PREVIEW-Episode 31: Husserl’s Phenomenology

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0:42 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 31 is how can we analyze our experience with a discussion of Edmund Husserl's Cartesian meditations issued in 1931, based on lectures given in Paris in 1929? For link to this text discussion, other information, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer. You'll end it up in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:12 Seth: This is Seth Paskin experiencing my internal immanent sense of time in Austin, Texas.

1:18 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan, bracketing everything in Boston, Massachusetts.

1:26 Mark: That's very nice. Here are some ground rules for our discussion. We should try not to assume that our audience knows anything about any of this. No fair. Name dropping. In lieu of making your point, don't say you would understand me if only you had read Sir Percival Famayama's masterwork, Butter and Scoliosis. And number three, if at all possible, make sense. Damn you.

1:47 Seth: You forgot number two. We're only exact and rigorous in all that we say.

1:52 Mark: That was the number three. I just rephrased it this time. Makes sense.

1:56 Seth: Fine. Be contra. I can see how this is going to go.

2:00 Mark: All right, enough merriment to the pain.

2:05 Wes: Yeah, let's get this over quickly.

2:06 Seth: Let's talk about the concept of pain versus merriment and this podcast. So are we doing this for fun or is this like the Bataan death march through the history of philosophy?

2:21 Wes: Exactly. That's what I felt like.

2:23 Mark: I'm like, there are many things that I do as a fun leisure time activity that then I get obsessed enough about that I'm doing unpleasant things in the service of them. And I think that's true for any sport or any. Anything that you're, you know, if you're recording in a studio, that's pretty grueling. If you're serious about anything, you're going to have some unpleasant parts.

2:42 Seth: Well, all right. This is definitely one of the unpleasant ones for me.

2:46 Wes: Yeah. And it was too long for something this. I was going to say technical, but maybe wordy is the right. This was unpleasant.

2:52 Seth: So Husserl has a particularly obtuse style, and I think it was just exacerbated because this was intended to be like a much later clarification of the big picture thing. And there was a lot assumed. It's just very difficult going. There's no doubt this is one of the hardest things we've read.

3:10 Mark: So I chose this, I think, really just because it was assigned to us as an introduction to Husserl in the Intro to Continental Philosophy graduate course that Wes and I were in together. And in fact, Wes, you presented on it, right?

3:23 Wes: Yeah, I still have the presentation write up.

3:26 Mark: And did you feel like you understood it at the time?

3:28 Wes: At the time, I just felt panicked, as I felt about everything then in grad school. But now I look at it and like, wow. And then the notes, you know, I have this old copy of the Cartesian Meditations with all my underlining. And I definitely looked like I understood it a lot better back then.

3:45 Mark: I chose this because it's supposed to be a summary of his philosophy. A lot of the ideas put forth here came out in this book called ideas from 1913. And again, for the most part, this was based on lectures from 1929. So toward the end of his career, and he was trying to reformulate things to give a nice summary in these lectures in Paris, which actually there is another version of this called the Paris lectures that's only 40 pages long and we probably should have read that, but

4:11 Wes: I didn't think of that.

4:13 Mark: So the Cartesian meditations, this was 170 pages long or something like that. I don't know if it's much more technical than the Paris Lectures. I couldn't get a hold of that text before this recording, but I'm sure he put a lot more time into trying to work out the bugs. This was his more maturely thought out version of it. And a lot of what he was. The difference between this, his later work and his earlier work is also the difference between what people associate with Husserl and his followers with Heidegger. Just high level overview. He invented this discipline that he calls Phenomenology.

The word was floating around before that. And Hegel called his big book Phenomenology of Spirit. And it was used back even I think I read in the 17th century or something. Some people were still using it. It kind of came into something close to what it is now following Kant like one of the followers of the followers of Kant. I always thought that it was because Kant makes this distinction between the phenomena, the things that we experience, the things as we experience them, the appearances and the noumena, the things in reality. And so phenomenology is the study of appearances, the study of the things that appear to us.

Is that what you guys all thought?

5:20 Wes: Yeah. Yes, I think that's right.

5:21 Mark: One of the things I read recently said, actually, no, that would be phenomenalism. If you're saying I'm studying appearances, and I know that they are only appearances of something that is sitting behind them. If you're committing yourself to a Kantian metaphysics or something, then you're doing phenomenalism, not phenomenology.

5:37 Seth: If you're doing phenomenology, you're taking the world as given in Husserl's sense. You're not taking any stance with respect to the being or non being of the world, but you're taking your experience of the world as given.

5:48 Mark: Yes. So that's what phenomenology in all its forms is all about, is describing your experience from a first person perspective. And this is used even in psychology and in analytic philosophy. So even if you're doing neuropsychology and trying to come up with the neuro equivalent of your thinking of your grandmother to some brain state, and ultimately you're an eliminated materialist and don't want to have psychological terms like thinking of your grandmother in your vocabulary. And so that's why you're doing this correlation. You're still using phenomenology because you're relying on the person you're experimenting on to tell you when he's thinking of his grandmother.

That's the only way you could make the correlation. So phenomenology is still around, but it became a big movement in the early 20th century with Husserl and then Heidegger and Sartre and other folks following around that time. And the big jump normally considered between Husserl and Heidegger is that Husserl supposedly just talks about what is it like to perceive things, what is it like to perceive this object in front of me? Whereas Heidegger makes the jump to talking about the life world, or Sartre talks about what it's like to wait for a friend, these sort of very humanistic kind of things.

But at this late stage, by 1929, in Husserl's thought, he actually uses the world, the Lebenswelt, the life world, and he has a lot of those elements in here. So it seemed like it was worth. If you're gonna get the best possible argument for the fullness of Husserl's kind of picture, this seemed at least the part of his career to look at. And this is the only. Maybe again, the Paris lectures themselves accepting is the only text that you could choose. That's not much, much, much longer. In fact, from what I understand, he created this in 1931 as a French translation, Right, because he gave these lectures in German in 1929.

But he wanted to leave the French that he had talked to with something. And so he worked with an editor or translator and issued this in 1931. But he never ended up re releasing this in its long form in German because he wasn't actually that happy with it. And so in our PDF that we have, there's a bunch of footnotes that say husserl Mark. This sentence is unsatisfactory. And then he jammed another page written in longhand, between these notes to his editor, sort of where he just abandoned it. But it still seemed like a better option than. Because it's the last time he tried to do something reasonably short that would give a comprehensive view of his philosophy, as opposed to, I guess, Phenomenology and the Crisis of the European Sciences is his big book after that, 1936, and that's much, much, much longer.

And again, looking back to The Ideas Book, 1913, which I've read parts of, it takes him much, much longer in that book to say anything. Even though it seems like it's really dragged out here. It's. It's much worse everywhere else, even if it is a little easier to take because he's more gradual in introducing his technical terminology and just dwells on every point more and more, and so it's maybe easier to understand. That said, you guys can bitch about it all you want.

8:37 Seth: My biggest complaint about this is just that he introduces terminology, lots and lots of technical terms and new words without defining them. So it gets very difficult, actually. The first meditation is very clear. The second one is good for about five or 10 pages, and then he just goes completely apeshit. And there's so much jargon in this that it's really difficult to follow, because you don't know whether something is just another way of him saying something or the translation kind of rewording something, or if he's actually introducing a technical distinction, which for him is really, really important.

Like when you finally realize that he makes a distinction between psychological ego and the transcendental ego, which takes a While, by the way, it's really important that you be aware that he's making that distinction. And then there's other stuff where he uses terminology where it doesn't really matter that much. It's really, really difficult to read for that than anything. And he doesn't need to take nearly as much time to say the things that he needs to say.

9:41 Wes: Yeah, and I'm not even sure that all the concepts are really that difficult. It's just gratuitously wordy and repetitive.

9:50 Mark: Yeah, See, I thought the repetition actually helped me to understand the language. And I had a heck of a time. I mean, this is definitely a text you have to read twice. The first time I'm just struggling and struggling and you've read a paragraph and you realize you have no idea what's been said and you've kind of lost your place and you don't remember what this term means. But going through the second time, I was much more comfortable with it. I'm not saying that every word he used I understood exactly what the distinctions he was making, but I got the general drift. I was able to take some pretty good notes, I think.

10:17 Wes: Now, was the second reading part of some sadomasochistic ritual or.

10:21 Mark: It was my attempt to take notes. We're linking to a PDF that's on this Scribd site that people upload stuff and it's obviously a scan of a paper copy. And even though this site provides not only the PDF, it provides like a text version and a Kindle version and all this other stuff, it does not convert well. In fact, I think it was scanned at slightly an angle. And so wherever there was underlining, which there was in early parts of this copy of the book, the optical character recognition is absolute garbage. So if you look at the text like it's just nonsense characters for a while, and even when it worked, it rearranges the order of some of the words.

10:59 Wes: It's a non apodictic scan.

11:01 Mark: Yes. So the text version of that that's posted there is absolutely useless. So I took the PDF and I did a conversion myself using Mobipocket Creator or whatever I do to create Kindle stuff. And it was better, but I'll put a screenshot of this on the website, but it ended up with just random font sizes and no spaces between a lot of the words.

11:19 Wes: Yeah, this whole episode is cursed, I think.

11:23 Mark: But in any case, it made. Even though you could do your underlining and stuff on the Kindle, it made that mostly useless. And so I just felt Like, I had to go back and sit down at my computer and look through the PDF and take real notes off of it. So that was what the second reading was about.

11:37 Wes: Get an iPad, I suppose.

11:40 Mark: And then it got pleasant enough, so we're gonna try to go there. Five Meditations here. And we all read through number four, right?

11:45 Wes: Yeah.

11:45 Mark: Because number five is freaking long. Is like a third of the whole essay. I did read to the end of it now, so I can give a little summary of it. In some ways, it's one of the more important things because it's when he introduces the whole life world and the existence of other people and stuff. But I had even thought that, oh, we could just look at the first couple meditations because that gives you a flavor of what his system is and what the task of phenomenology is.

12:07 Wes: Yeah. You know, I was just. From skimming the fifth meditation and looking at some secondary literature, I would have. It would have been more interesting to focus simply on the other mind's problem and Husserl's take on it instead of all this.

12:21 Mark: I'm happy to take it up in another episode if you guys want to

12:24 Seth: spend more time on it. So what is Husserl's enterprise in this book, then? What's he trying to do?

12:32 Mark: Why don't you tell us?

12:34 Seth: Well, it is called the Cartesian Meditations, so we can take our clue, I guess, from that. His goal is essentially similar in the sense that he is looking to take a scientific approach, as it were, to philosophy and find a way to ground philosophy scientifically and in turn, hence ground the sciences. So his enterprise is similar to what Descartes states his enterprise to be in the Meditations on First Philosophy, which is he's trying to find this absolutely certain ground upon which we can build a foundation of scientific knowledge. The difference is that Husserl is not going to undertake a program of radical doubt.

13:22 Mark: Yeah. And he has some nasty things to say about. Well, as nasty as he gets, but which is not very nasty about the current state of philosophy and the current state of the sciences. And it actually, most of it still applies today that it's so splintered that there's no common ground in terms of methodology. There's no common ground in terms of basic assumptions. He even says that there are philosophy conferences. He says the philosophers meet, but unfortunately not the philosophies. There's no common mental space that these things share.

13:49 Wes: This is where I think the whole, like, just the whole goal is misguided. It's like calling for Bipartisanship. I just, I reject the whole.

13:59 Seth: Yeah, so I don't agree with the enterprise, which is part of the problem. But he's doing what he's doing and he's very important, you know, pivotal figure, all that kind of stuff. So Mark, why don't you explain to us then what he means by the term apodic. Apodictic.

14:17 Mark: Apodictic, yes.

14:17 Seth: Which we get on page 15 already.

14:20 Mark: He didn't make that up. That's just indubitable. Right.

14:22 Seth: But it means something specific for him.

14:24 Wes: Well, that's. Non being is inconceivable.

14:27 Mark: Yes, it's certainty is what the point is. And what is cool about this is that whereas for Descartes, or sort of maybe in your ordinary sense, I mean, if you're certain of something, it has to be true. That's sort of the point of it. It's not just a psychological state that if you've reached Descartes goal in getting certain knowledge, that means for sure this knowledge is true. Whereas Husserl gives almost a psychological definition of it in saying that it's just inconceivable to you that it be false. But that doesn't mean that it's inconceivable that someday you might have grounds to doubt it.

So he sort of leaves a loophole there for himself. And you know, it actually makes it achievable if you set things up such that we have to reach this field of knowledge that is wholly other than us, that is nothing that we could. This Godlike certainty. Right. The certainty that only God has, then by definition you're never going to fulfill your goal. But if he makes it in some way relative to the capabilities of human knowledge, then okay, at least we've got a shot here. And he thinks that in fact, if you look at it as a psychological state, there's a wide range of things that are apodictic to us.

Right. That we can't conceive the opposite of.

15:34 Seth: Maybe there was a nuance here that I'm. Maybe I'm missing. I thought for him what he was saying was that apodictic, meantime, there was a certainty in the sense that you couldn't conceive the opposite. Like it was sort of like there was a law of non contradiction. So it's. It has to be the case and it can't possibly be otherwise. But also you have to add the criteria of the unimaginableness of non being. In other words, it's not just the case that it's True and its opposite can't be true, but that it actually in fact holds. This doesn't encompass for him the realm of purely logical truths or definitional truths that we could make up. It has to be incontrovertible and absolutely existing to the extent that you couldn't imagine that it couldn't possibly not exist. Which seems to me to be a slightly stronger claim than what you guys just mentioned.

16:27 Wes: So it's a form of self evidence, right?

16:30 Mark: Yes.

16:30 Wes: What's important here is it's not, you know, the empiricists took empirical knowledge to be a self evident given in a way. Right. So he's still rejecting, along with Descartes, the idea that the empirical will provide that foundation. So I think you're right. It's not going to be simply formal logical truths, but it is going to be something that's non empirical where you go through an exercise of trying to doubt, let's say, or trying to assume the opposite and finding out that she can't conceive of it.

16:59 Mark: Right, right. However, I guess I take issue with a couple of. And there's a reason he uses all this crazy terminology that Seth, you said. Oh, it's not only that it's true, but also that blah, blah, blah. And just putting it that way again is kind of putting it like Descartes is shooting for. Yes, Husserl is going to say that any propositions that you could come up with to describe these apodictic intuitions are going to be true ones. But he defines truth in the course of it, much the way James and Peirce are. The pragmatists defined it. So I wouldn't start out using that.

I like Wes's term self evidence. In fact, he talks about evidence and things presenting themselves very clearly and, and he doesn't want to say, I guess there was something that Wes said that made me think that it was combined to propositions. I mean, even if you talk about truth, it sounds like then you're talking about propositions. Right.

17:46 Seth: Okay, you can steer away from that because that's not what I meant. I mean, I certainly didn't intend to be talking about propositions.

17:52 Mark: No, I think Wes said something along those lines.

17:55 Wes: I was talking about the given and evidence. So the given, traditionally, right, would have been you could think of it as some sort of sensation, some sort of sensory perception. But I think for Husserl it's going to actually be, let's say the transcendental structure or essence of perception, something like that. This is pre. Predicative this isn't propositions.

18:16 Mark: Right.

18:16 Wes: That's your evidence is coming from. And that's what phenomenology is going to be doing. Something more basic. I was trying to get at the sense in which it's not empirical, but it's this weird variation on that. We're still thinking of evidence and what's given, but we're doing something different from, say, what the empiricists did with that.

18:33 Seth: You remember to read the passage?

18:35 Mark: Go ahead.

18:36 Wes: Yeah.

18:36 Seth: An apodictic evidence, however, is not merely certainty of the affairs or affair complexes, AKA states of affairs evident in it. Rather, it discloses itself to critical reflection as having the single peculiarity of being at the same time, the absolute unimaginableness or inconceivability of their non being and thus excluding in advance every doubt as objectless or empty.

19:04 Mark: Yep. I guess I take issue, though, Wes, with your description of this as. He doesn't use the term empiricism in here, I don't think at all. And it's interesting, I think, because he wants to get away from the naturalist assumptions that I think he thinks that empiricists of the past have had. Right. So that Locke and Hume, or at least Locke, let's say, assume that there is a world, there are physical objects in it more or less like what we think they are. And the question is just how do we know those things? How do we get those ideas in our head?

And so you get this picture of the knowledge coming from outside and impinging upon our senses, and then maybe our mind does something to it and. And Husserl just wants to avoid all that right from the beginning. In fact, a lot of the point of this is to argue that naturalism, that approaching this like a natural psychologist is ungrounded. And Schopenhauer is guilty of this. Just in our last episode, Schopenhauer was backing off and trying to give this Cartesian, Kantian explanation of the faculties of knowledge and how the doubts that we have and how we can be sure of things in the external world and all that kind of stuff, but yet was talking about, oh, this is all happening in the human brain and kind of assuming from the beginning that we are animals, rational animals running around in a world that's approximately, you know, that the naturalist picture assumed by the scientists is correct.

The advantage of Schopenhauer over Kant, one of the ones we discussed, is that he actually talks about the brain, that he actually talks about people using their hands to get knowledge and stuff like that. But in a certain sense if you're trying to step back and figure out the structure of our knowing capacity, you can't make any assumptions about that. There is a brain. You can't rely on that kind of stuff. Like all that stuff needs to be founded. You need to get your epistemology completely sorted out before you start talking like a psychologist, like Schopenhauer was.

20:51 Seth: If your project is to ground science, then you can't use science during the grounding of your project. I agree.

20:56 Mark: Exactly.

20:57 Seth: Yes.

20:57 Wes: What's this objection to the. He's very explicit about the eidetic reduction, which we'll talk about in a second, being non empirical. Right. Going beyond that.

21:06 Mark: Empirical is just referring to experience, Right? Now the classical empiricists like Locke and Hume, they did assume something like sense data, that we get this raw stuff and we interpret it. And in fact, Husserl, though not in this reading, but I was reading like, does talk about something like this, this hyletic data. But anyway, we don't have to worry about that for our purposes.

21:25 Wes: Look, there's two senses in which you could say the given is non empirical. There's the sense in which you're not taking what he calls the natural or the naive position. Right, where you're a sort of transcendental realist.

21:40 Mark: Say a little more about this because this is his big objection. This is what he's trying to bracket out.

21:44 Wes: So let's talk about the bracketing the epoche. Is that how it's pronounced? That's how it's pronounced in the ancient Greek.

21:50 Mark: Yes, sure.

21:51 Wes: On the face of it, it sounds a lot like Descartes, methodological doubt. His whole goal here is to find this very solid self evident foundation to philosophy, to establish philosophy as a science. And so you doubt everything that you can doubt until you find something that can't be doubted. What he's going to do here though, is different. In the epoch, it's not doubting exactly, but it's sort of a putting aside of background beliefs, especially those beliefs where you make judgments about things belonging to the real world as opposed to being, let's say, constituted by the ego. This just sounds like his jargons. I don't know that I'm doing a very good job of describing it. But basically you're abstaining from making assertions about whether or not there are, let's just call them things in themselves, beyond the phenomena.

22:40 Mark: Let's say, right, that the big fight is between the realists and the idealist is not something that should interferes with the practice of science. Right. An idealist is still going to say that in our experience there are objective things, whatever they're. Even though maybe they're just ideas. If you're Berkeley, Bishop Berkeley, he's going to say, well, they're all actually ideas, but still you could do science on them. They're still objective in the sense of if you look there once and then you come back later and you look again, it's still there. You can walk around it and look at all the sides.

23:09 Wes: Yeah.

23:09 Mark: So the conflict between Berkeley and a realist is just going to be what is the ultimate metaphysical status of these things? Is it matter? Is it mind? Is it an illusion? Ultimately, the Buddhist is going to say it's just conventional reality. But that doesn't mean you can't do something with it. Like conventional is still useful for something. So the epoche, and this is what I came away thinking about Husserl from my first introduction to him, that I thought was cool is that's kind of a dumb question. Let's not worry about that. Let's just bracket that question and just describe what our experience is actually like and see if we can get, for instance, a theory of perception out of that.

And so clearly, even though the empiricists, that's what they're trying to do, they're trying to pay attention to experience and not say we have innate ideas, they still make up stuff. Like this whole model that Locke or Hume had of we get this sense data and then we combine it in certain ways and we abstract from it and we have associations, like that is some relation to how our experience actually seems to us. But it's definitely. It's imposing a theory upon it. And that was the whole thing that Husserl was arguing against. So this epoche is really just supposed to be a theory free way of describing our experience, which to me I would still call that empiricism.

It's just a radical empiricism. It's just a more thoroughgoing empiricism than the people that are actually called empiricists. But you don't have to argue about the term.

24:32 Wes: Obviously he's not doing what an empirical scientist does. And he says up front that those sciences don't have the kind of certainty he's looking for. And then in section 34 he talks about this method of eidetic description which he opposes to the empirical. But I guess basically the idea I want to get at is that instead of a science which sort of gives you laws that organize particular sense data, he's thinking about the abstract structure of experience. So when you introspect phenomenologically, you're looking for very abstract structures of experience.

25:09 Mark: Well, ultimately, that's what we're looking for. Yes, but that's not all there is to it. Like, the first thing we're doing is contemplating this concrete experience that I'm having right now. And he thinks there are lots of different layers of stuff we can get out of that, some of which are these abstract, you know, they're. They're universals. Their essences I can also just contemplate right now.

25:29 Wes: But you're contemplating it qua phenomenon.

25:32 Mark: Yes, not qua.

25:34 Wes: This thing is impinging on my senses and I'm a good empiricist and so on and so forth. I think we agree. You can call it empirical, I think.

25:41 Mark: Right.

25:41 Wes: You know, it's fair if you want to call it empirical. But as long as we keep in mind the distinction he's trying to make between phenomena and this thing to which we have immediate access and metaphysical assumptions that go along with the traditional empiricism that he wants to avoid.

25:56 Mark: Yeah. As I was reading through this, I was thinking of William James Essays in Radical Empiricism that I had taken a peek at during our Pragmatism episode. Because some of the things he says about truth certainly sound like William James. In fact, one of the things I read. Just a little background on Husserl. So he was a mathematician, that's what he got his doctorate in. And so he wrote stuff about philosophy, mathematics. But then after that he worked with a famous psychologist, Franz Brentano, who is the guy that invented this term intentionality, which is going to be important.

But he also. One of the things he read, I read was William James, Principles of Psychology. So there actually was some cross fertilization here. So it's not an accident that these guys are working at approximately the same time in history and that they're coming up with similar ideas, even though it's a completely different intellectual tradition. You might say right after Kant, you've got this hardcore Continental bunch of guys with Sartre and Husserl and Heidegger and all them. And then you've got the analytic folks, which are mostly English and American, and pragmatists are kind of a fringe of those guys.

Right. But there is more cross pollination than people maybe recognize usually.

27:00 Wes: Yeah. The other part of this, though is, you know, in an empirical science, the idea is that you're going beyond the first person experience. Right. Where phenomenology is very focused on the subjective experience. And you're abstracting, you're getting at the essences of things as opposed to simply generalizing over repeated experiments or repeated collection of sense data. You can get at the essences right away through phenomenal, you know, it doesn't involve a repetition of experiments and generalization. You actually, through eidetic reduction, you get at the structure of an experience through internal reflection.

27:36 Mark: When you really think about your experience, like when you look at another person, you see that it's another person. You don't just note that it is a humanoid shaped thing and infer based on an analogy with yourself, that it is another person. Like you just see it as another person. And it's the same thing with ethics. It seems if you see somebody get hurt right in front of you, that's horrible, right? Unless you're a sociopath or if you feel pain, you just experience it as wrong. Now, not morally wrong necessarily, that's something additional.

And some folks go farther than that to actually say that moral fitness is part of an experience itself. And those are all phenomenological talk, that one of the advantages of phenomenology over regular empiricism is that you don't have to impose this theory of, oh, we must only be perceiving colors and shapes and things. Experience is not just perception. Experience is everything that's swirling around there in your mind with all of its different levels of meaning attached to it. So there's a lot more built into it. And if you were going to actually do some kind of analysis of it, at least Husserl thinks that we can reflect on our own experience and like kind of pick apart the layers of meanings.

I mean, that's really what you're talking about with Essences, is you can see what the structure of this experience is. How is it that if I see a book that I relate its shape and what we call physical properties of this being a book with the informational content, the fact that I look and like, oh, that's my book, that's my Husserl book, that there are all these layers and we can pick them apart and do some fancy kind of analyses, which I think Husserl is much too fancy with them in such a way that nobody else, you know, he's trying to establish these as scientific.

In other words, other people will come and repeat exactly these kind of analyses. But yet I think it ends up being so totally idiosyncratic that only his immediate followers use language that's anything like his or come up with analyses that are gonna match his in terms of how these layers stack upon each other. But that's jumping ahead.

29:36 Wes: All right, so we were talking about bracketing. Did you want to say anything more about that?

29:40 Mark: I have a quote for the epoche. So this is on page 19 of the text. It's right below where it says 59 in the margin, section 8. But no matter what the status of this phenomenon's claim to actuality, no matter whether at some future time I decide critically that the world exists or that is an illusion, still this phenomenon itself as mine, is not nothing, but is precisely what makes such critical decisions at all possible, and accordingly makes possible whatever has for me sense and validity as true being definitively decided, or definitively decidable being.

And besides, if I abstained, as I was free to do, and I did, and still abstain from every believing involved or founded on sensuous experiencing, in other words, I can experience a book, but not think that there's a book out in the world or whatever, so that the being of the experienced world remains unaccepted by me still, this abstaining is what it is, what it is, and it exists together with the whole stream of my experiencing life. So the idea is, even if you bracket off the metaphysical existence of the external world, you don't want to say, this is my ontology, that there are physical things like Descartes does, or like a materialist does, still everything in your experience that is undeniable.

Right? The fact that. I was going to say the fact that you are having that experience. Right. That's how Descartes puts it. But even that almost seems to presuppose that there's an external world and I'm having these experiences that come from somewhere. I mean, at this point, he really just wants to say there is a stream of experience.

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