Intuition by Whom? Epistemic Responsibility and the Role of the Self
David L. Thompson
Outline
by Section
PART
II: INTUITION AS TRUSTING
PART
III: INTUITION AS INTEGRATING
Intuition
n. The
power of understanding situations or people's feelings immediately, without the
need for conscious reasoning or study.
The Canadian
Intuition. Originally an alleged direct relation, analogous to
visual seeing, between the mind and something abstract and so not accessible to
the senses. What are intuited (which can be derivatively called
'intuitions') may be abstract objects, like numbers or properties, or certain
truths regarded as not accessible to investigation through the senses or
calculation; the mere short-circuiting of such processes in 'bank managers
intuition' would not count as intuition for philosophy. Kant talks of our
intuiting space and time, in a way which is direct and entirely free from any
mediation by the intellect - but this must be distinguished from an alleged
pure reception of 'raw data' from the senses; the intuiting is presupposed by,
and so cannot depend upon, sensory experience.
Intuitions
or alleged intuitions have been important in logic, metaphysics, and ethics, as
well as in epistemology. Recently, however, the term 'intuition' has been used
for pre-philosophical thoughts or feelings, e.g., on morality, which emerge in
thought experiments and are then used philosophical1y. A.R.L.
(Allan Lacey,
The
My aim in this
paper is to try to make sense of one particular meaning of intuition. I show
that, when examined closely, intuition needs to be understood as a way of
integrating our experience into meaningful wholes. The first part of the paper
is as purely expository as I manage - given that all exposition involves
interpretation - and presents the Cartesian-Husserlian
understanding of intuition as a kind of "seeing." In a transitional
section, Part II, I argue, picking up on an indication from Descartes, that
seeing cannot be self-supporting, but depends on
"trusting," either trusting in God or trusting in ourselves. The
final part defends "my own" claim that intuiting is integrating,
though, - given that most of one's ideas are recycled from those of others -
"my" ideas remain strongly influenced by various philosophers.
So: Part I: Seeing; Part II Trusting; and Part III: Integrating.
In
everyday, pre-philosophical life, the word intuition is often used in the sense
of a "hunch." Attributed to bank managers and, in more sexist and
racist days, to women, to blacks, or to anyone considered beyond the pale of
rationality, it is used to refer to beliefs for which we cannot offer reasons
or evidence. It is purported knowledge "without the need for conscious
reasoning," as the dictionary puts it. Some philosophers, pace
the Oxford Companion, use the term is ways derivative from this everyday sense
and contrast intuitive knowledge with logical, intellectual or conceptual
knowledge. Others use the term to refer to the grasping of
concrete individuals. Sometimes the term appears to be used to refer to
artistic creativity. Neither of the latter two uses are
supported by either the dictionary or the Oxford Companion.
Since I don't believe
that the meanings of words are given by God, I think all of these uses of the
term are legitimate. In this paper, however, I'd like to make it clear that
I'll be using the term in its more traditional philosophical use, a use based
on the etymology of the term: in Latin tueri
means to look at. My use is almost diametrically opposed to the everyday sense
of a non-rational hunch. Following the Cartesian-Husserlian
(and Platonic?) axis, I'll be using the term to refer to that kind of knowledge
which is the most rational, the epitome of rationality. Descartes, for
instance, defines it this way:
By intuition I mean, not the wavering assurance of
the senses, or the deceitful judgment of a misconstructing
imagination, but a conception, formed by unclouded mental attention, so easy and distinct as to leave no room for doubt in regard
to the thing we are understanding. It comes to the same thing if we say: It is
an indubitable conception formed by an unclouded and attentive mind; one that
originates solely from the light of reason . . . Thus, anybody can see by
mental intuition that he himself exists, that he thinks, that a triangle is
bounded by just three lines, and a globe by a single surface, and so on; . . .
(Rules, Rule 3, EA155)
Such intuition is the absolute basis for Descartes' rationalism.
Rationalism, for Descartes, is the reliance on reason as opposed to authority,
faith, imagination, the senses or any of the other purported sources of
knowledge which fall before his method of doubt. Far from intuition being
contrasted with intellection, cognition or reason, as it is in the everyday
sense of a hunch, Descartes uses the term intuition to
refer to the very paradigm of rational thought.
In an early work, Rules (1627), Descartes also uses intuitive knowledge in a way that contrasts it with deductive knowledge, which although non-intuitive is still certain.
Hence we are distinguishing mental intuition from
certain deduction on the grounds that we are aware of a movement or a sort of
sequence in the latter but not in the former, and also because immediate
self-evidence is not required for deduction, as it is for intuition; deduction
in a sense gets its certainty from memory. (Rules, Rule 3, EA 156)
But this is problematic for him. The immediate self-evidence of intuition
does not extend beyond the moment. Even the certainty of the cogito only occurs
at the moment that I am actually thinking: my memory of having been thinking in
the past, even the immediate past, is subject to doubt. So how can deduction be
certain? In the Rules he attempts to solve the problem by pointing out
that each individual step in the deduction can be intuitive and hence the whole
deduction can be certain if there is
A continuous and uninterrupted movement of thought,
with a clear intuition at each point. . . . Thus we distinguish at this point
between intuition and certain deduction; because the latter, unlike the former,
is conceived as involving a movement or succession; and is again unlike
intuition in not requiring something evident at the moment, but rather, so to
say, borrowing its certainty from memory. (Rules, Rule III, EA 156)
This is hardly satisfactory and Descartes worries at the problem for a
number of Rules before trying once again in Rule XI:
As I said, when conclusions are too complex to be
held in a single act of intuition, their certainty depends on memory; and since
memory is perishable and weak, it must be revived and strengthened by this
continuous and repeated movement of thought. For example, suppose I have
learnt, in a number of successive mental acts, the relations between magnitudes
1 and 2, magnitudes 2 and 3, magnitudes 3 and 4, and, finally, magnitudes 4 and
5; this does not make me see the relation between magnitudes 1 and 5, nor can I
deduce it from the ones I already know, unless I remember them all;
accordingly, I must run over them in thought again and again, until I pass from
the first to the last so quickly that I have hardly any parts to the care of
memory, but seem to have a simultaneous intuition of the whole. (Rules,
Rule XI, EA 164)
The notion that one can achieve certainty by seeming
to have an intuition which one does not in fact have boggles the mind.
To his credit,
Descartes drops this line of thought entirely when he writes the Meditations
15 years later. By then the problem of time has become more acute for him and
it must have become clear to him that fast-forwarding, even at top speed, cannot
overcome the non-instantaneous, and hence non-intuitive, status of memory and
so of logical deduction. Indeed, in the Meditations, the past not only
has no power to guarantee my present memory, it cannot even guarantee the existence
of the present. There is no natural causal relationship between the past and
the present. Every instant requires a new creative act of God to bring it into
existence. The substance of the world, and the substance of
thought, are powerless ontologically as well as epistemologically.
For the whole
time of my life may be divided into an infinity of parts, each of which is in
no way dependent on any other; and, accordingly, because I was in existence a
short time ago, it does not follow that I must now exist, unless in this moment
some cause create me anew as it were, that is, conserve me. In truth, it is
perfectly clear and evident to all who will attentively consider the nature of
duration, that the conservation of a substance, in each moment of its duration,
requires the same power and act that would be necessary to create it, supposing
it were not yet in existence; so that it is manifestly a dictate of the natural
light that conservation and creation differ merely in respect of our mode of
thinking [and not in reality]. (Meditations, Third Meditation, EA 88)
I will call this notion that time is made up of independent, isolated moments
of duration "punctualism." As a punctualist, once the past moment has slipped away,
Descartes must trust in God to use Her miraculous powers
to recreate the present moment. Since any memory I currently have of the past
is directly created by God, the certainty of deduction can only be solved by
trusting in Her.
Descartes'
solution is not available to Husserl 250 years later.
By then, God is dead, or is at least, as Bernie Wills puts it, absconditus. I read Husserl's
project as the attempt to see if humans can manage by themselves to find an
absolute foundation for the sciences without having to rely on trust in God.
Following Descartes, Husserl thinks that it is to
intuition that we must appeal.
To grasp Husserl's notion of intuition, we need to understand a
fundamental difference between two kinds of consciousness or experience. For
example, in our experience with language, we differentiate between merely
saying something, and really meaning it. Husserl
holds that a parallel distinction can be found in all experience:
perception of physical objects; understanding of mathematical entities; the
hearing of melodies; and so on. The crucial distinction is between
"seeing" and not "seeing" the thing itself.
Something similar is obviously true of all types of
intuitions and of all other processes of meaning an object even when they have
the character of mere re-presentations that (like rememberings
or pictorial intuitions or processes of meaning something symbolic) do not have
the intrinsic character of being conscious of the intuited's
being there "in person" but are conscious of it instead as recalled,
as re-presented in the picture or by means of symbolic indications and the
like. (Husserl,
Thinking about the object through the mediation of images or signs counts as
non-seeing, and so is uncertain. For instance, we can use words to talk about a
table, or we can form an image of it, but these are different experiences than
actually perceiving the table itself, "in person," as he puts it. We
can perform a correct calculation by manipulating (maybe mentally) mathematical
signs, but only when we actually see the numbers present
before us can we achieve certainty. It is presence of the thing itself to us
that Husserl calls intuition, and only in this case
can we have rational certainty.
When I
actually see an object before me, a table for example, we have a presentive act of consciousness. When I only
remember the table, the act is a re-presentive
or unfulfilled one and the image or word I am experiencing has a sense
[Sinn] only in so far as it refers back to the original act
of seeing in which the table was present itself in person.
Thus a memorial [remembered] consciousness - for
example, of a landscape - is not originarily presentive; the landscape is not perceived as it would be
in case we actually saw it. . . . We can assert "blindly" that two
plus one is equal to one plus two; but we can also make the judgment in the
manner peculiar to intellectual seeing. When we do this, the synthetical objectivity corresponding to the judgment-synthesis
is given originarily, seized upon in an originary manner. It is no longer given originarily
after effecting the actual [lebendigen] intellectual seeing which becomes
forthwith an obscured retentional modification. . . .
(Husserl, Ideas 326-327)
At first sight, then, it seems as if Husserl
follows Descartes in holding that intuition is punctual and so the certainty it
delivers cannot extend to past experience. Only presence in
the living now counts as intuition, and only that can fulfil
the blind and empty promise of words or re-presentative
images and so deliver rational certainty.
One mode of consciousness pertaining to the sense [Sinn]
is the "intuitive" mode, which is such that the "meant
object as meant" is intentively [intentionally]
intuited; and an especially preeminent case here is the one in which the mode
of intuition is precisely the originarily
presentive mode. In the perception of the
landscape the sense is fulfilled perceptually; in the mode of "itself in
person" there is consciousness of the perceived object with its colors,
forms, and other determinations. . . .
If the position is blind, if the verbal significations are effected on the basis of an obscure and confusedly intentive [intentional] act-substratum, then the rational character belonging to intellectual seeing is necessarily lacking; ... (Husserl, Ideas 327-328)
Husserl's fundamental claim for intuition, that certainty
is to be found only in experiences in which the object intended is present
itself in person, is captured in his "Principle of all Principles":
Every originary presentive intuition is a legitimating source of cognition,
everything originarily (so to speak, in its
"personal" actuality) offered to us in 'intuition' is to be accepted
simply as what it is presented as being . . . (Ideas 44)
The target that Husserl is aiming at is symbolic consciousness, experiences
in which we manipulate just the signs, words, or images without intuition of
the objects they signify. Such techniques of sign manipulation may be
pragmatically successful in science, engineering and everyday life, but without
the foundation given by intuition we cannot reach the certainty that real
science (episteme) requires.
By insisting
in this way on the intuitive presence of the object, Husserl,
like Descartes, runs up against the problem of time. Intuitive presence is an
analogical concept and Husserl applies it to many
different regions of objects: physical things, mathematical objects,
melodies, and so on. Some of these objects, melodies are the most obvious
examples, are extended in time, yet Husserl insists
that, if our words are to be meaningful, it must be possible for even temporal
objects to be present in intuition. If the words "Beethoven's Fifth
Symphony" are to be meaningful there must be an originary
experience in which the symphony itself in person is present to intuition. This
is possible only if intuition itself is extended over time, which appears
incompatible with Cartesian punctualism. Exacerbating
the problem is Husserl's claim that consciousness -
unlike a Divine Intellect - is essentially temporal and so it is not
only the intuition of melodies, but of any object, that is dispersed in time. Husserl is therefore led to renounce Cartesian punctualism: Intuitive presence cannot be limited to the
present.
If one speaks of the self-evident givenness of an immanent content, it is obvious that this self-evidence cannot mean indubitable certainty with regard to the temporal existence of a sound at a point. Self-evidence so grasped (as, is admitted by Brentano, for example) I would hold to be a fiction. If to be extended in time belongs to the essence of a content given in perception, then the indubitableness of the perception can mean nothing other than indubitableness with reference to the temporally extended existent. . . . These are perceptions which in themselves contain nothing further that is questionable. We are led back to these perceptions in all questions regarding origins, but they themselves exclude any further question as to origin. It is clear that the much-talked-of certainty of internal perception, the evidence of the cogito, would lose all meaning and significance if we excluded temporal extension from the sphere of self-evidence and true givenness. (Husserl, ITC 111-112)
Husserl, then, solves Descartes' problem that,
because the certainty of intuition is limited by the instant, we must trust in
God's continuous miraculous interventions. Intuition is not punctual in the
first place, but extends over time by its own nature, without divine help.
So far I have
focussed on the presence "in person" of the
object in intuition. But intuition is bipolar; it is Janus-faced, looking in
two directions. Not only must the object itself be there, but the subject must
also. It takes two to tango. No one else can perform my intuitions for me; I
must be there myself, in person. Intuition excludes hearsay, the intuition of
others passed on to me through verbal signs. I must see for myself. I too, not
just the object, must be present when fulfilled intuition takes place.
In the
literature, this feature of intuition is often referred to as
"self-presence," (Derrida 35) but this can be misleading. It is not
as if object and subject were equal partners who lie down side by side, each
mutually present to the other in the bed of intuition. The ego is not like just
one other object; it is not an object at all. It is more like the condition for
there being any objects, or at least for the presence of any object. The
subject of intuition is more like a form than an object; it is that which makes
presence possible rather than being itself present.
For
Descartes, since certainty can be found only in the instant, it is crucial that
the subject not have a history: one function of methodological doubt is to
disengage the present point of intuition from any previous habits, beliefs,
opinions or teachings so that no prejudices can distort the pure natural light
of immediate presence. If now we accept that for Husserl
intuition and intuited objects are dispersed in time, we cannot continue to
cling to an instantaneous, punctual subject. How can the subject get beyond the
instant? How can the subject doing the intuition be dispersed in time? This is
the issue I now want to tackle.
In bringing
epistemology down to earth, Husserl, unlike
Descartes, no longer trusts in God to guarantee intuitions of the past. But if
I don't trust God, who can I trust? Myself!
What is it to
trust myself? In the moral sphere, I make decisions and count on my future self
to carry them out. I take responsibility today for the promises and commitments
I made yesterday. If, in Sartrian fashion, I had to
remake every decision, recommit myself anew every moment, I would be as paralysed as Prufrock.
And indeed there will be time . . .
There will be time, there will be time . . .
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
T.S. Elliot, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Today I find myself responsible for yesterday's free decisions. If
yesterday's decision were not free, I would not be bound today, but in so far
as it was my free act, it binds me today. While the bonds of the past are not
absolute, if my default position were not to remain bound I would not be the
same person from day to day (Ricoeur 165). My being
as a self is not like that of a bump on a log; I am
not a self-contained substance, but a web of decisions in which my current
being is structured by my history. In so far as actions take time, a being who
could not bind herself in the future could not act (Merleau-Ponty
437). I must today trust in the validity of yesterday's decisions and I must
trust that tomorrow I will continue to embrace the projects I launch today.
Trust is constitutive of moral selfhood; I am now the kind of person I made
myself into yesterday.
Can we find a
similar temporal structure in the epistemological sphere? I embark on a
deduction, perhaps in geometry. I have intuitive certainty of the initial
premises and of the first step of the proof, but these are past when I arrive
at the conclusion. Initially, Doubting René tries to repeat the proof
faster so that all the steps "seem" to be present to punctual
intuition. However Trusting David doesn't need to depend on speed but trusts
himself to have got it right in the first step. The intuition of the initial
step would then be analogous to a kind of decision, an abiding commitment to
treat the initial position adopted as true. When I reach the conclusion of the
deduction, I remain bound by that commitment; I continue to take responsibility
for my previous insight. Who I am now is the self I constructed earlier in the
proof. The initial "intuition" is still there at the conclusion not
as a dubitable memory but as an abiding structure of my selfhood. Yesterday I
promised today's self that what I was seeing then is true. I certified its
truth to my future self. Today I receive that certification and I trust the
certifier, yesterday's self. I put my seal of approval today on the belief
which yesterday I bequeathed to myself. I abide by the epistemic decision I
made.
Let me call
this structure "epistemic responsibility": I take responsibility now
for the commitment I made earlier. In a way,
Descartes anticipates this notion when he claims equality to God with respect
to what I call "epistemic freedom":
For . . . God's will . . . does not seem any greater
than mine when considered as will in the essential and strict sense. . . .When
something is put forward for our consideration by the intellect, we are moved
to affirm or deny it, or pursue or avoid it, in such a way that we feel we are
not determined by any external force. (Meditations, Fourth
Meditation. EA 96)
I assume he is speaking here of intuition. His Promethean interpretation of
it as an act of freedom equal to God's could have led him to my notion of
epistemic responsibility as the upshot of epistemic freedom. He cannot take
this step, however, because his punctualism blocks
him from considering the temporal nature of the ego. Neither an eternal will,
like God's, nor a punctual will, like Descartes, has to face the problem within
time of binding oneself for the future, not the correlated problem of accepting
responsibility for one's own decisions in the past. Descartes can depend on God
to manage the link between yesterday and tomorrow; I claim that I must manage
on my own. Prometheus has only himself to trust.
Why am I
trustworthy? Why should I today accept the certification of an intuition by
yesterday's self? Does it even make sense to speak of yesterday's self and
today's self? Parfit speaks of person-stages and
investigates how different person-stages dispersed in time could still be the same
person. I find this way of putting the question inadequate because Parfit remained mired in punctualism.
It makes sense to trust another person, or to trust God, but to speak of
"trusting oneself" seems to involve a conceptual splitting up of the
self into semi-separate entities, an alienation of time-slices from one unified
self. Once this gap has been created, reliance on trust of a former self seems
no less problematic than reliance on memory in Descartes. We need a better way
of linking my past intuition to my present.
Part of the
problem is that we think of intuition by means of the metaphor of vision. Vision
is experienced as passive: a prefabricated seen object imposes itself on me. In
reality, as both Merleau-Ponty and cognitive
scientists have shown, perception is a very active process, but it appears
to us as passive, and hence basing the metaphor of intuition on vision - on tueri - runs the risk of us interpreting intuition
as a passive process.
A better way
is to conceptualize intuition as integration. Let me first explain what I mean
in general by the term integration. When I see a face, I don't see an
assortment of eyes, nose, mouth, etc. as isolated data which serve as rational
clues for figuring out what is before me. Rather, each feature is experienced
as having a sense: the eye is the eye of a face - how else could it be an
"eye?" The parts fit together into a patterned whole and it is in
function of this whole that the parts have their meaning. The meaning
"face" integrates the elements into what they are for me,
the eyes of this face. The immediate intuition of a face, the face present in
person, is not simply a matter of passive reception; it is the giving of a
meaning to the situation. (Husserl calls this synthesis
or constitution, and the result of it intentionality.)
Not all
integration is synchronous, however. When I intuit a melody, the individual
notes are integrated into the one melody which is the meaning of the
experience, and each note is heard as the note of that melody. This is
diachronic or temporal integration. It is temporal integration that Husserl is getting at when he claims, "the evidence of the cogito would lose all meaning
and significance if we excluded temporal extension from the sphere of
self-evidence and true givenness." (ITC
112) Only a non-punctual subject, an ego which is extended over time, could be
capable of the intuition of a temporal object.
It is not a
matter of trusting a past self. Intuition is the process of making the past fit
into a larger meaning which includes elements from the current moment. Or
better, my current intuition is the integrating of a patterned temporal whole
which incorporates past phases in so far as they contribute to the total
pattern. In synchronous integration, it is not that my left eye trusts
my right eye when I look at the landscape: it is that both perspectives are
integrated into the experience of the one landscape. When I hear a melody, it
is not that a present self trusts a past self to have heard the earlier note
correctly: both the past notes and the current one are held together,
integrated as the one melody which I, the intuiter,
experience. The intuiter is not stuck punctually and
passively in one instant of time: Intuition is the active process of
integrating one meaning out of many moments. I don't just trust my past self to
have seen the first step of the proof; when I reach the conclusion I don't
simply experience the last step and trust my earlier self to have seen the
initial premises. Rather, I give the last step the meaning "one step in
the whole proof," thereby integrating not only this step, but also the earlier
ones, into the one patterned whole, "the proof." Just as I am not
conscious of an isolated note, but notes of the melody, so I
experience each step as a step of this proof.
This account
may help us to understand what is intuited, but how does it help us interpret
who is intuiting? Let me turn again to Husserl for
help. He claims that it is not only the intuited object which is integrated
over time; so is the subject.
The ego is . . . continuously constituting
himself as existing . . . as the same I. This centering ego is not an
empty pole of identity. . . . with every act
emanating from him and having a new objective sense [meaning as an
object], he acquires a new abiding property. For example: If, in an
act of judgment, I decide for the first time in favor of a being and a
being-thus, the fleeting act passes; but from now on I am abidingly the Ego
who is thus and so decided, I am of this conviction. . . . [I] find myself
as the Ego who is convinced, who, as the persisting Ego, is determined
by this abiding habitus or state. . . .
Since, by his own active generating, the Ego constitutes himself as identical
substrate of Ego-properties, he constitutes himself also as a "fixed
and abiding" personal Ego . . . (Husserl
CM 66-67)
Translating this into my language of integration, I take Husserl
to be saying that there is no pre-existing, pre-integrated self other than that
which is integrated over time by means of its history. There is no abstract
unity-in-principle, but only the particular integrative structure that has
pulled itself together around its objects. The process which integrates a
melody, for instance, includes the perspective from which the melody is
perceived. My self is being integrated as much as the melody or the landscape.
Who, then, intuits? From this perspective the subject of intuition is the
framework itself, the pattern into which the elements fall. To integrate the
object is to integrate the subject. What "I" am is the way my world is integrated. "Consequently the
phenomenology of this self-constitution coincides with phenomenology
as a whole." (Husserl, CM 68)
Husserl is, of course, a transcendental idealist, but I
think his insights can be carried over into naturalism, with which I am more
comfortable. The integration of the eyes and nose into a face is done by facial
recognition circuits in the brain. We know this since when tumours
destroy these circuits, the patient cannot recognize faces. Similarly, the
integration of data from the two eyes into the experience of a
three-dimensional landscape and the integration of a series of notes into the
recognition of one, unified melody are both carried out by the brain. On the
subjective pole, it is the brain too which integrates the structure which we
call a "self." Indeed, if we follow Husserl,
the subject is not another structure created in addition to the
object-structures; it is the same structure. The process that Husserl calls transcendental constitution is carried out by
the brain, itself programmed by cultural memes in the way Dennett describes so
well.
So what happens, under this
interpretation, to the privilege of intuition to deliver absolute certainty? I
think it must be abandoned; there is no place for certainty in the ways our
brains integrate experience. Nevertheless, there is clearly an experiential
difference between speaking without thinking and speaking with sense, or
between a rote repetition that 2 + 2 = 4 and actually "seeing" the
relationship, what Husserl calls intuition. How can
my integration account explain this difference?
I think I can
explain non-intuitive experience as that which occurs when our brains hive off
an operation into an isolated mechanism, whereas in the case of intuitive
experience, it integrates the object into the overall structure of our lives.
For many practical purposes, however, such integration may be unnecessary or
even disruptive. If I want to divide 3 into 402 (which goes in 134 times),
along the way I may write (or think) the digits 1 followed by 3. If the sign
"13" gets fully activated and integrated into my life, that is, if I
intuit it, I may not only recognize that this is the 7th prime
number, but I may be gripped by an attack of triskaidekaphobia. Much better to ignore what "13" means and just treat it
as a sign to be manipulated. In the extreme case, the brains of savants
must do something like this: some savants can figure out in seconds whether
37658431 is a prime number. They have no experience of the steps along the way.
Their brains just act like calculating machines and deliver to consciousness
the correct answer in the mode of a "hunch" without justification.
This is the very opposite to what Descartes and Husserl
are striving for when searching for certainty in science. It is this kind of
pure "technique" of signs which Husserl
(and Heidegger after him) inveighs against. But in everyday life, most of the
time we rely upon non-intuitive brain mechanisms which avoid integrating into
our lives the objects represented by the signs. So my integrative approach can
still account for the experiential difference between "merely meant"
signs and the fulfilled experience of intuiting the object itself there in
person. What the account abandons is the claim that the later delivers
certainty.
The traditional (Cartesian-Husserlian) concept of intuition does not only etymologically originate in visual perception but is so saturated with the optical metaphor that it is hopelessly corrupted by its origin. "Intuition" relies on a notion of presence which is abstracted from time and so is available only to either a timeless God or an instantaneous ego stripped of all historicity. When it comes to real spatio-temporal knowers who live in the hic et nunc, we must substitute for absolute presence the embodied temporal process of making sense of the world. Absolute seeing is an illusionary product, a product generated by the processes of our bodies which structure our experience, integrating both objects and conscious selves over space and time.
David L. Thompson
Philosophy,
2004-03-07
Dennett, Daniel, Consciousness Explained.
Derrida, Jacques, Speech and Phenomena,
(Rules EA) Descartes, Renè, Rules for the Direction of the Mind.
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(Ideas) Husserl, Edmund, Ideas
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(ITC) Husserl, Edmund, The
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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Phenomenology of Perception.
Parfit,
Derek, Reasons and Persons. Oxford University
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