"A Phenomenology of Cognitive Desire"

Abstract: In this article, we articulate how phenomenology can and should appropriate the theme of Platonic cognitive erôs.  Erôs has two principal meanings: sexual passion and the desire for the whole that characterizes the philosophical life; in its cognitive sense, it implies dissatisfaction with partial truth and aiming at the givenness of the whole.  The kind of lived-experience in which the being-true of the world is presented to the knower is, we argue, the phenomenological correlate to what in Plato is the non-discursive, non-conceptual union with the truth of the world.  In a different context, Kant borrows, in significant ways, the notion of a ceaseless striving after complete knowledge that is inherent in the nature of reason and is meaningfully directed toward an unattainable goal.  For Plato, Kant, and phenomenology alike, cognitive desire is always motivated by the consciousness of the lack of knowledge.  For desire to be enflamed the consciousness of this lack must be ever present to the mind.  In a word, cognitive desire is spurred on by a natural inclination to uncover that fundamental dimension of mental life and the world by which the potentially present remains absent, the potentially visible remains invisible, and the potentially similar or identical remains manifold.  Despite the fact that we are always co-conscious of the invisible absent depth of the world, our cognitive striving is dissatisfied with this co-intentionality and we forever seek to bring this depth to intuitive presence.

Publications

"Phenomenology," in Encyclopedia of Europe 1914-2004, Charles Scribner's and Sons, forthcoming.

• An overview of the phenomenological movement, beginning with Husserl and ending with Derrida and Marion.
  

"Wittgenstein, Kant and Husserl on the Dialectical Temptations of Reason," in Continental Philosophy Review 37 (2004): 277-307.

• Abstract: There is an interesting sense in which philosophical reflection in the transcendental tradition is thought to be unnatural.  Kant claims that metaphysical speculation is as natural as breathing and that transcendental critique is necessary to prevent reason from lapsing into a natural dialectic of dogmatism and skepticism.  Husserl argues that the critique of theoretical reason is grounded upon a transcending of the natural attitude in which we are at first unjustifiably and naïvely directed toward objects as separate from consciousness.  A perfectly sensible question arises: Why do we need to effect a change in our natural cognitive orientation to both ourselves and the world in order to know each respectively?  Why does a sort of dialectical self-deception come so naturally to us, and why is an effort so great as to seem unnatural necessary for philosophical self-knowledge?  In this paper, I argue against “therapeutic Wittgensteinians” that seemingly compulsory philosophical assumptions are inevitably generated from within reason itself and thus remain resistant to a complete diagnostic therapy.  Next, I show how Kant discloses reason’s dialectical tendencies as inevitable and ever-recurring without transcendental vigilance.  Finally, I claim that the early Husserl’s appropriation of a transcendental epistemology is influenced decisively by Kant’s transcendental reflection in order to combat the reigning naturalism of his day.  It is only through a non-empirical, non-naturalistic insight into our “form of life” or our “mindedness” that we can achieve Wittgenstein’s ideal of a comprehensive overview of the dialectical temptations of reason.

“Kant and Husserl on the Dialectical Temptations of Modern Reason,” published in the Proceedings of the 34th Husserl Circle, Georgetown University (2004): 9-19.  (Note: slow download.)

• Abstract: There is an interesting sense in which philosophical reflection in the transcendental tradition is thought to be unnatural.  Kant claims that metaphysical speculation is as natural as breathing and that transcendental critique is necessary to prevent reason from lapsing into a natural dialectic of dogmatism and skepticism.  Husserl argues that the critique of theoretical reason is grounded upon a transcending of the natural attitude in which we are simply and at first naively directed toward objects as separate from consciousness.  A perfectly natural question arises, however, when one wonders why we need to effect a change in our natural cognitive orientation to both ourselves in order to know ourselves and the world in order to know the world?  Why does dialectical self-deception come so naturally to us, and why is an effort so great as to seem unnatural necessary for philosophical self-knowledge?  The argument of this paper is threefold: first, to argue that seemingly compulsory philosophical assumptions are inevitably generated from within modern reason itself and thus remain resistant to a complete therapy of the Wittgensteinian variety; second, to show the way in which reason’s dialectical tendencies can be overcome, at least provisionally, in a common transcendental tradition that includes both Kant and Husserl; and finally, to argue that the early Husserl’s turn to a specifically transcendental epistemology is decisive for resisting the inevitable and dialectical temptation to naturalize consciousness.

• Abstract: Perhaps no other philosopher emphasized and critiqued the metaphysical urge of the mind to “spread itself on external objects” more systematically than Kant.  Kant had a special vocabulary for this mental inclination: "subreption" (Erschleichung).  For Kant, subreption is a logical fallacy whereby one "slips under" (sub: "under," and repere: "creep, crawl") a phenomenon under the wrong category; in Kant's specific use of the term, something objective is mistaken for something subjective.  Kant thus crowns Hume's epistemological move with a special vocabulary.  This paper examines the theme of subreption in the first part of the Critique of Judgment.  In this work there is surprisingly only one reference to the fallacy of subreption (vitium subreptionis), in the section on the sublime.  The question of why the notion of the sublime engages the question of subreption, whereas the notion of the beautiful seems not to, is posed.  Finally, we consider a way in which even in the domain of the beautiful Kant is warning against a naive aesthetic objectivism, a sort of counterpart to the naive metaphysical objectivism which was the subject of the first Critique's critique. 

Review of Nathan Rotenstreich, Reason and Its Manifestations: A Study on Kant and Hegel in The Review of Metaphysics, March 1999

Presentations

"The Preconceptual Conditions of Perception," Husserl Circle, University College Dublin, 9-12 June 2005

“Kant and Husserl on the Dialectical Temptations of Modern Reason,”  Husserl Circle, Washington, DC, June 2004

“The Methodological Forgetfulness of the Science and Philosophy of Consciousness,” Towards a Science of Consciousness Conference, Skövde, Sweden, August 2001

“Subreption in the Critique of Judgment: Kant’s Critique of Naïve Objectivism in Aesthetics,” Ninth International Kant Congress, Humboldt University, Berlin, March 2000
 
“Spontaneität und Rezeptivität in Husserls Transzendentaler Logik: Eine Husserlsche Antwort auf die Kohärenztheorie der Wahrheit,” Husserl Arbeitstage, University of Cologne, October 1999
 
“Neo-Hegelianism in Recent Analytic Philosophy” at Graduate Philosophy Conferences at the University of Kentucky, March 1999, and the City University of New York, April 1999


Translations

Dieter Thomä, "Sein und Zeit in Rückblick," in Thomas Rentsch, ed., Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Berlin: Akademie, 2001), 281-98, to appear in Heidegger's Being and Time: Critical Essays, ed. Richard Polt, forthcoming

Wolfgang Neuser, “Der neurophilosophische Personbegriff,” presentation at the Towards a Science of Consciousness conference,Tucson, Arizona, April 2000