Transcendental Field

In mentioning a transcendental field, I am adapting a term from the one book of Sartre that I sort of liked long ago, The Transcendence of the Ego (1936). Husserl had built his phenomenology on the supposition of a “transcendental Ego” — a foundational Subject that was to be free of the limitations of empirical subjectivity, and prior to any particular content. Despite this unpromising beginning, Husserl achieved some keen insights into details of the nature of appearance. Sartre wanted to adopt some of these results without the baggage of the transcendental Ego. (See also Husserlian and Existential Phenomenology.)

In transplanting this term to a more Kantian register, I want to suggest we should pause at the level of an ecosystem of transcendental Subjectivity-functions, without going on to assume that it must take the form of a single, strongly centralized Subject-entity. The idea is that every bit of transcendental content is already in itself a bit of Subjectivity (which is how I want to read “Substance is also Subject”), and any number of such bits that is more or less coherent may be taken as together constituting a subject. I then want to combine this with Brandom’s reading of the Kantian transcendental as linguistic/social/historical in nature and his identification of it with Hegelian Geist. (See also Psyche, Subjectivity.)

Participation

In mentioning our second natures’s “participation” in a transcendental field, I am falling back on a Platonic metaphor. Plato spoke of a thing’s “participation” in a separate Form. While a transcendental field is not per se a Platonic form, it is both generally on the side of form, and “separate” from the psyche in approximately the same sense that a Platonic form is separate from what participates in it. This separateness indicates that the psyche or a putative empirical subject could never have simple possession or mastery of it. A transcendental field is also not the immanent form of some matter in the Aristotelian sense; it is not even to be identified with second nature; rather, it is something the empirical psyche can indirectly participate in by virtue of acquired second nature’s participation in it. Conversely, the empirical psyche has its own more direct characteristics that are relatively independent of this participation. (See also Psyche, Subjectivity.)

Psyche, Subjectivity

Things in general exhibit unity in a wide range of degrees. The kinds of unity that are possible for simple things are different from those that are possible for complex things.

Plato compared the human soul (psyche in Greek) to a city. This certainly implies more coherence than that of a mere collection, but it also implies somewhat less coherence than that of an organism.

The traditional folk psychology of many cultures distinguished layers or components of the psyche with nontrivial degrees of relative autonomy. Medieval Christian theology was somewhat unusual in emphasizing a very strong unity of the soul. For the theologians, a strong unity of the soul was at once a moral wish, an object of faith, and a discursive result of a vigorous tradition of introspective psychology that was also influenced by faith.

Through Descartes, this strong unity acquired a new destiny of a more secular sort, in new implicit claims that the empirical psyche naturally has the same very strong unity the theologians had wanted for the soul. Descartes effectively presented this as an immediate natural intuition, independent of faith and independent of discursive argument. Meanwhile, his account of psychology was very truncated and impoverished.

(Despite its iconic status, Cartesianism never held Western philosophy in a hegemonic grip. To mention but one example of an alternative, Locke — for whom I have little affinity, but whom I take quite a bit more seriously than Descartes — greatly developed the idea of immediate natural intuition Descartes had relied upon, but without making such strong claims about the unity of the empirical psyche. Locke’s notion of personal identity was based on actual concrete continuity of memory. While this might be criticized as reliant on a kind of immediacy, it is not the sort of sheer presumption or rabbit out of a hat that Descartes had on offer. Locke’s epistemology was also foundationalist, but in other ways it was more modest, and his psychology was much more richly detailed.)

At any rate, I now want to at least begin to make explicit what ought to follow about the sort or degree of unity of the empirical psyche from what I have been writing in these posts.

The empirical psyche would be the seat of what I have called feeling and of Aristotelian acquired character or emotional disposition, as well as of Kantian intuition, physical sensation, and general sentience; and of our acquired second nature as talking animals. It would be the common-sense referent of an empirical-factual “me”.

As sapient talking animals, our acquired second nature nominalizes the empirical psyche’s participation in a socially, historically, and linguistically constituted Kantian transcendental field that would be the home of values, ethics, Thought, Reason, unities of apperception, Aristotelian intellect, Hegelian Spirit, and Brandomian scorekeeping. Things of this sort are involved with time, but not in the same way as empirical things. Like empirical things, they evolve diachronically, but they also have much more extensive acquired synchronous structure. As the index of the unity of a unity of apperception, a philosophical “I” has this character. With respect to the sort of individuation conferred by empirical facts, this “I” is completely anonymous. It is nothing in itself, but metonymically identifiable with all things or, more precisely, with anything or everything in a unity of apperception it indexes. This philosophical “I” is the rational ground of the “I” of ecstatic poetic identification.

Nonmental, inferential-relationally constituted Essences or Forms or shareable Thoughts are the real bearers of normative Subjectivity. A philosophical “I” just nominalizes something like the ecosystem or community of shareable, interacting Thoughts in a unity of apperception or piece of Hegelian Spirit. The empirical psyche provides a kind of place where these things happen, and a kind of embodiment of that happening. The psyche is not a Subject, but a place where some precious Subjectivity may happen and get embodied. “I” am not that place, that “me”, but rather the transcendental “ecosystem” that lives in that “me”. Part of the same transcendental ecosystem — values and inspiration and Thoughts and spiritual love — that lives in “me” may also live in “you”. “We” are not mutually exclusive entities, and that is part of our social essence. (See also What Is “I”?)

Feeling

We talking animals are like amphibians or dual citizens. We share basic sentience and emotion with many other biological species (at the very least least other mammals, and perhaps in some rudimentary sense all living things). We also participate in a larger, shared realm of language and reason that is open to all possessed of such. Reason and emotion interact in complex ways.

The fact that we participate in language and reason thus contributes in a major way to the overall constitution of our feeling. Just as practical reasonableness is deeply tied to our emotional state and constitution, we also tend to respond emotionally when we judge things to be reasonable or unreasonable.

Our feelings are in one sense wholly ours, but the words we speak to ourselves are not wholly our own, and they do also significantly influence our feelings, so in another sense, our feelings are not wholly ours, either. (Also, there is a passivity in feeling.) In terms of taking responsibility, such questions of “ownership” do not matter much — far more important is what we feel and think, and how well. (See also Intellectual Virtue, Love; Honesty, Kindness.)

Subject

While I have no objection to speaking of some subjectivity or subject-as-functional-role, a foundational Subject or subject-as-unexplained-explainer is an albatross with no philosophical benefit except to make possible intriguing but ultimately untenable discourses like those of Fichte or Husserl. It gets worse when something like foundational Subjecthood is attributed to empirical subjectivity. All sorts of errors follow.

The idea of a foundational Subject was happily unknown to Plato and Aristotle. It was not in fact a requirement for Kant, who famously dwells on subjectivity, but without giving it unexplained-explainer status or assuming strong unity. It was decisively deconstructed by Hegel as a delusion of Mastery. (For a Brandomian alternative, see Scorekeeping; Mutual Recognition.)

In the early middle ages, in a more theological context, something anticipating the concept of a Subject with strong unity began to emerge in writers like Augustine and Avicenna. This proto-Subject played an important role in Christian theological notions of persons divine and human, and appears in the Thomistic notion of the intellectual soul, which in this regard owes more to Augustinian mens (“mind”) and to Avicenna than it does to Aristotle. (See also Pseudo-Dionysius on the Soul; God and the Soul; Identity, Isomorphism.)

Centuries of intensive and thoughtful theological discourse about personhood and the soul’s knowledge prepared the way for the strongly unified, foundational Subject that Descartes presented as a natural intuition, and made the cornerstone of his system. The theologians were more nuanced and interesting on this than Descartes. They wanted a stronger unity of the soul than I could philosophically countenance, but the theological context mostly prevented it from being used as an unexplained explainer. Descartes made a wreck of both philosophy and theology. (See also What Is “I”?; Substance Also Subject; Individuation; Psyche, Subjectivity; Cogito; Influence.)

Subject, Object

Subject and object are functional roles. There is no guarantee that either has any stronger unity than is required by its role. Referentially, members of a subject-object pair may pick out parts of the same content. This can result in confusion when terms are used at different levels of analysis.

In the Sociology of Knowledge? post, I complained about a naive, unproblematic distinction between mind and world, then went on to speak of an asymmetric mutual determination. The latter sort of language might standardly be taken to imply a relation between distinct things, contradicting the former language. However, in context, the latter phrase is intended to be anaphoric at a higher level. In this case, mutual determination and the lack of an unproblematic distinction are two ways of talking about the same state of affairs.

This sort of mixed-metaphor-like phenomenon leading to apparent literal inconsistency often crops up when different dialectical levels are mentioned. We have to choose between potentially cumbersome formal disambiguation and extra interpretive work. (See also Aristotelian Dialectic.)

Sociology of Knowledge?

In my youth, I was very interested in Karl Mannheim’s attempt to develop a sociology of knowledge. Mannheim belongs to the tradition of classical German sociology, which was always much more philosophical than its American counterpart. As a young man in Hungary, he was close to Georg Lukács. Later, he taught at Frankfurt and interacted with members of the early Frankfurt school.

In his doctoral dissertation, Mannheim had argued that epistemology cannot be self-grounding, and suggested that what he at the time called “ontology” should come first. In “The Problem of a Sociology of Knowledge” (1925), he argued that the principal characteristic of modernity was a progressive “self-relativization” of knowledge, and attempted to generalize Marx’s concept of ideology into a theory of something like culture.

His most famous work, Ideology and Utopia (1929), was concerned with the fragility of democracy. His naive hopes that a “free-floating intelligentsia” would lead the way to social peace were severely criticized by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. While rejecting economic determinism, Mannheim saw general social-scientific value in the Marxist thesis that “being determines consciousness”. Like the Marxists, what Mannheim had in mind in speaking of “being” was mainly concrete social-historical circumstance. He spoke of thought as inseparable from such being, and sought to distinguish his own “dynamic relationism” from relativism. Later, as a refugee from the Nazis, he among other things proposed a broader “sociology of mind”, with some reference to Hegel.

(Mannheim did not much rely on the term “consciousness”, mentioned above. For a long time now, I have shied away from programmatic use of that term. It does vaguely refer to something, but that something can be more clearly discussed in other ways. Phenomenologists, existentialists, and Marxists tend to indiscriminately broaden the term “consciousness” to include all phases of the Hegelian phenomenology, but in Hegel, Consciousness refers in particular to the most primitive and inadequate phase, which posits a naive, unproblematic distinction between mind and world. In Brandomian terms, such indiscriminate references to “consciousness” imply a reduction of sapience to mere sentience. In common parlance, “consciousness” suggests a naive notion of a transparent mental substance or medium, or a container of mental objects. I’ve many times registered my objection to programmatic “being” talk, as well. See also Being, Existence.)

In spite of preferring to avoid reliance on terms like “being” and “consciousness”, I do still see an important real asymmetry that is loosely picked out by a phrase like “being determines consciousness”. Reality and thought are asymmetrically mutually determining (see Subject, Object). The real (never simply possessed by us, but rather as that which pushes back) always has an edge over thought, and at any given moment exceeds it, provoking further development. That (in conjunction with mutual recognition) is how a non-naive realism can be recovered, and relativism avoided.

Abstraction

Abstraction in Aristotle is sometimes made out to be mysterious. I think it is just straightforward subtraction of features of a thing that have been previously recognized as “accidental” for the pertinent context of evaluation. Abstraction is neither a way of magically laying bare the true inner essence of a thing, as envisioned by some medieval realists, nor the mental creation of a universal ex nihilo, as envisioned by some nominalists. It is also does not have any necessary dependency on induction.

What counts as accidental may vary with the context of evaluation. While distinctions of essence and accident are fairly stable within a given context, they are ultimately relative and contextual. The pertinent context includes not only contingent facts about what is being evaluated, but also the purpose of the evaluation.

In other, non-Aristotelian contexts, Badiou has recently made it somewhat fashionable to speak literally about “subtraction” instead of “abstraction”. Though I have many issues with his thought, this is actually a useful clarification.

Ontology

Ontology as a supposed science of being acquired its basic shape in the middle ages, as a sort of reification of Aristotelian semantics. Duns Scotus was very proud of his ontological “improvement” of Aristotle. Aristotle himself preferred to shift clumsy, sterile discussions of sheer being onto more subtle and fruitful registers of form and meaning at the earliest opportunity.

Kant pointed out that existence is not a property, and Hegel pointed out the equivalence of Being to Nothing. When Hegel talks about “logic” as the form of future metaphysics, this means a return to the original meaning of “metaphysics” as Aristotelian dialectical semantics, not an ontologization of dialectic. Broadly Aristotelian dialectical semantics give us all the “ontology” we will ever need.

For the historical back story of how Scotus invented ontology as we know it today, if you read French, see Olivier Boulnois, Être et représentation: Une généalogie de la métaphysique moderne à l’époque de Duns Scot (XIIIe–XIVe siècle). As suggested by the title, this work also has extremely important things to say about the premodern history of strongly representationalist views. The famous univocal “being” invented by Scotus was defined in terms of representability. (See also Being, Existence; Aristotelian Dialectic; Objectivity of Objects; Form; Repraesentatio.)