Table Of ContentSensations
and
Phenomenology
HARMON M. CHAPMAN
Indiana University Press ° Bloomington and London
Sensations
and
Phenomenology
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1966 by Indiana University Press
Library of Congress catalog card number: 66-22443
Manufactured in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Foreword
I. Two Fundamental Assumptions
II. Scientific Humanism: Kepler and Galileo
1. Scientific Humanism
2. Kepler
3. Galileo
III. Descartes’s Direct Argument for Sensations
IV. The Indirect Arguments for Sensations
= . Berkeley
. Descartes
WNN . External Experience as Operation and Idea
A. Internal Experience
R
NHK. Possible and Contingent Existence
. Experience and Existence
S
. Summary
V. Production or Constitution
&. Sensation and Perception
. Perception and Imagination
NA. Transformation and Projection
W
. Synthesis of Object and Field
NBN. Synthesis and Time
. The Primordial Time-Synthesis
A
. Two Kinds of Time-Synthesis
O. Constitution: Kant
. Constitution: Husserl
vi CONTENTS
VI. Intentionality and the Intentional Relation 99
1. A Common-Sense View 99
2. Husserl’s View 108
VII. Is the World Internal to Consciousness? 115
l. The General Argument 115
2. The Special Arguments 117
a. The Argument from Thesis 118
b. The Argument from Givenness 131
c. Hyletic Data 148
VIII. Conclusion: The Purge 154
Index 161
FOREWORD
The central theme of the following essay is that there are no
such things as “sensations” or “impressions” in the traditional
sense of modern epistemology. The assumption that there are
such I call the “theory of sensation.” Since the proof of non-
existence is notoriously difficult, I offer instead an expose partly
historical, partly analytical. I attempt to show how the theory
originated with Descartes, how at its inception it acquired two
accessory theories, how in league with these it issued in an ex-
citing new problem of knowledge and existence, how for this
problem and its solutions the sensation theory prescribed the
terms and conditions thus fixing the framework and ground rules
for all who would philosophize in the “modern” vein, and how
finally it persisted as a speculative tradition upwards of three
centuries to the Transcendental Phenomenology of Edmund
Husserl.
The essay culminates in an examination of Husserl’s Phenom-
enology with its doctrine of transcendental constitution. In
examining this doctrine I focus chiefly on its main support, the
famous “reduction” or epoché, the suspending of existence. This
suspension turns out to be a withholding of a mere “sense” of
existing, which consciousness confers on objects of sense insofar
as they are made (“constituted”) of impressions. That the direct
objects of sense are but complexes of impressions is of course a
characteristic tenet of the sensation theory. The upshot is that
vi
Vill FOREWORD
this theory, silently and uncritically presupposed, underlies the
whole of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, rendering it
to this extent unphenomenological, as it also rendered uncritical
the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
My mode of analysis is not that of current linguistic analysis.
This latter has a devastating antiseptic power which might well
have served my purpose. But it is quite foreign to the tradition
I am examining, and I would prefer to criticize this tradition from
within rather than from without. Hence I have chosen a mode of
analysis more akin to its own native habits of thought. If I claim
a right, even a responsibility, to proceed in this old-fashioned way,
it is because I was reared in this tradition and am reluctant to
turn upon it weapons of alien origin.
In adopting this procedure I am quite prepared to be found
on occasion to ride roughshod over niceties and nuances of
meaning which my friends in linguistic analysis will find objec-
tionable. A further excuse is my synoptic aim, which has impelled
me to draw boldly with a few broad strokes rather than minutely
with a profusion of fine lines. This boldness has brought brevity,
but it has also exposed me to the danger of being “positive” —it
was The New Yorker, I think, which once defined “being posi-
tive” as “being wrong at the top of one’s voice.”
If I have been thus “positive,” perhaps others more knowl-
edgeable than I will be moved to rise in defense of the doctrines
I here assail. I think first of all of Dorion Cairns, to whom I owe
so much of what I know of Phenomenology, and of others like
Quentin Lauer and Maurice Natanson. They, if anybody, could
resolve the difficulties I encounter and thus render Phenomenol-
ogy and American philosophy in general, not to mention myself,
a notable service.
If there is anything original in this essay I am not aware of it.
Novelty is not my concern. My concern is rather with the tradition
of which I am a child even while trying also to be its critic. I am
FOREWORD 1X
so steeped in this tradition that my thoughts seem to be its
thoughts; each seems to echo a voice that has already spoken.
My sense of obligation, accordingly, is so vast as to defy enu-
meration.
Only in a few instances can I acknowledge specific indebted-
ness. | have already mentioned Dorion Cairns. I must also men-
tion two friends and colleagues, Raziel Abelson and Chauncey
Downes, who read the manuscript and offered valuable sugges-
tions. There are also Winifred and Leonard Carpenter, without
whose gracious generosity this book would not have come to pass.
There is yet another whose aid and encouragement were indis-
pensable. How, in the midst of her many wifely and motherly
duties, she managed to find the time to read and query, and re-
read and encourage, all with limitless patience, I shall never
know. To these last three, especially to the memory of the first,
I dedicate this volume, mindful that it is but the token of a grati-
tude that defies expression.
Now in medias res!
University College
New York University
