One thing I find interesting about Husserl is he is perhaps the most unflinchingly serious and earnest philosopher I've ever read. The greats that he respected, like Hume, all had a playful, deconstructive, even destructive side to them, but Husserl really had his nose to the grindstone. His distinctions and analyses are so numerous, so subtle, and so wide-reaching in scope and insight: I feel like for a lot of philosophers, it's a matter of 'there but for the grace of a serious work ethic go I,' I just don't see that kind of sheer backbone in a writer like Derrida or even Heidegger. Their writings are too eager to get to the point and to be clever, and lack that sheer earnest labor. Who but Husserl would be insane enough to bulldoze through the issue of other minds while swallowing all of the classical Cartesian assumptions?

I like that, although I think I would like it even more if it were real. Deep cover jokes that can only be gotten by an extremely narrow audience are great – like the Sokal hoax but with a real 'journal' and a real 'social scientist.' I'm sure Borges' Tlönian philosophers would approve, as would paradigm pirates. And there's an exquisite pleasure in coming to understand that you're reading a joke after careful study, especially if others who are less attentive or skilled have been unable to 'get it' and made fools of themselves trying to take it seriously.

I once tried to write a parody Wikipedia-style article on continental philosophy, in the overly affected style of a continental philosopher, but I found I just didn't have the knack for it. I think I might be able to do an analytic one.

The lived experiences are what's going on with the thinker when they make some logical deduction. These are connected to each other – one motivates the other, but because they are psychological processes taking place in an empirical mind, they only indicate one another. We move from one thought to another via the suggestion of one thought by another, but not in such a way that the association between these thoughts is in any way logically guaranteed. Rather, it's subject to the frailties of our mental capacities and our powers of association, and there is no logical guarantee that one thought will suggest another in strict logical fashion (we can make deductive mistakes). The things thought about however, in making the deduction, don't have this empirical flavor: a syllogism shows the truth of its conclusion being guaranteed by its premises in such a way that this truth must follow, the conclusion is tied to the premises with 'adequate evidence' or with 'insight.' Thus even though our thoughts are empirically collocated, what we think about in making logical deductions is not; they are related by an internal necessity, and we deduce correctly insofar as our contingent psychological powers lead us to see this with adequate evidence.

Here we invoke the Humean notion of contiguity never implying necessity, and the corresponding division between matters of fact and matters of reason. No matter how strongly A suggests B (there are lightning storms often here in Chicago; whenever you see a certain sort of flash from indoors, you can bet with an extremely high probability that a roll of thunder is coming in several seconds), there is nothing essential about B's following from A. It is only their constant juxtaposition that psychologically inclines us to see A as justifying B, as movement from one empirical state of affairs to another. So we can expect thunder form lightning, and be justified in doing so, but cannot deduce thunder from lightning, nor any indicated thing from its indication.

When we appeal to indication in talking about logical deduction, we always do it with respect to our psychological acts or thoughts, where one indicates another empirically, like lightning and thunder. The ideal objects themselves, however, do not indicate one another but are demonstrated from one another. In showing how a syllogism works, we do not point to the psychological acts that discover how it works, because these are irrelevant, except insofar as they serve to get us to see the connection that lies between the ideal objects themselves.

I picked up the clarinet as a kid after hearing stuff like this (and clarinet jazz groups, too). Man, was I a sucker!

Can you be having an experience, during which you take yourself to see somehting that you do not actually see?

I'm going to take a crack at the supplementary text to see if it has any ideas, but so far I haven't found it extraordinarily helpful. Much of the front matter before the text seems irrelevant, and the discussion of the text itself seems in some places to be reducible to repetitions of what Derrida actually says with certain things repeated and certain words italicized.

Can you experience something, and take yourself to see it, even though in reality you don't?

To the best of my knowledge Derrida is being faithful to Husserl here. Husserl is broadly Kantian on this point: the transcendental conditions of experience are unworldly, not in the world, but are themselves experiential (except, confusingly, perhaps the transcendental ego, though this changes in his later philosophy). This is an important point about Husserl's philosophy: Husserl believes that you can perceive essences as well as facts. This is a kind of empiricist-rationalist 'fusion:' Platonic forms are real but experientially constituted, in such a way that you can literally see them. Just not in the same way you see an empirical object, because it's not the same sort of thing (though forms depend on empirical objects for their existence). Perception for Husserl is the ur-epistemological act; his 'principle of principles' which Derrida will mention later is founded on perception in this extended sense.

'Empirical' so far as I can see is just a synonym for 'worldly' with Derrida, but it also implies non-essentiality, belonging to matters of fact rather than essence. For Husserl, essences are 'irreal,' which he means in a technical way not as unreal or fake, but as opposed to 'reality' in the way that the transcendental idealists roughly use it (bound up in causal efficacy, in the world, etc.)

I can see this, but the discussion of time-consciousness then seems far more relevant than the discussion of expression, whose significance I still don't really understand. I know Derrida wants to show there is no pre-linguistic substratum of experience, and that the fact/essence distinction somehow maps onto the indication/expression distinction, and that these distinctions can't be made pre-linguistically, but thus far I only know that he claims these things, but neither why nor how.

OK, so now the question is, 'is what I experience seen?' The structure, and problems, remain.

Do you have any illusory experiences, or is it possible for you to?

Again, you cannot know that beforehand, since you do not know which experiences are hallucinations or not beforehand.

I agree that showing that indication can't be disentangled from expression goes against what Husserl explicitly says. What I don't understand is why Derrida thinks this would be ruinous for the phenomenological project. There are many things Derrida is saying about the relation of indication and expression to fact and essence and so on, and the consequences for phenomenology, that I can't make sense of. I don't understand why he thinks the fact-essence distinction is mappable onto indication-expression, for example (there is an essence of indication, in fact Derrida himself describes it in Chapter 2, from Husserl's own text), and there are factual instances of expression, and neither so far as I can see is meant to 'fall to' the reduction.

But I want to put the 'problem sentences' up to go more into this.

It has never been my impression that Husserl has tried to define the transcendental without the empirical, and on the contrary he insists that perception of an eidos can only ever come through the instantiation of some fact (cf. the fact-eidos connection and the inability of one to exist without the other in Ideas S. 2). This is why Derrida's way of speaking confuses me. He also seems to speak of the transcendental reduction in such a way that he thinks that empirical reality 'falls to' it, or 'outside of it.' This, if taken seriously, is a misunderstanding of the epoché; it's the eidetic reduction that deals with essence.

Indeed indication is itself something to be studied phenomenologically, and it's not as if Husserl expects all indication to disappear once the epoché is performed. The epoché does not bracket particular things or phenomena; it brackets an attitude and commits a reversal, so that previously one was seen to be constituted by preexisting things, now all these things are seen to be constituted by consciousness. This is not in itself a move to ideality in the relevant sense.

Then, despite your denials, it is obviously assumed that his experience represents either something or nothing, and that the object of his hallucinatory experience would be some element of the experience itself, i.e. sense-data, generated by synaptic screw-ups. — jkop

Not at all. You merely must rather see something or nothing, which you have already admitted.

No it doesn't. As I already showed, the problem doesn't arise from a representational view of perception, nor from the existence of sense data. A direct realist must also admit that he can be mistaken about what he sees. If during a hallucination one sees nothing, then he does not know for any given experience whether he is seeing something or nothing, unless he antecedently assumes what was to be shown.

Again, you don't know that, because you don't know which experiences are illusory versus veridical to begin with.

I'm really looking forward to the time-consciousness section. Probably one of the most interesting philosophical issues period. Time-consciousness is mind-blowing, even 'sensuously' and pre-philosophically, and Husserl's writings evidence a genuine recognition of this.

In the meantime I still don't want to pass over this section with burning questions remaining that the text itself can't be squeezed for. To that end I think I want to compile a list of 'problem sentences' alongside questions about them. Anyone who has ideas or is similarly frustrated by these sentences, comments would be appreciated.

Husserl does recognize the ability of indication to be independent of expression, but my sense is the thinks this is already intuitively obvious from everyday examples. Neither Husserl nor Derrida seem to expend effort defending this claim.

Though hey, there's a possible reversal of Derrida, if you were up for it. The more I think about it the less obvious it seems. Both admit already that indication requires the animation of 'lived experiences' – who's to say this doesn't require that the person who sees the indicator as an indicator must not 'mean' something in the expressive sense in order for it to work...?

Your question makes no sense, because when we see the object we also see the light it reflects, not either light or the object. We can also see emitted light without seeing an object, e.g. a flashlight, that emits it. — jkop

I was only responding to the way you worded your post.

Hallucinations are hardly as recalcitrant, continuous, and non-detachable as the objects of veridical cases of perception. — jkop

The whole point is that you don't know that, because you haven't antecedently figured out that all, or any particular, perception is not an illusion.

The existence of sense-data is not disvovered by having experiences, they're blindly assumed in the representationalist doctrine according to which we never see objects and states of affairs directly. — jkop

It doesn't matter. Your arguments will not go through whether sense data are assumed or not, or whether they're real or not. What is blind, if anything, is the realist assumptions you are making.

It really doesn't matter. Now the question is just about whether you're seeing merely light or the object.

If you say you see nothing in a hallucination, then the question is just whether for any case you are really seeing anything or not, since the same experience can be one of seeing something or seeing nothing, and you aren't able in principle to distinguish between the two.

None of these rhetorical moves are ever going to work, because they all have the same structure.

Merely because we know some truth, namely that we are mistaken? Or is this the stronger claim that we must perceive real things in some sense to know that we are mistaken at some point (by comparing what is real to what we thought we perceived)? If the latter, this seems not to hold, since we can know we're mistaken, because our claims are internally contradictory or stifled by internal evidence having nothing to do with having any veridical perceptions, yet we might still never have any veridical perceptions (and even possibly know this).

I don't think the argument from illusion even has anything to do with the OP. It's just a mistake I made about what TGW was saying. — Mongrel

I think I mistook what was meant by 'argument from illusion.'

That argument begins by pointing out that we are sometimes mistaken (which obviously implies that some of our assertions are true.) — Mongrel

Why would that be?

Obviously not by continuing to assume representational perception; basically your question and problem arises from that asumption, i.e. that you only see your own impressions, sense-data or the like, and never the objects directly. — jkop

Nope. Even if, like you, we assume that all perception is without a representational intermediary, you still have to come up with an explanation for hallucination, claiming that it's a real perception not of sense-data, but of a misleading ocular phenomenon, or something like that. But then we just have the same problem, rewritten without sense data: how do we know that all of our perceptions are not just of these misleading ocular phenomena and not of what we think they are?

No sense data required, and their removal does nothing to help you.

Whence the assumption that it would be an impression? See, you continuously assume representational perception without noticing it . — jkop

Fine – having a visual experience in no way leads to the metaphysical conclusion that something external causes it.

It doesn't matter. The fact that this kind of imagining depends on a distinction noticed in experience doesn't mean that that distinction amounts to what we thought it did. We may simply be mistaken, and both waking and dreaming were part of a larger illusion, and we never had any veridical experiences. There is nothing incoherent about this.

What a realist says in claiming that our experiences are sometimes veridical is not that sometimes we have the experience of being awake. What they claim is that we really see objects as we think we do while having this experience. This claim isn't justified by the mere fact that we have two different sorts of experiences, and frpm this take one of them to be evidence for a certain metaphysical thesis. It's a bad argument, it doesn't work. If you want to defend realism, find a better one.

No, this just doesn't work. You're only shifting the goalposts – now we can just ask, how do I know whether everything I'm seeing isn't what I think it is, but merely a series of 'real effects of optics,' and whether I'm not perpetually mistaken about what it is I see, so that none of my perceptions are ever of the objects I take them to be?

And as to there being no illusions without veridical perceptions, I've already dealt with this above.

(Also, you aren't at liberty to assume that experiences are of external objects to begin with; nothing about having a certain visual impression implies the metaphysical conclusion that something external is causing this impression).

VagabondSpectre is an ally 'wolf in sheep's clothing.' His primary interest in calling himself feminist is to police women and 'politely disagree' with them about what counts as feminist, and to tell feminists that they're hysterical and to 'get their acts together.' This is perhaps the worst kind of male feminist, and I agree with feminists in being repulsed by them, if maybe not for exactly the same reason. SX's wide-eyed feminism, and csal's 'we're all just people man' views are naive in a way, but VS strikes me as downright sinister.

I have sympathies with second-wave feminism in that they take seriously the notion of gender separation and gender abolition. Aren't the identity-fems just playing games?

BitterCrank's views also interest me. I think there may be a link between being attracted to men and being skeptical of these sorts of things: a heterosexual man, I think, simply cannot remove the smokescreen of his sexual attractions in thinking about women in any way. They will always have a higher value for him than another man because of biological impetus. I'm attracted to women as well, but I think even that there is another sexual option on the table helps remedy this blindness.

So when Derrida says this:

Husserl's whole enterprise–and well beyond the Logical Investigations–will be threatened if the Verflechtung attaching indication onto expression is absolutely irreducible and in principle inextricable, if indication were not added onto expression as a more or less tenacious bond, but inhabited the essential intimacy of the movement of expression.

Okay, but why? Seriously, why? There is no attempt to explain this, and it is so important! None of this matters unless we understand why he feels confident in asserting this!

First, it doesn't matter since the dreaming argument will go through in that this purported reality, the only one you've ever experienced, will have turned out to be unreal and dependent on something you never perceived before, so the point is still made, and you could go your whole life never having a veridical experience and never 'waking up.' This is not only conceivable, but perfectly commonsensical, contra the pretensions; it is why a movie like the Matrix makes sense to a popular audience.

Second, even in a Matrix scenario, we can imagine Neo awaking yet again. And again.

Thanks for the summary, it's very helpful.

I don't know about anyone else, but I found this chapter a little bewildering, and am not sure even now I understand it. The last paragraph, in particular, is very difficult to parse. In particular, Derrida's insistence that what was outside essential demonstration was therefore 'outside of truth' was a little bizarre. This is characteristic of my frustration so far with this text – Husserl never disavows empirical truth.

It also seems to me that Husserl's definition of indication is not actually as broad as Derrida makes it out to be (causing him to drill down to 'indication proper,' which excludes demonstration), because Husserl clarifies in his definition that he is speaking of non-evident motivation, which has a precise technical meaning that excludes demonstration, which requires evident motivation in the sense of having adequate evidence for its claims. But this is less important.

Yet the origin of indication, for Husserl, lies in the association of ideas (as the footnote on page 25 tells us — csalisbury

True. Though late in his career, Husserl also begins to speak of a pure phenomenological notion of association that does not have to do with empirical psychology (even pure psychology). Again, I do not really understand how this works: it's one of the mysterious sections in the Cartesian Meditations (and may appear elsewhere).

Husserl still sees us as discovering ideal logical truths/relations/orders, rather than transcendentally constituting them. Thus, at this stage the processes whereby we discover these truths must be something entirely separate from the truths themselves (otherwise the psychologists are right.) In other words expression must be absolutely separable in principle from indication, otherwise expression (and so the order of ideal logical/mathematical truths) falls right back into the maw of psychologism. — csalisbury

I am having a hard time with this because the fact that the psychological acts whereby these truths are discovered require indication does nothing, at least in principle, to show that logic itself must be psychologistic. All it shows is that the human practice by which these non-psychological laws are discovered is amenable to psychology, which I take it no one denies. The point is just that regardless of how we discover the logical truths or draw logical implications, these implications in themselves have adequate evidence, and the psychological means by which they're reached is irrelevant. We would not, for example, mention necessarily any such method of discovery in a logic textbook at all.

Derrida also talks about how the reductions factor into this, and Husserl had not come up with the notion of reduction in the Investigations yet. So if Derrida means to criticize Husserl, and not just 1901-Husserl (which is the only way the text holds together), this sort of subjectivity versus objectivity thing, and discovering versus constituting ideal truths, should fall through, since as Derrida admits, Husserl's method of viewing ideal objectivities in terms of experiential constitution effectively transcends the subjectivist-objectivist divide (phenomenology is if you like no more than an assimilation of the science of experience to logic rather than to physics).

What we know about being awake or asleep, conscious or dreaming is based on our personal experience of these states of being which is then used to demolish what was learned in experience, which yes makes sense logically, but its not how we experience life. I can understand and accept that sun neither rises nor sets, but asserting the same sort of reality to my nightmares, misses something about reality and what it misses, I think, has to do with the language we use. — Cavacava

As long as the possibility of waking up in a Matrix-like scenario makes sense to you (which presumably it does, since you can watch the movie without getting confused as to what's happening), then it is to that extent how you experience life. That is, you experience life in such a way that you recognize all of your perceptions could be non-veridical. The dreaming argument goes through.

But the argument from illusion doesn't assume that; it concludes it, at least as a possibility.

But that's just not true. Supposed people saw a bunch of glass objects on the water, but had no access to boats. They came up a word for these objects, and referred to them constantly. It was taken for granted they were solid and glass-like. When the boat was invented, people rowed out to them to pick them up, and it turned out they disappeared as they neared; they were optical illusions all along. Say the word was 'fabloo.' All purported fabloos would then have been counterfeit, precisely because there had been no fabloos, or genuine fabloos, at all, on the terms people thought there were.

At this juncture, you could either say (1), there are fabloos, but they are optical construcitons, not glass objects as was thought (so the boaters discovered something about fabloos), or (2) that there are not nor were there any fabloos to begin with (though there might be some day if they're made by an independent process). These both seem like reasonable things to say, and the linguistic community could go either way. But no matter which way they go, all of them were counterfeit in that none of them were what anyone purported them to be. And this is regardless of what linguistic distinctions are made. In fact, the people could have had another word, 'habloo,' for illusory fabloos formed as a result of an optical illusion on the water. Could we then say that because habloos are counterfeit fabloos, there must be some genuine fabloos? No, of course not; upon rowing out into the water, we discover all of them had been habloos, and there were no fabloos to begin with, even though these words gained meaning in experience in opposition to each other. There was something to counterfeit in principle, but that real instantiation simply never occurred.

This doesn't seem like a good argument, since the fact that two words come to mean opposite things from use doesn't mean that we can't have been mistaken in thinking that more than one side of the dichotomy ever applied. We thought the difference was apparent in our experience, but we were wrong; we were always dreaming, and never 'conscious' in the relevant way we thought we were. The distinction in retrospect would merely have been two sorts of dreaming, and there is nothing unintelligible or unimaginable about this.

Theme song for team Husserl.

I lose my shape, I tumble
And I drift across the sea
I lose my thoughts, I watch them
In graceful movements flow

I catch the raging darkness
And transform it into light
I try to catch a second
But it slips out of my hand

When I reach the
Glorious
My silence within
Enormous
A journey begins

All the words fall so silent
No need to react
I'll remain in my silence within

Illuminated highways, only used for thoughts
They're winding through the mountain still covered with snow
When touching time they ignore it, it stands still
The only thing that matters is the silent inner will

Increasing the innermost recesses
Of the heart and of the soul
The utmost of the inner
Revelations is the call

Inside the echoes of the laughter
Underneath a waterfall
Beyond the growing trees of knowledge
In a forest still unknown

Untie
Unfold the silence with
Unveil
We caught the silence within
We sold
We caught (we caught) (we caught)

I watch the sounds, they're fading
Into a silhouette
Of all the silent courts I've reached
But lost along my way

I touch vibrating timbres
Inside my silent voice
Out of an ocean of my thoughts
I catch a single drop

When I reach the
Glorious
My silence within
Melodious
My journey begins

All the notes fall so silent
No need to react
I'll remain in my silence within
I'll remain in my silence within

Let me know if anyone else wants to do the summary of Chapter 2. If not, I can do it.

One more...

ANVIL WOOO \m/

Scene 6 of the Ratboy Genius space opera, 'Starship Genius.' Pretty amazing.

I'm not sure what you're complaining about and don't feel like replying to these posts. The cases actually happened.