1) Why are the suggested terms exempt from the criticisms you make about any other supposedly external term? Why is OK to acknowledge the non-arbitrary existence of a “consonance” but not a tree or some other self-identical spatial object? — J

The nature of the flow that Husserl described is not without order, even though it lacks formal features. How can this be? Husserl is not the only philosopher who has depicted the primordial basis of reality in these terms. We find such thinking also in Nietzsche , Deleuze, Foucault, Heidegger , Derrida and others. What is common to them is the idea that no entity in the world pre-exists its interactions with other entities. The patterns that arise obey no analogies or categorical placements. Things are not identities , they only continue to exist the same differently.

2) Why, and in what way, would an “affordance”, e.g., be constraining? Why couldn’t it be ignored? Does this have to do with the role that “our own activities” play in this process? — J

We cannot ignore events which thwart our purposes, even though what stands in the way of our goals emerges by way of those very goals.

3) Are these terms actually meaningful? Is it possible, e.g., to have “texture” without its being of anything? This seems like a predicate without a subject. Surely textures and consonances need to inhere somewhere, otherwise what organ of perception are we using to identify them? — J

The subject is itself produced as a continually shifting effect of organism-environment interactions. The person-world dynamic isnt a subject-predicate propositional structure, with a subject representing a world to itself. Instead, both the subject and the object ‘inhere’ as the result of their interaction.

:up:

whereas I'm inclined to grant the subject a kind of ontological primacy.

An utterly formless, structureless flow of change. — Joshs

That would be what is traditionally called chaos, would it not?

whereas I'm inclined to grant the subject a kind of ontological primacy. — Wayfarer

Husserl certainly grants subjectivity ontological primacy, but the content of the ego changes with its acts.

“We can discern with evidence the sense in which the pure Ego changes in the changing of its acts. It is changeable in its practices, in its activities and passivities, in its being attracted and being repulsed, etc

What is unchanging about it is its structural role as center from which the retentional and protentional horizons extend backward to the past and forward to the future, respectively.

“As pure Ego it does not harbor any hidden inner richness; it is absolutely simple and it lies there absolutely clear. All richness lies in the cogito and in the mode of the function which can be adequately grasped therein.”(Ideas II). Husserl describes this pure ego pole as non-perceivable, non-graspable and anonymous. This suggests that the pure ego may function as nothing but an empty zero point or center of activity rather than a consciously sensed feeling of any kind.

An utterly formless, structureless flow of change.
— Joshs

That would be what is traditionally called chaos, would it not?

Traditionally, chaos is defined by its opposition to order. But
the constituting temporal flow is not without all order. Heidegger says:

“Chaos and the Greek meaning of it are not the same. Chaos mostly refers to the disorder which is a consequence of a loss of order; thus chaos, as the interpenetration and mishmash of all claims, measures, goals, and expedients, is completely dependent on the precedent “order” which still operates on it as its nonessence. In contrast, the Greek meaning of it, chaos in the original sense, is nothing nonessential and “negative”—instead, it is the gaping open of the abyss of the essential possibilities of grounding. An experience of this kind of “chaos” is reserved for the one who is decided and creative—this “chaos” cannot be brought into order, but “only” into an unfolding toward an extreme and ever freer opposition. The essentiality—the nearness to being—of a humanity can at times be gauged by what it takes, and can take, to be “chaos.”” (Ponderings 1938-39)

The nature of the flow that Husserl described is not without order, even though it lacks formal features. How can this be? Husserl is not the only philosopher who has depicted the primordial basis of reality in these terms. We find such thinking also in Nietzsche , Deleuze, Foucault, Heidegger , Derrida and others. What is common to them is the idea that no entity in the world pre-exists its interactions with other entities. The patterns that arise obey no analogies or categorical placements. Things are not identities , they only continue to exist the same differently. — Joshs

I've bolded the question above. We want to understand how something called a flow can have order and patterns while lacking formal features. We also want to understand how this flow is not an entity, nor is it composed of entities. Would an analogy with water help? -- it's the first thing that comes to mind when I think of "flow." The problem here would be that water is composed of entities, and the ways in which water is ordered and patterned give rise to features such as depth, velocity, waves, eddies, etc. (Arguably, these are not formal features, but then we need an account of what a formal feature would be.) We could say that the "entities" of which water is composed -- I'm thinking of molecules -- are themselves composed of smaller entities, right down to the subatomic level, at which it's unclear whether we can speak of entities at all. Might this level be closer to Husserlian "flow"? But do we really perceive that flow? If we could imagine -- and I'm not sure we can -- an epoché that bracketed everything, would we get the quantum world?

We cannot ignore events which thwart our purposes, even though what stands in the way of our goals emerges by way of those very goals — Joshs

OK.

The subject is itself produced as a continually shifting effect of organism-environment interactions. The person-world dynamic isnt a subject-predicate propositional structure, with a subject representing a world to itself. Instead, both the subject and the object ‘inhere’ as the result of their interaction. — Joshs

There's some unwitting ambiguity here, I think, brought on by the term "subject". I didn't mean "subject" as opposed to "object". Let me rephrase without that term:

Is it possible, e.g., to have “texture” without its being of anything? Texture is meant to precede our constituting any specific intentionally constituted object. But surely textures and consonances need to inhere somewhere. We can't say that they begin to appear after the act of intentionality, since they are precisely supposed to be the material out of which such an act is constituted. — J

This now looks like a version of the first question about flow. We might ask, Is flow ontologically primitive? That fits with @Wayfarer's remark above about chaos. It may also fit with current scientific speculation about how to represent an abstraction such as "quantity" in strictly physical terms. Here's a very good recent paper on that. The question discussed is whether quantity is simply a primitive property of the physical world, or whether it can be explained in non-mathematical terms. The relevance here would be that quantity might be an example -- like texture and consonance -- of something that appears ontologically primitive, part of the "flow" we encounter in the lifeworld. But maybe not, as the paper discusses.

whereas I'm inclined to grant the subject a kind of ontological primacy. — Wayfarer

My remarks above about ontological primitives shouldn't be read as excluding this possibility as well. Subjectivity may be as primary as "flow".

I'd like to follow this thread. I await mention of Husserl's bracketing, or epoche.

I find this in Wiki, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracketing_(phenomenology)).

"Edmund Husserl included the ideas of Kant in developing his concept of bracketing, also referred to as epoché. Though Husserl likely began developing the method of bracketing around 1906, his book, Ideas, introduced it when it was published in 1913. Husserl reinterpreted and revitalized the epoché of Pyrrhonism as a permanent way of challenging the dogmatic naivete of life in the “natural attitude” and motivating the transformation to theoria, or the theoretical attitude of the disinterested spectator, which is essential both to modern science and to a genuine transcendental philosophy."

Mention of Pyrrhonism is imo critical. (See this thread, :https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/4252/pyrrhonism/p1)

Why is OK to acknowledge the non-arbitrary existence of a “consonance” but not a tree or some other self-identical spatial object? — J

This question is the nut of philosophy to me, reframed since before the time of Plato’s cave.

You just raised an analogy with water to describe the flow. Thales ears perked up.

The fact that we haven’t been able to answer it plainly after all this feeds the predicament. It may be instructive that we seem to have beat around the bush here but continually miss the target.

Because of the linear function of logical thought that we can’t escape in order to even merely form a sentence (or just say “consonance” as “not-flow”), when we speak or think of this question, we automatically separate consonance from the flow. And, we make a new consonance out of the flow itself and pit it against consonance itself. All so we can speak of whatever we are speaking of.

But it is one thing, any one moment, we first and plainly sought to speak of, so we contradict ourselves and our goals by merely positing the question and identifying a subject to examine (such as “consonance”), and by trying to say just one thing “consonance” we have to say two things “consonance in flow”.

So there will never be a satisfactory answer to this in the form of linear thinking and our concepts. This, to me is why this basic question has remained unanswered.

Although not an answer, I see what Heraclitus said as addressing this in a plain way, because he wasn’t being linear in his words (“the path of writing is both crooked and straight.”). We aren’t drawing a line between consonance and flow; we have to see them together at once to see either at all.

Heraclitus said “it rests from change”. This would be the most analytic framing of this observation, but it might also just be taken as mysticism or nonsense. So what does it say?

His best description of what to make of the appearance of consonance was this: “the barley-drink stands still, only while stirring”. ) This is a a more faithful translation of his aphorism at 125.

The barley/ drink is a mixture of barley, wine, cheese and maybe some oil. It’s a like a vinaigrette you can drink. And like a vinaigrette, if it sits in a cup or bottle it separates. In order to bring the barley-drink into existence, for a consonance to appear, you must stir the ingredients and only while the ingredients are stirring in motion can the barley drink be drunk - otherwise you still have not-barley-drink, but cheese and barley, or wine and oil.

Flow and consonance reveal each other in the instant of experience.

So the barley-drink, the consonance, stands out in existence as a “thing” for the first time, only in the motion.

Linear thinking places the motion first and the barley-drink second. But they have to be seen together in the moments the stirring is happening. There is no prior or post or cause or effect between them. The consonance points immediately to its stirring in the instant the stirring is consonant as a barley-drink.

So this doesn’t really answer the question, but I think it reframes the object we are investigating.

Another observation here is that this is paradox. We are trying to nail down nailing down - or undo doing by doing something as if it was already done. We are cracking open what neither can be cracked nor is it not already open. It rests is the same as it changes now in our speech, so how on earth can we be logical about things grounded in illogical paradox?

So I don’t have an answer, but spiral towards one anyway treating the above moving parts.

We always try to grab a subject, a motionless object, and then predicate it, fixing properties to it. But the fixing, the predicating is as much before the object predicated, as the object predicated appears first in out sentences.

In the end, I don’t think these are linguistic tricks hiding self-delusion, nor do I think Plato fee ally explained the existence of essences, nor Aristotle though he did better to account for the flow, nor Nietzsche though he did even better to account for the flow. But I do think consonance is something we minded-beings sense, from out in the flow; even though we do not see the thing in itself as it is in itself, we see that it is, that it is flowing, that there is consonance and flow.

It is a different thing to say that we do not know what any of the phenomena in experience really are by continuing to use the eyeballs and minds that make them phenomena, from saying “separate, self consonant things apart from us do not exist.”

It’s a triangulating dance we dance when we say “consonance” at all.

. We want to understand how something called a flow can have order and patterns while lacking formal features. We also want to understand how this flow is not an entity, nor is it composed of entities. Would an analogy with water help? -- it's the first thing that comes to mind when I think of "flow." The problem here would be that water is composed of entities, and the ways in which water is ordered and patterned give rise to features such as depth, velocity, waves, eddies, etc. (Arguably, these are not formal features, but then we need an account of what a formal feature would be.) We could say that the "entities" of which water is composed -- I'm thinking of molecules -- are themselves composed of smaller entities, right down to the subatomic level, at which it's unclear whether we can speak of entities at all. Might this level be closer to Husserlian "flow"? But do we really perceive that flow? If we could imagine -- and I'm not sure we can -- an epoché that bracketed everything, would we get the quantum world?

. The question discussed is whether quantity is simply a primitive property of the physical world, or whether it can be explained in non-mathematical terms. The relevance here would be that quantity might be an example -- like texture and consonance -- of something that appears ontologically primitive, part of the "flow" we encounter in the lifeworld. But maybe not, as the paper discusses. — J

In order to understand the basis of quantity, we have to see its relation to quantity. We can only count instances of something that remains qualitatively the same over the course of the counting. For instance, if we define change in terms of spatial displacement of a body, we are defining change in terms of motion. Motion is a formal notion of change, because it relies on the form of a quality, which remains self-identical as we measure its temporal movement in space. Contrast this to Husserl’s temporal flow, which contains within itself no self-identical qualities, and thus cannot be measured like motion can, and which is why it doesn’t make sense to talk about the flow moving faster or slower. Each new phase of the flow varies qualitatively with respect to the previous phase, but this doesn’t prevent there being dimensions of similarity and resonances within the differentiations of the flow.

Put differently, if every change in degree is at the same time a difference in kind, then both quality and quantity are in a sense illusions or abstractions we place over the flow.
Nathan Widder reveals a similar way of thinking in what Deleuze borrows from Nietzsche:

“…the thesis from Deleuze's late 1960s writings holds identity to be a simulation or optical illusion…identity and fixed markers, which may be considered natural and pregiven or contingently constructed but indispensable, are surface effects of difference. Identities and fixed markers, I want to say, are like patterns on the surface of water, which appear fixed when seen from a great distance, such as from the window of an airplane in flight: their stability and substantiality, in short, are a matter of perspective.”

“Nietzsche declares that ‘everything for which the word “knowledge” makes any sense refers to the domain of reckoning, weighing, measuring, to the domain of quantity' (Nietzsche 1968: §565); but he also maintains that ‘we need “unities” in order to be able to reckon: that does not mean we must suppose that such unities exist' (§635). Mechanism begins with unities that can be quantified or counted, but the idea of unity applies to abstract things and objects, not to forces. On a more concrete level, where there are no unities or things pre-existing their relations but only incongruent relations of force, quantity cannot be a number but only a relation: as Deleuze argues, there is no ‘quantity in itself', but rather ‘difference in quantity', a relation of more and less, but one that cannot be placed on a fixed numerical scale. Forces are determined quantitatively – ‘Nietzsche always believed that forces were quantitative and had to be defined quantitatively' (NP 43) – and this determination takes the form of relative strength and weakness.But this difference does not entail fixed numerical values being assigned to each force, as this can only be done in abstraction, when, for example, two forces are isolated in a closed system, as mechanism does when it examines the world. A quantitative difference between forces is therefore on the order of an intensive difference à la Leibniz, an intensive quantity in which forces vice-dict rather than contradict one another.”

We also want to understand how this flow is not an entity, nor is it composed of entities. — J

I'm not an expert on Husserl; my perspective on this topic comes from sociology - in particular from Helmut Plessner, Alfred Schütz, and Berger/Luckmann, all of whom were heavily leaning on Husserl. I've never read Husserl (except in the form of quotes); but what this reminded me of is Husserl's distinction between "Leib" and "Körper" (two German words for "body"), which Plessner discussed as "being a body" (Leib) and "having a body" (Körper). As far as I remember, this is a lived duality: you attend to one or the other and relate to that relation thus creating a tension field (from which, among other things, the subject-object distinction emerges).

While refreshing my memory, I stumbled on a pretty interesting article about this, which I'll save here for myself (and I hope it's interesting for the topic at hand):

Being a Body and Having a Body. The Twofold Temporality of Embodied Intentionality - WEHRLE, Maren

I find the body to be the best topic to think about this, because it's basically the locus of our perspective: the structure of our bodies (eyes facing forward, ears on the side of our heads...) determine our perceptive within a broader world we're part of. But the borders between body/not body emerge through some sort of worldly process. The very concept of "entities" wouldn't make sense if that difference didn't emerge.

At what moment does the air in your lungs become part of you? This feels like a pretty silly and inconsequential question, but if we assume "entities", we'd need to answer that, or at least figure out in what we can't. If we don't normally even ask this sort of question, it's because our daily praxis doesn't recognise this as thematic. It's also the reason why losing a finger is somewhat more relevant than losing a hair, and so on. There's a tension field here that never pins things down enough to make full sense, but remains within a certain perimater so that we can just experience the equivalent of a tip-of-the-tongue experience.

Or to sum it up: if we think of the flow, we are tempted to think of it in terms of "object/subject" - but we're actually engulfed - we're part of it. Metaphorically, we're maybe ripples that fall in on themselves and disappear - but it's all water. Trying to answer this question feels to me like a cartoon coyote running on air until he looks down... I can still reason, but nothing underpins it anymore. At some point reason stops being meaningful to me.

chaos — Wayfarer

i.e. classical atomists' swirling void or (in contemporary physical terms) random – acausal – vacuum fluctuations

Metaphorically, we're maybe ripples that fall in on themselves and disappear - but it's all water. — Dawnstorm

:fire:

From Thales to Heraclitus & Democritus ... to Spinoza & Nietzsche ... to Deleuze, Badiou & Meillassoux ...

I await mention of Husserl's bracketing, or epoche. — tim wood

There's a book-length article on IEP, The Phenomenological Reduction. I'm still going through it but it's a dense and rich entry. The passage I'll mention in this context is under the heading, The Epochē:

Husserl’s insight is that we live our lives in what he terms a “captivation-in-an-acceptedness;” that is to say, we live our lives in an unquestioning sort of way by being wholly taken up in the unbroken belief-performance of our customary life in the world. We take for granted our bodies, the culture, gravity, our everyday language, logic and a myriad other facets of our existence. All of this together is present to every individual in every moment and makes up what Fink terms “human immanence”; everyone accepts it and this acceptance is what keeps us in captivity. The epochē is a procedure whereby we no longer accept it. Hence, Fink notes in Sixth Cartesian Meditation: “This self consciousness develops in that the onlooker that comes to himself in the epochē reduces ‘bracketed’ human immanence by explicit inquiry back behind the acceptednesses in self-apperception that hold regarding humanness, that is, regarding one’s belonging to the world; and thus he lays bare transcendental experiential life and the transcendental having of the world” (p.40). Husserl has referred to this variously as “bracketing” or “putting out of action” but it boils down to the same thing, we must somehow come to see ourselves as no longer of this world, where “this world” means to capture all that we currently accept.

...Here it is important to realize two things: the first is that withdrawal of belief in the world is not a denial of the world. It should not be considered that the abstention of belief in the world’s existence is the same as the denial of its existence; indeed, the whole point of the epochē is that it is neither an affirmation nor a denial in the existence of the world. — IEP

I was struck by something I read in a wikipedia entry on the Buddhist teaching of 'two truths' (conventional and transcendental):

By and large, Kaccāyana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "non-existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. — The Kaccāyana Sutta

This is is making an essentially similar point; because here 'the world' is not the objective physical cosmos, but the totality of experience, or in other words, the world as it exists in experience (another Wikipedia entry discusses the resonances between Husserl and Buddhist philosophy.)

Personally, I think this is a far more practical line of enquiry than the metaphysics of objects or quantity, because it is grounded in the real nature of existence, not in grappling with abstract concepts.

-----

Husserl’s insight is that we live our lives in what he terms a “captivation-in-an-acceptedness" — IEP

Which sounds awfully like habituation, doesn't it? I bought a book over Christmas on exactly this topic, Look Again, although I have a habit of buying self-improvement books and then not reading them. :yikes:

Personally, I think this is a far more practical line of enquiry than the metaphysics of objects or quantity, because it is grounded in the real nature of existence, not in grappling with abstract concepts. — Wayfarer

I don't know what the Metaphysics of objects of quantity is, Or, rather, I think it is the inventory of what different people at different times have thought it is, and what thereby they think about objects and quantity.

Bracketing I think I understand. And like chess or playing the guitar, pretty much anyone can do it. It's tempting to suppose that in the epoche achieved one encounters the true essence of the thing. I'm more inclined to think one encounters - to the extent one does - the true essence of the thing as it is for oneself at that moment. Which means there is no absolute categorical essence, though there may be aspects, descriptions, that people agree upon. Thus no pure immanence, no pure transcendence, but always a mix of the two.

For me, Husserl's Cartesian enclosure limits his philosophy. His aspiration was to objectivity and ideality, but then why shut himself up in subjectivity? Husserl himself in "The Origin of Geometry" gives us the tools to get out of the enclosure when he speaks of ideality as something constituted by repetition and reactivation through tradition. This repetition, however, cannot occur by means of an epoché. We interact with things in a theoretical way but without the need to leave the natural attitude. Moreover, the only possibility of achieving true ideality and objectivity is to go against Cartesian enclosure. Proof of this is Husserl's own need to introduce apperception and intersubjectivity into the bosom of this transcendental dimension. But the question is how can another subjectivity settle in this dimension of the solitary life of the ego? Is it not necessary, for example, language and writing to make what we call objective truths settle? And ultimately to make their ideality be given as such? Husserl in this sense remained a prisoner of the egological dimension. And therefore it is necessary to find another way out of the confinement of founding the constitution of truth and objectivity.

. His aspiration was to objectivity and ideality, but then why shut himself up in subjectivity? Husserl himself in "The Origin of Geometry" gives us the tools to get out of the enclosure when he speaks of ideality as something constituted by repetition and reactivation through tradition. T — JuanZu

I have the feeling that you’re incorrect in this analysis although I’m not well versed enough in Husserl to put my finger on why. Perhaps you might consider glancing at the IEP Phenomenological Reduction article I mentioned above and find something in that which you consider to provide an example of where Husserl goes wrong with the epochē?

Husserl himself in "The Origin of Geometry" gives us the tools to get out of the enclosure when he speaks of ideality as something constituted by repetition and reactivation through tradition. This repetition, however, cannot occur by means of an epoché. We interact with things in a theoretical way but without the need to leave the natural attitude. — JuanZu

:up: :up:

The article barely discusses eidetic intuition and original evidence (in the epoche) and Husserl's intuitionism in general. What I am referring to is what links intuitionism in Husserl with his claim of objectivity and ideality of phenomenology as a science of essences (unconventional Platonism as Husserl himself would say).

An example is given by Derrida: when I say "I am" in the epoche. Husserl would tell us that it has a full evidence or that we have an intuition of full and ideal essence (which can be understood universally) , however for being in the epoche the "I am" has a possible meaning without object in the world (since the world is put in parenthesis). So the "I am" has full meaning and evidence even if in fact I am dead. How is this possible? Well, it is not simply because of the epoche because the epoche is still made by me being alive. It is language that makes such a thing possible, that "I am" means even if I am in fact dead. Language here gives ideality to expression because language is transmitted and repeated.

So the "I am" has full meaning and evidence even if in fact I am dead. How is this possible? — JuanZu

I can't see that at all. The paragraphs that I've just been studying are those concerning his critique of naturalism:



Here, he's saying that while logical laws have a priori justifications, so-called 'natural laws' can only be inductive. He's dealing with the paradox of how consciousness, which is always perspectival and structured by intentionality, can give us access to an objective world at all. He challenges the naïve realism of natural science, which assumes that it simply describes a world that exists independently of any observer. So in a key sense, it confuses observed with logical causality, and then mistakenly attributes to the former, the certainty that properly only belongs to the latter.

One of Husserl’s key insights here is that the structure of consciousness itself is not incidental to how things appear to us—it constitutes the manner in which objects are given. The naturalist assumption that there is a reality “in itself,” wholly independent of the mind, runs into difficulty when we ask how it is that we can know this reality at all. As the passage suggests, merely accumulating experiences does not in itself explain the coherence of knowledge, nor does it explain why subjective acts of consciousness can make statements that claim objective validity.

This is where Husserl’s phenomenology originates—not in denying the reality of the world, but in questioning how the world is disclosed to us. His method, the epochē or phenomenological reduction, brackets assumptions about the apparently mind-independent existence of objects in order to examine the object-as-experienced. What he reveals is that objectivity is not something simply found in the world but something constituted through intentional acts of consciousness.

I can't see that at all. The paragraphs that I've just been studying are those concerning his critique of naturalism — Wayfarer

I am speaking "in fact". By bracketing the world I include my worldly self. That is why in the epoche it is said that the "I am" has full evidence. Which means that I can be dead (the worldly self) and the "I am" is still originally self-evident. But in fact the epoche is made from a singularity that gives the specific sense to the "I am", with which the "I am" remains anchored to worldliness if it is not for the language that here saves ideality.

hmm. I think it's very much your own interpretation, but I will yield the floor for now.

While refreshing my memory, I stumbled on a pretty interesting article about this, which I'll save here for myself (and I hope it's interesting for the topic at hand):

Being a Body and Having a Body. The Twofold Temporality of Embodied Intentionality - WEHRLE, Maren — Dawnstorm

Thanks, I will check it out.

At what moment does the air in your lungs become part of you? This feels like a pretty silly and inconsequential question, but if we assume "entities", we'd need to answer that, or at least figure out in what we can't — Dawnstorm

It isn't silly at all. Along with many other similar questions we could ask (what about all those microbes that live inside us?), it reveals that entity-talk is always going to be loose talk, more or less appropriate for particular contexts. A pulmonologist may need a very specific answer to the question you pose; ordinarily we don't need such an answer; our sense of "human as entity" varies accordingly.

Does this give indirect support to the Husserlian flow? Possibly, as it suggests that even our rough-grain constituted objects ("your body") are not as obvious or "common-sense" as we suppose them to be.

This is perhaps a good place to pose two related questions that I think we ought to try to answer, if we're serious about a Husserlian "underlying reality" that is formless but has features such as texture, consonance, and dissonance.

1) Is this theory meant to be a psychological description of how infants begin to constitute objects? If so, how do infants replace the shared-lifeworld aspect that seems so necessary to the description? Some equivalent of a Chomskian universal grammar?

2) Does Husserl mean that what we encounter in the lifeworld must be as he describes, or only that it may be, for all we know? A similar question can be posed about Kantian noumena: Do we know that noumena do not resemble phenomena at all, or is it merely the case that we can't know either way?

Another version of this second question, posed by a realist, would be something like: If we grant that consciousness plays a vital role in constituting the objects and events of our experience, must it be the case that the result is different from what might obtain in the absence of consciousness? Suppose objects like trees are "really out there"; we couldn't know this, of course, but do we know they aren't? Do we have a transcendental argument that can show this?

I am speaking "in fact". By bracketing the world I include my worldly self. That is why in the epoche it is said that the "I am" has full evidence. Which means that I can be dead (the worldly self) and the "I am" is still originally self-evident. But in fact the epoche is made from a singularity that gives the specific sense to the "I am", with which the "I am" remains anchored to worldliness if it is not for the language that here saves ideality. — JuanZu

By ‘world’, Husserl means any notion of an entity ( world, reality, universe, etc) presupposed by the natural attitude. I. his 5th Cartesian mediation, where he imagines the destruction of the world without the elimination of the transcendental ego, he does not mean the elimination of exposure to an outside. There can be no subjectivity, no ego, without time consciousness , and time consciousness is always about something. What is left when we bracket out all concepts of world is phenomena.

“Let us imagine that we effect natural apperceptions, but that our apperceptions are always invalid since they allow for no harmonious concatenations in which experienced unities might become constituted. In other words, let us imagine that, in the manner described above, the whole of Nature, in the first place, physical nature, is "annihilated."”.. (Ideas I).

Husserl here isn’t eliminating all worlds, just the world of fulfilled adumbrations that the natural sciences call ‘real objects’. There is still a world of subjectively experienced sensate data after the bracketing of the natural world. But what is annihilated along with the world of physical objects and nature is the world of human beings and alter egos, my own psychological ego included.

You keep using the word ‘objective’ to describe Husserl’s goal of grounding the sciences, but objectivity has a specific, derivative meaning for him. Empirical objectivity is the outcome of intesubjective processes of relation among individual subjectivities. The fundamental ground that phenomenology strives for is in the associative processes of constitution, which can only be achieved by bracketing the higher levels of constitution. The apodictic certainty that is achieved through this method is not itself ‘objective’, since objectivity refers to the constituted product of associative processes of objectivation rather than the universality of those processes themselves. The ‘objective’ facts of the natural world are secondary, relative and contingent for Husserl. Objectivity is an ‘irreal’ product of constituting idealizations.

1) Is this theory meant to be a psychological description of how infants begin to constitute objects? If so, how do infants replace the shared-lifeworld aspect that seems so necessary to the description? Some equivalent of a Chomskian universal grammar? — J

This is a difficult question for me. Back then I didn't quite understand some of this stuff, and now I don't have enough memory about it. It's made even more difficult, given that the institutionalisation of psychology and academic differentiation has progressed quite a bit since Husserl's time, so even if I knew whether he talked about psychology (I vaguely think he did; or that at least someone said he did...), we'd probably have to dive into the history of what the term would have meant in academic circles back then and how that impacts now.

In any case, I don't think infants "replace" anything under the theory. Rather, this is an ongoing process and not stable. So for example, when a new-born child cries... is it already in a shared-lifeworld-to-be? Something to be developed from that moment on? I mean, usually a crying baby is going to be comforted by physical contact quite soon. It's not like you delevop something you replace later; it's that you just develop, and left to your own devices you just... die.

It's an interesting question, though.

2) Does Husserl mean that what we encounter in the lifeworld must be as he describes, or only that it may be, for all we know? A similar question can be posed about Kantian noumena: Do we know that noumena do not resemble phenomena at all, or is it merely the case that we can't know either way? — J

Again, take everything here with a grain of salt, since I'm out of the loop, but as far as I remember Husserl's phenomenology didn't have much to do with the thing-in-itself. As far as I remember, where Kant speaks of noeuma, Husserl speaks of noesis which results in "nouma", which are part of the stream of consciousness rather than part of the world.

I think Husserl might have said that resemblance is relation between phenomena, and to ask if a phenomenon "resembles" some putative thing-in-itself is a category error. Also, the "shared life-world" in (1) is a phenomenon, something that emerges from the process of noesis. At the thing-in-itself level, if we posit something like that, the world isn't yet differentiated into perceiver-perceived to begin with.

Personally, I think "flow" is a metaphor something we can't grasp without metaphor, and as such it might not be the only applicable metaphor. You can easily imagine that objects exist as we see them, too, but that, too, would be a mataphor, and imagining an undifferentiated flow instead has the advantage of being different - so it's harder to forget that it's a metaphor for something otherwise ungraspable.

Or differently speaking: there's one tree and there's another, and they're both alike in some ways and different in others, so we can tell them apart and also categorise them together. You cannot make the same sort of comparison to something you can't experience. You can make any number of working assumptions - ideal forms, a material level of existance, an undifferentiated flow... The differences will relate to who you few the world: what's intuitive here is different for different people. Phenomenology needn't make any working assumption, because they start "later". But that "starting later" has to be conceptualised to ground the ideas - say with the concept of "noesis".

Basically, I think question (2) lies outside the scope of phenomenology, and I'm not sure in what framework to treat the quesion. (I have a hunch I'd have to solve "the hard problem" to even begin having an approach.)

You are forgetting that there is a passage from the naturalized ego to the transcendental ego. Therefore, the two cannot be confused. The transcendental ego is a sort of eidetic reduction of the ego that we begin with in the natural attitude and which is dealt with by psychology, for example. Thus this natural ego is also reduced, put in parentheses. I know that the reduction and epoche does not mean that literally the world of the natural attitude ceases to exist. But there is an ego of the natural attitude which is taken care of by psychology. Therefore, by rights, the self-evident and essential sense of "I am" would be worth and have all its transcendental eidetic value even if the natural ego disappears or is bracketed out of existence. It is a necessary possibility. But a possibility that is no longer safeguarded by the transcendental ego itself but by the language that allows signification beyond a living or dead subjectivity.

“The ego as the subject of psychological experiences is not the pure ego of transcendental phenomenology. The latter is not an object in the world but the source of all world-constitution.”
— Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book (1913)

My point stands because there is in fact a reduction of one's own psychological ego or empirical self. Otherwise all transcendentality would be ruined.

. Therefore, by rights, the self-evident and essential sense of "I am" would be worth and have all its transcendental eidetic value even if the natural ego disappears or is bracketed out of existence — JuanZu

I agree with what you said in general, but I want to put into question the quote above. What exactly does ‘I am’ mean to you here? It isn’t a static substance for Husserl but a synthetic structure. The ego is but a pole of an indissociable interaction with an object pole , and this is as true of the transcendental ‘I’ as it is of the natural ‘I’. The ‘I’ has no existence in and of itself.

In any case, I don't think infants "replace" anything under the theory. — Dawnstorm

"Replace" may not be quite the right word. I'm asking into whether an infant, when she sees a shape, is already constrained by the textures of "flow" to see it in a particular manner, quite apart from how the human community (which she will join, but has not yet) sees it.

If asked in the broadest terms what Kant was about, I should answer that he was about setting science on solid ground. I think he thought the best he could do was a synthesis of idealist and realist views; i.e., that raw sensation comes to the mind, the mind turning it into our world, the world being in turn the object of study.

If asked what Husserl was about, I should say his goal to see things as they are, by separating out from them what they are not. E.g., being presented with a red apple, if his interest was the appleness of the apple, to endeavor to think the red away from it, attending to what was left.

And I think this bottom-up approach to Husserl is best. Establishing first what his grounds are, and then examining what he draws from it.

Two immediate difficulties are, first, language-based: to speak of red apples rigorously, the red apple, adjective-noun, must be distinguished from the red apple, noun substantive. Second, psychology. I don't know how Husserl either understood or defined the word, but some psychology is science, based on hypothesis, experiment, observation, and conclusion. And some is speculation, based on presuppositions and syllogisms. Two different things.

The useful tool for understanding Husserl, as well as we're going to do here, is simplicity. Simplicity of language and simplicity of examples. As a reader of this thread, then, I invite posters to aspire to a jargon-free simplicity of language, supported by simple examples. Can we do it?

If asked what Husserl was about, I should say his goal to see things as they are, by separating out from them what they are not. E.g., being presented with a red apple, if his interest was the appleness of the apple, to endeavor to think the red away from it, attending to what was left — tim wood

For Husserl, things as they are is utterly contingent and relative, so there is nothing for phenomenology to state about ‘apples’ in themselves which is philosophical grounding. His goal is to strip away not only the redness of apples , but everything else about apples and all other objects which define them as entities, in order to reveal the PROCESS OF CONSTITUTING objects in universal certainty.

As an historical analog, you might consider why Heraclitus felt the need to provide for a Logos at work in a world of unceasing, inchoate flux. The charge of Aristotle, which perhaps could be laid at the feet of some modern analogs of Heraclitus, is that this is simply a post-hoc explanation for the apparent order at work in reality.

Yet I think the more pressing concerns lie around the Problem of the One and the Many. Does the "soup" of flux and constraints/regularities that lies prior to the constructions of the human intellect include things or is it just one thing, a single process?

There is a lot of overlap here with the "classical metaphysical tradition," even in the need to speak of the "soup" (God in the earlier tradition) by way of analogy.

So, as a contrast consider:

...these principles are that (1) the world of space and time does not itself exist in space and time: it exists in Intellect (the Empyrean, pure conscious being); (2) matter, in medieval hylomorphism, is not something “material”: it is a principle of unintelligibility, of alienation from conscious being; (3) all finite form, that is, all creation, is a self-qualification of Intellect or Being, and only exists insofar as it participates in it; (4) Creator and creation are not two, since the latter has no existence independent of the former; but of course creator and creation are not the same; and (5) God, as the ultimate subject of all experience, cannot be an object of experience: to know God is to know oneself as God, or (if the expression seems troubling) as one “with” God or “in” God.

Let me spell out these principles at greater length. In medieval hylomorphism (the matter-form analysis of reality), pure Intellect (consciousness or awareness) is pure actuality, or form, or Being, or God: it is the self-subsistent principle that spawns or “contains” all finite being and experience. Intellect Being is what is, unqualified, self-subsistent, attributeless, dimensionless. It has no extension in space or time; rather, it projects space-time “within” itself, as, analogously, a dreaming intelligence projects a dream-world, or a mind gives being to a thought. The analogy holds in at least three respects: (1) like dreams or thoughts, created things are radically contingent, and dependent at every instant of their existence on what gives them being; (2)as there is nothing thoughts are “made of,” so there is nothing the world is “made of”: being is not a “something” to make things out of; and (3) dreams and thoughts have no existence apart from the intelligence in which they arise, but one cannot point to that intelligence because it is not a thing. In the same way, one cannot point to the Empyrean, the tenth heaven that the Comedy presents as the infinite intelligence/reality “within” which all things exist; remove it and the universe would instantly vanish. Note that the analogy in no way implies that the world is “unreal” or a “dream” (except in contrast to its ontological ground); rather, it expresses the radical non-self-subsistence of finite reality. This understanding of the radical contingency of “created” things is the wellspring of medieval Christian thought, without which the rest of medieval thought makes little sense.

Conscious being spawns experience by giving itself to it, by qualifying itself as this-or-that, and thus in one sense becoming other than itself. This is how the world comes into being: it is one valence of the Incarnation and the Trinity. ...As Beatrice puts it in Paradiso 29: conceived in itself, the ultimate ontological principle is a splendore, the reflexive self-awareness of pure consciousness; creation is its re-reflection as an apparently self-subsistent entity, a limitation of its unqualified self-experience as something, as a determinate thing. This voluntary self-experience of self as “other” is love; thus Dante can say that creation is an unfolding of divine love

Christian Moevs - The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy - Introduction: Non-Duality and Self-Knowledge - pg. 5-6

This obviously contrasts starkly with the common modern view of the consciousness as a contingent/accidental re-presentation of being, and of things and matter as self-subsistent building blocks of reality. But it also contrasts with Post-Kantian philosophy that heads in the other direction, which tends to assign to the specifically human intellect the power to bestow intelligibility on the world of experience, whereas in the older view the human intellect is not the ground of this intelligibility. Another difference is that the "pre-experiential soup" is often described as arational, irrational, or pre-rational, whereas God is said to be "super-rational" (this distinction in turn implies the much greater role for finite, and specifically human intellects).

Of course, the other big difference would be a conception of reality where consciousness can be contingent, being without "whatness" or intentionality.

The old Scholastic adage that "everything is received in the mode of the receiver" becomes dominant in Kant and later thinkers. I suppose that what tends to be obscured from sight by the inflation of this principle is the role of ecstasis in knowing, knowing as primarily union, a "going beyond and outside the self." This second principle, when taken with the first, notes that while "everything is received in the mode of the receiver," the mode of the receiver itself is determined by this joining with being.

IDK, there are a lot of parallels between the Kantian noumena and its development in later thinkers and earlier conceptions of God, and in some ways they are very similar and in others they could not be more unlike.