The Philosophy of Perception: Phenomenology and Image Theory 9781780937595, 9781472546036, 9781780937519

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The Philosophy of Perception ‘Already in its original German version, Lambert Wiesing’s The Philosophy of Perception has had an unusually deep and specific impact on contemporary philosophical discussions, both on the “analytic” and “continental” sides of the epistemological divide. In a present both desirous of a return to cognitive realism and with an awareness of its impossibility, this is the resonance of a book that, on the one side, posits “perception” as a reality, and, on the other, patiently unravels the challenging of this “reality” for the human mind.’ Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Guérard Professor in Literature, Stanford University, USA ‘Wiesing not only provides an original and illuminating treatment of the core issues in the philosophy of perception, he radically recasts the terms of the debate and extends the field of enquiry, including a thought-provoking discussion of the transformation brought about by the perception of images. It is a major achievement that this important book has now made been made available to English-speaking readers.’ Jason Gaiger, University of Oxford, UK ‘Writing with wonderful clarity, Wiesing illuminates and re-orientates our understanding of perception, self and world. He also repositions the role of image-perception, and our understanding of what constitutes an image, in this context. Highly recommended.’ Kathleen Lennon, Professor of Philosophy, University of Hull, UK ‘This radical rethinking of the philosophy of perception fascinates by casting old issues in a new light and giving prominence to topics – such as the perception of images – that orthodox thinking is condemned to treat as marginal. The book is bold, original, full of challenging ideas and makes a powerful case for changing our approach to this central philosophical problem.’ Robert Hopkins, Professor of Philosophy, New York University USA ‘Wiesing presents an uncompromising critique of established theories of perception and takes huge strides in a new direction. The book contains invigorating argument and surprising developments on every page. It should be essential reading for anyone working in the philosophy of images.’ Dawn Wilson, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Hull, UK

Also available from Bloomsbury Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy, Owen Hulatt Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Martin Heidegger (translated by Scott Campbell) Phenomenologies of Art and Vision, Paul Crowther Phenomenology: An Introduction, Michael Lewis and Tanja Staehler The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic, Monique Roelofs The Phenomenology of Modern Art, Paul Crowther

The Philosophy of Perception Phenomenology and Image Theory Lambert Wiesing Translated by Nancy Ann Roth

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2016 Originally published in German as Das Mich der Wahrnehmung. Eine Autopsie. Lambert Wiesing © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2009. All rights reserved by and controlled by Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. English language translation © Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7809-3759-5 PB: 978-1-4742-7532-3 ePDF: 978-1-7809-3751-9 ePub: 978-1-7809-3708-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [Mich der Wahrnehmung. English] The philosophy of perception : phenomenology and image theory / Lambert Wiesing ; translated by Nancy Ann Roth. pages cm ISBN 978-1-78093-759-5 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-78093-708-3 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-78093-751-9 (epdf) 1. Perception (Philosophy) 2. Phenomenology. I. Title. B828.45.W5213 2014 121’.34–dc23 2014009530 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents Foreword 1 Philosophical Myths and Models Dissatisfaction at the highest level 1 – The accusation of ‘myth’ in philosophy 4 – Model-making philosophy, a contradictio in adjecto 7 – The myth of the given 16 – From the myth of the given to the myth of the mediate 21 – Interpretationism and the philosophy of perception 23 – Transcendental interpretationism 27 – The link between the myth of the given and the myth of the mediate: Representationism 34 – The paradigm of access 37

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2 Phenomenology: Philosophy without a Model Phenomenal certainty 43 – From Cartesian Cartesianism to phenomenological Cartesianism 45 – Intentionality: The fundamentum inconcussum relationalis 50 – To the things themselves and back to language 57 – Phenomenological protrepsis 60 – Eidetic variation 64

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3 The Me of Perception From conditions of possibility to consequences of reality 69 – From the primacy of the perceiver to the primacy of perception 72 – From the I to the Me of perception 75 – The imposition of continuing presence 78 – Describing the imposition of presence: The content of perception 81 – The quality of perception and the moment of apperception 83 – Being certain that something is the case: Knowledge and certainty 86 – The impossible epoché 90 – From impression to expression to taking part 95 – Transcendental aesthetics and the assumption of forms of intuition 102 – The embodiment of the perceiver: A consequence of perception 105

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– The continuity of the perceived 111 – The perceived and the cause of perception 116 – The imposition of a presence in public 120 – The identity of me 124 4 The Pause in Participation Pause versus interruption 131 – The three paradigms of the theory of image perception 133 – The unique object of image perception 134 – The unique origin of image perception 137 – The unique consequences of image perception 140 – Forced into spectatorship 145 – Optical de-individualization of the Me 147 – Deciding to take part 150

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Foreword The thoughts in this book bear the marks of a fundamentally sceptical persuasion. In fact it may be that only those who can share this persuasion will consider the topic meaningful: the existence of perception cannot be explained. I actually doubt that it would be possible to explain, by way of a theory, why there is perception rather than no perception. It was in any case a sceptical attitude that led me to wonder whether perception could not be described in a way completely different from the traditional one. For perception is usually understood as the product of the one who perceives. For more than 200 years, theories of perception have worked with the concept of an active subject. One can say that until now, all our perceptions were assumed to be dependent on the subjective capacities of the perceiver. It is nearly a matter of consensus that the relationship between perceptions and the one who perceives them is one of unambiguous dependency and consistency: a subject’s perceptions arise from that subject’s previous engagements and achievements. Whether the concern is with philosophical, psychological or neurophysiologic theory, the thinking almost always rests on the following understanding: perception is the end product of the subject of perception’s effort at construction or interpretation. As long as the idea of perception is conditioned by such an understanding of internal dependence, a theory of perception will evidently need to research the subjective conditions of perception so as to explain how perception came to be. And to one who harbours doubts that it is possible to explain how perception came to be, that is exactly the problem. This is what happened to me: my engagement with the history of the philosophy of perception led, on the one hand, to a loss of interest in further explanatory models using construction or interpretation, and, on the other hand, to the idea of describing the relationship between perceiver and perception with the dependency reversed. At one point I became sure that, as long as one takes perception to be dependent on the perceiver, the explanation of perception will not improve. I then

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wondered whether it wouldn’t be better to leave perception alone, and let the perceiver be dependent on it. At least the idea seemed worth pursuing: the philosophy of perception might be better served by assuming a perceiver to be dependent on his perceptions. And so this book is not about the ‘I’ that brings perception into being. It is rather concerned with the perception that brings me about; that is to say, that lets me be in the world in the first place. The question is not what hold I have on perception, but what hold perception has on me. Personal expectations are bound up with the reality of one’s own perceptions: because my perceptions exist, I must exist, as the one who must be there as the subject of these perceptions in a real world, as the one who, because his perceptions exist, must be there along with the others in the world – which does not exclude the possibility of there being exceptions to or relief from the obligation. In fact when one stops worrying about perception’s conditions of possibility and attends instead to the consequences of its being real, the perception of images emerges as particularly noteworthy. For the perception of images is exceptional: it actually transforms perception-dependent beingin-the-world into the curious state of suspended participation. Only in images can something be seen without perception itself demanding that one be personally involved in the seen event. I am aware that this shift in thinking casts doubt not only on the validity of a certain theory of perception, but also on the sense of an approach to perception found in many theories – but it was not done in the interests of doubt. I believe that the change in perspective suggested here has an epistemic advantage that might not be crucial for a practical model of perception, but that is necessary for any philosophy of perception: by starting from the reality of perception, it becomes possible to make claims that can be verified through the certainty of one’s own experience: anyone who perceives, knows what it’s like to be a perceiver. A phenomenology that dares to reject models of any sort in the interests of a secure knowledge depends on this unique, doubt-proof knowledge one has of one’s own situation. A sceptical posture toward the currents that dominate the philosophy of perception today does not close the discussion. On the contrary, phenomenology opens a way to resolve reasonable doubt about the truth of the explanations: not through a better model, not through a

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better theory, not through a better explanation, but simply by limiting the field of contention to statements whose status as certainties of principle can be demonstrated on the basis of one’s own experience. This book finally concerns the possibilities and limitations of a philosophy without a model, one that takes autopsy as the principle of both its method and argument: doing one’s own looking in order to see oneself.

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Dissatisfaction at the highest level At the present time, philosophy is in a state that is difficult to understand, that is, distinctly odd; one could speak of dissatisfaction at the highest qualitative level. Conditions for philosophical research have never been remotely as good as they are today, and it would be a grave injustice not to humbly acknowledge this. As in every other science, specialized knowledge has expanded enormously and with increasing speed. When could it ever have been possible to familiarize oneself with a philosophical problem so quickly and comprehensively as it is today? Recent philosophical literature is overwhelmingly more accurate and diverse than that of any other human epoch or culture. Part of the reason for this is very simple and quantitative, and nothing to be proud of: there have never been so many people in a position to be concerned with philosophical problems. Whatever philosophical question one may choose to consider, more relevant contributions to its solution are under discussion now than ever before, and hardly a single contribution that is relevant in any way will be overlooked or ignored. It is no longer rare for an interpreter to fulfil the hermeneutic desire to understand an author better than the author understood himself. It almost seems normal for appropriate research into the thought of classical philosophers to provide more systematic knowledge of their positions than they themselves could have had during their lifetimes. In short, the history and problems of philosophy have never been illuminated so well as they are today – and yet this brings no real joy, to say nothing of euphoria. Who would want to actually claim, on the basis of this diagnosis, that the quality of philosophy has never been so high? It is a paradox that would be unthinkable in any other discipline. For,

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in every other discipline, qualitative progress consists solely in making better discoveries about a specific object of research. How could it be otherwise? Only in philosophy is this kind of progress not accepted as success, and for good reason: philosophical reflections are directed towards the whole; there is no empirical object of philosophical research for which the research is better simply because more is known about it. The unique character of philosophy as a scientific discipline and the special task with which it is charged can be described with an image: a philosopher’s work is to report on a situation. In fact philosophical writing usually does take up concrete themes, but the questions are never completely resolved by the argument. Work on a special question in philosophy aims at something beyond that question: it is concerned with a kind of anthropological condition report. It tries to answer the question: what is the situation in which a human being finds himself simply as a result of the unequivocal, given condition of being human? What is it to be human? An engagement with this general concern is implicit in the various philosophical disciplines and many specialized problems. Whether one is concerned with perception theory, ethics or aesthetics, if the concern has a philosophical intention (and it does not have to!), then it is also about human beings, and that means, about the question: what can a human being know, given that he is constrained to the condition of being human? What should a human being do, inasmuch as he is saddled with the fate of being human? Given the inescapable condition of always being human, what can a human being hope for? At present this interpretation of philosophical sub-disciplines as feeder routes into anthropology is firmly associated with Kant. At least he explicitly considered classical problems in philosophy to be ultimately subsumable under the crucial question: What is a human being? If it is fair to demand of philosophy that its work not be concerned exclusively with concrete problems, but that this work should be conducted in such a way as to also draw a picture of the human condition, of human beings’ presence in the world, then we encounter a difficulty in evaluating philosophical reflections. It is characteristic of site plans and situation reports that their quality is in no way enhanced by more precise detail; this is clear from area maps and city plans. Obviously there can be no authoritative depiction of any kind of situation without detail and precision; still, it is often



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the case that a rough map on a small scale is more effective in providing an overview of complex material than an extremely detailed map at a large scale. Something of this kind may be what is meant by the folk saying about not being able to see the forest for the trees. At least this expression applies to more than a few contemporary philosophical reflections which, despite their fascinating intricacies and subtle precision, can seem questionable overall, at least if we accept philosophy’s obligation always to reflect the human condition. With this in mind, it becomes at least understandable that one might speak of discontent at the highest level of contemporary philosophy. In the history of philosophy, the human condition has rarely been depicted with so few alternatives as it has been in the last decade. In professional philosophy, apart from some fine points of academic argumentation and no doubt some exceptions and outsiders, the human condition is evaluated with startling unanimity and, exactly because of this quasi-universal consensus, is actually not seriously researched any more: whether hermeneutic or analytic, de-constructivist, pragmatist, Kantian, Hegelian or Nietzschian, all are united: nothing touches human beings without mediation; for humans, being-in-theworld is a mediated being-in-the-world. A human being lives in a state of detachment that does not allow anything to be immediately present, whether through perception or action, thinking or imagination. A human being is not part of a world, but rather possesses points of access to it. Expressed implicitly as well as explicitly, this view characterizes the human situation as having no immediate present at all, although human beings themselves experience this present as unmediated. The experience is considered sheer illusion. The means through which the world and human beings bring a world and human beings into existence operate anonymously in the background; the means themselves are hidden, and so are working quietly and silently. Whenever someone believes something is something – if, for example, he gets the idea that there is a table over there, that a slap in the face was justified or that a given image is a work of art – he believes it because interpretations and representations have made it appear in this way. Whenever anyone believes anything, these processes are at work, inevitably and without exception. No matter what a person may think he knows, it is all known only through the medium specific to it. There is no other way. For even his own intentions and thoughts about his own situation are accessible to him only through mediation. Only because

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of media does anything happen, can anything exist at all. For only media offer the opportunity for something to exist. That is to say: a human being finds himself inextricably caught in the position of not being able to locate himself without mediation; he lives in a mediated world in which nothing is immediately present, an inescapable prison of media. For the boundaries of his media are the boundaries of his world, if not to say more pointedly that the world as it is medially transmitted and interpreted represents his actual and only world, for it constitutes the unreliable universe of the human. This is the myth of the mediate.

The accusation of ‘myth’ in philosophy A detached look at the most prominent philosophical positions today actually reinforces the view that these positions are, in their most basic perspectives, pervasively determined by a belief in myths. This may seem like a harsh accusation at first glance, but it should be noted: as radical as this accusation is, the concept of myth has led to the formulation of a very particular kind of criticism that keeps its distance from anything so crude as it is all false and untenable. The concept of myth supports a form of criticism that simultaneously contains an appreciation. At least this is the reason the concept of myth has exerted a very particular appeal in philosophy. Not least among the pioneering uses of myth as a philosophical category would be Gilbert Ryle’s well-known account of Descartes’ theory of consciousness in The Concept of Mind of 1949. According to Ryle, Descartes, in relating his philosophy of consciousness, is narrating nothing other than a myth about a ghost in a machine. Ryle’s unique way of using the concept of myth has become a model for the analytic philosophy of language, much as Edmund Husserl’s talk about Kant’s merely ‘mythical constructions’ from §30 of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy of 1936 became famous within the phenomenological movement. How seriously and deliberately Husserl used the concept of myth as a critical category may be judged by the way he refined it, speaking of ‘still half-mythical concepts’ in the lecture on Erste Philosophie [First Philosophy] from 1923/4, for example (Husserliana, Vol. VII, p. 235). Even looking further afield, it is still easy to see that this way of using the



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concept of myth in the history of philosophy was and is taken up with enthusiasm. In recent decades the accusations of myth have been mounting up; there is one example after another: Wilfrid Sellars interpreted empiricism as the ‘myth of the given’ in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind of 1956; in an essay of 1988 with the programmatic title ‘The Myth of the Subjective’, Donald Davidson claimed that such a myth is represented by traditional philosophy of consciousness; and in 1990, Daniel C. Dennett saw a ‘myth of original intentionality’ emerging among the critics of artificial intelligence, again in an essay bearing the same name. Jean-François Lyotard’s account of the ‘grand récits’, the grand narratives of modernity in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge of 1979, too, may be included in this line of thinking. As early as 1969, in an interview published as the foreword to the German edition of Das Imaginäre [The Imaginary], Jean-Paul Sartre characterized Freud’s psychoanalysis as an integrated ‘mythology of the unconscious’ (p. 15) There is no doubt: the list of examples could be, and surely will be, extended. The only question is: why is it always a myth? What special sort of scepticism finds expression in the accusation of myth? More specifically, what do these accusations propose beyond merely indicating that the positions are false? There is no doubt that the accusation of myth contains an accusation of falsehood. To describe a philosophy as a myth is also to say that this philosophy is flatly and finally logically untenable, that it is in error – but not only that: in the accusation of myth, the error, in its error, actually gets credit as an explanatory narrative. What is being criticized is in fact wrong, but is nevertheless a story. This is the way the accusation of myth stands within a contemporary understanding of myth: a philosophy that is accused of being a myth is not thought to be nothing, but rather a special story. For it is by no means the case that any epistemologically untenable explanation is a noteworthy literary narrative such as we find in myth. The diagnosis of myth is therefore as much a kind of recognition as it is an accusation. Not everything that is irrational and illogical, speculative and unscientific is, per se, on those grounds, mythical. In addition to the simple negative and necessary indication that the explanation is epistemologically unsound, there must also be positive and sufficient indications that this epistemologically unsound explanation should be designated a myth. These sufficient indicators lie in the specific way a myth simplifies and lends meaning to a complex situation:

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myths always start out as allegorical stories of origins and backgrounds. In ancient classical myth, an incomprehensible phenomenon – the example of natural forces comes to mind – is referred back, by way of literary comparisons, to powers that are hidden, yet effective behind the scenes. So the puzzling thing is as it is because of the hidden circumstances described in the myth. The classical myths of antiquity are remarkable in having given effects and explanations a tangible and representable form, in having thought them through theologically and anthropomorphically: Vulcan’s fire and eruptions may be understood by assuming that a man, this mythical Vulcan, is smelting his iron in the underworld – which however does not mean that every myth must personify hypostasized forces. If we were to unequivocally demand an allegorical personification from every myth, it would become very difficult to accuse a philosophical position of being a myth. In any case Ryle would not accuse Descartes, nor would Husserl accuse Kant, of having brought allegorical personifications into their philosophies. The understanding of myth that informs the accusation of myth in philosophy sees personification of explanatory underpinnings, crucial for the origin of myth in antiquity, as a contingent feature of mythical thinking. For it is entirely possible to narrate and argue on the basis of analogies and causes without necessarily having to lend these causes a human form. When philosophers refer to other philosophies as myths, it is because the philosophies purported to be mythical argue in a way that is comparable in form, not in content, to explanations that rely on allegorical personification. That is, philosophical argumentation does not become a myth because of its subject matter or its specific thesis, but because of the way its thinking is structured. What Ryle held against Descartes and Husserl against Kant is that instead of describing the realities and phenomena they took into consideration, they thought about how these might have come to be – and this is exactly the explanatory strategy that is in fact to be found in every myth. What is specific to myth, then, is not personification as such, but a form of thinking that may be conveyed through personification: the things we don’t understand become understandable if we assume that they came about as a result of one condition or another that we cannot experience. In short: a philosophy accused of being a myth is accused of constructing tales of genesis just by building on assumptions. For myth wants to reveal the true, hidden background of the incomprehensible, possibly absurd things that are in the



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foreground; this is the reason myths tell stories about the means through which phenomena came to be as they are; myths have ulterior motives. For the means are not themselves events or phenomena that can be experienced; they are rather constructions and underpinnings that serve to explain observable phenomena. In philosophers’ accusations of myth, the concept of ‘myth’ refers to a form of explanation employed even in scientific models.

Model-making philosophy, a contradictio in adjecto In fact a myth’s way of explaining something can be formally compared to, even identified with, the way a scientific model explains it. This assertion may be astonishing at first glance, for models rightfully enjoy great prestige in scientific work, which is exactly not the case for myths. The reputations of models and myths respectively within empirical science could not be more different. But that should not deter us from recognizing a nearly fundamental relationship between the two. Myths function formally like scientific models and, vice versa, scientific models like myths. For both models and myths are thinkable ways of explaining puzzling empirical facts. As unlike as they may seem on the basis of their very different contents, myths and models are aids to explanation that refer back to perceptible, usually pictorially representable origins. The grounds for the explanation are actually not perceived in either case, but can still be thought reasonable with respect to the reasons and origins of the problem and the established facts about the problem. Models and myths make no sense apart from the one they produce in reference to a hidden agenda. Both make equally simplified constructions available that facilitate an ordering of the facts in question. Both start from the premise that a phenomenon is understood when its origin is explained in terms of a known narrative. In both cases – as Martin Heidegger would have written – something that exists is defined as existing by referring to something else in its genesis; in both cases – as Charles Sanders Peirce would have written – one searches by abduction for underpinnings that offer an explanation and that make sense. Whether we explain the properties of physical materials by referring to an atomic model or a mythology of origin, the problematic part will be interpreted as the result of concealed forces and mechanisms, and the interpreter

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will believe he knows how these hypostatized forces behave. The behaviour of concealed atomic particles, whose existence has been experienced by no one, follows gravitational laws, and the behaviour of the concealed Creator of the World follows patterns known from the religious heritage. Just as we know from Homer that Hermes is a deceptive and unreliable companion, we know through gravitational laws how electrons behave. Myths and models have an exceptionally successful heuristic effect exactly because they refer what we do not know back to things we do know. This is not to deny that what we know from a model and from a myth come from very different sources, whether these be religious belief, tradition or the idealistically inflected interpretation of scientific experiments. Yet leaving aside these differences in the way the known thing comes to be known, what is under consideration always behaves in a known way, as much for a myth as for a model. From a formal standpoint, then, there is no difference between a mythical history and a scientific model with respect to their cryptic explanatory strategies. That does not mean that there is therefore no difference between myth and model. The difference just does not lie in the manner of argument; rather it first arises as a different use of a comparable argument: myths arise in philosophy through a specific way of using models. Neither a myth nor a model is in any way troubling or even objectionable independently of its use, its an sich, so to speak. If a myth or a model can be critically illuminated, it will always and exclusively be with respect to how well it handles the concrete situation. And what objection could there be to people trying to understand their world and their existence with the help of myths? What is there to criticize about scientists of the most widely diverse disciplines making models of their respective objects of research that function and fascinate in equal measure? Any model that does something well is a good model for exactly that reason. As long as the model is used only for those purposes to which it is suited, say, to calculate and predict certain events, the model is and remains a means of explanation to which there is no alternative in modern science. The model subordinates active reality with the justification that an apparent reality, which looks completely different from that of the model, can be understood, explained, predicted. Models are methods of explaining and, as long as we are interested in working models, there is no reason at all why several models should not be engaged simultaneously,



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even if their contentions contradict one another. In fact we can only decide whether an explanatory assumption should be understood as a model on the basis of its usefulness as a method. A deliberate assumption is to be understood as a model at exactly the moment of rejecting any temptation to take the assumption as an answer to an ontological question: what is it that can be grasped with the model? Models are neither true nor false; they are only more or less effective. This can also be turned around: as soon as a model-making theory is faced with questions in which truth is at issue, every model must fail. Now this is not at all an objection to a model, for an ontologically oriented model is, finally, a model alien to any purpose. It is presented as the resolution to a question that, as a model, it cannot and should not answer, for to do so casts doubt on its status as a model. These basic considerations of the purely pragmatic epistemological status and the limits of models are well known and uncontroversial, and it is further established a priori that no satisfactory answers to such basic questions can be reached by means of a model. It is remarkable, then, that these are the typical questions that one expects to be discussed in philosophy. Philosophy, because of the way it understands itself as a discipline, must raise the sort of question that brackets out the model, thereby ensuring that it remains a method – which is exactly how there comes to be a peculiar relationship between philosophy, on the one hand, and the use of models on the other. Any attempt, however promising, to use a model to answer questions that lie beyond the model’s capacities, necessarily turns the model into a philosophical myth, for no other reason than that is has been exceeded. Myths arise in philosophy when models become detached from their purposes – or to put it another way: when truth is confused with method. Just as it is impossible to recognize an object as a gift just by the object’s appearance, and just as it is impossible to recognize an object as an artwork by observing its appearance, it is impossible to recognize a myth or model by observing the content of that myth or model. Any model, subjected to an externally generated demand for truth, can be turned into a myth. To claim that reality as understood in terms of a model is the same as reality independent of the model is to turn that model into a myth. But let’s be clear: it would be postmodern scepticism in a negative sense to claim that scientific models per se are myths – that is not the case. Yet every scientific model does have the potential to be a myth. For

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what a model claims becomes myth at exactly the moment it is saddled with the additional requirement to be philosophically relevant – and far from being rare or exceptional, this transfiguration of the commonplace, this apotheosis of a model into a literary myth occurs whenever scientific models are taken to be philosophical truth. To say it differently: philosophy is the curious attempt to think reality without a model for once; philosophy begins with an epoché of assumptions based on models. In 1875, the now-forgotten Viennese lecturer Vincenz Knauer wrote an essay entitled ‘Zum Atome-Mythus’ [‘On the Myth of Atoms’] in Volume XI of the Philosophische Monatshefte. There, he showed precisely why atoms are, from a philosophical standpoint, mythical. In the next volume of the same journal Undersecretary Ludwig Weis, hardly better known than Knauer, answered, in an article with the telling title ‘Die Atome kein Mythus!’ [Atoms are no myth!]. Obscure as these writings now are, they exhibit the pattern of many futile exchanges in twentieth-century philosophy. The discussion between Knauer and Weis is typical and boring to the same degree, because it differentiates myth from model in terms of content but not in terms of function. Neither philosopher doubts that the question about whether a theory is mythical or logical will be determined by its contents. They argue, for example, about whether the claim that atoms exist is made mythical on the grounds of atoms’ invisibility. But the mere fact of arguing about such matters of content shows that both sides are persuaded that one will have to observe closely what is being said about an atom in order to know whether the theory of atoms is a myth or a scientific model. Exactly on the basis of this assumption, Knauer and Weis talk past one another. In their respective views, both are right and wrong to the same extent: functioning as an ontological concept of substance, atoms are a myth; in the practice of physics, they constitute a successful model. The example of the discussion about the atomic model may be generalized: when an entity or a function that cannot be experienced is made subordinate to phenomena that can be experienced, we are dealing with a model that will turn mythical the moment it stops being understood as a method and begins to be understood as truth. Many kinds of models are available today that offer fascinating and persuasive answers to such questions as: What is knowledge? What is truth? What is perception? What is reality? But philosophy, regrettably, cannot accept these



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models, because in philosophy, and perhaps only in philosophy, the difference between the image and what it depicts, between the model and the thing it models, between method and truth may not be passed over in the interests of practicality or plausibility. Because philosophy cannot do this as a matter of principle, its relationship to myths and models is different from that of any other science. This relationship is in fact so specific as to qualify admirably as a way of defining the philosophical project: philosophy is an attempt to work scientifically, yet without the use of models. We should acknowledge that this attempt may be doomed to failure. Still, it does not mean that philosophy, in rejecting models, is a discipline that has freely restricted itself; that would be sheer nonsense. A scientist should make use of anything that is helpful – since scientists are human beings – within moral boundaries. Nor does philosophy positively decide to reject models. Rather this is the logical consequence of the way philosophy frames its question; that unique interest demands the epoché. Every scientist uses models, and it follows that every philosopher would like to do the same – if he only could. But, unfortunately, if he examines the situation honestly, he must acknowledge that any model gets him into trouble, because it doesn’t offer sufficient working methods, and he himself must ask what the model is modelling. This inevitable opposition between philosophy and model-based thought stems from the difference between truth and method: in philosophy, these cannot be made identical just because it is practical and plausible to do so. When the claim is made – in a sort of self-application of pragmatism to the truth claims of one’s own philosophical thinking – that it might still be possible to unite truth and method in philosophy, then we must be aware that the claim itself, apart from whether it is persuasive or not, is no longer just a practical or plausible method, but constitutes a philosophical meta-reflection on the relationship between truth and practice, and that it is – as meta-reflection – anything but pragmatic. Even a pragmatist demands of his own philosophical theory something other than he would from a separate discipline. At least William James, in The Principles of Psychology of 1890, did not, for example, defend the existence of ideas in consciousness, a spatial model with a long tradition, on the grounds of superior practicality, but quite the opposite, stigmatized them as philosophical myth – perhaps the first to do so – on the grounds of such models’ doubtful ontological status – as philosophical myth: ‘No doubt it is often convenient to formulate the mental facts

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in an atomistic sort of way, and to treat the higher states of consciousness as if they were all built out of unchanging simple ideas. It is convenient often to treat curves as if they were composed of small straight lines, and electricity and nerve-forces as if they were fluids. But in the one case, as in the other, we must never forget that we are talking symbolically, and that there is nothing in nature to answer to our words. A permanently existing ‘idea’ or ‘Vorstellung’ which makes its appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals, is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades’ (James [1890], p. 236). In a more general context, this kind of argumentation means that, among the disciplines, philosophy is always accorded a unique position. For in order to be a distinct discipline, it cannot do the very thing that renders the other disciplines successful, which is to reject such meta-reflections. A model that may be thoroughly persuasive in other disciplines must be judged to be myth in philosophy. One and the same theory can be a model or a myth, depending on whether it is understood as a contribution to an independent science or to philosophy, just as a soup tin may be a work of art in a museum or a functional object in a supermarket. That may also explain why philosophy often appears irrational and irrelevant to those outside it. Philosophy is the discipline that can and must be expected to raise questions that in turn exclude models in order to work. A philosophical discussion of a model that did not raise the question of the truth of the ontological meaning of that model would not merit the name ‘philosophical’. Seen in this way, philosophy seems like a collection point where questions are discussed that other disciplines exclude as threats to their success as disciplines. What other discipline would consider itself obliged to engage with questions that perception-theoretical reflections within model-based disciplines have ruled out, and rightly ruled out, as unrecognizable and no longer relevant? What are the characteristics of the object the model is modelling? What are the other things the model might explain? As long as we take this kind of questioning to be something philosophical research cannot do without, or more, take just this sort of penetrating Socratic drilling-down to be the very stuff of philosophy, such an understanding means a priori that philosophy cannot be conducted through the construction of models. These conditions may be stated more pointedly: a model-making philosophy is a contradictio in adjecto. The way models and myths are related lends the philosophical project



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a negative imperative, namely to pursue philosophy without constructing models. Hardly anyone is obliged to raise philosophy’s impractical questions or engage in the less than lucrative work of answering them. But having no interest in the transcendence of a model does not turn the model into a philosophy. In philosophy, a model is a ground for discussion, but never the satisfying result of a philosophical reflection. A discussion may begin with models, but it may not end there. This is not to say that there will be a modelfree solution every time. We must even consider the possibility that human beings do not have the capacity to describe their situation without using models. Philosophy, rather, appears as an on-going struggle to dispel the bewitchment of understanding through models. There is no doubt that it is a radical obligation, yet one with a long tradition bound up with, among others, the meditations of René Descartes. One may well claim that anyone concerned, in principle, with philosophy’s relationship to models as a problem is engaging in a kind of renewed Cartesian reflection. The accusation that a given philosophy is a myth is grounded in a desire to recover a stronger, selfdoubting understanding of philosophy, something that is in many cases missing from contemporary philosophy. I refer to those cases in which philosophers are satisfied with themselves when their opinions and theses are plausible. A different fundamental position can be seen with exceptional clarity in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations of 1953: it concerns remark 109, quoted enthusiastically and often in contemporary philosophy, but rarely followed: ‘There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.’ In saying this, Wittgenstein was not suggesting that explanations can be easily replaced, or that there would eventually be a philosophy without models. Still, to founder on a phenomenological description is not the same as never having made the attempt at all. The situation in contemporary philosophy does not seem to be determined by widespread attempts to stop explaining though models, followed by an admission that in the end it was impossible to reach the goal of a philosophy without hypotheses and explanations. Philosophy now seems rather disinclined to understand the use of models as any loss of self-discipline. This is confirmed by a review of which concepts and assumptions in contemporary philosophical publications are no

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longer thought to need further explanation. These are self-evident ideas for whose validity no justification is considered necessary. The remarkable thing is not, then, that publications with titles such as Modelling the Mind, Mental Model, or Self-Model are easily found, but that, in them, there is no sense of needing to justify the use of a model. Indeed the model is simply not seen as a problem, and it is exactly these opinions that are not perceived to be any sort of problem at a particular moment that have a significant effect on the contemporary situation. It is at present considered obvious that modelling is a way of philosophizing, even though philosophy has the task of problematizing the obvious. It remains to be seen whether good grounds will be found for permitting the use of models in philosophy or, as is usually the case in contemporary philosophy, philosophical discussion will continue to take models to be perfectly obvious, without challenging or problematizing them at all. So the effort to represent the combination of concepts philosophical model as an oxymoron here serves the additional purpose of representing a kind of zeitgeist of contemporary philosophy. The attempt to do philosophy without a hypothesis in itself departs from the current fashion. This brings us to the remarkable condition of philosophy at present, and specifically to the idea that the demand for a philosophy without models could be considered excessive: more than 100 years ago, Husserl asked, in his Cartesian Meditations, ‘…must not the demand for a philosophy aiming at the ultimate conceivable freedom from prejudice, shaping itself with actual autonomy according to ultimate evidences it has itself produced, and therefore absolutely self-responsible, must not this demand, instead of being excessive, be part of the fundamental sense of genuine philosophy?’ ([1950], §2). And yet that such an idea appears in this way says something not only about the idea, but also about those to whom it presents itself as excessive. For this demand is exactly the opposite of excessive. It is rather a demand for modesty: the demand is, finally, for philosophy to please stop making assertions as if there were no doubt about them, and to stop explaining what cannot be explained in any case. The epoché of models from thinking is a modesty that should not be practised by those intent on successful action, but only by those in search of certainty about being-in-the-world, which is not to say that such certainty will be found. A thoroughly dialectical situation prevails in philosophy: numerous attempts to bring philosophy closer to a modern model-making science, so as



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to achieve comparable success and give philosophers a comparable relevance, flip over into the exact opposite: they undermine what is unique in philosophy. Edmund Husserl may have seen it more clearly than anyone else: ‘Cannot the disconsolateness of our philosophical position be traced back ultimately to the fact that the driving forces emanating from the Meditations of Descartes have lost their original vitality, lost it because the spirit that characterizes radicalness of philosophical self-responsibility has been lost?’ ([1950], §2). There is no question: this serious understanding of philosophy, which asserts the independence of philosophy as a discipline with respect to all other disciplines, carries with it the problem that the fantastic success of all other disciplines may be attributed to their doing the very thing philosophy, understood in this way, must not do. It is the splendid successes of model-making disciplines that constantly reinforce the desire to adopt model-making in philosophy as well. In this respect the situation in contemporary philosophy is of a kind that has many precedents in the history of philosophy. This refers to attempts to turn philosophy into an exact science by making philosophical argumentation correspond to that of a science with established successes. Or one thinks of the attempts to find answers to philosophical problems within the context of a non-philosophical discipline with a defined research area. It always ends with the declaration that some other discipline has taken over the actual work of philosophy and so become the real philosophy, because that discipline is in the best position to resolve philosophical problems. Psychologism, in the work of Theodor Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt, among others, is exemplary of the substitution tradition in philosophy as it appears in the nineteenth century. Although they do so in different ways, both are equally sure that experimental psychology should be regarded as the discipline to actually answer philosophical questions. From a contemporary standpoint, the psychologism of the nineteenth century is what interpretationism and representationism are in the twentieth: the discussion of the universal mediatedness of the world. They are examples of the dissolution of philosophy into mythology, and this is what will happen as long as philosophy’s strength is insufficiently recognized as something different from the strengths of other, model-making disciplines. Interpretationism and representationism are expressions of a faulty disciplinary self-awareness with respect to the great progressive empirical sciences. It would be difficult to make a

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serious claim that the dominant tendency in philosophy’s recent past and present has been a drive to transform it into one or another science. There are isolated attempts among philosophizing neurophysiologists to do away with philosophy. But that is not to say that the successes of the sciences as a whole have resolved the problematical function of their ideals. It is not so much any one discipline as the ideal of thinking in models, the kind of thinking that accounts for the success of most disciplines, that seems to have become the obvious way to reach the precision that philosophy has sought for so long. In short, the accusation of myth is an accusation of a misuse of models. It accuses an argument of using a model, which means that the accusation is meaningful only with respect to arguments in which the use of models is questionable in principle, which in turn is the case only in philosophy. An argument that seeks to explain something within a given discipline might welcome the same model that qualifies as a myth in philosophy. The accusation of myth attempts two things, then: on the one hand it tries to expose the presence of an immanent model; on the other, it carefully justifies this model on the basis of its plausibility, explanatory force, accessibility or practicality outside philosophy. There can hardly be a better example of this distinctive ambivalence between distanced criticism and sympathetic justification than what may be the best-known accusation of myth in the twentieth century: Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the myth of the given.

The myth of the given The myth of the given is a philosophical model, specifically a model ordinarily found in empiristic perception theories. This model is based on the assumption of a theoretical entity unique in being given to consciousness directly, without mediation. With this entity we are not concerned with material objects as we know them in everyday life. John Locke’s ideas, David Hume’s impressions or Bertrand Russell’s sense data are given without mediation. That this entity exists is an assumption: one assumes that when one is, say, standing under a tree, it is only the sense data of the tree that one is in fact seeing. Not material things, but ideas are the actual object of perception. Sense data or sensations are directly accessible, so there can be no mistake about their qualities.



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A sensory impression of red cannot really be blue; the recognition of sensory impressions is not subject to any perspective or interpretation. They are just given directly and without mediation as they really are. Here, as with any model, it is appropriate to ask which phenomenon the model is good at explaining. What becomes understandable when sense data are introduced? The answer to this question is unambiguous, and is very clearly presented by the American John McDowell in Mind and World of 1994; even as it criticizes this myth, this study of the myth of the given goes on acknowledging an elementary truth in it. The myth of the given is a model that describes experience and tries to explain that the world is not freely available to a human being. This lack of freedom becomes apparent particularly in perception: ‘But one’s control over what happens in experience has limits: one can decide where to place oneself, at what pitch to tune one’s attention, and so forth, but it is not up to one what, having done all that, one will experience. This minimal point is what I am insisting on’ (p. 10, note 8). And we should insist on this minimal point as well, for it is nothing other than the basic phenomenon of human being-in-the-world that an empirical theory tries to describe and to explain by means of an image or an analogy. For what is true of every model is also true of the model of the given: a model that can do something well is a good model for exactly that reason. The model of the given depicts a human being’s anthropological situation in such a way that he appears to be thrown into a given, which is to say also a pre-existing world, which he did not make and which is not at all the way he would like it to be. The theoretical construction of something directly given is a pictorial transformation of something inaccessible into the human life world. When we open our eyes, we have no choice about what we see: when we decide to see, we must see what is given. That is to say: with the myth of the given we have not only the elaboration of a philosophical detail, namely the justification of empirical knowledge, but also a sketch of humanity concerned to show that human beings cannot see, feel and sense what they please, but only those things that are given. McDowell pointed this out with great clarity. ‘But the Myth of the Given has a deeper motivation, in the thought that if spontaneity is not subject to rational constraint from outside […] then we cannot make it intelligible to ourselves how exercises of spontaneity can represent the world at all. […] The Myth of the Given expresses a craving for rational constraint from

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outside the realm of thought and judgement’ (pp. 17–18). ‘It is “the craving for a limit to freedom” that underlies the Myth of the Given’ (p. 10). That is to say: a human being is given a reality that is not the result of his interpretation, but that is present to him without interpretation. A human being must accept what is given, for it happens to him. In empiricism, this elementary experience is explained through the assumption of direct and unavoidably accessible sense data, these being the only and actual objects of perception. In short: as a model, the assumption that there is something directly given is not wrong and can make sense and be useful in many contexts. No psychologist or physiologist would be taken to task for speaking of ‘direct sensations’ or ‘immediate impressions’. And yet his theory would not be taken to be a philosophy of the unmediated either. And this is exactly where Wilfrid Sellars begins his critique of the myth of the given, which he develops further into Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind of 1956. Sellars does not leave any doubt that other disciplines differ from philosophy ‘in their effort to break out of a discourse in favour of an arché beyond discourse’ (sec. 63). In fact: discourse cannot be overcome with models – and if they are used nevertheless, models become myths. ‘Unfortunately,’ Sellars writes of a philosopher who assumed the unmediated given, ‘he mislocates the truth of these conceptions, and, with a modesty forgivable in any but a philosopher, confuses his own creative enrichment of the framework of empirical knowledge with an analysis of knowledge as it was’ (sec. 62). Here, the crucial point in Sellars is named with all the clarity one could wish: modest models are acceptable for ‘any but a philosopher’; a model is no suitable perspective for someone concerned with an ‘analysis of knowledge as it was’, someone concerned, that is, with ‘break[ing] out of a discourse in favour of an arché beyond discourse’. If you take Sellars seriously, that is, if you forgive anyone except a philosopher for making models, the main argument in many of the numerous commentaries on Sellars begins to seem like an incomplete syllogism, that is, like an enthymeme. Nearly every commentary on Sellars’ argumentation points out that his ‘opponent [is] the classical empiristic model’, that Sellars ‘considers it an error to view things as given and so as empirical data, things that on closer inspection possess the status of theoretical constructions’, as Thomas Blume wrote in his introduction to the German edition of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (pp. xxxii, xxii). In the reception of Sellars, it is



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further understood to be perfectly obvious – as if it were the same thing – that an accusation of myth need only show which model is being criticized and that the model has weaknesses. And yet that is exactly the problem: what’s missing is a clear naming of the reason a model should be rejected, and a theoretical construction is an error. One asks oneself why a model with weaknesses is labelled a myth without further ado – it is not the same thing and it is by no means obvious, although it is treated that way. The following argument of Richard Rorty’s appears to be representative. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature of 1979, Rorty defends the view ‘that this myth is the notion that such epistemic relations as “direct knowledge” or “incorrigible knowledge” or “certain knowledge” are to be understood on a causal, para-mechanical model, as a special relation between certain objects and the human mind which enables knowledge to take place more easily or naturally or quickly’ (pp. 95–6). Rorty’s description is exceptionally apt. Who would not agree that the myth of the given formulates an idea that can be understood as a causal model? Still, the sentence clearly also builds on the assumption that this model is obviously a myth because it is a bad model. But bad models are not myths. One should rather say: the way in which a bad model is currently identified as a philosophical myth, lightly and as though it were obvious, bears witness to a particular Geist in contemporary philosophy. In any case, the limited explanatory breadth of a model cannot in itself be a reason for turning the bad, causal model of empiristic philosophy into a myth. For every model is limited. The critical element – required for any accusation of myth – has still not been made explicit, although it quietly persists in every accusation of myth: according to its own principles, philosophy cannot permit any model. Other researchers may well be pleased to have a working model for the problematic object of their work; and if, in being accepted, the model gains the status of a theoretical construction, they would have no objection. But this depends on a researcher not coincidentally being a philosopher as well, on a scientist who does not ask and does not need to ask what reality the model represents. The critique of the myth of the given may be reconstructed as a syllogism and formulated as follows: empiricism works with a model of something given directly, and also accepts that models in philosophy are, a priori, untenable myths. The resulting conclusion: therefore empiricism is working with an untenable myth, namely with the myth of the given.

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Here we have a masterly example of an enthymeme, for the second premise remains unnamed, and is assumed without mention. The transformation into the mythical occurred first and only when the classical empiricists – Locke, Hume, Russell – sought to develop not only a practical psychological model, but also a theoretical philosophy that exceeded the boundaries and possibilities of human knowledge. The principle of argumentation goes: myths are not bad, falsified or impractical models, but all models become myths without exception if they must answer a philosophical inquiry concerning whether something really is so, and this is the case whether the model is, in other disciplines, good or bad, fascinating or boring, causal or para-mechanical. One may well wonder why the syllogism implied in the reception of Sellars tends so strongly toward enthymeme, for in this short-cut a particular attitude is revealed. There is a particular ambiguity here that affects the character of contemporary philosophy more broadly: is a philosophy vulnerable to criticism because it uses a bad model, or because it uses any model at all? The answer to this question determines whether the perspective in one’s own philosophical practice is being used as a means of improving the model or of getting rid of it. Opinions will differ on this question. For, as banal as the question may appear to be, the answer to it exposes one’s understanding of philosophy. It shows either that one expects philosophy to construct plausible answers, or that he remains, Cartesian-style, sceptical towards any model. Rather than an insignificant step, then, the shortening of the syllogism to an enthymeme can be interpreted as an expression of a position characteristic of contemporary philosophy. Those who feel justified in calling a philosophical theory a myth on the grounds that it constructs a poor model will themselves be able to imagine a better philosophy in the form of a better model. These people believe that philosophy, too, can proceed by building models. It is worth noting here that there are those with a particular interest in the syllogism against the myth of the given because the second premise – unspoken but nevertheless assumed – could correspond to their own alternative views, because the defeat of the myth of the given is itself a model, that is, also a myth. Or to put it another way: as long as philosophy proceeds by replacing models with better models, it makes sense to present the syllogism with which Sellars criticized the myth of the given in the incomplete form of a enthymeme.



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From the myth of the given to the myth of the mediate The myth of the given is not usually criticized because it is a model, but rather because it should provide a distinctly better model. This recalls the model of the mediate, which, in its numerous applications, exerts a significant force in contemporary philosophy: whenever something is given to us as knowledge or opinion, as presumably or actually real, as wish or intention, it is mediated. Everything that is given is given only through the use of media, and so everything real is necessarily real within the boundaries of the possibilities of these media. The interpretation of the model of the given as a myth is the result of the success of the opposing model, leading to the conclusion that there most certainly are givens, and just not unmediated ones: everything we can say, perceive and know about the world is said, perceived and known with the help of media. Philosophy rightly invokes a linguistic or medial turn, emphasizing the irreducibility of mediation. It is then no longer even conceivable for something to be given directly, since to be given there must be a possible existence in the form of a medium, usually understood to be language. To put it another way: cognitive systems possess only mediate access to their reality, even if the systems themselves have no awareness of this irreducible mediation. This last may be the crucial point about the model of the mediate: the model assumes anonymous, unconscious means. The assumption is supported in a way that is typical for models: it is acceptable to relegate the existence of means to the background because, by assuming it, it becomes possible to explain how human beings gain access to the world. In the model of the mediate, the end justifies the means in the truest sense of the word. But the question is ‘which means’? Which means give a human being access to his world? Although many philosophical positions concern themselves with the means of gaining access to the world, it appears from the answers to the question that philosophies involving medial thinking may be formally divided into two basic types. These two varieties of the model of the mediate emerge from the two phenomena suitable for consideration as possible candidates for mediating the world: functions, for one, and entities, for the other. Mediation between mind and world may be modelled procedurally or ontologically. That is to say: the subject’s access to his world may be constructed on the one hand as an unconscious process, and on the other by accepting a metaphysical entity

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as a bridge between the subject and his world. In the first case the subject does something in order to create a way through to the world, and in the second case the subject is in fact given ‘something’ directly and without mediation, only what is given is not the world itself, but a symbolic representation of the world. The formal division of possible means of accessing the world into two types corresponds to the two current concepts ‘interpretationism’ and ‘representationism’. At least these concepts appear to define the two main varieties of the myth of the mediate. These concepts have the virtue of letting us see that the model of the mediate has no definite position within contemporary philosophy, but is rather a paradigmatic basic attitude that can be recognized in many positions otherwise sharply critical of one another. This is especially clear with interpretationism: the search for a proponent of interpretationism might as well end with a Kantian as a Nietzschian, a language analyst as a hermeneutic interpreter, a deconstructionist as a structuralist. It must be said: apart from phenomenology, there is hardly a dominant position in contemporary philosophy that could not be considered interpretationist, as long as the concept of ‘interpretationism’ is linked to the view that human beings have no reality apart from the results of their interpretation. Interpretationism contends that without interpretative processes, no thinking, recognition, action, perception, judgement or evaluation is possible. One quickly suspects that so many philosophers accede to such a contention because the exact meaning of the concept of interpretation remains open. And in fact it is just this closer specification that has attracted more than a little attention in contemporary philosophy, if it could not even further be said that a key feature of contemporary philosophy consists exactly in the tendency for discussions to revolve around internal differences. At least Jacques Derrida, in his memoir of Hans-Georg Gadamer in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for 23 March 2002, called attention to exactly this idea: looking back, he observed that his philosophical discussion with Gadamer, which sometimes appeared to be contentious from the outside, only ever consisted of an ‘interpretation of interpretation’ (p. 41). This characterization can readily be extended into a report on the situation in contemporary philosophy: one interprets practices of interpretation. There could hardly be a broader consensus that in constituting the world and meaning, human beings are interpreting. What is in dispute is how this activity of interpreting should be interpreted. The majority of debates,



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quite fierce at present, proceed from a common ground, even though, in the interests of cultivating individual profiles, this commonality tends to be kept in the background, as can be seen in examples from the philosophy of perception.

Interpretationism and the philosophy of perception The philosophy of perception gives a good impression of what it means for philosophy to concern itself primarily with the interpretation of interpretations that have been reached unconsciously. Leaving aside for a moment the critique of interpretationism developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception, it appears that philosophers, psychologists and neurophysiologists agree to an extent worth noting: perception is a process of interpretation; we get to the point of perceiving something as a result of the work of interpreting. The perceived object is therefore an interpretative construct, that is, a construction made by the subject through the act of interpretation. The act of interpreting definitely does not mean a perceiver describing his perception in the sentence ‘I see a tree’. That perceptual judgements rely on interpretation may not be the key feature of the numerous interpretationist philosophies of perception. These philosophies draw their strengths from the decidedly more radical view that perceptual consciousness itself, apart from any explicit articulation of it in language, comes about through an act of interpretation. The first interpretation of perception is not in linguistic description. It can be shown that in developing a sensual awareness of the present, a subject has already made many unconscious interpretations, although views diverge when it comes to the all-important details about what sort of interpretative achievements these may be. Markedly different conceptions are at issue, as is confirmed by a brief glance at the history of the philosophy of perception. The patriarch in the long chain of interpretationist philosophers of perception is the Scot Thomas Reid. In An Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense of 1764 he distinguishes between perception and sensation and in this way formulates, very early and with great clarity, the principal argumentative strategy for this position, which is of considerable interest to contemporary philosophers of perception: perceptual

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consciousness arises from the interpretation of sensations. If a person has a perceptual awareness of the present it is, for Reid, the result of an unconscious interpretation of sensations given directly, and in fact of an unconscious reading of natural signs. The present of something exists because a subject has interpreted his immediate sensations as natural signs for something present. Someone who sees a tree interprets his sensations by unconsciously reading them as signs for the presence of a tree. Because it specifies so exactly what interpretation does with sensations, Reid’s theory can be treated as a prototype of all theories of perception that involve unconscious activity. One of the foremost representatives of this tradition is Hermann von Helmholtz. In ‘Über das Sehen des Menschen’ [On Human Vision] of 1855 and ‘Die Tatsachen in der Wahrnehmung’ [The Facts in Perception] of 1878, he interpreted immanent interpreting not as an unconscious reading but as an unconscious conclusion. A person who sees a tree unconsciously concludes, from his sensations, that a tree is present. The interpretation of interpretation as reading is replaced by the interpretation of interpretation as an unconscious conclusion in this case, and it is exactly this inference Charles Sanders Peirce describes even more exactly in his ‘Lectures on Pragmatism’ of 1903. As one might expect from the logician, he does this by formally defining the special character of the unconscious inference. According to Peirce, with unconscious inferences we are dealing with unconscious abductions that allow sensations to become a perception. The seeing of a tree unconsciously assumes the presence of a tree as a meaningful explanation for having those sensations one has when one is looking at a tree. Despite differences in details, Reid, von Helmholtz and Peirce all liken interpreting to rational, logical activity. Another, more aesthetically oriented tendency in the interpretation of interpretation was initiated primarily through Konrad Fiedler’s text, Über den Ursprung der künstlerischen Tätigkeit [On the Origin of Artistic Activity] of 1887. For Fiedler likens interpretation, essential to a perceiver’s sense of something being present, to an artistic process of giving shape or form. In seeing a tree, a person unconsciously shapes the visible phenomenon as an artist might, to conform to some, and it must be said to his reality. Not only Heinrich Wölfflin but also Nelson Goodman continued in the direction Fiedler’s work had taken in the tradition of perception through unconscious activity. Wölfflin and Goodman, in Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History of 1915



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and in Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking of 1978 respectively, rely on the concept of style to the same extent to interpret unconscious interpretation: a person who sees a tree unconsciously styles it to have a particular appearance. This interpretation of interpretation has the advantage of making sense of there being a history of perception, of perception depending to a great extent on culture and circumstances. Arnold Gehlen takes up just this point in Man: His Nature and Place in the World of 1940, presenting the interpretation of interpretation as an individual’s effort to relieve tension. The world presents a person who is open to it with a flood of sensations, and special unconscious processes are required to keep from being overwhelmed. Someone who sees a tree sees it because he is unconsciously overlooking a great deal of what he could see. Only by overlooking countless possible perceptions can there be a liberating overview. James J. Gibson, in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception of 1979, interpreted this pragmatic interpretation of interpretation as unconscious extraction, as relief. Someone who sees a tree unconsciously extracts a fixed form from a flow of available optical arrangements. These examples give an impression of how many attempts have been made to use comparisons to give the unconscious interpretation activity of perception a concrete form. The puzzle of how perception comes about is solved by way of a prehistory of unconscious activity that produces the perception. The activities in the background are primarily activities that are in the foreground of everyday life: reading, inferring, abducing, shaping … There are also interpretations of interpretation that are not about bringing activities from the life world into the process of perception, but rather about formally describing the unconscious act of interpretation. For example Hans Lenk, in Interpretationskonstrukte: Zur Kritik der interpretatorischen Vernunft [Interpretational Constructs: A Critique of Interpretational Reason] of 1993, interprets the act of interpretation in the process of perception as the application of schemata. Someone who sees a tree sees it only because of an unconscious structure of schematization. Many possible variations have been suggested for this comparatively formal way of interpreting interpretations as well: interpretation is accomplished through differentiation, filtering, selection, calculation, ordering, reworking, identification, structuring, abstraction, optimization, forming and formatting. The basic assumption remains the same: in the process of perceiving, stimuli are being processed in some way that is surely

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very complicated, yet specific. This is to say that the perception of something is the result of a series of steps in the processing of stimuli. In grasping interpretational thinking so broadly, and in further reflecting on how many positions rest on this dualistic model of input and processing, one might well come to the same conclusion Hans Lenk does, that ‘there is simply no longer any meaningful way to challenge interpretation as a point of departure for the process of perception’ (1993, p. 131) (tr.). This thesis can be embraced without reservation, provided interpretationism is understood exclusively as a model with a methodological purpose. When we are concerned with the view that it is reasonable to treat the most diverse processes as interpretation, we may speak precisely of a methodological interpretationism. In this sense it is practical and plausible that perception psychologists, for example, should proceed, with complete confidence, to take the process of human perception to be an act of interpretation. Methodological interpretationism offers a universal method of explanation. For it is more than a model for a particular phenomenon such as perception; on the contrary: one could almost speak of interpretationism as an unspecific model, since interpretationism does not establish firmly which processes can be interpreted as interpretation. Interpretationism is related to a specific model as a computer is related to a specific machine; one is dealing with a kind of universal model for the formation of models. Yet independently of the great openness of this meta-model, it can be firmly established: because methodological interpretationism understands the act of interpretation in the classical sense as the assumed assumption of a model, it is philosophically as unproblematical as it is meaningless. The problems of a method are never resolved through philosophical doubt, but only through the success of a method. No successful model would let itself be unsettled by any kind of principle, philosophical consideration or pyrrhonian scepticism; the reverse is also the case, that a philosophical argument would not let itself be affected by a model. In this respect interpretationism is scientifically very successful. It rightly enjoys very widespread acceptance, and has brought a meaningful enrichment of practical vocabulary. It is an entirely different matter, however, when interpretationism makes a claim to being transcendental, transfiguring the model of the mediate into a myth of the mediate.



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Transcendental interpretationism For transcendental interpretationism, interpretations are the conditions of possibility for there to be anything that is taken to be real. This thesis is that what is given, in whatever form, logically requires an interpretation. So a human being can do what he likes, his universe is interpretation. In his study Nietzsche: Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr [Nietzsche: The Dynamic of the Will to Power and the Eternal Return] of 1984, Günter Abel leaves no doubt about the universality of interpretationism’s claim, for there he presents, with support from Wittgenstein, the main thesis of transcendental interpretationism: ‘The boundaries of interpretation are the boundaries of the world’ (1984, p. 169). Understood in this way, interpretationism is in fact no method, but a sort of expansion of the linguistic turn, for he does not go on to confirm that linguistic interpretation alone determines the world’s limits; he is also open to interpretations other than linguistic ones as a way to open up the world. But the inevitability of interpretation corresponds to the inevitability of language in the linguistic turn. At least the main proponents of interpretationism do not shrink from making ontological statements of the ‘everything is …’ sort in the manner of the pre-Socratics: ‘Everything that is, is interpretation, and interpretation is everything that is.’ This is the way Günter Abel put it in his essay ‘Interpretations-Welten’ [Worlds of Interpretation] of 1989 (p.11). This statement refers to both relata in the relationship of a human being to the world. In this model it is equally impossible for there to be an esse without an interpretari, as it is for there to be a cogitare that is not also an interpretare. In this myth, it is just as unthinkable for a subject to stop interpreting as it is for there to be an actual or presumable situation that was not constituted through interpretation. There is never a moment when I am not interpreting, for then I would not be. Clearly the critical point about transcendental interpretationism is that its reasons for treating a problematical phenomenon as if it depended on a hidden act of interpretation are not methodological. The critical point is that it ascribes a transcending and transcendental truth to this model of hidden interpretation. It is exactly this step that requires justification, however. As banal as the question may sound, it is nevertheless important with respect to any claim that ‘everything-is-assertion’: how do we really know that the only basis for

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human beings’ being-in-the-world is interpretation? For there is probably general agreement that this knowledge is not based on empirical observation or experience. In any case these interpretations would not let themselves be seen or in any way perceived, for they are unspoken, unconscious interpretations. Although quite a few philosophers currently find it plausible, practically obvious, that human beings make the world through silent interpretation, it may still be within the sense of this interpretation to point out that there is no immediate evidence at all to justify the main premise. It is actually necessary to ask what support there is for the truth claim of a statement such as ‘Everything that is, is interpretation, and interpretation is everything that is.’ The proof must be of a transcendental kind: it must be demonstrated that interpretation is logically necessary for any form of ‘there is something’. There would be grounds for thinking that suppressed acts of interpretation are the actual conditions of possibility for reality, rather than a suppressed assumption of models, if it can just be demonstrated that being-in-the-world without interpretation is unthinkable. This may be the critical point: in interpretationism, interpretation precedes any opening to the world in a logical rather than a temporal sense; precedence is not sought empirically and measured, but rather logically deduced. For this concerns the claim that the comprehensibility of the world and objects is unthinkable without assuming an interpretation. This is the reason Hans Lenk’s thesis goes: ‘Without a logically preliminary interpretation, we cannot think, perceive, act, evaluate, judge, etc.’ (1989, p. 23) (tr.). It is clear that in this sentence – and with it in the main thesis of interpretationism – the concept ‘interpretation’ is no longer being used with the meaning it once had, at least at the beginning, and that it still usually has, namely a conscious examination and explanation. Rather, interpretation is being used to refer to intellectual reflex actions aimed at understanding, explaining, finding meaning. This is the way, for example, through conscious interpretation, that legal texts are examined, people’s behaviour explained, or the contents of artworks made comprehensible. The beginning and end of an act of interpretation is then always a problem of understanding that is resolved by being explicitly thought through. Someone who is in a state of interpreting is thinking about how something can be made meaningful, comprehensible, conclusive; thinking about it supposedly either creates or discovers the meaning. Opinions diverge on this point, but it is



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certain that, in original and everyday speech, interpretation is a conscious explication with the goal of reaching understanding; it occurs intentionally and is directed towards meaning. This common meaning of ‘interpretation’ is hardly ever what is meant now, with such a claim as ‘Without a logically preliminary interpretation, we cannot think, perceive, act, evaluate, judge, etc.’ The logically preliminary interpretation occurs and runs its course without intention or conscious thought. So the question arises: why should one be prepared to assume the possibility of an unconscious interpretation? In ‘Beneath Interpretation’ of 1990, in any case, Richard Shusterman proposes ‘that although every understanding is selective, not every selective understanding is interpretive. If the understanding’s selection is neither conscious nor considered, but rather pre-reflexive and immediated, we have no reason to regard that selection or the resulting understanding as interpretation; since interpretation, unlike understanding, standardly implies some deliberate or at least conscious thinking, while understanding does not. We can understand something without thinking about it at all; but to interpret something we need to think about it’ (p. 190). From this standpoint, the formulation ‘unconscious interpretation’ would be nothing other than a contradictio in adjecto. Yet even if one is prepared to consider interpretations achieved unconsciously to be thinkable, we still have what is in fact the key question: why is it logically necessary to accept them? Why must there have been an unconscious interpretation in order for someone to see a tree or want ice cream or go downstairs? The assumption makes sense only if we accept a second alteration in the concept of interpretation; not only must we be prepared to consider unconscious interpretations thinkable, but beyond this to reduce the act of interpretation to an act that is common to all different interpretations. What occurs that is the same in diverse cases, e.g. when a legal text is explained, behaviour understood or content made comprehensible? Or to ask in a different way: what formal intellectual achievement is the basis for the many, heterogeneous acts of interpretation? What is it that does not cast doubt on an interpretation of interpretation on the grounds of its being part of an interpretation? The answer seems to be clear: as varied as the themes or processes of interpretation may be, any interpretation will finally produce distinctions, selections, structures; decisions will be reached and comparisons made. Friedrich Nietzsche made the point in his famous formulation of ‘making

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equivalent that which is non-equivalent’ in the essay ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’ of 1873. In any memorable interpretation, there will be subtle distinctions or clever analogies. That is to say: in interpreting, we finally do exactly that which we can also observe in situations where we cannot observe a preliminary conscious act of interpretation. When someone goes downstairs, he is not likely to consciously interpret each individual stair, and yet he does distinguish among the stairs. When someone says ‘that is a dog’, he is unlikely to want to claim that in making this statement he provided a conscious interpretation of this form of life, although in both cases there has certainly been an awareness of differences and identities. The thinking of human beings is exactly like their actions and perception, full of differentiations and schematizations, of acts of synthesis and selection. One might even say that it is just this that constitutes the world for human beings: when a person takes something to be something, that person is conscious of differences and identities. If I am asked what it’s like to be a human being, I would say that I experience myself as part of a world that is differentiated within itself and so has particular qualities. Things that appear to human beings to be something are differentiated. Otherwise they would not be what they are. Something can only be given if it is, first, differentiated from something else, and, second, manifests exactly the differences it must have in order to be what it is. There is no given that can be thought without essential differentiation. At this point a transcendental argument may be introduced: the givenness of the given is only possible through differentiation: differentiation comes about through interpretation, therefore wherever something is differentiated, there has necessarily been an interpretation, even if this interpretation was achieved without the consciousness of the interpreter. Someone who claims to see a tree is having a perception involving an unconscious interpretation. For he cannot actually see a tree – so the argument goes – but rather interprets something as a tree in his perception, whatever this something – this interpretandum that is being interpreted – may be, exactly. One could say, for example: actually he is just seeing forms and colours, and he interprets this as the perception of a tree. This interpretation occurs unconsciously, for the perceiver does not believe he has interpreted; he rather believes he has perceived a tree. The



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argument of interpretationism, then, goes: it is logically necessary to accept an unconscious act of interpretation because without it, that which is phenomenally beyond doubt, namely the givenness of one or another differentiated given, could not be. If we take ourselves to be part of a differentiated reality, we must also say that the possibility of such an understanding of reality must be given – and this possibility provides for interpretations; they are the only means of recognizing differences. In short, interpretations make differentiation possible, and therefore comprise one of the conditions of possibility that something differentiated can be given. Yet this very idea is a logical fallacy, a petition principia. The idea that acts of interpretation are the conditions of possibility for all givens is an error, because it presumes that which it sets out to demonstrate to be true, namely that a differentiated world can be perceived and so mediated through interpretation alone. There will be little doubt that interpretation differentiates and identifies, but this does not mean that every differentiated thing has to be a product of an act of interpretation. That would be like claiming that because driving a car is a movement forwards, wherever a movement forwards can be demonstrated, we must logically assume some obscure car journey. Logical necessity is given only if, in addition to the first premise, driving a car is a forwards movement, the second premise, driving a car is the only way to move forwards, has been demonstrated. Yet driving a car is as far from having a monopoly on forward motion as interpretation is from having a monopoly on differentiation. Interpretationism leads consciousness from a structured reality back to an act of interpretation, because human beings’ reality happens to be in itself consciously structured, and this characteristic is thought to be the result of an interpretation. But the question is whether the story of consciousness of being in a structured world came about must necessarily be thought in this way. We are concerned here, that is, not with the empirical question of how consciousness came about, but exclusively with the philosophical question of how to make the origin of consciousness of a structured world thinkable. Then it becomes clear: there is no logical requirement whatsoever for everything that can be consciously differentiated to have arisen by way of an interpretation, even accepting that interpretations do differentiate and structure. For it is entirely thinkable that differences are not the product of interpretations, even if every interpretation does in fact selectively differentiate.

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So we are facing the following situation. The uncontested phenomenon that human being-in-the-world is a being-in-a-world-that-is-structured-insuch-and-such-a-way is, for interpretationism, necessarily the product of an interpreted act of interpretation. This would be persuasive if the truth of the constituent premises – of the medium – had been established, that an act of interpretation is the only thinkable way a consciousness of structures and differences could be created. But this monopoly cannot be assumed, because it has yet to be demonstrated. If the premises were established, that if no car is available there is no means of moving forwards, then, from empirical evidence that someone had moved forwards, we would have to deduce that a car had been driven, even if there had been no perception of it. The parallel can even be pushed a bit further: if we really accept as a true premise the absurd view that we can move only by car, we wonder how it is possible to get to a car. The answer would of course be, with another car, for by definition one moves forwards only by car. And how does one get to this other car? If it is really possible to see a tree only because stimuli are interpreted as a tree, how do we access the product of the interpretation, the interpretative construct? The principal problem we are concerned with here and that Shusterman, too, pointed out, is obvious: if nothing in the world can be understood and recognized without interpreting it, how is the interpretative product itself to be understood? Even the results of interpretation would have to be accessible exclusively by means of interpretation; in order to be conscious of a interpretative product, it, too, would have to be interpreted, for in this model, consciousness of something is possible only through interpretation, which leads to an interpretation of the interpretation, and so on and so on. We come to an infinite regress. And so it is reasonable to ask: how do we know that interpretations alone are capable of structuring, and therefore that the world we perceive, which is structured in such and such a way, must contain interpretations? And the other way around: why must we expand the concept of interpretation to such an extent that all forms of structuring and differentiation become interpretations? It is not logically necessary to understand the givenness of something as an interpretative construct. ‘The concept of interpretation,’ Shusterman continues in ‘Beneath Interpretation’, ‘becomes synonymous with all human life and activity, and thus loses any real meaning or specific role of its own’



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(p. 195). In fact it is not only thinkable, but not at all unreasonable for many structures in the world to arise through conscious interpretation, but for other structures to be perceived as well, without perception having necessarily interpreted them. For perception is one more capacity to gain consciousness of an object that is present, that looks a particular way and that further looks different from its immediate surroundings. Because the opposite is thinkable, we cannot say that we know perception is interpreting. The assumption of an unconscious act of interpretation is therefore only appropriate if it has a methodological advantage. Just because perceptions exhibit qualities that are known from the products of interpretation – grasping the concept of ‘interpretation’ very broadly, it does not follow that perception necessarily contains a process of interpretation: the process of interpretation continues to be an assumption that often is a useful model which, when it makes transcendental claims, becomes a myth – in the best sense of the word a modern myth of world-making. For many people it is a mystery that there is a world and that it appears as it does. Who really knows why being human in the world is as it is for him? For thousands of years, people have been telling stories that describe a thinkable background for the situation. Interpretationism stands in this fine tradition; it, too, recounts a possibility, namely that everything that exists is based on an interpretation. Unconscious interpretations – taken to be selfevident – have taken over a task that was usually performed by a god. Suppose someone was defending the view that everything God made produced differentiations. On the first day, God divided light from darkness … Now there is a world of complex differentiation, so every differentiation is God’s work. The argument corresponds to that of interpretationism: it is possible to believe in the transcendental function of God and in that of interpretation – just as one may believe in myths. In interpretationism, too, one is dealing with a mythical construction, for the puzzling form of the phenomenal world and of human existence is referred back, not in this case to a personified principle, but to a principle that is known mainly from literary discourse and that functions only in the background. It is enough for a model to be possible, and to provide those who accept it with a means of grasping the phenomenon. But when something that is merely thinkable is presented as philosophy, it is the psychology of philosophers that is expressed in the choice. The selection of one thinkable thing rather than another indicates a particular picture of what it means to

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be a human being in the world. Richard Shusterman is exceptionally rigorous in this respect. He has pursued the issue to the point of no longer seeing interpretationism as a philosophical position at all, but rather as a cultural symptom, in fact as symptomatic of a type of mind by no means exclusive to contemporary philosophy. Interpretationism – the dominant religion of the present – arises when the world is treated as a text, when the legibility of the world displaces the visibility of the world. This substitution grounds the dogma of the basically linguistic nature of all world experience, in turn leading to the view that there is no being, no consciousness and no present without language – a view that is, in Shusterman’s trenchant description, far from rare: ‘Our age is even more hermeneutic than it is postmodern, and the only meaningful question to be raised at this stage is whether there is ever a time when we refrain from interpreting. […] There is a host of holistic hermeneuts who answer this question firmly in the negative, maintaining that simply to perceive, read, understand or behave intelligently is already, and must always be, to interpret. This position of hermeneutic holism dominates most current interpretive theory. Loss of faith in fundamentalist and realist objectivity has made it the current dogma. Having abandoned the ideal of reaching a naked, rock-bottom, unmediated God’s-eye view of reality, we seem impelled to embrace the opposite position, that we see everything through an interpretive veil or from an interpretive angle’ (p. 181).

The link between the myth of the given and the myth of the mediate: Representationism Representationism links the myth of the mediate to the myth of the given, working as it does with both models. On the one hand, the subject finds himself in the situation of knowing the world in which he believes himself to be only through media, and on the other hand these media for access to the world are given without mediation. The connection between world and subject is made possible through representation, and as a result the only connections there are between world and subject occur within the framework of possibilities offered by representation. That there is no being-in-the-world without these representations because they are logically necessary for being-in-the-world



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is grounded in an interpretation of intentionality. The classical idea is taken up, that consciousness is an intentional state, so that someone in this state is related to something, directed toward something or treating of something. This ‘of ’ in the concept of intentionality then becomes critical: the ‘of ’ that describes what is characteristic of consciousness, that it is consciousness of something, is equated with the ‘of ’ in a representational relationship. A representation, too, is a representation of something, directed toward something or treating of something. Through this identification, intentionality is thought as semanticity, that is, interpreted as having content. This conception is the fragile but also essential basis for representationism, especially as Martin Kurthen presents it in Hermeneutische Kognitionwissenschaft [Hermeneutic Cognitive Science] of 1994. For ‘the semanticity of intentional conditions – that is, their meaningfulness – can then in a further step be understood as representationality: as the quality of depicting or bringing out particular content’ (p. 25) (tr.). But, as Kurthen rightly comments: ‘The step from semanticity to representationality is not required’ (p. 25). On the contrary, it is a step that construes an intentional state as if this state were the means through which something was being presented or depicted for a ‘cognitive system’, as it is usually called, in which such states prevail. Seeing a tree is then an event in which the tree is made present (vergegenwärtigt) by means of a representation in the specific manner of a perception. The tree is not present through seeing, but is made present through seeing. The statement marks a vast difference: in saying that the tree is present by means of perception one is describing how the perceiver himself is experiencing the perception, that is, as consciousness of the present. In saying that perception makes the tree present, perception is being described as doing things and having effects. Presentness is the effect of making present. The presence of a tree in perception is then the effect of a making present through a representation. Yet even if the effect of a making present is presentness, it does not mean that awareness of the present must always have occurred by means of a representational making present. We are dealing here with the same error as in interpretationism: a phenomenon is assumed to have necessarily come about through those principles and entities that could also have allowed what the phenomenon is to come into being. Yet there is no reason at all why we must assume that presentness should be possible exclusively through representation. The perception of something is

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bound up with the consciousness of the presence of this something – however it may be possible. Even if one believes it is necessary to use a model to explain this possibility, representations appear to be a bad model: for if one supposes that consciousness of the present in a perception arises through unconscious representational making present, there is a problem about the concept of representation being defined through a three-point relation: a representation is, from the standpoint of conceptual analysis, always a representation of something, to someone by means of something. And that raises the question of how a representation makes something present to whom. So representationism shifts the problem: representation is the means of building up the present of the perceived object. But how do we get to the present of the representation? Is the representation present to the perceiving subject? How it happens that consciousness is consciousness of something cannot be explained through mediation. So in the end, the objection that must be made to representationism is the one that must be made to any philosophy whose models one wants to expose as myths: they model subjective being-in-theworld from an external perspective and by assuming metaphysical entities as a sort of bridge to the world. One can again join Martin Kurthen in working out the visual conception of the relationship between man and world, drawn with an implicit belief in representation: ‘That representations are “only for observers” means that in a description of the interaction between world and organism that refers back to representations, the organism’s relationship to the world is modeled according to the appearance of the interaction from outside the relationship of world to organism, while within the limitations of world and organism, there is no place for re-present-making, since the very distinctness and with it the distance between the two, which could require a re-present-making, is missing’ (pp. 81–2) (tr.). One might also say it is adventurously speculative to take representations to be the logical conditions of possibility for a being-in-the-world. But it is certain that a particular picture of humanity is the condition of possibility for contemporary philosophy’s embrace of the myth of the mediate – of interpretationism as much as of representationism: it is the image of a remote world. Both myths describe the situation of human beings in such a way that a subject is here and a world there. The myth of the mediate draws a picture of human existence in which the subject is not a part of the world, but stands apart from the world,



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and thinks about how he can gain access to this world beyond. For all their differences in detail, these philosophies sketch comparable pictures of the relationship between man and world.

The paradigm of access The relationship between man and world, between consciousness and being, is a relation. This statement is in turn a tautology, for a relationship is always a relation. The question is only about what kind of relation we are concerned with, and in particular whether this relation of a human being to that which he takes to be what is really happening can be described without model-like analogies. Looking at the myth of the given and the myth of the mediate with this in mind, we can confirm they are united in their basic conception of this relation; apparently in opposition, they share the same ground. This judgement may seem surprising at first glance, since the myth of the mediate usually presents itself as having successfully and definitively overcome the myth of the given. Still, the victory does not apply to the frame of inquiry the two myths share. Seen overall, the two myths have more connections than they do differences, for both myths depend to such an extent on the same assumptions that it seems appropriate to speak of a common paradigm. This common background appears in their common metaphors. It concerns the assumption of a gap between man and world. In both myths the world stands apart from human beings as an Other. The opposition I’m here – reality is there does not imply, but still suggests something remarkably unworldly or otherworldly about the self. It is not an exaggeration to say that the myth of the mediate and the myth of the given finally see human beings in the same situation: human beings need access to the world – the controversy, finally, is only about how this access is made: is it of a direct or indirect sort? In particular, the concept of access takes on the function of a background metaphor in both myths. A first indication for this central function of the concept of access is a curious discrepancy noticeable from even a passing glance at contemporary philosophy. Although use of the concept of ‘access’ is practically inflationary, it is usually not thematized explicitly, so it is hardly ever indexed as a relevant concept. Even in texts that deliberately

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distance themselves from any philosophy that appears consciously literary or metaphorical, in key definitions and supporting arguments, the metaphor of access is treated as a self-evident concept. If we wanted to try to define some kind of feature characteristic of contemporary philosophy, we might look for it in the production of books that do not devote a single line to an examination of the concept of access, despite using it to present the main thesis – as for example in Hans Lenk’s Interpretationskonstrukte [Interpretational Constructs]: ‘We have no access to the world that does not depend on interpretation, neither in cognition nor in action nor anywhere else’ (p. 21) (tr.). An access is a way – a way one uses either to get to a certain place oneself, or to get something else to a certain place; an access always has a certain length, and always spans some spatial distance. It is different from an entry, which crosses some boundary, and so forms an interface or transition point between two adjoining places. This is why an entry can have a threshold that a person steps over, rather than through, when coming and going. An access, conversely, cannot be stepped over, but must rather always be stepped through in its entire length. That does not exclude the possibility of gaining access to the space by way of an entry. The use of an entry is ordinarily part of the use of an access; an access can even have multiple entries. If a doctor gains access to the heart by introducing a catheter through the skin, for example, then the point of entry through the skin is an entry into the body, the passage through the aorta in turn an entry into the heart chamber, and the catheter itself the entire access. In short: an access creates a spatial bridging and connection – and this, the spatial extension of access, is how the relation between man and world, whenever it is compared to an access, comes to be described as a spatial connection. If we use accesses as the term of comparison for the relation between human beings and the world, it becomes impossible to keep the world from moving off into the distance, out of reach. To speak of accesses into the world is to produce a chasm between human beings and the world. The concept of access is not the only one that polarizes person and world; it is just used more often than many. The relation between a human being and the world is being modelled spatially in such concepts such as ‘way’, ‘contact’ and ‘connection’ as well. Spatial modelling of a relationship that is not spatial is further, in this case as in many others, methodologically profoundly



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meaningful and indispensably practical. One has only to think of ordinary discussions of upper and lower social classes in a society. The relationship between well-placed and less well-placed groups lends itself to being represented as a higher and a lower level. But imagine someone seriously claiming to need a ladder to gain access to the upper class. It hardly makes any more sense to believe that a human being gains access to the world through an interpretation or representation. In both cases, metaphors are being taken literally. This is not to say that interpretations and representations cannot mediate effectively, or that these mediations may not be compared to access. In fact a computer offers access to the internet. The problem is not at all whether media are accesses. The problem rather is whether the relation between a human being and the world is constituted in such a way that a certain kind of access can effectively describe this relation. Hardly anyone would doubt that a ladder is often a suitable means of climbing up to a certain height. But, just as a ladder will not bring anyone to the upper range of the social hierarchy, the relation between a human being and the world is not a spatial one that can be negotiated through access. The problem of defending the medial turn lies in this spatialization – embedded in the metaphor of access – of the relations between human beings and that which is real for them. We have good example of exactly how such a defence looks in Martin Seels’ essay ‘Medien der Realität und Realität der Medien’ [Media of Reality and Reality of Media] of 1998. The argument begins with a clear understanding of media: ‘Media are accesses that let something be given […] The givenness of something is achieved through media. They are the opportunities a thing has to be given’ (p. 248) (tr.). Then it is pointed out that intentional contents are givens: ‘Everything that is perceived, recognized, undertaken is given in this sense, in short: whatever can take up the position of an intentional object. […] This given, whatever it is, can only be an object of our examination or intention if media are present, thanks to which it can exist for us’ (p. 248). Following this, both statements are combined into a syllogism, the concluding sentence of which goes: ‘No intentional given without a medium of its being given, […] or still more simply: no intentionality without mediality’ (pp. 248–9). This result may in turn be generalized: if all intentional givens are of a medial character, then also and especially that which is given to us as reality: to say there is no intentionality without mediality is also to say ‘no reality (accessible

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to intentional behaviour) without them. […] No reality, n.b. that can be experienced; no reality that can be experienced specifically as such–and–such’ (pp. 249–50). The main thesis of the medial turn goes: ‘no reality accessible to intentional consciousness without mediality’ (p. 250). Such an argument is an example of highly rational and precise thinking within a mythical paradigm: for the argument functions only because, first, it assumes that the relation of a human being to the world is an access, and, second, that philosophies assuming a direct, immediate access to the world have in the meantime been exposed as the myth of the given. Once these two premises have been accepted as true, the assertion that there is no reality accessible to consciousness without mediality really is persuasive. It becomes clear that such inconspicuous metaphors as ‘access’ or ‘accessible’ are so meaningful because the very coherence of the argument depends on their justification and explication. The persuasive force continues to depend on the assumption that philosophical descriptions of human being-in-theworld must choose between two possibilities only: direct or mediated access – tertium non datur. But this means: even the philosophical positions that defend a medial turn and share doubts about human beings having any direct connection to the world, nevertheless continue to treat the question of the myth of the given as a meaningful inquiry. Both models engage with dualism to the same extent, that there is an ‘I’ here and a world over there, and that the two so abstracted relata must be brought into contact; both models look for constructions to bridge the gap. For as soon as the question is even raised concerning the way human consciousness’s access to the world is constituted, the thesis has already been put forward that we are concerned with a spatial connection, modelled as access. For an access is a passage, a way, and so it is a means. It is a tautology inasmuch as there is no access without a means. This makes it clear: the image of human beings with access to the world makes it possible to develop views that were formulated in the myth of the given and of the mediate. For both the view that there are direct and immediate ways into the world and the view that there are only mediated and mediate accesses rest on the assumption of a relationship between a human being and his world that can be effectively modelled with the concept of access. The image of access to the world is a construction that asks to be deconstructed; even though the analogy may have beginnings as old as



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philosophy itself. At least it does not seem far-fetched to see the first sketch of this foundational anthropological image in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: a human being has an uninviting, as well as difficult, steep uphill path to overcome in order to reach the actual world. Contemporary philosophy secularizes this image in the metaphor of world access. For it frees the image of the cave from the ontological hierarchy. We know from Plato that the path out of the cave is a steep ascent. In shifting from cave-exit to worldaccess, modern ways into the world have levelled off between Platonic ascent and the descent of Nietzsche’s reversed Platonism. One need not decide whether Arthur Danto, in identifying the primary task of theoretical philosophy as the description of Connections to the World, the title of his book of 1989, was reflecting on observations or exhibiting a symptom of this paradigmatic situation. The question of the existence of human beings is interpreted as the problem of ‘whether mind ever succeeds in making unmediated contact with world’, as Richard Rorty put it in his introduction to the new edition of Wilfrid Sellars’s Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (p. 9). But in accepting this spatial, distancing analysis of the question of human existence, the spectrum of possible answers contract into one fatal opposition. The two possibilities for analysing the paradigm of access are the myth of the mediate and the myth of the given. Only those who believe that human beings’ relation to the world resembles an access are able to converse and contest whether a human being has a direct or only mediated contact with the world. Those who advocate a direct connection take the view that there are paths to the world that do not change what crosses them. Direct access allows a person to sense the presence of something that is the same as it was before he gained access – and precedents for such connections and accesses from everyday life are actually known everywhere: think of water pipes. Water that flows in through a pipe flows out in the same way; the transmission through the pipe does not change the water. In the model of the immediately given, a human being is in this sense endowed with pipes for sensual impressions, ideas, conceptions and perceptions. These entities, directly given, are mediated as if through a pipe, because for the subject there is no sense of perspective on the ideas or sensual data. One cannot feel stomach pains any way other than they really are.

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For philosophers of the mediate, on the other hand – for proponents of interpretationism as much as for those of representationism – to accept such a metaphysical conductor would be to accept a myth. In fact they are right: the idea of the immediately given is a model that compares access to the world to pipes. But we must not overlook this: the counterargument, too, depends on a model. Although this counter-model does not think of the mediation between man and world by analogy to the use of pipes, it, too, thinks pictorially, in this case by analogy to the use of languages and media. Media change and affect that which they transmit; the bridging is bound up with processes of interpretation and transformation. In the same way, the spoken word covers a distance by means of a telephone, but the medium transfers it repeatedly into other conditions and transmits it changed. To sum up: both the myth of the given and that of the mediate set up a gap between the self and the world, between the perceiving subject and the perceived reality. They disagree about which kind of connection familiar from the life world is comparable to the connection between a human being and a world: whether pipes or media. But once the world has been put at a distance, neither of the two connections suffices to reach it. That is why we get no further by accepting accesses: there can be no accesses to the world, because we must think of those things that should have access to the world as part of the world. In asking about what access people have to the world, we are fatally conceding the existence of a worldless subject who is not part of the world unless he exercises his access to it. The image of access to the world is antiecological hubris: human beings do not have access to the world, but rather live in the world as part of the world until they reach the exit.

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Phenomenal certainty Human beings, and probably only human beings, know what it’s like to be a human being. This knowledge is phenomenal knowledge and is – like phenomenal knowledge as such – a special kind of self-consciousness: among the things they experience as they live are personal qualities of being in the world; they have an awareness of situations, for they themselves experience their existence in the world at every moment in a particular way. This is not astonishing, at least not unless the question is about the existence of consciousness itself. If we start by thinking that conscious experiences are real and, further, that what is real cannot be thought without properties, then each experience must have properties, which makes this experience the particular experience it is. It can also be stated differently: anyone who wants no experiences of his own is better off not being human. A human life without phenomenal knowledge is unimaginable. One may perhaps think subtle thoughts about what it would be like to be another person, what it would be like to be a person of another gender, or what it would be like to be a bat; but, whatever conclusions are reached, the special marker of phenomenal knowledge will not have been addressed and should not be ignored: no position within contemporary philosophy of mind casts doubt on the reality of one’s own phenomenal experiences and ideas, one’s own desires and feelings, one’s own imagination and perception, one’s own pains and hopes. That is what is unique about phenomena: in the experience of a phenomenon there is no difference between being and appearing-to-be. It is possible to categorize experiences incorrectly when we discuss them, and it may be hard to find criteria for the right description, but this does not affect private

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knowledge about the reality of experiences. For this reason, phenomenal knowledge has a special epistemic quality: phenomenal knowledge cannot be relativized with sceptical arguments – the only objection that might be raised about phenomenal knowledge is that it is not normal knowledge in the traditional sense of justified true belief. Is ‘I know that I have a stomach ache’ a meaningful claim? Probably not. For in fact that which is true, but in principle cannot be false, is true in a way that differs from that which is true but could also be false. For this reason it is appropriate to speak of phenomenal knowledge more precisely as phenomenal certainty; even the old concept of intuition may be included. Perhaps it is also a good idea to reserve the concept of comprehension for statements that can be true, and speak instead of Erkenntnis. Yet whatever terminology we choose (intuition sive Kenntnis sive acquaintance sive insight sive certainty sive evidence), the phenomenon at issue is clear: the properties of mental states, at the moment of their existence, cannot be illusions. Using a model, the myth of the given interprets this absolute certainty as the immediacy of the content of one’s own consciousness. The reason phenomenal knowledge has such certainty, then, is that in self-reflection, one’s own consciousness is immediately accessible to itself. The criticism that is always levelled against this model, and against the discussion of immediacy, is that it would fail if the criticism were to doubt reality of what is meant by the model of immediacy. It is not that the image depicts a doubtful reality, but that the image presents a reliable reality in a doubtful manner. Apart from that, whether the existence of qualia is to be defended or contested, whether a private language exists or is unthinkable, conscious phenomena have exactly those phenomenal properties they have for someone – and this insight into the reliability of phenomenal certainties is anything but new: phenomenal knowledge is one version of Cartesian self-certainty. In fact it seems worth the effort to transform this simple, basic, familiar idea – that reflexive consciousness provides absolutely reliable certainties about one’s own state of consciousness – so as to outline the concept of a philosophy without models. The key idea for such a programme of a philosophy without a model is as follows: Descartes did not specify the full extent to which knowledge of the self is certain; phenomenal self-certainty comprehends not only the certainty of one’s own momentary existence, but also the manner



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of this existence. So when I am thinking, it is certain that I am, and it is also certain that I am in such and such a specific way. The that-I-am, as well as the how-I-am, is known to me beyond doubt. For I can exist only if my existence has characteristics. Someone who knows he exists also knows what it is like to be the one he is. We are concerned here with an idea that is not at all extraordinary in the context of phenomenological thought; in Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception of 1945, it is formulated as follows: ‘For we have the experience of ourselves, of that consciousness which we are.’ (pp. xvi–xvii) It is exactly such an extension of Cartesian self-certainty of one’s own way of being that becomes central to the attempt to present the possibilities and perspectives of a philosophy ‘without any ideal model’ (p. 61). Such a project would at least be possible if this kind of philosophy made no claims beyond those that could be proven through one’s own phenomenal knowledge. As old-fashioned as it may sound, this is about a new way of realizing the Cartesian idea of a fundamentum inconcussum.

From Cartesian Cartesianism to phenomenological Cartesianism Primers of philosophy usually describe what matters most about René Descartes as his effort to defeat scepticism by means of certain knowledge in his Meditationes de Prima Philosophia [Meditations on First Philosophy] of 1641– which is correct. Yet the description does not acknowledge that what Descartes was trying to defeat was not at all scepticism alone, but also the use of models in philosophy. Descartes is far from accepting a methodologically effective model as an approach to philosophical work. Descartes expects the truth of a philosophical contribution to resist any kind of scepticism, however radical – and no model could or would be so unassailable. Descartes rightly assumes that someone who is radically sceptical with respect to models of any kind will always introduce good arguments against the possibility of attributing any unassailable truth to them. Or, to say it better: a sceptic just would not engage with a model, properly understood as such, because in doing so he would be engaging with a method open to improvement rather than a truth open to doubt. And although it is not often emphasized, this is exactly why

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Descartes finds modelling as unacceptable as scepticism for philosophical work: neither brings Descartes to his actual goal, namely to certainties about human existence. For we must not lose sight of this: In the Meditations, the experience of ‘I, who now necessarily exist’ (p. 13) is a goal sought even by Descartes. The argument is well-known: Descartes takes the certainty of the thinking self as a fundamentum inconcussum. This certainty of one’s own existence in fact exemplifies phenomenal certainty, for any doubt about its truth only confirms its validity. One may doubt the justification for any truth claim except that of the doubter having an existence, for if I doubt everything, I still experience myself as a doubter in this situation. But, in itself, this famous insight into the cogito, ergo sum is not necessarily very significant. The crucial question is, rather: what is to be done with the classical idea cogito, ergo sum? What purpose is served by this insight, that I myself know myself, with certainty, to be something at this very moment? For it is about the answer to this question that opinion is so sharply divided. Looking at the dominant positions within the philosophy of mind at present, one gets the impression that the cogito, ergo sum hardly has any relevant role in thought about questions of consciousness; as if philosophers after Descartes had brought in new arguments that cast justifiable doubt on his proof of self-certainty – yet this is not the case at all. Contemporary disinterest in Cartesianism has not come from any doubt about the certainty of phenomenal knowledge, but solely from a doubt that this phenomenal insight can be gainfully applied, that it can be relevant. Not least through the analytical philosophy of language, preference has shifted from the self-reflection of consciousness to the selfreflection of language, because many believe that whereas a public linguistic statement lends itself to argumentation, private reflection does not. The turn back to self-consciousness then appears pointless, because the acquisition of language is a public process, guided by public sanctions, but private phenomena in the private sphere of one’s own consciousness necessarily stand apart from rational discourse. And yet those who distance themselves from the turn back to consciousness usually assume that there is just the one Cartesian way of using phenomenal insights philosophically, which is not the case. It seems relevant to point out that there are at least two Cartesian ways of defending the concept of a model-free philosophy.



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Speaking metaphorically, we can distinguish between an architectonic and a geometric way. The two ways both argue from a Cartesian standpoint, that is, they take phenomenal knowledge to be a fundamentum inconcussum. But one is, if you will, a Cartesian Cartesianism, and the other a phenomenological Cartesianism. The difference concerns the function ascribed to phenomenal knowledge within the concepts of the respective model-free philosophies. In his philosophy, Descartes makes certainty of one’s own phenomenal existence at a given moment the first, absolutely certain premise for further deductions. These deductions are only possible, however, if there are more, equally certain premises; this leads, as we know, to a problem with Descartes, the problem of finding these additional certain premises. Leaving the problem with its application aside, the concept behind this philosophy is significant, however it is criticized, for it stands as a prototype of a certain understanding of philosophy: Descartes himself was always fully persuaded that his own concept of philosophy constituted an instance of rationalism. He wanted to develop a philosophy that deduced secure conclusions from secure premises. In his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl’s terse comment about the way Descartes had made the cogito serve as ‘the point of departure for inferences’ was: ‘unfortunately’ (§10). One can in fact say that Cartesianism and phenomenology – or more precisely, Cartesian rationalism and phenomenological Cartesianism – differ in the way they use phenomenal certainty. Applied phenomenologically, Cartesianism does not aspire to secure premises by meditative reflection on one’s own consciousness, but rather opens the field of secure description. The meditative attitude, that is, the view that only personal and current phenomenal insights count as knowledge, gives the phenomenologist a thematic field. The basic idea is fairly straightforward: model-free philosophy is possible only through thematic modesty; one must restrict oneself to speaking about that which is phenomenally certain; anything else should not be addressed in philosophy at all. Hans Blumenberg got to the heart of this undoubtedly unique, yet significant moment in phenomenological understanding of philosophy in his posthumous work Beschreibung des Menschen [Description of Man] which appeared in 2006. ‘Whether objects achieve the rank of the philosophical depends on the quality of thought that can be attained, no matter what value may be ascribed to them on the basis of the thinker’s other motivations. The question: What can we have as evidence,

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as given in itself, as a phenomenon? That which cannot be known in this way does not merit phenomenological effort’ (p. 10) (tr.). Or to say it another way: if we demand certain knowledge from philosophy, then only those themes that permit certain knowledge are admissible as philosophical themes. This explains, for example, why Husserl never wrote an ethics. One fights the sceptic not with weapons of argumentation, but by retreating to secure territory. A phenomenologist, as a phenomenologist, is always a radical pyrrhonist in the course of his work, that is, he avoids discussions in which judgements that are doubtful in principle are defended as meaningful, practical or rational. A phenomenologist avoids any model, any induction, any conclusion – however plausible – simply because the only place he can allocate to them lies outside philosophical argumentation. This ‘dodging’ is called ‘epoché ’: the abstention from judgements. It is necessary for a philosophy without models, which is an effort to describe what it is like to be the one that one is. That is the principle – that of the double self – of autopsy: to do your own looking in order to see how you yourself are. The difference between Cartesian Cartesianism and phenomenological Cartesianism actually seems to lend itself especially well to a metaphorical description: for example, as a difference between a withdrawal and a retreat. Descartes, in his Meditations, goes back to secure insights, but not to stay modestly put. That is what phenomenologists do. A phenomenologist makes a strategic withdrawal to secure territory and stays there. What matters to him is the infrastructure of phenomenological knowledge alone. For Descartes, on the other hand, the fundamentum inconcussum is the firm basis on which sturdy houses, or ideally lofty towers, can be built. He himself liked to use the image of house building. In this way, philosophy is understood as architecture. This is different in phenomenology. There, the theory of consciousness is more likely to appear in the role of a demarcation of territory. One could speak of a geography – or more exactly, the idea is finally a geometry of the infrastructure of consciousness, since we are concerned not simply with monitoring the ephemeral relationships among areas, but rather with durable structures. The fundamentum inconcussum is a level working field, on which one must in fact keep low, but can still move about safely: human beings know what it is like to be human, and so it is appropriate to link the explication of human existence to this experience. This corresponds to the principle that was



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for Husserl, in the Ideas of 1913, the ‘principle of all principles’, namely ‘that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that 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, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there’ (p. 44). Since phenomenology tries to test each assumption against one’s own experience, against phenomenal knowledge, the fundamentum inconcussum does not serve as an underpinning at all, but should rather be regarded simply as a surface with an infrastructure. At least this image can clarify how a firm foundation can offer two movements the same level of certainty, proving a brace for the movement upwards on the one hand and, on the other, support for moving around on the flat. These movements correspond to the two types of Cartesian philosophy. Descartes is related to Husserl as a vertical to a horizontal, for the argumentation of Cartesian engineers is thoroughly architectonic and builds upwards, and that of phenomenological flaneurs casts about horizontally. And yet – to stay with this image – horizontal meanderings on secure grounds are only meaningful and promising under one important condition: the grounds must have an infrastructure; there must be something to discover about the way the surface is structured. One may turn to a fundamentum inconcussum without having any intention to build, but then there must be some other motivation. Only if there is a chance of discovering immanent features in the fundamentum inconcussum does time spent on safe ground go beyond a theoretical exercise towards a logical perspective that pays off. What is true for any discipline holds true for phenomenology as well: discoveries in principle need to be made; it is not enough to just say what it happens to be like, to be the one one is. Rather it is about the discovery of characteristics that describe how it is to be what one must be. To say it differently: it is about demanding knowledge as such from one’s own knowledge of how it is to be the one one is. It is about describing exactly these immanent structures of phenomenal knowledge – that is: what is essential about the way one must be in the world. Seen in this way, the phenomenologist is researching no more or less than the question of how the Cartesian fundamentum inconcussum is itself constituted; it is no longer a matter of using the ground, but rather about a description of the ground. This is the exact image of a kind of phenomenological mental geography, a description of structures immanent to

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consciousness, which is simultaneously a description of the modes of human being-in-the-world. But this is only possible and necessary if the surface phenomena possess a complex, rich infrastructure, which is to say, if they contain various kinds of differences and identities, if the foundation is structured in a particular way, in short: if the fundamentum inconcussum consists not of one dull, homogeneous surface, but rather of exciting relationships.

Intentionality: The fundamentum inconcussum relationalis ‘Thus, after everything has been most carefully weighed,’ wrote Descartes in the second Meditation, ‘it must finally be established that this pronouncement, “I am, I exist”, is necessarily true every time I utter it or conceive it in my mind’ (p. 13). This is followed by the decisive question: ‘But I do not yet understand sufficiently what I am – I, who now necessarily exist’ (p. 13). For Descartes, establishing the certainty of the thinker’s self-knowledge is not, in itself, a result that is sufficient, needing nothing more. Beyond this he wants to know more about the one whose existence as a thinking person is phenomenally certain. So he asks who or what that certainty is, when a thinking person is sure of himself. The answer is short, typical for Descartes and utterly un-phenomenological. It appears repeatedly in the question ‘But what, then, am I? A thing that thinks!’ (II. Med., §14). The self that is sure of itself is, for Descartes, a substance that exists. For me to be, a special sort of substance has to exist, namely the res cogitans – and that is actually noteworthy: one gets the impression that Descartes never considered any answer apart from one making reference to a substance. If something is real, it has to be a substance, for only substances are real. One actually gets the impression that Descartes’ affirmation of the self as substantial does not imply any refutation of the possibility of another answer to the question about who I necessarily am. It appears that he thought his own view apparent from conceptual analysis: I exist with particular features, particularities are particularities of substance, and therefore I am a substance. Such a substantialistic explication of one’s own secure self, defining classical Cartesianism, can perhaps be seen today as a prime example of a substantiating mentalism. It offers a good contrasting background against which to present phenomenological Cartesianism’s understanding of self.



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With phenomenology’s changed expectation of the fundamentum inconcussum, from a premise for deductions to a working field for descriptions, there is also a shift from thinking in substantial categories to thinking in relational categories. From a phenomenological point of view, the answer to Descartes’ question, what am I, that I necessarily am now would be: it is not substances that are phenomenally self-certain, but exclusively the reality of relationships, and in particular the reality of the relationship between the cogito and its cogitatum. In principle, the crux of phenomenology lies in the smallest possible difference from Descartes, so small that a few modest words are enough to mark a huge philosophical step: Cartesian self-certainty, ego cogito, becomes phenomenological self-certainty ego cogito cogitatum, and this extension means that the Cartesian fundamentum inconcussum substantialis becomes a fundamentum inconcussum relationalis. The foundation that supports philosophy as rigorous science is understood not as a kind of substance, but as a complex infrastructure characterized by various kinds of relationships. It is this certain infrastructure that is called ‘intentionality’. ‘The word ‘intentionality’, writes Husserl in the Cartesian Meditations, means ‘nothing other than this general basic quality of consciousness, to be consciousness of something, as cogito to carry its cogitatum within itself ’ (§14). This makes clear why no other concept has fascinated phenomenology so much as intentionality, that quality mental conditions have of being experienced in various ways as consciousness of something: in the history of Cartesianism, intentionality is a substitute; it takes up the position within the system that the res cogitans had for Descartes. For through intentionality, a thinking person’s self-certainty takes the place of a self understood as a substance. That which is certain, when it is certain, that I am, is not something that might be, but the ways I must be a self in the world. In retrospect, this means that from a phenomenological point of view, the complexity of the self-certainty discovered by Descartes has not been specified to its full extent. For self-certain existence contains immanent structures and differentiations open to possible experience that the thinking person will experience with as much certainty as the simple fact of his own existence. To put it simply: one has knowledge not only of the fact that one exists, but also of what it is like to be a human being. Of course one could say that restricting the structure of mental conditions to intentionality alone doesn’t make for a

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richly nuanced internal differentiation either. It’s beside the point to argue about whether consciousness is always intentional. It is certain and important that the complexity of immanent relations in the phenomenal experience of consciousness depends on one’s own experience of many kinds of intentionality: ‘Each cogito, each conscious process, we may also say, “means” something or other and bears in itself, in this manner peculiar to the meant, its particular cognitatum. Each does this, moreover, in its own fashion. The house-perception means a house more precisely, as this individual house and means it in the fashion peculiar to perception. A house-memory means a house in the fashion peculiar to memory; a house-phantasy, in the fashion peculiar to phantasy; a predicative judging about a house, which perhaps is “there” perceptually, means it in just the fashion peculiar to judging; a valuing that supervenes means in yet another fashion, and so forth’ (§14). In phenomenology, the turn back to the self-certainty of the thinker is a turning back to the self-certainty of the multiple ways consciousness can be intentional. For it is worth noting: the reality of intentionality – in whatever form – is always a phenomenal certainty – even if this does not conform to the division into two that has been established in the philosophy of mind. In the philosophy of mind, two kinds of mental conditions have established themselves as a starting point: sensations and intentional conditions; or, in other words: phenomenal states and intentional states. This distinction lies within the tradition of Thomas Reid’s demand that sensation be held separate from perception. Sensations or phenomenal conditions such as pain or nausea are distinctive in that they are ways of being; to have sensations means to find oneself in a particular mental state – and specifically in one in which there is no object that can be so differentiated from the condition that one could say, I am not this object: when someone is in pain, the one who is in that state is that person himself. On the other hand, with perceptions, one always has a clear case of an intentional condition: there is a consciousness that directs itself to an object – for example: I see a tree. There is an object, for ‘see’ is a transitive verb. Here, we find ourselves in a situation of having a consciousness in which there is a relation between oneself and something that is not one’s own self. Yet a question arises at exactly this point that is invariably raised by all sceptics, and that cannot be stupid a priori: how do we actually know this? How do we know that these two kinds of conditions really exist? The intentionality of



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consciousness has been addressed countless times. When it is claimed that consciousness has an intentional structure, then a claim is being made for the existence of a relation, and when an existence is claimed, one may ask how one knows about this existence, how this existence claim is to be demonstrated. What proves the claim that there are mental states with and without the quality of intentionality? How a justification may not function in this case is obvious: the possible qualities of a mental state can neither be perceived as other things are perceived, nor can they be deduced logically. Knowledge about the existence of intentionality is justified neither through deduction nor induction. Suppose someone seriously claimed that earlier philosophies concerned with the intentionality of consciousness are addressing sheer fiction. Such an objection would not be new in the history of philosophy; positivists are well known to object to Platonists that their theories of ideas are theories about fictions and therefore not really logical theories at all. Yet with intentionality the situation seems to be different; an accusation of fiction is unthinkable there. To interpret the existence of intentional states as fiction would be as absurd as the effort to account for stomach pains as fiction. To someone who is experiencing intentionality, it is incontrovertibly certain ‘that some experiences are present that have the character of intention’ (Husserl, V. Logical Investigations, §11). So one knows that there is intentionality in the same way one knows that there is stomach pain: each person for himself at the moment of his own experience. The reality of both can be known as one is himself experiencing it. When I experience myself in relation to something, this relationship, too, is an experienced certainty. The concept of intentionality is required to describe what it is like to be a human being. For intentionality is a way of living existence; one feels oneself in relation to something and this situation is not exactly rare for human beings. For existence with consciousness simply is existence in relation, as sensation, too, is a way of existing. It consequently makes no sense to separate intentional from phenomenal mental conditions. Whether all mental conditions actually have intentional as well as a phenomenal content, or whether we are not rather concerned with a spectrum of mental conditions, with instances of pure intention and pure sensation at either extreme, are questions discussed with some frequency. It seems more productive to see intentional and non-intentional as two kinds of phenomenal state. It comes down to defining both states,

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namely having stomach ache and seeing trees, as private phenomenal experiences, which is to say, conditions whose existence is experienced in some way. And that means: the phenomenological turn back to the many kinds of intentionality is, in itself, already an answer to the Cartesian question ‘what am I – I, who now necessarily exists?’ When intentionality is promoted to the primary philosophical theme, it paints a picture of the human condition that expresses human beings’ understanding of themselves. Instead of Descartes’ thesis about a thinking thing, the neo-Cartesian proposition says: I am bound up in relations. The concept of intentionality becomes a key category for the description of the human state of being. It is this shift in phenomenology, from a concept of substance to a concept of relation, that re-energizes basic Cartesian ideas. For the reflexive return to the intentionality of one’s own consciousness permits the philosophical work of describing relational phenomena that are beyond doubt – and with them phenomena relevant to human being-in-the-world. My situation consists of finding myself in indissoluble relations. In this respect Husserl, especially in his Paris Lectures of 1929 [1959], left no doubt that intentionality means not only a consciousness of something, but also the way in which I have an existence. ‘The essence of consciousness, in which I live as my own self, is the so-called intentionality’ (pp. 12–13). Here one can see that the concept of the life world had already been set forth in the concept of intentionality all the while. For the turn back to intentionality is only thought through when an understanding of the self has been worked out which can be read as an answer to the question of what it is for a human being to have an existence: I do not grasp the way I myself am directly, but by paying attention to how the world is for me, how there is Me in the world, how my intentional states engage Me in relationships. This idea – from the I to the Me – applies to one’s own experience of the life world as well as to transcendental argumentation: the ‘I’, which the thinker can take to be a certainty, cannot be detached from the relation cogito cogitatum as a linguistically reified, transcendental identity – if no model is permitted. It is the same for objects that are objects for someone in an intentional structure. To say it differently: self and world, as poles, are certain. Husserl introduced the lovely concept of the I-pole, which corresponds in just the same way with the idea of a world-pole; the Crisis-essay of 1936 reads: ‘Clearly here, in the radical consistency of the epoché, each ‘I’ is considered purely as the ego-pole of his



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acts, habitualities, and capacities and thence as being directed at what appears in ontic certainty “through” the appearances, the manners of givenness of the latter – i.e. as directed toward the particular object-pole and its pole-horizon, the world’ (p. 183). That is, it is phenomenally certain that there is always a Me as an I, accompanying all my ideas. Through my conscious existence, I am condemned to this incomprehensible existence as a constant companion. And the other way around, the world of objects is also only certain as an object-pole in the relation. The step to emancipation of the I from the world and the world from the I is a linguistic reification, which does not register in one’s own experience. With this pole metaphor, three central characteristics are grasped: namely that the I and the world are equally primordial, that the I and the world mutually need each other and – not to be forgotten – that the two are different; for with all our equi-primordiality and mutuality, the world and I are not identical. In self-awareness, a subject is always a ‘subject for the world’ (p. 178) and the reverse, the world in self-awareness always appears as the world of a subject. This, the subject’s being-in-the-world and the world’s being-in-the-subject lead to phenomenology’s famous assertion that all statements concerning an emancipated transcendence of relata of intentional structures should submit to the epoché: all assertions about the existence of the world in itself and about the ‘I’ being out-of-the-world are to be avoided – but the latter epoché is no easy matter. In The Transcendence of the Ego of 1936/37, Jean-Paul Sartre unreservedly insists that the phenomenological epoché must include the rejection of all models as well as the transcendence of the ego: ‘And how are we to explain this privileged treatment of the I if it is not by metaphysical or critical preoccupations that have nothing to do with phenomenology? Let us be more radical and affirm quite fearlessly that all transcendence must fall under the scope of the epoché ’ (p. 8). And more: ‘The transcendence of the ego must fall under phenomenological reduction’ (p. 54). He suggests, accordingly, that one should say, rather than ‘I have consciousness of this chair’, ‘there is consciousness of this chair’ (p. 54). In fact this assertion seems persuasive at first glance. Yet at the latest in The Phenomenology of Perception of 1945, Maurice MerleauPonty asserts that even a phenomenologist is sure of his own existence, and that this certain existence can accordingly not be bracketed in while he is philosophizing. In meditation, the world – but not one’s own reality – can be

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treated as an ontologically doubtful phenomenon. One cannot treat oneself as a deceptive appearance. The possibility of being treated as an apparent phenomenon shows how the two poles differ. Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty thinks: ‘The most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction. If we were absolute mind, the reduction would present no problem’ (p. xv). One way out of these problems appears to be available in the famous passage from the Critique of Pure Reason, which Sartre opened up with the suggestion that ‘I’ be replaced with ‘It’. For in fact Kant was already discussing this situation of the self being certain of itself only in its role as companion: ‘Through this I, or He, or It (the thing), which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of thoughts = x, which is recognized only through the thoughts that are its predicates, and about which, in abstraction, we can never have even the least concept’ (A 346). Here Kant formulated quite precisely what Husserl was trying to grasp with the I-pole metaphor: The ‘I’ can only be experienced in the relation I am with an idea just now. The ‘I’ is caught in intentional structures, and there is no hope of liberation. One can only agree with Kant, when he finds that substituting an ‘it’ or a ‘he’ for the ‘I’ does not solve the problem. The substitution does not address the phenomenal way it is to be in intentional relationships. We can draw this conclusion: the phenomenological reduction cannot turn the ‘I’ into an ‘it’, but only into an I certain of its own being in relations. That is: phenomenology needs to begin with its own intentional state in order to describe how it is for me to have to be a subject in this condition: so the Me takes the place of the I. This step could readily be interpreted to mean that phenomenology, in its epoché of the transcendence of the ego, takes Kant’s own description – just cited – seriously, that the I ‘is recognized only through its ideas, that are its predicates, and of which we, in separation from them, cannot have the slightest conception’. If a philosopher concentrates on phenomenal self-knowledge because this knowledge has the status of certainty, then there will be no dualism – a world there and a subject here – in the resulting philosophy. There will be no problematic of access, for both realism and idealism appear as equally mythical models. Accordingly, there is nothing certain to say about the self without describing a relationship between that self and something that is not the self. The intentional relation is secure, for the fundamentum inconcussum is a relation. If I am, I am sure that I



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feel myself as different from something I am not. That is to say: I cannot in fact experience what I am, but I can experience how it is to be that which I am; how it is for me to be I. If we want to say something certain about the self and the world, then the varieties of this relation must be addressed, that is, intentionalities. For intentionality is nothing other than a mode of being-part-of-the world, and it is exactly this experience that needs to be described – which would bring us to a problem of phenomenological texts.

To the things themselves and back to language Perhaps the greatest problem in phenomenological philosophy is at the same time one of the oldest problems in philosophy; Plato described it with his cave allegory: Plato’s escaped prisoner had to go back into the cave and report what he experienced there. No philosophy that ascribes a categorical meaning to appearance, in whatever form, can just do a visual examination and call the work finished. As much sense as it makes to demand, for the sake of logic, that philosophy always measure its achievements against direct experience, it is equally impossible to understand self-reflection itself as a discursive contribution. Epoché is the rejection of any judgement, still, a phenomenologist must communicate – judgements, in language. To turn phenomenal knowledge into a disciplinary contribution, private experience must be made into language, and so publicized and reified. The certainties of the phenomenal world must be translated into sentences – and this is exactly what some like to see as the Achilles’ heel of phenomenology: for in fact in the transformation to language the certainty as well as the private character of what is being transformed is lost. Even if we agree that human beings know by themselves how it is to be human, we have not agreed that it is also possible to talk about what it is like to be a human being; to say nothing of whether it is possible to securely describe private experience without constructing models of it. Language does in fact appear to be unavoidable for a philosophical contribution, and Husserl did in fact neglect to account for this prerequisite of phenomenologists’ communication – not only in the famous motto ‘back to the things themselves’. The sense of this assertion has been explained and interpreted many times: the things are not simply material things; they

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are, rather, phenomena that appear in reflexive experience as certainties. The admonition to go ‘back to the things themselves’ is a criticism of a philosophy that is in the truest sense of the phrase not concerned with the things themselves, and is instead concerned with models, theories, constructions and interpretations, which is to say with that which others have made of the things themselves. Still, as illuminating as this provocative call and response may be, we should finally get down to the matter at hand, and this can happen only at the point we start speaking about phenomena, that is, at the moment we describe them in language and so make a discussable claim. Husserl’s motto ‘back to the things themselves’ makes things too easy. Hans Blumenberg got to the heart of this difficulty: phenomenology is not simply a move away – here it resembles the philosophy of the Platonic cave allegory – but rather requires a movement back and forth. That is why the title Hans Blumenberg gave his posthumously published writing on phenomenology of 2002, Zu den Sachen und Zurück [To the Things and Back Again], is so extraordinarily apt. The turn back to secure phenomena is only an advance that must inevitably follow a retreat into language. And this is in fact a step back: that is, a step back into the discussion of contemporary philosophy, back into the contingent language games of the present. Back into the situation we just abandoned, through language and epoché. It is almost paradoxical: at first glance, phenomenology’s only hope of success seems to depend on its doing something it doesn’t want to do under any circumstances. Even a stomach pain becomes contingent in a discussion of stomach pain: For stomach pain is as contingent and public in discussion as it is certain and private for the person who is just now experiencing it; it is possible to lie, and just claim to have stomach pain. A statement about the existence of stomach pain does not necessarily need to be true. Description in language unavoidably establishes identities and differences whose criteria no longer lie within experience at all, but rather within the language community. Whether gastric or gall bladder complaints qualify as stomach pain makes no difference at all to the quality of the experience; these things matter exclusively to the use of language. It is the height of such impertinence to admit to the doctor that the stomach pain was really kidney pain. The silent but sovereign mastery of one’s own experiences breaks down, becomes perfectly democratic at the point those experiences are described. What can be said about experiences in language can be no



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more or less than that which can be thought by the language community. There can be little doubt that media, besides transmitting messages, are also engaged with the content of the messages. As soon as experiences are under discussion, anyone can join in, for if this were not the case there would be no speech. So the conditions of possibility for a discussable contribution lie not in the conditions of possibility for experiences, but in those for language. If we still want to speak of things that language interprets, without accepting that language interprets them, then we are accepting a utopia. A utopia whose fascination and impossibility will probably never again be so impressively presented as in Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics of 1966. It puts the goal of liberating language in order to emancipate phenomena in a nutshell: ‘The cognitive utopia would be to use concepts to unseal [auftun] the nonconceptual with concepts, without making it their equal’ (p. 10). There is no reason to doubt that opening things beyond conception up with concepts without making them equivalent will remain an unattainable utopia as long as concepts are used as they usually are in the sciences: for specifying characteristics, for recording observations, for stating matters of fact. Experiences in themselves make no contribution in the space of reason, shattering the hope of all empirical philosophy of being able to ground secure statements in secure experience. Yet just because statements about the ways and means something appears to someone do not adequately justify claims to matters of fact, there is still no doubt that the way something appears to someone is impervious to any kind of error. To say it differently: there may be an insoluble problem about grounding truth claims for assertions of fact empirically. But that does not cast any doubt on whether one’s own experience from the ‘I’ perspective is and remains an incontrovertible certainty – therefore that one’s own experience in the ‘I’-perspective fulfils the requirements one would like to see applied to scientific statements. Adorno’s unique formulation, ‘unseal the concept-less with concepts’ can be read as an admonition, that in order to make use of the certainty of phenomenal experience, phenomenology will have to take an unusual linguistic route, not simply naming and describing the concept-less, but also opening it up. Whatever Adorno means by this ‘unsealing’, there is in fact a long philosophical tradition of a specifically phenomenological use of language, to which contemporary philosophy hardly pays appropriate attention: the protreptic.

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Phenomenological protrepsis Protrepsis is a particular use of language, first described in antiquity. As speech that promotes and encourages, it lends itself to practical engagement in instruction. The protreptic text, the so-called protreptikós, is an invitation to produce one’s own knowledge. So one might easily think, at first glance, that protreptic was nothing other than rhetoric, and it is probably correct to speak of a particular sort of rhetoric. For protreptic texts use every possible rhetorical means with the explicit goal of engaging with a discipline in one’s own way. And that is exactly the point of significant difference from rhetorical structures exclusively concerned to bring an audience to a particular point of view: in the protreptikós, language serves to talk an audience into it, to persuade oneself. The protreptic tries to bring one around to one’s own insight. We see this difference between rhetoric as such and rhetorical protreptic in everyday situations: on the one hand, a promotional text may make an automobile’s special handling characteristics present using every rhetorical means, yet, on the other hand, these characteristics could also be described in a text that would also be rhetorical, but concerned to point out what a reader should look for on a test drive in order to experience the car’s special qualities for himself. The protreptikós does not argue for a particular persuasion, but directs attention to the ways one can achieve certainty for oneself. And this is exactly the principle of phenomenological description: the description is a kind of instruction and encouragement to do something worth doing. A phenomenological insight is therefore not carried by the text itself, but rather – and Adorno’s concept fits here – is unsealed by it: the instructions tell the reader what to do to reach for himself the insights the phenomenologist has reached for himself; it is a rhetorical call to experience for oneself the insights a phenomenologist has experienced for himself. It is certainly difficult to decide to what extent Husserl himself defended this special, protreptic understanding of language. In contemporary phenomenology, in any case, the protreptic has been programmatically recognized as the way phenomenology understands language, if in an unexpected context: in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 9 October 1985, Manfred Sommer provided an exceptionally concise description of what matters to a phenomenologist about his texts, namely the ‘instruction to do what is necessary to gain the insights he



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himself has had as the one giving the description. In this sense describing something to someone always also means prescribing something to someone. […] The commentary does not say what the speaker sees, but what the hearer must do in order to see for himself ’ (p. 33). The reason for the exhortation to do it oneself is clear: only self-made self-reflections are safe from sceptical doubt – and so it is not surprising that Descartes himself had an explicitly protreptic understanding of texts. In his ‘Response’ to the Second Objections to the Meditations (1641), he stated very clearly that he himself neither argued nor persuaded in his analyses, but rather exhorted his readers to carry out his analyses for themselves: ‘Analysis shows the true way by which a thing has been discovered methodically, and, as it were, “a priori,” so that were the reader willing to follow it and to pay sufficient attention to everything, he will no less perfectly understand a thing and render it his own than had he himself discovered it’ (p. 92). Here, as early as Descartes, we have the heart of phenomenology’s typical understanding of texts distilled with all the clarity one could want: the text exhorts a reader with as much rhetorical skill as possible to turn to his own situation in the hope of experiencing that which the phenomenologist discovered for himself earlier and re-enacted through description – for ‘these mysteries,’ as Merleau-Ponty wrote in his In Praise of Philosophy of 1953, ‘are in each one of us as in him’ (p. 63). The phenomenologist can only invite readers to do what the author has done; a philosophy without a model can only be defended protreptically. If a reader cannot be moved to persuade himself, then there is no other possibility of persuading him by other means, and Descartes described this as well. In such a case, the protreptikós has failed to instruct: ‘But I cannot force something that depends entirely on someone else’s thought upon people who have no stake in it, who read my Meditations as they would a novel, to pass the time and without close attention’ (p. 123) (tr.). That means that since the protreptikós achieves its sole purpose only if the reader has done the same things and so has seen for himself, such a text can only with difficulty be regarded as a literary text, in the sense of an artwork; although such a presumption seems obvious. In the end, a phenomenologist reports private meditations and episodes in texts, and in this sense writes texts that may be found in literature as stories, memoirs and novels. Yet in contrast to a literary work, the phenomenological text is only an aid – it is not the text itself that is supposed to make things present as

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aesthetically as effectively as possible, it is rather supposed to encourage and instruct a reader as effectively as possible in how to make things present for himself; this does not keep him from further making those things aesthetically present that need to be present to a reader. Still, there is a crucial difference from literature: a phenomenologist does not seek to complete or to even replace the argumentatively persuasive force of his texts with aesthetic acuity. It is not concerned with literary forms of knowledge, which complete propositional forms of knowledge in a complementary way, it is not about completing what is said with what is shown at the same time, but rather about saying as clearly and distinctly as possible how specific certainties were discovered and how the experience of the insight can be re-enacted. In this respect these texts are proper users’ guides, and so as literary as users’ guides can be. We can also say that a phenomenological text partially coincides with a rhetorical text and with literature respectively: like a rhetorical text, it is interested in promotion; yet unlike a rhetorical text, it pursues insights of the reader’s own. Both the literary text and the phenomenological text have the character of a report in the first person. Yet in contrast to a literary text, there is no concern about a work with or about insights linked to the literary form of the representation. This relationship to rhetoric and literature could hardly be better exemplified than with the prime example of a protreptic text as such: Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism from the end of the second century. The Outlines are a highly refined protreptikós, demanding a sceptical stance with respect to any sort of truth claim. The work reports the discovery that all the truth claims of scientific theory and personal opinion are unfounded, and that this is a good thing, because it is extraordinarily effective in promoting happiness. The pyrrhonist actually doubts the defensibility of any truth claim. This suggests an objection, that he is contradicting himself; an objection familiar to phenomenologists. In the case of the pyrrhonist, the contradiction consists in his apparently arguing for the impossibility of argumentation – just as a phenomenologist might make a judgement about the possibility of a philosophy that abstains from making judgements. In fact it would not be persuasive to use assertions to argue that assertions are impossible. Yet these accusations of performative contradiction rest on a false assumption. No sceptic or phenomenologist would ever say that the texts he has written contain a rationale or proof – they are reports, as Sextus Empiricus emphasized more



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than once. Sextus Empiricus had hardly properly begun to write when he made clear, as early as the first page: ‘By way of preface let us say that on none of the matters to be discussed do we affirm that things certainly are just as we say they are: rather, we report descriptively on each item according to how it appears to us at the time’ (I.1.4, p. 3). In this respect the phenomenologist, too, is a pyrrhonist. It is the case for both: ‘They are saying what is apparent to them about the subject proposed – not dogmatically making a confident assertion, but describing and reporting how they feel’ (I.23.197, p. 49). And the other way around, we could say the pyrrhonist already understood his text entirely phenomenologically, as a report on the human situation, as a description of how he got along being a human being. For the theme is those things that, ‘manifest a sceptical disposition and our feelings’ (I.18.187, p. 46). It is, almost proto-phenomenologically, about ‘a report of a human feeling which is apparent to the person who feels it.’ (I.27.203, p. 51). In countless places it is made very clear what the accusation of performative contradiction overlooks, namely that pyrrhonists ‘say what is apparent to themselves and report their own feelings without holding opinions, affirming nothing about external objects’ (I.7.15, p. 7). And yet this very restriction against attesting to anything raises the question of why anyone would write his private affairs down for others, and still more pressing, why others should be interested in these private affairs. For if the immanent literary quality of the report cannot be the reason, then there is only one other reason: someone believes that he has experienced something that is valid for others: it is about validity. Someone believes he has discovered in his experience general principles that apply to anyone who has experiences. Once again, the views of pyrrhonist and phenomenologist coincide, despite sharp differences between them in what they discover through experience. The pyrrhonist believes he has discovered how to reach spiritual peace, ataraxia. He believes he has made a kind of moral discovery, which he is reporting to others in the interests of generosity: ‘Sceptics are philanthropic’ (III.32.280, p. 216). The phenomenologist, on the other hand, takes the view that it is possible to describe structures in his own experience that are logically necessary for these experience to be real; one cannot think the reality of this experience without these structures (‘think’ to be understood here as suppose, vermeinen, cogitare). That means that the phenomenological protreptikós

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not only reports on personal experiences, but endorses the re-enactment of experiences in the interests of categorical insight. The phenomenologist fosters an engagement with one’s own experience that leads to certainty about categorical relationships.

Eidetic variation The process of phenomenological proof can be clarified very simply by presenting a classic example. Kant’s argumentation in his Transcendental Aesthetic may perhaps be unexpected, but it is nevertheless especially apt. The claim he develops there is well known: space and time are forms of intuition. Everything that is perceived is perceived in spatial and temporal relationships. For neither space nor time is an empirical characteristic of any object in the world, rather space and time, as forms of intuition, belong to the cognitive apparatus, that is, they are stored cognitive prerequisites that make the perception of something possible in the first place, and so lay claim to be valid for any empirical perception. The appropriate sceptical response to this claim goes: how does Kant know that this is so? How does he justify his principal claim that space and time are necessarily and generally forms of intuition? There is no doubt about it: hence Kant says explicitly that he will not justify this principle empirically; and it cannot be proven empirically through induction at all in any case. The Transcendental Aesthetic does not engage with psychological generalizations, statistics or questionnaires (that would be dreadful). But it is equally uncontroversial that the Transcendental Aesthetic does not employ transcendental deduction either, as Transcendental Logic later did. Kant does not reach his conviction that space and time are forms of intuition by deduction from secure premises, such as ‘It must be possible for all my ideas to be accompanied by the I think.’ So the question arises: If the Transcendental Aesthetic employs neither empirical induction nor logical deduction, how does Kant justify his claim? The answer is clear: he performs an eidetic variation. The eidetic variation is a third way, after induction and deduction, that is specifically for phenomenological proofs, but which, as we can see from Kant, is not practised exclusively by committed phenomenologists.



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The starting point for an eidetic variation is conscious reflection on one’s own mental state; one turns self-reflectively to the situation in which one knows oneself to be: for example, I see a tomato and am certain that for me, it is red. I experience myself in the situation of being in the presence of a tomato that is red for me. The next, critical step consists of fantasizing variations on this situation that one has experienced for oneself. Husserl emphasizes this step into fantasy in countless contexts: we produce the variations in fantasy. I can imagine the tomato in green, in blue, in pink, with or without spots. My capacity to do this is my own experience in a kind of thought experiment. It is entirely right to speak of a thought experiment, since the process of forming variations is instigated with a particular cognitive purpose: it is intended that the limits of the variability be reached; variations are undertaken in order to fail. In the process of arbitrary and random variation, boundaries of variability are experienced, markers that cannot be abstracted even in imagination – and Kant describes exactly such a boundary in the Transcendental Aesthetic: ‘One can never represent that there is no space, although one can very well think that there are no objects to be encountered in it’ (A 24). The argument Kant makes is protreptic: he refers to his own experience, calling for its re-enactment. It is claimed that one cannot imagine certain things. But what does it mean here that ‘one’ can’t do it? How does Kant know that it is not only he who can’t do it, but that no one can? He has found through his own experience that he cannot imagine it. To achieve certainty for oneself, each person must experience this for himself. Private affairs are re-enacted, but from private experiences comes insight into the reality of possibilities. The proof of forms of intuition is not made through argument, but by way of eidetic variation: we are able to imagine red and blue tomatoes, but the effort to imagine tomatoes in space or not in space fails. Just as Kant said: ‘One can never imagine it.’ The proof is therefore achieved by one who experiences this failure and incapacity for himself. Yet this experience or ‘fantasy investigation’ is not an empirical perception; it is not a normal sense investigation with ears or eyes, although it is often spoken of as a visual perception. The self-recognition that one is unable to imagine certain things is a phenomenal insight. Husserl described it as follows in his posthumous text Experience and Judgment. Investigations in
a Genealogy of Logic of 1939: ‘We speak of an essential “seeing” and, in general, of the seeing of generalities. This way of talking still requires justification. We

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use the expression “to see” here in the completely broad sense which implies nothing other than the act of experiencing things oneself [...] this, naturally, does not mean a sensuous seeing’ (p. 348). In short: the Kantian formulation ‘One can never imagine it’ is the expression of a failure Kant himself experienced, that the reader experiences in a certain way, and that he is protreptically encouraged to re-enact by means of the term ‘one’. The categorical experience being encouraged cannot really be explained, and the attempt should be abandoned; it can be described, however. The question does arise, of course, of exactly how much time has to pass before a person gives up the effort to make variations and makes the claim, as Kant did, not only that he cannot imagine another now, at this moment, but further, that he will never be able to imagine another. The question is how to recognize the moment one stops saying to himself: Well, I can’t imagine a tomato, but perhaps I could imagine ducks or cars or pocket calculators without space … the boundary of the variations is established through a particular kind of self-experience Husserl described as follows: ‘This remarkable and truly important consciousness of “and so on, at my pleasure” belongs essentially to every multiplicity of variations’ (p. 342). The variation comes to its end with the experience of each object in the variation becoming ‘an arbitrary example’ (p. 340). The quality that does not change in the variation is then experienced as an essential quality not only of the concrete object, but also of the thing as such: ‘The essence proves to be that without which an object of a particular kind cannot be thought, i.e., without which the object cannot be intuitively imagined as such’ (p. 341). The formulation of Husserl’s that is critical here is ‘without which the object cannot be intuitively imagined as such’. It is clear at this point that with eidetic variation, phenomenology is no longer concerned with describing only private phenomena only in the way they are given. The description of a phenomenon, through the variations, is to become a logic of phenomena: the eidetic variations are wholly within the classical rationalistic understanding that distinguishes empirical facts from logical necessities on the basis of a fact’s always permitting its opposite to be imagined. David Hume, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding of 1748, used exactly these criteria to distinguish matters of fact from relations of ideas: ‘The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible; because it can never imply a contradiction, and is conceived by mind with the same facility



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and distinctness, as if ever so comformable to reality’ (4.2). That is, we may recognize contingent facts by the ease with which the mind imagines their opposites. So it is only a logical step to interpret this Humean description as a methodological challenge, and to undertake the ‘production of an infinitely open multiplicity of variants’ (Husserl, Experience and Judgement, §87) in order to discover which ones have unthinkable opposites. Here we can see that in eidetic variations, the method of discovering necessary relations and the rationalistic proof that we are dealing with a logically necessary relationship are identical. Using the variations, we are supposed to discover and prove what otherwise could not be thought. The Husserlian concept of a vision of ideas is awkward here because of the Platonic connotations. We are, getting back to the matter at hand, dealing with someone making relations of ideas present for himself – with self-evident relations that cannot be imagined otherwise, even by fantasizing freely. It is difficult to say whether a priori structures have been described through eidetic variation. For these are in fact structures whose opposites cannot be imagined, and that are to this extent independent of experience; but this is about relations of ideas, the certainty of which is established only through personal experience. It is, then, about structures that are by no means addressed only within phenomenology. On the contrary: the sort of relations that are described by phenomenologists have long since been addressed in other disciplines. This reflects Husserl’s view that phenomenology is just one of several formal disciplines that use eidetic variations to describe relations of ideas; phenomenology is not even in the forefront. Husserl turns to geometry for most of his key examples of the great success of eidetic variations, concerned as they are in fact not with objective content, but rather, as he says repeatedly, not only in the Ideas, with ‘Wesensverhalte’ [matters of essence]. The Pythagorean theorem is proven using an actual triangle on an actual surface, and yet the process is not an inquiry into facts, intended to show these relations within this particular triangle. But it is not extended inductively either, by examining many more concrete examples. The crucial sceptical question appears once again: how do we know that the theorem applies to all triangles? The extension from an actual triangle to a mathematical insight occurs because the person giving the proof, however he may exercise his fantasy in giving it, is unable to imagine any kind of triangle anywhere to which the steps of the respective proof would not apply. So the

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concrete triangle becomes an instance of triangles as such. This shows how the protreptic challenge to reach certainty through one’s own variations is not at all restricted to phenomenological inquiries. How does Descartes know that his claim cogito, ergo sum is true? The same characteristic features reappear: the statement is not proven empirically or deductively, but protreptically, by means of an eidetic variation: Descartes is not thinking just about wax, but about an idea in fantasy that is like wax in that it is malleable, so as to discover what cannot be thought away. This applies to the self: I am just now experiencing myself as someone who is here in a situation of writing: even in the situation of walking I experience myself as being, in the situation of seeing as well, and in the situation of doubting. The variation of the experience causes something to show up that would not show up in a single experience, namely relations and infrastructures that cannot be thought other than they are. At one time, rather than the expression ‘It then becomes evident,’ whose widespread use and acceptance is not recent (Husserl, Experience and Judgement, §87), one would have spoken of revelation, and said: phenomenology is the attempt to find logical structures in revelations; in order to do this, it uses eidetic variations; it replaces philosophical myths with rational mysticism.

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From the conditions of possibility to the consequences of reality In looking back at the way theories of perception have developed, one notices a distinct thematic focus: at the centre of interest is the origin of perception; questions are raised most often about how perception comes about: how is perception possible? What does a subject need to do in order to perceive? What conditions lead to perception? A theory of perception cannot do otherwise: if such questions are to be answered, then the processes and conditions that lead to conscious perception must be described – and this is exactly the way things look: the history of perception theory reads like a long history of prehistories. It is almost entirely concerned with the conditions that make it possible to see, hear, smell, feel and taste. It doesn’t matter whether the theories are psychological, neurological or even transcendental. Every case involves the invention of an ingenious, obscure entity that constitutes the imperceptible building material of a perception: Eindrücke, sensations, Lego® bricks, sense data and stimuli are discussed. Finished perceptions come from these materials by means of contrived acts of interpretation by the subject – acts of synthesis, filtering, construction, formatting, abduction, conclusion, reading, relieving, structuring, that are as invisible and unconscious as the materials they engage. But as resourceful as these narratives of the origin of perception may be, they remain prehistories dealing with entities and processes that are not groundless, but are not thought through either. It is neither surprising nor objectionable that this is the case – on the contrary: it has to be this way! Since perception does not reveal the conditions of its own genesis to the perceiver, this prehistory of perception can only be thought:

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seeing does not reveal how seeing comes about; even in reflecting on one’s own perception, those acts cannot be discovered that are responsible for the reality of the perception. And for just this reason, because the causes and conditions of perception are imperceptible, perceivers can only explain the origin of their perceptions with constructions, myths, models or other more or less well-founded assumptions – assumptions and suppositions most of us would not want to be without as we go about coping with life. The natural attitude to the world and the normal position in the lifeworld obviously must employ constructed models. Yet however much a person may depend on models in life, the epistemological status of models remains unchanged: for philosophical purposes, all of them are myths. If the human drive to construct things is bound up with an interest in the prehistory of perception, then an interest in the phenomenon of perception itself must take its post-history into account – and this with a clear expectation of epistemic benefit. For the cognitive possibilities change markedly if we reverse the question that is usually posed in perception philosophy – to put it concretely: if we stop asking about subjective conditions of possibility for perception, and instead ask what consequences the reality of perception have for a subject. The advantage of changing the inquiry in this way is obvious: the answer does not require constructions, narratives and occultism – and that in itself is worth noting. It might well be said that the philosophy of perception occupies a special position among the philosophical disciplines. For, in philosophy, it is not unusual to have to contend with the curious problem of not being sure whether the object of one’s considerations even exists. Theorists of knowledge in particular struggle with the question of whether knowledge exists. Such problems happily do not appear in the philosophy of perception. What could we say to someone who seriously refuted the existence of perceptual experiences? The reality of perception is not controversial. And that means that whatever heavenly gods, earthly processes or transcendental acts may be responsible for the origin of my perceptions, their genesis simply doesn’t matter, either for the reality of the phenomenon or for the phenomenal knowledge of one’s own state of mind: if I perceive, I am aware of what it’s like to be a perceiver, even if the genesis of this perception is obscure to me. And more: if I am a perceiver, I not only can, but must know what it is like to be a perceiver. Perhaps we should not speak of knowledge for this reason:



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for if we cannot imagine a perceiver who does not also know what it is like to be a perceiver, then that which is phenomenally certain for him through his existence as a perceiver is something certain, but hardly something known. To be a perceiver is bound up with a drive toward a conscious state of mind, the other side of which is a unique epistemic security: this epistemic security of phenomenal certainty is pure gold for a philosophical consideration of perception. For if we find it is not worth the philosophical effort to take up questions that can’t be answered from evidence, then we are entitled to reverse the question that the philosophy of perception normally poses: not What does a subject put into a perception? But What is in perception for a subject? By reframing the question in this way we come to an inverse form of transcendental philosophy – at least if the question about the consequences of the reality of perception for the perceiver is understood to refer exclusively to consequences that are logically compelling, that is, that are inferred necessarily; it must be about consequences in principle for the perceiver as such. That is, someone who is not subject to the consequences of the perception cannot be a perceiver. This is by no means the case for every consequence: if someone knows how a tree looks, this is without a doubt the concrete consequence of perception – but this is not about a logically necessary consequence, always and inevitably linked to the conditions of perception. It is about this in phenomenology, however: about the important step from a simple description of private phenomena to the discovery of its internal logic. A report about the consequences of the reality of one’s own perception therefore remains un-phenomenological just as long as it is exclusively concerned with concrete and individual consequences, and is not working out, by means of eidetic variations on the consequences one has experienced for oneself, the consequences in principle of the reality of each perception. The fantastic possibilities of perception must be thought through in order to expose what is logically impossible: that which cannot be thought differently; that which cannot become conscious in any other way. It is easy to imagine that not every perceiver will necessarily know what a tree looks like. The inverse transcendental philosophy of perception is concerned with such questions: which inferential or logical consequences – meaning in both cases that their absence cannot be imagined – are bound up with the phenomenon of perception for the perceiver? What can a perceiver claim with certainty

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about the state of mind of any perceiving subject, based on his familiarity with his own perceptions? Stated somewhat more personally: in which situations do I necessarily find myself just because I am a perceiver? Stated somewhat more emphatically: to what existence does my perception condemn me?

From the primacy of the perceiver to the primacy of perception The question about the consequence of the reality of perception may be linked to traditional problems in the philosophy of perception in two ways: on the one hand, it transforms transcendental interest into an inverse form of transcendental philosophy of perception by moving from the conditions of possibility to the consequences of a reality. But, on the other hand, this new framing of the question also involves the explicit effort to show, using the theory of perception as an example, that the alternative between the myth of the given and the myth of the mediate is out of date and incomplete. For when the consequences of the reality of perception is questioned, in principle, it changes such a thing as the internal statics and dynamics between the three relata of any perceptual relationship. It comes to a third constellation between perception, the perceiver and the perceived; another relatum takes over the priority function, and so changes the ratios between them. But the most important thing is: not two, but three constellations are possible! The first constellation arises when the object of perception takes priority. This is always given when a theory of perception operates on the basis of the following assumption, often unstated: there is perception, because there is a real, material, perceived object, which lets its perception be as it is. We are dealing with something close to a paradigm for multiple forms of theory formation. In each of these theories, perception – meaning the state of perceiving – is being researched on the premise that the object perceived in this mental state is an object existing in the material world, which exists there, independently of any perception, with the characteristics it is being perceived to have; the existence of the perceived object is assumed. As a result, no secondary, but only primary qualities occur in these models. To say it simply: if someone sees a red tomato, then he is seeing a red tomato because this red tomato really exists and because



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it really is red – in fact even when he is not seeing it. ‘Because’ is the critical word. We are dealing here with perception clearly defined by the seen object. The existence and the phenomenal qualities of perception are a consequence of the perceived object: because it is this way, it is perceived this way. The perceived thing dominates the perceiver and perception. The processes of determination, immediate and direct in this model, have to be immediate and direct, because in the paradigm of this kind of thinking about perception, a subject has in principle no influence over what he perceives. If the immediacy were not given, means and media would participate in the determination of their perception. But the paradigmatic assumption is the exact opposite, no longer treated as problematical in itself, but rather as constituting the problems to be addressed. In short: those theories known as the myth of the given, as naïve realism, as the theory of causation or even as resemblance- or mirror-theory share the primacy of the object of perception. A second constellation arises when a Copernican revolution turns the subject of perception into a fixed star. Once again, these theories generate questions and answers from an equally unshakeable common premise: perception exists because there is a perceiving subject who lets the perception of an object be as it is. At this point, the subject leaves the mirror stage and becomes an active producer who, because of what he did before, is responsible for the perception that comes later. Even today, in the third millennium, this step into sovereignty is felt to be progress of a nearly spectacular sort: as if each person had to get past the mirror stage afresh and on his own; as if a superficial glance at the contemporary philosophy of perception would not easily establish that the paradigm of mediation has long since turned into a self-evident and widespread myth of the current philosophy of perception, essays with such titles as ‘Perception: Reflection or Construction’ are still written in all seriousness. With as much anger as astonishment we are forced to confirm: the thousandth variation of interpretationism and constructivism still forcefully asserts itself as an urgently needed liberation from the primacy of the object. All the while school children must already be learning to believe: the red tomato is a red tomato for the interpreting subject; how it really looks in itself, independently of the interpreting subject, is in principle unknowable; so it makes no sense to even ask about it. In the most radical explication of this paradigm, even its independent existence is refuted. Apparently it helps

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to represent a theory as a turn that has recently taken place, so as to avoid the question of whether a new turn hasn’t occurred long since. The subject may appear as an interpreting or a creative producer. In either case, in this constellation the perceived things are not seen as they are in themselves, but rather as they are constructed on the basis of their subjective conditions of visibility. When the subject becomes primary, all the qualities of objects necessarily become secondary qualities. It is obvious: in a constellation among the three relata – the subject of perception, the object of perception and the state of perceiving – any one may take on the primary role: there are therefore in principle three constellations: if the state of perceiving gained sovereignty, or in other words, if the reality of perception became the fixed star in the constellation, a paradigm for the philosophy of perception would appear whose basic assumptions would distance themselves equally from both of the foregoing notions of dominance; the problems in this sort of philosophy of perception arise on the basis of the assumption: there is a perceiver, because there is a perception of objects that lets the perceiver be as he is. That clarifies what a reversal and also release is at issue. It is not I who makes the perception as it is, but the perception that lets me be as I am. In the new constellation, the ‘I’ becomes one pole in a relation, a pole that depends on the reality of perception. It becomes a mere correlate, and this in a nearly existential sense: one of the inevitable features of my life is that I must be the subject of my perceptions. In the face of the evidence of this paradigmatic basic assumption, there is no way around it: as long as there is Me, perceiving, it is impossible for me to avoid having to personally serve as the subject of my perceptions; whatever happens, I am a part of it. That means: whether the tomato really is red or only appears red to me by means of some clever interpretation – all consciousness of and interest in such questions abruptly disappears with the coming of the new constellation. Other questions appear in their place, in fact questions that may seem, in contrast to the two traditional paradigms, thoroughly unfamiliar and perhaps even bizarre: what consequences does perceiving a tomato have for the perceiver? What does it mean for me that I perceive? Does the reality of perception also set the terms of the perceiver’s existence? When perception gains priority, not only are such questions reasonable and highly relevant, they can be seen to express the core premise of this paradigm. These are the questions that arise when one adopts



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the view: because my perception exists, I must exist in the world. This treats perception unequivocally as the ur-phenomenon that people will always want to explain, but cannot. It is about outlining a position in which any attempt to explain perception seems to be hubris. For perception achieves its primacy when there is no longer any difference between the question of why there is perception, and the question of why is there anything at all. In fully engaging with the change of position, a particular attitude toward perception takes shape: whatever may be perceived, nothing will ever be so astonishing as perception itself.

From the I to the Me of perception In getting beyond the paradigm of mediate, we come to what seems to be a paradoxical situation: when perception becomes primary, interest does shift from the subject of perception to the reality of the state of perceiving itself – yet this turning away from the subject is done in order to discover more about the subject. It is the consequences of perception for the perceiver that are to be examined; so when perception is primary – just as when the subject is primary – the subject of perception is the central theme. It is clear: even the question to what existence does my perception consign me? is directed toward the subject: it is about me perceiving! For I try to describe my perception so as to discover what existence it imposes on me. So we are not dealing with a paradox: the subject of perception as it appears when perception has priority is not the same subject described by those defending the paradigm of the subject priority. It is not remarkable that a subject can be addressed in two completely different ways in a philosophy of perception, for the very formulation the subject of perception has two meanings. When the subject is primary, the genitive construction ‘of perception’ is understood to be a genitivus obiectivus: this subject is, with respect to perception, understood to be a pre-existing, active subject that brings perception about as its product, as the object it makes. In this analysis the subject is accordingly also the place where the solutions to the problems of the philosophy of perception are to be found. But the genitive case in the formulation the subject of perception can be read equally well as a genitivus subiectivus: the perceiving subject is in this case to be regarded as

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an object that is brought about by perception, as the subject of perception. The question then becomes what sort of subject suits the requirements of perception. This analysis of the genitive is appropriate to a way of regarding the subject that a philosophy based on the primacy of perception would support: it is not that I first exist and then perceive, but rather that my existence is an existence as the subject of my perceptions. The subject then becomes an object resulting from and depending on perception; here the ‘object of perception’ does not mean the thing being perceived, but the subject that is perceiving, although it is described as an object of perception: as something made by a pre-existing perception, because the existence of the perceiving subject is determined by the constraints of perception. It can certainly be said: when perception has priority, the way the subject of perception is addressed corresponds to the literal meaning of subiectum: I am one who is subject to something – subject to the constraints of perception. In this respect I have no choice: my perception, in order to be perception, necessarily requires me as the subject of that perception. Here we must contradict Kant: it is necessary for us to exist; we are the logically necessary subjects of our perception – which, however, is not necessary. The primacy of perception is, in any case, concerned to elaborate a perspective that presents itself in this way: the subject of perception is something whose existence is an existence made by perception as a relatum. For I am the one who is there in my perception – in fact because of my perception – as the perceiving subject of this perception – and I know about this occurrence of me, my existence, through my own acquaintance with it, which is the inestimable advantage of the change in paradigm. The bringing forward or creating of a subject by means of perception is not an act or operation of perception. No one would propose the nonsense that a perception might act or perform as people do: a perception does absolutely nothing! A perception is a mental state or experience in which subjects may find themselves, specifically the condition of taking a particular, describable object to be present and extant. Yet this mental state requires the existence of a subject as a perceiving subject. For something can only be present if there is someone for whom it is present. The formulation ‘is made’ should be understood in exactly this sense of necessarily requiring existence: the reality of a perception makes one a perceiver, just as the birth of a child makes a man a father, or the purchase of an automobile makes someone an owner. In all



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cases – perception, fatherhood and ownership – we are concerned with ways of being in relationships that we should describe, and relationships are regrettably far more difficult to describe than characteristics are. The task is clearly structured: to treat the perceiver as a relatum that appears equiprimordial as the relation, and not as something that precedes perception. This, incidentally, also makes the striking difference to fatherhood clear: one can easily say what a father is without a child: a man. This is why we say that a father has a child or that someone has an automobile. For in having something, a relationship is specified in which the one who has the thing could be described independently of this relationship. The basic idea at issue here goes, simply: a subject has no perceptions, but rather perceives! The perceiver cannot be separated from his perceptions. One could at best speculate about what the subject of perception could be without his perception, using constructions, models and myths of an unworldly, transcendental subject. In any case a perceiver will not establish through his own experience what that subject is that haunts theories of perception. There is no phenomenal evidence of the self; and as long as this is required – and it must be required for a philosophical description, the self must be given up. There is no self-knowledge, for the self is a secret to itself! But just because self is not observable is no reason to abandon a phenomenological philosophy of the subject: even if we can’t recognize who or what is perceiving, our own indisputable acquaintance with what it is like to be a mental being in a perceived physical world is still given. In the case of perception there is just one example of a general principle: I cannot perceive what I am, for I cannot perceive what it is that is perceiving. Yet existence in a blind spot must not be misunderstood as the death of the subject. On the contrary: it would be a complete misuse of the argument about the phenomenal unrecognizability of the self if it were to come to leaving a valuable residue of certainty unused: namely the certainty that I, who does not know what a self is – nevertheless have phenomenal certainty of what it is like to be a perceiving self in a perceptible world. I have personal certainty of my requisite existence as a correlate of consciousness – of my existence in my own blind spot. It could extend to experiences that human beings can hardly avoid. For even if I don’t know who I am, I still know how I am and how things seem to be going with me. In this respect we have to say that the famous Cartesian I think, therefore I am directs our attention in a fatal direction, namely in the direction of a substantial,

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extant subject – the res cogitans. This danger can be avoided with a simple transformation of the fundamentum inconcussum: I think, therefore there is Me – that is: I think, therefore there is Me as the subject of my thinking; so I must be the way a thinker must be in order to be a thinker. Perhaps we must go still further and say: no, through my thinking I don’t actually know that I exist, but only that there is Me. The reality of my perception lets me know beyond any doubt that there is Me in perception, not as a subject of substance, but as an ego-pole in a constellation. For I myself do not experience myself as an object; rather with respect to each object there is Me as the subject for which something is an object. This is all I know of myself – but this certainty is enough for a philosophy of the subject based on one’s own experience. For the Me of perception is, in the truest sense of the word, the salvation of the subject-philosophy of perception. However sceptically we may regard any talk about the ‘I’ of perception, we can speak confidently about how it is for us to be forced to be the subject of our states of perception. We could even go on to say that this may be the most elementary and important description of the Me of perception: there is Me only if there has to be: I am forced to be the subject of my perception. In the world, I may be as free as I like, but my being in the world is the absolutely inevitable consequence of the reality of my perception: no one asked me whether I wanted to take on this role in the world; and playing has nothing to do with it. Each perception is, for its subject, bound up with a merciless personal, inner-worldly duty of presence and participation. One could speak of my phenomenological fate: The reality of my perception leaves me no choice: I am there! I am always part of it! And not only that: the reality of my perception sets out the ways—the existential possibilities—I have of being there, the ways I must become a part of the world. It seems worth the effort, in any case, to give a more precise description of the constraints that are logically necessary for the Me of perception.

The imposition of continuing presence We may disagree about whether all mental states are intentional states; we may also want to discuss whether intentionality can be distinguished from consciousness at all; but whatever the result of these inquiries may be, there



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is no dispute that perceptions are – almost prototypically – intentional states; that which is the case for any intentional state, namely, that it is a consciousness of something, can be seen especially clearly in perception. It is just this particular inner quality of certain mental states or experiences that defines the concept of intentionality: the obligation to exist as a consciousness of something else. For perception, this has the concrete effect of permitting differentiation, first, of a subject who finds himself in a state of perceiving, and second, of an object of which a subject in this state becomes aware. The intentionality of a mental state reveals itself in the existence of a content of consciousness for a subject, at least we can say this if we are not troubled by the spatial metaphor that is bound up with the concept of content. It is true of all intentional conditions, for wishing and imagining as much as for believing and hoping. These experiences are not identical to that which is intentionally present ‘in’ them as ‘content’. On the contrary: with respect to any of these states, it is reasonable to ask ‘who finds himself in this condition?’ ‘What becomes conscious in this condition?’ Still – and it may be the critical point – even if all intentional states consist of an internal relation between a subject and object, this does not mean that the conditions cannot be distinguished from one another by their various kinds of intentional relations, and actually distinguished quite easily. Intentional states differ from one another in the specific impositions they make with respect to the way intentional content is given; there are varieties of intentional experience because each one allows a particular object to impose on a subject in a different way. Each object of consciousness correlates with a specific mental state of the subject. A house that is seen, desired, or imagined imposes differently on the subject of these different mental states, one could even say: it imposes a different phenomenal quality of awareness – and in fact a quality that is so specific to each mental condition that it is precisely the one we fall back on when we are trying to identify a mental state of this sort. This becomes especially clear in the example of perception: how do we actually know that someone is perceiving? The answer is clear: an object is present for a subject exclusively when that subject is perceiving. Perceptions are presentations, for the quality of presentness is a necessary quality of everything that is perceived. This imposition of presence is the criterion that can be used to decide whether and when someone is perceiving

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something: a subject is perceiving just when something is present for him. For me this means: my perception is imposing the obligation to consider whatever-it-is to be present. The concept of the present has a temporal meaning that is not part of the concept of presence in the sense of ‘in attendance’. That something is present initially suggests only that something exists just now. This does not mean that the temporal present is a point in time just now that does not expand. The present of something in time has in itself a structure of protention and retention – and this is exactly what differentiates the concept of the present from that of presence: not everything that exists now in time has therefore also be present in a spatial sense. On the other side of the Earth there are things that count as being in the present, but that are not in attendance. That is the special feature of the concepts of the present and of presence. Both refer to a shared existence in the present in a common space and a common time. What has a presence for someone is not only temporally present, but also spatially present in a common space. For presence of something for someone is always a being there; an asymmetry can readily be maintained: everything that has a presence for someone in this moment is present to him, but not everything that is in the same present moment has a presence in the sense of sharing the same place. But exactly this momentary being in attendance sets the object of perception apart. The specific quality attributable to an object of perception alone is: presence. In fact the phenomenon of perception may be defined in a very traditional way in two steps: first through the defining of the genus proximum and then through the differentia specifica. That is: perception is one of the many mental states with an internal intentional structure; but among them, only perception imposes the presence of the object on the subject – and this for concept-analytical reasons alone: when something has a presence for a someone, that subject’s mental state is called ‘perception’ exactly on the grounds of the phenomenal manner in which the object is given. The phenomenal imposition of temporal and spatial presence is the feature to be identified as the condition of perception. For the idea that something could be perceived without that something having a presence for the perceiver could no more be true than the idea that something could be present for someone without that person having the experience of perception. In short: perception imposes the presence,



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the ‘being in attendance’ of an object for a subject, and one who has to experience this imposition of presence on the basis of his perceptions can – sometimes, at least – also give an account of it.

Describing the imposition of presence: The content of perception Linguistically, the intentional structure of perception is conveyed in the mere structure of a simple accusative sentence, such as I see a house or he smells the flowers. The only problem is: when we are trying to describe perception, statements of the type A sees x bracket out significant aspects of perception, namely their so-called intentional content. They say only in terms of extension to which object a subject has a relationship of perception, but nothing of how that object appears to the perceiving subject. The sentence I see a house does not describe the manner in which the presence of the house is experienced by the perceiver. Should we want to describe this manner as well – that is, to describe as what the object presents itself to the perceiver – the accusative structure must be replaced by a dependent clause, a that-sentence. So the formulation I see that there is a house over there says that the seen object is, for the one seeing it, a house, rather than a palace or a hut: intentional characteristics of the particular experience are being described. That is necessary: by no means everyone who sees a house necessarily sees it as a house. It is not even necessary to know what a house is in order to see an object that is a house. Otherwise we could hardly claim that animals can see houses. Only someone who knows what a house is would have the experience of being able to see that there is a house is over there. Experiences of perception that are related to the same object may differ in the way they grasp this same object, which is the reason we say they have a different content in each case: I see that the house is old. I see that the house has five windows. I see that the house is standing on the street … The content of a perception is the way the intentional object is experienced by the subject; the concrete compulsion, so to speak, that is bound up with a specific perception for the perceiver. A perception without content is unthinkable. For if something is seen, it must have been seen in some way. The concept of content therefore becomes a key concept in the philosophy

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of perception, although not to the same extent in all streams. Philosophies of perception informed by cognitive science and language analysis in particular use the concept of intentional content for the way a perception is experienced. The terms sensual or even phenomenal content are also used, but are effectively synonyms for intentional content. As is usually the case, however, here, too, it is not the term that makes the difference, but rather the phenomena under consideration, and especially the questions the concept evoke. And at least one question crops up regularly when content is at issue: if we agree that perception without content is unthinkable, the next thing we’d like to know is whether there is some content that necessarily applies to all experiences of perception? To put it another way: if someone is in the state of perceiving something, can we logically deduce how this something must appear to him? From the knowledge that a sentence of the type A sees x is true, can we conclude, a priori, that a sentence of the type A sees that … is true? The answer is clear: the quality of the perception, namely the imposition of presentness in all perception in principle, is the general, ubiquitous, a priori content of all perception. In fact we can say: when something is being perceived, the perceived object does not determine how and as what it is being perceived; but we must not fail to notice that the content of a perception is also determined by its being perception and not some other mental state, (e.g. wishing, imagining): when something is being perceived, then the mental state of perception definitely determines the way the something becomes conscious, namely a way that makes this something present. Otherwise this state would not be perception; the state of perception alone permits the subject to experience that which is perceived as present. For it is certain a priori that there is no perception of things absent or non-existent. It is simply unthinkable that a perception could impose an absence of something on a subject. Although of course an awareness of things that are not present and do not exist is entirely possible. Fantasies, memories and desires are examples of states of consciousness in which an object becomes conscious to a subject as absent or non-existent; objects of fantasy are actually defined as having not quality of presence. But that is exactly what is different in perception: all experiences of perception share this quality in principle, that they impose a presence, demand it of their subject. To this extent, the sentence he sees a house does not, in fact, say anything about how the house is being perceived; and yet this is only partially correct; it needs to be completed: even the sentence he sees a house



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says that something is being imposed upon someone to the extent that he can talk about having a perception. Whatever this something may be, it imposes its presence on the perceiver: otherwise it would not have been perceived. And that means: the sentence I see a house does not describe any concrete, definite content in this instance: no specific identification of the thing, no particular interpretation of the thing and no particular persuasion about the thing. But the sentence I see a house describes a general content: namely the content that is bound up in principle with every perception. There is an imposition that is particular and essential to the phenomenon of perception. So the sentence I see an extant house says no more than the sentence I see a house. Existence is not a quality of the house that can be perceived, as one might perceive, say, that the house is red. The perceived house is an extant house because it is a perceived house, and not because the existence of the house was perceived. It follows, then, that the sentence I see a house has the same relationship to the sentence I see an extant house as the sentence I see a house has to the sentence it is true that I see a house. In the connections between perception and truth, we encounter statements that a have striking resonance with the literal meaning of German word for perception, Wahrnehmung, namely taking [something] to be true. Perception permits consciousness only of things that force the perceiver to accept, as true, a proposition claiming that these things exist. It may be idle to speculate about the origin of the singular manner in which presence is imposed in perception; as if perception could ever be understood or even explained. The main thing is that the consequences of this genuine mystery may be described: the reality of perception consigns the perceiver to an existence in a world that is in attendance in the present; to a permanent existence in the present. What a categorical constraint: because I perceive, it is compulsory for me to be in a world that is extant and in the present, a world that is present and real!

The quality of perception and the moment of apperception In phenomenological description, the concept of content is not very useful; the concept of the way something is given is used, and this for good reason. For, in contrast to the concept of content, the concept of a way of being

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given is a meta-concept that combines two specific sub-forms of the way something may be given, at least if we orient ourselves according to Husserl. For Husserl distinguishes between two moments in the way a perceived object is given. These determine, independently of one another, the way an intentional object imposes on the subject: there is, for one, the moment of quality [Moment der Qualität] and for the other, the moment of apperception [Auffassungssinn]. He characterizes quality as that aspect of the realm of experience that changes when the same object becomes conscious in various states of consciousness. When an object is perceived, it is experienced in a way that is different from the way it would be experienced if it were wished or imagined. Apperception, i.e. the second moment, is that aspect in the realm of experience that can change within the state of perception without preventing the state from continuing to be one of perception. The same house may be perceived in various ways even within perception – say, if it is perceived as a red, derelict, palatial, Renaissance or whatever other sort of house. But we still cannot say that something is being perceived as present or as absent. Perception does not put me in the state of perceiving something as present for me. For the presentness of the perceived thing is not an interpretation or an explanation of the perceived thing that could vary. It does not permit something to be perceived as either present or absent. This is the reason the perceiver’s certainty that the object of perception is in the present is not in the mode of as something, but is the real present, with the indisputable certainty of every form of knowledge by acquaintance. This is the key reason perception cannot be reduced to any act of interpretation: one may perceive a thingamajig as a house, a palace, a hut, or a daub of colour, but not as present or absent. For perception cannot permit a thingamajig to appear as present, as extant or as real at all, because it is not in a position to let the thing not be present. Only if it can be other than it is can the mode of existence of something that exists be an existence-as-something. In short: we are concerned with two moments in the experience of perception, each of which designates one of the modes of being given, and both of which need to be kept distinct linguistically as well as technically, which is impossible using the regrettably widespread notion of content. On the contrary: a reductive position is inherent in the usual and traditional concept of content: the concept of content typical of language analysis − which should



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really specify how something is experienced − is used as a synonym for the phenomenological concept of Auffassungssinn [apperception] which, however, does not refer to the whole quality of experience at all, but only to the way something is experienced within a perception. So the concept of content does not let us grasp that the special way I perceive something in the world is not the point where my perception begins to impose on me: the real imposition is perception itself. Whatever I perceive is bound up, for me, with an experience of presence – this is certain a priori, for otherwise my state would not be perception. So this quality must be added to the meaning of the traditional concept of content if it is really to pertain to the whole mode of being given − and this is what happens in John R. Searle’s philosophy of perception. His philosophy of perception is central for an understanding of the concept of content, since here, for the first time within the language analytic tradition, an effort was made to expand the concept of content phenomenologically. Searle explicitly considers the quality of presentness to be an extension of the concept of content. As a result, with Searle – and this is a reasonable suggestion – the concept of content ceases to be synonymous with Husserl’s Auffassungssinn [apperception] and instead becomes a concept of the way something is given. In Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind of 1983, Searle writes in this vein: ‘The content of the visual experience, like the content of the belief, is always equivalent to a whole proposition. Visual experience is never simply of an object, but rather it must always be that such and such is the case. […] When I say that the content of the visual experience is equivalent to a whole proposition I do not mean that it is linguistic but rather that the content requires the existence of a whole state of affairs if it is to be satisfied’ (p. 40). So, in other words: a thing can only be perceived if one is convinced that it is the case – otherwise it would not be a perception. Yet – and the following idea may be surprising at first – that is by no means a reason perception must necessarily be, as Searle believes, inferentially bound up with acquiring beliefs. That is the exceptional thing about perception: although it is necessarily bound up with the presumption that something is the case, it is not necessarily bound up with a belief that something is the case, which is possible for a simple reason: not every mental state in which something is the case for someone is necessarily a state of believing that something is the case.

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Being certain that something is the case: Knowledge and certainty There is a wide-ranging discussion of inferential associations between perception and belief still, one gets the impression that two main positions are at issue: there is, first, the classical position, contending that each perception must logically be an effort to believe the principle for this tendency is seeing is believing. What it means is that the state of perception for the perceiver is necessarily bound up with having true convictions, opinions or beliefs; having beliefs is, accordingly, an inevitable result of the reality of perception. This position is especially clear in David M. Armstrong’s A Materialist Theory of the Mind of 1968, in George Pitcher’s A Theory of Perception of 1971, and even in John R. Searle. As different as their views may be in the details, they share the principle that perceptions are necessarily bound up with having beliefs. Yet this very opinion is also contradicted. In discussions of the relationship between perception and belief there is also a second thesis, exactly the opposite of the first, according to which there is no necessary connection between the condition of perceiving and the condition of belief. As Fred I. Dretske, the key advocate in this context, makes clear in Seeing and Knowing of 1969, seeing a bug is like stepping on a bug: both can happen without anyone having to believe or not believe anything about the bug (p. 5). This is no reason at all to doubt that actual perceptions can be bound up with convictions and also usually are bound up with convictions − only that these connections are of a psychological or associative, rather than logical, kind. The main thing is that there could be such a thing as a so-called non-propositional perception, which would only be that something looks different from the immediate surroundings to someone without his or her believing anything at all about this something. As intractable as the two parties to the discussion of the logical association between perception and having beliefs appear to be, we must not forget that the struggle is occurring on the same platform. Both parties share the assumption that only one of the two parties can be right: either perception necessarily leads to belief or perception does not necessarily lead to belief − tertium non datur. But that is exactly what is questionable: is tertium non datur appropriate in this case? A look at the varieties of becoming aware that something is the



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case raises grave doubt. There are several – at least two – kinds of subjective certainty that something is the case. Yet both of these classical positions argue on the premise that there is just one mode of becoming aware that something is the case: this mode is that of having a belief. In a certain sense one could even say that both classical positions are correct, although they contradict one another. This is meant as follows: one could affirm, to those critics who deny a logical connection between perception and belief in fact, no perception is necessarily bound up with a belief. Only that is no reason not to notice that every perception is nevertheless necessarily bound up with a different manner of becoming subjectively aware that something is the case. Still, those who argue for the logical correlation are right in a certain sense as well: in fact every perception is bound up with a subjective self-certainty that something is the case – only one must not fail to notice that this self-certainty is not the self-certainty that occurs in a state of believing. It is clear: the actual problem is not the various viewpoints themselves, but the ground they do not discuss: without a differentiation among the ways of becoming subjectively aware, both sides, first, categorize all mental states in which something is the case for someone as ‘belief ’, and, second, collapse the different meanings of the concepts ‘belief ’, ‘opinion,’ ‘conviction,’ ‘faith’ and ‘knowledge’ into one. That is, if someone is sure or if someone feels or if someone is convinced or if someone thinks or if someone believes or if someone assumes or becomes aware in some other way that something in the world is the case, this occurs without any sort of differentiation in the one state of having a conviction. This lack of differentiation among the various ways of being-sure-of-oneselfthat-something-is-the-case makes it impossible to describe the special way in which perception makes the perceiver aware of the perceived thing as something in the world. Only by accepting the premise that having a belief is the only way of becoming aware of something can we conclude, from the insight that this is not necessarily the way perceptions occur, that perception is not bound up with becoming aware at all. The following example may help to distinguish between the two ways of being sure that something is the case. Think, on the one hand, of a state in which someone is certain of having shares of stock, and, on the other hand, of a state in which someone is certain of having stomach ache. We are concerned in both cases with intentional experiences, and in both cases, someone is

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certain that something in the world is the case. What is true for the state of someone knowing he has shares is also true for the state of someone having pain: both are certain that something is the case. Yet only the first state of owning shares can be designated belief, opinion or conviction. If this belief should further be shown to be a true and justified belief, the state could also be described as knowledge; one is then justified in claiming: I know I have shares. And this is exactly what is not possible with stomach pain. The sentence I know that I have stomach ache makes no sense, although I am subjectively just as certain that my pain is the case in the world. For me it is equally beyond doubt that my stomach pain is real. The difference from having shares of stock is clear: for me it is impossible to be mistaken, that is, to think I have pain that doesn’t exist in reality, as one could be mistaken about owning shares. And here we have the feature that clearly distinguishes the pain-state from the knowledge-state. It is completely unreasonable to claim that someone has knowledge of the existence of stomach pain. The formulation I know that I have stomach ache simply makes no sense, however often we may hear it. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein got to the heart of the problem with so-called knowledge of pain – in remark 246 [1953]: ‘If we are using the word “to know” as it is normally used (and how else are we supposed to use it?), then other people very often know when I am in pain. Yes, but all the same not with the certainty with which I know it myself! – It can’t be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I am in pain. What is it supposed to mean – except perhaps that I have pain?’ That means: it is by no means as one might think, that I myself know whether I have stomach pain and another can only guess this. It is rather exactly the reverse: only one who does not himself have pain has knowledge of the existence of pain; for only he can be mistaken in his opinion and in his judgement. For someone standing outside it, it is not certain beyond doubt whether someone else has pain. Yet how could one be mistaken about the presence of his own pain? That distinguishes the one who has pain from the one who knows about pain: someone who is certain that he has pain has a form of subjective certainty different from someone who is certain that he knows something. But just because there is this difference in the way awareness is attained, it does not follow that having pain is simply not a case of reaching awareness of something that exists. The problem is, finally, of a linguistic type: the terms for the special epistemological status



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of this kind of being-certain-of-oneself with respect to pain are rare, and the risk is commensurately high that this kind of subjective certainty, too, is being referred to as knowledge, belief and persuasion. The concept of ‘phenomenal knowledge’ walks right into this trap: it designates something as knowledge that cannot be any special sort of knowledge at all because it does not fulfil the conditions of knowledge. This is not a reason to avoid it; only we do need to be careful that this language does not level out differences – which is entirely possible by means of a reflection on alternative concepts: this is about concepts such as ‘certainty’ and ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ [Kenntnis] – unless we also want to include the concept of revelation as used by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Certainty is categorically different from knowledge: for someone who has stomach pain does not have knowledge, but rather certainty about the existence of the stomach pains. Certainties permit no doubt that that which is certain is the case. The categorical difference between knowledge and certainty, or between Erkenntnis and Kenntnis, is helpful in describing the kind of being-sureof-oneself that is given when a perceiver is certain that a perceived object exists. Here we need to take care not to concern ourselves with, say, ways of being true independently of a subject, but to be concerned exclusively with ways of subjective taking-to-be-true. Now we can say in exactly this regard: the certainty that a perceived thing exists is the same sort of certainty as in a state of pain, but not the same as that in a state of knowledge. For if someone sees something, this is, for him, bound up with the subjective certainty in the form of an inevitable Kenntnis that something is the case – which exactly does not mean that he therefore already knows that something is the case. On the contrary: a perception does not impose knowledge on the perceiver – it does impose certainties. Knowledge and certainties impose taking-to-be-true on their subjects in different ways. When something is perceived by me, I do not therefore necessarily know yet whether this something exists, but I must be acquainted with its existing. There is an inevitable quality of imposition that every perceiver must endure: he must tolerate certainty of being personally present in a reality. Anyone who perceives necessarily acquires a subjective certainty that something is and how it is; he must live in a certainly existing world − and cannot do otherwise. For whatever someone may see, hear, smell, feel or taste – whether it be a thing, an event or a difference, his perception

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will make him feel that this perceived thing is present and real. For if this imposition were not given, the state in which the subject finds himself could not be identified as perception. It is in any case unthinkable that someone would say: I see this, yet I have no sense that it is present. The force my perception exercises on me is the force of certainty that there is a real world. No knowledge of the world is forced upon a human being simply on the basis of his situation in the world. The sort of being sure that is inherent to perception is rather taking cognizance that something certainly exists. That the perceived world is real is not knowledge but a stark certainty: when I perceive, I must be aware, as I would be of pain, that I am in a real world and that quality of reality about what I perceive is no interpretation that might be different. That is the fate of one who perceives: he must be there in an unequivocal reality. He cannot even make the excuse that the whole world, everything he perceives, is just an illusion.

The impossible epoché A rudder blade at the stern of a boat appears to be bent; the helmsman at the stern has a perception of a rudder blade that is present, and that is bent. For him, this damaged rudder blade is as genuinely present as it is possible for something to be. If the rudder blade is interpreted as appearance, there is trouble. Then a conviction comes into play that in reality there is no bent rudder blade at all, but only a straight one. The bent rudder blade is deemed an illusion. This step may be broadly generalized: illusions always appear when certainties are treated as knowledge or, to say it differently, when awareness gained through perception, which is not knowledge but is nevertheless treated as knowledge. For this is actually an example of an illusion that is not perceptually convincing. For hardly anyone is convinced that the rudder blade is bent. But exactly by not being convinced, merely by having perceptions, we still find ourselves becoming aware that something is the case. This way of becoming aware of something being the case even resists knowledge. For even if we know that there is no problem with the rudder blade, we become aware that it is bent. The problem arises when the helmsman says, for example, I know that the rudder blade is bent because I see it that way. For this



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claim cannot be made on the basis of his experience of perception: through perception alone he just wouldn’t know that it is bent. In order to do that he would have to be able to see something that isn’t there. But he always sees something that is there: he sees a bent rudder blade that is there, or a straight one that is there. So the problem does not arise with the claim that the rudder blade is bent, but with the claim to know, on the basis of perception, that it is bent. From this, someone’s state of seeing that the blade is bent, the conclusion is then drawn that this person also knows the blade is bent. But seeing that something is does not lead to the knowledge that something is − although it does lead to certainty that something is. In equating these two states − that of seeing that something is with the knowledge that something is, the problem arises that illusions seem to be contradictions between two states. For in fact most people know that a rudder blade is straight when it is pulled out of the water. On the basis of this knowledge − rudder blades out of water are straight – people like to take the view that perception has delivered false knowledge. But this is exactly what cannot be justified: the perception of a bent rudder blade does not deliver false knowledge, because a perception doesn’t deliver knowledge at all, and is not necessarily bound up with a conviction. Perception rather delivers an awareness by acquaintance of what is the case in the world in which I am a subject – and it is worth noting: an awareness by acquaintance cannot be made relational by way of knowledge. For this reason we continue to defend our knowledge that the rudder blade is straight, even if we have seen the rudder blade bent. No one would let his pain’s existence be made relative through medical knowledge The wish to have the rudder blade be straight does not contradict the perception that it is bent, either. If someone has phantom pain, his awareness that his leg hurts in such and such a way does not contradict that fact that there is no leg present. Since we are dealing with different ways of being subjectively certain of oneself, we can only maintain: knowledge about what is the case in the world, however it is justified, does not always correspond to one’s own certainty by acquaintance of what is the case in the world. The world that perceiving human beings are obliged to become acquainted with, because of their perception, which is to say their life world, has characteristics that are not identical to those characteristics that may be the content of knowledge. It is not surprising that there is a difference here: the perceived life world also has characteristics unlike those of the world

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one would like. There is no reason to rationalize away the authority of what is noticed – and in particular there is no reason to relativize the validity of awareness by acquaintance through knowledge, and so treat the world of which one is aware in perception as an apparent and therefore inauthentic world. For the reality of the perceived world cannot be an apparent reality. If it were, it would not be a perceived world at all. Perception alone provides a standard for what really is present – for without perception we would not even get as far as an experience of presence. That has far-reaching consequences for the phenomenology of perception in particular. The reality of stomach pain cannot be bracketed out in an epoché, any more than the perceived object’s quality of presence can be negated without turning the perceived object into something that is no longer a perceived object. René Descartes is famous for having radically doubted the reliability of perception. In his Meditations he argues that we may doubt reality and existence of what is seen; what is perceived to be real could be just an illusion of reality. We have to realize that things can seem to us as if what we are seeing really is present; yet in reality we are being deceived. Descartes considers it justified, through a reference to a rather devious God, but then also by reference to everyday sensual deception, that it is better not to believe that the things we perceive really exist. For illusions – such as the rudder blade that appears bent in water – would show that people think they are seeing things that in reality do not exist at all. Radical as he is known to be, in his Meditations on First Philosophy, he applies this argument to his own body: ‘It could even happen that I have no eyes with which to see anything’ (II. Med., §23) For in this case, too, it is not the perceived thing, but only the reality of the act of perceiving that does not allow itself to be interpreted as apparent reality: ‘But it could not happen that, while I see or think I see (I do not now distinguish these two), I who think am not something’ (II. Med., §23). That is, a person who is seeing has no certainty of the existence of the perceived thing, but does have a certainty of his own existence as one who is seeing. The consequences of this argument for the Me of perception are clear: it can be that I, as a perceiver, could ‘regard myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, no sense, but as nevertheless falsely believing that I possess all these things’ (I. Med., §16). Descartes’ engagement with perception can be described with a comparison: suppose someone wanted to research the geometric characteristics of triangles



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and happened upon the glorious idea that he could do this really well if he began by doubting whether all triangles really have three corners. The result of this doubt is obvious: the object supposedly under consideration is destroyed. A person who starts thinking mathematically about triangles by supposing that perhaps not all triangles have three corners has suddenly and completely stopped thinking about triangles – the same holds for the way Descartes treats perception: we are dealing with a perceiver only if that person takes what he is perceiving to be real and present. A person who, in his philosophical considerations of perception, doubts the real existence and presence of what he perceives, doubts the very thing that lets him identify his own intentional state as perception. The attribution of presence – and in fact the presence of something real is the irreducible sign of any state of perception; it is the one – and in fact the only – way to recognize the perceiver himself, that he is a perceiver. Anyone who doubts the real and actual existence of what is seen has therefore stopped treating the thing seen as seen. The attribution of presence to the perceived is the definition of someone being in a state of perception. The same holds for illusions. The locus horribilis in Descartes’ Meditations can be identified with precision; the key passage is short; it is the passage quoted above in which he identifies seeing something with thinking that one is seeing something: ‘I am seeing, or – and I make no distinction for now – while I am aware that I am seeing.’ The categorical error is just here: equating the state of seeing something with the state of thinking one is seeing something. For someone who sees something does not presume that something could be there, but rather that it is there for him. In The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty showed, in a way that is impossible to misunderstand, that if these two things are the same, a phenomenology of perception becomes impossible: ‘Any contention that the perception is indubitable, whereas the thing perceived is not, must be ruled out. If I see an ash-tray, in the fullest sense of the word see’ − it can hardly be a coincidence that Merleau-Ponty uses Husserl’s favourite object, and so lets us know who is being addressed, ‘there must be an ash-tray there, and I cannot forego this assertion. To see is to see something. To see red is to see red actively in existence. Vision cannot be reduced to the mere presumption of seeing …’ (p. 374). Although Merleau-Ponty’s argument is typical of phenomenological thought, it gets phenomenology into trouble, at least as long as phenomenology

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is understood to be neo-Cartesian on this critical point, which is not infrequently the case. There is a widespread common attitude – not altogether unjustified – that the phenomenology of perception, in its descriptions, is not concerned with whether the things being perceived really exist in an external world. The phenomenological epoché encourages us, one might say in an entirely Cartesian way, not to pursue the reality of the perceived, and instead to declare the existential question to be unimportant to the description of perception. In Husserl’s words, it inhibits the positing of existence. What this means is that things in the world are no longer thought to really exist. Husserl speaks, in Ideas, of an ‘Annihilation of the World’ (§49). So epoché becomes a kind of contemplative solipsism – yet this is exactly the salient point: when it comes to perception, epoché is simply impossible! By bracketing out existence, the method destroys the mental state defined by a positing existence. An understanding of the epoché as a withdrawal from being necessarily pushes phenomenology over into an aesthetic theory that treats the world as an image observed contemplatively, utterly transfiguring and mistaking the situation of human beings; nothing so completely misses the situation itself. Perception sees to it that human beings cannot deny their worldliness. My perception just does not permit me to be an onlooker in the world. Rather I am forced, because I perceive, to participate in the real events to the world – and, furthermore, I must be aware of it: I am a perceiver only if I am in the state of believing myself present in a real, and not in an apparent world. The idea of a phenomenological epoché therefore contradicts the idea of a phenomenological description of the situation in which I find myself as a result of my perception. If, during perception, the positing of that perceived object’s existence is bracketed out, that is, submitted to the epoché, then we simply are no longer describing the phenomenon of perception. That means: in the philosophy of perception, the epoché is not achieved by abstention from the question of the perceived object’s existence, but only as abstention in the use of models for describing perception.



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From impression to expression to taking part As numerous as the problems and perspectives may be within the philosophy of perception, a satisfying unity prevails in the description of perception in one key point: perception is a case of an intentional state, in which a subject is made aware of a presence and of the present. And yet as firmly as this basic view is defended across the boundaries of various positions, it doesn’t seem to help much; in any case the unity in principle seems to be forgotten with alacrity as soon as the salient question is raised: what sort of relation comes about when something is present for someone? What sort of relation is given when an intentional state is given? To which relations can the intentional relation of perception be compared in terms of its formal qualities? The description of the constellation linking perception, the perceived and the perceiver cannot end with the mere statement that the perceiver has an awareness of the present existence of the perceived thing – on the contrary, this is where the real work of description begins. The differences and squabbles inside the philosophy of perception are not about whether perception is intentional, but about what is being said when we say that perception is intentional. This last question is where the opinions clearly part company – and this in strict accordance with whatever paradigm is in the background. Each of the three paradigms of the philosophy of perception corresponds to a fundamentally different understanding of the intentionality of perception and its relata. In the paradigm primacy of the object, the intentional relationship of perception is a relationship of impression. Although the concept of intentionality is not in common use in this paradigm’s theories, there is nevertheless a clear and distinct idea of intentionality: here, perception is the state in which the perceived object makes an imprint, an image or an impression on the perceiver: accordingly, perception is exactly that mental state in which the perceived thing makes an imprint, image or impression on the perceiver. Intentionality is understood as an emanation from the object: something comes from the object, beams over and makes an impression on the subject; the subject of perception is accordingly understood to be a subject that is impressed, affected. We are dealing here with a rather traditional kind of philosophy that pictures consciousness as an image, a wax tablet or a great mirror. The wax tablet and the mirror are the medial precursors of perception,

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if perception is understood to be a trace of a material object – and, because it is, the perceived object is always a pre-existing material object in this paradigm; consciousness of perceiving this thing’s presence is the immediate impression or, more exactly: the momentary causal effect of this perceived thing. This implied image of intentionality as a trace becomes especially apparent when we sketch actual images of the perception situation. The reference is to the arrows that illustrators fall back on when they try to represent intentionality. One who believes that intentionality can be illustrated with an arrow must decide whether the arrow should point from the object to the subject or the other way around. If the perception relata are ordered so that the object is in the primary position, the direction is clear: perception is modelled as a process that may be depicted as an arrow from object to subject, that is, from the cause to the effect. Intentionality goes from the object towards, or even into the subject. The subject becomes a kind of bucket into which things beam and flow. For in the act of perception, something presses in on a subject and, by means of its pressing, produces a trace there, an image or mental representation. The question this constellation, as a philosophy of perception, needs to answer, is: how, assuming that perception is a consciousness of the presence of something, does an object that is present produce an impression on the subject? It can hardly be surprising that when the paradigm the primacy of the object shifts to the paradigm primacy of the subject, the arrow of intentionality turns around 180 degrees. For subject primacy describes the relationship of intentionality in perception as a movement not of impression but of expression. The relevant textbook illustrations are striking in this case as well: the subject is here, the object is there, and there is an arrow between them, only this time from the subject to the object, revealing on what sort of image of perception this equally traditional paradigm draws: through the act of perception, a subject directs himself toward an object, and specifically toward an object that the subject himself has constituted. The perceived object is understood not as an independent material thing, but as an interpretative construct – the end product of information processing, which is, in the relevant theories that style the myth of the mediate, obviously always described as terribly complex. How often can we hear that the process of perception is a complex interpretation process – complex by what standard? Since in this model a thing is only ever perceived if the subject has constructed this thing, the relation



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between subject and object has a clear direction: the existence of the perceived thing comes from the subject; it is the result of a subjective act. The points of continuity and contrast with the primacy of the object may be named: in both cases, perception is a product at the end of a process: in one case it comes at the end of a causal chain from the object to an effect on the subject, in the other, it comes at the end of an act of interpretation on the part of the subject. In the myth of the mediate, something is seen because it is constructed by the subject. Through this sacrosanct basic assumption – that perception’s intentionality is an emanation of the subject on an object − this paradigm’s way of framing the problem emerges, which is: that perception is consciousness of the presence of something means that it must be explained how a subject creates the present object by means of his act of interpretation. The main point is easy to recognize: equating intentionality with directionality, depicting relationships of intentionality with arrows, aiming and shooting, treating intentionality as an impression or emanation, are equally fatal – or, better, a tragic birth defect that can be blamed on the father. For in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint of 1874, Franz Brentano not only introduced the concept of intentionality into philosophical discussion, but also provided its metaphorical interpretation: intentionality, for him, is both consciousness of something and its direction toward an object. And this initial identification appears to have persevered without difficulty. At least there are very few views in contemporary philosophy that are so widely considered obvious as the thesis that intentionality is directed. Still, impressive distribution and acceptance does not improve a metaphor – and in this case it is all the more astonishing, for the problem that is bound up in the theory of consciousness with the bewitched directionality metaphor is exceedingly well known: consciousness is not a spatial entity. It changes nothing about this plain statement to say that consciousness is consciousness of something. Obviously there is consciousness of spatial relationships, but consciousness of them is as spatial as consciousness of a red tomato is a red tomato. But since direction and directedness can only be spatial, the problem is quickly evident: with the assertion that on the grounds of its intentional structure, consciousness is directed at something, the relation between consciousness and its intentional object is modelled as distance overcome. We inevitably find ourselves in the long tradition of reifying and spatializing consciousness

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– and this tradition will certainly last as long as theories of cognition and consciousness seriously look for accesses and ways into the world. The myth of access to the world and the directionality of intentionality are two sides of the same coin: in both cases theories are trying to describe how a worldless subject sets out for the world on his own, or sends his intentionality on the way to overcoming the chasm between himself and a distant world. When the problem of knowledge of the world is formulated as a spatial problem, it is no surprise that the suggested solutions involve extension in space. We need to distinguish between the description of perception as directionality and directionality within perception: it is a familiar and frequent experience for a perceiver, in his perception, to direct himself toward an object. One sees a group of people and concentrates one’s attention on a certain person. Yet in this case of directing attention to something specific, we are describing a process that takes place in a spatial situation. In a perceived reality, the perceiving subject can direct himself toward particular objects. But just because a subject does this consciously and willingly is no reason to understand the whole of perceived reality as the product of an unconscious directionality of a subject. The attentive, concentrated and conscious look is a special case of perception that cannot be promoted to the canonical case of perception. For it assumes a subject of perception who is already part of a spatial reality, in which a subject directs himself towards an object – and it is exactly this assumption that concerns the primacy of perception. The primacy of perception is bound up with an understanding of intentionality that distances itself from arrow models of intentionality, the metaphor of directionality and ideas about emanations and impressions. Instead, it tries to grasp the internal relation of intentionality according to a subject’s own awareness of the underlying phenomenon: the intentionality of perception is a participatory relationship. The state of perception is defined by being a relationship of intention, in which the perceiver appears as one relatum in the relationship: the perception of something is given exactly when the perceiver is sharing his present with that something. One can only agree with Aristotle: ‘the whole is necessarily prior to the part’ (1253a). Perception – the experience in which it is possible to differentiate between a present subject and a present object – is more original that the perceiver and the perceived. This is why we need to assume, not that I create my perception in the world, but that my



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perception of the world is tied to the consequence that I am in it. Perceivers, because they are perceivers, become part of the world they perceive − inevitably: they must share their own present with the present of things. Perception produces an ontological identity between what is perceived and the perceiver; one can have no object of perception without oneself sharing a quality of that object: namely, perceptibility in the world. The perceived world surrounds me, not as the Other that doesn’t matter to me, but as a reality in which I am as well. One might well speak of a price that must be paid for the presence of something in perception: whether one wants to be or not, one is personally involved in the perceived world. For without the perceiver’s being there physically, it is unthinkable for something to exist in the present. Accordingly, we need to think of the Me of perception: my perceptions do not make impressions on me, nor do I direct myself toward a distant world: my perceptions let me participate – in fact unavoidably! That means: perception is thinkable only with the consequence of the one who perceives having a worldly existence. One can then say, not only I see, therefore I am, but also beyond this, I see, therefore I myself am in the visible world. For the presence of the perceived that is given through perception necessarily requires the presence of the perceiver, because the relationship of presence – in contrast to arrow-like directionality – is a symmetrical relation: When A is present with B, B is also present with A. But when A is directed towards B, B is not necessarily directed towards A. We can therefore hold on to the classical idea of perception as a realizing consciousness – being careful not to forget that what is being realized through perception is not an object, but a relationship: the part-to-whole relationship between me and the world. Because my perception is real, there is Me as a part of the world – in fact nolens volens: for me there is no choice: no substitutes are available to participate in the world through my perception; each person must do that for himself. You can’t have anyone else perceive for you. It is practically the conditio humana: no one other than I myself can be the subject of my perception. That means: my own irrefutable existence comes into being through perception. This immersion is what lends perceived things their irrefutable existence. For if there can be no doubt about one’s own existence – cogito, ergo sum − and if perception furthermore makes me part of something larger, then neither can there be any doubt about the existence of that in which perception lets me participate. My personal

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participation is the reason it is possible to see only those things that really exist. For someone who wants to doubt the existence of what is perceived must ultimately – and it is unthinkable – doubt his own existence. With this it becomes possible to formulate a criterion for deciding when it is reasonable to say that something exists. A thing exists exactly when its perception is constructing the perceiver’s presence. The familiar idea that the world is that which we perceive falls somewhat short: it would be more accurate to say: the world is that of which perception lets me be a part. A goalkeeper is part of a football team. Yet the goalkeeper’s being-part-ofthe-team cannot be understood spatially, and was never meant to be, even if the linguistic formulation doesn’t indicate that the relational logic of being-inthe-football-team is different from that of being-in-a-drawer. For the second case of being-in-something is of a spatial kind – and that means: that which is in something does not become part of the thing in which it is as a result of the relationship. A lighter in a drawer is not a part of the drawer. Yet with the goalkeeper it is the case: if someone is engaged as goalkeeper in the football team, he becomes part of the whole through this action. One hardly need point out how contrived the questions are: does the goalkeeper have a direct or indirect relationship to his team? Does my liver have mediate or immediate access to my body? In whatever way we might answer these questions, the answers could only be more absurd nonsense, for there is a categorical error in the way the questions are framed. Should the primacy of perception establish itself in thought about perception, it would have the effect of making talk about ways and accesses to the world appear to be similarly absurd nonsense: both cases involve a categorically false understanding of the relation. For neither the engagement of a goalkeeper in a team nor in the realization of a perception is about the solutions to a bridging problem, but rather in each case about the realization of a part-to-whole relation. The relationship of the perceiver to the perceived cannot be described with the categories ‘mediate’ and ‘immediate’ at all, because between a part and the whole, that is between the subject and the perceived, there is no spatial interval or distance. Therefore, when perception is achieved, no gap is bridged; rather, participation is realized. My perception always takes me along; I must get into the world I perceive. If we want to distinguish between ‘being a part’ and ‘taking part’ we would even have to say that perception doesn’t just let me be a part of the world as a stone



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is, but forces me to take part in the world. Because the state of perception is, for me, bound up with a consciousness of belonging to the world. Just as someone only takes part in a game if he knows he is taking part in this game, so a state of perceiving is only achieved when the perceiver knows what it is like to be a part of the world – which does not mean that participation in the world is not in other respects completely different from taking part in a game. For example, a player must know when and where the game begins and ends. But exactly this knowledge about the limits of the world is not bound to the state of perception. So one can’t actually say that a part-to-whole relation is realized through perception either. It may be more accurate to speak of a part-to-something-larger rather than to a whole in the case of perception, at least this corresponds to one’s own experience of being a perceiver. For that of which my perception makes me part is not present to me as a complete whole; a whole has edges and boundaries where it starts and ends. But the reality in which my perception lets me participate does not have these very things: it has neither a beginning nor middle nor end. The boundaries of the larger thing, of which I must, through my perception, be a smaller part, resist perception, and that determines my personal complicity with the world: the reality of my perception consigns me to life in a world bounded by horizons. So it is misleading to say that perception puts me in a cave- or prison-like situation. As if he had never himself perceived, Paul du Bois-Reymond wrote in 1890, in Über die Grundlagen der Erkenntnis in den exakten Wissenschaften, [On the Basis of Knowledge in the Exact Sciences] in a completely neo-Platonic way: ‘We are locked within the shell of our perception, and for that which lies beyond it, we are blind’ (p. 112) (tr.). For him, the perceiver, just because he perceives, exists in an ‘intra-phenomenal prison’ (p. 112) – when in fact just the opposite is the case: the only thing being-in-the-world has in common with being-ina-prison is that in both situations one does not enter freely – apart from that, the conditions are completely different. The boundaries of being-in-the-world are structured as a horizon, and are therefore not comparable to being in prison. Perception consigns me to exist in a reality from which no escape is thinkable. Not even in fantasy can I take comfort in an escape from worldly existence; this is always possible for a prisoner: no worldly prison is resistant to fantasized escape. But the boundaries of that of which my perception makes me a part do not permit being crossed in fantasy: I am always pushing them

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away. We may now draw a conclusion from this: when I, in my position, experience the boundaries of my perceived reality as a horizon, then that of which I experience myself as part itself appears as a part, and not as a whole. This is the situation in which I find myself: perception allows me to be part of a whole that appears to me as something larger that cannot, in principle, be defined. It is this open-endedness that undermines a comparison between my situation in the world and that of a spectator − and for at least two reasons: a spectator sees a complete whole, and a spectator is not part of this event. Exactly as the bracketing out of existence is impossible for perception, there can be no Me as a world spectator as long as I am perceiving. Someone who is perceiving is controlled: perception forces the perceiver into an earthly situation that is characterized by his entering into a perspectival relationship to the things that are there in the present with him. It is almost impossible to imagine that a god would perceive what is happening in the world: he may know what is happening here, but he won’t be acquainted with it through his own perception. For, if he wanted to be, he would have to become part of the world. But someone whose perception saddles him with that sort of innerworldly duty of presence could hardly be godly. Every perception – whoever or whatever may be responsible for it – is inevitably associated with a fate that is personal and tragic to the same degree: it tears a non-participating observer from the spectators’ ranks into the midst of worldly events: a person falls into a contingent and concrete, ephemeral and spatial, visible and public world; we are no longer in the comfort of the mind’s presence-room, when the worst that could happen was to occasionally see a bad film.

Transcendental aesthetics and the assumption of forms of intuition With the shift from the primacy of the subject to the primacy of perception, there is a shift in the way we look at Kant’s transcendental aesthetics, undoubtedly the prime example of a successful eidetic variation: as we know from our own individual experience, objects with spatial structures are perceived. But there is more: Kant noticed that the spatiotemporal structures of the perceived are not empirical, but rather necessarily characteristics of



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the perceived, and this for a familiar reason: empirical qualities are facts in the world exactly because they could be different; they are contingent, so are susceptible to alteration in fantasy. It is possible to imagine that something could be different with respect to such qualities – for example with respect to colour. But this possibility of fantasized variation is exactly what is not given for spatiality and temporality: it is not possible to imagine – to see, hear or feel − spatial and non-spatial automobiles. Anyone attempting an eidetic variation − and each must attempt this for himself − will notice that whatever deformations, transformations and metamorphoses a perceived object may undergo, there is no change in the given spatial structure. Through the variations, the spatiality and temporality of the perceived does not vary, which is the reason the spatial and temporary structures of a perceived thing cannot be an empirical characteristic of that thing. The spatiotemporal is, in Husserl’s sense, a necessary quality of what is perceived. The crucial point is the answer to the question: what are we to make of such a result, that spatiality and temporality are essential objective characteristics of all perceived things? How do we deal with this result? Kant’s way is clear: he takes the recognition of invariance as a point of departure, so as to designate a prior instance, which explains why invariance is a necessary phenomenon. But that specifically means that Kant does not stop with eidetic variation and its phenomenological result. He seeks the explanatory conditions of possibility, and in fact seeks them where they must be sought since his Copernican revolution: in the subject. It is the inherent constraints of a subject − the forms of intuition – which establish that, for this subject, everything perceived must be spatiotemporally structured. Perception occurs under the conditions of the forms of intuition; they establish the style in which perception comes about. Still, we may not let ourselves be put off the simple, yet always ultimately critical question: How does Kant know that there are forms of intuition? Kant’s claim is refreshingly clear: he doesn’t make any, say, psychological arguments; forms of intuition cannot be empirically demonstrated. Kant’s defence strategy is of an unambiguously logical sort – that is: the existence of forms of intuition is logically necessary. Only the proof of this logical necessity is not a deduction, as one would like for the sake of the logical claim, but an abduction, that stated in full, goes: it is the case that it is impossible to think the spatiotemporal structures of a perceived thing away; further, the rule

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applies: if space and time are pre-existing forms of intuition in the subject, then spatiotemporal structure cannot be thought away; therefore we can say: space and time are forms of intuition. It is clear that such a conclusion is more than problematic. The abducted conclusion that forms of intuitions exist would be persuasive only if it were certain that forms of intuition alone are able to do what they do. If, further, the premise were therefore established that forms of intuition alone explain the impossibility of abstracting spatiotemporal structures. But neither is there a proof of this monopoly, nor have forms of intuition ever been observed before being transcendentally assumed. Kant does not explain by reference to a phenomenon known in another context, but rather through the introduction of an instance one would not recognize had it not been introduced in this context. At this point is becomes clear that the central problem with transcendental aesthetics is by no means any doubt that forms of intuition explain superlatively why it is certain a priori that everything perceived is spatiotemporally structured. Forms of intuition would have to be capable of this, since Kant invented them for this sole purpose. The difficulty is: the phenomenon of invariance is explained by way of an instance that would be unknown if it were not made responsible for the explanation; forms of intuition are a transcendental instance invented to explain the phenomenon. This ultimately means that the abduction in transcendental aesthetics possesses a genuinely theological character − which may seem remarkable at first glance, but which is easily clarified when the arguments are compared with those David Hume develops against the design argument of natural religion in the eleventh chapter of his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. The famous design argument of natural religion goes: if it is possible to observe order, plan, and purposefulness in something, we can assume some rational authorship behind this thing; because purposefulness can be observed in the world, an intelligent God must have designed this world. In both cases, in the design argument and in transcendental aesthetics, we are dealing with an abduction: an earlier instance of something is sought to explain why the phenomenon under consideration has to be as it is. Hume, too – and this tends to be overlooked – finds this assumption of a God entirely possible: in fact from the purposefulness of the world we can conclude on Hume’s behalf that there is a Creator God – only it is completely useless! And this is exactly Hume’s objection: we gain no additional insights by assuming a God. An



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explanation by means of a previous instance is persuasive only on condition that this instance was not invented for the purpose. If a phenomenon is explained by reference to an instance that is known solely as an explanation for the phenomenon, we are dealing with a completely pointless conjecture. What is meant here can be shown with the antithetical, unproblematic case of an explanation through abductive presupposition: someone finds a machine with which he is unfamiliar, and assumes that it was built by human beings, although he himself has not seen that this machine was designed and built by human beings. For Hume this would be a useful and reasonable explanation. For what human beings are, what they want and can do is sufficiently wellknown from the many encounters and personal experiences with human beings. In assuming a human being as the engineer of a machine, then, the puzzle is explained by way of a known instance. So the problem with explanation by abductive assumption lies solely in the uniqueness of the abducted instance – we could also say: if we had already seen gods make purposeful worlds a few times, it would be reasonable and persuasive to accept an intelligent god as the creator of one’s own purposeful world. Since there can only be one world, for that is all there is, the acceptance of a creator produces no further insights. It is the same with Kant’s acceptance of forms of intuition; a parallel may be drawn: the God of natural religion, like the forms of intuition in transcendental aesthetics, is not known in any other context and has not otherwise been encountered. In both cases a phenomenon is explained by the existence of an instance invented and introduced for the purpose of this explanation. The result is ultimately a tautology that says nothing: it must be true that the conditions of possibility for perception are the forms of intuition, because the forms of intuition have been defined in such a way as to be the conditions of possibility for perception.

The embodiment of the perceiver: A consequence of perception Once the primacy of the subject is detached from the primacy of perception, there is no further need to accept transcendental abduction in order to explain phenomena. The primacy of perception rather is defined by the attitude that

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it is advantageous to let description take the place of explanation − which also means that when perception is primary, we encounter themes that permit description on the basis of one’s own experience: the consequences of perception for the perceiver are taken into consideration – and transcendental aesthetics is especially relevant in just this regard. The ineluctable spatiotemporal structure of what is perceived carries with it enormous consequences for the perceiver: they may be summarized quickly: my perception forces me to be physically present! Because I am a perceiving subject, I have no choice but to be physically there in the world. For if everything perceived possesses spatiotemporal structures, this must also apply to me as a subject of perception, since perception turns me into a part of the perceived world. What a fatal consequence! Since the reality of perception consists of making me part of what is perceived, I myself will necessarily be a spatiotemporal part of the perceived. Perception cannot be reduced to a subjective feeling of presence – that is not enough. For the perceiver, it is further bound up with the necessary certainty of having to be a spatial something in time and a temporal something in space. The reality of my perception demands not only that I feel myself present, but also that I feel obliged to be there as objective matter of fact in the world. This is a logical demand. For it is not at all the case that I see and perceive where I am and how I get older; rather because I perceive, I am in a place and get older. The reality of my perception logically requires me to lead an embodied existence as part of the world. To put it another way: I am not an embodied being in the world that has an empirical insight into this situation and his embodiment. My embodiment as a perceiver is not contingent, any more than the spatio­ temporal structure of the perceived is. Kant should really have gone on to think out an embodiment-of-the-one-who-perceives-form of intuition. For the physicality of me as a perceiver is not there because the body is a feature of my self perceived in the empirical world, but rather because the form of perception only permits me to be there in perceived reality with a body – whether fat or thin is then really an empirical question that cannot be resolved phenomenologically, but that can be answered only through perception – yet it is not relevant to my embodiment in principle. It is not my bodily presence that makes my perception possible but just the reverse, my bodily presence is the consequence of my perception: for a perception that permits



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the perception only of things that are spatiotemporally structured will only permit me to be, and to be there, spatiotemporally. Now the assertion that a perceiver must have a body may sound banal. But it is not about the empirical fact that that we ourselves only encounter perceivers in the world who have bodies – how would we encounter anything else? It is about a logical necessity: even God has to become an embodied being in the world if He wants to see how things are going there. If this is about knowing what it is like to be human, God cannot have the advantage. Embodiment must be accepted as a mandatory characteristic of all perceiving subjects – and this is by no means the case for all philosophies of perception. On the contrary: it is surprising to find that only from the standpoint of the primacy of perception does it become logically necessary to think of a perceiver as an embodied subject; the primacy of perception inverts the view of the primacy of the subject in this respect. For when the subject is primary – this tends not to be mentioned in the many everyday and common versions of interpretationism and constructivism – the perceiver must necessarily be thought of as a world- and body-less subject. Only a subject that is not part of the world can be held responsible for making the world as an interpretative construct. The classical theorists of the primacy of the subject describe this step – which takes some getting used to – as clearly as anyone could wish; epigones of neuroscience do not; it makes no difference whether one follows Kant or Husserl. Both agree about which thesis constructivism cannot pass by if it is to be taken seriously: whether the perceived object is to be the product of a subjective act of interpretation, constitution or construction, this active and productive subject cannot already be considered part of the perceived world, for then that which is to be explained as a product of the subject would already have been assumed in the explanation. In transcendental aesthetics, too, there is evidence of the need to avoid this circular reasoning. Kant is really exemplary in his interpretationist consistency: for a reason that is as simple as it is persuasive, he simply does not permit the perceiver a part in the spatiality and temporality of the perceived: a subject, supposedly able to constitute the transcendent world in perception, cannot himself even be thought of as part of this transcendent world. When every form of objectivity is referred back to the act of a subject, then this subject cannot himself be part of the objective world − so there are only two ways: reject the one way because it leads to a

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creatio ex nihilo, or invent an instance that can achieve a creatio ex nihilo: the transcendental subject. The transcendental subject is the subject who constitutes the transcendent world, but who is neither in this world nor to be thought physically in any other way. For that which determines the world cannot be in the world at the same time. Even the transcendental subject’s own empirical body is his interpretative construct: a kind of emanation. The self I myself understand to be in the world as the perceiver is therefore − as Husserl writes in Formal and Transcendental Logic, ‘a self-Objectification of my transcendental ego’ (p. 239) and so I should believe that I ‘find myself as a psychophysical being, as a unity constituted in my ego-cogito …’ (p. 238). The truth of the premises are open to doubt, but one must go along with the reasoning: if the world is to be thought of as a product constituted by a subject, then this subject cannot himself be thought of as part of the world. Even Kant is gratifyingly concrete in this respect – if only in the Opus Postumum; he leaves no doubt that with an interpretationist model, there is no way to avoid having to work with an assumption of multiple selves: on the one hand the transcendental and constituting self, and on the other the empirical and constituted self: ‘I am an object of myself and my representation. That there should be something beyond me is of my own making. I myself make me […] We make everything ourselves!’ (Akademie Ausgabe XXII, p. 82) (tr.). It is this wonderful self-proliferation that needs to be recognized as the characteristic sign of all versions of interpretationism – even when they are not always named and presented as clearly as they are with Kant or Husserl. It must be said: at least they accept the remarkable consequences their approach demands: ‘The subject sets himself in pure intuition and turns himself into an object,’ writes Kant in Opus Postumum (p. 452), and Husserl not very differently in Formal and Transcendental Logic: ‘Therefore I, the constituting Ego, am not identical with the Ego who is already worldly, not identical with myself as a psychophysical reality; and my psychic life, the psychophysical and worldly life of consciousness, is not identical with my transcendental ego, in which the world, with everything physical and psychic that belongs to it, is constituted for me’ (p. 238). Such statements get to the heart of the problem: If constructivism or interpretationism is taken seriously, as it is in transcendental philosophy, the subject takes on two functions: as the constituting and the constituted subject; the making and the made subject; the interpreting



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subject is then simultaneously its own interpretative product. In short: the talk about, as Husserl put it so well, ‘the self-constitution of the ego as a spatialized, as a psychophysical being’ (p. 96), is deliberately ambiguous because it refers both to the constitution performed by the self and the constitution that produces the self. It is easy to poke fun at the disembodied nature of the transcendental ego – and it has often been done. In the end one is dealing with a philosophy concerned with, as Arthur Schopenhauer scoffed in The World as Will and Idea of 1819, ‘a winged Cherub without a body’ (p. 129). Some 70 years later Wilhelm Dilthey rightfully complained in his Introduction to the Human Sciences that the veins of such a subject carry ‘not real blood, but the watered-down juice of reason as a mere act of thinking’. Still, as accurate as these invectives may be, we must not fail to notice that accepting a bodiless subject is not some crackpot speculation, but the impressive conclusion of a highly consistent argument. The conditions of possibility of transcendence cannot themselves be a worldly part of this transcendent world but can only be transcendental. If the world and my self in the world are constructs of a subject, then one must assume that this subject is not a physical part of this world. In terms of content, there is no way of contradicting this. The acceptance of a bodiless transcendental subject is not the result of faulty reasoning. Rather it is the premises that must logically end in the acceptance of a mythical existence. It is the paradigmatic premise that the world is a subject’s interpretative construct. As long as anyone tries to understand the world as the interpretative construct of a subject, there will have to be a belief in the myth of a disembodied transcendental subjectivity. This is why forms of interpretationism that are so common today will remain inconsistent as long as they are dealing with a worldly subject. Since naturalism and constructivism are ruled out, the invention of a transcendental subjectivity now seems like some kind of concrete satire of vulgar interpretationist and constructivist myths of the mediate: Once we begin to think of the perceived world as a product of a subject, we are heading – a reductio ad absurdum couldn’t be better – not towards the brain becoming the real subject, but towards a subject that is no longer in the world at all. Consistent, transcendental interpretationism à la Kant and Husserl is at best useful – nolens volens − as a mockery of interpretationist myths of the mediate.

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With this in the background, the image of an embodied subject, which appears through the shift from the primacy of the subject to the primacy of perception, is anything but banal – on the contrary: it is the effort to draft an ecological perspective on to perception, for which the subject of perception has to be a physical part of the world and cannot be thought in any other way. For a constructivism, even if it is interested in emphasizing the meaning of the body, does not need to accept an embodied subject as the subject of the construction – perhaps this is why a fashionable alliance is so easily formed between constructivists and neuroscientists, diverting attention from the objectively unavoidable link between constructivism and the transcendental philosophical fiction of the disembodied subject. The view from the primacy of perception challenges all this in its understanding of embodiment not at all as an empirical fact, a contingent issue, but as an a priori certain consequence of the reality of my perception. Since my perception forces me to be present as part of the world, I am sentenced to an embodied existence. I don’t know whether there must be a physical Me in order to perceive, for all the conditions for perception resist recognition; but when I am perceiving there must be a physical Me – I know that because I know what it is like to be a perceiver: to be forced to participate in the material world. There may be an objection that this result is not very surprising. Who would doubt that so far, all subjects that have perceived have had bodies? But this is about a difference that can be explained in this way: it would be possible to examine many triangles, and to measure each one with a precise geometry set square to determine the sum of their angles. No doubt it would come to 180 degrees. But, despite having the same result, this would not be a mathematical proof. For an eidetic variation would show that in this case it is certain a priori that the sum of the angles of all thinkable triangles will be 180 degrees. And we are concerned here with just such a comparable proof of the embodiment of the perceiver, a sort of geometry of consciousness: the reality of perception shows that an embodied subject is necessary a priori. This is the critical point: it is about what is thinkable! For Descartes it is thinkable for reality to be such that I have no hands, nor eyes nor flesh, nor blood, nor senses. And it is right, on the basis of his paradigmatic suppositions. But those paradigmatic suppositions are doubtful. If we abandon any belief in the disembodied, god-like transcendental subject of interpretationism and



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start from the reality of perception, then my existence as a perceiver with a body is not an empirical trait based on observation; rather space and time determine the form in which I must exist. That which is a form of intuition in a philosophy that works with the primacy of the subject becomes a necessary form of existence in a philosophy that works with the primacy of perception. For me as a perceiver, spatiotemporal embodiment is existentially essential clothing, for the perceiver’s embodiment has the same status as the spatiality and temporality of what is perceived. It is perception that establishes the conditions of possibility for my existence: there can only be me as part of a spatial and temporal world. For it is a quality of perceptual consciousness to demand that the one whose consciousness it is, is not just someone who just has consciousness. That means: the embodiment of the perceiver is not a contingent fact in the world; rather the embodiment of a perceiving subject can be demonstrated through eidetic variation of the perceiving consciousness. This is because perception is not a form of consciousness in which arrow-shaped looks are thrown from consciousness over into another world; this form of consciousness rather consists exactly in implicating the one whose consciousness it is within a part-whole relation to the content of consciousness.

The continuity of the perceived Someone looks at an object and walks away. At the moment of perception, the perceiver finds himself physically present with the present object, which is, for the perceiver, an object that exists independently of his perception. To put it another way: in perception, an object is present for the perceiver with the necessary imposition of continuing to be an object when the perception of this object ends for the perceiver. This end of the perception of the object is not combined with consciousness of an end to the existence of the object – although this is well known from other mental states. One need only think of fantasies or of pain. Hardly anyone would seriously ask where my stomach ache goes after I no longer have it. For the quality of presence that pain has for the one suffering it is necessarily an instance of the esse est sentiri. Stomach pain exists with the qualitative feeling that it exists only

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at the moment it exists − and this bond between the existence of pain and the momentary condition of its being felt is simultaneously present for the one who is feeling it as he is feeling it; for otherwise he would not be able to identify pain as pain. The feeling of pain is set apart by being a consciousness of something whose existence is dependent on the act of feeling, and that therefore begins and ends with the feeling. This is exactly where pain differs from perception; one does not achieve a consciousness of something whose existence is independent of someone becoming aware. The same coming and going – esse est cogitari – applies to fantasies: where is the sports car after my imagined joyride, and where is it going? Questions about where it was before and where it will be after it was imagined can’t be asked of a fantasized object. Imagined things are, for the one who imagines them, self-induced products, which can neither surprise him nor teach him anything. It is different in the case of perception. For the perceiver, the perception of an object is bound up with the quality of the object’s not existing because of his perception, that is, that it will not disappear and reappear each time he blinks his eyes; perception gives the perceiver a world in the mode of a lasting discovery – and there is no controversy about this: a perceived object’s independence and continuity inevitably belongs to its mode of existence – or, as David Hume put it so well in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ‘Our presence bestows not being on it: Our absence does not annihilate it’ (12.8). The phenomenally critical thing is: this mode of existence is present while the perceived thing exists. The existence of the perceived thing is independent of the act of being perceived, and this is a quality of the perceived, a perceived thing, a qualia, in fact. It is not that when consciousness of a perceived object has ended, that a view is formed in retrospect that the existence of the object perceived earlier is not over, rather the experience of the independence of the perceived thing belongs to the sort of experience a perceiver has. The situation we know from transcendental aesthetics recurs here. What was said in that context about space and time may be carried over to the qualities of continuity and independence of the perceived: independent existence would then be a form of intuition, in which everything that is perceived is present. But resorting to what appears to be the logically necessary givenness of a form of intuition would be a theological explanation of the phenomenon in this case as well, that it is certain even before perception that whatever is



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being perceived will necessarily be not only something spatial and temporal, but also something independently extant. Whatever one’s view of forms of intuition, the critical thing is: the perception of objects is not a feeling for objects. That the quality of the perceived differs phenomenally from feelings such as pain is the reason adverbial theories of perception – first developed by Curt J. Ducasse in Nature, Mind, and Death of 1951 − fail when it comes to one’s own perception. The argument is clear: we must disagree with the main thesis of adverbial theory because such a formulation as I feel a-house-ly does not match up with the perception of a house. The problem is not, say, that the formulation I feel-a-house-ly is linguistically odd and takes some getting used to. The substantial problem with adverbial theory is that the perceiver does not believe that the house, like a feeling, exists only at the moment of perception, although that is exactly what he must believe in order to be able to understand perception as a kind of sensation. I feel a-house-ly would be an accurate description of a house perception if the house had this sort of presence for the perceiver at the moment of perception that he felt sure that the house would cease to exist when he stopped perceiving it. But that is not the case, for phenomenal qualities are not perceived as qualities of a temporary mental state or of a current experience, but of an experienced object. As often happens, despite agreement about the existence of a phenomenon, reactions to it can hardly be more diverse – at least this how it is to deal with duration and independence of the perceived. We can examine these divergent reactions, which correspond, as might be expected, to the three paradigms of perception theory. In the paradigm primacy of the object, the phenomenon of continuity is understood not as a problem but rather as a confirmation: material things, which causally impress and press or mirror themselves directly in consciousness, really are things that exist independently; it is therefore not surprising or even problematic that they are perceived as such. If the subject has primacy on the other hand, an explanation is clearly needed. Here one is trying to explain why the perceived object’s dependence on the subject is not conscious to that subject as a momentary construction. Although the subject constructs the object, the object does not become conscious as a made product. So the independence with which it is present must be an appearance

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or an illusion, for in this model − in reality, contrary to appearance − the existence of the object of perception depends on being perceived. In light of how well the phenomenon of duration and independence is known and how much attention and explanation it has had, it is surprising that there has been so little interest in what implications the phenomenon has for the perceiver, although these implications are most serious: because I am in a perceptible world, I am in a world whose existence is not dependent on my participation. Existence in an enduring world becomes a fate, conditioned by perception, with which I must live. Perception determines the form of existence: in my life, my perception can bring me into contact only with things that could also be there without me. The world does not behave in such a resistant way because it is so resistant, but because the world in which I live is the object of my perception, and perception can bring only unruly objects to my consciousness. So one can either love or hate perception for this, but what is certain is: it denies me my paradisiacal existence in my fantasy world. This is why theodicy is for perceivers only, unless we want to go on to say that the real problem with a theodicy is human perception: why didn’t God make the perceived world so that it − despite being perceived – became conscious as my fantasy world? What a fatal decision; how much suffering He could have spared His subjects if they had not been obliged to live out their existences in the style of being determined by perception. Just because I perceive, I am put into a world whose existence does not appear to me to be my own product – and the critical thing about this claim is the rationale that rests on the reality of my perception alone: the reality of perception requires the reality of a participating self! Without this rationale, one could understand the claim as just a repetition of a familiar banality: people live in a world given beforehand. With this rationale, however, the statement becomes fundamentally different from a materialistic or naturalistic position that proceeds from the assumption that I cannot live in my fantasy world because I live in a material world. Here we are seeing a tremendous difference in the image of human beings: one, because I perceive, and one because I live in a material world. With the rationale just given we are starting from an extant, material world; subjects seek access to this world – in whatever way – and because they do, they live in this material world in consciousness of this world. Yet we need to note that such a claim – quite apart from how persuasive the naturalistic premise may be – does



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not explain why perception is consciousness of the presence of something that is durably and independently extant. For the unavailable material world assumed in naturalism and materialism makes no strict demand at all that the perceiver, in perceiving this material world, must also have a consciousness that makes the world appear independent to the perceiver. If, in the way of naturalism, one takes oneself to be a material part of the material world, it actually doesn’t explain why one also has consciousness of being a material part of this unavailable world. The naturalist assumption that a human being has a physical existence in a material world is a boring perspective because it rules out the critical problem: it doesn’t explain how a person comes to have his own phenomenal awareness of having a physical existence in a material world. You can’t just say you’re aware of it because it is so. For it is entirely thinkable that, for the perceiver, the material world could lead to consciousness of it as a wilfully produced product of fantasy, even though it isn’t. In the end, it could be that I am a material part of a causally determined world, but have the mistaken illusion of being part of a fantasy world that is at my disposal. I then have the deceptive belief that I live in worlds I have thought out for myself, although this is not the case. At issue is the remarkable difference, the way naturalistic, especially neuroscientific positions describe a human being’s belief in, on the one hand, his own free will − not causally determined, and on the other hand his belief in an unfree, causally determined nature. So naturalistic positions like to claim that belief in one’s own free will is an illusion, since actions are in reality causally determined. But if this illusion of free will is possible, then the illusion must also be possible, for a seen house, which really is materially present and producing consciousness of a seen house, to nevertheless deceptively become conscious, in perception, as a product of open fantasy, even though it isn’t at all. Just as a human being lives – according to naturalist ideology – in the illusion of freedom, although his will is in reality firmly determined, he could − in naturalist ideology – also have the pleasant illusion of living in a fantasy world, although what appears to be his freely invented fantasies are in reality perceptions of an independent, resistant and material world. One would be dealing a genuine malice in perception: namely a kind of self-emancipation of the subject from the fate of world participation by means of a persistent, self-induced, illusion of living in a fantasy world, although in reality it is a perceived, material world.

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To sum up: my having to live out my existence in a material world independent of my consciousness cannot be justified by presuming that the material world is so – for what is so does not need to be present in the same way in consciousness at all. We must start with perception, that is to say, exclusively with the way things are qualitatively and phenomenally given in consciousness: there must be Me in an independent world, because I perceive, and perception permits me to be present only in such a world. And that means, finally: it follows, as a consequence of the reality of my perception that I must live out my existence in a material world that is independent of my consciousness. It forces me not only to be part of a material world, but even more, to be aware of not having devised this, my situation, myself. A person perceives what is present only if he believes he has not himself dreamed it up. But for me, that means that when I perceive I must necessarily become part of a reality that I cannot invent. Because I perceive, I must personally share the presence of things, without having, myself, to be the reason for my consciousness of their presence. One cannot see as one would like, and if something is present because one would like it to be, one does not see it. To say it differently: perception is always and forever putting its subject into unconscionable situations, that is to say, into the presence of things it does not want. The question is: where does the responsibility lie for the situation in which perception puts me? What, for me, is the reason I perceive what I perceive?

The perceived and the cause of perception It is a negative description: perception forces me to be conscious of my presence in a world whose existence I did not devise – yet negative descriptions are always unsatisfying in the end. They always raise the question: wouldn’t it be possible to give a positive description? Just because perceived reality is not present to me as a product of my fantasy, that doesn’t say this perceived reality is not bound up, for me, with the requisite certainty that something other than me is responsible for the existence of my perception. In short: what in perception is, for me, the reason for my perception? When I perceive something, what can I be sure is the reason for my perception? As far-fetched



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as this question might sound, the answer is simple, for perception has a clear phenomenal quality in this respect: the object of perception is itself present in a way that it is, for the perceiver, the causal reason for his state of perception. In order that I accept an object as a perceived object, it must have, for me, the status of being a cause of my experience of perception. One could also say: ‘that is that’ – ‘that’ as a definite article (e.g. that tomato) is the same as ‘that’ introducing a restrictive clause (e.g. the tomato that I see), meaning that which I perceive is the reason that I perceive. Without this imposition, an intentional experience could not be regarded as a perception. For no eidetic variation is capable of abstracting this quality: what is given to the perceiver in a state of perception is not only subjective certainty that the perceived thing is present, but beyond this, that the existence of the perceived thing is causally responsible for experience of perception; in perception, the objectivity of the perceived thing is always an objectivity that affects the perceiver causally and, accordingly, there must always be Me in the world as the subject of my perception: in order for my perception to be my perception in the first place, my perception requires me as a sensing subject that can be affected by things – and this is just how it is for me to be a perceiver. I not only feel myself present, but I am also involved in a set of effects, becoming part of a causal exchange of worldly things, becoming a subject being affected. At least the following situation is unthinkable: I see something, yet, for me, the existence of this thing has nothing to do with the reason I am seeing it. Nor is this in conflict with the view given in some philosophies and quite a few science fiction novels, that the perceived object need have no causal involvement at all in the way an experience of perception comes about. For whatever these stories tell us about the origin of perception, they, like all stories on this topic, deal with assumed, imperceptible processes, and in every case they are completely useless for a description of phenomenal qualities: even if I adopt the philosophy that God makes all my perceptions occasionalistically, or if I am completely convinced that a computer is in charge, like a brain-in-a-vat, the resulting perceptions still do not have the quality of making the perceiver in a state of perception aware of the cause for their coming about. If it were otherwise we would not speaking of a state of perception. Even perceptions made by God, the brain or a computer are only perceptions for me if they have the quality of letting the existence of the perceived thing be one of the

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causal reasons for the existence of the state of perception – and it is exactly this quality that categorically separates the experience of perception from the experience of pain. If someone is wondering about the causes of his stomach pain, he cannot under any circumstances come to the conclusion that stomach pain produces stomach pain. Just imagine going to the doctor with stomach pain, and the doctor deciding, after a thorough examination, ‘You have stomach pain because there is stomach pain.’ In this case one can say a priori that it would be wise to change doctors immediately: because for the sufferer, pain itself cannot be present in the role of a cause of the pain. It cannot be, because it does not present itself as something whose existence is independent of its being felt. Yet the object of perception, given in just this way, constantly imposes on a perceiver: Because it is perceived, the object is the independently extant cause of the experience of perception for the perceiver. Perception is a consciousness of something I myself am not, but that affects me. For the perceiver, seeing a tree is necessarily bound up with a subjective certainty that this tree is being seen, because for me this tree exists with the power to produce an effect. In phenomenological perception theory, two strategies can be found for describing this quality of perception – the quality of experiencing the perceived object as having been caused by that experienced object. There is, first, the way Merleau-Ponty proposed with his suggestive formulation in The Phenomenology of Perception: ‘Our perception ends in objects, and the object once constituted appears as the reason for all the experience of it we have had or could have’ (p. 67). The description is noteworthy, for it shows the transition from the primacy of the subject to the primacy of perception; in this passage Merleau-Ponty turns to address perception, once it has, as he says, been constituted. He is not interested in the question of how this constituting happened, but only in what consequences the result of this constituting will have for the perceiver. He describes this result with the model of seeing-as, however; he uses the formulation ‘the object appears as the reason’. That is surprising in light of how vehemently Merleau-Ponty criticized Descartes’ view that perceived things may not really be real at all, but may rather appear to the perceiver as real. Descartes considers it possible for me to see things as real that are in fact not real at all. Merleau-Ponty rightly objects that this is not compatible with the manner in which perceived things are given: what



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is perceived is real for the perceiver, and does not just appear as real. For if it was to appear as real, then it must also have been possible for it to make itself appear otherwise, as not real; which, however, is not possible. This very distinction can be claimed for the description of causation as well. We are concerned with the difference between the two statements the perceived thing appears to the perceiver as the cause of perception and the perceived thing must be a cause of perception for the perceiver. The second sentence has the advantage of making clear that this way of being given is a necessary condition of being able to speak of someone perceiving at all. This is the reason Searle suggests another way in his phenomenology: instead of a seeing-as, he speaks of conditions of fulfilment that must be realized so that a state becomes a state of perception: ‘Rather, what is seen are objects and states of affairs, and part of the conditions of satisfaction of the visual experience of seeing them is that the experience itself must be caused by what is seen’ (p. 49). In fact: we don’t see something as if this something was the cause of the seeing. For the quality of being the cause of the state is not certain in the manner of appearance; if this were the case, we could speak of ‘appearing as the reason’ as Merleau-Ponty does. We are dealing with an imposition of a way of being: something is seen if the subjective certainty is given that this experience is and must be caused by the seen thing. The status of being the cause then applies to the necessary intentional content, the very quality of every perception and with it the characteristics that must be given in order for a particular state of consciousness to be called a perception – or, as Searle aptly put it: ‘It is part of the content of the visual experience, that if it is to be satisfied it must be caused by the state of affairs that its Intentional object exists and has those features that are presented in the visual experience’ (p. 49). To prevent misunderstanding right away: the description that required the perceived thing to be present as a cause of the state of perception does not correspond to the contents of a so-called causal theory of perception. This approach advances the view that something is perceived because this something is the cause of the perceiver’s state of perception. Causal theories of perception are always theories of the origin of perception – which fail because they are not in a position to give the reasons why, among the many are causes that affect perception on the physical side, only certain causes become the object of an intentional state of perception. Why does a person see a house

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and not light on the retina, even though for these theories, light and the retina are causes of the state of perception as least as much the house? What we call a cause is always only a cause in a chain of many causes – and that is exactly the problem with an explanation of perception through causal events: we can’t find a cause that explains which, among the many causes involved, becomes the object of perception. We can’t do it, and would perhaps therefore hasten to adopt a highly critical position with respect to the theme ‘perception and causality.’ But it should not blind us to perception’s special quality of causality: that which inexplicably becomes the intentional object of perception is then, for the perceiver, the cause of his state of perception. It does not follow from this that causes can be perceived between things in the world, but only that something perceived in the world can only be something that is, for the perceiver, the cause of his perception, and that also is present as such in perception. In the perceived world, a perceiving subject can encounter only such objects as have the quality, for this subject, of being a cause of his intentional state at the time. We are dealing with an a priori correlation that permits a proper conclusion: if someone claims I see a tree, then we may conclude, a priori, that he will have to agree not only with the statement the existence of this tree is certain for me, but also with the statement I can see the tree because it exists. And that means: since for me, the seen object must be the cause of my experience, it, this object, cannot be an object for me that is perceptible only for me. There are no causes that are causes only for me. It comes to a determination, advancing step by step, of a style of existence in which there has to be me in the world because I am the subject of my perception: I have to be a part, I have to be embodied, I have to be capable of being affected – and still more: perception necessarily leads not only to an existence in a world that affects me causally, but to a being that is in principle visible in public – which needs to be described more closely.

The imposition of a presence in public Wittgenstein’s private language argument figures among the most important arguments in analytic philosophy. It is, rather, a thought experiment: can we imagine a language spoken and understood by just one single person?



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Wittgenstein was not thinking of a well-guarded secret language, whose rules would be known to only one person; there are plenty of such languages. It is about whether a language is imaginable that cannot in principle be learned by another. Whatever the reasons for Wittgenstein’s view that the existence of such a private language is unthinkable, the thought experiment may be transferred to perception; the analogous question goes: is it possible for someone to perceive something that he alone is able to perceive? As in the private language argument, this is not meant to be about the perception of secret things. For, once again, it is easy to imagine things in obscure places that can actually be seen by only one person. The question is: is it possible to think of perceiving an object that would not be perceptible to another person under any circumstances? With this question it becomes clear that the private language argument can be transformed into the private perception argument; it may even be that it only functions as a private perception argument, for, in contrast to the contested existence of a private language, the result of the inquiry into the possibility of a private perception is clear: the public aspect of the object of perception belongs in principle to the necessary intentional content of every experience of perception. Private perception is unthinkable, for such a thing could no longer be designated perception. An awareness of the presence of something imposed without an awareness of that presence being public lacks a quality it must have to be considered a perception – although there certainly are such impositions: it is possible to imagine, wish or remember that something is present. With these intentional states, one is dealing with private objects – but not with perception. Perception alone puts me, with phenomenal certainty, into the presence of something that can also be present to others. Whether the statement I see something you do not see is true or not depends on circumstances in the world. But the statement I see something you cannot see is always false a priori, for if it were true, I would no longer have grounds for my claim to have a relationship of perception with the object. With this, it becomes clear: the qualities a perceived object must have include not only that what is perceived must exist for me, for pain, too exists for me when I have it. The presence of something extant is only a necessary, but still not a sufficient quality of the perceived thing. The perceived thing is existentially present in such a way that what is present is never for me alone but rather always for us. One could speak of the perceived as ineluctably inter-subjective

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in nature, or public in principle. But no matter how one designates this quality, it may not, under any circumstances, be treated as something obvious, for an adequate description of the experience of perception is possible only by specifying the perceived thing’s type of existence. The comparison with pain can make this clear, because pain possesses another quality of imposition that is almost the reverse of an imposition of perception. It is unimaginable that two people could have the same pain; they can have similar pain, but there will always have to be two different pains from which two people can suffer. The objectivity of the perceived object, on the other hand, consists in its being an object that can become an object of perception for anyone. This quality of the perceived thing is certain for the perceiver – and this definitely cannot be treated as an empirical fact. For even if we went along with naturalism’s premise and based a description of perception on the assumption that in a material world, there are independent things that can be seen by several people, a significant problem arises: a naturalist theory of perception must explain why the presumably material objects among presumably physical human beings result in that which is ‘accessible’ to many – as this paradigm explains it – also become conscious in perception as accessible to many, in other words, as the same. It remains to be explained why it is that when many see the same thing, they don’t just think that either they’ve seen similar things or that they have had a delusion. Perception’s style of public presence can again be treated in the same way the subject’s phenomenal certainty of having free will was treated – that is, as an illusion. If we assume a prior existence of the world, we can’t explain how and why it becomes conscious. This one case shows something that is true in general: with perception, attempts at explanation are futile. It would be reasonable to respond to this by putting this philosophical effort ad acta and starting instead from the certain reality of perception itself, to accept its inexplicability, change the questions, and describe what effects the reality of perception necessarily has on the perceiver. The comparison between perception and pain is helpful in the context: it demonstrates that experiences of perception and experiences of pain involve their subjects in fundamentally different existential situations. I am on my own with my pain, but in the world in which my perception lets me participate, I cannot be alone; on the basis of my perception, I can at most be alone in a space for a moment, but even then my situation is disappointingly far from a peaceful solipsism. Every object in



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my perception presumes that I must lead life in certainty that solipsism is the myth of a subjectivist philosophical paradigm. Perception inevitably puts me in spaces that continually radiate disturbance: others can get into this space as well. Even when I am alone in a space, a public aspect is given in principle that Husserl, in Cartesian Meditations described as follows: ‘The existence-sense [Seinssinn] of the world and of Nature in particular, as Objective Nature, includes after all, as we have already mentioned, thereness-for-everyone. This is always cointended wherever we speak of Objective actuality. If I “abstract” (in the usual sense) from others, I “alone” remain. But such abstraction is not radical, such aloneness in no respect alters the natural world-sense, “experienceable by everyone”, which attaches to the naturally understood Ego and would not be lost, even if a universal plague had left only me’ (§43 a. 44). The spaces in which my perception permits me to be are always there for, and visible to anyone. Nothing could be further from my situation in the world than talk of a solipsistic prison of consciousness, of a putative imprisonment in my representation. For consciousness of perception is such that it never lets me be invisible in the world. When someone perceives something, then he is certain that another must be able to perceive it, and so the world into which perception binds its subject is, for that subject, always, in principle, a publicly accessible world. The metaphor of access fits here: on the basis of my perception, I am in a spatiotemporal situation in and to which others could also come. But my being in this situation cannot be described as the result of a found access. The one who perceives must see something that forces him to acknowledge its visibility to others as well. We are concerned with an additional criterion for determining that something has been perceived. I see something only if I am sure that anyone can see it. Subjective accounts of origin cannot, in principle, grasp this experience of objectivity to which I am consigned. For if what is seen is a subject’s product of interpretation, then two subjects cannot in principle see the same thing, for what they produce could at best be similar, but not the same. So another person is never as I am; he, too, like everything in the world, is a product of my interpretation. The problem is one’s own experience: another person may see the same thing differently, but it is the same thing he sees differently. And for me, that means: without pause, without exception and unsolicited, my perception leaves me in a world

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for everyone – perception’s immanent punishment for its subject is not a phantom solipsistic prison. The perceiver’s fate is rather exactly of the opposite kind: one who is perceiving is out among others. Sartre got to the heart of the matter in his early essay ‘Intentionality: a Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology’ of 1939. The intentionality of perception has, he writes, ‘thrown us on to the highway, in the midst of dangers, under a dazzling light’ (p. 383). But that means: perception permits its subject no withdrawal into inwardness. It permits no epoché. Anyone who perceives must himself be a participant, visible to others, in the real world. So the question is whether Sartre’s metaphor is so apt. No doubt we would rather be thrown on to a busy main street than a lonely country road; the harsh light in which I find myself will, in the end, be brazenly used to see me. If we are not in need of a still more radical metaphor. For we should not stint on this description: what is at issue is not just a formal, reciprocal conditional relationship: I see, therefore I am visible, or, being-able-to-see implies being visible. It is rather about the situation of a human being, about a human being’s innerworldy state. We therefore need to grasp that being-in-the-world, to which perception condemns its subject, carries with it an inevitable imposition of compulsory self-exposure: the most brutal consequence of the reality of my perception is without a doubt the unsolicited having-to-be-visible-to-everyone, this having-to-show-oneself, the unremitting being-presented-to-someone-else. Not sur la grand’route! Clearly the metaphor is too weak. What is needed is an image that captures the experiential character of dealing with one’s own revealing visibility in the world. Sartre himself seems to have noticed it. At least he makes another highly suggestive proposal for such an image that describes ‘the proof of my condition as a man’ in Being and Nothingness of 1943: ‘Among the consequences of the reality of my perception is that it is through it that I am in the world, and to be-in-the-world this way means to be ‘thrown in the arena beneath millions of looks ...’ (p. 281).

The identity of me What holds for the perception of the same thing by various subjects also holds for my own perception of the same thing at various points in time:



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I can see the same object at various times in various places. I am just now seeing the same computer I saw yesterday. The presumption of identity of what has been seen is a consequence of perception that it must have. In order to be a perception, it must be able to confront me at various times and in various places with the same actuality – and this possibility of my perception is bound up with striking consequences for me: my perception must let me be self-identical across time and space; it must let me be in such a way as to have an identity. For a change in the world can only become conscious to me in perception if perception lets me be one and the same subject under various conditions of perceptual experience. If we turn the skewer around, that is if, rather than starting from the subject and deriving perception from it, we start from the reality of perception, then the identity of the subject is not a problematic assumption requiring explanatory theories of perception’s origin, but a phenomenally necessary consequence of the reality of perception: because there is my perception, there must be Me, both as a subject that persists over time and also as a temporally developing subject in a transient world. For if perception makes me part of the world, I, too, am what the world is: something present with the inner temporal structure of past and future. The continuity of the perceived world shares itself with me in perception as my identity. Without ever giving me a chance to decide, my perception imposes an obligation to feel myself to be a consistent subject in the stream of perceptions. When it comes to the reality of my perception, my identity can no longer be avoided. That means: my identity is a logically necessary result of the reality of an inexplicable mental state. For perception requires a subject with identity in order to be a perception of something that changes. To put it another way: because I perceive changes, it is no longer possible for me to lose myself irretrievably in the turmoil of sensation: my perception cannot allow me an existence as a happy impressionist. For it can only be a consciousness of presence and change if it lets me be one and the same subject with respect to the spatial and temporal changes. Since perception exists – God knows why, my identity in space and time is not an empirical problem, nor is it a fact that could be otherwise. Rather it is a logical necessity. The reality of perception must involve – as a necessity a priori – the reality of a subject that remains identical across temporal and spatial changes. That is exactly the critical point: The reality of my – always exclusively my – perceptions, creates subjects that

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find themselves situated in the world in such a way that the relationship of this perceiving subject to the things perceived by this subject can be interpreted interpretationistically − and this must be so: for if I see the same thing twice or if two people see the same thing, then I see the same thing, or they both look the same differently in each case. I see it from a different position than I did yesterday; the same thing applies to the others. I can think of this difference in relation to the same thing as being grounded in the subject. For the object presents itself as the same. So the difference must become certain for me as the result of something for which I am responsible in the perceptual situation. It can’t be otherwise, for then the same thing would not have been perceived differently. That means that the manner in which my perception forces me to be present in the world puts me into a situation that permits an interpretationistic interpretation of this situation. If I am in the world perceiving, this world is there for me in such a way that many subjects can interpret it in various ways. The perceptually conditioned situation of the perceiver permits an interpretationistic self-description, but – and this is the important point – this situation cannot arise as a result of an act of interpretation. I am not in the world because acts of interpretation have built me an access to it. Rather if, because of my perception, I have to live with being, inexplicably, part of the world, then I am placed by my perception in a relationship to the perceived things that enables me to interpret the relationship as an interpretation of these things. My perception requires me as a consistent subject – inconceivable that it would be otherwise: no, yesterday for three hours I was not the subject of my perception. Peter took over for me! It can’t happen even in a dream. For a priori relations apply even in a dream, as in fantasy – this is the reason Descartes, after the dream argument, went on to invent the genius malignus to strengthen his scepticism. But even the assumption of a genius malignus changes nothing about the imposition in principle. I see, therefore I am identical with myself. With the reality of perception, the identity of the perceiver becomes phenomenally necessary: it is difficult to say what kind of logical constraint this is. But it is certain: the question of the identity of subjects is not an empirical question about whether a particular matter of fact is the case in the world – although it has often been treated in exactly this way. The sentence my perception lets me be the same self today as yesterday is not an empirical, but



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a grammatical, or more exactly a phenomenological statement. That I am identical in my temporality in the world is a logical consequence of the reality of my perception, which must exact this style of being from me for the sake of its own reality. So questions about what is responsible for my identical existence in the world, or how identity can be formed, are about as productive as the question: why do triangles have three corners? If they didn’t have them, they wouldn’t be triangles! If my perception did not make me a subject that stays the same in time and space, it just would not be my perception. So just as the reality of triangles is bound to the inevitable consequence that a sum of angles of 180 degrees exists, so is the ur-phenomenon of perception bound, for the perceiver, to the consequence of having to be a subject who participates in the world, who can be causally affected by the world, who is embodied, visible, public and self-identical. Only in this style can there be me in the world, because I perceive. But that means a human being does not know about his own embodiment and identity, or, more exactly, he knows about it not just as he might know, on the basis of perception, say, that there are automobiles in the world. Having a body that participates in causes-and-effects, and the exposure in public to which my perception forces me, are not empirical, contingent facts, but necessary consequences of the reality of perception. That there is my perception determines, not only that there is me, existing, but also my kind of intra-worldly existence. In this respect there is also an important difference between the statements cogito, ergo sum and video, ergo sum – although it is a difference Descartes did not pursue. In fact Descartes did come to speak of the idea video, ergo sum very briefly and very much in passing in his late work The Principles of Philosophy of 1644 (Part I, §1). The results of his reflections are what might be expected. However, it makes no difference to Descartes whether we say cogito, ambulo or video, ergo sum. In each case, a being with consciousness can be certain of his existence. And that is correct. If we are interested only in being certain of existence, then no particular act of consciousness has priority: whether I see, think, love, wish or dream, I can be certain, as I perform this act, that I am. The difference between the various intentional conditions is not that one lets me exist and another does not, but rather that the various intentional states let me exist variously, and that only some of them let me exist in the world at all. The differences between intentional states are relevant not to the that, but

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to the how I am. And it is the task of an inverse transcendental philosophy to describe exactly the specific force specific intentional experience exerts on me. Traditional transcendental philosophy of perception makes a blatant category error when it looks for perception’s conditions of possibility in the subject. The inversion consists of correcting this mistake, and shifting the site of the transcendental from the subject to perception: the reality of perception is the transcendental – it is the ur-phenomenon that must be accepted, that determines the conditions of possibility for my being in the world. This does not mean that perception is the only inexplicable ur-phenomenon whose necessary consequences deserve a phenomenological description. The Me of fantasy, the Me of desire, the Me of emotion await philosophical description – or think of the question of what my actions permit me to be. What do I have to be as a result of being the subject of my actions? The freedom of the subject can, but need not be considered a condition of possibility for actions. Here again, the perspective changes by starting from the inexplicable reality of actions instead, and asking about the consequences of this reality: what does it mean for me to have to be in the world as an acting subject? But however the idea of an inverse transcendental philosophy is worked out, perception has a priority among the available ways forward. Participation in the world occurs for me through my experience of perception. There may be subjects who do not perceive – but they would not be intra-worldly subjects, they would not be part of the physical world, would not participate in it with a body, be visible, be affected by it. The inverse form of transcendental philosophy, that is, the primacy of perception, finally defends a simple basic idea, which, however, does effect a radical change in perspective: much remains to be worked out in the sketch of it given here: it is not I who keeps the continuing existence of my perceptions alive with constant, continuous constitutive processes; rather perception keeps me alive. There is Me because of my perception. That there is Me in the world and how there is Me in the world in a particular way is a consequence of the reality of my perception that can be described phenomenologically. We are, then, concerned with a suggestion for rearranging a known constellation, for getting past questions that cannot be answered in any case. My perception exists not because I am or because I exist or because I live; rather, because my perception exists, there is Me in the world – in fact there is Me necessarily present, causally affected, visible and self-consistent.



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Because I perceive, I am saddled with the task of surviving in the world with a body; without my perception I would have been spared this handicap. Here we reach a new definition of what contingencies are in the world of human beings, and in fact a definition that differs fundamentally from a Cartesian conception of contingencies in the world – which still dominates in the paradigm of the primacy of the subject. That I have a body, that things affect me, that I am visible, that I have a spatial and temporal identity, that I am not the only one in the world – none of these are contingent facts in the world, but a priori necessary certainties for a perceiver. Now a person may ask whether the reality of perception itself isn’t contingent. Can it be that there is no perception? That is a question that in the end is about how it happened that there is something rather than nothing. The best answer to this question of all questions may be Husserl’s bold, flippant assertion: ‘How the material arose does not concern us’ (p. 195). There we can only agree: what is inexplicable has to be accepted as such. Wherever our myths, models and speculations take us with respect to the origin of perception, it is certain that perception permits its subject to be in the world; participation is the fate of every perceiver – a fate not appreciated by everyone, by any means. At least we can see that people deliberately seek out pauses in participation.

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Pause versus interruption The reality of one’s own perceptions is bound up with being personally imposed upon: because my perceptions are there, someone must be there who is the subject of these perceptions: the very one who is presumed to be: because his perceptions exist, he must be in the world among others. And yet – and we must not overlook this positive aspect – the subject of a perception is in no sense obliged to accept these impositions. Perceptions are finite and ephemeral; they can stop and disappear in various ways – and when they do, the impositions cease for the subject as well. It takes only a little nap to free me from my obligation to be the subject of my perceptions in the world. Consciousness of one’s own physical participation in the present comes to an end every time one goes to sleep, at least for the time of dreamless sleep. This ending may challenge basic philosophical principles concerning whether and in what form a person perceiving at one time retains his continuing existence and identity in dreamless sleep or even in losing consciousness. But whatever conclusion we may reach in examining such questions of identity, this much remains completely untouched: if someone is not perceiving, then the feeling of being in the world is not being imposed upon him. He does not feel himself to be in the world. For if he did feel this way, he would be perceiving. Sleep is such a case: at the moment of going to sleep, perception ends, and with it the experience of having-to-be-in-the-world. In order to describe the way this ending of perception occurs when going to sleep in particular, it is helpful to consider the difference between ‘interruption’ and ‘pause’. In both cases we are dealing with events in time: interruptions as well as pauses are phases in which something is not there for a certain time, then

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starts again. But a pause is different from an interruption in that in an interruption, the phase of not-being-there is not understood or felt to be part of the suspended process. During the morning at school there are pauses, but when a pupil goes home after classes end for the day, the teaching is interrupted until it begins again the next morning. Afternoons and especially holidays are not pauses, because they do not qualify as integral components of the school programme. For the person making a pause, on the other hand, this phase remains part of a larger process; during a pause one remains in the process from which one is pausing. It is just this quality of pauses, of being special situations within a continuing process, which explains why pauses are only possible on the basis of plans and decisions. There are no accidental pauses. Someone who pauses must be persuaded that even in doing so he is continuing to do what he was doing at the time. This is why, on a car journey, the congestion that may interrupt the journey will not be seen as a pause, for congestion is not – at least not ordinarily – taken to be an integral aspect of travelling by car. Yet the very possibility of falling asleep unintentionally argues against sleep being a form of pause. But the argument that holds sway in the end goes: in falling asleep, the state of perception is such that the sleeper is no longer in the situation of being a perceiver. Someone who is perceiving cannot simultaneously consider himself to be asleep. The manner of emancipation from the impositions of perception is, for the sleeper, like having a holiday from participation: in sleep, one leaves the state of perception for a certain time. That is to say, the state of perception is interrupted and does not continue in another form – but that just raises questions: can that last happen as well? Can the state of perception change so that a perceiver can make a proper pause in participation? Is it possible, in a state of perception, to be briefly relieved of one’s obligation to participate in the world? It should be clear what demands such an exceptional state of perception must fulfil: the perceiver may neither fall asleep nor lose consciousness; he must remain in a state of perception, as a student remains in school when there is a pause in teaching. The only noticeable sign of a pause must be that the perceiver is not experiencing that which his perception otherwise imposes on him: embodied participation in the perceived event. As abstract as these requirements for a pause in participation may sound, meeting them is a simple, everyday matter: looking at an image is enough! The



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perception of images enables a subject to use his own perception to transport himself into a state of suspended participation. At least it seems worth the effort to think the perception of images back from their specific consequences for the perceiver. For if the image can be described as the sole means human being have of seeing something without automatically becoming, just by seeing, a physical part of what is seen, that would make looking at an image an exceptional state of perception, much sought after and really useful: the perception of images is a perception sui generis. The viewer of an image is spared what every subject of perception unavoidably experiences: participation in what is perceived. This difference between the perception of an image and the perception of objects in general needs to be worked out and described more precisely.

The three paradigms of the theory of image perception As in every perception, the perception of an image is an intentional state with a subject and an object. In order to describe this state, three relata must therefore be identified and set into a constellation: the state of image perception, the subject of the image perception, as well as the object of the image perception. It is entirely right to say that, as long as we are dealing with the reality of this intentional structure, we cannot speak of the perception of images being an exceptional state: like every intentional state, the perception of an image can reasonably be approached through the questions: who finds himself in this state? What becomes conscious in this state? But that also means: should this image perception really turn out to be a categorically special case of perception, its specific difference from normal perception must be clearly manifest in at least one of the three relata involved; at least one of these relata must be different in a state of image perception from its analogue relatum in a state of normal perception – and the situation within the theory of pictorial perception corresponds to this: three fundamentally different tendencies may identified. These tendencies do not advance competing views of the image at all. Rather they look for an answer to the question concerning the distinguishing feature of image perception in different places. It is possible to attribute the distinguishing feature to any of the three relata – image

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perception, the image perceiver or the object of image perception. From this standpoint, the situation in the philosophy of image perception is similar to that in the philosophy of perception. Once again, three paradigms may be identified: because the image object is different from a normal object of perception, the first paradigm centres on a description of the image object; in the second, the recipient of the image is addressed in his specific actions, because the actions he performs are different from those of the usual subject of perception; the third paradigm starts from the reality of image perception, because this is an intentional state bound up with fundamentally different consequences for the subject of this state.

The unique object of image perception We can speak of the primacy of the image object if a theory of image perception works with the following assumption: the image object is a unique object that is different from a normal object of perception. From this point of view, in image perception something is being perceived that is categorically different from what is perceived in a normal case of perception: image perception is something special, because the object of image perception is ontologically unique. This does not mean that unusual or inaccessible things are made visible through images. This paradigm accepts the premise that something becomes visible in images that otherwise would not be visible at all, because it is not an extant and real object in the world at all. One example, possibly a primary example of this theory, appears as early as Plato, namely in Book 10 of The Republic: according to his main thesis, someone who perceives an image is perceiving something that appears to be, rather than actually being there. For Plato it is a reason to criticize the use of images and finally to actually ban them: the perceived object in the case of image perception is not, as it is in the case of normal perception, a thing in the world, but an inferior object: an object without objectivity. Plato did not mean the painted vases or tesserae of a mosaic, which can more accurately be called an image supports or image carriers. An image carrier is – like every other perceptible object –a material thing in the world. The object with the doubtful special ontological status for Plato is – and this holds true for the paradigm overall – the object



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that is visible on the physical support: the image object. The image object is the intentional object that is, in image perception, conscious as the object of the perceiver’s intentional experience. To put it simply: we speak of an image object when someone answers the question about what he sees in the image. Normally he does not describe how the canvas or paper looks, but what can be seen on such a carrier. This object of image perception only becomes visible for the receiver by way of the perception of the carrier – and it must be said: it only becomes visible, for it is exclusively visible. The specific ontological characteristic of an image object is its reduction to a single sensible quality. The cheese in a photograph cannot be touched or smelled; it can only be seen. So, in looking at images, there is no complete and real presence of anything in a physical sense. The presence of the object shown in the image is rather an artificial presence reduced to visibility, which is why even though image perception is – like any perception – an awareness of the presence of something, it is the presence of something that is not a material object in space and time in a physical sense. We are dealing with something close to a paradox: although the object of image perception does not exist in the world, it can nevertheless be described in its real appearance. This very thing may in any case be the basic idea of this paradigm: through images, something is presented visibly – and this visibly presented thing distinguishes itself in its visibility from visible things in the world in that it is exclusively visual. The formulation pictures make things visible, used so enthusiastically and often, is in fact to this extent correct, but seriously inexact, because it designates only a necessary and not a sufficient quality of the image: it is not images alone that can be said to make things visible. For a statement such as in the light of the lamp, the disarray became visible, or taking up the carpets made the damage to the masonry visible are reasonable. Many events in the world make something in the world visible, which means simply: they make it possible for something to be seen. Therefore to make something visible can only be a necessary but not a sufficient quality of images; something specific must be added – and it is clear what that is: only in images does something become visible which does not conform to the laws of nature. Plato’s objection to the exclusive visibility of the image is perhaps not as relevant as the fact that he quite rightly pointed out: images generate objects that actually should not be seen because they are not real things in the world. Someone looking at an image gets something

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categorically different from what is present in a normal case of perception: appearance rather than being. The paradigm based on Plato’s reflections is perfectly up to date: in looking over the many phenomenological image theories of the twentieth century, it is easy to find a whole range of analogous efforts to describe a categorical difference between the object of image perception and the object of another perception. Husserl’s own descriptions of the image object in his lecture on ‘Fantasy and Image Consciousness’ of 1904/5 had no other purpose. He gets to the heart of the unique ontological status of the image radically and clearly in a single word: the image object is a ‘Nichts’ [‘nothing’] (Husserliana XXIII, p. 46), and one can only agree: in seeing an image object, one is seeing something that is not. This notable characterization – one sees a nothing – prompted students of Husserl to designate the image object metaphorically as a ‘phantom’. This entirely consistent terminology can be found programmatically developed in Günther Anders’ Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen [The Outdatedness of Human Beings] of 1956, but also – although only in a few places – in Roman Ingarden’s The Ontology of the Work of Art of 1962 (p. 153). The phantom concept is not at all restricted to images that show things like ghosts. Ingarden and Anders want to emphasize that the phantom character of the object of image perception differs in principle from the object of normal perception in every case. We have here a kind of ontological style: but the question of how a style works does not address the way an image object looks. Rather it is concerned with the manner in which the image object is present: it is about a style of being; this has no real presence, it has an artificial presence. The image object is not present in the style of the world of cause and effect, but in a phantom style that lies beyond physics – reason enough for Vilém Flusser to write, in Towards a Philosophy of Photography of 1983, of a ‘magical character’ in every image. The magical in an image is found, for example, in the way a person visible as an image object on a piece of paper miraculously does not age. The person remains, even if the image is hundreds of years old, as old as it looks. This holds for every image object: it is, in the truest sense of the word, metaphysical, antigrav, elegant, beyond the forces of nature. The carrier must submit to the ravages of time and all other physical laws. But the image object is spared that; an image object cannot even be illuminated – despite being visible: the image of a moonlit landscape does not brighten up in



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sunlight. A look at an image is a look into a physics-free zone; it concentrates on things and events that are physically impossible in principle in the visible world, and so possess an eerie reality: visibility without the presence of real things. This is exactly why the concept of the phantom is so very apt. Very few people are likely to believe that there are phantoms and ghosts. This is exactly what is special about the status of image perception: in an image – and in fact only in an image – things can be observed that do not, in principle, exist in the world: autonomous things that are visible-and-nothing-else. The concept of a phantom is one suggestion among many for grasping the ontological peculiarity of the image object. There are others. In The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception of 1979, the psychologist of perception James J. Gibson speaks of ‘virtual objects’ (p. 283). In What is Literature? of 1947, Jean-Paul Sartre likewise describes the peculiarity in an adjective, in a text that opens with a concise account of his a-semiotic conception of the image; he does speak of ‘imaginary objects’ (p. 9), however, rather than virtual ones. But any suggestion we take will provide the same level of assurance that for phenomenologists, the image object is no content, no sense nor any meaning, but rather is an ontological exception. The image symbolizes nothing; rather it presents something: that means, it presents visible things that are not normal things. For the visible parts of an image object are not physically connected, as those parts are for a real object; rather than being underpinned by any binding substance that could be perceived by another sense as well, they consist of pure visibility. In short: whether we describe the image object as appearance, as nothing, as phantom, virtual object, imaginary object, as pure visibility or false unity, in every case the unique status of the object of image perception – and this is a mark of the thinking in this paradigm – is described by attributing not a real, but rather an artificial, physics-free presence to the object of image perception.

The unique origin of image perception New paradigms appear when new questions arise. Within the theory of image perception, this happens as soon as interest shifts from the image object to the perceiving subject, and from here to the origin of image perception. We

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should keep in mind, however, that shifting attention in this way does not imply that the special position of image perception cannot also be described in terms of the image object. On the contrary: descriptions of the image object must in fact be taken into account if, beyond examining the image recipient’s special constitutive acts, the unique position of image perception is to be made explicit. That is exactly what is at issue in this second paradigm: to explain the unique ontological property of the image object as the result of a subject’s unique constitutive process. If the first paradigm aspires to phenomenological description exclusively, the second conforms to a thoroughly genetic or transcendental mode of inquiry. It is about the conditions of possibility of image object perception. Since these conditions of origin are being sought in the subject of image perception, the paradigm’s underlying thought goes: The image object is the unique, phantom-like object, because it is an object that has been made this way by the recipient of the image; the special property of image perception lies in the perceiving subject performing a fundamentally different constitutive act in this case than he does in the case of normal object perception. Once this position is taken, it necessarily follows that one of the tasks of image theory will be to reconstruct the specific constitutive acts of image perception. So we are dealing with a paradigm in which only theories of the genesis of image perception can develop. For the question to be answered is: What do I do, so that what is real is possible: that is, so that I see a physics-free image object? This much would probably not be contested among the various exponents of this paradigm. But if we want to say precisely how what a subject does in the case of image perception differs from what he does in the case of object perception, then we are dealing with many diverse conceptions within a common paradigm. The situation recurs: as in the earlier case of normal perception, opinions diverge regarding the constitution of the image object, which tasks – obviously always performed unconsciously – make the perception of phantoms and false unities possible. The image theory of Hippolyte Taine – still insufficiently recognized – delivers a prime example of exactly such an attempt – that is: a description of the origin of consciousness of a perceived image object. In his superb work Of Images, reprinted as Book 2 of On Intelligence of 1870, the origin of image perception is described with all the clarity anyone could want. Its central argument is ordinarily attributed to Husserl, who did in fact



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present it, but was not the first to do so. At issue is the idea that an inner ‘conflict … distinguishes it from the true sensation’ (p. 48, a. 49). An image is a ‘double fact’ (p. 49): it consists as much of a visible carrier as of a likewise visible image object. But their simultaneous visibility and presence contradict one another. It comes to an internally ‘presence of a contradictory sensation’ (p. 46), the effect of which is that the viewer thinks, on the one hand, that he is seeing something, and thinks on the other hand that this something is not a real object. Taine distils his view of the origin of consciousness of the image object into: ‘It is the result of a struggle’ (p. 49). From a contemporary point of view, Taine’s work contains a literally classic explanatory scheme for the origin of image consciousness, one that has shaped theories of the origin of images across the whole of the twentieth century. Husserl used it at the beginning of the century in his lectures ‘Phantasy and Image Consciousness’ [in: Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory]; in the second half, it turns up in James J. Gibson’s ecological perception theory; even Gottfried Boehm’s analyses of iconic difference may be placed in this tradition. But whatever developmental phase we may be thinking about, image perception owes its particularity to a dialectical interplay of conflicting perceptions. In light of just this dominance of Taine’s concept of conflict in theories of the origin of image perception, however, it is especially important not to overlook other perfectly possible routes within this paradigm. If we are concerned with a relevant alternative to the concept of conflict, we would think first of Jean-Paul Sartre’s great study The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination of 1940. Here, a position is developed that is as clear as it is radical in its opposition to the concept of conflict: the perception of the image object is not a special form of object perception at all, and this for a simple reason: objects that are perceived must be real objects for the perceiver. Since the image object is not a real object, we can conclude that it was not perceived – exactly what Sartre thinks: the image object is imagined, meaning here: envisioned; it is the product of an act of imagination. An image comes about if a material thing is transfigured and transformed by means of the imagination. One might say that whereas consciousness of the image object is, for Taine and his followers, the result of a play between two conflicting perceptions, for Sartre image consciousness is not a product of perception at all: images arise

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through acts of imagination. The positions of Taine and Sartre are extremes, in a sense, so it is not surprising to find suggestions about how a middle way might look. Richard Wollheim developed such a suggestion in his Art and its Objects of 1980. Wollheim turns against both Taine’s ideas about conflicting perception and Sartre’s idea of a transfiguration through imagination. For Wollheim doesn’t explain image perception either by referring back to another known capacity of consciousness − such as imagination – or by letting it arise from a play of components – such as two conflicting perceptions – but by introducing a special kind of perception that is necessary for image perception and image perception only: seeing-in. This seeing-in is just exactly the kind of seeing that is exclusively found in the seeing of images. Accordingly, a human being cannot just see something as something, but rather also has the unique capability sui generis to see something in something, and if he uses this, then and only then does he see images. That means: a person can see images because he has a capability that is required for just this one thing. What was the case in the first paradigm earlier holds here as well: as diverse as the views offered here may be, they are all, always, answers to the same question; in each of these theories, it is the conditions of possibility of the perception of images that are sought, and in each of these theories, the special conditions of possibility are sought and found in the subject of image perception.

The unique consequences of image perception Should image perception gain functional primacy, a third paradigm arises for the philosophy of image perception – a paradigm that is, in its interests and mode of inquiry, as clearly different from one as the other of the two preceding paradigms. This is neither about the question what do I see when I see an image? Nor is it about the problem what do I do when I see an image? A third way opens with the question what happens with me when I see an image? The starting point for this approach is, accordingly: the unique property of image perceptions may be thought back from the distinctive consequences this mental state has for the subject. The advantage of this perspective on the phenomenon of looking at images is clear: there is no need to speculate about



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the consequences of image perception, no need to supposition-hermeneutically invent them and construe them as a model. Instead, the subject of image perception experiences them for himself. This does not mean, however, that all consequences of every concrete observation of an image are of interest. The theme in this paradigm has nothing to do with experiences that can be described through claims such as the image makes me feel sad, or the image brings back memories. In keeping with an inverse transcendental philosophy, it is necessary to define the consequences, and exactly the consequences that must be bound up with the reality of every experience of seeing an image, because otherwise this experience would not be an experience of seeing an image. To put it another way: we turn to the necessary consequences of seeing an image, which have to be involved in the perception of the image for the subject, because only a state with these very consequences can be identified as the perception of an image. But that means: if there are such necessary consequences of the reality of seeing an image, the elementary question what is an image? can be answered not only in the two ways mentioned, but in three ways: first, by demonstrating the specific qualities of the image object, second, by reconstructing subjective acts of image constitution and, third, by establishing those consequences that must be bound up with the viewing of images for the perceiver. From the consequences I can tell whether I am seeing an image. For someone who is seeing an image is necessarily put into an exceptional state by his perception, and in fact in an exceptional state whose peculiarities with respect to other perception can be described with gratifying ease and clarity: only in looking at an image is an experience of perception not bound up with the obligation to take part in the perceived events. He no longer has to participate! Exclusively in the case of the perception of an image, the perceiver is not immersed in the perceived world. Images are non-immersive. The concept of immersion has actually become a key category for the description of the consequences of image perception. One speaks of an immersive image when the viewer of this image believes the seen image object not to be an image object, but a real thing. It reaches a state of confusion: the viewer does not notice that he is seeing an artificial image object. The usual key examples of such immersive images include stereoscopic photographs, panoramas and modern digital simulations with head-mounted displays.

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Yet as impressive as such visual media may be, it seems clear that so far these technologies have not fully achieved the transformation, but are at best steps on the way toward an immersive image to come. In certain situations, trompe-l’oeil painting succeeds in creating an immersive effect for someone viewing from a particular standpoint. But even such examples do not displace the ordinary phenomenon of imagery, or let us ignore the categorical disadvantages attached to the distinction between immersive and non-immersive images. So it is most unfortunate that the immersive image is discussed in such a way as to suggest a phenomenon that occurs only on seeing specific images: as if the immersion effect could come only from seeing immersive images. But that is just not the case. Immersion is rather what happens to anyone who perceives. Perception immerses him in the perceived world. My perception’s letting-me-be-in-the-world means that my perception is immersive. So-called immersive images are therefore not reinventing immersion; the goal is rather for them to lose the special status of images, that is, for the perception of such images to become more like normal perception, which always is immersive: through the viewing of special images, the state of image perception is supposed to become as immersive as any other perception. Only this very pursuit of sameness is doomed to failure a priori: for either immersive images cannot be realized for technical reasons, in which case they simply don’t function at all; or they do function, in which case they can no longer be called images – tertium non datur. Here is another weighty reason for thinking talk about immersive images is unfortunate: it gives the impression that there could be immersive images, which is a logical impossibility: an image must be non-immersive in order to be an image. The difference between immersive and non-immersive images is as reasonable as the difference between square and round circles. If an image were immersive, the perception of the image could no longer be distinguished from the perception of a normal object, and with that we are once again dealing with one of the necessary consequences of image perception. For the viewer, the viewing of an image does not necessarily entail becoming so involved in the world visible in the image as to have become part of that world. If this did happen, this subject would no longer believe himself to be in a state of image perception. But that means: perception of an image is given only if, in this intentional state, the effect of immersion – otherwise necessarily



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given by perception – is suspended. The principle of perception, the principle of letting me be its subject as a part of the perceived world, is inhibited. In fact an image’s actual effect on perception in some ways neutralizes some of its consequences for the subject. Images alone are in a position to let me see something without demanding the price of my personal presence in the perceived world. This is in fact the rule with an image: I can see something without becoming causally involved in it through my state of perception. Looking at image perception from the standpoint of its consequences, its uniqueness consists in its blocking certain consequences. In the case of the perception of image objects, one is less concerned with side effects than one is with the perception of common objects. But that also means: the immersionfree image perception is an object perception that is freed from immersion. Or, to stay with the immersion metaphor: images allow me to artificially rise up out of my being-in-the-world. Images that purport to be immersive are hardly noteworthy, because at best they lead to an intentional state every perceiver has and knows anyway. It is different with a non-immersive image: it comes to a short-term, artificial neutralization or suspension of a participation given, imposed, by perception. The viewer is relieved of the demands imposed by immersive perception, that is, the strenuous, persistent presence of the perceived world; the image facilitates an exceptional state of freedomfrom-participation. Subjects remain alert subjects all the while: they look at images that appear to be material things in the world: namely images that hang on a wall, are printed in books or glow on screens. We cannot speak of an interruption in participation as it is given in sleep. The state of perception is not abandoned; for in those moments in which the image object becomes the intentional object of a state of consciousness, only the known impositions are relaxed. That is critical: through the perception of an image object, the perceiver does not himself turn into a visible part of a visible image world; he does not become an image object: it does not come to this known binding of the subject into the world he perceives by means of his perception. It might well be said: the viewing of an image puts its viewing subject into literally apolitical circumstances – at least this is how it appears in light of Volker Gerhardt’s apt analyses in Partizipation. Das Prinzip der Politik [Participation: the Principle of Politics] of 2007: political decision-making processes always rest on acts of participation; through representations, individuals are brought

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into and kept out of a communal decision-making process; they are immersed in the collective decisions, even if they themselves are not there; in this way, their self-determination becomes co-determination. But this very co-determination blocks the perception of an image of its viewing subject – unless what appears in the image is his representative, a politician, in short: an avatar! This, the viewer’s placeholder in the image, does not let the viewing of the image become immersive in an optical sense, but it does in a political sense: the interactive image enables its viewer to take part in determining the processes and decisions of the image object – and this, in fact, through a representative, as in politics. However if the object is either a still image or a film, it is not possible for the viewing subject to interact and share in this way. On the contrary: in viewing such images the viewer does not become part of the viewed world in any way, either personally or through a placeholder. So the consequences are clear: I must be detached, apolitical, perhaps even somewhat decadent towards them. The subject of this perception, sui generis, is made to make a pause from participation, whether that subject wants to or not. But that also means: in light of the consequences, image perception is no improvement, no intensification or completion of normal perception, but rather a reduction that affords relief. Only in this state of intentional perception am I not obliged to participate in perceived events, and this is not necessarily, but can be distinctly pleasant. At least this very possibility is one of the main themes in Aristotle’s Poetics. The more critical consideration, however, may be that Aristotle’s few remarks about images may be interpreted not only as an attempt to explain the special aesthetic pleasure of certain images, but beyond this one of the first attempts to answer the question of what an image is in the first place by determining which perceptual consequences are typical and which do not occur. Aristotle writes as follows: ‘Objects which in reality we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies’ (1448b, 10). Assuming an interest in the matter in principle, the evaluation of the statement is easy: the thought that one might take pleasure in the viewing of grisly images of corpses may not be the statement’s most noteworthy idea. For who would seriously claim that this is necessarily, in principle, the case? It is too easy to find counter-examples to show that it can be, but is not necessarily the case. But what really can be generalized to a statement in principle



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is the phenomenological insight, implicit in Aristotle’s statement, into what an image is to begin with: this goes: when we see something without being there, at the event, ourselves, then and only then are we seeing an image.

Forced into spectatorship In any given instance, looking at images has consequences for the perceiving subject that may be described negatively with great ease: in viewing images, one is not there, one does not participate, the recipient is not part of the event, does not belong to it. But as helpful as these descriptions may be, such confinement to negative statements is always unsatisfactory in the end. It is particularly relevant in this case, since such a restriction is not at all necessary – on the contrary: a concept is available for a positive characterization of the consequences that is as apt as it is widespread: my image perception lets me be a spectator. It is an inevitable consequence of observing an image that the observer, through this intentional state, becomes a spectator. We can almost reach this definition through conceptual analysis alone, at least if we hold to the classical understanding of a spectator as an uninvolved observer. The spectator is the opposite of a participant: just as the participant is defined by his participation in the perceived events, the spectator is defined by his not participating: there is a distance − either literal or metaphorical − between the spectator and the events he perceives, so that he does not engage in the events seen. Just such a distance is given a priori for the viewing of an image, and to that extent fundamentally distinguishes a spectator of images from a spectator of an inner world, as, for example, a theatregoer. A theatregoer is by no means a spectator eo ipso; he becomes one by taking the usual attitude in the theatre with respect to events on stage. It is characteristic of this attitude that he sees real fellow human beings and knows that they are fellow human beings, but does not regard them as such. As a spectator, he is watching a depicted event in which he himself does not belong. Yet this does not mean that everyone in the theatre automatically regards events on stage as a spectator would; one need only think of the director, or of the parents of an actor who are watching their child on stage: both pay attention to the human being who is actually present in preference to the depicted person – and this

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is exactly what is different with an image: in fact it is exactly reversed! With an image, the mode of perception forces the viewer to be a non-participating spectator – whether he wants to be or not. For in contrast to spectating-inthe-world, the spectating-of-an-image is not a question of how one goes about it, but rather a consequence of the mental state in which a subject finds himself due to this special case of perception: the spectator arises through the viewing of the image. The viewing subject has no need to take an aesthetic attitude at all in order to achieve a distance from the seen event; the epoché is inherent in the viewing of image objects, and this for a reason that is as simple as it is compelling: if the perceiver were not forced by his perception to be a non-participating spectator with respect to the image object, he would not think he was seeing an imaginary image object, but rather a real event. The result is a correlation in principle: because being a spectator is a necessary consequence of a special perception in the case of image perception, we can say a priori that the recipient of an image is always a spectator, and in fact a spectator so strange as to be unthinkable to such a radical degree for the viewing of worldly things. An inner-worldly spectator finds himself in an unsteady position: as long as the viewed events are real events in the world, it remains thinkable that they would develop in such a way as to undermine his attitude as a non-parti­ cipating viewer and involve him, nolens volens, as part of the event. There are various levels of this: a theatregoer today must be prepared to become involved, more or less awkwardly, in the production; other spectators must be prepared for completely different developments: every spectator is, in the end, in the same position as those who saw the Formula One race of 10 September 1961, at Monza in Italy. After a light collision with Jim Clark’s Lotus in the second round, a Ferrari, driven by Wolfgang Graf Berghe von Trips, was sent at speed flying into the air by a side barrier at the approach to the famous Parabolic Curve leading on from the straight stretch, flying through an ineffectual wire fence towards the public: 14 spectators died at the race track. Between the viewer of an image and an image object there is no spatial demarcation, no frame or mesh fencing, but a categorical gap: the viewer of the image looks into the physics-free zone without physical properties. And that means: that which has no physical being may in principle be observed with no danger to the body at all. No aesthetic attitude and no seat, however



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exclusive, can put the viewer beyond the reach of causality. So the innerworldly spectator, who is himself always in the world on account of his own perception, can be a spectator only in the form of seeing-as. We can look at aspects of the world or at events in the world as spectators, that is, as if we were not part of the seen events. For the world may be looked at as an image – despite not being one. As long as what is seen is not an image object, the viewer continues to be a part of the same physical world − which makes it necessary to say clearly: if ever a metaphor of human existence did not apply, it is the one of shipwreck with spectator. In the end, the spectators always sit in the same boat. A withdrawal from the causal traffic of things into a truly unconditional position of safety and absolute distance is granted to the viewer of an image alone. Here and only here do I see the entirely Other, namely that which I, as a perceiver in the world, cannot be: a free, visible being that is not subject to the laws of physics.

Optical de-individualization of the Me Among the established hopes of classical spectator theory is the idea that the spectator’s attitude softens or even supresses individual differences between people. The thought is that when people become spectators, they come to resemble one other, and so are able to judge more objectively, in aesthetic, theoretical as well as ethical matters. So Kant, for example, is of the opinion that aesthetic judgements of taste are only possible because the one judging had first put his own preferences and desires aside and taken up the position of a disinterested spectator. A very similar thought is found with Husserl: phenomenological description requires universal epoché because only this radical spectator-position provides certainty that we are dealing with consciousness as such, and not with an individual human consciousness. And, for John Rawls, it is only non-participating social spectators, behind a veil of ignorance, that recognize, with a justifiable claim to objectivity, whether behaviour is socially just or unjust. Against the background of such hopes, it does not seem remarkable that a proper de-individualization of the perceiving subject is actually to be found among the consequences of looking at images – after all, the viewer of an image is a perfect spectator, as no adjustment in

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attitude would enable him to be in the world. This optical de-individualization of the subject in a state of perception may be described in at least three of its aspects: in one’s own self-positioning, in one’s own temporality, and in oneself being visible. When I look at an image, this state is bound up, for me, with the consequence that I distinguish myself less sharply from other subjects who are looking at the same image than would be the case for the perception of a normal object. It is about the following phenomenon: the viewing of a real object necessarily leads to my locating myself in a place that can then be occupied by no other. Among the inescapable consequences of the reality of my perception is that I, as a result of this state, am put into the presence of something in such a way as only one person can be at that moment. Two people cannot see the same thing in the same way, because they cannot be in the same place. For me this means that my perception is bound up with the consequence of having to be a subject in the world that must necessarily distinguish itself spatially from another perceiving subject – and that is exactly the point: image perception does not impose this individual spatial positioning on its subject. Individual location is just not an issue in a state of image perception. There is no individual point of view for an image object. Several people can look at the same image object, but they do not see it from different points of view – nor can they. However one may circle about an image, no individual viewing position will be found. Even if two viewers are looking at an image object, one more from the left, the other more from the right, this is not bound up with the consequence that the image object on the image carrier is seen by one more from the left and the other more from the right. The image carrier will be seen differently, but not the image object. This does not mean that the image object is not seen from a place – yet this place is no individual place. On the contrary: the image refers its viewers to a viewing position – and in fact: to each the same one, to no one his own, to each, mine. What is seen in an image will – certainly within certain limits, be seen by all who stand in various places in front of the image from the same place. The face on an image is seen from one side; but someone else who is also looking at the face on the image carrier sees this from the same place at the same moment. Each person sees from that place in which I, too, find myself. My seeing from this place no longer excludes others’ seeing from this place at the same time. In this respect all are the same, so that it can be said



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that we are dealing with a de-individualization of the subject: the perception of an image is for me bound up with the consequence that I differentiate myself less from another perceiving subject than would necessarily be the case for states of perception of a real object. Through the viewing of images I am freed and relieved of the imposition of my spatially unique being-in-theworld – a very similar situation exists in relation to time. The de-individualization of the subject of perception in the viewing of an image affects that subject’s bodily existence in space as well as in time. The perceptual imposition is obvious: if someone wants to perceive an object twice, he must pay the price of becoming older himself. If you want to see how something will look tomorrow, there is no way around it: you have to wait! You have to live through the same time as the object to be perceived. Participation of the perceiver in the perceived world is also a synchronized participation in its temporality: everything that is perceived is, because it is perceived, an object growing older at a specific point in time – only the image object is not. Unlike the image carrier, an image object does not change with time: it does not get older. For the viewer, this means that the image object can be viewed repeatedly at different times without the image object becoming older in the meantime. There is no longer any need to wait in order to be able to see what something will look like tomorrow – for the image object will have to look the same tomorrow as it does today in order to be an image object. For the subject of this image viewing, it means there can be no reference to the moment of viewing. In the state of the viewing of image objects – and in fact only in this state, do we miss the conditions of possibility for saying, meaningfully, when I saw that, it still looked different. The image carrier may have been in better condition, but not the image object. The absolute synchrony between the temporal being of the perceiver and the perceived is suspended with respect to the image object. And that means: my individual moment, in which I have just seen, am seeing or will see the image object, cannot be an exclusive moment, because it is not different from other moments. If time, with its aging effect, passes over the appearance of the causality-free image object, images permit the same thing to be seen at different times, and the seeing subject becomes, on entering into the state of image perception, a subject who does in fact see the image object at a specific point in time – but not at his point in time; there is, then, no Me as someone who saw the image object at a particular point

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in time – and this is an enormous relief: one cannot miss either the right moment or the right position for viewing an image. Among the consequences of being able-to-see is the ability-to-be-seen. In order to be a perceiving subject in the world, one must tolerate the imposition of being visible to others in the world. That does not mean that someone else is actually seeing me; it means only: if I can see, I must be visible. In the case of viewing an image object, I am spared this very imposition. For, unlike the perception of a thing, I remain in principle invisible to the world visible in the image. It is simply wrong to claim that an image object can see an image viewer: that which is not subject to the laws of physics cannot see, in principle. Here we are concerned, then, not with the phenomenon of blindness, but with a categorical not-being-able-to-see. What I see in an image may watch me as much as it likes: there is no place there that sees me. This, image perception’s act of neutralization, can readily be compared with the effect of a diode on an alternating current. In current that flows back and forth, the diode lets only current flowing in one direction through, and the situation with the image is analogous: one can look into a depicted scene, but no one can look out from it. And that is the singular possibility – prized and employed so often – of looking at images: only in an image can something be viewed without incurring visibility, without being visible for the seen thing at all, perfectly distanced and wholly shameless – which does not mean, however, that the only-visible image object can be seen only in this way – just as that which it is.

Deciding to take part As real things and events in the world do, an image object, too, permits an artificial attitude to be taken toward it − although this attitude is not the spectator’s, for the image object is always seen from a non-participatory position by a spectator. To claim to be looking at an image as a spectator is not even a tautology, but simply wrong: one does not look at an image as a spectator; rather one who sees an image is a spectator. The relationship is just the reverse of the perception of things in the world: these things do not let themselves be viewed as real things, for they really are real things as they are being perceived. It would be absurd to confront someone with the



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admonition: just let us look at the world as if it were a real world. But it would not be less absurd to insist: just let us look at the image object for once as if it were not really there. Image objects are image objects because they are not really present. They are artificially present, because they, unlike a real object, can only be seen. This constitutes their artificiality: their reduced ontological existence as only-visible beings. Each of the artificial attitudes, from which real things in the world and phantoms in images can be seen, applies to its opposite. Just as the world lets itself be seen by way of an unnatural spectator posture − as Husserl would say – so does the phantom-like only-visibility of the image object allow itself to be qualitatively modified by way of a participating attitude. The only-visible lets itself be viewed as if it were only seen. This is the decisive point that defines the artificial participant position: the interpretation of the only-visible as the only-seen. In a participating attitude, the concern is not to see the only-visible image object as an only-visible phantom, which it actually is, but as something real, that is still just seen. Now the only-visible image object is in fact always something that can only be seen; how could it be otherwise? But not everything that is just seen and not also smelled, heard, touched or tasted is an image object. That which is, like an image object, only visible, is not only seen because someone is only looking, but because someone can only see – that is not always the case by any means: just think of the moon, but also of the fitting of a display window. At least as a rule, both are exclusively seen, although they are not only-visible. So the claim can be made: an artificial participating attitude is taken exactly when the image object is viewed as a detached and distanced object in a display window. The real phantom in the image is then viewed as if it were an object behind a window, to be exclusively seen; as if the absence of any possibility of touching hearing, smelling and tasting were not categorical, but contingent. But that means: in the participating attitude, the reason an image object in an image can only be seen is overlooked; the possibility of comprehensive sensual perception of the image object, which is in principle not there, is treated as just a possibility that is not used. There is a difference between something that is not touched because it cannot be touched, and something that is not touched because no one ever tried to touch it, even if the result is the same in both cases, namely that something was not touched. With this difference, the participating attitude becomes

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clear: it disempowers a categorical impossibility by treating the image in such a way that the impossibility is not noticeable. In the participating attitude, an object’s only-visibility, which is given, is justified as if it depended on my engagement with the object. I only see the object because I am only looking, and not, say, because the object simply couldn’t be touched or smelled. Or to put it another way: in the participating attitude the viewer deliberately and artificially acts as though his own capacity to see were his only perceptual capacity, that is, as if he were an only-seeing subject. So suppose an image were viewed by an only-seeing subject. Such a subject cannot notice that what he is seeing is only visible. We can see that something is only visible only if we can not only see. It is obvious that, for this reason, sound film engages the participating attitude fundamentally more easily than still images do. In the case of a sound film, the viewer need not artificially act as though he is not hearing the depicted events, because he can’t hear them. There is not as much need to adjust and reposition. But this does not mean that no artificial participating attitude is needed in order to participate artificially. Those forms of engagement and compassion, empathy and sympathy, hardly unusual in film, are also made possible through the participating attitude, the attitude that allows the speaking phantoms to be perceived as speaking human beings − which they are not, which is why we are concerned with a seeing-as from a participating attitude. The spectator-attitude with respect to the world and the participantattitude with respect to the image object are, then, two opposing attitudes − at least they are when their consequences are described: the attitude makes me a spectator on the one hand and a participant on the other. But what is remarkable is: if the description of the attitude is brought to bear on the way the repositioning is respectively accomplished, so as to arrive at the opposite position, then one notices: the same displacement grounds both attitudes, but leads to different positions with respect to what is visible. For the spectatorattitude in the world as well as the participating-attitude with respect to an image are based on an artificial displacement, on my deliberately looking at something as if I could only see, as if vision was my only sense – which is not the case. Because the starting situations are different, the same displacement leads to different attitudes. In the matter of looking at the world, the actingas-if I-could-only-see leads to the subject becoming a spectator in the world.



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This is not to say that all spectators in the world necessarily arise solely from this mode of displacement, but only that this kind of displacement necessarily leads to a spectator-being in the world. On the other hand, in the case of looking at images, this displacement turns the subject into an artificial participant in the event. These respectively opposing effects of the same displacement under respectively different conditions is not surprising after all: for if a real event in the world is perceived and the viewer artificially performs as a subject who is in contact with the event exclusively through seeing, then the viewer necessarily becomes a more or less well-defined spectator of a reality of which he himself is a part. For someone who behaves as though he could only see automatically views the world as an image object that really can only be seen. The same artificial displacement has the reverse effect in the case of viewing images: if an image object on a canvas is perceived and the viewer deliberately treats it as though he were someone who could only see, then the viewer turns into a more or less well-defined participant in an only-visible reality in which he plays no part. Through the same displacement, the image perception’s imposition of having to be a participating spectator to what is perceived, becomes relative; it comes to a participating spectatorship for things and events shown pictorially, which still is always participation, but with relief, because it never comes to a shared determination in the image. As intense as artificial participation in a strange and intangible reality may be, the state of viewing images remains an inner-worldly pause in participation, because the viewer, although he can sympathize with events in the image, is always relieved of the obligation to take a personal part in the pictorial event. However sincere the excitement, however deep the artificial immersion, this kind of participation in depicted events is still qualitatively different from the kind of participation demanded of a subject by non-pictorial perception: artificial participation does not lead to a real, bodily presence in the image; the perception of images does not make one a visible part in the image. As present as the image object may be, I am still not present in the image myself. Therefore, the exceptional moments of image object perception allow the perceiving subject a proper pause in participation, a pause from being-in-the-world, relieving the subject, for a little while, from having to suffer the whole range of personal consequences of his perception. In this state of image perception, less is demanded of me; I take part without

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becoming a part; less happens to me than usual. Whether to see this less as a loss or as an unburdening, cannot be made into a general principle. But the spectrum of thinkable evaluation is easy to define: the pause in participation may be condemned as artificial escapism, but also welcomed as a first step in the direction of a metaphysical paradise. However the evaluation turns out, the uniqueness of image perception, which accounts for the irreplaceability of images and perhaps for their lasting fascination as well, appears as a contrast to normal perception. My perception forces me to be a real part of a real world. This is exactly what does not happen in the case of the perception of an image object: the viewing of an image does not demand that I myself become an image object in the image. That is just what sets the perception of an image apart: someone who immerses himself in an image does not emerge within it again. On the contrary: I see, I plunge, I am gone.

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Index abduction 7, 24, 104–5 Abel, Günter 27 access direct as distinct from mediated 40–2 as distinct from entry 38 as hubris 42 as link between myth of the given and myth of the mediate 34–5 paradigm of 37–8, 41 as self-evident concept 36 as spatial connection 38–9, 40 Adorno, Theodor W. 59 Anders, Günther 136 apperception 83–5 Armstrong, David M. 86 Artistotle 144–5 Auffassungssinn see apperception autopsy 48 bewitchment 13 Blume, Thomas 18 Blumenberg, Hans 47–8, 58 Boehm, Gottfried 139 Cartesianism Cartesian as distinct from phenomenological 47–51 two understandings of self in 50 certainty by acquaintance 91 as distinct from knowledge 70–1, 89, 91 perception’s imposition of 90 phenomenal 44, 46–7, 51, 68, 99, 108, 127 philosophical need to translate into sentences 57 reality of intentionality as 52 cogito, ergo sum 46, 68, 99 consciousness as image, wax tablet, or mirror 95 intentionality of 52–3

object of, correlated to specific mental state 79, 87 content John R. Searle’s concept of 85 in phenomenological description 84–5 contradictio in adjecto model-making philosophy as 12 unconscious interpretation as 29 Danto, Arthur 41 Davidson, Donald 5 Dennett, Daniel C. 5 Derrida, Jacques 22 Descartes, René eidetic variation in 68 on perception 92–3 on philosophy’s use of models 13, 15 protreptic understanding of texts in 61 on reality of perceived things 118 reliability of perception 92–3 self–certainty 45–51 theory of consciousness according to Ryle 4 video, ergo sum 127 differentiation essential to perception 30–1 between subject and object of perception 79–80 Dilthey, William 109 doubt see scepticism Dretske, Fred I. 86 Du Bois-Raymond, Paul 101 dualism 40 Ducasse, Curt J. 113 ego-pole 78 see also I-pole eidetic variation geometric examples to describe (Husserl) 67, 110 as logic of phenomena 66, 71

162 Index as phenomenological proof 64–5, 103, 110, 117 spatial and temporal qualities excluded from 103 transcendental aesthetic defence as 64–6, 102 Wittgenstein’s private language argument as 120–1 empiricism 5, 18, 19 enthymeme (incomplete syllogism) 18 as symptom of philosophical position 20 epoché as abstention from judgement 48, 57 circumscribes existential problems 94 of ‘I’ 54, 55 impossibility of complete 90–1 of language games 58 limit of, in the philosophy of perception 94, 146 of models 10, 11 14 of pain 92 transcendence in relation to 55, 56, 57, 58, Erkenntnis 44, 89 see also certainty explanation as distinct from description 13, 106 in relation to models 14 fate fantasy release from 115 participation as 129 of perceiver 90, 102, 114 phenomenological 78 public exposure as perceiver’s 124 Fechner, Theodor 15 fiction 53, 110 Fiedler, Konrad 24 Flusser, Vilém 136 fundamentum inconcussum Cartesian as distinct from phenomenological understanding of 47–51 phenomenal certainty as 45–6, 47 phenomenological, as certainty of relationships 54, 56–7, 77–8 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 22 Gehlen, Arnold 25 Gerhardt, Volker 143

Gibson, James J. 25, 137, 139 Goodman, Nelson 24–5 Heidegger, Martin 7 Helmholz, Hermann von 24 Hume, David 16, 20, 66–7, 104–5, 112 Husserl, Edmund ‘back to the things themselves’ 58 cogito, uses of 46, 47, 48 conditions for aesthetic judgement 147 eidetic variation 65, 67, 68, 138 epoché and existential questions 94, 124 ‘givenness’ in perception 84, 85 image, ontological status of 136 I-pole metaphor 56 on intentionality 51, 53, 54, on models in philosophy 14, 15 on myth in philosophy 4 perception, disinterest in origin of 129 philosophical use of language 57–8, 60 public aspect of perception 123–4 self as subject and object 108–9 I-pole (Husserl) anticipated in Kant 56 in paradigm of perception 74, 78 as subject in the world 54–5 image contradiction in consciousness in viewing 139 immersive 141–2, 144 magical qualities of (Flusser) 136 visibility of, to exclusion of all other forms of perception 135 image carrier 134, 148, 149 image object as ‘a nothing’ (Husserl) 136 artificial presence of 137, 151 consciousness of, as struggle 139 definition of 134–5 durability of 149 as ‘imaginary object’ (Sartre) 137 impossibility of illuminating 136 no individual point of view for 148 as only visible 135, 137, 150–2 participating attitude toward 152–3 as ‘phantom’ 136, 151 physics-free 137, 138

Index Plato’s objection to 134 as ‘virtual object’ (Gibson) 137 image perception as act of imagination (Sartre) 139–40 consequences of (for perceiver) 141 as intentional state 133 non-participation of perceiver as identifying mark of 144 optical de-individualisation as consequence of 147 origin of 137–40 as ‘seeing-in’ (Wollheim) 140 as suspension of perceiver’s obligation to participate 141, 143, 144, 145 as suspension of perceiver’s spatial and temporal uniqueness 148–50 as suspension of perceiver’s submission to laws of physics 136 as suspension of perceiver’s visibility in the perceived situation 150 as suspension of state of immersion given by normal perception 142, 144 three paradigms of difference image object is different 134–5 perception is different 134, 135–7, 141 subject behaves differently 137–40 Ingarden, Roman 136 intentionality basis for knowledge about 53 as being-in-the-world 57 consciousness in relation to 35, 51, 54, 78–9 Descartes’s res cognitans in relation to 51 directional, as distinct from relational metaphors for 95–8, 99, 111 mediality in relation to 39, 54 of self as substance, as distinct from self as relation 54 subject and object of perception distinguishable by difference in 79 interpretationism compared with psychologism 15 as cultural symptom 34 as one variety of myth of the mediate 21 proliferation of selves characteristic of 108

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prominence in contemporary philosophy 22–3 subject of, not part of the world 107, 109 success of, as scientific model 26 transcendental 27–34 intuition, Kant’s argument for the logical necessity of 103 limitation of 106 space and time as forms of (Kant) 64 theological character of Kant’s argument for 104, 105 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 89 James, William 11 Kant, Immanuel aesthetic judgements 147 eidetic variation in defence of transcendental aesthetic 64–6 forms of intuition 103–6 human condition, philosophy as report on 2 self as subject and object in 56, 107–8 subject priority in paradigm of perception 76 transcendental aesthetic of 102, 103 Kenntnis 89 see also knowledge by acquaintance Knauer, Vincenz 10 knowledge by acquaintance 84, 89 phenomenal 43, 44, 45, 56 see also certainty Kurthen, Martin 35, 36 Lenk, Hans 25–6, 28, 38 linguistic turn 27 interpretationism as expansion of 27 Locke, John 16, 20 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 5 MacDowell, John 17 medial turn 39, 40 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice epoché never complete 55, 93–4 objection to ‘seeing as’ 118 protreptic use of language 61 self-certainty in 45, 55–6

164 Index models Descartes’ resistance to 46 as distinct from myths 7–8 evaluation of 8 limits of, in philosophy 9 as myths in philosophy 9–10, 70 philosophy without 13, 14, 44, 48 myth accusation of, in philosophy 4–5, 16 compared to model 7–8 as explanation 5–7 origin of image consciousness 138–9 as recognition 5 myth of the given 16–20, 37, 40, 44 myth of the mediate 3–4, 40 compared to myth of the given 37 relationship to the model of the mediate 21 success of, in contemporary philosophy 36 two varieties of 22 Nietzsche, Friedrich 29, 41 pain imposition of, compared to imposition of perception 122 knowledge of, as distinct from perception of 88–9, 111–12, 118, 122 origin of, unrelated to experience of 58, 118 phantom 91 as sensation 52 participation as distinct from spectatorship 101–2 imposed by perception 99 as part-to-whole relationship 100–1 suspended in viewing of image 132 Peirce, Charles Sanders 7, 24 perception adverbial theories of 113 belief in relation to 85–6 bound up with consciousness of something 36 content of 81–3 as demanding embodiment 107 as demanding perceiver’s participation in worldly events 102

(perception cont.) as distinct from imagination or fantasy 112 as distinct from knowledge 9 as distinct from sensation 52 duration and independence of object of 112–14 fantasy world, denied by 114–15 finiteness and ephemerality of 131 image allows pause in 132–3 image perception as special case of 133 imperceptibility of causes of 70, 82 as independent of awareness 87 as intentional condition 52, 79, 95 intentional content of 82 internal structure of, reflected in grammar 81 invariability of spatial and temporal 103 irreducible to any act of interpretation 84 irrelevance of causes of 70–1 materials said to constitute 69 non–propositional 86 object of, as cause of 116–18 one state of mind among others 82 origin of 69, 117, 119, 129 paradigm of with primacy of object 72–3, 95, 113–14 with primacy of perception 74–5 with primacy of subject 73–4, 113, 129 with primacy of subject compared to paradigm with primacy of perception 75–6, 118 perceiver exposed by 124 perceiver’s existence conditioned by 111, 131 philosophy of, different from other philosophical disciplines 70 presence of perceiver demanded by 106 presentness as essential feature of 79–81 public aspect of 121–3 reality of, demands acceptance of world independent of perceiver 114 reality of, demands existence of perceiver 76–7 sleep as interrupting 131–2 spatial and temporal qualities as intrinsic to 65, 103

Index (perception cont.) subject of 76, 147 subject’s identity as consequence of 124 personification, allegorical 6 philosophy analytic 4, 46, 120 inverse transcendental 71, 72, 128, 141 model-free 47–50 myths and models in 9–12, 70 obligation to challenge models in 12–13, 19 other disciplines as substitutes for 15–16 Pitcher, George 86 Plato Allegory of the Cave 41, 57, 58 objection to images 134, 135 pragmatism 11 presence artificial for images 135, 136 as feature of perception 80, 93 imposition of, as distinguishing quality of perception 82–3 temporal as distinct from spatial 80 presentness, as the effect of making present 35–6 prison, as metaphor for being-in-theworld 4, 57, 101, 123, 124 private language argument (Wittgenstein) 120 protreptikós (protreptic text) definition of 60–2 literary and rhetorical status of 62 as phenomenological use of language 60, 62 Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism as example of 62 psychoanalysis 5 psychologism 15 pyrrhonist avoids truth claims 62 as moral philanthopist 63 phenomenologist as 48, 63 qualia 112 Rawls, John 147 reduction 56 see also epoché

165

Reid, Thomas 23–4, 52 representation, three-point relational definition of 36 representationism 15, 34–7, 21 res cognitans, as substance 50, 78 revelation 68, 89 Rorty, Richard 19, 41 Russell, Bertrand 16, 20 Ryle, Gilbert Sartre, Jean-Paul 5, 55, 124, 137, 139 scepticism 5, 9, 26, 45–6, 52, 62, 64, 92–3 Schopenhauer, Arthur 109 Searle, John R. 85, 86, 119 Seels, Martin 39 self–certainty Cartesian, as basis for a philosophy without models 44–6 Cartesian, as distinct from phenomenological, 51 diverse forms of 87–8 Sellars, Wilfred 5, 16–19, 41 sense data, multiple terms for 16–17 sensations, as distinct from intentional conditions 52 Sextus Empiricus 62–4 see also protreptikós (protreptic text) Shusterman, Richard 29, 32–3, 34 Sommer, Manfred 60 spectatorship classical understanding of 145, 147 image, as distinct from ‘inner-worldly’ 145–7 image perception as 150 as opposite of participation 145 subject as both constituting and constituted 108–9 Cartesian res cogitans as 78 de-individualisation of 148–9 embodied 107–11 as ‘I’ and ‘Me’ 75, 78 identity of, as consequence of reality of perception 125 only-seeing 152 philosophy of, without self-knowledge 76 time sense grounded in 126

166 Index transcendental 107, 108–9 worldless and bodiless in interpretationism and constructivism 107, 109 Taine, Hippolyte 138–9 theodicy 114 theological explanation 104, 112 thought experiment 65, 120–1 transcendental aesthetic (Kant) eidetic variation in defence of 64–6 self as subject and object in 56, 107–8 spatiotemporal structures in 102, 104

theological character of abduction in argument for 104 utopia, cognitive 59 video, ergo sum 127 Wahrnehmung (perception), literal meaning of German 83 Weis, Ludwig 10 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 13, 88, 120 Wölfflin, Heinrich 24 Wollheim, Richard 140 Wundt, Wilhelm 15