Abstract
The aim of this paper is to show, based on Heidegger’s ontology of being and Husserl’s ontological aspects of phenomenology, the ways in which may be highlighted the ontological turned epistemological (and vice versa) enigma of the actual presence of being-in-the-world. In such perspective the content of the philosophical term ‘being there’, in the sense of an original presence in the actuality of the world, is the key issue of discussion both in terms of the ontological implication of the accompanying notion of transcendence and the epistemological relevance it can have by virtue of a phenomenon within the world. Concerning the latter in particular, except for some prompts from formal-mathematical theory, a special attention is drawn to the incompleteness of quantum theory with regard to the treatment of certain ‘ontological’ aspects of the measurement question in a quantum context. The clarification of certain epistemological ‘black box’ cases as this one by virtue of a subjectively based interpretation of the ‘being there’ is a main goal of this article as well as the ontological foundation of the ‘being there’ per se.
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Notes
The question of an ‘isolated’ from the world pure ego was, in fact, left by Husserl himself quite murky or, at least, ambivalent thus offering grounds for misinterpretations or conflicting views by the phenomenologists that followed suit. At some point Husserl regarded the construction of the eidos of transcendental ego as constituted unity unthinkable without a conception of the transcendental ego as factual, (Husserl (1973), p. 385), which makes by itself the assumption of a pure, isolated from the world ego quite problematic, while furnishing by the same token substantive credentials to the concept of the Heideggerian Dasein as essentially defined by its special kind of presence-in-the-world.
For Husserl the validity of the life-world, the latter a phenomenological term describing grosso modo the world as the horizon of our intersubjectively defined presence, is derived out of the a priori ‘constituting’ intentionality of transcendental subjectivity, and accordingly life-world in its ultimate ontic meaning is immanently constituted according to the universal eidetic categories of thematic consciousness and the a priori norms of subjective (temporal) unity (Husserl (1976a), Engl. transl., p. 69).
See: Moran (2014), pp. 507, 510.
The term osmotic appearing twice in the text is not intended to have any ontological or other meaning except for its rather loose literary use to refer to the (existing) mutual influence ontological philosophy and epistemology have developed over the last two centuries. Yet if the author would be inclined to think in terms of the more restricted physical meaning of osmotic relation, i.e., in terms of the spontaneous vs. forced flow, he would choose philosophy, in the Husserlian sense of a universal eidetic science, over science in the conventional sense as representing the spontaneity of the flow.
In Two dogmas of empiricism, Quine’s view of physical as well as of abstract objects essentially as convenient posits toward “working a manageable structure into the flux of experience” is primarily driven by his pragmatist concerns and correspondingly of no particular significance as to an ontological inquiry into the sense of being of objects as such. Yet his attitude of preserving an experience-independent conceptual corpus as a means to accommodate recalcitrant experience at the ‘edges’ is a telling sign of the ways epistemological issues may conflate with ontological concerns. This is also related with Quine’s objectual interpretation of quantification, in the sense that it is not a substitutional quantification that is relevant to ontology but the quantification over the values of the variables when taken as objects in the domain over which these variables range.
By eidetic laws or eidetic attributes one can roughly determine what relates to properties of objects or states-of-affairs as regularities by essential necessity and not by mere facticity. One may consult E. Husserl’s Ideas I in Husserl (1976b), Engl. transl., pp. 12-15.
A. Chakravartty in Chakravartty (2017) has vowed to explain why it is that any sort of scientific ontology involves at least the tacit acceptance of some metaphysical inferences, arguing that “scientific and even everyday observations are theory laden in the sense that theoretical beliefs held prior to observation significantly shape how they are experienced and described” (Chakravartty (2017), p. 56). However, in spite of Chakravartty’s invocation of metaphysical inferences as having a significant a priori dimension due to their substantial conditioning on non-empirical considerations in terms of which the explanatory virtues of a given theory or hypothesis of observable phenomena are reducible to underlying objects, events, or properties, he actually nowhere proceeds to a discussion of the a priori dimension of metaphysical inferences in purely ontological terms, much less so in subjectively founded ones.
The three forms of PII, are: PII(1), stating that it is not possible for two individuals to possess all properties and relations in common, the form PII(2) that excludes spatio-temporal properties and the strongest form PII(3) that includes only monadic, non-relational properties alluding in a certain sense to Leibniz’s views on monadology. For details see: Identity and Individuality in Quantum Theory, (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-idind/\(\sharp\)PII.
Roughly said the closure \(\overline{S}\) of a subset S of a topological space X is the union of the set S together with its limit points, the latter meant as the points of X whose neighborhoods have non-empty intersections with S.
A noematic object is constituted by certain a priori modes as a well-defined object immanent to the temporal flux of a subject’s consciousness, in simpler terms an object as meant and in the modes it is meant. More in Husserl’s it Ideas I; Husserl (1976b), Engl. transl., pp. 229-232.
Immanence, a properly phenomenological term, can be roughly characterized the ‘interiority’ of consciousness in contrast to all that is ‘external’ to it. An immanent object is thought of as a correlate of intentional consciousness as opposed to a transcendent to the consciousness common physical object whose objectivity is put anyway by phenomenology into brackets.
As a matter of fact \(\omega\)-consistency is easily proved to imply simple consistency.
Presentation in actuality as a general state-of-affairs should be understood in a deeper phenomenological sense as the implementation of the subjective character of the ‘being there’ in the world. I point out that for Husserl everything belonging to this world has its origin in the primeval flux of the living present (lebendige Gegenwart) which is essentially the mode of being of primeval ego (Ur-Ego), the originaliter known primeval phenomenal being, (Husserl (2001), pp. 4, 7).
A first-kind measurement is one in which the measured quantum system described by the quantum state s is taken to interact with the measuring apparatus described by the quantum state \(\varphi\), so that the total wave function before the interaction is \(s \cdot \varphi\).
An interesting article on the purported implication of the Husserlian phenomenological ego in the quantum measurement question, giving as a matter of fact also some clues to the intricacies of the concept of pure ego itself, is S. French’s A Phenomenological Solution to the Measurement Problem? Husserl and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, French (2002).
Boge refers to the decisive role attributed to consciousness in Zeh’s and Wallace’s interpretation of MWI in the sense that “only in relation to the experience of conscious beings can these (classical) ‘worlds’ (auth. add.: i.e., multiple universes) really be said to exist, because decoherence preserves one (highly entangled) state vector and never fully eliminates the off diagonal terms in a density matrix, while we (the somehow dynamically created conscious beings) do not perceive ourselves as simultaneously ‘partly’ in this and partly in that ‘branch’ ” (Boge (2018), p. 269).
Friedman has argued in Friedman (1999) that Kant’s second tenet, namely that the (constitutive) a priori principles are given once and for all “independently of our observing and theorizing”, becomes untenable by the evolution of science as the ground of prescriptive principles laid down ‘à la carte’. For instance the position that, insofar as objects are perceptible and conceivable by being embedded in a three-dimensional Euclidean space, the physical space has to be three-dimensional and Euclidean became ultimately untenable (ibid., p. 1704). The untenability in question is of course due to the general relativity theory.
The a priori of the life-world, after the phenomenological Epochë, is thought to be made evident as a ‘stratum’ within the universal a priori of transcendental subjectivity.
See Husserl (2001), pp. 4, 7.
These are of course the well-known to any knowledgeable with the fundamentals of phenomenology intentional forms of retention (primary memory) and protention (a-thematic expectation).
The notion of the ‘being there’ may be also thought, in terms of the discussion above, to be relevant with what Levinas described, citing Husserl’s Lessons for a Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness, as the ‘where’ time, original impression, and consciousness conjugate, i.e., the original consciousness of time which is yet a null without sensation, more precisely without original impression (Levinas (1974), p. 40).
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Livadas, S. The Enigma of ‘Being There’: Choosing Between Ontology and Epistemology. Axiomathes 32, 1129–1149 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-021-09572-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-021-09572-5