James Mensch

Retention and the Schema

Among the topics of time consciousness, there is, perhaps, none so controversial as Husserl’s use of the schema to interpret our awareness of time. This schema of interpretative intention, contents-there-to-be-interpreted, and the resulting intentional object has been subject to continuous criticism. The reason for all this attention is not hard to see. At issue is how we are to understand our retention of just past time. This short term memory is the basis of our consciousness of extended time, but such time consciousness is fundamental for our apprehension of every temporally determinate object. Thus, the question of the schema concerns the very basis of Husserl’s theory of how we grasp our world. Although Husserl severely criticizes the schema, he never abandons it. In fact, we find him continuing to employ it in the C and B manuscripts on time consciousness from the 1930s. In this article, I show how Husserl applies the schema to our apprehension of time. This includes a crucial limitation he imposes on the schema with regard to the lowest level of such apprehension. I also examine how the schema determines what Husserl means by retention and, hence, temporal constitution. Having shown how his use of the schema overcomes the objections that have been brought against it, I describe the implications that thereby arise regarding the priority of appearing as such.

Phenomenology and artificial intelligence: Husserl learns Chinese

For over a decade John Searles ingenious argument against the possibility of artificial intelligence has held a prominent place in contemporary philosophy. This is not just because of its striking central example and the apparent simplicity of its argument. As its appearance in Scientific American testifies, it is also due to its importance to the wider scientific community. If Searle is right, artificial intelligence in the strict sense, the sense that would claim that mind can be instantiated through a formal program of symbol manipulation, is basically wrong. No set of formal conditions can provide us with the characteristic feature of mind which is the intentionally of its mental contents. Formally regarded, such intentionally is an irreducible primitive. It cannot be analyzed into non-intentional (purely syntactic, symbolic) components. This paper will argue that this objection is based on a misunderstanding. Intentionality is not simply something given which is incapable of further analysis. It only appears so when we mistakenly abstract it from time. When we regard its temporal structure, it shows itself as a rule-governed, synthetic process, one capable of being instantiated both by machines and men.

What is a Self

The question of “what is a self” is probably the most puzzling and persistent in philosophy. It announces itself with the Oracle at Delphi’s injunction: “know thyself.” Such an injunction, of course, presupposes that there is something there to be known, that the self can stand there as an object of knowledge, that the knower can know himself. Knowing himself, he can know himself as knower. This means that he can grasp the very performance which is himself as knower, is himself as this grasping of himself. As even these slight reflections show, the task of fulfilling the Oracle’s injunction involves a certain mystery. Either the self is empty or it involves everything. The circle of my apprehending myself apprehending myself is, in its self-reference, devoid of content. Content seems to arise once I admit that, knowing myself, I do not know an object. I know that by which objects are known. Here I assert that the self is that in and through which they are present. Its mode of presence is their modes of coming to presence. As such, it hides itself behind them. Presenting itself as their place, it itself seems placeless. Its content is given by its objects and their modes of appearing. This implies that to know it, I would have to know what could fill it, what objects I could possibly know. For this, however, I would have to know the knowable world itself. Is the self then a world? It does not seem so. Embodied, it is subject to various accidents, including injury, decay, and death. Psychologically, it also has its vulnerabilities, its habits, its peculiarities. An entity among entities, a being within the world, how can it claim to be a world?

Patočka and Artificial Intelligence

In our times, the mind-body problem has assumed the form of trying to explain the qualitative aspect of experience. As David Chalmers expresses it, “It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises.” In fact, as John Locke long ago noted, there is “no conceivable connection” between them. We cannot conceive how from the structure and dynamics of a physical process the appearing of the world can arise. In my paper, I argue that this impasse points to the reform of metaphysics that Patocka’s asubjective phenomenology envisaged. According to Patocka, the appearing of the world is “something completely original.” It “cannot be converted into anything that appears in appearing.” Various things appear, but “appearing itself is not any of the things that appear.” If we accept this, then we cannot ontologize showing, i.e., explain it in terms of what shows itself. In particular, we cannot say that it is the result of the material elements and processes that make up a natural scientific account of perception. The unbridgeable gap between physical processes and experience points, in fact, to the originality of appearing or manifestation and, hence, to the study of it as envisaged in Patocka’s asubjective phenomenology.

Real and Ideal Determination in Husserl’s Sixth Logical Investigation

One of the permanent factors driving philosophy is the puzzle presented by our embodiment. Our consciousness is embodied. We are its embodiment; we are that curious amalgam that we try to describe in terms of mind and body. Philosophy has sought again and again to describe their relation. Yet each time it attempts this from one of these aspects, the other hides itself. From the perspective of mind, everything appears as a content of consciousness. Yet, from the perspective of the body, there are no conscious contents. There are only neural pathways and chemical processes. As thinkers as early as Locke and Leibniz realized, we may search the brain as thoroughly as we wish; within its material structure, we will never find a conscious content1. Both perspectives are obviously one-sided. We are both mind and body; we are determined by our conscious contents and our physical makeup. Husserl’s Logical Investigations takes account of this fact in speaking of the real and ideal determination of the subject. As embodied beings, we are subjected to real causal laws. Such laws, insofar as they relate to our mental contents, take these as determined by the contents temporally preceding them1. As engaged in mind, we are also subject to the ideal laws of “authentic thought.” These are nontemporal, logical laws governing “the compatibility or incompatibility of mentally realizable contents.” In the Investigations, the problem of the mind’s relation to the body comes to a head in these two determinations. How can the same set of mental acts be subject to both causal and logical laws? How can a causally determined subject grasp an apodictically certain set of logical relations ? As Theodor DeBoer puts this question: “on the one hand, these acts are empirically necessary and determined; on the other hand, an idea realizes itself in them through which they claim apodictic validity. How can both these views be combined ?”2