Abstract
The goal of the present text is to analyze some aspects of Husserl’s own phenomenology against the backdrop of the quite famous or infamous critique of the “Myth of the Given” proposed by the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars in his Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Indeed, whereas Sellars’ volume is usually deemed the (“textual” and “theoretical”) source of what has been recently referred to as the “Hegelian Renaissance” characterizing analytic philosophy, Husserl and his transcendental phenomenology are on the contrary seen as the very expression of a new “form” of “Cartesianism.” Now, after a quick discussion of Sellars’ “diagnosis” of the Myth of the Given, the present essay elaborates on the general “Hegelian” character of his argumentations (as they are understood by Robert Brandom); finally, an analysis of Husserl’s alleged Cartesianism in the late text known as Cartesian Meditations will be provided bearing upon the notions of “evidence” and “synthesis.” As we firmly believe, our remarks will show not only that Husserl does not at all fall prey to the “Myth,” but also that his understanding of the concept of reason can help us avoid some of the implications directly flowing from Sellars’ position.
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Sellars (1997, 45): “‘Until you have disposed, therefore, of the idea that there is a more fundamental logical space than that of physical objects in Space and Time, or shown that it too is fraught with coherence, your incipient Méditations Hégéliennes are premature.’”
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“I presume that no philosopher who has attacked the philosophical idea of givenness or, to use the Hegelian term, immediacy, has intended to deny that there is a difference between inferring that something is the case and, for example, seeing it to be the case” (Sellars 1997, 13). On this, see Selivanov (2012).
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Moritz Schlick, “Gibt es ein materiales Apriori?” in Schlick (1938, 28), on the Gesetzmässigkeit des Soseins.
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In this sense, arguing that the phenomenological conception of the Given would not be subject to Sellars’ critique because it takes the Given itself as having a structure of its own, which nevertheless is not necessarily and intrinsically imbued with concepts (“avente una struttura (quindi non bruto), ma una struttura propria e autonoma (quindi non necessariamente intrisa di concetti”, as is claimed by Lanfredini 2012, 527), is not enough of an argument yet.
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For this expression, we are of course referring to Carraud (2002).
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As Sellars (1997, 24) points out: “the grammatical similarity of ‘sensation of a red triangle’ to ‘thought of a celestial city’ is interpreted to mean, or, better, gives rise to the presupposition that sensations belong in the same general pigeonhole as thoughts—in short, are cognitive facts.”
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See also Sellars (2002, Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 11).
- 10.
See the analysis by Benoist (2004, 522–523).
- 11.
Sellars (1997, 77) himself explains: “The idea that observation ‘strictly and properly so-called’ is constituted by certain self-authenticating nonverbal episodes, the authority of which is transmitted to verbal and quasi-verbal performances when these performances are made ‘in conformity with the semantical rules of the language,’ is, of course, the hearth of the Myth of the Given. For the given, in epistemological tradition, is what is taken by these self-authenticating episodes These ‘takings’ are, so to speak, the unmoved movers of empirical knowledge, the ‘knowing in presence’ which are presupposed by all other knowledge, both the knowledge of general truth and the knowledge ‘in absence’ of other particular matters of fact. Such is the framework in which traditional empiricism makes its characteristic claim that the perceptually given is the foundation of empirical knowledge”.
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Brandom (1994, 93); see also 9–11 (“From Cartesian Certainty to Kantian Necessity”) and Chapter 2 (“Toward an Inferential Semantics”). For a more detailed analysis, see Brandom (2000), notably 45–77 (“Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism”); and Brandom (2011, 203–206), where it is explained that “representationalism” entails “semantic atomism,” “non-inferential knowledge” and a generalization of “semantic nominalism.”
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Hegel (1959, 331 and 335): “[…] with him [Descartes] the new epoch of philosophy begins. […] Descartes started by saying that thought must necessarily commence from itself.”
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See Soffer (2003).
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See also Husserl (1984b, 405): “Closer consideration shows it to be absurd in principle, here or in like cases, to treat an intentional as a causal relation, to give it the sense of an empirical, substantial-causal case of necessary connection.”
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We can perceive the difference with respect to the following passage from the Logical Investigations: “It makes no essential difference to an object presented and given to consciousness whether it exists, or is fictitious or is perhaps completely absurd” (Husserl 1984b, 387).
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As Brandom (2009, 2–3 points out): “To be a rational being [i.e., to have Vernunft] in this sense is to be subject to a distinctive kind of normative appraisal: assessment if the reasons [read Gründe] for what one does—in the sense of ‘doing’ that is marked off by its liability to just that sort of appraisal. Rational beings [read with Vernunft] are ones that ought to have reasons [read Gründe] for what they do, and ought to act, as they have reason to [read Grund]”.
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Brandom (2009, 4): “Reasons are construed as premises, from which one can draw conclusions.”
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The key passage upon which McDowell’s and Brandom’s interpretation rely is the famous § 38: “I do wish to insist that the metaphor of ‘foundation’ is misleading in that it keeps us from seeing that if there is a logical dimension in which other empirical propositions rest on observation reports, there is another logical dimension in which the latter rest on the former” (Sellars 1997, 78). See Brandom (1994, 90–91, 2011, 87), where he claims that for any judgment “to be a potential bit of knowledge or evidence […], it must be able to play a distinctive role in reasoning: it must be able to serve as a reason for further judgments, claims, or beliefs, hence as a premise from which they can be inferred.” See also McDowell (2009, 221–223).
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Or, in other words, “The parrot does not treat ‘That’s red’ as incompatible with ‘That’s green,’ nor as following from ‘That’s scarlet’ and entailing ‘That’s colored’” (Brandom 1994, 89).
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See Husserl (1950a, 92).
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Consider the following passages from the Prolegomena (where Husserl speaks of both Grund and Begründung): “A group of isolated bits of chemical knowledge would certainly not justify talk of a science of chemistry. More is plainly required, i.e., a systematic connection in the theoretical sense, which means finding grounds [Begründung] for one’s knowing, and suitably combining and arranging the sequence of such groundings” (Husserl 1984a, 14–15); “The unity of science involves unity of the foundational connections [Begründungszusammenhängen]: not only isolated pieces of knowledge, but their grounded validations themselves;” “Connections of validation [Begründungszusammenhängen] are not governed by caprice or chance, but by reason and order” (Husserl 1984a, 15 and 18).
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It is interesting to notice that Brandom takes up the concept of “synthesis” by explicitly interpreting it in “linguistic” terms Brandom (2009, 52–77): “Autonomy, Community and Freedom”, 78–108: “History, Reason and Reality”. For an analysis of the problem of synthesis in Husserl, see De Santis (2018a, b); for what concerns the notion of reason, see De Santis (2018c).
- 24.
Benoist (2004).
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Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund-Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).
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De Santis, D. (2019). Méditations Hégéliennes vs. Méditations Cartésiennes. Edmund Husserl and Wilfrid Sellars on the Given. In: Ferrarin, A., Moran, D., Magrì, E., Manca, D. (eds) Hegel and Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 102. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17546-7_11
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