The world and life are one. I am my world, the microcosm. The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing. If I wrote a book The World As I Found It, I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made. The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world. — TLP ~5.6, edited to flow as a paragraph
Philosophers have called this minimal “I” a 'pure witness' or a 'transcendental ego,' — plaque flag
I do understand why Husserl speaks of a transcendental ego rather than something neutral, something prior to such articulation. — plaque flag
Which philosophers in particular? — Wayfarer
This means that the world's objectivity and our knowledge of it are not simply "given," but are actively constituted by conscious acts. — Wayfarer
My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience,’ the knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. — W. James, Does Consciousness Exist?
https://plato-philosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-Monadology-1714-by-Gottfried-Wilhelm-LEIBNIZ-1646-1716.pdfThis connexion or adaptation of all created things to each and of each to all, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and, consequently, that it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.
And as the same town, looked at from various sides, appears quite different and becomes as it were numerous in aspects [perspectivement]; even so, as a result of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were so many different universes, which, nevertheless are nothing but aspects [perspectives] of a single universe, according to the special point of view of each Monad.
And by this means there is obtained as great variety as possible, along with the greatest possible order; that is to say, it is the way to get as much perfection as possible. — link, section 56
For a fundamental theory the subject and and the ego would have to be reduced. — FrancisRay
The subject-object duality would be, in Sartre's words, of a functional order only, and the ego would be a fantasy. — FrancisRay
Does it refer to particular theory or approach? — FrancisRay
Each I finds itself as a middle point, so to speak a zero-point of a system of coordinates, in reference to which the I considers, arranges, and cognizes all things of the world, the already known or the unknown. But each I apprehends this middle point as something relative. For example, the I changes bodily its place in space, and while it continues to say “here” it knows that “here” in each case is spatially different....
The same holds for things. Each person has around himself the same world and perhaps several see the same thing, the same segment of the world. But each has his thing-appearance: The same thing appears for each in a different way in accordance with the different place in space. The thing has its front and back, above and below. And what is my front of the thing is for the other perhaps its back, and so on. But it is the same thing with the same properties. — Husserl : Basic Problems Lecture (available free online )
Each of us knows himself as an I. Now, being in that attitude where each of us finds himself present as an I, what does each of us find present in himself and in connection with himself ? We began thus with a description of the kind that everyone had to say “I,” and it was to this that everything else was tied. It is best to speak here in the singular first person and to continue thus: I posit myself as being and as being this here, as being with this and that determinate content. I posit me as experiencing this and that; I have such and such dispositions and acts. But I do not posit me as a disposition or an act; I do not come upon me as a disposition or an act.
Further, I posit me and find me not only present as an experiencing subject but also as a subject of personal properties, as a person with a certain character, as having certain intellectual and moral dispositions, etc. This I find to be present, of course, in a completely different way than I find my experiences to be present.
Further, I find me and what is mine as having duration in time, as changing or not changing during their duration, and I distinguish the flowing Now and the still given “just past” in retention. Further, in recollection I come upon myself as being the very same one who existed earlier, as still perduring now, s the one who perdured earlier on, who experienced such and such things in succession, etc.
Further, I have, as I find this, a lived body; and the lived body is a thing among other things that I likewise come upon. I also find this in time: In the Now, the existing lived body as my body; in the just past, the lived body which has just been; in recollection, the recollected body — the lived body belongs to me at all times.
I'll end by referring back to GoldenEye (video games given only via first-person perspectives) and ontological cubism.The psychological I belongs to objective time, the same time to which the spatial world belongs, to the
time that is measured by clocks and other chronometers. And this I is connected to, in a spatial-temporal way, the lived body, upon whose functioning the psychical states and acts (which, once again, are ordered within objective time) are dependent, dependent in their objective, i.e., their spatial–temporal existence and condition. Everything psychical is spatial–temporal. Even if one holds it to be an absurdity, and perhaps justifiably so, that the psychical I itself (along with its experiences) has extension and place, it does have an existence in space, namely as the I of the respective lived body, which has its objective place in space. And therefore each person says naturally and rightly : I am now here and later there. — Husserl
'I don't see the world differently. Or this is still not strong and clear enough. I am the world from a different perspective. The world [so far as we can know or even make sense of ] only exists perspectively. ' — plaque flag
For the world of time and space this is the case. — FrancisRay
In what sense do you call it neutral? — FrancisRay
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/james1.htmI believe that ‘consciousness,’ when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy. During the past year, I have read a number of articles whose authors seemed just on the point of abandoning the notion of consciousness,[1] and substituting for it that of an absolute experience not due to two factors. But they were not quite radical enough, not quite daring enough in their negations. For twenty years past I have mistrusted ‘consciousness’ as an entity; for seven or eight years past I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded.
To deny plumply that ‘consciousness’ exists seems so absurd on the face of it – for undeniably ‘thoughts’ do exist – that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable. Thinking is not an activity performed by the individual person qua individual. It is the activity of spirit, to which Hegel famously referred in the Phenomenology as “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Hegel [1807] 1977: 110).
ccording to various textbooks, the 'transcendental ego' refers to 'subjective consciousness devoid of empirical content', namely anything that pertains to the external world or to the ego's psychological states (e.g. feelings or moods). It is the "observing self" that remains when we bracket out or set aside all our beliefs about the world, including our own existence in it. This bracketing process, which Husserl termed "phenomenological reduction," allows for the focus on consciousness as such and its structures without becoming entangled in empirical or naturalistic assumptions. For Husserl, the transcendental ego is the source and condition for the constitution of all meaning and objectivity. Objects appear as meaningful and objective only within the intentional acts of the transcendental ego. This means that the world's objectivity and our knowledge of it are not simply "given," but are actively constituted by conscious acts. (It is in this last where one can trace the influence of Kant although of course Husserl also departs from Kant in many important ways.)
This doesn't so much 'dissolve the sensing and thinking subject', as dissolving acts of sensing and thinking so as to lay bare the transcendental subject. — Wayfarer
“In no way do we accept what any empirical act presents to us as being. Instead of living in its achievement, and instead of clinging naıvely to its positing with its sense after its achievement, we rather turn to the act itself and make it itself, plus what in it may present itself to us,
an object.
“In my ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning?”(Phenomenology and Anthropology)
Granted that the stream of experience changes, are their general structures which are relatively constant ? I think Husserl and Heidegger and others have tried to sketch that relatively constant structure. If being is a river, it has a shape. (?)
The psychological I belongs to objective time, the same time to which the spatial world belongs, to the time that is measured by clocks and other chronometers… The thing has its front and back, above and below. And what is my front of the thing is for the other perhaps its back, and so on. But it is the same thing with the same properties — plaque flag
When Husserl says that through empirical knowledge we come to see our perception of a thing as only our subjective perspective on the ‘same’ thing that others see, he means that it is the peculiar function of empirical objectivity to give the impression , through apperceptive idealization, of a unity where there is only similarity. — Joshs
Sounds like an important point. I can guess at the answer, but for you, as a long time student of phenomenology, what is the significance of this point for how humans live with each other? Can it be applied in a practical way? — Tom Storm
Phenomenology gives us a way to identity and protect the unique perspectives of all participants in a community even when their views deviate from the dominant scientific conventions. — Joshs
The transcendent ego is not a subject as opposed to an object. It is a synthetic structure composed of a subjective (noetic) and objective (noematic) pole. It is only abstractively that we can think of these poles separately from each other. — Joshs
“The fundamental form of this universal synthesis, the form that makes all other syntheses of consciousness possible, is the all embracing consciousness of internal time.” — Joshs
When Husserl says that through empirical knowledge we come to see our perception of a thing as only our subjective perspective on the ‘same’ thing that others see, he means that it is the peculiar function of empirical objectivity to give the impression , through apperceptive idealization, of a unity where there is only similarity. Through the reduction we can come to see that it is not the same empirical thing we all see from our own vantage, any more than the aspectual features unfolding in our apprehension of a spatial object belong to the ‘same’ object. — Joshs
Speaking quite universally, the surrounding world is not a world "in itself" but is rather a world "for me," precisely the surrounding world of its Ego-subject, a world experienced by the subject or grasped consciously in some other way and posited by the subject in his intentional lived experiences with the sense-content of the moment. As such, the surrounding world is in a certain way always in the process of becoming, constantly producing itself by means of transformations of sense and ever new formations of sense along with the concomitant positings and annullings.
...
To begin with, the world is, in its core, a world appearing to the senses and characterized as "on hand," a world given in straightforward empirical intuitions and perhaps grasped actively. The Ego then finds itself related to this empirical world in new acts, e.g., in acts of valuing or in acts of pleasure and displeasure. In these acts, the object is brought to consciousness as valuable, pleasant, beautiful, etc., and indeed this happens in various ways, e.g., in original givenness. In that case, there is
built, upon the substratum of mere intuitive representing, an evaluating which, if we presuppose it, plays, in the immediacy of its lively motivation, the role of a value-"perception" (in our terms, a value-reception) in which the value character itself is given in original intuition. — Husserl
I claim that we see the same object differently. Even I, by myself, see the same object differently as I walk around it or shine my flashlight on it. The object transcends and unifies its adumbrations. — plaque flag
“The consciousness of its [the object's] existence is here a belief in act; by virtue of the accord in which the perceptive appearances flow off in original presentation, retention, and protention, an accord of continuous self-affirmation, belief is continuous certainty of belief, which has its certainty in this originality of the object in its living being-present.”
The object is “a unity which “appears” continually in the change of the modes of its givenness and which belongs to the essential structure of a specific act of the ego.” “The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.
“…only idealism, in all its forms, attempts to lay hold of subjectivity as subjectivity and to do justice to the fact that the world is never given to the subject and the communities of subjects in any other way than as the subjectively relative valid world with particular experiential content and as a world which, in and through subjectivity, takes on ever new transformations of meaning; and that even the apodictically persisting conviction of one and the same world, exhibiting itself subjectively in changing ways, is a conviction motivated purely within subjectivity, a conviction whose sense—the world itself, the actually existing world—never surpasses the subjectivity that brings it about. But idealism was always too quick with its theories and for the most part could not free itself from hidden objectivistic presuppositions…”(Basic Problems)
According to various textbooks, the 'transcendental ego' refers to 'subjective consciousness devoid of empirical content', namely anything that pertains to the external world or to the ego's psychological states (e.g. feelings or moods) — Wayfarer
Does the hard problem vanish or rather find itself replaced ?
The "hard problem," is the problem of explaining how consciousness arises and how it produces its subjective qualities through a scientific theory that has the same rigor, comprehensiveness, and depth as any other of the major scientific theories we are familiar with (e.g., explanations of cellular reproduction.) If that's sort of answer you're looking for, this sort of framing isn't going to help you.
Phenomenology might help us find an answer to the hard problem, or it might tell us that the answer we want is unattainable, but it can't answer the problem because the problem is about explaining the subjective elements of consciousness in the same sort of language/model that we use for explaining how a car works — Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't think so. The "hard problem," is the problem of explaining how consciousness arises and how it produces its subjective qualities through a scientific theory that has the same rigor, comprehensiveness, and depth as any other of the major scientific theories we are familiar with (e.g., explanations of cellular reproduction.) If that's sort of answer you're looking for, this sort of framing isn't going to help you. — Count Timothy von Icarus
:up:Nothing in our experience of the world ever gives us the justification to claim that what we see is the ‘same’ object, except in a relative way. — Joshs
When a crowd of people all observe a rocket bursting, they will ignore whatever there is reason to think peculiar and personal in their experience, and will not realize without an effort that there is any private element in what they see. But they can, if necessary, become aware of these elements. One part of the crowd sees the rocket on the right, one on the left, and so on. Thus when each person's perception is studied in its fullness, and not in the abstract form which is most convenient for conveying information about the outside world, the perception becomes a datum forpsychologyphenomenology. — Russell. --- I changed the last word
The trouble with phenomenology is that it is effectively naive realism and can never produce a fundamental theory. . . . — FrancisRay
“…only idealism, in all its forms, attempts to lay hold of subjectivity as subjectivity and to do justice to the fact that the world is never given to the subject and the communities of subjects in any other way than as the subjectively relative valid world with particular experiential content and as a world which, in and through subjectivity, takes on ever new transformations of meaning; and that even the apodictically persisting conviction of one and the same world, exhibiting itself subjectively in changing ways, is a conviction motivated purely within subjectivity, a conviction whose sense—the world itself, the actually existing world—never surpasses the subjectivity that brings it about.
I think if we had something like the technology mentioned above, something such that someone could control what you see, the emotions you feel, and even the words of your internal monologue by "playing" your nervous system like a piano, then most people would say we've sufficiently grounded the causal underpinnings of experience to be able to tell when something is conscious at a human level versus just appearing so, even if we can't fully explain exactly where that consciousness emerges on the level from zygote to new born. — Count Timothy von Icarus
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