I cannot become conscious of the transcendental Self, I-who-am-aware. But I am conscious of a vast array of different objects and types of objects. Some of these are Objective, they have the sense, “there for everyone” – such objects as physical things, people, cultural objects such as institutions and values, etc. Others are subjective, they have the sense “there directly only for me” – such objects as thoughts, emotions, feelings of all types, etc. Process is experienced Objectively as movement of things or behavior of people; but from my own subjective point of view, I am aware of my behavior as my action – sometimes deliberate, sometimes habitual, but my action.
Doing phenomenology, I reflectively examine my experience of myself to find out who I am; I try to find the nature of the self as I experience it. Of all the objects of which I am conscious, the ones that I initially mark off and say of them, “This is me,” are those available directly only to me – thoughts, feelings, and actions.
(To say this is to make an abstraction from the concrete character of the self-in-the-world. Again, this is a heuristically useful device and in fact the way my own investigation has proceeded. As we concentrate our attention on the aspects of the self present in my experience and directly available only to me, we shall find concrete evidence of the relatedness of the self to the world and to other selves.)
All of these (thoughts, feelings, and actions) are present in experience, although action, as we shall see, is available to me in a peculiar way. We shall now take these types of objects and analyze each in turn, both as abstracted from the rest of the objects of which I am aware and as it occurs in its relations to the others. But, as William James says, “Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw.”1 At the outset of this investigation, we cannot be overly precise; as it continues the distinction, in particular cases, it will become clearer.
We must initially distinguish between thoughts and thinking. Thoughts are objects of which I am conscious. They are not, of course, physical Objects in the spatio-temporal world Objectively available to all. In a sense they are only in my mind – certainly only I can be directly conscious of what I am thinking – but in a sense they are more than merely private mental objects, for they are sharable by others (others can think the same thoughts I do) and they have a certain stability and identity (I can think the same thought over and over again). Thinking is the activity whereby I bring thoughts to mind, contemplate them, compare them, alter them, follow out their implications, etc. Much of my thinking is deliberate; I reflectively apprehend it as my doing, done on purpose. But much of the time thoughts simply occur to me, without my deliberately thinking them. Thus, the activity of thinking shows the same characteristic as all action; it may be more or less deliberate or more or less involuntary (see Chapter Five, “Action.”)
Thoughts have a two-fold nature. On the one hand they are simply there, present to pure consciousness; they are objects of which I am conscious. On the other hand they refer to something else, they are thoughts of something. I call these aspects of thoughts their material aspect and their intentional aspect, respectively. The distinction I am drawing can be seen in a remark that William James has made. Says James:
it makes little or no difference in what sort of mind-stuff, in what sort of imagery, our thinking goes on. The only images intrinsically important are the halting-places, the substantive conclusions . . . . Let A be some experience from which a number of thinkers start. Let Z be the practical conclusion rationally inferable from it. One gets to this conclusion by one line, another by another; one follows a course of English, another of German, verbal imagery. With one, visual images predominate; with another, tactile. Some trains are tinged with emotions, others not; some are very abridged, synthetic and rapid; others hesitating and broken into many steps. But when the penultimate terms of all the trains, however differing inter se, finally shoot into the same conclusion, we say; and rightly say, that all the thinkers have had substantially the same thought. It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor’s mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.2
The material aspect of a thought is that aspect of it which is immediately present to pure consciousness, what James calls “imagery” and “mind-stuff,” or as I shall say, “material quality.” It may, for all we know, vary considerably from person to person; we can only find out by telling each other what the material qualities of our thoughts are, because each of us is restricted to his or her own subjective experience and cannot experience anyone else’s. The intentional aspect is the character thoughts have of being thoughts of something else, something other than what is immediately before the mind. By virtue of their intentional aspect thoughts are stable, self-identical objects which seem to remain existent even when I am not contemplating them, for I can return to them repeatedly. Because their intentional objects are mostly public, they are sharable by others; many people can, as James says, have the same thought. I’ll return to the topic of the intentional aspect shortly.
I suspect that the material qualities of thoughts vary considerably from mind to mind. Describing this aspect of thoughts is an area in which it is difficult for me, the subjective-phenomenological observer, to distinguish the ontic from the ontological, that which is peculiar to myself from those general structures shared by all. This is an area in which intersubjective checking and comparison is a necessity. In order for such checking to take place, each of us must make his or her subjective life available to all by describing what is found there. Accordingly, I shall briefly list the material qualities of thoughts that I find in my subjective life.
In my own mind there are four kinds of material qualities of thoughts: words and sounds, pictures, vague visual outlines or gestältlich forms, and a kind of vivid three-dimensional fantasy reality in which I participate as in a dream. Words and sounds are exactly that – I hear tunes running through my mind, or I think sentences or isolated words. I may deliberately think them or they may be there without my having called them forth. Pictures are much the same in that respect; most often I will simply have a flash of seeing something quite detailed and colorful. I find it more difficult deliberately to visualize a picture than to sound words to myself; perhaps I am simply more oriented through my ears than through my eyes. Both of these sorts of thoughts occur at varying levels of intensity and often they occur together. It may be that I will hear clearly a phrase or a sentence, especially when I am deliberately thinking. Often, however, the sounds are fainter, harder to recognize – sometimes I can stop and try to recognize what has just passed briefly through my mind and perhaps repeat it to myself, but sometimes it simply gets lost into oblivion. Thoughts on this level I call preverbal. “Preverbal” means in this case not prior in time to the acquisition of language, as in developmental psychology; it refers rather to thoughts that, were they more intense or present with more force, would be verbal, that is, distinct words, phrases, sentences, etc. Sometimes I can call them to mind more forcefully, make them explicit and fully verbal. Before I do this they are preverbal. A similar thing happens with pictures – there is a previsual level of images that aren’t quite intense enough for me to see clearly or recognize. Often, especially on the preverbal and previsual level, there occurs a sort of mixed-media thought form which consists of words and pictures together.
The ultimate vagueness of a picture is its outline or shape. Color seems to go first and then the details of the picture. Most of my visual thoughts are of this outline variety, where I will see simply geometrical shapes – shapes or lines standing out from that background. This type of thought is the way I chiefly apprehend abstract concepts. Visual gestalts like this often occur in a mixed mode with words, either explicit or preverbal. I can, for instance, visualize the shape of an argument, knowing where the argument begins and which way it moves; each part of the shape has a preverbal string of words attached to it, the words being (if I make them more distinct) the explicit verbalization of the concept involved and the visual aspect indicating the relations between the concepts. I often apprehend concepts or arguments this way that I know well and have gone over often; I am so familiar with the ideas that this is a sort of shorthand for them. Sometimes, however, I will be working through a new idea and suddenly perceive it as related to other concepts by means of these visual gestalts. I discover things in this way. Again, there are different levels of intensity or force with which these gestalts are present. It often happens that I will have a vague intuition of such a shape and have to try to make it more clear and distinct – by letting my mind go blank and allowing it to come forth, for instance, or by going over the first couple of steps in a train of thought preverbally and hoping that the rest will follow.
There has been some controversy throughout the history of philosophy as to whether thought is identical with language or whether language merely expresses a thought that pre-existed in a latent form. It seems to me that thought, even abstract thought, does occur in ways other than verbal. Verbalization is necessary to make a thought explicit and fixed – words are easier to remember than pictures and more easily communicated to others. But this is not at all the only way that I think. I recall once shuffling papers and wanting a stapler to fasten them together. I had a picture in my mind of the stapler located in a box; I went to that box, pulled out the stapler, and returned to my desk to use it. This was a situation in which I was definitely thinking, but not verbally.
There is another type of material quality of thought that is not related to the first three in that it does not convey abstract concepts. It is, however, composed largely of words and pictures. This is when I imagine myself being in a real-life situation, often with other people. I get a full three-dimensional scene in which I am conscious of my surroundings and of myself, what I am doing and how I am feeling. If I didn’t know this was a fantasy I would be hallucinating. Sometimes I will imagine myself saying or doing things; sometimes I will see mostly the faces and actions of other people. This sort of thing happens in reveries and daydreams, in actual dreams, and sometimes deliberately, as when I am anticipating a situation and deciding what to say or do.
In addition to these major types of material qualities of thoughts, there are others which occur less frequently and less intensely. There are such things as imagining tastes or smells or bodily feelings, or mentally going through certain motions or actions, such as dancing, without overtly doing them. Thoughts of these kinds seem to have less relation to the conceptual, although they can be quite practical – imagining the flavor of a certain food, for instance, enables me to see whether I am hungry for it or not.
Such are the general types of material qualities found in my thoughts. But we must be careful not to be misled into a Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, “the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete.”3 To consider thoughts, especially merely in their material aspect, as objects that simply hover, statically, before the mind is to commit that error; for my mental life is constantly in flux. Says Husserl, “Every experience is in itself a flow of becoming.”4 Thoughts come and go, appear with vivid force and fade away, whether I am deliberately thinking them or not. Moreover, thoughts are connected or associated with each other. Thinking of something will lead me to think of something else, and that in turn to something else – whether I am idly daydreaming or thinking through a philosophical or political argument. The connections between thoughts are usually a function of their intentional aspect, a topic I shall turn to shortly.
Finally, it is not the case that thoughts, even when I am explicitly conscious of them, are entirely clear and distinct. I have already alluded to this in my talk of preverbal, previsual, etc. thoughts. When I am conscious of a thought, I “see” a more or less clear core, a picture perhaps or a phrase; but this distinct focal point is girt about with what William James calls “fringe,” a zone of indistinct and obscure material contents pervaded by feeling. Says James:
Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, - or rather that is fused into one with it . . . .5
James’ remark about significance is important. I shall return to it after introducing one more concept, the concept, “concept.”
I have mentioned concepts as well as more primitive elements of thoughts like words and pictures. By “concept,” in its material aspect, I mean a coherent group of words, pictures, etc., that is a unity in itself. The concept, “chair,” for instance, to take a trivial but easily-analyzed example, consists partly of a picture or outline of a typical chair, partly of the word “chair,” partly of a fantasy of sitting down in a chair and of being seated in it, and partly of a fringe of preverbal, previsual, and premotor elements that, if followed out explicitly relate the concept to other concepts, such as typical knowledge of what to do with a chair, where to buy chairs, etc. A concept is a unity in itself. Whenever I think of a chair or chairs, I get some or all of the above-mentioned material contents. But I do not get exactly the same material contents each time. Depending on the context in which I am thinking of a chair, I may get just the word, or just the picture, or just an impulsion to go do something with a chair; and every time I think of “chair,” there is a qualitatively different fringe relating to the immediately antecedent and subsequent thoughts.
Because the material content of the concept “chair” is not rigidly fixed, but changes somewhat with each change of context, it is clear that the unity of the concept is not found simply in its material aspect. Rather, since the concept “chair” is one and the same even in different material manifestations of it, the unity of the concept is found in its meaning. What makes the concept one and the same is that it is a concept of something, not simply a bare material quality in itself.
This meaning is the intentional aspect of the concept. When I think of something, I do not simply have a bare material content before my mind. I know that the concept refers to something other than itself; it is not simply an object before my mind, but a concept of something. This of-relationship is hard to grasp phenomenologically because it is not plain and evident as is the material quality of the concept. I express the relationship between the material and the intentional aspect of concepts as follows: When I think of something, say my car, what strictly speaking I am conscious of, what I have in the mode, “it itself,” is the material quality of the concept – words, pictures, etc., explicit or preverbal and previsual. By means of the material quality of the concept, I am conscious of something else, what the concept is a concept of, the car. This second thing, the intentional object, I have in the mode, “having it in my mind.” To put it another way, when I think of my car outside in the driveway, I am conscious that my car is out there by means of being conscious of the concept or idea in its material aspect. It is not hard to express this relationship in words; it is more difficult to have an evident “seeing” of what the words mean.
William James gives us a clue. Recall that he says that “The significance . . . of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it . . . .”6 When I am conscious that something is the case by means of being conscious of a certain concept, the intentionality of the concept, the being of something else than it itself, is found in the dimly-apprehended material fringe of the concept. Connected with the focal nucleus of the concept, though at a more or less preconscious level, are associations, links, with a large number of things, including other thoughts, suggested by the concept, connotations, steps in reasoning, etc.; concepts of the surroundings or context of the intentional object; memories perhaps, of having been in contact with it itself and anticipations or at least imaginings of coming into contact with it, perhaps again; knowledge of what the intentional object is good for, what it does, and what I can do with it; “recipes,” so to speak, for typical action relating to it, which I shall call latent action-schemata; and incipient impulsions to action. Of course, knowledge-that, such as knowledge that I can do typical things with my car, like get in and drive it, etc., is also present to pure consciousness in the form of material contents, but in the dimly-apprehended fringe. The forms of intentionality are many-leveled and complex, and the unraveling of them requires much patient and painstaking observation and analysis – analysis which I have by no means completed.7
Now, this fringe, exactly because it is the fringe, and thus dimly apprehended, is hard to analyze in detail. It is only on occasion that I have been able evidently to “see” the fringe of a concept for what it is. Most of the time I simply have a vague feeling that the concept is a concept of its intentional object. Were that all there is to the story, my account of intentionality would have to stop here, vague and ambiguous as it is. But there is more. In reflecting on my experience in general, taking into account evidence gained not only in strict phenomenological observation but also through thinking about myself in a variety of modes, I have come to agree with another observation that William James makes, that the intentional aspect of concepts consists in that they orient me to action regarding something beyond themselves, i.e., their intentional objects. In a famous essay called “The Tigers of India,” James asks about the nature of conceptual knowledge. When we know that there are tigers in India, when, as I say, we are conscious of them in the mode, “having them in mind,” James asks, “Exactly what do we mean by saying that we here know the tigers?” Most people, he says, would say that “what we mean by knowing the tigers is mentally pointing towards them as we sit here. But now what do we mean by pointing, in such a case as this?” I can do no better than quote his answer:
The pointing of our thought to the tigers is known simply and solely as a procession of mental associates and motor consequences that follow on the thought, and that would lead harmoniously, if followed out, into some ideal or real context, or even into the immediate presence, of the tigers. It is known as our rejection of a jaguar, if that beast were shown us as a tiger; as our assent to a genuine tiger if so shown. It is known as our ability to utter all sorts of propositions which don’t contradict other propositions that are true of the real tigers. It is even known, if we take the tigers very seriously, as actions of ours which may terminate in directly intuited tigers, as they would if we took a voyage to India for the purpose of tiger-hunting and brought back a lot of skins of the striped rascals which we had laid low. In all this there is no self-transcendency in our mental images taken by themselves. They are one phenomenal fact; the tigers are another; and their pointing to the tigers is a perfectly commonplace intra-experiential relation . . . .8
The truth of James’ contention can be seen, not in simply contemplating a concept, but in following out the fringe, letting the material core of the concept fade away and be replaced by one or another of the associated concepts or of the impulsions to action. The associated concepts are connected by virtue of the intentional object, not the material quality. Concepts do not somehow magically have an “intentional quality” that hovers ghost-like above the material quality. On the contrary, the intentional aspect is found in the material fringe, which, if followed out, leads me to do something, either to think of it in a different context or to act toward it in some way in the mode, “it itself.” Thus, the specifically intentional aspect of concepts consists in that they orient me to action regarding something beyond themselves, their intentional objects. Even when there is no question of overt action – I don’t plan, for instance, to go to India to see the tigers – even when I am just contemplating, idly thinking or thinking something through, I feel that I am thinking of something, that my concepts are concepts of something. That feelings consists of immediate impulsions to think more about the intentional object, latent action-schemata, preverbal or latent knowledge about the object or how to act regarding it (for instance, knowledge that I could go to India and see tigers), incipient impulsions to action, whether overt or just thinking of related concepts, perhaps imaginings of acting with concomitant evaluational feelings.
With this understanding of intentionality in mind, we can see the truth of James’ remark that the material qualities, the “imagery” and “mind-stuff,” don’t matter . Whether I think the words, “my car,” or get a picture of my car or become conscious of it (in the mode, “having it in mind”) by means of some other material quality, the important point is that I eventually be led to relate to the car either in some other way in the mode “having it in mind” or in the mode “it itself.” It is not so much whether my thinking is primarily pictorial or verbal that is significant, but how my concepts lead me to think of other concepts or act in the external world, and whether my concepts are shared by others – each in his own way.
It is also clear that by virtue of their intentional aspect, concepts are stable entities, to which I can return again and again. To return to a concept is not necessarily to return to the same material qualities; rather, it is to think of the same intentional object or state of affairs. It is a mistake to think that concepts are nothing but their material qualities and that every time I think of something I get a different concept of it, to equate, as Husserl says, “the formations produced by judging . . . with phenomena appearing in internal experience.” On the contrary:
in repeated acts, which are quite alike or else similar, the produced judgments, arguments, and so forth are not merely quite alike or similar but numerically, identically, the same . . . . Their “making an appearance” in the domain of consciousness is multiple. The particular formative processes of thinking are temporally outside one another . . .; they are individually different and separated. Not so, however, the thoughts that are thought in the thinking. To be sure, the thoughts do not make their appearance in consciousness as something “external.” They are not real objects, not spatial objects, but irreal formations produced by the mind; and their peculiar essence excludes extension, original locality, and mobility.9
Because their intentional objects are mostly public, concepts are sharable. When we think of the same thing, we can be said to be thinking the same concept. Moreover, we can know that we have the same concept because as Husserl notes, concepts are expressible in language Objectively available to all.10
Also note that the relations between concepts, although present on a preconscious level or incipiently in the fringe of each concept as I hold it before my mind, are experienced mostly as movements from one concept to another, whether I deliberately think the subsequent concepts or idly allow my mind to wander. Even when I think of a whole argument or train of thought by getting a visual gestalt of the whole thing, I am getting a sort of fixed isolate depicting relations statically and simultaneously which originally had to be discovered or followed through in sequence. And even when I do this, I often have to run my attention from the top of the gestalt to the bottom, from beginning to end, in order to apprehend it as a whole. It is clear that most movement between concepts is a function of their intentional aspect. If I think of my car, I may be led to think that it needs a tune-up, and then to think of possible people to call who will tune it up for me. The transition between concepts is motivated by their intentional objects, not their material qualities. I can, of course, in a moment of sheer idle thinking, be led from the word “car,” to “bar” and “far,” etc. – such a transition is based solely on the homophony of the material qualities and is without significance. The movement between concepts is hard to apprehend phenomenologically because movement, especially complex movement is hard to apprehend. To apprehend something, i.e., to “see” it clearly enough to form a definite image of it – takes time, and if that something is gone before I have a chance to apprehend it, as relations between concepts often are, then I am lost unless I can recapture that movement. In this respect, James makes the distinction between “substantive” or static concepts that can be held before the mind for a long time, and “transitive” states of mind consisting of movement between the substantive parts. “Now it is very difficult,” he notes,
introspectively, to see the transitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really annihilating them. Whilst if we wait till the conclusion be reached, it so exceeds them in vigor that it quite eclipses and swallows them up in its glare.11
James is eager to insist that the fact that these transitive states of mind are hard to capture should not prevent us from “seeing” that they really are there.
In addition to their material and intentional aspects, concepts and conceptual thinking have a function. That function is interpretation. By means of concepts I interpret the world of which I am aware, including Objective and subjective reality. I conceptually place things in categories, organize them according to type, and perceive (in the mode, “having them in mind”) or discover the relations between various types of things. By building up a system of concepts and relations between concepts that refer to the various types of objects that I experience and the relations between them, I construct a guide that I can refer to in my dealings with reality. The world as it appears to me is constantly in flux; by referring what I experience as it comes and goes to a stable system of concepts, I can take note of regularities in the behavior of the various objects I am conscious of, learn to predict future consequences of events, and learn to manipulate different objects in the world for my own purposes. Says James:
All our conceptions are what the Germans call Denkmittel, means by which we handle facts by thinking them. Experience merely as such doesn’t come ticketed and labeled, we have first to discover what it is. . . . What we usually do is first to frame some system of concepts mentally classified, serialized, or connected in some intellectual way, and then use this as a tally by which we ‘keep tab’ on the impressions that present themselves. When each is referred to some possible place in the conceptual system, it is thereby ‘understood.’12
Now, in order to fully understand the function of concepts and conceptual thinking, we shall have to recognize and investigate the fact that concepts play a role in all modes of experience, not just conceptual thinking. As a way of approaching this topic, let us consider James’ assertion that experience doesn’t come “ticketed and labeled.”
When he says this, he refers to experience as it is initially had in the early years of life, before we have learned to make sense of it – his example is of a baby who doesn’t wonder where his rattle has gone when he drops it nor where it came from when someone puts it in his hand; “The idea of its being a ‘thing,’ whose permanent existence by itself he might interpolate between its successive apparitions has evidently not occurred to him.”13 But as an adult I do – automatically – think of things as existing when I am not looking at them. In fact, the process is so automatic that I don’t even think – I just experience physical things as having an independent spatio-temporal existence of their own. Not only that, I know what they are. I have, as Schutz says, a stock of knowledge at hand of the typical characteristics of all the different kinds of things that I experience.14 This knowledge too is not something that I have to think about; rather, I simply perceive things as what they are, as trees, papers, people, etc. In other words, my adult experience is ticketed and labeled, and the tickets and labels are found in experience itself. That is, there is a conceptual element in all my experience, in perception, recollection, imagination, anticipation, etc., not just in conceptual thinking. This conceptual element is the locus of intentionality in a broader sense, Husserl’s famous “intentionally of consciousness,” not just the intentionality in conceptual thinking.
Intentionality, says Husserl, is “the unique peculiarity of experiences ‘to be the consciousness of something.’”15 This phrase could be taken in two ways. On the one hand, consciousness, that is, pure transcendental consciousness, is always consciousness of something in that there are always objects there, presented to it. Both the material quality and the fringe, wherein resides the intentional aspect, of a concept are objects for pure transcendental consciousness, things that are there, to which I have only to pay attention to “see.” But this is not exactly Husserl’s meaning. For one thing, he uses the term “consciousness” to mean something different from pure transcendental consciousness, which as we have seen, he terms the “pure Ego.” “Consciousness” for Husserl is a broad term signifying experience in general. He says, “ . . . in its widest connotation the expression ‘consciousness’ . . . includes all experiences (Erlebnisse).”16 Again: “ . . . we can interpret consciousness to cover eventually whatever the concept of experience includes . . . .”17 To prevent confusion with pure transcendental consciousness, I shall say “experience” instead of “consciousness.” When Husserl says that experience is intentional, he means that there is an intentional object which an experience is an experience of, just as a concept is a concept of its intentional object. This is true of all modes of experience,18 but for simplicity, let’s limit the discussion to perceptual experience. In perception – meaning by that term the process or act (in so far as there is deliberate paying attention to) of perceiving – there is a material aspect and an intentional aspect, just as in conception, the process or act of thinking conceptually. The material element is sensation. Husserl speaks of “’sensory contents’ such as colour, touch, sound, and the like, . . . pleasure, pain, tickling, etc., and also the sensile phases of the sphere of ‘impulses.’”19 Sensations are just bare qualities – just this shade of blue, for instance, or just this tone or flavor, etc. Sensations are much more vivid than the material qualities of concepts – a fact which has lead some, especially the British Empiricists, to think that concepts are nothing but faint images of sensations, a mistake which ignores the element of intentionality. When I perceive something, I do not simply have a bare sensation or collection of sensations. My sensations are elements in perceptions of something. This of, this intentionality, is due to the presence in experience (presence to pure consciousness) of a conceptual fringe, inextricably attached and intermingled with the bare sensation. This conceptual fringe is composed of preverbal, previsual, etc., thoughts, all very vague and obscure, almost or entirely imperceptible, and generally entirely overlooked in the natural attitude. By virtue of these conceptual elements, perception is intentional, that is, I have a perception of something, not just a meaningless collection of sensations. As James says:
‘Ideas’ about the object mingle with the awareness of its mere sensible presence, we name it, class it, compare it, utter propositions concerning it . . . . In general, this higher consciousness about things is called Perception, the mere inarticulate feeling of their presence is Sensation . . . .20
James notes that we as adults almost never have bare sensation uninterpreted, that is, unaccompanied by conceptual elements. It is obvious, he says, that “immediate sensations can only be realized in the earliest days of life. They are all but impossible to adults with memories and stores of associations acquired . . . . A sensation is thus an abstraction seldom realized by itself.”21 He notes that “To some degree we seem able to lapse into this inarticulate feeling at moments when our attention is entirely dispersed.”22
Husserl speaks of the same state of affairs, but in different language. He speaks of “sensile phases” of experience and “sensory contents.” “Such concrete data of experience,” he says, “are to be found as components in concrete experiences of a more comprehensive kind which as wholes are intentional . . . .”23 He also calls the material element in perception “sensile hyle,”24 using a Greek word for “matter,” and “hyletic or material data.”25 Present in experience with hyletic data are other elements which make up the specifically intentional character: “ . . . over those sensile phases lies as it were an ‘animating,’ meaning-bestowing stratum . . ., a stratum through whose agency, out of the sensile-element, which contains in itself nothing intentional, the concrete intentional experience takes form and shape.” “Sensory data offer themselves as material for intentional informings or bestowals of meaning . . . .”26 The emphasis on meaning, which occurs over and over again in Husserl’s discussion of intentionality, indicates the conceptual element. That which bestows meaning on material data he calls the “noetic phase,” or, more briefly put, noesis. These noeses constitute the specifications of “Nous (mind, spirit) in the widest sense of the term . . . .”27 Thus, noeses are conceptual in nature.
The way in which noeses “animate” material data can be seen from Husserl’s account of the intentional object, the “noematic content” or “noema.”28 He gives an example: seeing a tree and noting the color of the tree trunk. We take the color of the trunk to be always the same color, no matter how we look at it! Phenomenological reflection reveals that:
this colour . . . belongs to the noema. But it does not belong to the perceptual experience as a real (reeles) integral part of it, although we also find in the experience “a colour-like something,” namely, the “sensory colour,” the hyletic phase of the concrete experience in which the noematic or “objective” [objektiv]29 colour “manifests itself in varying perspectives.”
But one and the same noematic colour of which we are thus aware as self-same, in itself unchanged . . ., runs through its perspective variations in a continuous variety of sensory colours.30
By a “real part” of an experience, Husserl means something that is actually there for inspection, present, as I say, to pure consciousness, or present in experience. Now what is there in this sense is a series of different material qualities; the immediate sensory color changes as I look from the shady portion of the tree trunk to the sunny portion. But I take the tree to have the same color all around it, and I assume that others will see the same color. This color, which I take to be the same even though, strictly speaking, I see different color-sensations, is an intentional object, noematic. The same is true of the tree itself, taken as an Objectively existing material thing. What strictly speaking is present to pure consciousness, the real factors in the experience, are the material data and the conceptual or noetic fringe. By virtue of the noesis, I take the continuously and systematically changing material data to be sensations of one and the same actually-existing tree. Says Husserl:
. . . not only the hyletic phases (the sensory colours, sounds, etc.), but also the animating apprehensions . . . belong to the “real” (reelen) constitution of the experience.
. . . whereas that which “exhibits” itself in its variety and “varies perspectively” has its place in the noema.31
. . . the specifically noetical phases . . . contrive it so that a complex variety of hyletic data, of colour or touch, for instance, assumes the function of varied perspectival shading of one and the same objective [objektiven]32 thing.33
Noeses are what, in Chapter Two, I have called “interpretations.” They are conceptual in nature and interpret my sensations such that I have perceptions of something. Husserl notes this explicitly in Formal and Transcendental Logic:
Such an affair as an object (even a physical object) draws the ontic sense peculiar to it . . . originally from the mental processes of experience alone . . . .
Consequently a certain ideality lies in the sense of every experiencable object, including every physical object, over against the manifold “psychic” processes separated from each other by individuation in immanent time . . . . It is the universal ideality of all intentional unities over against the multiplicities constituting them.34
A fundamental type of noesis or interpretation is what Husserl calls a “synthesis of recognition,” by virtue of which I recognize something as one-and-the-same, something which, perhaps, I have come into contact before, but at any rate can come into contact with again:
Perception alone is never a full Objectivating performance, if we understand such a performance to be indeed the seizing upon an object itself. We accept internal perception as a seizing upon an object itself, only because we are tacitly taking into account possible recollection, repeatable at will. When actualized, recollection gives for the first time original certainty of the being of a subjective object in the full sense . . . something to which one can “always go back again” and which one can recognize in a reactivation as the selfsame. Naturally, the concomitant intentional relation to such a “synthesis of recognition” plays a similar role in the case of each external objectivity – which is by no means to say that it makes up the full performance effected by external experience.35
James recognizes the same fact:
Any fact, be it thing, event, or quality may be conceived sufficiently for purposes of identification, if only it be singled out and marked so as to separate it from other things. Simply calling it ‘this’ or ‘that’ will suffice. . . . The essential point is that it should be reidentified by us . . . . This sense of sameness is the very keel and backbone of our consciousness.36
As Husserl notes, there are many other noeses in experience besides syntheses of recognition. One of the most pervasive is the interpretation (in the natural attitude) that the Objective world has factual, spatio-temporal existence. This is clear even in Husserl’s initial portrayal of the natural attitude:
The General Thesis according to which the real world about me is at all times known . . . as a fact-world that has its being out there, does not consist of course in an act proper, in an articulated judgment about existence. . . . What has been at any time perceived . . . bears in its totality and in all its articulated sections the character “present” “out there,” a character which can function essentially as the ground of support for an explicit (predicative) existential judgment which is in agreement with the character it is grounded upon. If we express that same judgment, we know quite well that in so doing we have simply put into the form of a statement and grasped as a prediction what we already lay somehow in the original experience, or lay there as the character of something “present to one’s hand.”37
The character, “present” “out there,” is present in experience of the external world in the form of an operative interpretation, an implicit judgment, in short, a noesis.
In general, my experience is pervaded by noeses, usually of a more specific character. When I see my typewriter, for instance, I know not only that it is an enduring Object in the spatio-temporal world, but also that it is a typewriter, that I can use it to type letters, papers, etc. I know how to type on it; I know its individual quirks that make it different from other typewriters. I recognize it not only as the self-same thing that it has been as long as I have been acquainted with it, but I recognize it as an implement useful for certain purposes. Recognition in this latter sense is not the same as Husserl’s synthesis of recognition, although it is founded on the former, in the sense that without the former recognition I could not recognize it as a typewriter. The synthesis of recognition, which I shall call “simple recognition,” reveals that this Object is enduring, something I can return to and see again and again. The latter recognition, which I shall call “recognition-as,” is a – generally preconscious, that is, entirely operative – being aware that the Object is related to a broader context, the context of what it can do and what I can do with it.
Husserl says that “The viewpoint of Function is the central viewpoint of phenomenology.”38 His talk of noeses as animating the hyletic data, as effecting a performance and bestowing meaning, should be seen in this light, for he says “all treatment of detail is governed by the ‘teleological’ view of its function in making ‘synthetic unity’ possible.”39 My experience is always in process, in flux. The noetic elements in experience function such that I recognize continuity amid the flux. I take a series of changing sensations to be a tree, as I walk past it; I take this configuration of shape, color, texture, and resistance before me to be my typewriter. Moreover, depending on which further interpretations are indeed operative and not merely latent (i.e., possible, but not actualized), I “see” the object in a different light. I can look at my typewriter and think of it as a tool, useful for getting legible words onto paper; or I can think of it as a relatively ugly piece of machinery; or, as my typewriter, which has a certain sentimental value. These different ways of thinking of it, i.e., of having it by means of concepts, animate the same configuration of sensations differently in the different ways of perceiving it, having it itself. I have it itself in a different way with each different interpretation. Noeses thus structure my experience in various ways, but we should not take the “noetic performance” to mean that first we have bare sensations and then, with the addition of noeses, intentional objects. On the contrary, sensation and interpretation occur concomitantly. As James has pointed out, we almost never have bare sensation.
The second thing to note is that the intentionality of perception is exactly analogous to the intentionality of conception in that both orient me to (actual or possible) action regarding the intentional object. Husserl says that “consciousness points . . . to something of which it is the consciousness.”40 The pointing here is of the same nature as the mental pointing of which James spoke when we think of something, have a concept of it. To perceive something as one-and-the-same via simple recognition is to know that I can do something – I can return to it, I can look away and look back and it will still be there. To perceive this Object as a typewriter via a recognition – as is to know that I can use it for certain purposes, I can perform certain actions, such as type this essay, with it. As in conceptual intentionality, the intentionality itself, the of-relationship, is present in the immediate experience in the conceptual fringe of my perception. I can become aware of it explicitly by following out the fringe and actually performing the actions suggested in the immediate perception. Thus, speaking of a percept as analogous to a concept, the specifically intentional aspect of percepts consists in that they orient me to action regarding their intentional objects.
The intentional aspect of both conception and perception is the same as their function. Both in thought and in perception I am aware of a world that is significantly organized, a world in which I know how to act, how to get around. I shall borrow the terminology of Joseph Church at this point and call sets of noeses – for they almost never occur one at a time – which organize my experience, “schemata.”41 Schemata are of various types. One kind is visual, operating in such a way that instead of sheer visual chaos, I see discrete Objects of definite shape and color and at various distances from me with unperceived sides which I know are there. Another is sound-oriented, as when I complete to myself a tune half-heard on the radio. Another is sound- and meaning-oriented, as when I struggle to make sense of words heard dimly or distorted. Another governs habitual actions, as when I go through my routine of getting up in the morning, getting dressed, etc., while I am still half-asleep or thinking of something else. Another very common type is a sort of generalized awareness of how space is divided up and what Objects are where, etc. – a combination of visual and motor schemata. Because they are so pervasive, schemata are for the most part overlooked, simply operative and not thematic. Schemata which are not present in experience on any level to which I have conscious (explicit) access I call “latent.” Latent schemata are potentially actualizable when the need arises, but are not in operation at the moment; some examples of my schemata which are latent as I sit here and type are the motor-schemata involved in swimming and the spatial-orientation schemata used in getting around New York City. Schemata are most often noticed when they conflict with perceived reality – when the last step of a stairway is not there, for instance. I went to an art show one time and entered through the left door; the next day I entered through the right door and was disorganized because what I saw didn’t agree with what I had expected, schematically, to see. My one previous acquaintance with the place had instituted a set of schemata relating to spatial configuration.
The function of schemata is the same as that of conception: interpretation. We can now see that there are actually two functions involved, the one for the sake of the other. The first is to organize experience so that I perceive a stable and orderly world rather than chaos without significance. Says Church, “a schema is an implicit principle by which we organize experience . . . . we become sensitive to regularities in the way things are constituted and act, so that we perceive the environment as coherent and orderly . . . .”42 But this organization of experience is for the sake of action; its function is to enable me to get around in the world, to do all the typical things that I do without having to stop and think and figure out what to do. The other side of schemata, says Church, is that “schemata exist in our mobilization to act and react, which in turn reflect the environmental properties to which we are sensitive.”43
I have been emphasizing that schemata (noeses, operative interpretations) are conceptual in nature; it is by virtue of the conceptual element in experience that experience is intentional. Concepts merge into schemata; thus, the way I think of the world, how I believe it to be, influences my perception of the world. C.S. Peirce has called attention to this fact. In an early essay, “Questions Concerning Faculties Claimed for Man,” he states that
. . . just as we are able to recognize our friends by certain appearances, although we cannot possibly say what those appearances are and are quite unconscious of any process of reasoning, so in any case when the reasoning is easy and natural to us, however complex may be the premises, they sink into insignificance and oblivion proportionately to the satisfactoriness of the theory based upon them.44
What I have called “operative interpretations” Peirce calls “perceptual judgments.”45 He gives an illustration of what he means by referring to a common optical illusion:
So it is with that well-known unshaded outline figure of a pair of steps seen in perspective. We seem at first to be looking at the steps from above; but some unconscious part of the mind seems to tire of putting that construction upon it and suddenly we seem to see the steps from below, and so the perceptive judgment, and the percept itself, seems to be shifting from one general aspect to the other and back again.
In all such visual illusions . . . the most striking thing is that a certain theory of interpretation of the figure has all the appearance of being given in perception.46
Now, Peirce says that perceptual judgments are “logically analogous to inferences excepting only that they are unconscious and therefore uncontrollable and therefore not subject to criticism.”47 I can control my deliberate judgments by going over my reasoning again and again in order to see that it is correct, subjecting each step of an argument to criticism to see that it follows from previous steps in accordance with the rules of inference that hold good in every analogous case.48 But the making of a perceptual judgment is automatic, and whatever steps of reasoning are involved have sunk into “insignificance and oblivion.” This is the meaning of saying that concepts merge into schemata, operative interpretations present in immediate perceptual experience (and in all other modes of experience).
Peirce is correct in saying that perceptual judgments are not subject to control when they arise in immediate perceptual experience. But it is not the case that they are altogether uncontrollable. To take Peirce’s own example: he looks at a surface and sees that it is clean (he sees a clean surface), but upon looking again he sees that it is dirty. In such a case,
I have no right to say that my first percept was that of a soiled surface. I absolutely have no testimony concerning it, except my perceptual judgment, and although that was careless and had no high degree of veracity, still I have to accept the only evidence in my possession.49
Peirce’s point is that he saw what he saw, and even if it later turns out that his original perception was mistaken, still there is no way to go back and correct that perception. More importantly, there is no way, at the time of the original perceptual judgment, to evaluate that judgment by looking at the process of inference that gave rise to it, for if there was any process of inference, it was unconscious or (here I interpret Peirce) at best preconscious. The results of such unconscious mental processes, considered individually, can only be taken at face value. In this sense they are “absolutely forced upon my acceptance.”50
In another sense, however, Peirce is mistaken. No doubt he cannot truthfully say that his original perception was of anything but a clean surface; but it is equally clear that he can later say that that perceptual judgment was mistaken. He can say this, not on the basis of logical criticism of the assumed inference that led to the judgment, but on the basis of further perceptions of the same intentional object. Such further perceptions, while not altering the original perception, certainly can be instrumental in controlling later perceptual judgments. To push his own example to an extreme, it seems likely that Peirce could at least learn to look more closely at surfaces, thereby reducing the possibility of misperception in the future. To take a less trivial example, a racist may perceive black people as smelly, ugly, shiftless and lazy, etc., but he can be made to lose his prejudices through a process of education about black history and accomplishments, acquaintance with blacks, and perhaps an explanation of the social forces reinforcing racist attitudes. If such a process is successful, he will no longer perceive blacks so unfavorably. The point is that deliberate observation and reflection can at least influence, if not control, later perceptual judgments. Thus they are subject to some kind of control.
A further examination of Peirce’s doctrine of perceptual judgments will reveal in more detail just how they are related to action. Perceptual judgments, says Peirce, “are to be regarded as an extreme case of abductive inferences . . . .”51 Abduction differs from deduction, strict derivation of conclusions from what is logically contained in the premises, and from induction, reasoning that if something is true of a sample of a certain type of thing or event then it will be true of all such things or events. Abduction consists in deriving the minor premises of a syllogism from the major premise and the conclusion. Thus, given two propositions, 1) All copper conducts electricity, and 2) Item x conducts electricity, it may be inferred that 3) Item x is copper. In his early writings, Peirce called this kind of inference “hypothetic reasoning” or “hypothesis”:
Hypothesis may be defined as an argument which proceeds upon the assumption that a character which is known necessarily to involve a certain number of others, may be probably predicated of any object which has all the characters which this character is known to involve.
The function of hypothesis is to substitute for a great series of predicates forming no unity in themselves, a single one (or small number) which involves them all, together (perhaps) with an indefinite number of others.52
This is, if an object has all the characteristics included in the definition of copper it may be inferred that it is copper. A certain name or general category is judged to be applicable in a specific instance. The usefulness of this procedure is apparent, for it allows us to refer to something by a single name rather than by a long list of predicates, thus simplifying language and thought.
Now, Peirce says that perceptual judgments are extreme cases of abductive inferences, that are exactly analogous to such inference. This means that in immediate perception of something, I (generally) immediately recognize what it is, what type of thing it is, as Schutz says. Now, to recognize something as what it is is to know what to do with it. Peirce says that “A judgment is an act of formation of a mental proposition combined with an adoption of it or act of assent to it.”53 For Peirce it is so axiomatic as to be definitional that assent to a proposition, i.e., belief that it is true, involves the willingness to act on it. As early as 1868, Peirce wrote that “it is a mere question of words whether we define belief as that judgment which is accompanied by this feeling [of conviction], or as that judgment from which a man will act.”54 In the famous Popular Science Monthly essays, he states that
The feeling of believing is a more or less sure indication of there being established in our nature some habit which will determine our actions.
Belief does not make us act at once, but puts us into such a condition that we shall behave in a certain way, when the occasion arises.55
We need not take Peirce’s word for it that this is true. By following out the conceptual fringe present in any moment of perception I can become conscious of action-schemata that guide further action regarding the intentional object of my perception and of incipient impulsions to perform the typical actions that I know I can perform.
We thus have more corroborative evidence for the assertions that schemata (noeses, operative interpretations, perceptual judgments) are conceptual in nature; that concepts merge into schemata in such a way that the way I think of the world or some part of it influences the way I experience it – as Peirce says, “abductive inference shades into perceptual judgment without any sharp line of demarcation between them . . .”56; and that the function of both clear concepts and operative schemata is to enable me to act fruitfully, to get around in the world and do the things I do. If I have to figure out what I am to do and how to accomplish it, it is my conceptual structure of beliefs about the world and myself that enables me to do it; if I am acting straightforwardly, either deliberately or habitually, the fact that my experience of the world and myself is organized into coherent, recognizable patterns enables me to do that.
There is a more subtle way that my concepts influence my perceptions and my actions. Not only do my beliefs about the world shade into perceptual noeses, but the very structure of the concepts by means of which I think and believe influences my perception and action. This can be seen by looking briefly at the nature of language.
I want to discuss language only as it relates to me, occupying and phenomenologically investigating the subjective point of view. First, the obvious fact should be noted that verbal thoughts are reflections or imaginations of actual vocal speech. This assertion is confirmed phenomenologically by noting not only that imagined words “sound” like spoken words, but also that when I think to myself in words, sometimes I can feel the muscles of my mouth and tongue and throat move slightly – I can feel impulsions to speak as I think to myself. When I speak, I usually speak to someone else; in fact it is hard to imagine language existing without the function of interpersonal communication – it seems that language is essentially social in nature.
Now, language fixes our experience in symbolic forms. Words are a way of (conceptually) dividing up reality, reducing the chaotic flux to patterned and ordered elements, stable and recognizable in both senses. Thus, it directs attention to certain aspects of reality and leads us to ignore others. This can be verified phenomenologically by comparing your everyday state of mind with a non-verbal state of mind, with little or no conceptual thought. There exist techniques – Zen meditation is one – for attaining such a state of “no-mind.” It can also be seen by a comparison of how different languages are related to different perceived realities experienced by members of different cultures. This comparison is not phenomenological, of course, but is heuristically useful. Benjamin Whorf has done pioneering work in this field. His basic generalization is that “all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can be in some way calibrated . . . . Languages dissect nature in many ways . . . .”57 Among his many examples, Whorf notes that English and related languages divide reality into things and events, corresponding to nouns and verbs. But “in Nootka, a language of Vancouver Island, all words seem to us to be verbs . . .; we have, as it were, a monistic view of nature that gives us only one class of word for all kinds of events. ‘A house occurs’ or ‘it houses’ is the way of saying ‘house,’ exactly like ‘a flame occurs’ or ‘it burns.’”58 Some languages classify things differently from English; the Hopi, for instance, call everything that flies by one name – except for birds. If this class seems too large and general, Whorf points out, so does our word for snow seem to the Eskimo, who have many words for different kinds of snow. For Whorf, such examples point to the fact that
various grand generalizations of the Western world, such as time, velocity, and matter, are not essential to the construction of a consistent picture of the universe. The psychic experiences that we class under these headings are, of course, not destroyed; rather, categories derived from other kinds of experience take over the rulership of the cosmology and seem to function just as well.59
It seems a little too one-sided to push this position to its extreme, as does one of Whorf’s followers, who says, “analysis of nature (and the classification of events as ‘like’ or ‘in the same category’) are governed by mere grammatical habits – and not by the objective structure of the real world.”60 Language, words, do refer to elements of reality that are given, not just thought up. Alan Watts notes both sides of this tension. “What governs what we choose to notice?” he asks, and answers, Two things. One is “the pattern and logic of all the notation symbols which we have learned from others, from our society, and our culture.” The other is “whatever seems advantageous or disadvantageous for our survival, our social status, and the security of our egos.”61 These two are interrelated of course in that our culture in many ways defines for us what is advantageous and disadvantageous, but also such judgments arise out of a continuing common perception of those things as having those value characteristics. I prefer to say that reality is not only socially constructed but also socially discovered.
We can now briefly summarize the functions of thought. Concepts – both in deliberate conceptual thinking and as the noetic element in perception and other modes of experience, interpret what I experience. This includes two aspects. One is the description, classification, and explanation of reality and the structuring of my experience, whether Objective or subjective. Description and explanation of reality and logical clarification of the relations between concepts are but two sides of one function. The other is to orient me to reality with respect to action. To know that reality is divided up in such and such a way and to experience it that way is to know that certain actions are possible and appropriate, and certain others impossible or inappropriate. Through conceptual thinking and the schematic interpretive elements in experience, we both discover and create the elements and structures of reality and we both discover and create ways of behaving and acting that are useful.
We can now begin to make some judgments regarding the ways that the conceptual element in experience is and is not an element in the self. It is clear that the intentional objects of my concepts are not the self; even when I am thinking of myself, I have myself in the mode, “having myself in mind,” not in the mode, “I myself.” The material qualities of my concepts are uniquely mine – no one else has them directly – but the concepts in their full nature, as intentional, may be shared by others. That is, you and I may both have the same concept of the Pythagorean Theorem, say, or of the physical layout of the University, or of the value of certain kinds of action, such as being honest. We can find out that we have the same concepts either by discussing the matter or simply by observing that we treat the intentional objects or states of affairs the same way, we perform typically the same actions toward them. The activity of thinking, of calling concepts to mind and thinking about things by means of them, is, however, uniquely mine, if not me. When I deliberately pursue a train of thought, it is I who think, it is my activity. This has a double sense. On the one hand, it is I rather than someone else who am thinking. This is true even in moments of idle contemplation, when thoughts just drift through my mind. But in moments of deliberate thinking about something, the element of deliberateness, of doing it on purpose, makes the thinking mine in a further sense, a sense that is distinguished from mere idle thinking in that there is a distinct sense of agency involved. If I am just idly letting thoughts come and go, the thoughts occur to me, but I do not deliberately think them; the activity is more anonymous than deliberate thinking. I shall deal with the exact nature of this sense of agency in Chapter Five.
With respect to noeses, the conceptual element in perception, recollection, etc., the situation is somewhat similar. The intentional objects are not me – unless I am self-consciously paying attention to myself. But the noeses are at least mine, in that they function in my experience, not someone else’s. They are not my action, in the sense of deliberate action; they function automatically. But I think it makes sense to say that they are me in a way similar to the way that my heart and lungs are me. I do not deliberately make my heart beat; nor (for the most part) do I deliberately think of the Objects I see as having other sides, as being perceivable by others, etc. But both the functioning of my heart and of my noeses are indispensable if I am to continue to exist and exist in more or less the same way as I always have been existing. As James says, the line between “me” and “mine” is hard to draw; but it seems clear that my noeses are fundamentally mine, if not me. Were they different or absent altogether, I, as the whole complex of elements in experience that I am, would be quite different. To put it another way, whenever I reflectively “look” at myself, I find my operative noeses, just as I find my automatically functioning heart and lungs. My noeses are a quite fundamental and pervasive feature of my experience.
Now, I have noted that my explicit concepts merge with and become functionally indistinguishable from my operative interpretations, my noeses. In the sense of being pervasively present and having a constant effect on my experience and actions, my basic beliefs about myself and my world are at least fundamentally mine, if not me. My belief that people should be treated equally and with respect influences the way I perceive others and the way I act toward them. If this belief were altered or abandoned, I would be a different person, recognizably different, both to myself and to others. Not all my beliefs share this characteristic. My belief that the mailbox is on the corner, for instance, is my belief, but is not fundamentally me. If it were found to be false (if the mailbox were moved, for instance), the way I conduct my life would be altered only to an insignificant degree. By basic or fundamental beliefs, I mean those that orient me to all or most of what I experience all or most of the time. Such fundamental beliefs may be me, or at least peculiarly mine, in another sense if they are the result of careful criticism and are ones which I have deliberately adopted. Then they partake of that sense of agency, as the results of my doing. They are me no longer simply as I find myself to be, but now as I have created myself to be as well. I’ll discuss the self-creative nature of myself more fully in Chapters Four and Seven.
It is important to recognize that my beliefs may be true or false, and so, in a sense, may my schemata. In order for my action to be effective it must be based on true beliefs; if not, it will be frustrated and inhibited. Now, it is a characteristic of the self that I keep on believing what I find to be true and stop believing something when I find it to be false, and that I can determine the truth and falsehood of my beliefs. The most basic way that this happens is by comparing, in a sense, the belief or the judgment believed to be true with the state of affairs that it refers to. As Husserl says,
Every judgment can be confronted with “its affairs themselves” and adjusted to them in either a positive or a negative adequation. In the one case, the judgment is evidently true – it is in fulfilling and verifying coincidence with the categorical objectivity meant in the relevant judging . . . and now offering itself as itself-given; in the other case it is evidently false because . . . there comes out as itself-given a categorical objectivity that conflicts with the total judicial meaning and necessarily “annuls” it.62
To take a trivial but easily grasped example, if I believe that my car is in the driveway, I have only to go and look to see whether it is or not in order to determine whether my belief is true or not. If my car is in the driveway, my judgment to that effect is true; if not, the belief is false. But this process occurs not only on the level of explicit conceptual judgments, but also on the level of operative interpretations, of perceptual judgments. Recall Peirce’s example of first seeing a clean surface and then seeing that it was dirty. In that case, the later perceptions conflict with the first one and prove it mistaken. If, in such a case, I continue to see a clean surface each time I look at it, then I simply go on believing it to be clean, without thinking about it. Now, Husserl says, and the phenomenological evidence bears him out, that whenever I experience something, I expect to be able to experience it again and to “see” it as what I saw the first time (unless it is something inherently unstable and fleeting, such as a flash of lightning or a passing image in my mind). By virtue of a synthesis of recognition, I can perceive something as the same thing that I perceived earlier. But more than this, when I perceive something for the first time, one aspect of the schemata that tell me what it is is the implicit anticipation of being able to recognize it again. Says Husserl,
The effect produced by a single intentional process, in particular its effect as a giving of something-itself, its effect as evidence, is . . . not shut off singly. The single evidence, by its own intentionality, can implicitly “demand” further givings of the object itself; it can “refer one” to them for a supplementation of its Objectivating effect . . . .
Absolutely any consciousness of anything whatever belongs a priori to an openly endless multiplicity of possible modes of consciousness, which can always be connected synthetically in the unity-form of a conjoint acceptance . . . to make one consciousness, as a consciousness of “the Same.”63
But further perceptions, further givings of something-itself, can either fulfill or annul this implicit demand. Further perceptions give me either something indeed the same, or something different, in which case my implicit belief that I shall perceive the same thing is proven false. On this fundamental level of syntheses of recognition, my beliefs are constantly being verified or falsified. Speaking of “evidence” as “that performance on the part of intentionality which consists in the giving of something-itself,”64 Husserl says that
Thanks to evidence, the life of consciousness has an all-pervasive teleological structure, a pointedness toward “reason” and even a pervasive tendency toward it – that is: toward the discovery of correctness (and, at the same time, toward the lasting acquisition of correctness) and toward the canceling of incorrectness (thereby ending their acceptance as acquired possessions).65
To put it in different terms, it is a fundamental function of the self to acquire true beliefs and true perceptions and to hold them as “lasting acquisitions” and to discard false beliefs and perceptions.
Phenomenological analysis of concepts and the conceptual element in experience leads us to begin to see another fundamental characteristic of the self. We started out the analysis of the empirical self by deciding to investigate those elements of the world present to pure consciousness that have the sense, “subjective, available directly only to me,” and to say that these elements compose the self. But through our investigation of the conceptual element in experience, we begin to suspect that this is an abstraction and that the self cannot be understood without reference to other selves. This is seen easily in the case of concepts and conceptual thinking. Much of my thinking (though not all) is by means of language; I think about things by thinking verbal thoughts, words and sentences. But language, at least as I find it in my experience, is an intersubjective phenomenon. I may think to myself in words, but only because I am able to talk to others and have them understand me and because I am able to hear and understand them. Without language, my thinking would be much less easy and effective; pictures and other modes of sensory imagery convey both too much and too little information – too much because it is presented all at once, with aspects of what is thought about that are relevant to my purposes and aspects that are irrelevant being presented together, and too little because if I can’t easily distinguish what is relevant and significant from what is not the effect is the same as having no information at all, or nearly so. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but words are much easier to fix in the mind and on paper and are easier to communicate to others. My ability to think is enhanced immeasurably because I think in language over what it would be if I had no language. Moreover, as we have seen, my language influences my perception of reality. We’ll see in Chapter Four that I am who I am correlative to what I perceive and interact with; because language influences what I perceive and how I perceive it, it influences who I am.
The relatedness of the self to other selves is seen also in the operative interpretations, the noeses, that are an integral element in my experience of the world. One of the most fundamental (and therefore easily overlooked) interpretations operative in perception of the Objective world is the knowledge that others can perceive the same world and perceive it in much the same way I do. Husserl notes that
the world is the world for us all; as an Objective world it has, in its own sense, the categorical form, “once for all truly existing,” not only for me but for everyone . . . . World-experience . . . signifies, not just my quite private experience, but community experience: The world itself, according to its sense, is the one identical world, to which all of us necessarily have experiential access, and about which all of us by “exchanging” our experiences – that is: by making common –, can reach a common understanding . . . .66
Alfred Schutz has noted the same fact in his analysis of the nature of our common-sense knowledge of the world. Under the heading of “the reciprocity of perspectives,” he notes that “in daily life I take it for granted that intelligent fellow-men exist. This implies that the objects of the world are, as a matter of principle, accessible to their knowledge . . . .”67 I also take it for granted that were I to change places with someone else, I should see the world as he did and he as I did and that we should recognize the same features of it as significant or insignificant: “‘We’ assume that both of us have selected and interpreted the actually or potentially common objects and their features in an identical manner or at least an ‘empirically identical’ manner, i.e., one sufficient for all practical purposes.”68 It is thus a fundamental characteristic of the self as I find it in my experience that I experience a world that includes other selves who experience it much the same way as I do. As our investigation proceeds, we shall find more evidence for the relatedness of the self to other selves.
More can be said about the way the conceptual element in experience figures in the structure and composition of the self, but not before we “see” what the other elements of my self are and how they interact. By way of transition into the next topic, the discussion of feeling, let us remember Watts’ words – that we notice aspects of reality that are advantageous or disadvantageous to us. That is a more or less Objective way of saying that reality, filtered through and divided up and structured by my noeses, is perceived as attractive or repellant, good or bad (or indifferent), leading to satisfaction or not. In everyday experience, feelings arise concomitantly with perception and conception and all other modes of experience. Even my most abstract concepts are never devoid of feeling. The feeling element may be reduced to unnoticed insignificance; but if it is, I am bored, and boredom is surely a feeling.
Watts has pointed out one aspect of a general truth – that in my mental life nothing is devoid of emotion. We encountered another example of this truth when we found the self unperceivable; we were at least puzzled – I myself was amazed and awed – at the conclusion. To give another example, feelings are involved in conceptual thinking in the very process of writing this paper. On the one hand, I am often aware of vague gestaltlich outlines of concepts, abstract visual patterns of the structure of the concepts and of the emerging structure of the essay. On the other hand, I am thinking of exact words, phrases, sentences, to put on paper. Often I seem to be trying out different phrases against the more abstract pattern to see if they fit or are appropriate, trying to express an exact nuance of meaning – when I get one that feels good, I write it down. But note that an essential element here is the feeling of harmony or discord, of feeling-good-with or feeling-bad-with, between the words and the unverbalized concept. It is not a matter of comparing two equally distinct entities and finding an identity – I do not simply verbalize a previously existing thought. On the contrary, as I verbalize my thoughts I discover more precisely what it is that I am thinking; and the clue, the aspect of reality that tells me whether I have expressed by thought well or poorly, is the feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction that occurs with it.
I shall use the terminology of R. G. Collingwood and say that attached to every thought, every percept, every word and image, is an “emotional charge.”69 Collingwood uses the phrase to refer to a characteristic of perception of external reality, that perceptions of Objects, events, relations, etc., are accompanied by emotional feelings. I go farther and say that emotional charges are attached to my concepts as well. If one will examine his experience, says Collingwood, “I believe that he will find that every sensum [percept] presents itself to him bearing a peculiar emotional charge, and that sensation [perception] and emotion, thus related, are twin elements in every experience of feeling.”70 I say this is true of all experience – but that is to anticipate the detailed discussion of feeling.
1 James, Psychology, p. 166.
2 Ibid., pp. 160-161.
3 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 52.
4 Husserl, Ideas, p. 202.
5 James, Psychology, pp. 157-158.
6 Ibid.
7 Says Husserl (and here we may read “experience” for “consciousness,” since Husserl uses the latter term differently from the way I do), “If one intends to understand what consciousness does . . . it is not enough, here or anywhere else, to speak of the ‘directedness’ of consciousness . . . to objects and, at most, to distinguish superficially among internal and external experience, ideation, and the like. The multiplicities of consciousness coming under these headings must be brought to sight in phenomenological reflection and dissected structurally . . . one must seek out the intentional role or function (Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 163).” Such detailed investigation is, however, beyond the scope of this paper.
8 James, Pragmatism, pp. 225-226.
9 Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, pp. 154-155.
10 Ibid.
11 James, Psychology, p. 153.
12 James, Pragmatism, p. 115.
13 Ibid., p. 116.
14 Schutz, Collected Papers I, pp. 7-8.
15 Husserl, Ideas, p. 223.
16 Ibid., p. 102.
17 Ibid., p. 114.
18 Ibid., p. 238.
19 Ibid., p. 226.
20 James, Psychology, p. 26.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Husserl, Ideas, p. 226.
24 Ibid., p. 227.
25 Ibid., p. 228.
26 Ibid., pp. 227-228.
27 Ibid., p. 228.
28 Ibid., p. 238.
29 Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie, p. 243.
30 Husserl, Ideas, p. 261.
31 Husserl, Ideas, p. 262.
32 Husserl, Ideen, p. 247.
33 Husserl, Ideas, p. 265.
34 Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, pp. 164, 165.
35 Ibid., p. 157.
36 James, Psychology, p. 218.
37 Husserl, Ideas, pp. 96-97.
38 Ibid., p. 231.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., p. 228.
41 Joseph Church, Language and the Discovery of Reality, pp. 35-37.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Charles Sanders Peirce, Selected Writings, ed. Philip P. Wiener, p. 24.
45 Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. V, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, pp. 38, 114-115.
46 Ibid, p. 114.
47 Ibid., p. 70.
48 Ibid., pp. 70, 120.
49 Ibid., p. 88.
50 Ibid., p. 97.
51 Ibid., p. 113.
52 Peirce, Selected Writings, pp. 46-47.
53 Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. V, pp. 73-74.
54 Peirce, Selected Writings, p. 31.
55 Ibid., pp. 98-99.
56 Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. V, p. 113.
57 Benjamin Lee Whorf, Science and Linguistics, in Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, ed. John B. Carroll, p. 214.
58 Ibid., pp. 215-216.
59 Ibid., p. 216.
60 Weston La Barre, The Human Animal, p. 204.
61 Alan Watts, The Book, p. 29.
62 Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 193.
63 Ibid., pp. 159-160.
64 Ibid., p. 157, emphasis omitted.
65 Ibid., p. 160.
66 Ibid., p. 236.
67 Schutz Collected Papers I, p. 11.
68 Ibid., p. 12.
69 R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, p. 162.
70 Ibid., pp. 162-163.
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