Truth and Consciousness

I am grateful to my anonymous reviewers for their time and valuable input on an earlier version of this manuscript.

I take the terms “pre-reflective” and “reflective” consciousness from Sartre (1960, 1992).

The sense of the givenness of experience here does not conflict with Sellars’ (1997) critique of givenness. Sellars’ main point concerns epistemological accounts that grant certain immediacies in experience (e.g., sensing) as non-inferential knowledge by which to ground further knowledge and justifications. Sellars finds these accounts flawed, and I agree, but his interest lies in epistemology and normativity in relation to experience and the “space of reason”. The account of the givenness of experience here is not epistemological; it is merely descriptive. Sellars even appears to be quite content with descriptive accounts of experience (1997: 13).

I use “representationalist” in the traditional manner of creating conceptual pictures or models in the mind of the experiencing person. More recently, representationalism has a more varied use, such as even allowing for non-conceptual representational content (e.g., Tye 1995; Crane 2003). Discussing how these more recent forms of representationalism match or conflict with the account of phenomenal consciousness I sketch here is beyond the scope of this paper, so I leave them be.

Heidegger himself eschews talk of consciousness, for the most part, because he is trying to talk instead about the existence of “Da-sein”. He is not supplanting the term “consciousness” with a mere replacement of “Da-sein” (1998a: 283); rather, it is the phenomenon of Da-sein and its openness to beings that makes consciousness possible. “All consciousness presupposes existence, thought as ecstatic, as the essentia of the human being—essentia meaning that as which the being essentially prevails insofar as he is human. But consciousness does not itself create the openness of beings, nor is it consciousness that makes it possible for the human being to stand open for beings” (1998a: 284). If one accepts Heidegger’s point here, it may seem that talk of consciousness is overrated or even wrong, but Heidegger is more concerned with traditional phenomenology’s focus on intentionality than with the holistic aspect of consciousness I am emphasizing at the moment. He writes, “[w]hither and whence and in what free dimension could the intentionality of consciousness move, if in-standing were not the essence of the human being in the first instance?” (1998a: 284f.) Thus, while Heidegger is not smitten with talk about consciousness, it is fair to link this account of the unity of consciousness with Heidegger’s account of the there-ness of being; they amount to the same thing. They are both founded on the pre-reflective, holistic givenness of human existence. Nonetheless, I thereby avoid saddling Heidegger’s concept of Da-sein as another expression of intentional consciousness.

Even if one directs one’s awareness to oneself such that one attempts to be present to oneself in a positional manner, this is still awareness of an other. One is aware of an objectification of oneself. This is why Sartre says that presence to oneself always implies a duality (1992: 124).

It is worth noting that Michel Henry disagrees with traditional phenomenology’s insistence on intentionality in a manner akin to Heidegger. Rather than adhere to a phenomenology that only sees transcendence (an orientation towards the other), Henry argues that subjectivity should first be recognized as absolute and immanent, being fully self-sufficient as non-intentional, and hence, non-relational (1975, 2008). The transcendence of subjectivity is only made possible based upon the more originary “radical immanence” of subjectivity (2008: 81). There is no need to assess his claim though. Whether Henry is right that subjectivity sits in primordial, radical immanence, he acknowledges the irreducible facet of intentionality. “Certainly, subjectivity is always a life in the presence of a transcendent being” (1975: 187). So, while Henry argues that the “monistic” approach of traditional phenomenology must be supplanted by a more “dualistic” one to recognize both the immanence and transcendence of subjectivity, that does not discount the indispensability of intentionality in consciousness. Henry weakens the importance given to intentionality, but even if intentionality is derivative, it is still a vital aspect in the phenomenon of consciousness.

Traditional representationalist theories of consciousness commit the error of only and ever esteeming the disunity in consciousness to the exclusion of any unity, and theorists like Taylor make the opposite error of emphasizing the unity of consciousness over any meaningful measure of disunity. Taylor is so insistent against mediational views that he formulates his “contact” theory in a way that situates humans in the embeddedness and unity of experience without adequate consideration for why such mediational views arise in the first place. In section “Some Implications,” I explain how this causes a problem for Taylor’s understanding of truth.

I leave unexplained that concordance is sought after, but all theories of truth demonstrate this aspiration, and due to the structure of phenomenal consciousness, it is not surprising how these theories of truth become formulated.

It may also be possible to list Kierkegaard’s explanation of “truth is subjectivity” (1992) here as a retention theory, but one could say that Heidegger “ontologizes” Kierkegaard’s metaethical account of subjectivity and that this offers a clearer example.

As a sidenote, it is interesting that what James does differently than correspondence and coherence theories is that he also tries to answer why we want concordance—truth is useful for living. That theories of truth involve harmonizing disparate elements is undeniable, but it is a different matter to ask whether we should really care about concordance or not. This is one of Nietzsche’s questions as he was perplexed by the philosophers’ “will to truth” and asks “why not untruth instead” (2002: 5)? Perhaps the drive for truth as concordance is more of an issue for cultural studies than just philosophy. But as I mention above, I leave the drive for truth as concordance unexplained.

Heidegger’s developed, though earlier, view of truth here is paradigmatic of a retention theory of truth. Yet, it is interesting to note that in his later years, Heidegger came to walk back this notion of truth, though not the notion of unconcealment. In “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” he remarks, “[i]n any case, one thing becomes clear: to raise the question of alētheia, of unconcealment as such, is not the same as raising the question of truth. For this reason, it was inadequate and misleading to call alētheia in the sense of opening, truth” (1977: 389).