Abstract
In his paper, “The Dorsal Stream and the Visual Horizon,” Michael Madary argues that “dorsal stream processing plays a main role in the spatiotemporal limits of visual perception, in what Husserl identified as the visual horizon” (Madary 2011, p. 424). Madary regards himself as thereby providing a theoretical framework “sensitive to basic Husserlian phenomenology” (Madary 2011). In particular, Madary draws connections between perceptual anticipations and the experience of the indeterminate spatial margins, on the one hand, and the Husserlian spatiotemporal visual horizons, on the other. I argue that Madary’s arguments, for a Husserlian view of the two visual systems, are not convincing. When the notion of visual horizon is adequately understood as a constitutive notion, there will be reason to regard the connections between dorsal processing and the Husserlian spatiotemporal horizons as tenuous at best.
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Notes
This example is discussed, in greater detail and nuance, in Husserl 1997, § 36, especially p. 107 (128).
If we were to go into more detail as to when one look suffices to find out a thing’s color, we would need to discuss Husserl’s notion of “normality,” viz., whether the thing’s color is perceived in “normal” circumstances (in broad daylight, with healthy eyes, etc.). See Husserl 1989, § 18 b.
I am writing this in full awareness of Husserl’s discussion of reality in Husserl 1989, § 15. If I were to flesh out the Husserlian conception of reality in more detail, I would have to add the qualification that the achievement of any of the fulfillments associated with the mere spatial object or “phantom” is not sufficient to establish reality. As Husserl explains in Husserl 1989, § 15 c, we would also need fulfillments pertinent to the material thing, viz., concerning the ways in which the object causally depends on the circumstances.
Transcendence, for Husserl, is persistence or constancy in the flux of experience (Husserl 1997, p. 315 (355)).
I believe that these remarks to pertain to the very core of Husserlian phenomenology. If they were presented as an original interpretative take on Husserl, they would have to be carefully defended, based on all the relevant textual support. However, I draw my views of the fundamentals of Husserlian phenomenology from Ernst Tugendhat’s influential book Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (1970), where the requisite argumentation has already been provided. While the views that I have just put forward can be regarded as being at the center of the entire Part One of Tugendhat 1970, I will indicate some relevant passages to highlight the interpretative thrust. Thus, on page 174, Tugendhat argues that the constitution of different kinds of objectivity depends on what we can, in each case, regard as the relevant intuitive evidence, and needs to be conceived in terms of what it means to achieve such intuitive evidence. Elsewhere, on page 213, Tugendhat articulates the view that, on the Husserlian approach, we can cash out the idea of positing an object in terms of what it takes to bring it to consummate fulfillment. On page 228, he argues that, with the broadening of Husserl’s notion of truth, all ontological themes become “aletheiological,” needing to be regarded in terms of what it takes to bring the relevant objectivities to intuitively evidential givenness.
Compare Tugendhat (1970, p. 246), for a similar emphasis on the constitutive significance of the horizons.
In his discussion of aspects of Husserl’s idea of the horizons, Roberto J. Walton devotes a section to the encasement and stratification of the horizons (Walton 2003, pp. 15–19).
The reader may have noticed that in § 27, that I have been discussing, of Ideas I, Husserl also advances the claim that “the field of actual perception” is surrounded by a “constant halo,” and wondered as to the relevance of this claim to the present discussion (Husserl 1982, p. 52 (49)). The attentive reader will also notice we are dealing with a “constant halo” of emptiness. Husserl does not emphasize its indeterminacy and it is therefore not the same as Madary’s indeterminate spatial margins.
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Laasik, K. Constitutive strata and the dorsal stream. Phenom Cogn Sci 13, 419–435 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9306-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9306-2