Husserl distinguishes two types of evidence: "self-evidence" and "indication". That which is "self-evident" is "seen" with "insight" and "clarity". The idea of clarity and distinctness as the defining characteristics of evidence goes back to Descartes, at least. That which is an "indication" signals something else; indications "point to" or "press upon" or "motivate" us conclude or presume something regarding something other than that which indicates.
If we are to take seriously that all knowledge is corrigible; if we are to be truly respectful of concepts such as "historicality" and "culture" and "the social," then we must grant that a perfectly secure grasp on meaning is impossible, that the ideal of self-evidence is precisely that, and ideal. More importantly, it is the ideal of indication and not somehow different in kind, as Husserl asserts. Heidegger, perhaps, begins to grasp this, yet remains committed to the metaphors of "clearing" and "shining." Merleau-Ponty develops this theme most adequately. He grasps the essential tension between the drive for clarity and self-evidentness--indeed, it is to be celebrated and valued--and the fact that this drive is but one amongst many that compete for attention, pushing and pulling our conscious lives down various paths. Any phenomenal character of "self-evidence," of "insight," "grasping," or "clarity," is just motivation to the highest degree. It is better characterized by "heaviness" and other gravatational metaphors. That which we seem to grasp with the utmost clarity are really that which we are most committed to, that which we cannot help but take to mean a certain something.
Showing posts with label phenomenology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label phenomenology. Show all posts
5/25/11
Don't Mind the Plurality
[edited 6/7/11]
When it comes to talking about plural subjects, or collective intentionality, or the philosophy of social phenomena in general, the toughest issue pertains to whether we should posit some unique ontological entity that is the bearer of these supra-individual states. Many philosophers, such as Michael Bratman, contend that in order to properly account for social phenomena we must work within the parameters established by an ontology of subjectivity that is limited to individual mental states, their contents, and properties. Thus, on this line of thought, social phenomena are accounted for in the “singularist” paradigm that reduces phenomena such as shared intentions and collective beliefs to the individual mental states of the constituent group members. However, other philosophers, such as Margaret Gilbert and John Searle, have persuasively argued against the singularist account—arguing that there are good grounds for committing to the existence of shared intentions and collective beliefs that are not reducible to the mental states or behaviors of individuals. And yet, Gilbert, Searle, and those sympathetic to their holistic view adamantly resist the idea that they are positing some unique “hive mind” or “group thought.” Thus, the question becomes: how can we account for social phenomena in a way that does justice to the (relative) autonomy of such phenomena (i.e. that they are non-reducible), but also without over-inflating our ontology of subjectivity?
I contend that this debate over the ontology of social phenomena would greatly benefit from some phenomenological considerations, which are largely absent from most discussions of the topic. The phenomenal character of experience (i.e., what it is like) extends beyond merely sensuous experience, and is an irreducible aspect of the content of “cognitive” experiences such as intention and belief. Thus, we may speak of the properties and features of a plural subject with psychological predicates, but we must be mindful that these are analogies. Theses analogies are possible insofar as we are all intimately acquainted with what it is like to intend or what it is like to believe in virtue of the unique phenomenal character of these mental states. We must not mind the plural subject in that we must not en-mind whatever entity ‘plural subject’ designates. On this line of argument, phenomenal character is the mark of the mental.
Accounting for plural subjects thus becomes twofold: we must understand the conceptual limitations of reduction and describe the social phenomena constituted by plural subjects as if they were an autonomous form of agency (i.e., we use psychological predicates: we talk of collective beliefs, joint commitments, and shared trauma); simultaneously, we must describe the phenomenology of being a member of a plural subject in individualist terms (for only these terms pick out the primordial phenomenon of subjectivity) that maintain the sui generis character of this unique form of experience. This twofold task can be achieved by paying specific attention to the classic phenomenological notion of empathy, which is treated as a phenomenon sui generis and is meant to account for the lived reality of social interaction.
2/22/11
The New Philosophy of Mind
Despite the popularity of criticizing Descartes’ understanding of the mind, philosophers and theorists remain in the shadow of Descartes. This is evident from the fact that endorsing a theory of mind largely means congratulating its author for being “thoroughly anti-Cartesian,” while criticism typically amounts to a theory’s remaining “too Cartesian.” Amidst the contemporary rush to de-center the mind and overthrow the Cartesian paradigm, two distinct trajectories emerge: the body and the environment. These days, there is nothing particularly radical to the assertion that the mind is thoroughly embodied. This is accepted as fact, with debates focusing on the conceptual particularities and the empirical substantiations. Slightly more radical is the idea of “the extended mind”—succinctly articulated by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in their 1998 paper by the same name—which de-centers the mind not only from the skull, but from the entire organism. Key to both trajectories are analyses of the complex set of causal relations that constitute cognition. In these analyses, something counts as a component of cognition if it plays a significant role in the causal network that enables a certain cognitive task. Debates in this field have largely focused on how significant a certain feature of the body or the environment must be in order to be counted among the causal components of cognition. For instance, the presence of oxygen is obviously an enabling condition for cognition, insofar as an organism requires it to be alive. For Clark and Chalmers, however, oxygen is not sufficiently proximal to the cognitive functions in question to actually be counted as a component of mind. Were we to extend the criterion of causal proximity too far, we would end up with a rather trivial insight, as all of the basic laws of nature would be included in cognition.
How then, are we to determine a criterion of causal proximity for determining whether a feature of the body or environment is to count as a component of cognition? This question exposes the shaky ground that theories of embodied and extended mind stand on. Malcolm MacIver, who argues that the unique structure of bat ears is responsible for a kind of non-neural cognition, falls prey to the same (ultimately Cartesian) presupposition as Clark and Chalmers when he reasons that “although we may not have a clear definition of cognition, we have some intuition about when we are closer to it or further away from it.” Indeed, we do have “some intuition” about proximity, but it is more likely than not based upon a Cartesian presupposition about what counts as cognition in the first place. I propose that we build on Descartes' insights rather than seek to demolish them. More specifically, I wish to focus on Descartes' conclusions concerning the consciousness that characterizes our cognitive states. Strictly defining cognition in functional terms (as contemporary rhetorics of embodiment and environmental embeddedness typically do) leaves out an essential property of mind--its irreducible qualitative and subjective character. The phenomenological tradition, especially Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, have never lost sight of this essential feature of mind, and thus provides a logical starting point for the reorientation that I am calling for. This is not to totally discount the value of functional analyses of cognition. To deny functionalism is not to deny function (as David Woodruff Smith often reminds us). However, if we wish to have an adequate understanding of cognition, we must account for its embodiment and environmental embeddedness without losing sight of what it is like to think--i.e., we must do the phenomenology of embodiment and the phenomenology of being-in-the-world. Only in this way can we gain a clearer understanding of our intuitions regarding what cognition is, thus putting us in a position to evaluate precisely how Cartesian we ought to be.
1/9/11
On Planning for the Future (part 2)
In my previous post I discussed the essential difference between retention and protention, with the intention to extend this analysis to the difference between recollection and thinking about the future (I have alternatively referred to thinking about the future as 'planning', which may be too narrow a term. From here, I will try to consistently use 'thinking about the future' or 'futural thinking'.)
Retention and protention are the bookends of what I call the micro-structure of time-consciousness. Recollection and planning are parts of the macro-structure of time-consciousness, which is more complex. The macro-structure of time-consciousness is accomplished through our "narrativizing faculty." That is, the narratives one constructs about her past and potential future constitute her autobiographical sense of self. Recollection and planning both participate in the phenomenological form of this narrativizing activity. Thus, when we think about the future, we are essentially "recalling memories" that we do not have (but wish to have; fear having; etc.)
As I said in my previous post, an essential difference between retention and protention can be cashed out in terms of their differing levels of determinateness of the content and context. Whereas retention has a determinate content and context, protention has a more or less determinate context but a necessarily unfulfilled content. However, this "essential difference" does not exhaust the difference between retention and protention. Protention, with its unfulfilled character, is affective. That is, the content of protentions is made determinate through the unfolding of time in a uni-directional manner. The phenomenal character of this "filling-in" is thus affective in the sense that we experience it as happening to us. Thus, protentional contents have a certain valence, or power to affect us, to varying degrees.
The reason we must be cautious with our thinking of the future is precisely because the emotional/valence aspect of protention is narratively affective on the level of maco-temporal consciousness. We view, and thus (e)value(ate) ourselves in light of our pasts and in anticipation of some future. The past is determinate but the possibility of the future is delimited by the context provided it by our past. Thus, it makes sense to say that we think of our future--through planning, hoping, fearing, desiring--in a formally similar way as we think of our past.
We are greatly affected by what we perceive to be our potential futures. The power of this affect only makes one more prone to self-fulfill the 'motivated' and thus delimited possible path through life. The more one becomes attuned to the infinity of logical possibility, one is able to become infinitely more hopeful; but also potentially infinitely more wrought with despair.
There is a danger here, however. While it makes psychological sense to assert that our fantasized futures are constrained by, even dependent upon, our past experiences; this runs the risk of forgetting or covering over the logical truth by virtue of which our futures are generally much more open and indeterminate than we typically imagine them to be. Our everyday understanding of what "could" happen is really just a misunderstanding of what will "probably" happen.
Notice that this forgetting is not necessarily good or bad for any particular group. Some individuals probably conceive of their futures in much too positive a light, while others are generally much too negative. Those unfailing optimists should recognize that a vast horizon of misfortune potentially awaits them, while those miserable misanthropes need to learn to see the light a bit more.
Our consciousness of the future generally conforms to how the future unfolds. This is more true for protention than it is for macro-level anticipation/planning. The further off into the futural horizon one abstracts, the broader the transverse horizon of meaningful possibility expands. As a subject approaches a fixed point in the future, the phenomenological horizon of possibility contracts, while the logical horizon does not. While it would be absurd to always pay heed to the logical horizon of possibility, it is wise to pay more attention to it more often than not. It is a humbling viewpoint which makes one cautious with words, thoughts, and deeds.
Retention and protention are the bookends of what I call the micro-structure of time-consciousness. Recollection and planning are parts of the macro-structure of time-consciousness, which is more complex. The macro-structure of time-consciousness is accomplished through our "narrativizing faculty." That is, the narratives one constructs about her past and potential future constitute her autobiographical sense of self. Recollection and planning both participate in the phenomenological form of this narrativizing activity. Thus, when we think about the future, we are essentially "recalling memories" that we do not have (but wish to have; fear having; etc.)
As I said in my previous post, an essential difference between retention and protention can be cashed out in terms of their differing levels of determinateness of the content and context. Whereas retention has a determinate content and context, protention has a more or less determinate context but a necessarily unfulfilled content. However, this "essential difference" does not exhaust the difference between retention and protention. Protention, with its unfulfilled character, is affective. That is, the content of protentions is made determinate through the unfolding of time in a uni-directional manner. The phenomenal character of this "filling-in" is thus affective in the sense that we experience it as happening to us. Thus, protentional contents have a certain valence, or power to affect us, to varying degrees.
The reason we must be cautious with our thinking of the future is precisely because the emotional/valence aspect of protention is narratively affective on the level of maco-temporal consciousness. We view, and thus (e)value(ate) ourselves in light of our pasts and in anticipation of some future. The past is determinate but the possibility of the future is delimited by the context provided it by our past. Thus, it makes sense to say that we think of our future--through planning, hoping, fearing, desiring--in a formally similar way as we think of our past.
We are greatly affected by what we perceive to be our potential futures. The power of this affect only makes one more prone to self-fulfill the 'motivated' and thus delimited possible path through life. The more one becomes attuned to the infinity of logical possibility, one is able to become infinitely more hopeful; but also potentially infinitely more wrought with despair.
There is a danger here, however. While it makes psychological sense to assert that our fantasized futures are constrained by, even dependent upon, our past experiences; this runs the risk of forgetting or covering over the logical truth by virtue of which our futures are generally much more open and indeterminate than we typically imagine them to be. Our everyday understanding of what "could" happen is really just a misunderstanding of what will "probably" happen.
Notice that this forgetting is not necessarily good or bad for any particular group. Some individuals probably conceive of their futures in much too positive a light, while others are generally much too negative. Those unfailing optimists should recognize that a vast horizon of misfortune potentially awaits them, while those miserable misanthropes need to learn to see the light a bit more.
Our consciousness of the future generally conforms to how the future unfolds. This is more true for protention than it is for macro-level anticipation/planning. The further off into the futural horizon one abstracts, the broader the transverse horizon of meaningful possibility expands. As a subject approaches a fixed point in the future, the phenomenological horizon of possibility contracts, while the logical horizon does not. While it would be absurd to always pay heed to the logical horizon of possibility, it is wise to pay more attention to it more often than not. It is a humbling viewpoint which makes one cautious with words, thoughts, and deeds.
1/4/11
On Planning for the Future (part 1)
While watching a fascinating TED talk last night on the difference between the "experiencing self" and the "remembering self", I was struck by the connection I could draw to some recent reading I've been doing on time-consciousness. I'm almost done Evan Thompson's Mind in Life, which is an ambitious work on phenomenology, cognitive science, and the philosophy of biology. Thompson covers everything from cellular biology to Husserlian analyses of empathy, enculturation, visual perception, and, as I will discuss here today, time-consciousness. The line from the TED talk (btw, check out the compendious collection of TED talks, they are great!) that really struck me was along the lines of: "When we think about our future, we think about memories we anticipate having." This means that one's form of thinking about the future shares in (some, if not all of) the essential features of recollection. As someone who has thought time-consciousness and the phenomenal character of recollection before, this really got me thinking. I will proceed with two posts: this one will cover some of the "nuts and bolts" of Husserl's analysis of time-consciousness; the next one will be more speculative and probably conclude with some sentences using the word "ought".
The analysis of time-consciousness occupies one of the most important places in phenomenology. The syntheses that constitute both the objects of experience, and the experiences themselves, are temporal syntheses. Husserl shed a great deal of ink analyzing both types of constitution; the former are constituted in "objective time" while the latter are constituted in "immanent time." Both levels of temporality are constituted by an underlying, bedrock "absolute flow," which is essentially forward moving, unfolding in a three-part structure. "Primal impressions" are the absolute now-point of consciousness--the "knife-edge" of the specious present. Primal impressions make no reference to what-has-just-passed or what-is-about-to-come. But we don't experience the present as a series of "knife-edge" moments. We experience the present as a "duration block" (William James). That is, while time flows along, our experience of it is "chunky." The present chunk of temporal experience is constituted by the primal impression and its relation to what has just passed but remains in consciousness--retentions. When one hears a melody, her experience of the presently sounding note is affected by the note that has just sounded. Similarly, one's experience of the present note is conditioned by her anticipation of what is imminently to follow--protention. Thus, the threefold structure retention-primal impression-protention is a formal invariant structure of our experience of time.
In a chapter titled "Primordial Dynamism" in his Mind in Life, Evan Thompson considers protention's essential difference from retention:
"In thinking about time-consciousness, it is easy to assume that protention is simply the reverse or inverse of retention and thus that the threefold structure of temporality is symmetrical. But this can be the case for several reasons" (360).
The principle difference between retention and protention can be articulated in terms of the determinateness of the content of these respective time-phases. The retentional character of temporal experience takes the form of "what's-having-just-been." If one were to cash out a retention in propositional form, both the context (conditions necessary for determining the meaning of a proposition) and content (immanent meaningful object of experience) would be determinate. That is, what's-having-just-been is not subject to change. It is contingent in the sense that things could have gone otherwise, but it is necessary in that the past is fixed. The protentional aspect of experience, on the other hand, takes the form of "what-has-yet-to-come." If one were to spell out a protention in propositional form, the context would be more or less determinate, but the content remains necessarily unfulfilled. Here, I say the context is more or less determinate in that when we are experiencing the specious present, background conditions such as physical location, surrounding objects, natural laws, etc, are operant such that any change in them would result in massive shock to one's temporal consciousness. The content of the what-has-yet-to-come remains necessarily unfulfilled in that there is an openness to a horizon of possibility underlying the forward flow of time. Thus, while we may have a very good sense of what is about to happen, we can never be sure.
Here's an example to clarify some things:
As I sit here at my desk typing away, the background conditions defining the context of my experience are "sedimented" as they define my experience with great regularity. I do not find myself instantly teleported to another location. The furniture in the room does not start floating. Nothing dissipates into thin air, etc. Were anything like this to happen, it would cause massive shock to my temporal consciousness. I.e. "what the hell!!!" Whereas, let's say all of a sudden I see a spider crawling up the wall next to me. I was not expecting this, but it does not come as a shock, only a mild surprise at best. The difference between the two scenarios (the first being "shocking" and the second being "unexpected") is that the first involves an alteration to the context of the proposition that would be used to articulate the meaning of a protention, whereas the latter involves a uniform context inherited from my retentions while the content is filled in with something I didn't expect (the spider).
In my next post, I will consider whether the necessity of unfulfilled content characterizing protention fully exhausts the phenomenological difference between protention and retention. I will argue (following Thompson) that protention is a necessarily affective experience, thus involving emotion and valence. I will go on to consider the implications of this analysis for the difference between recollection and fantasizing about the future, and if this tells us anything about how we ought to think about our futures.
The analysis of time-consciousness occupies one of the most important places in phenomenology. The syntheses that constitute both the objects of experience, and the experiences themselves, are temporal syntheses. Husserl shed a great deal of ink analyzing both types of constitution; the former are constituted in "objective time" while the latter are constituted in "immanent time." Both levels of temporality are constituted by an underlying, bedrock "absolute flow," which is essentially forward moving, unfolding in a three-part structure. "Primal impressions" are the absolute now-point of consciousness--the "knife-edge" of the specious present. Primal impressions make no reference to what-has-just-passed or what-is-about-to-come. But we don't experience the present as a series of "knife-edge" moments. We experience the present as a "duration block" (William James). That is, while time flows along, our experience of it is "chunky." The present chunk of temporal experience is constituted by the primal impression and its relation to what has just passed but remains in consciousness--retentions. When one hears a melody, her experience of the presently sounding note is affected by the note that has just sounded. Similarly, one's experience of the present note is conditioned by her anticipation of what is imminently to follow--protention. Thus, the threefold structure retention-primal impression-protention is a formal invariant structure of our experience of time.
In a chapter titled "Primordial Dynamism" in his Mind in Life, Evan Thompson considers protention's essential difference from retention:
"In thinking about time-consciousness, it is easy to assume that protention is simply the reverse or inverse of retention and thus that the threefold structure of temporality is symmetrical. But this can be the case for several reasons" (360).
The principle difference between retention and protention can be articulated in terms of the determinateness of the content of these respective time-phases. The retentional character of temporal experience takes the form of "what's-having-just-been." If one were to cash out a retention in propositional form, both the context (conditions necessary for determining the meaning of a proposition) and content (immanent meaningful object of experience) would be determinate. That is, what's-having-just-been is not subject to change. It is contingent in the sense that things could have gone otherwise, but it is necessary in that the past is fixed. The protentional aspect of experience, on the other hand, takes the form of "what-has-yet-to-come." If one were to spell out a protention in propositional form, the context would be more or less determinate, but the content remains necessarily unfulfilled. Here, I say the context is more or less determinate in that when we are experiencing the specious present, background conditions such as physical location, surrounding objects, natural laws, etc, are operant such that any change in them would result in massive shock to one's temporal consciousness. The content of the what-has-yet-to-come remains necessarily unfulfilled in that there is an openness to a horizon of possibility underlying the forward flow of time. Thus, while we may have a very good sense of what is about to happen, we can never be sure.
Here's an example to clarify some things:
As I sit here at my desk typing away, the background conditions defining the context of my experience are "sedimented" as they define my experience with great regularity. I do not find myself instantly teleported to another location. The furniture in the room does not start floating. Nothing dissipates into thin air, etc. Were anything like this to happen, it would cause massive shock to my temporal consciousness. I.e. "what the hell!!!" Whereas, let's say all of a sudden I see a spider crawling up the wall next to me. I was not expecting this, but it does not come as a shock, only a mild surprise at best. The difference between the two scenarios (the first being "shocking" and the second being "unexpected") is that the first involves an alteration to the context of the proposition that would be used to articulate the meaning of a protention, whereas the latter involves a uniform context inherited from my retentions while the content is filled in with something I didn't expect (the spider).
In my next post, I will consider whether the necessity of unfulfilled content characterizing protention fully exhausts the phenomenological difference between protention and retention. I will argue (following Thompson) that protention is a necessarily affective experience, thus involving emotion and valence. I will go on to consider the implications of this analysis for the difference between recollection and fantasizing about the future, and if this tells us anything about how we ought to think about our futures.
9/29/10
Rorty's words, my mouth
A DIALOGUE DERIVED FROM SEGMENTS OF RICHARD RORTY'S "DANIEL DENNETT ON INTRINSICALITY" (TRUTH AND PROGRESS, 1998):
For those like Rorty, who wish to explain away phenomenology, a first-person point of view, is (supposedly) a point of view that produces knowledge of intrinsic, nonrelational properties of mental events. This is partially true, but in painting their primary targets (Nagel, Searle) as concerned with a mysterious form of knowing, they may overlook the actual phenomenological tradition which posits no such thing. From a phenomenological perspective, forms of reference and forms of belief are founded on phenomenological forms of experience. So if we wish to satisfy Rorty and Dennett on their own terms, we must come up with entities like "phenomenal concepts" which are concepts possessed in virtue of "having had an experience." But even this way of painting things is a distraction. To cut right to the heart of the matter, we must argue against Rorty and Dennett by coming up with convincing ways of talking about experience that makes it logically prior to reference and belief.
But what does this involve, and why ought we to do it?
What we are really talking about here is getting the skeptics to accept an ontological category--"experiential," "phenomenal," "qualia," or something like that. We are arguing for a notion of consciousness that is not exhausted by the relations it stands in--a notion of what consciousness is intrinsically.
Intrinsic? Sounds mysterious. Everything is just language anyway. Why posit such mysterious things?
One will be able to defend the claim that there are intrinsic, non-relational features of objects only if one can claim that knowledge of those feature is not the same as knowledge of how to use the words one employs to describe those features.
So now there's a form of knowledge that is, by definition, ineffable? Sounds fishy. When will you realize that these are pseudo-problems? Dennett has already explained that it is enough to explain why there seems to be phenomenology--why it seems as if "there's a difference between thinking something seems pink to you and something really seeming pink to you.
On Nagel's view, Dennett's claim that "there are no qualities, only judgments," is a product of his "Procrustean conception of scientific objectivity." Nagel thinks that a non-Procrustean conception would make room for phenomenological data by allowing for "objective standards that combine the first- and third-person points of view.
Ok, suppose I allow you, as Rorty would, that "qualia" could be a coherent part of a category scheme?
Ah, Rorty is always a lot of talk, but at the end will tone it down and just say: "To forswear intrinsicality is merely to say that we should replace "intrinsic feature of X" with "feature unlikely to be woven out of our descrpitions of X." And to this I reply, "Ok, but we should actually keep in our category scheme. It's worth having around."
At which point he would undoubtedly appeal to meta-philosophical reasons. Something like, "we should just talk about relieving human suffering. We should stop talking about whether anything is intrinsically worth anything. Such talk creates more problems than it solves."
I'm sure he would, and Nagel would reply by pointing out that the sources of philosophy are pre-verbal and often pre-cultural, and one of its most difficult tasks is to express unformed but intuitively felt problems in language without losing them.
But we all know from Wittgenstein that it make sense to say that someone is or is not using a concept correctly only against the background of the possibility of agreement and identifiable disagreement in judgments employing the concept. So let's just drop those concepts that lead to undue suffering.
Accepting that claim would mean that "what there is or what is true" is limited to what we "could discover or conceive of or describe in some extension of human language." To believe that is to give up on what Nagel calls "the ambition of transcendence." Nagel thinks that the willingness of recent philosophers (such as Wittgenstein, Ryle, Sellars, Davidson, and Dennett) to renounce this ambition is a sign of spiritual degeneration. Attempts like Dennett's to change the language in order to help us actively forget troublesome old intuitions are symptoms of a childish rebellion against the philosophical impulse itself.
Nagel's ambition of transcendence is not the tough-minded commitment to intellectual honesty he thinks it, but rather a tender-minded yearing for an impossible stability and order--a kind of yearning William James deplored in the opening chapter of his Pragmatism. There is nothing like what Carnap called "the language" and Husserl called "eidetic structures." All of these "pre-verbal philosophical impulses"were supposed to play the role of canon fixer, the sort of role Conan Doyle played for [Sherlock] Holmes.
Indeed, Nagel thinks that the content of some thoughts transcend every form they can take in the human mind. And perhaps this sounds dubious. However, it is worthwhile to keep trying to use language, in a rigorous and systematic way, to account for unformed but intuitively felt problems. So the issue about who is more spiritually degenerate than whom depends on whether you think it more robust to describe yourself in the Darwinian terms that Dewey, Davidson, and Dennett use to describe themselves, or whether you think it more robust to keep you eyes on something on the other side of a gap, the sort of object that is "more" than just a center of descriptive gravity. Nagel's The View from Nowhere is one of the few books that articulates its author's moral sensibility and that recognizes that philosophical argument will sooner or later run up against the limits set by such sensibility. So, like Nagel, I recognize that Rorty, and cynics like him, can reply with equal meta-philosophical force and argue that it is worthwhile and important for human beings to renounce the ambition of transcendence to which Nagel remains faithful. I continue to find inspiration in Husserl for a phenomenologically informed theory of value that could provide, as Rorty would require of it, a very useful way of talking about human progress, value, and truth.
For those like Rorty, who wish to explain away phenomenology, a first-person point of view, is (supposedly) a point of view that produces knowledge of intrinsic, nonrelational properties of mental events. This is partially true, but in painting their primary targets (Nagel, Searle) as concerned with a mysterious form of knowing, they may overlook the actual phenomenological tradition which posits no such thing. From a phenomenological perspective, forms of reference and forms of belief are founded on phenomenological forms of experience. So if we wish to satisfy Rorty and Dennett on their own terms, we must come up with entities like "phenomenal concepts" which are concepts possessed in virtue of "having had an experience." But even this way of painting things is a distraction. To cut right to the heart of the matter, we must argue against Rorty and Dennett by coming up with convincing ways of talking about experience that makes it logically prior to reference and belief.
But what does this involve, and why ought we to do it?
What we are really talking about here is getting the skeptics to accept an ontological category--"experiential," "phenomenal," "qualia," or something like that. We are arguing for a notion of consciousness that is not exhausted by the relations it stands in--a notion of what consciousness is intrinsically.
Intrinsic? Sounds mysterious. Everything is just language anyway. Why posit such mysterious things?
One will be able to defend the claim that there are intrinsic, non-relational features of objects only if one can claim that knowledge of those feature is not the same as knowledge of how to use the words one employs to describe those features.
So now there's a form of knowledge that is, by definition, ineffable? Sounds fishy. When will you realize that these are pseudo-problems? Dennett has already explained that it is enough to explain why there seems to be phenomenology--why it seems as if "there's a difference between thinking something seems pink to you and something really seeming pink to you.
On Nagel's view, Dennett's claim that "there are no qualities, only judgments," is a product of his "Procrustean conception of scientific objectivity." Nagel thinks that a non-Procrustean conception would make room for phenomenological data by allowing for "objective standards that combine the first- and third-person points of view.
Ok, suppose I allow you, as Rorty would, that "qualia" could be a coherent part of a category scheme?
Ah, Rorty is always a lot of talk, but at the end will tone it down and just say: "To forswear intrinsicality is merely to say that we should replace "intrinsic feature of X" with "feature unlikely to be woven out of our descrpitions of X." And to this I reply, "Ok, but we should actually keep in our category scheme. It's worth having around."
At which point he would undoubtedly appeal to meta-philosophical reasons. Something like, "we should just talk about relieving human suffering. We should stop talking about whether anything is intrinsically worth anything. Such talk creates more problems than it solves."
I'm sure he would, and Nagel would reply by pointing out that the sources of philosophy are pre-verbal and often pre-cultural, and one of its most difficult tasks is to express unformed but intuitively felt problems in language without losing them.
But we all know from Wittgenstein that it make sense to say that someone is or is not using a concept correctly only against the background of the possibility of agreement and identifiable disagreement in judgments employing the concept. So let's just drop those concepts that lead to undue suffering.
Accepting that claim would mean that "what there is or what is true" is limited to what we "could discover or conceive of or describe in some extension of human language." To believe that is to give up on what Nagel calls "the ambition of transcendence." Nagel thinks that the willingness of recent philosophers (such as Wittgenstein, Ryle, Sellars, Davidson, and Dennett) to renounce this ambition is a sign of spiritual degeneration. Attempts like Dennett's to change the language in order to help us actively forget troublesome old intuitions are symptoms of a childish rebellion against the philosophical impulse itself.
Nagel's ambition of transcendence is not the tough-minded commitment to intellectual honesty he thinks it, but rather a tender-minded yearing for an impossible stability and order--a kind of yearning William James deplored in the opening chapter of his Pragmatism. There is nothing like what Carnap called "the language" and Husserl called "eidetic structures." All of these "pre-verbal philosophical impulses"were supposed to play the role of canon fixer, the sort of role Conan Doyle played for [Sherlock] Holmes.
Indeed, Nagel thinks that the content of some thoughts transcend every form they can take in the human mind. And perhaps this sounds dubious. However, it is worthwhile to keep trying to use language, in a rigorous and systematic way, to account for unformed but intuitively felt problems. So the issue about who is more spiritually degenerate than whom depends on whether you think it more robust to describe yourself in the Darwinian terms that Dewey, Davidson, and Dennett use to describe themselves, or whether you think it more robust to keep you eyes on something on the other side of a gap, the sort of object that is "more" than just a center of descriptive gravity. Nagel's The View from Nowhere is one of the few books that articulates its author's moral sensibility and that recognizes that philosophical argument will sooner or later run up against the limits set by such sensibility. So, like Nagel, I recognize that Rorty, and cynics like him, can reply with equal meta-philosophical force and argue that it is worthwhile and important for human beings to renounce the ambition of transcendence to which Nagel remains faithful. I continue to find inspiration in Husserl for a phenomenologically informed theory of value that could provide, as Rorty would require of it, a very useful way of talking about human progress, value, and truth.
8/10/10
Phenomenological Lottery
The last post was quite technical, I realize. So in this post I will do some similar phenomenological work, but on a more basic kind of experience, and in a more plain manner, as I am basically winging this right now.
During a recent conversation with an associate, in which I brought up a favorite topic of mine: winning the lottery, I did some quick phenomenological reflection and was able to come up with a very precise way to account for both the similarities and differences between our experiences. Some meta-reflection on what had just happened made me appreciate and understand phenomenology more, which I'll say more about later. The conversation went something like this:
I brought up how much I love fantasizing about winning the lottery. (Its true! I don't know exactly why, but I simply love thinking about what I would do with millions of dollars. Whether I would actually do any of these things is of course impossible to determine. But the fact remains that I derive great joy from simply thinking about such things, which I think is at least modest evidence for the fact that I would actually do them...anyway...). My associate told an amazing story about how a friend of his had bought him a modest amount of stock in a bio-tech company. After awhile he received a message from his friend telling him that the stock had gone up five-hundred percent. Mistakenly thinking that five-hundred percent meant 500X the initial investment instead of what it actually means--5X (still not bad at all!)--my associate spent an entire day unaware of his error. This is a fascinating set-up because it means that my associate spent about a day of his life as a millionaire. It is sufficient, but not necessary, to actually be a millionaire in order to spend a day as a millionaire. All that is is needed to spend a day as a millionaire, technically, is the assured belief that one is a millionaire. Thus, my associate spent that day literally mapping his empire, planning his various degrees of charity and largess, contemplating how to live with the inevitable joy that awaited him in his newly acquired wealth. Of course, all of this came to an abrupt end upon realizing the magnitude of his mathematical error. But nevertheless, all of this is enough to ground the truth of the statement that my associate knows what its like to be a millionaire in a way that I never have. While we have both entertained the same propositional content, namely "I am a millionaire", we have entertained it in completely different ways. My associate believed that he was a millionaire, for however brief a time. I will never have such a belief, unless I actually win the lottery or fall prey to some similar drunken math. I have only hoped to be a millionaire, and imagined being a millionaire.
The phenomenological point is that the overall content of the experience is best articulated by taking into account both properties of the object of consciousness "I am a millionaire" and properties of the experience of the object of consciousness "believing", "wishing", "imagining" etc.
As for my metareflections on phenomenology, the whole experience of sharing these stories and then thinking about them in this way made me realize that my phenomenological training may amount to something like: the ability to make very fine and precise distinctions between both the types and tokens of objects, properties, and other sorts of categories in a very consistent way that allows for a standardized form in which to compare experiences. A bit of a mouthful, but I'm working on it. I'm beginning to realize that doing phenomenology means constantly formulating an ever clearer and more concise definition of phenomenology.
During a recent conversation with an associate, in which I brought up a favorite topic of mine: winning the lottery, I did some quick phenomenological reflection and was able to come up with a very precise way to account for both the similarities and differences between our experiences. Some meta-reflection on what had just happened made me appreciate and understand phenomenology more, which I'll say more about later. The conversation went something like this:
I brought up how much I love fantasizing about winning the lottery. (Its true! I don't know exactly why, but I simply love thinking about what I would do with millions of dollars. Whether I would actually do any of these things is of course impossible to determine. But the fact remains that I derive great joy from simply thinking about such things, which I think is at least modest evidence for the fact that I would actually do them...anyway...). My associate told an amazing story about how a friend of his had bought him a modest amount of stock in a bio-tech company. After awhile he received a message from his friend telling him that the stock had gone up five-hundred percent. Mistakenly thinking that five-hundred percent meant 500X the initial investment instead of what it actually means--5X (still not bad at all!)--my associate spent an entire day unaware of his error. This is a fascinating set-up because it means that my associate spent about a day of his life as a millionaire. It is sufficient, but not necessary, to actually be a millionaire in order to spend a day as a millionaire. All that is is needed to spend a day as a millionaire, technically, is the assured belief that one is a millionaire. Thus, my associate spent that day literally mapping his empire, planning his various degrees of charity and largess, contemplating how to live with the inevitable joy that awaited him in his newly acquired wealth. Of course, all of this came to an abrupt end upon realizing the magnitude of his mathematical error. But nevertheless, all of this is enough to ground the truth of the statement that my associate knows what its like to be a millionaire in a way that I never have. While we have both entertained the same propositional content, namely "I am a millionaire"
The phenomenological point is that the overall content of the experience is best articulated by taking into account both properties of the object of consciousness "I am a millionaire" and properties of the experience of the object of consciousness "believing", "wishing", "imagining"
As for my metareflections on phenomenology, the whole experience of sharing these stories and then thinking about them in this way made me realize that my phenomenological training may amount to something like: the ability to make very fine and precise distinctions between both the types and tokens of objects, properties, and other sorts of categories in a very consistent way that allows for a standardized form in which to compare experiences. A bit of a mouthful, but I'm working on it. I'm beginning to realize that doing phenomenology means constantly formulating an ever clearer and more concise definition of phenomenology.
7/21/10
Absorption & Reflection
I want to draw a contrast between absorption and reflection. This has vague historical influences, but if it turns out that I am misreading Heidegger or misappropriating something, just focus on the concepts and not where they may have come from. By "absorption" I mean the modality of experience where one is "absorbed" in an activity. We typically speak of athletes and musicians being "absorbed" in their activities, unaware of "what" they are doing insofar as they are simply doing. In this sort of mode the boundary between subject and object seems blurry. By "reflection" I mean the modality of experience where one "steps back" and "regards" the very activity they are undertaking. Philosophy has typically been done in a reflective way--attempting to step back from the immediacy of experience in order to gain a third person perspective on things so that the structure, or logic, of experience can be made explicit.
Does Heidegger favor absorption to reflection? If so, I see his romanticization of absorption as problematic, and open to a relativization or complete degeneration of moral life. On Heidegger's account, we have gradually "forgotten" Being as such. We have forgotten how to be authentically attuned to the world, how to authentically be-IN-the-world. I characterize this as our movement from absorption to reflection. Nietzsche speaks of something similar, vis a vis the movement from master to slave morality. Or we could examine Richard Moran's recent classic, Authority and Estrangement. We are, indeed, increasingly estranged from our biological heritage- from our absorption in the practical concerns of surviving in nature. But this estrangement brings authority. As we are increasingly able to step back to reflect, we are increasingly moral. Following Levinas, we can see estrangement as the condition for the possibility of ethics. One's confrontation with oneself is the a priori condition for the ethical encounter with the other. When absorbed in playful, spontaneous, or violent activity, the other is but a feature of my world--and this is not the world. This is my world; my consciousness has absorbed it into the activity which consumes both self and world. In this mode, the other is subject to my activity and has no ethical standing.
Does Heidegger favor absorption to reflection? If so, I see his romanticization of absorption as problematic, and open to a relativization or complete degeneration of moral life. On Heidegger's account, we have gradually "forgotten" Being as such. We have forgotten how to be authentically attuned to the world, how to authentically be-IN-the-world. I characterize this as our movement from absorption to reflection. Nietzsche speaks of something similar, vis a vis the movement from master to slave morality. Or we could examine Richard Moran's recent classic, Authority and Estrangement. We are, indeed, increasingly estranged from our biological heritage- from our absorption in the practical concerns of surviving in nature. But this estrangement brings authority. As we are increasingly able to step back to reflect, we are increasingly moral. Following Levinas, we can see estrangement as the condition for the possibility of ethics. One's confrontation with oneself is the a priori condition for the ethical encounter with the other. When absorbed in playful, spontaneous, or violent activity, the other is but a feature of my world--and this is not the world. This is my world; my consciousness has absorbed it into the activity which consumes both self and world. In this mode, the other is subject to my activity and has no ethical standing.
6/1/10
Kant's Majesty
Passages like this will always keep me coming back to Kant:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not need to search for them and merely conjecture them as though they were veiled in obscurity or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence. The first begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense and extends the connection in which I stand into an unbounded magnitude with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into the unbounded times of their periodic motion, their beginning and their duration. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and presents me in a world which has true infinity but which can be discovered only by the understanding, and I cognize that my connection with that world (and thereby with all those visible worlds as well) is not merely contingent, as in the first case, but universal and necessary. The first view of a countless magnitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital force (one knows not how) must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came. The second, on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as this may be inferred from the purposive determination of my existence by this law, a determination not restricted to the conditions and boundaries of this life but reaching into the infinite.
-Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge 1996.
One might argue that the whole of philosophy is contained in this passage. Kant touches on contingency, necessity, time, space, and morality with grace and precision. Additionally, he does this with a phenomenological tone: there is something that its like to have this most unique perspective, that of the zoon logon echon (animal having reason)--our being-in-the-world as well as our being-beyond-the-world.
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not need to search for them and merely conjecture them as though they were veiled in obscurity or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence. The first begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense and extends the connection in which I stand into an unbounded magnitude with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into the unbounded times of their periodic motion, their beginning and their duration. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and presents me in a world which has true infinity but which can be discovered only by the understanding, and I cognize that my connection with that world (and thereby with all those visible worlds as well) is not merely contingent, as in the first case, but universal and necessary. The first view of a countless magnitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital force (one knows not how) must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came. The second, on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as this may be inferred from the purposive determination of my existence by this law, a determination not restricted to the conditions and boundaries of this life but reaching into the infinite.
-Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge 1996.
One might argue that the whole of philosophy is contained in this passage. Kant touches on contingency, necessity, time, space, and morality with grace and precision. Additionally, he does this with a phenomenological tone: there is something that its like to have this most unique perspective, that of the zoon logon echon (animal having reason)--our being-in-the-world as well as our being-beyond-the-world.
5/5/10
the Quantified Self
A recent article in the Times opened my eyes to a growing movement- the "data-driven life." There are many dedicated "self-trackers" out there now, who are taking advantage of increasingly small, light, and affordable technology (or simply just know-how sometimes) to diligently track various aspects of their lives. Think of this as keeping a journal on steroids. Keep track of your workouts? Why not write an app that lets you chart every aspect of your progress, where a heartrate/CO2 monitor as well, and correlate the data over months at time, while comparing it to the calorie counting data you have kept- all in order to gaze in what many are considering the most accurate mirror possible.
These sorts of specialized projects--tracking one's sleep, diet, concentration, coffee intake, flaxseed-influenced cognitive performance, etc.--point to an exciting, but possibly terrifying, trend in how to approach the famous Delphic dictum- "Know thyself." For so long, self-knowledge has been conceived as a sort of primitive access one has to one's own mental life. 'Insight', 'intuition', 'reflection', 'introspection', and 'meditation' have variously described this sort of privileged access. But why not approach self-knowledge scientifically? Something about these projects strike me as very true. They show how 'technology' is not a concept whose extension is limited to human artifacts. Technological artifacts embody a way of thinking- the technological mode of thought. This way of thinking is arguably the distinctively human mode of thought, insofar as humans are unique in their technological mastery over nature. A tool based approach to ourselves may be what allows evolution to continue beyond 'human'- to what we can now only label as 'post-human'. The inadequacy of this label resides in the fact that its meaning is purely dependent on what 'human' means in the first place. But what "post-humanists" have been postulating, roughly, is that technology will enable us to overcome our material bodies, and exist in a "nous[mind]-sphere" of pure consciousness. The Cartesian dream may have in fact been the offspring of the more primal human desire to overcome the so obviously imperfect, transitory sphere of nature and dwell in the eternal, perfect realm of pure spirit. Heck, maybe it all goes back to Plato afterall. Regardless, much of phenomenology and post-WWII european thought has been focused on Descartes' error to separate mind and body, and the pathologies it has bequeathed to Western culture. The later Husserl, Heidegger, and especially Merleau-Ponty have taught us that consciousness is fundamentally embodied, and that to separate our lived-bodily awareness from a higher sphere of consciousness is a mistake. We are insofar as we are in the world, you might say. Again, to be rough, this tradition has developed a suspicion of technology, aware of its artifacts as indicating a mode of thought- a mode of thought that leads to dehumanization, most evident in the wars of the 20th century, Auschwitz as their mechanized culmination. One of the purported reasons Heidegger grew dissatisfied with the Nazi party is that he recognized their overly technological form of domination as inauthentic.
I, for one, see both of these outlooks on technology--as the promise of overcoming our feeble condition, and as the promise of coldly slaughtering our fellow man--as excess and deficiency. We must avoid the excessive optimism of the 'post-humanists' who blindly praise every advance in technology as "progress". Yet the utter skepticism and cynicism regarding technology from the opposite pole is also guilty of blind generalization. Technology is not monolithic. An honest evaluation of technology is one that recognizes various technologies. Don Ihde is a notable exception to the vicious trend in the history of the philosophy of technology. Ihde recognizes that the various sense modalities create vastly different kinds of technology--all allowing for humans to extend their knowledge of nature in vastly divergent directions. A mature view of technology recognizes self-tracking and the data driven life as valiant efforts at self-knowledge. Ones that must be tempered with constant reminders that the data is merely one aspect--one of many that makes us human.
These sorts of specialized projects--tracking one's sleep, diet, concentration, coffee intake, flaxseed-influenced cognitive performance, etc.--point to an exciting, but possibly terrifying, trend in how to approach the famous Delphic dictum- "Know thyself." For so long, self-knowledge has been conceived as a sort of primitive access one has to one's own mental life. 'Insight', 'intuition', 'reflection', 'introspection', and 'meditation' have variously described this sort of privileged access. But why not approach self-knowledge scientifically? Something about these projects strike me as very true. They show how 'technology' is not a concept whose extension is limited to human artifacts. Technological artifacts embody a way of thinking- the technological mode of thought. This way of thinking is arguably the distinctively human mode of thought, insofar as humans are unique in their technological mastery over nature. A tool based approach to ourselves may be what allows evolution to continue beyond 'human'- to what we can now only label as 'post-human'. The inadequacy of this label resides in the fact that its meaning is purely dependent on what 'human' means in the first place. But what "post-humanists" have been postulating, roughly, is that technology will enable us to overcome our material bodies, and exist in a "nous[mind]-sphere" of pure consciousness. The Cartesian dream may have in fact been the offspring of the more primal human desire to overcome the so obviously imperfect, transitory sphere of nature and dwell in the eternal, perfect realm of pure spirit. Heck, maybe it all goes back to Plato afterall. Regardless, much of phenomenology and post-WWII european thought has been focused on Descartes' error to separate mind and body, and the pathologies it has bequeathed to Western culture. The later Husserl, Heidegger, and especially Merleau-Ponty have taught us that consciousness is fundamentally embodied, and that to separate our lived-bodily awareness from a higher sphere of consciousness is a mistake. We are insofar as we are in the world, you might say. Again, to be rough, this tradition has developed a suspicion of technology, aware of its artifacts as indicating a mode of thought- a mode of thought that leads to dehumanization, most evident in the wars of the 20th century, Auschwitz as their mechanized culmination. One of the purported reasons Heidegger grew dissatisfied with the Nazi party is that he recognized their overly technological form of domination as inauthentic.
I, for one, see both of these outlooks on technology--as the promise of overcoming our feeble condition, and as the promise of coldly slaughtering our fellow man--as excess and deficiency. We must avoid the excessive optimism of the 'post-humanists' who blindly praise every advance in technology as "progress". Yet the utter skepticism and cynicism regarding technology from the opposite pole is also guilty of blind generalization. Technology is not monolithic. An honest evaluation of technology is one that recognizes various technologies. Don Ihde is a notable exception to the vicious trend in the history of the philosophy of technology. Ihde recognizes that the various sense modalities create vastly different kinds of technology--all allowing for humans to extend their knowledge of nature in vastly divergent directions. A mature view of technology recognizes self-tracking and the data driven life as valiant efforts at self-knowledge. Ones that must be tempered with constant reminders that the data is merely one aspect--one of many that makes us human.
4/27/10
Fragments on Empathy
Recent conversations with strong individuals have prompted me to post some fragments from a paper that I started writing last year but never completed, nor refined. The original structure of the paper was meant to a. lay out the problem, b. provide a historical context, c. map the historical context onto the contemporary debate, d. show how the relevant connections provide insight. I only made it through an abbreviated laying out of the problem and a rough historical overview. Comments would be most welcome:
The Problem
The fundamental issue at hand is the need to reconcile two strongly contrasting intuitions regarding social perception. The first is that an essential property of mental states is that they are not accessible. Prima facie, the way I know about your mental state is fundamentally different from the way I perceive medium sized objects. The second is that the mental states of others, in some basic sense, are directly perceivable, and that understanding the expressive behavior of others is neither a matter of theorizing about it nor sequential processes of simulation and projection. The first intuition evokes Cartesian conceptions of the mental, while the second echoes Wittgenstein’s anti-Cartesian challenge: “Do you look within yourself, in order to recognize the fury in his face?” (Wittgenstein 1980, sect. 927).
Phenomenologists are quick to invoke Wittgenstein’s blunt common sense approach, but their discussions of social perception can result in puzzling conceptual formulations. Gallagher and Zahavi, for instance, claim “that the expressive relation between mental phenomena and behavior is stronger than that of a mere contingent causal connection, though weaker than that of identity” (Gallagher & Zahavi 2008, 185). What could this mean? How are we to conceive of such a relation? I appreciate this attempt to balance the aforementioned contrasting intuitions, but in order for phenomenological considerations to be significant, further conceptual clarification is needed.
In order to provide the necessary clarification, first we need to identify the concepts that are causing the confusion. Clearly, the concept ‘expression’ is crucial to the debate, as it provides the link between observable behavior and private mental states. But if we begin to explore this concept, we find that our ability to discern our own mental states becomes caught up in any debate about how to discern the mental states of others. As Davidson has pointed out, “If the mental states of other are known only through their behavioral…manifestation, while this is not true of our own mental states, why should we think our own mental states are anything like those of others?” (Davidson 2001, 207). Thus, if phenomenology is dedicated to studying consciousness from the first person perspective, it may appear that it has nothing to contribute to an account of social perception.
History
The problem of social perception is nothing new in philosophy. Indeed, “the problem of other minds” is at least as old as Descartes. However, the contemporary debate between phenomenology and ‘analytic’ theories of mind can be made clearer by examining a very similar debate that was ongoing around the turn of the 20th century.
The concept of ‘expressivity’ did much of the heavy lifting in early explanations of how phenomena with both ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ reality are adequately grasped. At the turn of the century, philosophers, psychologists, and historians all saw empathy (einfühlung) and understanding (Verstehen) as intimately related concepts, both of which dealt with how we are able to grasp the ‘inner’ or ‘spiritual’ reality of something based on its ‘outer’ manifestation. Theodore Lipps, saw empathy as an especially important concept for explaining how aesthetic experience is constituted as meaningful. In Lipps (1903), our ability to understand and appreciate the beauty of external objects is directly linked to our ability to recognize other subjects as having minds. Lipps drew this connection “since for him the paradigm of beauty for human is the form, movement, and expressivity of the human body itself” (Steuber 2006, 7). This led Lipps to infer the existence of an underlying sub-personal mechanism that allows for the noninferential and quasi-perceptual character of aesthetic experience (ibid). Lipps characterized this sub-personal mechanism as ‘inner imitation’, and his primary intention was to causally explain why it is that we “move our legs when we see dancing” and “…” [citation needed].
While Lipps was interested in explaining the causal genesis of empathy through the function of basic sub-personal processes, other thinkers described empathy as a higher-level cognitive process. The early theorists in the hermeneutic tradition, namely Schleiermacher and Dilthey, also linked einfühlung and Verstehen, but had aims different from Lipps’. Schleiermacher saw empathy as the ability to understand other minds by imagining ourselves in various contexts [cite Scheleiermacher 1998, p. 92]. Dilthey expanded on this description, but opted for the term ‘reexperiencing’ (Nacherleben) to capture the methodological procedure of understanding others, guided by a variety of historical sources and by our knowledge of the general political, economic, social, and psychological state of affairs relevant for an adequate grasp of a particular historical time [cite Dilthey 1981, 172, 175-176]. As Steuber points out, “It was Dilthey’s…complete ‘psychologization’ of the interpretive process that made possible the common identification of the concept of understanding and empathy that we find at the beginning of the twentieth century” (2006, 11).
Stepping back for a moment, before examining Stein/Husserl’s phenomenological critique of the then prevailing views of empathy/understanding, we can see that at the turn of the century a similar twofold distinction within the concept of empathy was already taking shape. Taking Lipps as paradigmatic, one side of this distinction developed the concept of empathy as part of a psychological-causal-genetic account of what processes must take place within an individual when social perception occurs. The other side of this distinction, as exemplified by the hermeneutic tradition inaugurated by Schleiermacher and Dilthey, conceived of empathy as a highly cognitive process involved in interpreting the meaning of the signs, marks, and artifacts created by others. Lipps was interested understanding what sub-personal processes could cause social perception. Schleiermacher and Dilthey were interested in the personal processes that could allow for understanding others from disparate places and times. Before even considering what phenomenology might add to this characterization, it is noteworthy that contemporary empathy theorists have already mapped this framework onto the contemporary TT/ST debate. Steuber (2006) sees recent neurobiology as supporting Lipps’ conception of empathy, referring to this sub-personal, underlying causal mechanism as ‘basic empathy’—which he distinguishes from ‘reenactive empathy’, which allows us to “conceive of another person’s more complex social behavior as the behavior of a rational agent who acts for a reason,” which corresponds to the more robust concept of empathy developed in the hermeneutic tradition (20-21).
Edith Stein’s 1916 doctoral dissertation under Edmund Husserl, Zum Problem der Einfühlung (On The Problem of Empathy, trans. 1989) explores empathy as a phenomenon sui generis. On Stein’s account, Lipps’ theory of ‘inner imitation’ confuses social perception, or perception of ‘foreign experience’, with self-experience, or that which is ‘primordially given’. Her basic claim is that Lipps’ theory characterizes empathy as ‘convergence’ or ‘an experience of oneness’ between observer and what is observed. One way to understand this is by highlighting the difference between a memory and a flashback. When one has a memory, one perceives an experience that is no longer present. When one has a flashback, one experiences an experience as if it were literally present. In Stein’s terms, memory (along with fantasy) is an example of non-primordial experience—the subject has an experience of an experience that is not ‘fully given’ in the way that my present experience of my direct surroundings are given to me. A flashback, on the other hand, differs from a memory precisely because this line between non-primoridal and primordial experience is blurred. Empathy, in Stein’s sense, “can only be the non-primordial experience which announces a primordial one” (Stein 1989, 13-14). The potentially traumatic effects of a flashback are possible insofar as one is having an experience which is indistinguishable from the present, fully given experience typical of everyday perception. Thus, empathy shares the structure of memory and fantasy, whereas Lipps’ characterization of ‘inner imitation’ too easily leads to a conception of empathy having the same structure as flashback.
Lipps may also be understood as having confused the concepts of empathy and sympathy. Stein is careful to note that sympathy is a primordial experience whereas empathy is not, however this does not preclude the possibility of the two experiences coinciding. For example, there is a difference between my perceiving the grief in your facial expression and my feeling that grief. My empathetic perception of your grief may lead me to attribute a mental state to you, and it may serve as the basis for my theorizing about the larger context of your grief; but at no point is it necessary to this experience that I myself feel grief. If you are my friend or loved one, and I perceive that you are grieving, I myself, as someone who cares for your well-being, may also feel grief. But this primordial feeling of grief that I now have is better characterized as sympathy, or feeling with the other, and not empathy. Thus it is common for therapists to speak of the importance being empathetic while remaining unsympathetic. The job of the therapist is to understand the mental states of the other without being affected by them.
Lipps’ talk of ‘oneness’ and ‘convergence’ are especially problematic if carried out to its logical conclusion—telepathy. For if I truly was to ‘feel your pain’, the distinction between us as separate egos would be entirely erased. If I feel your pain as you feel it, then does it even make sense to call this empathy? The phenomenon we set out to explain, under the name ‘empathy’, was the phenomena whereby I am somehow aware of your mental states. If I am experiencing your mental states qua you and not qua I, this is not empathy.
The Problem
The fundamental issue at hand is the need to reconcile two strongly contrasting intuitions regarding social perception. The first is that an essential property of mental states is that they are not accessible. Prima facie, the way I know about your mental state is fundamentally different from the way I perceive medium sized objects. The second is that the mental states of others, in some basic sense, are directly perceivable, and that understanding the expressive behavior of others is neither a matter of theorizing about it nor sequential processes of simulation and projection. The first intuition evokes Cartesian conceptions of the mental, while the second echoes Wittgenstein’s anti-Cartesian challenge: “Do you look within yourself, in order to recognize the fury in his face?” (Wittgenstein 1980, sect. 927).
Phenomenologists are quick to invoke Wittgenstein’s blunt common sense approach, but their discussions of social perception can result in puzzling conceptual formulations. Gallagher and Zahavi, for instance, claim “that the expressive relation between mental phenomena and behavior is stronger than that of a mere contingent causal connection, though weaker than that of identity” (Gallagher & Zahavi 2008, 185). What could this mean? How are we to conceive of such a relation? I appreciate this attempt to balance the aforementioned contrasting intuitions, but in order for phenomenological considerations to be significant, further conceptual clarification is needed.
In order to provide the necessary clarification, first we need to identify the concepts that are causing the confusion. Clearly, the concept ‘expression’ is crucial to the debate, as it provides the link between observable behavior and private mental states. But if we begin to explore this concept, we find that our ability to discern our own mental states becomes caught up in any debate about how to discern the mental states of others. As Davidson has pointed out, “If the mental states of other are known only through their behavioral…manifestation, while this is not true of our own mental states, why should we think our own mental states are anything like those of others?” (Davidson 2001, 207). Thus, if phenomenology is dedicated to studying consciousness from the first person perspective, it may appear that it has nothing to contribute to an account of social perception.
History
The problem of social perception is nothing new in philosophy. Indeed, “the problem of other minds” is at least as old as Descartes. However, the contemporary debate between phenomenology and ‘analytic’ theories of mind can be made clearer by examining a very similar debate that was ongoing around the turn of the 20th century.
The concept of ‘expressivity’ did much of the heavy lifting in early explanations of how phenomena with both ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ reality are adequately grasped. At the turn of the century, philosophers, psychologists, and historians all saw empathy (einfühlung) and understanding (Verstehen) as intimately related concepts, both of which dealt with how we are able to grasp the ‘inner’ or ‘spiritual’ reality of something based on its ‘outer’ manifestation. Theodore Lipps, saw empathy as an especially important concept for explaining how aesthetic experience is constituted as meaningful. In Lipps (1903), our ability to understand and appreciate the beauty of external objects is directly linked to our ability to recognize other subjects as having minds. Lipps drew this connection “since for him the paradigm of beauty for human is the form, movement, and expressivity of the human body itself” (Steuber 2006, 7). This led Lipps to infer the existence of an underlying sub-personal mechanism that allows for the noninferential and quasi-perceptual character of aesthetic experience (ibid). Lipps characterized this sub-personal mechanism as ‘inner imitation’, and his primary intention was to causally explain why it is that we “move our legs when we see dancing” and “…” [citation needed].
While Lipps was interested in explaining the causal genesis of empathy through the function of basic sub-personal processes, other thinkers described empathy as a higher-level cognitive process. The early theorists in the hermeneutic tradition, namely Schleiermacher and Dilthey, also linked einfühlung and Verstehen, but had aims different from Lipps’. Schleiermacher saw empathy as the ability to understand other minds by imagining ourselves in various contexts [cite Scheleiermacher 1998, p. 92]. Dilthey expanded on this description, but opted for the term ‘reexperiencing’ (Nacherleben) to capture the methodological procedure of understanding others, guided by a variety of historical sources and by our knowledge of the general political, economic, social, and psychological state of affairs relevant for an adequate grasp of a particular historical time [cite Dilthey 1981, 172, 175-176]. As Steuber points out, “It was Dilthey’s…complete ‘psychologization’ of the interpretive process that made possible the common identification of the concept of understanding and empathy that we find at the beginning of the twentieth century” (2006, 11).
Stepping back for a moment, before examining Stein/Husserl’s phenomenological critique of the then prevailing views of empathy/understanding, we can see that at the turn of the century a similar twofold distinction within the concept of empathy was already taking shape. Taking Lipps as paradigmatic, one side of this distinction developed the concept of empathy as part of a psychological-causal-genetic account of what processes must take place within an individual when social perception occurs. The other side of this distinction, as exemplified by the hermeneutic tradition inaugurated by Schleiermacher and Dilthey, conceived of empathy as a highly cognitive process involved in interpreting the meaning of the signs, marks, and artifacts created by others. Lipps was interested understanding what sub-personal processes could cause social perception. Schleiermacher and Dilthey were interested in the personal processes that could allow for understanding others from disparate places and times. Before even considering what phenomenology might add to this characterization, it is noteworthy that contemporary empathy theorists have already mapped this framework onto the contemporary TT/ST debate. Steuber (2006) sees recent neurobiology as supporting Lipps’ conception of empathy, referring to this sub-personal, underlying causal mechanism as ‘basic empathy’—which he distinguishes from ‘reenactive empathy’, which allows us to “conceive of another person’s more complex social behavior as the behavior of a rational agent who acts for a reason,” which corresponds to the more robust concept of empathy developed in the hermeneutic tradition (20-21).
Edith Stein’s 1916 doctoral dissertation under Edmund Husserl, Zum Problem der Einfühlung (On The Problem of Empathy, trans. 1989) explores empathy as a phenomenon sui generis. On Stein’s account, Lipps’ theory of ‘inner imitation’ confuses social perception, or perception of ‘foreign experience’, with self-experience, or that which is ‘primordially given’. Her basic claim is that Lipps’ theory characterizes empathy as ‘convergence’ or ‘an experience of oneness’ between observer and what is observed. One way to understand this is by highlighting the difference between a memory and a flashback. When one has a memory, one perceives an experience that is no longer present. When one has a flashback, one experiences an experience as if it were literally present. In Stein’s terms, memory (along with fantasy) is an example of non-primordial experience—the subject has an experience of an experience that is not ‘fully given’ in the way that my present experience of my direct surroundings are given to me. A flashback, on the other hand, differs from a memory precisely because this line between non-primoridal and primordial experience is blurred. Empathy, in Stein’s sense, “can only be the non-primordial experience which announces a primordial one” (Stein 1989, 13-14). The potentially traumatic effects of a flashback are possible insofar as one is having an experience which is indistinguishable from the present, fully given experience typical of everyday perception. Thus, empathy shares the structure of memory and fantasy, whereas Lipps’ characterization of ‘inner imitation’ too easily leads to a conception of empathy having the same structure as flashback.
Lipps may also be understood as having confused the concepts of empathy and sympathy. Stein is careful to note that sympathy is a primordial experience whereas empathy is not, however this does not preclude the possibility of the two experiences coinciding. For example, there is a difference between my perceiving the grief in your facial expression and my feeling that grief. My empathetic perception of your grief may lead me to attribute a mental state to you, and it may serve as the basis for my theorizing about the larger context of your grief; but at no point is it necessary to this experience that I myself feel grief. If you are my friend or loved one, and I perceive that you are grieving, I myself, as someone who cares for your well-being, may also feel grief. But this primordial feeling of grief that I now have is better characterized as sympathy, or feeling with the other, and not empathy. Thus it is common for therapists to speak of the importance being empathetic while remaining unsympathetic. The job of the therapist is to understand the mental states of the other without being affected by them.
Lipps’ talk of ‘oneness’ and ‘convergence’ are especially problematic if carried out to its logical conclusion—telepathy. For if I truly was to ‘feel your pain’, the distinction between us as separate egos would be entirely erased. If I feel your pain as you feel it, then does it even make sense to call this empathy? The phenomenon we set out to explain, under the name ‘empathy’, was the phenomena whereby I am somehow aware of your mental states. If I am experiencing your mental states qua you and not qua I, this is not empathy.
2/15/10
Descriptive, not Explanatory
I think the essence of Husserl's phenomenology can be gleaned from the following passage, which is worth quoting at length:
We may now note that to every positing name a possible judgment self-evidently corresponds, or that to every attribution a possible predication corresponds and vice versa. After we have rejected the essential sameness of these acts, we can assume only that we have here a case of law-governed connection, and of connection governed by ideal law. Ideal connections do not point to the causal genesis or the empirical concomitance of the acts they coordinate, but to a certain ideally governed, operative belongingness of the ideatively graspable act-essences in question, which have their 'being' and law-governed ontological order, in the realm of phenomenological ideality, just as pure numbers and pure specifications of geometric patterns have their respectively in the realms of arithmetical and geometric ideality. If we enter the a priori reaches of pure Ideas, we can likewise say that 'one' (in pure, i.e. unconditional universality) could not perform the one set of acts without being able to perform those coordinated with them, and this on account of the specific semantic essence of the acts concerned. (Logical Investigations, V.35)
This has a Kantian flavor to it. We are here attempting to establish the conditions under which knowledge is possible, and thus these conditions will not assume a genetic role, but rather a descriptive one. My question could generally be stated as: how can descriptive endeavors enrich genetic ones and vice versa?
[added several days later]:
It was true to say that our considerations could not be scientific ones...And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, entry 109- as quoted in Avrum Stroll's Sketches of Landscapes, 1998).
Wittgenstein and Husserl, do not, of course, have very similar philosophical projects- especially not the later Wittgenstein. But here, what does Wittgenstein mean by 'explanation' and 'description'? Could this not be likened to Husserl's phenomenological method, which uses terms like 'motivation' to express how parts of an experience are related without explaning that relation in terms of causality? Husserl's project is one of description rather than explanation, and perhaps is more similar to Wittgenstein's than most think.
This has a Kantian flavor to it. We are here attempting to establish the conditions under which knowledge is possible, and thus these conditions will not assume a genetic role, but rather a descriptive one. My question could generally be stated as: how can descriptive endeavors enrich genetic ones and vice versa?
[added several days later]:
It was true to say that our considerations could not be scientific ones...And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, entry 109- as quoted in Avrum Stroll's Sketches of Landscapes, 1998).
Wittgenstein and Husserl, do not, of course, have very similar philosophical projects- especially not the later Wittgenstein. But here, what does Wittgenstein mean by 'explanation' and 'description'? Could this not be likened to Husserl's phenomenological method, which uses terms like 'motivation' to express how parts of an experience are related without explaning that relation in terms of causality? Husserl's project is one of description rather than explanation, and perhaps is more similar to Wittgenstein's than most think.
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