Imaginary, Symbolic, Real

I’ve been feeling a need to say something about the controversial French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Due to his provocative personality and style, he evoked extreme hostility from some quarters, not all of which was unjustified, but I still think he is important. (Wikipedia has a relatively balanced summary article.)

American psychoanalysis has been much more narrowly medicalized than Freud’s original work. While trained as a psychiatrist, Lacan went in the opposite direction and engaged even more extensively with philosophy, literature, the arts, linguistics, logic, and mathematics. Among many other things, he developed a rich notion of three orders — Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real — in which we simultaneously participate.

The Imaginary seems to me to elaborate on Spinoza’s poignant words about human illusions in the Ethics. Lacan notably maintained — against the implicit mentalism of the American ego psychologists — that the ego is a product of alienated Imaginary identification.

The Symbolic or the “Other” is the order of language and culture and social relationships, within which I would place what I have been calling second nature and the transcendental. Lacan argued that speech originates neither in the subject nor the ego but in the Other. The unconscious for Lacan is not something primitive, and is not a deep interiority. He said the unconscious is the “discourse of the Other”, and is structured like a language. “I” belongs to the Other. We are our words. He even said our desire is the desire of the Other. Lacan was associated with many famous avant-garde writers and artists, and himself spoke and wrote in a linguistically experimental style with much wordplay, while embracing a structuralist view of language.

The Real in Lacan’s earlier work seems to me to recall a sort of Spinozist whole. In his later work, it especially foregrounds what Brandom called the world’s “stubborn recalcitrance to mastery and agency”. Earlier in his career, Lacan had tended to emphasize a therapeutic transition from the Imaginary to the Symbolic. Later, he began to stress the importance of the Real as something that is impossible and contradictory from the point of view of the univocal synchronic order of the Symbolic. He developed a series of topological and other mathematical metaphors for characterizing things like subject/object relations in terms much richer than simple duality.

Lacan’s seminars, the main primary source, are now mostly available in English. The vast secondary literature is very uneven in quality. I found the biography by Elizabeth Roudinesco and the works of Bruce Fink helpful for getting some orientation. (See also Meaning, Consciousness; Therapy; Primary Process; Mutual Recognition and the Other; Pure Negativity?; Split Subject, Contradiction.)

My own thought about subjectivity is summarized in Ethos, and related articles directly or indirectly linked from there. See the Subjectivity section for more.

Transcendental?

Kant already wanted to clearly distinguish his new concept of the transcendental from traditional notions of transcendence. He associated transcendence with things beyond the possibility of any knowledge — with which the critical philosopher has nothing to do — and the transcendental with knowledge that was a priori in his expansive sense of that term. What is a priori for Kant does not depend on any particular experience, but does concern the limits and conditions of possible experience or knowledge. A priori in this sense does not imply any self-evidence, simple givenness, or other coming out of nowhere. It just effectively captures higher-order structure of knowledge or experience. (See also Kantian Discipline.)

According to Brandom, the Kantian transcendental is socially, historically, and linguistically constituted, though this represents a Hegelian rather than Kantian interpretation. I would further suggest that the transcendental field includes only forms, and no entities such as subjects or objects. (See also Psyche, Subjectivity.)

Husserlian and Existential Phenomenology

Phenomenology in the tradition stemming from Husserl is a prime example of what Habermas called subject-centered philosophy. Though a much more serious philosopher than Descartes, Husserl explicitly adopted a Cartesian perspective, and on this basis wanted to trace all meaning back to a foundation in intentional acts of a transcendental Ego. Existential phenomenology tried to soften Husserl’s Cartesianism, and favored analysis of more concrete experience over Husserl’s foundational concerns (see Primacy of Perception?; Phenomenology of Will).

I’ve been developing a strong distinction of actual adverbial subjectivity from any posited unitary Subject standing behind it, while also sharply separating empirical “subjectivity” from transcendental Subjectivity. I’d like to recover some of the detailed insights of both Husserlian and existential phenomenology for a broadly semantic perspective that addresses subjectivity in a modular way, and hence has no use for a monolithic Subject, be it transcendental or existential. (As usual, by “semantic” I have in mind the combination of Aristotelian and Brandomian concerns developed here.) Then with respect to the matter of subjectivity, I’d like to achieve an Aristotelian mean between coherence and pluralism. Meaning is neither a single tree nor a collection of atoms, but mostly constituted at the level of intermediate structures that build coherence.

Unlike the Aristotelian/Brandomian approach favored here, the phenomenological tradition avowedly aims at a sort of hermeneutic genealogy of perceptual and other mental representations rather than of reasons. Nonetheless, any serious, in-depth tracing of layers and dependencies of meaning can be reconstructed in terms of reasons, and then combined with other materials directly derived from a genealogy of reasons.

Husserl aimed at a subjective discipline of direct observation of pure forms of appearance. Initially interested in the foundations of mathematics, in early work he developed a critique of psychologism in logic. He went on to recommend a radical “reduction” or suspension of ordinary assumptions, in two interdependent moments — epoché, a putting in brackets of putative existence behind appearances, and in general of what we ordinarily think we know or practically act as if we know; and the phenomenological reduction proper, which would be the recognition of everything that has been put in brackets as what Brandom would call a taking.

Husserl’s close collaborator Eugen Fink characterized the reduction as an extensive and rigorous meditative discipline that would take us back to an original astonishment characteristic of genuine knowing. According to Fink, when carried through rigorously, the reduction eventually shows itself as a “self-meditation” that would lay bare the transcendental Ego as the material ground of all science. What remains after the reduction is an “unhumanized” pure “reducing I”.

This bears some resemblance to the Kantian “I” as bare index of the unity of a unity of apperception, but unlike the Kantian “I”, the Husserlian Ego is not fully abstract. For one thing, it is supposed to be the agent performing the reduction, and it seems to be assumed that it is appropriate to speak of “the” agent in this role.

For another, Husserl stressed that the reduction should provide access to what he called pure essences, understood as pure forms of intentionality grounded in acts of the transcendental Ego. This makes it clear that Husserl’s transcendental Ego is supposed to be contentful, not purely formal like the Kantian “I”. Correlatively, Husserl’s essences, while nonpychological and free of empirical content and the presuppositions that go with it, are what they are by virtue of their complete and unilateral subordination to a foundational Subject that has supposedly been not merely posited, but discovered via the meditative process of the reduction. By contrast, the determination of content in a Kantian unity of apperception is purely a matter of coherence. (See also Transcendental Field; Error.)

In my youth, though already viewing the Ego as a reification, I was attracted to the idea of a meditative discipline and a focus on improving the knower by shedding presuppositions. While still seeing some value in this, I have come increasingly to think not only that such discipline is insufficient by itself, but that such a focus can easily be taken too far, implicitly reflecting an undesirable ascetic and effectively subjectivist turn away from serious open-ended inquiry about the larger world. A sole focus on improving the knower is too narrow. (Husserl did at one point have a motto “to the things themselves”, and certainly was far too serious to be subjectivist in the crude sense. His Ego would be purely transcendental. However, his “things themselves” seem to turn out to be intentional acts of the Ego.) Nonetheless, I remain fascinated by Husserl’s detailed descriptions of the stream of consciousness with all its passive syntheses, margins of awareness, implicit back sides of things, and so on. (See also Phenomenological Reduction?; Ricoeur on Husserl on Memory; Ricoeur on Husserl’s Ideas II.)

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.)