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Fisette, Denis. Husserl's Logical Investigations Reconsidered.

Looks Like Syntax Got Away This Time

But I have some tracks and a few feathers and spoor samples.

I'll get you next time, syntax.

But the armature of logic and language developed by Husserl and his followers provides ways for investigating the experience of artistic objects outside of considerations of "true" or "false," "realistic" or "non-realistic." The forms of logic and the modes of transformation are employed in experience without necessarily drawing on the principles for formulating logical statements. A logic of sense is at work in the experiencer even if logical deliberation is not.

The spectre of Nonsense always threatens merely multistable Representation or the contradictory Absurdity. But phenomenology can deal with all of them.

Future reads:

  • Woodruff Smith, David. Husserl: Edition 2

  • Bernet, Rudolf, Donn Welton, Gina Zavota. Edmund Husserl: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers.

  • Mohanty, J.N. Readings on Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations.

The brief mention of syntax in Mediations suggests a bridge between inentional experience and logic, a kind of phenomenology of contradictions and of sense.

Later developments of Husserl's ideas provide a context for unfolding the implications of his notions of syntax and grammar.

Ortiz Hill, Claire and Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock. Husserl or Frege?: Meaning, Objectivity and Mathematics

Carnap develops "formation rules" and "syntax" out of Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic. (203)
* Husserl provides for a basic "morphology of propositions" and a secondary syntaxtical layer governing the formation of propositions (203)
* He later proposes a sematic aspect to logic (203)
* Husserl anticipates distinctions drawn more sharply by Carnap and Tarski (203)

Logic can encompass absurd propostitions that are both contradictory and sense-rich. The semantic aspects of reference to truth or falsity are one way to investigate the non-literal, non-sensical, or absurd. But not the only way. The constitution of absurdities in experience need not depend on the truth value or any existential predication . Meditations hints at operations of consciousness in which absurdities become constituted as intentional objects and become part of internal temporality. Following these hints could permit turning investigations of language, metaphor, and poetry as relational objects, non-identical, non-unified rather than as the wholes sought by aesthetics and by some phenomeologies. The retention of an absurdity does not require the resolution of that absurdity or the solving of a logical contradiction. The relational-complex persists unresolved and self-contradictory in internal temporality regardless of any transformations wrought on it in its objective temporality.

* What is the phenomenology of Unsinn or nonsense?
* How would it differ from the phenomenology of Widersinn or absurdity?
Vrahimis, Andreas. "Nonsense and Absurdity: Carnap's Use of Husserl's Theory of Meaning"

* contradictory statements may be non-meaningful but not without sense
* an absurd statement when taken as a whole may be non-meaningful but its parts were brought together so as to "not break the rules of logical syntax"
[IIRC: For Husserl, the logical whole of a proposition takes precedence over the parts when construing meaning]
* absurdities occur because of "contingent linguistic habits" but the universal logical grammar is observed
* an absurdity is "mere contradiction" and not nonsense
* nonsense violates that universal grammar
* Widersinn (absurdity)

≠ Unsinn (nonsense)
* Deleuze is not the only one who suggests that the logic of sense is a fruitful area of investigation for those interested in poetic and metaphorical language use [that's me]
* Vrahimis' point: Carnap being polemical against Heidegger is a clash between two interpreters of Husserl.
* both Carnap and Heidegger, Logical Positivist and Existentialist are trying to overcome metaphysics in the wake of Husserl's logical and phenomenological investigations
Syntax has a metaporical relationship to linguistic syntax in Husserl.

(now we are getting somewhere)
Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa, ed. Phenomenology World-Wide: Foundations — Expanding Dynamics — Life-Engagements A Guide for Research and Study

* grammar as a "logic of sense" takes precedence over grammar as a "logic of contradiction" (96)
* poetical and metaphoical use better accounted for by a "logic of sense" [cue the Deleuze entry music: Amon Duul II] (96)
* grammatical syntax : logical syntax :: grammatical morphology :"core forms" of logic (101)
* there are commonalities w th Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations, and with Ryle (101)
* pure logical grammar is the metalanguage of linguistic grammar (102)
* the fourth Logical Investigation

What on earth would a "syntactically" unfolding process be? A temporally extended modification? After which a non-unitary or contradictory relation-complex pesists as an achieved synthesis?

Chasing Down the Syntax of Consciousness

A consciousness can intend its object synthetically or syntactically. (Husserl 42)

And the Meditations never go on to distinguish a syntactic process from a synthetic one.

I can still intend an non-unitary object "unitarily" and the resulting consciousness (or noesis) is a synthesis.
But this synthesis may be achieved in two different ways: synthetically or syntactically.

The prospect of sorting out this apparent contradiction is dim. At least from an initial reading around.

Mohanty & Mohanty Edmund Husserl's Theory of Meaning

* a "common logical basis" to formal logic (105)
* "pure categories of meaning" & "permissible forms of connection as well as modification"
* imagine the case of a word like "red" having meaning as a noun and as an adjective: you may switch the modes (from Rot the color to rot as an adjective describing an article of clothing) but there is a "core of meaning which is retained unchanged in spite of the modification": such modifications, in which cores of meaning can persist in spite of the modification, are syntax. Or, to modify while retaining the core of meaning, when you modify while you retain a core of meaning you are modifying "syntactically." (108)
* Husserl's use of the term is different from linguists' use (109)
* It is [sadly] "not quite fixed" (109)

I may read (perceive? experience?) a contradictory proposition such as "These pants are red and they are not red" as a contradiction. I can form a unified cognition of that proposition-object on the page. This object has been constituted for me syntactically, even if it enters my internal time sense as an achieved synthesis.
Time to parse:

Husserl limits his discussion of the non-identical to consciousnesses.

I can intend, unitarily.
(The logical implication is that I can intend non-unitarily. This implication is not followed up. Neither is their any description of how or if intention may fail or may be switched from a unitary to a non-unitary mode)

This intending constitutes the cogitatum (hereafter, noema) synthetically or syntactically.
(The implication is that this is a duality, there is no suggestion of overlap between these modes of constitution)

Constitution is a product of consciousness that synthesizes appearances as the appearances of an object. (41-42)

The synthesis occurs in consciousness of internal temporality: "this die showed me its 1-face, then its 6-face, and just now I was shown its 3-face." The fading away of the object in internal time-consciousness is a unity: that die showed multiple faces and it was that die.

The object has its own temporality and there is my internal temporality (memory of the faces that were shown to me). Both temporalities are synthesized in a consciousness

What happens when the noema is a relational complex or a non-identity?

When this non-identity persists in internal time consciousness, and I synthesize the temporality of that non-identity with my internal time-consciousness, then it may be said that this non-identity has been constituted for me.

  • This painting on which are painted the words "this is not a pipe," is this a relational complex?

  • Are all art objects relational complexes and non-unities?

  • What does it mean when I say the non-identity has been consituted for me, but it has not been constituted for others?

  • What does it mean so say an object has been consituted for me "syntactically" and not synthetically?

("syntactictally" shows up only once in the Cairns translation)

Phenomenology of Contradictions


Contradictions are real.

What is the subject-pole of the experience of a contradiction?

Or, how to engage in phenomenology without losing comtiment to realism. Good luck.

“But likewise every consciousness in which the non-identical is intended unitarily (every consciousness of a plurality, a relational complex, or the like) is ultimately a synthesis in this sense, constituting its peculiar cogitatum (the plurality, the relational complex, or whatever it is) synthetically or, as is also said here, syntactically – regardless, moreover, of whether this synthesis should be characterized as a pure passivity on the Ego’s part or as his activity. Even contradictions, incompatibilities, are products of “synthesis” (to be sure, synthesis of another kind).” (42)

Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: an Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960.

Phenomenology of Games

A game needs a playground. It needs a topography for there to be a place for the game to happen. It needs rules to direct decisions.

In "The Origin of the Work of Art" Heidegger provides for an understanding of the work of art, with work operating as a verb and a noun in his presentation.  Earth can be seen as the topography of the play space. With Heidegger, this topography is not to be seen as a static mathematically-delimited surface but as a phenomenon. The Earth earths, it rises up but at the same time conceals, concealing depths, depths which are perpetually drawing away from exposure. The World provides essential directions for decision. The World, as a phenomenon, is always "worlding," it is not just bare emptiness. Rules of games should be understood in this way, phenomenologically. The laws of physics, if we are to follow Schopenhauer, describe but do not cause things to happen. Following Betrand Russel, a "law"  should be thought not within any metaphysics of causality, but as a precisely defined function. The rules of games should be seen as neither causes for the activity of the game, nor functions determining what will happen in any particular instance of a game. If rules are to be looked at phenomenologically and not metaphysically, they should be looked at as the sense of providing essential directions for the decisions of the players. Looking at the phenomenon of playing means considering a player not only as a subject calculating the most advantageous move or an object pushed about by the rules or bumped from place to place by other player-objects . It means following Heidegger in thinking existentially, and to take the player as neither subject  nor object, but as "Dasein," the being that is cast into a place and time, but also casts intentions and projects forward, who is at play in a particular place and plays by placing itself among players in the same place. The players in their playspace are in a World constituted by the rules and on an Earth with a particular topography, delimited by borders.

Here is where the borders of space and time delimited by Callois and Huizing come in not just as enabling the activity of play, but existentially, as part of Dasein's horizions and intentional activity.
I Do Not Even Dare Think About Deliberate Attempts to Instrumentalize This Situation

"The boundary between rationality and hysteria becomes blurred. Given the right invested in them to avert dangers, politicians, in particular, may easily be forced to proclaim a security which they cannot honor, because the political costs of omission are much higher than the costs of overreaction. In future, therefore, it is not going to be easy, in the context of promises of security and a mass media hungry for catastrophes, actively to limit and prevent a diabolical power game with the hysteria of not-knowing. I do not even dare think about deliberate attempts to instrumentalize this situation." 


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