Download Subjectivity, Objectivity, Intersubjectivity: Phenomenology and

Subjectivity, Objectivity, Intersubjectivity: Phenomenology and Analytical
Philosophy1
In this paper, I do not intend to give a comprehensive comparative
analysis of phenomenology and what is called analytical philosophy; instead, I
will focus on “the things themselves”. However, my paper might eventually also
show that, contrary to the view of quite a few philosophers in both the
phenomenological and the analytical tradition, there are no strict boundaries and
ineliminable differences between the two ways of thinking. Certainly, this is due
partly to the common tradition to which the two “movements” belong, but a
deeper explanation lies in the problems themselves: they are such that occur in
any attempt at understanding human experience. To be sure, this methodological
approach is not meant to be a new and original one. It has been represented by
philosophers like Manfred Frank, Paul Ricoeur, David Carr, and others who
have demonstrated either by their philosophy, or by way of their analyses of the
history of philosophy that relying on both traditions at once might prove to be
fruitful.
The problems under discussion are interrelated. Even if they do not form a
whole in the strict sense, an answer to one of them implies some position
towards the others as well. Experience, stream of consciousness, subjectivity
and time belong together; and so do the knowledge of the self, others and the
world.
Knowledge of the Self and of the World
The self is at once an ontological and an epistemic concept. The epistemic
issue is twofold: on the one hand, the question is whether I have a special,
privileged access to my self; on the other hand, whether this knowledge is a
basic and unique one due to its infallible and apodictic character, whether it is a
kind of “foundational knowledge”. However, these two issues are to be kept
apart: acceptance of the special access thesis does not necessarily entail the
acceptance of the foundational thesis. The ontological issue is whether there is
such a thing as a self? If the answer is yes, what type of being is it? The
epistemic and the ontological issues are, of course, interrelated: if there is no
access to the self, it seems to follow that there is no self.
Following Descartes, a significant tradition of modern philosophy
attributes a special and basic role to the self. However, in the last fifty years or
so, “Cartesianism”, i.e., the view that the self is the basic, apodictic object and
the ultimate origin of all cognition and meaning, was attacked by quite a few
1
A first version of this essay was written with the support of a three-month scholarship at Central European
University.
philosophers. In the phenomenological tradition, Husserl’s Cartesianism was the
target of criticism from all sides (Scheler, Heidegger, Patocka, Sartre, MerleauPonty).
According to the cogito argument (or at least an interpretation of that),
this uniqueness is due to the fact that I have apodictic knowledge only of my
self, my act of consciousness. This is the argument of the second Meditation. In
the following meditations, the existence of the world is accepted only as a result
of a deductive procedure that takes the apodicticity of the self, of the ego cogito,
as its premiss. Descartes’ train of thought may be reconstructed as follows: I
realize that I possess the idea of God, which implies the existence of God; God’s
properties include veracity so God never deceives me; consequently, whenever I
have a clear and distinct perception, the object of perception exists.
Accordingly, there is a radical, foundational difference between the
knowledge of my self and the world. The second Meditation asserts that the first
object of cognition is the “ego cogito”: my act of consciousness, my experience
exists. It is possible that the object of consciousness, the cogitatum does not
exist: I may be wrong about the cogitatum which may ever turn out to be nonexistent.
Though Husserl considered himself to be continuing the Cartesian
tradition, he criticised Descartes on essential points. First, Husserl made a
distinction between the perception of a thing and the consciousness of the world.
To be sure, this distinction goes back at least to Kant who held that the world is
an idea of reason. Husserl argues that in the strict sense there is no such thing as
a distinct perception, since perception is always horizontal: just as in the case of
an individual object I only perceive it from some perspective so there are other
parts of it that are not perceived, in the case of a thing I always perceive it
among other objects. The world is the horizon of all horizons, or the allencompassing horizon. Accordingly, although the existence of individual objects
may always be doubtful, our belief in the existence of the world is never made
doubtful. One is never without an object, and it can only be another object that
refutes the previous perception: from the distance, I thought that it was a man
but as I approached, it turned out to be a tree. So the existence of the world as a
horizon can never become doubtful.
This insight has significant consequences for the Cartesian cogito
formula. We may hold this in an extended form at once, without any deductive
procedure: it is the form ego cogito cogitatum. There is no need for a deductive
procedure starting from the ego cogito towards the cogitatum, in order to prove
that the world exists. My idea of God, God’s existence and God’s veracity are
unnecessary steps: the ego cogito already involves the world as cogitatum. This
thought is expressed in the phenomenological conception of intentionality: the
essence of consciousness is that it is always the consciousness of something.
Consciousness is not a substantive but a relational concept.
Knowledge of the Self and of Others
The formula ego cogito cogitatum expresses the insight that there is no
foundational difference between the knowledge of my self and the world. But
there is a third type of knowledge to be accounted for: that of others. It is almost
universally held that one of the main problems with Husserlian transcendental
phenomenology is that, being ontologically a transcendental idealism, it
necessarily entails solipsism.
The traditional problem of solipsism is that on the basis of perceiving
someone else’s behaviour, I can never be certain of another mind or self. In
Husserl, the problem is somewhat different. Husserl maintains that there is a
difference only in the mode of givenness of the other, as compared to the
givenness of myself, but the difference is not foundational. However, I think that
in fact he attributes foundational priority to the consciousness of the ego.
In this case, the general Husserlian formula of ego cogito cogitatum is to
be considered, as David Carr puts it2, in the form “ego cogito cogitatum qua
cogitatum cogitans”. While I am having a continuous awareness of myself I
perceive an “object”, such that it is not a mere object but is someone else. The
foundation of this peculiar form of consciousness, that Husserl calls
“analogising apperception”, is my permanent living present. When I see another
body that behaves similarly to my body, on the basis of my presence, I attribute
to this body the meaning of an alter ego. But the third constituent of the
interrelationship, i.e. the world is also simultaneously present. I experience the
other as someone who is in the world, but, at the same time, as someone who
experiences the same world as I do. The correlation is between the world as
experienced by me and the world as experienced by the other. But these “two”
worlds are in fact the same3.
But what exactly is the “analogising apperception” mentioned above, and
are we really carrying it out when experiencing someone else?
According to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, the beginning of
philosophy is the phenomenological epoché. It is the philosopher’s act of
suspending or bracketing the belief that the world exists independently of his/her
consciousness of it. So, instead of describing the world as a “final product of
consciousness”, the philosopher turns towards his own experiences of the world,
and describes their noetic-noematic structure: he/she describes how the world is
coming into being in consciousness. However, in describing the consciousness
of others, the philosopher is to carry out a “thematic” or “abstractive” epoché as
well, in order to get what Husserl calls a sphere of one’s own (or primordial
sphere) on the one hand, and an “alien” sphere on the other. The objective of
this thematic epoché is to get rid of everything that has the trace of a shared
2
3
David Carr, Interpreting Husserl, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Päriser Vorträge (Husserliana, Band I), 1950.
world (like cultural objects and artefacts in general which refer back to other
people as their producers) and show their coming into being for me, in my
consciousness.
Husserl says that the primordial sphere is characterised by original
givenness, the “alien” sphere by non-original, re-presented givenness: the
difference is not temporal, logical, or foundational but lies in the mode of
givenness. However, this conception is highly problematic. As I have pointed
put, according to Husserl, it is on the basis of the experience of my own body
that I perceive someone else’s body as similar to mine; but in fact it cannot be
such a basis, since I do not perceive my body in the way as I perceive others’
bodies. It is only the perceptions of others’ bodies, seen from the outside, that
are similar to each other. This is the main problem with Husserl’s conception:
though it is true that the first-person knowledge of my self is irreducible to my
knowledge of others, it is false that this irreducibility is a foundational relation.
In fact, my knowledge of others is not founded on my knowledge of myself, but
the two kinds of knowledge intermingle. In fact, Husserl accepts not only the
irreducibility of the knowledge of myself and of the world but also the
foundational nature of the knowledge of myself with respect to the knowledge of
someone else. On Husserl’s conception of primordiality, one’s own body is not
primordial since in respect of the body, in fact I am given to myself less
adequately then others are. Whereas ideally I can perceive the body of others,
there are aspects of my own body which are never given to me intuitively. My
body stands, as it were, in the way of its cognition. In other, Husserlian words,
my own body is constituted imperfectly. And this asymmetry shows not only
that my consciousness of others is dependent upon my self-consciousness, but
also that my self-consciousness is dependent upon my consciousness of others. I
can only think of my body on the analogy of my experience of others’ bodies;
consequently, there is no such thing as a Husserlian primordial sphere without
the experience of someone else.
Although there is an essential epistemic difference between the experience
of myself, of the world and of others, there is no foundational or ontological
difference between them. They are irreducible to each other. In fact,
irreducibility implies an essential difference in the mode of access of the three
types of knowledge, not in the extent to which they are basic. Let me allude very
briefly to the way this thought is present in some most influential works of
analytical philosophy.
In a paper called States of Mind4, Quine gives a brief account of teaching
somebody a new word. To be sure, this example describes a situation in which
the speaker aims at successful communication but the description of this
situation is valid not only for verbal communication but actions as well: and this
description entails the interrelatedness of the self, others, and the world. Quine
4
William v. O. Quine, “States of Mind”, The Journal of Philosophy 82, 1985. pp.5-8.
shows that without the supposition that I know what is going on in someone
else’s mind, I cannot teach him/her a proposition about the world. When I try to
teach somebody what an object I perceive is called I always suppose that the
other also perceives what I perceive. So the constituents of the interrelation are
the following: I perceive something; I suppose that the other is perceiving
something; I suppose that we perceive one and the same thing; I tell the other
what it is called. In additon, Quine’s conception of the “indeterminacy of
translation” does not contradict my assumption that I always assume to know
what the other perceives: even if I am wrong, even if the other has something
different in mind when he/she calls what I call x x, I cannot not suppose that I
know what is in his/her mind. This is analogous to the classical problem of
spectrum inversion: even if the experience of someone who calls what I call
‘green’ ‘green’, is in fact, due to whatever, an experience of what I would call an
experience of ‘blue’, this difference, that I might never become aware of, in no
way prevents our successful communication.
This interdependence is implied in Hilary Putnam’s philosophy as well.
What I have in mind is Putnam’s thesis, illustrated by his Twin Earth thought
experiment5, that “meanings ain’t in the head”: since the world determines the
meanings, without the world there would be no meanings “in the head”. If we
suppose that there is a planet called Twin Earth which is exactly like the Earth,
with the only difference that the substance we call water is not H2O but, let’s
say, XYZ, then On Twin Earth the meaning of ‘water’ will be different because
the thing ‘water’ is different. From the point of view of our problems, Putnam’s
“anti-mentalism”, or “semantic externalism” appears to be a consequence of the
fact that I and the world are necessarily interrelated. And, in fact, he explicitly
says this in an introduction, written in 1995, to the new publication of his then
twenty-year-old paper: he says that “contrary to [...] traditional views,
knowledge of meanings is not something that is possible for a thinker in
isolation, [...] it presupposes both interactions with the world and interactions
with other language users”6.
This is even more clear if we consider Putnam’s other well-known
thought experiment7 in which he argues that the very concept of being merely a
“brain in a vat” is self-contradictory. Let us suppose that we are brains in a vat
containing nutrients, and we are manipulated through our nerve endings by a
computer. In our experience, everything looks as if we were experiencing the
world, though in fact all we receive are electronic impulses. This example might
illustrate the problem of scepticism as regards the outside world; however,
Putnam’s objective is to say something about the mind/world relationship. He
argues that “being a brain in a vat” and having the same meanings as a subject
existing in the world presupposes that meanings can be the same irrespective of
5
Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of Meaning”, in: Pessin and Goldberg eds., The Twin Earth Chronicles, 1996.
Putnam, “Meaning”, xvi.
7
Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
6
whether or not the world exists: consequently, since objects in the world
determine the meanings in the head, the “brain in a vat” assumption is selfrefuting. It is like the proposition “I do not exist” which refutes itself in the
moment of its utterance. If I am a brain in a vat, I cannot think I am a brain in a
vat; if I am not a brain in a vat, then the question is nonsense. Therefore, the
‘Brain in a Vat’ hypothesis is incoherent8. In this sense, “internal realism” is in
conformity with the irreducibility thesis.
Donald Davidson’s “triangulation” thesis, explicated in his last book9,
also seems to express the same insight. Though there is an essential difference
between the mode of access to the self, to others and to the world, these three
kinds of knowledge are irreducible to each other10. Criticising the Cartesian
tradition, Davidson argues that there is no gradual, step-by-step process from
subjectivity to objectivity: my knowledge of myself, others and the world are
interdependent. One might call it a “holistic” epistemology, in the sense that the
three types of knowledge develop simultaneously. In the moment that I identify
myself as a person, I am a person amongst others, in the world.
Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics may be seen as a forerunner of the
triangulation thesis, asserting that the “problem of other minds” cannot even be
coherently formulated11. What Strawson calls person-predicates (“P-predicates”)
are such that can only be applied to myself if they can also be applied to other
persons as well; if they could only be applied to myself, i.e., if I were the only
person in the world, it would not make sense to apply them to myself. Or, rather,
their application to myself would tantamount to applying them to no one at all.
When Strawson says that the concept of a person is a primitive one, he means
that it cannot be reduced to any other concept, i.e., it cannot be reduced to my
self-knowledge either. That is why he explicitly argues against the Cartesian
conception.
Strawson’s metaphysics is descriptive in the sense that it aims at
“describing the actual structure of our thought about the world”12. His question
is not “how is it possible that we think that there are other persons?”, but “what
kind of predicates are person-predicates”? It is evident that predicates like
“writing a letter”, “playing ball” are such that they can be ascribed not only to
myself but to others as well; but Strawson’s point is that to this type of
predicates (as opposed to a predicate like “being in pain”) it is impossible to
apply those terms in which the problem of solipsism is generally formulated.
That is, it is simply not true that in my own case I ascribe them to myself
immediately, without observational criterion, whereas in the case of another
person I apply them on the basis of observation and inference. Thereby
8
Putnam, Reason, p. 22.
Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. The title of the
present essay alludes to this book.
10
Davidson: „none of the three forms of knowledge are reducible to one or both of the others”, p.206.
11
Peter F. Strawson, Individuals, London: Methuen, 1959, p.112.
12
Strawson, p.9.
9
Strawson discards the Cartesian idea that the self-ascription of a predicate is
foundational with regards to its other-ascription. The fact that we see others’
movements as actions shows that the world is not only a world of material
objects to which material predicates may be applied, not only a solipsistic world
in which the only self is my self, but at once a common world that we share with
others. Strawson’s two basic particulars, i.e. material objects and persons are
irreducible to each other.
However, the irreducibility thesis does not imply the denial of the
asymmetry between the knowledge of myself and of someone else. Although the
other is there for me as someone experiencing the world, the way the other
experiences the world is unavailable for me immediately.
Unity of Consciousness
Irreducibility implies that the knowledge of the self is of a special kind.
But what is this self, to whom these experiences belong? Am I entitled to say
that, in addition to the stream of consciousness, there is a self as well? If there is,
I must have some kind of access to it. But what kind of access is it? Further:
what makes my consciousness a unity of consciousness? How can I know the
difference between a past consciousness of myself and a fantasy consciousness
of someone else?
Most philosophers who deny the existence of the self are showing that on
the model of perception there is no such thing13. This is Hume’s well-known
argument who held that since in reflection I can only find perceptions, and never
a self, there is no such thing as a self. By the way, this is the way Husserl
thought about the problem in his early Logical Investigations, too, explicitly
referring to Hume’s “bundle of perceptions” conception. But this involves the
model of seeing, in which case the object is by definition either something
different from me, or the object of introspection. To be sure, on an ontology that
only accepts the existence of such objects, there cannot be such an entity as a
self.
What other ways are available that would result in the acceptance of the
self? First, there is the Kantian way, the research into the conditions of
possibility. How is it possible in general that I experience an object? This is the
problem of the original, synthetic unity of transcendental apperception, the unity
of the self as the supreme condition of the possibility of experience. And,
according to the Critique of Pure Reason, the supreme condition of experience
is that we be conscious of ourselves in a certain way. In order to experience an
object, it is necessary that while I am carrying out the synthesis, I be identical
with myself. Without this, there would be no unitary experience. Kant supposes
13
Sidney Shoemaker, The First-Person Perspective and Other Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996.
that experience is going on in time: a synthesis through which the impressions
are put together. In fact, there are three syntheses going on simultaneously: the
former impressions are to be retained (apprehension), the later impressions are
to be attached to them (reproduction), and finally they are to be apprehended as
a whole (recognition). All through this, I must be aware that the moments
belong to one and the same self. If I were not aware of this, the experience
would not be unitary, would only contain an aggregate. To be sure, this self is
not the empirical subject. As Kant puts it: it is the consciousness of a subject,
not of a substance. The chapter on paralogisms shows that it would be a mistake
to interpret it as a substance.
I am directly conscious of myself, but not as an object. I am not
identifiable in the way an object is identifiable. This is what Wittgenstein called
the “subjective use” of the word “I”, as contrasted to its “objective” use, and
about which Gareth Evans says that it is not identifiable in the way an object of
perception is identifiable14 (to be sure, Evans extends the “immunity to error
through misidentification” claim to what Wittgenstein called the “objective use”
of “I” too). And this is also what Sidney Shoemaker argues for.
The point can be demonstrated by an examination of the way I perceive
myself in a mirror. The linguistic usage here is somewhat misleading, since of
course it is never myself that I see in the mirror but only a duplicate, an image of
myself. In fact, on the sole basis of what I see, I could never recognise that it is
my image. Without being conscious of myself in an immediate, non-perceptual
way, it would be impossible to identify an image as an image of myself. One
might object that I recognise myself because when I move my head in a certain
direction, I have a sense of that movement, while I also see that the mirrorimage changes in a similar way at the same time too. But the objection begs the
question: it presupposes that I am conscious that I am moving my head in a
certain direction. Moreover, it is not at all clear how I could perceive any
similarity between two such different things as a mirror-image and a gesture of
my own.
However, it would be wrong to assert that the example shows that the
consciousness of the self is antecedent to the recognition of the image as my
image. It only shows that the two are interrelated, irreducible to each other.
The question of the unity of consciousness and of the self arises, of
course, in relation to the mind/body problem as well. Let me recall Parfit’s
thought experiment15. It is about someone who is able to divide his/her stream of
consciousness into two parallel streams, and thereby can try to find the solution
to a mathematical problem simultaneously in the two streams of consciousness.
In the end he/she can decide which one to choose. But in fact Parfit presupposes
all the way the unity of consciousness. The stream can be “separated” into two
parallel streams, and later reunited only if there is a unitary centre all the way
14
15
Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Derek Parfit, “Personal Identity”, in: Philosophical Review 80, 1971, pp.3-27.
through. The thought experiment begs the question, since it presupposes unity. If
I understand Shoemaker correctly, he makes the same objection to Parfit16.
Self, Stream of Consciousness and Time
The Parfit example is relevant not only for the issue of the unity of
consciousness, but also for that of “identity over time”. By way of an
examination of the experience of time, perhaps we can give some answer to this
problem. At the same time, our account of time is to be in conformity with our
concept of the interrelation between the self, the world and others.
A typical form of the classical problem of “unity over time”: what makes
different experiences the experiences of one and the same ego? Is there some
substratum, which remains the same, while the experiences are ever changing?
Is it the same ego that had an experience twenty years ago and is having some
experience right now? But all these questions, and the very concept of “unity
over time” presupposes that there are distinct experiences which then may make
up a unity, i.e., it contains a concept of time made up of distinct now-points of
the self. But in fact the self is not to be found in distinct points of time, since
experience, whose form is time, is continuous. Time as the form of the stream of
consciousness is a network of primal impressions, retentions and protentions.
The stream of experience is not a whole made up of distinct now-points, but an
ever-changing network, in which past, present and future penetrate and
continually modify each other17.
Husserl demonstrates the temporary nature of experience on the example
of experiencing a melody. It is to be kept in mind that the subject matter of this
analysis is not the “objective” or “physical” melody but the way a melody
appears in the experience of it. On the objective model, the case seems to be
quite simple. I hear the first tone, then the second, the third, etc., and finally the
melody is over. But this conception suggests that the experience is a sequence of
now-points and is contradictory.
The first problem is that a mere sequence of “objective” tones would
never result in an experience of a melody. On the one hand, if after its
appearance each tone entirely disappeared, I would only hear independent tones,
one at a time, with no relation whatsoever. On the other hand, if the tones would
remain entirely, I would hear a harmony consisting of an ever-growing number
of tones. In fact, in the experience of a melody, the tones are retained in a
continually modified form, and after the first tone there is no “point” when there
is only one tone. With the second tone, the first is retained in a modified form,
with the third tone, the first and the second are retained, etc. What I experience
has a box-in-a-box structure. Every new tone pushes back the whole network
16
17
Shoemaker, The First-Person Perspective and Other Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (Husserliana, Band X), 1966.
made up of previous tones, while retaining them and their ever-changing relative
relations at the same time, in a modified form. This model may be extended to
the phenomenon of awakening, of dreaming, of the gradual coming to hearing of
a noise and many others. In general, this is the way meanings and intuitions
work together towards a unity that is never fully attained.
But on the basis of the example, we can make a general proposition about
the problem of the stream of consciousness. In fact, the continuous, reiterated
modifications can never become a closed whole. There never is a distinct nowpoint, but the present experience is always accompanied by a network of
retentions. That is why the meaning of an event is never fully determined. If it
were, we could never reinterpret the past and it would be impossible for
moments to appear in our lives shedding a new light on a past incident.
As to our subject matter, the experience of melody or of temporal objects
in general suggests that the unity of experience or of consciousness is not a unity
over time – if by time one means a series of now-points. Time is the form of
experience, and as such, the ever-changing intentional objects of experience are
also parts of that. Therefore, since objects are objects in a world that we share
with others, the irreducibility thesis is kept in effect, while the problem of the
self’s “unity over time” is also given some answer.
The self is an embodied, ever-present perspectival centre of experience.
However, the self does not precede or transcend the world; to the contrary, it
implies that the self is contemporary with the world of perception. In the
objective world of physics, there is no self, no centre of perspective, no firstperson viewpoint, and there is no process, no direction of time either, since they
presuppose an observer. That is why in an objective account of the world the
subjectivity of experience cannot be taken into account18. In addition, the
perspectival presence of the self is evident not only in perception but in
imagination as well. Even if I imagine a fictive world, e.g. when reading a novel
by Tolstoy, with people and objects, or a fictive world such that includes a
duplicate of myself as well, I as the one that imagines this world am the
perspectival centre. It is an undeniable feature of experience that can only be
accounted for if the subjective nature of experience is examined.
Conclusion
The knowledge of the self is not the basic, ultimate foundation of the
knowledge of others and of the world. The access to the self, to others and to the
world are not only irreducible but interrelated as well.
Though Husserl conceived of the first two moments of the
interrelationship as irreducible, he in fact failed to give a non-foundational
18
Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
account of the relation of self-knowledge and the knowledge of others.
Phenomenologists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty were right in their
criticism. These problems are also present, implicitly like in Quine or Putnam,
or explicitly like in Davidson, Strawson, Nagel and Shoemaker, in analytical
philosophy, and the answers given by them should be kept in mind also by those
philosophers who consider themselves to be continuing the phenomenological
tradition.