Sensations and Phenomenology HARMON M. CHAPMAN Indiana University Press ° Bloomington and London Sensations and Phenomenology All rights reserved Copyright © 1966 by Indiana University Press Library of Congress catalog card number: 66-22443 Manufactured in the United States of America CONTENTS Foreword I. Two Fundamental Assumptions II. Scientific Humanism: Kepler and Galileo 1. Scientific Humanism 2. Kepler 3. Galileo III. Descartes’s Direct Argument for Sensations IV. The Indirect Arguments for Sensations = . Berkeley . Descartes WNN . External Experience as Operation and Idea A. Internal Experience R NHK. Possible and Contingent Existence . Experience and Existence S . Summary V. Production or Constitution &. Sensation and Perception . Perception and Imagination NA. Transformation and Projection W . Synthesis of Object and Field NBN. Synthesis and Time . The Primordial Time-Synthesis A . Two Kinds of Time-Synthesis O. Constitution: Kant . Constitution: Husserl vi CONTENTS VI. Intentionality and the Intentional Relation 99 1. A Common-Sense View 99 2. Husserl’s View 108 VII. Is the World Internal to Consciousness? 115 l. The General Argument 115 2. The Special Arguments 117 a. The Argument from Thesis 118 b. The Argument from Givenness 131 c. Hyletic Data 148 VIII. Conclusion: The Purge 154 Index 161 FOREWORD The central theme of the following essay is that there are no such things as “sensations” or “impressions” in the traditional sense of modern epistemology. The assumption that there are such I call the “theory of sensation.” Since the proof of non- existence is notoriously difficult, I offer instead an expose partly historical, partly analytical. I attempt to show how the theory originated with Descartes, how at its inception it acquired two accessory theories, how in league with these it issued in an ex- citing new problem of knowledge and existence, how for this problem and its solutions the sensation theory prescribed the terms and conditions thus fixing the framework and ground rules for all who would philosophize in the “modern” vein, and how finally it persisted as a speculative tradition upwards of three centuries to the Transcendental Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. The essay culminates in an examination of Husserl’s Phenom- enology with its doctrine of transcendental constitution. In examining this doctrine I focus chiefly on its main support, the famous “reduction” or epoché, the suspending of existence. This suspension turns out to be a withholding of a mere “sense” of existing, which consciousness confers on objects of sense insofar as they are made (“constituted”) of impressions. That the direct objects of sense are but complexes of impressions is of course a characteristic tenet of the sensation theory. The upshot is that vi Vill FOREWORD this theory, silently and uncritically presupposed, underlies the whole of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, rendering it to this extent unphenomenological, as it also rendered uncritical the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. My mode of analysis is not that of current linguistic analysis. This latter has a devastating antiseptic power which might well have served my purpose. But it is quite foreign to the tradition I am examining, and I would prefer to criticize this tradition from within rather than from without. Hence I have chosen a mode of analysis more akin to its own native habits of thought. If I claim a right, even a responsibility, to proceed in this old-fashioned way, it is because I was reared in this tradition and am reluctant to turn upon it weapons of alien origin. In adopting this procedure I am quite prepared to be found on occasion to ride roughshod over niceties and nuances of meaning which my friends in linguistic analysis will find objec- tionable. A further excuse is my synoptic aim, which has impelled me to draw boldly with a few broad strokes rather than minutely with a profusion of fine lines. This boldness has brought brevity, but it has also exposed me to the danger of being “positive” —it was The New Yorker, I think, which once defined “being posi- tive” as “being wrong at the top of one’s voice.” If I have been thus “positive,” perhaps others more knowl- edgeable than I will be moved to rise in defense of the doctrines I here assail. I think first of all of Dorion Cairns, to whom I owe so much of what I know of Phenomenology, and of others like Quentin Lauer and Maurice Natanson. They, if anybody, could resolve the difficulties I encounter and thus render Phenomenol- ogy and American philosophy in general, not to mention myself, a notable service. If there is anything original in this essay I am not aware of it. Novelty is not my concern. My concern is rather with the tradition of which I am a child even while trying also to be its critic. I am FOREWORD 1X so steeped in this tradition that my thoughts seem to be its thoughts; each seems to echo a voice that has already spoken. My sense of obligation, accordingly, is so vast as to defy enu- meration. Only in a few instances can I acknowledge specific indebted- ness. | have already mentioned Dorion Cairns. I must also men- tion two friends and colleagues, Raziel Abelson and Chauncey Downes, who read the manuscript and offered valuable sugges- tions. There are also Winifred and Leonard Carpenter, without whose gracious generosity this book would not have come to pass. There is yet another whose aid and encouragement were indis- pensable. How, in the midst of her many wifely and motherly duties, she managed to find the time to read and query, and re- read and encourage, all with limitless patience, I shall never know. To these last three, especially to the memory of the first, I dedicate this volume, mindful that it is but the token of a grati- tude that defies expression. Now in medias res! University College New York University