“Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology”
A Phenomenological Interpretation
of the Analogy of Being
In the final section of his chef d’oeuvre, The Field of Consciousness, in a chapter called “Ontological Problems,” Aron Gur-witsch suggests the possibility of a phenomenological interpretation of the Aristotelian doctrine of the analogy of being.1 His treatment is indirect and programmatic rather than fully worked out. It is more in the nature of a suggestion that will open up further work on the ontological implications of the field theory of consciousness he has developed than a clearly developed phenomenological theory of the analogy of being. Now, since Gurwitsch was clearly one of the closest and most trusted of Husserl’s disciples,2 it would be interesting to attempt to take this suggestion of his further.
By way of introduction, we will take our point of departure from the doctrine of the analogy of being in a sense more specific than that discussed by Gurwitsch, namely, not only what Aristotle says on analogy, primarily in the Metaphysics, but this doctrine as it was developed in the later tradition by Proclus, the author of the Liber de Causis, Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas. This is an objectivistic and realistic account of the structural relations among beings and properties of beings which is both a metaphysical theory of reality and a logical investigation of the meaning of the term “being” as distributed through the various categories and generally given to us in sense experience.
Already Plato had declared in the Timaeus that reasoning by analogy was the “most beautiful form of argument.”3 Though he was there talking of mathematical (and geometrical) proportionality, his concept of analogy (as the relation: A is to B as C is to D) had much wider metaphorical implications for philosophical reasoning, and it is this that Aristotle exploited, primarily in his Metaphysics, but throughout his writings: “As one thing is to another, so a third is to something else.”4 It is clear both in the Metaphysics of Aristotle and in the commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics written by Thomas Aquinas5 that this doctrine was both metaphysical and logical, a method for approaching and discussing the objective structure of reality as a whole.
The concept of being is our first and most important concept, first both temporally and logically. Without it we would not be able to think anything at all. In order to think, one must be able to single out and identify that about which one is thinking and distinguish it from all the rest. On this concept is founded the principle of identity, the keel of the mind, the foundation of all objectification. Logically, it assumes the place of the idea of “something” or “anything whatsoever”, of res, of Etwas überhaupt (the fundamental concept of Husserl’s formal ontology), the concept that enables us to begin to sort out from the blosse Mannigfaltigkeit of experience certain objects and certain aspects which otherwise would always be something different at each successive instant in time. But chaos is not our experience. Our experience is ruled by a principle of selection and the ability to distinguish objects, all of which are beings, from one another according to certain objectively given rules. A theory of the analogy of being is necessary precisely to enable us to account for the structure of the beings which distinguish themselves from being-in-general.
In itself, the concept of being is very vague. Aristotle begins Book Gamma of the Metaphysics by pointing out that the term “being” is used in many different senses: tò ón polachôs legetai.6 There are many distinguishable uses of the term “being, ” to designate actuality and potentiality, substance and accidents, all the causes, all the categories. The concept of being transcends all generic and specific categories; it applies to all beings and to every aspect of every being. There is nothing to which this concept does not apply, except to nothing and yet it even applies to nothing in the sense that we say: “not-being is not-being.”
For some things are said to “be” because they are substances; others because they are modifications of substance; others because they are a process towards substance, or destructions or privations or qualities of substance, or productive or generative of substance or of terms relating to substance, or negations of certain of these terms or of substance. Hence we even say that not-being is not-being.7
Thus the concept of being, though it means many different things does not mean them merely equivocally but with reference to some primary analogon, some primary sense in which all of these various usages can be seen to be analogous, i.e., with reference to some one thing, pros hen. For Aristotle, all are agreed, the primary term to which the various usages of the concept of being were analogous was the notion of substance (ousia); for his more Neoplatonic disciple, Thomas Aquinas, it was existence (ipsum esse). Here we must leave in abeyance the larger metaphysics of both Aristotle and Aquinas and concentrate on the general theory of analogy as it can be divorced from any specific metaphysical system. We are concerned only with the possibility of an order and interrelationship among all the degrees of being, as experienced.
Perhaps Aristotle’s most pithy and illuminating statement on the matter comes in his discussion of how the concepts of “One” and of “Being,” though having different meanings have the same reference and are, therefore, “convertible” or interchangeable with one another as they apply to the concrete realities of experience. The concept of “one” or “unity” is also, like “being,” used polachôs (and not monachôs), i.e., in many different ways:
Again, some things are one numerically, others formally, others generically, and others analogically; numerically, those whose matter is one; formally, those whose definition is one; generically, those which belong to the same category; and analogically, those which have the same relation as something else to some third object. In every case the latter types of unity are implied in the former, e.g., all things which are one numerically are also one formally, but not all which are one formally are one numerically; and all are one generically which are one formally, but such as are one generically are not all one formally, although they are one analogically; and such as are one analogically are not all one generically.8 (Or as the Oxford translation has it: “are not all in one genus.”9)
This is perhaps the clearest text in the corpus Aristotelicum which states that the various senses of the word “being” often invoke a metabasis eis allo genos, both in their sense and in their reference.10 This is a metaphysical assertion, but it clearly has logical and epistemological consequences. As Abelard would have put it: If there is Socrates, there is a Greek, if there is a Greek, there is a man, if there is a man, there is a rational animal, if there is a rational animal, there is an animal, if there is an animal, there is a living being, if there is a living being, there is a being, if there is a being, there is not nothing. Here, we are not referring to anything but the meanings of the terms considered; they are related in a necessary logical progression even if we thereby say nothing about the real world. We can understand this necessary progression and divisions by an analysis of the meaning of the terms themselves. All of the various orders of the analogy—by an analytical necessity—are predicated with reference to some one fundamental sense of reality. This parallelism between the logical and the real orders undergirds the Porphyrian Tree of the Neoplatonic logicians as well as the conclusion of Spinoza, the last and the greatest of the Scholastics: or do et connexio rerum idem est ac ordo et connexio idearum.
It is precisely this problematic connection between the logical and the metaphysical versions of the doctrine of the analogy of being which has caused it to be rejected by almost all contemporary philosophers.11 As a theory of concepts and also of (metaphorical) language, it is seen as a valuable tool of analysis; as a theory of the participation of all beings in Being, as a theory of how each being has a discoverable and assignable place in “the Great Chain of Being,” it has suffered the fate of all metaphysical systems; it has been consigned to oblivion.12
The purpose of this paper is to suggest that the most fundamental insight operating in the ancient doctrine of the analogy of being can be given a more modern, more experiential, more phenomenological sense. We all know that, since Hegel, philosophy has given up most of its systematic metaphysical pretensions. Edmund Husserl, John Dewey, and Henri Bergson were born in 1859, the year of the publication of The Origin of Species. All of these, and others, have given us a different notion of the relations of genera et species than that held by Aristotle. It is common to contemporary (as distinct from Modern, and therefore from Medieval and Ancient) philosophy to turn toward experience, zu den Sachen selbst, as Husserl would say, and away from the purely logical analysis of texts or the construction of universal explanatory hypotheses, formerly called metaphysics. We are living in a post-and anti-metaphysical age and have been since the first deflations of Hegel began to gain credence in Western philosophy toward the middle of the nineteenth century. All the currents of contemporary philosophy, whether pragmatism or logical positivism or logical empiricism or phenomenology or existentialism, base themselves methodologically on the rejection of any kind of trans-empirical metaphysics to turn to immediate, life-world, practical experience. It is here alone that we must breast non-entity; it is in experience alone that we can base and, ultimately, confirm our arguments. To be sure, the various contemporary currents of philosophy give different accounts of what actually constitutes experience, but it is clear that we are in a different arena from that in which Aristotle and Aquinas developed the theory of analogy. There are precious few phenomenological arguments in any of the ancients, and even fewer in Thomas Aquinas.
Nevertheless, suppose we take the phenomenological turn to experience, is it possible to give an experiential interpretation, a phenomenological, as opposed to a metaphysical, account of the analogy of being? It seems to me that it is, and in doing so I will follow the lead principally (after Husserl and Merleau-Ponty) of Aron Gurwitsch, William James, and Alfred Schutz.13
It seems to me that Gurwitsch’s discussion of the interrelationships among the several orders of Reality14 are the clearest in showing that the several orders of reality, as experienced, are united by a unity of analogy similar to that of Aristotle’s and that there is a primary analogon (a pros hen), namely, the primacy of the perceptual domain in consciousness—what Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl, called “the primacy of perception.” Each of the “several orders of existence,” according to Gurwitsch, delineates a specific “eidetic domain” ruled by its own specific ontological laws and characterized by its own specific type of the experience of time and of space. In distinguishing and then interrelating these various orders of existence, both Gurwitsch and Alfred Schutz followed the earlier, more psychological reflections of William James, as did Husserl for that matter.15 My intention here is to give my own (incomplete) list of the phenomenologically distinguishable orders of reality, mainly by collating what Gurwitsch, James, and Schutz have outlined, and then drawing some general conclusions.
As phenomenologists we begin by attempting to sort out the various kinds of objects given in the various kinds of experience open to us, such as perceptual objects; thought objects; imagined objects; remembered objects; past objects; objects of emotion, mood, or desire, or various degrees of dislike, revulsion, etc.; ideal objects; the objects of logic and mathematics; the theoretical objects of scientific, cultural, and religious belief; the aesthetic, artistic, musical, political, and historical domains of objects; and so on.
Since all objects are strictly correlative to acts of experience, i.e., acts of “having objects,” Gurwitsch writes: “To experience an object amounts to being confronted with a certain order of existence.”16 The method for distinguishing the various orders of existence is the eidetic method of Husserl, the “free variation”:
Plato’s Chorismos is to be upheld, without, however, being interpreted in the sense of metaphysical realism. [Essences] do not present themselves in isolation from one another. Rather they appear in systematic orders and form eidetic domains. Such domains are exemplified by the system of colors, of musical notes, the number systems, any system of geometry, or any multiplicity (Mannigfaltigkeit) in the mathematical sense. Every eidetic domain must be considered as an autonomous order of existence. . . Free variation in imagination thus prepares the way for a real Metabasis eis allo genos.17
All three of the authors we are primarily considering emphasize two things, namely (1) the primacy of perception and (2) the subjective, ego-centered nature of our concept of reality. There are an indefinite, perhaps even infinite, number of various orders or realities. The ones that Schutz and James studied are given only as examples, something to be further elaborated.
James begins:
The fons et origo of all reality, whether from the absolute or the practical point of view, is . . . subjective, is . . . ourselves. . . . As thinkers with emotional reactions, we give what seems to us a . . . higher degree of reality to whatever things we select and emphasize and turn to with a will. These are our living realities. . . . Reality, starting from our Ego, thus sheds itself from point to point—first, upon all objects which show an immediate sting of interest for our Ego in them, and next, upon the objects most continuously related to these. . . .
The world of living realities as contrasted with unrealities is thus anchored in the Ego, considered as an active and emotional term. That is the hook from which the rest dangles, the absolute support. And as from a painted hook . . . one can only hang a painted chain, so conversely, from a real hook only a real chain can properly be hung. Whatever things have intimate and continuous connection with my life are things of whose reality I cannot doubt.18
Alfred Schutz emphasized that my body is the center or zero-point of my system of coordinates, which extend indefinitely to the whole world of objects. Relative to my body I arrange the objects in my surrounding world under the categories of right and left, before and behind, above and below, near and far, in series and orders which extend as far as my “manipulatory area” can reach.19 Schutz is mostly concerned with the manner in which our “realities” are built up as correlates of our practical interests, of how we “gear” into the world through being governed by a “pragmatic motive” which controls our “natural attitude” toward the world of everyday life.
There are, therefore, multiple orders of reality. However, there is an organizational principle at work among these various orders of reality, and it is their common relationship to the primary sense of reality—what James calls “the paramount reality” of the perceptual world. Any relationship between our minds and an object of any kind—in the absence of a stronger relation—suffices to make an object real. “As a rule we believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we only could.”20
1. The Primacy of Perception
All three of the authors we are considering, then, agree that the “paramount reality,” the primary sense of “the real,” comes from the world of perception. It is not, therefore, accidental that phenomenology itself begins with the phenomenology of perception. We have become accustomed to credit Merleau-Ponty with the thesis of “the primacy of perception” because of his own strong version of this thesis, but, in germ, it is all there in James and Husserl before him.
Every science [writes Husserl] has its own object-domain as field of research and to all that it knows . . . there correspond as original sources of the reasoned justification that support them certain intuitions in which objects of the region appear as self-given and in part at least as given in a primordial sense. . . and the primordial dator experience is perception. . . .21
It is in the elaboration of a phenomenology of perception that we discover the primary sense of “being” or “real object.” The lived-time and lived-space of our corporeally embodied existence perspectivally situated within a world of factually given physical bodies, gives us our primary experience of existence and our primordial conception of “the world.” This is the realm of fundamentally experienced and irreversible temporal synthesis (phenomenal time) on the basis of which we objectify our perceptual realities, other persons, and our own bodies as situated among others, our own past, and the past of others, and on the basis of which we conceive the ideas of “objective” (standard) time and “objective” space. This is the inescapable world in which we live our lives, work, pursue our practical projects as citizens, as members of a family, or of a profession, and in which we die. Even when we are lost in the higher and “founded” regions of imagination, of categorial thought, or of scientific, artistic, religious, or philosophical theories, the perceptual world is always present in the margins of our consciousness as a perceptual imperative, as the inescapable place and time of our existence.
The primacy of perception rests on the incontrovertible fact that no matter what or how complex the objects of our experience may be at any given point, there is always one object, given inescapably at the margins of consciousness, that cannot completely disappear, namely, our perceptual insertion in the world through embodiment. Perception exercises a coerciveness over our attention, an intensity, a capacity to arouse impulses and stimulate action, an appeal to emotional response, a contextual coherence and congruity, an independence of other sources of objects, which distinguish it from all other kinds of experience.
The experience of time here is crucial. The irreversibility of time is experienced only in the primary world of everyday life and not in the worlds of imagination, dreaming, or categorial thought. As Schutz says: Even while imagining and dreaming I continued to grow old. This is the world of what James calls “tangible realities” and what Schutz calls “the world of working,” or the “world of everyday life,” not a private but a common world, in which there exist fellow-men with whom I am connected by manifold social relationships.22
James writes:
A dagger hurts us only when in contact with our skin, a poison only when we take it into our mouths, and we can only use an object for our advantage when we have it in our muscular control. It is as tangibles, then, that things concern us most; and the other senses, so far as their practical use goes, do but warn us of what tangible things to expect.23
And Alfred Schutz continues:
In the case of a mere performance, such as the attempt to solve a mathematical problem mentally, I can, if my anticipations are not fulfilled by the outcome and I am dissatisfied with the result, cancel the whole process of mental operations and restart from the beginning. Nothing will have changed in the outer world, no vestige of the annulled process will remain. Mere mental actions are, in this sense, revocable. Working, however, is irrevocable. My work has changed the outer world. At best, I may restore the initial situation by countermoves but I cannot make undone what I have done. That is why—from the moral and legal point of view—I am responsible for my deeds but not for my thoughts.24
2. Thinking
We must distinguish between the mere having of an object, the mere entertaining of a meaning, and affirming or asserting the existence of this object in an act of “judgment” or “belief.” The act of having an object is the intentional structure of every field of consciousness; the quality of belief in the existence of the objects of a given field is distinctive of that particular order of existence. The various orders of reality depend on the belief-attitude of the subject. “Any object which remains uncontradicted is ipso facto believed and posited as absolute reality.”25 The very existence of objects depends on their relation to the “world” to which they belong. All objects of consciousness are “existents.” They are, writes James, “mental objects [which] . . . have existence as mental objects. But they are situated in their own space, the space in which they severally appear. . . .”26
And Schutz, following Husserl’s distinction between predications of existence and predications of reality,27 states that our “realities” are nothing other than “finite provinces of meaning” insofar as it is our experience rather than its noematic correlates which determine what is to be taken as real and in what sense.
Thinking, in the widest sense, is the having of thoughts; in a more restricted sense it is the giving of linguistic form to experience. Thinking, in the second and strict sense always takes place in language and enables us to make the distinction between meaning and reference, and thus to turn to meanings themselves, to what Merleau-Ponty calls the “separated essences,” abstracted from and independent of the unspoken life-world experience from which they arose. Here it would be utterly impossible to go into a phenomenology of thinking (or of language-using consciousness) in any detail at all.28 We must be content with making the point that thinking, in the strict sense, through the use of words, always relates to an objective content, and that this content can refer to more primordial experiences. Thinking is characterized by the fact that as soon as I think the images of a dream or an imagined world, I am no longer dreaming or imagining but thinking. Acts of thinking, therefore, like acts of perceiving, in which they are intimately founded, also always take place in the primary world of everyday life and irreversible time.
3. Imagining
In considering imagining and the various realms of the imagination, we must make the distinction between the primary, operating imagination (which is concomitant with perception and which can never be divorced from it) and the more or less deliberate creating of worlds of imaginary beings whether in fantasy, fiction, fable, myth, literature, or other cultural inventions. In the primary sense it is clear that we would have no perceptual objects at all if we could not, in the very experience of having them, imagine them differently. Every perceptual presentation is given together with implications, absences, lacunae, possibilities and potentialities, expectancies, etc. Every perception takes place on the background of what Sartre called l’imaginaire.
The objects of imagination are “unreal” when compared to the objects of perception, even though the worlds of imagination are all made of quasi-perceptual objects, possessed of their own specific temporality, their own specific thematic consistency, and so on.
Worlds of imagination . . . may exhibit considerable complexity of events and happenings as intermeshing with one another. The most diversified relationships may exist between personages involved; persons, human, divine, and even animal. . . . For a world of imagination to appear as one world, it must contain no contradictions, nor inconsistencies. . . . Contriving a world of imagination or, as in reading, following the imagination of an author, we proceed from phase to phase. At every moment of our imagining, whether productive or merely receptive, a certain phase of the imagined world appears as present and refers both backward to earlier phases and forward to later ones.29
The time of imagination does not correspond to perceptual time; we can relive the whole of the lives of the Brothers Karamazov in a few hours of our own lifetime; their world exists as a separate realm for the imagination which we can discover, leave, and return to—“as identically the same as imagined on a previous occasion”—at will. In short, the worlds of imagination are not and cannot be perceived, and are possessed of a noematic consistency and coefficient of reality utterly distinct from the perceptual world, all the while being “founded” on perceptual structures which cannot ever be completely escaped but which can be manipulated by imagining consciousness so as to effect a veritable metabasis eis allo genos.
James notes that a given world of the imagination, once it is fixed, has its own laws of objectivity and truth, not the same as those of perception, but analogous:
Neptune’s trident. . . has no status of reality whatever in the Christian heaven; but within the classical Olympus certain definite things are true of it, whether one believes in the reality of the classic mythology as a whole or not.30
We can define and give the rules for identifying centaurs, peg-asuses, and unicorns even if no such entities exist in the perceptual world. The worlds of fable, myth, and literature, the worlds of the Iliad, King Lear, The Pickwick Papers, or Ivanhoe, are all consistent worlds based on a specific attitude of belief, which establishes its own sense of reality. Thus we can say such things as:
Ivanhoe did not really marry Rebecca as Thackeray falsely makes him do. The real Ivanhoe-world is the one which Scott wrote down for us. In that world Ivanhoe does not marry Rebecca. The objects within that world are knit together by perfectly definite relations, which can be affirmed or denied. Once absorbed in the novel, we turn our backs on all other worlds, and for the time the Ivanhoe-world remains our absolute reality. When we wake from the spell, however, we find the still more real world, which reduces Ivanhoe, and other things connected with him, to the fictive status. . . .31
One of the “sub-universes” of the imagination in which William James took special delight, was that of child’s play, though he begins with some questionable generalizations:
The primitive savage’s mind is a jungle in which hallucinations, dreams, superstitions, conceptions, and sensible objects all flourish alongside each other, unregulated except by the attention turning in this way or that. The child’s mind is the same. . . . In children’s minds, fancies and realities live side by side.32
An imaginative child will make a dog do duty for a horse, or a soldier for a shepherd, till at last the objective resemblance almost disappears, and a bit of wood may be dragged about, resembling a ship on the sea or a coach on the road. Here the likeness of the bit of wood to a ship or coach is very slight indeed; but it is a thing, and can be moved about . . . and it is an evident assistance to the child in enabling it to arrange and develop its ideas. . . . Of how much use . . . may be seen by taking it away, and leaving the child with nothing to play with. ... In later years and among highly educated people the mental process which goes on in a child’s playing with wooden soldiers and horses, though it never disappears, must be sought for in more complex phenomena.33
And again:
The most useful doll I ever saw was a large cucumber in the hands of a little Amazonian-Indian girl; she nursed it and washed it and rocked it to sleep in a hammock, and talked to it all day long—there was no part in life which the cucumber did not play.34
4. Memory
A complete theory of the realms and divisions of “past objects” is yet to be given. Here we will content ourselves with the fundamental distinction between the on-going operating memory, which James called the “specious present” and Bergson called “memoire,” from the more explicit, categorial notion of memory. The first and most fundamental sense of memory enables us to maintain given and distinct objects before us through time. The objects of this memory are given in the basic syntheses of identification and temporal duration which both Kant and Husserl found to be the necessary conditions of the possibility of any objectivity whatever. If consciousness could not surmount the flux of experience through time, there would be no “objects” for consciousness at all.
The second sense of memory, and all those derived from it, requires a deliberate (rather than merely “passive”) bringing together of past objects in which present consciousness attempts to recover its own past, or the past of others. My own memory (e.g., as I remember the day of my graduation from high school, my first vote for a President of the country, my last vacation on Cape Cod, my professors in college, my final examination for the doctorate, etc.) is given to me more intimately and personally than other past objects, but like others can only be verified by objective procedures which go far beyond what is immediately capable of being given. While we must leave a place for the extensive realm of past objects, we must do so by admitting that, apart from the most fundamental structures, phenomenologists have not progressed as yet very far in the delineation of their mental geography. The phenomenology of “historical objects,” of the common heritage of what we take to be our collective “past,” or that of the whole race, would take us far afield.
5. Dreaming
Similarly, both William James and Alfred Schutz give a place to dreaming, even though this domain of experience remains one of the least studied by phenomenologists. The objects presented in dreams differ from those given in waking experience in that they are extremely schematic and seem to present a minimum of the kinds of marginal awareness associated with most modalities of consciousness.35 Moreover, in dreaming we are not free to choose our objects, but are inexorably caught up in a stream of objects that dominates us, and from which it is impossible to take a distance. As an example James seems to give a personal experience which is later taken up by Schutz:
If I merely dream of a horse with wings, my horse interferes with nothing else and has not to be contradicted. That horse, its wings, and its place, are all equally real. That horse exists no otherwise than as winged, and is moreover really there, for that place exists no otherwise than as the place of that horse, and claims as yet no connection with the other places of the world. But if with this horse I make an inroad to the world otherwise known, and say, for example, “that my old mare Maggie, has grown a pair of wings where she stands in her stall,” the whole case is altered; for now the horse and place are identified with a horse and place otherwise known, and what is known of the latter objects is incompatible with what is perceived with the former. “Maggie in her stall with wings! Never!” The wings are unreal, then, visionary. I have dreamed a lie about Maggie in her stall.36
6. Emotions
As with memory and dreaming, we find with what can be loosely listed under objects of the emotions that we do not even have the vocabulary to discuss them. With respect to feelings, emotions, moods, desires, affectivity in general, we are in the same state today as the Homeric Greeks were with respect to a vocabulary for discussing any mental processes at all. Only a few things are clear. First, the emotive having of an object is almost always what Husserl would call a “passive” (as opposed to an “active”) synthesis. By that is meant that the objects which cathect our emotions are not deliberately chosen but passively accepted. I do not choose to fall in love with this woman; I do not choose to fall in love with physics rather than music or philosophy; I do not choose to be convinced by this argument; it simply happens to me.
Emotions are certainly a very important and powerful means of having objects in the world; no object of perception, imagination, memory, or any other experience is devoid of emotional content. Moreover, emotive intentionalities reveal to us the intentionality of the unconscious as well as of conscious experience. Even if I cannot explain why I am driven by this insane dislike or disgust for one of my colleagues, my dislike or disgust is clearly not an objectless revulsion; it is my way of having that particular object of concern in my life. When we range the various orders of emotions we are able to distinguish them in their natural series from instances of lowest intensity to highest intensity. In each case we find that our emotive behaviors precede categorial acts and deliberate choice. (I find such-and-such interesting, I have a rapport with my boss, I get along with so-and-so, I like this or that, I very much like this kind of work, I am fascinated by Asia, I love ballet, I am in love with her, etc.)
Clearly the emotional having of objects is one of the most important, as well as one of the least studied, of intentional behaviors. Should it include the worlds of abnormality, of “sheer madness and vagary,” as James said, of individual opinions and illusions, of all ideas, however misguided, that are conceived with an emotional conviction and force that goes far beyond their evidence?
James likes to study abnormal states of consciousness, just as most existentialists do, because it is sometimes easier to see in certain extreme cases what the normal or ordinary implies but hides. Of the altered states of consciousness brought on through drunkenness he writes:
One of the charms of drunkenness unquestionably lies in the deepening of the sense of reality and truth which is gained therein. In whatever light things may appear to us, they seem more utterly what they are, more “utterly utter’’ than when we are sober. This goes to a fully unutterable extreme in nitrate oxide intoxication, in which a man’s very soul will sweat with conviction, and he be all the while unable to tell what he is convinced of at all.37
And, in another place, he compares drunkenness with mystical experience:
The next step into mystical states carries us into a realm that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as pathological, though private practice and certain lyric strains of poetry seems still to bear witness to its ideality. I refer to the consciousness produced by intoxicants and anesthetics, especially by alcohol. The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkeness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning.38
7. Ideal Objects
When we turn to the worlds of ideality, of categorial thought, and of the theoretical attitudes of consciousness, we discover “objects” of a still different nature. Such “objects” are the purely ideal orders of logical systems, geometrical systems, number systems, etc., which constitute specific eidetic domains. Needless to say, there is no question of treating mathematical and conceptual entities as if they were perceptually real. Since every eidetic domain is considered as an autonomous order of existence, the sense of being and reality attributed to “ideal” entities must be defined in function of that particular contextual realm of experience. It is in this sense of “being” that we can most easily distinguish phenomenology as a science of experience from traditional metaphysics.
The status given to ideal entities is just that which accrues to them in experience; since we can live in realms of ideality as effortlessly as we live in the world of perception, the realms of ideal relationships can be shown to have their own distinctive thematic consistencies, in this case essentially atemporal and unaffected in their objectivity by phenomenal time, and to be, as the correlatives of acts of thinking, “real” objects of consciousness. As such, ideal entities are subject to laws of logical validity, propositional truth, and so on, and wholly independent of the laws which pertain to mundane perceptual reality. Thus the “reality” which we ascribe to them is of a different order, but for that reason no less “real” and “discoverable” mutatis mutandis than the objects of perception. In fact, it is here, in the treatment of ideal objects, that the true value of substituting the metaphysically neutral concept of “objects” for the more naively realistic term “being” in ontology comes to the fore. The reality-status of objects of consciousness is totally a function of the acts of consciousness (perceiving, imagining, and thinking) in which they are experienced.
To experience an object then means to apprehend that object within a wider context, the order of existence [regional ontology], having a certain systematic form of unity and continuity, in virtue of a specific constitutive relevancy-principle. Accordingly, when an object appears as existing, it presents itself as existing within a certain specific order.39
The primary specificity of ideal objects is that they have the properties of sameness or identity, on the one hand, and repeatability, on the other. As we have said above, no real, perceptual object given in irreversible time and located in finite space is repeatable, whether it be a thing in the world or an act of the thinking and experiencing mind. No act of the mind is ever repeatable, will ever come again; what is repeatable is its noetic object. This theory of ideal objects is, of course, central to James’s and Husserl’s refutation of psychologism and, by implication, of British (and every) empiricism or nominalism.
8. Objects of Theory
Finally James also singles out the theoretical entities discussed in science, philosophy and religion (or, at least, theology). Galileo’s law of falling bodies, Boyle’s law of the expansion of gasses, molecular vibrations of all kinds, are “by the physicist judged more real than felt warmth, because so intimately related to all those other facts of motion in the world which he has made his special study.”40 Perhaps here also belong all those “idols of the tribe,” all those social and cultural objectivities which have their own historical force and reality: the Declaration of Independence, capitalism, the counter-culture, all the numerous abstract and yet concretely productive principles of explanation which seem to us as objective as the objects of perception and the conclusions of mathematics.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that James’s theory of “the many worlds”41 provides us with the first foundation for phenomenological ontology. He says that what distinguishes the philosopher from “the popular mind” is that whereas the man-in-the-street dwells in all these worlds more or less disconnectedly, the philosopher “seeks not only to assign to every given object of his thought its right place in one or other of these . . . worlds, but . . . also seeks to determine the relation of each sub-world to the others in the total world which is.”42 The total world of which the philosophers must take account includes not only commonsense realities but also fantasies and illusions; there are the sub-universes of collective error, or practical reality, ideal relations as well as the world of the supernatural.43
Every object we think of gets at last referred to one world or another of this or some similar list. . . . Each world whilst it is attended to is real after its own fashion; only the reality lapses with the attention.44
All of these worlds have “practical” relationships to the ego. The things we believe in most strongly carry with them the epithet “as sure as I exist!”45 or we say of our belief in them that “it is as strong as my belief in my own senses.”46 All realities are “practical.”
. . . reality means simply relation to our emotional and active life . . . in this sense, whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real. . . .47
What James calls “the many worlds,” Husserl calls “regional ontologies” (subject to the “formal ontology” which establishes the laws of objectivity in general).48 Intentionality distinguishes conscious processes from all other kinds of processes in that they are ways of having objects. Since we have no access to being-in-itself except through the phenomenon of being, all being quoad nos is objectified and endowed with a meaning and value responsive to our theoretical and practical aims, needs, interests, goals, intentions, desires. Experienced being is the “world according to man,” a structured, objectified, intentional object, and this is why Husserl posed the problem of being in the language of “being in the world”49 and gradually developed his thought in the direction of an “ontology of the Lebenswelt.”50
Phenomenology thereby replaces the ancient metaphysical category of “being” with the concept “world,” or the “world of objects” (because to say “the world of objects” is to say the world as meaningful, as objectified, as structured by consciousness). Transcendental phenomenology discovers that “being” already always has a sense for consciousness, that it is the objective correlate of the processes of subjectivity which are the necessary and sufficient conditions of its objectivity. Perhaps the most striking contribution of phenomenology (in both its transcendental and existential forms) has been the elaboration of the notion of “world.” This is not the Greek kosmos, an ordered and fixed totality of beings whose order and structure owes nothing to human consciousness, which is governed by “divine” laws to which the gods and men are subject. Nor is it the moral conception of “this world” of the New Testament, the world of pride and concupiscence, the arena of sin under the reign of Caesar and Satan. Finally, it is not the world as the elaborate fabrication of a hidden metaphysical instinct in man, the “transcendental illusion,” of which Kant spoke, which forces us to think a world which can never be experienced. The world, in the phenomenological sense, is the ever-experienced horizon of all objectifying acts of consciousness, the experienced coherence of all the objects presented in a given regional ontology, and, ultimately, the experienced concordance of the objects of all the regional ontologies within a coherent structure of experience. The world as world can never be given as an object in the strict sense (as Selbst da), but only as the field of contextual relevancy within which any given object is distinguished, as the ultimate ground within which all experience takes place. It is never a given totality but rather the always presupposed “presumptive” totality, the never completed but always more closely approached synthesis of all perspectives. It is our experience of the world, as the ground of any particular experience, that founds our belief (Uxdoxa) that all perspectives, all objectifications, will ultimately be found to coalesce in a coherent structure. In short, the world is the ultimate and most global objective correlate of transcendental constituting subjectivity; it is the basis on which any given “object” can be identified and distinguished from any other and can thus acquire an “objective” sense.
The “objects of consciousness” and the doxic modalities of belief in which they are given (believing, hoping, expecting, knowing, doubt, possibility, probability, certitude, etc.) give what is nothing other than a phenomenological account of what was traditionally discussed as the theory of the analogy of being (by Aristotle and the Scholastics). The ancient theory of the analogy of being emphasizes the objective side; the phenomenological theory of belief emphasizes the subjective side, namely, the way we experience objects in the world. The replacement of the ancient term “being” by the term “world”—a usage begun by William James—is nothing other than a thematization of this difference of perspective. The general concept of “world” adds to the concept of “being” the notion of “experience as. . . .”
We are now, then, in a better position to define the phenomenological sense of “world.” It is constituted of all the objects correlative to a consciousness which at the same time perceives, imagines, remembers, and thinks it. In order to elaborate this phenomenological notion completely it would be necessary to pose the thesis of the “primacy of perception” which Merleau-Ponty has elaborated concerning the interrelations of the various regional ontologies and the correlative phenomenologies of perception, imagination, and thought. This thesis requires that all the “higher” levels of experience be “founded” in the perceptual (though irreducible to it), and that it is ultimately impossible to account even for perception without taking into account the structures of operating-imagination, operating-memory, categorial thought, and so on. These structures of experience which can and must be distinguished for the purposes of phenomenological analysis are not, in actual experience, ever separated in actu exercito, and the “world according to man,” that is, the Lebenswelt, is the complex and interconnected structure which polarizes all of man’s various powers at once.
The least perception contains the categorial structures of objective truth and freedom, and there is no perception isolated from the derealizing powers of imagination which accompany and surround it. Conversely, the most purified realms of irreality and ideality are never completely freed from their dependence on certain perceptual structures. The discussion of this thesis would require the elaboration of a complete phenomenological ontology of the Lebenswelt.
With the concept of the orders of reality (or “orders of existence”) phenomenology is able to give a new sense to the concept of being, by translating it into “world of objects” experienced by consciousness. But even granting this phrase its full phenomenological sense, the phenomenological theory of reality may seem to resemble, at least initially, certain classical metaphysical systems. The sense given to the word “reality” or “being” in the context of the various regional ontologies elaborated by phenomenology is not univocal, since each use of the term for a distinct regional ontology requires a metabasis eis allo genos. Yet, at the same time, these various domains of objects, taken as perceptual reality, the imaginary, the ideal, and so on, are not totally unrelated to one another since they all fall within the unified theory of “objectivity in general.” We therefore do not hesitate to speak the Aristotelian language of “unity by analogy” for the various senses of “reality” or “being” as applicable to the various regional ontologies. All objects are experienced as real, although not all exist in the same manner, and thus the concept of reality, as applied to the various orders of objects of experience, retains a unity which is not a pure equivocity. Such a unity, according to Aristotle, requires a proton analogon, a primary sense with reference to which all the distinct but related senses of the term can be predicated. Tò ón polachôs legetai. “Being,” Aristotle tells us, “is predicated in many different ways,” but it retains a unity of meaning because of the fact that in all its usages it retains a reference to one primary sense, ousia. Phenomenology, to be sure, does not and cannot speak the naively realistic language of ousiai, substances which are never perceived but only inferred from their accidents.
But, when phenomenology locates the primary sense of reality in perceptual objects and recognizes in the processes of perception the primary sense of objectification, on which all the higher orders of imagination, of ideality, and so on, are “founded,” it translates into a new idiom a conception which is perhaps not totally and in every respect incompatible with Aristotle’s fundamental insight regarding the concept of being. According to this reading of phenomenology, the concept of reality (as an object of consciousness) is an “analogous” concept which derives its unity from the fact that the orders of experience thematized in the fundamental regional ontologies are all interrelated and founded on (although irreducible to) that primary experience of the real which is given in the structures of perception.
Thus, phenomenology as a “science of objects” is more of a reinterpretation and restriction of traditional metaphysics than a rejection; it clearly does not rule out the question of reality or the investigation of the meaning of being.
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