Ideal Verificationism and Perceptual Faith: Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on Perceptual Knowledge (Forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, edited by Dan Zahavi, Oxford University Press) Walter Hopp, Boston University From at least the “breakthrough” work of the Logical Investigations onwards, Husserl maintains that there is an essential relationship between consciousness and being.1 Understanding the details of that relationship—both in general and with respect to specific sorts of beings—is one of the principal tasks of Husserl’s phenomenology, both before and after his transcendental turn. A.D. Smith characterizes Husserl’s position as “ideal verificationism,” according to which “There is nothing, no possible entity, that is not in principle experienceable”—and, therefore, knowable on the basis of experience.2 In what follows, I will lay out Husserl’s principal argument for ideal verificationism. More specifically, I will discuss Husserl’s views on the relationships among truth and being, truth and evidence, and evidence and consciousness.3 I will then discuss Husserl’s view that it is at least ideally possible that any object could be intuited adequately or completely. I then turn to Merleau-Ponty’s argument against that view. Finally, I examine Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception and perceptual faith, and argue that a version of Husserl’s ideal verificationism is compatible with Merleau-Ponty’s position. 1. Husserl’s Overall Position When it comes to a tidy summary of Husserl’s position concerning the relationships among being, truth, evidence, and consciousness, one cannot ask for a more perspicuous statement than the following: Every possible object is, speaking in logical-formal universality, the subject of certain predicates. To each belongs an ideally closed body of true propositions in which what the object is is thought. To the possibility of each true proposition belongs a priori the possibility of a demonstration, and this requires an originary giving intuition of the intended state of affairs and therefore also of the object-about-which, i.e. the object to be determined. An object is without doubt possible without me or anyone else actually thinking of it … But an object is in principle unthinkable that would lack the ideal possibility of being experienced, and with it also the possibility of a subject experiencing it.4 All of the elements of our correlation are present here. There is a necessary connection between objects and their “predicates” or properties, on the one hand, and a body of true propositions about them, on the other. Every true proposition, in turn, is in principle such that it can be verified by means of an originary intuition of its object. Such originary intuitions and the corresponding verifications that they permit can only be carried out in the experiential life of 1 I would like to thank Steven Crowell, Zach Joachim, Jacob Rump, Charles Siewert, and Judson Webb for helpful discussions on these topics. I am especially indebted to Colin Cmiel, Daniel Dahlstrom, David Kasmier, Dan Zahavi, and two anonymous referees for their insights, criticism, and assistance. 2 A.D. Smith 2003, 186. Also see Hardy 2013, 92 and 100. 3 Or, in Husserl’s words, the “essential relations that combine the idea of what truly is with the ideas of truth, reason, and consciousness” (Husserl 2014, §142, 283). 4 Husserl 2003, 142. Thanks to Daniel O. Dahlstrom for assistance translating this passage. 1 conscious subjects. And so there is an essential link between objects and consciousness: every real object is the object of a possible originary intuition carried out in the conscious life of some subject. Let us investigate each of these correlations in turn. 2. Truth and Being In §39 of the Sixth Logical Investigation, Husserl conducts a rather confusing discussion of (at least) four different concepts of truth. The fourth, which is the clearest and best corresponds to what contemporary philosophers understand by “truth,” is “truth as the rightness of our intention (and especially that of our judgment), its adequacy to its true object” (Husserl 1970, §39, 766). This is the sense of “truth” under consideration in this section. Of the essential relations under consideration, that between truth, in this sense, and being is probably the least controversial. If anything exists, there is some body of truths concerning it. And their being true, correspondingly, entails that the corresponding object exists. As Husserl puts it, discussing the “interconnection of truths” and the “interconnection of things” that jointly constitute the objective side of any science, “These two things are given together a priori, and are mutually inseparable. Nothing can be without being thus or thus determined, and that it is, and that it is thus and thus determined, is the self-subsistent truth which is the necessary correlate of the self-subsistent being” (Husserl 1970, Prol., §62, 225-226). As the passage above suggests, Husserl’s position is a version of the “correspondence” theory of truth. Corresponding to a proposition is a state of affairs, precisely the one that is posited in it as obtaining. If the proposition is true, then the state of affairs actually obtains (and the object-aboutwhich actually exists), and it does not obtain if the proposition is false.5 To use an example of Husserl’s, consider the proposition <The knife is on the table>. This proposition is about the knife, but its “full and entire object” is the state of affairs of the knife’s being on the table.6 Despite their essential relationship, the proposition and the state of affairs are distinct. The state of affairs is partly composed of a knife and a table, and it is not about or directed toward anything. The proposition contains no knife or table, but is composed of the concept of a knife and the concept of a table, both of which, along with the proposition they help constitute, are about something. This proposition is true just in case its “corresponding” state of affairs—that is, its object—“obtains” or exists. “The proposition ‘directs’ itself to the thing itself, it says that it is so, and it really is so” (Husserl 1970, 6, §39, 766). Propositions and meanings, for Husserl, are ideal, non-temporal objects. Not only must they be sharply distinguished from the objects and states of affairs that they represent, they are also distinct from mental acts. Despite some appearances to the contrary, I am not persuaded that Husserl ever abandons this view. In his later work Husserl claims that “Judgments as senses … have a sense-genesis” (Husserl 1969 §85, 207)—that is, they are “constituted” in consciousness (Husserl 1969, §85, 208). But he says this after stating, “that there are indeed truths in themselves, which one can seek, and also find, by avenues already predelineated in themselves, is surely one of life's unquestioned truisms” (Husserl 1969, §80, 198). He assures us shortly 5 Husserl 2008, §14, 52. Also see Willard 1984, 189: “For Husserl, truth is agreement between a propositional meaning and the correlative state of affairs.” 6 Husserl 1970, 5, §17, 579. Also see Smith and McIntyre 1982: 6–9. Here and in what follows, references to the Logical Investigations will include the investigation number, the section number, and the page number. In this case it is Investigation 5, section 17, p. 579. 2 thereafter that “We do not intend to give up any of these truisms; they surely rank as evidences” (Husserl 1969, §80, 199). That “judgments as senses” are “constituted,” then, appears to be compatible with the contention that they are “in themselves.” But granted that something is true if, and only if, the knife is on the table, why should we think that it is a proposition or any other sort of ideal meaning? Intentional experiences might also seem to be plausible candidates, especially if some version of global metaphysical idealism is true. So it is worth asking why ideal meanings, rather than experiences or mental acts, are considered by Husserl to be the primary bearers of truth—those entities whose truth is metaphysically necessary and sufficient for the existence of their corresponding objects. There are a couple of reasons. One reason is that there are true propositions which we do not and cannot grasp. After characterizing the sphere of meanings as, like numbers, “an ideally closed set of general objects, to which being thought or being expressed are alike contingent,” Husserl writes that “There are therefore countless meanings which … are never expressed, and since they can, owing to the limits of man’s cognitive powers, never be expressed” (Husserl 1970, 1, §35, 333). But among this “countless” array of humanly ungraspable meanings, some must be true. If a proposition P is graspable and expressible by us, so is its negation not-P. So if not-P is ungraspable by us, P must also be ungraspable by us, and one of those two must be true. The argument from humanly ungraspable propositions falls short of showing that propositions are the primary bearers of truth, however. That a proposition is ungraspable by humans does not entail that it is ungraspable, or even not actually grasped, by a non-human subject. What the argument shows is that, at least with respect to at least some truths, the intentional acts of humans are not the primary bearers of truth. Husserl does have an additional argument, however. Consider a case in which many people judge that the knife is on the table. In such a case, writes Husserl, “There is a single truth, which corresponds to the multitude of individual acts of knowledge having the same content, which is just their ideally identical content” (Husserl 1970, Prol., §66, 234). The “ideally identical content” in question is, in this case, a proposition. We believe the same thing; what we believe is distinct from what our beliefs are about (the corresponding state of affairs); and it is what we believe that is primarily true.7 And it is this one thing which stands in such logical relations as entailment, contrariety, and so on with other truth-value-bearers. As is well known, Husserl in the Investigations holds that the relation between meanings (concepts, propositions, and so on), on the one hand, and intentional experiences, on the other, is that of instantiation (Willard 1984, 184). “The manifold singulars for the ideal unity Meaning are naturally the corresponding act-moments of meaning, the meaning-intentions” (Husserl 1970, 2, §32, 330). Concepts and propositions are “more-or-less complex intentional properties of more-or-less complex mental acts.”8 And just as the multiplication of red objects does not count as a multiplication of colors, so “Multiplication of persons and acts does not multiply propositional 7 As Crane (2013, 7), following Prior (1971, 111), notes, there is a difference between “what we think” and “what we think about.” Also see Davis 2003, 317. To think a proposition is not to think about that proposition. 8 Willard 1984, 178. By this Willard means that they are the properties of acts in virtue of which they are directed upon their objects in the manner that they are. They are wholly shareable, and therefore not parts of acts. Thanks to an anonymous referee for helping me clarify this point. Note that the matter and quality of an act are real moments or parts—they are the property-instances of such things as propositions. “[W]e can mean by ‘content’ … its meaning as an ideal unity … To this corresponds, as a real (reelles) moment in the real (reellen) content of the presentative act, the intentional essence with its … quality and matter” (Husserl 1970, 5, §45, 657). 3 meanings; the judgement in the ideal, logical sense remains single.”9 It is, finally, because mental acts instantiate such properties that “logical laws also apply informatively and normatively to particular acts, and do so precisely because they are about the characters of such acts” (Willard 1984, 185). 3. Truth and Evidence Now we turn to the relationship between truth and evidence. Husserl’s conviction that there was such a connection predates his turn to transcendental idealism, and indeed one of the main arguments for it is located in the Logical Investigations.10 There he goes so far as to claim that evidence is the “experience of truth.”11 This claim, however, does not secure the link between truth and evidence that we are trying to establish. The reason is that evidence is not the experience of truth as correspondence. Rather, it is an experience of truth in quite another sense of “truth,” namely truth in the sense of “being” (see Husserl 1970, 6, §39). As he says, “inner evidence is called a seeing, a grasping of the self-given (true) state of affairs, or, as we say with tempting equivocation, of the truth” (Husserl 1970, Prol., §51, 195). Truth as correspondence can be grasped in evidence too, but only in reflective acts trained upon acts in which first-order acts of evidence—the consciousness of being—has already occurred.12 We must, then, look elsewhere for Husserl’s argument for the essential connection between evidence and truth. Husserl characterizes the “epistemologically pregnant sense of self-evidence [Evidenz]” as the “most perfect synthesis of fulfillment” (Husserl 1970, 6, §38, 765). In such an act, “The object is not merely meant, but in the strictest sense given, and given as it is meant” (Husserl 1970, 6, §38, 765). Any such experience is, or involves, an act of “primal givenness” or “adequate perception” (ibid.). In such acts, Husserl writes, a thing is not “merely meant in some manner or other: it is a thing primarily given in our act, and as what we meant, i.e. as itself given and grasped without residue” (Husserl 1970, Prol., §51, 195). Husserl here admits that there is a “looser” sense of evidence according to which it permits of degrees. For our purposes, the most important distinction is between adequate and inadequate evidence. Evidence “is either adequate, i.e. intrinsically incapable of being ‘strengthened’ or ‘weakened’ any more and thus devoid of any gradations of weight, or it is inadequate and thus capable of increase and decrease” (Husserl 2014, §138, 276). In all cases, however, evidence amounts to the givenness of things in intuitive acts, and specifically those which present their objects “in an originary way” (Husserl 2014, §1, 9). Evidence is “the giving of something itself” (Husserl 1969, §59, 156), the “mode of consciousness … that offers its intentional objectivity in the mode belonging to the original ‘it itself’.”13 In the case of some objects, adequate givenness is unattainable. When an intuition is adequate to its object, its object is completely given, with no hidden features or sides, and with no indeterminacy in its mode of givenness. In adequate or “self-posing” intuitions, “the identity of the object and the identity of the perception are one and the same; I mean different perceptions have different objects” (Husserl 1997, §10, 22). There is no possible intuition of any physical 9 Husserl 1970, 1, §31, 329. Also see Husserl 2008, §30b, 140-141. See Heffernan (1997 and 1998) for extremely nuanced and philosophically rich treatments of Husserl’s account of evidence and its modifications over the span of his writings. 11 Husserl 1970, Prol. §51, 194; also see Husserl 1970, 6, §39, 766. 12 Husserl 1970, 6, §39, 767. Also see Dahlstrom 2001, 67. See Crowell 2016 for a rich discussion of the “experience of truth” as against the experience of objects, and why it is and must be phenomenally conscious. 13 Husserl 1969, §63, 168; also see Husserl 1977, §24, 57 and Hardy 2013, 85. 10 4 object with this character; each physical object has multiple ways of appearing in and through veridical experiences of it. “Inadequate modes of givenness belong essentially to the spatial structure of things; any other way of givenness is simply absurd” (Husserl 2001, 58). This is true even of the properties and features of physical objects, “whether it be called a primary or a secondary quality” (Husserl 2014, §41, 72). An experience of a color which is fully in view, for instance, is not adequate or self-posing, since the color “appears but while it appears, the appearance can and must continuously change in the course of ostensive experience of it” (ibid.). As Alva Noë says, “There is no quality that is so simple that it is ever given to us all at once, completely and fully.”14 Despite their incompleteness, however, perceptual experiences are primary sources of evidence. They are originary (Husserl 2014, §1, 9) without being adequate. The relation between evidence, understood as originary givenness, and truth is what Husserl’s account of fulfillment is largely devoted to explicating. Despite Husserl’s occasional identification of evidence with fulfillment, evidence is a genus which includes both fulfillment and intuition as species.15 Fulfillment is a more complicated act than intuition. It is an act in which “the object is seen as being exactly the same as it is thought of” (Husserl 1970, 6, §8, 696), which mandates that it be both “seen” and thought of, and that the two acts be unified or synthesized. Dallas Willard nicely brings out the complexity involved in fulfillment when he characterizes it as a “union of the conceptualizing act with the object, on the basis of a corresponding intuition of that object together with a recognition of the identity of the object of the concept and of the perception” (Willard 1995, 152). While Husserl is not always entirely clear on the distinction between intuition and fulfillment in the Investigations, he is aware that they are distinct, and aware that he uses “evidence” to cover both sorts of acts.16 Of these two species of evidential acts, acts of intuition are primary insofar as they are proper parts of the more complicated acts of fulfillment. (This does not, however, entail that they are primary genetically. It could be—though I myself do not think this is so—that intuitions always occur together with appropriate acts of conceptualization, and can only be isolated in reflection and analysis.) Conceptual thinking and acts of meaning, familiarly, often occur with no intuitive fulfillment. I can think that my shirt is in the dryer with or without seeing that it is. Many conceptual acts are, nevertheless, capable of being fulfilled. Indeed, Husserl maintains that anything that can be intuited can also be thought about “emptily.”17 The converse, however, is not true. Many meanings refer to impossible objects or states of affairs, and these have no possibility of fulfillment. That is, they have, as a matter of necessity, no “fulfilling sense,” where the fulfilling sense of a meaning is the totality of possible experiences which intuitively present what it represents.18 These are the impossible meanings. A possible meaning, by contrast, is one 14 Noë 2004, 193. Also see Jansen (2015, 62) and A.D. Smith (2008, 324). See Hardy 2013, 86-87 for a helpful discussion. 16 He writes, “I often used ‘evidence’ in a sense equivalent to the givenness of something itself. But surely we must distinguish: evidence as insight that belongs to judgment, <to the> judgment that <something> is there itself that exists and that is given again <as> that—and, on the other hand, the being-given itself” (Husserl 2005, 305). 17 “There are empty presentations of all possible objects in all subjective modes of inner givenness; in other words, corresponding to every mode of intuition is a possible mode of empty presentation” (Husserl 2001, 113). “To every intuitive intention there pertains, in the sense of an ideal possibility, a signitive intention precisely accommodated to its material (Materie)” (Husserl 1970, 6, §21, 728). 18 See Husserl 1970, 1, §14. Later, Husserl claims that corresponding to the meaning of a word—that is, to a concept—is “an ideally delimited manifold of possible intuitions, each of which could serve as the basis for an act of 15 5 with a fulfilling sense (Husserl 1970, 6, §30, 749). That a meaning is possible does not mean that anyone has or ever will actually undergo an experience in which the relevant meaning has been fulfilled. Rather, these claims concern “ideal possibilities” (ibid.). Just as meanings are ideal, so it is with fulfilling senses and the complicated relations, including fulfillment, that hold among them and other contents of intentional acts. Evidence is an “ideal relationship which obtains in the unity of coincidence … among the epistemic essences of the coinciding acts.”19 If Husserl is right, we now have an argument connecting truth with evidence. Corresponding to any true meaning, there is a fulfilling sense. And the fulfilling sense of a meaning is the body of contents in which that meaning’s object is intended intuitively or with evidence. Therefore, corresponding to every possibly true proposition, there is a body of evidence associated with it. To put it simply: to every possibly true proposition, there is the possibility of its being fulfilled.20 Given bivalence, every proposition is verifiable in principle, since either it or its negation can be fulfilled.21 4. Consciousness and Evidence We can now establish an essential correlation between consciousness and evidence. As we have seen, ideal meanings are properties whose possible instances are mental acts. The same is true of their fulfilling senses; in their case, their instances are conscious experiences in which an object is given with evidence. The existence of these ideal entities—meanings, fulfilling senses, and the relations of fulfillment among them—entails that they have possible instances.22 Therefore, such mental acts possibly exist. Not only is there, eidetically speaking, a fulfilling sense for every possibly true proposition, but there is also a possible conscious evidential experience in which that fulfilling sense is realized. The role of evidence in the life of consciousness on Husserl’s account cannot be overemphasized. From what we have said, it follows that To every region and category of alleged objects there corresponds not only a basic kind of senses or posits but also a basic kind of consciousness originally affording such senses and, inherent to it, a basic type of originary evidence, that is essentially motivated by the originary givenness of the specified kind.23 But even this does not sufficiently state the centrality of evidence in Husserl’s account of intentionality. Evidence is not just one possibility of consciousness alongside the others. It is the “quite preeminent mode of consciousness” (Husserl 1969, §59, 158), one which “precedes all recognitive naming endowed with the same sense” (Husserl 1970, 6, §7, 692). Also see his discussion of an object’s “manifold,” which is comprised of the “possible noetic occurrences,” or experiences, of that object (Husserl 2014, §135, 268; also see Smith and McIntyre 1982, 244). 19 Husserl 1970, 6, §39, 766; also see Willard 1984, 232. 20 In Ideas III, Husserl writes that no matter how we acquired the ability to use words, “the word-significations can be valid as logical essences only if according to ideal possibility the ‘logical thinking’ actualizing them in itself is adaptable to a ‘corresponding intuition,’ if there is as corresponding noema a corresponding essence that is graspable through Intuition and that finds its true ‘expression’ through the logical concept” (Husserl 1980, §7, 23). 21 Because of this correlation, Husserl maintains that every logical law has an equivalent but non-identical formulation couched in terms of evidence. See, for instance, Husserl 1970, Prol., §50 and Husserl 1969, §77. 22 I owe this point to David Kasmier (conversation). As Dorion Cairns puts it, “Any eidetic fact corresponds to a universal fact about possible instances of the essences in which the eidetic fact is founded” (Cairns 2013, 253). See also Husserl 1970, Prol., §66 B., 235. 23 Husserl 2014, §138, 276. Also see Husserl 1969, §60, 161. 6 other[s]” (Husserl 1969, §86, 209). It is the possibility in virtue of which the others are possible at all, upon which all other intentional achievements are even thinkable. What things are—the only things that we make assertions about, the only things whose being or nonbeing, whose being in a certain way or being otherwise we dispute and can rationally decide— they are as things of experience (Husserl 2014, §47, 85). More specifically, they are what they are as actual or possible objects of intuitive experience. And it is in virtue of actual and possible experiences of this sort that empty intentions—including virtually all of the “propositional attitudes”—are possible (Benoist 2003, 22). As Husserl says, In fact, we would not be able to speak at all of empty presentations and to attribute to them the character of having a relation to an object if it did not belong essentially to each empty presentation that it admit … of a disclosing, of a clarification, or a manifestation of its objectlike character, i.e., that it could enter into a synthesis with a corresponding intuition (Husserl 2001, 113). And Husserl, far from finding intuition or givenness “weird” or “mysterious” in contrast to acts of thinking and other “propositional attitudes”—as many philosophers do—holds that exactly the opposite is the case.24 Intentional acts are oriented towards beings, and understanding what those beings are is bound up with some sort of understanding of how they do or would manifest themselves to consciousness.25 And this in turn is dependent upon at least some of those entities actually manifesting themselves to consciousness. Evidence, then, does not just ground the structure of knowledge. It grounds the whole structure of intentionality. It is what nourishes signitive meanings with sense and provides a teleological orientation for conscious life.26 5. Consciousness and Being So, then, according to Husserl: (1) An object O exists if and only if it is the subject matter of some true proposition or set of true propositions about it. (2) If P is a true proposition, it has a fulfilling sense FS. (3) A fulfilling sense FS exists if and only if there is a possible experience or set of experiences with FS as its content. (4) If an experience has a fulfilling sense FS as its content, then it is an evidential experience of that fulfilling sense’s object. (5) So, if O exists, there is a possible evidential experience or set of experiences of O.27 Here is an argument for the correlation between consciousness and being, one grounded in the essences of what it is to be an object, truth, meaning, fulfillment, evidence, and the types of 24 “Alles Rätselhafte, alles Problematische liegt auf seiten des blossen Meinens. Das schauende Selbsterfassen, Selbsthaben, als ein Rätsel behandeln wollen, das heisst selbst nicht verstehen, es heisst von oben her über Evidenz philosophieren statt sich die Evidenz selbst anzusehen, sie sich selbst zur Evidenz bringen” (Husserl 1996, 326-327). I first encountered this passage in Heffernan 1998, 2. 25 See Willard 1984, 206 and Kasmier 2015. For an excellent discussion of the critical role of “presence” in grounding intentionality—and of the inadequacy of most contemporary naturalistic accounts of intentionality—see Fasching 2012. 26 “Any consciousness, without exception, either is itself already characterized as evidence ... or else has an essential tendency toward conversion into givings of its object originaliter…” (Husserl 1977, §24, 58; also see Husserl 1969, §60, 160). Also see Bernet 2003 and Willard 1984, 227. For a good discussion of the “entelechic character” of consciousness, see Dahlstrom 2001, 60ff. 27 Kasmier (2015) presents two related and similar reconstructions of Dallas Willard’s argument—much of it based on Husserl’s work—for the thesis that if something is real, it is a possible object of knowledge. I am deeply indebted to his work and to our conversations on the topic. 7 experiences in which these can become actualized (see Willard 1984, 232). I take this to constitute one of the central planks of Husserl’s mature philosophical thinking. It is worth mentioning in passing the connection between ideal verificationism and idealism. There is considerable evidence that Husserl endorses metaphysical idealism in addition to ideal verificationism.28 Ideal verificationism does not, however, entail idealism, nor does it exclude metaphysical realism. Metaphysical realism with respect to some class of entities is the position that they exist, and that their existence is not grounded in their being the actual or possible objects of thought, experience, or discourse.29 If ideal verificationism is correct, then a necessary condition of every object’s existence is that it is ideally knowable on the basis of an originary intuition of it. Any possible object essentially has an appearance, a manner in which “it is known or apprehended’’ (D.W. Smith 2004, 17), or could be so known, and a full understanding of any object requires specifying this (Sokolowski 1964, 219). That, however, does not by itself entail that there is any grounding relation between existence and intuitability, or, if there is, the direction in which that grounding relation runs.30 Consider an example.31 Any house can, in principle, be photographed. This is true even if there are no actual photographs or photographic processes—before there were photographic processes, houses were such that they could possibly be photographed. But a house’s existence and nature is not grounded in its capacity to be photographed. Rather, the latter capacity is grounded in its existence and its nature as a house—its photographability is part of its “consequential” rather than its “constitutive” essence, to use Fine’s terminology (Fine 1995, 276). Or, otherwise stated, what enables houses and photographic processes to enter into relations with one another is the intrinsic natures of each: that they can relate to one another is grounded in what each of them is, but neither the nature or existence of each of them is grounded in their actually or possibly entering into such a relation. The case may be similar with respect to 28 The strongest case of which I am aware occurs in A.D. Smith 2003, especially Chapter 4. Husserliana 36 is brimming with pronouncements that real objects require the actual existence of subjects—including embodied subjects (Husserl 2003, 132)—to whom they could possibly appear (see, for instance, Husserl 2003, 139-140). This is not true of ideal objects, however (Husserl 2003, 74). Jeff Yoshimi’s arguments in Yoshimi 2015 seem to me to attack Husserl’s ideal verificationism more directly than his idealism, and therefore to constitute a more serious threat to Husserl’s position. 29 I borrow this characterization from Dallas Willard’s definition of “epistemic realism,” according to which “the objects of veridical thought and perception both exist and have the characteristics they are therein discovered to have without regard to whether or not they are in any way actually present to any mind of any type” (Willard 2002, 69; also see Willard 2003, 163). Epistemic realism, as here defined, is metaphysical realism with respect to the objects of true thought and veridical perception. Note that this is not the view that what is metaphysically real exists independently of minds. This is not an apt characterization of metaphysical realism. As Vinueza (2001, 51-52) and Khlentzos (2011, §1) note, it entails that whatever is ontologically dependent upon the mind is not metaphysically real. But minds and their states are widely regarded to be metaphysically real, despite their obvious dependence on minds. Antirealism about minds and their states or properties is not the view that minds and their states depend on minds. Ideal verificationism does appear incompatible with the brand of metaphysical realism Dan Zahavi critically discusses, according to which “If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings, that is, we should aim for a description where all traces of ourselves have been removed” (Zahavi 2010, 85). Not all brands of metaphysical realism are committed to such an aim, however. 30 The literature on grounding or “ontological dependence” has grown vast, but for the present purposes I think the discussions in Kit Fine’s now classic pieces (Fine 1994 and 1995) suffice. 31 I am grateful to an anonymous referee for insisting on clarification regarding the compatibility of metaphysical realism and ideal verificationism. 8 consciousness and its objects. For example, because of what consciousness is and what clumps of mud are, it is ideally possible for conscious subjects and clumps of mud to enter into relations with one another. It does not follow from this that the intrinsic nature or existence of either is grounded in its ability to relate to the other. Neither the realist nor the idealist would likely maintain that either the existence or nature of consciousness is grounded in the existence or nature of clumps of mud, despite its being an essential feature of consciousness that it can, under the right conditions, be directed upon clumps of mud. The realist would simply add that it is equally implausible to hold that the nature or existence of clumps of mud is grounded in the existence or nature of consciousness, despite, again, the fact that a clump of mud is essentially such that it can enter into relations with consciousness. Because ideal verificationism is silent on such issues of grounding, it leaves it open that it is the existence and intrinsic natures of objects that ground their ability to enter into relations with consciousness, and that the activity of bringing something to conscious awareness may, far from creating or grounding that object, be “guided by the object itself” (Drummond 1990, 270). 6. Adequacy as an Ideal Now we turn to a rather surprising consequence of Husserl’s position. In §142 of Ideas I, Husserl claims that to be an object and to be “posited in a rational way” are “equivalent correlates” (Husserl 2014, §142, 283). He adds that the rational positing in question must be “an original, perfect rational thesis,” one in which “the object would not be given incompletely” or “onesidedly,” but would be “completely determined, finished off” (ibid.). This leads Husserl to propose what Daniel Dahlstrom calls the “principle of adequacy” (Dahlstrom, this volume). To each object ‘that truly is,’ there corresponds in principle ... the idea of a possible consciousness in which the object itself can be apprehended in an originary and thereby perfectly adequate manner (Husserl 2014, §142, 283). This principle is not a consequence of the view that every object can be intuited originarily. The reason is that an originary presentation of an object need not be adequate. It is, nevertheless, a consequence of the argument for ideal verificationism presented above. Each proposition about an object has associated with it a fulfilling sense or manifold, which in turn is the content of some possible consciousness. But if the complete fulfilling sense associated with (a proposition about) an object were the content of a conscious experience or series thereof, the object in question would be given adequately. Therefore, corresponding to each object is not only the possibility of an originary experience of it, but, ideally, of an adequate experience of it. An immediate problem presents itself: it would seem that if this is true, no physical objects could exist. For, as we have seen, Husserl maintains that while such objects can be given in an originary way, they cannot be given adequately. Husserl sees the “semblance of a contradiction” here, and responds: “In principle, we said, the only objects are those that appear inadequately ... Yet our added qualifying remark should not be overlooked. ‘Those that cannot be perceived adequately in an isolated experience,’ we said.”32 An “isolated” experience is any “finite, merely transient act” (Husserl 2014, §143, 285), not an unchanging or static experience of just one side or part of an object. Even the fastidious examination of all the details of a postage stamp for ten hours, or ten years, would constitute an “isolated experience” in this sense. Husserl’s way out of the seeming contradiction is to show that “the perfect givenness is 32 Husserl 2014, §143, 284. Daniel Dahlstrom, to whom I am grateful for calling my attention to these passages, has a helpful discussion in Dahlstrom 2015, 282. 9 nonetheless prefigured as an ‘idea’ (in the Kantian sense).”33 What is prefigured, on the side of the experience of an object, is an “infinite, ideal manifold of noetic experiences” of it (Husserl 2014, §135, 268) and the ideal possibility of having the object given with increasing adequacy through the pursuit of “any arbitrary line” of that manifold (Husserl 2014, §143, 285). No complete realization of this infinite manifold is possible in any finite act or series of acts. “Nonetheless, the idea of this continuum and the idea of the perfect givenness exemplified by it are patently discernible” (ibid.).” As he puts it later, “every incomplete givenness … contains in itself a rule for the ideal possibility of its perfection” (Husserl 2014, §149, 297). The idea here seems plain enough. Objects cannot be given adequately because they are just too large. Not necessarily spatially, of course, but in terms of their possible ways of appearing, on the noematic side, and the density of their corresponding experiential manifolds, on the noetic side (see Husserl 2014, §135, 268). Their adequate givenness is out of reach, an ideal limit. But it can be approached, or we can at least entertain the idea of such an approach, through the progressive realization of any “line” of the object’s manifold, in and through which “empty places of the foregoing appearances are filled and the indeterminacies are determined in more detail,” and by virtue of which we experience a “thoroughly coherent repleteness [or fulfillment] with a constantly mounting rational power” (Husserl 2014, §138, 275). 7. Merleau-Ponty on the Impossibility of Adequacy In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty pursues a line of thought which, if correct, entails that the principle of adequacy is false. The house I see, Merleau-Ponty begins, is not identical with any of its appearances. Perhaps, as Leibniz held, it is the “geometrical plan that includes these perspectives and all possible perspectives”; it is the “house seen from nowhere” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 69). But this cannot be right: a house must be seen from somewhere. To make sense of vision, we must see how it “can come about from somewhere without thereby being locked within its perspective.”34 This is accomplished by means of horizons. The house appears in a world of other things, and to see it is to see it as showing other sides of itself to those things. “The back of my lamp,” he writes, “is merely the face that it ‘shows’ to the fireplace” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 71), and were I where the fireplace is, I would then see the back of the lamp. And so the house is better thought of as “seen from everywhere.” It is “translucent, it is shot through from all sides by an infinity of present gazes intersecting in its depth and leaving nothing there hidden” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 71). According to Sean Kelly, Merleau-Ponty regards this “view from everywhere” as “the norm of seeing things” (Kelly 2004, 90). “It should be clear,” writes Kelly, “that the view from everywhere is not a view that I can have.” But, he continues, it is “nevertheless an ideal from which I can sense myself deviating” (Kelly 2004, 91). I think, though, that Merleau-Ponty regards the view from everywhere as every bit as absurd as the view from nowhere, and intends to discredit both this ideal and the related Husserlian ideal of adequate givenness in one blow. Here Merleau-Ponty reminds us of our situation: But again, my human gaze never posits more than one side of the object, even if by means of horizons it intends all the others. My gaze can only be compared with previous acts of seeing or with the acts of seeing accomplished by others through the intermediary of time and language. If I 33 Husserl 2014, §143, 285; also see Husserl 1969, 62, note 1. Merleau-Ponty 2012, 69. Alva Noë notes that “When you perceive an object, you never take it in from all sides at once. And yet you have a sense of the presence of the object as a whole at a moment in time.” This “perceptual presence,” according to Noë, “is the problem for the theory of perception” (Noë 2012, 74). 34 10 imagine, taking my own gaze as a model, the gazes that scour the house from all directions and define the house itself, I still have but a concordant and indefinite series of points of view upon the object, I do not have the object in its fullness. In the same way, even though my present condenses within itself the time gone by and the time to come, it only possesses them in intention. And if, for example, the consciousness that I now have of my past appears to me to match precisely what it was, this past that I claim to take hold of again is not itself the past in person; it is my past such as I now see it, and I have perhaps altered it…Thus the synthesis of horizons is but a presumptive synthesis, it only operates with certainty and precision within the object’s immediate surroundings (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 72). There is much here that Husserl would endorse. Of course only one side of the object is at any time “posited,” if by that we mean “originarily given.” Of course it is only by means of “intentions” or empty “horizons” that the rest of the object and the other possible gazes on it are included in our consciousness of the object. But Merleau-Ponty’s statements, if true, show that the adequate givenness of an object is an incoherent ideal (see Pietersma 2000, 140). Let’s turn to some examples. As I encounter my kitchen table at t1, I have an intuitive presentation of its brown color on the front side. I emptily intend that it is this same color on the other side. I can fulfill this empty intention by walking around to the other side of the table. Doing so at t2, I discover that it too is brown. Let us assume, in this example, that the front of the table, and my experience of it, are still retained within the horizon of time consciousness at t2. That is, I don’t simply remember, at t2, that the table is brown. I retain it. I have an originary consciousness of the just-past, not a non-originary, reproductive recollection of it.35 Here we have a clear case of an increase in the adequacy of my experience of the table. But what, exactly, lies within the scope of originariness here? Do I have originarily given to me at t2 that the table is brown in the front and the back? Not exactly. What I have originarily given to me is that the table’s back is brown at t2, and that its front was brown at t1. Whether the front is brown at t2 is not given to me at t2. This is not to deny that I have very strong evidence that it still is brown at t2. But that evidence should not be confused with originary givenness. Consider another example that makes this point more clearly. Suppose I am indoors during a hailstorm. I look at my front windows at t1 to determine if any have broken, and see that they have not. I run to the back of the house, arriving there at t2, to check those windows. They’re also fine. Assuming, again, that my experience at t1 is still retained at t2, do I now, at t2, know that none of the windows are broken on the basis of an originary intuition? No, since a front window might easily have broken in the interim. What I have given to me originarily at t2 is that no back window is broken at t2, and no front window was broken at t1. How those front windows fare at t2, however, is an open question. If this is right, what is originarily given to me is not the relevant objects as they exist at t2. It is how one portion was at t1, and how another portion is at t2. And that is not a case of my getting an increasingly adequate originary consciousness of the condition of the table or the windows as they are at t2, but an increasingly adequate originary consciousness of different aspects of theirs from t1-t2. I can go back to the front of the table, or the front of the house, and see how they are at t3. Seeing the front of the table to be brown, or the front windows to be intact, at t3 provides me with incredibly strong evidence that they were brown, or intact, at t2. 35 See Husserl 1991, 42-43 for a good discussion, where Husserl contrasts “primary memory” or retention and recollection. “For only in primary memory do we see what is past, only in it does the past become constituted—and constituted presentatively, not re-presentatively” (ibid., 43). 11 But again, that should not be confused with the claim that I have ever had an originary evidential consciousness of how they were at t2. These cases are, of course, quite different. I can be much more confident that the front of my table has not changed color than I can that my window has not broken in a hailstorm at t2. And that is no doubt right. But that confidence stems, in large measure, from what I already know about the conditions under which things like tables change color. Similarly with the window: that it was not broken at t2 is something I know at t3, when I discover it to be intact. But that knowledge is heavily fortified by my general knowledge of windows, not something derived solely from an originary intuition of my window at t2. We are even further removed from adequate perception when the past fades from retentional consciousness, as it always eventually (and quickly) does. Suppose I check that my front windows are unbroken, and then go about examining my back windows for some time—a couple of minutes, say. As my original experience of the front windows fades, I am left to remember rather than retain how it presented things. Similarly, if I dally long enough looking at one side of the table, the experience that revealed its other side to be brown will slip out of retentional consciousness, leaving me to the mercy of my memory. The once originary experience of the past ceases to be originary any longer. What these examples show is that it is possible that each member of a series of experiences E1-En be originary, without the whole sequence E1-En itself being originary. In the sequence below for instance, in which E5 occurs in the present, only E3 and E4 still lie in retentional consciousness, while E1 and E2 have slipped away. E1 … E2 … E3 … E4 … E5 t-4 … t-3 … t-2 … t-1 … t0 They are no longer present “in person.” And the upshot of this is just as Merleau-Ponty describes: even if what is present at E5 appears to correspond or harmonize exactly with what I experienced at E1, “this past that I claim to take hold of again is not itself the past in person; it is my past such as I now see it, and I have perhaps altered it” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 72). Naturally this latter worry is not a live one much of the time. But the greater the distance between the remembered and my memory of it, or the stronger my motivations to “alter” the past, the more pressing it becomes. These examples make it clear that the reason objects cannot be given adequately is not just, or even principally, because of their infinitely rich manifolds. Although that’s sufficient for inadequacy, it is hardly necessary. There is an additional and equally insurmountable source of inadequacy: one cannot take up multiple perspectives at once, and things might change by the time I take up a new one. If I choose to inspect the table by walking around its right side, I am now barred from perceiving its left side as it is at that time. I can only perceive it earlier or later. Even if an object's manifold consisted of only two possible lines of givenness over a time, the ideal of adequate givenness would be impossible in principle. This is not to deny that every feature of an object could be originarily given simultaneously; we can conceive of “an infinity”—or just a couple—“of different perspectives condensed into a strict coexistence” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 72). But this cannot be the norm of perception either, because it requires multiple subjects, and neither a perceptual experience nor a unified sequence of such experiences can be distributed across multiple subjects. A friend can 12 view the front of the table while I am busy examining the back. But while this is a case in which the front is given and the back is given at the same time, it is not a case in which both are given to anyone together. Givenness is givenness to a subject, and my friend and I do not constitute a subject. If I want to know how things stand with the front of the table without consulting my memory (of a previous time), I must rely on my friend’s testimony; I must appeal to the “acts of seeing accomplished by others through the intermediary of time and language” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 72). That is, when things go well, sufficient for knowledge. But it is not sufficient for originary givenness. The argument against Husserl’s position should be clear. For any object, or any proposition about an object, there is an associated fulfilling sense. This fulfilling sense comprises an immense body of possible experiential contents, not all of which could possibly be co-realized by one consciousness. This is not to deny that each content making up an object’s fulfilling sense is the content of a possible experience. The claim, rather, is that not all of them could be. Each may be possible, but they are not all compossible. This is not, moreover, because of the infinite size of an object’s manifold, but simply because the having of some experiences of an object rules out the having of others. And so premise 3 of Husserl’s argument—that the fulfilling sense of every true proposition can be the content of some possible consciousness—is false. This argument also, it seems to me, undermines Husserl’s view of nature as “the correlate of consciousness” (Husserl 2014, §47, 85), and more specifically, as the correlate of possible originary conscious experiences of it. Regarding an object, or the world, as a correlate of possible evidential presentations enables us to conceive of it as something which “is fully spread out and its parts coexist while our gaze skims over them one by one; its present does not efface its past, and its future will not efface its present” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 73). It invites us to conceive of a house as the correlate of an infinity of ideally possible harmonious, unified perspectives on it—as a place in which no one could hide from an ideal observer forever. And that is just what Merleau-Ponty’s observations show to be incoherent. Someone could hide from an ideal observer in a house forever, provided they always managed to move to a location where that observer is not then looking.36 8. Perceptual Evidence and Perceptual Faith In light of this, it may seem that Merleau-Ponty’s position makes our epistemic situation significantly less secure than does Husserl’s. If we think of perception as a process of stitching “appearances” together, and the security of our perceptual knowledge of physical objects as proportional to the amount of harmonious stitching we have accomplished, then Merleau-Ponty’s reminders of just how incomplete perception is and must be will appear to threaten our knowledge of the world. One answer to this worry is that perception is not at all like that.37 It can, it is true, appear to be like that in a reflective attitude. Through a series of “reductions” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 339), I might move from the die out there in the world to a die that only shows certain sides to me, then to something present only to sight, then to this reduced visible phantom’s “profiles” or “projections” which can only be seen from here, and finally to a cluster of mere sensations. But 36 William James’s example (James 1995, 17) of a squirrel circling around a tree in concert with a human on the other side, although recruited to establish a different point, nicely illustrates the possibility. Thanks to Daniel Dahlstrom for making me aware of this example. 37 Merleau-Ponty 2012, lxxiv. See Pietersma 2000, 137-138 for a good discussion. 13 this process of dismantling perception through analysis is not the process of constitution carried out in reverse.38 “The experience of the thing does not go through all of these mediations” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 339). That’s a claim we can check for ourselves. When looking at the die from various angles, I see it and its sides—objective, transcendent parts of it—not “profiles.”39 And we are not, in general, assured of the existence or natures of things by seeing their appearances, parts, or sides unfold over time harmoniously. The existence of the other cars on the freeway is not increasingly verified as I drive alongside them and see more and more of their parts; spotting a tailpipe does not make me more sure that I’m dealing with an actual car. Their reality is settled beyond any but the most artificial of doubts the instant they come into view, and now it’s a matter of dealing with them. The reality of the real in perception strikes us instantly, even when it is completely unexpected (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 39), and even when only a tiny fraction of an object’s manifold is experienced. And the unreality of the imagined clings to it no matter how adequate our consciousness of it may be or how well it coheres internally—or even with our apprehension of the actual world. “The least particle of the perceived incorporates itself it from the first into the ‘perceived,’ the most credible phantasm glances off at the surface of the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 40), and the difference between perception and imagination is “not a difference of the more and the less” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 40; also see Merleau-Ponty 2012, lxxiv). If I am unsure of the existence of a table upon the first few seconds of seeing one, an additional decade of investigation is unlikely to help. This is why a genuine skeptic (if one existed) would not be converted, or even brought nearer to conversion, by looking at things more closely or for a very long time. A committed skeptic would be unmoved by all of this, I suspect. Since there is a tight connection between adequate perception and knowledge, a skeptic might argue, and since no conceivable augmentation of our perceptual evidence could bring us anywhere near adequacy, we simply cannot have knowledge of the world. That we become thoroughly convinced of the existence of things on the basis of massively incomplete experiences of them only adds to our misfortune: not only do we have bad evidence, but we respond to it badly as well. If skepticism is right, then ideal verificationism is false. Therefore, anyone at all concerned with defending any version of ideal verificationism must address skepticism. One promising response is to criticize the skeptic for having an overly demanding standard of evidence. Unlike the “dogmatist” (Pryor 2000), the skeptic is unwilling to accept anything less than indefeasible and apodictic evidence. If only we could persuade the skeptic to relax his standards, and that even inadequate perception really does meet any reasonable standard of evidence, perhaps everything could be made right. There is some reason to believe that a Husserlian strategy would proceed along these or similar lines.40 One might, for instance, establish—as a “principle of all principles” (Husserl 2014, §24, 43)—that all originary intuitions provide justification for believing propositions about the objects and states of affairs that they present, and that perceptual experiences are such intuitions. Furthermore, an answer along these lines could, if suitably developed, reconcile 38 “Reflection does not work backward along a pathway already traveled in the opposite direction by constitution” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 253). Also see Merleau-Ponty 2012, lxxiii and Merleau-Ponty 1968, 33 and 45. 39 “If the subject moves, these are not signs, but rather sides of the die that appear; he does not perceive projections or even profiles of the die; rather, he sees the die itself sometimes from here, and sometimes from over there” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 339; also see 344). Scheler (1973, 55-56) makes a similar point, and Merleau-Ponty (2012, 319) mentions him in connection with a related issue. 40 Berghofer 2014; Wiltsche 2015; Hopp 2013. 14 Husserl’s ideal verificationism with Merleau-Ponty’s observations regarding the ideal impossibility of adequate perception. More specifically, we could simply replace the problematic premise that the entire fulfilling sense belonging to any existing object could, ideally, be the content of experience with the premise that at least some contents composing the fulfilling sense of any existing object could be the contents of experience, and that those experiences would be originary, albeit inadequate, presentations of the object in question. The conclusion—ideal verificationism of a rather weaker variety—would still follow. Merleau-Ponty, however, has a rather different response to skepticism. The world of perception is primary in every important sense—genetically, evidentially, and conceptually. Any philosophical attempt to undermine or vindicate it is addressed not to us as embodied and situated inhabitants of the world, but to the alleged “impartial spectator that inhabits us” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 15). Such attempts submit perception and the world for our consideration as if we, weighing the evidence, were independently equipped with the relevant concepts to understand the questions and free to affirm or deny them. But we are not. We are embodied, involved in and open to a primary “sensible” world that is “older than the universe of thought” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 12). As a type of “reflection,” any such inquiry rests “upon the perceptual faith whose tenor it claims to give us and whose measure it claims to be.”41 More importantly, our meanings, our conceptions of essences, our epistemic criteria, and our notion of what it means to be in the first place are all grounded in and derived from the world of perception. As Dillon puts it, the “to the extent that transcendental philosophy succeeds in revealing the structure of meaning constitutive of the phenomenal world, that success is measured against the standard of actual experience.”42 Any attempt to call perception into question presupposes its accomplishments and the conceptual tools that only it could provide. The skeptic commits just this error. The skeptic asks whether the world of perception might be a dream world, but “does not elucidate the mental existence it substitutes for it, which in fact it conceives as a weakened or degraded real existence” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 95). But the concept and criteria of real existence are acquired in perception. The problem with the skeptical argument is that it “makes use of that faith in the world it seems to be unsettling: we would not know even what the false is, if there were not times when we had distinguished it from the true” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 5; also Merleau-Ponty 2012, lxxx). Skepticism is, in Marcus Sacrini’s words, a “self-undermining enterprise” for Merleau-Ponty.43 One can hardly imagine the skeptic—or Husserl—regarding Merleau-Ponty’s appeal to “perceptual faith” as an adequate response to skepticism or an adequate account of perceptual knowledge. Before deciding that issue, though, it is worth taking a closer look at what perceptual faith is. First, as Todd Cronan points out, Merleau-Ponty himself assimilates perceptual faith to Husserl’s “Urdoxa” or “Urglaube,” a kind of primordial passive belief that precedes all (other) reasons.44 Our perceptual faith is an “unjustifiable certitude of a sensible world common to us” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 11). It is a certitude in the existence of both things and other consciousnesses which is “entirely irresistible” but “absolutely obscure; we can live it, we can 41 Merleau-Ponty 1968, 50. Sacrini (2013, 731) writes: “It is only in opposition to this pre-reflective insertion into the world that the voluntary project of searching for absolute rational justifications makes sense.” Also see Cronan 2010, 503. 42 Dillon 1997, 175; also see Merleau-Ponty 1968, 98 and Carmen 2008, 36-37. 43 Sacrini 2013, 729. Sacrini presents extremely sophisticated and detailed analyses of several of Merleau-Ponty’s responses to skepticism, which, he argues, achieve very different levels of success. 44 See Cronan 2010, 497 and Merleau-Ponty 2012, 359 and 553, n. 96. 15 neither think it nor formulate it nor set it up in theses” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 11). As one would expect from Merleau-Ponty’s designation of it, perceptual faith is not a “work.” It is not a decision that can be made or revoked, nor is it a “positing” act performed by a transcendental subject (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 336; also lxxiv). Whatever reflective attitude we take toward it, it persists as long as perception does.45 Like my visual field, I possess it by “a gift of nature, without any effort required on my part” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 224). And because it is a gift we do not have the power to refuse, perceptual faith is, as Bernard Flynn notes, “perhaps the very opposite of the agonized Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith.’ It is a faith the commitment of which has ‘always already’ been made…” (Flynn 2011, §7). Merleau-Ponty was undoubtedly fully aware of the theological connotations involved in characterizing perception as a kind of “faith.” Perhaps the most helpful characterization of the faith in perceptual faith comes from Paul, who famously characterizes faith as “the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). So, tellingly, does Merleau-Ponty.46 Perception—seeing—is or involves a conviction of things not seen. And that claim, while paradoxical on its face, makes a great deal of sense. The confidence I have in the existence of the tree before me involves a confidence in its having further features, its relations to other things in the environment, and its capacity to manifest itself to others. “Perception’s silent thesis is that experience, at each moment, can be coordinated with the experience of the preceding moment and with that of the following one, that my perspective can be coordinated with the perspectives of other consciousnesses” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 54). Without that “silent thesis,” perception would not be perception, and would therefore not be the disclosure of the real. We can appreciate Merleau-Ponty’s point by examining how perceptual acts and their objects are what they are only if they occupy positions within a much broader contexture of other acts (some of them merely “presumptive”), other objects (many of them unseen), other embodied subjects, and the Gestalts in which they are embedded.47 More precisely, such acts and their objects are what they are in virtue of their place within a horizon of acts and a horizon of objects which are not thematic or thematized. In the “originary field” of perception, Merleau-Ponty writes, “Nothing here is thematized. Neither the object nor the subject is posited.” And it is this “originary field” which is presupposed by perceptual acts: “every perceptual act appears as taken from an overall adhesion to the world” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 251; also see 294). Likewise, every perceived object and quality appears within a field, and ultimately within the world—the “field of all fields” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 336). “A color,” he famously writes, “is never simply a color, but rather the color of a certain object, and the blue of a rug would not be the same blue if were not a wooly blue” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 326). He goes on to say that “The constancy of color is merely an abstract moment of the constancy of things, and the constancy of things is established upon the primordial consciousness of the world as the horizon of all of our experiences” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 326). That “primordial consciousness” is not a synthesis of positing acts, and the world itself is not a collection of things and qualities “harmoniously” synthesized in such acts.48 Acts, things, and qualities, on the contrary, are dependent upon the “originary” field of 45 “The perceived is and remains, despite all critical training, beneath the level of doubt and demonstration” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 359). 46 As Darian Meacham (2010, 185) points out. See Merleau-Ponty 1964, 176. 47 See Pietersma 2000, 137-138 for a helpful discussion. 48 “[T]he real is coherent and probable because it is real, and not real because it is coherent” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 40; also Merleau-Ponty 2012, lxxiv). 16 consciousness and the world as the outmost horizon of the field of consciousness. The world, as Komarine Romdenh-Romluc expresses it, “forms the background to all one’s experiences; it is that indeterminate, massive presence against which things are seen” (Romdenh-Romluc 2011, 126). Our confidence in the thing—and with it the experiences that would reveal it—can be misplaced. The presumptive synthesis of horizons, which helps constitute this experience as an experience of a tree, might fail to unfold; perhaps the experience will turn out to be illusory or deceptive. But if it does, that is because it is overthrown by further experiences which bear the evidential strength to perform that function. “The dis-illusion is the loss of one evidence only because it is the acquisition of another evidence.”49 This new experience might itself be overturned by others. But what seems incapable of being overturned is our confidence in being in touch with the world. “Each perception is mutable and only probable—it is, if one likes, only an opinion; but what is not opinion, what each perception, even if false, verifies, is the belongingness of each experience to the same world, their equal power to manifest it, as possibilities of the same world.”50 That Merleau-Ponty speaks here of disillusion as the acquisition of evidence suggests that he and Husserl may share common ground. This act of perceiving the tree before me is a case in which it is presented to me with strong, albeit defeasible, evidence. Of course, he also says that each perception is “only an opinion.” This may suggest that each perceptual act is a case of faith. But that hardly seems right. It is not faith that I have in the tree. It cannot be, since our perceptual faith cannot be overturned by evidence, while any particular act of perceiving can. And perceptual faith is faith in what is unseen, and the tree is not unseen. Perceptual faith is, rather, “our experience, prior to every opinion, of inhabiting the world by our body” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 28, my emphasis). An act of explicitly seeing a tree is not itself an act of faith. It may be “opinion”—that is, fallible or defeasible evidence—but perceptual faith is not opinion. MerleauPonty’s position, rather, is that this sort of act can only exist within a more fundamental consciousness of and confidence in what is unseen—the world. In “positing” the tree, I place it in the world, which is overwhelmingly unseen, and which could never, even in principle, be completely seen. But the world itself is not posited. It is lived in.51 “Beneath the explicit acts by which I posit an object out in front of myself … beneath, then, perceptions properly so-called, there is, sustaining them, a deeper function without which perceived objects would lack the mark of reality” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 358-359). This “deeper function,” he continues, “places us in the world prior to every science and every verification through a sort of ‘faith’” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 359). That deeper function, I suggest, just is perceptual faith. The chief differences between Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of perceptual knowledge can now be stated rather clearly. For Husserl, the ultimate foundation of knowledge is evidence. That is, perceptual knowledge is based ultimately on positing conscious episodes, whether passive or active, in which an object is presented in an originary manner to a conscious subject. Merleau-Ponty does not deny the existence of such acts, nor their importance in the 49 Merleau-Ponty 1968, 40. Also see Merleau-Ponty 2012, 359-360. Merleau-Ponty 1968, 41. Elsewhere he writes: “Of course, each thing can, après coup, appear uncertain, but at least it is certain for us that there are things, that is, that there is a world” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 360). Also see Sacrini 2013, 721. 51 “Natural perception is not a science, it does not posit the things upon which it bears, and it does not step back from them in order to observe them; rather, it lives among them and is the “opinion” or the “originary faith” that ties us to a world as if to our homeland” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 336). 50 17 generation of knowledge. Nor does he regard them as acts of faith. But they are founded on a general faith in the world that is maintained by our “anonymous,” bodily attachment to and engagement in it. “If…every perception has something anonymous about it, this is because it takes up an acquisition that it does not question” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 247). We enjoy an attachment to the world more fundamental than evidential acts of originary intuition, without which the latter could not so much as exist. And unlike Husserl, Merleau-Ponty does not think there is any possibility, even ideally, of bringing the world-horizon to explicit consciousness through progressive fulfillments—no way, that is, to transform perceptual faith into knowledge (see Merleau-Ponty 2012, 347). How might “the skeptic” respond at this point? It’s hard to image the skeptic being persuaded at all by this. In fact, the skeptic might say, there is reason to think that we have fallen into a form of skepticism that is the very antithesis of Husserl’s ideal verificationism. Even if, the skeptic might argue, adequate evidence is not required for knowledge, knowledge must be founded ultimately on evidence or the consciousness thereof. Since “perceptual faith,” on any understanding of it, is not evidence or the consciousness thereof, Merleau-Ponty’s account cannot explain our possession of knowledge. But this, I think, is a classic case of “high-altitude thinking” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 91). Against it, and with the phenomenological description of perception that opened this section in mind, we may respond that it is monumentally more plausible to hold that what we acquire in our perceptual interaction with objects in the world is, at least some of the time, knowledge. At the very least, it is strongly rationally justified belief. It is undeniable that my epistemic situation changes radically when I move from merely thinking that a car is nearby to seeing one. If it should turn out that this experience constitutively depends on a sort of confidence in the world, in what is unseen, the proper conclusion to draw is that acts grounded in such a confidence can confer justification on my beliefs. More generally, if, instead of reasoning about what knowledge and rational engagement with the world must look like we instead describe what it does look like, by examining paradigmatic cases on whose basis we acquired the concepts of knowledge and rationality in the first place, we realize that it would be absurd to claim that someone who sees a car on a freeway is in a comparable epistemic situation as someone merely thinking about or imagining a car on a freeway. But phenomenological inquiry shows that both perceptual knowledge and perception itself are grounded in a more fundamental engagement with the world that Merleau-Ponty calls, perhaps not wholly advisedly, “perceptual faith.” To adopt Husserlian terminology, we can think of perceptual faith as constituting a distinctive field, the field of the world.52 To show up in that field is the necessary and sufficient condition for something to appear as real, quite independently of how adequately it is perceived. This explains why inadequate and surprising perceptual experiences manage to reveal the real, while highly adequate and coherent imaginative experiences reveal nothing real at all. There is a great deal more to be said about perceptual faith. I have characterized it as a non-thetic “conviction of things not seen”—and ultimately of the world—which, among other things, makes perceptual acts and knowledge possible. I have not, however, discussed the “paradoxes” contained in our perceptual faith, the most notable being that “perception enters into the things and that it is formed this side of the body.”53 I am not entirely convinced there is much 52 As Orion Edgar puts it, “The unity of the world is grounded, then, in a sense, by what Merleau-Ponty calls … the perceptual faith” (Edgar 2016, 23). 53 Merleau-Ponty 2012, 8. See Mensch 2010 for an excellent discussion. 18 of a paradox there. James Mensch seems to me to resolve it rather neatly: “We are not in the world in the same way that the world is in us. The sense of our being within the world is spatial– temporal, while the sense of the world’s being within us involves its being within our consciousness” (Mensch 2010, 455). But whatever paradoxes perceptual faith contains, it seems clear that we can say, without paradox, that perceptual knowledge is grounded in a conscious, non-thetic, embodied engagement with reality more fundamental than any positing act of intuition. 9. Conclusion As different as Merleau-Ponty’s position is from Husserl’s in some respects, his observations do not threaten the heart of Husserl’s position. They do not establish that there are possible objects that cannot be given to consciousness at all. Nor do they refute Husserl’s contention that there is an essential correlation between consciousness and being. To be more precise, Merleau-Ponty’s arguments do not cast any doubt on Husserl’s contention that corresponding to every state of affairs is a true proposition. They do not undermine his view that every true proposition has a fulfilling sense. Nor do they even undermine his view that each of the intuitive contents contained in a true proposition’s fulfilling sense is the possible content of a conscious experience. What his arguments cast doubt upon is that all of the contents contained in such a fulfilling sense—even if it were finite—could be the contents of a single subject’s conscious experience. The first revision we are required to make, if Merleau-Ponty’s arguments hold, is that originary intuition not only need not be adequate, but it need not even have adequacy as its ideal limit or aim. But that only requires us to modify, not abandon, ideal verificationism. The second revision required of Husserl’s view, if Merleau-Ponty is correct, is that perceptual knowledge is not ultimately founded on evidence, but perceptual faith. Once we understand perceptual faith as a sort of primal, non-propositional, non-thetic confidence in and inherence in the world, rather than a belief we hold for no good reasons—once, that is, we see perceptual faith as the kind of thing for which no reasons could be given, rather than something which could (and should) be backed up with reasons but isn’t—we can recognize it as an ontological condition for the consciousness of evidence of any variety at all. Instead of an impediment to knowledge, it is, if Merleau-Ponty is right, its necessary condition. 19 Works Cited Benoist, Jocelyn. 2003. “Husserl’s Theory of Meaning in the First Logical Investigation.” In D.O. Dahlstrom, ed., Husserl’s Logical Investigations. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 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