Ben's Interests

 Fr. Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D.

Lecture

Fr. Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1962, he is internationally recognized and honored for his work in philosophy, particularly phenomenology. In 1994, Catholic University sponsored a conference on his work and published several papers and other essays under the title, The Truthful and the Good, Essays In Honor of Robert Sokolowski. Fr. Sokolowski came to the College as part of the E.L. Wiegand Distinguished Visiting Lecturers Program, which was established to bring distinguished educators to Thomas Aquinas College and St. John's College. Following is abridged from a lecture he gave at the College on March 26, 1999.

I'd like to begin with a rather confrontational claim: That phenomenology can help restore the understanding of being and mind that was accepted in classical Greek philosophy and medieval thought and can still take into account certain contributions of modernity, especially those of science. Phenomenology, in its classical form, understands the human mind as ordered towards truth, and this is the understanding of the mind that prevailed in classical thinking. Phenomenology develops this understanding through its doctrines of intentionality and evidence but with a consideration of modern problems.

This revival of classical thinking is both desirable and important. In spite of the many advantages the modern age has brought us over the past 500 years, it has also contributed to a kind of undermining of our human self-understanding and a skepticism about our ability to know both ourselves and the world in which we live. I think phenomenology can provide an alternative to both the modern and the post-modern predicament because it provides a new understanding of mind as ordered towards truth.

Phenomenology began with the work of Edmund Husserl, whose first major work appeared about 100 years ago in Germany. While other phenomenologists came along after him (such as Heidegger, Scheler, and Sartre), I want to concentrate on him because I think the strengths of phenomenology are found more in him than in the others. He was able to overcome the problem that has plagued philosophy throughout the modern age: The isolation of thinking from being. Sometimes we call that "the egocentric predicament" - the problem of claiming to know only ourselves.

Husserl said that the discovery of intentionality is the central move that establishes the phenomenological movement. He claimed that consciousness is intentional, that is, it is always conscious of something. When we know, we don't just know our own ideas; we know something other than ourselves. This looks like a trivial remark but it contradicts the modern notion that the mind is immediately aware of only itself and of events that occur in itself.

Phenomenology claims that consciousness and the mind are presentational - they let things become present to us - and not just things like chairs and tables and walls and ceilings, but things like past memories and groups and art and judgments and numbers and mathematical equations. These things are not simply constructs that the mind builds up on the basis of impressions or ideas given to it. The mind is made public; it is with other things and not just with itself. Phenomenology describes these different forms of presentation.

Perhaps Husserl's greatest contribution to philosophy is his treatment of the theme of absence. He gives absence a kind of reality. He shows that all presences are accompanied by absences; all presentation is accompanied by intending something that is not present. This counters the modernists who assert that mind only knows itself.

Husserl says whenever we perceive an object there is a mix in it of parts that are present and parts that are absent. If one side is given to us, we always cointend the other sides. The presence of an object involves both presence and absence. It also involves sequence. As one aspect comes into presence, the other one slides into absence.

Now there can be different kinds of absence. Consider how when a sentence is beginning we already anticipate the end, even though it's not there yet, and how we're all waiting for the period of the sentence because the meaning isn't clear until that period is reached. And when we come to the end, the beginning has already been gone for some time. It is in this unusual mixture of presence and absence which stretches through time that the identity of the sentence is recognized. Also, a sentence may be given to us even though its meaning is absent, when we don't "get it." The same can be true when we see a painting, say of Matisse. It is physically present to us but it may be aesthetically absent. The painting comes to life when we finally "get it." We see that all of these distortions are actually a part of a pattern that makes sense.

Consider situations where we can turn our minds to something entirely absent to us. We can talk about the Empire State Building and intend that building in its absence. We might do this through words, but we might also do it through imagination and memory. We can stretch our minds towards things that are far away or past or future. What is absent is meant in its absence. In fact, its absence can be palpable, indeed, even sorrowful, if it is something we deeply regret, or is the absence of someone we love, for example. And we do not have to account for absence by appealing to a present representative of the thing that we are aware of. The mind ranges over the absent as well as the present. And "being" includes absence as well as presence.

Consider how fiction is different as a kind of absence, even from history. Fiction projects a world that never existed at all. Or consider the definitive absence of someone who has just died. This absence is conclusive; it is different from someone going far away. Or consider the absence we have in a picture. A man might have a picture of his wife and children in his office. But it is not the same thing as just putting their names there. Their names impose a different kind of absence. The picture draws the presence of the person there in a way the name does not. Finally, consider absence in theological issues. The absence of God allows the Incarnation to take place. Only because God is so different from the world can He become man.

Another aspect of phenomenology is the theme of identity. Normally in classical philosophy, identity was treated as the permanence of an object through time or the permanence of an object through changes. But there's another aspect to identity that comes out in the presence and absence theme because an object is the same in its absence and in its presence. If we intend the Empire State Building and then go see it, it has the same identity we intended, first absently and now in its presence.

Once I went to see a golf tournament when Jack Nicklaus was playing. I had never seen him play, but I had read about him. That's one kind of absence. I saw his picture in the newspaper. That's another kind of intending of Nicklaus. And then I went to the tournament, and I saw leader boards with the names of the players, including that of Nicklaus. So there I had another intending of him. Then I saw his famous caddy, and that was a kind of associative intending of him. Finally, I saw Nicklaus. I identified him, but I had been intending him in his same identity even when I didn't see him. I'm sure I was the only guy at the tournament thinking of identity this way!

Phenomenology also concerns personal identity - identification of the self or the ego. Our own identity is especially involved with presentation, since what lets us be human beings is most fundamentally being rational animals. We are what we are because things appear to us and because we can let them appear. We identify things, but we are identified also; we are "identified identifiers."

Now Husserl uses several very interesting techniques to bring out what personal identity is. One such example is the theme of memory and imagination which are similar to one another. He argues strongly against the idea that in memory or imagination what we have is an internal picture that tells us about something past or something non-existent. We tend to think of memory and imagination working like a little movie screen in which we look at images of something past. But he rejects that understanding. In memory or imagination we have a displacement of the self. We double ourselves, as it were.

If I'm daydreaming about something I did yesterday, I am now doubled into the one who was doing what I did yesterday. My identity is not found primarily in my present self. It's found in between myself now and myself then. We have this duality within our own selves. We carry around our past and our future. We live not only in our immediate surroundings, but in the absence of the future and the past, and we see ourselves in that future and past. Indeed, sometimes the memory is so powerful and intrusive that it won't remain past. It becomes present constantly, and that's known as a kind of psychological difficulty. Overcoming that problem essentially involves distinguishing between one's present self and one's past self. And one's identity is the identity that occurs between those two.

Following another level of personal identity, we can sympathize with another person and yet know that the other person is always irreducible to us. Wouldn't it be scary to have someone else's memory come up inside of you? Isn't it odd how when we see somebody we haven't seen for 10 or 15 years that we think of them as somehow alien because we realize they have so many memories that we never shared with them?

Also, the way we are in our body is distinctive. So are the ways in which our various senses work - how touch is reciprocal. When you use your hand to rub your elbow you sort of think through your hand; but if your elbow started the rubbing, then you sort of think through it instead. There's a kind of reversibility of your own thinking within your own body because of the extendedness of your own consciousness and reason. Think about how reason is embodied in the human body - how the self expresses itself through voice; how sign language is conveyed and how it expresses emphasis in lieu of modulation.

Finally, there are many other ways in which phenomenology can be fruitful. Consider the play of presence and absence in friendship or hostility, or the patterns that occur in gratitude and in envy. Consider the sequences that take place when we redefine a personal relationship, when we are the same and yet not the same, after a particularly disruptive event in our lives. How is a writer present in the words written? How is a footprint or a flag there for us except as still new forms of presence and absence? These analyses will shed light on what it is to be human and in doing so revive the most classical form of philosophy.

Phenomenology is not just a local dialect in the human conversation, nor a temporary amusement, but part of the philosophical conversation that has been with us since reason first became aware of itself in the great thinkers of ancient Greece.

-- Qtrly Newsletter, Spring 1999