Abstract
Claude Romano (2012) and Andrea Staiti (2015) have recently discussed Husserl’s account of perception in relation to debates in current analytic philosophy between so-called “conjunctivists” and “disjunctivists”. Romano and Staiti offer strikingly different accounts of the nature of illusion and hallucination, and opposing readings of Husserl. Romano thinks hallucinations and illusions are fleeting, fragile phenomena, while Staiti claims they are inherently retrospective phenomena. Romano reads Husserl as being committed to a form of conjunctivism that Romano rejects in favour of a version of disjunctivism. Staiti, by contrast, claims that, from a Husserlian viewpoint, conjunctivism and disjunctivism are equally untenable. I suggest that both Romano and Staiti offer implausible accounts of illusions and hallucinations, and deliver premature verdicts on Husserl in relation to the analytic debates on perception.
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Notes
The labels “intentionalism”, “conjunctivism” and “representationalism” are not exactly co-extensional. The same goes for “disjunctivism” “relationalism”, and “naïve realism”. Addressing this matter in detail would require much space and lead me away from my main topic. I hope it will become clear which rough families of views I intend to contrast here. One point that will be of some importance later on is that disjunctivists need not be “naïve realists”; but with that one exception, we can, for present purposes, treat the two groups of labels as roughly co-extensional.
Not exclusively, though. See Riccardi (2016) for a disjunctivist interpretation of Scheler. For disjunctivist readings of Husserl see A. D. Smith (2008) and Hopp (2011, ch. 6); see Drummond (2012), D. W. Smith (2012), and Soldati (2012) for different perspectives. Disjunctivist readings of Merleau-Ponty are developed in Berendzen (2013) and Jensen (2013).
To be precise, things being as they are perceptually experienced as being is sufficient for veridicality, but not for perception. It is possible – or so most philosophers believe – to undergo a hallucination that by sheer coincidence (or scientific design) happens to reflect what is actually out there. In order to perceive one’s environment, one must, in addition, make perceptual contact with it, whatever exactly that means. To complicate matters further, some philosophers believe there can be fully veridical illusions (see Johnston 2006, pp. 271-274). Having noted these possible cases, I will set them aside and confine my discussion to standard non-veridical illusions and hallucinations. Note that I will – for ease of exposition – use the phrase “veridical (perceptual) experience” to refer to the experience had in a case of veridical perception.
This naïve picture is, at least prima facie, compatible with believing that veridical perception is mediated in certain ways – e.g. (in vision) through retinal images, neuronal signals passing through the optical nerve, and so on. Retinal images and the rest are not objects of our perceptual experiences, and so they do not get in between us and the ordinary objects of perception in a way that would contradict the naïve picture.
Disjunctivists disagree about how to think of illusion. To keep matters simple, I therefore concentrate on the contrast between hallucination and veridical perception.
Assuming otherwise seems to generate paradoxical consequences. If my false thought that there’s a red sphere in front of me is actually about a mental item that’s red and spherical, not a physical one, and the mental item actually exists, then it’s hard to see why my thought would be false in the first place. Also, suppose I have that thought, and that it’s false at first, but then becomes true because somebody places a red and spherical item in front of me. It is hard to see how that might make my thought true unless my thought was about a physical item from the outset.
In Russell’s sense: “the relation of subject and object which I call acquaintance is simply the converse of the relation of object and subject which constitutes presentation. That is, to say that S has acquaintance with O is essentially the same thing as to say that O is presented to S” (Russell 1917, pp. 209–210). Note that an object cannot be presented to a subject unless they both exist, and so S cannot be acquainted with O unless O exists.
Austin (1962) may give the impression of being a disjunctivist (avant la lettre) who rejects Indistinguishability, but in fact he does not: “I do not, of course, wish to deny that there may be cases in which ‘delusive and veridical experiences’ really are ‘qualitatively indistinguishable’” (1962, p. 52).
See footnote 3 for my use of the phrase “veridical perceptual experience”.
In this section, all references are to Romano (2012) unless otherwise specified.
When quoting Husserl, I provide references to the English translations in square brackets.
This is clear throughout Husserl’s writings. For just a few examples, see Hua III/1, pp. 207–208; Hua VI, p. 236; Hua XVII, pp. 175, 287.
Recall that, as Romano and Staiti use the term “illusion”, it includes what I call hallucinations and is thus co-extensive with my “perceptual error”.
In line with these enigmatic statements, Romano also suggests that an experience, on the Husserlian view, can be “at the same time perception and illusion” (p. 440). I am not sure what to make of this, but one thing seems certain: one and the same experience cannot be both confirmed and disconfirmed at the same time, nor would Husserl suggest otherwise.
But let me indicate – very briefly – some of the key questions such a discussion would have to address. As we have seen, Romano objects to Husserl’s (alleged) view that “one and the same experience could just as well be a perception as an illusion” (Romano 2011, p. 10), depending on whether it accords with other experiences. Now, Romano’s holism rejects the “false presupposition underlying the entire Cartesian tradition”, according to which “it is meaningful to attribute such a thing as truth or falsity to experiences considered in isolation, conferring on some of them a relation to objects, and on others not” (2011, p. 14). For Romano, it simply “makes no sense to attribute to an isolated experience the property of being a perception (and therefore also the property of not being a perception), in the absence of its integration into the whole of perception” (ibid.). So, take a token experience, E. For Romano, it makes no sense to confer the property of being a perception (or a hallucination) to E, independently of its relation to perception as a whole. So it is that relation alone that determines whether E is a perception or a hallucination, nothing intrinsic about E. Indeed, Romano concedes that “[i]t goes without saying that every perception may turn out to be illusory after the fact” (2011, p. 5; my emphasis). One question is how exactly a “holism” with such commitments is supposed to differ from the allegedly Husserlian conception Romano rejects. Another question is whether Romano’s holism is consistent with the points he repeatedly presses in his discussions of conjunctivism. Recall, hallucinations and perceptions are never indistinguishable, Romano claims – they always differ phenomenologically. The former are “fleeting”, “indecisive”, a “blur” and so on. So why, then, can’t it be immediately read off E whether it is a perception or a hallucination? Why does it even make no sense to say of E (in isolation) that it is a hallucination, say, if it is experienced as blurry, indecisive, fleeting and the rest? Only a careful examination – which, unfortunately, I cannot undertake in this paper – can reveal whether Romano ultimately has good answers to these questions.
All unattributed references in this section are to Staiti (2015).
I discuss Romano”s reasons for denying Indistinguishability in the next section.
In fact, even if neither the hallucinatory nor the genuine experience guarantees their respective objects’ existence, it is not clear that we must think of them as belonging to the same fundamental kind. That would follow if there would be no other basis on which Husserl could maintain that hallucinatory and genuinely perceptual experiences belong to different fundamental kinds. But it is not clear that this is so. I will, however, waive this point, as discussing it would lead us too far afield.
It seems he is not alone in doing so. See Soldati (2012, p. 391).
Although this is obviously a possibility for which nothing whatever speaks.
In the conclusion I offer some more positive, albeit tentative, remarks on how I think Husserl ought to be read.
Husserl continues: “And conversely: Things can be in reality without being perceived”. Thus, no one needs to perceive an object for it to be there – and thus for there to be facts about the object. While Husserl points out that “such statements go beyond the purely phenomenological sphere” (Hua XI, p. 293 [579]), he obviously doesn’t think they are nonsensical.
Again, numerous references could be made here. See, for example, Hua VII, p. 117; Hua VIII, p. 46; Hua XVII, p. 164.
Although I will tentatively suggest later on that Husserl may well have been a disjunctivist of sorts.
First described by Aristotle in “On Dreams”, 459b (Aristotle 1984, p. 731).
Several of Romano’s formulations sound like paraphrases of Merleau-Ponty. The latter writes of hallucinations in schizophrenia, for example, that they “play out on a different stage than that of the perceived world; it is as if they are superimposed” (2012, p. 355).
A reviewer complains that I simply presuppose the possibility of “perfect hallucinations”, and so the truth of Indistinguishability. Note, however, that cases such as the one related by Sacks strongly suggest that some real-life hallucinations may be “perfect” in the relevant sense. Similarly, Bill Brewer claims to have once had a hallucinatory experience “that was not distinguishable by introspection alone from one in which a large pink elephant in a desert was the direct object of my perception” (Brewer 2011, p. 109). Clearly, what is actual is also possible. And even if no actual hallucinations did precisely fit the bill, the onus would be squarely on those looking to deny that perfect hallucinations are possible.
It should also be noted that some illusions seem to “unmask themselves”, as it were. This seems to be the case with the waterfall illusion (in which something seems at once to move and not to move). When you undergo the experience, you have a sense that something isn’t right.
Might it be replied that we, in our discussion of Jill’s experience, are classifying it (retrospectively) as invalidated? True enough, but the point is the experience would have been an illusion even if nobody would ever have classified it as such. Its status as an illusion is determined by facts about Jill’s experience in conjunction with facts about her environment. The question of whether anyone ever unmasks the illusion is neither here nor there.
One might of course go with the sense-datum theory and claim that a mind-dependent “sense-datum” is what “de facto” exists in such a case, not a physical object (ball). I am assuming that Staiti – like Husserl (footnote 14) – does not want to embrace the sense-datum theory. Note also that what Staiti (2015) seems to say exists is precisely a physical object – a flag.
I offer a more detailed summary in Overgaard (2013).
Perhaps there is a more direct route to the same conclusion. For Husserl, every external perception necessarily has its perceived correlate. In the case of genuine perception (whether veridical or illusory), each experience is of an individual (token) object. Thus, two experiences whose objects are “entirely similar” have “direction toward something similar, but not identity as a direction toward something identical, toward one and the same object” (Hua XVI, p. 155 [131-132]). Now, Husserl maintains that “the experience of imagination in general provides no individual objects in the true sense but only quasi-individual objects” (Husserl 1999, p. 203 [174]). Thus, if I imagine a leprechaun at t1 and again at t2 and t3, then “it is impossible to speak of several objects or even of one and the same object represented repeatedly” (ibid., p. 197 [169]; cf. p. 202 [173]). This seems due, not to peculiarities of the act of imagining as such, but to the unreality of what is imagined (ibid., p. 202 [173]). If so, it seems Husserl would be committed to a similar story for total hallucinations: If I hallucinate a pink elephant at t1 and again at t2, it makes no sense to ask whether it was the same elephant again, or a different one. But then hallucinations and perceptions differ qua experiences, in that a singular object necessarily belongs to the latter, but not to the former. (I fully acknowledge that this is merely a very rough sketch of a speculative line of thought. But it is one I hope to be able to develop more fully in future work).
Here, too, I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer.
See Zahavi (2017) for a book-length treatment of the topic.
“[…] so würde das transzendente Objekt […] als seiend gelten können, auch wenn gar keine Wahrnehmung verwirklicht wäre” (Hua IX, p. 186).
“So ist jedes raumdingliche Objekt gegenüber aller Wahrnehmung von ihm an sich und, wie einzusehen, gegenüber jedem sonstigen Bewußtsein von ihm” (Hua IX, p. 186).
I am grateful to Corijn van Mazijk, Rasmus Thybo Jensen, Celeste Vecino, and an audience at the 2016 Copenhagen Summer School in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind, for helpful discussion. I also thank Steven Crowell and an anonymous referee for constructive criticisms of the penultimate draft of the paper.
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Overgaard, S. Perceptual Error, Conjunctivism, and Husserl. Husserl Stud 34, 25–45 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-017-9215-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-017-9215-2