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?

Here is one I like:

[Husserl] tries to show how the formal, logical structures of thinking arise from perception; the subtitle of Experience and Judgment is Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. The “genealogy” of logic is to be located not in something we are born with but in the way experience becomes transformed. Husserl describes the origin of syntactic form as follows.

When we perceive an object, we run through a manifold of aspects and profiles: we see the thing first from this side and then from that; we concentrate on the color; we pay attention to the hardness or softness; we turn the thing around and see other sides and aspects, and so on. In this manifold of appearances, however, we continuously experience all the aspects and profiles, all the views, as being “of” one and the same object. The multiple appearances are not single separate beads following one another; they are “threaded” by the identity continuing within them all. As Husserl puts it, “Each single percept in this series is already a percept of the thing. Whether I look at this book from above or below, from inside or outside, I always see this book. It is always one and the same thing.” The identity of the thing is implicitly presented in and through the manifold. We do not focus on this identity; rather, we focus on some aspects or profiles, but all of them are experienced, not as isolated flashes or pressures, but as belonging to a single entity. As Husserl puts it, “An identification is performed, but no identity is meant.” The identity itself never shows up as one of these aspects or profiles; its way of being present is more implicit, but it does truly present itself. We do not have just color patches succeeding one another, but the blue and the gray of the object as we perceive it continuously. In fact, if we run into dissonances in the course of our experience – I saw the thing as green, and now the same area is showing up as blue – we recognize them as dissonant precisely because we assume that all the appearances belong to one and the same thing and that it cannot show up in such divergent ways if it is to remain identifiable as itself. [It's worth noting the experiments on animals show they are sensitive to these same sorts of dissonances].

[Such experience is pre-syntactical, nevertheless] such continuous perception can, however, become a platform for the constitution of syntax and logic. What happens, according to Husserl, is that the continuous perception can come to an arrest as one particular feature of the thing attracts our attention and holds it. We focus, say, on the color of the thing. When we do this, the identity of the object, as well as the totality of the other aspects and profiles, still remain in the background. At this point of arrest, we have not yet moved into categoriality and logic, but we are on the verge of doing so; we are balanced between perception and thinking. This is a philosophically interesting state. We feel the form about to come into play, but it is not there yet. Thinking is about to be born, and an assertion is about to be made…

We, therefore, in our experience and thoughtful activity, have moved from a perception to an articulated opinion or position; we have reached something that enters into logic and the space of reasons. We achieve a proposition or a meaning, something that can be communicated and shared as the very same with other people (in contrast with a perception, which cannot be conveyed to others). We achieve something that can be confirmed, disconfirmed, adjusted, brought to greater distinctness, shown to be vague and contradictory, and the like. All the issues that logic deals with now come into play. According to Husserl, therefore, the proposition or the state of affairs, as a categorial object, does not come about when we impose an a priori form on experience; rather, it emerges from and within experience as a formal structure of parts and wholes...

This is how Husserl describes the genealogy of logic and logical form. He shows how logical and syntactic structures arise when things are presented to us. We are relatively passive when we perceive – but even in perception there is an active dimension, since we have to be alert, direct our attention this way and that, and perceive carefully. Just “being awake (Wachsein)” is a cognitive accomplishment of the ego. We are much more active, however, and active in a new way, when we rise to the level of categoriality, where we articulate a subject and predicate and state them publicly in a sentence. We are more engaged. We constitute something more energetically, and we take a position in the human conversation, a position for which we are responsible. At this point, a higher-level objectivity is established, which can remain an “abiding possession (ein bleibender Besitz).” It can be detached from this situation and made present again in others. It becomes something like a piece of property or real estate, which can be transferred from one owner to another. Correlatively, I become more actualized in my cognitive life and hence more real. I become something like a property owner (I was not elevated to that status by mere perception); I now have my own opinions and have been able to document the way things are, and these opinions can be communicated to others. This higher status is reached through “the active position-takings of the ego [die aktiven Stellungnahmen des Ich] in the act of predicative judgment.”

Logical form or syntactic structure does not have to issue from inborn powers in our brains, nor does it have to come from a priori structures of the mind. It arises through an enhancement of perception, a lifting of perception into thought, by a new way of making things present to us. Of course, neurological structures are necessary as a condition for this to happen, but these neural structures do not simply provide a template that we impose on the thing we are experiencing...

-Robert Sokolowski - The Phenomenology of the Human Person

John Deely also has a lot of interesting stuff on the emergence of the lebenswelt, and his semiotic approach bridges the gap on some of the thorny epistemic issues that come up in representationalist readings of perception. Nathan Lyons has some interesting stuff here too that I've shared before. It tries to get at what is prior to individual instances of perception:

These [information carrying/encoding] energy and chemical patterns revealed by modern empirical science are the place that we should locate Aquinas’ sensory species today.14 The patterns are physical structures in physical media, but they are also the locus of intentional species, because their structure is determined by the structure of the real things that cause them. The patterns thus have a representational character in the sense that they disperse a representative form of the thing into the surrounding media. In Thomistic perception, therefore, the form of the tree does not ‘teleport’ into your mind; it is communicated through normal physical mechanisms as a pattern of physical matter and energy.

The interpretation of intentions in the medium I am suggesting here is in keeping with a number of recent readers of Aquinas who construe his notion of extra-mental species as information communicated by physical means.18 Eleonore Stump notes that ‘what Aquinas refers to as the spiritual reception of an immaterial form . . . is what we are more likely to call encoded information’, as when a street map represents a city or DNA represents a protein. 19... Gyula Klima argues that ‘for Aquinas, intentionality or aboutness is the property of any form of information carried by anything about anything’, so that ‘ordinary causal processes, besides producing their ordinary physical effects according to the ordinary laws of nature, at the same time serve to transfer information about the causes of these processes in a natural system of encoding’.22

The upshot of this reading of Aquinas is that intentional being is in play even in situations where there is not a thinking, perceiving, or even sensing subject present. The phenomenon of representation which is characteristic of knowledge can thus occur in any physical media and between any existing thing, including inanimate things, because for Aquinas the domain of the intentional is not limited to mind or even to life, but includes to some degree even inanimate corporeality.

Logical form or syntactic structure does not have to issue from inborn powers in our brains, nor does it have to come from a priori structures of the mind. It arises through an enhancement of perception, a lifting of perception into thought, by a new way of making things present to us.

What does the bolded phrase mean, exactly? And is this what happens for an infant (which was my original question)? I hope you can fill this out a bit more; it sounds interesting.

Things are present to us whenever we are experiencing them in any way. So, a thing might be present through sense experience, through memory, through imagination, etc.

Sokolowski gives a certain primacy to names/words as "calling forth the intelligibility of things," and "making them present to us." The "intelligibility of a thing" is "the sum total of true things we can say about it," and not "we" as individuals, but rather what all of mankind can say about something through all our investigations, across the history of the collective "human conversation" (so inclusive of the arts, sciences, etc.). Following Aquinas, he doesn't think we can ever fully exhaust the intelligibility of any one object, since we can always come to experience it in new contexts.

Names call forth a thing and make it present to us. The syntax required for the "human conversation" relies on human biology, but also develops due to the "way consciousness is." A child, in developing language (and the intellect more broadly), is in some sense gaining access to things, to being. The structure here is in part due to the way experience is.

It's a really great book though and I might not be doing it justice in trying to stay brief.


---

I should probably add that in my first comment I was thinking mostly about later advocates of the "soup" view (for lack of a better term lol). I haven't read much about Husserl's thoughts on religion except that he was a convert and committed Lutheran. His prize student, Edith Stein (a nun and later Catholic saint) found phenomenology to flow well with her later work on Christian metaphysics, particularly Dionysius the Areopagite as far as I know, but I'm not super familiar with her work. Or Pope/Saint JPJ II, who was big on phenomenology before his poping stint.

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." — J

Thomas Nail defines a flow as a fundamental concept of ‘a new historical ontology
of the present’:
“Flows are an active and creative process that one can never see in a pure or incomposite state,
since they are not a state at all but a process. A flow is something that can only be known immanently
as the ontological condition of the things that flow. The visible will always have as its condition a relatively or not fully isolatable kinetic substratum that distributes it for observation. Things never appear on their own or fully present but in relation and in motion. Since motion is not a thing but a process, kinetic relations are not strictly empirical, because one cannot directly sense a process “as such,” but only the fragmentary sense perceptions within that relational process are not metaphysical either, since they are material processes, not substances. The conditions of the empirical cannot be anything empirical in themselves, but this does not mean that the kinetic conditions are not thoroughly real. It only means
that flows in themselves are not necessarily and fully empirically present or sensible discrete ‘things.’”
(Nail, ‘Being and Motion’, p 67).

Thomas Nail is an advocate of Karen Barad’s
agential realism brand of new materialism, which I think provides us with a way to unite inorganic matter and living consciousness on the shared basis of material agency.

It's a really great book [by Sokolowski] though and I might not be doing it justice in trying to stay brief. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I read his Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions -- first-rate essays.

It is related to the sphere of expressivity of sense or meaning where the pure self of the transcendental reduction shows itself self-evident to consciousness. The sense of this pure I is self-evident. But as sense it has a linguistic value (see phenomenology of language in Husserl) , as "I am". "I am" is the sense of the self-evidence of the pure self.

For Husserl, things as they are is.... — Joshs

Very clear, thank you.

I buy bracketing as the main tool/method. Your emphasis appears to make of it an endeavor to look into becoming instead of a laying out and laying bare of being. While the bracketing itself seems scientific, its content must be subjective - that I'll call here "psychological." But then the goal appears to be through some alchemy to turn the psychological back into science - "universal certainty."

And that seems categorically impossible. If the bracketing ultimately yields the concrete, the concrete (either object or process) by definition not shared, only abstract descriptors being shared, then no science of object or process is possible in terms of "universal certainty."

It would indeed be interesting to see a statement of something - anything - that is universally certain without some recourse to abstraction. Which leads me to suppose that the "universal certainty" is simply certainty for an individual and the criteria for such individual certainty. "Utterly contingent and relative," then, seems right, while in themselves universally certain.

I buy bracketing as the main tool/method. Your emphasis appears to make of it an endeavor to look into becoming instead of a laying out and laying bare of being. While the bracketing itself seems scientific, its content must be subjective - that I'll call here "psychological." But then the goal appears to be through some alchemy to turn the psychological back into science - "universal certainty." — tim wood

It’s good you put psychological in scare quotes, because Husserl took pains to avoid the accusation of psychologism. The difference between treating subjective processes as psychological vs transcendental is that the former reduces those processes to contingent features of a physiological system, while the latter grounds those processes in principles that are ontologically prior to any empirical facts about human beings as biological or psychological organisms.

It would indeed be interesting to see a statement of something - anything - that is universally certain without some recourse to abstraction. Which leads me to suppose that the "universal certainty" is simply certainty for an individual and the criteria for such individual certainty. "Utterly contingent and relative," then, seems right, while in themselves universally certain. — tim wood

What sorts of concepts must be understood in order to make sense of ideas like contingency and relativity? Are concepts like past, present and future, or time in general, utterly contingent and relative, or they the irreducible ground for thinking about anything contingent and relative? This is what Husserl meant by apodictic certainty, that which must always be presumed in order to think anything.

The multiple appearances are not single separate beads following one another; they are “threaded” by the identity continuing within them all. As Husserl puts it, “Each single percept in this series is already a percept of the thing. Whether I look at this book from above or below, from inside or outside, I always see this book. It is always one and the same thing.”

‘transcendental unity of apperception’.

. Which means that I can be dead (the worldly self) and the "I am" is still originally self-evident. — JuanZu

Is this at all related to the immortality of the soul?

A flow is something that can only be known immanently
as the ontological condition of the things that flow. — Number2018

And there's the rub: what are "the things that flow"?

:up:

Of course, this has been taken in two ways. As the mind's construction of intelligible reality, or as the mind's union and co-identity with reality. Reminds me of Perl's comments in Thinking Being:

The key insight of phenomenology is that the modern interpretation of knowledge as a relation between consciousness as a self-contained ‘subject’ and reality as an ‘object’ extrinsic to it is incoherent. On the one hand, consciousness is always and essentially the awareness of something, and is thus always already together with being. On the other hand, if ‘being’ is to mean anything at all, it can only mean that which is phenomenal, that which is so to speak ‘there’ for awareness, and thus always already belongs to consciousness. Consciousness is the grasping of being; being is what is grasped by consciousness. The phenomenological term for the first of these observations is ‘intentionality;’ for the second, ‘givenness.’ “The mind is a moment to the world and the things in it; the mind is essentially correlated with its objects. The mind is essentially intentional. There is no ‘problem of knowledge’ or ‘problem of the external world,’ there is no problem about how we get to ‘extramental’ reality, because the mind should never be separated from reality from the beginning. Mind and being are moments to each other; they are not pieces that can be segmented out of the whole to which they belong.”* Intended as an exposition of Husserlian phenomenology, these words hold true for the entire classical tradition from Parmenides to Aquinas...

In arguing that being qua intelligible is not apart from but is the content of intellectual apprehension, Plotinus is upholding what may be called an 'identity theory of truth,’ an understanding of truth not as a mere extrinsic correspondence but as the sameness of thought and reality. The weakness of any correspondence theory of truth is that on such a theory thought can never reach outside itself to that with which it supposedly corresponds.1 Thought can be ‘adequate’ (literally, ‘equal-to’) to reality only if it is one with, the same as, reality. In Aristotle’s formulation, which as we have seen Plotinus cites in support of his position, knowledge is the same as the known.2

If thought and reality are not together in this way, then, as Plotinus argues, there is no truth, for truth just is the togetherness of being with thought. Plotinus’ arguments against the separation of intellect and being thus resonate profoundly with the nihilistic predicament of modernity. If thought and reality are conceived in modern terms, as ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ extrinsic to and over against one another, and truth is conceived as a mere correspondence between them, then thought cannot get to reality at all, then there can be no knowledge, and in the end, since nothing is given to thought, no truth and no reality. We must rather understand thought in classical Platonic, Aristotelian, and Plotinian terms, as an openness to, an embracing of, a being-with reality, and of reality as not apart from but as, in Plotinus’ phenomenological terms, “given” (V.5.2.9) to thought. This, again, is the very meaning of the identification of being as εἶδος or ἰδέα. Being means nothing if it is not given to thought; thought means nothing if it is not the apprehension of being. Hence at the pure and paradigmatic level of both, intellect as perfect apprehension and the forms as perfect being, they coincide. “We have here, then, one nature: intellect, all beings, truth” (V.5.3.1–2).

And there's the rub: what are "the things that flow"?

An excellent question. I don't know Nail, but in general this would tend to be "anything that is mutable." The question then is: "is anything immutable?"

I have always thought some things do seem quite immutable. For instance, "Adolf Hitler was the first US President" or "the USA had 76 states in 2018" are currently false. This does not seem like the sort of thing that can become true in the future.

Since motion is not a thing but a process, kinetic relations are not strictly empirical, because one cannot directly sense a process “as such,” but only the fragmentary sense perceptions within that relational process are not metaphysical either, since they are material processes, not substances. The conditions of the empirical cannot be anything empirical in themselves, but this does not mean that the kinetic conditions are not thoroughly real. It only means that flows in themselves are not necessarily and fully empirically present or sensible discrete ‘things.’”

This seems somewhat akin to Hume's pronouncement that one cannot observe causation. I would imagine this conclusion depends on some key assumptions about what observing motion or cause would entail. It seems to me that, in at least some sense, seeing a rock sail through a window and shatter it simply is to observe both motion and causation.

This is maybe also akin to statements to the effect that "matter" and "energy" are "unobservable." On the view that this is all that there is, it would rather be that we never experience anything other than matter and energy.

I am not sure why we should assume that only substances are received through the senses. It is true that one cannot have a "fast motion" with nothing moving, but even given a substance-centric ontology it still seems possible for the senses to capture and transmit relation. At the opening of the Phenomenology, Hegel (IMO fairly convincingly) demonstrates how sheer sense certainty would be contentless. However, I would take it that "observation" relevant to empiricism would be broader than "sense certainty," else we would have a quite impoverished view of what sensation does for us. If "nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses," then relation, universals, etc. must be at least virtually present in sensation.

. Which means that I can be dead (the worldly self) and the "I am" is still originally self-evident.
— JuanZu

Is this at all related to the immortality of the soul? — Wayfarer

This all gets very complicated, but the upshot is that what is immortal is not an individual ‘I am’ , but a pre-individual ego. This ‘absolute ego’ has more to do with the structure of the immortal flow of time than with the traditional notion of the soul.

James Mensch explains:

The “absolute”, which appears in the late manuscripts, can be considered as Husserl’s final expression of the process of temporalization—the “absolute consciousness,” the “living present” and the “absolute ego” being its other expressions. All these names point to an original process of non-constituted appearing, an appearing from which being, as persisting in time, comes to be constituted. In describing the absolute, Husserl stresses its unity, which is that “of the ‘streaming living,’ the primordial present … that temporalizes and has temporalized everything that is anything.” He also positions “the absolute as the absolute human totality of monads” as the first of its levels. As another manuscript from the same period makes clear, the absolute is not the same as this totality of human subjects. As individuals, monads are temporally limited. The same holds for “humanities.” They, too, are born and die. One cannot, however, assert this of the pre-individual absolute, which is not temporally determinate.

I am not sure why we should assume that only substances are received through the senses. It is true that one cannot have a "fast motion" with nothing moving, but even given a substance-centric ontology it still seems possible for the senses to capture and transmit relation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Are there substances which are not moving, or more exactly, vibrating?

At the opening of the Phenomenology, Hegel (IMO fairly convincingly) demonstrates how sheer sense certainty would be contentless. However, I would take it that "observation" relevant to empiricism would be broader than "sense certainty," else we would have a quite impoverished view of what sensation does for us. If "nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses," then relation, universals, etc. must be at least virtually present in sensation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nathan Widder provides an account of Hegel's dialectical solution to the problem of the genesis of propositional thought and meaning from the flow of perception:
“‘Phenomenology’ is literally the science of phenomena or appearances. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit begins with a dialectical analysis of appearances as they are given to an individual consciousness. It examines them specifically to determine the conditions that endow these appearances with truth. This ‘Dialectic of Consciousness’ comprises three main stages. The first, called ‘sense certainty’, presents the immediate sensuous experience of an external thing appearing to consciousness. Hegel argues here that the assertion that truth is found in the thing’s immediate appearance is self-negating. The negation within sense certainty is thereby negated in the realization that every seemingly immediate experience is mediated by categories of ‘perception. If one asserts that the truth of a perception is found immediately
within its conceptual object, this again is self-contradictory. This self-contradiction in the object of perception can only be overcome through a new concept that encompasses both a moment of unity and a moment of relation-to-others. Hegel shows that the condition for the truth of an immediate experience is that the things that appear to consciousness are perceived as objects whose identities are constituted by a forceful dynamic of negative and reciprocal relations, with the conscious subject being absorbed into these relations.” (Widder, 'Political after Deleuze" p 36)

The experienced identities and differences presuppose the dynamics of dialectical progression, which make these experiences meaningful. However, they are grounded in underlying forceful relations that are not directly present in sensuous experience itself. Consequently, we can conclude that an immanent network of relations virtually constitutes the sense of actual experience. This conclusion contradicts Sokolowski’s account of the Husserlian genesis of propositional thought and meaning arising from the flow of perception. On this account, it is not clear how 'the formal structure of experience' differs from 'the imposition of a priori form on experience.'

No. It is related to the sense of expression. "I am" has meaning beyond whether I am alive or not, but no longer because it is said in the epoche but because it is a function of language. Husserl needed language to found the expressivity of the epoche. He tried to make language something pure given in the epoche. But he did not succeed, since he needed to justify ideality as repetition in the sense in the epoche.

It is related to the sphere of expressivity of sense or meaning where the pure self of the transcendental reduction shows itself self-evident to consciousness. The sense of this pure I is self-evident. But as sense it has a linguistic value (see phenomenology of language in Husserl) , as "I am". "I am" is the sense of the self-evidence of the pure self. — JuanZu

The pure ego only shows itself to consciousness by reflection, that is, by treating the ego as an object. One has no direct, pre-reflective awareness of the pure I.

The living ego performs acts and experiences affections—acts and affections that themselves enter into time and occupy its stretches. But the living source-point of this entering into time and, hence, the living point of being, with which the ego itself enters into subjective relations to being and itself becomes temporal and enduring, is, as a matter of principle, not directly perceivable. The [living] ego is graspable only in reflection, which is after the fact, and is graspable only as the limit of what streams in the flow of time (Bernau Manuscripts, pp. 286-87).

Hegel shows that the condition for the truth of an immediate experience is that the things that appear to consciousness are perceived as objects whose identities are constituted by a forceful dynamic of negative and reciprocal relations, — Number2018

The experienced identities and differences presuppose the dynamics of dialectical progression, which make these experiences meaningful. However, they are grounded in underlying forceful relations that are not directly present in sensuous experience itself. — Number2018

But we still need to ask: Relations among what? I don't think we can talk of "relations" that have no relata.

The pure ego only shows itself to consciousness by reflection, — Joshs

But it has intentional sense. That's my point. And therefore it is related to the expressiveness of language. The pure self as an object for consciousness is intentional and therefore it is expressive. My emphasis is Husserl's need for pure language for a description of the phenomena in the epoche Including pure ego.

This all gets very complicated, but the upshot is that what is immortal is not an individual ‘I am’ , but a pre-individual ego. This ‘absolute ego’ has more to do with the structure of the immortal flow of time than with the traditional notion of the soul. — Joshs

Again, this doctrine is remarkably like the traditional distinction between "soul" and "spirit" (psyche and pneuma). The one is individual, particular; the other is the "stuff" of which all living beings are made.

I don't think the two views are necessarily in conflict. Sokolowski has syntactical structure emerging from the phenomenological character of experience. Hegel ultimately traces this back to being, to the Absolute (in SoL). Sokolowski's inquiry is just significantly more bracketed.

But we still need to ask: Relations among what? I don't think we can talk of "relations" that have no relata.

Relations between the objects we perceive, ourselves, the world, our own abstractions, etc. Hegelian "objective idealism" doesn't deny that such thing exist or are "real." They are just not subsistent, and not "as real" because they are not subsistent.

[Hegel] thinks he has demonstrated, in the chapter on “Quality,” that the ordinary conceptions of quality, reality, or finitude are not systematically defensible, by themselves, but can only
be properly employed within a context of negativity or true infinity...

Note:For instance, one cannot understand “red” atomically, but rather it depends on other notions such as “color” and the things (substances) that can be red, etc. to be intelligible. This notion is similar to how the Patristics (e.g., St. Maximus) developed Aristotle in light of the apparent truth that even "proper beings" (e.g., a horse) are not fully intelligible in terms of themselves.

[Hegel] has now shown, through his analysis of “diversity” and opposition, that within such a context of negativity or true infinity, the reality that is described by apparently merely “contrary” concepts will turn out to be better described, at a fundamental level, by contradictory concepts. The fundamental reality will be contradictory, rather than merely contrary. It’s not that nothing will be neither black nor white, but rather that qualities such as black, white, and colorless are less real (less able to be what they are by virtue of [only] themselves) than self-transcending finitude (true infinity) is…

From Robert M. Wallace - Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God

Or perhaps the agent/actual intellect, more so in the hands of Averroes. I've heard of interpretations of Kant on an Averroist line where the "mind" in question is a sort of pan-European intellect.

we still need to ask: Relations among what? I don't think we can talk of "relations" that have no relata. — J

In the context of this thread, intentional conscious acts (cognitives) could be considered as relata. What is important is that each of these relata can be decomposed into a bundle of interrelated mental activities.

“Every phenomenon has its own total form of intention [intentionale Gesamtform], but at the same time it has a structure, which in intentional analysis leads always again to components which are themselves also intentional. So for example in starting from a perception of something (for example, a die), phenomenological reflection leads to a multiple and yet synthetically unified intentionality. There are continually varying differences in the modes of appearing of objects, which are caused by the changing of "orientation"-of right and left, nearness and farness, with the consequent differences in perspective
involved. There are further differences in appearance between the "actually seen front" and the "unseeable"["unanschaulichen"] and relatively "undetermined" reverse side, which is nevertheless "meant along with it." Observing the flux of modes of appearing and the manner of their "synthesis," one finds that every phase and portion [of the flux] is already in itself "consciousness-of '-but in such a
manner that there is formed within the constant emerging of new phases the synthetically unified awareness that this is one and the same object”. Article

I don't think the two views are necessarily in conflict. Sokolowski has syntactical structure emerging from the phenomenological character of experience. Hegel ultimately traces this back to being, to the Absolute (in SoL). Sokolowski's inquiry is just significantly more bracketed. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sokolowski does not obscure the difficulty of Husserlian transitioning from the flow of immediate experience to the domain of universal thought. The flow of meaning is constituted within a play of specific perspectives and is always unfolding and expanding. As such, it can never be fully revealed or accomplished. The process can be interrupted and annulled, but it immediately gives rise to a new meaning. It is always a meaning of something, the experience of which can change, but will always be experience in its constituting dynamic process. Husserl points out that “Constitution of the existence-sense, ’Objective world ‘based on my primordial "world", involves a number of levels. As the first of these, there is to be distinguished the constitutional level pertaining to the "other ego" or to any "other egos" whatever that is: to egos excluded from my own concrete being (from me as the "primordial ego"). In connection with that and, indeed, motivated by it, there occurs a universal superaddition of sense to my primordial world, whereby the latter becomes the appearance "of" a determinate "Objective" world, as the identical world for everyone, myself included. Accordingly, the intrinsically first other (the first "non-Ego") is the other Ego.” Elaborating on this argument, Deleuze notes that Husserl grounds the constitution of the universal ego in the pre-given common sense. In contrast, the Hegelian dialectical movement from perception to the Absolute is based on the notion of force, which sublates the contradictions within the process of perceiving. The relations of forces become constitutive and reciprocal with relations of opposition and contradiction.

we still need to ask: Relations among what? I don't think we can talk of "relations" that have no relata.
— J
In the context of this thread, intentional conscious acts (cognitives) could be considered as relata. What is important is that each of these relata can be decomposed into a bundle of interrelated mental activities. — Number2018

OK, let's try to plug that in to the quotes:

"Hegel shows that the condition for the truth of an immediate experience is that the things that appear to consciousness are perceived as objects whose identities are constituted by a forceful dynamic of negative and reciprocal relations among intentional conscious acts (cognitives)."

Does that really work? We're talking about what constitutes the identities of apparent "objects" -- why we perceive them that way. But now the quote seems to be saying that it's all within the intentional conscious acts themselves. Either I'm misunderstanding, or we haven't left any room for the "flow," the "things that appear to consciousness."

"The experienced identities and differences presuppose the dynamics of dialectical progression, which make these experiences meaningful. However, they are grounded in underlying forceful relations among intentional conscious acts (cognitives) that are not directly present in sensuous experience itself."

This seems to exhibit the same problem. The experienced identities and differences, which are required to make experience meaningful, are grounded strictly in relations among conscious acts. How could this answer the question about the role of "flow" in our constituting consciousness?

I want to return to this passage as I'd like to discuss it some more.

When we perceive an object, we run through a manifold of aspects and profiles: we see the thing first from this side and then from that; we concentrate on the color; we pay attention to the hardness or softness; we turn the thing around and see other sides and aspects, and so on. In this manifold of appearances, however, we continuously experience all the aspects and profiles, all the views, as being “of” one and the same object. The multiple appearances are not single separate beads following one another; they are “threaded” by the identity continuing within them all. As Husserl puts it, “Each single percept in this series is already a percept of the thing. Whether I look at this book from above or below, from inside or outside, I always see this book. It is always one and the same thing.” The identity of the thing is implicitly presented in and through the manifold ~ Robert Sokolowski — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is the process whereby all of the various aspects and forms of an object are aggregated into a unity - we see the object not as a set of disparate forms, shapes and colours, but as an object. Plainly that is intrinsic to the process of appercerption, which Oliver Sachs noted in his books can be radically disrupted by various neural conditions. I think this is also what was articulated by Kant as 'the synthetic unity of apperception'.

There are two things I like to explore. The first is the relation of this fact to the 'neural binding problem'. This is the well-known problem of accounting for the synthetic unity of apperception and the inability of neuroscience to identify a neural sub-system that accounts for it:

There are intractable problems in all branches of science; for Neuroscience a major one is the mystery of subjective personal experience. This is one instance of the famous mind–body problem (Chalmers 1996, 'Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness') concerning the relation of our subjective experience (aka qualia) to neural function. ...Traditionally, the neural binding problem concerns instantaneous perception and does not consider integration over saccades (rapid movement of the eye between fixation points). But in both cases the hard problem is explaining why we experience the world the way we do. ...There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion....But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene... — The Neural Binding Problem, Jerome S. Feldman

Maybe because this ability literally transcends the neurophysiological basis which is employed by it, through which:

We, therefore, in our experience and thoughtful activity, have moved from a perception to an articulated opinion or position; we have reached something that enters into logic and the space of reasons~ Sokolowski.

What we've moved into is what Charles Pinter calls 'gestalts'. In Pinter’s framework ('Mind and the Cosmic Order'), gestalts are not just patterns in perception but higher-level cognitive structures that allow us to engage in reasoning, abstraction, and judgment. This connects directly to the phenomenological account of perception as an intentional act that synthesizes meaning suggested by sensory input.

The second idea I'd like to explore, is whether this ability or faculty is an aspect of the same process by which organic life attains and maintains unity. Life itself exhibits a kind of synthetic unity—a self-organizing coherence that cannot be reduced to mere molecular interactions. In enactivism (Varela, Thompson, Rosch), cognition is not just something that happens in the brain but is an emergent property of the organism as a whole, including its sensorimotor and metabolic interactions with the environment.

Just as conscious experience integrates multiple sensory modalities into a singular world, life integrates biochemical and environmental interactions into a singular, self-maintaining unity. Both perceptual synthesis and biological unity resist full reduction to mechanistic explanations as they're intrinsically holistic. Phenomenology sees that perceptual unity transcends neurophysiology, while philosophical biologists like Varela argue that organisms exhibit a self-producing (autopoietic) unity that is irreducible to molecular interactions. This points to a structural parallel between mind and life as different facets of the same underlying logos.

@Joshs

Very thought-provoking, and I want more time to reflect on your ideas. But just quickly:

This points to a structural parallel between mind and life as different facets of the same underlying logos. — Wayfarer

This is a major reason why I suspect it will turn out that only living things can be conscious. Sorry, AI!
More to follow . . .

Yes. An ontological distinction that I will insist on. Sorry, 'new materialists'.

Both perceptual synthesis and biological unity resist full reduction to mechanistic explanations as they're intrinsically holistic.

Hence the soul as the form/actuality of man and the notion of essence/nature/formal causality (and thus final causality) :cool: .

Some further thoughts . . .

But in both cases the hard problem is explaining why we experience the world the way we do. — The Neural Binding Problem, Jerome S. Feldman

I don't think he's formulating it radically enough. Yes, this is part of the hard problem, but even more basic is the question, Why do we experience the world at all? Why aren't we robots, or philosophical zombies? If all we want is "a plausible functional story," what would be wrong with organisms that just react to stimuli without experience? What we want to say about this, of course, is that it's impossible -- the idea of an organism "just reacting" without any form of subjectivity is offensive somehow. Or maybe we want to say that the very concept of "reacting" presupposes experience. But none of this is obvious; we can't just declare this picture it to be impossible. If it is, we need to know why -- back to the hard problem.

We, therefore, in our experience and thoughtful activity, have moved from a perception to an articulated opinion or position; we have reached something that enters into logic and the space of reasons

(Sokolowski)

Once again I want to raise the question of infants and psychological development. Sokolowski clearly means, by "we", fully-functioning adult humans. Infants do not do what he describes. They don't have a recognizable "thoughtful activity," and they don't reach anything that enters logical or rational space. So what story must we tell about this? None of this standard phenomenological/Kantian picture can be said to obtain until a certain developmental point has been reached. James's "blooming buzzing confusion" has to give way to something like what Sokolowski is describing.

So why does it happen? And is there some way to transform what looks like a scientific question into a phenomenological one? That is, we want an account of brain development that will explain the emergence of our "higher" capacities. Yet at the same time we'd like a transcendental argument that shows why all this must characterize human being-in-the-world. Are the two desires mutually exclusive? Or the same thing, on some basic level?

More worrying, will a semi-naturalistic account of this development tend to reduce Sokolowski's "space of reasons" to a strictly functional concept? I'd like a way to understand rationality as both a biologically inevitable phenomenon and a doorway into knowledge that really does provide reasons and justifications. This is a tall order, and thus far unreached, as far as I know.

Once again I want to raise the question of infants and psychological development. — J

I tried to respond to this when you rephrased yourself in response to me, but I didn't know how. This is fiendishly difficult to get a hold of. I'll try to get a few things in here; not sure how relevant they'll be, though.

None of this standard phenomenological/Kantian picture can be said to obtain until a certain developmental point has been reached. — J

I want to emphasise, here, that Husserl didn't hold with the Kantian idea of a "thing in itself". The world we live in constitutes in the mind. It's probably possible to give a phenomenological account of the psychological development of a child, but this wouldn't be addressing the "underlying reality".

During the reading of this thread, it struck me that Husserl's ego seemed very much like Descartes' cogito, so I googled what Husserl had to say on Descartes, and I found a text called "Cartesian Meditations"; apparently only published in French during Husserl's life time. The text I skimmed over was in German (my mother tongue).

Basically, both Descartes and Husserl start out with radical doubt; but Husserl that the phenomena present themselves in a particular way no matter whether there's an underlying reality or not: the world we live in is always and forever consituted in our consciousness. This is the starting point, and it gets ever more complex from here on out. (One problem, for example, is the other: we construe them of having a consciouness of their own, much like we do.)

What you're interested in just seems outside of the scope of phenomenological analysis, so we'd need some other frame of reference. I'm not sure what could apply, given that - to me - the singular strength of phenomenology (as it occurred in sociological theory) has always been that you don't really need to make up your mind about the underlying reality before drawing conclusions.