Abstract
Disjunctivism has triggered an intense discussion about the nature of perceptual experience. A question in its own right concerns possible historical antecedents of the position. So far, Frege and Husserl are the most prominent names that have been mentioned in this regard. In my paper I shall argue that Max Scheler deserves a particularly relevant place in the genealogy of disjunctivism for three main reasons. First, Scheler’s view of perceptual experience is distinctively disjunctivist, as he explicitly argues that perceptions and hallucinations differ in nature. Second, his version of the position is philosophically interesting in its own right. This is so primarily, though not exclusively, in virtue of the positive story he tells us about perceptual content. Third, Scheler’s case proves particularly instructive to the question of whether intentionalism and disjunctivism constitute a fundamental, unbridgeable divide.
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Notes
More precisely: Husserl clearly distinguishes between imagery and perception: only the second is a direct—as he says, “leibhaftig”—presentation of objects. For our discussion, the crucial point is that he (correctly) notes that perception shares such a presentational character with hallucination. When it comes to distinguishing between these two kinds of mental states, he claims that they differ in their possible fulfillment. This, Smith argues, is indeed enough to qualify Husserl’s position as a version of disjunctivism, albeit a weak and rather sui generis one.
To avoid confusion: the relation in question is not conceived as a causal relation, but as a relation of direct awareness or acquaintance.
All translations from Scheler’s work are mine.
The locus classicus here is Martin (2004).
Here, I chose to follow Taine in characterizing the hypothetical hallucinator by using the male pronouns “he”/“him”, just in order to avoid confusion.
See, for instance, Husserl (1913, §129: 326).
The affinity between Scheler’s view and Noë’s one is likely to run quite deep. For instance, Scheler (1926) defends that perception is tightly connected to motor actions, a claim which constitutes the core idea of Noë’s enactive theory of perception.
More worryingly, one could wonder whether Scheler does not simply contradict himself. On the one hand, as we saw, he argues that objects of perception cannot be contents of perception. On the other hand, he characterizes the content of perception—what he calls a “physical appearance”—as a kind of object. However, as soon as we see Scheler as endorsing a distinction already drawn by Husserl, as it is not unreasonable to assume, the supposed contradiction dissolves. If I look to a tomato from different angles, I enjoy experiences of the same object but with different contents. According to Husserl’s view, the changing content—which he qualifies as “noematic”—of my perception is, at any given time, constituted by what he calls the “perceived object as such” (see Husserl 1913, § 88). Of course, the “perceived object as such” constituting the content of my experience differs from the object that same experience is about. Thus, as long as Scheler conceives of “physical appearances” as objects, the notion he has in mind, I submit, is akin to Husserl’s notion of “perceived object as such”.
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Acknowledgments
I thank the blind reviewers for their helpful comments. I also would like to thank Charles Travis for insightful discussions on perception and for inspiring the title of this paper.
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Riccardi, M. Max Scheler, cousin of disjunctivism. Phenom Cogn Sci 15, 443–454 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9420-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9420-4