hidden within this bifurcation of causality between the noumenal and phenomenal realm may be a deeper, more pluralistic understanding of ‘appearance’ waiting to emerge.

    
    

    
    

    
    

    
    

    
    

    
    

    
    

    
    

    
    

    
    

    
    

    
    

    Works Consulted:

    
    

    Aristotle The Organon I tr. Hugh Tredennick (Loeb Classics, 1934).

    
    

    Kant on Causality, Freedom, and Objectivity ed. William L. Harper & Ralf Meerbote (University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

    
    

    Hume, David A Treatise of Human Nature ed. David Fate Norton & Mary J. Norton (Oxford University Press, 2000).

    
    

    Kant, Immanuel Critique of Pure Reason tr. Guyer & Wood (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

    Kant, Immanuel Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Felix Meiner Verlag, 1998).

    Kant, Immanuel Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science tr. James Ellington (Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1970)

    Kant, Immanuel Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics tr. James Ellington (Hackett, 1977).

    
    

    
    

    Kant’s Early Critics tr. Brigitte Sassen (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

    
    

    Plato Complete Works ed. John M. Cooper (Hackett, 1997).

    
    

    Watkins, Eric Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

    
    

    
    

    ---

    [1] There is a question, raised by Kant himself, concerning the compatibility of the heated stove example (B 247-8) with the succession model, given that the heated stove and warmed air seem to be co-instituted simultaneously rather than in sequence. Kant dismisses the worry for reasons that will become clear below in (b) and (c) as we open up the notion of causality beyond succession.

    [2]There remains the difficulty of whether or not a given cause A must in all cases result in given effect B. Or is the appearance of A possible without the subsequent appearance of B? To identify A as the cause and B as the effect, then to insist that B never shall have priority over B seems to beg the question how we can know which is the cause and which the effect in the first place. What is needed here is a distinction between the genesis of experience in the transcendental and empirical senses. We will discuss this more in section (3).

    [3]Hume, Treatise (p. 35)

    [4]“Now one can, to be sure, call everything, and even every representation, insofar as one is conscious of it, and object;  only what this word is to mean in the case of appearances, not insofar as they are (as representations) of objects, but rather only insofar as they designate an object, requires a deeper investigation.” (B 234-5)

    [5]Watkins, p. 242-3. The transition to the “causal powers” discussion turns precisely on the need to explain the mutual interaction of the Third Analogy and the failure of the “event-event” model, based on the Second Analogy, to do so.

    [6]Watkins (p, 252) Look here for a discussion of the causal powers of substance as a basic scientific presupposition held by Kant, as well as Aristotle, Leibniz, and Locke. A very diverse list. Undoubtedly the details of substance metaphysics theories have evolved over time, but Watkin’s claim, that the basic structure remained intact in through Kant and can still serve an explanatory function for causality in the activity of scientific elucidation, if not amplification (seem CPR B 249).

    [7]Watkins (p. 245)

    [8]  B 225 “Now time cannot be perceived itself. Consequently it is in the objects of perception, i.e., the appearances, that the substratum must be encountered that represents time in general…the substratum of everything real, i.e., everything that belongs to the existence of things, is substance, of which everything that belongs to existence can be thought only as a determination.” The  substance lingers beneath the temporally determinate as an indeterminate substratum. This indeterminacy does not endanger the objective relation of the possession of the effects by the ground; on the contrary, it is through the temporal indeterminacy of the ground that the temporal determination of the effect is made possible.

    [9] Watkins (p. 243)

    [10]Disregarding whatever putative value the “Theory of Forms” has for explaining “Platonic Doctrine” as a whole, it remains the case that an argument resembling that theory surfaces at different points in the Platonic corpus.

  • Draft: Henry of Ghent and John Duns Scotus on the Subject of Divine Illumination

    Apr 30, 13

    Duns Scotus (1266 - 1308)

    
    

    In this paper I will examine two thinkers, Henry of Ghent and John Duns Scotus, with respect to their contrasting positions on the subject of divine illumination (DI). Broadly construed, DI is the theory that natural human ability is not enough to ground human knowledge, and, consequently, divine assistance of some form is required to supplement what human understanding cannot on its own provide. Henry believed that some manner of DI was essential to the certainty of human knowledge, whereas Scotus countered that natural human ability, as created by God, was sufficient on its own to grasp what knowledge was fit for human understanding. I will elaborate the details of these contrasting positions in three sections:

    
    

    (1) Henry of Ghent on DI

    (2) Scotus’s rejection of Henry’s position

    (3) Treatment of two areas in which Scotus thinks we have DI-free knowledge

    
    

    (1) Henry of Ghent on DI

    
    

    Henry’s position on divine illumination may be characterized as a naturalist-fortified DI stance. This is a hybrid position between the two extremes of a pure naturalist stance and a pure DI stance. The former extreme would hold that natural human ability alone is sufficient for acquisition and verification of knowledge. The latter extreme would hold that only divine assistance can provide the absolute immutable certainty that we hold as the ideal standard for true knowledge. Henry splits the middle.

    On the one hand, he considered natural human abilities sufficient to acquire so-called “created” exemplars of knowledge. These are the models of the objects of human understanding as pieced together through sense experience and the organizing impetus of human intelligence. For example, we acquire an understanding of what a dog is through repeated contacted with dogs in the world. We take in the look, feel, smell, etc., of dogs through our senses and we organize this information with our intelligence, accommodating all different species of dogs under the genus ‘dog’ as we encounter them. Comparing the token dog to the acquired type ‘dog’ is the form of verification and validation available to natural human knowledge on the basis of created exemplars.

    On the other hand, he considered natural human abilities insufficient to furnish, by its own powers, the so-called “uncreated” exemplars of knowledge. These are the models of the objects of human understanding as provided by DI. The uncreated exemplars are the basis of knowledge of the conformity of tokens to types. If we reflect on the work accomplished by the created exemplars, we will notice the following: although the acquired type provides a model by which we can judge whether this or that token is a token of this type, we still have no basis for determining why and how a type is self-identical to itself. For example, we can categorize the tokens ‘golden retriever’ and ‘cocker spaniel’ as the type ‘dog’, but on what basis do we know that the type ‘dog’ is the type ‘dog’? Henry’s response is that we are gifted with the uncreated exemplars of knowledge from God. A clear parallel can be drawn here between the uncreated exemplars and the Platonic Forms, which, according to one reading, are the ideal and otherworldly paradigms, the conformity to which grounds establishes every X as an X (by virtue of sharing in the form of X), every Y as a Y (by virtue of sharing in the form of Y), and so on. It is only in conformity to this higher, uncreated exemplar that the ultimate truth of human knowledge could be vouchsafed -- therefore, DI maintained a necessary part of the total process of veridical human cognition.

    We can provide the following three arguments, on Henry’s behalf, justifying the appeal to DI. These arguments are the very same that Scotus presents in advance of his critical appraisal of Henry, but they adequately track Henry’s exposition of his own view without undue distortion.

    First, regarding the exemplars, the created exemplar is abstracted out of an object that is mutable (CHK 100). Given that humans are embodied subjects, who encounter the world as an amalgam of sense and understanding, the uncertainty of mutable sense perception will always confer a measure of uncertainty onto the created exemplar. The work of the intellect, which refines the material gained through the senses (by grouping tokens according to types, for example), can enhance the reliability of this information. But natural human ability can never excise the instability of sense perception by virtue of its own powers; thus, we must appeal to something like DI to provide the immutable reason by which our mutable knowledge may hold fast.

    Second, regarding that which apprehends the mutable object, the soul itself is mutable and imperfect (CHK 101). This is obvious upon reflection; the human soul errs frequently. If immutable knowledge is possible, then it cannot be guaranteed by an immutable soul. Nor can the mutable knowledge gleaned from sense perception ultimately improve upon the situation. Some higher standard than the soul, than the objects of perception, than the created exemplars abstracted out of sense perception, must be appealed to to preserve immutable knowledge; again, we require something like DI to provide the uncreated exemplars that will hold both our mutable souls and mutable knowledge firm.

    Third, regarding truth (CHK 101), we can only know the truth by being able to distinguish between what seems to be true and what is true. But the created exemplar is only able to inform us of what seems to be true because it is dependent on the ultimately uncertain foundation of the mutable perception and the mutable soul. Therefore, the uncreated, divine exemplar is required as the most fundamental arbiter of being versus seeming.

    
    

    (2) Scotus’s rejection of Henry’s position

    
    

    In broad strokes, Scotus’s rejection of Henry’s position is a rejection of skepticism, which the former thinks is inevitable based on the latter’s appeal to DI. Of Henry’s arguments above, Scotus remarks: “...these reasons seem to imply the impossibility of any certain natural knowledge” (CHK 103). Scotus will seek to bolster the strain of Aristotle (and Aquinas) in Henry’s naturalist-fortified DI stance by bolstering the argument for naturalistically-derived certain knowledge. Scotus thinks he has good reasons to do so because it seems clear to him that there are at least four kinds of certain knowledge that are available to human understanding, as we will discuss in (3). And he thinks he has a ripe target for critique in Henry’s arguments, which he regards as inconsistent or otherwise unconvincing -- Scotus responds to each of the three arguments for the necessity of DI in turn.

                First, regarding the mutability of the object of knowledge, Scotus has reasons why it leads to skepticism and why it is, in any event, a wrongheaded argument. It leads to skepticism because if the object were continually, and without qualification, changing, then even the divine exemplar would be unable to hold fast the truth of the created exemplar (CHK 103). For example, if the object of knowledge changed constantly from cat, to dog, to chicken, and so on, then even the immutable divine exemplar ‘dog’ would not suffice to guarantee a conformity between the changing and the unchanging. Scotus goes on to argue that Henry’s premise on this point is, in any event, false: “For sensible things are not in continual motion; indeed, they remain the same for some time” (CHK 115). The time during which they remain the same is the time during which natural human ability can effectively judge them. Also, Scotus denies that the mutability of the object is an obstacle to immutable knowledge insofar as immutable knowledge targets the immutable nature of objects, available to human reason, not the mutability as such (CHK 116). Also (and this point transitions into Scotus’s second rebuttal), there is no reason that immutable aspects cannot be represented through mutable objects: Scotus takes the representation of the infinite and immutable God through his finite and mutable effects as the most impressive example here (CHK 117).

                Second, regarding the mutability of the soul, Scotus charges (in a manner similar to the previous point) that if the soul is mutable in the manner Henry describes, then the divine exemplar will do it no good; the soul’s mutability will destroy the possibility of securing the conformity between the object of knowledge and the divine exemplar that Henry takes as the only path to certain truth. Now, Scotus’s resistance to Henry’s points here does not mean that Scotus regards the human soul as infallible -- it surely is, in comparison to the perfection of God -- but Scotus will want to make some qualifications in Henry’s imputation, which will open the door for the certainty of natural human knowledge. He glosses the qualifications in the following manner. There is a twofold sense in which we can understanding the mutability of the soul: “one from affirmation to negation and vice versa, such as from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge or from a lack of understanding to understanding; the other from once contrary as it were to another, such as from being right to being deceived, or vice versa” (CHK 117). Scotus held that the soul proves mutable in the first sense, but not so in the second sense. This preserves the possibility of knowledge insofar as being wrong in the first sense offers us natural human recourse to correct our impressions: we can reexamine the evidence in order to deny what we previously affirmed, and vice versa. Being habitually wrong in the second sense, however, would pull the ground from any sort of validation procedures. Central to this distinction is Scotus’s optimism about our ability to get clear on the terms of knowledge. If we are clear about what the term ‘dog’ means, for example, then we can affirm or deny that an object of knowledge is a dog, and, more importantly, have a standard against which we can judge whether that affirmation or denial is valid. If Henry is the skeptic that Scotus says he is, then he seems to think that the human soul is stuck in the second sort of uncertainty without DI.

                Third, regarding the ability to judge between seeming and being true, Scotus takes an interesting tack by flipping Henry’s argument in his own favor (if it holds at all). The created exemplar -- which is not the sense image or phantasm itself, but rather the intelligible species abstracted out thereof -- is evidence that natural human ability possesses the resources required to distinguish between what merely seems to be the case and what is so (CHK 118). Scotus will ultimately not be comfortable with sustaining this line of thought in precisely its original form because it is part of an architecture of thought that requires DI. He will, however, string it out far enough to show that Henry is inconsistent on what the judgment of natural human understanding can and cannot accomplish.

    
    

    (3) Treatment of two areas in which Scotus thinks we have DI-free knowledge

    
    

    In (2) we detailed how Scotus rejects Henry’s position, mainly by listing the inconstancy of DI as Scotus interpreted the matter. The most impressive counter to skeptics, however, is often not a critique, but rather a positive account of the indubitable knowledge we have. Scotus mentions four kinds of certain knowledge that are freely available to natural human understanding: first principles (CHK 106), experimental knowledge (CHK 109), knowledge of our own acts (CHK 111), and sense knowledge (CHK 114). We will treat of experimental knowledge and knowledge of our own acts.

                What is experimental knowledge? Experimental knowledge is what is known by experience. Scotus holds that such knowledge is certain insofar as accumulated experiences give us a sufficiently clear picture of the “natural effects” of “natural causes.” For example, after an indeterminate number of times feeding our dog Pavlov (a certain type of food, at a certain time of day, at a certain point in his feeding schedule, etc.), in which Pavlov eagerly gobbled up the food, we can be reasonably certain that Pavlov will continue this behavior into the future. Such a complex affair has a number of causes and effects, but we can at least point out one natural cause -- hunger, appropriate to a living animal -- and one natural effect -- eating, appropriate to the satiation of hunger -- which, combined, begin to give us reliable information about the nature of the objects of knowledge in our world and how these objects interrelate. An important qualification: none of this is to say that experimental knowledge cannot occasionally go astray. We look for correlation between natural cause and natural effect across “a great many instances” but not all of them. When we are wrong, however, we are wrong in the sense of misapplying our affirmations and denials. Experimental knowledge can be refined and made more precise by further examination of experience, all by virtue of our natural human reason and without an appeal to DI in Henry’s sense.

                What is knowledge of our own acts? It is a type of immediate self-awareness of our acts of consciousness, or an awareness of consciousness simpliciter. Scotus accords this type of knowledge a kind of immediate certainty (nearly always) on par with that of the certitude of first principles. We possess certain knowledge of our own acts in an immediate manner that does not require any further redress to experience (as in experimental knowledge) for improvement or refinement. A good point of comparison in modern philosophy is the immediate self-evidence Descartes’s cogito, and in late ancient philosophy Augustine had already made a similar point. However we doubt regarding the veridicality of the objects of our consciousness, it makes little sense to doubt that we have an immediate certainty of the acts of consciousness themselves. Such a doubt would doubt its own ability to doubt. If we affirm the sight of a dog, experience may or may not require that we amend this judgment on further examination -- but to doubt that did, indeed, affirm or deny the sight of the dog is, for Scotus, a step into the realm of absurdity. Anyone willing to doubt this far is the sort of “quibbler” (CHK 119), who either does not realize that his doubts are self-defeating or is too reckless to care.

    
    

    Conclusion

    
    

    In the effort to disprove Henry’s position on DI and to argue in favor of the competence of natural human understanding, Scotus provides us with a negative line of argument and a positive line. The negative line seeks to show that if Henry’s position is correct, then it is self-defeating in the way that fundamentally skeptical arguments against knowledge are self-defeating: if we can’t know, then we can’t know enough to doubt. But Scotus will amplify this criticism by attacking the premises of Henry’s position, as we’ve addressed in (2). Having attacked the premises of Henry’s position, Scotus clears the way for his own positive account concerning the competence of human knowledge and understanding. The centerpiece of his positive account is the four kinds of certain, natural, human knowledge. None of these four kinds of knowledge, Scotus argues, requires DI in order to be valid. Therefore, we may conclude according to Scotus’s argument that humans have been created in a manner sufficiently capable to possess knowledge of at least these four kinds without recourse to the intervention of the uncreated exemplar.

    
    

    
    

    
    

    Works Consulted

    
    

    Duns Scotus Philosophical Writings tr. Allan Wolter (Hackett, 1987)

    Henry of Ghent Summa tr. Decorte; Teske (Peeters, 2005)

    Henry of Ghent Summa of Ordinary Questions tr. Teske (St. Augustine’s Press, 2008)

    
    

    Abbreviations

    
    

    (CHK) “Concerning Human Knowledge” Philosophical Writings tr. Allan Wolter (Hackett, 1987)

  • Callimachus (of the Aetia)

    Apr 27, 13

    My Greek teacher Dr. Dobrov alerted me to the existence of a style of poetry called Aetia (Latinization of aitia) made famous by a Hellenistic poet named Callimachus. More on this soon. For now let me post one of his poems, not in the style of an Aetia, on the subject of Heraclitus. Is this the pre-Socratic philosopher, or some other? I don't know.

    Heraclitus

    They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
    They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
    I wept as I remembered how often you and I
    Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
    
    And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
    A handful of gray ashes, long, long ago at rest,
    Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
    For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

  • Notes: A Short Reading and Response to Chretien’s “The Wounded Word”

    Apr 16, 13

    
    

    In the essay “The Wounded Word” [“La parole blessée”] the philosopher Jean-Louis Chrétien undertakes to provide a short phenomenology of prayer. Although he restricts himself to this task alone (and even further restricts the scope of the description to vocal, as opposed to silent, prayer), he takes himself to be contributing to an understanding of the religious dimension of life as it is experienced across every sort of authentically religious experience. He ventures to claim this more universal result on the basis of his claim that “[p]rayer is the religious phenomenon par excellence” (TT 147).  Prayer is a religious phenomenon among other religious phenomenon, of course, but Chrétien allots to prayer a further privilege: whatever constitutes the condition for the possibility of prayer is to be found at the heart of the condition of the possibility for all other religious phenomena (TT 147). In the word of vocal prayer, the praying individual enters into the agony of the faithful before God which underlies all genuinely religious experience.

                We will examine the above claims in seven questions and related sub-questions:

    
    

    (1) What is prayer? (P1-6, et passim)[2](a) What is prayer in general? (b) What is prayer in the sense relevant to Chrétien’s phenomenological task? Virtuality (P8).

    (2) What justifies the restriction of the phenomenological description to vocal, as opposed to silent, prayer? (P7...) (a) What is revealed in vocal prayer? Anthrophany (P8-9, 13-14) (b) Three questions: (i) What are the functions performed by prayer? Why bother in view of an omniscient God? (P11) (ii) What is the importance of the address, saying “you”? (P12, 23-26) (iii) Why give voice to it? (P26-29)

    (3) What is the truth or rectitude of prayer? (P14-19)

    (4) The circularity of prayer (P20-21)

    (5) Prayer as gift and task (P29-33)

    (6) Why and how is prayer vocal? (P35...) (a) What does it mean to “recite” a prayer? (P46-49) (b) What of prayer’s public nature? (P41-45)

    (7) What is the woundedness of the “wounded word”? (P49-51)

    
    

    (1) What is prayer? An act of presence to the invisible. (P1-6, et passim) (a) What is prayer in general? (b) What is prayer in the sense relevant to Chrétien’s phenomenological task? Virtuality (P8).

    
    

    Prayer, for Chrétien, is the act proper to humans which opens up the religious dimension of experience and sustains the openness to this experience (TT 147). Our received notion of act has a few standard features: it requires an agent, some “thing” acted upon, and some end or purpose or goal. Prayer conforms to some of these standard features. There does, indeed, always seem to be some agency involved in the act of prayer; namely, the praying individual. But Chrétien raises a difficulty that concerns both the some “thing” acted upon and the end or purpose of prayer. Regarding the “thing” acted upon, Chrétien notes a phenomenological difference between talking to oneself and addressing another in prayer (TT 149, 151), which means that prayer could not be a merely intransitive act in any unqualified sense. We occupy ourselves with prayer, but the praying is not limited to a self-directedness. The praying individual directs his or her prayer beyond him- or herself. The end of prayer also shows this directedness beyond the self. Chrétien insists on the real phenomenological difference between the act of self-address and the address of another. The style, the tone, the nature of the appeal manifest themselves in different fashions in a self-address or soliloquy versus the address of another; this difference is observable even from the third-person perspective of a non-believer. The praying individual intends that his or her prayer finds its way to God and comports him- or herself accordingly – this address is at least one purpose of the prayer, whether or not it can be realized in a conventional sense.

    Yet it’s not clear that the phenomenon of God offers itself a manner that is accessible to a conventional address (as one would take place between humans). Does God exist that He might be addressed at all? The existential worry puts pressure on the veridicality of statements like “The purpose of the act of prayer is to address God.” If God turns out to be an empty concept, then the statement loses its force, and some of the traditional parameters of what makes an act an act start to fall away. Chrétien tackles this worry early on in the essay by asserting that the “virtuality” (TT 147) of the addressee of prayer does not discount the reality of the prayer itself. This is not an argument for the existence of God, but rather an invitation to the reader to recognize that the phenomenologically accessible aspects of prayer remain visible and describable even if the “thing” to which the prayer is addressed remains virtual, or “invisible” (TT 149).

    
    

    (1)(a) What is prayer in general?

    
    

    Chrétien thus sidesteps the question of the existence of God; he continues with his phenomenological task of describing prayer by appealing to the very common, very uncontroversial, very obvious dimension of prayer as a socio-cultural practice (like any other socio-cultural practice, such as the activity that takes place in law courts, in markets, in schools, etc.) that is available for description regardless of whether one accepts the articles of faith that animate religion. To underline the neutrality of his description, Chrétien even cites the famous atheist Feuerbach as confirming his basic understanding of prayer as available for description. Regardless of God’s putative “virtuality,” prayer remains phenomenally-available for the believer and non-believer alike.

    
    

    (1)(b) What is prayer in the sense relevant to Chrétien’s phenomenological task?

    
    

    Chrétien takes this uncontroversial phenomenal availability of prayer as his starting point. How he attempts to develop the phenomenological description from out of this starting point is somewhat more provocative. Instead of focusing his main descriptive efforts on the varieties of prayer as manifested in different social and cultural contexts, he chooses to focus on prayer specifically as “an act of presence to the invisible” (TT 149). To describe prayer in this way is to orient the description of what is visible in it to what is invisible without it: namely, the virtual, or invisible, God. Chrétien takes this to be the key point of interest in a phenomenology of prayer that saves the effort from devolving into a mere “inventory of the different possible modes in which the divine can appear...” (TT 149). Furthermore, Chrétien limits his treatment to vocal (as opposed to silent prayer) for reasons to be explored below.

    
    

    (2) What justifies the restriction of the phenomenological description to vocal, as opposed to silent, prayer? (P7...)

    
    

    The restriction to prayer as a vocal speech act is first broached for reasons of mere expedience. If religion is something like a natural activity of humanity, then the variety of religion (and, by extension, prayer) would multiply indefinitely as long as the life of humanity endures. The task of describing this variety would itself be indefinite and ongoing as well. Restriction to prayer as a vocal speech act, then, is a means to make a great task more manageable. On the other hand, Chrétien has another more explicitly philosophical, phenomenological reason for the restriction. Namely, that he will attempt to argue for vocal prayer as “prayer par excellence” (TT 149) in a manner parallel to the attempt to treat prayer as the religious phenomenon par excellence. In the essential condition of the possibility of vocal prayer, he believes he has found the condition of possibility for all other varieties of prayer, including the silent variety. This choice makes sense for strategic methodological reasons: the vocal prayer, as audible, manifests itself in a manner that is uncontroversially phenomenally-available, both subjectively and intersubjectively. We hear the vocal prayer; it is not confined to the head, heart or soul of the praying individual. The vocal prayer reveals itself to us in ways that we can only guess at when observing individuals engaged in silent prayer. Once again, Chrétien reaches back to this very common, very mundane notion of phenomenal availability as the foundation for his more involved layers of description.

    
    

    (2)(a) What is revealed in vocal prayer? Anthrophany (P8-9, 13-14) 

    
    

    If vocal prayer reveals, what does it reveal? The answer is initially somewhat surprising: vocal prayer is first of all “an anthropophany, a manifestation of man” (TT 150). The surprise originates in our presumption that a prayer to God should result in a theophany, for the believer at the very least. Chrétien plays against this expectation in a manner that accords with his original claim that vocal prayer is an “act of presence to the invisible.” What is revealed in vocal prayer is not the God (which is invisible) but rather, through the sounding of the prayer, the praying individual is him- or herself revealed “in all dimensions of his being” (TT 150). The act of orienting the visible towards the invisible “exposes” the praying individual across his or her entire being because there exists no likeness between the visible and the invisible in which the difference of human and God could take refuge.

    
    

    (2)(b) Three questions

    
    

    To further elucidate the topic, Chrétien promises to answer three questions that might be read as objections to his privileging of vocal prayer (TT 152).

    First, (i) What are the functions performed by vocal prayer? Indeed, we might wonder what possible function prayer addressed to a God, virtual or otherwise, might serve. Given God’s omniscience, He already is aware of every thought or plea we might utter. Our prayers are not hidden from God even when un-vocalized, so what function can vocalization serve? Chrétien’s response again emphasizes that the act of prayer is an anthropophany to man, not to God. The act of prayer is not a communication or transmission of information to God (TT 152), rather it is manifestation of man to man, through words addressed to God, and it is we who are taught by these words (TT 153).

    Second, (ii) What is the importance of the address, saying “you”? (P12, 23-26) We might wonder about the importance of directing the address to God. Given the putative “virtuality” of God, does it matter in which direction we address prayers, or whether we direct prayers in any direction at all? Consider a work of sacred art as an example of a “directionless” religious phenomenon. The artwork endures and, as a work of sacred art, fulfills its religious function without the presence of its human creator, without directing its religious aspect in any particular direction. It is like an ongoing prayer, but without any particular addresser. Chrétien’s response, we can speculate, would be that the sacred work of art is one of the many varieties of religious experience whose condition of possibility is derivative of the condition of possibility inherent in the address of vocal prayer. Before any artist can dedicate a work to God, there must be the possibility of the artist directing himself to God. The work of art, or any variety of religious phenomena that defers the responsibility of the direct address, does not fill the “yawning chasm” between the addresser and the addressee, but rather takes that chasm as the first clue to describing what lies visible before the invisible. Chrétien again appeals to Feuerbach for confirmation of the importance of the “you”, or the “Thou” (TT 159), but immediately rejects Feuerbach’s further interpretation that such an address reduces God to an alter ego of the human. Thus, the importance of the second-person address, for Chrétien, is the asymmetry of the addresser and the addressee that turns prayer into an act that illuminates the praying individual rather than an omniscient God.

    Third, (iii) Why give voice to prayer? (P26-29) Part of the response to this question includes elements of the response to (i) and (ii). As in (i), giving voice to prayer contributes to the phenomenal content that makes the act of prayer an anthropophany. As in (ii), giving voice to prayer initiates the asymmetrical “relation” between I (the praying individual) and Thou (God). However, to draw a difference from these two, we might ask: in regards to (i), why not seek that phenomenal content of the act of prayer along some other avenue than speech? Would a ritualized and deeply felt waving of the hands, for example, suffice as an appeal to God? While such a waving of the hands is silent, it is not non-phenomenal. In regards to (ii), could not such a ritualized waving of the hands be directed to the Thou as effectively as any vocalized speech? Chrétien appears to favor interpreting prayer as a vocalized speech act because he thinks that “the ordeal of speech” (TT 161), nourished in the attempt to address prayer across the “yawning chasm,” produces the sort of phenomenal theopathy that provides the basis for a phenomenological description of prayer. It’s not clear, however, (at least to this writer) why something like a ritualized waving of the hands could not result in a similarly agonistic theopathy in the right circumstances. (Perhaps in a certain culture with a certain religious tradition such a waving of the hands would be the preferred means to opening one up to the religious dimension, suffering God, registering theopathy? Here a hermeneutics of religious experience is called for.)

    
    

    (3) What is the truth or rectitude of prayer? (P14-19)

    
    

    The claim that prayer is an anthropophany and a “self-manifestation before the invisible,” (TT 154) further requires that the way in which prayer is true accord with the way manifestation is true. The truth of prayer is not true in the way that a predicative proposition is true. Although Chrétien follows Aristotle in naming prayer a logos, it is not the sort of logos, or speech, that seeks confirmation in a corresponding state of affairs (such as “The cat is on the mat” can be affirmed or denied as an inhering state of affairs in the world). What is important in prayer is that it affords the praying individual a point of access, through the spoken word of prayer, onto his or her self-manifestation and does so in a way that is phenomenally different from conventional self-reflection.

    While the logic of manifestation does not look for confirmation in the correlative, scientifically-objective style of propositional logic, this does not mean that the former is unconcerned with the rectitude of vocal prayer. The style of rectitude in prayer is an authenticity that emerges or does not emerge in the praying individual’s efforts. There is a wrong way to pray that will not arrive at the truth of prayer. The rightness or wrongness of the prayer’s recitation, judged in purely conventional terms, conceals the more primordial sense of rectitude at issue.^[3] The praying individual, through the vocal prayer, submits him- or herself to judgment before the invisible. The true prayer is that prayer that submits itself to judgment concerning its truth. The authenticity of this submission preserves the truth of prayer, the inauthenticity of this submission destroys it. Chrétien reminds us at this point that the Lord’s Prayer begins with an “Our Father,” not a “My Father” (TT 155). In a purely conventional sense the latter formulation lacks rectitude. But there is another sense to the lack of rectitude here. The individual for whom God is his or her own God has not fully exposed his or her visibility to the invisible, or virtual, God -- the prayer that arises out of such a stance holds back that which the praying individual calls his or her own possession, and refuses to expose itself. Such a refusal hides nothing from an omniscient God, virtual or otherwise, but rather only covers over the anthropophany that authentic prayer renders.

    
    

    (4) The circularity of prayer (P20-21)

    
    

    The asymmetry implied in the act of prayer between humans and God leads to the somewhat paradoxical conclusion regarding how we can come to know and not know how to pray. Chrétien writes, “it belongs to prayers itself that in it alone does the praying man learn that he does not know how to pray” (TT 157). If prayer is a self-manifestation before the invisible, then, to put it in crude terms, we do not know in which direction to find the invisible for the very reason that it is invisible. And we do not know what words to pray with when we face the invisible. The desire to pray has no visible correlate towards which we can properly direct our act, and yet the religious individual still feels affected by this desire to pray. He or she can only respond to the call of the desire (TT 158). He or she must enter into the prayer without having mastery of the act of prayer. Once the habit of prayer has commenced the praying individual still gains no final mastery because the call to prayer always outpaces the human response. No final word of prayer can be offered up to the infinite God -- at best we can repeat the effort (repetition as a form of worship). Thus, prayer is a circle because it is a desire that follows along the course opened up by its own attempt at satiation. Religious traditions, laws, and clerical guidance can help the religious individual enter into the circularity of prayer (or reveal to us that we are already in the circle without knowing it) by instructing or showing us the “correct” way to pray. But this is only helpful if the religious tradition helps the praying individual manifest him- or herself, through the word, to the invisible. Religious tradition becomes unhelpful -- irreligious, even -- when it presumes to bring the invisible to visibility, thereby obscuring the radical desire of prayer as the jointure of the visible and the invisible. This is the danger, for example, of idol worship.

                Chrétien calls the activity of prayer “agonic” (TT 158) in order to emphasize that it is the human struggle with the circular task, rather than initial call to prayer (which comes from God), or the final term of the act’s completion (which is beyond the reach of finite humanity), that describes the properly, phenomenally human element of prayer.

    
    

    (5) Prayer as gift and task (P29-33)

    
    

    If we think of the activity of prayer as agonic and circular, then “gift” and “task” become useful ways of thinking about how this agonic circularity came to be and towards what end it conducts itself, respectively.

                First, the act of vocal prayer is a gift in the sense that the possibility of response to an infinite call is not a possibility that could ever be authored or fabricated by a finite individual exercising his or her own finite powers. This is not to say that the human response, though possible, is adequate, when actualized, in the face of the invisible. The possibility of a response is not the same as the possibility of an adequate response. Nevertheless, the desire to pray remains, and entering into the agonic circularity of prayer remains a possibility to even those who would deny the gift.

                Second, the act of vocal prayer is a task in the purest sense of task: an ongoing directive, which, due to its limitless nature, takes up other lesser tasks within its fold. All the ceremonial tasks handed down to the faithful by the religious tradition, for example, are merely preparatory to the task of prayer. Given the circularity of prayer, the preparatory work as a whole is never complete, although the individual affairs of this preparatory work do find their completion as parts. The discrete rituals that make up religion are finite acts that come to an end (lighting the incense, giving confession, singing a hymn), whereas the end to which all this preparatory work is directed – to addressing God – is always yet to be accomplished.

    
    

    (6) Why and how is prayer vocal? (P35...)

    
    

    In (2) we reviewed some of Chrétien’s initial claims about the essentially vocal nature of prayer. The vocal prayer is the condition for the possibility of all other prayer and religious activity because in it the praying individual is fully exposed, fully manifest to him- or herself, to the religious community, to the invisible, holding nothing back in the silence of silent prayer. Chrétien amplifies his remarks about the importance of vocalization in two further ways, regarding (a) recitation of prayer, and (b) the publicity of prayer.

    
    

    (6)(a) What does it mean to “recite” a prayer? (P46-49)

    
    

    As a matter of religious and cultural fact most vocalized prayer is a repetition of verbal formulas learned and repeated without any claim of authorship on behalf of the praying individual. Prayers are most often cited and re-cited by non-authors. Although some have claimed this detracts from the authenticity of prayer (Montaigne), Chrétien develops the notion of recitation into another aspect of prayer’s desire to break out of the circle of the self and break into a genuine dialogue with God (TT 166). By means of speech that “does not belong to him exclusively,” the praying individual lets himself be appropriated by a tradition and by a God (TT 172). Letting oneself be appropriated through recitation is a kind of submission, but it is not a wholly passive gesture. The words and the traditions make a difference to the praying individual, lest the submission be a sort of farce or play-acting. The praying individual can express him- or herself quite personally with the right words borrowed from the right tradition.^[4] To vocalize the words of another for the sake of addressing God is to “feel” the meaning of a prayer reverberate through one’s own larynx, through one’s own body. The affective power of prayer can be channeled through the words of another, which aid the individual in breaking out of the silent circle of his or her own thoughts and joining into a community of devotion.

    
    

    
    

    (6)(b) What of prayer’s public nature? (P41-45)

    
    

    The vocal prayer is a public prayer in the very obvious sense that the prayer uttered aloud by an individual is heard by others. But this sense can be deepened by relating it to the ‘letting oneself be appropriated’ described in (6)(a): the praying individual recites the prayer of tradition and community. Not just any tradition and community, but rather his or her own. The public, thus, is not simply an aggregate of anonymous others -- it is a meaningful, extended cultural family in which the praying individual can find prayers that he or she finds personally meaningful and in which particular religious customs have developed that facilitate the individual’s entrance into the circularity of prayer.

    A collective of individuals that is truly a community represents the possibility of communal prayer. This is another way the publicity of prayer can manifest itself. Chrétien emphasizes that this assimilation of the individual into collective prayer, however, does not efface the personality of the praying individual. Rather, “one has to pray for oneself, the prayer for oneself being the condition of the prayer for others” (TT 171). The priority of the prayer for oneself makes good phenomenological sense in view of the fact that we experience life as an ego-centered life. The priority is nevertheless not an ego-centric one is the pejorative sense of selfishness or aloofness from others. On the contrary, the praying individual uses the resources of his or her personality to reach out to the community in religious life. Prayer is an important, perhaps fundamental, part of this embrace of the public community by the private individual.

    
    

    (7) What is the woundedness of the “wounded word”? (P49-51)

    
    

    We arrive now at Chrétien’s concluding attempt to make sense of the phrase in the article’s title, “the wounded word.” His first explicit statement on it came earlier in reference to “the yawning chasm” between the addresser and addressee of prayer (TT 153). This “chasm” represents the asymmetry of the relation between human and God, the “radical alterity” of the addressee (TT 175). The attempt to “bridge” the “chasm” in prayer is really no bridge at all in the sense of establishing a correlative relation. As we’ve seen in (4) the circularity of prayer means that God does not lie at the end of the activity of prayer like a destination and that what manifests itself is not God, but rather the praying individual him- or herself. Prayer is an anthropophany. Through prayer, the praying individual manifests him- or herself to the self, to the community, and before the invisible (God). The importance of the vocalization of vocal prayer is to maximize the visibility of the praying individual before the invisible. The vocal prayer announces itself as a visible phenomenon. This visibility has a sense that can be read doubly (spiritual, physical) in an analogical sense or singly in a literal sense (the spiritual through the physical, and vice versa). In a double sense, the “wounded word” of prayer has its origin in “the wound of joy or distress,” which can be taken either in a spiritual/psychic sense of affection or a physical/pathetic sense of affection. This division is useful for the purpose of analysis but in life we experience ourselves as an embodied unity of material and spiritual phenomena. The cry of distress and joy, emblematic of the agonic character of prayer, therefore, is both a spiritual and physical lament. The prayer that issues out of these affective states, thus, reverberates through the finitude of our material nature while aiming at a spiritual meaning beyond the limits of our individuality. What the praying individual discovers in this attempt is not God, who can never be a correlate of a finite act. But rather, through the prayer addressed to God, we discover ourselves, our community, and our tradition. The woundedness of prayer is the physical and spiritual ordeal of the act so basic and primordial (Chrétien compares it to respiration) that we are never free of it as gift or task so long as we live. When we rejoice, prayer is the prayer of joy, and when we suffer, prayer is the prayer of suffering. To make prayer so fundamental to our way of human life is to recognize that our inability to master this special discourse in order to surmount the instability of our passions and finite existence is not an accident. Rather our “woundedness,” as creatures born to die, is an essential feature of our being.

    In the final parting words of the essay Chrétien claims that the wound of the wounded word, despite its description as an agony and ordeal, will make us stronger. It’s an interesting statement, and also somewhat mysterious, given that he does not elaborate on the way in which prayer would make us stronger. Shall we take it in a double sense as a spiritual or physical strengthening? Or in the single, literal sense of a unified, embodied individual who finds physical strength through spiritual exercise? While Chrétien does not fully flesh out his final word, his intent seems clear: to provide some solace and hope for the reader who would despair of entering into the circular ordeal of prayer. Just as a religious guide can provide support from the side of spiritual tradition, so does Chrétien look to provide support from the side of intellectual tradition. As a result his phenomenological enterprise becomes something of a handmaiden to theology: a result that may or may not satisfy, depending on one’s religious proclivities.

    
    

    ---

    
    

    [1]All citations have been listed according to the page numbering in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn” tr. Bernard Prusak (Fordham University Press, 1991).

    [2] To facilitate finding textual support for claims made in this essay, I have included a reference to paragraph numbers that speak to the relevant claims. Paragraph 1, for example, is listed as P1.

    ^[3] On this point, Chrétien writes: “the possible truth of prayer a speech act cannot be reduced solely to that of the predicative theological proposition that it utters or presupposes” (TT 155-6). A prayer can be spoken incorrectly, or contain within in it false propositions, and still be authentic. Thus, one does not need to be a master of theology to pray authentically.

    ^[4] Chrétien quotes the words of John Cassian on the use of the Psalms in prayer, “he sings them...as if he himself were their author and they were his own personal prayer” (TT 172). In such a radical form of speech, from human to God, traditional notions of authorship are insufficient to describe the ownership of the words in prayer. Prayer as gift to all, not just to the authors of prayer, means that anyone can let themselves be appropriated into the intimacy of a prayer.

  • PRG 5: Body and Space

    Apr 11, 13

    Below is the poster for the fifth Phenomenology Research Group workshop: Body & Space. The event takes place on May 4th at Loyola Univesrity Chicago and features talks from Trevor Perri (KU Leuven) and Sean Petranovich (LUC). Find out more at the PRG website.
    
    

    
    
  • Draft: Henry of Ghent’s Naturalist-Fortified Divine Illumination Stance

    Apr 07, 13

    
    

    As part of his general theory of knowledge, Henry of Ghent (1217-1293) makes reference to a version of what is generally known as the Theory of Divine Illumination (DI) in order to explain the basis for our knowledge of things. In broad strokes DI refers to an epistemological theory that appeals to, perhaps requires, some level of divine intervention in the process of acquiring knowledge. In equally broad strokes we can contrast DI to a naturalistic theory of knowledge in which the agent of knowledge is described as relying upon natural (non-divine) means of acquiring knowledge. ‘Natural means’ would include whatever the modes of our human sensibility can provide us with and whatever sense our human intelligence can make of what our human sensibility provides. Henry avoids committing to strictly one end of the supernatural-natural spectrum. He mixes Platonic and Aristotelian components to construct a hybrid epistemological theory that appeals to both a supernaturalism and a naturalism, although it leans decisively towards the essential involvement of divine illumination in acquiring truth about things in the deepest and most profound sense.

    
    

    (1) Henry of Ghent on Divine Illumination

    
    

    Toward the end of Question Two, Article One of the Summa of Ordinary Questions, Henry reviews three manners in which DI and human natural abilities could stand to each other in knowledge acquisition.

    
    

    (i) the purely naturalist stance: “By purely natural means...with the exclusion of all divine illumination” (35). That is, no DI is needed at all for the purposes of acquiring knowledge.

    
    

    (ii) the DI-fortified naturalist stance: wherein an agent of knowledge would, “attain that illumination of the divine light by purely natural means and through it know the pure truth” (35). That is, DI is still required for knowledge acquisition of the highest sort, but the means for attaining DI are natural -- therefore, the enterprise of knowledge acquisition ultimately rests on the foundation of purely natural ability.

    
    

    (iii) the naturalist-fortified DI stance: “although a human constituted in purely natural conditions can attain [the pure truth], he cannot, nonetheless, attain it naturally by purely natural means” (36). That is, the natural condition of a human is the condition proper to the acquisition of knowledge (at least for humans and the knowledge proper to humans), but it is not in virtue of this natural condition that humans gain access to knowledge in its truest sense.

    
    

    For the sake of completeness, we might mention also (iv) the purely DI stance, in which DI would be necessary for every sort and every phase of knowledge acquisition. That is, every bit of “knowledge” would be directly enabled by God’s intervention, as opposed to a scenario, say, where God created us with the ability to secure certain sorts of knowledge on our own (although always on the basis of the ability granted by God and no other).

    
    

    Henry clearly rejects the extreme naturalism of (i), the extreme supernaturalism of (iv), and the naturalist-leaning, mediated solution of (ii)^[1]. His preferred solution will be the DI-leaning, mediated solution of (iii) because it harmonizes the relation of both the Creator (God) and the created (humans) in a single, albeit hybrid, epistemological theory wherein DI is a condition of possibility of, but not a substitute for, human knowledge. To better understand how this harmony is supposed to work, we will examine Henry’s exposition on the following points: (a) whether it is possible for a human to know something, and (b) whether it is possible to know something without divine illumination, (c) created and uncreated exemplars, and (d) the argument versus Aristotle.

    
    

    (1)(a)

    
    

    The question of whether or not (human) knowledge is at all possible bears on all the stances glossed above, (i)-(iv). If such knowledge were not possible, it would make little or no sense for Henry to develop an epistemological theory. But the issue is more complicated than simply affirming or denying whether knowledge and truth, conceived in an undifferentiated and  homogeneous fashion, is possible. The different epistemological stances bear within themselves different conceptions of what knowledge, and truth, and true knowledge is. The strong supernaturalism of (iv), for example, eliminates the possibility of knowledge procured by natural means and therefore equates knowledge with a kind of supernatural assistance, a manifestation of truth to man by the power of God. Knowledge as supernatural assistance, then, is an epistemic process involving a relation of God and man. This is a very different notion of knowledge than that maintained by the strong naturalism of (i) in which knowledge consists of an epistemic process involving a relation of the human agent and object of knowledge in virtue of the natural abilities of human understanding. Thus, the question of the possibility of human knowledge can be broken down into a question concerning the different types of knowledge and the different modes of access to these types of knowledge.

                Henry roughly follows the Platonic tradition by first of all presupposing the difference between the sensible and the intellective in regards to knowledge. The sensible is that which can be known by the senses; the intellective is that which can be known by the intellect. The difference between these two modes of cognition creates different sets of possibilities and limitations for each. Although sensible cognition is taken to be in some sense the more primordial of the two,^[2] it is also taken to be uncertain and fallible. The object of our senses can change and transform over time -- furthermore, our senses can deceive us.^[3] If the senses are  a starting point for knowledge, they are a shaky starting point. Such fallibility can be mollified if we can secure our knowledge on the basis of, following Aristotle, “something prior and better known” (5). The attempt to do so, however, raises the specter of an infinite regress in which we are endlessly seeking the more secure grounds of our present knowledge.

                Henry replies to the infinite regress problem by arguing that there are two ways to know something: either as a principle, which is known through itself; or as a thing which is known through other things, which ultimately on the basis of a principle (12). Because the principle is known through itself and no other thing, the regressive chain of inquiry completes itself in the discovery of this principle. Knowledge of the principles of knowledge means that science has found a firm and unchanging epistemological justification for its investigative ends and means. Knowledge acquisition can thus proceed without the prospect of being a vain endeavor. Following both Aristotle and Augustine, Henry asserts that it would be senseless for humans to be granted a natural desire to know without being granted a corresponding ability to satisfy that natural desire.

                The problem of fallible sensible knowledge is also ultimately resolved in reference to principles of knowledge known through themselves, along with help from intellection. Although what is garnered by the senses is subject to change, the sense content is trustworthy in itself insofar as one refrains from making judgment upon it in either the affirmative or negative. That is, sensation is a simple apprehension that is veridical in the same way that a perception, or even a hallucination, is veridical. Both the hallucination and the perception (which may turn out to be a hallucination) provide us with sense content which we can subject to further, more intensive examination. Intellective cognition plays its role here by abstracting from the mutable sense an immutable intellective apprehension that can render a more secure truth than that provided by the senses alone (13). When the intellect performs such abstraction correctly, it is doing so on the basis of the principle of knowledge which directs it to the intelligible species of the sensible and corporeal thing. As long as the sensible apprehension is veridical and the abstracting intellect operates according to principle of knowledge known through itself, then the process of knowledge acquisition can find its start (if not its completion) in the sensible and still find the highest sort of truth.

                Knowledge, thus, is possible for humans and both sensible and intellective cognition play a role in its acquisition. Sensibility is the starting point of the process, and the intellect refines what is garnered by the senses in order to distill its truth. The question of DI versus naturalistic epistemological theories, then, will hinge on whether this refinement and distillation of the truth happens through natural means, or whether we must rely here on divine assistance.

    
    

    (1)(b) Whether it is possible to know something without divine illumination

    
    

    The question is whether it is possible to know something without divine illumination by the natural means that remain available to our sensible and intellective cognition. If we could know by our own natural human resources, for example, the first and prior principles of knowledge, then we could say with confidence that the truths derived from these first principles, which make up the bodies of knowledge of the sciences, represented the products of a naturalistic enterprise. We also ask this question with epistemological stances (ii) and (iii) in mind. Henry is eager to find a place for natural means of knowing along with DI, lest one “take away from the dignity of the rational soul” (21) by suggesting it was created for an end that it was not provided the means to reach -- but just where the line is drawn between DI and natural means is initially unclear. There seem to be at least one science where the prior principles are known only through revelation (theology: the articles of faith) (19-20); for the other sciences where natural human ability presumably plays a role along with DI in knowledge acquisition, does it play the leading role (as in (ii)) or does it play a subordinate role (as in (iii))?^[4]Henry draws an important distinction between different ways the intellect can grasp knowledge and know the truth, and this distinction will ultimately prove critical to deciding the point between (ii) and (iii).

                Henry describes the distinction in the following manner: “it is one thing to know about a creature what is true in it, and it is another to know its truth” (22). What is meant by this distinction? Henry is attempting to distinguish two levels of epistemic intimacy with the object of knowledge at work within the intellect.

    The first level, “to know about a creature what is true in it,” is a kind of simple apprehension in which the intellect “follows the senses absolutely” (22). That is, whatever the senses provide, the intellects apprehends what the thing is, whether a tree, a stone, a house. In this epistemic relation, the knower assumes an externalist stance on the object of knowledge.^[5] The knower “here” apprehends the object of knowledge “there” as it is offered by the senses. The apprehension is veridical insofar as the content provided by the senses is veridical. The drawback to following the senses, however, is that the understanding of the intellect at this level does not penetrate to the truth of its apprehension. Henry compares this level of intellective apprehension to that which available even to animals -- just as the squirrel grasps that a thing is a tree in order to scavenge for nuts and fulfill its other natural desires, so do humans make all sorts of simple apprehensions relative to their own needs and not relative to the truth of the object of knowledge in itself. These sorts of simple apprehensions give us a baseline acquaintance with the world by means of our own natural abilities of sense and simple intellection, but they do not secure truth in the rigorous sense Henry will elucidate at the second level of the intellect. We can, for example, apprehend quite well the color of an object and yet our judgment may contradict the judgment of someone else who happens to be color blind. This does not discount the veridicality of either apprehension, though it does show that simple apprehension does not attain the highest level of truth as immutable.

    The second level of the intellect, “by which the truth of the thing itself is known or grasped”, functions by “composing and dividing” (23) with regard to the intellective apprehension in order to judge its conformity to the highest exemplar. The truth of the thing is only known through the measure of this conformity of object to exemplar (24). This is a task beyond the ability of the senses, and, at the highest level, beyond the merely natural ability of the human intellect. The role of the exemplar in Henry’s epistemological theory functions in an analogous fashion to a certain reading of the Platonic Theory of Forms in which objects “share in” their ideal, transcendent, perhaps otherworldly, patterns (or “Forms”) as the secure basis of their metaphysical reality. Similarly, Henry’s exemplars function as the patterns to which the objects of our knowledge must conform in order that our cognition penetrate past the level of simple apprehension to the pure truth of the object. The critical point is that the highest sort of exemplar (Henry distinguishes between a lesser and greater kind, as will be described below) is inscribed within us by God. In contrast to the externalism of first level of intellective cognition, then, the epistemic orientation is internalist, seeking the conformity of the object with the exemplar inscribed within.

    
    

    (1)(c) Created and uncreated exemplars

    
    

    The two levels of intellective cognition both rely on conformity of the object of knowledge with its exemplar as the metric for truth. The kind of exemplar appealed to in each case, however, varies. In the case of the intellect of simple apprehension, the “made” and “fabricated” exemplar^[6] of a thing is “its universal species existing in the soul, through which the soul acquires knowledge of all the individual things that fall under it, and it is caused by the thing” (24).  The origin of the “made” or created exemplar is external to the knower, who, by natural means, abstracts out from the sense content the universal species beheld in the soul. In the case of the intellect of composing and dividing, on the other hand, the “perpetual” and “immutable” exemplar is “the divine art containing the ideal patterns of all things” (24). It is only this second higher sort of uncreated exemplar, issued by DI, that can guide the knower towards the pure truth of his or her knowledge, beyond veridical, but nonetheless uncertain, simple apprehension.

    
    

    (1)(d) The argument versus Aristotle

    
    

    Henry takes Aristotle’s lead on a number of points, including the generally anti-skeptical notion that humans are endowed with a natural desire to know and that nature does not supply a desire that cannot, in some meaningful sense, be fulfilled (Meta. I.1). The justification for this general notion, however, varies. With Aristotle the argument focuses on natural human abilities, or capacities, like sense perception and memory, which work together to render reliable access to the principles of art and science: “Art is produced when from many notions of experience a single universal judgment is formed with regard to like objects” (Meta. I.1). By this reckoning, the right combination of natural human capacity and time (experience) is enough to find the secure basis for knowledge that would defeat skepticism and pave the way for real progress in the theoretical and practical sciences. Such a view is either the strong naturalism of (i) or the DI-fortified naturalism of (ii), if references to the First Mover were massaged in the right manner. On the contrary, Henry’s faith in the human faculties does not extend quite as far. He denies that an exemplar acquired by natural means can give us the highest truth, and he makes his break from Aristotle in three points (25-26).

                First, the kind of exemplar accessible by natural human ability is only the exemplar abstracted from out of sensibility, the created exemplar, which, coming from a mutable and uncertain sense, is itself also mutable and uncertain. Therefore, it could never serve as the measuring stick for an immutable and certain truth.

                Second, the human soul is mutable and receptive of error and it can be corrected by nothing which is of equal or greater mutability, such as the senses. If there is some immutable truth in or available to humans, then it must come from a source that is superior to the mutability of humans, which is only the divine source.

                Third, any exemplar that issues out of abstraction from a sensible thing bears a likeness to that sensible thing. But the sensible thing, insofar as it is mutable, is, or can be shown to be, false. This means that the exemplar that is the abstracted sensible species bears a likeness to what is false and cannot serve as the model to which true knowledge must conform.

                Together these three points distance Henry from Aristotle’s naturalism and find ways to incorporate a need for quasi-Platonic, immutable, ideal exemplars.^[7] Such ideal exemplars serve as the principles for our refining the knowledge gained by our natural human abilities (of sensible cognition and intellective cognition of the ‘simple apprehension’ variety). Such refinement brings knowledge out of the uncertainty of sense and into the certainty of the intellect that bears witness to the immutable truth of the divine exemplars provided by DI.

    
    

    Conclusion

    
    

    Henry forms his epistemological theory on the basis of two main pillars of the tradition, Plato and Aristotle. From the latter he inherits a certain naturalism regarding the possibility of knowledge. Humans naturally desire to know things and they are endowed with the natural ability to satisfy that desire to know. But Henry’s naturalism extends only so far. By distinguishing between two levels of intellective cognition, and two corresponding exemplars (conformity to which is the necessary metric for truth), he sketches a picture of human intellection with one foot in the sensible and mundane, and the other foot in the ideal and divine. Natural human abilities are sufficient to measure the conformity of an object of sensible and mundane knowledge to the created exemplar abstracted out of that sensible and mundane object. But natural human abilities is not sufficient to create the uncreated divine exemplar through which we know not merely what a thing is, but also the truth of the thing. The transition from knowledge to the truth is the transition from the mutable to the immutable in cognition. As mutable beings ourselves, it is not a transition we could ever make without divine assistance. Therefore DI is required to render the divine exemplar, which is not an object of cognition, but rather the base of cognition that secures the possibility of meaningful progress in the arts and sciences.

                This hybrid epistemological theory, thus, is a rejection of stance (i) and (iv); and the privileging of the divine exemplar as the base of cognition, rather than object, indicates that the DI-fortified naturalistic stance (ii) is still too naturalist. The remaining naturalist-fortified DI stance (iii), therefore, seems closest to Henry’s position.

    
    

    
    

    Works Cited:

    
    

    Aristotle, Metaphysics tr. Hugh Tredennick, Loeb Classics (Harvard University Press, 2003)

    Henry of Ghent, Summa of Ordinary Questions tr. Roland J. Teske (St. Augustine’s Press, 2008)

    
    

    
    

    ---

    ^[1] For an explicit rejection of (i) and an implicit rejection of (iv) (because “natural abilities” are granted) see: “...to the first argument to the contrary that, unless a human being could by his purely natural abilities attain the knowledge of the truth, he would seek it in vain, it must be said that without illumination a human being could not seek [knowledge of the truth] to the point that he would be able to come to the knowledge of the truth by seeking it in purely natural abilities, But he can do this only with the help of that illumination, since the rational soul exists in that way as created in its natural abilities” [38]. For an rejection of (ii) see: “still those natural abilities cannot of themselves act is such a way that they attain [the rules of eternal light; that is, DI] but God offers them to whom he wills and takes them from whom he wills” (35).

    ^[2] Sensible cognition is asserted to be, following Aristotle, the origin of both itself and intellective cognition (5).

    ^[3] Following Aristotle, “A sense apprehends nothing certain about a thing” and following Augustine, “the pure truth is not to be sought from the senses of the body” (5).

    ^[4] Henry’s begins the Question with a presentation of denials and affirmations of the question in question (18-19). The denials refuting the possibility of human knowledge without DI, roughly corresponding to stance (iv), generally consist of scriptural and philosophical authorities crediting all knowledge to DI. The affirmations endorsing the same possibility, roughly corresponding to stance (i), cite more authorities (sometimes the same ones!) to the contrary. Henry clearly uses this blunt contrast to set up the need to draw out the finer nuances of cognition. I will therefore skip over the finer points of this prelude and deal with the more nuanced points he has to make about human cognition.

    ^[5] Henry distinguishes two types of epistemic “testimony” here: an externalist testimony “of another and from outside” and an internalist testimony “by one’s own testimony and from inside” (8). The distinction is relevant to the two levels of intellective cognition: the intellect of simple apprehension follows the externalist testimony of the sense, the intellect of composing and dividing follows the internalist testimony of the uncreated exemplars.

    ^[6] Henry borrows the language of “made,” “fabricated,” “perpetual,” and “immutable,” from Plato’s Timaeus (24).

    ^[7] Henry has a longer story to tell regarding what Aristotle does and does not believe and whether or not he deviated from the “divine doctrine of his master,” Plato. But the takeaway message seems to be that based on what can be known about Aristotle’s views, as opposed to merely guessed, we have to conclude Aristotle held a naturalistic epistemological stance that would not endorse DI.

  • 16th Century German Woodcut of UFO Battle by Hans Glaser

    Apr 04, 13

    "At sunrise on the 14th April 1561, the citizens of Nuremberg beheld "A very frightful spectacle." The sky appeared to fill with cylindrical objects from which red, black, orange and blue white disks and globes emerged. Crosses and tubes resembling cannon barrels also appeared whereupon the objects promptly "began to fight one another." This event is depicted in a famous 16th century woodcut by Hans Glaser."
    
    

    
    
    Interesting case. I occasionally read dismissive responses to this story based on the "inaccuracy" of representations via woodcut art. Ummm, yeah, no shit. Woodcuts will not give you photographic realism. The selling point here is not the colorful woodcut, but rather the fact that there seems to be an entire effin town that confirms a sighting of "something" over the town. What that "something" is is obviously hard to say. But chalking up the phenomenon to static "sun dogs" and the like strikes me as laughably inadequate. The fact that the townspeople described this as a "battle" in which the UFOs "began to fight one another" militates against reducing this event to basically motionless quirky sun phenomena. Explanations that require the entire town to be stoned via an ergotism-based hallucination are also very weak -- the corny PSA "The More You Know" version of history. An entire town stoned on hallucinogens would have worse problems than lights in the sky, and they certainly wouldn't have the mental wherewithal or inter-subjective cohesion to report such an event in common, plus get it recorded for posterity in a woodcut (which takes a good deal longer to complete than the intoxicating effects of an hallucinogen lasts).
  • Some Ideas About Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors

    Apr 03, 13

    
    

    Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), The Ambassadors (1533).

    
    

    2 (3?) strata of relations

    1) “before the reveal” (a) painting as object of natural scientific regard, (b) painting as object of aesthetic regard

    (i) Ideas: time (t1-tn) and space (xyz coordinates) versus history (tradition) and corporeality (embodiment)

    2) “after the reveal,” the relation between (1)(a) and (1)(b) is internalized within the frame of the painting, highlighted by the spectator’s ability to swivel back and forth between the two looks of the skull/log. (Does there need to be a corresponding externalization of of the relation between (1)(a) and (1)(b) for the sake of symmetry? Maybe. But perhaps we would no longer be talking about an artwork.)

    
    

    We might think, however, that the transition from before to after the “reveal” is ultimately reducible to adopting a different perspective in time and space upon the same object of natural scientific regard. This is true. But it must further be asked whether this transition in three-dimensional space is alone able to produce the revealing element of surprise. What is surprising about the surprise?

    
    

    First, that x-“arrangement of paint splotches” can pass for “representation”-1 at y-perspective and pass for “representation”-2 at z-perspective. Surprising in the sense of (1): the transition from meaningless matter to meaningful matter.)

    
    

    Second, that the painting subverts the expectations of its tradition by concealing rather than revealing the symbolic elements of its narrative. Surprising in the sense of (2): the transition from meaningful to differently meaningful. One symbol conceals another symbol that could potentially animate x-”arrangement of paint splotches”. (This is a double concealing since symbols already conceal that which they symbolize.) (Note also that the trompe l’oeil stunts of consciousness and attention studies in neuroscience almost always efface historical and cultural techniques of object recognition. See the reference to “those with basketball familiarity” were better able to register the gorilla. Weak at best.) Two thoughts that will help bring out the historical and cultural motivations at work in the second sort of surprise: (i) what motivates looking or not looking for the concealed symbol? (What is a genre? A style of aesthetic representation that has a past, present, and possible future.) (ii) what are we looking at when we finally see the skull and not a log? A skull? Not at all. The skull is equally a log, or a skull, or a distorted bit of nonsense; if we adopt the correct perspective to reveal the skull we are bringing that perspective into view as well, which is, the anamorphic object of the modern science of perspective. (Contrast to Wittgenstein’s duck/rabbit in which no accompanying science of viewing is implied -- deceptively so!)

    
    Question: what have been the advances of contemporary science of perspective over the modern science of perspective? I am vaguely aware that the art of perspective achieved by the Old Masters was highly-effective, but the grid/plot system by which this perspective was charted does not exactly correspond to space and spatiality as we observe it with our human eye. We see in three dimensions, but not according to the exactitude of an XYZ coordinate plane (the eye, after all, is curved, and consists of regions of relative excellence: center, margins, blindspots, etc.).
  • Let's Cook Rabbit And Then Eat The Cooked Rabbit!

    Apr 02, 13

    "I'm 2 kewt 2 die!!!" -bunny

    Here are some recipes -- I'll pick one to cook up a meal tomorrow night with my girlfriend in celebration of
    our love(-ing being at the top of the food chain! Suck it vegetarians!).
    
    I'm picking out some pressure cooker recipes because that's a nice stew-y way to whip up meat without worrying about my cranky oven.
    
    How about Rabbit Stew in White Wine Sauce?
    
    How about Rabbit Cacciatora?
    
    How about Brown Rabbit Stew?
    
    How about Country Style Rabbit?
    
    They all look good to me, nah mean?
  • Notes: Henry of Ghent's Summa of Ordinary Questions

    Mar 31, 13

    
    

    Henry of Ghent

    
    

    Henry of Ghent (1217 - 1293)

    from Summa of Ordinary Questions (St. Augustine’s Press, 2008)

    
    

    With regard to the possibility of knowing, with or without divine illumination, insofar as it pertains to a human being.

    
    

    Questions:

    
    

    (1) In the first place, whether it is possible for a human being to know something;

    (2) In the second place, whether it is possible for a human being to know something without divine illumination;

    
    

    There are 10 more questions; only the first 2 were covered in class.

    
    

    (1) Whether it is possible for a human being to know something

    
    

    HG begins with arguments against and for question (1).

    
    

    Against consists of 7 arguments, including: (i) whenever a human knows X, he knows it as a result of something prior and better known; but this would set up an infinite regress, which is impossible; (ii) that all human intellective knowledge issues from sensation, but pure truth is not to be gleaned from the senses (Augustine); (iii) similarly, sense is uncertain, the intellect apprehends nothing except by senses, so the intellect is uncertain; (iv) that knowledge only concerns the fixed and lasting, but the sensible is neither; (v) the argument of Meno, that know one “learns” except one who already knows, so no one genuinely learns, and no one that does not learn can be said to know;  (vi) similarly, someone who knows nothing learns nothing; humans begin as a blank tablet, so they cannot learn anything nor have any sort of knowledge or discipline; (vii) that humans perceive images only and know nothing of the essence and quiddity of things, which is necessary in order to know;

    
    

    For consists of 1 “to the contrary” and 5 replies, including: (i) appealing to Aristotle, that “a human being desires to know by nature” and natural desires are not in vain; (ii) similarly, appealing to Augustine, that it’s possible for a human being to attain what he naturally desires; (iii) similarly, knowing is the perfection of a human being to which he is naturally ordered; (iv) that it is impossible for an act begun not to find its completion; humans began to search out wisdom, and they must find their completion in wisdom; (v) via Augustine, that skepticism about the possibility of knowledge is self-defeating because one knows that one doubts; (vi) similarly, via Aristotle,  skepticism is self-defeating;

    
    

    <Resolution> (to (1))

    It is possible for a human to know something. Someone can know something in 2 ways: (i) either by testimony of another and from outside, or (ii) by one’s own testimony and from inside.

    
    

    Via (i) Augustine says we know many things: oceans, foreign lands and cities, etc.

    Via (ii) we know things both in the sense of (a) sensitive knowledge and (b) intellective knowledge. (a) gives us knowledge when we truly perceive a thing as it is without any deception. Sensation is “better than reason” and needs nothing further to found its self-evidence. (b) gives us knowledge when the “intellect truly perceives a thing as it is without any deception or error, which a truer understanding or one received from a truer sense does not contradict in its proper action of understanding.”

    
    

    Historical digression on seven errors committed by philosophers of antiquity regarding sense and intellect. Contra Anaxagoras, Xenophanes; Democritus, Luecippus; the Academics; Amfrathagoras; Heraclitus; Meno and certain Platonists; all of these historical examples of arguments against the possibility of knowledge are self-defeating along different lines. HG goes through three counter arguments provided by Tully in On the Academics: argument from knowledge of the arts; from the acts of the virtues; from the tasks of human life.

    
    

    The third is interesting; it shares some similarities with Husserl’s way into phenomenology via the lifeworld. Tully asks, How would anyone go about his life if his knowledge of himself and the world was absolutely uncertain? Similarly, Husserl argues that we are always already enmeshed in the meaningful activity of a pregiven lifeworld, which provides a structure of motivations for our activity prior to any scientific or theoretical thematization of knowledge as knowledge.

    
    

    <Replies to the Arguments> (HG proceeds to give explicit reply to the 7 arguments against the possibility of knowledge (listed at the beginning of (1)))

    
    

    Reply to (i): that principles of knowledge are known first and immediately through themselves thereby halting the infinite regress; (ii) although sensible objects are fallible and mutable, they are nevertheless an appropriate starting point for knowledge; unimpeded sensation is a good candidate for the application of reason; (iii); (iv); (v) and (vi); (vii).

    
    

    (2) Whether a human being can know something without divine illumination

    
    

    HG presents 5 comments in favor of (2) and 2 comments against.

    In favor, HG writes: (i) that our sufficiency for perceiving the truth comes only from God; (ii) similarly with (i); (iii) similarly; (iv); (v);

    Against, “to the contrary”, via Augustine, we search for the truth and susch a search would be in vain were it not in our power to attain the truth without divine illumination; (ii) again, via Aristotle, “All human beings naturally desire to know.” One naturally desire only what one can know by nature. So, humans can have knowledge without assistance of divine illumination.

    
    

    <The Resolution> (of (2))

    
    

    Knowledge is known sequentially, meaning that conclusions are drawn from prior principles, which, in turn, are conclusions themselves, drawn from yet earlier principles, and so on. If human understanding can grasp, by natural means, the knowledge of the first speculative principle that sets this sequential knowing in motion, then a human can be said to know without the aid of divine illumination.

    
    

    HG makes a distinction between (a) objects of knowledge that can be known by natural means and (b) those that obviously cannot. (b) includes articles of faith, which can only be known by divine illumination. But must this style of knowing be extended across the entire range of knowing, both (b) and as the first principle of (a)?

    
    

    Against such extension, HG charges that “those who speak in this way take much away from the dignity and perfection of the created intellect.” To know and understand  are proper to the intellect (aristotle), so it is a naturally constituted perfection of the intellect to come to know in virtue of its own natural abilities, created by God but not otherwise assisted by the means of divine illumination. Although HG grants that God is the first knower and the first agent in every intellectual and cognitive action (21) (just as he is the first mover for every motion), this does not prevent every subsequent act of knowing proceeding by the natural means which God set up.

    
    

    HG distinguishes between knowing (i) about a creature what is true in it, and (ii) to know its truth. Even animals demonstrate knowledge of sort (i), which seems to require only a sensible faculty. But truth only so far as (i) does not grant the ability to judge of something, ‘whether a human being is a true human being, or of a color whether it is a real color.’

    
    

    Again, the distinction is between (i) by which one knows and grasps by simple intelligence (~sense?) what the thing is, and (ii) by which one knows and grasps the truth of the thing itself by the intelligence that composes and divides.

    
    

    In (i) our intellect follows the senses absolutely. Knowledge of the intellect that follows the form of (i) is veridical in the way that senses are veridical, as a knowing without an understanding, as grasping the thing as it is but not grasping its truth. In (i) that which is being and true in the thing can be apprehended without the intention of its truth being apprehended by the intellect (23b). To apprehend the truth in a thing requires apprehending its conformity to its exemplar -- to grasp the principle by which that conformity operates, so to speak -- which (i) does not appear to accomplish.

    
    

    In (ii) the knowledge we garner by (i) may become perfected. Again, the intellect in (ii) acquires knowledge by composing & dividing, which the sense of (i) does not accomplish.

    
    

    The question is, again, whether it’s possible to know in the way of (ii) without divine illumination, by purely natural means. Given the standard that the truth of the thing can only be known by knowing its conformity to its exemplar (via Augustine, via Anselm) (24t), we can expect that there is a twofold sort of conformity to an exemplar, in the style of (i) and (ii).

    
    

    In the style of (i), conformity is the grasping as something outside the knower. In the style of (ii), conformity is the understanding of the object as a species of intelligible thing inscribed in the intellect. The style of (i) will not grant knowledge of truth of the thing (because its exemplar is held outside the knower and, like a painting, is similar but vulnerable to all the error of becoming?). The style of (ii) grants knowledge of the thing itself because the thing itself is taken as the exemplar and basis for knowing in the knower (like a man as an exemplar of man, compared to a mere portrait of a man as exemplar of man?).

    
    

    Aristotle holds that we can have knowledge of the truth of things by purely natural means in the style of (ii) (25t).

    
    

    But HG appears to reject this at (25m): “for three reasons it is absolutely impossible that an entirely certain and infallible knowledge of the truth is had through such an exemplar acquired in us: (1) because such an exemplar is abstracted from a changeable thing, so whatever is derived from the changeable is also changeable and uncertain; (2) because the human soul is mutable and receptive of error, it can be rectified by nothing that is of equal or greater mutability --- so if there is immutable truth by which the soul has certain knowledge, then this must come from a source superior to the mutable human soul (as Augustine argues); (3) since such an exemplar is an intention and sensible species of a thing abstracted from the phantasm, it has a likeness with what is false, just as it does with what is true, so their is an ambiguous mixture -- and so, again, if there is some immutable truth is must be “above” the human mind;

    
    

    Historical digression on the Academics; Plato and the Platonists; Augustine; Stoics; Epicureans; Zeno; Arcesilas; Carneades; Antiochus, student of Philo; Metrodorus; Plotinus;

    
    

    Again, two styles of knowing the pure truth: (i) by looking at at the exemplar as an object known, that is, by seeing a copy in(?) it, and (ii) by looking at the exemplar as the basis for knowing. In way (i) we cognize conformity of object to exemplar as we cognize conformity of a painted image of Hercules to Hercules.

    
    

    Although a human can come to know in the style of (i) by natural means, HG denies (30t) that he can acquire knowledge of the exemplar, by which the truth of (i) and (ii) is secured, without divine illumination.

    
    

    So the basic idea seems to be that God’s divine illumination is essential for (ii), and, although our natural human means of sensibility gives us the basic material of knowledge in (i), still, we require knowledge of the exemplar, which is only provided by divine illumination, in our to understand the truth of what is provided in (i).

    
    

    There is some question in HG where Aristotle stood on this issue, and whether or not his views were compatible with Plato’s views on the topic (34t). On the one hand, HG sketches Aristotle as holding knowledge possible by purely and unqualifiedly natural means. On the other hand, HG ventures to include Aristotle in his somewhat convoluted historical narrative along with the Academics who “concealed” the truth of Plato for its safekeeping, because people were to stupid to understand it, etc (34m).

    
    

    HG: “By purely natural means, then, with the exclusion of all divine illumination, it is in no way possible for a human being to know the clear truth” (35t). The distinction fleshed out between (i) and (ii) before now instructs us how to interpret the ‘clear.’ But can a human come to know the divine illumination by natural means, or must it be bestowed in some sense? The former would reduce divine illumination to a sort of tool of knowing, and save the possibility of knowing by natural means.

    
    

    So, different possibilities:

    (a) knowing by purely natural means

    (b) knowing by divine illumination, but acquiring DI by natural means

    (c) knowing by pure divine illumination, building on this with natural means of knowing

    
    

    HG opts for (c) at (35m). Although purely natural abilities attain DI, this is a product of our created capacities not by our self-sufficient action. Summary of position at (36t).

    
    

    <Replies to the Arguments>

    
    

    (38b) “...it must be said that without illumination a human being could not seek [knowledge of the truth] to the point that he would be able to come to the knowledge of the truth by seeking it in purely natural abilities, But he can do this only with the help of that illumination, since the rational soul exists in that way as created in its natural abilities.” And, “to the argument...that a human being naturally desires to know and so he can know by purely natural means, it must be said that it is true, but not so that he sees the truth itself by purely natural abilities...For a human being certainly desires to know by a natural desire even those things that have to be known supernaturally, which he still could not attain in accord with the common illumination by the divine exemplar without a more special illumination....”

    
    

    *******
  • Simons and Chambris, 1999 ("The Gorilla")

    Mar 30, 13

    Have a look.
    
    

  • Notes: Chrétien's "The Wounded Word"

    Mar 29, 13

    
    

    Notes on the Wounded Word, paragraph by paragraph.

    
    
    
    
    

    P1: “Prayer is the religious phenomenon par excellence, for it is the sole human act that opens the religious dimension and never ceases to underwrite, to support, and to suffer this opening.” Prayer is the condition of possibility of all other religious phenomenon (sacrifice, etc.). “With prayer, the religious appears and disappears.” C tackles the issue of the appearance of religious phenomena in the first paragraph.

    
    

    P2: “This appearing can, in some cases, open only onto the virtual...” To a god who may or may not be listening.

    
    

    Q

    
    

    P3: Nevertheless, this prayer to a virtual God...is not itself a virtual prayer, but an actual and real prayer....” Prayer is a fact, whether or not the target of the prayer exists or not. OK. But contrarians will object that it’s not to the point whether the prayer is actual or not, but whether the prayer can successfully target the object to which it prays. This is what would make prayer prayer, as opposed to meaningless pining in the dark of night. If successful targeting wasn’t necessary, then we could, for example, call the activity of a child making a mudpie “cooking”, and call that “cooking”, whether it dealt with edible or virtual ingredients, whether it resulted in an edible product or a virtual product, a fact. Is this an impressive fact?

    
    

    The response could follow: but the act of prayer is swept up in a real social-cultural practice of religion that predelineates what counts and doesn’t count as prayer at least well enough to distinguish genuine prayer from prayer that is on par with the child “cooking” a mudpie. OK. But now we are relying social, cultural parameters that don’t depend on any god, virtual or otherwise. What happened to the religious of religion?

    
    

    P4: Appeal to authorities that the religious is founded in and through prayer. Novalis & Feuerbach(!).

    
    

    P5: Prayer as simple and fundamental and irreducible phenomenon. A phenomenon that is veiled by classifications that divide mental and vocal prayer. But more is required, C insists, for a prayer to be mental other than the withholding of speech. And if a real vocal prayer is always paired with a mental prayer, then classifying the two as separate varieties is problematized by their coincidence.

    
    

    P6: “..in questions regarding the constitution of the meaning of prayer, the addressee is thoroughly essential.” The importance of the addressee is obvious. Interesting that we’re speaking of constitution here, because the possibility that the addressee may be nothing more than virtual should impact whether or not we would like to consider the meaning of prayer successfully, adequately, as you like, constituted.

    
    

    C has a point that phenomenology, from its inception, refused the obligation to posit the existence of its objects of investigation. Should this methodological fact be used to avoid the hard question of whether a phenomenology of religion can survive on the thin soup of virtuality? C asks us to observe all the behavioral phenomena that accompanies prayer; the fear/confidence of the addresser, the faithful one.

    
    

    P7: C disowns the task of describing the full range of this behavior, restricting himself to a treatment of prayer as a speech act. “And the guiding question will be that of the voice in this act.” Having claimed that prayer is the religious phenomenon par excellence, C suggests that vocal prayer is prayer par excellence. Again, an appeal to Feuerback(!) as an authority.

    
    

    P8: “Still incomplete, a first description of prayer can situate it in an act of presence to the invisible.” The transition from a virtual relation to a real relation to the invisible. There is a manifestation here -- it’s the manifestation of the individual towards the invisible (presence) in which he believes. A “anthrophany”, a manifestation of man that “puts him at stake.” “Even he who turns toward the incorporeal does so corporeally.” The question begins to become, whether or not the invisibility is an essential (virtual) component of prayer. If it is essential, then C can begin to deflect objections that the phenomenon of prayer is object-less in the way that speculation about the details of heaven & hell is object-less (we don’t know, we can’t know, there’s no way of verifying although the details we describe “the heat of the flames”, “the sharp whip of Satan” demand verification along the lines of sensibility --- invisibility qua invisibility does not make the demand of verification). “The being before God of the one praying is an active self-manifestation to God.”

    
    

    P9: “What do we see when we see a man praying?” C shifts the line of approach to the third person persepctive in order to impress upon us that not only is the act of prayer a unique phenomenon for the praying individual that believes, but also that we (believers or not) see that the praying individual is up to more than simply speaking softly to himself. A man speaking to God is not the same as a man speaking alone, or a man speaking to himself, in pure soliloquy.

    
    

    P10: C digs deeper into the “functions performed by speech in prayer” by way of further elucidating the motivation for restricting his study to vocal (as opposed to silent/mental) prayer. Questions in order: (1) What are the functions performed by speech in prayer? (2) What is the importance of the address, of saying “you”? (3) Why give voice to it?

    
    

    P11: One objection to monotheistic prayer (objection in what sense? that it successfully targets anything?): that an omniscient God has nothing to learn from us so what possible need could there be to speak our “secret” prayers aloud? The reply: that the meaning of vocal prayer is not to be found in the content that is communicated aloud from the praying individual to God.

    
    

    P12: “We speak by addressing ourselves to another and by turning ourselves toward him, but it is we who are taught by this word, and it is on us that it acts.” In the act of address to God, it is the addresser, not the addressee, whom is affected. The self-affection that is only made possible in the address to the infinite other (contrast to self-affection made possible by self-address, masturbation) is the “first wound of the word.”

    
    

    P13: Again, we are made manifest in prayer in a manner that is only possible because the manifestation is before God. The prayer that commences at our own impetus still relies on God for what becomes manifest in the anthopophany: “All prayer confesses God as giver by dispossessing us of our egocentrism...”

    
    

    P14: “Prayer, says Saint Bonaventure, calls for the fervor of affection...” “The first function speech performs in prayer is therefore a self-manifestation before the invisible other, a manifestation that becomes a manifestation of self to self through the other...” [see Rilke: “Wer, wenn ich schrie, hoerte mich...?”]

    
    

    P15: On the one hand, “prayer is a logos but is neither true nor false” (Aristotle). On the other hand, there is a question of truth and norms and rectitude insofar as prayers are determined socially. culturally, historically along certain lines. “But this concerns the problem of ritual more than the problem of prayer.”

    
    

    P16: We say “Our father” in the Lord’s Prayer, not “My father.”

    
    

    P17: Again, the rectitude of prayer cannot be reduced to simply a question of the rectitude of theological propositions articulated in prayer. The rectitude of prayer is caught up in the contest for truth in which prayer as a speech act engages.

    
    

    P18: A moral objection against prayer: is not the prayer of the corrupt corrupt, and what need do the virtuous have for prayer? Reply: C insists that the moral objection is a red herring. Prayer is not a privilege reserved for the virtuous who no longer needed. Attentiveness to the phenomenon of prayer shows that it serves a function indifferent to the moral point of departure of the praying individual. Prayer “shatters us and reconfigures us” so what is the worry regarding the moral qualities of the individual before prayer as long as the turn towards prayer is genuine?

    
    

    P19: The moral and immoral individual alike confront their lack of rectitude before God.

    
    

    P20: “But it belongs to prayer itself that in it alone does the praying man learn that he does not know how to pray.” [see St. Paul] Similarly, the shortcoming of speech opens only in speech. The circularity: doing X in order to learn how to do X. Thus, we are thrust into the circularity with “no prolegomena or preliminaries.” C, following Proclus, claims that prayer does not fall into an infinite regress (doing in order to know how to do, in order to know how to do, in order..., etc.) because the act of wanting (to pray) and the act of prayer hold at the same time, not successively.

    
    

    P21: “[Prayer] does not begin, it responds....” The circularity in which the praying individual finds himself means that he will not on his own powers master that fundamental ground which sets the circle circulating. Therefore, no prayer is a trigger, it is a response that situates one in the event of prayer. Summary of response to question (1): “This completes the first part of our description of prayer: the manifestation of self to the other by the word is agonic and transforming, for it is dialogue and conversation with the other in an encounter where our truth is at issue. Being before God is at stake only in and through prayer.”

    
    

    P22: Again, the manifestation of prayer is agonic.

    
    

    P23: What renders “these fortunate wounds of the Word” possible? “The address, allocution, saying “you.”” Or, “Thou” (Feuerbach). One objection via Karl Jaspers: that to address God is to reduce Him to a personality.

    
    

    P24: Reply: that the “you” directed to God does not make excessively familiar by virtue of the infinite abyss separating the addresser from the addressee. A prayer does not collapse this abyss; a prayer draws attention to this abyss. Even the silent admiration of Greek & Roman prayer (which, unlike Jewish & Christian prayer, did not have a vocative form of the word ‘god’) is an act of silence, an allocution.

    
    

    P25: The voice of silence. “The silence of prayer is here a silence heard by God...”

    
    

    P26: “Only the second person singular can open the space of such an ordeal. It is only in saying You that the I can be completely exposed, beyond all that it can master.”

    
    

    P27: “A new characteristic is added to our description of prayer: the manifestation of self to the other by the word, that is, agonic speech that struggles for its truth, is an ordeal, a suffering God, a passion for God, a theopathy.” In the address to God, the voice is naked. What would be dress here? The correlate response responding to the call of the address, which provides a ready to hand meaning by which the call/response event can be tidily classified, labeled, and stored away. On the contrary, the speech addressed towards God lingers, is forced to weather the burden of an addressed address that outpaces the possibility of response in the same terms as the address.

    
    

    P28: “...the divine wants to be prayed to and addressed.” “...the speech act seems to be made possible by the silence of divine hearing...” The asymmetry of human/divine is marked by an infinite abyss that is also a silence that, endlessly, invites speech. Without divine silence, no human speech. And so, many prayers include thanks for themselves. Prayer as giving thanks for the possibility of prayer.

    
    

    P29: Again,  “Thus we understand that this is also a gift of God, that we cry to God...” (Augustine). In terms of phenomenological description, the giftedness of the possibility of vocal prayer manifests itself against the backdrop of the Addressee who is always already there.

    
    

    P30: (In opposition to van der Leeuw) Prayer is also adoration. C introduces the connection of desire and prayer as a means to unify different definitions of prayer.

    
    

    P31: Of two definitions -- (i) prayer, as elevation of the spirit toward God, and (ii) prayer, as a demand that God grant what is fitting -- both suppose desire. If one construes desire broadly & equates desiring with praying, then one can venture that, “man by his very nature, namely, as will, is a religious being, a praying.”

    
    

    P32: “When this desire for God appears to the man praying as a gift of God, when the very act by which he addresses a demand to God is in his eyes found in a space where God already answers for him, it is fair to describe prayer as a conversation or a dialogue with God, quite independent of extraordinary or supernatural events where one would hear voices or receive signs.” An exceptional dialogue, in which signs or voices are independent of that which makes the event a dialogue. The temptation is to say that nothing at all is communicated in this putative dialogue. But the event itself is given, and one finds oneself in the event, and one can, perhaps, concede that this sort of thoroughgoing self-manifestation is only possible through an act that puts one before an uncrossable limit (past which nothing of “mine” could slip away). “The response is in the call.” Here I am, thank You.

    
    

    P33: Prayer as gift and task. Prayer is to the spirit as respiration is to the life of the body.

    
    

    P34: ‘Circulation’ is further developed in this double sense: (i) the circulation of the circularity of prayer, and (ii) the circulation of the vital rhythms of respiration.

    
    

    P35: Two decisive questions concerning the attempted phenomenology: already treated, (i) Why and how is prayer vocal? and, regarding the uniqueness of the speech used in prayer, (2) What exactly does it mean to “recite” a prayer? Is the word “recite’ suitable?...In what way does this appropriation of the words [composed by others, passed on by tradition, etc.] spoken happen?

    
    

    P36: Humorous digression concerning the deaf god Mna.

    
    

    P37: Literary and philosophical perspectives on vocal prayer throughout history: Aeschylus to Feuerbach.

    
    

    P38: What are the standards for vocal versus silent prayer throughout history? In ages where vocal prayer was the rule, a quiet prayer could be called silent. Murmur as ambiguous border of vocal/silent prayer. Consider how the emergence of silent reading affected the line of delineation between vocal and silent prayer.

    
    

    P39: In antiquity, prayer spoken aloud was the norm. “...a manifestation of self before God could not be purely spiritual and acosmic.”

    
    

    P40: “Where does one manifest oneself entirely, if not is and through the voice, inseparably spiritual and fleshly?” C clearly shows his bias here in favor of the voice as the privileged unity of spirit and flesh. But why could we not make a related, though different, bid for the koerper/leib distinction fulfilling the same theoretical function? What, after all, is so fleshly about voice? One might, on the contrary, describe it as the reverberation of the flesh, but not the flesh itself. Perhaps this is close to C’s point: voice as the affection of the flesh, imbued with spirit.

    
    

    See also: “Instead of being the simple exterior manifestation of an interior state -- an expression -- it becomes an effusion that collects and an offering that concentrates.” That is surely vague; the reverberation of the flesh in vocal prayer seems to bear some resemblance to this collection and offering. “The voice is not an instrument for itself.” OK, this is clear enough based on the voice’s function in communication. We needn’t vocalize to communicate to ourselves. But C wants to go further, I think. Because God is not someone to which we need to communicate -- He knows all already. What is performed in the vocal prayer is performed, through the possibility given by God, for ourselves, for awakening us to the fact of God’s greatness and immeasurability, for celebrating this in our body’s song.

    
    

    P41: “A second aspect of vocal prayer, whether it be individual or collective, is its public nature.” The audibility of vocal prayer removes it from the realm of the private. Vocal prayer is offered to God, and offered in the world. In antiquity, murmured prayers were regarded as suspect. C also asks us to see that the publicity of vocal prayer still holds even if the praying individual is the only one who hears it. The vocalization of prayer alienates even the praying individual from the privacy of his own prayer -- both individual and the prayer are thrust into public view.

    
    

    P42: What is the respective importance of the collective versus the individual prayer? Some traditions emphasize the superiority of collective over individual prayer.

    
    

    P43: “No one prays merely for himself, and the collectivity also prays, also speaks for those who can no longer or can not yet speak.” C reframes the individual/collective opposition; it is not that the collective is superior to the individual prayer by virtue of being a greater number of individuals, rather it is superior because collective prayer affords the individual a greater opportunity to be surpassed as one expects to be surpassed in prayer by a force greater than one’s self. The surpassing is key. Collective prayer also seeks to surpass itself, by surrendering its speech to those that are no more or are not yet, on the way to God.

    
    

    P44: “In Christianity, for example, all prayer is communal by essence...” Christianity is the exemplar for C; this is what Ricoeur will attempt to undo, or at least, if it is inescapable for one residing within a Judeo-Christian culture, draw attention to the tradition structuring our experience of religious phenomena. “Prayer thus founds a sui generis mode of community in and through speech.”

    
    

    P45: “Another characteristic manifests this: the insistence on the fact that one has to pray for oneself, the prayer for oneself being the condition of the prayer for others.” The theme of surpassing in prayer does not make of prayer a blind mechanism of selflessness and self-alienation. One must have and hold onto one’s self in order to pray and in order to pray for others. Ego-centered spiritual life is not necessarily egotistical.

    
    

    P46: Summary of results: “...that the highest intimacy with God is said in speech we do not invent, but which invents us,...,” etc. So with the citing of traditional prayers, we appropriate the words while the action of prayer appropriates us.

    
    

    P47: Q, that the monk recites the prophet’s words as if they expressed the monk’s own feelings -- which they do.

    
    

    P48: Assuming the authorship, in even a weak sense, of words not penned by one’s self on the basis of the feeling of ownership smacks of audacity. C objects that it is not pride, but rather the belief in inspiration (in-spiration) that lets the monk, for example, greet the words of the prophet as his own.

    
    

    P49: The “life” of prayer, as it is said, is so said in recognition of the thoroughgoing existential involvement in truth and transcendence that the activity of prayer makes visible. “...the human voice, in what is unique and irreplaceable about it, is always hymnal and cannot speak without giving voice to all that has none, without bringing to speech all that remains mute or can only babble, without offering to God, with it and in it, the world as a whole wounded by the word...” “The human voice becomes a place where the world returns to God.” The scope of what is made manifest has widened from the praying individual, to include the community, to include those who are no longer or not yet part of the community, to include the whole world.

    
    

    P50: Again, that silent prayer can only be defined and constituted by reference to vocal prayer. “...vocal prayer, in the full range of its forms, is something like the index of religious existence, leaving outside none of the phenomena that constitute religion.” Again, prayer is the religious phenomenon par excellence. “...it unveils to us our own condition and our own finitude...” C mentions finitude here; he did not dwell on this aspect of humanity, in contrast to divinity, although he might have. Finitude is implied everywhere.

    
    

    P51: “Why call it “wounded word”? It always has its origin in the wound of joy or distress...” The prayer struggles in the agonic engagement with truth. An illumination in suffering to speak prayers that one knows not yet how to speak. The speech of prayer is yet wounded by wanting t give voice to all the voices that cannot be voiced, not yet or no longer.

    
    

    P52: “This act of a word wounded by the radical alterity of him to whom it speaks is pure address.” ‘Alterity’, with ‘finitude’, is another word that might have arisen more often in this paper but did not. “[The praying individual] itself learns from this ordeal, and this is why this wound makes it stronger, all the stronger as it will not have sought to heal it.” The wounded word makes the one who speaks it stronger by illuminating defects within him which would have otherwise festered in silence.

    
    
  • Panda GIFs Tumblr (via @jessicagalliart)

    Mar 28, 13

    This is a no brainer. Some highlights below. Visit at pandagifs.tumblr.com.
    Actually, upon reflection, this Tumblr only has 3 pages worth of panda GIFs. Not that impressive. I demand more for my panda dollar.
    
    

    
    

    
    

    
    
  • Mockup Poster for PRG 5: Body & Space

    Mar 24, 13

    A couple of presenters from PRG 3 rescheduled due to unforeseen circumstances. We've finally got the opportunity to get them together for a second try. The theme is Body and Space. Titles TBA, scheduled for May 4th.
    
    Here's a mockup for the poster. Old timey medicine vibe. Check for latest updates at the PRG site.
    
    

    
    
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