Abstract
The light metaphor seems inescapable in our description of the appearing of things in the world. Indeed an elemental sense of things appearing is their coming forth into the light or their becoming visible or luminous. Since ancient times this has motivated an analogy between mind and light. In this paper I want to review some of the issues, especially the special place self-consciousness has in a meditation on appearings and light.
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Notes
James J. Gibson, An Ecological Apprach to Visual Perception (Hilldale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associatees, 1986) 47 ff, and 111 ff.
Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Schriften zur Philosophie, ed. Eberhard Avé-Lallemant, Vol. III (Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1965), 261 ff.
See Thomas Prufer, Recapitulations (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 57, 65, 75–76, 84–89.
Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press: 1974 and 1980), 120.
Robert Sokolowski, Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 3.
See Sokolowski, Presence and Absence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976) and Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions, especially ch. 8 and
Richard Cobb-Stevens, Husserl and Analytic Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990).
Sokolowski, Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions, 31.
See my “Agens Intellectus and Primal Sensibility in Husserl” in the volume on Ideas II, ed. Tom Nenon and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996).
Ms. C 2 I, 1 ff; I wish to thank Prof. Samuel IJsseling, Head of the Husserl Archives in Louvain, for permission to quote from the Nachlass texts.
Michel Henry, Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff: 1973; reissue: Dordrecht: Kluwer), 258–259; in the French original, 321–323.1 am indebted to Dan Zahavi for calling my attention not only to this discussion of Henry, but to Henry’s writings in general. Zahavi discusses all these matters with great precision and care in his forthcoming habilitation on self-consciousness.
Cf. C 3 III, 26–29 where Husserl states that consciousness is a striving or tendency to that of which we are conscious, so that consciousness itself is a transparent “through which” (durch) what appears is striven for. Thus this transparent medium of striving is comprised of modes of synthesis of tendencies as well as a unified tendency pervading a manifold of tendencies.
Sir William Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics (New York: Sheldon and Company, 1883), 133. The ancients approached this insight. See Aristotle, De Anima, DI.2, 425b 12ff; for an excellent general discussion leading up to Plotinus’ very nuanced meditations,
see H.-R. Schwyzer, “‘Bewusst’ und ‘Unbewusst’ bei Plotin,” in Entretiens, Vol. V, Les Sources de Plotin, (Geneva: Vandoeuvres, 1957), 363 ff;
also J.M. Rist, The Road to Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), ch. 4.
See Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, Kluwer), especially, Section I, §§8–16.
Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics, 154.
Cf. Eugen Fink, Natur, Freiheit, Welt, ed. Franz A. Schwarz (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1992), 115–127.
See Michel Henry, Essence of Manifestation, 287; 357 of the original French.
I appropriate this expression from my collaboration with Thomas Prüfer in a (1965) Master’s Dissertation at Catholic University of America on self-consciousness.
Cf. Roderick Chisholm for whom this immediate non-reflective awareness is the primary form of reference and “direct attribution” requiring an identity between knower and known. See his First Person (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 37.
See Henry, Essence of Manifestation, 288; 358 of original French.
This ground has been deftly covered by Manfred Frank’s distillation of recent analytic philosophy, especially in his Selbstbewusstsein und Selbsterkenntnis (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991).
There is a seeming unanimity on this matter in the writings of Sartre, Wittgenstein, Rilke, and others.
H.-N. Castafieda, “Philosophical Method and Direct Awareness of the Self,” Grazer philosophische Studien 7/9 (1979), 10.
H.-N. Castafieda, “Self-Consciousness, Demonstrative Reference, and the Self-Ascription View of Relieving,” Philosophical Perspectives 1, Metaphysics (1987), 426.
Clearly Castafieda equates unreflective consciousness with egoless consciousness in Sartre—and perhaps in his own thought. But that equation poses a problem because for Sartre even the egoless form of consciousness is a pre-reflective or non-reflective self-awareness. I return to this in the text below.
Castafieda, “Self-Consciousness, Demonstrative Reference, and Self-Ascription View of Believing” 427.
Chisholm, however, explicitly maintains that his view does not require thinking of self-consciousness as a kind of identifying relation; this is to confuse what he calls direct and indirect attribution. See his The First Person, 36.
Castafieda, “Self-Consciousness, Demonstrative Reference, and Self-Ascription View of Believing” 440–441.
Here is a text which affirms a kind of Externus attitude but which also affirms the immanently lived non-reflective self-awareness which is not an implication. “There is consciousness of self with the ’of underlined in the case where we have reflective knowledge of ourselves. If on the contrary, we consider that at the moment I do not know that I exist, that I am so absorbed that when someone brings me out of my reading I ask myself where I am, and if we may consider that perhaps my reading implies the consciousness of my reading, the consciousness of my reading is not able to be posited as the consciousness of the book before me. We will say that it is a matter of a non-conditional or non-thetic consciousness.... This non-thetic consciousness is attained without recourse to reasoning and implications...” J.-P. Sartre, “Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi”, Bulletin de la Societé francaise de philosophie, Vol. 42, Paris, 1948; reprinted in Selbstbewusstseintheorien von Fichte bis Sartre, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 381.
The point I am making here, i.e., that there is a distinction between the implicit non-reflexive consciousness and the immanent awareness of wakeful consciousness which is at the heart of all sensa and acts is made by Michel Henry against Heidegger’s reading of Descartes. Henry holds that for Heidegger’s Descartes, “the ego is presupposed in every representation, not a posteriori as the discovered ob-ject, but a priori as an intrinsic part of the field where all discovery is made, insofar as such a field is constructed precisely as thrown by ego, before it, in-front of it—because the retro-reference to the ego is identical to the structure and opening of that field.” But this view, “for which ipseity is tributary to and comprehensible through the structure of representation” is quite different from Descartes’ basic insight that the self-immanence of affective determination... constitutes the site of absolute certitude and truth, which, as self-certainty and self-referential, self-legitimizing truth, is precisely appearance’s first appearing to and in itself. “We can see that representation has nothing to do with phenomenality’s original upwelling, because sensation, pain, for example—is entirely what it is in the immanence of its affectivity without first being posed before itself, in-front of itself.” Michel Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 74 and 76.
See Ms. LI 21, 9a/l7.
See my “Phenomenological Time: Its Religious Significance” in Religion and Time, ed. A.N. Baslev and J.N. Mohanty (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 17–45.
Thomas Prufer, Recapitulations (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 53.
Prüfer, Recapitulations, 53. This is a very difficult matter and a patient study of Husserl, I believe, will bear out Prüfer’s interpretation. Yet in Cartesian Meditations, §18, he speaks of the all encompassing inner-time consciousness as the basic form of universal synthesis which makes possible all other syntheses of consciousness. But the issue, the phenomenology of phenomenology, is only hinted at here. What counts as a form or eidos of the primal streaming is what the phenomenological gaze constitutes as an identity with its own necessities (Prufer’s “primal occasionality”)—even though this gaze itself is being constituted by the primal presencing which is the primal occasion. This latter is not therefore a form or eidos but what constitutes it. That is the way I take the discussion in C II 1, 1 la ff. Here we see that the living present is originally conscious and we are able to unpack its marvellous structure. “Its basic essence is to constitute itself as the nunc stans of a unified streaming through an anonymous continuity of intentional modifications of a primal mode, which, in its regard (ihrerseits), is not fixed (starrseiende), but itself is streaming. In this streaming there is constituted a standing and abiding primal now as the fixed form for a content streaming through and as the primal source-point of all constituted modifications.” Husserl immediately goes on to speak of the Form of the primal-now as have a two-sided continuity of rigid forms, those of the just having been and those of what is not yet. But I take these forms to refer to Prufer’s primal occasionality, not the primal occasion, which Husserl here says “nicht starrseiende, sondern selbst strömende ist.”
See Prufer, Recapitulations, 52.
Michel Henry, Phénomenologie matérielle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, Épiméthée, 1990), 125 ff.
Prufer, Recapitulations, 53; cf. Henry, Phénomenologie matérielle, 105 ff.
See Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations, especially 166 and Thomas Prufer, Recapitulations, especially 76. Cf. my “Being and Mind” in The Truthful and the Good: Essays in Honor of Robert Sokolowski, ed. John L. Drummond and James G. Hart (Kluwer: Dordrecht, 1996).
I wish to thank Dan Zahavi for helping me to think these matters over. I also want to thank Rudolf Bernet, Director of the Husserl Archieves, for permission to quote from Husserl’s Nachlass. I also want to express my appreciation for J. Claude Evans’ provocative contribution to this discussion. It was he who first proposed that the field of consciousness is centered around “a fundamental absence.” See his “The Myth of Absolute Consciousness” in Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existentialism: Crises in Continental Thought, ed. Arleeen B. Dallery and Charles Scott (Albany: SUNY, 1990), 35 ff. Evans’ claim that “the myth” of absolute consciousness “turns one’s intentional experience of the world into one’s awareness of oneself as experiencing the world, rather than viewing one’s self-awareness as being marginal to one’s experience of the world” (40) suggests that transcendental phenomenology substitutes the transcendental attitude’s discoveries for the natural attitude’s inherent disposition. In this paper there is an attempt to show how through the transcendental attitude so-called absolute consciousness can be seen as the necessary condition for phenomenality. But this is not to state that one’s intentional experience of the world is turned into one’s awareness of oneself as experiencing the world. That is to miss the key issue of the nature of this kind of awareness and what the fuss about time-consciousness is about.
Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 151 and 163; French original 183, 198–199. When Henry more recently, in Phénoménologie matérielle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 12–59, discussed Husserl he faulted the analysis of inner time-consciousness with assigning phenomenality to what is constituted and claiming that what is constituting itself remains anonymous and without phenomenality. This means in part that the entire hyletic realm, the realm of affections and sensibility is sacrificed to the ecstatic-intentional constituting act as the source of disclosure—thereby missing the original sensibility which is prior to this realm of transcendence. For Henry Husserl offers a position which does not merely “establish itself through coming forth in the light of ecstatic phenomenality” but rather secures this coming forth by the primal presencing which itself does not show itself in this coming forth. But for Henry this anonymity and non-presentness of the primal presencing robs the primal sensibility of its genuine sensibility, i.e., its power to be consciousness’ self-manifestation. As I indicate in the text this is a genuine problem for Husserl.
Essence of Manifestation, 682; 858–859 of the French original.
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Hart, J.G. (1998). Intentionality, Phenomenality, and Light. In: Zahavi, D. (eds) Self-Awareness, Temporality, and Alterity. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 34. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9078-5_4
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