On Husserl’s picture of the phenomenological method, the phenomenologist must reflect on their own experience. So the practice of phenomenology involves some form of self-awareness. But how exactly ought we to characterise this self-awareness and, in particular, does it involves an awareness not just of our experiences but also of the self that has them?
Hume (1739-40) notoriously claimed that reflection upon one’s own experience does not reveal a continuously existing self. Rather, reflection reveals nothing but an ever-changing stream of mental states or events. But, as is equally well known, Hume failed to provide a compelling account of what it is that accounts for the fact that these mental states and events are unified within a single stream. In virtue of what is it that my experiences in all their variety—visual, auditory, bodily, etc.—all seem to be had together, as aspects of one all-encompassing experience?
In dealing with this issue, Kant (1781/1787) speaks of the transcendental unity of apperception (self-consciousness). Accepting Hume’s claim that reflection reveals no self presented as an object of awareness, Kant nevertheless argued that the (transcendental) ego is a necessarily condition of the unity of experience—the various elements of my experiential life are unfired in virtue of their being all potentially self-ascribable together, I can ‘unite them in a self-consciousness’.
Husserl’s early (1900/1901) position on self-awareness is broadly Humean, whilst his mature (1913, 1952) view is much closer to Kant’s. In his later work Husserl accepts the Kantian view that self-consciousness is necessary for the unity of experience, but he adds an element (arguably) not present in Kant which is that all experiences involves an implicit awareness of what he calls the ‘pure ego’. The pure ego, Husserl tells us, is given in every experience as that from which the experience is directed. That the pure ego is experienced as within experience rather that as an object of experience is, on Husserl’s view, manifested in the fact that it is not experienced from one side, as are all objects of perceptual awareness, but rather is ‘given absolutely’.
Sartre (1937) famously claims that Husserl’s change of mind is a mistake, arguing, amongst other things, that the transcendental ego is ‘superfluous’ since consciousness ‘unifies itself’. Sartre suggests that the Husserlian conception of intentional experience is all that is required for an account of the unity of consciousness. His is, however, outrageously short on the details of how such an account would work. But we can fill in a few for him, based on the clue that he gives us concerning time-consciousness. For, as Sartre notes, Husserl’s account of time-consciousness (discussed in my previous post) is, in effect, an account of the diachronic unity of consciousness—it gives us a picture according to which experiences are unified over durations. And it does so, crucially, without recourse to the transcendental, or pure, ego. My experience of a temporally extended event is unified, on this view, in virtue of the fact that at any moment I retain an awareness of the past phase of that event. But, crucially, I also retain an awareness of the past experience of that past phase. That is, in a series ABC, at the time of B, I retain both A and my experience of A. Unity over time, then, is accounted for in terms of intentional experiences being directed towards both a unified world and towards each other.
What of the unity of experience at a time? Again, Sartre can appeal to Husserl’s account of the experience of a thing as identical through a changing stream of experience. For example, as I walk around something the way that it appears changes. In Husserl’s terminology, it is given through varying adumbrations. Nevertheless, it is given as one and the same thing. That is, the thing appears to be the same. Now, plausibly, if two of my experiences are directed towards the same object and present it as identical, then those two experiences are unified, given together. And this unity is, according to Sartre, present across the sensory modalities. Thus, the keyboard that I see before me is given, in vision, as that which I am currently touching. Further, on Husserl’s own picture, things are experienced against a background or ‘external horizon’. That is, whenever one experiences a thing, one experiences it in its relation to the numerous other objects of which one is aware. Most notably, one will be aware of the spatial relations holding between the things of which one is currently perceptually aware—I am aware of the tree as located between the window and the neighbouring houses. Furthermore, this account can be extended beyond the realm of perceptual experience to incorporate, for example, thought. For, when I close my eyes and consider the tree that I have recently seen, it is implicitly given to me as the tree that I have recently seen—as that very tree. That is, just as in the diachronic case, the synchronic unity of experience can be accounted for in terms of simultaneous intentional experiences being directed towards both a unified world and towards each other. If this is along the right lines, and of course there are plenty of details yet to supply, the transcendental ego is surplus to requirements and the late Husserl’s neo-Kantian view should be rejected.
Postscript
I said in the first post that a central in writing Experiencing Phenomenology was to show that the philosophical work of the ‘classical Phenomenologists’ is closer in spirit to debates in contemporary philosophy of mind than people sometimes suppose. One way to do this would be to convince Phenomenologists that they should be reading work in the philosophy of mind, the other is to convince philosophers of mind to read Phenomenology. Given the readership of this blog, I’ve taken the latter approach. Whilst everything that I’ve said has been introductory in character, I hope that it’s given a sense that these are philosophical issues that are actually rather close to some central concerns of the philosophy of mind. Whilst the terminology differs, and the styles vary, there is a wealth of material in there from which everyone with an interest in the mind can benefit.
[ I’m offline for two days now for the academic strike (details). I’ll be back on Friday to respond to any comments. Joel ]
References
Hume, David. 1739-40. A Treatise of human Nature. Edited by L. S. Selby-Bigge, Second Edition revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978.
Husserl, Edmund. 1900-1. Logical Investigations. Translated by J. N. Findlay, Edited by Dermot Moran. London: Routledge, 2001.
Husserl, Edmund. 1913. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book. Translated by F. Kersten. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998.
Husserl. Edmund. 1952. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz & André Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989.
Kant, Immanuel. 1781/1787. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer & Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1937. The Transcendence of the Ego. Translated by Andrew Brown. London: Routledge, 2004.
Thanks for this very interesting series of posts!
I’m a student who is currently working through Uriah Krigel’s ‘Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory.’ His analysis of the mystery of phenomenal consciousness is that it has two components: qualitative character (the particular blueish-ness of the sky) and subjective character (for-me-ness). His book, as would be predicted by its title, find its novel contribution primarily in the analysis of ‘subjective character.’ In short: “Kriegel argues that a mental state has subjective character because its subject is aware of it, then that the subject is aware of it in virtue of representing it, and finally that the subject represents its conscious state in virtue of being in that very conscious state, which is thus selfrepresenting.”
In chapter three, Krigel addresses Husserl: “According to Husserl, the for‐me‐ness of conscious episodes involves a sui generis form of intentional directedness, which he called act‐intentionality and contrasted with object‐intentionality.”
He goes on that Husserl’s position is that these intentionalities are both irreducible and sui generis phenomena. His critique of this position is that it is methodologically unuseful to adopt a primitivist view from the outset of an investigation.
Your post has given me reason to doubt this characterization. Is it reasonable to say that these arguments between the positions held by Hume, Husserl, Kant, and Sartre about the subjective unity of experience are in fact attempts at analyzing the “for-me-ness”?
In other words, is it an unfair to say that the phenomenologist holds the view that: “subjective character is an unstructured, inexplicable, sui generis property, a sort of intrinsic glow that attaches to some mental states and not others…” by which …”there is very little positive that can be said about subjective character.”
It seems the names in the above post have quite a bit to say about subjective character – or is the question of “unification of experience” and “self-awareness” different from the analytic conception of subjective character?
Hi Luke
The issues are, I think, distinct but related. My concern in the post above was really not with the question of how to account for the fact that in having an experience there is something it is like *for me* to have it, but rather with the question of whether, in being so aware of an experience, one is thereby aware of *onself* as that which has it. The concern with the unity of consciousness, aside from its own intrinsic interest, is there for the reason that some (including Kant and the later Husserl) have thought that something like this sort of self-awareness is required if we are to explan unity.
But you are right that these philosophers all have something to say about subjective character. You can read the later Husserl as claiming that every experience has two ‘ends’ or ‘poles’—the object of awareness and the subject of awareness. And this is not just the metaphysical claim that all experiences must be owned by subjects, but the phenomenological claim that all experiences must be given as so owned. And you can read Huserl as claiming that (i) this is explains subjective character (what it is for the experience to be something *for me* is for it to be given as belonging to my pure ego), and (ii) this awareness of the pure ego is of a different sort to object awareness (since if the pure ego were the object of awareness in the same way, it would the the object of a higher-order state which would itself need to be given as owned by a subject, and so on…). In that sense, I think that Kriegel is right. However, don’t go looking for a consistent use of the term ‘act-intentionality’ as a sui generis form of intentionality, as you won’t find one in Husserl (at least, I don’t think so!). And it is not at all clear that he thinks that there is nothing more that can be said about it. He says quite a bit in Ideas II (the chapter on the Pure Ego), but admittedly it’s not entirely clear what the account amounts to!
The early Husserl has, in my view, quite a different picture. In Logical Invesitations (Investigation V, §8), he effectively says that if I am aware of anything then it is an object. If my memory serves me right, Zahavi (on whom Kriegel is drawing) reads even the early Husserl has putting forward the idea that there is a distinct form of intentionality via which we are aware of our own experiences. I must say that I think that there are good reasons to doubt this as a way of reading Husserl.
I hope that helps a bit.
Best, Joel