James Mensch

As David Chalmers notes, the “hard problem of consciousness” has two aspects. The first concerns the felt quality of experience. The contents we experience—say, the color of a book or the warmth of the sun—are not just present but felt to be so. The question is: how is this possible? What are the conscious processes involved in this? The second concerns the relation of the subjective aspect of experience to the physical processes that are at its origin. What is required, in Chalmers’s view, is an “explanatory bridge” that would link conscious processes to “the structure and dynamics of physical processes.” In this article, I first argue that Husserl’s account of temporal constitution accounts for the felt quality of experience. I then go on to show how we can see time-constituting phenomena as providing the explanatory bridge that Chalmers requires.

There is a famous passage in the Gospels, where a lawyer questions Jesus with regard to the command to love God with one's whole heart and to love ones neighbour `as oneself.' The lawyer asks, 'And who is my neighbour?' (Luke 10:2 [1]). Is he someone who lives close by or a co-religionist or is he a stranger, a follower of a different faith as Jesus suggests by answering with the parable of the good Samaritan? The 'religions of the book [2],' Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have difficulties answering this question. As their respective histories show, they all manifest a double potential. They show themselves capable of promoting acts of love and extreme self-sacrifice in their followers. But they also have histories marked by religiously motivated struggles, intolerance and acts of brutality. What is the root of this double potential? How can they promote both love and violence?

What is the origin of ethical responsibility? What gives us our ability to respond? An ethical response involves responding to myself: I answer the call of my conscience. It also involves answering to the Other: I respond to the appeal of my neighbor. Is one form of response prior to the other? Contemporary thinking about these questions has been largely taken up by the debate between Levinas and Heidegger. Responsibility, according to Heidegger, begins with our concern for our being.1 The “call of conscience” originates in our responsibility for what we are. By contrast, Levinas sees this “call” as beginning, not with ourselves, but with our neighbor. Its origin is “the face of the other.” So framed, the debate can be expressed in the opposition: self-responsibility against responsibility for the other.2 My purpose in what follows is to establish two claims. The first is that behind this opposition, there is a fundamental agreement concerning the origin of our ethical obligations. Both philosophers hold that ethical responsibility ultimately springs from our encounter with death. Their real quarrel concerns its location. Where do we first confront death? Is the “first death” our own or that of the other person? Do I confront death in the anxiety I have over my own demise or does it make its primary appearance in what Levinas calls “the face as the very mortality of the other person”?3 My second claim is that, whichever we choose, we cannot really base ethical responsibility on this encounter. This is because death for both philosophers is nontransferable and, hence, ultimately isolating. Furthermore, to face it is a traumatic experience. A traumatised self, however, cannot act. It can only flee. Given this, the response death actually provokes is avoidance. To adequately ground ethical responsibility, we must, I conclude, turn from seeking its basis in death understood in terms of absence and passivity. We must rethink this ground in terms of life taken as presence and affectivity. §1..

How would we conceive a phenomenology that has been purified by a post-modern critique? Although the term “post-modernism” names an extremely varied phenomenon, two features seem especially relevant. The first is its distrust of meta-narratives or overarching accounts of the way things are. The second, which is closely related to this, is the deconstruction of the subject. By this is meant not just the deconstruction of the “author”—i.e., the undermining the notion of his/her subjective intentions as setting the parameters of textual interpretation. At issue is the grand meta-narrative of modernity itself. This is the narrative of subjectivity. Beginning with Descartes, and continuing through Kant and Husserl, subjectivity has been central theme of modern philosophy. For Descartes, it provided the Archimedean point, the central focus of certainty. For Kant, subjectivity is the terminus of his Copernican turn. Rather than assuming that all our knowledge must conform to objects, let us, Kant suggests, turn and try the reverse. Let us see if the rules of our understanding make possible the experience of objects.1 Husserl, in radicalizing this position, takes these rules as rules of synthesis. He sees the world we experience as the “product” of the synthetic (or constitutive) activities of transcendental subjectivity. After pointing out the difficulties with this narrative, difficulties involving the inability of subjectivity sustain the normative role that modernity assigns it, my question will be: what remains of the phenomenological project? How can we think of phenomenology apart from the narrative Husserl inherits from his predecessors? In othe words: What is phenomenology’s self-understanding, once it admits the validity of the post-modern critique of the subject? Such an understanding, I shall argue, can be found in Patocka’s insight that that..

This paper proposes an explanatory bridge between structures of processing and qualia. It shows how the process of their arising is such that qualia are nonpublic objects, i.e., are only accessible to the person experiencing them. My basic premise is that the subjective “felt” character of qualia is a function of this first-person character. The account I provide is basically Husserlian. Thus, I use Husserl’s analyses to show why qualia always refer to a single point of view, that of a subjective “center” of experience. The very processes that set up this center yield qualia in their first-person quality. These processes involve the temporal sequencing of experience in the perspectivally arranged patterns that center experience about a given “here.” They also include the processes of retention and protention that center it about a given “now.” The paper concludes with a discussion of the ontological status of qualia

Our past century was exemplary in a number of ways. The advances it made in science and medicine were unparalleled. Also without precedent was the destructiveness of its wars. In part, this was due to an increasing technological sophistication. The time lag between a scientific advance and its technological application was, in the urgency of the century, constantly diminished. Modern weaponry combined with mass production, communication and mobilization to produce what came to be known as “total war.” This was a war without any of the limits that characterized the conflicts of the previous centuries. It was this lack of restraint that, perhaps more than anything else, led to the terrible excesses of this century: its war time terror bombings, deportations, and genocidal slaughters. It also led to the chief problem this century presents to ethics: that of the grasp and comprehension of collective evil. This problem is not just theoretical. An inability of those involved in its collective processes to take thought--to actually apprehend the evil they were engaged in--characterized the disasters of our century. At least in part, the participants’ lack of restraint was based on a lack of recognition

Is violence senseless or is it at the origin of sense? Does its destruction of meaning disclose ourselves as the origin of meaning? Or is it the case that it leaves in its wake only a barren field? Does it result in renewal or only in a sense of dead loss? To answer these questions, I shall look at James Dodd’s, Hegel’s, and Carl Schmitt’s accounts of the creative power of violence—particularly with regard to its ability to give individuals and groups their sense of self-identity. I shall also follow up on Peg Birmingham’s suggestion that Socrates’ defense at his trial points to an alternate source of our self-identity—one that is ultimately less barren

The attempt to use the results of phenomenology in cognitive and neural science has in the past decade become increasingly widespread. It is, however, open to the objection that phenomenology does not concern itself with the embodied, empirical subject, but rather with the non-causally determined “transcendental” subject. If this is true, then the attempt to employ its results is bound to come to grief on the opposition of two different accounts of consciousness: the non-causal, transcendental paradigm put forward by phenomenology and the causal paradigm assumed by cognitive and neural science. In what follows, I shall analyze this objection in terms of the conception of subjectivity the objection presupposes. By employing a different conception, I shall then show how it can be met. My aim will be to explain how we can empirically use the insights of phenomenology without denaturing the consciousness it studies

Patočka and Merleau-Ponty are both interested in appearing as such. Both attempt to understand this in terms of the body. Despite this agreement, there is a fundamental difference. For Merleau-Ponty, the body’s determination of appearing is ultimately a function of its intertwining with the world. Indeed, its very status as an animated body or “flesh” involves the fact that, located in the world, it also is able to internalize the world that encloses it. This intertwining or “chiasm” is its form as flesh. For Patočka, by contrast, what is crucial is the body’s motility, a motility whose sense embraces all of its actions. He claims that “movement … first makes this or that being apparent, causes it to manifest itself in its own original manner.” I bring these approaches into dialogue by seeing Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm, not just as the form of flesh, but also as the form of its movement