Argument 2: The Argument from Intelligibility — Esse Quam Videri

Nice. Yes I think that’s a detailed account, which goes further - to Mr God - than we need to.

The other arguments may have been made by CS Lewis too I seem to recall.

I found this from a rather well written and somewhat intractable essay by Hart on the matter.

Or, more simply, the whole issue is intentionality, which stands at the very heart of the phenomenological project, but which phenomenologists in the vein of Marion—which might just mean Marion—tend to treat not as determinative of our understanding of being, or even of our understanding of our capacity to seek and find, but principally as the limitation of what we receive in any phenomenon, defined every bit as strictly as the Kantian rule of representation. This is very odd indeed, since such limits by definition would be unsurpassable and for that very reason unrecognizable; any awareness of a givenness in excess of our intentional capacity—any ‘saturated phenomenon’, to borrow a phrase—would be impossible not only to perceive, but to intuit. That, however, is a secondary consideration. That there is such a thing as intentionality at all invites a certain set of metaphysical conjectures, and those of an almost inescapably idealist kind (as Husserl, for all the restraint he exercised in making large pronouncements, understood). There is, of course, no such thing as an ‘analytic’ idealism, since every metaphysical picture requires a synthetic judgement pronounced upon certain phenomenologically specified structures of experience. But there is a certain inevitability in the sort of questions our experience of intentionality prompts, and a limited range of intelligible answers.

There is no great mystery, of course, as to why the idea of intrinsic intentionality is abhorrent to a consistent naturalist, or why a ‘scientistic reductionist’ such as Alex Rosenberg (that is his description of himself) should feel obliged to deny its very existence. It simply cannot be reconciled with the mechanical narrative of emergence. There is no avenue strictly upward from mere behavior, understood in terms of stimulus and response, to intentional agency, except (and this is the preposterous alternative favored by Rosenberg and others) as an epiphenomenal illusion. Along even the most gradualist of evolutionary paths, the slow, cumulative, agonizing ascent from entropy to homeostasis to metabolism to interiority to intentionality is impossibly fantastic; such a sequence of developments would never reach that point of inflection where actual intention toward an end arose from the sheer momentum of life out of the primordial night. The horizons of intention would have to be pushed ever further back into the past and ever further ahead into the future without cessation in order to tell the tale, because both horizons are necessarily presumed within the very structure of persistence, and must be present (as so much current biological thinking powerfully suggests) at every systemic level, from the highest to the lowest. So, if intentionality is real, it must—contrary to the mechanical narrative—mean that the future and the purposive and the final, on the one hand, coexist with the past and the energetic and original, on the other, in every present act of a real agent. This requires that there is always already a noetic realm in which chronos is wholly present in a replete aeon, a notional order in which the end is always already accomplished—even if that end is never realized here below, in the land of unlikeness. And yet this too cannot intelligibly be understood as a composite order, in which diverse extrinsic causes collaborate to produce a mere totality. It must be a true intrinsic unity, and so must be subordinate to and contingent upon a yet higher realm of unity as such. If there is intentionality, simply enough, a metaphysics of participation is always proposing itself for consideration, and with considerable persuasive force.

Perhaps, however, I should lay out the sequence of investigations I would think necessary to determine whether my understanding of, say, Plotinus’s hierarchy of emanations could be regarded as a ‘phenomenological’ deduction—or even, to employ the terminology of the guild, a phenomenological reduction.

The very first question I would pose is whether the pre-Kantian or pre-critical assumption that metaphysics can be directly deduced by reflection on the conditions of experience, without any prior methodological rationale, actually concealed certain rigorous principles tacitly at work in Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic thought. The next is whether the modern critical project, in identifying the necessity of a proper distinction between epistemological investigation of the categories of understanding and metaphysical speculation on ‘essences’ or forms, at once revealed what most premodern philosophy had failed to discriminate and yet also, paradoxically, served further to conceal those governing principles mentioned above. In that sense, perhaps, Kant’s first Critique might be regarded not so much as a barrier erected between the confident metaphysics of the premodern world and modern thought so much as a prism that can separate the formerly blended light of the metaphysical, empirical, phenomenological, practical, and culturally contingent into their distinct colors. Chiefly, my concern is whether, rather than constituting merely an illicit leap from the temporal into the eternal, the attempt in Platonic and Aristotelian tradition to understand the structure of reality according to rational categories derived from mental agency (such as idea, form, and finality) might more properly be understood, in a great many cases, as an ontology of time, naïvely but in many respects consistently based upon what we now might describe as a phenomenology of all agency, mental and otherwise. Again, I am not persuaded that the partition that contemporary continental phenomenology erects between its method and ‘metaphysics’ tout court can possibly remain impermeable in the way it is so often asserted to be. I think a particularly fruitful way of framing the issue might be to ask, for instance, whether Heidegger’s project of the ‘temporalization of ontology’ was not, in a manner that he did not recognize, an accidental inversion of an ancient project of the ‘ontologization of time’, whose beginning we can vaguely locate in the dictum from the Timaeus that “Chronos is the moving image of Aeon” (which, misleadingly to our modern ears, is usually rendered as “Time is the moving image of Eternity”) and whose first culmination might be found in that aforementioned Plotinian hierarchy of hypostases. My aim would be not some elevation of either ‘the ancients’ over ‘the moderns’ or the reverse, but rather a partial erasure of a hard distinction of method between them and a reconciliation of certain ancient and certain modern philosophical impulses at a more original level of reasoning. There is a point at which the boundaries enforced by phenomenological ‘bracketing’ might profitably be encouraged to dissolve, if only to reveal the ‘phenomenological’ method implicit in what has been defined historically as mere metaphysics.

So I would begin from Heidegger’s example of the differing ways in which a hammer is understood—or, better, grasped—by the one who is wielding it. The image is emblematic of both an agent’s inescapable pragmatic engagement in the disclosure of being and also the temporality of Dasein; but what tends to disappear in his account of the ecstatic openness of Dasein to the future, as determined toward the horizon of death, is any sufficiently precise analysis of the element of specific intentionality in the agent’s use of a hammer, and of the way that finite intention always arises within the context of a more original orientation toward certain more absolute ends. In one sense, Heidegger’s project of enclosing ontology within a pragmatic and hermeneutical horizon arrived very late in the day within the larger modern project inaugurated by Descartes’s rational reconstruction of reality from the original position of the subject, which reached its most epochal expression in Kant’s transcendental deduction; but, in another sense, Heidegger was also resuming the earlier Protestant resistance against the ‘Athenian captivity’ of the schoolmen. Ever since the critical threshold was crossed, there has been a great deal of philosophical ferment around the possibility of retrieving the premodern faith in the unity of being and thought, now purged of its naïveté by critical scruple. In a broad sense, this is the guiding pathos in much modern continental thought, Romantic, Idealist, Phenomenological, and so on. Needless to say, this ambition has been hindered by the triumph not only of the critical vantage, but of the mechanical view of nature as well. The latter may be hospitable to substance dualism, materialist emergentism, or physicalist reductionism (even eliminativism), but not to any genuine rapprochement between our pictures of mental agency and of the intrinsic structure of reality. Absolute Idealism constituted the most daring attempt at overcoming the breach, and Hegel’s logic the most monumentally systematic.

Be that as it may, I wish to cast a glance back toward the earlier syntheses, before the threshold of the critical was reached, but to do so without retreating back across that threshold. In brief, if intrinsic intentionality truly exists, it already from the first forbids a complete mechanization of our picture of reality simply by virtue of the actual efficacy of rationales, purposes, and meanings. If mental agency requires the real existence of an antecedent finality as a rational relation within all intentional acts, then this naturally suggests that there must be a distinct ‘noetic’ space in which every act enjoys at least a notional existence as a complete totality; and, so Plotinus and others assumed, this ‘aeonian’ totality, which is meted out in a fluent succession of episodes in the sublunary world of chronos, must be sustained more originally by a principle of unity prior to all distinctions of states. And, if nature is hospitable to efficacious intentionality, it is perhaps not irrational to suppose that it is configured intrinsically upon this model of agency, especially if intentionality can be discerned within even its most elementary functions. The Critique of Judgement tells us that teleology can at most be assumed to be a necessary aspect of our rational perception of totality, and nothing more; but (as Hegel noted) this too is a metaphysical supposition, and an arbitrary imposition of limits upon reason’s grasp of the real. So, if as I say I were to begin with Heidegger’s hammer in hand, the first line of inquiry would be to ask what the absolutely indispensable features of any complete account of my intentional engagement with it must be. The next would be to ask, with some caution but real application, what the actual structure of intentional acts suggests about causality in regard to time, and so about the ontology of those causal relations. And, at the end of that train of reflections, it might be possible to ask whether there must be an ultimate point of indistinction in the structure of reality between the mind as knower and being as the known.

Thoughts? It's a little too difficult for me.

It should be possible to make sense of any clear and consistent argument. The claim seems to be that because physicalism cannot make sense of intentionality, and intentionality is obviously real, then physicalism is refuted.

The problem is that any physicalism which claims that there can be no real intentionality is always already refuted, since the claim that there is no real intentionality is itself a claim about something and hence is itself and example of intentionality.

It doesn't follow that, for example, electro-chemical signalling, which amounts to semiosis ...that is amounts to information about some conditions or other being apprehended, would be impossible if it were nothing more than a physical process, just because we cannot explain how it works in the terms of physics.

It is already obvious that those kinds of biological processes cannot be explained in terms of physics. It is simply the wrong toolkit.

That there might be (current at least but even no possible future) physical explanation does not prove that something more than physical processes are involved, even if it might reasonably serve as a motivator for the faith-based intuition that something mysterious and perhaps inexplicable is going on. Claiming that the something mysterious is logical or empirical proof of a spiritual realm or god or whatever is a step too far and does not provide any missing explanation in any case.