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Animalia and Psychological Consciousness
But what about animate realities, humans and beasts? What about their psyches and psychical mental processes? The complete physical world is not merely physical; it is also psychophysical. It must - who can deny it? - include all the streams of consciousness connected with animated organisms. Thus, on the one hand consciousness is said to be absolute in which everything transcendent and, therefore, ultimately the whole psychophysical world, becomes constituted; and, on the other hand, consciousness is said to be a subordinate real event within that world. How can these statements be reconciled?
Let us make clear to ourselves how consciousness, so to speak, can enter into the real world, how that which in itself is absolute can relinquish its immanence and take on the characteristic of transcendence. We immediately see that it can do so only by a certain participation in transcendence in the first, the originary sense; and this is obviously the transcendence belonging to Nature. Only by virtue of its experienced relation to the organism does consciousness become real human or brute consciousness, and only thereby does it acquire a place in the space belonging to Nature and the time belonging to Nature- the time which is physically measured. We also recall that only by virtue of the connection joining a consciousness and an organism to make up an empirically intuited unity within Nature is any such thing as mutual understanding between animate beings pertaining to a world possible; and that only thereby can any cognizing subject fine complete the world and at the same time know it as one and the same surrounding world belonging to him and to all other subjects.
The danger of equivocation extends over judgments as well. On the one hand, we can count multiple apperceptive events of affirmation, occurring psychologically, which proceed in time, begin and end, and recur as often as we like, in happenings that can be distinguished one from another. On the other hand, the judgment thus reached remains the same throughout each act accessing it. It seems to persist and to be called back for encore appearances; it seems even to have pre-existed its first appearance to me (# 47). In this latter sense, the judgment is not the same as the mental act that reaches it. Moreover, the truth of the judgment is neither equivalent to nor dependent upon the psychological experience of clear evidence that accompanies the mental act embracing it. Husserl easily shows this by recalling that in both logic and arithmetic, there are truths that have never been entertained in any human consciousness, and indeed could never be humanly conceived (# 50). (Cases of truth without the possibility of psychological evidence would include the computation of very large numbers, and decisions about membership in sets that are uncountably large. The arithmetical and logical operations connected with such determinations could never be "done" by a human mind or a computer. Their truth cannot be "factual.") ...Husserl's discussion of "noetic-noematic structures" fails in its attempt to show how the ego reaches and secures both the unity of the known object, and the unity of the knowing subject. But it fails in a spectacular starburst of insight. Husserl notices that the mental stream has its own distinctive kind of adumbrations or continuities, which are more complex than those discussed above, the relatively simple off-shaded appearings of spatial objects in perception. Beyond that simple sort of off-shading, consciousness can also turn back on itself and reflect upon its own intending acts, or on any component thereof. The stream meanders among spatial objects, but can also at whim objectify aspects of its own acts of intending, and consider them. This yields a thick layering of possible objects (# 97). For example, here are some noemata that might enter the live experience stream: pencils ... writing ... German verbs ... the frustration of strong verbs ... Ulrike ... memories in general ... the unreliability of memory ... components of perceptions ... the advisability of analyzing perceptions into their components ... the smell of popcorn wafting into the study ... the effort to resist distractions ... and so forth. Some of these arise directly from things, while others arise as objectifications of what was inherent a moment ago in the very act of knowing, the noesis. How can we tell the difference? Husserl answers that you can tell when the ego-beam has penetrated through to the bottom of the stack of noemata, so to speak, and has gotten ahold of a thing itself, because at that point, all the aspects of the thing are known immanently--really--in the act of perceiving as being contained in the sense of the thing (# 98). For example, you know popcorn itself when you are perceiving the taste of butter and salt. (You do not know popcorn when you read this sentence; instead, you are reflecting on what it is to know popcorn, and popcorn's qualities are not given immanently within your object. But then while tasting popcorn, saltiness was given immanently but not objectified.) Husserl rightly points out that we are able to slide up and down the pole of the ego-beam at will, moving now toward the thing, now away from it to consider the act of knowing and its modalities. For example, noematically I can consider a certain cat who probably exists, but then I can turn back noetically to assess the degree of certitude that characterizes my consideration of that selfsame cat as existing (# 105). Now if we were to slide down to the point where all modalities are behind us on the noetic side of the pole, and if there we were to face the object, we would get the pure sense of the object in which its unity is given. In # 102 Husserl claims that this can happen, and that we can indeed slide far enough toward the object that the unity of the noema will be known as not having been imposed by the act of knowing. At that point, all of its qualities supposedly will be given immanently, really, contained in the perception rather than in the secondary conscious act that may grasp it a split-second later. Its sense will have been captured as something known with certainty to comprise its qualities, without the interference of a synthetic conscious act. (If this worked, it would effectively ensure the objectivity of knowledge, and would win the day for realism against idealism.) Husserl writes:
"The noematic objects ... are unities transcendent to, but evidentially intended to in, the mental process. But if that is the case, then characteristics, which arise in [those unities] for consciousness and which are seized upon as their properties in focusing the regard on them, cannot possibly be regarded as really inherent moments of the mental process" (248-249).
Rather, they inhere in the object's sense, and subsequently are lifted out for analysis in the mental process
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