Egology and its deconstraction

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One of the trivialisms one has to embrace upon entering a philosophical department is that philosophy investigates the link between human and world. World here refers to both the material world of a physicist and the living world - the world which all sentient creatures share. This opposition indicates that no matter how we define human, personal experience is always of importance for philosophy. Where does this personal dimension lie? Is it situated on the level of consciousness or ego? These are the basic questions that first spring to mind. Then there is a risk to overestimate one part of the opposition over another. If we give preference to the human subject over its world, we are considered idealists. If the reverse is true, we tend towards the materialistic. In such a way, we have vastly different approaches to philosophy. These broadly defined camps are not only opponents but fierce rivals on the battlefield of philosophy.

It is common knowledge that philosophical labels often serve as charged terms. This is particularly notable in the case of dialectical materialism, but the accusations of subjective idealism and solipsism have haunted Descartes, Kant, and Husserl. Despite the fact that dead ends inherent to subjectivism have been thoroughly examined through the ages, the subjective idealism tradition lasts. It is useful to take a closer look at it through the lens of the problem of intersubjectivity - a concept invented by Edmund Husserl in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (1913). As a pharmakon, the concept was supposed to heal Husserl's philosophical enterprise. Instead, it only poisoned it. Such focus helps to highlight inherent vices of subjectivism as well as to expose the consequences of establishing a science on pure ego. Doing so follows in the footsteps of Jean-Luc Marion, particularly in his book, Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics (1991). Marion is a far-reaching and preeminent scholar of Descartes, deeply engaged in the study of self and subjectivity. It is important to weave Marion's argument regarding Descartes with the criticism of Husserl to demonstrate how enforcing and overestimating ego, and its cognitive capacities, distorts not only the epistemological sphere but also the practical and ethical ones.

The core idea of subjective idealism consists in establishing pure and transparent «I» as an absolute ground for cognition and knowledge. The paradoxical absence of evidence at the logic and language levels that supports the existence of the outside world forces us to look in another direction for sources of knowledge. Thus, if one cannot find real evidence to dispel any doubt about the existence of the material world, then we are able at least to try to find them in ourselves. In a sense our ability to doubt makes possible issuing any doubt at all. In such a move, cogito, or thinking thought, is always bent to itself and equal to itself in an ouroboric fashion. On the other hand, Descartes's ambitions clearly go much further than simply to ontologize the «I» and its cognitive states. This rings true for Husserl, also.

Concerning Descartes, it is worth remembering that not only was he a philopsher, but also a mathematician and scientist. So is not much a surprise that he wanted it all at once: to invent a true and strictly scientific method as well as to establish metaphysics. It is crucial, however, to lay out Descartes theses of importance for our further investigation. As curious as it may be, in Descartes's time, science was yet to be established as a respectful and dignified practice. Wisdom was regarded to reside elsewhere. So unlike Kant and Husserl, Descartes had to restore the dignity of science. And he believed that it was possible via a correct method. Decartes claimed that all sciences have common grounds. He even issued a hypothesis that they are so intertwined that it is easier to learn them all together. Having learned one, you already have a taste of the other.

According to Descartes the origin of sciences goes back to mens humana, human reason. The key criterion for truth is evidence, most precisely self-evidence. Truth is incapable of doubt. It is established by reason, which is independent of all affections of consciousness except self-evidence. Descartes's famous cogitationes, i.e. thoughts, are mental states in which we come into awareness about the content of conscious experiences. Products of my mental activities, i.e. objects, are represented as opposed to my mind. By these operations, the difference between thoughts is eliminated. The main and only producer of the cogitationes is the ego, which similarly imbues them with evidence. The ego is in charge of this thought universe; it controls and manages it. According to him, nothing lies entirely within our power except our thoughts. Therefore, truth is a function of the ego. The latter is a kind of machine that constantly produces mental objects and their true meanings. Finally, as soon as ego cogito ergo sum, the existence of other things, at least as representations, is guaranteed and saved from pervasive metaphysical doubt. intersubjectivity philosophy phenomenological

That Descartes's ego cogito is an egoistic conception is not only a pun. It carries a couple of paradoxes which cannot be solved within Descartes's world view. Not to mention that the theoretical emphasis on the ego may contribute to augmenting egoistic impulses, values and morality. Pascal discerned that centuries ago. In Descartes's Discourse on the Method, the ego gets it all. It is not just a blinking «I» who dives in and out depending on external situations and its moods. The ego obtains a substance status, which was the highest rank in early modern metaphysics. The first paradox concerns the already decimated theory of representation and the status of the ego's self-affection. Here, again, we rely on Marion's argument in Cartesian Questions. No one would doubt that we are aware of ourselves. The very act of such questioning implies the ever-repeating awareness. But this awareness is precisely self-affection. It involves a twofold structure of representation as soon as I think of myself, cogito me cogitare, in such a way that I have an idea of myself, and thus the ego is redoubled. But which of these egos exist? Who obtains the existential status - the ego who thinks or the ego that is represented? Therefore, we clearly have a metaphysical construction, a transcendental and intangible ego, which is stillborn.

Marion points out that Descartes, while recovering God, soul, and the external world from his metaphysical doubt, never grants the same validity or even amount of attention to other humans. Can the ego guarantee and save the otherness of other humans? It appears not. First of all, I perceive others as moving objects, at best as automatons covered in clothes. Then only by reasoning, I can make a conclusion what I am witnessing are humans before my eyes. The very humanity of others rests in the grip of my ego. This phenomenon is omnipresent in the sense that everything one knows about other humans is reliant on their own best judgments. Thus, the ego obtains as much power as it can take over any alterity. The only reason one has to reject other sentient creatures is his or her doubts about their existence. Nonetheless, it is hard not to notice that this procedure is only possible in severe seclusion--whether it be in a monastery or in a solitary study.

As a result, there are two paradoxes at play. The first concerns the metaphysical status of the ego, and the second implies the inaccessibility of another human being. From this point of view, they seem interdependent. By paradoxes I mean the substance status of the ego and unintelligibility of the Other. Furthermore, both of them were inherited by the two greatest followers of Descartes: Kant and Husserl. It is necessary to emphasize that they were well-aware of the predicaments of such approach and tried to resolve them as best as they could. But ultimately, they failed to untangle these inherited paradoxes. Regarding the main focus of my research, I will narrow down our investigations to Husserl's explication of the intersubjectivity which helps us to outline the schemata of the latter problem, which is the intangibility of the psychic life of the Other.

Husserl was a modern scientist. He was a student of Alfred Brentano, and as a mathematician by training combined all available knowledge of the 19th-century psychology with that of mathematics and logics. He reconsidered, enhanced, and made more contemporary Descartes's and Kant's approaches. In his fight to restore the dignity of philosophy against the pretensions of psychology, Husserl followed in the footsteps of Kant. He vehemently rejected and despised any metaphysical pretense and was eager to reestablish the philosophical canon from scratch. In Kuhn's terms, Husserl was at pains to invent a paradigm for philosophy. He adopted Brentano's concept, `intentionality', which implies that all our conscious states are directed towards something, and have the form `consciousness of'. By the acknowledgment of such a seemingly simple axiom, he managed to heal the subject/object dichotomy by sewing together this split with the intrinsic directionality of conscious acts and passions. As soon as intentionality connects and links subject and object, subject accesses object itself to some extent. But in all honesty, only subject has the truly absolute value and status from this point of view. So, to avoid the ghost of solipsism, which threatened Husserl's initiative all along, he established the objectivity of the outer world on intersubjectivity.

As aforementioned, the radical otherness of people and their uneradicated spontaneity are inexplicable in terms of the absolute and transcendental subject. This latter concept was introduced by Emmanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. In his fight against dogmatism, Kant drew line between what one can know and what one cannot. He investigated the conditions of universal and necessary knowledge, i.e. truths, and found that they are the pure forms of sensory experience. By this, he pointed to space and time, as well as logical categories. The transcendental subject is to some extent an enigmatic entity that synthesizes the world with the help of the forms of sensibility and categories of understanding. Already with Kant we stumble upon the questions of whether the transcendental subject is always singular or whether one can speak of transcendental subjects. Husserl seems to admit the plurality by positing transcendental intersubjectivity. But does he really escape the problem of the objectivity and commonality of the outside world? And do transcendental monads have windows to open into their fellow monads? These are the pressing questions Husserl attempted to resolve starting with Ideas II and ending with The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy. Thus, the problem of intersubjectivity turned out to be the main stake and even the fate of transcendental philosophy in general.

In the realm of the subject, the external world and other humans are always doubtful. We do not have them directly and presentatively as ourselves but only constitute them representatively or at best copresentatively. It is worth mentioning that `to constitute' does not mean `to construct' or `to create.' It means to clarify the generation, sedimentation, and operability of sense-structures pertaining to conscious life. However, it is not so easy a task to stop oneself from creating meaning--even for the founder of phenomenology. Husserl builds his scientific approach by rejecting any ontological implication and situating his investigations at the level of meaning. Husserl abstains from claims about what really exists and what does not, and sticks to what we think, desire, and will and how it is carried out. When we speak of intentionality, it implies our belief in the existence of the world which inter alia is inhabited by sentient beings. Husserl calls this common orientation and conviction `the natural attitude.' Within the natural attitude I see and grasp others as animated bodies. With the guidance of empathy I can sense and judge others' inner mental and emotional states by their bodily expressions. But the meaning of the world as objective and common remains in the sphere of pure transcendental consciousness. Again, it is embedded in its concept. The world's curious commonality is the reason why other egos have to touch on my inner psychic construction. The question Husserl poses is the following: How does my ego constitute another ego while experiencing of the other is necessarily refracted, if not corrupted, by my egoconstitution? Whether this question is answerable has yet to be proven. In this transcendental terrain, Husserl proposes to explain intersubjectivity with the help of so-called appresentation, that is to say, analogical apperception. He already used appresentation to explain how the identity of an object is pregiven in perception. I see only the front side of any object, but I already anticipate its backside by means of appresentation. I encounter another human primarily in-person. At first, I see their body. As soon as I experience my body as mein Leib (my living body) which I feel and control, I ascribe the meaning `living body' to this human being. Thus, the experience of pairing takes places. Significantly, pairing is one of the forms of passive synthesis that is not an act of consciousness from Husserl. Consciousness serves here as the container that not only encloses and juxtaposes two mental objects, but also interweaves them. In appresentation, the I and the Other, united and differentiated, exchange meanings, stimulate each other, and resonate. Thus, the I and the Other participate in the transcendental intersubjective merging on equal terms.

In the middle of the twentieth century, Alfred Schutz already indicated a number of paradoxes and difficulties involved in Husserl's strategy. I perceive my body and the body of the Other in radically different ways. I see others as contained and saturated physical objects while my body is given to me in pieces. I feel my body as a polarized field of inner and outer perceptions and as a locus of actual engagement with the world. People whom I have never seen in person, nevertheless, are of the same egotistic nature as me. I have no need to be present with the other in the same time and space to know that. It is impossible for my unique stream of time-consciousness to embrace and constitute within itself another stream of consciousness. Finally, in Husserl, it is never clear what beings comprise the intersubjective world. They may be all ego-like beings or all rational beings or only those belonging to one cultural community. Today, Husserl's explanation of transcendental intersubjectivity in Cartesian Meditation is regarded as a `buried corpse'.

Schutz concludes that pure consciousness is not enough to describe the phenomenon of intersubjectivity. People just take it for granted as a matter of fact. And this fact is crucial not only for social sciences and political life but for any reflection of the self in general:

As a result of these considerations we must conclude that Husserl's attempt to account for the constitution of transcendental intersubjectivity in terms of operations of the consciousness of the transcendental ego has not succeeded. It is to be surmised that intersubjectivity is not a problem of constitution which can be solved within the transcendental sphere, but is rather a datum (Gegebenheit) of the life-world. It is the fundamental ontological category of human existence in the world and therefore of all philosophical anthropology. As long as man is born of woman, intersubjectivity and the we-relationship will be the foundation for all other categories of human existence. The possibility of reflection on the self, discovery of the ego, capacity for performing any epoche, and the possibility of all communication and of establishing a communicative surrounding world as well, are founded on the primal experience of the we-relationship [6, p. 82].

Despite all this criticism, it is essential to restate that the above-stated interventions of philosophers into subjectivity hold great value. Nonetheless, today we can admit that the ambitious task to establish a philosophical sphere and science based on pure subjectivity collapses. At present, studies of consciousness are conducted not on the level of individual consciousness-which is regarded as highly erroneous and susceptible to interventions of alterity-but find support in the neurosciences. In the meantime we do not know how independent from each other we are, how impenetrable our psyches are, whether consciousness serves only as imperfect software which connects neuronic hardware with the world and facilitates biosocial existence. We do not know how consciousness and psyche are connected, and intertwined. What's more-and it may be prosaic to say - we do not know to what extent we have excess to the world and things in themselves. It is fitting, then, to conclude by bringing to mind Blaise Pascal's famous words: «Self is hateful... But if I hate it because it is unjust, and because it makes itself the centre of everything, I shall always hate it. .the Self has two qualities: it is unjust in itself since it makes itself the centre of everything; it is inconvenient to others since it would enslave them; for each self is the enemy and would like to be the tyrant of all others» [5, p. 152]. So today there is still a need to find a balancing approach which will not be reductive neither towards personality and freedom nor social determinedness and `we- relation'.

References

1. Descartes, R., 2006. `A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences', Oxford University Press.

2. Husserl, E., 1977. `Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology', The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff

3. Kant, L, 1999. `Critique of Pure Reason', Cambridge University Press.

4. Marion, J., 1999. `Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics', Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

5. Pascal, P, 2007. `Blaise Pascal: Thoughts, Letters, and Minor Works', New York: Cosimo Classics.

6. Schutz, A., 1970. `Collected Papers III - Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy', The Hague: Springer Netherlands.

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