Abstract
In our times, the mind-body problem has assumed the form of trying to explain the qualitative aspect of experience. As David Chalmers expresses it, “It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises.” In fact, as John Locke long ago noted, there is “no conceivable connection” between them. We cannot conceive how from the structure and dynamics of a physical process the appearing of the world can arise. In my paper, I argue that this impasse points to the reform of metaphysics that Patočka’s asubjective phenomenology envisaged. According to Patočka, the appearing of the world is “something completely original.” It “cannot be converted into anything that appears in appearing.” Various things appear, but “appearing itself is not any of the things that appear.” If we accept this, then we cannot ontologize showing, i.e., explain it in terms of what shows itself. In particular, we cannot say that it is the result of the material elements and processes that make up a natural scientific account of perception. The unbridgeable gap between physical processes and experience points, in fact, to the originality of appearing or manifestation and, hence, to the study of it as envisaged in Patočka’s asubjective phenomenology.
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Notes
- 1.
David Chalmers, “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness,” in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 2, no. 3, 1995, p. 201.
- 2.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1995), p. 444.
- 3.
David Chalmers, op. cit., p. 208.
- 4.
Locke’s formulation is: “We are so far from knowing what figure, size, or motion of parts produce a yellow color, a sweet taste, or a sharp sound, that we can by no means conceive how any size, figure, or motion of any particles can possibly produce in us the idea of any color, taste, or sound whatsoever: there is no conceivable connection between the one and other” (John Locke, op. cit., p. 445). Leibniz makes the same point in his analogy of the mill. “Perceptions,” he writes, “... are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is to say, by figures and motions. Supposing that there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception, we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions until one was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on going into it he would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain perception” (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Monadology,” in Basic Writings, transl. G. Montgomery [La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1962], p. 254).
- 5.
David Chalmers, op. cit., p. 203.
- 6.
Donald Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991), p. 406. Part of the difficulty in reading Dennett’s Consciousness Explained is that while denying qualia, he often seems to imply them. Thus, on the one hand, he feels compelled to offer an explanation “why secondary qualities, for example, colors, turn out to be so ‘ineffable,’ so resistant to definition” (p. 382). The reason is that “[c]olors … are the product of biological evolution, which has a tolerance for sloppy boundaries” (p. 381, n. 2). On the other hand, the conclusion of this and other similar arguments is the dismissal of qualia as “mere complexes of mechanically accomplished dispositions to react” (p. 386).
- 7.
Frank Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” in Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 32, no. 127, April 1982, pp. 135, 134.
- 8.
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, transl. L. LaFleur (New York: Macmillan, 1990), p. 74.
- 9.
See note 4 above.
- 10.
George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, § 19 (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1982), p. 30.
- 11.
David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part I, sec. 7 (Minneola, New York: Dover Publications, 2003), p. 12.
- 12.
Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, ed. K. Schuhmann (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), Husserliana III, 1, p. 106.
- 13.
Ibid., p. 105. See also ibid., p. 120 and the comments of the “Nachwort” in Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Drittes Buch, ed. M. Biemel (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), Husserliana IV, p. 146. A later expression of the same position occurs in the assertion: “The absolute has its ground in itself; and, in its non-grounded being [grundlosen Sein], it has its absolute necessity as the single, ‘absolute substance’ [‘absolute Substanz’].... All essential necessities are moments of its fact [Factum], are modes of its functioning in relation to itself – its modes of understanding itself or being able to understand itself” (MS E III 9, Nov. 5, 1931, in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Dritter Teil: 1929–1935, ed. I. Kern [Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973], Husserliana XV, p. 386).
- 14.
George Berkeley, op. cit., Part I, sec. 3, p. 24.
- 15.
Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, transl. P. Lom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 142–143.
- 16.
Immanuel Kant, “Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” B531, in Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 23 vols. (Berlin: George Reiner, 1955), III, p. 345–346.
- 17.
For Kant this condition was the assumption that the appearing world was the world “in itself.” See ibid.
- 18.
Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, op. cit., p. 24.
- 19.
“Showing is not then, as it appears, a merely objective structure, because the objective, material structure is that which shows itself. Showing is also not mind and it is not structures of mind, because that is also just a thing, something that is and that eventually can also manifest itself.… showing itself is not any of the things that show themselves, be it a psychic or physical object … and yet it is the showing of these things” (ibid., p. 22).
- 20.
As Patočka writes: “the world of phenomena, the world of phenomenal lawfulness, is independent of the world of realities, of the world of actualities.… It is never possible to deduce appearing as such, as we have said, from any, either objective or psychical, structures. It cannot be done” (ibid., p. 31).
- 21.
The fallacy here is that of the petitio principii. In Patočka’s words: “Es ist ja von vornherein klar, daß die Gesetzmäßigkeit des Erscheinens in seinem Erscheinen keineswegs die des Erscheinenden in seinen Eigenstrukturen, besonders in seinen Kausalbeziehungen sein kann. Ich kann nicht auf das Erscheinende rekurrieren, um die Erscheinung in ihrem Erscheinen zu klären, denn das Verständnis des Erscheinens ist bei jeder These über das erscheinende Seiende schon vorausgesetzt” (“Der Subjektivismus der Husserlschen und die Möglichkeit einer ‘asubjektiven’ Phänomenologie” in Jan Patočka, Die Bewegung der menschlichen Existenz. Phänomenologische Schriften II, ed. K. Nellen, J. Němec, and I. Srubar [Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991], p. 278). All translations from the original German of this text are my own.
- 22.
See ibid., pp. 287–296.
- 23.
Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, op. cit., pp. 146–147.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 164. As Patočka elsewhere writes: “Vielleicht ist die Hauptquelle des Mißverständnisses des Erscheinungsproblems als solchen gerade dies, daß man Erscheinungsstruktur mit der Struktur eines Erscheinenden verwechselte oder vermengte. ‘Es gibt eine Erscheinungsstruktur’ bedeutet nicht ‘es gibt ein Seiendes, ein Dies-da, das man Erscheinung nennen kann.’ Erscheinen als solches ist kein Seiendes und es kann nicht wie auf Seiendes darauf hingewiesen werden. Weil er diese Unterscheidung (zwar irgendwie im Sinne hat, aber) nicht ausdrücklich vollzieht, sucht Husserl nach einem absolut gegebenen Seienden, statt nach der Gegebenheit des Seienden, meinetwegen einer absoluten, zu fahnden” (“Epoché und Reduktion in den ‘Fünf Vorlesungen,’ ” in Jan Patočka, Vom Erscheinen als solchem. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, ed. H. Blaschek-Hahn and K. Novotný [Freiburg and München: Alber, 2000], p. 119). All translations from the original German of this text are my own. The reference to an “absolut gegebenen Seienden” is to transcendental subjectivity in the immanent givenness of its experiences (Erlebnisse).
- 25.
Jan Patočka, “Epoché und Reduktion in…,” op. cit., p. 119.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967), p. 22.
- 28.
Jan Patočka, “Epoché und Reduktion in…,” op. cit., p. 123.
- 29.
Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, op. cit., pp. 142–143.
- 30.
Jan Patočka, “Epoché und Reduktion in…,” op. cit., p. 123: “Das Subjekt, dem das All sich zeigt, ist leer, während das erfüllte Subjekt weder Vorzug noch Vorrang vor anderen Weltrealitäten aufweist…”
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 126.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 132.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 125, n. 174.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 125. Phenomenology’s task, Patočka writes, is to investigate this determining lawfulness: “die Phänomenologie untersucht schauend die Grundstrukturen, aufgrund deren überhaupt Welt erscheinen kann und aufgrund deren etwas wie natürliche, d.h. nicht schauende, sondern hypothetisch erwägende, formal-leere und erst Voraussicht aufgrund der Erfahrung verbürgende Erkenntnis möglich ist. Das von der Phänomenologie Geleistete wäre zugleich eine neue Wissenschaft vom anschauungszugänglichen Apriori, ein Beitrag zur Metaphysik als Wissenschaft vom Aufbau der Weltstrukturen und eine Grundlage für die objektiven Wissenschaften” (p. 126).
- 36.
The incompatibility is not just between causal and noncausal (or formal) lawfulness, but also, more basically, between appearing as such, with its lawfulness, and all causal processes. There are forms of formal lawfulness – such as those of Dedikind’s number theory – that have no connection to appearing as such.
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Mensch, J. (2011). Patočka and Artificial Intelligence. In: Abrams, E., Chvatík, I. (eds) Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 61. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9124-6_9
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